Tech Nuggets with the Technology

Sunday, June 16, 2019

China’s housing unicorn Danke appoints ex-Baidu exec as new COO

A few months after nabbing a handsome $500 million funding round, China’s shared housing startup Danke Apartment got a talent boost.

On Monday, Danke announced the appointment of Gu Guoliang as its new chief operating officer to ramp up the company’s offline operational crew. Gu, whose nickname is Michael, stepped down from Baidu after five years as one of the key figures in search, historically the company’s biggest revenue-generating division. He’s known to have managed several tens of thousands of marketing staff and helped generate sales of close to 100 billion yuan ($14.44 billion) for Baidu annually.

Gu’s arrival followed a period of explosive expansion at Danke, which is now managing almost 500,000 units of rooms across 10 Chinese cities after founding four years ago. The startup takes the co-living approach akin to that of WeWork’s Welive and rents out fully furnished apartments targeted at young professionals who can’t afford a full suite. Backed by Tiger Global and Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Financial, Danke’s valuation crossed $2 billion in its funding round in February.

Gu is one of the former Baidu executives who resigned during a recent top-level exodus (report in Chinese) that involved at least five leaders, including the search division boss Xiang Hailong, to whom Gu reported. There were speculations that Xiang’s exit might have triggered his lieutenants to leave, though TechCrunch has learned from a person close to Gu that he had left “one to two weeks” prior to Xiang’s departure.

For Gu, joining Danke would almost feel like returning home. “We welcome our comrade and good friend Michael,” said Danke chief executive Gao Jing, who previously worked alongside Gu at Nuomi, the local services startup that was sold to Baidu for $3.2 billion and became integral to the internet giant’s online-to-offline business. Derek Shen, an investor and current chairman of Danke, co-founded Nuomi in 2010 before heading up LinkedIn China between 2014 and 2017. Several other core members of Danke have also hailed from Nuomi.

Danke is confident that Gu’s addition will be a boon to its operational capacity. “Gu has abundant experience in operational management, sharp business insights, outstanding leadership, and a deep understanding of the internet sector and user needs,” said Gao. “Under his direction, Danke will enter a new phase of refined operation.”

By that, Gao means Gu will be tasked with rolling out more targeted marketing, more efficient housing renovation, more precise acquisition of apartment space, among other quality-control measures to drive sustainable growth at the company.

Prenda Law's Paul Hansmeier sentenced to 14 years for a fraud scheme that involved uploading porn videos and then threatening to sue people who downloaded them (Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica)

Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
Prenda Law's Paul Hansmeier sentenced to 14 years for a fraud scheme that involved uploading porn videos and then threatening to sue people who downloaded them — Judge blasts Hansmeier for “almost incalculable” harms to justice. — A federal judge in Minneapolis has sentenced Paul Hansmeier …

Mi 9T Launch, Samsung M40 in India, PUBG, and More Tech News This Week

Mi 9T price reveal, Samsung M40 price in India announced, Honor 20 series in India, and PUBG Mobile updates were top tech stories this week. http://bit.ly/2IimV6Y

Shot on OnePlus feature was reportedly leaking email id of users online

If you use a OnePlus smartphone might have noticed a ‘Shot on OnePlus’ application, which can be accessed via the wallpaper selection menu. The feature enables OnePlus users to set images as wallpapers that were captured via OnePlus phones, and a new wallpaper is added to it every day. 9to5Google has reported discovering a major bug in the option that is leaking email id of users online. OnePlus is said to use an API to facilitate connectivity between its server and the Shot on OnePlus app. This API is hosted on open.oneplus.net and is reportedly insecure as it can be accessed by anyone who has an access token. This access token can apparently be retrieved via an unencrypted key and the token and the key is said to be alphanumeric codes.

The API is used to fetch public images uploaded by users but as per a screenshot of it in action, it also displays their sensitive information like email id, upload location and time. The main issue arises due to a ‘gid’ used by the API to identify a user. Every user has a unique gid assigned to them and it can be used by OnePlus’s API to find and/or delete photos uploaded by a particular user. It can also be used to get information on a user like their email id, name and country. Since this id uses a unique number, one can cycle through the numbers to find other users.

