A Brazilian phone spyware was hacked and victims’ devices ‘deleted’ from server
A Portuguese-language spyware called WebDetetive has been used to compromise more than 76,000 Android phones in recent years across South America, largely in Brazil. WebDetetive is also the latest phone spyware company in recent months to have been hacked. In an undated note seen by TechCrunch, the unnamed hackers described
Read moreYes, in my backyard
W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Can startups help solve the U.S. housing crisis? BuildCasa thinks so. It raised a $3.5 million round of
Read moreVerifying the Origin of Media in an Algorithmic World
A walkthrough of the C2PA content authenticity specification and its Rust SDK1970s Transamerica building in San Francisco. Midjourney.Distinguishing authentic human-produced media from deepfakes or other algorithmically generated media is notoriously difficult. Existing tools produce a probability that given media is generated, but certainty is elusive. In the coming years, verifying the
Read morePrivacy czars urge websites to block data scraping
Privacy and information commissioners from 12 jurisdictions including Canada, the U.K., China, and Australia have urged social media companies to do more to prevent threat actors from scraping personal data from their IT systems. “Social media companies and the operators of websites that host publicly accessible personal data have obligations
Read moreThe scoop on Gen-Z and how they are rewriting the rules of the Internet
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Welcome to an old-school Equity tradition: the bonus show! Despite getting through our regular episodes this week, we have one more
Read moreA small programming language
Paul Graham said “Programming languages teach you not to want what they don’t provide.” He meant that as a negative: programmers using less expressive languages don’t know what they’re missing. But you could also take that as a positive: using a simple language can teach you that you don’t need
Read moreMy ten year quest for concise lambda expressions in Java
My ten-year quest for concise lambda expressions in JavaA mission to hold off the horde of for loops in Java.Photo by Fivos Avgerinos on UnsplashA series of fortunate and unfortunate eventsI started learning Java in 1997. I thought initially Java would be a fad and that Smalltalk would emerge as the victor in
Read moreQuadrature rules and an impossibility theorem
Many numerical integration formulas over a finite interval have the form That is, the integral on the left can be approximated by evaluating the integrand f at particular nodes and taking the weighted sum, and the error is some multiple of a derivative of f evaluated at a point in
Read moreThe mugshot that launched a thousand memes
Memes can happen in the blink of an eye, like a Jeopardy! contestant who accidentally makes a sexual innuendo under the pressure of stage lights, or a kid who randomly gets interviewed on a playground and professes his undying love for America’s most plentiful crop, corn. But as soon as
Read moreFive takeaways from Instacart’s S-1 filing
On-demand grocery delivery giant Instacart has finally dropped its much anticipated S-1. The company, actually named MapleBear, is one of the best-known unicorns on the IPO shortlist. Instacart’s public-offering filing has been long awaited due to not only its massive fundraising history, but also its sheer anticipated heft. Instacart is,
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