Amazon filed its formal protest over JEDI on Friday, citing a Fox News segment and a Trump rally as evidence of improper political pressure from the White House — Amazon filed its formal protest over Microsoft's victory in a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract …
About 200 Googlers protest placing of two of their colleagues on administrative leave over the actions they took opposing some of Google management's decisions — - Company denies wrongdoing with two employees placed on leave — Culture of openness battered by Google's staff rebellion
T-Mobile has confirmed a data breach affecting more than a million of its customers, whose personal data (but no financial or password data) was exposed to a malicious actor. The company alerted the affected customers but did not provide many details in its official account of the hack.
The company said in its disclosure to affected users that its security team had shut down “malicious, unauthorized access” to prepaid data customers. The data exposed appears to have been:
The latter data is considered “customer proprietary network information” and under telecoms regulations they are required to notify customers if it is leaked. The implication seems to be that they might not have done so otherwise. Of course some hacks, even hacks of historic magnitude, go undisclosed sometimes for years.
In this case however it seems that T-Mobile has disclosed the hack in a fairly prompt manner, though it provided very few details. When I asked, a T-Mobile representative indicated that “less than 1.5 percent” of customers were affected, which of the company’s approximately 75 million users adds up to somewhat over a million.
The company reports that “we take the security of your information very seriously,” a canard we’ve asked companies to stop saying in these situations.
The T-Mobile representative stated that the attack was discovered in early November and shut down “immediately.” They did not answer other questions I asked, such as whether it was on a public-facing or internal website or database, how long the data was exposed, and what specifically the company had done to rectify the problem.
The data listed above is not necessarily highly damaging on its own, but it’s the kind of data with which someone might attempt to steal your identity or take over your account. Account hijacking is a fairly common tactic among cyber-ne’er-do-wells these days and it helps to have details like the target’s plan, home address, and so on at one’s fingertips.
If you’re a T-Mobile customer, it may be a good idea to change your password there and check up on your account details.
Last week, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, we sat down with Maryanna Saenko and Steve Jurvetson, investors who came together to create the investment outfit Future Ventures roughly one year ago. It was their first public appearance together since announcing their $200 million fund, and we started by asking Jurvetson about his very public transition out of his old firm DFJ. (He said of the experience that “sometimes life forces a dislocation in what you’re doing, and it got me to become an entrepreneur for the first time in a long time.”)
We also talked about how the two came together and where they’re shopping, as they have fewer constraints than most firms. It was a wide-ranging chat that covered SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla, whose boards of directors Jurvetson sits on. We also talked about The Boring Company, in which Future Ventures has a stake, the profound dangers of the AI race between companies (and countries), and whether the powerful psychedelic ayahuasca — or something like it — might become represent an investment opportunity. Included in the mix was the “biggest money-making opportunity” that Jurvetson said he has “ever seen in my life.”
Read on to learn more. Our conversation has been edited lightly for length.
You’ve come together to build this new fund that has a 15-year investing horizon. Your interests overlap quite a bit. Maryanna, you’re a robotics expert; you were with Airbus before joining DFJ then heading later to Khosa Ventures. Who is better at what?
SJ: I think we’re better as a pair. The beauty of small team is you’re better than you would be on your own. I knew when I set off that I didn’t want to do it alone. I know that the people I’ve worked with over the last 20 years have made me better. The best investments I did at DFJ I largely attribute to the junior partner I was working with at the time, and I might not have done those best deals if I was on my own.
There’s something about the dialectic, the discussion, the debates with someone you respect whose opinion is valuable, so rather than thinking, ‘You handle this, I’ll handle that’ and partitioning it, it’s more of a [back and forth]. So we have partner meetings all the time, just not any scheduled meetings.
Certainly, Maryanna’s deep background in robotics is a vein of interest, as is all the aerospace stuff. But just a reminder, when I first interviewed her [Jurvetson originally hired her at DFJ], I was blown away that she had already invested in several of the quirky sectors from quantum computer to phasor antennas for satellites to [inaudible but relating to space].
Of course you would be investing [in this thing I’ve never heard of before].
MS: It’s going to become relevant, I promise.
Speaking of aerospace, you two have invested in SpaceX, a company that DFJ had also backed. Is this company ever going to go public?
SJ: I think the official last tweet on this matter was that the company will go public after there are regularly scheduled flights to Mars.
Which is when?
SJ: It might not be that far off. Probably within the 15-year [investing] cycle that we have now. Clearly the business is much more dramatic than just that. That’s the big storm on the horizon [that captures a lot of interest] but in the near term, there are multiple billions of dollars in revenue. They’re a profitable business. And frankly, they’re about to launch what may be the biggest money-making opportunity I’ve ever seen in my life, which is the broadband satellite data business [Starlink, which is a constellation being constructed by SpaceX to provide satellite Internet access].
So there’s plenty of good stuff happening before we get to Mars. That was just a way to put all the investment bankers off. They’re continuously hounding the company, ‘When are you going public? When are you going public?’
It is 17 years old. Have you made money off it [as an investor] thus far?
SJ: Oh, yeah, at our prior firm, they’ve [enjoyed] well over $1 billion in profit [through secondary sales].
What do you think of scientists’ concerns that these satellites going to ruin astronomy because they’re so bright? I know SpaceX has tried to paint them. I also know SpaceX isn’t alone and that Amazon is also trying to put up a constellation, for example. But you’re a mission-driven firm. Should we be worried that we’re littering the sky with these things?
MS: One of the fundamental questions when you invest in technology is what are the second-order effects that we’re aware of and what are the second-order effects that we’re not clever enough to foresee ahead of time [and] to look holistically at these problems.
So first and foremost, right, it’s not just Space X. Many companies these days are trying to put up a constellation whether in [Low Earth Orbit] or [Medium Earth Orbit] or increasingly in [Geostationary Orbit]. We need to think mindfully and work with the scientific communities and say, ‘What are the needs?’ Because the reality is that the communication is going to go up, and if it’s not from U.S. companies, it’ll be from European or from Asian companies. So I think the scientific community needs to wake up, unfortunately, to the reality that the Luddite form of saying, ‘Technology isn’t going up to space; the sky isn’t going to continue to get brighter, and we should just hope for the best,’ they should say say, ‘Here’s a set of metrics that we’d like to continue moving forward with.’
Ideally we can design to those specs and beyond that, I fundamentally believe we’ll find ways to shine brighter lights and move further [out]. Honestly, most of the interesting imaging happens well past [Low Earth Orbit] and I think when we start building a lunar base, we’ll solve a lot of these problems.
At StrictlyVC’s last event, we played host to a supersonic jet company called Boom. There are a handful of companies with which it competes, too–
MS: Oh, more than [a handful]. If you count just pure electric aircraft companies, I’ve met with 55 of, I would guess, around 200 or 300. Within that, supersonic is smaller, but it’s still in the dozens.
Whoa, that many? Does the world need supersonic jets — again?
MS: [As a] recovering engineer and scientist, the way that I look at the space is does the business model fundamentally [make more sense] than when we tried this the last time in the ’80s. If the answer is, ‘This time, we’re a bunch of clever software kids building an aerospace device and don’t worry about it, we’ll figure out how to build an aircraft,’ I’m going to tell you all the reasons that isn’t necessarily going to work.
I think on the electric aircraft side, we have a bunch of questions to answer about what is the timeline of battery density versus what is a mission profile for these flights that actually makes sense. On the long-range side, we can look at what SpaceX might do with point-to-point capsules, and then question whether or not this intermediate stage of hypersonic club flight through fixed-wing aircraft is even the right trajectory at all, because I think we might be able to bypass the whole thing.
I have not yet seen an engineering trajectory matched with a business model that I think closes in this space, at all, so I’m not sure what the bankers are doing,
SJ: Also, the FAA regulatory cycle is very long. But [in addition to these reasons], our life becomes very simple the moment we know there are 55 to maybe 200 companies in a sector, and this is true for small sat launch or eVTOL aircraft — huge swaths of the landscape. Whenever there’s more than one or two [companies in a space], we don’t even want to meet unless we’re just trying to understand what’s going on. Why would anyone invest in the 130th small sat launch company? We try to look for companies are unlike anything that’s been seen before at the time.
There’s only one new company that I know of that’s digging tunnels, Boring Company. It’s another investment of Future Ventures. Did it come with a board seat?
SJ: No. We’re in the first round of investment.
Is this a real company? I’ve read it takes $1 billion to tunnel through a mile.
SJ: Historically. It depends where you’re digging. That’s the worst case, but it can be up there, like when Boring Company won this contract in Las Vegas for a very short segment, the competition was bidding like $400 million for just a mile. It was like, really?
If you think about the pattern across aerospace with SpaceX, [the motor] issue with Tesla, and now potentially in construction, fintech, and agriculture, there are industries that haven’t [seen major innovation] in a long time. So the top four companies in America that are digging tunnels all started in the 1800s. That’s an especially long time ago. And the whole point, too, with Boring is switching diesel to electric, to do continuous digging, to reengineer the entire thing with a software and simulation mindset, to dramatically increase the speed and lower the cost. Think two orders of magnitude cheaper at least.
Steve, you’d said once before that in most of the deals you’ve funded across your career, yours was the only check, that there just wasn’t any competition. But more people are focused on the ‘future’ as an investment theme now. Is it harder to find those outliers?
SJ: It’s a little harder. We usually use that as a signal to look to a new market. Whenever there are multiple checks. When it’s a category, when there are conferences about it, when other venture firms are talking about it, that’s usually a sure-enough sign that we already should have moved on to something else.
MS: The simple reality, too, is the industry is focused on a handful of sectors — enterprise software, consumer internet, and the like — and often there are fantastic funds with one or two edge-case investments, and that’s great, because we love those funds and we want to work with them. But there are very few funds where that trajectory is the straight and narrow of their fundamental thesis.
You raised $200 million for this fund from tech CEOs and hedge funds and VCs; do you have the same constraints that other firms have?
MS: I don’t think we have particularly fine constraints on anything, but we do have the constraint of our own conviction, our word and the quality of our characters, so one of the theses when we raised the fund was that we don’t prey on human frailty, so no addictive substances, no [social media influencers] — and not just because we’re bad at being cool hunters. But that’s not our intention; that’s not what we’re trying to create in the world.
I know you’re interested in AI. What does that mean? Are you funding drug development?
SJ: What have you heard? That’s a really good guess.
There are so many companies — hundreds of them — using AI to try and uncover drug candidates, but they don’t seem to be getting very far or maybe they’re aren’t getting far enough along as fast as I’d expected.
SJ: [We have a related deal in process]. Interestingly, we’ve done ten deals that have closed; we have three more that are in the process, two in the signed term sheet phase. Four are in the area of edge intelligence . . .
MS: I’ll often come at things from how would I build this robot in the world to do some critical task and Steve often looks at it more from the chip and power and processing and how you lay the algorithm onto the silicon. And between those two, we arrive at a really interesting thesis up and down the stack.So we’ve done Mythic, an edge intelligence chip company, but we’ve also looked at this idea that we’re going to send out these AIs into the world but we basically bake them into these edge devices that are terrible [because they don’t work well].
The real issue is an AI that’s getting trained somewhere in some cloud then getting pushed to your edge device and then good luck. But increasingly [we’re thinking] about continuous improvement of those AIs as they’re running in real time and be mindful of how we shuttle the data back to the mother ship data centers to enable that continuous improvement and acceleration of that learning and we have a number of portfolio companies up and down that stack that I’m incredibly excited about.
That all sounds comfortably pedestrian compared to the very big picture, wherein a small group of companies is amassing all the richest data to train AI and are growing more powerful by the day. Steve, you’ve talked about this before, about your concerns that one day there could be very few companies, which would exacerbate income inequality. You said this could be a bigger threat to society than climate change. Do you think these companies — Facebook, Amazon, Google — should be broken up?
SJ: No, I don’t think they should be broken up, but I do think it’s an inexorable trend in the the technology business that there are power laws within firms and between firms . . . If you want to maintain capitalism and democracy, it’s not self-rectifying and it’s only going to get worse. Compared to when we last spoke about this [in 2015], it’s gotten a lot worse. The data concentration, the usage of it.
Think, for example, of SenseTime in China . . . it recognizes faces better than any other algorithm on earth right now . . . So you have the U.S. power laws and power laws between countries as well. That’s just one new pejoration as AI and quantum computing escalates.
So everyone in technology and who invests in it should be thoughtful about what this means and think about entrepreneurial paths to the future we want to live in . . . how we get from here to there is not obvious. The markets [will handle some but not all of these things]. So it’s very worrisome and when I said it’s worst than climate change, I meant it will have more impact on whether humanity makes it through the next 20 years. Climate change [may do us in] 200 years from now but there’s some serious pressing issues over the next 20 years.
And breaking up these companies isn’t part of the solution.
It’s almost like this notion of controlling an AI that’s greater than human intelligence. How would you ever imagine you would control such a thing? How would you even imagine understanding its inner workings? So the notion that through regulation you could break up a natural monopoly when everything that fixes the industry creates a natural monopoly, it’d be like whack-a-mole.
What’s the answer? Looking around the corner, what are you funding that’s going to blow people’s minds? Ayahuasca? Is there a market for that? I know it’s everywhere.
SJ: [Looking shocked.] There are two companies, one we wired funds earlier today and the other is a signed term sheet and they relate to your questions.
MS: We should check if the office is bugged [laughs].
SJ: There’s a lot going on. Curing mental illness. Alternative modalities.
MS: The largest rising global epidemic is depression. Adolescent suicide rates are up 300 percent in the U.S. in the last 10 years. And we don’t have the resources, the skills, the technologies and the licensed therapists available. We know there are medicinal compounds, often from plant vines, that have shown incredible value in addressing treatment-resistant depressions and addiction and abusive substances. And often participation in those things is is a privilege of particular groups in society and so how do we democratize access to mental health.
Wait, I can’t believe I guessed it. You’re investing in an ayahuasca-related startup!?
SJ: It’s close, not exactly. [Laughs.]
Facebook built a now discontinued internal app, report says between 2015 and 2016, that let employees identify colleagues and friends via facial recognition — The discontinued app could identify employees and their friends who had enabled facial recognition, Facebook said.
Well, I don’t think that was supposed to happen.
In what was one of the more surreal product launches I’ve seen, Tesla debuted its $39,900 Cybertruck pickup tonight. After running through some specs and hitting the truck’s door with a sledge hammer, Elon asked an on-stage companion to demonstrate the strength of the Tesla “Armor Glass” by throwing a solid metal, baseball-sized ball at the driver side window.
It… did not go well.
While the glass didn’t completely shatter, it did appear to crack from edge to edge. So they tried it again on the rear passenger window… and it cracked too.
Was this a gag? A “Hah hah! Just kidding, here’s a test on the real glass!” sort of thing? Nope. Elon stood in front of the truck, two broken windows and all, and completed the presentation.
While no one would expect most standard windows to stand up to a test like this, even Elon seemed surprised by the results. “We threw wrenches, we threw everything.” he said on stage. “We even literally threw a kitchen sink at the glass, and it didn’t break. For a little weird reason it broke now, I don’t know why.”
“We’ll fix it in post,” he followed up with a laugh. The video went private on Tesla’s YouTube channel about 30 seconds after the live stream was over.
And with that, the undeniable truth that is “live demos never work” lives on.
Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite has been making rounds on the internet for quite some time now. Leaks and rumours have revealed the internal specifications such as processor and camera resolution of the smartphone already. Now, the Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite has been allegedly spotted receiving US FCC certification. The certification documents have revealed some interesting details about the hardware of the device. Moreover, the Galaxy S10 Lite is rumoured to launch as soon as next month.
The latest development comes from the folks at XDA-Developers who have spotted the Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite’s US FCC certification. The listing carries a model number SM-G770F. Interestingly, it is the same model number that was recently revealed by Brazil's ANATEL as well as the Geekbench listing. Furthermore, one of the three screenshots of ‘About Phone’ in the certification documents have revealed the name ‘Galaxy S10 Lite.’ The screenshots also mention that the Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite will be a dual SIM device.
The FCC Listing has unveiled another piece of interesting information about the Galaxy S10 Lite. The smartphone will reportedly have high charging capacity - the one seen on the Galaxy Note10 lineup. The ‘Rated; option on ‘Status’ page in the Setting’s app mentions “DC 11V; 4.05A”, which is said to translate to a net power output of 45W. Samsung calls it Super Fast Charging 2.0 technology.
Previously, Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite was spotted on Geekbench 5 listing. According to the listing, the smartphone will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, paired with 8GB RAM. It could run Android 10 out of the box. The Galaxy S10 Lite managed to score 724 points in the single-core department and 2,604 in the multi-core test, which is higher than the scores of Galaxy S10. The device may feature a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED display with FHD+ resolution.
As for the optics, the Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite is said to sport a triple camera setup with a 48MP main shooter with an aperture of f/2.0 and phase-detection autofocus, a 12MP ultra-wide sensor with an aperture of f/2.2, and a 5MP depth sensor with an aperture of f/2.2. It may come with a single 32MP selfie shooter with an aperture of f/2.2. The Galaxy S10 Lite is tipped to pack a 4370mAh battery.
Moreover, the Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite is rumoured to come in ‘Prism’ colours, like the Prism Black, Prism Blue, and Prism White that the Galaxy S10 is currently available in. It is also likely to borrow the green and yellow options from the more affordable Galaxy S10e. The device is said to launch in December. In the meantime, you can read our review of the Galaxy S10 here.
https://ift.tt/34gOTc8
A couple of days ago, Valve announced that a new Half-Life game was in the works. Called Half-Life: Alyx, the game is set between the events of Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 and is a VR experience. A lot of information is available about the game but before we delve in, you should check out the trailer of the game below.
Now that you are as excited as we are for the game, let's break down the key information you need to know about the game.
Price and release date.Half-Life: Alyx is priced at Rs 1,299 on the Steam Store but is currently available at a 10% discount priced at Rs 1169. The game will release in March 2020 and there is no concrete date yet. Just the month.
Since it a VR game, what headsets will it support?The headset is compatible with all PC based VR headsets including the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality Headset. It will be compatible with the Oculus Quest as well but you will need the Link cable for it to work on the portable headset.
What are the minimum system requirements for Half-Life: Alyx?You will need a Windows 10 PC (sorry Mac users) powered by a Core i5-7500 or Ryzen 5 1600 or better. For the GPU, you will need a GTX 1060 or RX 580 (6GB VRAM) graphics card or better. The system will also need 12GB of RAM but according to The Verge, 8GB should work as well.
Is this a full-sized game or just a VR experience?Half-Life: Alyx is a full-sized game and not just a demo or experience. Players can expect a 12 to 15-hour experience from the game. Valve has said that the length of the game will be the same as Half-Life 2.
What kind of gameplay can I expect from the game?Since this is a VR game compatible with all the PC based VR headsets, you can expect to customize the game experience a bit. For the headsets that support room scaling, you should be able to move around physically, you can also play the game standing or sitting based on your comfort. You can use the traditional analogue stick to move around the room or teleport from one position to the other as we have seen in numerous VR games.
Did you know you could build your own levels in Half-Life: Alyx?For starters, the game is based on Valve’s Source 2 engine and the game will provide a set of tools for anyone to build their own new levels. It will be interesting to see the kind of levels players will make in the VR world.
According to the press release, “Everyone at Valve is excited to be returning to the world of Half-Life”, says Valve founder Gabe Newell. “VR has energized us. We’ve invested a lot of ourselves in the technology. But we’re also game developers at heart, and to be devoting ourselves to a VR game this ambitious is just as exciting. For that to come in the form of Half-Life feels like the culmination of a lot things we care a lot about: truly great games, cutting edge technology, and open platforms. We can’t wait for people to experience this.”
If you are interested in a deep dive with the developers of Half-Life: Alyx, you can check out a 22-minute interview with the developer conducted by Geoff Keighley below.
Source
https://ift.tt/35q5CK1
Elon Musk revealed Thursday evening the Tesla Cybertruck, a futuristic pickup truck made of cold-rolled steel that will start at $39,900 and have between 250 miles and more than 500 miles of range.
Musk has talked about producing an all-electric pickup truck for years now. In December, Musk resurrected the idea, saying that Tesla might have a prototype to unveil in 2019.
Musk mentioned on Twitter the desire to produce a pickup truck in April 2017, before the first Model 3 sedans had been handed over to customers and the CEO had entered production hell. At the time, Musk tweeted that a pickup truck would be unveiled in 18 to 24 months.
The pickup truck is expected to go into production in
If Tesla were to hit that mark it would be bringing its electric truck to market as GM and Rivian also starting delivering their products.
Rivian is expected to begin vehicle production of its electric R1T pickup truck in the second half of 2020. GM CEO Mary Barra said Thursday during an investor conference that the automaker plans to bring an electric pickup truck to market in 2021. Ford also is planning an electric F-150 truck.
It’s unclear how much demand there will be for electric pickup trucks. However, the demand for gas- and diesel-powered trucks is growing. Large trucks account for 14.4% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 12.6% in 2015, according to Edmunds.
Midsize trucks accounted for 3.7% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 1.5% in 2014.
Automakers are keen to tap into that growth since trucks and SUVs, which tend to have higher profit margins than sedans. And those margins could continue to increase if automakers can keep costs down.
The average transaction price of a full-size truck (gas and diesel) crossed $50,000 for the first time in September, and continues to climb, according Jessica Caldwell, the executive director of insights at Edmunds. The average transaction price of a full-size truck was $50,496 in October, and a midsize truck was $36,251.
Vivo is all set to expand its U-series of smartphones with the launch of Vivo U20 today. The smartphone will succeed Vivo U10 that was launched in India a couple of months ago. Vivo U20 teasers have already revealed some of the key specifications of the smartphone. It is seen to sport a blue gradient back panel finish. The phone will launch at 12 PM in India today, November 22. The phone will go on sale on Amazon India and Vivo e-store. The price, availability and launch offers of Vivo U20 are expected to be revealed at 12 PM.
According to the teasers, Vivo U20 will feature a 6.53 full-HD+ FullView display with waterdrop-style notch. The smartphone is tipped to have a 90.3 percent screen-to-body ratio. Vivo U20 is listed to be powered bt the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 chipset. It could come equipped with 6GB RAM and UFS 2.1 storage. It will pack a 5000mAh battery with 18W fast charging support. The teaser page claims that Vivo U20 can last for about 273 hours on standby. Further, it can last for about 21 hours on Instagram usage, 17 hours on Facebook usage, and 11 hours on YouTube usage.
Vivo U20 is also claimed to be a rebranded version of the Vivo U3 that was launched in China last month. There is no official word on the same yet. However, all the specifications revealed for the Vivo U20 thus far match with the Vivo U3 specifications. According to this, Vivo U20 may sport a triple rear camera setup: a 16MP primary camera with an f/1.78 aperture + an 8MP wide-angle sensor with an f/2.2 aperture + a 2MP depth sensor. It may also come with a 16MP selfie shooter.
For reference, Vivo U10 is priced at Rs 8,990 for the 3GB RAM + 32GB storage variant, whereas the 3GB RAM + 64GB storage option costs Rs 9,990. Vivo U20 may be priced slightly above this price bracket.
https://ift.tt/2KL96yP
Sources say Apple AirPods shipments expected to double to 60M in 2019, driven by much higher than expected demand for the AirPods Pro model — - Demand for AirPods Pro ‘much higher’ than original estimate — Wearables drive Apple's growth as smartphone shipments plateau
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters : Google proposes Search tweaks in Europe to comply with the DMA, including removing the map showing hotel locatio...
