A contractor working for cell giant Sprint stored on an unprotected cloud server hundreds of thousands of cell phone bills of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile subscribers. The storage bucket had more than 261,300 documents, the vast majority of which were phone bills belonging to cell subscribers dating as far back as 2015. But the bucket,…
It didn’t take much for the founders of Cora, Brazil’s newest startup to tackle some aspect of the broken financial services industry in the country, to raise their first $10 million. Igor Senra and Leo Mendes had worked together before — founding their first online payments company, MOIP, in 2005. That company sold to WireCard…
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Alphabet Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced that Google CEO…
Plex today is launching its own ad-supported streaming service, a rival to The Roku Channel, Tubi, Crackle, Vudu’s Movies on Us, and others that offer a way to stream movies and TV for free without a subscription. The service will feature several thousand movies and shows from studios like MGM, Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution,…
Prolific, a U.K.-based startup that wants to make it easier to conduct online research, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. The round is co-led by Silicon Valley-based Pioneer Fund, and Altair Capital, with support from various angel investors based in the Bay Area. Prolific is also a graduate of Y Combinator and presented at…
Figuring out just what an AI is good at is one of the hardest thing about understanding them. To help determine this, OpenAI has designed a set of games that can help researchers tell whether their machine learning agent is actually learning basic skills or, what is equally likely, has figured out how to rig…
What kinds of businesses might be able to operate in space? Well datacenter are one potential target you might not have thought of. Space provides an interesting environment for datacenter operations, including advanced analytics operations and even artificial intelligence, due in part to the excellent cooling conditions and reasonable access to renewable power supply (solar).…
Mozilla today announced that its Firefox Private Network (FPN), which lets you encrypt your Firefox connections, is now in an extended beta after a few months of relatively limited testing in the Firefox Test Pilot program. This beta, however, is only available to users in the U.S. and the free service is restricted to 12…
In the waning years of the last millennium, at my university, one of the cause célèbres of the progressive left was a concept known as “Manufacturing Consent,” the title of a book and film, by and starring Noam Chomsky. Its central thesis was that US mass media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry…
Atomico, the European venture capital firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, has released its latest annual The State of European Tech report, published in partnership with Slush and Orrick. As part of the report, the authors surveyed 5,000 members of the ecosystem — including 1,000 founders — as well as pulling in robust data from…
