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Something strange is happening in the world of cryptocurrencies. To the investor, the speculator, or the casual observer, the industry is in the midst of the “crypto winter” marked by dwindling public interest and stagnant prices after last year’s massive plunges.

But to the engineer or the founder, it is an industry which has never been so feverish; a sector erupting and overflowing with new initiatives, new developments, and new technologies. What follows is a brief, oversimplified summary of what I view as the most important current initiatives.

Outsiders ask, quite reasonably: will anyone outside of a tiny minority ever really care? But “ever” is a long time, and blockchainers are still fairly flush with funding from the boom, and — more importantly — armed with two of the most potent weapons known to humankind: technical brilliance and true belief.

Developments in the self-driving car world can sometimes be a bit dry: a million miles without an accident, a 10 percent increase in pedestrian detection range, and so on. But this research has both an interesting idea behind it and a surprisingly hands-on method of testing: pitting the vehicle against a real racing driver on a course.

To set expectations here, this isn’t some stunt, it’s actually warranted given the nature of the research, and it’s not like they were trading positions, jockeying for entry lines, and generally rubbing bumpers. They went separately, and the researcher, whom I contacted, politely declined to provide the actual lap times. This is science, people. Please!

The question which Nathan Spielberg and his colleagues at Stanford were interested in answering has to do with an autonomous vehicle operating under extreme conditions. The simple fact is that a huge proportion of the miles driven by these systems are at normal speeds, in good conditions. And most obstacle encounters are similarly ordinary.

If the worst should happen and a car needs to exceed these ordinary bounds of handling — specifically friction limits — can it be trusted to do so? And how would you build an AI agent that can do so?

The researchers’ paper, published today in the journal Science Robotics, begins with the assumption that a physics-based model just isn’t adequate for the job. These are computer models that simulate the car’s motion in terms of weight, speed, road surface, and other conditions. But they are necessarily simplified and their assumptions are of the type to produce increasingly inaccurate results as values exceed ordinary limits.

Imagine if such a simulator simplified each wheel to a point or line when during a slide it is highly important which side of the tire is experiencing the most friction. Such detailed simulations are beyond the ability of current hardware to do quickly or accurately enough. But the results of such simulations can be summarized into an input and output, and that data can be fed into a neural network — one that turns out to be remarkably good at taking turns.

The simulation provides the basics of how a car of this make and weight should move when it is going at speed X and needs to turn at angle Y — obviously it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea. It’s fairly basic. The model then consults its training, but is also informed by the real-world results, which may perhaps differ from theory.

So the car goes into a turn knowing that, theoretically, it should have to move the wheel this much to the left, then this much more at this point, and so on. But the sensors in the car report that despite this, the car is drifting a bit off the intended line — and this input is taken into account, causing the agent to turn the wheel a bit more, or less, or whatever the case may be.

And where does the racing driver come into it, you ask? Well, the researchers needed to compare the car’s performance with a human driver who knows from experience how to control a car at its friction limits, and that’s pretty much the definition of a racer. If your tires aren’t hot, you’re probably going too slow.

The team had the racer (a “champion amateur race car driver,” as they put it) drive around the Thunderhill Raceway Park in California, then sent Shelley — their modified, self-driving 2009 Audi TTS — around as well, ten times each. And it wasn’t a relaxing Sunday ramble. As the paper reads:

Both the automated vehicle and human participant attempted to complete the course in the minimum amount of time. This consisted of driving at accelerations nearing 0.95g while tracking a minimum time racing trajectory at the the physical limits of tire adhesion. At this combined level of longitudinal and lateral acceleration, the vehicle was able to approach speeds of 95 miles per hour (mph) on portions of the track.

Even under these extreme driving conditions, the controller was able to consistently track the racing line with the mean path tracking error below 40 cm everywhere on the track.

In other words, while pulling a G and hitting 95, the self-driving Audi was never more than a foot and a half off its ideal racing line. The human driver had much wider variation, but this is by no means considered an error — they were changing the line for their own reasons.

“We focused on a segment of the track with a variety of turns that provided the comparison we needed and allowed us to gather more data sets,” wrote Spielberg in an email to TechCrunch. “We have done full lap comparisons and the same trends hold. Shelley has an advantage of consistency while the human drivers have the advantage of changing their line as the car changes, something we are currently implementing.”

Shelley showed far lower variation in its times than the racer, but the racer also posted considerably lower times on several laps. The averages for the segments evaluated were about comparable, with a slight edge going to the human.

This is pretty impressive considering the simplicity of the self-driving model. It had very little real-world knowledge going into its systems, mostly the results of a simulation giving it an approximate idea of how it ought to be handling moment by moment. And its feedback was very limited — it didn’t have access to all the advanced telemetry that self-driving systems often use to flesh out the scene.

The conclusion is that this type of approach, with a relatively simple model controlling the car beyond ordinary handling conditions, is promising. It would need to be tweaked for each surface and setup — obviously a rear-wheel-drive car on a dirt road would be different than front-wheel on tarmac. How best to create and test such models is a matter for future investigation, though the team seemed confident it was a mere engineering challenge.

The experiment was undertaken in order to pursue the still-distant goal of self-driving cars being superior to humans on all driving tasks. The results from these early tests are promising, but there’s still a long way to go before an AV can take on a pro head-to-head. But I look forward to the occasion.

While Magic Leap’s first augmented reality headset launch wasn’t the earth-shattering drop they had sort of pitched the world on, the company is about to see a major corporate partnership push their device in front of more consumers’ eyes. Next week, the $2,295 headset will be going up for sale at flagship AT&T stores in Boston, San Francisco and Chicago.

Having more channels of distribution than direct-to-consumer orders from the web is obviously good for Magic Leap and distills some soft of bleeding-edge innovation marketing ethos for AT&T, but as the Magic Leap One appears to be exiting the dev kit phase of its life cycle, what relatively normal person out there is really going to be interested in buying this thing?

I think it’s fair to say that there isn’t a great reason to own one of these as a consumer, aside from just exploring a new piece of technology that’s pretty interesting.

VR platforms from Oculus and Valve have built up far more robust storefronts, but that’s going to be a big challenge for Magic Leap to do on its own. The company has showcased plenty of brief demos, but there isn’t a huge amount of gaming content for the device and Magic Leap doesn’t seem to have realized any substantial new consumer hits. At AT&T’s in-store demos, Magic Leap will be showing off a Game of Thrones experience they’ve built with HBO.

The enterprise market is perhaps the more realistic sell, and while it would seem like most customers would know whether they want something like this, having the opportunity to take it for a whirl, albeit with some GoT content, might be the added push they need.

Facebook is abandoning a longstanding policy of allowing white supremacy to flourish on its platform under the guise of terms like white nationalism and white separatism.

Motherboard reports that the decision came out of a conversation on platform moderation out of Facebook’s Content Standards Forum yesterday and will go into effect next week. Under the new rules, detailed in a Facebook blog post, Facebook will direct users who search for content related to white supremacy to Life After Hate, an organization that helps individuals leave violent far-right groups.

As we wrote last year, Facebook foolishly took the distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy seriously even while most white supremacists don’t. For hate groups, hiding behind the guise of a slightly more benign term like white nationalism is a very useful way to obscure the fact that many of these superficially disparate ideologies have nearly total ideological overlap.

Last year, leaked internal documents revealed that Facebook policy formally distinguished between white supremacy and white nationalism. That misguided policy failed to see that white nationalism, white pride, and white separatism are guises for and generally synonymous with the ideals set forth by white supremacy, a dangerous form of race-motivated radicalism that inspires hate-based violence.

Six months ago, Facebook indicated that it would review its policy on white nationalism and white separatism after speaking with civil rights groups that decried the company’s stance toward forms of white supremacy on its platform.

“Color Of Change alerted Facebook years ago to the growing dangers of white nationalists on its platform, and today, we are glad to see the company’s leadership take this critical step forward in updating its policy on white nationalism,” Color Of Change President Rashad Robinson said of the upcoming policy shift.

“… Facebook’s update should move Twitter, YouTube, and Amazon to act urgently to stem the growth of white nationalist ideologies, which find space on platforms to spread the violent ideas and rhetoric that inspired the tragic attacks witnessed in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and now Christchurch.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Facebook for more details about the new policy on white nationalism and white separatism and will be following the story as it develops.

Facebook’s shift toward taking white supremacism in its many forms more seriously is a big deal. Online platforms, particularly those driven by algorithms, play a big role in funneling users toward suggested content. As long as white supremacy, under the guise of white nationalism or white separatism, has a place on major tech platforms, users expressing even passing interest in white supremacist themes and language will be funneled deeper down the radicalization rabbit hole.

Facebook has taken major strides in the last year, taking action against white supremacy-adjacent groups like the Proud Boys, which relied the platform for international recruitment. Still, it wasn’t very long ago that a simple search of a ubiquitous white supremacist term like “1488” would steer Facebook users toward a wealth of memes, posts and groups promoting violence against jews and the black community, normalizing race-based hate in the process.

You know how kings used to have trumpeters heralding their arrival wherever they went? Proxy wants to do that with Bluetooth. The startup lets you instantly unlock office doors and reserve meeting rooms using Bluetooth Low Energy signal. You never even have to pull out your phone or open an app. But Proxy is gearing up to build an entire Bluetooth identity layer for the world that could invisibly hover around its users. That could allow devices around the workplace and beyond to instantly recognize your credentials and preferences to sign you into teleconferences, pay for public transit, or ask the barista for your usual,

Today, Proxy emerges from stealth after piloting its keyless, badgeless office entry tech with 50 companies. It’s raised a $13.6 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins to turn your phone into your skeleton key. “The door is a forcing function to solve all the hard problems — everything from safety to reliability to the experience to privacy” says Proxy co-founder and CEO Denis Mars. “If you’re gonna do this, it’s gonna have to work right, and especially if you’re going to do this in the workplace with enterprises where there’s no room to fix it.”

But rather than creepily trying to capitalize on your data, Proxy believes you should own and control it. Each interaction is powered by an encrypted one-time token so you’re not just beaming your unprotected information out into the universe. “I’ve been really worried about how the internet world spills over to the physical world. Cookies are everywhere with no control. What’s the future going to be like? Are we going to be tracked everywhere or is there a better way?” He figured the best path to the destiny he wanted was to build it himself.

Mars and his co-founder Simon Ratner, both Australian, have been best buddies for 10 years. Ratner co-founded a video annotation startup called Omnisio that was acquired by YouTube while Mars co-founded teleconferencing company Bitplay which was bought by Jive Software. Ratner ended up joining Jive where the pair began plotting a new startup. “We asked ourselves what we wanted to do with the next 10 or 20 years of our lives. We both had kids and it changed out perspective. What’s meaningful that’s worth working on for a long time?”

They decided to fix a real problem while also addressing their privacy concerns. As he experimented with Internet Of Things devices, Mars found every fridge and lightbulb wanted you to download an app, set up a profile, enter your password, and then hit a button to make something happen. He became convinced this couldn’t scale and we’d need a hands-free way to tell computers who we are. The idea for Proxy emerged. Mars wanted to know, “Can we create this universal signal that anything can pick up?”

Most offices already have infrastructure for badge-based RFID entry. The problem is that employees often forget their badges, waste time fumbling to scan them, and don’t get additional value from the system elsewhere.

So rather than re-invent the wheel, Proxy integrates with existing access control systems at offices. It just replaces your cards with an app authorized to constantly emit a Bluetooth Low Energy signal with an encrypted identifier of your identity. The signal is picked up by readers that fit onto the existing fixtures. Employees can then just walk up to a door with their phone within about 6 feet of the sensor, and the door pops open. Meanwhile, their bosses can define who can go where using the same software as before, but the user still owns their credentials.

“Data is valuable, but how does the end user benefit? How do we change all that value being stuck with these big tech companies and instead give it to the user?” Mars asks. “We need to make privacy a thing that’s not exploited.”

Mars believes now’s the time for Proxy because phone battery life is finally getting good enough that people aren’t constantly worried about running out of juice. Proxy’s Bluetooth Low Energy signal doesn’t suck up much, and geofencing can wake up the app in case it shuts down while on a long stint away from the office. Proxy has even considered putting inductive charging into its sensors so you could top up until your phone turns back on and you can unlock the door.

Opening office doors isn’t super exciting, though. What comes next is. Proxy is polishing its features that auto-reserve conference rooms when you walk inside, that sign you into your teleconferencing system when you approach the screen, and and that personalize workstations when you arrive. It’s also working on better office guest check-in to eliminate the annoying iPad sign-in process in the lobby. Next, Mars is eyeing “Your car, your home, all your devices. All these things are going to ask ‘can I sense you and do something useful for you?'”

After demoing at Y Combinator, thousands of companies reached out to Proxy from hotel chains to corporate conglomerates to theme parks. Proxy charges for its hardware plus a monthly subscription fee per reader. Employees are eager to ditch their keycards, so Proxy sees 90% adoption across all its deployments. Customers only churn if something breaks and it hasn’t lost a customer in two years, Mars claims.

The status quo of keycards, competitors like OpenPath, and long-standing incumbents all typically only handle doors, while Proxy wants to build an omni-device identity system. Now Proxy has the cash to challenge them, thanks the to the $13.6 million from Kleiner, Y Combinator, Coatue Management, and strategic investor WeWork. In fact, Proxy now counts WeWork’s headquarters and Dropbox as clients. “With Proxy, we can give our employees, contractors, and visitors a seamless smartphone-enabled access experience they love, while actually bolstering security,” says Christopher Bauer, Dropbox’s Physical Security Systems Architect.

The cash will help answer the question of “How do we turn this into a protocol so we don’t have to build the other side for everyone?” Mars explains. Proxy will build out SDKs that can be integrated into any device, like a smoke detector that could recognize what people are in the vicinity and report that to first responders. Mars thinks hotel rooms that learn your climate, wake up call, and housekeeping preferences would be a no-brainer. Amazon Go-style autonomous retail could also benefit from the tech.

When asked what keeps him up at night, Mars concludes that “the biggest thing that scares me is that this requires us to be the most trustworthy company in the planet. There is no ‘move fast, break things’ here. It’s ‘move fast, do it right, don’t screw it up.'”

Though Apex Legends continues to be a bright spot for EA, the game publisher and the industry as a whole still have hurdles ahead. Today, EA confirmed that it laid off 350 people in marketing, publishing and other departments.

Kotaku obtained an email sent to employees by EA CEO Andrew Wilson, which said that the main focus is increasing the quality of its games. A part of that is ‘ramping down’ the company’s presence in Japan and Russia. Famitsu later confirmed that the Japan office has been closed entirely.

Of the 9,000 global employees at EA, the 350 people laid off represent 3.8 percent of EA’s workforce.

EA isn’t alone. The publisher’s biggest competitor, Activision Blizzard, let go nearly 800 employees, roughly 8 percent of its workforce, in February.

“We have a vision to be the World’s Greatest Games Company,” wrote Wilson in an email obtained and published by Kotaku. “If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re not there right now. We have work to do with our games, our player relationships, and our business. Across the company, teams are already taking action to ensure we are creating higher-quality games and live services, reaching more platforms with our content and subscriptions, improving our Frostbite tools, focusing our network and cloud gaming priorities, and closing the gap between us and our player communities.”

EA sent Kotaku the following statement:

Today we took some important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead. As we look across a changing world around us, it’s clear that we must change with it. We’re making deliberate moves to better deliver on our commitments, refine our organization and meet the needs of our players. As part of this, we have made changes to our marketing and publishing organization, our operations teams, and we are ramping down our current presence in Japan and Russia as we focus on different ways to serve our players in those markets. In addition to organizational changes, we are deeply focused on increasing quality in our games and services. Great games will continue to be at the core of everything we do, and we are thinking differently about how to amaze and inspire our players.

This is a difficult day. The changes we’re making today will impact about 350 roles in our 9,000-person company. These are important but very hard decisions, and we do not take them lightly. We are friends and colleagues at EA, we appreciate and value everyone’s contributions, and we are doing everything we can to ensure we are looking after our people to help them through this period to find their next opportunity. This is our top priority.

Gaming continues to grow, and record-breaking titles like Fortnite and EA’s own Apex Legends show that there is plenty of money to be made. In fact, Blizzard Activision CEO announced record earnings in 2018 but also said that the company failed to reach its full potential.

That potential has to do with a shift from a model that generates revenue once for a single title to something more akin to a content subscription service. In-app purchases and gaming subscriptions are accounting for more and more of game publishers’ revenues. The Financial Times reported in 2017 that, ten years prior, one-off sales of packaged home-console software accounted for 64 percent of the global gaming market. That number dropped to 30 percent as in-game purchases and subscriptions continue to grow in popularity, as seen with games like Fortnite and Apex Legends.

This more layered revenue structure creates something sticky with consumers, but also runs the risk of alienating them by constantly asking for more money, especially with a game that isn’t free to play.

We’ve reached out to EA and will update if/when we know more.

At last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, the CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe and SAP took the stage to announce the launch of the Open Data Initiative. The idea behind this effort was to make it easier for their customers to move data between each others’ services by standardizing on a common data format and helping them move their data out of their respective silos and into a single customer-chosen data lake. At this week’s Adobe Summit, the three companies today announced how they plan to expand this program as they look to bring in additional partners.

“The intent of the companies joining forces was really to solve a common customer problem that we hear time and time again, which is that there are high-value business data tends to be very siloed in a variety of different applications,” Alysa Taylor, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Business Applications & Global Industry, told me. “Being able to extract that data, reason over that data, garner intelligence from that data, is very cost-prohibitive and it’s very manual and time-consuming.”

The core principle of the alliance is that the customers own their data and they should be able to get as much value out of it as they can. Ideally, having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.

At the Adobe Summit today, the three companies showed their first customer use case based on how Unilever is making use of this common data standard. More importantly, though, they also stressed that the Open Data Initiative is indeed open to others. As a first step, the three companies today announced the formation of a partner advisory council.

“What this basically means is that we’ve extended it out to key participants in the ecosystem to come and join us as part of this ODI effort,” Adobe’s VP of Ecosystem Development Amit Ahuja told me. “What we’re starting with is really a focus around two big groups of partners. Number one is, who are the other really interesting ISVs who have a lot of this core data that we want to make sure we can bring into this kind of single unified view. And the second piece is who are the major players out there that are trying to help these customers around their enterprise architecture.”

The first 12 partners that are joining this new council include Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, Inmobi, Sprinklr and WPP . This is very much a first step, though. Over time, the group expects to expand far beyond this first set of partners and include a much larger group of stakeholders.

“We really want to make this really broad in a way that we can quickly make progress and demonstrate that what we’re talking about from a conceptual process has really hard customer benefits attached to it,” Abhay Kumar, SAP’s global vice president, Global Business Development & Ecosystem, noted. The use cases the alliance has identified focus on market intelligence, sales intelligence and services intelligence, he added.

Today, as enterprises often pull in data from dozens of disparate systems, making sense of all that information is hard enough, but to even get to this point, enterprises first have to transform it and make it usable. To do so, they then have to deploy another set of applications that massages the data. “I don’t want to go and buy another 15 or 20 applications to make that work,” Ahuja said. “I want to realize the investment and the ROI of the applications that I’ve already bought.”

All three stressed that this is very much a collaborative effort that spans the engineering, sales and product marketing groups.

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Microsoft has won a restraining order in a U.S. court in order to take control of domains used by an Iranian hacker group.

The software and cloud giant applied to the court in order to take control of 99 websites used by the hacker group, known as Phosphorus or APT 35, in various hacking operations. The court granted the motion earlier this month but was unsealed this week, said Microsoft’s consumer security chief Tom Burt in a blog post.

The granted order allowed Microsoft to take control of the domains from the registrars and host the domains on Microsoft’s own servers, including “outlook-verify.net” and “yahoo-verify.net,” and redirect malicious traffic safely into a Microsoft-controlled sinkhole.

“Throughout the course of tracking Phosphorus, we’ve worked closely with a number of other technology companies, including Yahoo, to share threat information and jointly stop attacks,” said Burt. (TechCrunch and Yahoo are both owned by Verizon Media.)

The hacker group is believed to be linked to a former U.S. Air Force counter-intelligence officer Monica Witt, who defected to Tehran in 2013 and is now wanted by the FBI for alleged espionage. The hackers has targeted academics and journalists with spearphishing campaigns designed to look like Yahoo and Google login pages but can defeat two-factor authentication.

It’s the latest legal action Microsoft has taken against a hacker group. Last year, the company filed a suit against Strontium, known as APT 28 or “Fancy Bear” — associated with Russian state intelligence agency, the GRU. It was one of a dozen actions over two years to take down fake websites used to trick targets into turning over their usernames and passwords.