Ideaforge

Mozilla laid off about 70 employees today, TechCrunch has learned.

In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision. The overall number may still be higher, though, as Mozilla is still looking into how this decision will affect workers in the UK and France.

“You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen,” Baker writes in her memo. “Our 2019 plan underestimated how long it would take to build and ship new, revenue-generating products. Given that, and all we learned in 2019 about the pace of innovation, we decided to take a more conservative approach to projecting our revenue for 2020. We also agreed to a principle of living within our means, of not spending more than we earn for the foreseeable future.”

Baker says laid-off employees will receive “generous exit packages” and outplacement support. She also notes that the leadership team looked into shutting down the Mozilla innovation fund but decided that it needed it in order to continue developing new products. In total, Mozilla is dedicating $43 million to building new products.

“As we look to the future, we know we must take bold steps to evolve and ensure the strength and longevity of our mission,” Baker writes. “Mozilla has a strong line of sight to future revenue generation, but we are taking a more conservative approach to our finances. This will enable us to pivot as needed to respond to market threats to internet health, and champion user privacy and agency.”

The organization last reported major layoffs in 2017.

We have reached out to Mozilla for comment and will update this post once we hear more.

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Here is the full memo:

Office of the CEO <officeoftheceo@mozilla.com>
to all-moco-mofo

Hi all,

I have some difficult news to share. With the support of the entire Steering Committee and our Board, we have made an extremely tough decision: over the course of today, we plan to eliminate about 70 roles from across MoCo. This number may be slightly larger as we are still in a consultation process in the UK and France, as the law requires, on the exact roles that may be eliminated there. We are doing this with the utmost respect for each and every person who is impacted and will go to great lengths to take care of them by providing generous exit packages and outplacement support. Most will not join us in Berlin. I will send another note when we have been able to talk to the affected people wherever possible, so that you will know when the notifications/outreach are complete.

This news likely comes as a shock and I am sorry that we could not have been more transparent with you along the way. This is never my desire. Reducing our headcount was something the Steering Committee considered as part of our 2020 planning and budgeting exercise only after all other avenues were explored. The final decision was made just before the holiday break with the work to finalize the exact set of roles affected continuing into early January (there are exceptions in the UK and France where we are consulting on decisions.) I made the decision not to communicate about this until we had a near-final list of roles and individuals affected.

Even though I expect it will be difficult to digest right now, I would like to share more about what led to this decision. Perhaps you can come back to it later, if that’s easier.

You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen. Our 2019 plan underestimated how long it would take to build and ship new, revenue-generating products. Given that, and all we learned in 2019 about the pace of innovation, we decided to take a more conservative approach to projecting our revenue for 2020. We also agreed to a principle of living within our means, of not spending more than we earn for the foreseeable future.

This approach is prudent certainly, but challenging practically. In our case, it required difficult decisions with painful results. Regular annual pay increases, bonuses and other costs which increase from year-to-year as well as a continuing need to maintain a separate, substantial innovation fund, meant that we had to look for considerable savings across Mozilla as part of our 2020 planning and budgeting process. This process ultimately led us to the decision to reduce our workforce.

At this point, you might ask if we considered foregoing the separate innovation fund, continuing as we did in 2019. The answer is yes but we ultimately decided we could not, in good faith, adopt this. Mozilla’s future depends on us excelling at our current work and developing new offerings to expand our impact. And creating the new products we need to change the future requires us to do things differently, including allocating funds, $43M to be specific, for this purpose. We will discuss our plans for making innovation robust and successful in increasing detail as we head into, and then again at, the All Hands, rather than trying to do so here.

As we look to the future, we know we must take bold steps to evolve and ensure the strength and longevity of our mission. Mozilla has a strong line of sight to future revenue generation, but we are taking a more conservative approach to our finances. This will enable us to pivot as needed to respond to market threats to internet health, and champion user privacy and agency.

I ask that we all do what we can to support each other through this difficult period.

Mitchell

Source: Tech Crunch

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re continuing our exploration of companies that have reached material scale, usually viewed through the lens of annual recurring revenue (ARR). We’ve looked at companies that have reached the $100 million ARR mark and a few that haven’t quite yet, but are on the way.

Today, a special entry. We’re looking at a company that isn’t yet at the $100 million ARR mark. It’s 60% of the way there, but with a twist. The company is bootstrapped. Yep, from pre-life as a consultancy that built a product to fit its own needs, Cloudinary is cruising toward nine-figure recurring revenue and an IPO under its own steam.

Source: Tech Crunch

Late last year, Boeing flew a key orbital flight test of its Starliner commercial crew spacecraft, a key test prior to the vehicle being able to actually carry astronauts on board. That test didn’t go exactly as planned, since the Starliner didn’t rendez-vous and dock with the International Space Station as outlined in the actual mission specs, due to a mission timer error, but a lot still went right, and cameras on board captured the whole flight.

Boeing cut together footage from each part of the flight (including immediately following the timer mishap), from cameras both trained on one of the capsule’s windows for an outside look, as well as interior angles that show the dummy astronaut used on the mission to see how a real human would fare on board. You can also see the secured cargo, as well as the Snoopy doll that acted as a “zero-G indicator” within the cabin.

Eventually, Boeing says it’ll release all of the footage capture onboard during the mission, a good measure of transparency and the right move given that the provider has to convince NASA and the general public that its commercial crew craft is totally safe for astronauts to climb aboard for their first orbital flight, which will hopefully take place sometime later this year.

Source: Tech Crunch

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has lost his campaign’s chief information security officer, citing “differences” with the campaign over its security practices.

Mick Baccio, who served under the former South Bend mayor’s campaign for the White House, left his position earlier this month.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news. TechCrunch also confirmed Baccio’s resignation, who left less than a year after joining the Buttigieg campaign.

“I had fundamental philosophical differences with campaign management regarding the architecture and scope of the information security program,” Baccio told TechCrunch.

“We thank him for the work he did to protect our campaign against attacks,” said Buttigieg spokesperson Chris Meagher. The spokesperson said that the campaign had retained a new security firm, but would not say which company.

Baccio was the only known staffer to oversee cybersecurity out of all the presidential campaigns. News of his departure comes at a time just months to go before millions of Americans are set to vote in the 2020 presidential campaign.

But concerns have been raised about the overall security posture of the candidates’ campaigns, as well as voting and election infrastructure across the United States, ahead of the vote.

A report from a government watchdog last March said Homeland Security “does not have dedicated staff” focused on election infrastructure. Since then, security researchers found many of the largest voting districts are vulnerable to simple cyberattacks, such as sending malicious emails designed to look like a legitimate message, a type of tactic used by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election.

In October, Iran-backed hackers unsuccessfully targeted President Trump’s re-election campaign.

Source: Tech Crunch

For the first time, this year Delta Air Lines had a large presence at CES. The carrier used much of its space to highlight the “parallel reality” screens developed by Misapplied Sciences and Sarcos Robotics, which brought its latest Guardian exoskeleton. At the show, I sat down with COO Gil West, an industry veteran with years of experience at a number of airlines and airplane manufacturers, to talk about how the company works with these startups.

Like all large companies, Delta has gone through a bit of a digital transformation in recent years by rebuilding a lot of the technical infrastructure that powers its internal and external services (though like all airlines, it also still has plenty of legacy tech that is hard to replace). This work enabled the company to move faster, rethink a lot of its processes and heightened the reality that a lot of this innovation has to come from outside the company.

“If you think about where we are as a world right now, it’s a Renaissance period for transportation,” West said. “Now, fortunately, we’re right in the middle of it, but if you think about the different modes of transportation and autonomous and electrification — and the technologies like AI and ML — everything is converging. There’s truly, I think, a transportation revolution — and we’ll play in it.

Source: Tech Crunch

What would we do if we could visit our own pasts or futures? Are we more likely to change our timelines, or will our timelines actually project themselves back on to us more forcefully?

This is the first discussion post of this beta-testing, informal TechCrunch book club, which is starting with the first short story in Ted Chiang’s science fiction collection “Exhalation.” Join us as we walk through each story in succession in the coming weeks and explore a wider expanse of technology and its effect on society.

The first story in the collection is “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a compact, interwoven series of tales that discusses a time-shifting “gate” that allows people to move forward and backward in time at a specific interval. Chiang takes the familiar device of the time-travel machine and repurposes it for a deeper introspection of how humans consider their own lives and the lives they affect.

For this first week, I want to start with some reading questions (posted below) to think about before presenting deeper thoughts from me and readers. As I mentioned before, you can email me your thoughts at danny+bookclub@techcrunch.com and include them below in the comments, as well. Several communities online on Reddit and Twitter have already begun conversations, as well.

My friend and occasional Extra Crunch contributor Eliot Peper wrote in to describe what he considered the most foundational passage of the piece, and his thoughts:

“Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”

This passage resonated with me deeply because it hints at one of the reasons I love reading science fiction like Chiang’s: Not to catch a glimpse into the future, but to inspect the present more closely, and from fresh angles—learning lessons along the way.

We will return next week on Tuesday with more fully formed thoughts on this short story, as well as a similar reading guide for the second short story, the eponymous “Exhalation.”

Some questions to ponder about “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”:

• What is Chiang trying to convey about the meaning of destiny? Are we really “the audience as well as the players”?
• Do we have agency in our own lives? Can we really affect the future with our own actions?
• How should we observe what happens around us? Is consideration of what is happening enough to bring understanding and contentment, or do we have to have a stake in every outcome for us to feel satisfied?
• Why did Chiang choose this particular time and setting (historical Baghdad) for this short story?
• Similarly, why did he choose to include three tales in such a short story? What did this structural device provide us as readers?
• What does the introduction of the gate imply about how new technology is accepted? Is it believable that such a wondrous device would be accepted so readily?
• Is the gate neutral? Could it be used for good or evil, or does it depend on the user themselves?

Source: Tech Crunch

Tesla apparently isn’t afraid to embrace some of its more embarrassing moments when doing so will likely lead to moving lots of merch — the automaker is now selling a t-shirt emblazoned with a graphic of the shatter incurred in the Cybertruck’s driver-side window when the controversial pickup truck was officially unveiled at the end of last year.

During that event in November, Tesla CEO Elon Musk invited Tesla lead designer Franz von Holzhausen onstage to stress test the Cybertruck’s durability. Von Holzhausen proceeded to smash the truck’s side panels with a sledgehammer, leaving no visible marks — but when he moved on to throwing a steel ball bearing at the supposedly blast-proof windows, they seemed to easily shatter.

The driver-side window first smashed, spidering the glass (but, as noted by Musk at the time, not allowing the ball to actually pass all the way through). At von Holzhausen’s urging, the rear driver-side window quickly followed suit on a second throw from the designer, once the attempt was OK’d by a seemingly stunned Musk.

This new t-shirt, which is available from the Tesla official merch shop, retails for $45 and features what looks like the actual photographic recreation of the shatter pattern from the front window, the first to be shattered in the onstage gaffe. The back of the shirt features the official Cybertruck logo, which is a primal, pared-down triangle that looks like a silhouette of the top of the Cybertruck from the wheel wells up.

When I checked, I couldn’t actually purchase the t-shirt, but it’s likely to be a hot seller (if it didn’t just sell out in the first two minutes of availability already). The incident was instantly meme-orialized, and though Tesla later said that it was actually a result of a structural weakening of the window glass due to von Holzhausen’s earlier sledgehammer blasts at the door below, it clearly wasn’t a planned or desired part of the presentation for Musk or Tesla.

Just like Musk’s onstage claims regarding the window glass strength, take his Twitter assertion that the “T-shirt is bulletproof & makes u buff!” with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Source: Tech Crunch

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.

1. Visa is acquiring Plaid for $5.3 billion, 2x its final private valuation

You can compare what Plaid does to Stripe — but instead of facilitating payments, Plaid helps developers share banking and other financial information more easily.

Plaid raised $250 million at the end of 2018, with both Mastercard and Visa quietly participating in the round. So Visa must be pretty happy with how the startup has developed since then.

2. Google wants to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years

The fact that Google will drop support for these cookies — which are typically used to track users across the web — doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, given the company’s announcements around privacy in Chrome. But this aggressive timeline is new.

3. Disney+ was the most downloaded app in the US in Q4 2019

Following the app’s mid-November launch in the U.S., Disney+ was downloaded more than 30 million times in Q4 2019 — according to a new report from SensorTower, that’s more than double the downloads for the runner-up, TikTok.

4. Spotify and Warner Chappell end dispute in India, sign global licensing deal

The announcement marks the end of the companies’ litigation before the Bombay High Court, where Warner Music was seeking an injunction to prevent Spotify from using its music in India. Spotify ended up launching in India anyway, but without a number of Warner Music titles.

5. The robot homecoming is upon us

Home robots have already had a few false starts, including some high-profile flare-outs like Anki and previous CES darling Kuri. But Darrell Etherington argues that between slow-burn categories and the sheer volume of newer products, it now seems certain we’re on a path that will lead to robots becoming common household items. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Atrium lays off lawyers, explains pivot to legal tech

Moving forward, the Justin Kan-founded startup will focus on its software for startups navigating fundraising, hiring and collaborating with lawyers. Atrium also plans to ramp up its startup advising services, and it’s doubling down on its year-old network of professional service providers that help clients navigate day-to-day legal work.

7. Disrupting Space: A new event from TechCrunch

The show will be held at Gateway Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles on June 25, right in the neighborhood of America’s most powerful players in space, including Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon, Teledyne, The Aerospace Corporation, the U.S. Air Force and, of course, SpaceX.

Source: Tech Crunch

Microsoft has released a security patch for a dangerous vulnerability affecting hundreds of millions of computers running Windows 10.

The vulnerability is found in a decades-old Windows cryptographic component, known as CryptoAPI. The component has a range of functions, one of which allows developers to digitally sign their software, proving that the software has not been tampered with. But the bug may allow attackers to spoof legitimate software, potentially making it easier to run malicious software — like ransomware — on a vulnerable computer.

“The user would have no way of knowing the file was malicious, because the digital signature would appear to be from a trusted provider,” Microsoft said.

CERT-CC, the the vulnerability disclosure center at Carnegie Mellon University, said in its advisory that the bug can also be used to intercept and modify HTTPS (or TLS) communications.

Microsoft said it found no evidence to show that the bug has been actively exploited by attackers, and classified the bug as “important.”

Independent security journalist Brian Krebs first reported details of the bug.

The National Security Agency confirmed in a call with reporters that it found the vulnerability and turned over the details to Microsoft, allowing the company to build and ready a fix.

Only two years ago the spy agency was criticized for finding and using a Windows vulnerability to conduct surveillance instead of alerting Microsoft to the flaw. The agency used the vulnerability to create an exploit, known as EternalBlue, as a way to secretly backdoor vulnerable computers. But the exploit was later leaked and was used to infect thousands of computers with the WannaCry ransomware, causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Anne Neuberger, NSA’s director of cybersecurity, told TechCrunch that once the vulnerability was discovered, it went through the vulnerabilities equities process, a decision-making process used by the government to determine if it should retain control of the flaw for use in offensive security operations or if it should be disclosed to the vendor. It’s not known if the NSA used the bug for offensive operations before it was reported to Microsoft.

Neuberger confirmed Microsoft’s findings that NSA had not seen attackers actively exploiting the bug.

Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and founder of Rendition Infosec, told TechCrunch that it was “encouraging” that the flaw was turned over “rather than weaponized.”

“This one is a bug that would likely be easier for governments to use than the common hacker,” he said. “This would have been an ideal exploit to couple with man in the middle network access.”

Microsoft is said to have released patches for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, which is also affected, to the U.S. government, military and other high-profile companies ahead of Tuesday’s release to the wider public, amid fears that the bug would be abused and vulnerable computers could come under active attack.

The software giant kept a tight circle around the details of the vulnerabilities, with few at the company fully aware of their existence, sources told TechCrunch. Only a few outside the company and the NSA — such as the government’s cybersecurity advisory unit Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — were briefed.

CISA also issued a directive, compelling federal agencies to patch the vulnerabilities.

Williams said this now-patched flaw is like “a skeleton key for bypassing any number of endpoint security controls,” he told TechCrunch.

Skilled attackers have long tried to pass off their malware as legitimate software, in some cases by obtaining and stealing certificates. Last year, attackers stole a certificate belonging to computer maker Asus to sign a backdoored version of its software update tool. By pushing the tool to the company’s own servers, “hundreds of thousands” of Asus customers were compromised as a result.

When certificates are lost or stolen, they can be used to impersonate the app maker, allowing them to sign malicious software and make it look like it came from the original developer.

Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer at security firm CrowdStrike, said in a tweet that the NSA-discovered bug was a “critical issue.”

“Everyone should patch. Do not wait,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch