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Cyber Monday savings are here — for today only book a pass to TC Sessions: Space 2022 and save 50% on all available passes. This one-day exploration event is focused on early-stage space startups, trends, science and technology across the private, public and defense universe takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles.

Don’t miss out: Book your 50%-off pass now before the savings expire on tonightat 11:59 p.m. PST.

Join some of the space industry’s leading voices to learn about the latest advances, goals and challenges — both technical and financial — from the people in the trenches building and funding the future of space. Consider this, too. We expect more than 1,000 attendees at this event; top founders, investors, engineers, executives, military and government officials — an unsurpassed celestial body for networking.

Here’s a small sampling of the day’s expert speakers and topics. Don’t forget to set your coordinates to “agenda” and explore all the interviews, panel discussions and partner sessions waiting for you.

Looking to Startups to Help Secure Space

The commercial space sector has succeeded in driving down the cost of space-based technology while massively increasing its capabilities. The U.S. defense apparatus has traditionally favored legacy industry partners, but it’s shown a growing interest in turning to startups and new space companies to secure the space domain for the U.S. and its allies, and we’ll hear why and how from Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisitions and Integration, Frank Calvelli.

Asking and Answering Humanity’s Biggest Questions

After six years heading up NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen is a familiar face to anyone who has followed the agency’s many interplanetary and orbital missions. Now ready to move on to his next chapter, Zurbuchen will speak to how NASA, its mission, and the science it performs are changing — but they’re more important than ever.

Building Out Commercial Operations in Orbit

A new crop of companies are working on establishing permanent commercial operations in orbit and on the moon. But they likely won’t be able to do it without partnerships with government and defense. We’ll talk to Steve Jurczyk, cc-founder and CEO at Quantum Space, and leaders from ispace and the United States Space Force, about how these partnerships can foster a thriving orbital economy.

Don’t miss seeing early-stage space startups exhibiting at the show, and make sure you’re in the room for the TechCrunch Space Pitch-off featuring a handful of space startups as they bring the heat in front of a live audience — and an expert panel of VCs, including Jory Bell (Playground Global), Mark Boggett (Seraphim Space), Tess Hatch (Bessemer Partners) and Emily Henriksson (Root Ventures).

TC Sessions: Space 2022 takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles, but you have only T-minus five days left to lock a tractor beam on savings. Buy your pass for just $99.50 before the deal disintegrates on tonight at precisely 11:59 p.m. PST. We can’t wait to see you in LA!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form.

Cyber Monday sale – save 50% on passes for TC Sessions: Space by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

To celebrate Cyber Monday, TechCrunch+ is having a sale! Until November 30th, take 25% off a subscription to secure access to all our work.

TechCrunch+ is TechCrunch’s founder-focused analytical arm. We cover the trends behind the news, dig into venture capital numbers, report on how startups are executing today, and share advice and insight from tech operators. We’d love for you to join us.

You may have noticed more TechCrunch+ material on TechCrunch proper in the last few quarters. That’s thanks to our recently expanded staff. TechCrunch+ is obsessed with venture capital, climate, crypto, and reporting on who gets to build new companies.

We’re working to cover the startup market from a host of perspectives. Our goal is to better understand, to quote something dear to my heart, the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

We have big plans for 2023, including more reporters, more reporting, and more repartee. TechCrunch+ is a big tent — and one that we want to expand even further. So take advantage of our biggest sale of the year! We’re already hard at work to ensure you stay super informed about startups, tech, and venture.

Hugs, and happy holidays from myself and the TechCrunch+ crew,

Alex Wilhelm, EiC, TC+

Say hello to the TechCrunch+ Cyber Monday sale! by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, Community Notes, just received an update that the company claims will help to identify more “low quality” fact checks — meaning, the notes written by Twitter users that are appended to tweets to provide further clarification and context. As a result, more of the contributors who write these unhelpful annotations will lose their writing ability, Twitter said, requiring those users to earn back their “contributor” status.

The algorithm change involves scoring notes where contributors explain why a tweet shouldn’t be deemed misleading. Twitter had earlier paused scoring these types of notes because the rating data was “noisy,” the company said in a series of tweets posted on Friday night. However, it found these notes could still be low quality and “annoying to contributors,” so it’s now resuming scoring these notes, aided by other recent changes that help it to identify the different types of notes. This latest update will better identify and lock out more contributors who aren’t writing helpful content, Twitter said.

The company itself is not determining the note quality, to be clear. Twitter VP of Product, Keith Coleman, clarified in a tweet that “low-quality” notes are rated as such if a “wide range of people” — including those who typically disagree with one another — all agree a particular note is not helpful.

“This prevents one-sided outcomes,” he explained.

The update follows a series of advertiser exits from Twitter as new Twitter owner Elon Musk promotes community-based moderation as the future of the platform. Given Twitter makes the majority of its money from ads, it’s unclear how long Twitter will be able to sustain itself with the reductions in revenue. Musk, too, is clearly concerned — even today publicly shaming Apple for its decision to pause adverting by asking if they “hate free speech in America,” he tweeted.

Birdwatch, as Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-check system was previously called, rebranded to “Community Notes” shortly after Musk took ownership of Twitter, and is something the new CEO sees as key to the future of Twitter’s moderation. Musk has been highly critical of Twitter’s former content moderation efforts, which he saw as an overreach. Teams engaged in content moderation were also a sizable part of Twitter’s massive layoffs earlier this month, and were again cut in mid-November when Twitter eliminated a large number of contractor positions.

Community Notes takes a different approach to content moderation by putting much of those efforts in the hands of Twitter’s user base. The system is not as simple as having content upvoted or downvoted for accuracy — an algorithm that could easily be gamed if brigades of like-minded contributors teamed up to promote their own viewpoints. Instead, Community Notes uses a “bridging” algorithm that attempts to find consensus among people who don’t usually share the same views.

To become a contributor, users must first prove they’re capable of writing helpful “notes” by correctly assessing other notes as either Helpful or Not Helpful, which earns them points. Users start with a rating impact score of zero and have to reach at least a 5 to become a contributor, Twitter previously explained. After reaching contributor status, users must then continue to add quality contributions or they will have their contributor status removed.

The original idea behind Community Notes was to create a system that would add a layer of fact-checking and context to tweets that don’t necessarily violate Twitter’s rules. But in the Musk era, Community Notes may play an even larger role as Twitter now employs far fewer moderators following its layoffs.

Despite being designed to look for consensus, as more Twitter users flee to other platforms — like Mastodon, CounterSocial, Hive, Post, Tumblr and others — Twitter may lose access to potential contributors willing to do this kind of work. In that case, the “crowd” may not represent the voice of the wider public — much like how Wikipedia is open to editing by all, but most of it is ultimately written by only 1% of editors. In addition, if Twitter’s user base overall begins to largely lean to one side more than another — more conservative than liberal, e.g. — a bridging algorithm could become less useful in representing a true consensus.

Just ahead of the U.S. midterms (and Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, as it turned out), Community Notes, then called Birdwatch,expanded in the U.S., allowing its notes to become visible to all U.S. users.

The company said at the time it would add around 1,000 more contributors per week, on top of its 15,000 pilot testers. It’s not clear how many people actually write Community Notes now, how often, or when the system will be open for sign-up to all of Twitter’s global users — and Twitter no longer has a comms team to field such questions.

In more recent days, Musk has been touting this community fact-check system to advertisers who are concerned about the potential for increased misinformation, disinformation, and other toxic content on the platform in light of Musk’s “free speech” agenda. In a call with advertisers on Nov. 9, the exec referred to Community Notes as “epic” and a “gamechanger,” and something that would ultimately help improve the accuracy of what’s said on Twitter. Musk himself has been corrected by the community fact-check system, though he also often just deletes tweets rather than face the repercussions of being wrong.

Many advertisers, however, don’t seem convinced that crowdsourced moderation will make Twitter a safe place to promote their brands.

Several big advertisers have already pulled out, including General Mills, Audi and Pfizer, as well as automakers like General Motors. (Though the latter is more concerned about advertising on a site owned by a direct competitor, as Musk is also Tesla’s CEO). A report last week by The Washington Post also found that more than a third of Twitter’s top 100 clients had not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks — an indication that brands likely need more assurances of platform safety than something like Community Notes can provide.

Twitter says crowdsourced fact-checking system updated to better address ‘low quality’ contributions by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

You wouldn’t drive a car or fly a plane if the only controls you had available were on/off switches for left and right or up and down, and yet that’s pretty much what gamers are stuck with when they control their virtual avatars with their keyboards. U.K. startup Peratech wants to change that with a new range of “force feedback” keyboards that are starting to turn up in Lenovo notebook computers. I spoke with the company’s CEO to learn more.

“We just launched a force-sensing keyboard. It’s not just the keys; it’s a user experience. We created a user interface that is both an application and a game bar widget so that new users can have out-of-the-box simplicity, and serious gamers get advanced controls to take the mechanics of using the keyboard,” explains Jon Stark, CEO at Peratech. “With our keyboards you have a tactile feedback loop. The keyboard knows how hard you press, and you can change that pressure profile. Say you want to have really progressive acceleration at first because you tend to hit the gas too hard when you go around corners: The profile is configurable, and influencers can configure and deliver those profiles to people, creating engagement with other followers. It goes beyond just delivering force and delivering a great user experience: I’m talking about community-based user-experience content that drives engagement and simplicity.”

