Category: Tech news

When I was told that I’d be visiting the production of Disney’s new “Lion King,” I had a hazy idea of what to expect — sets recreating the iconic landscapes of the animated film, maybe some actors in costumes or motion capture suits.

Instead, if you’ve seen the movie (which came out on July 19), you probably won’t be surprised to hear that there wasn’t a single set or costume in sight. After all, even though the film looks like a live action remake of “The Lion King,” every shot except for the first was created on a computer.

So what I visited in 2017 was a nondescript Los Angeles warehouse filled with computers. In the main room, almost everything was black — black padding on the walls, black VR headsets, black dolly tracks for the camera.

Director Jon Favreau explained to visiting journalists that the plan was to create a virtual Serengeti in the Unity game engine, then apply live action filmmaking techniques to create the film — the “Lion King” team described this as a “virtual production process.”

It started with a research trip to Kenya, with copious reference photos taken of the landscape and animals. Then the art department got to work creating sets — the aforementioned virtual Serengeti — which could be “filmed” by moving a real camera around the space (hence the need for real-world camera equipment like dolly tracks). Those shots were then edited together and handed over to the effects team at MPC to create the images you see in the final film.

“If you go back to ‘Avatar,’ ‘Avatar’ solved the problem of how do you film a movie that usually gets created with computer graphics, so we put computer graphics into the cinematographer’s monitor so that they could use more traditional equipment to see the movie” said virtual production supervisor Ben Grossman. “Fast forward to ‘Lion King’ and what we’re doing is we’re putting the filmmakers inside the monitor. So now, they can put on a VR headset and be in Africa or on the Empire State Building or on the surface of the Moon, so that they can walk around and see and feel the filmmaking process … as though they were there.”

That doesn’t just involve VR and computer animation, Grossman added. Artificial intelligence was also used to bring the virtual characters to life. For example, the filmmakers could create a 3D model of a lion, and then teach the AI so that the lion can act hungry, or cold, or as if it’s looking for food: “We start telling the computer things like that and then it starts to associate behaviors with motivations and intents.”

Ultimately, Grossman suggested that this could lead to a situation where filmmaking is less about traditional “filmmaking or storytelling,” and more about “world-building”: “You create a world where characters have personalities and they have motivations to do different things and then essentially, you can throw them all out there like a simulation and then you can put real people in there and see what happens.”

And while the technology sounds quite sophisticated, everyone emphasized that the goal was to give the filmmakers the tools they needed to feel like they were making a live action film.

In fact, director of photography Caleb Deschanel (whose career has been focused on live action, with credits like “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Right Stuff”) described himself as “the Luddite in this group,” whose goal was to “try to make it feel as film-y as possible.”

“I remember reading about Brad Bird … who had directed a lot of animation, obviously, and then when he was directing live action, he got very frustrated ’cause he couldn’t do all these sort of crazy things,” Deschanel said. “And we’re going in the opposite direction and taking the tools of normal filmmaking and bringing them into [the animated] world, and using that as a method to create a reality.”

He acknowledged that working with the technology has been a learning process — so much so that he spoke wistfully about starting over again once they’d finished the movie, so that he could apply all the lessons he’d learned.

“I mean, when we did the canyon chase with the wildebeests early on, and we were filming and I was struggling with getting light where I wanted it,” he said. “And then, weeks later, I discovered: Well, if you don’t like the light there, we can take these mountains, we can just drop them down and get the sun coming through where you want it.”

All of this speaks to the extraordinary amount of thought and technology that went into making a movie in a new way. But it also dances around the most basic question: Why remake “The Lion King” at all?

Favreau’s answer was that he wanted to take the story and themes that were so powerful in the original film (and in the subsequent Broadway musical), and then “create something that feels like a completely different medium than either of those two.”

The box office receipts offer another answer, with “The Lion King” on-track to become perhaps the highest-grossing movie of the summer and one of the biggest hits of the year.

Critics haven’t been quite as impressed, complaining that the “realistic” approach hampers the emotional expressiveness of the animals (not to mention the imagination and energy of the musical numbers). Why take such a fantastical story and go to all the effort to tell it in a photo-real way?

Back during the set visit, VFX supervisor Rob Legato noted that a big element of the attempt to mimic live action was learning to embrace mistakes (“We don’t want to fix too much”), prompting studio heads to ask something similar: “Why would you go through the great expense to have everything under your control and then take your control away on purpose?”

The point, Legato argued, is to be true to “the artist’s idea” of creating a movie that “looks like a film” but could never be shot in real life. And his hope is that when audiences watch the new “Lion King,” they don’t see visual effects — similar to how most people don’t watch “The Godfather” and think “great sets, great costumes, interesting light.” Instead, “You just watch the film. You don’t really pick apart one of the disciplines, you just enjoy it.”

He added, “My viewpoint is: It’s not a visual effect anymore, if it’s just moviemaking.”

Let’s start with the good news. LG actually had a pretty good quarter (on the strength of appliance sales). The LG Home Appliance & Air Solution division made $5.23 billion for Q2. Anyone who’s been following the company for the past several years can guess where the bad news comes.

Smartphone sales dipped 21.3% year over year for the South Korean company. The culprits are as you’d expect: an overall slowing of the smartphone market, coupled with aggressive undercutting from Chinese manufacturers. Huawei seems to lead the pack on that front, with a big increase in sales, in spite of a confluence of external factors.

The smartphone unit saw an operating loss of $268.4 million, in spite of a 6.8% increase in sales from the quarter prior. LG chalks up the loss to higher marketing on new models and April’s move from Seoul to Vietnam for smartphone production for longer-term cost cutting.

In spite of this, the company says it’s still bullish about smartphone sales for Q3. “The introduction of competitive mass-tier smartphones and growing demand for 5G products are expected to contribute to improved performance in the third quarter,” it writes in an earnings release.

LG is, of course, among the first companies to release a 5G handset, with the V50 ThinQ. The next-gen wireless technology is expected to increase stagnating global smartphone sales, though much of that will depend on the speed with which carriers are able to roll it out. It seems unlikely that 5G in and of itself will be a quick or even longer-term fix for a struggling category.

Ford has acquired a small robotics company based in Michigan called Quantum Signal, which has produced mobile robots for a number of clients, including the U.S. military. The company’s specialty has been building remote control software for robotic vehicles, specifically, and it’s also responsible for a very highly regarded simulated testing and development environment for autonomous and remotely controlled robotic systems.

All of the above is useful not only when developing military robots, but also when setting out to build and deploy self-driving cars — hence Ford’s interest in acquiring Quantum Signal. Ford said in a blog post that while others might’ve been sleeping on Quantum Signal and the work it has done, it has been following the company closely, and will employ its experience in developing real-time simulation and algorithms related to autonomous vehicle control systems to help build out Ford’s self-driving vehicles, transportation-as-a-service platform and hardware and software related to both.

Reading between the lines here, it sounds like Ford’s main interest was in picking up some experienced talent working on autonomy, and very specific challenges that are needed to develop road-worthy self-driving vehicles, including perception systems and virtual testing environments. Ford does, however, explicitly lay out a desire to “preserve” Quantum’s own “unique culture” as it brings the company on-board, pointing out that that’s the course it took with similar acquisition SAIPS (an Israeli computer vision and machine learning company) when it brought that team on-board in 2016.

SAIPS has now more than doubled its team to 30 people, and relocated to a new headquarters in Tel Aviv, with a specific focus among its latest hires on bringing in specialists in reinforcement learning. Ford has also invested in Argo AI, taking a majority stake in the startup initially in 2017 and then re-upping with a joint investment with Volkswagen in July of this year in a deal that makes both major equal shareholders. Ford is happy to both acquire and partner in its pursuit of self-driving tech development, and this probably won’t be the last similar deal we see made en route to actually deploying autonomous vehicles on roads for any major automaker.

DigitalOcean, the cloud infrastructure service that made a name for itself by focusing on low-cost hosting options in its early days, today announced that it has appointed former SendGrid COO and CFO Yancey Spruill as its new CEO and former EnerNOC CFO Bill Sorenson as its new CFO. Spruill will replace Mark Templeton, who only joined the company a little more than a year ago and who had announced in May his decision to step down for personal reasons.

“DigitalOcean is a brand I’ve followed and admired for a while — the leadership team has done a tremendous job building out the products, services and, most importantly, a community, that puts developer needs first,” said Spruill in today’s announcement. “We have a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity in front of us and I’m looking forward to working closely with our strong leadership team to build upon the current strategy to drive DigitalOcean to the company’s full potential.”

Spruill does have a lot of experience, given that he was in CxO positions at SendGrid through both its IPO in 2017 and its sale to Twilio in 2019. He also previously held the CFO role at DigitalGlobe, which he also guided to an IPO.

In his announcement, Spruill notes that he expects DigitalOcean to focus on its core business, which currently has about 500,000 users (though it’s unclear how many of those are active, paying users). “My aspiration is for us to continue to provide everything you love about DO now, but to also enhance our offerings in a way that is meaningful, strategic and most helpful for you over time,” he writes.

