Techmeme
March 21, 2025, 3:20 PM

Top News

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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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, Sherwood News, Music Ally, The Canberra Times, The Overspill, Marcus on AI, Lou In Progress, ARTnews, Music Technology Policy, Twisted Dreams, south downs founding father …, Ellipsus, and The Daddy Complex
Forums: r/Piracy, r/books, and r/technology
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.
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  —  Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday walked back comments he made in January, when he cast doubt on whether useful quantum computers …
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  —  Google says it uncovered thousands of illegitimate listings, including for fake businesses, on Google Maps and has announced …

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Earlier Picks

Counterpoint Research:
Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk:
The Guardian:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Bloomberg: