Tech Drop Every Minute

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Getting personal: Funding rises for software-driven tastemakers The alumni of these universities raised the most VC in the past year A lot of people still get paid to sit in offices and do repetitive tasks. In recent years, however, employers have been pushing harder to find ways to outsource that work to machines. Venture and growth investors are doing a lot to speed up the rise of these worker-bots. So far this year, they’ve poured hundreds of millions into developers of robotic process automation technology, the term to describe software used for performing a series of tasks previously carried out by humans. Process automation funding activity spiked last week with a $225 million Series C round for one of the category leaders, New York-based  UiPath . Sequoia Capital and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the financing, which brings total capital raised by the 13-year-old company to more than $400 million, with a mo...

At a Senate hearing this week in which US lawmakers quizzed tech giants on how they should go about drawing up comprehensive Federal consumer privacy protection legislation, Apple’s VP of software technology described privacy as a “core value” for the company. “We want your device to know everything about you but we don’t think we should,” Bud Tribble told them in his opening remarks. Facebook was not at the commerce committee hearing which, as well as Apple, included reps from Amazon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Google and Twitter. But the company could hardly have made such a claim had it been in the room, given that its business is based on trying to know everything about you in order to dart you with ads. You could say Facebook has ‘ hostility to privacy ‘ as a core value. Earlier this year one US senator wondered of Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook could run its service given it doesn’t charge users for access. “ Senator we run ads ,” was the almost startled...

For hobbyist photographers like myself, Hasselblad has always been the untouchable luxury brand reserved for high-end professionals. To fill the gap between casual and intended photography, they released the X1D — a compact, mirrorless medium format. Last summer when Stefan Etienne reviewed the newly released camera, I asked to take a picture. After importing the raw file into Lightroom and flipping through a dozen presets, I joked that I would eat Ramen packets for the next year so I could buy this camera. It was that impressive. XCD 3.5/30mm lens Last month Hasselblad sent us the XCD 4/21mm (their latest ultra wide-angle lens) for a two-week review, along with the X1D body and XCD 3,2/90mm portrait lens for comparison. I wanted to see what I could do with the kit and had planned the following: Swipe right on everyone with an unflattering Tinder profile picture and offer to retake it for them Travel somewhere with spectacular landscapes My schedule didn’t offer muc...

The Pentagon is going to make one cloud vendor exceedingly happy when it chooses the winner of the $10 billion, ten-year enterprise cloud project dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI for short). The contract is designed to establish the cloud technology strategy for the military over the next 10 years as it begins to take advantage of current trends like Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data. Ten billion dollars spread out over ten years may not entirely alter a market that’s expected to reach $100 billion  a year very soon, but it is substantial enough give a lesser vendor much greater visibility, and possibly deeper entree into other government and private sector business. The cloud companies certainly recognize that . Photo: Glowimages/Getty Images That could explain why they are tripping over themselves to change the contract dynamics, insisting, maybe rightly, that a multi-vendor approach would make more sense. One look at the ...

Even if you never log into Facebook itself these days, the other apps and services you use might be impacted by Facebook’s latest big, bad news. In a follow-up call on Friday’s revelation that Facebook has suffered a security breach affecting at least 50 million accounts , the company clarified that Instagram users were not out of the woods — nor were any other third-party services that utilized Facebook Login. Facebook Login is the tool that allows users to sign in with a Facebook account instead of traditional login credentials and many users choose it as a convenient way to sign into a variety of apps and services. Third-party apps and sites affected too Due to the nature of the hack, Facebook cannot rule out the fact that attackers may have also accessed any Instagram account linked to an affected Facebook account through Facebook Login. Still, it’s worth remembering that while Facebook can’t rule it out, the company has no evidence (yet) of this kind of activity. “So th...

Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today’s big story about a security breach affecting 50 million Facebook users . The issue appears to only affect particular stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The Guardian and one from the  Associated Press , both reputable press outlets. Facebook is preventing users from posting The Guardian's report on the Facebook data breach. Ouch. https://t.co/IGU685PjdK pic.twitter.com/GGGrKqBZEc — Jed Bracy (@JedBracy) September 28, 2018 When going to share the story to their news feed, some users, including members of the staff here at TechCrunch who were able to replicate the bug, were met with the following error message which prevented them from sharing the story. According to the message, Facebook is flagging the stories as spam due to how widely they are being shared or as the message puts it, the system’s observation that “a lot of people are posting the same content.” Update:  After attent...