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Techmeme
April 8, 2025, 7:30 PM
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Elisabeth Buchwald / CNN:
The White House says that tariffs on China are set to rise to 104% at 12:01am ET Wednesday after China missed Trump's deadline to remove its reciprocal tariff  —  President Donald Trump is set to impose an astounding 104% in levies across all Chinese imports on Wednesday …
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge:
Razer pauses direct sales of the upcoming Blade 16 and other laptops in the US as new tariffs loom  —  With tariffs set to kick in tonight, Razer's new Blade 16 and other laptops are no longer available to purchase directly. … Razer's upcoming Blade 16 and other laptops are no longer available …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says that President Trump believes the US has the resources and workforce to build iPhones in the US  —  Trump's massive 104% tariffs on China are set to go into effect at midnight tonight, a move that will have a major impact on Apple and its supply chain.
Reuters:
Sources: Micron has told US customers that it plans to impose a surcharge on some products like SSDs from April 9 to account for President Trump's new tariffs
Ben Weiss / Fortune:
Internal memo: the US DOJ disbands the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit, established by Biden in 2021, as the agency is “not a digital assets regulator”  —  The U.S. Department of Justice notified staff on Monday evening that the agency was disbanding a unit dedicated to crypto-related investigations.
Reuters:
Sources: US officials say DOGE is using AI to surveil at least one federal agency's communications for anti-Trump talk; a source says DOGE is also using Signal  —  Trump administration officials have told some U.S. government employees that Elon Musk's DOGE team of technologists …
Bradly Shankar / MobileSyrup:
Nintendo says Switch 2 pre-orders in Canada “will not start on April 9, 2025 in order to align with the timing of pre-orders to be determined in the US”  —  The pre-orders were originally set to go live on April 9  —  Nintendo has confirmed that pre-orders for the Nintendo Switch 2 …
Darryn Bonthuys / GameSpot:
Nintendo says the Switch 2's Game-Key cards, which trigger a game download when loaded, are not tied to a user's account and can be resold, unlike the Switch's
The Information:
Source: Instagram is working on an iPad app, and Adam Mosseri told staff to be willing to assume more “risk” to take advantage of a potential TikTok ban  —  Meta Platforms has put the turmoil around TikTok to good use.  Amid a barrage of headlines about the White House's efforts …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta rolls out Teen Accounts to Facebook and Messenger, automatically enrolling users and adding built-in protections, in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada  —  Meta is introducing Teen Accounts to Facebook and Messenger.  The feature, which automatically enrolls young users …
Karen Freifeld / Reuters:
Sources: TSMC could face a $1B+ penalty to settle a US export control investigation over a chip it made that ended up inside Huawei's Ascend 910B chip  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (2330.TW) could face a penalty of $1 billion or more to settle a U.S. export control investigation …
Bloomberg:
Sources: hackers intercepted ~100 bank regulators' emails, 150K+ in total, for over a year at the US Treasury's OCC, which disclosed a breach on February 26  —  - Attackers lurked within OCC email accounts since 2023  — Chinese state hackers previously targeted Treasury files
Umar Shakir / The Verge:
Google rolls out Gemini Live camera and screenshare features to the Pixel 9 series and Samsung Galaxy S25 devices, available in 45 languages for users 18 and up  —  It's also coming soon to paid Gemini Advanced users on other devices. … Google's Gemini Live camera and screenshare functions …
Kylie Robison / The Verge:
LMArena says it is updating its leaderboard policies after a Llama 4 Maverick version, which Meta said in fine print is not public, secured the number two spot  —  With Llama 4, Meta fudged benchmarks to appear as though its new AI model is better than the competition.
Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
Tech CEOs who spent big on Trump's inauguration have yet to see the investment pay off; Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are down 22% since January 20  —  With inauguration donations and Mar-a-Lago visits, leaders of the biggest tech companies sought favor with the president …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Amazon launches Nova Sonic, which can generate natural-sounding speech and that it claims is “the most cost-efficient” AI voice model on the market, via Bedrock  —  On Tuesday, Amazon debuted a new generative AI model, Nova Sonic, capable of natively processing voice and generating natural-sounding speech.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:30 PM ET, April 8, 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.

From Mediagazer

Gary Baum / The Hollywood Reporter:
A look at the first “case” brought before Objection, which aims to use AI to evaluate news stories, and a Q&A with Objection's founder; the site is now dark

Daniel Arkin / NBC News:
Gene Shalit, a longtime film critic for NBC's Today who was with the show from 1970 until his retirement in 2010, dies at 100

Aidan Ryan / The Boston Globe:
A look at an AI-reliant news site for 19 towns south of Boston, which uses public meeting transcripts and LLMs to produce stories and has 350 paid subscribers

More News

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority:
Google says all new Google TV devices in the US must now have a remote with a Free TV or Live TV button that opens its Freeplay library of 150+ FAST channels

Earlier Picks

Katie Roof / Bloomberg:
Toronto-based Tailscale, which offers an enterprise mesh VPN service, raised $160M led by Accel, a source says at a $1.5B valuation, up from $1B in May 2022
Eliza Strickland / IEEE Spectrum:
A look at the state of AI in 2025 across training and inference costs, carbon footprint, US vs. China, investment activity, bills proposed in the US, and more
More: Stanford HAI, The Decoder, and Wired
Bluesky: @erikbryn and @smcgrath.phd
LinkedIn: Xiaopeng Li and Jon Adams.  Forums: r/technews
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch:
IBM unveils the z17 mainframe with a Telum II chip, able to process 450B daily inference operations, 50% more than the z16 released in 2022, available June 18
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
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