Author: TechBrunch
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) plans to introduce a bill that would extend TikTok's ban by 270 days. TikTok has warned of an impending shutdown in just five days, but the new bill, officially called the TikTok Deadline Extension Act, would force TikTok to leave its Chinese parent company ByteDance if approved by Congress. will give you more time. TikTok is currently expected to be “deactivated” on January 19th unless the Supreme Court intervenes to delay the ban. The Supreme Court is considering the ban and is expected to decide later this week whether the law behind the ban violates the…
Shortly after OpenAI released its first “inference” AI model, o1, people started noticing strange phenomena. Models sometimes started “thinking” in Chinese, Farsi, or other languages even when asked questions in English. When given a problem to sort out, such as “How many R's are there in the word 'strawberry'?”, o1 begins a “thinking” process and performs a series of reasoning steps to arrive at the answer. If the question is written in English, o1's final response will be in English. However, the model performs several steps in another language before making a conclusion. “[O1] Halfway through, I randomly started thinking…
The App Store is full of different services designed to help you reduce screen time, count your steps, and more. A new iOS app called Steppin combines these two ideas to help users do both at the same time to bridge the gap between physical and mental health. Steppin blocks social media apps unless you take a certain number of steps each day. Achieving your daily step goal will free up your time on the most used social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The app was co-founded by Paul English, who previously launched travel search engine Kayak, which was…
For years, twin sisters Nilo and Jen Rahmani have exchanged stories and compassion about the challenges they face in their respective engineering jobs. Niro told TechCrunch that a frequent topic of conversation was dissatisfaction with the reliability platform he uses for work. When they realized a few years ago that the reliability landscape was starting to change, they thought they had the best experience to build a reliability solution suited to the direction the industry was heading. “Before, reliability came first no matter what,” Nilo told TechCrunch. “now [companies] Cloud costs are getting more attention. Entire industries are being hit…
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing arm, said in an announcement Tuesday that it plans to invest $5 billion in Mexico over the next 15 years as part of its “long-term commitment” to the region. Ta. Part of that investment is a new server region launching today, the AWS Mexico (Central) Region. This will enable AWS customers to run applications and serve end users from AWS datacenters in Mexico. AWS estimates that the construction and continued operations of AWS Mexico will add approximately $10 billion to Mexico's GDP and support approximately 7,000 “full-time equivalent jobs.” To be clear, AWS…
Founded in late 2022, Powerset is an investment program with a simple hypothesis. “What if your best investors aren’t venture capitalists, but other founders scribbling checks between late-night coding sessions and board meetings?” Founded by AngelList alum Jake Zeller and Jonathan Swanson, founder of coaching firm Athena, PowerSet invests $1 million in other startups each year to five to 10 founders. and could potentially give away millions more if the founders bring in good investment. Past members include Paul Copplestone, co-founder of developer platform Supabase, Jordan Tigani, co-founder of analytics company MotherDuck, and Wes McKinney, a software engineer who created…
North Korean-backed hackers stole at least $659 million in multiple cryptocurrency heists in 2024, while simultaneously stealing internal It is said that IT personnel were also dispatched to infiltrate blockchain companies as a threat. . The announcement marks the first official confirmation that North Korea was behind the $235 million hack of WazirX, India's largest cryptocurrency exchange, in July. Due to a data breach in July 2024, WazirX was forced to cease trading and subsequently reorganized the company. Other large-scale attacks included $308 million stolen from Japan's DMM Bitcoin, $50 million each from Upbit and Radiant Capital, and $16.13 million…
UK public sector and critical infrastructure organizations could be banned from paying ransoms under new proposals from the UK government. The UK Home Office on Tuesday launched a consultation proposing a “targeted ban” on ransomware payments. Under the proposals, public sector bodies including local councils, schools and NHS trusts would be banned from making payments to ransomware hackers, which the government said would “strike at the heart of the cybercrime business model”. There is. The government proposals come in the wake of a wave of cyberattacks targeting the UK public sector. Last year, the NHS declared a “major” incident following…
Alex Dewez, partner at 20VC, has released the much-anticipated State of the French Technology Ecosystem report. This is a great follow-up to Atomico's European State of Technology report, and includes a more in-depth look at French startups in particular. As a reminder, the gist of Atomico's report is that European startups raised $45 billion in 2024 compared to $47 billion in 2023. Although this figure is only a decrease of $2 billion, it represents a decrease of more than 50% when compared to the 2022 figure. In France, the overall theme is more or less similar. According to Dewez, venture…
Britain's antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority, is wasting no time in filing its first formal inquiry in 2025 under new rules that came into force this month. The company will discuss new initiatives it is taking on in AI search and its huge search advertising business, as well as what remedies it may impose to improve competition in the space. We are investigating Google's market power. Those interested in filling out the survey have until February 3rd to comment. This is the first of two investigations the CMA is promising Big Tech this month under the new rules,…