Year: 2019

While it’s true that it’s going to take some time before most of us will actually be able to enjoy the benefits of 5G, that doesn’t mean you can’t sit back and enjoy the fireworks right now. AT&T’s adoption of the “5G Evolution” label has already been controversial among industry followers and fellow carriers alike, for watering down the meaning of next-gen connectivity — and now Sprint is looking to do something about it.

The carrier filed suit against what it called “false advertising and deceptive acts” relating to AT&T’s 5G E. The suit notes, rightly, that Sprint, AT&T and other major carriers are all jostling to be first to market, “but calling its network 5G E […] does not make it a 5G network.” In fact, the network is more akin to advanced LTE.

AT&T called itself “[the] first U.S. mobile company to introduce mobile 5G service in a dozen markets by late 2018” courtesy of the label, in a much maligned attempt to plant its flag. It’s similar to tactics used by the carrier ahead of the rollout of LTE. AT&T has largely waved away criticism, stating that it’s happy that such moves have gotten it into the heads of the competition.

That may be true, but anyone who’s watched the industry with even passing interest knows that real network advances take time, and this sort of branding goes a ways toward muddying up consumer understanding. The suit goes on to claim that the 5GE label violates state and federal false advertising laws and does damage to competitors like Sprint, who are invested in the slower roll out of true 5G.

Opera became the first browser-maker to bundle a VPN with its service, and now that effort is expanding to mobile.

The company announced today that its Android browser app will begin offering a free VPN. The feature will be rolled out to beta users on a gradual basis. The VPN is free and unlimited, and it can be set to locations in America, Europe and Asia as well as an ‘optimal’ setting which hooks up the faster available connection. Switching on the VPN means that user traffic data isn’t collected by Opera, while it makes it harder for websites to track location and user data.

There are granular settings too, which include limiting VPN usage to private tabs and switching it off for search engines to get more local results.

Opera previously offered a free VPN app for Android and iOS but that project was closed last year. The new strategy, it seems, was to bake that technology directly into the browser to give it a more competitive advantage and use the tech to bring more users into the Opera ecosystem. There’s no word on an iOS launch.

“The reason why we are including this built-in VPN in our Android browser is because it gives you that extra layer of protection that you are searching for in your daily mobile browsing,” the company — which listed on the Nasdaq last year — said in a blog post.

The VPN — which is powered by a 2015 acquisition — is one of a number of privacy features that Opera offers. Others include cookie dialogue box blocking, cryptojacking and ad blocking. The company has also offered support for crypto with the addition of a crypto wallet, support for Web 3 apps and — as of this week — a feature that lets users buy crypto from inside their browser.

Besides its core apps, Opera also offers a ‘Touch’ browser that is optimized for devices that don’t have a home button. It launched on Android and expanded to iOS late last year.

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate Clark and I sat down to get through the biggest news in the venture and startup world. This is our regular episode of the week after a shot focused on the Slack IPO, and an interview concerning Facebook. So, back to our roots. And as has been the case for months and months now, there was a lot to get through.

Podcasting took center stage this week, with music giant Spotify snapping up podcasting tool startup Anchor and podcast production company Gimlet. The latter was expected, but the combined $230 million pricetag may have come as a surprise to some.

Spotify says that it isn’t done investing in the space. It won’t be alone, however, in hoping to drive big dollars with original audio shows. Himalaya raised a pocket of money — $100 million — to build out its own podcasting world.

Moving to other huge rounds, Calm picked up $88 million in a new round, pushing its valuation to the $1 billion threshold. That makes Calm, probably, the first mental-health focused startup to make it into unicorn territory. Reddit is also scoping a nine-figure round (Kate isn’t a fan), which could just about double its valuation to $3 billion.

Databricks raised a bunch of money this week at a similar, $2.75 billion valuation. It does big data analytics.

Lastly on the funding front, Lime did close that big round we’ve been expecting it to. What does that mean? It could be that Lime’s latest capital shows that there isappetite  for risk left in the market. Or that a lot of folks need to tell their LPs that they have acquired exposure to the scooter market. Who knows.

We also hit on an LA venture summit and wrapped. We’ll be back in a week!

Security researchers have found thousands of exposed internet-connected industrial refrigerators that can be easily remotely instructed to defrost.

More than 7,000 vulnerable temperature controlled systems, manufactured by U.K.-based firm Resource Data Management, are accessible from the internet and can be controlled by simply plugging in its default password found in documentation on the company’s website, according to Noam Rotem, one of the security researchers who found the vulnerable systems.

Many of these vulnerable units are found in industrial refrigerators in restaurants, hospitals, and supermarkets and grocery stores from the U.K., Ireland, and as far away as Sweden, Germany and China. The researchers also found a pharmaceutical company in Malaysia and a cooling facility in Germany.

Defrosting the refrigerators could lead to untold water damage, financial losses, and the destruction of inventory. In the case of high-value industries, that could amount to hefty losses.

The web interface of an industrial freezer at a Marks & Spencer in Hong Kong. (Image: TechCrunch)

“The systems can be accessed through any browser,” said Rotem in his write-up. shared with TechCrunch before his public disclosure. “All you need is the right URL, which as our tests show, isn’t too difficult to find.”

Rotem said defrosting a machine takes only a “click a button and enter the default username and password,” both of which are near-universal across the company’s devices. TechCrunch found several hundred refrigerators on Shodan, a search engine for publicly available devices and databases, confirming the researchers’ findings, but did not use the credentials as doing so would be unlawful.

It’s also possible to modify user settings, alarms, and other features on the exposed devices, said Rotem.

In an email, a representative from Resource Data Management said: “We clearly state in our documentation that the default passwords must be changed when the system is installed.” However, the change isn’t mandatory. According to Rotem, many device owners don’t bother. The company also distanced itself from its own security practices. “We have no control over how our systems are set up by the installer and we suggest your article is directed at the users and installers of our equipment,” the representative said. “We will inform owners that we have new software available with new functions and features but ultimately it is up to them to request an upgrade.”

The company said it will write to all its known customers “reminding them of the importance of changing the default user names and passwords.”

Starting next year, California will ban internet-connected devices manufactured or sold in the state if they contain a weak or default password that isn’t unique to each device.

Spotify will take a harder stance on ad blockers in its updated terms of service. In an email to users today, the streaming music and podcast platform said its new user guidelines “mak[e] it clear that all types of ad blockers, bots and fraudulent streaming activities are not permitted.” Accounts that use ad blockers in Spotify face immediate suspension or termination under the new terms of service, which go into effect on March 1.

The new guidelines specify that “circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating and distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service” may now result in “immediate termination or suspension of your Spotify account.”

Ad blockers have long been a headache for Spotify. The company disclosed in March 2018 while preparing for its initial public offering that it discovered two million users, or about 1.3 percent of its total user base at the time, had been using ad blockers on the free version of Spotify, enough to force it to restate usage metrics. Around that time, Spotify also began cracking down on unauthorized Android apps that let people access Spotify without ads.

During its fourth-quarter earnings report yesterday, Spotify reported positive operating profit, net income and free cash flow for the first time since it was founded in 2006. The company, which went public in May 2018, fell below analysts’ expectations for revenue, but is continuing to grow quickly despite intense competition from other streaming services, with subscribers increasing 36 percent to 96 million. Revenue from paid subscriptions now account for nearly all of Spotify’s turnover, or 88 percent. Ad-supported revenue makes up a much smaller slice, but as public company, Spotify is under more scrutiny to prevent ad-blocking, piracy or anything else that might cut into its earnings or subscriber growth.

Spotify also announced the acquisition of two podcast startups this week, Gimlet Media and Anchor, as it focuses on gathering all of the audio content its users might listen to into its service.

Dixa, a Copenhagen-based startup that offers a platform to help companies provide better and more consistent customer service across multiple channels, has raised $14 million in Series funding. The round is led by Project A Ventures, with participation from early investor SEED Capital.

Founded in 2015 by Jacob Vous Petersen and Mads Fosselius, Dixa is on mission to end bad customer service with the help of smarter technology to facilitate more personalised customer support. Dubbed a “customer friendship” platform, the cloud-based software works across multiple channels — including phone, chat, e-mail, and Facebook messenger — and employs a smart routing system so that the right support requests reach the right people within an organisation.

“The problem for customer facing support teams today is that tickets, shared in boxes and legacy call center solutions limit brand’s ability to connect to their customers where they want to and add extra administrative burdens that ultimately harms the customer experience,” co-founder and CEO Mads Fosselius tells me.

“Despite companies and brands have promised stellar customer experiences and service the past 5 years based on digital transformation (example chatbots, self-service etc.) and technology vendors has promised even more, the facts are that 75 percent of all customers have had a bad customer experience within the past 6 months, and 70 percent say they will leave a brand after just one bad experience,” he says, citing Salesforce’s recent ‘State of the Connected Customer’ 2018 report.

Dixa’s solution is described by Fosselius as a “next-gen” customer engagement platform built for personal and insightful conversations across all channels. To various degrees, it competes with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce Servicecloud and Avaya, Cisco, and 8×8. “Dixa is different as it’s a one channel-neutral platform and it works [how[ friends connect and communicate, but for engagement between brands and their customers. We call it a ‘Customer Friendship’ platform”.

This sees Dixa help companies ensure that customers can always get the help they need when they need it and on the channel they prefer. The software’s algorithms smartly re-route requests to the correct human or bot based on a raft of data. This includes past conversations, orders, reviews, and sentiment. Additionally, the context is taken into account, such as the communication channel used, webpage visited, device etc., and the skills plus availability of the relevant customer facing employee.

The result, says Dixa, is a system that makes it possible to deliver a consistent level of personal service, regardless of how the customer reaches out.

To that end, the Dixa platform is targeting “customer-centric” brands with 5-500 customer-facing agents, such as scale-ups and companies in the travel, e-commerce, fintech and transport/delivery sectors. Its current customer base spans 23 countries and includes brands like Bosch, Interflora, Danish design icon Hay, and food waste movement company Too Good to Go.

Adds Fosselius: “We don’t believe in tickets and siloed ‘silver bullet’ customer support solutions doing one thing or one channel very well, the world of customer support is moving towards conversational customer engagement or ‘customer friendship’ as we like to call it, where the strong bond and relation between brands and customers are the center piece”.

NASA Kepler space telescope’s “last light” image

NASA has released the final view taken by Kepler in September, shortly before the space telescope was retired after nearly a decade of unprecedented discoveries about the universe beyond our solar system.

“It bookends the moment of intense excitement nine and a half years earlier when the spacecraft first opened its eye to the skies and captured its ’first light’ image,” wrote NASA Ames Research Center public affairs officer Alison Hawkes. “Kepler went on to discover more than 2,600 worlds beyond our solar system and statistically proved that our galaxy has even more planets than stars.”

The “last light” image was taken on September 25, about a month before Kepler retired. The space telescope was pointed in the direction of the Aquarius constellation and the image encompasses the TRAPPIST-1 system, containing “seven rocky planets, at least three of them believed to be temperate worlds,” Hawkes wrote, and the GJ 9827 system, a star with an orbiting super Earth exoplanet (or planet outside the Solar System) that is “considered an excellent opportunity for follow up observations with other telescopes to study an atmosphere of a faraway world.”

Kepler’s field of view also slightly overlapped with NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), its planet-hunting successor, so astronomers will be able to compare data from the two. TESS launched last year and is expected to catalogue more than 1,500 exoplanets.

Kepler’s legacy is even more extraordinary because its primary mission was originally planned to last for 3.5 years. Instead, the space craft, named for 17th-century German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler operated for nine years, thanks a combination of its sturdy construction and fuel reserve. During that time, it discovered more than 4,500 confirmed planets and planet candidates, including 3,912 exoplanets.

Significantly, many of the planets Kepler discovered may be similar to Earth in size, with NASA analysis concluding that 20 to 50 percent of the stars in the sky are likely orbited by “small, possibly rocky planets that are in the habitable zone of their stars where liquid water could pool on the surface” and potentially host life.

Kepler also continued recording specific targets every 30 seconds, doing so for a few hour after the “last light” image was taken. “Although Kepler’s transmitters have been turned off and it is no longer collecting science, its data will be mined for many years to come,” Hawkes wrote.

Encryption is an important part of the whole securing-your-data package, but it’s easy to underestimate the amount of complexity it adds to any service or device. One part of that is the amount of processing encryption takes — an amount that could be impractical on small or low-end devices. Google wants to change that with a highly efficient new method called Adiantum.

Here’s the problem. While encryption is in a way just transforming one block of data reversibly into another, that process is actually pretty complicated. Math needs to be done, data read and written and reread and rewritten and confirmed and hashed.

For a text message that’s not so hard. But if you have to do the same thing as you store or retrieve megabyte after megabyte of data, for instance with images or video, that extra computation adds up quick.

Lots of modern smartphones and other gadgets are equipped with a special chip that performs some of the most common encryption algorithms and processes (namely AES), just like we have GPUs to handle graphics calculations in games and such.

But what about older phones, or cheaper ones, or tiny smart home gadgets that don’t have room for that kind of thing on their boards? Just like they can’t run the latest games, they might not be able to efficiently run the latest cryptographic processes. They can still encrypt things, of course, but it might take too long for certain apps to work, or drain the battery.

Google, clearly interested in keeping cheap phones competitive, is tackling this problem by creating a special encryption method just for low-power phones. They call it Adiantum, and it will be optionally part of Android distributions going forward.

The technical details are all here, but the gist is this. Instead of using AES it relies on a cipher called ChaCha. This cipher method is highly optimized for basic binary operations, which any processor can execute quickly, though of course it will be outstripped by specialized hardware and drivers. It’s well documented and already in use lots of places — this isn’t some no-name bargain bin code. As they show, it performs way better on earlier chipsets like the Cortex A7.

The Adiantum process doesn’t increase or decrease the size of the payload (for instance by padding it or by appending some header or footer data), meaning the same number of bytes come in as go out. That’s nice when you’re a file system and don’t want to have to set aside too many special blocks for encryption metadata and the like.

Naturally new encryption techniques are viewed with some skepticism by security professionals, for whom the greatest pleasure in life is to prove one is compromised or unreliable. Adiantum’s engineers say they have “high confidence in its security,” with the assumption (currently reasonable) that its component “primitives” ChaCha and AES are themselves secure. We’ll soon see!

In the meantime don’t expect any instant gains, but future low-power devices may offer better security without having to use more expensive components — you won’t have to do a thing, either.

Oh, and in case you were wondering:

Adiantum is named after the genus of the maidenhair fern, which in the Victorian language of flowers (floriography) represents sincerity and discretion.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says he is being blackmailed with nude selfies by AMI, owner of the National Enquirer and reportedly protector of the president’s reputation, over claims the publisher has acted as a political operative. The events feel almost as if they have been arranged by mysterious forces as a microcosm of the “tech elite vs. the President” narrative.

Bezos, who has been in the news recently owing to a rather dramatic and public divorce, published a post on a fresh Medium instance describing in detail the process by which he has been targeted by AMI.

It began when Bezos commissioned private security provider and investigator Gavin de Becker to look into how the National Enquirer obtained (and published) private texts and images of his, part of which was apparently to look into connections with Saudi Arabia and potential interference with The Washington Post, which Bezos of course owns.

This apparently did not sit well with David Pecker, AMI’s CEO and Chairman:

Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our investigation. For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve… They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn’t stop our investigation.

They wanted Bezos to publicly state that he has “no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.” This, he writes, is simply not true, and he decided rather to publish the threats in full than to capitulate to the demands.

In emails purportedly from AMI, the publisher details the exact nature of the images they have obtained. Bezos, presumably in order to take away any ammunition they have short of shooting their whole shot, published the list in his post. The images sound suitably personal and they are exactly what you suspect, and include some of the woman with whom he is reportedly involved.

Apparently AMI says the images can and should be published as newsworthy in order to show Amazon shareholders that Bezos has poor judgment. Obviously Bezos disagrees, and he’d rather air his dirty laundry (rather more literally than that is usually meant) than compromise himself and the Post.

In a touching aside, he notes that although the newspaper is “a complexifier” for him, he is completely dedicated to it. “My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life,” he writes.

Notably Bezos chose not to publish this information with any kind of official connection with The Washington Post (such as a letter from the owner or the like, or with Post lawyers); considering this is more of a personal issue for him and that he is accusing AMI of poor journalistic practices (in fact of masquerading as journalism for nefarious purposes), it is well for him to keep a wide berth from potential accusations that he is abusing the Post in any way.

Some may be wondering: What about these images? How could AMI possibly claim they were obtained lawfully? In the email published by Bezos, they say:

Please be advised that our newsgathering and reporting on matters involving your client, including any use of your client’s “private photographs,” has been, and will continue to be, consistent with applicable laws. As you know, “the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting . . . is not an infringement of copyright.” 17 USC Sec. 107.

Whether “fair use” protects them from publishing photos that I can’t imagine could be acquired by anything but illegal means, is a question that may have to be decided in court. On the other hand, AMI and the National Enquirer are surely old hands at this type of thing considering the nature of their business.

This story is developing, and how. Check back for updates.

Ticketing app Gametime is taking its last-minute approach about as far as it can go, with the launch of a new feature called LastCall. This allows users to purchase tickets through Gametime until 90 minutes after an event has started.

Why would you want to do that? Well, prices usually drop precipitously after the event starts — for example, Gametime said that 48 hours before a game, the median price for a Major League Baseball is (coincidentally?) $48, but it’s dropped to $13 by 90 minutes after the first pitch.

Founder and CEO Brad Griffith acknowledged that most fans probably aren’t interested in just showing up for the fourth quarter or ninth inning of a game, or for the last song in a concert. On the other hand, if you could get a big discount and still catch most of the event, then it might be worth it.

Meanwhile, if you’re a team or a venue with empty seats, or if you’re a ticket-holder who realizes at the last minute that you can’t attend, then it’s good to have one last shot at selling those tickets.

In fact, it sounds like this is one of those “announcements” that’s partly acknowledging what’s already happening, both in the Gametime app and elsewhere. Griffith said the company is “doubling down” on this seriously-last-minute category of tickets, adding that it’s “constantly working through” what it’s actually including under the LastCall umbrella.

“The key element is the research that we’ve done, how it relates to the growth of this phenomenon” he said.

That research includes a survey of 287 event attendees, some who use Gametime and some who don’t. Apparently 27 percent said they’ve already purchased tickets after an event’s start time, and 62 percent of those late buyers were either Generation Z or millennials.

And while Gametime started out with a focus on sports, LastCall will include tickets from a variety of live events. In fact, Griffith said concerts are now the app’s fastest-growing category, and he suggested that this approach could help with the declining number of total concert tickets sold.

“We’re starting to see a bifurcation of windows, where the on-sale is still healthy, is strong, and the middle is maybe cratering in terms of transaction volume,” he said. “And then last-minute is vibrant and growing and fast. That is where we aim to do our best work.”