The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, today announced an in-depth investigation into Amazon.com Inc.’s proposed acquisition of robotic vacuum cleaner company iRobot Corp. Amazon announced in August last year that it had entered an agreement to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion. Along with its Roomba line of robotic vacuum cleaners, the ...

Data security startup Dig Security Solutions Inc. today announced that it has added optical character recognition to its data security posture management solution to allow enterprises to detect sensitive information stored in image files. With the release, Dig can detect that data in image files even when it’s stored in multicloud environments, such as passports and driver’s licenses. ...

Despite the ongoing hype and investment into generative artificial intelligence startups, venture capital funding fell again in the second quarter, according to a new report today from Crunchbase Inc. VC funding fell 18% in the second quarter from the first quarter and 49% year-over-year, to $65 billion. The Crunchbase report noted that the reduction mirrors an ...

Meta Platforms Inc. today launched Threads, a microblogging and messaging app linked to Instagram that’s set to take on the increasingly troubled Elon Musk-owned Twitter Inc. Threads is being pitched as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app.” The Google Play listing claims that the app “is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you ...

The infamous Russian-linked ransomware gang LockBit has claimed responsibility for an attack on a Japanese port that has temporarily crippled operations. The ransomware attack targeted the Nagoya Port Unified Terminal System, the controlling body of the Port of Nagoya, Japan’s largest port, on the morning of July 4 local time. The port is a major hub ...

Application security company ImmuniWeb SA today released a new email security test as a part of its free Community Edition to address a surge in phishing and other email-based cyberattacks. The service seeks to counter the growing sophistication of email cyberthreats, with the financial implications of phishing attacks almost doubling over the past year. According to ImmuniWeb, based on its ...

OpenAI LP, the company behind the wildly successful ChatGPT, has suspended a browsing feature in the generative artificial intelligence chatbot that allowed paying users to obtain search results through Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine, ostensibly because the feature bypasses paywalls. Called “Browse with Bing,” the feature was launched for ChatGPT Plus customers in March and ...

Security researchers at Bishop Fox LLC Friday issued a warning that hundreds of thousands of Fortinet Inc. firewalls remain vulnerable to attack because they weren’t patched following the disclosure of a critical vulnerability in June. The vulnerability, designated as CVE-2023-27997, is a “heap overflow” issue found in FortiOS, the operating system that powers FortiGate firewalls. The ...

As ongoing issues at Twitter Inc. continued into today, rival social media company Meta Platforms Inc. looks set to launch an alternative service called “Threads” that could finally provide competition to Elon Musk’s increasingly troubled service. The latest tale of woe at Twitter began on Friday, when users started seeing messages such as “rate limit exceeded” ...

Ongoing issues over the last few days at Twitter Inc., including the introduction of usage limits, have been blamed by owner Elon Musk as a response to artificial intelligence data scraping. The latest issue at Twitter — there’s rarely a dull moment since Musk took over — emerged on Friday when users started seeing messages ...