Tech workers at major U.S. companies are earning thousands of dollars by referring job candidates they've never met, creating an underground marketplace for employment referrals at firms like Microsoft and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg.

One tech worker cited in the report earned $30,000 in referral bonuses after recommending over 1,000 strangers to his employer over 18 months, resulting in more than six successful hires. While platforms like ReferralHub charge up to $50 per referral, Goldman Sachs and Google said such practices violate their policies. Google requires referrals to be based on personal knowledge of candidates.

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized, open-source Instagram competitor, labeling them as "spam" on Facebook and removing them immediately. 404 Media reports: Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week. Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted. Pixelfed has seen a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced it is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across its platforms.

Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a "declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces." The open source charter contains sections titled "right to privacy," "freedom from surveillance," "safeguards against hate speech," "strong protections for vulnerable communities," and "data portability and user agency."

"Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project," Supernault wrote on Mastodon. "Pixelfed is for the people, period."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don't enjoy making music. "We didn't just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people," Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. "And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music."

Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry. In the interview, Shulman says he's disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music.

Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: The New York law requiring Internet providers to offer cheap plans to people with low incomes will take effect on Wednesday this week following a multi-year court battle in which the state defeated broadband industry lobby groups. A US appeals court upheld the law in April 2024, reversing the ruling of a district judge who blocked it in 2021. The Supreme Court last month decided not to hear the broadband industry's challenge, leaving the appeals court ruling in place. The state law requires Internet providers to offer $15- or $20-per-month service to people with low incomes.

As we've written, the battle between New York and ISPs was an important test case for how states can regulate broadband providers when the Federal Communications Commission isn't doing so. The Biden-era FCC's attempt to reinstate net neutrality rules and regulate broadband providers as common carriers was blocked in court, but ISPs lost the fight against the New York affordability law and an earlier fight against California's net neutrality law.

New York-based ISPs can comply by offering $15 broadband plans with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, or $20-per-month service with 200Mbps speeds. The price must include "any recurring taxes and fees such as recurring rental fees for service provider equipment required to obtain broadband service and usage fees." Price increases are to be capped at 2 percent per year, and state officials will periodically review whether minimum required speeds should be raised. New York Public Service Commission Chair Rory Christian last week issued an order stating that the law will take effect on January 15. "On December 16, 2024, the United States Supreme Court denied the Plaintiff's request for further review," the order said. "As part of the litigation, the [New York attorney general] agreed not to enforce the ABA [Affordable Broadband Act] until 30 days after the date when the US Supreme Court decided the writ of Certiorari. Thus, the ABA will once again take effect and may be enforced in New York on January 15, 2025." The order said it plans to implement the law quickly because of "developments at the federal level impacting the affordability of broadband service."

ISPs can receive one-month exemptions by filing paperwork by Wednesday confirming they meet the subscriber threshold, notes Ars. To secure longer-term exemptions, ISPs must submit detailed financial information by February 15.

U.S. companies are increasingly using AI to curb hiring plans, citing "cost avoidance" as a key metric to justify AI investments amid pressure to show returns. At software firm TS Imagine, AI-powered email sorting saves 4,000 work hours annually at 3% of employee costs, while Palantir reported AI reduced future headcount needs by 10-15%, according to company executives.

The trend is most pronounced in software development and customer service sectors, where companies are deferring or scaling back hiring plans, said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. This shift comes as long-term unemployment in the U.S. has risen more than 50% since late 2022, though tech sector unemployment dropped to 2% in December.

Nvidia has hit back at the outgoing Biden administration's AI chip tech export restrictions designed to tighten America's stranglehold on supply chains and maintain market dominance. From a report: The White House today unveiled what it calls the Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion from the Biden-Harris government, placing limits on the number of AI-focused chips that can be exported to most countries, but allowing exemptions for key allies and partners.

