~techmeme | Bookmarks (999)

Faris Mokhtar / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple has raised its offer to invest in Indonesia from about $10M to almost $100M, in a bid to persuade the government to lift its iPhone 16 sales ban  —  - Company increases investment proposal tenfold, sources say  — Indonesia banned sales of iPhone 16 over local content rules

NBC News: The US Library of Congress says hackers accessed some email communications between congressional offices and library staff between January and September 2024  —  The Library of Congress didn't specify who was behind the hack.  —  The Library of Congress said hackers broke into its communications systems …

Eugene Kim / Business Insider: Internal document: Amazon has held talks with several partners for handling specific tasks on the AI-powered Alexa, including Uber, Ticketmaster, and Instacart  —  - Amazon discussed partnerships with other companies for an AI-powered Alexa upgrade.  — Partners under consideration included Uber …

Daniel Wiessner / Reuters: Amazon and SpaceX argued the NLRB, which recently found issues at the companies, is unconstitutional; 5th Circuit judges questioned the timeline of the charges  —  A panel of U.S. judges on Monday seemed likely to rule that Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Elon Musk's SpaceX were too quick to bring …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Perplexity debuts a shopping feature offering product recommendations, one-click checkout, and more for Pro users in the US, alongside a merchant program  —  AI-powered search engine Perplexity is venturing into e-commerce.  On Monday, the company debuted a new shopping feature …

Bloomberg: Sources: DOJ antitrust officials plan to ask a judge to force Google to sell Chrome, license Search data, uncouple Android from Search and Google Play, and more  —  - Antitrust officials also to seek data licensing, AI measures  — Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developers

CNN: Two Baltic Sea internet cables, connecting Lithuania with Sweden and Finland with Germany, were suddenly disrupted, sparking concerns of Russian sabotage  —  Two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been suddenly disrupted, according to local telecommunications companies …

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Xiaomi, the second largest smartphone vendor in India, plans to replace its app store there with one from PhonePe in January, amid ongoing geopolitical tensions  —  Xiaomi will replace its app store with fintech PhonePe's offering for customers in India starting in January.

Philip Stafford / Financial Times: Sources: Trump Media is nearing an all-share purchase of Intercontinental Exchange's crypto trading platform Bakkt; DJT closed up 16.65%, BKKT up 162.46%  —  Truth Social owner is close to an all-share takeover of Intercontinental Exchange's Bakkt  —  Donald Trump's social media company …

Kylie Robison / The Verge: A look at emails between Musk and Altman from the early days of OpenAI, discussing its partnership with Microsoft, fundraising, employee compensation, AGI, more  —  Emails in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI expose the startup's rocky origins. … As OpenAI was ironing out a new deal with Microsoft in 2016 …

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Mistral adds web search, image generation, Canvas for in-line editing, more to its Le Chat chatbot, and unveils Pixtral Large, a 124B-parameter multimodal model  —  Mistral, the French startup that made waves last year with a record-setting seed funding amount for Europe …

Umar Shakir / The Verge: Telegram updates “mini-apps” to be able to run full screen and be pinned to homescreens; devs can now add subscription plans, a “gift” sending feature, and more  —  Full-screen mini-apps, including games such as Doom, can run in either portrait or landscape orientations inside Telegram …

Federal Trade Commission: The US FTC's DNC Registry data shows the agency received ~1.1M consumer complaints about robocalls in FY 2024, down from ~1.2M in FY 2023 and 3.4M+ in FY 2021  —  FTC releases annual Do Not Call Registry Data Book showing total reports about unwanted calls decreased further in 2024

GovTech: US DHS issues guidance on adopting AI in critical infrastructure, identifying AI-driven attacks, targeted attacks on AI systems, and design flaws as core risks  —  A new series of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is designed to enable cloud providers, AI developers …

Bloomberg: Netflix says 60M households watched the Paul vs. Tyson boxing bout live around the world, peaking at 65M concurrent streams  —  - Mike Tyson and Jake Paul faced off in heavily anticipated bout  — Users complained on social media of difficulty watching fight

Ben Quinn / The Guardian: FOIA docs show Palantir has been in talks with the UK's Ministry of Justice about using its tech to calculate the “reoffending risks” of prisoners  —  Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministers

Wall Street Journal: Ukraine's drone suppliers are using US-based Auterion's tech to ramp up production of automated attack drones that are cheap and can evade electronic jamming  —  Kyiv's drone suppliers are ramping up production of computer-guided drones that are cheap and can't be electronically jammed

Gavin Anderegg / anderegg.ca: Bluesky is working to become fully decentralized but it could take years amid financial concerns as it makes money only by selling domains for usernames  —  November has sucked so far.  One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky.

Ax Sharma / BleepingComputer: Some GitHub projects have been targeted with malicious commits; a Texas researcher claims someone is impersonating him to make the submissions and smear him  —  GitHub projects have been targeted with malicious commits and pull requests, in an attempt to inject backdoors into these projects.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: ByteDance is valuing itself at about $300B as part of a recent buyback offer, one of its highest valuations ever  —  Investors see Trump victory as a positive with threat of TikTok ban looming in U.S.  —  TikTok parent ByteDance is valuing itself at about $300 billion …

Morgan Meaker / Wired: A profile of and an interview with Aura Salla, a former Meta lobbyist turned EU Parliament member, who says the EU's Big Tech regulation went too far, too fast  —  Aura Salla was once the tech giant's top lobbyist in Brussels.  Now, her presence as a regulator in the European Parliament is proving controversial.

Nandagopal Rajan / The Indian Express: An interview with Apple's Tim Millet and Tom Boger on Apple's chip strategy, making big changes to the Neural Engine after the 2017 transformer paper, and more  —  'No other platform can touch our power performance per watt.  That's the tangible benefit to users,' Tom Boger, Vice President of Mac Product Marketing at Apple, said.

ProPublica: Investigation: Microsoft offered the US government free cybersecurity upgrades in 2021, increasing government reliance on Microsoft due to high switching costs  —  - Raising the Bar: President Joe Biden asked tech companies to “raise the bar on cybersecurity.”

Dominic Patten / Deadline: Many Netflix viewers faced issues while watching the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight and the undercard bouts, including the stream glitching and losing sound  —  From nearly the start of the undercard bouts from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the streamer has been freezing, losing sound and proving slow to reload.