Author: TechBrunch

Spotify is expanding access to audiobooks to more US subscribers. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of its $11.99 per month audiobook + plan on the market. This allows family or duoplan subscribers or their household members to add 15 hours of audiobook listening in addition to the master plan. Spotify launched an audiobook service in the US in 2022, but duo and family planning household members have long been ruled out. The offering will make audiobooks available to household members for the first time in the US market. Through Spotify Premium, subscribers already have access to 15 hours…

TechCrunch will advance the startup world in 2025 and break the 20-year mark. And you only have two days left to join the movement and save up to $675 on your ticket. From October 27th to 29th, Moscone West will be home to more than 10,000 motors and manufacturers in the world of technology. Join San Francisco and celebrate 20 years of startup breakthroughs, VC connectivity and industry shift ideas. The deadline for locking your savings is 11:59pm on August 6th. Don't wait – sign up now to save a lot. Why confuse 2025? Confusion is more than a tech…

Enterprise security company Sonic Wall is urging customers to disable the core functionality of their latest lineup of firewall devices after security researchers reported an increase in ransomware incidents targeting Sonic Wall customers. In a statement this week, Sonic Wall said there was a “significant increase” of security incidents targeting Generation 7 firewalls where customers have VPN enabled. The company said it will “proactively investigate these cases to determine whether they are related to previously disclosed vulnerabilities, or whether new vulnerabilities could be held liable.” The company's alert says security researchers have identified hackers targeting SonicWall devices and gained initial…

Google's AI-powered bug hunter just reported the first batch of security vulnerabilities. Heather Adkins, Google's vice president of security, announced Monday that LLM-based vulnerability researcher Big Sleep has discovered and reported 20 flaws in a variety of popular open source software. Adkins said Big Sleep, developed by the company's AI division Deepmind and the elite team of Hackers Project Zero, reported the first vulnerability in open source software, primarily audio and video libraries FFMPEG and image editing suite image mogik. Given that the vulnerability has not been fixed yet, Google doesn't want to provide details yet, so there are no…

According to the Internet Infrastructure Provider CloudFlare, AI startups' stumps are raw scraping content from websites that explicitly indicate they don't want to be scraped away. On Monday, CloudFlare published a survey that found that AI startups ignored blocks and observing their raw or scraping activities. The Network Infrastructure giant has accused them of obscuring their identity when trying to scrape web pages “to avoid website preferences,” CloudFlare researchers wrote. AI products like Prplexity offer rely on gobbling large amounts of data from the Internet, and AI startups have repeatedly scraped text, images and videos from the Internet without permission…

ChatGpt's impressive growth as a consumer app continues, the company says, as chatbots are on track to hit 700 million weeks of active users this week. The app had reached 500 million active users as of the end of March, pointed out in an X post by Nick Turley, VP of Openai and ChatGpt's app head. He said the app has grown four times more than last year. “Every day, people and teams learn, create and solve more difficult problems. A big week ago. I'm grateful for the mission that made chat GPT more convenient and everyone can benefit from…

Elon Musk says he's getting the grapes back. Over the weekend, the X owner announced that the company was discovering a video archive of a popular short video app that is believed to have been removed and is working on restoring user access. Vine – It's like the predecessor of today's Tiktok, but only had 6 seconds long loop video, but was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million to expand the video ambitions of social media platforms. Unfortunately for Vine creators and fans, the company decided to shut down Vine in 2016 by fumbling the app's potential…

Researchers at Security Giant Crowdstrike say they have seen hundreds of cases where North Koreans pretend to be IT workers in remote areas. With each CrowdStrike's latest threat hunting report, the company has identified more than 320 incidents in the last 12 months. This is an increase of 220% from the previous year, with North Korea gaining fraudulent employment in Western companies working remotely as developers. The scheme uses false identities, resumes and workplace history to not only rely on North Korea to acquire jobs and earn money for the regime, but also allows workers to steal data from the…

Given the fact that recent social media apps are full of AI-generated videos, AI-Native apps seem keen to capture this trend. The latest to jump to that bandwagon is Charition.ai, which said Monday it is adding social feeds to its mobile apps so users can create and chat AI characters. The social feed, which first appeared on the company's web platform in June, allows users to share images, videos and chatbots with other users. Users can also share chat snippets with characters, post AI-generated images based on chats with characters, and have topics of character discussion in live streams. This…

According to Cathy Gao, partner at Sapphire Ventures, in 2025, startup founders face a confused and contradictory capital market. “Capacity is not rare, but access to its capital is more difficult than ever,” she said. Speaking at TechCrunch's All Stage Conference in July, Gao said it was possible for startup founders, particularly those of later Series C stage, to navigate this particular economic environment. And they need to start with a reality check. First, he said it is important to note that it is important for only one of the five startups that raise Series A to source Series C.…