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Qualcomm Inc.’s interest in pursuing an acquisition of Intel Corp. has cooled, according to people familiar with the matter, upending what would have likely been one of the largest technology deals of all time.

The complexities associated with acquiring all of Intel has made a deal less attractive to Qualcomm, said some of the people, asking not to be identified discussing confidential matters. It’s always possible Qualcomm looks at pieces of Intel instead or rekindles its interest later, they added.

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Apple is facing an uphill battle to release its own artificial intelligence models for iPhones and other products in China, with a top Beijing official warning that foreign companies will confront a “difficult and long process” to win approval unless they partner with local groups.

Apple chief Tim Cook arrived in China on Monday for his third visit of the year as the company tries to navigate the country’s complex regulatory regime and bring its Apple Intelligence to devices sold in the country.

In recent months, the US group has been holding talks with Chinese tech companies to help power Apple Intelligence in the country. Last month it began rolling out the suite of AI features in the US on iPhones and other devices.

Apple has also considered running its own large language models in China, according to two people familiar with the matter.

But a top Chinese tech regulator told the Financial Times that foreign groups such as Apple would face a lengthy and complex approval process to run their own models and indicated partnering with locals was their best option.

The high-ranking official at the Cyberspace Administration of China said it would be a comparatively “simple and straightforward approval process” for foreign device makers to use already vetted LLMs from Chinese groups.

Threads and rival BlueSky are competing to attract disenchanted X users following the 2024 election.

Bluesky said last week it now has more than 20 million users. The app's usage grew more than 5x in the two weeks following the election, per Similarweb. By the numbers: On November 14th, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said Threads added more than 15 million new signups since the start of the month.

According to the new data, another 20 million new signups have been added in the past 11 days. The app is now going on three months of more than one million signups per day, Stone said. Reality check: Bluesky is still tiny compared to Threads and X.

The U.S. government is granting Intel INTC -3.34%decrease; red down pointing triangle up to $7.87 billion to help fund new chip plants in four states, the largest award in the Biden administration program aimed at reviving American chip-making.

The funds are less than the $8.5 billion estimated for Intel in the preliminary award in March. That is because of previously announced funding of up to $3 billion to build secure facilities producing microchips for U.S. military and intelligence applications, according to senior administration officials.

The grant money, set aside under 2022’s Chips Act, aims to fund a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing to counteract any future supply-chain disruptions such as happened during the Covid era, and address growing geopolitical tensions with China. Much of the world’s chip production has shifted to Asia in recent decades, leaving the U.S. with around 12% of the world’s manufacturing in 2020.

Leo's Pick for 11/27/24

Starting in 1949, the Pillsbury Bake-Off was a sensation, inviting the nation’s home cooks to submit their best recipes—using Pillsbury flour, of course—for a cash prize and national acclaim. The Tunnel of Fudge, from Mrs. C.J. Helfrich of Houston, was merely the runner-up in the ’66 competition, but it went proto-viral, thanks to a thick, fudgy core that runs through the center of the cake, achieved through Helfrich’s canny use of powdered frosting mix. Nordic Ware, the company that made Bundt pans, had considered discontinuing the unpopular model—until the Tunnel of Fudge. “Demand for the pan skyrocketed,” New York Times food writer Kim Severson said. Soon, they were manufacturing 30,000 pans a day.

A tentative proposal to tax cryptocurrency mining to raise funds for climate action took off during a United Nations climate conference that’s set to come to a close today.

A levy on energy-hungry crypto mining, at $0.045 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity used, could generate $5.2 billion in revenue annually, according to a report released last week by the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, led by Kenya, Barbados, and France.

China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.

“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.

Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.

“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.

Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

Weeks after federal regulators announced a “click-to-cancel” rule for subscription businesses, a New York judge has ruled that SiriusXM made it too difficult for customers to end their service.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank’s ruling, issued Thursday, upheld elements of a lawsuit filed against the satellite audio firm in 2023 by New York Attorney General Letitia James. In a post on X after Frank’s ruling, she wrote that the company “illegally forced people to go through a long and burdensome process to simply cancel their subscriptions. We sued SiriusXM to protect people’s wallets, and now, SiriusXM must simplify its cancellation process and stop taking advantage of New Yorkers.”

Leaders of the top telecommunications companies were summoned to the White House on Friday to discuss a security problem that has been roiling the government: how to expel Chinese hackers from the deepest corners of the nation’s communications networks.

