Techmeme
March 21, 2025, 4:20 PM

Top News

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 …
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.
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
The US Treasury's sanctions watchdog removes Tornado Cash from its global blacklist, after a federal appeals court ruled against the sanctions in November 2024  —  The U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions watchdog removed Tornado Cash from its global blacklist Friday.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Coinbase is in advanced talks to buy Deribit, the largest bitcoin and ether options trading platform, which was reportedly valued at $4B-$5B in January  —  The companies have notified regulators in Dubai about the discussions as Deribit holds a license there, which would be taken over by any acquirer, some of the people said.
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 …
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.
Bruna Horvath / NBC News:
Lyft says it plans to roll out robotaxis in partnership with May Mobility in Atlanta, starting summer 2025  —  Robotaxis using self-driving technology can already be found on the streets of at least four U.S. cities and even more abroad.  —  Lyft is about to enter the increasingly competitive world of robotaxis.
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 Canberra Times, The Overspill, Schneier on Security, Marcus on AI, Lou In Progress, ARTnews, and Music Technology Policy
Forums: r/Piracy, r/books, and r/technology
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.
More: Spyglass
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta is testing a “Write with Meta AI” prompt on Instagram that gives users AI-generated suggestions to help write comments under other users' posts  —  In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting …
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 …
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 …

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Counterpoint Research:
Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk:
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Bloomberg: