Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the stories shaping our digital world.
Meta is pulling an AI image feature from Instagram after just days of public backlash. The company had rolled out a tool allowing users to alter content on the platform, but the response was swift and largely negative. Meta confirmed to reporters it has nixed the feature entirely — a reminder that even the largest platforms still answer to their users, at least sometimes.
Shifting to a story raising serious ethical questions, Phia — the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni — is facing accusations of cookie stuffing. That's a practice where a service quietly claims affiliate commissions for purchases it had no real hand in generating. A Bloomberg investigation surfaced the allegations, putting a high-profile young startup under uncomfortable scrutiny at a critical early moment.
And in defense technology, a California company called Castelion has secured a Navy order for its first fifty Blackbeard hypersonic missiles — at a total cost of twenty-three point four million dollars. That puts each missile under three hundred thousand dollars once full production begins, a remarkable figure for Mach five weaponry. The company credits sourcing components from the oil, gas, and audio industries for keeping costs down.
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