Ideaforge

Meet Spot, a beautifully designed mobile app to control your cryptocurrencies. Spot looks like a portfolio-tracking app. But the company has built a strong foundation to add more features in the coming months. Spot wants to be your unique gateway to the world of cryptocurrencies.

“Spot’s vision isn’t to build a portfolio tracker — we went a bit overboard with this feature,” co-founder and CEO Edouard Steegmann told me. “Eventually, we want to become the app to manage all your cryptos, a sort of Revolut but with a crypto DNA.”

When you first install the app, you can connect it to your existing wallets by adding public addresses. Even if you store your tokens on a hardware wallet, Spot can read the public details of your wallet to show them in the app.

“We have our own nodes on Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Stellar and others to recover the amount on your wallet,” Steegmann said. Data is also cross-checked with third-party services to make sure that everything is fine.

Spot also lets you connect to an exchange account using API keys. Right now, the app supports Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex and Poloniex, but the company already plans to add more exchanges.

The app then gives you a detailed overview of your holdings across all services and wallets. You can see detailed charts, and discover which token is performing better than the rest. It’s also one of the most well-designed mobile apps I’ve seen this year — the animations and interactions are gorgeous.

But Spot doesn’t rely on an API to get pricing information for each token. “We’ve rebuilt CoinMarketCap from the ground up, and we’re one of the few companies that have done it,” Steegmann said. The company stores pricing information for dozens of tokens across 150 exchanges. That’s a lot of pairings.

If you tap on the Spot logo at the top of the app, you can see the maximum value of your portfolio if you cash out on exchanges with the highest prices for your tokens. The company makes sure that there’s enough volume to show you coherent prices.

Spot thinks that controlling your own data is too important to rely on API calls. When you have your own data, you don’t have any API rate limits, you don’t have a major dependency and you can scale more calmly.

Up next, you’ll be able to trade directly in the app. The company isn’t going to build its own exchange, but you can expect to buy and sell tokens on a third-party exchange without having to visit the website.

“We think that many things will be tokenized and that there’s no user-friendly interface to transfer, receive, buy and sell,” Steegmann said.

The company raised a $1.2 million round (€1.056 million to be exact) from Kima Ventures and business angels, including Eric Larchevêque and Thomas France from Ledger, Jean-Daniel Guyot, Thibaud Elzière, Eduardo Ronzano, Nicolas Steegmann, Sébastien Lucas and Nicolas Debock.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

Source: Tech Crunch

Where are you? That’s not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position.

Countries around the world, including China, Japan, India and the United Kingdom plus the European Union are exploring, testing and deploying satellites to build out their own positioning capabilities.

That’s a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check out this article, or for the comprehensive history, here’s the book-length treatment).

Owning GPS has a number of advantages, but the first and most important is that global military and commercial users depend on this service of the U.S. government, putting location targeting ultimately at the mercy of the Pentagon. The development of the technology and the deployment of positioning satellites also provides a spillover advantage for the space industry.

Today, the only global alternative to that system is Russia’s GLONASS, which reached full global coverage a couple of years ago following an aggressive program by Russian president Vladimir Putin to rebuild it after it had degraded following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the U.S. and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. Its Beidou (北斗 – “Big Dipper”) navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.

Now, though, China hopes to accelerate the launch of Beidou satellites and provide worldwide positioning services. As Financial Times noted a few weeks ago, China has launched 11 satellites in the Beidou constellation just this year — almost half of the entire network, and it hopes to expand by another dozen satellites by 2020. That would make it one of the largest systems in the world when fully deployed.

A Long March-3B carrier rocket carrying the 24th and 25th Beidou navigation satellites takes off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on November 5, 2017 in Xichang, China. Photo by Wang Yulei/CHINA NEWS SERVICE/VCG via Getty Images

China is not just putting satellites into orbit though, but demanding that local smartphone manufacturers include Beidou positioning chips in their devices. Today, devices from a number of major manufacturers, including Huawei and Xiaomi, use the system, along with GPS and Russia’s GLONASS as well.

