Author: azeeadmin

Facebook “has a black people problem,” according to Mark Luckie, a now-former manager of partnerships at Facebook. Luckie, whose last day at Facebook was earlier this month, just posted an internal memo he sent to his colleagues that argues Facebook is failing its black employees, as well as its black users.

At Facebook, Luckie served as strategic partner manager for global influencers focused on underrepresented voices for a little over one year. During his time there, Luckie said he “heard far too many stories from black employees of a colleague or manager calling them ‘hostile’ or ‘aggressive’ for simply sharing their thoughts in a manner not dissimilar from their non-black team members.”

Luckie went on to describe how some black employees said their managers dissuaded them from participating in the employee resource group for black employees. On top of that, “too many black employees can recount stories of being aggressively accosted by campus security beyond what was necessary.”

Mark S. Luckie

Regarding human resources, Luckie said the department too often protects managers rather than the people actually filing the complaints.

On the user side, Luckie describes less-than-positive experiences from black people who find “that their attempts to create ‘safe spaces’ on Facebook for conversation among themselves are being derailed by the platform itself.”

Luckie has never been one to stay silent around issues of discrimination, racism and exclusion. In 2015, Luckie wrote extensively about what it’s like to be a black employee at a tech company. At the time, he had recently left his job at Twitter, where he spent three years as a manager of journalism and news.

Moving forward, Luckie has some recommendations for Facebook. A couple of those are:

• Creating an internal system for employees to report microaggressions
• Increasing cultural competency training for operations teams

For context, Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx, compared to 4 percent in 2014, according to the company’s most recent diversity report. White people, unsurprisingly, still make up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014).

Luckie’s entire memo is worth reading, so be sure to check it out in full over on Facebook. I’ve reached out to Facebook and will update this story if I hear back.

Urban Massage, a popular massage startup that bills itself as providing “wellness that comes to you,” has leaked its entire customer database.

The London, U.K.-based startup — now known as just Urban — left its Google-hosted ElasticSearch database online without a password, allowing anyone to read hundreds of thousands of customer and staff records. Anyone who knew where to look could access, edit or delete the database.

Security researcher Oliver Hough found the database through Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases, and told TechCrunch of the exposure.

It’s not known how long the database was exposed or if anyone else had accessed or obtained the database before it was pulled. It’s believed that the database was exposed for at least a few weeks.

Urban pulled the database offline after TechCrunch reached out.

Chief executive Jack Tang said in a statement: “Urban is looking into this as a matter of utmost urgency. We have informed the ICO and will take all other appropriate action, including in relation to data and communications.”

At the time of securing the database, the company had exposed more than 309,000 user records, including names, email addresses and phone numbers. Each record also had a unique referral code, allowing friends to get discounted treatments.

We verified the data by contacting several users at random. One user, who did not want to be named, said the data exposure was a “huge violation” of her privacy.

The database also contained over 351,000 booking records, and more than 2,000 records on Urban massage therapists, including their names, email addresses and phone numbers.

That roughly amounts to similar figures reported by the company earlier this month.

Among the records included thousands of complaints from workers about their clients. The records included specific complaints — from account blocks for fraudulent behavior, abuse of the referral system and persistent cancelers. But, many records also included allegations of sexual misconduct by clients — such as asking for “massage in genital area” and requesting “sexual services from therapist.” Others were marked as “dangerous,” while others were blocked due to “police enquiries.” Each complaint included a customer’s personally identifiable information — including their name, address and postcode and phone number.

But from a cursory review of the data, the database didn’t contain financial information — such as credit cards or individual account passwords.

How the data came to be exposed remains a mystery, but the severity of the data is serious — and the repercussions could be significant. Because the company falls under the new European-wide GDPR rules, Urban may face steep financial penalties of up to four percent of its global annual revenue.

For a company that’s centered around bringing relaxation to the masses, this breach will likely cause unnecessary stress for a lot of people.

Netflix and The Roald Dahl Story Company announced today that they’ve signed a deal for the streaming service to create a slate of animated “event series” based on a long list of titles by the classic children’s author, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,”
“Matilda” and “The BFG.”

All of those books have already been turned into feature films — multiple times, in the case of “Charlie.” But the deal also includes less famous titles like “George’s Marvellous Medicine,” “Going Solo” and even Dahl’s memoir “Boy.” (However, my favorite Dahl novel “Danny the Champion of the World” does not appear to be on the list on the list, which is a travesty.)

