TaskRabbit CEO posts statement as its app returns following a cybersecurity breach

After taking them down to investigate what it called a “cybersecurity incident,” TaskRabbit’s website and app are back online. The Ikea-owned platform for on-demand labor also posted an update from its chief executive officer Stacy Brown-Philpot about the incident. “While our investigation is ongoing, preliminary evidence shows that an unauthorized user gained access to our […]

Sports Illustrated TV will start streaming on more platforms

Sports Illustrated launched its $5-per-month streaming service last fall exclusively through Amazon Channels, and now it's preparing to open up for a wider release. Soon, users will be able to subscribe directly and watch on Roku, iOS, Android and we...

ZTE postpones earnings report after being slapped with U.S. exports ban

ZTE will postpone the release of its quarterly earnings report after the United States government banned American companies from selling goods to the Chinese telecom and smartphone maker. In a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, ZTE said that its earnings report, originally set to be released on Thursday, is now delayed to an […]

Pornhub hasn't been actively enforcing its deepfake ban

Remember how Pornhub said it was banning AI-generated deepfake videos? They're still a problem months later. BuzzFeed News "easily" found over 100 of the non-consensual videos by searching for obvious keywords like "deepfake" and "fake deep," nearl...

California OSHA is looking into injury reports at Tesla

After a report by Reveal suggested that Tesla was underreporting workplace injuries at its Fremont plant, Tesla responded with a blog post calling the report “completely false” and pinning it all up as a “calculated disinformation campaign.” Now California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (otherwise known as Cal/OSHA) is looking into things at the […]

Idris Elba's Netflix show is 'Charles in Charge' with turntables

Netflix just scored a comedy coup. The service has unveiled Turn Up Charlie, a comedy series starring and partly executive produced by Idris Elba. The half-hour show has Elba playing a "struggling" single DJ (fitting given his extensive DJ backgrou...

YouTube TV brings two Cheddar digital-only shows to its lineup

YouTube TV is making its way onto a more devices and bringing quite a few live TV channels along with it, including Turner Network channels. The Google-owned service is also in quite a few markets, making it easy to access from almost anywhere. Now Y...

DARPA’s Launch Challenge offers $10M prize for short-notice, rapid-turnaround rocketry

Getting to space is already tough, but getting there on short notice and then doing it again a couple weeks later? That's a big ask. Nevertheless, DARPA is asking it as part of its Launch Challenge, announced today at the 34th Space Symposium in Colorado. Teams must take a payload to space with only days to prepare, then do it again soon after — if they want to win the $10M grand prize.

Microsoft's Chrome extension fights phishing attacks

Due to the dominance of Google's Chrome browser, even if you're on Windows you're probably not using Microsoft Edge. You can still enjoy some of its technology, however, since Microsoft has plugged its Windows Defender browser protections into Chrome...

Review: Fitbit’s Versa is the first smartwatch I can recommend to most people

Fitbit’s had a rocky history with smartwatches. It wet its feet with the Surge in 2015, which followed up with the Blaze. Then there was last year’s Ionic, featuring the new FitbitOS designed with the help of Pebble’s team – its first ‘proper’ smartwatch. They were all solid devices for particular users, but none convinced me they were worth buying over a simpler fitness tracker or a more powerful smartwatch like the Apple Watch or an Android Wear device. The $199 Fitbit Versa changes that. It starts with the design. Fitbit finally realized its macho-blocky designs just don’t have broad appeal.…

This story continues at The Next Web

iZettle expands from mobile payments into e-commerce and online sales for SMBs

iZettle, the startup out of Sweden that has been referred to as the Square of Europe, is today making a move that underscores its bigger strategy to build on its traction with small businesses in mobile payments, to expand into an ever-wider range of financial services to fill out its $950 million valuation. The company […]

Data experts on Facebook’s GDPR changes: Expect lawsuits

Make no mistake: Fresh battle lines are being drawn in the clash between data-mining tech giants and Internet users over people’s right to control their personal information and protect their privacy. An update to European Union data protection rules next month — called the General Data Protection Regulation — is the catalyst for this next chapter […]

SpaceX brings NASA’s TESS to space and successfully lands its Falcon 9 rocket

SpaceX has successfully deployed NASA's new exoplanet-hunting telescope into high Earth orbit. From there, it will get a gravity assist from the moon and enter a wide orbit, beginning its mission. Meanwhile, back on the surface, the Falcon 9's first stage landed successfully on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

BenevolentAI, which uses AI to develop drugs and energy solutions, nabs $115M at $2B valuation

In the ongoing race to build the best and smartest applications that tap into the advances of artificial intelligence, a startup out of London has raised a large round of funding to double down on solving persistent problems in areas like healthcare and energy. BenevolventAI announced today that it has raised $115 million to continue […]

Pornhub promised to ban ‘deepfakes’ videos. And it failed miserably.

