<p>Amazon has submitted a bid to acquire all of TikTok, according to a new report from The New York Times. The last-minute bid comes as TikTok faces an April 5 deadline to shed its Chinese ownership or face a ban in the U.S. However, the parties involved in the deal talks do not appear to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A new security fund aims to help apps in the fediverse — like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed — to pay researchers for disclosing security bugs. </p>

<p>Accounting software company Open Ledger has launched a new product in time for tax day.  Meet PokéTax, a game that helps make tax filing quite fun. Instead of tax forms, users take on Tax Trainers — gym leaders — representing different parts of a tax form, such as income, deductions, and credits. Each leader asks [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Skylight, a startup taking on TikTok with a more open alternative, is launching its mobile app to the public on Tuesday after just 10 weeks of active development. The app, which is backed by Mark Cuban and others, is now one of many to build on top of the AT Protocol &#8212; the same technology [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is shutting down its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, on May 8. The photo-sharing app launched in testing in Canada, Australia, and Vietnam last year. The company is notifying TikTok Notes users of its decision to retire the app and is directing them to ByteDance-owned Lemon8, which isn&#8217;t surprising given that the apps are quite [&hellip;]</p>

<p>NaNoWriMo, a 25-year-old online writing community-turned-nonprofit, announced on Monday evening that it is shutting down. NaNoWriMo &#8212; an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month &#8212; is an annual challenge for writers to complete a rough draft of a novel during the month of November. After starting as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999, the project [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined Bluesky, following in the footsteps of former president Barack Obama, who made his first post on the platform last week. Clinton confirmed her Bluesky account&#8217;s legitimacy in an Instagram story and a post on X. In her introductory post, Clinton wrote about the Wisconsin Supreme Court election [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Substack continues to double down on video amid TikTok&#8217;s uncertain future in the U.S. The company announced on Monday that it&#8217;s rolling out a scrollable video feed in its app, making it the latest platform to introduce a TikTok-like feed. Given the timing of the launch, Substack is likely aiming to capitalize on the potential [&hellip;]</p>

<p>President Donald Trump has said that a deal with TikTok&#8217;s parent company ByteDance to sell the app will be finalized before the April 5 deadline, Reuters reports. &#8220;We have a lot of potential buyers,&#8221; Trump told reporters. &#8220;There&#8217;s tremendous interest in TikTok. He added, &#8220;I&#8217;d like to see TikTok remain alive.&#8221; Trump extended the deadline [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome back to Week in Review! Elon Musk says that xAI bought X in an all-stock deal; a16z-backed 11x faked some customers; the Lumon Terminal Pro pops up on Apple&#8217;s website; and much more. Let&#8217;s dig in! xAI buys X: X owner Elon Musk announced on X on Friday that xAI acquired X in an [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Mark Zuckerberg may not be the most likable figure in Silicon Valley, but we can empathize with him on this: It would feel really weird if someone made a movie about your life. On the YouTube podcast Colin and Samir, Zuckerberg spoke about the one and only time he saw &#8220;The Social Network.&#8221; &#8220;It was [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta-owned Instagram is copying yet another feature from TikTok. This time, it&#8217;s the ability for users to play a reel at 2x speed by long pressing on the right or left side of their screen. When TikTok first launched, videos could only be 15 seconds long. As the years passed and TikTok rose in popularity, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>After teasing a return to &#8220;OG Facebook&#8221; earlier this year, the social network on Thursday announced an update that will give users a simple way to connect with friends. The company is introducing a new Facebook Friends tab that will only showcase updates from friends, without any other recommended content. Meta explains in a blog [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is set to expand its TikTok Shop e-commerce platform to users in France, Germany, and Italy on Monday, Reuters reports. TikTok Shop has been available in the United Kingdom since 2021, and now the company is ready to expand farther into Europe. While TikTok Shop is also available in the United States and saw [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The encrypted messaging app Signal is getting some unexpected attention this week. High-ranking officials in the Trump administration, including Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth, communicated the plans for an attack on the Yemeni Houthis via a potentially unauthorized group chat on Signal. However, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Sez Us, a social app founded by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, is trying to build a platform without rage-bait. Rage-bait refers to any posts that are intended to stoke controversy. This might be an intentionally controversial political take, or it can be a wholly fabricated scenario designed to farm engagement (e.g., a satirical creator got [&hellip;]</p>

<p>YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator&#8217;s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It&#8217;s getting easier to build new applications on ATProto, the protocol that powers Bluesky&#8217;s social network and a growing number of other apps. At ATmosphere, the ATProto community conference held over the weekend in Seattle, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee offered attendees a glimpse of what&#8217;s ahead for the protocol&#8217;s development and how those will help [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Americans&#8217; support for a TikTok ban is declining, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. This survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults found that just 34% of respondents supported banning the short form video app. When Pew ran a similar study in 2023, 50% of adults supported the TikTok ban. Over the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Instagram on Tuesday announced a new school partnership program aimed at expediting the handling of moderation reports submitted by verified school accounts. The program is currently available to all middle and high schools in the U.S. It allows schools to report posts or student accounts that may violate the app&#8217;s guidelines directly to Instagram. These [&hellip;]</p>