Bitcoin’s price took a dive along with most other assets as Ethereum fees continue to dip.
Read more As cases rise and the U.S. settles in for a fresh wave of COVID-19, the economic fallout from round one is still being felt, from hedge funds to bankruptcies and beyond.
Read more As DeFi does away with middlemen in finance, “DeOps” could reduce the need for intermediaries in large-scale supply systems.
Read more PayPal opening its network to cryptocurrencies could create a serious tax headache for users.
Read more Not just the future of civilization is up for grabs this November. In this age of mobile social computing, we’re figuring out how to vote, entertain, teach, learn, and commit to meaningful change. Thanks to the pandemic emergency, our plans for transforming our country and planet are subject to immediate recall.
Much of the current political dynamic is expressed through the lense of “how much change can we afford to make?” The swing states in the race for the electoral college are those most profoundly affected by the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy. The choice: how many jobs will we lose by shifting away from oil and gas to wind and solar. Workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and Michigan are fearful of losing their livelihood to a future of retraining and disruption.
Regardless of where we sit along the left/right spectrum, we share the increasing understanding that government doesn’t work. Running for office is a gauntlet of fundraising and promises you can’t keep; legislating is a lobbyist playground where special interests are neither special nor in our interests. The courts are overwhelmed by political power plays timed to inflame and suppress voting turnout. It’s no wonder that the common reaction to this week’s final presidential debate was relief that the campaign is almost over.
The most important fix to the body politic is the mute button. For a brief moment in the debate, we got to experience a few seconds of not talking. Time seemed to stand still, as if we were being handed down a digital tablet of things to not do: don’t interrupt, don’t disrespect, don’t mock, don’t waste our time. Above all, don’t forget the people we’ve lost to the virus. Remember the days when our biggest problems were what show to watch, what music to play, what jokes to tell. It’s amazing what you can hear when the agenda is turned back to ourselves.
In that moment, you can hear things that smooth the soul. In that moment, you can hear the words leaders will have to speak to get our vote next time. I feel much better about the next election no matter how this one turns out. The explosive numbers of early voting tell us a lot about how this will go. The genie is out of the bottle and people are beginning to connect the dots. If the vote is suppressed, it only makes us try harder.
Mobility is about a return to value, to roots, to resilience. Working from home is a big step toward living from everywhere. AR stands for accelerated reality, VR for valued reality. If we want to know what social is good for, switch on the mute button and listen to what you’ve lost. If you can mute the sound, you can unmute it and find your voice.
At first, the mute button was a defensive move. It counteracted the business model of the cable news networks, the repetitive time-filling of partisan perspective mixed with not listening to the grievances of the other side. The hardest thing I’ve had to do is be open to the truth emanating from the least likely location. We are taught to attack our opponent’s weaknesses; a better strategy might be to respect their strengths and adopt them as your own. Don’t worry, though. You probably won’t find too much there to reflect.
Once you experience the mute button envelope, you can hear it even if it’s not there. The rules of the revised debate were that the first two minutes of each candidate’s response used the mute button, then the old rules returned. Even then, the experience of using the mute button informed the rest of the debate. Particularly noticeable was Joe Biden’s response to a series of back and forths when the moderator asked if he had any further response. “… … … No.”
There have been other mute buttons in history. The 18 and a half minute gap spoke loudly when Rose Mary Woods erased a crucial Watergate tape. Before that, we assumed there might be a smoking gun. After that, we knew there might be others, too. Throughout the campaign, we could learn more about what was really going on by listening for the moments when key questions were left unanswered, ducked, or bounced back to the opponent like some Pee Wee Herman playground retort.
Soon we’ll know the answer to the important question: how do we confront the virus? I vote for listening to the science, wearing a mask, socially distancing both off and online, rapid testing, and contact tracing. And the candidates who agree.
__________________
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, October 23, 2020.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.
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As promised, Microsoft announced that it has added full trackpad and mouse support for the iPadOS version of Microsoft 360. That includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, marking another important step in Apple’s longstanding push to blur the line between tablet and desktop, making iPads more well-rounded productivity machines.
Apple laid the foundation back in March, with the release of iPadOS 13.4. Announced alongside the latest iPad Pro, the technology introduced the ability to pair a trackpad or mouse with the tablet, bringing an on-screen cursor. Romain breaks it down more fully here. Along with the new tablet and operating system upgrade came a new (pricey) keyboard sporting a built-in trackpad.
Image Credits: Microsoft
Today’s upgrade from Microsoft builds on that, offering a more desktop-like experience when using its productivity tools on the latest iPad, iPad Pro and iPad Air. It can be used for standard Office things, like highlighting text, selecting range cells in Excel and resizing graphics. Stuff that was possible before, but will definitely benefit from an approach more familiar to anyone who’s used to doing these things on a laptop/desktop.
The update brings a handful of other additions, including a clearer interface and newly organized menus. All should be rolling out to users “within a couple of weeks,” per Microsoft.
