 There's a Lost Continent 1,000 Miles Under Europe
Scientists have reconstructed the tumultuous history of a lost continent hidden underneath Southern Europe, which has been formally named "Greater Adria" in a new study. From a report: This ancient landmass broke free from the supercontinent Gondwana more than 200 million years ago and roamed for another 100 million years before it gradually plunged underneath the Northern Mediterranean basin. Researchers led by Douwe van Hinsbergen, a professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht
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SoftBank Backers Rethink Role in Next Vision Fund on WeWork
The biggest backers of SoftBank's gargantuan Vision Fund are reconsidering how much to commit to its next investment vehicle as an oversized bet on flexible workspace provider WeWork sours. From a report: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which contributed $45 billion to the $100 billion Vision Fund, is now only planning to reinvest profits from that vehicle into its successor, according to people familiar with the talks. Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment, which invested $15 billion, is consi
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Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products
Amazon.com has adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company, WSJ reported Monday citing people who worked on the project, a move, contested internally, that could favor Amazon's own brands. From the report: Late last year, these people said, Amazon optimized the secret algorithm that ranks listings so that instead of showing customers mainly the most-relevant and best-selling listings when they search -- as it had for more than
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Database Leaks Data on Most of Ecuador's Citizens, Including 6.7 Million Children
The personal records of most of Ecuador's population, including children, has been left exposed online due to a misconfigured database, ZDNet reported Monday. From the report: The database, an Elasticsearch searver, was discovered two weeks ago by vpnMentor security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, who shared their findings exclusively with ZDNet. Together, we worked to analyze the leaking data, verify its authenticity, and contact the server owner. The leaky server is one of the, if not th
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LastPass Bug Leaks Credentials From Previous Site
Password manager LastPass has released an update last week to fix a security bug that exposes credentials entered on a previously visited site. From a report: The bug was discovered last month by Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher with Project Zero, Google's elite security and bug-hunting team. LastPass, believed to be the most popular password manager app today, fixed the reported issue in version 4.33.0, released last week, on September 12. If users have not enabled an auto-update mechanism
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Mozilla and Creative Commons Want To Reimagine the Internet Without Ads, and They Have $100M To Do It
An anonymous reader shares a report: Funding online content with small consumer payments rather than intrusive and privacy-compromising ads has for years been a goal for many internet theorists and publishers. "We're at a point where it's clear there's kinds of negative side effects for people and even for democracy of the data-driven ad economy that funds the internet," says Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Now, Mozilla, Creative Commons, and a new micropayment startup
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Russia Carried Out a 'Stunning' Breach of FBI Communications System, Escalating the Spy Game on US Soil
Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin, and Sean D. Naylor, reporting for Yahoo News: On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds -- sometimes known as the "dachas" -- were a
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 Plaid announces strategic investment from Mastercard and Visa
When Plaid announced its $250 million Series C investment last year, it left out a couple of key investors. Today it revealed that Mastercard and Visa quietly participated in the round. For a company like Plaid, which builds APIs to enable customers to access their bank accounts inside applications in a seamless way, having the […]
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Leeto helps works councils manage perks
French startup Leeto provides a service for French works councils, better known as comites d'entreprise. The fintech startup lets you hand out perks to employees using a simple web service combined with a payment card. Leeto recently raised a $2.2 million funding round (€2 million) from Founders Future and various business angels, such as Thomas […]
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Ten years after Adobe bought Omniture, the deal comes into clearer focus
Ten years ago this week, Adobe acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion. At the time, Adobe was a software company selling boxed software like Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop to creatives. Many people were baffled by the move, not realizing that purchasing a web analytics company was really the first volley in a full company transformation to […]
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Get popcorn for iOS 13's privacy pop-ups of creepy Facebook data grabs
Privacy-minded changes to smartphone operating systems which foreground the background activity of third party apps are helping to spotlight more of the surveillance infrastructure deployed by adtech giants to track and profile human eyeballs for profit. To wit: iOS 13, which will be generally released later this week, has already been spotted catching Facebook’s app […]
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Mitto, the payment card and app for 'Gen Z' teens, raises €2M seed round
Mitto, a debit card and app designed for “Generation Z” teens, has raised €2 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Spanish bank Banco Sabadell via its innovation and venture arm InnoCells, along with Athos Capital and Spanish social media influencers “AuronPlay” and “Wismichu,” among others. Claiming to plug a gap in existing payment […]
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Extreme Weather Events This Decade Have Cost America $750B
An anonymous reader quotes NBC News:
An analysis of weather disasters that did more than $1 billion in damage from the National Centers for Environmental Information finds that such high-cost events are up markedly since the 1980s. (The dollar figures for the events were adjusted for inflation.) There have been 250 such events since 1980 and almost half them, 111, have occurred in the current decade. And the 2019 figure does not include any events after May, so Hurricane Dorian is not on the
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FOSSA scores $8.5 million Series A to help enterprise manage open source licenses
As more enterprise developers make use of open source, it becomes increasingly important for companies to make sure that they are complying with licensing requirements. They also need to ensure the open sources bits are being updated over time for security purposes. That’s where FOSSA comes in, and today the company announced an $8.5 million […]
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Join the Q&A with top speakers at Disrupt SF (Oct. 2-4)
The main stage at Disrupt SF doesn’t make time for audience questions, but we know everyone has questions to ask our speakers. So we have a separate Q&A stage where many of our speakers appear a second time to take direct questions from Disrupt attendees, with the help of a moderator, of course. Ask Sebastian […]
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Facebook rolls out new video tools, plus Instagram and IGTV scheduling feature
Facebook on Monday announced a number of updates aimed at video creators and publishers, during a session at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) taking place in Amsterdam. The updates involve changes to live video broadcasting, Facebook’s Watch Party, and Creator Studio, and they include enhancements to tools, expanded feature sets, and improved analytics, among other […]
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Samsung's Galaxy Tab S6 combines creative flexibility with great design
The Android tablet market isn’t exactly a hotbed of excitement and activity, which makes it all the more impressive that Samsung continues to iterate its own tablet lineup in smart, meaningful ways that push the technology forward and deliver a stellar experience. Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab S6 (starting at $649.99) is no exception, and this […]
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'Men In Black' Director Barry Sonnenfeld Calls 8K, Netflix HDR 'Stupid'
CIStud writes
Barry Sonnenfeld, director of the "Men in Black" series, "Get Shorty" and most recently Netflix's "Series of Unfortunate Events", says 8K is "only good for sports" and High Dynamic Range (HDR) is "stupid" and "a waste."
Sonnenfeld, speaking with actor Patrick Warburton at the CEDIA Expo last week in Denver, called for a "filmmaker mode" on all TVs that can turn off unwanted HDR. He says Netflix's insistence everything be shot in HDR altered the cinematography on "Series of U
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Walt Disney Studios partners with Microsoft Azure on cloud innovation lab
Seems like everything is going to the cloud these days, so why should movie making be left out? Today, Walt Disney Studios announced a five-year partnership with Microsoft around an innovation lab to find ways to shift content production to the Azure cloud. The project involves the Walt Disney StudioLAB, an innovation work space where […]
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MIT Unveils the World's Most Advance Carbon Nanotube Chip
"A team of academics at MIT has unveiled the world's most advanced chip yet that's made from carbon nanotubes," reports MIT's Technology Review:
Not only are nanotube transistors faster than silicon ones, studies have found that chips made from nanotubes could be up to ten times more energy efficient. This efficiency boost could significantly extend electronic gadgets' battery life. Researchers have been working on alternative chips involving the molecules for decades, but manufacturing heada
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Daily Crunch: Salesforce launches vertical clouds
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. Salesforce doubles down on verticals, launches Manufacturing and Consumer Goods Clouds Salesforce unveiled two new business units today as part of […]
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Beekeeper raises $45M Series B to become the 'Slack for non-desk employees'
Beekeeper, the Switzerland and U.S.-based startup that provides a mobile-first communications platform for employers that need to communicate with blue-collar and service-oriented workers, has raised $45 million in Series B funding. The round was co-led by Thayer Ventures and Swisscanto Invest by Zürcher Kantonalbank, with participation from previous backers including Atomico, Alpana Ventures, Edenred Capital […]
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Trigo raises $22M for an automated grocery check out platform, similar to Amazon Go
Automated check-out systems in supermarkets, where cashiers are replaced by barcode-readers and touchscreen interfaces for taking payments, have become a commonplace fixture in many parts of the world. But today, a startup that’s building many believe will be the next generation of such systems — computer-vision-powered platforms that monitor what you take from the shelves […]
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Google will unveil the Pixel 4 and other new hardware on October 15
Google will reveal the next Pixel in greater detail at an event happening October 15 in New York, the company confirmed via invites sent to media today. We already know the Pixel 4 will be revealed at this event, because Google has already dropped some official images and feature details for the new Android smartphone, […]
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Pine64 Confirms $25 'PineTime' Smartwatch for Linux Smartphones
Besides their Linux laptops, single-board computers, and tablets, Pine64 is now also working on "PineTime," a new $25 smartwatch for Linux smartphones running open source software (and based on either ARM Mbed or FreeRTOS), reports Liliputing.com:
The company describes the PineTime watch as a companion for Linux smartphones... you know, like the company's upcoming $150 PinePhone. For either or both of those reasons, it could appeal to folks who may not have wanted in on the smartphone space u
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Linux 5.3 Released
"Linux 5.3 has been released," writes diegocg:
This release includes support for AMD Navi GPUs; support for the umwait x86 instructions that let processes wait for short amounts of time without spinning loops; a 'utilization clamping' mechanism that is used to boost interactivity on power-asymmetric CPUs used in phones; a new pidfd_open(2) system call that completes the work done to let users deal with the PID reuse problem; 16 millions of new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range are made av
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Online Lenders Publicly Shame Debtors in the Philippines Using Their Facebook Contacts
A man named Roger was surprised to hear from an old college friend after all these years, reports the Philippine Daily Inquirer -- and even more surprised to find out why.
What she wanted to know was why he gave her number to an online lending company that was hounding him at that time. The company told her that he was in debt and needed to pay up. Roger took out a loan using the company's app back in May, after seeing an ad on Facebook. His payment had been overdue for a week when the compan
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FCC Fails, Robocalls (and Complaints) Increase, Along with Number-Hijacking
"Despite new initiatives by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and carriers, robocalls aren't on the wane," reports Forbes.
"Americans are still facing a scourge of 200 million unwanted robocalls a day, according to a report from Transaction Network Services (TNS), a major telecommunications network and services company. And nearly 30% of all U.S. calls were negative (nuisance, scam or fraud calls) in the first six months of the year, TNS said..."
Nuisance calls jumped 38% from t
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'King of Kong' Billy Mitchell Argues He Was Framed for Donkey Kong Cheating, Threatens Legal Action
"Billy Mitchell, the former Donkey Kong and Pac-Man high-score champion made famous in the 2007 film The King of Kong, has threatened legal action against the sanctioning bodies who threw out all of Mitchell's high scores in April 2018 after finding that two were illegitimate," reports Polygon.
This week, lawyers for Mitchell sent a letter to Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records demanding that both "retract their claims against Billy Mitchell" and restore the scores to their world record le
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Inspired By Harry Potter, 150 Colleges Now Have Quidditch Teams
A reporter for SFGate describes what happened when he tried out for the quidditch team at the University of California at Berkeley:
The person throwing me what's called a "quaffle" (actually a slightly deflated volleyball) looked at me to make sure I'm ready. I gave them a head nod and grip my "broom" (a PVC pipe), ready to run. "GO!" I run 20 feet and turn back to catch the ball. Success!
But as I take my next step, I get decked by team captain Dara Gaeuman, fall to the ground, drop the
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The Next Energy-Efficient Architecture Revolution: A House Built By Robots
"Erecting a new building ranks among the most inefficient, polluting activities humans undertake," reports Qz. "The construction sector is responsible for nearly 40% of the world's total energy consumption and CO2 emissions, according to a UN global survey. A consortium of Swiss researchers has one answer to the problem: working with robots."
Over four years, 30 different industry partners joined a team of experts at ETH Zurich university for a cutting-edge "digital fabrication" project: b
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Ask Slashdot: Can A Lack of Privacy Be Weaponized?
Slashdot reader dryriver asks a scary what-if question about the detailed digital profiles of our online and offline lives that are being created by "hundreds of privately owned, profit-driven companies operating with no meaningful oversight."
Digital profiles are just a collection of 1s and 0s and are wide open to digital tampering or digital distortion. You could easily be made to appear to have done just about anything from visiting questionnable websites on the dark web, to buying things
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Google's Search Results Begin Prioritizing 'Original Reporting'
In the future Google will promote news articles that feature original reporting in its search results, the Hill reports.
"While we typically show the latest and most comprehensive version of a story in news results, we've made changes to our products globally to highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting," Richard Gingras, Google's vice president of news, said in a blog post. "Such articles may stay in a highly visible position longer. This prominence allows users
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IOS 13 Lock Screen Lets Anyone See Your Address Book
Slashdot reader dryriver writes:
A security researcher discovered that if you get your hands on someone else's iThing running iOS 13, and place a phone call to it, you can choose to respond with a TXT message, and get to see the contents of the address book on the iThing without actually getting past the lock screen...
The security researcher who found the flaw was not financially rewarded or acknowledged by Apple, but rather given the cold shoulder.
The security researcher says all
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Python 2 Sunsets in 107 Days. JPMorgan Isn't Ready
In 107 days, Python 2 -- first released in 2000 -- will officially sunset, according to an announcement this week by "volunteers who make and take care of the Python programming language."
But according to TechRepublic, not everybody is ready:
Given Python's popularity and ubiquity, the amount of business logic hinging on Python is quite vast, presenting an issue for organizations still clinging to Python 2. JPMorgan's Athena trading platform is one of those applications -- while access has
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Week in Review: Apple games the system
Hey all. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure. Last week, I talked about shifting Facebook user habits and their play to […]
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The 'World's Safest' Bike Helmet Has A Built-in Airbag
H&âOEouml;vding spent four years developing their next-generation bicycle helmet, the Metro reports:
Easier to use, adjustable and enabled with Bluetooth technology, the helmet, according to H&âOEouml;vding 's CEO Frederik Carling, is the world's safest. Donning advanced airbag tech and functions such as the ability to contact next-of-kin in the event of an accident, Frederik and the team spent years surveying people to make the kit as bespoke, safe and desirable as possible
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Please get your digital affairs in order
I really wish I hadn’t had cause to write this piece, but it recently came to my attention, in an especially unfortunate way, that death in the modern era can have a complex and difficult technical aftermath. You should make a will, of course. Of course you should make a will. But many wills only […]
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Released from Prison, Spammer Who Stole 17.5 Million Passwords Apologizes and Reforms
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
Kyle Milliken, a 29-year-old Arkansas man, was released last week from a federal work camp. He served 17 months for hacking into the servers of several companies and stealing their user databases. Some of the victims included Disqus, from where he stole 17.5 million user records, Kickstarter, from where he took 5.2 million records, and Imgur, with 1.7 million records. For years, Milliken and his partners operated by using the credentials stolen from other compa
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How to get people to open your emails
We've aggregated the world's best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.
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Would Consumers Be Safer With a National Data Broker Registry?
"A comprehensive national privacy law cannot be developed overnight..." argues the chief "data ethics officer" for Acxiom, a database marketing company, in a New York Times op-ed:
Still, people deserve to know who is collecting data about them, why it's being collected and the types of companies with which the data is being shared. They should also have assurances that companies collecting data have adequate measures in place to ensure security and confidentiality. That's why, until we have a
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Original Content podcast: 'The Family' investigates a secretive evangelical group
“The Family” is a new documentary series on Netflix, based on the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet — whose books promise to expose “the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power” and “the fundamentalist threat to American democracy.” Sarah Perez joins us on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast to discuss the series […]
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