Techmeme: Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions (Gleb Bryanski/Reuters)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise

December 25, 2024, 6:50 PM

Top News

Gleb Bryanski / Reuters:

Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions — Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments following legislative changes …

More: SiliconANGLE, Axios, The Daily Hodl, BeInCrypto, Cryptonews, The Crypto Basic, Cointelegraph, CoinGape, Coinpedia Fintech News, CCN.com, The Coin Republic, Crypto Briefing, CryptoSlate, Benzinga, and The Crypto Times

Bluesky: @sactosteve, @hybridcap, @lehtimaeki, @schizanon, and @vernster

Forums: r/Buttcoin and r/Bitcoin

Bloomberg:

Taiwan's FTC blocks Uber's $950M acquisition of Delivery Hero's Foodpanda, arguing it would decrease competition as their combined market share would be 90%+ — - Fair Trade Commission concerned deal would limit competition — Uber had sought Delivery Hero's Foodpanda unit in Taiwan

More: The Information, Seeking Alpha, Taipei Times, Axios, Benzinga, Reuters, The Straits Times, Taiwan News, The Week, Tech Xplore, and Tech in Asia

X: @newsbfm, @newsbfm, and @newsbfm

Qwen:

Alibaba's Qwen unveils QvQ-72B-Preview, an experimental research model focused on “enhancing visual reasoning capabilities”, built upon Qwen2-VL-72B — Language and vision intertwine in the human mind, shaping how we perceive and understand the world around us.

Jody Godoy / Reuters:

Filing: Apple asks to participate in the remedial phase of Google's US antitrust case, saying it can't rely on Google to defend their revenue-sharing agreements — Apple (AAPL.O) has asked to participate in Google's upcoming U.S. antitrust trial over online search, saying it cannot rely …

More: TechSpot, MacRumors, Beyond Search, BGR, iPhone in Canada Blog, SiliconANGLE, Wall Street Journal, TechIssuesToday.com, Hindustan Times, Tech in Asia, iClarified, AppleInsider, Benzinga, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Invezz, Wccftech, 9to5Mac, Thurrott, Chrome Unboxed, MediaPost, PhoneArena, Investing.com, Finimize, Moneycontrol, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and The Verge

Bluesky: @paulsemenza, @megangray, @megangray, @kint, and @kint

Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to and @lapcatsoftware@mastodon …. Threads: @grantjallen

X: @counternotions, @parkerortolani, @appleinsider, @9to5mac, @timsweeneyepic, @marionawfal, @laralogan, and @balancecrafting. LinkedIn: Jody Godoy

Forums: Hacker News, r/apple, r/google, Slashdot, and MacRumors Forums

The Block:

Analysis: Coinbase International saw its total trading volume grow 124% week-over-week to $119B+ this past week; it averaged just $2.5B per day in November 2024 — - The weekly total is 124% higher than the previous week's total. — The following is an excerpt from The Block's Data and Insights newsletter.

More: The Block, Cointelegraph, Cryptopolitan, BeInCrypto, Motley Fool, Coinpedia Fintech News, and Coinspeaker

X: @pancakeswap, @daancrypto, @martypartymusic, and @kyledoops

Ashley Capoot / CNBC:

Analysis: roughly two-thirds of 39 public digital health companies have lost value in 2024, while the Nasdaq is up 32% — If the Covid era marked a boom time for digital health companies, 2024 was the reckoning. — In a year that saw the Nasdaq jump 32%, surpassing 20,000 for the first time this month …

X: @ashleycapoot and @paul_sonnier. LinkedIn: Ashley Capoot

Bloomberg:

Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace approves lifting its ban on “certain widely used foreign platforms”, naming WhatsApp and Google Play as the first two apps — - Allowing WhatsApp and Google Play may placate opponents — Major social networking sites have been blocked for years

Martin Matishak / The Record:

President Biden signs the $895B 2025 defense policy bill, including $3B for the FCC's “rip and replace” program to get rid of Chinese networking equipment — The annual defense policy bill signed by President Joe Biden Monday evening allocates $3 billion to help telecom firms remove …

More: SiliconANGLE, TechRadar, and The Cyber Express. Forums: Slashdot

Tharin Pillay / Time:

A look at the more challenging AI evaluations emerging in response to the rapid progress of models, including FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and RE-Bench — Despite their expertise, AI developers don't always know what their most advanced systems are capable of—at least, not at first.

Bluesky: @iseff.com. X: @tharin_p and @tharin_p. LinkedIn: Ross Dawson

Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu / Financial Times:

Opensignal ranks Japan #1 in G7 mobile reliability experience between July 1 and September 28, followed by France, Germany, the US, Canada, Italy, and the UK — Research highlights impact of poor network performance on consumers — Mobile users in the UK had the least reliable experience …

More: iPhone in Canada Blog. Bluesky: @seanfionn. X: @workmj. Forums: r/ukpolitics and r/unitedkingdom

Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis:

Benchmarking AMD's MI300X and Nvidia's H100 and H200; in theory, AMD's GPU has advantages in specs and total cost of ownership, but software bugs hold it back — Intro — SemiAnalysis has been on a five-month long quest to settle the reality of MI300X. In theory, the MI300X …

More: TechSpot. Bluesky: @halvarflake. Mastodon: @pbloem@sigmoid.social. X: @cudahandbook, @cudahandbook, @benbajarin, @cudahandbook, @cudahandbook, @realgeorgehotz, @cudahandbook, @vintrotweets, @youjiacheng, @devnull_0, @dylan522p, @lemire, @benthompson, and @theycallmemr_. Forums: r/nvidia

Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:

Kaiko: the share of BTC-USD trades in US market hours has now climbed to ~53% from 40% in 2021, with crypto liquidity back at levels seen before FTX's collapse — - Bitcoin trading versus dollar is more concentrated in US hours — Open interest in CME futures for Bitcoin, Ether scaled records

More: Cointelegraph, DL News, and Cryptopolitan. X: @crypto

Sponsor Posts

TELUS Digital:

See how your customer experience priorities compare — TELUS Digital surveyed leaders about the tech they're investing in, the KPIs they're tracking and their plans for outsourcing. Get the results. No form fill required!

Intel:

Intel Delivers powerful CPUs for AI and Networking — With the onset of AI, businesses demand powerful and efficient CPUs. Explore new Intel Xeon 6 processors, for the broadest set of workloads with leadership performance and lower TCO.

Zoho:

The rise of AI in recruitment — Note: This is a guest post by our integration partner Ringover.AI has already begun transforming recruitment, but in the coming years, it will reach new heights.

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.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Techmeme Ride Home:

(BNS) The Legality Of The AI Stuff

The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.

Subscribe to Techmeme Ride Home.

Sponsor this podcast

Hard Fork:

Tech Stock Shock + Solving the Mystery of OpenAI's "Blip" + Tinder's Flirt-Off

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.

Subscribe to Hard Fork.

BG2 Pod:

Liberation Day, Tariffs, US v China Open Source, OpenAI Fundraise, $CRWV, TikTok

Open-source podcast on all things tech, markets, investing, and capitalism, hosted by Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley.

Subscribe to BG2 Pod.

Decoder with Nilay Patel:

What AI anime memes tell us about the future of art and humanity

A show from the Verge about big ideas - and other problems.

Subscribe to Decoder with Nilay Patel.

Great Chat:

Battle of the startup cities

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

The Logan Bartlett Show:

Zach Weinberg (Co-Founder & CEO, Curie.Bio) on The Tariff Trap, Self-Inflicted Recession Risk, and Open AI's Fundraise

A podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett, an investor at Redpoint Ventures, covering tech with industry insiders.

Subscribe to The Logan Bartlett Show.

