Thursday, June 27, 2019
‘Telcos’ health needs to be vetted before 5G pricing’
Design Chief Jony Ive to Leave Apple After 30 Years
Steve Jobs' confidant to leave Apple and start own firm
Zuckerberg says US govt inaction allowed fake news to spread
Israeli crypto startup Orbs says it's working with the Trump administration on blockchain tech to manage economic aid and investments for the Palestinian people (Leigh Cuen/CoinDesk)
Israeli crypto startup Orbs says it's working with the Trump administration on blockchain tech to manage economic aid and investments for the Palestinian people — The Trump administration has tapped Israeli crypto startup Orbs to develop blockchain solutions for the region's longstanding political conflicts.
Researchers: Google's reCAPTCHA v3 raises privacy concerns with its cookie-based data collection and Google's suggestion to embed reCAPTCHA everywhere on a site (Katharine Schwab/Fast Company)
Researchers: Google's reCAPTCHA v3 raises privacy concerns with its cookie-based data collection and Google's suggestion to embed reCAPTCHA everywhere on a site — The latest version of the bot detector reCaptcha is invisible to users and has spread to more than 650,000 websites.
Researchers detail a vulnerability in Excel's Power Query that can be abused to link to a webpage that contains malware; the exploit is in all versions of Excel (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)
Researchers detail a vulnerability in Excel's Power Query that can be abused to link to a webpage that contains malware; the exploit is in all versions of Excel — YOU PROBABLY THINK of Microsoft's classic spreadsheet program Excel as mostly boring. Sure, it can wrangle data, but it's not exactly Apex Legends.
Realme C2 Set to Go on Sale Today at 12 Noon via Flipkart, Realme.com
How Indian SaaS upstarts are muscling into the turf of global players
Spotify needs to crack down on labels snatching user data
Spotify seems to have learned little from the Facebook developer platform’s scandals despite getting a huge boost from the social network in its early days. Spotify has been caught allowing record labels to grab tons of unnecessary user data and permissions to even control their accounts just so people can “pre-save” upcoming song releases.
An investigation by Billboard’s Micah Singleton found major label Sony’s app for pre-saving demanded access to users’ email address, what you’ve listened to and saved to your library, playlists you’ve made or subscribed to, artists you follow, and what you’re playing right now. It also asks to be able to take actions on your behalf including change who you follow, add or remove songs from your library, create/edit/follow playlists, and even control Spotify on your devices.
An example of Universal Music Group’s pre-save app that asks for unnecessary user data and access permissions
This means that by agreeing to use a pre-save feature, a record label could index you music tastes and determine your current mood for marketing purposes, subscribe you to all of their artists and playlists, force you to create playlists that include their artists or add them to your existing playlists, and delete or unfollow any music or artists represented by their competitors.
Since users often speed through platform app permission screens assuming they’re just asking for what’s required, many likely gave up valuable data about themselves and the ability to manipulate their accounts without fully understanding what was happening. Other major labels like Warner and Universal’s pre-save apps like this one similarly ask for 10 types of permission — most extraneous.
In reality, the only permission a pre-save app should need is to be able to add the song you wanted to pre-save to your library. Anything else is theoretically prohibited by Spotify’s developer policy section 5.2: “You will only request the data you need to operate your Spotify Developer Application.” If you’ve used these apps, you can go into your Spotify account settings here to remove their access.
In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, platforms like Spotify should know better than to let developers run amok without proper oversight. That’s why I was so disappointed when Spotify refused to provide a statement, explanation, or even talk with me about the issue.
Offering a flexible developer platform has plenty of advantages for users. Apps for DJing with streaming music, discovering new bands, or synchronizing playback with friends could be built with rightful and transparent use of Spotify’s APIs. But for something as simple and common as volunteering to have a new song from your favorite band show up in your library on the day it’s released shouldn’t become a lure for an exploitative data grab.
That’s why Spotify should build its own in-house pre-save app that labels could all use to pre-promote their releases. Approved labels and their artists should be able to punch in their upcoming single’s Spotify URL and get a shareable link back that they can distribute through social media or wherever that only grants permission to pre-save that specific song, and that expires once that action is completed.
Spotify is widening its subscriber lead over Apple Music
Otherwise, Spotify risks losing all the goodwill its built up with listeners by being a music-first company compared to competitors like Apple and Google where music is a rounding error. Apple Music provides app developers with less data about users.
Just today Apple Music announced it has 60 million subscribers, lagging increasingly further behind Spotify which now has 100 million subscribers and 217 million total monthly users. Spotify already dominates cultural mind share for streaming, having used the playlists it controls to become a hit-maker and gain leverage over the labels for royalty negotiations. But turning a blind eye to shady developers just because they own the music it streams could make listeners question their loyalty and stray to Apple, which is notoriously serious about privacy.
If Spotify is unwilling to push back on data abuse by its record label partners, then it’s undeserving of users’ ears and subscription dollars.
SV Academy just landed $9.5 million to offer tuition-free training that puts people in tech jobs
When you live in Silicon Valley, it feels like nearly everyone works in tech and that entry into the industry is wide open. Of course, the reality is very different. Even as software eats the world, not everyone has the training or connections to land a high-paying job in either the traditional tech industry or with a company that’s actively embracing its digital future.
In fact, it would be challenging to interest an executive recruiter in someone who doesn’t have a tech background and didn’t go to college, yet a company called SV Academy is doing just that. According to cofounder and CEO Rahim Fazel, the nearly two-and-a-half-year-old, Bay Area company is currently helping 100 people every 30 days — or 1,200 per year — land jobs at companies like SurveyMonkey, Palo Alto Networks, and PayPal.
Did we mention that it costs these job candidates nothing, that instead employers pay SV Academy between $12,000 to $15,00 per hire? All the prospects really need to do is convince SV Academy that they have the grit required to take a 12-week, tuition-free training program that teaches human-centered skills that place these individuals in sales roles, as well as that they will embrace a year of ongoing training and mentorship for a year after graduating.
It sounds like a great deal, and it is, which is why SV Academy says it has more interest than it can handle. Fazel tells us that the company, which received 1,000 applications over eight months in its first year of operations, is now receiving 1,000 applications a week from people who’ve largely heard of the company through word of mouth.
Because it’s focused on grooming candidates who are serious about developing new careers (and will stay in their jobs), SV Academy is loath to scale up to accommodate that kind of demand. Still, a new round of funding should help widen the funnel a bit. Until recently, the company was backed by $2 million that it raised a couple of years ago from Bloomberg Beta, Rethink Education, Precursor Ventures, Uprising Ventures, 500 Startups and WTI.
The money was enough for SV Academy to achieve profitability and get to the point of placing employers on a waiting list. But with demand beginning to more seriously outpace its supply of candidates, SV Academy recently hit the market again, sharing exclusively that it has just closed on $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Owl Ventures with participation from Kapor Capital, Strada Education Network, and several earlier backer participating, namely Bloomberg, Rethink, and Uprising.
It isn’t the first time that Fazal has started a company that has taken off. He cofounded a company a decade ago that sold to Oracle, where he spent the next two and a half years. But SV Academy is even closer to his heart, given that he is exactly the kind of person who he wants to help with SV Academy — someone smart but lacking resources. Fazel himself grew up in government housing. He didn’t go to college. He knows firsthand that with determination and right amount of guidance and support, obstacles like not financial stability or a fancy degree can fall away.
Fazel also recognizes the importance of having the right cofounder, which he seems to have landed on with Joel Scott, who is also the company’s COO. A Stanford-trained lawyer, Scott was previously VP of operations at Hewlett Packard, and according to Fazel has trained upwards of 500 SaaS salespeople since college.
Indeed, Scott has played a major role in creating SV Academy’s curriculum, which is very focused on training people for SaaS jobs (for now) and that is entirely virtual, from the 12-week-training period, to the coaching that comes afterward. The unsurprising reason: it enables it to reach students in the U.S. wherever they may be, and whatever their experience might be. (Though some of the applicants who it accepts are college graduates, many are also “working full-time jobs, or they’re caretakers, and it’s impossible for them to drive into the city several times a week for classes,” he explains.)
It seems to be working, too. Fazel says that 100% of the individuals who complete the program are not only receiving median job offers of $79,000 plus benefits and, in many cases, equity, but 70% of them are also receiving promotions within their first year. Yes, the law of small numbers is a factor, but it’s also easy to understand investors’ enthusiasm for what they are seeing — including the cautious approach SV Academy is taking to expanding.
“Real transformation is difficult,” says Fazel. “You can’t create outcomes like this by throwing software at the problem.”
Above, left to right: Joel Scott and Rahim Fazel of SV Academy
Sources: senior Trump officials have discussed whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using encryption that law enforcement can't break (Eric Geller/Politico)
Sources: senior Trump officials have discussed whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using encryption that law enforcement can't break — Senior Trump administration officials met on Wednesday to discuss whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using forms …
After backlash, the creator of DeepNude, which uses AI to remove clothing from images of women, takes it offline, citing server overload and potential harms (Samantha Cole/VICE)
After backlash, the creator of DeepNude, which uses AI to remove clothing from images of women, takes it offline, citing server overload and potential harms — An app that algorithmically “undressed” images of women was taken down by its creator, citing server overload and potential harms.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
RBI Says Foreign Firms Can Process Abroad, but Must Store Data in India
Hands On With the LG W10 and LG W30
Anthropic cuts its list of unauthorized secondary market sellers from eight to four after the initial notice caused panic and pushback from investors (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)
Yazhou Sun / Bloomberg : Anthropic cuts its list of unauthorized secondary market sellers from eight to four after the initial notice cau...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
