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Bob Iger and Bob Chapek’s CEO battle made Disney the pettiest place on Earth

Current Disney CEO Bob Iger didn’t make Bob Chapek’s short-lived takeover any easier, according to this revealing report from CNBC.

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Gmail’s client-side encryption now works on mobile for businesses that use Workspace.

After rolling out client-side encryption for Gmail on the web earlier this year, now Android and iOS business users can read and write encrypted messages, too.

The company announced the update on its Workspace blog and provided instructions on how to set it up. With the feature enabled, Google says “sensitive data in the email body and attachments are indecipherable to Google servers.”


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The biggest known MOVEit hack leaked the personal information of up to 11 million people.

Maximus, a company that administers government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, was swept up in the broad MOVEit hacking campaign in May that affected over 2,000 organizations.

Victims filed a proposed class action lawsuit against the company after the attack, which as TechCrunch noted saw the leak of social security and other sensitive health information for between 8 and 11 million people.


The new WGA contract will change how Hollywood works

Historic raises and guarantees on AI use will have major ramifications in Hollywood, but the new transparency in streaming data means Netflix and Disney Plus will have to change how they work.

The Twitter deal is all downside risk for Elon Musk

Elon Musk has everything to lose and only retweets to gain

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Who is Open AI’s Sam Altman anyway?

Well, besides giving himself scurvy once, he likes meditating. Altman is also “pretty disconnected from the reality of life for most people,” he admits. And:

A friend in his inner circle described him to me as “the most ambitious person I know who is still sane, and I know 20,000 people in Silicon Valley.”


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Family vloggers’ fans are in turmoil as the scandals mount.

Ruby Franke, a parenting YouTuber, has been charged with child abuse. And now some fans are questioning the genre:

Franke is part of a sprawling family social media apparatus in which her parents and all four of her siblings have their own dedicated YouTube channels, with combined followers around 5.5 million and views in the billions. Halterman found their content fascinating. It even made her feel closer to her faith, as both she and the Frankes are Mormon. “They looked perfect,” she says. But since Franke’s arrest, Halterman wonders if her interest in family vloggers is part of the problem. “I now see it for what it is — exploitation of these minor [children] and voyeurism on my part.”


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Is a tax surprise the worst surprise?

Alert — if you resold your Taylor Swift tickets you bought on Ticketmaster, you may be on the hook for the profits. Ticketmaster has turned your info over to the IRS already, thanks to a new law, and:

The average price for Taylor Swift tickets sold in the U.S. on StubHub was $1,095, with the best seats going for thousands of dollars, according to the company, which operates an online market for people to resell and buy tickets.

Also, the number of fan resellers skyrocketed.


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Apple’s retail employees are getting lower raises this year.

Bloomberg reports that annual increases for Apple’s retail employees, including AppleCare technical support, will be about 4 percent this year, down from eight to 10 percent last year. Bloomberg cites labor shortages, inflation, and unionization efforts as factors in last year’s higher increases. Guess things are back to normal?


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Wait, Tether is lending again?

Controversial stablecoin Tether is making loans to its customers. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine walks through why that’s kind of weird:

If you are in charge of Tether and someone shows up at your office to pitch you on a clever investment that will get you a higher return with only a little risk, you should put your fingers in your ears and scream “NO” and kick them out of your office. You can make billions of dollars of pure profit taking no risk!

Anyway, the implications are even weirder: Tether might be propping up crypto prices.


After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch editor-in-chief Matthew Panzarino tells us what’s next

It’s been a rocky and chaotic decade — and now digital media is on the brink of yet another existential crisis thanks to generative AI.

What’s next for Windows and Surface without Panos Panay?

There’s a major shakeup atop the Surface line as Microsoft starts looking more toward AI.

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Now Unity says it’s changing the new pricing policy.

After nearly a week of indie developers tearing down Unity’s new pricing policy that was set to take effect on January 1st, the company now says, “We have heard you.” Unity’s pricing scheme that was set to take effect in 2024 would have established a convoluted setup charging game makers for downloads and installations.

Unity didn’t hint at what the changes are or reference the protest that saw some prominent devs disable its ad monetization tools, only saying it will release the details “in a couple of days.


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Coffee is for closers.

LockBit, a group that lends its eponymous ransomware to affiliates who then use it to extort businesses and governments, is workshopping new efficiency strategies for hard-selling solutions to unsolicited security checks.

So it’s proposing more consistent regulations, according to this post by malware watcher group vx-underground.