That puts American smartphone leaders like Alphabet and particularly Apple in a bind. For Apple, which prides itself on providing one unified iPhone device worldwide, the disintegration of the monopoly around GPS presents a quandary: Does it offer a unique device for the Chinese market capable of handling Beidou, or does it add Beidou chips to its phones worldwide and run into trouble with U.S. national security authorities?

The complexity doesn’t stop there. China may be the most aggressive in launching its alternative to GPS and also the most bullish in providing worldwide coverage, but it is not alone in pursuing its own system.

Japan has made launching a space program a national priority to compete with China and rejuvenate its economy, and one critical component of that program is building out a positioning system. The Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (準天頂衛星システム), which has cost ¥120 billion ($1.08 billion) to date, is designed to augment GPS with more coverage of Japan and also trigger an estimated ¥2.4 trillion ($21.58 billion) in economic benefits.

Using this new system comes at a huge cost due to lack of manufacturing scale. As the Nikkei Asian Review noted a few weeks ago, “The high price of receivers is a hurdle, however. Mitsubishi Electric on Thursday began selling receivers accurate to within a few centimeters — at a price of several million yen, or tens of thousands of dollars, apiece.” The additional location accuracy in Japan may well be necessary for autonomous cars, but auto manufactures will need to lower costs quickly if they want to include the technology in their vehicles.

Like Japan, India has similarly pursued a GPS-augmenting system known as IRNSS, and it has now launched seven satellites to increase coverage of the subcontinent. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, which is expected to leave the European Union in March following the referendum over Brexit, will most likely lose access to the EU’s Galileo positioning system, and is planning to launch its own. As for Galileo itself, it is expected to be fully operational in 2019.

In short, the world has moved from one system (GPS) to arguably seven. And while Chinese manufacturers increasingly have GPS, GLONASS and Beidou installed on one chip, that scale may only work in a country the size of China. In Japan, where the smartphone market is saturated and the population is less than a tenth of China, the scale required to lower prices may well be harder to find. It will be even tougher in the United Kingdom, for the same reasons.

Theoretically, one positioning chip could be designed to incorporate all of these different systems, but that might run afoul of U.S. national security laws, particularly in regards to GLONASS and Beidou. Which means that much as the internet is fragmenting into disparate poles, we might soon find that our smartphone positioning chips need to fragment as well in order to handle these local markets. That will ultimately mean higher prices for consumers, and tougher supply chains for manufacturers.

Source: Tech Crunch

For a CEO who insists his electric vehicle startup doesn’t want to be Tesla, Rivian founder RJ Scaringe can sound a lot like Elon Musk.

Just weeks before unveiling Rivian’s first vehicles — an all-electric pickup and a seven-seater SUV — at the LA Auto Show last month, Scaringe promised an impressive new battery technology and speculated about an electric jet-ski. He’s made other bold claims à la Musk, including that his company had developed an artificial intelligence charging system that “allows the battery to last … about three times longer than a traditional battery.”

There’s a method to, and a reason for, Scaringe’s promotional madness.

It’s a tough time to launch an EV startup. With a recession lurking around the corner and mainstream automakers promising to accelerate into the space, Rivian needs to show more than just a stylish brand and a half-empty bank account. TechCrunch has learned that Scaringe has a technology roadmap that includes regular reveals of new features, vehicles and partners, to lure in new business and keep pre-order customers happy while they wait for delivery in 2020.

For a start, Rivian’s AI will observe how new owners of its vehicles drive and charge their cars, and then adjust various parameters to maximize battery longevity. This might include not fully charging the battery for people who tend to drive only short distances in a day, although it would never reduce the total range available, Scaringe later told TechCrunch.

“We don’t make drastic adjustments over time,” he said. “We do this slowly as we learn more about you.”

Although Rivian could not provide evidence of a tripling of battery life, an EV battery expert contacted by TechCrunch confirmed that smart charging strategies could slow the deterioration of lithium-ion packs to some extent.

Rivian’s “AI batteries” could be integrated into other applications, such as electric jet-skis, snowmobiles and tractors built by partners, Scaringe said recently at an Economic Development Council meeting near the startup’s assembly plant in Normal, Ill.

