Year: 2019

Mozilla has rolled out what it bills as enhanced and simplified controls for Firefox users to manage how they block trackers.

An update to its browser software, released today, offers a redesigned interface which includes new controls that let users choose from ‘standard’, ‘strict’ or ‘custom’ settings to help them control online trackers.

Trackers refer to content embedded on websites that surreptitiously harvests information about visitors’ browsing activity — often for ad targeting purposes.

Using a tracker blocker is therefore one way to claw back a little online privacy. Although trackers can be used for lots of functions. Hence you may not want to block ’em all.

With the latest version of the Firefox browser the ‘strict’ level of tracker blocking is “for people who want a bit more protection and don’t mind if some sites break”, according to Mozilla. This mode also blocks trackers in all Windows.

Whereas ‘standard’ is summed up as a “set it and forget it” mode that blocks known trackers — but only when the user is using Private Browsing mode.

The standard mode will also block third party tracking cookies “in the future”. Though Mozilla looks to still be tweaking and testing that.

The third option is a custom tracker blocker mode which it says is “for those who want complete control to pick and choose what trackers and cookies they want to block”. This mode lets users choose whether or not to block trackers in all windows, or only in Private Browsing windows; and also to select different block lists.

On cookies, the custom option also lets users pick from blocking third-party trackers; cookies from unvisited websites; all third-party cookies (which Mozilla warns “may” cause websites to break); and all cookies (which it says will cause websites to break).

The redesigned tracker blocking interface follows an announcement from Mozilla last summer, when it said it would expand its approach to privacy by introducing default settings that block trackers, as well as “offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites” — flagging the “harms of unchecked data collection”.

Concern over behavioral advertising has generally been stepping up in recent years, fuelled by a string of data misuse and security scandals which have encouraged policymakers to take a closer interest in how personal data is collected and where it flows.

Rising concern over creepy ads has also encouraged a rise in activity in the tracker blocking space. So the latest tweaks to Firefox are part of a wider privacy trend.

“We initially announced in October that we would roll out Enhanced Tracking Protection off-by-default. This was just one of the many steps we took to help prepare users when we turn this on by default this year,” Mozilla writes today, teeing up the redesigned tracker blocking interface.

“We continue to experiment and share our journey to ensure we balance these new preferences with the experiences our users want and expect. Before we roll this feature out by default, we plan to run a few more experiments and users can expect to hear more from us about it.”

Firefox users can view the redesigned Content Blocking section via the Preferences menu, clicking on Privacy & Security — which will offer a Content Blocking section option. Or by clicking on the small “i” icon in the address bar, and then the small gear displayed next to Content Blocking.

A full list of changes in Firefox Release 65.0 can also be viewed here.

Among other listed improvements are a better pop-up blocker (“to prevent multiple pop-up windows from being opened by websites at the same time”); improved performance and web compatibility; and a better experience for multilingual users as also being among the updates.

Gmail on mobile will soon get a new look. Google today announced that its mobile email apps for iOS and Android are getting a redesign that is in line with the company’s recent Material Design updates to Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Docs and Site. Indeed, the new UI will look familiar to anybody who has ever used the Gmail web app, including that versions ability to select three different density styles. You’ll also see some new fonts and other visual tweaks. In terms of functionality, the mobile app is also getting a few new features that put it on par with the web version.

Like on the desktop, you can now choose between the default view, as well as a comfortable and compact style.  The default view features a generous amount of white space and the same attachment chips underneath the email preview as the web version. The comfortable view does away with those chips and the compact view removes a lot of the space between messages to show you more emails at a glance.

I’ve been testing the new app for a bit and quickly settled on the comfortable view since I never found the attachment chips all that useful in day-to-day use.

In line with Google’s Material Design guidelines, all the styles feature relatively subtle but welcome animations that don’t take a lot of time but give you a couple of extra visual cues about what’s going on as you work your way to Inbox Zero.

Google also notes that the new design makes it a bit easier to switch between accounts. I’m not sure I agree (I definitely find the implementation of this in Inbox, which is sadly going away soon, easier to use), but if you regularly use this feature, it’s still easy enough to use. The switcher is now part of the search bar, though, which is a bit confusing and took me a moment to find.

One nice addition to the mobile app is that the large red phishing and scam warning box from the web version now also appears in the mobile app.

Figma, the design and prototyping tool that aims to offer a web-based alternative to similar tools from the likes of Adobe, is launching a few new features today that will make the service easier to use to collaborate across teams in large organizations. Figma Organization, as the company calls this new feature set, is the company’s first enterprise-grade service that features the kind of controls and security tools that large companies expect. To develop and test these tools, the company partnered with companies like Rakuten, Square, Volvo and Uber and introduced features like unified billing and audit reports for the admins and shared fonts, browsable teams and organization-wide design systems for the designers.

For designers, one of the most important new features here is probably organization-wide design systems. Figma already had tools to create design systems, of course, but this enterprise version now makes it easier for teams to share libraries and fonts with each other to ensure that the same styles are applied to products and services across a company.

Businesses can now also create as many teams as they would like and admins will get more controls over how files are shared and who they can be shared with. That doesn’t seem like an especially interesting feature, but since many larger organizations work with customers outside of the company, its something that will make Figma more interesting to these large companies.

After working with Figma on these new tools, Uber, for example, moved all of its company over to the service and 90 percent of its product design work now happens on the platform. “We needed a way to get people in the right place at the right time — in the right team with the right assets,” said Jeff Jura, Staff Product Designer who focuses on Uber’s design systems. “Figma does that.”

Other new enterprise features that matter in this context are single sign-on support, activity logs for tracking activities across users, teams, projects and files, as well as draft ownership to ensure that all the files that have been created in an organization can be recovered after an employee leaves the company.

Figma still offers free and professional tiers (at $12/editor/month). Unsurprisingly, the new Organization tier is a bit more expensive and will cost $45/editor/month.

Apple is launching 58 new Today at Apple sessions to beef up its in-store education offerings for people who want to explore Apple’s products. The sessions, which cover video, photography, accessibility, coding, music, health and more, are free to attend and available at all of Apple’s retail stores across the world.

For the unveiling, Apple brought a group of reporters to its Apple Park campus in Cupertino last week. Throughout the day, Apple took us through sample Today at Apple sessions across Apple’s three categories: Skills, Walks and Labs. Skills are quick, thirty-minute sessions designed to teach you new techniques, Walks are actual physical walks with certain Apple products and services and Labs are 90-minute sessions where you create a project.

“So I think of Skills, Walks, Labs almost as, you know, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3,” Apple SVP of Retail Angela Ahrendts told a group of reports at Apple’s spaceship campus last week. “I mean, most things have green diamond, blue diamond, red, black diamond, I mean, there’s always levels.”

When Today at Apple first launched, it was a bit more open. Now, it’s a lot more structured, Ahrendts said.

Beats, art and jump-cuts

First up, I participated in a Garage Band Skills session, where we learned how to quickly create a beat using the beat sequencer. This session is geared toward people who are new to Apple’s tech and may need an introduction to the product or the software.

That is designed to prepare you for the next level of sessions, Walks. At Apple’s campus, we did a photo walk using the iPad Pro with Pencil and digital illustration app Procreate. The task at hand was to walk around Apple’s spaceship campus, snap photos of colorful scenes, capture that color in Procreate and then use the app’s numerous drawing tools to create a portrait. Here’s my masterpiece.

Walks, Apple Senior Director Karl Heiselman said, has been the most popular type of session.

“We think the reason why they’re so popular is you can’t do them on the Internet,” he said.

Last, but not least, we did a Lab where we learned how to create jump-cuts in the Clips app.

All of these sessions are entirely free to attend. Since launching Today at Apple almost two years ago, Apple has hosted 18,000 sessions per week. Millions of people have attended the sessions, so far, but it’s hard to get a totally accurate number, Ahrendts said.

“If you sign up, we have a number but the minute the session starts around the big screen, usually three times more people, you know, kind of hover over it,” Ahrendts said.

