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After stating clearly on Friday that he would honor a $95,000 contract with ICE, CEO Barry Crist must have had a change of heart over the weekend. In a blog post, this morning he wrote that the company would not be renewing the contract with ICE after all.

“After deep introspection and dialog within Chef, we will not renew our current contracts with ICE and CBP when they expire over the next year. Chef will fulfill our full obligations under the current contracts,” Crist wrote in the blog post.

He also backed off the seemingly firm position he took on Friday on the matter when he told TechCrunch, “It’s something that we spent a lot of time on, and I want to represent that there are portions of [our company] that do not agree with this, but I as a leader of the company, along with the executive team, made a decision that we would honor the contracts and those relationships that were formed and work with them over time,” he said.

Today, he acknowledged that intense feelings inside the company against the contract led to his decision. The contract began in 2015 under the Obama administration and was aimed at modernizing programming approaches at DHS, but over time as ICE family separation and deportation polices have come under fire, there were calls internally (and later externally) to end the contract. “Policies such as family separation and detention did not yet exist [when we started this contract]. While I and others privately opposed this and various other related policies, we did not take a position despite the recommendation of many of our employees. I apologize for this,” he wrote

Crist also indicated that the company would be donating the revenue from the contracts to organizations that work with people who have been affected by these policies. It’s a similar approach that Salesforce took when 618 of its employees protested a contract the company has with the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). In response to the protests, Salesforce pledged $1 million to organizations helping affected families.

After a tweet last week exposed the contract, the protests began on social media, and culminated in programmer Seth Vargo removing pieces of open source code from the repository in protest of the contract in response. The company sounded firmly committed to fulfilling this contract in spite of the calls for action internally and externally, and the widespread backlash it was facing both inside and outside the company.

Vargo told TechCrunch in an interview that he saw this issue in moral terms, “Contrary to Chef’s CEO’s publicly posted response, I do think it is the responsibility of businesses to evaluate how and for what purposes their software is being used, and to follow their moral compass,” he said. Apparently Crist has come around to this point of view. Vargo chose not to comment on the latest development.

Following the well-received launch of Apple Arcade, Google today is officially introducing its own take on subscription-based access to premium mobile games — or, Google’s case, premium mobile apps, too. The new Google Play Pass subscription, arriving this week, will offer over 350 apps and games that are completely unlocked, with no upfront fees, in-app purchases, or advertisements. And the initial price point is something of a no-brainer — it’s just $1.99 per month for the first year, Google says.

That price will increase to $4.99 per month after the first 12 months have passed, which is the same price as Apple Arcade at launch. This launch promotion is only available until October 10, 2019, however.

The two services are similar in concept, as both are providing a large library of premium content for a monthly subscription. But there are some differences between the two.

For starters, Apple Arcade is filled with exclusives — meaning its games will not be found on Andriod. The reverse is not true for Google Play Pass. Instead, the Play Pass catalog includes many cross-platform titles, including some that even found their fame first on iOS, like ustwo’s Monument Valley.

In addition, Play Pass’s launch titles aren’t all games. There are also ad-free versions of popular mobile apps, like AccuWeather, Facetune, and Pic Stitch, for example.

Notable launch titles include Stardew Valley, Risk, Terraria, Monument Valley, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Reigns: Game of Thrones, Titan Quest, and Wayward Souls. Some lesser-known additions include LIMBO, Lichtspeer, Mini Metro, and Old Man’s Journey. Others, like This War of Mine and Cytus, are coming soon. And for little kids, there are some preschooler-friendly titles like Toca Boca classics and the My Town series.

More titles are added on a monthly basis, Google says.

Because it’s not relying on exclusives, Google’s catalog is more than triple the size of Apple’s at launch. That being said, Apple’s Arcade library is filled with gorgeous, high-quality games while Play Pass is rounded out with a lot of more utilities, like weather apps and photo editors.

Like Apple Arcade, the new subscription gets its own tab in the Google Play app, where the games are organized by genre, popularity and other factors — just like a mini app store. However, unlike Apple Arcade, where games are only found in the Arcade tab or through search, Google Play Pass titles will appear directly in the Play Store. They’ll be designated with a Play Pass ticket badge, so you can easily identify them.

The Play Pass subscription also allows the games to be shared with the whole family. The family manager can share their Play Pass subscription with up to five other family members, who can each access the titles independently. This is comparable to Apple Arcade.

We already knew Google was working on an Apple Arcade competitor before today. The Play Pass subscription’s existence had been leaked, and Google later confirmed the service with a tweet. What we didn’t yet know was the launch date, lineup, or the official pricing.

Google Play Pass service is rolling out this week to Android devices in the U.S., with more countries coming soon. A 10-day subscription is available, before it converts to the $1.99 per month limited promotion, followed by the $4.99 per month price point when the promotion ends.

While neither Apple nor Google is discussing the terms of their deals with developers, Google says that the more people who download a Play Pass title, the more the revenue developers receive on a recurring basis. It also explained that Google itself is funding the initial launch offer, so developers can gain more subscriber interest without impacting their revenue.

Apple and Oprah will be working together to bring Oprah’s Book Club to the Apple TV+ streaming service. In a new series, the talk show host and producer will interview the authors of her book club picks, starting with Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of “The Water Dancer.” A new episode will then be available every two months, allowing viewers time to read the titles being discussed.

The series will debut alongside Apple TV+’s launch on November 1, and is part of a larger, multi-year partnership Apple and Oprah announced last year. In addition to the book club, Oprah is also developing two documentaries for Apple: “Toxic Labor” about sexual harassment in the workplace and another, in partnership with Prince Harry, that will focus on mental health.

While the documentaries bring much-needed attention to worthy topics, Oprah’s Book Club TV series will be mutually beneficial for both parties from more of a financial standpoint. Apple is promoting Oprah’s book club selections in its Apple Books app, where “The Water Dancer” can now be pre-ordered as either an e-book or audiobook, for example. The TV show will then help to bring more attention to this and other titles, which in turn could boost book sales.

Apple also says it will make a contribution to the American Library Association to support local libraries and fund their programs.

As older readers may recall, Oprah’s Book Club originally got its start as a recurring segment on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” After a 15-year run, it relaunched in 2012 as a joint project between OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, and O: The Oprah Magazine. But those selections have been few and far between. With the launch on Apple TV+, it seems the club will be back on a more regular pace.

“Few people in the world can bring us together like Oprah, whose compassion and grace celebrating the power of books are unmatched,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement. “It’s our honor to provide a new platform for Oprah’s Book Club and support the American Library Association in opening hearts and minds to the joy of reading.”

“I am who I am today because of the experience of learning to read at an early age. Reading opened up a whole world for me beyond the red dirt road and my grandmother’s porch in Mississippi,” Oprah Winfrey, added, in a press release. “I want to do that for everybody. And the opportunity to do this with Apple, to speak to people all over the world about the pleasures, the excitement, the tension, the drama that a good book can bring you … I don’t know what’s better than that.”

In addition to the Oprah’s Book Club news this morning, Apple also gave last night’s Emmy viewers a first look at several other upcoming Apple TV+ shows, including the Octavia Spencer-led drama “Truth Be Told,” and M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological thriller “Servant.” Last week, it showed off kids’ shows “Ghostwriter” and “Helpsters.”

There’s fashionably late and then there’s the Galaxy Fold. Initially scheduled for an April 22 launch, the device was delayed after multiple reviews returned broken devices. Samsung was quick to blame users, only to ultimately go back to the drawing board.

A few months later, the company offered a broad September timeframe. Samsung hit the mark with time to spare in its native South Korea, launching the device a few weeks back. Now it’s time to do the same here in North America. The company’s first foldable (and, really, for that matter, the first “commercially viable” foldable) arrives this Friday, Sept 27.

The handset will be available as a carrier branded version through AT&T stores or unlocked through Best Buy and other retail locations. As noted, the company’s also offering a “Galaxy Fold Premier Service” — apparently part of the reason it canceled the original round of preorders. Basically the company wants to personally help users who buy the $2,000 deal with any specific problems.

Notably and somewhat humorously (albeit unintentionally so), the company recently issued a “Caring for your Galaxy Fold” video, which highlights how to not break the expensive new device. Samsung appears somewhat resigned to the fact that, which the device has been improved over the first attempt at going to market, the product is still more fragile than what we’ve come to expect from our smartphones.

To quote Samsung, “Just use a light touch.” That comes with the somewhat redundant “Do not apply excessive pressure” footnote. Not exactly the sort of thing that inspires confidence in a product’s durability. 

