Month: January 2023

“Rebel Moon,” Netflix’s highly anticipated space fantasy epic, is coming to the streamer on December 22, 2023, the company announced today, alongside a sizzle reel of over a dozen titles that are also arriving on the streamer this year.

The sizzle reel shows a first look at the sci-fi adventure film, giving viewers a glimpse at the star-studded cast, crazy action sequences, explosives and a quick yet steamy make-out sesh between “Kingsman: The Secret Service” actress Sofia Boutella (who plays Kora) and “Sons of Anarchy” actor Charlie Hunnam (character yet-to-be-named).

The movie is set in a colony on the edge of the galaxy that’s threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Regent Balisarius (played by Ed Skrein). The peaceful colony sends Kora out to neighboring planets to recruit warriors that can help them. “Rebel Moon” also features Anthony Hopkins as the voice of a sentient battle robot named Jimmy, Djimon Housou as General Titus, Ray Fisher as Blood Axe, Jena Malone, Bae Doona, Cary Elwes, Corey Stoll and more.

“Army of the Dead” director Zack Snyder first announced “Rebel Moon” back in July of 2021, tweeting out teasers every so often like new cast members and behind-the-scenes images. So, it’s about time it gets an official release date.

It’s clear that Synder is a “Star Wars” fan, as the upcoming movie appears to take a lot of inspiration from the hugely popular franchise. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Snyder first pitched “Rebel Moon” to Lucasfilm as a potential “Star Wars” movie over ten years ago before Disney acquired the production company in 2012. Synder has since signed a first-look deal with Netflix.

Synder also told the publication that he hopes “Rebel Moon” turns into “a massive IP and a universe that can be built out.” It wouldn’t be surprising if “Rebel Moon” became a franchise as Netflix is known for investing heavily in its content, focusing on over-the-top action films and hiring A-list actors to draw in a big crowd. Currently, Netflix has a “The Gray Man” universe in the works.

Other titles coming to Netflix later this year include the comedy movie “You People,” “Murder Mystery 2” with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, the romance movie “Your Place or Mine” and “The Mother” starring Jennifer Lopez, among many others.

Zack Snyder’s ‘Rebel Moon’ is set to arrive on Netflix in December by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Email marketing and newsletter giant Mailchimp says it was hacked and that dozens of customers’ data was exposed. It’s the second time the company was hacked in the past six months. Worse, this breach appears to be almost identical to a previous incident.

Mailchimp said in an unattributed blog post that its security team detected an intruder on January 11 accessing one of its internal tools used by Mailchimp customer support and account administration, though the company did not say for how long the intruder was in its systems, if known. Mailchimp said the hacker targeted its employees and contractors with a social engineering attack, in which someone uses manipulation techniques by phone, email or text to gain private information, like passwords. The hacker then used those compromised employee passwords to gain access to data on 133 Mailchimp accounts, which the company notified of the intrusion.

One of those targeted accounts belongs to e-commerce giant WooCommerce. In a note to customers, WooCommerce said it was notified by Mailchimp a day later that the breach may have exposed the names, store web addresses and email addresses of its customers, though it said no customer passwords or other sensitive data was taken.

WooCommerce, which builds and maintains popular open-source e-commerce tools for small businesses relies on Mailchimp for sending emails to its customers. WooCommerce is said to have more than five million customers.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it is. Last August, Mailchimp said it was the victim of a social engineering attack that compromised credentials of its customer support staff, granting the intruder access to Mailchimp’s internal tools. In that breach, data on some 214 Mailchimp accounts were compromised, mostly of cryptocurrency and finance-related accounts. Cloud giant DigitalOcean confirmed that its account was compromised in the incident, and harshly criticized Mailchimp’s handling of the breach.

Mailchimp said at the time that it had implemented “an additional set of enhanced security measures,” but declined to tell TechCrunch what those measures entailed. With a near-identical repeat of its past breach, it’s not clear if Mailchimp properly implemented those enhanced measures, or if those measures failed.

Intuit, which bought Mailchimp for $12 billion in 2021, did not respond to an email by TechCrunch on Wednesday, which included questions about the incident. It’s not immediately clear who, if anyone, is responsible for cybersecurity at Mailchimp following the departure of its chief information security officer Siobhan Smyth shortly after the August breach.

Mailchimp says it was hacked — again by Zack Whittaker originally published on TechCrunch

That nagging deja vu feeling kept creeping in earlier this month during CES 2023 in Las Vegas.

At every turn, in the newly constructed West Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and even amid the crowded startup grinder at Eureka Park, was a company pitching lidar sensor technology.

That might not have been so remarkable in 2017 or 2018. But it’s 2023.

The peak of the hype cycle, when hundreds of millions of dollars were thrown into lidar startups, is a distant glint in the rearview mirror. The industry went through the business model pivot phase and rode the special purpose acquisition mergers wave in a pursuit of capital that public markets can provide.

How could so many of these lidar sensor companies — nearly two dozen by my count — still be hanging on (and spending considerable money to exhibit at CES) after a boom-and-bust cycle that led to a widespread culling?

Lidar, the light detection and ranging radar that measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world, is considered a critical sensor to support autonomous vehicles, and increasingly advanced driver assistance systems. As the optimism and gravitas surrounding autonomous vehicles reached new, dizzying heights, lidar was swept up in investment chaos.

Between 65 to 70 companies with active lidar programs existed in 2018, according to industry estimates. As the timelines around the deployment of autonomous vehicles slipped, consolidation seemed inevitable. And it was. Dozens of lidar companies have folded or been swallowed up by another competitor in the past four years.

Consolidation was already underway by 2019. It has only ramped up since. And that seek-capital-in-public-markets plan that took off in 2020 hasn’t been as fruitful as some hoped, due to the cost of development and that potentially inflated valuations were based on projected revenue, not actual revenue.

Of the nine companies that went public via SPAC mergers — a list that includes Aeye, Aeva, Cepton, Luminar, Innoviz, Ouster and Velodyne — there has been at least one bankruptcy and a merger. Quanergy filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2022 about 10 months after going public through a merger with a SPAC. Ouster, a SPAC that acquired Sense Photonics in 2021, agreed to merge with Velodyne in November 2022 in an all-stock transaction.

Lidar company Luminar said it’s able to verify 25 companies with active lidar programs, a figure in line with other estimates in the industry.

So where does that leave the industry today? Walking the floor of CES 2023 one might mistakenly assume that business is booming enough to sustain two dozen companies. It’s not.

Snow Bull Capital CEO Taylor Ogan expects many lidar companies will be sifted out this year and the “make it or break it year” for those that remain will be 2024.

“I think we will see the big OEMs make lidar commitments in 2023,” Ogan said, adding that a lot of models will be unveiled with lidar. “But 2024 will be the make-or-break year for lidar companies, where we will see whose fancy booths at CES were just that, and who is actually going to deliver.”

Today, about of 80% of lidar companies actually putting sensors in cars today are in Asia, according to Ogan.

China-based companies Hesai, Robosense and Livox all have design wins with automakers and have shipped sensors for production models in 2022. Hesai is at the top of the lidar sensor producer heap. The company has shipped more than 103,000 lidar units from 2017 to December 31, 2022, according to a recent securities filing.

However, the bulk of that production occurred in 2022 when it made and shipped more than 80,000 sensors. Of those, 62,000 Hesai units have gone to Chinese automakers including Li Auto, Jidu and Lotus to support advanced driver assistance systems. The remainder were used in other applications such as robotaxis, agriculture, mining, mapping and smart infrastructure. The pace of Hesai’s production is expected to ramp up this year. The company is opening a third factory in Shanghai this year with a capacity to produce 1 million units a year.

There are also handful U.S.-based companies that are producing and selling lidar sensors for robotics and industrial applications. And when it comes to U.S. lidar companies shipping sensors to production vehicles, that list gets even smaller.

Perhaps one of the buzziest companies is Luminar, a startup-turned-publicly traded company, that has operations in Florida and Silicon Valley. Luminar has started producing and shipping its Iris lidar sensors to SAIC Motor to support ADAS in the Chinese automaker’s new electric SUV, the Rising Auto R7. Its sensors are also headed to Volvo’s new electric EX90 SUV and the upcoming Polestar 3 SUV.

Luminar struck a deal in 2020 with Mobileye to supply the company with lidar for its robotaxi fleet. It has also landed contracts with Nissan and Mercedes. Based on its internal estimates, the company expects that by the second half of the decade (so after 2025) there will be more than 1 million Luminar-equipped vehicles out on the road, founder and CEO Austin Russell reiterated on stage at CES 2023.

There’s also Innovusion, a Silicon Valley based company with operations in Suzhou, China, that supplies Chinese automaker Nio with sensors.

While leadership positions can shift, industry experts still expect the field of lidar companies will continue to shrink.

The lidar industry will “directionally” start to look like the millimeter wave radar industry, Mike Ramsey, vp analyst of automotive and smart mobility at Gartner. Today, there are about seven or eight companies such as Aptiv, Bosch, Continental and ZF that supply automakers with millimeter wave radar.

“I can’t see why lidar for auto would be different, Ramsey said. He did add that lidar has more applications outside of auto, which may support a few additional companies.

Lidar companies face a ‘make it or break it’ year by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

In a press conference on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it has arrested Anatoly Legkodymov, founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato, for allegedly processing over $700 million of illicit funds.

“Overnight, the Department worked with key partners here and abroad to disrupt Bitzlato, the China-based money laundering engine that fueled a high-tech axis of cryptocrime, and to arrest its founder, Russian national Anatoly Legkodymov,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “Today’s actions send the clear message: whether you break our laws from China or Europe – or abuse our financial system from a tropical island – you can expect to answer for your crimes inside a United States courtroom.”

According to the DOJ, Bitzlato allowed users to trade cryptocurrencies without verifying their identity. The Hong Kong-registered exchange advertised itself to customers by saying that “neither selfies nor passports [are] required.” The government said that this lack of know-your-customer procedures turned Bitzlato into a hotbed for criminal activity.

U.S. government regulators have been cracking down on the crypto space. Coinbase, one of the most popular crypto exchanges, was recently fined $50 million by New York state regulators for failing to conduct adequate background checks. According to a government filing, Coinbase employed third-party contractors to handle a backlog of over 100,000 unreviewed transaction monitoring alerts, but Coinbase failed to conduct quality control measures, so it turned out that much of this contracted work was riddled with errors. As a result of these errors, regulators wrote that Coinbase failed to report potential instances of money laundering, narcotics trafficking and CSAM-related activity to authorities.

Meanwhile, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested on federal charges of defrauding investors after his $32 billion company imploded and filed for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried continues to assert he is not guilty and even started a Substack to defend himself, though his former associates like FTX co-founder Gary Wang and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison have pled guilty to federal charges.

Events like FTX’s bankruptcy shook the crypto industry, but longtime crypto insiders didn’t seem to know what Bitzlato was before the DOJ’s announcement. According to data of known wallets from Arkham, a crypto intelligence tool, wallets associated with Bitzlato contain just over $11,000; at its peak, they contained over $6 million, making Bitzlato a very small player in the industry.

If convicted, Legkodymov could face up to five years in prison.

“The FBI and our partners remain steadfast in our commitment to keeping cryptocurrency markets – as with any financial market – free from illicit activity,” said Michael J. Driscoll, an assistant director with the FBI’s New York field office. “Today’s action should serve as an example of this commitment as Legkodymov will now face the consequences of his actions in our criminal justice system.”

DOJ charges founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato for processing $700M of illegal funds by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Decodable, the well-funded real-time data engineering and stream processing platform based, in part, on the Apache Flink open-source project, is launching a major update today that aims to make the service more attractive to large enterprises. In addition to expanding its library of connectors to enable data ingestion from more sources and a new enterprise support option, the marquee feature here is the launch of its automated task-sizing capabilities. Thanks to this, Decodable can now dynamically configure workloads as needed to optimize performance and cost.

As Decodable founder and CEO Eric Sammer told me, he believes that while stream processing itself is quickly becoming mainstream — with Apache Flink becoming the de facto standard — what happens around that isn’t quite mainstream yet, in part because until now, only businesses with highly sophisticated engineering teams were able to build on top of this technology.

“The analogy I think about is networking switches,” he explained. “We can move packets back and forth. The next iteration of that — the part that I don’t think is fully mainstream yet — is the processing capability on top of that — the ability to transform and aggregate. What I think we would have called streaming analytics 10 years ago.”

The likes of Lyft, Uber or Stripe are able to create this enterprise-grade layer of abstractions on top of these real-time data streams. Others, he argues, need a tool like Decodable to do so, especially if they want to build consumer-facing applications.

“Streaming is one piece of technology,” he also noted. “It’s a collection of Debezium plus Kafka or Redpanda or whatever — plus Flink, plus API’s and all these other kinds of things. And it’s cost prohibitive to stand up a team and operationalize that. That’s where we add value. And that’s why we focus on developer experience and self-service and enterprise features.”

As for the new task sizing feature, Sammer noted that users can tell the service how many tasks they want to dedicate to a given workload. Decodable will then scale up to this maximum number of tasks — or scale down, if warranted. For a lot of users, this may result in lower spending overall. And while that may also mean they won’t spend as much on Decodable, Sammer believes that if the company can make stream processing easier and more cost effective for its users, these users will bring more workloads to the service. “There are very few cases where you wouldn’t want fresher, more accurate data — or be able to make a better decision in real time,” he said. “So from that perspective, every time we make it cheaper for someone to run a workload on Decodable, they add more workloads.”

Decodable wants to take real-time stream processing mainstream by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

As the crypto developer ecosystem expands, major ecosystems outside of the top two cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin and Ethereum — are growing, according to a new report.

About 72% of monthly active developers (devs) are working on blockchains that are not part of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, according to the 2022 Electric Capital Developer Report, which trawled code commits across open source repositories.

Solana saw the highest number of new developers contributing to the ecosystem, with its developer count rising by 83%, the fastest of any major blockchain. Compared to that, Polygon saw a 40% rise in developer count, Cosmos saw 25% and Polkadot saw 2%, the report showed.

“Developers will build where they see technology advantages, and Solana delivers faster transactions and lower costs than alternatives,” Solana co-founder Raj Gokal told TechCrunch. “But they will also build where they see other kinds of advantages, such as an active community.”

The growth of the developer ecosystem on Solana can be attributed to a mix of education efforts and resources, community engagement, technical advantages and business opportunities, Gokal said.

Even with around 2,000 total developers as of December 2022, Solana is still about 3,500 developers short of Ethereum’s count, which had a total of about 5,700 developers. It’s important to note, though, that Ethereum launched in 2013 and Solana launched in 2018, so the former has enjoyed a five-year head start.

These Solana developers are working on “a range of use cases,” from evolving the NFT and DeFi spaces to getting retailers to experiment with decentralized payment rails like Solana Pay, Gokal said. “Right now, game devs on Solana are very active and innovating heavily to create games that are both fun to play and rewarding for players to participate.”

Solana co-founder sees potential for devs to lead its network in 2023 by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

YouTube TV announced today that it’s rolling out updates to its Live Guide and Library. The updated Live Guide, which offers a more traditional grid showing what’s on now and what’s upcoming, has already reached some users, offering both a new design and recommendations of what to watch. Meanwhile, updates to the Library will roll out starting today and will continue over the next few months.

The updated Live Guide now includes a row of curated recommendations at the top, a condensed grid that displays more channels and programming on the screen and an overall simpler design. Users also get more information about each live show or movie from the new guide.

The condensed grid was mainly done so viewers could scroll less and take in information more quickly, Esther Ahn, Head of Design for YouTube TV and Primetime Channels, wrote in today’s blog post.

Ahn also claims that it’s easier to record content from the new guide since it requires fewer steps. The Live Guide makes it more obvious to users if a show or movie is already saved to the DVR or not, the post noted.

