One of India’s self-proclaimed “godmen” has established his own island nation off the coast of Ecuador, and wants to use cryptocurrency as the basis for its economic policy. Nithyananda, a fugitive on the run over allegations of rape and abduction, yesterday announced he’d founded the Republic of Kailaasa — a supposedly sovereign state that would serve…
OpenBSD, an open-source operating system built with security in mind, has been found vulnerable to four new high-severity security vulnerabilities, one of which is an old-school type authentication bypass vulnerability in BSD Auth framework. The other three vulnerabilities are privilege escalation issues that could allow local users or malicious software to gain privileges of an…
Plexo Capital, the fund founded by former GV Partner Lo Toney, has closed its first fund of $42.5 million. The plan is to invest in both startups and emerging VC funds, with 60% to 65% of the capital going toward venture capital funds as a limited partner, and 35% to 40% going directly to startups,…
GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra said Thursday morning that the automaker is forming a joint venture with LG Chem to mass produce battery cells for its electric vehicles, a portfolio that will include a new battery-electric truck coming in the fall of 2021. The two companies said they will invest up to a total…
10 years after debut, 300 million monthly user Imgur is one of the last massively popular yet unpersonalized home pages on the internet. Since everyone sees the same upvoted posts when they open Imgur, it creates a shared experience full of inside jokes and running gags. But while you can switch to a feed of…
Ben Holber and Ryan Hambley grew up together. Hambley, the son of a dermatologist, always had clear skin. But Holber struggled with acne from the time he was a teenager. The two saw first-hand the difference it makes to have a dermatologist on demand. Apostrophe was born. Apostrophe, a new startup that makes it easier…
Volvo is making an investment in Palo Alto-based Apex.AI, a startup working on developing a robotic operating system qualified for use in production automobiles. Apex.AI, founded by automated systems engineers Jan Becker and Dejan Pangercic, raised $15.5 million in a Series A last November, and revealed that its focus is on developing an enterprise-focused version…
Instagram is done playing dumb about users’ ages. After nine years, Instagram is finally embracing more responsibility to protect underage kids from the problems with social media. It will now ask new users to input their birth date and bar users younger than 13 from joining. However, it won’t be asking existing users their age,…
Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day. Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As de Beauvoir used to say: If you love yourself, you won’t do drugs! Bitcoin Price We closed the day,…
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new, previously undiscovered destructive data-wiping malware that is being used by state-sponsored hackers in the wild to target energy and industrial organizations in the Middle East. Dubbed ZeroCleare, the data wiper malware has been linked to not one but two Iranian state-sponsored hacking groups—APT34, also known as ITG13 and Oilrig,…
