Author : zebethcontrol

Drones in cities are a bad idea • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in delivery drones, drones, Hardware, Opinion, Robotics & AI, TransportationNo Comments

It’s year five, or maybe ten, of “drones are going to revolutionize transport” and so far, we’ve got very little to show for it. Maybe it’s time to put these foolish ambitions to rest and focus on where this technology could actually do some good, rather than pad out a billionaire’s bottom line or let the rich skip traffic. The promise of drone deliveries, drone taxis, and personal drone attendants has never sat, or rather floated, right with me. There’s so little to be gained, while braving so much liability and danger, and necessitating so much invention and testing. Why is anyone even pursuing this? I suspect it is the Jetsons-esque technotopianism instilled in so many of us from birth: It’s only a matter of time and effort before we have the flying cars, subliminal learning pillows, and robot housekeepers we deserve, right? It feels like because we have things that fly, and things that can navigate autonomously, we should be able to put those things together and make delivery drones and air taxis. Just have to wait for the right genius kid building the future out of their garage, with the help of your friendly neighborhood VCs. Of course it’s not quite that easy. And although the Jetsons mentality explains our acceptance of the development of these technologies — unlike others that we disapprove of for their impracticability, cost, or ethics — it doesn’t really explain why a company like Amazon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue it. The answer there, fortunately, is as clear as why Amazon does anything. To paraphrase Dr Johnson: “Sir, no man but a blockhead ever [spent a decade trying to build an autonomous drone delivery network], except for money.” That’s certainly the case with drone delivery. Amazon has made no secret of its intention to take over the logistics and delivery industry bite by bite, partly through sideways subsidy from other parts of its lucrative, mutually buttressed businesses, and partly with a punishing franchise model that offloads risk and liability onto contractors. That said, the end goal is, as in its warehouses, to replace those flesh and blood workers with tireless automatons. The best evidence for this is that Amazon’s warehouses already treat workers as if they are components in a machine, so it’s just a matter of swapping out a worn out part with another, more reliable part that doesn’t try to unionize. Same with delivery. High hopes Image Credits: Amazon But in the last-mile world, drones are kind of a funny idea. Certainly it has its merits: many packages are small and light and a drone could skip traffic or travel in a straight line over residential blocks to cut hours off delivery times. But that’s before you reckon with any of the actual needs or restrictions of the logistics world. To begin with, drones wouldn’t even cover the last mile — more like the last few hundred meters. Part of the reason for this is regulatory; it’s extremely unlikely that Amazon could procure a permit to fly its drones over all the private property in a city. The liability is just too damn high. Sure, you can do some sweetheart test markets in a random suburb, but good luck convincing urban areas to let commercial drones infest their skies at all hours. So what are they going to do, fly along the streets? High enough that they don’t hit any wires or trees? Carrying a 1-pound package? Only at certain hours? It isn’t particularly efficient! And then, the first time one of those packages or drones drops out of the sky and cracks a windshield next to a grade school, those drones are done in that city, and probably every other city. Done! Even if they could guarantee no accidents, no one wants those things flying around their neighborhood. Best case scenario is: fucking annoying. Drones are pretty loud, and it’s not even the kind of loud you can get used to, like the dull roar of a freeway a few blocks off. No, drones make the most annoying sound in the world short of Jeff Bezos’s laugh. Small ones, big ones, they all sound horrible. There are advances to be brought to bear here, but really, when you have 4 to 8 little rotors spinning at however many thousand RPMs and moving the necessary air downwards to lift a couple dozen pounds of body and payload, you tend to create a certain amount of truly obnoxious noise. That’s just the physics of the thing. If we could make helicopters quiet we would have done so by now. Even if we allow these drones dominion over the air and let them fly with impunity, they’re laughably limited. Where do packages go normally? In a big clearing in your building’s courtyard? On the roof? No, they go to the lobby, which locks, or perhaps in a parcel box… which locks. As commerce has moved online, parcel delivery has skyrocketed, and so has parcel theft. Imagine if a package made a really loud whining noise wherever it went then was guaranteed to be left out in the open somewhere. It’s a really frictionless experience for the criminals, at least. Image Credits: Walmart A drone can’t ring a doorbell or buzz your apartment (unless you hook it into your smart home infrastructure — best of luck with that). It doesn’t have a key to the lobby. It can’t ask you for a signature. Cities are diverse and complex physical environments with a wide variety of obstacles, methods, and requirements for making a package go from here to there in a safe and satisfactory way. We haven’t figured out how any robot can successfully deliver something without the recipient coming out to get it immediately, and doing it from the sky is even harder. Air-dropping is one of the worst possible ways (outside of combat) to deliver anything, only slightly better than yeeting it over the fence — admittedly common,

