Techmeme
February 18, 2024, 9:45 AM

Top News

Javier Espinoza / Financial Times:
Sources: the EU plans to fine Apple around €500M for allegedly breaking EU law over access to music streaming services, following a 2019 complaint by Spotify  —  Move is culmination of long-running European Commission antitrust probe after a complaint by Spotify
Michael Crider / PCWorld:
SPEC invalidates 2,600 benchmark results for some Intel Xeon CPUs, saying their compiler artificially inflated the results of its benchmark by as much as 9%  —  Benchmarks, while inherently contentious and not always representative of real-world performance, are an important tool in any kind of quantitative evaluation.
Zeke Faux / Bloomberg:
A Florida court filing accuses the Bahamas-based Deltec Bank of giving Alameda Research a short-term line of credit worth billions of dollars to buy Tether  —  - Deltec is alleged to have provided a short-term line of credit  — Court documents suggest a tighter web than previously known
Jessica Traynor / The Guardian:
A look at the data center economy of Ireland, which had 82 data centers in 2023, amid concerns about rolling blackouts due to pressure on the electrical grid  —  Datacentres are part of Ireland's vision of itself as a tech hub.  There are now more than 80, using vast amounts of electricity.
Bloomberg:
Sources: the UK, the US, and other allies are working to provide Ukraine with thousands of new AI-enabled drones that could swarm Russian targets simultaneously  —  - Technology could help Ukraine overwhelm some Russian targets  — Germany's Scholz calls on EU allies to increase Ukraine aid
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Q&A with Figma CEO Dylan Field on managing the company after the failed sale to Adobe, maintaining culture, using the $1B breakup fee, expansion plans, and more  —  Figma has a billion dollars and big plans for expansion as it emerges from the acquisition with its ‘foot on the gas.’  —  Happy Friday.
Washington Post:
How tech workers, spurred by geopolitical threats, are embracing battlefield tech; PitchBook: VCs invested $108B in defense tech companies between 2021 and 2023  —  After a decade of building the future, tech's new guard is going back to the American past — spurring a funding frenzy in defense technology

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More News

Tim Higgins / Wall Street Journal:
Dell Cameron / Wired:

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