The force feedback tech can be found in Lenovo’sLegion 7i and 7 gaming notebooks, which launched over the summer. To me, Lenovo isn’t necessarily the first brand that pops to mind when I think “gaming laptops,” but as a company, Peratech had a connection they could work to make these keyboards show up out in the real world.

“We have had a long relationship with Lenovo, and they really wanted to do something with the Legion to elevate it and innovate. It isn’t just for games; as we expand to a full notebook, other opportunities appeared. It works with video editing really well, for example,” says Stark, and he uses scrubbing through a video timeline as an example. “Imagine that as you scrub slower, might want want to zoom in at the same time. Imagine being able to do that just with one button and control that speed with your finger. And as you’re moving faster and pressing harder it zooms out. We are making controls where expert users would be really good with two hands, jumping back and forth to a mouse. We’re taking that cognitive load of doing all those activities and putting them into users’ hands where they can really focus on the content.”

The team hopes that its keyboard becomes another tool in the gamers’ tool belt for increased immersion and enjoyment when gaming.

“If you have a steering wheel that is basically for F1 or Forza, you have all the controls of an F1 car, but you also have all the complexity of an F1. It is immersive. But if you then go to play Call of Duty or GTA or Witcher, you have to unplug all of that and grab a joystick. And if you’re moving from flying to walking or driving to walking — it’s kind of impossible, and something like a steering wheel makes you sort of a one-game player,” Stark points out. “The other thing to note is that you can’t use these controllers on a plane. You can’t use them on a bus. You can’t use them in a coffee shop. And so for those who are buying a notebook, that makes a really big difference.”

The laptop keyboards have 400 or so levels of pressure, which the company claims gives users a large amount of fine control. The keyboards use a thin-film layer that sits within the mechanical key structure. Between 25 and 300 microns thick, the company claims its tech can be built into pretty much every keyboard out there.

“Whar we do is we take the signal [from the keyboard] and we drive that through our force control processor. Here, we condition the signal so it’s really easy for the computer electronics to use. We also use Windows-native driver. So it’s not like the PC feels it’s being hacked or you need this specialty API. We’re using keyboard, joystick, mouse, trackpad, track stick and other drivers to be able to give that experience through a keyboard: We disaggregate the input from the way you actually use an on/off switch on a keyboard,” says Stark. “So we offer a better keyboard experience.”

The company’s tech can be described as software-enabled hardware, or hardware-enabled software, depending on the level of integration it has with a keyboard manufacturer. Peratech told me a story of how it was able to design a redesign for an existing keyboard design in CAD in just four days.

“There are a couple of different [microcontroller] chips that you could use. Depending on the architecture of the computer, you can use the embedded controller on the main board, and we have applications of both with Lenovo,” explains Stark. “You do need to have an ADC that captures the data, and then we have some processing that needs to happen, where we process the signal. And that’s what gives you the full dynamic range that you’re looking for.”

The company’s keyboard line is a pivot from its tech originally developed for smartphones, designed to add force feedback to smartphone screens. Obviously, the company is hoping the tech will catch on and show up in more applications in the near future; the team was tight-lipped on exactly where and when we might see it turn up next, but it suggested there might be automotive and smart home applications in the pipeline. For now, the Lenovo laptops are the easiest place to try it out — look for the “Force Sensor Technology” to see whether Peratech’s technology lives in its innards somewhere.

This startup is bringing precision control for gamers to the humble keyboard by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Legal trouble may be brewing for Microsoft in the European Union where an assessment by a working group of German data protection regulators that’s spent around two years looking into a swathe of privacy concerns attached to its cloud-based 365 productivity products — including by engaging directly with the tech giant to try to get it to fix compliance issues — has found Microsoft has still not been able to resolve any of the compliance problems they’ve raised with it.

The working group’s update could crank up pressure on Microsoft 365 customers in Germany — and elsewhere in the European Union where the same data protection framework applies and other regulators are also investigating cloud services’ GDPR compliance — to reassess usage of its software and/or seek out less compliance-challenged alternatives.

The EU’s data protection supervisor (EDPS), which oversees the bloc’s own institutions’ GDPR compliance, has been looking into the European Commission’s use of Microsoft Office 365 since May last year — as well as probing EU bodies’ use of Amazon’s cloud services.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) also kicked off a related coordinated enforcement actionin February that it said would focus on public sectors use of cloud services — which it said would take about a year to report, with the aim for the action to harmonize regulatory interventions in this area.

