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Coinbase aspires to be the New York Stock Exchange of crypto, and it is taking a small — but not insignificant & step to offering a lot more cryptocurrencies after it revamped the process of listing new digital assets.

The exchange currently only supports just five cryptocurrencies — Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin — and the process of adding each one has been gradual. The company would announce plans, and then later announce when listing the asset. The idea being to reduce the potential to send the value of a token skyrocketing. (Since support from Coinbase potentially adds a lot more trading volume.)

That clearly isn&t a sustainable process if Coinbase is to add &hundreds& of tokens, as CEO Brian Amstrong told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt it eventually plans to.

Regulatory concern is high on the scale when evaluating support for new cryptocurrencies, so now Coinbase is speeding up the process by limiting trading of some tokens to specific locations where necessary.

&Today we&re announcing a new process that will allow us to rapidly list most digital assets that are compliant with local law, by satisfying listing requests in a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction manner. In practice, this means some new assets listed on our platform may only be available to customers in select jurisdictions for a period of time,& the company said in a blog post.

That&ll mean an end to the double announcement — ‘token X is coming soon& and ‘token X is now supported& — and instead asingle reveal. That indicates that a large number of new assets may be incoming — for an idea of which ones, Coinbase recently said it is looking over a number ofcryptocurrencies.

CoinbaseBrian Armstrong: ‘I&d love to run a public company&

Interestingly, the company also noted that it may introduce a listing fee — this is common with many other exchanges — in the future in order to cover costs around adding some projects.

&Initially there will be no application fee. Depending on the volume of submissions, we reserve the right to impose an application fee in the future to defray the legal and operational costs associated with evaluating and listing new assets,& it explained.

The company has opened a listing proposal link, here. If similar features from other exchanges are anything to go by, Coinbasewill be flooded by naive tokenholders who think they have a shot at getting listed on Coinbase, which will take them to the moon. Good luck maintaining that list, guys.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

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Even as Magic Leap has cleared the milestone of its first hardware release, the augmented reality startup still has big challenges ahead as it aims to entice developers to build the content for its wild new device.

The $2,295 Magic Leap One headset is a very polished-looking developer kit, but it didn&t ship with a ton of software for buyers to play around with at launch, just a couple short experiences that were essentially concept proofs.

The startup, which was most recently valued at north of $6 billion, is just a few weeks away from its first developer conference taking place down in Los Angeles. TheL.E.A.P. conference will be an opportunity for the company to bring more developers to its platform to build up a content library ahead of an eventual more consumer-facing release.

Magic Leap Onefirst big game is another Angry Birds; herewhat itlike

At L.E.A.P., Magic Leap is planning to show off more than a dozen demos from developers, the company tells TechCrunch.

We&ve already taken a hands-on look at a full Angry Birds game for Magic Leap One from Rovio and Resolution Games.Other demos to be showcased includeWingnut‘s Funhouse Pest Control,Funomena‘s Luna: Moondust Garden,Meow Wolf‘s The Mech,Wayfair Sketch and Magic Leapown Create title.We&ll also finally see the first demo ofDr. GrordbortInvaders, a shooter title by Weta Workshops that Magic Leap has been hyping since its first-ever teaser video.

Though building up content for a new device category is certainly daunting, Magic Leap has the benefit of having seen the major players of the VR industry brute force their way past some of these issues.

For the VR industryfirst two years following the releases of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, one of the big issues was that you could play through most of the good available titles in a week or two. The &content problem,& as it was called, led Facebook to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into upstart studios to build games that wouldn&t have otherwise been created. Fast forward to 2018 and there are plenty of high-quality games available on the Oculus and Steam stores though groups like Oculus and HTC are still investing just as heavily.

With Microsoft pointing its HoloLens AR developer ecosystem towards the enterprise, Magic Leap is in the somewhat lonely position of wrangling developers around building stuff for an AR headset that appeals to consumers, though plenty are excited to just get in on the ground floor.

&I&ve always been very fascinated at being able to do things at the forefront of technology, I definitely think that games are going to be trailblazing on these platforms when it comes to user interface and just coming up with what you can use it for,& Resolution Games CEO Tommy Palm told TechCrunch.&I think we&re among a lot of small and big companies that are believing that this is going to be a very big computing platform in the future.&

Magic Leap has several partnerships built up already with game studios, media orgs like The New York Times, and, just announced today, medtech company Brainlab.

Getting other partners to invest significant resources into the early platform could require Magic Leap to invest more of its own funds into kickstarting the content ecosystem.The startup has raised at least $2.3 billion according to Crunchbase, but as it takes an end-to-end approach to the entire ecosystem, itgoing to have to decide where its efforts are best spent. Things will certainly be expedited if and when Apple and/or Google embrace AR headset hardware and bring their developer networks into the fold, but Magic Leap will obviously want to make the most of its head start before then.

Magic Leap may be an entirely new platform with some big investors and big ideas. Itnewest challenge is a very old one however, getting developers pumped up for something new.

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Mars rover Opportunity has been operating on the surface of the Red Planet since 2004, but a dust storm this summer may prove to be the missiontoughest challenge. The enormous storm caked Opportunity in dust and blocked out the sun, its source of energy — and thereno guarantee the batteries aren&t dead for good. But now that the skies have cleared, we at least have our first look at the workhorse rover from orbit since it went radio silent.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures fabulous imagery of the planet at a regular rate, but it happened that it passed over Perseverance Valley last week, where Opportunity is currently stationary. In the image you can just make it out as a few pixels raised above the surface.

Mars orbiter spots silent, dust-covered Opportunity rover as dust storm clears That valley isn&t the only place that was hit by the storm — this was no flurry but a full-blown planet-spanning tempest that lasted for months. It isn&t the first dust storm Opportunity has weathered by a long shot, but it was probably the worst.

The last we heard from the rover was on June 10, at which point the storm was getting so intense that Opportunity couldn&t charge its batteries any more and lowered itself into a hibernation state, warmed only by its plutonium-powered heaters — if they&re even working.

Once a day, Opportunitydeeply embedded safety circuit checks if thereany power in its battery or coming in via solar.

&Now that the sun is shining through the dust, it will start to charge its batteries,& explained Jim Watzin, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA. And so some time in the coming weeks it will have sufficient power to wake up and place a call back to Earth. But we don&t know when that call will come.&

Mars orbiter spots silent, dust-covered Opportunity rover as dust storm clears

An Opportunity shadow-selfie from 2004, when Opportunity was comparatively young (and had &only& doubled its mission length).

Thatthe hope, anyway. There is of course the possibility that the dust has obscured the solar cells too thickly, or some power fault during the storm led to the safety circuit not working… thereno shortage of what-if scenarios. But space exploration is a unique combination of the deeply realistic with the deeply optimistic, and thereno way Opportunityhandlers aren&t going to give the little rover all the time it needs, within reason, to get back in touch.

The team has been sending extra signals out to spur a response from Opportunity and will continue to do so for the next few weeks, but even that won&t be the end of the line.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator at NASAScience Mission Directorate, assured the many Opportunity superfans out there that they plan to keep listening at least through January. And you can bet a few sentimental types will find a way to check now and then after that as well.

Should the worst happen and the dust storm appear to have disabled the rover for good, that would still be a hell of a run — Opportunity was intended to last for 90 days and has instead gone for 14 years. Nothing sad about that. But herehoping we hear from this long-lived explorer soon.

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Tinder has partnered with nonprofit Rock the Vote for a second time, in the hopes of driving young people to the polls through in-app messaging. The company claims a young adult user base where more than half are in the 18 to 24 demographic, and believes itwell-positioned to mobilize younger voters during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

Itcritical to get these voters to the polls, as only 46.1 percent of the 18 to 29-year olds turned out to vote during the 2016 election, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the company notes.

Tinder says it will beginto share &fun facts& with its users during election season right in the app — like the volumes of voter registrations and other anecdotes related to past and upcoming elections. These facts will have a particular focus on those that are of most interest to Tinderyounger users.

For example, some that will be shared include: &Did you know that only about 40% of eligible voters turn up for the midterm elections,&and &Even though millennials make up 25% of the population, they make up less than 5% of state legislatures,& plus, &The average American is twenty years younger than their congressional representative.&

The facts will pop up in the app as often as two to three times a week in the U.S. as a &Swipe the Vote& native display card.

These cards will also include a way to tap tonavigate in-app to theRock the Vote website, where users can enter their ZIP code and details in order to register to vote.

Additionally, the two organizations also produced aSchoolhouse Rock!-inspiredvideoencouraging young Americans to vote. (Though the Schoolhouse Rock reference may fly over the 18-year-olds& heads.)

Tinder isn&t the only large platform participating in National Voter Registration Day today (September 25).

Others, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, Lyft, HBO andmany more have also rolled out their own campaigns in an effort to mobilize and register voters.

But because of Tinderaccess to a very young group of potential voters, itone of the more interesting efforts to watch, along with Snapchat.

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DoorDash customers say their accounts have been hacked

Food delivery startup DoorDash has received dozens of complaints from customers who say their accounts have been hacked.

Dozens of people have tweeted at @DoorDash with complaints that their accounts had been improperly accessed and had fraudulent food deliveries charged to their account. In many cases, the hackers changed their email addresses so that the user could not regain access to their account until they contacted customer services. Yet, many said that they never got a response from DoorDash, or if they did, there was no resolution.

Several Reddit threadsalso point to similar complaints.

DoorDash is now a $4 billion company after raising $250 million last month, and serves more than 1,000 cities across the U.S. and Canada.

After receiving a tip, TechCrunch contacted some of the affected customers.

Four people we spoke to who had tweeted or commented that their accounts had been hacked said that they had used their DoorDash password on othersites. Three people said they weren&t sure if they used their DoorDash password elsewhere.

But six people we spoke to said that their password was unique to DoorDash, and three confirmed they used a complicated password generated by a password manager.

DoorDash said that there has been no data breach and that the likely culprit was credential stuffing, in which hackers take lists of stolen usernames and passwords and try them on other sites that may use the same credentials.

Yet, when asked, DoorDash could not explain how six accounts with unique passwords were breached.

&We do not have any information to suggest that DoorDash has suffered a data breach,& saidspokesperson Becky Sosnov in an email to TechCrunch. &To the contrary, based on the information available to us, including internal investigations, we have determined that the fraudulent activity reported by consumers resulted from credential stuffing.&

The victims that we spoke to said they used either the app or the website, or in some cases both. Some were only alerted when their credit cards contacted them about possible fraud.

&Simply makes no sense that so many people randomly had their accounts infiltrated for so much money at the same time,& said one victim.

If, as DoorDash claims, credential stuffing is the culprit, we asked if the company would improve its password policy, which currently only requires a minimum of eight characters. We found in our testing that a new user could enter &password& or &12345678& as their password — which have for years ranked in the top five worst passwords.

The company also would not say if it plans to roll out countermeasures to prevent credential stuffing, like two-factor authentication.

DoorDash raises another $250M, nearly triples valuation to $4B

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The new iPhones have excellent cameras, to be sure. But italways good to verify Applebreathless onstage claims with first-hand reports. We have our own review of the phones and their photography systems, but teardowns provide the invaluable service of letting you see the biggest changes with your own eyes — augmented, of course, by a high-powered microscope.

We&ve already seen iFixitsolid-as-always disassembly of the phone, but TechInsights gets a lot closer to the devicecomponents — including the improved camera of the iPhone XS and XS Max.

Although the optics of the new camera are as far as we can tell unchanged since the X, the sensor is a new one and is worth looking closely at.

Microphotography of the sensor die show that Appleclaims are borne out and then some. The sensor size has increased from 32.8mm2 to 40.6mm2 — a huge difference despite the small units. Every tiny bit counts at this scale. (For comparison, the Galaxy S9 is 45mm2, and the soon-to-be-replaced Pixel 2 is 25mm2.)

See the new iPhone‘focus pixels& up close

The pixels themselves also, as advertised, grew from 1.22 microns (micrometers) across to 1.4 microns — which should help with image quality across the board. But therean interesting, subtler development that has continually but quietly changed ever since its introduction: the &focus pixels.&

ThatApplebrand name for phase detection autofocus (PDAF) points, found in plenty of other devices. The basic idea is that you mask off half a sub-pixel every once in a while (which I guess makes it a sub-sub-pixel), and by observing how light enters these half-covered detectors you can tell whether something is in focus or not.

Of course, you need a bunch of them to sense the image patterns with high fidelity, but you have to strike a balance: losing half a pixel may not sound like much, but if you do it a million times, thathalf a megapixel effectively down the drain. Wondering why all the PDAF points are green Many camera sensors use an &RGBG& sub-pixel pattern, meaning there are two green sub-pixels for each red and blue one — itcomplicated why. But there are twice as many green sub-pixels and therefore the green channel is more robust to losing a bit of information.See the new iPhone‘focus pixels& up close Apple introduced PDAF in the iPhone 6, but as you can see in TechInsights& great diagram, the points are pretty scarce. Thereone for maybe every 64 sub-pixels, and not only that, they&re all masked off in the same orientation: either the left or right half gone.

The 6S and 7 Pluses saw the number double to one PDAF point per 32 sub-pixels. And in the 8 Plus, the number is improved to one per 20 — but thereanother addition: now the phase detection masks are on the tops and bottoms of the sub-pixels as well. As you can imagine, doing phase detection in multiple directions is a more sophisticated proposal, but it could also significantly improve the accuracy of the process. Autofocus systems all have their weaknesses, and this may have addressed one Apple regretted in earlier iterations.

Which brings us to the XS (and Max, of course), in which the PDAF points are now one per 16 sub-pixels, having increased the frequency of the vertical phase detection points so that they&re equal in number to the horizontal one. Clearly the experiment paid off and any consequent light loss has been mitigated or accounted for.

I&m curious how the sub-pixel patterns of Samsung, Huawei and Google phones compare, and I&m looking into it. But I wanted to highlight this interesting little evolution. Itan interesting example of the kind of changes that are hard to understand when explained in simple number form — we&ve doubled this, or there are a million more of that — but which make sense when you see them in physical form.

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