All posts tagged: platform

Deal Reached With Hackers to Delete Data Stolen From the Canvas Educational Platform

Deal Reached With Hackers to Delete Data Stolen From the Canvas Educational Platform

Published by Sam Flores

The company that operates online learning system Canvas said it struck a deal with hackers to delete the data they pilfered in a cyberattack that created chaos for students, many of them in the middle of finals. Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said in an online post that it “reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident.” The company didn’t provide any details on the agreement, including whether it involved a payment, and didn’t elaborate who was behind the hack. Instructure temporarily took the system offline while it investigated, locking out students and faculty. A hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for last week’s breach, threatening to leak data involving nearly 9,000 schools worldwide and 275 million individuals if schools did not pay a ransom by May 6. The group then extended the deadline, indicating some schools had engaged with them to negotiate. ShinyHunters also was behind a smaller breach of Infrastructure last year. A lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Utah alleged Instructure did not do enough to …

OpenAI’s New Daybreak Platform Uses GPT-5.5 to Find Software Vulnerabilities

OpenAI’s New Daybreak Platform Uses GPT-5.5 to Find Software Vulnerabilities

Published by skeptic

OpenAI today launched Daybreak, an answer to Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative and Mythos AI model. Like Glasswing, Daybreak is a cyber defense effort that will help tech companies find security vulnerabilities in their platforms. OpenAI says Daybreak is aimed at building cyber defense into software from the start. It builds on OpenAI’s April launch of GPT-5.4-Cyber, which the company says has contributed to fixing more than 3,000 vulnerabilities. Daybreak combines the intelligence of OpenAI models, the extensibility of Codex as an agentic harness, and our partners across the security flywheel to help make the world safer for everyone. Defenders can bring secure code review, threat modeling, patch validation, dependency risk analysis, detection, and remediation guidance into the everyday development loop so software becomes more resilient from the start. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI would like to work with “as many companies as possible” to help them continuously secure their software against cyber threats. Several companies have already adopted Anthropic’s competing Glasswing program, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Daybreak uses Codex Security to build …

Q&A with Open Restitution Africa’s Founders on ORA’s Open Data Platform

Q&A with Open Restitution Africa’s Founders on ORA’s Open Data Platform

Published by José Betancourt

On March 31, the research initiative Open Restitution Africa (ORA) launched the ORA Open Data Platform, a database that provides information on the restitution of African artifacts and ancestral remains. Developed over six years by ORA’s all-woman, pan-African team, the site uses case histories and AI-powered tools to offer practical insights into the return process. This resource, available in French and English, allows users to explore past restitution efforts and their outcomes, helping individuals and communities develop their own restitution strategies. Related Articles The ORA platform presents 25 case histories spanning 200 years. Using data visualizations, essays, and interactive tools, it addresses the lack of knowledge available to African communities, educators, activists, researchers, and other stakeholders wishing to carry the process of restitution forward. ARTnews interviewed ORA’s founders, Chao Tayiana Maina and Molemo Moiloa, about their reasons for creating ORA and how the ORA Open Data Platform works. Anne Doran: How did your project start? Chao Tayiana: I am a historian, and my interests are really around history and historical infrastructures, particularly how these intersect …

Kremlin Accuses Armenia of Providing Platform for Ukraine’s Zelenskiy, Agencies Report

Kremlin Accuses Armenia of Providing Platform for Ukraine’s Zelenskiy, Agencies Report

Published by Sam Flores

MOSCOW, May 10 (Reuters) – Russia accused Armenia ⁠on ⁠Sunday of providing Ukrainian ⁠President Volodymyr Zelenskiy with “a platform for anti-Russian remarks”, ​in a further sign of a chill in relations between traditional allies Moscow ‌and Yerevan. On a visit to ‌Yerevan last week, Zelenskiy said Russia feared “drones may buzz ⁠over Red ⁠Square” in Moscow during the annual parade on May 9 ​to commemorate the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two. The parade went ahead as planned on Saturday in a scaled-back ​format without the usual display of military hardware due to the ⁠threat ⁠of Ukrainian drone attacks. Moscow ⁠already summoned ​the Armenian ambassador on Thursday to protest over what it described ​as “terrorist threats against Russia” ⁠made by Zelenskiy in Yerevan. “This is not normal, it is not in keeping with the spirit of our relations with Yerevan,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to Russian news agencies. “The main ⁠thing for us is that Armenia does not adopt an anti-Russian ⁠stance,” Peskov said, adding that Russia was awaiting …

Streaming platform Twitch lets users enter viral ‘mogging’ beauty contests | Games

Streaming platform Twitch lets users enter viral ‘mogging’ beauty contests | Games

Published by Sam Flores

Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing. The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on. Omoggle enables one stranger to “dominate” another in a contest of looks, which in online slang, is called mogging. It uses facial recognition to analyse and score the faces of competitors between one and 10. Omoggle’s ecosystem is based on Omegle, a now defunct site that randomly matched strangers for video-based online chats. “It’s not [scored] by looks, but it’s like, how your head is shaped, how your face is shaped,” said Amz. A week later, Amz had already competed in hundreds of mog-offs, along with some of the biggest UK streamers, emulating a trend that began in …

Bumble posts upbeat quarterly revenue as platform overhaul targets Gen Z

Bumble posts upbeat quarterly revenue as platform overhaul targets Gen Z

Published by Sam Flores

May 5 : Bumble on Tuesday posted first-quarter revenue above estimates as the online dating platform’s strategy to win back younger users starts to bear fruit. The company posted revenue of $212.4 million, above analysts’ estimates of $211.4 million, according to data compiled by LSEG. • Online dating platforms are grappling with slowing growth and waning engagement, particularly among Gen Z users who have grown tired of endless swiping and disappointed by the quality of matches. • Total Paying Users decreased 21.1 per cent to 3.2 million, compared with 4 million, a year ago. • “We’re now focused on activating this higher-quality member base by launching a fully reimagined Bumble experience on our rebuilt, AI-enabled platform later this year,” said Whitney Wolfe Herd, Founder & CEO of Bumble. • Bumble, which has long marketed itself as a female-first alternative in the crowded dating market, is experimenting with tweaks to its core product to make the dating experience feel more curated and less transactional. • Rivals including Match Group’s Tinder and Hinge have stepped up the …

You don’t need a smart home hub if you pick the right platform from the start

You don’t need a smart home hub if you pick the right platform from the start

Published by skeptic

Buying a hub feels like the right first move. One device to manage everything, a single control point for your whole house. That logic made sense a decade ago. It mostly doesn’t anymore — and defaulting to it before you’ve figured out your ecosystem is one of the more expensive setup mistakes you can make. I built my current home setup without a dedicated hub, and it’s been more reliable than anything I’ve run before. What made the difference was picking a platform first, before buying a single device. What “hub-free” actually means The difference between a hub, a bridge, and an app The terminology gets sloppy fast, so it helps to untangle it before anything else. A hub is standalone hardware — something like a SmartThings hub or Hubitat controller — that manages device communication locally and handles multiple protocols. A bridge is narrower: protocol-specific hardware like the Philips Hue Bridge, built to translate Zigbee signals into something your router understands. An app is just software, controlling Wi-Fi devices through the cloud with no …

Lévy Gorvy Dayan Launches LGD Hammer Sales Platform

Lévy Gorvy Dayan Launches LGD Hammer Sales Platform

Published by José Betancourt

Lévy Gorvy Dayan is rolling out a new way to sell high-value art, though gallery cofounder Brett Gorvy is quick to lower the temperature on the idea. The gallery’s new platform, LGD Hammer, isn’t meant to remake the market. “We aren’t inventing a new paradigm, but it is a development,” he said. The platform, he said is informed by recent changed in the market. Private sales have slowed. Collectors want time to look, think, and negotiate. Deals stretch out. “There’s no urgency,” Gorvy said. Even strong works can sit while buyers circle. Related Articles Auctions still do the opposite. They create a moment: you either show up and bid, or you don’t. That pressure matters more right now because the market has spent the past couple of years resetting. Auction houses have leaned on lower estimates to get works moving, and the results have been solid. Strong sell-through rates and a run of clean sales have pulled sellers back toward competition. Now, LGD Hammer wants to bring that pressure into a gallery setting. Instead of sending a …

I found 5 Google TV features hiding in plain sight that completely changed how I use the platform

I found 5 Google TV features hiding in plain sight that completely changed how I use the platform

Published by skeptic

Google TV is one of the best smart TV platforms around, but the thing is, most people never go beyond the usual streaming options. And that’s a shame because Google TV includes some really clever features that can change the way you use your TV. These let you do everything from declutter the home screen and mirror your phone’s screen to even speed up your Google TV. Some of these are buried deep inside the settings menu, while others are available right in front of you but are easy to overlook. Related I Finally Found the Solution to My Android TV’s Slow Boot Times No more staring at the boot screen. Switch to apps-only mode Escape the recommendation overload Image Credit: Pankil ShahCredit: Pankil Shah/MakeUseOf Google TV loves to recommend stuff. The home screen comes filled with recommended movies, trending TV shows, autoplaying trailers, and sponsored content. Honestly, all of this makes your TV look more like an advertising board than your personal entertainment space. An easy way to get rid of this is to simply …

A DOGE Affiliate Is Now in Charge of the US Government’s ID Platform

A DOGE Affiliate Is Now in Charge of the US Government’s ID Platform

Published by skeptic

Greg Hogan, an affiliate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), will serve as acting assistant commissioner of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), a unit within the General Services Administration (GSA). There, he will oversee Login.gov, the government’s secure login and identity service. Gregory Barbaccia, the federal chief information officer and acting director of TTS, wrote in an email to TTS staff that Hogan will be focused on growing Login.gov’s user base, with the ultimate goal of the product “becoming a world-class identity platform recognized beyond the federal government.” Until earlier this year, TTS was led by Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer under whom TTS lost 50 percent of its staff in the early months of 2025. Hogan came to the government in January 2025 from a startup called Comma.ai, which works on self-automation technology for cars. He served as the CIO at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) as DOGE’s operatives burrowed into the agency and made it one of the nerve centers of its government takeover in early 2025. While there, …