Add your postcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:50 PM ET, December 25, 2024.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Axios:

Sources: G/O Media sold business news brand Quartz and commerce site The Inventory to software firm Redbrick, the fourth Quartz ownership change in seven years

Katie Campione / Deadline:

WGA members “overwhelmingly” ratify a new three-year deal with CBS News that includes AI protections and is modeled after a recent ABC News contract

Ella Creamer / The Guardian:

A judicial panel consolidates 12 copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft in New York, including cases from Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Grisham, and the NYT

More News

Suvashree Ghosh / Bloomberg:

Singapore issued 13 crypto licenses in 2024, pulling ahead of Hong Kong, where authorities have been more cautious, in the race to become a regional crypto hub

More: Cointelegraph, BeInCrypto, Coinpedia Fintech News, Bitcoinist.com, crypto.news, Cryptonews, Bitcoin Insider, Cryptopolitan, and Tech in Asia. X: @crypto

Ann Cao / South China Morning Post:

Ant splits Alipay into the Digital Payment Business Group focused on new payment products, and the Alipay Business Group focused on user growth and monetization

More: Tech in Asia and Pandaily

Niket Nishant / Reuters:

Fiserv to acquire Toronto-based Payfare, which lets gig workers on platforms like Uber access their wages early, for $140M, expected to close in H1 2025

More: Fiserv, Inc., Crowdfund Insider, FinTech Futures, FinTech Global, and SiliconANGLE

The Information:

A look at OpenAI's interest in robotics, from investing in startups like Figure and Physical Intelligence to, sources say, considering making a humanoid robot

More: TechCrunch, Cryptopolitan, Interesting Engineering, Gadgets 360, SiliconANGLE, and San Francisco Business Times

X: @rohanpaul_ai and @steph_palazzolo

Forums: r/singularity and Slashdot

Dan Primack / Axios:

Sources: Founders Fund seeks ~$3B for its third growth equity fund; it raised $3.4B for its second growth fund and $1.8B for its eighth early-stage fund in 2022

More: The Information and Tech in Asia. Bluesky: @laurenmeidasa

Isaac Schorr / Mediaite:

Elon Musk is one of two paid subscribers of an X account that has implied South Africa was better off under apartheid, slammed “Black ruled” countries, and more

Bluesky: @joyannreid, @jim-stewartson, @mobiledom, @murshedz, @bft.wtf, @petedavidsonny, @timescarcass, @dennycarter, @garymarcus, and @juddlegum

Mastodon: @KimPerales@toad.social and @cdarwin@c.im

Threads: @bennjordan, @hunterwalk, @carnage4life, and @barrykatz41

X: @mehdirhasan, @deanobeidallah, and @meidas_laurena

Forums: r/Law_and_Politics, r/EnoughMuskSpam, r/FoxFiction, r/EnoughMuskSpam, and r/RepublicanValues

Earlier Picks

The Information:

Two major China-based Amazon merchants say Amazon reps have recently been offering incentives like free ads and lower commissions if they stop selling on Temu

More: TechNode, South China Morning Post, and Tech in Asia. X: @theo_wayt

Stephanie Stacey / Financial Times:

The biggest online dating companies are in crisis, as women and younger users increasingly look elsewhere, toward niche apps, websites, or real-life meetups

More: Wired and The US Sun

Bluesky: @emilprotalinski. X: @eric_seufert. Forums: r/redscarepod

Sheldon Reback / CoinDesk:

US and Japanese law enforcement say North Korean hackers were responsible for stealing 4,502.9 BTC, worth $308M, from Japanese crypto exchange DMM in May 2024

Pranshu Verma / Washington Post:

Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production

More: MIT Technology Review and Department of Energy

Bluesky: @nathanpatin, @opcanary, @craigcwhite, @arjunsubgraph, @laurawags, @parismarx.com, @climatebrad.hillheat.com, @disabilitystor1, @ahjohnson, and @thetnholler

X: @michaelgiberso3 and @mbazilian

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:

The US FTC orders Marriott and Starwood to implement a robust customer data security scheme after Starwood's 2014 to 2018 breaches and Marriott's 2018 breach

More: Federal Trade Commission, SiliconANGLE, iTnews, TechRadar, 9to5Mac, and The Verge

X: @ftc. Forums: r/cybersecurity