Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Firefox maker Mozilla said it will not trust certificates from surveillance maker DarkMatter, ending a months-long effort to be whitelisted by the popular browser.

Months earlier, the United Arab Emirates-based DarkMatter had asked Mozilla to formally trust its root certificates in the Firefox certificate store, a place in the browser reserved for certificate authorities that are trusted and approved to issue HTTPS certificates. Mozilla and other browser makers use this store to know which HTTPS certificates to trust, effectively allowing these certificate authorities to confirm a website’s identity and certify that data going to and from it is secure.

But a rogue or malicious certificate authority could allow the interception of encrypted internet traffic by faking or impersonating websites.

DarkMatter has a history of controversial and shady operations, including developing malware and spyware to be used in surveillance operations, as well as the alleged targeting of journalists critical of the company. Just weeks ago, Reuters reported that the Emirati company — which employs former U.S. National Security Agency hackers — targeted several media personalities and dissidents at the behest of the Arab monarchy.

But the company has a clean record as a certificate authority, putting Mozilla in a tough spot.

Either Mozilla could accept DarkMatter’s record as a certificate authority or reject it based off a perceived risk.

As it turns out, the latter won.

“Our foremost responsibility is to protect individuals who rely on Mozilla products,” said said Wayne Thayer, certification authority program manager at Mozilla, in a discussion group post on Tuesday. He added that DarkMatter poses “a significant risk to our users.”

“I believe this framing strongly supports a decision to revoke trust in DarkMatter’s intermediate certificates,” he wrote.

Thayer added that although both sides of DarkMatter’s business were taken into account, the browser maker cited a core Mozilla principle — “individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional” — as a reason to reject the proposal.

Mozilla said it would also distrust six intermediary certificates in the meanwhile.

DarkMatter did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Our 14th Annual TechCrunch Summer Party is a mere two weeks away, and we’re serving up a fresh new batch of tickets to this popular Silicon Valley tradition. Jump on this opportunity, folks, because our previous releases sold out in a flash — and these babies won’t last long, either. Buy your ticket today.

Our summer soiree takes place on July 25 at Park Chalet, San Francisco’s coastal beer garden. Picture it: A cold brew, an ocean view, tasty food and relaxed conversations with other amazing members of the early-startup tech community.

TechCrunch parties have a reputation as a place where startup magic happens. And there will be plenty of magical opportunity afoot this year as heavy-hitter VCs from Merus Capital, August Capital, Battery Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Data Collective, General Catalyst and Uncork Capital join the party.

There’s more than one way to make magic at our summer fete. If you’re serious about catching the eye of these major VCs, consider buying a Startup Demo Package, which includes four attendee tickets.

Fun fact: Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith met one of their first investors, DFJ, at a party hosted by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. It’s one of our favorite success stories.

Check out the party details:

• When: July 25 from 5:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Where: Park Chalet in San Francisco
• How much: $95
• Startup Demo Package: $2,000

No TechCrunch party is complete without a chance to win great door prizes, including TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Buy your ticket today and enjoy a convivial evening of connection and community in a beautiful setting. Opportunity happens, and it’s waiting for you at the TechCrunch Summer Party.

Pro Tip: If you miss out this time, sign up here and we’ll let you know when we release the next group of tickets.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the TechCrunch 14th Annual Summer Party? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

It’s nice when people can come together and work through their differences to make it easier to watch stuff. That’s exactly what happened today, when the long-standing detente between Google and Amazon over streaming video services came to an end, with YouTube arriving on Fire TV and Prime Video making its way to Chromecast and Android TV.

Amazon’s second-generation Fire TV Stick, their Fire TV Stick 4K, the Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Stick Basic Edition and Fire TV Edition smart TVs made by partner OEMs will all get support for the official YouTube app globally starting today, and Amazon intends to extend support to even more of its hardware in future. YouTube TV and YouTube Kids will also come to Amazon Fire TV device later this year.

On the Google side, both its own Chromecast devices, as well as partners TVs and hardware that support Chromecast built-in, or that run Android TV, will gain support broadly for Prime Video. Plus, any Chromecast Ultra owners will also get access to Prime Video’s 4,000 title library normally reserved for Prime members only at no additional cost as part of the new tie-up between the two companies.

Prime has been available on some Android TV devices to date, but it’s expanding to a much broader selection of those smart TVs and streaming boxes from today.

This has been a long time coming – several years in fact, with the most recent spat between the two coming as a result of Amazon’s implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show. Then, in May, the companies announced they’d reached an agreement to put the feud behind them in the interest of consumers, which is what resulted in this cross-platform launch today.

Let the streams flow!

Starbucks’ mobile ordering app has proven wildly popular for the company, with reports indicating that it had more users than the likes of Apple Pay or Google Pay last year. The convenience is just too alluring. When you’re late for work and forgot to eat, being able to order up a drink and a sandwich with a tap or two and have it ready for pick up by the time you pass the store seems sort of like magic.

But how can smaller coffee shops compete? Building and maintaining an app of your own is a massive endeavor — and that’s before you start trying to convince customers to install yet another app.

Cloosiv is aiming to take that simplified, tap-of-a-button mobile ordering approach and make it work for local coffee shops by bringing them all to one place. It highlights the nearby coffee shops that are part of the service, presents their menus, and lets you tweak your drink to your liking before sending your order on its way. Tipping is handled through the app, and there’s a built-in rewards system to encourage people to keep coming back.

Cloosiv’s network of coffee shops isn’t huge yet; it’s up and running at just a couple of locations in San Francisco right now, and a quick glance at the in-app location map pins the nationwide total at a little shy of 200. The more that number grows, though, the more the concept makes sense. It becomes an everyone-versus-the-giant sort of thing.

As with Starbucks’ mobile ordering app, Cloosiv encourages users to pre-load money into a built-in wallet — the idea being that pre-loading means fewer credit card charges, which cuts back on processing fees for everyone. Unlike the big competition, however, users can make a one-off purchase without pre-loading the funds. There’s a 40 cent fee tacked onto those charges to cover processing, but the option is there.

I gave the app a spin in San Francisco last week, and it worked exactly as promised. I found a coffee shop (Coffee Mission) near BART, punched in my order as the train approached, and my drink was waiting for me by the time I made it out of the station.

Cloosiv’s Merchant app

As many (most?) coffee shops already have a tablet on the counter acting as the point of sales terminal, Cloosiv is focusing on integrating into what’s already in place. When an order comes in today, a sound plays as a notification banner drops down from the top of the screen; when an employee taps the banner, they’re bumped over to Cloosiv’s Merchant app where they can acknowledge orders or mark them as complete.

The next step for the company is tying all of this directly into the merchant apps that coffee shops are already using — they’re focusing on Square first, with plans to tie into things like Clover and Micros on the roadmap.

Cloosiv charges vendors a percentage of each sale, with that percentage going down as the number of orders goes up. The first 50 orders each month, for example, are charged a 12% fee; after 150 orders, that fee drops down to 8%.

Cloosiv founder Tim Griffin tells me they’ve processed over 35,000 orders so far, making up over $250,000 in revenue for the coffee shops they work with. He estimates that orders and gross volume are both growing by about 40% monthly. The company recently closed a small round with investors including Lachy Groom (previously Head of Issuing at Stripe) and Laura Behrens Wu (CEO of Shippo), and is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 class.

Bosch is bringing to market a new cloud-connected software service to manage and monitor the battery life of electric vehicles.

“Bosch is connecting electric-vehicle batteries with the cloud. Its data-based services mean we can substantially improve batteries’ performance and extend their service life,” said Dr. Markus Heyn, member of the board of management of Robert Bosch GmbH, in a statement.

The new connectivity will enable companies to remotely monitor and manage battery status to reduce wear and tear on the batteries by up to 20%, according to Bosch .

By gathering real-time data from batteries on the speed at which they’re charging; the number of charge cycles they’ve undergone; stress from rapid acceleration and deceleration, and ambient temperature, Bosch can optimize recharging and prompt drivers with updates on how to extend their battery life, according to the company.

The first customer for this new cloud-connected service is the Chinese ride-hailing giant, DiDi, which will deploy a fleet of Bosch’s software enabled electric vehicles in Xiamen.

The tools are not only prescriptive, but predictive, allowing fleet operators to determine when a battery might wear out and provide optimal information on when to replace aging batteries to ensure the best performance from a vehicle, Bosch said in a statement.

“Powerful batteries with long services lives will make electromobility more viable,” said Heyn, in a statement.

Bosch sees three advantages in these insights. They’re able to reduce the aging of batteries, improve maintenace and repair times, and by managing the recharging process can ensure that batteries don’t permanently lose performance and capacity.

Fintech startup Bunq is announcing a handful of new features today, such as a way to track group expenses without creating a joint account, a web app and better Siri integration.

If you usually track vacation expenses and group expenses from your phone, chances are you’ve been using two different products — a mobile app like Splitwise to track group expenses with your friends, and a peer-to-peer payment app to settle up balances.

Bunq is essentially bundling together these two features with Slice Groups for owners of the Bunq Travel Card. Given that the Bunq app already lists all your transactions, adding transactions to a group is easier than with your average group payment tracking app.

After adding other people to your Slice Group, each person can add expenses to the group. You get a list of your most recent Bunq transactions and you can add them to a group. You can also add manual transactions in case you paid for something using cash for instance.

This is just a group accounting feature. When you add a transaction to a Slice Group, your money remains in your account. But you can see who has a positive balance and who has a negative balance.

When you settle up a group, people who owe money get a push notification. They can then tap on the notification and send money from their Bunq account to your friends’ Bunq accounts.

This feature will work particularly well for groups of people who all use the Bunq Travel Card. But it doesn’t fundamentally change how you manage your money with groups.

Bunq now has two tiers of users. Free users get a travel card with an account that they can top up. Paid users get a full-fledged bank account with banking information.

Multiple paid users can already create joint accounts with their roommates or partner. You can then associate your Bunq card with a joint account and spend money from that joint account directly.

So if you have a Bunq Travel Card, Slice Groups are for you. If you have a Bunq bank account, joint accounts are for you.

Revolut doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel either as you can only split individual card transactions with other users. It could take a while to settle all transactions after a long vacation. Revolut also lets you create Group Vaults. Those are sub-accounts to put some money aside and invite other people to contribute. But only the admin can withdraw and spend money from those vaults.

N26 has promised Shared Spaces so that you can create sub-accounts and share them with other people. But the feature isn’t live yet.

Lydia’s take on group expenses works more like Bunq’s joint accounts. You can create sub-accounts and share those accounts with other people. Everyone can then top up that account and attach a payment method, such as a payment card or a virtual card in Apple Pay or Google Pay. You can also move expenses from one sub-account to another. When you’re back from vacation, you can associate your card with your personal Lydia account again.

In addition to Slice Groups, Bunq is also launching a web interface to access your bank account. It works a bit like WhatsApp’s web app. You scan a QR code with your phone and you can then control the mobile app from a desktop web browser.

Bunq should also work better with Siri. You can now send money using your voice or change card settings. Finally, the startup has also made improvements to its business accounts with a few new features. For instance, you can now automatically put money aside to pay back VAT later down the road.

It’s hard to avoid spoilers on the internet these days — even if you’re careful, a random tweet or recommended news item could lay to waste your plan to watch that season finale a day late or catch a movie after the crowds have subsided. But soon an AI agent may do the spoiler-spotting for you, and flag spoilerific reviews and content before you even have a chance to look.

SpoilerNet is the creation of a team at UC San Diego, composed perhaps of people who tried waiting a week to see Infinity War and got snapped for their troubles. Never again!

They assembled a database of more than a million reviews from Amazon-owned reading community Goodreads, where it is the convention to note spoilers in any reviews, essentially line by line. As a user of the site I’m thankful for this capability, and the researchers were too — because nowhere else is there a corpus of written reviews in which whatever constitutes a “spoiler” has been meticulously labeled by a conscientious community.

(Well, sort of conscientious. As the researchers note: “we observe that in reality only a few users utilize this feature.”)

At any rate, such labeled data is these days basically food for what are generally referred to as AI systems: neural networks of various types that “learn” the qualities that define a specific image, object, or in this case spoilers. The team fed the 1.3 million Goodreads reviews into the system, letting it observe and record the differences between ordinary sentences and ones with spoilers in them.

Perhaps writers of reviews tend to begin sentences with plot details in a certain way — “Later it is revealed…” — or maybe spoilery sentences tend to lack evaluative words like “great” or “complex.” Who knows? Only the network.

Once its training was complete, the agent was set loose on a separate set of sentences (from both Goodreads and mind-boggling timesink TV Tropes), which it was able to label as “spoiler” or “non-spoiler” with up to 92 percent accuracy. Earlier attempts to computationally predict whether a sentence has spoilers in it haven’t fare so well; one paper by Chiang et al. last year broke new ground, but is limited by its dataset and approach, which allow it to consider only the sentence in front of it.

“We also model the dependency and coherence among sentences within the same review document, so that the high-level semantics can be incorporated,” lead author of the SpoilerNet paper, Mengting Wan, told TechCrunch in an email. This allows for a more complete understanding of a paragraph or review, though of course it is also necessarily a more complex problem.

But the more complex model is a natural result from richer data, he wrote:

Such a model design indeed benefits from the new large-scale review dataset we collected for this work, which includes complete review documents, sentence-level spoiler tags, and other meta-data. To our knowledge, the public dataset (released in 2013) before this work only involves a few thousand single-sentence comments rather than complete review documents. For research communities, such a dataset also facilitates the possibility of analyzing real-world review spoilers in details as well as developing modern ‘data-hungry’ deep learning models in this domain.

This approach is still new, and the more complex approach has its drawbacks. For instance, the model occasionally mistakes a sentence as having spoilers if other spoiler-ish sentence are adjacent; and its understanding of individual sentences is not quite good enough to understand when certain words really indicate spoilers or not. You and I know that “this kills Darth Vader” is a spoiler, while “this kills the suspense” isn’t, but a computer model may have trouble telling the difference.

Wan told me that the system should be able to run in real time on a user’s computer, though of course training it would be a much bigger job. That opens up the possibility of a browser plugin or app that reads reviews ahead of you and hides anything it deems risky. Though Amazon is indirectly associated with the research (co-author Rishabh Misra works there) Wan said there was no plan as yet to commercialize or otherwise apply the tech.

No doubt it would be a useful tool for Amazon and its subsidiaries and sub-businesses to be able to automatically mark spoilers in reviews and other content. But until the new model is implemented (and really until it is a bit better) we’ll have to stick to the old-fashioned method of avoiding all contact with the world until we’ve seen the movie or show in question.

The team from UCSD will be presenting their work at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in Italy later this month; you can read the full paper here — but beware of spoilers. Seriously.

AT&T’s acquisition of HBO goes beyond just offering premium TV programming – the company revealed on Tuesday that it’s going to call its new streaming service HBO Max, and that this will launch next spring, with over 10,000 hours of content available to subscribers.

It’ll have ‘Friends,’ dear readers, which is all that matters in the modern streaming wars where weirdly services compete for dominion over a couple of decade-plus-year old TV shows including ‘The Office’ and this highly-unrelatable 90s NBC sitcom.

HBO Max won’t offer exclusively HBO content, as you can probably tell by the availability fo Friends, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the naming is meant to indicate how important HBO as a TV brand is to consumers. In other words, they’re going to make the most of that purchase, even if it dilutes the actual HBO brand in the process. It’s beginning to become much more clear why HBO CEO Richard Plepler resigned in February.

The new service enters a teeming field of competitors, including Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix and many more I can’t even remember off the top of my head. It’s also not launching until after Apple puts live its own Apple TV+ service, and Disney+ comes online in November, and per the WSJ, it’ll cost “slightly more” than HBO’s currently $14.99 per month pricing for Go alone.

AT&T is spending on content, however, including the high purchase price for ‘Friends’ rights, as well as development deals with a number of top talents from the film and television industry, including Reese Witherspoon, Greg Berlanti and more. Future CW shows will also reside in HBO Max instead of on Netflix, which is bad news for my habit of bingeing subpar DC superhero TV including ‘Arrow’ and ‘The Flash.’

We’ve known it was coming since late last year, but now it’s final: IBM has wrapped up its $34B acquisition of Red Hat, completing what is one of the largest tech acquisitions of all time.

IBM originally announced its intent to acquire the Linux developer in October of last year. The US Department of Justice gave its stamp of approval in May, and the last big potential roadblock was removed when the EU gave its unconditional approval at the end of June.

IBM says that Red Hat will stay under the watch of CEO Jim Whitehurst, with Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior management and reporting directly to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

The Volkswagen Beetle is taking a bow, after its return and restyle in 2011 (before earlier rebirth in 1997 – the one with the built-in flower vase). The last of the most recent generation of Beetles has already come off the production line, and will be put on display at the Volkswagen museum in Puebla near the plant that produced it.

Volkswagen’s 2011 Beetle redesign did away with much of the hippy throw-back appeal of the 1998 model year New Beetle, though it kept many of its curves and vaguely bug-like look that earned it its name to begin with. The U.S. run of the original Beetle ended in 1979, so it was nearly 20 years before it got its second life – and it’s been 21 years now that both revised versions have been on sale.

Last year, VW announced its intent to end production of the car in 2019, so it’s not catching anyone by surprise. As for whether a resurrection is in the cards down the road, the jury’s still out – VW didn’t rule out the possibility when it announced the end of the line, but it also didn’t commit to anything. Meanwhile, the automaker is refocusing many of its efforts too its new electric vehicle platform, which will provide the basis for its I.D. line of vehicles.

Today’s been a day for oddball things that nevertheless had ardent fans coming to an end. Bye bye, little Beetle.