Journals

Naman Ramachandran / Variety: Netflix removes an Indian film depicting a Hindu character eating meat after backlash from Hindu groups; producer Zee apologizes and plans to edit the film  —  Tamil-language film “Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food,” headlined by “Jawan”… Read More »Netflix removes an Indian film depicting a Hindu character eating meat after backlash from Hindu groups; producer Zee apologizes and plans to edit the film (Naman Ramachandran/Variety)

Carly Page / TechCrunch: Ivanti confirms hackers are exploiting two critical vulnerabilities in its corporate VPN software, but says patches won’t be available until the end of January  —  U.S. software giant Ivanti has confirmed that hackers are exploiting two… Read More »Ivanti confirms hackers are exploiting two critical vulnerabilities in its corporate VPN software, but says patches won’t be available until the end of January (Carly Page/TechCrunch)

Chris Kerr / gamedeveloper: Filing: ironSource founders, including CEO and Unity Grow president Tomer Bar-Zeev, are exiting Unity amid mass layoffs; Unity merged with ironSource in 2022  —  IronSource CEO Tomer Bar-Zeev and his fellow co-founders are stepping down effective… Read More »Filing: ironSource founders, including CEO and Unity Grow president Tomer Bar-Zeev, are exiting Unity amid mass layoffs; Unity merged with ironSource in 2022 (Chris Kerr/gamedeveloper)

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Amazon launches “badge pay,” which uses its Just Walk Out retail tech to let employees use their badges for payments, starting with a hospital in Savannah, GA  —  Amazon’s computer vision and sensor-powered Just Walk Out… Read More »Amazon launches “badge pay,” which uses its Just Walk Out retail tech to let employees use their badges for payments, starting with a hospital in Savannah, GA (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Dina Bass / Bloomberg: Google Cloud eliminates fees levied on customers who leave for a rival service, effective immediately, which may put pressure on AWS and Azure to do the same  —  Antirust officials have been looking at cloud data-transfer… Read More »Google Cloud eliminates fees levied on customers who leave for a rival service, effective immediately, which may put pressure on AWS and Azure to do the same (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Kat Tenbarge / NBC News: Analysis: Google and Bing showed deepfake porn images of female celebrities atop search results for their names plus “deepfakes”, “fake nudes”, and other terms  —  Google and other search engines include nonconsensual deepfake porn in… Read More »Analysis: Google and Bing showed deepfake porn images of female celebrities atop search results for their names plus “deepfakes”, “fake nudes”, and other terms (Kat Tenbarge/NBC News)

Bloomberg: Sources describe how AI replaced the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg’s top priority, leading Meta to ruthlessly cut jobs and focus on quickly releasing AI products  —  Meta’s founder has become deeply engaged in his company’s AI efforts ahead of… Read More »Sources describe how AI replaced the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg’s top priority, leading Meta to ruthlessly cut jobs and focus on quickly releasing AI products (Bloomberg)

Matt Burgess / Wired: A researcher finds 800GB of data online tied to school software maker Raptor, used by 5,300+ US districts, including evacuation plans and student medical files  —  More than 4 million school records, including safety procedures, student… Read More »A researcher finds 800GB of data online tied to school software maker Raptor, used by 5,300+ US districts, including evacuation plans and student medical files (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Charisma Madarang / Rolling Stone: Dudesy, a podcast generated by AI and curated by humans, releases an hour-long comedy special featuring an AI recreation of George Carlin, who died in 2008  —  The hour-long special arrived from Dudesy, a podcast… Read More »Dudesy, a podcast generated by AI and curated by humans, releases an hour-long comedy special featuring an AI recreation of George Carlin, who died in 2008 (Charisma Madarang/Rolling Stone)

Reuters: USDC stablecoin issuer Circle confidentially files for a US IPO, without saying the number of shares for sale or price range; Circle had a $9B valuation in 2022  —  Circle Internet Financial, the company behind stablecoin USDC, said on… Read More »USDC stablecoin issuer Circle confidentially files for a US IPO, without saying the number of shares for sale or price range; Circle had a $9B valuation in 2022 (Reuters)