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When Elon Musk talks about robotics, he does little to hide the ambition behind his dreams.Tesla’s Optimus is being pitched as an all-purpose humanoid robot that can do heavy lifting on the factory floor and free us from drudgery at home. Tesla aims to have 1 million of these robots over the next 10 years.But is there a chance that Mr. Musk will succeed? A few years ago, the idea of friendly and capable domestic robots belonged to the world of science fiction. We can imagine machines that dance, move boxes, and play chess, but we cannot imagine machines that…
Close one eye and focus straight ahead without moving your eye. You will notice a fleshy blur in your peripheral vision, namely your nose. It’s there every time you wake up, but you’re rarely aware of it. So why can’t you see your nose when it’s literally right in front of your eyes?”You can see your nose,” says Michael Webster, a vision scientist and co-director of the neuroscience program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Most of the time we just don’t realize it.The main reason why the nose takes up less space in our visual field comes down to…
Ravi LakshmananJanuary 24, 2026Malware/Critical Infrastructure The Russian state hacking group known as Sandworm is said to have been behind what was described as the “largest cyber attack” targeting Poland’s electricity system in the last week of December 2025. The country’s Energy Minister Milos Motyka said last week that the attack had failed. “The Cyberspace Command has diagnosed the last few days of this year as the most powerful attack on energy infrastructure in years,” Motyka said. According to a new report from ESET, the attack was the work of Sandworm, which deployed a previously undocumented wiper malware codenamed DynoWiper. The…
AI agents are accelerating the way we get work done. Schedule meetings, access data, trigger workflows, write code, and take actions in real-time to boost productivity beyond human speed across your enterprise. And there comes a moment when all security teams are finally faced with the following question: “Wait… who approved this?” Unlike users and applications, AI agents are often rapidly deployed, widely shared, and given broad access privileges, making ownership, authorization, and accountability difficult to track. What was once an easy question is now surprisingly difficult to answer. AI agents disrupt traditional access models AI agents are more than…
Ravi LakshmananJanuary 24, 2026Vulnerabilities / Enterprise Security The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical security flaw affecting Broadcom VMware vCenter Server patched in June 2024 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of real-world exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-37079 (CVSS score: 9.8). This refers to a heap overflow in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol that could allow a malicious attacker with network access to vCenter Server to execute remote code by sending specially crafted network packets. This issue was resolved by Broadcom in June 2024 along with CVE-2024-37080, another…
Harvey, a fast-growing legal AI startup, has acquired Hexus as it continues to aggressively expand in the fiercely competitive legal tech market. Hexus is a two-year-old startup that develops tools to create product demos, videos, and guides. Hexus founder and CEO Sakshi Pratap, who previously held engineering roles at Walmart, Oracle and Google, told TechCrunch that her San Francisco-based team has already joined Harvey, while the startup’s India-based engineers will join once Harvey opens an office in Bangalore. Pratap added that he will lead an engineering team focused on accelerating Harvey’s services for the in-house legal department. “What we bring…
With TikTok’s ownership change, TikTok users in the U.S., who were informed of the change through an in-app message, are collectively upset by the company’s privacy policy update. The revised document details the terms and conditions for your use of the service, including certain location information that may be collected by the U.S. joint venture. Many users have also posted on social media about the policy’s language, which says TikTok may collect sensitive information about users, including their “sex lives and sexual orientation, transgender or non-binary status, citizenship or immigration status.” However, despite the panic, this disclosure is not new…
Yann LeCun’s new venture, AMI Labs, has received intense attention since the AI scientist left Meta to form it. This week, the startup finally revealed what it’s building. And some important details are hidden in plain sight. On its newly launched website, the company revealed plans to develop “world models” to “build intelligent systems that understand the real world.” The focus on world models was already hinted at by AMI’s name, which stands for Advanced Machine Intelligence, and now it has officially joined the ranks of the hottest AI research startups. Building foundational models that bridge AI and the real…
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has launched an investigation into Waymo after its robot taxis were repeatedly spotted illegally passing stopped school buses in at least two states. The NTSB said in a post to X on Friday that it was specifically focused on more than 20 incidents in Austin, Texas. “Investigators will travel to Austin to gather information regarding a series of incidents in which self-driving vehicles failed to stop to pick up or drop off students,” the NTSB said in a statement to TechCrunch. A preliminary report is expected to be submitted within 30 days, and the…
The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Deal, a human resources and payroll startup, for allegedly hiring corporate spies to leak information about its biggest rival, Rippling, the Wall Street Journal reported. In an emailed statement to TechCrunch, Deal said: “We are not aware of any investigation. We will always cooperate with relevant authorities and provide any necessary information in response to valid inquiries.” Diehl’s statement then makes its own case against Rippling. The company pointed to its own lawsuit alleging that competitors are waging a “smear campaign” and claims it has an advantage over its competitors in…