Back in 2017 Ometria, an “AI-powered” customer marketing platform raised $6m in Series A funding to add to the $11m it had already raised. Its platform is all about allowing retailers to send individually personalized marketing messages across several brand touchpoints.

Today it’s announced that it’s raised $21m in a Series B funding led by London-based Octopus Ventures, with existing investors Sonae IM, Summit Action, Samos and Adjuvo, as well as ten early angel investors, making further investments. Marieke Christmann from Octopus Ventures and Eduardo Piedade from Sonae IM both join Ometria’s board.

The funding will be used to accelerate Ometria’s product development, expanding the platform’s specialist retail marketing capabilities and further innovating its AI-based technology.

Off the back of the funding round, Ometria will also be opening its first US-based operation in New York.

Ometria’s schtick is that it addresses the fact that consumers will no longer tolerate the torrent of communication send towards them that is basically irrelevant to them, especially as the retail environment becomes ever more competitive.

Its main competitors are spread across companies like email service providers (Emarsys, Sailthru, Selligent, Bronto, Dotmailer), behavioral marketing tools (CloudIQ, SaleCycle, Yieldify) and customer insight companies (More2, AgileOne). Its argument is that none of these companies were developed specifically for retail, or to create and use a unified predictive profile of each customer.

Ometria’s CEO and Founder Ivan Mazour says: “We’re all overloaded with information and communication, it’s relentless and must be addressed. Retail marketing has contributed heavily to this, with most marketing experiences being ones we simply don’t enjoy. Ometria solves this ever-increasing problem for hundreds of retailers, and hundreds of millions of customers.”

It now has a client base of 200 retailers, including Hotel Chocolat, Fred Perry, MADE.com and Notonthehighstreet.com. Its senior leadership team now includes Pete Crosby (formerly of Triptease) as Chief Revenue Officer, Rob Lord (formerly of CheetahMail) as VP of Professional Services and Jennifer Yorke (formerly of Bazaarvoice) as VP of Customer Success.

Marieke Christmann, Investor, Octopus Ventures, says, “We are very excited to have led Ometria’s Series B – a great example of how we invest in truly pioneering entrepreneurs that are creating innovative solutions through tech. Ometria will use this investment to revolutionize the retail marketing industry with its AI capabilities. We want to see entrepreneurs put their customers at the heart of the business and that is precisely what the team is doing.

GoPro’s successor to the Hero 7 is likely coming on October 1, as the action camera maker has posted a teaser with the date to its official website. The tagline “This is Action” appears over a fast cut mash-up of variety of shots, including off-road racing, underwater diving and what looks like close-up footage of Frank Zapata (or someone else with a jetpack) flying around, along with the date.

The mostly shadowed image above is the closest we get to an official product shot, but we’ve seen leaks sourced from photo-focused rumor site Photo Rumors that suggest a redesign with added expandability options for advanced accessories including front-facing display monitors and external flash. These leaks also include some potential specs, like a new GP2 chip to help with on-board image stabilization, better lenses and image quality, and a new 12MP sensor, in addition to the new optional housing and accessories.

GoPro’s Hero 7 introduced HyperSmooth stabilization, which provides gimbal-like results without the actual gimbal thanks to advanced digital stabilization technology that GoPro developed in-house. But the company also saw the introduction of its strongest-yet competitor in the market this year with the DJI Osmo Action, a GoPro-like action camera from drone and gimbal-maker DJI, which is at least on par with the Hero 7 in terms of stabilization and quality, with added features aimed at the vlogging market like a built-in front-facing display.

The slogan “This is Action.” could actually be interpreted as a dig against its newest rival, since Action is capitalized and the DJI camera is literally named the “Osmo Action.” Hopefully GoPro does indeed get a little spicy about its competitor, since it’s a market that could definitely stand to benefit from some genuine competition in the higher end of the category.

On Friday afternoon Chef CEO Barry Crist and CTO Corey Scobie sat down with TechCrunch to defend their contract with ICE after a firestorm on social media called for them to cut ties with the controversial agency. On Sunday, programmer Seth Vargo, the man who removed his open source components, which contributed to a partial shutdown of Chef’s commercial business for a time last week, responded.

