Trickbot—the for-hire botnet Microsoft attacked—is scrambling to stay alive

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Operators of Trickbot—a for-hire botnet that has infected more than 1 million devices since 2016—are looking for new ways to stay afloat after Microsoft and a host of industry partners took coordinated action to disrupt it last week.

In an update published on Tuesday, Microsoft Corporate VP for Security & Trust Tom Burt said the operation initially managed to take down 62 of the 69 servers Trickbot was known to be using to control its vast network of infected devices. Trickbot operators responded by quickly spinning up 59 new servers, and Microsoft was able to eliminate all of them except for one.

In all, the industrywide operation has taken down 120 of 128 servers identified as belonging to Trickbot. Now, Trickbot is responding by using a competing criminal group to distribute the Trickbot malware.

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https://arstechnica.com

WarnerMedia debuts WarnerMedia RIDE, a free video service for smartphones and tablets connected to in-car WiFi via AT&T's unlimited data connected-car plans (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Todd Spangler / Variety:
WarnerMedia debuts WarnerMedia RIDE, a free video service for smartphones and tablets connected to in-car WiFi via AT&T's unlimited data connected-car plans  —  Are we there yet?  —  WarnerMedia is bringing its premium video programming to bored kids and other road-weary passengers …

Facebook moderators in India, working for a third-party contractor, say they felt pressured to return to the office this summer, even as the pandemic surged (Rest of World)

Rest of World:
Facebook moderators in India, working for a third-party contractor, say they felt pressured to return to the office this summer, even as the pandemic surged  —  Employees told Rest of World the contractor they work for is taking advantage of an economic crisis.

Alumni Helping Alumni

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Political strategist turned tech investor Bradley Tusk on SPACs as a tool for VCs

Bradley Tusk has become known in recent years for being involved in what’s about to get hot, from his early days advising Uber, to writing one of the first checks to the insurance startup Lemonade, to pushing forward the idea that we should be using the smart devices in our pockets to vote.

Indeed, because he’s often at the vanguard, it wasn’t hugely surprising when Tusk, like a growing number of other investors, formed a $300 million SPAC or special acquisition company, one that he and a partner plan to use to target a business in the leisure, gaming, or hospitality industry, according to a regulatory filing.

Because Tusk — a former political operative who ran the successful third mayoral campaign for Mike Bloomberg —  seems adept at seeing around corners, we called him up late last week to ask whether SPACs are here to stay, how a Biden administration might impact the startup investing landscape, and how worried (or not) big tech should be about this election. You can hear the full conversation here. Owing to length, we are featuring solely the part of our conversation that centered on SPACs.

TC: Lemonade went public this summer and its shares, priced at $29, now trade at $70. 

BT: They are down today last I checked. When you only check once in a blue moon, you’re like, ‘Hey, look at how great this is,’ whereas if, like me, you check me every day, you’re like, ‘It lost 4%, where’s my money?’

We got really lucky; Lemonade was our second deal that we did out of our first fund, and the fact that it IPO’d within four years of the company’s founding is pretty amazing.

TC: Is it amazing? I wonder what it says about the common complaint that the traditional IPO process is bad — is it just an excuse that founders and investors use to keep a company private longer?

BT: [CEO] Daniel Schrieber was very clear that he and [cofounder] Shai Wininger had a strategy from day one to go public as quickly as they possibly could, because in his view, an IPO is supposed to represent kind of the the beginning. It’s the ‘Okay, we’ve proven that there’s product market fit, we’ve proven that there’s customer demand; now let’s see what we can really do with this thing.’ And it’s supposed to be about hope and promise and future and excitement. And if you’ve been a private company for 10 years, and you’re worth tens of billions of dollars and your growth is already starting to flatten out a little bit, it’s just much less exciting for public investors.

The question now for everyone in our business is what happens with Airbnb in a few weeks or whenever they are [staging an IPO]. Will that pixie dust be there, or will they have been around so long that the market is kind of indifferent?

TC: Is that why we’re seeing so many SPACs? Some of that pixie dust is gone. No one knows when the IPO window might shut. Let’s get some of these companies out into the public market while we still can?

BT: No, I don’t I don’t think so. I think SPACs have become a way to raise a lot of money very quickly. It took me two years to raise $37 million for my first venture fund, and three months was the entire process for me to raise $300 million for my SPAC. So it’s a mechanism that is highly efficient and right now is so popular with public market investors that there is just a lot of opportunity, and people are grabbing it. In fact, now you’re hearing about people who are planning SPACs having to pull [them] back because there’s a ton of competition right now.

At the end of the day, the fundamentals still rule. If you take a really bad company public through a SPAC, maybe the excitement of the SPAC gets you an early pop. But if the company has neither good unit economics nor high growth, there’s no real reason to believe it will be successful. And especially for the people in the SPAC, where they have to hold on to it for a little while, by the time the lockup ends, the world has probably figured out that this is not the greatest IPO of all time. You can’t put lipstick on a pig.

TC: You say you raised the SPAC very quickly. How is the investor profile different than that of a typical venture fund investor?

BT:  The investors for this SPAC — at least when I did the roadshow, and I think I did 28 meetings over a couple of days — is mainly hedge funds and people who don’t really invest in venture at all, so there was no overlap between my [venture fund] LP base and the people who invested in our SPAC that I’m aware of. These are public market investors who are used to moving very quickly. There’s a lot more liquidity in a SPAC. We have two years to acquire something, but ultimately, it’s a public property, so investors can come in and out as they see fit.

TC: So it’s mostly hedge funds that are getting paid management fees to deploy their capital in this comparatively safe way and that are getting interest on the money invested, too, while it’s sitting around in a trust while [the SPAC managers] look for a target company.

BT: Why it kind of does make sense for [them to back] VCs is they are basically making the bet to say: does this person running the SPAC have enough deal flow, enough of a public profile, enough going on that they are going to come across the right target? And venture investors in many ways fit that profile because we just look at so many companies before deploying capital.

TC: Do you have to demonstrate some kind of public markets expertise in order to convince some of these investors that you know what it takes to take a company public and grow it in the public markets?

BT: I guess. We raised the money, so I guess I passed the test. But I did spend a little under two years on Wall Street; I created the lottery privatization group of Lehman Brothers. And my partner [in the SPAC], Christian Goode, has a lot of experience with big gaming companies. But overall, I think that if you are a venture investor with a ton of deal flow and a good track record but very little or no public market experience, I don’t know that that would disqualify you from being able to rate a SPAC.

Watch GM unveil the $80,000 GMC Hummer EV right here

GM just took the wraps off the Hummer EV and it looks great. The vehicle is coming to dealers in 2022, with pre-orders starting in 2021. You can watch the unveiling here.

The vehicle is detailed here. With 1,000 HP, 350 mile range, and autonomous drive modes, it’s an impressive vehicle though still significantly more than Tesla said the Cybertruck will cost.

Feast your eyes on the all-new, all-electric GMC Hummer EV

GMC reveals the Hummer EV: 1,000 HP, 350 mile range, and 0-60 in “around 3 seconds”

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AOC aims to get out the vote by streaming Among Us with pokimane and HasanAbi

We are about seven months into a pandemic and just two weeks from a presidential election. At this point, surprises are a dime a dozen. So it should feel very 2020 that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is about to stream Among Us, the hit game of 2020, on Twitch alongside mega-streamer pokimane and political analyst HasanAbi.

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted yesterday that she was looking for people to play the popular game with in an effort to get out the vote, noting that she’s never played before but that it looks fun.

Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote? (I’ve never played but it looks like a lot of fun)

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 19, 2020

Streamer pokimane, who has 6 million followers on Twitch and whose YouTube videos regularly see more than 1 million views each, responded to the tweet with a figurative raised hand.

Let’s do it! I’ll set up and account and get some streaming equipment today

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 19, 2020

HasanAbi, a very popular political commentator on Twitch, who has more than 380,000 Twitter followers, also chimed in to the conversation saying that they’re already making a lobby. It wasn’t long before Rep. Ilhan Omar raised her hand, too.

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 19, 2020

A good game of Among Us (imagine that someone mixed a fairly basic multiplayer video game with a murder mystery party) usually requires 10 players, so the other six players are still TBD. But the Verge reports that a handful of other streamers (such as DrLupo, Felicia Day, Greg Miller, James Charles, and Neekolul) also lined up to play with AOC.

According to Ocasio-Cortez, the stream is all about getting out the vote. And this isn’t the first time that she’s used video games to connect with her followers. AOC opened up her DMs to all 6.8 million of her followers back in May to let them send her an invite to their island, and she visited them.

Millennial voters (and Gen Z) skew toward backing the Biden / Harris ticket, and AOC is coming to them by getting on Twitch and streaming one of the rocket ship games of this year.

The stream starts at 9pm ET/6pm PT and can be found here.

And you can check if you’re registered to vote here.

Update 9:01pm ET: AOC hasn’t even started playing the game yet and has nearly 250,000 concurrent viewers. 

US officials offer Brazil telecoms financing to buy equipment from Huawei competitors, in an effort to keep China out of Brazil's 5G market (Reuters)

Reuters:
US officials offer Brazil telecoms financing to buy equipment from Huawei competitors, in an effort to keep China out of Brazil's 5G market  —  BRASILIA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government stepped up an offensive on Tuesday to keep China's Huawei Technologies out of Brazil's 5G market …

Feast your eyes on the all-new, all-electric GMC Hummer EV

GMC has a new all-electric version of its classic Hummer oversized SUV. This thing is a beast, as you might expect, with an advertised 350-mile range and a 3-second zero to 60 mph time. It’s a bit ridiculous to be honest, which is kind of what the Hummer has always been about so that makes sense.

Alongside a teaser, GMC released a number of press photos of the 1,000 HP bruiser, so take a look below. It definitely looks like a Hummer – which may or may not be your cup of tea.

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GMC reveals the Hummer EV: 1,000 HP, 350 mile range, and 0-60 in “around 3 seconds”

 

GMC reveals the Hummer EV: 1,000 HP, 350 mile range, and 0-60 in “around 3 seconds”

General Motors today revealed the GMC Hummer EV, its first electric pickup. The vehicle has a 350 range, 1,000 HP, and up to 11,500 pound feet of torque (through fuzzy math). Yes, it sort of looks like the Tesla Cybertruck.

Several key stats stick above the rest. Three motors within two Ultium drive units power the vehicle and it appears to have the longest battery of any GM vehicle with an electric powertrain. GM says the Hummer EV can hit 60 mph in around three seconds. It also has all-wheel steering, which allows it drive diagonally in a mode called Crabwalk. There are removable roof panels, 35-inch tires, and an air suspension system that can raise the vehicle 6-inches.

Some details are still missing including the capacity of the battery, towing capacity, and price. For truck buyers, numbers around power and torque are secondary to what they mean in the real world. How much can the vehicle tow? How far can it go? How far can it go when pulling a trailer?

GM has plenty of time to answer those questions and more. The Hummer EV is not coming soon. GMC said the vehicle will be available for pre-ordering in 2021 and vehicles will be available for delivery in 2022.

Feast your eyes on the all-new, all-electric GMC Hummer EV

The Hummer EV

The Hummer brand long stood for exessively large vehicles and this new incarnation is no different. It’s massive. While GM hasn’t revealed the full dimensions, it comes stock with 35-inch tires and is capable of 37-inch tires. That’s big.

GM built impressive technology into the Hummer EV. The Hummer EV comes with GM’s self-driving technology, Super Cruise, that allows the truck to drive partly autonomously. The battery pack is capable of connecting to an 800 volt charging system that will give the vehicle 100 miles in 10 minutes of charging. Buyers can order the Hummer EV with up to 18 cameras, including cameras that sit under the vehicle to help with ground clearance.

It seems GMC is positioning the Hummer EV as a quasi off-roader that’s part pickup and part SUV.

Inside a large display of unknown size dominates the dashboard. The driver’s gauge cluster is digital as well. Epic’s Unreal Engine powers both screens, which features class-leading animations. This technology is a huge leap forward over GM’s current infotainment system. The vehicle still has plenty of buttons, though, as functions such as climate control are separate from the screen.

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The General’s Electric Era

The Hummer EV is a big step for General Motors and signals a market shift. GM started its EV push in the ’90s with the EV1, which was revived in spirit with the Volt in 2010. GM released the small Chevy Bolt in 2017. None of these cars sold in large numbers, frankly, because they were uninspiring and, and well, cars. General Motors and others like Ford largely stopped developing cars as the market shifted to SUVs and pickups. GM is moving past the small commuter car with the Hummer EV in favor of a large pickup — a market segment GM knows well.

The Chevy Silverado joins the Ford F-150 and Ram Pickup as the top three selling vehicles in the United States. The three pickups outsold the next six vehicles combined. Trucks are a major market for American automakers, and the Hummer EV is clearly designed to test the water. With a unibody construction, it’s easy to imagine General Motors releasing an SUV version of the Hummer EV too. This would follow GM’s recent roadmap of moving away from cars and into SUVs and crossovers.

The Hummer EV’s unusual shape speaks to engineering limitations and partly explains why the GMC Hummer EV is not branded as a Chevy Silverado or GMC Serra. Much like the Tesla Cybertruck, the Hummer EV is likely based on a unibody construction similar to a passenger car. At this time, or rather when development began on the Hummer EV, it’s likely GM could not produce a unibody pickup with the same key specifications around towing, cargo capacity, and range of its Silverado pickups. An electric Silverado (or Ford F-150) must match its internal combustion counterpart on key areas — something the Hummer EV fails to do.

An electric Silverado is in the works. GM’s Mary Barra revealed the obvious during an interview in 2019. The automaker has only released one detail about the upcoming pickup: According to a financial document from July 2020, the electric pickup will have a 400 mile range.

General Motors has another electric pickup in the works through a significant investment with Nikola. On September 8, General Motors announced a $2 million investment in Michigan-based Nikola Motors. With the investment, General Motors gained access to Nikola’s EV development while also agreeing to manufacture Nikola’s Badger pickup. However, the deal is in question after fraud claims caused the company’s chairman to step down.

GM discontinued the Hummer brand during the auto crisis of 2008. It’s largely remembered for the monstrous H1 and H2 SUVs, the first being a civilian version of the military’s Humvee and the second being an over-the-top SUV. Towards the end of Hummer’s life, the company offered a pickup version of its smaller H3 model.

GM details 12 upcoming electric vehicles from Cadillac, GMC, Chevrolet and Buick

GMC Hummer EV vs. Tesla Cybertruck

Comparisons between the Hummer EV and Tesla Cybertrucks are inevitable. Much of the Cybertruck is still speculation and GM failed to reveal key details about the Hummer EV. Tesla unveiled the so-called super-truck eleven months ago and has been rather quiet since about the vehicle. In May, Elon Musk tweeted that the production version of the Cybertruck will likely be about the same size as the prototype.

At the time of the Cybertruck’s reveal, Tesla said it would be available starting at $39,000 for a single motor version capable of pulling 7,500 pounds and driving 250 miles on a charge. An AWD dual-motor and tri-motor version would also be available for $49,000 and $69,000, respectively. It’s unclear if those price points or specs will be true with Tesla releases the Cybertruck.

The Tesla Cybertruck and GMC Hummer EV share a lot in common, including a unibody construction that gives the vehicles their unusual look. Both the Hummer EV and Cybertruck feature unique C pillars that act as a flying buttress. These pillars add significant strength to the vehicle and compensate for the unibody design.

Generally, pickup trucks are built as two pieces: the body is placed on a frame. This is done for several reasons, but most notable here is because a frame can handle the significant twist caused by the drivetrain running from the front axle to the back. And in an EV, truck or car, there isn’t a drivetrain connecting the front and rear axels. This allows the automakers to employ a lighter unibody construction, which is often safer for the occupants. However, these bodies need to be as stiff as possible to help with towing and hauling. Honda leaned into this design with the unibody Ridgeline pickup.

Feast your eyes on the all-new, all-electric GMC Hummer EV

Truck Buyers Have Different Expectations

The Hummer EV is a significant step for General Motors as it pushes into the electric future. Some buyers are not ready for electric vehicles, and truck buyers could be among the hardest demographic to convince.

Following the reveal of the Tesla Cybertruck in 2019, the company hooked a prototype up to the tow bar of a newer Ford F-150. The test was widely panned, as many pointed out the flaws that resulted in a Cybertruck win. Tesla was trying to demonstrate that its truck, though electric, can still do truck stuff. GMC will likely employ similar feats of strength, including commercials where gruff men proving a voiceover while the Hummer EV is towing a boat.

Truck buyers expect several things. One, the truck has to have a strong stance, which the Hummer EV has in bundles. Two, most truck buyers look at towing capacity even if they never tow anything. Towing capacity in trucks is much like horsepower in sports cars — more the better even if it’s not used. And towing capacity is only partially dictated by the powertrain’s power output. The rest comes from the design of the platform and how it can handle pulling weight. It’s unclear at this point if the Hummer EV, even with its crazy 1,000 HP, will be able to out tow a Silverado or F-150.

The Hummer falls short in several categories critical to pickup buyers: range and hauling capacity.

Pickups come with large gas tanks giving them amazing range. For instance, my 2016 Ford F-150 has a 32-gallon tank. If driven carefully, the truck can get 700 miles on one tank. When towing a trailer, the range is cut in half but exceeds 300 miles on a tank. GMC says the Hummer has a 350 range but has yet to say the range when towing a 7,000 travel trailer.

The electric pickup wars

With a release date of 2022, the Hummer EV is far from a sure bet. GM has plenty of time to rework the machine, adding or decreasing the range as technology improves before its release.

GM has competition too. The electric pickup race is just starting and Ford has the most to lose.

The Ford F-150 is the top selling vehicle in the American market, and has been for generations. The truck is the foundation of Ford’s success. In 2019 the company released a video demonstration of an early prototype electric powertrain that was able to pull (note: not tow) 1 million pounds. To help its efforts Ford invested hundreds of millions into Michigan-based Rivian, maker of an electric pickup platform. Recent reports place the viability of that partnership in question, but Ford is likely working at full tilt towards its electric pickups.

Automotive startups are also looking at building electric pickups. Rivian intends to build and sell its own pickup and SUV. Lordstown Motors, an outfit out of Lordstown, Ohio, revealed its pickup design in June and said it would retail for $52,000. And there’s more: Bollinger Motors, Workhorse, and Nikola.

Electric pickups are ripe for an electric takeover and GM just threw down a Hummer-sized hammer.

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Rivian raises $2.5 billion as it pushes to bring its electric RT1 pickup, R1S SUV to market

The debut of electric pickups signals a new EV era

After historic OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample collection, Lockheed Martin VP Lisa Callahan will join us at TC Sessions: Space

This December 16 and 17, we’re hosting our very first TC Sessions: Space event. It’ll be a virtual, live-streamed two-day show, including conversations with some of the best and brightest in the space industry. We’re thrilled to be hosting Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of Commercial Civil Space at Lockheed Martin. She’ll join us to discuss her company’s history-making work in robotic space exploration — including the asteroid mining sample collection at asteroid Bennu that happened today — as well as the future of human space exploration.

Callahan’s work at Lockheed covers all the work they do to support NASA and other civil exploration efforts of space, including both robotic and human transportation and science investigations. That includes OSIRIS-REx, the asteroid study and sample return mission that earlier today made a historic descent to the surface of rocky solar system visitor Bennu, an asteroid that’s over 200 thousand miles from Earth.

OSIRIS-REx already made plenty of history, including becoming the closest orbit to an asteroid ever conducted by a spacecraft. But today it topped all of that with a “tap-and-go” descent to the rocky surface, scooping samples that it will now attempt to return to Earth for direct study by scientists. That’s exactly the kind of ambitious extra-planetary robotic research that Callahan and her division at Lockheed have made possible with their work in advanced spacecraft and robotics design.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx just snatched a rock sample from asteroid Bennu

Callahan is also directly involved in NASA’s plans to return humans to the surface of the moon — including sending a woman on a lunar landing mission for the first time. Lockheed Martin is the manufacturing partner for NASA’s Orion lander, which will transport the first American woman and the next American man to the -oon for their historic mission in 2024.

We’ll talk in December with Callahan about what these achievements mean for the space industry, and the future of space exploration — and human spaceflight.

You can get Early-Bird tickets right now, and save $150 before prices go up on November 13 — and you can even get a fifth person free if you bring a group of four from your company. Special discounts for current members of the government/military/nonprofit and student tickets are also available directly on the website. And if you are an early-stage space startup looking to get exposure to decision makers, you can even exhibit for the day for just $2,000.

Is your company interested in partnering at TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.