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Last year, in the midst of a particularly spiky U.S. presidential election campaign, a startup called Sentropy emerged from stealth with an AI-based platform aimed at social media and other companies that corralled people together for online conversation.
Sentropy had built a set of algorithms, using natural language processing and machine learning, to help these platforms detect when abusive language, harassing tendencies, and other harmful content was coming around the bend, and to act on those situations before they became an issue.
Today, the startup is unveiling a new product, now aimed at consumers.
Using the same technology that it originally built for enterprise platform, Sentropy Protect is a free consumer product that detects harmful content on a person’s social media feed and, by way of a dashboard, lets a person have better control over how that content and the people producing it are handled.
Starting initially with Twitter, the plan is to add more social feeds over time, based initially on which services provide APIs to let Sentropy integrate with them. (Not all do.)
Sentropy CEO John Redgrave described the consumer product launch is not a pivot but an expansion of what the company is building.
The idea is that Sentropy will continue to work with enterprise customers — its two products in that department are called Sentropy Detect, which provides API-based access to its abuse detection technologies; and Sentropy Defend, a browser-based interface that enables end-to-end moderation workflows for moderators.
But at the same time, the Protect consumer product will give people an added option — whether or not Sentropy is being used by a particular platform — to take the reins and have more hands-on control over their harassment graph, as it were.
“We always had deep conviction of going after the enterprise as a start, but Sentropy is about more than that,” he said. “Cyber safety has to have both enterprise and consumer components.”
It’s refreshing to hear about startups building services, which potentially affect millions of people, also being cognizant of how individuals themselves want to keep an element of self-determination in the equation.
It’s not just, “well, it’s your choice if you use service X or not”, but a grasp of the concept that when someone chooses to use a service, especially a popular one, there should be and can be more than just a hope that the platform will always be looking out for that user’s best interests, by providing tools to help the user do that, too.
And it’s not a problem that is going away, and that goes not just for the hottest platforms today, which are continuing to look for ways to handle complex content — but also on emerging platforms.
The recent popularity of Clubhouse, for example, highlights not just new frontiers in social platforms, but how, for example, those new models — with Clubhouse based on “rooms” for conversations, and a reliance on audio rather than written text for interactions — are handling issues of harassment and abuse. Some striking examples so far point to the problem being one that definitely needs addressing before it grows any bigger.
Protect is free to use today, and Redgrave said that Sentropy is still working on deciding how and if it will charge for it. One likely scenario will be that Protect might come in freemium tiers: a free and limited product for individuals with “pro” services featuring enhanced tools, and perhaps a tier for companies who are managing accounts on behalf of one or several high-profile individuals.
Of course, services like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube and many others have made a big point over the years — and especially recently — to put in more rules, moderators and automated algorithms to help identify and stop abusive content in its tracks, and to help users report and stop content before it gets to them.
But if you are one of the people who gets targeted regularly, or even occasionally, you know that this is often not enough. Sentropy Protect seems to be built with that mindset in mind, too.
Indeed, Redgrave said that even though the company had consumers on its roadmap all along, its strategy was accelerated after the launch of its enterprise product last year in June.
“We started getting pinged by people saying, I get abused online. How can I get access to your technology?” He recalled that the company realized that the problem was at once bigger and more granular than Sentropy could fix simply by working its way through a list of companies, hoping to win them over as customers, and then successfully integrating its product.
“We had a hard decision to make then,” he recalled. “Do we spend 100% of our time focused on enterprises, or do we take a portion of our team and start to build out something for consumers, too?” It decided to take the latter route.
On the enterprise side, Sentropy is continuing to work with social networks and other kinds of companies that host interactions between people — for example message boards connected to gaming experiences, or dating apps. It’s not publicly disclosing any customer names at the moment, but Redgrave describes them as primarily smaller, fast-growing businesses, as opposed to larger and more legacy platforms.
Sentropy’s VP of product, Dev Bala — who has previously been an academic, and also worked at Facebook, Google and Microsoft — explained that bigger, legacy platforms are not outside of Sentropy’s remit. But more often than not, they are working on bigger trust and safety strategies and have small armies of engineers in-house working on building products.
