Author: azeeadmin

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg will testify in an open hearing at the Senate Intelligence Committee next week, the committee’s chairman has confirmed.

Larry Page, chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, was also invited but has not confirmed his attendance, a committee spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) said in a release that the social media giants will be asked about their responses to foreign influence operations on their platforms in an open hearing on September 5.

It will be the second time the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees the government’s intelligence and surveillance efforts, will have called the companies to testify. But it will be the first time that senior leadership will attend — though, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg did attend a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in April.

It comes in the wake of Twitter and Facebook recently announcing the suspension of accounts from their platforms that they believe to be linked to Iranian and Russian political meddling. Social media companies have been increasingly under the spotlight in the past years following Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election with disinformation.

A Twitter spokesperson said the company didn’t yet have details to share on the committee’s prospective questions. TechCrunch also reached out to Google and Facebook for comment and will update when we hear back.

Valimail, an enterprise email security firm, announced that it will offer its email protections for free to relevant government workers and campaigns through the 2018 midterms. That offer covers state election boards, voting system vendors and major party U.S. election campaigns, including congressional, statewide and gubernatorial candidates. The company will also offer the same email fraud prevention service, known as Valimail Enforce, to the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee at no cost through the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“Bad actors are trying to disrupt our elections and sow chaos in our democracy,” Valimail CEO and co-founder Alexander García-Tobar said in a statement. “They are targeting email because it is one of the weakest points in digital communications.”

As Valimail observes, spear phishing attempts in which an attacker tricks their target into opening a malicious email are a particular problem. In a spear phishing attack, a hacker can compromise a target’s login credentials by getting them to click on a fraudulent link or just by pretending to be someone they aren’t and obtaining usernames, passwords and other sensitive information. (The suspected Russian government-affiliated attackers who compromised a Gmail account belonging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair John Podesta used spear phishing to achieve their goals.)

Spear phishing attacks often employ email spoofing, a strategy in which the attacker disguises their true identity and makes an email look like it’s coming from a trusted domain. Citing its own research, Valimail notes that 90 percent of cyberattacks originate in spear phishing and two-thirds of those employ a fake “from” address to target potential victims.

Valimail Enforce prevents this kind of attack with an email authentication system that only allows authorized senders to use a domain name. The company’s email authentication service employs standards like SPF, DKIM and DMARC and is Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorized, making it easier for government entities to adopt its security tools.

Though no states and campaigns have signed on to the new offering yet, Valimail has been talking with the National Association of State Election Directors and the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency tasked with coordinating security for election systems — now designated as critical infrastructure — among the states. Valimail follows companies like Cloudflare and Synack in offering its services at no cost to help secure election systems.

Due to the state and local-led nature of U.S. elections, it’s very difficult to ensure that security measures can be uniformly implemented and enforced across the board. It’s too late for the patchwork of post-2016 election security efforts to provide any kind of comprehensive assurance for the 2018 midterms, but private tech companies are stepping in to fill some of the gaps. At the very least, getting some security relationships in place and educating state and local officials on potential precautions should be a useful stepping stone to more secure elections by 2020.

Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo, which offers an alternative to surveillance engines like Google, has quietly picked up $10M in fresh funding from Canadian pension fund Omers’ VC arm. The Globe and Mail reported the news earlier this month.

It’s only the second funding round for the ten year old company — which last picked up $3M in VC all the way back in 2011, according to Crunchbase.

In a blog post announcing the investment, Omers Ventures argues that privacy and security concerns have “risen to the forefront of public consciousness” over the past five years — noting how governments are responding to public demand and data breaches and “starting to take real action”, citing the European Union’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, as one example.

With that conviction in mind, the fund actively pursued an investment in DDG, which has been profitable (via non-tracking advertising) since 2014 so was not in need of a cash injection. And, indeed, initially refused one. But Omers persisted and was able to persuade founder Gabriel Weinberg to take the money to help support growth objectives for DDG, “particularly internationally”, and including in Canada (where the fund is based).

Expanding its privacy and security offerings is another rational for DDG taking the funding.

At the start of this year the company branched out from its core product of private (non-tracking) search — adding a tracker blocker and other privacy and security tools to create a functional bundle to help web users keep their browsing private too.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Weinberg said the focus with Omers is “to figure out how to take that globally as they’re a global pension fund”.

Asked for more detail about the plans, he told TechCrunch: “While we are already global (and have been since launch in 2008), we are now trying to focus more on specific markets: In hiring, better tuning our search engine results for local markets, and expanding the channels we use to market DuckDuckGo to have more of a global focus.”

Hiring international staff will therefore be a big part of DDG’s growth push.

“We are focused on staffing up to continue to deliver the best all-in-one privacy solution (the one we launched at the beginning of the year) and marketing, with a more particular focus on outside of the US,” he said.

“Our top markets (in terms of search traffic) outside the US are: DE [Germany], UK, FR [France], CA [Canada], though we have significant growth and presence in most countries in terms of relative search market share.”

Weinberg added that Omers has “a deep personal interest and investment thesis in privacy, and do believe there is an inflection point now”.

A coalition of privacy groups are calling on lawmakers to fill the vacant positions on the government’s surveillance oversight board, which hasn’t fully functioned in almost two years.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, known as PCLOB, is a little-known but important group that helps to ensure that intelligence agencies and executive branch policies are falling within the law. The board’s work allows them to have access to classified programs run by the dozen-plus intelligence agencies and determine if they’re legal and effective, while balancing Americans’ privacy and civil liberties rights.

In its most recent unclassified major report in 2015, PCLOB called for an end of the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records.

But the board fell out of quorum when four members left the board last year, leaving just the chairperson. President Obama did not fill the vacancies before he left office, putting PCLOB’s work largely on ice.

A report by The Intercept said, citing obtained emails, that the board was “basically dead,” butt things were looking up when President Trump earlier this year picked a bipartisan range of five nominees to the board, including a computer science and policy professor and a former senior Justice Department lawyer were named in March. If confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the newly appointed members would put the board back into full swing.

Except the committee has dragged its feet. Hearings have only been heard on three nominees but a vote has yet to be scheduled.

A total of 31 privacy organizations and rights groups, including the ACLU, Open Technology Institute and the Center for Democracy & Technology signed on to the letter calling on the senate panel to push forward with the hearings and vote on the nominees.

“During the eleven years since Congress created the PCLOB as an independent agency, it has only operated with a quorum for four and one-half years,” the letter said. “Without a quorum, the PCLOB cannot issue oversight reports, provide the agency’s advice, or build upon the agency foundations laid by the original members. It is also critical that the PCLOB operate with a full bipartisan slate of qualified individuals.”

The coalition called the lack of quorum a “lost opportunity to better inform the public and facilitate Congressional action.”

Given the continuing aftermath of the massive leak of classified documents by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the board’s work is more important than ever, the letter said.

Spokespeople for the Senate Judiciary Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

Next week, Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation aimed firmly at large companies he believes have taken advantage of “corporate welfare” by underpaying employees. Amazon and Walmart in particular have bore the brunt of the Senator’s criticisms, and the rhetoric has become increasingly heated over the the past few days.

Earlier today, Amazon accused Sanders of issuing “inaccurate and misleading” statements as he called the company out of warehouse conditions. The Vermont senator has since responded with a release, calling Amazon fulfillment center wages “absurd.”

“Thousands of Amazon employees are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing because their wages are too low,” Sanders says, “including 1 out of 3 of its workers in Arizona and 2,400 in Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to The New Food Economy. Bottom line: the taxpayers of this country should not have to subsidize employees at a company owned by Mr. Bezos who is worth $155 billion. That is absurd.”

In an interview yesterday, Sanders told TechCrunch that the company had not been forthcoming with information about employment. The company shot back, noting that the Senator had yet to take it up on its offer of a warehouse tour.

“In terms of visiting a fulfillment center, last month I was visiting Wisconsin and requested to visit the fulfillment center in Kenosha,” Sanders says. “Unfortunately, Amazon could not accommodate me then. In September, I look forward to visiting the fulfillment center in Chester, Virginia, and working out the details with Amazon. We have heard from workers there, including Navy veteran Seth King, about unsafe working conditions and at least one person has reportedly died at the warehouse.”

Sanders, of course, is far from the first person to raise issue with Amazon fulfillment center conditions. Stories have been floating around from current and former employees for years. CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been front and center in Sanders’ criticism recently told the press, “I am very proud of our working conditions, and I am very proud of the wages that we pay.”

The Atlantic has hired Facebook’s Alex Hardiman to head up its business and product efforts. She’ll join in the fall from Facebook, where she’s been serving as the social media giant’s head of news products.

In her new role, Hardiman will focus on digital consumer revenue, audience experience and product strategy, leading The Atlantic’s product, engineering, data and growth teams.

“I’ve always been a news person,” Hardiman said in a Facebook post. “It’s my passion during the workday and my guilty pleasure on nights and weekends. It’s why I spent a decade at The Times before coming to Facebook to help tackle some of the company’s formidable news challenges, and it’s why I’m now joining The Atlantic at a unique moment in its history.”

Hardiman joined Facebook in 2016, just as criticism against the platform for its role in spreading “fake news” began to spread like wildfire. She was promoted to lead its news efforts on the product side in May 2017. Before that, she spent more than a decade at The New York Times, completing her tenure as vice president of news products.

“Her leadership positions at both Facebook and The New York Times give her an unrivaled perspective on digital media, and her audience-first focus will sharpen the appeal of our work,” The Atlantic president Bob Cohn said in a statement. “All this will serve us extremely well as we aggressively expand our ambitions for 2019 and beyond.”   

At Facebook, Hardiman was involved in a variety of projects, including removing the trending feature and launching Facebook Watch. Both initiatives were part of a greater effort to remove fake news from the site and provide new avenues for more reliable news from trusted sources.

“Alex is a true leader who built a fantastic team,” a representative from Facebook told me. “She helped develop a framework and key news products for both people on Facebook and publishers. We wish her nothing but the best at The Atlantic.”

Here’s Hardiman’s full statement:

A Personal Update

I have some news to share: after two deeply gratifying years at Facebook, I’ve decided to leave and join The Atlantic in the fall.

I’ve always been a news person. It’s my passion during the workday and my guilty pleasure on nights and weekends. It’s why I spent a decade at The Times before coming to Facebook to help tackle some of the company’s formidable news challenges, and it’s why I’m now joining The Atlantic at a unique moment in its history.

Facebook has given me so many things for which I’m profoundly grateful: wildly talented colleagues, great relationships with news organizations that are reinventing their future, and deep humility for the difficulty of solving nuanced problems at Facebook’s scale. Facebook has a long way to go, but there’s important progress being made to rebuild trust with consumers and publishers. The people behind the scenes work like crazy to make that happen and they often fly under the radar, but you can read more about some of them here: https://www.cnet.com/…/the-cure-for-facebooks-fake-news-in…/. I’m proud of the News team’s mission-driven ethos and I couldn’t be more confident and optimistic about its future.

It therefore required an extraordinary opportunity to compel me to move on. The Atlantic has always been a part of my life when things got complicated. When I was conflicted about how to pursue professional ambition and motherhood at the same time, I found Anne Marie Slaughter’s perspective to be the most refreshing and relatable take on the issue. When I was trying to make sense of President Obama’s foreign policy, Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting brought radical clarity and honesty to my understanding of America. Since before the Civil War, The Atlantic has consistently defined the most ambitious and contentious ideas of the moment. In today’s political and social climate, its role has never been more vital.

So when I met with The Atlantic and Emerson Collective teams to learn about the next phase of investment and growth, I already knew how much of a privilege it would be to join them. In my new role, I’ll be partnering with teams across The Atlantic to create digital products that people love, grow the company’s consumer revenue line, and transform The Atlantic from a media-centric organization to a leader in media and product. After having built products with hundreds of news organizations at Facebook from the outside, I’m particularly excited to return to tackle these opportunities with The Atlantic from within.

Facebook friends: thank you for everything. I’ve learned so much from you and have an unwavering appreciation for all that you do to better serve the people and publishers who use your products.

Future Atlantic colleagues: I can’t wait to get to work and join you on this important mission. Thank you for having me.

In the past couple decades, Elon Musk’s efforts with SpaceX have partially kicked off a space race in the VC-funded rocket startup scene. At Disrupt SF 2018, we’re thrilled to host a panel of some of Silicon Valley’s top investors whose firms are eying the stars.

Rob Coneybeer from Shasta Ventures, Tess Hatch from Bessemer Venture Partners and Matt Ocko from DCVC will all be joining us to discuss their points of view on the commercial space industry and where the major opportunities lie for startups looking to penetrate the market.

We’ll hopefully get a closer look at some of the dominating trends in the industry from the trio whose careers have taken them through legacy space companies and led them to make several investments in young space startups.

Rob Coneybeer is a managing director at Shasta Ventures, a firm he co-founded back in 2004. He has a masters in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and worked as an engineer in Martin Marietta’s Astro Space division earlier in his career. Coneybeer has directed a number of investments in the space sector, including Accion Systems, Spire and Vector.

Tess Hatch is an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. Hatch has a masters in aeronautical engineering from Stanford and has had stints at NASA, SpaceX, Northrup Grumman and Boeing previous to joining Bessemer. She’s currently the board observer for a number of the firm’s investments including Spire and Rocket Lab.

Matt Ocko co-founded DCVC 7 years ago and has continued to serve as the firm’s co-managing director. Ocko has several decades of experience as an investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Since its co-founding, DCVC has made investments in Akash Systems, Capella Space, Descartes Labs, Planet and Rocket Lab.

We’ll be dialing into the attitudes among investors regarding the competitive arena and we’ll be looking for insights into how the esteemed group sees the industry transforming in the next decade.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

A British cave diving expert who helped save the young Thai football team that got trapped in caves this summer is preparing a legal action against Elon Musk for making “false and defamatory statements”, TechCrunch has confirmed.

BuzzFeed reported the development earlier, after obtaining a letter sent to Musk’s home on August 6 by a firm representing the diver, Vernon Unsworth.

The background here is that in a highly offensive and extremely bizarre episode last month — even for the famously ‘loose cannon online’ Musk — the Tesla and SpaceX CEO took to Twitter to attack Unsworth, branding him a “pedo guy”.

The bizarre attack came after Unsworth had given a critical interview to the media saying the mini sub which Musk had designed and brought to Thailand “had absolutely no chance of working”. Unsworth ended an interview segment by suggesting Musk should “stick his submarine where it hurts” — a tongue-in-cheek phrase which apparently triggered Musk’s Twitter outburst.

Facing a backlash over his comments about a man who had successfully helped rescue the boys, Musk subsequently deleted the offensive tweets and quasi-apologized for slurring Unsworth in a further set of tweets, on July 18, though these were only posted within a Twitter thread, rather than being broadcast to his ~22.4M Twitter followers.

At the time Musk said Unsworth’s comment had angered him, and that had made him lash out, but he also added: “Nonetheless, his actions against me do not justify my actions against him, and for that I apologize to Mr. Unsworth and to the companies I represent as leader. The fault is mine and mine alone.”

The public element of the episode might have ended there but earlier this week Musk dredged it all up again by repeating his offensive insinuation against Unsworth during a debate with ex-TechCrunch journalist Drew Olanoff — who had brought up the “pedo guy” attack as an example of Musk himself telling untruths.

Yet instead of reiterating his apology to Unsworth, Musk doubled down on his original offensive attack — writing: “You don’t think it’s strange he hasn’t sued me? He was offered free legal services.”

To which Olanoff replied: “What I think is especially strange here is that you’re wondering why he hasn’t sued you while the rest of us are wondering why you did something so egregious that he could sue you for in the first place.”

We contacted the law firm for confirmation that it is representing Mr Unsworth in a defamation suit against Musk. Partner Lin Wood was unavailable to speak about the matter when we called but he confirmed via email that the firm is representing Unsworth in a defamation suit against Musk, and that it is preparing a legal action.

In the letter sent by the firm to Musk’s home earlier this month Wood informs Musk he has been retained by Unsworth on account of the defamatory statements made by Musk on Twitter alleging that he is a pedophile.

Wood also writes that he is preparing a civil complaint of libel and invites Musk to contact him “in an attempt to avoid litigation and to see the public record corrected”.

It’s not clear whether or not Musk had seen the letter at the time of his tweets to Olanoff.

We’ve reached out to Musk (via Twitter) for comment on the legal action and to ask whether he will be withdrawing his repeat allegation against Unsworth. We’ll update this story with any response.

The Tesla CEO’s erratic behavior online has caused other high profile headaches for his companies in recent weeks, after he tweeted about taking Tesla private — triggering wild swings in the stock price and scrutiny (and potential problems) from the Securities and Exchange Commission, only for the idea to be nixed weeks later.

The associated risks for shareholders in a public company whose CEO uses Twitter as a weapon to indulge personal spats and feuds — and to spitball major business decisions — without, apparently, any thought for the legal and reputational consequences for him or his companies, are hard to quantify but equally difficult to deny.

Sony’s Playstation Vue, the over-the-top TV streaming service that’s now up against a host of new competitors including Hulu and YouTube TV, is expanding its lineup to include more local stations. While the service had already offered some limited access to locals in select markets, this expansion brings 200 more stations across the U.S. to its service, including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC stations.

In total, there are now more than 450 local stations available, the company says. (A list of the additions is available here.)

The news is notable because of how far behind Playstation Vue has slid in terms of subscribers, since the launch of newcomers to the market. And many of these newcomers have been touting their access to locals as one of their benefits.

Playstation Vue, on the other hand, may have gained more locals this week, but it also recently lost all Sinclair-owned local stations, and before that, Viacom channels. While Sony says it doesn’t have plans to shut down Vue, it has also made statements about its “uncertain” future, which concerned its user base.

Likely because of its branding as “Playstation,” many consumers may believe that the service is something that’s only available to Playstation owners. It’s not, though – Vue also streams across platforms, including iOS, Android, the web, and connected media players like Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, Fire TV, as well as Chromecast.

While an early player in streaming TV, Playstation Vue today lags on subscribers.

Dish’s Sling TV leads the pack with 2.3 million paying customers, followed by AT&T’s DirecTV Now with 1.8 million. Meanwhile, the newer Hulu Live TV service hit 800,000 subscribers in May, while YouTube TV passed 800,000 around the same time. Playstation Vue, however, reportedly has over 500,000 subscribers, in comparison.

The major players are benefitting from their large corporate parents, Digiday recently pointed out. For example, AT&T acquired Time Warner and is now leveraging its wireless business to sells subscriptions. And Google can afford to market and fund YouTube TV as it grows, and has bought expensive partnerships like the World Series and NBA Finals along the way.

What Vue has going for it, is that the market itself – streaming – is growing, and its service is among one of the better-designed and more stable. But if it’s not willing to rebrand Playstation Vue into something more approachable, it may never be able to come out ahead.

Google today announced that it is providing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with $9 million in Google Cloud credits to help further its work on the Kubernetes container orchestrator and that it is handing over operational control of the project to the community. These credits will be split over three years and are meant to cover the infrastructure costs of building, testing and distributing the Kubernetes software.

Why does this matter? Until now, Google hosted virtually all the cloud resources that supported the project like its CI/CD testing infrastructure, container downloads and DNS services on its cloud. But Google is now taking a step back. With the Kubernetes community reaching a state of maturity, Google is transferring all of this to the community.

Between the testing infrastructure and hosting container downloads, the Kubernetes project regularly runs over 150,000 containers on 5,000 virtual machines, so the cost of running these systems quickly adds up. The Kubernetes container registry served almost 130 million downloads since the launch of the project.

It’s also worth noting that the CNCF now includes a wide range of members that typically compete with each other. We’re talking Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, SAP and VMware, for example. All of these profit from the work of the CNCF and the Kubernetes community. Google doesn’t say so outright, but it’s fair to assume that it wanted others to shoulder some of the burdens of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, too. Similarly, some of the members of the community surely didn’t want to be so closely tied to Google’s infrastructure either.

“By sharing the operational responsibilities for Kubernetes with contributors to the project, we look forward to seeing the new ideas and efficiencies that all Kubernetes contributors bring to the project operations,” Google Kubernetes Engine product manager William Deniss writes in today’s announcement. He also notes that a number of Google’s will still be involved in running the Kubernetes infrastructure.

“Google’s significant financial donation to the Kubernetes community will help ensure that the project’s constant pace of innovation and broad adoption continue unabated,” said Dan Kohn, the executive director of the CNCF. “We’re thrilled to see Google Cloud transfer management of the Kubernetes testing and infrastructure projects into contributors’ hands – making the project not just open source, but openly managed, by an open community.”

It’s unclear whether the project plans to take some of the Google-hosted infrastructure and move it to another cloud, but it could definitely do so — and other cloud providers could step up and offer similar credits, too.