Month: August 2018

If you have an old Kindle e-reader lying about then you’d best dig it up. This cool hack can turn your dead e-reader into a living clock that scours hundreds of books for exact times and displays the current time in a quote. It updates once a minute.

The project, available on Instrucables, requires a jailbroken Kindle and little else. The app uses quotes collected by the Guardian for an art project and includes writing from Charles Bukowski to Shakespeare.

Creator Jaap Meijers writes:

My girlfriend is a *very* avid reader. As a teacher and scholar of English literature, she reads eighty books per year on average.

On her wishlist was a clock for our living room. I could have bought a wall clock from the store, but where is the fun in that? Instead, I made her a clock that tells the time by quoting time indications from literary works, using an e-reader as display, because it’s so incredibly appropriate :-)

Given that our family is apparently on our fifteenth Kindle in the household it only makes sense to repurpose one of these beasts into something useful. Don’t have a Kindle? You can visit a web-based version here.

Google has acquired GraphicsFuzz, a company that builds a framework for testing the security and reliability of Android graphics drivers. The news, which was first spotted by XDA Developers, comes on the same day Google announced the release of Android 9 Pie.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the news to us but declined to provide any further information. The companies also declined to provide any details about the price of the acquisition.

The GraphicsFuzz team, which consists of co-founders Alastair Donaldson, Hugues Evrard and Paul Thomson, will join the Android graphics team to bring its driver-testing technology to the wider Android ecosystem.

“GraphicsFuzz has pioneered the combination of fuzzing and metamorphic testing to yield a highly automatic method for testing graphics drivers that quickly finds and fixes bugs that could undermine reliability and security before they affect end users,” the team explains in today’s announcement. The company’s founders started their work at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and received funding support from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the TETRACOM EU project.

While this is obviously not the splashiest of acquisitions, it is nevertheless an important one. In the fractured Android ecosystem, graphics drivers are one of the many pieces that make a phone or tablet work — and when they don’t, it’s often immediately obvious to the user. But broken drivers also expose a phone to security exploits. GraphicsFuzz uses the same kind of fuzzing technique, which essentially throws lots of random data at a program, that’s also becoming increasingly popular in other areas of software development.

Clear, the biometrics company you’ve probably seen at airports and at a few other prominent queues, is rolling out the capability to simultaneously verify your ID and pay for an alcoholic drink with your fingerprint. It’s only at Seattle’s CenturyLink and Safeco Fields (and only a handful of concessions stands at those), but if it’s successful you can bet we’ll be seeing more of it.

That makes it the first time in the U.S. that biometrics are used for both age check and payment, but this exception will almost certainly become less uncommon in time: Clear announced its intention to pursue the payments side of biometrics when it raised $15 million last year.

This also marks the first NFL team to partner with Clear; Seahawks fans going to home games this season will be able to use a separate Clear lane at the northwest and southwest gates. It can be quite a melee or a considerable wait getting into both venues (I’m a local), so this will almost certainly be embraced by the Clear-privileged among Seattle sports fans. Sounders games at CenturyLink, by the way, will have the same perks, as will any concerts at either venue.

After you get inside the field, you’ll have to hoof it a bit to find one of the concession stands from which Clear serves. At Safeco it’s Double Play in section 136 and Shortstop Beer in 185. At CenturyLink it’s at the Delta Sky360 Club, by sections 210 and 234.

So, it’s not exactly everywhere. But during the beer rush of halftime or the seventh-inning stretch at a good ballgame, it might be worth it to traverse a few sections and skip the line. Unfortunately, Clear doesn’t get you a discount on the outrageously priced drinks, so savor those $10 tallboys. Your wallet may stay in your pocket, but the money flies out of it just the same.

It’s a bit remarkable to me that alcohol merchants are allowed to take anything but a state-issued ID or passport — but as at the airport, Clear has been given authority to track those IDs internally and verify their authenticity and the identity of the person. Obviously the company’s success there warmed the frozen hearts of our state’s Liquor Control Board and allowed this small divergence from the status quo.

There are still plenty of Mariners games at which to test this out, and the Seahawks preseason starts Thursday, at which time the Clear lane for entry and fingerprint-powered concessions will be available to all 12s. Assuming it goes well, we can expect it to show up at other major sports venues soon.

Amazon confirmed it’s rolling out a new feature called “Answer Update” to Alexa device users over the next week, which will notify users when Alexa learns the answer to a question the assistant didn’t know when first asked. The idea is to allow people to better take advantage of Alexa’s quickly improving Knowledge Graph – its informational database containing general knowledge facts and figures that Alexa uses to answer users’ questions.

The feature was first spotted by Voicebot, which said they were prompted to enable the feature after listening to some information a news item. Alexa then asked if the user wanted to enable “Answer Updates.”

When asked what this was, Alexa replied that she could notify the user later if she learned the answer to a question.

Typically, Alexa would have simply declined to answer the question when she didn’t know an answer, saying something like “I don’t know that, but I’m always learning,” “I can’t find the answer to the question I heard,” or “Sorry, I didn’t understand the question,” the report noted.

Amazon tells us that customers will be able to opt into the new experience, when offered, and can later choose to opt out by saying “Alexa, turn off Answer Update.”

“The Alexa service is getting smarter every day, and Answer Updates is just another way we’re continuing to expand Alexa’s Knowledge Graph,” an Amazon spokesperson said.

They also clarified the prompt would be triggered when you ask Alexa a factual question she didn’t yet know the answer to, not after listening to a news item or other information about a news item.

We were able to turn on Answer Update on our own Alexa device by saying “Alexa, turn on Answer Update.”

The assistant then responded by saying:

“Okay, if you ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, but I find out later I’ll notify you.” 

The feature is meant to offer a challenge to Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is far more developed, and gives Google Home a competitive advantage. Though Alexa has enjoyed an early lead in smart speaker market share, Google has been catching up, with some firms estimating its portion of the speaker market will grow both in the U.S. and abroad in the months ahead. Alexa needs to get better at basic Q&A and quickly.

For example, in a study reported by AdWeek last year, Google Home was found to be 6 times more likely to answer a user’s question than Amazon Alexa. The study involved asking both devices some 3,000 questions.

Answer Updates is not necessarily a fix for that problem, but it could be used as a way to reach frustrated users who expect their “smart” assistant to be a bit…well…smarter.

Backlash swelled this morning after Facebook’s aspirations in financial services were blown out of proportion by a Wall Street Journal report that neglected how the social network already works with banks. Facebook spokesperson Elisabeth Diana tells TechCrunch it’s not asking for credit card transaction data from banks and it’s not interested in building a dedicated banking feature where you could interact with your accounts. It also says its work with banks isn’t to gather data to power ad targeting, or even personalize content such as what Marketplace products you see based on what you buy elsewhere.

Instead, Facebook already lets Citibank customers in Singapore connect their accounts so they can ping their bank’s Messenger chatbot to check their balance, report fraud, or get customer service’s help if they’re locked out of their account without having to wait on hold on the phone. That chatbot integration, which has no humans on the other end to limit privacy risks, was announced last year and launched this March. Facebook works with PayPal in over 40 countries to let users get receipts via Messenger for their purchases.

Expansions of these partnerships to more financial services providers could boost usage of Messenger by increasing its convenience — and make it more of a centralized utility akin to China’s WeChat. But Facebook’s relationships with banks in the current form aren’t likely to produce a step change in ad targeting power that warrants significant heightening of its earning expectations. The reality of today’s news is out of step with the 3.5 percent share price climb triggered by the WSJ’s report.

“A recent Wall Street Journal story implies incorrectly that we are actively asking financial services companies for financial transaction data – this is not true. Like many online companies with commerce businesses, we partner with banks and credit card companies to offer services like customer chat or account management. Account linking enables people to receive real-time updates in Facebook Messenger where people can keep track of their transaction data like account balances, receipts, and shipping updates” Diana told TechCrunch. “The idea is that messaging with a bank can be better than waiting on hold over the phone – and it’s completely opt-in. We’re not using this information beyond enabling these types of experiences – not for advertising or anything else. A critical part of these partnerships is keeping people’s information safe and secure.”

Diana says banks and credit card companies have also approached it about potential partnerships, not just the other way around as the WSJ reports. She says any features that come from those talks with be opt-in, rather than happening behind users’ backs. The spokesperson stressed these integrations would only be built if they could be privacy safe. For example, signing up to use the Citibank Messenger chatbot requires two-factor authentication through your phone.

But renewed interest in Facebook’s dealings with banks comes at a time when many are pointing to its poor track record with privacy following the Cambridge Analytica scandal where people were duped into volunteering the personal info of them and their friends. Facebook hasn’t had a big traditional data breach where data was outright stolen, as has befallen LinkedIn, eBay, Yahoo [part of TechCrunch’s parent company], and others. But users are rightfully reluctant to see Facebook ingest any more of their sensitive data for fear it could leak or be misused.

