Category: Tech news

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1. Microsoft tweaks privacy policy to admit humans can listen to Skype Translator and Cortana audio

The change comes after a recent Motherboard report that contractors were listening to personal Skype conversations and Cortana audio recordings. Microsoft is just the latest tech giant to get called out for failing to make it clear that human contractors could be listening to users’ audio recordings.

When asked about the policy changes, the company said, “We realized, based on questions raised recently, that we could do a better job specifying that humans sometimes review this content.”

2. AT&T and T-Mobile team up to fight scam robocalls

The two companies will today begin to roll out new cross-network call authentication technology based on the STIR/SHAKEN standards — a sort of universal caller ID system designed to stop illegal caller ID spoofing.

3. Amazon launches a new program to donate unsold products from third-party sellers to charity

The program’s launch follows a series of news reports earlier this year, which found that Amazon warehouses routinely trashed millions of unsold items.

4. VMware says it’s looking to acquire Pivotal

Pivotal is best known for commercializing the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. Its shares have struggled since the company’s IPO in April 2018.

5. UPS takes minority stake in self-driving truck startup TuSimple

TuSimple, which is backed by Nvidia, ZP Capital and Sina Corp., is working on a “full-stack solution,” developing and bringing together all of the technological pieces required for autonomous driving.

6. Racial bias observed in hate speech detection algorithm from Google

Researchers at the University of Washington were interested in the idea that databases of hate speech currently available might have racial biases baked in — like many other data sets that suffered from a lack of inclusive practices during formation.

7. Inside Voyage’s plan to deliver a driverless future

In two years, Voyage has gone from a tiny self-driving car upstart spun out of Udacity to a company able to operate on 200 miles of roads in retirement communities. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

After 18 years at the helm, Mitchell Reichgut is stepping down as CEO of Jun Group, with COO and president Corey Weiner taking over as chief executive.

The news comes just about a year after Jun Group was acquired by Advantage Solutions, but Reichgut said the acquisition was a “non-factor” in his decision.

“I think it is the right time for the company to have a leadership change,” he said. “I have been stepping back more and more, so it’s a natural progression, with a bunch of managers here taking on larger roles as I move on.”

In addition to Weiner (who’s been at Jun Group since 2003), other Jun Group executives taking on new roles include Mishel Alon becoming COO, Leslie Bargmann becoming vice president of client services and Jeremy Ellison becoming vice president of technology.

Reichgut, meanwhile, said he’s “stepping back entirely to focus on artwork and writing and community service after a long, long career.”

Looking ahead, Weiner plans to double down on Jun Group’s approach to advertising, where it builds custom audience segments by polling users in its network, then shows video ads and branded content to interested viewers.

“Our primary motivation is to evangelize that format,” he said. “As you know, most advertising is interruptive and consumers don’t like that kind of advertising very much — in some cases, they’re annoyed by it. This value exchange flips the advertising paradigm on its head. By choosing to engage with advertising, they are getting something amazing in return.”

The right people to solve the trillion-dollar student debt crisis might be the ones who are suffering from it the hardest.

If you’re a recent college graduate, there’s a 50% chance you took on debt when you moved off campus. If you’re like the average student borrower, you graduated with $29,800 of loan debt, and are making a monthly re-payment of between $200 and $300, according to a recent report from the New York Fed.

GradJoy is a new Y Combinator-backed startup that wants to help the 45 million student debt borrowers in the U.S. manage their repayment plans. Within seven days of being a live platform and a marketing strategy that consisted of reaching out to a few universities, GradJoy is already managing $20 million in loans.

Co-founders Jose Bethancourt and Marco del Carmen turned down roles at Cloudflare and MongoDB, respectively, upon learning they’d been accepted to Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 class. GradJoy bills itself as a “student loan co-pilot,” and currently exists as a platform that helps users manage student loan repayments — whether that’s assessing pros and cons of refinancing, what a monthly payment should look like and if they have any wiggle room based on greater income and spending habits. GradJoy hopes to hammer a few cracks in the $1.5 trillion federal student loan debt crisis by giving new borrowers more insight into their repayment journey.

Loan companies will always advise borrowers to pay the minimum because they benefit from the outrageous interest fees amassed over time. GradJoy wants to tap into your bank account and monitor your finances to deliver more transparent loan-management advice with a feature that lets you simulate how different payment amounts would affect your loans.

Bethancourt, a recent University of Texas graduate, was his own first user. He built the GradJoy platform for himself while calculating his optimal student loan repayment plan in Excel. He’d met his co-founder in a coding bootcamp in the Rio Grande Valley at the border of Mexico and South Texas — where Bethancourt is originally from.

Student lending is a predatory industry that benefits off the ignorance of first-time borrowers and has been known to purposefully constrict resources for customers. New borrowers must navigate landmines like refinancing scams, the “7-minute rule” for customer service assistance and tricky requirements buried within the public service loan forgiveness program.

A question is posed for new startups that want to punch up against greedy student loan servicers like Navient and AES. Without replicating the corrupt business models that lenders have in order to make money off the student loan debt problem, how can newcomers like GradJoy become profitable?

Aside from venture capital, which GradJoy will be seeking upon its graduation from Y Combinator, it will make money in a few ways. In order to align with users’ goals, GradJoy’s business model is tied to their savings. If a user refinances using GradJoy, they get a referral payment from their lending partners. The platform is currently beta testing their robo-advisor for debt, and in the future they plan on charging a small fee per month if they’re able to save a user money.

Student loans don’t only burden millennial bank accounts. The student loan debt crisis is creating an economic trend. Inability to repay student loans causes young people to rely on credit cards to make ends meet and delay major life choices like investing in property. Not to mention the affect of student debt on mental health for young people at an already volatile point in their lives.

In five years, GradJoy’s founders say they’d like to be running a more robust financial services product that was first focused on helping its customers pay off student loans. They hope to mobilize customers while they’re at the nascence of their financial independence, and scale up to launch a larger suite of financial service products.

Gone are the days when tech companies can deploy their services in cities without any regard for rules and regulations. Before the rise of electric scooters, cities had already become hip to tech’s status quo (thanks to the likes of Uber and Lyft) and were ready to regulate. We explored some of this in “The uncertain future of shared scooters,” but since then, new challenges have emerged for scooter startups.

And for scooter startups, city regulations can make or break their businesses across nearly every aspect of operations, especially two major ones: ridership growth and ability to attract investor dollars. From issuing permits to determining how many scooters any one company can operate at any one time to enforcing low-income plans and impacting product roadmaps, the ball is really in the city’s court.

U.S. Cyber Command, the sister division of the National Security Agency focused on offensive hacking and security operations, has released a set of new samples of malware linked to North Korean hackers.

The military unit tweeted Wednesday that it had uploaded the malware to VirusTotal, a widely used database for malware and security research.

It’s not the first time the unit has uploaded malware to the server — it has its own Twitter account to tell followers which malware it uploads. On one hand the disclosure helps security teams fight threats from nation states, but it also gives a rare glimpse inside the nation state-backed hacking groups on which Cyber Command is focused.

The uploaded malware sample is named Electric Fish by the U.S. government. Electric Fish is a tunneling tool designed to exfiltrate data from one system to another over the internet once a backdoor has been placed.

Electric Fish is linked to the APT38 hacking group.

FireEye says APT38 has distinctly different motivations from other North Korean-backed hacking groups like Lazarus, which was blamed for the Sony hack in 2016 and the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017. APT38 is focused on financial crimes, such as stealing millions of dollars from banks across the world, the cybersecurity firm said.

Electric Fish was first discovered in May, according to Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division CISA, but APT38 has been active for several years.

A recently leaked United Nations report said the North Korean regime has stolen more than $2 billion through dozens of cyberattacks to fund its various weapons programs.

APT38 has amassed more than $100 million in stolen funds since its inception.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the North Korean threat group as APT36. The group is APT38.

Plex today is launching a new desktop application for Mac and Windows, with the goal of eventually replacing Plex Media Player as the company’s only desktop solution. The app’s arrival also signals a change in direction for the company, which will also now remove its existing Windows Store application and end support for the traditional home theater PC setup — the latter which involves a desktop computer connected to a TV or home theater.

The company explains this decision was made after examining how people were using Plex today, and found that most would have an equal or even better experience with a streaming device and its new players.

“It marks the end of an era for us, and we’d be lying if we said it wasn’t a little bittersweet,” the company wrote in a blog post about the change.

Home theater PC-style configurations are today a bit of a holdover from an earlier era where there were fewer resources to stream personal media from your PC to your TV. Today, however, Plex’s apps for streaming devices are fairly capable, and a heck of a lot simpler to set up and use by mainstream consumers.

