A look at the cottage industry of Russian tech contractors, many owned by oligarch-linked Citadel Group, building digital surveillance tools for use by the FSB — Russia is incubating a cottage industry of new digital surveillance tools to suppress domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine.
TweetDeck users report major problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load, after Elon Musk's new read-limits; home timelines still load — Over the weekend, Elon Musk limited the number of tweets users can read in a day, which he said was to prevent data scraping.
A look at uncensored and loosely moderated AI chatbots like WizardLM-Uncensored and Open Assistant setting off a polarizing debate about free-speech and risks — A new generation of chatbots doesn't have many of the guardrails put in place by companies like Google and OpenAI, presenting new possibilities — and risks.
Report: Apple is working on new external display for Macs that can double as a smart home display in low-power mode, to release next year “at the earliest” — In the latest Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman writes that he understands Apple is working on a new Mac external display option …
How researchers at Amazon and other companies are making AI-powered devices and bots more conversational by tackling the voice disentanglement issue — For Alexa to speak like a Dubliner, Amazon researchers had to crack a problem that's vexed data scientists for years: voice disentanglement.
Sources: Apple is exploring hearing health and body-temperature features for AirPods, while planning cheaper models and a shift to USB-C for the charging case — Apple is working on a slew of changes for its popular AirPods earbuds, seeking to expand its wearables business.
Thousands of performers, who signed their voice rights away in perpetuity years ago, are being forced to compete with AI-cloned versions of their voices — Performers forced to compete with themselves as companies' use of technology for cloning prompts calls to update copyright law
Drone shows are increasingly replacing fireworks displays; research: the global drone light show market is projected to grow from $1.3B in 2021 to $2.2B in 2031 — The light displays are quieter, safer and better for the environment. — Like many in the fireworks industry, Stephen Vitale is in the family business.
Q&A with Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, on the whirlwind first two weeks under Elon Musk, Twitter's content moderation approach, and more — Yoel Roth explains how moderation rules evolved at Twitter, the fight against harassment and why he no longer drives a Tesla
Elon Musk says verified Twitter accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6K posts/day, unverified 600, and new unverified 300, due to “extreme” data scraping — Twitter is putting limits to how many tweets its users can read as the Elon Musk-owned service suffers extended outage …
Musk says verified accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6000 posts/day, unverified to 600, and new unverified to 300, to address “extreme” data scraping — To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day
Former Amazon and Goodreads employees detail how Amazon let the book review site languish with limited resources while mining it for user-generated data — A prominent author's decision to pull her new novel from publication after being ‘review bombed’ highlights Goodreads's power in publishing …
Twitter users globally report multiple site issues, including seeing “rate limit exceeded” or “cannot retrieve tweets” error messages — Twitter is yet to acknowledge the outage. — x — 1x 1.5x 1.8x — Twitter has been hit by a global outage …
Elon Musk claims Twitter login requirement is a “temporary emergency measure” as “several hundred” orgs were “scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively” — Twitter is currently blocking visitors from viewing tweets and profiles unless they are logged in.
Tracxn: Indian startups raised $5.46B in H1 2023, down from $17.1B in H1 2022 and $13.4B in H1 2021; Tiger Global made just one deal while SoftBank made none — Several high-flying Indian startups, including Byju's, Swiggy and PharmEasy, have experienced a dramatic downward adjustment in their valuations
Pranshu Verma / Washington Post : Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 202...
