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U.S. prosecutors have formally brought charges against the alleged co-owners and administrators of Deep Dot Web, who were arrested Tuesday.

Tal Prihar, 37, and Michael Phan, 34 — both Israeli citizens — were charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to a now-unsealed indictment.

Prihar, who resided in Brazil, was arrested by French police in Paris on Monday, while Phan was arrested by Israeli police in a simultaneous raid.

The two are accused of making millions of dollars in commission from Deep Dot Web, a website featuring news, reviews, and information about dark web sites and marketplaces. Prosecutors said the administrators made their commission by linking to marketplaces on the dark web — only accessible through Tor, an encrypted anonymity network.

Many of the dark web marketplaces sold drugs, weapons and data, which hackers could use to break into online accounts.

Following the arrests, the FBI seized Deep Dot Web’s website.

“It was truly a 50:50 partnership between the two defendants,” said Scott Brady, U.S. attorney for Western Philadelphia, in a press conference in Pittsburg on Wednesday announcing the charges.

According to the district attorney, more than 23 percent of all transactions made on AlphaBay, a dark web marketplace taken down by authorities in 2017, were associated with a referral link from Deep Dot Web. The indictment also said Deep Dot Web referred over 198,000 users to Hansa, another defunct market, accounting for nearly half of the site’s users, of which Deep Dot Web “received a commission on all of those users’ purchases.”

The indictment said Prihar and Phan made about 8,155 bitcoins in total — almost half of which was collected from AlphaBay. Prosecutors said at its peak, the bitcoins were worth more than $15.4 million.

“This is the single most significant law enforcement disruption of the dark net to date,” said Brady.

A staffer at Deep Dot Web said in a Medium post that Deep Dot Web would generate a slice of the revenue from purchases made on dark web marketplaces, said to be as much as 4 percent. Brazil’s federal police said in a statement the site made millions in dollars in cryptocurrency from referral sales from more than 15,000 dark web users.

Google unveils new Pixel 3 phones, Bird will start selling directly to consumers and PUBG takes a hit in China. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 8, 2019.

1. Here’s everything Google announced today at the I/O 2019 Keynote

Google’s developer conference is still underway, but we’ve rounded up everything they announced at their big keynote, like more affordable versions of its Pixel 3 phones — the Pixel 3a will start at $399, and come with a 5.6-inch display.

Meanwhile, the Google Home Hub has been rebranded as the Nest Hub, with a price cut and a new, bigger brother.

2. Bird is now selling its electric scooters directly to consumers

Bird One will cost $1,299 and come in three colors. People can pre-order the scooter now and receive it this summer.

3. Tencent replaces hit mobile game PUBG with a Chinese government-friendly alternative

China’s new rules on video games, introduced last month, are having an effect on the country’s gamers. Tencent introduced “Game for Peace” at the same time as PUBG was delisted from China.

4. HeyJobs, a ‘talent acquisition’ platform out of Berlin, raises $12M Series A

Founded in 2016, HeyJobs aims to tackle the recruitment problem European employers are facing due to steep declines in available workforce as the so-called the “boomer” generation nears retirement.

5. Match Group records solid first-quarter revenue thanks to an increase in Tinder subscribers

The company, whose portfolio of dating apps also includes Match.com, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid and Hinge, among others, said in its earnings report that total quarterly revenue grew 14% year-over-year, to $465 million.

6. Sumo Logic announces $110M Series G investment on valuation over $1B

When we spoke to CEO Ramin Sayar in 2017, he indicated that Sumo Logic was on its way to becoming a public company. While that hasn’t happened yet, he says that’s still the goal.

7. Amazon upgrades its Blink outdoor security camera with better battery, two-way talk

At $90, it’s 25% less than the original model — which was already a decent price point, as far as outdoor cameras go.

Google employees are still going strong and not letting up on their demands. Following a sit-in protesting retaliation last month, Googlers are making four demands.

“Google seems to have lost its mooring, and trust between workers and the company is deeply broken,” Google walkout organizers wrote on Medium today. “As the company progresses from crisis to crisis, it is clear Google management is failing, along with HR. It’s time to put HR on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) and bring in someone we trust to supervise it. It’s time to escalate.”

The first demand is for Google to meet the rest of the demands of the walkout. While Google did make some changes post-walkout, the company did not address all of the organizers’ demands. For example, Google failed to elevate its chief diversity officer to report directly to Pichai and also ignored the organizers’ request to add an employee representative to the board of directors.

Employees also want Alphabet CEO Larry Page to intervene and address the demands of the walkout.

“Larry controls Alphabet’s board and has the individual authority to make changes, where others do not,” the organizers wrote.

Additionally, employees are demanding Google unblock Meredith Whittaker’s transfer and let Claire Stapleton transfer to a new team. Whittaker, the lead of Google’s Open Research and one of the organizers of the walkout, said her role was “changed dramatically” while fellow walkout organizer Claire Stapleton said her manager told her she would be demoted and lose half of her reports.

“We call on Google to unblock Meredith’s transfer, and allow her to continue her work as before, fully funded and supported, and to allow Claire to transfer to a new team without continued retaliation and interference,” Googlers wrote.

Lastly, they want a transparent and open investigation of human resources and how it handles employee complaints. That’s because they say Google’s HR department is broken.

“Over and over again it prioritizes the company and the reputation of abusers and harassers over their victims,” they wrote. “The collateral damage is all around us. Time is up. We need third party investigators. Even Uber did this, bringing in Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington.”

Amidst scandals at Uber pertaining to sexual harassment, the company brought in an outside team to investigate the company’s culture. That’s what Googlers are now asking for. They want the investigators not to have any financial relationship with Google or Alphabet.

Google declined to comment but pointed to its previous statement regarding retaliation:

“We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy. To make sure that no complaint raised goes unheard at Google, we give employees multiple channels to report concerns, including anonymously, and investigate all allegations of retaliation.”

Facebook still won’t let you advertise for cryptocurrencies, exchanges, binaries, or ICOs without prior approval. But a year after banning all blockchain-related ads, it’s reopening to ones for “blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency” without the need for pre-approval.

The change could be a boon to an industry struggling for mainstream attention in the wake of the 2018 cryptocurrency price collapse that soured much of the public on the financial technology. Blockchain events were especially hit hard since Facebook’s local and interest targeting capabilities made it ideal for selling tickets to potential attendees.

Facebook’s goal was to prevent users from getting scammed by Initial Coin Offerings and other cryptocurrency deals where providers had little to no accountability. When Facebook users get scammed, they don’t just blame the scammer but the social network too. Facebook initially cast a wide net in its ban to prevent this. Users began seeing ads for blockchain education yesterday.

Additionally, beginning June 5th Facebook will ban ads for “promoting contracts for difference (CFDs), complex financial products that are often associated with predatory behavior. These products, due to their complexity, often mislead people.”

The news comes as more info on Facebook’s own blockchain group trickles out. Bloomberg’s Julie Verhage reports it now has over 50 employees, one-fifth hailing from PayPal where Facebook Blockchain’s head David Marcus was formerly president. They’re working on a stablecoin, potentially pegged to a bundle of currencies Facebook is trying to raise from outside investors in order to keep its cryptocurrency’s price stable.

Facebook’s stablecoin could allow zero-fee remittance to friends or family across borders or payments to merchants without traditional credit card processing fes, as we predicted last year. To that end, hiring PayPal talent makes sense. They already built a nearly ubiquitous checkout option for ecommerce. But because they act as a middleman for the money and assume some risk of fraud, PayPal charges fees on insured payments to merchants. Facebook could undercut those fees by using blockchain technology to instantly transfer value between accounts.

Microsoft’s yearly Imagine Cup student startup competition crowned its latest winner today: EasyGlucose, a non-invasive, smartphone-based method for diabetics to test their blood glucose. It and the two other similarly beneficial finalists presented today at Microsoft’s Build developers conference.

The Imagine Cup brings together winners of many local student competitions around the world with a focus on social good and, of course, Microsoft services like Azure. Last year’s winner was a smart prosthetic forearm that uses a camera in the palm to identify the object it is meant to grasp. (They were on hand today as well, with an improved prototype.)

The three finalists hailed from the U.K., India, and the U.S.; EasyGlucose was a one-person team from my alma mater UCLA.

EasyGlucose takes advantage of machine learning’s knack for spotting the signal in noisy data, in this case the tiny details of the eye’s iris. It turns out, as creator Brian Chiang explained in his presentation, that the iris’s “ridges, crypts, and furrows” hide tiny hints as to their owner’s blood glucose levels.

EasyGlucose presents at the Imagine Cup finals.

These features aren’t the kind of thing you can see with the naked eye (or rather, on the naked eye), but by clipping a macro lens onto a smartphone camera Chiang was able to get a clear enough image that his computer vision algorithms were able to analyze them.

The resulting blood glucose measurement is significantly better than any non-invasive measure and more than good enough to serve in place of the most common method used by diabetics: stabbing themselves with a needle every couple hours. Currently EasyGlucose gets within 7 percent of the pinprick method, well above what’s needed for “clinical accuracy,” and Chiang is working on closing that gap. No doubt this innovation will be welcomed warmly by the community, as well as the low cost: $10 for the lens adapter, and $20 per month for continued support via the app.

It’s not a home run, or not just yet: Naturally, a technology like this can’t go straight from the lab (or in this case the dorm) to global deployment. It needs FDA approval first, though it likely won’t have as protracted a review period as, say, a new cancer treatment or surgical device. In the meantime, EasyGlucose has a patent pending, so no one can eat its lunch while it navigates the red tape.

As the winner, Chiang gets $100,000, plus $50,000 in Azure credit, plus the coveted one-on-one mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The other two Imagine Cup finalists also used computer vision (among other things) in service of social good.

Caeli is taking on the issue of air pollution by producing custom high-performance air filter masks intended for people with chronic respiratory conditions who have to live in polluted areas. This is a serious problem in many places that cheap or off-the-shelf filters can’t really solve.

It uses your phone’s front-facing camera to scan your face and pick the mask shape that makes the best seal against your face. What’s the point of a high-tech filter if the unwanted particles just creep in the sides?

Part of the mask is a custom-designed compact nebulizer for anyone who needs medication delivered in mist form, for example someone with asthma. The medicine is delivered automatically according to the dosage and schedule set in the app — which also tracks pollution levels in the area so the user can avoid hot zones.

Finderr is an interesting solution to the problem of visually impaired people being unable to find items they’ve left around their home. By using a custom camera and computer vision algorithm, the service watches the home and tracks the placement of everyday items: keys, bags, groceries, and so on. Just don’t lose your phone, since you’ll need that to find the other stuff.

You call up the app and tell it (by speaking) what you’re looking for, then the phone’s camera it determines your location relative to the item you’re looking for, giving you audio feedback that guides you to it in a sort of “getting warmer” style, and a big visual indicator for those who can see it.

After their presentations, I asked the creators a few questions about upcoming challenges, since as is usual in the Imagine Cup, these companies are extremely early stage.

Right now EasyGlucose is working well but Chiang emphasized that the model still needs lots more data and testing across multiple demographics. It’s trained on 15,000 eye images but many more will be necessary to get the kind of data they’ll need to present to the FDA.

Finderrr recognizes all the images in the widely used ImageNet database, but the team’s Ferdinand Loesch pointed out that others can be added very easily with 100 images to train with. As for the upfront cost, the U.K. offers a 500-pound grant to visually-impaired people for this sort of thing, and they engineered the 360-degree ceiling-mounted camera to minimize the number needed to cover the home.

Caeli noted that the nebulizer, which really is a medical device in its own right, is capable of being sold and promoted on its own, perhaps licensed to medical device manufacturers. There are other smart masks coming out, but he had a pretty low opinion of them (not strange in a competitor but there isn’t some big market leader they need to dethrone). He also pointed out that in the target market of India (from which they plan to expand later) isn’t as difficult to get insurance to cover this kind of thing.

While these are early-stage companies, they aren’t hobbies — though admittedly many of their founders are working on them between classes. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear more about them and others from Imagine Cup pulling in funding and hiring in the next year.

We’re hunting for a cadre of exciting early-stage startups to attend and exhibit at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 as part of our TC Top Pick program — for free. Not only that, if your company makes the cut, you’ll get the VIP treatment and receive a ton of media and investor attention. Sounds great, right? You bet. Gotta be a catch, right? Wrong.

The only thing you need to do is apply to be a TC Top Pick.

The application is super quick and easy, but the selection process is very competitive. Highly discerning TechCrunch editors will review every application. They’ll select up to five startups to represent each of these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

TC Top Pick designees receive a free Startup Alley Exhibition package that includes one full day of exhibiting alongside hundreds of startups in Startup Alley, our expo hall of opportunity. They also receive three Founder passes (good for all three days of the show), use of CrunchMatch — our investor-to-startup matching platform — access to the Disrupt SF 2019 press list, invitations to special events at Disrupt SF and a prime location in the Startup Alley.

In a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment, a TechCrunch editor will interview each Top Pick live on the Showcase Stage — and we’ll promote that video across our social media platforms. That kind of media exposure drives opportunity to your startup long after the show closes.

Here’s a real-world example of what a TC Top Picks designation can do for your startup.

UATAG, which stands for “unique authentication tag,” earned a TC Top Pick designation in the Privacy/Security category at Disrupt SF 2018. The startup’s authentication tags are designed to protect high-end luxury goods and other valuable items from forgery and counterfeiting. The unbreakable tags use two levels of security — the unique way that glass shatters plus blockchain ledger and data records.

Taras Rodtsevych, UATAG’s founder and CEO, said that the connections his team made as a TC Top Pick helped them find local representation in San Francisco, and it also resulted in two very promising leads.

“Currently we’re conducting negotiations with two major U.S. brands that are interested in our tags,” said Rodtsevych. I can’t disclose them yet, but they’ve already received and are in the process of testing the prototypes. We hope to build and expand on these relationships.”

Exhibiting in Startup Alley is an opportunity to make connections with influencers you might not normally meet, and that was certainly true for UATAG.

“We made valuable contacts in the fashion and logistics industries, and we met potential technical partners interested in becoming our local representatives in the U.S., Japan and Europe,” said Rodtsevych. “We even found a company that offers different kinds of back-office services — like accounting, payroll and HR — that are essential to registering our company in the U.S.”

Remember that Showcase Stage interview we mentioned?

“The Showcase interview with Greg Kumparak was an exceptional opportunity,” said Rodtsevych. “So far, that video has earned us 3,500 views on YouTube, 13,600 on Facebook and 12,700 on Twitter. It increased our reputation and made us recognizable worldwide.”

Of course, there’s more than one way to grab the spotlight at Disrupt SF. While you’re applying to be a TC Top Pick, why not apply to compete in Startup Battlefield, too? Our epic startup pitch competition carries a $100,000 equity-free cash prize.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place October 2-4. Apply now to be a TC Top Pick. It’s free and there’s no catch. Just big opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt SF? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Almost three years ago, as the gig-economy company TaskRabbit was nearing its eventual sale to Ikea, its founder, Leah Busque, headed into the venture world. More specifically, she joined Fuel Capital, a firm founded in 2013 by Chris Howard, a VC who’d spent nearly six years as a principal with Ignition Parters before deciding to break out and do his own thing.

Things have seemed to go well since the two teamed up. The early-stage firm, which looks for startups building developer tools, business software, marketplaces, and consumer goods and services — and which closed its second fund with $45 million in late 2015 — just closed its third fund with $75 million in capital commitments.

Adding Busque as a partner is a move that Fuel’s limited partners apparently like.

The young firm’s performance is also presumably a major factor. Though Fuel is relatively low-flying compared with many of its venture peers, its exits include CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat in January of last year for $250 million, and Nervana’s sale to Intel for more than $350 million in 2016.

Fuel also has stakes in an impressive number of in fast-growing and highly valued companies, including Katerra, Flexport, Convoy — all so-called unicorns — along with Figma, Mesosphere, CTRL-Labs, and Lattice. (At Ignition, Howard also wrote one of the first checks to PagerDuty, which went public last month.)

Given the track record they are building, we asked Howard and Busque yesterday how they think about teams; they told us that they lean toward first-time founders, saying that as Silicon Valley outsiders (Busque is from Boston and Howard is from Seattle), people looking for an inside edge resonate with both.

Like a lot of firms, Fuel is also looking for founders that have been building toward their product or service through their lived experiences. Busque herself founded TaskRabbit in 2008 after finding it forever difficult to run errands while juggling her job as a software engineer at IBM.

As for the size checks that both are writing, they tell us they’ve always matched investments to their size and strategy and that with this newest fund, most first checks will range from $750,000 to $1 million.

It’s enough to start leading rounds, they say, though they also plan to partner with the firms with which it they’ve long partnered.

Indeed, just last month, Fuel led a $2.7 million seed round in Fuzzbuzz, a year-old, San Francisco-based startup aiming to deliver a class of automated software testing known as fuzzing. We have more on that deal here.

Where top VCs are investing in Media, Entertainment & Gaming

Our media columnist Eric Peckham (who is hard at work on the Unity EC-1, which we will start to publish here shortly) pinged his network of media investors to figure out what the media VC world is up to in mid-2019:

Here are the media investment theses of: Cyan Banister (Founders Fund), Alex Taussig (Lightspeed), Matt Hartman (betaworks), Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia), Jordan Fudge (Sinai), Christian Dorffer (Sweet Capital), Charles Hudson (Precursor), MG Siegler (GV), and Eric Hippeau (Lerer Hippeau).

Lots of interesting ideas in Eric’s piece, but one that I thought was particularly interesting was from Matt Hartman at Betaworks:

In 2019, I’m paying attention to Synthetic Media and the continued fluidity between what’s real and artificially generated inside of social media. Synthetic celebrities will be complemented by synthesized voice as these content types go mainstream. The technology tools to create these characters will improve and we’ll also see technology built to detect malicious use of these new tools.

The future of mobility is the big topic driving TC Sessions: Mobility 2019, which takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Will it include flying cars? Space tourism? Transporter beams? Before we can go where no person has gone before, we need to foster a deep bench of thinkers, makers and technologists.

Students are essential to the future of mobility. If you’re in high school or college and have a passion for mobility tech, take advantage of our deeply discounted student tickets. Come to TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 to meet, network with and learn from some of mobility’s most creative thinkers, makers and investors.

Student tickets cost only $45, which means you’ll save $250 over the general admission price. Apply here for a student ticket and, once we verify your student status, we’ll send you an email with your ticket.

What can you expect at TC Sessions: Mobility? Our day-long conference — with more than 1,000 attendees — is packed with discussions, demos and workshops with the brightest founders, technologists and investors in mobility and transportation.

You’ll hear from industry experts like Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s CTO and VP of engineering. Waymo started out as Google’s super-secret self-driving car project, and Dolgov’s been involved since the beginning. Learn about the early days, how the company evolved and where it’s headed. We’ll dig into the tech behind self-driving cars, too.

You’ll also hear from Jump founder Ryan Rzepecki and Katie DeWitt, the SVP of product at Scoot, as they talk about the future of micromobility. That includes topics like asset management, unit economics, partnering with cities, data sharing and more.

That’s just a small sample of what you’ll experience. Check out our list of speakers — we’re announcing more every week. If you’d like to speak, demo your technology or nominate someone else, you can submit an application right here.

If $45 is still too rich for your budget, you can earn a free ticket. Simply join our Ambassador Program by downloading the Social Ladder app. Share your unique code with friends, family and colleagues to sell tickets. When you earn enough points, you score a free pass to TC Mobility 2019.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Students are the future of mobility, so book your student ticket today. Join us to learn, share and connect with a community that creates the opportunity to build the future.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the lead “axion wrangler” and a social media team member for the NASA STROBE-X Probe Concept Study.

The first Black woman in history to hold a faculty position in theoretical cosmology, Prescod-Weinstein  is also a Twitter activist who frequently goes viral, a prolific writer and editor in multiple genres and disciplines, and the author of a soon to come column in the New Scientist, and a 2021 book, The Disordered Cosmos: from Dark Matter to Black Lives Matter.

A millennial, she is at the vanguard of a new cohort of brilliant, young, tech-savvy academics who are conducting important research in science and technology while also gracefully shouldering the responsibility of helping transform the way many of us think about what it means to be a scientist or technologist and who we think of when we imagine those categories.

Why interview a theoretical cosmologist for this series on tech ethics? Because tech, like science, has much work to do in reckoning with issues of race, gender, inclusion, and intersectionality.

As I spoke with her recently, I pictured young women and men of color or other marginalized backgrounds, looking to find their own place in the extraordinary world that is our tech culture/industry (I call tech a religion to underscore its size and influence, but more on that in some other column) and wondering if a) they will be given a just and equitable opportunity to demonstrate their innate abilities; and b) if in their quest to “make it” in this world they will have to somehow ‘sell out.’

Prescod-Weinstein tells the story, below, of a profound ethical dilemma she faced at the very beginning of her career in science.

Prescod-Weinstein quoted Daniel Berrigan, about whom she first read in an Adrienne Rich poem about the“Catonsville Nine,” a group of anti-war activists who, in 1968, took hundreds of draft files in wire baskets to the parking lot of the draft board in Catonsville, MD. Berrigan, his brother and fellow Catholic priest Phillip, and their seven colleagues dumped the files out, doused them in homemade napalm, and set them on fire.

Berrigan later explained he was inspired to take such dramatic action, rather than merely talking about ethics, because he believed that mere talk would place him “in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.”

In Prescod-Weinstein’s story and in her reference to Berrigan, we can find a parable about the need for inclusion and justice in today’s tech world. When we talk about tech ethics, after all, are we talking mainly about having yet more academic discussions about self-regulation or even incremental government policy changes? Or will we eventually need to grapple with burning issues to which we can only respond meaningfully with hard choices or dramatic actions?

What we all make of this, and of several of other ethical questions raised in the conversation below, will determine so much about the future of ethics in tech.

Greg E.: You have been playing a prominent role in facilitating conversations about justice, inclusion, and intersectionality in the science world. I wanted to speak with you about your activism because it seems to me discussions are also needed in the tech world, but seem to be happening even less in tech. What do you think?

Chanda P.W.: