Techmeme
March 18, 2025, 1:45 PM

Top News

The Verge:
Alphabet acquires NYC-based cybersecurity startup Wiz for $32B cash, its largest acquisition yet, pending approval; antitrust fears stalled a $23B deal in 2024  —  The acquisition is Alphabet's biggest yet, after a $23 billion takeover attempt stalled last year.
More: The Keyword, Wiz Blog, Google Cloud Blog, Bloomberg, The Guardian, Reuters, CTech, 9to5Google, CRN, Tech Monitor, Financial Times, Business Insider, The Standard, The Economic Times, Thurrott, Financial Times, SiliconANGLE, CSO, SC Media, Neowin, Associated Press, BGR, UPI, Channel Futures, Pocketables, The Information, Analytics India Magazine, Reuters, Reuters, New York Times, Semafor, CTech, TechCrunch, Infosecurity, Constellation Research, TechRadar, CNBC, TechCrunch, Jerusalem Post, Reuters, Channel NewsAsia, CSO, Proactive, BusinessLIVE, Verdict, Security Boulevard, Patently Apple, TipRanks Financial, The Cyber Express, Yahoo Finance, en.ain.ua, Fortune, Wall Street Pit, Barron's Online, TheCable, StrictlyVC, CRN, The Times, Silicon Valley Business …, Capital Brief, Ynetnews, The Verge, Investor's Business Daily, CTech, TipRanks Financial, Tech in Asia, Financial Express, Benzinga, PYMNTS.com, Moneycontrol, and Wall Street Journal
Andrew Martin / Bloomberg:
David Pierce / The Verge:
Eric Migicovsky unveils two Pebble smartwatches, the $149 Core 2 Duo shipping July 2025 and $225 Core Time 2 shipping December 2025, running its open-source OS  —  Pebble's creator now runs a company called Core Devices, and it's getting ready to sell two new watches soon.
Scharon Harding / Ars Technica:
Some owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks with Roku OS report seeing autoplaying video ads before they can use the home screen; Roku says it is just a test  —  Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home screen.
New York Times:
Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, which already has fiber cables, after SpaceX “donated” the service, as some cite security concerns  —  Trump administration officials said the company donated the internet service, saying the gift had been vetted …
Timmy Shen / The Block:
Solana deletes a social media video ad promoting its NYC conference in May 2025 after the crypto community criticized it for insensitivity towards gender issues  —  - Solana posted a video ad on social media on Monday to promote its upcoming conference, but it was removed hours later.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Google updates its Gemini chatbot, adding Canvas, a space for users to create, refine, and share writing and coding projects, and Audio Overview from NotebookLM  —  They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Google seems to agree.  —  On Tuesday, the company added a feature …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's Llama models have been downloaded 1B times since their 2023 debut, up from 650M downloads in early December 2024  —  In a brief message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company's “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Attackers are actively exploiting a critical Apache Tomcat RCE flaw to take over servers with a PUT request; Wallarm: the attack “requires no authentication”  —  A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Apache Tomcat tracked as CVE-2025-24813 is actively exploited in the wild …
NVIDIA on YouTube:
A livestream of the Nvidia GTC 2025 keynote at the SAP Center in San Jose, California  —  Watch NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's GTC keynote to catch all the announcements on AI advances that are shaping our future.Dive into the announcements and discove...
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Google debuts new Search and Android health care features, including medical records APIs, and plans to release open AI models for drug discovery called TxGemma  —  Google on Tuesday announced new products and features aimed at healthcare use cases, including improved overviews in Google Search …
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
CISA scrambles to contact 130+ fired employees after court rules the layoffs unlawful but says re-hired staff will immediately be placed on administrative leave  —  The U.S. government's cybersecurity agency is scrambling to contact more than 130 former employees after a federal court ruled …
More: CSO
Bloomberg:
Tencent releases five AI tools that turn text or images into 3D visuals and graphics, based on Hunyuan3D-2.0, and plans to integrate DeepSeek's R1 into WeChat  —  Tencent's five new 3D-content generators are built atop its Hunyuan3D-2.0 model, all of which it intends to open-source to users, the company said in a statement.
More: Reuters
New York Times:
Since Xi Jinping met DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in February, Chinese officials have been racing to show they use its tech, like in courthouses and hospitals  —  Government bodies nationwide have been eager to show they are using DeepSeek's A.I. technology since the company's founder met with Xi Jinping, China's leader.
Bluesky: @hargreaves-s
Bert Hubert's writings:
A look at Europe's options and potential issues to get a “European Cloud”, which is likely to be more difficult to build than the €15B Galileo satellite system  —  The very short version: It has now become clear that European governments can no longer rely on American clouds …

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Todd Spangler / Variety:

Earlier Picks

Emma Roth / The Verge:
Zhiye Liu / Tom's Hardware:
Andrew Liszewski / The Verge:
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Jay Peters / The Verge: