Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, ADIA, and Morgan Stanley as part of its IPO.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Google is bringing passkey support to its Advanced Protection Program (APP), which is used by people who are at high risk of targeted attacks, such as campaign workers, candidates, journalists, human rights workers, and more.
APP traditionally required the use of hardware security keys, but soon users can enroll in APP with passkeys. Users will have the option to use passkeys alone, or alongside a password or hardware security key.
“In a critical election year, we’ll be bringing this feature to our users who need it most, and continue to work with experts like Defending Digital Campaigns, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, Asia Centre, Internews, and Possible to help protect global high-risk users,” Google’s VP of Security Engineering, Heather Adkins, said in a blog post.
Google says passkeys have been used to authenticate users more than one billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts since the company launched passkey support in 2022. Google says passkeys are used on Google Accounts more often than legacy forms of two-step verification, such as SMS one-time passwords and app-based one-time passwords combined.
Passkey logins make it harder for bad actors to remotely access your accounts since they would also need physical access to a phone. Passkeys also remove the need to rely on username and password combinations, which can be susceptible to phishing.
The technology has been adopted by numerous other companies, including Apple, Amazon, X (formerly Twitter), PayPal, WhatsApp, GitHub and TikTok.
Google also announced that it’s expanding its Cross-Account Protection program, which shares security notifications about suspicious activity with the third-party apps you’ve connected to your Google account. The company says this helps prevent cybercriminals from gaining access to one of your accounts and using it to infiltrate others. Google notes that it’s protecting 2.4 billion accounts across 3.4 million apps and sites and that it’s growing its collaborations across the industry.
On April 24, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok if its owner ByteDance doesn’t sell the app.
The bill requires ByteDance to secure a deal within nine months, with a 90-day extension available to close it. After this deadline, the U.S. will bar app stores from listing the app.
TikTok will challenge this decision in courts with a long legal battle ahead of us. But many countries worldwide have already banned the app, and ByteDance hasn’t had a chance to revive it. These moves impacted ByteDance’s operations in those countries, creators, as well as startups related to the creator economy.
Here’s how those bans are playing out in other markets.
Members of the Working Journalist of India (WJI) hold placards urging citizens to remove Chinese apps and stop using Chinese products during a demonstration against the Chinese newspaper Global Times, in New Delhi on June 30, 2020. – TikTok on June 30 denied sharing information on Indian users with the Chinese government, after New Delhi banned the wildly popular app citing national security and privacy concerns.
“TikTok continues to comply with all data privacy and security requirements under Indian law and have not shared any information of our users in India with any foreign government, including the Chinese Government,” said the company, which is owned by China’s ByteDance. (Photo by Prakash SINGH / AFP) (Photo by PRAKASH SINGH/AFP via Getty Images)
Multiple reports have captured the impact of the TikTok ban on creators who were reliant on the short video platform for reach and even money making. Many small businesses also use TikTok to promote their brands in different ways.
In many ways, India banning TikTok was a pivotal moment as Instagram rushed to release Reels in India to replace the platform. Meta (then Facebook) launched Reels in the U.S. a few months later. YouTube also followed suit by introducing Shorts in India.
However, TikTok’s ban also gave rise to many local short video apps. Twitter and Google-backed local social network ShareChat released Moj; Verse Innovation (parent company of news aggregator DailyHunt) launched Josh, Times Internet launched MX Takatak and eventually merged it with Moj in 2022; ad company InMobi released Roposo with other rivals like Mitron, Chingari, and Trell also trying to capture the market.
Developers in Nepal also launched a TikTok rival called Ramailo in November 2023, but its lifespan was short-lived.
Because of multiple apps, creators have had to invest in putting their content on multiple platforms. Critically, these platforms might not be putting short videos front and center like TikTok, and their recommendation algorithm might also differ, causing creators to lose their audience. A similar impact could occur in the U.S., as creators scramble to find a new platform or platforms for their work — even if only to hedge against the possibility that TikTok’s influence wanes under the threat of a ban.
In the aftermath of India banning TikTok, ByteDance had to scale back its operations. Earlier this year, the company’s music streaming service, Resso, was also shut down in India after the government asked app stores to pull the app.
Aside from the impact on creators, digital rights activists have also made arguments that banning platforms like TikTok curtails free speech. Some of these angles might play out in the U.S., too, as the government and ByteDance will indulge in legal battles.
Last year, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said that India set an “incredibly important precedent” by banning TikTok in 2020. Carr mentioned at that time that the U.S. needs to follow India’s lead to remove nefarious apps.
Anduril Industries has taken another step forward in its quest to become the next great American prime, this time by beating out major defense companies to develop and test small unmanned fighter jet prototypes.
The venture capital darling beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman on the deal, under the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. General Atomics was the other awardee out of the group of five.