Facebook gets into cloud gaming while continuing its public dispute with Apple, Ant Group prepares for a massive IPO and Pinterest embraces iOS widgets. This is your Daily Crunch for October 26, 2020.
The big story: Facebook launches cloud gaming service
Facebook is launching a cloud gaming service of its very own, although the focus is different from Google’s Stadia or Microsoft’s xCloud. Rather than trying to recreate the console experience on other devices, the social network’s gaming service is limited to mobile games, particularly on reducing the friction between seeing an ad for a game and playing the game.
The service is launching on the web and on Android, but it’s not available on iOS. Facebook blamed Apple’s App Store terms and conditions for the absence.
Facebook’s Jason Rubin told TechCrunch that Apple’s rules for cloud gaming service present “a sequence of hurdles that altogether make a bad consumer experience.”
The tech giants
Twitter will show all U.S. users warnings about voting misinfo and delayed election results — Starting today, Twitter users in the U.S. will see two large notices at the top of their feeds that aim to “preemptively debunk” misinformation related to voting.
Ant Group could raise as much as $34.5B in IPO in what would be world’s largest IPO — The long-anticipated IPO of Alibaba-affiliated Chinese fintech giant Ant Group could raise tens of billions of dollars in a dual-listing on both the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges.
Pinterest’s new widget brings photos from favorite boards to your iOS 14 home screen — As iPhone owners began customizing their iOS 14 home screens with new widgets and custom icons, Pinterest iOS downloads and searches surged.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Tencent leads $100M Series B funding round into China-based esport provider VSPN — Founded in 2016, VSPN was one of the early pioneers in esports tournament organization and content creation out of Asia.
Linktree raises $10.7M for its lightweight, link-centric user profiles — The Melbourne startup says that 8 million users, including celebrities like Selena Gomez and brands like Red Bull, have created profiles on the platform.
This startup wants to fix the broken structure of internships — Symba created white-label software to help companies communicate and collaborate with their now-distributed interns.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Good and bad board members (and what to do about them) — The CircleUp saga brings up questions about what happens behind the scenes at startups and about board composition specifically.
What would Databricks be worth in a 2021 IPO? — We’ve described Databricks as “an obvious IPO candidate,” and now it sounds like an offering is indeed in the works.
(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
NASA discovers water on the surface of the sunlit portion of the moon — Previously, we knew that water was present as ice on the dark part of the moon, but this is still a groundbreaking discovery.
Human Capital: Court ruling could mean trouble for Uber and Lyft as gig workers may finally become employees — Megan Rose Dickey has officially launched her newsletter focused on labor, diversity and inclusion in tech.
Original Content podcast: ‘Lovecraft Country’ is gloriously bonkers — Bonkers!
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Immigration law firm Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy has confirmed a data breach involving the personal information of current and former Google employees.
The New York-based law firm provides companies with employment verification screening services to determine if employees are eligible and authorized to work in the United States.
Every company operating in the United States is required to maintain a Form I-9 file on every employee to ensure that they are legally allowed to work and not subject to more restrictive immigration rules. But Form I-9 files can contain a ton of sensitive information, including government documents like passports, ID cards and driver’s licenses, and other personally identifiable data, making them a target for hackers and identity thieves.
But the law firm said it discovered last month that an unauthorized third-party accessed a file containing personal information on a “limited number” of current and former Google employees.
In a notice with the California attorney general’s office, Fragomen did not say what kind of data was accessed or how many Google employees were affected. Companies with more than 500 California residents affected by a breach are required to submit a notice with the state’s attorney general’s office.
Michael McNamara, a spokesperson for Fragomen, declined to say how many Google employees were affected by the breach.
A spokesperson for Google did not respond to a request for comment.
There likely isn’t a robotics teacher institute in the world actively pursuing robotic learning. The field, after all, holds the key to unlocking a lot of potential for the industry. One of the things that makes it so remarkable is the myriad different approaches so many researchers are taking to unlock the secrets of helping robots essentially learn from scratch.
A new paper from Johns Hopkins University sporting the admittedly delightful name “Good Robot” explores the potential of learning through positive reinforcement. The title derives from an anecdote from author Andrew Hundt about teaching his dog to not chase after squirrels. I won’t go into that here — you can just watch this video instead:
But the core of the idea is to offer the robot some manner of incentive when it gets something correct, rather than a disincentive when it does something wrong. For robots, incentives come in the form of a scoring system — essentially a kind of gamification that rewards a number of points based on correctly executing a task.
The PhD candidate says the method was able to reduce the training time of a task significantly. “The robot wants the higher score,” Hundt said in a release tied to the research. “It quickly learns the right behavior to get the best reward. In fact, it used to take a month of practice for the robot to achieve 100% accuracy. We were able to do it in two days.”
The tasks are still quite elementary, including stacking bricks and navigating through a video game, but there’s hope that future robots will be able to work up to more complex and useful real-world tasks.
Just over one week before Election Day, over 60 million Americans have already cast early votes. That dwarfs 2016’s entire early voting total of 47.2 million, and the number is going to keep growing significantly this week.
