Year: 2019

Whenever some new “cosmic puzzle” crops up, you always have to be ready for the other shoe to drop. But just because something isn’t an alien message or Ringworld doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting science. Today’s shoe drop concerns “fast radio bursts” coming from a distant galaxy — but don’t expect a secret message from an advanced civilization.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are short, intense blasts of radio waves that come from far outside our galaxy. No one knows what causes them, but they’re unlike anything else we’ve observed — and their uniqueness makes them a prime target for detection in noisy data.

A SETI project snatched a few just this fall, but another effort using a brand new radio telescope called CHIME that essentially points at the whole sky and chooses where to “look” using software. In a pair of papers published today, researchers say they’ve found 13 new FRBs using the method.

“The telescope has no moving parts. Instead it uses digital signal processing to ‘point’ the telescope and reconstruct where the radio waves are coming from. This is done using clever algorithms and a couple of giant computer clusters that sit beside the telescope and crunch away at the data in real time,” explained Kiyoshi Masui, an MIT scientist on the team behind CHIME’s discoveries, in a news release.

This kind of software-defined operation is sure to become more common as computing power increases and the effectiveness of smaller arrays increases.

You can see where in the universe they appeared in the video here:

Hopefully that helps.

Naturally everyone wants to think it’s spaceships or planets full of hyperintelligent broadcasters sending out signals to us, though of course they would have had to send it a long, long time ago. More likely it’s “powerful astrophysical objects more likely to be in locations with special characteristics,” the scientists speculated.

Supernovas, black holes, quasars — there are lots of strange, high-energy items out there in the universe, and who knows what happens when they combine? The FRBs observed recently also exhibited a much lower wavelength than those seen previously, so there appears to be quite a variety.

But what’s even rarer than FRBs is repeating FRBs; only one has ever been found, via the massive Arecibo array in Puerto Rico. That is, until these scientists spotted another.

When there was only the one, it was conceivable that the occurrence was a cosmic anomaly — perhaps some incredibly rare event that only happens once in a thousand millennia. But two in a handful of years? That suggests they’re far more common than that, and now that we know what to look for we’re likely to find more.

It might not be an alien civilization, but something totally new to science is a pretty nice consolation prize.

French startup Ledger unveiled a new hardware wallet at CES this week. While the device isn’t going to ship until March, the company let me play with a prototype version of the device. The Ledger Nano X feels just like using the Nano S, but on mobile.

When the company’s previous hardware wallet first came out, that was before the cryptocurrency boom, before Ledger raised $75 million. And the user experience wasn’t great.

You had to install multiple Chrome apps to manage multiple cryptocurrencies, switch between each app when you wanted to access your balance and manage your crypto assets. But things got much better when the company released Ledger Live on macOS, Windows and Linux.

With this new app, you could finally view your portfolio balance and manage multiple crypto assets from the same desktop app. The logical next step was mobile. And you have to get a new hardware wallet for that.

The Ledger Nano X looks more or less like the Ledger Nano S, but slightly bigger. It’s shaped like a USB key and it has a tiny screen to confirm transactions on the device. There’s a tiny 100 mAh battery in it and a slightly bigger screen. The battery should last a couple of months when you’re not using the wallet, and around 8 hours of active use. The microUSB port has been replaced by a USB-C port. The buttons are now on each side of the screen instead of on the side of the device.

After you pair the device with your phone, you can control everything from your iOS or Android phone. You can install apps on the Ledger Nano X, access your wallets and send cryptocurrencies. On iOS, you can lock the app using a password and optionally Face ID or Touch ID.

When you need to validate a transaction on your Ledger Nano X, your phone will pair with your Ledger device over Bluetooth. You can then view transaction information on your Ledger device and approve the transaction on the device itself.

What makes Ledger so secure is that your private keys never leave your Ledger device. Transactions are signed directly on the device. Your private keys are never sent over Bluetooth and your cryptocurrencies remain safe even if your smartphone is compromised.

Ledger now uses an ST33 secure element, which is slightly more secure than the previous version ST31. Now, there’s only a single chip, connected directly to the screen and buttons, which reduces the risk of having someone compromise the information on your screen.

