Year: 2019

SpaceX is keeping relatively close to schedule on one of the bold timelines pronounced by its CEO Elon Musk – an unusual but welcome twist from the company’s track record of sticking to its predicted timelines. Specifically, SpaceX notes that it has now completed seven system tests of the latest, upgraded version of the parachutes it plans to use with its Crew Dragon capsule when that launches with astronauts on board for the first time.

The parachute system is crucial, since it’s what provides the safe descent for astronauts on board the Crew Dragon when they return from the International Space Station to Earth once SpaceX’s crewed spacecraft is past the testing phase and fully operational. SpaceX has developed multiple iterations of the parachute system, and is currently on version 3, which features upgraded, more durable materials and new seam sewing processes to provide maximum strength.

Musk said in October that 10 successful tests in a row with the Mark 3 system would be the confidence bar SpaceX would have to attain before moving on to using the new system with the crew capsule, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine suggested those 10 tests might be able to be run prior to the end of the year. SpaceX shared on Tuesday that it has now run seven such tests, making that 10 figure seem within range prior to the close of 2019.

That would set SpaceX up nicely for a full demonstration mission and actual crewed launch in the first half of 2020, a timeline Bridenstine has repeated lately for crew launches by both SpaceX and NASA’s other commercial crew partner, Boeing. Boeing is set to do an in-flight abort test, another key milestone for these crewed programs, later this month.

It’s take two for SpaceX’s CRS-19 mission, the 19th Commercial Resupply Mission (see how that works?) it’s flying under contract with NASA. The goal of these missions is to ferry supplies, experimental materials and other equipment to the International Space Station, where it’ll be unloaded by the astronauts living and working aboard the orbiting research station.

SpaceX will be looking to launch this one at 12:29 PM EST (9:29 AM PST), during a backup window after the original planned launch on Wednesday was scrubbed due to high altitude winds. It’s not uncommon for a launch to be pushed back due to weather conditions, and there’s always a chance that today’s attempt could be postponed as well, though currently there’s no additional backup opportunity specified for the next try. The launch livestream from SpaceX above will begin at around 15 minutes before the liftoff time, so around 12:14 PM EST (9:14 AM PST).

This mission will continue SpaceX’s great track record with re-using elements of past launch and mission vehicles, with a Dragon cargo capsule (carrying 5,200 lbs of payload) that has flown twice before – once in 2014 and once in 2017. SpaceX will also look to recover the first stage booster of the Falcon 9 which will carry the Dragon to orbit.

On board, there’s a range of different science experiments, including one from Budweiser seeking to find out how beer production works in space, and new equipment for the ISS, like a robot garage for parking robotic equipment when it’s not in use.

Only 5% of the largest voting counties in the U.S. are protected against email impersonation and phishing attacks, seen as a key attack method by hackers who officials say want to disrupt the upcoming presidential election.

The findings come less than a year before millions of Americans are set to go to the polls to vote for the next U.S. commander-in-chief, amid fears that Russia is preparing to disrupt the upcoming presidential election with tactics to manipulate voters as the U.S. intelligence community found in 2016. U.S. officials aren’t only concerned about the spread of foreign-led disinformation — or “fake news” — to try to alter the outcome of the tally, but also threats facing election infrastructure, like hackers breaking into election websites to dissuade or disenfranchise voters from casting their ballot — or even stealing voter data.

Researchers at Valimail, which has a commercial stake in the email security space, looked at the largest three electoral districts in each U.S. state, and found only 10 out of 187 domains were protected with DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the authenticity of a sender’s email and rejects fraudulent or spoofed emails.

DMARC, when enabled and properly enforced, rejects fake emails that hackers design to spoof a genuine email address by sending to spam or bouncing it from the target’s inbox altogether. Hackers often use spoofed emails to try to trick victims into opening malicious links from people they know.

But the research found that although DMARC is enabled on many domains, it’s not properly enforced, rendering its filtering efforts largely ineffective.

The researchers said 66% of the district election-related domains had no DMARC recoat all, while 28% had either a valid DMARC entry but no enforcement, or an invalid DMARC entry altogether.

That could be a problem for six swing states — Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where their largest districts are not protected from impersonation attacks. These states are critical to both Democrats and Republicans, as their historically razor thin majorities have allowed either parties’ candidates to win.

The worry is that attackers could use the lack of DMARC to impersonate legitimate email addresses to send targeted phishing or malware in order to gain a foothold on election networks or launch attacks, steal data, or delete it altogether, a move that would potentially disrupt the democratic process.

“It does not require a stretch to imagine attackers impersonating election officials via spoofed domains in order to spread disinformation, conduct voter misdirection or voter-suppression campaigns, or even to inject malware into government networks,” said Valimail’s Seth Blank, who authored the research.

“DMARC at enforcement is a crucial best practice for stopping the largest attack vector into any organization,” said Blank.

“It’s time to get it done,” he said.

We’ve got a packed house for the TC Hackathon that kicks off at Disrupt Berlin 2019 in just six days. We may have limited the number of participants to 500 people, but there’s no limit on the skills, creativity and dogged determination of these coders. Hold up now, there’s still time to save money and buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin. Prices increase 10 December.

We can’t wait to see what this group of worthy competitors will design and build in just 24 hours. They’ve been waiting patiently, and it’s almost time to pull back the curtain and reveal our sponsors, the specific challenges and prizes.

If you’re not familiar with how the Hackathon works, here’s the Cliff Notes version. On day one, participants form teams and choose a sponsored challenge. They have 24 hours to build a working product, and we keep them fed, hydrated and pumped up on caffeine.

Judges review all completed projects and select just 10 teams to move on to the finals on day two. Finalists have two minutes to power pitch their work to the judges — on the Extra Crunch Stage in front of a live audience. A not-to-be-missed event!

Each sponsor announces its winners and awards a variety of cash and prizes. Then TechCrunch chooses one team as the creators of the best over-all hack and awards them $5,000!

Cue the drum roll please — here are the additional prizes waiting for you at the Disrupt Berlin TC Hackathon. Start reviewing your options and planning your design strategy now — and get ready to impress.

TomTom

Location technology can add so much to the services we use every day. Whether it is to locate people, track assets and vehicles, visualize location information or display routes, maps are an essential component to any web or mobile application. With TomTom’s Maps API, developers can easily integrate highly detailed and customizable maps in their application with only a few lines of code.

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to use the TomTom Maps APIs (and combine it with other services) to build an innovative on-demand service. Build the next Uber for delivering food, parcels or groceries — or for getting someone to come and fix your bike.

Prize one: Up to four Nintendo Switches for the winning team.

Prize two: Diversity Heroes Award. We’re giving a prize to the team that leverages its diversity to complete the hackathon challenge, and they’ll receive up to five Lego sets of heroes that leveraged diversity to succeed at a complex challenge.

And we will have another prize or two up our sleeve so stay tuned! The TechCrunch Hackathon takes place at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Good luck to all the plucky participants. As for the rest of you, come join us for the thrilling competition and see what determined hackers can build in 24 hours!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

We’ve got a packed house for the TC Hackathon that kicks off at Disrupt Berlin 2019 in just six days. We may have limited the number of participants to 500 people, but there’s no limit on the skills, creativity and dogged determination of these coders. Hold up now, there’s still time to save money and buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin. Prices increase 10 December.

We can’t wait to see what this group of worthy competitors will design and build in just 24 hours. They’ve been waiting patiently, and it’s almost time to pull back the curtain and reveal our sponsors, the specific challenges and prizes.

If you’re not familiar with how the Hackathon works, here’s the Cliff Notes version. On day one, participants form teams and choose a sponsored challenge. They have 24 hours to build a working product, and we keep them fed, hydrated and pumped up on caffeine.

Judges review all completed projects and select just 10 teams to move on to the finals on day two. Finalists have two minutes to power pitch their work to the judges — on the Extra Crunch Stage in front of a live audience. A not-to-be-missed event!

Each sponsor announces its winners and awards a variety of cash and prizes. Then TechCrunch chooses one team as the creators of the best over-all hack and awards them $5,000!

Cue the drum roll please — here are the additional prizes waiting for you at the Disrupt Berlin TC Hackathon. Start reviewing your options and planning your design strategy now — and get ready to impress.

TomTom

Location technology can add so much to the services we use every day. Whether it is to locate people, track assets and vehicles, visualize location information or display routes, maps are an essential component to any web or mobile application. With TomTom’s Maps API, developers can easily integrate highly detailed and customizable maps in their application with only a few lines of code.

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to use the TomTom Maps APIs (and combine it with other services) to build an innovative on-demand service. Build the next Uber for delivering food, parcels or groceries — or for getting someone to come and fix your bike.

Prize one: Up to four Nintendo Switches for the winning team.

Prize two: Diversity Heroes Award. We’re giving a prize to the team that leverages its diversity to complete the hackathon challenge, and they’ll receive up to five Lego sets of heroes that leveraged diversity to succeed at a complex challenge.

And we will have another prize or two up our sleeve so stay tuned! The TechCrunch Hackathon takes place at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Good luck to all the plucky participants. As for the rest of you, come join us for the thrilling competition and see what determined hackers can build in 24 hours!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Walmart’s Flipkart has backed Shadowfax in a new $60 million financing round as the retail giant works to strengthen its logistics network in the nation.

Flipkart, which alone contributed $30 million, led the Series D financing round for the three-year-old Bangalore-based startup, Shadowfax co-founder and chief executive Abhishek Bansal told TechCrunch in an interview.

Existing investors NGP Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Mirae Asset, and Eight Roads Ventures also participated in the round, which brings the startup’s total raise to date to $100 million. The new round valued Shadowfax at about $250 million, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The startup declined to comment on the valuation.

Shadowfax operates a business-to-business logistics network in over 300 cities in India. The startup works with neighbourhood stores to use their real estate to store inventory, and a large network of freelancers who do the delivery. “Anyone with a bicycle or a bike can join our platform and deliver items for us,” said Shadowfax’s Bansal. The startup has also setup its own warehouses and fulfilment hubs.

This logistics network can handle goods in a range of categories including hot food, grocery and e-commerce. Flipkart and food delivery startup Swiggy are among its “hundreds” of clients, he said.

“It’s a very reliable logistics network. And each grocery store is only serving to users in a kilometre radius, so the delivery could be incredibly quick. These grocery stores, whose staff also often participate in delivery, only have to work with us for a few hours in a day, so it’s a quick way for them to make extra money,” he said.

More to follow…

Huawei said today it is suing the Federal Communications Commission, asking to overturn a ban on carriers from using money from the Universal Service Fund (USF) to buy equipment from Huawei and ZTE.

The $8.5 billion USF supports the purchase of equipment to build communications infrastructure, especially in rural communities. Huawei is asking the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to overrule the FCC’s order, passed on Nov. 22.

Small carriers buy equipment from Huawei and ZTE because it is dependable and cheap. According to a Reuters report, some carriers are considering Nokia and Ericsson for replacements, but their equipment is priced less competitively.

During a press conference in Shenzhen today, Glen Nager, Huawei’s lead counsel for the lawsuit, claimed the ban goes beyond the FCC’s authority and violates the constitution. “The order fails to give Huawei constitutionally required due process before stigmatizing it as a national security threat, such as an opportunity to confront supposed evidence and witnesses, and a fair and neutral hearing process,” he said.

Huawei chief legal officer Song Liuping claims that FCC chairman and Ajit Pai and other commissioners did not present evidence to back its claim that Huawei is a security threat.

“This is a common trend in Washington these days. ‘Huawei is a Chinese company.’ That’s his only excuse,” Song said. He also claimed that the FCC ignored 21 rounds of “detailed comments” submitted by Huawei to explain how the order would harm businesses in rural areas, adding “This decision, just like the Entity List decision in May, is based on politics, not security.”

In March, Huawei also cited the Constitution in another lawsuit filed against the U.S. government arguing that a ban on the use of its products by federal agencies and contractors violate due process.

Huawei and ZTE were first identified as potential national security threats in 2012 by a U.S Congressional panel, but federal actions against Huawei and ZTE have intensified over the past year as the trade war between the U.S. and China escalates.

