Techmeme
December 26, 2022, 6:40 PM

Top News

Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:
Former Twitter employees and people in Elon Musk's orbit detail his erratic leadership; Musk wanted “full access” for Bari Weiss, which staff refused to grant  —  Musk's intense focus on his social media company purchase has devolved into the culture wars.  Meanwhile, Tesla is tanking.
Timmy Shen / Forkast:
IntoTheBlock: the Bitcoin network hashrate dropped by 38.8%+ on December 24 from its December 21 peak as many US-based miners paused operations due to blizzards  —  The Bitcoin network hashrate has dropped by more than 38.8% from its peak on Wednesday, as many U.S.-based miners have been forced …
Jaran Mellerud / Hashrate Index:
Analysis: publicly listed bitcoin mining companies collectively owe $4B+, led by bankrupt Core Scientific with $1.3B as of September 30 and Marathon with $851M  —  The public bitcoin mining companies collectively owe more than $4 billion, and the biggest of them has already declared bankruptcy due to its unsustainable debt burden.
More: The Block
Freddy Brewster / Los Angeles Times:
FOIA emails detail Sam Bankman-Fried's courtship of US federal regulators, including hiring former regulators and dining with ex-CFTC Commissioner Dan Berkovitz  —  Before his mid-December arrest, cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried repeatedly claimed that he was a responsible business leader …
Thomas Claburn / The Register:
Stanford study: programmers who used AI tools like GitHub Copilot to solve a set of coding challenges produced less secure code than those who did not  —  At the same time, tools like Github Copilot and Facebook InCoder make developers believe their code is sound
More: arXiv and WinBuzzer
Omer Benjakob / Haaretz:
A look at Tel Aviv-based Toka, which helps governments, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement hack security cameras to alter live feeds and past recordings  —  Meet Toka, the Israeli cyber firm founded by Ehud Barak, that lets clients hack cameras and change their feeds - just like in Hollywood heist movies
Ben Hunte / VICE:
A look at the Central African Republic's decision to adopt bitcoin as legal tender in April 2022 and launch a half-baked “Sangocoin” cryptocurrency in July 2022  —  The Central African Republic heralded its status as the only country in Africa to adopt Bitcoin as legal currency …
Justin Garrison / Justin Garrison:
Stack Overflow's 2022 Developer Survey: 40.2% use a Linux-based system, up from 25.3% in 2021 and 23.2% in 2018, compared to 62.3% for Windows and 31.1% for Mac  —  Thanks to the 2022 StackOverflow developer survey we can finally say 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop!
Anton Shilov / Tom's Hardware:
Jon Peddie Research: there are 18 companies globally developing and producing GPUs; eight out of the 11 PC and data center GPU designers are based in China  —  There are 18 GPU developers worldwide today.  —  The number of GPU startups in China is extraordinary as the country tries …
Iris Deng / South China Morning Post:
Chinese government data for January to October 2022 shows domestic smartphone shipments fell 22% YoY from 275.3M to 214.5M units  —  Smartphone shipments in China slumped 22 per cent in the first 10 months of the year, according to latest government data, as the industry's largest market …
More: PingWest and Reuters
Matthew Field / Telegraph:
Source: Magic Leap raised $450M in 2022, across $150M in equity and $300M in debt, giving Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund majority control of the company  —  Saudi Arabia has taken control of US augmented reality company Magic Leap, The Telegraph can reveal, as the company taps up investors for a further $450m.

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Earlier Picks

Patrick McGee / Financial Times:
Ricardo Cano / San Francisco Chronicle:
CyberScoop: