Techmeme
July 25, 2025, 1:30 PM

Top News

Sara Fischer / Axios:
Meta will no longer accept political, election, or social issue ads in the EU from October, like Google, with both citing incoming regulation  —  Meta on Friday said starting in October it will no longer accept political, election or social issue ads in the European Union …
Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Some 4chan users claim they breached Tea, the women's dating safety app that has topped the US App Store charts, exposing selfies and drivers' licenses  —  Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google's mobile app development platform, Firebase …
Angela Yang / NBC News:
A look at Tea, a women-only safety app with 4M users that lets users anonymously assign red or green flags to local men, as it goes viral with 900K new signups  —  “I've seen so many people I know on the app, it's crazy,” said one user of Tea, which topped the Apple App Store charts this week.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft previews Copilot Appearance, a virtual character with real-time expressions, voice, and conversational memory, for some users in the US, UK, Canada  —  Microsoft has a new Copilot Appearance virtual character that responds with real-time expressions.
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Michael Acton / Financial Times:
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Google is testing a vibe-coding tool called Opal that lets users create mini web apps using text prompts or remix existing apps, available in the US via Labs  —  AI-powered coding tools have become so popular over the past few months that almost every major tech company is either using one or making its own.
Jonathan Greig / The Record:
The US Treasury sanctions three senior North Korean officials accused of tricking companies into hiring North Koreans using stolen identities as IT workers  —  Three senior North Korean officials involved in IT schemes have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft's Recall is meeting a lot of resistance from app developers, with Brave and AdGuard joining Signal in blocking the controversial Windows AI tool  —  Brave and AdGuard are both following Signal's lead in blocking Microsoft's AI tool. … Microsoft's controversial Recall feature …
Jason Snell / Six Colors:
Hands-on with macOS 26: the interface is a mess, like a poorly imported iOS design, but the power of Spotlight and Shortcuts will delight many longtime users  —  For many years, Apple's annual operating-system cycle seemed to be all about the iPhone, with the occasional bone thrown to the Mac or iPad.
Dan Moren / Six Colors:
Jason Snell / Six Colors:
Lauren Goode / Wired:
Anysphere launches Bugbot, an AI-powered tool that integrates with GitHub to detect coding errors introduced by humans or AI agents, for $40 per month per user  —  One of the most popular platforms for AI-assisted programming says the next era of vibe coding is all about supercharging error detection.
Morgan Sung / KQED:
Sen. Alex Padilla grants the Internet Archive federal depository status, making it a part of a network of over 1,100 libraries that archive government documents  —  The San Francisco-based Internet Archive now has federal depository status, joining a network of over 1,100 libraries …
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information:
Sources: GPT-5 shows improved performance in coding, particularly in practical software engineering tasks, outperforming prior OpenAI models and Claude Sonnet 4  —  GPT-5 is almost here, and we're hearing good things.  The early reaction from at least one person who's used the unreleased version was extremely positive.

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More News

Financial Times:
Bluesky: @shlead, @mims, @dannygroner, and @jessefelderLinkedIn: Benjamin SteveninForums: Slashdot
Reuters:
Meir Orbach / CTech:
Richard Lawler / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Todd Bishop / GeekWire: