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March 21, 2025, 11:40 AM
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Paris Martineau / The Information:
Source: US Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham plan to introduce a bipartisan bill with wide support that would make Section 230 expire on January 1, 2027  —  In June 1995, two young congressmen reached across the aisle to introduce legislation that would become the defining legal protection …
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic:
A look at LibGen, one of the largest online pirate libraries, with 7.5M+ books and 81M+ research papers, allegedly used by Meta and OpenAI to train AI models  —  Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI.  Search through them here.  —  When employees at meta started developing …
More: The Atlantic, Sherwood News, Music Ally, The Overspill, The Canberra Times, Marcus on AI, Lou In Progress, ARTnews, Music Technology Policy, Twisted Dreams, Ellipsus, south downs founding father …, and The Daddy Complex
Bluesky: @amitkatwala, @heydebigale, @mcusolito, @dougjohnstone, @joemenn, @mattsteinglass, @jdslack, @benskipper, @www.johnbleasdale.com, @naomiclifford, @ajwestauthor, @Firlefanz.writing …, @paulphillips44, @bethreadscrime.com, @markriedl, @kristiankiehling, @annafeatherstone, @joachim123, @kint, @garymarcus, @raxkingisdead, @laurarbelin, @boxbrown, @dlknowles, @authormsbev, @moonalice.com, @maris, @melissagiragrant.com, @katienotopoulos, @ketanjoshi.co, @joebankswriter, and @michaellivingston.com
Mastodon: @timnitGebru@dair …, @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org, @ErikJonker@mastodon.social, @lizmonster@universeodon.com, @ravenbait@mastodon.scot, @JediSoth@chirp.enworld.org, @jwilker@wandering.shop, @michael_w_busch …, @harrymccracken@mastodon …, @rr4idic@mastodon.online, @invicticide@mastodon …, @susankayequinn@wandering.shop, @thecommongreen@mastodon.scot, and @beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com
Threads: @bostonjoan, @wurdsmyth, @nwbrownboi, @nwbrownboi, @nwbrownboi, @nwbrownboi, @jscalzi, and @karaswisher
X: @bradthor, @jason_kint, @elamin88, @jason_kint, @mininghistory, @garymarcus, @garymarcus, @jason_kint, and @neilturkewitz
LinkedIn: Melanie Dusseau, Lorenzo Thione, Chris Chapman, Zaki Khalid, Eamon Costello, Alison Croggon, and Fiona Moore
Forums: r/Piracy, r/books, and r/technology
See also Mediagazer
The Cloudflare Blog:
Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives  —  Today, we're excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down …
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang walks back his January 2025 comments casting doubt on useful quantum computing within 15 years, which triggered a quantum stock sell-off  —  Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday walked back comments he made in January, when he cast doubt on whether useful quantum computers …
Gary Rivlin / Bloomberg:
A book excerpt from AI Valley details the 2024 mass defection of staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving but faced scaling challenges, to Microsoft  —  An excerpt from AI Valley tells the story of why the staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving, defected en masse to Microsoft in 2024.
Bloomberg:
European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane says Europe needs a digital euro to avoid rising stablecoin risks and reduce reliance on US payment firms  —  Europe needs a digital currency to safeguard against threats from new forms of money like stablecoins, and reduce reliance …
Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk:
The US SEC says proof-of-work crypto mining doesn't trigger federal securities laws and mining operators do not need to register their transactions with the SEC  —  In a staff statement published Thursday, the SEC said that both solo mining and mining pool operations would fail the first prong of the Howey Test.
Kara Fellows / CBS News:
Google says it uncovered and eliminated 10K+ illegitimate Google Maps listings, including for fake businesses, and sues the alleged scammers behind the fraud  —  Google says it uncovered thousands of illegitimate listings, including for fake businesses, on Google Maps and has announced …
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Yahoo strikes a deal to sell TechCrunch to media investment firm Regent, which acquired PCWorld publisher Foundry earlier this week  —  Yahoo on Friday said it has struck a deal to sell TechCrunch, the 20-year-old tech journalism site, to Regent, a media investment firm.
Wired:
Interviews with 50+ current and ex-staffers reveal Google's two-year race to catch up with OpenAI, including through layoffs and lowering some guardrails  —  The search giant should've been first to the chatbot revolution.  It wasn't.  So it punched back with late nights, layoffs—and lowering some guardrails.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:40 AM ET, March 21, 2025.

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

David Folkenflik / NPR:
VOA journalists, their unions, and Reporters Without Borders sue USAGM, acting CEO Victor Morales, and Kari Lake, alleging their moves to close VOA are unlawful

Bloomberg Law:
Brendan Carr says the FCC is prepared to block M&A proposals, including the Paramount-Skydance deal, from companies with “invidious forms of DEI discrimination”

Bloomberg:
Sources: Apollo is exploring a sale of Cox Media, including TV and radio stations, at a possible $4B valuation; Nexstar and Gray Media are potential buyers

More News

Counterpoint Research:
Shipments of India-manufactured smartphones grew 6% YoY in 2024, with Samsung and Apple accounting for ~94% of exports; Samsung's India exports grew 13% YoY

Earlier Picks

The Guardian:
Researchers unveil Aardvark, an AI weather prediction system that they say uses thousands of times less compute and is tens of times faster than current methods
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google adds “smarter search” to Gmail for Android, iOS, and the web, using AI to show the most relevant results instead of showing emails in chronological order
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Anthropic adds web search to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, available now in preview for paid US Claude users, with support for free users and more countries coming soon
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: Perplexity has discussed raising as much as $500M to $1B in a new round that would double its valuation to $18B; its current ARR is nearly $100M
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Threads rolls out new features: ability to set following feed or any custom feed as the default, limit post replies to followers, a better video player, more
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI adds gpt-4o-mini-tts, a text-to-speech model that it says delivers more nuanced and realistic-sounding speech, and two speech-to-text models to its API
Bloomberg:
Huawei unveils the Pura X foldable phone that opens to an unconventional 16:10 6.3" display, its first flagship with HarmonyOS 5, launching in China for ~$1,036
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