#Signal Keeps Your iphone Calls And Texts Safe From Government Spies Don want someone else handing your text messages, pictures, video or phone conversations over to the government?
There an app for that. An ios app called Signal is a project out of Open Whisper Systems,
a not-for-profit collective of hackers dedicated to making it harder for prying government eyes to get a hold of your information.
makes it possible to send encrypted group, text, picture and video messages for free from iphone to iphone.
For those who want to share with their friends on Android the community organization currently has two Android apps Textsecure
and Redphone that need to be combined to do the same thing as Signal does on ios. Textsecure is the text message solution
and Redphone is encrypted the phone-call solution. The plan is to combine those two into one Android app for Signal users.
Recent security breaches and other events have prompted a number of apps to emerge that promise encrypted communications between mobile phones.
The Dutch SIM CARD manufacturer Gemalto is just one company among many of the alleged government hacking operations.
Founder Moxie Marlinspike tells me over the phone. Marlinspike knows his way around encryption technology.
and formerly ran Twitter security team. he idea is to scramble the information so well that it not worth pursuing.
Signal code is open source. This means anyone can go to Github and use the source code to create encrypted apps.
Whatsapp recently incorporated Open Whisper System code into the Android version of its app. e want as many people as possible to have embedded the capability within their apps
so that nobody can get your information, Marlinspike says o
#Facebook Open-sources Some Of Its Deep-Learning Tools In the world of machine learning the buzzword these days is eep learning.
It a technique that has been popularized a by Geoff Hinton who is now at Google and previously worked at Microsoft Research as well as other computer science researchers like Yann Lecun who are looking for better ways to teach computers how to recognize objects and speech.
Facebook too has done quite a bit of work in the area and today the company is open-sourcing some of its projects around the Torch7 computing framework for machine learning.
Torch has long been at the center of many machine learning and artificial intelligence projects in academic labs and at companies like Google Twitter and Intel.
Facebook today is optimized launching tools to increase the speed at which deep-learning projects that use Torch run.
One allows developers to parallelize the training of their networks using multiple GPUS simultaneously. Another improvement ensures that training the convolutional neural nets at the center of many deep learning systems can be trained 23 times faster
when compared to the fastest publicly available code today. In addition Facebook is launching a number of additional tools that bring more speed to other parts of Torch as well.
Some of these are modest but many of Facebook projects results in 3 to 10x improvements over the default tools.
All of this is pretty technical of course and you can read more about the details here. What matters though is that deep learning techniques
(or at least their results) are slowly starting to show up in a lot of the software we use every day.
Google+Photos for example uses it to allow you to find images in your photo library.
And at CES last week Nvidia spent most of its keynote discussing how it uses deep learning to classify objects that a camera on a car may see in order to further its research in autonomous driving o
#Trillion-Dollar Alternative Lending Industry Is A VC Gold mine In a recovering economy where big banks are restricted by complex regulations,
startups and venture investors are gearing up for the next gold rush in the trillion-dollar marketplace lending industry.
That trillion. With A t. Big IPOS for Lending Club and Ondeck (valued at $9 billion and $1. 3 billion, respectively) appear to have spurred a funding frenzy this year as venture investors dig for more pay dirt.
and software to help them fly, detect obstacles and make sense of terabytes of data they collect.
Just look at the Google Trends for the word ronesor JI. Check out the number of drone videos on Youtube (827
000). ) According to Frost and Sullivan, an aerospace research firm, over 200,000 drones were sold each month in 2014.
Companies like Bouygues, Balfour Beatty and Webcor are using drones to map construction sites. They are employing drones made by Skycatch,
but youe probably already seen a lot of footage taken by drones on TV. Big brands like Walmart, BMW and Nike have taken videos using drones.
Farmers are increasingly using drones to monitor crop health and gauge growth patterns. This is a job well-suited to drones,
Companies like Precision Hawk are developing software and hardware that automatically measures the height of crops
and detect weeds, and they can even count plants. These kinds of drones are using fixed wings,
and capture a lot more data than a DJI-like quadcopter. Jay Bregman, the former CEO of Hailo, is verified developing database of drones,
punch in your destination via Google maps, and be driven by a computer, guiding your destination while avoiding all other air traffic.
Youl leave roads, traffic lights, traffic jams and accidents behind. The Challenge for Entrepreneurs This leaves us entrepreneurs with some challenges.
and what kind of software and hardware will have to be developed to manage that growth. There are very few companies out there today creating software to make drones safer.
What about systems to manage where drones can and cannot legally go? How will we know who owns a drone when the next one crashes into a famous person lawn?
and software is going to have to be built to make all of these dreams a reality. There are so many great applications for drones,
#Facebook Unveils Facebook At work Lets Businesses Create Their Own Social networks About six months ago we reported that Facebook was working on a new product aimed squarely at the enterprise market under the working title B@Work
today the company is launching new ios and Android apps called acebook At Workalong with a version of Facebook At work accessible via its main website
which will let businesses create their own social networks amongst their employees that are built to look
and act like Facebook itself. Facebook At work is now available for download on ios and wel update with a links to the Andriod version once it live though both are usable via a limited pilot to start with.
Check out Josh follow-up story for more screenshots details on privacy and analysis.)Employers can create separate logins for employees to use with their Work accounts
or users can link these up with their other profiles to access everything in one place.
The product puts Facebook head-to-head with the likes of Microsoft Yammer Slack Convo Socialcast and a huge number of others who are trying to tackle the nterprise social networkspace.
Even Linkedin conveniently let drop last night that it too was looking at building a product for coworkers to communicate
(but not chat as a Linkedin spokesperson tells me). Not all of these have been a hit:
Lars Rasmussen the engineering director at Facebook who is heading up the project had in his past once headed up one of the failed efforts at an enterprise social network Google Wave.
Facebook is positioning today debut as a bold first step. ee putting the app into the app stores
In fact Facebook has already been running tests of the service with very small setof external businesses around the world Rasmussen says;
In fact the existing Facebook Groups product is used already by smaller organisations. Because of the early nature of the product there are a lot of questions in the air.
For now Facebook Platform has been disabled on the Work product meaning no ads or apps. That may not always be the case (t could be paidhe says.
Rasmussen says that Facebook has effectively been working on Work for the last 10 years because it is based on
what Facebook own employees have been using to communicate with each other pass on news plan meetings and share documents.
That long-time use and Facebook familiarity to all of us are part of what makes Facebook confident that it can carve a place for itself in a market that already is crowded very. acebook At work strength is spent that wee ten years
and incorporated feedback from 1 billion active usershe says. ll embedded of that is now in the same product
but adapted for different use cases. nd it actually used by staff hen Mark Zuckerberg the CEO makes an announcement he just posts it on Facebook at Workrasmussen says.
In fact Facebook own popularity could be Facebook At work biggest advantage. A lot of efforts in offices to get employees to collaborate more with each other have been stymied
because employees don want to use the software. It yet another new thing to learn and doesn feel essential.
A lot of messaging apps (Microsoft Yammer being one of the notably early movers) have tried to tap into onsumerizationor getting enterprise apps to look
In that vein Facebook At work built essentially on Facebook itself will be arguably the closest of all to an authentic onsumersocial experience.
By making this free Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to its wider network.
The fact that Rasmussen would not rule out advertising as an option down the road to me suggests that Facebook could consider tiers of its own where some businesses may pay for the product
Plus this would give Facebook another revenue stream beyond ads and app-related payments. How it will work Facebook wouldn show me a demo ahead of the launch
but this is how Rasmussen describes it: hen an employer adopts Facebook At work they can construct it with a set of new accounts.
Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time. his would work much like Groups
and public profiles do today. On mobile you would have two mobile apps running at the same time he adds. ven
if the employee chooses to link there is no crossover. The content stays entirely within your personal or work Facebook. hat not there/integrations.
You can share documents today but for now there will be no in-app editing urrently. gain that leaves this open as something that will come down the line. he set of features are identitcal to personal Facebook
but just to get it out sooner wee disabled the Platform so the APIS that third parties work with are not there
Hopefully in the future other enterprise tools will integrate with Facebook At work. ackstory on development. Back in June I deduced that Facebook At work was connected with Rasmussen work in London but what
I found out from sources after that report was that this was more than casual: this was his baby.
and the knowledge of a failure of doing this at a different companyhe says referring of course to Google Wave. thought that maybe Facebook experience was
however is one that Facebook will have to continue to grapple with all the more so as it continues to grow.
Canvassing opinion on a Facebook At work product I heard not only once people shy away from the idea concerned with the thought of Facebook wningyour data
and the potential lack of confidentiality resulting from it. That can be frustrating when related to pictures of you too drunk
#Ford#s Applink Will Soon Support Third-party Navigation Apps Most carsbuilt-in navigation systems tend to be compared a bit clunky to modern smartphone apps like of Google maps.
The next version of Applink its system for connecting smartphone apps to its SYNC infotainment system will allow third-party navigation apps to project their maps from the phone onto the built-in screens in its cars.
but Applink 3. 0 will only become available at a later date (SYNC can be updated over Wifi and through a connected smartphone).
The company is already working with Alibaba to bring its navigation and music services to its in-vehicle screens.
There no reason to believe the company will stop Google Microsoft Telenav or Here from offering its mapping services on its platform though.
The members in the Genivi alliance besides Ford include the likes of BMW Honda Nissan renault Volvo and John Deere as well as chip manufacturers like Intel Qualcomm and Nvidia and plenty of aftermarket manufacturers.
Earlier this month the Genivi Alliance also announced that it would offer open source middleware to support Android Auto integration into car infotainment products r
and expand its credit offerings something the company notes is key as it expands into the offline world,
#Sony's Just Released A Worthwhile Waterproof Phone Waterproof phones have been around for ages. But to be waterproof,
But now there the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, an Android smartphone that waterproof without those annoying caps.
The rest of the phone is on par with other mid-range phones. There are 13mp/5mp cameras
Sony notes that the phone has a two-day battery life. Sony says the phone is waterproof under a few conditions.
First it cannot be submerged past 1. 5 meters. So youe out of luck if you throw it in the deep end.
and the phone should only occasionally be chlorinated in water, and it needs to be rinsed off afterward.
And of course, before the phone is recharged, the USB port needs to be dry. The M4 Aqua will have a starting price of 299 EUR
and will be available in 80 countries, but not the U s. Sony tells us that the company is focusing on its flagship offering in the States.
Yet that point is distinctly farther under the water than any other major cell phone maker.
but I wouldn have any issue reading a Kindle book on the phone while taking my nightly bath l
Slickr, a fashion social network. Swipentap. com a POS ipad app. Integreight which develops novel products for the electronic hobbyist and education market.
Filkhedma A concierge for household services Baby Boons modern baby ecommerce Wallstreetchamber Which claims to have an algorithm for automated share investing.
Zex a mobile ad platform that serves offers to users smartphone via their lock-screens Eventus for creating and analysis social events.
Tennra A a gamified crowdfunding platform. Usertalk An embedded call button for customer support over VOIP.
according to an Uber blog post. Uber said that the service is ideal for ferrying any kind of item around:
and scored a $10 million investment from Chinese social network Renren in 2014. Lalamove and Gogovan are based both in Hong kong,
and add Baidu as a strategic investor in China Uber Cargo is another reminder that new Uber initiatives can
Uber Cargo looks like it is primarily targeting business users, but Lalamove executive Blake Larson told Techcrunch earlier this week that he believes there is also a strong market for consumers.
And it can power all your mobile devices for weeks. kraftwerk which translates to ower stationin German is the product of ezelleron an engineering team that spun out of German research firm Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.
since the 1950 (Wikipedia says the first reference to it was in 1838) but gas and other fossil fuels have eclipsed it as a preferred energy source.
and your cellphone can get instant clean power for a long period of time. There have been a few other fuel cell Kickstarters for powering cellphones but none look as slick as kraftwerk.
The Devotec Micro Fuel Charger a key ring sized fuel cell cellphone charger added about 20-30 minutes of extra talk time
if plugged in. There was also the unsuccessfully funded HALO fuel cell charger. Touted as emergency preparedness for the outdoorsy type with an ipad it was a bit clunky looking.
But you could charge two devices at the same time on it. The kraftwerk units come in three different colors rbanutdoorand lamand run on a short spray of camping gas or standard lighter fluid.
It will charge anything that can be plugged into a USB cable such as your iphone tablet or even a Gopro.
One illingsupplies power for up to 11 iphones. Once depleted the unit will recharge itself in the aforementioned 3 seconds w
#Hardware Battlefield 2015 The majority of home climate control systems in the world just won work with Nest,
Sensibo is a small IR-compatible blaster that also connects to an app on your smartphone,
timer settings and a learning algorithm that the company claims can save you up to 40 percent on your home heating and cooling bills over time,
and while it still conceivable that the Google-owned company could build a Sensibo-style device,
With the company first product launching today at Techcrunch Hardware Battlefield 2015 drones become aware of their surroundings
While demoing in Hardware Battlefield at CES 2015 the drone swiftly moved out of the way of a person walking towards the blades.
#Square Cash Integrates Touch ID To Send Money Using Your Fingerprint Square Cash Square Venmo competitor that lets you use the app to transfer money to other people has added a new feature to its ios app that some might say is long overdue:
users can now authenticate money transfers using the Touch ID feature in later versions of the iphone (5s
but money transferring apps are generally have been some of the more popular payment services on smartphones.
Prior to today updates to Square Cash had other updates including the ability to send money via Bluetooth and email
#Tencent Launches China#s First Private Online Bank Tencent one of the top Internet companies in China launched the country first private online bank today.
Called Webank after Tencent popular messaging app Wechat the financial institution is the first one in China to be based on the Internet.
while Alibaba Baidu and electronics seller Suning Commerce Group also got government licenses to offer mutual funds loans and insurance.
#Automatic Launches Its SDK, Turning The Car Into An App Platform Automatic, a startup whose sensor-and-software combo has been described as itbit for your car,
is today rolling out a software development kit and new hardware that turn your car into a platform for apps.
which has been updated to accommodate streaming real-time data from a car computer and sensors to apps running on your phone.
The apps draw relevant data from a car computer via the OBD port letting you do things like feed the exact mileage from a particular drive into Concur to expense a work trip
which points to corresponding apps on ios and Android respective app stores. The app is designed to help drivers determine their actual income taking fuel costs
Estimating those things with the app on your smartphone was a boon before, but now with data from Automatic, drivers will have exact numbers on the fuel burning
though the few apps that offer real-time data to your phone will require the new model,
so we should have a video review of the new hardware and apps shortly o
All bookings are made through the site, with the startup handling the required insurance and offering 24/7 road assistance cover in the event of a breakdown. ur insurance setup allows car owners to list their cars in less than a minute
provide their information on our website and rent a car as soon as the car owner approves the request,
#The Bank of Facebook Technology is changing one of the most fundamental mediums that touch every person on the planet:
and securityare actively being created by the world social network. This past March, Facebook rolled out free peer-to-peer payments and set the company down a path to becoming one of the world most powerful financial institutions.
Last year foreign workers sent $583 billion to individuals in their home countries, also known as remittances. Remittances are one of the largest financial inflows to the developing world.
Facebook isn charging fees on transfers. While the company does incur charges from banks on the back end,
Facebook says it will not pass these on to the consumer. At the moment Facebook transfers are limited to users within the United states,
but sources inside the company have confirmed it will expand beyond U s. borders in the near future.
if Facebook will charge users a nominal fee on cross-border transfers and currency conversions,
According to Steve Davis, product manager at Facebook: ee not trying to make a profit out of payments. acebook is already well on its way to becoming a global financial institution.
Last summer, Financial times discovered that Facebook is close to receiving approval from the Central bank of Ireland to become an electronic money institution throughout Europe.
This would allow users the ability to store money with the social network, transfer money to others,
Long term, Facebook payments has the power to completely destroy Western union and Money Gram (good riddance) and massively benefit millions of people in the developing world with billions of dollars more freely flowing into those countries.
Facebook is in a position to control the lion share of remittances sent globally by offering below market-rate transfers and the best experience on mobile.
It couldn come at a better time for the social network, which desperately needs the rest of the world to sign up
The last couple of years have been especially rough for Facebook with North america and European markets reaching saturation.
There is no better way for Facebook to add new users in the developing world than by becoming the de facto app for how they receive their income from abroad.
that possibility pales in comparison to the larger opportunity for Facebook offering a way for people who don use banks now to do e-commerce.
In the next five years, nearly every person on the planet will have access to the Internet.
By 2019, Ericsson predicts there will be 5. 9 billion smartphone users worldwide. When every family on the planet has access to a smartphone with fast Internet, the paradigm changes.
The idea that we still need physical banks, plastic cards, and paper money fades away. It already starting to occur.
Wechat users sent over 1 billion ed envelopesfilled with e-money to other users. It easy to imagine a world where workers in developing countries are paid through Facebook via peer-to-peer payments,
store their money on Facebook, purchase local goods through transfers, and have the ability to pay for items using Facebook.
The effect that Facebook could have on the world as an electronic financial institution is nothing short of profound.
So why would Facebook facilitate millions of transfers and online purchases for next to nothing?
For one, it puts them closer to attaining the holy grail of datahow users spend their money.
Let not forget that at the end of the day Facebook is most definitely an ad network at its core.
Just because a user ikesa brand, doesn mean he or she is a customer. For example, how many of Lamborghini 11 million Facebook fans could actually afford that car?
While Facebook could make an educated guess, it can answer that question with certainty. However, in a world where Facebook could combine financial transactions and social graphs,
advertisers would be given near-perfect information on their audience. No other ad network in the world would be able to match Facebook targeting capabilitiespurchase behavior, income, savings, etc.
Despite the doomsayers, the world future has looked never so bright. Wee currently undergoing a period of massive socioeconomic growth.
In 2009 there were 1. 9 billion people in the middle class and over the next 15 years that number will rise to 4. 9 billion people.
As billions of people rise up out of poverty to become consumers the question presents itselfow will the new economies of the future operate?
Will they still cling to the coins and paper that society has used for the last 3, 500 years?
Or can mobile and the Internet change all that? I like to believe the latter. While many of these ideas will take decades to come to fruition,
Facebook has an incredible opportunity in front of itselfo use technology to change the way the world thinks about money.
I quit using Facebook years ago but maybe, hopefully, Mark Zuckerberg will give me a compelling reason to sign back up b
The Telegraph newspaper this week suggested new powers to be outlined in the Bill will require companies like Google
and Facebook to give U k. intelligence agencies access to the encrypted conversations of suspected terrorists and criminals.
That scenario presupposes Internet companies have the ability to access their usersencrypted messages. While that is certainly true for some digital services with a sloppy attitude to security (or with business models that rely on data mining their users), others,
such as Apple, claim they intentionally do not hold encryption keys which presumably sets up a legal clash with security-and privacy-conscious tech companies and the U k. government.
the Communications Data Bill widely criticized as a nooperscharter on the grounds that it would have required ISPS to retain detailed data on web usage failed to pass through Parliament owing to the lack of support from the Conservative Lib dem coalition partners.
and we agreed to doone was about requiring ISPS to keep track of web logs, effectively.
So a list of every website you go to, and things like that. And the third thing was to have a power to require ISPS to keep track of third party information so
what you do on Facebook, what you do on any other site, says Huppert. hose were the three things they said they wanted.
The IP ADDRESS matching basically was the only thing they had any evidence for. And it doesn involve any significant privacy intrusions
but has huge advantages. Whereas I think the concept of keeping track of every website everybody ever goes to,
or of requiring ISPS to keep track of what you do on Facebook all the time are deeply intrusive.
And actually they couldn come up with any significant evidence of why it was useful.?There should be a clear piece of legislation that sets out
and privacy intrusion of having the state require systematic logging of citizensweb browsing habits and social media activity,
he argues. o unlike IP ADDRESS matching where there really was a strong case, there isn a clear case here.
but also if you look at some of the things that Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance David Omand has argued saidhe for full public
Speaking at an Internet festival taking place in London this week he asked of politicians:
so my personal data is not going to be snooped on and when people do have snooped their data on it only used in a very serious process of tracking down organised crime and terrorism?
of which will ripple out to affect both U k. web users and their online behavior, and global companies doing business in the U k. The U k. is referred often to as the most surveilled country in the world typically a reference to the pervasive use of CCTV.
this same outsourcing modus operandi used with CCTV is being applied by governments to Internet companies with the U k. government now preparing to push one of the most hawkish data retention agendas in the Western world,
where their user data is then subject to systematic mining by the state as a byproduct of citizensdigital participation,
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