Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Microsoft today announced two new open-source projects: Dapr, a portable, event-driven runtime that takes some of the complexity out of building microservices, and the Open Application Model (OAM), a specification that allows developers to define the resources their applications need to run on Kubernetes clusters and which Microsoft developed in cooperation with Alibaba Cloud.

As Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told me ahead of today’s launch, OAM very much solves a problem that a lot of developers and ops teams are facing every day. “If you take a look just at the Kubernetes ecosystem, Kubernetes has no concept of an application,” he explained. “It’s got the concept of a deployment and services, but nothing that coherently connects these things together into one unit and deployment lifecycle that a developer would understand in the way they look at their applications.” He argues that while Kubernetes has Helm charts, once an application is deployed, Kubernetes doesn’t know about the relationships between the objects that were represented in that chart. “We need a first-class application concept in a Kubernetes cluster.”

OAM is essentially a YAML file. It can be put in a service catalog or marketplace and deployed from there. But what’s maybe most important, says Russinovich, is that the developer can hand off the specification to the ops team and the ops team can then deploy it without having to talk to the developer. He also argues that Kubernetes itself is too complicated for enterprise developers. “At this point, it’s really infrastructure-focused,” he said. “You want a developer to focus on the app. What we saw when we talked to Kubernetes shops, they don’t let developers near Kubernetes.”

As for the cooperation with Alibaba Cloud on this specification, Russinovich noted that the two companies were already working on other projects together and that they both encountered the same problems when they talked to their customers and internal teams. Over time, they plan to bring the specification into an open-source foundation.

Alibaba Cloud will launch a managed service based on OAM, and chances are that Microsoft will do the same over time. “We’re looking to see what adoption looks like to decide,” Russinovich said.

While OAM solves an obvious problem for developers and ops team and fills a gap, Russinovich argues that Dapr may actually be quite revolutionary. “If you take a look at Dapr, it is really going to make microservices, cloud-native development, accessible to the enterprise.”

So what is Dapr? Microsoft describes it as “open source, portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge.”

That’s a mouthful, but the general idea here is to make it easier for developers to write distributed, microservice-based applications. “If you take a look at the list of problems they run into, they want to be event-driven, so they have to manage things like events and responding to triggers,” he said. “They want communication between these microservices, so they’ve got to do pub/sub. They’ve got to do service discovery — how do I get a service from one microservice to another one. They’ve got to do state management — how does my microservice store state and retrieve it.” And then, depending on whether it’s a stateless or stateful app, developers have to work with different SDKs and programming models. Dapr, on the other hand, doesn’t need an SDK because it delivers its services through a local HTTP or gRPC endpoint, keeping the application code separate from the Dapr code. Because of this, Dapr is also independent of the language you write in.

Dapr abstracts a lot of this away and provides the building blocks (which can be accessed by HTTP or gRPC APIs) that encode best practices for building these distributed services.

The chief executive of Foursquare, one of the largest location data platforms on the internet, is calling on lawmakers to pass legislation to better regulate the wider location data industry amid abuses and misuses of consumers’ personal data.

It comes in the aftermath of the recent location sharing scandal, which revealed how bounty hunters were able to get a hold of any cell subscriber’s real-time location data by obtaining the records from the cell networks. Vice was first to report the story. Since then there have been numerous cases of abuse — including the mass collection of vehicle locations in a single database, and popular iPhone apps that were caught collecting user locations without explicit permission.

The cell giants have since promised to stop selling location data but have been slow to act on their pledges.

“It’s time for Congress to regulate the industry,” said Foursquare’s chief executive Jeff Glueck (shown on the left in the photo above) in an op-ed in The New York Times on Wednesday.

In his opinion piece, Glueck called on Congress to push for a federal regulation that enforces three points.

Firstly, phone apps should not be allowed to access location data without explicitly stating how it will be used. Apple has already introduced a new location tracking privacy feature that tells users where their apps track them, and is giving them options to restrict that access — but all too often apps are not clear about how they use data beyond their intended use case.

“Why, for example, should a flashlight app have your location data?,” he said, referring to scammy apps that push for device permissions they should not need.

Second, the Foursquare chief said any new law should provide greater transparency around what app makers do with location data, and give consumers the ability to opt-out. “Consumers, not companies, should control the process,” he added. Europe’s GDPR already allows this to some extent, as will California’s incoming privacy law. But the rest of the U.S. is out of luck unless the measures are pushed out federally.

