Techmeme
December 8, 2025, 1:35 AM

Top News

Bjarke Smith-Meyer / Politico:
Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about the €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account  —  Nikita Bier, X's head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying …
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly  —  Netflix Inc. co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos ventured to the White House in mid-November for a meeting with President Donald Trump.
Bloomberg:
President Trump says Netflix's planned acquisition of WBD will have “to go through a process” and he will be personally involved in the decision-making process  —  President Donald Trump raised potential antitrust concerns for Netflix Inc.'s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. …
Ashish Vaswani / Essential AI:
Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o  —  The long-term advancement and equitable diffusion of AI technologies crucially depend on their development in the Open.
John Thornhill / Financial Times:
Impressions from a test ride in London in a car using Wayve's self-driving tech; Wayve has raised $1.3B since launch and is testing cars with Level 2+ autonomy  —  John Thornhill takes an autonomous spin through the city's tangled streets with the British start-up's chief Alex Kendall
Aaron Krolik / New York Times:
How “cash to crypto” swaps allow users everywhere to convert national currencies to stablecoins and then debit cards, avoiding financial oversight and sanctions  —  Smugglers, money launderers and people facing sanctions once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork to store illicit fortunes.
X: @neerajkaLinkedIn: Ali KhanBluesky: @waldo.net, @klonick, and @watchdogprgMastodon: @SuffolkLITLab@esq.socialForums: r/NoShitSherlock
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Sources: Aaru, which uses AI to simulate user behavior, has raised a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures at multiple valuation tiers, including a $1B tier  —  Aaru, a startup that provides near-instant customer research by using AI to simulate user behavior, has raised a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures …
Bloomberg:
India's digital transformation has exposed citizens to scams like “digital arrests”, where victims are coerced into transferring funds under false accusations  —  She races into her bedroom, shuts the door behind her, then falls to the checkered-tile floor.  The only place to hide is beneath the bed.
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Sally Ward-Foxton / EE Times:
Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon  —  AI software startup Lemurian Labs has pivoted away from AI hardware, having raised a $28-million series A to build its AI software stack.

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Shopify:
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Zoho:
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IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

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