The intent is to work with AI companies and foreign governments to initiate critical security and trust standards as they build out their AI infrastructure, but the regulation also makes it clear that the focus of this policy is "to enhance US national security and economic strength," and "it is essential that ... the world's AI runs on American rails." Measures are intended to restrict the transfer to non-trusted countries of the weights for advanced "closed-weight" AI models, and set out security standards to protect the weights of such models. However GPU supremo Nvidia claims the proposed rules are so harmful that it has published a document strongly criticizing the decision.

Sonos Chief Executive Patrick Spence stepped down on Monday, following a tumultuous period marked by a botched app rollout that angered customers and hurt sales of its new headphones. Board member Tom Conrad, a former Pandora chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO while the audio equipment maker searches for a permanent replacement, the company said.

Spence's departure comes eight months after Sonos released a revamped app that launched with missing features and technical problems, leading to widespread customer complaints and necessitating an extensive fix-it effort. The company will pay Spence, who joined Sonos in 2012 as chief commercial officer, a $1.875 million severance package. He will remain as a strategic advisor until June 30, earning $7,500 monthly, according to a regulatory filing.

"Neuralink Corp.'s brain-computer device has been implanted in a third patient," reports Bloomberg, "and the company has plans for about 20 to 30 more implants in 2025, founder Elon Musk said."

In an interview streamed on X.com, Musk says "We've got now three humans with Neuralinks implanted and they're all working well," according to The Times of India: "We upgraded the devices, they'll have more electrodes, basically higher bandwidth, longer battery life and everything. So, expect 20 or 30 patients this year with the upgraded Neuralink devices...."

"[O]ur next part will be Blindsight devices where even if somebody has lost both eyes or has lost the optic nerve, we can interface directly with the visual cortex in the brain and enable them to see. We already have that working in monkeys," Musk added.

"I know, I know: 'Year of the Linux desktop ... yadda, yadda'," writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, a ZDNet senior contributing editor. "You've heard it all before. But now there's a Linux-powered PC that many people will want..."

He's talking about Nvidia's newly-announced Project Digits, describing it as "a desktop with AI supercomputer power that runs DGX OS, a customized Ubuntu Linux 22.04 distro." Powered by MediaTek and Nvidia's Grace Blackwell Superchip, Project DIGITS is a $3,000 personal AI that combines Nvidia's Blackwell GPU with a 20-core Grace CPU built on the Arm architecture... At CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed plans to make this technology available to everyone, not just AI developers. "We're going to make this a mainstream product," Huang said. His statement suggests that Nvidia and MediaTek are positioning themselves to challenge established players — including Intel and AMD — in the desktop CPU market. This move to the desktop and perhaps even laptops has been coming for a while. As early as 2023, Nvidia was hinting that a consumer desktop chip would be in its future... [W]hy not use native Linux as the primary operating system on this new chip family?

Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn't. It's that simple. Nowadays, Linux runs well with Nvidia chips. Recent benchmarks show that open-source Linux graphic drivers work with Nvidia GPUs as well as its proprietary drivers. Even Linus Torvalds thinks Nvidia has gotten its open-source and Linux act together. In August 2023, Torvalds said, "Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work." Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, has long worked closely with Nvidia. Ubuntu already provides Blackwell drivers.
The article strays into speculation, when it adds "maybe you wouldn't pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo? All three of these companies are already selling MediaTek-powered Chromebooks...."

"The first consumer products featuring this technology are expected to hit the market later this year. I'm looking forward to running Linux on it. Come on in! The operating system's fine."

WordPress co-creator (and Automattic CEO) Matt Mullenweg "has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members," reports TechCrunch, "some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project." Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications' lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his "vision for a new WordPress era," alluding to a potential fork in the form of "federated and independent repositories." Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed these thoughts in a separate blog post. WP Engine indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand. Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork.
But when Automattic slashed its contributions to Wordpress.org, things heated up: This spurred de Valk to take to X.com on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his "team stands ready." Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, in a sarcasm-laden blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the "push it needs to get off the ground," he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts. "I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort," Mullenweg wrote.

