The last few months have seen an escalating series of incidents in which the harmful elements of drones have loomed large in the public eye. In April, rumors of a coup in Saudi Arabia flared after a recreational drone was shot down when flying into an unauthorized zone in the capital. August saw a drone attack on…
On Tuesday, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted to approve a ban on the use of facial recognition tech by city agencies, including the police department. The Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance, introduced by San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, is the first ban of its kind for a major American city and the seventh major surveillance…
If you thought Uber’s disastrous initial public offering last week would deter fellow venture-backed technology companies from pursuing the public markets in 2019, you thought wrong. CrowdStrike, yet another multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley “unicorn,” has filed to go public. The cloud-based cybersecurity platform valued at $3.3 billion in 2018 revealed its IPO prospectus Tuesday afternoon. The…
Away‘s new lofty valuation proves how far you can get with excellent branding. The direct-to-consumer seller of Instagrammable luggage has collected $100 million in Series D funding at a $1.4 billion valuation in a round led by Wellington Management, with support from Baillie Gifford, Lone Pine Capital and Global Founders Capital, reports The Wall Street…
Amazon want to be plenty of things, the most predictable of which is its ambitions to control America’s shipping backbone. The company’s efforts to bring users whatever they desire in 24 hours requires movements by land, air and sea. Today, the company broke ground on expanding its airborne ambitions, breaking ground on a three million…
Tired of chatty drivers? Uber is finally giving users its most requested feature: an in-app way to ask for minimal conversation during your ride. The “Quiet Mode” feature is free and will be available to everyone in the US tomorrow, but only on Uber Black and Uber Black SUV premium rides. Users can select “Quiet…
President Trump is expected to sign an executive order this week that would ban US companies from using equipment from firms that pose a national security risk. If signed, the order would all but block Huawei from the United States. The order isn’t expected to name individual companies, although Huawei is clearly the one that…
Academic researchers today disclosed details of the newest class of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel processors that impacts all modern chips, including the chips used in Apple devices. After the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities earlier last year that put practically every computer in the world at risk, different classes of Spectre…
Cool missions need cool names, and NASA’s new plan to establish a permanent lunar presence and put an American on the Moon again now has one: Artemis. It’s nod both to Apollo, the 50th anniversary of the culmination of which is this year, and to the fact that the program is likely to send the…
Love it or hate it, Game of Thrones ends this week. The series finale will air this upcoming Sunday, capping a final season that has been criticized for being too short, too rushed, and, at times, too damned hard to see. Seemingly immune to the ires of the Internet, the series’ showrunners are moving…
