Year: 2019

It’s tax season! You know what that means? It’s scamming season, too.

You might have heard this story before. A scammer starts by spoofing an email pretending to be the chief executive of a company, angrily demanding that someone in accounting or human resources immediately sends over their employees’ W-2 forms “or there will be trouble!” The person doesn’t think twice, not wanting to get told off, and emails back the forms, which spell out exactly how much the employees’ earned and how much the company withheld from your wages in tax for the year.

Lo and behold, they’ve just handed over the crown jewels for committing fraud to criminals.

Then, after the scammers steal your W-2 forms, they file your tax returns as though they were you. By fudging the numbers, they can trick the Internal Revenue Service into turning over a tax refund — which then they cash in, using none other than the information from your stole W-2 form.

All the while, you’re putting off doing your taxes until late March because the thought of doing them is so depressing that you literally need months of mental preparation before you start crunching the numbers.

These so-called “W-2 scams” are far too easy to carry out. They’re easy for scammers to obtain and the scammers go undetected for weeks or months, and the IRS doesn’t tell you when your tax return has been filed, meaning anyone can do it without your knowledge.

Scamming consumers out of their tax refunds costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year — and the IRS knows full well how damaging these scams can be. Earlier this year, a government watchdog said that the IRS could do a lot more to prevent W-2 scams in the future — not least telling taxpayers when their filings have been accepted, so that it can be withheld and refunds are protected in case the taxpayer flags it as fraudulent.

Right now, the U.S. is in the midst of a government shutdown — and that’s affecting the IRS. Normally, the IRS lets you start submitting your tax returns by the end of January. This year, it’s not clear when taxpayers can start submitting their filings. Worse, because of the shutdown, any refunds are expected to be delayed.

But it doesn’t mean you can drag your feet and put things off. Now’s a better time than ever to get prepared.

If you haven’t already received your W-2 by mail, you’ll receive it from your employer the end of January. (Many companies these days let you download your W-2 form early through Workday, if you’re subscribed, or other internal corporate portals.) Once you’ve received all of the documents and paperwork you need to file, sit down with a pot of coffee and get the return done.

Once the IRS flings open the doors, file your return as soon as possible.

You should check before you file using the IRS’ filing status checker to see if your tax return has already been submitted. If it has, contact your company and speak to the IRS to file a certain form to get it voided.

Remember, in security, humans are the weakest link. And that’s never been more true than during tax season.

If you have a job today, there’s a good chance you personally reached out to your employer and interviewed with other humans to get it. Now that you’ve been there a while, it’s also likely the workday feels more like a long slog than the fulfilling career move you had envisioned.

But if today’s early-stage startups have their way, your next employment experience could be quite different.

First, forget the networking and interview gauntlet. Instead, let an AI-enabled screening program reach out about a job you don’t seem obviously qualified to do. Or, rather than talk to a company’s employees, wait for them to play some online games instead. If you play similarly, they may decide to hire you.

Once you have the job, software will also make you more efficient and happier at your work.

An AI-driven software platform will deliver regular “nudges,” offering customized suggestions to make you a more effective worker. If you’re feeling burned out, head online to text or video chat with a coach or therapist. Or perhaps you’ll just be happier in your job now that your employer is delivering regular tokens of appreciation.

Those are a few of the ways early-stage startups are looking to change the status quo of job-seeking and employment. While employment is a broad category, an analysis of Crunchbase funding data for the space shows a high concentration of activity in two key areas: AI-driven hiring software and tools to improve employee engagement.

Below, we look at where the money’s going and how today’s early-stage startups could play a role in transforming the work experience of tomorrow.

Artificial intelligence

To begin, let us reflect that we are at a strange inflection point for AI and employment. Our artificially intelligent overlords are not smart enough to actually do our jobs. Nonetheless, they have strong opinions about whether we’re qualified to do them ourselves.

It is at this peculiar point that the alchemic mix of AI software, recruiting-based business models and venture capital are coming together to build startups.

In 2018, at least 43 companies applying AI or machine learning to some facet of employment have raised seed or early-stage funding, according to Crunchbase data. In the chart below, we look at a few startups that have secured rounds, along with their backers and respective business models:

At present, even AI boosters don’t tout the technology as a cure-all for troubles plaguing the talent recruitment space. While it’s true humans are biased and flawed when it comes to evaluating job candidates, artificially intelligent software suffers from many of the same bugs. For instance, Amazon scrapped its AI recruiting tool developed in-house because it exhibited bias against women.

That said, it’s still early innings. Over the next few years, startups will be actively tweaking their software to improve performance and reduce bias.

Happiness and engagement

Once the goal of recruiting the best people is achieved, the next step is ensuring they stay and thrive.

Usually, a paycheck goes a long way to accomplishing the goal of staying. But in case that’s not enough, startups are busily devising a host of tools for employers to boost engagement and fight the scourge of burnout.

In the chart below, we look at a few of the companies that received early-stage funding this year to build out software platforms and services aimed at making people happier and more effective at work:

The most heavily funded of the early-stage crop looks to be Peakon, which offers a software platform for measuring employee engagement and collecting feedback. The Danish firm has raised $33 million to date to fund its expansion.

London-based BioBeats is another up-and-comer aimed at the “corporate wellness” market, with digital tools to help employees track stress levels and other health-related metrics. The company has raised $7 million to date to help keep those stress levels in check.

Early-stage indicators

Early-stage funding activity tends to be an indicator of areas with somewhat low adoption rates today that are poised to take off dramatically. For employment, that means we can likely expect to see AI-based recruitment and software-driven engagement tools become more widespread in the coming years.

What does that mean for job seekers and paycheck toilers? Expect to spend more of your time interfacing with intelligent software. Apparently, it’ll make you more employable, and happier, too.

Security researchers say they’ve found more than a dozen iPhone apps covertly communicating with a server associated with Golduck, a historically Android-focused malware that infects popular classic game apps.

The malware has been known about for over a year, after it was first discovered by Appthority infecting classic and retro games on Google Play, by embedding backdoor code that allowed malicious payloads to be silently pushed to the device. At the time, more than 10 million users were affected by the malware, allowing hackers to run malicious commands at the highest privileges, like sending premium SMS messages from a victim’s phone to make money.

Now, the researchers say iPhone apps linked to the malware could also present a risk.

Wandera, an enterprise security firm, said it found 14 apps — all retro-style games — that were communicating with the same command and control server used by the Golduck malware.

“The [Golduck] domain was on a watchlist we established due to its use in distributing a specific strain of Android malware in the past,” said Michael Covington, Wandera’s vice-president of product. “When we started seeing communication between iOS devices and the known malware domain, we investigated further.”

The apps include: Commando Metal: Classic Contra, Super Pentron Adventure: Super Hard, Classic Tank vs Super Bomber, Super Adventure of Maritron, Roy Adventure Troll Game, Trap Dungeons: Super Adventure, Bounce Classic Legend, Block Game, Classic Bomber: Super Legend, Brain It On: Stickman Physics, Bomber Game: Classic Bomberman, Classic Brick – Retro Block, The Climber Brick, and Chicken Shoot Galaxy Invaders.

According to the researchers, what they saw so far seems relatively benign — the command and control server simply pushes a list of icons in a pocket of ad space in the upper-right corner of the app. When the user opens the game, the server tells the app which icons and links it should serve to the user. They did, however, see the apps sending IP address data — and, in some cases, location data — back to the Golduck command and control server. TechCrunch verified their claims, running the apps on a clean iPhone through a proxy, allowing us to see where the data goes. Based on what we saw, the app tells the malicious Golduck server what app, version, device type, and the IP address of the device — including how many ads were displayed on the phone.

As of now, the researchers say that the apps are packed with ads — likely as a way to make a quick buck. But they expressed concern that the communication between the app and the known-to-be-malicious server could open up the app — and the device — to malicious commands down the line.

“The apps themselves are technically not compromised; while they do not contain any malicious code, the backdoor they open presents a risk for exposure that our customers do not want to take.

“A hacker could easily use the secondary advertisement space to display a link that redirects the user and dupes them into installing a provisioning profile or a new certificate that ultimately allows for a more malicious app to be installed,” said the researchers.

One of the iPhone apps, “Classic Bomber,” which was spotted communicating with a malicious command and control server. It’s since been pulled from the U.S. store. (Screenshot: TechCrunch)

That could be said for any game or app, regardless of device maker or software. But the connection to a known malicious server isn’t a good look. Covington said that the company has “observed malicious content being shared from the server,” but that it wasn’t related to the games.

The implication is that if the server is sending malicious payloads to Android users, iPhone users could be next.

TechCrunch sent the list of apps to data insights firm Sensor Tower, which estimated that the 14 apps had been installed close to one million times since they were released — excluding repeated downloads or installs across different devices.

When we tried contacting the app makers, many of the App Store links pointed to dead links or to pages with boilerplate privacy policies but no contact information. The registrant on the Golduck domain appears to be fake, along with other domains associated with Golduck, which often have different names and email addresses.

Apple did not comment when reached prior to publication. The apps are appear to still be downloadable from the App Store, but all now say they are “not currently available in the U.S. store.”

Apple’s app stores may have a better rap than Google’s, which every once in a while lets malicious apps slip through the net. In reality, neither store is perfect. Earlier this year, security researchers found a top-tier app in the Mac App Store that was collecting users’ browsing history without permission, and dozens of iPhone apps that were sending user location data to advertisers without explicitly asking first.

For the average user, malicious apps remain the largest and most common threat to mobile users — even with locked down device software and the extensive vetting of apps.

If there’s one lesson, now and always: don’t download what you don’t need, or can’t trust.

As every software company knows, over time as code ages and workarounds build on work-arounds, the code base becomes bloated. It becomes ever more difficult to get around the technical debt that you’ve built up over time. It’s really impossible to avoid this phenomenon, but at some point, companies realize that the debt is so great that it’s limiting their ability to build new functionality. That’s precisely what Trulia faced in 2017 when it began a process of paying down that debt and modernizing its architecture.

Trulia is a real estate site founded way back in 2005, an eternity ago in terms of technology. The company went public in 2012 and was acquired by Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion, but has continued to operate as an independent brand under the Zillow umbrella. It understood that a lot had changed technologically in the 12 years since its inception when engineering began thinking about this. The team knew it had a humongous, monolithic code base that was inhibiting the ability to update the site.

While they tried to pull out some of the newer functions as services, it didn’t really make the site any more nimble because these services always had to tie back into that monolithic central code base. The development team knew if it was to escape this coding trap, it would take a complete overhaul.

Brainstorming broad change

As you would expect, a process like this doesn’t happen overnight, taking months to plan and implement. It all started back in 2017 when the company held what they called an “Innovation Week” with the entire engineering team. Groups of engineers came up with ideas about how to solve this problem, but the one that got the most attention was one called Project Islands, which involved breaking out the different pieces of the site as individual coding islands that could operate independently of one another.

It sounds simple, but in practice it involved breaking down the entire code base into services. They would use Next.js and React to rebuild the front end and GraphQL, an open source graph database technology to rebuild the back end.

Deep Varma, Trulia’s VP of engineering, pointed out that as a company founded in 2005, the site was built on PHP and MySQL, two popular development technologies from that time. Varma says that whenever his engineers made a change to any part of the site, they needed to do a complete system release. This caused a major bottleneck.

What they really needed to do was move to a completely modern microservices architecture that allowed engineering teams to work independently in a continuous delivery approach without breaking any other team’s code. That’s where the concept of islands came into play.

Islands in the stream

The islands were actually microservices. Each one could communicate to a set of central common services like authentication, A/B testing, the navigation bar, the footer — all of the pieces that every mini code base would need, while allowing the teams building these islands to work independently and not require a huge rebuild every time they added a new element or changed something.

Cousine island. Seychelles. Photo: Martin Harvey/Getty Images

The harsh reality of this kind of overhaul came into focus as the teams realized they had to be writing the new pieces while the old system was still in place and running. In a video the company made describing the effort, one engineer likened it to changing the engine of a 747 in the middle of a flight.

Varma says he didn’t try to do everything at once, as he needed to see if the islands approach would work in practice first. In November 2017, he pulled the first engineering team together, and by January it had built the app shell (the common services piece) and one microservice island. When the proof of concept succeeded, Varma knew they were in business.

Building out the archipelago

It’s one thing to build a single island, but it’s another matter to build a chain of them and that would be the next step. By last April, engineering had shown enough progress that they were able to present the entire idea to senior management and get the go-ahead to move forward with a more complex project.

Photo of Rock Islands, Palau, Micronesia: J.W.Alker/Getty Images

First, it took some work with the Next.js development team to get the development framework to work the way they wanted. Varma said he brought in the Next.js team to work with his engineers. He said that they needed to figure out how to stitch the various islands together and resolve dependencies among the different services. The Next.js team actually changed its development roadmap for Trulia, speeding up delivery of these requirements, understanding that other companies would have similar issues.

