Tech

On Friday morning, University of Pennsylvania alumni, students, staff, and community affiliates received several emails from hackers purporting to represent the university’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). “We have terrible security practices and are completely unmeritocratic,” read the email. “We love breaking federal rules like FERPA (all your data will be leaked).” A partially redacted email sent by hackers with …

Treasure to Trash and Back Again According to Erin Merani, Hatch’s vice president of marketing, this series of events was not, in fact, a planned marketing stunt, and Hatch is still figuring out the ramifications of the demon discourse. While Merani is glad the ads and programming “caught people’s attention,” she wants to clarify they were all meant for fun, …

Julie Van Ullen. (iSpot Photo) — Julie Van Ullen is now president and chief revenue officer for iSpot, a Bellevue, Wash., company that measures the impact of advertising campaigns on TV and video streaming. Van Ullen serves on the board of directors for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group. She joins iSpot from Rakuten Rewards, a leading e-commerce …

Amazon’s cloud infrastructure service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is on track to record its strongest year of growth in three years, fueled by the AI industry’s unprecedented demand for computing power. AWS is growing 20% year-over-year and ended the third quarter with $33.1 billion in sales through the first nine months of the year, Amazon announced in its third-quarter earnings …

U.S. telecommunications giant Ribbon has confirmed that government-backed hackers had access to its network for almost a year before getting caught, according to a public filing. The telco giant said in a 10-Q disclosure last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that a suspected “nation-state actor had gained access to the company’s IT network” as early as December …

In a letter to a House committee last month, legal counsel for Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, claimed that president Joe Biden’s administration sought to “influence” the company to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation. Republicans celebrated the letter as an apparent admission of Democratic censorship. But Democrats seem to be throwing cold water on the allegations. In a new letter to …

AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.  Perplexity …

Apple CEO Tim Cook signaled to investors the company is still open to acquisitions and partnerships to move things forward on the AI front. The comments were made this week during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. The exec also offered a brief update about Apple’s next-generation, AI-powered Siri, saying the service was still on track to launch in 2026. …

Lidar-maker Luminar is warning shareholders that it will run out of cash in early 2026 and has announced a 25% cut to its workforce to help staunch the bleeding — its second layoff of the year — according to a Friday regulatory filing. It’s not immediately clear how many workers will be affected. Luminar started the year with around 580 …

Adam, one of the most viral startups in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, has raised a $4.1 million seed round to power its next steps, TechCrunch learned exclusively. After generating over 10 million social media impressions with the launch of its text-to-3D model app, the AI startup had its pick of investors. “We were getting term sheets over email without …