It’s a bittersweet weekend over on Bluesky, where one of the platform’s most unforgettable accounts has vanished—though maybe not forever. The account, known simply (and ominously) as The Louvre of Bluesky, earned a reputation for striking fear into the hearts of bad posters everywhere. Sure, it shared its own commentary and clever jokes. But what really made it legendary were the screenshots—those perfect, damning captures of unhinged posts that revealed the platform’s strangest instincts. It’s tough to write a real tribute now that the Louvre is gone. There’s no easy way to catalog the many shades of internet weirdness it…
Author: Intern
Cloudflare is drawing a line in the sand—and it wants AI companies to pay up if they want to cross it. The cloud infrastructure giant, which quietly powers about 20% of everything you see online, just unveiled what could be its most ambitious move yet: an experiment called Pay per Crawl. The idea is simple in theory, but potentially transformative in practice. Under the new model, publishers would be able to charge AI firms every single time their bots crawl a site to ingest content. It’s a bold bet on the future of the web—one where the flood of AI…
Investing in Y Combinator startups has consistently proven to be one of the most promising paths to outsized returns. “If you look at the data: 6% of YC companies become unicorns, and of that 6%, a quarter become decacorns,” Kulveer Taggar told. Taggar, a two-time YC alum, is perhaps best known for founding Zeus Living, the property management startup that raised over $150 million in funding. Taggar believes so strongly in the continued potential of YC-backed startups that he’s launched Phosphor Capital, a venture firm focused exclusively on investing in them. Since its debut last year, Phosphor has raised $34…
Republican lawmakers on Thursday passed a sweeping reconciliation bill that will roll back major parts of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), dealing a significant blow to several clean energy sectors. The legislation narrowly passed the House in a 218-214 vote, with two Republicans breaking ranks to oppose it. It now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk, where he is expected to sign it into law. Under the bill, incentives for solar, wind, and clean hydrogen will be slashed or expire earlier than planned, dramatically shifting the landscape for renewable energy developers. In contrast, nuclear and geothermal energy will retain some…
Earlier this week, Instagram Threads rolled out what it described as its most-requested feature so far: direct messages (DMs). But instead of widespread applause, the update has sparked a wave of criticism—particularly from women—who say there should be an option to opt out of DMs completely due to concerns about harassment. While most major social platforms, including X, Bluesky, and Mastodon, already offer DMs, some Threads users actually liked that this feature was absent. For them, not having private messages created a different, more comfortable environment. Comments like these were common in response to Threads’ announcement, which Instagram head Adam…
Even Tesla’s energy storage division—long a rare bright spot in the company’s sprawling operations—can’t seem to escape the turbulence swirling around the electric automaker. For the second quarter in a row, installations of Tesla’s Powerwall home batteries and Megapack utility-scale storage systems have fallen. According to the latest figures released by Tesla, the company deployed 9.6 gigawatt-hours of stationary storage in Q2. That’s down from 10.4 GWh in the first quarter—a decline of about 8%. It’s a sharp reversal from late last year, when Tesla’s storage business hit an all-time high. In the final quarter of 2024, the company deployed…
A critical security flaw in a shadowy Android spyware operation called Catwatchful has exposed thousands of people—both the customers using the app and the unsuspecting victims whose phones were being secretly monitored. The vulnerability, discovered by Canadian security researcher Eric Daigle, effectively spilled Catwatchful’s entire user database onto the open internet. This cache included email addresses and plaintext passwords that customers used to log in and track the stolen data from targeted devices. Catwatchful presents itself as a “child monitoring app” that claims to be “invisible and cannot be detected.” In reality, it quietly uploads nearly everything from a victim’s…
ICEBlock, a new iPhone app designed for anonymously reporting sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, has surged to the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store rankings. Ironically, the app’s sudden popularity was fueled by public criticism from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. According to CNN, most of ICEBlock’s roughly 20,000 users are in Los Angeles, where ICE raids have increased in recent weeks. After Bondi’s remarks late Monday denouncing the app, it went viral almost overnight. By Tuesday afternoon, ICEBlock had become one of the most downloaded free iPhone apps in the country. The app lets people…
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has confirmed that plans to move Tumblr over to WordPress infrastructure have been put on hold indefinitely. Speaking on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Mullenweg explained that the company decided to focus on projects that users can see and care about more directly, rather than a big backend overhaul. “This was more like an infrastructure thing, kind of like any big re-architecture,” he said. “I still want to do it. It’s just cleaner. But right now, we’re not working on it.” One reason for the migration was to better integrate Tumblr into the broader open social web,…
Apple is exploring using AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic to power an updated version of Siri, rather than relying solely on its own technology, according to a report from Bloomberg. While Apple continues to develop an internal project called LLM Siri, the company has reportedly asked both OpenAI and Anthropic to train versions of their AI models that could run on Apple’s cloud infrastructure for testing. Apple had planned to launch an AI-enabled Siri in 2025, but the release was delayed until 2026 or later due to technical challenges. The company has faced increasing pressure as rivals like Google,…
Campfire, the AI-powered accounting startup challenging legacy ERP systems, has raised a $35 million Series A round led by Accel. The round also included Foundation Capital, Y Combinator, Capital 49, and angel investors such as Mercury’s CFO Dan Kang. Founded by finance veteran John Glasgow, Campfire launched in 2023 to replace traditional accounting software like NetSuite with an LLM-driven alternative that automates reconciliation, cash flow analysis, and reporting. In under a year, Campfire attracted a notable roster of customers, including Advisor360, Rhumbix, and Fooji, all of which migrated from NetSuite. At the seed stage alone, Campfire grew to around 100…
Former President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday that a sale is finally going through to sell TikTok to a consortium of high-net-worth American investors—a move that, if it happens, would reshape the app’s uncertain future in the U.S. Speaking on Fox News in an interview on Sunday, Trump said a purchaser has emerged to buy the extremely popular short-form video app from its Chinese parent, ByteDance. “We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way,” Trump declared. “I think I’ll probably need China’s approval. I think President Xi [Jinping] will likely do it.” He refrained from identifying any buyers or…
The FBI and leading cybersecurity firms are sounding the alarm: Scattered Spider, one of the most notorious hacking groups in recent years, has shifted its sights to the airline and transportation sectors. In a short but urgent statement shared with TechCrunch on Friday, the FBI confirmed it had “recently observed” cyberattacks linked to the group hitting airlines. Executives at Google’s cybersecurity arm, Mandiant, and Palo Alto Networks’ research unit, Unit 42, echoed the warning. They said they have seen fresh evidence of Scattered Spider targeting aviation companies, a troubling escalation given the group’s reputation for brazen and damaging attacks. Scattered…
Meta is definitely offering hefty multimillion-dollar pay packages to AI researchers when wooing them to its new superintelligence lab. But no one is really getting a $100 million “signing bonus,” according to a poached researcher and comments from a leaked internal meeting. During a company-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday, leaked to The Verge, some of Meta’s top executives were asked about the bonuses that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had offered to top researchers. Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth implied that only a few people in very senior leadership roles may have been offered that kind of money, but clarified…
A crane collapsed at SpaceX’s South Texas rocket facility this week, and the company’s newly formed city won’t say if anyone was hurt. On June 23, a crane being used to clean up debris from the most recent SpaceX rocket explosion collapsed at the company’s launch complex. Footage of the accident was captured by Lab Padre, one of the content creators who film and photograph the site on a regular basis. But it was filmed from far away, making it impossible to tell whether anyone was harmed or in danger. SpaceX has not publicly acknowledged the collapse and did not…