Tech News

Accounting firm KPMG plans to invest $2B in AI and cloud services globally over the next five years through an expanded partnership with Microsoft (Mark Maurer/Wall Street Journal)

India’s Goods and Services Tax Council agrees to levy a 28% indirect tax on online gaming, casinos, and horse racing, rejecting that they are “games of skill” (TechCrunch)

Roger Thomas Clark, who was Silk Road’s second-in-command, behind Ross Ulbricht, is sentenced to 20 years, following his extradition from Thailand in 2018 (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

Meta now lets avatars be used to answer and make video calls on Instagram and Messenger and adds ways to share animated avatar stickers (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

US DOJ arrests a security engineer on wire fraud and money laundering charges, saying he “fraudulently obtained” $9M through a DEX by creating fake pricing data (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

Gemini sues DCG and its founder Barry Silbert, accusing Barry Silbert of being the architect and mastermind of the DCG and Genesis fraud against creditors (Sarah Wynn/The Block)

A researcher says a Bangladesh government site is leaking data of millions of citizens, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, and national ID numbers (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

data.ai: Bluesky hits a million downloads globally across iOS and Android, roughly four months after launch; Bluesky has been installed ~300k since June 30 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

People’s Bank of China fines Ant Group ~$984M for violations in payment, settlement, anti-money laundering, and fund sales businesses, ending a years-long probe (Bloomberg)

Apple removed several predatory lending apps from India’s App Store; some of the apps reached the finance list’s top 20 despite hundreds of negative reviews (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Crypto bridging protocol Multichain confirms a $130M exploit affecting user-supplied tokens and recommends “all users suspend the use of Multichain services” (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)

Huawei unveils Pangu Model 3.0, its new AI model for cloud computing in operations, product R&D, and software engineering, based on its own hardware and chips (Nikkei Asia)