Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business under Alphabet, sent an email to customers of its ride-hailing app that their next trip might not have a human safety driver behind the wheel, according to a copy of the email that was posted on Reddit. The email entitled “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way” was sent…
If you had to slip a couple AAs into your smartphone every morning to check your email, browse Instagram, and text your friends, chances are the mobile revolution would not have been quite so revolutionary. Fortunately the rechargeable lithium-ion battery was invented — a decades-long task for which three men have just been awarded the…
California lawmakers today passed a bill placing a three-year state-wide moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies. AB 1215, The Body Camera Accountability Act, was introduced earlier this year by assemblymember Phil Tang, a Democrat. Both San Francisco and Oakland previously passed similar bills preventing the use of facial recognition…
There has been no shortage of massive security breaches so far this year. Just last July, Capital One disclosed that it was hit by a breach that affected more than 100 million customers. Also recently, researchers came across an unsecured cloud server that contained the names, phone numbers, and financial information of virtually all citizens…
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. China attacks Apple for allowing Hong Kong crowdsourced police activity app Apple’s decision to greenlight an app called HKmaps, which is…
“If Silicon Valley is going to keep telling itself the story that the only uses of their technology will be the most optimistic, the most hopeful, the most salubrious, the most prosocial,” New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz told me in Part 1 of this recent conversation for Extra Crunch, “you can try to rebut…
Julie Yoo has joined Andreessen Horowitz as its newest general partner. She will make investments out of the venture capital firm’s bio fund, which closed on $450 million in 2017. Yoo spent the last eight years as a co-founder and chief product officer of Kyruus, a venture-backed healthcare provider matching tool. She’s joins as a16z’s…
Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division is pushing to change the law that would allow it to demand information from internet providers that would identify the owners of vulnerable systems, TechCrunch has learned. Sources familiar with the proposal say the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), founded just less than a year ago, wants the new administrative…
Pinterest is the latest tech company to introduce a “Lite” version of its mobile application to meet the needs of users in emerging markets. With Pinterest Lite, launched on Monday, users will benefit from a faster download and an app that takes up less storage space on their mobile device, the company says. Pinterest previously…
In a trio of announcements at Arm TechCon 2019 in San Jose yesterday (October 8), chip design company Arm walked the line on increasing flexibility and reducing fragmentation in the IoT space, as the rise of 5G and AI place ever-higher demand on compute power, hardware-software integration, and easy scalability. Most significantly, Arm is enabling…
