Steve Thomas - IT Consultant

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill this afternoon that would require TikTok-owner ByteDance to sell the popular social media app or see it banned in the United States. Efforts to ban TikTok go back to the Trump Administration, but the issue has been revived in recent months. The House already passed a similar […]

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New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles. The two new models, part of the Facebook parent company’s Llama line of artificial intelligence tools, are both open-source, helping them stand apart from competing offerings from OpenAI and other well-known names. Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama […]

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Apple has removed the Meta-owned end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp from its App Store in China following a government order citing national security concerns, the news agency Reuters reported Friday. Meta’s newer, Twitter-esque text-based social networking app, Threads, has also been pulled from the App Store for the same reason, it said. “The Cyberspace Administration […]

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TikTok owner ByteDance is facing fresh questions about its compliance with the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), an online governance and content moderation framework that puts a legal obligation on larger platforms to mitigate systemic risks in areas like youth mental health. The EU’s latest concerns about TikTok’s DSA compliance center on the launch […]

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Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union starting Tuesday. Developers who opt in — and who meet Apple’s criteria, including app notarization requirements — will be able to offer iPhone apps for direct download to EU users from their own websites. It’s a massive change for a […]

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Spotify isn’t the only one to dabble with AI playlists — on Tuesday, Amazon announced it would do the same. Amazon Music is now testing Maestro, an AI playlist generator, allowing U.S. customers on both iOS and Android to create playlists using spoken or written prompts, which can even contain emojis. Amazon suggests that in […]

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While the launch of a survey isn't necessarily a commitment to federating Ghost, it is another signal pointing to the broader reshaping of the web that's now underway.

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iGBA was an ad-supported copy of the open-source project GBA4iOS that offered a Game Boy game emulator for iOS.

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Airchat is a new social media app that encourages users to “just talk.” A previous version of Airchat was released last year, but the team — led by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder product exec Brian Norgard — rebuilt the app and relaunched it on iOS and Android yesterday. Currently invite-only, Airchat is […]

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This represents an over 8,000% increase from $1.8 million in the first quarter of 2023, when just 21 apps were available.

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The Internet’s mega-platforms are slowly merging into a great blob of sameness, and even the hottest companies in the world are not immune from the trend. TikTok’s winning strategy to focus on short-form, vertical video has found fans amongst other Internet platforms, and now TikTok is taking a page from its rivals books, reportedly borrowing […]

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Threads. Mastodon. Bluesky. Substack Notes. Post. Nostr. Spoutible. There’s no shortage of X competitors in the months following the acquisition of the text-based social network formerly known as Twitter by Elon Musk. Now you can add one more startup to that lineup: Lyrak, a new X rival that aims to differentiate itself by focusing on […]

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