Technology

dimanche 12 mars 2023

The tech industry moved fast and broke its most prestigious bank

Silicon Valley Bank Photo Illustrations — Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The fall of Silicon Valley Bank, explained

On the last night of its existence, Silicon Valley Bank was hosting VC Bill Reichert of Pegasus Tech Ventures, who was giving a presentation on “How to Pitch Your WOW! to Investors” to about 45 or 50 people. Mike McEvoy, the CEO of OmniLayers, recounted the scene for me. “It was eerie over there,” he said. He saw a number of people exiting the building during the event, looking subdued.

Roger Sanford, the CEO of Hcare Health and a self-described “professional Silicon Valley gadfly,” was also there. “Everyone was in denial,” he told me. “The band played on.”

The next day, the emblematic bank of the tech industry was shut down by regulators — the second-biggest bank failure in US history, after Washington Mutual in 2008.

What happened is a little complicated — and I’ll explain farther down — but it’s also simple. A bank run occurs when depositors try to pull out all their money at once, like in It’s a Wonderful Life. And as It’s a Wonderful Life explains, sometimes the actual cash isn’t immediately there because the bank used it for other things. That was the immediate cause of death for the most systemically and symbolically important bank in the tech industry, but to get to that point, a lot of other things had to happen first.

What is Silicon Valley Bank?

Founded in 1983 after a poker game, Silicon Valley Bank was an important engine for the tech industry’s success and the 16th largest bank in the US before its collapse. It’s easy to forget, based on the tech industry’s lionization of nerds, but the actual fuel for startups is money, not brains.

Silicon Valley Bank provided that fuel, working closely with many VC-backed startups. It claimed to be the “financial partner of the innovation economy” and the “go-to bank for investors.” Among those banking at SVB: the parent company of this here website. That’s not all. More than 2,500 VC firms banked there, and so did a lot of tech execs.

It fell in less than 48 hours.

What happens to Silicon Valley Bank’s customers?

Most banks are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a government agency that’s been around since the Great Depression. So of course, the accounts at Silicon Valley Bank were insured by the FDIC — but only up to $250,000. That’s how FDIC deposit insurance works.

That might be a lot of money for an individual, but we’re talking about companies here. Many have burn rates of millions of dollars a month. A recent regulatory filing reveals that about 90 percent of deposits were uninsured as of December 2022. The FDIC says it’s “undetermined” how many deposits were uninsured when the bank closed.

How bad could it get?

Even small disruptions to cash flow can have drastic effects on individuals, companies, and industries. So while one very likely outcome is that the uninsured depositors will eventually be made whole, the problem is that right now they have no access to that money.

The most immediate effect is on payroll. There are lots of people who are wondering if their next paycheck will be disrupted. Some people already know their paychecks will be; a payroll service company called Rippling had to tell its customers that some paychecks weren’t coming on time because of the SVB collapse. For some workers, that’s rent or mortgage payments, and money for groceries, gas, or childcare that isn’t coming.

This is especially rough for startups. A third of Y Combinator companies won’t be able to make payroll in the next 30 days, according to YC CEO Garry Tan. An unexpected mass furlough or layoff is a nightmare for most companies — after all, you can’t make sales if the salesforce isn’t coming into the office.

Some investors are loaning their companies money to make payroll. Penske Media, the largest investor of this website’s parent company, Vox Media, told The New York Times that “it was ready if the company required additional capital,” for instance. That’s good, because Vox Media has “a substantial concentration of cash” at Silicon Valley Bank. Of course, one other problem is that a lot of investors were also banking at SVB, too.

Payroll isn’t the only expense a company has: there are payments to software providers, cloud services, and so on, too. I’m just scratching the surface here.

Does this have something to do with crypto?

SVB’s failure didn’t have anything directly to do with the ongoing crypto meltdown, but it could potentially worsen that crisis, too. Crypto firm Circle operates a stablecoin, USDC, that’s backed with cash reserves — $3.3 billion of which are stuck at Silicon Valley Bank. That stablecoin should always be worth $1, but it broke its peg after SVB failed, dropping as low as 87 cents. Coinbase stopped conversions between USDC and the dollar.

On March 11th, Circle said that it “will stand behind USDC and cover any shortfall using corporate resources, involving external capital if necessary.” The stablecoin’s value mostly recovered.

Oh, and bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi also has $227 million in funds stuck, too.

So if SVB doesn’t exist anymore, what takes its place?

In response to the collapse, the FDIC created a new entity, the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara, for all insured deposits for Silicon Valley Bank. It will open for business on March 13th. People who have uninsured deposits will be paid an advanced dividend and get a little certificate, but that isn’t a guarantee people will get all their money back.

The FDIC’s job is to get the maximum amount from Silicon Valley Bank’s assets. That can happen a couple ways. One is that another bank acquires SVB, getting the deposits in the process. In the best-case scenario, that acquisition means that everyone gets all their money back — hooray! And that’s the best-case scenario not just for everyone who wants to get their paycheck on time, but also because the FDIC’s greater mission is to ensure stability and public confidence in the US banking system. If SVB’s assets can only be sold for, say, 90 cents on the dollar, it could encourage bank runs elsewhere.

Okay, but let’s say that acquisition doesn’t happen. Then what? Well, the FDIC evaluates, then sells the assets associated with Silicon Valley Bank over a period of weeks or months, with the proceeds going to depositors. Uninsured deposits rank high on the pay-back scale, behind only administrative expenses and insured deposits. So even if a sale doesn’t happen soon, the odds are high that customers will get their money back, assuming they can stay afloat waiting for it.

How did we get here?

So this is actually bigger than startups and Silicon Valley VCs. To understand how this happened, we’ve gotta talk about interest rates. Since 2008, they’ve been pretty low, sparking a venture capital boom and some real silliness (see: WeWork, Theranos, Juicero). There’s been a lot of froth for a long time, and it got worse during the pandemic, when the money printer went brrr. Meme stocks? Crypto boom? SPACs? Thank Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, who settled on zero percent interest rate policy (ZIRP).

So if you are, let’s say, a bank specializing in startups, do you know what ZIRP world does to you? Well, my children, according to the most recent annual filing from SVB, bank deposits grew as IPOs, SPACs, VC investment and so on went on at a frenetic pace.

And because of all these liquidity events — congrats, btw — no one needed a loan because they had all this cash. This is sort of a problem for a bank. Loans are an important way to make money! So, as explained in more detail by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, Silicon Valley Bank bought government securities. This was a fine and steady way for SVB to make money, but it also meant it was vulnerable if interest rates rose.

Which they did! Powell started cranking up rates to slow inflation, and told Congress this week that he expects to let them get as high as 5.75 percent, which is a lot higher than zero.

Here’s the problem for Silicon Valley Bank. It’s got a bunch of assets that are worth less money if interest rates go up. And it also banks startups, which are more plentiful when interest rates are low. Essentially, these bankers managed to put themselves in double trouble, something a few short-sellers noticed (Pity the shorts! Despite being right, they’re also fucked because it’ll be hard to collect their winnings).

So did Silicon Valley just flunk the prisoner’s dilemma?

Okay, this mismatch in risk in and of itself won’t tip a bank over. A good old-fashioned bank run did that. And at Silicon Valley Bank, there was no George Bailey to stop it.

Here’s how it happened. When interest rates rose, VCs stopped flinging money around. Startups started drawing down more of their money to pay for their expenses, and SVB had to come up with cash to make that happen. That meant the bank needed to get liquidity — so it sold $21 billion of securities, resulting in an after-tax loss of $1.8 billion. It also came up with a plan to sell $2.2 billion in shares to help shore itself up. Moody’s downgraded the bank’s credit rating.

In its slide deck explaining all this, Silicon Valley Bank talks about — I am not making this up — “ample liquidity” and its “strong capital position.”

Now, recall, another bank called Silvergate had just collapsed (for crypto reasons). Investors, like horses, are easily spooked. So when Silicon Valley Bank made this announcement on March 8th, people bolted. Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund advised its portfolio companies to pull out, ultimately yanking millions. And you know how VCs love to follow trends! Union Square Ventures and Coatue Management, among others, decided to tell companies to pull their money, too.

This bank run happened fast, in less than two days. Tech nerds can take credit for that one. It used to be that you had to physically go to a bank to withdraw your money — or at least take the psychic damage of picking up a telephone. That slower process gave banks time to maneuver. In this case, digitalization meant that the money went out so fast that Silicon Valley Bank was essentially helpless, points out Samir Kaji, CEO of investing platform Allocate. Customers tried to withdraw $42 billion in deposits on March 9th alone — a quarter of the bank’s total deposits on a single day.

It was over the next day. The share sale was canceled. Silicon Valley Bank tried to sell itself. Then the regulators stepped in.

Who was in charge here?

Until shortly after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, its (now-former) CEO Greg Becker was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. That’s one of the 12 banks overseen by the Washington Fed.

While the bank run was ongoing, Becker told VCs, “I would ask everyone to stay calm and to support us just like we supported you during the challenging times.” As anyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship knows, telling someone else to calm down is a way to ensure they lose their entire goddamn mind. I think it might have been possible to staunch the bleeding if Becker had been even halfway good at PR. Obviously, he’s not.

But separately from Becker’s ill communication, he was the leader behind the spooky asset sale/share offering combo punch. In fact, Silicon Valley Bank had other options: it could have borrowed funds or tried to offer sweet deals to depositors who stayed.

That’s not all.

It turns out Becker also sold $3.6 million of shares in Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company on February 27th. This was a pre-arranged sale — he filed the paperwork on January 26th — but it does seem like curious timing! Becker was presumably aware of his own balance sheet, and a director of a regional Fed bank. He had to know the Fed was going to keep raising interest rates — I mean, if I knew it, he’d better have known it — and he had to know that would be bad news for Silicon Valley Bank.

What does this mean for startupland?

The venture capital ecosystem exists because once upon a time, banks wouldn’t loan startups money. Think about it: a 23-year-old nerd slapping together a startup in someone’s garage or whatever usually doesn’t own anything they can put up as collateral against a loan.

One way that Silicon Valley Bank bolstered startups was by offering risky forms of financing. For instance, the bank lent against money owed to a business’ accounts receivables. Even riskier: the company lent against expected revenue for future services. Silicon Valley Bank also offered venture debt, which uses a VC investment as a way of underwriting a loan. And it worked! These kinds of products helped build Silicon Valley into the powerhouse it is now, says Jonathan Hirshon, who’s done high-tech PR for the last 30 years.

The bank also would get slices of companies as part of its credit terms. That meant it made $13.9 million on FitBit’s IPO, for instance. More recently, Coinbase’s IPO paperwork revealed that Silicon Valley Bank had the right to buy more than 400,000 shares for about $1 a share. Coinbase’s shares closed at a price of $328.28 the first day it was listed.

Startups aren’t the only ones who need to raise money. Venture capitalists do too — often from family offices or governments. Silicon Valley Bank invested in a number of VCs over the years, including Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock.

This kind of gets us to one of SVB’s key problems: Silicon Valley is actually a small town. And while that meant SVB was the cool banker for the tech and life sciences startups here, that also meant its portfolio wasn’t very diverse. The incestuous nature of Silicon Valley startups means gossip is a contact sport, because everyone here is hopelessly entwined with everyone else.

I don’t know if this is going to lead to bigger problems. It could! A lot of other banks are also losing money on their securities. But the gossipy nature of Silicon Valley, and the fact that so many of these firms are entwined, made the possibility of a bank run higher for SVB than it was for other places. Right now, rumors are flying in WhatsApp groupchats full of founders scrambling for cash. I suspect, too, that we’ll start seeing scammers attempting to target panicky technology brothers, to extract even more cash from them.

I don’t know what’s going to happen now, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. I do know, though, that SVB’s leadership weren’t the only ones who fucked up. This was the second big bank failure in a single week, suggesting our regulators were asleep at the wheel. And who was the primary regulator for both banks? Why, our friends at the Fed,

Has the 3D printing revolution finally arrived?

Has the 3D printing revolution finally arrived? Car engines, bespoke medicines, organs for transplant, food, fashion and now even a whole street of houses… Is the all-conquering promise of 3D printing finally coming true?

Nori bricks, which were first fired in the Lancashire town of Accrington in 1887, quickly became legendary as the hardest brick ever produced. Their strength, derived from the chemical properties of the local clay, enabled megastructures to rise up around the world, including the Blackpool Tower in 1894 and the Empire State Building in New York in 1930. Their name is said to be a cock-up from when they meant to write “iron” on the works’ chimney.

This year a different, though equally pioneering, construction material is set to bring attention to the town, which is 20 miles north of Manchester and whose most recent claim to fame is being trash-talked in a 1989 advert for milk. On Charter Street, on a patch of disused land owned by the council, there are plans to build 46 net-zero-carbon homes, ranging from single-bedroom apartments to four-bed houses, all occupied by low-income families or military veterans. The homes will be made not from Nori bricks, but from 3D-extruded concrete. When the development is complete, potentially in late 2023, it will be the largest printed building complex in Europe.

‘Not going to beg’: why entrepreneurs of color are increasingly self-funding

Raising funds from investors is unfavorable for marginalized founders, who face racial bias in the world of venture capital

Rechelle Balanzat, an Asian-American founder, has led her startup Juliette, a self-funded, app-enabled dry-cleaning startup since 2014. As a double minority in tech, Balanzat said she faced gender bias with investors, and also encountered investors who inflicted racial bias. Investors would often expect Balanzat to speak with an accent and if not they were amazed she could speak English, she said.

Balanzat said her decision to self-fund her startup was born out of necessity. In fact, she is not the only founder of color that finds venture capital fundraising to feel more like a marathon than a sprint. In actuality, many report that the process can feel more like running on a hamster wheel, endless and with no positive outcome.

White House backs bill that could give it power to ban TikTok nationwide

The bill would allow commerce department to impose restrictions on technologies that pose a risk to national security

The White House said it backed legislation introduced on Tuesday by a dozen senators to give the administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.

The endorsement boosts efforts by a number of lawmakers to ban the popular ByteDance-owned app, which is used by more than 100 million Americans.

Making Deepfakes Gets Cheaper and Easier Thanks to A.I.

Making Deepfakes Gets Cheaper and Easier Thanks to A.I. Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.

samedi 11 mars 2023

USD Coin value falls after revealing $3.3bn held at Silicon Valley Bank

The stablecoin fell as low as $0.87 as Circle broke the news that its reserves were at the collapsed lender

The value of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, USD Coin (USDC), slumped to an all-time low on Saturday after Circle, the US firm behind the coin, revealed that $3.3bn of the reserves backing it were held at Silicon Valley Bank.

USDC is a stablecoin – cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value – USDC’s value is supposed to mimic the dollar. But the coin broke its 1:1 dollar peg and fell as low as $0.87 on Saturday morning.

Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Sets Off Blame Game Between Crypto and Tech

Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Sets Off Blame Game Between Crypto and Tech The implosion of the Silicon Valley bank led to finger-pointing, as executives and investors jumped on the crisis for their own messaging.

How to edit ProRAW photos on your iPhone

Hand holding iPhone showing back of phone with camera against illustrated background. — *Edit your ProRAW photo like a pro.* | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Apple’s ProRAW camera feature is a powerful tool to have in your back pocket. An image taken in ProRAW mode combines the same great post-processing flexibility of a traditional RAW file with the benefits of multi-frame computational photography. Kind of the best of both worlds! But once you’ve gone through the steps to enable it on your iPhone and have taken your photo, that’s when the real work starts: processing and converting it to a shareable format like JPEG, PNG, or HEIF.

ProRAW files are saved in Adobe’s ubiquitous DNG format, which is compatible with virtually every RAW photo editing app under the sun. That means you have a lot of options, including just sending the file to a computer and using desktop software. But you don’t need access to a computer — you can process your image right on your phone, either using a third-party app or Apple’s own editing tools. Here’s how to go about it. (I followed these steps on an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 16.3.1.)

Editing and sharing a ProRAW photo with Apple Photos

You don’t need to download a separate app to edit ProRAW DNG files — Apple’s own Photos app will do the job. A third-party app will give you a lot more control, but for quick and basic functions like boosting exposure, Apple’s app is just fine.

Open your RAW photo and tap edit in the top right of the screen
If you’re viewing your image in the camera app gallery, the edit options will appear at the bottom of the screen
Scroll through the adjustment options below your image and use the tools you would like
You can tap the three-ring filter icon at the bottom of the screen to apply a filter. This is not to be confused with Apple’s Photographic Styles, which are “baked in” to the capture process
If you need to rotate the photo, use the crop tool, the icon on the bottom right of the editing pane
Tap Done at the bottom right of your screen to save your changes. There’s no option to save it as a separate image, but you can always revert your changes to the original by opening it again in the Photos app, tapping the three-dot menu icon in the upper right, and choosing Revert to Original.

Once you’ve made edits to your RAW file, you can use the Photos app’s sharing functions to export a JPEG version of your image. You can email it, post it to Instagram, or put it on your digital picture frame — it’s your choice.

Screenshot of an image in edit view of Apple Photos app. — *Apple’s Photos app provides basic editing functions.*

Screenshot of final image and app sharing options. — *Once you’re happy with your edits, you can use any of the sharing functions, and the app will automatically share a JPEG.*

How to export a ProRAW file from your iPhone

So what if you want to export the original RAW image? That’s a little tricky. Once you’ve made edits in the Photos app, you can’t easily share the original DNG file. The only exception is if you’re AirDropping your image to a Mac. If that’s the case, there’s a way to send both the original file and a JPEG with your edits. Here’s how:

Scroll to your photo in the Photos app and tap the share / export icon in the lower left
Tap Options at the top of the screen
Toggle All Photos Data on and press Done
Tap the Airdrop icon below the image and choose your destination
On the Mac, tap Accept and Save to Downloads when prompted. This creates a folder in Downloads with both the DNG file and your edited JPEG.

If you aren’t AirDropping to a Mac and you want to save your DNG file somewhere else, you’ll have to make a copy of your edited RAW and revert changes.

In the Photos app, scroll to your image and tap the three-dot menu icon in the upper right
Tap Duplicate, then tap the three-dot menu and select Revert to Original
Tap the export icon in the lower left and choose how you’d like to send your file

Screenshot of a menu showing toggle for All Photos Data. — *You can AirDrop your edited JPEG and original DNG file to a Mac by toggling All Photos Data on in sharing options.*

Screenshot of a menu showing options to duplicate and revert changes to photo. — *If you want to share your original DNG file without AirDrop, you’ll need to duplicate your image, revert changes, and share that version.*

If you want a PNG or HEIF of your image rather than a JPEG, you need to follow a couple of extra steps. You can either directly convert an unedited DNG or make your edits in Apple Photos first and then convert the resulting JPEG to a PNG or HEIF — not ideal if you want to minimize compression, but it works. Here’s what to do:

Scroll to the image in Apple Photos and tap the share / export icon
Scroll down and tap Save to Files
Pick the folder you want to save to and tap Save
Open the Files app and locate your image
Long press the image thumbnail and tap Quick Actions
Select Convert image
Choose your format (JPEG, PNG, or HEIF) as well as image size (Small, Medium, Large, or Original)
Your converted image will be saved to the same folder

Screenshot showing a thumbnail image with a menu of options including Convert Image. — *To save your photo in another format, save it to Files and find the Convert Image option under Quick Actions.*

Screenshot showing file type options for image conversion. — *You can convert a DNG to a JPEG, PNG, or HEIF file.*

Editing a ProRAW photo with a third-party app

If you have a photo-editing app that you’d prefer to use instead of Photos, that’s not a problem. You can start by either opening the Apple Photos app or by opening the photo editing app you want to use.

If you start in Photos, do the following:

Find the image you want to edit and tap the export / share icon at the bottom left of the screen
Scroll through the suggested app icons just below the image. If your editor is there, tap the icon to open your file in the app
If you don’t see the app icon you’re looking for, tap the three-dot More icon for additional options
Exporting your RAW file this way will only work if you haven’t made any edits to the photo in the Photos app. If you edited it there first, it will export as a JPEG.

If you prefer to start in your photo editing app of choice, just follow that app’s procedure for importing a new image. For example, in Snapseed — my favorite free editor — that’s just a matter of opening the app, tapping the plus icon and choosing Open from Device.

This smart oven solved my work-from-home lunchtime conundrum

Tovala reinvents the TV dinner with its connected oven combined with a meal delivery service that cooks healthy, delicious meals in under 20 minutes. But as a smart oven, it’s a disappointment.

The one thing no one tells you about working from home is that you have to make your own lunch. And my midday eating habits have become dire. It’s hard to whip up something in 10 minutes that’s healthy, tastes good, and doesn’t exist between two slices of bread — I hate sandwiches, and I don’t live near any quick lunch spots. I’ve tried all sorts of “easy” options — ready-to-eat supermarket offerings to bland and soggy microwave meals — only to be disappointed, as I always am by TV dinner-style options. Then, I met the Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer.

Tovala’s latest oven is a $250 smart countertop appliance designed to cook the company’s fresh meal kits perfectly. A built-in scanner lets you just pop the food in, scan a QR code that comes with the kit, and in under 20 minutes, a tasty meal is ready. The oven can also scan a selection of store-bought groceries and works as a standard countertop oven.

The Tovala meals were really good, transforming my weekday meal experiences from an unsatisfying hassle to simple and yummy. I enjoyed Italian sausage and vegetable minestrone on Wednesday, tandoori spiced chicken breast on Thursday, a Korean BBQ salmon bowl on Friday (this was so tasty), and a sweet hoisin beef and veggie bowl the following Monday.

But I didn’t find the oven’s scan-to-cook feature all that helpful outside of Tovala’s meals. With no option to customize the preset cooking functions, I was occasionally left with food that was slightly undercooked for my taste. As an air fryer, the Tovala was nowhere near as good as my $100 Ninja, and it was also underwhelming as a smart oven. (Although, as a category, smart ovens are still finding their way.)

I tested Tovala’s newest model, the Smart Oven Air Fryer ($249). The Wi-Fi-connected oven can toast, air fry (it comes with a basket), bake, reheat, and broil. It’s the company’s third model following its launch on Kickstarter in 2017. Tovala also sells the Tovala Smart Oven Pro ($299, with the addition of a steam oven).

Tovala’s meal kits are what make the Tovala Smart Oven worth buying, and you can really only cook those meals with the Tovala oven — there are no instructions for cooking them any other way. You can buy the oven for just $99 if you sign up for six weeks’ worth of meals — which start at around $60 a week plus shipping — over six months.

It’s not that the Tovala oven can only cook Tovala meals — I could scan to cook various brand-name groceries, follow along with some recipes in the app to make my own dishes from scratch, or just use it as a regular oven. But it’s much better at cooking the Tovala meals than anything else, which makes this more of a meal kit subscription with a connected oven than a true smart oven.

While the concept of a smart oven is still being refined, I expected more than just preprogrammed recipes. The cooking function here is probably the smartest thing about it — custom cook cycles switch between multiple cooking modes and different temperatures automatically.

*The Tovala comes with an air fry basket, a sheet tray, and an oven glove.*

Compared to, say, a June smart oven, which uses AI to identify food and cook it accurately, the Tovala is less impressive (also several hundred dollars cheaper). The Tovala’s only smart home integration is Siri Shortcuts (no Alexa or Google Assistant voice control). App control is limited to sending a program to the oven and getting an alert when it’s done. You can’t start or stop the oven remotely or adjust temperatures on the fly as you can with other connected cookers.

I also couldn’t sync the oven with any of my favorite recipe apps or another meal delivery service — not even to send the correct temperature to the oven. Ecosystem lock-in isn’t unusual in the smart kitchen space, where cross-platform compatibility is fragmented and spotty. But all I want is a smart oven that I can send any recipe to and then cook it with the push of a button with no programming required. Why is that so hard?

While the Tovala does let you manually program any recipe to the oven using the app, its smart features work best with its own food. After testing the oven for two weeks, I would recommend buying it if you plan to use the meal kits at least occasionally, but not as a standalone smart oven.

Tovala’s fresh meals are excellent and easy to cook

*You cook all the parts of the Tovala meal kit at the same time by just scanning a QR code and pressing start.*

Tovala supplied me with eight meals during my test period, delivered fresh to my door in well-thought-out packaging. And everything was very good. Not only were the dishes easy to make but also there were actual flavor profiles, great texture combinations, and plenty of add-ons to make each meal look and taste varied and interesting.

The oven also cooked everything perfectly — doing a better job in a shorter time than I could have managed if I had tried to make any of these from scratch. I enjoyed what tasted like a home-cooked meal every lunchtime with little to no effort on my part. That’s a win in my book.

Unlike some meal delivery services, there’s no chopping, marinading, preheating, or prepping — you put it all in the oven at once, press a button, and out comes a perfectly cooked meal. It’s the microwave oven meal reimagined to taste better. This is clearly a need in the category; Blue Apron recently added ready-to-cook meals, and many services now offer prep-free options.

With Tovala, everything — carbohydrate, protein, veggies — goes in simultaneously (sometimes in different containers). The oven uses custom cook cycles that switch between multiple cooking modes and different temperatures to cook every part of the meal perfectly. Then, once done, you assemble it on a plate or bowl and eat.

For example, to make the pictured Korean BBQ salmon bowl, I unpacked the small brown box that contained everything I needed, including a recipe card, a piece of vacuum-wrapped salmon, a bag of broccoli, some sauce packets, and two aluminum trays, one of which had uncooked rice in it.

Following the directions on the included card (which are also in the Tovala app), I put the broccoli in the tray with the rice, put the salmon in the other tray, and covered it with the sauce. Both trays went in the oven, and I scanned the QR code.

Seventeen minutes later, out came perfectly cooked rice and just-right salmon. I assembled everything in a bowl, stirred in the provided sesame sauce, and added the optional toppings of pickled cucumbers and crunchy noodles.

*The Korean BBQ salmon bowl was very good.*

The app sent a notification to my phone when the dish was done — so I could keep working until the food was ready and then sit down and enjoy my meal rather than spending 20 minutes cooking and trying to eat quickly to get back to work. The one hiccup I had was that the scanning function only works with an internet connection. My Wi-Fi went down one lunchtime, and I couldn’t cook the meal kit by scanning the code. I did eventually find some instructions for cooking without Wi-Fi on the Tovala support site (and the oven still works as a regular oven without internet).

Overall, it was so easy that I wished I could use it for dinner, too, but the Tovala service isn’t designed for my family of four. You can only cook up to two portions at a time, making it best suited for one or two people. But it worked as a solo lunchtime option, and I was impressed with the quality and taste.

The meal service is also not cheap. Meals start at $10 each, and most are around $13. There’s a minimum of four meals per week (with a maximum of 16), and including the flat rate of $10 shipping, my four meals cost $60 to $70 per week, around $15 to $17 per meal. That’s much more expensive than a $4 Trader Joe’s frozen chicken tikka masala — but also way tastier and more filling. It’s also cheaper and, on balance, probably healthier than Uber Eats or Grubhub. The menu choices were limited, though, especially if you’re a vegetarian or on any restricted diet. It doesn’t appear to have the breadth of options of some bigger meal services.

As a smart oven, Tovala isn’t so hot

*The Tovala is a pretty standard countertop oven.*

While the oven costs $250 as a standalone purchase, you don’t need to use Tovala’s meal kits or commit to any subscription to use it, so it’s something of a bargain for a smart oven. The June smart oven starts at $900 and the Brava at $1,295. Then there are highly rated “smart” countertop ovens, like the Breville Smart Oven Pro, for around $300. These generally aren’t connected but are more advanced than your standard toaster oven, with preset cooking options, multiple cooking modes, and other features that make cooking easier.

However, all of these options are, first and foremost, very good ovens — the June (which I have tested) and the Brava (which I have not) deploy innovative heating techniques for faster cook times. (The Brava can cook three zones independently.) The Breville is a very well-reviewed oven. It’s a Wirecutter favorite, and my parents have one and love it.

Compared to these ovens, the Tovala felt a bit basic, which shouldn’t be surprising for the price. The times I ventured outside of the meal kits, the results were disappointing. My Eggo waffles were underdone — despite scanning the Eggo box, as were my MorningStar Mozzarella Sticks.

*The Tovala’s air fryer mode was no match for my Ninja. The nuggets on the right were from the Tovala, and the ones on the left were from the Ninja.*

Air frying was lackluster compared to my Ninja Air Fryer. I cooked chicken nuggets in both at the same temperature and for the same amount of time, and the Ninja won hands down. The Tovala specifically bills itself as an air fryer, so this was a disappointment.

Tovala also offers step-by-step recipes in its app for making dishes from scratch. There is a decent selection, and this would be handy for beginner chefs. I didn’t get a chance to test many of these out, as I was feeding four to six people each night, and this oven just can’t handle that. But I did use it for a few side dishes and found the reheat button useful — this also cycles through cooking modes and does a better job than my microwave at evenly reheating and crisping up leftovers.

The couple of Tovala recipes I did try weren’t super successful, however. My deviled eggs popped and leaked all over the oven, and when I tried a second batch, the preset cook cycle wouldn’t let me shorten the cooking time. And the air-fried carrots came out distinctly soggy rather than nicely crisp.

While I like the oven’s simple physical controls (no fiddly touchscreen), I found them a bit limiting. For example, I couldn’t dial in a specific temperature; it only allowed me to enter in temperatures in 25-degree increments, so 375 or 400 degrees Fahrenheit and nothing in between.

*The Tovala Oven has simple, easy-to-use physical controls and a very handy reheat button.*

For a single person or a couple who likes fresh food but is too busy to shop and cook, Tovala offers a useful solution if you’re fine with a more basic countertop oven outside of cooking Tovala meals. (This is not the oven to try if you want to give air frying a whirl.) While there are plenty of other meal kit options out there, the added convenience of an oven that’s specially programmed to cook your meal to perfection takes all the prep and guesswork out of the process.

As a lunch option for a busy work-from-home mom, the Tovala is very tempting. If it could replace my Ninja, this would be a must-buy for me. But my chicken nugget eater roundly rejected Tovala’s attempts to cook her favorite food, and I don’t have room for two countertop ovens. And what is parenting, if not many small sacrifices?

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

For Palestinian Tech Worker in Israel, Pride, Frustration and 4-Hour Commute

For Palestinian Tech Worker in Israel, Pride, Frustration and 4-Hour Commute Moha Alshawamreh is among the few Palestinians who work in Israel’s tech industry. His commute shows both the inequities of life in the West Bank and an exception to them.

vendredi 10 mars 2023

Tesla cuts prices for its most expensive electric vehicles to drive demand

Cuts range from 4% on performance version of Model S to 9% on more expensive Model X

Tesla has cut prices on its two most expensive electric vehicles in the United States, according to the company’s website, days after its chief executive, Elon Musk, said recent price cuts on other models had stoked demand.

The price cuts, Tesla’s fifth adjustment since the start of the year, ranged from 4% on the performance version of the Model S to 9% on the more expensive Model X.

A Representative Goes to A.I. School, and How to Ban TikTok

A Representative Goes to A.I. School, and How to Ban TikTok Also, how Waluigi may explain why A.I. chatbots are misbehaving.

jeudi 9 mars 2023

Meta is cutting its Reels Play bonus program on Instagram and Facebook

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Short-form video creators on Instagram and Facebook will soon lose one way of making money on the platforms.

Meta is ending its Reels Play bonus program, which rewards content creators when they hit certain goals for views on their videos. The change, first reported by Business Insider, will affect creators on Facebook and US creators on Instagram. The company won’t offer any new or renewed Reels Play bonus deals, but will honor existing commitments over the next 30 days, according to Business Insider.

“We are evolving the test of our Reels Play bonus on Instagram and Facebook as we focus on investing in a suite of monetization solutions to help creators earn steady streams of income,” Paige Cohen, a Meta spokesperson, told The Verge in an email. “We will look into ways to run the program in a more targeted form, for example in potential new markets.”

The Reels bonus program has had its ups and downs since Meta launched it in 2021 to try to compete with TikTok. Initially, creators saw huge payouts — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. But over the course of 2022, some creators reported that payments had been shrinking and that it was becoming harder to make the same amount in bonuses.

Cohen noted that creators can still earn money through things like subscriptions and brand partnerships. The Reels bonuses were part of Meta’s two-year, $1 billion pool of money that the company promised would go to creators through 2022.

Similar incentives at other companies have also slowly been shrinking. There was something of a gold rush on Snapchat in 2020 when the company announced it would pay $1 million a day for hit content on its TikTok-esque feature, Spotlight. That amount was gradually cut over the course of 2022, and other monetization methods like ad revenue sharing were introduced. YouTube initially offered cash payouts to get creators to make content for its TikTok clone, Shorts, but announced it was moving to a revenue sharing model last fall.

Other companies like TikTok are retooling creator funds and incentivizing new types of content. The short-form video app recently announced an updated fund that only rewards creators who make videos longer than one minute. Monetization directly from platforms has been an issue: under the original TikTok fund, some creators reported low earnings even for viral videos.

Starbucks sold 2,000 NFTs in 20 minutes — coffee not included

Image: Starbucks

It’s been more than a year since NFT sales peaked — and then collapsed — but that’s not stopping enterprising multi-billion dollar corporations from trying to get in on the action.

Starbucks launched its first paid collection of NFTs today, a group of 2,000 digital “stamps,” each priced at $100. Starbucks calls its NFTs “Journey Stamps,” a less technical-sounding term that the uninitiated might use as a way to explain what they just spent money on. And people did buy them — CoinDesk reports that the “stamps” sold out in under 20 minutes.

The coffee company first launched its NFT and Web3 push in December, when it opened up a new membership program called Starbucks Odyssey. An extension of the existing Starbucks rewards program that gives customers perks like free drink upgrades, Odyssey promises to deliver new benefits and “immersive coffee experiences that [customers] cannot get anywhere else” as members complete games, quizzes, and make purchases. Rewards might include virtual classes, access to merchandise, or a trip to a Starbucks coffee farm at higher membership tiers. Free coffee, notably, isn’t listed as a possible reward. Purchasing an NFT gives members additional “points” that they can use to level up their tier.

Dozens of big brands have wrung the NFT towel dry over the past couple years. A non-exhaustive list: Taco Bell, Nike, Adidas, Paramount, GameStop, a bunch of celebrities via a revamped LimeWire, the NBA, CNN, and the list goes on. What’s particularly odd about the Starbucks NFTs is that they’re coming so late, though the most devout Starbucks and crypto fans did scoop them up. According to Nifty Gateway, 1,164 people own an NFT from the new collection.

As a casual Starbucks drinker, seeing a new membership program made me think of one thing: how my Starbucks “stars” are worth less now under the updated rewards program that the company announced earlier this year. You could call it shrink-flation for the original virtual coffee tokens. And when times are tough for rewards programs, I suppose selling off a slew of new digital tokens makes sense — especially when there are people who’ll buy them.

Best podcasts of the week: Civil rights activist James Meredith reflects on his remarkable life

In this week’s newsletter: The first Black student at the University of Mississippi looks back at segregation and his activism and legacy in Breaking Mississippi. Plus: five of the best Oscars podcasts

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Northern News
Widely available, episodes weekly
“Mum Finds Soggy Whole Potato in her Packet of Cheese and Onion Crisps!” That’s just one of the headlines that “northerners-in-London” comedians Amy Gledhill and Ian Smith are catching up on in local newspapers from back home in the opener of this fun, breezy series. As they check in on the happenings up north, they’re joined by guests such as Maisie Adam, Isy Suttie, Tim Key, Phil Wang, Rosie Jones and Nick Helm. Hollie Richardson

When Quitting Videos Go Viral

When Quitting Videos Go Viral On TikTok and YouTube, workers are sharing their stories of leaving their jobs, giving them a sense of power over often untenable situations.

Green gold: Torrefied biomass to replace coal and oil

Green gold: Torrefied biomass to replace coal and oil In February, the Estonian-based startup New Standard Oil successfully commissioned their first industrial-scale prototype for drying and torrefaction of biogenic feedstock operating with superheated steam at atmospheric pressure. The energy-efficient process was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart, Germany, and produces valuable raw materials for the chemical and energy industries: basic chemicals, biocoal and water.

mercredi 8 mars 2023

Sensitive personal data of US House and Senate members hacked, offered for sale

Breach in the systems of DC Health Link, a health insurance company, led to 170,000 records being compromised

Members of the House and Senate were informed Wednesday that hackers may have gained access to their sensitive personal data in a breach of a Washington, DC, health insurance marketplace. Employees of the lawmakers and their families were also affected.

