A year ago I felt a panic that still reverberates in me today. Hackers swapped my T-Mobile SIM card without my approval and methodically shut down access to most of my accounts and began reaching out to my Facebook friends asking to borrow crypto. Their social engineering tactics, to be clear, were laughable but they could have been catastrophic if my friends were less savvy.

Flash forward a year and the same thing happened to me again – my LTE coverage winked out at about 9pm and it appeared that my phone was disconnected from the network. Panicked, I rushed to my computer to try to salvage everything I could before more damage occurred. It was a false alarm but my pulse went up and I broke out in a cold sweat. I had dealt with this once before and didn’t want to deal with it again.

Sadly, I probably will. And you will, too. The SIM card swap hack is still alive and well and points to one and only one solution: keeping your crypto (and almost your entire life) offline.

Trust No Carrier

Stories about massive SIM-based hacks are all over. Most recently a crypto PR rep and investor, Michael Terpin, lost $24 million to hackers who swapped his AT&T SIM. Terpin is suing the carrier for $224 million. This move, which could set a frightening precedent for carriers, accuses AT&T of “fraud and gross negligence.”

From Krebs:

Terpin alleges that on January 7, 2018, someone requested an unauthorized SIM swap on his AT&T account, causing his phone to go dead and sending all incoming texts and phone calls to a device the attackers controlled. Armed with that access, the intruders were able to reset credentials tied to his cryptocurrency accounts and siphon nearly $24 million worth of digital currencies.

While we can wonder in disbelief at a crypto investor who keeps his cash in an online wallet secured by text message, how many other services do we use that depend on emails or text messages, two vectors easily hackable by SIM spoofing attacks? How many of us would be resistant to the techniques that nabbed Terpin?

Another crypto owner, Namek Zu’bi, lost access to his Coinbase account after hackers swapped his SIM, logged into his account, and changed his email while attempting direct debits to his bank account.

“When the hackers took over my account they attempted direct debits into the account. But because I blocked my bank accounts before they could it seems there are bank chargebacks on that account. So Coinbase is essentially telling me sorry you can’t recover your account and we can’t help you but if you do want to use the account you owe $3K in bank chargebacks,” he said.

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Now Zu’bi is facing a different issue: Coinbase is accusing him of being $3,000 in arrears and will not give him access to his account because he cannot reply from the hacker’s email.

“I tried to work with coinbase hotline who is supposed to help with this but they were clueless even after I told them that the hackerchanged email address on my original account and then created a new account with my email address. Since then I’ve been waiting for a ‘specialist’ to email me (was supposed to be 4 business days it’s been 8 days) and I’m still locked out of my account because Coinbase support can’t verify me,” he said.

It has been a frustrating ride.

“As an avid supporter and investor in crypto it baffles me how one of the market leaders who just supposedly launched institutional grade custody solutions can barely deal with a basic account take-over fraud,” Zu’bi said.

How do you protect yourself?

I’ve been using Trezor hardware wallets for a while, storing them in safe places outside of my home and maintaining a separate record of the seeds in another location. I have very little crypto but even for a fraction of a few BTC it just makes sense to practice safe storage. Ultimately, if you own crypto you are now your own bank. That you would trust anyone – including a fiat bank – to keep your digital currency safe is deeply delusional. Heck, I barely trust Trezor and they seem like the only solution for safe storage right now.

When I was first hacked I posted recommendations by crypto exchange Kraken. They are still applicable today:

Call your telco and:

• Set a passcode/PIN on your account

  • Make sure it applies to ALL account changes
  • Make sure it applies to all numbers on the account
  • Ask them what happens if you forget the passcode
    • Ask them what happens if you lose that too

• Institute a port freeze

• Institute a SIM lock

• Add a high-risk flag

• Close your online web-based management account

• Block future registration to online management system

• Hack yo’ self

  • See what information they will leak

  • See what account changes you can make

They also recommend changing your telco email to something wildly inappropriate and using a burner phone or Google Voice number that is completely disconnected from your regular accounts as a sort of blind for your two factor texts and alerts.

Sadly, doing all of these things is quite difficult. Further, carriers don’t make it easy. In May a 27-year-old man named Paul Rosenzweig fell victim to a SIM-swapping hack even though he had SIM lock installed on his account. A rogue T-Mobile employee bypassed the security, resulting in the loss of a unique three character Twitter and Snapchat account.

Ultimately nothing is secure. The bottom line is simple: if you’re in crypto expect to be hacked and expect it to be painful and frustrating. What you do now – setting up real two-factory security, offloading your crypto onto physical hardware, making diligent backups, and protecting your keys – will make things far better for you in the long run. Ultimately, you don’t want to wake up one morning with your phone off and all of your crypto siphoned off into the pocket of a college kid like Joel Ortiz, a hacker who is now facing jail time for “13 counts of identity theft, 13 counts of hacking, and two counts of grand theft.” Sadly, none of the crypto he stole has surfaced after his arrest.

Dark Sky, one of the more popular mobile weather applications on the market, is out today with a complete refresh of its app, which has now been re-written from the ground up, the company says. The biggest change is the introduction of a new unified timeline that combines both the precipitation predictions Dark Sky is best known for, and its weather forecast all on one page. This makes it easier to view all the critical weather information in a single view, without having to tab around to different pages.

The app’s design has been updated, as well.

Before, a simple bar graph would show you the rainfall predictions for the day ahead, with the rainfall percentage to the right of the hour blocks. With the new release, that graph has been replaced with an animated chart that instead has the rainfall percentage displayed within a circle that fans out to the right of the bar, with the higher percentages out further to the right than the lower ones. This allows you to better visualize the ebb and flow of the rainfall over the hours ahead.

Combined with the map above the chart, you can get more of a sense of the day’s rainfall patterns – like if there were breaks in a storm that’s passing over, for example, or if you’re in for all-day rain.

The only qualm we have about the changes here is that the day’s high and low temps are now given less prominence – they’re in small italics above the animated chart, making them easier to miss.

The same animated chart for rainfall can be changed to display the day’s temperature, the “feels like” temperature, and the wind (mph) in the same way by tapping on those options at the bottom.

Plus, you can see these charts for any day of the week ahead, by scrolling down to the daily forecasts and tapping on the day you want to view.

There’s also a clever, if not always practical, “Time Machine” feature here at the bottom which can show you the weather going back decades. You just put in the date you want to see and press “jump.” This may be more fun for true weather nerds, than for day-to-day use, but it’s worth noting.

Another big fix, and one that was prompted by user feedback, was Dark Sky’s lack of support for saved locations. That’s now been addressed with this new release, where you can manage locations from the Search screen.

Another nod to weather nerds is available from Search, too – it will show you “interesting storms” from around the country in case “your weather happens to be too bland,” the company says, in its announcement. However, this could be useful if you’re checking in on friends or family in the path of a major storm or hurricane.

While no weather app is perfect, Dark Sky allows users to report the weather at their location which helps improve the app’s hyperlocal forecasts. That means the app may seem to be more accurate in places where there’s more consumer adoption. If you live somewhere rainy, then there’s a good chance a number of Dark Sky users are nearby because of the app’s key focus on precipitation forecasts.

The updated app offers an improved set of notifications, allowing you to toggle on or off things like Next Hour Precipitation, Daily Summary, Severe Weather Alerts, Umbrella Reminder, Sunscreen Reminder or your own custom notifications, based on other conditions that matter to you – like UV index forecasts, for instance.

The Iconfactory designed new weather icons for the updated app, which has also been entirely rewritten to load more quickly, be more responsive and stable.

The company didn’t have to improve Dark Sky – the app was pretty good as it was, and was almost always the No. 1 paid Weather app on the App Store, as well as ranked in the Top 50 Overall. Today,  however, it’s ranked No. 1 in Weather, and has shot up to No. 4 in the Top Paid charts, as result of the update.

Current users will be able to download the update for no charge. The app is a free download on Android (with in-app purchases), and a $3.99 paid app on iOS. It’s available in the U.S., U.K, and Ireland. The company also makes money through licensing its API, which is used by organizations like Yelp, Citymapper, Microsoft, Runkeeper, DuckDuckGo, and others. As the API is updated with more functionality, those will come to the app in the form of new features, we’re told.

 

In May, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that had banned gambling on sporting events in most states. That ruling is set to unlock billions of dollars in new business opportunities for online fantasy sports sites like DraftKings.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have DraftKings CEO Jason Robins join us on stage at Disrupt SF.

DraftKings launched back in 2012 and quickly grew into a household name by offering daily and weekly fantasy sports contests across a number of sports.

In fact, as of 2017, DraftKings had roughly 8 million users, and together with its top competitor FanDuel, the two companies owned more than 90 percent of the $2.6 billion daily fantasy sports market.

In 2016, DraftKings and FanDuel announced their intention to merge, but were met with resistance from the FTC who sued to block the merger. If it had been approved, the merger would have allowed both companies to combine resources with regards to regulatory approval and advertising spend.

At the time, Robins said that DraftKings has a “growing customer base of nearly 8 million, our revenue is growing over 30% year-over-year, and we are only just beginning to take our product overseas to the billions of international sports fans we have yet to even reach.”

At Disrupt, we’ll chat with Robins about the growth of the company, DraftKing’s plans for the 2018 NFL season, and what’s in store for the company following the Supreme Court ruling.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

In May, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that had banned gambling on sporting events in most states. That ruling is set to unlock billions of dollars in new business opportunities for online fantasy sports sites like DraftKings.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have DraftKings CEO Jason Robins join us on stage at Disrupt SF.

DraftKings launched back in 2012 and quickly grew into a household name by offering daily and weekly fantasy sports contests across a number of sports.

In fact, as of 2017, DraftKings had roughly 8 million users, and together with its top competitor FanDuel, the two companies owned more than 90 percent of the $2.6 billion daily fantasy sports market.

In 2016, DraftKings and FanDuel announced their intention to merge, but were met with resistance from the FTC who sued to block the merger. If it had been approved, the merger would have allowed both companies to combine resources with regards to regulatory approval and advertising spend.

At the time, Robins said that DraftKings has a “growing customer base of nearly 8 million, our revenue is growing over 30% year-over-year, and we are only just beginning to take our product overseas to the billions of international sports fans we have yet to even reach.”

At Disrupt, we’ll chat with Robins about the growth of the company, DraftKing’s plans for the 2018 NFL season, and what’s in store for the company following the Supreme Court ruling.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

Pepsi this morning announced its intentions to buy Tel Aviv-based beverage company SodaStream for $3.2 billion. The deal comes as more consumers are turning away from sugary beverages and toward more sustainable, in-home options.

The acquisition, which has been unanimously approved by PepsiCo’s shareholders, comes as the soda company is looking to diversify its portfolio and expand its reach globally. Pepsi products are currently available in retail shops in 45 countries, primarily focused on the U.S., Germany, France and Canada.

Among other things, the deal marks a play for the home market, which has proven elusive for Pepsi, as more and more consumers buy grocery supplies online. “We get to play in a business — home beverages — where we don’t play,” Pepsi CFO Hugh Johnston told CNBC.

There’s also a clear sustainability element to all of this, as consumer focus shifts away from single-use plastics. SodaStream has that going for it — a marked advantage over products like the bygone Keurig Kold.

“PepsiCo and SodaStream are an inspired match,” PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said in a press release. “Daniel and his leadership team have built an extraordinary company that is offering consumers the ability to make great-tasting beverages while reducing the amount of waste generated. That focus is well-aligned with Performance with Purpose, our philosophy of making more nutritious products while limiting our environmental footprint. Together, we can advance our shared vision of a healthier, more-sustainable planet.”

Earlier this month, Nooyi announced plans to step down from her role. Under her watch as Chief Executive, Pepsi has shifted toward healthier options, like Bubly, largely seen as competitor to the popular LaCroix line. The SodaStream deal marks another step toward more health conscious offerings from the company. 

The deal is expected to close by January.

Pepsi this morning announced its intentions to buy Tel Aviv-based beverage company SodaStream for $3.2 billion. The deal comes as more consumers are turning away from sugary beverages and toward more sustainable, in-home options.

The acquisition, which has been unanimously approved by PepsiCo’s shareholders, comes as the soda company is looking to diversify its portfolio and expand its reach globally. Pepsi products are currently available in retail shops in 45 countries, primarily focused on the U.S., Germany, France and Canada.

Among other things, the deal marks a play for the home market, which has proven elusive for Pepsi, as more and more consumers buy grocery supplies online. “We get to play in a business — home beverages — where we don’t play,” Pepsi CFO Hugh Johnston told CNBC.

