Author: GT

As a devastating wildfire burned through a Maui town, killing more than 100 people, emergency management employees traded dozens of text messages, creating a record that would later help investigators piece together the government’s response to the 2023 tragedy.One text exchange hinted officials might also be using a second, untraceable messaging service.“That’s what Signal was supposed to be for,” then-Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator Herman Andaya texted a colleague. Signal is one of many end-to-end encrypted messaging apps that include message auto-delete functions.While such apps promise increased security and privacy, they often skirt open records laws meant to increase transparency…

Bitcoin’s price has been stuck in a tight range between $80,000 and $100,000, and some analysts believe institutional adoption is making it behave differently than in past cycles. Speaking with TheStreet Roundtable, Jeff LaBerge, Head of Capital Markets at Bitdeer, explained that Bitcoin’s increasing presence in traditional finance has changed how it reacts to market turbulence. “It used to be that Bitcoin was really hard to buy. It was hard to buy, hard to sell for individuals, anybody other than a Bitcoiner, right? But now it is in people’s portfolios. It’s an ETF,” LaBerge said. “There’s futures, and so it’s…

Newsletter platform Ghost, an open source competitor to Substack, is now connected to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Federated apps run on the protocol ActivityPub, which powers apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Flipboard, and others, allowing posts published on one app to be seen and engaged with by those on other federated platforms. Ghost said last year that it was working on an integration with ActivityPub, which would allow its publishers to share their blog posts with the broader open social web. The company expected the integrations to go live last year. However, Ghost this week…

In a new report, a California-based policy group co-led by Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer, suggests that lawmakers should consider AI risks that “have not yet been observed in the world” when crafting AI regulatory policies. The 41-page interim report released on Tuesday comes from the Joint California Policy Working Group on Frontier AI Models, an effort organized by Governor Gavin Newsom following his veto of California’s controversial AI safety bill, SB 1047. While Newsom found that SB 1047 missed the mark, he acknowledged last year the need for a more extensive assessment of AI risks to inform legislators. In…

On March 19, Republican senators Todd Johnson, Brad Overcash, and Timothy Moffitt introduced Senate Bill 327 (SB327) that mandates the State Treasurer to allocate up to 10% of public funds to Bitcoin. The bill attempts to position North Carolina as a “leader in state-level cryptocurrency adoption.” The bill urges the Treasurer to ensure that Bitcoin is stored in multi-signature cold storage and is audited on a monthly basis for transparency and security. It also outlines that liquidation of Bitcoin holdings would be permitted only if there is a “severe financial crisis,” subject to approval from two-thirds of the General Assembly.…

Raj Aggarwal is leaving AWS after nearly three years as the company’s GM of generative AI and revenue acceleration, according to a LinkedIn post Aggarwal published Wednesday. “I’m proud of the pioneering work our team did in generative AI from its earliest days,” Aggarwal said in his post. “We built what might be the world’s first large-scale generative AI products — launched to tens of thousands of sellers, used hundreds of thousands of times, driving a 4.9% increase in pipeline generation.” Aggarwal played a notable role in AWS’ recent push into generative AI. In the LinkedIn post, he mentioned his…

(Bloomberg) — The crypto industry is on a roll in Washington and it’s not just because of Donald Trump. Most Read from Bloomberg A key ally is rising in the Democratic party and the industry just demonstrated its political might by sweeping away a long-entrenched antagonist with a flood of campaign money. Crypto-friendly stablecoin legislation is poised to pass the Senate after years of the industry’s Capitol Hill agenda languishing. Prospects for other priorities also are improving. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a long-standing supporter of the crypto industry, moved up in her party’s leadership ranks to head…

Nvidia has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that’s developed a platform to generate synthetic AI training data. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag was said to be nine figures, exceeding Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel and its team of roughly 80 employees will be folded into Nvidia, where its tech will be deployed as part of the former’s suit of generative AI services for developers, Wired reported. Gretel was founded in 2019 by Alex Watson, Laszlo Bock, John Myers, and Ali Golshan, who also serves as the company’s CEO. The…

Bitcoin is trading around $84,393.09, up nearly 4% following the Federal Reserve’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged and retain its target range of 4.25% to 4.5%. Policymakers did not backtrack on rate cuts, but they did reiterate expectations for two cuts later in 2025 — a mixed signal for risk assets such as Bitcoin. The markets had already predicted very little chance of a rate increase at the FOMC this week, but investors were following economic growth and inflation updates closely. The Fed has also cut its GDP growth forecast to 1.7% for 2025, a 0.4% point drop from…

NEW YORK (AP) — A former Meta official’s explosive insider account sold 60,000 copies in its first week and reached the top 10 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list amid efforts by the social media giant to discredit the book. Released last week by Flatiron Books, a Macmillan imprint, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ “Careless People” alleges cruel and otherwise disturbing behavior by Mark Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan and other executives and describes Zuckerberg’s alleged efforts to win favor with Chinese officials. Meta has countered that Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy who left what was then Facebook in 2017, violated a severance agreement…