TechCoreVoice

Google has agreed to pay $29.5M to settle lawsuits with Washington DC and Indiana over location tracking practices, after agreeing to pay ~$392M to 40 US states (Jared Gans/The Hill)

First pretrial hearing in the FTC's case against Microsoft's $69B bid to take over Activision Blizzard set for January 3, 2023 (Alexandra Alper/Reuters)

Employment in tech occupations grew 12% YoY to a record 6.39M in November 2022, as workers eye banking, retail, health care, and manufacturing amid tech layoffs (New York Times)

A look at ABBA Voyage, the hit London concert performed by 3D digital avatars of the band created from motion capture, as its producers plan a global expansion (Jenni Reid/CNBC)

Leaked screener copies of big movies tend to surface at year's end, but didn't in 2022, probably due to more security, streaming, and shorter release windows (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

Meta's dramatic implosion, Elon Musk's Twitter train wreck, and Amazon's labor uprising show that 2022 was not just a disastrous year, but a reckoning for tech (Brian Merchant/The Atlantic)

Sources: founder Richard Liu berated JD.com executives for poor performance and remains the undisputed decision maker despite having quit many frontline roles (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

A look at the disastrous 2022 for NFT-based games, after interest from EA, Ubisoft, Zynga, Niantic, and others, as the community grew more niche and scam-filled (Ryan Broderick/Polygon)

FTX says it would seek the return of its digital assets held by the Bahamas, claiming the value was ~$296M when transferred on November 12 and is now ~$167M (Nathan Crooks/The Block)

Italy's parliament approves a 26% tax on gains of €2,000+ from crypto trading per tax period and offers incentives for declaring crypto profits for tax purposes (Sandali Handagama/CoinDesk)

Google changes its appeals process for CSAM-flagged accounts; content deemed exploitative will still be removed and reported but users can plead their innocence (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)

Bahamas' Securities Commission says it is holding FTX assets worth $3.5B on a temporary basis and plans to deliver them to customers and creditors who own them (Reuters)

Canada's competition tribunal approves Rogers' $14.77B bid to acquire Shaw, saying the deal is "not likely to prevent or lessen competition substantially" (Reuters)

Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft plan to connect data centers to heating systems in Europe; Meta began in 2020 in Denmark, and Google is assessing its opportunities (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal)

Report: Twitter is closing its Seattle office, the company's second-largest engineering hub outside of San Francisco, asking employees to work from home instead (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Sources: the FBI is investigating the leak of ~100K API keys linked to users of crypto trading service 3Commas, as a victims group claims to have lost over $20M (Sam Kessler/CoinDesk)

Sources detail Elon Musk's Twitter cost-cutting measures, including closing a data center, reducing training for new staff, and canceling janitorial services (New York Times)

TSMC begins mass production of next-gen 3nm chips in Taiwan, which need ~35% less power than 5nm chips, following Samsung, and also plans to build 2nm plants (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

Jon Peddie Research: shipments of discrete GPUs fell 42% YoY to ~14M in Q3 2022, including ~6.9M units for desktop PCs, the lowest number since at least Q3 2005 (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware)

The SEC says FTX made two $100M investments using customer funds in fintech company Dave in March 2022 and blockchain startup Mysten Labs in September 2022 (CNBC)

A US appeals court revives a lawsuit accusing Google and others of violating children's privacy state laws by tracking their YouTube activity for ad targeting (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Some Twitter users are reporting widespread service interruptions; Downdetector: the issues mainly affect its website and started around 7 PM ET on Wednesday (Kate Conger/New York Times)

Q&A with Christopher Phillips, head of the Google Geo group, which runs Maps, on the future of navigation, making maps more immersive, and more (Danny Lewis/Wall Street Journal)

CCS Insight: global shipments of VR and AR devices fell 12%+ YoY to 9.6M in 2022; NPD Group: US sales of VR headsets fell 2% YoY to $1.1B as of early December (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Kraken says it is closing its cryptocurrency exchange services in Japan, operated by Payward Asia, on January 31 2023, weeks after cutting its workforce by 30% (Bloomberg)