Author: azeeadmin

If you’ve got any gear from Lowe’s Iris line of smart home products, it’s time to start looking for alternatives.

Lowe’s has announced that the line is toast, with plans to flip the switch on “the platform and related services” at the end of March. In other words: much of this once smart connected gear is about to get bricked.

On the upside, Lowe’s is committing to refund customers for “eligible, connected Iris devices” — with the caveat that you’ve got to go through its redemption portal. “PLEASE DO NOT BRING YOUR CONNECTED IRIS DEVICES BACK TO A LOWE’S STORE,” they note repeatedly. They don’t want it either.

Refunds will be issued in the form of a prepaid Visa card. They also note that some — but definitely not all — Iris-compatible devices work with alternatives like Samsung’s SmartThings platform.

As of November of 2018, Lowe’s was attempting to find a buyer for the product line.

It might seem easier than ever to make any home a smart home — but for many, it’s still just a maze. Type “smart lightbulb” into your favorite mega online retail site — half of the results are probably from mystery brands that you’ve never heard of. Are they secure? If someone finds some nasty exploit that lets hackers tap that lightbulb to poke around your wider network, will it be patched? Will they even work in a year? For anyone who walked into a Lowe’s and figured they could count on the house brand to stick around, the answer to that last one, it seems, is a no.

This is why people worry about Internet of Things gadgets that can “betray you even after you toss them in the trash”: these things probably won’t last forever.

“KP used to be a small team doing hands-on company building. We’re moving away from being this institution with multiple products and really just focusing on early-stage venture capital,” Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman tells me. Indeed, 47 years after its founding, the storied venture fund is going “back to the future” with today’s announcement of an 18th fund — a $600 million fund for seed, Series A and Series B financings. It’s investing across consumer, enterprise, hard tech and fintech, looking for high-potential teams to help mold into unicorns.

Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman

“We went out to market to LPs. We got a lot of interest. We were significantly oversubscribed,” Fushman says of the firm’s raise.

Kleiner Perkins was recently rocked by the departure of legendary investor Mary Meeker. She took Kleiner partners Mood Rowghani, Noah Knauf and Juliet de Baubigny, and they’re reportedly raising a $1.25 billion growth fund called Bond. Fushman explained that with Kleiner refocusing on early-stage, their funds will be well-differentiated. “They’re going to focus on very late-stage growth,” while he described Kleiner fund 18 as a place where partners can “collaborate and create” alongside new startups.

Other trends Kleiner is seeking to invest in include better distributed work tools, infrastructure for technology businesses, shifts in the urban and economic landscape and security and identity tools to protect the software-enabled future. Recent early-stage investments from the firm have included wellness product subscription service FabFitFun, tax and insurance safety net Catch and food stamps app Propel.

With the explosion of early-stage funds, competition for the best deals is cutthroat. Kleiner will have to trade on its reputation, the expertise of its founders and its extensive connections to lure in founders. If entrepreneurs think Kleiner can fund their mid-stage rounds like some seed funds can’t, or hook them up with potential acquirers whether things go peachy or pear-shaped, they’ll open their cap table.

Amazon had a heck of a holiday. The online retail giant posted Q4 earnings today, reporting $72.4 billion in revenue, topping last year’s $60.45 billion and besting the analysts’ forecast of $71.92 billion.

Extremely wealthy individual Jeff Bezos singled out Alexa’s record holiday season as a source of the robust quarter.

“Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year,” the CEO said of the earnings. “The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s hard work are clear.”

Amazon Web Services also played a key role here, with a massive $2.2 billion operating income. AWS’s $7.43 billion sales beat the $7.29 billion analysts’ estimate and marked a healthy jump from last year’s $5.11 billion. 

The numbers look good, though; as CNBC notes, the 19.7 percent revenue growth for the quarter is the lowest since 2015. Wall Street reaction was further dampened by Amazon’s lowered guidance for Q1. Amazon put revenue for the upcoming quarter at between $56 billion and $60 billion, below analyst expectations of $60.99 billion.

Keeping its spot among the top countries who are competing in the space race, China is planning to launch 30 missions this year, according to information from the state-run China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., reported by the Xinhua news agency.

Last year, China outpaced the United States in the number of national launches it had completed through the middle of December, according to a report in the MIT Technology Review. Public and private Chinese companies launched 35 missions that were reported to the public through 2018 compared to 30 from the U.S., wrote Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College.

“Privately funded space startups are changing China’s space industry,” Johnson-Freese wrote at the time. “And even without their help, China is poised to become a space power on par with the United States.”

