Techmeme
January 1, 2025, 5:50 PM

Top News

Raquel Coronell Uribe / NBC News:
The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes  —  The Treasury Department said Iran and Russia sought to divide Americans through targeted disinformation campaigns in the 2024 elections.
Matt Simons / Courthouse News Service:
A judge blocks parts of California's SB 976, a law to protect kids from social media, citing 1A concerns, but allows a ban on “addictive feeds” for minors  —  Parts of the law will still take effect Wednesday.  — A federal judge on Tuesday barred the state of California …
Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post:
Elon Musk got new support for his OpenAI lawsuit in filings last week, including from tech advocacy group Encode, backed by AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton  —  The billionaire is attempting to block the ChatGPT maker's transition into a for-profit company.  His own start-up xAI competes with OpenAI.
John Herrman / New York Magazine:
Meta saying it expects AI characters to populate its apps is its friendly rebrand of an effective but alienating effort to automate social interactions  —  Why AI friends are coming to Facebook and Instagram.  —  Among Meta's many resolutions for the new year — making augmented reality …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, and slop arrived  —  A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024.  Here's a review of things we figured …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing Softchoice at ~CA$1.8B  —  One last mega-deal closed out an eventful 2024.  —  On Tuesday, World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis …
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
The US arrests a US Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, who sold sensitive customer call records stolen from AT&T and Verizon in the Snowflake hack  —  Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m …
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:
Government data: users on Douyin, WeChat, and other short video apps in China dropped for the first time to 1.05B in June 2024, down ~300M from December 2023  —  The number of short video app users in China reached 1.05 billion at the end of June, about 300 million fewer than in December last year

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