Business & Tech X and Other Platforms Restrict Searches for ‘Taylor Swift’ As Deepfake Pornography of Her Goes Viral Graphic AI-generated images of pop star Taylor Swift have snowballed on social media platforms from X to Meta to Reddit, exposing the limits of their content moderation and lack of legislation.
Business & Tech Waymo Looks to Expand to the Peninsula, SFO, and Sunnyvale Just as the City of San Francisco is suing the state's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) over the expansion of robotaxi permits, Alphabet-owned Waymo wants to expand its permits further to cover the Peninsula and part of Santa Clara County, as well as LA.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Will Probably Keep Mindlessly Casting Doubt on Mail-In Ballots and Election Integrity All Year on X Elon Musk has proven himself no better and no wiser than the many, many idiots who chatter about conspiracies and the "Deep State" on social media, the only difference being he's a billionaire who owns a social media platform who should know better.
SF News We Should Know the Winning Bidder on Anchor Brewing Co. in the Next Ten Days We are apparently in the final days of the auction that will determine what (if any) future there is for SF’s Anchor Brewing Co. and popular Anchor Steam beer, as the winning bidder will reportedly be determined by the end of January.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Continues Apology Tour By Going to Auschwitz With Ben Shapiro Billionaire multi-CEO Elon Musk took a break from running his companies to take a tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp Monday and attend a conference on antisemitism organized by the European Jewish Association (EJA) in Krakow.
Business & Tech After Buying Alcohol Delivery App Drizly For $1.1B, Uber Is Shutting It Down Three years after acquiring alcohol delivery app Drizly, Uber is shutting the platform down and moving all liquor delivery services to Uber Eats.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Wants More Compensation Out of Tesla to Move More Toward AI Elon Musk is in some sort of negotiation with the board of Tesla to regain greater voting control at the board level, and he's making this publicly known in a series of tweets, for some reason.
SF News Grindr Hookup Goes Wrong When SF Man Pulls Gun, Attempts Carjacking, Shoots Victim A 20-year-old San Francisco man is in jail for carjacking and assault, after hooking up with a Grindr date, allegedly pulling out a semiautomatic weapon, trying to steal the date’s car, and then shooting him.
SF News San Rafael Couple Nearly Scammed Out of $15,000 by AI Fake of Their Son’s Voice We are in era where AI can recreate someone’s voice, and scammers are taking notice, with one San Rafael couple almost paying $15,000 to con artists who’d accurately mimicked their son’s voice in a panicked phone call.
Business & Tech Sam Altman Just Got Married on a Beach... Somewhere OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the It Boy of the tech world last year and one of the most visible figures in the artificial intelligence space, just married his partner Oliver Mulherin in a small ceremony on an undisclosed tropical beach.
Business & Tech Cruise Is Offering $75K to Settle CPUC Investigation Into Crash In Which Woman Was Dragged General Motors-owned robotaxi outfit Cruise is offering $75,000 to "resolve" an investigation by California regulators into a gruesome October 2 crash incident involving one of its vehicles, which set off a cascade of negative impacts on the company's operations.
SF News CNBC Host and Strident SF Hater Jim Cramer Now Says He’s ‘Fired Up’ to Be In SF Cable news shouter Jim Cramer once claimed SF and the Embarcadero were so dangerous he wouldn’t let his staff “go out there by themselves, even in daytime.” But guess who’s now tweeting pictures from a luxe Embarcadero hotel, saying he’s “fired up” to be here.
Business & Tech Report: Elon Musk’s Alleged Drug Use Creating Problems for Tesla, SpaceX Board Members After a Wall Street Journal report this weekend said Elon Musk has been using cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, ketamine, and magic mushrooms, Musk issued non-denials, but top executives of his companies remain worried about the fallout.
Business & Tech Judge Rules That Musk's X Must Abide By California's Content Moderation Law In another blow to Elon Musk's quest for absolute free speech, a federal judge has rejected Musk and his attorneys' argument that a California law requiring social media companies to disclose their content-moderation policies and procedures.
Business & Tech GM Sues San Francisco Over Cruise Tax Bill, Which It Says Is Unfair General Motors, the parent company of autonomous taxi outfit Cruise, has filed suit against the City of San Francisco over a $108 million tax bill that it says was incorrectly charged. And this may be some sort of revenge for the city and state's treatment of the company.
Business & Tech New York Times Sues OpenAI, Microsoft Over Use of Copyrighted Content In what may prove a pivotal legal moment for the artificial intelligence industry, the New York Times has filed suit against OpenAI over the unauthorized use of years of journalistic content in the training of its generative AI models.
Business & Tech Lawsuit Over Twitter/X Employees' Unpaid Bonuses Moves Forward After Judge's Ruling A lawsuit brought by one former Twitter exec who stayed on with company following the Fall 2022 purge by new owner Elon Musk, claiming that Musk reneged on a promise of bonuses for all those didn't resign, is moving to trial.
Business & Tech Apple's Legal Woes Over Apple Watch Oxygen Monitor Leads to Device Removal From US Shelves, Biden Declines to Help The newest models of the Apple Watch have been pulled from shelves across the U.S. due to an ongoing patent-infringement legal battle with the maker of blood-oxygen monitoring technology.
Business & Tech Elon Musk's Hyperloop One Is Shutting Down After Nine Years, Laying Off Everyone Elon Musk's dreams of building a high-speed steel-tube transit network that would theoretically make train and short-haul airline travel obsolete appear to be dead. Hyperloop One, founded in 2014, is shutting down.
SF News Sure Enough, Shoplifting Was Not the Reason For the Closure of Target at Folsom and 13th Streets When Target announced they were closing an SF store in SoMa, they blamed “theft and organized retail crime.” Uhh, turns out that Target had the least reported crime of any Target store in the entire Bay Area.
Business & Tech Once High-Flying Scooter Company Bird Declares Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Scooter startup Bird already left San Francisco in February blaming “onerous regulations,” but ten months later they’re declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy as their stock is down 97%, so you have to wonder about their business acumen.
Business & Tech In Contrast to Cruise, Waymo Is Touting Its Vehicles' Safety In New Report We started the year with two main competitors in the robotaxi space, but we are ending the year with just one. And that company, Waymo, has a new peer-reviewed study to share that shows how safe its autonomous cars are compared to cars driven by humans.
Business & Tech Google Agrees to Pay $700M to Settle States' Antitrust Case, Will Let Developers Take Direct Payments In Play Store We are now learning the details of a settlement reached in September between Google and 50 state attorneys general over antitrust claims about its Play Store, and they are mostly time-limited and minor for Google/Alphabet.
Business & Tech Former Facebook Executive Pleads Guilty to Swindling Company Out of $4 Million A one-time Facebook executive based in Atlanta has pleaded guilty to defrauding $4 million out of Facebook parent company Meta, by embezzling money from her company credit card, and directing contracts to friends in exchange for kickbacks.
Business & Tech Google Loses Antitrust Suit Brought By Fortnite Maker Epic Games Epic Games, the maker of popular mobile game Fortnite, has prevailed in a federal lawsuit brought in San Francisco against Google over anticompetitive practices relating to the company's app store for Android phones.
