Sensor Tower, a prominent market intelligence firm for the app economy, this week laid off a notable portion of its workforce, estimated at around 40 people out of the 270+ at the company, according to LinkedIn's headcount. The layoffs included C-suite executives, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources, including the CMO, CFO and chief product officer. Other teams impacted include finance and nearly all of marketing, we're hearing. 'Earlier this week, Sensor Tower's management team took necessary steps to reorganize and right-size our business under a talented and experienced senior leadership team,' said Melissa Sheer, a publicist for Sensor Tower, in an emailed statement provided to TechCrunch. 'We are excited about these changes as we position the company for a balance of continued growth and best-in-class profitability. We will provide more details in the coming days,' she said. A popular provider of third-party data and insights for app developers, brands, marketers and publishers, Sensor Tower has grown its headcount over the years following its $45 million investment in 2020 from Riverwood Capital. The firm at the time cited 350 enterprise-level customers, such as Morgan Stanley, Zynga and Tencent. But Sensor Tower was still a small team then ' just 75 employees ' only a bit larger than the number of employees laid off this week....

The Justice Department on April 14, 2023, charged Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member, with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. Media reports suggest that Teixeira didn't intend to leak the documents widely but rather shared them on a closed Discord community focused on playing war games. Ever since the earliest days of the internet in the 1980s, getting online has meant getting involved in a community. Initially, there were dial-up chat servers, email lists and text-based discussion groups focused on specific interests. Since the early 2000s, mass-appeal social media platforms have collected these small spaces into bigger ones, letting people find their own little corners of the internet, but only with interconnections to others. This allows social media sites to suggest new spaces users might join, whether it's a local neighborhood discussion or a group with the same hobby, and sell specifically targeted advertising. But the small-group niche community is making a comeback with adults, and with kids and teens....

In the weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joe Biden and U.S. national security officials provided the public with a running stream of intelligence of the sort that is usually classified. The administration announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin was assembling troops along the eastern border of Ukraine and provided pictures of that buildup. Russia had a 'kill list,' with plans to detain or kill Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other prominent Ukrainians. Biden said that Russia was going to invade Ukraine 'in the coming days.' A fascinating set of events played out in the runup to this war. There was the national security adviser of the United States, Jake Sullivan, going out in front of the cameras and revealing intelligence that must have come from the highest sources that the U.S. has, not just inside of Ukraine, but inside of Russia, and making this information public in a way that is unprecedented. If you have good sources, especially within a highly repressive regime, those sources are pure gold to you. The last thing that you want to do is reveal information that could make it easier for that regime to identify them. Even just a few pieces of leaked intelligence could be sufficient, because they could allow the government to identify meetings in which a certain person was present, or a certain set of people was present, and they can then narrow down their list of suspects....