Apple’s in-store sessions are a way for the company to build brand loyalty and differentiate itself from the likes of Google and other hardware companies. While Apple’s online store is geared toward purchasing products and receiving customer support, its retail stores are designed to be focused on people and their experiences, Ahrendts said.

“If you’re taking the time to come into a store, we’re assuming you want a much more human experience,” she said.

Today is the biggest launch of sessions to date, with Ahrendts likening the update to its in-store sessions to updates to Apple’s digital software, “but you could assume there will always continue to be updates on our store software forever.”

Encoding biases into machine learning models, and in general into the constructs we refer to as AI, is nearly inescapable — but we can sure do better than we have in past years. IBM is hoping that a new database of a million faces more reflective of those in the real world will help.

Facial recognition being relied on for everything from unlocking your phone to your front door, and being used to estimate your mood or likelihood to commit criminal acts — and we may as well admit many of these applications are bunk. But even the good ones often fail simple tests like working adequately with people of certain skin tones or ages.

This is a multi-layered problem, and of course a major part of it is that many developers and creators of these systems fail to think about, let alone audit for, a failure of representation in their data.

That’s something everyone needs to work harder at, but the actual data matters as well. How can you train a computer vision algorithm to work well with all people if there’s no set of data that has all people in it?

Every set will necessarily be limited, but building one that has enough of everyone in it that no one is effectively systematically excluded is a worthwhile goal. And with its new million-image Diversity in Faces (DiF) set, that’s what IBM has attempted to create. As the paper introducing the set reads:

For face recognition to perform as desired – to be both accurate and fair – training data must provide sufficient balance and coverage. The training data sets should be large enough and diverse enough to learn the many ways in which faces inherently differ. The images must reflect the diversity of features in faces we see in the world.

The faces are sourced from a huge 100-million-image dataset (Flickr Creative Commons), through which another machine learning system prowled and found as many faces as it could. These were then isolated and cropped, and that’s when the real work started.

These sets are meant to be ingested by other machine learning algorithms, so they need to be both diverse and accurately labeled. So the DiF set has a million faces, and each one is accompanied by metadata describing things like the distance between the eyes, the size of the forehead, and all that. All these measurements together create the “faceprint” that a system would use to, for example, match one image to another of the same person.

But any given set of those measurements may or may not be good for identifying people, or accurate for a certain ethnic group, or what have you. So the IBM team put together a revised set that not only includes simple things like distances between features, but how those measures relate to one another, for example how the ratio of this area above the eyes to that area below the nose. Skin color, as well as contrast and types of coloration, are also included.

In a move that is long overdue, gender in the set is detected and encoded according to a spectrum, not a binary. As gender is itself nonbinary, it makes sense to represent it as any fraction between 0 and 1. So what you really have is a metric describing how individuals present on a scale from feminine to masculine.

Age is also automatically estimated, but for these two last values a sort of “reality check” is also included in the form of a “subjective annotation” field in which people were asked to label faces male or female and guess at age. Here there may be bias re-encoded, as sourcing from humans tends to introduce it. All these make for a considerably broader set of measurements than any other publicly available facial recognition training set.

You may wonder why race or ethnicity isn’t a category — IBM’s John R. Smith, who led the creation of the set, explained in an email to me:

Ethnicity and race are often used interchangeably, although the first is more related to culture and the second is related to biology. The boundaries within either are not distinct, and labeling is highly subjective and noisy as found in prior work. Instead, we chose to focus on coding schemes that could be determined reliably and have some kind of continuous scale that could feed diversity analysis. We may return to some of these subjective categories.

Even with a million faces, however, there’s no guarantee that this set is adequately representative — that enough of all groups and sub-sets are present to prevent bias. In fact, Smith seems sure it isn’t, which is really the only logical position.

We could not ensure this in this first version of the data set. But, it is the goal. First, we need to figure out the dimensions for diversity. We do that by starting with data and coding schemes as in this release. Then we iterate. Hopefully, we bring along the larger research community and industry in the process.

In other words, it’s a work in progress. But so is all of science, and despite the frequent missteps and broken promises, facial recognition is inarguably a technology we will all be engaging with in the future, whether we like it or not.

Any AI system is only as good as the data on which it’s built, so improvements to the data will trickle down for a long time. Like any other set DiF will likely go through iterations addressing shortcomings, adding more content, and integrating suggestions or requests from researchers using it. You can request access here.

Apple’s new streaming service is poised to launch this spring, according to The Information, citing three unnamed sources. Tucked away in a report about Amazon’s plans to dial down its efforts with its subscription video offering, The Information noted that Apple has been telling entertainment partners to be ready for a mid-April launch for the streaming service. But the report also said the actual launch date could be within several weeks of that time frame.

A spring launch date would fall in line with earlier reports, which said Apple’s video streaming service would launch in the first half of 2019.

Apple CEO Tim Cook also vaguely confirmed its plans in this area, when speaking with CNBC earlier this month. He said that Apple would announce “material” new additions to its line of service offerings this year. These could include the upcoming news and magazine subscription service, which is also rumored for a spring arrival, and possibly new services in the health space.

Apple has been gearing up for its streaming service for some time, acquiring rights and making deals for a number of TV shows and movies — it even just brokered its first movie deal at Sundance 2019 on Monday.

However, Apple’s original content may not be the only thing to watch on the new service.

Apple may include an Amazon Channels-like offering as a part of its video service, the new report said. This, too, has been claimed previously by both Bloomberg and CNBC.

This Amazon Channels-like model has been copied throughout the competitive streaming market because of the low overhead and the big cut Amazon and Roku take on subscription sales — around 30 percent, The Information says.

For example, Roku this week launched its own video subscriptions in The Roku Channel; Sling TV rolled out a selection of premium à la carte channels last year; and media center software maker Plex aims to do the same in 2019. Walmart had been rumored to be entering this market via Vudu, its video marketplace that’s now its key focus for competing on streaming.

Even Facebook is considering an Amazon Channels-like offering, the report said.

Apple’s decision to move forward with a spring — or possibly, even mid-April — launch date would see its service going head-to-head with Disney+, the Disney-owned Netflix competitor that will be shown off to investors on April 11.

But what’s still unclear is how Apple will be marketing and selling its streaming offering — reports have varied on this front, claiming everything from a bundle with Apple Music and news to being entirely free.

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. Apple disables group calling in FaceTime in response to eavesdropping bug

Apple has disabled the group calling feature within its FaceTime calling service while it works on a patch to fix a nasty bug that allows eavesdropping. Apple’s status page shows that group calling via FaceTime is “temporarily unavailable” — that’s a stop-gap move while the company works to deliver a more permanent fix.

We were unable to set up a group call when we tried, having earlier been able to do so and replicate the issue.

2. Huawei ‘disappointed,’ denies charges

The long-simmering battle between the U.S. government and Huawei heated up last night when the U.S. DOJ announced that it is pursuing criminal charges against the Chinese hardware maker. Huawei has, unsurprisingly, denied all wrongdoing.

3. SAP job cuts prove harsh realities of enterprise transformation

While the company tried to put as positive a spin on the announcement as possible, there could be up to 4,000 job cuts as SAP shifts into more modern technologies.

4. Petal raises $30M from Valar to bank the unbanked with credit cards

Petal uses a more holistic and comprehensive underwriting model to determine the creditworthiness of credit card applicants compared to traditional banks that rely predominantly on an applicant’s FICO score. The goal is to focus more on cash flows rather than a static score.

5. Casper announces the Glow — a portable, sleep-friendly light

The Casper team sent me a couple of Glows to try out for myself. The result? I found myself getting sleepier as the light dimmed, and I seemed to pass out more quickly and reliably than normal.

6. Home improvement platform Houzz lays off 180, reportedly gears up for public listing

We’ve confirmed that the company laid off around 110 people in the U.K. and Germany this month, along with an additional 70 in its U.S. home market in Q4 of last year.

7. Screen time inhibits toddler development, study finds

A study has found that kids 2-5 years old who engage in more screen time received worse scores in developmental screening tests. The apparent explanation is simple: when a kid is in front of a screen, they’re not talking, walking or playing, the activities during which basic skills are cultivated.

Darkstore, a technology-driven fulfillment solution for companies like Nike and others, has raised a $7.5 million Series A round. With the additional funding in hand, Darkstore plans to expand its fulfillment center into more categories.

Currently, Darkstore fulfills products for brands in the areas of footwear, home and consumer electronics. With the funding, Darkstore will expand into lifestyle, health and beauty, and athletic leisure, Darkstore founder and CEO Lee Hnetinka told TechCrunch over the phone.

“There are other categories where we get inbound and turn it town,” Hnetinka said. Down the road, Hnetinka said he envisions additional categories, including groceries and perishables.

Darkstore works by exploiting excess capacity in storage facilities, malls and bodegas and enables them to be fulfillment centers with just a smartphone. The idea is that brands without local inventory can store it in a Darkstore and then ship out same-day. Darkstore doesn’t charge brands anything to store inventory but charges 3 percent for every item that Darkstore ships, with a minimum of $2 and a maximum of $20.

“Up until now, Darkstore has really been behind the scenes,” Hnetinka said. “We want to continue to do that and to be a superpower to our brands. Our mission is to enable the brands to be direct to consumer and we believe we can help them do that even better by creating what we call a branded movement.”

Specifically, Darkstore envisions creating a badge for brands to place on their websites to signal that it offers same-day delivery via Darkstore. Brands currently see Darkstore as a competitive advantage, Hnetinka said, so they’re unwilling to promote its use of Darkstore, but he hopes to change that. That change would ideally help brands to increase trust with its customers, while also undoubtedly providing more visibility and therefore more business for Darkstore.

Also on the docket for 2019 is to explore a new giving initiative. Tentatively called Darkstore Giving, the idea is to make it easier for brands to reduce return-driven waste. Instead of throwing away lightly used items, Darkstore could facilitate the donation of those items to non-profit organizations.

Darkstore first launched in 2016, counting mattress startup Tuft & Needle as one of its first customers. To date, Darkstore has raised almost $10 million in funding.

Nvidia today announced that its Quadro Virtual Machine Workstation (vWS) is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The promise of the Quadro vWS it to allow businesses to run high-end graphics applications in the cloud, using any of the Nvidia’s high-end and mid-level cloud  GPUs like the P100, V100, P4 or P40. For the Azure cloud, this specifically means that the Quadro vWS can use Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs with 24GB of frame buffer per GPU.

“We’re focused on delivering the best and broadest range of GPU-accelerated capabilities in the public cloud,” said Talal Alqinaw, senior director of Microsoft Azure, in today’s announcement. “NVIDIA Quadro vWS expands customer choice of GPU offerings on Azure to bring powerful professional workstations in the cloud to meet the needs of the most demanding applications from any device, anywhere.”

The promise of a virtual workstation, of course, is that you can easily spin them up and down as needed and only pay for when they are running. And all the underlying infrastructures is managed by somebody else, as are software and driver updates, in addition to all the financial calculations that come into effect when you are renting workstations in the cloud.

Nvidia argues that these workstations should be especially of interested to users in industries like architecture, entertainment, oil and gas and manufacturing.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s own Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure also supports the Quadro vWS on Tesla GPUs. Indeed, virtual desktops and enabling GPUs for them seems to have been an area of focus for the Azure team in recent months.

You’d think that through Y Combinator‘s many initiatives — in person and online — the popular accelerator program would have its bases covered when it comes to creating and growing a talent network. Yet the organization’s president, Sam Altman, doesn’t see it that way. He’d far prefer that YC get to know the world’s brainiacs earlier in their lives, before they’re thinking about the kind of startup they might like to someday launch.

Enter Altman’s newest idea, a kind of annual weekend getaway for nerds in picturesque Boulder, Colorado. Called the YC120, the idea is bring together 120 people for a couple of days in April to mostly just hang out and, hopefully, stay in touch afterward, both with fellow attendees, as well as with YC, which is paying for lodging, travel, and food. The idea is to help create connections.

Naturally, this being YC, the weekend isn’t open to just anyone looking for a free weekend in the mountains. YC is looking for people who with an eye on the future, whether that means they are “interested in gene editing,” or “nuclear fusion” or “building a space colony,” says Altman in a new post about the initiative. We caught up with him yesterday morning to learn more in a chat that’s been lightly edited for length below.

TC: So two days in Boulder in the spring. What will take place there, exactly? 

SA: There will be a little bit of content, but it’s mostly unstructured time for attendees to hang out and meet other people. I rarely go to events anymore; the few that I go to and get value out of are [those] that [provide attendees with] time to spend with interesting people to go hiking or whatever.

TC: One hundred of the people you are welcoming will be people you’ve never met. Another 20 will be people who are already at the top of their fields. Do you know who these 20 people are? Is there anyone we can mention?

SA: We’ve made lists but we haven’t specifically invited anyone just yet.

TC: Do attendees have to have a budding company idea? Would you prefer that they not have a startup idea?

SA: In fact, they don’t. YC is good at many things, including identifying raw talent, but we’d like to get to know people earlier. If we get to know them now and five years from now they have a startup idea, [we want them to think of us]. [The weekend] is open to people who have startups, by the way, but it’s not a requirement in any way. We don’t want to dissuade anyone from applying.

TC: I guess, too, that anyone with venture funding has a bit more of a network in place already.

SA: Probably, though I think we bring together something special.

TC: You are asking applicants to submit one-minute long videos that answer three questions: ‘What are you interested in and what are you working on?’ ‘What have you done so far that shows your potential for greatness, adjusted for whatever life circumstances you were born into?’ And ‘In a best-case scenario, what do you want your obituary to say?’

How can you discern enough from a short video to know who to choose of the thousands of people who might reach out? What if you have three likable teams from Ivy League schools who want to build space colonies, for example?

SA:  You can’t get it perfectly, to be very clear. We’ll make mistakes, I’m 100 percent sure. But when YC first started, we didn’t ask for video, then we made it optional, then a couple of years later, we made it required because although it’s not as good as talking with people in person, which is how we make YC investing decisions, it’s surprisingly helpful. [You can get] 25 to 30 percent of the experience [from video] that you’d get from sitting across the table from someone, based on how someone comes across and their level of passion. Hopefully, we picked pretty good questions, too.

TC: The part about life circumstances is curious. We all know great founders who’ve come from nothing and great founders who’ve come from comfortable backgrounds. Why are someone’s circumstances of particular interest?

SA: A key skill for an entrepreneur is the ability to make the best of whatever situation you have in front of you, whether you were born into privilege or you weren’t. We’re looking for people who, whatever their situation was, did the absolute most possible. We can supply a lot of things — capital, a network– but we’re ultimately looking for raw talent.

TC: Given that you’re asking applicants about what their obituary would say in the best case scenario, we naturally have to ask you what you’d want yours to say.

SA: [Here, Altman answers but does so off the record, explaining in a non-obnoxious way that if we publish what he says, YC will begin to see the same wording in future applications as nascent founders wittingly and otherwise model his behavior.]

TC: Does YC really need yet another program to see some of the world’s best and brightest?

SA: It’s been a surprising lesson for me in my own life and my experience running YC that the most important thing for ambitious people — more than even resources or basically anything else — is a network of like-minded, super-talented people to network with and to help you, and that’s so hard to get in the world, and so easy for YC to create. And if we can do this well, we can unlock much more human potential.

TC: Do you ever worry about steering too many people into creating startups, when they could perhaps be enjoying financial stability and maybe better mental health, working for someone else?

SA: I think entrepreneurship is wrong for almost everyone. When I speak at college campuses, I try to put out a really big disclaimer first that starting a company and becoming a successful company founder is a miserable life that’s good in only a small number of ways. I explain first why not do it, and why for most people, it’s a terrible idea.

I expect one thing I’ll do is discourage [YC120 attendees] from starting a company right away and to be patient. If you’re 18, you have a long time horizon.