Timef 04/25/2025

The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly going after TP-Link for anti-competitive predatory pricing — and potentially posing a national security risk.

Upgrading your wine glass game is a window into the finer things in life. These are our WIRED-tested favorites.

Meta is cracking down on spam and engagement farming on the Facebook Feed. Now, if someone could please tell Elon to do the same over at X.

As of April 25, get the Meta Quest 3S headset bundle for $30 off.

New automaker Slate has revealed the Slate Truck, a $28,000 customizable electric truck coming in late 2026.

As of April 25, you can score an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom Play portable Bluetooth speaker for just $36.99, down from $89.99, at Woot.

As of April 23, select movie theaters are giving away film strips from the 70mm IMAX version of 'Sinners.' Here's how you can get one of your own.

Google started testing AI-summarized results in Google Search, AI Overviews, two years ago, and continues to expand the feature to new regions and languages. By the company’s estimation, it’s been a big success. AI Overviews is now used by more than 1.5 billion users monthly across over 100 countries. AI Overviews compiles results from around […]

As of April 25, you can score a Google Pixel Watch (1st gen) for just $79.99, down from $329.99, at Woot. That's a 76% discount.

David F. Sandberg and Gary Dauberman talk about adapting the hit video game "Until Dawn" and working with Peter Stormare.

We’re thrilled to announce that Roelof Botha, the managing partner of Sequoia Capital and one of the most influential figures in the venture capital world, will join us live onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 at Moscone West in San Francisco, which will take place from October 27 to 29. As part of our ongoing mission […]

"The Legend of Ochi" stars Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Emily Watson, and director Isaiah Saxon break down how the Ochi came to life.

Apple plans to fully move production of U.S.-sold iPhones to India as soon as next year.

Hertz, the rental car giant, recently confirmed that customer information was exposed through a cyberattack on one of its software vendors.

This is your last chance to put your brand at the center of the AI conversation during TechCrunch Sessions: AI Week — with applications to host a Side Event closing tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. From June 1-7, TechCrunch is curating a dynamic weeklong series of Side Events leading up to and following the main […]

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, walked into the sunlight-lit hotel conference room in Brooklyn on Thursday to meet with a dozen youth leaders working in tech safety, policy, and innovation. The young adults chatted away at black circular tables, many unaware of his presence until he plopped down at a table and started talking with […]

Several founders of hot startups took big payouts and let Mark Zuckerberg gobble up their companies—and came to regret it.

How do consumer electronics manufacturers deal with a US-China trade war? Apple’s solution could be to move its manufacturing out of China—as much as it feasibly can, anyway.

Chinese startup Manus AI, which works on building tools related to AI agents, has picked up $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a roughly $500 million valuation, according to Bloomberg. The company will use the money to expand to new markets, including the U.S., Japan, and the Middle East, Bloomberg noted, […]

As of April 25, the LEGO Star Wars R2-D2 set is on sale for $81.99. Normally it's listed for $99.99, so you can enjoy 18% off it right now.

Yale New Haven Health is Connecticut's largest healthcare provider.

Entry-level exercisers will love Aviron’s low profile and tons of addicting exercise content.

We tested leading filtered showerheads, from Jolie to Canopy to Hydroviv. The winners were clear.

These wireless earbuds with an “open” design let you zone out to your music while also keeping you aware of your surroundings.

“They are being dragged into change, kicking and screaming.”

As of April 25, the Apple Watch SE (2nd Gen, GPS, 40mm) is on sale at Amazon for $189. Usually it's listed for $249, so you're saving 24%.

Social Security workers are being asked to use an AI chatbot. An animated video on how to do so failed to mention that the chatbot can’t be trusted with personally identifiable information.

There are a number of features with AirPods you may or may not know about to take your listening experience to the next level. Kurt the CyberGuy explains.

As Mashable's beauty reporter, I've tested tons of Dyson dupes. Here are my top three picks from the best Supersonic and Airwrap dupes out there.

Google's AI Overviews have had a rough run with search results, and now they're coming to YouTube.

As of April 25, the Soundcore Sport X20 by Anker earbuds are on sale at Amazon for $63.99. This is 20% off their list price of $79.99.