“A significant part of our business is leveraging the technology we built around batteries and battery control systems to help electrify the things that move on our planet,” he said.

Scaringe told TechCrunch that Rivian is in the process of negotiating strategic partnerships with companies that might take a stake in the startup, as well as use its batteries and powertrain in their products.

Trademark applications filed by Rivian in October suggest the company is also planning to expand its own vehicle line-up. As well as the R1T pickup and R1S SUV announced in LA, Rivian has reserved the vehicle names R1A, R1C, R2A, R2C, R2R and R2S.

Scaringe admitted that Rivian has four additional “adventure” vehicles on its immediate roadmap, all using the same battery and powertrain system (dubbed a “skateboard”) as its pickup and SUV. The next two vehicles would be quite a bit smaller than the launch duo, and possibly includes a rally car.  Rivian is not working on a sedan to compete with Tesla’s Model 3, Scaringe said.

Rivian also trademarked the terms “tank turn” and “tank steer,” referring to independently moving wheels that can enable extremely tight turns. Scaringe confirmed that this feature would be available on the R1S, the R1T, and future quad-drive vehicles.

All of these plans — from the multiple models and AI batteries to the strategic partnerships and triple battery life — are ambitious for a company that has yet to demonstrate a moving vehicle, and still about two years from producing its first vehicles.

A history of grand plans

But ambition has never been a problem for Scaringe. In 2010, he persuaded the state of Florida and Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency, to hand over $3.5 million to develop and produce a 60 miles per gallon sports car using advanced manufacturing techniques. Rivian even signed an agreement with NASA to test the high-speed car on the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center.

Scaringe promised a factory in Florida that would employ 1,200 people by 2015, with a new automotive engineering course at the Florida Institute of Technology to produce the skilled workers required. Rivian did complete an initial technology demonstrator vehicle but neither the factory nor the jobs materialized.

“Although we did not get the manufacturing, we’re still very excited about the technology,” Dale Ketchum, VP of Space Florida, told TechCrunch. “We remain optimistic that some of their operations and technology and job generation will eventually occur in Florida.”

Space Florida continues to hold stock warrants in Rivian, issued as part of its grant.

By 2013, Rivian had pivoted to developing electric vehicles in Michigan, California, the UK, and, following the purchase of an ex-Mitsubishi plant in Normal in 2017, Illinois. Rivian has sought public funds there, too. It negotiated nearly $50 million in state tax credits by promising to create 1000 new full-time jobs in Illinois in 2024, and a package of around $4m in local credits.

These include the city of Normal handing over $1 million in cash after Rivian invests $20 million of its own money to refurbish the factory. The town will also provide security and landscaping services for the plant, and even remove snow from its driveways and parking lots for two years.

A bet on job growth

But while the economic benefits of Rivian’s promised jobs lie in the future, Normal is having to tighten its belt today. In February, the town noted that property tax abatements granted to Rivian would reduce its 2018-2019 operating fund by $74,900 and its library fund by $32,200. In March, Normal postponed plans for a new library indefinitely. Scaringe says Rivian currently has just 65 Rivian employees at the Normal facility.

The company says that it has also raised $450 million in capital and debt financing from investors, including Sumitomo Corporation of Americas. Its largest shareholder is Saudi conglomerate Abdul Latif Jameel, whose initial investment Scaringe secured while working on a Master’s degree at MIT.

Following a generally positive reception of its electric pickup and SUV at the LA Auto Show, and a subsequent flurry of $1,000 pre-orders, Rivian now faces the trickier task of bringing them into production in just two years.

Scaringe has promised that both vehicles will be capable of Level 3 autonomous highway driving – something that Tesla also has promised, but has yet to deliver. Although Rivian’s self-driving team is based in Silicon Valley, the company has yet to apply for an autonomous vehicle testing permit from the California DMV.

Scaringe said the company is testing on public roads in California, but in a way that does not require a permit. “We took the decision to be very quiet in stealth and stay below the radar,” he said. “But we will probably have to file for a permit, possibly in the next year.”

Developing and integrating such advanced technology so quickly will put even more pressure on Rivian’s aggressive development cycle. The first big adventure for Rivian’s innovative vehicles won’t be muddy tracks or forest roads, but in factories that are still worryingly empty.

Source: Tech Crunch

WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography, cloaked by the app’s end-to-end encryption. Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp’s automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include “Adult” sections that offer invite links to join rings of users trading images of child exploitation. TechCrunch has reviewed materials showing many of these groups are currently active.

TechCrunch’s investigation shows that Facebook could do more to police WhatsApp and remove this kind of content. Even without technical solutions that would require a weakening of encryption, WhatsApp’s moderators should have been able to find these groups and put a stop to them. Groups with names like “child porn only no adv” and “child porn xvideos” found on the group discovery app “Group Links For Whats” by Lisa Studio don’t even attempt to hide their nature. And a screenshot provided by anti-exploitation startup AntiToxin reveals active WhatsApp groups with names like “Children ” or “videos cp” — a known abbreviation for ‘child pornography’.

A screenshot from today of active child exploitation groups on WhatsApp. Phone numbers and photos redacted. Provided by AntiToxin.

Better manual investigation of these group discovery apps and WhatsApp itself should have immediately led these groups to be deleted and their members banned. While Facebook doubled its moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018 to crack down on election interference, bullying, and other policy violations, that staff does not moderate WhatsApp content. With just 300 employees, WhatsApp runs semi-independently, and the company confirms it handles its own moderation efforts. That’s proving inadequate for policing at 1.5 billion user community.

The findings from the NGOs Screen Savers and Netivei Reshe were written about today by The Financial Times, but TechCrunch is publishing the full report, their translated letter to Facebook translated emails with Facebook, their police report, plus the names of child pornography groups on WhatsApp and group discovery apps the lead to them listed above. An exploitation detection startup called AntiToxin has backed up the report, providing the screenshot above and saying it’s identified more than 1300 videos and photographs of minors involved in sexual acts on WhatsApp groups. Given that Tumblr’s app was recently temporarily removed from the Apple App Store for allegedly harboring child pornography, we’ve asked Apple if it will temporarily suspend WhatsApp but have not heard back. 

Uncovering A Nightmare

In July 2018, the NGOs became aware of the issue after a man reported to one of their hotlines that he’d seen hardcore pornography on WhatsApp. In October, they spent 20 days cataloging over 10 of the child pornography groups, their content, and the apps that allow people to find them.

The NGOs began contacting Facebook’s head of policy Jordana Cutler starting September 4th. They requested a meeting four times to discuss their findings. Cutler asked for email evidence but did not agree to a meeting, instead following Israeli law enforcement’s guidance to instruct researchers to contact the authorities. The NGO reported their findings to Israeli police but declined to provide Facebook with their research. WhatsApp only received their report and the screenshot of active child pornography groups today from TechCrunch.

Listings from a group discovery app of child exploitation groups on WhatsApp. URLs and photos have been redacted.

WhatsApp tells me it’s now investigating the groups visible from the research we provided. A Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch “Keeping people safe on Facebook is fundamental to the work of our teams around the world. We offered to work together with police in Israel to launch an investigation to stop this abuse.” A statement from the Israeli Police’s Head of the Child Online Protection Bureau Meir Hayoun notes that: “In past meetings with Jordana, I instructed her to always tell anyone who wanted to report any pedophile content to contact the Israeli police to report a complaint.”

A WhatsApp spokesperson tells me that while legal adult pornography is allowed on WhatsApp, it banned 130,000 accounts in a recent 10-day period for violating its policies against child exploitation. In a statement, WhatsApp wrote that:

“WhatsApp has a zero-tolerance policy around child sexual abuse. We deploy our most advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, to scan profile photos and images in reported content, and actively ban accounts suspected of sharing this vile content. We also respond to law enforcement requests around the world and immediately report abuse to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Sadly, because both app stores and communications services are being misused to spread abusive content, technology companies must work together to stop it.”

But it’s that over-reliance on technology and subsequent under-staffing that seems to have allowed the problem to fester. AntiToxin’s CEO Zohar Levkovitz tells me “Can it be argued that Facebook has unwittingly growth-hacked pedophilia? Yes. As parents and tech executives we cannot remain complacent to that.”

Automated Moderation Doesn’t Cut It

WhatsApp introduced an invite link feature for groups in late 2016, making it much easier to discover and join groups without knowing any members. Competitors like Telegram had benefited as engagement in their public group chats rose. WhatsApp likely saw group invite links as an opportunity for growth, but didn’t allocate enough resources to monitor groups of strangers assembling around different topics. Apps sprung up to allow people to browse different groups by category. Some usage of these apps is legitimate, as people seek communities to discuss sports or entertainment. But many of these apps now feature “Adult” sections that can include invite links to both legal pornography sharing groups as well as illegal child exploitation content.

A WhatsApp spokesperson tells me that it scans all unencrypted information on its network — basically anything outside of chat threads themselves — including user profile photos, group profile photos, and group information. It seeks to match content against the PhotoDNA banks of indexed child pornography that many tech companies use to identify previously reported inappropriate imagery. If it find a match, that account, or that group and all of its members receive a lifetime ban from WhatsApp.

A WhatsApp group discovery app’s listings of child exploitation groups on WhatsApp

If imagery doesn’t match the database but is suspected of showing child exploitation, it’s manually reviewed. If found to be illegal, WhatsApp bans the accounts and/or groups, prevents it from being uploaded in the future, and reports the content and accounts to the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children. The one example group reported to WhatsApp by the Financial Times was already flagged for human review by its automated system, and was then banned along with all 256 members.

WhatsApp says it purposefully does not provide a search function for people or groups within its app, and does not encourage the publication of group invite links. It’s already working with Google and Apple to enforce its terms of service against apps like the child exploitation group discovery apps that abuse WhatsApp. Those kind of groups already can’t be found in Apple’s App Store, but remain available on Google Play. We’ve contacted Google Play to ask how it addresses illegal content discovery apps and whether Group Links For Whats by Lisa Studio will remain available, and will update if we hear back.

But the larger question is that if WhatsApp was already aware of these group discovery apps, why wasn’t it using them to track down and ban groups that violate its policies. A spokesperson claimed that group names with “CP” or other indicators of child exploitation are some of the signals it uses to hunt these groups, and that names in group discovery apps don’t necessarily correlate to the group names on WhatsApp. But TechCrunch then provided a screenshot showing active groups within WhatsApp as of this morning with names like “Children ” or “videos cp”. That shows that WhatsApp’s automated systems and lean staff are not enough to prevent the spread of illegal imagery.

The situation also raises questions about the tradeoffs of encryption as some governments like Australia seek to prevent its usage by messaging apps. The technology can protect free speech, improve the safety of political dissidents, and prevent censorship by both governments and tech platforms. However, it can also make detecting crime more difficult, exacerbating the harm caused to victims.

WhatsApp’s spokesperson tells me that it stands behind strong end-to-end encryption that protects conversations with loved ones, doctors, and more. They said there are plenty of good reasons for end-to-end encryption and it will continue to support it. Changing that in any way, even to aid catching those that exploit children, would be require a significant change to the privacy guarantees it’s given users. They suggested that on-device scanning for illegal content would have to be implemented by phone makers to prevent its spread without hampering encryption.

But for now, WhatsApp needs more human moderators willing to use proactive and unscalable manual investigation to address its child pornography problem. With Facebook earning billions in profit per quarter and staffing up its own moderation ranks, there’s no reason WhatsApp’s supposed autonomy should prevent it from applying adequate resources to the issue. WhatsApp sought to grow through big public groups, but failed to implement the necessary precautions to ensure they didn’t become havens for child exploitation. Tech companies like WhatsApp need to stop assuming cheap and efficient technological solutions are sufficient. If they want to make money off of huge user bases, they must be willing to pay to protect and police them.

Source: Tech Crunch