Crypto and earn a free pass to ZebethMedia Disrupt 2023 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in blockchain, Crypto, TC Sessions: Crypto, TC Sessions: Crypto 2022, TechCrunch Events 2022, volunteer, web3No Comments

It takes a lot of people to bring a tech conference to life, and we’re looking for a few amazing volunteers to support our events team and help make TC Sessions: Crypto an awesome experience for our attendees. If you’re amazing, crypto curious, a DeFi die-hard, big on blockchain, wild about web3, interested in event planning — or all of the above — apply to volunteer at TC Sessions: Crypto, which takes place on November 17 in Miami. We expect around 1,000 people at this event, and volunteers will handle a variety of tasks. At any given time, you might help with registration, wrangle speakers, direct attendees, scan tickets or help with general event setup. What’s in it for you? Fair question. If you’re selected, not only will you get a behind-the-scenes look at how events are produced, but you’ll also earn a free pass to attend ZebethMedia Disrupt 2023 next year in San Francisco on September 19–21. Plus, when you complete your volunteer shift, you can attend the interviews and presentations. You’ll hear some of the leading voices in the crypto universe, including Nicole Muniz (Yuga Labs), Amy Wu (FTX Ventures), Changpeng “CZ” Zhao (Binance) and many more. Volunteer spots are limited. If you want to gain valuable event experience; take in all the blockchain, crypto, DeFi, NFT and web3 goodness; and earn a free pass to ZebethMedia Disrupt 2023, then apply to volunteer before November 7 to be considered! Not interested in volunteering? Buy your TC Sessions Crypto pass now and save $150 — before the early-bird pricing disappears. Either way, we’ll see you on November 17 in Miami! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Crypto? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Zillow lays off 300 employees in latest workforce shift • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Commerce, Layoffs, ZillowNo Comments

Zillow has laid off about 300 employees as it is shifting focus towards technology-related positions in the company, ZebethMedia has learned from sources and confirmed with the company over e-mail. The Seattle-headquartered online real estate marketplace informed its impacted employees about the decision on Tuesday. Shortly after receiving the communication, the impacted employees had to leave the company. The layoffs impacted Zillow Offer advisors, PA sales and back-end staff at Zillow Home Loans as well as Zillow Closing Services, as well as other teams. “As part of our normal business process, we continuously evaluate and responsibly manage our resources as we create digital solutions to make it easier for people to move. This week, we have made the difficult — but necessary — decision to eliminate a small number of roles and will shift those resources to key growth areas around our housing super-app. We’re still hiring in key technology-related roles across the company,” a Zillow spokesperson said in a statement emailed to ZebethMedia. The company did not reveal the percentage of its workforce affected by the decision. However, in its last quarterly report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in August, Zillow reported that it had 5,791 full-time employees in its workforce. Using that figure, this layoff has impacted around 5% of employees. In November last year, Zillow announced that it would lay off a quarter of its staff — around 2,000 people — due to shutting down its home-buying service Offers that aimed to provide sellers with instant home offers. The company, at the time, had 8,000 employees. Zillow has become one of the latest tech companies to lay off employees during this economic slowdown. Earlier this week, telehealth unicorn Cerebral reduced its workforce by 20% due to an ongoing push for efficiency. Companies including Netflix, Momentive Global, Spotify and Tencent have also made similar decisions recently. Similarly, Indian startups including Byju’s and Ola have let hundreds of employees go amid the downfall of funding and investments.

