Swedish music streaming giant Spotify saw its user numbers peak last quarter, driven by its year-end “Wrapped” campaign, which rounds up stats and listening highlights for users, and new features on its free tier.

The company said it saw a record 38 million new users in the fourth quarter, taking its total to 751 million monthly active users, up 11% from a year earlier. Paying subscribers increased by 10% to 290 million in the quarter.

Spotify said the “Wrapped” campaign resulted in more than 300 million engaged users and 630 million shares on social media in 56 languages.

Revenue came in at €4.53 billion ($5.39 billion), about 7% more than a year earlier, thanks to an 8% increase in subscription revenue. However, the company’s ad-supported business saw revenue dip by 4% to €518 million ($616.6 million). Gross margin, an important metric investors watch for indications of improvements to Spotify’s profitability, improved by 83 basis points to a record high of 33.1% as the company sold more ads for podcasts and music.

The solid performance comes as Spotify’s new co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström take over the reins from co-founder Daniel Ek, and they will now oversee a business that has far outgrown what it initially set out to do.

After launching as a music streaming pure-play, Spotify has expanded its remit to include podcasts, audiobooks, and even physical bookstores. It’s launched music videos within the app as well as video podcasts, and has doubled down on its retention strategy by adding social features like group chats and letting users share what they’re listening to. You can even use Spotify to book tickets to concerts, or explore the story behind songs.

The company has also added AI features like an AI DJ, AI-generated playlists, and now lets users exclude tracks from being recommended to help them better tailor what they listen to.

Profitability has been a big focus for Spotify in recent years, and the company has tried to achieve that by increasing subscription prices in the U.S. and Europe. It’s also added new features to its free, ad-supported tier to attract more people away from rivals like YouTube Music and Amazon Music, letting users search for and choose songs they want to listen to.

The company expects to reach 759 million users, and 293 million paying subscribers in the current quarter.

What would happen if you lost your memory, even partially? With so much of our lives being digital, forgetting your passwords (or the master key to your password manager) could be disastrous. Haunted by that specter after a concussion, [eljojo] created ReMemory, a tool based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing to help your friends help you.

Shamir’s Secret Sharing, for the uninitiated, is a way to split up important data between parties so that the full picture is only available when a quorum comes together. The classic example is giving everyone a couple of digits out of the combination to the bank vault, but no one the full combination. Together, they can open the vault.

ReMemory works the same way. Rather than the combination to a bank vault, the locally-hosted, browser-based interface splits the encryption key to your sensitive data. If you’re old fashioned that might be a plaintext list of passwords, or for the more modern the recovery codes to your password manager. It could be literally anything, like your Aunt Edna’s famous cupcake recipe, which surely should not be lost to time.

You can chose how many friends to split your data betwixt, and how many will be required to meet quorum– the minimum, of course, being two, but the suggested default is to split the data five ways, and allow decryption from any three parties. Each bundle includes the complete recovery tool, so anyone in your circle of trust can start the process of decrypting your data if they get the others on board. Since it’s self-hosted and browser based, those friends don’t have to be particularly tech-savvy, as long as they can be trusted to hold onto the files. Everything is explained in the readme included in each bundle.

This does have the downside of requiring you to have multiple close friends, at least some of whom you trust to come through in a crunch, and all of whom you trust not to collude behind your back. Still, if you’re the social type, this seems like it might be a useful tool. The code is available under an Apache 2.0 license, so you can audit it for yourself — a must for any tool you plan on entrusting your secrets to.

The best part of the sharing algorithm is that it’s not vulnerable to quantum computing. While [eljojo] was thinking of amnesia when he put the tool together, we can’t help but think this also solves the postmortem password problem.

As Anthropic expands into India, a local software company has filed a court complaint saying it was already using the name “Anthropic,” spotlighting how the rapid global push of AI firms can collide with local incumbents.

The filing comes amid Anthropic deepening its focus on India, announcing an India office last October and more recently appointing former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead its operations in the country, underscoring the South Asian market’s growing importance to global AI companies expanding beyond the U.S. and Europe.

In a complaint filed in a commercial court in Karnataka in January, reviewed by TechCrunch, the Indian company Anthropic Software says it has used the name since 2017 and that Anthropic’s recent entry into India has led to customer confusion. The firm is seeking recognition of its prior use and relief to prevent further confusion, along with ₹10 million (about $110,000) in damages.

