Techmeme
January 1, 2025, 12:40 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.
Matt Simons / Courthouse News Service:
A judge blocks parts of California's SB 976, finding it may infringe on First Amendment rights, but allows a provision banning “addictive feeds” for minors  —  Parts of the law will still take effect Wednesday.  —  SAN JOSE, Calif. (CN) — A federal judge on Tuesday barred …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Alibaba cuts prices on its visual language model Qwen-VL by up to 85%, after cutting Qwen prices by as much as 97% in May, amid growing AI competition in China  —  Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85%, the Chinese tech giant announced Tuesday.
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.
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
India extends a deadline for implementing a 30% cap on any company's share of transactions on UPI payments network, providing relief to Google Pay and PhonePe  —  India has once again pushed back a contentious plan to limit big technology companies' control of the nation's digital payments system …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:

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Reuters: