Reading List

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

Sources: Chinese government hackers breached the US Treasury Department's OFAC, which administers economic sanctions, and two other Treasury offices (Washington Post)

Techmeme

Pornhub now blocks users in 17 US states, including almost all of the South, after blocking Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina due to age verification laws (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

Techmeme

Huawei Rotating Chair Meng Wanzhou says the company is helping train 300,000+ tech students per year, in cooperation with 3,000+ universities in 110 countries (Nikkei Asia)

Techmeme

Meta saying it expects AI characters to populate its apps is its friendly rebrand of an effective but alienating effort to automate social interactions (John Herrman/New York Magazine)

Techmeme

The defense industry is poised for a deal surge as firms expand in AI, drones, and space systems; Bain: VC deal value in the sector has risen 18x in a decade (Sylvia Pfeifer/Financial Times)

Techmeme

Elon Musk got new support for his OpenAI lawsuit in filings last week, including from tech advocacy group Encode, backed by AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)

Techmeme

A US judge blocks parts of California's SB 976, a law to protect kids from social media, citing 1A concerns, but allows a ban on "addictive feeds" for minors (Matt Simons/Courthouse News Service)

Techmeme

OpenAI missed its goal to launch Media Manager, an opt-out tool for creators, by 2025; sources: the tool was rarely viewed as an important launch internally (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

PitchBook: the number of VCs investing in US startups fell from a peak of 8,315 in 2021 to 6,175 in 2024; 9 firms raised 50%+ of the $71B raised by VCs in 2024 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Techmeme

Alibaba sells Sun Art Retail stake to PE firm DCP for ~$1.6B, after paying ~$3.6B in 2020 to double the stake to 70%+, as it focuses on its core online business (Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Link-Busters, an anti-piracy company working for big publishers, passed 2B URL takedown requests sent to Google and is behind 50%+ of Google takedown requests (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

Techmeme

An investigation details how predatory men engage in the grooming of child influencers on Instagram under the guise of working as social media professionals (New York Times)

Techmeme

As Beijing pushes for self-sufficiency in the $80B+ per year car chip business, sources say the use of homemade chips in Chinese cars has risen to around 15% (Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

KoBold Metals, which uses AI to sift through historical and scientific data to identify untapped mineral deposits, raised a $537M Series C at a $2.96B valuation (Camilla Hodgson/Financial Times)

Techmeme

Government data: users on Douyin, WeChat, and other short video apps in China dropped for the first time to 1.05B in June 2024, down ~300M from December 2023 (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

Techmeme

The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes (Raquel Coronell Uribe/NBC News)

Techmeme

St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing Softchoice at ~CA$1.8B (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, and slop arrived (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Techmeme

Researchers find 4.5M "stars" on GitHub repos they suspect are fake; in July, Check Point found a network of inauthentic users starring repos containing malware (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Techmeme

In 2024, Intel had its worst year since going public in 1971, losing 61% of value; Broadcom stock soared 111%, its best performance ever, driven by AI revenue (CNBC)

Techmeme