Anthropic Software founder and director Mohammad Ayyaz Mulla told TechCrunch that the Indian company was not seeking confrontation, but clarity and recognition of its prior use in India, adding that litigation was a fallback if clean coexistence could not be achieved.

“As of now, I am exercising my legal right as it’s causing huge confusion to my customers,” he said.

India, the world’s most populous nation and one of the fastest-growing internet markets, has become a key battleground for AI companies like Anthropic and its rival OpenAI. The country is also set to host an AI Impact Summit in New Delhi next week, where Anthropic co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei is appearing alongside other industry leaders like Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Sundar Pichai.

A court order dated January 20 and seen by TechCrunch shows that the court has issued notice and suit summons to Anthropic. However, it declined to grant an interim injunction and listed the matter to return on February 16.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

from the liar-liar dept

Way back in 2018, a series of events in Samoa brought about the country’s worst measles outbreak in years. It started in July of that year when two 1-year old children who were given a measles vaccine subsequently died. While anti-vaxxers around the world gleefully jumped into action to blame the vaccine for those deaths, it turns out that the vaccine didn’t kill the children at all. Instead, medical professionals had accidentally mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxer solution instead of sterilized water like they were supposed to. Despite that fact, the anti-vaxxers sowed all kinds of fear and disinformation throughout the country, whipping up negativity around measles vaccines. As a result of that, the government put a 10 months ban in place on the vaccine.

In June of 2019, RFK Jr. visited Samoa. He met with anti-vaxxer crusaders and government officials. Despite that, he has said publicly and in testimony before Congress that his trip there had nothing to do with vaccines and was instead about a medical records and tracking system the country was interested in. You can see an example of that claim in his own confirmation hearing.

Lots of people questioned that claim. And rightly so. The people he was meeting with, the timing in conjunction with the vaccination ban, it all lined up to yet another anti-vaxxer visiting the country to push their anti-vaxxer message.

Two months later, Samoa experienced a massive measles outbreak.

An outbreak began in October 2019 and continued for four months. Before seeking proper medical treatment, some parents first took their children to ‘traditional healers’ who used machines purchased that claimed to produce “immune-protective” water.

As of 22 December, there were 79 deaths. This was 0.4 deaths per 1,000 people, based on a population of 200,874, an infection fatality rate of 1.43%. There were 5,520 cases, representing 2.75% of the population.61 of the first 70 deaths were aged four and under. All but seven of the deaths were from people aged under 15.

At least 20% of babies aged six to 11 months contracted measles. One in 150 babies died.

This past week, documents and emails obtained by The Guardian and The AP show that everyone on the Samoan government’s side of the house understood Kennedy’s visit to be explicitly about vaccines, contrary to his statements, including statements before Congress. He was sworn in for that confirmation hearing, to be clear.

Documents obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press undermine that testimony. Emails sent by staffers at the U.S. Embassy and the United Nations provide, for the first time, an inside look at how Kennedy’s trip came about and include contemporaneous accounts suggesting his concerns about vaccine safety motivated the visit.

The documents have prompted concerns from at least one U.S. senator that the lawyer and activist now leading America’s health policy lied to Congress over the visit. Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak, which sickened thousands of people and killed 83, mostly children under age 5.

The AP post has a ton of details further down the article, but here is an example of the content.

Embassy staffers got a tip about Harding’s involvement in the trip from Sheldon Yett, then the representative for Pacific island countries at UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine,” Yett wrote in a May 22, 2019, email to an embassy staffer based in New Zealand. “The staff member in question seems to have had a role in facilitating this.”

Two days later, a top embassy staff member in Apia wrote to Scott Brown, then the Republican U.S. president’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, alerting him to Kennedy’s trip and Harding’s involvement.

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“The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view),” the embassy official, Antone Greubel, wrote. “It turns out our very own Benjamin Harding played some role in a personal capacity to bring him here.” Greubel wrote that he told Harding to “cease and desist from any further involvement with this travel,” though the rest of the sentence is redacted.

Now, I have zero problem believing that Kennedy is lying about all of this. Lying is just what he does. And regularly. I also put the blood of all those dead children, and any long term health issues in the thousands of others, partially on Kennedy’s ledger. This is all simply common sense.

But the real travesty is something quite similar is happening right here, right now. The measles outbreak in America is speeding up, not slowing down. Kennedy, as with Samoa, is taking zero responsibility for it. If he’s taking any real concrete actions to combat it, I don’t know what those would be, nor would I understand why they’ve been hidden so completely from public visibility. Kennedy once opined that maybe it would be better if everyone just got measles.

