UPDATE: Telstra and Vodafone are no longer offering the S8 Plus in contract plans, but there are some excellent deals on plans from Optus and Woolworths Mobile below.
If you want to get in on the cutting edge S8 action but were thinking you wanted to make better use of that gorgeous Infinity Display, then the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus is gonna be the
Read more: The best Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus plans and prices in Australia compared
Write comment (90 Comments)In an unusual move, Tesla reportedly asked some suppliers to return part of the money itpaid them since 2016, including for past work. According tothe Wall Street Journal, which reviewed a memo Tesla sent to a supplier last week, the electric auto maker said it is asking suppliers for refunds to help it reach profitability. This stokes concerns about the companycash flow, despite earlier assurances from Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk that it will be profitable in the third and fourth quarters of this year.
After months of production delays for the Model 3, Tesla recently hit a major milestone, announcing earlier this month that it reached its 5,000-per-week production target for the vehicle.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the memo, sent by one of Teslaglobal supply managers, said the company is requesting back a &meaningful& portion of its payments since 2016. Tesla described it as not only important for Teslaoperations, but an investment in the companylong-term growth that will also benefit its suppliers.
Tesla declined to comment about the memo to the Wall Street Journal, but said it is seeking price reductions on some projects, including several dating back to 2016 and some which haven&t been completed. It also told the newspaper that requests like the memo are standard in procurement negotiations between auto manufacturers and their suppliers.
But if Tesla is indeed asking suppliers for money back on past work to help it achieve profitability, as opposed to reduced prices on future work, it adds to concerns about companycash flows. It may also make some suppliers reluctant to work with Tesla. As manufacturing consultant Dennis Virag told the Wall Street Journal, &itsimply ludicrous and it just shows that Tesla is desperate right now. They&re worried about their profitability but they don&t care about their suppliers& profitability.&
TechCrunch has contacted Tesla for comment.
Read more: Tesla reportedly asked suppliers for cash back to help it reach profitability
Write comment (98 Comments)For the nearly 20 percent of Americans who experience severe online harassment, therea new company launching in the latest batch of Y Combinator called Tall Poppy thatgiving them the tools to fight back.
Co-founded by Leigh Honeywell and Logan Dean, Tall Poppy grew out of the work that Honeywell, a security specialist, had been doing to hunt down trolls in online communities since at least 2008.
That was the year that Honeywell first went after a particularly noxious specimen who spent his time sending death threats to women in various Linux communities. Honeywell cooperated with law enforcement to try and track down the troll and eventually pushed the commenter into hiding after he was visited by investigators.
That early success led Honeywell to assume a not-so-secret identity as a security expert by day for companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Slack, and a defender against online harassment when she wasn&t at work.
&It was an accidental thing that I got into this work,& says Honeywell. &Itsort of an occupational hazard of being an internet feminist.&
Honeywell started working one-on-one with victims of online harassment that would be referred to her directly.
&As people were coming forward with #metoo… I was working with a number of high profile folks to essentially batten down the hatches,& says Honeywell. &Itbeen satisfying work helping people get back a sense of safety when they feel like they have lost it.&
As those referrals began to climb (eventually numbering in the low hundreds of cases), Honeywell began to think about ways to systematize her approach so it could reach the widest number of people possible.
&The reason we&re doing it that way is to help scale up,& says Honeywell. &As with everything in computer security itan arms race… As you learn to combat abuse the abusive people adopt technologies and learn new tactics and ways to get around it.&
Primarily, Tall Poppy will provide an educational toolkit to help people lock down their own presence and do incident response properly, says Honeywell. The company will work with customers to gain an understanding of how to protect themselves, but also to be aware of the laws in each state that they can use to protect themselves and punish their attackers.
The scope of the problem
Based on research conducted by the Pew Foundation, there are millions of people in the U.S. alone, who could benefit from the type of service that Tall Poppy aims to provide.
According to a 2017 study, &nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) have been subjected to particularly severe forms of harassment online, such as physical threats, harassment over a sustained period, sexual harassment or stalking.&
The women and minorities that bear the brunt of these assaults (and, letbe clear, it is primarily women and minorities who bear the brunt of these assaults), face very real consequences from these virtual assaults.
Take the case of the New York principal who lost her job when an ex-boyfriend sent stolen photographs of her to the New York Post and her boss. In a powerful piece for Jezebel she wrote about the consequences of her harassment.
As a result, city investigators escorted me out of my school pending an investigation. The subsequent investigation quickly showed that I was set up by my abuser. Still, Mayor Bill de Blasioadministration demoted me from principal to teacher, slashed my pay in half, and sent me to arubber room, the DOEnotorious reassignment centers where hundreds of unwanted employees languish until they are fired or forgotten.
In 2016, I took a yearlong medical leave from the DOE to treat extreme post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Since the leave was almost entirely unpaid, I took loans against my pension to get by. I ran out of money in early 2017 and reported back to the department, where I was quickly sent to anadministrative trial. There the city tried to terminate me. I was charged with eight counts of misconduct despite the conclusion by all parties that my ex-partner uploaded the photos to the computer and that there was no evidence to back up his salacious story. I was accused of bringing &widespread negative publicity, ridicule and notoriety& to the school system, as well as &failing to safeguard a Department of Education computer& from my abusive ex.
Her story isn&t unique. Victims of online harassment regularly face serious consequences from online harassment.
According to a 2013 Science Daily study,cyber stalking victims routinely need to take time off from work, or change or quit their job or school. And the stalking coststhe victims $1200 on average to even attempt to address the harassment, the study said.
&Itthis widespread problem and the platforms have in many ways have dropped the ball on this,& Honeywell says.
Tall Poppyco-founders
Creating Tall Poppy
As Honeywell heard more and more stories of online intimidation and assault, she started laying the groundwork for the service that would eventually become Tall Poppy. Through a mutual friend she reached out to Dean, a talented coder who had been working at Ticketfly before its Eventbrite acquisition and was looking for a new opportunity.
That was in early 2015. But, afraid that striking out on her own would affect her citizenship status (Honeywell is Canadian), she and Dean waited before making the move to finally start the company.
What ultimately convinced them was the election of Donald Trump.
&After the election I had a heart-to-heart with myself… And I decided that I could move back to Canada, but I wanted to stay and fight,& Honeywell says.
Initially, Honeywell took on a year-long fellowship with the American Civil Liberties Union to pick up on work around privacy and security that had been handled by Chris Soghoian who had left to take a position with Senator Ron Wyden office.
But the idea for Tall Poppy remained, and once Honeywell received her green card, she was &chomping at the bit to start this company.&
A few months in the company already has businesses that have signed up for the services and tools it provides to help companies protect their employees.
Some platforms have taken small steps against online harassment. Facebook, for instance, launched an initiative to get people to upload their nude pictures so that the social network can monitor when similar images are distributed online and contact a user to see if the distribution is consensual.
Meanwhile, Twitter has made a series of changes to its algorithm to combat online abuse.
&People were shocked and horrified that people were trying this,& Honeywell says. &[But] what is the way [harassers] can do the most damage Sharing them to Facebook is one of the ways where they can do the most damage. It was a worthwhile experiment.&
To underscore how pervasive a problem online harassment is, out of the four companies where the company is doing business or could do business in the first month and a half there is already an issue that the company is addressing.
&It is an important problem to work on,& says Honeywell. &My recurring realization is that the cavalry is not coming.&
Read more: Tall Poppy aims to make online harassment protection an employee benefit
Write comment (97 Comments)Don&t look now, but July 25 is sneaking up mighty fast. Why should you care Thatthe day prices go up on all passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place on September 5-7. If you want to attend one of the best tech conferences for all-things startup and — depending on the type of pass you select — save up to $1,200 in the process, then stop what you&re doing and go buy your passes today. Seriously, why wouldn&t you
You simply don&t want to miss this event, and we&ll tell you why. Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — the largest Disrupt event we&ve ever produced — is the only Disrupt event happening in North America this year. We&re dedicating our time, resources and talent to making this the biggest, boldest Disrupt show ever.
More than 10,000 attendees will descend on Moscone Center West (our new venue with three times the floor space) to see the latest technologies from hundreds of early-stage startups. More than 1,200 of those startups — along with other exhibitors — will showcase a staggering array of technology in Startup Alley. All tech industries are welcome to exhibit, but you&ll find a special focus on these categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics/IoT/Hardware.