And, lastly, Glueck said anyone collecting location data should promise to “do no harm.” By that, he said companies should apply privacy-protecting measures to all data uses by not discriminating against individuals based on their religion, sexual orientation or political beliefs. That would make it illegal for family tracking apps, for example, to secretly pass on location data to healthcare or insurance providers who might use that data to hike up a person’s premiums above normal rates by monitoring their driving speeds, he said.

For a business that relies on location data, it’s a gutsy move.

But Glueck hinted that businesses like Foursquare would be less directly affected as they already take a more measured and mindful approach to privacy, whereas the fast and loose players in the location data industry would face greater scrutiny and more enforcement action.

“These steps are necessary, but they’re not sufficient,” said Glueck. But he warned that Congress could do “great damage” if lawmakers fail to sufficiently push overly burdensome regulations on smaller companies, which could increase overheads, put companies out of business and have a negative effect on competition.

“There’s no good reason that companies won’t be able to comply with reasonable regulation,” said Glueck.

“Comprehensive regulation will support future innovation, weed out the bad companies and earn the public trust,” he said.

Very few modern tech companies have executed on their mission as consistently, and at such a high level of quality as Analogue. Analogue’s obsessively engineered modern consoles for old-school physical cartridge video games are museum-quality hardware design, housing specially tuned processors that offer pitch- and pixel-perfect play of all NES, Sega Genesis, SNES and other retro console games on modern HD TVs – and their new $199 Analogue Pocket aims to provide the best way to play classic portable console titles in similar high fidelity.

The Analogue Pocket is a portable gaming console that can play the entire library of Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games out of the box – natively, without emulation, so that the gaming experience is exactly as you remember it (or as it was intended, if this is your first experience with these classic titles). That’s not all, though: Using cartridge adapters, the Analogue Pocket can support Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Atari Lynx and other games, too.

It uses two FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) which are processors that have been programmed specifically to play these games back as they were originally intended, mimicking the the operation of the original silicon found in the consoles that these games were designed for with the faithfulness of true restoration hardware. The result is a great gaming experience that will feel like the original – but played on the Analogue Pocket’s much more impressive hardware, which offers a 3.5-inch, 1600×1440 LCD display that provides a very high-resolution 615 ppi. For those keeping tracks that’s ten times the resolution of the original Game Boy display. And it’s color tuned for amazing color rendering and brightness – it could actually be the best display on a dedicated gaming device, period, let alone for a retro console.

The Analogue Pocket also works with an accessory called the Analogue Dock (sold separately, pricing TBD), which adds HDMI out and Bluetooth/wired controller support, to turn the Pocket into a home console for your big screen TV, too. The dock offers two standard USB ports for wired controllers, and its Bluetooth support works with any of 8Bitdo’s excellent gamepads. It’s basically a Switch but for all your favorite Game Boy series games, and with what looks like much better quality hardware.

That would be plenty to offer in a portable console, but the Analogue Pocket is designed to do still more. It has a built-in synthesizer and sequencer for making digital music, and the second FPGA it’s packing is designed to be used specifically for development. It allows the development community to bring their own cores to the platform, which means it could potentially support a whole host of classic and ported games in future.

Analogue Pocket is set to release some time in 2020, with a more specific date to be announced later on. It’s a natural next step for the company that delivered excellent gaming experiences via the Nt Mini, the Super Nt and the Mega Sg, but it’s still a nice, exciting surprise to find out that they’re tackling the rich history of mobile gaming next.

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Instagram is slowly rolling out a new feature that will help better protect your personal data from being accessed by your long discarded, third-party applications — that is, any app you had once authorized to access your Instagram profile over the years. This may include websites you used for printing your Instagram photos, various dating apps, or Instagram tools for making collages, finding your top photos, and more.

Providing a tool to remove third-party apps’ access to your account is now a fairly commonplace security setting among platform providers. Instagram is late to offer such functionality. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have had similar functionality in place for years.

And Instagram isn’t hurrying its launch, either.

The company says its new security features will take a whopping six months to reach all users, as it’s designed to be a gradual rollout. For comparison’s sake, most new features tend to roll out in days or sometimes weeks, but rarely as long as half a year.

The choice to move slowly is worth calling out here — especially, given that Instagram’s parent company Facebook’s massive personal data scandal, Cambridge Analytica, arose because users had connected to a third-party app that improperly collected users’ personal data.

Instagram, arguably, has less of a treasure trove of personal information on hand to tap into, compared with Facebook. But there’s still no need to let some app you used once, many years ago, to continue to access information like your Instagram username, your photos, all your captions, timestamps of your posts, permalinks, and more. And if you maintain a private account with the intention of only sharing your content with close friends and family, this level of access might make you even more uncomfortable.

While Instagram isn’t clear in its public announcement about its reasoning for such a slow rollout, it’s tied to API changes for developers. The company is giving developers time to move from the Instagram Legacy API Platform to the Facebook Graph API.

As the company explains in a developer announcement, the new API will enable “appropriate consumer use-cases, while protecting user privacy and safety” — including giving users the ability to decide what information they share with apps, then revoke access through the Instagram mobile app. The legacy API platform will be deprecated on March 2, 2020.

It would have made sense for Instagram to communicate to users that the gradual rollout is because it’s giving developers time to get their apps ready for these changes. But because it didn’t mention this, the news of the slow rollout comes across as Instagram not believing such a feature is a priority or important to users.

If you have the new security setting, you’ll find it under “Settings” in the Instagram app. It will be under “Security,” then “Apps and Websites.” From this screen, you can tap “Remove” on any apps you don’t want connected to your Instagram account.

Related to this, Instagram says it’s also introducing an updated authorization screen that will detail all the information an app is requesting when you go to authorize it to connect to your Instagram account. If you think it’s over-reaching, you can just choose “Cancel” instead of “Authorize.”

If you don’t have the new features now, just wait until sometime in 2020, I guess.

Quentin Clark resigned a couple of weeks ago as the CTO of Dropbox at the same time that the storage company announced two other execs — Bharat Mediratta and Tim Young — were joining its leadership team in Clark’s stead.

Now we know where Clark was headed — into the world of venture capital and, more specifically, into a role as a managing director with the 19-year-old venture firm General Catalyst.

He joins a team of enterprise investors within the firm that includes Steve Herrod, himself the former CTO of VMWare; Paul Sagan, the former CEO of Akamai; and Holly Maloney, who joined GC as its first female managing director roughly two years ago after spending seven years with North Bridge Venture Partners in Boston. Clark will remain in the Bay Area, looking at earlier-stage opportunities alongside Herrod, while Sagan and Maloney handle later-stage deals from GC’s Boston location.

To find out a bit more, we talked late last week with Clark — who’d previously spent two years in the C-suite as SAP and 20 years with Microsoft before that — to learn why now is the right time to become an investor, and what he’s particularly interested in seeing.

TC: You’ve worked informally with GC for a number of years. Is that right?

QC: Yes, I was in Seattle for a long time. I moved down here five years ago and was introduced to a bunch of great folks in the venture community, including Hemant Taneja [of GC] and Reid Hoffman and I spent time with different investments in their portfolios, helping to advise them and investing and that kind of stuff. After I left SAP [in August 2016], I spent a year with GC engaging with a bunch of things in its portfolio.

TC: So becoming a VC was something you were considering.

QC: It was something I was considering long term, but Dropbox gave me this amazing opportunity to join them in this operational role that I couldn’t turn down, and working with [CEO] Drew [Houston] is now one of the highlights of my career.

TC: They must be very different, Dropbox and SAP. How would you characterize your experiences inside both companies?

QC: It isn’t often you get to help pivot something as impactful as what’s happening at Dropbox. We did [Dropbox’s] User Conference [event in late in September],  and we launched Dropbox Spaces, which is a fundamental pivot based on a point of view about what the workplace is like and where the pain points are, and you don’t get to do things like that very often. The last time I got to do something that significant was at MIcrosoft, migrating from on-premises to Azure and rebuilding the entire product portfolio to be entirely cloud based.

To have your hands that deeply in the work is rare. At SAP, it’s very, very large organization, with a very large portfolio, and you don’t personally dig in that deeply in terms of your ability to take an individual product and [change it into something else].

TC: How long ago did you start investing?

QC: I wasn’t investing at Microsoft. There’s now a much bigger tech scene [in Seattle] than five years ago. I really started exploring when I moved.

TC: You’re now going to be working as an enterprise-focused investor. But what, more specifically, interests you?

QC: I’m interested in healthcare. I’m interested in how people navigate their careers. But mostly, I’m business-to-business focused. I think the next generation of enterprise software will help people excel in the work, through machine intelligence, the cloud, the evolution and maturity of the devices we carry.  I think this wave we’ve seen with the consumer space will impact the enterprise space more deeply, so I’ll be looking for larger-scale impact on how people [manage] their day to day.

TC: Are you at all nervous about getting up to speed?

QC: I feel very well-supported. There’s a lot of teamwork at GC, so they won’t leave me out there to do this myself. This is literally a venture business, though. I am going to make decisions that 100 percent of them won’t pan out, but that’s part of finding success. My hesitancy will be around whether I’m investing enough, not whether I’m investing in the wrong things — at least, initially. But I do have 25 years of judgment that I can apply. I’ve been making investment choices in my career for a long time and seeing bets through and making them successful. That gives me confidence that I can exercise good judgment in this new role, too.

A controversial UK government scheme to introduce mandatary age checks for accessing online pornography has been dropped — for now.

Introduction of the measure, which was intended to protect children from accessing inappropriate content online, had already been delayed by several months this year, most recently after a bureaucratic oversight.

The reason given for ditching the plan now is the government says it has decided it no longer makes sense to introduce the age check provision at this stage — given wider plans to introduce comprehensive legislation to regulate a range of online harms, as set out in the Online Harms white paper earlier this year.

The news that age checks for accessing porn were being ditched dropped quietly, via a written statement from secretary of state for digital, Nicky Morgan, today.

“Since the White Paper’s publication, the government’s proposals have continued to develop at pace. The government announced as part of the Queen’s Speech that we will publish draft legislation for pre-legislative scrutiny. It is important that our policy aims and our overall policy on protecting children from online harms are developed coherently in view of these developments with the aim of bringing forward the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children,” she writes.

“The government has concluded that this objective of coherence will be best achieved through our wider online harms proposals and, as a consequence, will not be commencing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 concerning age verification for online pornography. The Digital Economy Act [DEA] objectives will therefore be delivered through our proposed online harms regulatory regime. This course of action will give the regulator discretion on the most effective means for companies to meet their duty of care. As currently drafted, the Digital Economy Act does not cover social media platforms.”

A spokesman for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport confirmed the intention is to incorporate the objectives of Part 3 of the DEA into comprehensive online harms regulation that will place a duty of care on platforms to protect users from a range of harmful content. Including in the case of inappropriate material being accessed by children.

The spokesman could not give a timeframe for such a provision making it into law now in light of the change of plans. But given how much government and parliamentary time continues being consumed by the brexit process there is no realistic chance of online porn age checks making it onto the UK’s statute books this year.

Getting agreement on comprehensive regulation of online harms is also unlikely to prove any less controversial. So the timeframe for passing a broader law could be a long one — ergo, it looks safe to assume regulations for accessing online porn are being booted into 2020 at least.

In terms of where it’s at with the wider online harms plan, a consultation on the White Paper was concluded in July, per the DCMS spokesman, who said the government will be publishing its response in the coming months. The intent is to introduce a draft bill this session and pass legislation as soon as possible, he added.

A day after NASA debuted the space suits set to be worn by the first woman on the moon, Virgin Galactic showed of its own gear at an event in New York. Created in collaboration with fitness wear company, Under Armour, the gear is designed for wear by Virgin’s private astronauts.

The getup includes a limited edition jacket, base layer, training suit, footwear and space suit. The elements were created with “input” for a wide range of different people, including doctors, pilots, clothing designers and astronaut trainers. All were tested in labs designed to simulate the various stages of space flight.

The unveiling comes shortly after Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson announced that crewed test flights will begin this year (with about 2.5 months left on the calendar).

Branson was present at this morning’s event, leading a simulated zero gravity vertical space walk in the suit. The billionaire will, naturally, be wearing the same suit on the private space company’s upcoming first commercial space flight. For other interested parties, the cost of the 90 minute space flight runs around $250,000. Late last year, Branson reported that the company had already collected some $80 million in deposits.

The blue suits mark a stark contrast from the more traditional garb unveiled at NASA’s event. Instead, they’re something closer to jet pilot jump suits, tailored to the measurements of some of the 600 people who have signed up for the flight. The company debuted them at an event in a skydiving range, complete with with a fog machined-powered zero gravity ballet.

Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank noted at the event that, despite the Star Trek style look, there’s nothing particularly exceptional about the suits. They’re built using off-the-shelf Under Armour technologies and designed for comfort. They also have a number of “secret pockets” on board, so passengers can take personal belongings with them on the flight.

The Justice Department says it’s dismantled one of the largest child exploitation sites on the dark web.

With the help of international partners in the U.K. and South Korea, U.S. prosecutors have brought charges against a South Korean citizen, Jong Woo Son, for conspiracy to advertise, product, and distribute child abuse imagery.

Son was charged in August 2018 but the indictment was only unsealed Wednesday. NBC News was first to report the indictments.

The site contained more than 200,000 unique videos — some 8 terabytes of data — involving children.

Prosecutors said the site was only accessible on the dark web, a term used for an encrypted and anonymized version of the internet that’s accessible through services like the Tor anonymity network. Investigators identified the real-world internet location of the site by viewing the source of the website, which pointed to a server hosted at the defendant’s residence in South Korea.

“Darknet sites that profit from the sexual exploitation of children are among the most vile and reprehensible forms of criminal behavior,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, assistant attorney general. “Today’s announcement demonstrates that the Department of Justice remains firmly committed to working closely with our partners in South Korea and around the world to rescue child victims and bring to justice the perpetrators of these abhorrent crimes.”

More than three-dozen other individuals involved with the site have also been arrested and charged under various state and national laws.

Canva, the Australian-based design tool maker, has today announced that it has raised an additional $10 million to bring its valuation to $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion in May.

Investors in the company include Mary Meeker’s Bond, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackbird and Sequoia China.

Alongside the new funding and valuation, Canva is also making its foray into enterprise with the launch of Canva for Enterprise.

Thus far, Canva has offered users a lightweight tool set for creating marketing and sales decks, social media materials, and other design products mostly unrelated to product design. The idea here is that, outside of product designers, the rest of the organization is often left behind with regards to keeping brand parity in the materials they use.

Canva is available for free for individual users, but the company has addressed the growing need within professional organizations to keep brand parity through Canva Pro, a premium version of the product available for $12.95/month.

The company is now extending service to organizations with the launch of Canva for Enterprise. The new product will not only offer a brand kit (Canva’s parlance for Design System), but will also offer marketing and sales templates, locked approval-based workflows, and even hide Canva’s massive design library within the organization so employees only have access to their approved brand assets, fonts, colors, etc.

Canva for Enterprise also adds another layer of organization, allowing collaboration across comments, a dashboard to manage teams and assign roles, and team folders.

“We’re in a fortunate place because the market has been disaggregated,” said Canva CEO and founder Melanie Perkins. “The way we think about the pain point consumers have is that people are being inconsistent with the brand, and there are huge inefficiencies within the organization, which is why people have been literally asking us to build this exact product.”

More than 20 million users sign into Canva each month across 190 countries, with 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies using the product, according to the company.

Perkins says that the ultimate goal is to have every person in the world with access to the internet and a design need to be on the platform.

One of the major challenges facing engineers as they develop more agile robots is helping them move through space while avoiding collisions, especially in a dynamic environment. RealTime Robotics, a Boston-based startup announced an $11.7 million Series A investment to help solve this problem.

SPARX Asset Management led the round with participation from some strategic investors including Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Hyundai Motor Company and Omron Ventures. Existing investors Toyota AI Ventures, Scrum Ventures and the Duke Angel Network also pitched in. Today’s investment is actually the culmination of a couple of investments over this year that the company is announcing today, and brings the total raised to $12.9 million.

RealTime Robotics CEO Peter Howard says the company’s solutions are grounded in advanced research on robotic motion planning. “We are based on research work done at Duke University in 2016 in the field of work called robotic motion planning, which is basically how a six or seven degree of freedom robot finds its way through space without hitting anything,” Howard told TechCrunch.

It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve, especially in dynamic environments where robots are interacting with humans and other robots, and you can’t necessarily predict with precision the kinds of movements the robot will have to make. The company has created a two-part solution to help called RapidPlan and RapidSense, which it describes as, “allowing people and multiple robots to work collaboratively and cooperatively within the same work cell, without the need for expensive safety systems or time-consuming programming efforts.” The solution involves a combination of proprietary hardware and software working together to help robots move through space safely.

It’s still very early days for the startup. It’s currently working with 13 customers on proof of concept projects with a goal of having these customers act as OEMs and sell the products on behalf of the company. He said that major robotics companies are working with the technology, as well as several automotive companies, which would also have an interest in collision avoidance with self-driving cars. In fact, Toyota was one of its earliest investors and Hyundai is an investor in this round.

Howard says once it establishes itself in these markets, he could see looking at other industries that could make use of this technology such as agriculture, food service and construction. “Anywhere where people are currently employed principally for their motor skills, you can think of as a market that’s fairly ripe for [this type of technology],” Howard said.