Month: July 2019

If these past few weeks felt like the sky was falling, you weren’t alone.

In the past month there were several major internet outages affecting millions of users across the world. Sites buckled, services broke, images wouldn’t load, direct messages ground to a halt and calendars and email were unavailable for hours at a time.

It’s not believed any single event tied the outages together, more so just terrible luck for all involved.

It started on June 2 — a quiet Sunday — when most weren’t working. A massive Google Cloud outage took out service for most on the U.S. east coast. Many third-party sites like Discord, Snap and Vimeo, as well as several of Google’s own services, like Gmail and Nest, were affected.

A routine but faulty configuration change was to blame. The issue was meant to be isolated to a few systems but a bug caused the issue to cascade throughout Google’s servers, causing gridlock across its entire cloud for more than three hours.

On June 24, Cloudflare dropped 15% of its global traffic during an hours-long outage because of a network route leak. The networking giant quickly blamed Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) for the fustercluck. Because of inherent flaws in the border gateway protocol — which manages how internet traffic is routed on the internet — Verizon effectively routed an “entire freeway down a neighborhood street,” said Cloudflare in its post-mortem blog post. “This should never have happened because Verizon should never have forwarded those routes to the rest of the Internet.”

Amazon, Linode and other major companies reliant on Cloudflare’s infrastructure also ground to a halt.

A week later, on July 2, Cloudflare was hit by a second outage — this time caused by an internal code push that went badly. In a blog post, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer John Graham-Cumming blamed the half-hour outage on a rogue bit of “regex” code in its web firewall, designed to prevent its customer sites from getting hit by JavaScript-based attacks. But the regex code was bad and caused its processors to spike across its machines worldwide, effectively crippling the entire service — and any site reliant on it. The code rollback was swift, however, and the internet quickly returned to normal.

Google, not wanting to out-do Cloudflare, was hit by another outage on July 2 thanks to physical damage to a fiber cable in its U.S. east coast region. The disruption lasted for about six hours, though Google says most of the disruption was mitigated by routing traffic through its other data centers.

Then, Facebook and its entire portfolio of services — including WhatsApp and Instagram — stumbled along for eight hours during July 3 as its shared content delivery network was hit by downtime. Facebook took to Twitter, no less, to confirm the outage. Images and videos across the services wouldn’t load, leaving behind only the creepy machine learning-generated descriptions of each photo.

Instagram was one of the many Facebook-owned services hit by an outage this week, with several taking to Twitter noting the automatic tagging and categorization of images (Image: Derek Kinsman/Twitter)

At about the same time, Twitter too had to face the music, admitting in a tweet that direct messages were broken. Some complained of “ghost” messages that weren’t there. Some weren’t getting notified of new messages at all.

Then came Apple’s turn. On July 4, iCloud was hit by a three-hour nationwide outage, affecting almost every part of its cloud-based service — from the App Store, Apple ID, Apple Pay and Apple TV. In some cases, users couldn’t access their cloud-based email or photos.

According to internet monitoring firm ThousandEyes, the cause of the outage was yet another border gateway protocol issue — similar to Cloudflare’s scuffle with Verizon.

Apple’s nondescript outage page; it acknowledges issues, but not why or for how long (Image: TechCrunch)

It was a rough month for a lot of people. Points to Cloudflare and Google for explaining what happened and why. Less so to Apple, Facebook and Twitter, all of which barely acknowledged their issues.

What can we learn? For one, internet providers need to do better with routing filters, and, secondly, perhaps it’s not a good idea to run new code directly on a production system.

These past few weeks have not looked good for the cloud, shaking confidence in the many reliant on hosting giants — like Amazon, Google and more. Although some quickly — and irresponsibly and eventually wrongly — concluded the outages were because of hackers or threat actors launching distributed denial-of-service attacks, it’s always far safer to assume that an internal mistake is to blame.

But for the vast majority of consumers and businesses alike, the cloud is still far more resilient — and better equipped to handle user security — than most of those who run their own servers in-house.

The easy lesson is to not put all your eggs in one basket — or your data in a single cloud. But as this month showed, sometimes you can be just plain unlucky.

Source: Tech Crunch

Alphabet-backed UnitedMasters, the music label distribution startup and record label alternative that offers artists 100 percent ownership of everything they create, launched its iPhone app today.

The iPhone app works like the service they used to offer only via the web, giving artists the chance to upload their own tracks (from iCloud, Dropbox or directly from text messages), then distribute them to a full range of streaming music platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and more. In exchange for this distribution, as well as analytics on how your music is performing, UnitedMasters takes a 10% share on revenue generated by tracks it distributes, but artists retain full ownership of the content they create.

UnitedMasters also works with brand partners, including Bose, the NBA and AT&T, to place tracks in marketing use across the brand’s properties and distributed content. Music creators are paid out via PayPal once they connect their accounts, and they can also tie-in their social accounts for connecting their overall online presence with their music.

Using the app, artists can create entire releases by uploading not only music tracks but also high-quality cover art, and by entering information like whether any producers participated in the music creation, and whether the tracks contain any explicit lyrics. You can also specific an exact desired release date, and UnitedMasters will do its best to distribute across services on that day, pending content approvals.

UnitedMasters was founded by former Interscope Records president Steve Stoute, and also has funding from Andreessen Horwitz and 20th Century Fox. It’s aiming to serve a new generation of artists who are disenfranchised by the traditional label model, but seeking distribution through the services where listeners actually spend their time, and using the iPhone as manage the entire process definitely fits with serving that customer base.

Source: Tech Crunch

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a solar panel that’s only there when the sun shines on it? That’s the idea behind this research project, which uses shape-shifting materials to make a solar panel grow from a compressed state to an expanded one with nothing more than a change in temperature.

The flower-like prototype device is made of what’s called a “shape-memory polymer,” a material that can be shaped when cool to one form, then when heated will attempt to return to its original, natural configuration. In this case the cool form is a compressed disc, and the warm one is a much wider one.

The transition (demonstrated here in warm water for simplicity) takes less than a minute. It’s guided by a network of hinged joints, the structure of which was inspired by the children’s toy known as a Hoberman sphere, which changes from a small, spiky ball to a larger spherical one when thrown.

The cooled-down material would stay rigid during, say, deployment on a satellite. Then when the satellite enters the sun, the mechanism would bloom into the full-sized array, no power necessary. That would potentially save space on a satellite that can’t quite fit a battery or spare solar array to kick-start a larger one.

For now the transformation is one-way; the larger disc must be manually folded back into the smaller configuration — but one can imagine how once powered up, a separate mechanism could accomplish that, stowing itself away until the next chance to absorb some sunlight appears.

Don’t expect to see this on any spacecraft next year, but it’s definitely a cool (and warm) idea that could prove more than a little useful for small satellites and the like in the future. And who knows? Maybe you’ll have a garden of these little blooming arrays on your roof before that.

The research, from Caltech and ETHZ, is documented in the journal Physics Review Applied.

Source: Tech Crunch

HQ Trivia is struggling after a mutiny failed to oust its CEO. Downloads per month are down 92% versus last June according to Sensor Tower. And now four sources confirm that HQ laid off staff members this week. One said about 20% of staff was let go, and another said six to seven employees were departing. That aligns with Digiday reporter Kerry Flynn’s tweet that 7 employees were let go bringing HQ to under 30 (shrinking from 35 to 28 staffers would be a 20% drop).

That will leave the company short-handed as it attempts to diversify revenue with the upcoming launch of monthly subscriptions. “HQ Words Everyday. Coming next month . . .  Bigger prizes . . . More ways to win. $9.99/mo. subscription” the company tweeted from the account for its second game, the Wheel Of Fortune-style HQ Words. The company has been trying to regain momentum with new hosts since the departure of Quiz Daddy aka Scott Rogowsky, HQ Trivia’s original host.

The cuts hit HQ’s HR, marketing, and product engineering teams, according to LinkedIn profiles of employees let go. The cuts could further hamper morale at the startup following a tough first half of the year. HQ Trivia and co-founder Rus Yusupov did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

HQ Trivia employees petitioned to remove co-founder Rus Yusupov from the CEO position

Following the tragic death of co-founder and CEO Colin Kroll, Yusupov retook control. But staff found him difficult to work with as he’d allowed the product to stagnate and popularity to decline. Yusupov was slow to make changes to the app, and “no one wanted to work under Rus” a source told me.

That led 20 of 35 staffers to sign a letter to HQ Trivia’s board asking them to remove Yusupov, though it was never formally sent. Yusupov caught wind of the plot and fired two of the leaders of the petition. That further sunk morale, leading to the exit of HQ Trivia’s SVP of brand partnerships and its marketing manager. The board began a search for a new CEO, though it’s unclear how that’s panned out.

Since then, new games HQ teased in April haven’t materialized as its download rate continued to suffer. It’s dropped to the #731 US game on iOS according to AppAnnie. HQ Trivia saw just 827,000 downloads from January through June 2019, down 92% from the 10.2 million it saw in the same time frame in 2018 according to Sensor Tower. That’s the same percentage drop in downloads from June 2019 versus June 2018, indicating Rogowsky’s replacements that started in April couldn’t turn things around.

Interest in the live game show format seems to be waning as a whole. HQ Trivia fan site HQTrivia.fan shut down this week fearing the end was near for the official game, and the (Business) INSIDER-run clone of the game on Facebook Watch called Confetti stopped airing at the end of June.

Rather than solely monetizing a waning audience via in-app purchases and sponsorships, HQ Words announced it would debut a $9.99 monthly subscription sometime this month that would grant access to winning “bigger prizes”. This could be a smart way to squeeze more dollars out of a smaller but more diehard audience.

While HQ Trivia was an inspiring approach to mobile gaming, its twice-daily games didn’t fit the always-on nature of mobile. It’s failed build a proper onboarding experience that gives users a taste of it games right away rather than forcing them to wait for the next scheduled match as we suggested over a year ago. Gamers are fickle, craving instant gratification, and HQ hasn’t tried to meet them in middle.

Perhaps there’s a future for HQ on cable television, or as a small but steady business on mobile catering to loyalists. But all the unfortunate events and mismanagement may make it difficult to exceed the $100 million valuation it raised money at during its peak.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tesla has extended its 5-star safety rating streak to Europe.

In a new round of testing, the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) awarded the Model 3 its highest rating of five stars. You can watch a video of Euro NCAP’s crash test below.

As fun as it is to watch a Tesla Model 3 (or any vehicle) get pummeled in crash tests, understanding what helped push the company’s safety rating so high is far more interesting.

The testing measures four areas: how the vehicle protects adults and children, how it treats vulnerable road users like pedestrians and safety assist. Tesla has historically achieved high safety ratings thanks to the underlying architecture of the vehicle and its powertrain design, which makes the cars more rigid and better protects occupants. The location of the battery also gives the Model 3 and other Tesla vehicles a low center of gravity, which improves handling and reduces the chance of a rollover.

The Model 3 earned a 96% score for how it protects adults and 86% for crash test performance in keeping children safe. It scored a 74% for how the vehicle handles vulnerable road users. That vulnerable road users score is lower than some of the other 5-star rated vehicles like the 2019 Mercedes-Benz GLE, Mercedes-Benz B-Class and the Skoda Scala. 

But it’s the safety assist score, which rates the standard safety features in the vehicle, where the Model 3 stands out. Euro NCAP did not test Autopilot, the advanced driver assistance system that includes adaptive cruise control, can change lanes and keeps the car in its lane.

Instead, this assessment focused on the car’s active safety features such as automatic emergency braking system (AEB) or one that prevents drivers from unintentionally drifting into another lane. The Tesla Model 3 earned the highest safety assist score ever awarded by Euro NCAP under its newer 2018-2019 testing protocols.

Tesla improved its AEB system to all Model S, Model X and Model 3 vehicles built since October 2016 via an over-the-air software update made earlier this year. Tesla also rolled out other new features in May including lane departure avoidance and emergency lane departure avoidance.

The company’s engineers used data collected from the sensor suite of every Tesla made since October 2016 along with inputs from drivers to get a better understanding of how people behave behind the wheel, according to Tesla. That data was used to build out more accurate prediction models, which in turn, allow the features to better mitigate or avoid accidents.

The Model 3 is not the only vehicle to earn a 5-star rating from Euro NCAP. The Audi e-tron, Toyota Corolla, Volkswagen T-Cross, Mazda 3, Kia Ceed, and Lexus UX are some of the other 2019 models that earned five stars.

Source: Tech Crunch

The $10 million entry fee to join the Facebook-developed cryptocurrency’s Libra Association is merely a minimum. Members who’ll verify transactions can opt to invest more in exchange for more Libra Investment Tokens that will earn them dividends from the interest earned by the Libra Reserve after it pays for infrastructure and operations costs. If regulators allow it to launch after today requesting a halt of development, and the cryptocurrency grows popular with tons of people cashing in local currencies for Libra, the Reserve that holds those assets could grow huge and generate meaningful returns via interest — especially for members willing to sink a ton of money in early.

But therein lies potential disalignment of incentives.

If you’re confused, read our guide to everything about Libra

Each Libra Association member only gets one vote on the council, including Facebook . But if Facebook puts in $500 million and another member like eBay antes just the $10 million minimum, Facebook has a much bigger incentive to get people cashing into Libra and holding onto the cryptocurrency so the Reserve earns interest on those dollars or other fiat, rather than just getting people to transact with it regardless of whether they hold on to Libra permanently. That could lead Facebook (and its Calibra subsidiary representing it) to push governance decisions that would disproportionately benefit it.

Ahead of the Libra announcement two weeks ago, Facebook’s head of blockchain and now Calibra David Marcus told me “The reserve earns interest on some of those treasuries. It’s a small amount and it’s variable but if the reserve becomes big it could become a substantial way to fund the association but also return capital to investors.”

Yet Facebook, for all its talk about transparency with Libra, refused to tell me how much it’s invested into the Libra project as a whole or the Libra Investment Token. That should be a core question raised by congress when Marcus testifies before the Senate Banking Chair on July 16th and the House Financial Services Committee on July 17th. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment on this article. Congress should also be sure to ask how Libra will avoid a Cambridge Analytica-style crypto disaster given that apps built on the Libra developer platform aren’t subject to review.

The proportion of the total Libra Investment Tokens that Facebook owns in part determines how decentralized Libra really is. If Facebook owns the lion’s share or a majority, that could give it too much financial impetus to bend the rules in its favor even if it only has one vote on the council.

Here’s how. Facebook has led development of Libra to date. In fact, the Libra Association has yet to draw up and ratify a charter or formally admit members. Technically it’s just Facebook’s project right now. “So far we’ve been funding it all” Marcus told The Information’s Alex Heath. It’s also been coding it all, organizing it all, and communicating it all.

As such, for now the project can’t survive without Facebook, and may not be able to for quite a while. That means if that if at any time Facebook disagrees so strongly with the Libra Association that it threatens to pull out, it jeopardizes the investment of all the other members. That could coerce them to vote in support of its governance policy suggestions. Facebook thereby wouldn’t need more than one vote to have a much larger influence on the direction of the project.

Today in a Facebook Note (…not a Libra.org blog post), Marcus wrote “The levels of investments of each of the partners will most likely be public as well when that’s actually live.” But that’s far from a guarantee, and could come too late for regulators to intercede or other members to truly understand the assymetry.

Meanwhile, Marcus also said that “We’ve been basically lending money to the association that will be at some point repaid back.” That raises another question of how much Facebook has already sunk into the Libra project, how much it expects to be repaid, on what schedule. Members might be more skittish to join if they learn much of their $10 million investment might just go to paying Facebook back. 

That’s not to mention the other ways Facebook will earn money from Libra. Marcus wrote today that “If Libra is successful, Facebook will first benefit from it by enabling more commerce across its family of apps. More commerce means ads will be more effective, and advertisers will buy more of them to grow their businesses. Additionally, if we earn people’s trust with the Calibra wallet over time, we will also be in a position to start offering more financial services, and generate other revenue streams for the company.”

The fact that Facebook oversees development and has a massive head start on building its wallet that will be baked into its billion-plus user Messenger and WhatsApp products sure doesn’t hurt its prospects for offering other financial services. It will be first to market, instantly at scale, with an insider’s role in defining the rule book.

I’m not discounting the potential Libra has to aid the unbanked who can’t pay fees for having too little money in their accounts, or make commerce cheaper for small businesses. But if Facebook stands to earn outsized returns directly and indirectly from Libra, while expecting other members to foot its R&D bill, and these numbers aren’t made public soon, it’s reasonable to question how decentralized and altruistic this project really is.

Source: Tech Crunch

If you’re driving your car from Portland to Merced, you probably rely on GPS to see where you are. But what if you’re driving your Moon rover from Oceanus Procellarum to the Sea of Tranquility? Actually, GPS should be fine — if this NASA research pans out.

Knowing exactly where you are in space, relative to other bodies anyway, is definitely a non-trivial problem. Fortunately the stars are fixed and by triangulating with them and other known landmarks, a spacecraft can figure out its location quite precisely.

But that’s so much work! Here on Earth we gave that up years ago, and now rely (perhaps too much) on GPS to tell us where we are to within a few meters.

By creating our own fixed stars — satellites in geosynchronous orbits — constantly emitting known signals, we made it possible for our devices to quickly sample those signals and immediately locate themselves.

That sure would be handy on the Moon, but a quarter of a million miles makes a lot of difference to a system that relies on ultra-precise timing and signal measurement. Yet there’s nothing theoretically barring GPS signals from being measured out there — and in fact, NASA has already done it at nearly half that distance with the MMS mission a few years ago.

“NASA has been pushing high-altitude GPS technology for years,” said MMS system architect Luke Winternitz in a NASA news release. “GPS around the Moon is the next frontier.”

Astronauts can’t just take their phones up there, of course. Our devices are calibrated for catching and calculating signals from satellites known to be in orbit above us and within a certain range of distances. The time for the signal to reach us from orbit is a fraction of a second, while on or near the Moon it would take perhaps a full second and a half. That may not sound like much, but it fundamentally affects how the receiving and processing systems have to be built.

That’s precisely what the team at NASA Goddard has been working on addressing with a new navigation computer that uses a special high-gain antenna, a super-precise clock, and other improvements over the earlier NavCube space GPS system and, of course, the terrestrial ones we all have in our phones.

The idea is to use GPS instead of relying on NASA’s network of ground and satellite measurement systems, which must exchange data to the spacecraft and eat up valuable bandwidth and power. Freeing up those systems could empower them to work on other missions and let more of the GPS-capable satellite’s communications be dedicated to science and other high-priority transmissions.

The team hopes to complete the lunar NavCube hardware by the end of the year and then find a flight to the Moon on which to test it as soon as possible. Fortunately, with Artemis gaining traction, it looks as if there will be no shortage of those.

Source: Tech Crunch