It sounds like the idea is less about straightforward adaptations and more about telling new stories using various characters, storylines and settings. Could it be a Roald Dahl … cinematic universe? Well, the press release describes it as “an imaginative story universe that expands far beyond the pages of the books themselves.”

“Our mission, which is purposefully lofty, is for as many children as possible around the world to experience the unique magic and positive message of Roald Dahl’s stories,” said Felicity Dahl (his widow) in the release. “This partnership with Netflix marks a significant move toward making that possible and is an incredibly exciting new chapter for the Roald Dahl Story Company. Roald would, I know, be thrilled.”

Netflix and The Roald Dahl Story Company say they will go into production on the first series in 2019.

First, a dirty little secret about product reviews: You’d love to integrate every product into your daily use, but it just isn’t possible. Especially when you’re dealing with the volumes we deal with here. Every so often, however, the stars align. You find yourself days from a two-week trip through Asia, when Google overnights you the Pixel Slate.

That, ultimately, is the best way to put a product through its paces, finding yourself a stranger in a strange land, forced to grapple with an unfamiliar product. Google’s new convertible hitched a ride through two countries and an autonomous territory, from the neon-lit, Mario Kart racing streets of Akihabara to the gadget markets of Shenzhen to the densely packed hostels of Hong Kong’s Chunking Mansions, where the showers are the toilets and the landlord bangs on your door after midnight, demanding payment.

It’s not the sort of experiment for which I would have volunteered to play guinea pig a few short years back. Google’s operating systems are often slow out of the gate, and Chrome OS is certainly no exception. The earliest Chromebooks were, at best, novelties, underpowered machines with little to differentiate themselves from the previous generation’s netbooks. Aside, of course, from an operating system that barely functioned offline.

But even while the mere existence of the category was (rightfully) questioned by pundits, Google kept plugging away. The company continued adding features to Chrome, turning the browser-based OS into something approaching a full desktop operating system. In 2013, the company unveiled the Chromebook Pixel, a premium notebook designed to show what Google, “could do if we really wanted to design the best computer possible at the best price possible,” according to then-SVP Sundar Pichai.

Even while the Chromebook came to dominate the classroom in subsequent years, Google still had something to prove. The company was never content to have its operating system relegated to the bargain bins. All of that came to a head with last year’s Pixelbook. The apex of Chrome features and proprietary design, the device pushed the boundaries of what a Chromebook can do.

Last December, Google quietly retired the Pixel C. Google acknowledged the move and managed to get a plug in for its new device, telling TechCrunch, “Our newly launched Google Pixelbook combines the best parts of a laptop and a tablet for those looking for a versatile device.”

Back in March, however, the company partnered with Acer to launch an education-focused Chrome tablet, just ahead of Apple’s big education event. And then, last month, it launched the Pixel Slate. More than anything, the Slate feels like a sister device to the Pixelbook. In fact, from a pure spec standpoint, you’d be pretty hard pressed to distinguish the devices.

The lack of distinction between the products really stood out during my time with the device. Detachables are great from the standpoint of versatility, but how often do you really end up taking advantage of the feature? After nearly two weeks spent traveling with the Slate, I can’t think of a single occasion that warranted removing it from the keyboard dock. Hell, the dock’s even better for watching videos — I’d much rather use a built-in stand than be forced to hold it for the duration of a film.

It’s just a fact of life that you’re going to sacrifice some features when opting for a convertible instead of a devoted laptop. The gulf between the two does seem to get smaller with each passing generation, but it continues to be the case with the Slate. The Pixelbook is simply the better typing experience of the two devices. That said, the Slate is easily one of the best typing experiences I’ve had on a keyboard case.

As someone whose job is like 90 percent typing, keyboards have long been the largest thing keeping me from seriously considering a hybrid tablet as a daily driver. The Slate case’s round keys are perfectly responsive, and it didn’t take me too long to get into the rhythm. Halfway into my first story, I could fully imagine myself doing all of my filing on the Slate.

Chrome OS has also improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years. Way back in 2016, Google announced a clever fix to Google’s app problem. The company would bring the Play Store to the operating system. At the time, the company told TechCrunch it was a “powerful way of bringing those two worlds together.” More than anything, however, it’s a clever workaround.

I found myself downloading a number of different apps from the Play Store, and in a number of cases ran into the same complaint I had on the Pixelbook. Try downloading and loading a less common app, and it will open with smartphone dimensions on your display. Try making it full size and you’ll see the following pop-up: “This application needs to restart to resize and may not work well when resized.”

Oof.

Another app gave me the more straightforward (and honest), “Sorry! This device is not supported.”

Double oof.

I’d run into a lot of this the last time I went to China with the Pixelbook in tow. I’d had some grand ambition to edit my podcast on the 14-hour plane ride, but ultimately gave up looking for a decent Audacity replacement after downloading and installing a half dozen or so different apps. These issues are understandable for a new operating system, but Chrome OS has been kicking for around seven years now. It can still feel like a frustrating mix of fully fledged operating system and undercooked user experience.

Like the iPad Pro, the Pixel Slate’s software shortcomings can be particularly frustrating when coupled with premium hardware. I could still do most of what I needed on the Slate, but the inability to fully connect some of the dots left me wondering why I wouldn’t just opt for a full laptop, nine times out of 10.

Price is one factor, certainly. The Slate starts at $599, which puts the 12.3-inch device well below the 11-inch iPad’s $799 entry (though the latter, admittedly, comes with 64GB of storage to the former’s 32GB). That price includes a stunning 3000 x 2000 pixel display, besting the Pixelbook’s 2400 x 1600.

Customization is really the name of the game here. The Slate has more configurations than the Pixelbook, letting you max out the specs at $1,599 for a model with 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage (half the Pixelbook’s max) and a Core i7 processor. Of course, if you want the keyboard and pen, that’s going to cost you too — $199 and $99, respectively. The keyboard, it should be noted, brings the device’s total weight up to 2.7 pounds — more than both the Pixelbook (2.6 pounds) and 12-inch MacBook (2.03 pounds).

The keyboard is really a must have, snapping the OS into Desktop UI mode as soon as it’s docked. Of course, you also can still swipe up from the bottom to bring up the app tray. As someone who continues to use a Mac as my daily driver, it boggles the mind that Apple hasn’t brought full touchscreen functionality to the desktop. The touch bar is really no replacement for the feature, and having used the Pixel Slate for a few days now, I still find myself reaching out to touch the screen. “Some day,” I whisper softly to myself, before returning to the task at hand.

Other small touches like Split Screen and tabs that can be dragged into their own windows are nice touches, as well, which lend the device a bit more credence as a work machine. The pen is a nice add-on, as well, though I found a lot fewer uses for it during my day to day.

Ultimately, I would probably opt out of that additional $99 — especially with no easy way to store it à la the iPad Pro. Rather than a rechargeable battery, it takes the fairly uncommon AAAA — a shorter, thinner take on the AAA. They’re around if you look — I was actually a bit surprised to see them stocked at my local Walgreen’s.

The Pixel Imprint combo power button/fingerprint reader is a nice touch. The loss of the headphone jack, meanwhile, is a bit of a blow. I found myself all dongled up when using my headphones. It’s just an inevitability in 2018, I suppose. I also appreciate the fact that Google’s gone with one USB-C slot on either side, rather than sticking them both on the same edge like the MacBook Air. That gives you a little more wiggle room on the accessories front.

I don’t regret packing the Pixel Slate. I’ve had far worse travel companions, both human and gadget. Like the Pixelbook, the tablet is intended to be a showcase for what Chrome can do on a solid piece of hardware. And once again, it’s a case of the hardware outshining the software, even as it muddies the waters around Google’s Chromebook strategy. 

As an operating system, Chrome has made leaps and bounds in recent years, and it’s no wonder that it’s become a mainstay in classrooms. When it comes to being a serious desktop operating system for business, however, there’s still some work to be done.

Google’s last major piece of hardware for the year is finally shipping this week. A number of pre-orders have already begun receiving shipping notifications for the Pixel Slate, and the company just popped up a blog post noting that the device will officially be available at retail starting this Thursday (11/29).

The detachable tablet, which was announced alongside the Pixel 3 and Google Home Hub last month, joins last year’s Pixelbook on the high-end of the Chromebook spectrum. You can read my full review of the device here, but the TLDR version is solid hardware propping up an operating system that still has some work to do for pro users.

