Technology

samedi 18 mars 2023

Apple’s last-gen MacBook Pro 14 and new Mac Mini are up to $400 off

Apple’s 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro sitting turned on and open with its screen facing the camera on a desk. — *Apple’s 14-inch MacBook Pro from 2021 offers a lot of the same functionality as the newer M2 models at a fraction of the cost.* | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The nice thing about the entry-level M2-powered MacBook Air is the fact it's relatively affordable (for a Mac, of course). But that lower price tag comes with a drawback: it’s just not powerful enough for more demanding creative work. Thankfully, today’s $500 discount on the 14-inch MacBook Pro means you can buy a laptop that’s an absolute powerhouse for content creation at what’s closer to an entry-level price for the M2 Air.

Right now, the M1 Pro-equipped laptop is on sale at Best Buy with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for $1,599 ($400 off), which is just $100 more than buying an M2-equipped MacBook Air with 512GB of storage and half the RAM. What’s more, the 14-inch MacBook Pro supports up to two external displays as opposed to one, while offering a nicer Mini LED screen and better battery life. And while not as speedy as the new M2-equipped MacBook Pros, the M1 Pro model from 2021 still blazing fast and — at this price — also a lot cheaper. Read our Macbook Pro 2021 review.

Alternatively, if the MacBook Pro is too expensive and you don’t require all that power, Apple’s M2-powered Mac Mini is down to $699.99 ($100 off) at Amazon. That’s a new all-time low on this particular configuration, which offers 512GB of storage, 8GB of RAM, an eight‑core CPU, and a 10‑core GPU.

Overall, the new Mini is faster than its M1-equipped predecessor and is a good desktop for everyday computing needs with enough power to tackle even some light video work. It also touts future-proof specs like Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, along with HDMI 2.0 output, an ethernet port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and other ports. Just be mindful that you’ll have to supply your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse as the Mac Mini doesn’t come with these. Read our review of the M2 Pro-powered Mac Mini.

If it’s a decent pair of noise-canceling wireless earbuds you’re after, you can currently grab Amazon’s second-gen Echo Buds with a wireless charging case for $99.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is just $10 shy of their all-time low. You can also buy them with a wired charging case for $79.99 ($40 off) at Amazon and Target.

For the price, the earbuds offer a solid combination of good sound quality and effective noise cancellation, with perks like an excellent passthrough mode for when you need to hear your surroundings. Their noise cancellation may not be on par with more premium earbuds like Sony’s WF-1000XM4, but they’re still able to reduce noise well enough. Plus, they support hands-free Alexa commands, so you can make music requests and control smart home devices with just your voice. Read our review.

We’ve got a good deal for Nintendo Switch lovers who travel often and like to hook up their console to a TV or other large screen. Right now, you can buy the Genki Covert Dock for $59.99 ($15 off) from Genki. The accessory is like a pocketable version of the standard Switch dock, so you can easily carry it on the go, yet it also comes with multiple ports. That includes a single 30W USB-C PD port as well as outputs for USB-C and HDMI. To top it all off, the dock also comes with three international adapters. Read our review.

If the Xbox One or Series X/S is your primary gaming console and you’re looking for a new controller, 8BitDo’s Pro 2 Wired Controller for Xbox and PC is down to $39.99 ($5 off) at Amazon. That’s a small discount but one of the better prices we’ve seen on the pro-grade controller, which offers many of the same features as the wireless model we reviewed for the Nintendo Switch, including a pair of remappable buttons on the back. You can also customize the controller’s vibration, trigger, and stick sensitivity via an app for Android or iOS, and there’s a 3.5mm port you can use to connect your headphones or headset.

A few more deals to start the weekend right

The physical edition of Super Mario Odyssey is currently on sale for around $37 ($23 off) at Best Buy and Walmart. That makes today’s deal on the 2017 Nintendo Switch classic even cheaper than the deal we saw during Mario Day last week. Read our review.
Sonos is still selling a number of refurbished products, including the Sonos Arc SL for $679 ($170 off the price you’d pay if purchased new). The SL edition is the mic-less version of the Sonos Arc, a home theater soundbar that pairs well with newer 4K TVs but also functions as a terrific music speaker. Read our Sonos Arc review.
Apple’s Leather iPhone Wallet with MagSafe is discounted to just $26.99 ($32 off) at Woot right now in multiple colorways. The wallet can store up to three credit cards and features built-in magnets so you can snap it onto iPhone 12 and newer models.
You can buy Amazon’s Echo Show 15 for around $194.95 from Amazon, Best Buy, and Kohl’s. The smart display offers a large screen that mounts onto your wall and can double as a Fire TV streaming device, although you’ll need to buy a remote separately. Read our review.

‘ChatGPT said I did not exist’: how artists and writers are fighting back against AI

From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automation

No need for more scare stories about the looming automation of the future. Artists, designers, photographers, authors, actors and musicians see little humour left in jokes about AI programs that will one day do their job for less money. That dark dawn is here, they say.

Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest.

I used an incredible X-ray machine to look inside my gadgets — let me show you

I want to scan everything I own with the Lumafield Neptune.

I am that guy who asks airport security if I can photograph my luggage going through the X-ray machine. I’m also the guy who spent a solid hour scrubbing through the CT scan of my broken jaw with a mix of horror and utter fascination. You could say I’ve been on a bit of a spectral imaging kick.

So when a startup called Lumafield told me I could put as many things as I wanted into its $54,000 a year radiographic density scanning machine... let’s just say I’ve a sneaking suspicion they didn’t think I’d take it literally.

Last month, I walked into the company’s satellite office in San Francisco with a stuffed-to-the-gills backpack containing:

One vintage Polaroid camera
One original PalmPilot
One HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone
One Philips Hue smart light bulb
One Oral-B electric toothbrush
One Elgato Stream Deck Mini
One Apple Pencil (second-generation)
Three sets of gamepads (PS5 DualSense, Xbox One Elite, Nintendo Switch)
One GaN charger that looks like a Mac
One magnetic wireless charging battery pack that also happens to double as a handheld game system
One Dart Zone foam blaster with parts I’d 3D printed to make it look like Master Chief’s pistol from Halo

A big black box on legs with wheels, with a shiny silver pipe of a handle on its sliding door, in front of a wood plank covered wall next to a window-filled garage door. — *A Lumafield Neptune at the company’s satellite office in San Francisco.*

I would have brought more, but I wanted to be polite!

The Neptune, Lumafield’s first scanner, is a hulking machine that looks like a gigantic black microwave oven at first glance. It’s six feet wide, six feet tall, weighs 2,600 pounds, and a thick sliding metal door guards the scanning chamber while the machine is in use. Close that door and press a button on its integrated touchscreen, and it’ll fire up to 190,000 volts worth of X-rays through whatever you place on the rotating pedestal inside.

I began with my Polaroid OneStep SX-70, the classic rainbow-striped camera that arguably first brought instant photography to the masses. Forty-five minutes and 35 gigabytes of data later, the company’s cloud servers turned the Neptune’s rotating radiograms into the closest thing I’ve seen to superhero X-ray vision.

@verge
Ever wanted X-ray vision? Here's the next best thing. #Lumafield #Gadgets #Polaroid #Tech #TechTok
♬ original sound - The Verge

Where my Kaiser Permanente hospital CT scan only produced ugly black-and-white images of my jaw that the surgeon had to interpret before I had the foggiest idea — plus a ghastly low-poly recreation of my skull that looked like something out of a ’90s video game — these scans look like the real thing.

A see-through translucent blue 1970s Polaroid showing all its internal metal components in orange spins against a black background. — *If a ‘70s plastic Polaroid were see-through.*

In a humble web browser, I can manipulate ghostly see-through versions of these objects in 3D space. I can peel away their plastic casings, melt them down to the bare metal, and see every gear, wire, chip, and spring. I can digitally slice out a cross section worthy of r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn (note: contains no actual porn) without ever picking up a water jet or saw. In some cases, I can finally visualize how a gadget works.

@verge
An X-ray look inside our vintage Polaroid camera. #Lumafield #Polaroid #Tech #TechTok
♬ original sound - The Verge

But Lumafield isn’t building these machines to satisfy our curiosity or to help reverse engineer. Primarily, it rents them to companies that need to dissect their own products to make sure they don’t fail — companies that could never afford the previous generation of industrial CT scanners.

A decade ago, Eduardo Torrealba was a prizewinning engineering student who’d prototyped, crowdfunded, and shipped a soil moisture sensor that ScottsMiracle-Gro eventually took off his hands. (Fun fact: his fellow prizewinners were behind Microsoft’s IllumiRoom and Disney’s Aireal we once featured on The Verge.) Torrealba has been helping people prototype products ever since, both via the Fuse 1 selective laser sintering 3D printer he developed as a director of engineering at Formlabs and as an independent consultant for hardware startups after that.

Throughout, he ran into issues with manufactured parts not turning out properly, and the most compelling solution seemed to be a piece of lab equipment: the computed tomography (CT) scanner, which takes a series of X-ray images, each of which shows one “slice” of an object. Good ones, he says, can cost a million dollars to buy and maintain.

So in 2019, he and his co-founders started Lumafield to democratize and popularize the CT scanner by building its own from scratch. It’s now an 80-person company with $67.5 million in funding and a handful of big-name clients including L’Oréal, Trek Bikes, and Saucony.

“If the only cars that existed were Ferraris, a lot less people would have cars. But if I’m going to the corner store to get a gallon of milk, I don’t need a Ferrari to get there,” he tells The Verge, pitching the Lumafield Neptune as an affordable Honda Civic by comparison.

You can see the chips, layered boards, spring loaded hinges and more in translucent lemon-lime-aqua — *The many layers of the* *T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream, the first Android phone.*

He admits the Neptune has limitations compared to a traditional CT, like how it doesn’t readily scan objects larger than a bike helmet, doesn’t go down to one micron in resolution, and probably won’t help you dive into, say, individual chips on a circuit board. I found it hard to identify some digital components in my scans.

But so far, Lumafield’s “gallon of milk” is selling scanners to companies that don’t need high resolution — companies that mostly just want to see why their products fail without destroying the evidence. “Really, we compete with cutting things open with a saw,” says Jon Bruner, Lumafield’s director of marketing.

Bruner says that, for most companies, the state of the art is still a band saw — you literally cut products in half. But the saw doesn’t always make sense. Some materials release toxic dust or chemicals when you cut them. Many batteries go up in flames. And it’s harder to see how running impacts a running shoe if you’ve added the impact of slicing it in half. “Plastic packaging, batteries, performance equipment... these are all fields where we’re replacing destructive testing,” Bruner adds.

When L’Oréal found the bottle caps for its Garnier cleansing water were leaking, it turned out that a 100-micron dent in the neck of the bottle was to blame, something the company discovered in its very first Lumafield scan — but that never showed up in traditional tests. Bruner says that’s because the previous method is messy: you “immerse in resin, cut open with a bandsaw, and hope you hit the right area.”

Little yellow, green and blue dots visualized inside a part on screen to show where its potentially problematic pores are. — *Lumafield’s flaw detection at work.*

With a CT scanner, there’s no need to cut: you can spin, zoom, and go slice by digital slice to see what’s wrong. Lumafield’s web interface lets you measure distance with just a couple clicks, and the company sells a flaw detection add-on that automatically finds tiny hollow areas in an object — known as porosity; it’s looking for pores — which could potentially turn into cracks down the road.

But only select firms like aerospace contractors and major medical device companies could normally afford such technology. “Tony Fadell said [even Apple] didn’t have a CT scanner until they started working on the iPod nano,” Bruner relates. (Fadell, creator of the Apple iPod and co-founder of Nest, is an investor in Lumafield.)

Torrealba suggests that while you could maybe find a basic industrial CT scanner for $250,000 with $50,000 a year in ongoing software, maintenance, and licensing fees, one equivalent to the Neptune would run $750,000 to $1 million just in upfront costs. Meanwhile, he says, some clients are paying Lumafield just $54,000 a year ($4,500 a month), though many are more like $75,000 a year with a couple of add-ons, such as a lower-power, higher-resolution scanner or a module that can check a part against its original CAD design. Each scanner ships to your office, and the price includes the software and service, unlimited scans, and access for as many employees as you’d like.

The blue translucent shell of my blaster vanishes exposing the metal spring and screws and grips and barrel. — *Melting my Halo Magnum foam blaster down to its (very few) metal parts.*

How can Lumafield’s CT scanner be that much less expensive? “There’s never been market pressure within the industry to push costs down and make it more accessible,” says Bruner, saying that aircraft manufacturers, for example, have only ever asked for higher-performance machines, not more affordable ones, and that’s where Lumafield finds an opportunity.

Torrealba says there are plenty of other reasons, too — like how the company hired its own PhDs to design and build the scanners from scratch, assembling them at their own facilities in Boston, writing their own software stack, and creating a cloud-based reconstruction pipeline to cut down on the compute they needed to put inside the actual machine.

Even after a pair of interviews, it’s not wholly clear to me just how successful Lumafield has been since it emerged from stealth early last year. Torrealba says the team has shipped more than 10 but fewer than 100 machines — and would only say that the number isn’t 11 or 99, either. They wouldn’t mention the names of any clients that aren’t already listed on their case studies page.

The Neptune with a big green Ready light indicating it’s ready to begin a new scan. The touchscreen also reads “scan complete.”

But if you take the director of marketing at his word, Lumafield is making waves. “In the case of shoes, we have many of the household names in that space,” says Bruner, adding that “a lot of the big household names” in the consumer packaged goods category have signed on as well. “In batteries, it’s a group of companies, some of which are large and some small.” Product design consultancies are “a handful of customers,” and Lumafield has approached Kickstarter and Indiegogo to gauge interest, too.

Lumafield believes it may also get business from sectors that actually have used CT scanning before — like medical device and auto part manufacturers — largely by being faster. While many of the high-quality scans of my gadgets took hours to complete, Bruner says that even those companies that do have access to CT scanners might not have them at hand and need to mail the part to the right facility or an independent scanner bureau. “It’s the difference between having your engineering problem answered in two hours and waiting a week.”

And for simple injection molded products like some auto parts, Lumafield even retrofitted the Neptune with a fully automatic door, so a robot arm can swing parts in and out of the machine after a quick go / no go porosity scan that takes well under a minute to complete. Torrealba says one customer is “doing something adjacent” to the auto part example, and more than one customer is inspecting every single part on their production line as of today.

Automation is not what the Neptune was originally intended for, Torrealba admits, but enough customers seem interested that he wants to design for high-volume production in the future.

A robot arm pulls items in and out of the CT scanner, door automatically opening each time.

I’ve kept my Polaroid camera on my desk the entire time I’ve been typing and editing this story, and I can’t help but pick it up from time to time, remembering what’s on the other side of its rainbow-striped plastic shell and imagining the components at work. It gives me a greater appreciation for the engineers who designed it, and it’s intriguing to think future engineers might use these scanners to build and test their next products, too.

I’d love to hear if you spot anything particularly cool or unusual in our Lumafield scans. I’m at sean@theverge.com.

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.

vendredi 17 mars 2023

Resident Evil 4 Remake review – beautiful, tense, camp, gory: all that’s best about the series

Capcom; PC, PS4/5, Xbox Series S/X
This reimagining includes all the design knowledge of the whole series, from the awkward shuffling tension of the first version to the gory horror of Resident Evil 7

It begins in the way it always has. Leon Kennedy, the bruised, damaged rookie cop from Resident Evil 2 is now a spec-ops super soldier sent on a mission to a remote village somewhere in Europe. He’s searching for the US president’s kidnapped daughter and this is her last known whereabouts. His entry point is an overgrown woodland path, dark and cold; ravens peck at the bodies of dead animals, weird sounds fill the fetid air. And finally he spots it – an abandoned hovel just visible among the dead branches…

But from this point on, we’re in different territory. Although this updated version of Capcom’s seminal survival horror sequel retains the narrative, characters and major locations of the original, the structure of the game, the way each terrifying and exhilarating set-piece plays out, has been subtly remixed. It’s definitely a remake, but it feels fresh and vibrant. And it is brilliant.

GPT-4 Is Here, and the Silicon Valley Bank Fallout

GPT-4 Is Here, and the Silicon Valley Bank Fallout Then, Mark Zuckerberg rethinks Meta’s strategy.

The TikTok wars – why the US and China are feuding over the app

The US says the extremely popular video-sharing app ‘screams’ of national security concerns and considers a countrywide ban

TikTok is once again fending off claims that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would share user data from its popular video-sharing app with the Chinese government, or push propaganda and misinformation on its behalf.

China’s foreign ministry on Wednesday accused the US itself of spreading disinformation about TikTok’s potential security risks following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the committee on foreign investment in the US – part of the treasury department – was threatening a US ban on the app unless its Chinese owners divest their stake.

Chinese ChatGPT rival from search engine firm Baidu fails to impress

Shares plummet after Ernie Bot AI chatbot software falls short of expectations at unveiling in Beijing

The Chinese search engine company Baidu’s shares have fallen by as much as 10% after it presented its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence software, with investors unimpressed by the bot’s display of linguistic and maths skills.

The AI-powered ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming code on demand within seconds, prompting widespread fears over cheating or of professions becoming obsolete.

jeudi 16 mars 2023

Google says hackers could silently own your phone until Samsung fixes its modems

Illustration of two smartphones sitting on a yellow background with red tape across them that reads “DANGER” — Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Project Zero, Google’s team dedicated to security research, has found some big problems in the Samsung modems that power devices like the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, and some models of the Galaxy S22 and A53. According to its blog post, a variety of Exynos modems have a series of vulnerabilities that could “allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction” without needing much more than a victim’s phone number. And, frustratingly, it seems like Samsung is dragging its feet on fixing it.

The team also warns that experienced hackers could exploit the issue “with only limited additional research and development.” Google says the March security update for Pixels should patch the problem — though 9to5Google notes that it’s not available for the Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and 6a yet (we also checked on our own 6a and there was no update). The researchers say they believe the following devices may be at risk:

Mobile devices from Samsung, including those in the Galaxy S22, M33, M13, M12, A71, A53, A33, A21, A13, A12 and A04 series
Mobile devices from Vivo, including those in the S16, S15, S6, X70, X60 and X30 series
any wearables that use the Exynos W920 chipset
any vehicles that use the Exynos Auto T5123 chipset

It is worth noting that, in order for devices to be vulnerable, they have to use one of the affected Samsung modems. For a lot of S22 owners, that could be a relief — the phones sold outside of Europe and some African countries have a Qualcomm processor and also use a Qualcomm modem, and thus should be safe from these specific issues. But phones with Exynos processors, like the popular midrange A53, and European S22, might be vulnerable.

In theory, the S21 and S23 are safe — Samsung’s most recent flagships use Qualcomm worldwide, and the older ones with Exynos chips use a modem that doesn’t appear on Samsung’s list of affected chips.

If you know your phone uses one of the vulnerable modems, and you’re concerned about it being exploited (remember, attacks could “compromise affected devices silently and remotely”), Project Zero says you can protect yourself by turning off Wi-Fi calling and Voice-over-LTE. Yes, your calls will be worse, but it’s probably worth it.

End-users still don't have patches 90 days after report.... https://t.co/dkA9kuzTso
— Maddie Stone (@maddiestone) March 16, 2023

Traditionally, security researchers will wait until a fix is available before announcing that they’ve found the bug, or until it’s been a certain amount of time since they reported it without any fix in sight. It seems like it’s the latter case here — as TechCrunch notes, Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone tweeted that “end-users still don’t have patches 90 days after report,” which appears to be a prod at Samsung and other vendors that they need to deal with the issue.

Samsung didn’t immediately reply to The Verge’s request for comment on why there doesn’t appear to have been a patch yet.

In total, Project Zero found 18 vulnerabilities in the modems. Four are the really bad ones that allow “Internet-to-baseband remote code execution,” and Google says it’s not sharing additional information on those right now, in spite of its usual disclosure policy. (Again, due to the fact that it believes they could very easily be exploited.) The rest were more minor, requiring “either a malicious mobile network operator or an attacker with local access to the device.” To be clear, that’s still not great — we’ve seen how flimsy carrier security can be — but at least they’re not quite as bad as the others.

Pornhub is under new ownership

pornhub billboard times square — *A Pornhub billboard in Times Square*

A Canadian private equity firm has acquired MindGeek, the company behind Pornhub, YouPorn, and other major adult media sites. Financial Times reported that newly formed Ethical Capital Partners acquired MindGeek for an undisclosed amount and that it will continue to operate under an unidentified group of current executives alongside an ECP management team that includes “lawyers and former cannabis investors.” ECP also confirmed the news on its site.

MindGeek is a massive but troubled brand. The company owns some of the highest-trafficked sites on the internet, but it’s also faced persistent criticism that it’s failed to prevent users from uploading or viewing illegal videos, including child sexual abuse material. Its long-standing moderation problems reached a tipping point in 2020 when Visa and Mastercard both cut off service to Pornhub, prompting it to remove most of its videos and build out a mandatory age verification system for actors.

While MindGeek got payment services restored to Pornhub, the payment processors have continued to deny access to its ad network TrafficJunky, after a California court said Visa could potentially be held liable for helping MindGeek “monetize child porn.” Legal challenges against the site remain ongoing, and it could face further pressure as US lawmakers push to weaken liability protections for websites under Section 230. MindGeek’s CEO and COO, Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both stepped down in mid-2022. This all adds up to a series of challenges that go beyond even the baseline difficulty of running a large web platform in 2023.

ECP’s press release gestures at solving the company’s legal issues. It says it intends to focus on “investing in MindGeek as the internet leader in fighting illegal online content,” including playing “a leading role in the fight against illegal content across the internet” — a role that possibly includes things like the MindGeek-affiliated age verification tool AgeID, which it has previously promoted for use by other adult sites, or its image recognition tool Safeguard.

What, exactly, is Ethical Capital Partners, the investment firm that appeared just in time to make this single transaction? Well, its chairman Rocco Meliambro has roots in Canada’s cannabis industry, where (among other things) he served as a director of National Access Cannabis Corporation alongside fellow director Chuck Rifici — who also just so happened to be in talks to buy Pornhub and other parts of MindGeek two years ago, according to a 2021 report at The Globe and Mail.

Rifici’s company Bruinen Investments, which similarly appeared out of nowhere ahead of a potential deal for Pornhub, also had a prominent reference to ethics — its website promised to put “ethics first to deliver safe, legal and positive online experiences for adults.” Both Bruinen and Ethical Capital Partners also feature a criminal defense lawyer named Fady Mansour, as well as Derek Ogden, a former director of drug and organized crime enforcement for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Sarah Bain, a communications consultant.

If these are the same people, two years apart, what plan might they have for MindGeek? The previous plan was simple: restructure, “rehabilitate its reputation,” and flip it or merge it with a SPAC, according to a slide deck obtained as part of a late 2021 investigation by The Logic. The idea was called Project Narsil, a reference to the broken sword in The Lord of the Rings, and suggested that “the acquisition target is one of the most recognized and undervalued brands in the adult entertainment and technology sector.”

mercredi 15 mars 2023

Stripe Raises New Funding That Values It at $50 Billion

Stripe Raises New Funding That Values It at $50 Billion The payments processing start-up was valued at $95 billion in 2021, but private company dealmaking has been hurt by souring global economic conditions.

Samsung’s midrange A-series phones get a Galaxy S23 facelift

The Galaxy A34 in lime (left) and A54 in purple (right). — *The Samsung Galaxy A34 (left) and A54 (right).* | Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge

Samsung’s Galaxy A34 and A54 are the latest additions to its popular midrange A-series. Although both phones offer a number of upgrades over last year’s models, the most striking thing for me is how much they both look like this year’s Galaxy S23 and S23 Plus.

The camera bumps of the A33 and A53 are gone, leaving three simple camera lenses per phone in their wake. It makes both look more premium to me, and Samsung is promising flagship-level support periods of up to four generations of major Android updates and five years of security patches.

The Galaxy A54 will go on sale on April 6th in the US starting at $449.99 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. In the UK the A54 is releasing this month starting at £449 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £499 for 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage.

Meanwhile, the Galaxy A34 will also be available this month in the UK starting at £349 for 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £399 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Samsung is not announcing a US release for the Galaxy A34 at this time. We’ve followed up with the company for exact European pricing and release info.

Galaxy A34 and A54 laid on the ground. — *From the back, there’s little to tell the two phones apart.*

Hold them in your hands and the flagship illusion disappears, these are obviously midrange phones. Both feel a little thick (8.2mm, presumably to make room for their large 5,000mAh batteries), and the A34 in particular has a plastic-feeling back panel. Both phones support fast-charging at up to 25W.

The phones each come with a main, ultra-wide, and macro camera on their back — though their exact specs differ. The A54 has a main 50-megapixel sensor, which is joined by a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and 5-megapixel macro. Samsung boasts that this main sensor is bigger than the one found in its previous-gen model, which should make for better low-light photography. The A34, meanwhile, has a 48-megapixel main, 8-megapixel ultrawide, and 5-megapixel macro camera.

Around front the phones are more visually distinct. The A34 has its 13-megapixel selfie camera in a small teardrop notch, while the A54 has a hole-punch cutout containing its 32-megapixel front-facing sensor. Both have 120Hz, 1080p OLED displays with a peak brightness of 1000 nits, though the A34’s screen is slightly bigger at 6.6 inches, versus 6.4 inches on the A54.

Galaxy A54 from the front. — *The Galaxy A54 has a hole-punch notch and a 6.4-inch screen...*

Galaxy A34 from the front. — *... while the Galaxy A34 has a teardrop notch and 6.6-inch screen.*

Internally, the A34 is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 1080 processor, while the A54 has one of Samsung’s in-house Exynos 1380 chips. Both phones have microSD card slots that support up to a 1TB cards.

