Antivirus firm Avast Software s.r.o., the owner of popular free products such as AVG and Avast Antivirus, is under investigation in its home country, the Czech Republic, for allegedly selling the browser history of its users to outside companies. The allegations that Avast was harvesting user browser history and selling it via a subsidiary called Jumpshot Inc. surfaced ...

Facebook Inc.-owned messaging service WhatsApp has passed 2 billion users, becoming the third app to pass the mark after the Facebook app and the YouTube app. To put the number in perspective, there are currently 7.8 billion on the planet, meaning that more than a quarter of the world uses WhatsApp. Despite never gaining wide ...

Some 440 million records in a database belonging to cosmetics maker Estée Lauder Companies Inc. have been found unsecured and exposed online, potentially putting customers at risk. The database was discovered by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler from Security Discovery Jan. 30 and publicized today. It involved 440,336,852 individual pieces of data, including plaintext email addresses, some sent ...

Despite beating analyst predictions in its fourth-quarter earnings Monday, shares in Lyft Inc. dropped in after-hours trading after the company failed to move up its profitability timeline as rival Uber Technologies Inc. did Feb. 6. For the quarter ending Dec. 31, Lyft reported revenue of $1.02 billion, up 52% from the same quarter of 2018 ...

Microsoft Corp. today backflipped on its controversial decision to install Bing as the default search engine in Google Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users. The original decision announced Jan. 22 was justified on the grounds that it will allow users in an organization to “take advantage of Microsoft Search, including being able to access relevant ...

Airbnb Inc. reportedly lost $322 million in the first nine months of 2019 on rising costs, raising questions about its valuation going into an initial public offering later this year. The Wall Street Journal reported the figure today, saying that the loss came from rising administrative and technology costs despite increased revenue in the third quarter. ...

Apple Inc., along with various other tech companies, may have avoided serious supply shortages as some plants belonging to Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn partially opened Monday, despite conflicting reports that they might not. Reuters reported Monday that the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen was given approval to reopen but with the plant only having “some production.” The report added ...

Outsourcing giant Infosys Ltd. said today it has reached an agreement to acquire Salesforce.com Inc. partner consulting firm Simplus Inc. Infosys did not disclose a specific acquisition price, but a regulatory filing said the acquisition was valued at up to $250 million — $200 million up front with “employee incentives and retention payments amounting up to ...

Shares in Slack Technologies Inc. surged as high as 21% today after a report claimed that International Business Machines Corp. had picked the company to exclusively provide its 350,000 employees with workplace collaboration tools. The problem: IBM isn’t a new Slack customer. The spike in Slack’s share price came as a result of Business Insider claiming, ...

Reduced supply and increased demand thanks to the Wuhan coronavirus in China spurred bitcoin to break through $10,000 over the weekend, its highest level since September. Bitcoin started to see price increases thanks to coronavirus concerns in January. Some saw the cryptocurrency as a safe harbor at a time of financial market concern, but the ...