Latest Robots: VB Daily | January 25 - Advertising is about to get more interesting with Google's Topics API 🔴🟡🔵

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The Lead

[1] Google Privacy Sandbox Initiative ushers in interest-based advertising with Topics API

[2] SentinelOne XDR enables growing list of top incident response firms

[3] Linux vulnerability can be 'easily exploited' for local privilege escalation

The Follow

[1] Today, Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative, which is designed to improve web privacy for users, announced the launch of the Topics API for interest-based advertising. The API enables a user's web browser to analyze their browsing history and determine what topics represent their top interests.

Then, once the user visits a website, the Topics API will select three of those topics to share with the site and its advertising partners. The web browser can only store topics for a maximum of three weeks, and Google Chrome users will have the option to view the topics associated with them, remove them, or to disable the feature completely.

The announcement comes ahead of Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome. It will give consumers greater control over their data by storing it on their local device, while still ensuring that advertisers have access to sufficient information to deliver a relevant experience. >> Read more.

[2] SentinelOne today announced it has expanded the ranks of its incident response partners with a prominent addition, KPMG, which is using the vendor's Singularity XDR platform to bring greater automation to its cyber investigations for customers.

The company shared with VentureBeat that it now has more than 130 incident response (IR) partners in total, up from 29 at the beginning of 2021. The cybersecurity firm — which went public last June and has a market capitalization above $11 billion — began providing technology to enable IR partners in 2020.

SentinelOne's Scalyr XDR technology brings capabilities for rapidly ingesting and correlating data from endpoints, making it possible for IR investigators to more easily search and query the data, according to the company. >> Read more.

[3] A newly disclosed vulnerability in a widely installed Linux program can be easily exploited for local privilege escalation, researchers from cyber firm Qualys said today.

The memory corruption vulnerability (CVE-2021-4034) — which affects polkit's pkexec — isn't remotely exploitable. However, it can be "quickly" exploited to acquire root privileges, the researchers said in a blog post. "This easily exploited vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain full root privileges on a vulnerable host by exploiting this vulnerability in its default configuration," the Qualys researchers said in the post.

In Unix-like operating systems, polkit is used to control system-wide privileges. Polkit's pkexec is a program that enables an authorized user to execute commands as a different user. >> Read more.

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Study: B2B Events Get a Long-Needed Digital Makeover

Cvent commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current and future state of B2B event planning. Forrester conducted a global online survey with 505 respondents and seven interviews with marketers and event planners to explore this topic. Access the report to learn about shared challenges marketers are facing, the future of events, and where organizations are investing to grow their event practices. Read B2B Events Get a Long-Needed Digital Makeover.

The Funding Breakdown

SparkCognition nabs $123M - SparkCognition, which uses AI to analyze, optimize, and learn from customers' data to predict future outcomes, optimize processes, and ostensibly prevent cyberattacks, will put the new capital toward planned marketing, sales, and R&D efforts. The financing follows a record year of growth for SparkCognition, with revenue increasing 90% year over year and booking climbing by five times.
InstaDeep raises $100M - InstaDeep, a London-based firm that bills its products — which leverage AI to solve problems across logistics, energy, biology, and electronic design — as "decision-making" tools, will use the funding to further strengthen its enterprise offerings and capabilities utilizing AI.
Darwinbox nabs $72M - Darwinbox, which offers HR software designed to help enterprises automate the employee lifecycle, plans to put the latest funding raised toward further expansion of its all-in-one HR cloud software solution. "With the pandemic and the world going to remote work, companies are left with truly little choice but to rethink their talent strategy and embrace digital transformation," Darwinbox's CEO Rohit Chennamaneni said.
Hunters gets $68M - Hunters, which provides a cloud-based security operations center (SOC) platform, now ingests and correlates data from 70 other vendors — enabling customers to prioritize the biggest cyber threats across their different tools. The company will use the new capital to further strengthen its cloud-driven security operations platform.
Scratchpad secures $33M - Scratchpad, a company that has built a modern productivity workspace on top of Salesforce, will use the newly raised capital to capitalize on recent momentum which has seen it bring a slew of new products to market. These include Scratchpad Command, which allows users to update Salesforce from anywhere on the web; a new unified workspace for calendar, sales notes, and Salesforce; and a workspace commenting system for sales teams.
Verusen lands $25M - "Verusen exists to build the intelligent, connected supply chain," CEO Paul Noble says. "Our AI platform has saved supply chain companies around the world millions in wasted working capital caused by their disparate data, processes, and systems — which has been further aggravated as a result of the pandemic." The company will use the funding to expand its supply chain analytics platform.

A message from Cvent

B2B Events Get a Long-Needed Digital Makeover

The Buzz

Christoph Molnar

@ChristophMolnar

A lot of machine learning research has detached itself from solving real problems, and created their own "benchmark-islands".

How does this happen? And why are researchers not escaping this pattern?

A thread 🧵 https://t.co/uggKd7RsJf

1:47 AM - 24 Jan 2022

Amos Toh

@AmosToh

emerging from my writing hole to applaud @AdaLovelaceInst for their brilliantly clear taxonomy of regulatory tools available to policymakers looking to hold algorithmic systems accountable to the public interest

https://t.co/pMt69aSzK6

10:14 AM - 19 Jan 2022

Sources Say

Sources say the semiconductor industry is expected to reach $600 billion in 2022. A new report by Deloitte predicts that companies will hit historic revenue highs this year, despite chip shortages and supply chain issues. For the first time, the industry is expected to earn over $600 billion globally, despite an anticipated slowing in growth. In 2022, growth is predicted to reach 10%, compared to 25% growth in 2021.

It is predicted that this sector will continue to see strong growth — even as it takes steps to address chip shortages, manage lead times with suppliers and end customers, build manufacturing capacity locally or nearshore, hire specialized engineering and design talent, and bolster its supply networks using advanced digital solutions.

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