Month: August 2018

Mozilla today announced that its Firefox browser will soon automatically block all attempts at cross-site tracking by default.

There’s three parts to this strategy. Starting with version 63, which is currently in testing in the browser’s nightly release channel, Firefox will block all slow-loading trackers (with ads being the biggest offender here). Those are trackers that take more than five seconds to load. Starting with Firefox 65, the browser will also strip all cookies and block all storage access from third-party trackers. In addition, Mozilla is also working on blocking cryptomining scripts and trackers that fingerprint users. As usual, the timeline could still change, depending on how these first tests work out.

“In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase,” Mozilla’s Nick Nguyen writes today. “Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go. Most web browsers fail to help users get the level of privacy they expect and deserve.”

If you want to give these new features a try today, all you have to do is install the unstable Firefox Nightly release. There, in the privacy settings, you’ll find the new tracker blocking features under the “Content Blocking” header. Once you’ve turned that on, the browser will also walk you through how all of this works and highlights that some of the more aggressive settings may break a few sites.

In addition, Firefox’s private mode also uses the same kind of tracking protection already, as does Firefox for iOS.

Safari users, too, will have likely yawned while reading this. Apple, after all, already announced similar privacy features for its browser last year. The approach here is different, with Apple betting on machine learning and Firefox using more traditional block lists, but the intent is the same.

As Mozilla notes, the idea here is to give users choice. Sites can still ask for a user’s data but they’ll have to ask for consent before they get it. “Blocking pop-up ads in the original Firefox release was the right move in 2004, because it didn’t just make Firefox users happier, it gave the advertising platforms of the time a reason to care about their users’ experience. In 2018, we hope that our efforts to empower our users will have the same effect,” writes Nguyen.

The OpenStack Foundation today released the 18th version of its namesake open-source cloud infrastructure software. The project has had its ups and downs, but it remains the de facto standard for running and managing large private clouds.

What’s been interesting to watch over the years is how the project’s releases have mirrored what’s been happening in the wider world of enterprise software. The core features of the platform (compute, storage, networking) are very much in place at this point, allowing the project to look forward and to add new features that enterprises are now requesting.

The new release, dubbed Rocky, puts an emphasis on bare metal clouds, for example. While the majority of enterprises still run their workloads in virtual machines, a lot of them are now looking at containers as an alternative with less overhead and the promise of faster development cycles. Many of these enterprises want to run those containers on bare metal clouds and the project is reacting to this with its “Ironic” project that offers all of the management and automation features necessary to run these kinds of deployments.

“There’s a couple of big features that landed in Ironic in the Rocky release cycle that we think really set it up well for OpenStack bare clouds to be the foundation for both running VMs and containers,” OpenStack Foundation VP of marketing and community Lauren Sell told me. 

Ironic itself isn’t new, but in today’s update, Ironic gets use-managed BIOS settings (to configure power management, for example) and RAM disk support for high-performance computing workloads. Magnum, OpenStack’s service for using container engines like Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos and Kubernetes, is now also a Kubernetes certified installer, meaning that users can be confident that OpenStack and Kubernetes work together just like a user would expect.

Another trend that’s becoming quite apparent is that many enterprises that build their own private clouds do so because they have very specific hardware needs. Often, that includes GPUs and FPGAs, for example, for machine learning workloads. To make it easier for these businesses to use OpenStack, the project now includes a lifecycle management service for these kinds of accelerators.

“Specialized hardware is getting a lot of traction right now,” OpenStack CTO Mark Collier noted. “And what’s interesting is that FPGAs have been around for a long time but people are finding out that they are really useful for certain types of AI, because they’re really good at doing the relatively simple math that you need to repeat over and over again millions of times. It’s kind of interesting to see this kind of resurgence of certain types of hardware that maybe was seen as going to be disrupted by cloud and now it’s making a roaring comeback.”

With this update, the OpenStack project is also enabling easier upgrades, something that was long a daunting process for enterprises. Because it was so hard, many chose to simply not update to the latest releases and often stayed a few releases behind. Now, the so-called Fast Forward Upgrade feature allows these users to get on new releases faster, even if they are well behind the project’s own cycle. Oath, which owns TechCrunch, runs a massive OpenStack cloud, for example, and the team recently upgraded a 20,000-core deployment from Juno (the 10th OpenStack release) to Ocata (the 15th release).

The fact that Vexxhost, a Canadian cloud provider, is already offering support for the Rocky release in its new Silicon Valley cloud today is yet another sign that updates are getting a bit easier (and the whole public cloud side of OpenStack, too, often gets overlooked, but continues to grow).

Twitter continues to roll out new policies aimed at increasing transparency, particularly around political advertising.

Amidst ongoing concerns about Russian election interference and misinformation on social media, the company recently announced political ad guidelines and launched an Ads Transparency Center where you can find more information about advertisers.

Initially, however, Twitter’s stricter standards were limited to ads for U.S. federal election candidates and campaigns. Now it’s announced a policy around the broader category of “issue ads.”

In a blog post, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety Del Harvey and its general manager of revenue product Bruce Falck said the policy affects two categories:

* Ads that refer to an election or a clearly identified candidate, or
* Ads that advocate for legislative issues of national importance

In both cases, advertisers will need to apply for certification, which involves verifying their identity and location in the United States. Like election ads, issue ads will be labeled as such in the Twitter timeline, and they’ll allow users to click through and learn more about the advertiser. They’ll also be included in the Ads Transparency center.

As examples of the kinds of issues that would be covered, Harvey and Falck cited “abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, and trade,” though they also said that list will likely evolve over time.

News organizations that want to run ads around their political coverage can apply for an exemption. (Since the definition of what is and isn’t a news organization can be blurry, there are specific criteria that they’d need to meet, like providing editorial staff information online and not being “dedicated to advocating on a single issue.”)

“We don’t believe that news organizations running ads on Twitter that report on these issues, rather than advocate for or against them, should be subject to this policy,” Harvey and Falck wrote.

Twitter says it will start enforcing the policy (which, to be clear, is currently U.S.-only) on September 30.

The Google Assistant just got more useful for multilingual families. Starting today, you’ll be able to set up two languages in the Google Home app and the Assistant on your phone and Google Home will then happily react to your commands in both English and Spanish, for example.

Today’s announcement doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, given that Google announced at its I/O developer conference earlier this year that it was working on this feature. It’s nice to see that this year, Google is rolling out its I/O announcements well before next year’s event. That hasn’t always been the case in the past.

Currently, the Assistant is only bilingual and it still has a few languages to learn. But for the time being, you’ll be able to set up any language pair that includes English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. More pairs are coming in the future and Google also says it is working on trilingual support, too.

Google tells me this feature will work with all Assistant surfaces that support the languages you have selected. That’s basically all phones and smart speakers with the Assistant, but not the new smart displays, as they only support English right now.

While this may sound like an easy feature to implement, Google notes this was a multi-year effort. To build a system like this, you have to be able to identify multiple languages, understand them and then make sure you present the right experience to the user. And you have to do all of this within a few seconds.

Google says its language identification model (LangID) can now distinguish between 2,000 language pairs. With that in place, the company’s researchers then had to build a system that could turn spoken queries into actionable results in all supported languages. “When the user stops speaking, the model has not only determined what language was being spoken, but also what was said,” Google’s VP Johan Schalkwyk and Google Speech engineer Lopez Moreno write in today’s announcement. “Of course, this process requires a sophisticated architecture that comes with an increased processing cost and the possibility of introducing unnecessary latency.”

If you are in Germany, France or the U.K., you’ll now also be able to use the bilingual assistant on a Google Home Max. That high-end version of the Google Home family is going on sale in those countries today.

In addition, Google also today announced that a number of new devices will soon support the Assistant, including the tado° thermostats, a number of new security and smart home hubs (though not, of course, Amazon’s own Ring Alarm), smart bulbs and appliances, including the iRobot Roomba 980, 896 and 676 vacuums. Who wants to have to push a button on a vacuum, after all.

The invites have dropped, and the big show’s official. After months of speculation, Apple just let slip that its next event will be going down September 12, at the company’s shiny new headquarters in Cupertino. The invite bears the words “Gather round,” along with a large gold circle, which appears to be a reference to its big, circular new digs. Of course, the company does love throwing a hint or two in these invites, so we may also be getting some reference to a new piece of tech and/or color scheme. 

This year has been a fairly quiet one for the company on the hardware front. Apple showed off some new iPads at an event in Chicago, back in March and updated the MacBook Pro line more recently. Otherwise, however, we haven’t heard a lot out of the company, including a WWDC that was entirely devoid of new hardware.

All of that’s about to change, however. And if the rumors are to be believed, Apple’s going to make up for all of that in a big way the second week of September. At least one new iPhone is almost certainly on the schedule for the event.

The company’s done a pretty solid job keeping things under wraps this time, unlike Google and Samsung, though a few leaks have sprung up here and there. Three new iPhones are supposedly in the works, including an upgraded version of the iPhone X. A new Watch and iPad Pro have also been rumored for the big show. 

We’ll certainly be there with bells on and a few large camera lenses in tow. Rumor has it that the company will also shakes things up a bit this time out by livestreaming the show via Twitter.

The day has arrived. After more than two months of waiting, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is poised to determine which of 12 companies will successfully procure one of the city’s five permits. 

The permits are hot commodities for those competing for scooter market dominance, which includes Uber and Lyft, which applied for permits to operate e-scooters despite not yet having any. San Francisco is a key market for e-scooters; for some of these companies, failing to receive a permit could mean the end of the road.

Santa Monica, where Bird is headquartered, is also expected to award four permits for its electric scooter and bike pilot program today. Bird is the most valuable scooter startup; it hit a $2 billion valuation in June after raising hundreds of millions in venture capital funding. 

Bird, Lime and Spin — all of which applied for permits — were the three original players in the San Francisco scooter game. They released their fleet of scooters in the city in March without permission. As a result, the SFMTA asked the companies to temporarily remove the scooters in late May and initiated a permit process as part of the 24-month pilot program.

As part of the program, the city will allow only 2,500 scooters on the streets at once. Those chosen are required to provide user education and insurance, share the data of the trips with the city, have a privacy policy that protects user data and offer a low-income plan to their riders.

The other companies that applied for permits are Scoot, Ridecell, USSCooter, Skip, Ofo, Razor and Hopr (Cyclehop).

Marshall Speakers are hardly the first third-party manufacturer to hop on the smart speaker bandwagon, but the company’s got a strong case for bringing the best design into the mix.

Announced at IFA in Berlin this week, the Acton II and Stanmore II continue the line’s legacy of cribbing heavily from Marshall’s iconic guitar amp designs. It’s not original, really, but it’s a sort of timeless design that should fit in pretty comfortably most living rooms.

The speakers are both launching in the fall with Amazon Alexa on-board. Google Assistant will be arriving later in the year, letting them do double assistant duty. A cheeky bit of ad copy on that front from Marshall,

Just like a roadie, Alexa is there to help while you’re busy doing other things. Can’t remember the name of a song? Say the lyrics and Alexa will find it for you. Looking for information on when your favourite band goes on tour? Just ask. You can even have Alexa remind you when tickets go on sale, help you tune your guitar, learn music theory, test your music knowledge, or catch you up on the latest news. Alexa and Marshall Voice really are a match made in music heaven.

The Acton is the smaller of the two, running $299, while the Stanmore costs $100 more. The speakers are launching November 9 and October 2, respectively.

In March, Walmart announced it was partnering with Handy to sell its in-home installation and assembly services in over 2,000 of its brick-and-mortar retail stores. Now, that partnership is expanding to Walmart’s e-commerce site, too. This week, Walmart began offering online shoppers the ability to add Handy services to their cart at checkout. This allows customers to order in-home installations for things like mounting TVs, or get help with assembling their furniture, among other things.

The news was first reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, when Handy became available to online shoppers. However, the full rollout of Handy across Walmart’s e-commerce site will continue throughout September – meaning, if you don’t see the option now, you will fairly soon.

Founded in 2012, New York-based Handy lets anyone book household services like cleaners, plumbers, handyman services, and more. The company, which is backed by $110 million in VC funding, has grown over the years to over 80,000 service professionals on its platform, and has served over half a million customers over half a million bookings.

Being offered by Walmart both in stores, and now online, has been a big win for the services provider, as it greatly expands its ability to reach customers without having to spend on marketing.

Via the Walmart.com U.S. website, Handy will be offered for indoor projects, including furniture assembly ($95), hanging TVs ($79), installing ACs ($90), and a number of others like hanging ceiling fans, installing garbage disposals, installing lighting, and more. Handy says the range of services may be expanded in the future. In addition, Walmart may choose to offer Handy’s full range of services at some point – which includes things like housecleaning and various handyman services.

Services are a critical area for online retailers, and one where Walmart’s chief rival Amazon has been ramping up over the years, following the official launch of its Home Services site in 2015. Since then, Amazon has been expanding its services business to include those that help customers set up their smart home, and, most recently, install home security systems like Amazon’s Cloud Cam, Ring doorbell, and others.

By enabling more customers to add smart home devices, Amazon also helps to boost its Amazon Echo / Alexa device business, too – as smart home control is one of the primary use cases. Over time, Amazon can monetize its Alexa home through subscriptions and skills purchases, voice ads, shopping, and more.

Adding services to e-commerce sites allows retailers to also generate more revenue from online shoppers, without having to stock more inventory. Customers benefit as well, since installation and assembly services were traditionally offered by the brick-and-mortar stores they once frequented, but were slower to arrive online.

IKEA is also venturing into this space – it acquired TaskRabbit in fall 2017, and then rolled out its own furniture assembly service earlier this year, both online and in stores.

Walmart, meanwhile, has a history of leveraging partnerships to venture into areas where it wants to challenge Amazon and others.

For instance, because it doesn’t have its own e-readers and e-books service, it teamed up with Rakuten Kobo for its new e-book store; and because it doesn’t have its own smart speaker like the Amazon Echo, it partnered with Google to offer voice-shopping through Google Home devices instead.

The Handy installation services will be available via Walmart’s website in the U.S. when the rollout completes in September.

I suspect $300 wireless earbuds might have been a bit more easy to swallow back when the technology was still something of a novelty just a few years ago. Now that these devices are fairly ubiquitous, however, it’s going to be a tougher for a company to justify what’s essentially twice the price of a set of AirPods.

That said, the Momentum certainly look nice. And they probably are — Sennheiser makes nice, premium products. Announced at IFA in Berlin this week, the earbuds have 7mm dynamic drivers, support AAC and Qualcomm aptXTM for bluetooth high-def audio.

The headphones work with Siri and Google Assistant, via a touch interface. Battery life is pretty decent at four hours, plus 12 more via the recharging case. The case actually looks pretty nice too, with a fabric cover that’s got a real Google Home vibe.  All of that can be yours in mid-November for the totally not crazy price of 299.95 U.S. American dollars.