Posted on

Hire faster, work happier: Startups target employment with AI and engagement tools

Joanna Glasner
Contributor

More posts by this contributor

If you have a job today, there’s a good chance you personally reached out to your employer and interviewed with other humans to get it. Now that you’ve been there a while, it’s also likely the workday feels more like a long slog than the fulfilling career move you had envisioned.

But if today’s early-stage startups have their way, your next employment experience could be quite different.

First, forget the networking and interview gauntlet. Instead, let an AI-enabled screening program reach out about a job you don’t seem obviously qualified to do. Or, rather than talk to a company’s employees, wait for them to play some online games instead. If you play similarly, they may decide to hire you.

Once you have the job, software will also make you more efficient and happier at your work.

An AI-driven software platform will deliver regular “nudges,” offering customized suggestions to make you a more effective worker. If you’re feeling burned out, head online to text or video chat with a coach or therapist. Or perhaps you’ll just be happier in your job now that your employer is delivering regular tokens of appreciation.

Those are a few of the ways early-stage startups are looking to change the status quo of job-seeking and employment. While employment is a broad category, an analysis of Crunchbase funding data for the space shows a high concentration of activity in two key areas: AI-driven hiring software and tools to improve employee engagement.

Below, we look at where the money’s going and how today’s early-stage startups could play a role in transforming the work experience of tomorrow.

Artificial intelligence

To begin, let us reflect that we are at a strange inflection point for AI and employment. Our artificially intelligent overlords are not smart enough to actually do our jobs. Nonetheless, they have strong opinions about whether we’re qualified to do them ourselves.

It is at this peculiar point that the alchemic mix of AI software, recruiting-based business models and venture capital are coming together to build startups.

In 2018, at least 43 companies applying AI or machine learning to some facet of employment have raised seed or early-stage funding, according to Crunchbase data. In the chart below, we look at a few startups that have secured rounds, along with their backers and respective business models:

At present, even AI boosters don’t tout the technology as a cure-all for troubles plaguing the talent recruitment space. While it’s true humans are biased and flawed when it comes to evaluating job candidates, artificially intelligent software suffers from many of the same bugs. For instance, Amazon scrapped its AI recruiting tool developed in-house because it exhibited bias against women.

That said, it’s still early innings. Over the next few years, startups will be actively tweaking their software to improve performance and reduce bias.

Happiness and engagement

Once the goal of recruiting the best people is achieved, the next step is ensuring they stay and thrive.

Usually, a paycheck goes a long way to accomplishing the goal of staying. But in case that’s not enough, startups are busily devising a host of tools for employers to boost engagement and fight the scourge of burnout.

In the chart below, we look at a few of the companies that received early-stage funding this year to build out software platforms and services aimed at making people happier and more effective at work:

The most heavily funded of the early-stage crop looks to be Peakon, which offers a software platform for measuring employee engagement and collecting feedback. The Danish firm has raised $33 million to date to fund its expansion.

London-based BioBeats is another up-and-comer aimed at the “corporate wellness” market, with digital tools to help employees track stress levels and other health-related metrics. The company has raised $7 million to date to help keep those stress levels in check.

Early-stage indicators

Early-stage funding activity tends to be an indicator of areas with somewhat low adoption rates today that are poised to take off dramatically. For employment, that means we can likely expect to see AI-based recruitment and software-driven engagement tools become more widespread in the coming years.

What does that mean for job seekers and paycheck toilers? Expect to spend more of your time interfacing with intelligent software. Apparently, it’ll make you more employable, and happier, too.


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

Security researchers find over a dozen iPhone apps linked to Golduck malware

Security researchers say they’ve found more than a dozen iPhone apps covertly communicating with a server associated with Golduck, a historically Android-focused malware that infects popular classic game apps.

The malware has been known about for over a year, after it was first discovered by Appthority infecting classic and retro games on Google Play, by embedding backdoor code that allowed malicious payloads to be silently pushed to the device. At the time, more than 10 million users were affected by the malware, allowing hackers to run malicious commands at the highest privileges, like sending premium SMS messages from a victim’s phone to make money.

Now, the researchers say iPhone apps linked to the malware could also present a risk.

Wandera, an enterprise security firm, said it found 14 apps — all retro-style games — that were communicating with the same command and control server used by the Golduck malware.

“The [Golduck] domain was on a watchlist we established due to its use in distributing a specific strain of Android malware in the past,” said Michael Covington, Wandera’s vice-president of product. “When we started seeing communication between iOS devices and the known malware domain, we investigated further.”

The apps include: Commando Metal: Classic Contra, Super Pentron Adventure: Super Hard, Classic Tank vs Super Bomber, Super Adventure of Maritron, Roy Adventure Troll Game, Trap Dungeons: Super Adventure, Bounce Classic Legend, Block Game, Classic Bomber: Super Legend, Brain It On: Stickman Physics, Bomber Game: Classic Bomberman, Classic Brick – Retro Block, The Climber Brick, and Chicken Shoot Galaxy Invaders.

According to the researchers, what they saw so far seems relatively benign — the command and control server simply pushes a list of icons in a pocket of ad space in the upper-right corner of the app. When the user opens the game, the server tells the app which icons and links it should serve to the user. They did, however, see the apps sending IP address data — and, in some cases, location data — back to the Golduck command and control server. TechCrunch verified their claims, running the apps on a clean iPhone through a proxy, allowing us to see where the data goes. Based on what we saw, the app tells the malicious Golduck server what app, version, device type, and the IP address of the device — including how many ads were displayed on the phone.

As of now, the researchers say that the apps are packed with ads — likely as a way to make a quick buck. But they expressed concern that the communication between the app and the known-to-be-malicious server could open up the app — and the device — to malicious commands down the line.

“The apps themselves are technically not compromised; while they do not contain any malicious code, the backdoor they open presents a risk for exposure that our customers do not want to take.

“A hacker could easily use the secondary advertisement space to display a link that redirects the user and dupes them into installing a provisioning profile or a new certificate that ultimately allows for a more malicious app to be installed,” said the researchers.

One of the iPhone apps, “Classic Bomber,” which was spotted communicating with a malicious command and control server. It’s since been pulled from the U.S. store. (Screenshot: TechCrunch)

That could be said for any game or app, regardless of device maker or software. But the connection to a known malicious server isn’t a good look. Covington said that the company has “observed malicious content being shared from the server,” but that it wasn’t related to the games.

The implication is that if the server is sending malicious payloads to Android users, iPhone users could be next.

TechCrunch sent the list of apps to data insights firm Sensor Tower, which estimated that the 14 apps had been installed close to one million times since they were released — excluding repeated downloads or installs across different devices.

When we tried contacting the app makers, many of the App Store links pointed to dead links or to pages with boilerplate privacy policies but no contact information. The registrant on the Golduck domain appears to be fake, along with other domains associated with Golduck, which often have different names and email addresses.

Apple did not comment when reached prior to publication. The apps are appear to still be downloadable from the App Store, but all now say they are “not currently available in the U.S. store.”

Apple’s app stores may have a better rap than Google’s, which every once in a while lets malicious apps slip through the net. In reality, neither store is perfect. Earlier this year, security researchers found a top-tier app in the Mac App Store that was collecting users’ browsing history without permission, and dozens of iPhone apps that were sending user location data to advertisers without explicitly asking first.

For the average user, malicious apps remain the largest and most common threat to mobile users — even with locked down device software and the extensive vetting of apps.

If there’s one lesson, now and always: don’t download what you don’t need, or can’t trust.

Cybersecurity 101: Five simple security guides for protecting your privacy


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

How Trulia began paying down its technical debt

As every software company knows, over time as code ages and workarounds build on work-arounds, the code base becomes bloated. It becomes ever more difficult to get around the technical debt that you’ve built up over time. It’s really impossible to avoid this phenomenon, but at some point, companies realize that the debt is so great that it’s limiting their ability to build new functionality. That’s precisely what Trulia faced in 2017 when it began a process of paying down that debt and modernizing its architecture.

Trulia is a real estate site founded way back in 2005, an eternity ago in terms of technology. The company went public in 2012 and was acquired by Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion, but has continued to operate as an independent brand under the Zillow umbrella. It understood that a lot had changed technologically in the 12 years since its inception when engineering began thinking about this. The team knew it had a humongous, monolithic code base that was inhibiting the ability to update the site.

While they tried to pull out some of the newer functions as services, it didn’t really make the site any more nimble because these services always had to tie back into that monolithic central code base. The development team knew if it was to escape this coding trap, it would take a complete overhaul.

Brainstorming broad change

As you would expect, a process like this doesn’t happen overnight, taking months to plan and implement. It all started back in 2017 when the company held what they called an “Innovation Week” with the entire engineering team. Groups of engineers came up with ideas about how to solve this problem, but the one that got the most attention was one called Project Islands, which involved breaking out the different pieces of the site as individual coding islands that could operate independently of one another.

It sounds simple, but in practice it involved breaking down the entire code base into services. They would use Next.js and React to rebuild the front end and GraphQL, an open source graph database technology to rebuild the back end.

Deep Varma, Trulia’s VP of engineering, pointed out that as a company founded in 2005, the site was built on PHP and MySQL, two popular development technologies from that time. Varma says that whenever his engineers made a change to any part of the site, they needed to do a complete system release. This caused a major bottleneck.

What they really needed to do was move to a completely modern microservices architecture that allowed engineering teams to work independently in a continuous delivery approach without breaking any other team’s code. That’s where the concept of islands came into play.

Islands in the stream

The islands were actually microservices. Each one could communicate to a set of central common services like authentication, A/B testing, the navigation bar, the footer — all of the pieces that every mini code base would need, while allowing the teams building these islands to work independently and not require a huge rebuild every time they added a new element or changed something.

Cousine island. Seychelles. Photo: Martin Harvey/Getty Images

The harsh reality of this kind of overhaul came into focus as the teams realized they had to be writing the new pieces while the old system was still in place and running. In a video the company made describing the effort, one engineer likened it to changing the engine of a 747 in the middle of a flight.

Varma says he didn’t try to do everything at once, as he needed to see if the islands approach would work in practice first. In November 2017, he pulled the first engineering team together, and by January it had built the app shell (the common services piece) and one microservice island. When the proof of concept succeeded, Varma knew they were in business.

Building out the archipelago

It’s one thing to build a single island, but it’s another matter to build a chain of them and that would be the next step. By last April, engineering had shown enough progress that they were able to present the entire idea to senior management and get the go-ahead to move forward with a more complex project.

Photo of Rock Islands, Palau, Micronesia: J.W.Alker/Getty Images

First, it took some work with the Next.js development team to get the development framework to work the way they wanted. Varma said he brought in the Next.js team to work with his engineers. He said that they needed to figure out how to stitch the various islands together and resolve dependencies among the different services. The Next.js team actually changed its development roadmap for Trulia, speeding up delivery of these requirements, understanding that other companies would have similar issues.

By last July, the company released Neighborhoods, the first fully independent island functionality on the site. Recently, it moved off-market properties to islands. Off-market properties, as the name implies, are pages with information about properties that are no longer on the market. Varma says that these pages actually make up a significant portion of the company’s traffic.

While Varma would not say just how much of the site has been moved to islands at this point, he said the goal is to move the majority to the new platform in 2019. All of this shows that a complete overhaul of a complex site doesn’t happen overnight, but Trulia is taking steps to move off the original system it created in 2005 and move to a more modern and flexible architecture it has created with islands. It may not have paid down its technical debt in full in 2018, but it went a long way on laying the foundation to do so.

Atlassian’s two-year cloud journey


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

Startups Weekly: VCs celebrate the new year the only way they know how

Venture capitalists swore in the new year the only way they know how… by submitting SEC paperwork for new funds! insert party hat/confetti emoji here.

As many of us brainstormed our New Year’s resolutions and let our hangovers wear off, several firms began this week what for some is a long and arduous process of raising a VC fund and for others is as simple as a few phone calls to LPs. What else happened this week? Pokémon GO creator Niantic secured $190 million, Mary Meeker announced the name of her fund and a whole bunch of people played with Popsugar’s somewhat sketchy twinning app.

Fresh funds:

Mary Meeker will raise up to $1.5 billion for Bond, her new VC fund. Union Square Ventures raised $429 million across two new funds. Lightspeed Venture partners announced a $560 million China fund. And biotech firm Atlas Venture brought in $250 million.

AR startups are failing:

TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney takes a look at struggling augmented reality startups and questions some of the larger players, from Magic Leap to Snap and Niantic. And speaking of Niantic, the Pokémon GO developer closed a $190 million funding round this week at a $3.9 billion valuation.

Indian startups start the year off strong:

Startups based in India raised more than $10 billion in 2018, per Venture Beat, a record amount of capital for the country. Already this year one company has closed a round larger than $100 million. CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round this week to push deeper into financial services and insurance.

Future tech:

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

A startup disrupting the … bottled water business:

FloWater has raised $15 million for its reusable water bottle refilling stations to produce purified water. Bluewater, a Swedish company that sells water purifiers, among other things, led the round.

VC subsidized vending machines:

Vengo makes wall-mounted mini-vending machines the size of large picture frames that it then sells to vending machine distributors, asking for a small fee per month in exchange for access to its software. Now it has $7 million to build out its business.

A VC gets a second chance:

After SpaceX filed more SEC paperwork as part of its $500 million upcoming fundraise, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos noticed a familiar name on the document: Steve Jurvetson. Jurvetson is a longtime board member of both Tesla and SpaceX, but after he left DFJ, the venture capital firm he co-founded, in 2017 amid questions about his personal conduct, there was uncertainty around whether he would keep those director positions. Well, it looks like Elon Musk is standing by Jurvetson.

And finally, are you smarter than a TechCrunch reporter?

Let this test decide.

 

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

Boom Supersonic nabs $100M to build its Mach 2.2 commercial airliner

One Denver-based startup’s long-shot bid to move today’s commercial jets beyond supersonic speeds just got a big injection of cash.

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced today that they’ve closed a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator Continuity, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

The startup has raised around $140 million to date. The team has about 100 employees, and hopes to double that number this year with its new funding.

“Today, the time and cost of long-distance travel prevent us from connecting with far-off people and places,” said Boom CEO Blake Scholl in a statement. “Overture fares will be similar to today’s business class—widening horizons for tens of millions of travelers. Ultimately, our goal is to make high-speed flight affordable to all.”

Alongside the fundraise, Boom is further detailing its plans to begin testing its Mach 2.2 commercial airliner this year. The company is aiming to launch a 1:3 scale prototype of its planned Overture airliner this year, called the XB-1. The two-seater plane will serve to validate the technologies being built for the full-sized jet.

The startup’s supersonic Overture jet will hold 55 passengers, and the team hopes that the costs of flying more than double the speed of sound will be comparable to today’s business-class ticket prices. The company already has pre-orders from Virgin Group and Japan Airlines for 30 airliners.

Indeed, $100 million may seem like a lot of money, but the development costs for lengthy projects like these can quickly race toward the billions of dollars, suggesting that if they carry out their mission, they’re going to need a whole lot more.


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

Marriott now says 5 million unencrypted passport numbers were stolen in Starwood hotel data breach

Starwood’s data breach just got both better and worse at the same time.

Marriott, which owns hotel chain giant Starwood, said it has revised the number of customers affected by its recently disclosed data breach from 500 million to “fewer than 383 million unique guests.” That doesn’t mean all those 383 million guests are affected, Marriott said, but the hotel giant still can’t yet give a more precise number of customers whose data was stolen.

The bad news is that the company confirmed that more than five million unencrypted passport numbers were stolen, on top of the more than 20 million encrypted passport numbers.

That might be a problem, given passport numbers can be used for identity theft and to commit fraud, but is the sort of data that remains highly valuable for spy agencies that can use the information to track down where government officials, diplomats and adversaries have stayed — giving insight into what would ordinarily be clandestine activities.

Marriott also said that 8.6 million unique payment card numbers were taken, but only 354,000 cards were active and unexpired at the time of the breach in September.

The hotel giant said it had “no evidence” to show that the hackers stole the keys needed to decrypt the data, but did not say how it came to that conclusion.

Starwood’s security lapse became the largest data breach last year, and remains one of the most damaging hacking incidents in recent memory. The company said the contents of the stolen data were from the Starwood guest reservation database, which it acquired when it bought Starwood and its 1,200 properties in 2016 for $13 billion.

Marriott said in its Friday update that it has “completed the phase out” of Starwood’s reservation database and now runs guest bookings through its Marriott database, which was not affected by the breach.

