Year: 2019

Apple has said it will compensate the teenager who first found a security bug in Group FaceTime that allowed users to eavesdrop before a call was picked up.

The bug was initially reported to Apple by 14-year-old Grant Thompson and his mother, but the family struggled getting in contact the company before the bug was discovered elsewhere and went viral on social media.

The payout will fall under Apple’s bug bounty, which incentivizes security researchers to claim a reward for privately submitting security bugs and vulnerabilities to the company. Apple will also offer an unspecified additional gift to Thompson’s education.

“In addition to addressing the bug that was reported, our team conducted a thorough security audit of the FaceTime service and made additional updates to both the FaceTime app and server to improve security, an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. “This includes a previously unidentified vulnerability in the Live Photos feature of FaceTime.”

“To protect customers who have not yet upgraded to the latest software, we have updated our servers to block the Live Photos feature of FaceTime for older versions of iOS and macOS,” said Apple.

Apple rolled out iOS 12.4.1 on Thursday, which Apple says “provides important security updates and is recommended for all users.” The company’s separate security advisory also credited Thompson with finding the bug.

Woody Allen filed a $68 million suit with the Southern District of New York today over a four-picture deal with Amazon. The suit arrives as Allen’s latest film, “A Rainy Day in New York” has been set in limbo, months after release.

The film, which stars Selena Gomez, Elle Fanning and Jude Law, among others, has been shelved following the latest round of controversy around the filmmaker’s 1992 sexual assault allegations. A number of the film’s stars have since expressed regret at participating in the picture and others have agreed to donate their salaries to charity.

“Amazon has tried to excuse its action by referencing a 25-year-old, baseless allegation against Mr. Allen, but that allegation was already well known to Amazon (and the public) before Amazon entered into four separate deals with Mr. Allen,” the suit reads, “and, in any event it does not provide a basis for Amazon to terminate the contract,” the suit alleges. “There simply was no legitimate ground for Amazon to renege on its promises.”

The Amazon/Allen deal has already resulted in the release of two films — “Wonder Wheel” and “Cafe Society” — with more on the way. As Variety notes, the initial agreement was met with a then tongue-in-cheek comment from Allen, stating, “Like all beginning relationships, there is much hope, mutual affection and genuine goodwill — the lawsuits come later.” 

The rise of the Me Too movement, however, brought past Allen allegations back into the spotlight, and Amazon has noted the increased scrutiny it has experienced as a result.

Insulin pills have long been a kind of Holy Grail for people living with diabetes. A research team at MIT believes it may have taken an important step toward that dream with a new blueberry-sized capsule made of compressed insulin.

Once ingested, water dissolves a disk of sugar, using a spring to release a tiny needle made up almost entirely of freeze-dried insulin. The needle is injected into the stomach — which the patient can’t feel, owing to a lack of pain receptors in the stomach. Once the injection has occurred, the needle can break down in the digestive tract.

The pill is able to orient itself once swallowed, in order to make sure it injects in the right spot. That bit was apparently inspired by tortoise shells.

According to MIT, “The researchers drew their inspiration for the self-orientation feature from a tortoise known as the leopard tortoise. This tortoise, which is found in Africa, has a shell with a high, steep dome, allowing it to right itself if it rolls onto its back. The researchers used computer modeling to come up with a variant of this shape for their capsule, which allows it to reorient itself even in the dynamic environment of the stomach.”

So far, the team has been testing the pill successfully in pigs, delivering up to 300 micrograms of insulin in a go. No word on how long it might take to arrive in pharmacies.

Earlier this week, Slack announced that it has filed the paperwork to go public at some point later this year. The big question is, will the company exit into the public markets as expected, or will one of the technology giants swoop in at the last minute with buckets of cash and take them off the market?

Slack, which raised over $1 billion on an other worldly $7 billion valuation, is an interesting property. It has managed to grow and be successful while competing with some of the world’s largest tech companies — Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook, Google and Salesforce. Not coincidentally these deep-pocketed companies could be the ones that come knock, knock, knocking at Slack’s door.

Slack has managed to hold its own against these giants by doing something in this space that hadn’t been done effectively before. It made it easy to plug in other services, effectively making Slack a work hub where you could spend your day because your work could get pushed to you there from other enterprise apps.

As I’ve discussed before, this centralized hub has been a dream of communications tools for most of the 21st century. It began with enterprise IM tools in the early 2000s, progressed to Enterprise 2.0 tools in the 2007 timeframe. That period culminated in 2012 when Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion, the only billion dollar exit for that generation of tools.

I remember hearing complaints about Enterprise 2.0 tools. While they had utility, in many ways they were just one more thing employees had to check for information beyond email. The talk was these tools would replace email, but a decade later email’s still standing and that generation of tools has been absorbed.

In 2013, Slack came along, perhaps sensing that Enterprise 2.0 never really got mobile and the cloud and it recreated the notion in a more modern guise. By taking all of that a step further and making the tool a kind of workplace hub, it has been tremendously successful growing to 8 million daily users in roughly 4 years, around 3 million of which were the paying variety, at last count.

Slack’s growth numbers as of May 2018

All of this leads us back to the exit question. While the company has obviously filed for IPO paperwork, it might not be the way it ultimately exits. Just the other day CNBC’s Jay Yarrow posited this questions on Twitter:

Not sure where he pulled that number from, but if you figure 3x valuation, that could be the value for a company of this ilk. There would be symmetry in Microsoft buying Slack six years after it plucked Yammer off the market, and it would remove a major competitive piece from the board, while allowing Microsoft access to Slack’s growing customer base.

Nobody can see into the future, and maybe Slack does IPO and takes its turn as a public company, but it surely wouldn’t be a surprise if someone came along with an offer it couldn’t refuse, whatever that figure might be.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Instacart CEO apologizes for tipping debacle

On the heels of a recently filed class-action lawsuit over wages and tips, as well as drivers and shoppers speaking out about Instacart’s alleged practices of subsidizing wages with tips, Instacart is taking steps to ensure tips are counted separately from what Instacart pays shoppers.

“While our intention was to increase the guaranteed payment for small orders, we understand that the inclusion of tips as a part of this guarantee was misguided,” said CEO Apoorva Mehta in a blog post. “We apologize for taking this approach.”

2. Match Group fully acquires relationship-focused app Hinge

Last year, Match Group acquired a 51 percent stake in the relationship-focused dating app Hinge, in order to diversify its portfolio of dating apps led by Tinder. The company has now confirmed that it fully bought out Hinge in the past quarter.

3. German antitrust office limits Facebook’s data gathering

A lengthy antitrust probe into how Facebook gathers data on users has resulted in Germany’s competition watchdog banning the social network giant from combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms without their consent.

4. Twitter Q4 beats on sales of $909M and EPS of $0.33, but MAUs slump to just 321M

Twitter’s Achilles’ heel remains user growth.

5. Amazon, Sequoia invest in self-driving car startup Aurora

Aurora, the buzzy startup founded by early pioneers of self-driving car technology who led programs at Google, Tesla and Uber, has raised more than $530 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia, a round that also includes “significant investment” from Amazon and T. Rowe Price Associates.

6. Why Spotify is betting big on podcasting

In an interview with TechCrunch, Spotify’s chief R&D officer Gustav Söderström admits that the company wasn’t doing a particularly good job serving up podcasting content: “The user experience was really poor.”

7. Skype can now blur the background during video calls

The Microsoft-owned service’s latest addition is a screen-blurring feature designed to obscure your messy room or any other background details that you’d rather not display to the other party on the line.

To better measure aptitude of applicants, online career marketplace Hired has acquired Py, which helps companies like Opendoor and Niantic identify talent with app-based interactive courses on Python, iOS development and more.

As part of the deal, Hired will launch a new feature called Hired Assessments, leveraging tools from the Py platform, as well as a tiered subscription model. The base-level package, called Hired Essential, will provide enhanced search functionality, tools to help candidates arrive to interviews as prepared as possible and more. A spokesperson for Py declined to disclose terms of the deal but did say that Py counts 500,000 users who’ve completed 2 million coding assignments. They also offered this little anecdote:

Derek Lo, founder and chief executive officer of Py, first began building the mobile app in May 2016 before completing Y Combinator’s accelerator program in summer 2017. Lo started the company in his dorm room after becoming frustrated with Yale’s computer sciences courses, which he felt were useless when it came to real business applications.

Lo has joined Hired as its head of product.

In a conversation with TechCrunch while Py was still completing the accelerator, Lo said the company had decided to turn down a $1 million investment offer because it was unnecessary for such an early-stage startup. At the time, the Py team had brought in $20,000 in pre-seed funding from Dorm Room Fund, plus another $100,000 from the Yale Venture Creation Program. In total, Py has raised $615,000.

“With Py founder Derek Lo, we saw a shared vision for making hiring easier for everyone,” Hired’s vice president of strategic development Andre Charoo said in a statement. “For companies, this means helping them hire in-demand talent quickly and predictably, and for job seekers, it is about empowering them to land their dream job. By combining Py’s technical assessment expertise with Hired’s dependable pipeline of first-rate talent, we’re ready to transform today’s hiring standards.”

Hired Assessments will include online coding quizzes, standardized testing, projects and a “live code” environment where hiring managers can “view, rewind, fast forward and save live candidate challenges.” The features are customizable so companies can tweak assessments based on their hiring needs.

Hired Essential will use machine learning to curate lists of candidates for available roles, as well as help candidates arrive at interviews prepared with a clear outline of hiring steps, expectations and tips.

Founded in 2012, San Francisco-based Hired is backed by venture capital firms including Comcast Ventures, Sherpa Capital, Lumia Ventures and Uncork Capital. To date, the business has raised $133 million, most recently at a post-valuation of $550 million, according to PitchBook.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation just unveiled a brand new project — an actual store. If you live in Cambridge in the U.K., you can now buy a bunch of sweet Raspberry Pis to tinker and develop some cool stuff.

The Raspberry Pi has always been about making coding more accessible. And a physical retail space fits the bill. The foundation has developed a lineup of insanely cheap computers with an ARM-based processor, a bunch of ports, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The latest flagship model, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ costs only $35. But if you want something smaller and cheaper, there are other models for various needs.

Maybe you just need a tiny computer for some internet-of-things project. You can opt for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ for $25 in that case. It has a bit less RAM and fewer ports, but it works pretty much like any Raspberry Pi. There’s also power-efficient models that cost less than $10 — the Raspberry Pi Zero models.

I never really thought about Raspberry Pi stores. But the introduction video makes a strong case in favor of such a store. The product lineup is getting a bit complicated and it’s always good to be able to talk to someone about your projects.

Moreover, the foundation can use this store as a showcase for some cool examples. You can also buy goodies, such as mugs and plushy toys. Those white-and-red keyboard and mouse look cool too.

That nasty FaceTime bug is now a thing of the past. You can now download and update your iPhone and iPad to re-enable Group FaceTime again. iOS 12.1.4 is a bug fix release and doesn’t contain any new feature other than this one.

Shortly after people found out that you could eavesdrop on somebody’s microphone or camera by starting a fake Group FaceTime call, Apple disabled Group FaceTime altogether. If you’re running iOS 12.1.3 or earlier, you simply can’t start or join a FaceTime call with more than two persons.

The company has been working on a fix to re-enable Group FaceTime without the nasty bug. And that update is now available.

“We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week,” Apple said in a statement last week. “We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process.”

Back up your iPhone or iPad to iCloud or your computer first using iTunes. You can then head over to the Settings app. Tap on ‘General’ then ‘Software Update’ to download and install the patch. The update is still propagating on Apple’s servers so it could take a few minutes before you see it.

LG’s never been much on waiting for a big show to announce its latest offering. Mobile World Congress is still weeks away, and the company just dropped what’s likely to be the biggest new feature of its upcoming flagship, the G8 ThinQ.

Clunky naming conventions aside, the handset once again finds LG focusing its efforts on imaging, with a time-of-flight sensor built-in to the front-facing camera array (sensor pictured above, incidentally). Here’s LG on what that means,

While other 3D technologies utilize complex algorithms to calculate an object’s distance from the camera lens, the ToF image sensor chip delivers more accurate measurements by capturing infrared light as it is reflected off the subject. As a result, ToF is faster and more effective in ambient light, reducing the workload on the application processor thereby also reducing power consumption.

For the end-user, that means the camera will be more capable of advanced face recognition than what most Android handsets currently offer. The addition of depth sensing brings more advanced biometric authentication, closer to what you get with the iPhone. The feature also goes a way toward validating earlier leaks of the phone, which bring a larger top notch.

As for the rest of the details — LG’s got to save something for MWC, I guess.