from the it's-not-for-kids-and-it's-not-about-safety dept We’ve written a number of posts about the problems of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn (both of whom have fairly long and detailed histories for pushing anti-internet legislation). As with many “protect the children” or “but think of the children!” kinds of legislation, KOSA is built around moral panics and nonsense, blaming the internet any time anything bad happens, and ...read more

FrankieOne, a Melbourne-based startup that provides an API platform for identity verification and fraud detection, said it has added $23 million AUD (about $15.4 million USD) in a Series A+, taking its Series A’s total to $45 million AUD (about $30 million USD). FrankieOne says this is the largest amount of VC funding raised by an Australian regtech so far. The funding included a group of returning investors, including lead backers AirTree Ventures and Greycroft, and participants Reinventure ...read more

The big picture: If it wasn't obvious, Amazon has somewhat confusing methods for promoting specific products to customers. People have begun to notice how seemingly broken shopping on Amazon has become in recent years due to "sponsored products" and items that Amazon touts as "highly rated." As we get closer to the holiday season, millions of people are either beginning, continuing, or wrapping up their shopping sprees. Amazon is no stranger to the influx of orders and deliveries during this ...read more

To celebrate Cyber Monday, TechCrunch+ is having a sale! Until November 30, take 25% off a subscription to secure access to all our work.  TechCrunch+ is TechCrunch’s founder-focused analytical arm. We cover the trends behind the news, dig into venture capital numbers, report on how startups are executing today, and share advice and insight from tech operators. We’d love for you to join us. You may have noticed more TechCrunch+ material on TechCrunch proper in the last few qu ...read more

Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, Community Notes, just received an update that the company claims will help to identify more “low quality” fact checks — meaning, the notes written by Twitter users that are appended to tweets to provide further clarification and context. As a result, more of the contributors who write these unhelpful annotations will lose their writing ability, Twitter said, requiring those users to earn back their “contributor” status. The algorithm chan ...read more

Editor's take: Another year is nearly in the record books, and that's reason enough for Time to share its 10 best video games of 2022. These sorts of lists usually disappoint but it seems the publication might have gotten it mostly right this time around. Coming in at number 10 is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, a co-op brawler from Dotemu featuring side-scrolling action, a pixelated art style and voice work from the original cartoon actors. Shredder's revenge launched digit ...read more

from the [extremely-Jim-Morrison-voice]-there's-a-killer-at-the-door dept Lots of people like to pretend California is home to certifiable Communists — a socialist collective masquerading as a state. But California is not beholden to socialist ideals. It has its own dictatorial ideological bent, one that’s only slightly tamed by its election of liberal leaders. Every move towards the left is greeted by an offset to the right. If anything, California is the Land of Compromise. Ideological ...read more

Funko’s toys were one of the hot sellers on Black Friday, according to Adobe Analytics. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Black Friday online sales hit a record $9.12 billion despite ongoing inflation as categories such as electronics, toys, and exercise equipment posted strong numbers. Online sales on Black Friday were up 2.3% year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics. Electronics were a “major growth driver,” with sales up 221% over the average day in October; smart ho ...read more

from the puzzling-through-upload-filters dept A clear demonstration that the EU Copyright Directive is a badly-drafted law is the fact that it has still not been implemented in national legislation by all the EU Member States three years after it was passed, and over a year after the nominal deadline for doing so. That’s largely because of the upload filters of Article 17. The requirement to block copyrighted material without authorization while fully preserving users’ rights is prob ...read more

When it comes to performance issues, it’s hard to know where the problem lies. This is especially true when your monitoring dashboard shows an all-clear, yet you’re still hearing slow app complaints from your users. In these cases, there’s a good chance those problems could be related to an internet connection issue. These kinds of issues are harder to track down because they vary so greatly and depend on a lot of factors that are mostly out of your control. Amazon wants to make it ...read more