Minds, a decentralized social network, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Medici Ventures, Overstock.com’s venture arm. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne will join the Minds Board of Directors. What is a decentralized social network? The creators, who originally crowdfunded their product, see it as an anti-surveillance, anti-censorship, and anti-“big tech” platform that ensures…
An omnipotent data infrastructure and knowledge-sharing tech organization has spread across the planet. Global conspiracies to disseminate propaganda and rig elections are ever present. Algorithms determine what people see as objective truth, and terrorist organizations gird to bring down the monopoly on information. Malka Older faces a problem few speculative science fiction authors face in…
Security researchers have found flaws in four popular connected storage drives that they say could let hackers access a user’s private and sensitive data. The researchers Paulos Yibelo and Daniel Eshetu said the software running on three of the devices they tested — NetGear Stora, Seagate Home and Medion LifeCloud — can allow an attacker to…
A decade ago, it was almost inconceivable that nearly every household item could be hooked up to the internet. These days, it’s near impossible to avoid a non-smart home gadget, and they’re vacuuming up a ton of new data that we’d never normally think about. Thermostats know the temperature of your house, and smart cameras…
Facebook has confirmed it has hired the former leader of the UK’s former third largest political party — Nick Clegg of the middle ground Liberal Democrats — to head up global policy and comms. The news was reported earlier by the Financial Times. Clegg is also a former UK deputy prime minister, after the Lib…
Twilio is hosting its Signal developer conference in San Francisco this week. Yesterday was all about bots and taking payments over the phone; today is all about IoT. The company is launching two new (but related) products today that will make it easier for IoT developers to connect their devices. The first is the Global…
The hype around quantum computing is real. But to fully realize the promise of quantum computing, it’ll still take a few years of research and scientific breakthroughs. And indeed, it still remains to be seen if quantum computers will ever live up to the hype. Today, though, we got mathematical proof that there are really calculations that…
More bad news for MoviePass . At the direction of New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson is now the subject of a fraud probe in New York state. “We’ve launched a securities fraud investigation into @MoviePass’ parent company,” Underwood confirmed in a tweet. “My office is committed to protecting…
Great startups normally come from a personal place. Byran Dai’s new company, Daivergent, is no different. Founded in December 2017, Daivergent looks to connect enterprise clients with folks on the autism spectrum who will help complete tasks in AI/ML data management. Dai’s younger brother, Brandon, is on the autism spectrum. Dai realized that his brother…
Several major Facebook shareholders have submitted a proposal calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to step down as chairman of the company’s board. The filing is mainly symbolic, since Zuckerberg has almost total voting control, an arrangement that has earned the company’s board structure comparisons to a “dictatorship.” The proposal is still noteworthy, however, because of…