Nintendo Switch 2 preorders went live on April 24 but sold out quickly. We're tracking restocks so you can order.

Israel developed new artificial intelligence tools to gain an advantage in the war. The technologies have sometimes led to fatal consequences.

Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture a detailed view of the Rosette Nebula, a sprawling and visually brilliant star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy.

"The Legend of Ochi," starring Helena Zengel, Willem Dafoe, Finn Wolfhard, and Emily Watson, is now in theaters. Review.

This MacBook Pro is in near-mint condition with 32GB RAM and a 512GB SSD, and it's only $620

Ditch subscription fees and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more for life for only $49.97.

SwiftScan VIP turns your phone into a scanner and it's just $41.99 (reg. $199) with coupon code TAKE30.

Access GPT-4o, Claude 3, Gemini, and more in one AI platform with 1min.AI’s lifetime Business Plan — just $99.99 for a limited time, no monthly fees.

Save 13% on the ASUS Vivobook S 14 at Amazon.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an image of NASA's Curiosity rover traversing the Red Planet's surface. The image shows the rover and a long trail of tracks.

Save 20% on the Amazon Fire TV 32-inch 2-Series at Amazon.

Save 17% on the Bose QuietComfort earbuds at Amazon.

Netflix has dropped its trailer for "LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS VOLUME 4", Tim Miller's chaotic sci-fi anthology series.

As of April 25, Sony’s 77-inch Bravia XR A95L OLED TV is on sale for $3,998 at Amazon — a $1,000 discount from the regular $4,999.99 price.

As of April 25, Soundcore Space A40 wireless earbuds are on sale for $44.99 at Amazon — 44% off their usual $79.99 price.

As of April 25, Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro is on sale for $199.99 at Amazon, 20% off its regular $249.99 price.

Answers to each clue for the April 25, 2025 edition of NYT's The Mini crossword puzzle.

Netflix is introducing subtitles that only cover dialogue.

Connections: Sports Edition is a New York Times word game about finding common sports threads between words. How to solve the puzzle.

We’re thrilled to announce that Greece Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will be joining us at our upcoming StrictlyVC event in Athens, co-hosted with Endeavor, on Thursday night, May 8, at the stunning Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. For those who might not be familiar with his background, Mitsotakis brings a fascinating blend of experiences to […]

A new American electric vehicle startup called Slate Auto has made its debut, and it’s about as anti-Tesla as it gets. It’s affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog. It has manual windows and it doesn’t come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn’t even painted. It can also transform from a two-seater pickup to […]

How to watch Eurovision for free. Live stream the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest for free from anywhere in the world.

The best TVs for under £300, including models from top brands like TCL and LG.

The best wireless headphones from top brands like Apple and Bose.

Upgrade your WFH setup with this selection of monitors from top brands like Samsung and Dell.

Troubled electric vehicle startup Faraday Future’s board of directors has appointed founder Jia Yueting as the company’s co-CEO, three years after he was sidelined following an internal probe into allegations of fraud — a probe that led to a investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission that remains ongoing. Jia will serve alongside current CEO […]

The modestly priced EV pickup goes 150 miles on a charge and is infinitely customizable. Deliveries start next year.

The NYT Strands hints and answers you need to make the most of your puzzling experience.

Connections is a New York Times word game that's all about finding the "common threads between words." How to solve the puzzle.

Here's the answer for "Wordle" #1405 on April 25 as well as a few hints, tips, and clues to help you solve it yourself.

Hints and answers to today's Hurdle all in one place.

Apparently, decentralized social networks can go down, too. On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky’s status page, the company was aware of the outage, which it […]

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Thursday highlighting how little researchers understand about the inner workings of the world’s leading AI models. To address that, he’s set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. In “The Urgency of Interpretability,” the CEO says Anthropic has made […]

A new autonomous vehicle framework would also make it easier for Tesla and other companies to research domestically-made self-driving cars that don’t meet all federal safety standards.

This AI startup raised $5.3M to help people “cheat on everything.” But in the age of AI, how do you define cheating? Columbia University recently suspended student Roy Lee for building a tool to help people cheat on engineering interviews. He’s been making waves on X after posting a long thread detailing the saga and how […]

OpenAI is bringing a new “lightweight” version of its ChatGPT deep research tool, which scours the web to compile research reports on a topic, to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users, the company announced Thursday. The new lightweight deep research, which will also come to free ChatGPT users starting today, is powered by a version […]

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

Meta is now using the Threads.com domain name for its X competitor Threads.

Semiconductor giant Intel won’t spin out its venture arm, Intel Capital, after all. Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company has reversed its decision to spin out its 34-year-old venture arm on Intel’s Thursday Q1 earnings call. Instead, the firm will remain internal and continue to invest with Intel’s interests in mind. “We have made […]

In this episode of Uncanny Valley, our hosts explain how to prepare for travel to and from the United States—and how to stay safe.

Intel says that it’ll require employees to work from the office four days a week, a shift from the company’s old policy. CEO Lip-Bu Tan made the announcement during Intel’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Thursday. Previously, Intel allowed staff to work from home two days a week, but Tan said that adherence to the […]

Adding words to our chatbot can apparently cost tens of millions of dollars. But some fear the cost of not saying please or thank you could be higher.

Motorola has three new Razrs to show off this year, one of which is a powerful new Ultra model.

Individuals, industry groups, and local governments submitted over 10,000 comments to the White House about its work-in-progress national AI policy, also known as the AI Action Plan. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on Thursday published the text of the submissions in a PDF spanning 18,480 pages. The comments, which touch […]

Google’s parent company, which is battling the government to stay intact after losing two antitrust cases, also said quarterly profit rose 46 percent.

The NFL Draft can be overwhelming, luckily we've collected the online resources you'll need for the 2025 edition.

We are thrilled to announce that Astro Teller, the head honcho of Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” X, will be joining us as a featured speaker at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening from October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The whole affair promises to be fun-filled and rife with intel and insights that you won’t want […]

Evernote founder Phil Libin is ready to liven up your video meetings. The entrepreneur’s video startup, mmhmm, launched in 2020 amid the pandemic, on Thursday unveiled its latest product: a video toolkit for online meetings called Airtime. The suite includes two related tools: a virtual camera that helps you appear more polished on video calls, […]

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has raised over $100 million in capital for his proptech startup, Flow, in a round that values that company at about $2.5 billion, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.  Citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal, Bloomberg reported that existing backer Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) participated in the financing. Neumann told Bloomberg that […]

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has raised over $100 million in capital for his proptech startup, Flow, in a round that values that company at about $2.5 billion, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.  Citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal, Bloomberg reported that existing backer Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) participated in the financing. Neumann told Bloomberg that […]

For the first time in roughly five years, OpenAI is gearing up to release an AI system that’s truly “open,” meaning it’ll be available for download at no cost and not gated behind an API. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that OpenAI is aiming for an early summer launch, and targeting performance superior to open models […]

OpenAI is reportedly building its own X-like social network. The project is still in the early stages, but there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, The Verge reports. A social app would give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already use to help train […]

We’re thrilled to announce that Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and founder and CEO of Aetherflux, will be joining us for a rare, intimate fireside chat as part of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening series on June 18 on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. As with all of our StrictlyVC evenings, the event will feature just […]

We’re thrilled to announce that Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and founder and CEO of Aetherflux, will be joining us for a rare, intimate fireside chat as part of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening series on June 18 on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. As with all of our StrictlyVC evenings, the event will feature just […]

Meta laid off employees on Thursday in its Reality Labs division, which encompasses various virtual and augmented reality projects. The cuts impact employees within Oculus Studios, which develops apps and games for Meta’s Quest headsets. Meta did not specify how many people were impacted by the layoffs, but said that the cuts impacted people working […]

Meta may have managed to kill a bipartisan bill to protect children online, but parents of children who have suffered from online harm are still putting pressure on social media companies to step up. On Thursday, 45 families who lost children to online harms – from sextortion to cyberbullying – held a vigil outside of […]

Google announced it is completely backtracking on its plans to end third-party cookies in Google Chrome.

Instagram Threads, Meta’s newest social network and X competitor, is officially relocating from the website Threads.net to Threads.com. The transition will coincide with a handful of quality-of-life improvements for the Threads web app, including features to more easily access custom feeds, saved posts, and likes, as well as other tools for creating new columns, copying […]

The funeral of Pope Francis will be livestreamed on YouTube on Saturday. Pope Francis passed away earlier this week at age 88 due to a stroke and cardiac arrest. Vatican News’ YouTube channel will begin coverage of the funeral at 10 AM CET/4 AM ET, with availability in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German. […]

Flex, a startup that offers personal finance software for business owners, has acquired Maza, a finance app aimed at Spanish speakers in the U.S., for $40 million, the companies told TechCrunch exclusively. At first glance, the pairing may seem a bit curious. Flex’s software and payments infrastructure is to help business owners have a single […]

Data centers to train and run AI may soon contain millions of chips, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and require power equivalent to a large city’s electricity grid, if the current trends hold. That’s according to a new study from researchers at Georgetown, Epoch AI, and Rand, which looked at the growth trajectory of […]

In an ongoing antitrust case, the Federal Trade Commission says that Meta has a monopoly on “personal social networking services” and should have to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. Throughout the proceedings, there have been several internal messages and plans that have come to light. In one, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered wiping all Facebook […]

Netflix just introduced a new way to experience subtitles that eliminates the need to read audio cues like “door slams” or “phone rings.”  Announced on Thursday, Netflix’s new dialogue-only subtitles can be enabled by going to “Navigate to Audio” and then “Subtitles.” Users will see an option labeled “English” instead of “English (CC),” indicating that […]

Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as it nears its 20th birthday. Chess.com, the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has surpassed 200 million members. Of those 200 million members, 1.5 million are paying users. More than 6 million games of chess are played every day on the platform. […]

Students and members of the law community are outraged after the State Bar of California admitted some of the questions were developed by AI.

Gareth Evans, the director of "The Raid," turns to the stereotypical American cop saga for his latest action-fest, "Havoc," starring Tom Hardy. Review.

Donald Trump will attend a dinner with the largest holders of his own-brand crypto coin, sending its price through the roof. But the real profits have already been made just out of view.

The acting head of the General Services Administration says it has no DOGE team. It merely lists at least a half-dozen DOGE affiliates on payroll and has a section of its building for DOGE use only.

Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to “OG Facebook.” […]

Plan summer fun with confidence. Get lifetime access to Weather Hi-Def Radar for A$43 until this weekend only — track storms, air quality, and road conditions in real time.

What does 'You can't lick a badger twice' mean? AI Overviews will confidently explain any idiotic saying you invent.

A new study forecasts more than 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years if US vaccination rates stay the same. Millions of infections are possible if rates drop.

The Home Depot Spring Deals include dozens under $20 including Miracle Gro garden soil, tomato plants, and solar lights.

As of April 24, preorder the Hori Piranha Plant Switch 2 camera for $59.99.

TikTok is rolling out support for ALT text for photo posts to make content more accessible for users with visual and cognitive impairments. Creators can now provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen readers understand the visual content through spoken descriptions. TikTok told TechCrunch in an email that creators can add ALT […]

President Trump signed an executive order to promote AI education in K-12 schools. China passed similar mandates recently.

Google is rolling out an end-to-end encrypted email feature for business customers, but it could spawn phishing attacks, particularly in non-Gmail inboxes.

Perplexity? Gemini? Copilot? The Razr Ultra will have it all optimized for its flippy, folding screen.

Who died? Who survived? And what was with that word? We dive into the series finale of Netflix's "You," starring Penn Badgley.

Could future AIs be “conscious,” and experience the world similarly to the way humans do? There’s no strong evidence that they will, but Anthropic isn’t ruling out the possibility. On Thursday, the AI lab announced that it has started a research program to investigate — and prepare to navigate — what it’s calling “model welfare.” […]

Adding words to our chatbot can apparently cost tens of millions of dollars. But some fear the cost of not saying please or thank you could be higher.

The Apple iPad 11-inch (128GB, Wi-Fi) with A16 chip is on sale at Amazon for $319.99, down from the normal price of $349.99. That's a $30 discount.

As of April 24, these are all of the Nintendo Switch 2 games available to preorder right now.