Facebook has recently cracked down on the use of data brokers that suck in public and purchased data sets for ad targeting. It no longer lets data brokers upload Managed Custom Audience lists of user contact info or power Partner Categories for targeting ads based on interests. It also more admantly demands that advertisers have the consent of users whose email addresses or phone numbers they upload for Custom Audience targeting, though Facebook does little to verify that consent and advertisers could still buy data sets from brokers and upload them themselves.

Facebook’s statement today shows more scruples than Google, which last year struck an ad targeting data deals with data brokers that have access to 70 percent of credit and debit card transactions in the U.S. That led to a formal complaint to the FTC from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Cambridge Analytica has brought on an overdue era of scrutiny regarding privacy and how internet giants use our data. Practices that were overlooked, accepted as industry standard, or seen as just the way business gets done are coming under fire. Interent users aren’t likely to escape ads, and some would rather have those they see be relevant thanks to deep targeting data. But the combination of our offline purchase behavior with our online identities seems to trigger uproar absent from sites using cookies to track our web browsing and buying.

Facebook’s probably better off backing away from anything that involves sensitive data like checking account balances until Cambridge Analytica blows over and its proven its newfound sense of responsibility translates into a safer social networking. But at least for now, it’s not slurping up our banking data wholesale.

Another social media domino has fallen for Infowars. After bans this morning from Apple and Facebook, Google followed suit by terminating Alex Jones’ page for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines,” according to a bright red bar that now graces the page. The embattled, conspiracy peddling host’s Infowars page, which until recently boasted 2.4 million subscribers, has been removed from both the site and its search results.

YouTube was among the first to levy punishment against Jones. Back in July, the site issued a strike against Infowars, for violating child endangerment and hate speech policies. Four videos were removed in the process, and the host was banned from live-streaming for 90 days.

“We have long standing policies against child endangerment and hate speech,” YouTube wrote at the time. “We apply our policies consistently according to the content in the videos, regardless of the speaker or the channel. We also have a clear three strikes policy and we terminate channels when they receive three strikes in three months.”

YouTube hasn’t specified the second two strikes leading to termination, but a spokesperson for the company confirmed with TechCrunch that the concerns once again centered around hate speech and harassment.

“All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts.”

Last week Spotify also removed Jones’ podcasts over a violation of company terms.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you make a mobile operating system, and somewhere along the line, you decided whimsically to name major updates after alphabetical dessert foods. What a fun idea!

Sure, some letters will prove harder than others. “K” and “O” are admittedly tough, but that’s nothing that little bit of clever cross-branding can’t fix. Who doesn’t love a good Kit-Kat or Oreo? (Don’t @ me.) Others, however, will be simple. In fact, some letters will be such an embarrassment of riches. “P” is one such letter. There are a ridiculous number of options for the consonant.

So, naturally, Google went with the most boring one possible.

Pie. Freaking Android Pie. It sounds more like a rejected Philip K. Dick manuscript than mobile operating system. If this was Android 3.14, maybe, sure. The nerd jokes are just way to strong not to go all-in. But Slices jokes aside, Android 9.0 Pie feels like a missed opportunity. It seems possible that a licensing deal fell through last minute, leaving the company to settle on cake’s lesser cousin.

Sure, it’s too late to make suggestions, and honestly, Google never really listens to us in the first place, but here are a few belated replacements for the half-baked Pie.

Popsicle: This one seemed to be the front runner. In fact, the company appeared to tease in an early release of wallpaper. Popsicle would have been the perfect, colorful name for a summer OS release. Of course, there are two issues here. First, believe it or not, the name is still a trademark. Second, the name is hardly universal outside of North America. Those cold things on a stick are alternately (and incredibly delightfully) known as ice pops, freezer pops, ice lollies, ice blocks, icy poles ands ice drops, according to the always-correct editors of Wikipedia.

Pez: Another trademarked name, of course, holy moly, imagine the marketing on this one.

Pop Rocks: Ditto, but totally worth is for all the free packets of Pop Rocks we’d be getting from Google events for the next year.

Popcorn: Okay, kind of boring and a borderline dessert food at best, but still more fun than Pie.

Pecan, Pumpkin Pie: A little alliteration goes a long way.

Parfait: A delicious, refreshing summer treat, Also, everyone loves France! (Again, don’t @ me.) 

Pop-Tart: Or, if you prefer to keep it in the States, nothing says “America” quite like a mass produced, foil wrapped frosted breakfast pastry from Kellogg’s.

Peppermint Patty: A delicious treat and an iconic supporting Peanuts cast member? Yes, please.

Pudding: Sweet, gelatinous, sometimes found in pop-form. If that doesn’t say mobile operating system, what does?

Poundcake: Cake is better than Pie. I’m not backing down on this one.

Pancake: Okay, more of a breakfast food, but crepes count, right?

Phish Food: Google’s been taking jam band enthusiasts for granted for far too long. And besides, Ben & Jerry never met a cross promotion they didn’t like.

Pastry: Simple, elegant, slightly better than Pie.

Peanut Brittle: Okay, fine, maybe Pie’s better than this one. You win this round, Google. 

There’s also Petit Four, though these bite-sized French cakes actually served as the internal code name for Android 1.1.

The nickname for Android 9 is “Pie.” It’s not the most inspired of Android names, but it’ll do. What really matters at the end of the day are the new features in Pie — and there are plenty of those.

If you are a Pixel owner, you’ll be happy to hear that Pie will start rolling out as an over-the-air update today. The same goes for every other device that was enrolled in the Android Beta (that includes any Sony Mobile, Xiaomi, HMD Global, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Essential devices that got the betas) and qualifying Android One devices. Everybody else, well, you know the drill. Wait until your manufacturer launches it for you… which should be the end of the year for some — and never for quite a few others.

Overall, Pie is a solid upgrade. The only real disappointment here is that Pie won’t launch with Android’s new digital wellness features by default. Instead, you’ll have to sign up for a beta and own a Pixel device. That’s because these new features won’t officially launch until the fall (Google’s hardware event, which traditionally happens in early October, seems like a good bet for the date).

Let’s talk about the features you’ll get when you update to Android 9 Pie, though. The most obvious sign that you have updated to the new version is the new system navigation bar, which replaces the standard three-icon navigation bar that has served Android users well for the last couple of iterations. The new navigation bar replaces the three icons (back, home, overview) that are virtually always on screen with a more adaptive system and a home button that now lets you swipe to switch between apps (instead of tapping on the overview button). You can also now swipe up on the home button and see full-screen previews of the apps you used recently, as well as the names of a few apps that Google thinks you’ll want to use. A second up-swipe and you get to the usual list of all of your installed apps.

In day-to-day use, I’m not yet 100 percent convinced that this new system is any better than the old one. Maybe I just don’t like change, but the whole swiping thing does not strike me as very efficient, and if you leave your finger on the home button for a split-second longer than Google expects, it’ll launch the Assistant instead of letting you swipe between apps. You get used to it, though, and you can get back to the old system if you want to.

Google’s suggestions for apps you’ll like and want to use when you swipe up feel like a nice tech demo but aren’t all that useful in day-to-day use. I’m sure Google uses some kind of machine learning to power these suggestions, but I’d rather use that area as an extended favorites bar where I can pin a few additional apps. It’s not that Android’s suggestions were necessarily wrong and that these weren’t apps I wanted to use, it’s mostly that the apps it suggested were already on my home screen anyway. I don’t think I ever started an app from there while using the last two betas.

But that’s enough grumbling, because it’s actually all of the little things that make Android 9 Pie better. There’s stuff like the adaptive battery management, which makes your battery last longer by learning which apps you use the most. And that’s great (though I’m not sure how much influence it has had on my daily battery life), but the new feature that actually made me smile was a new popup that tells you that you have maybe 20 percent of battery left and that this charge should last until 9:20pm. That’s actually useful.

Google also loves to talk about its Adaptive Brightness feature that also learns about how you like your screen brightness based on your surroundings, but what actually made a difference for me was that Google now blends out the whole settings drawer when you change the setting so that you can actually see what difference those changes make. It’s also nice to have the volume slider pop up right next to the volume buttons now.

Talking about sound: Your phone now plays a pleasant little sound when you plug in the charger. It’s the little things that matter, after all.

The other new machine learning-powered feature is the smart text selection tool that recognizes the meaning of the text you selected and then allows you to suggest relevant actions like opening Google Maps or bringing up the share dialog for an address. It’s nifty when it works, but here, too, what actually makes the real difference in daily usage is that the text selection magnifier shows you a larger, clearer picture of what you’re selecting (and it sits right on top of what you are selecting), which makes it far easier to pick the right text (and yes, iOS pretty much does the same thing).

