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    Telegram’s user base climbs to 950M, plans to launch app store

    From the Sphere to false cyberattack claims, misinformation runs rampant amid CrowdStrike outage

    It seemed too good to be true. On Friday morning, as the East Coast woke up to one of the most widespread IT disruptions ever due to a faulty CrowdStrike update, a priceless image circulated across X, accumulating millions of views. It appeared that the Sphere — the ostentatious new addition to the Las Vegas skyline, with 580,000 square feet of programmable LEDs on its exterior — had succumbed to the blue screen of death. But according to a representative for the Sphere, this photo was digitally altered. The Sphere escaped unscathed from the CrowdStrike outage, which has affected computers…

    Evolve Bank says ransomware gang stole personal data on millions of customers

    Twitter disappears from Mac App Store

    X (formerly Twitter) can no longer be accessed in the Mac App Store, suggesting that it has been officially delisted.  Searches for both “Twitter” and “X” on Apple’s platform no longer surface the app. The URL no longer works, either. Instead, it displays a pop-up message indicating that it is unavailable. This means new users can no longer download the service, instead having to rely on the browser-based version. Some who already have the app installed reported they can still use it. Others, meanwhile, have reported that utilizing the iPad version on MacOS could potentially cause its own issues. X has…

    This Week in AI: Companies are growing skeptical of AI’s ROI

    Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, Gartner released a report suggesting that around a third of generative AI projects in the enterprise will be abandoned after the proof-of-concept phase by year-end 2025. The reasons are many — poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating infrastructure costs and so on. But one of the biggest barriers to generative AI adoption is the unclear business value, per the report. Embracing generative AI organization-wide comes with significant costs, ranging from $5 million to a whopping $20 million, estimates Gartner. A simple coding assistant has an upfront cost…

    Meta releases its biggest ‘open’ AI model yet

    AI

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    AI and The Next Computing Platforms With Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg

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    Nvidia's Jensen Huang & Meta's Mark Zuckerberg Talk AI at Siggraph: Everything in 9 Minutes

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    Inside Mark Zuckerberg's AI Era | The Circuit

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    Create Cinematic AI Videos with Runway Gen-3

    15:15
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    What Is an AI Anyway? | Mustafa Suleyman | TED

    22:02

    SECURE

    • SecurityThe Bumble app on a smartphone arranged in New York, US, on Monday, Nov. 6, 2023.
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      Bumble and Hinge allowed stalkers to pinpoint users’ locations down to 2 meters, researchers say

      A group of researchers said they found that vulnerabilities in the design of some dating apps, including the popular Bumble and Hinge, allowed malicious users or stalkers to pinpoint the location of their victims down to 2 meters.  In a new academic paper, researchers from the Belgian university KU Leuven detailed their findings when they analyzed 15 popular dating apps. Of those, Badoo, Bumble, Grindr, happn, Hinge and Hily all had the same vulnerability that could have helped a malicious user identify the near-exact location of another user, according to the researchers. While neither of those apps share exact locations…

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    • SecurityPaper Craft of a Cracked Yellow Padlock in a Group of Secure Ones on Purple Background Front View, Data Security Concept.
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      Lineaje raises $20M to help organizations combat software supply chain threats

      The software supply chain faces threats from all sides. A 2024 report by the Ponemon Institute found that over half of organizations have experienced a software supply chain attack, with 54% having experienced one within the past year. Supply chain attacks typically target services from third-party vendors or open source software that make up a company’s tech stack, and they can financially devastate an organization. According to a Juniper Research study, supply chain cyberattacks could cost the global economy almost $81 billion in lost revenue and damages by 2026. The White House has indicated a commitment to addressing the broader…

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    • SecurityThe Wiz logo on a smartphone arranged in
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      It took some serious nerve for Wiz to walk away from Google’s $23B offer

      Google had good news and bad news last week. The good news was that the cloud division — including Google Workplace software as a service and Google Cloud infrastructure services — generated $10 billion for the quarter for the first time. That had to take the sting out of losing out on its second potential $20+ billion acquisition in less than a month. The first failed acquisition was the long-rumored deal to buy Boston-based CRM and marketing software company HubSpot. We never got a price on that, but the company’s market cap is in the $30 billion range, so you…

