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Isobel Koshiw / The Verge:
Sources detail a $100M+ Ukraine-based hacking scheme that stole press releases from three US newswires for insider trading over a period of at least five years — At a Kiev nightclub in the spring of 2012, 24-year-old Ivan Turchynov made a fateful drunken boast to some fellow hackers.
Patricia Hernandez / The Verge:
The YouTube stream for the Logan Paul vs. KSI fight had ~773k viewers, at $10/view, but 1M+ people watched unofficial streams of the fight on Twitch at its peak — Most people didn't pay for the biggest event on YouTube — After months of hype, YouTube superstars Logan Paul …
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
A look at IGTV's struggles and slow growth two months after launch as Instagram and content creators try to figure out how to make the longer video format work — ‘Everything great starts small,’ says CEO — Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts …
Today, there was a little bit of a skirmish between two professional YouTubers. Our dear old friend Logan Paul and KSI had an actual boxing match at the Manchester Arena where 15,000 tickets were sold (!!!!!!!!) for an event that ultimately ended in a draw and vows for a rematch.
The action onstage wasn’t the only place where viewers could get a look into the action, there was a $10 pay-per-view stream on YouTube, but more people seemed to end up watching pirated streams on Twitch with boxing fight streams reaching over a million concurrent users at one point. Streams also popped up on Twitter-owned Periscope.
Now, forget the parties involved and the topic and the motivations for a moment if you can. I understand if it might feel more than a little difficult to feel remorse for the parties involved, that has been a common refrain for pirated content popping up from whatever group for whatever reason though.
There’s obviously a big difference between free curiosity and $10 curiosity for an event like this but it seems pretty apparent that having access to a free stream on an easily-accessible mainstream site probably dissuaded some people from paying for the event on YouTube. While people may have previously scoured the web for pop-up ridden sites to view something like this, Twitch and other services unofficially served it up on a platter.
It’s impossible to squash all of the pirated streams, but Amazon’s Twitch is a bit too mature to be hosting pirated streams in such rampant numbers without being a little more proactive — instead of just relying on user reports to police pirated content that was fairly hard to avoid stumbling upon on the platform.
Even as tech companies continue to try and crack live content, services like Twitch that don’t proactively search out users hijacking streams of big events like this really serve to complicate and deter their own goals of eventually finding a way to monetize big events like this.
Will Oremus / Slate:
Amazon is rapidly losing global smart speaker market share to Google Home and devices customized for China, where Amazon has little experience and influence — A year ago, everyone was buying an Amazon Echo. Here's how Google turned the tables. — It's easy to imagine a world in which …
Muyao Shen / CoinDesk:
WeChat and Alipay ban cryptocurrency-related transactions on their payment platforms — Chinese mobile payment platforms WeChat Pay and Alipay are scrambling to keep up with regulators after recent announcements regarding initial coin offerings (ICOs) and cryptocurrencies.
What’s next for robotics? At at Disrupt SF, we’ll be joined by four experts to discuss how new technologies are changing the field.
Those experts include Peter Barrett, founder and CTO and Playground, a venture fund and design studio focused on hardware startups. Barrett is a 30-year veteran of the tech industry, whose accomplishments include developing Cinepak (video compression software that was included as part of Apple QuickTime) and working at WebTV — which was acquired by Microsoft, where he led Internet TV efforts for more than a decade.
We’ll also be joined by Helen Boniske, a partner at early stage hardware investor Lemnos. Before joining Lemnos, Boniske was a front office executive for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The panel will also include Claire Delaunay, Nvidia’s vice president of engineering. Delaunay was previously robotics program lead at Google, co-founder of autonomous vehicle startup Otto and director of engineering at Uber. At Nvidia, she leads the Isaac robotics initiative.
The final panelist will be Cyril Ebersweiler. Ebersweiler is founder and managing director of Hax, a hardware accelerator with offices in both Shenzhen and San Francisco. He’s also a general partner at global venture capital firm SOSV. And somehow, he pulls off describing himself as a “visionary punk” on his LinkedIn profile.
Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. (The robotics panel will be at 1:15pm on the 5th.) You can still buy tickets right here.
It’s not been a great week for cell carriers. EE was hit with two security bugs and T-Mobile admitted a data breach. Now, Sprint is the latest phone giant to admit a security lapse, TechCrunch has learned.
Using two sets of weak, easy-to-guess usernames and passwords, a security researcher accessed an internal Sprint staff portal. Because the portal’s log-in page didn’t use two-factor authentication, the researcher — who did not want to be named — navigated to pages that could have allowed access customer account data.
Sprint is the fourth largest US cell network with 55 million customers.
TechCrunch passed on details and screenshots of the issue to Sprint, which confirmed the findings in an email.
“After looking into this, we do not believe customer information can be obtained without successful authentication to the site,” said a Sprint spokesperson.
“Based on the information and screenshots provided, legitimate credentials were utilized to access the site. Regardless, the security of our customers is a top priority, and our team is working diligently to research this issue and immediately changed the passwords associated with these accounts,” the spokesperson said.
We’re not disclosing the passwords, but suffice to say they were not difficult to guess.
The first set of credentials let the researcher into a prepaid Sprint employee portal that gave staff access to Sprint customer data — as well as Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile, which are Sprint subsidiaries. The researcher used another set of credentials to gain access to a part of the website, which he said gave him access to a portal for customer account data.
A screenshot shared with TechCrunch showed that anyone with access to this portal allowed the user to conduct a device swap, change plans and add-ons, replenish a customer’s account, check activation status and view customer account information.
A screenshot showing an internal customer portal.
All a user would need is a customer’s mobile phone number and a four-digit PIN number, which could be bypassed by cycling through every possible combination.
The researcher said there were no limits on the number of PIN attempts.
Account PIN numbers are highly sensitive as they can be used to transfer ownership from one person to another. That gives hackers an easier route to carry out a “SIM swapping” attack, which target and hijack cell phone numbers. Hackers use a mix of techniques — such as calling up customer service and impersonating a customer, all the way to recruiting telecom employees to hijack SIM cards from the inside. In hijacking phone numbers, hackers can break into online accounts to steal vanity Instagram usernames, and intercept codes for two-factor authentication to steal the contents of cryptocurrency wallets.
SIM swapping is becoming a big, albeit illegal business. An investigation by Motherboard revealed that hundreds of people across the US have had their cellphone number stolen over the past few years. TechCrunch’s John Biggs was one such victim.
But the authorities are catching up to the growing threat of SIM swapping. Three SIM swappers have been arrested in the past few weeks alone.
Reuters:
Chinese province suspends Didi's service after a driver allegedly killed a carpooling passenger, the second such incident in 2018 — BEIJING (Reuters) - A ride-sharing passenger in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou was raped and killed, allegedly by a driver for the country's largest ride-hailing firm …
If you’re not sure about watching a whole movie where your point-of-view is limited to computer and smartphone screens, you’re not alone — “Searching” filmmakers Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian told me they had very similar reservations.
Chaganty said that when the pair was first approached by Timur Bekmambetov’s Bazelevs (the production company behind the “Unfriended” movies), the idea was to contribute a segment to an anthology of short films set on computer screens. That’s when they came up with the basic plot of “Searching” — after a teenaged girl goes missing, her father (played by John Cho) goes through the laptop she left behind in an effort to find her.
But then the studio proposed turning the idea into a feature film, with Chaganty directing, Ohanian producing and the two of them writing the screenplay.
“It was this incredible moment where no filmmaker ever gets this opportunity,” Chaganty recalled. “But in that instant, I said no.”
It seemed to him that they’d come up with a way to make the format more than a gimmick —but as a short film. He worried that extending it into a feature might “stretch it right back into a 90-minute gimmick.”
Chaganty and Ohanian kept talking about the idea, though, and ultimately moved forward after coming up with an opening sequence — which is indeed the opening sequence of the finished film. It’s a seven-minute montage of footage stored on a desktop computer, which doubles as a compressed (and surprisingly emotional) history of the Kim family.
“In that moment, there was a click, there was a lightbulb that went off, where we realized the potential of this format with this story,” Chaganty said. “And we realized, despite the films that had existed before, there was a way to make this feel not only new … but also for once emotional, engaging, cinematic.”
“Searching” is in limited release this weekend, before opening more widely on Friday, August 31. You can read more about how Chaganty and Ohanian actually made the movie in the edited transcript below.
Director/writer Aneesh Chaganty and Debra Messing on the set of “Searching.”
TechCrunch: How much of this started with the format, and how much with the kidnapping plot?
Sev Ohanian: Honestly, it was almost neither of those things. Aneesh and I are writing partners — he directs, I produce, we met each other at USC film school. We had made a two-minute short film that takes place on the Google Glasses, if you remember those at all? It kind of blew up — it was called “Seeds” — and one of the results of that was he got hired by Google to come out here and start writing commercials for one or two years.
I’ve been an indie producer for a couple of years now and I had an opportunity to meet with Timur Bekmambetov’s company Bazelevs. He had just released “Unfriended,” it was super successful, and he asked me if there were any filmmakers I wanted to collaborate with. I immediately thought of Aneesh, of course.
Aneesh Chaganty: When I came in and we had the meeting together, they were like, “We want to follow-up ‘Unfriended’ but we don’t want to follow it up with a traditional feature, we want to follow it up with an anthology feature, basically comprised of a bunch of shorts, all of which take place on computer screens.”
Immediately to me, that was a lot more interesting than a feature film, because we had seen all the feature films that took place on screens and none of them were proof that this was a direction we should be going in. A short film, though, I knew we could make it into not a gimmick, which I think all the other films were. [Pauses.] Sort of rude, but whatever.
About a month and a half later, we ended up texting each other with the idea for “Searching” — first as a short film, that’s how it started out. Same plot. Basically, Dad breaks into his daughter’s laptop to look at clues to find her.
We thought in eight minutes it could be not a gimmick and really cool and engaging and get out before anyone got bored. And we sent a few pages back to the company and I happened to be in Los Angeles a few weeks later for a Google photo shoot and they called us into a board room. All of a sudden, it was Sev and myself in front of a big table of execs and financiers and all that stuff.
They basically told us, “Hey, we don’t want to make the short.” We go, “Well, that’s a bummer.” And they go, “We want to turn it into a feature. Sev and Aneesh, you guys can write it, we’ll pay you guys to write it, Sev, you can produce it, Aneesh, we’ll pay you to direct your first feature, and we’ll finance the whole thing. What do you guys say?”
It was this incredible moment where no filmmaker ever gets this opportunity — but in that instant, I said no.
Ohanian: He said no!
Chaganty: On my left side, he was like kicking me, like, “What are you doing?” and everything like that. But in the moment, it felt like what we were being asked to do was take a concept that we had found to not be a gimmick and then stretch it right back into a 90-minute gimmick. And more than that, make a film not because ours had any artistic merit, but because another film was a hit. Not that ours deserved to exist.
And so for the right reasons I said no, and for the right reasons, Sev said, “We’ll be in touch.” And we left the room and we just kept talking about the enormity of the opportunity, obviously, and how that never happens, despite the parameters of what we were being asked to do. And we were like, “If we hit a wall, we hit a wall, but we should pay respect to this by talking.”
So for two months we just tried to figure out a way into the story and we couldn’t. Until one day, I was living in Williamsburg at the time, and I was texting Sev, and I was like, “Hey, I have a really random idea for an opening sequence.” And Sev goes, “I have an idea for an opening sequence.” And we get on the phone and we pitch each other the exact same opening scene. And to this day, that’s the opening sequence of the film, which is a standalone, very unique seven-minute montage that takes place over 16 years of a family’s life stored on their desktop computer.
In that moment, there was a click, there was a lightbulb that went off, where we realized the potential of this format with this story. And we realized, despite the films that had existed before, there was a way to make this feel not only new, but also for once emotional, engaging, cinematic.
Director/writer Aneesh Chaganty and John Cho on the set of “Searching.”
Ohanian: Our idea with the opening scene was, we wanted to create something that within five minutes, audiences would just forget that what they were watching was unfolding on screens and just get sucked into the story. Hopefully we did that.
Chaganty: So we put together a longer pitch, because immediately [after] that idea of the opening scene, we were like, “And I guess the next scene would be this, and the next scene would be this.” And we started plotting it out immediately. We had a structure very quickly.
We sent that structure back to the company, they bought in, they were like, “We’re paying you guys to do this.” I quit my job at Google, and I got on a flight, moved to L.A. and we made a movie.
TechCrunch: My understanding is that you had created a lot of what happens on the computer screen first, and then John and Debra [Messing] and the other actors were acting on webcams to a certain extent based on what you’d already created.
Chaganty: The way that we like to describe this movie is, we sort of made an animated movie, then shot a live action film, and then put the live action film within the animated film and just kept refining it and refining it.
The reason we started with an animated movie was Sev’s idea, and basically coming from a movie called “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” It was made in a very similar way, in the sense that it was made before it was made.
Basically, what we realized was that in our film, there are two cameras. There’s all the footage that you’re seeing on this screen, and then there’s the way that you’re framing it, because the camera in our film is always moving around. We realized those two need to play with each other and also inform one another. We need to know what the final product is going to look like, before we even went to set.
So basically, seven weeks before we even hired the actors, we brought in the editors to the film and took them to a room about this big, with two iMac computers, and said, “Welcome home.” And literally just said, “Go.”
They started screen capturing the Internet, like doing text messages, voicemail, whatever, every single thing, zooming in, putting together a cut. And by the end of seven weeks, we had an hour-and-40-minute cut of the entire film, starring me playing every role — dad, daughter, brother, mother, father. You know, all of the friends, talking to myself. And we would understand how the camera was moving and everything, and how to make this movie.
We showed that cut to the crew the night before we started shooting and it was in that moment that they were like, “Oh, that’s the movie we’re making.” Because up until that point, this movie is impossible to talk about. Now we have a trailer, we have a poster, it’s all very easy to be like, “Oh, this is what we made.” But before that I’m saying, “We’re making a thriller, but it takes place on a computer screen, but it’s going to be really good.” And it’s really hard to sell people on that idea. So for them to finally see what we were thinking was very helpful.
And then on set, John’s character, who’s literally operating the computer in the movie, his eyeline — he needs to know exactly where every button is, where every cursor moves, where everything pops, where every video message comes in, he always needs to have a perfect eyeline in the film and know what’s happening. We literally needed to show him that temp video as he’s shooting, so he understands where what he’s shooting is actually being placed in the larger film.
Debra Messing and John Cho in “Searching.”
Ohanian: And the idea with that previz version of the movie was, we wanted the final version of the film to feel polished and cinematic and grab the audience’s attention. It’s a studio movie now with worldwide distribution, but it started off as an indie film. You’ve seen the movie: There’s aerial stuff, car stuff, crowd scenes, water, ravines. We shot it in 13 days.
And part of the idea of doing this version was that we wanted to spend every one of those days making them count as much as we can, and the final product would have consistency and good screen composition and mise en scene and all these amazing things. So it wouldn’t feel accidental, it would feel polished.
TechCrunch: When you were working with the actors, how much did they instinctively know what to do, and how much, given that this is not a format that exists already, did you have to train them for a different kind of acting?
Chaganty: I think every single person on the cast and the crew had to relearn aspects of the job to make this movie. Michelle [La, who plays the daughter Margot] actually says this, that it’s a lot easier for her to behave in front of a screen than it was for John. Maybe it’s a generational thing or whatever, but for us, all the rules visually are different. None of us have ever made another movie like this. I know for a fact, none of us are going to do this again. We’re on-set, we’re all learning together.
I really equate this whole movie with cast and crew holding each other’s hands, we all walk into a dark cave, every single person thinks the person to their right knows a little more than them, but nobody does. And I’m on the far right being like, “Uh, I don’t know … ” But jumping in, and at every point of this cave, in the pure darkness, realizing that there’s one person on this crew or cast who knew how to get to this next challenge.
TechCrunch: It sounds like you guys aren’t necessarily looking to make “Searching 2,” and in fact, I know you already have another project lined up.
Now that you’re at the end of the process, to what extent do you feel that okay, [computer screen movies are a genre] where other directors can come in and do interesting stuff? And to what extent to do you feel like this is probably something that you can make four or five films with, and at the end of it, the possibilities are exhausted?
Chaganty: At the end of the day, I keep saying this, but I think that if you asked Christopher Nolan how many more backwards films are going to happen [after “Memento”], is he starting a subgenre with backwards films? I don’t think the answer would be yes.
We feel the same way about this movie. This, at the end of the day, is a gimmick. It’s a style of telling the story. We found a way, I think, to make it not that and tell the story first, but at the same time, a computer screen only has set imagery. It’s even more limiting than traditional found footage, because with traditional found footage you can set yourself in Singapore, or Hong Kong, or New York, or whatever. You’re always on a laptop screen with a computer screen film.
Maybe the lesson people will learn from us is something that I’ve learned: There is a way still to show technology accurately and honestly — because I don’t think Hollywood has done that yet — using screens and using traditional cinematic language when you’re showing screens. You can still combine that with a live action film, and in a way that feels consistent with your tone and style and genre of whatever larger piece you’re making.
Whatever criteria we look at, whether it’s schools with the highest number of well-capitalized founders, highest funding totals or even where startup investors went to college, the same names top the list. The only surprise factor, it seems, is whether Harvard or Stanford will be in first place.
It’s possible we’ll do a data-driven university- and startup-related ranking that doesn’t feature the same two schools in the top two positions. But that’s not happening today, as we look at universities with founder alumni who have raised the most venture funding.1
Luckily, there are more than two names on the list. In this survey, we looked at the top 15 schools ranked by alumni who have raised the most venture funding for their startups in roughly the past year.
This is a follow-up to our earlier piece, which ranked U.S. universities according to the number of funded startup founders who raised $1 million or more in the survey period. The results, however, feature most of the same names, and an only slightly altered order.
Take a look for yourself below. The chart includes the name of the school, the total known venture capital funding raised by alumni founders since August 1, 2017, and the most heavily funded companies.
In the survey results, we included universities and affiliated business schools together. This significantly bumped up the totals for universities with well-known business schools, like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania (home of the Wharton School of Business).
Additionally, a number of funded founders have degrees from more than one university in the ranking. These entrepreneurs are counted once for each university.