The screen is now twice as tall, which lets you view full public addresses without a scrolling view. You can now install up to 100 different cryptocurrency apps. You can still plug the device into a computer and use the desktop app, as well. The device costs €120 ($138).

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

The government shutdown has entered into day 19, making it the second-longest shutdown in U.S. history. With President Donald Trump slamming his hands down on a table and storming out of negotiations with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer earlier today, a fast-approaching end feels unlikely.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are out of work as U.S. leaders struggle to reach a fair agreement on the federal budget, including employees of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission . The government agency, responsible for protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, shut down on December 27 and has just 285 of its 4,436 employees on the clock.

“Due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, the SEC is currently operating in accordance with the agency’s plan for operating during a shutdown,” the agency wrote on its website. “The SEC has staff available to respond to emergency situations involving market integrity and investor protection, including law enforcement.”

EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system that allows companies to electronically file crucial documents, including paperwork for initial public offerings, has remained up and running. That’s led to a “large and growing” backlog of filings, reports CNBC, that could cause a delay in several IPOs, as well as a lasting impact on the state of the IPO market in 2019.

Several major technology companies have taken steps toward early-2019 IPOs, all of which are at risk of a delay. A poor performing stock market is only adding fuel to the flames in a year that many had expected would bring record amounts of liquidity to investors via high-profile offerings. Uber, Lyft, Slack and Pinterest have all begun IPO prep, for example, with Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi recently claiming turbulent public markets would not delay the ride-hailing company’s float.

“The good news is that we’ve got a strong balance sheet so we don’t need to go public this year,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a desire [but] if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen. I’d be disappointed and I think our shareholders would be disappointed but the company would be just fine.”

He didn’t comment on the potential resonating effects of a government shutdown, per The WSJ. Uber and its largest U.S. competitor Lyft both filed confidentially with the SEC in December, just weeks before the shutdown began. During the shutdown, companies are still permitted to file confidentially, a method preferred by many companies as it allows them to refrain from disclosing key IPO details and financials to the public ahead of an exit.

Ultimately, tech’s most buzz-worthy unicorns will be the least affected by Trump and co.’s discordance. Well-funded businesses with strong balance sheets, as Khosrowshahi pointed out, have a safety net ready if IPO plans go awry. Smaller businesses, particularly those in need of an infusion of capital to continue operating, will bear the brunt of any IPO delays.

Have a stationary lifestyle and a penchant for lasagna left your cat overweight and sluggish? Sure, kicking dogs off the sides of tables and mailing cats to Abu Dhabi are decent legwork, but what about the full-body workout your furry friend deserves?

That, dear reader, is where The Little Cat comes in. This $1,800 hamster wheel from South Korean company Pet Ding promises to help your feline burn away those excess kilograms. There’s a small, color changing light in the middle of the track for the cat to chase, à la a laser pointer.

An Android/iOS app, meanwhile, moves the light higher, depending on how quickly you want him or her to run. It also offers up distance and calories burned.

This is either the stupidest or most brilliant thing I’ve seen this week at CES. Honestly though, it’s like day 5,000 of the show and I’m very tired right now, so I can’t say for sure. At the very least, your cat will almost certainly appreciate the big ring as a metaphor for the futility of life. Make every day feel like a Monday.

The Little Cat is coming to the U.S. in late March.

Do you frequently record super-slow-motion 8K video? Do you want to back up your entire computer to your coin pocket? Then these measly 512-gigabyte SD cards probably aren’t cutting it. Fortunately, Lexar has a 1-terabyte card for you. Only $500!

Terabyte cards have been promised for years — SanDisk said it was going to, but never made it happen. Longsys (which owns the Lexar brand) beat them to the punch, and today you can buy one. Or pay for one, anyway — it’s unclear what the shipping date is. Funnily enough, Lexar was on its way out at the time as a brand, but has since returned and no doubt this card is a way to get it back into the conversation.

Beyond the capacity, the specs aren’t anything exciting; 95 MB/s read rate, slower read rate, just like any normal SD card. Well, SDXC technically, but everyone just calls them SD.

Of course, a terabyte card isn’t really practical for most people. For most photographers, it would be difficult, not to mention inadvisable, to fill up a card that big before offloading or backing up. If the card gets stolen or broken or corrupted, that’s a whole lot of data you’ve just lost.

Even if you wanted to, it would take some three hours to read the entire card off. That’s not ideal. I asked one of our video team if they’d want a terabyte card; the response: “Uh, no. No way.”

On the other hand, for cameras with two card slots, one could hold a super-high-capacity card like this and the other a smaller card that you offload more frequently. If you write shots to both, it’s like an in-camera backup. Even then, a terabyte is more than most would need.

But of course, we all laughed when the first gigabyte cards came out — who needs that much space?

With 8K video capture becoming more common, mostly for the convenience of cropping and editing rather than for any increased fidelity, and higher frame rates being asked for in many forms of media, a terabyte actually disappears pretty quickly, even with a single shooter. So these terabyte cards will likely find a niche even if you and I don’t really need one.

Even so, maybe wait for a sale.

AWS launched DocumentDB today, a new database offering that is compatible with the MongoDB API. The company describes DocumentDB as a “fast, scalable, and highly available document database that is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools.” In effect, it’s a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB code.

AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does, its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open-source platform that can scale to multiple terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second. So what the company did was build its own document database, but made it compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API.

If you’ve been following the politics of open source over the last few months, you’ll understand that the optics of this aren’t great. It’s also no secret that AWS has long been accused of taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities.

The wrinkle here is that MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license. Since then, others have followed.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB’s document model,” MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told us. “However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”

That’s a pretty feisty comment. Last November, Ittycheria told my colleague Ron Miller that he believed that AWS loved MongoDB because it drives a lot of consumption. In that interview, he also noted that “customers have spent the last five years trying to extricate themselves from another large vendor. The last thing they want to do is replay the same movie.”

MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz echoed this. “In order to give developers what they want, AWS has been pushed to offer an imitation MongoDB service that is based on the MongoDB code from two years ago,” he said. “Our entire company is focused on one thing — giving developers the best way to work with data with the freedom to run anywhere. Our commitment to that single mission will continue to differentiate the real MongoDB from any imitation products that come along.”

A company spokesperson for MongoDB also highlighted that the 3.6 API that DocumentDB is compatible with is now two years old and misses most of the newest features, including ACID transactions, global clusters and mobile sync.

To be fair, AWS has become more active in open source lately and, in a way, it’s giving developers what they want (and not all developers are happy with MongoDB’s own hosted service). Bypassing MongoDB’s licensing by going for API comparability, given that AWS knows exactly why MongoDB did that, was always going to be a controversial move and won’t endear the company to the open-source community.

A bug that anyone can easily exploit in Google makes it easy to kick out manipulated search results that look entirely real.

The search manipulation bug was documented by Wietze Beukema, a London-based security specialist, who warned that a malicious user could use this bug to generate misinformation.

This is done by splicing together values from a Google search result’s “knowledge graph,” the cards that pop up in search results to supplement the search query with visuals and quick facts. Anything from countries, planets, tech news sites and more have cards that appear on the right-side of Google’s search results, displaying other nuggets of information at a glance.

In a blog post, Beukema explained that the short, shareable URL when entered into a Google search result could be chopped and added to the web address of any other search query.

So, when you’d search: “What is the capital of Britain,” you’d expect London to return. Actually, you can make it any value — such as Mars.

It also works if you search “Who is the US president?” You can just manipulate the result to read “Snoop Dogg.”

A bug makes it easy to put the contents of a knowledge card into a search result. (Image: TechCrunch)The manipulated search query doesn’t break HTTPS, so anyone can craft a link, send it in an email, tweet it out or share it on Facebook — and the recipient, one assumes, would be none the wiser. But that can be a real problem in an age of mistrust of internet companies after misinformation campaigns by nation-state actors.

Beukema warned that this search manipulation bug could be used to spread factually incorrect information, or even propaganda.

