Category: Tech news

A new machine learning model suggests small tweaks to your outfit, points to the future of algorithm-based fashion advice.

The 1996 title featuring Christopher Walken was held up as an exemplar of gaming’s future. But things didn’t exactly work out that way.

The only way to fight FOMO is to inspire more FOMO.

It might sound crazy, but it’s true: The heavens cast their wrath and fury on the ships more than on the fishes.

The road to routing all Domain Name System lookups through HTTPS is pocked with disagreements over just how much it will help.

Apple’s decision to greenlight an app called HKmaps, which is being used by pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong to crowdsource information about street closures and police presence, is attracting the ire of the Chinese government.

An article in Chinese state mouthpiece, China Daily, attacks the iPhone maker for reversing an earlier decision not to allow the app to be listed on the iOS App Store — claiming the app is “allowing the rioters in Hong Kong to go on violent acts” (via The Guardian).

HKmaps uses emoji to denote live police and protest activity around Hong Kong, as reported by users.

The former British colony is a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China that’s been able to maintain certain economic and and political freedoms since reunification with China — under the one country, two systems principle. But earlier this year pro-democracy protests broke out after the Hong Kong government sought to pass legislation that would allow for extradition to mainland China. It’s policing around those on-going protests that’s being made visible on HKmaps.

The app’s developer denies the map enables illegal activity, saying its function is “for info” purposes only — to allow residents to move freely around the city by being able to avoid protest flash-points. But the Chinese government is branding it “toxic”.

“Business is business, and politics is politics. Nobody wants to drag Apple into the lingering unrest in Hong Kong. But people have reason to assume that Apple is mixing business with politics, and even illegal acts. Apple has to think about the consequences of its unwise and reckless decision,” the China Daily writer warns in a not-so-veiled threat about continued access to the Chinese market.

“Providing a gateway for ‘toxic apps’ is hurting the feelings of the Chinese people, twisting the facts of Hong Kong affairs, and against the views and principles of the Chinese people,” it goes on. “Apple and other corporations should be able to discern right from wrong. They also need to know that only the prosperity of China and China’s Hong Kong will bring them a broader and more sustainable market.”

The article takes further aim at Apple — claiming it reinstated a song which advocates for independence for Hong Kong and had previously been removed from its music store.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

A few days ago the company was getting flak from the other direction as Western commentators piled on to express incredulity over its decision, at the app review stage, not to allow HKmaps on its store. The app’s developer said Apple App Store reviewers had rejected it citing the reasoning as “the app allowed users to evade law enforcement”.

Yet, as many pointed out at the time, the Google-owned Waze app literally describes its function as “avoid police” if you take the trouble to read its iOS listing. So it looked like a crystal-clear case of double standards by Cupertino. And, most awkwardly for Apple, as if the US tech giant was siding with the Chinese state against Hong Kong as concerned residents fight for their autonomy and call for democracy.

We asked Apple about its decision to reject the app at the App Store review stage last week. It did not provide any comment but a couple of days afterwards a spokesman pointed us to an “update” — where the developer tweeted that the iOS version was “Approved, comming soon!” [sic].

At the time of writing the iOS app remains available on the App Store but the episode highlights the tricky trade-offs Apple is facing by operating in the Chinese market — a choice that risks denting its reputation for highly polished corporate values.

The size of the China market is such that just “economical deceleration” can — and has — put a serious dent in Apple’s bottom line. If the company were to exit — or be ejected — from the market entirely there would be no way for it to cushion the blow for shareholders. Yet with a premium brand so bound up with ethical claims to champion and defend fundamental human rights like privacy Apple risks being pinned between a rock and a hard place as an increasingly powerful China flexes more political and economic muscle.

Wider trade tensions between the US and China are also creating further instability, causing major operating headaches for Chinese tech giant Huawei — with the Trump administration pressuring allies to freeze it out of 5G networks and leaning on US companies not to provide services to Chinese firms (leading to question marks over whether Huawei’s smartphones can continue using Google’s Android OS, and suggestions it might seek to deploy its own OS).

The going is certainly getting tougher for tech businesses working from East to West. But it also remains to be seen how sustainable Apple’s West-to-East democratic balancing act can be given heightened and escalating geopolitical tensions.

Even India’s biggest festive season, featuring blinding marketing blitzkrieg and heavy discounts from Amazon India and Walmart’s Flipkart, has failed to escape the pains of slowing economy.

Online retailers in India sold goods worth $3 billion in the six-day festive sale that concluded last week, growing at an impressive 30% since last year, according to research firm RedSeer. The catch? A year before, the growth rate stood at 93%.

Forrester projected online retailers in India to generate about $4.8 billion in sales between September 25 and October 29. Satish Meena, an analyst at the research firm, said about 80% of these projected sales — $3.84 billion — were expected to occur between September 29 and October 4.

For Amazon India, which has invested more than $5.5 billion in the nation, RedSeer’s findings are more troublesome. According to the research firm’s estimate, Flipkart — together with e-commerce businesses Jabong and Myntra that it owns — commanded 63% of the market share during the festive season. Amazon India settled with just 22%.

An Amazon spokesperson in India declined to comment on the finding, but expressed concerns with the way RedSeer conducts its surveys. The spokesperson said these “speculative reports … lack robust and credible methodology.”

Amazon India did not share its internal findings, but volunteered to cite a Nielsen’s survey of 190,000 users in 50 cities. Per Nielsen, Amazon commanded 51% of all transactions during the festive sales, 42% of all orders, and 45% of all “value.”

The spokesperson added that “this event has been our biggest celebration ever.” The company received orders from 99.4% postal codes in India, and saw participation of more than 65,000 sellers from 500 cities. “Over 88% new customers came from small towns,” the spokesperson said.

Flipkart did not respond to a request for comment.

Many in India have been watching the e-commerce sales as a test to see if it could kickstart the slowing consumer spending in the nation. The sales, leading up to the Hindu festival of Diwali, has traditionally been the season of lavish and reckless consumption in India.

And for Amazon and Walmart, a lot was riding on this festive season. The first half of this year has been slow for Amazon and Flipkart in India, said Meena. The e-commerce giants were subjected to disruptive changes in local e-commerce policy earlier this year, which forced both to delist hundreds of thousands of goods overnight from their marketplaces.

At a conference last week, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross expressed concerns over some of India’s recent regulatory changes, saying that India has become one of the most protectionist nations in the world. Indian newspaper The Economic Times reported last week that Amazon had cut investment in its India business by a third this year. Citing the report, Ross said disruptive policy changes influence the way global giants see the Indian market.

But disruptive policies is only one of the causes of concerns for international giants. India’s economy has slowed to a six-year low. Forrester’s Meena said the sales last week was the time when both Amazon and Flipkart could have bounced back. According to industry reports, e-commerce businesses generate nearly a third of their annual sales in India during this festive season.

But even as the growth rate has slowed, Meena said the fact that both these companies, along with other online retailers, were able to generate so much in sales is good news for them.

“Overall 2019 has been a slow year for e-commerce,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “Two things are clear, though. One is that there remains a big opportunity for e-commerce in India. Second, consumers from smaller cities and towns are increasing their online spending.”

In the meantime, both Amazon and Flipkart have steered clear of sharing any meaningful internal data. Flipkart said that its marketplace had registered “2X sales growth.” The company said it had seen “3X transaction growth” and electronics grew over “70% from tier 2+ cities.” Amazon said “fashion grew 5X” and beauty items saw “7X” jump in sales.

The companies have never disclosed exact figures, so it is impossible to fathom how one should assess this growth.

The Internet Research Agency specifically targeted African Americans, and has not stopped trying to influence elections, a Senate intelligence report says.

A staggering 800,000 customers will lose power across the state starting Wednesday. But that won’t fix the mess California’s made.

Catch up on the most important news from today in two minutes or less.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the new Extra Crunch series where we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything from the OS’s to the apps that run upon them, as well as the money that flows through it all.

The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and over $100 in consumer spending. Beyond that, the business of user acquisition and advertising generates even more money. And all because we’re spending more time on our phones than we do watching TV.

This week, the news was centered on the app stores’ ability to censor, the censorship in apps, and also how the antritrust investigations are forcing companies to open up access more to third parties.

Headlines

Third-party iOS apps will get to tap into Siri

According to Bloomberg and confirmed elsewhere, Apple will allow third-party messaging and phone apps to work better with the Siri digital assistant. That means, if you regularly use WhatsApp to message friends, Siri will launch that app instead of iMessage. Currently, you have to say the name of the app you want to invoke. The update is largely about Apple’s attempt to demonstrate anti-competitive behavior, in light of increased regulatory scrutiny and antitrust claims. But the change will also be a huge win for consumers as their iPhones will become more personalized to them.

In a wide-ranging conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last week, Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann made light of the company’s lack of IPO documents.

The San Francisco-based on-demand delivery business was expected to publicly file its IPO prospectus in September in preparation for a fall exit, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch this summer. September, however, has come and gone and we’re still waiting on Postmates to release the critical document.

“The reality is that we will IPO when we believe we find the right time for the business and the right time for the markets,” Lehmann told TechCrunch. “And if you look at the markets right now, I believe they are a little choppy. They are a little choppy when it comes to growth companies specifically … We are hopeful that we find a good window to get out there.”

Lehmann made reference to Uber and other companies to recently float, citing market conditions as an IPO deterrent. Uber, Lyft, Slack and other fast-growing unicorns have struggled since entering the public markets earlier this year despite sky-high private market valuations. WeWork, a money-losing endeavor, recently decided to delay its IPO after demand from Wall Street devalued the business by the billions. Whether Postmates will complete its debut by the end of the year is unclear.

Postmates confidentially filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO in February. Shortly after, Postmates held M&A talks with DoorDash, another food delivery unicorn, according to people familiar with the matter, but failed to come to mutually favorable terms. DoorDash has previously declined to comment on these reports. On stage last week, Lehmann declined to confirm the reports.

“I don’t think it does any good to speculate on M&A,” he said. “I think you have four well-funded players here in the U.S. in this space. I think everyone is well aware of the strengths and the weaknesses of each other and you know at some point down the line, if we take Europe for example, you will see consolidation in the market. People have conversations all the time but I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

Postmates operates its on-demand delivery platform, powered by a network of local gig economy workers, in more than 3,500 cities across all 50 states. The company does not yet operate in any international markets aside from Mexico City, however, Lehmann’s comments suggest the business could be plotting a foray into Europe, where Deliveroo, Just Eat and others dominate the market.

Postmates has raised about $900 million to date, including a $225 million round announced last month that valued the company at $2.4 billion. DoorDash, on the other hand, reached a $12.6 billion valuation in May with a $600 million Series G and has raised more than double that of Postmates. When asked why DoorDash, a similar and competing business, needed that much more capital, Lehmann joked “Maybe [DoorDash CEO Tony Xu] needs a jet, I don’t know.”

Postmates, founded in 2011 by Lehmann, is backed by Spark Capital, Founders Fund, Uncork Capital, Slow Ventures, Tiger Global, Blackrock and others. In our interview with Lehmann, the long-time CEO discussed the ‘choppy’ public markets, competitors, the company’s autonomous robotics delivery efforts and more.

Dr. Stuart Russell, a distinguished AI researcher and computer scientist at UC Berkeley, believes there is a fundamental and potentially civilization-ending shortcoming in the “standard model” of AI, which is taught (and Dr. Russell wrote the main textbook) and applied virtually everywhere. Dr. Russell’s new book, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, argues that unless we re-think the building blocks of AI, the arrival of superhuman AI may become the “last event in human history.”

That may sound a bit wild-eyed, but Human Compatible is a carefully written explanation of the concepts underlying AI as well as the history of their development. If you want to understand how fast AI is developing and why the technology is so dangerous, Human Compatible is your guide, literally starting with Aristotle and closing with OpenAI Five’s Dota 2 triumph.

Stuart’s aim is help non-technologists grasp why AI systems must be designed not simply to fulfill “objectives” assigned to them, the so-called “Standard Model” in AI development today, but to operate so “that machines will necessarily defer to humans: they will ask permission, they will accept correction, and they will allow themselves to be switched off.”

(UC Berkeley’s Dr. Stuart Russell’s new book, “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, goes on sale Oct. 8. I’ve written a review, “Human Compatible” is a provocative prescription to re-think AI before it’s too late,” and the following in an interview I conducted with Dr. Russell in his UC Berkeley office on September 3, 2019.)

Ned Desmond: Why did you write Human Compatible?

Dr. Russell: I’ve been thinking about this problem – what if we succeed with AI? – on and off since the early 90s. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that the path we were on doesn’t end well.

(AI Researchers) had mostly just doing toy stuff in the lab, or games, none of which represented any threat to anyone. It’s a little like a physicist playing tiny bits of uranium. Nothing happens, right? So we’ll just make more of it, and everything will be fine. But it just doesn’t work that way.  When you start crossing over to systems that are more intelligent, operating on a global scale, and having real-world impact, like trading algorithms, for example, or social media content selection, then all of a sudden, you are having a big impact on real-world, and it’s hard to control. It’s hard to undo. And that’s just going to get worse and worse and worse.

Desmond: Who should read Human Compatible?

Dr. Russell: I think everyone, because everyone is going to be affected by this.  As progress occurs towards human level (AI), each big step is going to magnify the impact by another factor of 10, or another factor of 100. Everyone’s life is going to be radically affected by this. People need to understand it. More specifically, it would be policymakers, the people who run the large companies like Google and Amazon, and people in AI, related disciplines, like control theory, cognitive science and so on.

My basic view was so much of this debate is going on without any understanding of what AI is.  It’s just this magic potion that will make things intelligent. And in these debates, people don’t understand the building blocks, how it fits together, how it works, how you make an intelligent system. So chapter two (of Human Compatible was) sort of mammoth and some people said, “Oh, this is too much to get through and others said, “No, you absolutely have to keep it.”  So I compromised and put the pedagogical stuff in the appendices.

Desmond: Why did computer scientists tend to overlook the issue of uncertainty in the objective function for AI systems?

Dr. Russell: Funnily enough, in AI, we took uncertainty (in the decision-making function) to heart starting in the 80s. Before that, most AI people said let’s just work on cases where we have definite knowledge, and we can come up with guaranteed plans.

The U.S. government may not be able to prevent another global cyberattack like WannaCry, a senior cybersecurity official has said.

Jeanette Manfra, the assistant director for cybersecurity for Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that the 2017 WannaCry cyberattack, which saw hundreds of thousands of computers around the world infected with ransomware, was uniquely challenging because it spread so quickly.

“I don’t know that we could ever prevent something like that,” said Manfra, referring to another WannaCry-style attack. “We just have something that completely manifests itself as a worm. I think the original perpetrators didn’t expect probably that sort of impact,” she added.

The WannaCry cyberattack was the first major global security incident in years. Hackers believed to be associated with North Korea used a set of highly classified hacking tools that only weeks earlier had been stolen from the National Security Agency and published online. The tools allowed anyone who used them to infect thousands of vulnerable computers with a backdoor. That backdoor was used to deliver the WannaCry payload, which locked out users from their own files unless they paid a ransom.

Making matters worse, WannaCry had wormable properties, allowing it to spread across a network and making it difficult to contain.

Although the National Security Agency never publicly acknowledged the theft of its hacking tools, Homeland Security said at the time that users were “the first line of defense” against the threat of WannaCry. Microsoft released security fixes weeks earlier, but many had not installed the patches.

“Updating your patches would have prevented a fair amount of people from from being a victim,” said Manfra. Yet data shows that two years after the attacks, more than a million computers remained vulnerable to the ransomware.

Manfra said “bad things are going to happen,” but that efforts to mobilize government and the private sector can help combat cyberattacks as they emerge.

“Luckily, there was a an enterprising individual who was able to find a way to kill it and it didn’t impact the U.S. as much,” she said.

Marcus Hutchins, a malware reverse engineer and security researcher, registered a domain name found the ransomware’s code which when registered acted as a “kill switch,” stopping the ransomware from spreading. Hutchins was hailed as an “accidental hero” for his efforts. Hutchins and his colleague Jamie Hankins spent a week ensuring the kill switch stayed up, helping to prevent millions of further infections.

Manfra’s remarks came just weeks after her department warned of a new, emerging threat posed by BlueKeep, a vulnerability found in Windows 7 and earlier, which experts say has the capacity to trigger another global incident similar to the WannaCry attack. BlueKeep can be exploited to run malicious code — such as malware or ransomware — on an affected system.

Like WannaCry, BlueKeep also has wormable properties, allowing it to spread to other vulnerable computers on the same network.

It’s estimated that a million internet-connected devices are vulnerable to BlueKeep. Security researchers say it is only a matter of time before bad actors develop and use a BlueKeep exploit to carry out a similar WannaCry-style cyberattack.