Reddit announced on Tuesday that it’s updating its Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt file), which tells automated web bots whether they are permitted to crawl a site. Historically, robots.txt file was used to allow search engines to scape a site and then direct people to the content. However, with the rise of AI, websites are being … Read more
Google is rolling out a new Gemini AI side panel in Gmail that can help you write emails and summarize email threads. The company is also adding the Gemini side panel to Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive. The launch of the new features comes shortly after Google announced them last month at its I/O developer … Read more
London-based internet rights monitoring group NetBlocks has reported a major internet disruption in Kenya following a wave of demonstrations across the country, as police violently cracked down on citizens taking to the streets to protest a government bill to hike taxes despite tough economic times and widespread corruption. The interruption in access comes as the … Read more
Instagram’s Twitter/X rival Threads is furthering its expansion into the fediverse — the interconnected social network that includes apps like Mastodon, PeerTube, and others running the ActivityPub protocol. On Tuesday, Meta announced that it’s now opening up its beta for sharing to the fediverse to Threads users who are 18 and up and who are … Read more
Pinterest is reimagining its app for the TikTok era. Catering to Gen Z’s demand for video-focused features, the company on Tuesday announced it will now allow users to create short videos of their curated Pinterest boards, designed to be shared on social media. The new addition was inspired by the video-sharing activity that was already … Read more
Investors, you know you need to keep your pipelines primed, and one of the best places to find early-stage startups with promising portfolio potential is, you guessed it, TechCrunch Disrupt. TechCrunch is here to help. Let’s take a look at all the ways you can pump up your pipeline at Disrupt and keep the deals … Read more
Goodreads‘ co-founder Otis Chandler is back to build the next big app community. But this time, his focus isn’t on books; it’s on the content you can find online, including news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts and more. With Smashing, an AI and community-powered content recommendation app, now launching into an invite-only beta, … Read more
In 2024, it seems like no week goes by without a media organization, author group, or artist suing generative AI companies for using their work to train models without permission. The issue is, of course, that there’s still no clear framework on what constitutes copyright violation in the context of training GenAI. While these cases … Read more
TestParty, a software compliance company powered by AI, announced a $4 million seed round today co-led by Harlem Capital and the Urban Innovation Fund. Michael Bervell and Jason Tan, the company’s CEO and CTO respectively, co-founded TestParty in March 2023 to automatically rewrite source code to help businesses avoid violating global digital accessibility regulations like … Read more
The European Union accused Microsoft of breaching competition rules Tuesday. In a formal statement of objections the bloc said it suspects the software giant of abusing antitrust rules by bundling its real-time comms and collaboration tool, Teams, with popular productivity apps, including its cloud-based suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The EU opened … Read more
