This summer, I went straight from VidCon — the largest creator conference — to a labor journalism seminar with the Sidney Hillman Foundation. One day, I was chatting with famous TikTokers about their financial anxieties (what if they accidentally get banned from TikTok tomorrow?), and the next, I was learning about the history of American labor organizing. These topics are not at all unrelated: at its core, writing about creator economy is labor journalism. The creator beat is a labor beat. ...read more

from the the-last-of-2022 dept Five Years Ago This week in 2017, people were still discovering that their dead loved ones had been used for fake comments supporting the death of net neutrality, while New York State was considering its own net neutrality law, and we wondered if Verizon would give back the taxpayer subsidies it got under Title II. We learned that the European Commission had hidden yet another report showing its assumptions about copyright were wrong, and took a closer look at ...read more

Arrested, seized, doxed and detained. These are just some of the ways police and prosecutors around the world took down the biggest cybercrime operations of the year, even if it meant resorting to new and unconventional eyebrow-raising methods. From stashing billions of bitcoin under the floorboards to teenage hackers gatecrashing Fortune 500 networks, this year saw some of the most jaw-dropping breaches — and the highest-profile apprehensions. As we close out 2022, we look back at the cyber ...read more

Interoperability and decentralization have been major themes in tech this year, driven in large part by mounting regulation, societal and industrial pressure and the hype trains that are crypto and web3. That rising tide is lifting other boats, such as an open standards-based communication protocol called Matrix — which is playing a part in bringing interoperability to another proprietary part of our digital lives: messaging. The number of people on the Matrix network doubled in size this ye ...read more

As additional facets of daily life go digital, it's more paramount now than ever to be proactive about online security. As 2022 proved, however, staying safe isn't just a modern concern as vulnerabilities have been around for years - decades, even - and can crop up in the most unexpected places and ways. Security researchers show off the RTX 4090's password cracking power The new GPU significantly reduces the time required to obtain or recover user passwords Security researcher and ...read more

Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says ...read more

A photo taken with a lightweight consumer drone, one of the technologies GeekWire’s Todd Bishop was thankful for this year as we took a step back on the GeekWire Podcast to take stock of the positive things in technology, business, and science. Listen here. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Across Seattle and from Redmond all the way to Iceland, GeekWire had its eye — and cameras — on stories in technology, business, science, startups, space, geek culture and more in 2022. A high-tech ...read more

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Welcome back to your daily digest of TechCrunch goodness. It is my last day with you (you’re welcome!), so Christine will be back in the Daily Crunch seat on Tuesday. Haje will not be back just yet because he is heading to Vegas as part of the team covering CES. Speaking of CES, Brian raised the curtain on what we can expect from its first full-fled ...read more

The first open source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived, but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all. This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta’s Make-A-Video, released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT. The system combines PaLM, a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create ...read more

'You'll never be bored but you'll also be glad when they leave.' What. A. Year. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. In honor of 2022 finally coming to a close, the Equity crew is getting reflective. We dug through the archives, and this week, we’re listening back to Alex, Natasha and Mary Ann’s coverage of the biggest stories of the year as they unfolded. Here’s what the trio got into ...read more