Year: 2018

For all of the news that Apple managed to cram into today’s 135 minute (!) WWDC keynote this morning, the event was actually pretty light on health care updates. It was a bit of a surprise, given how much of a focus the company has put on the space at past events.

Apple did announce an interesting health tidbit today on its website today — something that likely just got squeezed out of keynote the event late in the game. Starting this fall, the company will open up health record data to third-party iOS apps through a new API. The feature will make it possible for users to share health data from more than 500 hospitals/clinics with third-party apps.

There are, clearly, some serious concerns around sharing this sort of sensitive data. The company is addressing this in a couple of ways. For starters, it’s all opt-in, obviously. Your personal information won’t be shared with any apps unless you explicitly allow it to be. The health records are also encrypted and stored locally on the phone.

“When consumers choose to share their health record data with trusted apps,” according to Apple, “the data flows directly from HealthKit to the third-party app and is not sent to Apple’s servers.”

As far as specific applications for such data, Apple points to medication tracking as one of the key case uses. Medisafe will be among the first to use the information in this way, letting users import prescription lists, in order to push reminders, without having to manually enter all of that information in the app.

Disease management is another possibility, for something along the lines of a diabetes app, which customizes recommendations based on health information. There’s also some applications for broader medical research here, providing anonymized health data for laboratory purposes.

The strange, creepy world of “deepfakes,” videos (often explicit) with the faces of the subjects replaced by those of celebrities, set off alarm bells just about everywhere early this year. And in case you thought that sort of thing had gone away because people found it unethical or unconvincing, the practice is back with the highly convincing “Deep Video Portraits,” which refines and improves the technique.

To be clear, I don’t want to conflate this interesting research with the loathsome practice of putting celebrity faces on adult film star bodies. They’re also totally different implementations of deep learning-based image manipulation. But this application of technology is clearly here to stay and it’s only going to get better — so we had best keep pace with it so we don’t get taken by surprise.

Deep Video Portraits is the title of a paper submitted for consideration this August at SIGGRAPH; it describes an improved technique for reproducing the motions, facial expressions, and speech movements of one person using the face of another. Here’s a mild example:

What’s special about this technique is how comprehensive it is. It uses a video of a target person, in this case President Obama, to get a handle on what constitutes the face, eyebrows, corners of the mouth, background, and so on, and how they move normally.

Then, by carefully tracking those same landmarks on a source video it can make the necessary distortions to the President’s face, using their own motions and expressions as sources for that visual information.

So not only does the body and face move like the source video, but every little nuance of expression is captured and reproduced using the target person’s own expressions! If you look closely, even the shadows behind the person (if present) are accurate.

The researchers verified the effectiveness of this by comparing video of a person actually saying something on video with what the deep learning network produced using that same video as a source. “Our results are nearly indistinguishable from the real video,” says one of the researchers. And it’s true.

So, while you could use this to make video of anyone who’s appeared on camera appear to say whatever you want them to say — in your voice, it should be mentioned — there are practical applications as well. The video shows how dubbing a voice for a movie or show could be improved by syncing the character’s expression properly with the voice actor.

There’s no way to make a person do something or make an expression that’s too far from what they do on camera, though. For instance, the system can’t synthesize a big grin if the person is looking sour the whole time (though it might try and fail hilariously). And naturally there are all kinds of little bugs and artifacts. So for now the hijinks are limited.

But as you can see from the comparison with previous attempts at doing this, the science is advancing at a rapid pace. The differences between last year’s models and this years are clearly noticeable, and 2019’s will be more advanced still. I told you all this would happen back when that viral video of the eagle picking up the kid was making the rounds.

“I’m aware of the ethical implications,” coauthor Justus Theis told The Register. “That is also a reason why we published our results. I think it is important that the people get to know the possibilities of manipulation techniques.”

If you’ve ever thought about starting a video forensics company, now might be the time. Perhaps a deep learning system to detect deep learning-based image manipulation is just the ticket.

The paper describing Deep Video Portraits, from researchers at Technicolor, Stanford, the University of Bath, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and the Technical University of Munich, is available for you to read here on Arxiv.

On Monday afternoon, June 4, Apple handed out its annual Apple Design Awards on stage at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose. The awards, now in their 21st year, are meant to highlight those apps that set a benchmark for high-quality design, taking into consideration things like the user interface and user experience, originality, and other factors that represent those types of applications that Apple would like to see more of in its App Store.

Other app developers often look to the list of design award winners to get a sense of the type of apps and designs that Apple values.

This year, the award winners were an international crowd – only one winner comes from the U.S., despite the U.S. being one of Apple’s largest markets.

The American award winner was also a bit unusual – instead of being a consumer-facing app or game, it’s one build for the medical industry.

Several others showcase quality game development featuring beautiful artwork and music.

And others, still, rethink our standard utilities like note-taking apps, language translators, and calculators in interesting ways.

The full list of the winners is below:

Agenda (Netherlands)

Agenda is a minimalist note-taking app for Mac and iOS that takes a unique approach of organizing notes into a timeline, giving it the ability to track the past, present, and future of tasks at once. The app also includes beautifully styled notes and typography, along with well thought through navigational design elements, search, and support for iCloud sync and Handoff.

What’s also interesting about Agenda is that its website highlights the standalone Mac app download. The Mac App Store download link is buried at the bottom of the page.

Bandimal (Finland)

Bandimal is an adorably designed music composer for kids where animals are used in place of instruments. Kids can swipe through animals to change instruments, set up drum loops, and compose melodies without knowing about notes, chords, and scores.

Calzy 3 (India)

Calzy 3 is a smart, modern calculator app that adds a unique bookmarking features for saving calculations for future reference. It also integrates a host of Apple technologies in thoughtful ways, including Drag & Drop for sharing results in other apps, iMessage integration, Spotlight search for finding bookmarks, iCloud sync, and Handoff.

 

iTranslate Converse (Austria)

While Google Translate is the best known among real-time translator apps, iTranslate Converse, downloaded some 80 million times, offers an app with a simpler design and the ability to automatically detect the correct language, even in noisy rooms. The app supports 38 languages, works offline, uses 3D Touch, and works on both iPhone and Apple Watch.

On Apple Watch Series 3, you can use the app without your iPhone.

 

Triton Sponge (USA)

Triton Sponge, by Gauss Surgical, is an app dedicated to a very specific task – use in medical operating rooms to track blood loss, as estimated by what’s collected on surgical sponges and suction canisters. While not a consumer-facing app, Triton Sponge has a very critical and even life-saving task to manage. And it does so with the use of iOS technologies including Core Image, camera Depth Map to detect the sponges, Core ML and machine learning to perform blood loss calculations. The app is capable also of detecting duplicate sponges, even if they’re held up in front of the camera in a different orientation. Triton Sponge is FDA approved and HIPAA compliant.

Florence (Australia)

Florence is an interactive graphic novel from Monument Valley designer Ken Wong of Mountains, which is sort of a half game/half comic that tells a story of love and relationships. Players/readers follow along as Florence and Krish meet, date, fall in love and move in together. It showcases hand-drawn art and original music, while it shows you what it’s like to go through life as Florence as she experiences her first love.

Playdead’s INSIDE (Denmark)

This multi-award winning puzzle-adventure platformer from the team behind Limbo includes gorgeous art and animation, but a darker and even frightening tone. You play as an unnamed boy exploring a monochromatic, scary world, solving puzzles along the way. The (creepy) sound design also stands out, and works well to immerse players in the world when wearing their headphones. The app works across iPhone, iPad and Apple TV and has 10,000 5-star reviews on the App Store.

Alto’s Odyssey (Canada)

Alto’s Odyssey, the follow-up to the popular Alto’s Adventure, brings a similar magic, but instead has players on an endless sandboarding journey instead of skiing. The game takes advantage of 3D Touch and haptics, as well as Metal optimized artwork and design, and other immersive soundtrack, like its predecessor.

Frost (Austria)

This free-form puzzle game has players drawing paths to guide the flocking spirits to their home planets. It’s both beautiful and – thanks to its soundtrack – it’s calming, too. Frost uses Metal technology to create its smooth animations and takes advantage of other technologies like multi-touch. This is the second win for the team, which previously won for their game Blek.

Oddmar (Turkey)

Oddmar, four years in the making, is a hand-drawn Viking-themed side-scroller that looks almost like it could be a film, instead of game. The story focuses on Oddmar, the main character, trying to redeem himself and be worthy of a place in Valhalla. The game is optimized for touch controls, supports game controllers, takes advantage of Metal, and includes a soundtrack influenced by traditional Swedish music that was actually recorded in small studio in Sweden.

All the winners receive a solid aluminum trophy (pictured above) that lights up and a treasure trove of Apple swag including a tricked out iMac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone X, AirPods, MacBook Pro 15″, and exposure on the Apple iOS App Store.

You can watch a replay of the winners here.

The company at the center of a major Facebook data misuse scandal has failed to respond to a legal order issued by the U.K.’s data protection watchdog to provide a U.S. voter with all the personal information it holds on him.

An enforcement notice was served on Cambridge Analytica affiliate SCL Elections last month and the deadline for a response passed without it providing a response today.

The enforcement order followed a complaint by the U.S. academic, professor David Carroll, that the original Subject Access Request (SAR) he made under European law seeking to obtain his personal data had not been satisfactorily fulfilled.

The academic has spent more than a year trying to obtain the data Cambridge Analytica/SCL held on him after learning the company had built psychographic profiles of U.S. voters for the 2016 presidential election, when it was working for the Trump campaign.

Speaking in front of the EU parliament’s justice, civil liberties and home affairs (LIBE) committee today, Carroll said: “We have heard nothing [from SCL in response to the ICO’s enforcement order]. So they have not respected the regulator. They have not co-operated with the regulator. They are not respecting the law, in my opinion. So that’s very troubling — because they seem to be trying to use liquidation to evade their responsibility as far as we can tell.”

While he is not a U.K. citizen, Carroll discovered his personal data had been processed in the U.K. so he decided to bring a test case under U.K. law. The ICO supported his complaint — and last month ordered Cambridge Analytica/SCL Elections to hand over everything it holds on him, warning that failure to comply with the order is a criminal offense that can carry an unlimited fine.

At the same time — and pretty much at the height of a storm of publicity around the data misuse scandal — Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections announced insolvency proceedings, blaming what they described as “unfairly negative media coverage.”

Its Twitter account has been silent ever since. Though company directors, senior management and investors were quickly spotted attaching themselves to yet another data company. So the bankruptcy proceedings look rather more like an exit strategy to try to escape the snowballing scandal and cover any associated data trails.

There are a lot of data trails though. Back in April Facebook admitted that data on as many as 87 million of its users had been passed to Cambridge Analytica without most of the people’s knowledge or consent.

“I expected to help set precedents of data sovereignty in this case. But I did not expect to be trying to also set rules of liquidation as a way to avoid responsibility for potential data crimes,” Carroll also told the LIBE committee. “So now that this is seeming to becoming a criminal matter we are now in uncharted waters.

“I’m seeking full disclosure… so that I can evaluate if my opinions were influenced for the presidential election. I suspect that they were, I suspect that I was exposed to malicious information that was trying to [influence my vote] — whether it did is a different question.”

He added that he intends to continue to pursue a claim for full disclosure via the courts, arguing that the only way to assess whether psychographic models can successfully be matched to online profiles for the purposes of manipulating political opinions — which is what Cambridge Analytica/SCL stands accused of misusing Facebook data for — is to see how the company structured and processed the information it sucked out of Facebook’s platform.

“If the predictions of my personality are in 80-90% then we can understand that their model has the potential to affect a population — even if it’s just a tiny slice of the population. Because in the US only about 70,000 voters in three states decided the election,” he added.

What comes after Cambridge Analytica?

The LIBE committee hearing in the European Union’s parliament is the first of a series of planned sessions focused on digging into the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal and “setting out a way forward,” as committee chair Claude Moraes put it.

Today’s hearing took evidence from former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Sandy Parakilas; investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr; Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie; and the U.K.’s ICO Elizabeth Denham, along with her deputy, James Dipple-Johnstone.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has been running a more-than-year-long investigation into political ad targeting on online platforms — which now of course encompasses the Cambridge Analytica scandal and much more besides.

Denham described it today as “unprecedented in scale” — and likely the largest investigation ever undertaken by a data protection agency in Europe.

The inquiry is looking at “exactly what data went where; from whom; and how that flowed through the system; how that data was combined with other data from other data brokers; what were the algorithms that were processed,” explained Dipple-Johnstone, who is leading the investigation for the ICO.

“We’re presently working through a huge volume — many hundreds of terabytes of data — to follow that audit trail and we’re committed to getting to the bottom of that,” he added. “We are looking at over 30 organizations as part of this investigation and the actions of dozens of key individuals. We’re investigating social media platforms, data brokers, analytics firms, political parties and campaign groups across all spectrums and academic institutions.

“We are looking at both regulatory and criminal breaches, and we are working with other regulators, EU data protection colleagues and law enforcement in the U.K. and abroad.”

He said the ICO’s report is now expected to be published at the end of this month.

Denham previously told a U.K. parliamentary committee she’s leaning toward recommending a code of conduct for the use of social media in political campaigns to avoid the risk of political uses of the technology getting ahead of the law — a point she reiterated today.

“Beyond data protection I expect my report will be relevant to other regulators overseeing electoral processes and also overseeing academic research,” she said, emphasizing that the recommendations will be relevant “well beyond the borders of the U.K.”

“What is clear is that work will need to be done to strengthen information-sharing and closer working across these areas,” she added.

Many MEPs asked the witnesses for their views on whether the EU’s new data protection framework, the GDPR, is sufficient to curb the kinds of data abuse and misuse that has been so publicly foregrounded by the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal — or whether additional regulations are required?

On this Denham made a plea for GDPR to be “given some time to work.” “I think the GDPR is an important step, it’s one step but remember the GDPR is the law that’s written on paper — and what really matters now is the enforcement of the law,” she said.

“So it’s the activities that data protection authorities are willing to do. It’s the sanctions that we look at. It’s the users and the citizens who understand their rights enough to take action — because we don’t have thousands of inspectors that are going to go around and look at every system. But we do have millions of users and millions of citizens that can exercise their rights. So it’s the enforcement and the administration of the law. It’s going to take a village to change the scenario.

“You asked me if I thought this kind of activity which we’re speaking about today — involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook — is happening on other platforms or if there’s other applications or if there’s misuse and misselling of personal data. I would say yes,” she said in response to another question from an MEP.

“Even in the political arena there are other political consultancies that are pairing up with data brokers and other data analytics companies. I think there is a lack of transparency for users across many platforms.”

Parakilas, a former Facebook platform operations manager — and the closest stand in for the company in the room — fielded many of the questions from MEPs, including being asked for suggestions for a legislative framework that “wouldn’t put breaks on the development of healthy companies” and also not be unduly burdensome on smaller companies.

He urged EU lawmakers to think about ways to incentivize a commercial ecosystem that works to encourage rather than undermine data protection and privacy, as well as ensuring regulators are properly resourced to enforce the law.

“I think the GDPR is a really important first step,” he added. “What I would say beyond that is there’s going to have to be a lot of thinking that is done about the next generation of technologies — and so while I think GDPR does a admirable job of addressing some of the issues with current technologies the stuff that’s coming is, frankly, when you think about the bad cases is terrifying.

“Things like deepfakes. The ability to create on-demand content that’s completely fabricated but looks real… Things like artificial intelligence which can predict user actions before those actions are actually done. And in fact Facebook is just one company that’s working on this — but the fact that they have a business model where they could potentially sell the ability to influence future actions using these predictions. There’s a lot of thinking that needs to be done about the frameworks for these new technologies. So I would just encourage you to engage as soon as possible on those new technologies.”

Parakilas also discussed fresh revelations related to how Facebook’s platform disseminates user data published by The New York Times at the weekend.

The newspaper’s report details how, until April, Facebook’s API was passing user and friend data to at least 60 device makers without gaining people’s consent — despite a consent decree the company struck with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011, which Parakilas suggested “appears to prohibit that kind of behavior.”

He also pointed out the device maker data-sharing “appears to contradict Facebook’s own testimony to Congress and potentially other testimony and public statements they’ve made” — given the company’s repeat claims, since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, that it “locked down” data-sharing on its platform in 2015.

Yet data was still flowing out to multiple device maker partners — apparently without users’ knowledge or consent.

“I think this is a very, very important developing story. And I would encourage everyone in this body to follow it closely,” he said.

Two more LIBE hearings are planned around the Cambridge Analytica scandal — one on June 25 and one on July 2 — with the latter slated to include a Facebook representative.

Mark Zuckerberg himself attended a meeting with the EU parliament’s Council of Presidents on May 22, though the format of the meeting was widely criticized for allowing the Facebook founder to cherry-pick questions he wanted to answer — and dodge those he didn’t.

MEPs pushed for Facebook to follow up with answers to their many outstanding questions — and two sets of Facebook responses have now been published by the EU parliament.

In its follow up responses the company claims, for example, that it does not create shadow profiles on non-users — saying it merely collects information on site visitors in the same way that “any website or app” might.

On the issue of compensation for EU users affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal — something MEPs also pressed Zuckerberg on — Facebook claims it has not seen evidence that the app developer who harvested people’s data from its platform on behalf of Cambridge Analytica/SCL sold any EU users’ data to the company.

The developer, Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, had been contracted by SCL Elections for U.S.-related election work. Although his apps collected data on Facebook users from all over the world — including some 2.7 million EU citizens.

“We will conduct a forensic audit of Cambridge Analytica, which we hope to complete as soon as we are authorized by the UK’s Information Commissioner,” Facebook also writes on that.

While hose-toting drones may be a fantasy, hose-powered robo-dragons (or robotic hose-dragons — however you like it) are very much a reality. This strange but potentially useful robot from Japanese researchers could snake into the windows of burning buildings, blasting everything around it with the powerful jets of water it uses to maneuver itself.

Yes, it’s a real thing: Created by Tohoku University and Hachinohe College, the DragonFireFighter was presented last month at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

It works on the same principle your hose does when you turn it on and it starts flapping around everywhere. Essentially your hose is acting as a simple jet: the force of the water being blasted out pushes the hose itself in the opposite direction. So what if the hose had several nozzles, pointing in several directions, that could be opened and closed independently?

Well, you’d have a robotic hose-dragon. And we do.

The DragonFireFighter has a nozzle-covered sort of “head” and what can only be called a “neck.” The water pressure from the hose is diverted into numerous outlets on both in order to create a stable position that can be adjusted more or less at will.

It requires a bit of human intervention to go forwards, but, as you can see, several jets are pushing it that direction already, presumably at this point for stability and rigidity purposes. If the operators had a little more line to give it, it seems to me it could zoom out quite a bit farther than where it was permitted to in the video.

For now it may be more effective to just direct all that water pressure into the window, but one can certainly imagine situations where something like this would be useful.

DragonFireFighter was also displayed at the International Fire and Disaster Prevention Exhibition in Tokyo.

One last thing. I really have to give credit where credit’s due: I couldn’t possibly outdo IEEE Spectrum’s headline, “Firefighting Robot Snake Flies on Jets of Water.”

Barcelona-based online travel agency Exoticca — which sells “affordable luxury” holidays to popular destinations such as India, Kenya, Brazil, Thailand and South Africa — has closed a €3.5 million (~$4.1 million) Series A to expand into more markets.

The lead investor is early-stage Madrid-based VC K Fund, with existing investors Sabadell Venture Capital and Grupo Palau also participating, along with new investors Nero Ventures, Palladium Corporate Venture and Smartech Capital.

Exoticca was founded in 2013 and currently operates in three European markets: Spain, France and the U.K. The new funding will be put toward expanding that tally — with the German market next in line, and a launch into the U.S. and Canada also on the horizon. Funds will also be funneled into further developing the platform.

“The company spent the first couple of years developing the technological platform and sales have grown very rapidly since then (€4.4 million in 2016, €10.5 million in 2017 and a budget of more than €20 million for 2018),” says CEO Pere Valles, a recent recruit to the business and previously CEO of Scytl.

Valles argues that Exoticca’s progress to date proves both the profitability of its business model — noting that Spain was “the first market which Exoticca launched is already profitable” — and its replicability. “Last year we launched the U.K. and France and the U.K. is already bigger than Spain,” he says, adding: “In July, we are launching in Germany and we have plans to open in the U.S. and Canada in 2019.”

Valles says the market Exoticca is operating in is one of the few travel market segments that has not yet been digitized — with people still purchasing these types of trips in traditional “offline” travel agencies, owing to relative complexity, with the holidays typically having multiple legs and components, perhaps including international and domestic flights, land transportation, hotels in different locations, tour guides and so on.

Exoticca’s platform allows users to buy such trips online in a single visit, thanks to a proprietary booking engine that integrates with all the various providers — enabling real-time pricing for each component (so no need to phone up for an actual price before being able to book, for example).

“There is nobody else who provides real-time pricing for these types of trips through an online platform,” argues Valles. “Our competition uses internet only to generate leads and then close the sale either on the phone or in a store while we allow our customers to do the entire purchase process online in a single visit.”

There are some differences versus traditional bricks-and-mortar travel agents, though. Exoticca customers can’t spec out a very bespoke holiday in discussion with an agent, for example.

Rather it offers an inventory of around 50 trip packages in its permanent portfolio, covering what are described as “the most popular destinations” for its target travel category. (Though Valles points out it does offer a degree of light personalization — such as being able to pick a hotel category and optional excursions, for example.)

If you’re content to choose from the selection, Exoticca claims the trips are 30 percent cheaper on average versus “traditional providers” — as a consequence of the disintermediation process (i.e. it acting as both wholesaler and retailer).

“Each one of these trip packages is our ‘own’ product in the sense that we are the ones who ‘build’ it by engaging directly with the provider of each component,” says Valles, adding: “We also give our own personal touch to the tours in each one of these destinations.”

There’s a pretty striking branding style on show too — which features 1950s-esque graphics illustrating elements of the holiday packages and service…

Presumably the hope is the retro styling will resonate with the older adults who are the demographic most likely to be in the market for long-haul, luxury trips.

“We have customers in all age groups but those between 45 and 65 tend to be ‘overrepresented,’ ” agrees Valles.

He says the company is generally targeting a similar customer profile to that of GV-backed members-only travel club Secret Escapes.

Though they are not like-for-like competitors, with Exoticca’s product certainly having more of a focus on, well, exotic holidays — versus Secret Escapes offering hotel getaways to almost anywhere (so long as the hotel is up to snuff).

Other European online travel agency startups include the likes of Dreamlines, which is focused exclusively on cruise holidays to address a distinct market segment; and Evaneos, a marketplace for tailored travel experiences that connects travelers directly with a community of local travel agents — so is doing the lead generation Exoticca’s approach avoids.

Valles says the packages it sells are with “high-quality providers” (4- and 5-star hotels) but offered at “discounted prices” intended to appeal to a mass market of middle- and upper-class travelers.

The overall aim is to “democratize” this segment of the travel market. (“A great experience at a reasonable cost” is the pitch.) Though if they really succeed in widening the funnel they may end up undermining their luxury promise. But clearly that’s not something they have to worry about yet.

Funding wise, Valles says Exoticca previously raised €1 million in two seed rounds, one with F&F and another with Sabadell Venture Capital. The business is not breaking out any user or usage metrics at this stage, five years in.

Egnyte has always had the goal of protecting data and files wherever they live, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Today, the company announced a new feature to help customers comply with GDPR privacy regulations that went into effect in Europe last week in a straight-forward fashion.

You can start by simply telling Egnyte that you want to turn on “Identify sensitive content.” You then select which sets of rules you want to check for compliance including GDPR. Once you do this, the system goes and scans all of your repositories to find content deemed sensitive under GDPR rules (or whichever other rules you have selected).

It then gives you a list of files and marks them with a risk factor from 1-9 with one being the lowest level of risk and 9 being the highest. You can configure the program to expose whichever files you wish based on your own level of compliance tolerance. So for instance, you could ask to see any files with a risk level of seven or higher.

“In essence, it’s a data security and governance solution for unstructured data, and we are approaching that at the repository levels. The goal is to provide visibility, control and protection of that information in any in any unstructured repository,” Jeff Sizemore, VP of governance for Egnyte Protect told TechCrunch.

Sizemore says that Egnyte weighs the sensitivity of the data against the danger it could be exposed and leave a customer in violation of GDPR rules. “We look at things like public links into groups, which is basically just governance of the data, making sure nothing is wide open from a file share perspective. We also look at how the information is being shared,” Sizemore said. A social security number being shared internally is a lot less risky than a thousand social security numbers being shared in a public link.

The service covers 28 nations and 24 languages and it’s pre-configured to understand what data is considered sensitive by country and language. “We already have all the mapping and all the languages sitting underneath these policies. We are literally going into the data and actually scanning through and looking for GDPR-relevant data that’s in the scope of Article 40.”

The new service is generally available on Tuesday morning. The company will be makign an announcement at the InfoSecurity Conference in London. It has had the service in Beta prior to this.

Listen up, early-stage startup founders! Do you know the line that Marlon Brando made famous in the classic film, “On the Waterfront?” Well, if you don’t act within the next 48 hours and apply to compete in Startup Battlefield, the phrase “I coulda been a contender” might haunt you for a very long time.

TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — which takes place September 5-7 — is going big this year. We’re taking over Moscone Center West, tripling our floor space and playing host to more than 10,000 attendees, 1,200 exhibitors and more than 400 accredited media outlets. With such a <cough> disruptive Disrupt, no “ordinary” Startup Battlefield would do. So, we doubled the money to a very chill $100,000 equity-free cash prize.

You have absolutely nothing to lose by applying and a lot to gain if your company makes the cut. TechCrunch charges no fees and takes no equity from startups; applying to and competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. The selection process is highly competitive — savvy TechCrunch editors review every application and choose anywhere from 15-30 startups. The acceptance rate ranges between three and six percent.

But here’s the thing: Just making the first cut comes with a hefty load of benefits in the form of investor interest, media coverage and free exhibition space in Startup Alley — a birthing ground for magical wheeling and dealing — for all three days of the show.

Consider, for example, the case of Aircall, a cloud-based call center solution that competed in Startup Battlefield SF back in 2015. It didn’t move beyond round one but, trust us, they aren’t crying about it. Probably because Aircall recently scored $29 million in another round of funding. That brings its total funding to $40.5 million since its Battlefield debut.

