Canonical, the company best known for its Ubuntu Linux distribution, is on a path to an IPO. That’s something Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth has been quite open about. But don’t expect that IPO to happen this year.
“We did decide as a company — and that’s not just my decision — but we did decide that we want to have a commercial focus,” Shuttleworth told me during an interview at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada today. “So we picked cloud and IoT as the areas to develop that. And being a public company, given that most of our customers are now global institutions, it makes for us also to be a global institution. I think it would be great for my team to be part of a public company. It would be a lot of work, but we are not shy of work.”
Unsurprisingly, Shuttleworth didn’t want to talk about the exact timeline for the IPO, though. “We will do the right thing at the right time,” he said. That right time is not this year, though. “No, there is a process that you have to go through and that takes time. We know what we need to hit in terms of revenue and growth and we’re on track.”
Getting the company on track was very much Shuttleworth’s focus over the course of the last year. That meant killing projects like the Ubuntu Phone (which Shuttleworth said was “painful,”) as well as the Unity desktop environment. Instead, the company’s focus is now squarely on helping enterprises stand up and manage their private clouds — no matter whether those run OpenStack, Kubernetes or a combination of those.
That doesn’t mean Canonical has forgotten about the desktop, though. Shuttleworth told me that the desktop team still has the same size as before. He also noted that the desktop is still a passion for him.
“We took some big risks a year ago,” he said. “We cut a bunch of stuff that people loved about us. We had to see if people were going to respond commercially.” That move is paying off now, though. During a keynote earlier today, Shuttleworth noted that Canonical is now in talks for about 200 new deployments for 2018 — up from about 40 in 2017.
While the hype around OpenStack has died down considerably over the course of the last two years, Canonical is still seeing good growth there — especially now that there are only a few major players left, including RedHat, which he name-checked a number of times during both his keynote and our conversation.
Why are things going well for Canonical when others couldn’t make a business out of OpenStack? “I believe for this community — the OpenStack community — it’s really important to deliver on the underlying promise of more cost-effective infrastructure,” he said. “You can love technology and you can have new projects and it can all be kumbaya and open source. In practice, to me, most of the stuff that we saw at OpenStack was bullshit. The stuff that really matters is computers, virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks. So we ruthlessly focus on delivering that and then also solving all the problems around that.”
Today, Canonical can deliver an OpenStack platform to an enterprise in two weeks — with all of the hardware and services in place. “I don’t mind being a bit controversial because we are delivering the promise of OpenStack,” he said. “The promise of OpenStack wasn’t delivering endless summits and endless new projects and endless new ideas.” That, he said, is exactly the kind of bullshit he was referring to in his earlier comments.
Looking ahead, Shuttleworth noted that he’s especially interested in what Canonical can do around IoT solutions, too. Thanks to Ubuntu Core and its Snap system, it has all the tools in place, including a lightweight management layer. The company also is focusing heavily on getting more customers in the financial services sector. No doubt, having a bunch of large banks and brokerages as reference customers will help the company when it comes to its IPO — and my guess is that we can expect that one to happen next year.
Source: TechCrunch
Comcast has just been caught in a major security snafu: revealing the passwords of its customers’ Xfinity-provided wireless routers in plaintext on the web. Anyone with a subscriber’s account number and street address number will be served up the Wi-Fi name and password via the company’s Xfinity internet activation service.
Security researchers Karan Saini and Ryan Stevenson reported the issue to ZDnet.
The site is meant to help people setting up their internet for the first time: ideally, you put in your data, and Comcast sends back the router credentials while activating the service.
The problem is threefold:
This means that anyone with your account number and street address number (e.g. the 1425 in “1425 Alder Ave,” no street name, city, or apartment number needed), both of which can be found on your paper bill or in an email, will instantly be given your router’s SSID and password, allowing them to log in and use it however they like or monitor its traffic. They could also rename the router’s network or change its password, locking out subscribers.
This only affects people who use a router provided by Xfinity/Comcast, which comes with its own name and password built in. Though it also returns custom SSIDs and passwords, since they’re synced with your account and can be changed via app and other methods.
What can you do? While this problem is at large, it’s no good changing your password — Comcast will just provide any malicious actor the new one. So until further notice all of Comcast’s Xfinity customers with routers provided by the company are at risk.
One thing you can do for now is treat your home network as if it is a public one — if you must use it, make sure encryption is enabled if you conduct any private business like buying things online. What will likely happen is Comcast will issue a notice and ask users to change their router passwords at large.
Another is to buy your own router — this is a good idea anyway, as it will pay for itself in a few months and you can do more stuff with it. Which to buy and how to install it, however, are beyond the scope of this article. But if you’re really worried, you could conceivably fix this security issue today by bringing your own hardware to the bargain.
I’ve contacted the company for comment and will update when I hear back.
Source: TechCrunch
When you’re trying to build apps, there is a very tedious point where you have to stare at a wireframe and then laboriously turn it into code. Actually, the process itself is highly repetitive and ought to be much easier. The traditional software development from front-end design to front-end html/css development to working code is expensive, time-consuming, tedious and repetitive.
But most approaches to solving this problem have been more complex than they need to be. What if you could just turn wireframes straight into code and then devote your time to the more complex aspects of a build?
That’s the idea behind a Copenhagen-based startup called Uizard.
Uizard’s computer vision and AI platform claims to be able to automatically turn design mockups — and this could be on the back of napkin — into source code that developers can plug into their backend code.
It’s now raised an $800,000 pre-seed round led by New York-based LDV Capital with co-investors ByFounders, The Nordic Web Ventures, 7percent Ventures, New York Venture Partners, entrepreneur Peter Stern (co-founder of Datek) and Philipp Moehring and Andy Chung from AngelList . This fundraising will be used to grow the team and launch the beta product.
The company received interest in June 2017 when they released their first research milestone dubbed “pix2code” and implementation on GitHub was the second-mosttrending project of June 2017 ahead of Facebook Prepack and Google TensorFlow.
Source: TechCrunch
After being cancelled by Syfy, there’s new hope that The Expanse will come back for a fourth season.
Source: CNET
Intel promises patches in the next few weeks. Devices could take a performance hit.
Source: CNET
The Facebook CEO has repeatedly snubbed invitations to give evidence in London, but British politicians aren’t giving up without a fight.
Source: CNET
Without a chronological feed, it can be tough to tell if you’ve seen all the posts Instagram will show you. That can lead to more of the compulsive, passive, zombie browsing that research suggests is unhealthy as users endlessly scroll through stale content hoping for a hit of dopamine-inducing novelty.
But with Instagram’s newest feature, at least users know when they’ve seen everything and can stop scrolling without FOMO. Instagram is showing some users a mid-feed alert after a bunch of browsing that says “You’re All Caught Up – You’ve seen all new post from the past 48 hours.” When asked about it, Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing this feature. It declined to give details about how it works, including whether the announcement means you’ve seen literally every post from people you follow from the last two days, or just the best ones that the algorithm has decided are worth showing you.
The feature could help out Instagram completists who want to be sure they never miss a selfie, sunset or supper pic. Before Instagram rolled out its algorithm in the summer of 2016, they could just scroll to the last post they’d seen or when they knew they’d last visited. Warning them they’ve seen everything could quiet some of the backlash to the algorithm, which has centered around people missing content they wanted to see because the algorithm mixed up the chronology.
But perhaps more importantly, it’s one of the app’s first publicly tested features that’s clearly designed with the “time well spent” movement in mind. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been vocal about prioritizing well-being over profits, to the point that the network reduced the prevalence of viral videos in the feed so much that that app lost 1 million users in the U.S. and Canada in Q4 2017. “I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down . . . If we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too,” he wrote.
But Instagram’s leadership had been quiet on the issue until last week, when TechCrunch broke news that buried inside Instagram was an unlaunched “Usage Insights” feature that would show users their “time spent.” That prompted Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom to tweet our article, noting “It’s true . . . We’re building tools that will help the IG community know more about the time they spend on Instagram – any time should be positive and intentional . . . Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it’s the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously.”
Instagram is preparing a “Usage Insights” feature that will show how long you spend in the app. Image via Jane Manchun Wong
It’s reassuring to hear that one of the world’s most popular, but also overused, social media apps is going to put user health over engagement and revenue. Usage Insights has yet to launch. But the “You’re All Caught Up” alerts show Instagram is being earnest about its commitment. Those warnings almost surely prompt people to close the app and therefore see fewer ads, hurting Instagram’s bottom line.
Perhaps it’s a product of Facebook and Instagram’s dominance that they can afford to trade short-term engagement for long-term sustainability of the product. Some companies like Twitter have been criticized for not doing more to kick abusers off their platforms because it could hurt their user count.
But with Android now offering time management tools and many urging Apple to do the same, the time-well-spent reckoning may be dawning upon the mobile app ecosystem. Apps that continue to exploit users by doing whatever it takes to maximize total time spent may find themselves labeled the enemy, plus may actually be burning out their most loyal users. Urging them to scroll responsibly could not only win their favor, but keep them browsing in shorter, healthier sessions for years to come.
Source: TechCrunch
The ruling legitimizes agreements, widely used by tech companies, that prevent workers from filing lawsuits and are blamed for perpetuating sexual harassment.
Source: Wired
Hasta 200 cerebros de cerdos muertos volvieron a la ‘vida’ en la Universidad de Yale. Aunque ninguno demostró una actividad cerebral importante, la técnica plantea serias cuestiones éticas pero también muchas oportunidades de investigación. ¿Qué pasaría si se hiciera con un cerebro humano?
Source: MIT
Zapata Computing espera convertirse en un supermercado de software especializado para funcionar en ordenadores cuánticos. Si la tecnología logra aumentar sus aplicaciones, esta ‘start-up’ podría alcanzar una ventaja competitiva sin precedentes
Source: MIT