Eric David
Latest from Eric David
Facebook will give Congress copies of Russian-purchased political ads after all
Facebook Inc. has decided to give Congress copies of more than 3,000 political ads that had been bought by Russian accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, reversing its initial decision to withhold that information. Facebook revealed earlier this month that it had discovered that a Russian organization known as the Internet Research Agency had purchased a large ...
Alphabet’s Waymo wants Uber to pay $2.6B for alleged theft of self-driving tech
Waymo LLC, Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car division, has asked for a $2.6 billion judgment in its intellectual property theft case against ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc., according to statements made by Uber’s legal team. On Wednesday, Waymo tried to convince a judge to delay the upcoming trial, which is set to take place on Oct. 10, ...
Toshiba reaches deal to sell its chip business to Bain-led group for $18B
Japanese electronics giant Toshiba Corp. has finally reached an $18 billion deal to sell its semiconductor business to a consortium of businesses led by Bain Capital. Toshiba has been working toward the deal since January, when the struggling company announced it would be looking for bidders to acquire its lucrative chip business in an effort to raise ...
Doubling down on hardware, Google spends $1.1B to buy part of HTC’s mobile phone business
Cementing rampant speculation, Google LLC late Wednesday said it signed a $1.1 billion “cooperation agreement” with Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp. Under the deal, the main subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. will acquire a team of HTC employees, many of whom worked on Google’s Pixel smartphone. It also picked up non-exclusive licenses to some of HTC’s ...
YouTube extends its Twitch-like subscription model to more streamers
Since first launching in 2015, YouTube Gaming has yet to achieve the same clout with livestreaming gamers as Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch, but YouTube is looking to change that today with the public launch of Sponsorships, a new way for streamers to make money. Today, YouTube announced that all eligible streamers can now apply for its Sponsorships program, which was previously ...
Next IT launches tools to help enterprises build their own AI solutions
Veteran artificial intelligence company Next IT Corp. announced today that it’s launching a suite of development tools and data libraries for businesses that want to build their own conversational AI. Next IT has been in the conversational AI business since before it was cool, and now the company will be offering 10 of its own proprietary AI tools to developers, including a ...
Millions of PCs vulnerable as hackers compromise CCleaner’s official installer
Hackers have compromised popular file cleanup tool CCleaner and may have been using it to inject malware into potentially millions of home personal computers over the last month. Piriform Ltd., the maker of CCleaner, confirmed in a blog post today that certain versions of the software were compromised with a hidden backdoor that may have allowed ...
Google Chrome will ditch annoying autoplay videos in January
Somehow web designers have still not learned that autoplay videos are almost universally hated by users, but Google LLC seems to have finally caught on—mostly. Google announced today that an upcoming update to Chrome will block autoplay videos unless they meet specific requirements that make them less irritating. In Chrome 63, which will roll out ...
Facebook becomes yet another tech giant with an AI lab in Montreal
Facebook Inc. today announced the launch of a new Facebook AI Research lab in Montreal, making the social media giant one more of several major tech companies to open an artificial intelligence lab in the Canadian city. “Montreal already has an existing fantastic academic AI community, an exciting ecosystem of startups, and promising government policies ...
Uber used ‘Greyball’ software to evade regulators in Portland
Uber Technologies Inc. has plenty of legal battles to go around, but this week one battle came to an end as Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman determined that the ride-hailing company used its “Greyball” software to evade regulators, Reuters reported. The New York Times revealed in March that Uber had developed Greyball to allow it to identify and block specific users from ...
