Author: TechBrunch
A group of bipartisan US lawmakers are urging the head of the UK surveillance court to hold a public hearing on Apple's anticipated challenge of suspected legal demand for the UK government. US Sen. Ron Wyden, along with four other federal lawmakers, wrote this week to the president of the UK Tribunal of Inquiry (IPT), which stated that it was in the public interest that hearings on the suspicious order were not kept secret. The MP also said the alleged British orders bar California-based Apple from engaging in speeches that are “constitutionally protected” under US law, hindering lawmakers' ability to…
Kelly Washington expands her angel investment portfolio and is the lead investor in the pre-seeded round of Cheercee in the wedding market. Founded in 2024 by Amy Shack Egan, Cheersy helped couples find day service wedding coordinators, raising a total of $550,000 from other investors, including Soul Cycle co-founder Elizabeth Cutler and Save the Date founder Jennifer Gilbert. Advised by Joanna Rothholm, former spokesperson for First Lady Michelle Obama, and Christina Tosi, founder of Milkbar. Washington did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Shack Egan said he met Washington through the actor's director of social influence. They both…
The UK government's Apple secret order demands backdoors an end-to-end encrypted version of the iCloud storage service, being challenged by two civil rights groups, Liberty and Privacy International, who filed a complaint on Thursday. They called the orders “unacceptable, unbalanced” and warned about “global outcomes” as access orders are thought to be extended to non-KUK users as well. The pair, along with two nominated individuals, Gas Hossain, executive director of Privacy International, and Ben Wisner, civil liberty advocate, directed the law firm Rayday to challenge the Secretary of the Interior.YvetteCooper's decision to provide Apple with the so-called Technical Capability Notification…
According to a Wall Street Journal report, President Trump's family is weighing their investments in Binance.us. The investment will come years after Binance's US division pleaded guilty to violating anti-money laundering regulations. As part of that guilty plea, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, paid a $4.3 billion fine in 2023 and spent four months in prison. According to Forbes rankings, Zao is currently the 24th wealthiest person in the world. The WSJ claims he is seeking pardon from the Trump administration. Zhao's conviction has made it difficult for Binance to find a commercial partner in the US or…
AI Company Sesame has released a basic model that promotes Maya, an impressive and realistic voice assistant. Models with a size of 1 billion parameters (“parameters” that refer to individual components of the model) are under the Apache 2.0 license. This means it can be used commercially with little restrictions. Called the CSM-1B, this model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text and audio inputs, as explained in SESAME on the AI Dev platform. RVQ refers to “residual vector quantization,” a technique for encoding audio into discrete tokens called code. RVQ is used in many recent AI audio technologies, such as…
Flock Safety and one of its longtime VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup has raised $275 million new $7.5 billion in value. Flock creates computer-vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement agencies, businesses, real estate management companies, and more. Best known for its automatic license plate recognition technology, Flock sold gunshot detection technology to schools and recently acquired public safety drone company Aerodome. Flock was founded in 2017 and passed the Y Combinator in the same year. In the years that followed, growth exploded. Flock spokesman Holly Beilin told TechCrunch that Flock exceeded $300 million in annual…
Y Combinator, one of the world's most prolific startup accelerators, sent a letter on Wednesday urging the Trump administration to openly support the European Digital Markets Act (DMA). DMA designates six high-tech companies as “gatekeepers” of the Internet (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Beitedance, Meta, Microsoft), restricting Kingpins of these technologies from engaging in anti-competitive tactics on the platform and advocating interoperability. The law was applied in May 2023 and has already had a major impact on high-tech companies in the US. In a letter to the White House posted to X by YC's Public Policy Director Luther Lowe, the startup accelerator…
Tiktok will have to complete sales to US-based buyers until April, but uncertainty remains about the future of the short video app. However, the information suggests that new reports are emerging, suggesting that Oracle is a leading candidate to act as a cloud technology partner for managing Tiktok in the US. Bytedance, a source, including investors, bankers and former executives familiar with Tiktok's parent company, told the outlet that the company prefers Oracle over other cloud providers. Since 2022, Tiktok has been using an Oracle server to store data from US users, making it a potential option for this transaction.…
People in the European Union are allowed to access alternative app stores thanks to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a regulation designed to encourage increased competition in the app ecosystem. Like Apple's App Store, the alternative app market will provide easy access to the wider world of apps, but instead of apps that go through Apple's app review process, apps in these third-party markets will need to go through a notarization process to meet the “baseline platform integrity criteria.” However, each store can review and approve apps according to its own policies. Stores are responsible for any issues related to…
Despite notifying TechCrunch that it was hosting stolen phone data a few weeks ago, Amazon wouldn't say whether it plans to take action against three phone monitoring apps that store personal private phone data on Amazon's cloud servers. Amazon told TechCrunch that it was “following” [its] After the February notice, as of the time of publication of this article, Stalkerware Operations Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie continue to upload and store photos extracted from the mobile phones of people on Amazon Web Services. Cocospy, Spyic and Spyzie are three almost identical Android apps that share the same source code and a…