About: blatcho

The fun-loving cybercriminals blamed for breaches of Uber and Rockstar are exposing weaknesses in ways others aren’t.

Reuters: Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons, which makes Splice and Remini, raised $340M+ from Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM, Ryan Reynolds, and more  —  Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised more than $340 million from investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Flatfile, which automates onboarding, structuring, and cleaning data, raised a $50M Series B led by Tiger Global, bringing its total funding to $94.7M  —  Data cleansing — prepping data for applications like predictive analytics — takes time.  In fact, data scientists spend an estimated 60% …

Financial Times: A look at South Korea’s Zepeto, owned by Naver and considered one of Asia’s largest metaverse platforms with 15M-20M MAUs, as it plans a global expansion  —  Asia’s largest metaverse platform, Zepeto, is stepping up its global expansion as it looks to compete against the Big Tech groups …

The mission was designed to test whether a probe could knock a hazardous space rock away from a crash course with Earth.

Bad weather forced a third delay for the space agency’s SLS rocket plans—another setback for the uncrewed back-to-the-moon mission.

An orchestrated attack went after an independent news website and harvested swathes of Facebook user data. And nobody can stop it.

Evelyn Cheng / CNBC: China-based Well-Link Technologies, which is building a real-time cloud rendering technology for video games, has raised a $40M Series B2 led by Temasek  —  – Singapore state investment firm Temasek has led a $40 million funding round in Chinese startup Well-Link Technologies, according to an announcement Monday.

Cheri Faulkner / NME: Netflix to open a new game studio in Helsinki “built from scratch” and led by ex-Zynga Vice President and General Manager Marko Lastikka  —  The studio will be responsible for delivering “a variety of delightful and deeply engaging original games”

Mike Masnick / Techdirt: A subreddit with 1.5M members, r/PoliticalHumor, challenges Texas’ content moderation law by mandating that comments include “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby”  —  Last year, I tried to create a “test suite” of websites that any new internet regulation ought to be “tested” against.

A targeted transmission of radio waves can disrupt what a camera detects – and the technology has the potential to fool object-detection systems into seeing things that aren’t there

The AI Policy Forum (AIPF) is an initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to move the global conversation about the impact of artificial intelligence from principles to practical policy implementation. Formed in late 2020, AIPF brings together leaders in government, business, and academia to develop approaches to address the societal challenges posed by […]

Every year during residence exploration week at MIT, or REX week, our undergraduate residence halls host activities to encourage new students to visit, get to know the vibe of the community, and hopefully choose to join. So, how do you get the attention of first-year MIT students? At East Campus, you invite them to help […]

Inside the DEI journey of a Black-owned business, Uncle Nearest, which has become the fastest-growing whiskey brand in the United States.

Five critical decisions to set it up for long-term success.

When you don’t want to quit, but you need to protect yourself from a manager’s bias and incivility.

The blockchain project’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin says its recent big upgrade lays a path for more technical changes, and greater adoption.

Everyone is telling one another to “get help,” but few acknowledge that the practice is often flawed.

Cleaning sucks. The Lupe Pure makes it a little easier and has replaceable parts in case they ever break.

Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg: The UK’s ICO could fine TikTok £27M after provisionally finding that the company breached data protection rules around children’s data  —  ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok faces a possible fine of 27 million pounds ($28.9 million) after the UK’s privacy watchdog provisionally found the company …

Christopher Weaver / Wall Street Journal: Analysis: Amazon’s regular trucking contractors were more than twice as likely as other companies to get unsafe driving scores from February 2020 to August 2022  —  Its regular contractors were more than twice as likely to receive unsafe driving scores compared with similar outfits; Amazon says its network is […]

Reuters: Sources: Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi express concerns over India’s home-grown GPS plan, arguing integrating the system would be costly and require new hardware  —  India is pushing tech giants to make smartphones compatible with its home-grown navigation system within months …

Scientists estimate that more than 95 percent of Earth’s oceans have never been observed, which means we have seen less of our planet’s ocean than we have the far side of the moon or the surface of Mars. The high cost of powering an underwater camera for a long time, by tethering it to a […]

Patrick McGee / Financial Times: Counterpoint: the average selling price of iPhones could rise to $892 in Q3 2022 and $944 in Q4 2022, as buyers choose Pro models; the record is $873 in Q4 2021  —  Upward trajectory driven by customers buying more expensive ‘Pro’ models that command higher margins

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: The iPhone, in its third year of a three-year design cycle, may be overhauled in 2023; Apple may delay Pay Later to 2023 and may not host an October 2022 event  —  I’ve spent the last week or so testing out the iPhone 14 Pro Max, and I believe it sets […]

Tiernan Ray / ZDNet: An interview with Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun on his critics and why today’s most popular approaches to AI won’t lead to human-level machine intelligence  —  (Article is updated with a rebuttal by Gary Marcus in context.)  —  Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist of Meta Properties …

Physicists have solved a key problem of robotic locomotion by revising the usual rules of interaction between simple component parts.

Joined a new community and discovered—to your horror—that there are no party parrots? Let’s fix that.

Everything you need to know to successfully transfer your contacts, music, photos, and apps from one iOS device to another.

Viola Zhou / Rest of World: Using translation apps, dubbing software, and VPNs, some Chinese creators are getting millions of views for TikTok videos summarizing Hollywood movies and shows  —  With machine translation, dubbing apps and VPNs, Chinese creators are shortening movies for Americans.

Kashmir Hill / New York Times: A look at The Follower, an art project using open-source facial recognition software to match Instagram photos with EarthCam video footage of people taking them  —  A tech-savvy artist unearthed video footage of people working hard to capture the perfect shot for Instagram.

Che Pan / South China Morning Post: A profile of YMTC, China’s top memory chip maker that could end up in the crosshairs of US sanctions; YMTC had 1% share of the global memory chip market in 2020  —  A few months before the US-China trade war started in July 2018, local media coverage of […]

Although Fernanda De La Torre still has several years left in her graduate studies, she’s already dreaming big when it comes to what the future has in store for her. “I dream of opening up a school one day where I could bring this world of understanding of cognition and perception into places that would […]

Plus: A leaked trove illuminates Russia’s internet regulator, a report finds Facebook and Instagram violated Palestinian rights, and more.

These weatherproof devices can keep a watchful eye on your property and let you get on with life.

Plus: Framework has a new ultra-repairable Chromebook, there’s a cheaper Google Chromecast, and Amazon refreshes its Fire HD tablets.

Anthony Breznican / Vanity Fair: A look at Kyiv-based Respeecher, which uses performers’ archival voice recordings and AI to create new dialogue, including for Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi  —  As the conflict raged, Ukrainian tech workers at Respeecher hurried to bring back James Earl Jones’s legendary voice for Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Voice of America: The US Treasury updates its guidance to let US tech companies expand their internet services in Iran, after the country took most of its ~83M citizens offline  —  The U.S. Treasury Department said Friday that it was updating guidance to U.S. tech firms to expand the range of internet services available …

Rest of World: A look at the fight between delivery apps in Brazil after the local government launched delivery app Valeu to take on iFood, which controls 80%+ of the market  —  Free-market politicians argue that a government-controlled app is unfair competition.  —  • RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

Todd Woody / Bloomberg: How Whale Safe is using real-time data and AI to detect endangered whales in the Bay Area’s busy shipping lanes and alert ships to avoid collisions  —  Is your iPhone whale-safe?  Smartphones, like many consumer products, arrive in the US on giant container ships, vessels that are leading killers …

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: A look at some of the challenges of zero-trust systems that can create friction for users and employees, as businesses increasingly adopt them to fight hackers  —  Hackers keep tricking employees to gain access to corporate networks, so companies are changing their approach to make it harder to wreak […]

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Source: Byju’s has paid ~$234M to Blackstone for ~38% shares in Aakash, settling all its dues owed to the PE firm as part of a ~$1B deal from April 2021  —  Byju’s has cleared all its dues to Blackstone by paying $234 million it owed the global investment giant for the […]

New research shows how third-party apps could be exploited to infiltrate these sensitive workplace tools.

In their new book, brothers Steven, Jay, and Bob Novella try to improve on the futurism of yesteryear by identifying 10 “futurism fallacies” that have bedeviled earlier predictions.

The company is going after cryptocurrency gambling—but will that be enough to satisfy concerned streamers?

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson’s blockchain technology startup Lamina1 releases a whitepaper on building an open metaverse, dubbed Theee Metaverse  —  Neal Stephenson’s Lamina1 blockchain technology startup dropped a white paper today on building the open metaverse.  It’s quite the manifesto.

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg: Internal letter shows Twitch SVP of global creators Constance Knight resigned on the same day the company announced revenue sharing changes for top creators  —  The senior vice president of global creators at Twitch told employees she is leaving the company on the same day it announced changes …

William Gallagher / AppleInsider: Report: some NFT startups say they are limiting functionality in iOS apps, as Apple insists that its 30% commission from IAP must be paid on all trades  —  Startup and trading NFT firms say they ignore the App Store because Apple’s rules, and 30% commission, make it untenable for them.

Metal pipes beneath the floor provide enough local disturbance of Earth’s magnetic field for an autonomous robot to work out where it is and navigate around a lab

This year’s incoming cohort of new MIT graduate students enjoyed a warm welcome from the Graduate Student Council (GSC), with a number of in-person orientation activities from Aug. 21 through Sept. 6. The GSC has traditionally offered a broad range of in-person orientation activities to the entire incoming graduate cohort. Katie Chen, a graduate student […]