Equifax exec charged with insider trading, selling shares ahead of hack news

Former Equifax exec Jun Ying has been charged with insider trading, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ying is accused of knowing that Equifax had been hacked and selling company shares before the public was notified.

Ying, who was “next in line to the be company’s global CIO, allegedly used confidential information entrusted to him by the company to conclude that Equifax had suffered a serious breach,” says the SEC release. He sold $1 million in shares and avoided a potential loss of $117,000.

Following the revelation of a widespread hack at the credit reporting agency, Equifax shares took a tumble on the stock market. Shares were above $142 and quickly fell to beneath $93 in the subsequent days.

Ying wasn’t the only employee who sold shares, resulting in several execs getting accused of insider trading. TechCrunch wrote something at the time about different executives, and received this defense from Equifax, particularly with regards to the CFO.

“As announced in the press release, Equifax discovered the cybersecurity incident on Saturday, July 29. The company acted immediately to stop the intrusion.

The three executives who sold a small percentage of their Equifax shares on Tuesday, August 1, and Wednesday, August 2, had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares.”


Source: Tech Crunch

Google explores how light fields shape VR environments in new free app

Lighting can make or break the right photo — when it comes to static environments inside virtual reality that users can move around in, this becomes exponentially more true.

Today, Google released a new app for VR devices focused on helping users make sense of “light fields.” They’ve also got a blog post running down some of the research work they’re doing.

Light fields — in a practical sense — are basically different perspectives of a point in space based on how that lighting looks from that angle. If you look at something like your phone screen, part of what makes it look realistic are how images reflect off of it. Most physical objects don’t offer so clear a mirror of the world around it, but even things like your own skin can have a dramatically different looking texture based on where your eyes are.

In a game engine-rendered world, if you have enough compute power you can reflect the hell out of everything to varying levels of success. When it comes to light fields based on real-world camera capture, companies like Google are using multiple cameras to capture multiple perspectives of objects and infer the perspectives between the lenses. With this you can get perspective of objects that move with you with lighting that changes as you move your head.

It’s a complicated way of saying that real-world scenarios look a lot more realistic and just… better. That’s just my take on it, but if you want to read more on how the Google sees Google’s new app, “Welcome to Light Fields” seeks to educate users on what exactly light fields are and how important the technology could be to unlocking more pleasant-feeling virtual reality experiences. The app seems to consist of a number of fairly simple scenarios where users can walk around and observe how light changes these environments.

The app is available for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality platforms. If you’re wondering why the company left out its own Daydream platform, it’s because you really need positional tracking in order to see what’s happening with light fields. Daydream will be gaining that tracking soon with the launch of Lenovo’s standalone 6DoF headset, but we’re still waiting on that one to go on sale.

Light fields present a number of technical issues for developers that go beyond just capturing them; chief among the issues is bandwidth. Light fields turn every file into a potentially massive endeavor to ship easily. For the photo environments Google seems to be playing with here, it’s still difficult enough, but video files that are just a few minutes long can stretch into the terabytes quite quickly, so there are clearly still some things to figure out here.


Source: Tech Crunch

Security researchers find flaws in AMD chips but raise eyebrows with rushed disclosure

 A newly discovered set of vulnerabilities in AMD chips is making waves not because of the scale of the flaws, but rather the rushed, market-ready way they were disclosed by the researchers. When was the last time a bug had its own professionally shot video and PR rep, yet the company was only alerted 24 hours ahead of time? The flaws may be real, but the precedent set here is an unsavory one. Read More


Source: Tech Crunch

How reinventing software testing can transform your business — and change the world

 Software isn’t “eating the world.” It’s feeding the world, healing the world, educating the world and bringing the world’s top minds together to solve our most challenging problems. At least that’s what I’ve witnessed while leading digital transformation initiatives across organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Genentech and… Read More


Source: Tech Crunch

Legal tech is opening the system to those who need legal representation the most

 Jane (whose name changed for privacy purposes) had been living with her elderly mother for more than 20 years in a rent-stabilized apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. But three years ago, Jane’s landlord began filing frivolous lawsuits against her and her mother in an effort to evict them from their home. While Jane was delinquent with rent, her apartment was in… Read More


Source: Tech Crunch

Universe, an Instagram for building mobile websites, nabs funding from YC

 As social media sites grow more massive and all-encompassing, one startup is looking to bring back the friendly customization of Myspace to a new generation of users looking to define their online presence in a unique way. Universe is a mobile-based website builder for the social media era, eschewing complicated templates for easily customizable website “filters” that pin… Read More


Source: Tech Crunch

Snoop Dogg’s venture firm just closed its debut fund with $45 million

 Snoop Dogg, the rapper, entertainer and businessman, can claim another small victory in a long string of career highlights. The venture firm that he co-founded a couple of years ago, Casa Verde Capital, has closed its debut fund with $45 million. The money was raised in earnest last year, says managing partner Karan Wadhera, an alum of both Goldman Sachs and Nomura Securities who joined… Read More


Source: Tech Crunch

Lyft says its revenue is growing nearly 3x faster than Uber’s

 Lyft made a lot of progress in 2017, helped by strong market expansion within the U.S., and riding some very bad news from its primary rival Uber. That’s helped it grow revenue to over $1 billion as measured by GAAP standards for its fiscal 2017, with a particularly strong Q4 during which its revenue outpaced Uber’s by 2.75x, lifted (get it?) 168 percent year-over-year, vs. 61… Read More


Source: Tech Crunch

Third-party AR lenses will appear in Snapchat’s main carousel soon

 After leading by example for quite a while, Snap is going to start putting AR lenses built by third-party creators front-and-center in the Snapchat app. The move, first reported by Mashable, will bring creator content to the main stage. While third-party filters have been a hallmark of the app for quite awhile, Snapchat has generally stuck to its own guns when it comes to its lenses.… Read More


Source: Tech Crunch

Making mastodon gummies, Geltor is recreating a truly paleo diet

 Most paleo dieters try to stick to some type of regimen similar to what they think our distant, pre-agricultural ancestors might’ve eaten. Few, however, talk about eating literally what those ancestors ate. Yet for Geltor, a Silicon Valley-backed start-up based in San Leandro, synthethic biology became the ticket for creating just such a literal understanding of the paleo diet.… Read More


Source: Tech Crunch