“Use of non-compliant ICT products and services by the public sector threatens the protection of personal data of all EU residents,” the EDPS wrote in an update on its probe in April (which also does not appear to have concluded and finally reported yet). “Public sector bodies at national and EU level have a duty to lead by example, including when it comes to outsourcing and transfers of personal data within and outside the EEA [European Economic Area].”

Microsoft announced some changes to its cloud contact terms in Europe back in 2019, following an earlier warning by the EDPS raising serious concerns — and after a Dutch ministry obtained some contractual changes and technical safeguards and settings in amended contracts it agreed with Microsoft that year after it requested changes — but it remains to be seen how the data supervisor will assess GDPR compliance for use of its cloud services now.

For one thing, it’s a more complicated situation for EU-US data transfers at present, in the wake of the July 2020 Schrems II CJEU ruling — and still with no replacement transatlantic data transfers agreement formally adopted by the bloc.

German working group weighs in

The German working group’s report is focused on assessing Microsoft 365 (née Microsoft Office 365)’s compliance with certain provisions of the pan-EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — after an earlier assessment by a local regulator, in January 2020, found that “no data protection-compliant use of Microsoft Office 365 is possible”.

Among the ongoing issues raised by the group are concerns over a lack of clarity and precision in Microsoft’s contracts and processing for 365, and the legal base it claims to process data — including for what it describes as “legitimate business purposes”.

The working group said a central theme of the talks was trying to determine in which cases Microsoft acts as a data controller, which carries a more expansive set of responsibilities under EU data protection law (e.g. accountability obligations), and in which scenarios it’s only a processor (as the 365 customer is the controller) — but their summary concludes: “This could not be conclusively clarified.”

They also query the viability of Microsoft relying on a “legitimate interest” ground as a legal base for processing data for its own purposes where 365 customers are public sector organizations like schools, with the group raising doubts that it can be applied in that context.

Their report also questions the sufficiency of additional technical and organizational measures added by Microsoft in response to concerns about the safety of exported data — arguing that legal uncertainties remain over the claimed security measures which it points out only cover a subset of personal data subject to the contract.

In a statement accompanying the report, the Datenschutzkonferenz (DSK) — a steering body for Germany’s decentralized application of data protection law — said it’s not possible for users of Microsoft’s cloud-based software to demonstrate compliance in spite of a series of changes it made to its 365 contracts in a data protection addendum from September 2022 which are assessed as being only “minor improvements” compared to the problems identified.

Or, put another way, the group’s conclusion is there’s currently no way to use Microsoft 365 in compliance with the GDPR.

Summarizing their assessment of Microsoft’s response to earlier compliance concerns, the group said it was not able to achieve “any significant improvements” in contract wording, as regards types and purposes of processing — noting that comprehensive descriptions and details are still lacking.

While it has taken the view that contractual amendments made by Microsoft as a result of this regulatory engagement — with regards to its own processing for so-called “business activities” (previously described in its contracts as “legitimate business purposes”) — are also superficial wording tweaks that do not bring any “substantial improvements”.

On that, the report refers to a statement made by Microsoft that it has not actually made any adjustments to its processing activities. The group’s assessment remains, therefore, that Microsoft continues to grant itself insufficiently limited rights for certain types of processing.

Microsoft’s large-scale collection of telemetry and diagnostic data — under what legal basis — is another concern for the regulators, with the group suggesting the data is processed by Microsoft “fundamentally for self-interested purposes” — which they point out is a particular challenge for public sector users of 365 to be able to justify under the GDPR.

Data transfers out of the EU are another area of focus, given ongoing legal uncertainties related to EU data exports to third countries like the US (and the group points out it’s not currently possible to use Microsoft 365 without data being processed in the US). As are concerns about legal issues arising as a result of US laws like the Cloud Act and FISA 702 — which could compel Microsoft to hand over customer data, which runs counter to EU privacy laws that require data to be adequate protected outside the bloc as well as within.

The working group points out that many 365 services require Microsoft to access customer data in the clear — meaning the obvious fix of applying strong encryption is not regularly available in this cloud service context.

Microsoft’s policies towards retention and deletion of data also do not always meet the requirements set out in the GDPR, per the group’s report.

They are also unimpressed by the level of notification and detail Microsoft provides to customers about sub-processors/sub-contractors — which is says falls below the specificity afforded in the updated Standard Contractual Clauses template provided by the European Commission last year.