At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed he was deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it's worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly established non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a "neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources" around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem. Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she hadn't been involved in the project since 2020...

It's worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through that channel, be it to the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with.
Rand-Hendriksen posted on BlueSky: So why is he targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge.
And while Mullenweg headlined his blog post "Joost/Karim Fork," Rand-Hendriksen wrote on BlueSky "there is no fork in the works as far as I know. He made that up, as he has done before. Heather and I have no involvement with any of this so I don't know why he grouped the five of us together like this. It smells like attempted harassment."

Later Rand-Hendriksen claimed "this is not the first time he's accused critics of forking WordPress" and that he's "convinced any fork will fail... I think he thinks saying someone is forking WordPress is an epic burn that discredits them in the eyes of the community."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, in an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, criticized the Biden administration for pushing for censorship around COVID-19 vaccines, the media for hounding Facebook to clamp down on misinformation after the 2016 election, and his own company for complying. Zuckerberg's three-hour interview with Rogan gives a clear window into his thinking during a remarkable week in which Meta loosened its content moderation policies and shut down its DEI programs.

The Meta CEO said a turning point for his approach to censorship came after Biden publicly said social media companies were "killing people" by allowing COVID misinformation to spread, and politicians started coming after the company from all angles. Zuckerberg told Rogan, who was a prominent skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccine, that the Biden administration would "call up the guys on our team and yell at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don't take down things that are true."

Zuckerberg said that Biden officials wanted Meta to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV, with a joke at the expense of people who were vaccinated. Zuckerberg said his company drew the line at removing "humor and satire." But he also said his company had gone too far in complying with such requests, and acknowledged that he and others at the company wrongly bought into the idea -- which he said the traditional media had been pushing -- that misinformation spreading on social media swung the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Zuckerberg likened his company's fact-checking process to a George Orwell novel, saying it was "something out of 1984" and led to a broad belief that Meta fact-checkers "were too biased."

"It really is a slippery slope, and it just got to a point where it's just, OK, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program." He said he was "worried" from the beginning about "becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world."

Later in the interview, Zuckerberg praised X's "community notes" program and suggested that social media creators were replacing the government and traditional media as arbiters of truth, becoming "a new kind of cultural elite that people look up to."

Further reading: Meta Is Ushering In a 'World Without Facts,' Says Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized Apple's innovation record and business practices in a Joe Rogan podcast interview on January 10, claiming the iPhone maker has not "invented anything great in a while" and is "just sitting" on its flagship product 20 years after Steve Jobs created it.

Zuckerberg accused Apple of using arbitrary App Store rules and 30% developer fees to offset declining iPhone sales. He also said Apple blocks competitors from accessing iPhone protocols, citing Meta's failed attempt to integrate its Ray-Ban smart glasses with Apple's connectivity features. The Meta chief also criticized Apple's $3,500 Vision Pro headset, calling it inferior to Meta's $300-400 device.

TechCrunch's Rebecca Szkutak reports: TechCrunch recently surveyed 20 VCs who back startups building for enterprises about what gives an AI startup a moat, or what makes it different compared to its peers. More than half of the respondents said that the thing that will give AI startups an edge is the quality or rarity of their proprietary data. Paul Drews, a managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, told TechCrunch that it's really hard for AI startups to have a moat because the landscape is changing so quickly. He added that he looks for startups that have a combination of differentiated data, technical research innovation, and a compelling user experience.

Jason Mendel, a venture investor at Battery Ventures, agreed that technology moats are diminishing. "I'm looking for companies that have deep data and workflow moats," Mendel told TechCrunch. "Access to unique, proprietary data enables companies to deliver better products than their competitors, while a sticky workflow or user experience allows them to become the core systems of engagement and intelligence that customers rely on daily." Having proprietary, or hard-to-get, data becomes increasingly important for companies that are building vertical solutions.

