Daily Crunch: There’s a major iPhone email security bug

Apple plans to fix an iPhone email security bug, Magic Leap cuts 1,000 staffers and Google is requiring all advertisers to identify themselves.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 23, 2020.

1. A new iPhone email security bug may let hackers steal private data

According to security firm ZecOps, the bug is in the iPhone’s default Mail app. By sending a specially crafted email to the victim’s device, an attacker can overrun the device’s memory, allowing the attacker to remotely run malicious code to steal data from the device.

The bug dates back to iOS 6, but on the latest version of iOS 13, it doesn’t require any user interaction. Motherboard, which first reported the story, said the bug has been fixed in a beta version of the software, and a fix will be rolled out in an upcoming update.

2. Magic Leap reportedly slashes 1,000 jobs and steps away from consumer plans

Magic Leap announced today that it has laid off a “number of employees” and is backing away from its consumer ambitions to focus more heavily on selling to enterprise customers. Bloomberg reports that half of the company’s employees were laid off, roughly 1,000 in total.

3. Google is extending identity verification requirements to all advertisers

The identity verification feature was first introduced in 2018, requiring political advertisers to provide documents to verify their identity, which is then displayed as part of the ad itself. Moving forward, Google says it will make identity verification a required part of the ad buying process, regardless of topic.

4. JustEat Takeaway $7.6B merger approved, pair pick up $756M in new funding

The UK’s competition watchdog officially gave a nod to the merger between UK’s JustEat and the Netherlands’ Takeaway.com. And the merged company announced that it had raised an additional €700 million ($756 million) in funding.

5. Cowboy VC’s Aileen Lee: Your coronavirus scenario planning should be more conservative

Lee and her fellow Cowboy Ventures partner Ted Wang joined us for our first episode of Extra Crunch Live, a virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. They covered a wide range of topics, including PPP loans, advice for business leaders around layoffs, the right time to seek funding and the right firms from which to seek that funding, how to pitch during a downturn and which sectors in particular Cowboy is interested in financing right now. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Boston Dynamics’ Spot finds a new career in telemedicine amid COVID-19 pandemic

For two weeks, Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has been walking the halls of local hospital Brigham and Women’s. Telemedicine wasn’t generally listed as one of the primary applications for the company’s first commercial product, but Boston Dynamics is only one in a long list of tech companies that’s found itself shifting on the fly as the COVID-19 pandemic has become an all-consuming part of life.

7. Bill Gurley is stepping away from an active role at Benchmark, 21 years after joining the firm

Gurley’s transition out of the firm won’t surprise many. Benchmark — which has always run a fairly small operation — has routinely groomed new investors as veterans of the firm have moved on.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Daily Crunch: There’s a major iPhone email security bug

Apple plans to fix an iPhone email security bug, Magic Leap cuts 1,000 staffers and Google is requiring all advertisers to identify themselves.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 23, 2020.

1. A new iPhone email security bug may let hackers steal private data

According to security firm ZecOps, the bug is in the iPhone’s default Mail app. By sending a specially crafted email to the victim’s device, an attacker can overrun the device’s memory, allowing the attacker to remotely run malicious code to steal data from the device.

The bug dates back to iOS 6, but on the latest version of iOS 13, it doesn’t require any user interaction. Motherboard, which first reported the story, said the bug has been fixed in a beta version of the software, and a fix will be rolled out in an upcoming update.

2. Magic Leap reportedly slashes 1,000 jobs and steps away from consumer plans

Magic Leap announced today that it has laid off a “number of employees” and is backing away from its consumer ambitions to focus more heavily on selling to enterprise customers. Bloomberg reports that half of the company’s employees were laid off, roughly 1,000 in total.

3. Google is extending identity verification requirements to all advertisers

The identity verification feature was first introduced in 2018, requiring political advertisers to provide documents to verify their identity, which is then displayed as part of the ad itself. Moving forward, Google says it will make identity verification a required part of the ad buying process, regardless of topic.

4. JustEat Takeaway $7.6B merger approved, pair pick up $756M in new funding

The UK’s competition watchdog officially gave a nod to the merger between UK’s JustEat and the Netherlands’ Takeaway.com. And the merged company announced that it had raised an additional €700 million ($756 million) in funding.

5. Cowboy VC’s Aileen Lee: Your coronavirus scenario planning should be more conservative

Lee and her fellow Cowboy Ventures partner Ted Wang joined us for our first episode of Extra Crunch Live, a virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. They covered a wide range of topics, including PPP loans, advice for business leaders around layoffs, the right time to seek funding and the right firms from which to seek that funding, how to pitch during a downturn and which sectors in particular Cowboy is interested in financing right now. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Boston Dynamics’ Spot finds a new career in telemedicine amid COVID-19 pandemic

For two weeks, Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has been walking the halls of local hospital Brigham and Women’s. Telemedicine wasn’t generally listed as one of the primary applications for the company’s first commercial product, but Boston Dynamics is only one in a long list of tech companies that’s found itself shifting on the fly as the COVID-19 pandemic has become an all-consuming part of life.

7. Bill Gurley is stepping away from an active role at Benchmark, 21 years after joining the firm

Gurley’s transition out of the firm won’t surprise many. Benchmark — which has always run a fairly small operation — has routinely groomed new investors as veterans of the firm have moved on.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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First version of Apple and Google’s contact tracing API should be available to developers next week

The first version of Apple and Google’s jointly developed, cross-platform contact tracing API should be available to developers as of next week, according to a conversation between Apple CEO Tim Cook and European Commission for internal market Thierry Breton. Bretton shared a photo from his office which shows him having a video conversation with Cook, and told Les Echos that the Apple chief executive told him April 28 would be the day the contact tracing API will be available to software developers building apps that employ it on behalf of public health agencies.

Apple and Google announced that they were working on the contract tracing system, which works across iOS and Android mobile device, on April 10, and detailed how the opt-in network would use randomized IDs not tied to a user’s actual identify information to communicate potential contacts with individuals with a confirmed positive COVID-19 diagnosis. It’s a decentralized system that never collects any geographic data in order to preserve individual privacy, and Apple and Google chose to collaborate on the project so that any apps built to use it will have the furthest potential reach possible in terms of user base.

The rollout of the contact tracing system is happening in two parts: First, the API is being made available to developers – that’s the part that’s happening next week. This phase was originally set for a mid-May release, but it sounds like the companies have stepped up their timeline (at least on the Apple side) based on this conversation between Thierry and Cook. That makes sense, given the urgency of the need for contact tracing in order to better understand how and when to alter or relax social distancing measures.

The second part of the plan is issuing a system update to build in contact tracing at the OS level. Opt-in would be managed on the device, and both Android and iOS smartphones with this toggle enabled would automatically be able to participate in local contact tracing efforts –whether or not they had any specific health agency apps installed. Apple and Google clarified in a follow-up Q&A session about the system that users would still be prompted to download and install a public health app from their local authority should their phone notify them of a possible contact, so that they could get additional info about next steps from a trusted source.

Note that the second phase isn’t expected until sometime later this year, but the early arrival of the first version of the API for developers is a promising sign that suggests both companies are focusing considerable effort and resources on getting this to market.

There are myriad contact tracing systems either in development or already being implemented, but a common technological backbone that makes it possible for them to cross-communicate, and that opens up broad participation across the most popular mobile devices currently in use has the greatest chance of actually being effective.

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Apple said to sell Macs powered by in-house ARM-based chips as early as 2021

Apple’s long-rumored Mac ARM chip transition could happen as early as next year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says that Apple is currently working on three Mac processors based on the design of the A14 system-on-a-chip that will power the next-generation iPhone. The first of the Mac versions will greatly exceed the speed of the iPhone and iPad processors, according to the report’s sources.

Already, Apple’s A-series line of ARM-based chips for iPhones and iPads have been steadily improving, to the point where their performance in benchmark tests regularly exceeds that of Intel processors used currently in Apple’s Mac line. As a result, and because Intel’s chip development has encountered a few setbacks and slowdowns in recent generations, rumors that Apple would move to using its own ARM-based designs have multiplied over the past few years.

Bloomberg says that “at least one Mac” powered by Apple’s own chip is being prepared for release in 2021, to be built by chip fabricator and longtime Apple partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). The first of these chips to power Macs will have at least 12 cores, including eight designed for high-performance applications, and four designed for lower-intensity activities with battery-preserving energy efficiency characteristics. Current Intel designs that Apple employs in devices such as the MacBook Air have four or even two cores, by comparison.

Initially, the report claims Apple will focus on using the chips to power a new Mac design, leaving Intel processors in its higher-end pro level Macs, because the ARM-based designs, while more performant on some scores, can’t yet match the top-end performance of Intel-based chip technology. ARM chips generally provide more power efficiency at the expense of raw computing power, which is why they’re so frequently used in mobile devices.

The first ARM-based Macs will still run macOS, per Bloomberg’s sources, and Apple will seek to make them compatible with software that works on current Intel-based Macs as well. That would be a similar endeavor to when Apple switched from using PowerPC-based processors to Intel chips for its Mac lineup in 2006, so the company has some experience in this regard. During that transition, Apple announced initially that the switch would take place between 2006 and 2007, but accelerated its plans so that all new Macs shipping by the end of 2006 were powered by Intel processors.

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Apple and CMU researchers demo a low friction learn-by-listening system for smarter home devices

A team of researchers from Apple and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have presented a system for embedded AIs to learn by listening to noises in their environment without the need for up-front training data or without placing a huge burden on the user to supervise the learning process. The overarching goal is for smart devices to more easily build up contextual/situational awareness to increase their utility.

The system, which they’ve called Listen Learner, relies on acoustic activity recognition to enable a smart device, such as a microphone-equipped speaker, to interpret events taking place in its environment via a process of self-supervised learning with manual labelling done by one-shot user interactions — such as by the speaker asking a person ‘what was that sound?’, after it’s heard the noise enough time to classify in into a cluster.

A general pre-trained model can also be looped in to enable the system to make an initial guess on what an acoustic cluster might signify. So the user interaction could be less open-ended, with the system able to pose a question such as ‘was that a faucet?’ — requiring only a yes/no response from the human in the room.

Refinement questions could also be deployed to help the system figure out what the researchers dub “edge cases”, i.e. where sounds have been closely clustered yet might still signify a distinct event — say a door being closed vs a cupboard being closed. Over time, the system might be able to make an educated either/or guess and then present that to the user to confirm.

They’ve put together the below video demoing the concept in a kitchen environment.

In their paper presenting the research they point out that while smart devices are becoming more prevalent in homes and offices they tend to lack “contextual sensing capabilities” — with only “minimal understanding of what is happening around them”, which in turn limits “their potential to enable truly assistive computational experiences”.

And while acoustic activity recognition is not itself new, the researchers wanted to see if they could improve on existing deployments which either require a lot of manual user training to yield high accuracy; or use pre-trained general classifiers to work ‘out of the box’ but — since they lack data for a user’s specific environment — are prone to low accuracy.

Listen Learner is thus intended as a middle ground to increase utility (accuracy) without placing a high burden on the human to structure the data. The end-to-end system automatically generates acoustic event classifiers over time, with the team building a proof-of-concept prototype device to act like a smart speaker and pipe up to ask for human input. 

“The algorithm learns an ensemble model by iteratively clustering unknown samples, and then training classifiers on the resulting cluster assignments,” they explain in the paper. “This allows for a ‘one-shot’ interaction with the user to label portions of the ensemble model when they are activated.”

Audio events are segmented using an adaptive threshold that triggers when the microphone input level is 1.5 standard deviations higher than the mean of the past minute.

“We employ hysteresis techniques (i.e., for debouncing) to further smooth our thresholding scheme,” they add, further noting that: “While many environments have persistent and characteristic background sounds (e.g., HVAC), we ignore them (along with silence) for computational efficiency. Note that incoming samples were discarded if they were too similar to ambient noise, but silence within a segmented window is not removed.”

The CNN (convolutional neural network) audio model they’re using was initially trained on the YouTube-8M dataset  — augmented with a library of professional sound effects, per the paper.

“The choice of using deep neural network embeddings, which can be seen as learned low-dimensional representations of input data, is consistent with the manifold assumption (i.e., that high-dimensional data roughly lie on a low-dimensional manifold). By performing clustering and classification on this low-dimensional learned representation, our system is able to more easily discover and recognize novel sound classes,” they add.

The team used unsupervised clustering methods to infer the location of class boundaries from the low-dimensional learned representations — using a hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithm known as Ward’s method.

Their system evaluates “all possible groupings of data to find the best representation of classes”, given candidate clusters may overlap with one another.

“While our clustering algorithm separates data into clusters by minimizing the total within-cluster variance, we also seek to evaluate clusters based on their classifiability. Following the clustering stage, we use a unsupervised one-class support vector machine (SVM) algorithm that learns decision boundaries for novelty detection. For each candidate cluster, a one-class SVM is trained on a cluster’s data points, and its F1 score is computed with all samples in the data pool,” they add.

“Traditional clustering algorithms seek to describe input data by providing a cluster assignment, but this alone cannot be used to discriminate unseen samples. Thus, to facilitate our system’s inference capability, we construct an ensemble model using the one-class SVMs generated from the previous step. We adopt an iterative procedure for building our ensemble model by selecting the first classifier with an F1 score exceeding the threshold, 𝜃&'( and adding it to the ensemble. When a classifier is added, we run it on the data pool and mark samples that are recognized. We then restart the cluster-classify loop until either 1) all samples in the pool are marked or 2) a loop does not produce any more classifiers.”

Privacy preservation?

The paper touches on privacy concerns that arise from such a listening system — given how often the microphone would be switched on and processing environmental data, and because they note it may not always be possible to carry out all processing locally on the device.

“While our acoustic approach to activity recognition affords benefits such as improved classification accuracy and incremental learning capabilities, the capture and transmission of audio data, especially spoken content, should raise privacy concerns,” they write. “In an ideal implementation, all data would be retained on the sensing device (though significant compute would be required for local training). Alternatively, compute could occur in the cloud with user-anonymized labels of model classes stored locally.”

You can read the full paper here.

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Apple said to sell Macs powered by in-house ARM-based chips as early as 2021

Apple’s long-rumored Mac ARM chip transition could happen as early as next year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says that Apple is currently working on three Mac processors based on the design of the A14 system-on-a-chip that will power the next-generation iPhone. The first of the Mac versions will greatly exceed the speed of the iPhone and iPad processors, according to the report’s sources.

Already, Apple’s A-series line of ARM-based chips for iPhones and iPads have been steadily improving, to the point where their performance in benchmark tests regularly exceeds that of Intel processors used currently in Apple’s Mac line. As a result, and because Intel’s chip development has encountered a few setbacks and slowdowns in recent generations, rumors that Apple would move to using its own ARM-based designs have multiplied over the past few years.

Bloomberg says that “at least one Mac” powered by Apple’s own chip is being prepared for release in 2021, to be built by chip fabricator and longtime Apple partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). The first of these chips to power Macs will have at least 12 cores, including eight designed for high-performance applications, and four designed for lower-intensity activities with battery-preserving energy efficiency characteristics. Current Intel designs that Apple employs in devices such as the MacBook Air have four or even two cores, by comparison.

Initially, the report claims Apple will focus on using the chips to power a new Mac design, leaving Intel processors in its higher-end pro level Macs, because the ARM-based designs, while more performant on some scores, can’t yet match the top-end performance of Intel-based chip technology. ARM chips generally provide more power efficiency at the expense of raw computing power, which is why they’re so frequently used in mobile devices.

The first ARM-based Macs will still run macOS, per Bloomberg’s sources, and Apple will seek to make them compatible with software that works on current Intel-based Macs as well. That would be a similar endeavor to when Apple switched from using PowerPC-based processors to Intel chips for its Mac lineup in 2006, so the company has some experience in this regard. During that transition, Apple announced initially that the switch would take place between 2006 and 2007, but accelerated its plans so that all new Macs shipping by the end of 2006 were powered by Intel processors.

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What happens if Magic Leap shuts down?

Since first uploading a YouTube teaser video of its tech five years ago, Magic Leap’s presence in the augmented reality industry has been controversial.

Some have lauded the team’s ambitions, while others I’ve talked to say the company’s posturing has dissuaded investors from taking chances on other AR hardware startups, which has hampered the industry’s advance.

Regardless of its impact, Magic Leap carries outsized weight, leading one to question what would happen to other AR companies if the company’s situation worsened.

The company announced layoffs today, with reports indicating that it is dismissing around 1,000 employees — about half of the company. Magic Leap’s added news of a major pivot to enterprise makes it seem like that wasn’t its primary strategy over the past year. From my perspective, the company looks like it is on a path to a fire sale and will be dependent on executing a dramatic turnaround, which grows tougher under current economic conditions.

Magic Leap reportedly slashes 1,000 jobs and steps away from consumer plans

Magic Leap has few users, so a theoretical shutdown would likely have a lesser impact than other unicorn flare-outs; still, losing a company on the forefront of a technology lauded by many as the next ubiquitous platform will certainly impact others that are striving to bring this tech to market.

The impact for startups moving forward would be nuanced. Without a substantial software suite of its own, Magic Leap relied heavily on developer partnerships, though in recent months many of those seemed to promote enterprise use cases. AR/VR startups are already in a rough position, and one less developer platform could force more companies to de-prioritize headset-based platforms and shift their focus to mobile.

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