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NYT Connections today — my hints and answers for Wednesday, January 1 (game #570)

The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes (Raquel Coronell Uribe/NBC News)

St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing the latter at ~CA$1.8B (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, slop arrived, more (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Letter: the US Treasury says China-backed hackers gained access to some Treasury workstations and unclassified docs; a vendor notified it of the hack on Dec. 8 (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

A US judge delays the CFTC v. Gemini trial to January 21, after Trump's inauguration; CFTC alleged Gemini misled the agency in its 2017 bid to debut BTC futures (Turner Wright/Cointelegraph)

VW Group had sensitive info, including GPS coordinates, of 800K+ electric vehicles exposed on an unprotected AWS database for months before it was alerted (Thanos Pappas/Carscoops)

The technology of passkeys is elegant, but the complexities of syncing them to password managers can contribute to platform lock-in and make them less usable (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Sources detail IDF's Unit 8200, tasked with identifying human targets as candidates for elimination during the war in Gaza; one describes it as an "AI factory" (Elizabeth Dwoskin/Washington Post)

The bitcoin rally fueled by Trump's reelection has lost steam near the end of 2024; BTC hovers around $93.5K, ~$15,000 below the record high set in mid-December (Sunil Jagtiani/Bloomberg)

NYT Connections today — my hints and answers for Monday, December 30 (game #568)

Netflix's foray into live sports caps off a strong year, with its share price up 90%+ in 2024, but the stock's rich valuation sets a high bar for follow-up act (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

AT&T says China targeted a few "individuals of foreign intelligence interest" in the Salt Typhoon hack and its networks are now clear from the intrusion (Kelcee Griffis/Bloomberg)

The US plans to update HIPAA with new cybersecurity rules to protect patients' private data, including mandatory encryption and multifactor authentication (A.J. Vicens/Reuters)

Trump supports H-1B visas, saying "I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I've been a believer in H-1B", siding with Musk in the MAGA debate on the issue (Jon Levine/New York Post)

Finland, Canada, the US, and other countries are testing tech for passport-free travel, including facial recognition and a "digital travel credential" (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Sydney-based Sitemate, which offers no-code software tools for industries like infrastructure and utilities, raised a AU$27.5M Series A at a ~AU$150M valuation (Shivaune Field/Forbes Australia)

Meta expects AI-generated characters to "generate and share content" and "over time, exist on our platforms", similarly to regular accounts (Financial Times)

Tech lobbyists see new opportunities to expand access to high-skilled H-1B visas and green cards by leveraging the sway of Elon Musk over the GOP (Brendan Bordelon/Politico)

DeepSeek unveils DeepSeek-V3, a mixture-of-experts model of 671B total parameters, with 37B activated per token, claiming it outperforms top open-source models (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat)

Microsoft adds Copilot to Microsoft 365 in Australia and Southeast Asia and raises 365's price, a sign of how it aims to turn a profit from its AI investments (Tom Dotan/Wall Street Journal)

US federal lobbying disclosure forms reveal how Meta, with a team of 14 directly employed lobbyists, led efforts to block the passage of KOSA in Congress (Ruth Reader/Politico)

NYT Connections today — my hints and answers for Thursday, December 26 (game #564)

Alibaba's Qwen unveils QvQ-72B-Preview, an experimental research model focused on "enhancing visual reasoning capabilities", built upon Qwen2-VL-72B (Qwen)

Analysis: roughly two-thirds of 39 public digital health companies have lost value in 2024, while the Nasdaq is up 32% (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)