While the Chef executives stated that the company was in fact the owner, Vargo made it clear he owned those pieces and he had every right to remove them from the repository. “Chef (the company) was including a third party software package that I owned. It was on my personal repository on GitHub and personal namespace on RubyGems,” he said. He believes that gave him the right to remove it.

Chef CTO Corey Scobie did not agree. “Part of the challenge was that [Vargo] actually didn’t have authorization to remove those assets. And the assets were not his to begin with. They were actually created under a time when that particular individual [Vargo] was an employee of Chef. And so therefore, the assets were Chef’s assets, and not his assets to remove,” he said.

Vargo says that simply isn’t true and Chef misunderstands the licensing. “No OSI license or employment agreement requires me to continue to maintain code of my personal account(s). They are conflating code ownership (which they can argue they have) over code stewardship,” Vargo told TechCrunch.

As further proof, Vargo added that he has even included detailed instructions in his will on how to deal with the code he owns when he dies. “I want to make it absolutely clear that I didn’t “hack” into Chef or perform any kind of privilege escalation. The code lived in my personal accounts. Had I died on Thursday, the exact same thing would have happened. My will requests all my social media and code accounts be deleted. If I had deleted my GitHub account, the same thing would have happened,” he explained.

Vargo said that Chef actually was in violation of the open source license when they restored those open source pieces without putting his name on it. “Chef actually violated the Apache license by removing my name, which they later restored in response to public pressure,” he said.

Scobie admitted that the company did forget to include Vargo’s name on the code, but added it back as soon as they heard about the problem. “In our haste to restore one of the objects, we inadvertently removed a piece of metadata that identified him as the author. We didn’t do that knowingly. It was absolutely a mistake in the process of trying to restore customers and our and our global customer base service. And as soon as we were notified of it, we reverted that change on this specific object in question,” he said.

Vargo says, as for why he took the open source components down, he was taking a moral stand against the contract, which dates back to the Obama administration. He also explained that he attempted to contact Chef via multiple channels before taking action. “First, I didn’t know about the history of the contract. I found out via a tweet from @shanley and subsequently verified via the USA spending website. I sent a letter and asked Chef publicly via Twitter to respond multiple times, and I was met with silence. I wanted to know how and why code in my personal repositories was being used with ICE. After no reply for 72 hours, I decided to take action,” he said.

Since then, Chef’s CEO Barry Crist has made it clear he was honoring the contract, which Vargo felt further justified his actions. “Contrary to Chef’s CEO’s publicly posted response, I do think it is the responsibility of businesses to evaluate how and for what purposes their software is being used, and to follow their moral compass,” he said.

Vargo has a long career helping build development tools and contributing to open source. He currently works for Google Cloud. Previous positions include HashiCorp and Chef.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was in Boca Chica, Texas over the weekend to oversee key construction activities in the assembly of the company’s newest Starship prototype. Musk will deliver an update on Starship, which will likely recap progress to date and provide a more detailed roadmap of SpaceX’s plans for the future of its next-generation spaceship and launch system.

Musk shared photos of the prototype construction in progress, with the so-called “Mk1” prototype getting its rear moving fins, which are located on the bottom half of the rocket and which work together with fins located on the yet-to-be-installed top half of the spacecraft to control its stability during entry and landing.

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The Starship Mk1 prototype will be the first to represent the final vehicle in its orbital-class configuration, after a ‘Starhopper’ prototype SpaceX produced initially accomplished the goal of testing one of the new Raptor engines and demonstrating low-altitude flight, control and landing capabilities. That stubbier version of Starship is retired after doing both a short and a longer ‘hop’ test flight over the past two months, and now SpaceX will look to test higher altitude and longer duration flights, using multiple Raptor engines, with the Starship Mk1 and Mk2 prototypes currently under development at Boca Chica, and in another SpaceX facility in Florida.

Musk has said that Starship Mk1 already has three Raptor engines installed on the vehicle, and the company has filed documents with the FCC required for it to receive permission for the communications components of its first test launches. We should find out more concrete details as of Saturday, and TechCrunch will have all the info here as it happens.

Cloudflare is ratcheting up its fight against bots with a new “fight mode,” which it says will frustrate and disincentivize bot operators from their malicious activity.

