Thursday, April 11, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM! Have you gotten a spyware warning from Apple lately? If yes, you were among the thousands who also got alerts yesterday — more notes on that below. We also have a look at the positive impact of EU regulation on browser tech; how we could soon have our own personal satellites beaming Internet down to us; and the big changes at Amazon’s board that hint at its future plans! — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

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1. iPhone users in 92 countries get spyware warnings: Apple sent out a massive warning on Wednesday telling users that the company had detected a mercenary spyware attack that aimed to compromise iPhones. The company previously used to call such attacks “state-sponsored attacks,” but now seems to prefer “mercenary spyware attacks” instead. Regardless of the phrasing, there are elections around the world this year, and this shows that the threat landscape is worsening for many people... Read More

2. Small browsers get a lift from EU’s DMA: A new regulation in the EU that requires users to be offered a choice of browser is driving attention and downloads to the smaller competitors of Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers. Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, and other browsers are seeing an encouraging lift in traffic, which is great... Read More

3. Apple News tries to ape New York Times with word games: Apple is testing a new game called Quartiles inside its News app. It’s clearly an effort to replicate some of the NYT’s success with word games like Wordle and Connections, given that Quartiles is fairly reminiscent of Connections. That is, of course, nothing more than a coincidence… Read More

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Morning Must Reads

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Astranis is building the AWS of space connectivity: Astranis wants to beam fast internet from space using small satellites in high orbit. But what’s really cool here isn’t just the promise of fast Internet from space. This startup wants to build dedicated satellites for customers. Talk about personalization! Read More

Catch up on all our Google Cloud Next 2024 coverage: The sheer volume of new stuff that was shown off at Google’s latest cloud developer event is somewhat staggering, so we compiled a single rundown of the most important pieces! Read More

Content creators criticize Meta’s political content limits: Given Meta’s history with elections, you can understand why the company might want to limit political content on its platform. The company recently chose to make the bulk of political content opt-in, which caused most users to see a limited selection of political content on their Meta apps. That, while good for most people’s mental health, has irked some content creators, who argue that the feature should be opt-in instead… Read More

Amazon drops entertainment board member for AI heft: All eyes on an AI-rich future, Amazon has swapped out former TV exec Judy McGrath from its board for Andrew Ng, who is known for his work with artificial intelligence at large tech companies. Amazon has spent lavishly to build out its entertainment bulk over the years, so this move says quite a lot about how and where it intends to spend its fortune next... Read More

Around the Web

Mistral AI drops new model via torrent: French startup Mistral AI has released a new sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) model called Mixtral 8x22B, Venture Beat reports. But instead of using a blog or a cool demo video like OpenAI or Google did this week, the company chose to release its model via a torrent link... Read More

SEC vs. Uniswap: The SEC’s rolling regulatory barrage against a host of crypto companies continued this week with Uniswap being served a Wells Notice, Coindesk reports. In more prosaic terms, it appears a rumble with the regulator is on the way... Read More

What if AI models had to disclose what material that they trained on? Or at least the copyright-protected material they used? That latter goal is what Rep. Adam Schiff has in mind with his plainly-titled “Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act,” which purports to do what it says on the tin, reports The Hill… Read More

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Before You Go

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X criticized for encouraging hate speech again: When X started paying users who generate lots of activity on the platform, folks changed up how they post. That wasn’t a bad thing in itself, since people respond to incentives. But the Center for Countering Digital Hate says that hate speech drives a lot of engagement, and some accounts have been profiting by posting hateful content related to the Israel-Gaza war... Read More