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EFF's Peter Eckersley On 'Clever' PRISM Denials, Fighting FISA, And Why Privacy Matters [TCTV]
Jun 08, 10:00PM
It's had to have been an interesting week for the people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The non-profit has been beating the drum about the importance of digital rights, privacy, and metadata for decades now. And in recent years, one of the EFF's causes has been to shed more light on the United States' National Security Agency (NSA) and specifically its use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to essentially spy on the telecommunications and web activity of millions of innocent Americans under the guise of keeping them safe.Snapchat Hiring Massive Sales Team, Said To Be Raising $100M At A Near $1B Valuation To Pay Them
Jun 08, 9:22PM
Snapchat is aggressively recruiting sales people from Stanford as well as USC for its impending debut of a monetization scheme, we've discovered. Meanwhile it's raising $100 million at a valuation as high as $1 billion to pay them, as well as buy more servers and hire other talent to power its rapidly growing self-destructing messaging app, sources say.Director Of National Intelligence Tries To Downplay PRISM Paranoia, Says The System Doesn't Mine Data
Jun 08, 9:16PM
There have been plenty of juicy (and unsettling) PRISM details making the rounds these past few days, and unsurprisingly the Office of the Director of National Intelligence doesn't think the NSA's surveillance practices have been cast in the most accurate light. In an effort to help do away with some pervasive misconceptions, the ODNI has issued a statement explaining why it thinks people are blowing this out of proportion.Zazzle Pulls Fake NSA PRISM Program T-Shirt For Intellectual Property Infringement
Jun 08, 9:00PM
Turn on your radio-activated tooth fillings and cover your windows in aluminum foil because someone - no one knows who, for sure - has asked that Gawker writer Max Read's homemade NSA PRISM t-shirts be removed from the Internet. Read created the t-shirts as a joke, selling a grand total of three items before Zazzle shut down his store after citing "infringement claims."Windows Phone 8 Reportedly Gained A Notification Center Before Losing It Again
Jun 08, 7:38PM
When I buy gadgets off of eBay, I'm lucky if half of them haven't previously been gnawef on by dogs. Meanwhile, this redditor who picked up a second-hand Nokia Lumia 920 from the auction sit seems to have gotten much more than he bargained for -- he's been posting screenshots from the device for the better part of a day, and the thing appears to run a previously unreleased build of Windows Phone 8. The big tip off? Well, there's a handful of UI changes (including the ability to kill apps from the multitasking screen), to say nothing of a slew of curious pre-installed test apps that seem tailor-made for internal development use. Really though, the most notable addition to the device is a notification center, one of the features that's missing from current versions of Windows Phone.The Zen of Entrepreneurship
Jun 08, 6:09PM
In Silicon Valley, it's easy to find lots of advice on what I call the "external" how-tos of startups, including: structuring your company, building a minimum viable product, negotiating a term sheet with investors, selling your company, and on and on! This post, on the other hand, is about the less publicized "inner side" of the entrepreneurial journey.Girl Loses Friends Because Her Phone Is Too Big To Carry
Jun 08, 6:07PM
Somewhere on the dance floor, she vanished. It would have a been no problem, except her smartphone was so large she left it at coat check. In the pursuit of a big, beautiful screen, she'd sacrificed why people carry phones in the first place. We had no way to find her in the massive nightclub, and we never saw her again.Senate Candidate @CoryBooker: What We Know And What We Need To Know
Jun 08, 5:20PM
Democratic celebrity Newark Mayor Cory Booker just announced his candidacy for Senate, to be decided in a special election on October 16 to replace the late Senator Frank Lautenberg. We named him one of our Most Innovative People in Democracy because there's a lot to like: he has pioneered constituent responsiveness through Twitter, he's a startup founder, he rescues people from burning buildings, and he's one of the most gifted political orators of our time.Gillmor Gang: Back in the USSR
Jun 08, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — view the world through PRISM glasses. We, or me, couldn't help wondering what part of surpised we are at the idea we're being monitored and scraped within an inch of our metadata. It's hard to tell whether we're worried about losing our individual freedoms, or having to do the hard work of balancing the tradeoffs in a dangerous world of drones and the streams that feed them.CrunchWeek: Zynga's Big Layoffs, OMGPOP Gets The Axe, NSA Spying Emerges With Verizon
Jun 08, 4:07PM
Are you feeling like you're ready to kick off the weekend, but could just use three more opinions on the biggest tech news stories of the week before you really get the party started? Well you came to the right place, because it's time for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days. I'd be amiss if I didn't acknowledge that this episode is missing a big, huge, massive story. We taped this late Thursday afternoon, one day earlier than normal, so that Leena Rao and I could say our proper CrunchWeek goodbyes sayonara to Drew Olanoff, who is departing TechCrunch for the purple shores of Yahoo.The Enterprise App Economy
Jun 08, 3:00PM
Editor's note: Aaron Levie is CEO and co-founder of Box. Next week, thousands of developers will converge on WWDC, the vast majority representing companies and products that didn't exist before the creation of Apple's iPhone and app store. They'll talk about the future of mobile gaming, photo sharing, and, of course, Snapchat. But what likely won't be center stage is how transformative Apple's devices and ecosystem have been in the enterprise.Blanket Surveillance. Total Secrecy. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Jun 08, 1:00PM
Imagine that one day you came home to find a shiny little bubble of one-way glass in an upper corner of every single room, and a notice left on your kitchen table: "As required by the Safe Society Act, we have installed remotely controlled cameras throughout your home. (Also your office.) But don't worry! They'll probably only be activated if the government believes that a non-US citizen might have entered this building." Would that give you warm fuzzy feelings of safety and security? I ask because that's a pretty good metaphor for what happened this week. I refer of course to PRISM.Tech Giants Built Segregated Systems For NSA Instead Of Firehoses To Protect Innocent Users From PRISM
Jun 08, 7:09AM
The NSA may have wanted full firehoses of data from Google, Facebook and other tech giants, but the companies attempted to protect innocent users from monitoring via compliance systems that segregated data before securely handing it over as required by law, according to individuals familiar with the systems used by the tech companies targeted by PRISM.Malaysia Is Poorly Marketed To Entrepreneurs, Says 500 Durians' Khailee Ng
Jun 08, 6:08AM
Malaysia is an easy place to get cheap, good, English-speaking talent, with overheads that are often far lower than in more advanced markets in Southeast Asia. But it continues to suffer the effects of brain drain. Simply put, Malaysia isn’t cool to be in for some of the nation’s brightest, and this has hurt its startup scene, according to Khailee Ng. Ng, who is from Malaysia, was recently hired by 500 Startups as venture partner for Southeast Asia. The Silicon Valley VC also set Ng up with a shiny new $10 million microfund for the region. (The SEC-filing was called 500 Durians.) Ng was speaking to a roomful of Malaysian startups and the 500 Startups’ Geeks On A Plane delegation that is currently traveling through Southeast Asia. When I spoke to him on the sidelines of the conference, he said Malaysia has all the makings of a ripe scene to be picked, but he has been watching in dismay as startups flocked to larger, far less Internet-penetrated countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines. And Malaysia often gets outshone by its smaller neighbor to the South, Singapore, where plenty of large corporations have set up shop, and seed funding is readily available, backed by government funding. Malaysia’s situation is the result of an under-marketed set of funding from the government, plus a syndrome where none of its successful entrepreneurs are keen to let others know about them, said Ng. Some government funds that have been around for a decade already. “Nobody knows they exist, or there are misconceptions that it’s hard to get, or there are bureaucratic hoops to jump through,” he said. For example, the Cradle fund offers up to $160,000 (RM500,000) in seed funding to projects that are younger than three-years-old. Other non-government-linked funds that have just been set up within this year include $10 million from 1337 Accelerator, $150 million from Catcha Group, and $5 million from the Asia Venture Group. Ng also said that people are often surprised to find that some of the largest tech companies to IPO in the region are from Malaysia. According to a ranking of publicly-listed companies taken about a year ago, Jobstreet had a market cap of $268.2 million, iProperty Group had $178.2, My EG Services had $151.7 and iCar Asia had $56 million. The fifth in the list was the only one not from Malaysia, and was Singapore-based Asiatravel.com,Samsung And Nokia Could Be Gearing Up For A Smartphone Camera War
Jun 08, 5:23AM
So Samsung's Galaxy S4 Mini and Galaxy S4 Active have officially made the leap from unimaginative rumors to unimaginative reality, which leaves only one oft-rumored version of the popular smartphone left unaccounted for -- the curious S4 Zoom. As the name sort of implies, this Galaxy variant is said to blur the line between smartphone and camera, and we may now be getting our first look at the thing. A set of images from both SamMobile and TechTastic purportedly show off the photo-centric S4 Zoom ahead of a big Samsung press event in London later this month.An Ex-Googler's Take On "The Internship"
Jun 08, 4:00AM
Editor's note: Caroline McCarthy is a writer and branded content consultant living in New York. Previously, she worked at Google and before that as a tech reporter for CNET. When I worked as a marketer at Google and learned of an upcoming comedy called "The Internship," which was to reunite "Wedding Crashers" duo Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as unemployed 40-year-old salesmen who luck their way into Google internships, most of the reactions I heard from my co-workers could be summed up as "meh." Neither Vaughn nor Wilson has had a truly funny movie in years. And, I'd surmise, most Googlers have reached a point where the company quirks that the outside world finds so odd and intriguing are accepted as more or less routine, and certainly not interesting enough to hold up the foundations of a decent movie.NYT Claims Tech Giants Gave NSA Access To Private Data, Just Not "Direct Access"
Jun 08, 3:05AM
The fog of confusion is slowly lifting and the facts surrounding the NSA's PRISM surveillance program are becoming a little bit clearer. According to a new report by the New York Time's Claire Cain Miller, the tech companies that allegedly helped the government to spy on their people did indeed not provide a direct access back door to their servers. Instead, the New York Times report claims, they made it easier for the government and the companies, including Microsoft, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and Paltalk, "to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests."Doublespeak Denials Of PRISM Hid The Truth About Participation
Jun 08, 2:40AM
"Direct Access" didn't mean no access. "Back door" didn't mean no door. "Only in accordance with the law" didn't mean PRISM is illegal. And you didn't need to have heard of a codename to have participated. Larry, Zuck, you didn't spell out your denials of the NSA's data spying program in plain English, and now we know why. You were obligated to help the government in its spying, but were muzzled.Who's Telling The Truth About PRISM? Computer Security Expert Gene Spafford Weighs In [TCTV]
Jun 08, 1:59AM
Between the reports this week about that the U.S. National Security Agency has been mining personal user data from some of the world's biggest Internet players through a project called 'PRISM', to the government's defense of wide scale data collection for security reasons, and finally the outright denials from web companies that they had ever even heard of PRISM let alone cooperated with it, it's hard to know what's really going on. So we were pleased today to have the chance to speak with Eugene H. Spafford, aka "Spaf," a computer science professor at Purdue University and a noted expert in computer security and ethics whose C.V. includes time serving on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, to help elucidate what's going on here -- and perhaps point us in the direction of the truth here.The Deep Space Tourbillon Is A One-Off, Handmade Watch That Will Take You To Infinity And Beyond
Jun 07, 11:41PM
As you may well know, the tourbillon is one of the hardest (and most expensive) complications to build and only the very rich and very obsessed can afford them. This watch, however, may be just the ticket if you're a hardcore Trekkie and you just hit a liquidity event.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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