~techmeme | Bookmarks (1043)

Lam Le / Rest of World: GSMA Intelligence: ~61 countries, including the US and China, plan to shut down their 2G networks, raising digital exclusion concerns, mainly affecting the poor  —  Global leap to 4G and 5G would cut off phone access for millions of vulnerable people.  —  Last November, Nguyen Thi Que's …

Malathi Nayak / Bloomberg: Filing: Elon Musk is set to be questioned under oath on April 3 in an investor lawsuit alleging his Twitter buyout flip-flop was a ruse to lower its stock price  —  After attorneys for the world's richest person initially balked at making him appear in person for a deposition …

Manish Singh / India Dispatch: A look at India's semiconductor push as it invests $18B in five projects, with combined federal and state subsidies covering approximately 70% of project costs  —  The journey of auto industry in India provides a remarkable case study on how the country, with prudent policies and rising demand, could establish manufacturing ecosystem

Steven Levy / Wired: Jim Sanborn, creator of the Kryptos sculpture at CIA HQ, says he's frustrated with amateurs falsely claiming they cracked the 35-year unsolved code using AI  —  Jim Sanborn's inbox is flooded with amateur cryptographers who say they've cracked the code with chatbots like Grok 3.

CNN: China plans a “state venture capital guidance fund”, expected to attract ~$138B over 20 years from local governments and private sector, to support AI and more  —  Hong Kong CNN —  Fresh off the global success of DeepSeek's latest artificial intelligence reasoning model …

Suzanne Smalley / The Record: Experts say Sean Cairncross' nomination as national cyber director signals the White House's ONCD will lead US cyber policy across the government  —  The Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) is poised to become a stronger force in the second Trump administration and will finally operate …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Signal's Meredith Whittaker says AI agents doing tasks on users' behalf pose security and privacy risks and refers to their use as “putting your brain in a jar”  —  Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy.

David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times: The White House hosted its first Crypto Summit, bringing together top crypto executives, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss  —  The first-of-its-kind event at the White House with top crypto executives showcased the president's embrace of the once-renegade industry.

Thomas Brewster / Forbes: Unsealed court docs: US investigators believe hackers behind the 2022 LastPass breach stole $150M in XRP, now worth ~$700M, from one person in January 2024  —  The stolen XRP is now worth $716 million.  The Secret Service is trying to claw it back from unknown hackers.

Pete Schroeder / Reuters: The US OCC says banks can engage in some crypto activities, rescinding prior guidance that told them they should clear such activities with regulators first  —  The U.S. regulator overseeing national banks clarified Friday that banks can engage in some crypto activities …

Bloomberg: Sources: virtual physical therapy service Hinge Health aims to file for a US IPO as soon as next week and could go public in April; it had $390M in 2024 revenue  —  The San Francisco-based company could go public as early as April, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn't public.

Bloomberg: ON Semiconductor reveals a $6.9B bid to acquire chipmaker Allegro Microsystems, which had a ~$4.9B market cap as of March 5, while Onsemi's stood at $19.6B  —  The chip company, which does business as Onsemi, is offering $35.10 per share for Allegro, up from a September proposal of $34.50, it said in a statement.

Financial Times: Sources: Microsoft canceled some CoreWeave agreements over delivery issues and missed deadlines before its IPO; Microsoft made up 62% of CoreWeave's 2024 sales  —  AI data centre provider hit by blow from biggest customer ahead of the biggest tech listing this year

Gaby Del Valle / The Verge: USCIS proposes to review social media accounts of people applying for US citizenship, green cards, and asylum or refugee status, to comply with Trump's EO  —  People applying for US citizenship or personal residency may soon have to disclose their social media handles to the government.

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: NY-based Ataraxis AI, which uses AI to predict if a patient has cancer and what their cancer outcome looks like, raised a $20.4M Series A led by AIX Ventures  —  Artificial intelligence is a big trend in cancer care, and it's mostly focused on detecting cancer at the earliest possible stage.

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters: Intel defeats a shareholder lawsuit accusing it of fraudulently concealing problems in its foundry unit, leading to job cuts and a $32B stock plunge  —  Intel (INTC.O) won the dismissal of a shareholder lawsuit accusing the chipmaker of fraudulently concealing problems in its foundry business …

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: Microsoft unveils Sales Agent and Sales Chat AI agents, available in public preview in May, designed to work with Dynamics 365 business apps and with Salesforce  —  Microsoft announced two AI agents for sales that double as a competitive response to Salesforce in an area where both companies are placing big bets.

Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Salesforce announces Agentforce 2dx, letting AI agents work proactively and autonomously across enterprise systems without constant human supervision  —  Salesforce announced Agentforce 2dx today, a major update to its digital labor platform that enables autonomous AI agents to work proactively behind …

The Economic Times: Ola's AI venture Krutrim partners with Lenovo to develop the 700B-parameter Krutrim 3 LLM and India's largest supercomputer, as India grows its AI capabilities  —  Ola has a 700-strong team building its full-stack AI offerings, said CTO Navendu Agarwal at the Lenovo Tech World India 2025 in Mumbai.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Tel Aviv-based Grain, which helps businesses find the best FX hedges using FX derivatives and AI, emerges from stealth with a $33M Series A and an $18M seed  —  Foreign exchange fluctuations can make or break a business that trades across borders, but keeping up and responding to the FX market …

Jordan Novet / CNBC: MongoDB Q4: revenue up ~20% YoY to $548.4M, vs. $519.6M est., and projects the slowest growth for FY 2026 since going public in 2017; MDB drops 16%+ after hours  —  MongoDB shares sank 16% in extended trading on Wednesday after the database software maker issued disappointing guidance.

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Broadcom fixes three VMware zero-days exploited in the wild; attackers with admin privileges can chain the flaws to escape the virtual machine's sandbox  —  Broadcom warned customers today about three VMware zero-days, tagged as exploited in attacks and reported by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center.

William Gallagher / AppleInsider: The new M4 MacBook Air supports two monitors of up to 6K resolution each, plus the built-in display simultaneously, addressing a limitation of previous models  —  The new M4 MacBook Air fixes what's been a key problem with the line, and now supports up to two external monitors …

Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Utah becomes the first state to pass an app store age-verification bill and require parental consent for minors to download apps; the bill heads to the governor  —  And Meta, Snap, and X are applauding it. … Utah became the first state in the country to pass legislation requiring …