Category: Uncategorized

Flexible objects are difficult for robots to handle, but a new approach could allow artificial nurses to help patients dress

Vishal Chawla / The Block: Sky Mavis, which runs Axie Infinity, raises $150M led by Binance, with participation from Animoca, a16z, and others, to reimburse users after the Ronin exploit  —  Sky Mavis, the creator of play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, has raised $150 million to reimburse its users who lost funds during …

Vera Bergengruen / TIME: Inside Kyiv’s IT office, whose workers have spent the past five weeks adapting and repurposing everyday tech, like the Kyiv Digital smartphone app, for wartime  —  Even the app’s logo reflects this shift.  What was once a friendly sky-blue “K” for Kyiv has been redesigned into a black-and-gray military camo pattern.

Kevin Marks: Twitter changed how embeds work for deleted tweets, causing blank spaces on websites; Twitter says it is “to better respect” when users deleted their tweets  —  Twitter Edits You 2022-04-06 With all the fuss about Twitter’s promised edit button, and how they might design it …

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Twitter requires removing tweets posted by government or state-affiliated media accounts that contain media of prisoners of war from the Russia-Ukraine conflict  —  It’ll ‘ask government or state-affiliated media accounts’ to take down pictures featuring prisoners of war

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Dropbox Shop, which lets creators sell digital content directly to customers, launches an open beta in the US with more store customization options and tipping  —  Dropbox Shop, a platform that allows creators to sell digital content directly to their customers, is now available in open beta, Dropbox announced on Tuesday.

The UK has announced plans to create its own non-fungible tokens in a bid to demonstrate its enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies

John Paul Tasker / CBC News: Canada’s government introduces legislation that would force major online platforms run by Google and Meta to negotiate deals with publishers, like in Australia  —  Bill demands that companies like Google and Facebook pay news businesses to use their content

Solar panels are cooler than the night air, creating a temperature difference that can be exploited to produce electricity

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet: Microsoft announces a preview of ARM-based chips for Azure virtual machines, using Ampere Altra CPUs  —  It’s been a long time coming, but Microsoft is making available a preview of Azure VMs supporting Arm-based processors from Ampere.  —  It’s been a long road, but Microsoft announced …

Ken Klippenstein / The Intercept: Internal Amazon documents show its planned internal messaging app would block union-related words, including “union”, “grievance”, and “pay raise”  —  Amazon will block and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining …

Bloomberg: FTX makes a “significant” investment in stock exchange IEX, made famous by Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys”; IEX represented 2.7% of US equities volume in March  —  Crypto exchange FTX US agreed to take a stake in IEX Group Inc., owner of the stock exchange made famous by …

Etan Vlessing / Hollywood Reporter: Roku and Amazon extend their distribution agreement, letting users continue accessing Prime Video and IMDb TV apps on their Roku devices; Roku stock is up 5%+  —  The new multi-year agreement means the Amazon Prime Video app will remain in Roku’s Channel Store.

Emily Baker-White / BuzzFeed News: Former ByteDance employees say the company scraped Instagram, Snap, and others to make fake accounts on TikTok predecessor Flipagram, later renamed Vigo Video  —  In 2017, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, scraped short-form videos, user names, profile pictures, and profile descriptions from Instagram …

Associated Press: Research: RT en Español is the third-most shared site on Twitter for Spanish-language info about Russia’s invasion and in March saw a boost in Facebook likes  —  Disinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is surging in Spanish, as stories crafted for a Latin American audience gets a boost from the Kremlin

Eva Dou / Washington Post: Huawei promotes CFO Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, as one of three rotating chairs, six months after her detention in Canada  —  SHANGHAI — Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has promoted chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou to a key role just half a year …

Reuters: Sources: Truth Social’s CTO Josh Adams and product chief Billy Boozer have quit, following a troubled launch for the Trump-backed social network  —  The two Southern tech entrepreneurs had the two qualities that Donald Trump’s Truth Social startup needed: tech-industry expertise …

