 PG&E Should Compensate Customers For Power Shutoffs, California Governor Says
Pacific Gas & Electric should give rebates or credits to each of its nearly 800,000 customers affected by last week's power shutoffs, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, demanding that the utility "be held accountable." CNN reports: The utility intentionally cut power to almost 800,000 customers in Northern California last week in an effort to prevent downed utility lines and equipment from causing wildfires amid dry and windy conditions. Some customers were without power for days. Newsom is
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 Watch Google unveil the Pixel 4 live right here
Google is about to unveil its new smartphone lineup, the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. And if you're an Android fan, you know that the Pixel is one of the most interesting Android phones out there thanks to a bloatware-free operating system and some incredible cameras. The conference starts at 10 AM Eastern Time […]
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NASA Engineer's 'Helical Engine' May Violate Laws of Physics
NASA engineer David Burns posted a paper describing the concept of his "helical engine," which could take humans to the stars by exploiting mass-altering effects known to occur at near-light speed. Unfortunately, it's been met with skepticism from those who say it violates the conservation of momentum, a core physical law. New Scientist explains: To get to grips with the principle of Burns's engine, picture a box on a frictionless surface. Inside that box is a rod, along which a ring can slide.
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South Korea-based Mathpresso, developer of tutoring app Qanda, raises $14.5 million Series B
Seoul-based education technology startup Mathpresso announced today that it has raised $14.5 million in Series B funding. The company's flagship app is Qanda, which provides students with math and science help and tutoring. Participants in the round include Legend Capital, InterVest, NP Investments and Mirae Asset Venture Investment. This brings Mathpresso's total funding so far […]
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A Prenup Is the Latest Must-Have For Tech Startup Founders In Love
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In Silicon Valley, where penniless programmers fervently believe their ideas are worth billions, getting rich can take priority over getting married. California law assumes that any wealth created during a marriage is community property, which should be split equally in a divorce. That's alarming not just for young entrepreneurs but also their investors. Fortunately, a well-written prenup is a safeguard against post-divorce havoc, which is why
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Internet Archive Releases 2,500 MS-DOS Games
The latest update from Internet Archive brings thousands of MS-DOS games from the '90s like 3D Bomber, Zool and Alien Rampage. CNET reports: On Sunday, Internet Archive released 2,500 MS-DOS games that includes action, strategy and adventure titles. Some of the games are Vor Terra, Spooky Kooky Monster Maker, Princess Maker 2 and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. "This will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decad
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Surfing the reverse mullet with Alexis Ohanian
For many years the allure of Silicon Valley was contingent on the ability to move here. Its ecosystem didn’t work remotely. “We see a very strong indication that where you’re located does matter… come to Silicon Valley,” intoned Joe Kraus of Google Ventures at the first Disrupt conference I ever intended, speaking for essentially all […]
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China Has Gained the Ability To Spy On More Than 100 Million Citizens Via a Heavily Promoted Official App, Report Suggests
Security researchers believe the Chinese Communist Party's official "Study the Great Nation" app has a backdoor that could help monitor use and copy data from those who have it installed on their devices. The BBC reports: Released in February, Study the Great Nation has become the most downloaded free program in China, thanks to persuasive demands by Chinese authorities that citizens download and install it. The app pushes out official news and images and encourages people to earn points by read
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Harley-Davidson Stops Electric Motorcycle Production Due To Charging Problem
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Harley-Davidson has temporarily stopped making and shipping its first electric motorcycle, LiveWire, due to a problem with the bike's charging equipment, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company told the Journal that LiveWire bikes are still safe to ride, but it's asking the first few customers to only charge the $30,000 electric motorcycle at dealerships, indicating that there may be a problem with plugging them into lower-vol
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Project xCloud Public Preview Is Now Live
Microsoft has started the public preview for the Project xCloud game streaming service that it first announced in late 2018. Thurrott reports: "The Project xCloud Preview is now officially live in the US, UK and Korea," a Microsoft representative told me today. "This preview serves as our opportunity to test, improve and garner feedback. It's critical we bring gamers with us on this journey so we can learn more from them and their experiences in a wide variety of real-world environments and use-
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Erin Valenti, CEO of Tinker Ventures, Found Dead In Trunk of Her Rental Car
McGruber shares a report from Deseret News, a newspaper published in Salt Lake City: The body of Erin Valenti, a tech entrepreneur who had been missing since Monday, was found Saturday in the trunk of her rental car. The 33-year-old Valenti was the CEO of Utah-based Tinker Ventures, a company that develops web and smartphone applications.
