The New AMD Ryzen Vulnerabilities Are Real: What You Need to Know

CPU manufacturers are enduring a rough few months. The massive Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities shook the computing world. And then, if the vulnerabilities weren’t bad enough, the patches put out to fix the issues came with their own set of problems. It’ll be some time until the effects of Spectre/Meltdown fade.

AMD chips weren’t unscathed. Worse, in March 2018, researchers claim to have found a raft of new AMD-specific critical vulnerabilities. However, some people in the tech world are unsure. Is there any truth to the reports of critical vulnerabilities in AMD Ryzen CPUs? Let’s take a look at the story so far.

Critical Vulnerabilities and Exploitable Backdoors

Israeli security firm CTS Labs disclosed 13 critical vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities affect AMD’s Ryzen workstation, Ryzen Pro, Ryzen mobile architecture, and EPYC server processors. Furthermore, the vulnerabilities bare similarities to Spectre/Meltdown and could allow an attacker access to private data, to install malware, or gain access to a compromised system.

The processor vulnerabilities stem from the design of AMD’s Secure Processor, a CPU security feature that allows safe storage of encryption keys, passwords, and other extremely sensitive data. This, in conjunction with a flaw in the design of AMD’s Zen chipset that links the processor to other hardware devices.

“This integral part of most of AMD’s products, including workstations and servers, is currently being shipped with multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow malicious actors to permanently install malicious code inside the Secure Processor itself.”

Are These Vulnerabilities Real?

Yes, they’re very much real and come in four flavors:

• Ryzenfall: Allows malicious code to take complete control of the AMD Secure Processor
• Fallout: Allows an attacker to read from and write to protected memory areas such as SMRAM
• Chimera: A “double” vulnerability, with one firmware flaw and one hardware flaw that allows the injection of malicious code directly into the AMD Ryzen chipset; chipset-based malware evades virtually all endpoint security solutions
• Masterkey: Exploits multiple vulnerabilities in AMD Secure Processor firmware to allow access to Secure Processor; allows extremely stealthy persistent chipset-based malware to evade security; could allow for physical device damage

The CTS Labs security blog states, “Attackers could use Ryzenfall to bypass Windows Credential Guard, steal network credentials, and then potentially spread through even highly secure Windows corporate network […] Attackers could use Ryzenfall in conjunction with Masterkey to install persistent malware on the Secure Processor, exposing customers to the risk of covert and long-term industrial espionage.”

Other security researchers quickly verified the findings.

Regardless of the hype around the release, the bugs are real, accurately described in their technical report (which is not public afaik), and their exploit code works.

— Dan Guido (@dguido) March 13, 2018

None of the vulnerabilities require physical device access or any additional drivers to run. They do, however, require local machine administrator privileges, so there is some respite. And let’s face it, if someone has direct root access to your system, you’re already in a world of pain.

What’s the Issue Then?

Well, no one has really heard of CTS Labs. Which on its own is not an issue. Small firms complete excellent research all the time. It is, rather, how CTS Labs went about disclosing the vulnerabilities to the public. Standard security disclosure asks researchers to give the vulnerable company at least 90-days to rectify an issue before going public with sensitive findings.

CTS Labs gave AMD a whopping 24 hours before putting their amdflaws site online. And that has attracted significant ire from the security community. It isn’t only the site though. The way the vulnerabilities are presented is also drawing issue. The vulnerability information site features an interview with one of the researchers, is full of infographics and other media, has exciting and catchy names for the issues and seems overblown for the release of a vulnerability. (A vulnerability they gave AMD less than 24-hours to fix, mind!)

CTS Labs gave their reasoning for this, too. CTS Labs CTO Ilia Luk-Zilberman explains that “the current structure of ‘Responsible Disclosure’ has a very serious problem.” Furthermore, they “think it’s hard to believe we’re the only group in the world who has these vulnerabilities, considering who are the actors in the world today.” You can read the full letter right here [PDF].

TL;DR: CTS Labs believes the 30/60/90 day waiting period prolongs the danger to already vulnerable consumers. If researchers make the disclosure straight away, it forces the hand of the company to act immediately. In fact, their suggestion of using third-party validation, as CTS Labs did with Dan Guido (whose confirmation Tweet is linked above), is sensible—but something that already happens.

Shorting AMD Stock

Other researchers downplayed the severity of the flaws due to the required level of system access. There were further questions about the timing of the report as it emerged stock short-selling firm Viceroy Research were issuing a report declaring that AMD shares might lose all their value. AMD shares did indeed take a tumble, coinciding with the release of the CTS Labs vulnerability report, but closed the day higher than before.

Linux-kernel lead developer Linus Torvalds also believe that CTS Labs approach is negligent, stating “Yes, it looks more like stock manipulation than a security advisory to me.” Torvalds also laments the unnecessary hype surrounding the release, claiming that security researchers “Look like clowns because of it.”

Torvalds ranting isn’t unprecedented. But he is right. It also comes on the back of another “security alert” requiring both a terrible SSH and terrible root password to work. Torvalds (and other security researchers and developers) point is that sometimes just because a flaw sounds dangerous and exotic, it doesn’t make it a huge issue for the general public.

Can You Stay Safe?

Well, it is a mixed security bag. Is your AMD Ryzen CPU vulnerable? Yes, it is. Is your AMD Ryzen CPU likely to see an exploit of this manner? It is somewhat unlikely, at least in the short-term.

That said, those with an AMD Ryzen system should raise their security vigilance level for the next few weeks until AMD can release a security patch. Hopefully, they’ll be a darn sight better than the Spectre/Meltdown patches!

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How to Download, Install, and Update DirectX on Your PC

While Windows 10 serves a lot of users, it’s definitely a fit for gamers. Features like the Xbox app, Game DVR, and native controller support offer huge advancements over prior versions.

But one of the most important elements powering the gaming experience on Windows 10 is behind the scenes: DirectX. Let’s review what DirectX is, then see how to manage it on your PC.

What Is DirectX?

DirectX is a set of APIs in Windows that handles graphical elements in games. Because no two gaming PCs have exactly the same set of components, game developers use the DirectX libraries to write games that work on computers of all kinds.

In the old days, DirectX was its own separate download. You’d often see a prompt to check for the latest updates for DirectX when you installed a game. Since Windows 8, Microsoft has included DirectX as a part of Windows. Thus, you can update it right from Windows Update.

The latest version of DirectX is DirectX 12, which is only available on Windows 10. Windows 7 and 8 are stuck on DirectX 11.

Note that DirectX isn’t the only graphics API. The Vulkan Run Time Libraries are a newer competitor that offer some enhanced performance.

What Version of DirectX Do I Have?

You can easily open a panel to see all about the version of DirectX you have installed on your PC. To do so, press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, then type dxdiag. You’ll see a window titled DirectX Diagnostic Tool a moment later:

At the bottom of this System Information panel, you’ll see a DirectX Version where you can confirm what you have installed. Again, if you’re on Windows 10, you should see DirectX 12 here. Check for Windows Updates if not.

While you’re here, you should click the Display tab (you’ll see multiple if you use more than one monitor) to make sure your computer supports all features of DirectX. DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration, and AGP Texture Acceleration should all say Enabled.

If not, you’ll need to upgrade your PC’s hardware to take advantage of these features.

How Do I Download DirectX?

How to download the latest version of DirectX depends on the version of Windows you’re using.

