Year: 2018

Twitter is pausing its work on overhauling its verification process, which provides a blue checkmark to public figures, in favor of election integrity, Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour tweeted today. That’s because, as we enter another election season, “updating our verification program isn’t a top priority for us right now (election integrity is),” he wrote on Twitter this afternoon.

Last November, Twitter paused its account verifications as it tried to figure out a way to address confusion around what it means to be verified. That decision came shortly after people criticized Twitter for having verified the account of Jason Keller, the person who organized the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Fast forward to today, and Twitter still verifies accounts “ad hoc when we think it serves the public conversation & is in line with our policy,” Beykpour wrote. “But this has led to frustration b/c our process remains opaque & inconsistent with our intented [sic] pause.”

While Twitter recognizes its job isn’t done, the company is not prioritizing the work at this time — at least for the next few weeks, he said. In an email addressed to Twitter’s health leadership team last week, Beykpour said his team simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to focus on verification “without coming at the cost of other priorities and distracting the team.”

The highest priority, Beykpour said, is election integrity. Specifically, Twitter’s team will be looking at the product “with a specific lens towards the upcoming elections and some of the ‘election integrity’ workstreams we’ve discussed.”

Once that’s done “after ~4 weeks,” he said, the product team will be in a better place to address verification.

Hackers can steal your phone number by reassigning it to a different SIM card, use it to reset your passwords, steal your Instagram and other accounts, and sell them for Bitcoin. As detailed in a harrowing Motherboard article today, Instagram accounts are especially vulnerable because the app only offers two-factor authentication through SMS that delivers a password reset or login code via text message.

But now Instagram has confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s building non-SMS two-factor authentication system that works with security apps like Google Authenticator or Duo. They generate a special code that you need to login that can’t be generated on a different phone in case your number is ported to a hacker’s SIM card.

Buried in the Instagram Android app’s APK code is a prototype of the upgraded 2FA feature, discovered by frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong. Her work has led to confirmed TechCrunch scoops on Instagram Video Calling, Usage Insights, soundtracks for Stories, and more.

When presented with the screenshots, an Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch that yes, it is working on the non-SMS 2FA feature, saying “We’re continuing to improve the security of Instagram accounts, including strengthening 2-factor authentication.”

Instagram actually lacked any two-factor protection until 2016 when it already had 400 million users. In November 2015, I wrote a story titled “Seriously. Instagram needs two-factor authentication.” A friend and star Instagram stop-motion animation creator Rachel Ryle had been hacked, costing up a lucrative sponsorship deal. The company listened. Three months later, the app began rolling out basic SMS-based 2FA.

But since then, SIM porting has become a much more common problem. Hackers typically call a mobile carrier and use social engineering tactics to convince them they’re you, or bribe an employee to help, and then change your number to a SIM card they control. Whether they’re hoping to steal intimate photos, empty cryptocurrency wallets, or sell desirable social media handles that like @t or @Rainbow as Motherboard reported, there are plenty of incentives to try a SIM porting attack. This article outlines how you can take steps to protect your phone number.

Hopefully as knowledge of this hacking technique becomes more well-known, more apps will introduce non-SMS 2FA, mobile providers will make it tougher to port numbers, and users will take more steps to safeguard their accounts. As our identities and assets increasingly go digital, its pin codes and authenticator apps, not just deadbolts and home security systems, that must become a part of our everyday lives.

Bitcoin is moving up, and it’s taking 99 of its best friends along for the ride. In the last 24 hours, every one of the top 100 coins by market cap was in the green with 84 of them posting gains of over 5 percent. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was sitting at $7,310, up 14 percent in the last 7 days and up almost 10 percent in the last 24 hours.

CoinMarketCap Top 100

Bitcoin itself crossed the $7,000 mark for the first time in the last month, an indication but no sure sign that it might be shaking off a summer slump that’s seen prices plunge below $6,000 on more than one occasion. Bitcoin is quickly moving back toward early June norms around $7,500 though may meet resistance at $7,750. In March, Bitcoin dipped below the $10,000 mark and it’s been unable to mount a rally back above that level in the months since.

screenshot via CoinMarketCap

They may not last, but mid-July’s gains aren’t just a Bitcoin story. Out of the top 100 coins, 24 coins made double digit gains in the last 24 hours, including 0x and Zcash, two coins recently tapped by Coinbase as potential assets that the platform is “exploring.” Big Bitcoin jumps normally lead the charge for altcoin growth, though seeing its peers so uniformly follow suit isn’t something you see every time the most prominent coin’s price shoots up.

So why is the price up? Potentially all of none of these reasons:

• Yesterday, Coinbase shared the news that U.S. regulators will open the door for the exchange to list tokens that are categorizes as securities.
• Last week, Coinbase announced that it was exploring the addition of Cardano, Basic Attention Token, Stellar Lumens, Zcash and 0x.
• At Goldman Sachs, current COO David Solomon will move into the chief executive role. Solomon is regarded as a cryptocurrency-friendly choice for CEO.
• Asset manager BlackRock created a working group to examine blockchain and cryptocurrencies, though its CEO cautioned that he hasn’t observed “huge demand for cryptocurrencies.”
• Japan’s Line is launching a cryptocurrency exchange known as BitBox this month, though the token-to-token exchange won’t serve the US or Japan.

As with any price shift, headlines in one part of the world are just a single rumble among the many invisible international seismic signals sending coins up or down on a given day. As one reads the tea leaves, it’s worth remembering that correlation ≠ causation when it comes to big price moves. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the tea.

Disclosure: The author holds a very small position in some cryptocurrencies, mostly because it seemed like a fun idea back in 2013 and then she forgot about it. Regrettably, it is not enough for a Lambo.

Zoox, a once-secretive self-driving car startup, is closing a $500 million at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Prior to the deal, Zoox was valued at $2.7 billion, Zoox confirmed to TechCrunch. The round, led by Mike Cannon-Brookes of Grok Ventures, brings its total amount of funding to $800 million.

Zoox’s plan, according to Bloomberg, is to publicly deploy autonomous vehicles by 2020 in the form of its own ride-hailing service. The cars themselves will be all-electric and fully autonomous. Meanwhile, ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft are also working on autonomous vehicles, as well as a number of other large players in the space.

Zoox, which turned four years old this month, is a 500-person company founded by Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson. In the meantime, head over to Bloomberg for the full rundown.

Technological innovation is moving at an ever-accelerating pace, and this comes with vast benefits and inevitable changes to our way of life. One downside is that machine learning and automation are already replacing jobs, and this will increase rapidly. It also has the potential to replace much of that income with Universal Basic Income (UBI), or government cash handouts to all adult citizens, perhaps starting with covering some element of taxes and rising in the range of $100,000/year per citizen within the next 20 years.

Sound ludicrous? Proponents of UBI include well-known figures such as Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Musk stated last year that he believed job loss would be so severe due to automation that some form of UBI will be necessary to support our society. Bill Gates suggested that every time an employee is replaced by a robot, or in most cases software using automation through artificial intelligence or machine learning, that the business owners should have to pay a tax on that, much like the employee would on wages. But to date, most other UBI ideas have involved raising taxes on people with higher earnings. What if the real solution to UBI was through a path of lowering income taxes on all people?

Stanford lecturer and executive director of East Palo Alto-based investment bank Woodside Partners, Kartik Gada believes that continued technology deflation will both lead to the need for UBI and a route to fund it, rather than increased government debt. In his ATOM publication, Gada gives a great deal of data supporting his argument. “In response to technological deflation, the central banks of the world will have to create new money in perpetuity, increasing the stream at an exponentially rising rate much higher than is currently assumed,” says Gada. “This now-permanent need for monetary expansion, if embraced, can fund government spending more directly. This in turn creates a very robust, dynamic, and efficient safety net for citizens, while simultaneously reducing and even eliminating most forms of taxation by 2025.”

