TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

1. Between a rock and a creepy place: Apple is being sued for abandoning its plans to implement a system that would detect child sexual abuse material in iCloud libraries. The company had shelved those plans after privacy and security advocates said it would open a backdoor to government surveillance. Read More

2. It's a computer, it's a keyboard! It's… the Raspberry Pi 500! This cute little computer-meet-keyboard device is basically the Raspberry Pi 5 tiny-but-mighty computer inside a keyboard, which lowers the barrier to entry to Raspberry Pi's products. Read More

3. Her, but not dystopian: Alexis Conneau, the creator of ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, has launched WaveForms AI, a new audio LLM startup that's training its own foundation models. Conneau envisions a world like the movie 'Her' but less creepy and dystopian. Not sure that's possible, but let's see what he's got. Read More

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Morning must-reads

Image Credits: Akio Kon / Bloomberg / Getty Images

🇨🇳 Stuck in the middle: China's competition regulator is probing Nvidia's 2019 acquisition of Israeli company Mellanox. Beijing had approved the deal under certain conditions — like sharing details of new products with their rivals — but Nvidia is having trouble meeting those requirements because the U.S. has imposed several restrictions on sales of semiconductors to China. Read More

🌍 It's a small world after all: Merchants that want to sell their wares internationally have to deal with steep shipping costs, long delivery times, and expensive distributors. Zimi wants to simplify cross-boarder commerce with localized fulfillment centers that can help manage tax regulations, currency exchange, and compliance. Read More

😈 Bring on the post-factual hellscape! X doesn't seem to be doing much to combat disinformation — instead, it's just added a new image generator to Grok, called Aurora. While there are some restrictions, graphic content wasn't off limits in our tests. Read More

🌈 We're here, we're queer, we're networking: Famm Connect is a new social networking app for LGBTQ+ professionals and business owners. The goal is to create a safe space for queer professionals to engage. Read More

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Around the web

🫣 Surprise, surprise: Bloomberg reports that Meta has allowed a network of Facebook pages to post more than 4,100 political ads attacking Romania's pro-EU presidential candidate, Elena Lasconi. Those very ads are promoting far-right, pro-Russia figures like Calin Georgescu in the run up to the country's elections. Read More

🫂 The AI we deserve: The Boston Review is proposing a utopian question: "If we could turn back the clock and shield computer scientists from the corrosive influence of the Cold War, what kind of more democratic and less militaristic technological agenda might have emerged?" Read More

Before you go

Image Credits: stockcam / Getty Images

🔍 Is Reddit's search finally useful now? No longer will you need to type a query into Google followed by "reddit" in hopes of avoiding a useless blog going on for pages without actually giving you an answer. Reddit is testing a tool that allows you to ask questions and get summaries of relevant responses and threads across the platform. Read More