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Reuters: Sources: the real closer for Wiz and Google executives was President Trump's election, which brought with it the prospect of a friendlier antitrust review  —  Less than a year after Google's plans to acquire Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz fell apart, executives were able to ink a deal …

Moneycontrol: Sources: Indian edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah confidentially filed draft papers for a ~$530M IPO; the startup was valued at $2.8B in September 2024  —  Top edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah has filed draft papers through the confidential pre-filing route to raise Rs 4,600 crore via an initial public offer …

Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal: Sources: activist investor Starboard Value plans to nominate a minority slate of director candidates at Autodesk ahead of the company's coming annual meeting  —  Starboard has a more than $500 million stake and plans to nominate a minority board slate  —  Activist investor Starboard Value …

Jessica Mathews / Fortune: Sequoia is laying off its Washington, DC-based policy team and shuttering its office there this month, as other VC firms beef up their presence in the city  —  Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital firms, is laying off its Washington, D.C.-based policy team …

Bloomberg.com: Community Notes, on X and now rolling out on Meta's services, fall short of stopping misinformation; removing rewards for posting misinformation would help more  —  The crowdsourced fact-checking system, which Meta adopted from X, is falling well short of stopping the spread of misinformation.

Financial Times: Sources: investors valued X at $44B in a secondary deal earlier this month; X posted ~$1.2B in adjusted EBITDA in 2024 and is raising $2B in a primary round  —  Social media site was valued at less than $10bn in September  —  Social media site X's valuation has soared back to $44bn …

Financial Times: Sources: US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged civil servants in charge of the $42B rural broadband program to increase the project's use of Starlink  —  Commerce secretary urges officials to consider Trump adviser's satellite connection for rural households

New York Times: Trump fires the two Democratic members of the FTC, threatening the independence of the regulator in a decision that is likely to face a legal challenge  —  The decision to fire the two Democratic members of the traditionally independent regulatory body is likely to face a legal challenge.

Scharon Harding / Ars Technica: A RevenueCat report, covering data from 75K+ mobile apps and $10B+ in revenue across 1B+ transactions, shows most apps fail to reach $1K/month after two years  —  If you're frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more.

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: San Francisco grants Waymo a temporary permit to map SFO roads with human-driven cars, paving the way for future commercial operations  —  Waymo has been given permission to map roadways at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) via a temporary permit — the first step …

New York Times: Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, which was already served by fiber cable, after service was “donated”, as some cite security concerns  —  Trump administration officials said the company donated the internet service, saying the gift had been vetted …

Bloomberg: Sources: Cognition, maker of AI coding assistant Devin, raised hundreds of millions led by 8VC at a ~$4B valuation, doubling its $2B valuation from April 2024  —  The new funding round is being led by 8VC, the Joe Lonsdale-backed venture capital firm, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

Todd Spangler / Variety: In an open letter to the OSTP, Ben Stiller and 400+ Hollywood creatives urge President Trump to not let Google, OpenAI, and others “exploit” copyrighted works  —  More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy …

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: A critical Apache Tomcat RCE flaw is being exploited, letting attackers take over servers via a PUT request; Wallarm: the attack “requires no authentication”  —  A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Apache Tomcat tracked as CVE-2025-24813 is actively exploited in the wild …

Scharon Harding / Ars Technica: Some owners of devices running Roku OS report seeing autoplaying video ads before they can access the home screen; Roku says it is just a test  —  Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home...

Karen Freifeld / Reuters: Sources: US Commerce Department bureaus informed staffers in recent weeks that DeepSeek is banned on their government devices  —  U.S. Commerce department bureaus informed staffers in recent weeks that Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek is banned on their government devices …

Emma Roth / The Verge: Amazon sues the US CPSC, accusing it of stretching consumer safety law by ruling Amazon responsible for recalling products sold by third parties on Amazon.com  —  The ecommerce giant claims it's not responsible for recalling items sold by third parties.

MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: President Trump's World Liberty Financial says it raised $250M in its second token sale, bringing the total amount of coins sold to $550M  —  President Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial crypto project said on Monday that it raised $250 million in its second token sale, bringing the total amount of coins sold to $550 million.

Zhiye Liu / Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon G3 Gen 3, G2 Gen 2, and G1 Gen 2 for gaming handhelds, saying the G3 Gen 3 offers a CPU 30% faster than the previous generation  —  Snapdragon G3 Gen 3, Snapdragon G2 Gen 2, and Snapdragon G1 Gen 2 enter the ring.  —  Qualcomm expanded its Snapdragon G series …

Andrew Liszewski / The Verge: Snap updates Spectacles AR glasses to add GPS support for Lenses, improved hand tracking, an AR keyboard, and more  —  The augmented reality smart glasses can now point you in the right direction. … Lenses — what Snap calls the Spectacles' various AR effects …

Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Mistral debuts Mistral Small 3.1, a 24B-parameter multimodal and multilingual open-source model it says outperforms Gemma 3 and GPT-4o-mini and runs on 32GB RAM  —  French artificial-intelligence startup Mistral AI unveiled a new open-source model today that the company says outperforms similar offerings …

Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for ~$30B; Alphabet was close to a $23B deal for Wiz last summer before talks ended  —  A deal worth some $30 billion could come together soon, after talks fizzled last summer  —  Google parent Alphabet …

The Information: Liam Fedus, VP of research in charge of post-training at OpenAI, is leaving the company to found a startup focused on using AI to discover new materials  —  Liam Fedus, vice president of research in charge of post-training at OpenAI, is leaving the company, a company spokesperson confirmed.

Jennifer Elias / CNBC: Google and other companies are considering bringing back in-person job interviews, as some startups sell AI tools that let engineers cheat in virtual interviews  —  After landing internship offers from Amazon, Meta and TikTok, computer science student Chungin “Roy” Lee has decided to move to San Francisco.