In a Wednesday Facebook post, Valenti's husband, Harrison Weinstein, wrote that she had been missing since Monday night and was last seen in Palo Alto Mond
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Flaw In Sudo Enables Non-Privileged Users To Run Commands As Root
exomondo shares a report from The Hacker News: A vulnerability has been discovered in Sudo -- one of the most important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core command installed on almost every UNIX and Linux-based operating system. The vulnerability in question is a sudo security policy bypass issue that could allow a malicious user or a program to execute arbitrary commands as root on a targeted Linux system even when the "sudoers configuration" explicitly disallows the roo
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Harley pulls plug on LiveWire production shortly after EV debut
Harley-Davidson has halted production and delivery of its first electric motorcycle, the LiveWire, after discovering what the Milwaukee-based manufacturer described as a non-standard condition. Harley-Davidson told TechCrunch it is not recalling LiveWire motorcycles already on the road. Reuters was the first to report that Harley-Davidson had stopped production and deliveries. “We recently discovered a non-standard condition […]
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Microsoft Wants To Use AI To Bleep Out Bad Words In Xbox Live Party Chat
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, Microsoft announced that it's rolling out filters that will let Xbox Live players automatically limit the text-based messages they receive to four maturity tiers: "Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered." That's a long-overdue feature for a major communication platform that's well over a decade old now, but not really anything new in terms of online content moderation writ large.
What's more interesting is a "looking ahead" prom
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Founder of 'Tesla Killer' Faraday Future Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
Faraday Future's founder and former CEO Jia Yueting has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware court in a bid to satisfy his myriad debts in China. From a report: The Chinese tycoon claims he still owes around $3.6 billion to more than 100 creditors, thanks, in large part, to the collapse of LeEco, the tech conglomerate he founded there. The bankruptcy filing marks a major turn in the story of Jia's prolific history of taking on debt, which led to him being named to a national debtor blackl
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Libra claims 180 potential replacements for 7 mutineers
Attempting to signal its popularity despite high-profile defections from Visa, Stripe and more, the Facebook-led cryptocurrency Libra Association announced that 1,500 organizations have expressed interest in joining the Libra project — 180 of those meet eligibility requirements to become members, which could replace the seven companies that dropped out of the Association this month, including […]
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Building China's Comac C919 Airplane Involved a Lot of Hacking, Report Says
A report published today shines a light on one of China's most ambitious hacking operations known to date, one that involved Ministry of State Security officers, the country's underground hacking scene, legitimate security researchers, and insiders at companies all over the world. From a report: The aim of this hacking operation was to acquire intellectual property to narrow China's technological gap in the aviation industry, and especially to help Comac, a Chinese state-owned aerospace manufact
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Leo Labs and its high-fidelity space radar track orbital debris better than ever — from New Zealand
Ask anyone in the space business and they'll tell you that orbital debris is a serious problem that will only get worse,but dealing with it is as much an opportunity as it is a problem. Leo Labs is building a global network of radar arrays that can track smaller debris than we can today, and with better precision — and the first of its new installations is about to start operations in New Zealand.
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Mini Gravitational-Wave Detector Could Probe Dark Matter
A miniature gravitational wave detector under development would measure higher-frequency waves than LIGO. From a report: Within one second of the big bang, the first newborn black holes may have announced their formation with gravitational waves that stretched and squeezed the fabric of existence as they rippled outward into the expanding universe. Now researchers at Northwestern University have begun planning a tabletop-size sensor that could detect these primordial howls for the first time. Th
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Would You Give Up Google For $17,000 a Year? The Federal Reserve Wants To Know
The Federal Reserve wants to know what the internet is worth to you. The answer could help the central bank solve one of the most puzzling paradoxes of the modern economy: The current expansion is the longest in history, yet productivity gains are weak and GDP growth, while steady, is far from stellar. From a report: In a speech last week, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell raised the possibility that the problem is with the data itself. GDP measures the value of products and services that are bought an
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WeWork pulls thousands of phone booths out of service over formaldehyde scare
WeWork, the co-working empire once valued at $47 billion before reality struck, plunging the business and its investors into crisis, has another problem to add to its growing pile — one which doesn’t exactly reflect well on its core business of kitting out and maintaining modern working environments. The problem is a safety concern affecting […]
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A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies
Scientists have uncovered a glitch in a piece of code that could have yielded incorrect results in over 100 published studies that cited the original paper. From a report: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, last week in the journal Organic L
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India's Reliance Jio Unveils Video Call Assistant To Help Businesses Automate Customer Support
Before Google moves to bring its human-sounding robot calling service Duplex to help users automate their interactions with businesses to international markets, an Indian giant is deploying its own solution to get a jumpstart on the local market. From a report: Reliance Jio today unveiled AI-powered Video Call Assistant service that will allow businesses to automate their customer support and other communications. The service, built in collaboration with Radisys, a U.S.-based subsidiary of Relia
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Uber Lays Off Another 350 Employees Across Eats, Self-driving and Other Departments
Uber has just laid off around 350 employees across a variety of teams within the organization, marking what the company says is its third and final phase of layoffs of the process it began earlier this year, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said to employees today in an email. From a report: Those affected include employees from Eats, performance marketing, Advanced Technologies Group, recruiting, as well as various teams within the global rides and platform departments. Some employees have also been
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Announcing TechCrunch Robotics & AI on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley
Robotics is back! We are excited to announce that on March 3 next year TechCrunch will host its fourth annual TC Sessions: Robotics & AI at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. Last year, 1,500 founders, technologists, engineering students and investors turned up for a day of main stage interviews with the top figures in AI and […]
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Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Private Meetings With Conservative Pundits
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting informal talks and small, off-the-record dinners with conservative journalists, commentators and at least one Republican lawmaker in recent months to discuss issues like free speech and discuss partnerships, Politico reported on Monday. From the report: The dinners, which began in July, are part of Zuckerberg's broader effort to cultivate friends on the right amid outrage by President Donald Trump and his allies over alleged "bias" against conservati
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Uber lays off another ~350 across Eats, self-driving and other departments
Uber has just laid off around 350 employees across a variety of teams within the organization, marking what the company says is its third and final phase of layoffs of the process it began earlier this year, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said to employees today in an email obtained by TechCrunch (full email below). Those […]
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Founder's guide to the pre-IPO secondary market
The increase in activity in the pre-IPO secondary market means that founders, early employees, and investors are receiving liquidity much sooner in a company's lifecycle than ever before...
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Thoma Bravo To Buy Sophos For $3.9 Billion
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo said today it plans to buy UK-based cyber-security giant Sophos for $7.40 per share, for a total value of $3.9 billion, both companies announced today. From a report: The sale price represents a 37% premium on the Sophos market trading price, as recorded on Friday, at the end of the trading. The Sophos board of directors said they plan to "unanimously recommend" the acquisition offer to their shareholders. Before today's announcement, Thoma Bravo acquired a minori
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Daily Crunch: Facebook has a weak stance on political ads
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Facebook should ban campaign ads. End the lies. Facebook recently formalized its approach to political advertising, declaring, “We don’t believe, however, […]
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Shipping giant Pitney Bowes hit by ransomware
Shipping tech giant Pitney Bowes has confirmed a cyberattack on its systems. The company said in a statement that its systems were hit by a “malware attack that encrypted information” on its systems, more commonly known as ransomware. “At this time, the company has seen no evidence that customer or employee data has been improperly […]
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Apple Responds To Reports That It is Sharing Data With Tencent
Over the weekend, reports emerged that claimed that Apple was sending users' browsing details to Tencent to run it against Chinese company's safe browsing feature. In a statement on Monday, an Apple spokesperson has offered a clarification: Apple protects user privacy and safeguards your data with Safari Fraudulent Website Warning, a security feature that flags websites known to be malicious in nature. When the feature is enabled, Safari checks the website URL against lists of known websites and
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Disney+ tweets all the movies and shows coming to its streaming service
In an impressive bit of pre-launch marketing, Disney today announced basically every movie and TV show coming to its upcoming streaming service Disney+ by way of a massive Twitter thread. The thread, which was posted in chronological order starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, reveals not just Disney’s best-known titles but […]
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Google updates its Titan security keys with USB-C
Google has revealed its latest Titan security key — and it’s now compatible with USB-C devices. The latest Titan key arrives just weeks after its closest market rival Yubico — which also manufactures the Titan security key for Google — released its own USB-C and Lightning compatible key, but almost two years after the release […]
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Fortnite's black hole stunt is the kind of alpha energy we're here for
As you are likely already aware, Epic Games is pulling a massive PR stunt that has shrunk the world’s most popular game down to a single black hole. As part of Fortnite’s Season 10 live event, called “The End”, the entire Battle Royale Island was sucked into a black hole, with every Fortnite social media […]
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Booking Holdings Is Latest to Pull Out of Libra Association
Booking Holdings, an online travel company that operates Kayak.com and Priceline.com among other websites, said it's withdrawing from participation in the Libra Association, an ambitious and controversial Facebook-led project to create a new cryptocurrency. From a report: The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company joins PayPal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, MercadoLibre and EBay in leaving the project in the past two weeks. The plan has came under intense scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators who feare
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UK biotech startup Mogrify injects $16M to get novel cell therapies to market soon
Cambridge, UK-based biotech startup Mogrify, which is working on systematizing the development of novel cell therapies in areas such as regenerative medicine, has closed an initial $16 million Series A. The raise follows a $4M seed in February — taking its total raised to date to $20M. Put simply, Mogrify’s approach entails analysis of vast […]
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Samsung opens Android 10 One UI beta ahead of final launch
After pushing back a planned early-October launch, Samsung has introduced the Android 10 beta of its One UI. The 2.0 version of the Android skin follows a little under a year after the first version's beta (released in November 2018). The concept goes counter to the earliest Android overlays, instead intending to create a simpler […]
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Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200
An anonymous reader shares a report: More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the report. The NSA dismissed it as a false alarm. The Defcon
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Reddit now lets iOS users share to Snapchat
Reddit users can now share their favorite content from the site to Snapchat, thanks to a new integration that allows sharing of text, link, and image-based posts on iOS from Reddit’s “Safe for Work” communities. The move makes Snapchat the first platform partner that Reddit is testing content sharing integration with, the company says, and […]
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San Francisco Wants to Require Companies To Get Permits Before Rolling Out 'Emerging Technology'
Companies in San Francisco might soon to be required to get a permission slip from the city before rolling out their new innovations in public spaces. From a report: On Tuesday, Norman Yee, president of the city's Board of Supervisors, introduced a bill that would create the Office of Emerging Technology (OET). Entrepreneurs looking to deploy any emerging technology "upon, above, or below" city properties or public rights-of-way would need to first obtain a pilot permit from the OET's director.
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DoorDash opens a shared kitchen in Redwood City
DoorDash is opening its first shared commissary kitchen in Redwood City, Calif., bringing new delivery and pickup options to customers in Peninsula towns including Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto. This is part of a broader trend of companies like Deliveroo opening shared kitchens that allow restaurant partners to expand their delivery footprint without dealing […]
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Thoma Bravo makes $3.9 billion offer to acquire security firm Sophos
Sophos announced this morning that private equity firm Thoma Bravo, has agreed to buy the British company for £3.1 billion ($3.9 billion USD). The price is based on $7.40 USD per share and the company indicated that the board of directors will recommend that shareholders accept the offer. Sophos CEO Kris Hagerman, as you would […]
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State-run IRCTC delivers India's best trading debut in 2 years
Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a state-run firm that offers train ticketing and catering services in India, more than doubled on its first day of trading in what was the best public debut for a local firm in two years. The firm, fourth public company to come out of Indian Railways, sold 20.1 […]
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G7 Taskforce Warns Global Crytocurrencies Like Libra Pose Risks, May Not Be Approved
"Stablecoin" cryptocurrencies like Libra pose a risk to the global financial system, warns a new report by the G7 group of nations.
An anonymous reader quotes the BBC:
The G7 taskforce that produced the report includes senior officials from central banks, the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board, which coordinates rules for the G20 economies. It says backers of digital currencies like Libra must be legally sound, protect consumers and ensure coins are not used to
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