Home Imrprovement Designs: 2017

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

kitchen remodeling companies Fairfax

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Monday, September 11, 2017

kitchen remodeling for cheap Herndon Virginia

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Saturday, September 9, 2017

Weibo orders users to verify their real names by September 15 following China's new restrictions on anonymous online conversation (Nectar Gan/South China Morning Post)

Nectar Gan / South China Morning Post:
Weibo orders users to verify their real names by September 15 following China's new restrictions on anonymous online conversation — Deadline comes as government seeks to tighten its grip on online speech ahead of next month's Communist Party congress — China's Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo …

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iOS 11 GM leak shows LTE Apple Watch may use same phone number as iPhone and reveals an image of a Watch with red Digital Crown and a face showing signal meter (Benjamin Mayo/9to5Mac)

Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
iOS 11 GM leak shows LTE Apple Watch may use same phone number as iPhone and reveals an image of a Watch with red Digital Crown and a face showing signal meter — In continuing news from the Apple Watch GM firmware, we've found several strings references to how cellular plans on Apple Watch work and how users set them up.

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Virginia State Board of Elections votes to remove touchscreen voting machines before November elections, saying they pose unacceptable digital risks (Eric Geller/Politico)

Eric Geller / Politico:
Virginia State Board of Elections votes to remove touchscreen voting machines before November elections, saying they pose unacceptable digital risks — Virginia's election supervisors on Friday directed counties to ditch touchscreen voting machines before November's elections, saying the devices posed unacceptable digital risks.

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Blockchain Firms Ripple, R3 File Dueling Lawsuits Over Crypto Contract Dispute (Stan Higgins/CoinDesk)

Stan Higgins / CoinDesk:
Blockchain Firms Ripple, R3 File Dueling Lawsuits Over Crypto Contract Dispute — Distributed ledger startups Ripple and R3 have become embroiled in a new legal battle, with both startups filing lawsuits related to a contract dispute between the two firms. — Ripple alleged in a complaint …

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Friday, September 8, 2017

Indian budget hotel aggregator OYO raises $250M Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenoaks, and Hero Enterprise participating (Sumit Chakraberty/Tech in Asia)

Sumit Chakraberty / Tech in Asia:
Indian budget hotel aggregator OYO raises $250M Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenoaks, and Hero Enterprise participating — Japanese giant SoftBank is keeping its faith in India's budget accommodation provider Oyo, despite its mounting losses and growing competition.

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AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon form Mobile Authentication Taskforce to create new open standard and fix security flaws present in current SMS-based 2FA (Steve Dent/Engadget)

Steve Dent / Engadget:
AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon form Mobile Authentication Taskforce to create new open standard and fix security flaws present in current SMS-based 2FA — Two-factor authentication (2FA) via SMS and a smartphone provides a heavy dose of additional security for your data …

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House Energy and Commerce Committee, Financial Services Committee, and New York attorney general announce probes into Equifax breach (Tony Romm/Recode)

Tony Romm / Recode:
House Energy and Commerce Committee, Financial Services Committee, and New York attorney general announce probes into Equifax breach — Meanwhile, New York announces its own investigation. — The U.S. Congress plans to probe a massive data breach at the credit-monitoring service Equifax …

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Medium adds curated articles from The New York Times, Financial Times, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and others to its premium membership program (Basil Enan/The Official Medium Blog)

Basil Enan / The Official Medium Blog:
Medium adds curated articles from The New York Times, Financial Times, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and others to its premium membership program — Members can enjoy curated selections from The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, and more

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Volvo acquires assets of car valet startup Luxe, which had raised $75M+ in funding (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Volvo acquires assets of car valet startup Luxe, which had raised $75M+ in funding — After a pivot and months of speculation about the future of car valet and concierge startup Luxe, the company has finally found a home. Today, automaker Volvo Cars announced that it is acquiring the startup's platform …

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Latin American online travel agency Despegar.com sets $23 to $26 range for its 12.8M share US IPO, will be valued at $1.6B at the midpoint of the range (Clark Schultz/Seeking Alpha)

Clark Schultz / Seeking Alpha:
Latin American online travel agency Despegar.com sets $23 to $26 range for its 12.8M share US IPO, will be valued at $1.6B at the midpoint of the range — Despegar.com (Pending:DESP) files for an IPO in the U.S. — The Latin American online travel agency plans to sell 12.8M shares in a range of $23 to $26 per share.

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From Infinity to 8: Translating AI into real numbers

Turning abstract AI into real business solutions.

Like infinity, artificial intelligence is an abstract concept. AI commercials show floating orbs and a sprinkling of fairy dust providing magical answers to our questions—even those we didn’t know to ask. These presentations of AI remind me of an episode from South Park’s second season called “Underpants Gnomes.” In this episode, gnomes collect underpants and make a profit. The question is, how exactly do they get from point A to point B? The business plan is revealed via a slide, of course:

Collect underpants
?
Profit

AI offers something similar: (1) Collect data, (2) AI, (3) Profit! My goal in this article is to help you be more explicit about Step 2. I hope it helps you make real the incredible AI opportunities that I know are available to your organization.

The first step in getting real with AI is to define it: AI is just maths. Just like there isn’t only one kind of math, there isn’t one AI. Before you run away because of the “m” word, have faith: just as you don’t need to know how to code to influence software design successfully, you don’t need to know math to influence the AI in your desired solution. Focus on the inputs and the outputs, and how you can validate each. In this post, I’ll cover the input and output validation tips, as well as how to make sure what’s in between focuses on the problem you need solved.

Putting the wheel before the cart before the horse

Every day, companies approach my company, Nara Logics, saying AI is one of their top objectives this year, and asking if our platform can help. Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, says, “Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve a customer’s problem.” In this analogy, AI success is two clicks away. Essentially, AI helps you deliver a feature. To find a problem that is a good fit for AI, I recommend focusing on the “Four Vs” of big data—i.e., the input:

What data do you have large Volumes of? What actions does it impact now? And what ones could it impact? For consumer companies, for example, customer transactions are large volumes of data. For a manufacturing company, factory production information provides volume.
Where is there significant Variety in your data? For example, an insurance company offering a few hundred policies doesn’t have volume. However, the variety of customer attributes driving the match to a policy is big data.
Do you have areas of high Velocity data? IoT is certainly driving this aspect of data for many companies. I also encourage you to think about relative velocity. If an analysis takes you a week and you need to make decisions daily, then you have a high velocity relative to your current capacity. This issue most often affects companies tackling their digital transformations.
Are there Veracity questions with your data? Do you need to track and verify data initially, or over time? One of our government intelligence customers tracks and verifies sources of data via both automated machine learning and scoring through human feedback.

In addition to evaluating the opportunities in your Vs, take a long, hard look in the mirror to see if your organization is ready to learn. A primary advantage of AI over alternative data analysis methods is continual, progressive, automated learning from data. For example, is your organization ready to respond proactively to possible quality issues, rather than only after issues are discovered? Are you ready to change your supply chain when you learn there’s a summer market for your winter product?

These questions may sound simple, but they can involve re-branding and/or significant organizational and operational changes. If your business is not agile, changes could cost more than the savings or additional sales. To really leverage AI, you need to build a learning organization. For some ideas of what change this could mean, I’m a fan of this Harvard Business Review article on Unilever’s move from insights to action.

Nobody here but us chickens

In an earlier article, I talked through the holy trinity of AI: the chicken (algorithms), eggs (data), and bacon (results). So far, I’ve discussed data and results—or at least the uncooked bacon, i.e., the problem you are solving.

Now, let’s talk about the chickens. How do you figure out the right algorithm? Here are my three pieces of advice for minding your chickens as they hatch:

AI’s equivalent to the real estate mantra of location, location, location should be lean, lean, lean. Use the lean feedback cycle: “build, measure, learn,” with a doubled-down emphasis on data—which is a by-product of measure, and the requirement for learn in the normal cycle. What’s important here is that we iterate more with continuous experiments and learning in our cycle as we start understanding how our chosen algorithm(s) interact with our data to deliver our results.
Data now drives actions in our applications; we must become much more data conversant. We need to add another key role in our product development teams: the data whisperer. Notice I did not say data analyst or data scientist. You need someone on your team who is not only talented in analyzing your data, but also understands its etymology and your organization. Cesar, the dog whisperer, teaches dog owners tools tailored to their situations and abilities to tame their pet problems.
Get real, fast. Because we are excited about the possibilities in AI, we often spend our time on the AI itself and not the rest of the application. Start with a quick statistical approach to serve your application, fake the image recognition with a team of people, or build a simple decision tree to simulate the AI. Make sure the basic flow of your application works for users. Learn from what people want and expect. They don’t have to like your “intelligence,” but they do need to respond to the problem you are solving.

Overall, this practical approach is similar to Marc Andreesen’s mantra on product/market fit. In this case, I call it tech/feature fit. Focus obsessively on the right AI fit for your feature.

This overall framework is not new. Use proven product development tools and frameworks, just add the emphasis on data and respect the new twists that requires. Think of this as a food chain: software is eating the world; software is fed by AI; and AI is fed by data. Know what you eat, and keep it real.

Continue reading From Infinity to 8: Translating AI into real numbers.

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Amid Setback, Researchers Forge Ahead with “Off-the-Shelf” Immune Cells to Treat Cancer

Amid Setback, Researchers Forge Ahead with “Off-the-Shelf” Immune Cells to Treat Cancer

The approach could treat patients in dire need faster at a lower price, but major questions remain about safety.

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Twitter enables account sharing in its mobile app, powered by TweetDeck Teams (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Twitter enables account sharing in its mobile app, powered by TweetDeck Teams — TweetDeck Teams — a feature that lets users share access to Twitter accounts without having to share a password — will now work in the Twitter app for iOS and Android. This change will make it easier …

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Zelle, a payment network backed by major US banks, will launch a standalone app on September 12 (Natt Garun/The Verge)

Natt Garun / The Verge:
Zelle, a payment network backed by major US banks, will launch a standalone app on September 12 — Zelle, a new payment service backed by more than 30 US banks, will launch its standalone app on September 12th to take on competitors like Venmo and Square Cash.

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TraceMe, founded by NFL star Russell Wilson, raises $9M led by Madrona, with Bezos, Chad Hurley, and Joe Tsai participating, to connect celebs with "superfans" (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
TraceMe, founded by NFL star Russell Wilson, raises $9M led by Madrona, with Bezos, Chad Hurley, and Joe Tsai participating, to connect celebs with “superfans” — As Russell Wilson describes the ethos of his new startup, it feels like you're inside his Seahawks huddle, driving down the field in the fourth quarter.

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Sources: Facebook is willing to spend $1B through 2018 on original video for its platform, a dramatic increase on its current video deals (Deepa Seetharaman/Wall Street Journal)

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Facebook is willing to spend $1B through 2018 on original video for its platform, a dramatic increase on its current video deals — Social-media giant could spend as much as $1 billion to cultivate original shows for its platform — Facebook Inc. FB .65% is loosening its purse strings …

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Israeli lidar startup Innoviz raises $65M round backed by auto suppliers Delphi and Magna; Canadian lidar maker LeddarTech raises $101M from Delphi and Magneti (Alan Ohnsman/Forbes)

Alan Ohnsman / Forbes:
Israeli lidar startup Innoviz raises $65M round backed by auto suppliers Delphi and Magna; Canadian lidar maker LeddarTech raises $101M from Delphi and Magneti — Israeli startup Innoviz Technologies closed a $65 million funding round with backing from Delphi and Magna …

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Sources: FBI is investigating Uber over use of defunct "Hell" program that illegally tracked drivers working for competitors like Lyft (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: FBI is investigating Uber over use of defunct “Hell” program that illegally tracked drivers working for competitors like Lyft — Investigators looking at whether Uber's defunct ‘Hell’ internal program was used to interfere illegally with competitors

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Why strong sound design is critical to successful products

Sound design should not be an afterthought at the end of a design process.

A brief survey of sound design

Given its broad range of uses, and central role in the formation of our culture and intellectual traditions, is it any wonder that we eventually bent ourselves to the task of turning sound into a full-fledged tool of communication and influence? The history of human civilization is also a history of increasingly complex sound design. How we got there offers some crucial insights into what we’ve come to expect from sound, and how to meet or confound those expectations.

Alarms

Throughout human history we have devised alarms that alert us to danger, or convey some other kind of status, over a greater physical range than could be achieved through visual signalling. Initially this was something as simple as a stick hitting a log, but as humans gathered into larger groups and more permanent settlements, we refined them to be louder, more distinctive and more customized. It was no longer enough to let 40 people know that a raiding party was coming—now you had to let 2,000 people know that a house was on fire, floodwaters were rising, or a thief was about. The story of alarms is the story of civilization, to the point where we hear dozens a day, almost without realizing it, from car horns and police sirens to school bells and smartphone alerts.

Musical instruments

The earliest musical instruments found are flutes, over 40,000 years old, meaning they predate written language by many thousands of years. We were shaping each other’s emotions with sound long before we learned to do so with text. As best we can tell, early musical instruments were created for use in ritual and were played in communal settings, and in many ways they’re still used this way in modern times.

Today, your daily ritual might incorporate a specific upbeat song into a wakeup or workout routine. Romance and relationships may be associated with particular songs. Outdoor concerts are spaces for coming of age as well as showing off and socializing. They are also places for the establishment and communication of tribal signatures such as fashion, identity, beauty and mating readiness. A popular, catchy summer song (Daft Punk’s Get Lucky comes to mind for 2014, or George Michael’s Faith for 1988) may define an entire summer, not just in one country, but around the world. Together these songs represent rituals of summer or certain moods.

Digital recording and playback marks an advancement over analog instruments in that it lets us produce and share music even more easily. Digital is portable: We can play it anywhere we like. It’s also accessible: We can sign up for a music streaming service and play it at any time.

This ease of access comes with drawbacks though, such as the loss of communal listening, and the loss of sound quality due to compression. Today it’s rare to hear full, uncompressed music as we might in a chamber music hall. Instead, we most often hear it post-produced to make it listenable at low bitrates, making it relatively easy to stream, but at diminished quality. This puts a hidden cognitive burden on our brains, which must work to fill miniscule gaps in the music left by the compression process.

In the short term, this is a small price to pay for instant access to millions of songs, but in the long term it turns music into a sort of virtual junk food, providing a semblance of satisfaction while fatiguing our auditory processing abilities. Still, this temporary fatigue is generally preferable to the random jarring noises present in everyday urban and suburban environments.

Messages at a distance

Among musical instruments, the talking drum is of particular interest to sound designers. Originally from West Africa, this drum is unusual in that it was specifically designed to make a variety of sounds that emulate human speech, giving it a rudimentary vocabulary. This made it effective as a method for long-distance communication between villages, with other drums picking up signals and repeating them further along.

Although not the first device to convey variable messages at a distance, the talking drum was far beyond any other audible communication device of its day, in its combination of flexibility, resolution and range. It communicated a variety of messages, not just a single alarm or status report, by taking advantage of the wide tonal range of languages commonly spoken in the area. Its resolution—the amount of detail that can be conveyed in a given period of time—is still considerably lower than that of human speech, but much higher than the one-bit resolution of an alarm, which is either on or off.

It turns out that many group-level communications tasks fit neatly into this resolution. If you wish to announce to your neighbors that there will be a council meeting next Monday, you need more than a gong. But sending a person several miles to the next village simply to say, “Meeting next Monday” is a lot of effort for a small amount of information. The ideal resolution is just a few bits, but it needs to stay accurate at a distance. The talking drum was an early, elegant solution to a very common problem.

Since then, humans have developed ever more sophisticated ways to convey messages over a distance, and a good fraction of them involve sound. Our first progression into electrically enabled distance communication was Morse Code. It employed sound, and enabled communication that turns out to be extremely useful for large groups like militaries, companies and governments.

Fast forward to today, and the variety of communication media we employ is astoundingly rich. Even in an era when millions have the ability to quickly record and send video at 1080p, we often resort to text messages just a few words long, or willingly submit ourselves to the 140 character limit of Twitter. There’s a certain wisdom to this: whether in sound, text or image, a limited amount of information is often preferable, especially when we’re asked to absorb thousands of such messages in a day.

Sound as instigator

Often, sound is deliberately employed to change the actions of individuals or groups, beyond the simple, direct “watch out” of an alarm. When properly designed, sounds can profoundly shape the behaviors of large groups of people, allowing a central actor to quickly communicate something to a large group of people and coordinate them.

Music is sometimes pressed into this kind of service. At shopping malls throughout China, the song Going Home by saxophonist Kenny G is played to indicate closing hours. In Taiwan, garbage trucks play a recording of Beethoven’s Für Elise as a cue for neighborhood residents to bring their garbage out for pick up. Numerous other examples exist on a small scale (one resort in Washington’s San Juan Islands plays Semisonic’s Closing Time when the spa is about to close), but each is leveraging the same advantages of recorded music: specific, recognizable, unignorable but also relatively unintrusive.

The downside, of course, is the danger of a formerly beloved song becoming irritating through constant repetition, creating a negative association with both the song and the event it’s indicating. Anyone who grew up hearing ice cream trucks playing “It’s a Small World” or the Mister Softee tune every summer day is familiar with this phenomenon.

A better solution in these situations would be to change the melody regularly, but always use the same timbre and instrumentation. This provides all the benefits of song-signalling, from recognizability to unobtrusiveness, but adds enough variety to avoid irritation. This type of subtlety in sound communication is still rare in our current sonic environment. One aim of this book is to make it the norm.

Why sound design is critical

We live in a world with a lot of undesigned sounds. Many are unavoidable or taken for granted. But many sounds can be designed, and when we can design them, we should.

Sound eases cognitive burdens. We build more and more products every year, and our environments are more the result of human than natural processes. Our attention is already overloaded, and rather than taking some of the cognitive load off our beleaguered brains, undesigned sounds add to the burden. This is the pragmatic argument for improving our sound design capabilities.

Sound is also a powerful brand differentiator. Implemented well, it helps a product stand out; implemented poorly—whether through inept design, hardware limitations, or poor integration—it detracts. Just as with visual aspects of UI, sound characteristics should be consistent across products and platforms, leaving us with no overt impression of any specific sound, but a deep sense of satisfaction and brand identity.

Sound is emotional. Because hearing is passive and immediate, it can produce an emotional response outside the will of the human experiencing it. Unless you block your ears or are hearing impaired, you can’t not hear.

Many of our sound reactions are hard-wired by our physiology. Hearing an unexpected and harsh alert from a mobile phone can trigger a startle response. These responses range from brief distraction to a fight-or-flight response, the result of millions of years of evolution. That snap might be potential prey. That growl might be a hungry bear.

It’s not all bears and beeps though. There many positive emotions that sound can release as well. Voice, music, the sound of a well-made machine in operation, and even Pavlovian stimuli such fresh toast popping up from a toaster can elicit an involuntary positive emotional response. Other times, it is the sound itself which elicits emotion. Beyond startling and alarming sounds, we have music, voice, environmental and architectural acoustics that can affect our emotions directly and without interpretation. For example: whether you speak Portuguese or not, try listening to Amália Rodrigues singing “Estranha forma de vida” and try not to slip into melancholy.

Finally, sound impacts productivity. Part of our brain is always attending to the sounds around us. Even if we’re good at compartmentalizing, a portion of our cognitive attention always goes toward listening. We are evolved to expect a certain level of background noise, and a certain level of variability: nature is rarely silent, but it’s also rarely loud, and loud noises in nature often indicate danger.

Because of this, sound can impact our behavior and productivity in a dramatic way. It’s difficult to focus on a task when part of your brain is sensing uncertainty or the implication of danger, but it’s also easy to dismiss these effects when no actual danger is present. For these reasons, sound has an extraordinary ability to influence our experience of nearly any task, promoting or sapping concentration, creativity and resolve.

How many benchmarks do we have for the visual components of user experience design? It’s time we had models and frameworks for sound design as well, that take advantage of existing design processes already developed. Otherwise we’ll be left with more of what we’re already facing—sound design as an afterthought at the end of a design process, or worse, sound determined by the default settings on hardware built in factories far away.

Where do we start?

Not every product needs sound design.

Maybe you build and sell valves for natural gas substations. Nobody really cares what valves for natural gas substations sound like, but a technician cares deeply about whether each valve is functioning properly. An audible alarm may be necessary to announce a problem, but only if it’s someplace the technician can hear it, not at the valve itself. In this case, the sound design challenge is extremely straightforward: there’s only a single use case, and a specific, known audience.

Other products don’t have sound as a design driver but still indicate their behavior and status audibly. Consider a baseball bat hitting a baseball, or an axe successfully splitting a piece of wood. Both produce sounds that give a lot of information about the action performed, and about the qualities of the objects themselves, but neither has been explicitly “sound-designed.” Still other products benefit from the tuning of their passive acoustic characteristics: weights are added to car doors in order to make them feel more solid when they are opened and produce a sturdy “crumpf” sound when they are closed.

This is why electronic devices increasingly look to the natural or mechanical world for inspiration in sound design; why your smartphone makes a subtle mechanical click when you unlock it. There was a time when designers debated whether camera apps should go entirely skeuomorphic (an actual recording of a real camera) or entirely digital (a monotone, artificial beep), but the sweet spot turns out to be somewhere in the middle, with a slightly pared-down version of the shutter sound. Human brains, it seems, like sounds that are familiar but not too familiar.

For the time being, it’s enough that you understand that sound matters, and that sound (like all aspects of UX design) is always designed, whether intentionally or not. In most cases, bad sound design is worse than no sound design at all. But if your product does make sound and you don’t design it, someone will design it for you.

Continue reading Why strong sound design is critical to successful products.

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Four short links: 8 September 2017

CryptoCurrency Fails, AI Interchange, Big Data Surveillance, and Foragers vs. Farmers

Cryptographic Vulnerabilities in IOTA -- The cryptocurrency space is heating up—Protocol Labs raised $200M for Filecoin, Bancor raised $150M, and Tezos raised $232M. [T]he due diligence required to make sound investments in the technology isn’t keeping up with the pace of the hype. Don't. Roll. Your. Own. Crypto!
Microsoft and Facebook Launch AI Interoperability -- Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format, a standard for representing deep learning models that enables models to be transferred between frameworks.
Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing -- based on observations and interviews with the Los Angeles Police Department, the author finds: First, discretionary assessments of risk are supplemented and quantified using risk scores. Second, data are used for predictive, rather than reactive or explanatory, purposes. Third, the proliferation of automatic alert systems makes it possible to systematically surveil an unprecedentedly large number of people. Fourth, the threshold for inclusion in law enforcement databases is lower, now including individuals who have not had direct police contact. Fifth, previously separate data systems are merged, facilitating the spread of surveillance into a wide range of institutions.
Forager vs. Farmer (Robin Hanson) -- a safe, playful, talky collective isn’t always the best way to deal with things. I think Robin Hanson is saying it's OK to punch Nazis but not OK to punch a coworker—EVEN IF THEY SUGGEST WRITING THE NEW SYSTEM IN {some language that has recently been mentioned on Hacker News}.

Continue reading Four short links: 8 September 2017.

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Four short links: 7 September 2017

IoT Future, DolphinAttack, Grid Threat, and Personal Communicators

A Tough Week for IoT (Matt Webb) -- The native business model of Enterprise IoT is hardware-enabled SaaS. What "hardware-enabled" means is that although the hardware is necessary (it's a sensor, or a camera, or whatever), it's not core. It can be commodity.
The DolphinAttack -- In this work, we design a completely inaudible attack, DolphinAttack, that modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers (e.g., f > 20 kHz) to achieve inaudibility. We validate DolphinAttack on popular speech recognition systems, including Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, Huawei HiVoice, Cortana, and Alexa. By injecting a sequence of inaudible voice commands, we show a few proof-of-concept attacks, which include activating Siri to initiate a FaceTime call on iPhone, activating Google Now to switch the phone to the airplane mode, and even manipulating the navigation system in an Audi automobile.
Hackers Gain Switch-Flipping Access to U.S. Power Grid (Wired) -- Chien reasons that they may have been seeking the option to cause an electric disruption but waiting for an opportunity that would be most strategically useful—say, if an armed conflict broke out, or potentially to issue a well-timed threat that would deter the U.S. from using its own hacking capabilities against another foreign nation's critical infrastructure.
Orion Labs -- Orion is a communicator with smarts on the back end—and they just released real-time translation. It's hard to make good hardware, and harder to make good social software, so this is a hell of an accomplishment.

Continue reading Four short links: 7 September 2017.

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Uber plans to electrify its London fleet by 2025, wants all uberX vehicles to be electric or hybrid by 2019, and adds 35p surcharge for funds for car upgrades (James Vincent/The Verge)

James Vincent / The Verge:
Uber plans to electrify its London fleet by 2025, wants all uberX vehicles to be electric or hybrid by 2019, and adds 35p surcharge for funds for car upgrades — The company is adding a surcharge of 35p ($0.46) to trips to help meet its green ambitions — Uber's UK operation has announced …

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The Equifax breach, affecting ~44% of US population, is possibly the worst leak of personal information ever, and was handled poorly by the company (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
The Equifax breach, affecting ~44% of US population, is possibly the worst leak of personal information ever, and was handled poorly by the company — Consumer's most sensitve data is now in the open and will remain so for years to come. — It's a sad reality in 2017 …

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Equifax Security Breach #1224 - Geek News Central

Equifax the holder of millions of credit reports and banking information was hacked. In the biggest blunder, the online world has seen to date. A vendor who’s security was lacking has now resulted in the exposure of 143 Million consumers Social Security Numbers, Date of Birth, Drivers License info and everything else banks use to identify us has been lost. This company needs to be made an example of and banned from doing any further business in the United States. This is a security failure in a system that should never have failed.

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Equifax Security Breach #1224

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Filecoin blockchain data storage network completes ICO by raising a record $257M including $52M presale, surpassing the $232M raised by Tezos (Stan Higgins/CoinDesk)

Stan Higgins / CoinDesk:
Filecoin blockchain data storage network completes ICO by raising a record $257M including $52M presale, surpassing the $232M raised by Tezos — Blockchain data storage network Filecoin has officially completed its initial coin offering (ICO), raising more than $257 million over a month of activity.

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Drones and Robots Are Taking Over Industrial Inspection

Drones and Robots Are Taking Over Industrial Inspection

Advances in AI have made it possible for machines to autonomously inspect pipelines, power lines, and transportation systems.

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Canadian-based Kik plans $125M ICO, says it won't allow investors from its home country to participate due to weak guidance from Ontario Securities Commission (Gerrit De Vynck/Bloomberg)

Gerrit De Vynck / Bloomberg:
Canadian-based Kik plans $125M ICO, says it won't allow investors from its home country to participate due to weak guidance from Ontario Securities Commission — Messaging app plans to raise $125 million total in offering — Kik CEO said ‘weak guidance’ from OSC led to the decision

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Thursday, September 7, 2017

Israel-based autonomous drone startup Airobotics raises $32.5M Series C from Microsoft Ventures and others to expand into defense and homeland security, more (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Israel-based autonomous drone startup Airobotics raises $32.5M Series C from Microsoft Ventures and others to expand into defense and homeland security, more — Airobotics, a startup building autonomous drones for the enterprise sector that do not require humans to get involved in any aspect …

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Three Equifax execs including CFO sold shares worth ~$1.8M days after breach found but before public disclosure; no filings list transactions as scheduled sales (Anders Melin/Bloomberg)

Anders Melin / Bloomberg:
Three Equifax execs including CFO sold shares worth ~$1.8M days after breach found but before public disclosure; no filings list transactions as scheduled sales — Three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach …

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Cloudera acquires machine learning research company Fast Forward Labs, beats Q2 expectations as it reports $89.8M revenue (Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE)

Robert Hof / SiliconANGLE:
Cloudera acquires machine learning research company Fast Forward Labs, beats Q2 expectations as it reports $89.8M revenue — In its second quarter since going public in April, big-data firm Cloudera Inc. managed to beat expectations, reversing a first-quarter disappointment that saw its shares plunge 16 percent the next day.

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UploadVR, now Upload, says sexual harassment and wrongful termination suit against it is over; sources say firm dodged a bullet, question its initial response (TechCrunch)

TechCrunch:
UploadVR, now Upload, says sexual harassment and wrongful termination suit against it is over; sources say firm dodged a bullet, question its initial response — Upload, formerly UploadVR, the virtual reality startupat the center of a sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit filed earlier …

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