The Download: DeepSeek for fortune telling, and the second private moon landing

March 3, 2025
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. How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that…

Jolla founders take the wraps off an AI assistant to power up their push for privacy-friendly GenAI

March 3, 2025

Jolla, the erstwhile mobile maker turned privacy-centric AI business — via sister startup, Venho.ai — has taken the wraps off an AI assistant that’s touted as a “fully private” alternative to letting data-mining cloud giants crawl all over your personal information.   The AI assistant is designed to integrate with apps like email, calendar and […]

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Cloudsmith raises $23M to improve software supply chain security

March 3, 2025

The software supply chain is notoriously porous: a reported 81% of codebases contain high- or critical-risk open source vulnerabilities. A single vulnerability can have a far-reaching impact on the wider software supply chain, as evidenced by the likes of the Log4Shell exploit that saw millions of applications exposed to potential remote code execution hacks via […]

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Opera announces a new agentic feature for its browser

March 3, 2025

Norway-based browser company Opera announced a new agent feature called Browser Operator as a feature preview. The Browser Operator feature, when released, will complete tasks for you on different websites, the company claims. In a demo video, the company showed the agent finding a right pair of socks from Walmart, tickets for a football match […]

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Google’s Gemini now lets you ask questions using videos or what’s on your screen

March 3, 2025

Google is adding new features to its AI assistant, Gemini, that let users ask it questions using video or content on the screen in real time. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025 in Barcelona, the company showed off a new “Screenshare” feature, which lets users share what’s on their phone’s screen with Gemini and […]

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How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth

March 3, 2025
In the glow of her laptop screen, 31-year-old Zhang Rui typed carefully, following a prompt she’d found on Chinese social media: “You are a BaZi master. Analyze my fate—describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I am a female, born June 17, 1993, at 4:42 a.m. in Hangzhou.” DeepSeek R1, China’s most…

Signal is the number-one downloaded app in the Netherlands. But why?

March 2, 2025

Privacy-focused messaging app Signal has been flying high in the Dutch app stores this past month, sitting many days as the most downloaded free app on iOS and Android for all categories, per data from multiple app-tracking platforms such as Sensor Tower. The app has experienced surges in popularity through the years, often in response […]

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Apple might not release a truly ‘modernized’ Siri until 2027

March 2, 2025

Apple is struggling to rebuild Siri for the age of generative AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who says the company might not release “a true modernized, conversational version of Siri” until iOS 20 comes out in 2027. That doesn’t mean there won’t be big Siri updates before then. A new version Siri will reportedly […]

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Flora is building an AI-powered ‘infinite canvas’ for creative professionals

March 2, 2025

With just a few words, AI models can be prompted to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.” In other words, they’re not built for actual creative professionals. That’s something Wong is hoping to […]

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