Tech News

1. Technology / AI:

   • Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks announced a landmark deal worth up to $10 billion, aimed at securing AI infrastructure and cloud services. 👉 reuters.com 👉 siliconangle.com

   • Microsoft's latest holiday ad for Copilot AI assistant showcased unrealistic capabilities, with The Verge finding significant discrepancies between the ad's claims and actual performance. 👉 theverge.com

   • Andrej Karpathy released his 2025 LLM Year in Review, highlighting key advancements such as RLVR, Claude Code, and Nano Banana. 👉 karpathy.bearblog.dev

2. Business / Finance:

   • Elon Musk's $56 billion Tesla pay package from 2018 has been reinstated by the Delaware Supreme Court, ending a years-long legal battle. 👉 cnbc.com 👉 techcrunch.com

   • The U.S. Senate confirmed Michael Selig as chairman of the CFTC, marking a significant shift in crypto regulation. 👉 bloomberg.com^$ 👉 cnbc.com

   • Instacart agreed to refund $60 million to settle FTC claims of deceptive subscription tactics and false advertising. 👉 bleepingcomputer.com

3. Cybersecurity / Privacy:

   • Denmark accused Russia of being behind two "destructive and disruptive" cyberattacks, including a 2024 attack on a water utility and DDoS attacks before November elections. 👉 theguardian.com 👉 bleepingcomputer.com

   • Microsoft 365 accounts are being targeted in a wave of OAuth phishing attacks, leveraging device code authorization mechanisms. 👉 thehackernews.com

   • A new UEFI flaw enables pre-boot attacks on motherboards from Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS, and ASRock, potentially allowing attackers to manipulate memory before the operating system loads. 👉 bleepingcomputer.com

4. Geopolitics / Diplomacy:

   • TikTok’s owner ByteDance signed a deal creating a U.S.-focused joint venture majority-owned by American investors, allowing the app to avoid a U.S. ban while ByteDance retains a minority stake. 👉 bbc.com 👉 theverge.com

   • The UK government confirmed that China was behind the October cyber attack on the UK's Foreign Office, highlighting a significant escalation in cyber espionage. 👉 theguardian.com

5. Technology / Hardware:

   • Samsung unveiled the Exynos 2600, the world's first smartphone SoC built on a 2nm Gate-All-Around process, expected to power some Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus models. 👉 androidauthority.com

   • iRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, filed for bankruptcy and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer. 👉 hardware.slashdot.org

6. Environment / Health:

   • Higher carbon dioxide levels in the environment are making food more calorific but less nutritious, and potentially more toxic, according to a new study. 👉 theguardian.com

7. Legal / Regulatory:

   • Coinbase sued three U.S. states (Connecticut, Illinois, and Michigan) over attempts to regulate prediction markets, arguing that these markets fall under CFTC jurisdiction. 👉 bloomberg.com^$

8. Technology / Software:

   • Apple updated its developer license agreement to allow recouping unpaid funds by deducting them from in-app purchases processed on developers' behalf. 👉 techcrunch.com

   • The Association for Computing Machinery announced that all publications in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available starting January 2026. 👉 dl.acm.org

9. Media / Entertainment:

   • Netflix acquired Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform, to enhance its gaming strategy and allow subscribers to carry their personas across games. 👉 techcrunch.com

10. Economy / Markets:

    • The U.S. Federal Reserve is reviewing Nvidia's H200 chip sales to China, highlighting ongoing concerns over national security and export controls. 👉 cfr.org

11. Technology / AI:

    • Google sues SerpApi, a data scraping company, alleging it used millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted content and sold it to third parties. 👉 reuters.com

12. Technology / AI:

    • Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman estimates that staying competitive in frontier AI development will require "hundreds of billions of dollars" over the next five to ten years. 👉 businessinsider.com^$

13. Technology / Hardware:

    • The television industry's brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, with TCL and Hisense releasing TVs capable of 5,000 nits. 👉 theverge.com

14. Business / Finance:

    • Uber is hiring more engineers rather than fewer due to AI productivity gains, pushing back against the industry trend of using AI to justify headcount cuts. 👉 businessinsider.com^$

15. Technology / AI:

    • New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act into law, making New York the latest state to have broad safety rules for advanced AI models. 👉 axios.com

16. Technology / AI:

    • An AI robotics startup, Physical Intelligence, saw improvements in its vision-language-action model by including human video data in the fine-tuning process. 👉 physicalintelligence.company

17. Economy / Markets:

    • ByteDance is on track for profits of roughly $50 billion in 2025, surpassing its internal target for the year. 👉 bloomberg.com^$

18. Technology / Software:

    • The Danish government accused Russia of being behind two "destructive and disruptive" cyberattacks, including a 2024 attack on a water utility and DDoS attacks before November elections. 👉 theguardian.com

19. Media / Entertainment:

    • Sequoia's Shaun Maguire was criticized for falsely accusing a Palestinian student of being the shooter in the Brown University shooting. 👉 fastcompany.com

20. Technology / Hardware:

    • The Association for Computing Machinery announced that all publications in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available starting January 2026. 👉 dl.acm.org

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