The blockbuster listing of Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of Alibaba, has been put on ice until the end of next year at the earliest, according to bankers. Market players have been counting on Ant, which runs China’s popular Alipay mobile payments service, to be the star in this year’s initial public offerings calendar. It was valued at $60bn in its last financing round in April 2016, […]
By Dustin Volz | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON An unprecedented global cyber attack that infected computers in at least 150 countries beginning on Friday has unleashed a new wave of criticism of the U.S. National Security Agency. The attack was made possible by a flaw in Microsoft’s Windows software that the NSA used to build a hacking tool for its own use – only to have that tool and […]
VMware said Monday that it plans to acquire Apteligent, makers of application performance software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to VMware, the Apteligent platform lets mobile app developers and IT admins analyze mobile application performance in real time, providing converged visibility and contextual analytics to improve application uptime. The company said it plans to use Apteligent’s capabilities to bolster its digital workspace platform and […]
Rolls-Royce lagged behind a London market rally on Monday that lifted the FTSE 100 to a fresh record high. Rolls was under pressure after Investec questioned whether management can hit a target of delivering more than £1bn in free cash flow by 2020. The cost of developing a new engine for Boeing could be “a material headwind” to that goal, the broker warned. Boeing is reportedly finalising […]
Although voice-activated platforms like Alexa will continue to grow and be important, it is my sense that AR is really the platform to watch. As I’ve discussed before, augmented reality has the potential to become the Next Big Thing. Voice-activated systems like Alexa are nice, but they have their limits. We’ve seen AR take off in apps like Snapchat and Pokemon Go, but what if a major […]
By Guy Faulconbridge and Dustin Volz | LONDON/WASHINGTON LONDON/WASHINGTON The global WannaCry “ransomware” cyber attack spread more slowly on Monday with no major infections reported, as attention shifted to investment and government policy implications of lax cyber security. There were 213,000 infected machines in 112 countries as of 1000 GMT on Monday, according to Czech security firm Avast, making it one of the largest coordinated attacks to […]
Criminal hacking groups have repurposed a second classified cyber weapon stolen from US spies and have made it available on the so-called dark web after the success of the WannaCry attack that swept across the globe on Friday. The hacking tool, developed by the US National Security Agency and codenamed EsteemAudit, has been adapted and is now available for criminal use, according to security analysts. As with […]
When you look at the popular, artificially intelligent “assistants” on the market today, they’re really just voice-recognition engines, coupled with pattern- and image-recognition and search engines. But those capabilities, when allowed to ‘learn’ over time, start to form the basis of cognition, inference, and then reasoning. Add attitude, subjective opinion, and feelings, and we get close to the human-brain benchmarks that all machine-learning scientists are pursuing. 25 […]
U.S. stocks opened higher on Monday as a rise in oil prices boosted energy stocks, soothing some nerves following a massive cyber attack that locked up 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries. Oil hit a three-week high after top exporters Saudi Arabia and Russia said supply cuts needed to last into 2018, a step toward extending an OPEC-led deal to support prices for longer than originally […]
Tesla has started taking orders for its innovative new solar roof, tile-sized solar panels that the company unveiled back in October last year. Coming from the makers of supercar-speed electric vehicles and reusable rockets, they’re not your ordinary solar panel: they’re aesthetically pleasing and won’t require ripping off existing tiles inside the home for installation. The Solar Roof, Tesla’s first post-SolarCity acquisition offering, is expected to sell […]
BEIJING Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that intelligence services should beware of creating software that can later be used for malicious means – a reference to global ‘ransomware’ attacks that researchers say exploited a hacking tool built by the U.S. National Security Agency. Speaking to reporters in Beijing, where he is taking part in a conference, Putin said that there was no significant damage to […]
The cyberattack crippled IT systems and forced doctors and nurses to work with pen and paper notes. Image: iStock NHS hospitals are still struggling in the fight against a global ransomware attack, with computer systems in several hospitals locked three days after the initial outbreak and previously unaffected hospitals revealed to have fallen to WannaCrypt ransomware. During the weekend more than 200,000 victims in over 150 countries […]
