Techmeme
July 25, 2025, 2:20 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; Tea confirms the breach also impacted some DMs  —  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.
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.
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 …
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Michael Acton / Financial Times:
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 …
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.
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.
Jason Snell / Six Colors:
Dan Moren / Six Colors:
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.
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.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
App Spotlight: Grow Payments for Zoho CRM  —  App Spotlight brings you hand-picked solutions that enhance your Zoho apps and tools.  Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all of our apps, integrations …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI Finally Ships Its Superapp, Meta's AI Price War, ChatGPT Cheating At Brown
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The 'Waymo' Lab For New Materials
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Hard Fork:
Do Social Media Bans Work? + A Conversation About A.I. Consciousness + Tool Time
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Access:
The AI writing app fighting AI slop
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Lenny's Podcast:
Adam Mosseri: AI is a tailwind for authenticity
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:20 PM ET, July 25, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Financial Times:
More: FlowingDataBluesky: @shlead, @mims, @dannygroner, and @jessefelderLinkedIn: Benjamin SteveninForums: Slashdot
Reuters:
Meir Orbach / CTech:

Earlier Picks

Richard Lawler / The Verge:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Todd Bishop / GeekWire: