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Techmeme
March 18, 2025, 12:25 PM

Top News

The Verge:
Alphabet acquires NYC-based cybersecurity startup Wiz for $32B cash, its largest acquisition yet, pending approval; antitrust fears stalled a $23B deal in 2024  —  The acquisition is Alphabet's biggest yet, after a $23 billion takeover attempt stalled last year.
More: The Keyword, Google Cloud Blog, Bloomberg, Wiz Blog, The Guardian, 9to5Google, Tech Monitor, Business Insider, The Standard, The Economic Times, Thurrott, PYMNTS.com, CNN, Financial Times, CSO, SC Media, Reuters, SiliconANGLE, New York Times, CTech, UPI, Pocketables, Analytics India Magazine, The Motley Fool, TechCrunch, The Information, Reuters, Infosecurity, Channel Futures, Constellation Research, TechRadar, Wall Street Pit, Security Boulevard, TechCrunch, TheCable, Fortune, CNBC, Channel NewsAsia, Reuters, Jerusalem Post, Channel NewsAsia, Yahoo Finance, CRN, The Times, Silicon Valley Business …, Capital Brief, Ynetnews, The Verge, Investor's Business Daily, CTech, TipRanks Financial, CSO, Proactive, BusinessLIVE, StrictlyVC, Verdict, Patently Apple, TipRanks Financial, The Cyber Express, en.ain.ua, Barron's Online, Tech in Asia, Financial Express, Benzinga, PYMNTS.com, Moneycontrol, Wall Street Journal, JD Supra, and Columbian
Andrew Martin / Bloomberg:
David Pierce / The Verge:
Eric Migicovsky unveils two Pebble smartwatches, the $149 Core 2 Duo shipping July 2025 and $225 Core Time 2 shipping December 2025, running its open-source OS  —  Pebble's creator now runs a company called Core Devices, and it's getting ready to sell two new watches soon.
Rajesh Pandey / Android Police:
Ahead of the Pixel 9a's rumored March 19 debut, a YouTuber posts a video of the alleged phone, showing a flat rear panel, minimal camera bump, and large bezels  —  - Detailed Pixel 9a unboxing and hands-on videos have been published on YouTube.  — One YouTuber has put the phone through its paces …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's Llama models have been downloaded 1B times since their 2023 debut, up from 650M downloads in early December 2024  —  In a brief message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company's “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads.
New York Times:
Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, which already has fiber cables, after SpaceX “donated” the service, as some cite security concerns  —  Trump administration officials said the company donated the internet service, saying the gift had been vetted …
Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:
Some owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks with Roku OS report seeing autoplaying video ads before they can use the home screen; Roku says it is just a test  —  Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home screen.
Timmy Shen / The Block:
Solana deletes a social media video ad promoting its NYC conference in May 2025 after the crypto community criticized it for insensitivity towards gender issues  —  - Solana posted a video ad on social media on Monday to promote its upcoming conference, but it was removed hours later.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Attackers are actively exploiting a critical Apache Tomcat RCE flaw to take over servers with a PUT request; Wallarm: the attack “requires no authentication”  —  A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Apache Tomcat tracked as CVE-2025-24813 is actively exploited in the wild …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
In an open letter to the OSTP, Ben Stiller and 400+ Hollywood creatives urge President Trump to not let Google, OpenAI, and others “exploit” copyrighted works  —  More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Google updates its Gemini chatbot, adding Canvas, a space for users to create, refine, and share writing and coding projects, and Audio Overview from NotebookLM  —  They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Google seems to agree.  —  On Tuesday, the company added a feature …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
AI coding assistant startup Graphite, now used by tens of thousands of staff at 500+ companies, raised an Accel-led $52M Series B; its revenue grew 20x in 2024  —  AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub's latest poll saying that they've adopted AI tools in some form.
Bloomberg:
Tencent releases five AI tools that turn text or images into 3D visuals and graphics, based on Hunyuan3D-2.0, and plans to integrate DeepSeek's R1 into WeChat  —  Tencent's five new 3D-content generators are built atop its Hunyuan3D-2.0 model, all of which it intends to open-source to users, the company said in a statement.
More: Reuters
New York Times:
Since Xi Jinping met DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in February, Chinese officials have been racing to show they use its tech, like in courthouses and hospitals  —  Government bodies nationwide have been eager to show they are using DeepSeek's A.I. technology since the company's founder met with Xi Jinping, China's leader.
Bluesky: @hargreaves-s
Bert Hubert's writings:
A look at Europe's options and potential issues to get a “European Cloud”, which is likely to be more difficult to build than the €15B Galileo satellite system  —  The very short version: It has now become clear that European governments can no longer rely on American clouds …

Sponsor Posts

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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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