Category: UNCATEGORIZED

18 Jul 2019

How a Hong Kong startup gets caught up in US-China trade war

Taylor Host has been operating his artificial intelligence startup out of Hong Kong for more than two years. The American entrepreneur has clients from Europe, North America and Asia, but he settled in the city for its adjacency to Southeast Asia and mainland China’s massive market.

Miro, which Host co-founded in 2017 with a British software engineer, had bootstrapped to six employees before raising a small note investment. Backed by Silicon Valley-based SOSV, it’s now seeking $2 million in a new funding round. As trade tensions between China and the U.S. drag on, the company is considering relocating for the first time because being a Hong Kong entity starts to turn off western investors.

Miro uses computer vision to tag images and videos of runners for the brands they wear. It then attributes that data — sporting goods purchases — to consumers profiles that are part of its clients’ customer relations management (CRM) system. Miro’s AI processes data in markets around the world, but China data, in particular, is desirable for western sports brands.

The Chinese rising middle-class has been fueling a marathon fever in recent years as they search for a healthier lifestyle. When they participate in a race, Miro’s sensors could be tracking their shoes and outfits for event organizers and sponsors. The technology has so far been used in nearly 500 events around the world and analyzed more than 10 million athletes — while most of the technical development has been conducted in Hong Kong.

“My co-founder and I both spent a considerable amount of time in Hong Kong. The majority of our team would call themselves Hong Kong Chinese, so we have a very strong foothold in Hong Kong and we love it here,” Host told TechCrunch over a phone interview.

“Lately though, it’s become very difficult to rationalize keeping the business in Hong Kong. There’s a number of reasons for that, but I think the ones that stand out are geopolitical.”

For one, Host has sensed a “dramatic” sentiment change among western investors towards Hong Kong, where a contentious extradition bill triggered a wave of mass protests recently. At the heart of the issue are fears that the special administrative region is ceding autonomy to Beijing. Critics cite examples of the disappearance of a Hong Kong bookseller and a Financial Times journalist’s visa denied by the local government.

miro tech2

Miro, a Hong Kong-based startup, uses computer vision to tag images and videos of runners for the brands they wear. / Photo: Miro

In an alarming move, the U.S. government stated the extradition bill “imperils the strong U.S.-Hong Kong relationship” that includes a special trade arrangement independent from that of mainland China.

Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam announced in early July that the bill was “dead“, but the die has been cast as concerns linger for Hong Kong’s autonomous status. Businesses in the territory now risk being dragged into the U.S.-China trade war.

In March, Miro won a pitch competition at SXSW and has since attracted institutional investors of all sizes. But two of its potential backers based in the U.S. have decided to leave the negotiation table seeing Hong Kong as a risk.

“Not a single firm has overlooked the issue of us being a Hong Kong-based company,” said Host. “There is zero appetite from the U.S. investors who we have talked to to invest in our Hong Kong entity right now.”

The risk of backing Miro, which processes seas of data with image recognition capabilities, is more pronounced than funding companies with little or no core technology as intellectual property is one of the main targets of the U.S.-China negotiations.

“Foreign venture capitalists have become more vigilant about investing in Chinese AI and chips companies, even when they don’t own core technology,” Joe Chan, founding partner of Hong Kong-based MindWorks Ventures, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Meanwhile, the trade war has had a tangential impact on U.S. fundings for Chinese startups that focus on education, lifestyle and other non-deep tech sectors, according to a handful of investors who we have spoken to in recent months.

Southeast Asia gains

With the help of legal and tax consultants, Miro has recently shifted to a U.S. entity by registering in Delaware but will keep its operations in Hong Kong. It’s a move which, in Host’s words, has “pleased and allowed the company to move forward” with some of its interested U.S. investors.

“It was a requirement of our conversations with those U.S. investors that they are investing in a U.S. — not Hong Kong — entity,” the founder noted. “If you are dead set on your company being the biggest company in your industry, why would you even consider being in a place that has so much uncertainty and risk?”

For China-based companies whose cross-border business is anchored in Asia, Southeast Asia could be a safe haven from the trade war. As Chan observed, some Chinese startups have intended to move to Singapore “to become less politically sensitive.”

miro sxsw winner

Miro won a pitch competition at SXSW and has since attracted institutional investors of all sizes. But potential backers have decided to leave the negotiation table seeing Hong Kong as a risk. / Photo: Miro

Miro is also hedging risks by looking to Southeast Asia, which many would argue is emerging as a winner from the U.S.-China fight. Like China, the region has a burgeoning middle class that is getting into running and a range of other hobbies and habits that will spawn startup ideas.

Indeed, there’s been a lot of chatter about the rise of the region with a population of 640 million. A few big-name global investors, including Warburg Pincus and TPG Capital, have set aside new funds over the past few months to back Southeast Asian startups. Corporate investors including Tencent, Alibaba, Didi Chuxing and JD.com, are also clamoring to gain a foothold in this rising part of the continent, as we wrote two years ago.

“On a macro level, the trade war certainly has a substantial impact on China’s economy, so we are seeing a lot more money flowing to Southeast Asia,” said Chan.

“For example, some manufacturers have moved to Indonesia where labor is cheaper. China’s tech industry — and this is not entirely linked to the trade war — is reaching saturation and dominated by the BAT [Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent], so the window of opportunity is small. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia is still in development.”

In a way, the trade war has accelerated the shift of attention from China to neighboring countries. The momentum was what brought Miro to visit one of the region’s largest tech conferences Techsauce recently.

“Nobody is talking about the trade war out here in Bangkok. We are talking about how Southeast Asia is exploding. And that is not just Chinese investors. It’s western investors too,” said Host.

18 Jul 2019

FaceApp gets federal attention as Sen. Schumer raises alarm on data use

It’s been hard to get away from FaceApp over the last few days, whether it’s your friends posting weird selfies using the app’s aging and other filters, or the brief furore over its apparent (but not actual) circumvention of permissions on iPhones. Now even the Senate is getting in on the fun: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has asked the FBI and the FTC to look into the app’s data handling practices.

“I write today to express my concerns regarding FaceApp,” he writes in a letter sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray and FTC Chairman Joseph Simons. I’ve excerpted his main concerns below:

In order to operate the application, users must provide the company full and irrevocable access to their personal photos and data. According to its privacy policy, users grant FaceApp license to use or publish content shared with the application, including their username or even their real name, without notifying them or providing compensation.

Furthermore, it is unclear how long FaceApp retains a user’s data or how a user may ensure their data is deleted after usage. These forms of “dark patterns,” which manifest in opaque disclosures and broader user authorizations, can be misleading to consumers and may even constitute a deceptive trade practices. Thus, I have serious concerns regarding both the protection of the data that is being aggregated as well as whether users are aware of who may have access to it.

In particular, FaceApp’s location in Russia raises questions regarding how and when the company provides access to the data of U.S. citizens to third parties, including potentially foreign governments.

For the cave-dwellers among you (and among whom I normally would proudly count myself) FaceApp is a selfie app that uses AI-esque techniques to apply various changes to faces, making them look older or younger, adding accessories, and, infamously, changing their race. That didn’t go over so well.

There’s been a surge in popularity over the last week, but it was also noticed that the app seemed to be able to access your photos whether you said it could or not. It turns out that this is actually a normal capability of iOS, but it was being deployed here in somewhat of a sneaky manner and not as intended. And arguably it was a mistake on Apple’s part to let this method of selecting a single photo go against the “never” preference for photo access that a user had set.

Fortunately the Senator’s team is not worried about this or even the unfounded (we checked) concerns that FaceApp was secretly sending your data off in the background. It isn’t. But it very much does send your data to Russia when you tell it to give you an old face, or a hipster face, or whatever. Because the computers that do the actual photo manipulation are located there — these filters are being applied in the cloud, not directly on your phone.

His concerns are over the lack of transparency that user data is being sent out to servers who knows where, to be kept for who knows how long, and sold to who knows whom. Fortunately the obliging FaceApp managed to answer most of these questions before the Senator’s letter was ever posted.

The answers to his questions, should we choose to believe them, are that user data is not in fact sent to Russia, the company doesn’t track users and usually can’t, doesn’t sell data to third parties, and deletes “most” photos within 48 hours.

Although the “dark patterns” of which the Senator speaks are indeed an issue, and although it would have been much better if FaceApp had said up front what it does with your data, this is hardly an attempt by a Russian adversary to build up a database of U.S. citizens.

While it is good to see Congress engaging with digital privacy, asking the FBI and FTC to look into a single app seems unproductive when that app is not doing much that a hundred others, American and otherwise, have been doing for years. Cloud-based processing and storage of user data is commonplace — though usually disclosed a little better.

Certainly as Sen. Schumer suggests, the FTC should make sure that “there are adequate safeguards in place to protect the privacy of Americans…and if not, that the public be made aware of the risks associated with the use of this application or others similar to it.” But this seems the wrong nail to hang that on. We see surreptitious slurping of contact lists, deceptive deletion promises, third-party sharing of poorly anonymized data, and other bad practices in apps and services all the time — if the federal government wants to intervene, let’s have it. But let’s have a law or a regulation, not a strongly worded letter written after the fact.

Schumer Faceapp Letter by TechCrunch on Scribd

18 Jul 2019

Altitude Angel launches an API for safer drone flights

Altitude Angel, a U.K. startup that provides safety, data and traffic management systems for drones, is launching a de-confliction service for drone flights — available via its developer API platform.

“The dynamic system will continuously monitor the airspace around an aircraft for the ‘unexpected’ such as other aerial vehicles or changes to airspace (such as a Temporary Flight Restriction/Dynamic Geofence around a police incident),” it writes of the new service.

“After identifying a potential conflict, CRS will make the necessary routing adjustments, allowing the drone to maintain an appropriate separation standard between other airspace users or fly around restricted airspace so it can continue safely (and efficiently) to its destination.”

The global Conflict Resolution Service (CRS) has two components: Strategic de-confliction, which will launch first, on July 23, letting drone operators submit flight plans to the startup to determine whether there are any conflicts with other previously submitted flight plans, or against ground and airspace geofenced areas available in Altitude Angel’s worldwide data feeds.

If a conflict is identified Altitude Angel says its CRS will propose alterations to the take-off time and/or route to “eliminate the conflict” — suggesting, as it puts it “minimally invasive changes to permit the mission to continue unobstructed”.

The service also supports ‘private’ modes for fleet operators who only want to check for conflicts against their own drones or customers.

The second component — which will launch in late September — is called Tactical de-confliction. This will provide information to drone pilots or the drone itself to ensure separation is maintained during the in-flight phase.

“We’re bringing in commercially available data feeds of every piece of manned air traffic available today. So that’s every commercial flight, that’s in some instances police helicopters, medical choppers etc etc. So the tactical service will then supplement that drone on drone collision data [from the Statistical CRS] with drone on manned aviation,” says CEO Richard Parker.

The UK startup, which also provides data to power geofencing services for drones (drone maker DJI is among its customers) is positioning its software and services business as an enabling layer for unmanned traffic management (UTM) companies, national organizations and fleet operators to embed into their own products, says Parker.

“What we’re doing is going beyond what a typical UTM company sees as its own customers and then providing the flight plans that we’ve received out to everybody,” he tells TechCrunch. “So, for example, Uber might use the [CRS] service to register all of Uber’s flights and Amazon might use the service to register all of Amazon’s flights — but together, via the API, they effectively can avoid each other.

“So that’s a service which connects everybody together, and only tells you when there’s conflict that’s expected to occur.”

Clearly, the Strategic de-confliction component will increase in utility as it gains more users — enabling it to increase the visibility it can provide of what’s being flown where and when.

Although Altitude Angel does not pretend it will be able to offer a comprehensive view of absolutely every artificial thing in the sky.

“One of the things we think is rife in the UTM industry today is false claims,” says Parker. “It would be really easy for us to market this wrongly — we could have done this to say this service guarantees no drones will ever crash. That’s simply not true. What it does guarantee, however, is any drone that has submitted a plan to us is going to be told up front whether it’s likely to conflict with another one.

“And when the tactical service comes online, again, we will be extremely clear — providing everything else you might conflict with is using that service then we can provide that separation.”

He points out that not even Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) can see all air traffic all of the time. So the CRS is pitched as a way for drone operators to increase awareness of what else might be flying in the vicinity — thereby reducing the risk of collision or a safety incident.

As regards the dynamic tactical de-confliction component of the CRS, which is designed to alert drone operators to unexpected craft in their vicinity, Altitude Angel says this is based on “tried and trusted safety technology”.

The core platform underpinning it has been in operation since 2016, according to Parker — and was originally used by general aviation pilots to request access to transit Class D airspace, meaning it’s “racked up thousands of requests” and had “a lot of scrutiny” globally, including from national air traffic services.

“It’s an extremely reliable and robust service,” he claims.

Altitude Angel is also layering on its GuardianUTMS airspace management platform. While Parker flags that the company’s enterprise background is in massive distributed cloud systems — ergo, it’s used to handling something along the lines of 7M-10M API requests per month.

“So we think we’ve got a reasonably robust and reliable system,” he says. “One which can also tolerate failure and it can do a lot of self-healing. From an infrastructure perspective it’s very robust, and from an application perspective it’s been doing a lot of operational use cases and load for one of the world’s most trusted and respected ANSPs.”

“Usage is still increasing. We’re still learning from that. But again our main primary goal is to get this out, get it used, monitor it, make sure that we improve it over time. It’s kind of a crawl, walk and run type service,” he adds.

All Altitude Angel’s current customers are signed up to go live with the CRS — which Parker suggests will translate into some 5,000 to 6,000 flights per month feeding the de-confliction service.

“We’re then going to connect in our additional flights that have been shared with us as well so I think we’re talking about a fairly significant proportion of all of the flights that are being shared with any UTM today,” he continues. “What we’re then going to be doing is working with our ANSP customers to see if the permission requests that they’re currently managing can also be connected into that network. And I think that’s a really interesting area to explore.

“Because again we’re only doing this because, ultimately, everyone in the industry wants to go beyond line-of-sight, everyone wants to be able to have a more automated flight system. But the reality is the infrastructure just isn’t there on the ANSP and regulatory side — and the technology isn’t there, from a safety management perspective, on the commercial side either.

“So that’s the gap that we’re trying to plug here so that more people can access to do that.”

While it might make more sense for drone de-confliction platforms to be run by national bodies, rather than a commercial entity, Parker isn’t worried that regulators will swoop in and claim the space because the business is positioning itself to play multiple roles: Helping drone operators integrate and adapt to changeable regulations, while also making sure it can take on a gateway service role for ANSPs should governments decide a regulator should provide UTM.

“The technology that we provide to our customers we provide on our own developer platform for the commercial industry to use but we also provide a version of that same system, effectively, to ANSPs to be able to offer that service nationally,” he says.

“I think it’s important to recognize that many of those ANSPs aren’t required to do this yet. So they’re not necessarily deploying those foundations… The key piece that might be an interesting angle is that our commitment to those developer customers, and people who are using our commercial technology, is to abstract them away from whatever local regulations and differences might occur internationally.”

“In the UK, if the government suddenly turns around to [UK air traffic operator] NATS and says hey you guys have to provide UTM services for the whole country it won’t be us that are operating the service but we’re very much hopeful that we’ll have the opportunity to provide NATS with the technology to actually provide that capability to the rest of the industry,” he adds, noting that Altitude Angel is already providing airspace user portal technology to NATS. 

“So, again, we’ve got this commercial side of the business — which is all about enabling those folks to integrate with the regulated community, and then we’ve got a technology capability [Guardian UTMS] that’s what we’re pushing to ANSPs to enable them to open up the skies and work with and embrace drones within their airspace estate.”

17 Jul 2019

Coinbase tells you if top holders are buying or selling a crypto asset

Coinbase is taking advantage of its significant user base to give you more information about trading behavior and price correlation. Given that there are now 15 different cryptocurrencies on Coinbase that you can trade, the new features should provide some signals.

In addition to price and variation information, you can see what Coinbase customers with large balances are currently doing. You get a buy/sell percentage for each asset.

Behind the scene, Coinbase looks at users with a Coinbase balance in the top 10%. The exchange then counts how many users in that pool have increased or decreased their positions over the last 24 hours. The signal is updated every two hours.

Coinbase is also calculating two other data points — the average hold time and the popularity of each asset. This time, the company relies on the entire Coinbase user base to tell you how long people keep a specific asset before selling it or sending it to another address.

Unfortunately, when you transfer your assets to a hardware wallet or a more secure wallet, Coinbase considers that you’re no longer “holding” that asset because it’s no longer on your Coinbase account.

Finally, Coinbase is looking at price data to find out if prices of multiple assets are correlated. For instance, if Crypto X and Crypto Y have a correlation of 0%, it means that they go up and down in parallel. A negative correlation means that two assets move in opposite directions. This feature could help you build a more balanced portfolio of cryptocurrencies.

hero signals

17 Jul 2019

Netflix will roll out a lower-priced subscription plan in India

Netflix said on Wednesday that it will roll out a cheaper subscription plan in India, one of the last great growth markets for global companies, as the streaming giant scrambles to find ways to accelerate its slowing growth worldwide.

The company added 2.7 million new subscribers in the quarter that ended in June this year, it said today, far fewer than the 5 million figure it had forecasted earlier this year.

The company said lowering its subscription plan, which starts at $9 in the U.S., would help it reach more users in India and expand its overall subscriber base.

Netflix started to test a lower-priced subscription plan in India and some other markets in Asia late last year. The plan restricts the usage of the service to only one mobile device and offers only the standard definition viewing (~480p). During the period of testing, which was active as of two months ago, the company charged users as low as $4.

The company did not specify the exact amount it intends to charge for the mobile only, cheaper plan. During the testing period, Netflix also provided users the option to get a subscription that would only last for a week. The company also did not say if it intends to bring the cheaper plan to other markets. TechCrunch has reached out to Netflix for more details.

“After several months of testing, we’ve decided to roll out a lower-priced mobile-screen plan in India to complement our existing plans. We believe this plan, which will launch in Q3, will be an effective way to introduce a larger number of people in India to Netflix and to further expand our business in a market where Pay TV ARPU is low (below $5),” it said in its quarterly earnings report.

The India challenge

Selling an entertainment service in India, the per capita GDP of which is under $2,000, is extremely challenging. The vast majority of companies that have performed exceedingly well in the nation offer their products and services at a very low price. Just look at Spotify, which entered India earlier this year and for the first time decided to offer full access to its service at no cost to local users. Even its premium option that features playback in higher quality costs Rs 119 ($1.6) per month.

That’s not to say that winning in India, home to more than 1.3 billion people, can’t be rewarding. Disney-owned streaming service Hotstar, which offers 80% of its content catalog at no cost, has amassed more than 300 million monthly active users.

In fact, Hotstar set a global record for most simultaneous views to a live event — about 25.3 million users — during the recently concluded ICC cricket world cup. It broke its own previous records. Hotstar’s free offering comes bundled with ads, while its ad-free premium option costs Rs 999 ($14.5) for a year-long access.

Amazon, another global rival of Netflix, bundles its Prime Video streaming service in its Prime membership, which includes access to faster delivery of packages and its music service, for Rs 999 a year.

For Netflix, the decision to lower its pricing in India comes at a time when it has hiked the subscription cost in many parts of the world. In the U.S., for instance, Netflix said earlier this year that it would raise its subscription price by up to 18%.

During a visit to India early last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the country could eventually emerge as the place that would eventually add the next 100 million service to his platform. “The Indian entertainment business will be much larger over the next 20 years because of investment in pay services like Netflix and others,” he said.

So far, Netflix has largely tried to lure customers through its original series. (Many popular U.S. shows such as NBC’s “The Office” that are available on Netflix’s U.S. catalog are not available in its India palate.) The company, which has produced more than a dozen original shows and movies for India, this week unveiled five more that are in the pipeline.

17 Jul 2019

Toyota locks in more than a supply of EV batteries in deal with China’s CATL

Toyota needs more than a secure and steady supply of batteries if it hopes to meet its ambitious global sales goal for electric vehicles. If it hopes to compete, the Japanese automaker will need better quality lithium-ion batteries that don’t squeeze profit margins.

The automaker is turning to Chinese EV battery supplier CATL for the answer. The companies announced Wednesday a wide-ranging partnership that covers the gamut of the battery ecosystem from developing new technology and locking in supply to improving product quality and reusing and recycling batteries.

Toyota said in June that it would partner with CATL, also known as Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd and EV maker BYD for battery procurement. This new agreement widens the scope of the relationship.

The companies said the partnership was borne out of a shared belief that a stable supply of batteries is critical and that battery technology must be further developed and advanced. CATL will combine its battery development and supply capabilities with Toyota’s electrified vehicle and battery development technologies, the companies said in a joint announcement.

Panasonic already supplies Toyota with batteries for hybrids and hybrid plug-ins. That won’t be enough, however, to meet its EV goals considering that virtually every other automaker is adding electric vehicles to their portfolio mix. Tesla and Nissan, once the only two notable producers of electric vehicles, are no longer alone. Audi and Jaguar Land Rover have introduced new all-electric vehicles. Bigger acts will soon follow. Volkswagen plans to have a portfolio of more than 20 full-electric models and to sell 1 million electric vehicles annually by 2025.

Meanwhile, Toyota has said that electric vehicles will make up half of its global sales by 2025. (That means annual sales of about 5.5 million electric vehicles.) Those EV plans have extend to other Toyota brands such as Lexus as well as other automakers.

The company said every Lexus model will have an electrified version by 2025. Toyota and Subaru announced in June plans to jointly develop a platform dedicated to battery electric vehicles for midsize and large passenger vehicles and to jointly develop a C-segment-class all-electric SUV model for sale under each company’s own brand.

17 Jul 2019

SpaceX’s ‘Starhopper’ bursts into flames during static fire test

SpaceX’s test vehicle, a small-scale demonstration craft for some Starship components, caught fire after what appears to be a fuel leak or dump following an otherwise successful static fire test last night. It’s not clear why the craft suddenly burst into flames, or whether it was seriously or even superficially damaged.

The “Starhopper,” as SpaceX has been calling it, is a much smaller scale version of the Starship craft the company has in development, meant to test them out in a live-fire environment and even perform short flights called hops — hence the name. It’s being assembled and operated at SpaceX’s facilities in Boca Chica, Texas.

The big shiny craft looks a bit like a toy, but it’s a functioning rocket and it was planned that this week it would do an untethered hovering flight at some 20 meters, a step above the short tethered flights it has already accomplished. But last night’s test firing of the engines seems to have produced an anomaly.

hopper fire

As captured by several in the SpaceX community, the static fire started and stopped, but flames continued to burn around the base of the engines. A stream of liquid (very likely water) is directed towards it, at which point the whole rocket appears to ignite in an impressive fireball — then does it again a few seconds later. You can see the whole process (in 4K no less) in Everyday Astronaut’s video:

It’s unclear at this point what the cause of the fireball is, and whether it was in any part intentional. What’s certain is that this is not how previous test fires have gone, and generally speaking you don’t want your rocket to be on fire, even if it is highly heat-resistant.

Some have speculated that there was a fuel dump following the tests that produced lighter-than-air vapors, which rose and surrounded the rocket. The water jet may have caused the small fire to ignite the vapor, producing the fireball. I’ve asked SpaceX for any information they can share.

Images taken the next day don’t show a molten pile of slag, and in fact the vehicle doesn’t look any worse for wear on the outside. But while that’s testament to the test vehicle’s durability and stainless steel skin, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong inside.

Anything unexpected happening during a test like this is reason to abort and reassess, so it won’t be a surprise if we hear that Starhopper tests have been indefinitely delayed. LabPadre, who took another video of the event, noted on Twitter that the local authorities told him SpaceX withdrew all road and beach closures, so testing is apparently off for now.

