Author: TechBrunch

Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz has revitalized the state's National Guard after a cyberattack on St. Paul, the state's capital. City officials have yet to disclose the nature of the cyberattack, but the July 25 violation continues to disrupt the city's operations and several public services. St. Paul is one of the largest cities in the United States with over 300,000 residents, and is the latest in a list of major cities targeted by hackers and ransomware gangs in recent years. In a statement Tuesday, Waltz allowed the National Guard cyber forces at city demands to help St. Paul recover from…

Skechers introduced a line of kids' sneakers, including hidden compartments that parents can glide on Apple Airtags. Inside the heel of the shoe, a small insert can be lifted to reveal the compartment. Parents can then track the location of their children. At least you can track your child's shoes. These shoes don't come with air tags and look like they're third-party products, developed by Skechers, not real collaborations with Apple. The shoes were announced to Little Press in mid-July, but Appleinsider reported on the product on Wednesday. Apple only promotes air tags as products that track items such as…

In the first half of 2025, generative AI apps are experiencing incredible growth in both downloads and in-app revenue, a report from market intelligence company Sensor Tower said. Users downloaded the Genai app 1.7 billion times in H2 2024 compared to 1 billion people. These apps doubled in-app revenue, resulting in $1.87 billion in 2025, compared to $932 million in H2 in 2024. The report noted that users spent over 15.6 billion hours on the Genai app in the first half of 2025, jumping from 8.5 billion hours on H2 2024. This time it recorded more than 426 billion sessions.…

Tiktok announced on Wednesday that it is releasing a number of new features, including enhanced parental control, additional tools for creators, and new interactive welfare features. We have also published footnotes, a fact-checking system. Social networks bring new parental control to family pairings. This feature allows parents to link their accounts to their teenage accounts and customize their safety settings. Parents can now block certain accounts on teenage accounts. Blocked accounts cannot interact with teens, and teens will not display their account's content in their feed. Additionally, parents will be automatically notified when a teen uploads a public video, story…

Tiktok announced on Wednesday that it would release Footnotes, a crowdsourcing fact-checking system similar to X and Meta's community notes functionality. The technology was initially deployed to users as a pilot program, allowing contributors to write footnotes and evaluate them on Tiktok videos. All US Tiktok users can view notes rated as rated and submitted their ratings in return. The company first announced plans to test footnotes in April. At the time, this feature was described as a way to provide more context to the community about Tiktok's content. Like X's Community Notes and other similar programs, Tiktok usually uses…

The UK government is reportedly retreating from previous demands that Apple build a secret backdoor that allows access to customer data around the world, following the harsh responsibilities from the US government. But one US senator wants to know if other tech giants like Google have received secret backdoor requests from the UK government. Google refused to answer the lawmaker's questions, but later told Techrunch that the tech giant wasn't receiving backdoor demand. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that the UK's Department of Home Affairs is seeking a secret court order in the UK's surveillance court to allow…

Humanity is approaching $3 billion to $5 billion in funding, with large language model developers valued at $170 billion, Bloomberg reported. Iconiq Capital is leading this funding, but there is a possibility that a second lead investor will take part in the transaction. The company is also in talks with the Qatar Investment Bureau, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, and GIC. If confirmed, the deal will almost triple the artificial valuation, which received a $3.5 billion valuation of $3.5 billion, after a $3.5 billion funding round announced in March, followed by a $3.5 billion funding round. Other participants in the final…

Cash App launched a new peer-to-peer payments feature called “Pools” on Tuesday. This allows users to pool money with friends and family to pay for grocery bills, restaurant checks, holidays, group gifts and more. We will expand more widely in the coming months as we can select users first. Users set target amounts and invite contributors via $CashTag or text links to non-users to make payments via Apple Pay or Google Pay.[支払い]You can create a pool through tabs. Organizers can close the pool at any time and transfer funds to their cash balances. The ability of non-users to contribute through…

Google announced Tuesday that it was deploying a video overview to Notebooklm, an AI-based note-taking and research assistant. A video overview, first introduced in May, can help users turn dense multimedia, such as Raw Notes, PDFs, and images, into digestible visual presentations. Previously, we adopted an audio approach to help users understand the material in an audio overview. This is a feature that gives users the ability to generate podcasts using AI virtual hosts based on documents shared with notebook bulk, such as course measurements and legal briefs. With this new feature, NoteBookLM takes a more visual approach to help…

The UK government is reportedly retreating from previous demands that Apple build a secret backdoor that allows access to customer data around the world, following the harsh responsibilities from the US government. But one US senator wants to know if other tech giants like Google have received secret backdoor requests from the UK government, and Google has refused to say so far. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that the UK's Department of Home Affairs is seeking a secret court order in the UK's surveillance court to allow Apple to access end-to-end encrypted cloud data stored by customers around…