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Lauren Feiner / The Verge: President Biden signs the ByteDance-TikTok divest-or-ban bill into law, after the Senate passed it by 79-18; the House passed the legislation 360-58 on April 20 -
Alex Barinka / Bloomberg: Biden signing the TikTok divestment bill starts a 270-day countdown for a sale or a US prohibition; sources say ByteDance sees a divestiture as a last resort -
Casey Newton / Platformer: Legal scholars discuss how the TikTok divestment bill could survive a First Amendment challenge and why the US will likely rely on a national security argument -
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass: Whether TikTok is banned or not, this is the end as we know it for the money-losing app, which may lose focus due to advertiser, creator, and staff uncertainty -
Monica Alba / NBC News: Biden's re-election campaign plans to continue using TikTok for at least the next year, with “enhanced security measures”, to help “meet voters where they are” -
Will Oremus / Washington Post: Meta, Google, Snap, and Amazon all benefit from the US' TikTok ban; Mark Zuckerberg criticized TikTok's Chinese roots in 2019, part of Meta's broader campaign -
New York Times: How a tiny group of US lawmakers and aides wrote the TikTok divestment bill, hiding their efforts to avoid TikTok's lobbying, alongside the DOJ and White House -
Brian Schwartz / CNBC: Filings: in 2024, ByteDance and TikTok spent $7M+ combined on lobbying against the US' TikTok bill; AdImpact: TikTok spent $4.5M+ on TV and digital ads in 2023 -
Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft begins rolling out Windows 11 Start menu ads that show app “recommendations” from “a small set of curated developers”; users can disable the ads -
Joanna Nelius / The Verge: Qualcomm details its Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite chips; benchmarks from a demo suggest the chips match Apple's M3, Intel's Core Ultra 9, and AMD's Ryzen 9 -
Charlie Demerjian / SemiAccurate: Sources: Qualcomm is cheating on Snapdragon X Plus and Elite benchmarks given to OEMs and the press; the numbers are not achievable with the claimed settings -
Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk: The US DOJ argues Binance founder Changpeng Zhao should spend three years in prison and pay $50M for helping Binance violate sanctions and money laundering laws -
Meir Orbach / CTech: Nvidia acquires AI infrastructure orchestration and management service Run:ai, a source says for ~$700M; Run:ai, founded in 2018, had raised $118M to date -
Wall Street Journal: The US FTC bans noncompete clauses that restrict job switching, the first time in 50+ years that the FTC has issued a regulation mandating an economywide change -
James Batchelor / GamesIndustry.biz: An interview with Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors on criticism over mass layoffs and studio closures, splitting the company into three, rising debt, and more -
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: The US OFAC sanctions four Iranian nationals over cyberattacks on the US government, defense contractors, and private companies, and the DOJ unseals indictments -
Seb Joseph / Digiday: Google delays deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome for the third time, pushing back its Q4 2024 plans to early 2025, after the UK CMA expressed concerns -
Wall Street Journal: US companies racing to build data centers to serve AI demand is causing a shortage of parts, property, and power; cooling system lead times are now 5x longer -
Mary Jo Foley / Directions on Microsoft: Microsoft must take security seriously again by being transparent about breaches and no longer charging subscribers for core security and compliance features -
Adam Iscoe / New Yorker: A look at the restaurant reservation ecosystem in New York City, where new apps have sprung up to help diners book a table at buzzy restaurants for a price -
The Pragmatic Engineer: A deep dive into how Bluesky is built, including its growth from three engineers to 12 in just over two years and its infrastructure move from AWS to on-prem -
Jacob Ridley / PC Gamer: The European Parliament adopts right-to-repair rules clarifying manufacturers' obligations to provide repair services, consumer access to spare parts, and more -
Brian X. Chen / New York Times: Hands-on with the Meta AI chatbot: fails at basic search queries, stinks at counting, excels at editing existing paragraphs, quickly creates images, and more -
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: Block says it has finished developing its own 3nm bitcoin mining chip and is working through the design with a “leading global semiconductor foundry”