DC Health Link confirmed that data on an unspecified number of customers was affected and said it was notifying them and working with law enforcement. It said it was offering identity theft service to those affected and extending credit monitoring to all customers.

Uh-oh! The crypto collapse has reached the real financial system

Liquidity trouble? | Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Update, March 8th, 7PM ET: Silvergate has announced it is shutting down, the original story follows below.

Silvergate, one of the most important banks in crypto, is in big trouble. Maybe existential trouble.

Silvergate didn’t start in crypto. It started in real estate. But in January 2014, the bank jumped into Bitcoin, a volatile year — Bitcoin started the year at $770 and closed above $300 in December. “Some of the companies that were being formed at the time to provide services to this budding Bitcoin space, many of them were struggling to find and maintain bank accounts,” said Silvergate CEO Alan Lane in a June 2022 episode of the Odd Lots podcast. “So that was really where we started.”

The focus at the bank was institutions — other companies, some of which work with consumers. For instance, Genesis, the now-bankrupt crypto-lending subsidiary of DCG, was among Silvergate’s early clients. The bank developed the Silvergate Exchange Network, which was a way for crypto institutions such as Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken to transact in dollars 24/7. “We’ve got all of them,” Lane said in 2022. “All of the major ones. Anybody who is serious about regulation.”

Also among Lane’s clients: FTX. Federal prosecutors are now examining Silvergate’s role in banking Sam Bankman-Fried’s fallen empire. The more pressing problem is that the collapse of FTX spooked other Silvergate customers, resulting in an $8.1 billion run on the bank: 60 percent of its deposits that walked out the door in just one quarter. (“Worse than that experienced by the average bank to close in the Great Depression,” The Wall Street Journal helpfully explained.)

In its earnings filing, we found out that Silvergate’s results last quarter were absolute dogshit, a $1 billion loss. Then, on March 1st, Silvergate entered a surprise regulatory filing. It says that, actually, the quarterly results were even worse, and it’s not clear the bank will be able to stay in business.

In response, Coinbase, Galaxy Digital, Crypto.com, Circle, and Paxos have said they will stop using Silvergate — as did other, less notable clients. Tether, the controversial stablecoin that has had its own problems with banking, helpfully popped up to remind us it was not using Silvergate.

The laundry list of customers helps to explain why Silvergate’s woes are frightening. Very few banks will touch crypto because it’s so risky — and most traditional banks don’t let crypto clients transact in dollars 24/7. Access to banking that moves at the pace crypto does is rare, and only one other US bank can do it.

“If Silvergate goes out of business, it’s going to push funds and market makers further offshore,” Ava Labs president John Wu told Barron’s. The issue is how easy it is to get into actual cash dollars, which in finance-speak is called liquidity. Less liquidity makes transactions more difficult. Already there is a broader gap between the price at which a trade is expected to go through at and the actual price at which it executes, Wu said.

So Silvergate’s troubles are a problem for the entire crypto industry.

Stablecoins

Silvergate’s SEN was an important on- and off-ramp from the almighty dollar (and the almighty euro) into crypto. In 2022, Lane said all the “regulated, US-dollar backed stablecoin issuers” banked at Silvergate.

But for stablecoins issued by Circle, Paxos, and Gemini, among others, the SEN was important for making and burning their tokens, which were issued when someone deposited a dollar in their Silvergate bank accounts, Lane said.

Silvergate was a pass-through point for crypto. Stablecoins that are backed by dollars at least theoretically have cash or cash-like assets sitting in reserve somewhere. (The reason Tether is controversial is that there are questions about the existence and value of that reserve.) Silvergate’s job was to create a token when someone put a dollar into, say, USDC and to burn a token when someone took a dollar out. “We are this critical piece of infrastructure where folks, as they’re exiting the ecosystem and wanting to go to cash — those dollars pass through Silvergate,” Lane said in 2022.

You’ll notice I’m saying “was.” That’s because on March 3, Silvergate announced it was suspending SEN, effective immediately.

The dollar side of the transaction meant that Silvergate’s clients had to keep a bunch of cash on hand at the bank in order to pay each other and anyone who wanted to cash out. To make money here, Silvergate could do a few things. The safest is to buy, like, one-month Treasury bills at the Fed and call it a day.

Now, this being finance, taking more risk also may mean more profit. So Silvergate seems to have bought bonds. (Verge favorite Matt Levine at Bloomberg has a more in-depth analysis of how this worked if you want the gory details.) The problem is not that the bonds were super risky — it is that FTX sparked a mass exodus into dollars, and Silvergate suddenly had to come up with a bunch of money. Unfortunately, that meant selling its bonds at a loss in order to pay its obligations. Ironically, the bonds were pretty safe — “if its depositors had kept their money at Silvergate, its bonds would have matured with plenty of money to pay them back,” notes Levine.

Silvergate has another way of touching stablecoins besides serving as the on- and off-ramp for their transactions. It bought assets from Facebook’s doomed stablecoin attempt Libra, later renamed Diem, in January 2022. At the time, Silvergate said it would start making Diem available by the end of the year. The goal was a digital payments network.

Of course, that was before FTX blew up, and the Enron guy said it was worse than Enron. That’s the kind of thing that tends to change the regulatory environment.

Lending against Bitcoin

One of the other services Silvergate offered was the ability to lend dollars against Bitcoin. Now, Silvergate said in January on its fourth quarter earnings call that “all of our SEN Leverage loans continued to perform as expected, with no losses or forced liquidations.” Maybe these loans are fine! Silvergate doesn’t appear to have done anything exceptionally risky elsewhere.

But if you want to use your Bitcoin to take out a dollar loan, I think that just got harder.

Real estate

Silvergate had a life before crypto: it was a tiny bank focused on real estate deals in southern California. During that time, it never had more than $1 billion in deposits, according to The Financial Times. And Silvergate needed deposits. When Lane steered the company into crypto, its business ballooned. By 2021, Silvergate had more than $10 billion. The bank went public in 2019 at $12 a share and peaked at over $200 a share in 2021. (Shares closed at $5.77 on March 3.)

Real estate became less and less of a focus because crypto was a rocket ship for the bank. But that real estate connection proved useful for Silvergate in 2022, though. In the last quarter of the year, Silvergate got at least $3.6 billion in funds from Federal Home Loan Banks, a 1930s-era system that also originally dealt in mortgages.

To pay that off, Silvergate sold off more bonds. This is not ideal, and it is part of the reason Silvergate is in trouble. “If you are a bank you do not want to be pointing in the wrong direction, because that becomes self-fulfilling,” writes Bloomberg’s Levine. And indeed, this is why many of Silvergate’s major customers are spooked. Levine thinks that this may get some regulators interested in crypto banking.

Bizarre transactions

In fact, the Justice Department is already interested. There are some questions around bizarre transactions that took place at Silvergate.

For instance, Binance. Its supposedly independent arm, Binance.US, transferred more than $400 million to a trading firm called Merit Peak Ltd, Reuters reported. That firm is managed by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. “The CEO of Binance.US at the time, Catherine Coley, wrote to a Binance finance executive in late 2020 asking for an explanation for the transfers, calling them ‘unexpected’ and saying ‘no one mentioned them,’” Reuters wrote. Those transfers took place on Silvergate’s special network, SEN.

This is similar to some of the problems Silvergate faces around FTX. Alameda Research, the trading firm also owned by Bankman-Fried, opened an account with Silvergate in 2018. Bankman-Fried admitted he used Alameda accounts for FTX funds, commingling customer funds with those for the trading firm.

