Blog

    • UPI, a payments platform created by India's largest retail banks, has crossed 100M users and 1B transactions three-and-a-half-years after its launch (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

    Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: UPI, a payments platform created by India’s largest retail banks, has crossed 100M users and 1B transactions three-and-a-half-years after its launch  —  – Walmart, Paytm and others also vie in thriving payments market  — Competition is expected to intensify in Indian digital wallets UPI, a payments platform created by India's largest

    Read More
    • Japan-based Paidy, which lets people pay for online goods without using a credit card by offering them instant credit, raises a $83M Series C extension (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)

    Catherine Shu / TechCrunch: Japan-based Paidy, which lets people pay for online goods without using a credit card by offering them instant credit, raises a $83M Series C extension  —  Paidy, a Japanese financial tech startup that provides instant credit to consumers in Japan, announced today that it has raised a total of $143 million

    Read More
    • It’s ‘impossible to exist’ on Facebook as an NSFW artist

    Last year, Facebook began clamping down on ‘inappropriate content‘ by banning discussion around “sexual preference,” “sexual roles,” “breasts,” and “buttocks” on the site. The tech giant has now quietly updated its policies, under the guise of preventing “sexual solicitation,” and now restricts solicitation involving “sexual emoji or emoji strings” and nudity “including long shots of

    Read More
    • Investigation finds domestic workers in Kuwait are bought and sold online through Instagram, promoted via hashtags, and other apps on Play Store and App Store (BBC)

    BBC: Investigation finds domestic workers in Kuwait are bought and sold online through Instagram, promoted via hashtags, and other apps on Play Store and App Store  —  Drive around the streets of Kuwait and you won’t see these women.  They are behind closed doors, deprived of their basic rights … Investigation finds domestic workers in

    Read More
    • Cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX doxes users in mass email blunder

    Cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX has inadvertently doxed its users after someone at the company forgot to use blind copy (bcc) on a mass email, revealing, and potentially compromising, users‘ email addresses. “We are aware that some of our users have received a general user update email earlier today, which contained the email addresses of other users,” a statement issued

    Read More
    • Microsoft says authorities in Dehradun, India were able to automate hundreds of driver license tests in recent weeks by using its AI-based project called HAMS (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

    Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Microsoft says authorities in Dehradun, India were able to automate hundreds of driver license tests in recent weeks by using its AI-based project called HAMS  —  An American giant may have figured out a way to simplify the tedious procedure of issuing driver’s licenses. Microsoft says authorities in Dehradun, India were

    Read More
    • Chinese state-backed hackers are compromising telecom operators to steal text messages

    APT41, one of China’s prolific hacking groups has developed a new kind of malware that can steal SMS messages from a cellular network. According to latest research by cybersecurity vendor FireEye, the state-backed threat actor — notorious for a barrage of espionage operations against geopolitical adversaries — developed the capabilities to monitor and save SMS

    Read More