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.
A Tesla delivery center in Virginia reportedly has a way to deal with the now-recalled accelerator pedal on Cybertrucks.
In a Facebook post, Jim McGlone wrote that they installed a temporary rivet to secure the pad that might slip off and get stuck. With that in place, he picked up his new Cybertruck yesterday after it had been in a “containment hold.”
Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, but previously served as the CEO of 99Fang, a Chinese home finder startup with “very powerful” tech for search, image processing, and recommendations.
Now, The New York Times reports that former contractors suing Susquehanna, an investor in both companies, claim technology they developed for 99Fang was used to create TikTok without compensating them.
In 2020, Apple sued a recycling partner after more than 11,000 pounds of gadgets disappeared. But a Bloomberg report reveals that workers pilfering iPhones isn’t the only problem with Apple’s recycling program.
The company regularly ordered the recycling partner to destroy “tens of thousands” of refurbishable devices, legal filings show. Such waste occurs regularly throughout the globe.
[Bloomberg]
As we saw in the beta release this new version of Adobe Express packs the same creative, editing, and generative AI features that desktop users have into an iOS and Android app.
It’s free to use, but to access Firefly and the full suite of editing tools you’ll need a $10 per month Premium membership.
The deepfaked voice of Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner is just one controversial application of AI in documentaries, and now the Archival Producers Alliance has drafted some “best practices.”
It’s calling for filmmakers to be “transparent” to viewers, to get consent from human subjects, and to prioritize primary sources. The group hopes to issue final guidelines this summer.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
It hopes to recruit more EU users through a new rewards app called TikTok Lite that offers cash incentives.
Le Monde gives us a first look at the app where users earn “coins” for their activities on TikTok. A daily target of 3,600 coins (or €0.36 or $0.38) is reportedly equal to an hour of consuming content. Liking three videos? 150 coins.