Bots are notorious for scraping websites and abusing developer access to download gobs of user data. All too often bots try to game the system by scraping concert or airline ticket prices to buy in bulk at their lowest price and sell them off for higher. Worse, some imitate real users and brute-force their way into websites with lists of stolen passwords.

Cloudflare gets three billion bot requests each day. Now the company said it’s “decided to fight back.”

Its new “bot fight mode,” which Cloudflare today enabled as a free opt-in feature for all accounts, will detect and serve bots with deliberately computationally intensive challenges. As the bot tries to crunch the impossible puzzle — effectively a small bit of code only visible to the bot — the bot’s server will max out its processing power, churning up cloud resources and driving up costs for the bot operator.

While the company says its efforts will dissuade bot activities in the long run, it recognizes its efforts in the short term will result in cloud servers working overtime, thus consuming more electricity and requiring more cooling — all of which contribute to greater energy consumption.

“We loved the idea of frustrating bots,” John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. But he said the company was “mindful” of how the spike in bot resources — like electricity and cooling — are directly linked to carbon emissions. Some internally had initially objected to the plan if it would result in contributing to the use of natural resources, he said.

The company found a simple solution: to plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from the bot’s activity but also their takedown.

“By making bots do extra work we may be increasing carbon emissions from the [processor] usage and decided to offset through tree planting which will have a long term effect,” said Graham-Cumming. “In the long term our goal is simple: ending malicious bots as a viable practice.”

Each tree planted can absorb about a year’s worth of dual-core computing power. But given trees need time to grow, Cloudflare said its donations will result in the planting of 25 trees for each frustrated bot the company encounters and shuts down.

Planting trees will offset the carbon, Graham-Cumming said, but reducing the number of bad bots on the internet will have the greatest net benefit.

“If we’re successful in doing, that the environmental impact will be substantial and positive given how many internet resources are wasted by malicious bots today,” he said.

Frustrating bots isn’t Cloudflare’s only weapon. When it can, it will ask one of its industry partners to pull the bot offline. If the bot is hosted by a company that serves as a member of the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of some of the largest cloud and web hosts, Cloudflare will hand over the internet address in order to shut the bot down.

Cloudflare isn’t the only player in the anti-bot space. Earlier this year we profiled Kasada, a startup aimed at trolling bots in an effort to deter and disincentivize bot operators from targeting its customers’ websites. Cloudflare said its scale and reach — with coverage of more than 20 million internet properties — will help contribute to the faster demise of the so-called bot economy.

Graham-Cumming said although the feature is opt-in for now, the company is planning to push the feature out by default to its users before the end of the year.

Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has announced its plans to expand to Canada.

It marks the first time EF has entered North America. Along with London, EF currently operates in Berlin, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangalore.

The new Canadian outpost, due to launch in early 2020, will be in Toronto and follows EF’s $115 million first closing of a new fund in February.

At the time of the fund announcement, the talent investor/company builder said it would use the capital to continue scaling globally — specifically, enabling it to back more than 2,200 individuals who join its various programs over the next three years.

This, we were told, should amount to around 300-plus venture-backed companies being created, three times the number of startups EF has helped create since being founded by McKinsey colleagues Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck all the way back in 2011. Clearly, setting up shop in Toronto is part of the plan to achieve this.

Often – mistakingly – described as an accelerator, EF stands out from the many other startup programmes because of the way it backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea”. This means that participants typically find their co-founder and found their respective companies on the programme, and that these startup may never have seen the light of day without EF.

It’s a new type of venture model that appears to be working so far — measured both in terms of exits and follow on funding — although question marks remain with regards to how scalable it can be, given that what works in one city and ecosystem with one set of EF staff may not be entirely replicable in another. Or, as one VC put it to me, “there’s only one Matt and Alice”.

With that said, others, such as Greylock partner and co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, are convinced EF can scale. Greylock is an investor in EF and Hoffman previously told TechCrunch he can see there being between 20-50 cities “where Entrepreneur First is integral to creating a set of interesting tech companies in those areas.”

Cue a statement from Matt Clifford: “By launching a programme in a third continent, we’re a step closer to achieving our goal of giving the world’s most ambitious individuals the tools to build a company wherever they happen to be… Toronto is one of the fastest growing tech ecosystems in North America in terms of capital and talent, and the city represents a great opportunity for EF to encourage the next generation of ambitious founders.”