It’s been one year since New York enacted a law that barred most whole-apartment rentals for short-term stays on platforms like Airbnb. Since then, the number of stays under 30 days has plummeted in the city, but Airbnb is raising questions about whether the lawmakers’ stated goals—lowering rents and opening …
Read More »A Judge Has Banned Elon Musk's X in Brazil
Brazil’s top court has ordered that access to X be suspended in the country of more than 200 million people, as a prominent judge continued to lock horns with site owner Elon Musk. Musk has been engaged in a months-long feud with Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes over X’s …
Read More »Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP
This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands …
Read More »Telegram Faces a Reckoning. Other Founders Should Beware
Among the leaders of the world’s biggest social media sites, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has always been an outsider. Unlike Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he has never appeared on Capitol Hill to apologize for past mistakes. Unlike TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, he’s never signed up for a five-hour grilling by Congress …
Read More »The Paris Olympics Promised Flying Taxis—Here’s Why They Failed to Launch
In November 2022, Dominique Lazarski stood among a small crowd of people on the Pontoise airfield near Paris, watching a flying taxi trace wide circles in a clear blue sky after it took off for the first time from a working vertiport in France. Airborne, the vehicle looked like a …
Read More »Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Charged Over Alleged Criminal Activity on the App
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is forbidden from leaving French territory after being charged for complicity in running an online platform that allegedly enabled the spread of sexual images of children, creating an uncertain future for the messaging app that has become one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. Durov …
Read More »Generative AI Transformed English Homework. Math Is Next
ChatGPT has already wreaked havoc on classrooms and changed how teachers approach writing homework, since OpenAI publicly launched the generative AI chatbot in late 2022. School administrators rushed to try to detect AI-generated essays, and in turn, students scrambled to find out how to cloak their synthetic compositions. But by …
Read More »Israel Is Buying Google Ads to Discredit the UN’s Top Gaza Aid Agency
Back In mid-January, Mara Kronenfeld was googling the name of the nonprofit she runs, which raises money in the US on behalf of the leading humanitarian aid provider in Gaza. Atop the search results for her organization—UNRWA USA, partner to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in …
Read More »‘Should Art Be Regulated by the SEC?’: NFT Artists’ New Lawsuit Seeks Answers
Since around 2013, Jonathan Mann’s sole job has been writing and posting a song online each day. With titles ranging from “Yeah, I’m Rocking a Headband” to “Joe Biden, Retire” (posted July 1), his pop tunes are at turns whimsical and topical. Some go viral. Still, says the Connecticut-based Mann …
Read More »The Apartment Rental Market Is Rigged by Algorithms, a DOJ Lawsuit Alleges
If you’ve rented an apartment in the US in the past several years, you may have had the sense that the game was rigged: Prices creep up not only at your building but at others throughout the city, seemingly in lockstep. A new civil lawsuit brought by the US Department …
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