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How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products.

Microsoft appears likely to solidify its No. 2 spot behind Amazon in 2019.

The decision reportedly occurred after Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook, but it’s not confirmed

DeepMasterPrints created by a machine learning technique have error rate of only one in five

TechCrunch has obtained an internal memo published by Facebook’s outgoing head of public policy Elliot Schrage in which he blames himself for hiring PR firm Definers. He admits to having the company push negative narratives about competitors, but says Facebook did not ask or pay Definers to publish fake news. COO Sheryl Sandberg left a […]

Valve’s Steam Link wireless in-home PC game streaming gadget is nearly sold out; here’s your last chance to get it for $2.50

The surge in popularity of services like 23andMe and Ancestry means that more and more people are unearthing long-buried connections and surprises in their ancestry.

My wife and I both have a PM account. Today, I sent her a lengthy email which was quite complex (I'm a writer and she was proofreading...

Amazon’s renowned secrecy encompasses its response to a new security issue, withholding info that could help victims protect themselves. Amazon emailed users Tuesday, warning them that it exposed an unknown number of customer email addresses after a “technical error” on its website. When reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch that the issue exposed […]

China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.

Duplex in Google Assistant is finally rolling out to the public. It's available for a small group of Google Pixel users in select cities.

Get your lost phone's pinpoint location, provided Google has the right map data.

Documents alleged to contain revelations on data and privacy controls that led to Cambridge Analytica scandal

Solving the Atari games Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall has been a long-standing AI grand challenge. These games represent a broad class of challenging, real-world problems called “hard-exploration problems,” where an agent has to learn complex tasks with very infrequent or deceptive feedback. Previous state-of-the-art algorithms obtained at most 17,500 points on Montezuma's Revenge (barely solving level 1) and no algorithm has managed to score even a single point on Pitfall.

This video introduces Go-Explore, a new family of algorithms capable of achieving scores over 2,000,000 on Montezuma’s Revenge and over 23,000 on Pitfall! Go-Explore reliably solves all three unique levels of Montezuma’s Revenge, and then generalizes to the nearly-identical subsequent levels (which only differ in the timing of events and the score on the screen). We have even seen it reach level 159!

We describe Go-Explore here: eng.uber.com/go-explore

Authors: Adrien Ecoffet, Joost Huizinga, Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley, and Jeff…

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of business software. TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources that Parallels, the virtualization software specialist with millions of users, is getting acquired by Corel, the Canadian company behind design apps like CorelDraw and productivity apps like WordPerfect that once competed heavily with Microsoft. Employees at Parallels were briefed […]

We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly, Google’s effort to create a…

Did you know that there are currently thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth? I certainly did not, and would have guessed a few hundred at most. Today, high school and college students design, fabricate, and launch nano-, pico-, and even femto-satellites such as CubeSats, PocketQubes, and SunCubes. On the commercial side, organizations of any size […]

The Boring Company’s big dig plans hit a snag this week, as the Elon Musk-led project announced that it would abandon plans to dig a massive tunnel beneath Los Angeles’ 405 freeway and Sepulveda Boulevard. Musk and co. debuted the plan to drill on L.A.’s Westside last year, but ultimately reversed course after local lawsuits […]

Money lenders offering services like Afterpay are demanding that customers send naked selfies as collateral.