In 1972, NASA launched two twin probes, called Pioneer 10 and 11. These predecessors to the Voyager mission were the first to visit Jupiter and Saturn and to achieve the escape velocity required to leave the solar system (which they will both do one day, many thousands of years from now). The Pioneer probes were…

The theme of this week is by now a familiar one: "Things keep getting worse." Starting with the security of countless so-called real time operating systems that all share some variation on the same decades-old code. That makes them all vulnerable to the set of Urgent/11 vulnerabilities we had reported on just the other week.…

I recently decided to purchase a phone that had more of what I wanted (battery life!) and less of what I didn't (news alerts, social media notifications, emails). I used to have a device exactly like this—a flip phone that could last a week on a single charge, and that didn't act like a supercomputer…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the new Extra Crunch series where we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything…

In a wide-ranging conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last week, Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann made light of the company’s lack of IPO documents. The San…

Dr. Stuart Russell, a distinguished AI researcher and computer scientist at UC Berkeley, believes there is a fundamental and potentially civilization-ending shortcoming in the “standard model” of AI, which is…

(UC Berkeley’s Dr. Stuart Russell’s new book, “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, goes on sale Oct. 8. I’ve written a review, “Human Compatible” is a provocative…

The U.S. government may not be able to prevent another global cyberattack like WannaCry, a senior cybersecurity official has said. Jeanette Manfra, the assistant director for cybersecurity for Homeland Security’s…

Editor’s Note This week, we hosted 23 panels on all aspects of building startups on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Thanks to the thousands of attendees who…

The tech industry has won at capitalism. From America to China, from Amazon to Alibaba, from Alphabet to Tencent, the most valuable and most dynamic companies in the world are…