And now we get to the part where I wish I could tell you all about the flagship Digital Wellness features in Pie (because pie and wellness go together like Gwyneth Paltrow and jade eggs), but we’ll have to wait a few days for that. Here’s what we know will be available: a dashboard for seeing where you spend time on your device; an app timer that lets you set limits on how long you can use Instagram, for example, and then grays out the icon of that app; and a Wind Down feature that switches on the night-light mode, turns on Do Not Disturb and fades the screen to grayscale before it’s bedtime.

The one wellness feature you can try now if you are on Pie already is the new Do Not Disturb tool that lets you turn off all visual interruptions. To try out everything else, you’ll have to sign up for the beta here.

Another feature that’s only launching in the fall is “slices” (like slices of pie…). I was looking forward to this one as it’ll allow developers to highlight parts of their apps (maybe to start playing a song or hail a car) in the Android Pie search bar when warranted. Maybe Google wasn’t ready yet — or maybe its partners just hadn’t built enough slices yet, but either way, we won’t see these pop up in Android Pie until later this year.

And that’s Android 9 Pie. It’s a nice update for sure, and while Google loves to talk about all of the machine learning and intelligence it’s baking into Android, at the end of the day, it’s the small quality of life changes that actually make the biggest difference.

We’re counting the days until we head to Lagos, Nigeria to host TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 on December 11. The region’s startup scene is taking off and, with more than 300 tech hubs connecting and mentoring entrepreneurs across the continent, it’s a great time to be an early-stage startup founder. Think you’ve got the right stuff to compete in Startup Battlefield? Don’t wait, apply here today.

Here’s how Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 works. We’ll accept applications from any kind of early-stage tech startup. Our TechCrunch editors — who have years of experience spotting high-potential startups — will evaluate every eligible submission (more on that topic a bit later). Basing their choices primarily on a startup’s potential to produce an exit or IPO, they will select 15 companies to compete.

The founders of each startup receive free pitch coaching from our Battlefield-tested editors, and they’ll be prepared and ready to face off on the big day. Five startups will compete in one of three preliminary rounds, and each startup team has six minutes to pitch and present their demo.

The judges then have six minutes to put each team through a rigorous Q&A, and all that pitch coaching will certainly come in handy. The judges will select five startups to pitch again in the semi-finals, and only one will emerge as the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018.

Winning founders receive US$25,000 in no-equity cash, plus a trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield in San Francisco at TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

But you don’t have to win to benefit. Every participating startup receives invaluable exposure to the media and influential technologists, entrepreneurs and investors — not to mention the online TechCrunch audience. You will be launching your company to the world.

Here’s what you need to know about eligibility. All startups should:

• Be early-stage companies in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of our eligible countries*
• Have a fully working product/beta that’s reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts

If you’re detail-oriented, you can read our TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 FAQ.

TechCrunch does not charge startups any fees or take any equity. You have nothing to lose and so much to gain. TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 takes place on December 11 in Lagos, Nigeria. Come on and take your shot. Apply to compete today.

*Residents in the following countries may apply:

Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Comoros, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the foregoing language, the “Applicable Countries” does not include any country to or on which the United States has embargoed goods or imposed targeted sanctions (including, but not limited to, Sudan).

These days, no cloud platform is complete without support for GPUs. There’s no other way to support modern high-performance and machine learning workloads without them, after all. Often, the focus of these offerings is on building machine learning models, but today, Google is launching support for the Nvidia P4 accelerator, which focuses specifically on inferencing to help developers run their existing models faster.

In addition to these machine learning workloads, Google Cloud users also can use the GPUs for running remote display applications that need a fast graphics card. To do this, the GPUs support Nvidia Grid, the company’s system for making server-side graphics more responsive for users who log in to remote desktops.

Because the P4s come with 8GB of DDR5 memory and can handle up to 22 tera-operations per second for integer operations, these cards can handle pretty much anything you throw at them. And because buying one will set you back at least $2,200, if not more, renting them by the hour may not be the worst idea.

On the Google Cloud, the P4 will cost $0.60 per hour with standard pricing and $0.21 per hour if you’re comfortable with running a preemptible GPU. That’s significantly lower than Google’s prices for the P100 and V100 GPUs, though we’re talking about different use cases here, too.

The new GPUs are now available in us-central1 (Iowa), us-east4 (N. Virginia), Montreal (northamerica-northeast1) and europe-west4 (Netherlands), with more regions coming soon.