There’s also a clear sustainability element to all of this, as consumer focus shifts away from single-use plastics. SodaStream has that going for it — a marked advantage over products like the bygone Keurig Kold.

“PepsiCo and SodaStream are an inspired match,” PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said in a press release. “Daniel and his leadership team have built an extraordinary company that is offering consumers the ability to make great-tasting beverages while reducing the amount of waste generated. That focus is well-aligned with Performance with Purpose, our philosophy of making more nutritious products while limiting our environmental footprint. Together, we can advance our shared vision of a healthier, more-sustainable planet.”

Earlier this month, Nooyi announced plans to step down from her role. Under her watch as Chief Executive, Pepsi has shifted toward healthier options, like Bubly, largely seen as competitor to the popular LaCroix line. The SodaStream deal marks another step toward more health conscious offerings from the company. 

The deal is expected to close by January.

Gecko Robotics aims to save human lives at our nation’s power plants with its wall-climbing robots. To continue doing so, the startup tells TechCrunch it has just secured $7 million from a cadre of high-profile sources, including Founders Fund, Mark Cuban, The Westly Group, Justin Kan and Y Combinator.

We first reported on the Pittsburgh-based company when co-founder Jake Loosararian came to the TechCrunch TV studios to show off his device for the camera. Back then, Gecko was in the YC Spring 2016 cohort, working with several U.S. power plants and headed toward profitability, according to Loosararian. 

You can see the original interview below:

The type of robots Gecko makes are an important part of ensuring safety in industrial and power plant facilities as they are able to go ahead of humans to check for potential hazards. The robots can climb tanks, boilers, pipelines and other industrial equipment using proprietary magnetic adhesion, ultra-sonics, lasers and a variety of sensors to inspect structural integrity, according to a company release.

While not cheap — the robots run anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 — they are also obviously a minuscule cost compared to human life.

Loosararian also mentioned his technology was faster and more accurate than what is out there at the moment by using machine learning “to solve some of the most difficult problems,” he told TechCrunch.

It’s also a unique enough idea to get the attention from several seasoned investors.

Gecko Robotics aims to save human lives at our nation’s power plants with its wall-climbing robots. To continue doing so, the startup tells TechCrunch it has just secured $7 million from a cadre of high-profile sources, including Founders Fund, Mark Cuban, The Westly Group, Justin Kan and Y Combinator.

We first reported on the Pittsburgh-based company when co-founder Jake Loosararian came to the TechCrunch TV studios to show off his device for the camera. Back then, Gecko was in the YC Spring 2016 cohort, working with several U.S. power plants and headed toward profitability, according to Loosararian. 

You can see the original interview below:

The type of robots Gecko makes are an important part of ensuring safety in industrial and power plant facilities as they are able to go ahead of humans to check for potential hazards. The robots can climb tanks, boilers, pipelines and other industrial equipment using proprietary magnetic adhesion, ultra-sonics, lasers and a variety of sensors to inspect structural integrity, according to a company release.

While not cheap — the robots run anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 — they are also obviously a minuscule cost compared to human life.

Loosararian also mentioned his technology was faster and more accurate than what is out there at the moment by using machine learning “to solve some of the most difficult problems,” he told TechCrunch.

It’s also a unique enough idea to get the attention from several seasoned investors.

Nvidia is taking advantage of the Gamescom in Germany to hold a press conference about its future graphics processing units. The conference will start at 6 PM in Germany, 12 PM in New York, 9 AM in San Francisco.

Just a week after the company unveiled its new Turing architecture, Nvidia could share more details about the configurations and prices of its upcoming products — the RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Ti, etc.

The name of the conference #BeForeTheGame suggests that Nvidia is going to focus on consumer products and in particular GPUs for gamers. While the GeForce GTX 1080 is still doing fine when it comes to playing demanding games, the company is always working on new generations to push the graphical boundaries of your computer.

According to Next INpact, you can expect two different products this afternoon. The GeForce RTX 2080 is going to feature 2,944 CUDA cores with 8GB of GDDR6. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti could feature as many as 4,352 CUDA cores with 11GB of GDDR6.

Nvidia already unveiled Quadro RTX models for professional workstations last week. The company is expecting significant performance improvements with this new generation as those GPUs are optimized for ray tracing — the “RT” in RTX stands for ray tracing.

While ray tracing isn’t new, it’s hard to process images using this method with current hardware. The RTX GPUs will have dedicated hardware units for this task in particular.

And maybe it’s going to become easier to buy GPUs now that the cryptocurrency mining craze is slowly fading away.

You wouldn’t expect a medical app to get its start as a Snapchat competitor. Neither did video chat startup TapTalk’s founder Onno Faber. But four years ago he was diagnosed with a rare disease called Neurofibromatosis Type 2 that caused tumors leading Onno to lose hearing in one ear. He’s amongst the one in ten people with an uncommon health condition suffering from the lack of data designed to invent treatments for their ails. And he’s now the co-founder of RDMD.

Emerging from stealth today, RDMD aggregates and analyzes medical records and sells the de-identified data to pharmaceutical companies to help them develop medicines. In exchange for access to the data, patients gets their fragmented medical records organized into an app they can use to track their treatment and get second opinions. It’s like Flatiron Health, the Google-backed cancer data startup that just got bought for $2 billion, but for rare diseases.

Now RDMD is announcing it’s raised a $3 million seed round led by Lux Capital and joined by Village Global, Shasta, Garuda, First Round’s Healthcare Coop, and a ton of top healthtech angels including Flatiron investors and board members. The cash will help RDMD expand to build out its product and address more rare diseases.

“We believe that the traditional way rare disease R&D is done needs to change” RDMD CEO Nancy Yu tells TechCrunch. The former head of corp dev at 23andme explains that, “There are over 7,000 rare diseases and growing, yet <5% of them have an FDA-approved therapy . . . it’s a massive problem.” 

While data infrastructure supports development of treatments for more common diseases like cancer and diabetes, rare diseases have been ignored because it’s wildly expensive and difficult to collect the high-quality data required to invent new medicines. But “RDMD generates research-grade, regulatory-grade data from patient medical records for use in rare disease drug R&D” says Yu. The more data it can collect, the more pharma companies can do to help patients.

Trading Utility For Patient Data

With RDMD’s app, a patient’s medical data that’s strewn across hospitals and health facilities can be compiled, organized and synthesized. Handwritten physicians’ notes and faxes are digitized with optical character recognition, structuring the data for scientific research. RDMD lays out a patients’ records in a disease-specific timeline that summarizes their data that can be kept updated, delivered to specialists for consultations, or shared with their family and caregivers.

If users opt in, that data can be anonymized and provided to research organizations, hospitals, and pharma companies that pay RDMD, though these patients can delete their accounts at any time. Since it’s straight from the medical records, the data is reliable enough to be regulation-compliant and research-ready. That allows it to accelerate the drug development process that’s both lucrative and life-saving. “It normally takes millions of dollars over several years to gather this type of data in rare diseases” Yu notes. “For the first time, we have a centralized and consented set of data for use in translational research, in a fraction of the time and cost.”

So far, RDMD has enrolled 150 patients with neurofibromatosis. But the potential to expand to other rare diseases attracted a previous pre-seed round from Village Global and new funding from angels like Clover Health CEO and Flatiron board member Vivek Garipalli, Flatiron investor and GV (Google Ventures) partner Vineeta Agarwala, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, former 23andme president Andy Page, and the husband and wife duo of former Instagram VP of product Kevin Weil and 137 Ventures managing director Elizabeth Weil.

“Onno and Nancy realized there’s an opportunity to do in rare diseases what Flatiron has done in oncology — to aggregate clinical data from patients, and to leverage that data in clinical trials and other use cases for biotech and pharma” says Shasta partner Nikhil Basu Trivedi. RDMD will be competing against pharma contract research organizations that incur high costs for collecting data the startup gets for free from patients in exchange for its product. Luckily, Flatiron’s exit paved the way for industry acceptance of RDMD’s model.

“The biggest risk for our company is if we lose our focus on providing real, immediate value to rare disease patients and families. Patients are the reason we are all here, and only with their trust can we fundamentally change how rare disease drug research is done” says Yu. RDMD will have to ensure it can protect the privacy of patients, the security of data, and the efficacy of its application to drug development.

Hindering this process is just one more consequence of our fractured medical records. Hopefully if startups like RDMD and Flatiron can demonstrate the massive value created by unifying medical data, it will pressure the healthcare power players to cooperate on a true industry standard.