A history of text games and interactive fiction, from Infocom to 80 Days, and the roles of MUDs, Usenet, and open source in the 50 years of interactive fiction (Anna Washenko/Ars Technica)
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The California Public Utilities Commission rejects AT&T's request to end its landline phone obligations and urges AT&T to upgrade copper facilities to fiber (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
Source: a group that claims to have hacked car dealership software provider CDK Global has demanded tens of millions of dollars in ransom, and CDK plans to pay (Craig Trudell/Bloomberg)
In an interview, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati says "some creative jobs maybe will go away" due to AI, "but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place" (Kate Irwin/PCMag)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-cto-mira-murati-ai-could-take-some-creative-jobs
Microsoft's Copilot key on the new Copilot+ PCs launches a PWA version of Copilot, which doesn't integrate into Windows like the previous Copilot experience (Tom Warren/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/21/24182979/microsoft-copilot-key-keyboard-shortcut-pwa
Source: Stability AI hired ex- CEO of Weta Digital Prem Akkaraju as new CEO; Akkaraju and Sean Parker are among investors that have stepped in to save Stability (The Information)
X plans to make the ability to create live streams a premium feature, making it the only major social platform to charge for the feature (Karissa Bell/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/x-is-making-live-streaming-a-premium-feature-185151147.html
Retro game streamer Antstream plans to launch on the App Store with 1,300 titles, the first such launch after Apple allowed game streaming services on iPhone (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge)
Change Healthcare says the February ransomware attack on its systems resulted in the theft of medical records of a "substantial proportion of people" in the US (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
Sources: Amazon has considered a $5 to $10 monthly price tag for a revamped Alexa with generative AI features, dubbed "Remarkable Alexa" (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)
Sources: Sony is making deep cuts to funding for VR games, with only two PSVR 2 games in development; Sony released just three PSVR 2 games last year (Nicholas Sutrich/Android Central)
The US publishes targeted draft rules to ban or require notification of US investments in AI and other key technology sectors in China (Reuters)
Apple will withhold the release of Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, and more in the EU this year, citing concerns about DMA's interoperability requirements (Bloomberg)
A Las Vegas jury convicts five men for operating Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month and officials say was one of the largest illegal streamers in the US (Todd Spangler/Variety)
The US Department of the Treasury announces sanctions against twelve executives of Kaspersky; founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky is not included in the sanctions (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/21/u-s-government-sanctions-kaspersky-executives/
Google pauses plans to allow real-money games on the Play Store, as supporting such apps in markets without a central licensing framework proves difficult (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
OpenAI buys Rockset, an enterprise search and analytics startup that raised $105M, integrating both the tech and staff of an acquisition for the first time (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)
Some users say Meta is tagging real photos with the Made with AI label, possibly because AI-powered tools were used to edit, rather than create, the images (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/21/meta-tagging-real-photos-made-with-ai/
Spotify introduces a new Basic streaming plan in the US, which costs $10.99/month and includes all the benefits of Premium besides audiobook listening time (Spotify)
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-06-21/more-choice-for-us-subscribers/
Squarespace agrees to sell its restaurant reservation service Tock to American Express for $400M, the exact amount that it paid for Tock in 2021 (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)
AI-powered language-learning app Speak raised a $20M Series B extension led by Buckley, bringing its total funding to $84M and doubling its valuation to $500M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/20/language-learning-app-speak-nets-20m-doubles-valuation/
TikTok confirms it offered the US a "kill switch" in 2022 to shut down the app in the US at the government's discretion if TikTok did not follow certain rules (Imran Rahman-Jones/BBC)
Estonia blocks an EU VAT reform that would have imposed new liabilities on short-term rental services like Airbnb and passenger transport services like Bolt (Bloomberg)
Huawei says around 900M gadgets are now running on its HarmonyOS and sales of premium Huawei smartphones climbed 72% in the first five months of 2024 (Bloomberg)
Qilin, hackers behind the London hospitals hack, published ~400GB of patient data on their darknet site and Telegram channel; the NHS is investigating the claim (Joe Tidy/BBC)
