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The music distribution platform Bandcamp announced in a Reddit post on Tuesday that it’s banning AI-generated music and audio. “We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans,” the company said. Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio generated “wholly or in substantial part by AI” is not permitted, and that it will not allow the use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles. So, if Drake had released “Taylor Made Freestyle” on Bandcamp, he would’ve had a problem (and maybe it…
As the Trump administration publicly cast Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua (TdA) as a unified terrorist force tied to President Nicolás Maduro and operating inside the United States, hundreds of internal US government records obtained by WIRED tell a far less certain story. Intelligence taskings, law-enforcement bulletins, and drug-task-force assessments show that agencies spent much of 2025 struggling to determine whether TdA even functioned as an organized entity in the US at all—let alone as a coordinated national security threat.While senior administration officials portrayed TdA as a centrally directed terrorist network active across American cities, internal tasking directives and threat assessments…
Sabrina Carpenter is teaming up with Pringles to star in her first-ever Super Bowl ad.Today (Jan. 14), the snack brand released a teaser for its campaign, in which Carpenter sits on a kitchen floor holding a flower made of Pringles. As she plucks the chip petals from her salty bouquet, she repeats the familiar rhyme: “He loves me, he loves me not.” She lands on, “He loves me,” before enjoying a crunchy bite.Pringles’ ad, created by agency BBDO New York, will continue its “Once You Pop, the Pop Don’t Stop” creative direction, “bringing playful, unhinged humor to the Big Game,” according…
Skild AI, which makes foundation models for robots, seems to have more than tripled its valuation in just seven months. The startup has raised a $1.4 billion Series C round that values it at more than $14 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round was led by SoftBank, and Nvidia, Macquarie Group, 1789 Capital and others also invested. Skild AI last raised a funding at a $4.5 billion valuation this prior summer, Bloomberg reported. The company hasn’t disclosed the exact value of that round — it was rumored to be around $500 million — but Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak told Bloomberg…
Whether it was protesting Covid lockdowns, attending school board meetings, or facing off against Black Lives Matter protesters, the far-right Proud Boys were always on hand to support Donald Trump’s first term in office.When Trump left office in 2021, the group’s leaders languished in jail for their role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. With reported infighting destabilizing the movement, it looked like the group’s glory days were behind it.But Trump’s return a year ago, and his release of all January 6 prisoners, signaled that a Proud Boy comeback could be in the cards. And while there have…
Private equity-backed Spins has acquired ecommerce and retail data firm MikMak.Spins provides data and analytics for consumer packaged goods brands aimed at helping brands understand who is buying their products in stores and online. MikMak’s analytics and data technology also helps brands track sales; the 11-year-old company also sells shoppable media technology that allows consumers to buy products from social media platforms through landing pages that link to the retailers where products are sold.Terms of the deal were not disclosed.MikMak has raised a total of $14 million from investors including Wavecrest Growth Partners. Tracking retail data to salesSpins’ customers include small…
YouTube and other social media platforms are ramping up their parental controls as the online safety of minors continues to be a hot topic internationally. The Google-owned platform announced on Wednesday that it’s implementing additional parental controls, particularly around the amount of time their children and teens spend watching YouTube Shorts. Image Credits:YouTube Parents will now be able to set a timer for how much time children’s connected accounts can spend watching Shorts — YouTube’s equivalent of TikToks or Instagram Reels — helping to limit the potential to waste time with mindless scrolling. Parents can even block accounts from watching…
It’s been one week since a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since then, the city has been in tumult.Thousands of protestors—from young students to elderly residents—have taken to the streets, setting up memorials for Good and facing off with ICE agents. Dozens have been arrested.More than 2,000 ICE agents have been deployed to Minneapolis, with another 1,000 on the way. Local leaders have decried ICE’s continued, aggressive tactics. “It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” Minnesota state representative Michael Howard told…
With great power comes great responsibility.Let’s start by restating the obvious. Every December, Spotify Wrapped is a highly anticipated cultural phenomenon. While the 2025 Wrapped is better than the AI fiasco of 2024 Wrapped, we’ve seen better wraps. We just need to compare Wrapped to Wrapped itself. We miss lines like “Dear person in the theatre district who listened to Hamilton soundtrack 5,376 times this year, can you get us tickets?” or “1983. UB40, Red Red Wine. 2019. You be forty, red red wine.” And so many others. Spotify, you’ve been so incredibly hyperpersonal, insightful, and clever. You created your own…
Nicholas Leonard and Derek Caneja wanted to build AI voice agents, but when they went to build the product, they felt many of these voice agents had design flaws. Some of these agents were being built with no-code tools, meaning shipping to production was fast, but the quality of the product was often low. Other agents were being made by companies that had the time and resources to spend months building specialized tools. “Developers and enterprises needed an alternative,” Leonard told TechCrunch, adding that he and Caneja also realized that the future of software would be “coded, validated, and optimized…
How to Sit Properly at a DeskAccordionItemContainerButtonIt’s not just about finding a chair you like. We’ve rounded up several tips on how to set up your desk properly here, and how to avoid tech neck, but here are a few highlights.Sitting for too long in a day is not good for your health, no matter what chair you use. It increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, stroke, and heart disease. The best thing you can do is get up and move every half hour. If you can, a 40-minute walk per day can, according to a recent study, make…
Few celebrity chefs are as instantly recognisable as Gordon Ramsay, whose razor-sharp tongue and unforgiving food standards made him famous on shows like Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen.Now, the blunt British chef has been recruited by I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (ICBINB) to lead the brand into a new era following its biggest product overhaul in decades.Sales of the Flora-owned brand have been steadily declining over the last 10 years as consumer tastes swung away from processed margarine-style spreads and towards natural butter and plant-based alternatives.Now, ICBINB wants to ride a new trend, appealing to foodie, health-savvy consumers. As…
There are thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth, and an increasing number of them are able to capture all types of images in near real time. It used to be a somewhat cumbersome process to access those images. But Austin-based startup SkyFi has built a platform that acts as a sort of “Getty Images” for more than 50 geospatial imagery partners that has proven popular in the worlds of finance, defense, infrastructure, and insurance — to name a few. That popularity escalated as SkyFi began offering more analytics and insights to its customers through its website and mobile app, along…
Many years ago, my brother-in-law was renovating an 18th-century house in New Orleans. As I spent the day searching through piles of moldy copies of Peanuts comics, I found a (still working!) 1950s-style fat-jiggler machine. From the Remington Beltmaster to the classic Shake Weight, many gimmicky fitness devices over the years have tried to capitalize on the concept of dynamic inertia to help us get toned and lose weight.Most human beings don’t like to move, even though moving is how you maintain your muscle mass and, you know, how you stay alive. A vibrating device offers you a mystical promise:…
Slackbot, the automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned corporate messaging platform Slack, is entering a new era as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will be as viral as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The cloud software giant rolled out the new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent version of Slackbot, which is generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, can find information, draft emails, and schedule meetings, among other things, all within the Slack platform, according to the company. It can also connect to, and interact with, other enterprise products like Microsoft Teams and Google…
Google Workspace is the modern business world’s de facto productivity suite, and it’s only gotten better over the years. There’s the centralization of Google Docs, Drive, and Gmail, of course, but Google has bolstered its productivity suite with an AI infusion via Gemini, as well as simplified its offerings to work for massive corporations all the way down to individual users. If you want to get the best price, you need a Google Workspace promo code.Thankfully, you’ve landed in the right spot. Google is offering Workspace discounts until the end of 2026, allowing you to save up to 14 percent…