I don’t know if Silvergate did anything wrong. Possibly it didn’t! But having the Feds start poking around, asking questions? That is a headache and a distraction. It is the last thing a troubled bank needs.

What to expect

A lot of companies that banked with Silvergate have been out here talking about how they have minimal exposure to it, which is historically not a great sign. (See: Bankman-Fried’s notorious “FTX is fine. Assets are fine” tweet.)

But you know what? In this specific case, I’m inclined to believe them. First of all, just a fuckload of money has already left Silvergate. But second, Silvergate was a pass-through bank for crypto; it didn’t hold onto reserves, and it didn’t pay interest. The problem here is less that some exchange or stablecoin is going to suffer a massive loss of customer money and more that it is now even harder for crypto companies to get banking.

The crypto industry desperately needs banks. But both of Silvergate’s competitors, Metropolitan and Signature, were pulling away from the sector even before this debacle. Metropolitan said in January that it was getting all the way out of crypto. And in December, Signature said it was going to get rid of $8 billion to $10 billion in digital asset-related funds.

I don’t know whether Silvergate is going to come through this. But I strongly suspect it has just gotten a lot harder to exchange dollars and crypto. Silvergate dealt in liquidity, and a liquidity problem can become a solvency problem real fast. The entire crypto industry just got a lot more fragile.

Silvergate has collapsed

A coin is set aflame to reveal a digital wireframe underneath. — Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Silvergate Bank, which had been a cornerstone in the crypto world, announced it’s closing and returning deposits. In a press release, the bank’s holding company, Silvergate Capital Corporation, said it made the decision to shut down “in light of recent industry and regulatory developments.”

It’s been clear for a while that the company was struggling along with some of its most high-profile clients like FTX and Genesis. In January, its earnings report revealed that it lost a billion dollars in one quarter after its customers withdrew $8.1 billion. Then, on March 1st, it filed a document saying its financials were even worse than the quarterly report had shown.

There are several concerns about what the crypto landscape will look like without Silvergate, especially when it comes to where companies will turn to get cash. My colleague Elizabeth Lopatto has done an excellent job summarizing a lot of them in this explainer. One of the major concerns is that crypto companies may turn to less regulated institutions for their banking needs, potentially making the space even riskier for everyone involved. In other words, if there isn’t a bank playing by the rules willing to do business with them, they may have to find a bank that doesn’t.

As for the next steps for the bank, it’s liquidating “in an orderly manner and in accordance with applicable regulatory processes” and is “considering how best to resolve claims and preserve the residual value of its assets, including its proprietary technology and tax assets.”

It also shut down its Silvergate Exchange Network, which let crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken move money between themselves and other institutions earlier this month.

As all of this has been going down, companies like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Paxos have started moving away from the bank. Even the Tether stablecoin took the opportunity to distance itself from the institution. Its list of allies was thin, and the government was scrutinizing it for its role in the FTX meltdown.

Silvergate’s collapse will almost surely draw scrutiny from lawmakers, especially those who are concerned about the crypto contagion reaching the traditional financial sector.

“Today we are seeing what can happen when a bank is overreliant on a risky, volatile sector like cryptocurrencies,” said Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who is the chair of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. “I’ve been concerned that when banks get involved with crypto, it spreads risk across the financial system and it will be taxpayers and consumers who pay the price.”

mardi 7 mars 2023

White House backs bill that could give it power to ban TikTok nationwide

The bill would allow commerce department to impose restrictions on technologies that pose a risk to national security

The endorsement boosts efforts by a number of lawmakers to ban the popular ByteDance-owned app, which is used by more than 100 million Americans.

F.T.C. Intensifies Investigation of Twitter’s Privacy Practices

F.T.C. Intensifies Investigation of Twitter’s Privacy Practices The commission is seeking an interview with Elon Musk, who has made major cuts at the company since acquiring it last year.

Twitch says deepfake porn is now grounds for instaban — here’s why

It’s been five full years since most online platforms made it crystal clear that face-swapped porn is not okay — but not Twitch, apparently. Today, in a blog post titled “Addressing Explicit Deepfake Content,” the livestreaming service now says that synthetic non-consensual exploitative images (NCEI) will not be tolerated.

Even a brief unintentional glimpse at those sorts of images “will be removed and will result in an enforcement,” the company writes. And if you intentionally promote, create, or share deepfake porn, that’s grounds for an instaban: doing that “can result in an indefinite suspension on the first offense.”

The company isn’t doing this on a whim — as BuzzFeed News and NBC News reported last month, Twitch recently had its own deepfake scandal. On January 30th, Twitch streamer Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing left a browser window open on stream that reportedly showed the faces of popular female Twitch streamers, including Pokimane, QTCinderella, and Maya Higa, “grafted onto the bodies of naked women,” as BuzzFeed tells it. In a tearful apology stream, Atrioc admitted he visited a deepfake site out of “morbid curiosity” about the images. “I just clicked a fucking link at 2AM, and the morals didn’t catch up to me,” he said while promising never to do anything like that again.

Needless to say, those female streamers weren’t happy.

I want to scream.
Stop.
Everybody fucking stop. Stop spreading it. Stop advertising it. Stop.
Being seen “naked” against your will should NOT BE A PART OF THIS JOB.

Thank you to all the male internet “journalists” reporting on this issue. Fucking losers @HUN2R
— QTCinderella (@qtcinderella) January 30, 2023

pic.twitter.com/VqtcwGlZUq
— Maya (@mayahiga) February 1, 2023

stop sexualizing people without their consent.

that’s it, that’s the tweet.
— pokimane (@pokimanelol) January 31, 2023

This story was how I found out that I'm on this website. I literally choose to pass up millions by not going into sex work and some random cheeto encrusted porn addict solicits my body without my consent instead. Don't know whether to cry, break stuff or laugh at this point. https://t.co/voNoxRyVBd
— Sweet Anita (@sweetanita) January 30, 2023

It’s not clear if Twitch took any enforcement action against Atrioc at the time — the company didn’t immediately respond to a fact-check request — but the new policy makes it clear that at least some action would be taken.

Twitch does tend to clamp down on accounts sharing sexual images, even when they accidentally make their way into a livestream. Atrioc himself was previously banned for showing a flaccid penis on screen, according to streaming news site Win.gg, and Pokimane famously got a warning (not a ban) after accidentally opening PornHub in a browser tab. But Twitch’s previous stance on deepfakes was extremely limited: it only mentioned them in the context of “sharing negative doctored or artistic content to abuse or degrade another person.”

Twitch did previously prohibit “broadcasting or uploading content that contains depictions of real nudity” and threatened instabans for “sexual violence and exploitation,” however.

Originally, QTCinderella vowed to sue the deepfake porn site that Atrioc brought to the world’s attention, but she’s since told NBC News that she’s given up: “Every single lawyer I’ve talked to essentially have come to the conclusion that we don’t have a case; there’s no way to sue the guy.”

We reported on the legality of deepfake porn back in 2018, and... things haven’t necessarily improved much since. According to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, only four US states have deepfake laws that aren’t specific to political elections. The UK, EU, and China are looking into crackdowns, too.

A New ‘MAS*H’ Scene: Written by ChatGPT, Read by Hawkeye and B.J.

A New ‘M*A*S*H’ Scene: Written by ChatGPT, Read by Hawkeye and B.J. Alan Alda, the star of the long-running sitcom, asked the artificial intelligence software to create a script for him and his former co-star Mike Farrell to read.

