Author: azeeadmin

European privacy group noyb, which recently kicked off a major campaign targeting rampant abuse of the region’s cookie consent rules, has followed up by publishing a technical proposal for an automated browser-level signal it believes could go even further to tackle the friction generated by endless ‘your data choices’ pop-ups.

Its proposal is for an automated signal layer that would enable users to configure advanced consent choices — such as only being asked to allow cookies if they frequently visit a website; or being able to whitelist lists of sites for consent (if, for example, they want to support quality journalism by allowing their data to be used for ads in those specific cases).

The approach would offer a route to circumvent the user experience nightmare flowing from all the dark pattern design that’s made cookie consent collection so cynical, confusing and tedious — by simply automating the yeses and noes, thereby keeping interruptions to a user-defined minimum.

In the European Union cookie consent banners mushroomed in the wake of a 2018 update to the bloc’s privacy rules (GDPR) — especially on websites that rely on targeted advertising to generate revenue. And in recent years it has not been unusual to find cookie pop-ups that contain a labyrinthine hell of opacity — culminating (if you don’t just click ‘agree’) — to vast menus of ‘trusted partners’ all after your data. Some of which are pre-set to share information and require the user to individually toggle each and every one off.

Such stuff is a mockery of compliance, rather than the truly simple choice envisage by the law. So noyb’s earlier campaign is focused on filing scores of complaints against sites it believes aren’t complying with requirements to provide users with a clear and free choice to say no to their data being used for ads (and it’s applying a little automation tech there too to help scale up the number of complaint it can file).

Its follow-up here — showing how an advanced control layer that signals user choices in the background could work — shares the same basic approach as the ‘Do Not Track’ proposals originally proposed for baking into web browsers all the way back in 2009 but which failed to get industry buy-in. There has also been a more recent US-based push to revive the idea of browser-level privacy control — buoyed by California’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which took effect at the start of last year, and includes a requirement that businesses respect user opt-out preferences via a signal from their browser.

However noyb’s version of browser-level privacy control seeks to go further by enabling more granular controls — which it says it necessary to better mesh with the EU’s nuanced legal framework around data protection.

It points out that Article 21(5) of the GDPR already allows for automatic signals from the browser to inform websites in the background whether a user is consenting to data processing or not.

The ePrivacy Regulation proposal, a much delayed reform of the bloc’s rules around electronic privacy has also included such a provision.

However noyb says development to establish such a signal hasn’t happened yet — suggesting that cynically manipulative consent management platforms may well have been hampering privacy-focused innovation.

But it also sees a chance for the necessary momentum to build behind the idea.

For example, it points to how Apple has recently been dialling up the notification and control it offers users of its mobile platform, iOS, to allow people to both know which third party apps want to track them and allow or deny access to their data — including giving users a super simple ‘deny all third party tracking’ option backed into iOS’ settings.

So, well, why should Internet users who happen to be browsing on a desktop device not have a set of similarly advanced privacy controls too?

EU lawmakers are also still debating the ePrivacy Regulation reform — which deals centrally with cookies — so the campaign group wants to demonstrate how automated control tech could be a key piece of the answer to so-called ‘cookie consent fatigue’; by giving users a modern toolset to shrink consent friction without compromising their ability to control what happens with their data.

In order to work as intended automated signals would need to be legally binding (to prevent adtech companies just ignoring them) — and having a clear legal basis set out in the ePrivacy Regulation is one way that could happen within fairly short order.

The chance at least is there.

There have been concerns that the ePrivacy reform — which was stalled for years — could end up weakening the EU’s data protection framework in the face of massive adtech industry lobbying. And the negotiation process to reach a final text remains ongoing. So it’s still not clear where it’s going to end up.

But, earlier this year, the European Council agreed its negotiating mandate with the other EU institutions. And, on cookies, the Council said they want companies to find ways to reduce ‘cookie consent fatigue’ among users — such as by whitelisting types of cookies/providers in their browser settings. So there is at least a potential path to legislate for an effective browser-level control layer in Europe.

For now, noyb has published a prototype and a technology specification for what it’s calling the ADPC (aka Advanced Data Protection Control). The work on the framework has been carried out by noyb working with the Sustainable Computing Lab at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

The proposal envisages web pages sending privacy requests in a machine-readable way and the ADPC allowing the response to be transmitted using header signals or via Java Script. noyb likens the intelligent management of queries and automatic responses such a system could support to an email spam filter.

Commenting in a statement, chairman Max Schrems said: “For Europe, we need more than just an ‘opt-out’ so that it fits into our legal framework. That’s why we call the prototype ‘Advanced’ Data Protection Control, because it’s much more flexible and specific than previous approaches.

“ADPC allows intelligent management of privacy requests. A user could say, for example, ‘please ask me only after I’ve been to the site several times’ or ‘ask me again after 3 months.’ It is also possible to answer similar requests centrally. ADPC thus allows the flood of data requests to be managed in a meaningful way.”

“With ADPC, we also want to show the European legislator that such a signal is feasible and brings advantages for all sides,” he added. “We hope that the negotiators of the member states and the European Parliament will ensure a solid legal basis here, which could be applicable law in a short time. What California has done already, the EU should be able to do as well.”

The Commission has been contacted for comment on noyb’s ADPC.

While there are wider industry shifts afoot to depreciate tracking cookies altogether — with Google proposing to replace current adtech infrastructure supported by Chrome with an alternative stack of (it claims) more privacy respecting alternatives (aka its Privacy Sandbox) — there’s still plenty of uncertainty over what will ultimately happen to third party cookies.

Google’s move to end support for tracking cookies is being closely scrutinized by regional antitrust regulators. And just last week the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is investigating a number of complaints about the plan, said it’s minded to accept concessions from Google that would mean the regulator could order it not to switch off tracking cookies.

Moreover, even if tracking cookies do finally crumble there is still the question of what exactly they get replaced with — and how alternative adtech infrastructure could impact user privacy?

Google’s so-called ‘Privacy Sandbox’ proposal to target ads at cohorts of users (based on bucketed ‘interests’ its technology will assign them via on-device analysis of their browsing habits) has raised fresh concerns about the risks of exploitative and predatory advertising. So it may be no less important for users to have meaningful browser-level controls over their privacy choices in the future — even if the tracking cookie itself goes away.

A browser-level signal could offer a way for a web user to say ‘no’ to being stuck in an ‘interest bucket’ for ad targeting purposes, for example — signalling that they prefer to see only contextual ads instead, say.

tl;dr: The issue of consent does not only affect cookies — and it’s telling that Google has avoided running the first trials of its replacement tech for tracking cookies (FLoCs, or federated learning of cohorts) in Europe.

Niantic has encouraged the world to roam the streets as Pokémon trainers and wizards… next up? Time to transform and roll out.

80’s mega toy Transformers is the latest IP to partner with Niantic to build a map-heavy, geolocation-centric game.

Details are still a bit light, but here’s just about everything we know:

• It’ll be called Transformers: Heavy Metal. They’ve put up a pre-registration page here.
• It’s being built in collaboration with Hasbro, TOMY, and Seattle game team Very Very Spaceship.
• Players will be a part of the “will join the Guardian Network, a group of humans who have banded together with the Autobots in a war against the Decepticons”
• It’s built on Niantic’s Lightship platform, the same underlying engine that powers Pokémon GO, Harry Potter Wizards Unite, and the still in-development Catan: World Explorers.
• When’s it arriving? Nothing too specific yet, but it’ll launch in “select markets” soon, and then globally “later this year”. This staged rollout tends to be Niantic’s approach; Pokémon GO landed first in Japan, while Catan was quietly rolled out in New Zealand last year.

They’ve only released a bit of concept art so far, and it suggests gameplay not unlike GO and Wizards Unite:

Image Credits: Niantic

Will this one take over the world the way Pokémon GO did in the summer of 2016? Maybe not — that one hit a lot of the right notes at the right time, the perfect blend of novelty and nostalgia. But Wizards Unite has found enough of an audience that it’s still in active development two years after launch, so it seems Niantic sees room for more map-centric games.

Google today announced that it is making Workspace, the service formerly known as G Suite (and with a number of new capabilities), available to everyone, including consumers on free Google accounts. The core philosophy behind Workspace is to enable deeper collaboration between users. You can think of it as the same Google productivity apps you’re already familiar with (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Chat, etc.), but with a new wrapper around it and deeper integrations between the different apps.

For individual users who want more from their Workspace, there will also be a new paid offering, though Google isn’t saying how much you’ll have to pay yet. With that, users will get access to “premium capabilities, including smart booking services, professional video meetings and personalized email marketing, with much more on the way.” We’ll likely hear more about this later this year. This new paid offering will be available “soon” in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil and Japan.

Consumers will have to switch from the classic Hangouts experience (RIP) to the new Google Chat to enable it — and with this update, all users will now have access to the new Google Chat, too. Until now, only paying G Suite/Workspace users had access to this new Workspace user experience.

“Collaboration doesn’t stop at the workplace — our products have been optimized for broad participation, sharing and helpfulness since the beginning,” said Javier Soltero, VP and GM, Google Workspace. “Our focus is on delivering consumers, workers, teachers and students alike an equitable approach to collaboration, while still providing flexibility that allows these different subsets of users to take their own approach to communication and collaboration.”

Image Credits: Google

Once enabled, users will encounter quite a few user interface changes. The left rail, for example, will look a little bit like the bottom bar of Gmail on iOS and Android now, with the ability to switch between Mail, Chat, Meet and Spaces (which — yeah — I’m not sure anybody really understands this one, but more about this later). The right rail will continue to bring up various plugins and shortcuts to features like Google Calendar, Tasks and Keep.

A lot of people — especially those who simply want Gmail to be Gmail and don’t care about all of this collaboration stuff in their private lives — will hate this. But at least for the time being, you can still keep the old experience by not switching from Hangouts to the new Google Chat. But for Google, this clearly shows the path Workspace is on.

Image Credits: Google

“Back in October of last year, we announced some very significant updates to our communication and collaboration product line and our business, starting with the new brand and identity that we chose around Google Workspace that’s meant to represent what we believe is the future direction and real opportunity around our product — less around being a suite of individual products and more around being an integrated set of experiences that represent the future of work,” Soltero explained in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement.

And then there is “Spaces.” Until now, Google Workspace features a tool called “Rooms.” Rooms are now Spaces. I’m not quite sure why, but Google says it is “evolving the Rooms experience in Google Chat into a dedicated place for organizing people, topics, and projects in Google Workspace.”

Best I can tell, these are Slack-like channels where teams can not just have conversations around a given topic but also organize relevant files and upcoming tasks, all with an integrated Google Meet experience and direct access to working on their files. That’s all good and well, but I’m not sure why Google felt the need to change the name. Maybe it just doesn’t want you to confuse Slack rooms with Google rooms. And it’s called Google Workspace, after all, not Workroom. 

New features for Rooms/Spaces include in-line topic threading, presence indicators, custom statuses, expressive reactions and a collapsible view, Google says.

Both free and paid users will get access to these new Spaces once they launch later this year.

But wait, there’s more. A lot more. Google is also introducing a number of new Workspace features today. Google Meet, for example, is getting a companion mode that is meant to foster “collaboration equity in a hybrid world.” The idea here is to give meeting participants who are in a physical meeting room and are interacting with remote participants a companion experience to use features like screen sharing, polls, in-meeting chat, hand raise and Q&A live captions on their personal devices. Every participant using the companion mode will also get their own video tile. This feature will be available in September.

Image Credits: Google

Also new is an RSVP option that will allow you to select whether you will participate remotely, in a meeting room (or not at all), as well as new moderation controls to allow hosts to prevent the use of in-meeting chat and to mute and unmute individual participants.

On the security side, Google today also announced that it will allow users to bring their own encryption keys. Currently, Google encrypts your data, but it does manage the key for you. To strengthen your security, you may want to bring your own keys to the service, so Google has now partnered with providers like Flowcrypt, Futurex, Thales and Virtru to enable this.

“With Client-side encryption, customer data is indecipherable to Google, while users can continue to take advantage of Google’s native web-based collaboration, access content on mobile devices, and share encrypted files externally,” writes Google directors of product management Karthik Lakshminarayanan and Erika Trautman in today’s announcement.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also introducing trust rules for Drive to give admins control over how files can be shared within an organization and externally. And to protect from real phishing threats (not those fake ones your internal security organization sends out every few weeks or so), Google is also now allowing admins to enable the same phishing protections it already offers today to content within an organization to help guard your data against insider threats.

As ubiquitous as Google Docs has become in the last year alone, a major criticism often overlooked by the countless workplaces who use it is that it isn’t end-to-end encrypted, allowing Google — or any requesting government agency — access to a company’s files. But Google is finally addressing that key complaint with a round of updates that will let customers shield their data by storing their own encryption keys.

Google Workspace, the company’s enterprise offering that includes Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, is adding client-side encryption so that a company’s data will be indecipherable to Google.

Companies using Google Workspace can store their encryption keys with one of four partners for now: Flowcrypt, Futurex, Thales, or Virtru, which are compatible with Google’s specifications. The move is largely aimed at regulated industries — like finance, healthcare, and defense — where intellectual property and sensitive data are subject to intense privacy and compliance rules.

(Image: Google / supplied)

The real magic lands later in the year when Google will publish details of an API that will let enterprise customers build their own in-house key service, allowing workplaces to retain direct control of their encryption keys. That means if the government wants that company’s data, they have to knock on their front door — and not sneak around the back by serving the key holder with a legal demand.

Google published technical details of how the client-side encryption feature works, and will roll out as a beta in the coming weeks.

Tech companies giving their corporate customers control of their own encryption keys has been a growing trend in recent years. Slack and cloud vendor Egnyte bucked the trend by allowing their enterprise users to store their own encryption keys, effectively cutting themselves out of the surveillance loop. But Google has dragged its feet on encryption for so long that startups are working to build alternatives that bake in encryption from the ground up.

Google said it’s also pushing out new trust rules for how files are shared in Google Drive to give administrators more granularity on how different levels of sensitive files can be shared, and new data classification labels to mark documents with a level of sensitivity such as “secret” or “internal”.

The company said it’s improving its malware protection efforts by now blocking phishing and malware shared from within organizations. The aim is to help cut down on employees mistakenly sharing malicious documents.

Motorway, is a UK startup that allows professional car dealers to bid in an auction for privately-owned cars for sale. The startup has had rapid success by removing a lot of friction in the process. It’s now raised £48m / $67.7m in a Series B round led by Index Ventures, along with new investors BMW i Ventures and Unbound. Existing investors Latitude and Marchmont Ventures also participated. The funding will be used to extend its platform and grow the current 160-strong team.

The startup allows consumers to sell their car for up to £1,000, by uploading its details via a smartphone. Over 3,000 professional car dealers then bid for the vehicle in a daily online auction. The highest offer wins the car, which is then collected for free by the winning dealer inside 24 hours. 

Motorway says it has sold 65,000 cars since its launch in 2017 and seen sales hit £50m in May 2021 alone, £2.5m of transactions a day, and more than 4,000 completed car sales a month. With only 5% of all vehicles in the UK sold online right now, there is plenty of headroom for this market to grow.
 
Tom Leathes, CEO of Motorway, said: “For half a century, inefficient offline processes have led to bad deals and a bad experience for both car sellers and car dealers. Motorway has fundamentally changed a broken experience where everyone ends up dissatisfied – and we’ve transformed it with a superior online experience where everybody wins. Cutting out the middlemen leaves both the consumer and car dealer with a better deal, all from home and without the stress. Our incredible growth so far is testament to our focus on delivering more value through technology – and this investment will provide us with the fuel to take Motorway to the next level.”
 
