Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Wednesday, April 16th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Well, it looks like Doge has finally come for cybersecurity. It sounds like the tariff stuff is already

biting Nvidia to the tune of $5 billion. Why is Open AI building a social network?

The government would have settled the antitrust

case with meta to the tune of $30 billion. And why did Mark Zuckerberg consider spinning off

Instagram voluntarily? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Quick note, right as I was about to hit publish on the whole episode, this news hit. The CISA

says it will extend funding to MITR, which runs the CVE program and, quote, there will be no

lapse in critical CVE services. What does that even mean? I'm about to tell you, because since

the show has already been edited,

even though this news story is now in theory different, though who knows these days we shall see,

right? I'm going to go ahead and give you the original segment as I recorded it right here,

so you will have the full context of the whole brouhaha.

MITR, the non-profit research organization behind the common vulnerabilities and

exposures program, or CVE, says the U.S. government funding needed to develop and operate CVE will

expire on April 16th, quoting aid funk Ebola. Let me explain what that means to the uninitiated.

Miter is a government organization that contains repositories of all of the vulnerabilities

that have been exposed slash exploited so far. It is through this repository that

antivirus and other malware detectors are based on, end quote. Quoting Reuters.

Reuters couldn't establish the reason for the contract's lapse, but CISA is, like the rest

of the federal government, undergoing a radical downsizing driven in part by tech tycoon Elon Musk's

U.S. Doge service. A spokesperson for Doge didn't immediately reply to an email.

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