HQ Trivia and Vine co-founder Colin Kroll found dead of suspected overdose

Colin Kroll, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his apartment, TechCrunch has confirmed.

A spokesman for the NYPD told us that a female called 911 for a wellness check on Kroll’s apartment and he was found dead inside at 08:00 hours today.

The police department said the investigation is ongoing but added that the cause of death is “allegedly a drug overdose”.

“We’re still waiting on the ME’s report to confirm that,” he added.

The story was reported earlier by TMZ — which cites a police source saying cocaine and heroin were believed to be involved.

We reached out to HQ for comment but the company has declined to make a statement at this time.

Kroll was only named CEO of the HQ Trivia mobile game show app three months ago, replacing fellow co-founder Rus Yusupov who moved over to serve as chief creative officer.

Prior to taking the CEO role Kroll served as HQ’s CTO. He co-founded the startup in 2015, a few months after moving on from Vine — the Twitter-owned short video format startup which got closed down in 2017.

It’s not clear who will take over the CEO role for HQ Trivia at this stage but Yusupov looks a likely candidate, at least in the interim.

In recent months the startup has been beta testing a follow up mobile game show, called HQ Words. Its original trivia format show airs twice per day and awards winners as much as $100,000 for successfully answering 12 questions.

The app debuted last August and was a viral success. But the question hanging over HQ Trivia and its co-founders has increasingly been how to sustain an early winning streak, once the novelty of the original show ran its course.

As we reported previously, HQ Trivia’s ranking in the app store has been steadily decreasing in recent months.

Kroll started his career as a software engineer at Right Media, which went on to be acquired by Yahoo in 2006. From then until 2011, he led the engineering team in Yahoo’s search and advertising tech group before joining luxury travel site Jetsetter as VP of Product — where he went on to be promoted to CTO.

In 2012 he left to start Vine with co-founders Dominik Hofmann and Yusopov.

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3D-printed heads let hackers – and cops – unlock your phone

There’s a lot you can make with a 3D printer: from prosthetics, corneas, and firearms — even an Olympic-standard luge.

You can even 3D print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D printed model of his own head to test the face unlocking systems on a range of phones — four Android models and an iPhone X.

Bad news if you’re an Android user: all four phones unlocked with the 3D printed head.

Gone, it seems, are the days of the trusty passcode, which many still find cumbersome, fiddly, and inconvenient — especially when you unlock your phone dozens of times a day. Phone makers are taking to the more convenient unlock methods. Even if Google’s latest Pixel 3 shunned facial recognition, many Android models — including popular Samsung devices — are relying more on your facial biometrics. In its latest models, Apple effectively killed its fingerprint-reading Touch ID in favor of its newer Face ID.

But that poses a problem for your data if a mere 3D-printed model can trick your phone into giving up your secrets. That makes life much easier for hackers, who have no rulebook to go from. But what about the police or the feds, who do?

It’s no secret that biometrics — your fingerprints and your face — aren’t protected under the Fifth Amendment. That means police can’t compel you to give up your passcode, but they can forcibly depress your fingerprint to unlock your phone, or hold it to your face while you’re looking at it. And the police know it — it happens more often than you might realize.

But there’s also little in the way of stopping police from 3D printing or replicating a set of biometrics to break into a phone.

“Legally, it’s no different from using fingerprints to unlock a device,” said Orin Kerr, professor at USC Gould School of Law, in an email. “The government needs to get the biometric unlocking information somehow,” by either the finger pattern shape or the head shape, he said.

Although a warrant “wouldn’t necessarily be a requirement” to get the biometric data, one would be needed to use the data to unlock a device, he said.

Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project On Government Oversight, said it was doable but isn’t the most practical or cost-effective way for cops to get access to phone data.

“A situation where you couldn’t get the actual person but could use a 3D print model may exist,” he said. “I think the big threat is that a system where anyone — cops or criminals — can get into your phone by holding your face up to it is a system with serious security limits.”

The FBI alone has thousands of devices in its custody — even after admitting the number of encrypted devices is far lower than first reported. With the ubiquitous nature of surveillance, now even more powerful with high-resolution cameras and facial recognition software, it’s easier than ever for police to obtain our biometric data as we go about our everyday lives.

Those cheering on the “death of the password” might want to think again. They’re still the only thing that’s keeping your data safe from the law.

FBI reportedly overestimated inaccessible encrypted phones by thousands

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Facebook Bug Exposes Users’ Photos

A Facebook bug has exposed the private photos of up to 6.8 million users. The bug means thousands of third-party apps had potential access to photos they didn’t have permission to view. The worst thing is the amount of time Facebook took to disclose the incident.

Facebook’s Very Bad Year

It’s fair to say Facebook hasn’t had a good 2018. There was the Cambridge Analytica scandal everyone should be familiar with by now. And over a backdrop of people deleting Facebook, the social network has had ongoing issues maintaining people’s trust.

The issues run deep, with Facebook battling the spread of fake news, advertising campaigns with the potential to influence elections, and a seemingly lax attitude to users’ data and privacy. And now we get the news that private photos were exposed to apps.

Facebook Discloses New Bug

Facebook disclosed the incident in a Facebook for Developers Blog post. The social network explains that this bug affected “people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos”.

If you want to check if you're affected by Facebook's latest bug involving photo sharing, here's the link: https://t.co/yQDopYtQhy pic.twitter.com/QNMWErLOU9

— Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) December 14, 2018

Users sometimes give apps permission to access photos they share on their timeline. However, this bug meant that for 12 days developers could also access other photos shared on Facebook, and even photos people uploaded but then decided not to post.

The bug in question was live between September 13 and September 25, 2018. Facebook discovered and duly fixed the bug on the 25th. However, it has taken almost three months for Facebook to notify the developers affected and, by extension, the users affected.

Facebook is “sorry this happened,” and is rolling out tools to help developers “determine which people using their app might be impacted by this bug.” Those people will then be notified, and directed to a Help Center link explaining the issue in more detail.

Fingers Crossed for 2019

This tops off an annus horribilis for Facebook, and we really hope 2019 brings better fortune. Not for Facebook’s sake, but for the sake of its users. Otherwise Facebook et al might find that everyone collectively decides to quit social media altogether.

Image Credit: Marco Verch/Flickr

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