The company also noted that the new Apple TV and Android players support nearly all the same formats and that Plex’s app for streaming devices has come a long way in recent years.

“Modern streaming devices don’t need as much care and feeding as desktop computers. They don’t need to sleep (much), they use a tiny amount of electricity…and they don’t require nearly as much effort to get up and running. They have remotes that work wonderfully out of the box (no more fiddly custom key mappings!) In short, they’re designed for the environment in which you’re using them, and it shows,” the company explained, in hopes of fending off any backlash.

Meanwhile, the new Plex desktop app includes all the capabilities of Plex Media Player along with support for offline access. Previously called “Sync,” this feature has been renamed to “Downloads,” and lets you take your media with you. Similar support for offline media will come to Plex’s mobile apps, too, at a later date, the company said.

To use the Downloads feature, you’ll need a Plex Pass subscription. But otherwise, the new desktop app is free.

Though the desktop app is meant to replace Plex Media Player, the company says it will continue to update the software until January 2020, to allow time for everyone to make the transition.

Plex’s overall business has been changing, in recent years, to become more than just a home media organizer. Today, Plex is a DIY streaming solution that allows users to watch not just their own media across platforms, but also stream podcasts, news, web series and music from TIDAL, as well as capture and record live TV from a digital antenna.

This change has led to other closures, including Plex’s decision last year to shutter Plugins, Cloud Sync and its “Watch Later” bookmarking feature, in addition to the technically challenging Plex Cloud.

It’s unclear how successful Plex’s changes have been as the company doesn’t disclose its number of paying subscribers. However, last year, Plex said it had 15 million registered users — meaning both free and paid. In January 2019, it upped that number to 20 million and noted it had “millions” of people using Plex on a monthly basis.

New numbers out of Canalys show strong continued growth for the North America wearables market for Q2. The market hit $2 billion value for the quarter, according to the firm, marking a 38% year over year growth.

It’s not exactly earth-shattering, but it’s steady for a category that felt almost dead in the water a year or two back. Growth for the quarter was led by Apple and Samsung, which marked 32% and 121% growth, coming in at first and third place, respectively — at 2.2 million and 400,000 units.

Fitbit, meanwhile, retained its No. 2 position. The company showed a modest 18% growth, owing the slowdown to fewer smartwatches (versus fitness bands) shipped. That tracks with the company’s disappointing quarterly results as the new Versa Lite failed to hit the mark. The move marks a misstep for the Versa brand, which has otherwise contributed well to Fitbit’s bounce back.

Interestingly, while North America is the No. 2 wearables market in terms of units shipped, it continues to be the most valuable. That’s likely due to higher unit prices, with the Apple Watch leading the pack, versus Xiaomi’s super-cheap fitness bands, which have a much stronger foothold in their native China.

For a couple of years now Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America was more aspirational than functional, but now it’s been built out with the necessaries for commercial spaceflight — mainly coffee. The company just showed off the newly redesigned space from which it plans to launch flights… sometime.

Much of the undulating, aesthetically rusted building, located deep in the desert of New Mexico, is dedicated to housing the carrier craft and rocket planes that the company has been testing for the last few years.

That was almost certainly the hard part, in fact: relocating the infrastructure necessary to support the spacefaring vehicles, including engineers, equipment and supply chain people, as Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told me in May.

But the spaceport itself must also become a place for humans to arrive, park at, nervously sip coffee and have a pre-flight meal — if that’s really a good idea for your first trip to space. Maybe stick to coffee.

The “first phase” of the consumer-side build-out includes an elegantly appointed little restaurant and cafe, and upstairs can be found “mission control,” which looks more like a conference room than a spaceplane pilot staging area.

There are a number of little lounge areas for passengers and others to congregate in, and if the scale seems a little small, keep in mind that this isn’t an airport food court. These flights are going to be full, but they’re also going to be six passengers at a time.

Jeremy Brown, design director for Spaceport America, explains that the choice of materials and terraced surfaces, leading up to the lighter, airier second story, is meant to evoke the landscape outside, which nearly all the seating faces, and draw the attention outwards and upwards.

Although Virgin Galactic has had several successful test flights, there’s no indication when its first actual commercial flight will be.

“The last flight we did, we basically demonstrated a full commercial profile, including the interior of the vehicle,” Whitesides said in May. “Not only did we, you know, go up to space and come down, but because Beth was in the back — Beth Moses, our flight instructor — she was sort of our mock passenger. She got up a couple times and moved around, she was able to verify our cabin conditions.”

The paperwork is in order and the spaceport itself is now equipped with a cafe, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw the first flight from Virgin Galactic before the end of the year.

Most of us, by now, are aware that all sorts of crazy stuff is happening to the planet’s climate, and the blame is pretty much universally recognized as lying with humans pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere. Scientists are now saying tree planting, for instance, has to happen very, very quickly if we are to avert disaster.

A few startups, such as Changers, have tried to incentivize us to do things like walk instead of taking the car, with mixed results.

Now a blockchain startup thinks it may have the making of one solution, rewarding us with crypto tokens for making the right choices for the planet. Now, before you roll your eyes, hear me out…

Imagine rewarding people for taking the bus instead of their car — and them exchanging that token to offset their carbon by planting a tree? Or incentivizing passengers for sharing their travel data — helping companies to improve their experience in the future? That’s the big idea here.

Here’s how it works: The DOVU platform offers a token, wallet and marketplace and allows users to earn tokens and spend them to carbon-offset their activity and on rewards within the mobility ecosystem, starting with their Uber rides.

Users link their Uber account to their DOVU wallet, enabling them to earn DOV tokens for every journey taken. The startup has connected to Uber APIs, meaning that, once authenticated, the user has to do nothing other than take the journey.

The DOVU CO2 calculator then automatically rewards the value of tokens depending on the length of the journey. The DOV tokens can then be spent within the DOVU Action, and the user can choose the project to back or the user can ask DOVU to choose the project on their behalf to ensure the carbon offsetting happens.

The platform can connect to any published API, meaning it is in a notional position to have an immediate impact on all the new mobility solutions globally.

With Jaguar Land Rover as shareholders, DOVU potentially has the backing to try to make this happen.

Mobility-related organizations often have a need to reward, incentivize or nudge their users to do the right thing. It might be sharing their data for better service planning, taking an alternate route to help ease traffic congestion or charging electric batteries at times that are best for the grid. Whether it’s influencing consumer behavior or encouraging data sharing, the DOVU platform could, in theory, provide a solution that meets the needs of both the mobility provider and the end user. That at least is their pitch.

Hell, given the state of the planet, it might be worth a shot…

Networking and web security giant Cloudflare says the recent 8chan controversy may be an ongoing “risk factor” for its business on the back of its upcoming initial public offering.

The San Francisco-based company and former Battlefield finalist, which filed its IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, earlier this month took the rare step of pulling the plug on one of its customers, 8chan, an anonymous message board linked to recent domestic terrorist attacks in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, which killed 31 people. The site is also linked to the shootings in New Zealand, which killed 50 people.

8chan became the second customer to have its service cut off by Cloudflare in the aftermath of the attacks. The first and other time Cloudflare booted one of its customers was neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer in 2017, after it claimed the networking giant was secretly supportive of the website.

Cloudflare, which provides web security and denial-of-service protection for websites, recognizes those customer cut-offs as a risk factor for investors buying shares in the company’s common stock.

“Activities of our paying and free customers or the content of their websites and other Internet properties could cause us to experience significant adverse political, business, and reputational consequences with customers, employees, suppliers, government entities, and other third parties,” the filing said. “Even if we comply with legal obligations to remove or disable customer content, we may maintain relationships with customers that others find hostile, offensive, or inappropriate.”

Cloudflare had long taken a stance of not policing who it provides service to, citing freedom of speech. In a 2015 interview with ZDNet, chief executive Matthew Prince said he didn’t ever want to be in a position where he was making “moral judgments on what’s good and bad,” and would instead defer to the courts.

“If a final court order comes down and says we can’t do something… governments have tanks and guns,” he said.

But since Prince changed his stance on both The Daily Stormer and 8chan, the company recognized it “experienced significant negative publicity” in the aftermath.

“We are aware of some potential customers that have indicated their decision to not subscribe to our products was impacted, at least in part, by the actions of certain of our paying and free customers,” said the filing. “We may also experience other adverse political, business and reputational consequences with prospective and current customers, employees, suppliers, and others related to the activities of our paying and free customers, especially if such hostile, offensive, or inappropriate use is high profile.”

Cloudflare has also come under fire in recent months for allegedly supplying web protection services to sites that promote and support terrorism, including al-Shabaab and the Taliban, both of which are covered under U.S. Treasury sanctions.

In response, the company said it tries “to be neutral,” but wouldn’t comment specifically on the matter.

Porsche is upping its plug-in hybrid game with several new vehicles added to its lineup, including a power-packing 2020 Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid.

The plug-in version of this flagship SUV combines a 14.1-kilowatt-hour battery and 134-horsepower electric motor with a 4.0-liter twin turbocharged V8 engine found in the traditional gas-powered Cayenne Turbo. The electric motor is located between the V8 engine and its standard eight-speed transmission.

The upshot is a 670-horsepower plug-in beast that produces 663 pound-feet of torque and can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.6 seconds. Not bad for an SUV.

But it’s not all about power. Porsche also increased the energy capacity of its battery, 30% more than the one used in previous generation plug-in hybrid Cayenne models. EPA fuel economy figures have not been released yet, but if it’s like other Porsche plug-in hybrids, the range will be somewhere around 20 or so miles.

The automaker has a number of nifty standard items in the Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid (and two new plug-in variants of the Cayenne Coupé), including a 7.2 kW onboard charger and 21-inch AeroDesign Wheels. The upgraded charger enables a complete recharge of the battery in as little as 2.4 hours when using a 240-volt connection with a 50-amp circuit, according to Porsche.

The plug-in versions of Cayenne Turbo and the Cayenne Turbo Coupé also comes standard with Porsche’s ceramic composite brakes, dynamic chassis control and other bonuses like 18-way adaptive sports seats.

All of this has a price, of course. The base price of the 2020 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid is $161,900.

Porsche also took the wraps off of two other plug-in variants of its new Cayenne Coupé, a smaller, flashier version of the Cayenne. Both Cayenne Coupé variants feature a fixed spoiler above the rear window with a new adaptive rear spoiler below it that’s designed to enhance aerodynamic stability.

The Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid Coupé has a base price of pricier $164,400, slightly more expensive than its Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid counterpart due to a few additional extras such as 20-inch alloy wheels and a glass panoramic roof.

But the two high-end vehicles share many of the same standard items and stats. Both vehicles can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.6 seconds and reach a top speed of 183 miles per hour, which is electronically limited.

Porsche also unveiled a less powerful and cheaper 455-horsepower Cayenne E-Hybrid Coupé that has a V6 engine and a base price of $86,400. This coupé version, which has the same powertrain as the Cayenne E-Hybrid, has a top speed of 157 mph and can travel from 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds.

Tumblr has been an millstone around the neck of its owners, first Yahoo and later Oath and Verizon Media, pretty much since it was acquired in 2013. They never found an answer to the question that new owner Automattic is presumably about to take a crack at: how to make this unruly erstwhile porn factory turn a profit.

Amazingly, the secret technique that Tumblr may have been waiting for was good old-fashioned business sense: make something people want, then charge them a good price for it. Tumblr may fit into the WordPress model and do just this — quite a change from the indirect monetization attempts of the past decade.

The Yahoo acquisition under the stewardship of Marissa Mayer seems to have been made with the assumption, naive in retrospect but incredibly common in that era, that you could buy an audience, plunk some ads in the product, then sit back and let the money roll in.

But beyond doing that, Yahoo never really did anything with Tumblr apart from adding a few features and expanding ads. And for a while growth was good and the network flourished, even rivaling Instagram on some metrics.

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

The star gymnast appears to defy physics in her epic tumbling pass. Here’s how she managed to jump, twist, and flip her way into sports legend.

Last week when Salesforce announced it was buying ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion you might not have realized it, but the law firm Shearman & Sterling was advising Salesforce throughout the deal. In fact, there are lawyers involved in every transaction of this sort, from the initial call to the closing.

As you would expect, there are hundreds of tiny details involved in bringing a deal to fruition, from checking the validity of the offer to checking the financial health of the target company, negotiating a price and terms and clearing it with the boards/stockholders. Even after the deal is signed and agreed upon by both companies, the lawyers often have to ease it through the regulatory process before it finally closes.

The attorneys act as project managers, working with company executives and boards of directors, guiding them through the lengthy transaction process, advising them on the legal side of the equation — all while working with the investment banks to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.

Looking for a target

A company like Salesforce doesn’t go out and buy ClickSoftware randomly. There is in fact a method to its M&A madness. As I wrote in an article describing the process in 2016: