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Techmeme
May 15, 2025, 11:20 AM

Top News

Niket Nishant / Reuters:
Coinbase says hackers accessed a “small subset” of users' data, but not credentials, expects to incur $180M to $400M in costs, and refuses to pay a $20M ransom  —  Coinbase (COIN.O) forecast a hit between $180 million and $400 million from a cyber attack that breached account data of a …
Bloomberg:
Issie Lapowsky / Vanity Fair:
Q&A with the FT's Patrick McGee on his new book, Apple in China, which examines Apple's role in enabling China's rise; Apple says it is “full of inaccuracies”  —  In his new book, Apple in China, Patrick McGee examines how Tim Cook unwittingly led Apple right into the heart of Trump's trade war.
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Apple rolls out CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, in new and existing Aston Martins in North America after months of delays, before a wider rollout  —  After months of delays, Apple today officially announced the launch of next-gen CarPlay, now with a new brand name of ‘CarPlay Ultra’.
Johnny Ryan / Irish Council for Civil Liberties:
The Belgian Court of Appeal rules that the Transparency & Consent Framework, used by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, and the ad industry, is illegal across Europe  —  Landmark court decision against “TCF” consent pop ups on 80% of the internet  —  Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
OpenAI releases GPT-4.1 in ChatGPT for Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers “by popular request”, and replaces GPT-4o mini with GPT-4.1 mini for all ChatGPT users  —  OpenAI is releasing its GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini AI models in ChatGPT, the company announced in a post on X Wednesday.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI launches the “Safety evaluations hub”, a webpage showing how its models score on tests for harmful content generation, jailbreaks, and hallucinations  —  OpenAI is moving to publish the results of its internal AI model safety evaluations more regularly in what the outfit …
More: CNBC, OpenAI, Tom's Guide, and Tech in Asia
Bluesky: @sal19X: @haydenfield and @openaiLinkedIn: Jennifer EliasForums: Hacker News
ProPublica:
How the US conducted a monthslong campaign to push The Gambia and at least four other developing nations to license Starlink; diplomats call the events alarming  —  The State Department has intervened on behalf of Musk's satellite internet company in five developing nations.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Joe Tidy / BBC:
Hacking group DragonForce says it stole UK retailer Co-op's customer data but couldn't deploy ransomware because Co-op quickly shut down its systems, unlike M&S  —  Co-op narrowly averted being locked out of its computer systems during the cyber attack that saw customer data stolen …
Bloomberg:
Docs: Microsoft's recent layoffs of 6,000 workers hit software engineers the hardest, making up 40%+ of the ~2,000 positions cut in its home state of Washington  —  In Microsoft's home state of Washington, software engineering was by far the largest single job category to receive layoff notices …
Paresh Dave / Wired:
Microsoft plans to shut down its Bing Search APIs on August 11; a source says the largest customers will retain access, and DuckDuckGo says it won't be affected  —  Microsoft is limiting access to tools that boosted its rivals, but larger customers like DuckDuckGo say they won't be affected.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Reuters:
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun unveils the XringO1, the company's first self-developed mobile chip, for its high-end devices, coming in late May, without giving any details  —  Chinese smartphone and electric vehicle maker Xiaomi (1810.HK) said on Thursday it would launch a new self developed mobile phone chip, XringO1, in late May.
More: XiaomiTimeX: @maxwinebach
Barbara Moens / Financial Times:
The EU provisionally finds that TikTok breached the DSA by failing to offer a publicly searchable ad library, potentially opening the platform up to a fine  —  Ad transparency investigation is one of several ongoing European cases against social media platform
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Huione Guarantee, a Telegram-based black market for crypto scammers and money launderers that enabled $27B+ in transactions, shuts down after mass account bans  —  Following a WIRED inquiry, Telegram banned thousands of accounts used for crypto scam money laundering, including those of Haowang Guarantee …

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