Techmeme
March 21, 2025, 6:00 PM

Top News

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.
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.
Kylie Robison / The Verge:
Paul Liu / The Keyword:
Google says its test removing European news content for 1% of users in eight EU countries found that there was no change to Search ad revenue due to the removal  —  Google ran an experiment to understand the value of European news content.  The data shows people visited Google …
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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
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.
More: Spyglass

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Earlier Picks

Counterpoint Research:
Kara Fellows / CBS News:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: