What to watch this week: Free VPN leaked 360 million pieces of user data; Twitter Trust and Security Director announced his resignation; Xuanya International announced the launch of OrangeGPT; Amazon Japan will open two new logistics centers in the Kanto region; Sentence Interactive completed millions of dollars Pre-A round of financing...
data security
Free VPN Leaks 360 Million User Data
Recently, security researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered that the popular free VPN service SuperVPN publicly exposed a database without password protection, leaking more than 360 million pieces of user data, with a total size of 133GB. The records included a wide range of sensitive information, including user email addresses, origin IP addresses, geolocation data, and server usage records.
Additionally, the database leaked keys, unique application user ID numbers, and UUID numbers, which can be used to identify more useful information. Meanwhile, other information found in the database included phone or device model, operating system, internet connection type and VPN app version. Also, chargeback requests and paid account details were included in the breach.
While SuperVPN claims that it does not store user logs, the leaked data shows otherwise and contradicts the company's policy. It also shows that "almost every major free VPN service is a glorified data farm." (Source: GoUpSec)
Tesla's Massive Data Breach
Recently, according to the German "Handelsblatt" report, Tesla failed to adequately protect the data of customers, employees and business partners, resulting in a leak, and received thousands of customer complaints about the company's driver assistance system.
The report cites a whistleblower leaking 100GB of confidential data containing more than 100,000 former and current employee names, as well as multiple tables with private email addresses, phone numbers, employee salaries, customers' banking details and secret details of production , including the social security number of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
According to reports, such an action would violate the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If such violations are proven to have occurred, Tesla could be fined as much as 4 percent of its annual sales, or 3.26 billion euros ($3.5 billion). (Source: Interface News)
work those things
Twitter trust and safety chief Ella Irwin resigns
June 2 news, according to Reuters, Twitter's director of trust and safety Ella Irwin announced her resignation on Thursday, but she refused to disclose the reasons for her resignation, only saying that she believed that she was very loyal to the company during her tenure.
Irwin joined Twitter in June last year and took over from Yoel Roth in November as the head of the trust and safety team, mainly responsible for supervising and reviewing platform content. (Source: IT House)
Ant Group's former international business CRO Gu Ming returned to Xinye Technology
Gu Ming, who previously left Xinye Technology and joined Ant Group, recently returned to Xinye Technology as the CEO of the Indonesian business and reported directly to the group CEO Li Tiezheng. It is understood that Gu Ming joined Xinye Technology’s predecessor, Paipaidai, in 2014, and successively served as risk director, chief risk officer and chief data officer; in 2021, Gu Ming joined Ant Group as the international business CRO (chief risk officer). The second time was that he returned to Xinye Technology after two years. (Source: Shanghai Securities News)
Zhihu: CTO Dahai Li concurrently serves as CEO of Facewall Smart
Zhihu announced that the company's partner and CTO Dahai Li will be the director and CEO of Zhihu's invested company, Facewall Intelligence, and will be responsible for the strategic development and daily operation management of Facewall Intelligence. At the same time, Li Dahai continues to serve as the executive director and CTO of Zhihu, leading the technological development of Zhihu, closely linking the two companies, accelerating the research and development process in the field of large models and launching deeper cooperation. (Source: 36 krypton)
industry
Xuanya International announced the launch of OrangeGPT
Recently, Xuanya International officially announced that it will build OrangeGPT around the application scenarios related to its main business, relying on closed-source and open-source GPT artificial intelligence underlying key technologies. It is expected that version 1.0 will start internal testing in the near future. (Source: Securities Times)
E-commerce/logistics matters
Amazon Japan to open two new fulfillment centers in the Kanto region
According to news on June 2, it is reported that Amazon Japan has announced that it will open two new logistics centers in the Kanto region, with a total construction area of about 200,000 square meters. Amazon will employ more than 3,000 people at the two fulfillment centers, including regional managers, workplace safety and health managers, product quality managers, equipment maintenance managers and product picking, packaging and shipping personnel. The two new fulfillment centers are scheduled to open in August 2023, and Amazon is currently hiring people to work at the two bases. (Source: E-commerce News)
Investment and financing / mergers and acquisitions
Sentence Interactive Completes Millions of Dollars in Pre-A Round of Financing
Beijing Sentence Interactive Technology Co., Ltd. has completed the pre-A round of financing of several million US dollars, led by Zhencheng Investment, followed by Qiji Chuangtan. This round of financing is mainly used to build a next-generation conversational marketing cloud driven by large models. According to the official introduction, Sentence Interactive was established in 2019 and focuses on RPA+AI. It is an IM-based cross-platform (corporate WeChat, Feishu, 5G news, WhatsApp, Xiaohongshu, etc.) marketing cloud vendor. (Source: 36 krypton)
AI startup MiniMax to raise more than $250 million
According to foreign media reports, people familiar with the matter said that MiniMax, a Chinese AI startup focusing on general-purpose large-scale models, is about to complete a round of financing of more than 250 million U.S. dollars, and its valuation is expected to reach nearly 1.2 billion U.S. dollars. The company is developing an AI solution similar to ChatGPT. The latest funding round for MiniMax has attracted new investors, including entities linked to Tencent, two sources familiar with the matter said. It is understood that MiniMax attracted Mihayou to participate in the previous financing. Other early investors include Yunqi Capital and Mingshi Capital. (Source: interface)
Feilun Technology completed a new round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan
The real-time data warehouse company "Flywheel Technology" has recently completed a new round of financing. The amount of this round of financing is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the investors have not yet disclosed it. According to reports, the core business of Flywheel Technology includes the development and promotion of Apache Doris, an open source real-time data warehouse, providing technical support and commercial services for Apache Doris users, and launching the SelectDB commercial product based on the Apache Doris kernel. (Source: 36 krypton)