Iranian hackers charged with hacking Trump campaign to ‘stoke discord’

The U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges against three hackers working for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), accusing the trio of a four-year-long hacking campaign that included this year's hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.  On Friday,

Wordy’s new app helps you learn vocabulary while watching movies and TV shows

Wordy is a new iOS app that offers a unique way to learning English. The app automatically translates and defines unknown words while you watch your favorite movies or TV shows. Wordy has over 500,000 titles available, including popular series such as HBO's “The Penguin” and the new Disney+

Amazon dodges antitrust scrutiny in UK over Anthropic investment

The U.K.s’ antitrust authority has concluded that Amazon’s partnership and equity investment in AI startup Anthropic can’t be investigated under current merger rules due to the size and scope of the deal. The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) announcement comes

Meta fined $101.5M for 2019 breach that exposed hundreds of millions of Facebook passwords

Reset your clocks: Meta has been hit with yet another privacy penalty in Europe. On Friday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced a reprimand and a €91 million fine — around $101.5 million at current exchange rates — after concluding a multiyear investigation into

UK data watchdog confirms it’s investigating MoneyGram data breach

The U.K.'s data protection regulator has confirmed it's investigating MoneyGram after receiving a data breach report from the U.S.-based money transfer giant. The U.K.’s Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which requires that organizations report data breaches within 72 hour

Napkin is a note-taking app that is not about making you more productive

Note-taking apps typically aim to make you more efficient and productive. A lot of those apps concentrate on quickly jotting down your thoughts, organizing them better, or a mix of both. Napkin (not to be confused with the Accel-backed startup of the same name) wants to stand out amid these apps by

9 startups that stood out on YC Demo Day 2

Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator held the second Demo Day for its Summer 2024 cohort on Thursday, and just like we saw on Day 1, AI is the focus of most startups in this cohort. However, we did also find a few interesting startups that are working on cool tech like drones that can’t b

Indian game streaming startup Loco sells majority stake to Redwood

UAE-based Redwood has acquired a majority stake in the game streaming platform Loco as the Indian firm looks to expand focus to international markets, technewss has learned and confirmed. Redwood, a newly formed investment firm, has signed a $65 million deal with Loco, an investment that also giv

Starlink hits 4 million subscribers

SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet network is expected to hit a new customer milestone this week, company President Gwynne Shotwell told Texas legislators on Tuesday.  “This week, by the way, we will pass 4 million customers for Starlink, which is quite exciting,” she said while testify

Runway earmarks $5M to fund up to 100 films using AI-generated video

AI video generators need to believe that filmmakers will use their models in the production process. Otherwise why exist? To jump-start the new AI film ecosystem, Runway has set aside $5 million in cash and more in service credits to fund up to 100 original films. If you’re an AI-curious di

OpenAI’s VP of global affairs claims o1 is ‘virtually perfect’ at correcting bias, but the data doesn’t quite back that up

Departures might be dominating the week’s OpenAI-related headlines. But comments on AI bias from Anna Makanju, the company’s VP of global affairs, also grabbed our attention. Makanju, speaking on a panel at the UN’s Summit of the Future event on Tuesday, suggested that emerging

Former Brex COO who now heads unicorn fintech Figure says GPT is already upending the mortgage industry

Lending startup Figure announced today a rollout of AI tooling to make the home lending process more efficient. The company will be launching an AI tool powered by GPT-4 to help catch errors in lending documents.  Figure, founded in 2018, specializes in helping consumers secure home equity li

Nomi’s companion chatbots will now remember things like the colleague you don’t get along with

As OpenAI boasts about its o1 model's increased thoughtfulness, small, self-funded startup Nomi AI is building the same kind of technology. Unlike the broad generalist ChatGPT, which slows down to think through anything from math problems or historical research, Nomi niches down on a specific u

Zap Energy investors in recent $130M round included Soros Fund and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective

The race for commercial fusion power is heating up. Investors have poured money into fusion startups over the last several years, and one of the more recent beneficiaries of their beneficence is Zap Energy, an Everett, Washington-based startup that's pursuing a clever approach to harnessing th