Author: TechBrunch

Volkswagen Group's troubled automotive software arm Cariad has been releasing terabytes of customer data on around 800,000 Audi, SEAT, Skoda and Volkswagen electric cars onto the internet for several months, Der Spiegel reports. I left it on [in German]He quoted a security researcher who learned about the data breach from an anonymous whistleblower. Researchers speaking at the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, Germany this week said the published data also includes the exact location coordinates of more than half of the vehicles on the list, some 460,000. He said that Some of the location data is accurate to a few…

Encode, the nonprofit that co-sponsored California's ill-fated AI safety law SB 1047, seeks permission to file a court brief in support of Elon Musk's injunction to block OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company. Ta. In a draft brief filed Friday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Encode's lawyers said OpenAI's transformation into a for-profit company would undermine the company's mission to “develop and deploy innovative technology.” He said it would be “damaging.” It is safe and beneficial to the public. ” “OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman claim to be developing technology that will…

Bench, the venture capital-backed accounting startup that abruptly shut down last week, leaving thousands of customers locked out of their accounts, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal. was obtained exclusively by TechCrunch. San Francisco-based HR technology company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax. Matt Charney, Employer.com's chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch that the company is bringing back the Bench platform and providing instructions for customers to quickly log in and retrieve their data. Charney told TechCrunch that customers will have the option of…

Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli startup that helps manage and optimize AI hardware infrastructure. As part of the merger, Run:ai said its software, which currently only works on Nvidia products, will be open sourced, meaning Nvidia rivals such as AMD and Intel can also adapt it to their own hardware. said to mean. “We are eager to build on our gains to date, expand our talented team, and expand our product and market reach,” Run:ai told Bloomberg in a statement. “Open sourcing the software allows us to extend its availability to the entire AI ecosystem.” Nvidia…

AI holds great promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side. Many startups believe that machine learning-based systems can bring a lot of benefits to adjacent tasks such as scheduling and confirming reservations. Brazilian startup Carecode is one of these AI believers. The company has quietly emerged with ambitions to reduce healthcare costs and improve healthcare outcomes by developing AI agents that focus on tasks that occur before, during and after medical appointments, and typically Performed by a call center. “We tend to think that the moment with a doctor is the only thing that matters, but after…

Middle Eastern startup Calo has injected significant funding into offering time-poor customers and a growing range of heat-and-cook products, with a business built around increasingly customized ready-to-eat meals. We are trying to expand both of our customers. -Eat food. The Middle East meal delivery market is expected to reach $11.2 billion by 2030, according to a MarkNtel Advisors report released last year. Food aggregators like Careem, Deliveroo, and Talabat have built large businesses by capitalizing on the habit of busy professionals ordering meals rather than preparing them themselves. This was primarily driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. Riyadh-based Calo differentiates itself…

US telecommunications giant Verizon, which was targeted by the China-linked cyber espionage group Salt Typhoon, announced that it had secured its network. In a statement given to TechCrunch on Sunday, Verizon spokesperson Richard Young said the company had “contained the cyber incident brought on by this nation-state threat actor” and had “no security measures in place on our network for some time.” “We have not detected any threat actor activity.” ” Verizon's containment of the incident was confirmed by a “highly reputable cybersecurity firm,” the company said, but Young declined to name the third party. The scale of the Salt…

The proliferation of data centers aimed at meeting AI's computational needs could spell bad news for the U.S. power grid, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Using 1 million home sensors tracked by Whisker Labs and market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the households with the worst power distortions were within 20 miles of significant data center activity. I discovered that I live in In other words, there appears to be a link between proximity to data centers and “bad harmonics” (a term used to describe less-than-ideal power flow to the home).…

Three cryptocurrency industry groups, the DeFi Education Fund, the Blockchain Association, and the Blockchain Council of Texas, are calling the Internal Revenue Service to block new regulations that would require decentralized finance (DeFi) entities to report customer information. I'm appealing. The IRS is finalizing cryptocurrency tax regulations as part of the Biden administration's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The IRS says these new rules should help “close the information gap regarding digital assets.” The lawsuit, on the other hand, argues that this approach disproportionately relies on “DeFi trading front-ends,” online platforms that essentially allow users to access crypto protocols but…

It's been a busy year in the private equity space, with countless big acquisitions. There have been some huge deals, especially in the private equity space, with private equity firms leading deals worth billions of dollars or more for publicly traded technology companies. London-headquartered Permira was a key player, joining Blackstone in acquiring European online advertising group Adevinta for $13 billion, and in October closing on the popular deal in a deal ultimately worth $7.2 billion. Squarespace, a website building platform, has been made private. But Permira isn't just interested in multibillion-dollar acquisitions. In addition to closing a new €16.7…