Sunday, July 7, 2019
Uber may lease 700k sq ft office space in Bengaluru
No incentives left for banks to push digital pay, fears fintech
ETtech Top 5: OYO founder's share buyback, Infosys crorepatis & more
Baring Private Equity Asia leads race for CitiusTech
Handset makers seek fast action on sourcing norms
Public sector should embrace multicloud to cut risk of cloud market monopolisation, says report
Companies like Alibaba are helping Shanghai deal with a new compulsory recycling program with services like on-demand trash pickup and garbage sorting mini-apps (Rita Liao/TechCrunch)
Companies like Alibaba are helping Shanghai deal with a new compulsory recycling program with services like on-demand trash pickup and garbage sorting mini-apps — China's war on garbage is as digitally savvy as the country itself. Think QR codes attached to trash bags that allow …
FBI and ICE have access to 641M photos including driver's license photos from 21 states for facial recognition searches, internal docs and GAO report show (Drew Harwell/Washington Post)
FBI and ICE have access to 641M photos including driver's license photos from 21 states for facial recognition searches, internal docs and GAO report show — A cache of records shared with The Washington Post reveals that agents are scanning hundreds of millions of Americans' faces without their knowledge or consent.
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, Radeon RX 5700 Now on Sale, India Prices Announced
AMD Ryzen 3000 Series: Prices, Specs, Features, and All the Info You Need
Fixing the past: The art of collecting pinball machines
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Inside this concrete slab hides the biggest collection of the rarest pinball and electromechanical games ever made. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]
Pinball is dying, if it's still alive at all. The major manufacturers have moved from creating pinball machines to slot machines for casinos, a business with a much rosier future. With even larger arcades only sporting one or two pinball machines, most likely emblazoned with licensed artwork from a popular movie or TV show, enthusiasts of the game are forced to look backward for their joy, not forward.
"Pinball has seen a steady decline since the 90s. Chicago used to have many manufacturers that cranked out thousands of games each year. In the 80s and 90s, video games became popular and pinball sales suffered," Karl Marsicek explained to Ars. He knows a little bit about the lost art of pinball: his basement houses a collection of machines he has bought and restored. "There is only one manufacturer left, Stern Pinball. They put out about 4 or 5 new titles each year, just a fraction of what manufacturers were cranking out in Pinball’s glory days."
As a hobby, collecting and restoring pinball machines is tough. The machines are loud, large, heavy, and expensive. The problem is, if you can't play a game at your local arcade, the only place left is your own basement. "The many machines that were produced in the '80s and '90s have reached the end of their life cycle and are disappearing from bars and pizza joints," Marsicek said. "Strip mall arcades are just about extinct because of computer games and gaming consoles. So pinball machines are getting hard to find."
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Someone is wrong on the Internet
You wake up, and check your phone, and see a new condemnation. Some awful person has said something outrageously insulting. Something actually evil, if you think about it. Something that belittles, dehumanizes, and/or argues against the freedom and agency of a whole category of people.
You add your voice to the furious chorus in response. How can you not? These people may never understand how wrong they are, they’re too ignorant and wedded to their idiocy for that, but they need to know that they are opposed, and their opponents are legion.
We all know what you mean when you say ‘these people.’ The ones who voted for those awful faces on every news site and TV channel, the ones whose names alone cause you to clench with fury. The ones responsible for the awful, unforgivable things happening at the border. The ones responsible for the reports of violence in the streets.
If pushed you’d probably admit that only some of These People are genuinely evil. More than you could have imagined in your worst nightmares five years ago, but still, only some. Others may be prisoners of their upbringing, or their ignorance, or victims of their own hardships, lashing out wildly. But what they all seem to have in common is an incapacity for compassion.
It’s easy to distance yourself from Them. It’s hard not to. The overwhelming majority of the people with whom you actually interact are Us.
You know you should try to feel compassion for Them, as you should for everyone. Not sympathy. Sympathy is very different. But your religion, or your spirituality, or your morality, or simply your belief, teaches you compassion for all. But how can you hold compassion for people who seem incapable of compassion themselves? People who don’t condemn, who actually cheer, what’s happening at the border?
And so every online outrage leaches a little more compassion away, widens and deepens the abyss between Us and Them a little further. You know intellectually that many of these viral outrages stem from bots, programmed by trolls or worse, and each new one does not represent every member of … them.
But you can’t help but grow more certain with each new outrage, in your heart if not your head, that there is a Them. That there are no longer people with whom one can reasonably disagree. That there are now only Us, and Them.
You realize when you think about it that this makes it easier to give people who are notionally Us a pass when they too behave with a flagrant lack of compassion, or judge people’s whole lives by their worst moments, or prioritize the purity of the process they have decreed over any actual results accomplished.
You realize that the growing abyss between Us and Them makes both sides close ranks, makes it harder for people who are Them and yet who have uneasy, even horrified feelings about what’s happening at the border in their name, to at least speak against it. They should anyway. Of course they should. But people are weak. The easier something becomes, the more that people do it.
You understand, on some level, that the online divide is different from the awful things actually happening offline. That the latter matters, deeply, and the former … not so much. That the former distracts both sides from great systemic injustices which have learned to lie hidden in bland terminology, coolly steering clear of the outrage of Us versus Them.
But you slept poorly, you’re exhausted, and you already have so much to do, so many duties to attend to at your frustrating job, so many worries to keep at bay, once you get out of this bed. Maybe all that is because of those systemic injustices, but those are a rot, those are cancer, those are bone-deep, and the evils at the border are an open wound about which something must done immediately. They are responsible for those evils. They must be fought and stopped.
So you add your voice to the furious chorus. And you give more money to those fighting the real fight at the border, because you know that’s what’s actually important. And maybe before you roll out of bed you pause to wonder how much the great online divide represents reality, or how much it prefigures reality; whether They really have all lost their minds and their moral compasses.
And you can’t help but wonder: even if they haven’t, what can now be done?
Week-in-Review: Alexa’s indefinite memory and NASA’s otherworldly plans for GPS
Hello, weekenders. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.
Last week, I talked about the cult of Ive and the degradation of Apple design. On Sunday night, The Wall Street Journal published a report on how Ive had been moving away from the company to the dismay of many on the design team. Tim Cook didn’t like the report very much. Our EIC gave a little breakdown on the whole saga in a nice piece he did.
Apple sans Ive
The big story
This week was a tad restrained in its eventfulness, seems like the newsmakers went on 4th of July vacations a little early. Amazon made a bit of news this week when the company confirmed that Alexa request logs are kept indefinitely.
Last week, an Amazon public policy exec answered some questions about Alexa in a letter sent to U.S. Senator Coons. His office published the letter on its site a few days ago and most of the details aren’t all that surprising but the first answer really sets the tone for how Amazon sees Alexa activity.
Q: How long does Amazon store the transcripts of user voice recordings?
A: We retain customers’ voice recordings and transcripts until the customer chooses to delete them.
What’s interesting about this isn’t that we’re only now getting this level of straightforward dialogue from Amazon on how long data is kept if not specifically deleted, but it makes one wonder why it is useful or feasible for them to keep it indefinitely. (This assumes that they actually are keeping it indefinitely, it seems likely that most of it isn’t and that by saying this they’re protecting themselves legally, but I’m just going off the letter.)
After several years of “Hey Alexa,” the company doesn’t seem all that close to figuring out what it is.
Alexa seems to be a shit solution for commerce, so why does Amazon have 10,000 people working on it, according to a report this week in The Information? All signs are pointing to the voice assistant experiment being a short term failure in terms of the short term ambitions though AI advances will push the utility.
Training data is a big deal across AI teams looking to educate models on datasets of relevant information. The company seems to say as much. “Our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems use machine learning to adapt to customers’ speech patterns and vocabulary, informed by the way customers use Alexa in the real world. To work well, machine learning systems need to be trained using real world data.”
The company says it doesn’t anonymize any of this data because it has to stay associated with a user’s account in order for them to delete it. I’d feel a lot better if Amazon just effectively anonymized the data in the first place and used on-device processing the build a profile on my voice for personalized . What I’m more afraid of is Amazon having such a detailed voiceprint of everyone who has ever used an Alexa device.
If effortless voice-based e-commerce isn’t really the product anymore, what is? The answer is always us, but I don’t like the idea of indefinitely leaving Amazon with my data until they figure out the answer.
Send me feedback
on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
lucas@techcrunch.com
On to the rest of the week’s news.
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.
- NASA’s GPS moonshot
The U.S. government really did us a solid inventing GPS, but NASA has some bigger ideas on the table for the positioning platform, namely, taking it to the moon.It might be a little complicated but unsurprisingly scientists have some ideas here. Read more - Apple has your eyes
Most of the iOS beta updates are bug fixes, but the latest change to iOS13 brought a very strange surprise, changing the way the eyes of users on iPhone XS or XS Max look to people on the other end of the call. Instead of appearing that you’re looking below the camera, some software wizardry will now make it look like you’re staring directly at the camera. Apple hasn’t detailed how this works but here’s what we do know here. - Trump is having a Twitter party
Donald Trump’s administration declared a couple months ago that it was launching an exploratory survey to try and gain a sense of conservative voices that had been silenced on social media, now @realdonaldtrump is having a get together and inviting his friends to chat about the issue. It’s a real who’s who, check out some of the people attending here.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
GAFA Gaffes
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:
- Amazon is responsible for what it sells:
[Appeals court rules Amazon can be held liable for third-party products] - Android co-creator gets additional allegations filed:
[Newly-unsealed court documents reveal additional allegations against Andy Rubin]
Extra Crunch
Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. TechCrunch reporter Kate Clark did a great interview with the ex-Facebook, ex-Venmo founding team behind Fin and how they’re thinking about the consumerization of the enterprise.
Sam Lessin and Andrew Kortina on their voice assistant’s workplace pivot
“…The thing is, developing an AI assistant capable of booking flights, arranging trips, teaching users how to play poker, identifying places to purchase specific items for a birthday party and answering wide-ranging zany questions like “can you look up a place where I can milk a goat?” requires a whole lot more human power than one might think. Capital-intensive and hard-to-scale, an app for “instantly offloading” chores wasn’t the best business. Neither Lessin nor Kortina will admit to failure, but Fin‘s excursion into B2B enterprise software eight months ago suggests the assistant technology wasn’t a billion-dollar idea.…”
Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week, we talked a bit about asking for money and the future of China’s favorite tech platform.
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Researchers say they have been able to store the digital data of thumbnail-sized images on molecules smaller than DNA and retrieve it with ~99% accuracy (Ruby Prosser Scully/New Scientist)
Researchers say they have been able to store the digital data of thumbnail-sized images on molecules smaller than DNA and retrieve it with ~99% accuracy — DNA isn't the only molecule we could use for digital storage. It turns out that solutions containing sugars, amino acids and other small molecules could replace hard drives too.
Berlin-based Nelly, whose SaaS lets medical practices digitally onboard new patients, accept payments, and more, raised a €50M Series B led by Cathay Innovation (Romain Dillet/TechCrunch)
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch : Berlin-based Nelly, whose SaaS lets medical practices digitally onboard new patients, accept payments, and m...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
