Internet

When Clubhouse became very popular, every platform rushed to make a copy of it. But in the last year or so, the format has become less popular, and companies are rethinking what they should focus on. Reddit announced on Wednesday that its live audio service, Reddit Talk, will end on …

YouTube relaxed its controversial profanity rules today. The company claims the new rules created a “stricter approach” than intended. The new policy allows moderate and strong profanity without demonetization. The November policy flagged videos with profanity in the first 15 seconds and made them ineligible for monetization, meaning YouTube wouldn’t …

Analysts say Slice has a 5% stake in an Indian bank. North East Small Finance is a key step in the unicorn fintech startup’s journey amid mounting central bank challenges that have toppled many young firms. A regulatory filing showed that the Bengaluru startup paid $3.42 million for the 5% …

Fake online identities are common. The ability to easily create them has been a boon for social media platforms—more “users”—and a scourge, as they spread conspiracy theories, distorted discourse, and other social ills. ChatGPT shows that Twitter bots are nothing compared to what’s coming. In a few years, it will …

DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, launched DuckAssist, an AI-powered summarization feature, in beta today. DuckAssist can directly answer simple search queries. DDG says it uses ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Anthropic, an AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI employees, to power its natural language summarization capability, along with its own active indexing …

Google announced that I/O will return to Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheater on May 10. The company will stream the keynotes for free, but the in-person event will be small, like last year’s. Pre-pandemic I/O was a multi-day event with keynotes and workshops. This scaled-down event appears to focus on public-facing …

According to a person with knowledge of the situation, the Japanese marketing technology company Geniee, a member of the SoftBank Group, paid about $70 million in cash to acquire the revenue optimization platform Zelto (previously known as AdPushup), providing investors in the startup that started out in India with a …

More than 20 new nations in Europe are now able to use Twitter’s paid service, Twitter Blue. These countries are the Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Estonia, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, and Cyprus.They also include the Netherlands, Poland, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Romania, and …

The Royal ransomware operation is getting a lot of attention. The U.S. government says that it targeted a number of important infrastructure sectors across the country. In a joint statement on Thursday, the FBI and the US cybersecurity agency CISA said that the Royal ransomware has affected businesses in the …

Humanoid robots are a timeless concept, but their popularity fluctuates over time. Tesla’s Optimus prototype has reignited the debate over general-purpose robot form, efficacy, and viability. In an interview this week, Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert said, “I thought that they’d gotten a lot more done than I expected, and …