Meanwhile, the updated Library now lets users manage their content better thanks to improved filters and organizational tools. YouTube TV removed the side navigation, and instead, there’s a row of filters for more specific content categories, such as daily shows. There’s also a new “Catch up on your favorites” shelf, so users can easily find the content that they enjoy the most.

Ahn noted that users with large libraries were frustrated with how difficult it was to find a title they wanted to watch. “Members have built up their libraries over time, but programs they were interested in several years ago might no longer be relevant to them,” Ahn said. “The more their libraries grew, the less usable they became due to the lack of tools to organize their shows, movies and sports.”

YouTube TV wanted to focus on upgrading its Live Guide and Library since they are the most used pages by YouTube TV watchers, the company said. For both features, YouTube designed new side panels with shortcuts, like “Add to Library.” A “Set Reminder” shortcut is in the works as well.

These changes aim to give YouTube users more control over how they explore and find content.

“Decision fatigue is real when you turn on your TV with even more apps and channels than ever before. Viewers are looking for easier ways to find the content most relevant to them, whether it’s jumping into a live game or seeing what’s trending right now,” Ahn wrote.

While overall, these are minor design tweaks and changes, making the product simpler to use is a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting new cord-cutters to the YouTube TV service over rivals, like Hulu with Live TV or Sling TV.

The company said more changes were on the way including those that would bring more flexibility and interactivity during live playback and make it easier to switch between user profiles, but did not offer an ETA as to when those features would launch.

YouTube TV upgrades its live TV guide and library to give users more control by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Open source password management platform Bitwarden has made its first known acquisition, snapping up a fledgling Sweden-based startup called Passwordless.dev, which specializes in helping developers integrate passwordless authentication technology into their software.

The news comes shortly after 1Password and LastPass rival Bitwarden announced its first outside funding since its inception in 2015, securing $100 million from PSG and Battery Ventures. The company also revealed at the time that it had raised a previously undisclosed Series A round in 2019.

The password problem

Similar to other password management services, Bitwarden is designed to make it easier for individuals and enterprises to automatically create hard-to-guess passwords, and store them all in a secure vault. It’s all about helping people to not re-use the same predictable password across all their online services. Bitwarden’s key selling point, though, is that it’s open source — or, at least, it’s source available, meaning that it promises full transparency into the codebase, while also allowing the community to contribute and help develop new features.

Now, Bitwarden is looking to capitalize on a burgeoning trend in the online security sphere, one that is looking to consign passwords to the history books — compromised passwords, after all, are responsible for most business security breaches.

Indeed, there has been a concerted push toward passwordless authentication across the technology landscape. Last year, Apple, Google and Microsoft partnered in support of a new password-free sign-in standard called WebAuthn, while separately Apple introduced a new feature called Passkey that allows people to use their Apple device to log-in to online services without passwords.

Elsewhere, passwordless-focused startups such as Hypr, Magic, and Stytch have attracted VC dollars to bolster their respective efforts.

Bitwarden, for its part, already offers some support for passwordless authentication, such as biometric logins for Bitwarden’s own apps, while it also supports physical two-factor authentication (2FA) security keys such as YubiKey. But by bringing Passwordless.dev under its wing, Bitwarden wants to make it easier for developers to bake native biometric sign-in smarts into their software, while allowing enterprises to modernize their existing applications that currently rely on passwords.

Founded out of Sweden in 2020, Passwordless.dev has largely flown under the radar since its inception. But the company provides APIs built on WebAuthn, a web standard developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to support secure password logins. Passwordless.dev essentially makes it easier for developers to bring WebAuthn to software with a few lines of code, reducing many of the costs and complexities involved in introducing passwordless authentication to software.

From today, Bitwarden has launched a new beta service called Passwordless.dev by Bitwarden, which allows any third-party developer to embed biometric sign-in technology such as Touch ID, Face ID, and Windows Hello into their apps.

