Technology

Twitter is trying out a small new change to Moments that would provide contextual information within its curated stories. Spotted by Twitter user @kwatt and confirmed by a number of Twitter product team members, the little snippets appear sandwiched between tweets in a Moment.

Called &annotations& — not to be confused withTwittermetadata annotationsof yore — the morsels of info aim to clarify and provide context for the tweets that comprise Twittercurated trending content. According to the product team, they are authored by Twittercuration group.

In our testing, annotations only appear on the mobile app and not on the same Moments on desktop. So far we&ve seen them on a story about the NFL, one about Moviepass and another about staffing changes in the White House.

While ita tiny feature tweak, annotations are another sign that Twitter is exploring ways to infuse its platform with value and veracity in the face of what so far appears to be an intractable misinformation crisis.

Virtually every modern computer processor was thrown under the bus earlier this year when researchers found a fundamental design weakness in Intel, AMD and ARM chips, making it possible to steal sensitive data from the computermemory.

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities — which date back to 1995 — punched holes in the walls that keeps apps from accessing other parts of the systemmemory that it doesn&t have permission to read. That meant a skilled attacker could figure out where sensitive data was stored, like passwords and encryption keys. While the companies mitigated some of the flaws, they acknowledged that their long term plan would require a core redesign in how their computer processors work.

Now, a team of MITComputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers say they have found a way to prevent a similar range of flaws like Meltdown and Spectre in the future.

When an app needs to store something in memory, it asks the processor where to put it. But searching for that memory is slow, so processors use a trick known as &speculative execution& to run several sets of tasks at the same time while it finds the right memory slot. But attackers can exploit the same technique to allow an app to read parts of the memory that it shouldn&t be allowed to read.

MITCSAIL says their technique would split up memory so that the data not stored in the same place — in what the team calls &secure way partitioning.&

They call it called DAWG — or &Dynamically Allocated Way Guard& — which, admittedly might sound ridiculous, but itmeant to work as a counterpoint to IntelCache Allocation Technology, or CAT. According to their work, DAWG works similarly to CAT and doesn&t require many changes to the deviceoperating system — making it potentially as easy to install on an affected computer as Meltdownmicrocode fix.

According to Vladimir Kiriansky, one of the research paperauthors, the new technique &establishes clear boundaries for where sharing should and should not happen, so that programs with sensitive information can keep that data reasonably secure.&

Not only could the technology help to protect regular computers, but also also vulnerable cloud infrastructures.

Although DAWG can&t prevent against every speculative attack, the researchers are now working to improve their technology to prevent against more — if not all attacks.

But if their technology is picked up by Intel or any other chip maker, the researchers say techniques like DAWG could &restore our confidence in public cloud infrastructure, and hardware and software co-design will help minimize performance overheads.&

In its first institutional funding round, Oh My Green has raised $20 million from Initialized Capital, Powerplant Ventures, Backed VC, ZhenFund, Talis Capital and the Stanford StartX Fund to bring healthier foods to offices around the U.S.

The concierge-style startup, which completed Y Combinatorstartup accelerator in 2016, provides businesses in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Austin, Denver, Boston, New York City and Nashville nutritional snacks and meals. It stocks office snack pantries — a staple at tech startups — caters events, manages cafes and provides wellness programming. Its goal is to be a one-stop shop for corporate nutritional wellness.

The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2014 by Michael Heinrich. Based off my conversation with him earlier this week, I&m guessing he wouldn&t approve of the TechCrunch snack cupboard, which includes a year-long supply of Skittles, M-Ms and Fruit by the Foot.

&I wanted to do something more meaningful in my life,& Heinrich told TechCrunch. &I had worked in really challenging environments and I found myself really enjoying the people and the problems but looking at the food we had available, a lot of it was ultra-processed and ultra-sugared.&

&When I was sugar crashing and not being productive at work, I realized I should stop complaining and actually make a difference,& he added.

Oh My Greentech-enabled service, which relies on machine learning to give its customers personalized recommendations for meals and snacks, has 200 customers today, including Lyft, Apple and Y Combinator. With the investment, the company will expand throughout the U.S. and eventually launch overseas.