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    • SecurityAn Opened Prescription Medicine Bottle Among Many Other Sealed Bottles on Yellow Background High Angle View.
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      HealthEquity data breach affects 4.3M people

      HealthEquity is notifying 4.3 million people following a March data breach that affects their personal and protected health information. In its data breach notice, filed with Maine’s attorney general, the Utah-based healthcare benefits administrator said that although the compromised data varies by person, it largely consists of sign-up information for accounts and information about benefits that the company administers. HealthEquity said the data may include customer names, addresses, phone numbers, their Social Security number, information about the person’s employer and the person’s dependent (if any), and some payment card information.  HealthEquity provides employees at companies across the United States access…

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    Apple

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    WWDC 2024 — June 10 | Apple

    01:43:37
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    Apple Intelligence in 5 minutes

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    18 things from WWDC24 | Apple

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    Apple Intelligence | Privacy

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    Apple Event - May 7

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    Apple Event - October 30

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    Apps

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    • AI3D headphones with sound waves on dark background. Concept of electronic music listening and digital audio. Abstract visualization of digital sound waves and modern art. Vector illustration. (3D headphones with sound waves on dark background. Concept
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      AI music startup Suno claims training model on copyrighted music is ‘fair use’

      Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in fact, train its AI model using copyrighted songs. But it claimed that doing so was legal under the fair-use doctrine. The RIAA filed the lawsuit against Udio and Suno on June 24, alleging that the companies trained their models using copyrighted music. While Suno’s investors have previously hinted that the startup didn’t have permission from the music labels to use the copyrighted material, it hasn’t been so directly stated as…

    • Apple
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      iPad sales help bail out Apple amid a continued iPhone slide

      Apple on Thursday announced that its third-quarter financials beat Wall Street expectations, as its overall revenue ticked up 5%. iPad, which had languished in recent years, saw the biggest category increase for the quarter, up from $5.8 billion to $7.2 billion year-over-year. Tablet sales, fueled by the line’s largest refresh in years, helped counter slowed iPhone revenue, which dropped from $39.7 billion to $39.3 billion year-on-year. In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple’s most important category by a wide margin, followed by service, which includes software offerings like iCloud, Apple TV+ and Apple Music. That category…

    • Apple
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      Google brings Gemini-powered search history and Lens to Chrome desktop

      Google Thursday said that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features for Chrome’s desktop version, including Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping assistance, and natural language integration for search history. Years after introducing and evolving Google Lens on mobile, the feature is finally coming to desktop. Rolling out to users across the world in the coming days, Lens will live in the address bar, as well as the three-dot menu. After clicking, you can select a part of a page and ask more questions to get search results. You can also tap on objects, such as someone’s backpack in a…

    • Apple
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      How to enable Apple Intelligence on your iPhone

      Apple is finally releasing some of the Apple Intelligence features it announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. However, the rollout is currently restricted to developer beta versions of iOS 18.1. So if you don’t want to deal with early-stage buggy software, you might want to wait for the Apple Intelligence feature release of public betas or the stable release later this year. If you are on the developer beta, you can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language is set to U.S. English and your region is set to U.S. This doesn’t affect your App Store regions…

    • AIMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco
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      Microsoft now lists OpenAI as a competitor in AI and search

      Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long-term partnership. As part of the deal, Microsoft runs OpenAI’s models across its enterprise and consumer products and is OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. However, the tech giant called the startup a “competitor” for the first time in an SEC filing on Tuesday. In Microsoft’s annual 10K, OpenAI joined a long list of competitors in AI, alongside Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta. OpenAI was also listed alongside Google as a competitor to Microsoft in search, thanks to OpenAI’s new…

    • AppleIn this photo illustration, the 'Apple' logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying Apple Intelligence logo.
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      Apple brings Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 dev beta, but there are a lot of limitations

      Users who have signed up for iOS 18’s developer beta can now get the first taste of Apple Intelligence as the company has released some features of its AI suite via an update released on Monday. The company revealed Apple Intelligence at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June, but the first set of developer beta and public beta releases didn’t have any Apple Intelligence features. Usage limitations The rollout with iOS 18.1 seems to be quite limited. Apple said in June that users with iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPads and Macs that run on M1 chips…

    • ApplePeople walk past an Apple Store on March 25, 2024 in Berlin, Germany.
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      Apple reaches its first contract agreement with a US retail union

      Two years ago, workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland, were the first to establish a formally recognized union at an Apple retail store in the United States. Now they’re the first to reach a tentative contract agreement. According to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, which represents approximately 85 employees at the Towson store, the three-year agreement includes scheduling improvements, average raises of 10% over the life of the contract, a severance clause and limits on contracted employees, and a transparent disciplinary process. “By reaching a tentative agreement with Apple, we…

    • Securitya facial recognition tablet used at Dulles Airport featuring someone's face
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      How to opt out of facial recognition at airports (if you’re American)

      U.S. airports are rolling out facial-recognition technology to scan the faces of travelers before they board their flight. Americans, at least, get to opt out.  More than 230 U.S. airports have already rolled out facial-recognition technology, according to the website of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency tasked with border security.  On one hand, the government claims that facial recognition reduces paper tickets and that it can be more efficient for travelers. But facial recognition remains imperfect and controversial. Technical problems and reliability issues plagued the initial rollout of airport facial recognition, and independent testing called…

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      Google Cloud expands its database portfolio with new AI capabilities

      Google is hosting a version of its Cloud Next conference in Tokyo this week, and it’s putting the focus squarely on tweaking its databases for AI workloads (because at this point in 2024, AI is the only thing these major tech companies want to talk about). These include updates to its Spanner SQL database, which now features graph and vector search support, as well as extended full-text search capabilities. This wouldn’t be a Google announcement without some Gemini-powered features. These include Gemini in BigQuery and Looker to help users with data engineering and analysis, as well as governance and security…

    • Apple
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      OpenAI comes for Google with SearchGPT

      OpenAI is testing SearchGPT, a new AI search experience to compete directly with Google. The feature aims to elevate search queries with “timely answers” from across the internet and allows the user to ask follow-up questions. The temporary prototype is currently only available to a small group of users and its publisher partners for testing and feedback, but curious minds can join the waitlist. Read more CrowdStrike offered its partners $10 Uber Eats gift cards to apologize for the global IT outage caused by its botched update. A source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them…

    • SecurityInternational travelers wait to have their passports checked at O'Hare International Airport on September 19, 2014 in Chicago, Illinois
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      US border agents must get warrant before cell phone searches, federal court rules

      A federal district court in New York has ruled that U.S. border agents must obtain a warrant before searching the electronic devices of Americans and international travelers crossing the U.S. border. The ruling on July 24 is the latest court opinion to upend the U.S. government’s long-standing legal argument, which asserts that federal border agents should be allowed to access the devices of travelers at ports of entry, like airports, seaports and land borders, without a court-approved warrant. Civil liberties groups who advocated for the ruling praised the judgment.  “The ruling makes clear that border agents need a warrant before…

    • AILisbon , Portugal - 2 November 2022; Garry Tan, Initialized Capital, on Venture stage during day one of Web Summit 2022 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. (Photo By Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images)
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      Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for Y Combinator startups

      Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of Google Cloud’s effort to cozy up with promising early-stage AI startups, in hopes some of them will evolve into massive, compute-hungry businesses. “We want to surround them with a lot of love and warmth early in their life cycle so they get familiarized with building and working on the Google Cloud Platform,” said general manager for Google Cloud’s startups and AI business, James Lee, in an interview with TechCrunch. “As…

    • AppleApple's iCloud Private Relay on an iPhone
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      Apple reports iCloud Private Relay global outages for some users

      Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, which helps protect paid iCloud users from online trackers, has experienced outages affecting major markets, restricting users from accessing web services and apps that use internet connectivity. TechCrunch understands that iCloud Private Relay’s downtime has affected some Apple users in markets including Europe, India Japan, and the United States since at least Thursday. The sporadic outages are restricting users from accessing the web on the Safari browser and reporting internet connectivity issues on installed apps. Apple’s System Status web page confirms the latest iCloud Private Relay outage and mentions that the service might be “slow or…

    • AIBusinessman touching the brain working of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Automation, Predictive analytics, Customer service AI-powered chatbot, analyze customer data, business and technology
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      The EU’s AI Act is now in force

      It’s official: The European Union’s risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence has come into force starting Thursday, August 1, 2024. This starts the clock on a series of staggered compliance deadlines that the law will apply to different types of AI developers and applications. Most provisions will be fully applicable by mid-2026. But the first deadline, which enforces bans on a small number of prohibited uses of AI in specific contexts, such as law enforcement use of remote biometrics in public places, will apply in just six months’ time. Under the bloc’s approach, most applications of AI are considered…

    • AppleTim Cook
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      Apple signs the White House’s commitment to AI safety

      Apple signed the White House’s voluntary commitment to developing safe, secure and trustworthy AI, according to a press release on Friday. The company will soon launch its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, into its core products, putting generative AI in front of Apple’s 2 billion users. Apple joins 15 other technology companies — including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — that committed to the White House’s ground rules for developing generative AI in July 2023. At the time, Apple had not revealed how deeply it planned to ingrain AI into iOS. But we heard Apple loud and…

    • SecurityServer room with laptop sitting on a table inside data center.
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      ZeroTier raises $13.5M to help avert CrowdStrike-like network problems

      With the CrowdStrike update continuing to cause havoc across the planet, a startup has raised $13.5 million to at least improve some level of security for the kinds of devices that have been affected. California-based ZeroTier raised the Series A in a funding round led by Battery Ventures. While legacy companies like Cisco or Palo Alto Networks typically secure edge networks, the new vanguard of this sector is considered to be more focused around devices. This is the arena ZeroTier is playing in, and it now claims to support over 3 million connected devices and 600,000 network administrators across more…

    • AIpeople walking past Meta signage
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      Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3

      Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that to train Llama 4, the company will need 10x more compute than what was needed to train Llama 3. But he still wants Meta to build capacity to train models rather than fall behind its competitors. “The amount of computing needed to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times more than what we used to train Llama 3, and…

    • Securitya collection of patterned illustrated eyes in green and red on a darker green background.
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      Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

      There is a whole shady industry for people who want to monitor and spy on their families. Multiple app makers market their software — sometimes referred to as stalkerware — to jealous partners who can use these apps to access their victims’ phones remotely.  Yet, despite how sensitive this data is, an increasing number of these companies are losing huge amounts of it.  According to TechCrunch’s tally, counting the latest hack on Spytech, there have been at least 21 stalkerware companies since 2017 that are known to have been hacked, or leaked customer and victims’ data online. That’s not a…

    • AISam Altman OpenAI
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      OpenAI pledges to give U.S. AI Safety Institute early access to its next model

      OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on an agreement to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing. The announcement, which Altman made in a post on X late Thursday evening, was light on details. But it — along with a similar deal with the U.K.’s AI safety body struck in June — appears to be intended to counter the narrative that OpenAI has deprioritized work on AI safety in the pursuit…

    • Securityrender of a data breach with computer folders over blue, green and purple spilling data squares
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      Data breach exposes US spyware maker behind Windows, Mac, Android and Chromebook malware

      A little-known spyware maker based in Minnesota has been hacked, TechCrunch has learned, revealing thousands of devices around the world under its stealthy remote surveillance. A person with knowledge of the breach provided TechCrunch with a cache of files taken from the company’s servers containing detailed device activity logs from the phones, tablets, and computers that Spytech monitors, with some of the files dated as recently as early June.  TechCrunch verified the data as authentic in part by analyzing some of the exfiltrated device activity logs that pertain to the company’s chief executive, who installed the spyware on one of…

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