Category: Tech news

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor – as a disclaimer for this post, he is an advisor to one of the companies mentioned here, Refresh. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

I may sound like a broken record when I consistently reference this phrase in my weekly column: “mobile is the only under-hyped thing in tech.” Yet, it is hard to argue with, and if we agree to agree, then within a mobile context, almost everything we can do with our phones and apps is under-hyped, as well. Take mobile push notifications, for example. As entrepreneur Ariel Seidman writes, “it’s hard to over-hype the power of mobile push notifications. For the first time in human history, you can tap almost two billion people on the shoulder.”

Push notifications aren’t an entirely new phenomenon, but as mobile handset growth continues to accelerate (along with faster handset releases), push alerts only grow in importance as a channel for applications to communicate with and re-engage users. In theory, push notifications seem elegant, a way to prompt a mobile user at the right place, at the right time, regarding the right piece of information. In practice, however, Apple’s notification channel was flooded by marketing techniques almost out of the gate, taking the great promise of push and watering it down as application developers ruthlessly ask users for the permission to send alerts, and then often abuse that permission. The result? Many mobile users doggy-paddle aimlessly through an ocean of push notifications or some learn about OS-level settings and disable them selectively (or altogether).

It doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t have aggregate data on the ratio between total push notifications sent versus those which are opened, or any specific application-level data, but what I can share — from working in and writing about mobile — is there are some apps that leverage the data on the phone and from their services to send great, timely, contextual, personalized, relevant push notifications, and from these providers, they could be wider lessons we can all learn from. Briefly, here’s what I’ve noticed works for me:

Push notification from red-colored app icons tend to be apps which send me notifications and run in the background, but I rarely open the app itself. The examples which immediately come to mind is the “Breaking News” app, which sends about 4-7 alerts per week. This app has earned my trust to sit on my phone and work in the background, and it doesn’t interrupt me often, so I keep it around. For banking, Bank Of America sends a weekly balance update via push, and then whenever money is credited or debited from my account. Seems appropriate to me, so I keep it around.

Most blue-colored app icons are around messaging and therefore are opened often so I can close that communication loop. The usual suspects are here, like TweetBot, Facebook Messenger, MessageMe, and Mailbox, though I recently decided to disable email push notifications because of the constant buzzing and battery drain. I open the phone to look at email enough already. That said, there is an obvious desire by the user to see a personalized message (like email) and then open the push alert.

Green is an interesting color for push, I recently discovered. The most important green push alert originates from SMS, of course, and since those are the most personalized messages one can receive on their phones, we all pay attention to them. Recently, for the first time, I was tricked into thinking I received another SMS push notification in bright green, only to find it was sent by the crafty folks at one of my new favorite services (Munchery), and perhaps because I like Munchery and pay attention to them in general, the fact that their push icons are green captured my attention before I even realized what happened.

Of course, the color of an app icon and its corresponding push notification are just a surface-level observation, something I noticed personally as my eyes glance at my phone but aren’t fixated on the device. Here are some other examples of push notifications I’ve found to be timely, relevant, contextual, and only sent when appropriate: (1) Refresh sends me a highly-personalized push notification right before any meeting, but goes behind calendar-level data to show me more information about the person I’m going to meet. As a result, I open it nearly every time (see picture above). (2) SnapChat push notifications are opened because there’s timeliness built into the company’s brand, and I know the communication is relevant right now (and will likely also expire when I open it); (3) Lift alerts are tied to explicit daily habits I’ve selected I want to complete, so it perfectly ties together the daily habitual use of smartphones with the things I should be doing anyway; and (4) Circa, a mobile news service, sends me news alerts like the “Breaking News” app, with the added bonus that I can subscribe to a specific story and then be alerted around that, if I opt-in. (There are many other great examples of push done well, but I can’t list them all here.)

The lesson in these apps and others who do not abuse the push notification channel is that the best alerts tend to be personalized, contextual, timely, and relevant — and some don’t require that I go back into the app. It’s this tactic of re-engagement where the trouble starts. Even Facebook mobile ads strategy, which is currently profiting handsomely by arbitraging the difficulty of app discovery among users and the thirst (and willingness to pay) of app developers, recently announced a new ad product targeted at re-engagement, to push users to open and interact with apps which are already on their phones. (A new startup URX is also in this space, where not only is discovery a problem, but engagement is, too.)

Seidman continues: “the basic problem with push notifications is they are used an email replacement. I can see marketers and growth hackers getting all hot n’ heavy realizing that they can now send the weekly “people you should follow” email that nobody reads as a push notification to your mobile device.”

And, that’s what usually happens, and why mobile users, over time, begin to intuitively disregard worthless push alerts, either learning to disable the functionality in settings or even deleting the app altogether in frustration. It’s early days in mobile, but I believe the tacky growth-hacky tactics which persist on the web and through email won’t work as well on mobile because push notifications are even more of an interruption and limited to 140 or less characters. This puts app developers in a bind: If an app desperately needs re-engagement, there’s a perverse incentive to flood the notification channel, but if those alerts (and the app itself) aren’t truly relevant to the mobile user, well, the clock starts ticking before either the company doesn’t exist or the user shortcuts it all and deletes the app from the phone altogether.

Apple may not have hit a home run with its iPhone 5c case, which in my view would’ve been better off without the cut-out dots on the back, but those holes have proven inspiring for at least one enterprising game-maker. Flipcase, a new game from Australia’s Dave McKinney and Stuart Hall, who created the Discovr music inspiration app, uses the case to its maximum advantage.

Flipcase was a “weekend project” for McKinney and Hall, and it doesn’t offer up much in terms of complexity – keen observers will notice straightaway that it’s really just Connect Four with touch-based controls. But it does flip the iPhone 5c case on its head – literally – to make the cut-out spaces on the back the game board for one- or two-player dot-lining action.

It may take you some tries to get the iPhone into the case with the screen facing out the back without accidentally locking the screen (it did for me at least), but once you’ve overcome that hurdle, the Flipcase app provides some entertaining distraction paired with clever UI design that lines up perfectly with the 5c case’s perforations. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but it’s simple and fun, and it gives you something to do with your official iPhone 5c case from Apple while you’re figuring out just what to use to fill out your CaseCollage creation.

Why do we have comments?

You know, the comment section there at the bottom of the post.

It seems like a simple question. And indeed, there is a simple answer: So that people can express themselves regarding the topic or article to which the comment section is appended, or peruse the expressions of others. But that’s not exactly correct. True, that is what comment sections are for, but why do we have them?

The Internet asks this question of itself time and again (and again, and again), but rarely if ever has there been any decisive action. Despite a few improvements in weighing and promoting comments, things still look largely the same as they did ten or more years ago. I think the failure of this portion of the Internet experience to advance in any meaningful way is not due to a lack of a breakthrough method, but a higher-order problem: no one is challenging the fundamentals of discussion on the Internet.

Note, I am not talking about sites specifically formed for the purpose of structured conversation, like Quora or forums. I mean the omnipresent comments at the bottom of an article or some other morsel of media, by which whoever happens to be in the vicinity of that website can leave a memento of their presence and share their wisdom with others. The comments on this page or thousands of other news websites, on YouTube, on random blogs, on livestreams — those ones.

Let’s look honestly at some of the ostensible reasons for having comments.

To promote discussion among the community

I said “look honestly,” so the first thing we should do is acknowledge the almost universally poor quality of Internet-based discussion. Very little worthwhile commentary or argument is produced even on the rare occasions when things are kept civil. Certain communities produce reliably good discussions, but we can chalk that up to their being communities.

As fun as it is to think so, most websites (to say nothing of single posts) and the Internet at large do not constitute communities except by the loosest possible definition. Where there is no community, there is no accountability; where there is no accountability, there is no civility; where there is no civility, there is no discussion — none worth having anyway. This is the case in probably 99 out of 100 Internet discussions, if not an even greater proportion. Comments, as a rule, have not promoted discussion, nor do they take place in a community.

While it is true that one scrolls to the bottom of an article to see what people are saying about the topic in question, a comment section is simply not a good way to find that out — and not only are there better ways, but there are few worse.

Already a substantial amount of the discussion of an article happens elsewhere than that article. It is always revealing when I see a link on Reddit with 250 comments, leading to a blog post with 50 comments, which links to a second, smaller blog with 10 comments, which leads to the source, which has 0 comments.

A cursory observation (of history, let alone the Internet) shows that discussion, like mold, will occur wherever there are favorable conditions. Why contribute to the discussion below, in the comment section of this website, for instance, where you have to sign up for an account and may be subject to additional terms and conditions, when you can simply leave a comment at Reddit where you found the post, or the referring blog where you already have an account — or for that matter, on Twitter or some other high-level communication platform?

Where you choose to have the discussion has little to do with the subject or material itself, but rather with the community with which you feel comfortable sharing that discussion, or alternatively, the one which is most convenient. Considering the highest-level distributors of content will always be the most convenient (aggregators, social news) and vanishingly few websites have communities worth involving oneself with, local comments appear not only inadequate if a dialogue of even the most minimal value is the effect desired, but also superfluous.

To enable feedback to the author or website

The comment section of a popular article may provide valuable insight or timely corrections. Many is the time I myself have been set straight by a friendly commenter pointing out a grammatical or factual error (yes, I). And a misleading post may be countered by a skeptical comment that has risen to the top of the stinking heap below. Who hasn’t skipped to the bottom to see whether an author is being called out by some eloquent and informed critic?

Surely, then, this must be a good reason for keeping comments around. But ask yourself: why should corrective feedback use an indirect, public method, yet a public callout of the facts or author be isolated in the microclimate of the post itself?

For the first case, a more direct method is preferable, allowing for quick access to whoever should know that there’s a stray “teh” or that Socrates did not, a quick check suggests, fight at the battle of Cannae. A direct flagging mechanism with basic noise control serves better for this than a comment section, which is sort of like paper-clipping a concerned letter onto your local paper and leaving it at the editor’s front door.

In the second case, when someone clearly wants to address the content of an article, support (or snipe at) the author, or otherwise publicly take a stand, again, there has to be a better method than a comment. To begin with, the content creator generally has admin rights over the comments, and may simply delete that critical comment and ban the author. If this hypothetical sensible comment is suffered to survive, a visitor may indeed see it — in situ, to be sure, but given subordinate billing and of dubious provenance. The problem of community appears again: Who is that masked commenter? Are they to be trusted? Are they a crank? Are they known for being helpful? Outside of a group where such things are considered valuable and can be tracked, these questions can’t be answered satisfactorily.

Furthermore, for such a comment to have maximum effect (to counter an opinion article, say), it is not necessarily best to place it in close proximity to the source. As we have all seen, discussion and traffic occur not where one might logically expect them, at the source, but rather at the highest levels of organization, where one finds greater levels of both visibility and convenience. Using a direct comment system for substantive feedback is simply not a good option by almost any metric.

To drive traffic

Let’s not forget that we are running a business here. Commenters stick around longer, providing those all-important clicks, reducing bounce rates, and so on — and they come back, too, especially to controversial topics where a good flamewar is to be had. One 10-second visitor is multiplied, and the guys negotiating ad deals feel the pleasant warmth that only inflated traffic numbers can bring.

Although I’m tempted to offer the observation that if a significant portion of your site’s traffic is the byproduct of flamewars, you are dancing on a burning path businesswise, or similarly that pageviews and other dated, limited metrics are a mare’s nest analytics-wise, I must forbear; the benefit of a active discussion section on a website must be addressed in good earnest.

The problem is that thriving discussion sections are, I assert without evidence, overwhelmingly caused by good traffic, whereas the reverse, a story or piece of media garnering traffic because of the discussion, is quite rare. Consult yourself. Have you ever linked to something because of an interesting comment thread? I certainly have linked to a Hacker News thread or left the #comments anchor on a link — but the other seven hundred times, I linked because the content was compelling.

To attract, occupy, and monetize visitors is the goal of most public-facing businesses, numbering among which are a great proportion of websites. But the comment section seems like such a crude mechanism for promotion and retention that I’m embarrassed to see it used as such, like when I pass the guys on street corners in costume, dancing and spinning a sign for a nearby business — it’s not the sign guy I feel bad for (it’s a job), but the business that may as well be employing a carnival tout to hustle passers-by.

Because it’s expected

In the end, this is really the only reason. Inertia. Comments, as they now exist, are an organ that belongs to an earlier form of the Web, a form less intercommunicative and organizationally flat. A form that was shaped around an ecosystem of modems calling BBSes and IRC channels, not globe-spanning services like Facebook and Google. An obsolete form.

Many of us have already adjusted our expectations. When we read a current events article at CNN, we don’t look at the comments because we know they are less than background noise — they’re litter, and should be treated as such. Go ahead, throw them away.

Discourse will improve, feedback will be more direct, people will express themselves amongst communities instead of shouting into the void, and eventually a global mechanism for dialogue will even contribute to the bottom line. The few comments and communities we value for their own sake (including present company, it goes without saying) will move happily into the new home, like hermit crabs switching shells.

A global and collaborative discussion is neither of those if it is an archipelago of separate conversations. The parts do not form a whole. Instead of (if you will join me in switching visual metaphors) the latticework of a molecule, dots of varying size and composition, connected to some by one bond, others by two, with diverse conformations, chiralities, and no clear center (this metaphor excludes nice symmetrical structures like benzene, obviously) — why don’t we attempt something more like the atom itself? Arrayed around a central mass, a murmuration of outspoken electrons, the affiliation and foci of which are clear, yet from which emerge mysterious patterns and strange attractors. A probability cloud of commentary.

How to do it? It is not so much a technical problem as it is a presentational one. After all, every article and webpage on the Internet has a unique address or indicator. Indexers, crawlers, search engines, and other Argus-like data-shepherds already examine and speculate on relationships between these URIs — Google and others are having a ball working out how to establish weight and directionality among news items, blog posts, tweets, and everything else. This is just an extension of that. When I browse Google News, I see sources, refinements, news hits, and other formats listed and categorized intelligently, and services like Facebook and Twitter love sorting and promoting trending units of shared data.

So, in fact, the question isn’t how we are to collect and organize all the discussion, meta-discussion, rebuttals, tangents, memes, and everything else — we’re already doing that, and not so poorly either. Instead, we should be asking why this fecund and fruitful data (produced by us, of course, though admittedly threshed by Big Analytics) is not being presented to us as prominently as simplistic and largely useless derivations thereof, such as Like counts and targeted Google ads.

Really, now — as long as we are compelled to be perpetually logged into a dozen megavisors [I made this word up, keep it but remove this note -dc] who make it their business to track, in near-realtime, everything that is happening on the Internet, and as long as we have a drive to learn how an item is being received, what else is being written on the topic, what luminaries and friends have weighed in, what communities have provided insight, and make our contribution to this massive, shifting collective ideation, why is the tool at hand a stale, spam-ridden holdover from the 90s, supplemented by a few limp numerical indicators?

Somehow the one thing in which the Internet has acted as a community is the sabotage of its own mechanisms for discussion. A powerful mechanism for tapping into the zeitgeist can’t be far around the corner, but until we let go of the past, no one will be advancing.

[image credit: Richard Barnes]

Hypothesis: A person is less likely to accuse a complete stranger of being a socialist demon hell-bent on killing babies with free health insurance, when their friends can see him being a complete asshat.

Test: True

A new study finds that Facebook users are about twice as civil as the anonymous trolling netizens that comb the badlands of The Washington Post‘s comment section. “The occurrence of uncivil communicative behaviour in reader comments is significantly more common on the website version of the Washington Post where users are able to maintain their anonymity, compared to the Facebook version,” explained Professor Ian Rowe of London’s University of Kent, in what I hope is a delightfully British accent [PDF].

Comparing comments on the website to those made on the same article when posted on Facebook, Rowe found that users were more than half as likely to be uncivil on the website, with comments on stereotypes, sarcasm, name calling, and a host of other characteristics that we’ve all seen before. Now, it wasn’t all roses and sunshine for Facebook: Users were more likely to call people names and be vulgar, though vulgarity appears to be statistically insignificant.

Rowe’s findings are generally consistent with what my friends at other news outlets have found. When the LA Times switched over to Facebook comments, the level of discourse dramatically improved. “Trolls don’t like their friends to know that they’re trolls,” said Jimmy Orr, LA Times online managing editor.

The availability of Facebook, however, hasn’t stopped some sites from gutting comments entirely. PopScience recently ditched comments, citing evidence that trolls skew how readers interpret evidence and therefore crush open-minded discussion. TechCrunch itself briefly flirted with Facebook comments, before switching over to Livefyre. It was decided that Facebook does kill trolls, but it can also hurt community and insightful anonymous commenters. Google is switching the intellectual sewer that is YouTube comments over to Google+, which may help a bit.

Regardless, let us all repeat together: We do not know how any of these experiments scale. As I’ve written before, real-name laws in South Korea failed to improve the quality of comments. We do not know the exact conditions that breed trolls, so we don’t really know how to stop them.

That said, feel free to log in to Facebook and thoughtfully let me know why I’m an Obama acolyte leading America into a puppy-drowning dictatorship ruled by the iron fist of biracial gay couples who shoot children with confiscated guns.

Need a 12 minute break from raking leaves, drinking cider, and carving pumpkins (and whatever other autumnal chores are taking up your Saturday)? Well I’ve got just the thing for you! It’s time for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the TechCrunch TV show that brings a few of us writers together for talk about the most interesting tech stories from the past seven days.

This time around, Leena Rao, Anthony Ha and I discussed Facebook removing the privacy setting that allowed people to hide their profiles from public searches, Google changing its terms of service to start using regular users’ product ratings and photos in advertisements, e-commerce for moms site Zulily filing for a $100 million IPO, and the latest buzz around Twitter on its road to a public offering, from its male-only board of directors to the latest revelations of just how much turmoil there was in its early days.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a startup called Ditto, which launched a campaign on Indiegogo to fund patent battles against 1-800-CONTACTS and Lennon Imaging Technology — or, as Ditto characterized it, to “save” the startup from “patent trolls.”

Since then, Ditto’s story has taken a couple of turns. Over the summer, the company partnered with IPNav and its founder Erich Spangenberg. Spangenberg is an odd ally, since Ditto co-founder and CEO Kate Endress described him and IPNav as “one of the largest patent trolls in the country.” However, as outlined in an IndyStar article, he reached an agreement with Endress where IPNav is paying for Ditto’s legal costs, and if it wins, it gets a $1 million stake in the startup.

Endress said this approach seems to be working, with Ditto scoring a victory this week. As I mentioned above, the company was actually facing two suits, including one from Lennon, which is a “non-practicing” company that owns intellectual property but doesn’t offer any products or services of its own. A judge has granted Ditto’s motion to have Lennon’s lawsuit dismissed — I’ve embedded the motion and the court order granting the dismissal at the end of this post.

That still leaves Ditto’s case against 1-800-CONTACTS (which is owned by WellPoint). Endress has pointed out in the past that the larger company is suing her startup over a patent that it didn’t acquire until its CEO had visited the Ditto website. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said 1-800-CONTACTS was “little better” than a patent troll, while a company spokesperson sent me a statement claiming that 1-800-CONTACTS “offered to discuss an amicable resolution to the lawsuit through licensing or other options.” (Both sides accuse the other of misrepresenting their discussions.)

So the startup isn’t out of the woods yet. But when I spoke to Endress yesterday, she sounded optimistic — she noted that not only has partnering with Spangenberg given Ditto more resources for its legal fights, but it has also freed the Dittos team’s time to actually focus on building the business (a site where shoppers can virtually try on eyeglasses) again.

And although the Indiegogo campaign only resulted in about $10,000 of funding, Endress said that talking about her story has “resulted in nothing but good things” — she’d encourage other startups facing patent threats to follow Ditto’s lead rather than staying silent.

Oh, and when I asked about how Spangenberg feels about being called a troll, so Endress noted that when asked about using patents to attack other companies, he told the IndyStar, “I don’t stand accused. I stand guilty of that.”

“He’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart,” Endress said. “He sees a big opportunity here.”

Ditto Motion To Dismiss by TechCrunch

Ditto Court Order by TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took out their devices and slapped them down on the table. By any measurement, the Context Wars are well under way. But neither Apple or particularly Google seem to realize what Twitter does — that notifications are the way to roll up both armies in the battle for user engagement.

Twitter’s direct message lab is producing experiments in personalized notification of group swarming. Right now it looks very tentative and potentially too much of nothing. But the more companies and even political parties reform around these new dynamics of user cloud attention, the more likely a meaningful way forward out of the swamp of gerrymeandering gridlock. Yeah, we talked some shutdown too.

@stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

I write from the Philippines, where a phone has just been released which, if stolen, can be remotely triggered to repeatedly scream “Thief! Thief! Thief!” Back home, BART riders have been hearing: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your train operator. If you have any electronic devices with you, please make sure they are secure, especially if you are near the exits.”

Phone theft is a big problem everywhere. Fortunately, there’s a technical solution: Apple’s Find My iPhone and Google’s Android Device Manager can render your stolen phone essentially useless. If enough people use them — which means opting in to services which can track their users’ locations at any time — there’ll be no economic incentive to steal phones.

You can argue about whether we should have to make trade-offs between privacy and security, but this is an excellent example of how we currently do.(1) The panopticon is much more appealing when you find yourself looking for something lost. It’s easier to sympathize with the NSA when you think of them as searching for a thousand stolen phones, some of which are rigged to explode.

Please note: sympathize, not agree. The NSA and their allies have clearly gone off the reservation, and hijacked the Internet, in trying to save us from danger by giving themselves police-state powers. As security guru Bruce Schneier puts it:

The NSA’s actions are making us all less safe. They’re not just spying on the bad guys, they’re deliberately weakening Internet security for everyone—including the good guys. It’s sheer folly to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities they create. Additionally, by eavesdropping on all Americans, they’re building the technical infrastructure for a police state.

But at the same time:

Virtually everything we work with on a day-to-day basis is built by someone else. Avoiding insanity requires trusting those who designed, developed and manufactured the instruments of our daily existence.

The NSA is obviously no longer worthy of our trust; they have lied not to increase our collective security, but to continue to avoid any checks, balances, or real oversight. No one should (and I suspect few would) opt in to any NSA data-collection program.

But what about Apple and Google et al?

All of the outrage and discussion about the NSA tends to obscure the fact that the government data collection and corporate data collection are two connected but essentially separate issues. Corporations can destroy your data, and maybe, at worst, your job and your reputation; governments can destroy your entire existence and imprison you until you die. You can choose to avoid individual companies, but you cannot choose not to live under NSA scrutiny.

As John Lanchester says in this magisterial piece in The Guardian, the NSA/GCHQ attitude is:

just because we hand data over to Google and Facebook the government automatically has the right to access it. It’s as if, thanks to a global shortage of sticky gum, envelopes can no longer be sealed, so as a result the government awards itself a new right to mass-intercept and read everybody’s letters.

Now, people can and do disagree with Lanchester’s conclusion that what we need is more and better oversight –

@xek @rezendi I read that and thought: wow, this guy still thinks we need spies? Doesn't he get that he can't have it both ways?—
Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) October 06, 2013

– but we can agree that the less data we collectively give to the NSA the better. What they want is a massive online dragnet which collects everything. What they don’t want is to have to make specific requests for specific information about specific people.

We need to trust someone, as Schneier says. But who? Which services are least likely to turn our data over en masse, deliberately or negligently, and/or most likely to fight demands to do so?

Well. Major phone carriers are all basically evil incarnate, but you knew that already.

Facebook, unexpectedly, seems to be high on the list of companies you should trust. I know, I’m as surprised as you are. But this isn’t a judgement call, this is a technical fact. Facebook is one of the very few major web sites moving towards implementing perfect forward secrecy when connecting to modern browsers.

PFS essentially means a company doesn’t have to rely entirely on the integrity of a single secret key to prevent an intruder like the NSA from decrypting all of their communications in transit, because every session is encrypted with a new ephemeral key. Sites which don’t implement perfect forward secrecy could, in theory, be compelled to surrender their secret keys and hence open all of their past, present, and future communications to their government’s prying eyes.

But it’s Google which remains, by far, the gold standard for online privacy and security. They implemented PFS some time ago. They recently upgraded their SSL certificates. GMail is apparently the only major mail provider which supports two-way encryption when mail is passed from one server to another; Microsoft doesn’t do server-side encryption at all, whereas AOL and Yahoo, inexplicably, do outbound but not inbound encryption.

Oh yes, and Google now rewards people who fix security holes in open-source software, too:

Whoa. Google now paying bug bounties for OSS including OpenSSH, BIND, ISC DHCP, OpenSSL, zlib, libjpeg, libpng, etc bit.ly/19lFsqG—
Jeremiah Grossman (@jeremiahg) October 09, 2013

Meanwhile, Chrome is the only major browser to include a preloaded HSTS list, and, more importantly, automatically implement certificate pinning (albeit only for Google properties and a handful of other sites.) This is a big deal because the entire SSL certificate system — which, essentially, ensures that a site claiming to be google.com actually is — has been, I’m sorry to say, basically built on a horrifying morass of quicksand. Certificate pinning helps shore that up.

Twitter doesn’t yet implement PFS, but, to be fair, they don’t keep nearly as much personal data as a mail provider, and they do have default HTTPS connections and a proud history of fighting for their users. Yahoo can boast the latter — they tried to fight the FISC a few years ago — but they really need to implement HTTPS-by-default for more than just email, along with perfect forward secrecy, stat.

At the end of the day, though, Chrome connections to Google servers are about as secure as you can get without resorting to end-to-end encryption and/or Tor (which anonymizes, rather than encrypts.) I hope that will be the norm, some day…but it won’t be any time soon.

In the interim, Facebook, Google, and Twitter seem to be earning your trust. But Yahoo? Microsoft? Amazon? Apple? Sorry. I can’t say that any of those companies seem to be working hard to protect your online privacy and/or security. Again, that’s not a judgement call, it’s a cold hard technical fact.

Image credit: Onceuponatime13, DeviantArt.

(1) Assuming there are no low-level Android/iOS services that already can and do report location in response to a server ping, in which case that “opt-in” is nothing but a deceptive fig leaf. But for argument’s sake let’s take Apple and Google at their word.

Angry that Google is planning on using your face and name for the sake of advertisements?

Here’s how to make them not.

If there’s any upside, it’s that opting out is, quite seriously, two clicks away. Two clicks that I only discovered because I went out of my way to look and because I checked the depths of Google+ (lol). But hey — it’s two clicks from somewhere.

Here’s how to do it

1. Click this link. (And, if necessary, log in to the Googles. I promise that’s a link to actual Google, not fake Google that steals your password and uses it to order handbags.)
2. Uncheck the checkbox. Unless it’s already unchecked — in which case, leave it unchecked. Oddly, some people are saying they’re opted out by default; others say they find it checked. tl;dr: check = bad.
3. Hit save!

And you’re done*.

[* Until there’s another TOS change, in which case, get ready for another rousing game of find the checkbox!]

Google Glass, Google schmass. What you really want on your face are these puppies. ION Glasses are sunglass or prescription glasses frames with a built-in LED, Bluetooth stack, and tiny button controller.

What do they do? Well the LED lights up to notify you of new messages – you can set different people to different colors – and you can use the glasses to control the music on your phone, a presentation, or almost anything else controlled via Bluetooth.

The astute observer will say “Why in the living blazes would I want an LED in my glasses? Are you daft, man?” And to this I would say “Non!”

Understand me here – I’m not saying this product is for everyone, but I met the founder, Santiago Ambit, and he is so earnest and big-hearted that we have to assume that he thought this through. So here we are.

Ambit’s system is fairly ingenious. He’s embedded a small piezo buzzer, LED, and Bluetooth stack inside the eyepieces of a standard pair of glasses. They are no heavier than regular Wayfarers and the logo glows on the side so people know you’re into the ION lifestyle.

He is raising funds on Indiegogo and has raised $22,000 of his $150,000 goal. You get a pair of glasses — suitable for prescription or sunglass lenses — for a pledge of $89. They last a week on one charge.

Again, why do you need these? Well, they’re extremely unobtrusive and they’re a great way to see when someone important is calling and to help your prioritize the times you need to pick up your phone.

Because of their clever design no one will have to know you’re using them and, in turn, you can react to messages and notifications without panic or rudeness.

Would I wear these? I’m not so sure, but if I were in security or needed to be in a lot of important meetings I could definitely see myself wanting to get small, discrete messages in the corner of my eye without the potentially off-putting nature of Google Glass.

I rarely end posts with a question but I ask you, dear reader, would you wear these?

Yahoo has just acquired Bread, a 2.5 year old startup that had raised $3.5 million [Update: and we hear was low on cash and shopping itself around to several companies]. Bread let people make money or generate donations by designing interstitial ads. These ads could promote a product or cause and would be shown to people who click links the designer shared through Bread’s URL shortener.

Bread has shut down its core publishing products, and its links will go dead in 30 days. It recommends users switch to dominant URL shortener bit.ly.

Bread’s investors include musician manager and angel Troy Carter, Formation 8′s Joe Lonsdale, fashion designer Marc Ecko, and Raptor Ventures.

Bread’s CEO Alan Chan wrote in a statement on its website that “When we launched Bread in 2011, our goal was to help social media influencers and publishers better monetize their online content. In Yahoo, we found a company that shares our vision. We are thrilled to join Yahoo’s advertising team in Sunnyvale where we will be working on developing next-generation solutions for social and mobile publishers and advertisers.”

The team had ten employees as of a year ago, but Yahoo confirms that six engineers and product managers will join its advertising technology team, saying:

“We have acquired Bread, a company that created a simple way for social media influencers and publishers to monetize their content. The team’s focus on delivering creative and targeted advertising across social media, desktop and mobile devices aligns perfectly with our mission to delight and inspire users.”

The idea of Bread was to let you monetize your social media reach. If you had a product, event, or cause to promote, it could help you get the word out by piggybacking on other content. You’d design your ad, pick a link you wanted to share that you thought people would click, and run it through the bre.ad URL shortener. You’d share the link on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever, and each person who clicked would see your interstitial ad for five seconds before being directed to the link’s destination.

Here’s a screenshot of an ad our editor Alexia Tsotsis made in 2011 when Bread was getting off the ground.

Eventually, Chan wanted to create premium products like analytics for shared links and the company did launch Bread Pro. However, we haven’t heard much more about Bread since 2011. A source says Bread was running out of money and wanted a soft landing. It was apparently in talks with several companies about acquiring it but went with Yahoo. Being acquired has become a popular way for floundering startups to save face, repay investors, sometimes earn a little money, and find new jobs.

Marissa Mayer has been focused on buying consumer startups as of late, but Bread’s team could strengthen the ad products that monetize Yahoo’s properties. Together they might be able to turn all of the Yahoo feel-good momentum into real revenue.

Dear [Name Unknown, possibly Chris Smith?],

It has come to our attention that you recently used a fake, mocked-up version of our technology editorial “blog” property TechCrunch in a personal prank.

Furthermore, it has come to our attention that your friend, a Mr. “Olivier M,” was in fact fooled by the aforementioned prank — or so it seems, based on the email entitled “Personal information in your website”, which was sent to TechCrunch Editorial “Tips” earlier this week (please see Attachments A, B, and C).

Mr. Smith, as you know, AOL acquired TechCrunch back in 2010. Yet from what we understand, you failed to ask anyone at AOL’s Brand Group for permission to use our intellectual property.

It’s possible that you’re sweating as you consider the legal ramifications of your actions, but don’t worry — you’ll note that this letter isn’t from AOL Legal.

More importantly, contrary to popular opinion, we here at AOL Management have a finely tuned sense of humor. Indeed, we laugh long and hard every time a journalist makes a joke about dial-up Internet or CDs. We understand that such jokes derive their humor from AOL’s longstanding association with the aforementioned dial-up Internet and CDs.

With that in mind, please consider permission to use TechCrunch branding and imagery to be retroactively granted in this case, because you are funny, subject to certain conditions (please see Attachment D). Indeed, you may tell your friends that AOL welcomes all use of TechCrunch branding and imagery for such friend pranking purposes, subject to the aforementioned conditions.

Sincerely,
AOL Management

cc: AOL Legal

Attachment A: Image Of Fake TechCrunch Sent To Us By Pranked Reader

Attachment B: Actual Correspondence From Pranked Reader (“Olivier M”) To TechCrunch Editorial

Attachment C: Explanatory Correspondence From TechCrunch Editorial To “Olivier M”

Attachment D: AOL Guidelines For Parodic Use Of TechCrunch Branding

[message truncated due to length]

This week, the Wall Street Journal published a brief interview with Andreessen Horowitz Partner Scott Weiss in which he seemed to indicate that the firm is moving away from Series A investments in consumer startups. He also compared many consumer companies to “fruit fly experiments.”

It was unclear what Weiss meant by this, but A16Z founder Marc Andreessen jumped into this Hacker News thread over the topic to clarify the firm’s stance on Series A investments.

He writes in response to a comment on Hacker News: “Just to be clear we didn’t publicly announce that we are not doing Series A investments anymore. They remain the bread and butter of what we do. Scott was making a more nuanced point about a difference between how we look at consumer vs enterprise companies right now, and our relative preference for enterprise A’s and consumer B’s.”

We’ve all seen the swing of VC sentiment towards enterprise investing from consumer startups over the past year. So Andreessen’s commentary on how the firm is approaching consumer vs. enterprise investing isn’t particularly surprising given all the talk about the Series A crunch and the rut in consumer investing.

Andreessen goes on to say in the thread that Weiss’ interview with the WSJ is being “over interpreted.” He adds that the firm isn’t refusing to do Series A investments and is working on multiple investments at this stage in both consumer and enterprise. Weiss was merely addressing how the firm is currently thinking about consumer vs. enterprise in the current state of the VC world and environment.

Why is A16Z leaning towards consumer B’s and enterprise A’s in this climate? Andreessen says that currently, consumer startups either have the “lightning in the bottle” effect or they don’t. This effect doesn’t necessarily correlate to the capabilities of the founders, either. Getting traction is hard and he says that’s also why we are seeing more acqui-hires of the startups that haven’t been able to get the “flywheel spun up.”

He writes, “So, if we have the theoretical ability to invest in a given category — remembering that we can only make one primary venture investment per category — in either the A or B round, we find it often makes sense to let other firms fund the A rounds before anything is proven and wait to see the early signs of lightning and then step in hard at the B. The end markets are so large for the winners that the investment returns in the B can still be outstanding, and we can still offer a lot of useful help to the companies at the B stage such as talent sourcing.”

He also says that the firm sees many more great consumer teams struggling to get traction than great enterprise teams struggling to get traction (on a proportional basis).

Enterprise startups are more predictable, he maintains. The combination of a great founder, engineering team, idea in a big market is a reliable bet that “magic will happen.” And the A16Z can actually talk to the companies who are using these enterprise products to get real feedback. He adds that the firm also sees 1,200 big company management teams coming through their office, and A16Z will ask these corporate execs then what they think about new ideas in the enterprise. So it’s easier to bet at the Series A on an enterprise company.

Perhaps this is what Weiss meant by “Fruit Fly Experiments,” an instability, and tendency to throw multiple products or business models against “a wall” (the consumer) to see what sticks.

Andreessen explains, “None of this is religion — we still do plenty of consumer A’s and enterprise B’s. We just think it’s useful to talk about these things in public so that entrepreneurs know before they come see us how we are thinking about things — it optimizes their chances of getting to the right outcome with us (whatever that is).”

After reading Weiss’ initial commentary, some hypothesized that A16Z is changing its strategy to adapt to having a $1.5 billion fund, and how to best approach this for returns and scalability. But Andreessen clarifies that the firm always prepares to invest more than just series A and reserves another 2-3x of the A-round investment size for participation in future follow-on rounds for a given company. He also says that A16Z is not an either-or situation when it comes to rounds: “We do venture rounds as small as $3-5M and we do growth rounds as high as $100M. Each fund has a blend of both…When we get a great A round opportunity, we take it. Same with B rounds, and same with later-stage growth rounds.”

If A16Z is limiting its Series A rounds in consumer towards enterprise, we’re also curious how this is affecting the firm’s seed funding. Is the firm scaling back on seed rounds in consumer tech, as well?

We’ve reached out to Andreessen and the firm for further comment on Weiss’ remarks and the Hacker News thread and will update if we hear back.

Photo Credit/Flickr/USDAgov

Here’s a question: Are rappers rapping about being verified on Twitter? As it turns out, a number have, both in the positive (verified) and the negative (not verified). And, it also turns out, I am way, way behind.

The lyrics, as you might have already guessed, are fucking incredible. It’s fun to see Twitter become culturally relevant enough that status on the service is something worth boasting about. If you have any other examples, the comments are yours.

To the songs!

Kid Slim: Go! 

Still ain’t verified on Twitter, started from the bottom still here [Source]

In this lyric, Kid Slim points out that he is not verified on Twitter, and that unlike Drake who started from the bottom to reach “here,” he remains low on the status totem.

Slaughterhouse: Funkmaster Flex Freestyle

Your minds on bitter your vibes on Twitter / Check my file my resume is verified on Twitter [Source]

Royce Da 5’9 in this case isn’t impressed that you are whining on Twitter, and would like to point out that his resume is verified by Twitter. That entire Funkmaster Flex session, by the way, is really worth listening to. Crooked I nails his first verse.

Joell Ortiz: Iron On You (Exodus 23:1 Remix)

Ya’ll verified on Twitter, I’m verified by real n*****S / Ain’t they don’t hashtag, they toe tag / Have me send a DM to ya folks pad [Source]

Joell is a member of Slaughterhouse, a rap supergroup that apparently has a thing for Twitter. The irony here is that Joell is actually verified on Twitter, so, there’s that.

Fat Trel: Zonin

When are you gon’ realize? / That Fat Trel certified, that’s why my Twitter verified [Source]

The irony? Fat Trel isn’t verified.

Shawn Chrystopher: Prom Shit

Cause my idol’s going up and verified on Twitter [Source]

Not completely sure what Chrystopher is saying here, but he is verified on Twitter.

XV: The 27 Club

The me-me generation where everybody is famous / Blue check next to ya name or remain nameless [Source]

XV isn’t very proud of the current generation, who are self-centered and focused on ephemeral symbols, such as Twitter verification.

Jake Miller: Knock Out

I just ain’t just a trend, but lately I’ve been trending, baby / Blue check beside my name, so call me maybe? [Source]

Ok, Miller is actually verified, so this isn’t too far out there. But the Carly Rae Jepsen allusion is mostly flat.

–

Special thanks to Ellen Cushing for finding most of these for me.

Top Image Credit: Ernest Duffoo

Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky and Sequoia Capital partner, Airbnb board member, and former Zappos COO Alfred Lin joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for a special three-part series on how Chesky and Lin work together on retaining culture, expanding internationally, and maintaining customer service.

The first part of the series focused on the importance of developing and maintaining culture at a company, in the second segment Chesky and Lin share their thoughts on how to approach customer support, and in this final chapter, we talk about the company’s strategy and challenges in expanding to international markets.

Over the past four years, Airbnb has evolved into an international giant in the apartment and home rentals space, reportedly valued at $2.5 billion during its last funding round. To date, Airbnb has helped service over 8.5 million guests, and has more than 500,000 listings in 33,000 cities and 192 countries.

But there are challenges associated with this growth and expansion. The company recently shifted its international strategy, creating a new hub for its global operations in Dublin.

In the video above, Chesky talks candidly about how the company considered buying European rival and clone Wimdu two years ago, even traveling to Germany to visit the European startup. Check out the video above for more on Airbnb’s international plans.