Author: TechBrunch

Aiming to put the “social” back into “social media,” a new app called “noplace” moved out of invite-only mode and rocketed to the top of the App Store on Wednesday. Designed for the younger generation or anyone looking to connect with friends and shared interests, noplace is like a modern-day MySpace, with colorful, customizable profiles where you can share everything from your relationship status to what you're listening to, watching, reading, and doing. A harbinger of potential in the often-fractious consumer social market, noplace was already generating buzz before its public launch due to its ability to let users express…

It's easier than ever to create deepfakes of someone else's voice or face, but at least YouTube is making some small changes that make it easier to report videos that use your likeness without your consent. Previously, you could only report these impersonations as misleading, but now you can submit a deepfake removal request to YouTube through our privacy request process. This change shows that YouTube considers deepfakes as a privacy issue, not a content moderation issue. And it is a privacy issue. The more AI tools we have at our disposal, the more opportunities there are for those tools…

Publicly traded cloud services provider Cloudflare has released a new free tool to prevent bots from scraping data from websites hosted on its platform to train AI models. Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI, and Apple, allow website owners to block bots used for data scraping and model training by modifying their site's robots.txt, a text file that tells bots which pages they can visit on a website. But as Cloudflare points out in a post announcing its bot-fighting tools, not all AI scrapers respect this. “Customers don't want AI bots visiting their websites, especially not bots that are engaging…

Hackers claimed last week to have stolen 33 million phone numbers from US messaging giant Twilio. On Tuesday, Twilio confirmed to TechCrunch that “threat actors” had also managed to identify phone numbers belonging to users of Authy, a popular two-factor authentication app owned by Twilio. In a post on a popular hacking forum, the hackers known as ShinyHunters wrote that they had hacked Twilio to obtain the mobile phone numbers of 33 million users. “We detected that an unauthenticated endpoint enabled threat actors to identify data associated with Authy accounts, including phone numbers. We have taken steps to secure this…

Are you planning to attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 with your team? Bring your team and maximize your team-building time and your company's impact throughout the conference. Groups of 4-9 people receive 15% off passes, and groups of 10 or more receive 30% off. Here are some of the great content you and your team can enjoy: What you need to raise a Series A today: Top tips and strategies for securing your next funding round. How to Find and Maintain Product-Market Fit: Learn the secrets to identifying and maintaining the right product-market fit. Family offices want exposure for their startups,…

As more music streaming apps and creation tools emerge, vying for users' attention, social music sharing app Popster is introducing two new features to expand its user base: an AI image generator for cover art and a collaboration feature that lets artists remix other users' songs. Popster, which was first released last year as a song-making tool and music video platform, allows artists to connect with other musicians, create original songs and music videos, and share them on social media. Users can record video and audio directly within the app, and add stickers and colored backgrounds. The app also offers…

Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that Meta's Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users. The announcement came just two days before Threads' one-year anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed in April that Threads now has more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 130 million reported in February. Threads was launched on July 3, 2023, at a time when users were looking for alternatives to X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk introduced major changes to the social network. The updated metrics confirm Musk's recent claim that X now has 600 million monthly active users, half of whom use the…

What do Tesla, startups, General Motors, venture capital, and Lyft have in common? John McNeil, co-founder and partner at DVx Ventures, appears on Equity with TechCrunch editor Kirsten Kolosec to discuss how Elon Musk's compensation packages have affected founders, when it makes sense to have less cash and more stock, and the firm's unique investment approach that eschews traditional management fee structures. McNeil describes DVx as VC 2.0. The firm develops business ideas and grows them into startups internally before seeking a leadership team. To date, the firm has launched and invested in 14 portfolio companies across EV, AI, SaaS,…

Ashwin Nandakumar and Ashwin Jainarayanan were PhD students in neighboring departments at Oxford University, but didn't know each other. Nandakumar, who was studying oncology, came across an interesting dataset on prostate cancer one day and needed help sequencing it. “I reached out to a few friends and asked them to help me analyze this data,” Nandakumar says. “They said, 'There's another guy named Ashwin, why don't you get in touch with him?'” The two Ashwins hit it off immediately, and soon after they met, Ashwin began working in the lab of Jainarayanan's supervisor, Michael Dustin, a professor of molecular immunology.…

Leading Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX is expanding internationally through the acquisition of Middle East and North Africa digital asset platform BitOasis, the companies announced on Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based startup announced that the BitOasis team will join CoinDCX, with the original management team continuing to manage the exchange and offering trading for more than 60 tokens. CoinDCX told TechCrunch that BitOasis will also retain its brand. Dubai-based BitOasis has secured more than $40 million in funding over its eight-year history. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but a CoinDCX spokesperson told TechCrunch that BitOasis investors will receive…