Time on wire

Online food delivery and restaurant discovery platform Zomato has acquired the Indian operations of Uber Eats, the food delivery business run by Uber, for around $350 million (Rs 2,485 crore), two people in the know of the deal said. The all-stock transaction will give the US-based ride-hailing company about 10% shareholding in Gurgaon-based Zomato. Uber Eats will cease to exist as a separate brand locally and users on its platform will be redirected to Zomato’s app, said one of the people privy to the details. Zomato will not absorb Uber Eats’ team in India. This means around 100 executives will either be reallocated to Uber’s other verticals here or laid off.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has discovered a major flaw in Windows 10 that could have been used by hackers to create malicious software that looked legitimate. Microsoft has issued a patch and said it had seen no evidence of the bug being exploited by hackers. The issue was revealed during an NSA press conference. It was not clear how long they had known about it, before revealing it to Microsoft. Brian Krebs, the security expert who first reported the revelation, said the software giant had sent the patch to branches of the US military and other high-level users ahead of its wider release. It was, he wrote, "extraordinarily scary". The problem exists in a core component of Windows known as crypt32.dll, a program that allows software developers to access various functions, such as digital certificates which are used to sign software. It could, in theory, have allowed a hacker to pass off a piece of malicious software as being entirely l...

German airline ‘Hahn Air’ on Monday declared it had issued the first airline tickets empowered by blockchain technology, in collaboration with ‘Winding Tree,’ an open-source travel distribution platform. Hahn Air provides scheduled and charter flights in Europe. The first blockchain passengers included ‘Maksim Izmaylov,’ Founder of Winding Tree, ‘Dave Montali’, CIO of Winding Tree, & ‘Frederick Nowotny,’ Head of Sales Engineering of Hahn Air. Apart from being an airline, Hahn Air is also a distribution solution for travel agents. Employing the Winding Tree platform, Hahn Air can manage the reservation requests, list inventory, manage the reservation requests, and accept payments once the booking process is succeeded. The airline accepts cash, credit card, cryptocurrency, (either the lif token or ether) as a mode of payment. Pedro Anderson’, Winding Tree’s Chief Operating Officer, and co-founder added  “One of the aspects that we are emphasizing on our side is the d...

Avast, the cybersecurity company with over 400 million users, today admitted its internal systems had been breached by a hacker who used an employee’s compromised VPN profile to obtain domain admin privileges. Now security firm ramps up security for its product build and release environments.                                              The attack, first flagged in May 2019, was made via a staff member’s temporary VPN profile that had erroneously been kept enabled and which did not require 2FA, Baloo said. She cited likely credential theft, noting “the temporary profile had been used by multiple sets of user credentials.” The company believes the attack targeted its CCleaner product, which was also compromised in 2017 in an attack first identified by Cisco Talos. In that incident, hackers used their access to push malware through the tool, but then also used comp...

IBM today announced that it will soon make a 53-qubit quantum computer available to clients of its IBM Q Network. The new system, which is scheduled to go online in the middle of next month, will be the largest universal quantum computer available for external use yet. The new center, which is essentially a data center for IBM’s quantum machines, will also feature five 20-qubit machines, but that number will grow to 14 within the next month. IBM promises a 95% service availability for its quantum machines. The New 53-qubit system introduces a number of new techniques that enable the company to launch larger, more reliable systems for cloud deployments. It features more compact custom electronics for improving scaling and lower error rates, as well as a new processor design. The fact that IBM is now opening this Quantum Computation itself, of course, is a pretty good indication about how serious the company is about its quantum efforts. The company’s quantum program also ...

Right now  Computer systems don’t understand time, space and causality. it hasn’t yet earned our confidence, Artificial intelligence has a trust problem. But we are relying on A.I. more and more. Tesla cars driving in Autopilot mode, for example, have a troubling history of crashing into stopped vehicles. Amazon’s facial recognition system works great much of the time, but when asked to compare the faces of all 535 members of Congress with 25,000 public arrest photos, it found 28 matches, when in reality there were none. A computer program designed to vet job applicants for Amazon was discovered to systematically discriminate against women. Every month new weaknesses in A.I. are uncovered. The problem is that today’s A.I. needs to try to do something completely different, Not that today’s A.I. needs to get better at what it does. In particular, we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets — often...

Cisco announced early this week that it has teamed up with Google to provide free, high-speed Wi-Fi to 200 locations across India in the next two months. The planned locations are all in Bengaluru, the capital of India’s southern Karnataka state, and the region considered to be the center of India’s high-tech industry. Cisco said the public Wi-Fi zones, powered by Google Station (gStation), will be in high-traffic areas, like bus stations, government buildings, and hospitals. Those densely-populated and highly-trafficked locations struggle to provide quality connectivity to hundreds, often thousands, of devices simultaneously.  Currently, 25 zones have been implemented, and Google and Cisco’s final aim is to provide 500 zones in Bengaluru alone, before eventually expanding into other regions across India.  The public Wi-Fi plan in India is part of the global alliance the two companies announced last February, which aims to provide communities with limited connectivity a...