Danny Rimer, Partner at Index Ventures, said: “We’re always looking to invest in companies that are truly disrupting an industry and meeting a real customer need. We have found that in Motorway. The team has built an incredibly powerful platform, underpinned by great technology and a deep understanding of the challenges both consumers and car dealers face. Motorway has quickly become the first port of call for tens of thousands of people selling their car.” 
 
Motorway previously raised £14m in venture funding since it was founded by Tom Leathes, Harry Jones and Alex Buttle in 2017.

Speaking to me over interview Leathes added: “COVID has been a real accelerator of something that was already happening. The car industry is moving online and that’s partly about people buying their next car online, but it’s also about dealers changing their behavior, how they do business, where they buy their cars. It forced that change which they resisted for a long time, and now they’re embracing it, so it’s a fundamental shift in the industry. And this is why we see such a massive opportunity to provide the rails to help both sides of the marketplace to move online.”

Rimer added: “It’s rare that you have founders who have worked together across multiple successful and less successful startups who have that scar tissue and success, and are now going for a much bigger opportunity. The business model is really an important one for us because instead of owning inventory and then having to get rid of your inventory, sort of like the difference between Nat-a-Porter and Farfetch. Motorway’s marketplace is just like Farfetch – they don’t have any inventory, which means that just by merely making that platform happen for buyers and sellers, they win. So there’s a lot less risk associated with what the money is going to be used for when building the business.”

Immersive Labs, a platform which teaches cyber security skills corporate employees by using real, up-to-date threat intelligence in a “gamified” way, has closed a $75 million Series C funding round led by new investors Insight Partners alongside Menlo Ventures, Citi Ventures and existing investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

The investment will be used to scale Immersive’s offering in the US and take advantage of the new wave of interest in cyber threats caused by so many people working remotely, post-pandemic. Founded in 2017, Immersive Labs now has 200 people, with joint operations HQs in Bristol, UK, and Boston, US. It plans to raise headcount to over 600 in the next two years and establish operations in new regions throughout APAC and Europe. Immersive’s ‘Cyber Workforce Optimization’ platform claims to offer board-level metrics and benchmarking to gauge how the skills inside organizations are coping.

Immersive has now raised a total of $123m in venture funding and counts HSBC, Vodafone, and the NHS as customers. The company says it is growing at “over 100% year-on-year”.

James Hadley, CEO and founder of Immersive Labs, said: “With cyber risk becoming a problem for a growing number of business functions, cybersecurity knowledge and skills should no longer be the preserve of a few technical people hidden away in a back office. Everyone from the teams who build software, to the CEO, now need to play their part in addressing a pervasive company issue. This requires unlocking and evidencing skills in a much broader group of people.”

Ryan Hinkle, managing director at Insight Partners, said: “With significant global customer and revenue growth over the last few years, Immersive Labs has established a strong position in the fast-developing cyber skills space. With influential leadership, an innovative product in a growing market, and strong user engagement, the company is in a position to continue to lead the cyber readiness market.”

Speaking to me over an interview, Hadley added: “We chose Insight Partners because they’ve got a real strength in enterprise B2B which is where we sell to CIOs and CEOs… We want to be the next Darktrace in terms of a successful UK cybersecurity company.”

The comparison might not be that fanciful. Immersive Labs came out of the CYLON cyber accelerator, similar to Darktrace, has the same investors as Darktrace, but has in fact attracted $75m for its Series C, whereas Darktrace didn’t manage that level until Series D. Darktrace has now IPO’d in the London for £1.7bn.

Hadley, a former GCHQ security researcher and trainer, came up with the idea for the cyber skills platform while leading cyber training himself. I asked him why he thinks Immersive has managed to come up with a ‘flywheel effect’ with its platform.

“People always talk about all the cyber threats getting worse, but it really is now and it’s in the public domain. We’ve got a strong belief that cybersecurity is no longer the responsibility of the geeks in the basement. Actually, it’s business-wide. And now the tidal wave is coming. Cybercrime is going to go off the scale this year and next because companies are paying the ransoms. And as a result of that, we’re putting in analytics to measure decision-making in a crisis. It’s just resonating really well with every company regardless of CIO or vertical,” he told me.

No single question bedevils American energy and environmental policy more than nuclear waste. No, not even a changing climate, which may be a wicked problem but nonetheless receives a great deal of counter-bedeviling attention.

It’s difficult to paint the picture with a straight face. Let’s start with three main elements of the story.

First, nuclear power plants in the United States generate about 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste (or “spent fuel”) per year. Due to its inherent radioactivity, it is carefully stored at various sites around the country.

Second, the federal government is in charge of figuring out what to do with it. In fact, power plant operators have paid over $40 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund so that the government can handle it. The idea was to bury it in the “deep geological repository” embodied by Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but this has proved politically impossible. Nevertheless, $15 billion was spent on the scoping.

Third, due to the Energy Department’s inability to manage this waste, it simply accumulates. According to that agency’s most recent data release, some 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel—hundreds of thousands of fuel assemblies containing millions of fuel rods—is waiting for a final destination.

And here’s the twist ending: those nuclear plant operators sued the government for breach of contract and, in 2013, they won. Several hundred million dollars is now paid out to them each year by the U.S. Treasury, as part of a series of settlements and judgments. The running total is over $8 billion.

I realize this story sounds a little crazy. Am I really saying that the U.S. government collected billions of dollars to manage nuclear waste, then spent billions of dollars on a feasibility study only to stick it on the shelf, and now is paying even more billions of dollars for this failure? Yes, I am.

Fortunately, all of the aggregated waste occupies a relatively small area and temporary storage exists. Without an urgent reason to act, policymakers generally will not.

While attempts to find long-term storage will continue, policymakers should look towards recycling some of this “waste” into usable fuel. This is actually an old idea. Only a small fraction of nuclear fuel is consumed to generate electricity.

Proponents of recycling envision reactors that use “reprocessed” spent fuel, extracting energy from the 90% of it leftover after burn-up. Even its critics admit that the underlying chemistry, physics, and engineering of recycling are technically feasible, and instead assail the disputable economics and perceived security risks.

So-called Generation IV reactors come in all shapes and sizes. The designs have been around for years—in some respects, all the way back to the dawn of nuclear energy—but light-water reactors have dominated the field for a variety of political, economic, and strategic reasons. For example, Southern Company’s twin conventional pressurized water reactors under construction in Georgia each boast a capacity of just over 1,000-megawatt (or 1 gigawatt), standard for Westinghouse’s AP 1000 design.

In contrast, next-generation plant designs are a fraction of the size and capacity, and also may use different cooling systems: Oregon-based NuScale Power’s 77-megawatt small modular reactor, San Diego-based General Atomics’ 50-megawatt helium-cooled fast modular reactor, Alameda-based Kairos Power’s 140-megawatt molten fluoride salt reactor, and so on all have different configurations that can fit different business and policy objectives.

Many Gen-IV designs can either explicitly recycle used fuel or be configured to do so. On June 3, TerraPower (backed by Bill Gates), GE Hitachi, and the State of Wyoming announced an agreement to build a demonstration of the 345-megawatt Natrium design, a sodium-cooled fast reactor.

Natrium is technically capable of recycling fuel for generation. California-based Oklo has already reached an agreement with Idaho National Laboratory to operate its 1.5-megawatt “microreactor” off of used-fuel supplies. In fact, the self-professed “preferred fuel” for New York-based Elysium Industries’ molten salt reactor design is spent nuclear fuel and Alabama-based Flibe Energy advertises the waste-burning capability of its thorium reactor design.

Whether advanced reactors rise or fall does not depend on resolving the nuclear waste deadlock. Though such reactors may be able to consume spent fuel, they don’t necessarily have to. Nonetheless, incentivizing waste recycling would improve their economics.

“Incentivize” here is code for “pay.” Policymakers should consider ways that Washington can make it more profitable for a power plant to recycle fuel than to import it—from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Russia, and other countries.

Political support for advanced nuclear technology, including recycling, is deeper than might be expected. In 2019, the Senate confirmed Dr. Rita Baranwal as the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy (DOE). A materials scientist by training, she emerged as a champion of recycling.

The new Biden administration has continued broadly bipartisan support for advanced nuclear reactors in proposing in its Fiscal Year 2022 Budget Request to increase funding for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy by nearly $350 million. The proposal includes specific funding increases for researching and developing reactor concepts (plus $32 million), fuel cycle R&D (plus $59 million), and advanced reactor demonstration (plus $120 million), and tripling funding for the Versatile Test Reactor (from $45 million to $145 million, year over year).

In May, the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced a new $40 million program to support research in “optimizing” waste and disposal from advanced reactors, including through waste recycling. Importantly, the announcement explicitly states that the lack of a solution to nuclear waste today “poses a challenge” to the future of Gen-IV reactors.

The debate is a reminder that recycling in general is a very messy process. It is chemical-, machine-, and energy-intensive. Recycling of all kinds, from critical minerals to plastic bottles, produces new waste, too. Today, federal and state governments are quite active in recycling these other waste streams, and they should be equally involved in nuclear waste.

Blue Origin has its winning bidder for its first ever human spaceflight, and the winner will pay $28 million for the privilege of flying aboard the company’s debut private astronaut mission. The winning bid came in today during a live auction, which saw 7,600 registered bidders, from 159 countries compete for the spot.

This was the culmination of Blue Origin’s three part bidding process for the ticket, which included a blind auction first, followed by an open, asynchronous auction with the highest bid posted to the company’s website whenever it changed. This last live auction greatly ramped up the value of the winning bid, which was at just under $5 million prior to the event.

This first seat up for sale went for a lot more than what an actual, commercial spot is likely to cost on Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule, which flies to suborbital space and only spends a few minutes there before returning to Earth. Estimates put the cost of a typical launch at someone under $1 million, likely closer to $500,000 or so. But this is the first, which is obviously a special distinction, and it’s also a trip that will allow the winning bidder to pretty much literally rub elbows with Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, who is going to be on the flight as well, along with his brother Mark, and a fourth passenger that Blue Origin says it will be announcing sometime in the coming “weeks,” ahead of the July 20 target flight date.

As for who won the auction, we’ll also have to wait to find that out, since the winner’s identity is also going to be “released in the weeks following” the end of today’s live bidding. And in case you thought that $28 million might represent a big revenue windfall for Blue Origin, which has spent years developing its human spaceflight capability, think again: The company is donating it to its Club for the Future non-profit foundation, which is focused on encouraging kids to pursue careers in STEM in a long-term bid to help Bezos’ larger goals of making humanity a spacefaring civilization.

You can re-watch the entire live bidding portion of the auction via the stream below.

In a world of talking points and corporate jargon, opinions are refreshing — and Expensify CEO and founder David Barrett is full of them. One of his earliest lessons in life, for example, was that basically everyone is wrong about basically everything. If instilling that at a young age doesn’t force you to become an entrepreneur, I don’t know what does.

Barrett’s ethos has, as reporter Anna Heim puts, led to Expensify having “its own take on almost everything” from hiring without job titles and resumes, to going distributed before it was cool, to having an almost non-existent sales team.

And before you roll your eyes at the unconventional, here’s a factoid for you: Today, the 130-person expense management business has reached more than 10 million users and hit $100 million in annual revenue.

Heim has spent months working on the Expensify EC-1 to connect dots and give us a full picture into an anything-but-conventional company as it heads toward an IPO. The final installment published this week so you can read the whole series in one straight shot:

• Part 1: Origin story “How a band of P2P hackers planted the seeds of a unique expense management giant” (2,400 words/10 minutes
• Part 2: Culture: “How Expensify got to $100M in revenue by hiring ‘stem cells’ and not ‘cogs in a wheel’” (3,120 words/12.5 minutes)
• Part 3: Expansion and remote work: “How Expensify shed Silicon Valley arrogance to realize its global ambitions” (3,250 words/13 minutes)
• Part 4: Engineering and technology: “How Expensify hacked its way to a robust, scalable tech stack” (3,300 words/13 minutes)
• Part 5: Business model: “How bottom-up sales helped Expensify blaze the path for SaaS” (4,200 words/17 minutes)

In the rest of this newsletter, I’ll walk you through a refresh of some new investment vehicles and two fintech mega-rounds to know. I also want to give a shout out to our mobility team, with transportation editor Kirsten Korosec and reporters Aria Alamalhodaei and Rebecca Bellan, who led efforts to put on a fantastic event at TC Sessions: Mobility this week.

Ok, into the news!

More money, more representation?

Image Credits: Black_Kira / Getty Images

As I discussed last month, venture capital is going through yet another unbundling process. But, for every savvy fintech syndicate out there, I don’t see the same level of explicitness when it comes to the tools that help the communityless, undernetworked and underestimated access opportunities.

Here’s what to know: Two new efforts this week give me hope. Ten venture capitalists teamed up to launch Screendoor, which Forbes reports is a $50 million fund-of-funds to back emerging fund managers from diverse backgrounds. The partners, which include Charles Hudson, Kirsten Green, Aileen Lee and Hunter Walk, will not take any fee or carry in the fund.

Speaking of cross-fund collaboration, Utah-based startup incubator Altitude Lab had similar news to share. The incubator, which spun out of Recursion and the University of Utah, has launched a 13-investor coalition to back underrepresented health tech founders. This week, it announced a $50 million commitment in funding and mentorship.

And if you want to have more fun(ds):

• Seven Seven Six, the new venture firm from Alexis Ohanian, closes $150M fund
• Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund closes new $24 million fund
• Supply Change Capital, founded by Noramay Cadena and Shayna Harris, had its first close for its $40 million fund.

The Fintech twins

Image Credits: Janet Kimber (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Three is a trend, but two means twins, and that matters too! Riddles aside, we saw two fintech giants raise massive tranches of capital within days of each other.

Here’s what to know: Klarna raised $639 million at a $45.6 billion valuation, and Nubank raised $750 million at a $30 billion valuation. Both fintech companies are based outside of the United States, but Klarna attests some of its rapid growth to a growing consumer base in the United States. More than 18 million American consumers are now using Klarna, which is up from 10 million at the end of last year’s third quarter. Meanwhile, Nubank is staying focused on its primary market of Brazil, with some expansion in Colombia and Mexico.

 Demystifying mega-rounds:

• The fintech endgame: New supercompanies combine the best of software and financials
• As buy now, pay later startups keep raising capital, a dive into Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm’s earnings
• Visa takes a swipe in fintech, builds new online marketplace

The huge TAM of fake breaded chicken bits

Image Credits: Simulate (opens in a new window)

Another week, another spicy Equity episode for you. And this week, we mean it literally: Simulate, the company behind those sometimes spicy fake chicken nuggets, raised a ton of money.

Here’s what to know: Beyond fake meat, topics in this week’s episode include worker empowerment, culture in startups, eldercare and a $900 million exit.

Around TC

• A big theme of this year in tech? Figuring out how to break through the noise. Sure, there are millions of marketers out there, but only a slice of those have actually had experience helping grow startups to success. So, TechCrunch is here to help! We’re making a list of the best growth marketers for startups. You can help us by nominating your favorites into this survey.
• Also, TechCrunch is coming to Pittsburgh! We want to know the best local talent out there, so if you or someone you know might be a good fit, pitch us.

Across the week

Seen on TechCrunch

• SoftBank, Uber, Tencent set to reap rewards from Didi IPO
• Does what happens at YC stay at YC?
• The imbalance landscape of hormonal health
• Here’s everything Apple announced at the WWDC 2021 keynote

Seen on Extra Crunch

• Don’t panic: ‘Algorithm updates’ aren’t the end of the world for SEO managers 
• Toast’s Aman Narang and BVP’s Kent Bennett on how customer obsession is everything
• What do these 4 IPOs tell us about the state of the market?
• How to start a company in 4 days
• Dear Sophie: What is a diversity green card and how do I apply for one?

Talk next week,

N