Meta hit with antitrust breach order in Turkey for combining user data across Fb, WhatsApp, Instagram • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in competition regulation, Facebook, Instagram, meta, Privacy, privacy regulation, WhatsAppNo Comments

Meta won’t be quaking at the size of the penalty it’s just been handed by Turkey’s competition authority, which announced a 346.72 million lira sanction today. The circa $18.6M fine pales in comparison to a number of recent stings hitting it from European regulators. Such as the $267M fine for WhatsApp in the European Union just over a year ago — for transparency breaches of the bloc’s data protection framework; or the $70M spank a year ago from the UK’s competition authority after it said Meta failed to comply with information requests during scrutiny of its purchase of Giphy. It was subsequently ordered by the UK’s CMA to undo that acquisition too, so the whole sorry saga will likely cost it considerably more. Plenty more data protection complaints are still hanging over its head too, such as the one targeting its EU-US data flows that could see an order to suspend those transfers — and essentially shutter its service in Europe — in the coming months unless a looming replacement for the defunct Privacy Shield framework can be rushed into place first. Still, it’s the crux of the Turkish fine — that Meta holds a dominant position in social media and sought to obstruct competitors by combining data between separate services it operates — that’s likely to send a chill down the social networking giant’s spine because its business runs on people profiling. And that runs on its ability to obtain people’s data and flesh out detailed ad profiles. So any regulatory roadblocks that cut into its ability to conduct its unfettered surveillance of Internet users poses an existential threat to its core microtargeting ad model. The Turkish action is also of note because Germany’s competition regulator has had a similar concern for years. It started investigating Facebook’s ‘superprofiling’ all the way back in March 2016 — going on to confirm an abuse finding in a February 2019 order which concluded that the company’s trampling of user privacy amounted to “exploitative abuse” and a violation of its dominant position in social networking. Hence the German FCO ordered Facebook to stop combining data on users of different products. But Meta appealed and an enforcement battle over that earlier German data separation order continues. Its appeal was referred up to the bloc’s top court in March 2021 and is still pending a judgement (likely next year). But an opinion put out by influential advisor to the CJEU last month favored allowing antitrust authorities to consider data protection compatibility as part of their assessment of competition rules — which, if the court follows the AG’s view, would be bad news for Meta across the EU, as it would open the door to more competition watchdogs taking a non-siloed, ‘big picture’, comprehensive view of what it’s doing when assessing any antitrust concerns. There is therefore a growing sense that international regulators are — gradually, inexorably — closing in on Meta’s legacy of moving fast and breaking things (or, as appears a better description of its modus operandi, hoovering up in all the data and pooling it into a massive data lake far from the reach of any user control, per leaked internal documents). “By combining the data collected by [Meta] from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services… it causes the deterioration of competition by making it difficult for competitors with personal social networking services operating in online display advertising markets and creates barriers to entry to the market,” the Turkish competition authority wrote in a decision published today — following the culmination of an investigation — and explaining its decision to impose an administrative fine [the decision text is in Turkish; we’ve translated it here using machine translation]. The authority’s investigation kicked off last year after a controversial change to WhatsApp’s T&Cs caused a major privacy backlash around the world. And consumer protection regulators in Europe remain concerned about its T&Cs confusing consumers. So there could be more enforcements coming down the pipe on that front, too. (In addition to the massive GDPR ‘transparency’ fine mentioned above — and potentially more GDPR enforcements on a backlog of complaints still being chewed over by the tech giant’s lead data protection regulator in the EU.) The Turkish competition authority found unanimously that Meta holds a dominant position in the social media market and unanimously concluded its behavior amounted to a breach of local competition law. As well as being issued with a fine, the tech giant has been ordered to cease the violation — and establish “effective competition in the market” — with a deadline of one month provided for it to notify the authority of the steps it will take to do that; and a maximum of six months (from today’s decision) for implementing the measures, once approved. Meta has also been ordered to report back to the regulator on the measures it’s taking for a period of five years. The tech giant was contacted for comment on the Turkish authority’s sanction. A Meta spokesperson emailed this brief line — but did not confirm whether or not it will file an objection: “We disagree with the findings of the Turkish Competition Authority. We protect our users’ privacy and provide people with transparency and control over their data. We will consider all our options.” One thing is clear: Meta’s business is facing costly regulatory incursions on multiple fronts — which are threatening its ability to keep a grip on the world’s attention by ignoring privacy laws; threatening its ability to do that through the route of acquiring/assimilating other businesses to grab data that way (as well as threatening its ability to combine data across separate services it already owns); and threatening its ability to try to evade this legacy regulatory reckoning by skating its business to where it thinks the puck is headed (aka ‘the metaverse’) — by blocking its ability to use its market muscle to buy up VR startups that are seeing some nascent success (in what may, in any case, be overhyped vaporware). Add

Korean internet giant Naver eyes North America, Europe as it grows its C2C marketplace business • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Commerce, EC Consumer Applications, EC Ecommerce and D2C, Naver, Poshmark, south koreaNo Comments

Did you know that Google isn’t the top search engine in South Korea? It’s not even a close second. Most Koreans actually prefer Naver for various reasons, and they like it so much that the search engine holds about 56% of the market, per Statista. Google is catching up, but it currently only has about a 35% share, and it’ll likely be a while before it can close the gap. Naver’s other offerings are also received quite well in the country, including its e-commerce platform, messaging, payments, storytelling, digital comics (webtoons), metaverse efforts, a selfie app, games, the cloud and more. But like any true tech company, Naver was never satisfied with its success at home. The company quickly expanded to Japan, and more widely in Southeast Asia. But instead of leading with its core search engine and e-commerce businesses, it instead opted for different strategies in each new country, such as expanding in Japan with its Line messaging app and increasing its footprint in Southeast Asia with its 3D avatar app, Zepeto, and other offerings. It’s now expanding its e-commerce business — wildly successful in South Korea with 18% of the market — with a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace model that it aims to offer in North America, Europe and Asia. Unlike many B2C marketplaces, which usually sell large quantities of a few profitable, popular items, Naver’s e-commerce strategy is focusing on long-tail business, allowing sellers to sell small quantities of hard-to-find items to buyers looking for niche products. It wants to add a social network feature, which allows sellers to receive comments, likes and users in its e-commerce unit. To that end, the company earlier this month said it would buy Redwood, California-based social commerce marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion.

UK watchdog warns against AI for emotional analysis, dubs ‘immature’ biometrics a bias risk • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in biometric regulation, biometrics, emotion analysis AI, Government & Policy, ICONo Comments

The UK’s privacy watchdog has warned against use of so-called “emotion analysis” technologies for anything more serious than kids’ party games, saying there’s a discrimination risk attached to applying “immature” biometric tech that makes pseudoscientific claims about being able to recognize people’s emotions using AI to interpret biometric data inputs. Such AI systems ‘function’, if we can use the word, by claiming to be able to ‘read the tea leaves’ of one or more biometric signals, such as heart rate, eye movements, facial expression, skin moisture, gait tracking, vocal tone etc, and perform emotion detection or sentiment analysis to predict how the person is feeling — presumably after being trained on a bunch of visual data of faces frowning, faces smiling etc (but you can immediately see the problem with trying to assign individual facial expressions to absolute emotional states — because no two people, and often no two emotional states, are the same; hence hello pseudoscience!). The watchdog’s deputy commissioner, Stephen Bonner, appears to agree that this high tech nonsense must be stopped — saying today there’s no evidence that such technologies do actually work as claimed (or that they will ever work). “Developments in the biometrics and emotion AI market are immature. They may not work yet, or indeed ever,” he warned in a statement. “While there are opportunities present, the risks are currently greater. At the ICO, we are concerned that incorrect analysis of data could result in assumptions and judgements about a person that are inaccurate and lead to discrimination. “The only sustainable biometric deployments will be those that are fully functional, accountable and backed by science. As it stands, we are yet to see any emotion AI technology develop in a way that satisfies data protection requirements, and have more general questions about proportionality, fairness and transparency in this area.” In a blog post accompanying Bonner’s shot across the bows of dodgy biometrics, the Information Commission’s Office (ICO) said organizations should assess public risks before deploying such tech — with a further warning that those that fail to act responsibly could face an investigation. (So could also be risking a penalty.) “The ICO will continue to scrutinise the market, identifying stakeholders who are seeking to create or deploy these technologies, and explaining the importance of enhanced data privacy and compliance, whilst encouraging trust and confidence in how these systems work,” added Bonner. The watchdog has fuller biometrics guidance coming in the spring — which it said today will highlight the need for organizations to pay proper mind to data security — so Bonner’s warning offers a taster of more comprehensive steerage coming down the pipe in the next half year or so. “Organisations that do not act responsibly, posing risks to vulnerable people, or fail to meet ICO expectations will be investigated,” the watchdog added. Its blog post gives some examples of potentially concerning uses of biometrics — including AI tech being used to monitoring the physical health of workers via the use of wearable screening tools; or the use of visual and behavioural methods such as body position, speech, eyes and head movements to register students for exams. “Emotion analysis relies on collecting, storing and processing a range of personal data, including subconscious behavioural or emotional responses, and in some cases, special category data. This kind of data use is far more risky than traditional biometric technologies that are used to verify or identify a person,” it continued. “The inability of algorithms which are not sufficiently developed to detect emotional cues, means there’s a risk of systemic bias, inaccuracy and even discrimination.” It’s not the first time the ICO has had concerns over rising use of biometric tech. Last year the then information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, published an opinion expressing concerns about what she couched as the potentially “significant” impacts of inappropriate, reckless or excess use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology — warning it could lead to a ‘big brother’ style surveillance of the public. However that warning was targeting a more specific technology (LFR). And the ICO’s Bonner told the Guardian this is the first time the regulator has issued a blanket warning on the ineffectiveness of a whole new technology — arguing this is justified by the harm that could be caused if companies made meaningful decisions based on meaningless data, per the newspaper’s report. Where’s the biometrics regulation? The ICO may be feeling moved to make more substantial interventions in this area because UK lawmakers aren’t being proactive when it comes to biometrics regulation. An independent review of UK legislation in this area, published this summer, concluded the country urgently needs new laws to govern the use of biometric technologies — and called for the government to come forward with primary legislation. However the government does not appear to have paid much mind to such urging or these various regulatory warnings — with a planned data protection reform, which it presented earlier this year, eschewing action to boost algorithmic transparency across the public sector, for example, while — on biometrics specifically — it offered only soft-touch measures aimed at clarifying the rules on (specifically) police use of biometric data (taking about developing best practice standards and codes of conduct). So a far cry from the comprehensive framework called for by the Ada Lovelace research institute-commissioned independent law review. In any case, the data reform bill remains on pause after a summer of domestic political turmoil that has led to two changes of prime minister in quick succession. A legislative rethink was also announced earlier this month by the (still in post) secretary of state for digital issues, Michelle Donelan — who used a recent Conservative Party conference speech to take aim at the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), aka the framework that was transposed into UK law back in 2018. She said the government would be “replacing” the GDPR with a bespoke British data protection system — but gave precious little detail on what exactly will be put in place

