Author: GT

A modest bitcoin rally to a possible challenge of the $86,000 level quickly reversed during U.S. afternoon trading hours on Wednesday as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned on the effects of President Trump’s tariff regime. “The level of the tariff increases announced so far is significantly larger than anticipated,” said Powell in a speech. “The same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.” In other words, stagflation — a throwback to a sizable portion of the 1970s when the U.S. experienced weak economic activity alongside double-digit inflation. “We may…

TikTok is testing a new “Footnotes” feature that works similarly to Community Notes on X. The social network announced on Wednesday that Footnotes will allow users to add additional context and relevant information to videos to help others better understand certain content, starting in the United States. The company says Footnotes will complement its current suite of measures designed to help people understand the reliability of content, such as content labels and its fact-checking program. In other words, TikTok isn’t replacing fact-checking with Footnotes, unlike Meta, which is doing exactly that through its new Community Notes feature. Similar to other…

WASHINGTON (AP) — On the rooftop patio of the General Services Administration headquarters, an agency staffer recently discovered something strange: a rectangular device attached to a wire that snaked across the roof, over the ledge and into the administrator’s window one floor below. It didn’t take long for the employee — an IT specialist — to figure out the device was a transceiver that communicates with Elon Musk’s vast and private Starlink satellite network. Concerned that the equipment violated federal laws designed to protect public data, staffers reported the discovery to superiors and the agency’s internal watchdog.The Starlink equipment raises…

Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas / AFP Bitcoin bounced. A bit. The leading currency recently traded around $84,000, rising back above the prices below $77,000 seen late last week that were in the neighborhood of their pre-election levels but retreating slightly from levels logged earlier today. That recovery has come as crypto trading volume has fallen, Oppenheimer analysts wrote in a note published Tuesday, with investors’ risk appetite pressured by trade-related uncertainty that has counteracted enthusiasm about the crypto industry’s prospects after President Donald Trump’s reelection. “It’s unfortunate to see Trump’s on-and-off again tariffs have driven bear market concern, recession…

Last month, Deezer reported its first positive cash flow in 2024, marking a significant milestone in its history. As the music streaming platform nears profitability, it’s launching new features to differentiate itself in the highly competitive market. On Wednesday, Deezer announced several features aimed at providing listeners with a more personalized experience. These include a customizable algorithm, monthly recaps, universal sharing, and more.  Most notably, Deezer believes its custom algorithm will distinguish itself since listeners can fully personalize their recommendations without restriction.  Starting this month, users can manually adjust the recommended songs, playlists, albums, and artists, completely controlling their music…

Apple has restricted domestic access to 14 crypto apps in South Korea in response to a request from South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), an anti-money laundering agency. This was aimed at foreign businesses providing virtual asset services whom the FIU has accused of operating unregistered, including recognized exchanges KuCoin and MEXC. Google Play had taken similar action previously, and removed 17 crypto-related apps in March on a request from the FIU, as per reports. The affected apps cannot be downloaded and existing users cannot get updates. The FIU noted that unregistered platforms create risks such as personal data breaches,…

The governments of Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan were among several countries accused of being behind the 2019 hacking campaign that targeted more than 1,200 WhatsApp users with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, according to a lawyer working for the Israeli spyware maker. During a hearing in the lawsuit between WhatsApp and NSO Group last Thursday, NSO Group’s lawyer Joe Akrotirianakis specifically named the three governments as spyware-using customers, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by TechCrunch this week. This is the first time that representatives for NSO Group have publicly acknowledged who the spyware maker’s customers are (or…

In an interview with TheStreet Roundtable, Konstantin Richter, CEO and Founder of Blockdaemon, gave some advice to crypto founders: embrace governance. The value of professional oversight is often overlooked in an industry that, at its core, is anti-establishment. Konstatin’s perspective is driven by his interactions with major financial institutions like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, who have been hesitant to enter the space for several reasons, including the tendency for projects to not set up traditional structures. Crypto is overrun with scams, rugpulls, and other types of fraud. Earlier this year, Hailey Welch launched $HAWK, a meme coin based on…

Microsoft researchers claim they’ve developed the largest-scale 1-bit AI model, also known as a “bitnet,” to date. Called BitNet b1.58 2B4T, it’s openly available under an MIT license and can run on CPUs, including Apple’s M2. Bitnets are essentially compressed models designed to run on lightweight hardware. In standard models, weights, the values that define the internal structure of a model, are often quantized so the models perform well on a wide range of machines. Quantizing the weights lowers the number of bits — the smallest units a computer can process — needed to represent those weights, enabling models to…

A federal judge agreed to pause an ongoing lawsuit between 18 state attorneys general and a decentralized finance lobbyist group against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday, after the parties noted the SEC’s new leadership. The state AGs, all Republicans, filed the lawsuit alongside the DeFi Education Fund last November after Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election. They allege that the federal securities regulator had exceeded its authority in filing lawsuits against crypto exchanges. In Wednesday’s filing, the SEC suggested that Paul Atkins’ confirmation as the new agency chair could end the litigation. “As support,…