Month: December 2019

As big tech gets bigger, industry leaders have begun making more noise about helping homeless populations, particularly in those regions where high salaries have driven up the cost of living to heights not seen before. Last January, for example, Facebook and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, among other participants, formed a group called the Partnership for the Bay’s Future that said it was going to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to expand affordable housing and strengthen “low-income tenant protections” in the five main counties in and around San Francisco. Microsoft meanwhile made a similar pledge in January of last year, promising $500 million to increase housing options in Seattle where low  and middle-income workers are being priced out of Seattle and its surrounding suburbs.

Amazon has made similar pledges in the past, with CEO Jeff Bezos pledging $2 billion to combat homelessness and to fund a network of “Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities,” as he said in a statement posted on Twitter at the time, in September 2018.

Now, however, Amazon is taking an approach that immediately raises the bar for its rivals in tech: it’s opening up a space in its Seattle headquarters to a homeless shelter, one that’s expected to become the largest family shelter in the state of Washington.

Business Insider reported the news earlier today, and it says the space will be able to accommodate 275 people each night and that it will offer individual, private rooms for families, who are allowed to bring pets. It also will feature an industrial kitchen that’s expected to produce 600,000 meals per year.

The space is scheduled to open in the first quarter of the new year, and is part of a partnership Amazon has enjoyed for years with a nonprofit called Mary’s Place that has been operating a shelter out of a Travelodge hotel on Amazon’s campus since 2016. The new space, which BI says will have enough beds and blankets for 400 families each year, isn’t just owned by Amazon — the company has offered to pay for the nonprofit’s utilities, maintenance and security for the next 10 years, or as long as Mary’s Place needs it.

BI notes that the shelter will make a mere dent in Seattle’s homeless population, which includes 12,500 people in King County, where Seattle is located, but it’s still notable, not least because of the company’s willingness to house the shelter in its own headquarters.

It’s a move that no other tech company of which we’re aware has taken. The decision also underscores other cities’ equivocation over where their own, growing homeless populations should receive support. In just one memorable instance, after San Francisco Mayor London Breed last March floated an idea of turning a parking lot along the city’s Embarcadero into a center that would provide health and housing services and stays for up to 200 of the city’s 7,000-plus homeless residents, neighboring residents launched a campaign to squash the proposal. It was later passed anyway.

Vox noted in a report about Microsoft’s $500 million pledge last year that many of these corporate efforts tend to elicit two types of reactions: admiration for the companies’ efforts or frustration over the publicity these initiatives receive. After all, it’s hard to forget that Amazon paid no federal tax in the U.S. in 2018 on more than $11 billion in profit before taxes. The company also threatened in 2018 to stop construction in Seattle if the city passed a tax on major businesses that would have raised money for affordable housing.

Whether Amazon — one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a current $915 billion market cap — is doing its fair share is certainly worthy of exploring in an ongoing way. The same is true of every tech company that’s “eating the world.”

Still, a homeless shelter at the heart of a company like Amazon is worth acknowledging — and perhaps emulating — too.

“It’s not one entity that’s going to solve this,” Marty Hartman, the executive director of Mary’s Place, tells BI. “It’s not on corporations. It’s not on congregations. It’s not on government. It’s not on foundations. It’s all of us working together.”

Pictured above: A view of the new Mary’s Place Family Center from the street, courtesy of Amazon.

Source: Tech Crunch

Happy New Year! It’s been another wild and wacky ride of a year in the tech world: breakthroughs and disgraces, triumphs and catastrophes, cryptocurrencies and starships, the ongoing rise of utopian clean energy and dystopian cyberpunk societies, and most of all, the ongoing weirding of the whole wide world.

In other words it was another perfect year for The Jons, the annual award which celebrates dubious tech-related achievements, named, in an awe-inspiring fit of humility, after myself. We’ve got quite a lineup for you this year, folks. So let’s get to it! With very little further ado, I give you: the fuftg annual Jon Awards for Dubious Technical Achievement!

(The Jons 2015) (The Jons 2016) (The Jons 2017) (The Jons 2018)

THE CATLIKE FINANCIAL REFLEXES AWARD FOR LANDING ON YOUR FEET AFTER UNMITIGATED DISASTER

To Adam Neumann, who presided over the spectacular rise and even more spectacular fall from grace of WeWork, which proudly launched its proposed IPO this year and promptly saw most of its valuation (and its cash) disintegrate in a sea of eyebrow-raising stories about delusional irresponsibility and the harsh realities of actual business. However, give Neumann credit: stories may have made him sound like a potsmoking surfer dude who lived in a hallucinatory fantasyland, but — unlike his employees, whose dreams of IPO wealth were suddenly and completely shattered — he managed to walk away from the business he drove nearly into the ground with a reported $1.7 billion windfall.

THE EVERYBODY’S BEST FRIEND AWARD FOR INSPIRING NOSEBLEED VALUATIONS AND ASPIRATIONAL POSTERS EVERYWHERE

To Masayoshi Son, whose widely announced dreams of a $108 billion Vision Fund II turned into the relative nightmare of something “far smaller” — but still has his surreal, dreamlike slide decks to fall back on. After all, “SoftBank works to comfort people in their sorrow.”

THE WE MAY AS WELL JUST GIVE HIM A LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR ELON DOING HIS ELON THING

To — obviously — Elon Musk, who actually had a really good year: Tesla stock got ‘so high‘ it brushed the price at which he previously announced he would take it private (he didn’t); SpaceX launched Starlink, a “very big deal“; and he was acquitted of defamation for calling a complete stranger a pedophile on twitter. OK, so he also announced Starship should reach orbit by this coming March, and smashed the Cybertruck’s allegedly unbreakable windows onstage at its unveiling, but still, a good year! See you in 2020, Elon.

THE IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T CONVINCE, TELL AN EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS TALE AWARD FOR RISIBLE SATOSHI NAKAMOTO CLAIMS

To Craig Wright, who has long claimed in the face of mocking industrywide disbelief to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, and especially for his claims that, now work with me here, the keys 1 million of Satoshi’s bitcoin were put in a “Tulip Trust” by a long-deceased collaborator and will be delivered to him by a “bonded courier” on January 1st 2020, i.e. a few days from now. The judge he told this to was, unsurprisingly, spectacularly unconvinced, saying “Dr. Wright’s demeanor did not impress me as someone who was telling the truth” and also reproached him for his “willful and bad faith pattern of obstructive behavior.” You don’t say.

THE DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, BUT ONLY IF THEY’RE ACTUALLY DEAD AWARD FOR LEAVING A TRAIL OF CRYPTOCURRENCY CHAOS IN ONE’S WAKE

To my fellow Canadian Gerald William Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, who apparently stole and/or lost essentially all of his customers’ money, spending much of it on “luxury goods and real estate,” before his death in Mumbai last year. “But Jon,” you say, “how does this quality for a 2019 Jon Award?” Because the many thousands who lost money are now demanding an exhumation to determine that the body in Cotten’s grave is, in fact, Cotten. As for the surviving founder, he’s “a reported ex-con who served 18 months in a federal U.S. prison for identity theft, bank fraud and credit card fraud.” Is this the end of this crazy story? …Well, probably yes. But in the world of cryptocurrencies, which reliably gives us the most jawdropping Jons, who can say for sure?

THE I’VE SEEN THE FUTURE BABY AND IT’S PRETTY CRAZY AWARD FOR EPITOMIZING OUR CYBERPUNK PRESENT

To Lil Nas X, a previously unknown queer black American teenager who made a country-trap song with a beat he purchased for $30 from a Dutch producer, which sampled an obscure Nine Inch Nails deep cut, recorded it in less than an hour for $20, crafted a hundred memes to publicize it on a new Chinese-owned video-snippet social network, and then saw it go viral courtesy of a Yeehaw Challenge meme, hit first country and then crossover success, and become the longest-reigning Billboard No. 1 single of all time. Does it even get more postmodern cyberpunk than that? Lil Nas X, this is your world (well, and Billie Eilish’s) — we just live in it.

THE POWER TO DRIVE BABY BOOMERS COMPLETELY MAD AWARD FOR BEING SENSIBLY UPSET ABOUT THINGS

To Greta Thunberg, another teenager, who is an angry advocate of doing something about climate change and for some reason frequently drives a whole lot of apparently lucid people, as well as the President of the United States, completely insane, prompting them to level ludicrous and deeply attacks at a sixteen-year-old autistic girl. It is truly mystifying, and yet revelatory. Maybe they’re just upset that she’s so good at Twitter?

THE SOMEONE MUST BE TO BLAME, THIS IS SOMEONE, THEY MUST BE TO BLAME AWARD FOR LASHING OUT IN THE WRONG DIRECTIONS

To the mass media, for the techlash: the backlash against tech in which they blame the tech industry not only for its actual sins and problems, which are admittedly not hard to find, but also for essentially everything that is wrong with the world’s political and financial systems. Politics is somehow the fault of Facebook, rather than venal politicians and their ability to manipulate, er, the mass media like a Stradivarius. Inequality is somehow the fault of the tech industry, rather than City / Wall Street parasitism, regulatory capture, and, again, the politicians who actually write the laws which enact inequality. Again, the tech industry has real problems — but the fact that it has devoured the advertising and classifieds income that long propped up the media seems to have caused otherwise sober and thoughtful journalists to instinctively knee-jerk blame it for every ill, while letting their actual architects off lightly. Sadly I fear this one is going to be a perennial.

THE WHO NEEDS HUMAN FACES OR WORDS AWARD FOR SIMULATING THE DEEP INSIGHTS OF INTERNET DISCOURSE

To StyleGAN 2 and GPT-2, neural networks from Nvidia and OpenAI respectively, which generate fully convincing fake human faces, and close-enough-for-the-Internet convincing fake human comment sections, respectively. I feel certain that somewhere out there on the Internet, bots with StyleGAN avatars and GPT-2-sourced texts are already waging war against one another in befuddling comment sections: battles which have no end, no point, and no room for any actual humanity. The more things change, eh?

THE POP GOES THE IPO AWARD FOR MAKING LOCKUP PERIODS MEANINGFUL AGAIN

THE WHAT’S A FEW BILLION DOLLARS BETWEEN FRIENDS AWARD FOR JAM YESTERDAY, JAM TOMORROW, BUT NEVER JAM TODAY

To Ron Abovitz of Magic Leap, whose technology demos over the last decade have been, by all accounts, truly breathtaking and mindboggling, but whose actual shipped technology, despite ten years and nearly $3 billion in funding, has been, by all accounts, deeply disappointing. Now Magic Leap is hemmorhaging high-profile board members, signing over patents as collatoral to JP Morgan Chase while desperately trying to raise funding, and it next headset is reportedly still years away from launch. But look, those demos were amazing.

THE A SINGLE SACRIFICIAL LAMB FRANKLY ISN’T ENOUGH AWARD FOR A DEEP AND SYSTEMIC CATASTROPHE

To Boeing and its 737 MAX debacle, in which, among numerous other stunning derelictions of fundamental engineering duties, crucial safety features were sold as profitable optional extras — and yet it took not one but two crashes, killing hundreds, for them to admit any problems. Their CEO has resigned, but the company’s failures are clearly deep and systemic rather than individual; their once famously engineer-driven corporate culture is clearly no more. Their example of the decline of American capitalism in general is almost a little too on-the-nose, but then, that’s 2019 for you.

Congratulations, of a sort, to all the winners of the Jons! All recipients shall receive a bobblehead of myself made up as a Blue Man, as per the image on this post, which will doubtless become coveted and increasingly valuable collectibles. (And needless to say, sometime next year they will become redeemable for JonCoin.) And, of course, all winners shall be remembered by posterity forevermore.

¹Bobbleheads shall only be distributed if and when available and convenient. The eventual existence of said bobbleheads is not guaranteed or indeed even particularly likely. Not valid on days named after Norse or Roman gods. All rights reserved, especially those rights about which we have reservations.

Source: Tech Crunch

A security researcher has found several vulnerabilities in a number of Ruckus Wireless routers, which the networking giant has since patched.

Gal Zror told TechCrunch that the vulnerabilities he found lie inside in the web user interface software that runs on the company’s Unleashed line of routers.

The flaws can be exploited without needing a router’s password, and can be used to take complete control of affected routers from over the internet.

Routers act as a gateway between a home or office network and the wider internet. Routers are also a major line of defense against unauthorized access to that network. But routers can be a single point of failure. If attackers find and take advantage of vulnerabilities in the router’s software, they can control the device and gain access to the wider internal network, exposing computers and other devices to hacks and data theft.

Zror said his three vulnerabilities can be used to to gain “root” privileges on the router — the highest level of access — allowing the attacker unfettered access to the device and the network.

Although the three vulnerabilities vary by difficulty to exploit, the easiest of the vulnerabilities uses just a single line of code, Zror said.

With complete control of a router, an attacker can see all of the network’s unencrypted internet traffic. An attacker can also silently re-route traffic from users on the network to malicious pages that are designed to steal usernames and passwords.

Zror said that because many of the router are accessible from the internet, they make “very good candidates for botnets” That’s when an attacker forcibly enlists a vulnerable router — or any other internet-connected device — into its own distributed network, controlled by a malicious actor, which can be collectively told to pummel websites and other networks with massive amounts of junk traffic, knocking them offline.

There are “thousands” of vulnerable Ruckus routers on the internet, said Zror. He revealed his findings at the annual Chaos Communication Congress conference in Germany.

Ruckus told TechCrunch it fixed the vulnerabilities in the 200.7.10.202.92 software update, but said that customers have to update their vulnerable devices themselves.

“By design our devices do not fetch and install software automatically to ensure our customers can manage their networks appropriately,” said Ruckus spokesperson Aharon Etengoff. “We are strongly advising our customers and partners to deploy the latest firmware releases as soon as possible to mitigate these vulnerabilities,” he said.

Ruckus confirmed its SmartZone-enabled devices and Ruckus Cloud access points are not vulnerable.

“It’s very important for the customers to know that if they’re running an old version [of the software], they might be super vulnerable to this very simple attack,” said Zror.

Source: Tech Crunch

Over the weekend, media and digital brand holding company IAC announced that it had agreed to buy Care.com, which describes itself as “the world’s largest online family care platform,” in a deal valued at about $500 million. Despite being the best-known marketplace in the United States for finding child and senior caregivers, Care.com has spent the past nine months dealing with the fallout from a Wall Street Journal investigative article that detailed potentially dangerous gaps in its vetting process. The company’s issues not only highlight the problems with scaling a marketplace created to find caregivers for the most vulnerable members of society, but also the United States’ childcare crisis.

Childcare in the United States is weighed down with many issues and arguably no one platform can fix it, no matter how large or well-known. Over the past year and a half, however, several startups dedicated to fixing specific challenges have raised funding, including Wonderschool, Kinside and Winnie.

IAC and Care.com’s announcement came at the end of a year when more media attention has been paid to the difficulties American parents face in finding and affording childcare, and how that contributes to gender disparities, falling birthrates and other social issues. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world without mandated paid parental leave and childcare is one of the biggest expenses for families. Several Democratic presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have made universal childcare part of their platform and business leaders like Alexis Ohanian are using their clout to advocate for better family leave policies.

But the issue has already created deep structural problems. From an economic perspective, a September 2018 study by ReadyNation and Council for a Strong America estimated that annually, the 11 million working parents in the United States lose a total of $37 billion in earnings because they lack adequate childcare. Businesses in turn lose a total of $13 billion a year as a result, while the impact on lower income and sales tax reduces tax revenues by $7 billion. Many parents change their career trajectories after they have children, even if they did not plan to. For example, a study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 43% of women and 23% of men in STEM change fields, switch to part-time work or leave the workforce.

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s easy to see “The Witcher” as Netflix’s answer to “Game of Thrones,” thanks to its impressive special effects and its big movie star lead (Henry Cavill, previously best known as Superman in the recent DC films) — not to mention its willingness to put blood, guts and naked female bodies on-screen.

But in other ways, “The Witcher” feels like a throwback to an earlier generation of fantasy TV, and to shows like “Xena: Warrior Princess.” While longer storylines weave their way through the eight-episode season — and those storylines tie together quite cleverly — the show also maintains an old-fashioned devotion to self-contained storytelling, with Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia battling different adversaries in each episode.

And as we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we both found this to be pretty refreshing. Once you get past its gray surface, “The Witcher” turns out to be delightfully unpretentious, reveling in its pulpiness and occasionally poking fun at its stoic hero with preposterously large muscles.

That sense of fun also made us more forgiving of touches like rushed plots and anachronistic dialogue.

And while the setting might seem, at first, to resemble a generic copy of George R. R. Martin, we were both won over by “The Witcher”’s world-building; even though neither of us could keep track of all the made-up countries going to war with each other, we were still impressed by the intricate mythology behind some of the show’s monsters.

You can listen to our spoiler-free discussion in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Source: Tech Crunch

On Friday, China announced that it would complete its competitor to the U.S.-operated global positioning system network by the first half of next year, increasing the pace of its decoupling from U.S. technologies.

China’s Beidou network of satellites — named after the “Big Dipper” constellation — will be the first service to compete with the U.S. Air Force’s global positioning system and already has a potentially massive user base since over 70% of Chinese smartphones are now ready to use its positioning services, according to a report in the Nikkei Asian Review.

The Beidou network is integral to China’s longterm plans to dominate the next generation of telecommunications services and — coupled with China’s advances in fifth-generation wireless communications technology — represents as significant challenge to the U.S. hegemony over telecommunications infrastructure.

China plans to launch the final two satellites needed to make the Beidou system operational by June 2020, according to a statement from the project’s director, Ran Chengqi quoted by The Associated Press.

Envisioning a system where China’s global positioning system and fifth generation wireless networking technologies work in tandem, China could command a lion’s share of the market for new telecommunications services.

A test of how these technologies could work in tandem is being developed in Wuhan, where both 5G and Beidou’s mapping technologies will be used to create an autonomous vehicle testbed on a 28 kilometer stretch of road.

Beidou already has 120 partners signed up to work with the service — all linked to agreements made under China’s expanding Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, according to Nikkei.

Chinese smartphone manufacturers accounted for over 40% of sales worldwide as of the second quarter of 2019, the latest data from Counterpoint Research shows.

China’s GPS<a href=”https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45471959″> rolled out in phases beginning with a domestic service launched in 2000 and a regional service for Asia Pacific coming online in 2012.

By 2020 the nation’s network of 35 satellites will exceed the U.S. system that’s currently in place.

“There is certainly an aspect of this that is about expanding influence, but part of it is likely also about economic security,” Alexandra Stickings, from the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, told the BBC last year. “The main advantage of having your own system is security of access, in the sense that you are not relying on another country to provide it. The US could deny users access over certain areas, for example in times of conflict.”

Space is an area of strategic importance for the Chinese government. The country has already achieved significant milestones including quantum communications powered by its space capabilities and the first human exploration of the far side of the moon. And current plans are in place for China to send a probe to Mars in 2020 as it prepares to complete a space station by 2022.

It’s against this backdrop of increasing activity in space — even as tensions mount terrestrially — that the U.S. created the latest branch of its armed forces under the moniker of the Space Force.

Citing Chinese state media, the Nikkei Times reported that the value of goods and services tied to Beidou will reach $57 billion by 2020. The figure itself is nebulous, but points to the kind of economic power Beijing hopes to yield through the new satellite positioning service.

The development of these alternative internet realities matters a great deal.

As Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google — and no stranger to the operations of Chinese technology companies —  noted last year at a private dinner (first reported by CNBC):

“[The] Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number. If you think of China as like ‘Oh yeah, they’re good with the Internet,’ you’re missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you’re going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There’s a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc. Look at the way BRI works – their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries – it’s perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Salesforce turned 20 this year, and the most successful pure enterprise SaaS company ever showed no signs of slowing down. Consider that the company finished the year on an $18 billion run rate, rushing toward its 2022 revenue goal of $20 billion. Oh, and it also spent a tidy $15.7 billion to buy Tableau this year in the most high-profile and expensive acquisition it’s ever made.

Co-founder, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff published a book called Trailblazer about running a socially responsible company, and made the rounds promoting it. In fact, he even stopped by TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September, telling the audience that capitalism as we know it is dead. Still, the company announced it was building two more towers in Sydney and Dublin.

It also promoted Bret Taylor earlier this month, who could be in line as heir apparent to Benioff and co-CEO Keith Block whenever they decide to retire. The company closed the year with a bang with a $4.5 billion quarter. Salesforce, for the most part, has somehow been able to balance Benioff’s vision of responsible capitalism while building a company makes money in bunches, one that continues to grow and flourish, and that’s showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

All aboard the gravy train

The company just keeps churning out good quarters. Here’s what this year looked like:

Source: Tech Crunch