By last July, the company released Neighborhoods, the first fully independent island functionality on the site. Recently, it moved off-market properties to islands. Off-market properties, as the name implies, are pages with information about properties that are no longer on the market. Varma says that these pages actually make up a significant portion of the company’s traffic.

While Varma would not say just how much of the site has been moved to islands at this point, he said the goal is to move the majority to the new platform in 2019. All of this shows that a complete overhaul of a complex site doesn’t happen overnight, but Trulia is taking steps to move off the original system it created in 2005 and move to a more modern and flexible architecture it has created with islands. It may not have paid down its technical debt in full in 2018, but it went a long way on laying the foundation to do so.

Venture capitalists swore in the new year the only way they know how… by submitting SEC paperwork for new funds! insert party hat/confetti emoji here.

As many of us brainstormed our New Year’s resolutions and let our hangovers wear off, several firms began this week what for some is a long and arduous process of raising a VC fund and for others is as simple as a few phone calls to LPs. What else happened this week? Pokémon GO creator Niantic secured $190 million, Mary Meeker announced the name of her fund and a whole bunch of people played with Popsugar’s somewhat sketchy twinning app.

Fresh funds:

Mary Meeker will raise up to $1.5 billion for Bond, her new VC fund. Union Square Ventures raised $429 million across two new funds. Lightspeed Venture partners announced a $560 million China fund. And biotech firm Atlas Venture brought in $250 million.

AR startups are failing:

TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney takes a look at struggling augmented reality startups and questions some of the larger players, from Magic Leap to Snap and Niantic. And speaking of Niantic, the Pokémon GO developer closed a $190 million funding round this week at a $3.9 billion valuation.

Indian startups start the year off strong:

Startups based in India raised more than $10 billion in 2018, per Venture Beat, a record amount of capital for the country. Already this year one company has closed a round larger than $100 million. CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round this week to push deeper into financial services and insurance.

Future tech:

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

A startup disrupting the … bottled water business:

FloWater has raised $15 million for its reusable water bottle refilling stations to produce purified water. Bluewater, a Swedish company that sells water purifiers, among other things, led the round.

VC subsidized vending machines:

Vengo makes wall-mounted mini-vending machines the size of large picture frames that it then sells to vending machine distributors, asking for a small fee per month in exchange for access to its software. Now it has $7 million to build out its business.

A VC gets a second chance:

After SpaceX filed more SEC paperwork as part of its $500 million upcoming fundraise, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos noticed a familiar name on the document: Steve Jurvetson. Jurvetson is a longtime board member of both Tesla and SpaceX, but after he left DFJ, the venture capital firm he co-founded, in 2017 amid questions about his personal conduct, there was uncertainty around whether he would keep those director positions. Well, it looks like Elon Musk is standing by Jurvetson.

And finally, are you smarter than a TechCrunch reporter?

Let this test decide.

Jonathan Teo, long a Bay Area venture capitalist, might be regretting having a Twitter account tonight. The reason: it was used to serve a summons to Teo by the law firm Baker Curtis & Schwartz, which represents a former employee of the early-stage venture firm Teo had cofounded in 2014, Binary Capital.

The plaintiff is Ann Lai, who joined Binary in 2015 and whose role at the firm, according to her complaint, was to be “primarily responsible for establishing [Binary’s] data-driven sourcing strategy, conducting the diligence regarding their potential investments, and supporting their portfolio companies on analytics/growth strategies.”

Yet Lai, who has three Harvard degrees, says that she battled discrimination and harassment on the job “almost from the day she started work,” according to her lawsuit.

Among Lai’s grievances: that Teo and firm cofounder Justin Caldbeck “requested and received headshots of female applicants that they sought to hire, and assessed these headshots for attractiveness. They also searched the applicants’ social media profiles to determine their relative ‘hotness.'” The complaint also states the Teo, Caldbeck, and Binary, which the two controlled, “expressed a desire to hold a company retreat, without significant others, at a location in which no one would wear clothes.”

The lurid details go on.

Ultimately, states the complaint — which was originally filed by her attorneys in 2017 and amended back in September — Lai was denied benefits, opportunities, and compensation owed to her because she pushed back against such conduct. She was also forced to resign and was defamed by both Caldbeck and Teo in the aftermath of her departure, says the suit, which seeks civil penalties.

The Information first reported in June of 2017 that, according to half a dozen women in the tech industry, Caldbeck had made unwanted advanced toward them. He resigned shortly afterward, while Teo fought unsuccessfully to keep Binary a going concern.

What happens next remains to be seen, but it’s certainly interesting that Lai’s attorneys used social media to reach Teo. They had no choice, they argue in an “ex parte application for order of publication of summons.” They say they tried reaching his attorneys as well as reaching Teo at the address where he last lived in San Francisco, but they say that not only has Teo since moved to an unknown address, his attorneys claimed to not know his whereabouts and refused to accept the summons on his behalf.

There was a precedent for the lawyers’ move. In fact, multiple cases have been granted similar approval by the court system to reach subjects via both Facebook and Twitter after they evaded being served, largely because social media is now the one point of contact that people typically maintain even when they flee to a foreign country of otherwise make themselves difficult to locate. For his part, Teo last tweeted from his account on December 12.

Worth noting: Lai’s attorneys — who also represented former Uber engineer Susan Fowler after she published her account of sexual harassment and sexism at the company — were able to serve Caldbeck this fall, they say through filings.

Caldbeck subsequently agreed to pay Lai $85,000 in exchange for her dismissing litigation against him personally.

We know Disney’s Star Wars Land (or “Galaxy’s Edge,” if we’re being formal) is opening sometime in summer 2019. But that’s about as exact as anyone at Disney would get.

The rumors said June. Now, it seems, so does Disney CEO Bob Iger.

Iger casually dropped the June target in an interview with Barron’s (as spotted by the OC Register).

You can read the full interview here, but the key bit comes in a question about the strategic impact of Galaxy’s Edge.

When Star Wars opens in Anaheim in June and in Florida later in the year, that’s adding capacity. You’re adding 14 acres of land [each], more rides, and more things for people to do.

So while it’s not as official as a press release, it’s about the next best thing. Anaheim in June, Florida still “later in the year.”

A June target makes a ton of sense, of course. Disney wants to make the biggest possible splash right out of the gate, which means opening the doors when the greatest number of people can visit. While Disney won’t have any trouble getting people into Star Wars Land, they might as well clear the runway. June means summer vacation, and summer vacation means ticket sales. Combine that with an unusual uptick in season pass blackout dates for June of 2019, and it really seems like all the stars are aligned for June.

Coming in at roughly 14 acres, Galaxy’s Edge is one of Disney’s biggest endeavors in years. It’s got a Millennium Falcon! It’s got a cantina with blue milk (and booze!). It’s got a hotel where guests get their own friggin’ storylines! As with anything Star Wars, expectations are going to be ridiculously high — but after seeing what they’ve done with Cars Land or Pandora (the Avatar-themed land in Florida), I’m convinced they’ll pull it off.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is looking to keep his ex-girlfriend Grimes and alleged acquaintance Azealia Banks out of the official record of a lawsuit concerning his “420” “joke” that brought the SEC down on him. An attempt to subpoena both Grimes and Banks was met with stiff opposition by Musk’s lawyer, who accused the plaintiffs of attempting to sensationalize the case.

As you may remember — though it seems so long ago now — Musk tweeted that he was “considering taking Tesla private at $420,” adding “Funding secured.”

Those initiated in weed culture recognized the nod to the official time of day for getting high, and soon afterwords came Instagram posts from Azealia Banks claiming that she had been staying at his place at the time at the invite of Grimes, that he had been high at the time of the tweet and that the share price was chosen as a clumsy joke to impress his girlfriend.

There were also questions as to the actual existence of funding, the wisdom of announcing such an important thing on Twitter without telling his board, and so on, leading to action by the SEC and shareholders. As part of a lawsuit filed by the latter, the plaintiffs wanted to subpoena Banks and Grimes (real name Claire Elise Boucher), whom they suggested had relevant evidence. Musk’s attorney, Dean Kristy, pushed back in a motion of opposition.

He first complains that the plaintiffs did not follow procedure, but then suggests that Grimes is uninvolved and Banks is a “rapper” (in shade quotes) and a crank. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

Moreover, by targeting Mr. Musk’s girlfriend at the time (who has never worked for Tesla) and, according to published reports, a “rapper” who, based on the articles plaintiff has submitted, has a “history of making bold and sometimes unverified claims,” is a “veteran of long and nonsensical beefs [and has] feuded with everyone from Sarah Palin to Nick Cannon,” and has been “banned” from Twitter (see Pl. Exs. A, B), it is readily apparent that this is more of an effort to sensationalize these proceedings than a serious, legitimate effort to preserve “electronic documents” of third parties with first-hand knowledge of important facts.

