As 2018 draws to a close, China’s gaming industry — which has been beaten by a nine-month-long freeze in license approvals — woke up to exhilarating news as officials announced that they have started to review new titles again. The much-coveted game licenses are essential for developers to legally monetize their work in China. “We’ve…
Thousands of people trusted Blind, an app-based “anonymous social network,” as a safe way to reveal malfeasance, wrongdoing and improper conduct at their companies. But Blind left one of its database servers exposed without a password for more than a month, making it possible for anyone who knew where to look to access each user’s…
Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler Contributor A cyberattack has the power to paralyze cellular communications; alter or erase information in computerized systems; prevent access to computer servers; and directly harm a country’s economy and security by attacking its electricity networks or banking system. The necessity is clear for any country, but especially Israel with its unique security…
Before Ram Palaniappan founded Earnin, he developed a system for employees at a payments company called UniRush, where he spent eight years as president. If you needed money before payday, he would write you a check from his checking account and when payday rolled around, employees would reimburse him. Despite being paid what Palaniappan thought were…
Grab, Southeast Asia’s top ride-hailing company, has hit a roadblock in its efforts to improve its mapping and routing service after running into trouble with OpenStreetMap, the world’s largest collaborative mapping community, through a series of blundering edits in Thailand. Grab, which gobbled up Uber’s local business in exchange for an equity swap earlier this…
In a new blog post, Facebook VP of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong addressed the company’s latest user privacy controversy. The rebuttal is the second round of Facebook’s push back against Tuesday’s report by the New York Times detailing some of Facebook’s special partnerships and extensive data sharing with major tech players. In the new post,…
If there was a word that dominated startup and tech news coverage this year, it was SoftBank. The Japanese telecom conglomerate’s Vision Fund pushed out a prodigious amount of capital this year — quite literally billions of dollars — into companies as diverse as a molecular manufacturer (Zymergen) and a robotic pizza delivery business (Zume Pizza).…
Justin Kosslyn Contributor Justin Kosslyn is the chief product manager at Jigsaw, a unit within Alphabet that uses technology to address global security issues. Amid all the discussion today about online threats, from censorship to surveillance to cyberwar, we often spend more time on the symptoms than on the underlying chronic conditions. If we want…
SoftBank Corp’s initial public offering today started with a bang before trailing off into a whimper, with the stock falling 14.5 percent during its first day of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The company is the mobile unit of conglomerate SoftBank Group, whose holdings also include Sprint and the $100 billion Vision Fund. Shares…
By any measure Facebook hasn’t had the best of years in 2018. But while toxic problems keep piling up and, well, raining acidly down on the social networking giant — from election interference, to fake accounts, faulty metrics, security flaws, ethics failures, privacy outrages and much more besides — the silver lining of having a core…
