Author: azeeadmin

The State Department has confirmed a data breach affecting an unknown number of employees.

A spokesperson told TechCrunch that the breach affected “less than 1 percent” of unclassified employee inboxes. “We have not detected activity of concern in the Department’s classified email system.”

“We determined that certain employee personally identifiable information may have been exposed and those employees were notified,” the spokesperson said.

The department said an interagency investigation — including help from the private sector — is underway and declined to share further information.

Politico was first to report the incident, citing a notice on the department’s internal pages.

State is said to be using Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud-based email service for unclassified work.

It’s not known what’s to blame for the breach. A report published earlier this year by administration watchdog Government Accountability Office said that the State Department had only rolled out some form of two-factor authentication to 11 percent of required agency devices, despite a legal requirement to secure all accounts with higher privileges.

Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, and several bipartisan colleagues, said in a letter last week that the department was “failing to meet federal cybersecurity standards” that could make it “significantly harder for foreign governments or criminals to access accounts.”

The Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act, signed into law in 2015, requires every agency to improve cybersecurity practices.

The law was introduced after a catastrophic data breach at the Office of Personnel Management months earlier, exposing over 21 million records of security-cleared government employees, including their biometrics.

It’s not known if the two are linked but the state of cybersecurity at State doesn’t look so good right now.

Amazon wants developers to build their own Alexa Gadgets. As you may recall, Amazon last year launched its own gadgets – those weird, Bluetooth-connected Echo Buttons – but told us this year at CES that it had plans to open up gadget-building to the wider developer community. Now, it has. The company today is launching the Alexa Gadgets Toolkit into beta, allowing developers to build accessories that pair with Echo over Bluetooth.

The gadgets themselves could use things like lights, sound chips, or even motors, and can work with Alexa interfaces like notifications, timers, reminders, text-to-speech, or wake word detection. For example, you could create a device designed for outdoor use that chimes when a timer has concluded, or a switch that drops dog food into a bowl when an alarm expires. A pill box could chime or flash to remind you to take medications, and so on.

Support for interacting with music will be added soon, Amazon says. Yes, that’s right – Big Mouth Billy Bass will respond to Alexa voice commands and dance to music streamed via Alexa, as promised. It’s no longer just a hack.

The Alexa Gadgets Toolkit offers self-service APIs, including Gadget Interfaces that expose metadata of Alexa’s capabilities on compatible Echo devices, as well as technical documentation, sample code and more.

Already, a number of companies are building Alexa Gadgets, including Hasbro, WowWee Group Limited, Gemmy Industries, Baby Plus, TOMY International, Novalia, and eKids (an affiliate of iHome). The partners aren’t necessarily detailing their creations at this point, but have offered some hints.

Toy maker Hasbro is working on immersive play experiences; TOMY will bring hands-free assistance to parents using its products; WowWee is creating Alexa-connected smart toothbrushes; BabyPlus is offering a connected rubber duckie that controls smart home devices and streams music; and Novalia is developing a touch-sensitive mat for kids’ immersive play.

These products will later be sold on Amazon, the retailer notes, starting later this year with the updated Big Mouth Billy Bass from Gemmy Industries.

The news comes just ahead of an Amazon Alexa press event, where the company is preparing to announce a variety of new Alexa devices. According to a recent CNBC report, Amazon has at least 8 in the works, including a microwave oven, subwoofer, and in-car gadget.

 

Even bigger than the salary gap that sees women earn $.82 on the dollar is the equity gap. A new study from Carta and the ex-Twitter female investor group #Angels reveals that women make up 35 percent of startup equity-holding employees, yet own just 20 percent of the equity. That means they own just $0.47 for every $1 that men own. Even worse, women account for 13 percent of startup founder but just 6 percent of founder equity — or merely $0.39 on the dollar.

Combined, that means only 9 percent of founder and employee startup equity is owned by women.

“This is not just about wealth” says #Angels’ Chloe Sladden. “Wealth from successful exits goes on to shape the entire industry. It’s about who has power and who gets to decide what gets funded.” #Angels’ Jessica Verrilli notes that “Having this data is going to  be a watershed moment and catalyze more urgency to address this underrepresentation.”

The study by cap table management tool Carta (formerly eShares) looked at a subset of its privately held company customers including roughly 180,000 employees, 15,000 founders, and 6,000 companies encompassing $45 billion in equity value.

#Angels’ Jana Messerschmidt explains that the gap table spotlights how women aren’t being hired for early engineering and leadership poisitions. These roles often get the lion’s share of equity, and when women are hired for sales, marketing, and HR jobs, “those folks are getting less equity because they are joining later and we have a hypothesis of how those roles are valued differently.” Sladden reminds founders to focus on diversity from day one. “Don’t push this off as something you’ll fix down the road as you’re facing all the other challenges.”

Once a successful startup gets acquired or IPOs and paper money turns into cash, tech workers often reinvest their winnings into more startups as angels, fund LPs, or by starting their own venture firm. If only men are getting enough equity to make those downstream investments, their biases could further unbalance the gender breakdown of the tech industry. The #Angels say they’ve found this translates into fewer fundraising term sheets and bargaining power for female founders when they come to the Sand Hill Road boy’s club for venture capital.

Beyond more diverse hiring, the #Angels believe it’s critical that the industry dymystify equity so more women know how to exercise stock options and score tax advantages for maximum gain. “You shouldn’t need to have an MBA to know the importance of equity and how to negotiate for it” says Sladden. Better financing avenues for those women who need up-front capital to exercise their stock options could also ensure it’s not just those who already have money who can make money through equity.

Sladden concludes, “We hope this is going to start a movement. We hope that CEOs will start to measure it and talk about it.”

As iOS12 drops, we are again reminded that phone-based AR is on hundreds of millions of phones but we still haven’t seen any big successes built on the new technologies.

Illumix is hoping that its approach to building games that understand where the user is while serving up content that responds to that space can help accelerate AR’s popularity.

The Menlo Park-based company is emerging out of stealth today and sharing that they’ve raised an $8.6 million seed round co-led by Maveron and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Radar Partners, Unusual Ventures and Michael Bay’s 451 Media also participated in the round.

The gaming studio is working on tech that allows gaming content to dynamically scale based on the environment. So, theoretically if you’re playing an Illumix title in a big open area like a warehouse, it’s going to look a lot different than if you fire up the app in your living room crammed with furniture. The startup is working on a couple of titles but is keeping them under tight wraps for now so I can’t speak to how this technology works in practice though the concepts seems pretty technically challenging.

What’s key is that this apparently won’t require users to pre-scan their space and that the content will effortlessly adapt thanks to “real-time understanding of the environment taken from the way a user would normally hold their phone,” Illumix co-founder Kirin Sinha tells TechCrunch.

While the tech is an important part, Sinha claims the company is very much a game studio first and foremost and that the startup’s tech serves the creative ambition of their upcoming titles rather than just being developed to prove what is possible.

Next year, the studio plans to release a completely original title as well as a licensed game and will be using this latest bout of funding to grow the team of 11 and invest more in their upcoming work.

Today marks a big milestone for Lyft — one billion rides. That’s a milestone Uber hit in December 2015. Uber has since grown to 10 billion trips completed — including Eats deliveries — as of this past July. Uber, of course, had a bit of head start given it launched in 2009 while Lyft first launched in 2012.

This milestone for Lyft comes about a year after it announced it was completing one million rides a day. To celebrate it, Lyft employees are surprising 3,500 drives with a free tank of gas.

Earlier this month, Lyft officially entered the scooter sharing space when it launched electric scooters in Denver, Colo. Lyft has since deployed its scooters in Santa Monica, Calif. as part of the city’s pilot program. Lyft’s entrance into scooters came close after its acquisition of bike-share company Motivate. We’ll be watching closely to see how Lyft’s additional modes of transportation impacts number of trips completed.

Design tools are becoming increasingly important to just about every brand out there. Today, a new entrant joins the race.

Framer X, a revamped version of three-year-old Framer, was founded by Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk after the duo sold design software Sofa to Facebook in 2011. Framer X is a rich, React-based design tool that lets any designer draw out their interface components and instantly send them over to the engineering team for collaboration.

The key here is reusability and fidelity. With Framer X, engineers can send over existing components that are in production and let designers move forward from there. Conversely, designers aren’t sending developers a facsimile of a button or icon but the actual SVG code behind that component.

Framer X also allows users to collect components and other design items as a package within the Framer X store, so that they’re easily accessible during the design process. Framer X offers a public Framer X Store where casual designers can build off of the experience of advanced designers who’ve uploaded components to the store.

The company also allows enterprises to launch their own private store for use within the organization.

Framer costs $15/month for users, and private Framer X stores for the enterprise are priced flexibly based on the size of the organization.

Framer now joins a competitive landscape, which includes the likes of InVision, Adobe, and Sketch .

The company says it has around 50,000 monthly active users, with 200 companies (including Google, Facebook and Dropbox) using the product. Framer has raised $9 million to date from Greylock, Foundation Capital, Designer Fund, and Accel Europe.

Lyft has launched its electric scooters in Santa Monica, Calif. as part of the city’s pilot program, joining both Bird and Lime, CNET first reported.

As part of the pilot program, Lyft can have up to 250 scooters on the streets at any one time. Riders must also be sure to stay within the service area of Santa Monica, and not venture out into the broader Los Angeles area. Otherwise, they’ll be fined.

Lyft’s launch in Santa Monica comes just a couple of weeks after the company deployed scooters in Denver, Colo. Lyft’s scooters cost $1 to unlock and then 15 cents per minute to ride. They can travel up to 15 mph.

Lyft’s chief rival Uber/JUMP, which received a permit to operate in Santa Monica, has yet to deploy any electric scooters. Though, it does have a partnership of sorts with Lime.

Google’s parental control software for mobile devices, Family Link, will now help parents of teenagers, too. The company announced this morning the addition of new features aimed at parents of children over the age of 13. Perhaps the most controversial choice Google has made with this expansion is that teens can choose to turn off supervision via the software. While this does send an alert to parents, it’s a decidedly odd choice.

After all, if parents are planning on controlling smartphone use through Family Link – which lets them do things like manage and track screen time, view the location of the device, or control which apps are able to be installed, for example – it seems that parent and child would have already had a conversation about the topic.

And while it’s a nice gesture to ask teens to give consent to monitoring, it’s a hollow one – teens, after all, are still children, and parents likely bought them their device and are paying the phone bill. Parents at this point should have already established that using a phone is a privilege, not a right, and that there are ground rules, as well as what those rules are.

Parents should have had the conversation about how usage and location is tracked, and discussed what sort of content should or should not be viewed and shared on the teens’ phone. Allowing the kid to just “opt out” should not be how that conversation starts.

Plus, you can’t really argue that teens could somehow be surreptitiously monitored by parents, given that parents are approving their app downloads and setting screen time limits, among other things, if on Family Link. They must have some awareness there’s a control mechanism in place.

The software’s support for teens rolls out this week worldwide, Google says, as part of Family Link’s global expansion. The applicable age for a teen varies by country, but in the U.S. it’s 13. The app will also be available for Chromebook devices. And soon, parents will be able to manage Family Link devices through Google Assistant voice commands, too.

 

 

 

On-demand delivery service Postmates announced this morning that it has raised $300 million in additional funding led by Tiger Global Management.

While the company’s press release doesn’t mention this, Fortune reports that the deal valued Postmates at $1.2 billion. Tiger’s Scott Schleifer is joining the board of directors.

Postmates does say that it’s completing “millions” of deliveries every month and is profitable in 90 percent of its markets, and that over the past four years, gross margins have “improved dramatically to nearly 50%.”

Over the past few months, Postmates expanded into more than 100 new cities (it’s now available in more than 400 U.S. cities, as well as Mexico City) and also announced partnerships with companies like Instacart and Walmart.

Postmates previously raised a $140 million round at a $600 million valuation in 2016. More broadly, it looks like VCs aren’t backing away from the on-demand delivery market — DoorDash, for example, recently raised $250 million at a $4 billion valuation.

“The transformation of how commerce moves in cities demands that we build the most innovative tools for businesses to keep up and distribute their products to the modern consumer — efficiently and cost effectively,” said Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann in the release. “Postmates is proud to be the first and largest on-demand network that is enabling the growth of retail across the country, and today’s investment accelerates our ability to pair technology with the vitality of our neighborhoods.”

Facebook’s ad platform is facing charges that it has enabled gender-based discrimination against millions of women in a class action suit filed on behalf of three female workers and backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The legal action also names ten employers who are alleged to have used the social media giant’s platform to exclusively and unlawfully target job adverts at male Facebook users, thereby excluding women and non-binary users from receiving the ads.

The ACLU, law firm Outten & Golden LLP, and the Communications Workers of America have filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The 10 employers and employment agency advertisers named in the suit, which the charges allege ran discriminatory jobs in “mostly” male-dominated fields, include a police department, multiple retailers, a software development firm and various installation, repair and remodelling companies. (All ten named in the suit are listed in the ACLU’s press release.)

“I’ve heard stories about when people looked for jobs in the classified ads and big bold letters read ‘help wanted-male’ or ‘help wanted-female.’ I was shocked to find that this discrimination is still happening, just online instead of in newspapers,” said Bobbi Spees, a job-seeker and lead complainant in the case, commenting in a statement.  “I shouldn’t be shut out of the chance to hear about a job opportunity just because I am a woman.”

“The internet did not erase our civil rights laws.  It violates the law if an employer uses Facebook to deny job ads to women,” added Peter Romer-Friedman, an attorney at Outten & Golden, in another supporting statement. “The last time I checked, you don’t have to be a man to be a truck driver or a police officer.  But Facebook and employers are acting like it’s the 1950s, before federal employment law banned sex discrimination.”

The charges allege that Facebook, via its platform, delivers job ads selectively based on age and sex categories that employers expressly choose, and that it earns revenue from placing job ads that exclude women and older workers from receiving the ads.

The ACLU notes that targeting job ads by sex is unlawful under federal, state, and local civil rights laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Sex segregated job advertising has historically been used to shut women out of well-paying jobs and economic opportunities,” said Galen Sherwin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, in another supporting statement. “We can’t let gender-based ad targeting online give new life to a form of discrimination that should have been eradicated long ago.”

While online platforms are not as heavily regulated as publishing platforms the lawsuit argues that Facebook can be held legally responsible for:

1. creating and operating the system that allows and encourages employers to select the gender and age of the people who get their job ads, including providing employers with data on users’ gender and age for targeting purposes;
2. delivering the gender- and age-based ads based on employers’ preferences; and
3. acting as a recruiter connecting employers with prospective employees

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the lawsuit.

It’s by no means the first time the company has faced civil rights complaints related to its ad platform.

Back in 2016 ProPublica exposed how Facebook’s ad tools could be used to exclude users based on their “ethnic affinity” — including in protected categories such as housing, employment and credit opportunities which prohibit discriminatory advertising.

The company responded by saying it would build tools to prevent advertisers from applying ethnic affinity targeting in the protected categories. And also by rewording its ad policies to more clearly prohibit discrimination.

But the following year another ProPublica investigation showed it was still failing to block discriminatory ads — leaving Facebook to apologize for failing to effectively enforce its own policies (hmmm, now where else have we heard the company accused of that… ), and saying: “Our systems continue to improve but we can do better.”

Last year the company was also shown to have allowed ads that included hateful sentiments targeted at Jewish people.

Around about the same time that Facebook was facing renewed criticism over ethnic affinity targeting on its platform being used as a tool for racial discrimination, the company said it would also take a look at how advertisers are using exclusion targeting across other “sensitive segments” — such as those relating to members of the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities.

It’s not clear whether Facebook included gender-based discrimination in those 2017 self reviews too. (We’ve asked and will update this post with any response.)

Either way, it appears Facebook has failed to pick up on the potential for gender-based discrimination to be carried out via its ad platform.

And given all the attention its ad tools have attracted lately as a vector for discrimination and other types of abuse that looks careless to say the least.

Facebook’s ad platform has faced additional criticism in Europe for sensitive inferences it makes about users — given the platform allows advertisers to target people based on political and religious interests, meaning Facebook’s platform is quietly making sensitive inferences about individuals.

Privacy experts argue this modus operandi entails Facebook processing the sensitive personal data of individuals without explicitly asking people for their upfront consent (as would be required under EU law when you’re processing sensitive personal data such as political or religious affiliation).

An opinion on a person is still personal data of that person, they contend.

Facebook disagrees, disputing that the inferences its ad platform makes about users (based off of its tracking and data-mining of people) constitutes personal data. But it’s yet another bone of legal contention now being lobbed at the company.