TechCoreVoice

Bungie says it will lay off 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce, and integrate an additional 155 roles into its parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment (Wesley Yin-Poole/IGN)

A ransomware attack hits blood donation nonprofit OneBlood, which has asked over 250 hospitals in the US to activate their critical blood shortage protocols (Sean Lyngaas/CNN)

Nvidia shares jump 10%+ after Microsoft and AMD signaled no slowdown in the buildout of AI servers built around GPUs; Microsoft spent $19B on capex in Q4 (CNBC)

OpenAI begins rolling out ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, initially called out for sounding like Scarlett Johansson after its demo in May, to ChatGPT Plus users (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

The US CPSC rules that Amazon is legally responsible for recalled products sold on Amazon.com, even by third parties, and must remove them and notify purchasers (Kate Gibson/CBS News)

California's DMV says it has created tokens for 42M car titles on the Avalanche blockchain and aims to help residents access them by early next year (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

The SEC charges BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji of raising $257M+ from unregistered offers and sales of BTCLT and lying to investors about personal compensation (Mat Di Salvo/Decrypt)

A look at the AI-assisted Judging Support System for scoring in gymnastics that made its debut at the 2023 world championships and helps settle disputes (Dvora Meyers/The Verge)

Apple debuts Apple Intelligence in the iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 developer betas, with text generation and Siri updates, but missing some features (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

NYT Connections today — hints and answers for Monday, July 29 (game #414)

How podcasting is turning into an industry of megastars with huge deals and the biggest audiences; Edison: the top 25 podcasts reach ~50% of US weekly listeners (Anne Steele/Wall Street Journal)

Dune Analytics: ~1.7M new digital coins entered circulation in H1 2024, compared with 264K in H1 2023, as the crypto market revival fuels a surge in memecoins (David Yaffe-Bellany/New York Times)

At Nashville's Bitcoin 2024 conference, Trump said the US must become a leader in crypto, he will fire SEC chair Gary Gensler, stop creation of a CBDC, and more (CoinDesk)

Samsung Galaxy Buds3 review: auto-pause works well, but copies Apple's dated design with plastic tips, shoddy ANC, expensive, and AI tools are mostly useless (Parker Hall/Wired)

Sources: Talkie, which lets users chat with AI personas of celebrities and was one of most downloaded AI apps in the US in H1, is owned by China-based MiniMax (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)

US-based security vendor KnowBe4 says it unwittingly hired a North Korean hacker who then unsuccessfully attempted to load malware into the company's network (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

A look at the race to build advanced AI robots; PitchBook: robotics startups have raised $6.5B across 552 deals in 2024 vs. $9.7B across 1,256 deals in 2023 (Financial Times)

Ireland's Data Protection Commission says it is surprised and is "seeking clarity" about X's move to automatically allow user data to train Grok (Financial Times)

US unions are trying to organize staff at chip firms set to receive CHIPS Act grants; CWA is pushing to organize workers at Intel and other big chip companies (Jiyoung Sohn/Wall Street Journal)

Meta says WhatsApp now has more than 100M MAUs in the US and that more than 50% of WhatsApp users in the country have an iPhone; WhatsApp has 2B+ MAUs globally (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

California's Supreme Court upholds Prop 22, allowing Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other companies to keep classifying California drivers as independent contractors (Maia Spoto/Bloomberg)

Apple launches Apple Maps on the web in beta, available in English and compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, and Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Reddit appears to be blocking search engines that don't rely on Google's indexing; Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others are not showing recent results from Reddit (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

Atos appoints its chairman Jean Pierre Mustier as CEO to replace departing boss Paul Saleh, in its fifth top management reshuffle in less than two years (Reuters)

Comcast reports Peacock Q2 revenue up 28% YoY to $1B, and a $348M loss, down from $651M in Q2 2023; paying subs were up 38% YoY to 33M but down from 33.5M in Q1 (The Hollywood Reporter)

Harvey, which is building an AI-powered "copilot" for lawyers, raised a $100M Series C led by GV that values it at $1.5B and brings its total funding to $206M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)