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Devin Coldewey

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AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. But it’s not all bad news. (Actually, it is all bad news, because I wrote up the good news...
Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The upcoming 7.0 version adds usernames, but the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker, explained that this was nowhere near as...
Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death… the death of the company, at least. He told TechCrunch that the company is a startup whose fortunes may be swayed by the whims of multi-billion-dollar rivals — but that’s no reason to give up and go home. Appearing on...
As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that you might think of as a mobile weather station for the sea, and is ready to emerge...
Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for historical context. While the underlying issue is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” oversensitive. But the model didn’t...
Your phone’s camera is as much software as it is hardware, and Glass is hoping to improve both. But while its wild anamorphic lens creeps to market, the company (running on $9.3 million in new money) has released an AI-powered camera upgrade that it says vastly improves image quality...
Mechanical keyboards are everywhere these days, and there’s a larger variety now than ever before. If you’re looking to pick one up but want to look beyond the most common layouts and types, read on. Here are eight mechanical keyboards that stick out from the pack. Feker Alice 80 Image Credits:...
The vastness of the ocean allows polluters to evade detection in all but the most egregious violations. SkyTruth aims to change that with Cerulean, an orbital monitoring platform for coastal waters that spots not just oil slicks but the ships that produce them faster and with more certainty than...
Today is demo day at Alchemist Accelerator, which focuses on very early stage startups from technical founders. 15 companies are presenting in this batch, but here are four we thought worth a closer look. Alchemist also scored an additional $2 million from Mayfield to keep investing like this, so...
Those of us lucky enough to be sitting by a window can predict the weather just by looking outside, but for the less privileged, weather forecasting and analysis is getting better and better. Tomorrow.io just released the results from its first two radar satellites, which, thanks to machine learning,...