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December 19, 2024, 12:35 PM
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Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Apple says Meta has made 15 interoperability requests under the EU's DMA, more than any other company, and that these could affect users' privacy and security  —  Apple (AAPL.O) on Wednesday hit out at Meta Platforms (META.O), saying its numerous requests to access the iPhone maker's software tools …
Bloomberg:
Document: the EU Commission pressed Apple to rework iOS so that the OS is more compatible with competitors' smartwatches, earbuds, headsets, and other devices  —  - Apple cites concerns that Meta access may undermine privacy  — EU watchdog has pressed company to rework iOS operating system
Reuters:
Sources: Apple is in early-stage talks with Tencent and ByteDance about integrating their AI models into iPhones sold in China; ChatGPT is unavailable in China  —  Apple (AAPL.O) is in talks with Tencent (0700.HK) and TikTok owner ByteDance about integrating their artificial intelligence models …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Adam Mosseri teases an AI editing tool in Instagram powered by Meta's Movie Gen AI model to change outfits, backgrounds, and more in videos with a text prompt  —  Instagram is planning to introduce a generative AI editing feature next year that will allow users to “change nearly any aspect of your videos.”
More: Politico and BGR
Bluesky: @oblivionwithbells.com, @dnas.is, and @jaseheeley
Threads: @zuck, @johnalmighty, and @mattnavarra.  Instagram: Adam Mosseri
Kiyoshi Takenaka / Reuters:
Sony buys ~$320M of shares in Japanese media powerhouse Kadokawa, which owns FromSoftware, taking its stake to ~10% and becoming Kadokawa's top shareholder  —  Sony Group (6758.T) said on Thursday it will invest about 50 billion yen ($320 million) to acquire new shares of Kadokawa (9468.T) …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Anthropic demonstrates “alignment faking” in Claude 3 Opus to show how developers could be misled into thinking an LLM is more aligned than it may actually be  —  AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows.  They can pretend to have different views during training …
S.E. Smith / The Verge:
A look at the quickly disappearing web, as digital decay and link rot erase all kinds of media; a Pew study says 38% of webpages accessible in 2013 are now gone  —  The internet is forever.  But also, it isn't.  What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?
Robert Booth / The Guardian:
A coalition of newspapers, writers, movie producers, and others rejects UK's plans to create a copyright exemption for AI companies to train their models  —  Exclusive: Coalition of musicians, photographers and newspapers insist existing copyright laws must be respected
IDC:
Global shipments of wrist-worn wearables hit 139M units in the first nine months of 2024, down 1% YoY; China was the largest market with 45.8M units, up 20% YoY  —  , the global wrist-worn device market shipped 139.0 million units in the first three quarters of 2024, a year-over-year decline of 1.0% …
Jef Feeley / Bloomberg:
Arm v. Qualcomm: Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon described Arm's Nuvia license cancellation and demand for Qualcomm to destroy IP after buying Nuvia as “outrageous”  —  - Tech firms are sparring in weeklong jury trial in Delaware  — Closing arguments are expected Thursday in federal court
Chainalysis:
In 2024, hackers stole $2.2B in crypto across 303 hacks, up from $1.8B across 282 hacks in 2023; in H1 2024, $1.58B had been stolen, but the pace slowed in H2  —  The Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime Report  —  Crypto hacking remains a persistent threat, with four years in the past decade individually seeing …
Deadline:
Two Tencent-appointed Epic board directors resigned after the DOJ expressed antitrust concerns; Tencent also gave up its right to appoint future Epic directors  —  Two board members of Epic Games have resigned amid Justice Department concerns over antitrust concerns.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Decart, which helps organizations train AI models at scale, raised a $32M Series A, sources say at a $500M+ valuation, after a $21M seed in October 2024  —  A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions is returning to the spotlight.
More: FinSMEs
Bloomberg:
Sources: Insight Partners, which bought Dotmatics for around $629M in 2021, is exploring options for the R&D software maker, including selling it for $5B+  —  - Dotmatics expected to draw interest from strategic suitors  — Scientists use the company's software in drug research
Will Judd / Eurogamer.net:
Sony details the PS5 Pro's specs, including an AMD RDNA 2 GPU and ray tracing improvements, and announces a long-term machine learning partnership with AMD  —  Plus: what this all means for future PlayStation hardware.  —  When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro, it did so in a very different manner …
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
GitHub offers Copilot in VS Code for free with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month; GitHub now has 150M developers, up from 100M in early 2023  —  Microsoft-owned GitHub today announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Appfigures: global consumer spending in mobile apps on the App Store and Google Play rose 15.7% YoY to $127.3B in 2024, but app downloads dropped 2.3% to 109.7B  —  The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending.
Joel Khalili / Wired:
A look at Truth Terminal, an AI bot on X that was created to spark debate about AI alignment, as its crypto wallet swells to ~$40M after boosting memecoins  —  Truth Terminal started as a techno-modernist art project meant to invite discussion about the applications and potential dangers of autonomous AI agents.
Allyson Versprille / Bloomberg:
The US FAA prohibits drone flights over several parts of New Jersey, as public hysteria over sightings of possible drone activity continues to persist  —  The US Federal Aviation Administration prohibited drone flights over several parts of New Jersey as public hysteria over sightings continues to persist.

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:35 PM ET, December 19, 2024.

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From Mediagazer

Bloomberg:
Sources: WBD begins exclusive talks with Netflix to sell its film and TV studios and HBO Max; Netflix is offering a $5B breakup fee if the deal isn't approved

The Guardian:
Ireland, Spain, Slovenia, and the Netherlands exit Eurovision after Israel received an all-clear to compete; the BBC and Germany's SWR plan to participate

James Faris / Business Insider:
Kalshi strikes a deal with CNBC that will integrate Kalshi's prediction data into CNBC's channel, site, and app starting in 2026, days after striking a CNN deal

More News

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
An analysis of nearly 4,000 public datasets finds that over 90% of AI training datasets came from Europe and North America, and fewer than 4% came from Africa

Earlier Picks

Vince Dioquino / Decrypt:
El Salvador plans to scale back its bitcoin efforts under an IMF deal for a $1.4B loan; bitcoin acceptance will no longer be mandatory for the private sector
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Micron reports Q1 revenue up 84% YoY to $8.71B, in line with est., and a Q2 revenue forecast below est. due to sluggish phone and PC demand; MU drops 15%+
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Intel unveils the first updates to address Arrow Lake's gaming performance issues, fixing four of the five root causes, and plans a final update in January 2025
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple halts work on a project to build an iPhone hardware subscription service, which had been in development since 2022 and was set to launch then
Hayden Field / CNBC:
OpenAI debuts a way to talk to ChatGPT by dialing 1-800-CHATGPT for 15 minutes of free access per month in the US or messaging the number via WhatsApp globally
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