If that is his real goal, it appears we’re on our way. But somebody besides a couple of press outlets should be investigating Kennedy for lying to Congress, at a minimum. And perhaps having a hand in the deaths of children, as well.

Filed Under: health & human services, lies, measles, perjury, rfk jr., samoa, vaccines

Maker Nick Maselli created a pretty decent laundry folding robot prototype in under 24 hours for a client who simply needed the job done. He named it Sourccey, and it’s essentially a movable, cylindrical box with a dome on top, two articulated arms, and a center vertical lift to access items. The majority of the structural components, from arm parts to outer enclosures, were created using a 3D printer that produced PLA filament. The fact that it can print so quickly allows them to swap items out throughout the build window.

A Raspberry Pi 5 handles all computational tasks, including taking feeds from four cameras, controlling the motor drivers, running a display, speakers, and microphone, and overseeing the entire operation. Its power source is a 12 volt, 10 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery, which was chosen for its safety and longevity. A custom power distribution board, combined with voltage converters, ensures that everything receives a constant supply without overloading.

Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot（No Secondary Development）

• Height, width and thickness (standing): 1270x450x200mm Height, width and thickness (folded): 690x450x300mm Weight with battery: approx. 35kg
• Total freedom (joint motor): 23 Freedom of one leg: 6 Waist Freedom: 1 Freedom of one arm: 5
• Maximum knee torque: 90N.m Maximum arm load: 2kg Calf + thigh length: 0.6m Arm arm span: approx. 0.45m Extra large joint movement space Lumbar Z-axis…

To achieve proper folding, the arms use several servos for ultra precise, coordinated motion. A vertical Z-axis actuator runs through the center, allowing the arms to reach up and grab objects from the floor or a table. The grippers at the ends hold the fabric tight. Getting all of stuff sorted requires careful wiring and safety features like as fuses to keep everything stable.

The way it folds a towel or whatever it is avoids all the hard-coded stuff and instead relies entirely on artificial intelligence. A human demonstrates how to perform the move first, which serves as training data for the AI model, which then trains overnight on several powerful GPUs. Once it’s all done, the model is deployed back to the Raspberry Pi, and Sourccey can then do its thing independently: cameras spot a towel, work out where it is and what it looks like, grab it, and then execute the folding sequence it learned on the Pi, but here’s the thing, it’s not just tough on this one task, it can handle the natural give in fabric because it’s using vision to guide the whole process and learned patterns rather than just being told exactly what

The entire build took less than 24 hours, with the hardware assembled during the day and the AI training taking place at night. There were a few hiccups along the way, such as a missing motor clip that needed to be resoldered and a defective 3D-printed bit that needed to be reprinted, as well as a couple of team members calling it a day early, which cut into their time, but despite the rush, everything seemed to work fine and the prototype completed the task.
[Source]

Honor’s Magic V6 is set to debut next month, and leaks suggest it will be the fastest‑charging foldable yet.

This is thanks to 120W wired charging and a battery capacity of up to 7150mAh. This marks a huge leap over the Magic V5 and rivals like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold.

The mobile phone brand has confirmed that the Magic V6 will be unveiled a day before MWC 2026 officially begins, positioning it as one of the headline launches of the event.

Certification from China’s CCC authority reveals support for 120W wired charging, which is nearly double the 67W maximum offered by the Magic V5.

Foldable smartphones have gone from strength to strength in the past couple of years; these once-chunky, fragile devices are now slimmer, more robust and more capable, and that means they’re more tempting than ever.

The question is, which foldable should you buy? While there was initially a limited number of foldable available, that number has greatly expanded in the past 12 months. Whether you’re looking for the slimmest book-style foldable around, a compact clamshell-style foldable that fits in the palm of your hand or something that helps you multitask on the go, there’s a foldable for your needs.

Generally, it’s worth keeping in mind that foldable phones are still more fragile than regular smartphones with the flexible nature of foldable screens means that there is more potential for damage, but this could be a worthy trade-off depending on your needs.

In fact, durability issues and premium prices are the main reasons why we’ve yet to give any foldable the coveted five-star rating and remain key reasons to opt for a traditional flagship – though a couple of foldable entries have come closer than ever, suggesting that foldables are slowly but surely closing the gap.

You can see a selection of some of the most impressive regular phones we’ve tested in our best iPhone, best Android phone and best smartphone guides for context.

However, if that doesn’t put you off, keep reading. In this list, we’ve detailed the top-performing foldables we’ve tried and tested.

Best foldable phones at a glance

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