It also presents an interesting crossroads for the OS moving forward. The Slate doesn’t offer a whole lot to differentiate itself from the Pixelbook, right down to the specs. Really, the only key differences here are a higher res screen and a detachable form factor — the latter of which isn’t hugely distinct, given the laptop’s fully swiveling keyboard. But hey, options are generally a good thing.

The tablet starts at $599 standalone. That gives you 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and an Intel Celeron. That maxes out at $1,599 for 16GB of RA and 256GB of storage with an Intel Core i7 processor. The keyboard case and Pen will cost you an additional $199 and $99, respectively.

The mainstream will never adopt blockchain-powered decentralized apps (dApps) if it’s a struggle to log in. They’re either forced to manage complex security keys themselves, or rely on a clunky wallet-equipped browser like MetaMask. What users need is for signing in to blockchain apps to be as easy as Login With Facebook. So that’s what Bitski built. The startup emerges from stealth today with exclusive on TechCrunch about the release of the developer beta of its single sign-on cryptocurrency wallet platform.

10 projects including 7 game developers are lined up to pay a fee to integrate Bitski’s SDK. Then, whenever they need a user’s identity or to transact a payment, their app pops open a Bitski authorization screen where users can grant permissions to access their ID, send money, or receive items. Users sign up just once with Bitski, and then there’s no more punching in long private keys or other friction. Using blockchain apps becomes simple enough for novices. Given the recent price plunge, the mainstream has been spooked about speculating on cryptocurrencies. But Bitski could unlock the utility of dApps that blockchain developers have been promising but haven’t delivered.

The scrappy Bitski team raised $1.5 million in pre-seed capital from Signia, Founders Fund, Village Global, Social Capital, and Steve Jain. They were betting on Dinch, a designer-as-CEO who’d built concert discovery app WillCall that he sold to Ticketfly, which was eventually bought by Pandora. After 18 months of rebranding Ticketfly and overhauling its consumer experience, Dinch left and eventually recruited engineer Julian Tescher to come with him and found Bitski.

Bitski co-founder and CEO Donnie Dinch

After Riff failed to hit scale, the team hung up its social ambitions in late 2017 and “started kicking around ideas for dApps. We mocked up a Venmo one, a remittance app…but found the hurdle to get someone to use one of these products is enormous” Dinch recalls. “Onboarding was a dealbreaker for anyone building dApps. Even if we made the best crypto Venmo, to get normal people on it would be extremely difficult. It’s already hard enough to get people to install apps from the App Store.” They came up with Bitski to let any developer ski jump over that hurdle.

Looking across the crypto industry, the companies like Coinbase and Binance with their own hosted wallets that permitted smooth UX were the ones winning. Bitski would bring that same experience to any app. “Our hosted wallet SDK lets developers drop the Btski wallet into their apps and onboard users with standards web 2.0 users have grown to know and love” Dinch explains.

Imagine an iOS game wants to reward users with a digital sword or token. Users would have to set up a whole new wallet, struggle with their credentials, or use another clumsy soluation. They’d have to own Ethereum already to pay the Ethereium “gas” price to power the transaction, and the developer would have to manually approve sending the gift. With Bitski, users can approve receiving tokens from a developer from then on, and developers can pay the gas on users behalf while triggering transactions programmatically.

Magik is an AR content platform that’s one of Bitski’s first developers. Magik’s founders tell me “We’re building towards reaching millions of mainstream consumers, and Bitski is the only wallet solution that understands what we need to reach users at that scale. They provide a dead-simple, secure, and familiar interface that addresses every pain point along the user-onboarding journey.”

Bitski will offer a free tier, priced tiers based on transaction volume or a monthly fee, and an enterprise version. In the future, the company is considering doubling-down on premium developer services to help them build more on top of the blockchain. “We will never, ever monetize user data. We’ve never had any intent at looking at it” Dinch vows. The startup hopes developers will seize on the network effects of a cross-app wallet, as once someone sets up Bitski to use one product, all future sign-ins just require a few clicks.

In August, Coinbase acquired a startup called Distributed Systems that was building a similar crypto identity platform called the Clear Protocol. A “login with Coinbase” feature could be popular if launched, but the company is focus is spread a ton of blockchain projects. “If [login with Coinbase] launched tomorrow, they wouldn’t be able to support games or anything with a unique token. We’re a lockbox, they’re a bank” Dinch claims.