A history of Banks’s greatest hits on social media followed, which I need not recap here.

Not only that, but there is no evidence, Kristy wrote, that Grimes, Banks or the media outlets also named were likely to discard any relevant evidence (Gizmodo, for example, is not going to delete its post on the whole affair, which is no doubt still getting traffic), for which additional reason the request should be denied.

Whether the plaintiffs will succeed in officially involving the parties in question is not for me to say, but it seems clear that at the very least they have unofficially involved them. Whether that proves a benefit or hindrance to their case in the end is similarly up in the air.

Signs that the Federal Reserve could hold off on further interest rate hikes coupled with a booming jobs report sent stocks on Wall Street surging to close a volatile first trading week for the New Year.

After yesterday’s Apple-induced slide, and in the face of economic indicators that signaled a potential slowdown in global and domestic growth, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said that the central bank would be “patient” when it comes to raising interest rates.

That news, coupled with a strong jobs report, sent stocks rocketing up. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 746.9 points, or roughly 3.3 percent, while the Nasdaq shot up 4.3 percent, or 275.4 points.

It wasn’t just the Fed chairman’s observations about the potential for rate hikes in 2019 that had investors buying, but assurances about Powell’s job security in the face of increasing pressure from President Trump.

Speaking at a panel discussion of the American Economic Association alongside former Federal Reserve chairs Janet L. Yellen and Ben Bernanke, Powell said that he would not resign if asked by the president.

Immediately after Powell’s comments stocks began surging.

“With the muted inflation readings that we’ve seen coming in, we will be patient as we watch to see how the economy evolves,” Powell was quoted as saying in The Washington Post. “We’re always prepared to shift the stance of policy and to shift it significantly if necessary.”

It won’t be long before the James Webb Space Telescope is launched, an enormous and complex feat of engineering — but all one piece. That’s a good thing for now, but new research suggests that in the near future giant telescopes like the Webb might be replaced (or at least augmented) by swarms of tiny spacecraft working in concert.

One advance, from Ben Gurion University in Israel, is a leap in the capabilities of what are called synthetic aperture systems. It’s a technique where a single small camera moves across a space, capturing images as it goes, and by very careful analysis of the data it collects, it can produce imagery like that created by a much larger camera — essentially synthesizing a bigger aperture.

As documented in a paper published today in Optica, the team leapfrogs existing methods in an interesting way. Two satellites move in synchrony around the edge of a circle, collecting data as they go and beaming it to a third stationary one; this circle describes the synthetic aperture the two cameras are creating.

“We found that you only need a small part of a telescope lens to obtain quality images,” explained BGU grad student Angika Bulbul, who led the research, in a news release. “Even by using the perimeter aperture of a lens, as low as 0.43 percent, we managed to obtain similar image resolution compared to the full aperture area of mirror/lens-based imaging systems.”

In other words, they were basically able to get the results of a camera 50 times the size. That would be impressive anywhere, but up in space it’s especially important. Putting something as huge and complex as the Webb into orbit is an incredibly complicated and drawn out endeavor. And it’s putting a lot of eggs in one (very carefully checked and rechecked) basket.

But if you could instead use a handful of satellites working together, and just replace one if it fails, that really opens up the field. “We can slash the huge cost, time and material needed for gigantic traditional optical space telescopes with large curved mirrors,” Bulbul said.

One of the challenges of space telescopes, however, is that they need to take measurements with extreme precision. And keeping a satellite perfectly still is hard enough, to say nothing of having it move perfectly to within fractions of a millimeter.

To keep on track, right now many satellites use reliable fixed sources of light, like bright stars, as reference points when calculating various things relating to their operations. Some astronomers have even used lasers to excite a point high in the atmosphere to provide a sort of artificial star for these systems to use.

These methods both have their strengths and weaknesses, but MIT researchers think they’ve found a more permanent, high-precision solution: a “guide star” satellite that would sit thousands of miles out and train a strong laser on the Earth and its orbital region.

This light source would be reliable, steady, and highly visible; satellites could use it to calculate their position and the minute changes to their imaging apparatus caused by heat and radiation, perhaps to a degree not possible with actual stars or atmospheric dots.

Both these intriguing technologies are still very much in the lab, but theory is where all big advances start, and it could be that in a few years, swarms of satellites will be sent into space not to provide terrestrial communications, but to create a massive synthetic telescope looking out on the universe.