Tech News
Tech News and Analysis from around the web
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
Brendan Carr becomes FCC chair, and plans to focus on tech and media regulation, combating China, spectrum licenses, infrastructure, the space economy, and more — Brendan Carr is now formally the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, giving him the power to set the agency's agenda …
Washington Post:
Legal experts and lawmakers: Trump's EO halting the TikTok ban may not protect companies that host or distribute the app, as Trump cannot overturn Congress' law — Measure directs Justice Department to not enforce the law for 75 days while administration determines “the appropriate course forward.”
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Card game Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance-owned Nuverse, is back online in the US and plans to “partner with a new publisher” to prevent future bans — Marvel Snap is back online in the US after access was cut off Saturday night due to the law that banned TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps.
Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times:
Huawei plans to challenge Nvidia in China's AI chip market by positioning its latest Ascend AI processors as the hardware of choice for “inference” tasks — Tech giant pushes its artificial intelligence chips as hardware of choice for ‘inference’ tasks
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Trump signs an EO renaming the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service, directing agency heads to form “DOGE Teams” of at least four members within 30 days — The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory commission spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk recommending deep cuts …
Bobby Allyn / NPR:
Trump signs an EO that pauses the TikTok ban for 75 days to give ByteDance more time to reach a deal and provides a “liability shield” to TikTok's providers — President Trump signed an executive order on Monday seeking to hit pause on a law banning TikTok and to provide …
The Information:
Source: Meta is offering creators with large TikTok followings bonuses ranging from $10K to $50K per month to post on Instagram Reels before other platforms — Instagram isn't letting a good TikTok crisis go to waste. — Representatives for the Meta Platforms-owned app in the last week …
Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post:
Trump signs an EO to end “federal censorship” of online platforms, and directs the AG to probe if the Biden admin engaged in censorship of Americans' views — President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to stop “government censorship,” a sweeping action …
David Shepardson / Reuters:
Trump revokes Biden's 2023 executive order that sought to reduce the risks that AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security, fulfilling a GOP pledge — U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday revoked a 2023 executive order signed by Joe Biden that sought to reduce the risks …
Matt Novak / Gizmodo:
During a speech following Donald Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk delivered what many saw as two “Nazi salutes”; Musk posted a video of his speech to X — The billionaire Tesla CEO has a history of racist comments. … Elon Musk gave what appeared to be Nazi salutes at a rally held …
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
A January 17 filing shows the US NHTSA said it “upgraded” its April 2024 probe into Ford's BlueCruise, a driver assistance system used during two fatal crashes — A U.S. federal safety regulator has “upgraded” its investigation into Ford's hands-free advanced driver assistance system known …
Hafiz Rashid / New Republic:
Did Elon Musk Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at Trump's Inauguration? — During a speech at Capitol One Arena Monday following Donald Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk appeared to deliver a Roman salute not once, but twice. — The gesture is associated with Nazi Germany …
PYMNTS.com:
Stuttgart-based robotics startup Sereact, which develops Vision Language Action Models and whose customers include BMW and Daimler Truck, raised a $26M Series A — German tech company Sereact has raised $26 million for its AI-powered robotics efforts. — The company's Series A round …
Tim Copeland / The Block:
A memecoin named Official Barron Trump hit a $460M market cap before falling 95%; a Pump.fun user behind it has debuted other unofficial coins called “official” — - A memecoin called Official Barron Trump rose to a $460 million market cap on speculation that it might have been launched by Barron Trump himself.
I just wrote a review for Industry in BingeWorthy, but it doesn't have a text editor. It farms the job off to WordLand, which shoots the text back to Bingeworthy as the user publishes to WordPress and RSS, in Markdown. So the text is on both BW and WP and the feediverse. And through WordPress it has a presence on the web. This is the goal, writing exists on its own, but can be shared in all the contexts it makes sense in, but it lives primarily in your blog, your home base. That's why WordPress is so important in the scheme of things. It's a consensus, this is where a lot of people are blogging in 2025. And there's a lot of mostly unexplored interop. And they don't break developers. This may not make total sense at this time, but soon, I hope to be able to point back at this post, and say it was the first time something important worked.
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Metropolis, an AI-powered parking service, acquires Oosto, formerly known as AnyVision, for just $125M in stock, well under the $380M it raised over the years — The general hype around all things AI is not lifting all boats, as certain startups continue to struggle and look for exits.
There's a great scene in No Country For Old Men, where a character is facing imminent death, but he's arguing with the character who will kill him, who asks if all your great ideas led to this (his death) how good were the ideas (paraphrasing).
Along those lines.. If Twitter was such a great idea but it led to the death of democracy (for now at least) maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Maybe when we try to reboot we should try something realllly different.
As they say -- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
PS: This started as a thread on Bluesky.
Sad news: Longtime friend Pam McQuesten passed away on January 1 after a brief illness.
I knew Pam in Silicon Valley, as we were starting up Living Videotext in 1983. Our office was on Elwell Court in Palo Alto, just off 101, near the golf course and airport. Pam was managing editor of BYTE, the class act of tech pubs in the early personal computer business, then editor of Popular Computing, the magazine for the people (ie users of computers). When she was at BYTE, her office was on the same floor as ours.
The tech industry was rough even then, all the young egos, people who were sure they could do everything, not much collaboration, lots of betrayal. She was one of the few people I could talk with on a personal level, with trust and intelligence. We talked about the future of the technology we were creating, and what we wanted from all this. She was a mentor, like a big sister, best friend, someone I trusted and loved. A very rare friendship.
BTW, her name in the 80s, before her marriage to Paul McQuesten, was Pam Clark.
Our paths crossed again a few years ago on Facebook. I invited her to join a private group I have with friends I love and trust, to share the life I had at my "pond house" in the Catskills.
I wanted to post a brief remembrance here in case any of Pam's friends are tuned in, so they can be part of the celebration of her life.
Random observations posted on Bluesky in the early morning hours.
5:09AM: "Biden had one job to do, and he didn’t do it."
5:17AM: "The NYT had one job to do, and they didn’t do it."
5:21AM: "The NYT is the saddest excuse for the leading news org of the most significant democracy in human history. They flushed it down the fucking toilet. They, like the Washington Post, deserve to die in darkness."
7:39AM: "Being impartial about last year’s election was not an option for the NYT. It was democracy’s Pearl Harbor. We will never forget or forgive what they did."
Editor's note: Soon, I will do all my writing in one place, and these kinds of snapshots will be easier to assemble.
How easy would it be to create a twitter-like app using RSS, and in what ways would it differ from other twitter-like apps. Here's the deal. You need a place to write a posts and a way to read a timeline of posts. That's the basic functionality. To do that with RSS you would start with a blogging app like WordPress, and a feed reader like FeedLand or NetNewsWire. Manton has integrated the two into a single user interface at micro.blog. I'm going to approach it in a somewhat differently, not sure yet how it will work, but I'm getting there. And I will offer a way for people to hook in any feed reader they want, thus opening up innovation to tech-curious users. The take-away is that you need to handle inbound and outbound feeds. That's the basics of being twitter-like.