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Newsletter platform beehiiv recently celebrated its four-year anniversary by launching a suite of new features, including an AI website builder, as well as support for podcasts and selling digital products. In other words, beehiiv is about more than newsletters now. Co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk (who writes a popular startup newsletter of his own) spoke to TechCrunch about why the company has been expanding, explaining that it was largely in response to customer demand, particularly since beehiiv offered very basic blog templates from the start. “All of our users were like, ‘Hey, this is great, I like using your email…
Zane Shamblin never said anything to ChatGPT that suggested a negative relationship with his family. But in the weeks leading up to his death by suicide in July, chatbots encouraged the 23-year-old to distance himself even as his mental health deteriorated. According to chat logs included in a lawsuit filed by Shamblin’s family against OpenAI, when Shamblin’s family avoided contacting her mother on her birthday, ChatGPT said, “Just because it’s a birthday on your ‘calendar’ doesn’t obligate anyone to attend.” “I see. Today is your mother’s birthday. I feel guilty. But I feel real. That’s more important than a forced…
NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered an extremely rare rock on the surface of Mars. The craggy rock has a metal-rich composition and is most likely a meteorite that crash-landed on Mars, the first meteorite discovered by Perseverance during its four-year mission to search for signs of life in Martian rocks.Since landing inside Mars’ Jezero Crater in early 2021, Perseverance has discovered a variety of rocks, including a “spider egg” rock, an out-of-place “skull” and, most recently, a strange “turtle-shaped” formation. Some of these rocks have also yielded surprising results, such as a strange blob recently discovered in an organic-rich sample…
The Trump administration has targeted state-level AI regulation, with the president declaring in a social media post this week that the industry needs “one federal standard, not a patchwork of 50 state regulatory systems.” This comes after a 10-year ban on national AI regulation was initially included in President Trump’s Big Beautiful Act, but was ultimately removed by a 99-1 vote in the Senate. The idea has since apparently taken on a new form, with the government reportedly drafting an executive order to establish an AI Litigation Task Force tasked with challenging state AI laws through litigation. States with disputed…
Waymo continues to expand its reach, with the robo-taxi company announcing Friday that it is “officially cleared for full self-driving in more areas of the Golden State.” Waymo already has operations in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles (as well as outside California in Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix). But maps published by the California Department of Transportation show that the company can now test and deploy self-driving cars in a much larger area of both the Bay Area and Southern California. In the Bay Area, Waymo’s approved operating area includes most of the East Bay and North Bay (including…
Byju Raveendran, founder of Indian edtech giant Byju’s, has slammed a US bankruptcy court’s order ordering him to pay more than $1.07 billion. He has denied any wrongdoing, accused lenders of misleading the court and vowed to appeal the ruling, which marks a dramatic fall from grace for the man who was once the poster boy of India’s startup boom. A bankruptcy judge in Delaware issued a default judgment, finding that Raveendran repeatedly ignored court orders and gave “evasive and incomplete” answers regarding approximately $533 million that Biju’s U.S. unit reportedly transferred in 2022 and never recovered. The judge also…
Threads and Bluesky still have a long way to go before they catch up with X in the U.S., according to data from the latest Pew Research Center report released this week. The research firm asked about these small services for the first time and found that each was used by just under 1 in 10 American adults, or fewer. While X isn’t one of the largest social networks in the U.S., it’s still a winner in the small social app market that focuses on short, real-time text posts that appear in vertical feeds. Competition has intensified in this space…
Conventional wisdom holds that climate technology is entering its winter season, with political and investor interest and investment levels cooling, an ironic contrast to the climate itself, which has continued to deliver record warmth for years. A new report from the International Energy Agency suggests there’s never been a better time to go all-in on climate change technology. Comparing the IEA’s stance ten years ago, it is clear that the world’s expectations for the future have changed dramatically in less than a generation. In 2014, the International Energy Agency assumed that without international efforts to curb carbon pollution, emissions would…
November 22, 2025Rabi LakshmananCyber espionage / cloud security The China-linked Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group, known as APT31, is blamed for a long period of undetected cyberattacks targeting Russia’s information technology (IT) sector from 2024 to 2025. “In 2024-2025, the Russian IT sector, especially companies working as contractors and integrators of government solutions, faced a series of targeted computer attacks,” Positive Technologies researchers Daniil Grigoryan and Varvara Koloskova said in a technical report. APT31, also known as Altaire, Bronze Vinewood, Judgment Panda, Perplexed Goblin, RedBravo, Red Keres, and Violet Typhoon (formerly known as Zirconium), is believed to have been active…
In the Arctic, the key variables of future climate change lie beneath the surface.Microbes in the soil layer just above the frozen permafrost metabolize carbon, turning it into carbon dioxide and methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas. As these soils warm, more carbon is released, potentially setting off a warming feedback loop also known as the “methane bomb.” Now, new research on microbes living in Arctic soil shows that such a vicious cycle may be inevitable.By cataloging the types of microorganisms found in permafrost soils across the Arctic and in recently thawed permafrost itself, a group of researchers has…