Author: admin

PAPIRI, Nigeria (AP) — In a Christmas reunion, families and villagers in north-central Nigeria cried and hugged schoolchildren who were held for a month after being seized in one of the largest mass abductions in the country’s history. The 130 schoolchildren and teachers were released on Sunday and brought home in Niger state’s Papiri community late Wednesday night, marking the last batch freed since the Nov. 21 attack on St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri.Mothers with teary eyes hugged their kids tightly while other children were lifted high in the air, their faces beaming with joy as villagers called out…

Read More

Pavlo Gonchar | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesTubi hit profitability this year doing what other streaming services are trying to: attract younger audiences who are willing to sit through ads. The Fox Corp.-owned free streaming platform has long been among a sort of second tier of streaming services alongside lower-budget and less popular offerings like Pluto and The Roku Channel. But the free service is gaining traction and finding its footing in conversations with the big players. In November, Tubi made up 2.1% of total streaming minutes on The Gauge, Nielsen’s monthly analysis of viewing trends, ahead of NBCUniversal’s Peacock and…

Read More

There’s good news and bad news for air travelers renting a car this winter.Firstly, new survey data from Cheapcarrental.com shows that average car rental rates this winter are down by more than 17 percent compared to the summer. However, seasonal pricing varies widely by destination, and the average daily rental rate across 100 U.S. airports is $62.25, up 1 percent from the same period last year. To find out which airports will set you back the most and which will allow you to stretch your budget this winter, the team at Cheapcarrental.com compared rental car rates at 100 U.S. airports…

Read More

The former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, refuses to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution. After spending the last six years running Sunshine, a photo-sharing and contact-management startup with little success, the storied tech leader has shuttered the company to launch Dazzle, a new startup focused on building the next generation of AI personal assistants. While Mayer is not yet sharing specifics about Dazzle’s functionality, she has revealed that the new company has raised an $8 million seed round at a $35 million valuation. The round was led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft,…

Read More

Nick Donahue’s parents were in the business of building houses, which means he spent his childhood hearing about the U.S. construction industry. His dad built homes for major developers, and his mom sold to big-box builders across the East Coast. Donahue was particularly interested in why designing a custom home cost a fortune and took forever, and why most people had to settle for whatever the developers were offering that year. So when he dropped out of NC State and moved to the Bay Area, he eventually did what you might expect a college dropout to do in San Francisco:…

Read More

In June, U.S. insurance giant Aflac disclosed a data breach where hackers stole customers’ personal information, including Social Security numbers and health information, without saying how many victims were affected.  On Tuesday, the company confirmed it has begun notifying around 22.65 million people whose data was stolen during the cyberattack. In a filing with the Texas attorney general, Aflac said that the stolen data includes customer names, dates of birth, home addresses, government-issued ID numbers (such as passports and state ID cards) and driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers, as well as medical and health insurance information. And, in a…

Read More

This week on StrictlyVC Download, Connie Loizos spoke with Colin Angle, the founder and former CEO of iRobot. From his living room into a household name, Angle spent 30 years turning iRobot into one of the most pioneering companies in the robotics industry, stepping down as CEO following the failed Amazon acquisition. In this conversation, he unpacks why he considers iRobot’s bankruptcy “avoidable and a tragedy,” what regulators got catastrophically wrong in blocking the $1.7 billion Amazon deal, and why the FTC’s office walls covered with “blocked deals” as trophies revealed a deeply misguided approach to protecting innovation.   Angle also shares the brutal reality of fighting regulators for 18 months…

Read More

Cybercriminals stole $2.7 billion in crypto this year, a new record for crypto-stealing hacks, according to blockchain-monitoring firms. Once again, in 2025, there were dozens of crypto heists hitting several cryptocurrency exchanges and other web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. The biggest hack by far was the breach at Dubai-based crypto exchange Bybit, where hackers stole around $1.4 billion in crypto. Blockchain analysis firms, as well as the FBI, accused North Korean government hackers — the most prolific group targeting crypto in the last few years — of this massive heist.   This was the largest known loot of crypto of…

Read More

A group of writers, including Theranos whistleblower and “Bad Blood” author John Carreyrou, is filing a lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the companies of training their models on pirated copies of their books. If this sounds familiar, it’s because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but that it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place.…

Read More

Amazon-owned Zoox issued a recall Tuesday over concerns its autonomous driving system caused vehicles to cross over the center lane line near intersections or block crosswalks. The voluntary recall of its software affected 332 vehicles, according to documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). While there have not been any collisions associated with the issue, Zoox noted in the NHTSA filing that it could increase the risk of a crash. The company provides free rides to the public in its driverless Zoox vehicles in parts of San Francisco and Las Vegas. A Zoox spokesperson told TechCrunch the…

Read More