Rounding out the specs, both phones feature a relatively robust IP67 rating for dust and water resistance (that’s technically enough for full submersion, though we’d recommend not putting that to the test yourself), 5G, and in-display fingerprint sensors. Exact colors vary by market, but in the UK the A34 is available in black, silver, lime, and violet, while the A54 will be sold in white rather than silver in addition to black, lime, and violet.

Stay tuned for our full review of the Samsung Galaxy A54.

Software engineer David Auerbach: ‘Big tech is in denial about not being in control’

The writer says that meganets – the huge tech networks already part of daily life – have led to groupthink and the breakdown of public discourse and that we must exert more influence on them

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft. He also teaches the history of computation at the New Centre for Research & Practice in Seattle, US. His new book is Meganets: How Digital Forms Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities. He argues that widespread concern about artificial intelligence is legitimate, but the problem is already all around us, with huge tech networks that no one – neither governments nor their owners – is able to control.

Your book is concerned with the threat to social and economic stability represented by what you call meganets. How do you define a meganet?
The definition I use for a meganet is a persistent, evolving and opaque data network that heavily influences how people see the world. It is always on and it consists both of a large server tech component as well as millions upon millions of users who are constantly active, using those services and influencing them. All these users play a small part in the collective authorship of how these algorithms run. The effect is contributing to a severe fracturing of society in which we are literally becoming unable to understand one another, as we split into like-minded self-policing groups that enforce unanimity and uniformity, and prevent any larger-scale societal consensus.

How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race

How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race The virtual assistants had more than a decade to become indispensable. But they were hampered by clunky design and miscalculations, leaving room for chatbots to rise.

Investigation launched into complaints of Tesla steering wheels coming off mid-drive

US regulators receive two complaints about Model Y SUVs with missing bolt in latest string of safety problems for company

US auto safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla’s Model Y SUV after getting two complaints that the steering wheels can come off while being driven.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says the investigation covers an estimated 120,000 vehicles from the 2023 model year.

Streams are made of this: will digital platforms change our musical memories?

So many of our most precious memories are anchored in particular songs. But does the easy availability of every track spell the end of that? Jude Rogers and her young son compare music notes

The second we get in the car, my son strikes up his familiar tune. “I want my playlist, Mum!” Put your belt on, young man. “Pleeease?” Some politeness for a change. Belt. Now.

I get a second’s sweet peace as I hear the clunk-click. Then the noise: “Mum! I need my playlist right now!”

mardi 14 mars 2023

Robots can help improve mental well-being at work—as long as they look right

Robots can help improve mental well-being at work—as long as they look right Robots can be useful as mental well-being coaches in the workplace—but perception of their effectiveness depends in large part on what the robot looks like.

Google-backed Anthropic launches Claude, an AI chatbot that’s easier to talk to

An image showing a repeating pattern of brain illustrations — Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has launched its AI chatbot, Claude. While the tool does much of what OpenAI’s ChatGPT can, Anthropic says its early clients report the tool’s “less likely to produce harmful outputs” and is “easier to converse with.”

Like OpenAI, Anthropic also has big tech backing: Google invested $300 million into Anthropic in February. The company’s chatbot — similar to ChatGPT — can provide summaries, answer questions, provide assistance with writing, and generate code. You can also tweak the chatbot’s tone, personality, and behavior, which sounds a bit more comprehensive than the “creative, balanced, and precise” settings Bing’s chatbot offers.

After working for the past few moths with key partners like @NotionHQ, @Quora, and @DuckDuckGo, we’ve been able to carefully test out our systems in the wild. We are now opening up access to Claude, our AI assistant, to power businesses at scale. pic.twitter.com/m0QFE74LJD
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) March 14, 2023

Overall, the goal of Anthropic is to develop an AI assistant that’s “helpful, honest, and harmless.” It also has no ability to access the internet, as Anthropic says it’s designed to be “self-contained.”

In addition to launching the standard version of Claude, Anthropic is also releasing Claude Instant, a cheaper, faster, and lighter model when compared to its full-featured counterpart. Anthropic already gave several companies access to Claude in the months leading up to its launch, including Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo, which recently announced its Anthropic and OpenAI-powered DuckAssist search tool. You can view pricing information for both models and sign up for access to Claude here.

Anthropic’s announcement comes amidst a flurry of AI-related news, including the launch of OpenAI’s newest GPT-4 model. Google also announced new AI applications in Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.

App turns Oppo’s Find N2 Flip cover display into a ‘fully functional mini phone’

Three Find N2 Flip phones with browser, youtube, and app drawer displayed on their cover screens. — *Images show an app drawer, browser, and YouTube running on the Find N2 Flip’s cover display.* | Image: Jagan2

CoverScreen OS is a piece of software that attempts to turn the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s small 3.26-inch cover display into a “fully functional mini phone.” Crucially, this means being able to access the app drawer and launch “almost any app” on the cover screen, massively increasing the amount you can do on the foldable flip phone without having to open it up. The software is downloadable from the Google Play Store.

CoverScreen OS has been available for awhile for the Samsung Z Flip 3 and 4. In fact, my colleague Allison tried it out on the Z Flip 4 last August. But while the app’s usefulness was limited on Samsung’s tiny 1.9-inch cover display, the Find N2 Flip’s portrait-oriented 3.26-inch, 720 x 382 cover display feels like it has a lot more potential.

When I reviewed the Find N2 Flip last month, I found myself getting frustrated by the limited functionality of its cover display despite being bigger than the cover display on Samsung’s flip phones. In practice I felt Oppo didn’t make the most of this larger screen real estate. The Find N2 Flip will only display the subject lines and not the body text of emails when you get a notification, for example, or only offer a few hours of weather forecasts rather than the whole day.

Two Find N2 Flips, one with a T9 keyboard on its cover display, and one with a Qwerty keyboard. — *You can type using either a T9 or full Qwerty keyboard.*

CoverScreen OS’s support for the Find N2 Flip is described as “experimental” and “initial” for now, but it has big ambitions. As well as the ability to launch full apps, it also aims to let you add widgets designed for the standard home screen. There’s support for a full Qwerty keyboard, voice typing, or an old-fashioned T9 keyboard. In a video demonstration, the developer demonstrates opening YouTube and then a web browser from the app drawer, and then typing into a text box using an onscreen keyboard.

Plus, according to the app’s developer, CoverScreen OS still leaves you able to use the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s default cover display functionality like system quick toggles and widgets. Just be warned that while it’s reportedly stable on Samsung’s flip phones, the app is a first preview version and still “requires some heavy sustained development effort to deliver a feature complete version,” according to its developers.

If you’d like to give CoverScreen OS a try, you can download it now over on the Google Play Store.

Sabrina Brier Is TikTok’s Latest Character

Sabrina Brier Is TikTok’s Latest Character Sabrina Brier is finding success online in the role of a 20-something in New York who’s trying to shed her basic suburban past.

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

lundi 13 mars 2023

Sony wants to help low-vision users enjoy photography by shining lasers in their eyes

A person holding the Sony DSC-HX99 compact camera to their eye with a QD Laser Retissa Neoviewer retinal projection viewfinder. — *It’s like the eye-level finders of old medium format film cameras, but now for a compact digital camera — with lasers.* | Image: Sony

Giant frickin’ laser beams get all the buzz and sci-fi love, but it’s our little laser bros that are putting in the work: taking measurements, entertaining our cats, and now, in the case of a Sony camera, helping people with vision problems see clearly through an electronic viewfinder and take pictures.

Sony is working with fellow Japanese company QD Laser to release the HX99 RNV Retina Projection Camera kit, a compact camera with an add-on retinal laser housing for projecting the camera’s focused live view image into the user’s eye. The low-power laser projection is designed to effectively bypass the focusing of the eye, helping users with visual impairments like shortsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism see a clear image.

It uses Sony’s existing DSC-HX99 compact camera, which is a somewhat middling model from 2018 with an 18-megapixel sensor and equivalent zoom lens of 24-720mm (30x magnification), combined with QD Laser’s Retissa Neoviewer projector. According to QD Laser’s specs, the Retissa Neoviewer uses an RGB semiconductor laser to display an image with an equivalent of 720p resolution and 8-bit color depth. This beamed image has an approximate 60-degree horizontal field of view with 60Hz refresh, and the housing’s battery has an estimated four hours of battery life. Tragically, it charges via Micro USB instead of USB-C.

*The Retissa Neoviewer has a plate and mount system designed specifically for the HX99 camera.*

The extra kicker here is that while the DSC-HX99 camera normally costs $474.99 on its own, Sony is offering the kit with both the camera and laser projector for $599.99 — claiming it is bearing the majority of the cost in an effort to support the low-vision community. Sony is also encouraging users to try it before purchasing, as it may not be suitable for all visual impairments, and is offering appointments via phone or email. The camera and projector kit will be available in the US in limited quantities beginning this summer.

While this device is designed exclusively for the aging DSC-HX99, it isn’t technically limited to that camera. A spokesperson for QD Laser, Nori Miyauchi, said in a video interview with CineD on YouTube that other cameras can potentially work with it via HDMI. Of course, the housing for the Retissa Neoviewer looks tightly integrated to the dimensions and design of the DSC-HX99, potentially making it awkward to adapt to something like Sony’s popular Alpha line of interchangeable mirrorless cameras.

But hopefully this experiment means there can one day be a more universal model, allowing low-vision users to easily adapt it to the full-size camera of their choice.

An Indian tech company’s stock falls after it reveals a link to Silicon Valley Bank.

An Indian tech company’s stock falls after it reveals a link to Silicon Valley Bank. Nazara Technologies, a mobile gaming company, said two of its subsidiaries had together more than $7.7 million in balances at the failed bank.

TikTok unveils European data security plan amid calls for US ban

Move comes as White House backs bill that could give it power to ban Chinese-owned app nationwide

TikTok has announced a data security regime for protecting user information across Europe, as political pressure increases in the US to ban the social video app.

The plan, known as Project Clover, involves user data being stored on servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of €1.2bn (£1.1bn), while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party IT company.

Lenovo Builds a Workstation James Bond Would Love

Lenovo has launched a new line of workstations co-designed with Aston Martin. They are impressive performers, using up to two of Intel's most powerful CPUs and up to four of Nvidia's most powerful professional graphics cards. The post Lenovo Builds a Workstation James Bond Would Love appeared first on TechNewsWorld.

ChatGPT could power voice assistants in General Motors vehicles

GM is reportedly using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service — which includes a ChatGPT API — to develop a virtual personal assistant for its vehicles. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The AI language models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT could soon be powering virtual assistants in General Motors vehicles. As reported by Reuters on Friday, an executive for GM has revealed that the American automaker is exploring potential uses for ChatGPT as part of a broader collaboration with Microsoft. Semafor similarly reported last week that “people with knowledge of the product” had specified GM was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service — which includes a ChatGPT API — to develop a virtual personal assistant for its vehicles.

GM Vice President Scott Miller provided some details for the project in an interview with Reuters last week, saying that “ChatGPT is going to be in everything.” Miller claimed that the chatbot could push things beyond voice commands currently used in vehicles by providing drivers with information about their vehicle’s features, such as advising the driver on what action to take when a diagnostic light appears on the dashboard or instructing the user on how to change a flat tire by displaying a video demonstration on the vehicle’s infotainment system.

Ford’s as-yet-unnamed assistant could also program functions like garage door codes, or integrating user schedules from a calendar to remind the driver of any upcoming meetings and tasks. According to Semafor, GM’s voice assistant won’t necessarily behave like ChatGPT or Bing Chat as the company plans to apply a “car-specific layer” to OpenAI’s tech.

“This shift is not just about one single capability like the evolution of voice commands, but instead means that customers can expect their future vehicles to be far more capable and fresh overall when it comes to emerging technologies,” a GM spokesperson told Reuters on Friday.

Microsoft already has a “long-term strategic relationship” with General Motors, having partnered with the automaker’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise in 2021 to use Microsoft’s Azure platform to develop GM’s autonomous vehicles. There’s no release timeline or even a formal announcement for General Motor’s ChatGPT integration plans as yet, and with details being so slim, it could be a while before we’re recreating scenes from Knight Rider in a new Chevrolet.

Go fishing with a record player using Jackery’s flagship solar generator

A man in tights and puffer fishes in a remote lake while a giant Jackery battery powers a record player nearby. — *I don’t know why you’d want to bring your record collection while fishing in tights, but you be you, stud.* | Image: Jackery

The absurdity of that promotional image aside, Jackery is actually a respected maker of big-ass portable batteries for anyone needing to recharge their lives when away from the grid. Today, the company is releasing details on its latest flagship product — the Explorer 3000 Pro — first revealed at CES in January alongside the lesser specced Explorer 1500 Pro.

The Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro comes loaded with AC and DC ports to charge almost anything you throw at it — including power tools, air conditioners, space heaters, microwaves, blenders, and all your gadgets — producing up to 3000W of sustained AC output with a 6000W peak. You also have the option of plugging up to 1400W of solar input into the unit to keep everything charged while on the go.

The 29kg (almost 64 pounds) power station is made portable by a telescoping handle and wheels to help you transport all 3024Wh of battery capacity. Unfortunately, Jackery’s still using NMC battery chemistry here instead of more advanced lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4, or LFP), which offers longer life and better performance.

*You can plug up to six solar panels into the Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro to fully charge the battery in less than four hours if conditions are perfect (and they never are).*

And as long as we’re complaining, Jackery also doesn’t provide an app to remotely monitor its solar generators. It also uses nonstandard eight-millimeter barrel connectors between its batteries and solar panels instead of industry standard XT60 / MC4. That means you’ll need to futz around with adapters to connect any third-party panels you might already own.

Otherwise, Jackery says the Explorer 3000 Pro can be charged from zero to 100 percent in three to four hours with perfect sun hitting six of the company’s 200W panels at a right angle. That charge time drops to 2.5 hours when plugged into an AC outlet pulling a maximum of 1800W, or 35 hours from a 12V / 8A car outlet.

As far as output jacks go, the Explorer 3000 Pro is fitted with 4x AC (120V, 2400W), 1x AC (120V, 3000W), 2x USB-A (Quick Charge 3.0, 18W), 2x USB-C (100W), and 1x car output (12V / 10A).

The battery-only Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro goes on sale March 27th for $2,799, while the solar-generator configuration bundled with two of Jackery’s excellent 200W Solar Saga panels lists for $3,999. Early birds are eligible for a $399 discount.

dimanche 12 mars 2023

Signature Bank is closed by regulators, the third US bank failure in a week

Illustration of several wads of $20 bills — Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Signature Bank, one of the two big US destinations for crypto companies, has been closed by New York regulators. “All depositors of this institution will be made whole,” the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a joint statement.

This is the third major bank that has fallen in the space of a week, and investors are spooked. The joint announcement that depositors will be protected above the $250,000 guaranteed by the FDIC appears to be meant to reassure banking customers that their money will not be frozen. Signature had $88.59 billion in deposits as of December 31, 2022. The New York Department of Financial Services has taken possession of the bank.

Signature was one of two banks that was widely used in cryptocurrency. Like Silvergate, which collapsed on March 8th, Signature had a network that let crypto companies transfer dollars in real-time. With both crypto banks gone, it may be harder to get back into dollars.

Additionally, the Fed’s announcement said that depositors at Silicon Valley Bank will also be made whole. That’s good news for crypto — since stablecoin provider Circle was keeping $3.3 billion of its reserves there. Circle operates USDC, a token that is always meant to be worth $1 — and an important part of crypto payments.

Also in the statement, the regulators said that depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, a non-crypto bank that failed on March 10 following a bank run, will have access to their uninsured deposits on Monday. The statement noted that in both cases, no losses would be paid for by taxes.

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

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.