Category: UNCATEGORIZED

An internet advertising company specializing in helping law firms sign up potential clients has exposed close to 150,000 records from a database that was left unsecured.

The database contained submissions as part of a lead-generation effort by X Social Media, a Florida-based ad firm that largely uses Facebook to advertise various campaigns for its law firm customers. Law firms pay the ad company to set up individual websites that aim to sign up victims from specific categories of harm and injuries — from medical implants, malpractice, sexual abuse and more — who submit their information in the hope of receiving legal relief.

But the database was left unprotected and without a password, allowing anyone to look inside.

Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the database and reported it to the company, which pulled the database offline. The researchers also shared their discovery exclusively with TechCrunch and posted their findings on vpnMentor.

The database contained names, addresses, phone numbers, the date and time of a person’s submission and the circumstances and explanation of their accident, injury or illness. Often this included personal health information, sensitive medical information, details of procedures or the consumption of certain medications or specifics of traumatic events.

Several records seen by TechCrunch include records from campaigns targeting combat veterans who were injured on duty. Other campaigns sought to sign up those who suffered illnesses from pesticides or medications.

Other campaigns included soliciting claims for sexual abuse. We found several names, postal and email addresses and phone numbers of victims, many of which also described their sexual abuse as part of filling out the website form.

One of the records in the database

The researchers said the exposed data could be “easily traced” back to the individuals who filled out the website forms.

The exposed database also contained a list of more than 300 law firms who paid X Social Media to set up the lead-generation operation. It also contained records of how much each law firm paid the ad company — in some cases amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. The database also contained the bank routing and account numbers of the ad company, which law firms used to pay the company for its services.

In reporting this story, we found a second, smaller database. In an effort to get the database secured, we provided the IP address to Jacob Malherbe, founder of X Social Media, in an email. Within an hour, the database had been pulled offline.

Despite this, Malherbe denied that the company stored medical data, described the findings as “inaccurate” and asked we “direct all other emails to our company lawyers.”

When presented with several files containing the data, Malherbe responded:

After being notified by TechCrunch about a security problems in MongoDB the X Social Media developer team immediately shut down the vulnerability create [sic] by a MongoDB database and did a night long log file review and we only found the two IP addresses, associated with TechCrunch accessing our database. Our log files show that nobody else accesses the database while in transit. We will continue to investigating this incident and work closely with state and Federal agencies as more information becomes available.

When asked, Malherbe declined to provide the logs to verify his claims. The company also wouldn’t say how long the database was exposed.

This is the latest exposed database found by the researchers in recent months.

The researchers have previously found data leaking on Fortune 500 firm Tech Data, exposed user records and private messages of Jewish dating app JCrush and leaking data from Canadian cell network Freedom Mobile and online retailer Gearbest.

Read more:

• Fortune 500 giant Tech Data exposed customer and billing data
• Jewish dating app JCrush exposed user data and private messages
• Rela, a Chinese lesbian dating app, exposed 5 million user profiles
• At Blind, a security lapse revealed private complaints from Silicon Valley employees
• Donald Daters, a dating app for Trump supporters, leaked its users’ data
• Security lapse exposed private Theta photos
• After breach, Stack Overflow says some user data exposed
• An unsecured SMS spam operation doxxed its owners

Rivian, the once secretive company that made its public debut in November with an electric pickup truck and SUV, plans to give its batteries a second life and put them to work in a solar microgrid project in Puerto Rico.

The automaker is teaming up with The Honnold Foundation, an organization started by Alex Honnold, the professional climber and subject of the documentary Free Solo, on the microgrid project. Honnold and Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe will discuss the project Saturday in Denver. The discussion, which is scheduled for 6 pm MT, will be live streamed.

The microgrid project will be set up in Adjuntas, a city of about 20,000 people in midwestern Puerto Rico that was severely impacted by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Casa Pueblo, an environmental watchdog based in Adjuntas that has been looking for ways to setup affordable sources of community power, is also a partner in the project.

Rivian is providing 135 kilowatt-hour battery packs from its development vehicles to support the microgrid. Earlier this year, battery engineers from Rivian and The Honnold Foundation visited Casa Pueblo and met with community leaders to design a site-specific system that will power many of the businesses located in the Adjuntas town square.

The downtown solar microgrid project will serve two purposes. It will give residents access to electricity for core business if the primary source of power is gone. The microgrid will also be used daily to offset the high cost of energy in Puerto Rico, which is twice the national average of the U.S.

The system is expected to launch in 2020.

