Last year, Maddie Kowalski was a regular sophomore attending the University of Florida. Then a series of burner accounts on X started proliferating explicit, nonconsensual videos of her. This week, Zoë Schiffer sits down with WIRED’s senior writer Ej Dickson to discuss the burnerverse, a sprawling, loosely organized network of anonymous accounts that have turned
A federal court in Delaware has ruled on a trademark fight between Elon Musk’s X and a startup trying to launch a rival social network. The startup, Operation Bluebird, originally launched under the name Twitter.now, but the court barred it from using that name, siding with X on the core “Twitter” trademark. However, the court
The social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, gets to retain the Twitter trademark for the moment, thanks to a partial preliminary injunction against Operation Bluebird, Inc.’s Twitter.new. But by the same ruling, Bluebird gets to keep the birds and tweets. Bluebird responded to this fail whale by announcing it would rename its nascent
OpenAI said it’s ending its contract with Cursor, a coding startup recently acquired by SpaceX, because it doesn’t trust an Elon Musk-owned company to comply with its terms of service. The company said in a statement published on Friday night that it plans to shut off Cursor’s access to OpenAI models on November 12. “This
A former Twitter trademark lawyer has launched a social network with a familiar name. Stephen Coates’ startup, Operation Bluebird, launched Twitter.now in early testing on Thursday. Coates, formerly Twitter’s head counsel for trademarks, domain names, and marketing, told Business Insider that the platform is experimenting with a twist on content moderation: Users, rather than the
It’s been a big year for AI acquisitions, so big that most of them barely register. Anthropic and OpenAI have continued to buy, acquiring developer tools, AI service shops, and product testing startups to turn model capability into enterprise revenue and expand their reach faster than each other. Which is what made the weekend rumor
