Bookmarks (1078)

Justine Calma / The Verge: A NASA-funded study of satellite data finds traffic-related N02 pollution spiked ~20% near ~150K large US warehouses, which have proliferated due to e-commerce  —  The data is in, and it shows a significant rise in air pollution where e-retailers build their warehouses …

Michael Hennessey / Bloomberg: STMicro reports Q2 net revenue down 25.3% YoY to $3.23B and cuts its FY 2024 revenue outlook to $13.2B to $13.7B, down from a previous range of $14B to $15B  —  - Sales this year will fall to $13.2 billion to $13.7 billion  — CEO: Customer orders for industrial business didn't improve

Laura Dobberstein / The Register: India drops the 2% equalization levy on digital services offered by foreign companies starting August 1; the levy had become a point of contention with the US  —  who retained her position despite her Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) losing its outright majority and forming a coalition …

Sara Fischer / Axios: A group of 16 US lawmakers ask Meta to delay shutting down CrowdTangle for at least six months, citing concerns about the limitations of Meta Content Library  —  A group of bipartisan lawmakers on Wednesday sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking the firm to delay shutting down CrowdTangle for six months.

New York Times: Analysis: since the start of Ukraine war in 2022, Russia obtained ~$4B worth of US restricted chips from 6K+ companies, including from shell firms in Hong Kong  —  Defying sanctions, Russia has obtained nearly $4 billion in restricted chips since the war began in Ukraine.

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: Lakera, which helps enterprises protect generative AI apps from LLM vulnerabilities, raised a $20M Series A led by Atomico, bringing its total funding to $30M  —  Lakera, a Swiss startup that's building technology to protect generative AI applications from malicious prompts and other threats …

Bloomberg: Enterprise financial software company OneStream's shares closed up 34.25% at $26.85 in its Nasdaq debut, giving it a market cap of ~$6.2B, after a ~$490M IPO  —  - Firm, shareholders sold stock at $20 each, above range  — Company's software is used by CFOs and finance teams

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Dazz, which provides AI-based cloud security remediation software for enterprises, raised $50M from Greylock and others, sources say at a ~$400M valuation  —  Cybersecurity has become a white-hot topic in the world of technology.  Not only are data breaches continuing unabated …

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: ServiceNow President CJ Desai leaves the company after an internal probe found he violated company policy related to a US contract and an ex-Army CIO's hiring  —  - Company hired former Army CIO Iyer after $432 million contract  — Iyer, who headed public sector business, also resigned

Olivia Carville / Bloomberg: Meta removes ~63K Instagram accounts used by sextortion scammers in Nigeria, along with ~7,200 Facebook assets, including accounts linked to the Yahoo Boys  —  - Purge includes thousands of Groups offering sextortion ‘tips’  — One network of 20 criminals was running 2,500 fake accounts

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land: Microsoft says Bing stopped crawling Reddit after Reddit updated its robots.txt file on July 1  —  Reddit updated its robots.txt file prohibiting Bing and some other search engines from crawling its site.  —  Chat with SearchBot  —  Reddit has updated its robots.txt file …

Dana Hull / Bloomberg: Elon Musk's poll asking if Tesla should invest $5B in xAI ends with 67.9% voting yes, after Musk said on Tesla's earnings call that he supported the idea  —  - CEO takes poll on whether EV maker should back his startup  — The two companies have intermingled on procurement, recruiting

Reuters: SK Hynix Q2: revenue up 125% YoY to ~$11.86B, operating profit of ~$3.96B, its highest quarterly profit in six years, and sees further rising chip demand in H2  —  South Korea's SK Hynix (000660.KS) posted on Thursday its highest quarterly profit since 2018 as the Nvidia (NVDA.O) …

Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware: AMD delays its Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 launch, originally set for July, to August due to an unspecified quality issue, and pulls back all units shipped to replace them  —  AMD hits the brakes on its Zen 5-powered Ryzen 9000 processors.  —  AMD announced today that it has delayed its Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 launch due …

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: Privacy-focused developer Proton debuts a self-custody bitcoin wallet, its first cryptocurrency product, initially available to early access users  —  When you think about it, Proton has always been a crypto company — cryptography, not cryptocurrency.  But the Switzerland-based company …

Simon Sharwood / The Register: CrowdStrike says the problematic July 19 software update that affected 8.5M Windows devices was deployed into production due to “a bug in the Content Validator”  —  CrowdStrike has blamed a bug in its own test software for the mass-crash-event it caused last week.

Reuters: Foxconn to invest $138 mln for new business headquarters in China  —  Taiwan's Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker and Apple's biggest iPhone assembler, said on Wednesday it plans to invest 1 billion yuan ($137.5 million) to construct a new business headquarters in Zhengzhou, China.

