~techmeme | Bookmarks (1028)

Joseph Menn / Washington Post: A US judge finds NSO Group liable for exploiting a bug in WhatsApp to spy on 1,400 users and that WhatsApp is entitled to sanctions against NSO  —  Israel-based maker of Pegasus program loses five-year-old landmark case.  —  Messaging giant WhatsApp won a landmark ruling Friday …

David Scheer / Bloomberg: Tai Mo Shan, part of Jump Trading's crypto unit, agrees to pay $123M to settle SEC's claims it misled investors about the stability of TerraUSD  —  Tai Mo Shan Ltd., part of Jump Trading's crypto unit, agreed to pay $123 million to settle a US regulator's claims it misled investors …

Kali Hays / Fortune: Sources: David Sacks' role as WH AI and crypto czar will be limited to an adviser role, overseen by Michael Kratsios, partly because he won't divest from Craft  —  David Sacks may already be getting a taste of how difficult it can be to get things done in Washington D.C.

Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: A study by Waymo and insurer Swiss Re finds Waymo's vehicles were safer than those driven by humans, with a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims and more  —  Waymo's autonomous vehicles cause less property damage and fewer bodily injuries when they crash than human-driven vehicles …

Stephen Alpher / CoinDesk: Rumble announces a $775M investment from Tether and plans to use $525M to fund a tender offer for ~70M shares of its common stock; RUM jumps 35%+ after hours  —  YouTube competitor Rumble (RUM) is in a deal for a $775 million strategic investment from stablecoin giant Tether.

Sylvia Varnham O'Regan / The Information: Google hired 100+ staffers of Magic Leap as contractors to assist with Google's work on its new Android XR OS, raising questions about the future of Magic Leap  —  Google has hired more than 100 staffers at augmented reality firm Magic Leap as contractors to assist with Google's work …

Bloomberg: SAP promoted a team lead five female staff allege has a pattern of targeting female reports, raising questions about its culture and workplace discrimination  —  Women who worked for a team lead at the tech giant's Signavio unit say that the company failed to address complaints of bullying and discrimination.

Bloomberg: Sony shares surged ~50% from an August trough to reach an all-time high last week, as investors are bullish on Sony's gaming business growth in 2025  —  - Next year ‘one of the greatest’ for video games: Smithers  — M&A and good management boost stock's appeal: Janus Henderson

Yantoultra Ngui / Reuters: Singapore-based bolttech, a B2B2C startup that offers “embedded” insurance products, raised a $100M+ Series C led by Dragon Fund at a $2.1B valuation  —  Singapore-headquartered insurance technology firm bolttech has raised more than $100 million in its latest funding round …

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Sources: Anysphere, developer of GitHub Copilot rival Cursor, raised a $100M Series B at a $2.6B valuation, up from a $400M valuation in August 2024  —  Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, raised $100 million Series B at a post-money valuation of $2.6 billion, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.

Malcolm Owen / AppleInsider: Apple researchers say the company's open-source ReDrafter method on Nvidia GPUs led to a 2.7x speed increase in generated tokens per second for greedy encoding  —  Apple's latest machine learning research could make creating models for Apple Intelligence faster, by coming up with a technique …

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Researchers unveil Genesis, an open-source generative physics engine that trains robots in simulated reality 430K times faster than in the real world  —  On Thursday, a large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Charlotte, NC-based Aiwyn, which provides automation software for accounting firms, raised $113M led by KKR and Bessemer, bringing its total funding to $127M  —  Accounting firms are struggling to adopt high-tech solutions.  That's according to a survey earlier this year from Rightsworks …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: YouTube plans to start a crackdown on “egregious clickbait”, or videos where the titles or thumbnails make claims the videos don't back up, beginning in India  —  A lot of YouTube videos have flashy, misleading titles and thumbnails, such as “BREAKING NEWS” or “The president steps down …

Bloomberg: A look at Frank McCourt's efforts to acquire TikTok and the obstacles he faces, as he lobbies Congress and Trump's team and recruits former TikTok executives  —  - TikTok hopes Supreme Court will halt ban at final hour  — McCourt is pitching his bid to Congress, Trump's team

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: Backflip, which is building AI models that can generate 3D designs using text, sketches, or photos as prompts, raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and a16z  —  What if it were as easy to generate a usable 3D design as prompting ChatGPT?  That's the mission of Backflip …

Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information: Anthropic, whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has vocally opposed Donald Trump, and OpenAI look to hire more people with ties to Trump and the GOP for their policy teams  —  Lately, AI developer Anthropic has been riding high, with its models' impressive performance on tasks like code generation helping …

New York Times: Sources: the US' proposed AI chip framework would block adversaries entirely, and give others quotas based on their US alignment, threatening Nvidia's expansion  —  The chipmaker expects more than $10 billion in foreign sales this year, but the Biden administration is advancing rules that could curb that growth.

New York Times: In 150+ X posts, Elon Musk led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by sharing misinfo, which may lead to a government shutdown over Christmas  —  The world's richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Google releases Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, an experimental “reasoning” model that “explicitly shows its thoughts” and can use them to strengthen its reasoning  —  Google has released what it's calling a new “reasoning” AI model — but it's in the experimental stages …

Allyson Versprille / Bloomberg: The US FAA publishes 22 temporary flight restrictions for drones over parts of New Jersey, as public hysteria over sightings of possible drone activity persists  —  The US Federal Aviation Administration prohibited drone flights over several parts of New Jersey as public hysteria over sightings continues to persist.

Myles McCormick / Financial Times: NERC, overseen by FERC, warns soaring electricity demand from sources including data centers to power AI could strain US and Canadian grids, risking blackouts  —  Surging demand from tech sector could overwhelm generation capacity, report says  —  North America's electricity grid faces …

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: India's commerce minister says that Shein will operate in India purely as a tech partner, with Reliance Retail having full ownership and control of operations  —  Shein must surrender all data of Indian customers and control of its local operations to its partner, Reliance Retail …

Google DeepMind: Google introduces FACTS Grounding benchmark for evaluating the factuality of LLMs, and announces a leaderboard that ranks Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental on top  —  Our comprehensive benchmark and online leaderboard offer a much-needed measure of how accurately LLMs ground their responses …