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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...

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek on Tuesday signed Senate Bill 1596 into law, joining California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts and Minnesota in a growing list of states embracing a right to repair for citizens. The law is set to go into effect January 1. The bill’s coauthors Janeen Sollman and Representative Courtney Ne...

Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete, TechCrunch has learned. The EV startup was ultimately able to track down a majority of those payments or request new ones from custo...

Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace. The sanction, of close to $8M (or in local currency: PLN 31,850,141), also calls out the e-commerce giant for deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purcha...

In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbu...

Telegram has introduced a controversial new feature that grants users a free premium membership in exchange for allowing the instant messaging app to utilize their phone number as a relay for sending one-time SMS passwords to other users attempting to log into the platform, raising concerns about potential privacy r...