Category: Sports

We’re not getting a national vaccine passport. Here’s why it never stood a chance

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Political arguments about vaccine passports have been raging for months : whether we need them, if they could be built equitably , and if they are ultimately an infringement on Americans’ rights to keep their health information private. But while other countries experiment with rolling out digital vaccination credentials, the U.S. national effort was doomed before it ever began. Security experts had hoped that the government would develop a national system for credentialing vaccine recipients. A national vaccine passport would create a single standard that could be used everywhere and would be potentially difficult to fake. But on Tuesday, the White House announced the federal government would not be “supporting” a vaccine credential system. Part of what that means is that there will be no centralized database where all vaccination records live—a crucial feature of vaccine verification systems in other countries like Israel and Estonia. “Unless there was a major change in how health data is viewed from a public and government perspective, it wouldn’t even be possible to create the database,” says JP Pollak, cofounder and chief architect of the Commons Project, which has developed a globally available mobile app for storing COVID-19 testing results. “States have the mandate for maintaining vaccination registries and states are required to report things like how many people have been vaccinated for COVID-19, but they actually are not permitted to transmit the personal information of people back to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].” . @PressSec Jen Psaki on possibility of the federal government supporting vaccine passports: “The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential.” Full video here: https://t.co/TLFF718hVo pic.twitter.com/jJP0Ph95jH — CSPAN (@cspan) April 6, 2021 Since states are charged with maintaining vaccine registries, some, like New York, are creating their own credentialing systems Read More …

Tracy Chou’s Block Party is fighting online trolls—and the startup ecosystem itself

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In January 2021, prominent software engineer Tracy Chou opened up registrations for her company’s first product. The service—like the company, called Block Party—is designed to help people who experience harassment online, starting on Twitter but with the ambition to expand to other platforms. By giving users more control over what they see on Twitter, Chou is hoping to solve one of the biggest and most intractable problems with social media. The problem is also deeply personal. “I have some dedicated harassers who are proud to have been harassing me for six or seven years,” says Chou, who grew up in Silicon Valley as the child of Taiwanese immigrants. “Platforms are really bad at detecting this and don’t really care.” Chou’s experiences with online abuse began when she was in high school, she recalls, but slowly escalated when she became an early employee at Quora and then Pinterest. While at Pinterest, she published a blog post encouraging tech companies to reveal how many female engineers they employed, sparking a movement toward publishing diversity metrics. In 2016, she cofounded Project Include, solidifying her position as an outspoken advocate for equity and inclusion in the tech industry. But as her profile has risen—she now has more than 100,000 Twitter followers —the more she has been forced to deal with trolls, stalkers, and serial harassers sending her abusive, horrifying messages everywhere she goes online. “My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically,” she says. Now, as Block Party’s founder and CEO, Chou is confronting a new challenge: a well-capitalized competitor offering a free alternative to Block Party. Just a few weeks after Chou opened Block Party to the public, another startup called Sentropy announced a similar product. Like Block Party, Sentropy Protect is designed to help Twitter users manage online harassment by filtering out abusive messages. While Chou ultimately plans to sell subscriptions to Block Party, Sentropy, whose core business is enterprise software, says it will always offer Protect to individual users for free. My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically.” Tracy Chou, Block Party The financial disparity between the two companies is stark. Though both launched their consumer products in early 2021 and were founded around the same time in 2018, Sentropy has raised a total of $13 million in funding. Block Party has raised less than $1.5 million, from Precursor Ventures and a handful of angel investors including Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, and former TechCrunch editor Alexia Bonatsos. When we spoke in early March, Chou was her company’s only full-time employee and she’d built most of the product on her own. Sentropy, meanwhile, has a team of 26. For some in Silicon Valley, news that Sentropy would be competing with Block Party touched a raw nerve Read More …

This iPhone app lets anybody mint an NFT for anything—for free

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Musicians and visual artists have long registered their work with the U.S. Copyright Office to prove it’s theirs. But doing so is really little more than a person in a government office “witnessing” that a creation is associated with a person’s name on a certain date. And the process takes weeks or months to complete. In the 21st century, creation happens on digital platforms. It happens far faster than ever before, and in many ways. Inspiration for a vocal line or a beat can happen spontaneously during a TikTok duet, for example. A GIF can be created on a phone and uploaded to social networks. It’s a good thing, then, that the blockchain can also “witness” the creation—and the creator—of a digital thing, and record it for perpetuity. A new, free app called S!ng lets pretty much anybody do this in a few seconds by minting an NFT ( nonfungible token ) of a work on the Ethereum blockchain. An NFT is a type of cryptographic token that signifies true ownership of a digital asset, such as a piece of digital artwork. Creators can upload images (JPEG, BMP, or TIFF files) or audio (WAV, MP3, MIDI, PTX, PTF, or M4A) to the S!ng app, or record audio directly via the phone’s microphone. Once creators have minted an NFT for their work, it can be sold or licensed to others online if there’s a market for it. Read More …

The company behind the NBA’s NFT trading cards is now valued at $2.6 billion

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NFTs, or nonfungible tokens , have exploded in both the financial markets and the zeitgeist at large. Simply put, NFTs use blockchain technology to authenticate digital assets, which can then be bought and sold—sometimes at staggering sums. Much of the hype around NFTs has been fueled by headline grabbing sales, such as the artist Beeple’s recent $69.3 million payday for a single digital artwork, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hawking his first tweet for $2.9 million, and the original GIF of the internet’s favorite Pop-Tart cat going for nearly $600,000. While some analysts worry that NFTs are a speculation bubble primed to burst, Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of blockchain company Dapper Labs , is planning for the long haul—and he just received a major round of funding to meet that goal. Announced today, Dapper Labs, the company behind the National Basketball Association’s (NBA’s) digital collectibles platform Top Shot , closed $305 million in funding led by investment management company Coatue, with additional backing from Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala , Will Smith and Keisuke Honda’s Dreamers VC, Andreessen Horowitz, The Chernin Group, and more. Dapper Labs came out of beta last fall and is now valued at a $2.6 billion. ????ALL HAIL THE KING???? @YoDough scooped up this Legendary LeBron James Moment from our Cosmic Series 1 set for $208,000‼️ This Moment is from our first Legendary set ever minted ???? The top acquisition for any NBA Top Shot Moment … so far. Congrats on the nice pickup! ???? pic.twitter.com/rFLMzbwXN7 — NBA Top Shot (@nbatopshot) February 22, 2021 Founded in 2018, Dapper Labs is on a mission to make blockchain technology mainstream. Its first product, CryptoKitties (which Gharegozlou launched in 2017 under venture studio Axiom Zen), gamified the blockchain experience by allowing users to collect and breed digital cats as NFTs. But its partnership with the NBA has been one of the most notable cosigns in making blockchain more accessible. Launched last October, NBA Top Shot, powered by Dapper Labs’s own blockchain system Flow, allows users to buy and sell Moments, i.e. digital trading cards that feature a clip of an NBA player’s best shots or plays. A video of LeBron James dunking on Nemanja Bjelica during a 2019 matchup between the L.A. Lakers and the Sacramento Kings sold on Top Shot for $208,000. New Orleans Pelican Zion Williamson’s epic shot block in a game against the Denver Nuggets Read More …

The NSFW future of OnlyFans, where celebs, influencers, and sex workers post side by side

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Vex Ashley began working as a cam girl to pay her way through art school. Whatever reservations she had about being a “little weird goth kid” doing porn melted away as she met other performers online who also had a more alternative approach to mainstream adult content. “I thought that to do porn, you had to fit a very rigid stereotype,” Ashley says. “I never was interested in fitting into that mold.” Ashley wanted to infuse porn with a higher level of aesthetics and concepts, using it as a medium to explore ideas rather than purely for viewing pleasure. And if ever there was a tenet of the creator economy, it’s that niche interests can always find an audience. Ashley uploaded experimental videos to Tumblr and quickly gained a following that she took to Patreon in 2014 to better monetize her art and support her production company, Four Chambers . At the height of her success on Patreon, Ashley had more than 3,000 subscribers and was pulling in around $25,000 per month. But after the platform changed its policies in 2018, she effectively lost it all. Vex Ashley [Photo: courtesy of Four Chambers] Like many other adult content creators whose Patreon revenue was decimated, Ashley migrated to OnlyFans in 2018. And like many of her peers, she’s now wary of meeting the same fate on the platform. OnlyFans, which allows creators to charge users a monthly or pay-per-view fee to access content, launched in 2016 with the intention of being for all types of creators but has become a nexus for adult entertainment. Amateur and professionals alike have flocked to OnlyFans as a safe haven to monetize NSFW (not safe for work) content, becoming the key drivers of the platform’s early growth. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that momentum as more creators looked to OnlyFans as a source of income during record rates of unemployment. Between March and April of last year, OnlyFans experienced a 75% spike in new user and creator registrations. To date, OnlyFans has more than 120 million users and 1 million creators who have earned more than $3 billion collectively (the company takes a 20% cut). Read More …