~techmeme | Bookmarks (1028)

Margaux Nijkerk / CoinDesk: Electric Capital annual survey: total developers working in crypto fell 7% YoY globally, and Solana was the most popular blockchain among new developers  —  Ethereum remained the blockchain with the most devs, and the overall population of software builders in crypto was flat, the VC firm said in its annual survey.

Suzanne Vranica / Wall Street Journal: The merger of advertising giants Omnicom and Interpublic shows how the industry is preparing for an AI-driven upheaval, which is squeezing out creative talent  —  Two advertisers are combining into a $30 billion behemoth to harness the data, tech and AI expertise now dominating Madison Avenue—and all the marketing you see

Anna Edgerton / Bloomberg: TikTok critics like Marco Rubio, Jacob Helberg, and Brendan Carr are set for senior roles in Trump's administration, emphasizing Trump's murky stance on the app  —  - Longtime China critic Helberg named under secretary of State  — Rubio pushed for congress's TikTok divest-or-ban law last year

Natasha Singer / New York Times: How tech is stoking cycles of violence in US schools, with students using phones and social media to arrange, provoke, record, and spread school brawl videos  —  Ricardo Martinez, an 11th grader, was in his high school lunchroom in April when a mass brawl erupted.

Jason Parham / Wired: A look at Blacksky, the Bluesky custom feed curated by a team of six moderators that is slowly turning into the main avenue for many Black users on the service  —  The curated feed, now run by a team of six moderators, is the meeting ground for hundreds of thousands of Black users on Bluesky.

George Hammond / Financial Times: A profile of Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar David Sacks, who has urged AI companies and other tech startups to boost US competitiveness and national security  —  Silicon Valley investor and podcast host has joined Elon Musk in securing a key role in incoming US administration

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: Telegram says it removed 15.4M groups and channels with harmful content in 2024, and its new moderation page shows more enforcement since Pavel Durov's arrest  —  Telegram has been under unprecedented pressure to clean up its platform this year, after its founder Pavel Durov was arrested …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is working on a foldable device the size of two iPad Pros for 2028, a Magic Mouse revamp, and an AirTag with triple the range of the current one  —  Apple's new vision for the future of computing is a giant, iPad-like foldable device.  Also: The company rethinks the mouse …

John Towfighi / CNN: How Sony turned itself around by innovating its games business beyond consoles and making acquisitions to expand its IP and original entertainment content  —  The last time Sony was worth this much on the stock market, Bill Clinton was president and the PlayStation 2 was about to debut on American store shelves.

Andrew Lawrence / The Guardian: Sports stars promoting crypto coins and exchanges with little knowledge highlight the lack of mechanisms for consumers to distinguish opportunities from scams  —  Sports stars are rushing to promote coins and exchanges.  But they are stepping into a world of which they often have scant knowledge

John Beck / Rest of World: The White Helmets, UNHCR, UNRWA, and other volunteer organizations describe how apps like WhatsApp have transformed communication in conflict and disaster zones  —  Meta's messaging app has transformed communication in conflict and crisis areas.  —  Fidaa Maksour, a dispatcher with the White Helmets …

New York Times: While businesses frequently try to get on an incoming president's good side, the past week's frenzy of tech leaders to woo Trump stood out from other industries  —  It was a week of frenzied activity, as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for the President-elect.

Pieter Haeck / Politico: The EC pledges €750M of the €1.5B planned investment to fund AI-optimized supercomputers across seven sites to help EU startups compete with global rivals  —  BRUSSELS — The European Union has committed hundreds of millions of euros to help startups catch up in the global artificial intelligence race.

Eliza Strickland / IEEE Spectrum: Q&A with Fei-Fei Li on her NeurIPS talk “Ascending the Ladder of Visual Intelligence”, her startup World Labs, giving machines 3D spatial intelligence, and more  —  Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li has already earned her place in the history of AI.

Harrison Smith / Washington Post: Donald Bitzer, the plasma screen's co-inventor and the father of PLATO, a computer-based network that sparked messaging apps and more, died on December 10 at 90  —  He helped shape cyberculture as the father of PLATO, a computer-based educational network that sparked the development of plasma screens and digital messaging.

Aimee Ortiz / New York Times: Officials say hackers possibly accessed personal data of hundreds of thousands Rhode Island residents, with a “high probability” that sensitive info was stolen  —  An “international cybercriminal group” harvested the personal data of potentially hundreds of thousands of people …

Financial Times: Sources say it makes no sense for Elon Musk to target OpenAI with onerous regulation as co-chair of DOGE, given his remit is to find ways to slash regulation  —  Tesla chief's influence over Donald Trump encourages ChatGPT-maker into patriotic pitch to incoming administration

Dylan Martin / CRN: Qualcomm stated Snapdragon X PC return rates are “within industry norm”, after interim Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus claimed large ARM PC return rates  —  Qualcomm provided the statement in response to a claim made by interim Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus …

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: Researchers find a yearlong ongoing supply-chain attack targeting malicious and benevolent security personnel and stealing over 390K WordPress credentials  —  A sophisticated and ongoing supply-chain attack operating for the past year has been stealing sensitive login credentials from both malicious …

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: An investigation finds Cryptomus, registered in Vancouver, is a payment processor for dozens of Russian crypto exchanges and sites hawking cybercrime services  —  A financial firm registered in Canada has emerged as the payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges …

Lillian Perlmutter / Rest of World: Mexico's Yucatán state says AI-powered app MeMind contributed to a 9% drop in suicides over the past two years by connecting 10,000 at-risk people to treatment  —  MeMind has connected 10,000 at-risk people with mental health treatment, contributing to a 9% drop in suicides.

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: An analysis of App Store rankings shows how market saturation for AI-based creative apps is making it harder to find good apps that use AI in more focused ways  —  Many high-ranking AI apps feel like an attempted cash grab, and it's not easy to spot the trash from the treasure.

Politico: Donald Trump plans to appoint Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes to lead the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees the US intelligence community  —  Nunes is CEO of Truth Social and will continue leading Trump Media & Technology Group, a public company with a nearly $8 billion market cap.

Nicola Jones / Nature: AI companies, running out of conventional training datasets from the web, may be forced to shift from big, all-purpose LLMs to smaller, more specialized models  —  By -  The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn't infinite.  And artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have nearly sucked it dry.