Author: GT

On Monday, Google released an update for Android that fixes two zero-day flaws that “may be under limited, targeted exploitation,” as the company put it. That means Google is aware that hackers have been and may still be using the bugs to compromise Android devices in real-world scenarios.  One of the two now-fixed zero-days, tracked as CVE-2024-53197, was identified by Amnesty International in collaboration with Benoît Sevens of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, the tech giant’s security team that tracks government-backed cyberattacks. In February, Amnesty said it had found that Cellebrite, a company that sells devices to law enforcement for unlocking…

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has solved a problem that has frustrated AI researchers for several years. Its breakthrough in AI reward models could improve dramatically how AI systems reason and respond to questions. In partnership with Tsinghua University researchers, DeepSeek has created a technique detailed in a research paper, titled “Inference-Time Scaling for Generalist Reward Modeling.” It outlines how a new approach outperforms existing methods and how the team “achieved competitive performance” compared to strong public reward models. The innovation focuses on enhancing how AI systems learn from human preferences – a important aspect of creating more useful and aligned…

Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have to see their post appear twice in your feed if they’ve shared it in multiple places. The new feature, called Crosstalk, is rolling out with the Tapestry 1.1 iOS update on Tuesday — a sizable update that follows its February 2025 release. Tapestry was built…

The value of Bitcoin held by the U.S. government has declined by $2 billion since Apr. 2, dubbed “Liberation Day” by President Donald Trump when he announced global “reciprocal tariffs.” As per the on-chain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence, the U.S. government holds 198,012 BTC the value of which stood at $17.24 billion on Apr. 2. As the king coin’s price declined from $87,106 on Apr. 2 to $76,830.22 on Apr. 8, the value of the U.S. government’s Bitcoin holdings has dipped to $15.21 billion. In short, the government has seen a loss of nearly 12% in its Bitcoin holdings since “Liberation…

Tech giants like Microsoft might be touting AI “agents” as profit-boosting tools for corporations, but a nonprofit is trying to prove that agents can be a force for good, too. Sage Future, a 501(c)(3) backed by Open Philanthropy, launched an experiment earlier this month tasking four AI models in a virtual environment with raising money for charity. The models — OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 and two of Anthropic’s newer Claude models (3.6 and 3.7 Sonnet) — had the freedom to choose which charity to fundraise for and how to best drum up interest in their campaign. In around a week,…

There is an intriguing relationship between Bitcoin and the U.S. President Donald Trump. Once dismissive of the crypto assets, Trump referred to Bitcoin as a “scam” in an interview in June 2021. However, he came to embrace crypto in the run-up to the 2024 presidential elections. “I will ensure that the future of crypto and the future of Bitcoin will be made in the USA, not driven overseas,” Trump said in a speech to his supporters at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington D.C. on May 25, 2024. When Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 5, 2024, Bitcoin was…

Aerial view of containers for export sitting stacked at Qingdao Qianwan Container Terminal on April 5, 2025 in Qingdao, Shandong Province of China. Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty ImagesThe United Nations shipping agency is on the cusp of introducing binding regulations to phase out fossil fuel use in global shipping — with the world’s first-ever global emissions levy on the table.The International Maritime Organization (IMO) will this week hold talks at its London headquarters to hammer out measures to reduce the climate impact of international shipping, which accounts for around 3% of global carbon emissions.Some of the measures on…

On Monday, the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences announced its most ambitious results to date: the dire wolf. These are creatures that have been extinct for more than 12,000 years and made famous by the HBO show “Game of Thrones.” These white, fluffy animals live on a 2,000-acre preserve in a location so secretive that journalists, including from TechCrunch, who were invited to view the live animals, were not invited to the compound itself, located in the northern United States. Instead we flew to another secretive location to see the animals with our own eyes because in this age of AI,…

Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) is heading lower again in Tuesday’s trading. The cryptocurrency’s token price was down 4% as of 5:30 p.m. ET. At the same point in time, Bitcoin was down 2.6% over the last day, and Ethereum had fallen 6.1%. Dogecoin’s valuation is falling as investors respond to new tariffs that are set to go into effect after midnight tonight. In particular, investors are worried about the fallout from tariffs on China. The Trump administration confirmed today that tariffs on products imported from China will be set at 104% — by far the highest level of any country. The…

Your 401k is suffering. The billionaires are fighting. The gamers are imperiled. Not even the penguins on McDonald Island, where no humans reside, have been spared. But at long last, 26-year-old YouTuber and chocolatier MrBeast has weighed in on President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to impose sweeping tariffs on imports. Jokes aside, the prolific YouTuber MrBeast is probably the most influential public figure among American children — you may not like it, but it’s true. In an X post, he points out how for some companies, like his chocolate business Feastables, Trump’s tariffs don’t actually incentivize businesses to move manufacturing…