Echo Wang / Reuters: Sources: enterprise financial software maker OneStream raised $490M after pricing its IPO at $20 a share, above its $17-$19 marketed range, at a $4.6B valuation  —  Financial software maker OneStream (OS.O), which is backed by private equity firm KKR (KKR.N), priced its U.S. initial public offering …

Eva Dou / Washington Post: Elon Musk says Starlink service is now active in a hospital in Gaza, reflecting Israel's reluctance for Gaza residents to have internet access more broadly  —  The satellite-enabled service is active in a Gaza hospital, Musk posted on X, following months of negotiation over humanitarian internet access.

Kelly Le / South China Morning Post: In an effort to compete with Shein and Temu, Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall offer qualified merchants, selling goods in the fashion category, free overseas shipping  —  - Alibaba's pan-clothing global free shipping plan offers qualified merchants a new way to sell their products overseas

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: India scraps “angel tax” for all classes of investors, a major victory to the country's startup ecosystem that had lobbied for years against the measure  —  India's federal government has removed the controversial “angel tax” for all classes of investors, delivering a major victory …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Seattle-based QA Wolf, which helps companies automate QA testing for apps, raised a $36M Series B and opens a waitlist for Android and iOS test automation  —  Quality assurance in the app development world is a necessary, but often resource-draining, undertaking.

Ian King / Bloomberg: Texas Instruments reports Q2 revenue down 16% YoY to $3.82B and forecasts Q3 revenue in line with analysts' estimates of $4.14B, easing fears of a chip downturn  —  - Chipmaker says sales dip again in industrial, automotive units  — Forecast follows more pessimistic view offered by rival NXP

Keith Broni / Emojipedia: X reverts its water pistol emoji back to a firearm on the web, after Twitter originally switched the pistol emoji from a realistic-looking handgun in 2018  —  X (fka Twitter) has quietly redesigned its 🔫 Water Pistol emoji to display as a firearm.  This diverges from the cross-platform conversion …

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Meta says it will allow developers to use the outputs from Llama models, including Llama 3.1 405B, to improve other models for the first time  —  “Open source AI is the path forward,” says Mark Zuckerberg, misusing the term.  —  In the AI world, there's a buzz in the air …

Eva Roytburg / Fortune: Elon Musk says “I am not donating $45M a month to Trump”, and that he created America PAC to support Trump, without revealing precisely how much he is donating  —  Elon Musk is not spending $45 million a month to elect former President Donald Trump, though he has created …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Level AI, maker of AI-powered tools to automate customer service tasks, raised a $39.4M Series C led by Adams Street Partners, taking its total raised to $73.1M  —  Ashish Nagar, an engineer by trade, was working at Amazon's Alexa org on the conversational AI team when he realized that AI …

Reuters: Sources: Samsung's HBM3 chips have been cleared by Nvidia for use in its H20 GPU, developed for the Chinese market; HBM3E chips are still being tested  —  Samsung Electronics' (005930.KS) fourth-generation high bandwidth memory or HBM3 chips have been cleared by Nvidia (NVDA.O) …

Brian Heater / TechCrunch: Mytra, a startup building autonomous robots for warehouses that can move loads up to 3,000 pounds, launches from stealth with $78M in total funding  —  Mytra has been quietly operating behind the scenes since its May 2022 founding in a bid to rethink warehouse automation.

Jennifer Elias / CNBC: Alphabet reports Other Bets Q2 revenue of $365M, up from $285M in Q2 2023, a $1.13B loss, up from $813M, and announces a “multiyear” investment of $5B in Waymo  —  Alphabet is again investing in its self-driving car unit Waymo — this time with $5 billion.

Hannah Murphy / Financial Times: A profile of Nick Pickles, who has recently been promoted to X's VP of global affairs; sources: Pickles has become the right-hand man to CEO Linda Yaccarino  —  Ex-music photographer promoted as right-hand man to X chief Linda Yaccarino tasked with fighting company's political battles

Nikkei Asia: Malaysia plans to require social and messaging apps to register for a renewable license starting late 2024; Singapore asks online platforms to curb scams  —  Southeast Asia grapples with malicious activities on social media and market sites  —  KUALA LUMPUR/SINGAPORE …

Bloomberg: Sources: TikTok plans to launch TikTok Shop in Spain and Ireland as early as October; the rollout will be smaller than previously envisioned amid EU scrutiny  —  - Shop rollout in Europe will be smaller than initially planned  — Company will introduce the platform to rest of Europe in 2025

Bloomberg: An investigation shows how pedophiles groom children using Roblox, a problem exacerbated by Roblox not collecting any personal information beyond a user's age  —  DoctorRofatnik, known to fans as “Doc,” looked almost mayoral in a tall white hat, a red tie and an American flag pin.

