Category: Technology

Companies including Nestle, Epic and reportedly Disney suspend YouTube ads over child exploitation concerns Days after a YouTube creator accused the platform of enabling a “soft-core pedophilia ring,” several companies have suspended advertising on the platform, including Nestle, Epic, and reportedly Disney and McDonald’s. Nestle told CNBC that all of its companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, while a spokesperson for Epic, maker of the massively popular game Fortnite, said it has suspended all pre-roll advertising. Other companies that confirmed publicly they are pausing YouTube advertising include…

Samsung unveils folding phone for nearly ,000 [unable to retrieve full-text content] Samsung unveils a nearly $2,000 folding smartphone in a bid to top the technology of Apple Inc and Chinese rivals and reignite consumer interest in a massive consumer electronics category that had its worst sales ever last year. Source: Reuters Technology

Security token offerings aren’t looking much better in 2019 An analysis of a year of liquidity and trading data Galen Moore 9 hours Pressed to explain who is using them, and why, 99 percent of cryptocurrencies let out all their air, go flying around the room making a raspberry sound, hit the wall and fall behind the couch forever. The party is over. A few, however, can present a credible use case. “Tokenized securities” could be one of them: a more open and efficient way to transact shares and notes…

Can you guess which face is real, and which is computer generated? Computers have recently gotten much, much better at a somewhat unsettling skill: generating fake human faces. As in, creating an image of a human who has never existed before. We saw the concept go a bit viral this week with ThisPersonDoesNotExist, a website hooked to a machine that generates a new face every few seconds. Or the feline version that dreams up (sometimes nightmare-inducing) cats, ThisCatDoesNotExist. Now it has been turned into a game. Think you can tell…

On-demand shuttle startup Via enters South American market Via, the on-demand shuttle startup backed by Daimler, has expanded into South America. The company launched a service in Goiânia, Brazil with HP Transportes Coletivos, one of the country’s largest public transportation operators. Via says the service called CityBus 2.0 is the first on-demand shuttle system operated by a public transit operator to launch in Latin America. Users are able to use an app to request a ride in 11 districts around the city. Base fares are R$2.50, or $0.68. Via’s service is features…

Trustpilot is revealing more data about how businesses flag reviews Review site Trustpilot says it’s creating more transparency around how businesses respond to consumer reviews. Founder and CEO Peter Mühlmann told me that while “the vast majority of companies” are using their ability to flag questionable reviews in “exactly the right way,” there’s a small minority that are potentially “ruining it for everyone” by aggressively flagging bad reviews. So with the new Transparent Flagging feature, Trustpilot visitors can actually see how many reviews a company flagged (starting on January 1st…