Windows 10: You can’t download any standalone packages of DirectX. Microsoft provides updates for DirectX through Windows Update. Thus, you won’t even need to update DirectX when you install a new game. Go to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update and click Check for updates to see if you can update DirectX.

Windows 8.1: Like Windows 10, there’s no manual update link for DirectX. Windows 8.1 includes DirectX 11.2, which is the latest version compatible with Windows 8. Check Windows Update at Settings > Update and Recovery > Windows Update for any updates to DirectX.

Windows 7: The latest version of DirectX for Windows 7 is 11.1. This is available with Windows 7 Service Pack 1. You’ll need to install Windows Update KB2670838, either manually or through Windows Update, to get it.

Earlier versions of Windows: Windows XP and Vista both no longer receive support from Microsoft. Since they’re so old, you’re probably not playing any modern games on them. For the sake of completion, though, we’ll note that the latest version of DirectX for Vista is 11.0 with Service Pack 2. On Windows XP, you’re stuck with DirectX 9.0c, which you can update with Microsoft’s web installer.

Why Do I Have So Many DirectX Versions Installed?

While the version of Windows you use dictates the newest version of DirectX that your computer can run, that doesn’t mean it’s the only one installed.

Even though DirectX is built into Windows now, you likely have all kinds of DirectX files located at C:\Windows\System32 (and C:\Windows\SysWOW64 on a 64-bit copy of Windows).

Why is this?

Like Microsoft’s C++ Runtime, every game relies on a different version of DirectX. For instance, if a developer wrote a game to use DirectX 11 update 40, then only version 40 will work. A newer one isn’t compatible.

Thus, whenever you install a new game, it will likely install a unique copy of DirectX. This leads to you having potentially dozens of copies on your system.

Should I Uninstall DirectX?

There’s no official way to uninstall DirectX. You can’t remove it from the Apps panel of the Settings app in Windows 10. But there’s really no reason you would need to, as it’s not a normal program. It’s a core part of how Windows displays graphics.

And don’t worry about having several versions installed. Those extra libraries aren’t hurting anything, and they were installed for a reason when you downloaded a particular game.

You shouldn’t try to delete individual DirectX files in the folders mentioned above. That could cause games or other programs to stop working properly. If you’re having problems with a particular version of DirectX, try reinstalling the game that uses it.

Now You Know About DirectX

We’ve covered what DirectX is, how you can check which version you have installed, and how to get the latest updates for it. This powerful library of graphics tools is part of the reason Windows is the popular platform for gaming that it is. It’s a normal part of your computer if you play games, and in most cases, you shouldn’t have to do anything to manage it.

For more, check out the best ways to optimize Windows 10 for gaming.

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Pinterest is slowly rolling out its automated shopping ads to more marketers

Pinterest is looking to continue to increase its portfolio of ads, though sometimes that can take a little while to see the light of day — and that includes a new-ish tool called Shopping Ads that’s slowly getting opened to more developers.

Getting new ad formats is important for a smaller company looking to build out an advertising business, as it has to show potential advertisers it can offer an array of tools to play with as they experiment with that service. The company said today that it’s expanding those shopping ad tools to hundreds of additional advertisers after launching a pilot program last year as it looks to continue to ramp up that tool. Pinterest has to be able to convince marketers that it should be a mainstay advertising purchase alongside Facebook and Google, which are able to routinely show returns in value for their advertising spend.

Shopping ads automatically create promoted pins from an existing product feed for a retailer. That means it’s basically one less thing for retailers to worry about as they add more and more content to the service. Most of Pinterest’s content online is business content as users share products they might be interested in one day buying or already own. As Pinterest gets more and more data on this, they’ll have a better handle on what ads work best, and hope that businesses will hand off the process in full to something more automated.

Pinterest hopes to capture that routine user behavior of planning what they want to do next, whether that’s an outfit to wear that day or some kind of major event or purchase down the line. Getting a hold of those users in the moment they might be interested in a new product is key to the company’s pitch to advertisers. You can more or less consider this a continued test as the company starts to slowly give the tool to the advertisers it works with before it becomes generally available. If it works, it could probably end up down the line in the hands of all advertisers, which could help for small- to medium-sized businesses without a lot of experience build out their early marketing campaigns.

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Rylo’s shoot first, frame later camera is ideal for casual adventure-seekers

Action cameras are a gadget that mostly cater to a person’s wish to see themselves in a certain way: Most people aren’t skiing off mountains or cliff diving most of the time, but they aspire to. The issue with most action cameras, though, is that even when you actually do something cool, you still have to shoot the right angle to capture the moment, which is itself a skill. That’s the beauty of Rylo, a tiny 360 camera that minimizes the skill required and makes it easy to get the shots you want.

Rylo is compact enough to have roughly the footprint of a GoPro, but with dual lenses for 4K, 360-degree video capture. It has a removable battery pack good for an hour of continuous video recording, and a micro USB port for charging. In the box, you’ll get either a micro USB to Lightning, or micro USB to micro USB and USB C cables, depending on whether you pick up the Android or the iOS version, and you handle all editing on the mobile device you already have with you always.

The device itself feels solid, and has stood up to a lot of travel and various conditions over the course of my usage. The anodized aluminum exterior can take some lumps, and the OLED screen on the device provides just enough info when you’re shooting, without overwhelming. There’s no viewfinder, but the point of the Rylo is that you don’t need one – it’s capturing a full 360-degree image all the time, and you position your shot after the fact in editing.

Rylo includes a 16GB microSD card in the box, too, but you can use up to 256GB versions for more storage. A single button on top controls both power functions and recording, and the simplicity is nice when you’re in the moment and just want to start shooting without worrying about settings.

The basic functionality of Rylo is more than most people will need out of a device like this: Using the app, you can select out an HD, flat frame of video to export, and easily trim the length plus make adjustments to picture, including basic edits like highlights, color and contrast. Rylo’s built-in stabilization keeps things surprisingly smooth, even when you’re driving very fast along a bumpy road with what amounts to nearly race-tuned tires and suspension.

Then, if you want to get really fancy, you can do things like add motion to your clips, including being able to make dead-simple smooth pans from one focus point to another. The end result looks like you’re using a gimbal or other stabilized film camera, but all the equipment you need is the Rylo itself, plus any mount, including the handle/tripod mount that comes in the box, or anything that works with a GoPro.

You can even set a specific follow point, allowing you to track a specific object or person throughout the clip. This works well, though sometimes it’ll lose track of the person or thing if there’s low light or the thing it’s following gets blocked. The app will let you know it’s lost its target, however, and in practice it works well enough to create good-looking videos for things like bicycling and riding ATVs, for instance.

Other companies are trying to do similar things with their own hardware, including GoPro with the Fusion and Insta360 with its Insta360 One. But Rylo’s solution has the advantage of being dead simple to use, with easily portable hardware that’s durable and compatible with existing GoPro mount accessories. The included micro USB to Lightning cable isn’t easily replaced, except for from Rylo itself, and it’s also small and easy to lose, so that’s my main complaint when it comes to the system as a whole.

In the end, the Rylo does what it’s designed to do: Takes the sting out of creating cool action clips and compelling short movies for people working mostly from their mobile devices. It’s not as flexible for pros looking for a way to integrated more interesting camera angles into their desktop workflow because of how tied content captured on the Rylo is to the Rylo app itself, but it seems clearly designed for a consumer enthusiast market anyway.

At $499, the Rylo isn’t all that much more expensive than the GoPro Hero 6. It’s still a significant investment, and the image quality isn’t up to the 4K video output by the GoPro, but for users who just want to make cool videos to share among friends using social tools, Rylo’s ease of use and incredibly low bar in terms of filming expertise required is hard to beat.

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Google introduces ‘Shopping Actions’ to help retailers in their battle with Amazon

Google announced this morning a new plan to help retailers take on Amazon – and give Google a cut of their sales in the process. The search giant will allow retailers to list their products across Google Search, in its Google Express shopping service, and in the Google Assistant app for smartphones and on smart speakers, like the Google Home.

The program offers online shoppers a universal cart whether they’re shopping on mobile, desktop or via a voice-powered device. That latter item is especially important to retailers, given that Amazon has tied voice shopping to its Echo devices, and has claimed the majority of market share in smart speakers for the time being. And you aren’t able to shop Walmart from an Echo, of course.

Google is working with a range of top retailers on the new effort, including Target, Walmart, Ulta Beauty, Costco, and Home Depot. Some of these were detailed in the company’s official announcement of Shopping Actions, as the program is called. A report from Reuters noted the others.

Walmart and Target were both already partnered with Google on voice-based shopping, which includes integrations with Google Express and Google Assistant. This allows customers to shop their site through the Google Express app or by saying things like “buy peanut butter from Walmart,” to place a quick voice order with Google Assistant’s help.

Those partnerships, and the new program being introduced today, also allows retailers to increase shopper loyalty by supporting things like 1-click re-ordering, personalized recommendations, and basket-building, says Google. For example, if a customer integrates their Ultamate Rewards account (Ulta’s loyalty program) with Google, it will know what other products to recommend based on past order history when the shopper is searching for a particular item.

Google says it will use a pay-per-sale model, which means it’s only taking a cut of the sale when a shopper makes a purchase. That’s different from Google’s pay-per-click ads, where businesses pay when a web searcher engages with an ad by visiting the website or calling the business.

According to Google, retail partners saw the average size of a customer’s shopping basket increase by 30 percent after joining the program, and Ulta saw average order values increase 35 percent. Target, which has been live for 6 months, says its Google Express shopping baskets increased nearly 20 percent, on average.

The program is live now in the U.S. and open to any retailer.

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The Top 10 Crazy Things You Can Do With a Drone

Do You Love Cats? 8 Smartphone Games for Cat Lovers

There’s no denying it, the internet loves cats. Especially when it comes to memes. You may even own a cat or two, or just wish you had your own cat. If it’s the latter, you probably vicariously live through the cat photos posted of others. You poor, non-cat-owning person.

But even if you have a cat, or get your daily dose of feline fun through Instagram or Facebook, sometimes this just may not be enough. You need cats in everything, from clothes and accessories to video games.

While we can’t help you become the next feline fashionista, we do know some great cat-themed games you can play on your smartphone.

1. Super Phantom Cat 2

If you’re a fan of brilliant platformers, and especially Super Mario Bros., then Super Phantom Cat 2 is a must-play.

The game features colorful and blocky graphics that anyone will find cute and charming. There’s a wide roster of different cats available to play as, each having their own unique costume, and some have special abilities. It takes time to collect all of the necessary hero fragments though, so expect to be playing this for a while.

Super Phantom Cat 2 is level-based, and the goal is to reach the portal at the end to get to the next area. But there are obstacles, traps, and enemies in the way, making it easier said than done. Fortunately, you’ll have the powers of the Phantom World at your side, making the impossible possible.

There are also quests that provide more objectives to complete, as well as neat rewards. These are slightly more challenging than the normal levels.

Super Phantom Cat 2 is a good sequel to the original Super Phantom Cat, and it’s great for cat lovers who want platforming fun.

Download: Super Phantom Cat 2 for iOS | Android (Free)

2. Cat Quest

Are you in the mood for an action-packed, real-time dungeon crawling experience similar to Diablo 3? But with cats? Then you’ll love Cat Quest.

Embark on a grand journey full of dragons, magic, and, yep, you guessed it, cats. As an evil creature catnaps your sister, it’s up to you to get her back.

Cat Quest features distinctive 2.5D visuals with a cartoon style that is both endearing and adorable. The world of Felingard is lush and detailed, and has incredibly smooth animations during navigation and real-time battle.

Felingard is a vast world, and players are not limited to linear exploration. You can roam freely around the lands, battling in real-time to level up and become stronger, and delve into secret dungeons. There’s a lot of enemies to claw your way through with melee combat or magical spells, and plenty of loot to collect too.

Download: Cat Quest for iOS | Android ($4.99)

3. Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector

Do you want to relax and collect digital cats (or virtual pets like Tamagotchis), especially if you don’t have a real cat to call your own? Then check out Neko Atsume.

The simple art style of Neko Atsume matches the super easy gameplay. All you need to do is place toys and snacks in your yard to attract cats. Eventually, they will come and pay you a visit.

As cats stop by for a visit for free food and playtime, they’ll leave behind some fish as a gift. You spend the fish on new toys and snacks to attract even more cats, and repeat the cycle.

There are 40 different varieties of cats in Neko Atsume. Each one gets attracted by certain toys and food, so you’ll have to change things up every now and then, especially if you want to catch the rare breeds.

Download: Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector for iOS | Android (Free)

4. Cat Bird

Maybe Super Phantom Cat 2 isn’t enough of a platformer for you. Or perhaps you prefer your cats to… fly? Either way, Cat Bird should fulfills your needs.

Cat Bird features nostalgic pixel art visuals and chiptunes to appeal to retro gamers. The white cat is also adorable, especially when it takes flight with its stubby little arms.

There are several worlds in Cat Bird packed with a variety of stages. The goal is to help the flying cat reach the portal at the end of each stage so he can go home. It starts out easy enough, but the additional hazards, traps, and enemies make it a challenging task of survival. This one is all about timing.

Download: Cat Bird for iOS | Android (Free)

5. Bread Kittens

Cats and bread go hand-in-hand. Remember the whole “cat breading” meme? The idea is so irresistible that there’s a whole game dedicated to it.

In Bread Kittens, you take the role of a baker. You must stop the evil ChowCorp from turning all cats wild and aggressive with tainted cat food. Cats won’t get adopted and fed when they’re feral, so you have to engage in battles with them until they’re weak enough to get captured through bread.

Yes, you literally use bread like a Pokeball to capture kittens. Then you create bread loaf armor to protect them as you use them to tame other wild cats. Travel with your army of cats, find rare and powerful breeds, and save them from ChowCorp’s grasp.

Download: Bread Kittens for iOS | Android (Free)

6. Nom Cat

We all know cats like to eat, so why not turn that into a mobile game?

Nom Cats is a quick arcade style game that tests your reflexes. Just tap-and-hold to make the two cats open their mouths wide to catch and eat endless waves of fish. But you’ll want to watch out for those bombs that got mixed in. The more fish the cats eat, the higher your score.

There’s an impressive roster of famous felines in Nom Cat too, including Garfield, Grumpy Cat, Nyan Cat, Keyboard Cat, and more.

Download: Nom Cat for iOS | Android (Free)

7. Nyan Cat: Lost in Space

Do you remember Nyan Cat, the internet’s beloved flying cat in a Pop-Tart leaving behind a rainbow trail of awesomeness? There’s a game for this popular meme cat too, and it’s just as random and crazy as you might expect.

Nyan Cat: Lost in Space is an infinite runner with five different game modes. Each of them adds a unique twist to the gameplay that makes it more challenging, or even relaxing. Along the way, help Nyan Cat gather up tasty treats and avoid dangerous hazards like bombs, UFOs, and dogs.

For more Nyan Cat fun, there’s a virtual pet mini-game that awards you prizes quicker if you keep the cat happy. You can also create your own Nyan Cat as well, in case the original isn’t enough cat for you.

And don’t forget about the super catchy “nyan” song.

Download: Nyan Cat: Lost in Space for iOS | Android (Free)

8. Purrfect Date

Sometimes animals are definitely better than people, and that’s proven correct with a dating simulator featuring cats. Say hello to your Purrfect Date.

This creative interactive visual novel combines romance, mystery, and suspense all in one package, and finishes it all off with a lot of cats.

In Purrfect Date, players take on the role of a researcher who gets a new job on this remote island inhabited by felines, appropriately named Cat Island. There’s a mystery afoot, talking cats, and suspicious NPCs. As you try to unravel the secrets of the island, you’ll have the opportunity to get to know a cat on a more personal level. It’s almost like the cats are people, oddly enough.

There are six stories to go through in Purrfect Date, and you have tough decisions awaiting you. It’s a unique (if slightly creepy) game that’s packed with charm.

Download: Purrfect Date for iOS ($4.99)

A Purr-fect Way to Pass Time

If you love cats and mobile games, there are certainly a lot of options out there. We just rounded up some of the best feline-themed games for your enjoyment, and hope they help you to get your daily cat fix.

And while we’re all about the cats, don’t forget about these other trendy mobile games while you’re at it. Or you could always use a tablet to keep your cat entertained instead.

Image Credit: Alexmia/Depositphotos

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How to Cleanly Extract Text From Images on Your Computer Screen

If you have any experience with computers, you’ve probably heard of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This important procedure takes images that have text in them and extracts that text into an editable form.

For instance, Google uses OCR to scan old books and make them available digitally through Google Books. But OCR can be useful to you as a home user too. Let’s take a quick look at an app that makes it easy.

Capturing and Extracting Text Using Easy Screen OCR

Easy Screen OCR is a solid program for grabbing the text from any image on your PC. Head to its homepage and download it, opting for the portable version if you like.

Once installed, you’ll find an icon for the utility in your System Tray. Right-click it to access the program’s few options in the Preferences menu. Here, you can have the program run at startup, play a sound, and change the hotkey for its use.

To start a capture, right-click the icon and choose Capture, or press the hotkey. Your mouse will change to a rainbow color; click and drag over the image you’d like to use. Once you do so, you’ll see a small window in the bottom-right corner of your screen. Click the OCR button to perform the procedure.

After a moment, you’ll see the text from the image appear in the Text tab of the tool. You can then copy this text and paste it wherever you’d like.

This might not be a tool you use all the time, but it’s worth keeping around. For instance, if you ever receive an error message that doesn’t let you copy its text, you can use OCR to easily copy the text for troubleshooting, without typing it all out yourself.

If you need a more advanced OCR software, take a look at our comparison of OneNote and OmniPage.

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How to Verify Your Bitfinex Account to Withdraw Money and Reduce Deposit Times

If you’ve spent a while using services like Coinbase to buy mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum, you might feel like it’s time to branch out.

Perhaps you want to try your hand at trading, or maybe you’d just like to own some less well-known coins. In either case, you’ll need to sign up for a cryptocurrency exchange.

There are a lot to choose from, but one of the most popular is Bitfinex. To take full advantage of Bitfinex, you will need to verify your account. It will let you withdraw fiat currency from your account. Let’s take a closer look at the process.

What You’ll Need

Before starting the verification process, make sure you have all the paperwork and documentation you’ll require during the process.

Four documents are needed. They are:

• Two forms of official government ID (passport, driving license, national ID card, etc.)
• A bank statement from which your first deposit will be made
• Proof of address (a utility bill no more than three months old)

You will also need to have basic information such as telephone number, date of birth, and email address.

Completing the Verification Process on Bitfinex

1. Log into Bitfinex.
2. Go to Account > Verification.
3. Click on Begin Verification.
4. Go to Account Type and select Individual.
5. Choose your country of residence.
6. Select your reason for wanting account verification.
7. Fill in your details, uploading the aforementioned documents when prompted.

Keep in mind that due to the popularity of online crypto exchanges, verification could take as long as six weeks. You will receive an email when your account is ready.

In addition to withdrawing fiat currencies, you will also benefit from reduced deposit times once Bitfinex has verified your account. Without verification, you will only be able to withdraw cryptocurrencies from your account.

Warning: Trading cryptocurrencies involves risk. Only invest what you can afford to lose. If you’d like to become more knowledgeable before investing, check out some of the best sites for Bitcoin news.

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How to Reverse Facebook’s News Feed Change and See Your Favorite Pages Again

This year, Facebook announced that it planned to shift your News Feed away from pages and brands, returning to a focus on what it describes as meaningful interactions with friends and family.

What Does This Actually Mean?

This provides a bleak outlook for publishers and brands that rely on Facebook to reach their target audience. Since the announcement, at least one website has shut its doors, blaming the sudden and drastic loss of traffic on changes in the Facebook algorithm.

As Facebook pages disappear from your News Feed, replaced with more posts from your friends, there is one thing you can do to make sure that you still see posts from your favorite brands, publications, and celebrities: change one important setting.

Using Facebook in a Desktop Browser

1. Go to the Facebook page you want to make sure you see in your feed.
2. Hover over the Following button and select See First.

Using Facebook’s Mobile App

1. Launch the Facebook mobile app on your phone.
2. Go to the Facebook page you want to make sure you see in your feed.
3. Tap the Following button.
4. Under In your newsfeed, select See First.

In addition to using this feature for your favorite Facebook pages, you can actually do this for your friends as well. Just go to a friend’s Facebook page and follow the same steps above and you can choose to prioritize certain friends’ posts over everything else.

If you’d rather see less from a friend or page, you can either temporarily or permanently stop seeing their posts in your feed without unliking or unfriending them.

To stop friends or pages from becoming a permanent fixture in your feed, you can either snooze that page or friend for 30 days or unfollow them entirely.

Image Credit: Mactrunk/Depositphotos

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Facebook and the endless string of worst-case scenarios

Facebook has naively put its faith in humanity and repeatedly been abused, exploited, and proven either negligent or complicit. The company routinely ignores or downplays the worst-case scenarios, idealistically building products without the necessary safeguards, and then drags its feet to admit the extent of the problems.

This approach, willful or not, has led to its latest scandal, where a previously available API for app developers was harnessed by Trump and Brexit Leave campaign technology provider Cambridge Analytica to pull not just the profile data of 270,000 app users who gave express permission, but of 50 million of those people’s unwitting friends.

Facebook famously changed its motto in 2014 from “Move fast and break things” to “Move fast with stable infra” aka ‘infrastructure’. But all that’s meant is that Facebook’s products function as coded even at enormous scale, not that they’re built any slower or with more caution for how they could be weaponized. Facebook’s platform iconography above captures how it only sees the wrench, then gets shocked by the lightning on the other end.

Sometimes the abuse is natural and emergent, as when people grow envious and insecure from following the highlights of their peers’ lives through the News Feed that was meant to bring people together. Sometimes the abuse is malicious and opportunistic, as it was when Cambridge Analytica used an API designed to help people recommend relevant job openings to friends to purposefully harvest data that populated psychographic profiles of voters so they could be swayed with targeted messaging.

NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 19: CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix speaks at the 2016 Concordia Summit – Day 1 at Grand Hyatt New York on September 19, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)

Whether it doesn’t see the disasters coming, makes a calculated gamble that the growth or mission benefits of something will far outweigh the risks, or purposefully makes a dangerous decision while obscuring the consequences, Facebook is responsible for its significant shortcomings. The company has historically cut corners in pursuit of ubiquity that left it, potentially knowingly, vulnerable to exploitation.

And increasingly, Facebook is going to lengths to fight the news cycle surrounding its controversies instead of owning up early and getting to work. Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica’s data policy violations since at least August 2016, but did nothing but send a legal notice to delete the information.It only suspended the Facebook accounts of Cambridge Analytica and other guilty parties and announced the move this week in hopes of muting forthcoming New York Times and Guardian articles about the issue (articles which it also tried to prevent from running via legal threats.) And since, representatives of the company have quibbled with reporters over Twitter, describing the data misuse as a “breach” instead explaining why it didn’t inform the public about it for years.

“I have more fear in my life that we aren’t going to maximize the opportunity that we have than that we mess something up” Zuckerberg said at a Facebook’s Social Good Forum event in November. Perhaps it’s time for that fear to shift towards ‘what could go wrong’, not just for Zuck, but the leaders of all of today’s tech titans.

Facebook CEO mark Zuckerberg

An Abridged List Of Facebook’s Unforeseen Consequences

Here’s an incomplete list of the massive negative consequences and specific abuses that stem from Facebook’s idealistic product development process:

• Engagement Ranked Feed = Sensationalized Fake News – Facebook built the News Feed to show the most relevant content first so we’d see the most interesting things going on with our closest friends, but measured that relevance largely based on what people commented on, liked, clicked, shared, and watched. All of those activities are stoked by sensationalist fake new stories, allowing slews of them to go viral while their authors earned ad revenue and financed their operations with ad views delivered by Facebook referral traffic. Facebook downplayed the problem until it finally fessed up and is now scrambling to fight fake news.
• Engagement Priced Ad Auctions = Polarizing Ads – Facebook gives a discount to ads that are engaging so as to incentivize businesses to produce marketing materials that don’t bore or annoy users such that they close the social network. But the Trump campaign designed purposefully divisive and polarizing ads that would engage a niche base of his supporters to try to score cheaper ad clicks and more free viral sharing of those ads.
• Academic Research = Emotion Tampering – Facebook allows teams of internal and external researchers to conduct studies on its users in hopes of producing academic breakthroughs in sociology. But in some cases these studies have moved from observation into quietly interfering with the mental conditions of Facebookers. In 2012, Facebook data science team members manipulated the number of emotionally positive or negative posts in the feeds of 689,000 users and then studied their subsequent status updates to see if emotion was contagious. Facebook published the research, failing to foresee the huge uproar that ensued when the public learned that some users, including emotionally vulnerable teenagers who could have been suffering from depression, were deliberately shown sadder posts.
• Ethnic Affinity Ad Targeting = Racist Exclusion – Facebook’s ad system previously let businesses target users in “ethnic affinity” groups such as “African-American” or “Hispanic” based on their in-app behavior as a stand in for racial targeting. The idea was likely to help businesses find customers interested in their products, but the tool was shown to allow exclusion of certain ethnic affinity groups in ways that could be used to exclude them from legally protected opportunities such as housing; employment, and loans. Facebook has since disabled this kind of targeting while investigates the situation.
  

  Exclusionary ethnic affinity ad targeting, as spotted by ProPublica

• App Platform = Game Spam – One of Facebook’s earliest encounters with unforeseen consequences came in 2009 and 2010 after it launched its app platform. The company expected developers to build helpful utilities that could go viral thanks to special, sometimes automatic posts to the News Feed. But game developers seized on the platform and its viral growth channels, spawning companies like Zynga that turned optimizing News Feed game spam into a science. The constant invites to join games in order to help a friend win overwhelmed the feed, threatening to drown out legitimate communication and ruin the experience for non-gamers until Facebook shut down the viral growth channels, cratering many of the game developers.
• Real Name Policy = Enabling Stalkers – For years, Facebook strictly required to use their real names in order to reduce uncivility and bullying facilitated by hiding behind anonymity. But victims of stalking, domestic violence, and hate crimes argued that their abusers could use Facebook to track them down and harass them. Only after mounting criticism from the transgender community and others did Facebook slightly relax the policy in 2015, though some still find it onerous to set up a pseudonym on Facebook and dangerous to network without one.
• Self-Serve Ads = Objectionable Ads – To earn money efficiently, Facebook lets people buy ads through its apps without ever talking to a sales representative. But the self-serve ads interface has been repeatedly shown to used nefariously. ProPublica found businesses could target those who followed objectionable user-generated Pages and interests such as “jew haters” and other disturbing keywords on Facebook. And Russian political operatives famously used Facebook ads to spread divisive memes in the United States and pit people against each other and promote distrust between citizens. Facebook is only now shutting down long-tail user-generated ad targeting parameters, hiring more ad moderators, and requiring more thorough political ad buyer documentation.
• Developer Data Access = Data Abuse – Most recently, Facebook has found its trust in app developers misplaced. For years it offered an API that allowed app makers to pull robust profile data on their users and somewhat limited info about their friends to make personalized products. For example, one could show which bands your friends Like so you’d know who to invite to a concert. But Facebook lacked strong enforcement mechanisms for its policy that prevented developers from sharing or selling that data to others. Now the public is learning that Cambridge Analytica’s trick of turning 270,000 users of Dr. Aleksandr Kogan’s personality quiz app into info about 50 million people illicitly powered psychographic profiles that helped Trump and Brexit pinpoint their campaign messages. It’s quite likely that other developers have violated Facebook’s flimsy policies against storing, selling, or sharing user data they’ve collected, and more reports of misuse will emerge.

Each time, Facebook built tools with rosy expectations, only to negligently leave the safety off and see worst-case scenarios arise. In October, Zuckerberg already asked for forgiveness, but the public wants change.

Trading Kool-Aid For Contrarians

The desire to avoid censorship or partisanship or inefficiency is no excuse. Perhaps people are so addicted to Facebook that no backlash will pry them their feeds. But Facebook can’t treat this as merely a PR problem, a distraction from the fun work of building new social features, unless its employees are ready to shoulder the blame for the erosion of society. Each scandal further proves it can’t police itself, inviting government regulation that could gum up its business. Members of congress are already calling on Zuckerberg to testify.

Yet even with all of the public backlash and calls for regulation, Facebook still seems to lack or ignore the cynics and diverse voices who might foresee how its products could be perverted or were conceptualized foolishly in the first place. Having more minorities and contrarians on the teams that conceive its products could nip troubles in the bud before they blossom.

