As the COVID-19 pandemic keeps millions of Americans home, Hong Kong-based Lalamove believes it can seize the growing demand for delivery services in the country. It makes its debut in the Dallas Fort-Worth area, a major hub for distribution and logistics in the U.S. In days the service will launch in Chicago and Houston.
The startup was one of the first in Hong Kong to hit the $1 billion unicorn valuation mark alongside its archrival GoGoVan. Its business is multifold and highly localized, but essentially it works as an Uber for businesses and individuals that need to move goods within the city.
In China, where it’s known as Huolala (货拉拉), it primarily serves as a broker between shippers who need to send cargo and a network of truck drivers. In Southeast Asia, the business functions similarly with the addition of food delivery for restaurants, a crowded and cash-burning space. In the U.S., its fleet of sedans, SUVs and pickup trucks are available 24/7, allowing it to target customers spanning catering, retail, e-commerce, manufacturing and construction, with fees starting at $8.90.
“Delivery is essential, especially during the pandemic. But many local businesses don’t have or cannot afford in-house fleets, so we’re excited to work with businesses in the Dallas Fort-Worth area to provide same-day, on-demand delivery services to their customers,” said Blake Larson, international managing director at Lalamove and formerly co-founder of Rocket Internet’s Asia-focused e-hailing startup Easy Taxi.
Like GoGoVan, Lalamove was founded by a Hong Kong entrepreneur who was educated in the U.S. Both companies have scored fundings from heavyweight institutions from China and elsewhere.
Lalamove’s investors included Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital China and Xiaomi founder’s Shunwei Capital. Through a merger with China’s 58 Suyun, GoGoVan counts Tencent, Alibaba, KKR and New Horizon Capital amongst its backers.
The Hong Kong startup’s global expansion comes at a time when TikTok stumbles in the U.S. due to its links to China. In the logistics startup’s case, a Chinese team operates the Chinese division Huolala, while separate international teams manage the overseas segments of Lalamove, TechCrunch understands. The core of TikTok’s challenge in the U.S. is the video app’s dependence on its Chinese parent ByteDance’s technological capabilities.
To date, Lalamove has verified and onboarded more than 500 partner drivers in Dallas Fort-Worth, with plans to add another 500 in the area by the end of this year. It’s also hiring for its regional operational office at a time when the U.S. is struck by widespread virus-induced layoffs, furloughs and slowdown in hiring.
Lalamove claims it has to date matched more than 7 million users with a pool of over 700,000 delivery partners in 22 markets around the world.
If you’ve been following the SPAC boom, you may have noticed something about these blank-check vehicles that are springing up left and right in order to take public privately held companies. They are being organized mostly by men.
It’s not surprising, given the relative dearth of women in senior financial positions in banking and the venture industry. But it also begs the question of whether women, already hustling to overcome a wealth gap, could be left behind if the trend gains momentum.
Consider that studies have shown women investors are are twice as likely to invest in startups with at least one female founder, and more than three times as likely to invest in startups with female CEOs. It’s not a huge leap to imagine that women-led SPACs might also be more inclined to identify women-led companies with which to merge and take public.
SPAC sponsors can reap handsome rewards, too. In return for lining up investors, then persuading a target company to accept the terms it offers them, sponsors typically receive 25% of the SPACs founder shares, which can mean a lot of money in a short amount of time, given that SPACs typically aim to merge with a company in two years or less. In fact, even if the SPAC performs terribly — say the company with which it merges is later accused of fraud — those sponsors get paid.
Eventbrite cofounder Kevin Hartz, who is overseeing a $200 million SPAC, explained it to us in August this way: “On a $200 million SPAC, there’s a $50 million ‘promote’ that is earned.” But “if that company doesn’t perform and, say, drops in half over a year or 18-month period, then the shares are still worth $25 million. (Hartz himself called this guaranteed payout “egregious,” though he and his partner in the SPAC, Troy Steckenrider, didn’t structure their SPAC differently, saying that as a first-time SPAC sponsor, they wanted to keep things straightforward.)
Women aren’t entirely unaccounted for in the current SPAC craze. Thanks to a state law passed in California in 2018, nearly all SPACs based in California have a female director, as reported earlier by Axios.
More, in the two weeks, at least three SPACs to register with the SEC have been launched exclusively or in part by sponsors who are women. Hope Taiz, a New York-based investor who began her investment banking career at Drexel Burnham Lambert, registered plans this week with the SEC to raise a $300 million blank-check company called Aequi Acquisition.
Northern Star Acquisition, a consumer-focused SPAC co-led by magazine vet Joanna Coles, meanwhile filed for a $300 million IPO last week, and Climate Change Crisis Real Impact I Acquisition, a SPAC focused on climate technology, raised $200 million in an IPO . The blank check company is co-led by Mary Powell, the former CEO of Green Mountain Power.
One SPAC sponsor — Betsy Cohen, a founder and former CEO of the financial services company Bancorp — has really taken to SPACs, establishing four fintech-related shell firms so far, the most recent of which raised $750 million last month. (As an interesting aside, the SPAC programs of both Goldman Sachs and Jefferies are led by women.)
Given these developments, some might wonder — reasonably — if it isn’t a little early to worry about women missing out on this apparent gold rush. Still, women-led SPACs represent a minuscule percentage of the 133 SPACs that have raised more than $50 billion in proceeds this year at last count.
More, the only tech investors to jump into the pool to date are exclusively men, including Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital (who has dozens of SPACs in mind); Hartz and Steckenrider; entrepreneur-investors Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, Ribbit Capital’s Mickey Malka; former Uber executive Emil Michael; and the founders of FirstMark Capital.
It isn’t that their female counterparts aren’t paying attention, seemingly. A number of top women VCs with whom we’ve talked say they’re following the action and weighing how to participate. One such prominent investor told us she’s been researching under what circumstances it makes sense for VC firms to engage in a SPAC’s origination.
Others may be looking to gain exposure first to SPACs through their portfolio companies. Dana Grayson of Construct Capital, for example, led an early investment in the 3D printing company Desktop Metal — which is going public through a SPAC-led deal — while a partner the firm NEA. At TechCrunch’s recent Disrupt event, Grayson, speaking about Desktop Metal, called SPACs a “great new viable alternative for companies.”
Either way, observes Kristi Marvin, a former investment banker who now runs the data site SPACInsider, it’s not time to panic, she suggests.
For one thing, as with “most banking things, SPACs skew heavily male,” so it’s to be expected that many more men are sponsoring SPACs. The SPAC market is also on the verge of overheating, based on what she is seeing. “You have 10 deals trying to price in the same day, and investors are tapped out.”
SPACs also require a learning curve that some underestimate. “It’s why you see hedge funds and PE firms more involved in SPACs; they have infrastructure to do them versus three guys who are facing a ton of work just to do the administrative side of things,” notes Marvin.
As with other financial products, Marvin expects to see more women embrace SPACs over time, especially if they prove to be as durable as many early adherents suggest. That said, she adds, “If in a year or two, it’s still only male VCs who’ve dipped their toe into SPACs, it may be a problem.”
According to details from a shocking new affidavit, the FBI uncovered a group planning “violent action against multiple state governments,” including a detailed plot to capture or kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Individuals involved in the plot organized across Facebook groups, in-person events and at least two encrypted chat apps that the FBI did not name.
Whitmer, a Democrat, became a major target of pervasive anti-lockdown sentiment on the political right earlier this year when states imposed restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus. According to the affidavit, at a June in-person meeting, members of the group “talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor.” Thirteen people have been charged in relation to the kidnapping plot.
The group grew its numbers after contacting a Michigan-based militia known as the Wolverine Watchmen that shared overlapping interests. While it was not named at the time, Facebook removed the Wolverine Watchmen group from its platform in June when it purged a number of groups connected to the anti-government boogaloo movement. Wolverine Watchmen recruited on Facebook for seven months, from November of last year until June.
“Today we are designating a violent US-based anti-government network as a dangerous organization and banning it from our platform,” Facebook wrote at the time, drawing a distinction between violent boogaloo groups and the “loosely-affiliated” boogaloo movement.
Facebook says it played a “proactive” role in the FBI investigation, first reaching out to law enforcement six months ago. The FBI said it became aware of the activity through social media and also relied on an informant to collect information from within the group.
“We remove content, disable accounts and immediately report to law enforcement when there is a credible threat of imminent harm to people or public safety,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We proactively reached out and cooperated with the FBI early in this ongoing investigation.”
TechCrunch asked Facebook if the individuals connected with the Michigan militia through Facebook groups but the company did not provide an answer to that question. In August, Facebook identified and banned a number of other Michigan-based militarized groups from Facebook and Instagram, including the Michigan Liberty Militia and the Michigan Militia Corps, as well as another group that uses the “Wolverine” name.
