In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.
The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents.
The newly released documents reveal how Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors.
Given that Snapchat encrypted the traffic between the app and its servers, this network analysis technique was not going to be effective.
Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the program to Amazon and YouTube.
Adobe today announced Firefly Services, a set of over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools and services.
Firefly Services makes some of the company’s AI-powered features from its Creative Cloud tools like Photoshop available to enterprise developers to speed up content creation in their custom workflows — or create entirely new solutions.
In addition, the company also today launched Custom Models, which allows businesses to fine tune Firefly models based on their assets.
Custom Models is already built into Adobe’s new GenStudio.
In addition to these AI features, Firefly Services also exposes tools for editing text layers, tagging content and applying presets from Lightroom, for example.
Some of these features sound and work like rival browser Arc’s recent releases.
But SigmaOS claims that its feature returns better-quality results, which is a hard metric to quantify.
Going all out on AILast year, SigmaOS released some AI-powered features such as a contextual assistant called Airis, which can answer your questions about a web page or the broader web.
Now, the company is looking to monetize its AI features.
It said that all users would get access to AI-powered features but for $20 per month users would get better rate limits for AI features.
What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market, and leadership structure?
Well, you might call it Stability AI.
Stability AI’s latest leadership shakeup is no joke, with its CEO Emad Mostaque departing to work on AI products that are less centralized — which is to say, owned and built by a single company, like, say, Stability AI.
The startup’s fundraising journey is well-known to tech folks, while its best-known product — Stable Diffusion — is known even more broadly.
We dig into all that and more in today’s TechCrunch Minute:
0G Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm,” has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.
“In order to build the basic technology, we wanted to raise $5 million, originally,” said 0G co-founder Michael Heinrich.
0G, sometimes called ZeroGravity, is creating a modular AI blockchain that aims to alleviate the pain points of on-chain AI applications in the web3 ecosystem, like speed and cost efficiency.
On-chain AI and gaming requires a fast data pipeline.
It also plans to enable new use cases and things that were not possible before like on-chain AI, on-chain gaming and high-frequency decentralized finance (DeFi).
Uzum, an e-commerce startup offering online shopping, fintech and food deliveries to millions of customers in Uzbekistan, has raised $114 million in funding, becoming the country’s first unicorn with a valuation of $1.16 billion.
Fintech startups dominated the market with a 30% share, followed by e-commerce startups at 27%, according to estimates (PDF) by the Asian Development Bank.
“We want to expand the products, enhance the infrastructure of our e-commerce, and fund our fintech,” Djumaev said.
By the end of this year, Uzum plans to combine all its businesses into two super apps: one for its consumer-focused offerings, and another for its business-focused products.
However, he doesn’t see any competition in Uzbekistan, as Uzum has the advantage of enjoying different margins across products, and can make higher margins by combining its e-commerce and fintech services.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space.
As a preliminary step, the company used that second pad to launch an uncrewed Dragon capsule to the International Space Station.
This is the fifth and final mission Rocket Lab has performed for NRO under a contract the company was awarded back in 2020.
This week in space historyOn March 30, 1982, the space shuttle Columbia touched down at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The shuttle was carrying astronauts Jack R. Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton, who were returning home after a successful eight-day mission.
The New York Stock Exchange said Monday it will immediately suspend trading shares of EV startup Fisker and is moving to take the company off of its stock exchange.
The exchange said Monday that Fisker’s stock is “no longer suitable for listing” because of “abnormally low” price levels.
The decision comes a month after Fisker was warned by the NYSE that its stock price had spent 30 days trading below $1, putting it out of compliance with the exchange’s rules.
The suspension caps a tumultuous day for Fisker, which saw shares fall more than 28% before trading was halted.
The suspension comes just hours after Fisker announced it lost a potential deal with a large automaker, reported to be Nissan — a development that has also endangered a recently-announced attempt at securing emergency funding.
The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters.
The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn’t detected until a year later.
Dowden said that a separate attempted cyberattack by a China-backed hacking group targeted the email accounts of U.K. lawmakers in 2021, but that parliamentary authorities mitigated the attempted breaches before any email accounts were compromised.
The Norwegian government previously attributed a 2018 data breach on its systems to APT31.
In 2020, Google security researchers linked APT31 to the targeting of email accounts belonging to the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns.
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