Technological deflation is caused by a convergence of rapidly deflating technologies to an ever-rising percentage of the economy. Gada estimates that technology comprises about 2 percent of the world economy currently, and this percentage is on the brink of rising quickly.

For example, in 2007, the iPhone replaced most of the technology in your home, leading to less need for new purchases in that category year to year. The same iPhone 8 that you just bought for $699 will likely cost a quarter of that to buy new in three years, partly due to the release of a newer, faster, more powerful model at the top of the price ladder. Home Internet of Things devices, from Alexa and Ring to Nest, also are replacing and consolidating multiple normal purchases into lower-cost devices.

So while the price of new tools and toys might seem like it is going up on a case by case basis, it’s rapidly decreasing versus capabilities, speed, power, number of purchases required, etc. In addition, artificial intelligence and machine learning are driving use of automation up and use of employees for specific roles and functions down. Amazon reportedly installed 75,000 robots to replace human jobs in 2017. This helps them and other companies drive down costs, which makes it possible to offer lower prices across the board.

These factors, from continued innovation and efficiencies, paired with automation that reduces jobs and prices, has led to fewer consumer purchases and rapid overall declines in aggregate consumer spending — and could lead to serious problems for employment and the overall economy. If this happens, it may be more far-reaching than many realize and will certainly be scary for some along the way. Gada believes that we are nearing a point in our economy during which deflation is a more serious threat than inflation as the percentage of technological goods we buy increases and the cost and number of those goods decreases.

To make up for this deflationary pressure, the Federal Reserve first lowered the Fed Funds rate to 0 percent. But when deflation proved to be too much for even that, they had to go even further, and generate all new liquidity above that.

To this end, the Federal Reserve embarked on a program known as Quantitative Easing (QE), relying on the purchase of mortgage-backed securities and treasuries.

Other countries followed suit with similar programs. This has staved off deflation for now, but this may not continue to work in the next crisis without alternate methods of dispersing capital in a more direct, cash-oriented manner.

Eventually, central bank actions like QE will have to be permanent and ever-increasing. Enter the notion of funneling the QE money into a form of UBI. As automation and technology efficiencies increase, this also will create great savings for world governments as they can now deliver services for far less cost. While governments may not lower taxes willingly, competitive pressure between states and nations will rise, forcing them to compete for efficiency of governance. It is in this manner that income taxes can be eliminated and an unconditional Universal Basic Income can be funded.

The key is that as income tax is phased out and technology is monetized to fund government, new jobs are created more quickly, and this offsets the job loss through automation, with the UBI serving as a cushioning mechanism while people transition. Ultimately, Gada believes that the phase-out of income tax combined with UBI will foster a vastly higher degree of entrepreneurship in the economy, and this will be the source of most professional activity in the future.

Under the transition program that Gada has outlined in his publication, the numbers start in the early thousands of dollars each year per citizen, and rise continuously to upwards of $100,000 in the 2030s. That number may seem high, but is not outside of the range of long-term trendlines in world economic growth or the ever-accelerating levels of central bank liquidity actions being done worldwide. Not to be forgotten is the high cost of income tax on productivity and entrepreneurship, and how both will find a greatly enhanced climate when the tax burden on humans is lowered.

Could we be on the brink of an age where a much more advanced version of the #TaxRobots idea that Bill Gates has advocated can indeed be implemented? According to Kartik Gada, this may not be too many years away.

Pilot Labs’ Zeus Battle Robot captured our hearts at CES back in January, because, well, just look at this crazy thing:

Seemingly against all odds, the ‘bot is now available for purchase through Amazon. And the price tag is as insane as the rest of it: $1,600 for the kit and $1,700 for a pre-assembled version. That price includes a wireless controller, battery, charger, case and the robot, naturally. There are also a bunch of design files for further customizing it.

The Zeus stands 14-inches, weighs just under five pounds and sports 22 motors. We were pretty impressed by the demo we got at CES, though that model hit a bit of a snag, after battling it out all day. You can see in the video that it’s got a bit of a wonky arm thing going on. Hopefully the shipping version has those snags worked out.

The battery should get up to 50 minutes of fight time on a charge. Pilot says it’s already working on future versions with AI, computer vision and, potentially, Alexa voice control. It also plans to sponsor “an international fighting Robot contest with big cash prizes,” so maybe you can win back some the arm and leg that you paid for it. 

As Slack continues to grow its paid business users, the company is looking for ways to help customers build integrations that make sense for the work they do.

Slack announced today that it has acquired Robots and Pencils’ Missions, an app that allows Slack users to build tools to automate simple routines without code. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Paid users are already big fans of Slack integrations.There are currently 1,500 apps available in the Slack app directory. The company says that 94 percent of users in that bracket use apps and integrations, while 65 percent of teams have built their own. Building an integration certainly isn’t an easy process for non-tech teams to handle, Missions is focused on a more visual flow that ditches some of the complexity.

Missions’ technology lets people create workflows for tasks that they might normally have to talk about inside Slack and then carry out the process off-chat. With Missions, Slack hopes that users can help teams boost productivity by making things more simple for a variety of repeatable processes.

Onboarding seems to be an area where Slack sees a lot of potential for this tech, ensuring that new employees know what documents they need to fill out, who in the company they need to meet and other tasks they’ll have to complete. Other potential areas for the app to help users include managing approvals and rejections in the  hiring process as well as internal ticketing.

The company says that they’ll be supporting Missions’ customers for free for the next few months as they begin to build the technology into their platform. When you can start playing with this tech? The company said they’ll have more to share “later this year.”

For a certain kind of gamer, the premise of No Man’s Sky, that of an endless procedurally generated space universe teeming with life, was intoxicatingly perfect, almost too good to be true. After overselling that dream to the disappointment of just about everybody, Hello Games is back to make amends with a major new update: No Man’s Sky Next.

No Man’s Sky Next will introduce a spate of updates, including long-awaited full multiplayer gameplay, a visual update to improve textures and add detail, first to third-person perspective switching, unlimited base building and command freighters that allow you to create, upgrade and dispatch a fleet of ships from the comfort of your own bridge. You can see a few of those changes implemented in the trailer below.

The update, which will hit on July 24 as a free update to PlayStation and PC, also brings the advent of No Man’s Sky for the Xbox — great news for some console gamers who wanted to check it out without committing to a whole new system.

Whether No Man’s Sky Next will truly flesh out and deepen the innovative exploration game in a satisfying way remains to be seen, but both longtime players and those who followed along with curious hesitation now have something to look forward to. Happily, the wait won’t be long.

With the upcoming release of iOS 12, Apple is introducing a new app called Shortcuts that will allow users to build custom voice commands for Siri that can be used to kick off a variety of actions in apps. While some apps will directly prompt users to add a Shortcut to Siri, the new Shortcuts app will offer more shortcut suggestions to try, plus the ability to create your own shortcuts and workflows. Now, there’s a new resource for shortcut fans, too – Sharecuts, a directory of shortcuts created and shared by the community.

The site is still very much in the early stages.

Plus, iOS 12 is still in beta testing itself, and the Shortcuts app can only be installed by developers who request access via an invite.

But by the time iOS 12 releases to the public later this fall, Sharecuts’ directory will be filled out and a lot more functional.

The premise, explains Sharecuts’ creator Guilherme Rambo, was to make an easily accessible place where people could share their shortcuts with one another, discover those others have shared, and suggest improvements to existing shortcuts.

“I was talking to a friend [Patrick Balestra] about how cool shortcuts are, and how it should be easier for people to share and discover shortcuts,” says Guilherme. “He mentioned he wanted to build a website for that  – he even had the idea for the name Sharecuts – but he was on vacation without a good internet connection so I decided to just build it myself in one day,” he says.

The site is currently a bare bones, black-and-white page with cards for each shortcut, but an update will bring a more colorful style (see below) and features that will allow users to filter the shortcuts by tags, vote on favorites, among other things.

Above: current site

Guilherme says while the backend is being built to support a larger number of users, only a few people have been invited to upload for the time being. But in the upcoming release, the site will offer a “featured” selection of shortcuts chosen by some well-known members of the Apple community who will serve as curators.

The uploads to the site will also be moderated in the future, to prevent malicious shortcuts and spam from being included in the directory.

The site itself isn’t a new business or startup, Guilherme says, just a side project for now.

It’s written in Swift and open-sourced on GitHub so others can contribute. The page already has a list of ideas for improvements to the Sharecuts site, including the new design, plus more ways to refine, sort, and organize the shortcuts.

It remains to be seen how popular Siri Shortcuts will be with the mainstream iPhone user base.

With iOS 12, Apple is turning its iPhone into an “A.I. phone,” but I believe the Shortcuts app and workflows will remain a power user feature for some time. Mainstream users will gradually warm up to the idea of customizing their Siri interactions by getting prompted to create voice commands by their favorite apps. (E.g. Your coffee shop’s mobile ordering app may push you to add a “Coffee time!” shortcut to Siri.)

Over time, that may lead them to iOS 12’s Shortcuts app to do even more.

But in the near-term, power users will be busy taking advantage of the new Shortcuts app and Siri features to test the powers of Shortcuts. And with Sharecuts, all the other shortcuts enthusiasts can benefit from their enthusiasm and activity, too.

If you already have the beta Shortcuts app installed, you can try out some of the shortcuts featured on Sharecuts today. A couple of the interesting picks include the Siri News Reader which will read you headlines from an RSS feed, the Bitcoin Price checkers, and an always useful tip calculator.

Above: The news reader shortcut, from Federico Viticci

Those interested in contributing to Sharecuts in the future can register here for an invite.

Giphy is coming to Twitch . For the first time, Giphy is bringing its library of animated GIFs to the Amazon-owned game streaming service. The company today is launching a Giphy extension for Twitch streamers that will allow viewers to react in real-time using GIFs during a broadcast. The idea is that GIFs could make streams more engaging and entertaining, which would, in turn, attract retain viewers for longer periods of time.

Twitch extensions were first introduced last year, but only recently did Twitch add support for running multiple extensions at once. That could encourage more developers to try out the Giphy extension, without having to give up their other favorite overlays.

To use the new extension, the streamer will first configure which part of the screen area will be used to display the GIFs viewers post. Once the extension is activated, viewers will be able to access it during a broadcast via a Giphy icon and the search terms they enter into the message bar.

Twitch is not the first game streaming site to experiment with GIF reactions. The newer site Caffeine had this as a feature, too, but pulled it before launch because they found it could be used for harassment. Twitch and Giphy are hoping to not make the sane mistake by curating the catalog of GIFs that can be shared.

According to Twitch, Giphy’s content is moderated to remove those GIFs that are “overtly offense” to any race, gender, ethnicity or community. It’s also limiting GIFs to those with a PG rating and below, which will prohibit users from posting GIFs with violence, sexual references, and other lewd terms, it says.

“Extensions are a great framework designed to make channels on Twitch more interactive so creators can better engage and retain their fans,” said Amir Shevat, Twitch VP of Developer Experience, in a statement. “With Giphy tapping into their extensive library of animated GIFs for their new Extension, it adds a fun and compelling new element to the social video experience that is sure to resonate with the current meme generation.”

Extensions are one of Twitch’s differentiating features in the game streaming market. Thanks to Twitch’s scale, there are now thousands of these add-ons and overlays in development, and over 250 which have gone live since the feature’s launch. Dozens of these, including Giphy’s, also work alongside others, allowing streamers to better customize their broadcasts and channels.