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…
Author: David
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…
Adtech startup InMobi has raised $100 million in debt financing. The Indian company, which is already making money, wants to “significantly deepen” its AI efforts and pay for possible AI acquisitions before its planned IPO next year. InMobi said Wednesday that the money came from Mars Growth Capital, a partnership between MUFG and Liquidity Group. Mars has recently invested in a number of companies in India. In the past few months, it has also backed the quick commerce startup Zepto and the website Infra.Market. InMobi, which has users like Mastercard, Samsung, Vodafone, and Coca-Cola and is backed by SoftBank, has…
Apple Intelligence is a new set of AI features that will be available in iOS 18. These features will allow users to use apps in a new way. Today, regulators are always going after the old App Store strategy. At the same time, people can get a lot done by asking an AI assistant like ChatGPT pretty easy questions. Some people think that AI could replace humans as the main way we find answers, get work done, and try out new ideas. What does that mean for apps and the services they provide, which brought in more than $6 billion…
Even though users have asked them to, the Threads team is not yet working on a separate inbox or direct messaging system for the social network. They will still use Instagram’s inbox. That being said, the business may make it easier to message Instagram from the Threads app. Adwaith Varma, an app researcher, wrote on Threads about a new messaging button on users’ profiles that was part of an unreleased Threads feature. When people tapped that button, they saw a text box and a button that said “Send.” This let them quickly send a message to someone’s Instagram account. Parhlo…
The biggest event of the year for Apple brings new iPhones, changes to AI, and other hardware. The iPhone 16 lineup and a bunch of AI-related iOS 18 changes came with Apple’s biggest event of the year. Like at WWDC in June, Apple Intelligence was the star of the show at this year’s event. Apple also announced a lot of gear that people were looking forward to, like the new iPhone 16, AirPods 4, the Apple Watch Series 10, and more. The “Glowtime” event from Apple began at 10 a.m. PT and was broadcast live from the company’s offices in…
Google has lost again in its attempt to overturn a European Commission antitrust decision from 2017. The bloc decided that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had broken competition rules with its shopping comparison service. They fined Alphabet a record-breaking €2.42 billion, which is about $2.7 billion today, and told it to change how it runs the service. Google made an appeal, but in November 2021, the General Court of the European Union mostly threw out the case. It confirmed that putting its own shopping service at the top of general search results was unfair and hurt competitive shopping comparison services. It…
A report said that Elon Musk’s company Tesla had talked about splitting profits with another of his companies, xAI, so that xAI could use Tesla’s AI models. Musk denied the claim. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla would use xAI models in its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, as part of a deal that was being talked about with investors. The AI company would also help make features like a voice assistant for Tesla cars and software for Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot. Musk wrote on his social media site X (formerly Twitter) that he hadn’t read the WSJ story…
The big car rental company Avis is telling hundreds of thousands of people that their driver’s license numbers and personal information were stolen in a cyberattack in August. The company based in New Jersey said in a data breach notice sent to several U.S. attorneys general over the past week that it found hackers in one of its business applications on August 5 and worked to stop the two-day-old unauthorised access. Avis didn’t say what kind of cyberattack it was, and there are still not many information available about it. An email to Avis asking for a word on the…
Analysts thought that the AI feature Apple showed off at WWDC in June could help the iPhone 16 get ready for another “supercycle.” People who follow the industry thought that the addition of Apple Intelligence, like the addition of 5G before it, might finally get people to change their devices. When Apple shows off the iPhone 16 at tomorrow’s “It’s Glowtime” event in Cupertino, we’ll have a much better idea of what it looks like. In the meantime, though, the slow spread of Apple Intelligence is thought to could seriously hurt the supercycle potential. Apple showed the world in June…
This week, the EU’s top privacy regulator closed its court case about how X used user data to train its Grok AI chatbot. However, the problems for Elon Musk’s social media site that used to be called Twitter are still not over. Parhlo World stated that the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has received and will “examine” a number of complaints made under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU. The regulator told Parhlo World, “The DPC will now look into how well any processing that has taken place complies with the relevant provisions of the GDPR.” “If,…
Telegram stresses private chat reporting as the app’s founder defends it after being arrested The company said in its FAQ page that users can now report private chats to Telegram’s moderators. This comes after the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France last month for “crimes committed by third parties” on the platform. The messaging app has more than 10 million members and almost 1 billion monthly active users. It has a reputation for not keeping a close eye on what its users do. The FAQ page used to say that requests to moderate the secret chats would not…
Google is having more problems with antitrust. On Friday, the U.K.’s competition watchdog said it thinks the company broke trade rules in the adtech industry. Now, the tech giant has a chance to respond to the preliminary results before the regulator makes a final choice. If you are found to have broken U.K. competition law, you could be given corrective orders and fines of up to 10% of your annual global group sales. People are going to pay close attention to how this case turns out. Since May 2022, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the U.K. has been…