OnePlus was informed about the flaw and the company made some changes to the API to plug the gid leak. “OnePlus takes security seriously, and we investigate all reports we receive,” OnePlus said in a statement. The API is no longer displaying email id of users whose images are publicly posted and currently, the company seems to be working on fixing it as trying to access information is said to be blocked.

http://bit.ly/2wYJiI9

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Researchers develop AI-powered method for detecting facial edits made by Photoshop

A group of researchers has found an AI-powered method that can detect facial edits made by Adobe’s photo editing software Photoshop. Researchers Richard Zhang and Oliver Wang from Adobe, and Sheng-Yu Wang, Dr. Andrew Owens, and Professor Alexei A from University of California, Berkeley developed Efros to detect edits to images that were made using Photoshop’s Face Aware Liquify feature. The research was sponsored by the DARPA MediFor programme.

Although the methodology is still in its early stages, Adobe says that this collaboration between Adobe Research and UC Berkeley, is a step towards democratizing image forensics. “While we are proud of the impact that Photoshop and Adobe’s other creative tools have made on the world, we also recognize the ethical implications of our technology. Trust in what we see is increasingly important in a world where image editing has become ubiquitous – fake content is a serious and increasingly pressing issue,” Adobe said in a blog post.

The latest research builds up on the previous efforts to better detect image, video, audio and document manipulations. Past Adobe research focused on image manipulation detection from splicing, cloning, and removal, whereas this effort focuses on the Face Aware Liquify feature in Photoshop because it’s popular for adjusting facial features, including making adjustments to facial expressions.

The researchers trained a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a form of deep learning, so that the research project is able to recognise altered images of faces. The researchers created a training set of images by scripting Photoshop to use Face Aware Liquify on thousands of pictures scraped from the Internet. A subset of those photos was randomly chosen for training. In addition, an artist was hired to alter images that were mixed in to the data set.

“We started by showing image pairs (an original and an alteration) to people who knew that one of the faces was altered. For this approach to be useful, it should be able to perform significantly better than the human eye at identifying edited faces,” Oliver said. Adobe claims that human eyes were able to judge the altered face 53 percent of the time, but in a series of experiments, the neural network tool achieved results as high as 99 percent. Adobe Photoshop was originally released in 1990.

http://bit.ly/2wXx8iM

Developers say they have mixed feelings about the "Sign In With Apple" button and Apple's decision to make it mandatory for apps with other sign-in systems (Lauren Goode/Wired)

Lauren Goode / Wired:
Developers say they have mixed feelings about the “Sign In With Apple” button and Apple's decision to make it mandatory for apps with other sign-in systems — APPLE ISN'T ALWAYS the first company to introduce a particular product or service. But when it does finally decide …

SoftBank is leading a $300M investment in Gympass, a fitness app giving employees at 2,000+ companies access to ~47K partner gyms worldwide, at a $1B+ valuation (Fabiola Moura/Bloomberg)

Fabiola Moura / Bloomberg:
SoftBank is leading a $300M investment in Gympass, a fitness app giving employees at 2,000+ companies access to ~47K partner gyms worldwide, at a $1B+ valuation — - Brazilian fitness startup makes gym workouts more accessible — SoftBank wants to build global champions out of Latin America

ADDI, a Colombia-based point-of-sale lending startup, reveals it had raised $12.5M Series A from a16z in April, following $3.8M in seed rounds since Sept. 2018 (Jonathan Shieber/TechCrunch)

Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:
ADDI, a Colombia-based point-of-sale lending startup, reveals it had raised $12.5M Series A from a16z in April, following $3.8M in seed rounds since Sept. 2018 — Andreessen Horowitz <3 Latin American startups. — Latin America is the only region outside of the U.S. where the venture firm …

Vivo Z1 Pro will have Snapdragon 712 SoC, 5000mAh battery

Vivo is all set to launch the Z1 Pro mid-range phone in India, and it has now started to tease the specs and features of the device. According to the latest development, the phone will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 mobile platform, it will sport a 32MP selfie camera in the punch hole display, and will house 5000mAh battery with 18W fast charging technology. Vivo has also made a microsite live with a ‘Notify Me’ button. Those who want to receive notifications about the launch of the Z1 Pro can tap on the button.

Vivo started to tease a Z-series phone launch in India, and it was thought to be the Vivo Z5x that launched in China last month. But soon after these initial reports, an industry source shared images of a phone with Digit saying that the teased Z-Series phone is not the Vivo Z5x, but a separate phone under the same Series for the India market. Vivo has also partnered with Flipkart to sell the phone in the country.

For those who don’t know, the main reason for this error was the similar design of both the phones. The camera placement and number of sensors look the same on both the Vivo Z5x and the Z1 Pro. While the specs of the camera of the Z1 Pro are not known, the Z5x has a 16MP main sensor and a lens with an aperture of f/1.78. There is an 8MP ultra-wide angle snapper with f/2.2, and a 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor.

The Z5x is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 SoC, but as mentioned, the Z1 Pro will come with Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 instead. Further, the 16MP front sensor of the Z5x has been replaced by a 32MP one in the Z1 Pro. It, however, will have the same 5000mAh battery as the one in the Z5x. Rest of the specifications of the Z1 Pro are currently unavailable, but it is assumed that they will be made public in the coming days.

http://bit.ly/2WNb5uq

How to listen to WhatsApp audio messages secretly without earphones

The next time you receive an audio file on WhatsApp, instead of grabbing your earphones, do this. http://bit.ly/2XR1yPu

Edge Case Research, which is developing AI-based safety assessment tech for autonomous vehicles, raises $7M seed round led by Aurora CEO Chris Urmson and ANSYS (Junko Yoshida/EE Times)

Junko Yoshida / EE Times:
Edge Case Research, which is developing AI-based safety assessment tech for autonomous vehicles, raises $7M seed round led by Aurora CEO Chris Urmson and ANSYS — Chris Urmson and ANSYS to invest in Edge Case Research — “Making autonomy safe” is perhaps one of the hardest nuts for designers …

Redmi K20 Pro teased as fastest phone, company takes dig at OnePlus again

Redmi has been trolling OnePlus since long and unsurprisingly, it’s a no holds barred situation again. Redmi India has tweeted an image in which it claims that the Redmi K20 Pro is the fastest phone and will have the highest AnTuTu score. Through the same image, the company also took a dig at the fellow Chinese smartphone maker with a neat wordplay.

This is not the first time that Xiaomi has trolled OnePlus. Earlier this month, Manu Kumar Jain, Managing Director Xiaomi India and Global Vice President, shared a number of images to tease the launch of the phone in India, as well as take a dig at the rival. You can read the full story here. Similar to the previous incident, the company once again used symbols from OnePlus logo to make it clear that it is referring to the OnePlus 7 Pro-maker.

Some celebrations are short-lived. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/NitBxGxOVA

— Redmi India (@RedmiIndia) 14 June 2019

The phone will launch on July 15 in India and it was recently unveiled as the Mi 9T is Europe. The company also launched the Mi Band 4, however, it is yet to be learnt whether the company will bring the wearable to India or not. The top variant of the Mi Band 4 is equipped with NFC.

Redmi K20 Pro Specifications

The Redmi K20 Pro features Gorilla Glass 6 protected Full HD+ 6.39-inch Super AMOLED display. Redmi says that the display offers a 91.6 percent screen-to-body-ratio, and 19.5:9 aspect ratio. Under the hood, the phone features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, with up to 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. The Redmi K20 Pro ships with Game Turbo 2.0 which is claimed to deliver an enhanced gaming experience. The phone draws power from a 4000mAh battery, which supports 27W fast charging.

In the camera department, the phone sports a vertically stacked triple camera setup on the back. There is a 48MP Sony IMX586 primary shooter with an aperture of f/1.75, a 13MP secondary sensor with a wide-angle lens having an aperture of f/2.4 and a field-of-view of 124.89 degrees. The telephoto lens comes along with an 8MP sensor with an aperture of f/2.4. The pop-up selfie camera with a 20MP sensor.

http://bit.ly/2IjirgH