Major missions for 2019 will include the Long March-5 large carrier rocket, whose last launch was marred by malfunction. If the new Long March launch goes well, China will stage another flight to launch a probe designed to bring lunar samples back to Earth at the end of 2019.

China will also send still another version of the Long March rocket to the lay the groundwork for the country’s private space station.

While the bulk of China’s activity in space is being handled through government ministries and state owned companies, private companies are starting to make their mark as well.

Landspace, OneSpace and iSpace form a triumvirate of privately held Chinese companies that are all developing launch vehicles and planning to carry payloads to space.

In all, using some back of the napkin math and the calendar of launches available at Spaceflight Insider , there were roughly 80 major rocket launches this year that were scheduled.

Those figures mean that over once a week a rocket blasted off to deliver some sort of payload to a place above the atmosphere. RocketLab put its first commercial payload into orbit in November, and launched a second rocket the following month. Meanwhile, SpaceX, the darling of the private space industry, launched 21 rockets itself.

Notification spam ruins social networks, diluting the real human interaction. Desperate to gain an audience, users pay services to rapidly follow and unfollow tons of people in hopes that some will follow them back. The services can either automate this process or provide tools for users to generate this spam themselves, Earlier this month, a TechCrunch investigation found over two dozen follow-spam companies were paying Instagram to run ads for them. Instagram banned all the services in response an vowed to hunt down similar ones more aggressively.

ManageFlitter’s spammy follow/unfollow tools

Today, Twitter is stepping up its fight against notification spammers. Earlier today, the functionality of three of these services — ManageFlitter, Statusbrew, Crowdfire — ceased to function, as spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra.

TechCrunch inquired with Twitter about whether it had enforced its policy against those companies. A spokesperson provided this comment: “We have suspended these three apps for having repeatedly violated our API rules related to aggressive following & follow churn. As a part of our commitment to building a healthy service, we remain focused on rapidly curbing spam and abuse originating from use of Twitter’s APIs.” These apps will cease to function since they’ll no longer be able to programatically interact with Twitter to follow or unfollow people or take other actions.

Twitter’s policies specify that “Aggressive following (Accounts who follow or unfollow Twitter accounts in a bulk, aggressive, or indiscriminate manner) is a violation of the Twitter Rules.” This is to prevent a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation. These services and their customers exploit Twitter’s platform, worsening the experience of everyone else to grow these customers’ follower counts. We dug into these three apps and found they each promoted features designed to help their customers spam Twitter users.

ManageFlitter‘s site promotes how “Following relevant people on Twitter is a great way to gain new followers. Find people who are interested in similar topics, follow them and often they will follow you back.” For $12 to $49 per month, customers can use this feature shown in the GIF above to rapidly follow others, while another feature lets them check back a few days later and rapidly unfollow everyone who didn’t follow them back. 

Crowdfire had already gotten in trouble with Twitter for offering a prohibited auto-DM feature and tools specifically for generating follow notifications. Yep it only changed its functionality to dip just beneath the rate limits Twitter imposes. It seems it preferred charging users up to $75 per month to abuse the Twitter ecosystem than accept that what it was doing was wrong.

StatusBrew details how “Many a time when you follow users, they do not follow back . . . thereby, you might want to disconnect with such users after let’s say 7 days. Under ‘Cleanup Suggestion’ we give you a reverse sorted list of the people who’re Not Following Back”. It charges $25 to $416 month for these spam tools. After losing its API access today, StatusBrew posted a confusing half-mea culpa, half-“it was our customers’ fault” blog post announcing it will shut down its follow/unfollow features.

Twitter tells TechCrunch it will allow these companies “apply for a new developer account and register a new, compliant app” but the existing apps will remain suspended. I think they deserve an additional time-out period. But still, this is a good step towards Twitter protecting the health of conversation on its platform from greedy spam services. I’d urge the company to also work to prevent companies and sketchy individuals from selling fake followers or follow/unfollow spam via Twitter ads or tweets.

When you can’t trust that someone who follows you is real, the notifications become meaningless distractions, faith in finding real connection sinks, and we become skeptical of the whole app. It’s the users that lose, so it’s the platforms’ responsibility to play referee.

Houzz, a $4 billion-valued home improvement startup that recently laid off 10 percent of its staff, has admitted a data breach.

A reader contacted TechCrunch on Thursday with a copy of an email sent by the company. It doesn’t say much — such as when the breach happened, or if a hacker to blame or if it was a data exposure that the company could’ve prevented.

Houzz spokesperson Gabriela Hebert would not comment beyond an FAQ posted on the company’s website, citing an ongoing investigation.

In that FAQ, the company said it “recently learned that a file containing some of our user data was obtained by an unauthorized third party.” It added: “We immediately launched an investigation and engaged with a leading forensics firm to assist in our investigation, containment, and remediation efforts.”

The company said it was notifying all of its users who may have been affected.

An email from a Houzz user. (Image: supplied)

Houzz said some publicly visible information from a user’s Houzz profile, such as name, city, state, country and profile description, along with internal identifiers and fields “that have no discernible meaning to anyone outside of Houzz,” such as the region and location of the user and if they have a profile image, for example, the company said.

The company also said that usernames and scrambled passwords were also taken.

Houzz said that the passwords were scrambled and salted using a one-way hashing algorithm, but did not provide specifics on what kind of hashing algorithm was used. Some algorithms, like MD5, are old and outdated but still in use, while newer hashing algorithms — like bcrypt — are stronger and can be more difficult to crack, depending on the number of rounds the passwords go through.

Regardless, the company recommended users change their passwords.

No financial information was taken, according to the FAQ.

The company was last year among many mocked for sending out emails to users alerting them of mandatory changes to their privacy policies ahead of the 2018-introduced EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, saying it “value[s]” its customers privacy. “Their opening lines offer a glimpse of the way legal policy and user experience are colliding under the new regulations,” said Fast Company.

But it’s not clear if the company will face penalties — up to four percent of its global revenue — as a result of the regulation, only that the company “notified EU authorities within the statutory period,” said the spokesperson.

Another day, another breach.

More than a year after net neutrality was essentially abolished by a divided Federal Communications Commission, a major legal challenge supported by dozens of companies and advocates has its day in court tomorrow. Mozilla v. FCC argues that the agency’s decision was not just dead wrong, but achieved illegally.

“We’re not just going into court to argue that the FCC made a policy mistake,” said Public Knowledge VP Chris Lewis in a statement. “It broke the law, too. The FCC simply failed in its responsibility to engage in reasoned decision-making.”

Oral arguments before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals commence Friday, February 1, though the FCC attempted to have the date put off due to the shutdown — and the request was denied.

The legal challenge is one of several tacks being taken against the FCC’s replacement of 2015’s net neutrality rules with a much weaker one last year. As with any rule or law, there are multiple avenues for dissent; a direct legal challenge is among the quickest and most public.

Mozilla, along with Vimeo, Etsy, Public Knowledge, INCOMPAS, and a number of other companies and organizations, filed the challenge shortly after the new rules took effect, but these things take time to creep through the court system.

The lawsuit has a number of primary arguments against the rulemaking (you can read the full brief here), but they boil down to two basic ideas, which I’ve attempted to summarize below:

First and most important, the FCC’s entire argument that broadband is not a telecommunications service is false. This argument goes back decades, and you can read the history of it here. The short version is: telecommunication services move data from point to point, and information services do things with that data. The FCC argues that because broadband connections let you, for example, buy something online, that connection essentially is a store.

Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh made this same very elementary mistake and was set right by a judge a couple years ago. It’s basically indefensible and no one who understands how the internet works agrees with it. As the Mozilla filing puts it, the argument “confuse[s] the road with the destination.”

The FCC also says that DNS services and caching, some of the nuts and bolts of how the internet and web work, count as information services — which is perfectly true — and that because broadband uses them, it too is an information service instead of telecommunications — which is ridiculous. It’s like saying that if a road has signs on it, the road is itself a sign. Nope. The filing again resorts to metaphor, saying “a few drops of fresh water do not turn an ocean into a lake.”

This is the primary support for the FCC’s entire case, and removing it would essentially nullify the entire new set of rules, since if the judges agree that broadband is in fact telecommunications, the industry is governed by a whole different set of statutes under the Communications Act. There are numerous other sub-arguments here that could also come into play.

Second, the FCC’s decision is “arbitrary and capricious,” and thus illegal under the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires certain standards of evidence and method to be shown in the establishment of such rules. This is supported in a number of ways, including the authority argument above. It also failed to address consumer and other complaints during the rulemaking process.

The FCC also does not justify its argument that the broadband industry is better suited to regulation by antitrust authorities, and does not justify rejection of certain other statutory authorities under which the FCC could be responsible for some of the rules. “The FCC does not adequately explain why other statutes, developed to address other problems, just happen to do the job Congress assigned to the FCC,” argue Mozilla et al.

