Techmeme
January 1, 2025, 8:20 AM

Top News

Raquel Coronell Uribe / NBC News:
The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes  —  The Treasury Department said Iran and Russia sought to divide Americans through targeted disinformation campaigns in the 2024 elections.
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
The US arrests a US Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, who sold sensitive customer call records stolen from AT&T and Verizon in the Snowflake hack  —  Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m …
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Researchers find 4.5M “stars” on GitHub repos they suspect are fake; in July, Check Point found a network of inauthentic users starring repos containing malware  —  GitHub has a problem with inauthentic “stars” used to artificially inflate the popularity of scam …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, and slop arrived  —  A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024.  Here's a review of things we figured …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing Softchoice at ~CA$1.8B  —  One last mega-deal closed out an eventful 2024.  —  On Tuesday, World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis …
Kanishka Singh / Reuters:
The US DOJ files a complaint and announces a civil enforcement action against fintech startup Dave and CEO Jason Wilk, replacing an FTC complaint from November  —  The U.S. Justice Department filed a complaint and announced a civil enforcement action on Monday against financial technology company Dave Inc …
Reuters:
Montenegro extradites Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon to the US; South Korea also sought Do Kwon's extradition  —  Montenegro on Tuesday extradited Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon to the United States, the interior ministry said.  —  Kwon, a South Korean national …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
India removes a 100M user cap on WhatsApp Pay, letting Meta roll out the mobile payments service to all of its 500M+ users in the country  —  India has removed restrictions on WhatsApp's mobile payments service in a significant victory for Meta in its largest market by users as it seeks to compete with entrenched fintech rivals.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Reuters:
Samsung invests $181M in South Korean robot maker Rainbow Robotics, boosting its stake to 35%, and launches a Future Robotics Office reporting to the CEO  —  Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) became the largest shareholder of South Korea's Rainbow Robotics (277810.KQ), the robotics company said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.
Bloomberg:
Alibaba sells Sun Art Retail stake to PE firm DCP for ~$1.6B, after paying ~$3.6B in 2020 to double the stake to 70%+, as it focuses on its core online business  —  - Sun Art had attracted interest from other private equity firms … China's e-commerce pioneer said it could receive gross proceeds …
More: Reuters

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Earlier Picks

Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
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Thanos Pappas / Carscoops: