Techmeme
January 1, 2025, 2:45 PM

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.
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
Matt Simons / Courthouse News Service:
A judge blocks parts of California's SB 967, a law to protect kids from social media, citing 1A concerns, but allows a ban on “addictive feeds” for minors  —  Parts of the law will still take effect Wednesday.  — A federal judge on Tuesday barred the state of California …
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 …
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 …
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 …
New York Times:
An investigation details how predatory men engage in the grooming of child influencers on Instagram under the guise of working as social media professionals  —  Photographers and other men offer to build online followings for young girls, but some are pedophiles who work with parents to sexualize them.
George Hammond / Financial Times:
PitchBook: the number of VCs investing in US startups fell from a peak of 8,315 in 2021 to 6,175 in 2024; 9 firms raised 50%+ of the $71B raised by VCs in 2024  —  Risk-averse financial institutions concentrate money on biggest Silicon Valley VCs in trend that threatens smaller groups
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:

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Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: