 NASA's OSIRIS-REx Will Land On an Asteroid To Bring Home Rocks and Dust
Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into just two to three parking spaces surrounded by two-story boulders. On Oct. 20, a University of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years in the making will attempt the astronomical equivalent more than 200 million miles away. A NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx will soon attempt to touch the surface of an asteroid and collect loose rubble. bobbied writes: OSIRIS-REx is the United States' first asteroid sample return mission, aiming to collect and carry a pri
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Seven Mobile Browsers Vulnerable To Address Bar Spoofing Attacks
In a report published today by cyber-security firm Rapid7, the company said it worked with Pakistani security researcher Rafay Baloch to disclose ten new address bar spoofing vulnerabilities across seven mobile browser apps. From a report: Impacted browsers include big names like Apple Safari, Opera Touch, and Opera Mini, but also niche apps like Bolt, RITS, UC Browser, and Yandex Browser. The issues were discovered earlier this year and reported to browser makers in August. The big vendors patc
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Sweden Bans Chinese Telecoms Huawei and ZTE From 5G Networks
Sweden banned Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE from its 5G mobile networks on Tuesday, citing China's "extensive intelligence gathering and theft of technology." From a report: Since the Trump administration announced its own ban last year, the U.S. government has increasingly pressured allies to follow its lead amid growing tensions between the West and China. In July, the United Kingdom became the first European country to announce plans to exclude Huawei from its networks by 2027. The Sw
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Google Photos Revives Its Prints Subscription Service
Google Photos is reviving its photo printing subscription service and introducing same-day prints. The company earlier this year had briefly tested a new program that used A.I. to suggest the month's 10 best photos, which were then shipped to your home automatically. But Google ended the test on June 30. From a report: During the trial, Google had offered users a $7.99 per month subscription that would automatically select 10 photos from one of three themes, including people and pets, landscapes
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Impossible Foods Is Now Developing a Plant-Based Alternative To Cow's Milk
From a report: There's a myriad of reasons to replace cow's milk with alternatives like nut milks, oat milk, or soy milk, but for those who enjoy the experience of consuming animal-sourced dairy products, the alternatives just aren't the same. So Impossible Foods, makers of the Impossible Burger and other plant-based meat alternatives, are working on another food replacement that looks, tastes, and behaves like cow's milk. During a virtual press conference this morning where Impossible Foods rev
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 Microsoft Azure announces its first region in Austria
Microsoft today announced its plans to launch a new data center region in Austria, its first in the country. With nearby Azure regions in Switzerland, Germany, France and a planned new region in northern Italy, this part of Europe now has its fair share of Azure coverage. Microsoft also noted that it plans to launch […]
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Call analytics platform Invoca expands into sales, e-commerce and customer experience
Invoca, which helps companies extract and use data from customer phone calls, is expanding today with the launch of products for e-commerce, customer experience and sales teams, as well as a new Invoca Exchange, where businesses can find all of the platform’s third-party integrations. The company is making these announcements as part of its virtual […]
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Google calls DOJ's antitrust lawsuit “deeply flawed” in GIF-laden blog response
Google was clearly anticipating today’s U.S. Department of Justice antitrust complaint filing - the company posted an extensive rebuttal of the lawsuit to its Keyword company blog. The post, penned by SVP of Global Affairs and Google Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker, suggests that the DOJ’s case is “deeply flawed” and “would do nothing to […]
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Intel Agrees To Sell Storage Unit To SK Hynix for $9 Billion
Intel has agreed to sell its Nand memory unit to South Korea's SK Hynix for about $9 billion, a deal that allows the U.S. chipmaker to concentrate on its main business while shoring up the Asian company's position in a booming market. From a report: The chipmaker will pay 10.3 trillion won for the Intel unit, which makes flash memory components for computers and other devices. The acquisition, which will take place in stages through 2025, includes Intel's solid-state drive, Nand flash and wafer
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Beam is building a web browser that gathers knowledge from your web activity
Remember Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer? Those applications from the 1990s used emphatic metaphors in their names to talk about a simple task — browsing the web. Today, nobody would say that Google Chrome is a web explorer. Browsing the web has become an effortless — and often mindless — task. You grab your phone or […]
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NASA and Nokia To Install 4G on Lunar Surface
With competition among Earth's telecoms providers as fierce as ever, equipment maker Nokia has announced its expansion into a new market, winning a deal to install the first cellular network on the moon. From a report: The Finnish equipment manufacturer said it was selected by NASA to deploy an "ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened" wireless 4G network on the lunar surface, as part of the US space agency's plan to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by 2030. The $14.1m contract,
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Robotic kitchen startup YPC raises a $1.8M seed round
Montreal-based YPC Technologies today announced that it has raised a $1.8 million seed round. Led by Hike Ventures and Real Ventures, the funding includes participation from Toyota AI Ventures and Uphill Capital, among others, designed to help the company pilot its kitchen robotics technology. Toyota AI Venture's funding came as part of the company's "Call […]
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As startups accelerate in record Q3, Europe and Asia rack up huge VC results
Venture capital activity in Europe and Asia saw a strong return to form in Q3, data indicates. The two continents enjoyed more venture capital investment into their local startups than in some time, underscoring that strong VC results the United States saw in the third quarter were not a fluke, but part of a broader […]
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Sym raises $9M Series A for its security workflow platform
Sym, a new platform that makes it easier for developers to integrate security and privacy workflows into their process, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Amplify Partners. Earlier this year, the company announced its $3 million seed round lead by Andy McLoughlin of Uncork Capital and Robin […]
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Microsoft Teams With SpaceX To Push Cloud Battle With Amazon Into Orbit
Microsoft is teaming with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others as the software giant opens a new front in its cloud-computing battle with Amazon.com targeting space customers. From a report: Microsoft would help connect and deploy new services using swarms of low-orbit spacecraft being proposed by SpaceX [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], and more traditional fleets of satellites circling the earth at higher altitudes. Microsoft's initiative targeting commercial and governm
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The Polaris Slingshot R is a 3-wheel pocket rocket begging for electrification
The Polaris Slingshot has always wowed. Three wheels, open cockpit, and a design reminiscent of the Batmobile. It draws a crowd and is a blast to drive. I spent several weeks in the reworked Polaris Slingshot. The company just unveiled a new version that is finally available with an automatic transmission. Past versions were limited […]
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Instagram rolls out fan badges for live videos, expands IGTV ads test
Instagram is today introducing a new way for creators to make money. The company is now rolling out badges in Instagram Live to an initial group of over 50,000 creators, who will be able to offer their fans the ability to purchase badges during their live videos to stand out in the comments and show […]
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Index nabs $2.6M seed to create BI dashboards without coding
Index founders, Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet, have been friends since they were small children in the Dominican Republic. Both came to college in the U.S., and last year the two decided to launch a startup to help non-technical users build business intelligence dashboards without coding. Today they get to keep building on that dream […]
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Stampli, an invoice management software startup, launches a payments product
Stampli, a collaborative invoice management software company, introduced a payments product today called Stampli Direct Pay. The startup launched back in 2015 with a mission to simplify invoice management through collaboration (and a dash of AI). Interestingly, Stampli said it was uninterested at the time in providing a payments product alongside its collaborative suite, focusing […]
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Robin.io launches a free version of its cloud-native Kubernetes storage solution
Robin.io, a cloud-native application and data management solution with enterprise customers like USAA, Sabre, SAP, Palo Alto Networks and Rakuten Mobile, today announced the launch of its new free(-mium) version of its service, in addition to a major update to the core of its tool. Robin .io promises that it brings cloud-native data management capabilities […]
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Gowalla is being resurrected as an augmented reality social app
Gowalla is coming back. The startup, which longtime TechCrunch readers will likely recall, was an ambitious consumer social app that excited Silicon Valley investors but ultimately floundered in its quest to take on Foursquare before an eventual $3 million acquihire in 2011 brought the company’s talent to Facebook. The story certainly seemed destined to end […]
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US Accuses Google of Protecting Illegal Monopoly
The Justice Department plans to accuse Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit to be filed on Tuesday, the government's most significant legal challenge to a tech company's market power in a generation, according to officials at the agency. From a report: In its suit, to be filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., the agency will accuse Google, a unit of Alphabet, of illegally maintaining its monopoly over search through several exclusive bu
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Genies updates its software development kit and partners with Gucci, Giphy
Genies, has updated its software development kit and added Giphy and Gucci as new partners to enable their users to create personalized Genie avatars. The company released the first version of its sdk in 2018 when it raised a $10 million to directly challenge Snap and Apple for avatar dominance. Now, with the latest update, […]
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Security testing firm NSS Labs ceases operations, citing coronavirus
Security testing company NSS Labs “ceased operations” last week, the company said in a notice on its website, citing impacts related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The Austin, Texas-based company was quietly acquired by private equity firm Consecutive last October. But last week, the company was reportedly preparing for layoffs, according to Dark Reading, which […]
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OpenStack Foundation Transforms Into the Open Infrastructure Foundation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The writing was on the wall two years ago. The OpenStack Foundation was going to cover more than just the OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Today, that metamorphosis is complete. The Foundation now covers a wide variety of open-source cloud and container technologies as the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Why so long? COO Mark Collier said, "They wanted to be sure they did this right." One reason for this was to make sure they cou
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Tesla Slashes Its Used Car Warranty While Admitting Design Flaw In Model 3
Two recent articles from Electrek may have current and/or future Tesla owners concerned. According to Electrek, Tesla is now admitting that a design flaw in the Model 3 could cause the vehicle's rear bumper panel to fall off when driving through standing water. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Tesla admits that a problem with Model 3 vehicles led to them losing the body panel on their rear bumper when driving in puddles of water. Early on, the Model 3 had some issues with t
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Trilo lets merchants offer rewards to customers choosing bank-to-bank payments
Open banking enables bank-to-bank payments, meaning that (in theory) merchants should be able to accept payments without having to hand over fees to Visa or Mastercard or other payment providers, such as Stripe. The challenge, however, isn’t just implementing open-banking based payments as a checkout option — there are are already a host of open […]
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Eat Just partners with Proterra to launch a new subsidiary in Asia
Eat Just, the plant-based food startup, is launching a new Asian subsidiary through a partnership with Proterra Investment Partners Asia. The agreement includes building Eat Just’s first factory in Asia, which will be based in Singapore. As part of the deal, Proterra, which focuses on agri-tech, will invest up to $100 million in the facility, […]
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Voyager Spacecraft Detect An Increase In the Density of Space Outside the Solar System
As Voyager 2 moves farther and farther from the Sun, the density of space is increasing. "It's not the first time this density increase has been detected," notes SciencAlert. "Voyager 1, which entered interstellar space in 2012, detected a similar density gradient at a separate location." From the report: Voyager 2's new data show that not only was Voyager 1's detection legit, but that the increase in density may be a large-scale feature of the very local interstellar medium (VLIM). The Solar Sy
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Intel agrees to sell its NAND business to SK Hynix for $9 billion
SK Hynix, one of the world's largest chip makers, announced today it will pay $9 billion for Intel's flash memory business. Intel said it will use proceeds from the deal to focus on artificial intelligence, 5G and edge computing. “For Intel, this transaction will allow us to to further prioritize our investments in differentiated technology […]
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QAnon/8Chan Sites Back Online After Being Ousted By DDoS-Protection Vendor
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few dozen QAnon and 8chan-related sites were knocked offline temporarily yesterday when a DDoS-protection vendor disabled their access, according to an article by security reporter Brian Krebs. The websites [...] are connected to the Internet via the US-based ISP VanwaTech, which in turn "had a single point of failure on its end," Krebs wrote. "The swath of Internet addresses serving the various 8kun/QAnon sites were being protected from o
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Trump says 'nobody gets hacked' but forgot his hotel chain was hacked — twice
According to President Trump speaking at a campaign event in Tucson, Arizona, on Monday, “nobody gets hacked.” You don’t need someone who covers security day in and day out to call bullshit on this one. “Nobody gets hacked. To get hacked you need somebody with 197 IQ and he needs about 15 percent of your […]
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A Group of Materials Called Perovskites Could Be a Game-Changer For Solar Power
Researchers from Australia have discovered that the widely acclaimed mineral perovskite can be used to transform the solar industry through cheaper and more efficient photovoltaics. The Independent reports: Perovskite, which is forged deep within the Earth's mantle, has been hailed for its unprecedented potential to convert sunlight into electricity. Researchers have already improved its sunlight-to-energy efficiency from around 3 per cent to over 20 per cent in the space of just a few years. "I
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IKEA To Buy Back Used Furniture In Recycling Push
Last week, the BBC reported that IKEA, the world's biggest furniture business, is planning to launch a scheme to buy back your unwanted furniture you no longer need or want. From the report: Under the plan, it will offer vouchers worth up to 50% of the original price, to be spent at its stores. The "Buy Back" initiative will launch to coincide with Black Friday. "By making sustainable living more simple and accessible, Ikea hopes that the initiative will help its customers take a stand against e
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ShopUp raises $22.5 million to digitize millions of mom-and-pop shops in Bangladesh
A startup that is aiming to digitize millions of neighborhood stores in Bangladesh just raised the country's largest Series A financing round. Dhaka-headquartered ShopUp said on Tuesday it has raised $22.5 million in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Flourish Ventures. For both the venture firms, this is the first time they are […]
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Google Confirms the Nest Secure Has Been Discontinued
Google's Nest Secure alarm system, which was discussed on Slashdot for featuring an unlisted, disabled microphone, has been discontinued by Google, though it will continue functioning. Android Police reports: Google released the Nest Guard in 2017 as a simple security system with motion sensors and a keypad, but it never received an upgrade, even as other Nest devices were updated again and again. The product page for the Nest Guard on the Google Store was updated last week with a 'No longer ava
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Chess's Cheating Crisis: 'Paranoia Has Become the Culture'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In one chess tournament, five of the top six were disqualified for cheating. In another, the doting parents of 10-year-old competitors furiously rejected evidence that their darlings were playing at the level of the world No 1. And in a third, an Armenian grandmaster booted out for suspicious play accused his opponent of "doing pipi in his Pampers." These incidents may sound extreme but they are not isolated -- and they have all taken place
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Instagram's Handling of Kids' Data Is Now Being Probed In the EU
Facebook's lead data regulator in Europe has opened another two probes into its business empire -- both focused on how the Instagram platform processes children's information. TechCrunch reports: The action by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), reported earlier by the Telegraph, comes more than a year after a U.S. data scientist reported concerns to Instagram that its platform was leaking the contact information of minors. David Stier went on to publish details of his investigation last
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Lee Fixel is already raising a massive second fund
On Friday, former Tiger Global Management investor Lee Fixel registered plans for the second fund of his new investment firm, Addition, just four months after closing the first. According to a report on Friday by the Financial Times, the outfit spent last week finalizing the fundraising for the $1.4 billion fund, which Addition reportedly doesn’t […]
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Microsoft Adds Option To Disable JScript In Internet Explorer
As part of the October 2020 Patch Tuesday security updates, Microsoft has added a new option to Windows to let system administrators disable the JScript component inside Internet Explorer. ZDNet reports: The JScript scripting engine is an old component that was initially included with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996 and was Microsoft's own dialect of the ECMAScript standard (the JavaScript language). Development on the JScript engine ended, and the component was deprecated with the release of Inte
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TikTok's QAnon ban has been 'buggy'
TikTok has been cracking down on QAnon-related content, in line with similar moves by other major social media companies, including Facebook and YouTube, which focus on reducing the spread the baseless conspiracy theory across their respective platforms. According to a report by NPR this weekend, TikTok had quietly banned several hashtags associated with the QAnon […]
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Daily Crunch: Pakistan un-bans TikTok
TikTok returns to Pakistan, Apple launches a music-focused streaming station and SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites. This is your Daily Crunch for October 19, 2020. The big story: Pakistan un-bans TikTok The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority blocked the video app 11 days ago, over what it described as “immoral,” “obscene” and “vulgar” videos. The authority said […]
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