“The saying goes that optimists tend to be successful and pessimists tend to be right” Zuckerberg explained at the November forum. “If you think something is going to be terrible and it is going to fail, then you are going to look for the data points that prove you right and you will find them. That is what pessimists do. But if you think that something is possible, then you are going to try to find a way to make it work. And even when you make mistakes along the way and even when people doubt you, you are going to keep pushing until you find a way to make it happen.”

Zuckerberg speaks at Facebook’s Social Good Forum

That quote takes on new light given Facebook’s history. The company must promote a culture where pessimists can speak up without reprise. Where a seeking a raise, reaching milestones, avoiding culpability, or a desire to avoid rocking the Kool-Aid boat don’t stifle discussion of a product’s potential hazards. Facebook’s can-do hacker culture that codes with caution to the wind, that asks for forgiveness instead of permission, is failing to scale to the responsibility of being a two billion user communications institution.

And our species is failing to scale to that level of digital congregation too, stymied by our insecurity and greed. Whether someone is demeaning themselves for not having as glamorous of a vacation as their acquaintances, or seizing the world’s megaphone to spew lies in hopes of impeding democracy, we’ve proven incapable of safe social networking.

That’s why we’re relying on Facebook and the other social networks to change, and why it’s so catastrophic when they miss the festering problems, ignore the calls for reform, or try to hide their complicity. To connect the world, Facebook must foresee its ugliness and proactively rise against it.

For more on Facebook’s non-stop scandals, check out these TechCrunch feature pieces:

Zuckerberg asks forgiveness, but Facebook needs change

The difference between good and bad Facebooking

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What it’s like using the Owl car security camera

When you get a new car, and you’re feeling like a star, the first thing you’re probably going to do is ghost ride it. This is where the Owl camera can come in.

I’ve been testing Owl, an always-on, two-way camera that records everything that’s happening inside and outside of your car all day, every day for the last couple of weeks.

The Owl camera is designed to monitor your car for break-ins, collisions and police stops. Owl can also be used to capture fun moments (see above) on the road or beautiful scenery, simply by saying, ‘Ok, presto.’

If Owl senses a car accident, it automatically saves the video to your phone, including the 10 seconds before and after the accident. Also, if someone is attracted to your car because of the camera and its blinking green light, and proceeds to steal it, Owl will give you another one.

For 24 hours, you can view your driving and any other incidents that happened during the day. You can also, of course, save footage to your phone so you can watch it after 24 hours.

Setting it up

The two-way camera plugs into your car’s on-board diagnostics port (Every car built after 1996 has one), and takes just a few minutes to set up. The camera tucks right in between the dashboard and windshield. Once it’s hooked up, you can access your car’s camera anytime via the Owl mobile app.

I was a bit skeptical about the ease with which I’d be able to install the camera, but it was actually pretty easy. From opening the box to getting the camera up and running, it took fewer than ten minutes.

Accessing the footage

This is where it can get a little tricky. If you want to save footage after the fact, Owl requires that you be physically near the camera. That meant I had to put on real clothes and walk outside to my car to access the footage from the past 24 hours in order to connect to the Owl’s Wi-Fi. Eventually, however, Owl says it will be possible to access that footage over LTE.

But that wasn’t my only qualm with footage access. Once I tried to download the footage, the app would often crash or only download a portion of the footage I requested. This, however, should be easily fixable, given Owl is set up for over-the-air updates. In fact, Owl told me the company is aware of that issue and is releasing a fix this week. If I want to see the live footage, though, that’s easy to access.

Notifications

Owl is set up to let you know if and when something happens to your car while you’re not there. My Owl’s out-of-the-box settings were set to high sensitivity, which meant I received notifications if a car simply drove by. Changing the settings to a lower sensitivity fixed the annoyance of too many notifications.

Since installing the Owl camera, there hasn’t been a situation in which I was notified of any nefarious behavior happening in or around my car. But I do rest assured knowing that if something does happen, I’ll be notified right away and will be able to see live footage of whatever it is that’s happening.

My understanding is that most of the dash cams on the market aren’t set up to give you 24/7 video access, nor are they designed to be updatable over the air. The best-selling dash cam on Amazon, for example, is a one-way facing camera with collision detection, but it’s not always on. That one retails for about $100 while Amazon’s Choice is one that costs just $47.99, and comes with Wi-Fi to enable real-time viewing and video playback.

Owl is much more expensive than its competition, retailing at $299, with LTE service offered at $10 per month. Currently, Owl is only available as a bundle for $349, which includes one year of the LTE service.

Unlike Owl’s competition, however, the device is always on, due to the fact it plugs into your car’s OMD port. That’s the main, most attractive differentiator for me. To be clear, while the Owl does suck energy from your car’s battery, it’s smart enough to know when it needs to shutdown. Last weekend, I didn’t drive my car for over 24 hours, so Owl shut itself down to ensure my battery wasn’t dead once I came back.

Owl, which launched last month, has $18 million in funding from Defy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Sherpa Capital and others. The company was founded by Andy Hodge, a former product lead at Apple and executive at Dropcam, and Nathan Ackerman, who formerly led development for Microsoft’s HoloLens.

P.S. I was listening to “Finesse” by Bruno Mars and Cardi B in the GIF above.

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Qualcomm’s war may be over, but the casualties are just starting to be calculated

The epic battle between Qualcomm and Broadcom seems to have hit a final ceasefire, with President Trump using the power of CFIUS to block the transaction this past week, ending what would have been the largest tech M&A transaction of all time.

It may be all quiet on the semiconductor front, but Qualcomm and Broadcom will now need to find a path forward to win the peace and secure access to the coming 5G wireless market. Qualcomm faces a daunting number of challenges, including a potential takeover battle waged by the spurned son of its founder. Broadcom will have to find a new path to use acquisitions to continue its growth.

As with any war though, the damage from this conflict isn’t exclusive to the two enemy combatants. The future of corporate governance and shareholder autonomy is now being reevaluated in light of the actions used by Qualcomm in its defense against Broadcom’s hostile takeover. In addition, America’s openness to foreign investment is increasingly under scrutiny.

Qualcomm picks up the pieces

Hostile takeovers are always going to be damaging affairs, no matter the outcome. The most important mandate for any board of directors — and particularly for the boards of technology companies — is to identify long-term threats and opportunities facing a company, and guide the executive team toward the best possible outcome for shareholders. Hostile takeovers are firefighting affairs — the discussions of the board are jolted from roadmaps, strategy, and vision to the minute-by-minute tactics of defending the company from marauding invaders.

Qualcomm should be directing its attention to strategy, but it faces additional wars on nearly every front. Its fighting shareholders for its future, fighting Apple and Huawei over its revenues, fighting China over its acquisition of NXP, and now potentially fighting its founder’s son from a private takeover attempt.

Many of Qualcomm’s shareholders see the company’s performance as disappointing. While its stock has fluctuated over the past six years, today’s share price is essentially flat from where it stood in January of 2012. Compare that to Broadcom, which in the same timeframe has seen an increase of about 740%, and the PHLX Semiconductor Sector index, a basket index of the industry, which has seen its value increase by about 280%.

Unsurprisingly, shareholders were enticed by the opportunity to suddenly realize a 35% premium on their shares with Broadcom’s $82-a-share offer. Unlike Qualcomm’s board, shareholders were very interested in accepting Broadcom’s offer. In fact, we now know that Qualcomm’s board knew that it has lost the battle against Broadcom with its own shareholders during the acquisition process. As Bloomberg reported this week:

The votes started to come in on Friday, March 2. By Sunday it was clear that Qualcomm’s defense had failed.

Four of the six directors Broadcom had nominated were polling so far ahead of their Qualcomm peers that the race was effectively over, according to data viewed by Bloomberg. The remaining two were winning by less substantial margins. Making it worse, Mollenkopf and Jacobs, the architects of Qualcomm’s standalone plan, had received some of the fewest votes.

Inside the Qualcomm camp, the mood was bleak; assuming the trend continued, the board would lose control of the company at the shareholder meeting.

Broadcom’s message was one of quiet confidence. The company knew it had won, one person close to the discussions said. At that point, the person said, it was just a question of by how many votes, and who was going to leave the board.

Broadcom was winning the battle with shareholders, so Qualcomm’s board shifted to a terrain far more favorable to it: Washington bureaucrats. From the same Bloomberg report, “Federal lobbying disclosures for 2017 showing that Qualcomm spent $8.3 million, or roughly 100 times the $85,000 Broadcom spent…” These weren’t regulators; these were friends.

In late January, Qualcomm’s board submitted a preliminary, voluntary, and confidential notice to CFIUS asking for a review of Broadcom’s potential board coup. When Broadcom attempted to redomicile to the United States to avoid CFIUS purview (as it would no longer be a foreign company but a domestic one after it redomiciled), the government’s anger was palpable and sealed the company’s fate. The board’s original outreach to CFIUS precipitated the sequence of events that led to Trump’s block this past week.

Qualcomm’s board won the war, but it is still facing a rebellion from its own bosses. The board will be up for election unopposed this week at the company’s delayed shareholders meeting. Perhaps taking a page from tomorrow’s Russian presidential election, some shareholders are withholding their votes from the board slate to show their displeasure with the entire saga. From the Wall Street journal, “Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., an influential proxy-advisory firm, … in a note to investors late Wednesday, stood by its original recommendation that shareholders vote for four Broadcom nominees for Qualcomm’s 11-person board, even though the votes won’t count.”

That shareholder meeting will no doubt be eventful. While the board and the company’s execs will argue that they have a strategy moving forward, they confront two other ongoing firefighting challenges and one new one that could be another round of bruising internecine warfare.

Qualcomm is still in the midst of its $44 billion NXP acquisition, which continues to wait on Chinese regulatory approval. The timeline for that approval is still unclear, but even when Qualcomm does receive it, it will still have to close the deal and actually implement the transaction, which will take significant time and energy.

Even more complicated is the continuing fight over Qualcomm’s IP licensing revenue, which Apple and Huawei have been fighting for some time now. Licensing revenue is crucial for Qualcomm, and the litigation around the fight will force the board to continue monitoring the day-to-day legal tactics of the company rather than focus on a longer-term vision of how to work with the largest smartphone producer in the world to generate profits.

On top of those two challenges, another takeover attempt could potentially exhaust the board further. Yesterday, Qualcomm’s board voted to remove board member Paul Jacobs, who is the son of Qualcomm’s founder and also headed the company from 2005 to 2014. He had been demoted from executive chairman to director just last week. As the New York Times noted, “The split, which means no member of the Jacobs family will be involved at the top echelons of Qualcomm for the first time in 33 years, was not friendly.”

According to reports, Jacobs is attempting to raise more than $100 billion to buy the company, potentially leveraging SoftBank’s Vision Fund in the process. SoftBank, of course, is a Japanese company, and the Vision Fund has significant capital from foreign countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Even more ironically, Qualcomm is an investor in the Vision Fund.

Jacobs is following in the footsteps of Michael Dell who bought the eponymous tech company back in 2013 in a take-private transaction worth $24 billion. Can Jacobs even raise the required amount of capital, four times more than Dell? Will Qualcomm be forced to run back to the Trump administration in order to avoid a “foreign” takeover of the firm yet again, this time by the son of the company’s founder?

My guess — fairly weakly held — is that the answers are yes and no. Jacobs will find the money, and the board won’t fight a distinguished former executive — even if Jacobs was running seriously behind in shareholder approval in the Broadcom fight. We will learn more in the coming weeks, but expect more strategic actions here (maybe from Intel) as well.

Broadcom regroups

Despite its very public failure, Broadcom is in a much stronger position coming out of this battle. It beat analyst estimates this week for its Q1 earnings, and has seen impressive growth in its wireless communications segment, which were up 88% year-over-year. It also managed to lower expenses, which helped drive an increase in gross margin to 64.8% (aren’t fabless and patents awesome?)

Broadcom continues to deliver strong results, but the big question post-Qualcomm is really what’s next? Qualcomm was the single most important chip company that might have been available for purchase (Intel is out of Broadcom’s league). While it plans to continue to redomicile to the U.S., which should allow it to get back into the acquisition game in America, Broadcom may struggle in the coming years to find the kinds of accretive acquisitions that can keep its growth on the trajectory it has been on over the past few years.

Shareholder power wanes?

The biggest questions coming out of the Qualcomm / Broadcom spat is not related to the companies themselves, but the entire intellectual edifice of shareholder rights and the framework used by American companies to conduct corporate governance.

Qualcomm’s board of directors took extraordinary steps to block the Broadcom acquisition. They unilaterally went to Washington to get an injunction not on a deal — which had never been consummated between the two companies — but to block Broadcom from replacing its board of directors in a standard shareholder vote. This is a very important distinction: Qualcomm’s board saw the direction shareholders wanted to go, and essentially decided to just ignore the election process entirely.

From Dealpolitik columnist Ronald Barusch:

This change threatens over three decades of a carefully balanced governance system. Since the Delaware Supreme Court approved the use of the poison-pill takeover defense in 1985, the courts have basically blessed the following tradeoff: On the one hand, corporate directors can fight tooth and nail to stop a deal and the courts will give only limited scrutiny to defensive tactics.

However, the board is strictly limited in any moves to interfere with shareholders’ ability to replace directors and force a company to change course that way. In the vernacular of a leading Delaware case, a “just say no” defense doesn’t mean “just say never.” A bidder with enough patience who can convince a target’s shareholders to change directors has a path at least toward cooperation on resolving regulatory impediments to a deal.

This is a unique case as Barusch notes, but at what point can boards use every method at their disposal to prevent their own shareholders — the people they have a fiduciary duty to represent — from taking charge of the company? This past week presents one of the most complex examples to date, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a shareholder decides to attempt a legal attack on Qualcomm.

The other side of the potential waning of power for shareholders is CFIUS itself. The Trump administration ended a potential deal for a company that shareholders were widely in favor of. Where do the rights of shareholders to realize a return on their equity end and the right of America as a nation to control national security technology start?

We are on new terrain, and there are no clear answers here. In many ways, it depends on what happens over the next few years of the Trump administration. If there are more blocks like what we saw this week, we could see a radical change in the corporate calculus that would have a long-term negative effect on the value of some American companies.

Hostile takeovers may be incredible drama for writers like yours truly, but they have enormous consequences for companies and the employees who work at them. Qualcomm is going to have to shore up its support with a whole host of stakeholders in the coming months (while dealing with a potential take-private fight), while Broadcom needs to find its next strategy for further growth. All of us are going to have to deal with new uncertainty around the power of shareholders to shape the destiny of their companies. The war is over, but the aftermath and its consequences have just begun.

