Author: GT

TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been at the center of controversy in the U.S. for four years now due to concerns about user data potentially being accessed by the Chinese government. As a result, U.S. users have often found themselves caught in the middle of this tension. Earlier this year, the app experienced a temporary outage in the U.S. that left millions of users in suspense before it was quickly restored. TikTok returned to the App Store and Google Play Store in February.  A number of investors are competing for the opportunity to purchase the app, and…

NEW YORK (AP) — While close to 150 world leaders prepared to descend on Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly, the U.S. Secret Service was quietly dismantling a massive hidden telecom network across the New York area — a system investigators say could have crippled cell towers, jammed 911 calls and flooded networks with chaos at the very moment the city was most vulnerable.The cache, made up of more than 300 SIM servers packed with over 100,000 SIM cards and clustered within 35 miles of the United Nations, represents one of the most sweeping communications threats uncovered on U.S. soil.…

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesAmazon and the Federal Trade Commission are squaring off in a long-awaited trial over whether the company duped users into paying for Prime memberships.The lawsuit, filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the Biden administration, alleges that Amazon deceived tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription program and sabotaged their attempts to cancel it. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.The trial is being held in a federal court in Seattle, Amazon’s backyard. Jury selection began Monday and opening arguments are slated for Tuesday, with the trial expected to last about…

Stellantis, the car-making giant behind Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Dodge, Ram, and other brands, has confirmed a data breach involving customers’ personal information.  In a statement published Sunday, Stellantis said it experienced a breach of a “third-party service provider’s platform that supports our North American customer service operations.”  The statement said “contact information” was taken, but Stellantis spokesperson Kaileen Connelly declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about what specific types of customer data were taken in the breach. Stellantis’ spokesperson also declined to say how many customers it was notifying that their information was taken. Bleeping Computer reports that Stellantis’ data breach…

Ahead of the curve — he practically lives there. Before most of the world had even asked ChatGPT its first question, Elad Gil was writing early checks into companies like Perplexity, Character.AI, and Harvey. That’s just a slice of his story. His track record spans seed and Series A investments in over 30 unicorns and involvement with some of the most iconic names in tech, including Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Notion, Figma, Flexport, GitLab, and many more. This October, Gil takes the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 in San Francisco for a one-on-one fireside chat. He’ll cover his approach…

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — A skilled drone pilot flew two to three large unidentified drones over Copenhagen Airport on Monday night, shutting down the airspace for hours as the unknown perpetrator appeared to be showing off their capabilities over Scandinavia’s largest airport, police said Tuesday. Officials chose not to shoot down the drones because the risk was too great because of the airport being full of passengers, the planes on the runways and nearby fuel depots, Jes Jespersen, senior police inspector of the Copenhagen Police, said during a news conference.Jespersen called the pilot “a capable actor” and said the culprit…

TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 📍 October 27–29, Moscone West, San Francisco🎟️ Register now — Regular Bird savings of up to $668 end September 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT Why join this conversation on the Builders Stage? This honest and tactical conversation will cover what really matters when raising your first institutional check — from telling a compelling story to building trust without traction. Charles Hudson and Wesley Chan will share the traits they consistently look for in zero-to-one founders, the red flags that raise eyebrows, and the most common mistakes first-time entrepreneurs make when fundraising. Image Credits:Haje Kamps / TechCrunch Betting…

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (L), and Jensen Huang CEO of Nvidia.ReutersABILENE, Texas – Sam Altman had a deadline. OpenAI’s CEO was headed to Texas to unveil his company’s next big infrastructure push, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wanted in on the action. Through a series of hurried negotiations, late-night calls and last-minute contract tweaks, the two giants of artificial intelligence struck a $100 billion partnership on Monday, hours before Altman boarded his flight to Abilene, a city of about 130,000 residents roughly 180 miles west of Dallas. It helped that Huang and Altman had been part of President Donald…

There’s a classic Simpsons episode in which the sly businessman Mr. Burns recruits real Major League Baseball players to join his company softball team in order to win a bet. But when the championship is on the line, Mr. Burns pulls eight-time National League all-star Darryl Strawberry for a substitute, Homer Simpson. “You’re a left-hander, and so is the pitcher. If I send up a right-handed batter, it’s called playing the percentages,” Mr. Burns says to Strawberry. “It’s what smart managers do to win ballgames.” High-level baseball is very mathematically-driven, with teams hiring dozens of data engineers to study granular…

LONDON (AP) — Jaguar Land Rover said Tuesday that its production lines, shut down after a cyberattack in August, will remain at a halt until at least Oct. 1.Britain’s biggest automaker sent workers home from its factories in central and northwest England on Aug. 31.The shutdown has rippled through the U.K. auto industry. JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, employs more than 30,000 people, with its supply chain supporting tens of thousands more jobs.The company has disclosed limited information about the nature of the attack and says it’s investigating.JLR said in a statement that it had extended the…