The agency’s cost-benefit analysis, documentation required for new rules like this, is also inadequate, they argue. Certainly economic analysis of multiple major industries can be debated forever, but there are pretty basic questions unanswered or evaded here, which weakens the FCC’s entire case.

For the record, the FCC’s arguments and counter-arguments are set forth in the rule itself and court filings largely reiterate the same points.

All these arguments are not particularly new — they’ve been brought out and revised multiple times both before and after the net neutrality decision. But this is an important setting in which for them to be addressed. This panel of judges could essentially render the FCC’s rules or rulemaking process inadequate, illegal, or incorrect — or all three — and send the agency back to the drawing board.

These decisions take a great deal of time to arrive, so be ready for a wait just like the one we’ve had for the arguments to make it to court in the first place. But the wheels are in motion and it could be that in a few months’ time net neutrality will have new life.

Of course, if the FCC won’t keep net neutrality around, states will — and that’s a whole other legal battle waiting to happen.

“Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are going to wish they never picked this fight with the Internet,” said Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer. “Internet activists are continuing to fight in the courts, in Congress, and in the states. Net neutrality is coming back with a vengeance. It’s only a matter of time.”

Facebook just announced its latest round of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” this time out of Iran. The company took down 262 Pages, 356 accounts, three Facebook groups and 162 Instagram accounts that exhibited “malicious-looking indicators” and patterns that identify it as potentially state-sponsored or otherwise deceptive and coordinated activity.

As Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher noted in a press call, Facebook coordinated closely with Twitter to discover these accounts, and by collaborating early and often the company “[was] able to use that to build up our own investigation.” Today, Twitter published a postmortem on its efforts to combat misinformation during the US midterm election last year.

Example of the content removed

As the Newsroom post details, the activity affected a broad swath of areas around the globe:

“There were multiple sets of activity, each localized for a specific country or region, including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, US, and Yemen. The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as locals, often using fake accounts, and posted news stories on current events… on topics like Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, including the role of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.

Today’s takedown is the result of an internal investigation linking the newly discovered activity to other content out of Iran late last year. Remarkably, the activity Facebook flagged today dates back to 2010.

The Iranian activity was not focused on creating real world events, as we’ve seen in other cases. In many cases, the content “repurposed” reporting from Iranian state media and spread ideas that could benefit Iran’s positions on various geopolitical issues. Still, Facebook declined to link the newly identified activity to Iran’s government directly.

“Whenever we make an announcement like this we’re really careful,” Gleicher said. “We’re not in a position to directly assert who the actor is in this case, we’re asserting what we can prove.”

UltraViolet, an older “cloud movie locker” service, is shutting down. The service, which allowed consumers to unlock a digital copy of their DVDs and Blu-Rays, was something of a transitional step between the age of physical media and today’s streaming video landscape. Over time, it’s become less necessary for consumers, as movie marketplaces and subscription services now offer extensive libraries of movies for streaming, rental and purchase – all in digital formats.

The shutdown was first reported by Variety.

Today, UltraViolet claims to have over 30 million users, who are able to stream more than 300 million movies and shows from their cloud libraries. But arguably, “UltraViolet” never became a household name.

The service was not well-received at launch. When the Hollywood and tech execs first came up with the idea, many people at the time thought it was just another “form of DRM” to keep people from sharing their movies – the way that was possible with physical disks.

After a few years, however, UltraViolet loosened its grip a bit. Walmart’s Vudu began offering a way for people to selectively share their UltraViolet movies with friends back in 2014, for example..

But that may have already been too little, too late. People were increasingly more interested streaming Netflix on their Roku – not buying DVDs, converting them to digital, then loaning them out. (Besides, if you really wanted your friend to watch one of your Vudu movies, it was just easier to share your login.)

UltraViolet’s other issue was Disney. While UltraViolet was backed by all the major Hollywood studios, it didn’t have Disney on board. And Disney later decided to launch its own cloud locker, Disney Movies Anywhere. With its launch, several studios left UltraViolet for Disney’s service, Variety’s report also noted. And last year, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Lionsgate stopped distributing new release movies on Ultraviolet.

Disney’s service – now just called Movies Anywhere and operated with studio partners including Universal, WB, Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox – is more popular. Within one app, all the movies you purchased across retailers are centralized.

This, combined with a shift to streaming and subscription video, didn’t bode well for UltraViolet’s future.

The service will shut down on July 31, 2019.

Users are advised to link their UltraViolet accounts to at least one retailer before that date. They should not actually cancel or unlink their UltraViolet accounts before then, as they’d lose their entire movie collection, in that case.