Anita Balakrishnan / CNBC:
US blocks sale of money transfer service MoneyGram to Alibaba's Ant Financial; Ant Financial will pay a $30M termination fee for the deal breakup  —  - The U.S. government failed to approve a multimillion-dollar merger between MoneyGram and Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba.

Davey Alba / BuzzFeed:
Logan Paul debacle highlights YouTube's content moderation problem, as experts say Paul's video isn't something AI moderation could catch on its own  —  Logan Paul attends “The Thinning” Meet & Greet during the 2016 New York Comic Con.  —  YouTube has a content crisis — again.

Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch:
Mesh Wi-Fi router startup Eero lays off ~30 staff as it shifts priorities to its core business; Eero was launched in 2015 and has raised $90M in funding  —  Eero, the mesh Wi-Fi router startup, has laid off 20 percent of its workforce (about 30 employees), TechCrunch has learned.

Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Lenovo updates ThinkPad lineup with Intel 8th-gen CPUs and USB-C power adapters, with new T and X models shipping in January and L models in February  —  Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, Lenovo unveiled updates to its laptop lineups: its ThinkPad X, ThinkPad T, and ThinkPad L series.

Joe Shields / AnandTech:
Dell updates XPS 13 laptop with 13.3" 4K InfinityEdge touch display, 8th Generation Intel Quad Core i5/i7, 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports, available January 4 from $999  —  Dell is releasing a few new items at CES 2018 starting with its brand new XPS 13 laptop today.

Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
AT&T announces plans to start rolling out a true 5G network in 12 cities by the end of 2018  —  AT&T has announced plans to roll out a true 5G network in a dozen markets in accordance with the 3GPP's recently released 5G NR (new radio) guidelines by the end of 2018.

Troy Wolverton / Business Insider:
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold ~$24M of stock in Nov. and now owns 250K shares, the minimum he's required to hold; Intel was informed about chip flaws in June  —  - Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off $24 million worth of stock and options in the company in late November.

Bloomberg:
JD.com opens its first 7Fresh premium supermarket in Beijing, featuring robot carts that follow shoppers, and its first “unmanned” convenience store in Shandong  —  The Chinese e-commerce giant opened 7Fresh store this week  —  Web retailers are taking their battle into the physical world

New York Times:
Russian and Venezuelan governments talk about digital currencies, to be theoretically backed by countries' natural resources like oil, to sidestep sanctions  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Russian and Venezuelan officials are hoping virtual currencies can help their countries make an end run around American sanctions.

Recode:
Sources: TPG and Dragoneer converted Spotify debt into equity at ~$10B valuation, sold it to Tencent at ~$20B, solving Spotify's $1B debt problem ahead of IPO  —  Big investors TPG and Dragoneer get a nice return, and Tencent gets a piece of the streaming music company.  Everybody happy?

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Apple announces that its $99 developer program membership is now available at no cost to nonprofits, accredited educational institutions, government entities  —  Apple announced today it will begin allowing select publishers to waive the membership fees associated with its App Developer Program.

Spectreattack.com:
Researchers wrote a Spectre attack in JavaScript that violates browser sandboxing and reads data from the address space of the browser process running it  —  Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance.  For example, if the destination …

Reuters:
Sources: Google exploring sale of US restaurant review guide Zagat which it bought for $151M in 2011  —  (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google is exploring a potential sale of Zagat, the U.S. restaurant review guide which the search giant bought for $151 million in 2011, people familiar with the matter said.

Thomas Fox-Brewster / Forbes:
Spectre researcher Daniel Gruss says attacks work “super-reliably” on AMD CPUs, despite the company claiming “near zero risk” due to different architecture  —  Rumors had been flying around cybersecurity circles at the turn of the year about a vulnerability affecting computers running Intel chips.

Amazon Web Services, Inc.:
AWS: all but a small percentage of EC2 instances are patched, remaining will be within hours; says customers must also patch their instance operating systems  —  AWS is aware of recently disclosed research regarding side-channel analysis of speculative execution on modern computer processors …

Meltdown and Spectre:
Official webpage for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, which has links to research papers and an FAQ  —  Bugs in modern computers leak passwords and sensitive data.  Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors.  These hardware bugs allow programs …