The spectre of single sign-on’s biggest player Facebook looms as well. In May it announced the formation of a blockchain team we suspect might be working on a crypto login platform or other ways to make the decentralized world more accessible for mom and pop. Dinch suspects that fears about how Facebook uses data would dissuade developers and users from adopting such a product. Still, Bitski’s haste in getting its developer platform into beta just a year after forming shows it’s eager to beat them to market.

Building a centralized wallet in a decentralized ecosystem comes with its own security risks. But Dinch assures me Bitski is using all its own hardware with air-gapped computers that have been stripped of their wifi cards, and it’s taking other secret precautions to prevent anyone from snatching its wallets. He believes cross-app wallets will also deliver a future where users actually own their virtual goods instead of just relying on the good will of developers not to pull them away or shut them down.”The idea of we’ve never been able to provably own unique digital assets is crazy to me” Dinch notes. “Whether it’s a skin in Fortnight or a movie on iTunes that you purchase, you don’t have liquidity to resell those things. We think we’ll look back in 5 to 10 years and think it’s nuts that no one owned their digital items.”

While the crypto prices might be cratering and dApps like Cryptokitties have cooled off, Dinch is convinced the blockchain startups won’t fade away. “There is a thriving developer ecosystem hellbent on bringing the decentralized web to reality; regardless of token price. It’s a safe assumption that prices will dip a bit more, but will eventually rise whenever we see real use cases for a lot of these tokens. Most will die. The ones that success will be outcome oriented, building useful products that people want.” Bitski’s a big step in that direction.

Robinhood, the zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange is bringing on a former Amazon finance exec to help the company prepare for an eventual public debut.

Warnick

The startup has hired Jason Warnick, a former exec at Amazon who was with the company for nearly 20 years, most recently serving as the commerce giant’s VP of Finance. Warnick has worn many hats inside the Seattle company’s finance departments, with positions touching operations, internal audit, investor relations and risk management. In his most recent role, Warnick also served as the Chief of Staff to Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky.

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF earlier this fall, Robinhood CEO Baiju Bhatt told us that the startup was eying a public offering but wouldn’t be doing so in the “immediate term.” At the event, Bhatt also revealed that the company was searching for a CFO to help the highly-valued startup prep for an IPO.

Warnick’s wide range of financial admin expertise will undoubtedly be helpful to the five-year-old Robinhood which has grown to be one of the most valuable venture-backed startups. The fast-growing startup has raised over a half-billion dollars and earned a $5.6 billion valuation in its latest fundraise.

“We’re incredibly lucky to have Jason join our leadership team,” Robinhood co-CEO Vlad Tenev said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Jason to build out our operational and financial infrastructure and continuing to deliver the best possible financial products to our customers at the best possible prices.”

Warnick is just the latest in a line of Amazon execs fleeing the company for CFO roles at highly-valued startups. Yesterday, Pinterest hired Dave Stephenson as its new chief financial officer. A few weeks ago, Zillow hired Allen Parker — another Amazon finance VP — to its CFO role.

A grand committee of international parliamentarians empty-chaired Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing earlier today, after the Facebook founder snubbed repeat invitations to face questions about malicious, abusive and improper uses of his social media platform — including the democracy-denting impacts of so-called ‘fake news’.

The UK’s DCMS committee has been leading the charge to hold Facebook to account for data misuse scandals and election interference — now joined in the effort by international lawmakers from around the world. But still not by Zuckerberg himself.

In all parliamentarians from nine countries were in the room to put awkward questions to Zuckerberg’s stand in, policy VP Richard Allan — including asking what Facebook is doing to stop WhatsApp being used as a vector to spread political disinformation in South America; why Facebook refused to remove a piece of highly inflammatory anti-Muslim hate speech in Sri Lanka until the country blocked access to its platform; how Facebook continues to track non-users in Belgium and how it justifies doing so under Europe’s tough new GDPR framework; and, more generally, why anyone should have any trust in anything the company says at this point — with company neck-deep in privacy and trust scandals.

The elected representatives were collectively speaking up for close to 450 million people across the UK, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia and Singapore. The most oft repeated question on their lips was why wasn’t Zuckerberg there?

Allan looked uncomfortable on his absentee boss’ behalf and spent the best part of three hours running the gamut of placative hand gestures as he talked about wanting to work with regulators to find “the right regulation” to rein in social media’s antisocial, anti-democratic impacts.

Canadian MP Bob Zimmer spoke for the room, cutting into another bit of Allan’s defensive pablum with: “Here we are again hearing another apology from Facebook — ‘look trust us, y’all regulate us etc but we really don’t have that much influence in the global scheme of things’. In this room we regulate over 400M people and to not have your CEO sit in that chair there is an offence to all of us in this room and really our citizens as well.”

“[Blackberry co-founder] Jim Balsille said, when I asked him on our committee, is our democracy at risk if we don’t change the laws in Canada to deal with surveillance capitalism?” Zimmer continued. “He said without a doubt. What do you think?” — which Allan took as a cue to ummm his way into another series of “we need tos”, and talk of “a number of problematic vectors” Facebook is trying to address with a number of “tools”.

The session was largely filled up such frustratingly reframed waffle, as Allan sought to deflect, defang and defuse the committee’s questions — leading it to accuse him more than once of repeating the ‘delay, deny, deflect’ tactics recently reported on by the New York Times.

Allan claimed not — claiming to be there “acknowledging” problems. But that empty chair beside him sure looked awkward.

At the close, Canada’s Charlie Angus sought to sweep Facebook’s hot air away by accusing Allan of distracting with symptoms — to draw the regulatory eye away from the root cause of the problem which he sharply defined as Facebook itself.

“The problem we have with Facebook is there’s never accountability — so I would put it to you when we talk about regulation that perhaps the best regulation would be antitrust,” he said. “Because people who don’t like Facebook — oh they could go to WhatsApp . But oh we have some problems in South America, we have problems in Africa, we have to go back to Mr Zuckerberg who’s not here.

“My daughters could get off Facebook. But they’d go to Instagram . But that’s now controlled by Facebook. Perhaps the simplest form of regulation would be to break Facebook up — or treat it as a utility so that we could all then feel that when we talk about regulation we’re talking about allowing competition, counting metrics that are actually honest and true, and that Facebook has broken so much trust to allow you to simply gobble up every form of competition is probably not in the public interest.

“So when we’re talking about regulation would you be interested in asking your friend Mr Zuckerberg if we could have a discussion about antitrust?”

Allan’s reached for an “it depends upon the problem we’re trying to solve” reply.

“The problem is Facebook,” retorted Angus. “We’re talking about symptoms but the problem is the unprecedented economic control of every form of social discourse and communication. That it’s Facebook. That that is the problem that we need to address.”

Committee chair Damian Collins also gave short shrift to Allan’s attempt to muddily reframe this line of questioning — as regulators advocating “turning off the Internet” (instead of what Angus was actually advocating: A way to get “credible democratic responses from a corporation”) — by interjecting: “I think we would also distinguish between the Internet and Facebook to say they’re not necessarily the same thing.”

The room affirmed its accord with that.

At the start of the session Collins revealed the committee would not — at least for now — be publishing the cache of documents it dramatically seized this weekend from the founder of a startup that’s been suing Facebook since 2015, saying it was “not in a position to do that”.

Although at several points during the session DCMS committee members appeared to tease some new details derived from these documents, asking for example whether Facebook had ever made API decisions for developers contingent on them taking advertising on its platform.

Allan said it had not — and appeared to be attempting to suggest that the emails the committee might have been reading were the result of ‘normal’ internal business discussions about how to evolve Facebook’s original desktop-based business model for the mobile-first era.

Collins did detail one piece of new information that he categorically identified as having been sourced from the seized documents — and specifically from an internal email sent by a Facebook engineer, dating from October 2014 — describing this to be of significant public interest.

“An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses had been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3BN data points a day through the ordered friends API,” he revealed, asking Allan whether “that reported to any external body at the time”.

The Facebook VP responded by characterizing the information contained in the seized documents as “partial”, on account of being sourced via a “hostile litigant”.

“I don’t want you to use this opportunity just to attack the litigant,” retorted Collins. “I want you to address the question… what internal process [Facebook] ran when this was reported to the company by an engineer? And did they notify external agencies of this activity? Because if Russian IP addresses were pulling down a huge amount of data from the platform — was that reported or was that just kept, as so often seems to be the case, just kept within the family and not talked about.”

“Any information you have seen that’s contained within that cache of emails is at best partial and at worst potentially misleading,” responded Allan.