While larger social networks do bring in third-party technology for certain aspects of their services, those deals will typically take longer to close, even in urgent cases such as around working with online abuse.
“I think abuse and harassment are rapidly evolving to be an existential challenge for the likes of Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and the rest,” Bala said. “These companies will have a 10,000 person organization thinking just about trust and safety, and the world is seeing the ills of not doing that. What’s not as obvious to people on the outside is that they are also taking a portfolio approach, with armies of moderators and a portfolio of technology. Not all is built in house.
“We believe there is value from Sentropy for these bigger guys but also know there are a lot of optics around companies using products like ours. So we see the opportunities of going earlier, in cases where the company in question is not a Facebook, and having a less sophisticated approach.”
As a sign of the changing tides and sentiment in the market. It seems that the tackling of abuse and content is starting to get taken seriously as a business concept. And so Sentropy is not the only company tackling this opportunity.
Two other startups — one called Spectrum Labs, and another called L1ght have also built a sets of AI-based tools aimed at various platforms where conversations are happening to help those platforms detect and better moderate instances of toxicity, harassment and abuse.
Another, Block Party, is also looking to work across different social platforms to give users more control over how toxicity touches them, and has, like Sentropy, focused first on Twitter.
With Protect, after content is detected and flagged, users can set up wider, permanent blocks against specific users (who can also be muted through Protect) or themes, manage filtered words, and monitor content that gets automatically flagged for being potentially abusive, in case you want to override the flags and create “trusted” users. Tweets get labelled when they are snagged by Sentropy by the type of abuse (for example, threat of physical violence, sexual aggression, or identity attacks).
Since it’s based on a machine learning platform, Sentropy then takes all of those signals, including the Tweets that have been flagged, and uses them to teach Protect to identify future content along those same lines. The platform is also monitoring chatter on other platforms all the time, and that too feeds into what it looks for and moderates.
If you’re familiar with Twitter’s own abuse protection, you’ll know that all this takes the situation several steps further than the controls Twitter itself provides.
This is still a version one though. Right now, you don’t see your full timeline through Protect, so essentially it means that you toggle between Protect and whatever Twitter client you are using. Some might find that onerous, although on the other hand Bala noted that a sign of Sentropy’s success is that people will actually let it work in the background and you won’t feel the need to constantly check in.
Redgrave also noted that the service is still exploring how to add in other features, for example the ability also to filter direct messages.
Audi revealed Tuesday the 2022 e-tron Quattro GT and its higher-performing sibling the RS e-tron GT — flagships of the German automaker’s growing electric vehicle portfolio and its first departure from the crossovers and SUVs that have so far dominated the lineup.
The Audi e-tron GT and RS are the third and fourth all-electric vehicles in the company’s U.S. portfolio, followed by the e-tron SUV and e-tron Sportback that debuted in 2019. The Audi Q4 e-tron — another SUV — will be the automaker’s fifth electric vehicle. All of these e-tron models are part of Audi’s plan to launch more than 30 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids by 2025.
“This car is a new, very progressive interpretation of the classical GT,” Marc Lichte, head of Audi design, said in Tuesday’s presentation. “That means proportions like a super sports car, and the usability of a real four seater. And that’s something completely new.”
Image Credits: Audi
The e-tron GT, which goes into production this spring and will hit the U.S. market this summer, packs in the performance and luxury in its sporty package. The base e-tron GT has two motors that produce the equivalent of 469 horsepower — or 522 hp with “overboost” — and can travel an estimated 238 miles on the 93.4-kilowatt battery. Under the European WLTP standard, the e-tron GT range is 298 miles.
The RS e-tron has the same front motor as the entry-level GT, but has a more powerful rear motor. Together, the motors can produce 590 horsepower and up to 637 horsepower with overboost. As a result, the RS e-tron GT can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.1 seconds and has a 155 mph top track speed, the company said. The RS has an estimated EPA range of 232 miles.
The company has yet to receive an official EPA estimate for either variant.
The vehicles also have an 800-volt electrical architecture — the same that is in the Porsche Taycan. That architecture allows the e-tron GT, like the Taycan, to replenish its battery from 5% to 80% in 22.5 minutes, one of the quickest charging rates in the industry.
The e-tron GT shares more than just the 800-volt electrical architecture with Porsche. Audi and Porsche, which are both VW Group companies, co-developed the e-tron GT and the Taycan. The two vehicles also have the same chassis and J1 EV battery platform.
Inside, the e-tron GT comes standard with a 12.3-inch Audi virtual cockpit digital instrument cluster and a central 10.1-inch touchscreen, where drivers can control music, navigation and other controls as well as electric vehicle-specific features such as searching for charging stations. Owners can opt for an upgrade and add a head-up display as well.
Image Credits: Audi
The vehicle also comes standard in a leather-free interior featuring recycled materials including an artificial suede called Dinamica, although a Nappa leather option is also available as an upgrade.
All of this performance and luxury comes at a price. The base model of the e-tron GT quattro starts at $99,900, followed by a higher trim level priced at $107,100. The RS e-tron GT starts at $139,900. Those prices push even higher for those that opt for the additional features, notably the company’s Matrix LED headlights, which are only available in Europe.
Aerion has been working on ushering in a new era of commercial supersonic flight for nearly a decade now, and the company just revealed that it has signed a new partnership with NASA to put that experience to use in the pursuit of supersonic point-to-point travel – the technical name for putting the kind of high-speed flight typically associated with space launches to use in helping people move very quickly from one place on Earth to another.
The new collaboration comes via the Space Act Agreement, which basically allows NASA to enlist the aid of private companies to help it achieve its various goals. NASA has been developing high-Mach, supersonic aircraft technologies for some time now, in particular though its arrangement with Lockheed Martin to build and fly the X-59 QueSST, a demonstrator aircraft that will show how supersonic craft can also operate relatively quietly, with so-called ‘low-boom’ capabilities that avoid the loud sonic booms produced by most supersonic vehicles when they break the sound barrier.
NASA announced a similar partnership under the Space Act Agreement with Virgin Galactic last year, with the goal of helping the agency develop technologies that will assist in the eventual deployment of sustainable supersonic commercial flight. Aerion’s team-up with the agency will focus specifically on studying commercial flight capabilities in speeds ranging between Mach 3 and Mach 5, with a focus on propulsion and thermal management systems, power generation and technologies for use in the passenger and crew cabins.
Aerion’s own high-speed commercial aviation efforts are currently on track to see its AS2 private jet for business customers enter production in 2023, which will set the stage for its AS3 commercial supersonic passenger aircraft to follow after that.
This isn’t Aerion’s first team-up with NASA: The two have collaborated twice previously on similar projects, with the first collaboration begun way back in 2012. Now that Aerion’s closer to actual production, it’s likely that both partners will gain a lot towards their mutual goals of helping the U.S. develop commercially viable and sustainable supersonic passenger flight technologies.
There’s a popular misconception that the cryptocurrency industry is a realm of rogue tech-bro cowboys. But the reality is many of the most ambitious entrepreneurs in fintech are betting big on institutional bitcoin adoption.
Such is the case with Lebanese-American venture capitalist Soona Amhaz of Volt Capital, whom Forbes recently listed as one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. She discovered bitcoin through Reddit, back when she was an engineering student at the University of Michigan. Now her firm has invested in 11 crypto startups and is working alongside institutional players like TD Ameritrade, Cumberland and CMT Digital as part of the Chicago DeFi Alliance (CDA).
“Where institutions are at now is they’re looking to back quality founders in the space early on. They’re looking to be market makers for a lot of these [crypto] projects, and they’re looking to help with integrations and partnerships between decentralized finance [DeFi] projects and more established financial firms,” Amhaz said. “They see where the puck is going and the smart ones are getting ahead of the curve.”
When it comes to “DeFi,” Amhaz said the term includes bitcoin and the variety of blockchain-based systems gaining popularity among day traders during the pandemic.
“Specific DeFi projects that are gaining more traction now include automated market makers (AMMs), stablecoins and platforms for decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregation, lending and derivatives,” Amhaz said. “Recent DeFi projects simply offer more avenues to use bitcoin as a productive asset, not just a reserve asset.”
Until now, most institutions have preferred indirect exposure to cryptocurrency. Goldman Sachs alum Juthica Chou, who co-founded the derivatives exchange LedgerX back in 2013, pioneered the physically settled bitcoin futures that are now mainstay offerings among firms like Bakkt and CME Group. Futures contracts and bitcoin options offer a way for institutions to bet on the price of bitcoin without actually owning bitcoin directly. A cash-settled product means the buyer is paid in dollars, such as getting $10,000 when the option to buy at $10,000 expires, instead of getting paid in bitcoin. Rumor has it the asset management giant BlackRock will soon become the next player offering bitcoin futures products.
So far, many institutions are willing to forgo some profits in exchange for lower risk. One of the most popular institutional product providers, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), reportedly saw $1.2 billion in fresh investor funds in January 2021.
“I’m still bullish on options and derivatives,” Chou said, adding there’s enough demand from institutions for trust shares like GBTC, bitcoin options and even prospective exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to all generate substantial wealth in 2021.
“The environment has way more infrastructure than we had back in 2013,” Chou said. “There’s security infrastructure and best practices for custodians, auditing infrastructure … banking is another great example. Compared to 2013, the difference between where we were and where we are today is night and day.”
With regards to GBTC, in particular, insatiable demand for shares with lower risks than custodying bitcoin leads to sky-high premiums, sometimes up to 100% more expensive than buying cryptocurrency directly. That’s why Valkyrie CEO Leah Wald launched her own Texas-based asset management firm in 2020. According to Crunchbase, she was one of roughly 800 women founders who raised capital last year.
“It was really difficult to raise during a pandemic… not being able to organically expand my network,” Wald said. “I couldn’t have a meeting with someone even if I wanted to. And so much of seed investing is trusting in the team; trust built through high-quality, in-person conversations.”
Yet by January 2021, her startup had raised an undisclosed seed round from angel investors like Coinbase alum Charlie Lee, then applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to launch a bitcoin ETF. Chou said such a bitcoin ETF would boost the whole ecosystem because it would “open access for people who are already users brokers or securities services.”
Several ETF proposals have been rejected over the years, starting with a proposal by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in 2013. However, Wald says now she believes there’s never been better timing for an ETF to get approved. Among futures and options, trust shares and ETFs, all these products have different regulatory shapes that allow them to be redeemed faster, or traded in different ways, than the underlying asset, bitcoin, could be at-scale. Generally speaking, institutions seek indirect ways to gain exposure to these nascent, and often lucrative, crypto markets.
“Bitcoin’s market cap has grown large enough that it may have finally surpassed an important threshold in the minds of the regulators,” Wald said. “I believe the biggest reason the regulators were nervous about approving a bitcoin ETF in 2017 was concerns around custodial solutions and security. And I agree with that. We’re much closer to better security and custody now with institutional-grade options.”
Wald added that both Valkyrie’s bitcoin trust shares and prospective ETF are structured to reduce volatility and premiums.
“We wanted to create a more transparent product. I wanted our product to trade closer to the net asset value [NAV],” Wald said. “We’re the only bitcoin trust launching an ETF fund so everyday investors can buy exposure to bitcoin.”
This propensity among women entrepreneurs using cryptocurrency isn’t restricted to American tech bubbles. According to Toya Zhang, head of marketing at the Hong Kong-based crypto and futures exchange AAX, women make up 25% of her platform’s users and a third of the top users.
“Our biggest market is in Russia. Other than Russia, our biggest markets are Hong Kong, Korea, Indonesia and India,” Zhang said. “Asian women are more often the one to take care of finances. If you look at stock investment user groups in China and Hong Kong, women are more than half of them.”
The highly specialized crypto landscape is quickly gaining diversity, compared to other financial sectors. At India’s Coinswitch.co exchange, women reportedly make up 50% of around 25,000 users, depending on the specific region. Women also make up at least 40% of British cryptocurrency users, according to a survey by the crypto exchange Gemini.
Across borders, the clear gender disparity may be associated with net worth rather than any lack of interest. In 2018, the World Bank estimated women only held 38% of capital wealth. Plus, Crunchbase tallied just 15,379 companies, less than 20% of startups that raised capital, that had women founders from 2009-2019.
Beyond startups, there are also several companies like the New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG), where women executives took the helm in order to innovate on established brokerage models.
