IBM Corp. has acquired Watson-based cognitive shopping assistant Expert Personal Shopper from digital commerce firm Fluid Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Built using machine learning and artificial intelligence to deliver expert advice that sounds like it’s coming from an actual human, XPS is aimed at assisting customers in their research before making a purchase. “Understanding ...

Uber Technologies Inc. and General Motors Co. have signed a new deal that will see the automotive giant rent cars to Uber drivers through its Maven rental service. The deal, announced Tuesday, will initially begin as a 90-day trial in Uber’s hometown of San Francisco and allows drivers to rent GM vehicles for $179 a ...

A man accused of running cyber attack-for-hire service Titanium Stresser has pleaded guilty to multiples charges in relation to his ownership and use of the service. Nineteen-year-old Adam Mudd from Kings Langley, a town north of London in the United Kingdom, pleaded guilty to unauthorized acts with intent to impair the operation of a computer, ...

Big Data analytics firm Palantir Technologies Inc. has won a case against the United States Army in which it claimed it was unfairly shut out of the bid process to work on the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System. According to Bloomberg, the Army’s bid-solicitation ruled out any commercially available solutions, by default barring Palantir from ...

Notorious hacking group the Shadow Brokers is back in the news after it published a list of servers claimed to have been compromised by the National Security Agency-linked Equation Group. The group had previously claimed to have hacked the Equation Group and then attempted to sell much of what they found, before switching to an ...

A new device revealed at a security conference in Japan last week can hijack consumer drones, by exploiting a vulnerability in the frequency-hopping systems used to protect radio communications between an operator and the drone itself. The “Icarus” device, a form of radio transmitter, was designed by a researcher at security software maker Trend Micro ...

Toyota Motor Corp. has invested in San Francisco-based peer-to-peer car sharing service Getaround Inc. through its Mirai Creation Investment Limited Partnership, in a Series C round believed to be $10 million. Founded in 2009, the company calls itself an “on-demand carsharing community” that allows users to “share” their cars to other users who are able to ...

Shares in enterprise Software as a Service startup Blackline Inc. surged on the Nasdaq Friday in another sign of the markets growing thirst for tech initial public offerings. Offering shares at $17 each, higher than an initial price guidance of $13 to $15 a share, Blackline closed its first day of trading up 39 percent, to ...

A man involved in the infamous “celebgate/fappening” hacking scandal in 2014 that resulted in private images of celebrities appearing online has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. Ryan Collins, 36, from Pennsylvania had earlier pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information. Collins stood accused of obtaining access ...

LinkedIn Corp. beat market expectations Thursday with its third-quarter financials in what may be its last published figures before being acquired by Microsoft Corp. Revenue in the third quarter came in at $960 million, up 23 percent over the same quarter in 2015 and $1 million over a predicted figure of $959 million. Earnings per share ...