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Bluesky reports a record spike in usage as many X users in Brazil move to Bluesky and Threads; Brazil is X's fifth-largest international market, with 20M+ users (New York Times)

Coatue founder Philippe Laffont has left the board of ByteDance following a report that Coatue was considering selling a portion of its ByteDance stake (The Information)

A profile of Alexandre de Moraes as even some supporters wonder if the Brazilian Supreme Court judge has become too powerful and gone too far by banning X (Nick Burns/Americas Quarterly)

Sources: OpenAI is in discussions about changing its corporate structure to become more investor-friendly, including removing a cap on profits for investors (Financial Times)

The City of Columbus, OH, sues security researcher David Leroy Ross, aka Connor Goodwolf, accusing him of sharing data stolen by a ransomware gang with media (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Michael Lacey, co-founder of the classified ad site Backpage, gets five years in prison and a $3M fine for money laundering; two other executives get 10 years (New York Times)

OpenAI says ChatGPT weekly active users doubled since last year to 200M+, 92% of Fortune 500 companies use its tools, and automated API usage doubled since July (Ina Fried/Axios)

Sources: OpenAI is in talks for a funding round valuing it above $100B; Thrive Capital is leading the round and will invest ~$1B, and Microsoft will also invest (Wall Street Journal)

A US court rules TikTok must face a lawsuit over a 10-year-old's death and the "blackout challenge", saying algorithmic curation isn't protected by Section 230 (Nate Raymond/Reuters)

Sources: Meta plans to release a new MR device codenamed Puffin in 2027, resembling a bulky pair of glasses with a second unit for battery and computing power (Sylvia Varnham O'Regan/The Information)

ESPN launches a Where to Watch feature on its website and app, which aims to be a universal guide for streaming sports with data from 250+ streaming services (David Pierce/The Verge)

Google rolls out a Google Meet AI feature that automatically takes notes during meetings conducted in spoken English, available to select Workspace customers (Joanna Nelius/The Verge)

Self-driving truck company TuSimple, which delisted from Nasdaq in January, reaches a $189M settlement of a suit alleging fraud by overstating safety and more (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Web3 esports startup Gameplay Galaxy, focused on developing upcoming game Trial Xtreme Freedom, raised a $24M seed co-led by Blockchain Capital and Merit Circle (Rachel Kaser/VentureBeat)

Seattle-based startup Supio, which uses AI to help lawyers analyze documents, raised a $25M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Anthropic publishes a changelog for the system prompts of its Sonnet, Opus, and Haiku models, the first major AI vendor to do so (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Crypto platform Abra agrees to settle with the SEC over claims of unregistered securities; the SEC said the Abra Earn product had almost $500M from US investors (Jesse Hamilton/CoinDesk)

French prosecutors: Pavel Durov's arrest is part of a probe "against person unnamed" into CSAM, drug sales, and more on the app and not working with authorities (New York Times)

A look at Telegram's claims that it's a "secure messenger" despite lacking default end-to-end encrypted messages and any E2E encrypted option for group chats (Matthew Green/A Few Thoughts ...)

Telegram says its CEO Pavel Durov has "nothing to hide" and that the messaging app "abides by EU laws", including the Digital Services Act (Bloomberg)

Telegram says its CEO Pavel Durov has "nothing to hide" and that the messaging app "abides by EU laws", including the Digital Services Act (@telegram)

How prominent games accessibility advocate Susan Banks, who worked with studios and raised awareness for accessibility in games, may never have existed at all (Grant Stoner/IGN)

Threads says it is testing ephemeral posts that disappear within 24 hours with a limited number of users, but doesn't say if the experiment is region-specific (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

NYT Connections today — hints and answers for Sunday, August 25 (game #441)

Reports: Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, after being targeted by an arrest warrant in France (Reuters)

A look at Germany-based discount retailer Lidl's foray into offering cloud computing services, signing up clients like SAP and generating €1.9B in sales in 2023 (Olaf Storbeck/Financial Times)