Finextra: French startup Budget Insight, which helps clients initiate payments and aggregate financial data and documents, raises $35M from PSG Equity  —  Budget Insight, the leading aggregator of banking and financial data in France and a pioneer of Open Finance in Europe, is pleased to announce $35m …

damsondao / P — Mirror: Unpacking Terra’s design for its algorithmic stablecoins and how partial collateralization using bitcoin reserves could impact its price stabilization mechanism  —  As Terra climbed crypto market cap rankings at the start of 2022 while most of the market dumped or stalled …

NBC News: Government record keepers and watchdogs worry that use of Wickr and other auto-deletion apps may help CBP and other agencies sidestep transparency requirements  —  In October, Laurence Brewer, the chief records officer of the National Archives and Records Administration …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: How Apple’s rumored subscription programs for iPhone and other hardware may work, and why the company may expand its financial services  —  Apple’s in-the-works iPhone hardware subscription service will squeeze more revenue from its giant user base.  Also: The company is building …

Megha Paul / Tech.eu: Deepki, a Parisian provider of an ESG data intelligence platform for real estate, raises a €150M Series C round co-led by One Peak and Highland Europe  —  The Paris-headquartered startup offers a SaaS platform for real estate investors, owners and managers to improve the ESG performance …

Kollen Post / The Block: Interview with Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, who says the government’s crypto donation platform has raised $70M+ as of April 1  —  Quick Take  — The Block spoke with Alexander Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation.

An analysis of 630 billion words published online suggests that people tend to think of men when using gender-neutral terms, a sexist bias that could be learned by AI models

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: Zipline, Flytrex, and Alphabet’s Wing, which have started commercial drone deliveries in the US, say they are encouraged by the FAA’s evolving regulation  —  Drone companies have been cleared to expand their operations across the U.S., in cities as well as rural areas, at the same time their tech […]

Neil Cybart / Above Avalon: Apple’s hardware categories are now gaining record new users after a 2017/2018 strategy change that let product groups independently update major product lines  —  During Apple’s “Peek Performance” event held last month, the company announced not only a brand new Mac category with the Mac Studio …

Mike Masnick / Techdirt: A deep look at the benefits of content moderation in open forums, and how it can support free speech by creating spaces where more people feel free to talk  —  Obviously over the past few years there’s been all of these debates about the content moderation practices of various websites.

Washington Post: How Binance, which trades on its own exchange and plays a number of roles that pose conflicts of interest, remains mostly unaccountable to its customers  —  On May 19, 2021, Francis Kim thought he had hit it big.  The Australia-based entrepreneur had been dabbling in derivatives trading …

Zac Bowden / Windows Central: In a memo, EVP and CPO Panos Panay says Microsoft is moving Surface Duo OS, SwiftKey, Phone Link, and Microsoft Launcher under a new dedicated Android division  —  A new ‘Microsoft Android’ division houses Duo, SwiftKey, Launcher, and more.  —  What you need to know

Sam Dean / Los Angeles Times: Interview with GoPuff co-founder Rafael Ilishayev, on why the company acquired BevMo, breaking into the California market, responding to drivers’ demands, more  —  When an East Coast startup called Gopuff paid $350 million for BevMo in November 2020, it wasn’t immediately clear …

By sending light through urine it’s possible to generate a hologram that can reveal the presence of bacteria or other signs of disease

Aoyon Ashraf / CoinDesk: Bitcoin mining company PrimeBlock plans to go public via a SPAC merger at a $1.25B valuation; PrimeBlock generated $24.4M in Q4 2021 revenue  —  The deal is expected to close in the second half of this year.  —  Bitcoin miner PrimeBlock confirmed its plan to go public through a merger …

Edward Ongweso Jr / VICE: The Discord servers of some NFT projects, including BAYC, were compromised on Friday as part of a phishing scam seeking to trick users into “minting” fake NFTs  —  This isn’t the first hack of Discord-based crypto communities, and it’s not likely to be the last.

A network of 100,000 animals connected by trackers and watched from space could explain extraordinary animal behaviour and help forecast volcanic eruptions, extreme weather and emerging diseases

Kiran Stacey / Financial Times: A look at the eclectic group of pro-crypto lawmakers in Washington, from libertarians to tech utopians, who were galvanized by the recent infrastructure bill  —  A bipartisan mix of libertarians, business champions and tech utopians is uniting on legislation to help the sector grow

Henry Ren / Bloomberg: Three European food delivery stocks, Delivery Hero, Just Eat, and Deliveroo, lost a combined $23.7B, more than half their market value, in the first quarter  —  In a market gripped by concerns over rising interest rates and soaring inflation, investors are avoiding European food delivery companies …

Tiare Tuuhia / Rest of World: How homegrown courier services in French Polynesia are building their own online shopping service to fill the gaps left by e-commerce giants in remote islands  —  E-commerce giants don’t reliably deliver to the remote islands of French Polynesia, so locals made their own online shopping service.

Michael H. Keller / New York Times: To avoid erroneously flagging CSAM, Meta’s training docs tell content moderators to “err on the side of an adult” when judging people’s age in photos or videos  —  The company reports millions of photos and videos of suspected child sexual abuse each year.

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: Researchers: an allegedly Russia-tied wiper malware, AcidRain, which shares similarities with the malware VPNFilter, was behind the attack on Viasat in February  —  AcidRain is the seventh wiper associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine  —  Viasat—the high-speed-satellite-broadband …

Russia says its POM-3 landmines use artificial intelligence to distinguish between soldiers and civilians, though arms experts doubt if it really works

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: New York-based Black Crow AI, which delivers predictive analytics to e-commerce retailers, raises a $25M Series A led by Imaginary Ventures  —  In the pandemic era, where digital storefronts have become a matter of course for retailers, data analytics is proving its worth.

A robot made of magnetic slime with a custard-like consistency can navigate narrow passages, grasp objects and fix broken circuits.

Slime that can be controlled by a magnetic field can navigate tight spaces and grasp objects, making it ideal for possible uses inside the body

Tracy Wang / CoinDesk: Avalanche is now the fourth largest blockchain for DeFi protocols by “total value locked”, at $10B+, ahead of Solana, with its AVAX token rising 2,800% in 2021  —  To the crypto-conscious, blockchain industry conferences have become annual pilgrimages of sorts …

Shirin Ghaffary / Vox: Analysis: majority of the most-viewed Reels on Meta’s platforms are anonymous or reposted; Meta says Reels is Instagram’s biggest engagement growth contributor  —  Facebook’s pivot back to video shows how badly it needs young people.  —  Meta, the parent company of Facebook, needs to stay relevant.

CNBC: A look at 3C, a “grassroots” group of SMBs against Big Tech regulation, financed by Google and Amazon, which claims support from SMBs that haven’t heard of it  —  – The Connected Commerce Council, which pitches itself as a grassroots movement representing small business owners …

Kul Bhushan / Tech in Asia: India-based social commerce startup Citymall, which targets consumers in Tier 2, 3, and 4 towns, raises a $75M Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners  —  Citymall, an India-based social commerce startup, has raised US$75 million in a series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners.

Nate Raymond / Reuters: A judge invalidates Massachusetts’ fiduciary duty rule against Robinhood that underlies a 2020 suit accusing the firm of encouraging users to place risky trades  —  A Massachusetts judge on Wednesday dealt state securities regulators a major setback in their enforcement action …

Olga Kharif / Bloomberg: Chainalysis: $1B+ in crypto was stolen from bridge-related exploits in a little over a year across seven incidents; Dune: $21B+ is locked on Ethereum bridges  —  The hack of a so-called bridge supporting Axie Infinity’s play-to-earn game revealed this week highlights the increasingly problematic nature …

An artificial intelligence trained to mimic the logic circuits of an ordinary computer can run code within itself, potentially speeding up certain calculations