Contacted for a response to the working group’s criticisms, Microsoft sent us this statement:

“Microsoft 365 products meet the highest industry standards for the protection of privacy and data security. We respectfully disagree with the concerns raised by the Datenschutzkonferenz and have already implemented many suggested changes to our data protection terms. We remain committed to working with the DSK to address any remaining concerns.”

It also pointed to a blog post it published in German (the same statement is here in English translation) in which it expands on its claim of no EU privacy law concerns attached to Microsoft 365 products — arguing that the DSK’s concerns “do not appropriately reflect” changes it claims to have already undertaken and making a further assertion that the working group has misunderstood how its services operate and measures (and “significant changes”) it says it’s already implemented.

Microsoft’s statement referenced above links to a second (7-page) statement, which it has only made available in German — which it says offers a “more detailed” response to some of the issues raised.

In this expanded statement (which we’ve translated using machine translation), Microsoft offers a point by point rebuttal to the DSK’s concerns and also claims the EU Data Boundary will “significantly reduce” data flows outside Europe and boost transparency by providing “detailed documentation on remaining, necessary data flows”.

The document also goes on the attack, accusing “some” German regulators of interpreting GDPR in what it couches as an “excessively risk-averse manner” — which Microsoft claims “overburdens and paralizes those responsible” as a result of “excessive expectations of accountability”.

It will be up to the EU’s regulators to determine whether anything Microsoft argues can really fix the raft of legal issues that keep surfacing over its cloud services’ compliance with GDPR — or whether it’s just more bluster from a data-mining tech giant that’s being called on excessive and unlawful access to customer data, and, therefore, whether more substantial reforms will be required before Microsoft will be the ‘safe’ choice for IT procurers in the EU in future.

Following the German working group’s statement, data protection experts in Europe have been calling for pan-EU enforcement over the problems identified by regulators — and questioning why Microsoft cannot apply meaningful limits on customer data processing, given it previously agreed to drop processing for business activities in government and public sector contracts agreed in the Netherlands, for example.

Microsoft’s lead data protection authority in the EU is Ireland’s Data Protection Commission — which would be responsible for leading any pan-EU enforcement of the GDPR against the company.

However the DPC told TechCrunch it does not currently have any open inquiries into Microsoft — so it appears more likely that regional enforcement of cloud compliance concerns will be pushed through via decentralized (but coordinated) attention to public sector contracts Microsoft has inked around the bloc by regulators in different Member States. Which sounds like, well, the kind of messy, multi-pronged, resource-draining enforcement nightmare for itself and customers of Microsoft 365 the company should really be doing everything it can to avoid…

Microsoft 365 faces darkening GDPR compliance clouds after German report by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

This past year has been hectic for the crypto lending platform BlockFi and today is no different as the company shared an announcement that it filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.

On November 10 the crypto platform shared in a tweet that it paused activity, including withdraws, and stated on Monday that “activity continues to be paused at this time.”

The bankruptcy was commenced to “stabilize its business and provide the company with the opportunity to consummate a comprehensive restructuring transaction” for all its clients and other stakeholders.

BlockFi says it has $256.9 million in cash, which will be used to provide “sufficient liquidity to support certain operations during the restructuring process.” However, BlockFi owes a list of creditors unsecured claims up to $729 million, court documents show. One of BlockFi’s creditors was FTX, which has its second largest unsecured claim at $275 million.

The company said it will focus on recovering all obligations owed to BlockFi and counterparties like FTX.

In July, FTX signed a deal with the option to buy BlockFi for up to $240 million, the CEO of BlockFi Zac Prince tweeted. Since then, things have tumbled as FTX collapsed and also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, weeks before BlockFi. With that said, “the company expects that recoveries from FTX will be delayed.”

The company stated that it has a consolidated amount of over 100,000 creditors across a massive range of $1 billion to $10 billion in liabilities and assets, according to a court filing.

This news follows a number of crypto-focused companies, like Voyager and Celsius, which are also currently going through bankruptcy proceedings.

In March 2021, BlockFi closed a $350 million Series D funding round, valuing the company at $3 billion at the time. Bain Capital Ventures, partners of DST Global, Pomp Investments and Tiger Global co-led the round with participation from a number of other firms.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged BlockFi for failing to register its retail crypto lending product and violating the registration provisions of the Investment Company Act of 1940, according to a press release in February.

To settle the charges, BlockFi agreed to pay a $50 million penalty to the SEC and an additional $50 million in fines to 32 U.S. states to settle similar charges. According to a filing on Monday, BlockFi owes the SEC $30 million.

BlockFi files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch