Ideaforge

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re:

• Pretty good at tech stuff
• Spending time with your family for Thanksgiving
• Bored because you’re reading this article right now

You may not celebrate Thanksgiving where you live, but most of our readers are American. So let’s use this opportunity to review the tech setup of your family. You don’t want to get a call in a few months because your aunt’s computer caught a nasty ransomware and she can’t find her photos again.

Updates

If you want to get the latest security patches for a phone or a computer, you have to turn on automatic updates. Modern devices are pretty good at enabling automatic updates by default, but make sure it’s turned on.

• On Windows 10, search for “Windows update settings” in the search bar, click on “Advanced options” and select “Automatic”.
• On macOS, open the App Store and install the latest version of macOS (10.14 Mojave). Then open System Preferences, click on “Software Update” and turn on automatic updates. Turn on automatic updates in the preferences of the App Store as well so that apps keep working over the years.
• On iOS, open the Settings app, go to General > Software Update and update to iOS 12. Go to the same menu after the update and turn on automatic updates. You can also turn on automatic updates in “iTunes & App Stores” so that apps keep working over the years.
• On Android, it’s a bit more… complicated. Manufacturers and carriers push operating system update themselves, so look for system updates in the phone settings — it may vary from one phone to another. After that, open Google Play, go to the settings and turn on automatic updates so that apps keep working over the years.

Backups

There are many ways to backup a computer and a phone, so I won’t list them all. On a computer, you can buy a cheap external hard drive and set up automatic backups using Time Machine (macOS) or File History (Windows 10).

You can also configure a cloud backup solution in case you want to make sure you can access backups and see that everything is working. Backblaze and Arq Backup are pretty good solutions.

Ideally, you should find a way so that it’s completely transparent for your family. If you tell your in-laws that they have to make a backup every week, chances are they won’t do it. Giving a hard drive is not enough.

As for phones, it’s a different story. If it’s an iPhone, turn on iCloud for contacts, calendars and other sensitive data. Most people don’t backup their phone to iCloud though because the 5GB limit is too low. You can either pay for an iCloud plan ($1 per month for 50GB) or set up a photo backup solution using an app. Dropbox, OneDrive and Google’s services offer photo backup services.

On Android, many people now use Google Photos. It’s a good way to make sure your photos are saved somewhere. Make sure that contacts, calendars and other sensitive data are also synchronized with a Google account.

Disk encryption

On a Mac, go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault and turn on disk encryption. If your sibling loses their laptop and FileVault is not enabled, anybody could get the data on that computer and use it against your sibling. It’s completely transparent once it’s set up.

On Windows, turn on BitLocker. Microsoft doesn’t include BitLocker with Windows 10 Home edition. Install VeraCrypt in that case.

Passcodes

If you see a phone without a passcode, say something. It’s important because nasty things could happen if they lose their phone. Passcodes are also tied to disk encryption and various security features.

Six digits are better than four digits, but anything is better than nothing.

Security has always been about finding the right compromise between usability and perfect protection. Those tips aren’t going to make your family members perfectly secure, but it’s a good first step. Once you’re done with that, you can put all those devices down and spend some time with your family. Enjoy!

Source: Tech Crunch

Berlin-based Zizoo — a startup which self describes as booking.com for boats — has nabbed a €6.5 million (~$7.4M) Series A to help more millennials find holiday yachts to mess about taking selfies in.

Zizoo says its Series A — which was led by Revo Capital, with participation from new investors including Coparion, Check24 Ventures and PUSH Ventures — was “significantly oversubscribed”.

Existing investors including MairDumont Ventures, aws Founders Fund, Axel Springer Digital Ventures and Russmedia International also participated in the round.

We first came across Zizoo some three years ago when they won our pitching competition in Budapest.

We’re happy to say they’ve come a long way since, with a team that’s now 60-people strong, and business relationships with ~1,500 charter companies — serving up more than 21,000 boats for rent, across 30 countries, via a search and book platform that caters to a full range of “sailing experiences”, from experienced sailor to novice and, on the pricing front, luxury to budget.

Registered users passed the 100,000 mark this year, according to founder and CEO Anna Banicevic. She also tells us that revenue growth has been 2.5x year-on-year for the past three years.

Commenting on the Series A in a statement, Revo Capital’s managing director Cenk Bayrakdar said: “The yacht charter market is one of the most underserved verticals in the travel industry despite its huge potential. We believe in Zizoo’s successful future as a leading SaaS-enabled marketplace.”

The new funds will be put towards growing the business — including by expanding into new markets; plus product development and recruitment across the board.

Zizoo founder and CEO Anna Banicevic at its Berlin offices

“We’re looking to strengthen our presence in the US, where we’ve seen the biggest YoY growth while also expand our inventory in hot locations such as Greece, Spain and the Caribbean,” says Banicevic on market expansion. “We will also be aggressively pushing markets such as France and Spain where consumers show a growing interest in boat holidays.”

Zizoo is intending to hire 40 more employees over the course of the next year — to meet what it dubs “the booming demand for sailing experiences, especially among millennials”.

So why do millennials love boating holidays so much? Zizoo says the 20-40 age range makes up the “majority” of its customer.

Banicevic reckons the answer is they’re after a slice of ‘affordable luxury’.

“After the recent boom of the cruising industry, millennials are well familiar with the concept of holidays at sea. However, sailing holidays (yachting) are much more fitting to the millennial’s strive for independence, adventure and experiences off the beaten path,” she suggests.

“Yachting is a growing trend no longer reserved for the rich and famous — and millennials want a piece of that. On our platform, users can book a boat holiday for as low as £25 per person per night (this is an example of a sailboat in Croatia).”

On the competition front, she says the main competition is the offline sphere (“where 90% of business is conducted by a few large and many small travel agents”).

But a few rival platforms have emerged “in the last few years” — and here she reckons Zizoo has managed to outgrow the startup competition “thanks to our unique vertically integrated business model, offering suppliers a booking management system and making it easy for the user to book a boat holiday”.

Source: Tech Crunch

Ah, wonderful to see you again, sir. The usual? Kool-Aid Grain Alcohol Martini with a twisty straw. Of course. And I see you’re wearing a new watch. The MQT Essential Mirror. Quite striking.

I see the watch has a quartz ETA movement – an acceptable movement by any standard – and a very elegant face and hands combination. What’s that? It has a quickset date? Of course, no watch over $200 would skimp on that simple complication. $251 you say? On a silver mesh band, also known as a Milanese? A relative bargain, given its pedigree.

Of course, sir. I’ve spoken with the chef and she’s preparing your Ritz crackers with Easy Cheese as we speak. Do tell me more about this watch. It seems to be one of your only redeeming features.

What was that? No, I said nothing under my breath. Do go on.

Made in Berne, Switzerland, you say, by a pair of watchmakers, Hanna and Tom Heer, who left their high-paying jobs to make watches? And their goal is not to create a beautiful quartz piece that is eminently wearable yet quite delicate? Laudable, sir, laudable. I especially like the thin 41mm case. It’s so light and airy! Not unlike your Supreme baseball cap.

No, of course sir, we still give away all the mints you can eat after the meal. If you’d like I can tie that lobster bib around your neck. There we are. Nice and snug.

And they make a marble version? Wonderful! That hearkens back to the Tissot Rock Watches of yore. A delight, truly.

You’ve got a bit of cheese in your beard. Let me get… oh. I’m sorry to say that my hand got into the way of your pendulous tongue. I’m very sorry, sir.

Well, it’s been wonderful chatting with you. I’ll leave you to your Rick and Morty comics. What’s that? Caviar in an ice cream cone? With sprinkles? Of course. I’ll see what I can do. I do commend you, sir, all things being equal, on your taste in watches.

Source: Tech Crunch

Google has announced its plan for combating election interference in the European Union, ahead of elections next May when up to 350 million voters across the region will vote to elect 705 Members of the European Parliament.

In a blog post laying out a narrow approach to democracy-denting disinformation, Google says it will introduce a verification system for “EU election advertisers to make sure they are who they say they are”, and require that any election ads disclose who is paying for them.

The details of the verification process are not yet clear so it’s not possible to assess how robust a check this might be.

But Facebook, which also recently announced checks on political advertisers, had to delay its UK launch of ID checks earlier this month, after the beta system was shown being embarrassingly easy to game. So just because a piece of online content has an ‘ID badge’ on it does not automatically make it bona fide.

Google’s framing of “EU election advertisers” suggests it will exclude non-EU based advertisers from running election ads, at least as it’s defining these ads. (But we’ve asked for a confirm on that.)

What’s very clear from the blog post is that the adtech giant is defining political ads as an extremely narrowly category — with only ads that explicitly mention political parties, candidates or a current officeholder falling under the scope of the policy.

Here’s how Google explains what it means by “election ads”:

“To bring people more information about the election ads they see across Google’s ad networks, we’ll require that ads that mention a political party, candidate or current officeholder make it clear to voters who’s paying for the advertising.”

So any ads still intended to influence public opinion — and thus sway potential voters — but which cite issues, rather than parties and/or politicians, will fall entirely outside the scope of its policy.

Yet of course issues are material to determining election outcomes.

Issue-based political propaganda is also — as we all know very well now — a go-to tool for the shadowy entities using Internet platforms for highly affordable, mass-scale online disinformation campaigns.

The Kremlin seized on divisive issues for much of the propaganda it deployed across social media ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections, for example.

Russia didn’t even always wrap its politically charged infowar bombs in an ad format either.

All of which means that any election ‘security’ effort that fixes on a narrow definition (like “election ads”) seems unlikely to offer much more than a micro bump in the road for anyone wanting to pay to play with democracy.

The only real fix for this problem is likely full disclosure of all advertising and advertisers; Who’s paying for every online ad, regardless of what it contains, plus a powerful interface for parsing that data mountain.

Of course neither Google nor Facebook is offering that — yet.

Because, well, this is self-regulation, ahead of election laws catching up.

What Google is offering for the forthcoming EU parliament elections is an EU-specific Election Ads Transparency Report (akin to the one it already launched for the US mid-terms) — which it says it will introduce (before the May vote) to provide a “searchable ad library to provide more information about who is purchasing election ads, whom they’re targeted to, and how much money is being spent”.

“Our goal is to make this information as accessible and useful as possible to citizens, practitioners, and researchers,” it adds.

The rest of its blog post is given over to puffing up a number of unrelated steps it says it will also take, in the name of “supporting the European Union Parliamentary Elections”, but which don’t involve Google itself having to be any more transparent about its own ad platform.

So it says it will —

• be working with data from Election Commissions across the member states to “make authoritative electoral information available and help people find the info they need to get out and vote”
• offering in-person security training to the most vulnerable groups, who face increased risks of phishing attacks (“We’ll be walking them through Google’s Advanced Protection Program, our strongest level of account security and Project Shield, a free service that uses Google technology to protect news sites and free expression from DDoS attacks on the web.”)
• collaborating — via its Google News Lab entity — with news organizations across all 27 EU Member States to “support online fact checking”. (The Lab will “be offering a series of free verification workshops to point journalists to the latest tools and technology to tackle disinformation and support their coverage of the elections”)

No one’s going to turn their nose up at security training and freebie resource.

But the scale of the disinformation challenge is rather larger and more existential than a few free workshops and an anti-DDoS tool can fix.

The bulk of Google’s padding here also fits comfortably into its standard operating philosophy where the user-generated content that fuels its business is concerned; aka ‘tackle bad speech with more speech’. Crudely put: More speech, more ad revenue.

Though, as independent research has repeatedly shown, fake news flies much faster and is much, much harder to unstick than truth.

Which means fact checkers, and indeed journalists, are faced with the Sisyphean task of unpicking all the BS that Internet platforms are liberally fencing and accelerating (and monetizing as they do so).

The economic incentives inherent in the dominant adtech platform of the Internet should really be front and center when considering the modern disinformation challenge.

But of course Google and Facebook aren’t going to say that.

Meanwhile lawmakers are on the back foot. The European Commission has done something, signing tech firms up to a voluntary Code of Practice for fighting fake news — Google and Facebook among them.

Although, even in that dilute, non-legally binding document, signatories are supposed to have agreed to take action to make both political advertising and issue based advertising “more transparent”.

Yet here’s Google narrowly defining election ads in a way that lets issues slide on past.

We asked the company what it’s doing to prevent issue-based ads from interfering in EU elections. At the time of writing it had not responded to that question.

Safe to say, ‘election security’ looks to be a very long way off indeed.

Not so the date of the EU poll. That’s fast approaching: May 23 through 26, 2019.

Source: Tech Crunch

Apple’s HomePod is a distant third behind Amazon and Google when it comes to market share for smart speakers that double up as home hubs, with less than 5 percent share of the market for these devices in the US, according to one recent survey. And its flagship personal assistant Siri has also been determined to lag behind Google when it comes to comprehension and precision. But there are signs that the company is intent on doubling down on AI, putting it at the center of its next generation of products, and it’s using acquisitions to help it do so.

The Information reports that Apple has quietly acquired Silk Labs, a startup based out of San Francisco that had worked on AI-based personal assistant technology both for home hubs and mobile devices.

There are two notable things about Silk’s platform that set it apart from that of other assistants: it was able to modify its behaviour as it learned more about its users over time (both using sound and vision); and it was designed to work on-device — a nod to privacy and concerns about “always on” speakers listening to you; improved processing on devices; and the constraints of the cloud and networking technology.

Apple has not returned requests for comment, but we’ve found that at least some of Silk Labs’ employees appear already to be working for Apple (LinkedIn lists nine employees for Silk Labs, all with engineering backgrounds).

That means it’s not clear if this is a full acquisition or an aqui-hire — as we learn more we will update this post — but bringing on the team (and potentially the technology) speaks to Apple’s need and interest in doubling down to build products that are not mere repeats of what we already have on the market.

Silk Labs first emerged in February 2016, the brainchild of Adreas Gal, the former CTO of Mozilla, who had also created the company’s ill-fated mobile platform, Firefox OS; and Michael Vines, who came from Qualcomm. (Vines, incidentally, moved on in June 2018 to become the principal engineer for a blockchain startup, Solana.)

Its first product was originally conceived as integrated software and hardware: the company raised just under $165,000 in a Kickstarter to build and ship Sense, a smart speaker that would provide a way to control connected home devices and answer questions, and — with a camera integrated into the device — be able to monitor rooms and learn to recognise people and their actions.

Just four months later, Silk Labs announced that it would shelve the Sense hardware to focus specifically on the software, called Silk, after it said it started to receive inquiries from OEMs interested in getting a version of the platform to run on their own devices (it also raised money outside of Kickstarter, around $4 million).

Potentially, Silk could give those OEMs a way of differentiating from the plethora of devices that are already on the market. In addition to products from the likes of Google and Amazon, there are also a number of speakers powered by those assistants, along with devices using Cortana from Microsoft.

When Silk Labs announced that it was halting hardware development, it noted that it was in talks for some commercial partnerships (while at the same time open sourcing a basic version of the Silk platform for creating communications with IoT devices).

Silk Labs never disclosed the names of those partners, but buying and shutting down the company would be one way of making sure that the technology stays with just one company.

It’s temping to match up what Silk Labs has built up to now specifically with Apple’s efforts specifically in its own smart speaker, the HomePod.

Specifically, it could provide it with a smarter engine that learns about users, operates even if internet is down, and secures user privacy, and crucially becomes a lynchpin for how you might operate everything else in your connected life.

That would make for a mix of features that would clearly separate it from the market leader of the moment, and play into aspects — specifically privacy — that people are increasingly starting to value more.

But if you consider that spectrum of hardware and services that Apple is now involved in, you can see that the Silk team, and potentially the IP, may end up having also a wider impact.

Apple has had a mixed run when it comes to AI. The company was an early mover when it first put its Siri voice assistant into its iPhone 4S in 2011, and for a long time people would always mention it in conjunction with Amazon and Google (less so Microsoft) when they would lament about how a select few technology companies were snapping up all the AI talent, leaving little room for other companies to get a look in to building products or having a stake in how it was being developed on a larger scale.

More recently, though, it appears that the likes of Amazon — with its Alexa-powered portfolio of devices — and Google have stolen a march when it comes to consumer products built with AI technologies at their core, and as their primary interface with their users. (Siri, if anything, sometimes feels like a nuisance when you accidentally call it into action by pressing the Touch Bar or the home button on my older model iPhone.)

But it’s almost certainly wrong to guess Apple — one of the world’s biggest companies, known for playing its hand close to its chest — has lost its way in this area.

There have been a few indications, though, that it’s getting serious and rethinking how it is doing things.

A few months ago, it reorganized its AI teams under ex-Googler John Giannandrea, losing some talent in the process but more significantly setting the pace for how its Siri and Core ML teams would work together and across different projects at the company, from developer tools to mapping and more. 

Apple has also made dozens of smaller and bigger acquisitions in the last several years that speak to it picking up more talent and IP in the quest to build out its AI muscle across different areas, from augmented reality and computer vision through to big data processing at the back end. It’s even acquired other startups, such as VocalIQ in England, that focus on voice interfaces and ‘learn’ from interactions.

To be sure, the company has started to see a deceleration of iPhone unit sales (if not revenues: prices are higher than ever), and that will mean a focus newer devices, and ever more weight put on the services that run on these devices. Services can be augmented and expanded, and they represent recurring income — two big reasons why Apple will shift to putting more investment into them.

Expect to see that AI net covering not just the iPhone, but computers, Apple’s smart watch, its own smart speaker, the HomePod, Apple Music, Health and your whole digital life.

Source: Tech Crunch

For most Americans, the thought of cars autonomously navigating our streets still feels like a science fiction story. Despite the billions of dollars invested into the industry in recent years, no self-driving car company has proven that its technology is capable of producing mass-market autonomous vehicles in even the near-distant future.

In fact, a recent IIHS investigationidentified significant flaws in assisted driving technology and concluded that in all likelihood “autonomous vehicle[s] that can go anywhere, anytime” will not be market-ready for “quite some time.” The complexity of the problem has even led Uber to potentially spin off their autonomous car unit as a means of soliciting minority investments — in short, the cost of solving this problem is time and billions (if not trillions) of dollars.

Current shortcomings aside, there is a legitimate need for self-driving technology: every year, nearly 1.3 million people die and 2 million people are injured in car crashes. In the U.S. alone, 40,000 people died last year due to car accidents, putting car accident-based deaths in the top 15 leading causes of death in America. GM has determined that the major cause for 94 percent of those car crashes is human error. Independent studies have verified that technological advances such as ridesharing have reduced automotive accidents by removing from our streets drivers who should not be operating vehicles.

We should have every reason to believe that autonomous driving systems — determinant and finely tuned computers always operating at peak performance — will all but eliminate on-road fatalities. The challenge of developing self-driving technology is rooted in replicating the incredibly nuanced cognitive decisions we make every time we get behind the wheel.

Anyone with experience in the artificial intelligence space will tell you that quality and quantity of training data is one of the most important inputs in building real-world-functional AI. This is why today’s large technology companies continue to collect and keep detailed consumer data, despite recent public backlash. From search engines, to social media, to self driving cars, data — in some cases even more than the underlying technology itself — is what drives value in today’s technology companies.

It should be no surprise then that autonomous vehicle companies do not publicly share data, even in instances of deadly crashes. When it comes to autonomous vehicles, the public interest (making safe self-driving cars available as soon as possible) is clearly at odds with corporate interests (making as much money as possible on the technology).

We need to create industry and regulatory environments in which autonomous vehicle companies compete based upon the quality of their technology — not just upon their ability to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to collect and silo as much data as possible (yes, this is how much gathering this data costs). In today’s environment the inverse is true: autonomous car manufacturers are focusing on are gathering as many miles of data as possible, with the intention of feeding more information into their models than their competitors, all the while avoiding working together.

The siloed petabytes (and soon exabytes) of road data that these companies hoard should be, without giving away trade secrets or information about their models, pooled into a nonprofit consortium, perhaps even a government entity, where every mile driven is shared and audited for quality. By all means, take this data to your private company and consume it, make your models smarter and then provide more road data to the pool to make everyone smarter — and more importantly, increase the pace at which we have truly autonomous vehicles on the road, and their safety once they’re there.

The complexity of this data is diverse, yet public — I am not suggesting that people hand over private, privileged data, but actively pool and combine what the cars are seeing. There’s a reason that many of the autonomous car companies are driving millions of virtual miles — they’re attempting to get as much active driving data as they can. Beyond the fact that they drove those miles, what truly makes that data something that they have to hoard? By sharing these miles, by seeing as much of the world in as much detail as possible, these companies can focus on making smarter, better autonomous vehicles and bring them to market faster.

If you’re reading this and thinking it’s deeply unfair, I encourage you to once again consider 40,000 people are preventably dying every year in America alone. If you are not compelled by the massive life-saving potential of the technology, consider that publicly licenseable self-driving data sets would accelerate innovation by removing a substantial portion of the capital barrier-to-entry in the space and increasing competition.

Though big technology and automotive companies may scoff at the idea of sharing their data, the competition generated from a level data playing field could create tens of thousands of new high-tech jobs. Any government dollar spent on aggregating road data would be considered capitalized as opposed to lost — public data sets can be reused by researchers for AI and cross-disciplinary projects for many years to come.

The most ethical (and most economically sensible) choice is that all data generated by autonomous vehicle companies should be part of a contiguous system built to make for a smarter, safer humanity. We can’t afford to wait any longer.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook has recruited Kate Patchen, a veteran of the U.S. Department of Justice who led its antitrust office in Silicon Valley, to be a director and associate general counsel of litigation.

Patchen takes up her post amid ongoing scandals and reputation crises for her new employer, joining Facebook this month, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The move was spotted earlier by the FT, which reports that Facebook also posted a job listing on LinkedIn for a “lead counsel” in Washington to handle competition issues two weeks ago — suggesting a broader effort to bulk up its in-house expertise.

Patchen brings to her new employer a wealth of experience on the antitrust topic, having spent 16 years at the DoJ, where she began as a trial attorney before becoming an assistant chief in the antitrust division in 2014. Two years later she was made chief.

We reached out to Facebook about the hire and it acknowledged our email but did not immediately provide comment on its decision to recruit a specialist in antitrust enforcement.

The social media giant certainly has plenty playing on its mind on this front.

In 2016 it landed firmly on lawmakers’ radar and in hot political waters when the extent of Kremlin-funded election interference activity on the platform first emerged. Since then a string of security and data misuse scandals have only dialed up the political pressure on Facebook.

Domestic lawmakers are now most actively discussing how to regulate social media. Although competition scrutiny is increasing on big tech in general, with calls from some quarters to break up platform giants as a fix for a range of damaging impacts.

The FT notes, for example, that democratic lawmakers recently introduced legislation to address “the threat of economic concentration.” And the sight of Democrats pushing for tougher competition enforcement suggests the party’s love affair with Silicon Valley tech giants is well and truly over.

In Europe, competition regulators have already moved against big tech, issuing two very large fines in recent years against Google products, with more investigations ongoing.

Amazon is also now on the Commission’s radar. At a national level, EU competition regulators have been paying increasing attention to how the adtech industry is dominated by the duopoly of Google and Facebook.

Patchen, meanwhile, joins Facebook at the same time as some long-serving veterans are headed out the door — including public policy chief Elliot Schrage.

Schrage’s departure has been in train for some months, but a leaked internal memo we obtained this week suggests he’s being packaged up as a convenient fall guy for a freshly cracked public relations scandal.

Last month Facebook announced it was hiring more new blood: Former deputy prime minister of the U.K., Nick Clegg, to be its new head of global policy and comms — with Schrage slated then to be staying on in an advisory capacity.

In other recent senior leadership moves, Facebook CSO Alex Stamos also left the company this summer, while chief legal officer Colin Stretch announced he would leave at the end of the year.

But according to a Recode report this month, Stretch has now put his exit on hold — until at least next summer — apparently deciding to stay to help out with ongoing legal and political crises.

Source: Tech Crunch

Elon Musk’s dabble with the doobage in a September radio interview may have sparked more than just an outpouring of adulation from his acolytes (and a fairly interesting conversation around artificial intelligence, social media, invention, and space).

The Washington Post reports that the folks at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were less than amused with Musk’s antics and have ordered a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing as a response to the colorful chief executive’s shenanigans.

In an interview, NASA associate administrator for human exploration, William Gerstenmaier told the Post that the review will begin next year and would examine the “safety culture” of both Boeing and SpaceX.

Rather than focus on the safety of the actual rockets, the Post said that the review would look at the hours employees work, drug policies, leadership and management styles, and the responsiveness of both companies to safety concerns from employees. 

The review is going to be led by the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance within NASA, which has conducted similar probes before, according to the Post report.

According to the NASA official, the process could be “pretty invasive” with the potential for hundreds of interviews with employees at every level and across all locations where the companies operate.

At stake is the potential $6.8 billion in contracts the two companies received in 2014 to revive crewed missions to space. SpaceX grabbed $2.6 billion from NASA for the program, while the remainder went to Boeing.

Both companies have stumbled as they test their crewed systems to get NASA astronauts into orbit. Boeing still needs to test the heat shields and parachute systems of its spacecraft and address the potential for propellant leakage during the emergency abort process.

SpaceX also is having problems with its parachute system.

In a statement given to the Post, SpaceX said, “We couldn’t be more proud of all that we have already accomplished together with NASA, and we look forward to returning human spaceflight capabilities to the United States.”

Source: Tech Crunch