Devtron raises fresh capital for its cloud DevOps platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Dev, devops, Enterprise, funding, Insight Partners, StartupsNo Comments

The cloud-native market has seen the introduction of a range of open source DevOps tools — tools that combine software development and IT operations — built to address very specific use cases. As a result, DevOps teams today have too many narrow choices that don’t work together seamlessly or that can’t be integrated into a single platform. At least, that’s the opinion of Prashant Ghildiyal, one of the co-founders of Devtron, a startup offering a platform to address what he believes are the top challenges facing the DevOps space. A container management system, Devtron offers a low-code delivery platform optimized for Kubernetes. (“Containers” are packages of software that contain the necessary elements to run in any environment.) The platform handles app management, security and more, providing an interface that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure. To Ghildiyal’s point, there’s evidence to suggest that there’s a gap between DevOps adoption and success. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review survey, only 10% of developers said that their companies were successful at building and deploying software quickly, with less than half (48%) saying their organization always relies on DevOps methodologies. A separate, more recent poll by infrastructure automation company Puppet found that companies were hitting a number of DevOps speed bumps in the race to be cloud native, including a skills shortage, issues with legacy architecture, organizational resistance to change and limited or lack of automation. Investors are keen on Devtron, as evidenced by the company today closing a $12 million funding round led by Insight Partners. “Devtron integrates with products across the lifecycle of microservices, and in particular Kubernetes, enabling its users to deploy faster and automate their CI/CD pipelines without worrying about Kubernetes knowhow,” Insight Partners principal Josh Zelman told ZebethMedia via email. Ghildiyal says that he and Devtron’s other co-founders, Nishant Kumar and Rajesh Razdan, experienced the challenges of scaling DevOps firsthand in their previous roles as heads of technology and software architects at various startups. Their experiences informed Devtron’s design, which Ghildiyal describes as “DevOps in a box,” with tools that provide audit logs and metrics showing the state of an organization’s DevOps maturity. Devtron also provides tools for access controls and policy management, as well as environment orchestration, software delivery workflow and cost. “This saves significant time and resources to build and deploy in production,” Zelman added. Ghildiyal sees Devtron competing against formidable incumbent vendors like GitLab and Harness in a DevOps market that was worth an estimated $4 billion in 2020, according to Global Market Insights. (That’s not to mention startups like Render, which raised $20 million last November after winning our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield.) When asked about clients, Ghildiyal said Devtron has “several” unicorns and growth-stage companies as commercial customers, but he declined to reveal names — or Devtron’s revenue. Ghildiyal said that India-based Devtron’s principal focuses post-fundraise will be resources and cost optimizations to “enable DevOps automation and efficiency at scale.”

Nothing’s third device is a pair of pared down earbuds • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in earbuds, Gaming, Hardware, nothing, nothing stickNo Comments

Seems like there’s little room for surprises left in the industry, these days – and not just because of all the leaks. Like Google with its Pixel line, Nothing has moved away from the standard model of revealing a products in one fell swoop. Instead, it’s taken to shaping its own news cycle through slow, official teasers. With its third – and latest – device, the company gave us practically everything but date and price. This morning, founder Carl Pei officially unveiled the product. Like, officially, officially. The arrival of the Nothing Ear (stick) finds the company returning to the groundwork laid last summer by its first product, the Nothing Ear (1). The two immediately clear distinctions here are the new “lipstick-style” case that gives the product its parenthetical and move to a “half in-ear” design, versus its predecessors’ silicone tips. Image Credits: Nothing The (stick) isn’t replacing the (1), mind you. The pitch is instead focused on people who prefer the more traditional design, a la the AirPods vs. AirPods Pro. I’m not among them, but don’t blame you if you are. Everybody’s body’s different. The company says the design was “tested on over 100 people.” Otherwise, the buds (the stems, really) look more or less like the other product. Certainly no complains there. The Ear (1) promised 24/34 hours of battery life, all told, depending on active noise canceling and other usage. The (stick) is rated at 29 hours with the case and the big caveat that active noise canceling isn’t an option here (also like the standard Airpods). Still, if they can duplicate the sound of the (1) with their 12.6mm driver, you can justify the $99 ($149 CAD) price tag pretty easily. Image Credits: Nothing On that note, Pei took to Twitter last week to note that the price of the (1) had coincidentally increased from $99 to $149, owing to “an increase in costs.” Certainly the cost of producing devices at scale has jumped recently, thanks to supply chain shortest and inflation. The founder added that the company has sold “almost” 600,000 pairs of its first product. Sales for the (stick) open November 4 in 40-odd countries, including the U.S., U.K. and Canada. They will also be available at Nothing’s first store in London, naturally.

