Disney hired Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer. Anand was previously CEO of Character.AI, an AI startup that Disney accused of infringing on its copyrighted characters in a cease-and-desist letter in September 2025. The hiring suggests new Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro wants the company to embrace new technologies.
The pandemic accelerated tech adoption and triggered massive hiring by giants like Amazon and Google, fueled by a decade of loose monetary policy. When the Federal Reserve sharply raised interest rates to combat inflation, the tech sector crashed harder than any other, with major firms missing expectations and trillions in market value evaporating.
Circle Crop Image is a free, browser-based tool that converts photos into circular profile pictures locally on your device with no uploads or signup required. It supports multiple image formats and includes presets for platforms like Instagram, Discord, Facebook, and LinkedIn, with output options for PNG or JPG.
A web app operator reports severe bot traffic problems, with Facebook's crawler making 3 million requests in 2 days and AI scrapers using residential proxies to bypass security measures including Cloudflare Turnstile. Despite blocking efforts, costs have surged and the operator is considering switching to hCaptcha as a last resort.
Open source software follows an evolutionarily stable strategy where permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Apache) dominates because attempts to restrict usage or charge for code are undercut by free forks. Companies like Facebook, Elastic, HashiCorp, and Redis have tried to move away from open source licensing to monetize their work but were forced to revert after losing to competing forks.
Mark Zuckerberg posted about Cambridge Analytica on January 30, 2017. The post received 42K views.
Elon Musk's votesafe.org, run by his America PAC super PAC, collects extensive personal data including names, addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration status—far more than the official vote.gov site. The site's updated privacy policy allows America PAC to sell this information and inferences about users' psychology and behavior to business partners, and shares data with Facebook, Google, X, and other tracking companies for advertising purposes.
Meta agreed to pay $17.1 billion to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram were engineered to addict children, but the settlement may underestimate actual damages in the trillions. Mark Zuckerberg's dual-class voting structure gives him 61% voting control despite owning only 13% of the company, allowing him to override shareholder concerns about child safety that won 63% of independent votes in 2021.
Meta said it is changing its AI chatbot's prompts after a viral video showed it asking invasive questions about a user's young daughters, including their names, ages, and location. The company acknowledged it "missed the mark" and stated the feature should not have suggested such personal questions, claiming it has now fixed the issue that caused Meta AI to prompt users about sensitive topics.
An Australian journalist disabled Instagram's algorithm for 24 hours to test upcoming government reforms requiring opt-out options. After unfollowing non-personal accounts and reverting to chronological feeds, she found the experience hollow and quickly exhausted new content, concluding that the problem may not be algorithms themselves but social media's role in promoting self-promotion over genuine connection.