Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would strip away the liability shield that social media platforms hold dear when those companies are found to have boosted anti-vaccine conspiracies and other kinds of health misinformation. The Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), would create a…
Conventional wisdom holds that one ought let sleeping does lie. But no one says you’re barred from tracking them while they do. New York-based smart collar maker Fi announced today that it’s adding sleep to the list of the device’s tracking. The added feature uses the collar’s on-board motion sensing to monitor your best friend’s…
Slack set the standard in many ways for what knowledge workers want and expect out of a workplace collaboration app these days, but a lot has been left on the table when it comes to frontline workers. Today, one of the software companies that has built a popular app for that frontline crowd to become…
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Extra Crunch for July 21, 2021. It’s been a good day for crypto fans, with major coins seeing some recovery from recent lows. Bitcoin and ether remain depressed…
Twitter will test the use of Reddit-like upvote and downvote buttons as a way to better highlight the more interesting and relevant replies in a longer conversation thread. The company announced this afternoon it would begin what it’s calling a “small research experiment” that will add upvote and downvote buttons to replies, or even replace…
Coding is not just for engineers and computer programmers anymore: the pace of technology and its growing ubiquity mean that even non-tech roles will require workers to have some degree of knowledge to do their jobs in the future. Today a company called Sololearn — which has built a popular mobile-first education platform to meet…
What with the planet collapsing and democracy under constant attack from all quarters – you know, just the usual – one or two members of the global population have, idly or not, wondered if the private sector might want to step up? I mean, as well as shooting billionaires into space. At the same time,…
Samsung just sent out invites for its next Unpacked event. There are those companies that like to sneak hints into their invites — and then there’s Samsung. The note leads with the big, bold words “Get ready to unfold” and features a pair of flat-colored objects that can reasonably be said to resemble the form…
Michael Kebede Contributor Maine has joined a growing number of cities, counties and states that are rejecting dangerously biased surveillance technologies like facial recognition. The new law, which is the strongest statewide facial recognition law in the country, not only received broad, bipartisan support, but it passed unanimously in both chambers of the state legislature.…
Blue Origin successfully completed its first crewed launch Tuesday, sending four human passengers to space – including the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos. The result of billions of dollars of investment, dozens of test launches and some petty squabbling amongst ultra-rich founders, the triumph of the New Shepard, along with that of Virgin Galactic earlier this…
