Remember when you would “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, annoy them or just start a poke war?
Well, Facebook is trying to bring back that experience with some small updates to the poking feature.
Plus, Facebook added the ability to poke a friend when you search for them on the social network.
Facebook says these small changes have led to a 13x spike in poking in the past month.
Facebook never defined what the idea behind poking was, and left it up to users’ interpretation, with some choosing to use it a way to flirt.
Linktree is now allowing users to highlight links better with featured layout functionLink-in-bio startup Linktree introduced new features today including a featured layout to highlight links better, the ability to fetch the latest posts from Instagram, and support for a more prominent profile picture.
The company said that the new featured layout is great for highlighting certain links.
When you select “Featured layout” for a link it automatically expands with a content preview for links from YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Instagram.
In January, Linktree introduced a feature that automatically fetched the latest posts from YouTube and TikTok.
The company is now extending support for Instagram, with support for up to six of the latest posts and Reels from your account.
“[W]e await feedback from the Irish Data Protection Commission [DPC], our lead data protection regulator in the EU,” he added.
While Meta’s compliance with the GDPR is led by the Irish DPC, under the regulation’s one-stop-shop.
This structure does not mean the Irish authority gets final say on Meta’s compliance with EU privacy rules, though.
In the case of Meta, this has frequently led to objections from other data protection authorities which have landed stiffer enforcements than the DPC originally proposed.
So who gets the final say on the GDPR compliance of Meta’s consent mechanism is complex too.
Caller ID app Truecaller today blocks between 38 and 40 billion spam calls annually for its 374 million+ users.
The update is Android-only: Apple does not allow Truecaller (or other caller ID services) to check callers’ spammer status to block calls automatically on iOS.
But to get the best out of the app, users have to engage and tweak their own lists.
This isn’t the first AI feature at Truecaller: it provides an AI assistant that screens calls to identify why the caller has dialled the user.
After updating the Truecaller app to v13.58 or later, users can find the new spam-blocking feature by going through Settings > Block.
Documentation startup Mintlify says dozens of customers had GitHub tokens exposed in a data breach at the start of the month and publicly disclosed last week.
Mintlify helps developers create documentation for their software and source code by requesting access and tapping directly into the customer’s GitHub source code repositories.
These private tokens allow GitHub users to share their account access with third parties apps, including companies like Mintlify.
“The targets of this attack were GitHub tokens of our users,” Wang told TechCrunch by email.
We are currently working with GitHub and our customers to uncover if any of the other tokens were used by the attacker,” Wang said.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov said on his channel today that the company secured $330 million in investment through bond sales last week.
“This bond offering was oversubscribed, and we were delighted to have global funds of the highest caliber with impeccable reputations as participants.
The maturity for the bonds is either 2026 or when Telegram goes public, whichever is earlier.
The chat app, which has more than 900 million users, issued bonds worth $210 million last year.
Earlier this month, the company announced that personal users can convert their accounts to business accounts by paying a subscription fee.
Apple is looking to team up with Google for a mega-deal to leverage the Gemini AI model for features on iPhone, Bloomberg reported.
There is surmounting pressure on Apple to catch up with competitors in the AI field such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and even Google.
Later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Gemini’s responses were “completely unacceptable”.
Earlier this year, the company partnered with Samsung to introduce Gemini-powered AI features on the Galaxy S24 series of devices.
We have reached out to Apple and Google for a comment, and we will update the story if we hear back from them.
Elon Musk’s xAI has open-sourced the base code of Grok AI model, but without any training code.
In a blog post, xAI said that the model wasn’t tuned for any particular application such as using it for conversations.
Last week, Musk noted on X that xAI intended to open-source the Grok model this week.
Some AI-powered tool makers are already talking about using Grok in their solutions.
Yep, thanks to @elonmusk and xAI team for open-sourcing the base model for Grok.
India is walking back on a recent AI advisory after receiving criticism from many local and global entrepreneurs and investors.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT shared an updated AI advisory with industry stakeholders on Friday that no longer asked them to take the government approval before launching or deploying an AI model to users in the South Asian market.
Under the revised guidelines, firms are instead advised to label under-tested and unreliable AI models to inform users of their potential fallibility or unreliability.
The revision follows India’s IT ministry receiving severe criticism earlier this month from many high-profile individuals.
Less than a year ago, the ministry had declined to regulate AI growth, identifying the sector as vital to India’s strategic interests.
TikTok users, however, are not taking the changing political winds — and their consequences — sitting down.
TechCrunch spoke with several TikTok users that are incensed about, and fighting back against the potential ban of TikTok.
But while the talk of a possible ban is getting all the press, what about the potential of TikTok simply being divested from its parent company, Bytedance?
That would resolve the United States’ government’s issues, right?
So, the bill may have two tracks in it for TikTok, but it could really just be a single-issue law in practice.
