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Edward Ongweso Jr / VICE : California police won't release training materials on facial recognition or license plate readers on copyright grounds, despite law mandating access   —  California police are refusing to release documents about the surveillance technology it uses, despite a new law that requires their release. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2YL4LmO

It said the group seeks violence and is loosely affiliated with the far-right Boogaloo movement from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://ift.tt/2VzwMvp

Arielle Pardes / Wired : The 👁👄👁 stunt, a hyped beta of a fake app, exploited Silicon Valley's fixation on shiny new things, but raised $200K for charities   —  Last weekend, the stunt aimed to use Silicon Valley's love of shiny new things for charity.  The result left people wondering about the memeification of movements. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2NI0eLk

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat : Elementary Robotics, which develops tools to automate industrial tasks, announces $12.7M Series A funding to deploy its automation products at scale   —  Elementary Robotics, a robotics company developing tools to automate industrial tasks, today announced it has raised a $12.7 million round. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3ikiDfB

Alex Knapp / Forbes : NexHealth, which provides an automated online appointment system for small medical and dental practices, raises $15M Series A   —  I write about the future of science, technology, and culture.  —  I am a staff writer covering health care.  Email me at kjennings@forbes.com. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2ZsgNjQ

Jade Macmillan / ABC : The Australian government announces AU$1.35B will be used over the next decade to boost cyberdefense capabilities against a surge in state-backed cyberattacks   —  The Federal Government wants to create more than 500 new jobs in its highly secretive cyber intelligence agency as part … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2YNQXIf

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica : US Cybercom warns foreign state-backed hackers will likely abuse a recently discovered SAML vulnerability that allows unauthorized network admin logins   —  The window of opportunity to fix critical security bug is rapidly closing.  —  Foreign hackers backed by a well-resourced government … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2AjamXX

When in 2010, former VC Michael Kim set out to raise a fund that he would invest in a spate of micro VC managers, the investors to which he turned didn’t get it. Why pay Kim and his firm, Cendana Capital ,  a management fee on top of the management fees that the VC managers themselves charge? Fast forward to today, and Kim has apparently proven to his backers that he’s worth the extra cost. Three years after raising $260 million across a handful of vehicles whose capital he plugged into up-and-coming venture firms, Kim is now revealing a fresh $278 million in capital commitments, including $218 million for its fourth flagship fund, and $60 million that Cendana will be managing expressly for the University of Texas endowment. We talked with Kim last week about how he plans to invest the money, which differs slightly from how he has invested in the past. Rather than stick solely with U.S.-based seed-stage managers who are raising vehicles of $100 million or less, he will split C...

Facebook’s recently launched app, Hobbi , an experiment in short-form content creation around personal projects, hobbies, and other Pinterest-y content, is already shutting down. The app first arrived on iOS in February as one of now several launches from Facebook’s internal R&D group, the NPE Team. Hobbi users have now been notified by way of push notification that the app is shutting down on July 10, 2020. The app allows users to export their data from its settings. In the few months it’s been live on the U.S. App Store, Hobbi only gained 7,000 downloads, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. Apptopia also reported the app had under 10K downloads and saw minimal gains during May and June. Though Hobbi clearly took cues from Pinterest, it was not designed to be a pinboard of inspirational ideas. Instead, Hobbi users would organize photos of their projects — like gardening, cooking, arts & crafts, décor, and more — in a visual diary of sorts. The goal was to photograph ...

Lyft’s self-driving vehicle division has restarted testing on public roads in California, several months after pausing operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Lyft’s Level 5 program said Tuesday some of its autonomous vehicles are back on the road in Palo Alto and at its closed test track. The company has not resumed a pilot program that provided rides to Lyft employees in Palo Alto. The company said it is following CDC guidelines for personal protective equipment and surface cleaning. It has also enacted several additional safety steps to prevent the spread of COVID. Each autonomous test vehicle is equipped with partitions to separate the two safety operators inside, the company said. The operators must wear face shields and submit to temperature checks. They’re also paired together for two weeks at a time. Lyft’s Level 5 program — a nod to the SAE automated driving level that means the vehicle handles all driving in all conditions — launched in July 2017 but didn’t starting testi...

Bloomberg : Sources: Apple has shifted the strategy of its Arcade gaming service, canceling contracts for some titles in development and seeking games with more engagement   —  - Company ends contracts for multiple future Arcade titles  — Apple seeks games with stronger engagement to hook users from Techmeme https://ift.tt/38izhY4

Enlarge / An odd coincidence: YouTube TV and AT&T rolled out price hikes on the same day. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images ) Chances are, if you pay for a streaming alternative to live cable TV in the United States, your bills are about to go up, thanks to a glut of Tuesday announcements. First up is YouTube TV, which announced a 30 percent price hike, its largest since rolling out as a product in 2017 , effective immediately for all customers. The news came at the end of a lengthy announcement of various new channels , which users cannot opt out of, all coming from the CBS/Viacom family of cable TV networks. Brand-new customers can expect to pay $65/mo for the service from here on out, while existing customers will see the price jump from $50 to $65 on their July bill. Shortly after mentioning the new price point, YouTube TV VP Christian Oestlien directed users to this landing page to pause or cancel their service if they want to. Read 5 remaining paragraphs ...

Enlarge (credit: Ivan Radic ) Foreign hackers backed by a well-resourced government are likely to exploit a critical vulnerability in a host and VPN and firewall products sold by Palo Alto Networks, officials in the US federal government warned on Tuesday. In worst-case scenarios, the security vendor said in a post , the flaw allows unauthorized people to log in to networks as administrators. With those privileges, attackers could install software of their choice or carry out other malicious actions that have serious consequences. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-2021, can be exploited when an authentication mechanism known as Security Assertion Markup Language is used to validate that users gave the proper permission to access a network. Attackers must also have Internet access to an affected server. Shortly after Palo Alto Networks issued the advisory, the official Twitter account for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that the vulnerability ...

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Romain Dillet / TechCrunch : German startup solarisBank, which offers financial services to other fintech companies through a set of APIs, raises $67.5M Series C at a valuation of $360M   —  Despite the Wirecard fallout, German fintech startup solarisBank has raised a Series C funding round of $67.5 million (€60 million). from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2NKKMy0

Covid-19 has been disruptive and bewildering for everyone, but especially for children. In the UK and in most US states, schools closed in March. Many of them will keep their doors shut until the fall. That’s six months without the normality of a school day, not to mention a significant break without any formal education for the many children who cannot access online classes . It’s a global issue. Schools have had to close in 191 countries, affecting more than 1.5 billion students and 63 million teachers, according to the United Nations . But in many countries, schools are now cautiously reopening: in Germany, Denmark , Vietnam, New Zealand , and China, children are mostly back behind their desks. These countries all have two things in common: low levels of infection and a reasonably firm ability to trace outbreaks.  What about the UK or the US, where the number of cases is relatively high and tracing systems are still in the early stages? How will we know when it’s safe for chil...

DeepSpin , a Berlin-based startup that is developing what it describes as a “next-generation, AI-powered MRI imaging machine”, has raised €600,000 in seed funding. Backing the round is APEX Digital Health, with participation from existing investors Entrepreneur First (EF) and SOSV, along with a number of unnamed angel investors. Including grants and earlier investment, it brings the total raised to €1 million pre-launch. DeepSpin is a graduate of EF’s company builder programme, where its two founders — Clemens Tepel, a former McKinsey consultant, and Pedro Freire Silva, a PhD researcher from KIT — decided to partner in September 2019. Freire Silva drew on his research into small-scale, mass-manufacturable MRI systems and pitched the idea to his future co-founder. “From the beginning I found the idea very intriguing and so we directly jumped into attempting to prove its feasibility,” says Tepel. “Within 4 weeks we were able to prove it in simulation, get industry-leading advisors on...

Nikkei Asian Review : As China passes new national security laws for Hong Kong, people are altering their digital footprints or removing their social media posts to avoid detection   —  Social media users delete posts or alter identities to avoid detection  —  (Source photos by Reuters and Ken Kobayashi) from Techmeme https://ift.tt/38cY1RH

Facebook Avatars, which lets users customize a virtual lookalike of themselves for use as stickers in chat and comments, is now available in India, the social juggernaut’s biggest market by users account. The American firm said Tuesday it had launched Avatars to India as more social interaction moves online amid a nationwide lockdown in the world’s second largest internet market. The company said Avatars supports a variety of faces, hairstyles, outfits that are customized for users in India. Avatars’ launch comes to India at the height of a backlash against Chinese apps in the country — some of which have posed serious competition to Facebook’s ever-growing tentacles in Asia’s third-largest economy. On Monday evening, New Delhi ordered to ban TikTok and nearly 60 other apps developed by Chinese firms . The social giant’s Avatars, a clone of  Snapchat’s popular Bitmoji , was first unveiled last year. The feature, which Facebook sees as an expression tool, aims at turning...