Earlier this year, it was placed on the U.S. Entity List and the Department of Justice announced it was pursuing several criminal charges against Huawei, including conspiracy to steal trade secrets. Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou also faces fraud charges in New York. In response, Huawei has dramatically increased the amount it spends on lobbying in the U.S.

In China, Huawei’s announcement today about its FCC lawsuit was overshadowed by controversy about a former employee, Li Hongyuan who was arrested and detained for eight months after demanding severance pay. Li was arrested on extortion charges and released because of insufficient evidence and his treatment has triggered controversy and anger over the treatment of workers by Huawei and other tech companies.

When AWS announced Outposts, a private cloud hardware stack they install in your data center, last year, there were a lot of unanswered questions. This week at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced general availability as the vision for this approach began to come clearer.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy, speaking at a press conference earlier today said that there are certain workloads like running a factory that need compute resources to be close because of low latency requirements. That’s where Outposts could play well, and where similar existing solutions in his opinion fell short because there wasn’t a smooth connection between the on-prem hardware and the cloud.

“We tried to rethink this with a different approach,” he said. “We thought about it more as trying to distribute AWS on premises. With Outposts, you have racks of AWS servers that have compute, storage, database and analytics and machine learning on them. You get to decide what composition you want and we deliver that to you,” he said.

The hardware is equipped with a slew of services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon ECS, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Amazon EMR. Conspicuously missing is S3 storage, but Amazon promises that will be coming in 2020 with other services on deck as well.

Make no mistake, the world’s premiere cloud infrastructure vendor will be installing a rack of hardware inside your data center. AWS has formed a team inside the company to handle installation, monitoring and management of the equipment.

The easy way to think about this would be that it’s a way for companies, who might be afraid to go all-in on the cloud to start experimenting with a cloud-like environment, which you can manage from an AWS console or VMware (beginning next year). Yet an Amazon spokesperson indicated that many companies like Morningstar and Phillips Healthcare, both of which are already AWS public cloud customers, are choosing Outposts because itgives these customers is ultra low latency, almost like a hyper local availability zone.

These customers need to keep compute resources as close as possible to run a particular set of jobs. While a Local availability zone like the one announced for Los Angeles yesterday could also suffice for this, Outposts could help when there isn’t Local option.

Customers can sign up for Outposts in a similar fashion to any EC2 instance, but instead of spinning it up in the cloud, an order goes to the Outposts team, and it gets racked, stacked and installed on prem.

From then on, Amazon still handles the management just as it does with a public cloud instance. For now installation and going management is being handled by an internal Amazon team, but over time they plan to work with systems integrators to help handle some of that workload.

It didn’t take much for the founders of Cora, Brazil’s newest startup to tackle some aspect of the broken financial services industry in the country, to raise their first $10 million.

Igor Senra and Leo Mendes had worked together before — founding their first online payments company, MOIP, in 2005. That company sold to WireCard in 2016 and after three years the founders were able to strike out again.

They built their initial business servicing the small and medium sized businesses that make up roughly two-thirds of the Brazilian economy and represent some trillion dollars worth of transactions. But at WireCard, they increasingly were told to approach larger customers that didn’t have the same kind of demand for their services, according to Mendes.

So they built Cora — a technology enabled lender to the small and medium-sized businesses that they knew sowell.

The round was led by Kaszek Ventures, one of Latin America’s largest and most successful investment funds, with participation from Ribbit Capital — one of the most influential early-stage fintech investment firms globally.

“We created Cora to pursue our life purpose, which is to solve the financial problems faced by small and medium businesses. These businesses produce 67% of the Brazilian GDP but are totally underserved by the traditional banks”, said Senra, the company’s chief executive, in a statement.

The company is currently operating in closed beta and plans to launch its first product, a free SME-only mobile account in the first half of 2020, according to the statement. Cora will later release a portfolio of payments, credit related products, and financial management tools that are currently being developed.

“So far, large financial institutions have mainly built products that focus either on individuals or on large corporate clients and have totally ignored small and medium sized enterprises, who are the most relevant creators of value in our economies,” said Mendes in a statement. “We want to offer a high-quality, customer-centric suite of financial products that address the specific underserved needs of our clients’ businesses.”