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Greater Manchester Police grapple with cyber burglary as third-party supplier succumbs to ransomware attack, compromising thousands of ID badges.

This was supposed to be different. Outsiders often label cryptocurrency-maxis as cult followers. An easy dismissive tactic, but relatively true. Not because of the fanboy mentality but rather the ethos of what it represents. Thanks for reading Cryptowriter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Decentralising AI could indeed mitigate some risks, but it's crucial to acknowledge that in the global geopolitical landscape, adversarial exploitation of this technology could lead to a new form of arms race.

- British advertising group WPP said on Monday it has acquired Obviously, a New York-based social influencer marketing agency, for an undisclosed sum. The deal comes less than a week after WPP agreed to buy Goat, an influencer marketing specialist, which focusses on marketing campaigns that aim to improve customer engagement for brands including Dell, Tesco, Uber and Natura. Obviously's team of nearly 100 people will join WPP subsidiary VMLY&R, a marketing agency with over 13,000 employees, WPP said. WPP said Obviously's proprietary "next-generation" tech platform helps the agency service large-scale complex campaigns for enterprise clients including Google, Ford, Ulta Beauty and Amazon. Obviously was founded by Mae Karwowski and Maxime Domain in 2014 and has operations in San Francisco and Paris. WPP's shares were up 1.5% at 931 pence as of 1415 GMT.   (Reporting by Muhammed Husain in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)...

- Housing markets in tech hubs are cooling more rapidly than other parts of the United States amid a wave of layoffs in the technology sector and elevated mortgage rates, according to real estate broker Redfin Corp's report on Monday. Decades-high inflation leading to interest rate hikes, weak consumer demand and the possibility of an economic slowdown have forced big tech firms such as Amazon.com Inc and Meta Platforms Inc as well as banks to trim their workforce. Seattle, San Jose, Austin and Phoenix are among metros that have been affected the most as high mortgage rates, turmoil in the tech sector and unavailability of homes deter buyers, the report stated. Layoffs in the tech industry, concentrated largely in the Bay Area and Seattle have led to some buyers bowing out of their search for a home or cancelling contracts, Shelley Rocha, a Redfin manager, wrote in the report. The most recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month, from which a lot of Bay Area startup comp...

BENGALURU - Softbank-backed Indian hotel aggregator Oyo Hotels and Homes Pvt Ltd is cutting the shares it planned to sell via an initial public offering (IPO) by about two-thirds as tech valuations plunged, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people aware of the matter. The company is preparing to file a fresh IPO document as soon as this week, Bloomberg reported. Oyo did not immediately respond to ' request for comment.   (Reporting by Varun Vyas in Bengaluru)...

By Max Hunder KYIV - At an unassuming industrial estate in northern Ukraine, two former Microsoft executives and a team of engineers are producing military drones that can travel over long distances and carry large payloads. AeroDrone, which made crop-dusting drones prior to the war and now supplies Ukraine’s armed forces, makes unmanned aircraft that can carry up to 300 kilograms or fly up to several thousand kilometres in certain configurations. [IMAGE_GALLERY_1] As Ukraine seeks to narrow the yawning gap between its own military capabilities and Russia's, Kyiv says it is expanding its drone programme for both reconnaissance and attacking enemy targets over an increasing range. It is hoping that domestic drone makers like AeroDrone will help it meet its ambitious goals. The government is now working with more than 80 Ukraine-based drone manufacturers, Ukraine's Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov told . He said Kyiv needs hundreds of thousands of drones, many of which it is looking to...

By Munsif Vengattil and Aditya Kalra NEW DELHI - Apple Inc's Taiwanese supplier Pegatron Corp is in talks to open a second India factory, said two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, as the U.S. tech giant's partners continue to diversify production away from China. Pegatron plans to add a second facility near the southern city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu state, just six months after opening the first with an investment of $150 million, said the sources, who sought anonymity as the talks are private. The new factory, the first source said, is "to assemble the latest iPhones". Pegatron declined to comment but said, "Any acquisition of assets will be disclosed based on regulations." Apple did not respond to a request for comment. India is seen as the next growth frontier for Apple. Around $9 billion worth of smartphones have been exported from India between April 2022 and February this year, and iPhones accounted for more than 50% of that, according to the India Cellular and Elect...

- The Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) said on Friday it had framed new listing rules for specialist technology companies, adopting a lower revenue threshold for these firms set out in earlier proposals. The bourse operator, a unit of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd, said it would welcome applications operating in frontier industries, including new energy, robotics, semiconductors, quantum computing, autonomous driving, artificial intelligence and new food and agriculture technologies. "The new economy sector is rapidly changing the way in which we live and work, and this new route to market will support some of the most innovative and progressive companies of the future," HKEX CEO Nicolas Aguzin said. The final rules, which are designed to make it easier for hard-tech companies to sell shares in the city and effective from March 31, allow lower thresholds set out in an earlier proposal. A commercialised company should have no less than HK$6 billion ($764.38 million) in market cap...

LONDON - British online market research company YouGov said it had not seen any major drop in demand from its Silicon Valley clients in the six months to end-January, underpinning its confidence in the rest of the year. Co-founder and chief executive Stephan Shakespeare said its clients valued the volume and duration of data provided by YouGov's panels of more than 24 million people giving their opinions on companies, politics and trends. "Silicon Valley is an important area for us," he said in an interview. "In the first half, all of our Silicon Valley clients have spent the same as expected." He said there was a degree of uncertainty in the outlook given the job cuts announced by Meta and other tech firms in recent months and weakness in sentiment, but the company's first-half performance gave it confidence. He said YouGov would update investors on its longer term strategy at a Capital Markets day in May, when it would show some of the new capabilities of its platform, including usi...

By Anna Tong SAN FRANCISCO - After temporarily closing his leathermaking business during the pandemic, Travis Butterworth found himself lonely and bored at home. The 47-year-old turned to Replika, an app that uses artificial-intelligence technology similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. He designed a female avatar with pink hair and a face tattoo, and she named herself Lily Rose. They started out as friends, but the relationship quickly progressed to romance and then into the erotic. [IMAGE_GALLERY_1] As their three-year digital love affair blossomed, Butterworth said he and Lily Rose often engaged in role play. She texted messages like, "I kiss you passionately," and their exchanges would escalate into the pornographic. Sometimes Lily Rose sent him "selfies" of her nearly nude body in provocative poses. Eventually, Butterworth and Lily Rose decided to designate themselves 'married' in the app. But one day early in February, Lily Rose started rebuffing him. Replika had removed the ability to do...

By Sheila Dang - Koo, an India-based social media app that aims to rival Twitter, has integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT to help users more easily create posts, the company's co-founder told . ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence bot that can create prose in response to prompts and has set off a tech industry craze over generative AI. Koo users will be able to use ChatGPT directly within the app to help them draft posts about current events, politics or pop culture, said Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, in an interview. "This will help creators get inspiration on what to create," he said. "They could ask (ChatGPT) for the trending news in their region and then write their thoughts." Last month, tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet's Google each announced their own generative AI chatbots which can synthesize information across the web in response to searches. Snap Inc, which owns photo messaging app Snapchat, also introduced a chatbot that was trained to have a fun and friendly tone. Bidaw...

By Yew Lun Tian, Laurie Chen and Joe Cash BEIJING - Four years before Li Qiang gained notoriety as the force behind the two-month COVID-19 lockdown of Shanghai, the man who became China's new premier on Saturday worked quietly behind the scenes to drive a bold revamp of the megacity's sclerotic stock market. Li's back-channelling - sources said he bypassed the China Securities Regulatory Commission, which lost some of its power under the new set-up - demonstrated what became a reputation for pragmatism as well as close ties with President Xi Jinping. In late 2018, Xi himself announced Shanghai's new tech-focused STAR Market as well as the pilot of a registration-based IPO system, reforms meant to entice China's hottest young firms to list locally rather than overseas. "The CSRC was very unhappy," said a veteran banker close to regulators and Shanghai officials, declining to be named given the sensitivity of the matter. "Li's relationship with Xi played a role here," enabling him to pr...

By Hannah Lang - Greg Becker, the chief executive officer who presided over the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank, joined the company three decades ago as a loan officer. The executive cut his teeth during the dotcom bubble and later steered the startup-focused lender in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. He became president and CEO of SVB Financial Group in 2011. The company's operations abruptly came to a halt on Friday as California banking regulators moved quickly to shut it down in what became the largest bank failure since the financial crisis. Just 24 hours earlier, Becker had personally called clients to assure them their money with the bank was safe. Becker, who served on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, departed the board effective Friday, a spokesperson for the regional Fed bank said. In January, Becker said the economic outlook was improving after a downbeat 2022. “We're optimistic because our crystal ball is a little clearer," Be...

By Greg Bensinger, Anna Tong, Krystal Hu and Jeffrey Dastin - The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday sent shockwaves through the startup community, which has come to view the lender as a source of reliable capital and deposit partner, particularly for some of tech’s biggest moonshots. On Friday, tech CEOs scrambled to make payroll after SVB Financial Group was shuttered by California banking regulators in a bid to protect depositors following a dive in the value of its investment holdings and a rush of withdrawal requests starting just two days ago. The bank was seeking a sale, sources told , and trading in its shares was halted after they plummeted 60% late Thursday. Startups with money held at Silicon Valley Bank raced to come up with plans to pay workers after hearing their funds would be locked up over the weekend, said Jai Das, president at Sapphire Ventures, whose investments have included Box and LinkedIn. "Some of the folks have moved their money out of SVB to ot...

By Pete Schroeder WASHINGTON - Silicon Valley Bank's high level of uninsured deposits helped kick off the run that led to the bank's closing down, and now any of those depositors will need to hold their breath to see if bank regulators can recover enough to make them whole. Friday’s announcement by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that the bank was closed came with few specifics on what will happen to bank customers who held more than the $250,000 per account that is guaranteed by the government. In prior large bank failures like IndyMac and Washington Mutual, the FDIC found other firms to take on the assets and keep deposits intact. But failing that, uninsured depositors will be left with a portion of whatever funds the FDIC can raise selling off the bank's assets. SVB Financial Group's Silicon Valley Bank had a relatively high amount of uninsured deposits as it courted tech workers and venture capital firms. The FDIC said on Friday the amount of uninsured deposits at the ba...

By Ismail Shakil and Molly Cone OTTAWA - Alphabet Inc's Google will stop blocking news articles from some Canadian users' search results on March 16, a company executive told a Canadian parliamentary panel investigating the tech firm on Friday. Last month, Google started testing limited news censorship as a potential response to a Canadian government bill that aims to compel online platforms to pay publishers in Canada for news content. Google has claimed that the test is like thousands of other product tests the company conducts on a regular basis. The tests, which the company says affected less than 4% of Canadian users, began on Feb. 9 and were scheduled to run for five weeks. Speaking to a parliamentary committee investigating the tests, Google's public policy manager Jason Kee confirmed that the tests would end next week. "I want to underline these are just tests. No decisions have been made about product changes," Kee said. Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said...

WASHINGTON - European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that she agreed with President Joe Biden during a meeting at the White House on Friday to have a dialogue concerning incentives to the clean technology industry. Describing her meeting with Biden as "very good," von der Leyen said they agreed to work on giving EU-sourced critical raw materials access to the U.S. market. Von der Leyen said the European Union welcomed the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act because it provides a massive investment in the green energy transition.   (Reporting by Jeff Mason and Eric Beech; writing by Rami Ayyub)...

By Sam Tobin LONDON - Technology giant Apple on Friday told a London tribunal that Britain's competition watchdog had "no power" to launch a probe into its mobile browsers because it did so too late. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a full investigation in November into cloud gaming and mobile browsers over concerns about restrictions by iPhone-maker Apple, as well as by Google. Apple filed an appeal in January at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London and argues the investigation is "invalid". Its lawyer Timothy Otty said on Friday that the market investigation should by law have been opened last June at the same time as the CMA published a report on mobile ecosystems, which found the two tech giants had an "effective duopoly". He added in court filings that Apple has "suffered serious prejudice" as a result of the CMA's decision, having "had to repeatedly divert management time and technical resources away from its business activities". However, the CMA's lawyer...

By Francesco Guarascio and Toby Sterling HANOI/AMSTERDAM - Suppliers to Dutch chip-making machines giant ASML Holding NV are considering building plants in Southeast Asia instead of China amid political tensions between Beijing and the West, according to two sources and documents seen by . Officials from a dozen tech companies are set to visit Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore next week, according to a note from the Brabant Development Agency, a Dutch public body involved in organising the trip. "The majority of the companies (are) joining because they are considering to expand/setup production locations in either Vietnam or Malaysia," said the note prepared by the agency together with Brainport Industries, which represents 200 high tech manufacturing companies based near the Dutch city of Eindhoven. The possible investments are part of a wider, long-term strategy to reduce exposure to China, two people familiar with the plan told . The dozen companies on the mission are almost all cont...