Scott Beechuk, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, said companies that are able to home in on their unique data are the startups with the most long-term potential. Andrew Ferguson, a vice president at Databricks Ventures, said that having rich customer data, and data that creates a feedback loop in an AI system, makes it more effective and can help startups stand out, too. [...] Beyond just data, VCs said they look for AI teams led by strong talent, ones that have existing strong integrations with other tech, and companies that have a deep understanding of customer workflows.

Developer Q&A platform StackOverflow appears to be facing an existential crisis as volume of new questions on the site has plunged 75% from the 2017 peak and 60% year-on-year in December 2024, according to StackExchange Data Explorer figures.

The decline accelerated after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, with questions falling 76% since then. Despite banning AI-generated answers two years ago, StackOverflow has embraced AI partnerships, striking deals with Google, OpenAI and GitHub.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said quantum computers won't be very useful for another 20 years, causing stocks in this emerging sector to plunge more than 40% for a total market value loss of over $8 billion. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30, is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it," Huang said during a Q&A with analysts. PCMag reports: The field of quantum computing hasn't gotten nearly as much hype as generative AI and the tech giants promoting it in the past few years. Right now, part of the reason quantum computers aren't currently that helpful is because of their error rates. Nord Quantique CEO Julien Lemyre previously told PCMag that quantum error correction is the future of the field, and his firm is working on a solution. The errors that qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum machine, currently make result in quantum computers being largely unhelpful. It's an essential hurdle to overcomeâ"but we don't currently know if or when quantum errors will be eliminated.

Chris Erven, CEO and co-founder of Kets Quantum, believes quantum computers will eventually pose a significant threat to cybersecurity. "China is making some of the largest investments in quantum computing, pumping in billions of dollars into research and development in the hope of being the first to create a large-scale, cryptographically relevant machine," Erven tells PCMag in a statement. "Although they may be a few years away from being fully operational, we know a quantum computer will be capable of breaking all traditional cyber defenses we currently use. So they, and others, are actively harvesting now, to decrypt later." "The 15 to 20-year timeline seems very realistic," said Ivana Delevska, investment chief of Spear Invest, which holds Rigetti and IonQ shares in an actively managed ETF. "That is roughly what it took Nvidia to develop accelerated computing."

OpenAI has shut down the developer behind a viral device that could respond to ChatGPT queries to aim and fire an automated rifle. Futurism reports: The contraption, as seen in a video that's been making its rounds on social media, sparked a frenzied debate over our undying attempts to turn dystopian tech yanked straight out of the "Terminator" franchise into a reality. STS 3D's invention also apparently caught the attention of OpenAI, who says it swiftly shut him down for violating its policies. When Futurism reached out to the company, a spokesperson said that "we proactively identified this violation of our policies and notified the developer to cease this activity ahead of receiving your inquiry."

STS 3D -- who didn't respond to our request for comment -- used OpenAI's Realtime API to give his weapon a cheery voice and a way to decipher his commands. "ChatGPT, we're under attack from the front left and front right," he told the system in the video. "Respond accordingly." Without skipping a beat, the rifle jumped into action, shooting what appeared to be blanks while aiming at the nearby walls.

Plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized the team behind the company's Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated ebooks and articles for training. They further accuse the company of concealing its actions by stripping copyright information and torrenting the data. TechCrunch reports: In newly unredacted documents filed (PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta's testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta's use of a data set called LibGen for Llama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a "links aggregator," provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.

According to Meta's testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs' counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta's Llama models despite concerns within Meta's AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a "data set we know to be pirated," and flagging that its use "may undermine [Meta's] negotiating position with regulators." The filing also cites a memo to Meta AI decision-makers noting that after "escalation to MZ," Meta's AI team "[was] approved to use LibGen." (MZ, here, is rather obvious shorthand for "Mark Zuckerberg.")

The details seemingly line up with reporting from The New York Times last April, which suggested that Meta cut corners to gather data for its AI. At one point, Meta was hiring contractors in Africa to aggregate summaries of books and considering buying the publisher Simon & Schuster, according to the Times. But the company's execs determined that it would take too long to negotiate licenses and reasoned that fair use was a solid defense. The filing Wednesday contains new accusations, like that Meta might've tried to conceal its alleged infringement by stripping the LibGen data of attribution.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge this week rejected Google's motion to throw out a class-action lawsuit alleging that it invaded the privacy of users who opted out of functionality that records a users' web and app activities. A jury trial is scheduled for August 2025 in US District Court in San Francisco. The lawsuit concerns Google's Web & App Activity (WAA) settings, with the lead plaintiff representing two subclasses of people with Android and non-Android phones who opted out of tracking. "The WAA button is a Google account setting that purports to give users privacy control of Google's data logging of the user's web app and activity, such as a user's searches and activity from other Google services, information associated with the user's activity, and information about the user's location and device," wrote (PDF) US District Judge Richard Seeborg, the chief judge in the Northern District Of California.

Google says that Web & App Activity "saves your activity on Google sites and apps, including associated info like location, to give you faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences in Maps, Search, and other Google services." Google also has a supplemental Web App and Activity setting that the judge's ruling refers to as "(s)WAA." "The (s)WAA button, which can only be switched on if WAA is also switched on, governs information regarding a user's '[Google] Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services.' Disabling WAA also disables the (s)WAA button," Seeborg wrote. But data is still sent to third-party app developers through the Google Analytics for Firebase (GA4F), "a free analytical tool that takes user data from the Firebase kit and provides app developers with insight on app usage and user engagement," the ruling said. GA4F "is integrated in 60 percent of the top apps" and "works by automatically sending to Google a user's ad interactions and certain identifiers regardless of a user's (s)WAA settings, and Google will, in turn, provide analysis of that data back to the app developer."

Plaintiffs have brought claims of privacy invasion under California law. Plaintiffs "present evidence that their data has economic value," and "a reasonable juror could find that Plaintiffs suffered damage or loss because Google profited from the misappropriation of their data," Seeborg wrote. The lawsuit was filed in July 2020. The judge notes that summary judgment can be granted when "there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Google hasn't met that standard, he ruled. In a statement provided to Ars, Google said that "privacy controls have long been built into our service and the allegations here are a deliberate attempt to mischaracterize the way our products work. We will continue to make our case in court against these patently false claims."

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of 'Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers,' an initiative aimed at funding and supporting open development within the Chromium ecosystem. The purpose of this effort is to provide resources and foster collaboration among developers, academia, and tech companies to drive the sustainability and innovation of Chromium projects. Major industry players, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera, have pledged their support.

MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings and a tech investment fund are commanding extraordinary premiums in U.S. markets, highlighting unusual price anomalies reminiscent of past market distortions. MicroStrategy shares are trading at more than double the market value of their main asset -- bitcoin holdings -- while closed-end fund Destiny Tech100 recently traded at 11 times its net asset value, down from 21 times earlier in 2024.

Similar market irregularities have emerged throughout history. In 1923, investor Benjamin Graham profited from a disconnect between DuPont and General Motors shares. During the 1929 bull market, closed-end fund Capital Administration Co. traded at a 1,235% premium to its net asset value. WSJ adds: The PalmPilot during the 1990s and early 2000s was a hand-held device and personal assistant that came with a touch-screen display and a stylus. Palm was the biggest maker of hand-held computer devices, with 70% market share, and it held its initial public offering in March 2000, about a week before the Nasdaq Composite Index's peak during the dot-com bubble.

Palm's shares jumped 150% on their first day of trading, giving Palm a stock-market value of about $53 billion. Palm was still 94%-owned by parent 3Com at the time. Yet on Palm's first day of trading, 3Com's shares fell 21%.

The funny part: According to the stock market, 3Com was worth about $23 billion less than the value of the Palm shares that 3Com owned. This made no sense, yet the valuations remained out of whack for months. In time, both stocks came down to earth, sanity prevailed and the world eventually moved on to smartphones.