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VR, presence and the case of the missing killer app

Compelling virtual reality shipped to developers and consumers nearly two years ago. The first flagship headsets arrived from Oculus and HTC back in the spring of 2016, offering enough resolution, frame rate, field of view, latency mitigation and position-tracking to produce believable visual immersion.

But no one seems to know what to do with it. To date, no killer app has extended the promise of VR from a novelty to a sticky experience or utility that reaches beyond enthusiasts to resonate with the consumer center of mass.

This isn’t to say that great experiences don’t exist. Apps like Tilt Brush, Elite: Dangerous and Google Earth VR have earned rave reviews and plaudits from enthusiasts. But we have yet to see a household phenomenon like Halo or Lotus 1-2-3 — applications that single-handedly propelled their respective platforms to wide use. At CES 2018, one industry analyst referred to VR as “drawerware,” referring to the likelihood of headsets to be stuffed in a drawer after a few forays into jejune worlds.

In an attempt to shed some light on the case of the missing VR killer app, I want to offer a few thoughts on why VR matters to users, and what that implies for entrepreneurs and investors interested in building or funding the VR killer app.

Why VR matters: Presence

Why is virtual reality valuable? In a word, presence: Immersion is the heart of the incremental value of VR versus existing platforms. Most forms of expressive media provide a third-person perspective of an experience, or convey sufficient information to help a user imagine a first-person perspective on their own.

When done right (6DoF tracking, room-scale movement, sufficiently high-resolution/FOV/low latency, spatial audio), virtual reality helps a user feel like they are really there. Rather than convey an impression of an experience, VR manipulates our visual and auditory senses (and soon our tactile sense) to transmit experience itself.

Presence is valuable in two ways

The idea that VR is valuable because it generates presence is well understood. But why does presence matter? What need does being there fill for users?

The quality of presence has clear intrinsic value. With few exceptions, subjective immersion is the best way to fully grasp what a certain experience is like. Being at the mountaintop generates the maximum degree of sensory throughput, and is a better way to understand the truth of your relationship to that place than watching a video of the mountain, which is better than seeing a picture of the mountain.

The objective fact of being somewhere matters as much or more than the subjective feeling of being there.

But presence also can have instrumental value, where being there is valuable in an objective sense. Being present at a meeting with a potential business partner sends a positive signal separate from the fidelity of your experience. Actually visiting the mountaintop can impress your friends, mattering beyond the sensation of being there.

Put another way, and borrowing the language of philosophy, it seems like we value presence for its experiential worth — being for the sake of experience — as well as for its ontological worth, or being for the sake of being. Another way to describe the ontological value of presence is authenticity. The philosopher Robert Nozick suggested as much in his refutation of ethical hedonism, employing the notion of the “experience machine” to suggest we care about more than our feelings. What this all means is that for many kinds of experience, the objective fact of being somewhere matters as much or more than the subjective feeling of being there.

VR’s killer app will deliver both types of presence value

How does identifying the two ways that presence drives user value help us imagine the use case that a VR killer app might address?

First, it illuminates why many first-order VR applications may not be suited for adoption by a non-enthusiast audience. When examining some of the typical mass market use cases forwarded by VR aficionados — enterprise or personal telepresence, virtual tourism and travel, virtual attendance at sports and entertainment events, virtual social environments and rec rooms — it seems clear that authenticity matters a great deal to consumers of these experiences, meaning that simply porting them to VR may not be compelling beyond an initial sense of novelty.

I believe that the value of ontological presence is largely driven by social norms. As and when the quality of VR experience converges on metaphysically “real” experience, those norms will evolve. Perhaps our children will label us “substratist” for claiming that hanging out in VR is less satisfying than visiting in person. But with regards to the next generation or two of VR tech and applications, I’m not bullish on social VR experiences that merely replicate the ways we interact in real life. By generating experiential presence without authenticity, they seem to fall into an uncanny valley somewhere between interactive video chat and in-person interaction.

It’s tempting to believe, then, that the VR killer app will skirt the issue of authenticity by solving for problems where the subjective feeling of presence, and not the objective fact of it, matters most — for example, virtual training for a factory worker, touring new construction homes for sale or checking out a car in a virtual showroom. VR is already finding fruitful use in the enterprise and select consumer applications. But when considering potential killer applications, the problem is that arenas of experience where experiential presence matters but authenticity does not usually aren’t important or frequently accessed parts of our life.

Ultimately, I think the first VR blockbuster will deliver both the experiential and ontological value of presence. In other words, VR’s killer app will generate a powerful feeling of being there for a compelling experience, in a way that also feels completely authentic.

Quality, accessibility and ecosystem maturity are probably the biggest practical barriers gating the VR killer app.

I believe that the experience in question will lack an analogue in the real world. In other words, the VR killer app won’t be a multiplayer simulation of New York City in the present day, or a virtual movie theater, or a virtual Giants Stadium where you can kick back in a box and watch the Super Bowl. The application that sells the mass market on virtual reality will be fully native to the platform, such that the only way to know what it is really like will be donning a headset and stepping inside.

An engaging VR experience that isn’t simulating something in the real world, but exists solely in its own right, can immerse a user in both senses of the word: After all, authenticity is implied when the virtual substrate is the only home for a certain experience. The real question is making the experience interesting or fun or cool enough that the feeling of presence is appealing, too.

Concluding thoughts

If it sounds like I’m describing a video game, I think I am, too. But video games are a focal use case for every VR headset in production. What’s missing?

Quality, accessibility and ecosystem maturity are probably the biggest practical barriers gating the VR killer app. The current generation of flagship headsets are cumbersome and expensive to set up and run. Though deep price cuts across flagship wearables powered sales of more than a million VR headsets in Q3 2017, and both Oculus and HTC moved hundreds of thousands of high-end, PC-based units, individual install bases remain low enough to deter AAA studios.

Bootstrapping a two-sided ecosystem — in the case of VR, headsets/users and content, with more of the former increasing the incentive to invest in the latter and vice versa — is never easy. But better technology is on the way: HTC recently announced the Vive Pro, sporting improved resolution, spatial audio and a wireless adapter to do away with clunky wires. Google, Samsung, Lenovo and Oculus are working on standalone headsets that run without a PC or smartphone under the hood. Dozens of startups are developing peripherals and software to improve the VR experience, from haptics that mimic touch to pupil tracking that enables realistic eye contact.

Each new iteration of core VR hardware is a rising tide that makes any VR application more appealing to users on the margin. But killer apps often emerge on imperfect versions of the platforms they bring to life. The charting function of Lotus 1-2-3 strained the limits of the early graphics hardware on x86 PCs, but until 1-2-3, no one knew that programmatic generation of charts and graphs was even possible.

A killer app doesn’t need to be a perfect encapsulation of a new technology’s potential. All it needs to do is hint at the grand vision by providing a single, irresistible demonstration of value over the status quo.

In the case of VR, I’m not certain if that demonstration will occur on this generation of hardware or the next. But I believe it will be an experience that compares in intensity or joy or uniqueness to the best experiences we can access in reality. If you’re working on VR content or applications, consider this advice: Give us the ability to be present in a vision of the past, or a counterfactual world. Give us the feeling of life underwater or in space. Give us the sense of being present for an experience completely native to virtual reality, not merely an emulation of experiences we can already inhabit. Give us something real in its own right. That’s when the mass market will start to believe — and buy.

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