“Second-life batteries are a big enabler to accelerating widespread adoption of renewable energy, and it’s exciting to envision this system contributing importantly to a community. This project allows us to model a customized energy storage solution that takes into account space constraints, disaster resiliency and energy independence,” Scaringe said.

The project marks the beginning of the company’s long-term plans to find a wide variety of applications for second-life batteries.

The company designed its pack, module, and battery management system to transition from vehicle energy storage to stationary energy storage at the end of their vehicle life. The module itself is thin, a design that allows for second-life applications that are space-efficient and customizable.

Rivian is an electric automaker focused on adventure vehicles like pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. The company announced in February that it had raised $700 million in a round led by Amazon.

The company has spent the first part of its life operating out of the public eye. It was originally launched as Mainstream Motors in 2009. By 2011, the name changed to Rivian and moved out of Florida. Today, the company has more than 1,000 employees split between development locations in Plymouth, Michigan, San Jose and Irvine, California and Surrey, England. It also has a 2.6 million-square-foot factory in Normal, Illinois.

Rivian plans to launch the R1T electric pickup truck and the R1S SUV in the U.S. in late 2020, with introduction to other global geographies starting in 2021.

Three years ago, I met with a founder who had raised a massive seed round at a valuation that was at least five times the market rate. I asked what firm made the investment.

She said it was not a traditional venture firm, but rather a strategic investor that not only had no ties to her space but also had no prior investment experience. The strategic investor, she said, was looking to “get their hands dirty” and “get in on the ground floor.”

Over the next 2 years, I kept a close eye on the founder. Although she had enough capital to pivot her business focus multiple times, she seemed to be at odds, serving the needs of her strategic investor and her customer base.

Ultimately, when the business needed more capital to survive, the strategic investor didn’t agree with the founder’s focus, opted not to prop it up, and the business had to shut down.

Sadly, this is not an uncommon story as examples abound of strategic investors influencing startup direction and management decisions to the point of harm for the startup. Corporate strategics, not to be confused with dedicated funds focused on financial returns like a traditional venture investor like Google Ventures, often care less about return on investment, and more about a startup’s focus, and sector specificity. If corporate imperatives change, the strategic may cease to be the right partner or could push the startup in a challenging direction.

And yet, fortunately, as the disruptive power of technology is being unleashed on nearly every major industry, strategic investors are now getting smarter, both in terms of how they invest and how they partner with entrepreneurs.

From making strong acquisitive plays (i.e. GM’s purchase of Cruise Automation or Toyota’s early-stage investment in Uber) to building dedicated funds, to executing commercial agreements in tandem with capital investment, strategics are getting savvier, and by extension, becoming better partners.  In some instances, they may be the best partner.

Negotiating a term sheet with a strategic investor necessitates a different set of considerations. Namely: the preference for a strategic to facilitate commercial milestones for the startup, a cautious approach to avoid the “over-valuation” trap, an acute focus on information rights, and the limitation of non-compete provisions.

If AI-powered robots are ever going to help us out around the house, they’re going to need a lot of experience navigating human environments. Simulators, virtual worlds that look and behave just like real life are the best place for them to learn, and Facebook has created one of the most advanced such systems yet.

Called Habitat, Facebook’s new simulator was briefly mentioned some months ago but today received the full expository treatment, to accompany a paper on the system being presented at CVPR.

Teaching a robot to navigate a realistic world and accomplish simple tasks is a process that takes a considerable amount of time, so doing it in a physical space with an actual robot is impractical. It might take hundreds of hours, even years of real time, to learn over many repetitions how best to get from one place to another, or how to grip and pull a drawer.

Instead, the robot’s AI can be placed in a virtual environment that approximates the real one, and the basics can be hashed out as fast as the computer can run the calculations that govern that 3D world. That means you can achieve hundreds or thousands of hours of training in just a few minutes of intense computing time.

Habitat is not itself a virtual world itself, but rather a platform on which such simulated environments can run. It is compatible with several existing systems and environments (SUNCG, MatterPort3D, Gibson and others), and is optimized for efficiency so researchers can run it at hundreds of times real world speeds.

But Facebook also wanted to advance the state of the art in virtual worlds, and so created Replica, a database for Habitat that includes a number of photorealistic rooms organized into a whole house: a kitchen, bathroom, doors, a living room with couches, and everything. It was created by Facebook’s Reality Labs, and is the result of painstaking photography and depth mapping of real environments.

[gallery ids="1843686,1843683,1843682"]

The detail with which these are recreated is high, but you may notice some artifacts, especially along ceilings and inaccessible edges. Those areas aren’t a focus probably because AI vision agents don’t rely on detail in ceilings and distant corners for navigation — shapes like chairs and tables, or the way the walls define a hallway, are much more important.

Even more important, however, are the myriad annotations the team has done on the 3D data. It’s not enough to simply capture the 3D environment — the objects and surfaces must be consistently and exhaustively labeled. That’s not just a couch — it’s a grey couch, with blue pillows. And depending on the logic of the agent, it might or might not know that the couch is “soft,” that it’s “on top of a rug,” that it’s “by the TV,” and so on.

Habitat and Replica represented with a single color per semantic label.

But including labels like this increases the flexibility of the environment, and a comprehensive API and task language allows agents can perform complex multi-step problems like “go to the kitchen and tell me what color the vase on the table is.”

After all, if these assistants are meant to help out, say, a disabled person who can’t easily get around their home, they’ll need a certain level of savvy. Habitat and Replica are meant to help create that savvy and give the agents the practice they need.

Despite its advances, Habitat is only a small step along the road to truly realistic simulator environments. For one thing, the agents themselves aren’t rendered realistically — a robot might be tall or small, have wheels or legs, use depth cameras or RGB. Some logic won’t change — your size doesn’t influence the distance from the couch to the kitchen — but some will; a small robot might be able to walk under a table, or be unable to see what’s on top of it.

Habitat as seen through a variety of virtualized vision systems.

Furthermore, although Replica and many other 3D worlds like it are realistically rendered in a visual sense, they are almost completely non-functional in terms of physics and interactivity. You could tell an agent to go to the bedroom and locate the second drawer of the wardrobe — but there’s no way at all to open it. There is in fact no drawer — just a piece of the scenery labeled as such, which can’t be moved or touched.

Other simulators focus more on the physical aspect of rather than the visuals, such as THOR, a simulator meant to let AIs practice things like opening that drawer, which is an amazingly difficult task to learn from scratch. I asked two developers of THOR about Habitat. They both praised the platform for providing a powerfully realized place for AIs to learn navigation and observational tasks, but emphasized that lacking interactivity, Habitat is limited in what it can teach.

Obviously, however, there’s a need for both, and it seems that for now one can’t be the other — simulators can be either physically or visually realistic, not both. No doubt Facebook and others in AI research are hard at work creating one that can.

We’re excited to announce a special promotion for Extra Crunch. Starting today, new users signing up for Extra Crunch will get a trial rate of $2 for the first 2 months. After the trial period ends, you’ll be moved over to our monthly plan for $15 per month. This offer ends on June 21, so be sure to take advantage of it before it expires.

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The TechCrunch Hackathon is shaping up to be a huge battle royale, but we still have room for a few more creative coders, hackers and outright webmonsters to join us at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4 for a chance to win $10,000.

It won’t cost you a thing to come and play in the hackathon sandbox. If you have the vision, the chops and the stamina to face off against some of the world’s best devs, then stop what you’re doing and apply to compete right here.

Here’s what you need to know about the Disrupt SF 2019 Hackathon. Teams can consist of a maximum of 6 people. Don’t have a team? No problem, you can find a team member on our Devpost host site prior to the event.

Besides the $10,000 grand prize, sponsors will also offer prizes (including cold, hard cash, people) to the teams that build a great product using their platform. It won’t be easy. You’ll have roughly 24 high-pressure hours to deliver the goods using their APIs, data sets and other tools.

We’ll announce this year’s sponsors and challenges over the next few weeks, but the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from last year’s hackathon can give you an idea of what to expect.

When the dev clock runs out, it’s pencils down and time to submit your work. On the afternoon of day two, judges review all completed projects — kind of like a flashback to your science fair days. They’ll pick 10 finalists to deliver a two-minute project pitch on the Extra Crunch Stage.

The sponsors will announce their winners, and then TechCrunch will announce one grand prize winner for the best overall hack — and that team will take home a cool, $10,000 cash prize. Check out all the details and the agenda on the Hackathon website.

We’ll keep you fed, watered and highly caffeinated throughout the event — at no cost to you. Plus, you receive free Expo Only passes for the first two days of Disrupt. And if you have any energy left, you can enjoy your free Innovator pass to catch all of the content during day three of Disrupt SF. Sweet!

The entire experience is exhausting and exhilarating, grueling and gratifying. You’ll flex your mighty skills in front of influential people and build something awesome that can make a difference in this world.

