Lee Enterprises ransomware attack halts freelance and contractor payments

As disruption from a suspected ransomware attack on newspaper publishing giant Lee Enterprises enters its second month, the cyberattack is also affecting payments to freelancers and contractors who work for the company, technewss has learned. The cyberattack on Lee Enterprises on February 3 spark

Podcasting platform Podcastle launches a text-to-speech model with more than 450 AI voices

Podcast recording and editing platform Podcastle is now joining other companies in the AI-powered, text-to-speech race by releasing its own AI model called Asyncflow v1.0. An API for developers will also be available, allowing them to directly integrate the text-to-speech model in their apps. Than

Google upgrades Colab with an AI agent tool

Google Colab, Google’s cloud-based notebook tool for coding, data science, and AI, is gaining a new “AI agent” tool, Data Science Agent, to help Colab users quickly clean data, visualize trends, and get insights on their uploaded data sets. First announced at Google’s I/O d

No part of Amazon is ‘unaffected’ by AI, says its head of AGI

“There’s scarcely a part of the company that is unaffected by AI,” said Vishal Sharma, Amazon's VP of Artificial General Intelligence, on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He dismissed the idea that open source models might reduce compute needs and deflected when asked wh

Anthropic raises $3.5B to fuel its AI ambitions

AI startup Anthropic on Monday announced it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The Series E, which also had participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company

Fintech startup Ramp nearly doubles valuation to $13B in secondary share sale

Expense management startup Ramp has nearly doubled its valuation to $13 billion after a $150 million secondary share sale, the company announced Monday morning. New and existing backers including VC Stripes, GIC, Avenir Growth, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, 137 Ve

US said to halt offensive cyber operations against Russia 

The United States has suspended its offensive cyber operations against Russia, according to reports, amid efforts by the Trump administration to grant Moscow concessions to end the war in Ukraine. The reported order to halt U.S.-launched hacking operations against Russia was authorized by U.S. Def

Mozilla rewrites Firefox’s Terms of Use after user backlash

After fielding user backlash over its new Terms of Use last week, Firefox browser maker Mozilla has rewritten its policy to address issues around the overly broad language it had previously used. Critics said the terms implied Mozilla was asking users for the rights to whatever data they input into

Conan O’Brien comments on AI during his opening monologue at the Oscars

When hosting the 2025 Oscars last night, comedian and late-night TV host Conan O’Brien addressed the use of AI in his opening monologue, reflecting the growing conversation about the technology's influence in Hollywood. “We did not use AI to make this show,” O'Brien said. Hi

Deutsche Telekom and Perplexity announce new ‘AI Phone’ priced at under $1K

It was inevitable that this year at MWC in Barcelona, at least one carrier would announce a major effort at building a smartphone with a top AI company. And here it is: Deutsche Telekom (DT), said that it is building an “AI Phone,” a low-cost handset created in close collaboration with Perplexi

Stability AI optimized its audio generation model to run on Arm chips

AI startup Stability AI has teamed up with chipmaker Arm to bring Stability’s Stable Audio Open, an AI model that can generate audio including sound effects, to mobile devices running Arm chips. While a number of AI-powered apps can generate audio, like Suno and Udio, most rely on cloud proc

As Skype shuts down, its legacy is end-to-end encryption for the masses

In the early evening of March 5, 2012, in Cairo, Egyptian revolutionaries stormed the headquarters of the secret police called the State Security Investigations (SSI) service, a building known as “the capital of hell” because of its reputation as a place where ruthless officers tortured prisone

HackerPulse wants to help enterprises spot engineering bottlenecks

For years, startups have tried to fill various gaps in how enterprises operate to ostensibly improve processes, eliminate grunt work, and help managers identify and address where their teams are wasting time. The latest to join this cohort is HackerPulse, which has built a platform that gives ent

Jolla founders take the wraps off an AI assistant to power up their push for privacy-friendly GenAI

Jolla, the erstwhile mobile maker turned privacy-centric AI business — via sister startup, Venho.ai — has taken the wraps off an AI assistant it says is a “fully private” alternative to data-mining cloud giants crawling all over your personal information.   The AI assistant is designe