Category: Tech news

A Facebook security bug exposed users’ personal contact information (email or phone number) to other users who were connected to them; the bug has affected 6 million accounts.

“When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations,” the security team wrote in a blog post published today.

“Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook,” the post continued. “As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom they have some connection.”

A Facebook spokesperson tells me the bug has been live since last year, and was discovered last week. Facebook says the security team fixed the bug less than 24 hours after it was brought to their attention.

The social giant says six million users had email addresses or phone numbers that were included in the downloads. Additionally, there were non-Facebook users’ email addresses and phone numbers included in the downloads from tools to invite contacts to join Facebook; a Facebook spokesperson tells me that this information wasn’t tied to any Facebook accounts and “wasn’t structured and wasn’t identifiable.”

Facebook says the bug has not been exploited maliciously, and the company is reaching out to the affected users.

“For almost all of the email addresses or telephone numbers impacted, each individual email address or telephone number was only included in a download once or twice,” the post said. “This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person. Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook – not developers or advertisers – have access to the DYI tool.”

Google News in Germany will soon change. Starting August 1, it will only index sources that have decided to explicitly opt-in to being shown on the search giant’s news-aggregation service. Google News remains an opt-out service in the other 60 countries and languages it currently operates in, but since Germany passed a new copyright law earlier this year that takes effect on August 1, the company is in danger of having to pay newspapers, blogs and other publishers for the right to show even short snippets of news.

Publishers will have to go into Google’s News tools page to agree to be indexed by Google News. Publishers who don’t do this will simply be removed from the index come August 1.

Many of Germany’s publishers had hoped to force Google to pay a licensing fee for their content, but today’s announcement does not even mention this. Instead, Google notes that it is saddened by the fact that it has to make this change. On its German blog, Google argues that Google News currently gets 6 billion visits per month and that, if anything, it’s providing a free service for publishers that brings them more traffic.

One of the main issues with the “Leistungsschutzrecht” (how’s that for a good German word?) — the ancillary copyright law that the German government passed after large protests earlier this year — is that it’s not clear when a “snippet” becomes a snippet. The law doesn’t feature a clear definition of how long a snippet actually is (140 characters? 160? 250?).

Google always argued that the new law was neither necessary nor useful and that it wouldn’t pay for links and snippets. A number of major German publishers have already said that they will opt-in to being featured in Google News, but there is a good chance that quite a few will decide that they don’t need the traffic.

Gillmor Gang Live – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording for today has concluded.

You will gaze at your computer, and your computer will gaze back. That’s the inevitable path of progress in interface design, as evidenced by ongoing projects from companies like Leap Motion, Umoove, pmdtechnologies and more. Now, Sweden’s Tobii Technology is taking a step forward with its own approach, via a prototype ultrabook design created in partnership with touchpad company Synaptics.

The notebook will incorporate Tobii’s eye-tracking tech with Synpatics’ touch sensitive input methods to preview how the two can be used together to further the cause of new input methods. The purpose of the project is to showcase to OEMs how they might be able to use the same tech in their own products. Tobii and Synaptics will be touring with a roadshow of the prototype devices throughout July and August, showing off exactly how the two technologies work in tandem.

For Tobii, which has been showing off its Tobii Gaze technology since its introduction last year (and which was in development for many years before that in some form or another), this is a chance to finally start getting eye-tracking built-in to more mainstream devices. There’s been a lot of attention paid to how gaze tracking is a part of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 device, and other startups like Umoove are trying to market their own products to other consumer electronics makers, so the time is right for a major sales push.

Partnering with Synaptics is a good way to hitch Tobii’s wagon to a player with strong existing relationships with virtually every Windows PC manufacturer, as well as makers of mobile devices. The touchpad company has been in business for a long time, and survived the transition from cruder, simpler pressure-based input mechanisms to the more sensitive capacitive and hybrid systems now in place in most modern devices. Synaptics will be using the prototype to shop around its own ForcePad solution, a new product offering that incorporates per-finger pressure detection into the mix for even greater sensitivity.

The jury’s still out on whether any one company will dominate gaze detection and eye tracking the same way that Synaptics has done for touch-based input on PCs, but clearly Tobii (which raised $21 million from Intel last year) is making a play for the crown.

“We expect consumers will start seeing product options like this one in stores as early as sometime next year,” Tobii VP of Business Development told us via email. This push likely means we’ll see a lot of familiarly named PC makers trot out this kind of tech (or some kind of motion detection) in their prototype products and concepts at CES next year, so keep an eye out for that, and for the Tobii name.

While larger competitors struggle to differentiate themselves with different video lengths, Snapchat could use a different weapon to be the first camera app opened: speed. And unlike filters, this one will be more difficult to copy.

Snapchat has a patent, “Single mode visual media capture,” on its technology that allows the user to take a picture by tapping the camera button and a video by holding down the same camera button. Photos are simply taken by the tap, and videos end when you release the camera button, or after 10 seconds.

The app always opens directly to the camera screen, and this single camera, single button for both photo and video makes capturing moments simple and very fast. Vine’s recording interface is most similar, and is also quite quick, but it only does video.

By comparison, to move from photo to video in Instagram, you have to hit the video button, wait for the camera to shutter for a few seconds, move to a new screen, then press and hold to record. In Poke, Facebook’s Snapchat clone, you have to select camera or video camera before you see the capture screen; and, again, there’s loading time for the camera to open before you can capture something. Even in the standard iPhone camera app, you have to slide the dial from camera to video, wait for the camera to shutter for a couple seconds, then shoot.

This might seem like a trivial difference, but waste a couple seconds to switch to video or to wait for your camera app to load and the moment you were hoping to capture could be over.

The patent could also help Snapchat settle a pesky lawsuit. Frank Reginald “Reggie” Brown is currently suing Snapchat and co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy; Brown claims he was a co-founder of the company and was forced out by Spiegel and Murphy.

In a lawsuit filed in February 2013, Brown alleges:

“In addition, at this time [summer of 2011], Brown undertook the responsibility of drafting and filing a patent application for the technology used in the Application, which named Brown and the Individual Defendants as co-investors. Brown prepared the patent application and filed it with the United States Patent Office on behalf of the joint venture/partnership.”

As I wrote in March, this original patent led to a major argument:

“There was a big argument over patent filing,” the first source tells me. “Then there was a huge fight where each person said terrible things about the other and then Spiegel changed the passwords and Reggie just sat and waited to file…it was something to do with who’s name was listed first. Literally a pointless argument. The bigger thing was what happened after. I really don’t think the patent ended up being a problem. It’s pretty much just a fight between friends and people calling each other out. Not much basis for why they actually had a big split up.”

Nearly a year later, in August 2012, Spiegel and Murphy filed this patent.

Until recently, patent searches for Brown, Spiegel, Murphy, Snapchat, and even the company’s early names like Picaboo and Toyopa Group, came up with nothing.

A representative from the United States Patent Office tells me an “inventor can ask for an application not to be published at all until the patent is actually issued.” The patent eventually gets abandoned if it is never issued. The representative noted that if an application has multiple inventors, any of them can file a non-publication request.

A lawyer from the firm Lee, Tran & Liang, Brown’s representatives, confirmed the statement in the February 2013 complaint, but could not comment further due to the nature of the ongoing case.

Y Combinator-incubated LendUp launched in October with backing from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Kapor Capital and others, to bring a fresh solution to an old problem: You have to pay your bills now, but you don’t have the money to pay them. Rather than turn to predatory lenders and banks, with their high interest rates, borrow money from friends or cover your eyes and hope they go away, what do you do?

It may seem like a situation that only befalls the chronically irresponsible, but in fact, 15 million Americans turned to payday lenders to borrow money last year. Instead of ending up saddled with long-term debt from hidden fees or wrestling with Draconian terms and costly rollovers, LendUp wants to give those looking for a speedy fix to a short-term financial conundrum a way to borrow money without hidden fees, costly rollovers and high-interest rates.

The lending space at large has begun to brim with startups — like BillFloat, Zest, Think, Kabbage, On Deck and Lending Club — each of which is trying to make it easier for consumers and small businesses to get access to capital without having to jump through a million hoops. LendUp, in contrast, is positioning itself as a direct lender, using technology and Big Data to allow consumers with poor or no credit to get access to small-dollar, short-term loans (of up to $250 for 30 days) and build their credit while doing so.

Unfortunately, most credit agencies turn their backs on payday loans, so even if people are able to pay them on time, it doesn’t help their credit scores and the cycle of bad credit keeps on spinning. Most banks won’t touch these kind of loans because they’re high-risk, but like On Deck Capital (which is attempting to streamline the lending process for small businesses), LendUp uses Big Data to do instant risk analysis and evaluate creditworthiness, weeding out those who have bad credit for a reason from those who may have become victims of the system.

Along with eschewing hidden fees, rollovers and high interest rates, LendUp streamlines the application process for loans — which traditionally takes forever — by customizing the process. In other words, rather than make everyone submit bank statements, credit reports and so on right from the beginning, it crunches available data and approves those with good credit instantly. It only requests more information from you if questions arise, approving or rejecting as soon as it has enough information to make an informed decision.

Co-founders Jacob Rosenberg and Sasha Orloff tell us that they’re able to build a dynamic application that changes in realtime based on customer risk profiles and segment with a higher level of accuracy by utilizing data sources that most banks or credit bureaus don’t consider. That could be data from social media or other lesser-used credit institutions.

With its foundations in place, today the startup is taking its formula one stop further, offering instant online loans. This means that LendUp now has the ability to deposit money in your account in as little as 15 minutes, so that consumers not only can apply for and get approved quicker than than they normally would, but they now have near-instant access to that loan.

LendUp loans are also available on mobile, so unlike its aforementioned lending competitors, LendUp deposits that money into your bank account, which you can then access from your laptop or while you’re on-the-go.

Orloff, who has nearly 15 years of experience working in credit analysis at the World Bank, Citigroup and others, says that the biggest problem inherent to the current lending process is that it can take up to four days for people with good credit to be approved for loans. When you need money right away because of impending deadlines, when it’s an emergency, that’s too long to wait.

By depositing loans directly into your bank account and making that capital available while you’re on the go, the founders believe that they’re removing one of the last advantages of going to a payday loan store rather than borrowing online. Participating banks offer instant direct deposits and loan decisions through LendUp, while users with non-participating bank accounts will receive loans the next business day.

It also hopes to incentive users by offering financial education through its “LendUp Ladder,” which aims to help borrowers with poor credit improve their credit scores by using LendUp to pay their loans on time.

With its new announcement today, LendUp is removing one of the last barriers that stands in the way of short-term, payday lending that actually offers fair terms to the consumer. So, while the word “disruption” is overused in Startup Land, LendUp has begun to create a service that seems like it could have real disruptive potential in the predatory world of payday lending.

Find LendUp at home here.

Judging by the massive spike in selfies (and response selfies) and lunch shots in our Instagram feeds following the debut of their new video functionality, it certainly seemed like a successful launch.

Now, thanks to some stats that the team just shared with us, we know exactly how well it did right out of the gate.

In the first 24 hours after the switch was flipped, Instagram saw 5 million videos uploaded. That’s a jaw-droppingly huge number for any day one feature, but remember: Instagram does have 130 million users. Even if we assume that each of the 5 million videos came from a unique user (an absolutely wild assumption, of course), that works out to around 3.8% of Instagram’s userbase giving the new feature a spin.

In the first 8 hours alone, Instagram saw roughly a year’s worth of content uploaded.

Curiously, their biggest spike in traffic didn’t come right after launch — instead, it was a few hours later, when the Miami Heat won Game 7 of the NBA Finals. At that point, they were seeing almost 40 hours of videos uploaded per minute.

For comparison’s sake, Vine’s 13 million users reportedly upload a collective 1 million videos per day.

The unfortunately-named Scrooser (the creators are from Dresden so maybe it sounds better in German) is actually surprisingly cool. It looks like a standard, two-wheel kick scooter but actually has a motor built in and it can go about 15 miles per hour on a good day.

The Kickstarter project has been running for 19 days and is already at $43,000. The Scrooser itself can be yours for $3,950. It’s obviously quite pricey but it looks like it could be a fun way to get around town. It has a range of 20 miles.

The design of the Scrooser is quite unique and compact. The batteries are under the footboard and the motor is in the rear wheel. Quoth the creators:

While seeing grown men on scooters is always comical, this powerful hybrid could make scooting cool again… maybe.

Registries present an etiquette quandary for engaged couples. Open one at a major retailer, fill it with suggestions from a checklist and you end up looking greedy (how many newlywed couples really need a gravy boat?). Skip the registry, and you risk receiving multiple toasters. Thankful Registry tackles that problem by re-imagining registries as a way for couples to sign up for a thoughtful selection of items while connecting with their guests.

Bootstrapped by founder Kathy Cheng, Thankful Registry launched three months ago. Cheng worked with Web design studio Crush + Lovely to set the tone of the site. Each wedding registry features a full-bleed photo of the affianced pair and a personal message. Instead of the sterile lists seen in most wedding registries, photos of potential gifts are arranged like a catalog into categories such as “delicious,” “play” and “nest.” Items can be chosen from different vendors, separating the registry from big-box retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond that derive a large portion of their sales from the $10 billion wedding gift market. Once shoppers select an item, they are taken to the vendor’s order form pre-filled with the couple’s shipping information.

Though there are other sites, like NewlyWish and Registry Love, catering to couples who want to avoid retailer registries, Cheng says she drew on her design background to set Thankful Registry apart from its competitors by honing its elegant and simple user interface.

“I focused less on adding a bunch of features just for the sake of having features and more on the tone of the brand because I feel that in the wedding space, people are looking for something that draws them in emotionally,” says Cheng, a senior copywriter for consulting firm Smart Design. “Everyone else is about creating a wishlist and convenience.”

Cheng, who started brainstorming Thankful Registry three years ago, says she likes to take her time finding the perfect present and found shopping her friends’ wedding registries frustratingly impersonal.

“I consider myself a pretty okay gift-giver and it wasn’t cutting it. I was disappointed. I also felt that couples felt obligated to add things to their registries,” says Cheng. “Our site looks modern, it doesn’t look greedy. I thought, gifts are as much about the giver as they are the couple.”

“Couples put so much time into their weddings, but the true touchpoint that guests see outside of the actual wedding day are invitations and wedding registries,” she adds. “We don’t say things like ‘register for whatever you want’ because you don’t want guests to spend their time and heart picking out a gift that ends up just being returned for cash.”

With their gift registries independent from major retailers, Thankful Registry’s couples can add items from any site, allowing them to support smaller vendors. One couple, for example, registered for handcrafted Japanese cutlery.

“I am surprised at the retailers they pick sometimes. They are usually not retailers who are heavily represented in the wedding registry sector,” says Cheng.

Though Cheng expected almost all of the site’s users to come from the U.S., couples from different countries, including the U.K., Norway and Australia, have signed up, and she plans to make the site friendlier for international couples by making the content less U.S.-centric.

Thankful Registry is free for a one week trial, after which couples pay a $30 fee, and Cheng says it currently has a 24% conversion rate. The site also makes revenue by participating in Amazon’s affiliate program. Cheng’s next step is to create a baby gift registry with the same low-key approach as Thankful Registry, as well as versions of the site for other life milestones, including birthdays and graduations.

YouTube has been getting deeper into live-streaming sports lately and today, Google’s online video site announced that it will live-stream the Wimbledon tennis tournament, too. The company says YouTube will stream “the key moments of the tennis, interviews, behind the scenes and press conferences” throughout the two-week tournament. The coverage, which will be sponsored by Rolex, will be available on the Wimbledon YouTube channel, starting Monday, June 24.

The Wimbledon channel debuted in 2006, and this year marks the tournament’s first foray into live-streaming the matches.

The coverage will be available “anywhere YouTube Live is available.” There are some geographic restrictions, though. The live video and full broadcast will be restricted to the U.S., Canada, South America (except Brazil), the U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus and New Zealand. Highlights will be available globally except for the U.K., the U.S., South America, Germany, Austria and Italy. All other content will be available on a global basis.

As Google tells me, tennis is about as popular as baseball on YouTube according to searches, but both are still well behind soccer. Currently some of the most popular sports channels on YouTube that stream live video include the UFC’s and WWE’s channels, but YouTube has also recently streamed major soccer tournaments, cricket matches and similar sporting events with a worldwide audience.

Given that YouTube offers live streaming in its mobile apps, as well as through Google TV and its web-based “leanback” experience, this actually puts YouTube in direct competition with the traditional TV broadcasters that generally had a lock on major sporting events coverage.

Adobe released Photoshop CC this week, as part of its Creative Cloud-only revamp of the entire Creative Suite of software products it offers. The new version of Photoshop offers some exclusive new features, which I’ve covered previously, but the cloud-based and subscription nature of the program were seen by many as a way of counteracting the rampant piracy that greets each new edition of Adobe’s software.

Fast-forward a couple of days, and Photoshop is encountering the same old problems it has always had, thanks to a pirated version hitting the web only one day after its broad release. The pirated version has some trade-offs like a lack of cloud-based functionality tied to creative portfolio network and recent Adobe acquisition Behance, as well as other CC services, but it’s functional enough for most. So is Adobe’s grand cloud experiment a failure, at least in terms of deterring pirates? Yes and no.

On the one hand, Adobe is shifting more of its services and feature to the cloud, which is accessible only with a legit subscription. and add to that the fact that it’s actually much easier now to just sign up for a Creative Cloud subscription than to go through the often complex process of installing a pirated copy of software. Adobe’s David Wadhwani recently talked to Frederic about these aspects of piracy prevention, and said that that’s more where their energy is focused in terms of discouraging product theft, in fact.

Adobe has never played up or even talked much about the benefits of going with a subscription-based model for its creative suite products in terms of piracy prevention, so it’s hard to say specifically that that’s what they were trying and that those efforts have been thwarted with the rapid breaking of Photoshop CC’s DRM. But it’s worth an Ian Malcolm-esque “Piracy, uh, finds a way” to observe just how fruitless the subscription shift has been in terms of changing at least how easy it was to make Photoshop available to those who’d secure it by nefarious means.

The cloud might not be a cure-all, but Adobe’s right that it can build in additional, cloud-based functionality that will forever remain off-limits to pirates, and convenience is a huge factor for those who do have the money to pay for products like Photoshop but simply opt not to. The other big promise of CC is that it will be subject to frequent updates to address just do its (JDIs) to improve features and address nagging issues, and that kind of stuff might not make it through to pirated versions, so it’s early yet to say definitively what kind of impact going all-subscription will have on long-term piracy rates.

Instagram now has video! It may or may not be better than Vines. Samsung showed off a bunch of computers and cameras and phones with strange names. That was fun. And of course, 3D printing sweetheart Makerbot sold for $400 million to Stratasys.

It’s been a long, crazy, eventful week, and we’re here to discuss it with you on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, Chris Velazco, and a touch of Matt Burns.

Enjoy, folks!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

When Jufo Peltomaa and Tuomas Lukka were figuring out what to do next after selling Hybrid Graphics to Nvidia seven years ago, they knew it had to involve one thing.

Robots.

“Our business plan was — let’s do something cool with robots!” Peltomaa said.

The pair, plus their third co-founder Harri Volpola, are one of the most interesting entrepreneurial teams out of Finland today. Lukka is the country’s youngest ever Ph.D. after getting his degree in quantum chemistry at the age of 20 and Peltomaa is an early 1990s pop star from one of the country’s first rap groups, a past career he kind of wants to leave behind.

They didn’t know exactly what these robots would do, so they did hours and hours of interviews with different potential customers.

“The question we asked was, ‘How can we help you? What are you losing money on right now?’” he said. They looked at a number of industries like warehouse logistics and food companies.

They stumbled on a problem which wasn’t only just lucrative, but also interesting from a technical perspective. There were problems with getting machines to pick up oddly-shaped objects. They decided to settle on robotic recycling, with the European Union alone seeing 3 billion tons of waste each year and the regional construction industry generating 900 million tons of demolition waste annually.

They would build a system that would sort through trash and pick out things that could be recycled for extra revenue like wood or metal.

Their solution, which can cost anywhere up from a starting price of a half-million dollars, uses off-the-shelf industrial robots that are enhanced by artificial intelligence to determine whether trash rolling through on a conveyor belt is recyclable.

ZenRobotics’ system is also bolstered with several load sensors which detect things like surface area and weight.

The robots weigh trash as they lift pieces and calculate the price a piece could be redeemed for. There are also infrared scanners and metal detectors built into the system as well.

“These are the same kinds of robots that are used in Volkswagen factories,” Peltomaa said. “They are standard industrial robots. They are honed to be really reliable. What we are developing behind them is artificial intelligence software.”

They can also maintain the systems remotely so they can monitor if any parts in the system are starting to wear down ahead of time.

Peltomaa says that a client might normally pay 100 euros to get rid of a ton of waste. But if they can pick out a ton of metal, then they can sell that for about 250 euros.

The company has sold five units so far since they only started about a year ago, and believe that the total market size globally for what they make is about 8,000 units. They put together the systems locally in Finland and then deliver them to the customer.

The company just closed 13 million euros in funding from Invus, a private equity firm that has about $4 billion under management. They also pulled in a CEO who can scale the company in Juho Malmberg, who used to run Accenture in Finland and grew their office from 10 to 800 people. They also brought in Jorma Eloranta as a chairman of the board. He used to run mining and construction giant Metso, which pulled in 7.5 billion euros in revenue last year.

“We want to bring multi-billion euro thinking to our company,” Peltomaa said. “It will be our own fault if we don’t make it.”

According to the latest set of documents from Edward Snowden that were released by the Guardian today, the Britsh spy agency GCHQ has been tapping into 46 transatlantic fiber-optic cables that carry data between Europe and North America to collect and store email messages, Facebook posts and other information for at least the last 18 months. Though the program, code-named “Tempora,” has supposedly been built up over the last five years.

Given what we’ve heard about the NSA and its close relationship to Britain’s GCHQ, this may not come as a total surprise, and, as the Guardian reports, GCHQ is sharing its information with the NSA.

“It’s not just a U.S. problem. The U.K. has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden told the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the U.S.”

According to this report, about 300 GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts were working on analyzing this data by last May and an unnamed U.K. official argues that they get to work with even more information than the NSA because the program actually “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA.” By last year, the program was handling 600 million “telephone events” each day and was processing data from 46 of the 200 fibre-optic cables it tapped into.

As with all of these program, the legality of the operation is in doubt, though the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the report says, requires the GCHQ to obtain a warrant for the tapping of “defined targets.”

Paying Companies For Cooperation

The report also alleges that a number of companies have been “paid for the cost of their co-operation,” but unlike the NSA PRISM leaks, the names of these companies remain under wraps and the companies themselves are forbidden to reveal the existence of this program. They were, however, “obliged” to participate in the program, though it’s obviously not clear if they put up a fight or not.

Sadly, the Guardian did not post the actual documents, so for the time being, we have to take the reporter’s word as to the extent of the program.

Kickstarter just published a blog post offering its take on a controversial campaign to fund a book called Above the Game: A Guide To Getting Awesome With Women.

The title of the post, “We were wrong,” makes the company’s position pretty clear. What was so bad about the campaign? Well, comedian Casey Malone had a pretty damning blog post about it — Malone basically quoted the parts of the guide that have already been published on Reddit, with tips like:

Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances. …

Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.

(The author Ken Hoinsky has said the quotes were taken out of context, and that he was just saying, “Don’t wait for signs before you make your move,” not advocating for sexual assault.)

Kickstarter says it first saw Malone’s blog post, and the material that he was linking to, on Wednesday morning, and it found the content pretty offensive. But the company didn’t cancel the campaign, it says, because it only had two hours before it ended (“We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.”) and because Kickstarter has an obligation “to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project.”

“These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it,” the post says. It goes on to say that material glorifying violence against women has always been prohibited, and that if Kickstarter had seen this material when the project was submitted (again, the offensive content was first posted on Reddit, not the actual Kickstarter page), it would never have been approved.

Despite the apology, Kickstarter says there’s no taking back the money after the campaign has been funded. However, it says it is banning any future “seduction guides” from the site, and it’s also donating $25,000 to the anti-sexual violence group RAINN.