Day: August 13, 2018

Hackers at DefCon have exposed new security concerns around smart speakers. Tencent’s Wu HuiYu and Qian Wenxiang spoke at the security conference with a presentation called Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You, explaining how they hacked into an Amazon Echo speaker and turned it into a spy bug. The hack involved a modified […]

Uber announced a new program today called Profile Recommendations that takes advantage of machine intelligence to reduce user error when switching between personal and business accounts. It’s not unusual for a person to have both types of accounts. When you’re out and about, it’s easy to forget to switch between them when appropriate. Uber wants to […]

Yesterday I speculated that Elon Musk’s hints that he wanted to take Tesla private with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund backing it might not be as far-fetched as people think. Today Musk has published a statement claiming that he has been talking to the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund (known in the country as the […]

Chrome OS has come a long way in the past few years. Even so, it’s still not the full-fledged operating system many of us require on our desktop machines. Google is reportedly looking to address that, in part, by adding the ability for users to dual-boot in Windows 10. According to XDA-Developers, the company is […]

Microsoft announced today that it’s released Azure Stack for Azure Government at a time when it’s battling rivals at Amazon and other cloud companies for the massive winner-take-all $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract known as JEDI. Azure Stack provides customers with a similar set of cloud services that they would get in the public cloud, […]

Netflix announced this morning its Chief Financial Officer David Wells would be stepping down from his role after helping the streaming service choose his successor. The company says it will be considering both internal and external candidates to fill the position. Wells has been with Netflix for 14 years, and has served as CFO since […]

Samsung today is announcing an updated version of its Wifi product line. The company partnered with Palo Alto-based Plume Design to provide software that powers the devices. According to Samsung, Plume’s platform uses artificial intelligence to allocate bandwidth across connected devices while delivering the best possible wi-fi coverage throughout a home. Plus, by using Plume, […]

OYO Rooms, the India-based budget hotel network that’s backed by SoftBank’s Vision fund, has prioritized expansion into China this year but that’s not all it’s up to. Back home in India, it just moved into the event hosting space through the acquisition of a wedding banquet company. Today, OYO said it has acquired Weddingz.in, a three-year-old company that […]

It’s almost unheard of to see three unicorns join forces to fund a startup, but that’s exactly what has happened in Indonesia. Ride-hailing company Go-Jek, e-commerce firm Tokopedia and travel booking startup Traveloka — each of which is valued in the billions of U.S. dollars — have come together to provide a Series A funding […]

In a very unusual move, WikiLeaks has been subpoenaed via Twitter. In a tweet on Friday, a law firm representing the Democratic National Convention in its civil lawsuit against WikiLeaks and other defendants served legal documents formally notifying the non-profit that it is being sued. The lawsuit also names a long list of other people […]