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March 21, 2025, 5:45 PM
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Paris Martineau / The Information:
Source: US Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham plan to introduce a bipartisan bill with wide support that would make Section 230 expire on January 1, 2027  —  In June 1995, two young congressmen reached across the aisle to introduce legislation that would become the defining legal protection …
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
The US Treasury's sanctions watchdog removes Tornado Cash from its global blacklist, after a federal appeals court ruled against the sanctions in November 2024  —  The U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions watchdog removed Tornado Cash from its global blacklist Friday.
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Yahoo strikes a deal to sell TechCrunch to media investment firm Regent, which acquired PCWorld publisher Foundry earlier this week  —  Yahoo on Friday said it has struck a deal to sell TechCrunch, the 20-year-old tech journalism site, to Regent, a media investment firm.
Kylie Robison / The Verge:
Perplexity proposes to buy TikTok, says it wants to open source the algorithm and that it is “singularly positioned to rebuild” it “without creating a monopoly”  —  The AI search startup laid out its bid for buying, and rebuilding, TikTok.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Coinbase is in advanced talks to buy Deribit, the largest bitcoin and ether options trading platform, which was reportedly valued at $4B-$5B in January  —  The companies have notified regulators in Dubai about the discussions as Deribit holds a license there, which would be taken over by any acquirer, some of the people said.
The Cloudflare Blog:
Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives  —  Today, we're excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down …
Gael Cooper / CNET:
DoorDash partners with Klarna to offer payment plans, including credit options for purchases of $35 or more; Grubhub also uses Klarna as a payment option  —  Don't expect to pay for a taco in installments — a Klarna rep says the credit options can only be used on purchases of $35 and up.
Wired:
Interviews with 50+ current and ex-staffers reveal Google's two-year race to catch up with OpenAI, including through layoffs and lowering some guardrails  —  The search giant should've been first to the chatbot revolution.  It wasn't.  So it punched back with late nights, layoffs—and lowering some guardrails.
Dan Primack / Axios:
StubHub files for an IPO, with plans to list on the NYSE, and reports a $2.8M loss on $1.77B in revenue in 2024, vs. a $405M profit on $1.37B in revenue in 2023  —  Ticket resale marketplace StubHub on Friday filed for an IPO, saying that it plans to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
Bruna Horvath / NBC News:
Lyft says it plans to roll out robotaxis in partnership with May Mobility in Atlanta, starting summer 2025  —  Robotaxis using self-driving technology can already be found on the streets of at least four U.S. cities and even more abroad.  —  Lyft is about to enter the increasingly competitive world of robotaxis.
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic:
A look at LibGen, one of the largest online pirate libraries, with 7.5M+ books and 81M+ research papers, allegedly used by Meta and OpenAI to train AI models  —  Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI.  Search through them here.  —  When employees at meta started developing …
More: The Atlantic, Gizmodo, Northern District of California, Sherwood News, Music Ally, The Canberra Times, The Overspill, and ARTnews
Bluesky: @joemenn, @bcmerchant, @jdslack, @mitpress, @dougjohnstone, @heydebigale, @mcusolito, @amitkatwala, @paulphillips44, @katchowrites, @bethreadscrime.com, @markriedl, @kristiankiehling, @naomiclifford, @benskipper, @mattsteinglass, @www.johnbleasdale.com, @Firlefanz.writing …, @ajwestauthor, @annafeatherstone, @joachim123, @kint, @garymarcus, @raxkingisdead, @laurarbelin, @boxbrown, @dlknowles, @authormsbev, @moonalice.com, @maris, @melissagiragrant.com, @katienotopoulos, @ketanjoshi.co, @joebankswriter, and @michaellivingston.com
Mastodon: @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org, @timnitGebru@dair …, @ErikJonker@mastodon.social, @lizmonster@universeodon.com, @ravenbait@mastodon.scot, @JediSoth@chirp.enworld.org, @jwilker@wandering.shop, @michael_w_busch …, @harrymccracken@mastodon …, @rr4idic@mastodon.online, @invicticide@mastodon …, @susankayequinn@wandering.shop, @thecommongreen@mastodon.scot, and @beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com
Threads: @bostonjoan, @wurdsmyth, @nwbrownboi, @nwbrownboi, @nwbrownboi, @nwbrownboi, @jscalzi, and @karaswisher
X: @bradthor, @garymarcus, @mininghistory, @neilturkewitz, @jason_kint, @jason_kint, @garymarcus, @jason_kint, and @elamin88
LinkedIn: Zaki Khalid, Lorenzo Thione, Eamon Costello, Alison Croggon, Fiona Moore, Melanie Dusseau, and Chris Chapman
Forums: r/Piracy, r/books, and r/technology
See also Mediagazer
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta is testing a “Write with Meta AI” prompt on Instagram that gives users AI-generated suggestions to help write comments under other users' posts  —  In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting …
Gary Rivlin / Bloomberg:
A book excerpt from AI Valley details the 2024 mass defection of staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving but faced scaling challenges, to Microsoft  —  An excerpt from AI Valley tells the story of why the staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving, defected en masse to Microsoft in 2024.
More: Spyglass

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From Mediagazer

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Arkansas PBS severs ties with the PBS network, the first state public TV system to do so since Congress cut CPB funds, citing the annual $2M+ membership cost

Pamela McClintock / The Hollywood Reporter:
Disney's Zootopia 2 surpasses $1B at the global box office, the fastest PG-rated film to do so after just 17 days in release

Trip Gabriel / New York Times:
R. Bruce Dold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the Chicago Tribune, where he became editor-in-chief and publisher, is dead at 70

More News

Earlier Picks

Counterpoint Research:
Shipments of India-manufactured smartphones grew 6% YoY in 2024, with Samsung and Apple accounting for ~94% of exports; Samsung's India exports grew 13% YoY
Kara Fellows / CBS News:
Google says it uncovered and eliminated 10K+ illegitimate Google Maps listings, including for fake businesses, and sues the alleged scammers behind the fraud
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang walks back his January 2025 comments casting doubt on useful quantum computing within 15 years, which triggered a quantum stock sell-off
Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk:
The US SEC says proof-of-work crypto mining doesn't trigger federal securities laws and mining operators do not need to register their transactions with the SEC
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Anthropic adds web search to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, available now in preview for paid US Claude users, with support for free users and more countries coming soon
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
OpenAI adds gpt-4o-mini-tts, a text-to-speech model that it says delivers more nuanced and realistic-sounding speech, and two speech-to-text models to its API
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