Techmeme
January 19, 2025, 4:05 AM

Top News

NBC News:
ByteDance's TikTok and CapCut suspend service in the US, telling users “Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok”  —  Users reported being unable to access TikTok Saturday after a pop-up message from the company came up on their screens saying “a law banning TikTok has been enacted.”
More: Wired, The Information, Livemint, VentureBeat, USA Today, The Verge, TechCrunch, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Politico, Agence France-Presse, Washington Examiner, Financial Express, Premium Times Nigeria, Anadolu Ajansı …, The Indian Express, Forbes, The Independent, Hindustan Times, TweakTown, Android Central, Axios, Times of India, The Mirror, Yahoo Finance, South China Morning Post, NPR, Washington Examiner, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Hacker News, Lynxotic, 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, BBC, New York Post, Daily Post Nigeria, Reuters, BusinessLIVE, News18, Deseret News, DNyuz, Shacknews, WAtoday, PCMag, WVEC, WDAM-TV, Fox Business, GB News, Just Jared, The National, KCRG-TV, Daily Mail, and The Verge
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
TikTok is not available for download in the App Store and Play Store in the US, as the app halts service in the country to comply with the divest-or-ban law  —  Apple and Google removed TikTok from their app stores Saturday night, complying with a law requiring China's ByteDance to divest …
NBC News:
Trump says he will “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve after he takes office on Monday “because it's appropriate”  —  Trump spoke to NBC News' Kristen Welker in an exclusive phone interview Saturday, discussing his plans on what to do about the popular social media app.
Will Oremus / Washington Post:
TikTok bans in countries around the world have played out quite differently; Instagram Reels largely replaced TikTok in India, following TikTok's ban in 2020  —  India's 2020 crackdown helped give rise to Instagram Reels, which has largely replaced it there.  But TikTok has proved more resilient elsewhere.
Politico:
Congressional leaders seem flummoxed by the growing popularity of Chinese-owned apps Xiaohongshu and Lemon8, an unintended consequence of the TikTok ban  —  The Chinese apps RedNote and Lemon8 have exploded in popularity as TikTok faces an imminent ban and the Supreme Court upheld the law forcing its sale.
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Source: Perplexity AI made a TikTok US bid to ByteDance, proposing a merger that brings video to Perplexity, with ByteDance investors retaining their stakes  —  Perplexity AI officially made a play for TikTok on Saturday, submitting a bid to its parent company, ByteDance …
Financial Times:
Ana Faguy / BBC:
CNN:
Axios:
Andrew Hayward / Decrypt:
Matthew Green / A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering:
A close look at some privacy implications of AI interfacing with messaging apps and other E2EE systems, Apple's approach to “Private Cloud Compute”, and more  —  Recently I came across a fantastic new paper by a group of NYU and Cornell researchers entitled “How to think about end-to-end encryption and AI.”

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
How Zoho Workplace eliminates knowledge silos and provides a workplace where information flows  —  Discover how Zoho Workplace tears down information silos.  Bridge team gaps, centralize institutional knowledge …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Training Data:
Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming 'Dark Factory' Where Software Builds Itself
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Invest Like the Best:
Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Lenny's Podcast:
Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
Kimi K3 & AI's Price War, What Happened To Google?, OpenAI's Partner Trouble
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Great Chat:
Never follow your heroes (on X)
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:05 AM ET, January 19, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Zack Abrams / The Block:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg: