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Firefox parent Mozilla is returning to back the Tor Project, its long-time ally, after it committed to matching all donations made to fund Tor, the open source initiative to improve online privacy which has just started its annual end of year funding drive.
The company’s latest publicly available accounts cover 2015 when Tor received a record $3.3 million in donations. That’s up from $2.5 million in 2014 and it represented Tor’s highest year of income to date, but state-related grants accounted for 86 percent of the figure. That was an improvement on previous years, but Tor Research Director and President Roger Dingledine admitted that the organization has “more work to do” to change that ratio.
Tor hasn’t made its latest (2016) financials available as of yet, but the past year has seen the organization make big leaps in its product offerings, which are still best known for being used by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Tor launched its first official mobile browser for Android in September and the same month it released Tor Browser 8.0, its most usable browser yet which is based on Firefox’s 2017 Quantum structure. It is also worked closely with Mozilla to bring Tor into Firefox itself as it has already done with Brave, a browser firm led by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich.
Beyond the browser and the Tor network itself, which is designed to minimize the potential for network surveillance, the organization also develops a range of other projects. Around two million people are estimated to use Tor, according to data from the organization.
“The Tor Project has a bold mission: to take a stand against invasive and restrictive online practices and bring privacy and freedom to internet users around the world. But we can’t do it alone,” Sarah Stevenson, who is fundraising director at the Tor Foundation, wrote in a blog post.
“Countries like Egypt and Venezuela have tightened restrictions on free expression and accessing the open web; companies like Google and Amazon are mishandling people’s data and growing the surveillance economy; and some nations are even shutting off the internet completely to quell possible dissidence,” she added.
If you feel suitably compelled, you can donate to the Tor Project’s campaign right here.
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Last month, the internet was a buzz with reports that Apple was sweetening up selfies on the iPhone XS and XS Max. The shots appeared to have an effect applied, in a manner similar to “beauty” filters offered on competing handsets. Apple denied it was intentionally touching photos, but not before it earned the predictable name, “Beautygate.”
Turns out it wasn’t just your imagination. The shots were getting softer, as a result of a software bug, according to the company. As The Verge reports, however, Apple will be fixing things with the upcoming iOS 12.1 update. Apple has since confirmed the fix with TechCrunch, noting that it’s also available in the current beta.
The long and short of what’s happening is this: the HDR processing has been defaulting to a longer shutter speed. That coupled with a loss of front-facing OIS leads to shakier images and blurrier photos. In other words, your phone wasn’t making you prettier, so much as a bit more blurry.
Honestly though, sometimes we’ll take what we can get.
The beta of the update is available now and should be rolling out to everyone else soon.
This will be Carell’s first regular role on a TV show since his seven seasons starring in the U.S. version of “The Office.” He’ll be playing Mitch Kessler, a morning show anchor who’s struggling to stay relevant. And no, it’s not the first time he’s playing a news anchor.
The series will focus on the world of morning TV, drawing material from reporter Brian Stelter’s book “Top of the Morning.” (Stelter serves as a consultant.) It was one of the first shows that Apple announced as part of its push into original streaming content, with two seasons of 10 episodes each already ordered. The company plans to start production in Los Angeles next week.
Aniston and Witherspoon (who’s working on more than one show with Apple) are both serving as executive producers, as is director Mimi Leder (who directed many of the best episodes of “The Leftovers”) and showrunner Kerry Ehrin (who previously co-created “Bates Motel”).
Google sometimes experiments with new features in beta versions of its various Android applications on Google Play. However, the recently spotted YouTube beta program will not, unfortunately, be a testbed for upcoming additions to the video-sharing service. Instead, Google says it only plans to test the stability of the YouTube app at this time, not features.
The company quietly rolled out a YouTube beta program last week on Google Play, where it was soon spotted by the folks at Android Police.
Originally, the belief was that Google would use this new beta to try out features it was planning to bring to the YouTube app – in fact, that’s what Google’s own help documentation about the beta said!
Not only that, but the documentation urged testers not to share information about the features they see in the app until they’re publicly launched.
That all sounds pretty exciting, right? (At least for us early adopters who love to get mess around with the latest new thing before anyone else.)
But after asking Google for more information on the program, the company updated its help documentation to remove the wording about “experimental features.” It now says testers will only help YouTube to stabilize its app.
We also understand, too, that YouTube has always run a beta program, the only change is that, as of last week, it become more broadly accessible.
Users can now join the program to help YouTube test stability of the app and can then opt out at any time they choose. At this point, however, Google doesn’t plan on trying out new features in the beta build. That could, of course, change at any time in the future. So if you really want to be the first to know, you may want to join the beta program just in case.
But YouTube for a long time now has been testing its new additions by way of server-side testing. It even decided this year to be more public about those tests – disclosing its experiments by way of its @TeamYouTube handle and the Creator Insider channel.
For example, this is where the company first announced its test of a new Explore tab on iPhone a few months ago, and more recently said it would try different ways of inserting ads into videos, to see if users prefer fewer interruptions even if it meant multiple ads per interruption.
YouTube beta program members may or may not be opted into those same experiments, as they roll out. It will depend on if they’re in the testing bucket that’s targeted at that time.
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Last month, the internet was a buzz with reports that Apple was sweetening up selfies on the iPhone XS and XS Max. The shots appeared to have an effect applied, in a manner similar to “beauty” filters offered on competing handsets. Apple denied it was intentionally touching photos, but not before it earned the predictable name, “Beautygate.”
Turns out it wasn’t just your imagination. The shots were getting softer, as a result of a software bug, according to the company. As The Verge reports, however, Apple will be fixing things with the upcoming iOS 12.1 update. Apple has since confirmed the fix with TechCrunch, noting that it’s also available in the current beta.
The long and short of what’s happening is this: the HDR processing has been defaulting to a longer shutter speed. That coupled with a loss of front-facing OIS leads to shakier images and blurrier photos. In other words, your phone wasn’t making you prettier, so much as a bit more blurry.
Honestly though, sometimes we’ll take what we can get.
The beta of the update is available now and should be rolling out to everyone else soon.
Lyft, the transportation on demand company that is heading to a $15 billion IPO in 2019, is racing ahead with its autonomous vehicle plans. TechCrunch has learned that it is acquiring the London-based augmented reality startup Blue Vision Labs and unveiling its first test vehicle with Ford to advance its vision for self-driving cars.
While the integration of Lyft’s autonomous technologies and Ford’s hardware is impressive, perhaps more meaningful is the company’s acquisition of Blue Vision Labs, a startup out of London that has developed a way of ingesting street-level imagery and is using it to build collaborative, interactive augmented reality layers — all by way of basic smartphone cameras.
Blue Vision will sit within Lyft’s Level 5 autonomous car division headed up by Luc Vincent (who joined the company last year as VP of engineering after creating and running Google Street View).
The startup and its staff of 39 (everyone is joining Lyft) will also become the anchor for a new R&D operation in London or the San Francisco-based company, focused on that autonomous driving effort. Level 5 is stepping up a gear in another way today, too: Lyft is unveiling a new vehicle that it will be using for testing.
Blue Vision has developed technology that provides both street level mapping and interactive augmented reality that lets two people see the same virtual objects. The company has already built highly detailed maps that developers can now use to develop collaborative AR experiences — it’s like the maps of these spaces become canvasses for virtual objects to be painted on. Over time, we may see various uses of it throughout the Lyft platform, but for now the main focus is Level 5.
“We are looking forward to focusing Blue Vision’s technology on building the best maps at scale to support our autonomous vehicles, and then localization to support our stacks,” Vincent said in an interview. “This is fundamental to our business. We need good maps and to understand where every passenger and vehicle is. To make our services more efficient and remove friction, we want their tech to drive improvements.”
People familiar with the acquisition tell us Blue Vision was acquired for around $72 million with $30 million on top of that based on hitting certain milestones. Lyft has declined to comment on the valuation. Blue Vision had raised $17 million and had only come out of stealth last March, after working quietly on the product for two years. Investors included GV, Accel, Horizons Ventures, SV Angel and more.
This deal is notable in part because this is the first acquisition that Lyft has made to expand its autonomous car operation, which now has 300 people working on it. At a time when many larger companies are snapping up startups that have developed interesting applications or technologies around areas like AR, mapping, and autonomous driving, there may be more to come. “We are always evaluating build versus buy,” Vincent said when asked about more acquisitions. But he also acknowledged that it is a very crowded field today, even when considering just the most promising companies.
“I don’t have a crystal ball but arguably there are quite a few players today, including big tech, startups, OEMs and car makers. There are well over 100 [strong] companies in the space and there is bound to be some consolidation.” Lyft earlier this year also inked an investment and partnership with Magna to integrate its self-driving car system into components it supplies to car makers.
But it also might face other pressures. The company counts Didi and GM among its investors, and both of these companies are making their own big strides in self-driving technology and each has inked deals to have more partners using that tech, in part to justify some of their own hefty investment.
Lyft, of course, will hope that acquisitions like Blue Vision will give it more leverage, and make it one of the consolidators, rather than the consolidated.
Blue Vision’s use of smartphones to ingest data to create its street-level imagery and mapping is crucial to Lyft’s quest for scale. In effect, every Lyft vehicle in operation today, with a smartphone on the dashboard, could be commandeered to become a “camera” watching, surveying and mapping the roads that those cars drive on, and how humans behave on them, using that to help Lyft’s autonomous vehicle (AV) platform learn more about driving overall.
In the race for data to “teach” these AI systems, having that wide network of cameras deployed and picking up data so quickly is “game changing,” said Peter Ondruska, the co-founder and CEO of Blue Vision.
“The amount of data you have affects how much you can rely on your system,” Ondruska said in an interview. “What our tech allows us to do is to utilise Lyft’s fleet to train the cars. That is really game changing. I was working on this for eight years and you have to have a lot of data to get to the right level of safety. That is hard and we can get there faster using our technology.”
Lyft up to now has really concentrated its business presence in North America, and so this marks at least one kind of way that it is expanding on the other side of the pond. It opened its first European office in Munich earlier this year, a sign that it’s looking to this part of the world at least for R&D, if not to expand its business footprint to consumers, just yet. Vincent declined to comment on whether Lyft would get involved in autonomous trials in London, nor whether it would expand its transportation service there.
Another key area that is worth noting is that Blue Vision’s “collaborative” VR, which lets people look at the same spot in space and both see and create interactive, virtual figures in it, could be used by Lyft either to help drivers and would-be passengers better communicate, or even help passengers discover more services during a journey or at their destination.
When Ondruska first spoke to TechCrunch earlier this year as the company emerged from stealth, ride hailing applications, in fact, were one of the use cases that we pointed out could be helped by its tech.
Peter Ondruska, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, [said] that Blue Vision’s tech can pinpoint people and other moving objects in a space to within centimeters of their actual location — far more accurate than typical GPS — meaning that it could give better results in apps that require two parties to find each other, such as in a ride-hailing app. (Hands up if you and your Uber driver have ever lost each other before you’ve even stepped foot in the vehicle.)
Blue Vision isn’t the only company working to develop these virtual maps for the world. Startups like 6d.ai, Blippar and the incredibly well capitalized and wildly successful AR technology developer Niantic Labs are also building out these virtual maps on which developers can create applications. Indeed, Niantic’s Pokemon Go game is the most successful augmented reality application to date.
Large media companies have also been investing building content for these platforms, and investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into startups like 6d, Niantic, Blue Vision, and others that are building both software and hardware to usher in this new age of how we will, apparently, all soon be seeing the world.
The development of these new platforms will go a long way toward ensuring that more useful applications are just around the corner, waiting for users to pick them up.
“One of the reasons why AR hasn’t really reached mass market adoption is because of the tech that is on the market,” Ondruska told us earlier this year. “Single-user experiences are limiting. We are allowing the next step, letting people see the right place, for example. None of that was possible before in AR because the backend didn’t exist. But by filling in this piece, we are creating new AR use cases, ones that are important and will be used on a daily basis.”
The deal marks Lyft’s tenth acquisition, according to CrunchBase. In 2015, Lyft acquired the disappearing messaging company, Leo, to bring the company’s messaging expertise in house. Two years later, the ride-hailing company went on an acquisition tear, hoovering up FinitePaths, YesGraph, DataScore, and Kamcord. The first three seem like strategic acquisitions to bulk up mapping and marketing efforts internally; but Kamcord, a social media network for video sharing, seemed a little farther afield.
For more on Lyft’s bigger plans for AV, watch the video below of Vincent talking about the company’s roadmap (so to speak).
Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to endorse the idea of a “comprehensive federal privacy law” for the U.S. in a keynote speech tomorrow.
He will also back Europe’s approach to data protection and privacy — recently cemented in place via the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — essentially saying technology does not have to be creepy to be innovative. Nor should the tech itself be a cause of harm.
Cook will be addressing the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC), which is being held in Brussels this year to coincide with the introduction of GDPR.
Europe’s updated privacy framework came into timely force, this May, weeks after the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal had erupted into a major global scandal — further raising the profile of data protection as a consumer need, and convincing governments to prioritize an oft overlooked area.
By contrast US lawmakers have found themselves on the back foot, increasingly viewed as laggards on the issue vs Europe.
California also recently passed a state-wide data protection law. So federal regulators now have clear impetus to draw up domestic privacy rules. Though it remains to be seen whether they will stand up to platform power at home and hold their own on the world stage. Or merely close down the risk of a state-by-state data protection patchwork springing up to create new compliance headaches for business.
Silicon Valley’s response to the prospect of an overarching US privacy law has been predictably disingenuous — with attempts to reframe the issue under broadbrush, malleable concepts like ‘control’ or ‘accountability’; and lobbying efforts aimed at steering regulators away from drafting rules anywhere near as robust as GDPR.
The usual soundbites are being trotted out about the need to ‘protect innovation‘ (aka the data-fuelled business models such companies use as revenue engines).
Cook’s intervention is a reminder that not every tech giant is hostile to privacy. And privacy does not have to be systematically violated for value to be derived from data.
For example, Apple has invested in pro-privacy technologies that enable it to leverage data-based insights while protecting individual privacy, such as its use of differential privacy to pull aggregate patterns of behaviour across its user-base; rather than pursuing a per-person profiling approach, as adtech giants Google and Facebook do, riding roughshod over individual privacy in the process.
In his speech to the audience of international privacy commissioners, Cook is expected to thank global regulators for the work they do, and reiterate that Apple views privacy as a “fundamental human right” — a position which aligns the company with the EU’s ethics-based perspective on big data.
He will also compliment GDPR, specifically — dubbing it an example of how “good policy and political will can come together to protect the rights of us all” — and focus on ethical underpinnings, saying that at Apple “we are optimistic about technology’s awesome potential for good. But we know that it won’t happen on its own. Every day, we work to infuse the devices we make with the humanity that makes us.”
In another remark, Cook will say: “We will never achieve technology’s true potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it” — which looks like a not-so-coded attack on big tech’s trust crisis, which continues to be fuelled by data breach after data breach, every passing week.
In the speech, Cook will also seek to push the conversation beyond talk of compliance and defence of rights — by laying out a broad, positive vision for technology and privacy in the 21st century.
He is expected to tell delegates “we need to keep making progress — now more than ever” on “humanity’s greatest common project”, citing challenges such as climate change, fighting disease, and education and economy inclusion.
Cook is the first tech CEO to give the keynote speech at the ICDPPC, accepting an invitation from the conference organizers to do so.
He is also perhaps the only big tech CEO who could comfortably take to such a stage in person.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai will also be heard at the conference, but remotely, via pre-recorded video messages. The companies are sending policy staffers to answer delegates’ questions in Q&A sessions.
