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March 19, 2025, 2:50 PM
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Top News

Barbara Moens / Financial Times:
The EU Commission orders Apple to open iOS to third-party connected devices, and in preliminary findings charges Google with breaking the DMA in search and apps  —  EU continues Big Tech crackdown under landmark Digital Markets Act  —  Brussels is pressing ahead with regulatory action …
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Google unveils the $499+ Pixel 9a, with no camera bump, a 48MP rear camera, a 6.3" display, a Tensor G4 chip, and IP68 water resistance, shipping in April 2025  —  Google is confirming what we learned from a slew of leaks. … Google just announced the Pixel 9A, surprising nobody because it's been leaked to all heck.
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Google says it is “checking on a component quality issue” for the Pixel 9a, delaying its release from March to sometime in April; pre-orders are not yet open  —  Google isn't yet taking preorders for a phone it just announced, which is unusual.  A “small number” of early devices exhibited the unspecified issue.
Sam Rutherford / Engadget:
Google Pixel 9a hands-on: an iPhone 16e rival with a 120Hz display and water drop-inspired camera bump, priced for $300 less than the Pixel 9 with few tradeoffs
Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis:
A look at Nvidia's GTC 2025 announcements, including a focus on addressing pre-training and post-training scaling and inference time scaling working in tandem  —  The Reasoning Token Explosion  —  AI model progress has accelerated tremendously, and in the last six months, models have improved more than in the previous six months.
Tobias Mann / The Register:
Nvidia updates the DGX Station, begins taking reservations for the DGX Spark box, formerly Project Digits, and unveils the RTX PRO workstation and server GPUs
Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica:
A three-judge panel in US appeals court ruled, in a case involving AI generated poetry, that the Copyright Act requires human authorship for registration  —  A computer scientist who tried to register an artwork that credited an artificial intelligence system as the sole author lost his appeal on Tuesday.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Google updates Google Wallet to let kids with Android phones tap to pay in stores in the US, the UK, Australia, Spain, and Poland, with parental supervision  —  Google announced on Wednesday that kids with Android phones can now tap to pay at stores using Google Wallet in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and Poland.
Financial Times:
Sources: investors valued X at $44B in a secondary deal earlier in March; X posted ~$1.2B in adjusted EBITDA in 2024 and is raising ~$2B in a primary round
The Citizen Lab:
A look at Israeli spyware company Paragon, which makes Graphite: suspected deployments in Australia, Canada, Israel, and more, a WhatsApp zero-click, and more  —  Key Findings  — Introducing Paragon Solutions.  Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple says new EU interoperability rules “wrap us in red tape”, force “us to give away our new features for free”, and are “bad for our products” and users  —  In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple firmly rebuked the EU decision announced today …
CoinDesk:
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the US SEC is set to drop its appeal in its case against Ripple, nearing the end of a legal battle over XRP ongoing since 2020  —  Earlier reports said that the long-standing legal battle between Ripple and the agency is nearing its end.  —  What to know:
Makena Kelly / Wired:
Current and former FTC staff say the FTC removed 300+ Biden-era business guidance blog posts, including info on AI consumer protection and its Big Tech lawsuits  —  Business-guidance content published during the Biden administration has been removed from the Federal Trade Commission website.
New York Times:
President Trump fires the FTC's two Democratic members, threatening the regulatory body's independence in a decision that is likely to face a legal challenge
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices for the first time in a decade and making remote playback for personal media a paid feature at $1.99/month or $19.99/year  —  Streaming service and software maker Plex is raising its prices.  The company announced on Wednesday its first price increase …
Lauren Goode / Wired:
Sources: Nvidia acquires Gretel, which offers synthetic data tools, for more than its most recent $320M valuation; Pitchbook: Gretel had previously raised $67M+  —  Nvidia has acquired synthetic data startup Gretel to bolster the AI training data used by the chip maker's customers and developers.
More: UKTN
Matt Kapko / CyberScoop:
Flashpoint: attackers stole 3.2B credentials from organizations in 2024, up 33% YoY, 2.1B of which was via info-stealing malware infecting 23M hosts and devices  —  Inexpensive information-stealing malware surged in 2024, infecting 23 million hosts, according to Flashpoint.  —  Learn more.
Variety:
Q&A with Netflix's Ted Sarandos on his 25-year anniversary at Netflix, his cameo on Apple TV+ series The Studio, competing with suppliers like Disney, and more  —  In a few weeks, Ted Sarandos will make his acting debut — playing Ted Sarandos.  The co-CEO of Netflix is lampooning himself …
Counterpoint Research:
Global VR headset shipments fell 12% YoY in 2024, with Meta's market share hitting 77%; Vision Pro shipments fell 43% QoQ in Q4, but its enterprise sales grew  —  - Global VR headset shipments fell 12% YoY in 2024, marking their third consecutive year of declines due to the continued weak consumer demand.

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UiPath:
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From Mediagazer

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Paramount has offered $15M to settle with Trump; Trump's team wants more than $25M, is seeking an apology from CBS News, and threatened another lawsuit

Ben Johansen / Politico:
Sources: all 800 full-time VOA staff are expected to receive reduction-in-force notices this week, after ~600 VOA contractors were dismissed earlier in May

Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Memo: David Leavy, who became CNN's COO in 2023, is leaving; sources say the longtime key lieutenant of David Zaslav is returning to Warner Bros. Discovery

More News

Akash Sriram / Reuters:
BlackRock, Microsoft, and Abu Dhabi's MGX say Nvidia and xAI joined a consortium to build AI infrastructure in the US; investors committed $100B for deployment

Earlier Picks

Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
A look at Waymo's progress, from Alphabet's “moonshot” project to achieving commercial robotaxi deployment in three US cities in 2024, and its expansion plans
Bloomberg:
Community Notes, on X and rolling out on Meta's services, falls short of stopping misinformation; eliminating rewards for posting misinformation would help more
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