With 25M users, Bluesky launches a $1M fund to take on social media and AI. The fund will offer grants to those building on BlueSky’s open source AT Protocol. Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy. The two are warring in Europe over the balance between interoperability and privacy, Reuters reports. The fight focuses on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a competition regulation that requires designated gatekeepers (including Apple and Meta) not to restrict rivals’ access to so-called core platform services. California can ban new gas cars starting in 2035. California’s phase out would begin in 2026, when the state will require 35% of automakers’ sales to be zero emissions vehicles. Bugs in a major McDonald’s India delivery system exposed sensitive customer data. McDonald's India exposed the personal information of customers and drivers due to security flaws impacting its APIs. Tracker firm Hapn spilling names of thousands of GPS tracking customers. A security researcher found customer names and workplace affiliations spilling directly from Hapn's servers.

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There’s an ocean of meme coins beyond Dogecoin, and a new startup called Neverless wants to make it easier to get started with trading crypto, with a particular focus on providing access to small-cap tokens. This is an interesting new crypto startup, founded by three former executives at Revolut, the London-based fintech juggernaut.

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The US government is calling on a Perplexity executive to help make its case that Google is a monopolist.

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Many sites saw their organic traffic decline in 2024, in big part due to the rise of AI-generated search results. Many queries no longer lead to click-throughs, and even when users click, it is hard for companies to get more context on searches made within apps like ChatGPT or Perplexity.

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There are few matters in life that divide a room more than the prudence of putting pineapple on pizza. But if you’re of the persuasion that tropical fruit has no place on a pie, you’ll have to swallow a bitter pill — if you want to access the WordPress.org developer portal and forum, at least. Waymo will begin testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Tokyo in early 2025, the first time the Alphabet company’s robotaxis have driven on public roads outside the U.S. The move to Japan is part of Waymo’s “road trips,” a development program that involves bringing its technology to a variety of cities. TikTok and ByteDance asked the United States Supreme Court to block the law that forces TikTok to be sold off or banned in the United States, according to an emergency filing with America’s top court on Monday. The social media company requested that the Supreme Court consider blocking the sell-or-ban law passed earlier this year. ChatGPT Search, OpenAI’s AI-powered web search experience, is now live for all ChatGPT users — with several new features in tow. By default, ChatGPT will automatically determine which questions to route through ChatGPT Search, or users can tap a new “Search the web” icon in the ChatGPT interface.

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Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video generation game — and it might just, at least for a little while. On Monday, DeepMind announced Veo 2, a next-gen video-generating AI and the successor to Veo, which powers a growing number of products across Google’s portfolio.

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On Monday, the U.K.’s internet regulator, Ofcom, published the first set of final guidelines for online service providers subject to the Online Safety Act. This starts the clock ticking on the sprawling online harms law’s first compliance deadline, which the regulator expects to kick in in three months’ time.

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Regardless of how they're defined, the agents are for helping complete tasks in an automated way with as little human interaction as possible.

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Now with 25 million users, Bluesky is facing a test that will determine whether or not its platform will still be seen as a safe space and place of refuge from the toxicity of X. Also, OpenAI is blaming one of the longest outages in its history on a “new telemetry service” gone awry. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT; its video generator, Sora; and its developer-facing API experienced major disruptions starting at around 3 p.m. Pacific.

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The European Union’s executive body is facing an embarrassing privacy scandal after it was confirmed on Friday that a Commission ad campaign on X (formerly Twitter) breached the EU’s own data protection rules.

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