AI web-crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many software developers believe. Some devs have started fighting back in ingenuous, often humorous ways. While any website might be targeted by bad crawler behavior — sometimes taking down the site — open source developers are “disproportionately” impacted, writes Niccolò Venerandi, developer of a Linux desktop … Read more
Krafton, South Korea’s gaming giant known for titles including PUBG: Battlegrounds and Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), has acquired a controlling stake in 12-year-old Indian gaming studio Nautilus Mobile for $14 million in an all-cash deal. On Friday, the South Korean gaming company confirmed to TechCrunch that it has acquired a “north of 75% stake” in … Read more
Certification platform Certiverse raised an $11 million Series A led by Cherryrock Capital, it announced this week. The company was founded by Ruben Garcia, Pablo Meyer, and Federico Lopez in 2023. It lets organizations develop certification exams at, its founders say, far less cost than traditional methods. Certifications are an age-old method to gain technical … Read more
TikTok is set to expand its TikTok Shop e-commerce platform to users in France, Germany, and Italy on Monday, Reuters reports. TikTok Shop has been available in the United Kingdom since 2021, and now the company is ready to expand further into Europe. While TikTok Shop is also available in the United States and saw … Read more
NHS vendor Advanced will pay just over £3 million ($3.8 million) in fines for not implementing basic security measures before it suffered a ransomware attack in 2022, the U.K.’s data protection regulator has confirmed. It’s half the fine that the Information Commissioner’s Office had initially sought in August 2024, when the data watchdog said it … Read more
It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.” In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing … Read more
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Wednesday that the rollout of ChatGPT’s viral new AI image features to free users would be delayed, citing significantly higher demand than the company expected. “Images in ChatGPT are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations),” Altman said in a post on X on … Read more
YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a … Read more
Fintech Block laid off 931 people, roughly 8% of the company’s staff, on Tuesday, according to a leaked message from the company seen by TechCrunch. The news was announced to staff in an email from Block’s co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey told staff that on Tuesday, Block will be “making some org changes, including … Read more
Microsoft is introducing a “deep research” AI-powered tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI chatbot app. There’s been a raft of deep research agents launched recently across chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. Powering them are so-called reasoning AI models, which posses the ability to think through problems and fact-check themselves — … Read more