CNBC: Cybersecurity startup Wiz walks away from a $23B Google acquisition; memo: CEO Assaf Rappaport told staff that Wiz would pursue an IPO as originally planned  —  Wiz has walked away from a $23 billion deal to be acquired by Google, in what would have been the search giant's largest ever deal …

Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Amazon lost $25B+ on its devices business between 2017 and 2021 as its plan to sell hardware at a lower price and make money elsewhere hasn't worked  —  Amazon.com's Echo speakers are the type of business success companies don't want: a widely purchased product that is also a giant money loser.

Bloomberg: Wa'ed Ventures, the $500M venture arm of Saudi Aramco, made its first investment in South Korea by investing $15M in AI chipmaker Rebellions  —  - Oil giant set up Wa'ed Ventures to invest in new tech firms  — Rebellions is working with Samsung to develop AI chips

Reuters: Reeling from CrowdStrike-related outages, Delta has canceled 4,000+ flights since Friday, including 900+ flights on Monday so far, according to FlightAware  —  Delta Air Lines (DAL.N) CEO Ed Bastian on Monday said it will take the U.S. carrier another couple of days before its operations recover …

Ian King / Bloomberg: AMD President Victor Peng, who rejoined the chipmaker in 2022 following its acquisition of Xilinx, where he served as CEO, plans to retire on August 30, 2024  —  Peng's short career at AMD coincides with one of its most successful spells in business and the stock market.

Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch: Monarch Tractor, which makes autonomous electric tractors, raised a $133M Series C co-led by Astanor and HH-CTBC Partnership at a $500M+ valuation  —  Monarch Tractor was in a tricky spot late last year as the autonomous electric tractor startup juggled growth and an uncertain fundraising environment.

Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware: Intel says elevated voltage is causing the ongoing “instability issues” in some Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors, and plans to release a fix in August  —  Patch is on the way.  —  Intel has announced that it has found the root cause of the crashing issues plaguing its CPUs.

Sarah Wynn / The Block: Some spot ether ETFs receive the go-ahead from the SEC and can begin trading on Tuesday  —  - Registration statements become effective on Monday for firms vying for a spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund, marking the final sign-off for those products to begin trading.

Larry Dignan / Constellation Research: SAP reports Q2 cloud revenue of €4.15B, up 25% YoY, revenue of €8.29B, up 10% YoY, net profits of €918M, and says a “restructuring” will affect ~10,000 jobs  —  SAP in the second quarter said its cloud revenue was up 25% and CEO Christian Klein said its Business AI efforts are “enabling many deals.”

Jessica Mathews / Fortune: A look inside Iconiq Growth two months after it closed a $5.75B fund, its largest ever and 42% larger than its previous fund  —  The sudden death of former SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg in a treadmill accident nine years ago shook Iconiq Capital founder Divesh Makan.

Digiday: Google says it won't be “deprecating third-party cookies” in Chrome and will instead keep working on “privacy-preserving alternatives” via Privacy Sandbox APIs  —  After much back and forth, Google has decided to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser.

OCCRP: An investigation details how scammers are using crypto ATMs to commit fraud; the FBI says US losses from scams carried out via crypto ATMs was $120M+ in 2023  —  While crypto ATM operators insist they take steps to protect the public, investigators say the machines are a gift to criminal networks.

Vikas Dhoot / The Hindu: The officers of India's largest retirement fund, the EPFO, warn the organization's crash-prone IT systems require immediate attention of the Union Government  —  The EPF Officers' Association has cautioned that a “continued denial” of the problem will only exacerbate the situation and hinder remedial efforts

Wall Street Journal: Microsoft says it cannot wall off its OS due to a 2009 deal with the EC to give security software makers the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets  —  Global outage on Windows machines caused by CrowdStrike highlights Microsoft's security challenges

Financial Times: OpenSecrets: ~80% of donations from internet companies have gone to Democrats so far this US election cycle, down from 90% in 2020, as support for Trump grows  —  Some of America's wealthiest tech investors have come out for Trump.  But most Big Tech leaders are staying silent, for now

Sultan Quadri / Semafor: Starlink faces regulatory obstacles in Africa, as countries worry about losing control over content and the company providing services without paying taxes  —  LAGOS — At the end of April, Starlink, the satellite broadband service owned by South African-born tech billionaire Elon Musk …