Tuesday, October 6, 2020
Google changes logos of GMail, Hangouts, GMeet and more: Here's how they look now
DHS warns that Emotet malware is one of the most prevalent threats today
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
The malware known as Emotet has emerged as “one of the most prevalent ongoing threats” as it increasingly targets state and local governments and infects them with other malware, the cybersecurity arm of the Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday.
Emotet was first identified in 2014 as a relatively simple trojan for stealing banking account credentials. Within a year or two, it had reinvented itself as a formidable downloader or dropper that, after infecting a PC, installed other malware. The Trickbot banking trojan and the Ryuk ransomware are two of the more common follow-ons. Over the past month, Emotet has successfully burrowed into Quebec’s Department of Justice and increased its onslaught on governments in France, Japan, and New Zealand. It has also targeted the Democratic National Committee.
Not to be left out, US state and local governments are also receiving unwanted attention, according to the CISA, short for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Einstein—the agency’s intrusion-detection system for collecting, analyzing, and sharing security information across the federal civilian departments and agencies—has in recent weeks noticed a big uptick, too. In an advisory issued on Tuesday, officials wrote:
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Greycroft has rounded up $678 million in capital across two new funds
Greycroft, the New York and L.A.-based venture firm founded in 2006 by investors Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow, has closed on two new funds totaling $678 million in capital commitments. One of those funds is its sixth flagship early-stage fund and it closed with $310 million dollars. The firm also collected $368 million in commitments for a third growth-stage fund that it will use to support breakout startups from its early-stage portfolio.
The venture fund invests between $500,000 and $10 million in a first check, and Greycroft will invest up to $15 million in a portfolio company over multiple rounds. Checks from its growth fund begin at $10 million and the firm says it will invest up to $50 million in any one company.
Greycroft now counts seven partners altogether across its two offices, including Settle and Sigalow.
Patricof, who early in his career founded the predecessor to Apax Partners, has since launched another new firm called Primetime Partners that announced a $32 million fund in summer that is investing in platforms and products for aging Americans.
The firm invests in both consumer and enterprise startups, with a heavier emphasis on consumer. Among the brands in its portfolio are Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, the consignment business The RealReal (which went public last year), and the dating site Bumble, which is reportedly gearing up for an IPO at an expected valuation of between $6 billion to $8 billion, as reported by Bloomberg.
The firm also recently co-led a $5.5 million Series A round for Sisu Cosmetics, a nearly two-year-old, Ireland-based chain of cosmetic clinics that’s expanding into the U.S.
Across its now ten investment vehicles, the firm has raised $2 billion altogether and has over 200 active investments.
Those investments are located in 23 states and 15 countries, including the Nigeria-based payment service Flutterwave, which closed on $35 million in Series B funding earlier this year, and Yeahka, a mobile payment and SMB lending provider in China that went public in June.
Greycroft’s most recent early-stage fund had closed with $250 million in 2018; its second growth-stage fund closed with $250 million in 2017.
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Quarantine drives interest in autonomous delivery, but it’s still miles from mainstream
The prospect of truly zero contact delivery seems closer — and more important — than ever with the pandemic changing how we think of last mile logistics. Autonomous delivery executives from FedEx, Postmates, and Refraction AI joined us to talk about the emerging field at TechCrunch Mobility 2020.
FedEx VP of Advanced Technology and Innovation Rebecca Yeung explained why the logistics giant felt that it was time to double down on its experiments in the area of autonomy.
“COVID brought the term ‘contactless’ — before that not many people are talking about contactless; Now it’s almost a preferred way of us delivering,” she said. “So we see, from government to consumers, open mindedness about, maybe in the future you would have everything delivered to you through autonomous means, and that’s the preferred way.”
“If you looked up Postmates robots on Twitter or Instagram, people are always kind of questioning, what is this? What is it doing? Everything changed overnight with COVID, where people would see the robot and immediately understand, oh, this is for contactless delivery,” said Postmates VP of special projects Ali Kashani. “Everything suddenly made sense.”
He also explained how the seeming constraints of a robotic platform specific to food delivery made the engineering process, if not easier, at least naturally bounded by the data they’d collected.
“It’s kind of one of the advantages of being so close to the market, we can use data from our platform to drive certain decisions, because you don’t want to over-engineer you also don’t want to under-engineer,” Kashani said. “We actually developed simulations that would put robots in any location in the country on some date in the past. It would tell us, how many deliveries did this robot do? How many hours was it outside? How many miles did it travel? And it would use that information to decide exactly what kind of battery life do we need? Does it need to carry drinks? How many drink holders should it have to cover 99% of deliveries?”
Matthew Johnson-Roberson, co-founder and CTO of Refraction AI, noted that the pandemic has raised interest and demand, but also highlighted where things need to move forward in different ways.
“Obviously no one wants a global pandemic, but it has certainly energized this industry and put more attention on it,” he said. “Everybody is excited, oh, we’re going to have contactless delivery, it’s going to be great. But I think there are some real challenges that need to be addressed as an industry to get there. One of them is social acceptance, the other’s regulation. That’s starting to change because of COVID. I’m hopeful that this is an inflection point, and that we really do see more serious investment in this, but also widespread deployment, so it’s not a tech demo that you get to see once in one place, but it actually begins to take over some sizable bit of the market.”
Yeung also emphasized the need for the infrastructure that supports these autonomous platforms: “Thinking about the future, commercial launch, you need the dynamic routing, you need the dispatch system, you need the user interface, you need a tracking interface. We see great synergy for us to leverage for all sorts of autonomous applications.”
In discussing the danger of replacing human workers with robots, Yeung and Kashani were sanguine, suggesting like others in the robotics industry that there would be a shift in labor but it won’t kill any jobs. Johnson-Roberson disagreed.
“I think we are going to be replacing jobs, and we need to face that head on,” he said. “I think it’s important that we reckon with that, that a lot of these decisions, they have a long history of not thinking through what hte human consequences will be. So I’m an advocate for saying, look, we’re replacing jobs. Let’s think as a society: How do we address that? How do we deal with it? I think that we could live in a future with more just, fairer jobs with health insurance, more benefits. But I don’t think it is going to look how it looks today.”
Google Ads introduces an Insights page, automated Performance Max campaigns and will bring Video Action out of beta to all advertisers in the coming weeks (Ginny Marvin/Search Engine Land)
Google Ads introduces an Insights page, automated Performance Max campaigns and will bring Video Action out of beta to all advertisers in the coming weeks — The new products and features are further indication of Google's machine learning goals. — Google introduced more automation features …
Apple says it "vehemently disagrees" with the conclusions reached in US House report and doesn't have dominant marketshare in any categories of its businesses (Juli Clover/MacRumors)
Apple says it “vehemently disagrees” with the conclusions reached in US House report and doesn't have dominant marketshare in any categories of its businesses — Earlier today, the U.S. House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee completed its ongoing antitrust investigation …
Monday, October 5, 2020
Xiaomi Redmi 9A with 13MP primary camera to go on sale today via Amazon
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Samsung Galaxy S20 FE Price in India Tipped Ahead of Official Launch
Twitter Bans Trump Death Wishes, Sparks Debate
Musk's SpaceX Wins Pentagon Award for Missile Tracking Satellites
Finland, Canada, the US, and other countries are testing tech for passport-free travel, including facial recognition and a "digital travel credential" (Matt Burgess/Wired)
Matt Burgess / Wired : Finland, Canada, the US, and other countries are testing tech for passport-free travel, including facial recogniti...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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