Tech News

New York Times:
A look at Musk's unparalleled involvement in the US election; sources: Trump campaign contacted X to prevent the circulation of the hacked JD Vance dossier  —  Elon Musk is planting himself in Pennsylvania, has brought his brain trust to help and may even knock on doors himself.

Steve Dent / Engadget:
Steam now tells its users that they're buying a license, not a game, ahead of a California law that forces companies to do so when customers “buy” digital media  —  The company appears to be getting ahead of a California law going into force next year.

Business Insider:
Experts question the feasibility of Tesla's robotaxi plan, citing Musk's history of missing FSD targets, achieving scale without rideshare partnerships, more  —  - Tesla's driverless taxi plan has been met with skepticism over its feasibility and competition with rivals.

Iris Deng / South China Morning Post:
Apple opens an applied research laboratory in Shenzhen; Chinese state media says it will become the company's “most extensive” lab outside the US  —  The new facility in the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong tech cooperation zone is one of several Apple research centres in China

NPR:
Faulty court filing redactions show TikTok executives were unconcerned with the harms the app poses for teenagers despite internal research validating concerns  —  For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers.

I have a morning ritual which begins with breakfast and iced coffee, and my laptop, on the kitchen table, to review the news, sports, whatever. Write a few tweets or share a few links. Usually with WNYC playing in the background until I find something I want to read carefully, then I shout at Alexa to go away. When done, I head upstairs where the work begins, often with a blog post, as I'm writing now, and sometimes with a bit of code, but that usually waits until my brain is warmed up.

But today I had a different assignment. Instead of tweeting, I wrote a few wordpress/mastodon posts, a new hybrid, a medium that I may well be the first person to explore, to do actual writing in.

I have a writing tool I call wordland, it connects directly to WordPress, and from there, one of my sites is hooked up to Mastodon via ActivityPub. I choose to view it that way, to keep from going crazy. I know that it's hooked up to the "fediverse" -- meaning my writing can be viewed by any other app that supports the protocol Masotodon supports which is kind of ActivityPub+ -- where the + is the Mastodon API. Not sure what the ratios are, and I don't care. In this context I am a user, and happy to be that. The developers at Automattic are taking care of the technical details.

Here's the conclusion that appeared in one of the posts I wrote in my kitchen this morning -- "I am more excited about the web than I have been in a lonnnnng time." I am. I explained why in one of my posts, but it comes down to this. I have most of the features I asked for in textcasting (!) and I am typing in a respectable editing window, where I retain copies of my writing, and there's no freaking "tiny text box". And because I'm hooking in through a protocol (here's the punchline) this writing can go anywhere. Anywhere. Let me say that again. Anywhere.

Like I said the other day, I doubt if Automattic knows what they have. I seriously doubt it. But in a few years, we're going to look back on this as the moment when Twitter stopped controlling our writing, as they have since 2006.

No more character limits. Posts can have titles, or not. We can use links, as many as we like. Styling works. We can edit our posts. And the really big payoff, I can use a tool I love and you can use a tool you love and they work together perfectly well. And if one day you feel like using mine, and I feel like using yours, it works. So in one step, we turn the clock back to 1994, when the web had all the features a writer could want, and one extra -- links, that we've been missing since Twitter and Facebook decided we didn't need them. And the folks at Bluesky and Mastodon agreed, possibly without realizing all the damage. Maybe none of them understood, or maybe bringing back links was just never a priority. But if we move quickly now, we can create the expectation that Threads hasn't really supported the Fediverse until they support links and styling and no character limits, too.

Links to the stories I wrote earlier, on Mastodon:

1. My new writing environment does textcasting.
2. I have bad luck hooking up to platforms.
3. A place for a 90s blogosperic reboot.

WordPress versions are linked to from the Mastodon posts.

Enter this in the address box: @daveverse.wordpress.com to follow this blog in Mastodon.

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Salt Typhoon hackers still had access to some parts of US broadband networks within the last week, and investigators don't know what they were seeking  —  In letters to AT&T, Verizon and Lumen, lawmakers ask about proposed measures the companies will take to protect U.S. wiretap systems

Iain Martin / Forbes:
Filing: TikTok's European revenue grew to $4.57B in 2023, up from $2.6B in 2022; losses grew to $1.3B, up from $512M YoY; ByteDance set aside $1B for EU fines  —  Bytedance has set aside the ten-figure sum to pay regulatory fines in Europe while facing a barrage of investigations and lawsuits across …

Hayden Field / CNBC:
CoreWeave says it has a new $650M credit line and has raised $12.7B from equity and debt investors in the past 18 months  —  CoreWeave, an Nvidia-backed artificial intelligence startup that rents out chips to other companies, announced Friday that it has a new $650 million credit line to expand its business and data center portfolio.

Lauren Goode / Wired:
Some developers say OpenAI's GPT Store is a mixed bag, with revenue sharing reserved for a tiny number of GPT creators in an invite-only pilot program in the US  —  OpenAI promised payouts to custom GPT creators.  Now most are turning to outside sources for revenue.

Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
Report: 47% of traditional hedge funds have crypto investments, up from 29% in 2023; amongst the funds that invested in crypto, 33% plan to invest more in 2024  —  - That's up from 29% last year, per new AIMA and PwC report  — Many traditional hedge funds are active in crypto derivatives

Norman Goh / Nikkei Asia:
ByteDance confirms laying off hundreds of TikTok content moderators in Malaysia and plans to invest $2B in 2024 in trust and safety; sources: 700+ were laid off  —  KUALA LUMPUR — ByteDance, the parent company of social media platform TikTok, confirmed on Friday that it will be laying off hundreds …

Issie Lapowsky / Wired:
A profile of White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who has crafted a strategy to stop China from unseating the US as the world's tech superpower  —  China is racing to unseat the United States as the world's technological superpower.  Not if Jake Sullivan can help it.

Victoria Song / The Verge:
A review of Submerged, Apple's first scripted short film shot in Immersive Video for the Vision Pro: technologically impressive, but an isolating experience  —  I don't like submarines.  The idea of being trapped, several hundred feet underwater, in a narrow, creaking death trap?  No thanks.

Kylie Robison / The Verge:
A look at the promise of AI agents as a way for companies to monetize models; PitchBook: AI agent startups raised $8.2B over the last 12 months, up 81.4% YoY  —  Humans have automated tasks for centuries.  Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they've got a name for their solution: agents.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Relyance AI, which helps companies comply with data privacy regulations, raised a $32.1M Series B led by Thomvest, bringing its total funding to ~$59M  —  As the demand for AI surges, AI vendors are devoting greater bandwidth to data security issues.  Not only are they being compelled …

A tweet that says something that's obviously true until you realize it's not. "No kid remembers their best day in front of the TV." In fact I have four memories from my youth, watching TV.

1. I remember my father rolling around on the floor when the ball went through Buckner's legs. My father never rolled around on the floor, before or since. But I liked seeing him let go just that once.
2. Another with my father. When the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan he said they were wearing wigs. He knew that because no man would actually have hair like that. I was 8 or 9 years old and remember telling him I didn't think he got that right.
3. I remember exactly where I was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. At the Newport Folk Festival and about 500 people were watching a tiny TV on top of a VW bus. Somehow everyone could see. It was outdoors and it was silent, everyone was in awe.
4. One that's only peripherally about TV. I remember every time I went to see a game at Shea Stadium as a kid I was blown away by the color, because most of the Mets games I saw were on TV, in black and white.
5. Here's one from adulthood. Watching young Barack Obama give his victory speech on election night in 2008 in my house in Berkeley with a group of friends, with tears running down all our faces.