“Who is responsible for 9/11?” can be pointed to George Bush, a widely held conspiracy theory. “Where was Barack Obama born?” can be pointed to Kenya, another conspiracy theory largely propagated by his successor, Donald Trump, who later backtracked on the claim.

And even, “Which party should I vote for?” can be pointed to either the Republicans or the Democrats.

No wonder so many people think the election was rigged if they think they can click a button and have a search engine tell them who to vote for.

Beukema told TechCrunch that anyone can “generate normal-looking Google URLs that make controversial assertions,” which can “either look bad on Google, or worse, people will accept them as being true.”

He said that he first reported the bug to Google in December 2017, but the report was closed without the company taking any action.

“The ‘attack’ I described relies on this trust people have in Google and the facts it presents,” he said.

The bug is still active at the time of writing. In fact, it’s been known about for almost three years. Beukema simply brought the issue to light after first discovering the issue more than a year ago. But it’s already sparked interest from the hacker community. One developer, Lucas Miller, took just a few hours to build a Python script to automatically generate fake results based on search queries.

It’s a mystery why Google, despite claims of political bias (though no evidence to say it’s true), has taken so long to fix a basic weakness in its search results that would make the service far more trustworthy.

A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that it was “working to fix” the issue.

“There’s an implosion of early-stage VC funding, and no one’s talking about it,” was the headline of a viral article posted on this site in late 2017. Venture capitalists are deploying more capital than ever, the author explained, yet the number of deals for early-stage startups has taken a nosedive.

Roughly one year later, little has changed. Seed activity for U.S. startups has declined for the fourth straight year, according to venture data provider CB Insights, as median deal sizes increased at every stage of venture capital. In 2018, seed activity as a percentage of all deals shrank from 31 percent to 25 percent — a decade low — while the share and size of late-stage deals swelled to record highs. Total annual global VC funding, for its part, shot up 21 percent to $207 billion as deal activity only increased by 10 percent to 14,247 transactions.

The median U.S. seed deal was the highest on record in the fourth quarter of 2018, growing to $2.1 million after kicking off the year at an average of $1.7 million. Early-stage financings — i.e. Series A and Series B fundings — experienced the same trend, expanding to a median of $8 million in Q4, a significant increase from the $5.5 million median recorded in the first quarter of 2017.

The decline in seed deals and the simultaneous increase in deal size began in 2012, and is far from an anomaly at this point. What’s caused the end of seed investing as we know it? A record amount of dry powder in the venture ecosystem has pushed VCs downstream, where they can deploy large sums of capital in more mature companies. Even firms specializing in seed investments are muscling their way into Series A deals. Many seed firms have grown up and become more strategic in their bets, often opting to invest in startups that have found product/market fit rather than those still at the idea stage, despite the fact that historically, idea-stage companies were the target of seed financings. Fortunately, pre-seed, a newer stage of investing consisting of investments of around $500,000, has emerged to support those projects.

Not only are deals fewer and fatter, but companies earning seed investments are older, too. In 2016, for example, companies raising seed deals were older than the median age of a company raising a Series A deal 10 years ago, and Series A companies were older than the median age of Series B companies a decade prior, too.

Fundraising activity suggests deal sizes will only continue to inflate, rather than adjust. Firms in the $100 million to $500 million range are currently the most active fundraisers, and if you pay any attention to the tech press, you know there’s no shortage of fresh billion-dollar funds. Investors at those funds aren’t able to deploy small bits of capital into early-stage startups — not only because the return on the investment isn’t meaningful, but they don’t have the time to devote to those projects, which typically require more support and oversight than their late-stage counterparts.

One thing could send deal sizes back to their normal ranges, however, and that’s the market downturn many VCs are expecting in 2019. Median deal sizes shrank during the Great Recession in 2008, and investors tend to turn away from riskier bets when market conditions grow cold. That means, in a bear market, more attention will be paid to stable, later-stage businesses while early-stage companies are left to their own devices.

Twitter is already working with the NBA to stream video of pre-game warm-ups, in-game and post-game highlights and post-game behind-the-scenes content. Now, the company will for the first time ever stream live NBA action — with a twist. In partnership with the NBA, Twitter will introduce an alternate camera angle view during the second half of the live game, one that’s focused on a single player.

That’s right: NBA fans on Twitter won’t get to hear commentary, or watch the full game — the stream will only go live in the second half.

And they’re not watching the full game action — the stream will be focused on a single player in an isolated camera view.

That may sound like those watching Twitter are getting short-changed, but that is not the full story, according to Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA who spoke about the deal today onstage at CES in Las Vegas alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

A key goal with this deal is to make the experience less like tuning into a live sporting event and more like a social activity, tapping into more platforms where younger users are spending time in a moment where, by many accounts, traditional TV is dying.

“There are a lot of people out there who may not be accessing our games,” said Silver.

“Many of them don’t subscribe to cable TV and that is the transition,” he added. The deal, he said, aims at “cord cutters who aren’t subscribing to pay TV… but still consume massive amounts of NBA content. This gives them the opportunity to see live video” in another place, in complement to the other places such as live streams online. “The best position we can be in is to say here is our content, go at it.”

Dorsey highlighted how basketball was a fitting first-go for this kind of sports content on Twitter, given some of Twitter’s own DNA.

`The NBA fits so well because of the quick pace and how fast things can change,” he said. “The real-time aspect has been a core to almost everything we do.”

There will also be, of course, a social element to how the content is utilized.

The NBA will hold a vote on Twitter to ask fans which player the camera will focus on during the second half.

The way this will work is that fans will be given choices of players for the camera to follow in the second half. They’ll have through halftime to place their votes.

And then, while the camera follows the player during the second half, there will be additional NBA commentary from talent who will provide Twitter commentary.

“Twitter conversation has always been a complement to live action on TV. This groundbreaking partnership makes that complementary experience even richer, bringing additional views fans want to see, and the conversation around the game all together in one place,” said Laura Froelich, senior director, head of U.S. Content Partnerships at Twitter, speaking at CES.

It sounds like this could be laying the groundwork for how Twitter might potentially offer a credible alternative to broadcasting a full game of basketball, or other sports, for that matter. At a time when getting full-game streaming (not broadcast) rights comes with a multi-billion-dollar price tag, any way that Twitter can find to bypass that but still capture some of that audience, while helping sports organizations figure out how to grow their own audiences, is worth exploring.

Twitter will license the streams from the NBA and Turner, which holds the rights to the full, live games. It’s not disclosing the price it’s paying to do this, but it will try to recoup and profit on whatever the value is: Twitter will also attempt to sell advertising around them, on a revenue-share basis with the organizations.

The deal makes Twitter the first social platform to live-stream games in the U.S. — even if it’s only the second half.

“For us, [Twitter has been] an amazing innovation partner. And I also think, just given the fact that it’s such a real-time platform, it’s where the crux of all our conversations are happening. It just makes too much sense,” said Sam Farber, VP, Digital Media at the NBA.

Two and a half years after doing pushups on stage at Disrupt New York, Bay Area-based sports health company Halo Neuroscience is back with the second generation of its brain stimulating headphones.

The biggest update to the spiky wearable this time around is a newfound focus on the headphone aspect of the product. The Halo Sport 2 adds bluetooth audio — a nice change from its hardwired predecessor. After all, no one wants to be tethered while working out.

Co-founder Dr. Daniel Chao tells TechCrunch that it was one of the most requested feature from the first gen. People spending that much on a device like this wanted to be able to continue to use it as standard headphones when not training. There are little tweaks here and there to the hardware, as well, including the spiky contact strip, which is now one piece, so you can remove and dunk it in water more easily.

The other big difference here is price. The original headset ran close to $1,000. This one retails for $399 — or $299, if you get in early. That’s a pretty big dip in cost, and should go a ways toward getting the system into the hands of those of use who aren’t pro athletes. It’s still not cheap, but scale and funding have gone a ways toward helping mainstream the product.

The Sport 2 starts shipping in early April.