Author: GT

Apple is hosting its “Awe dropping” hardware event tomorrow at 10 a.m. PT. The company is expected to announce its iPhone 17 lineup, which could include a slimmer version, as well as updates for the Apple Watch and AirPods.  The keynote will take place at Apple Park in Cupertino. Viewers can tune in to the livestream here or watch it on Apple’s website. As usual, TechCrunch will be covering the event, so stay tuned for news. There have been numerous rumors surrounding the upcoming iPhone lineup. Taking center stage is the rumored iPhone 17 Air, which could replace the Plus…

AI speech transcription tools are about to get a lot more competitive with Alibaba’s Qwen team pulling unveiling the Qwen3-ASR-Flash model.Built upon the powerful Qwen3-Omni intelligence and trained using a massive dataset with tens of millions of hours of speech data, this isn’t just another AI speech recognition model. The team says it’s designed to deliver highly accurate performance, even when faced with tricky acoustic environments or complex language patterns.So, how does it stack up against the competition? The performance data, from tests conducted in August 2025, suggests it’s rather impressive.On a public test for standard Chinese, Qwen3-ASR-Flash achieved an…

Two current and two former Meta employees disclosed documents to Congress alleging that the company may have suppressed research on children’s safety, according to a report from The Washington Post. According to their claims, Meta changed its policies around researching sensitive topics — like politics, children, gender, race, and harassment — six weeks after whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents that showed how Meta’s own research found that Instagram can damage teen girls’ mental health. These revelations, which were made public in 2021, kicked off years of hearings in Congress over child safety on the internet, an issue that remains…

Apple on Tuesday will unveil its next line-up of iPhones amid a global trade war that’s added a potential price increase to the usual intrigue surrounding the annual evolution of the company’s marquee product. The new iPhones will be the first to be released since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and unleashed a barrage of tariffs, in what his administration says is an attempt to bring overseas manufacturing back to the U.S. — a crusade that has thrust Apple CEO Tim Cook into the hot seat.If Apple follows the same naming scheme since the product’s 2007 debut,…

Salesloft said a breach of its GitHub account in March allowed hackers to steal authentication tokens that were later used in a mass-hack targeting several of its Big Tech customers.  Citing an investigation by Google’s incident response unit Mandiant, Salesloft said on its data breach page that the as-yet-unnamed hackers accessed Salesloft’s GitHub account and performed reconnaissance activities from March until June, which allowed them to download “content from multiple repositories, add a guest user and establish workflows.”  The timeline raises fresh questions about the company’s security posture, including why it took Salesloft some six months to detect the intrusion.…

Privacy-focused messaging app Signal announced on Monday that it’s introducing a feature that allows users to back up their text conversations for free, along with the last 45 days of media. It’s also debuting its first paid feature by offering full media backups with up to 100GB of storage. Historically, the messaging app didn’t let users store any kind of backup of your conversations on the platform. This could be especially troublesome if you lost or broke your phone. While you could transfer conversations from one phone to another, there was no cloud backup in place. The new feature finally…

ISLAMABAD (AP) — A U.S. metals company signed a $500 million investment deal with Pakistan on Monday.Pakistan’s Frontier Works Organization — which is the country’s largest miner of critical minerals — signed a memorandum of understanding with Missouri-based U.S. Strategic Metals for collaboration plans that include setting up a poly-metallic refinery in Pakistan.The deal comes after Washington and Islamabad last month reached a trade agreement that Pakistan hoped would attract American investment in its minerals and oil reserves.U.S. Strategic Metals is focused on producing and recycling critical minerals, which the U.S. Department of Energy has defined as essential in a…

AI needs a better brain — and Edo Liberty is building it. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27–29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Pinecone founder and CEO Edo Liberty will explain why the next wave of AI-native apps won’t be driven by bigger models, but by smarter search. With 10,000+ startup and VC leaders expected to be at Disrupt, this AI Stage fireside chat and presentation is a must-attend session. The future of AI isn’t more data — it’s better retrieval As AI becomes more embedded in every workflow, the real differentiator isn’t just the algorithm — it’s…

BEIJING (AP) — Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, the Associated Press has found.AP journalists spoke to more than 100 sources, scoured tens of thousands of documents, and obtained several major leaks of internal and classified material, the existence of which is being reported here for the first time.Researchers and reporters have raised questions about American technology in Chinese policing before. Companies have pushed back, saying they weren’t aware of or responsible for the way…

Google is expanding AI Mode — its AI-powered Search experience — to five new languages, opening access to additional users around the world, after being limited to English for over six months. On Monday, Google announced that AI Mode will now support Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. The update follows last month’s rollout of the AI-powered experience to 180 new markets in English, after initially launching in the U.S. and later expanding to the U.K. and India. “With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the…