Technology

Investing in initial coin offerings, or ICOs, is a minefield. This isn&t just true for people with absolutely no technical background but also for many investors who may be well-versed in tech but still struggle to understand many projects& white papers.

Enter TruStory, a platform for users to research and validate claims that people make online, whether in a blog post, white paper, website or social media post. The young companyaim is to &bring authenticity back into the digital and decentralized world.&

Ita huge and growing opportunity. Though regulators around the world are cracking down on cryptocurrency fraud, the number of ICOs has skyrocketed and the funds raised through the mechanism are increasing. According to data collected last month by CoinDesk, ICOs raised $6.3 billion in the first three months of 2018; that118 percent more than projects managed to raise by way of ICOs in all of 2017.

Itnot just blockchain-startups that are carrying out ICOs, either. Many other types of companies are trying to use them — and many of them are frauds.Just last week, The Wall Street Journal published ananalysis of 1,450 cryptocurrency offerings, in which the outlet found &271 with red flags that include plagiarized investor documents, promises of guaranteed returns and missing or fake executive teams.&

Separating the wheat from the chaff is a tall order, but investors are willing to bet that TruStory can do the sorting.The outfit just raised $3 million in seed funding led by True Ventures with participation from Pantera Capital, Kindred Ventures, Homebrew, Coinbase Ventures, Wonder Ventures, Abstract Ventures and former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis through her new fund Dream Machine.

The round also attracted checks from numerous notable individual investors, including Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, entrepreneur and investor Scott Belsky and former Twitter M-A executive Jessica Verrilli, who recently joined GV as a general partner.

All are betting on TruStoryfounder,Preethi Kasireddy, and iteasy to imagine why, given her trajectory so far. A USC grad who studied industrial and systems engineering, Kasireddy took a job as a banking analyst with Goldman Sachs after graduating, learning how tech company financials work. After less than a year, Kasireddy was searching out a new role as an engineer but a cold call from Andreessen Horowitz led instead to a role on its deals group, where she learned from the firmgeneral partners, as well as developed a fascination with everything blockchain related.

In fact, several years after Andreessen Horowitz wrote an early check to Coinbase, Kasireddy left the firm to work for the digital currency exchange as a self-taught software engineer. There, she says, she architected and implemented the front-end interfaces and APIs required for the integration of Ethereum onto the Coinbase brokerage platform, among other things.

Then she left, again. &I just started to teach myself how to write code that runs on Ethereum. I was contributing to different blockchain projects and just listening, and learning, and observing.& She was also taking note of the growing number of false claims that people were making while raising millions of dollars in the process.

How TruStory will more effectively verify the veracity of these claims isn&t something that Kasireddy is interested in discussing publicly in great detail. (&The space is rampant with people copying other peopleideas.&)

What she can say is that it will use the wisdom of crowds — including scientists and researchers whom she is currently lining up — to evaluate whether a project or person is legitimate. They won&t be doing this out of their own beneficence. When someone successfully validates a claim or else identifies aspects of an offering that doesn&t make sense, she or he will &earn tokens and reputation and influence& for their efforts, Kasireddy explains.

If they&re dishonest, they&ll lose on all three fronts. (The tokens are generated using the protocol itself, she says.)

Eventually, says Kasireddy, the platform will be used to validate far more than white papers. &We&re starting with crypto market and claims being made in white papers and websites and building a network to help investors and researchers who need this information to make the right decisions.& But there are &other ways to use the same incentive design to validate other claims,& she says.

There will also be opportunities for people to buy tokens to have projects vetted, she adds, saying to &think about Facebook or Twitter& where there are plenty of claims of dubious origin that stakeholders might want to see either validated or debunked.

Asked when TruStory will actively start reviewing whatout there already, Kasireddy suggests the outfit isn&t ready for prime time quite yet. TruStory is currently run solely by Kasireddy, who is in the process of bringing aboard a couple of operations people and a few key engineers. But she says that unlike many other founders in todaymarket — including those who&ve raised venture capital — shenot interested in orchestrating an ICO to supercharge her company or her hiring plans.

&We&ll fund ourselves through the development of our tokens, and we expect the tokens eventually to fund the business.

&Itabout getting those token economics to work,& she says. &And then the engine starts up.&

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Elon Musk has, as I imagine he often does during meetings or long car rides, come up with an idea for a new thing. Unlike the Hyperloop, which was cool, and various space-related ideas, which we know heat least partly expert about, this one is just plain bad. Itbasically Yelp But For Journalism.

He may as well have said, I found this great can marked &worms& and I&m going to open it, or, I&ve determined a new method for herding cats.

The idea of holding publications and people accountable is great. Unfortunately it is the kind of problem that does not yield to even the best of intentions and smart engineering, because it is quickly complicated by the ethical, procedural and practical questions of crowdsourcing &the truth.&

He agreed with another Twitter user, whose comment is indistinguishable from sarcasm:

Elon Musk has a very bad idea for a website rating journalists

My guess is Musk does not often use Yelp, and has never operated a small business like a restaurant or salon.

Especially in todayfiercely divided internet landscape, there is no reliable metric for truth or accountability. Some will say The New York Times is the most trusted newspaper in America — others will call it a debased rag with a liberal agenda. Individual stories will receive the same treatment, with some disputing what they believe are biases and others disputing those same things as totally factual.

And while the truth lies somewhere in-between these extremes, it is unlikely to be the mathematical mean of them. The &wisdom of the crowd,& so often evoked but so seldom demonstrated, cannot depend on an equal number of people being totally wrong in opposite ways, producing a sort of stable system of bias.

The forces at work here — psychological, political, sociological, institutional — are subtle and incalculable.

The origins of this faith, and of the idea that there is somehow a quorum of truth-seekers in this age of deception, are unclear.

Facebookattempts to crowdsource the legitimacy of news stories has had mixed results, and the predictable outcome is, of course, that people simply report as false news with which they disagree. Independent adjudicators are needed, and Facebook has fired and hired them by the hundreds, yet to arrive at some system that produces results worth talking about.

Fact-checking sites perform an invaluable service, but they are labor-intensive, not a self-regulating system like what Musk proposes. Such systems are inevitably and notoriously ruled by chaos, vote brigades, bots, infiltrators, agents provocateur and so on.

Easier said than done — in fact, often said and never done, for years and years and years, by some of the smartest people in the industry. Itnot to say it is impossible, but Muskglib positivity and ignorance or dismissal of a decade and more of efforts on this front are not inspiring. (Nate Silver, for one, is furious.)

Likely as a demonstration of his &faith in the people,& if there are any on bot-ridden Twitter, he has put the idea up for public evaluation.

Currently the vote is about 90 percent yes. Ithard to explain how dumb this is. Yet like most efforts it will be instructive, both to others attempting to tame the zeitgeist, and hopefully to Musk.

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GUN is an open-source decentralized database service that allows developers to build fast peer-to-peer applications that will work, even when their users are offline. The company behind the project (which should probably change its name and logo…) today announced that it has raised just over $1.5 million in a seed round led by Draper Associates. Other investors include SalesforceMarc Benioff through Aloha Angels, as well as Boost VC, CRCM and other angel investors.

As GUN founder Mark Nadal told me, itbeen about four years since he started working on this problem, mostly because he saw the database behind his early projects as a single point of failure. When the database goes down, most online services will die with it, after all. So the idea behind GUN is to offer a decentralized database system that offers real-time updates with eventual consistency. You can use GUN to build a peer-to-peer database or opt for a multi-master setup. In this scheme, a cloud-based server simply becomes another peer in the network (though one with more resources and reliability than a userbrowser). GUN users get tools for conflict resolution and other core features out of the box and the data is automatically distributed between peers. When users go offline, data is cached locally and then merged back into this database once they come online.

GUN raises more than $1.5M for its decentralized database system

Nadal built the first prototype of GUN back in 2014, based on a mix of Firebase, MySQL, MongoDB and Cassandra. That was obviously a bit of a hack, but it gained him some traction among developers and enough momentum to carry the idea forward.

Today, the system has been used to build everything from a decentralized version of Reddit (which isn&t currently working) that can handle a few million uniques per month and a similarly decentralized YouTube clone.

Nadal also argues that his system has major speed advantages over some of the incumbents. &From our initial tests we find that for caching, our product is 28 times faster than Redis, MongoDB and others. Now we are looking for partnerships with companies pioneering technology in gaming, IoT, VR and distributed machine learning,& he said.

The Dutch Navy is already using it for some IoT services on its ships and a number of other groups are using it for their AI/ML services. Because its use cases are similar to that of many blockchain projects, Nadal is also looking at how he can target some of those developers to take a closer look at GUN.

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A uniquely 21st-century constitutional question received a satisfying answer today from a federal judge: President Trump cannot block people on Twitter, as it constitutes a violation of their First Amendment rights. The court also ruled he must unblock all previously blocked users. &No government official is above the law,& the judge concluded.

The question was an aspect of a suit brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute, which alleged that the official presidential Twitter feed amounts to a public forum, and that the government barring individuals from participating in it amounted to limiting their right to free speech.

After consideration, New York Southern District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald determined that this is indeed the case:

We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account — the &interactive space& where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the Presidenttweets — are properly analyzed under the &public forum& doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.

The presidentside argued that Trump has his own rights, and that in this case the choice not to engage with certain people on Twitter is among them. These are both true, Judge Buchwald found, but that doesn&t mean blocking is okay.

A group of Twitter users is suing Trump for blocking them

There is nothing wrong with a government official exercising their First Amendment rights by ignoring someone. And indeed that is what the &mute& function on Twitter is equivalent to. No harm is done to either party by the president choosing not to respond, and so he is free to do so.

But to block someone both prevents that person from seeing tweets and from responding to them, preventing them from even accessing a public forum. As the decision puts it:

We reject the defendants& contentions that the First Amendment does not apply in this case and that the Presidentpersonal First Amendment interests supersede those of plaintiffs…

While we must recognize, and are sensitive to, the Presidentpersonal First Amendment rights, he cannot exercise those rights in a way that infringes the corresponding First Amendment rights of those who have criticized him.

The court also examined the evidence and found that despite the Executivearguments that his Twitter accounts are, for various reasons, in part private and not subject to rules limiting government spaces, the presidentTwitter is definitively a public forum, meeting the criteria set out some time back by the Supreme Court.

At this point in time President Trump has by definition performed unconstitutional acts, but the court was not convinced that any serious legal remedy needs to be applied. And not because the Executive side of the case said it was monstrous of the Judicial to dare to tell it what to do:

While we find entirely unpersuasive the Governmentparade of horribles regarding the judicial interference in executive affairs presented by an injunction directing the President to comply with constitutional restrictions…declaratory relief is likely to achieve the same purpose.

By this the judge means that while the court would be legally in the clear if it issued an official order binding the relevant actors in the Executive, but that thereno reason to do so. Instead, merely declaring that the president has violated the rules of the Constitution should be more than enough to compel his team to take the appropriate action.

Specifically, Trump and (it is implied but not stated specifically) all public officials are to unblock any blocked users on Twitter and never hit that block button again:

No government official is above the law and because all government officials are presumed to follow the law once the judiciary has said what the law is, we must assume that the President and Scavino will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional.

No timeline is set but itclear that the Executive is on warning. You can read the full decision here.

&We&re pleased with the courtdecision, which reflects a careful application of core First Amendment principles to government censorship on a new communications platform,& said executive director of the Knight Institute, Jameel Jaffer, in a press release.

This also sets an interesting precedent as regarding other social networks; in fact, the Institute is currently representing a user in a similar complaint involving Facebook, but it is too early to draw any conclusions. The repercussions of this decision are likewise impossible to predict at this time, including whether and how other officials, such as senators and governors, are also bound by these rules. Legal scholars and political agents will almost certainly weigh in on the issue heavily over the coming weeks.

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On the same day that Spotify class-action settlement with musiciansgets final approval, the company is making a big push to encourage artists to participate on its streaming service & in this case, by offering them a host of educational material to help them get started. The streaming service today is launching its own video series dubbed The Game Plan, which instructs artists on how to get started using &Spotify for Artists,& and the other steps they have to take to make their music available for streaming.

The series includes short videos like: Getting Your Music Up; What Is Spotify for Artists; Releasing Music; Building Your Artist Profile; Understanding Your Audience; How to Read Your Data; Engaging Your Audience; The Follow Button, Promoting Your Work, and Building Your Team.

In the videos, Spotify attempts to demystify the world of streaming with tips about things like when is the best time to release music, how and why to use listening data, how to upload your music, when to hire a lawyer (irony alert), and more.

The series will also feature interviews with experts, including Spotify staff, industry vets, and artists themselves, includingRick Ross, Little Dragon, Mike Posner, and Vérité.

Spotify launches ‘The Game Plan,& a 10-part educational video series for artists

The idea is that, by sharing this knowledge with the wider community, Spotify will be able to help artists build their careers, the company explains. Naturally, it wants them to build those careers and invest in learning Spotifytools & not those from its rivals.

&From successful musicians, to employees who are industry experts, the Spotify community has a wealth of music industry knowledge,& said Charlie Hellman, Head of Creator Marketplace, Spotify, in a statement about the launch. &We want to equip artists at all stages of their career with that powerful knowledge, and make it as accessible as possible.&

The video series& debut comes at a time when thereincreased competition for Spotify, including from the just now launched YouTube Music streaming service,which takes direct aim at Spotify with a similar price point and the addition of music videos, including harder-to-find performances that are often just on YouTube. Plus, Applenew Netflix-like streaming service is rumored to be launching next year as a bundle with Apple Music.

The Game Plan begins as a 10-part video series, but Spotify says theremore to come in the future.

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SamsungAR Emojis were met with a…lukewarm reception when they launched alongside the Galaxy S9. The augmented reality avatars were regarded as a me-too response to AppleAnimojis — and more to the point, were downright creepy.

But at launch, the company brought one key element to the offering that Apple hasn&t: a content partnership. And not just any content partnership, mind. A Disney content partnership. So far, itrolled out the iconic likes of Mickey, Minnie and Donald, and now, just in time for the latest Pixar sequel, itoffering up the cast of The Incredibles 2.

Samsung adds ‘The Incredibles& to its AR Emojis

Starting today, Galaxy S9 and S9+ owners can download Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, Violet, Dash, Jack-Jack and new character Frozone, for all of their AR Emoji-related needs. So users can send a birthday greeting, reach out to a loved one or break up with an ex as their favorite super baby.

The new content pack is available directly through the camera softwarebuilt-in AR Emoji mode. The tech uses in excess of 100 facial features to map the usermovements.

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