LastPass says hackers stole customers’ password vaults It's time to start changing your passwords Password manager giant LastPass has confirmed that cybercriminals stole its customers’ encrypted password vaults, which store its customers’ passwords and other secrets, in a data breach earlier this year. In an updated blog post on its disclosure, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said the intruders took a c

YC advises founders to ‘plan for the worst’ amid market teardown Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley kingmaker, is advising its portfolio founders to “plan for the worst” as startups across the globe scramble to navigate a sharp reversal after a 13-year bull run. The investment firm — whose early backings include investments in Dropbox, Coinbase, Airbnb and Reddit — this week suggested startups cut the

Several major iOS apps crashing at launch due to Facebook SDK issues A number of popular apps including Spotify, GroupMe, Pinterest and TikTok were fielding user iOS crash reports Wednesday evening, the result of an apparent issues with Facebook’s SDK according to a lengthy GitHub thread on the topic. Downdetector logged tens of thousands of user crash reports on Spotify between 3:30 and 5:30 pm P

Enterprise Zoom freezes feature development to fix security and privacy issues Zoom has been widely criticized over the past couple of weeks for terrible security, a poorly designed screensharing feature, misleading dark patterns, fake end-to-end-encryption claims and an incomplete privacy policy. Despite that, the video conferencing service has attracted a ton of new users thanks to the coronavir

Startups Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and (more generally) tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buyi

Media & Entertainment Twitter takes down ‘a large number’ of Chinese-language accounts ahead of Tiananmen Square anniversary Twitter has suspended a large number of Chinese-language user accounts, including those belonging to critics of China’s government. It seems like a particularly ill-timed move, occurring just days before thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4. “A la

Microsoft launches Visual Studio Online, an online code editor Microsoft today announced the private preview launch of Visual Studio Online, an online code editor the company is positioning as a companion to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. The service is based on the Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s popular free and open-source desktop code editor. This means Visual Studio Online will also su

Microsoft today announced a new open-source project for React Native developers who want to target Windows. “React Native for Windows,” as the project is unsurprisingly called, is meant to be a new ‘performance-oriented’ implementation of React for Windows under the MIT License. Being able to target Windows using React Native, a framework for cross-platform development that came out of Facebook, i

A new CSS-based web attack will crash and restart your iPhone A security researcher has found a new way to crash and restart any iPhone — with just a few lines of code. Sabri Haddouche tweeted a proof-of-concept webpage with just 15 lines of code which, if visited, will crash and restart an iPhone or iPad. Those on macOS may also see Safari freeze when opening the link. The code exploits a weaknes

With the launch of the new Gmail, the writing was on the wall, but today Google made it official: Inbox by Gmail, the company’s experimental email client for Gmail, will shut down at the end of March 2019. Google says it’s making this change to put its focus “solely on Gmail.” While that makes sense, it’s a shame to see Inbox sail into the setting sun, given that it pioneered many of the features

Here are Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ tips about inspiration, work-life balance, and how to be an inventor. Oh, and how it felt getting doused with champagne at his rocket landing. The world’s richest person displayed an unprecedented level of candor during an interview at invite-only getaway Summit Series in Los Angeles this weekend. Why did Jeff get so vulnerable? Because his little brother Mark Bezos

MongoDB, a database software company based in New York, has filed to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission as it continues to burn a ton of cash despite its revenue almost doubling year-over-year. The company, which provides open-source database software that became very attractive among early-stage startups, is one of a myriad of companies that have sought to go public by building

The Libreboot T400 doesn’t look like much. It’s basically a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad with the traditional Lenovo/IBM pointer nubbin and a small touchpad. It’s a plain black laptop, as familiar as any luggable assigned to a cubicle warrior on the road. But, under the hood, you have a machine that fights for freedom. The T400 runs Libreboot, a free and open BIOS and the Trisquel GNU/Linux OS. Bot

IBM announced today that it was updating its Quantum Experience cloud with a new API that it hopes will increase the abilities of researchers and other interested parties to build more sophisticated applications with its experimental quantum computing system. Last May, IBM opened up its 5 qubit computer in its NY state labs to the public in the form of a cloud service. The hope was that by providi

Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch’s weekend columnist since 2010. I have long held that Atlassian’s ubiquitous JIRA bug-tracker / feature-planner serves a valuable purpose in the software biz: it gives project teams a common enemy to bond together against. Alas, i