Inside TheTruthSpy, the stalkerware network spying on thousands • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Android, cybersecurity, mobile spyware, Security, stalkerware, wiretappingNo Comments

A massive cache of leaked data reveals the inner workings of a stalkerware operation that is spying on hundreds of thousands of people around the world, including Americans. The leaked data includes call logs, text messages, granular location data and other personal device data of unsuspecting victims whose Android phones and tablets were compromised by a fleet of near-identical stalkerware apps, including TheTruthSpy, Copy9, MxSpy and others. These Android apps are planted by someone with physical access to a person’s device and are designed to stay hidden on their home screens but will continuously and silently upload the phone’s contents without the owner’s knowledge. SPYWARE LOOKUP TOOL You can check to see if your Android phone or tablet was compromised here. Months after we published our investigation uncovering the stalkerware operation, a source provided ZebethMedia with tens of gigabytes of data dumped from the stakerware’s servers. The cache contains the stalkerware operation’s core database, which includes detailed records on every Android device that was compromised by any of the stalkerware apps in TheTruthSpy’s network since early 2019 (though some records date earlier) and what device data was stolen. Given that victims had no idea that their device data was stolen, ZebethMedia extracted every unique device identifier from the leaked database and built a lookup tool to allow anyone to check if their device was compromised by any of the stalkerware apps up to April 2022, which is when the data was dumped. ZebethMedia has since analyzed the rest of the database. Using mapping software for geospatial analysis, we plotted hundreds of thousands of location data points from the database to understand its scale. Our analysis shows TheTruthSpy’s network is enormous, with victims on every continent and in almost every country. But stalkerware like TheTruthSpy operates in a legal gray area that makes it difficult for authorities around the world to combat, despite the growing threat it poses to victims. First, a word about the data. The database is about 34 gigabytes in size and consists of metadata, such as times and dates, as well as text-based content, like call logs, text messages and location data — even names of Wi-Fi networks that a device connected to and what was copied and pasted from the phone’s clipboard, including passwords and two-factor authentication codes. The database did not contain media, images, videos or call recordings taken from victims’ devices, but instead logged information about each file, such as when a photo or video was taken, and when calls were recorded and for how long, allowing us to determine how much content was exfiltrated from victims’ devices and when. Each compromised device uploaded a varying amount of data depending on how long their devices were compromised and available network coverage. ZebethMedia examined the data spanning March 4 to April 14, 2022, or six weeks of the most recent data stored in the database at the time it was leaked. It’s possible that TheTruthSpy’s servers only retain some data, such as call logs and location data, for a few weeks, but other content, like photos and text messages, for longer. This is what we found. This map shows six weeks of cumulative location data plotted on a map of North America. The location data is extremely granular and shows victims in major cities, urban hubs and traveling on major transport lines. Image Credits: ZebethMedia The database has about 360,000 unique device identifiers, including IMEI numbers for phones and advertising IDs for tablets. This number represents how many devices were compromised by the operation to date and about how many people are affected. The database also contains the email addresses of every person who signed up to use one of the many TheTruthSpy and clone stalkerware apps with the intention of planting them on a victim’s device, or about 337,000 users. That’s because some devices may have been compromised more than once (or by another app in the stalkerware network), and some users have more than one compromised device. About 9,400 new devices were compromised during the six-week span, our analysis shows, amounting to hundreds of new devices each day. The database stored 608,966 location data points during that same six-week period. We plotted the data and created a time lapse to show the cumulative spread of known compromised devices around the world. We did this to understand how wide-scale TheTruthSpy’s operation is. The animation is zoomed out to the world level to protect individuals’ privacy, but the data is extremely granular and shows victims at transportation hubs, places of worship and other sensitive locations. By breakdown, the United States ranked first with the most location data points (278,861) of any other country during the six-week span. India had the second most location data points (77,425), Indonesia third (42,701), Argentina fourth (19,015) and the United Kingdom (12,801) fifth. Canada, Nepal, Israel, Ghana and Tanzania were also included in the top 10 countries by volume of location data. This map shows the total number of locations ranked by country. The U.S. had the most location data points at 278,861 over the six-week span, followed by India, Indonesia, and Argentina, which makes sense given their huge geographic areas and populations. Image Credits: ZebethMedia The database contained a total of 1.2 million text messages, including the recipient’s contact name, and 4.42 million call logs during the six-week span, including detailed records of who called whom, for how long, and their contact’s name and phone number. ZebethMedia has seen evidence that data was likely collected from the phones of children. These stalkerware apps also recorded the contents of thousands of calls during the six weeks, the data shows. The database contains 179,055 entries of call recording files that are stored on another TheTruthSpy server. Our analysis correlated records with the dates and times of call recordings with location data stored elsewhere in the database to determine where the calls were recorded. We focused on U.S. states that have stricter phone call recording laws, which require that more than

