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Switzerland-based Proton, the privacy-focused firm behind end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) webmail ProtonMail and other apps, has acquired Standard Notes, a note-taking app founded back in 2017. It offers the same kind of robust privacy promise to its 300,000+ users by also applying E2EE. In a press release announcing th...

In 2023, higher egg prices provided an opportunity for alternative protein companies to show they could compete with traditional egg manufacturers. A year later, prices have calmed down, but the flurry of activity in creating more sustainable egg products continues to thrive. One place seeing a lot of activity is On...

Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet. Security researchers Can Yoleri, Murat Özfidan and Egemen Koçhisarlı with SOCRadar, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations find security weaknesses, discovered an open and public storage server...

At an event in London on Tuesday, Meta confirmed that it plans an initial release of Llama 3 — the next generation of its large language model used to power generative AI assistants — within the next month. This confirms a report published on Monday by The Information that Meta was getting close to launch. “Within t...

WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The deal, which was for $125 million according to sources close to the matter, is Automattic’s second acquisition of a cross...

The next big thing in mechanical keyboards is magnetic switches. Mechanical keyboards quickly went from a niche product to mainstream during the pandemic, as everybody was looking to upgrade their home offices — and maybe for a new hobby, too. Brands like Akko, Drop, Ducky, Epomaker and Keychron became household nam...

When I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier. Even contractors mostly went into the office in those days. Over time, though, that slowly changed, and the pandemic — along with generationally shifting views on work-life balance — accelerated worker senti...

Spotify already found success with its popular AI DJ feature, and now the streaming music service is bringing AI to playlist creation. The company on Monday introduced AI playlists into beta, a new option that allows users to generate a playlist based on written prompts. The feature will initially become available t...

There are a lot of ways to describe what’s happening to the Earth’s climate: Global warming. Climate change. Climate crisis. Global weirding. They all try to capture in different ways the phenomena caused by our world’s weather systems gone awry. Yet despite a thesaurus-entry’s worth of options, it’s still a remarka...

Microsoft has introduced new versions of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription services that exclude its business collaboration chat offering Teams following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack. The move — which some analysts say is unlikely to change the commercial growth ...

A startup out of Paris that began life building marketing tools has raised $22 million after making a successful pivot into billing — a space it discovered was even more broken among potential customers. Lago, developer of an open source billing platform, has picked up the funding across two rounds of funding it’s r...

On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Uber Eats courier Pa Edrissa Manjang, who is Black, had received a payout from Uber after “racially discriminatory” facial recognition checks prevented him from accessing the app, which he had been using since November 2019 to pick up jobs delivering food on Uber’s platform. The new...

One in 36 children in the U.S. has autism, according to the CDC. Research shows that the earlier a child gets diagnosed, the better their developmental outcome will be. EarliTec Diagnostics just raised fresh capital to expand its system that helps clinicians diagnose children as young as 16 months old. The Atlanta-b...

Tools that allow government hackers to break into iPhones and Android phones, popular software like the Chrome and Safari browsers, and chat apps like WhatsApp and iMessage, are now worth millions of dollars — and their price has multiplied in the last few years as these products get harder to hack. On Monday, start...

Tesla is reportedly abandoning its plan to build a lower-cost EV thought to cost around $25,000, according to Reuters, despite that vehicle’s status as a pivotal product for the company’s overall growth. The company will instead focus its efforts on a planned robotaxi that is being built on the same small EV platfor...

How do you get an AI to answer a question it’s not supposed to? There are many such “jailbreak” techniques, and Anthropic researchers just found a new one, in which a large language model (LLM) can be convinced to tell you how to build a bomb if you prime it with a few dozen less-harmful questions first. They call t...

Springtime means rain, the return of flowers and, of course, Y Combinator’s first demo day of the year. During the well-known accelerator’s first of two pitch days from the Winter 2024 cohort, a covey of TechCrunch staff tuned in, took notes, traded jokes and slowly whittled away at the dozens of presenting companie...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a third investigation into EV startup Fisker’s Ocean SUV, this time centered on problems getting the doors to open. NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) says in a new notice that it has received 14 complaints from owners who have not been able to...

U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies, with the aim of identifying criminal suspects. So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big tech companies, like Google, to tur...

Tucked inside Canoo’s 2023 earnings report is a nugget regarding the use of CEO Tony Aquila’s private jet — just one of many expenses that illustrates the gap between spending and revenue at the EV startup. Canoo posted Monday its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings for 2023 in a regulatory filing that shows a com...

The modern world is dependent on a vast network for extracting, processing, transporting and ultimately consuming hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas. But these resources come with a cost: they’re finite, difficult to extract and take carbon dioxide out of the ground and release it into the air. Instead of r...

The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store. Valkey is backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson and Snap. AWS and Google Cloud rarely back an open-source fork together. Yet, when Redis Labs switched Redis away from the permissive 3-clause BSD licen...

When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, California, expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When that startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app centered around subscription software for contact management, people wondered if something more ambit...

Sarah Perez @sarahintampa / 1 day A day after researchers surfaced X’s plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to avoid having their communities’ content auto-filtered. Otherwise...