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Whatstanding between you and a chance to launch your pre-Series A startup in front of Europeinfluential technorati A mere 24 hours. Thathow much time you have left before we stop accepting applications to Startup BattlefieldatDisrupt Berlin 2018, which takes place on November 29-30. Therestill time, but not a moment to waste. Apply right now.

Startup Battlefield is a whirlwind roller coaster, and over the years itbeen the launch platform for more than 750 companies — our Startup Battlefield alumni community — that have collectively raised $8 billion dollars and generated 102 exits. Names like TripIt, Dropbox, Vurb and Mint grew from humble beginnings to big-time tech companies.

Discerning TechCrunch editors with a knack for choosing successful startups will review every application and ultimately pick up to 15 companies to compete. Participating founders benefit from free pitch coaching from those Startup Battlefield-tested editors. You&ll be at your very best when you step onto the main stage to present your case.

Teams get six minutes to pitch and demo their product to the judges — experienced entrepreneurs, technologists and investors — and then spend another six minutes answering probing questions from said judges.

Five teams move on for another round of pitching and Q-A. Judges will choose one team from that impressive squad as the Startup Battlefield champion. Winning founders get bragging rights, the Disrupt Cup and a $50,000 equity-free cash prize.

The competition takes place in front of a live, rowdy audience — thousands of attendees cheering for you. Among them will be investors, journalists and influential technologists looking for the next big thing.

Plus, we live-stream the entire Startup Battlefield competition to a global audience on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (and make it available later, on-demand).

All Startup Battlefield participants get to exhibit in Startup Alley for the duration of Disrupt. Thatprime networking, maybe even life-changing, territory. We&d say itworth the price of admission, but TechCrunch does not charge any fees to participate. Competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free.

You have only 24 hours left to decide your fate. The application window closes on August 27 at 9 p.m. PST. If you want to compete in Startup Battlefield atDisrupt Berlin 2018on November 29-30, you need to apply right here, right now.

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Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing, the $60 billion-valued company that bought out UberChina business, has suspended its carpooling service after the murder of a female passenger. The fatally is the second such incident this year after a passenger was murdered in May.

Police this weekend arrested a man who is accused of raping and killing a 20-year-old female who rode with him via DidiHitch serviceon Friday inZhejiang, a province in the east of China.Reuters reportsthat the woman had messaged her friend earlier in the day asking for help before she disappeared.

Authorities inZhejiang cityLeqing suspended the service before Didi later announced it would suspend Hitch nationwide. Didiother (commercial) carpooling and ride-hailing services are not affected by this suspension.

&We are sorry the Hitch service… would be suspended for now because of our disappointing mistakes,& Didi said in a statement.

Hitch is a modern take on hitchhiking that lets a passenger ride for free with a driver headed in their direction. Passengers are encouraged to leave a tip to cover petrol, but the idea is to make each car ride more efficient. Didi doesn&t monetize the service, but it is a strategic way to attract passengers and drivers who may use other services that the firm does draw revenue from.

Didi claims Hitch hashandled over a billion trips in the past three years, butthere are major safety issues.

This new murder occurreda little over three months after an air stewardesswas killed inHenan province by a driver who got on to Didiplatform using an account belonging to his father, a verified Didi driver. Following that incident, Didi suspended Hitch for six weeks. The service resumed in Junewith a number of restrictions,in particular, one that only allowed drivers to serve passengers of the same sex during late night hours.

This fatalZhejiang ride occurred at 1pm, according to police, and thereplenty to be concerned with.

Didi said in a statement that the alleged murderer, who does not have a criminal record,had been flagged to Didisafety team just one day before. A female passenger complained that the driver had requested her to ride in the front seat and then followed her for some time after she left his vehicle.

The Didi safety center representative who handled the complaint had not followed companypolicy of initiating an investigation within two hours, according to Reuters. That policy was introduced during the suspension period after Didi discoveredanother passenger had flagged suspicious behavior from the driver who then went on to commit the murder in May.

&The incident shows the many deficiencies with our customer service processes, especially the failure to act swiftly on the previous passengercomplaint and the cumbersome and rigid process of information sharing with the police. This is too high a cost to pay. We plead for law enforcement and the public to work with us in developing more efficient and practical collaborative solutions to fight criminals and protect user personal and property safety,& Didi said in a statement.

The company confirmed that it has fired two executives following the murder: the general manager for Hitch and the companyvice president of customer services.

Didi said it will launch a &co-supervisory process of our operations& which it invited members of the public and experts to take part in.

Following the murder in May, Didi said it has booked &proactive consultation sessions with relevant authorities and experts& as it sought to shore up its safety processes.

Didi has operated a virtual monopoly on ride-hailing services since it acquired and integrated Uber China business in 2016, but this year it has seen increased competition.

In particular,Didi is facing pressure from rival Meituan Dianping, which started out in local services but recently introduced ride-sharing services andmoved into dockless bikes with the acquisition of Mobike. Meituan recently filed to go public in Hong Kong, with some reports suggesting it could raise as much as $4 billion.

Meituan is involved in a dogfight with Alibaba to win Chinalocal services market — Alibaba just amped up its efforts with a $3 billion raise for its Ele.me business unit — but no doubt Meituan will now doubly focus on its own safety and security measures to push its case as a legitimate alternative to Didi.

Didi has gone to great pains to emphasize that Hitch is well used — it hamfistedly shoved a mention of the serviceride completion numbers into its apology statement — but at this point it seems best to shutter the service if it can&t guarantee the safety of all passengers, no matter how popular or strategic it may be.

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Digital transformation refers to the incorporation of digital technology across all areas of a business, changing how the business operates. This is a powerful concept, which businesses that want to be on the cutting edge embrace, and it's increasingly essential as the Constellation Research 2017 Digital Transformation Study indicates that “64% of

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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 and there were a few unofficial streams popping up on YouTube as well.

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.

Thereobviously 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.

There are plenty of events similar to this one, but so often the refrain is made that people have to turn to pirated streams because the alternative is paying for cable or something that is really against the spirit of these easy-to-access platforms. Well, herean example of something that falls far outside that argument.

Itimpossible to squash all of the pirated streams, but AmazonTwitch 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.

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Whatnext 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, Nvidiavice 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. Healso 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 FranciscoMoscone Center West from September 5 to 7. (The robotics panel will be at 1:15pm on the 5th.) You can still buy ticketsright here.

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Itnot been a great week for cell carriers. EE was hit withtwo 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 portallog-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 customeraccount, check activation status and view customer account information.

Weak passwords let a hacker access internal Sprint staff portal

A screenshot showing an internal customer portal.

All a user would need is a customermobile 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 hijackcell 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. TechCrunchJohn Biggs was one such victim.

But the authorities are catching up to the growing threat of SIM swapping.Three SIM swappers have been arrestedin the past few weeks alone.

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