March 14, 2025

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan asks Big Tech if Biden tried to censor AI

On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the Biden Administration that might suggest the former President “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor lawful speech” in AI products. The Trump Administration’s top technology advisers previously signaled it would pick […]

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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…