The US House passes a bipartisan TikTok bill that forces a sale or ban of the app; the legislation faces an uncertain Senate path without a companion measure
The House vote, set for Wednesday, is expected to mark the first time a chamber of Congress has passed legislation that could lead to a ban of a social media platform.
Apple unveils App Store updates for the EU, including Web Distribution, which will let authorized developers offer iOS apps on their websites from spring 2024
Last week, Apple released iOS 17.4 with big changes to the iPhone and App Store ecosystem to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the European Union.
As TikTok faces a divestment bill in the US, a look at how lawmakers and the Biden administration quietly planned the legislation and caught TikTok by surprise
Executives of the video-messaging app thought they had fended off attacks. Behind the scenes, lawmakers and Biden officials were working to force its ban or sale.
The EU Parliament approves the AI Act, voting 523 in favor and 46 against, despite competition fears; the Act, born in 2021, puts AI tech into risk categories
- The European Union Parliament on Wednesday approved the world's first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern …
Neil Young brings his music back to Spotify after requesting its removal in January 2022, saying “Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation”
The singer-songwriter previously had his music removed from the platform over what he deemed the spread of vaccine misinformation on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Spotify rolls out music videos on mobile and desktop in beta in 11 markets, including Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, and the UK, for Premium subscribers
Spotify is adding music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in some markets. They are tightly integrated with the company's music library …
Google DeepMind details SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills to play like a human; SIMA trained on No Man's Sky, Goat Simulator 3, and other games
Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA, an AI agent training to learn gaming skills so it plays more like a human instead of an overpowered AI that does its own thing.
A US jury convicts Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov for operating crypto “tumbler” Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021, laundering 1.2M+ BTC worth ~$400M
Russian-Swedish national Roman Sterlingov was convicted by a federal jury in Washington, D.C., for operating Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021.
Google paid out $10M to 632 bug bounty researchers in 2023 via its Vulnerability Reward Program, including $3.4M for Android bugs; the highest bounty was $113K
Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services.
Brave says that daily Brave iOS app installs jumped from ~8K to over 11K after Apple added a default browser choice screen in the EU to comply with the DMA
Brave has seen a sharp increase in users installing its privacy-focused Brave Browser on iPhones after Apple introduced changes …
An analysis of 3M+ Discord and Telegram chats in 50+ groups finds a global network of thousands of violent predators who target, groom, and extort kids online
A global network of violent predators is hiding in plain sight, targeting children on major platforms, grooming them, and extorting them to commit horrific acts of abuse. Mastodon: @mattburgess@infose...
US Copyright Office and USPTO study: existing IP laws are sufficient to address NFT copyright infringement concerns and changes are not currently necessary
- The intellectual property authorities in the U.S. noted in an NFT study that the current laws are sufficient to address infringement concerns.
RevenueCat survey of nearly 30K mobile subscription apps: only 17.2% will reach $1,000 in monthly revenue and only 3.5% will reach $10,000 in monthly revenue
Investors know that most startups fail, but something that may be less understood is how few mobile apps actually make money.
Ethereum completes its Dencun upgrade, which lowers expenses on Layer 2 networks by storing data in “blobs”; a transaction that once cost $1 can now cost a cent
- Software upgrade reduces costs for so-called Layer 2 chains — Upgrade expected to spur on development of new apps and chains
Bluesky open sources its collaborative moderation tool Ozone and plans to let users run their own independent moderation services later this week
Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced today that it's open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network.
An interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on Sora, set for release later in 2024, its training data, red-teaming Sora, working with the film industry, and more
In an exclusive interview with our columnist, CTO Mira Murati explains the company's new Sora AI video tool and how it plans to roll it out
How MrBeast dominates this ostentatious YouTube era, using a fast, frantic, and omnipresent editing style, as his videos slowly evolve to focus on storytelling
Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back — In the fall of 2023, a clip ripped from a video … X: @johnwolfeyt , @twinkophrenia , @justinwhang , @nontrotski , @cku...
How online group 764 uses Discord and Telegram to blackmail teens into degrading and violent acts, and then boast about it; Discord removed 34K users in 2023
The abusers were part of an emerging INTL NWK of online grps that've targeted 1,000s of children with a sadistic form of SM terror that authorities & tech cos. have struggled to control. … Matt Burges...
The Tor Project releases WebTunnel, a Tor bridge that mimics HTTPS traffic to help users bypass censorship targeting Tor by hiding connections in plain sight
The Tor Project officially introduced WebTunnel, a new bridge type specifically designed to help bypass censorship targeting …
Cerebras announces the WSE-3, a TSMC-made 5nm chip almost the size of a 12-inch wafer with 4T transistors, up from 2.6T in the WSE-2, for training AI models
The race for ever-larger generative artificial intelligence models continues to fuel the chip industry.