You&ll enjoy three programming-packed days of presentations from world-class speakers — known movers and shakers, plus rising stars, too — who will share their insight and experience. You&ll hear from the likes of Marillyn Hewson, the chairman, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund and Mike Judge of HBO&Silicon Valley& fame. You&ll find the full lineup of speakers here.
We also went full tilt on Startup Battlefield by increasing the prize money to a tidy $100,000 in non-equity cash. We&re hard at work evaluating the applicants — ita highly selective process — but we can assure you that this startup pitch competition will be an epic battle for the ages. Boo-ya!
If you&re an early-stage startup founder or looking to invest in one, then you need to know about CrunchMatch. Itour free, curated business match-making service that helps connect founders with investors who share similar business goals. You&ll receive an invitation to CrunchMatch when you buy a Founder, Investor, Startup Alley Exhibitor Package or Insider Pass to Disrupt SF.
Thereso much more to do, see and experience at Disrupt SF &18, including interactive workshops andQ-A Sessions, ourVirtual Hackathon, unparalleled networking opportunities and, of course, the TechCrunch After Party.
Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7, and you have until July 25 at 5 p.m. PST before our pass prices increase. Avoid buyers& remorse and grab your tickets today.
Read more: Get passes to Disrupt SF 2018 before prices increase on July 25
Write comment (99 Comments)Blockchain technologies have a well-earned reputation for hacking and fraud, but the recent theft of more than twenty million dollars of second-tier cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Gold, Verge, and ZenCash was a fundamental attack on the core mechanisms that allow cryptocurrencies to function. The way that most blockchains (including Bitcoin and Ethereum) function now is called Proof-of-Work; miners must solve hard computational problems to add new blocks of transactions to the chain and the majority (i.e., 51%) of the computational power can determine what transactions appear in the public ledger.
In May and June, these second-tier cryptocurrencies suffered from what is called a &51% attack&, where attackers rented more processing power than the honest participants of the network, enabling them to control the transaction register and engage in nefarious behavior. For instance, an attacker could steal from an exchange by sending a deposit of compromised cryptocurrency, cashing it out, and then striking the initial deposit from the public ledger.
A new working paper from my friend and occasional collaborator Eric Budish, an economics professor at the University of ChicagoBooth School of Business, argues that any blockchain with reasonably low transaction fees is fundamentally vulnerable to 51% attacks. The risk of these attacks was known, informally, from the earliest days of cryptocurrency, and to counter this risk exchanges do not immediately credit deposits. Instead, they wait for deposit transactions to &age& on the blockchain in an escrow period. The assumption is that it would be hard for an attacker to control more computational power than honest miners for the whole escrow period.
Budish tests this assumption through a sophisticated simulation. He finds that, because it is easier for an attacker with majority compute capability to mine blocks than the honest network, escrow periods provide far less protection than has been thought previously. Budishsimulations suggest that increasing escrow periods 100-fold would generally increase the cost to an attacker by less than ten times.
The most pointed criticism of Budishargument is that it does not match the observed facts of the blockchain ecosystem. The average Bitcoin transaction fee is about a dollar; Budish suggests that these fees should be 100x higher (or more) to secure Bitcoinblockchain.
Crypto 51, a website that tracks the vulnerability of cryptocurrencies to 51% attacks, provides an answer for why Bitcoin appears secure while other currencies are not: only a small fraction of the mining capability of the Bitcoin network is available to rent. Bitcoin remains secure because there is a great deal of scarcity in the market for latest-generation mining equipment, such as the expensive ASIC chips that have driven Bitmain, the market leader, to a 12 billion dollar valuation.
Looking at the hourly attack-rental prices on Crypto 51 (generally only a few thousand dollars) it is easy to draw the conclusion that every cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin and (perhaps) Ethereum should simply not exist because it is too easy for scammers to destabilize them. Even with the recent collapse in cryptocurrency prices these second-tier coins still represent tens of billions of dollars of market capitalization.
The protections that Bitcoin enjoys come from the fact that these ASIC miners are hard to get, but there is no law that says this need always be the case. Samsung is actively developing ASIC miners now; if they were to glut the market with cheap, rentable Bitcoin mining rigs the result would probably be the mass destabilization of the Bitcoin network.
The threat of rental attacks means that Proof-of-Work blockchains must evolve or die. Ethereum is in the process of rolling out just such an evolution, called Casper.
Casper is a mechanism for adding new blocks to the Ethereum blockchain (&minting&) wherein Ethereum holders will lock up (&stake&) some of their ether and use those stakes as bonds to vouch for newly mined blocks. If a staker acts honestly, they will get rewarded with a fraction of the transaction fees in the ecosystem. f they act dishonestly and vouch for blocks that could be part of an attack, Casper confiscates a large amount of their staked ether. The threat of confiscation means that any rental attack on the system would require buying a substantial amount ether, driving up the cost of an attack significantly.
Casper would be a big change to the way Ethereum works and it faces considerable pushback from the community. To be fair, it is not a finished product yet in at least two respects. First, the parameters that define the economic benefits and potential losses for stakers are still in flux.
It is important that the parameters of Casper are set attractively enough that a significant fraction of ether would be staked, because the strength of the system would be proportional to the amount of honestly staked ether. And, although Casper uses Proof-of-Stake for adding blocks to the Ethereum blockchain, it still requires Proof-of-Work mining to create new blocks of transactions. That means Casper will not fix the power consumption or GPU scarcity issues that have been a consequence of Ethereumrise. Ideally, Casper would be a stepping stone to a purely Proof-of-Stake system, one in which we don&t need farms of computers wasting energy to solve meaningless computational problems.
Budisheconomic argument suggests that any Proof-of-Work blockchain with low transaction fees will be vulnerable to rental attacks. If blockchain technologies have a future, it will not be from Proof-of-Work. The replacement of Proof-of-Work with better, more robust, more energy-efficient technology will be the challenge of the second chapter of blockchain development.
Read more: Rental attacks mean that blockchains must evolve or die
Write comment (94 Comments)There was a time not so long ago when nine-figure venture capital rounds weren&t a near-daily feature of tech business news.
But now funding rounds of $100 million or more cross the wires withstunning frequency.
Theera of supergiant roundsis now the new normal. This is attributable, in part, to billions of dollars flowing into new venture capital funds — the largest of which are raised by the oldest, most entrenched firms — and competition from relative newcomers, likeSoftBank.
Q2 2018 may have set new records for worldwide VC deal and dollar volume in this post-dot com cycle, but that belies an important fact: Investors are dumping the bulk of capital into a relatively small number of companies. The rise of supergiant rounds wound up in a &takeover& of the market.
The chart below shows the proportion of capital raised in rounds of $100 million or more, tracing the period between Q1 2017 and the end of Q2 2018.
Just a little over a year ago, in Q1 2017, nine and 10-figure venture capital deals accounted for a healthy 35 percent of global dollar volume. Five quarters later, in Q2 2018, $100 million-and-up deals accounted for a majority — some 61 percent — of equity funding into upstart technology companies.
Itnot just that these mega-rounds are eclipsing smaller counterparts as a percent of dollar volume totals. Supergiant rounds also appear to be driving most of the growth in reported dollar volume, as the chart below shows.
Between Q1 2017 and Q2 2018, reported dollar volume in sub-$100 million deals grew by around 42 percent. By that same token, dollar volume in nine and 10-figure venture deals ballooned by about 325 percent over that stretch of time.
Granted, this is all based on recorded data in Crunchbase. And like all private-market databases, Crunchbase is subject to some reporting delays. Those delays primarily affect seed and early-stage rounds, which tend to be smaller. Still though, unless billions of dollars in small rounds get added to recent quarters, these figures are likely to remain relatively stable.
The obvious question to ask here: Why are $100+ million rounds more prevalent these days, and what explains their slow-motion takeover of the global venture capital market
As with most things, the answer is, &itcomplicated, and it depends.& The rise and reign of supergiant rounds is a phenomenon that emerges from a confluence of different factors:
It really does seem like mega-rounds are here to stay. And, based on just the last couple of weeks, it looks like the third quarter is likely to see a continuation of the trend.
Here are just a few examples from the first weeks of Q3: e-cigarette makerJuul is raising $1.2 billion, self-driving car companyZoox just raised $500 million, Chinese cafe chainLuckin Coffee raised $200 million and scooter and bike giant Lime raised$335 million in a Series C round.
Bigger funds are able to invest in bigger rounds. And as competitors raise big rounds, it becomes more strategically important for companies to also raise big rounds. Ita positive feedback loop. What stops the fundraising arms race, though, remains to be seen.
Read more: Inside the rise and reign of supergiant venture capital rounds
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