Eurogamer and VG247 report a Team17 spokesperson confirms CEO Michael Pattison, who joined the company two years ago after leaving PlayStation, is out. In 2022, Team17 was one of the companies that announced plans for an NFT project, before backtracking.
In response to rumors of plans for layoffs with “tens of redundancies,” the statement says:
We can also confirm that we have sadly entered into a period of consultation today within Team17 Digital, with Astragon and Storytoys remaining unaffected by the restructuring plans.
The electric truck and SUV automaker completed 15,564 deliveries to customers and built 16,304 vehicles out of its Normal, Illinois plant in its third fiscal quarter of 2023, ending September 30th, 2023.
Reuters points out that Rivian built 13,992 in the second quarter and would only need to make just 12,300 more next quarter to reach its goal of building 52,000 (up from 50,000) electric vehicles in one year.
Michael Lewis, interviewed on his time with Sam Bankman-Fried, says:
I do think that if he had the internet, he could survive jail forever. Without having a constant stream of information to react to— I think he may go mad. If you gave Sam Bankman-Fried a choice (this is quite serious) of living in a $39 million penthouse in the Bahamas without the internet, or the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn with the internet, there’s no question in my mind he’d take the jail.
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.”
[Google Workspace Updates]
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.
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.”
[Intelligencer]
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.”
[The Washington Post]
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.
[The Wall Street Journal]
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?
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.
[Bloomberg]
Dumb Money is the Funko Pop version of the GameStop story
History as written to soothe the bagholders.
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.