Latest Tech News
- Memo: the Trump admin pauses new student visa interviews as it mulls requiring all foreign students applying to study in the US to undergo social media vetting (Nahal Toosi/Politico)
- More US states are rolling out subsidies for satellite connectivity in rural areas, including some that have funded programs that exclusively subsidize Starlink (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)
- Texas enacts an online child-safety bill requiring app stores verify users' ages and secure parental approval before minors can get most apps or make IAPs (Bloomberg)
- Sources: Neuralink raised $600M at a $9B pre-money valuation; PitchBook: the company was valued at $3.5B in late 2023 (Liz Hoffman/Semafor)
- A Qualcomm-funded report says Android phones with Qualcomm modems priced similarly to the iPhone 16e with a C1 modem downloaded 5G data up to 35% faster in NYC (Ian King/Bloomberg)
- Adidas says customer data stolen in cyber attack
- Mistral launches an API for agents, which can run code, make images, access docs, search the web, and "hand off" to other agents, similar to OpenAI's offerings (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
- Memo: Meta reorganizes its AI teams into an AI products team and AGI Foundations; FAIR remains separate but one specific FAIR team is moving to AGI Foundations (Ina Fried/Axios)
- Q&A with Sundar Pichai on search's future, seeing "overall query growth", AI agents, not altering search rankings or AI Mode answers to favor Trump, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
- Apple says its App Store blocked $9B+ in fraudulent transactions over the past five years, with $2B in just 2024, and rejected ~2M risky app submissions in 2024 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Memo: nearly all of CISA's top leaders, including heads of five of its six operational divisions and six of 10 regional offices, have left or are leaving in May (Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive)
- Pornhub and three other porn sites face EU child safety probe
- Frugal tech: The start-ups working on cheap innovation
- Humanoid robots fight in Chinese kick-boxing competition
- AI could already be conscious. Are we ready for it?