Author: TechBrunch
Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction. Get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important crypto articles delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12pm PT. Subscribe here. Hello. Welcome to the fourth edition of the new and improved TechCrunch Crypto newsletter. You probably already know about this deal, but we've added some regular segments and features alongside some of our regularly scheduled news. If you like what you see (or don't), let us know at jacquelyn@techcrunch.com. Anyway, let's get into the big headings below. this week's web3 Decentralized social network Farcaster aims for mass adoption through…
New public data reveals that hackers have begun mass-exploiting a third vulnerability affecting Ivanti's widely used enterprise VPN appliances. Ivanti last week announced two new security flaws (CVE-2024-21888 and CVE- (tracked as 2024-21893). Ivanti has more than 40,000 of his customers, including universities, medical institutions and banks, and its technology allows employees to log in from outside the office, according to the company's website. This disclosure comes shortly after Ivanti identified two previous bugs in Connect Secure, tracked as CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887. Security researchers say the bug has been exploited by Chinese-backed hackers since December to infiltrate customer networks and…
The FCC's fight against robocalls has gained a new weapon by declaring AI-generated voices to be “artificial” and therefore clearly against the law when used for automated call fraud. It might not stop the flood of fake Joe Bidens that will almost certainly cause problems on our phones this election season, but it won't hurt either. This new rule, which has been under consideration for several months and was announced in the Telegram last week, actually new Rules — The FCC cannot invent them without due process. Robocall is just a new term for something that is already largely prohibited…
A fake app masquerading as the password manager LastPass has been removed from the App Store, but it's still unclear whether it was removed by Apple or by the fake app's developer. Apple has not commented. This illegal app was listed under the name of an individual developer (Parvati Patel) and copied LastPass' branding and user interface in order to confuse users. LastPass said the fake app was not only published by a different developer than LastPass owner LogMeIn, but also contained various misspellings and clues to its fraudulent nature. . It argues that allowing such clearly fake apps to…
it's fair to say The NFT space has lost a lot of its luster in recent years, but that hasn't stopped some founders, investors, and projects from trucking ahead in hopes of another surge. Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea, one of the first NFT marketplaces to gain serious traction and market share, is still betting big on the space. On January 1, 2022, global NFT sales peaked at $23.73 billion. Two years later, by the first day of 2024, it had fallen 94% to just $1.4 billion. While this volume decline is clearly impacting the bottom line of OpenSea's business,…
The European Union has launched a consultation on draft election security mitigations aimed at larger online platforms, such as Facebook, Google, TikTok and X (Twitter), that includes a set of recommendations it hopes will shrink democratic risks from generative AI and deepfakes — in addition to covering off more well-trodden ground such as content moderation resourcing and service integrity; political ads transparency; and media literacy. The overall goal for the guidance is to ensure tech giants take due care and attention to a full sweep of election-related risks that might bubble up on their platforms, including as a result of…
Don't enter anything criminal or anything you don't want others to see into Gemini, Google's GenAI family of apps. That's the PSA (of sorts) released by Google today, outlining in a new support document how the company collects data from users of its Gemini chatbot app for the web, Android, and iOS. Google says human annotators routinely read, label, and process your conversations with Gemini to improve its services (even though the conversations are “disconnected” from your Google account). ). (It's not clear whether these annotators are in-house or outsourced, but that could be important when it comes to data…
appears to be emerging The pricing of AI-powered software products will boost the total addressable market (TAM) for technology products and help re-accelerate the growth of technology companies large and small. Battery Ventures noted that in the second half of 2023, the rebound in revenue growth for software startups reached a nadir, with growth levels beginning to stabilize in the fourth quarter. Around the same time, Scale Venture Partners reported that after several years of slowdown, early-stage software companies are expected to regain momentum in his 2024. All told, tech companies appeared to be mostly out of the woods. We…
PayPal is working on a new consumer app for mobile customers and says it's “ready” to take advantage of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a new EU regulation that comes into effect next month for technology “gatekeepers.” ” like Apple. For PayPal, one of the key changes with DMA is that third-party apps will be able to access the NFC technology that currently powers Apple Pay in its own mobile wallet application. Based on the new guidelines, iPhone users can also switch to another mobile wallet as their default. PayPal didn't say much during its fourth quarter earnings call about…
Upstash announced a $1.9 million seed round almost exactly two years ago with the idea of building a serverless data platform for data-intensive applications built on Redis and Kafka. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but the data landscape has changed a lot since then. Fast forward to today, and the company boasts $1 million in ARR and a $10 million Series A centered around the a16z and a shiny new vector database. What has changed in the short two years since he started the company is the growth of generative AI. As you may have noticed, this is…