Remote access, collaboration and password manager provider LogMeIn has been sold to a private equity outfit for $4.3bn.
A consortium led by private equity firm Francisco Partners (along with Evergreen, the PE arm of tech activist investor Elliott Management), will pay $86.05 in cash for each LogMeIn share – a 25 per cent premium on prices before talk about the takeover surfaced in September.
LogMeIn’s board of directors is in favour of the buy. Chief executive Bill Wagner said the deal recognised the value of the firm and would provide for: “both our core and growth assets”.
The sale should close in mid-2020, subject to the usual shareholder and regulatory hurdles. Logmein also has 45 days to look at alternative offers.
In 2018 LogMeIn made revenues of $1.2bn and profits of $446m.
The company runs a bunch of subsidiaries which offer collaboration software and web meetings products, virtual telephony services, remote technical support, and customer service bots as well as several identity and password manager products.
Logmein bought LastPass, which now claims 18.6 million users, for $110m in 2015. That purchase raised concerns about exactly how LastPass’s new owner would exploit the user data it held, and today’s news is unlikely to allay any of those fears.
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance joined together to promote the formation of the Working Group. Zigbee Alliance board member companies IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also on board to join the Working Group and contribute to the project.
The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
The industry Working Group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol, and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
The project aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and Working Group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today.
Infrared cameras detect people and other objects by the heat they emit. Now, researchers have discovered the uncanny ability of a material to hide a target by masking its telltale heat properties.
The effect works for a range of temperatures that one day could include humans and vehicles, presenting a future asset to stealth technologies, the researchers say.
What makes the material special is its quantum nature—properties that are unexplainable by classical physics. The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is one step closer to unlocking the quantum material’s full potential.
The work was conducted by scientists and engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harvard University, Purdue University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Fooling infrared cameras is not new. Over the past few years, researchers have developed other materials made of graphene and black silicon that toy with electromagnetic radiation, also hiding objects from cameras.
But how the quantum material in this study tricks an infrared camera is unique: it decouples an object’s temperature from its thermal light radiation, which is counterintuitive based on what is known about how materials behave according to fundamental physics laws. The decoupling allows information about an object’s temperature to be hidden from an infrared camera.
The discovery does not violate any laws of physics, but suggests that these laws might be more flexible than conventionally thought.
Quantum phenomena tend to come with surprises. Several properties of the material, samarium nickel oxide, have been a mystery since its discovery a few decades ago.
Shriram Ramanathan, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue, has investigated samarium nickel oxide for the past 10 years. Earlier this year, Ramanathan’s lab co-discovered that the material also has the counterintuitive ability to be a good insulator of electrical current in low-oxygen environments, rather than an unstable conductor, when oxygen is removed from its molecular structure.
Additionally, samarium nickel oxide is one of a few materials that can switch from an insulating phase to a conducting phase at high temperatures. University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Mikhail Kats suspected that materials with this property might be capable of decoupling temperature and thermal radiation.
“There is a promise of engineering thermal radiation to control heat transfer and make it either easier or harder to identify and probe objects via infrared imaging,” said Kats, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Ramanathan’s lab created films of samarium nickel oxide on sapphire substrates to be compared with reference materials. Kats’ group measured spectroscopic emission and captured infrared images of each material as it was heated and cooled. Unlike other materials, samarium nickel oxide barely appeared hotter when it was heated up and maintained this effect between 105 and 135 degrees Celsius.
“Typically, when you heat or cool a material, the electrical resistance changes slowly. But for samarium nickel oxide, resistance changes in an unconventional manner from an insulating to a conducting state, which keeps its thermal light emission properties nearly the same for a certain temperature range,” Ramanathan said.
Because thermal light emission doesn’t change when temperature changes, that means the two are uncoupled over a 30-degree range.
According to the Kats, this study paves the way for not only concealing information from infrared cameras, but also for making new types of optics and even improving infrared cameras themselves.
“We are looking forward to exploring this material and related nickel oxides for infrared camera components such as tunable filters, optical limiters that protect sensors, and new sensitive light detectors,” Kats said.
More information: Temperature-independent thermal radiation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1911244116 , https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/12/16/1911244116 , https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00252
Next time you feel the need to justify to a family member, friend, or random acquaintance why you drive an old shitbox instead of a much more comfortable, modern vehicle, here’s another reason for you to trot out: your old shitbox, unlike every modern car, is not spying on you.
That’s the takeaway from a Washington Post investigation that hacked into a 2017 Chevy Volt to see what data the car hoovers up. The answer is: yikes.
Among the trove of data points were unique identifiers for my and Doug’s [the car’s owner] phones, and a detailed log of phone calls from the previous week. There was a long list of contacts, right down to people’s address, emails and even photos.
…
In our Chevy, we probably glimpsed just a fraction of what GM knows. We didn’t see what was uploaded to GM’s computers, because we couldn’t access the live OnStar cellular connection.
And it’s not just Chevy:
Mason has hacked into Fords that record locations once every few minutes, even when you don’t use the navigation system. He’s seen German cars with 300-gigabyte hard drives — five times as much as a basic iPhone 11. The Tesla Model 3 can collect video snippets from the car’s many cameras. Coming next: face data, used to personalize the vehicle and track driver attention.
Perhaps most troublingly, GM wouldn’t even share with the car’s owner what data about him it collected and shared.
And for what? Why are automakers collecting all this information about you? The short answer is they have no idea but are experimenting with the dumbest possible uses for it:
Automakers haven’t had a data reckoning yet, but they’re due for one. GM ran an experiment in which it tracked the radio music tastes of 90,000 volunteer drivers to look for patterns with where they traveled. According to the Detroit Free Press, GM told marketers that the data might help them persuade a country music fan who normally stopped at Tim Horton’s to go to McDonald’s instead.
That’s right, it wants to collect as much information about you as possible so it can take money from fast-food restaurants to target people who like a certain type of music, which is definitely, definitely a real indicator of what type of fast food restaurant you go to.
You should check out the entire investigation, as there are a lot of other fascinating bits in there, like what can be learned about a used infotainment system bought on eBay.
One point the article doesn’t mention, but that I think is important, is how badly this bodes for the electric future, since pretty much by definition every electric car must have at least some form of a computer. Unfortunately, making cars is hard and expensive so it’s unlikely a new privacy-focused electric automaker will pop up any time soon. I mean, hell, we barely even have privacy-focused phones.
Privacy or environmentally friendly: choose one. The future, it is trash.
If you were one of the millions of people that signed up with Unrollme to cut down on the emails from outfits you once bought a product from, we have some bad news for you: it has been storing and selling your data.
On Tuesday, America’s Federal Trade Commission finalized a settlement [PDF] with the New York City company, noting that it had deceived netizens when it promised not to “touch” people’s emails when they gave it permission to unsubscribe from, block, or otherwise get rid of marketing mailings they didn’t want.
It did touch them. In fact, it grabbed copies of e-receipts sent to customers after they’d bought something – often including someone’s name and physical address – and provided them to its parent company, Slice Technologies. Slice then used the information to compile reports that it sold to the very businesses people were trying to escape from.
Huge numbers of people signed up with Unrollme as a quick and easy way to cut down on the endless emails consumers get sent when they either buy something on the web, or provide their email address in-store or online. It can be time-consuming and tedious to click “unsubscribe” on emails as they come into your inbox, so Unrollme combined them in a single daily report with the ability to easily remove emails. This required granting Unrollme access to your inbox.
As the adage goes, if a product is free, you are the product. And so it was with Unrollme, which scooped up all that delicious data from people’s emails, and provided it to Slice, which was then stored and compiled into market research analytics products that it sold.
And before you get all told-you-so and free-market about it, consider this: Unrollme knew that a significant number of potential customers would drop out of the sign-up process as soon as they were informed that the company would require access to their email account, and so it wooed them by making a series of comforting statements about how it wouldn’t actually do anything with that access.
Examples?
Here’s one: “You need to authorize us to access your emails. Don’t worry, this is just to watch for those pesky newsletters, we’ll never touch your personal stuff.”
It’s been about a year since users of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX were informed that the company’s CEO unexpectedly died, taking the password that accessed most the money from their accounts with him to the grave. And now, those clients want to know what’s inside that grave.
The majority of QuadrigaCX’s holdings were kept offline in “cold storage,” with a password known only by 30-year-old CEO Gerald Cotten. On January 14, the company posted a Facebook note announcing Cotten had died about month earlier “due to complications with Crohn’s disease” while on a trip to India “where he was opening an orphanage to provide a home and safe refuge for children in need.”
The news meant that 76,000 people lost cryptocurrency and cash that amounted to about $163 million USD, collectively, according to Bloomberg. The story became more suspicious in June when a bankruptcy monitor revealed that Cotten funneled most of the money into fraudulent accounts and spent much of it on his wife and himself. Growing skepticism around the mysterious death has driven lawyers representing Quadriga CX users to request that Cotten’s grave be exhumed.
On Friday, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court-appointed lawyers sent a letter asking Canadian police to conduct an autopsy on the body in Cotten’s grave “to confirm both its identity and the cause of death” citing the “questionable circumstances surrounding Mr. Cotten’s death” and “the need for certainty around the question of whether Mr. Cotten is in fact deceased.”
Richard Niedermayer, a lawyer representing Cotten’s wife Jennifer Robertson told the New York Times in an email that Robertson was “heartbroken to learn” about the exhumation request, adding that Cotten’s death “should not be in doubt.”
The QuadrigaCX users’ counsel is asking that the exhumation and autopsy happen by the Spring of 2020 due to “decomposition concerns.”
Stung by an article mulling Amazon Web Services’ market dominance on Monday, AWS VP Andi Gutmans fired back, complaining the reporter ignored flattering comments from AWS partners – and that “AWS is ‘strip-mining’ open source is silly and off-base.”
“The journalist largely ignores the many positive comments he got from partners because it’s not as salacious copy for him,” Gutmans said in a blog post, as if critical reporting carried with it an obligation to publish a specific quota of marketing copy.
And he insisted that Amazon “contributes mightily to open source projects,” and “AWS has not copied anybody’s software or services.”
In its recent lawsuit against AWS, open source biz Elastic, cited in the New York Times article and a business which is public in its disaffection with Amazon, did not accuse AWS of copying its open source search software – which anyone can copy by virtue of its open source license. Rather, the search biz objects to AWS’ use of its trademark in its Amazon Elasticsearch Service.
But others have been more cutting. Following AWS’ launch of DocumentDB, a cloud database compatible with the MongoDB API, CEO Dev Ittycheria suggested his company’s product had been imitated and copied.
Indeed, among startups like Confluent, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4J, and Redis Labs that have been trying to turn open source projects into revenue-generating businesses, concern about AWS – and to a lesser extent Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – is quite common.
In September, at the Open Core Summit, small companies aspiring to be big ones gathered to figure out how they might make a profit in the shadow of AWS and its peers. Worries about AWS have proven broad enough to attract the attention of the US Federal Trade Commission, said to be exploring a possible antitrust case against AWS.
Despite his dissatisfaction with insufficiently rosy AWS coverage, Gutmans has a point: IT customers want what AWS is offering and they are willing to pay for it, regardless of potential problems like vendor lock-in and unpredictable bills.
Yet in his criticism that open source companies see the market as “as a zero-sum game and want to be the only ones able to freely monetize managed services around these open source projects,” he fails to acknowledge that Amazon too takes steps to limit competition and that small firms might need a barrier to entry to convince investors that they can protect their autonomy and revenue stream. Partnering with AWS may be expedient, but that doesn’t give companies a defensible business.
It’s reasonable for companies to want to control their own destiny. But, as open source pioneer Bruce Perens put it in an interview earlier this year, “Open source does not guarantee that you can make money. And that’s the problem that Redis, MongoDB, etc. are all facing right now.”
Then the ads only showed for those who were not Office 365 subscribers, but on this occasion, they are present for everyone and appear non-removable.
The ads are not fixed – when you read your Gmail if offers to let you read your Gmail on mobile, and for Outlook.com accounts it offers the Outlook app for mobile.
Most annoyingly, the ads are still present, even if you use the Outlook app on mobile, and take up considerable vertical space in the menu.
When asked Microsoft said;
“The ads within the app itself will be displayed regardless of which email address you use it with. It is not removable, but you can submit it as a suggestion within the Feedback Hub on Windows 10 here: https://msft.it/6012TVPXG . “
Ads in Mail and Calendar app are of course not in and of themselves evil, but most people feel they have paid for the built-in software in Windows, such as the mail app, when they purchased the computer, and it appears the ads will show even if you use a non-Microsoft email provider.
