Month: February 2023
Best Rural Internet Providers of 2023: Wired and Wireless – CNET
You don’t have to settle for satellite internet when there are more options out there for rural service. Here are our picks for the best rural internet providers.
You don’t have to settle for satellite internet when there are more options out there for rural service. Here are our picks for the best rural internet providers.
Best Squat Racks: Top Fitness Picks for Your Home Gym – CNET
Take your workouts up a notch with the best squat racks you can buy.
Take your workouts up a notch with the best squat racks you can buy.
Best Wine Club for 2023 – CNET
Wine subscriptions are a great way to taste different kinds of vino from all over the world without having to leave your house. Find the wine club that’s best for you.
Wine subscriptions are a great way to taste different kinds of vino from all over the world without having to leave your house. Find the wine club that’s best for you.
Best Noise-Canceling Headphones Under $100 for 2023 – CNET
You don’t have to sacrifice quality for affordability with these great noise-canceling headphones.
You don’t have to sacrifice quality for affordability with these great noise-canceling headphones.
Cycle is a new product management hub that centralizes all customer feedback
Meet Cycle, a French startup that is building a collaboration tool for product managers where they can collect data from various tools, work on the next product iterations and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers. The company raised a total of $6 million across two funding rounds, including a recent funding round
Cycle is a new product management hub that centralizes all customer feedback by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Meet Cycle, a French startup that is building a collaboration tool for product managers where they can collect data from various tools, work on the next product iterations and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers.
The company raised a total of $6 million across two funding rounds, including a recent funding round led by Boldstart that closed late last year. The startup is backed by eFounders, the European startup studio focused on SaaS products. Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures and 60 angels also invested in the company — it’s a long list of investors*.
Like many software-as-a-service products, Cycle first acts as a single source of truth. Many product teams rely heavily on products like Confluence, Notion or Google Docs. But they also have to check GitHub issues, Intercom messages and more.
“The issue we are trying to solve is an issue that every product manager faces. Product information is scattered across many different products,” Cycle founder and CEO Mehdi Boudoukhane told me. “As your company scales, you get feedback from users, the sales team, the customer success team and the marketing team.”
And yet, in most cases, product management becomes a black box. Other teams in the company don’t really know when something is going to ship or — worse — if their feedback will have an impact in one way or another.
Cycle has built integrations with popular startup products like HubSpot, Intercom and Slack. Once everything is in Cycle, product teams can organize feedback so that everything related to one feature is grouped together.
Product managers then use Cycle to write their Product Requirements Documents with a rich-text editor that supports embeds. It’s a collaborative editor with the ability to mention your teammates.
“Designers produce visuals, developers produce codes and product managers produce documents,” Boudoukhane said. The idea is that product managers could spend most of their day in Cycle — on average, product managers who use Cycle spend 3 hours per day in the product. And product managers don’t have to manually export their documents to other tools as Cycle offers integrations with Linear, GitHub or Notion.
Image Credits: Cycle
The worst thing that can happen when you read feedbacks from clients who have decided to end their contracts with you is when they say that there is a missing feature in your product even though… the feature exists. They just didn’t know about it.
So when something finally ships, Cycle helps you close the loop with your customers and coworkers. For instance, the sales team will receive a notification in HubSpot. “Sales teams can then reach out to clients who talked about the feature that was just shipped,” Boudoukhane said.
Having a clear line of communication with your customers is a good way to prevent churn and keep your customers engaged with your product. Some companies like Capitaine Train or Superhuman have been pretty good on this front according to Boudoukhane.
Cycle competes with Productboard or even Jira. But with its lightweight and collaborative approach, Cycle hopes that everyone in the company will interact with its product in one way or another to give feedback and contribute, making it easier to build a product-led company.
* Some individuals who invested in Cycle include Scott Belsky (Founder at Behance), Shreyas Doshi (ex-Product Lead at Stripe), Kelton Lynn (Director of Product Management at Google), Youcef Es-skouri (Head of Product at Dropbox), Omar Pera (Product Lead at Meta), David Hoang (VP Design at Webflow), Jonathan Widawski (CEO at Maze), Mark Pundsack (ex-VP Product at GitLab), Antoine Martin (Founder at Zenly), Marie Gassée (ex-VP Growth at Confluent), Mary Nelson (CCO at Aircall), Olivia Teich (ex-Product Director at Dropbox), David Apple (ex-Head of Sales & Customer Success at Notion), Eric Wittman (ex-CRO at Figma), Sriram Krishnan (ex-Head of Growth at Tinder), Jeremy Le Van (Founder at Sunrise), Brad Menezes (ex-Director of Product at Datadog), Guy Podjarny (Founder at Snyk), Nick Candito (Co-founder at Flatfile), Romain David (ex-Product Manager at Uber) and Kyle Parrish (VP Sales at Figma). I told you it was a long list.
Image Credits: Cycle
Cycle is a new product management hub that centralizes all customer feedback by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
LastPass says hackers broke into an employee PC to steal the company’s password vault
LastPass has posted an update on its investigation regarding a couple of security incidents that took place last year, and they’re sounding graver than previously thought. Apparently, the bad actors involved in those incidents also infiltrated a company DevOps engineer’s home computer by exploiting a third-party media software package. They implanted a keylogger into the software, which they then used to capture the engineer’s master password for an account with access to the LastPass corporate vault. After they got in, they exported the vault’s entries and shared folders that contained decryption keys needed to unlock cloud-based Amazon S3 buckets with customer vault backups.
This latest update in LastPass’ investigation gives us a clearer picture of how the two security breach incidents it went through last year were connected. If you’ll recall, LastPass revealed in August 2022 that an “unauthorized party” gained entry into its system. While the first incident ended on August 12th, the company said in its new announcement that the threat actors were “actively engaged in a new series of reconnaissance, enumeration, and exfiltration activities aligned to the cloud storage environment spanning from August 12th, 2022 to October 26th, 2022.”
When the company announced the second security breach in December, it said the bad actors used information obtained from the first incident to get into its cloud service. It also admitted that the hackers made off with a bunch of sensitive information, including its Amazon S3 buckets. To be able to access the data saved in those buckets, the hackers needed decryption keys saved in “highly restricted set of shared folders in a LastPass password manager vault.” That’s why the bad actors targeted one of the four DevOps engineers who had access to the keys needed to unlock the company’s cloud storage.
In a support document (PDF) the company released (via BleepingComputer), it detailed the data accessed by the threat actors during the two incidents. Apparently, the cloud-based backups accessed during the second breach included “API secrets, third-party integration secrets, customer metadata and backups of all customer vault data.” The company insisted that all sensitive customer vault data aside from some exceptions “can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password.” The company added that it doesn’t store users’ master passwords. LastPass also detailed the steps it has taken to strengthen its defenses going forward, including revising its threat detection and making “a multi-million-dollar allocation to enhance [its] investment in security across people, processes, and technology.”
LastPass has posted an update on its investigation regarding a couple of security incidents that took place last year, and they’re sounding graver than previously thought. Apparently, the bad actors involved in those incidents also infiltrated a company DevOps engineer’s home computer by exploiting a third-party media software package. They implanted a keylogger into the software, which they then used to capture the engineer’s master password for an account with access to the LastPass corporate vault. After they got in, they exported the vault’s entries and shared folders that contained decryption keys needed to unlock cloud-based Amazon S3 buckets with customer vault backups.
This latest update in LastPass’ investigation gives us a clearer picture of how the two security breach incidents it went through last year were connected. If you’ll recall, LastPass revealed in August 2022 that an “unauthorized party” gained entry into its system. While the first incident ended on August 12th, the company said in its new announcement that the threat actors were “actively engaged in a new series of reconnaissance, enumeration, and exfiltration activities aligned to the cloud storage environment spanning from August 12th, 2022 to October 26th, 2022.”
When the company announced the second security breach in December, it said the bad actors used information obtained from the first incident to get into its cloud service. It also admitted that the hackers made off with a bunch of sensitive information, including its Amazon S3 buckets. To be able to access the data saved in those buckets, the hackers needed decryption keys saved in “highly restricted set of shared folders in a LastPass password manager vault.” That’s why the bad actors targeted one of the four DevOps engineers who had access to the keys needed to unlock the company’s cloud storage.
In a support document (PDF) the company released (via BleepingComputer), it detailed the data accessed by the threat actors during the two incidents. Apparently, the cloud-based backups accessed during the second breach included “API secrets, third-party integration secrets, customer metadata and backups of all customer vault data.” The company insisted that all sensitive customer vault data aside from some exceptions “can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password.” The company added that it doesn’t store users’ master passwords. LastPass also detailed the steps it has taken to strengthen its defenses going forward, including revising its threat detection and making “a multi-million-dollar allocation to enhance [its] investment in security across people, processes, and technology.”
SpaceX Unveils ‘V2 Mini’ Starlink Satellites With Quadruple the Capacity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Starlink speeds slowing due to a growing capacity crunch, SpaceX said a launch happening as soon as today will deploy the first “V2 Mini” satellites that provide four times more per-satellite capacity than earlier versions. Starlink’s second-generation satellites include the V2 Minis and the larger V2. The larger V2s are designed for the SpaceX Starship, which isn’t quite ready to launch yet, but the V2 Minis are slimmed-down versions that can be deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket. “The V2 Minis are smaller than the V2 satellites (hence the name) but don’t let the name fool you,” SpaceX said in a statement provided to Ars yesterday. “The V2 Minis include more advanced phased array antennas and the use of E-band for backhaul, which will enable Starlink to provide ~4x more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations.”
SpaceX didn’t specify the amount of data that each V2 Mini satellite can provide, but its first-generation satellites were designed for an aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps per satellite. The Federal Communications Commission recently gave SpaceX approval to launch 7,500 of the 30,000 planned second-generation satellites. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch tentatively scheduled for today would put 21 V2 Minis into orbit. The larger V2 satellites that can’t launch until Starship is ready will be able to send signals directly to cell phones, a capability that’ll be used by SpaceX and T-Mobile in a partnership announced in August 2022. “Each Starlink V2 Mini satellite weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms) at launch, nearly three times heavier than the older Starlink satellites,” notes Spaceflight Now. “They are also bigger in size, with a spacecraft body more than 13 feet (4.1 meters) wide, filling more of the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing during launch.”
UPDATE: SpaceX successfully launched the first batch of “V2 Mini” Starlink satellites. “A Falcon 9 rocket hauled the 21 Starlink satellites into a 230-mile-high (370-kilometer) orbit after lifting off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:13:50 p.m. EST (2313:50 GMT) Monday,” reports Spaceflight Now. “SpaceX delayed the launch from earlier Monday afternoon to wait for radiation levels to abate following a solar storm that sparked dramatic auroral displays visible across Northern Europe and Canada.” You can watch the launch here. Elon Musk also shared video of the first V2 satellites to reach orbit.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Starlink speeds slowing due to a growing capacity crunch, SpaceX said a launch happening as soon as today will deploy the first “V2 Mini” satellites that provide four times more per-satellite capacity than earlier versions. Starlink’s second-generation satellites include the V2 Minis and the larger V2. The larger V2s are designed for the SpaceX Starship, which isn’t quite ready to launch yet, but the V2 Minis are slimmed-down versions that can be deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket. “The V2 Minis are smaller than the V2 satellites (hence the name) but don’t let the name fool you,” SpaceX said in a statement provided to Ars yesterday. “The V2 Minis include more advanced phased array antennas and the use of E-band for backhaul, which will enable Starlink to provide ~4x more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations.”
SpaceX didn’t specify the amount of data that each V2 Mini satellite can provide, but its first-generation satellites were designed for an aggregate downlink capacity of 17 to 23Gbps per satellite. The Federal Communications Commission recently gave SpaceX approval to launch 7,500 of the 30,000 planned second-generation satellites. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch tentatively scheduled for today would put 21 V2 Minis into orbit. The larger V2 satellites that can’t launch until Starship is ready will be able to send signals directly to cell phones, a capability that’ll be used by SpaceX and T-Mobile in a partnership announced in August 2022. “Each Starlink V2 Mini satellite weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms) at launch, nearly three times heavier than the older Starlink satellites,” notes Spaceflight Now. “They are also bigger in size, with a spacecraft body more than 13 feet (4.1 meters) wide, filling more of the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing during launch.”
UPDATE: SpaceX successfully launched the first batch of “V2 Mini” Starlink satellites. “A Falcon 9 rocket hauled the 21 Starlink satellites into a 230-mile-high (370-kilometer) orbit after lifting off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:13:50 p.m. EST (2313:50 GMT) Monday,” reports Spaceflight Now. “SpaceX delayed the launch from earlier Monday afternoon to wait for radiation levels to abate following a solar storm that sparked dramatic auroral displays visible across Northern Europe and Canada.” You can watch the launch here. Elon Musk also shared video of the first V2 satellites to reach orbit.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.