Launch Center Pro now lets you tap stickers to launch tasks on your iPhone

Before there were Siri Shortcuts, there was Launch Center Pro — a clever iOS utility that for years has allowed iPhone users to automate more complex tasks by creating shortcuts. For example, you could search Yelp for the nearest coffee shop, jump straight to the camera in Instagram or message a loved one, among other things — and all right from a widget in the Notification Center. Now, the company has come up with a new twist on app automation. Instead of just widgets and buttons to tap, the app has rolled out support for NFC stickers.

NFC, if you’re unfamiliar, is the same technology that powers wireless payments, like Apple Pay.

And at long last, with the release of iOS 12 this fall, Apple opened up NFC capabilities to app developers. This means iPhone owners with newer model devices can tap NFC tags to trigger actions — like app launches. It currently works on iPhone XS, XS Max and XR. (iPhone 7 and newer can only use in-app NFC scanning, not NFC tags.)

Launch Center Pro was quick to take advantage of this new functionality by creating NFC tags of its own, in the form of stickers.

The stickers, which are sold online and in the app, add a physical link to digital tasks, explains Launch Center Pro developer David Barnard.

“I’ve heard it said that if your goal is to run every morning, put your running shoes next to your bed so you see them every morning,” he says. “You can still choose to not go running, but the shoes are a reminder of the commitment you made to yourself. Same with the stickers; they provide that extra visual cue to take action — even if you could accomplish the same thing without the sticker,” Barnard adds.

Plus, the stickers are also a faster way to launch your tasks, compared with swiping to view then tapping on the Today View Widget on your device.

During the beta, testers used the stickers for a variety of tasks, like launching directions to their next event from a sticker placed in the car, or one that sent their ETA to their loved one and launched directions home. Other testers put a sticker in the fridge to launch a shopping list to add new items to; or placed stickers around the home to trigger HomeKit shortcuts; or placed a sticker by their bedside to help them set alarms, and more.

Basically, anything you do all the time on your iPhone could be linked to one of the stickers.

The support for stickers is part of a broader 3.0 release, which also adds new features like themes, support for alternate app icons, advanced scheduling of tasks (tasks can now have multiple schedules), support for “Add to Siri” and more.

Notably, the app is now shifting to a free-to-use business model, where a one-time purchase or subscription will unlock all the features.

For those who bought the paid app in the past, you can continue to use the features you paid for without a subscription, and only have to purchase access to the new 3.0 features you want to use. These can be bought as a one-time purchase, if you choose.

For new users, the app is $9.99/year or $30 as a one-time purchase to unlock all the features. For any sort of automation fans, it’s a worthy investment in saving yourself time.


Source: Tech Crunch

Cybersecurity and human rights

A cyberattack has the power to paralyze cellular communications; alter or erase information in computerized systems; prevent access to computer servers; and directly harm a country’s economy and security by attacking its electricity networks or banking system.

The necessity is clear for any country, but especially Israel with its unique security considerations, to maintain a cyber defense system. The creation of the unified Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), which includes the Israel Cyber Event Readiness Team (CERT-IL), side by side with other security agencies such as the Israeli NSA and Mossad within the Prime Minister’s Office, addresses this need. This is an important institution, and it therefore must have clearly defined legislative powers, goals and organizational structures.

What is interesting, though, is that although Israel is Startup Nation when it comes to innovation and development, it is sorely behind in legislation that deals with the growing dilemmas regarding the intersection between technology, human rights and democratic values. Most technological innovations in security and tracking systems used in social networks are developed out of the public eye. The unified INCD was established before legislation to regulate its activities was put in place.

To this end, the recent publishing of the first draft of a cyber law for Israel, designed to provide a legal framework for the activities of Israel’s cyber defense system, is welcomed. However, the content of the draft shows that the State is seeking to assume far wider powers than are needed to protect the public from cyberattacks. Part of the reason for this is that it is difficult at present to assess what cyberattacks could look like in the future, but another part is what seems to be a somewhat hidden policy of the government to use technology in order to increase their control over citizens’ activities.

According to the draft, the INCD, a division within the Prime Minister’s Office, will be able to routinely collect data from internet and cellular providers, government ministries, local authorities and government corporations in order to identify and thwart cyberattacks in real time. Yet the definition of “security relevant data” remains ambiguous, and is certainly much broader than the definitions laid out in IOC (Cyber Threat Indicator) in the American Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) passed in 2015.

The question is whether there is truly a need for all of this information — a record of all online activities and personal details we’ve shared with governmental agencies — to be collected in this way, and whether this is information that could potentially be used to create behavioral profiles that could be used against citizens. What, in effect, is the difference between gathering this data and wide-scale, unrestricted wiretapping? For the State to have access to such far-reaching information constitutes a real threat to citizens’ privacy and human rights on a larger scale.

In addition, should the drafted bill pass, INCD will have access to computers and the authority to collect and process information, all in the name of identifying cybersecurity infiltrators. This could include almost any information held by any private citizen or business. While the law mentions the need to respect the right to privacy, it also permits activities that do not infringe upon this right “more than is necessary” — a frighteningly vague limitation. In addition, there do not seem to be sufficient limits on the use of the information collected. How long can it be stored? Can it be passed from INCD to the police, or to other agencies?

We would not be global leaders in cyber and technology without simultaneously protecting fundamental human rights.

This bill endows the INCD with supreme regulatory powers that supersede those of the police, the Privacy Protection Authorities and others. The INCD even has the capacity to withdraw licenses awarded to commercial institutions. One obvious outcome of this is that it will lead to a lack of cooperation between the different authorities. The million-dollar question is, of course, when do these powers come into play? And the answer, again, is worrying: “Whenever necessary in order to defend a ‘vital interest.’”

This might mean protecting the country’s security or saving human life, but according to the draft, it also includes “the proper functioning of organizations that provide services on a significant scale.” Does this also mean a cyberattack on a large clothing chain? And if so, is this justified?

Classic cybersecurity, as we know it, deals mainly with potential damage to tangible infrastructure. However, the proposed bill allows the prime minister to add more cyberthreats to this list at his will. Which begs the question: What will happen when a prime minister adds something along the lines of “harming the public consciousness by presenting arguments on social networks”? or “disseminating fake news”? Do we really want the INCD to be empowered to deal with such cases in addition to the Israeli NSA?

Moreover, the draft makes scant mention of oversight bodies to regulate the use of such broad powers, and grants the head of INCD the power to maintain a veil of secrecy when attacks are being discovered. It certainly makes sense not to publicize the existence of a cyberattack until it is under control — in order to prevent additional damage — but assume that you are a patient in a hospital in which a cyberattack has created confusion in the administration of medicines. How long would you want this to be kept secret? And what of bank account holders, or people who have registered for a dating site, whose details have been compromised?

The proposed bill endows the INCD with unchecked power, especially when compared with other democracies. The abuse of such power and Edward Snowden’s exposure of PRISM (the NSA’s intrusive surveillance program) should serve as a warning to us all, especially here in Israel. Today, the right to privacy can no longer be seen as the right to control one’s personal data as laid out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Rather, the right to privacy is understood as a prerequisite condition for other human rights. While the bill is important, one cannot help but think that it may be the first stage in an unprecedented “big brother” scenario.

Legislators have to take the time to study cyber issues and the threats and opportunities that they pose. It is crucial that those who decide whether or not to pass the bill gain a deep understanding of the meaning of the right to privacy in a digital world. This knowledge will allow them to create a more balanced piece of legislation and in turn protect the rights of Israeli citizens.

The law states that one of its primary goals is to “advance Israel as a global leader in the field of cyber security.” Yet let us not forget that in a small country like Israel, driven by creativity, independence and thinking out-of-the-box, we would not be global leaders in cyber and technology without simultaneously protecting fundamental human rights.


Source: Tech Crunch

An inside look at Rivian’s EV ambitions from AI batteries to electric jet skis

For a CEO who insists his electric vehicle startup doesn’t want to be Tesla, Rivian founder RJ Scaringe can sound a lot like Elon Musk.

Just weeks before unveiling Rivian’s first vehicles — an all-electric pickup and a seven-seater SUV — at the LA Auto Show last month, Scaringe promised an impressive new battery technology and speculated about an electric jet-ski. He’s made other bold claims à la Musk, including that his company had developed an artificial intelligence charging system that “allows the battery to last … about three times longer than a traditional battery.”

There’s a method to, and a reason for, Scaringe’s promotional madness.

It’s a tough time to launch an EV startup. With a recession lurking around the corner and mainstream automakers promising to accelerate into the space, Rivian needs to show more than just a stylish brand and a half-empty bank account. TechCrunch has learned that Scaringe has a technology roadmap that includes regular reveals of new features, vehicles and partners, to lure in new business and keep pre-order customers happy while they wait for delivery in 2020.

Rivian automaker badge

For a start, Rivian’s AI will observe how new owners of its vehicles drive and charge their cars, and then adjust various parameters to maximize battery longevity. This might include not fully charging the battery for people who tend to drive only short distances in a day, although it would never reduce the total range available, Scaringe later told TechCrunch.

“We don’t make drastic adjustments over time,” he said. “We do this slowly as we learn more about you.”

Although Rivian could not provide evidence of a tripling of battery life, an EV battery expert contacted by TechCrunch confirmed that smart charging strategies could slow the deterioration of lithium-ion packs to some extent.

Rivian’s “AI batteries” could be integrated into other applications, such as electric jet-skis, snowmobiles and tractors built by partners, Scaringe said recently at an Economic Development Council meeting near the startup’s assembly plant in Normal, Ill.

“A significant part of our business is leveraging the technology we built around batteries and battery control systems to help electrify the things that move on our planet,” he said.

Scaringe told TechCrunch that Rivian is in the process of negotiating strategic partnerships with companies that might take a stake in the startup, as well as use its batteries and powertrain in their products.

Trademark applications filed by Rivian in October suggest the company is also planning to expand its own vehicle line-up. As well as the R1T pickup and R1S SUV announced in LA, Rivian has reserved the vehicle names R1A, R1C, R2A, R2C, R2R and R2S.

Scaringe admitted that Rivian has four additional “adventure” vehicles on its immediate roadmap, all using the same battery and powertrain system (dubbed a “skateboard”) as its pickup and SUV. The next two vehicles would be quite a bit smaller than the launch duo, and possibly includes a rally car.  Rivian is not working on a sedan to compete with Tesla’s Model 3, Scaringe said.

Rivian chassis

Rivian also trademarked the terms “tank turn” and “tank steer,” referring to independently moving wheels that can enable extremely tight turns. Scaringe confirmed that this feature would be available on the R1S, the R1T, and future quad-drive vehicles.

All of these plans — from the multiple models and AI batteries to the strategic partnerships and triple battery life — are ambitious for a company that has yet to demonstrate a moving vehicle, and still about two years from producing its first vehicles.

A history of grand plans

But ambition has never been a problem for Scaringe. In 2010, he persuaded the state of Florida and Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency, to hand over $3.5 million to develop and produce a 60 miles per gallon sports car using advanced manufacturing techniques. Rivian even signed an agreement with NASA to test the high-speed car on the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center.

Scaringe promised a factory in Florida that would employ 1,200 people by 2015, with a new automotive engineering course at the Florida Institute of Technology to produce the skilled workers required. Rivian did complete an initial technology demonstrator vehicle but neither the factory nor the jobs materialized.

“Although we did not get the manufacturing, we’re still very excited about the technology,” Dale Ketchum, VP of Space Florida, told TechCrunch. “We remain optimistic that some of their operations and technology and job generation will eventually occur in Florida.”

Space Florida continues to hold stock warrants in Rivian, issued as part of its grant.

By 2013, Rivian had pivoted to developing electric vehicles in Michigan, California, the UK, and, following the purchase of an ex-Mitsubishi plant in Normal in 2017, Illinois. Rivian has sought public funds there, too. It negotiated nearly $50 million in state tax credits by promising to create 1000 new full-time jobs in Illinois in 2024, and a package of around $4m in local credits.

These include the city of Normal handing over $1 million in cash after Rivian invests $20 million of its own money to refurbish the factory. The town will also provide security and landscaping services for the plant, and even remove snow from its driveways and parking lots for two years.

A bet on job growth

But while the economic benefits of Rivian’s promised jobs lie in the future, Normal is having to tighten its belt today. In February, the town noted that property tax abatements granted to Rivian would reduce its 2018-2019 operating fund by $74,900 and its library fund by $32,200. In March, Normal postponed plans for a new library indefinitely. Scaringe says Rivian currently has just 65 Rivian employees at the Normal facility.

The company says that it has also raised $450 million in capital and debt financing from investors, including Sumitomo Corporation of Americas. Its largest shareholder is Saudi conglomerate Abdul Latif Jameel, whose initial investment Scaringe secured while working on a Master’s degree at MIT.

Following a generally positive reception of its electric pickup and SUV at the LA Auto Show, and a subsequent flurry of $1,000 pre-orders, Rivian now faces the trickier task of bringing them into production in just two years.

Scaringe has promised that both vehicles will be capable of Level 3 autonomous highway driving – something that Tesla also has promised, but has yet to deliver. Although Rivian’s self-driving team is based in Silicon Valley, the company has yet to apply for an autonomous vehicle testing permit from the California DMV.

Scaringe said the company is testing on public roads in California, but in a way that does not require a permit. “We took the decision to be very quiet in stealth and stay below the radar,” he said. “But we will probably have to file for a permit, possibly in the next year.”

Developing and integrating such advanced technology so quickly will put even more pressure on Rivian’s aggressive development cycle. The first big adventure for Rivian’s innovative vehicles won’t be muddy tracks or forest roads, but in factories that are still worryingly empty.


Source: Tech Crunch

WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem

WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by the app’s end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp’s automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include “Adult” sections that offer invite links to join rings of users trading images of child exploitation. TechCrunch has reviewed materials showing many of these groups are currently active.

TechCrunch’s investigation shows that Facebook could do more to police WhatsApp and remove this kind of content. Even without technical solutions that would require a weakening of encryption, WhatsApp’s moderators should have been able to find these groups and put a stop to them. Groups with names like “child porn only no adv” and “child porn xvideos” found on the group discovery app “Group Links For Whats” by Lisa Studio don’t even attempt to hide their nature. And a screenshot provided by anti-exploitation startup AntiToxin reveals active WhatsApp groups with names like “Children 💋👙👙” or “videos cp” — a known abbreviation for ‘child pornography’.

A screenshot from today of active child exploitation groups on WhatsApp. Phone numbers and photos redacted. Provided by AntiToxin.

Better manual investigation of these group discovery apps and WhatsApp itself should have immediately led these groups to be deleted and their members banned. While Facebook doubled its moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018 to crack down on election interference, bullying, and other policy violations, that staff does not moderate WhatsApp content. With just 300 employees, WhatsApp runs semi-independently, and the company confirms it handles its own moderation efforts. That’s proving inadequate for policing at 1.5 billion user community.

The findings from the NGOs Screen Savers and Netivei Reshe were written about today by The Financial Times, but TechCrunch is publishing the full report, their translated letter to Facebook translated emails with Facebook, their police report, plus the names of child pornography groups on WhatsApp and group discovery apps the lead to them listed above. An exploitation detection startup called AntiToxin has backed up the report, providing the screenshot above and saying it’s identified more than 1300 videos and photographs of minors involved in sexual acts on WhatsApp groups. Given that Tumblr’s app was recently temporarily removed from the Apple App Store for allegedly harboring child pornography, we’ve asked Apple if it will temporarily suspend WhatsApp but have not heard back. 

Uncovering A Nightmare

In July 2018, the NGOs became aware of the issue after a man reported to one of their hotlines that he’d seen hardcore pornography on WhatsApp. In October, they spent 20 days cataloging over 10 of the child pornography groups, their content, and the apps that allow people to find them.

The NGOs began contacting Facebook’s head of policy Jordana Cutler starting September 4th. They requested a meeting four times to discuss their findings. Cutler asked for email evidence but did not agree to a meeting, instead following Israeli law enforcement’s guidance to instruct researchers to contact the authorities. The NGO reported their findings to Israeli police but declined to provide Facebook with their research. WhatsApp only received their report and the screenshot of active child pornography groups today from TechCrunch.

Listings from a group discovery app of child exploitation groups on WhatsApp. URLs and photos have been redacted.

WhatsApp tells me it’s now investigating the groups visible from the research we provided. A Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch “Keeping people safe on Facebook is fundamental to the work of our teams around the world. We offered to work together with police in Israel to launch an investigation to stop this abuse.” A statement from the Israeli Police’s Head of the Child Online Protection Bureau Meir Hayoun notes that: “In past meetings with Jordana, I instructed her to always tell anyone who wanted to report any pedophile content to contact the Israeli police to report a complaint.”

A WhatsApp spokesperson tells me that while legal adult pornography is allowed on WhatsApp, it banned 130,000 accounts in a recent 10-day period for violating its policies against child exploitation. In a statement, WhatsApp wrote that:

WhatsApp has a zero-tolerance policy around child sexual abuse. We deploy our most advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, to scan profile photos and images in reported content, and actively ban accounts suspected of sharing this vile content. We also respond to law enforcement requests around the world and immediately report abuse to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Sadly, because both app stores and communications services are being misused to spread abusive content, technology companies must work together to stop it.”

But it’s that over-reliance on technology and subsequent under-staffing that seems to have allowed the problem to fester. AntiToxin’s CEO Zohar Levkovitz tells me “Can it be argued that Facebook has unwittingly growth-hacked pedophilia? Yes. As parents and tech executives we cannot remain complacent to that.”

Automated Moderation Doesn’t Cut It

WhatsApp introduced an invite link feature for groups in late 2016, making it much easier to discover and join groups without knowing any members. Competitors like Telegram had benefited as engagement in their public group chats rose. WhatsApp likely saw group invite links as an opportunity for growth, but didn’t allocate enough resources to monitor groups of strangers assembling around different topics. Apps sprung up to allow people to browse different groups by category. Some usage of these apps is legitimate, as people seek communities to discuss sports or entertainment. But many of these apps now feature “Adult” sections that can include invite links to both legal pornography sharing groups as well as illegal child exploitation content.

A WhatsApp spokesperson tells me that it scans all unencrypted information on its network — basically anything outside of chat threads themselves — including user profile photos, group profile photos, and group information. It seeks to match content against the PhotoDNA banks of indexed child pornography that many tech companies use to identify previously reported inappropriate imagery. If it find a match, that account, or that group and all of its members receive a lifetime ban from WhatsApp.

A WhatsApp group discovery app’s listings of child exploitation groups on WhatsApp

If imagery doesn’t match the database but is suspected of showing child exploitation, it’s manually reviewed. If found to be illegal, WhatsApp bans the accounts and/or groups, prevents it from being uploaded in the future, and reports the content and accounts to the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children. The one example group reported to WhatsApp by the Financial Times was already flagged for human review by its automated system, and was then banned along with all 256 members.

WhatsApp says it purposefully does not provide a search function for people or groups within its app, and does not encourage the publication of group invite links. It’s already working with Google and Apple to enforce its terms of service against apps like the child exploitation group discovery apps that abuse WhatsApp. Those kind of groups already can’t be found in Apple’s App Store, but remain available on Google Play. We’ve contacted Google Play to ask how it addresses illegal content discovery apps and whether Group Links For Whats by Lisa Studio will remain available, and will update if we hear back.

But the larger question is that if WhatsApp was already aware of these group discovery apps, why wasn’t it using them to track down and ban groups that violate its policies. A spokesperson claimed that group names with “CP” or other indicators of child exploitation are some of the signals it uses to hunt these groups, and that names in group discovery apps don’t necessarily correlate to the group names on WhatsApp. But TechCrunch then provided a screenshot showing active groups within WhatsApp as of this morning with names like “Children 💋👙👙” or “videos cp”. That shows that WhatsApp’s automated systems and lean staff are not enough to prevent the spread of illegal imagery.

The situation also raises questions about the tradeoffs of encryption as some governments like Australia seek to prevent its usage by messaging apps. The technology can protect free speech, improve the safety of political dissidents, and prevent censorship by both governments and tech platforms. However, it can also make detecting crime more difficult, exacerbating the harm caused to victims.

WhatsApp’s spokesperson tells me that it stands behind strong end-to-end encryption that protects conversations with loved ones, doctors, and more. They said there are plenty of good reasons for end-to-end encryption and it will continue to support it. Changing that in any way, even to aid catching those that exploit children, would be require a significant change to the privacy guarantees it’s given users. They suggested that on-device scanning for illegal content would have to be implemented by phone makers to prevent its spread without hampering encryption.

But for now, WhatsApp needs more human moderators willing to use proactive and unscalable manual investigation to address its child pornography problem. With Facebook earning billions in profit per quarter and staffing up its own moderation ranks, there’s no reason WhatsApp’s supposed autonomy should prevent it from applying adequate resources to the issue. WhatsApp sought to grow through big public groups, but failed to implement the necessary precautions to ensure they didn’t become havens for child exploitation. Tech companies like WhatsApp need to stop assuming cheap and efficient technological solutions are sufficient. If they want to make money off of huge user bases, they must be willing to pay to protect and police them.


Source: Tech Crunch

App downloads across iOS & Google Play up 10% to 113B in 2018, consumer spend tops $76B

The app economy is continuing to grow, both in terms of app downloads and consumer spending. According to preliminary year-end data shared by App Annie, it’s predicting the number of global app downloads in 2018 will surpass 113 billion, up 10 percent from last year. Consumer spending in apps has grown even quicker – it’s up 20 percent year-over-year to surpass $76 billion worldwide.

The app intelligence firm came to these figures by analyzing data across both Apple’s iOS App Store and Google Play, up until December 15, 2018. It doesn’t include the third-party Chinese app stores, which would make the figures even higher.

The rest of this month may see the numbers increase a bit – especially as people unwrap new smartphones over the holidays, then download and buy apps. However, the numbers should still be in the general ballpark. App Annie will release a full “State of Mobile” report in January, after the holidays conclude and the final numbers are crunched.

The firm attributed the continued increase in consumer spending to mobile games, which are the most popular and profitable gaming format, it says.

In 2018, the mobile gaming market matured with hits like Fortnite, PUBG, and Roblox taking advantage of more capable specs on smartphones, as well as the trend towards cross-platform gaming. App Annie analysts predict we’ll see more of the same in 2019, as smartphones continue to be capable of supporting more complex, console-quality multiplayer games than in years past.

On the flip side, hyper-casual games did well this year, too – even hitting the year-end top charts both in terms of downloads and consumer spend.

Subscriptions also helped to drive up consumer spend in 2018, with App Annie having already forecast the app stores (including third-party stores in China) will pass $122 billion in 2019, thanks to a combination of gaming and subscriptions driving the growth.

App Annie noted that mobile was sucking up more of people’s time in 2018, as well.

In 2018, the average smartphone user in the U.S. spent nearly 3 hours each day in apps, up 10 percent from 2017 and up 20 percent from 2016.

The firm released the Top Charts across both app stores for 2018, with Messenger receiving the most downloads out of all apps, excluding games, and Helix Jump being the most downloaded game. Fate/Grand Order generated the most revenue out of all games, while Netflix generated the most out of non-games.


Source: Tech Crunch

FBI kicks some of the worst ‘DDoS for hire’ sites off the internet

The FBI has seized the domains of 15 several high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) websites, after a co-ordinated effort by law enforcement and several tech companies.

Several seizure warrants granted by a California federal judge went into effect Thursday, removing several of these “booter” or “stresser” sites off the internet “as part of coordinated law enforcement action taken against illegal DDoS-for-hire services.” The orders were granted under federal seizure laws, and the domains were replaced with a federal notice.

Prosecutors have charged three men, Matthew Gatrel and Juan Martinez in California and David Bukoski in Alaska, with operating the sites, according to affidavits filed in three U.S. federal courts, which were unsealed Thursday.

“DDoS for hire services such as these pose a significant national threat,” U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder said in a statement. “Coordinated investigations and prosecutions such as these demonstrate the importance of cross-District collaboration and coordination with public sector partners.”

The FBI had assistance from the U.K.’s National Crime Agency and the Dutch national police, and the Justice Department named several companies, including Cloudflare, Flashpoint, and Google, for providing authorities with additional assistance.

In all, several sites were knocked offline — including downthem.org, netstress.org, quantumstress.net, vbooter.org and defcon.pro and more — which allowed would-be attackers to sign up and rent time and servers to launch large-scale bandwidth attacks against systems and servers.

DDoS attacks have long plagued the internet as a by-product of faster connection speeds and easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities in the underlying protocols that power the internet. Through its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), the FBI warned over a year ago of the risks from booter and stresser sites amid a wider concern about the increasing size and scale of powerful DDoS attacks. While many use booter and stresser sites for legitimate services — such as to test the resilience of a corporate network from DDoS attacks — many have used them to launch large-scale attacks that can knock networks offline. When those networks support apps and services, those too can face downtime — in some cases affecting millions of users.

Some of the sites named in the indictments reported attacks exceeding 40 gigabits per second, large enough to knock some websites offline for a period of time.

Specifically in the complaint, the Justice Department accused Downthem had more than 2,000 customer subscriptions, and had been used to carry out over 200,000 attacks.

But booter sites have largely been put to the wayside for larger attacks, such as the botnet-powered attack that knocked Dyn, a major internet powerhouse relied on by many tech companies, offline.

Thursday’s seizures mark the latest in a string of law enforcement action aimed at booter services. Earlier this year, U.S. and European authorities took down webstresser.org which prosecutors claimed to help launch more than six million attacks,

When reached, the FBI did not comment beyond the Justice Department’s statement.


Source: Tech Crunch

This project is mapping every solar panel in the country using machine learning

Renewable energy is the future, but at present no one is tracking just who’s got solar panels on their roof, in their back yard, or a shared neighborhood installation. Fortunately, solar panels generally work best when exposed to the light. That makes them easy to spot, and count, from orbit — which is just what the DeepSolar project is doing.

There are a number of initiatives for collecting this information — some regulated, some voluntary, some automated. But none of them is comprehensive enough or accurate enough to base policy or business decisions on at a national or state level.

Stanford engineers (mechanical and civil, respectively) Arun Majumdar and Ram Rajagopal decided to remedy this with what seems like, in retrospect, rather an obvious solution.

Machine learning systems are great at looking at images and finding objects they’ve been “trained” to recognize, whether it’s cats, faces, or cars… so why not solar panels?

Their team, including grad students Jiafan Yu and Zhecheng Wang, put together an image recognition machine learning agent trained on hundreds of thousands of satellite images. The model learns both to identify the presence of solar panels in an image, and to find the shape and area of those panels.

Having evaluated the model on nearly a hundred thousand other randomly sampled satellite images of the U.S., they found they achieved an accuracy of about 90 percent (slightly more or less depending on how it’s measured), which is well ahead of other models, and it estimated cell size with only about a 3 percent error. (Its main weakness is very small installations, Rajagopal told me, but this is partially due to the limits of the imagery.)

The team then put the model to work chewing through over a billion image tiles covering as much of the lower 48 states as they could find suitable imagery for. That excludes quite a bit of area, but consider that much of that is, for example, mountains. Not a lot of solar installations there, and few people are trying to put up cells in national parks.

All in all it’s about 6 percent of the actual country — but Rajagopal pointed out that urban areas comprise only about 3.5 percent, so this covers all of them and more. He estimated that perhaps perhaps 5 percent of installations are in the areas the system has yet to process (but is working on).

Scanning took a whole month, but at the end the model had found 1.47 million individual solar installations (which could be a few panels on a roof or a whole solar farm). That’s many more than have been counted by other efforts, and the most successful of those didn’t come with the exact location, as DeepSolar’s data does.

Basic plotting of this data produces all kinds of interesting new info. You can compare solar installation density at the state, county, census tract, or even square mile level and compare that to all kinds of other metrics — average sunny days per year, household income, voting preference, and so on.

A couple interesting findings: Only 4 percent of all census tracts (roughly 3,000 out of 75,000) had more than 100 residential-scale solar systems, meaning installations are highly concentrated. Residential solar made up 87 percent of the total installation count, but with a median size of around 25 square meters, only 34 percent of the total solar cell surface area.

Peak deployment density can be found where there are about a thousand people per square mile — think a small town or suburb, not a major city. And there’s a sort of inflection point at which people start installing: when an area receives more than 4.5 kWh per square meter per day of solar radiation. How that corresponds to weather, location, exposure and so on is a more complicated question.

This and other demographics are all good information to know if you want to invest in solar, since they basically tell you where it’s justified or needed.

“We have created and released a website where you can play with the data at the aggregated level (we are keeping it at census tract level) to respect the privacy of consumers,” Rajagopal said. “We are exploring how to make individual detections public while respecting privacy (perhaps by encouraging public participation and crowdsourcing).”

“We decided to share all of the work in open source to encourage others in industry and academia to utilize both the method as well as the data to produce more insights. We feel that changes need to happen fast, and this is one of the ways to aid in that. Perhaps in the future, services can be built around this type of data,” he continued.

Plans are underway to expand the service to the rest of the U.S. and other countries as well. The data is available to peruse here, or here as a map; the team’s paper describing the project was published today in the journal Joule.


Source: Tech Crunch

Coinbase’s Earn.com becomes a crypto webinar with crypto rewards

Coinbase acquired Earn.com for at least $120 million back in April. And the company now plans to transform Earn.com into Coinbase Earn, a website with educational content to learn more about cryptocurrencies. Users who complete those classes will earn tokens.

Coinbase bought Earn.com partly so that it could appoint Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as Coinbase’s CTO. The previous iteration of Earn.com wasn’t a priority for Coinbase.

Earn.com started as a service where you can contact busy people for a small fee. Busy people would get paid in cryptocurrencies to accept those requests. The platform quickly became a way to massively contact Earn.com’s user base for initial coin offerings and airdrops.

Coinbase Earn is launching today in private beta. But at the time of this article, the new Coinbase Earn service is not live. Some Coinbase users will receive an invitation to the service. The company says that educational content will go beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. Developing education pages for obscure cryptocurrencies makes sense as Coinbase plans to add dozens of cryptocurrencies over the coming months.

At first, there is just one track. Users can learn more about 0x (ZRX), a protocol that lets you create decentralized exchanges. Cryptocurrency trades can be executed without a centralized exchange thanks to 0x .

0x content includes video lessons and quizzes — and yes, writing this makes me feel like it’s 2005 and webinars are cool again. Even if you’re not invited to Coinbase Earn, you can view the content. But those who are part of Coinbase Earn will receive a small amount of ZRX at the end of the track.

Coinbase had previously launched a learning hub to understand the basics of cryptocurrencies.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.


Source: Tech Crunch

With today’s IPO sinking, a year of highs and lows for SoftBank

If there was a word that dominated startup and tech news coverage this year, it was SoftBank. The Japanese telecom conglomerate’s Vision Fund pushed out a prodigious amount of capital this year — quite literally billions of dollars — into companies as diverse as a molecular manufacturer (Zymergen) and a robotic pizza delivery business (Zume Pizza). It was a year of highs as its Flipkart transaction produced billions in returns, as well as a year of incredible lows, what with the crisis over Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Saudi Arabia is the largest investor in the Vision Fund.

But the Vision Fund is only part of the SoftBank story this year. The company’s mobile unit started trading today on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (ticker: 9434), the second largest IPO of all time after Alibaba, raising $23.6 billion. But after weeks of pushing the stock to Japanese retail stock investors, those same consumers dumped the stock upon its debut, dropping by 15% from its debut at ¥1,463 to its close at ¥1,282. That’s the second worst IPO performance this decade for a Japanese company.

Highs and lows come with any ambitious project, and certainly for Masayoshi Son, the founder and chairman of SoftBank Group, nothing — not even piles of debt — will stand in his way.

Today, Arman and I wanted to look back at SoftBank’s year, and so we’ve compiled ten areas for analysis around the group’s telco business, its Vision Fund, and its other major investments (Sprint, Nvidia, Arm, and Alibaba).

SoftBank: The Telecom

1. Its IPO did what it had to do (raising money), but bad early performance will be a challenge for 2019

Ken Miyauchi, president and chief executive officer of SoftBank Corp., strikes the trading bell during the company’s listing ceremony at the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images

At its core, SoftBank Group is fundamentally a telecom, and the third-largest player in the Japanese market. Masayoshi Son has for years wanted to transform SoftBank from a mature telco player into a leading investment house for funding the next-generation of technology companies.

There’s just one problem: SoftBank is sitting on piles of debt. As Arman and I wrote about a few weeks ago:

The bigger number though is sitting on the liabilities side of the company’s balance sheet. As of the end of September, SoftBank had around 18 trillion yen, or about $158.8 billion of current and non-current interest-bearing debt. That’s more than six times the amount the company earns on an operating basis, and just slightly less than the public debt held by Pakistan.

And though SoftBank’s sky-high debt balance tends to be a secondary focus in the company’s media coverage, it’s a figure that SoftBank’s top brass is well aware of, and quite comfortable with. When discussing the company’s financial strategy, Softbank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto stated that the company is in the early stages of a transition from a telco holding company to an investment company, and as a result is “likely to be perceived as a corporate group with significant debt and interest payment burden” with what is “generally considered a high level of debt.”

Those debt loads have made corporate maneuvering quite complicated. And so the company decided to put its mobile telco unit up for public trading as a means of getting a fresh injection of capital and continue its transformation into an investment shop. By raising $23.6 billion today, the company did just that.

The 15% drop in value on its debut though shows that the market has yet to fully buy into Son’s vision for where SoftBank is heading. That lowered price will make the corporate financial math around debt tougher, and will be a key theme for 2019.

2. The Japanese government wants to increase competition in the telco space, putting massive pressure on SoftBank’s financials

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Photo by Matt Roberts/Getty Images

Japan’s telco market is quite dormant, with mature, oligopolistic companies charging some of the highest prices on the planet for mobile service. Japan’s government also doesn’t auction off spectrum, which has saved telcos billions of dollars in direct cash costs, helping them to become reliable profit-generating juggernauts.

That cozy world is being shattered by the policy of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who has made increasing competition in the industry a major policy initiative. That includes putting 5G spectrum up for what will essentially be a competitive auction, demanding lower prices from telcos, and opening the market to new entrants like Rakuten (see #3 below).

As a result, incumbents like NTT DoCoMo have announced rate cuts of up to 40 percent on mobile services, while warning investors that it may take five years for the company to return to current profitability. Those announcements caused stock traders to dump Japanese telco shares this year, shedding $34 billion in the days following the announcements.

At a time when SoftBank most needs its cash flow to pay off its debt, the world is rapidly moving against it. The company has insisted that it can keep revenues and profits stable and even grow into the competition, but the announcements from its larger competitors dump cold water on its claims. SoftBank’s profits surged in its last quarter, but mostly from its Vision Fund investments rather than its core telco business.

3. Rakuten’s entrance into the Japanese mobile service market will scramble the traditional three-way oligopoly

Hiroshi Mikitani, owner of Rakuten. BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

One of the big news stories for SoftBank came from ecommerce giant Rakuten, which announced that it will launch a new mobile service in Japan starting as early as next year. As Arman and I wrote about at the time:

Though a new entrant hasn’t been approved to enter the telco market since eAccess in 2007, Rakuten has already gotten the thumbs up to start operations in 2019. The government also instituted regulations that would make the new kid in town more competitive, such as banning telcos from limiting device portability.

Rakuten’s partnerships with key utilities and infrastructure players will also allow it to build out its network quickly, including one with Japan’s second largest mobile service provider, KDDI.

Rakuten has obvious built-in advantages as the second largest ecommerce company in Japan following Amazon, and that will put pressure on other incumbents — including SoftBank — to meet its prices or to compete with more marketing dollars to reach customers. Again, we see a tough road ahead for SoftBank’s telecom business at a very vulnerable time for its balance sheet.

SoftBank: The Vision Fund

4. The Vision Fund actually got bigger this year

Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

The Vision Fund’s massive vision got just a bit bigger this year. When the fund announced its first close in May 2017, it set a target final fund size of $93 billion. In 2018 though, the Vision Fund received another $5 billion in commitments. When we add the $6 billion already committed for SoftBank’s Delta Fund, which is a separate vehicle used to alleviate conflicts around the company’s Didi investment, Masayoshi Son now has more than a $100 billion at his disposal.

But that’s not all! The Vision Fund has also been rumored to be raising $4 billion in debt so that it can fund startups faster (picking up on that debt theme yet?). Its LPs, which include Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Apple, are given time to fund their commitments to the Vision Fund, and so the fund wants to have cash in the bank so that it can fund its investments faster. Debt structures in the fund are complicated, to say the least.

Masayoshi Son has repeatedly said that he wants to raise a $300 billion Vision Fund II, possibly as soon as next year, eventually ramping to $880 billion in the coming years. Whether the company’s debt load and controversy over Saudi Arabia (see #6 below) will allow that vision to come to pass is going to be a major question for 2019.

5. Seriously: is there any company not getting a multi-hundred million dollar term sheet from SoftBank these days?

Photo by Alessandro Di Ciommo/NurPhoto via Getty Images

SoftBank dominated headlines throughout 2018 with a steady cadence of monster investments across geographies and industries. Based on data from regulatory filings, Pitchbook, and Crunchbase, SoftBank and its Vision Fund led roughly 35 investment rounds, with total round sizes aggregating to roughly $30 billion, or over $40 billion when including investments in Uber and Grab, which were announced in 2017 but didn’t close until early 2018.

Surprisingly, SoftBank’s latest filings indicate that as of the end of September, the Vision Fund had only deployed roughly $33 billion, or about one-third the total fund, though the actual number might be quite a bit larger. SoftBank has led twelve rounds since September, including buying a $3 billion dollar warrant for WeWork and finalizing a large round that included secondary shares into Chinese news aggregator ByteDance.

In addition to investing directly through its Vision Fund, SoftBank also regularly makes and holds investments at the group level, with the intention of selling or transferring shares to the Vision Fund at a later date. As a result, SoftBank currently holds around $27.7 billion in investments that sit outside the Vision Fund, including the company’s stakes in Uber, Grab and Ola which it expects to eventually transfer to the Vision Fund pending LP and regulatory approvals. Assuming it plans to move the majority of these investments to the Vision Fund, SoftBank might have already deployed close to half the fund.

For all of that money flowing out the door though, there are limits even to the Vision Fund’s ambitions. Just today, the Wall Street Journal reported that LPs are pushing back against a plan to buy out a majority of WeWork, which would push the Vision Fund’s investment in the co-working startup to $24 billion. From the article:

Some of the people said that [Saudi Arabia’s] PIF and [Abu Dhabi’s] Mubadala have questioned the wisdom of doubling down on WeWork, and have cast doubt on its rich valuation. The company is on track to lose around $2 billion this year, and the funds have expressed concern that WeWork’s model could leave it exposed if the economy turns, some of the people said.

If the investment went through, WeWork would represent roughly a quarter of the fund’s capital, an astonishing level of concentration for a venture fund. Its a bold, concentrated bet, exactly the kind of model that entices Son.

6. The Vision Fund generated its first massive returns with Flipkart, Guardant and Ping An, with a huge roster to come

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

In just the first full year of operations, the Vision Fund has already begun to see the fruits of its investments with several portfolio company exits.

It made a spectacular return on Indian ecommerce startup Flipkart, where SoftBank realized a $1.5 billion gain on its $2.5 billion investment in just about a year. Walmart, which bought a 77% stake in Flipkart as part of its ambitious overseas strategy, valued the company at $21 billion.

Flipkart may have been the year’s largest highlight for the Vision Fund, but it wasn’t the only liquidity the fund saw. Its pre-IPO investment in Ping An Health & Technology Co, which produces the popular Chinese medical app Good Doctor, debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and Guardant Health, which makes blood tests for disease detection, went public in October to rabid investor enthusiasm.

While those early wins are positive signs, the proof of the Vision Fund’s thesis will come early next year, when companies like Uber, Slack and Didi are expected to go public. If the returns prove favorable, then the fundraise for Vision Fund II may well come together quickly. But if the markets turn south and complicate the roadshows for these unicorns, it could complicate the story of how the Vision Fund exits out of these high-flying investments.

7. Murder is wrong. That makes the math for SoftBank really hard.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

The tech media world went into a frenzy over Saudi Arabia’s horrific and horrifically public killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That put enormous pressure on SoftBank and its Vision Fund, where Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the largest LP with a $45 billion commitment.

There have been strong calls for Masayoshi Son to avoid Saudi Arabia in future fundraises, but that is complicated for one simple reason: there are just not that many money managers in the world who can a) invest tens of billions of dollars into firms backing risky technology investments, and b) are willing to ignore SoftBank’s massive debt stack and existential risks.

So SoftBank faces a tough choice. It can have its fund, but will need to get money from unsavory people. That might be fine — after all, Saudi Arabia is also the largest investor in Silicon Valley. Or it can walk away and try to find another LP that might replace the Kingdom’s huge fund commitment.

If the Vision Fund’s numbers look good after the early IPOs in 2019, I can imagine it being able to paper around Saudi Arabia’s commitment with a broader set of LPs that might be intrigued with technology investing and trust the numbers a bit more. If the IPOs stall though, whether because of internal company challenges à la pre-Dara Uber or broader market challenges, then expect a next fundraise to feature Saudi Arabia prominently, or for no fundraise to take place at all.

SoftBank: The Other Stuff

8. Good news on SoftBank’s Sprint side with its merger with T-Mobile looking like it will move forward

CEO of T-Mobile US Inc. John Legere and Executive Chairman of Sprint Corporation Marcelo Claure. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Since SoftBank acquired Sprint for $20 billion back in 2013, Sprint’s heavy debt balance has led to lackluster performance and the downgrade of SoftBank’s credit ratings to junk, where they’ve remained since.

After initial discussions stalled in 2017, SoftBank reinitiated merger discussions with T-Mobile’s German parent, Deutsche Telekom in 2018, eventually reaching an agreement for a Sprint/T-Mobile merger that would see SoftBank’s ownership stake fall from just over 80% of Sprint to just 27% of the combined entity.

Despite the poor track record for telco deal approvals and the increased scrutiny of cross-border M&A from U.S. regulators, SoftBank’s proposed merger recently received key approvals from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense. Part of that agreement came when SoftBank agreed to eliminate Huawei equipment from its infrastructure. While the deal still needs approval from the Federal Communications Commission, the road forward seems to be relatively clear.

If the deal ultimately goes through, SoftBank will no longer have to consolidate Sprint financials with its own and can instead report only its owned share of Sprint financials (and debt expense), improving (at least the optics of) SoftBank’s balance sheet.

9. SoftBank’s massive bet on Nvidia could be a $3 billion winner even as Nvidia faces crash

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

SoftBank became Nvidia’s fourth largest shareholder in 2017 after building up a roughly $4 billion stake in the company’s shares. As I detailed last week, Nvidia’s stock has gone into free fall over the past two months, as the company faces geopolitical turmoil, the loss of a huge revenue stream with the collapse in crypto, and an increasingly competitive battle in the next-generation application workflow space.

Now, SoftBank is reportedly looking to sell its Nvidia shares for possible profits of around $3 billion. As Bloomberg reported, that’s because the acquisition was built as a “collar trade” that protected SoftBank against a drop in Nvidia’s share price (a good reminder that even when a stock loses half of its value, it is entirely possible for people to still make money).

The opportunity though is that SoftBank almost certainly still wants to continue to play in the next-generation AI chip space, and needs to find another vehicle for it to hitch a ride on.

10. ARM could be the saving grace of chips for SoftBank

Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese mobile giant SoftBank, and Stuart Chambers, Chairman of British chip designer company ARM Holdings, are pictured outside 11 Downing street in central London. NIKLAS HALLE’N/AFP/Getty Images

In 2016, SoftBank made its biggest purchase ever when it acquired system-on-a-chip designer ARM Holdings for $32 billion. ARM’s designs were dominant among smartphones, which at the time was seeing rapid adoption and growth worldwide.

The good news hasn’t stopped since, although ARM has had to pivot its strategy in 2018 to adapt to changing market dynamics. Apple, which has seen its next-generation iPhone sales stalling, has been rumored to be moving to using ARM chips for a wider array of its products, including its Mac lineup. Beyond that expansion, ARM is now increasingly designing chips for the data center, and engaging in next-generation markets around artificial intelligence and automotive. ARM’s CEO has said that he sees a path to doubling revenues by 2022, which shows a healthy clip of growth if that pans out.

There are headwinds though. Consolidation in the semiconductor space has been a theme the past two years, and that will allow the surviving companies to be more ferocious competitors against ARM. Up-and-coming startups could also crimp the company’s growth in next-generation workloads, a risk shared with other incumbents like Nvidia.

That said, ARM seems to be in a much more strategic position than Nvidia these days, as ARM has managed to maintain its linchpin role, and that should ultimately roll up to a valuation that SoftBank will be excited about.

11. Alibaba is putting heavy pressure on SoftBank’s balance sheet

Jack Ma, businessman and founder of Alibaba, at the 40th Anniversary of Reform and Opening Up at The Great Hall Of The People on December 18, 2018 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images)

While SoftBank has slowly been cashing in after winning big on its early backing of Alibaba, the company’s ownership stake still sits at roughly 29%.

SoftBank’s Alibaba ties have helped the company fuel its incessant appetite for leverage, with SoftBank using its stake in Alibaba as collateral for an $8 billion off-balance sheet loan, which prevented additional downgrades of Softbank’s credit. But a tougher macro backdrop and slowing sales growth have caused Alibaba to follow the precipitous decline of other Chinese tech stocks in 2018, falling nearly 20% year-to-date and 30% in the last 6 months.

That decline means tens of billions of dollars of losses for SoftBank’s already overstretched balance sheet, and as with many of these stories, will make financing its vision challenging in 2019.

And so we get back to the core theme of 2018 for SoftBank: debt, leverage, and financial wizardry in pursuit of a bold transformation into a technology investment firm. That transformation has certainly not been smooth, but it has moved forward bit by bit. If SoftBank can navigate the changes in the Japanese telco market, exit some major investments in its Vision Fund, and manage its big commitments in Sprint and Alibaba, it will reach its destination, with a few ultimately superficial bruises along the way.


Source: Tech Crunch

Microsoft launches a new app to make using Office easier

Microsoft today announced a new Office app that’s now available to Windows Insiders and that will soon roll out to all Windows 10 users. The new Office app will replace the existing My Office app (yeah, those names…). While the existing app was mostly about managing Office 365 subscriptions, the new app provides significantly more features and will essentially become the central hub for Office users to switch between apps, see their pinned documents and access other Office features.

The company notes that this launch is part of its efforts to make using Office easier and help users “get the most out of Office and getting them back into their work quickly.” For many Office users, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel are basically their central tools for getting work done, so it makes sense to give them a single app that combines in a single place all the information about their work.

Using the app, users can switch between apps, see everything they’ve been working on, as well as recommended documents based on what I assume is data from the Microsoft Graph. There’s also an integrated search feature and admins will be able to customize the app with other line of business applications and their company’s branding.

The app is free and will be available in the oft-forgotten Microsoft Store. It’ll work for all users with Office 365 subscriptions or access to Office 2019, Office 2016 or Office Online.


Source: Tech Crunch