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Word documents, and even PDF files, aren’t necessarily safe. These normally innocuous files can be injected with malicious “poison” code or simple scripts of code that can be a serious security risk.You probably already know it’s dangerous to open files from sources you can’t necessarily trust. If you’re an activist or journalist—or anyone who occasionally depends on anonymous tips to do their jobs—you might run into a situation where potentially useful information is inside a Microsoft Word document or PDF file that you can’t exactly vouch for. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could open those files and read them…
Sometimes an apparently good idea, a big raise from a big-name VC, and a sea of well-connected angel investors is not enough. Less than a year after launching, Yupp is closing its business, co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne announced on Tuesday. Yupp offered a crowdsourced AI model-picking service. It allowed consumers to test and compare results from a supply of 800 AI models for free, including the state-of-the-art ones from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Yupp would return multiple replies from the prompt request, including information or images, and users would offer feedback on which models worked best for them…
I’ve been trying to become fluent in Spanish for the last decade. After spending most of my adult life surrounded by multilinguals, I often feel like I’m playing an impossible game of catch-up. Like everyone else, I’ve tried to become regimented with practicing on an in-phone app like Duolingo, which attempts to ‘game-ify’ language learning, but mostly ends up with a sad and sick-looking green bird icon guilting me to practice every time I open up my phone.Babbel aims to help people actually learn the language through practical conversation and grammar, using proven pedagogical methods and speech recognition technology. Each…
OpenAI has closed a deal to raise $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation, its largest funding round to date as the company is expected to hit the public markets this year. The round will add to OpenAI’s war chest as it spends enormous amounts of money on AI chips, data center buildouts, and hiring top talent. SoftBank co-led the round alongside Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft. About $3 billion came from individual investors via bank channels. OpenAI is also going to be included in several…
If that cooperation disappears, so does any clear path home. Labor organizations such as the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) say intervention is possible but often depends on coordination across jurisdictions and cooperation from ship owners.“When the war broke out, we put a Warlike Operations Area Committee in place to address the protection of seafarers in the region,” says John Canias, maritime operations coordinator at the ITF.The organization has identified certain maritime routes in the region, including the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and some parts of the Gulf of Oman as high-risk areas, encouraging ship owners to allow…
Sometimes, Michiko Kato thinks back on the great challenges of her life. She once dropped everything in her native city of Tokyo to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, she decided to leave her career in the stable world of finance to enter the rocky terrain of startup life. That jump is what changed everything. On Wednesday, Kato officially assumes her greatest challenge yet — CIO of Toyota’s Woven Capital and CEO of Toyota Invention Partners. The latter appointment makes her the first female CEO of a wholly owned Toyota subsidiary. Woven Capital is the growth-stage venture capital…
Last week, DarkSword was then posted to open source code repository GitHub, making it all the more accessible. Security firms Malfors and Proofpoint soon after warned that another Russian hacker group linked to the Kremlin’s FSB intelligence agency was sending out phishing emails that used the technique. Independent security researcher Johnny Franks tells WIRED that he found yet another new, active domain—a fake website written in English, capable of infecting US-based users—that was part of a DarkSword hacking campaign as late as Thursday of last week, a finding confirmed by mobile security firm iVerify.Despite DarkSword’s growing threat to iOS 18…
Mercor, a popular AI recruiting startup, has confirmed a security incident linked to a supply chain attack involving the open-source project LiteLLM. The AI startup told TechCrunch on Tuesday that it was “one of thousands of companies” affected by a recent compromise of LiteLLM’s project, which was linked to a hacking group called TeamPCP. Confirmation of the incident comes as extortion hacking group Lapsus$ claimed it had targeted Mercor and gained access to its data. It’s not immediately clear how the Lapsus$ gang obtained the stolen data from Mercor as part of TeamPCP’s cyberattack. Founded in 2023, Mercor works with…
An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.A college student in Wuhan tells WIRED that she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with…
Anthropic has built its public identity around the winning idea that it’s the careful AI company. It publishes detailed research on AI risk, employs some of the best researchers in the field, and has been vocal about the responsibilities that come with building such powerful technology — so vocal, of course, that it’s right now battling it out with the Department of Defense. On Tuesday, alas, someone there forgot to check a box. It is, notably, the second time in a week. Last Thursday, Fortune reported that Anthropic had accidentally made nearly 3,000 internal files publicly available, including a draft…
A series of letters sent by autonomous-vehicle (AV) developers to Democratic US senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts sheds the most light yet on the human side of robot vehicle operations. In the documents, submitted to Markey as part of an investigation into self-driving-vehicle technology and released on Tuesday, seven companies, including Tesla, Amazon-owned Zoox, and Uber- and Nvidia-funded Nuro, released new details about their “remote assistance” programs.All the companies that responded to the senator’s office say they use remote assistants—humans charged with responding to autonomous vehicles when they get confused, stuck, or in emergencies. The programs, experts say, are an…
Our Lego Agency’s Jennifer Berry on Building Connected Commerce Beyond ChannelsIn this episode of Brave Commerce, Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter speak with Jennifer Berry, VP of commerce & digital at Our Lego Agency, The Lego Group’s in-house agency. Jennifer shares how Lego is rethinking its operating model by bringing creativity, commerce, and retail together under one in-house agency to deliver more connected, audience-first experiences.They explore why consumers don’t see channels the way organizations do, how Lego is designing seamless ecosystems across DTC, retail partners, and physical experiences, and what it takes to balance long-term brand building with real-time cultural relevance. From…
Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been remaking its business around AI, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest results of those efforts: an updated version of Slack, with a plethora of new AI features. The most significant of these is a serious glow-up for its AI agent, Slackbot. The 30 new features, which will be available in the coming months, follow a January update that gave Slackbot agentic capabilities — including the ability to draft emails, schedule meetings, and sift through your inbox for specific information. Perhaps…
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the US and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla, and Boeing, which the IRGC accused of enabling United States military targeting operations. The IRGC urged employees of the US firms to evacuate and civilians in the region to stay away.Tuesday’s warning, posted to the IRGC’s Telegram channel, extends a campaign of threats by Iran against American…
After more than 50 years, the United States is heading back to the moon. On Wednesday afternoon, NASA is set to launch the four-person Artemis II mission on a 10-day trip that will orbit the moon and return. The mission will see the astronauts, Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, astronaut Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a test mission aboard NASA’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as they confirm the spacecraft’s systems operate as designed in the deep space environment.Should the test mission be successful, it would boost NASA’s chances of sending a crew to the moon as…
In February, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) sent letters to seven U.S. companies working on autonomous vehicle technology with a list of questions. He especially wanted to know how often these companies’ vehicles — operated by Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox — rely on input from remote staff. They all refused to say, according to the results of Markey’s investigation, which were released Tuesday. The information published by Markey’s office is the latest example of how hesitant autonomous vehicle companies are to share details about how their operations truly work — despite the fact that they are…