Evy wants to offer product protection insurance everywhere • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Evy, Fintech, insurance, insurtech, product protection, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Evy, a French startup that is working on extended warranties and product protection insurance. The company raised a $6.5 million seed round (€6.5 million) from Sequoia, La Famiglia VC, Global Founders Capital and several business angels. Evy wants to bring an AppleCare experience to other brands and retailers. Essentially, the startup wants to create a seamless experience when it comes to adding product protection at checkout and some good coverage out of the box. The startup acts as an insurance broker and partners with Wakam to cover the risk — but it could also partner with other insurance companies in the future. On the other side, it partners with retailers so that they embed Evy’s insurance products on their sites or try to sell an extended warranty in stores. For instance, Evy has signed a partnership with ManoMano, a home improvement and gardening e-commerce platform that I’ve covered over the years. When a customer is buying a product on ManoMano, they can add multi-year coverage against breakage, breakdown and/or theft. What makes Evy stand out from legacy players is that it can create custom-made insurance products in very little time. For instance, ManoMano has 25 different product categories across four countries. Evy has created 25 tailor-made insurance programs in just a few months. Similarly, retailers can develop deep integrations with Evy as the insurtech startup focuses on API-based integrations. If there is something wrong with the product, Evy first tries to find a solution to fix the product. It plans to put together a repair network. If it doesn’t work, Evy makes a payment to the customer. And the distribution method should work quite well as Evy shares some revenue with its retail partners. Some big retailers, such as Darty or Best Buy, already generate important revenue from insurance products. Evy wants to offer a solution for the long tail of e-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores. Evy isn’t just an insurance play. There’s a bigger vision around product lifecycles. “Eventually we want to offer all customer services that are associated with products. They are useful for both the merchant and the end user,” co-founder and CEO Simon Kemoun told me. “They are all switching to the circular economy. We know when a product is under warranty and we know when there has been no incident. We can issue a trade-in offer so that you can get the most recent product,” he added. There are some companies in the U.S. focusing on the same industry, such as Clyde and Extend. In France, Evy competes with Neat.