Geek Trivia: Which Major Video Game Company Also Owned A Major League Baseball Team?

Which Major Video Game Company Also Owned A Major League Baseball Team?

Microsoft Nintendo Sega Sony Think you know the answer?

from How-To Geek http://bit.ly/2SGWsqI

A look at the debate surrounding the economics of popular open source software like OpenSSL, as an ever-increasing workload on maintainers risks causing burnout (Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard)

Daniel Oberhaus / Motherboard:
A look at the debate surrounding the economics of popular open source software like OpenSSL, as an ever-increasing workload on maintainers risks causing burnout  —  A look at the complicated business of funding open source software development.  —  It was just before midnight on New Years Eve …

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2GuQS4k

Elroy Air, a maker of delivery drones that can carry up to 500 lbs, raises $9.2M in seed funding from new and existing investors Catapult, Precursor, and others (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Elroy Air, a maker of delivery drones that can carry up to 500 lbs, raises $9.2M in seed funding from new and existing investors Catapult, Precursor, and others  —  The dozens of companies vying for a foothold in the $11.2 billion drone industry — and by extension the $400 million same …

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2U0qzpq

Vicarious Surgical, which is building minimally invasive surgical tech that combines VR with miniature robots, has closed $10M round led by Gates Frontiers Fund (Jonathan Shieber/TechCrunch)

Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:
Vicarious Surgical, which is building minimally invasive surgical tech that combines VR with miniature robots, has closed $10M round led by Gates Frontiers Fund  —  In an operating room in rural Idaho, doctors prep a patient for surgery.  They make a tiny, thumb-sized incision into the patient …

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2GuPbnu

Seattle startup Xnor unveils a 100% solar-powered prototype AI camera with 320x320 resolution, an FPGA chip, and an object recognition algorithm loaded on board (James Vincent/The Verge)

James Vincent / The Verge:
Seattle startup Xnor unveils a 100% solar-powered prototype AI camera with 320x320 resolution, an FPGA chip, and an object recognition algorithm loaded on board  —  Stick it in sunlight and it can transmit data pretty much indefinitely  —  A big trend in AI is the transition from cloud to edge computing.

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2GMXaLR

Leaked images of the V50 ThinQ, LG's first 5G phone, show similar design to V40 with triple camera system and rear fingerprint sensor, likely launch on Feb. 24 (Bogdan Petrovan/Android Authority)

Bogdan Petrovan / Android Authority:
Leaked images of the V50 ThinQ, LG's first 5G phone, show similar design to V40 with triple camera system and rear fingerprint sensor, likely launch on Feb. 24  —  We've known for a while that LG would reveal a 5G phone in early 2019, just like every other OEM apparently.

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2Gv4Enp

Kids YouTube star Blippi on how he abused DMCA takedown requests to keep Harlem Shake Poop, an embarrassing viral video he starred in 2013, hidden on the web (Jason Koebler/Motherboard)

Jason Koebler / Motherboard:
Kids YouTube star Blippi on how he abused DMCA takedown requests to keep Harlem Shake Poop, an embarrassing viral video he starred in 2013, hidden on the web  —  Someone claiming to represent Blippi filed DMCA copyright takedown requests to Google in order to get an embarrassing viral video hidden.

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2EdZIRo

While some artists whose music is used in TikTok videos are compensated through their labels' sales of blanket licenses, others forgo payment for exposure (Duncan Cooper/Pitchfork)

Duncan Cooper / Pitchfork:
While some artists whose music is used in TikTok videos are compensated through their labels' sales of blanket licenses, others forgo payment for exposure  —  The company behind lip-sync app TikTok is reportedly worth three times as much as Spotify, but the artists whose music powers the platform are seeing very little of that money.

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2SEDgtC

ClassPass, Gfycat, StreetEasy hit in latest round of mass site hacks

In just a week, a single seller put close to 750 million records from 24 hacked sites up for sale. Now, the hacker has struck again.

The hacker, whose identity isn’t known, began listing user data from several major websites — including MyFitnessPal, 500px and Coffee Meets Bagel, and more recently Houzz and Roll20 — earlier this week. This weekend, the hacker added their third round of data breaches — another eight sites, amounting to another 91 million user records — on their dark web marketplace.

To date, the hacker has revealed breaches at 30 companies, totaling some 841 million records.

According to the latest listing, the sites include 20 million accounts from Legendas.tv, OneBip, Storybird, and Jobandtalent, as well as eight million accounts at Gfycat, 1.5 million ClassPass accounts, 60 million Pizap accounts, and another one million StreetEasy property searching accounts.

In all, the hacker is selling the eight additional hacked sites for 2.6 bitcoin, or about $9,350.

From the samples that TechCrunch has seen, the accounts include some variations of usernames and email addresses, names, locations by country and region, account creation dates, passwords hashed in various formats, and other account information.

We haven’t found any financial data in the samples.

Little is known about the hacker, and it remains unclear exactly how these sites were hacked.

Ariel Ainhoren, research team leader at Israeli security firm IntSights, told TechCrunch this week that the hacker was likely using the same exploit to target each of the sites and dump the backend databases.

“As most of these sites were not known breaches, it seems we’re dealing here with a hacker that did the hacks by himself, and not just someone who obtained it from somewhere else and now just resold it,” said Ainhoren in an email to TechCrunch earlier this week. The software in question, PostgreSQL, an open-source database project, said it was “currently unaware of any patched or unpatched vulnerabilities” that could have caused the breaches.

TechCrunch contacted several of the companies but didn’t hear back at the time of writing. If we hear back, we’ll update.

Hacker who stole 620 million records strikes again, stealing 127 million more

from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2SHNsld

Vision system for autonomous vehicles watches not just where pedestrians walk, but how

The University of Michigan, well known for its efforts in self-driving car tech, has been working on an improved algorithm for predicting the movements of pedestrians that takes into account not just what they’re doing, but how they’re doing it. This body language could be critical to predicting what a person does next.

Keeping an eye on pedestrians and predicting what they’re going to do is a major part of any autonomous vehicle’s vision system. Understanding that a person is present and where makes a huge difference to how the vehicle can operate — but while some companies advertise that they can see and label people at such and such a range, or under these or those conditions, few if any can or say they can see gestures and posture.

WTF is computer vision?

Such vision algorithms can (though nowadays are unlikely to) be as simple as identifying a human and seeing how many pixels it moves over a few frames, then extrapolating from there. But naturally human movement is a bit more complex than that.

UM’s new system uses the lidar and stereo camera systems to estimate not just a person’s trajectory, but their pose and gait. Pose can indicate whether a person is looking towards or away from the car, or using a cane, or stooped over a phone; gait indicates not just speed but also intention.

Is someone glancing over their shoulder? Maybe they’re going to turn around, or walk into traffic. Are they putting their arms out? Maybe they’re signaling someone (or perhaps the car) to stop. This additional data helps a system predict motion and makes for a more complete set of navigation plans and contingencies.

Importantly, it performs well with only a handful of frames to work with — perhaps comprising a single step and swing of the arm. That’s enough to make a prediction that beats simpler models handily, a critical measure of performance as one cannot assume that a pedestrian will be visible for any more than a few frames between obstructions.

Not too much can be done with this noisy, little-studied data right now but perceiving and cataloguing it is the first step to making it an integral part of an AV’s vision system. You can read the full paper describing the new system in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters or at Arxiv (PDF).

from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2SYUOQs

An account of the rise and untimely death of Vine and HQ Trivia cofounder Colin Kroll, based on interviews with and documents from friends, police, and others (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
An account of the rise and untimely death of Vine and HQ Trivia cofounder Colin Kroll, based on interviews with and documents from friends, police, and others  —  Self-taught coder Colin Kroll shot to startup fame, allowing him to live life in a fast lane  —  Colin Kroll, a college dropout …

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2V50BS6

Interview with GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon on medical fundraisers, some campaigns becoming highly politicized, fighting scams, and more (Dave Lee/BBC)

Dave Lee / BBC:
Interview with GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon on medical fundraisers, some campaigns becoming highly politicized, fighting scams, and more  —  Kelsey Colker is less than a year old but she's already spent more time in hospital than most of us will in our lifetime.

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2GNvtCM

Report: 17K Android apps, some with 100M+ installs, collect info that can be used to create a permanent record of user's activity on the device for ad targeting (Laura Hautala/CNET)

Laura Hautala / CNET:
Report: 17K Android apps, some with 100M+ installs, collect info that can be used to create a permanent record of user's activity on the device for ad targeting  —  Some apps may track your activity over time, even when you tell them to forget the past.  And there's nothing you can do about it.

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2EdX6mB

Records obtained via FOIA requests and interviews with local officials reveal the unusual lengths Google goes to keep its data center construction plans secret (Elizabeth Dwoskin/Washington Post)

Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
Records obtained via FOIA requests and interviews with local officials reveal the unusual lengths Google goes to keep its data center construction plans secret  —  Last May, officials in Midlothian, Tex., a city near Dallas, approved more than $10 million in tax breaks for a huge …

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2S71CXK

How to read fiction to build a startup

“The book itself is a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were 15, it will tell it to you again when you’re 50, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

Every year, Bill Gates goes off-grid, leaves friends and family behind, and spends two weeks holed up in a cabin reading books. His annual reading list rivals Oprah’s Book Club as a publishing kingmaker. Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg shared a reading recommendation every two weeks for a year, dubbing 2015 his “Year of Books.” Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, joined the board of Room to Read when she realized how books like The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate were inspiring girls to pursue careers in science and technology. Many a biotech entrepreneur treasures a dog-eared copy of Daniel Suarez’s Change Agent, which extrapolates the future of CRISPR. Noah Yuval Harari’s sweeping account of world history, Sapiens, is de rigueur for Silicon Valley nightstands.

This obsession with literature isn’t limited to founders. Investors are just as avid bookworms. “Reading was my first love,” says AngelList’s Naval Ravikant. “There is always a book to capture the imagination.” Ravikant reads dozens of books at a time, dipping in and out of each one nonlinearly. When asked about his preternatural instincts, Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe advised investors to “read voraciously and connect dots.” Foundry Group’s Brad Feld has reviewed 1,197 books on Goodreads and especially loves science fiction novels that “make the step function leaps in imagination that represent the coming dislocation from our current reality.”

This begs a fascinating question: Why do the people building the future spend so much of their scarcest resource — time — reading books?

Image by NiseriN via Getty Images. Reading time approximately 14 minutes.

Don’t Predict, Reframe

Do innovators read in order to mine literature for ideas? The Kindle was built to the specs of a science fictional children’s storybook featured in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, in fact, the Kindle project team was originally codenamed “Fiona” after the novel’s protagonist. Jeff Bezos later hired Stephenson as the first employee at his space startup Blue Origin. But this literary prototyping is the exception that proves the rule. To understand the extent of the feedback loop between books and technology, it’s necessary to attack the subject from a less direct angle.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is full of indirect angles that all manage to reveal deeper truths. It’s a mind-bending novel that follows six different characters through an intricate web of interconnected stories spanning three centuries. The book is a feat of pure M.C. Escher-esque imagination, featuring a structure as creative and compelling as its content. Mitchell takes the reader on a journey ranging from the 19th century South Pacific to a far-future Korean corpocracy and challenges the reader to rethink the very idea of civilization along the way. “Power, time, gravity, love,” writes Mitchell. “The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”

The technological incarnations of these invisible forces are precisely what Kevin Kelly seeks to catalog in The Inevitable. Kelly is an enthusiastic observer of the impact of technology on the human condition. He was a co-founder of Wired, and the insights explored in his book are deep, provocative, and wide-ranging. In his own words, “When answers become cheap, good questions become more difficult and therefore more valuable.” The Inevitable raises many important questions that will shape the next few decades, not least of which concern the impacts of AI:

“Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.”

It is precisely this kind of an AI-influenced world that Richard Powers describes so powerfully in his extraordinary novel The Overstory:

“Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.”

Taking this a step further, Virginia Heffernan points out in Magic and Loss that living in a digitally mediated reality impacts our inner lives at least as much as the world we inhabit:

“The Internet suggests immortality—comes just shy of promising it—with its magic. With its readability and persistence of data. With its suggestion of universal connectedness. With its disembodied imagines and sounds. And then, just as suddenly, it stirs grief: the deep feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound. That connectedness is illusory; that we’re all more alone than ever.”

And it is the questionable assumptions underlying such a future that Nick Harkaway enumerates in his existential speculative thriller Gnomon:

“Imagine how safe it would feel to know that no one could ever commit a crime of violence and go unnoticed, ever again. Imagine what it would mean to us to know—know for certain—that the plane or the bus we’re travelling on is properly maintained, that the teacher who looks after our children doesn’t have ugly secrets. All it would cost is our privacy, and to be honest who really cares about that? What secrets would you need to keep from a mathematical construct without a heart? From a card index? Why would it matter? And there couldn’t be any abuse of the system, because the system would be built not to allow it. It’s the pathway we’re taking now, that we’ve been on for a while.” 

Machine learning pioneer, former President of Google China, and leading Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee loves reading science fiction in this vein — books that extrapolate AI futures — like Hao Jingfang’s Hugo Award-winning Folding Beijing. Lee’s own book, AI Superpowers, provides a thought-provoking overview of the burgeoning feedback loop between machine learning and geopolitics. As AI becomes more and more powerful, it becomes an instrument of power, and this book outlines what that means for the 21st century world stage:

“Many techno-optimists and historians would argue that productivity gains from new technology almost always produce benefits throughout the economy, creating more jobs and prosperity than before. But not all inventions are created equal. Some changes replace one kind of labor (the calculator), and some disrupt a whole industry (the cotton gin). Then there are technological changes on a grander scale. These don’t merely affect one task or one industry but drive changes across hundreds of them. In the past three centuries, we’ve only really seen three such inventions: the steam engine, electrification, and information technology.”

So what’s different this time? Lee points out that “AI is inherently monopolistic: A company with more data and better algorithms will gain ever more users and data. This self-reinforcing cycle will lead to winner-take-all markets, with one company making massive profits while its rivals languish.” This tendency toward centralization has profound implications for the restructuring of world order:

“The AI revolution will be of the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution—but probably larger and definitely faster. Where the steam engine only took over physical labor, AI can perform both intellectual and physical labor. And where the Industrial Revolution took centuries to spread beyond Europe and the U.S., AI applications are already being adopted simultaneously all across the world.”

Cloud Atlas, The Inevitable, The Overstory, Gnomon, Folding Beijing, and AI Superpowers might appear to predict the future, but in fact they do something far more interesting and useful: reframe the present. They invite us to look at the world from new angles and through fresh eyes. And cultivating “beginner’s mind” is the problem for anyone hoping to build or bet on the future.

from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Iffkbv

Investor momentum builds for construction tech

US Government Accountability Office issues a report that calls on Congress to consider developing comprehensive legislation on internet privacy (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)

Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
US Government Accountability Office issues a report that calls on Congress to consider developing comprehensive legislation on internet privacy  —  Government officials, academia, and advocacy groups say it's time for the US to get its own GDPR-type law.  —  An independent report authored …

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2S4zlRz

Facebook engineers on how they developed intelligent video framing for Portal devices by combining computer vision tech with expertise of Hollywood filmmakers (Mark Sullivan/Fast Company)

Mark Sullivan / Fast Company:
Facebook engineers on how they developed intelligent video framing for Portal devices by combining computer vision tech with expertise of Hollywood filmmakers  —  Facebook's Portal home camera has its drawbacks-privacy concerns not least among them-but it does have one undeniably cool feature …

from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2TOp4ec

Visa and Mastercard could raise interchange fees

According to a report from the WSJ, Visa and Mastercard are considering raising interchange fees on card transactions in the U.S. Visa and Mastercard generate most of their revenue from these small processing fees, and it could have implications for merchants and fintech startups.

When you pay with a credit or debit card, merchants pay a small fee to the bank that issued this card. Your bank then pays an even smaller fee to the company that operates the card network.

In most cases, card issuers and card networks are separate companies. For instance, Chase issues a Visa card, Chase gets an interchange fee on every card transaction, and Chase pays a tiny fee to Visa. Some companies also operate a network and issue cards themselves, such as American Express.

The WSJ says that Mastercard and Visa will raise their fees in April — Visa confirmed the change. While fees on each transaction are nearly unnoticeable, they add up quite rapidly. They generate a ton of revenue for Visa and Mastercard, and they represent significant costs for large merchants.

It could become a consumer protection issue as customers often end up paying higher prices because of those fees. While Visa and Mastercard mostly negotiate with financial institutions, those financial institutions still want a cut on interchange fees. That’s why those fees are passed on to the merchants.

Merchants take into account the fact that a large portion of their customers are going to pay with a card. They end up raising prices for everyone, even if you pay using cash, a debit card or a credit card.

Fees on credit cards are generally higher and are the reason why points and rewards exist. Banks attract customers with advantageous reward systems because they want to get your interchange fees. Interchange fees are also much higher in the U.S. than in Europe because there has been more fraudulent activity — the U.S. has switched to chip-and-pin cards years after Europe.

An increase in interchange fees could also affect consumer fintech startups. Many challenger banks have been relying on interchange fees as one of their revenue streams. That’s part of the reason why European fintech startups, such as N26, Monzo and Revolut, have been looking at the U.S. as a potential market. There’s an entire industry built on top of those interchange fees.

from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2EdNlF7