The TC Hackathon takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Join the battle royale and show us what you can do. Apply to the Hackathon right here.

Is your company interested in sponsoring the Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

This is it. The final call for all the mobility and transportation startuppers who want to save a solid Benjamin on their ticket to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. The early-bird ticket price disappears tonight, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Beat that deadline and buy a ticket — or pay full freight.

Get ready to experience a full day devoted to the revolution that’s taking place within the mobility and transportation industries. More than 1,000 people — the greatest minds, biggest names and influential thinkers, makers and investors — will attend a day packed with interviews, panel discussions, fireside chats, demos and workshops.

Along with TechCrunch editors, speakers will question assumptions and examine complex technological and regulatory issues. They’ll discuss capital investment concerns and look at the ethics and human factors in a future of autonomous cars, delivery robots and flying taxis.

Here’s a small sample of the programming that’s on tap. The event agenda can help you plan your day, although you may have to clone yourself to catch it all.

Building Business and Autonomy: Co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson will be on hand to talk about Zoox, an independent autonomous vehicle company. Its cars can navigate tricky San Francisco streets — including the notoriously iconic Lombard Street. We’ll hear how Zoox plans to navigate the challenging road to business success.

The Future of Freight: The trucking industry is in serious trouble, and startups and OEMs are scrambling to come up with a solution. Volvo’s Jenny Elfsberg and Stefan Seltz-Axmacher of Starsky Robotics will join us to debate whether autonomous trucks are the fix we need or if another near-term technology can pave the way to a more efficient and profitable industry.

Will Venture Capital Drive the Future of Mobility? Michael Granoff of Maniv Mobility, Ted Serbinski of Techstars and Bain Capital’s Sarah Smith will debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.

Today’s the last day you can save $100 on your pass to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. Buy your ticket by 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight, June 14 or kiss that early bird — and $100 — goodbye.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

This is it. The final call for all the mobility and transportation startuppers who want to save a solid Benjamin on their ticket to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. The early-bird ticket price disappears tonight, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Beat that deadline and buy a ticket — or pay full freight.

Get ready to experience a full day devoted to the revolution that’s taking place within the mobility and transportation industries. More than 1,000 people — the greatest minds, biggest names and influential thinkers, makers and investors — will attend a day packed with interviews, panel discussions, fireside chats, demos and workshops.

Along with TechCrunch editors, speakers will question assumptions and examine complex technological and regulatory issues. They’ll discuss capital investment concerns and look at the ethics and human factors in a future of autonomous cars, delivery robots and flying taxis.

Here’s a small sample of the programming that’s on tap. The event agenda can help you plan your day, although you may have to clone yourself to catch it all.

Building Business and Autonomy: Co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson will be on hand to talk about Zoox, an independent autonomous vehicle company. Its cars can navigate tricky San Francisco streets — including the notoriously iconic Lombard Street. We’ll hear how Zoox plans to navigate the challenging road to business success.

The Future of Freight: The trucking industry is in serious trouble, and startups and OEMs are scrambling to come up with a solution. Volvo’s Jenny Elfsberg and Stefan Seltz-Axmacher of Starsky Robotics will join us to debate whether autonomous trucks are the fix we need or if another near-term technology can pave the way to a more efficient and profitable industry.

Will Venture Capital Drive the Future of Mobility? Michael Granoff of Maniv Mobility, Ted Serbinski of Techstars and Bain Capital’s Sarah Smith will debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.

Today’s the last day you can save $100 on your pass to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. Buy your ticket by 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight, June 14 or kiss that early bird — and $100 — goodbye.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The Vera autonomous, electric truck from Volvo’s trucking subsidiary is not what you might expect in a transport truck – it looks like a road-hugging sportscar, something emphasized by its lack of a place for humans to sit. The real reason it looks like this is that it’s totally self-driving, however – and tailor-made for use in specific situations like serving the Swedish port in Gothenburg where it’ll soon begin operations.

Vera’s inaugural job will be to move goods packed in cargo trailers from a logistics center the actual port terminal, where it’ll be ready to loaded onto boats for transport. This first commercial use of the connected, electric freight moving vehicle will be done in partnership with logistics company DFDS.

Use of the Vera will make up one part of a larger connected system to move goods from the logistics center to distribution destinations around the world. They’ll operate autonomous but be monitored by a central operator working out of a control tower, and they’ll be operating at a top speed of only around 24 mph.

These are basically just heavy-duty land tugs for now, but if successful, there’s a lot of potential business to be had in providing similar services for shipping port facilities around the world.