Yaaa News
Tech / Business / Security — the few worth reading each day
First US rideshare union — 70,000 Massachusetts drivers organize
Massachusetts Uber and Lyft drivers formed the App Drivers Union — the first officially recognized rideshare worker union in the US. 70,000 drivers covered, via state-law workaround of federal limits.
Google insists users love AI Search — DuckDuckGo's no-AI version sees 28% spike same week
Google's CEO claims «people love AI Mode». DuckDuckGo's no-AI search page noai.duckduckgo.com saw +22.7% weekly traffic the same week, with iOS App installs spiking 69.9% at peak.
Former CIA officer stashed 303 gold bars at home — 17 years of fraud uncovered in days
David Rush, a senior CIA admin official with top-secret clearance, was arrested May 19. FBI found 303kg of gold bars (~$40M), $2M cash, 35 Rolexes. He'd faked his Navy and degree records for 17 years.
Claude Opus 4.8 ships — same price, more honest, Fast Mode cost cut 3×
Claude Opus 4.8 ships with Anthropic's H-round announcement. Same API price, beats Opus 4.7 across coding, agents, reasoning. 4× more likely to flag code bugs honestly. Fast Mode unit cost cut 3×.
Anthropic raises $65B at $965B — overtakes OpenAI as world's most-valued AI startup
Anthropic closes a $65B H-round at a $965B post-money — overtaking OpenAI as the highest-valued AI startup. ARR hit $47B this month. Likely the last private round before IPO.
Xiaohongshu lands World Cup rights — Douyin steps aside, price holds flat
Xiaohongshu (RED) signed with China's CCTV on May 27 for 2026 World Cup broadcasting rights. Douyin walked away. The price was not higher than the previous cycle.
DeepSeek's valuation: $10B → $50B in three weeks, National Big Fund in talks
DeepSeek's valuation jumped four times in three weeks — from ~$10B in early April to potentially ~$50B by May 6. China's National Big Fund is in talks to lead — its first investment in a domestic LLM.
iOS 27 Siri's new brain: a Gemini-distilled on-device model, with Google Cloud fallback
iOS 27 Siri will run a small model distilled from Google's full Gemini for on-device queries; some requests will go to a licensed Gemini in Google Cloud. Apple pays Google ~$1B/year for it.
Amazon kills its AI leaderboard — staff inflated token use to climb
Amazon employees gamed internal AI leaderboards by burning tokens on pointless tasks — «Tokenmaxxing». Meta's «Claudeonomics» board logged 60 trillion tokens in 30 days. Uber blew its annual AI budget in four months.
Microsoft admits Win11's modern UI scaling is rough — major summer quality update incoming
Microsoft confirms a major Windows 11 quality update this summer — migrating core shell to WinUI 3, restoring a movable taskbar, and finally extending dark mode to long-overlooked legacy dialogs.
NYT: one job still growing in the AI era — cybersecurity
NYT: in the AI era, cybersecurity is one of the few jobs still growing.
Aliyun authoritative DNS adds 100K/day cap on free tier — third cut in 18 months
Aliyun's authoritative DNS free tier adds a 100K query/day cap per domain from June 24. Third tightening since 2024 — recursive DNS also capped, new free signups restricted.
Anthropic Glasswing month 1 — 10,000+ critical bugs, humans can't patch fast enough
Anthropic Project Glasswing's first month: Claude Mythos Preview and ~50 partners found 10,000+ high/critical vulnerabilities in major systems software. Of ~6,202 disclosed, only 75 patched. Humans can't keep up.
Musk and Zuckerberg killed Trump's AI EO — even «voluntary review» was too much
Hours before signing, Trump shelved a voluntary 90-day federal AI safety review EO. Musk, Zuckerberg, and David Sacks called Trump directly — the accelerationist faction won even against voluntary review.
Tesla FSD finally launches in China — but rivals are years ahead
Tesla launches FSD in China after years of waiting — but as Level 2, hands-on-wheel. Xpeng Mpilot already holds 60.1% of China NOA share; Baidu Apollo Go runs commercial robotaxis.