Spruill’s history as CFO includes its fair share of IPOs and sales, but so does Sorenson’s. As CFO at EnerNOC, he guided that company to a sale to investor Enel Group. Before that, he led business intelligence firm Qlik to an IPO.

It’s not unusual for incoming CEOs and CFOs to have this kind of experience, but it does make you wonder what DigitalOcean’s future holds in store. The company isn’t as hyped as it once was and while it still offers one of the best user experiences for developers, it remains a relatively small player in the overall cloud game. That’s a growing market, but the large companies — the ones that bring in the majority of revenue — are looking to Amazon, Microsoft and Google for their cloud infrastructure. Even a small piece of the overall cloud pie can be quite lucrative, but I think DigitalOcean’s ambitions go beyond that.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4, and we’re working every angle to make it financially accessible to as many people as possible. It starts with early-bird pricing on four types of passes for different needs and budgets. Plus, we offer discounts for students, nonprofit organizations, government employees and military personnel.

But did you know you can score discounted rates on flights and hotels for your Disrupt adventure? Yup. United Airlines offers Disrupt SF attendees discounted fares on flights to San Francisco International Airport or San Jose International Airport. Head on over to United.com and book your flight under “Advanced Search” using offer code ZFWZ101320. It’s an easy way to save.

Whether it’s just you or your entire team, you can reserve discounted hotel rooms through room blocks TechCrunch has secured at multiple hotels throughout the City by the Bay. Many of the hotels also offer special perks, including free Wi-Fi and gym access, when you book through this website. Your extras may vary depending on which hotel you choose. The supply of rooms is limited, so get booking!

Once you have your Disrupt pass and your travel reservations well in hand, you can start strategizing to make the most of your time at Disrupt SF — three short days packed with early-startup programming across four stages.

Whether on the Main stage, the Extra Crunch stage, on a panel or during a fireside chat, Disrupt speakers represent an impressive range of expertise. We’re talking up-and-coming boundary-pushers to the top players in the startup world — iconic technologists, investors and founders.

Witness the glory that is Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s epic pitch competition. Watch as the world’s most innovative startups launch and compete for the Disrupt Cup, investor and media love and, of course, $100,000.

Explore and network your way through Startup Alley, where you’ll find more than 1,200 startups and sponsors displaying products, platforms and services spanning the tech spectrum. While you’re there, be sure to visit the TC Top Picks, our hand-picked cadre of outstanding startups.

Want a tool that cuts through the crowds to help you meet the people who can help move your business forward? Then use CrunchMatch, the free business match-making service. It makes networking easier than ever.

Grab your discounts, people, and join us at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Buy your early-bird passes today, and then book your discounted flights and hotel rooms before they all disappear.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is looking for pitches on how to enhance and augment traditional creative arts through immersive technologies.

Through a partnership with Microsoft the foundation is offering a share of a $750,00 pool of cash and the option of technical support from Microsoft, including mentoring in mixed-reality technologies and access to the company’s suite of mixed reality technologies.

“We’ve seen how immersive technologies can reach new audiences and engage existing audiences in new ways,” said Chris Barr, director for arts and technology innovation at Knight Foundation, in a statement. “But arts institutions need more knowledge to move beyond just experimenting with these technologies to becoming proficient in leveraging their full potential.”

Specifically, the foundation is looking for projects that will help engage new audiences; build new service models; expand access beyond the walls of arts institutions; and provide means to distribute immersive experiences to multiple locations, the foundation said in a statement.

“When done right, life-changing experiences can happen at the intersection of arts and technology,” said Victoria Rogers, Knight Foundation vice president for arts. “Our goal through this call is to help cultural institutions develop informed and refined practices for using new technologies, equipping them to better navigate and thrive in the digital age.”

Launched at the Gray Area Festival in San Francisco, the new initiative is part of the Foundation’s art and technology focus, which the organization said is designed to help arts institutions better meet changing audience expectations. Last year, the foundation invested $600,000 in twelve projects focused on using technology to help people engage with the arts.

“We’re incredibly excited to support this open call for ways in which technology can help art institutions engage new audiences,” says Mira Lane, Partner Director Ethics & Society at Microsoft. “We strongly believe that immersive technology can enhance the ability for richer experiences, deeper storytelling, and broader engagement.”

Here are the winners from the first $600,000 pool:

• ArtsESP – Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts

Project lead: Nicole Keating | Miami | @ArshtCenter

Developing forecasting software that enables cultural institutions to make data-centered decisions in planning their seasons and events.

• Exploring the Gallery Through Voice – Alley Interactive

Project lead: Tim Schwartz | New York | @alleyco, @cooperhewitt, @SinaBahram

Exploring how conversational interfaces, like Amazon Alexa, can provide remote audiences with access to an exhibition experience at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

• The Bass in VR – The Bass

Project lead: T.J. Black | Miami Beach | @TheBassMoA

Using 360-degree photography technology to capture and share the exhibit experience in an engaging, virtual way for remote audiences.

• AR Enhanced Audio Tour – Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Project lead: Shane Richey | Bentonville, Arkansas | @crystalbridges

Developing mobile software to deliver immersive audio-only stories that museum visitors would experience when walking up to art for a closer look.

• Smart Label Initiative – Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University

Project lead: Brian Kirschensteiner | East Lansing, Michigan | @msubroad

Creating a system of smart labels that combine ultra-thin touch displays and microcomputers to deliver interactive informational content about artwork to audiences.

• Improving Arts Accessibility through Augmented Reality Technology – Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, in collaboration with People’s Light

Project lead: Lisa Sonnenborn | Philadelphia | @TempleUniv,@IODTempleU, @peopleslight 

Making theater and performance art more accessible for the deaf, hard of hearing and non-English speaking communities by integrating augmented reality smart glasses with an open access smart captioning system to accompany live works.

• ConcertCue – Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology

Project lead: Eran Egozy | Cambridge, Massachusetts | @EEgozy,@MIT,@ArtsatMIT, @MIT_SHASS

Developing a mobile app for classical music audiences that receives real-time program notes at precisely-timed moments of a live musical performance.

• Civic Portal – Monument Lab

Project lead: Paul Farber and Ken Lum | Philadelphia | @monument_lab, @PennDesign, @SachsArtsPhilly, @paul_farber

Encouraging public input on new forms of historical monuments through a digital tool that allows users to identify locations, topics and create designs for potential public art and monuments in our cities.

• Who’s Coming? – The Museum of Art and History at the McPherson Center

Project lead: Nina Simon | Santa Cruz, California | @santacruzmah, @OFBYFOR_ALL

Prototyping a tool in the form of a smartphone/tablet app for cultural institutions to capture visitor demographic data, increasing knowledge on who is and who is not participating in programs.

• Feedback Loop – Newport Art Museum, in collaboration with Work-Shop Design Studio

Project lead: Norah Diedrich | Newport, Rhode Island | @NewportArtMuse

Enabling audiences to share immediate feedback and reflections on art by designing hardware and software to test recording and sharing of audience thoughts.

• The Traveling Stanzas Listening Wall – Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University Foundation

Project lead: David Hassler | Kent, Ohio | @DavidWickPoetry,@WickPoetry,@KentState, @travelingstanza

Producing touchscreen installations in public locations that allow users to create and share poetry by reflecting on and responding to historical documents, oral histories, and multimedia stories about current events and community issues.

• Wiki Art Depiction Explorer – Wikimedia District of Columbia, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution

Project lead: Andrew Lih | Washington, District of Columbia | @wikimedia, @fuzheado

Using crowdsourcing methods to improve Wikipedia descriptions of artworks in major collections so people can better access and understand art virtually.

A hacker gained access to internal files and documents owned by security company and SSL certificate issuer Comodo by using an email address and password mistakenly exposed on the internet.

The credentials were found in a public GitHub repository owned by a Comodo software developer. With the email address and password in hand, the hacker was able to log into the company’s Microsoft-hosted cloud services. The account was not protected with two-factor authentication.

Jelle Ursem, a Netherlands-based security researcher who found the credentials, contacted Comodo vice president Rajaswi Das by WhatsApp to secure the account. The password was revoked the following day.

Ursem told TechCrunch that the account allowed him to access internal Comodo files and documents, including sales documents and spreadsheets in the company’s OneDrive — and the company’s organization graph on SharePoint, allowing him to see the team’s biographies, contact information including phone numbers and email addresses, photos, customer documents, calendar, and more.

He also shared several screenshots of folders containing agreements and contracts with several customers — with the names of customers in each filename, such as hospitals and U.S. state governments. Other documents appeared to be Comodo vulnerability reports. Ursem’s cursory review of the data did not turn up any customer certificates private keys, however.

“Seeing as they’re a security company and give out SSL certificates, you’d think that the security of their own environment would come first above all else,” said Ursem.

But according to Ursem, he wasn’t the first person to find the exposed email address and password.

“This account has already been hacked by somebody else, who has been sending out spam,” he told TechCrunch. He shared a screenshot of a spam email sent out, purporting to offer tax refunds from the French finance ministry.

We reached out to Comodo for comment prior to publication. A spokesperson said the account was an “automated account used for marketing and transactional purposes,” adding: “The data accessed was not manipulated in any way and within hours of being notified by the researcher, the account was locked down.”

It’s the latest example of exposed corporate passwords found in public GitHub repositories, where developers store code online. All too often developers upload files inadvertently containing private credentials used for internal-only testing. Researchers like Ursem regularly scan repositories for passwords and report them to the companies, often in exchange for bug bounties.

Earlier this year Ursem found a similarly exposed set of internal Asus passwords on an employee’s GitHub public account. Uber was also breached in 2016 after hackers found internal credentials on GitHub.

Is space truly within reach for startups and VC?

With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing taking place this past week, Darrell Etherington takes a temperature check of the current state of spacetech, chatting with startups like Wyvern and NSLComm. What he finds is actually a fairly positive picture — not only are there a huge number of original ideas and serious dollars flowing into the … space (couldn’t resist), but there are also clear trajectories to real products in the short-to-medium term. Writing about satellites:

Now, driven largely by miniaturization and manufacturing efficiency gains resulting from the ubiquity of home computing and smartphones, those components are a lot more affordable and a lot more available. High-quality optics can be had off the shelf for a relative song; antennas, solar cells, batteries and more have all dropped off a cliff in terms of manufacturing cost. Consumer hardware startups benefited from this trend as well, but it’s paying dividends to companies with higher-altitude ambitions, too.

[…]

Thanks to improvements in materials science, NSLComm was able to develop a proprietary technology to quickly deploy long communications antennas in orbit from relatively small craft, letting them offer high-bandwidth ground and air connectivity at a fraction of the cost needed by large satellite operators, while still maintaining favorable margins.

How top VCs view the new future of micromobility

Transportation into the cold vacuum of space isn’t the only hot zone for VC investment. Transportation itself is still getting a lot of love, but the investment theses are changing as more data comes in from the first wave of micromobility startups. At our Sessions: Mobility event, we had our VC reporter Kate Clark interview Sarah Smith of Bain Capital Ventures, Michael Granoff of Maniv Mobility, and Ted Serbinski of TechStars Detroit to discuss the future of this market, and we’ve now posted an exclusive edited transcript for Extra Crunch members.

This week professor David Carroll, whose dogged search for answers to how his personal data was misused plays a focal role in The Great Hack: Netflix’s documentary tackling the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, quipped that perhaps a follow up would be more punitive for the company than the $5BN FTC fine released the same day.

The documentary — which we previewed ahead of its general release Wednesday — does an impressive job of articulating for a mainstream audience the risks for individuals and society of unregulated surveillance capitalism, despite the complexities involved in the invisible data ‘supply chain’ that feeds the beast. Most obviously by trying to make these digital social emissions visible to the viewer — as mushrooming pop-ups overlaid on shots of smartphone users going about their everyday business, largely unaware of the pervasive tracking it enables.

Facebook is unlikely to be a fan of the treatment. In its own crisis PR around the Cambridge Analytica scandal it has sought to achieve the opposite effect; making it harder to join the data-dots embedded in its ad platform by seeking to deflect blame, bury key details and bore reporters and policymakers to death with reams of irrelevant detail — in the hope they might shift their attention elsewhere.

Data protection itself isn’t a topic that naturally lends itself to glamorous thriller treatment, of course. No amount of slick editing can transform the close and careful scrutiny of political committees into seat-of-the-pants viewing for anyone not already intimately familiar with the intricacies being picked over. And yet it’s exactly such thoughtful attention to detail that democracy demands. Without it we are all, to put it proverbially, screwed.

The Great Hack shows what happens when vital detail and context are cheaply ripped away at scale, via socially sticky content delivery platforms run by tech giants that never bothered to sweat the ethical detail of how their ad targeting tools could be repurposed by malign interests to sew social discord and/or manipulate voter opinion en mass.

Or indeed used by an official candidate for high office in a democratic society that lacks legal safeguards against data misuse.

But while the documentary packs in a lot over an almost two-hour span, retelling the story of Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 Trump presidential election campaign; exploring links to the UK’s Brexit leave vote; and zooming out to show a little of the wider impact of social media disinformation campaigns on various elections around the world, the viewer is left with plenty of questions. Not least the ones Carroll repeats towards the end of the film: What information had Cambridge Analytica amassed on him? Where did they get it from? What did they use it for? — apparently resigning himself to never knowing. The disgraced data firm chose declaring bankruptcy and folding back into its shell vs handing over the stolen goods and its algorithmic secrets.

There’s no doubt over the other question Carroll poses early on the film — could he delete his information? The lack of control over what’s done with people’s information is the central point around which the documentary pivots. The key warning being there’s no magical cleansing fire that can purge every digitally copied personal thing that’s put out there.

And while Carroll is shown able to tap into European data rights — purely by merit of Cambridge Analytica having processed his data in the UK — to try and get answers, the lack of control holds true in the US. Here, the absence of a legal framework to protect privacy is shown as the catalyzing fuel for the ‘great hack’ — and also shown enabling the ongoing data-free-for-all that underpins almost all ad-supported, Internet-delivered services. tl;dr: Your phone doesn’t need to listen to if it’s tracking everything else you do with it.

The film’s other obsession is the breathtaking scale of the thing. One focal moment is when we hear another central character, Cambridge Analytica’s Brittany Kaiser, dispassionately recounting how data surpassed oil in value last year — as if that’s all the explanation needed for the terrible behavior on show.

“Data’s the most valuable asset on Earth,” she monotones. The staggering value of digital stuff is thus fingered as an irresistible, manipulative force also sucking in bright minds to work at data firms like Cambridge Analytica — even at the expense of their own claimed political allegiances, in the conflicted case of Kaiser.

If knowledge is power and power corrupts, the construction can be refined further to ‘data corrupts’, is the suggestion.

The filmmakers linger long on Kaiser which can seem to humanize her — as they show what appear vulnerable or intimate moments. Yet they do this without ever entirely getting under her skin or allowing her role in the scandal to be fully resolved.

She’s often allowed to tell her narrative from behind dark glasses and a hat — which has the opposite effect on how we’re invited to perceive her. Questions about her motivations are never far away. It’s a human mystery linked to Cambridge Analytica’s money-minting algorithmic blackbox.

Nor is there any attempt by the filmmakers to mine Kaiser for answers themselves. It’s a documentary that spotlights mysteries and leaves questions hanging up there intact. From a journalist perspective that’s an inevitable frustration. Even as the story itself is much bigger than any one of its constituent parts.

It’s hard to imagine how Netflix could commission a straight up sequel to The Great Hack, given its central framing of Carroll’s data quest being combined with key moments of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Large chunks of the film are comprised from capturing scrutiny and reactions to the story unfolding in real-time.

But in displaying the ruthlessly transactional underpinnings of social platforms where the world’s smartphone users go to kill time, unwittingly trading away their agency in the process, Netflix has really just begun to open up the defining story of our time.

Tesla’s games library is getting bigger, and the latest announced title is probably a familiar one to gaming fans: Cuphead. This indie game was released in 2017 for Xbox One and Windows after making a big debut in 2013, attracting a lot of attention thanks to its hand-drawn, retro Disney-esque animation style.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that Cuphead would be getting a Tesla port sometime in August, replying to a post in which Tesla announced its latest addition to the in-car arcade library: Chess. The game will run at 60fps on the in-car display, Musk added, noting that while 4K isn’t supported for Tesla’s screens, the game “doesn’t need” that high resolution.

Cuphead has since been released for both macOS and Nintendo Switch, and has gained critical acclaim for its challenging gameplay in addition to its unique graphic style. The game works with one or two players (which Tesla cars also now support via gamepad controllers for some other titles) and basically involves side-scrolling run-and-gun action punctuated by frequent boss fights.

Musk continued on Twitter regarding the Cuphead port that it will use a Unity port for Tesla’s in-car OS, which is already done, and currently they’re in the process of refining the controls. A limit of available onboard storage will be solved by allowing added game storage via USB, so that Tesla owners will be able to add flash drives to hold more downloaded games.

Earlier this month, Netflix announced that it would be developing an animated series based on Cuphead, and the game has sold over 4 million copies world-wide so far. Tesla launched Tesla Arcade last month as a dedicated in-car app to host the growing collection of games it’s brought to the car – and it’s worth noting that you can only access these games while in park.

 

Gatik AI, the autonomous vehicle startup that’s aiming for the sweet middle spot in the world of logistics, is officially on the road through a partnership with Walmart .

The company received approval from the Arkansas Highway Commissioner’s office to launch a commercial service with Walmart . Gatik’s autonomous vehicles (with a human safety driver behind the wheel) is now delivering customer online grocery orders from Walmart’s main warehouse to its neighborhood stores in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The AVs will aim to travel seven days a week on a two-mile route — the tiniest of slivers of Walmart’s overall business. But the goal here isn’t ubiquity just yet. Instead, Walmart is using this project to capture the kind of data that will help it learn how best to integrate autonomous vehicles into their stores and services.

Gatik uses Ford transit vehicles outfitted with a self-driving system. Co-founder and CEO Gautam Narang has previously told TechCrunch that the company can fulfill a need in the market through a variety of use cases, including partnering with third-party logistics giants like Amazon, FedEx  or even the U.S. Postal Service, auto part distributors, consumer goods, food and beverage distributors as well as medical and pharmaceutical companies.

The company, which emerged from stealth in June, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by former CEO and executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Other investors include AngelPad, Dynamo Fund, Fontinalis Partners, Trucks Venture Capital and angel investor Lior Ron, who heads Uber Freight.

Gatik isn’t the only AV company working with Walmart. Walmart has partnerships with Waymo and Udelv. Both of these partnerships involve pilot programs in Arizona.

Udelv is testing the use of autonomous vans to deliver online grocery orders to customers. Last year, members of Waymo’s early rider program received grocery savings when they shopped from Walmart.com. The riders would then take a Waymo car to their nearby Walmart store for grocery pickup.

The chemist who helped create the magic sauce behind Juul, Xing Chenyue, unveiled the product of her new startup Myst Labs this week after two years of development: electronic cigarette alternatives designed for China’s 350 million smokers, the world’s biggest smoking population.

This new contender makes for a potentially heated battlefield given that Juul will reportedly enter China soon. TechCrunch has reached out to Juul about its expansion, but has not heard back at the time of writing.

Pax Labs — the company that spun out Juul in 2017 — was a 20-person team when Xing joined as one of its first scientists in 2013. During her nearly three-year post at what would become America’s largest vaping company, Xing helped invent nicotine salts, the compounds that made Juul an instant hit. The patented technology inspired a raft of followers because it allows high levels of nicotine to be inhaled more easily and with less irritation, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Xing left Juul when the company made a foray into marijuana vaporizers, a move that didn’t particularly interest the scientist, a non-smoker whose ambition is to “help smokers meet their nicotine needs whilst reducing the harmful substances they consume,” Xing told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

The China-born scientist took up a project management role at publicly-traded pharmaceutical company Dermia before eventually returning to cigarettes research by starting Myst Labs, which she co-founded in 2017 with Thomas Yao, a venture capitalist she had met over a decade ago at Fudan University in Shanghai.

As Myst began to take form, Juul was on course to reach its whopping $38 billion valuation even while it was under fire for luring teenagers into vaping. Meanwhile in China, vaping had just begun to catch on. Research from Soochow Securities (in Chinese) shows that China, despite being the world’s biggest producer of vaping devices, accounts for merely 6% of the world’s e-cig market. Xing wanted to seize the opportunity and this time, she’s in control over what comes out of the lab.

“We certainly want to reach the same level of society-wide impact in China as Juul does in the U.S. We hope Myst can leave a positive mark on Chinese smokers,” said Xing. “Myst can slowly transform the way people smoke and gradually reduce the level of their nicotine intake.”

Myst’s first product, dubbed the P1 series, is a 399 yuan ($58) flash-drive-shaped device that comes with a nicotine level of 3% or 5% and sports a retractable cigarette holder for hygiene and a “click” sound that mimics a lighter. Myst will ship in China through online and offline channels and said it plans to sell in international markets down the road. Its price point is comparable to Juul’s pricing in the U.S.

Myst does not market itself as a smoking cessation tool because to do so would require approval from China’s drug regulator. Rather, the startup bills itself as a “new type of cigarette substitute for adult smokers.” It has avoided using images of young, cool-looking models, the style of campaigns that backfired on Juul. To verify customers’ age, Myst applies facial recognition, an increasingly ubiquitous technology in China where people scan their face to pay for things or access certain entertainment services such as video games and live videos.

That positioning also allows the company to potentially evade stepping on the toes of China’s powerful cigarette monopoly, which provides the government with handsome sums of tax revenues.

From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen

Myst deploys about half of its 20-person team to conduct research and development in Silicon Valley. The rest of the company mainly works out of Shenzhen, the electronics manufacturing hub that also produces the majority of the world’s vaporizers.

“We are combining Silicon Valley research and China’s supply chain, a strategy that sets us apart from most vaporizers on the market,” Yao, who heads up business development at Myst, told TechCrunch.