The meeting in the Situation Room came after weeks in which officials grew increasingly alarmed by what they had uncovered about the hack.

They now believe the hackers from a group called “Salt Typhoon,” closely linked to China’s Ministry of State Security, were lurking undetected inside the networks of the biggest American telecommunications firms for more than a year.

They have learned that the Chinese hackers got a nearly complete list of phone numbers the Justice Department monitors in its “lawful intercept” system, which places wiretaps on people suspected of committing crimes or spying, usually after a warrant is issued.

this week, Musk has escalated from targeting government agencies to singling out individuals—sparking his online army of followers to launch blistering critiques of ordinary federal employees.

One recent post by the billionaire zeroed in on Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., after another user on Musk’s social-media platform X questioned her role.

The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed Facebook's appeal of a lower court order reviving a shareholder lawsuit brought against the social media giant in light of consulting firm Cambridge Analytica's 2015 misuse of millions of Facebook users' data.

In its first opinion of the term, the high court issued a one-line unsigned decision dismissing Facebook's appeal. The court's ruling indicates it believes it should not have taken up the case, though the Supreme Court did not explain its reasoning.

A campaign by social media giant Meta to force app store giants Google and Apple to verify the ages of their users is picking up momentum with legislators in Congress.

Federal and state lawmakers have recently proposed a raft of measures requiring that platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram block users under a certain age from using their sites. The push has triggered fierce debate over the best way to ascertain how old users are online.

Last year Meta threw its support behind legislation that would push those obligations onto app stores rather than individual app providers, like itself, as your regular host and Naomi Nix reported. While some states have considered the plan, it has not gained much traction in Washington.

The top US consumer watchdog will supervise Apple Inc. and other major technology firms that offer digital wallets and payment apps, finalizing a proposal from last year with several changes.

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will now treat those companies more like banks as long as they handle more than 50 million transactions a year, conducted in US dollars, according to a statement Thursday. The original proposal set the supervision threshold at 5 million annual transactions.

“Digital payments have gone from novelty to necessity and our oversight must reflect this reality,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in the statement.

Apple Inc. is racing to develop a more conversational version of its Siri digital assistant, aiming to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other voice services, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The new Siri, details of which haven’t been reported, uses more advanced large language models, or LLMs, to allow for back-and-forth conversations, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the effort hasn’t been announced. The system also can handle more sophisticated requests in a quicker fashion, they said.

Revamping the 13-year-old Siri service is part of Apple’s efforts to become a force in artificial intelligence. The company debuted its much-ballyhooed Apple Intelligence platform last month, but it still lacks many of the features offered by other tech giants.

Efforts by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to address cybersecurity issues faced significant criticism this week from government watchdogs, members of Congress and regulated companies.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Tuesday said four of the six cybersecurity recommendations made to TSA since 2018 have still not been addressed — including one centered around the agency’s efforts to protect companies from ransomware.

“For example, in January 2024, GAO reported that ransomware was having increasingly devastating impacts in the sector and found that TSA’s security directives did not align with ransomware leading practices,” said Tina Won Sherman, director of Homeland Security and Justice at the GAO.

“GAO recommended that DHS determine the extent to which the transportation systems sector is adopting leading cybersecurity practices that help reduce the sector's risk of ransomware. As of November 2024, this recommendation was not yet implemented.”

The multi-trillion-dollar artificial intelligence boom was built on certainty that generative models would keep getting exponentially better. Spoiler alert: they aren’t.

In simple terms, “scaling laws” said that if you threw more data and computing power at an AI model, its capabilities would continuously grow. But a recent flurry of press reports suggests that’s no longer the case, and AI’s leading developers are finding their models aren’t improving as dramatically as they used to.

Yesterday Strava sent out an e-mail to users, outlining a change that’s occurring almost immediately, regarding 3rd party apps and the way apps are allowed to access and process data from Strava. All of these changes impact what is known as the Strava API (Application Programming Interface). That’s the piece that lets your Garmin watch push your workout to Strava, and then lets an app like VeloViewer or others access your data.

There are countless apps that use Strava’s API, literally tens of thousands according to Strava. Some of these are tiny, some of them are massive. Virtually every company in the space uses Strava’s API, including Garmin, Wahoo, TrainerRoad, VeloViewer, Xert, and plenty more. It’s become the defacto data hub for millions of athletes, some 100m+ according to Strava’s press release.