Technology
Haun Ventures rides to the top of bitcoin
This week, the company invested $5 million in Agora, a front-end DAO management solution
Blockchain startups were Things got hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to start her own cryptocurrency-focused enterprise capital firm. However, shortly after Haun announced that the two Haun Ventures funds had reached a combined amount of $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices plummeted and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a large arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures has been slow to get into crypto and web3 on the low-cost, with many observers wondering when the company will pick up its pace of adoption.
While Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) during the cryptocurrency market downturn, the company was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.
But now that bitcoin prices have rebounded to previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing dramatically. Including some token items, the company has made 48 investments in accelerator funds value $500 million in early-stage and $1 billion in later-stage funding, Haun Ventures told TechCrunch.
The company’s latest investment is Agora – an application that improves voting and other decision-making processes in decentralized autonomous organizations. On Tuesday, the company led a $5 million seed round to Agora, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenblum, partner at Haun Ventures, said a big barrier to DAO participation was the lack of an easy user interface that may allow members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software updates to the protocols they manage.
The process was very fragmented. Some decisions were made on a separate Discord channel; “Then (the community) would go somewhere else to vote on whether to allocate treasury dollars to a specific project,” Rosenblum said.
Agora solves this problem for DAO members by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol management solution. “Historically, if you wanted to participate in the allocation of protocol vault resources, you had to perform a number of on-chain activities yourself, which likely meant you had a hardware and software configuration that most people didn’t have,” Rosenblum said.
Agora goals to make it easier for non-technical users to take part in DAO. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made coin trading simpler for most individuals.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, who co-founded fintech Clearco; Coinbase product designer Yitong Zhang; and software engineer Kent Fenwick.
Agora, which is actually a SaaS offering, is already utilized by protocols reminiscent of Optimisma href=”https://agora.ensdao.org/” goal=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>ENS and Uniswap.
Rosenblum explained that these protocols are pleased to pay Agora since it helps lower the barrier to participation of their community.
While activity in the cryptocurrency world is actually accelerating, Rosenblum didn’t say exactly when Haun Ventures will finish rolling out its current fund. However, he said that investments will proceed next 12 months.
Technology
‘Wolves’ sequel canceled because director ‘no longer trusted’ Apple
It could also be hard to recollect, but George Clooney and Brad Pitt starred together within the movie “Wolves,” which Apple released just two months ago.
On Friday, the film’s author and director Jon Watts said Friday that the sequel is not any longer happening; IN one other interview for Deadlinehe explained that he “no longer trusts (Apple) as a creative partner.”
According to reports, the corporate limiting your film strategy. For example, “Wolfs” was imagined to have a giant theatrical release, but as an alternative it played in a limited variety of theaters for just per week before it landed on Apple TV+.
Watts, who also created the brand new Star Wars series “Skeleton Crew,” said Apple’s change “came as a complete surprise and was made without any explanation or discussion.”
“I was completely shocked and asked them not to tell me I was writing a sequel,” Watts said. “They ignored my request and announced it in their press release anyway, apparently to put a positive spin on their streaming axis.”
As a result, Watts said he “quietly refunded the money they gave me to continue” and canceled the project.
Technology
The Rise and Fall of the “Scattered Spider” Hackers.
After greater than two years of evading capture following a hacking spree that targeted some of the world’s largest technology firms, U.S. authorities say they’ve finally caught a minimum of some of the hackers responsible.
In August 2022 security researchers made their information public with a warning that a bunch of hackers targeted greater than 130 organizations in a complicated phishing campaign that stole the credentials of nearly 10,000 employees. The hackers specifically targeted firms that use Okta, a single sign-on service provider that hundreds of firms around the world use to permit their employees to log in from home.
Due to its give attention to Okta, the hacker group was dubbed “0ktapus”. By now the group has been hacked Caesar’s entertainmentCoinbase, DoorDash, Mailchimp, Riot Games, Twilio (twice) and dozens more.
The most notable and severe cyber attack by hackers in terms of downtime and impact was the September 2023 breach of MGM Resorts, which reportedly cost the casino and hotel giant a minimum of $100 million. In this case, the hackers collaborated with the Russian-speaking ransomware gang ALPHV and demanded a ransom from MGM for the company to get better its files. The break-in was such a nuisance that MGM-owned casinos had problems with service delivery for several days.
Over the past two years, as law enforcement has closed in on hackers, people in the cybersecurity industry have been attempting to work out exactly tips on how to classify hackers and whether to place them in a single group or one other.
Techniques utilized by hackers similar to social engineering, email and SMS phishing, and SIM swapping are common and widespread. Some of the individual hackers were part of several groups chargeable for various data breaches. These circumstances make it obscure exactly who belongs to which group. Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has dubbed this hacker group “Scattered Spider,” and researchers imagine it has some overlap with 0ktapus.
The group was so energetic and successful that the US cybersecurity agency CISA and the FBI issued a advice in late 2023 with detailed details about the group’s activities and techniques in an try and help organizations prepare for and defend against anticipated attacks.
Scattered Spider is a “cybercriminal group targeting large companies and their IT helpdesks,” CISA said in its advisory. The agency warned that the group “typically engaged in data theft for extortion purposes” and noted its known ties to ransomware gangs.
One thing that is comparatively certain is that hackers mostly speak English and are generally believed to be teenagers or early 20s, and are sometimes called “advanced, persistent teenagers.”
“A disproportionate number of minors are involved and this is because the group deliberately recruits minors due to the lenient legal environment in which these minors live, and they know that nothing will happen to them if the police catch the child” – Allison Nixon , director of research for Unit 221B, told TechCrunch at the time.
Over the past two years, some members of 0ktapus and Scattered Spider have been linked to a similarly nebulous group of cybercriminals generally known as “Com” People inside this broader cybercriminal community committed crimes that leaked into the real world. Some of them are chargeable for acts of violence similar to robberies, burglaries and bricklaying – hiring thugs to throw bricks at someone’s house or apartment; and swatting – when someone tricks authorities into believing that a violent crime has occurred, prompting the intervention of an armed police unit. Although born as a joke, the swat has fatal consequences.
After two years of hacking, authorities are finally starting to discover and prosecute Scattered Spider members.
in July This was confirmed by the British police arrest of a 17-year-old in reference to the MGM burglary.
In November, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had indicted five hackers: Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 23, of College Station, Texas; Noah Michael Urban, 20, from Palm Coast, Florida, arrested in January; Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 20, of Dallas, Texas; Joel Martin Evans, 25, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; and Tyler Robert Buchanan, 22, from the UK, who was arrested in June in Spain.
Technology
OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit (update)
Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, who’re suing OpenAI for allegedly copying their work to coach artificial intelligence models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted potentially relevant data.
Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to offer two virtual machines in order that advisors to The Times and Daily News could seek for copyrighted content in their AI training kits. (Virtual machines are software-based computers that exist inside one other computer’s operating system and are sometimes used for testing purposes, backing up data, and running applications.) letterlawyers for the publishers say they and the experts they hired have spent greater than 150 hours since November 1 combing through OpenAI training data.
However, on November 14, OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one among the virtual machines, in keeping with the above-mentioned letter, which was filed late Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
OpenAI tried to get better the information – and was mostly successful. However, since the folder structure and filenames were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news authors’ copied articles were used to build the (OpenAI) models,” the letter says.
“The news plaintiffs were forced to recreate their work from scratch, using significant man-hours and computer processing time,” lawyers for The Times and the Daily News wrote. “The plaintiffs of the news learned only yesterday that the recovered data was useless and that the work of experts and lawyers, which took a whole week, had to be repeated, which is why this supplementary letter is being filed today.”
The plaintiffs’ attorney explains that they don’t have any reason to consider the removal was intentional. However, they are saying the incident highlights that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools.
An OpenAI spokesman declined to make an announcement.
However, late Friday, November 22, OpenAI’s lawyer filed a motion answer to a letter sent Wednesday by attorneys to The Times and Daily News. In their response, OpenAI’s lawyers unequivocally denied that OpenAI had deleted any evidence and as a substitute suggested that the plaintiffs were guilty for a system misconfiguration that led to the technical problem.
“Plaintiffs requested that one of several machines provided by OpenAI be reconfigured to search training datasets,” OpenAI’s attorney wrote. “Implementation of plaintiffs’ requested change, however, resulted in the deletion of the folder structure and certain file names from one hard drive – a drive that was intended to serve as a temporary cache… In any event, there is no reason to believe that any files were actually lost.”
In this and other cases, OpenAI maintains that training models using publicly available data – including articles from The Times and Daily News – are permissible. In other words, by creating models like GPT-4o that “learn” from billions of examples of e-books, essays, and other materials to generate human-sounding text, OpenAI believes there isn’t a licensing or other payment required for examples – even when he makes money from these models.
With this in mind, OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with a growing number of recent publishers, including the Associated Press, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, the Financial Times, People’s parent company Dotdash Meredith and News Corp. OpenAI declined to offer the terms of those agreements. offers are public, but one among its content partners, Dotdash, is apparently earns at the least $16 million a 12 months.
OpenAI has not confirmed or denied that it has trained its AI systems on any copyrighted works without permission.
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