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Amrita Khalid

Amrita Khalid

Hot Pod Reporter

Amrita Khalid covers the podcast and audio industry for The Verge, and is also one of the authors of the newsletter Hot Pod. Khalid has covered the tech industry for more than a decade. She got her start as a general assignment congressional reporter at CQ in Washington, D.C., where she grew interested in tech and surveillance policy. She then went on to write about tech platforms and online communities for The Daily Dot. She’s also held roles at Engadget, Quartz and Inc. Magazine, where she covered the business of tech and the consumer gadget industry. She is based in Los Angeles.

Got a tip? Contact her at amrita.khalid@theverge.com.

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X now wants to compete with Google Meet.

I mean, what could go wrong? A new video conferencing feature in the style of Zoom, Meet and Microsoft Teams is coming soon to X, according to X user/Elon whisperer DogeDesigner and X Daily News.

X Conferences will be hosted on the the platform’s existing live audio platform X Spaces (which added video earlier this year), according to a screenshot of the beta version.


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Former NSA hacker and former Apple researcher launch iOS security startup.

There’s a lack of cybersecurity products devoted to iOS and macOS, and the startup DoubleYou thinks it can fix that problem, says co-founders Patrick Wardle and Mikhail Sosonkin.

DoubleYou will be like a “supplier of car parts” for Apple cybersecurity solutions, developing tools that it can license to companies, who can then build them in their security products.


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Bluesky backs effort to make Mastodon apps compatible with its protocol.

The decentralized social network has awarded an $800 grant to SkyBridge, an “in-progress proxy web server that translates Mastodon API calls into appropriate Bluesky ones,” which will let people use their favorite Mastodon apps on Bluesky.

The funds came from Bluesky’s rather modest ($10,000 in its initial allocation) grant fund for developers on the AT Protocol.


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T-Mobile wants to buy the fiber optic company Lumos.

Ahead of its earnings call today, T-Mobile announced a new joint venture with Swedish investment firm EQT to buy Lumos Fiber, which reaches over 350,000 households.

Once the deal closes, T-Mobile will invest $950 million for a 50 percent stake in Lumos and acquire all of its existing fiber customers, with plans to expand even further. The T-Mobile Fiber network is currently in 16 markets.