Author: GT

Meta-owned chat app WhatsApp changed its business API policy this week to ban general-purpose chatbots from its platform. The move will likely affect WhatsApp-based assistants of companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, Khosla Ventures-backed Luzia, and General Catalyst-backed Poke. The company has added a new section to address “AI providers” in its business API terms, focusing on general-purpose chatbots. The terms, which will go into effect on January 15, 2026, say that Meta won’t allow AI model providers to distribute their AI assistants on WhatsApp. Providers and developers of artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies, including but not limited to large language…

Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, appears to be walking back comments calling for the National Guard to patrol San Francisco. “Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” Benioff said in a post on X. “My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused. “ Benioff stirred up controversy last week after giving an interview with The…

At a time when startup hustle culture is back, when “locked in” tech founders have even embraced the “996” way of working — 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week — there is something dystopian about using an AI app to generate fake vacation photos of yourself. And yet, here we are. Product designer Laurent Del Rey, who recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, launched a side project called Endless Summer, a photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos starring you in locations around the world. Here you are exploring a beach town, or overlooking a European…

BEIJING (AP) — China on Sunday accused the U.S. National Security Agency of carrying out cyberattacks on its national time center following an investigation, saying any damage to related facilities could have disrupted network communications, financial systems and power supply. The Ministry of State Security alleged in a WeChat post that the U.S. agency had exploited vulnerabilities in the messaging services of a foreign mobile phone brand to steal sensitive information from devices of the National Time Service Center’s staff in 2022. It did not specify the brand.The U.S. agency also used 42 types of “special cyberattack weapons” to target…

YouTube has become the biggest platform out there, offering tons of opportunities for creators to earn a living. Back in June, the company reported that its creative ecosystem added over $55 billion to the U.S. GDP and created more than 490,000 full-time jobs. However, many YouTubers have reduced their reliance on ad revenue and brand deals. There are several reasons for this shift. First, ad revenue can be unpredictable. With YouTube continually updating its policies, some creators find it challenging to secure ads for their videos, which can negatively impact their earnings. They’ve also realized that income from these streams…

Kevin Hartz tends to be first through the door. In 2001, he co-founded Xoom, back when sending money across borders meant standing in line at Western Union. In 2013, it went public, and in 2015, PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite, which went public in 2018 and turned buying event tickets into something you could do without wanting to throw your laptop in the ocean. After a stint at Founders Fund, Hartz co-founded his own venture firm, A* Capital (a nod to a computer science algorithm), then in 2020, he spotted another…

Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop. But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human pageviews falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller writes that the decline “over the past few months” was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems appeared to show that “much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May…

A federal judge has granted Meta-owned WhatsApp’s request for a permanent injunction blocking Israeli cyberintelligence company NSO Group from targeting the messaging app’s users. At the same time, the judge dramatically reduced the fine that NSO Group must pay to Meta. Earlier this year, a jury decided that the cyberintelligence company would have to pay Meta more than $167 million following a 2019 campaign that targeted more than 1,400 WhatsApp users, including human rights activists and journalists.  However, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled Friday that because the court did not have enough evidence to determine that NSO Group’s behavior…

WhatsApp is attempting to solve its spam problem by curbing how many messages individual users and businesses can send to unknown people without getting a response. While the app started as an easy way to send messages to personal contacts, over time, it has become more complex with groups, communities, and business messaging. With those changes, people are getting more messages than ever, and it is hard to catch up with all of them. All messages users and businesses send to others will count against this new per-month limit, unless they get a response. For instance, if you meet someone…

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