Author: TechBrunch
A coalition of international law enforcement agencies has announced that it has disrupted the operations of two prolific information thieves who stole sensitive data from millions of people. The Dutch National Police, which led the destruction of the so-called “Operation Magnus”, reports that it has gained “full access” to servers used by Redline and Meta information thieves. Infostealer is a type of malware that is specifically designed to extract sensitive information from infected systems, such as passwords, credit card data, search history, and the contents of cryptocurrency wallets. Redline is considered to be one of the most prolific information stealing…
A British man who used AI to transform ordinary photos of children into images of sexual abuse has been sentenced to 18 years in prison in what some are calling a landmark case. Ta. Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, used the Daz 3D app to create 3D 'characters' from innocent photographs of children. In some cases, the images were commissioned by people who had provided photographs of the children they had come into contact with, the Guardian reported. Nelson made around £5,000 (approximately $6,494) in 18 months by selling commissioned child sexual abuse images on online forums. He was arrested…
World models (also known as world simulators) are being touted by some as the next big thing in AI. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $230 million to build “large-scale world models,” and DeepMind invests in Sora, one of the creators of OpenAI's video generator. I hired him to develop the “World Simulator.” But what exactly are these? World models are inspired by the mental models of the world that humans naturally develop. Our brains take abstract representations from our senses and shape them into more concrete understandings of the world around us, creating what we call “models” long…
Welcome to Day 1 of TechCrunch Disrupt 2024! We're excited to welcome you to the start of this amazing event. Get ready for an action-packed 3-day immersive technology experience. Learn from industry leaders on stage and in hands-on sessions, network with fellow innovators, meet startups shaping the future of technology, and enjoy a reception. Want to attend but don't have a ticket? There's still time! Register here to get in on the action. Now, let me introduce today's content. stage session We're preparing an impressive lineup of the industry's top leaders to take to the stage. See the full schedule…
Months after acquiring equity management company Easop, Remote, the HR platform for managing geographically dispersed teams, is further focusing on managing equity compensation with a new product, Remote Equity. Remote already makes it easier for companies to collaborate with talent around the world. Companies can hire employees anywhere and treat them like local employees without establishing a local subsidiary. But stock option plans remain a hurdle for startups with distributed teams. Providing equity for foreign employees is a difficult proposition as tax withholding and other local regulations need to be considered. Remote Equity essentially solves this problem by allowing companies…
With so many startups now offering AI bots that can do everything from listening to and transcribing meetings to taking notes and surfacing insights, companies in this space are looking to add additional feature sets. They need to differentiate themselves by offering integration and integration. One such company, Read AI, is trying to do just that by integrating its AI bot with email, Slack, and enterprise tools like Hubspot, Jira, and Confluence. And to accelerate product development, the company announced Monday that it has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Smash Capital. Notably, this new…
We finally have an “official” definition of open source AI. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the long-standing organization dedicated to defining and “governing” all things open source, today released version 1.0 of the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). OSAID is the result of several years of collaboration between academia and industry, and aims to provide a standard by which anyone can determine whether AI is open source. Like this reporter, you may be wondering why consensus is important in defining open source AI. OSI Vice President Stefano Maffri said a big motivation is to get policy makers and AI developers…
xAI, owned by Elon Musk, has added image understanding capabilities to its Grok AI model. This will allow paid users of the X social platform to upload an image and ask the AI chatbot questions about it. One of the xAI employees and official Grok handle posted about this update on X. https://twitter.com/grok/status/1850808322074509434 In another post, Musk said Grok can also explain the meaning of jokes through new image understanding capabilities. He added that this feature is in its early stages and will be improved along the way. In August, Musk's AI company released a chatbot modeled after Grok-2 for…
This story has been updated throughout with updated details as the story unfolds. We will continue to do so as litigation and disputes are ongoing. There is a lot of controversy going on in the world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites. The central issue is a dispute between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. WordPress technology is open source, free, and powers a huge portion of the internet (approximately 40% of websites). Websites can host their own WordPress instance or use a…
Paris-based startup Filigran is quickly emerging as the next cybersecurity rocket. The company just raised a $35 million Series B round, just months after raising $16 million in a Series A round. Filigran's main product is OpenCTI. OpenCTI is an open-source threat intelligence platform that allows enterprises and public sector organizations to import threat data from multiple sources and enrich that data set with intelligence from providers such as CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Sekoia. The open source version of OpenCTI has attracted contributions from 4,300 cybersecurity professionals and has been downloaded millions of times. The European Commission, FBI, and New York…