Sunday, November 27, 2022

China seems to be flooding Twitter with porn tweets mentioning places where people are protesting, overwhelming Twitter's radically reduced anti-propaganda team (Joseph Menn/Washington Post)

Joseph Menn / Washington Post:
China seems to be flooding Twitter with porn tweets mentioning places where people are protesting, overwhelming Twitter's radically reduced anti-propaganda team  —  For hours, links to adult content overwhelmed other posts from cities where dramatic rallies escalated



A look at OpenAI's Minecraft bot, which has learned to complete complex tasks in Minecraft after being trained on 70K hours of video of people playing the game (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
A look at OpenAI's Minecraft bot, which has learned to complete complex tasks in Minecraft after being trained on 70K hours of video of people playing the game  —  Online videos are a vast and untapped source of training data—and OpenAI says it has a new way to use it.



Shanghai-based eRoad, which offers a cloud-based HR management service with a focus on payroll, raised a ~$140M Series D, after raising an ~$84M Series C (Eudora Wang/DealStreetAsia)

Eudora Wang / DealStreetAsia:
Shanghai-based eRoad, which offers a cloud-based HR management service with a focus on payroll, raised a ~$140M Series D, after raising an ~$84M Series C  —  Chinese human resource technology firm eRoad on Tuesday announced the completion of its Series D funding round at 1 billion yuan …



Saturday, November 26, 2022

How live-action YouTube kids channels Vlad and Niki, Like Nastya, and Kids Diana Show, with a total of ~300M subscribers, are building global franchises (R.T. Watson/Wall Street Journal)

R.T. Watson / Wall Street Journal:
How live-action YouTube kids channels Vlad and Niki, Like Nastya, and Kids Diana Show, with a total of ~300M subscribers, are building global franchises  —  Vlad, Niki, Diana and Nastya party on yachts, ride in Ferraris and travel the world.  Their massive audience of fellow kids can't get enough.



New Delhi-based diabetes management app BeatO raised a $33M Series B led by Lightrock India, with Flipkart and others participating (Debjyoti Roy/Livemint)

Debjyoti Roy / Livemint:
New Delhi-based diabetes management app BeatO raised a $33M Series B led by Lightrock India, with Flipkart and others participating  —  Diabetes management app BeatO has raised $33 million in its Series B round of funding led by impact investor Lightrock India.



Source: the US DOJ is investigating whether rent-setting software made by RealPage is facilitating collusion among landlords to drive up rental prices (Heather Vogell/ProPublica)

Heather Vogell / ProPublica:
Source: the US DOJ is investigating whether rent-setting software made by RealPage is facilitating collusion among landlords to drive up rental prices  —  The DOJ will examine whether RealPage helped landlords coordinate rent increases.  Questions also swirl around a 2017 merger deal with its largest competitor.



Sources: amid the Iran war, Asian bankers say rising power prices and energy security are becoming a bigger consideration in data center financing decisions (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg : Sources: amid the Iran war, Asian bankers say rising power prices and energy security are becoming a bigger consideration in ...