Yael Grauer is an independent tech journalist and investigative reporter based in Phoenix. She’s written for The Intercept, Ars Technica, Breaker, Motherboard, WIRED, Slate and more. After the driver of a speeding bus ran over and killed two college students in Dhaka in July, student protesters took to the streets. They forced the ordinarily disorganized […]
As Facebook continues to grasp the severity of the situation in Myanmar, where the UN has concluded that its social network plays a “determining role” in inciting genocide, the U.S. tech giant has completed a third sweep in recent months to remove bad actors from its platform. Facebook said late Tuesday U.S. time that with […]
WhatsApp is making group calls easier with a change to the way its mobile app works. Before, users would have to start a 1:1 video call, then add participants — there wasn’t an option to begin a group call at once, the company says. Now, the design has been updated so you can start group […]
Facebook looks to be jumping on the blockchain wagon with plans to introduce its own stablecoin, according to a report from Bloomberg. The social network company — under fire for a seemingly constant stream of privacy snafus of late — created an internal blockchain division in May and, while there has been plenty of speculation, […]
WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by the app’s end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp’s automated systems. A report from two Israeli NGOs reviewed by TechCrunch details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include “Adult” sections that offer […]
In a new blog post, Facebook VP of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong addressed the company’s latest user privacy controversy. The rebuttal is the second round of Facebook’s push back against Tuesday’s report by the New York Times detailing some of Facebook’s special partnerships and extensive data sharing with major tech players. In the new post, […]
As Facebook colonized the rest of the web with its functionality in hopes of fueling user growth, it built aggressive integrations with partners that are coming under newfound scrutiny through a deeply reported New York Times investigation. Some of what Facebook did was sloppy or unsettling, including forgetting to shut down APIs when it cancelled its […]
I’ve been fortunate to have been part of half a dozen exits this year, and have seen the process work smoothly, and, other times, like a roller coaster, with only the most tenuous connection to the track. Here are 10 bits of advice I’ve distilled from these experiences in the event someone makes you an […]
India-based educational startup Byju’s was widely reported to have raised a massive $400 million round and now the company is making things official. The ten-year-old company revealed today it has pulled in a total of $540 million from investors to go after international opportunities. The round is led by Naspers, the investment firm famous for […]
Facebook AI Research is open-sourcing some of the conversational AI tech it is using to power its Portal video chat display and M suggestions on Facebook Messenger. The company announced today that its PyTorch-based PyText NLP framework is now available to developers. Natural language processing deals with how systems parse human language and are able […]