Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space.
You also can send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew at tips@techcrunch.com.
For more secure communications, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop instructions and links to encrypted messaging apps.
The Space Force has contracted out its next “responsive space” mission, and this one is a doozy.
The two awardees, Rocket Lab and startup True Anomaly, will each build and launch spacecraft that will conduct rendezvous and proximity operations on orbit.
According to a post from Ghost founder John O’Nolan, the company — which is structured as a nonprofit — is considering federating Ghost over ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers the fediverse.
It also asks how federation would personally benefit Ghost users.
With Ghost, however, the idea could be to federate the accounts of the writers who use Ghost to publish their content.
After seeing O’Nolan’s post, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput reached out to help with the ActivityPub integration, which O’Nolan accepted.
In addition to Newton, other notable Ghost users include 404Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.
A few months after its launch, how is Apple’s Vision Pro faring?
I am a long-term bull on augmented reality, virtual reality, and face-computers in general.
So it is to my partial chagrin that the hype around the Apple Vision Pro has faded more rapidly than I anticipated.
But I anticipated the Apple brand to keep the hardware in the news — and atop our collective minds — longer than it managed after its launch.
I find it archaic that my monitors are akin to digital chalkboards when they should be built into my glasses.
Meta said on Monday that it plans to “temporarily” shutter Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction imposed by the Turkish competition authority last month over the way Meta shares data between Threads and Instagram.
In 2022, Turkey imposed a $18.6 million fine on Meta for combining user data across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Initially, the only way Meta allowed users to delete a Threads profile was by deleting their whole Instagram account, though it later introduced a separate mechanism for those wishing to ditch their Threads profile only.
Turkish regulators had announced the investigation on the way Meta linked Threads with Instagram in December, concluding last month that there was a strong case to answer for.
The latter of these options means a user’s profile can be resurrected when and if Threads is available in the country again.
Additionally, in a notable step last month, the European Union opened a formal investigation into whether Meta’s tactic breaches obligations that apply to Facebook and Instagram under the competition-focused Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The Board’s opinion on “consent or pay” is expected to provide guidance on how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should be applied in this area.
It’s worth noting the Board’s opinion will look at “consent or pay” generally, rather than specifically investigating Meta’s deployment.
Nor is Meta the only service provider pushing “consent or pay” on users.
“However, the current ‘Consent or Pay’ model sets in stone a coercive dynamic, leaving users without an actual choice.
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best.
But what if companies were to open up those referral bonuses to people outside the organization?
Draftboard lets employers post referral bonuses and have referrers compete to earn them by scouring their networks for talent.
Free for companies, Draftboard notifies its roughly 1,000 referrers — in Draftboard’s parlance, “scouts” — as referrals move through the different stages of companies’ recruiting processes.
Referrers are graded on the quality of their referrals, and Draftboard takes a 20% cut of each referral bonus.
The startup charges a listing fee (subscription fee) to publish jobs on the platform and a success fee when a hire is made.
“The listing fee ensures buy-in from startups to the two-way marketplace and a commitment to the recruiters they’re working with,” Kim said.
In addition to early- and late-stage startups, Kim said the platform also works with larger in-house talent teams to fill challenging roles.
“More than 50% of our customers have great in-house talent teams, but they continue to post roles on Paraform.
“We’re already branching out into research, science, manufacturing and defense roles due to the demand we’re seeing from potential customers,” Kim said.
Bluesky now allows heads of states to sign up for the social networkSocial networking platform Bluesky lifted its ban on sign-ups for heads of state over the weekend.
This applies to recent/prominent heads of state as well,” the company had said at that time.
Bluesky faced moderation challenges early in its lifespan and battled issues like allowing racial slurs in handles.
With the social network now allowing political heads to join the platform, there could be new types of moderation issues that it hasn’t faced yet.
However, Bluesky users don’t have to rely on a central algorithm to look at different kinds of political content, as they can subscribe to different feeds.
Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has since 2015 been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets, shielding them against losses from pests, diseases and/or extreme weather events like floods and droughts.
“Partnering with this group of like-minded investors to boost the growth of Pula globally is a very exciting milestone in driving our triple 100 vision, through which we intend to bring insurance to 100 million smallholder farmers.
Pula embeds insurance in partners’ productsInstead of selling insurance directly to farmers, Pula has built a distribution channel of over 100 partners, including charitable organizations, banks, governments and agricultural input companies, to serve even the hard-to-reach farmers, by embedding insurance, for instance, in farm input costs or credit.
Each product Pula offers is customized to suit the demands of its clients, and the needs of the beneficiary farmers.
Pula, through insurance partners, has been offering rural families in Nigeria comprehensive coverage against banditry, disease and death of animals.
Government spyware is another reason to use an ad blockerAd blockers might seem like an unlikely defense in the fight against spyware, but new reporting casts fresh light on how spyware makers are weaponizing online ads to allow governments to conduct surveillance.
Spyware makers are reportedly capable of locating and stealthily infecting specific targets with spyware using banner ads.
One of the startups that worked on an ad-based spyware infection system is Intellexa, a European company that develops the Predator spyware.
Ad blockers don’t just hide the ads, but rather block the underlying website from loading the ads to begin with.
In 2022, the FBI said in a public service announcement to use an ad blocker as an online safety precaution.