In February, Pornhub announced it would no longer tolerate AI-generated pornography featuring the facial features of celebrities over the bodies of adult actresses. And it’s kept its promise, except… not really. As Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel says: While banned material frequently slips through the cracks on large sites that allow users to upload content, the deepfake violations on PornHub are especially flagrant. More than 70 deepfake videos were easily searchable from the site’s homepage using the search term “deepfake.”  What it is: So-called ‘deepfakes’ were born of an algorithm of the same name. It uses training material — mostly from YouTube clips…

This story continues at The Next Web

Battlefield and Call of Duty’s bandwagon royale must be stopped at all costs

Rumors are swirling the upcoming games in the eternally-warring Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises will both contain a battle royale mode — and I have no doubt they’ll both find some way to ruin it. Polygon yesterday broke the news that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 might not have a single-player mode, and sources later corroborated that with Kotaku, adding the news about a potential battle royale mode. This, in and of itself, would just be news of a game developer jumping on a trend. Then, today, VentureBeat reported Battlefield 5’s developers were also testing a battle royale mode, and suddenly both companies are starting to look a little…

This story continues at The Next Web

SpaceX launches NASA's planet-finding spacecraft TESS

NASA's new planet-hunting Kepler successor TESS is on its way to orbit. SpaceX has successfully launched the spacecraft after scrubbing its first attempt on Monday to review and analyze its guidance, navigation and control systems. The Falcon 9 rocke...

Russia's Telegram ban is causing problems for Twitch

According to multiple reports on Reddit and Twitter, Twitch has been blocked in Russia to some extent. This comes a day after the country's state communications regulator finally managed to silence the secure messaging app Telegram. To do so, the nat...

Can data science save social media?

The unfettered internet is too often used for malicious purposes and is frequently woefully inaccurate. Social media -- especially Facebook -- has failed miserably at protecting user privacy and blocking miscreants from sowing discord.

Microsoft's AI-powered offline translation now runs on any phone

Like many translation apps, Microsoft Translator has only used AI to decipher phrases while you have an internet connection. That's not much help if you're on a vacation in a place where mobile data is just a distant memory. Well, you won't have to...

Watch SpaceX launch NASA’s new planet-hunting satellite here

It's almost time for SpaceX to launch NASA's TESS, a space telescope that will search for exoplants more across nearly the entire night sky. The launch has been delayed more than once already: originally scheduled for March 20, it slipped to April 16 (Monday), then some minor issues pushed it to today — at 3:51 PM Pacific time, to be precise.

Facebook is just crazy enough to make its own processors

Facebook is forming a team to build its own semiconductors, according to job listings and sources that spoke to Bloomberg. The social media company would be joining other tech titans that have recently invested in building their own chips, from Googl...

Amazon passes 100 million paid Prime members

Jeff Bezos is understandably all sorts of self-congratulatory in the annual shareholder letter Amazon released today. The note is full of all smanner of large numbers, including, perhaps most notably, 100 million. Amazon has exceeded that number of Prime subscribers globally, 13 years after the service launched as a free shipping offering. It’s no surprise, […]

Emphasizing social, shareable, and meaningful work, Girlboss launches a new site

Girlboss, the juggernaut business and lifestyle brand launched by serial entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso (the founder of Nasty Gal), has launched a fresh redesign of its website as the company looks to evolve beyond publishing. While publishing will remain a central component of the business that Girlboss is building, Amoruso says that the brand encompasses much […]

Alicia Vikander turns 'Tide's Fall' into a VR masterpiece

Penrose Studios set a new standard for VR storytelling last year with Arden's Wake, a stunning short that introduced us to Meena, a young girl living in a post-apocalyptic, waterlogged world. But that was just the prologue. At the Tribeca Film Festiv...