“This is good news!” wrote Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who heads up the US Election Project, which tracks early voting nationally. “There were many concerns about election officials’ ability to conduct an election during a pandemic. Not only are people voting, but they are voting over a longer period of time, thereby spreading out the workload of election officials.”
At a time when there is so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt about American elections (and lots of it unwarranted), it’s important to spotlight that “frankly, it’s going well,” as Benjamin Hovland, chairman of the Electoral Assistance Commission, told me last week.
“We see an opportunity for political actors both domestic and foreign to opportunistically select projections, data, or cases they can use to amplify confusion, to sow doubt.”
Kate Starbird, Election Integrity Partnership
But what about the day itself? What should you be prepared for over the hours, days and weeks after November 3?
“We’re expecting a mess,” says Kate Starbird, a crisis informatics researcher at the University of Washington and one of the lead researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership.
“My plan for Election Day is to start the day very early with a lot of coffee,” says Eddie Perez, an election expert at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, “and to be prepared to not go to sleep for 24 hours or much more.”
What will happen
November 3 may begin with long lines, and it will probably end with unusual amounts of uncertainty.
On Monday, Starbird published a report zeroing in on the exact sort of “uncertainty and misinformation” experts expect on Election Day, that evening, and going forward.
They are ready for social media to be filled with photos and videos of long lines, confusing ballots, or malfunctioning voting machines—the sorts of problems that occur every time America votes. But this time around, these pieces of information will likely be used to push specific slanted narratives at a moment when voter are waiting for conclusive election results to arrive, an information vacuum that leaves the country particularly vulnerable.
What we’ll know
Perhaps the most consequential moment of the day will happen between 7 and 9 p.m. Eastern Time, shortly after many East Coast polls close and some states start to report information on millions of mail-in and early votes, not to mention the standard Election Day ballots. That will begin to tell the story of the election.
To start with, the exact mechanics of counting varies by state. As polls close, the memory cards and USB sticks coming from both the computers that count mail-in votes and the equipment that handled early in-person voting will need just minutes to tabulate weeks’ worth of early votes. Many election officials will be double-checking results reports before publicly releasing numbers, to make sure that the numbers add up and to avoid confusion. Otherwise they could contribute to chaos at a particularly high-stakes moment.
“Even though it’s going to take some time to count every single ballot in every state, particularly given the legal battles that have been taking place over final deadlines, there will be many weeks and millions of ballots’ worth of results that will be able to be released as part of early voting pretty early on election night,” Perez says. “It is not going to be a total information vacuum. And I think that those early results are going to provide some early indicators of what the trends are, and that then is going to send the campaigns into different spin operations.”
So we will know something about the results on Election Day. Exactly how much we’ll know remains up in the air—dependent on both the actual votes and the processes states use to count those votes. But it’s important to note that although mail-in votes take longer to count and often are counted later than in-person votes, most states allow processing of mail-in votes to start before Election Day.
What we won’t know
The level of early voting is also a virtual guarantee that we will see disinformation proliferate through traditional and social media throughout the day.
“We see an opportunity for political actors both domestic and foreign to opportunistically select projections, data, or cases they can use to amplify confusion, to sow doubt,” Starbird says. “Especially to set the stage so that if early results do go one way that then change as mail-in ballots come in, we see domestic groups setting the stage for tying those to voter fraud claims. They’ve already laid the foundation for this false narrative of voter fraud.”
Starbird’s analysis details some of the key threats based on the study of recent crisis moments in which social media played a big role: Stories and videos about the voting process will be distorted to fit preconceived narratives, premature winners will be declared, so-called “evidence” of voter fraud will be amplified, and social-media companies taking action to stop the spread of misinformation will be accused of censorship. Potential phenomena like a red or blue “shift” in which results change as in-person, early, and mail-in votes are counted will be used to build on preexisting false narratives undermining confidence in the election results.
Mainly, you should expect uncertainty
When you see examples of issues with ballots or polling stations, try to understand them in a broader context: dramatic and often unverified anecdotes get amplified but are not the norm. And think twice about what anyone except for state and local election officials says about results, because candidates have their own needs to serve. “Armchair data scientists” are not going to add to your understanding of the results, even if their analyses are tempting.
“Many people in past elections feel they are used to ‘knowing’ the winner on election night,” Perez says. “In fact, that has never really been the case. It’s always taken weeks for official results to be certified. The reality is that nobody has ever officially known the winner on election night.”
Unofficial results combined with media projections have existed, of course, and in general the consensus aligns with the official results that come in later down the line. But this election in the time of a pandemic is fundamentally different from any that’s come before, and we have to understand that the results may come in differently, and later, as a result.
“There will be claims of voter fraud and claims that the election is rigged; it’s an inevitability,” Starbird says. “How salient that is, how much people grab on, depends on results and margins of victory. But some of the worst scenarios are that a large portion of society feels they’ve been cheated. That’s where you start to lose trust in democracy.”
This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.