Marriott’s breach response is so bad, security experts are filling in the gaps — at their own expense


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

HTC had a truly terrible 2018

If you think times are bad at Apple, spare a thought for HTC, the once king-of-the-hill phone maker that continues to struggle very badly.

The Taiwanese smartphone company, which offloaded a portion of its business to Google for $1.1 billion and is pivoting to VR, laid off yet more staff in 2018 and had its worst year of sales ever.

According to its own figures — and as noted by Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan — the company brought in just 23.74 billion TWD ($770 million) in revenue over the entire year. That’s the first time it has grossed less than $1 billion during a year as a public company.

That figure represents a massive 62 percent drop on HTC’s paltry revenue for 2017 — 62.12 billion TWD, around $2 billion — which was its poorest year since 2005. We don’t yet know the total loss for 2018, but its three previous quarterly reports combined amount to a total operating loss of 11.13 billion TWD, $361 million, with one more quarter to add.HTC’s 2018 total was so bad that it actually made more money during just one single month a few years ago. Its total revenue during May 2013, back when phones like the One M7, One Mini and One Max made it one of the best smartphone companies on the planet, came in at 29 billion TWD.

Those days of booming sales are, of course, long gone as these charts painfully illustrate.

The decision to sell a large chunk of the smartphone business to Google one year ago was the icing on the cake served at HTC’s smartphone wake. Yes, the company did announce the U12+ — with a squeezable side — in May and it is working on a blockchain phone that we kind of got a look at during our Shenzhen event last year, but these are peripheral plays that are tucked well away from where the mainstream players are dueling, a place where HTC used to be.Even VR, trumpeted as HTC’s great area of hope, is a long-term play.

The company doesn’t break down revenue — that’ll come later when it releases its next earnings report in February — so we don’t know how its Vive and other virtual reality plays are working out in terms of numbers. But the immediate future isn’t great.

Lucas Matney — TechCrunch’s resident virtual reality cyberpunk — noted just this week that 2019 is shaping up to be a very testing year for the entire VR and AR industry, HTC/Vive very much included.

“There are plenty of reasons to be long-term bullish on AR, but the time horizons some have espoused seems to be bogus and pitch decks organized around a near-term spike in phone-based or glasses-based users are going to have a tougher time being taken seriously in 2019,” Matney wrote.

If that proves true, HTC’s sickly sales may well contract further still.

HTC is gone

In many ways, it’s hard to not feel sorry for the company. Pivots this brutal are usually carried out by private startups who can keep the contents of their books to themselves, rather than 22-year-old public companies that must file financial statements. Unfortunately for HTC, information like monthly sales, losses and other revealing data will continue to be public information, ensuring that this painful transition continues to play out with full public scrutiny.

Despite an incredible downturn in success, co-founder, president and CEO Cher Wang continues to run the business with no calls for a change in leadership. Wang keeps a low profile and has said little of her plans to turn things around. Maybe 2019 is a good year for being more forthcoming, especially if the losses continue to mount, as seems inevitable.


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

Amazon debuts Showroom, a visual shopping experience for home furnishings

Amazon just over a year ago launched its first in-home furniture brands, with private labels Rivet and Stone & Beam. This past fall, it began experimenting with a new, more visual way to shop for furniture and other merchandise with its Pinterest-like recommendation service Scout. Now, Amazon is venturing further into home furnishings with the debut of Amazon Showroom, a visual design tool that allows you to place furniture into a virtual living room, customize the décor, then shop the look.

The retailer didn’t formally announce the launch of Amazon Showroom, but a spokesperson confirmed it’s a recent test that’s now available on Amazon.com and in the Amazon mobile app.

You can access it from the “Accounts & Lists” drop-down on the web; the Home, Garden & Pets department on the web; or the Home & Kitchen department on the mobile app.

Currently, the new feature is focused on helping Amazon shoppers put together a living room. In a virtual setting, you can make adjustments to the wall color and the flooring, then swap out each item in the space with one of your own choosing — including the sofa, coffee table, chair, end table, lamp, rug and even the art on the wall.

To do so, click on the piece in question, then pick another from the right-side panel where a scrollable list of options are available, along with their prices. This selection can be filtered by a number of factors, as well, like price, style, color, material, brand and star rating.

Not surprisingly, Amazon’s own home furnishing brands are heavily featured here.

As you work on your project, you can save your room design to pull up later. And you can save more than one room design, if you’re trying to decide between different styles. When satisfied, an “Add to cart” button lets you place all into your cart for checkout with just one click.

Amazon Showroom — a name that’s almost a cruel reference to Amazon’s ability to turn brick-and-mortar stores into showrooms for online shoppers — isn’t the retailer’s first attempt at helping shoppers visualize items in their home ahead of purchase. The company also launched an AR shopping feature in its app in 2017, which allows you to place a virtual item in your camera view to see how it goes in your own room. That can be useful if shopping for a single item, but less so when designing a complete room.

Home furnishings is still an emerging category for online retail, not only because they’re hard to visualize, but also because heavy items are expensive to ship. However, major retailers see the potential in this growing market.

Walmart, for example, launched a new home shopping site for furniture and décor last year, which features its own in-house brands and more visual, editorial-style imagery. It has also snapped up other home furnishing and décor retailers, including Hayneedle and recently, Art.com, and is building its own visual search.

Amazon confirmed the launch of Showroom in a statement.

The retailer wouldn’t say when the feature debuted, exactly, but a Twitter account was tweeting links to a pre-production site earlier in December. Amazon confirmed that Amazon Showroom was built entirely in-house.

“Amazon Showroom is a new way for customers to visualize their home furnishing purchases when shopping online,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Amazon Showroom presents customers with a virtual living room, where they can customize the décor and furniture selection providing the ability to visually compare to scale representations of furniture items together in a room to determine how an item will fit with the style of a room and work with other complimentary pieces. The result is a photorealistic rendering of a room that answers the question: ‘How will this all look together?’,” they said.

The feature is live for all customers on the web and in the Amazon app.

Update, 1/4/19, 1:50 PM ET with confirmation from Amazon that Showroom was built in-house.


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

DiscountMugs.com says four months of customer credit cards stolen by hackers

DiscountMugs.com, a large online custom mug and apparel store, had a four-month-long data breach just before the busy Christmas holiday season.

The company said in a letter to state attorneys general that hackers siphoned off credit card numbers from customers who made orders through its site between August 5 and November 16, 2018 using code injected on the company’s payments page.

The malicious card skimming code was removed from the site after it was discovered.

According to the letter, the hackers stole credit card numbers, the security code and expiration date, as well as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and ZIP codes — everything that someone might need to make fraudulent payments.

But the company didn’t say how many people were affected by the breach. It’s believed to be thousands of customers who made purchases through the site during the four-month period.

TechCrunch reached out to Sai Koppaka, chief executive of parent company Bel USA, who did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the company’s spokesperson. Emails sent to Comvest, a private equity firm and an investor in Bel USA, also went unreturned.

DiscountMugs.com might not be a household name, but it ranks in the top 10,000 sites in the U.S., according to Alexa, bringing in thousands of customers every day.

The company becomes the latest in a line of websites affected by credit card skimming code. The so-called Magecart group of hackers have targeted thousands of sites in the past few years, scraping credit card data when a customer enters their information at the checkout and silently sending it on to the hackers’ servers.

Other big-name companies were hit, including British Airways, Newegg and Ticketmaster.

Meet the Magecart hackers, a persistent credit card skimmer group of groups you’ve never heard of


Source: Tech Crunch

Posted on

3D printed gun activist Cody Wilson indicted for sexual assault

The State of Texas has indicted Cody Wilson, a 3D printed gun rights activist who fought to allow makers post and print guns, of sexual assault after he had sex with a 17-year-old girl he met on a site called SugarDaddyMeet.com. The indictment, posted on Ars, notes that he faces “four counts of sexual assault of a child, two charges of indecency with a child by contact, and two charges of indecency with a child by exposure.”

The charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. His company, DefenseDistributed, has dumped him as founder. The affidavit on the crime said Wilson used the name Sanjuro on the site and that he paid the 17-year-old $500 for sex.

Wilson is out on $150,000 bond and not yet in jail. He rose to prominence for supporting 3D printed guns as far back as 2013, causing a panic that reduced interest in the 3D printing industry and led to a court decision in July that found 3D printed gun plans to be legal.


Source: Tech Crunch