Alibaba's stock jumped 42% this year, giving it a market value above $800B, as the pandemic accelerates China's rapid embrace of online commerce — Recent rally cements company's position as one of the world's most valuable technology companies — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. 's stock …
Google Meet is rolling out breakout rooms for Enterprise for Education customers; Google says the feature will come to other Workspace plans “later this year” — You can split a call into a maximum of 100 groups — Google's Meet videoconferencing service is getting breakout rooms …
Sources: Twilio has agreed to acquire customer data infrastructure company Segment for $3.2B; the deal is not yet finalized — Covering venture capital, software and startups — With cloud companies booming during the pandemic, one of the category's recent public-company success stories …
Judge refuses to reinstate Epic's Fortnite on the App Store but grants an injunction that keeps Apple from retaliating against the Unreal Engine — Apple won't be forced to bring Fortnite back to the App Store — Fortnite won't be coming back to the App Store any time soon.
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The FBI and the cybersecurity arm of the Department of Homeland Security said they have detected hackers exploiting a critical Windows vulnerability against state and local governments and that in some cases the attacks are being used to breach networks used to support elections.
Members of unspecific APTs—the abbreviation for advanced persistent threats—are exploiting the Windows vulnerability dubbed Zerologon. It gives attackers who already have a toehold on a vulnerable network access to the all-powerful domain controllers that administrators use to allocate new accounts and manage existing ones.
To gain initial access, the attackers are exploiting separate vulnerabilities in firewalls, VPNs, and other products from companies including Juniper, Pulse Secure, Citrix NetScaler, and Palo Alto Networks. All of the vulnerabilities—Zerologon included—have received patches, but as evidenced by Friday’s warning from the DHS and FBI, not everyone has installed them. The inaction is putting governments and elections systems at all levels at risk.
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DOD awards $600M to AT&T, Ericsson, Nokia, and others for 5G experiments at five US military test sites; tests will include pilots for 5G-enabled AR/VR — The Department of Defense today announced it is awarding some $600 million to more than a dozen companies for “5G experimentation” at five military test sites.
Sources: AMD is in advanced talks to buy rival chip maker Xilinx for more than $30B in a deal could be finalized as early as next week — Deal that could be worth more than $30 billion would mark the latest big tie-up in the rapidly consolidating industry — Advanced Micro Devices Inc …
Sources: Microsoft's Phil Spencer told employees on Wed that Game Pass will absolutely be on iOS and iPadOS in 2021 via a “direct browser-based solution” — - Microsoft last month officially added a key feature to Game Pass, its Netflix-style subscription library of Xbox games …
Baidu released a video search app called Kankan to find short videos and live streams, a move that may start to challenge Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok — With Kankan, Baidu is competing for a larger slice of China's massive online video market, which has more than 880 million viewers …
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For months, Apple’s corporate network was at risk of hacks that could have stolen sensitive data from potentially millions of its customers and executed malicious code on their phones and computers, a security researcher said on Thursday.
Sam Curry, a 20-year-old researcher who specializes in website security, said that, in total, he and his team found 55 vulnerabilities. He rated 11 of them critical because they allowed him to take control of core Apple infrastructure and from there steal private emails, iCloud data, and other private information.
The 11 critical bugs were:
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The recently thwarted Michigan kidnapping plot highlights social media's role in promoting violent extremism, as well as building a case against extremists — In June, one of the suspects in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer took to the relative privacy of a Facebook group to make clear his brewing hatred.
Dispo, a disposable camera app co-created by YouTube star David Dobrik, raises $4M seed led by Alexis Ohanian's new fund Seven Seven Six — Seven Seven Six fund leads a $4 million seed round for social-media platform Dispo, also known as David's Disposable
Documents show that Airbnb spent $1.2B between mid-2019 and mid-2020, with the biggest portion of cash burn coming in Q1 2020 as it issued refunds amid COVID-19 — Airbnb burned through more than $1.2 billion in cash between mid-2019 and mid-2020, according to previously undisclosed figures …
