Author: TechBrunch

Threads, Meta's Twitter alternative, has just celebrated its first anniversary. Since its launch on July 5 last year, the social network has hit 175 million monthly active users, a remarkable achievement. But a year later, Threads is still finding its own voice, not as newsworthy as Twitter/X, and not as open as Mastodon or Bluesky. At least for now. Over the past year, the Threads team has been rapidly releasing features and soliciting feedback directly from the social network's users. Since launch, Threads has gained support for multiple profiles, a web app, a Tweetdeck-like interface on desktop, trending topics in…

J2 Ventures, a company run largely by U.S. military veterans, said Thursday it has raised $150 million in its second fund. The Boston-based firm invests in startups whose products are purchased by civilians and the U.S. Department of Defense. At a time when many emerging venture capital firms are struggling to raise second funds, J2's latest fund is more than double the size of its first fund of $67.5 million in 2021. At first glance, the company might seem like it is benefiting from growing venture capital interest in defense technology. But J2 isn't interested in positioning itself as a…

Health technology services provider HealthEquity on Tuesday disclosed in a federal regulatory filing that it had fallen victim to a data breach in which hackers stole “protected health information” of some of its customers. In an 8-K filing with the SEC, the company said it had detected “unusual activity from a business partner's personal device” and concluded that someone had compromised the partner's account and used it to access members' information. HealthEquity shared details of the incident with TechCrunch on Wednesday. HealthEquity spokesperson Amy Cerny said in an email that it was an “isolated incident” and not related to other…

Popular online tabletop and role-playing game platform Roll20 announced on Wednesday that it had suffered a data breach that exposed personal information of some of its users. In a post on its official website, Roll20 said it detected that a “malicious actor” had accessed an account on its administrative website for an hour on June 29, after which the company “blocked all unauthorized access and terminated the network breach.” “A malicious actor made changes to one user account that we immediately reverted. During this time, the malicious actor was able to access and view all user accounts,” the company wrote.…

Sidney Scott has decided to quit the venture capital rat race and is now jokingly auctioning off his best pieces, with prices starting at $500,000. Driving Forces' sole general partner announced on LinkedIn this week that he was closing the $5 million fintech and deep tech VC fund he launched in 2020, calling the past four years “eventful.” But the healthy performance of his first small fund wasn't enough: He told TechCrunch he recognized that increased competition for what are essentially a handful of hard tech and deep tech deals would be a challenge for a small fund like his.…

If you've ever moved your hand during a video call and seen thumbs-up bubbles or confetti fly up on your screen, you're not alone. Many people consider this a strange feature for Zoom or WhatsApp, but it's an Apple feature built into iOS and Mac. However, you can turn off the reactions feature to prevent these effects from appearing on your screen during work calls. How to turn off video call responsiveness on Mac While you're in a video call on your Mac, click the video menu in the menu bar. This is the green camera icon at the top…

Hey everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. In AI news this week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned “Chevron deference,” a 40-year-old ruling on federal agency power that required courts to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of Congressional statutes. The Chevron deference allowed agencies to make their own rules if Congress had left parts of the statute vague. Now courts will be asked to make their own legal decisions, with potentially far-reaching implications. Scott Rosenberg of Axios writes that because agencies can no longer apply basic rules to new enforcement situations, Congress (an institution that is barely functional today) must…

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…