Wednesday, July 17, 2019

5 trends that technology companies in India 'copied' from Xiaomi

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DoJ charges former Microsoft developer, a Ukrainian citizen, for allegedly using a test account to steal $10M by purchasing and reselling Microsoft e-gift cards (Thomas Claburn/The Register)

Thomas Claburn / The Register:
DoJ charges former Microsoft developer, a Ukrainian citizen, for allegedly using a test account to steal $10M by purchasing and reselling Microsoft e-gift cards  —  ‘No safeguards’ on QA accounts, and suddenly this guy gets a Tesla and $1.6m home, say prosecutors



"Not designed for children" warning appearing on some Play Store listings; developers have the option to apply it where kids are outside the target age group (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Abner Li / 9to5Google:
“Not designed for children” warning appearing on some Play Store listings; developers have the option to apply it where kids are outside the target age group  —  Back in May, Google announced that Android developers have to specify a “target age range” for all apps in the Play Store.



EBay beats second-quarter revenue estimates

The e-commerce company reported net revenue of $2.69 billion for the second quarter ended June 30, down from $2.64 billion a year earlier. https://ift.tt/2YZaByv https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

ETtech Top 5: EBay buys stake in Paytm Mall, E-comm sales boom despite lower discounts & more

A closer look at today's biggest tech and startup news and why they matter. https://ift.tt/2GcgZev https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Indians just love to shop on e-comm sale days, even with lower discounts

According to experts, sales are increasing even though discounts are declining because of the belief that shopping online is the cheapest. https://ift.tt/2GhMXpz https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Uber riders in some cities, including DC and San Diego, were charged 100x the advertised fare, with some fares exceeding $1,000; Uber says glitch has been fixed (Faiz Siddiqui/Washington Post)

Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:
Uber riders in some cities, including DC and San Diego, were charged 100x the advertised fare, with some fares exceeding $1,000; Uber says glitch has been fixed  —  One passenger said she paid $1,308 for a $13.08 fare.  Decimal points matter.  —  Uber passengers in multiple cities …



Realme X Hate-to-Wait Sale to Be Held in India Today at 8pm

Realme X was launched in India, and ahead of its first sale next week, the company is hosting a 'Hate-to-Wait' sale on Flipkart and Realme.com today. https://ift.tt/2XWf7wj

Suits Season 9 to Premiere Today on Colors Infinity in India

The ninth and final season of Suits will premiere Thursday at 12pm IST on Colors Infinity and Colors Infinity HD in India, several hours after it airs in the US. https://ift.tt/2LnSdwh

How Google Glass and other devices are being tested to teach children on the autism spectrum to make eye contact and recognize emotions (Cade Metz/New York Times)

Cade Metz / New York Times:
How Google Glass and other devices are being tested to teach children on the autism spectrum to make eye contact and recognize emotions  —  Privacy concerns caused the computerized eyewear to fail with the general public.  But researchers believe it could help autistic children learn to recognize emotion and make eye contact.



Redmi 7A to Go on Sale Again in India Today

Redmi 7A price in India is set at Rs. 5,999 for the 16GB storage variant, while its 32GB storage model is priced at Rs. 6,199. https://ift.tt/2SpntLN

FaceApp gets federal attention as Sen. Schumer raises alarm on data use

It’s been hard to get away from FaceApp over the last few days, whether it’s your friends posting weird selfies using the app’s aging and other filters, or the brief furore over its apparent (but not actual) circumvention of permissions on iPhones. Now even the Senate is getting in on the fun: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has asked the FBI and the FTC to look into the app’s data handling practices.

“I write today to express my concerns regarding FaceApp,” he writes in a letter sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray and FTC Chairman Joseph Simons. I’ve excerpted his main concerns below:

In order to operate the application, users must provide the company full and irrevocable access to their personal photos and data. According to its privacy policy, users grant FaceApp license to use or publish content shared with the application, including their username or even their real name, without notifying them or providing compensation.

Furthermore, it is unclear how long FaceApp retains a user’s data or how a user may ensure their data is deleted after usage. These forms of “dark patterns,” which manifest in opaque disclosures and broader user authorizations, can be misleading to consumers and may even constitute a deceptive trade practices. Thus, I have serious concerns regarding both the protection of the data that is being aggregated as well as whether users are aware of who may have access to it.

In particular, FaceApp’s location in Russia raises questions regarding how and when the company provides access to the data of U.S. citizens to third parties, including potentially foreign governments.

For the cave-dwellers among you (and among whom I normally would proudly count myself) FaceApp is a selfie app that uses AI-esque techniques to apply various changes to faces, making them look older or younger, adding accessories, and, infamously, changing their race. That didn’t go over so well.

There’s been a surge in popularity over the last week, but it was also noticed that the app seemed to be able to access your photos whether you said it could or not. It turns out that this is actually a normal capability of iOS, but it was being deployed here in somewhat of a sneaky manner and not as intended. And arguably it was a mistake on Apple’s part to let this method of selecting a single photo go against the “never” preference for photo access that a user had set.

Fortunately the Senator’s team is not worried about this or even the unfounded (we checked) concerns that FaceApp was secretly sending your data off in the background. It isn’t. But it very much does send your data to Russia when you tell it to give you an old face, or a hipster face, or whatever. Because the computers that do the actual photo manipulation are located there — these filters are being applied in the cloud, not directly on your phone.

His concerns are over the lack of transparency that user data is being sent out to servers who knows where, to be kept for who knows how long, and sold to who knows whom. Fortunately the obliging FaceApp managed to answer most of these questions before the Senator’s letter was ever posted.

The answers to his questions, should we choose to believe them, are that user data is not in fact sent to Russia, the company doesn’t track users and usually can’t, doesn’t sell data to third parties, and deletes “most” photos within 48 hours.

Although the “dark patterns” of which the Senator speaks are indeed an issue, and although it would have been much better if FaceApp had said up front what it does with your data, this is hardly an attempt by a Russian adversary to build up a database of U.S. citizens.

While it is good to see Congress engaging with digital privacy, asking the FBI and FTC to look into a single app seems unproductive when that app is not doing much that a hundred others, American and otherwise, have been doing for years. Cloud-based processing and storage of user data is commonplace — though usually disclosed a little better.

Certainly as Sen. Schumer suggests, the FTC should make sure that “there are adequate safeguards in place to protect the privacy of Americans…and if not, that the public be made aware of the risks associated with the use of this application or others similar to it.” But this seems the wrong nail to hang that on. We see surreptitious slurping of contact lists, deceptive deletion promises, third-party sharing of poorly anonymized data, and other bad practices in apps and services all the time — if the federal government wants to intervene, let’s have it. But let’s have a law or a regulation, not a strongly worded letter written after the fact.

Schumer Faceapp Letter by TechCrunch on Scribd

Microsoft warns 10,000 customers they’re targeted by nation-sponsored hackers

Altitude Angel launches an API for safer drone flights

Altitude Angel, a U.K. startup that provides safety, data and traffic management systems for drones, is launching a de-confliction service for drone flights — available via its developer API platform.

“The dynamic system will continuously monitor the airspace around an aircraft for the ‘unexpected’ such as other aerial vehicles or changes to airspace (such as a Temporary Flight Restriction/Dynamic Geofence around a police incident),” it writes of the new service.

“After identifying a potential conflict, CRS will make the necessary routing adjustments, allowing the drone to maintain an appropriate separation standard between other airspace users or fly around restricted airspace so it can continue safely (and efficiently) to its destination.”

The global Conflict Resolution Service (CRS) has two components: Strategic de-confliction, which will launch first, on July 23, letting drone operators submit flight plans to the startup to determine whether there are any conflicts with other previously submitted flight plans, or against ground and airspace geofenced areas available in Altitude Angel’s worldwide data feeds.

If a conflict is identified Altitude Angel says its CRS will propose alterations to the take-off time and/or route to “eliminate the conflict” — suggesting, as it puts it “minimally invasive changes to permit the mission to continue unobstructed”.

The service also supports ‘private’ modes for fleet operators who only want to check for conflicts against their own drones or customers.

The second component — which will launch in late September — is called Tactical de-confliction. This will provide information to drone pilots or the drone itself to ensure separation is maintained during the in-flight phase.

“We’re bringing in commercially available data feeds of every piece of manned air traffic available today. So that’s every commercial flight, that’s in some instances police helicopters, medical choppers etc etc. So the tactical service will then supplement that drone on drone collision data [from the Statistical CRS] with drone on manned aviation,” says CEO Richard Parker.

The UK startup, which also provides data to power geofencing services for drones (drone maker DJI is among its customers) is positioning its software and services business as an enabling layer for unmanned traffic management (UTM) companies, national organizations and fleet operators to embed into their own products, says Parker.

“What we’re doing is going beyond what a typical UTM company sees as its own customers and then providing the flight plans that we’ve received out to everybody,” he tells TechCrunch. “So, for example, Uber might use the [CRS] service to register all of Uber’s flights and Amazon might use the service to register all of Amazon’s flights — but together, via the API, they effectively can avoid each other.

“So that’s a service which connects everybody together, and only tells you when there’s conflict that’s expected to occur.”

Clearly, the Strategic de-confliction component will increase in utility as it gains more users — enabling it to increase the visibility it can provide of what’s being flown where and when.

Although Altitude Angel does not pretend it will be able to offer a comprehensive view of absolutely every artificial thing in the sky.

“One of the things we think is rife in the UTM industry today is false claims,” says Parker. “It would be really easy for us to market this wrongly — we could have done this to say this service guarantees no drones will ever crash. That’s simply not true. What it does guarantee, however, is any drone that has submitted a plan to us is going to be told up front whether it’s likely to conflict with another one.

“And when the tactical service comes online, again, we will be extremely clear — providing everything else you might conflict with is using that service then we can provide that separation.”

He points out that not even Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) can see all air traffic all of the time. So the CRS is pitched as a way for drone operators to increase awareness of what else might be flying in the vicinity — thereby reducing the risk of collision or a safety incident.

As regards the dynamic tactical de-confliction component of the CRS, which is designed to alert drone operators to unexpected craft in their vicinity, Altitude Angel says this is based on “tried and trusted safety technology”.

The core platform underpinning it has been in operation since 2016, according to Parker — and was originally used by general aviation pilots to request access to transit Class D airspace, meaning it’s “racked up thousands of requests” and had “a lot of scrutiny” globally, including from national air traffic services.

“It’s an extremely reliable and robust service,” he claims.

Altitude Angel is also layering on its GuardianUTMS airspace management platform. While Parker flags that the company’s enterprise background is in massive distributed cloud systems — ergo, it’s used to handling something along the lines of 7M-10M API requests per month.

“So we think we’ve got a reasonably robust and reliable system,” he says. “One which can also tolerate failure and it can do a lot of self-healing. From an infrastructure perspective it’s very robust, and from an application perspective it’s been doing a lot of operational use cases and load for one of the world’s most trusted and respected ANSPs.”

“Usage is still increasing. We’re still learning from that. But again our main primary goal is to get this out, get it used, monitor it, make sure that we improve it over time. It’s kind of a crawl, walk and run type service,” he adds.

All Altitude Angel’s current customers are signed up to go live with the CRS — which Parker suggests will translate into some 5,000 to 6,000 flights per month feeding the de-confliction service.

“We’re then going to connect in our additional flights that have been shared with us as well so I think we’re talking about a fairly significant proportion of all of the flights that are being shared with any UTM today,” he continues. “What we’re then going to be doing is working with our ANSP customers to see if the permission requests that they’re currently managing can also be connected into that network. And I think that’s a really interesting area to explore.

“Because again we’re only doing this because, ultimately, everyone in the industry wants to go beyond line-of-sight, everyone wants to be able to have a more automated flight system. But the reality is the infrastructure just isn’t there on the ANSP and regulatory side — and the technology isn’t there, from a safety management perspective, on the commercial side either.

“So that’s the gap that we’re trying to plug here so that more people can access to do that.”

While it might make more sense for drone de-confliction platforms to be run by national bodies, rather than a commercial entity, Parker isn’t worried that regulators will swoop in and claim the space because the business is positioning itself to play multiple roles: Helping drone operators integrate and adapt to changeable regulations, while also making sure it can take on a gateway service role for ANSPs should governments decide a regulator should provide UTM.

“The technology that we provide to our customers we provide on our own developer platform for the commercial industry to use but we also provide a version of that same system, effectively, to ANSPs to be able to offer that service nationally,” he says.

“I think it’s important to recognize that many of those ANSPs aren’t required to do this yet. So they’re not necessarily deploying those foundations… The key piece that might be an interesting angle is that our commitment to those developer customers, and people who are using our commercial technology, is to abstract them away from whatever local regulations and differences might occur internationally.”

“In the UK, if the government suddenly turns around to [UK air traffic operator] NATS and says hey you guys have to provide UTM services for the whole country it won’t be us that are operating the service but we’re very much hopeful that we’ll have the opportunity to provide NATS with the technology to actually provide that capability to the rest of the industry,” he adds, noting that Altitude Angel is already providing airspace user portal technology to NATS. 

“So, again, we’ve got this commercial side of the business — which is all about enabling those folks to integrate with the regulated community, and then we’ve got a technology capability [Guardian UTMS] that’s what we’re pushing to ANSPs to enable them to open up the skies and work with and embrace drones within their airspace estate.”

After a seven-month probe, Amazon reaches a deal with German antitrust watchdog to give 30 days notice and a reason for removing a merchant from its platform (Douglas Busvine/Reuters)

Douglas Busvine / Reuters:
After a seven-month probe, Amazon reaches a deal with German antitrust watchdog to give 30 days notice and a reason for removing a merchant from its platform  —  FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Amazon (AMZN.O) has reached a deal with Germany's anti-trust authority to overhaul its terms of service …



An in-depth look at the UK's AI Safety Institute, whose researchers test AI systems for risks and for capabilities that might become dangerous in the future (Billy Perrigo/Time)

Billy Perrigo / Time : An in-depth look at the UK's AI Safety Institute, whose researchers test AI systems for risks and for capabili...