Author: TechBrunch
With TikTok's fate on the line, TikTok CEO Shou Chiu plans to attend President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday, The New York Times reported. The executive will join Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on the dais traditionally reserved for former presidents and other important guests. Trump called for a ban on the app during his first term, but took a different approach during his 2024 campaign, promising to preserve the app if elected. Trump talked about how content about himself and his campaign has fared well on TikTok and how he was able to reach younger users through…
Is the grass greener on the other side? We’re not sure, but the sky is most certainly bluer. It’s been two years since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now X, leading people to set up shop on alternative platforms. Mastodon, Post, Pebble (two of which have already shuttered operations) and Spill have been presented as potential replacements, but few aside from Meta’s Threads have achieved the speed of growth Bluesky has reached. As of January 2025, Bluesky has surpassed 25 million users. Its growth stems from several policy changes at X, including a heavily criticized change to the block feature and…
The prolific Clop ransomware group has exploited vulnerabilities in several companies' popular file transfer products, developed by US software company Cleo, to hack dozens of corporate victims it claims to have hacked in recent weeks. Announced the name. In a post on a dark web leak site seen by TechCrunch, the Russian-linked Klopp Gang listed 59 organizations it claims were compromised by exploiting high-risk bugs in Cleo's software tools. This flaw affects Cleo's LexiCom, VLTransfer, and Harmony products. Cleo first disclosed this vulnerability in an October 2024 security advisory before security researchers observed it being heavily exploited by hackers several…
In recent weeks, PayPal's Honey, which claims to find the best coupon codes for your transactions, has been at the center of controversy. The tool reportedly secretly earned affiliate revenue by changing the attribution of product link creators who posted in their videos. The central question was how affiliate links work and how money is paid to the person with the last link when a user makes a purchase. Former Vercel employee Steven Tey says his open source URL shortening and link tracking service Dub.co solves this problem by eliminating the need for coupon codes and embedding them in links.…
Just one day after Google signed the deal with Associated Press, Mistral also announced a content deal with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to improve the accuracy of answers in Mistral's chatbot product, Le Chat. This is the first deal of its kind for the Paris-based artificial intelligence company. And it shows that Mistral doesn't want to be seen as “just” a basic model maker. The company also hopes to develop more attractive products starting with “Le Chat.” From what I've heard, the company is also working on a dedicated app to access Le Chat and better compete with ChatGPT and Claude.…
French startup Hyperline aims to build the next generation of Chargebee. Over the past two years, the startup has been building a new billing platform that can be used for recurring subscriptions, one-time purchases, usage-based billing, and more. Hyperline raised its first funding round of 4 million euros ($4.1 million at current exchange rates) from Index Ventures in 2023. Now, Index Ventures is doubling down on this investment, investing an additional $10 million in the startup. Billing may seem like a simple problem, but it becomes a pain when you start scaling. “What takes time when it comes to billing…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube's battle to remove pirated content to defend his company's use of a dataset containing copyrighted e-books. , newly released excerpts from an affidavit filed late last year. The deposition is part of a complaint filed with the court by plaintiffs' lawyers related to the AI copyright case Kadri v. Mehta. This is one of many similar cases in the U.S. court system pitting AI companies against authors and other intellectual property holders. In most cases, the AI companies that are defendants in these lawsuits claim that training on copyrighted content is…
Chinese companies continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other US-based AI companies. This week, MiniMax, a startup backed by Alibaba and Tencent, raised about $850 million in venture capital at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion and has launched MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and debuted three new models of T2A. -01-HD. MiniMax-Text-01 is a text-only model, while MiniMax-VL-01 can understand both images and text. The T2A-01-HD, on the other hand, produces audio, especially audio. With a size of 456 billion parameters, MiniMax-Text-01 outperforms models such as Google's recently announced Gemini 2.0 Flash…
Y Combinator alumnus Stoke Space has raised $260 million in Series C, bringing its total funding to $480 million. This follows $100 million raised in October 2023 and $75 million raised in December 2021. The company was founded in 2019 by Blue Origin veteran Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, who started his career as an intern at SpaceX. Stoke participated in the 2021 Winter YC Cohort. The space startup has an ambitious goal of building the first fully reusable rocket – both the booster and the second stage. Last month, the company released a video showing a successful test of…
On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council held a meeting to discuss the dangers of commercial spyware. This is the first time this type of software (also known as government spyware or mercenary spyware) has been discussed by the Security Council. According to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, the purpose of the conference was to “address the impact of the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware on the maintenance of international peace and security.” The United States and 15 other countries called for the conference. Although the meeting was largely informal and did not result in concrete proposals,…