By TechCrunch Staff

Thursday, August 8, 2024

Welcome to your TechCrunch afternoon. Today we've got news for you about the ADT hack, Apple's DMA compliance revision, X's lawsuit against advertisers and much more.

TechCrunch Top 3

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🚨 Security firm hacked. Home security giant ADT was so busy securing your homes that it forgot to secure its own. The company confirmed this week that it was the victim of a cybersecurity attack that compromised its databases containing customers' home addresses, email addresses and phone numbers. Read more

💬 X minus ads. X has announced that it will no longer show ads to its Premium+ subscribers. This move has led some to question how this change would affect creator earnings as part of X's ad revenue share program. Read more

🤳 Long live photo dumping. Instagram is doubling the number of photos and videos that you can share in a carousel, allowing you to dump up to 20 of your best shots. This takes us back to the mid-2000s when we would dump a full weekend's worth of images onto Facebook in an album titled "Party weekend with the girls." Also, it should be noted, this brings Instagram's carousel closer to TikTok's carousel feature, which lets people include up to 35 photos in a single post. Read more

Afternoon must-reads

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😎 AI realism. While Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang talk about artificial general intelligence like the tech is on the horizon, Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst isn't sure the industry will ever get there. But despite the healthy dose of skepticism, Frosst says he doesn't think the AI industry is a bubble. Read more

🧐 3D displays. Looking Glass, which offers screens to display hologram-like images, is starting to ship its new 16- and 32-inch models of the Spatial Display. The coolest addition to the lineup, though, has to be the 6-inch $299 Looking Glass Go, which is way less expensive than the others (the 16-inch version, for example, will cost you a cool $4,000). Read more

🍎 Apple and the DMA: The company further revised its compliance plan for the EU's Digital Markets Act, and not everyone is happy about it. Among the revisions: Developers who include link-outs in their apps will no longer need to accept the newer version of its business terms. Read more about these and the other revisions

📆 Keep your Thursdays open. Thursday is a dating app that allows you to match up with people only on Thursdays. At midnight, matches disappear, with the intent of forcing people to meet up IRL. The app is now open in San Francisco, allowing Bay Area residents the chance to fall in love, even as interest in dating apps has waned due to "swiping fatigue." Read more

👨‍🏫 OpenAI board adds a new member. Carnegie Mellon professor Zico Kolter focuses his research predominantly on AI safety. This makes him an "invaluable technical director for [OpenAI's] governance," OpenAI writes in a post on its official blog. Read more

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Money, money, money

Image Credits: Yuri Samoilov / Flickr (Image has been modified)

💰 Flint Capital's newest fund. The Boston-based firm closed its third fund at $160 million, which is four times the amount of its initial fund in 2013. Notably, the firm has an unorthodox way of courting LPs: Instead of going after traditional LPs like pension funds or endowments, Flint seeks out IT entrepreneurs, believing they would want a front-row seat to the next generation of technology. Read more

♻️ Greener cement. Slag, the molten runoff created while producing steel in a traditional blast furnace, is a greener cement alternative for creating concrete. Steel producers are turning to electric arc furnaces to make the stuff; these furnaces are smaller and more energy efficient because they run off electricity rather than coal. Cocoon is a new startup that's capitalizing on the trend with technology that can slot into existing steel production workflows. The company recently raised a $5.4 million pre-seed. Read more

💼 Taking the work out of work. A new AI business agent startup, called Bardeen, uses a natural language interface to automate repetitive knowledge work.The company has secured $3 million in this new round, taking its total funding raised to $22 million, with both Dropbox and HubSpot becoming strategic investors in the startup via their venture investment arms. Read more

Around the web

🎙️ Podcast boom and bust. Latin America's podcast boom happened in 2019, which is later than when it happened in the U.S. That's because Spotify started pouring tons of money into the industry by commissioning hundreds of shows. Its high-volume strategy helped build an industry: Spotify won as much as 90% of the market. But the company has now frozen funding for new shows, and producers — many of whom won awards for their Spotify-funded podcasts — are struggling to figure out what comes next. Rest of World has more

🖥️ A new Mac Mini? Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that a new Mac Mini is on the way. The new model, which is set to be released later this year, is the first time since 2010 that the device has been revamped. The new Mini, which sources told Gurman would be way smaller than its predecessor, is one of several new Macs that will launch in the next few months. Read more

Before you go

Robot Ping-Pong. Table tennis has played a key role in benchmarking robot arms since a decade prior. That's because it requires speed, responsiveness and strategy, among other things. Google's DeepMind researchers have effectively developed a "solidly amateur human-level player" when pitted against a human component. Click here to see who won!