Anduril and General Atomics will design, manufacture and test “production representative test articles” as part of the contract work, the Air Force said in a statement. Eventually, the Air Force will make a final, multi-billion-dollar production decision in fiscal year 2026 and have fully operational aircraft from suppliers before the end of the decade. It is unclear if the Air Force will select more than one company to deliver production aircraft.
The deal could prove very lucrative for Anduril: eventually, the CCA program aims to deliver at least 1,000 combat aircraft, which will fly in concert with manned platforms, like the F-35, and deliver their own weapons. The CCA program is part of an Air Force initiative called Next Generation Air Dominance; the aim is to modernize the entire fleet of flying systems, including piloted aircraft (Boeing and Lockheed are still in the running for manned system contracts).
At the center of Anduril’s victory is Fury, an autonomous air vehicle that it acquired when it bought North Carolina-based Blue Force Technologies last year. Anduril moved from acquisition of the tech to winning a major defense award with it in less than a year.
The seven-year-old startup was valued at $8.5 billion by investors including Founders Fund in 2022, when it announced its $1.48 billion Series E. Anduril’s 31-year-old founder, Palmer Luckey, has been outspoken about reversing the zero-sum paradigm that has dominated defense spending — which is to say, the defense primes win and the taxpayer loses — by building cheaper assets at a much faster pace, while nevertheless generating fabulous revenue for its backers.
“Anduril’s work on this program is just beginning,” Anduril SVP Jason Levin said in a statement. “U.S. and allied success in the future requires CCAs to be delivered at a speed, cost, and scale to beat the pacing threat. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the U.S. Air Force to deliver this critical capability to our Airmen as quickly as possible.”
OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer — for better and worse. Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, the AI Eraser. Before you ask, no, this is not simply a rebadged version of Google’s longstanding and very good Magic Eraser.
Nope, OnePlus went ahead and built its own version in a bid to show the world that it has AI ambitions of its own. It’s likely the Oppo-owned company has been working on AI Eraser for some time now — though the world has known about Google’s version since the Pixel 6 event back in March 2021 (Magic Editor, meanwhile, debuted a year back at I/O 2023).
From the sound of its press material, the company went and built this thing ground-up, starting with its own first-party large language models.
“AI Eraser is the result of a substantial R&D investment from OnePlus,” the company notes in its press material. “The proprietary LLM behind the new feature has been trained on a vast dataset that allows it to comprehend complex scenes. Through this advanced visual understanding, AI Eraser is able to intelligently substitute unwanted objects with contextually appropriate elements that naturally elevate the photo’s appeal, empowering users with the ability to make high-quality photo edits anywhere and at any time.”
An AI-powered eraser is an undeniably handy feature, but it’s also one that Google knocked out of the park immediately. It’s probably not the best use of one’s R&D resources to go head to head on that feature — especially a feature that is currently available across iOS and Android devices via Google Photos.
More than anything, this appears to be OnePlus’s attempt to plant its flag into what has very much shaped up to be the year of the smartphone. Hopefully next time, it will use those resources to build something that truly differentiates itself from existing properties.
AI is rolling out to OnePlus devices this month, starting with OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open and OnePlus Nord CE 4. It will not, however, be coming to the R12-D12.
Weeks before the national elections in India, Elon Musk-owned X said it is rolling out support for posting Community Notes — the company’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program — in the key overseas market.
The first set of contributors from India will start posting notes from today and more will be accepted over time, X said. The contributors typically provide more context to popular posts to debunk any myth or offer broader insights. These submissions are then rated by users on factors such as the helpfulness they provide or the accuracy.
In December 2022, the social network enabled the ability for people to look at Community Notes related to posts globally, but users from only a few countries could post such notes.
Over time, the company has allowed members from different countries to start posting Community Notes to provide local context better. With the latest rollout, the program has contributors in 69 countries.
Last year, the company also introduced Community Notes, previously called Birdwatch, for images and videos.
India was one of the last major markets where Community Notes had not previously expanded. With national elections just a few weeks away, many platforms are making efforts to combat potential election-related misinformation. However, X hasn’t made any specific announcement about its efforts for Indian elections.
Though Community Notes is proving helpful in fact-checking posts on X, it has at times struggled to control the spread of misinformation despite contributors adding context to stories. The program may also face a tough test in India’s complex multilingual political landscape.
Last year, the company reallowed political ads on the platform, which were banned by the previous management.
Twitter/X has had a tough stay in the Indian market notably for its legal battle against the government for ordering the platform to block certain posts. Earlier this year, X withheld some accounts and posts related to farmers’ protests in India because of orders from authorities. At that time, the company reiterated that a writ appeal challenging blocking orders was still pending in the courts.
Last year, Musk said in a conversation with BBC that India’s social media rules are quite strict and the company “can’t go beyond the laws of the country.”
Founded in 2017, Atoms Lanka Solutions is a provider of IT consulting and software development services. Throughout the company’s history, we have worked with over 160 customers from 5+ countries..
