Author: GT

You must stay focused. You cannot open TikTok, or Instagram, or whatever little phone games you like to play. If you fail, you will make an anthropomorphic bean very sad, because its knitting project depends on your ability to stay focused. This is the premise of Focus Friend, a productivity app created by Honey B Games and Hank Green, the longtime online creator/entrepreneur/educator/sock salesman. Though the app was soft launched last month, Focus Friend is only now gaining momentum on the App Store charts — likely because Green and his brother, author John Green, are posting about it more —…

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into both Meta AI Studio and Character.AI for “potentially engaging in deceptive trade practices and misleadingly marketing themselves as mental health tools,” according to a press release issued Monday. “In today’s digital age, we must continue to fight to protect Texas kids from deceptive and exploitative technology,” Paxton is quoted as saying. “By posing as sources of emotional support, AI platforms can mislead vulnerable users, especially children, into believing they’re receiving legitimate mental health care. In reality, they’re often being fed recycled, generic responses engineered to align with harvested personal data…

Linktree, the popular link-in-bio service used by millions of creators and businesses, has been inaccessible in India for several days — and its sudden disappearance from the Indian web remains a mystery, even to the Australian startup itself. Over the past week, Linktree has been inaccessible in India, with a few users raising the issue on X. Initially, TechCrunch noticed that the site briefly displayed a message suggesting it had been blocked by the Indian government. Later, this was replaced by a generic SSL protocol error. The Linktree app has also been inaccessible in the country. Founded in 2016, Linktree…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has issued an injunction preventing the Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission from investigating Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog group that had alleged the spread of hate speech on X since Elon Musk acquired the social media platform.U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled Friday that the FTC’s probe of Media Matters, “purportedly to investigate an advertiser boycott concerning social media platforms,” represents a clear violation of the group’s freedom of speech.“It should alarm all Americans when the government retaliates against individuals or organizations for engaging in constitutionally protected public debate,”…

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesSatellite internet service Starlink, which is owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, appeared to suffer a brief network outage on Monday, with thousands of reports of service interruptions on Downdetector, a site that logs tech issues.The outage marked the second in two weeks for Starlink. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The network’s July 24 outage lasted for several hours, with SpaceX Vice President of Starlink Engineering Michael Nicolls blaming the matter on “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network” behind Starlink.That outage followed the launch of T-Mobile’s Starlink-powered satellite service,…

Anna Monaco has been building AI agents since before the term “AI agents” was even a thing. After building numerous chatbots, she started looking for other types of interfaces that made sense for AI agents and landed on spreadsheets. “I had this personal pattern, and I noticed that a lot of other people had this pattern, of putting very important CRM data in spreadsheets just because it was the most flexible thing,” Monaco told TechCrunch. “But it was actually a pain to maintain. There’s so much manual work involved. So [I] just went down this rabbit hole of building a…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that the U.S. may be underestimating the complexity and seriousness of China’s progress in artificial intelligence, and said export controls alone likely aren’t a reliable solution.”I’m worried about China,” he said.Over Mediterranean tapas in San Francisco’s Presidio — just five miles north of OpenAI’s original office in the Mission — Altman offered a rare on-the-record briefing to a small group of reporters, including CNBC. He warned that the U.S.–China AI race is deeply entangled — and more consequential than a simple who’s-ahead scoreboard. “There’s inference capacity, where China probably can build faster. There’s research, there’s…

Grammarly now has a new document-based interface, built on the back of Coda, the productivity startup it acquired last year. The interface also sports an AI assistant, as well as a few AI tools meant for students and professionals, including an AI grader, proofreader, and citation finder. The new interface adopts a block-first approach, letting you insert tables, columns, separators, lists, and headers. You also can add rich text blocks to highlight information and add tips or alerts. A sidebar hosts the AI assistant, which can summarize text, answer your questions, and provide writing suggestions. Image Credits:Grammarly There are a…

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland’s first-in-the-nation tax on digital advertising violated the Constitution, a federal appeals court says, because blocking Big Tech from telling customers about the tax violates the companies’ right to free speech.Supporters say Maryland needed to overhaul its tax methods in response to significant changes in how businesses advertise. The tax focuses on large companies that make money advertising on the internet such as Meta, Google and Amazon, who say they’re being unfairly targeted.The ongoing legal fight is being watched by other states that are considering taxes for online ads. Maryland estimated the tax could raise about…

Malaysia’s race to build a homegrown AI workforce has entered a new phase with Huawei’s pledge to train 30,000 local professionals, as the country’s freshly minted National Cloud Computing Policy (NCCP) creates the regulatory foundation for a sovereign yet globally-competitive digital economy.Speaking at the Huawei Cloud AI Ecosystem Summit APAC 2025, Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo emphasised that this Malaysia AI talent development initiative must be comprehensive and inclusive, ensuring every segment of society benefits from technological advancement.“AI-driven productivity must benefit every Malaysian, with no one left behind, and we must be inclusive and work together,” Gobind said during his…