Author: GT

BEIJING (AP) — The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks.By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do.Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20…

Cognition AI, the startup behind AI coding agent Devin, has hit a $10.2 billion valuation after raising $400 million, marking a jump from the company’s $4 billion valuation earlier this year, reports Bloomberg.  Founders Fund, the Peter Thiel-backed VC, led Cognition’s latest round, with participation from existing investors like Lux Capital, Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, Elad Gil, Definition Capital and Swish Ventures. In July, Cognition acquired AI coding startup Windsurf, just days after Google poached the startup’s CEO, co-founder, and research leads. The raise comes after serious growth for Cognition’s core product. The startup’s annual recurring revenue from Devin has climbed…

Nepal’s crackdown on social media companies, which led to protests and police killing at least 19 people, is part of a yearslong decline of internet freedoms around the world as even democracies seek to curtail online speech.The Himalayan country’s government said last week it was blocking several social media platforms including Facebook, X and YouTube because the companies failed to comply with a requirement that they register with the government. The ban was lifted Tuesday a day after the deadly protests.What’s happening in Nepal mirrors “this broader pattern of controlling the narrative and controlling of stories emerging from the ground,”…

Venture capital firm Insight Partners says it has completed notifying a number of individuals, including the firm’s limited partners, whose personal information was stolen by hackers in a January data breach.  In a statement late last week, the company said it completed its review in August following the data breach, which it described as a “social engineering attack” without further explanation. According to its earlier notice, the stolen data included information about certain Insight Partners’ funds, management companies, and portfolio companies. The hackers also took banking and tax information, the company said, as well as personal information about its current…

The corporate space world tired Bianca Cefalo to the point that she found it easier to literally start her own space company and launch objects into orbit.  Cefalo is the founder of Space DOTs, which launched in 2022 to detect space threats. She and her team have created a software platform called SKY-I for space tech manufacturers and operators to help them detect, interpret, and attribute natural and human-originated threats in orbit. She’s spent decades in the industry, working on projects that have put objects on the moon and launched satellites into orbit. She worked as a thermofluid dynamic analyst…

One of the biggest questions facing founders today: How do you keep building when the rules won’t stop shifting? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, where we celebrate TechCrunch’s 20th anniversary from October 27-29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, we’ll hear firsthand from Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, on the Builders Stage. Why Ryan’s story matters Since launching Flexport in 2013, Ryan Petersen has helped more than 10,000 companies move over $175 billion worth of goods worldwide, raising $2.3 billion and redefining how supply chains are managed in a volatile, tech-driven era. But Petersen’s lessons go far beyond logistics.…

Advertising exchange PubMatic has filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of illegally monopolizing the ad technology market. PubMatic is seeking billions of dollars in damages, according to a report from Bloomberg. The lawsuit marks the second time that an advertising exchange has sued Google since a federal judge ruled in April that the search giant had illegally monopolized ad exchanges and ad servers. The judge has set another trial for this month to determine whether Google should be forced to sell off parts of its advertising business due to its illegal conduct. PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel says…

Spotify is giving users more ways to personalize what they hear. The company is launching a new feature that allows users to filter their library by specific activities, moods, or genres. These filters can also be used to find playlists, or, to some extent, audiobooks and podcasts, and can even kick off a new session on Spotify’s AI DJ. The smart filters, which began rolling out on Friday, will first be made available to Premium subscribers on mobile devices and tablets in select markets, including the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa. Spotify estimates the rollout…

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesAn ex-Meta employee sued the social media company on Monday over allegations that its WhatsApp messaging service contained “systemic cybersecurity failures” that potentially compromise user privacy.Attaullah Baig, WhatsApp’s former head of security, alleged that Meta retaliated against him after he notified leaders, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, of security issues at the messaging app. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims that after joining WhatsApp in 2021, Baig found security flaws that violated federal securities laws and Meta’s legal obligations related to a 2020 privacy…

By the time Harry Qi was 23 years old, he had achieved the kind of financial success that most people will never attain: making about $1 million a year. He was working as a “quant” in his first job out of college. That’s hedge-fund speak for a stock-trading analyst at a statistical-model-driven quant fund. But like many people who spend their energy pursuing ever more money, he felt empty. “At some point you just want to make a much bigger impact on this world,” Qi, now 29, tells TechCrunch.  So in 2019, he and his high school buddy Omid Rooholfada,…