Reading List

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

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)

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Ant Group's payment app Alipay adds an AI-powered image search feature as it tries to become a super app like rival Tencent's WeChat (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

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Sources: Mobvista explores selling mobile ad platform Mintegral after getting interest from buyers like Bain Capital; Mobvista stock in HK surged ~190% in 2024 (Bloomberg)

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Alibaba cuts prices on its visual language model Qwen-VL by up to 85%, after cutting Qwen prices by as much as 97% in May, amid growing AI competition in China (Ryan Browne/CNBC)

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Montenegro extradites Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon to the US; South Korea also sought Do Kwon's extradition (Reuters)

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India extends a deadline for implementing a 30% cap on any company's share of transactions on UPI payments network, providing relief to Google Pay and PhonePe (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

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The US arrests a US Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, who sold sensitive customer call records stolen from AT&T and Verizon in the Snowflake hack (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

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India removes a 100M user cap on WhatsApp Pay, letting Meta roll out the mobile payments service to all of its 500M+ users in the country (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

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Inside Apple labs testing and calibrating iPhone 16 series' audio and video features, including new Audio Mix editing tools and 4K slow motion capabilities (Patrick Holland/CNET)

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The US DOJ files a complaint and announces a civil enforcement action against fintech startup Dave and CEO Jason Wilk, replacing an FTC complaint from November (Kanishka Singh/Reuters)

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BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF surpassed $50B in assets in 11 months, marking the fastest-growing ETF debut ever, and helping BTC exceed $100K in mid-December (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)

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Samsung invests $181M in South Korean robot maker Rainbow Robotics, boosting its stake to 35%, and launches a Future Robotics Office reporting to the CEO (Reuters)

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Venezuela's top court fines TikTok $10M over viral challenge deaths, citing a failure to take necessary measures, and orders it to open an office in the country (Agence France-Presse)

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Letter: the US Treasury says China-backed hackers gained access to some Treasury workstations and unclassified docs; a vendor notified it of the hack on Dec. 8 (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

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A US judge delays the CFTC v. Gemini trial to January 21, after Trump's inauguration; CFTC alleged Gemini misled the agency in its 2017 bid to debut BTC futures (Turner Wright/Cointelegraph)

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Sensitive data of over 800K VW Group EV customers, including GPS coordinates, was exposed on an unprotected AWS database for months before being reported (Thanos Pappas/Carscoops)

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The technology of passkeys is elegant, but the complexities of syncing them to password managers can contribute to platform lock-in and make them less usable (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

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Source: ByteDance keeps using a loophole for US chip sanctions and told suppliers it planned to spend up to $7B to access Nvidia chips outside China in 2025 (The Information)

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Accounting startup Bench, which had raised $100M+ and abruptly shut down last week, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price (Charles Rollet/TechCrunch)

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Waymo robotaxis, which are now ubiquitous in parts of CA, will often not stop for pedestrians using crosswalks there, unless a pedestrian is far into the road (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)

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