Telegram, which for years has had a reputation as a platform used to trade child sexual abuse material, has for the first time agreed to partner with a larger international watch group to combat such content. The U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation, which maintains a database of known abuse imagery and provides tools for tech platforms to automatically flag and remove it, announced a partnership with Telegram on Tuesday. Telegram’s enigmatic co-founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, remains free on bail in France after he was arrested in August as part of a larger sweep that included allegations of the platform’s “complicity” in several illegal schemes, including distributing explicit images of the abuse of minors. With the new partnership, the IWF can effectively scan Telegram for exact matches of child sexual abuse material in its databases and automatically block it, the IWF said in a news release. Similar tools will also block links to sites known to host such content and identify artificial intelligence-created abuse imagery. Before Durov was arrested, Telegram, based in Dubai, had a unique reputation as being overtly hostile to moderation and court orders from governments to either turn over information about users suspected of crimes or to follow orders to remove

TikTok users who would normally leap at the chance to identify an alleged criminal are standing down during the manhunt for the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. A high-profile violent crime typically sets social media abuzz with tips and theories from amateur internet sleuths, hunting for the alleged perpetrator.  But after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York City last week without a primary suspect being identified, a rare occurrence happened in the thriving true-crime world: silence online from highly followed armchair detectives. “I have yet to see a single video that’s pounding the drum of ‘we have to find him,’ and that is unique,” said Michael McWhorter, better known as TizzyEnt on TikTok, where he posts true crime and viral news content for his 6.7 million followers. “And in other situations of some kind of blatant violence, I would absolutely be seeing that.” A masked gunman, who is still on the lam, fatally shot the 50-year-old executive in front of a busy New York City hotel Wednesday, police said. A senior New York City law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said Thursday that shell casings found at the scene had the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written

Financial advisers are hearing more interest in digital currencies as Trump promises to boost the market, but they still argue for a cautious approach. Bitcoin’s value soared to new heights this week, extending a post-election surge as President-elect Donald Trump vows to boost cryptocurrencies. Wealth advisers and personal finance experts say they’re hearing from more people taking a fresh look at the market, but their advice remains: Dip a toe in, don’t dive headfirst. “My POV on the risks and benefits of bitcoin hasn’t changed much, if at all,” said Samuel Deane, president and CEO of Deane Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. “Though the incoming administration is pro-crypto right now, I’ve seen enough in politics to know that can change at any time.” The price of bitcoin traded north of $100,000 late last week after clearing the six-figure threshold for the first time Wednesday, as investors bet on the next administration resetting the rules for an industry that has drawn scrutiny from regulators. Trump, who swiftly took credit for the bitcoin milestone, named billionaire investor David Sacks a White House “crypto czar” and tapped crypto advocate Paul Atkins to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. The president-elect wrote on his social media app that Atkins “recognizes that

Until now, Sora has been available mainly to a small group of safety testers, or “red-teamers,” who test the model for vulnerabilities in areas such as misinformation and bias. OpenAI said Monday it’s releasing its buzzy AI video-generation tool, Sora, later in the day. The AI video-generation model works similarly to OpenAI’s image-generation AI tool, DALL-E: A user types out a desired scene, and Sora will return a high-definition video clip. Sora can also generate video clips inspired by still images and extend existing videos or fill in missing frames. The Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup, which burst into the mainstream last year thanks to the viral popularity of ChatGPT, introduced Sora in February. It’ll debut to U.S. users as well as to “most countries internationally” later today, according to OpenAI’s YouTube livestream, and the company has “no timeline” yet for launching the tool in Europe and the U.K., as well as some other countries. OpenAI said users don’t need to pay extra for the tool, which will be included in existing ChatGPT accounts such as Plus and Pro. Employees on the livestream and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated features like “Blend” (i.e., joining two scenes together at the user’s direction), as well

Highly influential figures in tech, including Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, allege the cryptocurrency industry is a victim of banking discrimination. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were conceived as a way to challenge traditional banks. Now, with the help of the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, the crypto industry is fighting for something else entirely: the right to have a checking account.  Musk and Andreessen are some of the prominent and powerful voices trying to make a case that crypto industry players are being wrongly discriminated against when they try to work with big corporate banks. The allegation is that banks, under pressure from the Biden administration, have unfairly “debanked” people who work with cryptocurrency by terminating their bank accounts.  The concept of “debanking,” a previously obscure term, has received fresh attention in the past month after Andreessen, an investor and co-founder of Netscape, said in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan that he knows 30 tech company founders who had been “debanked in the past four years” — a claim that set off a flood of anecdotes from social media users complaining that they, too, had lost access to their bank accounts.  Musk said on X that debanking is an example of “how