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August 4, 2025, 2:30 PM
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| Cloudflare: |
Cloudflare says Perplexity uses stealth crawling techniques, like undeclared user agents and rotating IP addresses, to evade robots.txt rules and network blocks — We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls …
More: TechCrunch, The Verge, PCMag, WinBuzzer, and Perplexity
X: @eastdakota and @cloudflare
Forums: Hacker News, r/technology, Lobsters, and Slashdot
| Mike Isaac / New York Times: |
Silicon Valley has shifted from Web 2.0 to a new “hard tech”, AI-dominated era with fewer perks and a more serious mood, as startups use San Francisco as a base — In a scene in HBO's “Silicon Valley” in 2014, a character who had just sold his idea to a fictional tech company …
More: User Mag. Bluesky: @romitmehta.com. Mastodon: @ricmac@mastodon.social. X: @obrien, @s_sullivan, @profschleich, @jjvincent, @mikeisaac, and @smchatter1
| Natallie Rocha / New York Times: |
How 20-something CEOs like Cognition AI's Scott Wu, Cursor's Michael Truell, Cluely's Roy Lee, and Scale AI's Alexandr Wang are swarming San Francisco's AI boom — Some dropped out of M.I.T., Georgetown and Stanford. Others decided not to go to college. They all say they could not afford …
More: New York Times and Implicator.ai
| Natalie Lung / Bloomberg: |
Lyft partners with Baidu to launch autonomous vehicles in Germany and the UK in 2026, pending regulatory approval; Lyft will deploy Baidu's sixth-gen robotaxis — Lyft Inc. said it's partnering with China's Baidu Inc. to launch autonomous vehicles in Europe starting next year … | Bloomberg: |
Amazon says it is closing its Wondery podcast studio and will break up its operations as part of a broad reorganization; a source says ~110 will lose their jobs — As podcasting becomes video-oriented, Amazon is shuffling Wondery into Audible and a new “creator services” team while cutting approximately 110 staff members| Olivia Solon / Bloomberg: |
Spotify says it is updating prices across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific; an example email had a €1/month rise — Spotify Technology SA shares gained in premarket trading after the company announced it's raising premium subscription prices across many markets outside the US.
More: Spotify, Reuters, MacRumors, Engadget, Thurrott, 9to5Google, TechCrunch, How-To Geek, AppleInsider, The Verge, 9to5Mac, Billboard, Investor's Business Daily, Benzinga, The Wrap, Android Authority, Droid Life, Neowin, PhoneArena, GB News, Proactive, Moneycontrol, Moneycontrol, Hypebot, MarketWatch, Sherwood News, and NDTV Profit
| MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: |
OpenAI says it will hit 700M weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500M in March and up 4x YoY, and has 5M paying business users, up from June's 3M — OpenAI is set to hit 700 million weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500 million in March …
More: TechCrunch, Neowin, UPI, Search Engine Journal, iPhone in Canada, Analytics India Magazine, WinBuzzer, and The Decoder
X: @nickaturley and @kevinweil
| Ian Carlos Campbell / Engadget: |
OpenAI says ChatGPT now offers “gentle reminders” to take breaks during long sessions, and it is building tools to better detect signs of emotional distress — OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will now remind users to take breaks if they're in a particularly long chat with AI.| Matt Kapko / CyberScoop: |
CrowdStrike's 2025 Threat Hunting Report: 320+ investigations into North Korean operatives in remote IT jobs in the US, Europe, and elsewhere in the past year — Threat hunters saw North Korean operatives almost daily, reflecting a 220% year-over-year increase in activity, CrowdStrike said in a new report.
More: CrowdStrike, CSO, Tom's Hardware, PCMag, Fortune, TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, and SlashGear. Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to
| Fred Lambert / Electrek: |
Transcripts from the trial over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash: Tesla withheld crash‑snapshot data and took years to admit it existed or was relevant to the case — Tesla was caught withholding data, lying about it, and misdirecting authorities in the wrongful death case involving Autopilot that it lost this week.
More: Bloomberg, InsideEVs, and The Autopian
Bluesky: @mmasnick and @carlquintanilla
Forums: Hacker News, r/SelfDrivingCars, and r/RealTesla
| Dan Milmo / The Guardian: |
The UK Online Safety Act's approach to keeping children safe online has become a rallying point for the right in the UK and the US over alleged censorship — Farage accuses government of being ‘so below the belt’ as right wing doubles down on censorship claims — The UK's Online Safety Act has been greatly anticipated.
More: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reclaim The Net, and Reclaim The Net
Bluesky: @gnomeicide and @eff.org
X: @christinatasty, @l_wastell, @reclaimthenethq, @sam_dumitriu, @matthewlesh, @charlottew39752, and @altymcaltalt3. Forums: r/ukpolitics
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Elon Musk says Vine's video archive is being brought back, and xAI's newly launched Grok Imagine, available to X Premium+ subscribers, is “AI Vine” — Elon Musk says he's bringing back Vine — sort of. The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered …
More: Engadget, Moneycontrol, New York Post, WinBuzzer, crypto.news, iPhone in Canada, Benzinga, and primetimer.com
| Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal: |
Connecticut-based Amphenol plans to acquire North Carolina-based CommScope's broadband connectivity and cable unit for ~$10.5B, including debt, amid the AI boom — Maker of interconnect products is buying CommScope's broadband connectivity and cable unit — Amphenol said it would buy … | Lu Wang / Bloomberg: |
Simulated markets study: without explicit instruction, AI trading bots collude to fix prices, hoard profits, and sideline human traders, a regulatory challenge — It's a regulator's nightmare: Hedge funds unleash AI bots on stock and bond exchanges — but they don't just compete, they collude.
More: Fortune, ZeroHedge News, The Decoder, Bloomberg Law, NBER, Tom's Hardware, and The Post Millennial
| Sheera Frenkel / New York Times: |
Google, OpenAI, Meta, and VCs are increasingly embracing the US military industrial complex, a major Silicon Valley cultural shift supported by President Trump — In a major shift, Google, OpenAI, Meta and venture capitalists — many of whom had once forsworn involvement in war — have embraced the military industrial complex.
Bluesky: @sheeraf
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