SpaceX launched its huge Starship for the first time and then brought the booster back to the launch site and caught it with a pair of big “chopsticks.” The company’s Starbase site in southeast Texas was the site of this test flight, which was the fifth in the Starship progress program. The almost 400-foot-tall Starship is the center of SpaceX’s stated goal to bring life to other planets and, more quickly, NASA’s Artemis campaign to bring people back to the moon’s surface. SpaceX wants to quickly reuse the whole Starship vehicle, which is made up of an upper stage (also…
Author: David
Since the beginning, Meta’s Threads has tried to use the network effects of its other social networks, like Facebook and Instagram, to its advantage by testing different ways to cross-post and promote Threads posts on a carousel. These days, the business is trying out a new tool that will let you share Instagram Reels straight to Threads. Alessandro Paluzzi, who tracks apps, found that Threads is working on a new feature that will let you choose Reels from your account and post them on Threads. The company told TechCrunch that it is testing the function after all. Paluzzi said that…
The U.S. Justice Department has made a broad proposal to force Google to sell off parts of its business. This could be the first big corporate breakup in 40 years and change the shape of one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general sent in a 32-page (PDF) document outlining possible ways to stop Google from having a monopoly on search and search ads. The suggested framework for remedies was sent to U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled against Google in a landmark antitrust…
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are spreading the idea that people can use everyday language to ask AI to answer their questions, write their proposals, or draw pictures. Meanwhile, a London-based startup called Basecamp Research has raised $60 million to take on a new challenge: making an AI that can not only answer any question about biology and the biodiversity of the natural world, but also come up with new ideas that humans could not come up with on their own. The CEO of Basecamp Research, Glen Gower, said in an interview, “There is a huge data gap right now…
Some Harvard students made news on Wednesday when they added facial recognition to a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The do-it-yourself project is the newest story to make people worry about their privacy when it comes to technology that is everywhere. As more and more people have cams, the problem has become more important. How we connect is also very important to this conversation. The need for a remote computer raises its own security and privacy issues. When Amazon, Ring’s parent company, and the police get involved, things get even worse. Plumerai has been around since 2017 and its main…
When Adam Selipsky quit as CEO of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit, it came as a big surprise. It may have been just as surprising that Matt Garman took over after him. Garman started working for Amazon as an intern in 2005. He started working full-time there in 2006 and worked on the first AWS products. The last job Garman had before becoming CEO was senior vice president for AWS sales, marketing, and global services. He knows the business better than almost anyone else. In a chat I had last week, Garman said that he hasn’t made any big changes…
Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later company based in Stockholm that is very close to going public, is still changing its board. The FT says that seven directors have just agreed to remove investor Mikael Walther from Klarna’s eight-person board, almost eight years after he started. Walther is close with Klarna co-founder Victor Jacobsson, who is still a big shareholder and is said to be a bother to co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who has been CEO of the company for almost 20 years since Jacobsson left in 2012. For Klarna, this is the second big change in their board this year. Once he joined…
Since Saturday, some YouTube videos with songs by Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, and R.E.M. have not been able to be played in the United States. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” is one example. If you try to play it, whether it’s the album version or a live performance, you are told, “This video contains content from SESAC.” You can’t get it in your country. There are times when you can even watch an ad before the news. Not all videos of these acts are blocked, though. It’s not clear if the videos that can be played are not…
A new estimate from investor Fidelity says that Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a fifth of the $44 billion that was paid for it. New information from Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund shows that the asset manager’s share in X is now worth about $4.19 million. This is because it helped Musk buy the social network that used to be called Twitter. The fund has lost 78.7% of the value of the shares it owns in X since the end of August. According to regulatory records, Fidelity had first put $19.66 million into X through the Blue…
California Governor Gavin Newsom looked at 38 AI-related bills in September. These included the very controversial SB 1047, which the state’s lawmakers sent to him to sign. On Sunday, he blocked SB 1047, which was California’s controversial AI bill that tried to stop AI disasters. However, this month he signed more than a dozen other AI bills into law. These bills try to deal with the most important problems in artificial intelligence, such as the risk of Al Gore, deepfake nudes made by AI image generators, and Hollywood companies making AI copies of dead actors. In a press release, Governor…
The famous British actress Dame Maggie Smith has died at the age of 89. She was best known for her parts in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films. Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, her kids, said in a statement that she died early Friday morning, September 27, 2024. “It is with great sadness that we have to tell you that Dame Maggie Smith has died,” the statement said. “She died peacefully in the hospital, surrounded by family and friends.” Family members of Smith thanked the staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their “care and unstinting kindness” during her…
There is a big fight going on in the world of WordPress, which is one of the most famous tools for building and hosting websites. There is a fight going on between Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, and WP Engine, which runs WordPress-built websites. The WordPress platform is free and open source, and it runs about 40% of all blogs on the internet. Websites can run their own WordPress instance or use a solution provider like Automattic or WP Engine to get a solution that is ready to use right away. In a blog post…
The week’s OpenAI news stories may be mostly about departures. But Anna Makanju, the company’s VP of global affairs, also said some interesting things about AI bias that caught our attention. At the UN’s Summit of the Future event on Tuesday, Makanju was on a panel that talked about how new “reasoning” models like OpenAI’s o1 could make AI much less biassed. How? By being more honest about their biases in their answers and following the rules more closely that tell them not to reply in “harmful” ways, she said. Makanju said that models like o1 “actually take longer and…
CEO Gwynne Shotwell told lawmakers in Texas on Tuesday that SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network should reach a new customer milestone this week. She told a meeting of the state House Appropriations Committee, “By the way, this week we will pass 4 million customers for Starlink, which is pretty exciting.” (SpaceX confirmed the important event on Thursday.) If SpaceX hits this goal, it will have added a million new customers just since the end of May. Starlink began offering beta services for its product in October 2020; it reached 1 million users in December 2022, 2 million in September 2023,…
When it comes to fusion power, there are two main ways to do it: One, make a small star on Earth that is held in place by strong magnetic fields. Two, take very strong lasers and make a series of even smaller stars. Do this several times a second. This is what Moritz von der Linden thinks the odds are best for. As the world tries to get off of fossil fuels, fusion power looks like it could be a virtually endless source of energy. It uses common materials to create temperatures hotter than the sun’s surface. However, most experts…
AI has already shown us some strange things. Friends, things will only get stranger from here on out. As the tech world dives headfirst into the uncanny valley, lines will blur and things will keep getting weird. Take the Meta Connect talk on Wednesday as an example. Multiple Meta AI and Llama demos played over and over at the event, but one stood out for being very strange. Mark Zuckerberg asked Don Allen Stevenson III, the founder, to join him on stage. As the real Stevenson stood between the CEO of Meta and a picture of himself on the big…
OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and a research VP, Barret Zoph, left the company on Wednesday, hours after OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced she would be departing. CEO Sam Altman revealed the two latest resignations in a post on X Wednesday evening, along with leadership transition plans. “Mira, Bob, and Barret made these decisions independently of each other and amicably,” he said, “but the timing of Mira’s decision was such that it made sense to now do this all at once, so that we can work together for a smooth handover to the next generation of leadership.” VP of…
There is a lot of trouble in the WordPress community, and it looks like it will turn into a trademark fight. The CEO of Automattic was told to stop publicly criticising WP Engine just one day ago by the WordPress hosting service WP Engine. Now, Automattic has sent a cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine saying that WP Engine has violated several trademarks, including those for WordPress and WooCommerce. Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, said last week that WP Engine was taking advantage of the open-source WordPress project to make money. He called it a “cancer to…
Google’s new plan for ad targeting raises new worries about competition in the UK What is going on with Google’s long-talked-about move to a different adtech stack, also known as its “Privacy Sandbox” plan? What, indeed. The latest move by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the U.K.’s antitrust regulator, seems to have put an end to the multi-year effort to change the way the business web works. This is on top of Google’s change of mind about third-party tracking cookies. At first, they were going to lose value, but as of July, it looks like cookies are here to…
More than 35 new places in Europe, Asia, and Latin America will soon have machine learning-powered versions added to Reddit. This is an effort to bring more people to the mostly English-speaking social network. It has been almost five months since Reddit first made the whole site translateable for French speakers. Before this, the company let users translate specific posts into multiple languages. Reddit already lets users choose the language they want to see post suggestions in. Users can also choose the language they want to see the Reddit layout in. Today’s news comes seven months after Reddit went public.…
MoneyGram, an American money transfer business, says that a “cybersecurity issue” is to blame for an outage that has been going on for days and is affecting both the company and its users. In a Monday post on X, MoneyGram said it had “found a cybersecurity issue that affects some of our systems.” The company had said before that the problem was caused by a “network outage.” MoneyGram’s most recent update says, “As soon as we found out about it, we started an investigation and took protective measures to deal with it, such as proactively taking systems offline, which affected…
Tech Mark Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, is changing his job on YouTube from reviewer to builder. His new wallpaper app, Panels, came out this week for iOS and Android. In it, he personally chooses the best digital wallpapers from artists, but there’s a catch. Users have to pay about $50 a year, or $12 a month, to get high-resolution images without having to watch ads. Since almost 20 million people follow Brownlee on YouTube, his tech reviews have a lot of weight. People think that his negative videos about businesses like Fisker and Humane, which were getting a lot…
ByteDance said that in November, it will no longer offer TikTok Music as a music streaming service. On its website, TikTok Music says, “We’re sorry to say that TikTok Music will be closing on November 28, 2024.” People in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico could use the service. The message said that subscribers could still use the service until November 28. After that date, renewals would be automatically cancelled. As of October 28, users could move their sets to other streaming services. Users who want to get their money back had until November 28, tho. With our “Add to…
A French startup called Jump has received €11 million (about $12 million at current exchange rates) in a Series A funding round. Jump is a new take on the idea of umbrella companies in France. Freelancers who want some stability and the perks of a full-time job can sign full-time contracts with Jump. As long as workers stay independent—they can work for more than one client and arrange their own contracts—it’s just an administrative companion. Index Ventures and Raise Ventures are also taking part in today’s funding round, which is led by Breega. The company had raised €4 million, which…
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, launched a harsh attack on a competitor this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” Since 2010, the company has been making money off of the open source WordPress project. Mullenweg criticised them for taking advantage of the project without giving much back and for turning off important features that make WordPress such a powerful platform in the first place. WordPress powers more than 40% of the web. Anyone or any business can use the open source project to run their own website, but many companies have sprung up to…
On September 16, all Apple users could get the iOS 18 update. Before Apple Intelligence came out, the most important new features were the new Passwords app, the ability to change app settings on the Lock Screen, the ability to change icons on the Home Screen, and the ability to support RCS. But there are also a lot of other fun and small changes that could be useful. Here is a list of some of our favourite traits that you may not have noticed. Changes Picture Camera Centre for Control What’s Up A Safari The weather Siri Podcasts Maps Notes…
Trump has been criticizing Jewish Democratic voters for years, and he has called Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “like a Palestinian” many times. Washington, D.C. In comments that were supposed to be about fighting racism, former President Donald Trump asked why he doesn’t have a lot of support from Jewish voters and said that they would have “a lot to do” with him losing in November if they don’t turn out in large numbers to vote for him. During a campaign event called “Fighting Antisemitism in America,” Trump said, “I’m not going to call this a prediction, but, in my…
The release of the public betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 on Thursday was a big step toward wide access for everyone. People who have signed up for Apple’s public beta program will be able to try out the generative AI-powered app starting Thursday. The company has been talking about it since June. The only language that Apple Intelligence can speak right now is U.S. English. The feature will also not work in the EU or the People’s Republic of China for a long time because of rules. People in the United States can use the…
With California’s newest law, people on social media who post or share AI deepfakes that trick voters about future elections could be charged with a crime. Governor Gavin Newsom says that AB 2839, which became law right after he signed it on Tuesday, could be used to catch people like Elon Musk who share false information on Twitter. In a tweet, Newsom said, “I just signed a bill to make this illegal in the state of California.” He was referring to an AI deepfake Musk shared earlier this year that made it look like Kamala Harris called herself a stupid…
The White House says that the Tesla CEO’s post on X was “irresponsible.” Tech billionaire Elon Musk took down a social media post that said there had been no efforts to kill US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris after getting a lot of negative feedback. There was a second effort to kill former President Donald Trump on Sunday. In response, Musk wrote on X that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” and included an emoji of a face with an eyebrow raised. In recent months, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has become an outspoken…
United plans to have the retrofits done on each plane within two days after the talks are over and the hardware is secured. United Airlines said late last week that it had signed a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet service on all of its planes and give all customers free Wi-Fi for the first time. Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo of United told us more about why the company chose Starlink, how it will be put into use, and what it means for passengers and workers. Jojo told me that the company is switching providers…
Google was given a $1.7 billion antitrust fine by the European Union in March 2019, but they were able to get it thrown out. The tech giant was fined €1.49 billion by the European Commission because its search ads brokering business broke competition rules from 2006 to 2016 to gain a strong position. Google then filed an appeal. The EU’s General Court upheld most of the EU’s findings on Wednesday, but threw out the earlier decision in its entirety because the Commission hadn’t taken into account all the relevant circumstances when judging the duration of the contract terms it found…
Amazon has named Samir Kumar, a long-time executive, as the new head of its India consumer business. This comes a month after the head of its India business quit because of tougher competition in the key market. Kumar will be Country Manager for India for the e-commerce giant. He has worked there for 25 years, the company said. This job would be in addition to Kumar’s current duties as head of Amazon’s customer business in the Middle East, South Africa, and Turkey, the company said. Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s senior vice president for developing markets, told staff about the change in…
Two people familiar with the matter told Parhlo World that Myntra, India’s biggest fashion e-commerce site, is testing a four-hour delivery service in four Indian cities. This is a big change from its normal two to three-day delivery period, which is being sped up because of the rise of fast commerce. One source told us that the fast-tracked delivery service is being tested by the Flipkart Group-owned company in places like Bengaluru and New Delhi. Our sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information is not public, said that the company plans to offer four-hour delivery in…
A group calling itself The Flappy Bird Foundation said they were going to “re-hatch the official Flappy Bird® game” ten years after the hugely famous game Flappy Bird went away. Dong Nguyen, who made the game, left a short comment this morning saying that he has nothing to do with the revival and that he “did not sell anything.” He also said, “I’m against crypto.” To be clear, Nguyen’s comments don’t really go against what the foundation said in its announcement. The foundation called the group a “new team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world”…
AWS said today that it is moving OpenSearch, its open source version of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation. The OpenSearch Foundation is the perfect name for this move. Elastic changed the license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own license, called the Elastic License, in 2021. That’s when AWS started the OpenSearch project for the first time. A lot of open source vendors made similar changes at the time, mostly to stop the big cloud providers, especially AWS, from giving hosted services based on their software. It’s kind of funny that this…
The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has made a preliminary decision in the long-running case to merge two of the country’s biggest phone companies. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says that the planned $19 billion merger between Three and Vodafone, which was revealed 15 months ago, could cause prices to go up for customers, service to get worse (like smaller data plans in contracts), and less investment in U.K. mobile networks. The CMA also went after the market for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). MVNOs were created to make the market more competitive by letting new carriers start up and offer…
Apple will finally let third-party app shops work on the iPad next week, on September 16. It was only a matter of time. With the next big release of iPadOS, the operating system made just for the iPad, this change will happen. The move has to do with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) of the European Union, which is a set of rules for fair markets and competition. The Commission released a list of six tech companies last fall. These companies are called “gatekeepers” because they run “core platform services” (CPS). Since then, a seventh has been added. At first,…
Late Thursday night, Oprah Winfrey showed a series about AI called “AI and the Future of Us.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and current FBI head Christopher Wray were among the guests. There was a lot of doubt and caution in the air. In prepared comments, Oprah said that AI is now out in the open, and people will have to learn how to live with the results, good or bad. “AI is still out of our hands and mostly beyond our comprehension,” she said. “But it is here, and we will have to live with technology…
Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google and former president of Alphabet, said he works at Google “pretty much every day” because he doesn’t want to miss the current progress in AI. Brin told the story in an interview this week at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles. Several news outlets said last year that Brin was back at Google HQ working on different AI projects. However, Brin’s statement at the sit-down is the first time he has talked about his return in public. Brin said of AI, “It’s a big, fast-moving field.” He also said that it has…