Here’s another bennie at which you ought not sneeze. Every competing team joins the ranks of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. Imagine the connections you can make among the more than 800 companies in this elite cohort. Companies that have, by the way, collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits.

If you suffer from performance anxiety, we’ve got you covered on that score. Every Startup Battlefield team receives free expert pitch coaching from our experienced, seen-it-all TechCrunch editorial team. We’ve been doing this since 2007, folks. You WILL be prepared to step into the ring to give it your best shot.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Your chance to apply and be a contender disappears in just two short days. Steer clear of Palooka-ville. Apply to Startup Battlefield right now.

Copyright is a mess, but more of a mess in some ways than others, and one of the biggest messes right now is licensing music for digital broadcast. The Music Modernization Act aims to smooth over some of the biggest bumps, but a companion piece has aroused the ire of a collection of internet advocacy groups, who have voiced their concerns via a letter penned by copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig.

The CLASSICS Act is the one in question, though no one is disputing the cleverness of its acronym: it stands for Compensating Legacy Artists for their Songs, Service, and Important Contributions to Society. And indeed the goal of the act is to harmonize copyright for musical works created before 1972, a sort of turning point after which copyright law changed considerably.

The issue at hand, although due to the complexity of copyright any summary will necessarily be somewhat inadequate, is that pre-1972 works are essentially ineligible for federal copyright status, and are instead registered by a hodgepodge of state and common law. This was a pain to start with, to be sure, but as digital transmission of music has increased and federal copyright become more important, it has really started to chafe and the question of royalties has become an increasingly complicated one. (Plagiarism Today has a good summary if you want more details.)

What CLASSICS is intended to do is endow those pre-1972 works with a semblance of federal copyright, helping eliminate this arbitrary line on how music is licensed. Sounds good, right? And it mostly is. But there’s a catch — or perhaps two catches.

“The objective of the whole package is to make much more efficient the process of licensing music in the digital age, and I think that’s great,” Lessig told me in an interview. “But I think, and this is an important line to draw, what we’re criticizing is that the public doesn’t benefit.”

He says the issues came up in discussions with other IP experts and in particular with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who Lessig said had faced serious legal obstacles relating to music archival in particular.

“America’s copyright system needs to be modernized, but not like this,” the letter at Equal Citizens reads, “and certainly not in a fashion that results in excessively long periods of protection, creates massive inconsistencies in the copyrighting of sound recordings, and gives inequitable access to those sound recordings.”

Cosignatories include Demand Progress, the EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Internet Archive.

A century and a half of protection

First there is the issue that under CLASSICS, the pre-1972 works are given what amounts to (though is legally not quite the same as) a copyright extension covering them until 2067. Why 2067? That’s 1972 plus 95 years, the duration a work would be copyrighted if registered today.

But it’s not just works from 1972 that will be covered up to 2067. Works going back another 50 years will also be protected until 2067. In other words, a 1927 recording would be getting what amounts to 140 years of copyright protection.

In case you don’t see the harm here, consider that such a recording would normally have entered the public domain a handful of years for now, but under CLASSICS would be granted another 42 years during which royalties would have to be paid and rights managed.

Now, the recurring extension of copyrights over years tends to benefit rights holders more than consumers. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine something like Mickey the Mouse being public domain, but really, there has to be some limit. And for a work to be kept out of the public domain for nearly a century and a half seems fundamentally excessive.

Brewster Kahle told me in an email that CLASSICS “would not release even Edison wax cylinders into the public domain until 2067 — nuts, if you ask me.”

Dozens of scholars argued this point in a letter issued in May:

The Act is deeply flawed…Because it grants new federal protections only to works that were created long ago (ranging in age from 46 to 95 years), it does nothing to incentivize the creation of new works. Rather, it simply provides new rewards to existing copyright owners.

Critics point out that the works aren’t actually being given copyright extensions — they’d be governed under a different law. But that has the air of semantics: CLASSICS itself assigns the same “remedies” as copyright infringement as punishment for the same crime. It’s not copyright, but it sure looks, walks, and would be prosecuted like copyright. It’s a sort of white-label copyright, since extending and reducing actual copyright terms is a bit of difficult issue.

Retroactive without registration

But the 2067 thing is just more of the same copyright extension stuff we’ve seen, Lessig says.

“A lot of people are concerned about the length, and I am too,” he told me. “But the 2067 thing doesn’t matter as much as the idea that you have to do something to earn this right. If you’re going to give the extension or benefits, at least do it in a way that clarifies the rights to the public.”

The main issue is that CLASSICS would apply universally to every work created before 1972, regardless of age, current status, whether the creators are alive and still benefiting, and so on. A hit song played daily on oldies stations is given the same rights as an obscure jazz recording no one has ever attempted to monetize or reissue.

The latter works are the type of thing that should be entering the public domain, Lessig and his colleagues argue. Under CLASSICS they are copyright protected by default, and their public domain status delayed by decades when they should be available for free like other old and abandoned media.

“I’d like to see a clear line between works people use and works people have no use for,” Lessig said.

Let the likes of The Temptations benefit from their hit songs for another century, if that’s what the government and industry decide is a reasonable term — all they should have to do is register those works.

By having artists and rights owners register, it solves the problem for everyone. Anyone who wants to have their pre-1972 works brought into the new scheme can easily achieve that, but orphan works will enter the public domain as they ought to.

This has the side effect of centralizing and formalizing the copyright status of pre-1972 works; if you’re a documentary producer or DJ looking for some music to use in your own project, you’ll be able to easily check if some ’60s record is rights-managed, in which case you can license it, or if it’s an orphan, in which case you can safely use it like any other public domain work.

Registration has been a sticky issue in IP law, since it isn’t necessary for the creation of a copyright — but as this isn’t creation of copyright, in fact not technically copyright at all in some ways, it’s an ideal time to introduce the concept to the benefit of the public and with very little if any inconvenience to rights holders.

“We’ve never had a point to leverage this point into the system,” Lessig said. There’s still time to add it and it would cost little to do so, he added.

Collective, automatic rights managed at a high level are the domain of large companies that can navigate the agreements and pay the huge fines associated with operating outside their terms while the law catches up with the rest of the world. CLASSICS, Lessig suggested, would benefit these companies.

“It concentrates their power as a sort of clearing house for intellectual property rights,” he said. “Right now we have no way to tell what is protected, which has what rights and why. The people that can do it are companies like Spotify and Google, that can afford the liability. But that doesn’t make the culture that nobody cares about available to the public.”

(NB: Lessig, among others, has been accused of being a paid academic puppet for Google; he laughed at the suggestion, saying “I’d love to see one of those checks.” Many of said scholars have similarly rejected the notion, though certainly private funding in science must be closely monitored.)

Kahle and others have recommended as an alternative to CLASSICS or even a modified version thereof, a rival bill called ACCESS, which takes a simpler approach to federalizing the copyrights of pre-1972 works. Perhaps too simple, critics argue: it would put a lot of work in directly the lap of the Copyright Office, which like most federal organs is overworked and inefficient enough as is.

The Music Modernization Act has received remarkable bipartisan support; it passed the House 415-0, which is nothing short of incredible in this day and age. So it seems to be on track to becoming a law. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and just as we have ended up kicking ourselves for sloppy wording and a lack of foresight in parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it might be better to take a moment to get it right the first time.

Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, started this afternoon down in San Jose — kicking off with a keynote as it does every year where it announced a bunch of updates to all of its major operating systems. We’ve wrapped up all the big announcements from its keynote below, and there will be plenty more information to come in over the next few days.

Apple introduces iOS 12

What Apple announced: Its next generation iPhone operating system. iOS 12 comes with a variety of new features, many of which we’ll dig into below, but it includes things like group FaceTime, new Animoji, some quality of live improvements to Siri, improvements in performance (especially for older devices) and updates to its push into augmented reality.

Why it matters: WWDC has always been the place where it’ll show off a slew of new features, which while very consumer-y in feel is typically pointed at developers to show all the tools they’ll soon get their hands on and all the reasons Apple will keep users on iPhones. The company is introducing its own file format for augmented reality, clearly signaling to developers that they should be flocking to iOS 12 if they want to go where the users are in the future.

Apple delivers big updates to its augmented reality platform

What Apple announced: Apple said it is rolling out ARKit 2.0, the next generation of its development software for augmented reality experiences on the iPhone. The new version showed improved face tracking, more realistic rendering, 3D object detection, persistent experiences and shared experiences (as well as a neat party trick when it comes to measurement). There’s also a multiplayer component the company will roll out with its new development tools.

Why it matters: Tim Cook has alluded to the importance of augmented reality for the iPhone multiple times over the years. While it was a sort of promise of the future for a while, the release of Pokémon Go and the phenomenon that followed demonstrated the potential of augmented reality to capture the hearts and minds of potential users. That was just one use case of what could be a massive potential app ecosystem, and Apple wants to get ahead of that with robust development kits that will keep users on iPhones with better augmented reality experiences.

With iOS 12, Apple focuses on performance

What Apple announced: Apple loves to talk about how its new OS generations, including iOS 11, have the highest adoption rate among smartphones — as well as show off a graphic that shows how bad Google is at that with Android. But it spent a lot of time today talking about how efficient its next OS, iOS 12, will be on older phones like the iPhone 6.

Why it matters: Apple can’t leave its older users in the dust. While it’s better that they upgrade to newer phones, some users are sitting on older devices like an iPhone 6S, and rolling out new operating systems with more robust and complex features might put a strain on those older devices. Apple got in trouble for not notifying users that it was slowing phones with older batteries down, and if it wants to keep people in the ecosystem — and eventually upgrade — it still has to keep those users with older phones excited about the Apple ecosystem amid a ton of competition.

Apple’s Memoji brings an animated you to your iPhone

What Apple announced: If you’ve ever used Bitmoji, you know exactly what to expect here. Apple is giving users a way to create a customized avatar for themselves that will behave exactly like an Animoji, its animated emoji that moves around as you move your head. Plus you can stick out your tongue and your Animoji will do the same, for some reason.

Why it matters: Snap spent more than $60 million on the makers of Bitmoji. Clearly this is a feature that users want, and it’s starting to show up in a lot of different ways as an attempt to differentiate a communications platform. Apple obviously needs iMessage to succeed because it continues to create iOS lock-in, and having these kinds of customized avatars can make the experience more robust.

Apple is adding group FaceTime video calls to iOS 12

What Apple announced: Apple is adding group FaceTime video calls to iOS 12, where you can chat with up to 32 people.

Why it matters: Apple is adding group FaceTime video calls to iOS 12, where you can chat with up to 32 people! This is an interesting and obvious move for Apple to port over the capabilities of Houseparty, an app that tapped a weird zeitgeist around multi-user video streaming. Managing that many streams is difficult and compute intensive, so it makes sense that Apple could absorb the shock of the challenges and bake that right into iOS.

Apple introduces watchOS 5

What Apple announced: Apple showed a bunch of new features that will show up in the next generation of the operating system for the Apple Watch. That includes new features like new workout types like yoga and hiking, challenges for friends, and automatic workout detection. There’s also Siri shortcuts and the walkie talkie, which we’ll get to below.

Why it matters: The most significant of these announcements focused in the health realm, which is where Apple is increasingly positioning itself with the Apple Watch. Originally seen as a sort of do-it-all accessory, it turns out the whole wearable category doesn’t really click for that, but it makes a lot of sense as a fitness tracker and a way to monitor health. It’s still an important part of Apple’s ecosystem, and creating better experiences around workouts can help the company position the Watch as the best fitness tracker on the market.

Apple unveils new screen time controls for children and a new set of ‘digital wellness’ features for better managing screen time

What Apple announced: Apple is adding some options in iOS to track usage of certain apps, as well as add time limits to flag users when they’re approaching the self-imposed boundaries within iOS. The updates also include more robust do-not-disturb modes. All this also extends to parental controls for children.

Why it matters: Apple is announcing this just after Google unveiled a slew of updates to its new Android operating system that were also focused on digital wellness. It’s become an increasing focus for the creators of the operating systems to try to discourage users from just tapping around and wasting time on some apps — and hopefully promote better behavior, which would make the whole experience nicer (and, of course, get them to buy new phones). The parental controls part is also significant given that investors questioned Apple when it came to screen time for children.

Apple gives users control of Siri with new Shortcuts tool

What Apple announced: Apple is giving its users the ability to create custom commands with Siri. The whole process involves chaining together a bunch of activities and queries within Siri that users can piece together to respond to a single voice command like “I’m headed to the gym.”

Why it matters: Siri is widely considered to be a much weaker service compared to Alexa or Google Assistant, and it certainly seems like something Apple is not ignoring. The company argues it works to protect privacy, but that comes at a cost, and Apple has to find a way to ensure that its voice assistant is competitive with other products out there.

The next version of macOS is macOS Mojave

What Apple announced: The company’s next version of its Mac operating system. Mojave, its latest update, brings in a ton of incremental updates for the service that include a “dark mode” that dims most of the elements on the screen. There are also a bunch of new tools to help users stay a little more organized, such as a new way of viewing files in Finder and stacking documents intelligently.

Why it matters: While the Mac operates a smaller niche inside Apple’s larger business — which, to be clear, is driven by phones — it has to keep those Mac users happy. They can be among Apple’s most avid fans, and the Mac serves as another piece of Apple’s overall ecosystem that sits alongside the phone and tablet. If Apple wants to pitch additional devices like the Watch or the HomePod, it has to convince users to stay within the Apple ecosystem. That means ensuring its laptop is up to date with new features every year.

Apple Watch gets Walkie-Talkie mode

What Apple announced: You can talk into your watch like a walkie talkie.

Why it matters: You can talk into your watch like a walkie talkie. Some people at TechCrunch care about that a lot for some reason. It’s another thing Apple Watch users have to play with that might get them to buy more watches. Or not.

Apple aims to simplify the Mac App Store with a redesign
What apple announced: Apple’s Mac App Store, it’s other App Store for its line of laptops and computers, is getting a complete overhaul. Everything is divvied up into tabs and more intelligent grouping, and Apple is making it easier for developers to prompt users to rate their apps.

Why it matters: Apple launched the Mac App Store years ago, but it hasn’t seen any major updates since Apple began making some significant changes to the Apple App Store. The company has taken more of an editorial bent for the App Store, looking to surface up the best apps in an era where the App Store is getting increasingly crowded. So it makes sense that the company would port over those learnings to the Mac App Store.

App Store hits 20M registered developers and $100B in revenues, 500M visitors per week

What Apple announced: The numbers above.

Why it matters: Apple loves to tout these numbers every year, but it’s also an important barometer for the success of the Apple App ecosystem. It’s kind of like looking at a stock chart — you might hear a company is doing well when you’re deciding whether or not to invest in something, but it’s good to have that nice round public-facing number.

Apple TV gets Dolby Atmos and streamlined sign-ons for channels and services
What Apple announced: The company is making it easier to sign on and also introducing Dolby Atmos audio, two quality-of-life improvements for Apple TV owners. The latter of which is a nice way to keep the experience clean, but the former makes the Apple TV the only streaming device to be both Dolby Atmos and Vision certified.

Why it matters: Apple insists that the TV is not a hobby, so it keeps bringing these updates to its living room device. While it really hasn’t gotten there yet, owning the living room is a tantalizing piece of the home puzzle that would help Apple not only sell more devices, but keep people locked into its ecosystem. That’ll be especially true as more and more internet-connected devices end up in the home, all of which needing some kind of hub — which could be the Apple TV.

Apple says CarPlay will now support third party navigation and mapping apps

What Apple announced: CarPlay, the company’s car-focused operating system, will support third-party apps like Google Maps and Waze.

Why it’s important: This is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a nice quality of life improvement that might make users a little more interested in using CarPlay. Apple doesn’t have a true car play yet, so to speak, but this is one way to start getting users accustomed to iOS in the car.