“On the specific question of whether or not we believe, based on our subsequent investigations, that there was activity by Russians at that time I will come back to you.”

We reached out to Pinterest to ask whether Facebook ever informed it about such an abuse of its API key. At the time of writing it had not responded to our request for comment.

Red Hat is in the process of being acquired by IBM for a massive $34 billion, but that deal hasn’t closed yet and, in the meantime, Red Hat is still running independently and making its own acquisitions, too. As the company today announced, it has acquired Tel Aviv-based NooBaa, an early-stage startup that helps enterprises manage their data more easily and access their various data providers through a single API.

NooBaa’s technology makes it a good fit for Red Hat, which has recently emphasized its ability to help enterprise more effectively manage their hybrid and multicloud deployments. At its core, NooBaa is all about bringing together various data silos, which should make it a good fit in Red Hat’s portfolio. With OpenShift and the OpenShift Container Platform, as well as its Ceph Storage service, Red Hat already offers a range of hybrid cloud tools, after all.

“NooBaa’s technologies will augment our portfolio and strengthen our ability to meet the needs of developers in today’s hybrid and multicloud world,” writes Ranga Rangachari, the VP and general manager for storage and hyperconverged infrastructure at Red Hat, in today’s announcement. “We are thrilled to welcome a technical team of nine to the Red Hat family as we work together to further solidify Red Hat as a leading provider of open hybrid cloud technologies.”

While virtually all of Red Hat’s technology is open source, NooBaa’s code is not. The company says that it plans to open source NooBaa’s technology in due time, though the exact timeline has yet to be determined.

NooBaa was founded in 2013. The company has raised some venture funding from the likes of Jerusalem Venture Partners and OurCrowd, with a strategic investment from Akamai Capital thrown in for good measure. The company never disclosed the size of that round, though, and neither Red Hat nor NooBaa are disclosing the financial terms of the acquisition.

Higher education is a mess. College students spend years learning arcana and quaint academic theories, only to be thrust into the harsh light of the workplace where they are ill-equipped to handle even the most mundane task. A crisis, a moral failure, or perhaps simply an expensive mistake, college is clearly in need of a reboot.

Colleges would perhaps love to innovate on their models, but are stymied by accreditation agencies charged with maintaining the standards and integrity of higher education. Unfortunately for students, those standards are based on inputs like classroom time, years on campus, and major / minor curriculums rather than on measurable outputs like job income. Worse, these agencies are advised by the colleges and universities themselves, who rarely see disruptive and innovative education as a positive.

That’s why the news today that Make School has received accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is so interesting.

Make School is a project-based, product-focused program based in San Francisco founded by Ashu Desai and Jeremy Rossmann. The two founders centered the program’s curriculum around a bachelor’s in applied computer science, but rather than learning algorithms or data structures theoretically from a textbook, they reimagined the university from the bottom up by teaching skills through a progression of working software applications and products.

As I wrote in a profile of the company three years ago, “At the heart of the school’s approach is the belief that focusing on an actual project helps motivate students in ways that college never does.” Desai and Rossmann started by teaching game programming, but then saw that the enthusiasm of their students could be extended to other areas of software engineering and product design.

Beyond just redesigning a typical college program, they scrapped the notion of a four-year bachelor’s degree and replaced it with a full-time, two-year curriculum. That simultaneously eliminated the “summer melt” that plagues the traditional American academic calendar, and also significantly cut the cost of tuition for the program. Make School generally uses an income-share agreement in lieu of upfront tuition for its students, which means that students pay nothing during the program, but then pay a percentage of their income after they graduate.

Make School had a novel model for teaching a complicated subject, but it was unaccredited. For students, that meant that Make School’s courses most likely couldn’t be transferred to other accredited universities, nor could they receive public student loans, which mandate that a school be accredited for disbursement.

WASC, the accreditation agency in charge of higher education in California, Hawaii, and certain territories, has in recent years revised its “incubation policy” to encourage more non-traditional education providers to pursue accreditation. The model works by linking accredited universities with unaccredited institutions, with the eventual goal of making the startup accredited itself.

In Make School’s case, its accreditation collaborator is Dominican University, located just north of San Francisco. Make School students will be able to minor in computer science by taking classes at the university’s campus.

For Make School, it’s one more milestone on the way to rebuilding higher education.