Adam Fox, one of the group’s alleged organizers, live-streamed to a private Facebook group earlier this year, complaining that Michigan’s restrictions were keeping gyms closed. In the video, Fox referred to Governor Whitmer as “this tyrant bitch,” and stated, “I don’t know, boys, we gotta do something.”
In April, Trump cheered on protests against those measures in Virginia, Minnesota and Michigan, three states with Democratic governors. Many of these early events were organized on Facebook, but anti-Whitmer sentiment quickly became ubiquitous on the right across social networks and traditional media.
I love Michigan, one of the reasons we are doing such a GREAT job for them during this horrible Pandemic. Yet your Governor, Gretchen “Half” Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude! #MAGA
By July, the group considered attacking a Michigan State Police location but landed on abducting Whitmer from her private vacation home or governor’s summer residence. The same day that decision was made, Fox wrote on a private Facebook page “We about to be busy ladies and gentlemen . . . This is where the Patriot shows up. Sacrifices his time, money, blood sweat and tears . . . it starts now so get fucking prepared!!”
The group alternated between planning to kidnap Whitmer for a private “trial” and killing her on sight. Over the course of the coming months, they conducted surveillance of Whitmer’s vacation home, collected supplies and planned detailed logistics for the kidnapping plot, including the idea of blowing up a nearby bridge to divert police attention. The group discussed those detailed plans in an encrypted chat.
According to the affidavit, “On several occasions, FOX has expressed his intention and desire to kidnap Governor Whitmer before November, 3, 2020, the date of the national election.”
The affidavit also details some of the training exercises the plot’s members engaged in with militias in Wisconsin and Michigan, where they practiced making IEDs “using black powder, balloons, a fuse, and BBs for shrapnel,” and conducted firearm and combat training drills. They shared photos and videos of their techniques through “Facebook discussions,” according to the affidavit.
A shift at Facebook
Facebook’s attitude toward some forms of extremist activity changed radically in recent months. While armed political groups had long been flourishing on the platform, the company cracked down on what it calls “militarized social movements” in August. Just this week, Facebook announced both a broader ban on the pro-Trump conspiracy known as QAnon and a new policy for voter intimidation efforts that use militaristic language.
When asked if the terror plot had an impact on the company’s recent spate of surprising policy changes, Facebook did not provide a direct response. It’s also not clear if the domestic terror plot used Facebook groups to recruit and connect online or just to communicate among members who already knew each other in real life.
Researchers who study extremism have long expressed concerns that Facebook’s algorithmic recommendations can push users toward dangerous ideas — and dangerous behavior.
Militias and other kinds of domestic extremist groups have increasingly leaned on Facebook for recruitment in recent years. Once members are connected and vetted, often through public groups, they are allowed into an inner circle, sometimes in the form of a private Facebook group. The Proud Boys, a violent far-right group with ties to white supremacists, were a prominent example of this recruitment strategy.
Users can be ushered into these extremist groups by Facebook’s algorithmic suggestions, which previously appeared in a box next to a group’s activity. For Facebook pages, those suggestions still appear to the side of the main stream of content, directing users toward “related pages.”
Facebook banned the Proud Boys from its platform in late 2018. But groups interested in violence that kept a lower profile have maintained a large presence on the platform well into 2020, including a number of state “patriot” organizations and anti-government boogaloo groups that coordinate firearm and combat trainings through the platform.
In June, Facebook banned a “violent network” of boogaloo groups, but other groups remain, organizing under code words related to the boogaloo movement. One boogaloo page TechCrunch identified calling itself “definitely not boogaloo” was selling “Boogaloo Boys” patches and posting violent memes as recently as this week.
Unfortunately for researchers and reporters tracking this kind of activity, Facebook recently removed the option to see how many members are in a public group at a glance from the search page.
Facebook recently announced a plan to actually expand the reach of its public groups, surfacing them to more users. “Public Group posts may now get more distribution on and off Facebook so that more people can discover and join in on the conversation,” Facebook wrote in the announcement.
Alphabet’s self-driving technology company hits a major milestone, Apple TV+ extends its free subscription period and Affirm files to go public. This is your Daily Crunch for October 8, 2020.
The big story: Waymo opens up driverless ride-hailing
While the Alphabet-owned company has offered plenty of self-driving rides before, they usually came with a human in the driver’s seat for safety. Members of the early rider program who’d signed nondisclosure agreements were able to try out fully driverless rides — but again, they had to sign NDAs first.
Today, the company said members of its more open Waymo One program in Phoenix will be able to go fully driverless, and to take friends and family with them. And over the next few weeks, the program will open up to even more passengers.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week Natasha was on vacation, so Danny and your humble servant had to endeavor alone. She’s back next week, so we’ll be back to full strength as a collective soon enough.
But even with a depleted hosting crew, we had a mountain of news to get through. And to joke about, as Danny was in the mood for a laugh. Here’s the rundown:
That was a lot. We did our best. Hugs and chat with you next week!
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President Trump is trying to recruit an “army” of poll watchers for Election Day. As part of his ongoing disinformation campaign about election fraud, these aggressive appeals to his supporters are raising worries about voter intimidation—or worse.
Meanwhile, Facebook just announced new rules that will no longer allow “militarized” language for poll watching on its platform. When asked about a video of Donald Trump Jr. calling for an “election security operation,” Facebook’s vice president of content policy, Monika Bickert, told reporters that “under the new policy if that video were to be posted again, we would indeed remove it.” (The original video is still online.)
But poll watching is a legitimate activity used by both parties and outside groups to monitor the vote. And every state has specific rules about what poll watchers can and cannot do.
What is a poll watcher?
A poll watcher’s job is to make sure every candidate has a fair chance of winning an election. In most states they are appointed, authorized, and trained, and must follow very specific rules. Typically they watch for any irregularities or violations of local election codes. If they spot an issue, they aren’t allowed to intervene directly with voters but must work with election officials.
Donald Trump Jr.’s video would be removed from Facebook under new rules.
What is Trump asking poll watchers to do?
Trump is arguing that Democrats are trying to steal the election with fraudulent votes, allegations that are not supported by any credible evidence. Amid the interruptions and insults of the first presidential debate last week, he talked repeatedly about intervention at polling places: “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that’s what has to happen,” he said.
According to the instruction videos the Trump campaign has been distributing, they hope to challenge voter and ballot eligibility in some cases. Even that means, however, that Republican poll watchers should never be talking directly to the voters. In those cases, voters should be allowed a provisional ballot that will be counted once their status is verified. The same rules apply to Democratic watchers.
How can this go wrong?
“There are two ways in which the actions of these groups can be effective,” Charles Stewart of the MIT Election Lab told me. “One is by their actual physical presence. And the second one is by being worried about them.”
When the president tells the Proud Boys, a white supremacist organization, to “stand by” and calls his poll watchers an “army,” it implicitly creates the threat of violence on Election Day.
That perception itself could be enough to intimidate voters and lower turnout for groups who believe they’d be targeted.
“We know that Trump’s language has an effect on how his supporters behave,” says Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher at the Wilson Center who has acted as an international election observer in Russia and Georgia.
“If you’re a Black or brown person listening to the debate, and you hear that Trump is encouraging his supporters to go and watch, and you’re in a place where it is permitted to open carry at a polling station, ask yourself: Do you bring your kids to vote with you that day? Probably not. Do you maybe not vote at all, or do you have to change your voting plan so that you are mitigating that risk? I think that is highly likely. The actual verbal threat is intimidation in my mind. It’s something that an international mission would note in its pre-election assessment heading into this consequential election here in the United States.”
Stewart suggested there may be less to worry about because groups like the Proud Boys often bark louder than they bite—and there aren’t as many of them as people think there are.
“Think about this Proud Boys rally that was supposed to be in Boston a couple of weeks ago,” he told me. “They had promised a crowd of 20,000 and 200 people showed up. There’s an over-promising and an overestimation about the ability of these groups to deploy to large numbers of polling places around the country.”
Is this a real concern?
The inability to muster numbers doesn’t mean there is no threat. In 1981, the Republican Party organized a “National Ballot Security Task Force” carrying guns, wearing uniforms, and preventing minority voters from casting ballots for New Jersey governor in multiple cities around the state. The whole effort took about 200 people, including off-duty police, and Republicans narrowly won that election. A lawsuit later banned Republicans from deploying armed poll watchers again—but that ban expired in 2017.
And then there is the potential for self-appointed poll watchers to cause trouble. Trump’s messages are at odds with how the law actually works, and could lead to questionable behavior from people who don’t know what an official poll watcher really does.
