Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Whistleblower: at NLRB, DOGE staff disabled monitoring tools, deleted logs, one worked on "NxGenBdoorExtract"; one DOGE account tried to log in via a Russian IP (Jenna McLaughlin/NPR)

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Source: Anthropic could launch a "voice mode" feature for Claude as soon as this month, which will initially roll out on a limited basis (Bloomberg)

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Anthropic says Claude now integrates with Google Workspace for access to Gmail, Calendar, and Google Docs, coming first to Max, Team, Enterprise, and Pro plans (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

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Google rolls out its text-to-video AI model Veo 2 to Gemini Advanced subscribers and makes its Whisk Animate tool available for Google One AI Premium users (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Mark Zuckerberg's $1B Instagram and $19B WhatsApp deals, central to the FTC's antitrust case, were mocked at the time, and the trial hinges on hypotheticals (Mike Isaac/New York Times)

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FTC v. Meta: Mark Zuckerberg testified about his acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, including a 2012 email exchange rationalizing the apps' acquisition (Bloomberg)

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Sources: OpenAI is in the early stages of building its own X-like social network, focused on ChatGPT image generation, and is asking some outsiders for feedback (The Verge)

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Temu shut off Google Shopping ads in the US on April 9; its App Store app ranking then plummeted from around third or fourth place to 58th in three days (Anu Adegbola/Search Engine Land)

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4chan is down after an apparent hack late on April 14; an Imgur post seems to show a hacker gained shell access to 4chan's hosting server and doxxed some users (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)

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Cohere debuts Embed 4, its search engine for enterprise AI assistants, now with a 128K context length, better multimodal abilities for complex documents, more (Emilia David/VentureBeat)

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Notion releases Notion Mail, a lightweight Gmail client to help users schedule meetings and organize and draft emails, available as a free macOS and web app (David Pierce/The Verge)

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AI safety and security startup Virtue AI raised $30M in seed and Series A funding and says its customers include several frontier labs, Uber, and Glean (Sam Sabin/Axios)

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Sources: activist investor Elliott has built a position worth $1.5B+ in HPE, making it one of the company's top five shareholders; HPE is down ~30% in 2025 (Bloomberg)

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Nvidia unveils its RTX 5060 family, including the RTX 5060 Ti with 4,608 CUDA cores for $379 with 8GB of VRAM or $429 for 16GB of VRAM, launching on April 16 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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Google rolls out a Play services update, including an Android security feature to auto-reboot phones and tablets that are "locked for three consecutive days" (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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UK data-based car insurance startup Marshmallow raised $90M, roughly split 50-50 in equity and debt, at a $2B+ valuation, up from $1.25B in September 2021 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

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US satellite startup Astranis and Taiwanese telco Chunghwa plan to launch a dedicated MicroGEO satellite by the end of 2025, with full bandwidth as soon as 2026 (Bloomberg)

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FCC Chair Brendan Carr says "allied western democracies" need to focus on China and those "concerned about Starlink" should be more fearful of a Chinese version (Financial Times)

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Chinese state media: police in Harbin accuse the NSA of launching "advanced" cyberattacks during the Asian Winter Games in February 2025 and name three agents (Reuters)

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An interview with eFishery CEO Gibran Huzaifah and 20+ sources detail how Gibran's "fake-it-till-you-make-it" deceptions spiraled, losing investors $300M+ (Bloomberg)

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