“This saves weeks of coding do-it-yourself passkey implementations,” Bitwarden CEO Michael Crandell explained to TechCrunch in an email. “Enterprises also have business applications that still rely on passwords for authentication and want to provide users with passwordless experiences. Bitwarden Passwordless.dev helps them quickly add WebAuthn and passwordless authentication features into these applications.”

Passwordless.dev by Bitwarden will be free through its initial beta period in Q1 2023, after which the company said it will offer paid plans that cover certain levels of usage and features.

While Bitwarden isn’t disclosing how much it paid for the startup or how many employees it’s taking on as part of the deal, it did confirm that Passwordless.dev hasn’t raised any external funding in its two-plus years in existence, meaning it likely didn’t break the bank for the acquisition.

Bitwarden also confirmed to TechCrunch that Passwordless.dev will continue to be offered to developers independently of other Bitwarden products.

Bitwarden acquires Passwordless.dev to help companies authenticate users without passwords by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

There are no guarantees in this world. Nothing lasts forever — especially those things made by Google. In September, the company announced that it would be pulling the plug on its ambitious, but oft-forgotten, cloud gaming service. Stadia’s servers are officially shutting down today, two months shy of its third birthday.

The dream of cloud gaming is long-lived and often fraught. Given all of the strides that have been made by services like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, it seemed like streaming technology might have finally caught up with the dream. But while services like Amazon Luna and Xbox Cloud gaming will live to stream another day, Stadia’s road ends here.

Over the summer, Google took to social media to insist that the service would not be shutting down, only to dramatically reverse course within months.

“[W]hile Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison said in a post at the time. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed.”

He went on to add that Google remains committed to gaming, but Stadia’s death represents a sizable setback, both for those who invested considerable money into developing for the platform and for general consumer confidence about the category’s future. Devoting all that time and resources into a service, only to shut it down just shy of three years after launch, isn’t a great example of commitment.

Google does deserve some props with regard to its handling of the whole thing, however. For starters, the company announced that it would be refunding all hardware and add-on content purchases made through its purchases by right around this time. Earlier this week, the company began rolling out a software update via Chrome that adds a Bluetooth mode to make the controller usable with other platforms once Stadia shuts down.

There’s no great way to shut down a much hyped service less than three years after launch, but it’s a start.

So long, Stadia by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

DNV, a Norwegian shipping classification society, has confirmed its systems were hit by a ransomware attack, affecting around 1,000 ships that rely on its technology.

The Oslo-based DNV said in a statement on Wednesday that its ShipManager software was targeted by file-encrypting malware on January 7, forcing the organization to shut down its servers. ShipManager is a fleet management software that allows DNV shipping customers to monitor the operational, technical, and compliance features of a shipping fleet, and is used by more than 7,000 vessels owned by 300 customers, according to the company’s website.

DNV said that 70 customers operating around 1,000 vessels were affected by the attack, close to 15% of its total fleet.

In a statement given to TechCrunch, DNV spokesperson Margrethe Andersen confirmed that all impacted vessels can still use the onboard, offline functionalities of the ShipManager software. “The cyber-attack does not affect the vessels’ ability to operate,” said Andersen.

DNV also says it’s confident that other DNV servers have not been affected. However, when asked whether any data was compromised as a result of the attack, the company declined to comment. DNV also declined to say whether the attack would result in any delays for ships and their onboard cargo.

The company said it is cooperating with the police. “We cannot release information that could harm or delay the investigation,” the spokesperson said.

It is unclear how DNV was compromised, if the company received a ransom demand, or who was behind the attack. TechCrunch checked the websites of several major ransomware groups but found no mention of DNV.

“DNV is working closely with global IT security partners to analyze the incident and ensure secure online operations as soon as possible,” the company said. “All affected customers have been advised to consider relevant mitigating measures depending on the types of data they have uploaded to the system.

The ransomware attack on DNV is one of many to have impacted the shipping industry in recent weeks. The Port of Lisbon, the third-largest shipping port in Portugal, was the target of a LockBit ransomware attack on Christmas Day.

Maritime giant DNV says 1,000 ships affected by ransomware attack by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch