Author: TechBrunch

Olivia DeLaMas is turning that mindset on its head. What if scrolling through social media didn't make you feel bad? What if social media, especially for women, actually made you feel more supported? “This is certainly not what mainstream social platforms were created for,” DeRamus told TechCrunch. But with his social platform Communia, DeRamus is venturing out something that may seem counterintuitive. Communia is both a social platform and a mental health tool, allowing users to post updates in a community feed or keep a private diary to track their feelings over time. But to be vulnerable, users need to…

What do MrBeast, John Oliver, and The Wall Street Journal have in common? Transcripts of their YouTube videos are collected and used to train AI used by companies like Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce. An investigation by Wired and Proof News found that the dataset, called “YouTube Subtitles,” contains transcripts of over 173,000 YouTube videos from over 48,000 different channels. This AI scraping has become an issue across the tech industry: Jingna Zhang, artist and founder of the app Cara, has tried to protect artists by building social platforms that don't sell them out, and the University of Chicago is…

TikTok has partnered with music distribution service DistroKit to speed up the creation of artist accounts for its members. The ByteDance-owned short-video platform introduced its Artist Account feature last year, allowing musicians to showcase new songs, their music catalogs and behind-the-scenes footage on the platform. Typically, when an artist applies for the tag, it takes up to 30 days for TikTok to process the paperwork. Currently, TikTok offers DistroKid members, who pay a yearly subscription fee of $22.99, the ability to sign up as an artist within a few hours. “It's now faster than ever for artists to create their…

OpenAI on Thursday announced its latest miniature AI model, GPT-4o mini, which the company says is cheaper and faster than OpenAI's current state-of-the-art AI models. GPT-4o mini will be released to developers starting today, and to consumers through the ChatGPT web and mobile apps. Enterprise users will be able to access it starting next week. The company claims that GPT-4o mini outperforms industry-leading small AI models on reasoning tasks, including text and vision. As small AI models improve, they are gaining popularity among developers due to their speed and cost-effectiveness compared to larger models such as GPT-4 Omni and Claude…

A TechCrunch investigation found that the U.S. Postal Service shared its online customers' addresses with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap. USPS announced Wednesday that it had addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming it was “unaware” of the problem. TechCrunch discovered that the USPS shares its customers' information through hidden data-collection code (also known as tracking pixels) used throughout its websites. Technology and advertising companies create this kind of code to collect user information, like which pages users visit, every time a webpage containing the code is loaded in a customer's browser. In the case of…

Fusion proponents have long promised the idea of ​​using the same reaction as the sun's energy source to produce nearly limitless energy on Earth. Today, fusion's biggest hurdle is ensuring that a fusion power plant will produce more electricity than it needs to run. The second is ensuring that there is enough fuel to run it. Many fusion reactors are designed to run on a mixture of two isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. (A typical hydrogen atom has no neutrons; a deuterium atom has one neutron, and a tritium atom has two.) While deuterium is abundant in ocean water,…

Security researchers say they have discovered a flaw in traffic light control devices that could allow malicious hackers to change signals and cause traffic jams. Andrew Lemon, a researcher at cybersecurity firm Red Threat, published two blog posts on Thursday detailing the findings of a broader research project looking into the security of traffic controllers. One of the devices Lemon investigated was the Intelight X-1, where he found a bug that could allow anyone to take full control of the device's traffic lights. Lemon said the bug was very simple and basic, as the device's internet-facing web interface had no…

Coast, a startup that describes itself as a “financial services platform for the future of transportation,” has raised $40 million in Series B funding, just four months after announcing $25 million in venture funding and $67 million in debt funding, the startup told TechCrunch exclusively. Back-to-back fundraising rounds were common during and before the investment boom of 2021, but have become much rarer since the VC market downturn in 2022, which makes Coast's latest round notable. New York-based Coast rivals the likes of Ramp and Brex in that it develops expense management software for fleet operators and their employees. To…

A fusion experiment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has set a record for the strongest, most stable magnetic field to confine plasma, raising new hope that upcoming demonstration reactors will fulfill the promise of producing more electricity than they consume. The new magnets were provided by Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a pioneering nuclear fusion industry startup that delivered the equipment to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's WHAM experiment earlier this month. When the WHAM team cooled the magnets to operating temperature and passed powerful electric currents through them, the high-temperature superconductors generated a magnetic field of 17 Tesla, more than twice…

Italy's competition and consumer watchdog said it was investigating how Google obtains user consent to link user activity across different services for advertising profiling, accusing the ad tech giant of “unfair commercial practices.” At issue is how Google, with consent from European Union users, will link user activity across its apps and services, including Google Search, YouTube, Chrome and Maps, allowing the company to profile users for ad targeting, which is its main source of revenue. In response to the Italian AGCM's investigation, a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company “will analyze the details of this incident and work…