Network Support Blog

Kate Park / TechCrunch: Singapore-based Volopay, which offers corporate cards and expense management software to startups and enterprises, raises a $29M Series A in equity and debt  —  Volopay, a Singapore-based fintech startup, raised a $29 million Series A in debt and equity financing as it seeks to further expand … https://bit.ly/36VCWyN

Bloomberg: Sources: the Biden administration asks major crypto exchanges globally to help thwart Russian individuals and organizations from using crypto to avoid sanctions  —  The Biden administration is asking crypto exchanges to help ensure that Russian individuals and organizations aren't using virtual currencies … https://bit.ly/35Aqcg8

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Indian fintech unicorn BharatPe co-founder Ashneer Grover resigns from the company's board, following a probe into alleged financial irregularities  —  Ashneer Grover, a founder and the public face of BharatPe, has resigned from the board and left the managing director position he held … https://bit.ly/3tky1i6

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: Ukraine, which this weekend formed an “IT Army” made up of global volunteer hackers, claims to have taken down several Russian government and bank websites  —  Key Russian websites and state online portals have been taken offline by attacks claimed by the Ukrainian cyber police force … https://bit.ly/3K6O6i6

NBC News: Meta and Twitter removed two anti-Ukrainian “covert influence operations” over the weekend, one tied to Russia and the other to Belarus  —  Facebook and Twitter removed two anti-Ukrainian “covert influence operations” over the weekend, one tied to Russia and another with connections to Belarus, the companies said. https://bit.ly/3pocuUC

Catalin Cimpanu / The Record: A pro-Ukraine member of the Conti ransomware gang posts 339 days' worth of the group's chat logs, after its leaders declared support for Russia  —  A member of the Conti ransomware group, believed to be Ukrainian of origin, has leaked the gang's internal chats after the group's leaders posted … https://bit.ly/3sqhMAS

Axios: Google Maps temporarily stops displaying live traffic and “busy area” data in Ukraine, but basic traffic navigation is still available  —  Google Maps has temporarily disabled some of its tools for Ukraine following the Russian military's invasion of the country, a spokesperson confirmed Sunday. https://bit.ly/3Is7Vjv

NetBlocks: Russia's leading internet providers have restricted access to Twitter and Facebook  —  NetBlocks metrics confirm the restriction of Twitter in Russia from the morning of Saturday 26 February 2022.  Facebook servers have subsequently been restricted as of Sunday. https://bit.ly/3IvDmcR

Lily Hay Newman / Wired: A profile of iSTARE, an Intel hardware hacking group that analyzes and attacks future generations of chips to find critical flaws before they go into production  —  Researchers at iSTARE have to think like the bad guys, finding critical flaws before processors go to production. https://bit.ly/3vvOF0S

Grace Dean / Insider: The Central Bank of Russia says customers of sanctioned Russian banks can't use their cards with Apple Pay and Google Pay abroad or to make online payments  —  - Customers of sanction-hit Russian banks are unable to use Apple and Google Pay, Russia's central bank said. https://bit.ly/36R7x0p

Max Read / Read Max: Many celebrities promoting NFTs, like Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon, are either represented by, or have links to, OpenSea investor Creative Artists Agency  —  Where do celebrities even hear about “bored apes”?  Who is recommending that they buy one?  Is this really the best thing any of them can think to do with their money and fame? https://bit.ly/3sn1bN3

Light Reading: FCC chair notified Congress that US service providers have requested ~$5.6B for removing and replacing network equipment and services provided by Huawei and ZTE  —  WASHINGTON Today, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel notified Congress that providers have initially requested approximately $5.6 billion … https://bit.ly/3LchC7I

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: Profile of Charlie Bell, who leads Microsoft's new 10,000 person security engineering org, as the company's annual revenue from security products surpasses $15B  —  “Your code will be attacked.”  —  That warning, so obvious today, was a blunt wake-up call 20 years ago for many of the … https://bit.ly/35Xhxop

The Seattle Times: The Washington State Department of Licensing says over 250,000 licensed professionals may have had personal data exposed, including SSNs, in a database breach  —  The personal information of more than a quarter-million licensed professionals may have been exposed in a breach … https://bit.ly/35WZXRr

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: Source: Spotify took down episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience at Rogan's request; all the removed episodes were recorded before he signed a deal with Spotify  —  Joe Rogan apologized Saturday for using a racial slur in past episodes of his popular podcast, many episodes of which have been removed from Spotify without explanation. https://bit.ly/330BedL

Nico Grant / Bloomberg: A breakdown of Google Cloud's rivalry with AWS and Azure as analysts expect $26B in 2022 GCP revenue and IDC predicts ~30% YoY cloud market growth until 2025  —  When Amazon's cloud computing network went down on Dec. 7, it hampered a broad swath of companies that rely on its servers, including Disney, Netflix, and Ticketmaster. https://bit.ly/3B28u0F

Riana Pfefferkorn / The Center for Internet and Society: A close look at the EARN IT Act, which is modeled after FOSTA and was recently reintroduced in Congress, and why it risks exacerbating the online CSAM problem  —  This is the latest entry in my lengthy archive of writing, talks, and interviews about the EARN IT Act: https://bit.ly/3B1bdHH

Katie Notopoulos / BuzzFeed News: Investigation reveals the identities of two main founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection: Greg Solano, aka “Gargamel”, and Wylie Aronow  —  The buzzy NFT collection has raked in millions and the eager support of dozens of celebrities. https://bit.ly/3gnLwaH

Ryan Browne / CNBC: The UK updates its Online Safety Bill proposal to outlaw content featuring revenge porn, drug and weapons dealing, suicide promotion, people smuggling, and more  —  - Britain's landmark Online Safety Bill seeks to combat the spread of harmful and illegal content on social media sites including Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. https://bit.ly/3GnkfQx

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple plans to unveil a 5G iPhone SE and an iPad Air with a faster processor and 5G in an online presentation on or near March 8  —  Apple Inc. is targeting a date on or near March 8 to unveil a new low-cost iPhone and an updated iPad, according to people with knowledge of the matter … https://bit.ly/3usxnl4

Bloomberg: Two more employees from Google's Ethical AI research group leave to join Timnit Gebru's new nonprofit research institute DAIR, adding to the turmoil at the unit  —  Google's Ethical AI research group lost two more employees, adding to the turmoil at the unit studying an area that is vitally important … https://bit.ly/3AZbefk

Andrew Thurman / CoinDesk: Wormhole's parent company replaces $322M worth of ETH stolen by a hacker on Wednesday; the bridge's operations resumed after the attack vector was patched  —  Wormhole's parent company has stepped in to prevent chaos across the Solana DeFi landscape.  —  After one of the most devastating exploits … https://bit.ly/3L8R33f

Blake Brittain / Reuters: Nike sues online reseller StockX for selling unauthorized NFTs of its shoes, citing its trademarks, and promises “a number of virtual products” later this month  —  Sneaker giant Nike sued online reseller StockX in New York federal court on Thursday for selling unauthorized images of Nike shoes … https://bit.ly/3okfbpK

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Activision Blizzard reports Q4 revenue of $2.16B, down 10% YoY, net bookings of $2.49B, down 18% YoY, 371M MAUs, down from 397M a year ago  —  Activision Blizzard's net bookings of $2.49 billion in the fourth quarter ended December 31 short of expectations on Wall Street … https://bit.ly/3HrH6M9

Nina Bambysheva / Forbes: Trust Machines, which wants to build DeFi apps, DAOs, and NFTs on Blockstack, now called Stacks, raises $150M via Breyer Capital, Union Square Ventures, others  —  It's summer 2017.  Muneeb Ali, a PhD candidate in computer science at Princeton, is finishing his thesis … https://bit.ly/3ooqddI

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Mozilla shuts down Firefox Reality, its web browser launched in 2018 for Oculus and other AR/VR headsets, and directs users to Igalia's upcoming browser Wolvic  —  A top VR web browser is closing down.  Today, Mozilla announced it's shutting down its Firefox Reality browser … https://bit.ly/3J2a5X7

Arif Bacchus / OnMSFT.com: Report: Microsoft scrapped plans for a HoloLens 3 in 2021, shifting instead to a mixed reality device with Samsung and leaving the HoloLens team “inflamed”  —  Microsoft turned heads when it first introduced HoloLens, and it even launched a second generation of the mixed reality headset … https://bit.ly/34uZLI4

Los Angeles Times: Sources: in a Spotify staff meeting, CEO Daniel Ek said the company sees itself as a platform for, not a publisher of, Joe Rogan's podcast  —  Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told employees Wednesday morning that the streaming service doesn't closely supervise controversial podcast host Joe Rogan … https://bit.ly/34wFpOB

Washington Post: Meta reports its first-ever sequential decline in global Facebook daily active users, falling from 1.930B to 1.929B QoQ  —  The slowing growth is taking place as the company pushes into the metaverse and hardware.  —  Facebook parent Meta's quarterly earnings report on Wednesday revealed … https://bit.ly/3olpDgK

Russell Brandom / The Verge: How OpenSea became synonymous with the NFT boom, hiding the complexity of ERC-721 transactions for a mass audience; OpenSea made $386M from fees in January 2022  —  On a cold day in January, NFTs started disappearing.  Major services like MetaMask and Twitter were suddenly unable … https://bit.ly/3IXKgYm

James Vincent / The Verge: DeepMind details AlphaCode, a new AI coding engine that it says “writes computer programs at a competitive level”  —  AlphaCode is good, but not great — not yet  —  DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode that it says “writes computer programs at a competitive level.” https://bit.ly/32SFVWZ

Christine Hall / TechCrunch: Jellyfish, which provides software to help manage engineering teams, raises a $71M Series C led by Accel, Insight Partners, and Tiger Global  —  As more companies become software companies, what is being created still needs to align with business objectives. https://bit.ly/3HpzUQo

Michael Tobin / Bloomberg: Match Group reports Q4 revenue of $806.1M, up 24% YoY, vs. est. $818.6M, with 16.2M paying users, up 15% YoY, forecasts weaker Q1 growth due to Omicron effects  —  Match Group Inc. gave a forecast for revenue in the current quarter that lagged behind analysts' estimates … https://bit.ly/3ufVzXH

Nathan Ingraham / Engadget: Sundar Pichai says Pixel “set an all-time quarterly sales record” in Q4 despite supply issues; Alphabet lumps Pixel into its Other category, which grew 22% YoY  —  Google's lineup of Pixel phones has usually been some of our favorite Android devices since the first Pixel arrived back in 2016 … https://bit.ly/3gdhYN8

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: The Google One VPN service, which has been available to Android users since October 2020, comes to iOS for users paying for the 2TB $9.99/month plan or higher  —  The VPN service that's included with a Google One Premium subscription is finally available on iPhones after Google's promise in October 2020 that it would come to iOS. https://bit.ly/3s6m7bi

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: Metronome, which offers APIs to help SaaS companies charge customers on a usage basis, raises a $30M Series A led by a16z  —  As more software companies shift to more flexible pricing models based on consumption, many are choosing to charge customers on a per-use, or usage, basis. https://bit.ly/3ANT4Nm