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Users of Grindr, the popular dating app for gay men, may have been broadcasting their location despite having disabled that particular feature. Two security flaws allowed for discovery of location data against a user’s will, though they take a bit of doing.

The first of the flaws, which were discovered by Trever Faden and reported first by NBC News, allowed users to see a variety of data not available normally: who had blocked them, deleted photos, locations of people who had chosen not to share that data and more.

The catch is that if you wanted to find out about this, you had to hand over your username and password to Faden’s purpose-built website, C*ckblocked (asterisk original), which would then scour your Grindr account for this hidden metadata.

Of course it’s a bad idea to surrender your credentials to any third party whatsoever, but regardless of that, this particular third party was able to find data that a user should not have access to in the first place.

The second flaw involved location data being sent unencrypted, meaning a traffic snooper might be able to detect it.

It may not sound too serious to have someone watching a Wi-Fi network know a person’s location — they’re there on the network, obviously, which narrows it down considerably. But users of a gay dating app are members of a minority often targeted by bigots and governments, and having their phone essentially send out a public signal saying “I’m here and I’m gay” without their knowledge is a serious problem.

I’ve asked Grindr for comment and confirmation; the company told NBC News that it had changed how data was handled in order to prevent the C*ckblocked exploit (the site has since been shut down), but did not address the second issue.

Users of Grindr, the popular dating app for gay men, may have been broadcasting their location despite having disabled that particular feature. Two security flaws allowed for discovery of location data against a user’s will, though they take a bit of doing.

The first of the flaws, which were discovered by Trever Faden and reported first by NBC News, allowed users to see a variety of data not available normally: who had blocked them, deleted photos, locations of people who had chosen not to share that data and more.

The catch is that if you wanted to find out about this, you had to hand over your username and password to Faden’s purpose-built website, C*ckblocked (asterisk original), which would then scour your Grindr account for this hidden metadata.

Of course it’s a bad idea to surrender your credentials to any third party whatsoever, but regardless of that, this particular third party was able to find data that a user should not have access to in the first place.

The second flaw involved location data being sent unencrypted, meaning a traffic snooper might be able to detect it.

It may not sound too serious to have someone watching a Wi-Fi network know a person’s location — they’re there on the network, obviously, which narrows it down considerably. But users of a gay dating app are members of a minority often targeted by bigots and governments, and having their phone essentially send out a public signal saying “I’m here and I’m gay” without their knowledge is a serious problem.

I’ve asked Grindr for comment and confirmation; the company told NBC News that it had changed how data was handled in order to prevent the C*ckblocked exploit (the site has since been shut down), but did not address the second issue.

General Motors’ self-driving car unit, Cruise Automation, is parting ways with CTO A.G. Gangadhar, Bloomberg first reported. This comes after public complaints pertaining to his role in fostering an alleged unsafe work environment for women.

“After serious consideration, Cruise and AG have elected to part ways,” a Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. “We wish him the best in all future endeavors.”

Before Cruise, Gangadhar had most recently worked at Uber, where he led the company’s storage, machine learning and infrastructure groups. Gangadhar, who left Uber in July, was reportedly a director former Uber engineer Susan Fowler referenced in her blog post about mismanagement, sexual harassment and other issues at Uber. His departure, however, was reportedly unrelated to Fowler’s claims.

General Motors’ self-driving car unit, Cruise Automation, is parting ways with CTO A.G. Gangadhar, Bloomberg first reported. This comes after public complaints pertaining to his role in fostering an alleged unsafe work environment for women.

“After serious consideration, Cruise and AG have elected to part ways,” a Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. “We wish him the best in all future endeavors.”

Before Cruise, Gangadhar had most recently worked at Uber, where he led the company’s storage, machine learning and infrastructure groups. Gangadhar, who left Uber in July, was reportedly a director former Uber engineer Susan Fowler referenced in her blog post about mismanagement, sexual harassment and other issues at Uber. His departure, however, was reportedly unrelated to Fowler’s claims.

Public places may soon be filled with secret pieces of art unlocked by looking through the lens of AR, if Artopia’s cheerily creative app catches on. It essentially lets you geocache your 3D scribbles so anyone else can find, appreciate, and share them.

Artopia, currently in beta for Android and iOS, is a straightforward combination of AR painting and real world discovery. You make your art by selecting brushes, colors, and so on and moving your phone as you would the brush. Grab objects and move them around, attach them, etc.

When you’re done, save it and its precise location is saved to Artopia’s service. Now anyone passing by will be able to see it (a map shows nearby creations) and who made it, give it a like, and maybe draw some complementary work nearby.

It’s simple (in concept, not in execution), but also a thoroughly pleasant and natural combo. Of course, there will also be a report button in case someone draws a fence of phalluses around your house (for example), and the usual caveats of crowd-sourced content and moderation apply.

Artopia was created by Kuwaiti developer Omar Khalil, so the density of art might be a bit higher around the American University of Kuwait. But if this sounds like something you’re into, apply to get into the beta and start filling the parks and streets around your neighborhood with color and shape.

Scotty Labs, a tele-operations company that is working on technology to enable people to remotely control self-driving cars, has raised a $6 million seed round from Gradient Ventures with participation from Horizon Ventures and Hemi Ventures. Gradient Ventures is an early-stage venture fund housed within Google.

“Usman and I founded Scotty on the belief that human intelligence is critical to solving the autonomous driving problem,” Scotty co-founder and CEO Tobenna Arodiogbu wrote in blog post. “The company exists to answer the fundamental questions — what role do humans play in the future of robotics and automation, and how do we leverage human and machine intelligence to build a better future?”

That’s what led to the creation of the company’s first product, a tele-operations platform that lets humans virtually control cars. The idea, Arodiogbu wrote, is this type of human intervention will help “solve some of the hardest edge cases of driving, while allowing AV companies and their teams to focus on what they do best — building and improving their autonomous driving technology.”

If something goes wrong, a human could theoretically intervene from the safety of their home, rather than from the car itself. Scotty Labs’ first partner is Voyage, an Udacity spin-out that’s aiming to build a fully self-driving taxi platform. In October, Voyage began testing its self-driving vehicles in retirement communities.

“We decided to work with Voyage as a partner because we are excited by and fundamentally believe in the work they are doing,” Arodiogbu wrote. “We believe it is critical to provide autonomy to the communities that need it the most. We also both share a belief that human intelligence will be needed to achieve level 4 autonomy, and we share a deep and uncompromising focus on safety above speed in the deployment of fully autonomous systems. We will continue to support Voyage in the coming months and years as they achieve their goal of building a level 4 autonomous fleet.”

A report by CSOOnline presented the possibility that Microsoft would be able to ban “offensive language” from Skype, Xbox, and, inexplicably, Office. The post, which cites Microsoft’s new terms of use, said that the company would not allow users to “publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity)” and that you could lose your Xbox Live Membership if you curse out a kid Overwatch.

“We are committed to providing our customers with safe and secure experiences while using our services. The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement’s Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. The company notes that “Microsoft Agents” do not watch Skype calls and that they can only respond to complaints with clear evidence of abuse. The changes, which go into effect May 1, allows Microsoft to ban you from it services if you’re found passing “inappropriate content” or using “offensive language.”

These new rules give Microsoft more power over abusive users and it seems like Microsoft is cracking down on bad behavior on its platforms. This is good news for victims of abuse in private communications channels on Microsoft products and may give trolls pause before they yell something about your mother on Xbox. We can only dare to dream.

It’s been seven months since a major data breach sent shares of Equifax tumbling, and the company is still pulling itself together. On Wednesday, the credit bureau announced it was appointing former GE exec Mark Begor to take over the troubled company’s affairs.

The hire comes six months after Equifax’s former CEO Richard Smith resigned and left  Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr. leading in the interim. He will “retire” from Equifax early next year as Begor takes over the role from him next month.

Most recently, Begor was at Warburg Pincus LLC, a US private equity firm, which he joined after 35 years at General Electric where he operated in a variety of roles including as CEO of GE Energy Management and CEO of GE Capital Real Estate.

Begor comes aboard as the company attempts to build back public trust or at least stay out of the news long enough for people to forget about their incompetence. Equifax shares have surprisingly only dipped around 18 percent since the admission of a massive breach which had released the personal data of over 140 million customers. The company’s public image has taken a much heavier hit.

Earlier this month, an exec was hit with insider trader charges, alleging he used non-public information of the undisclosed hack to sell $1 million in shares before the company’s admission sent the stock price tumbling.

“The team has made meaningful progress in the last several months to address a number of well-publicized issues while continuing to focus on delivering differentiated new products and advanced analytics to support our customers, Begor said in a statement released by Equifax. “…we will continue to invest in and strengthen our IT and data security. As a custodian of consumer and customer information, protecting that data is a central priority for Equifax and for me personally.”

It really is Go Time for GoDaddy . Amazon’s cloud services provider AWS and GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, may have competed in the past when it comes to working with small businesses to provide them with web services, but today the two took a step closer together. AWS said that GoDaddy is now migrating “the majority” of its infrastructure to AWS in a multi-year deal that will also see AWS becoming a partner in selling on some products of GoDaddy’s — namely Manaon ged WordPress and GoCentral for managing domains and building and running websites.

The deal — financial terms of which are not being disclosed — is wide-ranging, but it will not include taking on domain management for GoDaddy’s 75 million domains currently under management, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to me.

“GoDaddy is not migrating the domains it manages to AWS,” said Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of communications. “GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business for GoDaddy.”

The move underscores Amazon’s continuing expansion as a powerhouse in cloud hosting and related services, providing a one-stop shop for customers who come for one product and stay for everything else (not unlike its retail strategy in that regard). Also, it is a reminder of how the economies of scale in the cloud business make it financially challenging to compete if you are not already one of the big players, or lack deep pockets to sustain your business as you look to grow. GoDaddy has been a direct victim of those economics: just last summer, GoDaddy killed off Cloud Servers, its AWS-style business for building, testing and scaling cloud services on GoDaddy infrastructure.

The AWS deal also highlights how GoDaddy is trimming operational costs to improve its overall balance sheet under Scott Wagner, the COO who took over as CEO from Blake Irving at the beginning of this year. 

“As a technology provider with more than 17 million customers, it was very important for GoDaddy to select a cloud provider with deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support our rapidly expanding business,” said Charles Beadnall, CTO at GoDaddy, in a statement.

“AWS provides a superior global footprint and set of cloud capabilities which is why we selected them to meet our needs today and into the future. By operating on AWS, we’ll be able to innovate at the speed and scale we need to deliver powerful new tools that will help our customers run their own ventures and be successful online,” he continued.

AWS said that GoDaddy will be using AWS’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Elastic Compute Cloud P3 instances, as well as machine learning, analytics, and other database-related and container technology. Race told TechCrunch that the infrastructure components that the company is migrating to AWS currently run at GoDaddy but will be gradually moved away as part of its multi-year migration.

“As a large, high-growth business, GoDaddy will be able to leverage AWS to innovate for its customers around the world,” said Mike Clayville, VP, worldwide commercial sales at AWS, in a statement. “Our industry-leading services will enable GoDaddy to leverage emerging technologies like machine learning, quickly test ideas, and deliver new tools and solutions to their customers with greater frequency. We look forward to collaborating with GoDaddy as they build anew in the cloud and innovate new solutions to help people turn their ideas into reality online.”

We’re exactly 28 days away from the premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2. That may seem like a long time, but Hulu has mercifully released a new trailer.

The first season ended on the same note as Margaret Atwood’s novel by the same name, with Ofred in a van not knowing whether she was headed toward freedom or punishment for her rebellion. Season 2 marks the series departure from the book that it’s based on, moving into uncharted territory.

In the trailer, we see a number of familiar faces, including Ofred, Moira, Nick, Serena Joy, Commander Waterford, and Aunt Lydia, along with a few new faces. We also get a glimpse into the Colonies, which were spoken of quite a bit in the first Season but never shown.

The Handmaid’s Tale received critical acclaim last year, and even took home four Emmys last year for Outstanding Drama Series, Support Actress, Lead Actress, and Writing for a Drama Series.

Season 2 premiers on April 25 on Hulu.