Filing: the NYT denies OpenAI's claims that the NYT “hacked” ChatGPT to create misleading evidence of copyright infringement, calling the claims “grandstanding”
The New York Times (NYT.N) has denied claims by OpenAI that it “hacked” the company's artificial intelligence systems …
Memo: John Collison says Stripe is in “no rush” to go public and its payment volume rose 25% YoY to $1T in 2023; source: Stripe hit ~$1B in Q3 2023 net revenue
Payments company has become a Silicon Valley bellwether as its valuation has risen and fallen over the past few years
Chicago-based Ocient, which provides hyperscale data warehouse and analytics software, raised a $49.4M Series B extension, bringing its total funding to $119M
Our Investment in Ocient John Pletz / Chicago Business : Data-tech whiz Ocient raises nearly $50M for growth Eric Avidon / Business Analytics : Ocient raises $49.4M in funding to fuel development, gro...
Meta details its two new data center scale clusters, both containing 24,576 Nvidia H100 GPUs that the company is using for AI workloads like training Llama 3
Charlotte Trueman / DatacenterDynamics :
How online group 764 uses Discord and Telegram to blackmail teens into degrading and violent acts and then boast about it; Discord removed 34K users in 2023
Docs: Nigeria, which has held two Binance execs since February during a crypto exchange crackdown, is pushing for data on Binance's top 100 local users and more
Financial Times :
Self-driving startup Applied Intuition raised a $250M Series E led by Lux, Elad Gil, and Porsche at a $6B valuation and works with “18 of the top 20 automakers”
Investigation: 128 people complained to US law enforcement about non-consensual sexual content of them shared on OnlyFans between January 2019 and November 2023
Adults-only website OnlyFans has made aspiring porn stars rich and celebrities richer. But a Reuters investigation found a darker side … X: @williamsmjw X: Michael Williams / @williamsmjw : The dark ...
How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who returned in 2015 during a leadership crisis, grew the website from $12M in annual revenue to $800M+ and from 80 staff to 2,000
The site, a throwback to an earlier era of social media, is poised to go public as soon as next week. It hasn't been easy to reach this point.
Sources: the Pentagon abandoned its plan to spend up to $2.5B on a chip grant to Intel, putting the onus on the Commerce Department to make up for the shortfall
Bloomberg :
Livestreaming on Douyin and Kuaishou is helping attract out-of-town property buyers to Xishuangbanna in China's Yunnan province, despite a nationwide downturn
Caiwei Chen / Rest of World : X: @anupkaphle and @caiweic X: Anup Kaphle / @anupkaphle : China's property market has plummeted since the pandemic. So why are sales booming in one tropical border town...
A February 21 hack of Change Healthcare has seized the US health care system for over three weeks, halting billions in payments; Change processes $2T per year
Bloomberg :
Arm unveils its first Neoverse chip designs for self-driving cars, seeking to diversify from smartphones; the first vehicles could arrive in four to five years
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times :
Letter: Chamath Palihapitiya's VC firm Social Capital fired two of its partners, citing an undisclosed “situation”, and hired a law firm to investigate
Bloomberg :
Paris- and New York-based Adaptive ML, which helps businesses build custom tools with open-source generative AI models, raised a $20M seed led by Index Ventures
Daphné Leprince-Ringuet / Sifted :
TikTok expands its Effect Creator Rewards monetization program to 33 more regions, including Argentina, Belgium, and Israel, and lowers its payout threshold
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch :
Source: Physical Intelligence, a startup making an AI model for “any robot or physical device”, raised $70M from Thrive, Khosla, Lux, OpenAI, Sequoia, and more
Physical Intelligence (Pi, π, @physical_int). We're focused on bringing the amazing recent breakthroughs of AI and foundation models into the physical world. Ashlee Vance / @ashleevance : It's a two s...
Google updates Google Play game listings, including AI-powered FAQs and new ad formats, adds support for listing PC games, and says Play Points hit 220M members
Sources: e-commerce roll-up firm Kite, which was cofounded by Blackstone in 2022 and closed a $200M equity commitment, shut down earlier in 2024
Natasha Mascarenhas / The Information : X: @nmasc_ X: Natasha Mascarenhas / @nmasc_ : Scoop: Behind the shut down of a Blackstone-founded e-commerce roll up startup. Kite, which launched with a stack...
Filings: ByteDance-owned entity Picoheart is now the third-largest shareholder in InnoStar, a Chinese state-backed ReRAM chips maker, with a 9.5% stake
Juro Osawa / The Information :
Carta: tech startup workers are receiving 37% less equity in their companies on average compared with 18 months ago; average salaries are down 0.2% since 2022
Tabby Kinder / Financial Times :
Match and Bumble have lost $40B+ in market value since 2021, as they struggle to grow their ~$4.2B in 2023 subscription revenue and young users opt not to pay
Perplexity is licensing Yelp's data and integrating its maps, reviews, and other details in responses when users ask for restaurant recommendations
Emilia David / The Verge : X: @aravsrinivas and @carnage4life X: Aravind Srinivas / @aravsrinivas : the rebels are partnering against the establishment [image] Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The une...
Documents: RISC-V chip designer SiFive had $38.2M in revenue in 2023, a $113.1M net operating loss, and expects to boost its licensing revenue to $60M in 2024
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg :
Shopify: Revolutionizing Commerce with Winter Edition '26
Over 150+ new features transform how merchants build, design, and grow—with technology that amplifies creative vision.
Email fatigue is real: Here's how smart email tools help you regain control
Picture this: It's Monday morning. You walk into the office feeling energized and ready to take on the week.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data
Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.