Technology

A multi-year legal battle over the ability to distribute computer models of gun parts and replicate them in 3D printers has ended in defeat for government authorities who sought to prevent the practice. Cody Wilson, the gunmaker and free speech advocate behind the lawsuit, now intends to expand his operations, providing printable gun blueprints to all who desire them.

The longer story of the lawsuit is well told by Andy Greenberg over at Wired, but the decision is eloquent on its own. The fundamental question is whether making 3D models of gun components available online is covered by the free speech rights granted by the First Amendment.

This is a timely but complex conflict because it touches on two themes that happen to be, for many, ethically contradictory. Arguments for tighter restrictions on firearms are, in this case, directly opposed to arguments for the unfettered exchange of information on the internet. Ithard to advocate for both here: restricting firearms and restricting free speech are one and the same.

That at least seems to be conclusion of the government lawyers, who settled Wilsonlawsuit after years of court battles. In a copy of the settlement provided to me by Wilson, the U.S. government agrees to exempt &the technical data that is the subject of the Action& from legal restriction. The modified rules should appear in the Federal Register soon.

What does this mean It means that a 3D model that can be used to print the components of a working firearm is legal to own and legal to distribute. You can likely even print it and use the product — you just can&t sell it. There are technicalities to the law here (certain parts are restricted, but can be sold in an incomplete state, etc.), but the implications as regards the files themselves seems clear.

Wilsonoriginal vision, which he is now pursuing free of legal obstacles, is a repository of gun models, called DEFCAD, much like any other collection of data on the web, though naturally considerably more dangerous and controversial.

&I currently have no national legal barriers to continue or expand DEFCAD,& he wrote in an email to TechCrunch. &This legal victory is the formal beginning to the era of downloadable guns. Guns are as downloadable as music. There will be streaming services for semi-automatics.&

The concepts don&t map perfectly, no doubt, but ithard to deny that with the success of this lawsuit, there are few legal restrictions to speak of on the digital distribution of firearms. Before it even, there were few technical restrictions: certainly just as you could download MP3s on Napster in 2002, you can download a gun file today.

Gun control advocates will no doubt argue that greater availability of lethal weaponry is the opposite of what is needed in this country. But others will point out that in a way this is a powerful example of how liberally free speech can be defined. Itimportant to note that both of these things can be true.

This court victory settles one case, but marks the beginnings of many another. &I have promoted my values for years with great care and diligence,& Wilson wrote. Ithard to disagree with that. Those whose values differ are free to pursue them in their own way; perhaps they too will be awarded victories of this scale.

How do you fix digital information overload and the resulting life-attention deficit thatapparently afflicting smartphone owners everywhere — and even leadingsome very large tech giants to unbox &digital wellness& tools lately

San Francisco-based startupThe Nudgereckons the answer to getting millennials to spend less time sucked into screens, and more time out and about actually doingthings, is — you guessed it — another technology service! Albeit one that delivers inspirational plan ideas for stuff to do in your free time, delivered via the traditional text message conduit of SMS.

The sibling duo behind the startup, John and Sarah Peterson, havebagged $540,000 in pre-seed funding for their text planner idea, after running a year-long public beta of the servicein San Francisco. The investment is led by seed-stage VC firm NextView Ventures, with Sequoiascout fund also participating.

Peterson says the idea to send plans via SMS evolved out of his earlier (and first) startup, called Livday: Also a planner app for friends to share their favorite ideas for weekend hikes and so on. But being just another app meant having to compete for attention with noisy social content, so the siblings hit on the idea of using SMS — as a sort of artisanal reversion of current state consumer tech — to &find a way to rise above the noise,& as they put it. Or, well, attempt to circumvent app notification fatigue/mute buttons.

As is often the case in fashion-led consumer tech, old ways can get polished up to feel shiny and new again once whatever displaced them has lost enough sheen to start to look old.

The Nudge has garnered around 10,000 active weekly users at this point, launching out of its year-long public beta. Peterson describes the typical user as &an active millennial woman,& with the community skewing 70 percent female at this point.

For the active user metric the team defines an active user as someone who isreading and engaging with the text messages they&re sending — either by clicking a link or replying.

They further claim to have signed up 5 percent of San Franciscomillennials to their lifestyle &nudges.&

&While our new rebrand has a somewhat feminine aesthetic itinteresting that we initially were targeting men. It just really resonated with millennial women,& says Peterson.

&They need this because takingtheinitiative istheessential yet hardest part of living our lives tothefullest, and thatwhat we give them,& he adds. &Anudge. We&re laser-focused on that demo right now but have plans to help other demographics long-term. My empty nest parents badly need this.&

Nudges take the form of — initially — an SMS text message, containing a handwritten brunch idea or a hike plan, or details of a hip coffee venue or volunteering opportunity which the startup reckons will appeal to its SF community.

The texts may also containa link to a more fully fledged plan (with photos, address, logistics etc.). You can see some of theirsample plans here.

While the core delivery mechanism is SMS, there also is a Nudge app where plans can be saved for later perusal, and subscribers to the service can mark Nudges as &done& (presumably to avoid being spammed with the same plan later).

Currently, the startup has an editorial team ofthree people coming up with plan ideas to inspire subscribers — writing in a friendly, narrative style thatintended to complement the cozy SMS delivery medium.

They&re also working with local social media influencers to hit on trendy ideas that resonate with their target millennial users.

Convincing information-overloaded consumers to willingly hand over their mobile digits to get random texts might seem a bit of a counter-intuitive &fix& for digital information overload. ButPeterson reckons it boils down to getting the tone of voice right. (And, clearly, being careful not to send too many texts that you end up coming across as spam.)

&We want people to really feel likeTheNudgeis just another one of their (ridiculously resourceful and fun) friends texting them, and I think we&ve succeeded there so far,& he tells TechCrunch. &Nearly all of our growth has come from word of mouth. You&re right that text messaging is a sacred space, and we&re very sensitive about that.&

Peterson claims that unsubscribe rates are less than 1 percent each week — though they&re also limiting themselves to sending three &personalized& lifestyle &nudges& per week at this point.

On the personalization front, they say plan ideas are customized based on factors such as the current weather and local trends. They are not, as a rule, customized per user though — beyond being personalized with the subscribername. So itmore &Nudge Club& than VIP personalized lifestyle advisor.

&In general, everyone is gettingthesame content, as we&ve found that therea lot of power intheshared experience (you know your friend just gotthesame text at that moment),& he says. &That said, we do sometimes create a dialogue where we ask you a question and depending upon your answer, we recommend something specific for you.

&We&re carefully not taking this part too far, as we really don&t view ourselves as a bot.&

Given they are (usually) sending ~10,000 people pretty much the same idea of what to do at the weekend or of an evening, Peterson admits that venue overcrowding has been a problem they inadvertently ended up creating — for example he says they recommended a free event that ended up getting 10x overbooked and had to cancel some tickets.

&Our answer is to only recommend small venues as a general suggestion (do this date idea this summer), and recommend larger venues specifically (do this hike tomorrow),& he says, explaining how they&ve tweaked the service to try to workaround creating unintended flash mobs of demand.

On the business model side, the plan is to make The Nudge a subscription service. Though they&re not going into details at this stage as they&re still experimenting with different options. (And they&re not currently charging for the service.)

But Peterson says the intention is not to make money via the specific things they&re recommending — which, in theory, frees them from needing to operate a creepy, privacy-hostile data-harvesting surveillance operation to determine whether an SMS can be linked to a specific bar bill or restaurant check for them to take a cut, for example.

Though, to be clear, Peterson says they&re gathering &as much data as we can about people doing a Nudge& — presumably so the team can better tailor the content and recommendations they&re making by figuring out what their users really like doing.

&We don&t promote any products or services,& he emphasizes. &Selling tickets or products or ads is tempting, and a lot of lifestyle services do that, but it would ruin or credibility. This is ultimately a subscription service based on trust.&

Despite that reassuring claim, it is worth noting that their current privacy policy states they &may periodically send promotional emails about new products/special offers/info etc via provided email addresses.& So be aware you are at least agreeing to theoretical email spam if you hand over your details.

Whatnext for The Nudge now that the team has raised their first tranche of VC Peterson says they&re planning to expand the service to LA this year — which he confirms will mean hiring a team on the ground to produce the custom content needed to power the service.

Albeit, he concedes, &right now our process is very manual.& And itnot at all clear whether their concept could sustain much automation-based scaling — at least not if they don&t want to risk generating yet more impersonal noise versus the friendly digital lifestyle advisor tone they&re aiming to strike as a strategy to stand out.

Beyond LA, Peterson says they plan to expand &pretty aggressively& in 2019.&TheNudgeas it stands now would work in any urban market as I believe ita solution to a fundamental human problem,& he says.

The Nudgespare time plans by text is by no means the only SMS-based lifestyle subscription service hoping to cut itself a slice of the attention economy.

In 2016 a startup called Shine launched on-demand life coaching by text messaging, for example.

And letnot forget Magic— the &get anything via a text message& service that had a viral moment in 2015 — and now bills itself as a &24/7 virtual assistant.&

Google has also tried texting people shopping deals. And Microsoft has dabbled in event planning specifically — outing an iMessage app for social event planning last year.

Meanwhile Facebook added &M,& a text-based assistant app (which was itself human-assisted), to its Messenger platform back in 2015— but went on to shutter the service in January this year, apparently never having found a way to scale M into a fully fledged AI assistant.

Facebook continues to face fallout over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed how user data was stealthily obtained by way of quizzes and then appropriated for other purposes, such as targeted political advertising. Today, the U.K. Information CommissionerOffice (ICO) announced that it would be issuing the social network with its maximum fine, £500,000 ($662,000) after it concluded that it &contravened the law& — specifically the1998 Data Protection Act — &by failing to safeguard peopleinformation.&

The ICO is clear that Facebook effectively broke the law by failing to keep users data safe, when their systems allowed Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who developed an app, called &This is your digital life& on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, to scrape the data of up to 87 million Facebook users. This included accessing all of the friends data of the individual accounts that had engaged with Dr Koganapp.

The ICOinquiry first started in May 2017 in the wake of the Brexit vote and questions over how parties could have manipulated the outcome using targeted digital campaigns.

Damian Collins, the MP who is the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that has been undertaking the investigation, has as a result of this said that the DCMS will now demand more information from Facebook, including which other apps might have also been involved, or used in a similar way by others, as well as what potential links all of this activity might have had to Russia. Healso gearing up to demand a full, independent investigation of the company, rather than the internal audit that Facebook so far has provided. A full statement from Collins is below.

The fine, and the follow-up questions that U.K. government officials are now asking, are a signal that Facebook — after months of grilling on both sides of the Atlantic amid a wider investigation — is not yet off the hook in the U.K. This will come as good news to those who watched the hearings (and non-hearings) in Washington, London and European Parliament and felt that Facebook and others walked away relatively unscathed. The reverberations are also being felt in other parts of the world. In Australia, a group earlier today announced that it was forming a class action lawsuit against Facebook for breaching data privacy as well. (Australia has also been conducting a probe into the scandal.)

The ICO also put forward three questions alongside its announcement of the fine, which it will now be seeking answers to from Facebook. In its own words:

1. Who had access to the Facebook data scraped by Dr Kogan, or any data sets derived from it
2. Given Dr Kogan also worked on a project commissioned by the Russian Government through the University of St Petersburg, did anyone in Russia ever have access to this data or data sets derived from it
3. Did organisations who benefited from the scraped data fail to delete it when asked to by Facebook, and if so where is it now

The DCMS committee has been conducting a wider investigation into disinformation and data use in political campaigns and it plans to publish an interim report on it later this month.

Collins& full statement:

Given that the ICO is saying that Facebook broke the law, it is essential that we now know which other apps that ran on their platform may have scraped data in a similar way. This cannot by left to a secret internal investigation at Facebook. If other developers broke the law we have a right to know, and the users whose data may have been compromised in this way should be informed.

Facebook users will be rightly concerned that the company left their data far too vulnerable to being collected without their consent by developers working on behalf of companies like CambridgeAnalytica. The number of Facebook users affected by this kind of data scraping may be far greater than has currently been acknowledged.Facebook should now make the results of their internal investigations known to the ICO, our committee and other relevant investigatory authorities.

Facebook state that they only knew about this data breach when it was first reported in the press in December 2015. The company has consistently failed to answer the questions from our committee as to who at Facebook was informed about it. They say that Mark Zuckerberg did not know about it until it was reported in the press this year. In which case, given that it concerns a breach of the law, they should state who was the most senior person in the company to know, why they decided people like Mark Zuckerberg didn&t need to know, and why they didn&t inform users at the time about the data breach. Facebook need to provide answers on these important points. These important issues would have remained hidden, were it not for people speaking out about them. Facebookresponse during our inquiry has been consistently slow and unsatisfactory.

The receivers of SCL elections should comply with the law and respond to the enforcement notice issued by the ICO. It is also disturbing that AIQ have failed to comply with their enforcement notice.

Facebook has been in the crosshairs of the ICO over other data protection issues, and not come out well.