Dismissing the criticism, the Trump campaign’s deputy national press secretary, Thea McDonald, told me that “President Trump’s volunteer poll watchers will be trained to ensure all rules are applied equally, all valid ballots are counted, and all Democrat rule-breaking is called out.”
Yet Trump’s own Homeland Security analysts assessed white supremacists as the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland through 2021” and warned that “open-air, publicly accessible parts of physical election infrastructure” like polling places could be “flash points for potential violence.”
Are there protections?
For all the rising rhetoric, the law is clear, and voters should know they are protected from this kind of activity, which is already illegal across the United States. A new Brennan Center report details exactly how voter intimidation and discrimination are outlawed. Openly carrying guns in a polling place is illegal in most of the country.
Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection is leading an effort to prevent private militias from operating near polling places or voter registration drives.
“It’s so important that elected officials and law enforcement make clear that there is no Second Amendment right to engage in paramilitary activity.”
“We think it’s so important that elected officials and law enforcement make clear that there is no Second Amendment right to engage in paramilitary activity and make clear that it is unlawful in every state,” says Georgetown’s Jonathan Backer.
“That’s so these groups will be discouraged from showing up and engaging in that sort of conduct, and so that voters can engage in the civic process without fear that these groups will show up and that elected officials won’t do anything to prevent it.”
Voters should not need to fear intimidation and violence on Election Day. Anyone experiencing problems should inform a poll worker, call the nonpartisan organization Protect the Vote, or in an emergency call 911.
What can you expect on Election Day?
The election is already under way, and for the most part, things are proceeding as planned. Poll watchers are a normal part of elections. Voter intimidation is not.
One key difference between today and 1981 is attention. Election officials and poll workers are actively looking for illegal intimidation near polls and increasingly speaking up to say they’ll prosecute attempts at voter intimidation.
It’s also useful to remember that even in 2016, voting rights groups were gearing up for problems extremely similar to the issues feared today. Those threats didn’t materialize. The issue is real, but it shouldn’t stop anyone from voting either in person or by mail. Voters are protected by law.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year, Alonso Yañez, CIO of Walmart’s operations in Mexico and Central America, sprang into action, triggering the retailer’s crisis management plan and leading its ongoing response.
After quickly upgrading his remote-access infrastructure, Yañez sent all 1,000 of his IT staffers home, where they have been working ever since. That remote IT group has been able to support Walmart’s massive operations in the region—nearly 2,400 stores, 42,000 providers and vendors in the supply chain, and 200,000 employees.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
At the same time, Walmart accelerated its digital transformation efforts, creating an omnichannel buying experience for its customers. Now they can shop online and have products delivered, shop online and pick up at the store, shop at the store and pick up items ordered previously, or any combination thereof.
“Everything should be easier, independent of the channel, the situation, the location. That’s the intention, and that was the mission three or four years ago,” says Yañez. During the pandemic, with lockdowns and physical distancing, “everything is speeding up. It’s like a time machine. What we wanted three years ago and was part of our five-year mission is now reality.”
The result: Walmart stores and clubs—there’s one within 10 miles of nearly every home in Mexico—are open for business. Employee and customer safety is a priority. And e-commerce sales have registered triple-digit growth.
Walmart is a prime example of a company that has successfully negotiated a “digital pivot.” Virtually every company had a pre-existing digital transformation plan in place. In many cases, companies were diligently, but maybe not urgently, implementing their plans; in others, they had prolonged, multi-year programs. But the coronavirus pandemic presents a cataclysmic, once-in-a-lifetime disruption that is forcing companies to confront a new reality and reshuffle their digital transformation activities in order to survive.
Now in our new normal, so goes business
“We believe that what’s happened in the last four months, based on our conversations with CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and chief data and digital officers, is that there has been a pivot based on the type of organization that you fall into,” says Paul Lewis, global CTO at Hitachi Vantara.
The technology vendor sees three types of organizations dealing with the unprecedented disruption caused by the pandemic. There are thrivers—think Zoom, Netflix, Amazon. These are companies that are seeing an orders-of-magnitude increase in virtually every metric you can imagine—number of customers, number of subscriptions, number of transactions. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the businesses that require the physical presence of customers—theme parks, movie theater, hotels, airlines. They’ve seen revenue drop off a cliff. Then there are companies in industries like retail, financial services, and manufacturing that have been forced to change business practices and business models on the fly. For example, in financial and insurance, the move to digital signatures and mobile apps. For a small retailer with a store in the mall, switching to e-commerce or finding alternative sales channels.
Generally speaking, the companies that are doing the best job of adapting are those with a high level of digital maturity. “The more mature the organization was with modern philosophy, modern design, modern architecture going into covid, the healthier they are moving through it and the healthier they are moving out of it,” says Howard Holton, enterprise CTO at Hitachi Vantara.
Companies that pursued digital transformation initiatives “on paper”—that is, they got a top-down directive from the CEO, say, to write up a plan—didn’t get serious about the actual implementation, says Holton. As a result, they didn’t adapt as well as their peers.
“The companies that embraced it a companywide initiative were able to transform, to push forward. Your company needs to be designed in a way that allows you to pivot as the market demands,” Holton says. “That’s the most important differentiator and really the most important lesson we should have learned up to this point.”
Ahead of an October 20 attempt to bring extraterrestrial rocks from an asteroid called Bennu to Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has delivered new insights into its chemistry and geology.
Bennu, currently over 321 million kilometers from Earth, was chosen for study because it’s a carbonaceous chondritic rock—rich in organics, and thought to have formed in the early, oxygen-rich days of the solar system. Understanding Bennu’s physical composition, and how it was carved into its 500-meter-long shape, can help us understand how asteroids were formed back then, and what the solar system was like in its infancy.
In just a few weeks, OSIRIS-REx will attempt an audacious maneuver to collect a sample of rubble and small rock from Bennu’s surface and bring it to Earth for scientists to study. Since December 2018, the spacecraft has been orbiting Bennu from roughly a kilometer or so away and studying it with a slew of instruments. The sample collection, however, is the mission’s marquee event.
Perhaps as a prelude to this attempt, researchers just published a number of new studies about the geochemistry of Bennu today in the journals Science and Science Advances, providing some of the biggest revelations to date. Here are the most compelling.
Bennu’s watery history
In the first Science study, scientists used high-resolution images taken by OSIRIS-Rex, as well as spectroscopy (which involves analyzing electromagnetic waves emitted from Bennu to determine its chemistry), to better understand the composition and history of the asteroid’s Nightingale crater region, where the sample will be collected.
They found that boulders in this area showed bright veins, narrow in width but about a meter in length, similar to what’s found in other carbonaceous chondritic meteorites that have landed on Earth. In those cases, the veins indicate that the rock had once interacted with flowing water.
So naturally, for Bennu, “the veins suggest that water flowed through this asteroid very early in the solar system’s history,” says Hannah Kaplan, a planetary scientist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the lead author of the study. From the size of the veins, the researchers estimate that there was “a system of fluid flow that extended kilometers in size” back when Bennu was part of a much larger parent body. These water flows could have lasted for up to millions of years. Similar phenomena likely occurred on many other carbonaceous chondritic asteroids as well.
Carbon, carbon everywhere
Another Science study used infrared spectroscopy to demonstrate how widespread carbon-bearing minerals and hydrated clay minerals were across Bennu’s surface. According to Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the lead author of this study, these minerals are found all over Bennu (though they are particularly concentrated in specific boulders). This is very good news, since it means “we should find both [materials] in our returned samples,” she says.
Scientists think that Bennu formed from the rubble of a collision its parent body experienced in the main asteroid belt of our solar system. The remnants that came together as Bennu soon migrated out to an orbit closer to Earth. According to Simon, this process may be one way that small asteroid bodies delivered organics and hydrated minerals to the inner solar system, where they later became part of planets like Earth.
Rare rocks abound
One study published in Science Advances used infrared cameras to investigate the boulders and rocks that make up Bennu’s rubble-pile structure. The findings reveal that two types of rocks are common on Bennu, but one type is much more porous and brittle than rocks found on Earth, the moon, or Mars. “It is likely that we don’t have similar specimens in meteorite collections on Earth, because Bennu’s rocks are likely too weak to survive atmospheric entry,” says Ben Rozitis, a researcher at the Open University in the UK and the lead author of this study. “It is likely that OSIRIS-REx will bring back asteroid samples not previously studied by scientists in the laboratory.”
Weathering the elements
Things in space can weather down just as they do on Earth—only out there, the main forces to reckon with are solar winds and granular matter like micrometeorites. Daniella DellaGiustina, a research scientist with the University of Arizona, led a study in Science that looked at signs of this weathering on Bennu.
As it turns out, weathering is a strange process on Bennu. While most other asteroids and the moon darken (or redden) as they are weathered, Bennu actually brightens (or gets bluer). “It tells us that something about Bennu’s surface is quite different from other planetary objects we’ve observed,” says DellaGiustina. The darker the surface on Bennu, the better preserved that area should be. It just so happens Nightingale is one of the darkest areas of Bennu, which means it might be an undisturbed record of some of the most ancient activity in the solar system.
Weak gravity game
Another study in Science Advances focused on characterizing Bennu’s weak gravitational field by observing the motion of OSIRIS-REx as it orbited the asteroid, as well as the behavior of pebble-size grains of debris ejected from its surface. The measurements suggest that the asteroid’s rubble pile is unevenly distributed along its surface and is especially light at the asteroid’s equator. These data make sense with models that suggest Bennu had a period of rapid rotation at some point in its history (a hypothesis supported by another Science Advances study, looking at the hemispherical asymmetry of Bennu).
“Even though the current measurements do not definitively solve all of our questions on how rubble-pile asteroids evolve, they do significantly narrow the range of options and will provide more focus on our future investigations, both theoretical and in situ,” says D.J. Scheeres, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the lead author of the study.
Scheeres adds that the study also validates a novel research technique for assessing a small body’s gravitational field by studying the particles it ejects. Future missions to other asteroids can now build on this method, and try to make it faster and more accurate.
Busted: A bot powered by OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users. It was posting in bursts of roughly once a minute.
Fooled ya—again: It’s not the first time GPT-3 has fooled people into thinking what it writes comes from a human. In August a college student published a blog post that hit the top spot on Hacker News and led a handful of people to subscribe. And GPT-3 has been used to compose several articles about itself, though these typically end with a human-written disclaimer. But the bot presented as a regular Redditor and published hundreds of comments before being spotted.
Detective work: The bot’s prodigious posting caught the attention of Philip Winston, who describes on his blog how he unmasked it. Winston then confirmed that the language generated by the bot matched the output of a GPT-3 powered tool called the Philosopher AI, which was set up to answer tongue-in-cheek questions such as “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, do quantum mechanics still manifest classical reality without an observer?” The developer of the Philosopher AI does not allow automated use of his service and blocked the Reddit bot, which subsequently stopped posting.
No harm done? Most of /u/thegentlemetre’s comments were harmless. Its most popular post was a story about a colony of humans living in elevator shafts. But it also engaged with conspiracy theories and sensitive topics, including suicide. Responding to a request for advice from Redditors who said they had had suicidal thoughts in the past, the bot replied: “I think the thing that helped me most was probably my parents. I had a very good relationship with them and they were always there to support me no matter what happened. There have been numerous times in my life where I felt like killing myself but because of them, I never did it.” The response was upvoted 157 times.
Why it matters: This incident could be seen to confirm concerns that OpenAI raised over its previous language model GPT-2, which it said was too dangerous to release to the public because of its potential for misuse. The AI lab is trying to keep GPT-3 under control as well, giving access (via a website) only to selected individuals and licensing the whole software exclusively to Microsoft. And yet if we want these systems to do no harm, then they require more scrutiny, not less. Letting more researchers examine the code and explore its potential would be the safer option in the long run.
As covid-19 began to spread earlier this year, it soon became clear that prisons and jails are particularly susceptible to outbreaks. In response, criminal justice systems around the world started looking for alternatives to incarceration.
Many turned to electronic ankle monitors as a solution. They used this technology to quickly relocate people from secure custody to the relative safety of their homes, and placed them under continuous electronic supervision. At the same time, courts in the US and Australia began to experiment with using ankle monitors for an entirely different purpose—enforcing quarantine orders.
The pandemic has subtly normalized the expanded use of ankle monitors around the world. This is a worrisome trend that we shouldn’t allow to go unexamined. Previous research suggests that ankle monitors do not conclusively reduce recidivism, and the technology has no history as a tool for enforcing compliance with public health orders. In fact, frequent and long-standing criticism of monitors charges that their use causes significant harm.
For example, ankle monitors can impose financial burdens on wearers, who are often required to cover the expense of wearing a monitor themselves: they pay private companies, hired by states and counties, fees in the range of $3 to $35 per day, which can amount to hundreds of dollars per month. Such fee structures have led some to refer to ankle monitors as a present-day debtor’s prison.
Furthermore, monitors cause some wearers physical discomfort or pain. And they carry a social stigma because they’re widely associated with the criminal justice system, and with violent offenders specifically. In this sense, being required to wear an ankle monitor is akin to wearing a criminal record on one’s body—like a digital scarlet letter.
To make matters worse, ankle monitors are prone to technical glitches such as signal loss and drift, prohibitively short battery life, and inaccurate alerts sent to monitoring agencies. Such errors further complicate the lives of people required to wear them.
The recent surge in monitor use unfolded without sufficient concern for wearers or their communities. It’s a clear case of “surveillance creep”—the growth of surveillance tactics and systems beyond the circumstances for which they were initially intended.
Always on
Around the world, the rapid spread of covid prompted many public health measures that have been intrusive. Dozens of governments began rolling out contact tracing apps. In China, people were required to wear a digital wristband and download the StayHomeSafe app, which worked together to enforce quarantine requirements. Travelers returning to India and Bangladesh received hand stamps that marked them as meant to be in quarantine. In the US, states issued stay-at-home orders and mask mandates.
However, unlike these virus-specific measures, the increased use of ankle monitors won’t necessarily end when the health emergency does. Ankle monitors predate the virus, and it’s unclear how their heightened use will be reassessed when the virus is no longer a threat.
Taking decisive action to protect people from the virus shouldn’t preclude careful consideration about technological deployment, especially when there are well-known problems with the technology in question.
Electronic ankle monitors were originally inspired by a Spider-Man comic and electronic monitoring equipment for cows, and initially developed in the US to enforce house arrest in the early 1980s. They’re now regularly used in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to enforce supervision orders during probation, parole, and pretrial release.
In recent years, ankle monitor use has also spread outside the criminal justice system. They are now used to surveil immigrants who enter the US and Canada without documentation, to monitor truant teens, and to track elders affected by cognitive conditions.
From 2005 to 2015, the number of people in the United States who were monitored using this technology increased 140%, from approximately 53,000 to 125,000 people. Bloomberg estimates there are now 25% to 30% more people worldwide wearing electronic ankle monitors as a result of the pandemic. Bloomberg also reported in July that the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, alone, had put approximately 4,600 people on home confinement since the end of March, which was a 160% increase from pre-covid numbers.
Criminal justice officials say ankle monitors reduce the financial burden that detention facilities place on the state, while ensuring that people comply with the conditions of their release. Some lawyers have even advocated for their clients’ “right to be monitored,” arguing that round-the-clock surveillance is preferable to the inhumanity of incarceration.
However, these stances relativistically position ankle monitors as “better than” incarceration, and avoid tough conversations about the barbarism of the devices themselves.
Comparisons between ankle monitors and scarlet letters have led some to suggest that altering the form factor (the hardware’s physical size, shape, and appearance) might ameliorate some of the technology’s harms. One city council member in Ohio recently went so far as to suggest that microchipping people would be a suitable alternative, saying that chipping pretrial detainees “can’t be inhumane because we do it to our pets.”
While such proposals acknowledge the visual stigma that ankle monitors carry for wearers, these solutions are misguided. They treat human and civil rights issues as a design problem and explicitly advocate for even more invasive forms of tracking.
Other efforts to redesign monitors aim to make it easier for law enforcement to analyze the data the devices collect, or make the devices interoperable with other surveillance systems. Meanwhile, the design of the physical monitors themselves stagnates. None of these alleged fixes simultaneously alleviate the technology’s true physical and digital harms.
Digital shackles
The search for dignified, ethical alternatives to incarceration is an important one, but electronic ankle monitors are simply not an ethically or technologically effective answer. Instead of arguing that ankle monitors are “better than” the brutality of mass incarceration or a “solution” to acute pandemic health crises in prisons and jails, those in the criminal justice system should figure out how to move away from monitors completely, as long as that divestment doesn’t also mean a return to higher rates of incarceration.
Without action now, the widening use of ankle monitors during the pandemic risks becoming permanent. There’s been no clear plan for how the expanded use of this troubling technology will be walked back once the pandemic is under control.
Social scientists, humanists, government figures, law and policy makers, community members, and technologists must continuously come togetherand “talk across the aisle” to design a more just, dignified, and humanizing technological future that is attentive to the nuanced needs of varied users and social contexts. We can start by refusing to make or use any more digital shackles, and by refusing to let their creep extend one inch—or one use case—further.
Lauren Kilgour(@l_kilgour)is a doctoral candidate in information science at Cornell University. Her research considers the roles technology and data play in perpetuating stigma, social control, and inequality.