Biden F.C.C. Nominee Withdraws

Biden F.C.C. Nominee Withdraws Gigi Sohn, who was first nominated by President Biden in October 2021, said she had faced “unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks” on her character and career.

Hyundai’s next-gen Kona EV is a little bigger and goes a tad further

new Kona ev in a gray-blue color parked next to a futuristic angular building with metallic planks, and the car is plugged into a charging station. — *The 2024 Hyundai Kona EV.* | Image: Hyundai

Hyundai’s Kona compact SUV got a glow-up, and now the automaker is revealing new details about the model year 2024 redesign that includes a slight range improvement for the all-electric model.

Kona EV is a relatively unsung mass-market electric SUV compared to the Tesla Model Y and Mustang Mach-E, but now it’s been redesigned from the ground up as primarily an EV. It carries a 65.4 kWh battery that enables about 304 miles (490 km) of range on a full charge based on European WLTP estimates.

The previous 2023 model Kona had a similarly sized 64 kWh battery (long range) with a European WLTP range of 301 miles (484 km). The US Environmental Protection Agency’s range estimates are generally more conservative than the WLTP; the agency rated the 2023 Kona EV’s range at 258 miles on a single charge, for example. In an email to The Verge, Hyundai’s senior manager for product and advanced powertrain PR, Derek Joyce, wrote that the US range has not yet been finalized but will be revealed at this year’s New York auto show, which is in April.

Hyundai announced the new second-generation Kona model during its digital world premiere event yesterday and oddly referred to the compact SUV as a “multiplayer” vehicle. When asked, Joyce told The Verge the company is using the term to describe “exceptional versatility,” which “helps a wide variety of people to live out their lifestyle needs with freedom, versatility and capability.” Why not.

The versatility, of course, points to its various powertrain options that include plug-in hybrid and gas models, plus sporty N-line versions of each. Hyundai Motor Company president and CEO Jaehoon Chang said in a press release that the Kona EV will “play a major role” alongside the automaker’s dedicated Ioniq EV models. The all-electric Kona runs on a 400V platform that doesn’t match the company’s 800V E-GMP platform on the Ioniq 5 and 6, as well as Kia’s EV6 and upcoming EV9 vehicles.

Hyundai says it’s increased the overall size of the 2024 Kona compared to, specifically, the 2017 version. The overall length of the new EV is now 175mm longer at 4,355mm, while the wheelbase is now 60mm longer at 2,660mm. It’s also 25mm wider at 1,825mm and 20mm taller at 1,575mm. In addition, the vehicle has a drag coefficient of 0.27. The front trunk, however, is abysmally small at 0.95 cu-ft compared to the Model Y’s 4.1 cu-ft frunk.

The 2024 Kona EV comes with more tech-oriented features, like the one-pedal “I-Pedal” driving mode, and both exterior and interior Vehicle-to-Load (V2L) outlets that let you use AC-powered household appliances using the car as a battery bank. The new Kona vehicles also have two 12.3-inch panoramic instrument and infotainment screens, digital keys, and support over-the-air (OTA) software updates.

Hyundai is also including an advanced driver-assistant system (ADAS) that can help with lane-keeping and traffic-aware cruise control, plus blind spot monitoring. There are also new and fun pixelated light bars on the front and back of the vehicle.

As an EV, the Kona could potentially be very attractive if the price is right — the current model starts at a reasonable $33,550 in the US. And assuming it’ll have a range greater than 258 miles in the US, the 2024 Kona could be a serious contender for those looking to jump into their first EV.

lundi 6 mars 2023

Apple’s iPhone SE 4 may use OLED screens from a Chinese supplier, not Samsung or LG

A hand holding Apple’s 2022 iPhone SE at a slight angle. — *The LCD panel used by the 2022 iPhone SE (above) will likely be replaced by a 6.1-inch OLED from Chinese supplier BOE.* | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

China-based display maker BOE (Beijing Oriental Electronics) has a complicated relationship with Apple. But despite some missteps, it looks like the two companies will be working together for a while longer, at least: a new report from The Elec (spotted by MacRumors) pegs BOE as the display supplier for the rumored iPhone SE 4. This latest report comes as Apple is allegedly working on its own display tech — and trying to lessen reliance on its main display maker and rival, Samsung.

Things got off to a rough start with Apple in 2020 when some of BOE’s screens for the iPhone 12 reportedly failed quality tests. Later, Apple caught BOE making unapproved changes to its iPhone 13 display design. And while BOE eventually secured a deal to make 6.1-inch OLEDs for the iPhone 14, the company has reportedly been unable to produce iPhone 15 screens to Apple’s specifications. Instead, it looks like BOE will be supplying 6.1-inch OLEDs for the next budget iPhone.

That’s good news for the bottom line — the SE will likely use an older OLED design, so BOE can use existing parts inventory. But it’s not great news, as Apple has been trying to reduce its dependence on Samsung for displays. A new report from The Information details just how much power Samsung holds over Apple as one of the only manufacturers able to mass-produce high-end OLEDs to its specifications. Samsung Display reportedly gets away with things that no other Apple component supplier would dream of, like not letting Apple engineers into its facilities and refusing to replace a supply of screens when a minor flaw was identified.

As much as Cupertino would like to cut ties with Samsung, it’ll likely be quite a few years before that becomes a reality. If and when it gets its MicroLED production off the ground, Apple will likely start small and use the tech in watches first. In the meantime, Samsung probably isn’t losing any sleep over the iPhone SE order going to its competitor. As The Elec points out, the modern LTPO OLEDs that Samsung makes for the iPhone 14 (and likely 15) cost more than twice as much as the legacy OLEDs the SE will reportedly use. Maybe things will be different in a few years, but until then, it looks like Samsung’s display production lines will be plenty busy making OLED panels destined for high-end iPhones.

Microsoft’s latest AI CoPilot could be the voice behind a deluge of work emails

Image: The Verge

If you notice that emails from salespeople or responses from customer support agents seem a bit off — or that they’ve gotten a significant bump in writing quality — you may be have AI to thank. Microsoft has announced that it’ll be introducing AI features into Dynamics 365, its set of enterprise apps for customer relationship management and resource planning.

The company calls the set of features “CoPilot,” and is pitching it as a way to help businesspeople “create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions.” That involves things like having an AI write customizable emails to customers and automatically generate meeting summaries, write a response to customer service chats and emails based on the previous conversation, and help marketers delve into their data without having to write SQL. The company’s also pitching it as a way to help generate ideas for marketing emails, which means that you could start seeing AI-powered ads in your inbox soon.

Microsoft’s promising even more than that — the company says the system will make it easier to create “virtual agents” for customer support, which can use OpenAI’s tech to search Bing and internal knowledge bases for answers.

Like it has with other AI tools, Microsoft is pitching this as something that humans will use, rather than a way to replace employees. In a LinkedIn post, CEO Satya Nadella called the announcement a step towards “transforming every business process and function with interactive, AI-powered collaboration.”

Microsoft has been pushing generative AI tech in its other business-related apps as well — GitHub, a popular tool for coders, also has a CoPilot feature to help you write code, and Teams uses AI for a variety of things, such as recapping meetings. The company has also started releasing AI-generated “collaborative articles” on LinkedIn.

Similar tech could be coming to software that’s not completely enterprise-focused. There are reports that Microsoft is planning on integrating ChatGPT into apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Its most prominent use of the tech is likely with Bing, its chatbot and search engine that’s currently available to people on a waitlist.