US tech giants decry Australia’s ‘deeply flawed’ new anti-encryption law

A group of U.S. tech giants, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, have collectively denounced the new so-called “anti-encryption” law passed by the Australian parliament last week.

The bill was passed less than a day after the ruling coalition government secured the votes from opposition Labor lawmakers, despite strong objection from tech companies and telcos.

“The new Australian law is deeply flawed, overly broad, and lacking in adequate independent oversight over the new authorities,” said the Reform Government Surveillance coalition in a statement. The tech companies added that the law would “undermine the cybersecurity, human rights, or the right to privacy of our users.”

It’s the latest rebuke since the bill’s passing, following an extensive lobbying effort by Silicon Valley to push back on the anti-encryption proposals.

The law allows Australian police and the intelligence agencies wide-reaching powers to issue “technical notices” — essentially forcing companies and even websites operating in Australia to help the government undermine encryption or insert backdoors at the behest of the government. Critics argue that there’s little oversight, potentially allowing abuse of the system. And because the notices will almost always be issued with a gag order, any technical notices are served behind closed doors in secret.

Companies that refuse to comply with the demands in a technical notice can be served heavy financial penalties.

The Australian government won in part by accusing Labor of using scare tactics, saying that the opposition party was choosing to “allow terrorists and pedophiles to continue their evil work in order to engage in point scoring,” said Australian defense minister Christopher Pyne, in a since-deleted tweet. Labor caved in to the pressure, and party leader Bill Shorten instructed his members to vote for the bill. He promised that the party would offer amendments to the law once passed in the coming months, while keeping “Australians safer over Christmas.”

The tech coalition said it’ll hold the Australian parliament’s feet to the fire, urging lawmakers to “promptly address these flaws when it reconvenes” in the new year.

The group, which also includes Dropbox, Facebook, Google and Yahoo parent company Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) — was set up after the companies were named in classified U.S. documents as participants in the secret National Security Agency program, dubbed PRISM. All of the companies denied their willing involvement, and began a collective effort to lobby the government to reform its surveillance operations — many of which rely on compelled assistance from tech companies and telcos.

Evernote, LinkedIn, Snap and Twitter, which weren’t named as PRISM partners, later joined the coalition, and also signed on to the letter.

Cisco and Mozilla joined other companies in separately filing complaints with Australian lawmakers ahead of the planned vote, arguing that the law “could do significant harm to the Internet.”

Australia passes ‘dangerous’ anti-encryption law after bipartisan compromise

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2zP8MK0

Apple acquired Platoon, a platform for musicians to create and distribute work

Spotify has made some significant moves to bypass record labels and work directly with artists, and there are signs that Apple could be eyeing up a similar approach to get a bigger share of original content.

According to a report in Music Business Worldwide and also confirmed by us with sources close to the deal, Apple has acquired Platoon, a startup out of London that works primarily with musicians — but also other creators like writers — to produce (it has its own studios), distribute and sell their work, using analytics to source talent, and figure out the best way to target and market that content: the modern-day tech equivalent of A&R services.

We have reached out both to Apple and Platoon to confirm the acquisition. Sometimes Apple’s deals are not full acquisitions but involve hiring people, such as in the case of a music startup, working in analytics, called Asaii. However we went with this story before hearing back because our source tells us this is “definitely an acquisition.” Update: the co-founder and CEO of Platoon also confirmed the news on LinkedIn.

Platoon was founded in 2016 by Denzyl Feigelson, Ben Grabiner and Saul Klein.

Feigelson, Platoon’s CEO, is a music industry vet, “the real deal,” according to another person I spoke to. Previously an executive at Apple in iTunes, he stayed on very good terms with the company after leaving and describes himself as a “long-term advisor” to the company in areas like Apple Music and live events.

Before Feigelson’s 15-year stint at Apple, he founded AWAL — short for “Artists Without A Label” — which eventually was acquired by Kobalt. (Ironically, Kobalt, the Google-backed startup that helps musicians directly collect royalties across digital streaming platforms, also operates label services.)

Grabiner and Klein, meanwhile, have a double connection into Platoon through VC firm Local Globe, which appears to have been the only investor in the startup. Platoon has raised around $600,000, according to PitchBook, and was last valued at a modest $3.78 million.

Grabiner left Local Globe to become Platoon’s GM; Klein, a co-founder of the VC who is still active there, is on the Platoon board.

Apple’s interest in music services dovetails with another current in the tech world. Sales of iPhones have been slowing down, part of a bigger global trend resulting from mobile phone saturation across a number of countries. And so to continue growing its overall revenues, Apple has expanded its focus into more services that run on its hardware.

Its media, and specifically music, operations have been a key beneficiary of that, with some of Apple’s largest acquisitions being made to grow that business.

Those have included acquiring Beats and Shazam, expanding the remit of what Apple Music provides to artists on its platform beyond simple access to music tracks (including adding in more analytics, which was the focus of Asaii, which was coincidentally also founded by Apple alums).

It makes sense both in terms of Apple’s own focus on its music business, and also in terms of providing services comparable to that of its closest competitor, Spotify, to address all segments of the music industry.

Labels — especially large labels — continue to reign supreme, but the massive shift to digital distribution and streaming has opened the door for a wider range of channels for musicians to connect with listeners, and to make money through that experience.

And it’s no surprise that they want to: musicians collectively only made 12 percent of the $43 billion generated by the music industry last year.

Apple making a stronger move into services for artists plays into both sides of the marketplace.

On one side, it could find itself helping the labels source up and coming talent. Indeed, a number of Platoon’s early finds are now signed to major labels. (They include Billie Eilish and Jacob Banks at Interscope, Stefflon Don at Universal/Polydor, Jorja Smith at Sony.)

On the other, for those who do not make that leap and even for those who do, Apple can find a route to becoming their digital home (potentially exclusively, but potentially across a number of platforms) by giving them a range of tools to create and distribute their work. That provides Apple more access to a catalogue of original content, and maybe even a cut when it’s listened to somewhere else, giving Apple a potential hit one way or the other.

Updated with further comment.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2zLUqdq

Google has acquired one of India’s most popular train tracking apps

Google is increasing its efforts in India after it snapped up the team behind popular transportation app ‘Where is my Train.’

The app claims 10 million registered users and, as the name suggests, it helps commuters track arrivals and departures as well as buying seats. That’s no small job given that India is estimated to operate some 14,000 trains on a daily basis across the country. The app is for Android, it works offline or with poor connectivity and supports eight languages. It is rivaled by VC-backed companies like RailYatri and iXigo.

There’s no official price for the deal, although India’s Economic Times is reporting that it is in the region of $30-$40 million. The site reported on Google’s interest back in August, when it wrote that other suitors included Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. A Google spokesperson confirmed the deal to TechCrunch, but declined to provide a price.

Sigmoid Labs, the company that develops the train app, was founded by four former TiVo executives in 2013. Economic Times reports that it has around 10 staff. It is unclear how much money it has raised to date.

The company told customers news of the acquisition on its website earlier today.

“We can think of no better place to help us achieve our mission, and we’re excited to join Google to help bring technology and information into more people’s hands,” its founders wrote.

Google said that the Where is my Train team would “continue to build on the current offering,” so it seems that the app won’t be shuttered, immediately at least.

The service’s significant userbase would suggest that Google might look to develop and expand its scope to perhaps touch on other areas. Ride-hailing apps, for example, have moved into adjacent spaces including entertainment, payments and food delivery to take advantage of their position as daily apps.

That’s all conjecture at this point. But it also stands to reason that Google could fold it into other apps, including Google Maps, although that certainly isn’t the plan at this point.

Screenshots of Where is my Train Android app from the Google Play Store

The deal falls under Google’s ‘Next Billion User’ division which is developing products and services to help increase internet adoption in emerging markets. To date that has focused strongly on India where Google has developed data-friendly ‘lite’ versions of popular apps like YouTube, and initiatives like public WiFi for India’s rail network that’s used by over eight million people.

That scope has also covered services, with Google looking at apps that provide information and utility to Indian consumers. Google launched an on-demand app and a mobile payment service last year, and this year it released a neighborhood Q&A service. The Where is my Train deal certainly fits that strategy and you’d imagine it’ll become a core part of Google’s consumer-facing product line in India.

The deal is also one of the most significant to date for a U.S-based tech firm in India. Facebook, Twitter, Google and even Yahoo have made acquisitions to build teams or acquire talent but Where is my Train seems significantly more strategic as a product.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2QHvQUM
via IFTTT

The Epic Games Store is now live

It’s a busy week for Epic Games. Fresh from pushing out a major season 7 update for Fortnite, so the gaming giant has taken the wraps off its own games store.

First announced earlier this week, the Epic Games Store is targeted squarely at Steam — the giant in the digital game commerce space — and it quietly went live today.

Right now there’s a small cluster of games available including Hades, a new title from Supergiant Games that is in ‘early access’ for $19.99, and Epic’s own Fortnite and Unreal Tournament, both of which are free. But Epic is saying that’s there’s a lot more to come. In particular, the store will offer a free game every two weeks, starting out with Subnautica from December 14-17 and Super Meat Boy from December 28 until January 10.

What is most interesting about the store is the revenue split, which is just twelve percent. That has set off a change at Valve, the firm behind Steam, as we reported earlier this week:

While Valve will continue to take an App Store-like 30 percent from sales of game makers with less than 10 million in revenue, that figure drops to 25 percent until they hit 50 million revenue, from which point the slice drops to 20 percent.

All in all, the store is very early-stage but you can imagine that Epic is working to add more flesh to the bones. It makes absolute sense that the company is aiming to capitalize on the phenomenal success of Fortnite — which was estimated to be grossing as much as $2 million per day in the summer — by building a destination for gamers. Indeed, a big clue came from its decision to bypass the Google Play Store and offer its Android app directly from its website — that’s a move that is estimated to cost Google around $50 million in lost earnings in 2018.

“As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told TechCrunch in an emailed statement sent earlier this week. “Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.”

The Epic Games Store is part of a wider vision for the coming that prompted a range of investors to pump $1.25 billion into the company in October. That round was participation from the likes of KKR, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners and it is said to value the Epic Games business — which also includes Unreal Engine for game development — at more than $15 billion.

Epic is the only gaming firm to go after Valve this year. Discord introduced a game store in August — just months earlier, Valve appeared to go after Discord with the rollout of its own gamer chat system.

So everyone is going after everyone, but Epic’s big advantage continues to be Fortnite.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2zLbDDO
via IFTTT

The Apple Watch’s ECG feature goes live today

ECG/EKG was easily the new Apple Watch’s most lauded feature. It’s also been the most delayed. Of course, this kind of serious health feature is the sort of thing you need to get exactly right, for reasons that ought to be pretty obvious on their face.

Electrocardiogram finally goes live today for Series 4 owners as part of the watchOS 5.1.2 update. It’s an important feature — and one that will go a ways toward helping establish the wearable as a more serious health monitor.

The new feature builds on a hardware upgrade built into the Series 4: a pair of electrodes built into the larger back crystal on the rear of the watch and the digital crown. Once enabled, the new feature is checking for a couple of key bits of heart health: irregular heart rhythms, which the watch will passively monitor in the background, and ECG, which requires the user to actively engage with by completing the circuit with a finger tip placed on the edge of the watch’s digital crown.

Of course, getting all of this isn’t as simple as just installing a software update. There is, understandably, a pretty long opt-in here. The on-boarding process is several pages long for both of the new features, as Apple collects some vital information and repeatedly reminds you of some important information — like the fact that the watch can’t detect a heart attack. If you feel like you might be having one, call the emergency services.

The Apple Watch isn’t meant to replace a doctor either, of course. Really, it’s just a way to monitor for complications. If the smartwatch can be regarded as a potential lifesaver or even peripheral medical device, it’s due to the fact that it features a kind of always-on monitoring. After all, outside of the proliferation of these sorts of wearables, most of us won’t experience something like constant ECG monitoring until under the care of a doctor. If this feature is capable of isolating that information ahead of time, it could go a ways toward addressing complications before they turn into major issues.

The sign-up process airs on the side of caution, while attempting to not overwhelm the end user with information. It’s a tricky balance, and if TOS have taught us anything, it’s that too much information upfront will ultimately result in the user’s eyes glazing over. In the case of this information, that could potentially lead to serious consequences if not properly adhered to.

Some of the key takeaways:

• It cannot detect a heart attack (see a doctor)
• It cannot detect blood clots or a stroke (see a doctor)
• It cannot detect other heart-related conditions (see a doctor)
• [It] is not constantly looking for AFib

That last one is particularly important when distinguishing between the new features. While heart rhythm detection is a feature, the Watch isn’t regularly looking for atrial fibrillation. That’s where the ECG app and the finger detection come in. The feature is intended to be used when the heart rhythm monitor detects that something is off — like a skipped or rapid heartbeat. In which case, it will send a notification right to your wrist.

If that happens, fire up the ECG app, rest your arm on your lap or a table and hold your finger to the crown for 30 seconds. Apple will display a real-time graph of your heart rhythm while you wait. It’s strangely soothing, honestly, though Apple doesn’t recommend using the feature with much regularity, unless you have cause to.

Using it just now, I got a “This ECG does not show signs of atrial fibrillation” note, meaning the reading falls within the parameters of a sinus rhythm.

Here’s your old friends at WebMD:

Your heart’s job is to pump blood to your body. When it’s working the way it should, it pumps to a regular, steady beat. This is called a normal sinus rhythm. When it’s not, you could have an irregular heartbeat called AFib.

So, good. No need to call the doctor. If you’re still feeling unwell, however, there’s a quick link to dial emergency services on the screen. There’s also a spot for adding any symptoms you might be having if you’re feeling less than 100 percent. And while Apple promises not to share any of the info collected on-device, you can always export your findings to a PDF for your doctor to take a gander at.

Along with the new feature comes a new White Paper, detailing the technology. It’s an usual bit of transparency from Apple, but the company understandably wants to be as upfront about the technology as possible. The paper details a lot of what went into bringing the feature up to speed for general availability.

Apple started with a pre-clinical study of 2,000 subjects, including ~15 percent who have been diagnosed with heart arrhythmia. Six-hundred subjects were then involved with the clinical trial to validate the AFib.

Per Apple, “Rhythm classification of a 12-lead ECG by a cardiologist was compared to the rhythm classification of a simultaneously collected ECG from the ECG app. The ECG app demonstrated 98.3% sensitivity in classifying AFib and 99.6% specificity in classifying sinus rhythm in classifiable recordings.”

The company employed similar methods to validate the Irregular Rhythm notifications. “Of the participants that wore an Apple Watch and ECG patch at the same time,” the company writes, “almost 80 percent received the notification and showed AFib on the ECG patch, and 98 percent received the notification and showed other clinically relevant arrhythmias on the ECG patch.”

In addition to that testing, the company has also employed a number of medical doctors to help ensure the product meets the sort of exacting standards one would hope from a product like this.

More information on the research can be found in this Stanford partnered paper published earlier this month.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2G0pcoc

Google is killing off Allo, its latest messaging app flop

It’s official: Google is killing off Allo.

The messaging app was only launched in September 2016 but it was pretty much flawed from the word go with limited usage. Google was, once again, painfully late to the messaging game.

The company said it had ceased work on the service earlier this year, and now it has announced that it’ll close down in March of next year.

“Allo will continue to work through March 2019 and until then, you’ll be able to export all of your existing conversation history from the app,” Google said in a blog post. “We’ve learned a lot from Allo, particularly what’s possible when you incorporate machine learning features, like the Google Assistant, into messaging.”

Google said it wants “every single Android device to have a great default messaging experience,” but the fact remains that the experience on Android massively lags iOS, where Apple’s iMessage service offers a slick experience with free messages, calling and video between iPhone and iPad users.

Instead of Allo, Google is pushing ahead with RCS (Rich Communication Services), an enhanced SMS standard that could allow iMessage like communication between Android devices.

But could is the operative word. The main caveat with RCS is that carriers must develop their own messaging apps that work with the protocol and connect to other apps, while the many Android OEMs also need to hop on board with support.

As I wrote earlier this year, with RCS, Google is giving carriers a chance to take part in the messaging boom, rather than be cut out as WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessage and others take over. But the decision is tricky for carriers, who have traditionally tightly held any form of income until the death. That’s because they won’t directly make money from consumers via RCS, though it allows them to keep their brand and figure out other ways to generate income, such as business-related services.

Verizon has already signed up, for one, but tracking the other supporters worldwide is tricky. Another problem: RCS is not encrypted, which flies in the face of most messaging apps on the market today.

Elsewhere, Google is keeping Duo — the video chat service that launched alongside Allo — while it continues to develop Hangouts into an enterprise-focused service, much like Slack.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2EfPcum
via IFTTT

Apple’s HomePod will be available in China starting early next year

“嘿 Siri!” Apple’s HomePod will be available for sale in China early next year. A listing is already up on Apple’s China site, with the smart speaker priced at RMB 2,799 (about $407), or about 17% more than its $349 price in the United States. Though Apple doesn’t list an exact shipping date for Chinese buyers, it says the HomePod will be available in early 2019.

HomePod rivals Amazon Echo and Google Home haven’t launched in China, but Apple’s smart speakers will compete with a host of homegrown devices including Tencent’s Tingting, which integrates with WeChat, Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, several models by Baidu, Mobvoi’s TicHome Mini, and Xiaomi’s Mi Bluetooth speaker.

Several of these smart speakers are much, much cheaper than the HomePod; for example, the Tmall Genie, Tingting, and Baidu’s Xiaodu have each been offered at a discounted price of about $15. But in spite of its significantly higher price, the HomePod will probably still be an attractive option for iOS users. Despite formidable competition from Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi, Apple held an 11.9% market share in China as of the second quarter of 2018, according to Gartner.

The HomePod launched in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia in February before rolling out over the succeeding months in France, Germany, Canada, Mexico, and Spain.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2G25mcs