Author: gyasistory

By John Biggs Imagine a biomimetic robot that can inflate itself, bend at odd angles, and channel liquids through itself in any direction. That’s what scientists at Harvard University have created. By using squishy little Lego blocks with channels built-in, a team at Harvard has created robots can move like slugs or snakes. For example,…

By Frederic Lardinois Two Tap, a Y Combinator-back startup that aims to become the “shopping cart of the entire Internet,” today announced that it has raised a $2.7 million seed round from the likes of Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, former Visa CEO Joseph Saunders, Ryan Petersen, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Posterous co-founder Gary Tan,…

By John Biggs CryptoLocker is some nasty stuff. It is a type of malware that, when run, begins encrypting your entire disk and then requests a certain fraction of a bitcoin to decrypt it. The software began circulated in 2013 and researchers believe that the number of victims is well in the six figures at…

By Sarah Perez Facebook announced this morning it has acquired PrivateCore, a Palo Alto-based secure server technology company. The deal does not appear to be an acqui-hire, as Facebook says that it plans to deploy PrivateCore’s technology into Facebook’s server stack in order to better protect its own servers. Terms of the deal were not…

By Jon Evans Did you know the CIA has a venture fund? Of course the CIA has a venture fund. It’s called In-Q-Tel, and yesterday its Chief Information Security Officer, Dan Geer, a world-weary man with white Wolverine sideburns, stepped forth from the shadows to give the keynote address at Black Hat. It was a…