Twitter’s direct messages have always been a security liability. The DMs you send to friends and internet strangers aren’t end-to-end encrypted, making your conversations potentially accessible if Twitter suffers a data breach, or to company staffers with the right permissions to access them. Both scenarios are arguably more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where key security and […]
With a major United States intelligence authority set to expire at the end of the year, and a congressional showdown brewing over whether or not to renew it, new details of an internal audit show that US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) personnel have repeatedly conducted unlawful searches of data collected under the imperiled surveillance authority. Agents […]
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. However, […]
Emerging Indian social media app Slick left an internal database containing users’ personal information, including data of school-going children, publicly exposed to the internet for months. Since at least December 11, a database containing full names, mobile numbers, dates of birth, and profile pictures of Slick users was left online without a password. Bengaluru-based Slick launched in […]
Reddit has confirmed hackers accessed internal documents and source code following a “highly-targeted” phishing attack. A post by Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe, or KeyserSosa, explained that on February 5 the company became aware of the “sophisticated” attack targeting Reddit employees. He says that an as-yet-unidentified attacker sent “plausible-sounding prompts,” which redirected employees to a website masquerading as Reddit’s […]
Google confirmed it’s putting an end to a feature that allowed users to access playable podcasts directly from the Google Search results in favor of offering podcast recommendations. Officially launched in 2019, the feature surfaced podcasts when they matched a user’s query, including in those cases where a user specifically included the word “podcast” in their search […]
Facebook announced today that it’s introducing more comment moderation tools and controls to make it easier for creators to manage conversations on the social network. Creators will now be able to search comments by keywords, including emojis, commenter names and dates, on their posts and take bulk actions, such as liking or hiding. These new […]
For another year in a row, TikTok has found itself as the social app kids and teens are spending the most time using throughout the day, even outpacing YouTube. According to an ongoing annual review of kids’ and teens’ app usage and behavior globally, the younger demographic — minors ranging in ages from 4 through 18 — […]
Google is rushing to take part in the sudden fervor for conversational AI, driven by the pervasive success of rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bard, the company’s new AI experiment, aims to “combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models.” Not short on ambition, Google! The model, […]
Cybercriminals are actively exploiting a two-year-old VMware vulnerability as part of a ransomware campaign targeting thousands of organizations worldwide. Reports emerged over the weekend that VMware ESXi servers left vulnerable and unpatched against a remotely exploitable bug from 2021 were compromised and scrambled by a ransomware variant dubbed “ESXiArgs.” ESXi is VMware’s hypervisor, a technology that […]