A look at Congress' absurd plan to ban DJI drones in the US, even as the company adds restrictions and features to comply with US government regulations (Jason Koebler/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/the-dji-drone-ban-a-uniquely-american-disaster/
Indian grocery delivery startup Zepto raised $665M Series F co-led by Glade Brook, Nexus, and StepStone Group at a $3.6B valuation, up from $1.4B in August 2023 (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
Australia's eSafety Commissioner waters down child abuse and terror content detection rules on E2E encrypted services, after a push back from tech companies (Josh Taylor/The Guardian)
In a filing, ByteDance urged a US court to strike down a law that could ban TikTok in the US, recounting lengthy talks that it says the US ended in August 2022 (David Shepardson/Reuters)
iOS 18 brings a new API called AccessorySetupKit, letting third-party accessory makers build the same quick pairing experience as Apple accessories like AirPods (Filipe Espósito/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/20/ios-18-api-setup-accessories/
Source: AI chipmaker Cerebras confidentially filed for a US IPO; filing: in early June, it authorized new shares at a steep discount to its 2021 funding round (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/cerebras-an-nvidia-challenger-files-for-ipo-confidentially
Sources: US DOJ won't pursue FTC's claim that TikTok misled US consumers on data security in a forthcoming suit accusing TikTok of children's privacy violations (Bloomberg)
SpaceX unveils Starlink Mini, a compact version of its satellite internet antenna "that can easily fit in a backpack", offering a "limited number" for $599 each (Michael Sheetz/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/20/spacex-unveils-starlink-mini-satellite-internet-antenna-for-599.html
The restrictions on Kaspersky will stop new sales of its antivirus software in the US from July 20 and bar software updates to US customers after September 29 (Alexandra Alper/Reuters)
The Commerce Department bans Kaspersky antivirus sales in the US, says Kaspersky threatens national security and users' privacy because it is based in Russia (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/20/us-bans-kaspersky-software-security-risk-russia/
London-based PQShield, which is developing tools for implementing post-quantum cryptography, raised a $37M Series B, taking its total funding to $57M+ (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2024/06/20/post-quantum-cryptography-startup-pqshield-raises-37m/
NY Governor signs two bills to protect minors, banning "addictive feeds", limiting data collection, limiting social media notifications overnight, and more (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
Sources: Revolut plans to sell ~$500M worth of existing shares, including those held by employees, at a $40B+ valuation, up from $33B during a 2021 fundraising (Financial Times)
Claude 3.5 Sonnet appears to be a tremendous leap for Anthropic and LLMs generally, and shows that AI model makers' performance gains are not slowing down (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropics-claude-3-5-sonnet-wows-ai-power-users-this-is-wild/
Sources: Poolside, co-founded by ex-GitHub CTO Jason Warner to build AI tools to speed up software development, is raising $400M+ at a $2B+ post-money valuation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
How some Meta users in the US are turning to small claims court, often successfully, to recover their Facebook or Instagram accounts; some won financial damages (Karissa Bell/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/how-small-claims-court-became-metas-customer-service-hotline-160224479.html
Source: The CFTC is investigating the Chicago-based trading firm Jump's involvement in crypto, including inquiries into its trading and investing activity (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/06/20/cftc-jump-crypto-behnam-kanav-kariya-sec/
New Jersey-based Semperis, which offers tools to protect enterprises using Microsoft Active Directory, raised $125M and says it now has a $1B valuation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
PayPal hires one of Walmart's top tech executives Srini Venkatesan as its CTO, effective June 24, replacing Archie Deskus, who will leave the company in July (Hannah Lang/Reuters)
Meta rolls out the ability for users to restrict their Instagram Lives to Close Friends, with the option for three other users to join the broadcast (Kris Holt/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/you-can-now-restrict-instagram-lives-to-close-friends-150023794.html
LA-based GrayMatter Robotics, which develops AI-powered robotic cells for the manufacturing industry, raised a $45M Series B led by Wellington Management (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
Gynger, which lets companies "finance, pay, and manage" their tech purchases, raised a $20M Series A led by PayPal Ventures, bringing its total raised to $31.7M (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)
Anthropic adds Artifacts, a feature that lets users see and interact with the results of their Claude requests, signaling its long-term vision for Claude (David Pierce/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/20/24181961/anthropic-claude-35-sonnet-model-ai-launch
Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which beats its flagship Claude 3 Opus model and outperforms GPT-4o in some tasks, available for free on the web and iOS (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/20/anthropic-claims-its-latest-model-is-best-in-class/
HeyGen, which uses AI to let users create realistic-looking avatars, raised $60M led by Benchmark at a $500M valuation, taking its total funding to $74M (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)
Daydream, which is building a search engine for personalized shopping using GenAI, ML, and computer vision, raised a $50M seed co-led by Forerunner and Index (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
EU diplomats: a scheduled EU Council vote to amend a draft law that may force WhatsApp and Signal to scan images and links for CSAM was removed from the agenda (Clothilde Goujard/Politico)
Kenya ends a year-long investigation into Worldcoin with "no further police action" and says the startup must register its business, acquire licenses, and more (TechCrunch)
Tests show Instagram continues to recommend sexual videos to accounts with ages listed as 13; Snapchat and TikTok did not produce the same sexualized content (Jeff Horwitz/Wall Street Journal)
Tencent removes hit game Dungeon & Fighter from select Android app stores after its contracts expired; local media says the app stores include Huawei and Oppo (Reuters)
TikTok launches an in-app experience to celebrate Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, giving prizes to users who complete 11 weeks of tasks, following Instagram in April (Taylor Lorenz/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/20/tiktok-taylor-swift-frames-bracelets/
A history of the Lambda School: burning through $120M, why income share agreements failed, how one developer turned journalist ended the fraud, and more (Benjamin Sandofsky/Sandofsky)
A look at the many lawsuits against RealPage, the rent-fixing software company accused of artificially inflating the real estate rental prices across the US (Maureen Tkacik/American Prospect)
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-06-18-how-algorithm-turned-apartment-pools-green/
An investigation details how Chinese gangs, Chinese officials, and Myanmar's Junta made Myanmar's Kokang region a key hub in the global online scam industry (Washington Post)
Software vendors like Salesforce are getting left behind in the AI boom, as most AI spending at this point is going toward hardware or cloud infrastructure (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
Q&A with Meta Oversight Board co-chair Helle-Thorning Schmidt on AI deepfakes, Meta rejecting the board's decision on former Cambodian PM Hun Sen, and more (Murad Ahmed/Financial Times)
AMD says hackers accessed limited information related to assembling of certain AMD products on a third-party vendor site and expects no material business impact (Ian King/Bloomberg)
Sources: Apple held talks with several Chinese companies including Baidu and Alibaba to help offer Apple Intelligence in China as ChatGPT isn't available there (Wall Street Journal)
Accel and Dealroom: out of 221 generative AI startups in Europe and Israel, 27% were created in London, 13% in Tel Aviv, 12% in Berlin, and 10% in Paris (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
Paris-based C12, which is developing a carbon nanotube-based quantum computer, raised €18M led by Varsity, EIC, and Verve, after raising a ~€9M seed in 2021 (Lucy Adams/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2024/06/19/c12-raises-18m-for-universal-quantum-computing/
At Augmented World Expo, Palmer Luckey says he's building a new headset "driven by military requirements" that will also be used for "non-military stuff" (Adi Robertson/The Verge)
Arvind Mithal, a prolific computer scientist and longtime MIT professor who led the Computation Structures Group in MIT CSAIL, died on June 17 at age 77 (Adam Zewe/MIT News)
https://news.mit.edu/2024/computer-science-professor-arvind-dies-0618
Snap agrees to a $15M settlement with California after a three-year probe into employees' allegations of discrimination, retaliation, and sexual harassment (Lara Korte/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/19/california-snapchat-discrimination-settlement-00164083
CDK Global, which provides SaaS tools for over 15,000 car dealerships in North America, shuts down most of its systems following a cyberattack (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)
China's top-valued AI startup, Moonshot AI, recently debuted a role-play chat app and music maker app in the US; Chinese rival MiniMax also expanded to the US (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinas-top-ai-startups-enter-u-s-defying-political-tensions
Ilya Sutskever discloses his plans for Safe Superintelligence, says "we mean safe like nuclear safety as opposed to safe as in 'trust and safety'", and more (Ashlee Vance/Bloomberg)
Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy announce Safe Superintelligence, an American company "with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence" (Safe Superintelligence Inc.)
A look at Nvidia's 591,078% rally since its IPO in 1999; long-time investors in Nvidia have had to stomach three annual collapses of 50% or more in the stock (Bloomberg)
Analysis: Perplexity seems to scrape sites using surreptitious methods, ignoring robots.txt, with a Perplexity-tied machine doing so on Wired and other sites (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/
Amazon plans to invest €10B to expand cloud and logistics in Germany, including €8.8B by 2026 on AWS, taking its total planned German investment to €17.8B (Reuters)
Panasonic unveils the Toughbook 40 Mk2, a 14-inch rugged laptop aimed at police and others, with up to Intel Core Ultra 7, 5G, and IP66, on sale now for $4,699+ (João Carrasqueira/XDA Developers)
https://www.xda-developers.com/panasonic-toughbook-40-mk2-launch/
China plans new measures to encourage venture capital into its tech sector, including letting investors set up yuan funds; 2023 VC investment fell 7% to $69.9B (Foster Wong/Bloomberg)
VR game studio Another Axiom says Gorilla Tag passed $100M in revenue since its early 2021 launch, one of the most successful VR games ever, and has 3M MAUs (Ben Lang/Road to VR)
https://www.roadtovr.com/gorilla-tag-revenue-vr-success-another-axiom/
On its Korean website, Samsung says its new Snapdragon-powered Galaxy Book 4 Edge is not compatible with or cannot install some Adobe apps, Fortnite, and more (Wall Street Journal)
Sources: Nvidia agrees to buy Shoreline, which helps automate fixing software problems, in a deal that values Shoreline at ~$100M; Shoreline has raised ~$57M (Bloomberg)
Pornhub parent Aylo tells local news outlets in Kentucky and Indiana that local IP address are set to be geo-blocked in mid-July due to age verification laws (Michael McGrady Jr/AVN Industry News)
https://avn.com/business/articles/legal/aylo-blocks-kentucky-ip-addresses-from-pornhub-932182.html
The UK CMA opens a merger inquiry into HPE's $14B acquisition of Juniper Networks, setting an August 14 deadline to decide on opening a full investigation (Katharine Gemmell/Bloomberg)
Decagon, which uses generative AI to replace or augment a company's customer support staff, raised a $35M Series A led by Accel, with participation from a16z (Anna Tong/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/decagon-raises-35-million-ai-powered-customer-service-2024-06-18/
Sources detail how Jensen Huang and Nvidia are guarding against slowing chip sales, including offering more cloud services and designing custom server racks (The Information)
A look at Rebind, a mysterious startup that turns Margaret Atwood and other authors' voices into AI reading companions, and an interview with CEO John Dubuque (Laura Kipnis/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/i-am-laura-kipnis-bot-and-i-will-make-reading-sexy-and-tragic-again/
Framework partners with DeepComputing to build a RISC-V mainboard for its Laptop 13, set to become one of the first RISC-V laptops; price and release are TBC (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/18/24181278/framework-laptop-risc-v-laptop-isa-arm-amd-intel-x86
Netflix plans to open two permanent in-person experience venues, in Dallas and near Philadelphia, in 2025, a continuation of its previous pop-ups (Todd Spangler/Variety)
How generative AI model providers can create business models that reward copyright holders and content creators, much like what has happened on the web (Tim O'Reilly/O'Reilly Media)
The US surgeon general's call for social media warning labels seems to ignore evidence and may feed into a moral panic, similar to prior panics over video games (Mike Masnick/The Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-surgeon-general-is-wrong-social-media-doesnt-need-warning-labels
As Nvidia passes Microsoft's market cap, John Chambers, who was the CEO when Cisco passed Microsoft during the dot-com boom, says the situation now is different (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)
Sources: Huawei, which is considering taking a cut of in-app purchases on HarmonyOS, nears a deal with Tencent to exclude WeChat from revenue sharing (Pei Li/Bloomberg)
A Google DeepMind study involving 20 professional comedians who already use AI in their work finds LLMs struggled to produce material that was original or funny (Rhiannon Williams/MIT Technology Review)
Fengate Asset Management acquires over two-thirds stake in eStruxture, which operates data centers in 15 locations in four Canadian cities, in a $1.3B deal (Paul Vieira/Wall Street Journal)
Japan is looking to lure AI investment away from Europe and elsewhere by adopting a light-touch, industry-led approach to regulating AI (Nikkei Asia)
Sources: Google and OpenAI have stepped up staff vetting over Chinese espionage threat; Sequoia has encouraged some portfolio companies to tighten staff vetting (Financial Times)
A look at Mozilla's acquisition of Anonym, which offers "privacy-preserving" ad tools, and how Anonym might interact with a user base that tends to block ads (Thomas Claburn/The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_betting_privacy/
FOI documents: eight UK train stations scanned passenger faces for two years as part of AI trials; Amazon software was used to predict age, gender, and emotions (Matt Burgess/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-ai-cameras-emotions-uk-train-passengers/
Consensys says the US SEC is closing its investigation into Ethereum 2.0 and "will not bring charges alleging that sales of ETH are securities transactions" (Ryan Ozawa/Decrypt)
https://decrypt.co/236039/sec-dropping-ethereum-investigation-consensys
The California Labor Commissioner's Office fines Amazon $5.9M for violating a 2022 state law by failing to properly inform workers of quotas at two warehouses (Caroline O'Donovan/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/18/amazon-fine-labor-law-california/
Internal memo: Meta merges its Reality Labs teams into the "Metaverse" product group that now includes Quest, and the AR product group, now called "Wearables" (Alex Heath/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/18/24181420/meta-wearables-reality-labs-layoffs