He compared China’s vaping craze to what happened to smartphones between 2010 and 2011 when copycats of incumbents crowded the market in a gold rush. Countless knockoffs of Juul and other established brands now flood the market. Companies with various degrees of development capabilities have also mushroomed — at least 20 Chinese e-cig startups have received venture investment in the last seven months.

As with the smartphone market that’s now dominated by a small rank of players, Yao believed the bad apples in vaping will eventually be weeded out. “This [counterfaiting] happens whenever China experiences a technological breakthrough. Chinese brands get eliminated at a rate to which no other country can compare. Perhaps a lot of [e-cig] companies will go out of business by the end of this year.” A sector reshuffle will result in part from government regulation, which can arrive in China anytime soon.

Xing believes Myst’s edge lies in the quality of its products. According to Yao, the company spends about 20% of the money raised on R&D.

Yao declined to disclose how much the company has banked but said it has sufficient funds in the coffer and that “money isn’t an issue” because he has personally invested in Myst. Yao had previously picked some winners by backing mobility unicorn Lime and India’s wallet leader Paytm in their early days.

The co-founder has also brought to the table key personnel for the business, including Myst’s chief executive officer Daniel Chen, who previously managed Hong Kong-listed robotics firm Super Robotics; chief operation officer Martin Liu, former CEO of Blackberry China; head of product Yingqun Cao, a former product manager at Google Home and Juul; and lastly head of design Jiandong Hao, previously a design director at global design firm IDEO.

The pool of talent is reflective of Myst’s vision to digitize smoking, which can manifest in the form of a connected vaporizer that tracks users’ health conditions just like a smart wristband does. Myst’s current generation of products does not yet enable the futuristic scenario, but Yao maintained that digitization is key to smoking.

“For smokers, vaporizers could become the second most used electronic devices after smartphones,” he said.

Investigative news site Bellingcat has confirmed several of its staff were targeted by an attempted phishing attack on their ProtonMail accounts, which the journalists and the email provider say failed.

“Yet again, Bellingcat finds itself targeted by cyber attacks, almost certainly linked to our work on Russia,” wrote Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative news site in a tweet. “I guess one way to measure our impact is how frequently agents of the Russian Federation try to attack it, be it their hackers, trolls, or media.”

News emerged that a small number of ProtonMail email accounts were targeted this week — several of which belonged to Bellingcat’s researchers who work on projects related to activities by the Russian government. A phishing email purportedly from ProtonMail itself asked users to change their email account passwords or generate new encryption keys through a similarly-named domain set up by the attackers. Records show the fake site was registered anonymously, according to an analysis by security researchers.

In a statement, ProtonMail said the phishing attacks “did not succeed” and denied that its systems or user accounts had been hacked or compromised.

“The most practical way to obtain email data from a ProtonMail user’s inbox is by compromising the user, as opposed to trying to compromise the service itself,” said ProtonMail’s chief executive Andy Yen. “For this reason, the attackers opted for a phishing campaign that targeted the journalists directly.”

Yen said the attackers tried to exploit an unpatched flaw in third-party software used by ProtonMail, which has yet to be fixed or disclosed by the software maker.

“This vulnerability, however, is not widely known and indicates a higher level of sophistication on the part of the attackers,” said Yen.

It’s not known conclusively who was behind the attack. However, both Bellingcat and ProtonMail said they believe certain tactics and indicators of the attack may point to hackers associated with the Russian government. For instance, the attack’s targets were Bellingcat’s researchers working on the ongoing investigation into the downing of flight MH17 by Russian forces and the use of a nerve agent in a targeted killing in the U.K.

Higgins said in a tweet that this week’s attempted attack likely targeted “in the tens” of people unlike earlier attacks attributed to the Russian government-backed hacker group, known as APT 28 or Fancy Bear.

Bellingcat in the past year has gained critical acclaim for its investigations into the Russian government, uncovering the names of the alleged Russian operatives behind the suspected missile attack that blew up Malaysian airliner MH17 in 2014. The research team also discovered the names of the Russian operatives who were since accused of poisoning former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a nerve agent attack in Salisbury, U.K. in 2018.

The researchers use open-source intelligence and information gathering where police, law enforcement and intelligence agencies often fail.

It’s not the first time that hackers have targeted Bellingcat. Its researchers were targeted several times in 2016 and 2017 following the breach on the Democratic National Committee which saw thousands of internal emails stolen and published online.

A phone call to the Russian consulate in New York requesting comment was not returned.

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