In December 2020, the insurance company Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. purchased $100 million in bitcoin and acquired NYDIG equity, a move that signaled a bullish outlook on institutional demand for bitcoin exposure in 2021. Then, on February 8, 2021, Elon Musk’s publicly traded car company Tesla validated the institutional thesis by buying $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin.
“In 2021, the greater acceptance of bitcoin by traditional investors and allocators is really exciting,” said NYDIG president Yan Zhao. “We’ll give banks and wealth managers the ability to offer bitcoin products and exposure. We’ll handle the back end.”
Zhao said her bitcoin-focused firm has roughly $4 billion under management, including derivatives, and is currently courting prospective clients like private banks and various asset managers. Her firm is open to exploring ideas like a bitcoin ETF or trust shares, she said, but isn’t interested in Ethereum-based DeFi products.
“We’ve made a conscious decision to focus on bitcoin,” Zhao said.
Likewise, Chou was skeptical about many of the Ethereum-based DeFi options available today, while remaining cautiously optimistic about the future of DeFi derivative options.
“Crypto-native products are important because that’s how you can really harness the power of not having centralized authorities involved to facilitate the transaction,” Chou said.
In short, now traditional options offer indirect access to cryptocurrency gains. At the same time, cryptocurrency itself is experimentally being used to offer comparable, yet more accessible, financial products. These DeFi products are designed for new functionality, not just price exposure.
Meanwhile in California, from network scaling crusader Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs, to Amhaz at Volt Capital, the next generation of bitcoin whales may look remarkably different from Silicon Valley’s past unicorn-building bros.
“The face of our industry looks different than how the tech industry looked in the early 90s or how finance has looked since forever,” Amhaz said. “We’re starting at a higher, more informed baseline. So, although there’s still work to be done here, I’m optimistic.”
Disclosure: Together, Leah Wald and Leigh Cuen are volunteer co-founders of the Digital Salon Initiative.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/meet-the-entrepreneurs-bringing-bitcoin-to-institutions/
Oldsmar is a small town in Florida that became the center of the cyber world this week when a hacker broke into its drinking water supply and tried to poison it.
It’s the nightmare scenario that the security community has warned for years, one that could kill thousands by targeting the critical infrastructure that we all rely on. The hacker gained access to a computer at the water facility used for running remote control software TeamViewer, according to Reuters, and jacked up the levels of sodium hydroxide, aka lye, which would have made the water highly toxic to drink.
It’s not known what security was in place to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to the critical system. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in a press conference that there were fail-safes and alarms in place to prevent tainted water from reaching residents, and as a result there was little risk to the population of some 15,000 residents.
But suffice to say, running remote control software in a facility that controls the local water supply is a disaster waiting to happen. These networks are supposed to be isolated from the internet to prevent this exact scenario. But you can look for clues in this Reuters report: The water facility is a public utility owned by the town and has its own internal IT staff.
Gualtieri, in his remarks, said: “The important thing is to put everyone on notice.” He’s not kidding; it’s a similar picture to a lot of small-town America, where much of these facilities are under-resourced and underfunded. Robert Lee, founder and chief executive at industrial security startup Dragos, set the context:
Hiring, workforce development, culture shifts, working within national priorities and regulations, state and local regulations, resourcing other areas that are organizational challenges, modernizing infrastructure beyond "cyber", etc. There's not 1 easy answer tech or not
— Robert M. Lee (@RobertMLee) February 8, 2021
The FBI confirmed it has been called in to investigate. But what’s unlikely to change any time soon is that small towns are underfunded and don’t get the resources that other critical infrastructure gets. In the end, a TeamViewer subscription will be cheaper than a person’s salary, and there is no greater incentive to cut costs than during a pandemic.
On with the rest of Decrypted.
THE BIG PICTURE
Hackers post stolen health data after hospital ransomware attacks
As COVID-19 vaccines begin to roll out, ransomware actors are hitting back. NBC News this week revealed two hospitals that were hit by data-stealing ransomware. After the hospitals refused to pay the ransom, the hackers started to publish highly sensitive health and medical data stolen from the hospital networks.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/decrypted-hackers-attempt-to-poison-florida-towns-water-supply/
