Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🎬 Netflix to buy Warner Bros for $83 billion
🇪🇺 EU fines X $140 million over deceptive blue checks
🌐 Cloudflare goes down again
🍎 Apple announces more changes at the top
🏗️ Masayoshi Son plans series of 'Trump industrial parks'
⚖️ The New York Times sues Perplexity
🎁 + 14 other news you might like
🧰 + 6 trending tools
📚 + 2 trending papers
🎬 Netflix to buy Warner Bros for $83 billion LINK
Netflix has agreed to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for a total enterprise value of approximately $82.7 billion, beating out rivals like Comcast to take ownership of HBO Max and film and television studios.
The blockbuster deal pays $27.75 per WBD share and expects to close in 12-18 months, though there is no guarantee it gets necessary regulatory approvals for the massive sale.
The company will own bankable IP like Batman and Harry Potter and says it expects to maintain theatrical releases, raising questions about hit shows produced for Apple TV like Ted Lasso.
🇪🇺 EU fines X $140 million over deceptive blue checks LINK
The European Union just issued a $140 million penalty against X for violating the Digital Services Act, citing the deceptive design of blue checkmarks that allow anyone to pay for verification.
This decision marks the first time a company has been fined under the new law for obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers who need data to uncover potential threats.
Regulators reportedly deliberated on the penalty size to avoid sparking retaliation from President Donald Trump, while tech leaders have encouraged him to stop the EU from taking advantage of their companies.
🌐 Cloudflare goes down again LINK
Cloudflare services went offline for the second time in a month, briefly taking down major websites like LinkedIn and Coinbase before the company implemented a fix just ten minutes after the disruption started.
The company confirmed that engineers detected error levels for customers running Workers scripts, causing widespread 500 internal server error messages and user interface failures for Solana network protocols like Jupiter Exchange.
This incident follows a massive November 18 catastrophe caused by a database permissions malfunction, where a feature file exceeded the limit supported by routing software and crashed global traffic delivery.
🍎 Apple announces more changes at the top LINK
Apple general counsel Kate Adams and environment vice president Lisa Jackson are retiring, continuing a recent wave of senior leadership exits including the departure of the head software designer and AI chief.
Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, will become general counsel in March and will also oversee the government affairs staff when they begin reporting to her starting late next year.
The former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator led carbon neutral goals, but her job lost relevance as the second Trump administration denounced diversity programs and slammed efforts to combat climate change.
🏗️ Masayoshi Son plans series of 'Trump industrial parks' LINK
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is hammering out a plan to marshal hundreds of billions of dollars in Japanese capital to build a series of Trump-branded industrial parks across the United States.
The billionaire investor intends to use the project to revitalize U.S. manufacturing by directing foreign cash into domestic infrastructure that aligns with the administration's industrial agenda.
Son has spent months holding discussions with officials at the White House and Commerce Department to finalize the logistics of the collaboration and the funding structure.
⚖️ The New York Times sues Perplexity LINK
The New York Times has officially filed a lawsuit against the AI startup in federal court, accusing it of unlawfully scraping and distributing content to build an answer engine and profiting from responses.
This filing alleges that Perplexity ignores cease-and-desist notices to produce verbatim or substantially similar copies of the publication's work, creating substitutive output that misappropriates substantial subscription, advertising, licensing, and affiliate revenue opportunities.
The outlet is seeking damages and asking the court to permanently block it from engaging in the behavior regarding the copyrighted works that belong rightfully and exclusively to The Times.
Other news you might like
- Google taps Replit to rival Anthropic and Cursor in vibe coding warLINK
- AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisementsLINK
- Russia reportedly bans Snapchat and FaceTimeLINK
- Microsoft will raise prices of commercial Office subscriptions in JulyLINK
- Meta centralizes Facebook and Instagram support, tests AI support assistantLINK
- Gemini 3 Deep Think is now available in the Gemini app.LINK
- Bill Gates’ daughter snags $30M for AI startup backed by celebs, Silicon Valley heavyweightsLINK
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk announces major update with texting and driving on FSDLINK
- After Neuralink, Max Hodak is building something strangerLINK
- Meta signs commercial AI data agreements with publishers to offer real-time news on Meta AILINK
- In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the InternetLINK
🧰 Trending tools
Documentation.AI: a platform for creating and maintaining AI-optimized product documentation that stays current, helping teams avoid outdated docs and improve developer experience.LINK
8bitcn/ui: a retro 8-bit styled fork of shadcn/ui that transforms modern React components into pixel-art aesthetics for nostalgic web interfaces.LINK
Gemini 3 Deep Think by Google: a reasoning-focused AI model that tackles complex math, science, and logic problems using parallel thinking to explore multiple solution paths simultaneously.LINK
Bun: a fast JavaScript runtime and toolkit that compiles cross-platform executables, though Windows ARM support lags behind NPM's broader compatibility.LINK
Google Workspace Studio: a no-code tool for building AI agents within Google apps that automate tasks like email triage, report generation, and project coordination using natural language.LINK
Zalor: converts OpenAPI specifications into Model Context Protocol servers, enabling Claude or ChatGPT to interact with APIs without writing integration code.LINK
📚 Trending papers & reports
Twitter research ended abruptly in 2023: researchers documented how API shutdown eliminated access to 15 years of social media studies and public data analysis.LINK
Automated scoring system for AI answer quality: researchers created a tool that evaluates how well AI systems retrieve and use information to answer questions without needing human judges.LINK
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