Two senior police officials are accused of sharing citizens’ personal information from a classified government database with criminalsTwo senior officials working for anti-terror police in Bangladesh allegedly collected and sold classified and personal information of citizens to criminals on Telegram, TechCrunch has learned.
According to the letter, the police agents were caught after investigators analyzed logs of the NTMC’s systems and how often the two accessed it.
Last year, a security researcher found that the NTMC was leaking people’s personal information on an unsecured server.
Another Bangladeshi government agency, the Office of the Registrar General, Birth & Death Registration, also leaked citizens’ sensitive data last year, as TechCrunch reported at the time.
Although the incident is under investigation, a well-placed source within the government told TechCrunch that there are still officials who are offering to sell citizens’ data.
The big idea was to become the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions in the world.
Roughly 15 months later, in late 2022, the company’s CEO, Henry Ward, told Axios that Carta was worth even more – $8.5 billion – following a separate secondary sale.
(He did not disclose how many shares were sold at this valuation or who bought them.)
Now, Carta is seemingly returning to its roots – and an earlier valuation that’s probably better suited to the business.
Over the years, Carta has raised roughly $1.2 billion from investors, according to the startups tracker Tracxn.
With its list of Apple Design Awards winners, Apple is celebrating indie apps and startups over bigger tech firms — including those offering AI chatbots.
There’s no ChatGPT to be found on Apple’s list of Design Awards finalists, for example.
Instead, Apple’s list of finalists for its Design Awards favored small to midsize app makers like Copilot Money, SmartGym, recipe app Crouton, creative app Procreate Dreams, Gentler Streak, and others, as well as those from venture-backed startups like the creativity app Rooms and the reimagined web browser Arc Search.
We're overjoyed– and, frankly, in disbelief– that Rooms is a finalist for Apple's 2024 Design Awards.
An “Inclusivity” section also boosts Apple’s global app community, including members in the EU where regulation is underway via the Digital Markets Act.
Meta on Thursday said it is rolling out its Meta Verified program for WhatsApp Business users in Brazil, India, Indonesia and Colombia, and eventually to more countries.
The plan also lets businesses use their WhatsApp Business account from multiple devices.
Until now, WhatsApp Business users had to use their personal phone numbers to service customer calls.
With more than 200 million monthly users on WhatsApp Business, Meta is trying to build a full suite of solutions that businesses can tap for communicating with their customers.
The company said existing commerce and payment services only cater to the top 200 million users.
Your usual host Kirsten Korosec is taking a much deserved vacation, so I’ll be walking you through this week’s transportation news.
A little birdImage Credits: Bryce DurbinA lot of little birds have been talking to senior reporter Sean O’Kane about what is going on behind EV startup Fisker.
Other deals that got my attention …Euler Motors, an Indian manufacturer of commercial EVs, raised $24 million in a Series C extension.
Gireve, a French B2B platform for EV charging, raised €20 million to expand further in Europe and internationally and develop new services.
Zoox plans to test its robotaxis in Austin and Miami this summer, making them the Amazon-backed company’s fourth and fifth test cities.
But as the data analytics and AI boom drives organizations to expect more of data models, many of the old paradigms are proving difficult to manage — and exceptionally brittle.
Now, five years later, Keydunov and Tiunov have a veritable business on their hands, having launched a subscription-based service built on Cube — Cube Cloud — that adds automated workflows and enterprise-focused governance and deployment tooling.
An illustration of Cube’s semantic data layer.
Image Credits: Cube“Cube Cloud is a universal semantic layer that is an independent, yet interoperable, part of the modern data stack that sits between your data sources and data consumers,” Keydunov said.
Keydunov says that the open source Cube project has surpassed 10 million downloads, while Cube Cloud is now installed on around 90,000 servers.
Not all generative AI models are created equal, particularly when it comes to how they treat polarizing subject matter.
They found that the models tended to answer questions inconsistently, which reflects biases embedded in the data used to train the models, they say.
“Our research shows significant variation in the values conveyed by model responses, depending on culture and language.”Text-analyzing models, like all generative AI models, are statistical probability machines.
Instrumental to an AI model’s training data are annotations, or labels that enable the model to associate specific concepts with specific data (e.g.
Other studies have examined the deeply ingrained political, racial, ethnic, gender and ableist biases in generative AI models — many of which cut across languages, countries and dialects.
Stability AI, the startup behind the AI-powered art generator Stable Diffusion, has released an open AI model for generating sounds and songs that it claims was trained exclusively on royalty-free recordings.
Called Stable Audio Open, the generative model takes a text description (e.g.
Stability AI says that it’s not optimized for this, and suggests that users looking for those capabilities opt for the company’s premium Stable Audio service.
Stable Audio Open also can’t be used commercially; its terms of service prohibit it.
And it doesn’t perform equally well across musical styles and cultures or with descriptions in languages other than English — biases Stability AI blames on the training data.
The weather’s getting hotter — but not quite as hot as the generative AI space, which saw a slew of new models released this week, including Meta’s Llama 3.
In other AI news, Hyundai-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics unveiled an electric-powered humanoid follow-up to its long-running Atlas robot, which it recently retired.
And Rebecca and Sean report on layoffs at Tesla , which they say hit high performers and gutted some departments.
AnalysisGoogle Cloud bets on generative AI: Ron writes about how Google Cloud is investing heavily in generative AI, as evidenced by the string of announcements during Google’s Cloud Next conference earlier in the month.
Generative AI in health: Generative AI is coming for healthcare — but not everyone’s thrilled.
Why vector databases are having a moment as the AI hype cycle peaks GenAI spurs demand for vector search startups, but database giants are also taking noteVector databases are all the rage, judging by the number of startups entering the space and the investors ponying up for a piece of the pie.
“Working with visual search and robotics at Amazon was when I really looked at vector search — I was thinking about new ways to do product discovery, and that very quickly converged on vector search,” Clark told TechCrunch.
“I think the same is likely to happen with vector databases,” Zaitsev told TechCrunch.
“Our pitch is, ‘we do advanced vector search in the best way possible.’ It is all about specialization.
At some point, users will face limitations if vector search is a critical component of your solution.”
