Technology

A daredevil inventor known as "Mad" Mike Hughes has died after launching himself in a homemade rocket which crashed in the California desert.

BharatPe, a New Delhi-based startup that is enabling hundreds of thousands of merchants to accept digital payments for the first time and also providing them access to working capital, has raised $75 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its business in the nation.

The Series C round for the one-and-a-half-year old startup was led by New York-headquartered hedge fund Coatue Management and existing investor Palo Alto-based fintech investor Ribbit Capital .

VC firm Amplo, and existing investors Steadview Capital and Insight Partners also participated in the round, which valued the startup at over $400 million. The startup has raised $140 million to date.

BharatPe operates an eponymous service to help offline merchants accept digital payments. Even as India has already emerged as the second largest internet market, with more than 500 million users, much of the country remains offline. Among those outside of the reach of the internet are merchants running small businesses, such as roadside tea stalls.

To make these merchants comfortable in accepting digital payments, BharatPe relies on QR codes built as part of government-backed UPI payments infrastructure. Ashneer Grover, co-founder and chief executive of BharatPe, said the startup will use much of the fresh capital to fund working capital for its merchant partners.

BharatPe, he said, has disbursed about $14 million &short-term& loans to over 20,000 merchants in the last seven months. New merchants can secure about $500 for a period of three months from BharatPe. As merchants spend more time on BharatPe, the firm increases the amount to about $2,000.

The startup has amassed over 3 million merchants in 30 Indian cities. It aims to more than double that number by March 2021.

The lending business is crucial to BharatPe. Payment apps make little to no money through making transactions on their platforms. Those processing UPI payments can not even charge a small commission to merchants.

Additionally, access to working capital is a major challenge in developed markets such as India. According to a World Bank report, more than 2 billion people globally do not have access to working capital.

The asteroid, dubbed 2020 BR10, is set to fly past Earth at around 14:55 GMT today, according to the space agency

Rallyhood says it&private and secure.& But for some time, it wasn&t.

The social network designed to help groups communicate and coordinate left one of its cloud storage buckets containing user data open and exposed. The bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), was not protected with a password, allowing anyone who knew the easily-guessable web address access to a decadeworth of user files.

Rallyhood boasts users from Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops, and Komen, Habitat for Humanities, and YMCA factions. The company also hosts thousands of smaller groups, like local bands, sports teams, art clubs, and organizing committees. Many flocked to the site after Rallyhood said it would help migrate users from Yahoo Groups, after Verizon (which also owns TechCrunch) said it would shut down the discussion forum site last year.

The bucket contained group data as far back to 2011 up to and including last month. In total, the bucket contained 4.1 terabytes of uploaded files, representing millions of users& files.

Some of the files we reviewed contained sensitive data, like shared password lists and contracts or other permission slips and agreements. The documents also included non-disclosure agreements and other files that were not intended to be public.

Where we could identify contact information of users whose information was exposed, TechCrunch reached out to verify the authenticity of the data.

A security researcher who goes by the handle Timeless found the exposed bucket and informed TechCrunch, so that the bucket and its files could be secured.

When reached, Rallyhood chief technology officer Chris Alderson initially claimed that the bucket was for &testing& and that all user data was stored &in a highly secured bucket,& but later admitted that during a migration project, &there was a brief period when permissions were mistakenly left open.&

Itnot known if Rallyhood plans to warn its users and customers of the security lapse. At the time of writing, Rallyhood has made no statement on its website or any of its social media profiles of the incident.

What happens if a Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic hits? Ittime to at least start asking that question. What will the repercussions be, if the virus spreads worldwide? How will it change how we live, work, socialize, and travel?

Don&t get all disaster-movie here. Some people seem to have the notion that a pandemic will mean shutting down borders, building walls, canceling all air travel, and quarantining entire nations, indefinitely. That is entirely incorrect. Containment attempts can slow down an outbreak and buy time to prepare, but if a pandemic hits, by definition, containment has failed, and further attempts will be pointless if not counterproductive. Rather:

The focus will switch from containment to mitigation, i.e. slowing down how fast the virus spreads through a population in which it has taken root. Mitigation can occur via individual measures, such as frequent hand washing, and collective measures, such as &social distancing& — cancellations of mass events, closures, adopting remote work and remote education wherever possible, and so forth.

The slower the pandemic moves, the smoother the demands on health-care systems will be; the less risk those systems will have of becoming overloaded; the more they can learn about how best to treat the virus; and the greater the number of people who may ultimately benefit from a vaccine, if one is developed. I recommend the whole thread above this instructive graph:

An important question for those of us in the media is: how do we report on Covid-19, in this time of great flux and uncertainty? Let me direct you to this excellent Scientific American piece by HarvardBill Hanage and Marc Lipsitch: &How to Report on the COVID-19 Outbreak Responsibly.& (Disclosure / disclaimer; Bill is a personal friend.)

We think reporting should distinguish between at least three levels of information: (A) what we know is true; (B) what we think is true—fact-based assessments that also depend on inference, extrapolation or educated interpretation of facts that reflect an individualview of what is most likely to be going on; and (C) opinions and speculation […] facts about this epidemic that have lasted a few days are far more reliable than the latest &facts& that have just come out, which may be erroneous or unrepresentative and thus misleading. […] Distinguish between whether something ever happens and whether it is happening at a frequency that matters.

Read the whole thing. As an opinion columnist, I&m on pretty safe ground, in that everything I write is definitionally C) in the above taxonomy … but basically everything I&m citing counts as B).

Which includes the following statement: when I say &if a& in the first paragraph above, I really mean &when the.& A pandemic is coming; the question is at what scale. I recognize that may sound like irresponsible doomsaying. I strongly encourage you to be skeptical, to read widely, and to draw your own conclusions. But the clamor of expert voices is growing too loud for me to ignore. Herean entire Twitter thread linking to epidemiologists at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Universities of Basel and Bern, saying so with very little ambiguity:

Don&t panic. There is a great deal we can and will do to limit and mitigate this pandemic. Itall too easy to imagine fear becoming far more dangerous than the virus itself. Don&t let that happen. Italso worth noting that its mortality rate is likely significantly lower than the headline 2%, not least because that doesn&t include mild undiagnosed cases:

Furthermore, the rate seems much lower yet for anyone under 60 years old, and enormously lower for anyone under 50. Some more context regarding mitigation:

Unless all of those people cited above are wrong — which seems unlikely — we will all spend the next weeks and months sharing the very strange collective experience of watching, through our laptops and phones, through Twitter and the mass media, the spread of this pandemic through much of the world, in what will seem like slow motion. Our day-to-day lives are ultimately likely to change somewhat. (If your office job isn&t remote-work-friendly today, I assure you, it will be this time next year.) But it will be very far from the end of the world. I suspect we&ll all be surprised by how soon it begins to feel almost normal.

We are now onto the fifth short story of nine in Ted Chiang collection Exhalations. This one is a very short one at only a couple of pages, but despite its brief length, it explores some of the most fundamental issues facing us as a society today: technology, children, love, and the meaning of connection as all these elements fuse together. It was not my favorite story so far, but it is certainly interesting, especially in light of the previous short story Lifecycle of Software Objects (which in case you missed it, you can read more analysis here).

Some further quick notes:

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Reading DaceyPatent Automatic Nanny

Chiang has constructed a creative framing device here: we observe a peculiar machine — DaceyPatent Automatic Nanny — in historical retrospective within the context of an exhibit entitled &Little Defective Adults — Attitudes Toward Children 1700 to 1950.& The entire story is essentially the museum placard next to the mechanical artifact describing its background and how it was designed to raise an infant without the need for a human nanny.

Much like in the last short story we read in the collection, the question of human connection mediated by technology is at the core of the story. Can we raise a child purely through a piece of technology? Chiang seems to take a definitive stand against such a notion, showing that the childpsychosocial development is hindered by its nearly exclusive interaction with a non-human being. The author even plays a bit of a legerdemain right from the beginning: the exhibittitle of &Little Defective Adults& could be applied to robots just as much as Victorian-era children.

But like the digients in the last story, we later learn that the child at the center of the story actually has fine interaction skills, but with robots instead of humans. As the automatic nanny is removed from service after two years of raising Lionelchild Edmund, the child experiences stunted development. His development is rekindled once he has access to robots and other electronics again. Per the story:

Within a few weeks, it was apparent that Edmund was not cognitively delayed in the manner previously believed; the staff had merely lacked the appropriate means of communicating with him.

And so we are left with a continuation of the major questions from the last story: should human-robot interactions be considered equal to human-to-human interactions? If a child is more comfortable interacting with an electronic device instead of a human, is that just a sign that we privilege and value certain interactions over others?

Ita question that is expounded on much more comprehensively in Lifecycle of Software Objects, but remains just as interesting a question here in our increasingly digital world. We are about to launch a multi-part series on virtual worlds tomorrow (stay tuned), but ultimately all of these questions boil down to a fundamental one: what is real?

Outside of that theme (which veers into philosophy and isn&t deeply meditated on in the couple of pages of story here), I think there are two other threads worth pulling on. The first has to do with the variability of human experience. This whole experiment begins when Lionelown father Reginald decides to replace a human nanny with a machine to provide a more consistent environment for his child (&It will not expose your child to disreputable influences&). Indeed, he doesn&t just want that consistency for his own child, but wants to clone the automatic nanny for all children.

Yet while Reginald feels that human nannies are defective, it is really the automatic nannies themselves that are impoverished. They lack the spontaneity and complexity of human beings, preventing the children in their care from handling a wider variety of situations and instead pushing them inward. Indeed, women (aka mothers) intuitively understand this dynamic: &The inventor [Reginald] framed his proposal as an invitation to partake in a grand scientific undertaking and was baffled that none of the women he courted found this an appealing prospect.&

And yet, human contact is precisely what drives the continued pursuit of these robots in the first place. The nannyoriginal inventor, Reginald, uses it on his own son Lionel, who wants to prove their utility to the world by using it on his son Edmund. So we see a multi-generational pursuit of this dream, but that pursuit is driven by the human passion to defend the work of oneparents and the legacy they leave behind. Human-to-human contact then becomes the key driver to prove human-to-robot contact is just as effective, debunking the very claim under consideration in the process. Ita beautiful bit of irony.

The other thread to untangle a bit is the scientific method and how far astray it can lead us. Reginaldcreation and marketing of the device is undermined by the fact that he never really performed any real experiments on his own child to evaluate the quality of different nannies. He just makes assumptions, based on his Victorian values, and pursues them relentlessly before heading back to pure mathematics, a field where he can be at ease with his models of the universe.

In the middle of this little pattern is a common lesson: sometimes the things that are least measurable have the greatest influence on our lives. This story — like the exhibit ita depiction of — is a warning, about hubris and failing to listen and love.

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

Some questions to think about as you read the next short story, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling:

• What is truth? What is honesty?
• How do the two frames — an historical one about the Tiv and the &contemporary& one about the remem technology — work together to interrogate what truth means?
• How important is it to get the details right about a memory? Does a compelling narrative override the need for accuracy?
• Do different cultures have different approaches to storytelling, narration, and universal truth?
• Does constantly recording photos and videos change our perception of the world? Are they adequate representations of the truth?
• How important is it to forget? Memories are supposed to fade with time — is this fundamentally conducive to humanity or harmful?
• Will we fact check each otherbehavior more and more in the future? What consequences would such a future bring?