Lattice Data Apple has acquired Lattice Data, a data mining company which could give Apple a stronger talent pool in the artificial intelligence and analytics fields. Over the weekend, TechCrunch reported that Lattice Data, born out of the statistical inference Stanford research project DeepDive in 2015, had been quietly purchased by Apple. The company’s mission is to “unlock the value in dark data for critical real-world problems,” […]
By Jeremy Wagstaff and Dustin Volz | SINGAPORE/WASHINGTON SINGAPORE/WASHINGTON Asian governments and businesses reported some disruptions from the WannaCry ransomware worm on Monday but cybersecurity experts warned of a wider impact as more employees turned on their computers and checked e-mails. The ransomware that has locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries has been mainly spread by e-mail, hitting factories, hospitals, shops and […]
The cyber attacks that swept the globe on Friday likely aren’t over just yet: current data show more than 1.3m computer systems are still vulnerable to infection to the debilitating WannaCry infection. So far, 200,000 computers across 150 countries are known to have been infected in the first wave of the WannaCry cyber attack, Europol said on Sunday. “The recent attack is at an unprecedented level and […]
The ransomware attack caused chaos last week around the world, including at hospitals in the UK. sudok1, Getty Images/iStockphoto The global ransomware attack that caused chaos could spring back to life again as workers return to the office, experts have warned. While ransomware has been a growing menace for some time, this particular attack is without parallel, largely because the ransomware was combined with a worm-like functionality […]
By Dustin Volz and Eric Auchard | WASHINGTON/FRANKFURT WASHINGTON/FRANKFURT U.S. and European officials scrambled to catch the culprits behind a massive ransomware worm that caused damage across the globe over the weekend, stopping car factories, hospitals, shops and schools, as Microsoft pinned blame on governments for not disclosing more software vulnerabilities. The attack, which leveraged malicious software that security researchers widely believe was stolen from the U.S. National […]
In this May 12, 2017 photo, a display panel with an error can be seen at the main railway station in Chemnitz, Germany. Germany’s national railway says that it was among the organizations affected by the global cyberattack but there was no impact on train services. Deutsche Bahn said early Saturday that departure and arrival display screens at its stations were hit Friday night by the attack. […]
Businesses must brace for further cyber attacks this week on a potentially “significant scale”, British intelligence officials warned on Sunday, less than 48 hours after the debilitating WannaCry infection swept across the world. Current data show more than 1.3m computer systems are still vulnerable to infection by WannaCry, which has paralysed hospitals, disrupted transport networks and immobilised businesses, according to cyber security analysts. So far, 200,000 computers […]
Ransomware: Everything you ever wanted to know Hospitals across England and Scotland are being forced to postpone appointments and divert patients elsewhere because systems have been taken offline by a ransomware attack in an event NHS England has declared as a ‘major incident’. In a statement, NHS Digital, which runs IT systems for the health service, has confirmed that systems across the country have been brought down […]
Where will self-driving cars go once they drop you off? In big cities, parking can be expensive and take forever to find. But TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon team Val.ai built a way for autonomous vehicles to participate in auctions for nearby parking spaces. When a self-driving car needs to park itself, it can submit real-time bids for local spots occupied by others. If a currently parked car […]
Do you use Google Chrome? Do you want to become a Google Chrome guru? Read on! What follows are a collection of tips, tricks, and tools to help you get the most from Google Chrome. There are tips on speeding up the browser and making it consume less RAM, ways to increase your privacy, and extensions that you can install to help you get more done in […]
People walk past a Megafon mobile phones shop in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, May 13, 2017. A top Russian mobile operator said Friday it had come under cyberattacks that appeared similar to those that have crippled some U.K. hospitals. Pyotr Lidov, a spokesman for Megafon, said Friday’s attacks froze computers in company’s offices across Russia. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev) The cyberattack that spread malicious software around the world, shutting […]
Flash organizations are a new crowdsourcing technique that enables anyone to assemble an entire organization from a paid crowdsourcing marketplace and lead that organization in pursuit of complex, open-ended goals. (via WSJ)
