July 3, 2025

The Download: AI agents hype, and Google’s electricity plans

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality —Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs. At Google’s I/O 2025 event in May, the company…

Technology

Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly

November 28, 2022

Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, has raised $8 million in Series A investment.  London-based venture capital firm Anthemis co-led the growth round alongside crypto-focused fund Dragonfly Capital. Anthemis is a follow-on investor in Ejara, having also led the fintech’s $2 million […]

Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

What’s next in cybersecurity

November 28, 2022
This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to let you know what to expect in the coming year. In the world of cybersecurity, there is always one certainty: more hacks. That is the unavoidable constant in an industry that will spend an…

Great Wall of porn obscures China protest news on Twitter

November 28, 2022

Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results. There has been a “significant uptick” in these tweets over the last three days, according to a China-focused […]

Great Wall of porn obscures China protest news on Twitter by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

The Download: AI conquers Minecraft, and babies after death

November 25, 2022
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing The news: An AI that binged on 70,000 hours of people playing Minecraft has learned how to play the…

A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing

November 25, 2022
OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source…

UK to criminalize deepfake porn sharing without consent

November 25, 2022

Brace for yet another expansion to the UK’s Online Safety Bill: The Ministry of Justice has announced changes to the law which are aimed at protecting victims of revenge porn, pornographic deepfakes and other abuses related to the taking and sharing of intimate imagery without consent — in a crackdown on a type of abuse […]

UK to criminalize deepfake porn sharing without consent by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

We can now use cells from dead people to create new life. But who gets to decide?

November 25, 2022
This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Peter Zhu was just 19 years old when he died following a skiing accident in West Point, New York. His donor card made clear he had wanted to donate his organs. But…