Techmeme
December 8, 2025, 4:15 AM

Top News

Bjarke Smith-Meyer / Politico:
Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about its €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account  —  Nikita Bier, X's head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying …
Bloomberg:
President Trump says Netflix's planned acquisition of WBD will have “to go through a process” and he will be personally involved in the decision-making process  —  President Donald Trump raised potential antitrust concerns for Netflix Inc.'s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. …
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly  —  Netflix Inc. co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos ventured to the White House in mid-November for a meeting with President Donald Trump.
Aaron Krolik / New York Times:
How “cash to crypto” swaps allow users everywhere to convert national currencies to stablecoins and then debit cards, avoiding financial oversight and sanctions  —  Smugglers, money launderers and people facing sanctions once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork to store illicit fortunes.
X: @neerajkaLinkedIn: Ali KhanBluesky: @waldo.net, @klonick, and @watchdogprgMastodon: @SuffolkLITLab@esq.socialForums: r/NoShitSherlock
Rest of World:
An interview with 10 Kenyan AI annotators shows Chinese companies hire data labelers via opaque middleman networks and WhatsApp groups to avoid accountability  —  An unemployment crisis has created fertile ground for companies to step in with opaque systems built on WhatsApp groups, middlemen, and bargain-basement wages.
John Thornhill / Financial Times:
Impressions from a London test ride in a car using Wayve's self-driving tech; Wayve has raised $1.3B since its launch and is testing cars with Level 2+ autonomy  —  John Thornhill takes an autonomous spin through the city's tangled streets with the British start-up's chief Alex Kendall
Ashish Vaswani / Essential AI:
Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o  —  The long-term advancement and equitable diffusion of AI technologies crucially depend on their development in the Open.
Bloomberg:
India's digital transformation exposes citizens to scams like “digital arrests”, where victims are coerced into transferring funds under false accusations  —  She races into her bedroom, shuts the door behind her, then falls to the checkered-tile floor.  The only place to hide is beneath the bed.

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Sally Ward-Foxton / EE Times:

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