I’ll update this story if and when SpaceX provides further information on the event.

17 Jul 2019

Instagram will now hide likes in 6 more countries

Would the Internet be a better place if we all paid a little less attention to fake Internet points? Instagram is still trying to figure it out.

Just a few months back, Instagram started testing a design tweak that would no longer show the total number of “likes” other user’s posts had received. You could still see everyone that liked your photos and videos – but anyone else’s stuff? Don’t worry about it.

While the company hasn’t said much about how the tests are going so far, it seems they’re going well enough to expand them. Initially rolled out in just Canada, it’ll roll out to users in six more countries starting today:

  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Brazil
  • Australia
  • New Zealand

Curiously, some users in Canada (the first country where hidden likes were tested) reported yesterday that likes had returned to their feed. Instagram confirmed to us that the testing in Canada is still ongoing. Meanwhile, likes seem to be gone again in Canada as of this afternoon.

We wrote about Instagram’s like-hiding experiments a few weeks prior to the public tests, after the pending rollout was discovered by reverse engineering extraordinaire Jane Manchun Wong.

So why hide likes? Instagram says it’s “because [they] want your followers to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.”

In other words: when likes are public, people care too much about them. People view it as a metric of success – teasing those who get too few, or buying likes to try to gain admiration. If a post doesn’t get enough likes, people delete them to make it seem like all of their photos are hits. In theory, hiding likes from the feed but making them visible to the creator lets people get some sense of whats working, without having to worry so much about whatever anyone else is taking away from the like count on any given photo.

Here’s what Instagram looks like with the design tweak. Note the banner up top giving the user a heads up of the change, and that the like bar just says “Liked by username and others” instead of any specific number of users:

 

 

17 Jul 2019

Microsoft has warned 10,000 victims of state-sponsored hacking

Microsoft said it has notified close to 10,000 people in the past year that they have been targeted by state-sponsored hackers.

The tech giant said Wednesday that the victims were either targeted or compromised by hackers working for a foreign government. In almost all cases, Microsoft said, enterprise customers were the primary targets — such as businesses and corporations. About one in ten victims are consumer personal accounts, the company said.

Microsoft said its new data, revealed at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, demonstrates the “significant extent to which nation-states continue to rely on cyberattacks as a tool to gain intelligence, influence geopolitics, or achieve other objectives.”

On top of that the company also said it has made 781 notifications of state-sponsored attacks on organizations using its AccountGuard technology, designed for political campaigns, parties and government institutions.

Almost all of the attacks targeted U.S.-based organizations, the company said, but a spokesperson would not disclose the percentage of successful attacks.

Most of the attacks were traced back to activity by hacking groups believed to be associated with Russia, North Korea and Iran.

One such group, the so-called APT 33 group operating out of Iran — which Microsoft calls Holmium — has been in Microsoft’s crosshairs before. In March the company said the Tehran-backed hackers stole corporate secrets and destroyed data in a two-year long hacking campaign. Weeks later the company sued to obtain a restraining order for another Iranian hacker group, APT 35, or Phosphorus. A year earlier it took similar legal action against Russian hackers, known as APT 28, or Fancy Bear, which was blamed for disrupting the 2016 presidential election.

“Cyberattacks continue to be a significant tool and weapon wielded in cyberspace. In some instances, those attacks appear to be related to ongoing efforts to attack the democratic process,” said Microsoft’s customer security chief Tom Burt in a blog post.

Microsoft said it expects to see the “use of cyberattacks to specifically target democratic processes” ahead of the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

17 Jul 2019

Apple gives a sneak peak of its new Peanuts series with ‘Snoopy in Space’ trailer

As the U.S. commemorates the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Apple took to the internet to give audiences a peak into the first of its new Peanuts series, “Snoopy in Space”.

The series will follow Charles M. Schulz’s characters as they take afield trip to a NASA location where Snoopy and . Woodstock are selected for a space mission.

Charlie Brown and the rest of the characters will staff mission control, while Snoopy and Woodstock fly into the great beyond.

The series is set to launch on Apple TV+ in the Fall.