Bench customers are now being forced to hand over their data or risk losing it, he said
After accounting startup Bench suddenly shut down on December 27 and was bought in a fire sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning that it's not easy to just take their financial data and walk away. And some aren't too happy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. Recap: When Bench, a Canadian-based startup that raised $113 million from...
Drone blasts hole in LA firefighting plane
Do not fly your drone into an active fire. Although taking video of the damage can be tempting, it can prevent firefighters from doing their job. That's exactly what happened in Los Angeles on January 9 when a drone collided with a "Super Scooper" firefighting plane, the LA Times reports. It comes as LA battles its worst fires in...
These startups are making smarter canes for the visually impaired
White sugarcane for the 21st century. While many technology companies are increasingly working to make technology more accessible to the blind and visually impaired, sugarcane has not benefited much from these advances. London-born WeWalk takes a more traditional approach to white cane. Beyond the larger handle, there isn't much that visually differentiates the company's products from standard folding canes....
Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta’s latest pivot in a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to loosen Meta's content moderation policy in an appearance Friday on Joe Rogan's podcast. Zuckerberg faced widespread criticism of the decision, including from employees at his own company. "Maybe it depends on who you ask," Zuckerberg said when asked how the Meta update has been received. The main update Meta announced this...
Microsoft has accused a group of developing tools to abuse its AI services in a new lawsuit
Microsoft has taken legal action against a group that it claims the company deliberately developed and used tools to bypass the security fences of its cloud AI products. According to the complaint filed by the company in December in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a group of 10 unnamed defendants allegedly used stolen customer...
TikTok bans are more comparable
Shortly after Biden signed a bill to ban TikTok in April, the company and a consortium of users retaliated by filing a lawsuit accusing the federal government of violating First Amendment rights. In December, a federal appeals court upheld the ban, leaving TikTok with only one legal avenue to save itself: an appeal to the Supreme Court. Many of...
The Evolving (and Inexact) Science of Fire Evacuation
As wildfires ravaged neighborhoods in Los Angeles this week, residents and authorities faced a difficult and near-impossible challenge: convincing hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes to escape danger, within hours or minutes. officials conducted years of research on fire evacuation. The field is small but growing, reflecting a new study that says the frequency of extreme...
Lenovo’s latest form factor proves PCs can still be fun
Big companies are not known for taking risks. This is true in the world of consumer hardware everywhere. Annual updates are generally incremental, with minor changes like screen resolution or image quality. This is a phenomenon that Lenovo enjoys when it presents the latest updates to its PC line every year. These offerings are generally some combination of products...
TikTok Ban Will Be Social Media’s First Extinction Level Event
The attorney general of the Biden administration, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, insisted that Congress has the right to impose a ban, saying that the Chinese government can spy on Americans, in addition to their contacts, through TikTok. "It's about trying to close vulnerabilities that foreign adversaries can exploit," he said. Outside the courtroom, dozens of TikTok users gathered in support...
Even Trump Can’t Stop America’s Green Transition, Biden’s Top Climate Adviser Says
The second is whether we continue to address more people to the transformation. We have over 100,000 farmers and ranchers currently practicing climate smart agriculture. Will that climate action, distributed climate action, continue to grow? The last thing is how we can build the things we need to build. Steel in the ground. One of the things that we...
