Month: August 2018

After three months of discussions, Uber Elevate has selected The University of Texas at Austin as its partner alongside the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to develop new rotor technology for vehicles that the company will use in its uberAIR flying taxi network.

The news is the latest step in Uber’s plans to get demonstration flights off the ground in the megalopolises of Dallas Ft. Worth; Los Angeles, and Dubai. The ultimate goal is to have uberAIR services commercially available in those cities by 2023.

To achieve that, Uber has set up some rigorous specifications for its vehicle and the traffic management system used to operate uberAIR, developed in conjunction with several aircraft manufacturers and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Specifically for the vehicle, Uber is requiring a fully electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle that has a cruising speed of 150 to 200 miles per hour; a cruising altitude of 1,000 to 2,000 feet; and a range of up to 60 miles for a single charge.

The company isn’t the only one racing to own the sky taxi space for urban transport. Chinese drone manufacturer Ehang; Aston Martin; Rolls Royce; Audi and Airbus and other, smaller, startup vendors are all trying to make flying vehicles. Ehang has been touting manned test flights of its drone already.

Uber, on the other hand is trying to build out the service in much the same way it did with car hailing so many years ago.

The company actually unveiled its thoughts on air travel and design a few months ago at its Elevate conference.

At UT, a research team led by Professor Jayant Sirohi, one of the country’s experts on unmanned drone technology, VTOL aircraft, and fixed- and rotary-wing elasticity will examine how the efficacy of a new flying technology, which uses two rotor systems stacked on top of one another and rotating in the same direction.

Called co-rotating rotors, the new technology will be tested for its efficiency and noise signature, according to a statement from the university. Preliminary tests have shown the potential for these rotors to work better than other approaches while also improving versatility for an aircraft.

“There’s a lot of things to be done,” said Sirohi. “We are not doing vehicles. we’re doing a specific rotor system on one of the engineering common reference models that Uber has released.”

The reference model is a benchmark for what the aircraft should do in field tests and eventually operations, Sirohi said. “We are pursuing these technologies to see what the gaps are in where we are today and where we need to be,” Sirohi said.

IBM and shipping giant Maersk having been working together for the last year developing a blockchain-based shipping solution called TradeLens. Today they moved the project from Beta into limited availability.

Marie Wieck, GM for IBM Blockchain says the product provides a way to digitize every step of the global trade workflow, transforming it into a real-time communication and visual data sharing tool.

TradeLens was developed jointly by the two companies with IBM providing the underlying blockchain technology and Maersk bringing the worldwide shipping expertise. It involves three components: the blockchain, which provides a mechanism for tracking goods from factory or field to delivery, APIs for others to build new applications on top of the platform these two companies have built, and a set of standards to facilitate data sharing among the different entities in the workflow such as customs, ports and shipping companies.

Wieck says the blockchain really changes how companies have traditionally tracked shipped goods. While many of the entities in the system have digitized the process, the data they have has been trapped in siloes and previous attempts at sharing like EDI have been limited. “The challenge is they tend to think of a linear flow and you really only have visibility one [level] up and one down in your value chain,” she said.

The blockchain provides a couple of obvious advantages over previous methods. For starters, she says it’s safer because data is distributed, making it much more secure with digital encryption built in. The greatest advantage though is the visibility it provides. Every participant can check any aspect of the flow in real time, or an auditor or other authority can easily track the entire process from start to finish by clicking on a block in the blockchain instead of requesting data from each entity manually.

While she says it won’t entirely prevent fraud, it does help reduce it by putting more eyeballs onto the process. “If you had fraudulent data at start, blockchain won’t help prevent that. What it does help with is that you have multiple people validating every data set and you get greater visibility when something doesn’t look right,” she said.

As for the APIs, she sees the system becoming a shipping information platform. Developers can build on top of that, taking advantage of the data in the system to build even greater efficiencies. The standards help pull it together and align with APIs, such as providing a standard Bill of Lading. They are starting by incorporating existing industry standards, but are also looking for gaps that slow things down to add new standard approaches that would benefit everyone in the system.

So far, the companies have 94 entities in 300 locations around the world using TradeLens including customs authorities, ports, cargo shippers and logistics companies. They are opening the program to limited availability today with the goal of a full launch by the end of this year.

Wieck ultimately sees TradeLens as a way to facilitate trade by building in trust, the end of goal of any blockchain product. “By virtue of already having an early adopter program, and having coverage of 300 trading locations around the world, it is a very good basis for the global exchange of information. And I personally think visibility creates trust, and that can help in a myriad of ways,” she said.

The leaks, controlled and otherwise, have left little up to the imagination. That, in part, was likely by design. After all, sales of the S9 were underwhelming, which could well have Samsung positioning this as the Note line’s mainstream moment.

You can get the full rundown of what we know so far about the Note 9 here, but also expect this to be a pretty big show for Samsung on the news front. After all, the company announced a new tablet just last week, rather than holding it for the big Unpacked event, leading many to believe that Samsung’s got even more up its sleeve for today’s show.

Among other things, a new version of the Gear smartwatch appears to be on the stars for the event, possibly under the new Galaxy Watch title. We’ll be on hand at the event today, to break out all of the important news. A livestream of the event will be available both on Samsung’s page and YouTube.

The event starts at 11:00AM on the East Coast of the U.S. and 8:00AM out west.

Apple has commented on its decision to continue to allow conspiracy theorist profiteer InfoWars to livestream video podcasts via an app in its App Store, despite removing links to all but one of Alex Jones’ podcast content from its iTunes and podcast apps earlier this week.

At the time Apple said the podcasts had violated its community standards, emphasizing that it “does not tolerate hate speech”, and saying: “We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

Yet the InfoWars app allows iOS users to livestream the same content Apple just pulled from iTunes.

In a statement given to BuzzFeed News Apple explains its decision not to pull InfoWars app’ — saying:

We strongly support all points of view being represented on the App Store, as long as the apps are respectful to users with differing opinions, and follow our clear guidelines, ensuring the App Store is a safe marketplace for all. We continue to monitor apps for violations of our guidelines and if we find content that violates our guidelines and is harmful to users we will remove those apps from the store as we have done previously.

Multiple tech platforms have moved to close to door or limit Jones’ reach on their platforms in recent weeks, including Google, which shuttered his YouTube channel, and Facebook, which removed a series of videos and banned Jones’ personal account for 30 days as well as issuing the InfoWars page with a warning strike. Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, MailChimp and others have also taken action.

Although Twitter has not banned or otherwise censured Jones — despite InfoWars’ continued presence on its platform threatening CEO Jack Dorsey’s claimed push to want to improve conversational health on his platform. Snapchat is also merely monitoring Jones’ continued presence on its platform.

In an unsurprising twist, the additional exposure Jones/InfoWars has gained as a result of news coverage of the various platform bans appears to have given his apps some passing uplift…

So Apple’s decision to remove links to Jones’ podcasts yet allow the InfoWars app looks contradictory.

The company is certainly treading a fine line here. But there’s a technical distinction between a link to a podcast in a directory, where podcast makers can freely list their stuff (with the content hosted elsewhere), vs an app in Apple’s App Store which has gone through Apple’s review process and the content is being hosted by Apple.

When it removed Jones’ podcasts Apple was, in effect, just removing a pointer to the content, not the content itself. The podcasts also represented discrete content — meaning each episode which was being pointed to could be judged against Apple’s community standards. (And one podcast link was not removed, for example, though five were.)

Whereas Jones (mostly) uses the InfoWars app to livestream podcast shows. Meaning the content in the InfoWars app is more ephemeral — making it more difficult for Apple to cross-check against its community standards. The streamer has to be caught in the act, as it were.

Google has also not pulled the InfoWars app from its Play Store despite shuttering Jones’ YouTube channel, and a spokesperson told BuzzFeed: “We carefully review content on our platforms and products for violations of our terms and conditions, or our content policies. If an app or user violates these, we take action.”

That said, both the iOS and Android versions of the app also include ‘articles’ that can be saved by users, so some of the content appears to be less ephemeral.

The iOS listing further claims the app lets users “stay up to date with articles as they’re published from Infowars.com” — which at least suggests some of the content is ideal to what’s being spouting on Jones’ own website (where he’s only subject to his own T&Cs).

But in order to avoid failing foul of Apple and Google’s app store guidelines, Jones is likely carefully choosing which articles are funneled into the apps — to avoid breaching app store T&Cs against abuse and hateful conduct, and (most likely also) to hook more eyeballs with more soft-ball conspiracy nonsense before, once they’re pulled into his orbit, blasting people with his full bore BS shotgun on his own platform.

Sample articles depicted in screenshots in the App Store listing for the app include one claiming that George Soros is “literally behind Starbucks’ sensitivity training” and another, from the ‘science’ section, pushing some junk claims about vision correction — so all garbage but not at the same level of anti-truth toxicity that Jones has become notorious for for what he says on his shows; while the Play Store listing flags a different selection of sample articles with a slightly more international flavor — including several on European far right politics, in addition to U.S. focused political stories about Trump and some outrage about domestic ‘political correctness gone mad’. So the static sample content at least isn’t enough to violate any T&Cs.

Still, the livestream component of the apps presents an ongoing problem for Apple and Google — given both have stated that his content elsewhere violates their standards. And it’s not clear how sustainable it will be for them to continue to allow Jones a platform to livestream hate from inside the walls of their commercial app stores.

Beyond that, narrowly judging Jones — a purveyor of weaponized anti-truth (most egregiously his claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax) — by the content he uploads directly to their servers also ignores the wider context (and toxic baggage) around him.

And while no tech companies want their brands to be perceived as toxic to conservative points of view, InfoWars does not represent conservative politics. Jones peddles far right conspiracy theories, whips up hate and spreads junk science in order to generate fear and make money selling supplements. It’s cynical manipulation not conservatism.

Both should revisit their decision. Hateful anti-truth merely damages the marketplace of ideas they claim to want to champion, and chills free speech through violent bullying of minorities and the people it makes into targets and thus victimizes.

Earlier this week 9to5Mac reported that CNN’s Dylan Byers has said the decision to remove links to InfoWars’ podcasts had been made at the top of Apple after a meeting between CEO Tim Cook and SVP Eddy Cue. Byers’ reported it was also the execs’ decision not to remove the InfoWars app.

We’ve reached out to Apple to ask whether it will be monitoring InfoWars’ livestreams directly for any violations of its community standards and will update this story with any response.

Two of India’s most prominent VCs are backing a motorbike on-demand service after Sequoia India and Accel led a $12.2 million investment in Metro Bikes. Sequoia India and Accel were joined in the round by Raghunandan G, who founded TaxiForSure which sold to Ola, among other investors.

Metro Bikes started out as a luxury bike rental service in 2014 — initially as “Wicked Rides” — and it launched scooters (motorbikes) and other two-wheel rentals in 2016. Now, the company is rebranding to Bounce and refocusing its business to on-demand scooter (that’s motorbike in U.S. parlance) rentals for first and last mile transportation. The idea is to appeal to commuters, who can pick up a bike at their nearest location and later leave it at an endzone. The cost is based on distance and time spent.

Bounce is currently present in Bangalore, where it has 2,000 scooters currently, and Hyderabad, where it has around 500. The plan is to increase those numbers but the company is waiting on a permit to operate electric scooters, once it gets that it will only deploy electric, CEO Vivekananda Hallekere told TechCrunch in an interview. Its current mix of vehicles also includes bicycles, electric bicycles and kick scooters available.

The startup is going to hone its focus on Bangalore and Hyderabad for now, with no new expansions for 6-10 months, he added. Looking further forward, Bounce is aiming to be nationwide by 2020, while Hallekere said he sees the potential for deployment in Southeast Asia in the future.

Bounce claims that it is currently seeing around four rides per vehicle per day on its on-demand platform, the company is targeting seven to twelve rides which it believes will bring it to a good level of revenue. Although Hallekere did stress that the core business is anchored in sustainability.

That’s down to the funding of the fleet, which the CEO said is financed by institutional investors who purchase the assets in exchange for a cut of revenue. That helps cover a significant portion of operating expenses, while in other cases Bounce works with OEMs who provide vehicles under similar terms.

Bounce is entering a fairly congested market in India, with other startups include Wheelstreet — which TechCrunch wrote about earlier this year — ZipHop also competing with similar services. Hallekere, the Bounce CEO, said that the company’s history in the business and its technology can help it stand out.

Added to that, Bounce said it is working closely with authorities to help ease last mile congestion. For example, the company is one of a number to have a struck a deal with Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Ltd. (BMRCL) to put rental bikes at 36 metro stations. It also landed a deal with corporate to enable parking across the city. The company said it plans to pursue similar arrangements with metro operators in Hyderabad and other cities when it expands.

“The first mile and last mile are essential to having public transport work in India,” Hallekere said. “It’s very natural for Indians to go on scooters and we started with metro bikes keeping this in mind. We want to make an impact and enable people to ditch cars.”

Bounce is also looking to introduce a pooling service that would enable scooter owners to add their vehicles to the company’s fleet and make money when they are used.

Taxfix, the Berlin-based startup that has developed a mobile assistant to help you file your tax return, has closed $13 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with participation from existing investors Creandum and Redalpine.

Launched in 2017, Taxfix is built on the premise that filing taxes remains a daunting task in most countries, involving a lot of archaic form filling, often carried out incorrectly and without the proper advice, and rarely optimised for tax refunds. As a result, the company says that in Germany alone, over 10 million employees decide not to file a tax return, and therefore forgo an average tax rebate of 935 Euros.

“The problem is that most people don’t have a personal tax accountant, nor the sufficient knowledge on how to file their taxes,” explains Taxfix co-founder and CEO Mathis Büchi. “Taxpayers are required to invest a substantial amount of time to become an expert themselves to receive their maximum tax refund. That’s why the rich can optimise their taxes with their own accountants and the regular citizens are overpaying billions of Euros in taxes every year in almost every country in the world”.

To help combat this, the Taxfix app works similar to a chatbot, and — coupled with the startup’s “tax-engine technology” — aims to make filing your taxes as easy as it would be if you hired your own tax accountant. You simply photograph your annual payslip and work through a questionnaire personally tailored to optimise your refund. The Taxfix app then automatically calculates the predicted tax rebate and submits your filing for you.

“[Taxflix creates] a digital tax accountant on the mobile phone, which asks the users simple questions and makes sure they optimise their refund and file their tax return correctly,” says Büchi.

To date, Taxfix’s typical customers are young people between 20-35 years old, who are not tax experts and often have never filed a tax return before. For every tax return that generates a refund of over 50 Euros, the startup charges 35 Euros for submission to the relevant financial authorities.

Of course, there are already a large number of startups and software companies that can help you file a tax return. These include legacy players such as WISO in Germany and Intuit’s TurboTax in the U.S., or upstarts such as the U.K.’s TaxScouts. A government’s own online tax filing gateway could also be considered a direct competitor.

“Taxfix differentiates itself from all other solutions by its mobile-first approach and by not using forms fields as the user interface,” adds Büchi. “Taxfix creates a completely new user experience with the conversational interface that asks simple questions and translates the information into tax language automatically. It takes on average 20 minutes to file your taxes with Taxfix, compared to 3 to 6 hours with traditional software”.

Meanwhile, Büchi says the new funding will be used for international expansion, bringing the app’s tax declaration capabilities to other jurisdictions. The German company also plans to invest heavily in machine learning to bring its tax engine technology “to the next level”.

Walmart sold its China-based e-commerce business in 2016, but the U.S. retail giant is very much involved in the Chinese internet market through a partnership with e-commerce firm JD.com. Alibaba’s most serious rival, JD scooped up Walmart’s Yihaodian business and offered its own online retail platform to help enable Walmart to products in China, both on and offline.

Now that relationship is developing further after Walmart and JD jointly invested $500 million into Dada-JD Daojia, an online-to-offline grocery business which is part owned by JD, according to a CNBC report.

Unlike most grocery delivery services, though, Dada-JD Daojia stands apart because it includes a crowdsourced element.

The business was formed following a merger between JD Daojia, JD’s platform for order from supermarkets online which has 20 million monthly users, and Daojia, which uses crowdsourcing to fulfill deliveries and counts 10 million daily deliveries. JD Daojia claims over 100,000 retail stores and its signature is one-hour deliveries for a range of products, which include fruit, vegetables and groceries.

Walmart is already part of the service — it has 200 stores across 30 Chinese cities on the Dada-JD Daojia service; as well as five online stores on the core JD.com platform — and now it is getting into the business itself via this investment.

JD.com said the deal is part of its ‘Borderless Retail’ strategy, which includes staff-less stores and retail outlets that mix e-commerce with physical sales.

“The future of global retail is boundaryless. There will be no separation between online and offline shopping, only greater convenience, quality and selection to consumers. JD was an early investor in Dada-JD Daojia, and continues its support, because we believe that its innovations will be an important part of realizing that vision,” said Jianwen Liao, Chief Strategy Officer of JD.com, in a statement.

Alibaba, of course, has a similar hybrid strategy with its Hema stores and food delivery service Ele.me, all of which links up with its Taobao and T-Mall online shopping platforms. The company recently scored a major coup when it landed a tie-in with Starbucks, which is looking to rediscover growth in China through an alliance that will see Ele.me deliver coffee to customers and make use of Hema stores.

Away from the new retail experience, JD.com has been doing more to expand its overseas presence lately.

The company landed a $550 million investment from Google this summer which will see the duo team up to offer JD.com products for sale on the Google Shopping platform across the world. Separately, JD.com has voiced intention to expand into Europe, starting in Germany, and that’s where the Google deal and a relationship with Walmart could be hugely helpful.

Another strategic JD investor is Tencent, and that relationship has helped the e-commerce firm sell direct to customers through Tencent’s WeChat app, which is China’s most popular messaging service. Tencent and JD have co-invested in a range of companies in China, such as discount marketplace Vipshop and retail group Better Life. Their collaboration has also extended to Southeast Asia, where they are both investors in ride-hailing unicorn Go-Jek, which is aiming to rival Grab, the startup that bought out Uber’s local business.

TaskUs, the business process outsourcing service that moderates content, annotates information and handles back office customer support for some of the world’s largest tech companies, has raised $250 million in an investment from funds managed by the New York-based private equity giant, Blackstone Group.

It’s been ten years since TaskUs was founded with a $20,000 investment from its two co-founders, and the new deal, which values the decade-old company at $500 million before the money even comes in, is proof of how much has changed for the service in the years since it was founded.

The Santa Monica-based company, which began as a browser-based virtual assistant company — “You send us a task and we get the task done,” recalled TaskUs chief executive Bryce Maddock — is now one of the main providers in the growing field of content moderation for social networks and content annotation for training the algorithms that power artificial intelligence services around the world.

“What I can tell you is we do content moderation for almost every major social network and it’s the fastest growing part of our business today,” Maddock said.

From a network of offices spanning the globe from Mexico to Taiwan and the Philippines to the U.S., the thirty two year-old co-founders Maddock and Jaspar Weir have created a business that’s largest growth stems from snuffing out the distribution of snuff films; child pornography; inappropriate political content and the trails of human trafficking from the user and advertiser generated content on some of the world’s largest social networks.

(For a glimpse into how horrific that process can be, take a look at this article from Wired, which looked at content moderation for the anonymous messaging service, Whisper.)

Maddock estimates that while the vast majority of the business was outsourcing business process services in the company’s early days (whether that was transcribing voice mails to texts for the messaging service PhoneTag, or providing customer service and support for companies like HotelTonight) now about 40% of the business comes from content moderation.

Indeed, it was the growth in new technology services that attracted Blackstone to the business, according to Amit Dixit, Senior Managing Director at Blackstone.

“The growth in ride sharing, social media, online food delivery, e-commerce and autonomous driving is creating an enormous need for enabling business services,” said Dixit in a statement. “TaskUs has established a leadership position in this domain with its base of marquee customers, unique culture, and relentless focus on customer delivery.”

While the back office business processing services remain the majority of the company’s revenue, Maddock knows that the future belongs to an increasing automation of the company’s core services. That’s why part of the money is going to be invested in a new technology integration and consulting business that advises tech companies on which new automation tools to deploy, along with shoring up the company’s position as perhaps the best employer to work for in the world of content moderation and algorithm training services.

It’s been a long five year journey to get to the place it’s in now, with glowing reviews from employees on Glassdoor and social networks like Facebook, Maddock said. The company pays well above minimum wage in the market it operates in (Maddock estimates at least a 50% premium); and provides a generous package of benefits for what Maddock calls the “frontline” teammates. That includes perks like educational scholarships for one child of employees that have been with the company longer than one year; healthcare plans for the employee and three beneficiaries in the Philippines; and 120 days of maternity leave.

And, as content moderation is becoming more automated, the TaskUs employees are spending less time in the human cesspool that attempts to flood social networks every day.

“Increasingly the work that we’re doing is more nuanced. Does this advertisement have political intent. That type of work is far more engaging and could be seen to be a little bit less taxing,” Maddock said.

But he doesn’t deny that the bulk of the hard work his employees are tasked with is identifying and filtering the excremental trash that people would post online.

“I do think that the work is absolutely necessary. The alternative is that everybody has to look at this stuff. it has to be done in a way thats thoughtful and puts the interests of the people who are on the frontlines at the forefront of that effort,” says Maddock. “There have been multiple people who have been involved in sex trafficking, human trafficking and pedophilia that have been arrested directly because of the work that TaskUs is doing. And the consequence of someone not doing that is a far far worse world.”

Maddock also said that TaskUs now shields its employees from having to perform content moderation for an entire shift. “What we have tried to do universally is that there is a subject matter rotation so that you are not just sitting and doing that work all day.”

And the company’s executive knows how taxing the work can be because he said he does it himself. “I try to spend a day a quarter doing the work of our frontline teammates. I spend half my time in our offices,” Maddock said.

Now, with the new investment, TaskUs is looking to expand into additional markets in the UK, Europe, India, and Latin America, Maddock said.

“So far all we’ve been doing is hiring as fast as we possibly can,” said Maddock. “At some point in the future, there’s going to be a point when companies like ours will see the effects of automation,” he added, but that’s why the company is investing in the consulting business… so it can stay ahead of the trends in automation.

Even with the threat that automation could pose to the company’s business, TaskUs had no shortage of other suitors for the massive growth equity round, according to one person familiar with the company. Indeed, Goldman Sachs and Softbank were among the other bidders for a piece of TaskUs, the source said.

Currently, the company has over 11,000 employees (including 2,000 in the U.S.) and is looking to expand.

“We chose to partner with Blackstone because they have a track record of building category defining businesses. Our goal is to build TaskUs into the world’s number one provider of tech enabled business services.  This partnership will help us dramatically increase our investment in consulting, technology and innovation to support our customer’s efforts to streamline and refine their customer experience,” said Maddock in a statement.

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2018, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

To hack: to study a system’s flaws and emergent properties, and use them for your own ends; to instil your own instructions into a computer’s memory, and coerce its microprocessor to run them. To pick at the air gaps and missed stitches in the many overlapping layers of software from which our modern world is woven.

Et voilà, an entire industry, employing countless thousands. Information Security a.k.a. infosec. It is said that there are four PR people for every journalist in America, which seems high, but I expect the ratio of infosec people to actual hackers is higher yet, even if you count the proverbial script kiddies.

For a long time it was where the counterculture techies went, the curmudgeons, the renegades, in black boots and leather and tattoos and colored hair. By no coincidence they also tended to include many of the smartest ones. (I’m a CTO and to this day I find interview questions about security are the best way to delineate the merely good from the excellent.) And by no coincidence they also included many angry, wounded, and/or terrible people.

That was when the Internet was something people used from time to time, rather than the fundamental substrate of half of human activity. It was OK, as far as its users were concerned, for its walls to be built and defended (and only very rarely womanned, courtesy of infosec’s default oppressive, exclusionary, and often predatory sexual culture) by a cohort of … well … cranky assholes. Not all of them, I hasten to stress. But definitely a disproportionate number.

That was part of its appeal, in many ways. Bad boys in leather who could spin up hard drives and ransom data from across the planet with a few opaque, wizardly shell scripts, in green text on black, using knowledge they’d won the hard way from online duels and grimoires — that was the Hollywood myth of the hacker, and the much-less-romantic real hackers loved it, as you’d expect, whatever color their notional hats might be.

It was a shitty system and a shitty subculture in many ways — colorful and dramatic, sure, but essentially shitty — and it couldn’t last. Nowadays it is big business, on the one hand, and slowly becoming more equitable and less exclusionary, on the other. Don’t get me wrong, there’s much work to be done, but the trajectory is a hopeful one.

Nowadays the security biz is an iterative process rather than an exploratory frontier. Researchers discover vulnerabilities in software; they disclose them to vendors; vendors grumble and fix it. Security vendors offer a growing arsenal of tools to prevent, detect, log, and attribute attacks, iterating as attackers do the same — and attackers are, increasingly, likely to be 9-5ers paid by a nation state, rather than members of a criminal enterprise.

One of the most respected teams in infosec is Google’s Project Zero, and another is their Chrome security team; both are managed by Parisa Tabriz, who gave the keynote speech at Black Hat today. She pointed out that there has been good and measurable progress in the security world over the last few years. Initially, when Project Zero started giving vendors precisely 90 days to fix their bugs before their exploits were revealed to the world, only 25% complied in time; now that number is up to 98%. Secure HTTPS traffic has risen from 45% to 87% of traffic on ChromeOS, and from 29% to 77% on Android, just over the last three years … and Tabriz attributed this to UI improvements in the Chrome browser as much as to the behind-the-scenes plumbing work.

Once upon a time UX and usability were considered entirely orthogonal to security. This is probably directly attributable to the contemptuous attitudes of infosec at the time. Now, thankfully, the industry knows better. Once “community” was a dirty word among the black-clad lone wolves, and if a “vulnerability” was personal, you didn’t talk about it; now there’s an entire Community Track at Black Hat, discussing addiction, stress, PTSD, burnout, depression, sexual harassment/assault, among other issues that would have been swept under the collective rug not so long ago.

Conventional wisdom has it that everything is terrible and everything can be hacked, and that “attackers have strategies while defenders only have tactics,” to quote Black Hat founder Jeff Moss this morning. And don’t get me wrong: some things do continue to be terrible. (Border Gateway Protocol, anyone?) But there is room for a kind of guarded optimism. Many of the big new hacks of the last few years aren’t catastrophic flaws in widely used essential infrastructure. OK, some are, but some, like Meltdown/Spectre and Rowhammer, are astonishingly elaborate Rube Goldberg hacks.

This is an extremely good sign. In the same way that airline crashes tend to have a baroque set of perfect-storm causes these days, because the simple errors are guarded against with multiple redundancy, the increasingly baroqueness of major bugs suggests that the software we use is getting noticeably more secure. Slowly. In irregular fits and starts. Over a period of decades. Sometimes in devices which cannot be fixed except by complete replacement. And reducing vulnerabilities still doesn’t fix, say, the password reuse problem. But still.

We’ll see if the rise of machine learning causes a new arms race, or whether it gives us new and better tools against attackers, and/or whether convolutional pattern recognition will unearth an entire new crop of previously undetectable bugs. It’s admittedly worrying that adversarial examples are so effective at tricking current AI models. But even so I’m inclined to agree with Tabriz that there is, at long last, cause for a certain guarded optimism, both for the infosec community and their work.

WeWork recently announced a new office space solution called “HQ by WeWork” to provide mid-sized companies the privacy, flexibility, customization and cost-efficiency they need without making a long term brick-and-mortar commitment.

According to US Census data, the number of mid-sized companies with 11 to 250 employees account for 1.1 million companies in the country and employ approximately 30 million people. In many cases, these companies have begun seeing growth but are not ready (or financially capable enough) to settle into a long term office space that they may soon outgrow.

“Be it those lifestyle businesses that are going to be 30 people forever, a small law firm, or a tech firm, we believe very strongly in companies of that size and how important they are to their local economies,” WeWork Chief Growth Officer Dave Fano told TechCrunch. “Often times space is still very much a challenge for companies of that size and the way they have to make these [office space] commitments ends up probably being an inhibitor their growth.”

To better meet the needs of these companies, HQ by WeWork offers private office floors (leased and managed by WeWork) that companies can move into for flexible leasing periods — typically for a minimum of 12-24 months. But, should a company out grow its space in six months, Fano said WeWork will work to accommodate a move to support its growth.

Unlike WeWork’s Powered by We model, which allows companies to bring the management of WeWork to spaces they rent themselves, companies using HQ by WeWork can leave the ins-and-outs of office real estate to the office-sharing company.

HQ by WeWork offers spaces with customizable color schemes and branding incorporation, private entrances and a service-lite model of WeWork management that includes essentials (IT, AV etc.) but without all the bells and whistles (e.g. full conference rooms, events) that come with a typical WeWork office space. This pairing down of amenities allows it to offer these spaces at a lower price per person than a typical WeWork accommodation, Fano told me. That said, HQ tenants can still drop-by any WeWork facility to utilize the features their spaces lack.

So far, WeWork has leased six HQ spaces in New York City and is actively working to expand HQ by WeWork into all the company’s flagship cities, such as Los Angles and Toronto.