Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/10 – The Controversies Continue

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

All the controversies continue. I’ll update you on the Meta moderation controversy. The latest twist in the WordPress brouhaha. The TikTok thing is coming to a head right now as we speak, in the form of Supreme Court arguments. Asking again if the business model of Triple A gaming development is broken. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Qualialife.com/ride and code ride Links: Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims (TechCrunch) Automattic says it will reduce its contribution to WordPress core project to match WP Engine (TechCrunch) Billionaire Frank McCourt's Project Liberty proposes bid for TikTok's US assets (Reuters) Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location (Wired) Call of Duty's massive development budgets revealed: $700 million for Black Ops Cold War (Game File) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The New $30,000 Side Hustle: Making Job Referrals for Strangers (Bloomberg) The smart glasses era is here — I got a first look (The Verge) The Anti-Social Century (The Atlantic) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, January 10th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the controversies continue. I'll update you on the meta moderation controversy. The latest twist in the WordPress, brouhaha. The TikTok thing is coming to a head right now as we speak in the form of Supreme Court arguments, asking again if the business model of AAA gaming development is broken. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The controversies around meta's new moderation policies continue to roll on. It's sort of been the story that wouldn't die all week, even though nothing really new has happened. People just kept making different takes on it. People are angry that met as new policies for contractors

and staff moderating Facebook and Instagram now allow speech like, quote, a trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it. Basically, people are saying there are convoluted or contradictory hate speech examples for user content moderators, which might allow derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, etc. It's almost like the whole chessboard has been thrown in the air and people can't figure out what is allowed and what isn't. And sources are saying many of META's employees are furious about the moderation changes, which now could allow, quote, allegations of mental illness when based on gender or sexual orientation. Now, as I say, I don't know that there's anything new I can add to all this. I guess we'll have to see if there are increased incidence of

bad outcomes when all of this comes into effect. But among the things that have fallen out from the controversies around meta this week. I want to flag this, which is unrelated, but is very interesting. According to court documents, Mark Zuckerberg approved the meta team that trains AI Lama models to use data from LibGen, a links aggregator to pirated copyrighted material. Basically, LibGen is like old school Napster, but for books. So this would be a backdoor way to train AI on the universe of published books, quoting TechCrunch. The case, Cadreys versus Meta, is one of many against tech giants developing AI that accuse the companies of training models on copyrighted works without permission. For the most part, defendants like Meta have asserted

that they're shielded by fair use, the U.S. legal doctrine that allows for the use of copyright works to make something new as long as it's sufficiently transformative. Many creators reject that argument. In newly unredacted documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Cadreys META, who include best-selling authors Sarah Silverman and Tonehisi Coates, recount Meta's test, from late last year, during which it was revealed that Mark Zuckerberg himself approved Meta's use of a dataset called LibGen for Lama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a links aggregator, provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including McMillan Learning,

McRaw Hill, and Pearson Education. Libgen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and find tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement. According to Mehta's testimony, as relayed by plaintiff's counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least least one of META's Lama models despite concerns within META's AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes meta employees as referring to LibGen as a data set we know to be pirated and flagging that its use, quote, may undermine meta's negotiation position with regulators. The filing also cites a memo to meta AI decision makers noting that after, quote, escalation to MZ, meta's AI team was, quote, approved to use LibGen. MZ here is rather

obvious shorthand for Mark Zuckerberg. The details seemingly line up with reporting from the New York Times last April, which suggested that meta cut corners to gather data for its AI. At one point, Meta was hiring contractors in Africa to aggregate summaries of books and considering buying the publisher Simon & Schuster, according to the Times. But the company's execs determined it would take too long to negotiate licenses and reasoned that fair use was a solid defense. The filing Wednesday contains new accusations like that Meta might have tried to conceal its alleged infringement by stripping the Libgen data of attribution. According to plaintiff's counsel, meta-engineer Nikolai Bashlykov, who works on the Lama research team, wrote a script to remove copyright info,

including the word copyright and acknowledgments from e-books in LibGen. Separately, allegedly stripped copyright markers from science journal articles and source metadata in the training data it used for Lama, end quote. And the controversy around WordPress continues into this new year. This is another one where I don't have a take to add on the controversy, so basically I can just tell you what is happening. In a blog post, automatic announced plans to cut its WordPress contributions to 45 hours per week, quote, due to the lawsuits from WP Engine.

They're going to focus mostly on security and critical updates. As many of his critics have been saying online, Matt Mullenweg seems to have taken this brouhaha so far that he's basically at the point where he's like, screw it, I'm taking my ball and going home. Quoting TechCrunch. Automatic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has been in a kerfuffle with WP Engine since September last year. over the very issue of contribution to WordPress as an open source and community project. In a blog post, the company said that it would reduce the number of hours, it commits to the five for the future program to match rival hosting provider WP Engine's contribution in terms of

the number of weekly hours. As part of this reset, Automatic will match its volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem or about 45 hours a week that qualify under the five for the future program as benefiting the entire community and not just a single company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates, Automatic said in the latest blog post. The company added that it will redirect the resources to the ongoing legal battle against WP Engine. And an event last year, Malnweg called WP Engine a cancer to WordPress, pointing out a large stake owned by private equity firm Silver Lake in the company and a lack of contribution from the hosting provider to support sustainable growth.

In the new blog post, Automatic called out this fact again. Automatic contributes around 2,560 hours per week currently as per 5 for the Futures Dashboard. This number is already significantly less than the 3,900 hours per week the company contributed in September. It's not clear if this reduction is because of the company's shrinking headcount or a general strategy shift. The company's new blog post also sarcastically noted that members of the, quote, community have considered working on commercial products like WordPress.com, pressible, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce as contributing to WordPress, so engineers will focus on building those products instead of contributing to WordPress core.

Automatic is also under pressure to perform better on a financial point of view in December BlackRock mark down its investment in automatic by 10%, and this wasn't the first markdown. Overall, the investment firm has devalued its investment by more than 50%. End quote. The Supreme Court is taking up the arguments around the TikTok ban as we speak. I don't expect any sort of immediate ruling, so I kind of can't cover it for you for now. But I will note this. Frank McCourt's Project Liberty says it made a formal bid to bite dance to acquire TikTok's U.S. assets, aiming to keep the app alive without its current algorithm. So they have an out if things don't go their way in front of the Supremes, I guess.

Quoting Reuters. The consortium, which did not disclose the value of the proposal, said the financial capacity to complete the deal included expressions of interest from investors, including major private equity funds, family offices, and high net worth individuals for sufficient equity capital as well as debt. financing from one of the largest banks in the United States. McCourt and his firm Project Liberty formed the consortium last year to buy social media platform TikTok in the United States. Quote, by keeping the platform alive without relying on the current TikTok algorithm and avoiding a ban, millions of Americans continue to enjoy the platform. We look forward to working with Bytance, President Elect Trump, and the incoming administration to get this deal done, McCourt said in a statement, end quote. A hack of location data firm Gravy reveals Candy Crush, Tinder, and thousands of other apps are being used to steal user location data.

So I know, again, another hack, Brian. Eyes glaze over, right? Except what's interesting here is the suggestion that these apps might not even know that user location data is being leaked. Quoting Wired, the thousands of apps included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics include everything from games like Candy Crush and dating apps like Tinder to pregnancy, tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem, not code developed by the app creators themselves, this data collection is likely happening without users or even app developers' knowledge. For the

first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising bid stream rather than code embedded in the apps themselves. Zach Edwards, senior threat analysts at cybersecurity firm's Silent Push, who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 media after reviewing some of the data. The data provides a rare glimpse inside the world of real-time bidding, or RTB. Historically, location data firms paid app developers to include bundles of code that collected the location data of their users. Many companies have turned instead to sourcing location information through the advertising ecosystem where companies bid to place

ads inside apps. But a side effect is that data brokers can listen in on that process. and harvest the location of people's mobile phones. This is a nightmare scenario for privacy, because not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, but there's some company out there acting like a global honey badger doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way, Edward says. Included in the hacked gravy data are tens of millions of mobile phone coordinates of devices inside the U.S., Russia, and Europe.

Some of those files also reference an app next to each piece of location data. 404 media extracted the app names and built to the device. the list of mentioned apps. The list includes dating sites, Tinder and Grindr, Massive games such as Candy Crush, Temple Run, Subway Surfers, and Harry Potter Puzzles and Spells, Transit app, Move It, My Period Calendar, and Tracker, a period tracking app with more than 10 million downloads, popular fitness app, My Fitness Pal, social network Tumblr, Yahoo's email client, Microsoft 365's Office app, and Flight Tracker, Flight Trader 24. The list also mentions multiple religious-focused apps such as Muslim prayer and Christian Bible apps, various pregnancy trackers, and many VPN apps,

which some users may download, ironically, in an attempt to protect their privacy, end quote. And I believe we spoke obliquely recently about how the production of AAA video games is getting to be so expensive that maybe the business model itself is broken, will grok these numbers from GameFile, quote, in a court filing reviewed by GameFile that has not previously been reported, Patrick Kelly, Activision's current head of Creative on the Call of Duty franchise, said that three Call of Duty games released between 2015 and 2020 cost $450 to $700 million to make. The disclosed totals are the highest development costs ever reported by a major video game company and top just about any that have ever leaked or been estimated by analysts.

By comparison, a poorly redacted court filing from 2023 from Sony pegged the development cost of the company's marquee 2020 game, the Last of Us Part 2 at around $220 million. That number was considered huge when it leaked, end quote. Again, to sum up, Call of Duty, Black Ops 3 costs more than $450 million to make. Modern Warfare costs more than $640 million, and Black Ops Cold War costs more than $700 million, more than $700 million for a game that sold 30 million copies. And those, again, are from games from five years ago or more. I wonder what the numbers are right now. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, Bloomberg takes a look at an increasing side hustle

in Silicon Valley, which is giving job referrals to strangers to help them get hired at your company. Quote, the tech worker who spoke with Bloomberg, who requested anonymity so as not to draw the attention of his employer, said he sourced most of his referrals on blind. He invites interested candidates to fill out a Google form with their name, email address, and a short bio explaining why they're a good fit for the desired role. He then paced the information into his company's referral system. Each submission takes no more than a few seconds to complete, he said. The bounty he stands to earn can be as high as several thousand dollars per higher, depending on the role, end quote. This caught my eye because exactly 20 years ago, I launched a startup to do something similar. It was called who to talk to.com. I think the website

is still there on the web as some sort of zombie holdover from the web 2.0 era. The idea was something similar to create a sort of marketplace where people could trade personal job referrals, We could never get the structure or the economics of the marketplace to sort of work out quite right and be balanced, but who knows, maybe people have solved that issue all these years later. Next up, I said there was not a deluge of AI wearables at CES, a sort of, you know, tidal wave that I expected. But Victoria's song at The Verge rounds up some of the smart glasses plays that she saw, and she says they fell into three categories. There's just stylish glasses in the vein of meta-ray bands with, you know, a little smartness thrown in. and there's full-screen sort of glasses in the vein of X-real and the like, basically computers on your face, but smaller and lighter and cheaper than an Apple Vision Pro. But then there's also what she terms spy glasses, quote, in this vision of the smart glasses revolution, these devices are more like all-day companions that help you use your phone less.

The display is something that's only occasionally glanced at when it's relevant and is done mostly in a productivity context. They offer more smarts than the very use-specific camellio and nuanced audio glasses, but they offer more practicality and wearability to the average person than what Xreal and Vuzix are pursuing, end quote. Click through to read her full rundown of all of this. And finally, sometimes I share things with you that I don't necessarily agree with, in fact, have some real specific disagreements with, and yet the overall piece was so thought-provoking that I appreciated it overall. in that vein from Derek Thompson in the Atlantic. He says Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It's changing our personalities, he says, it's changing our politics and even our relationship to reality. Quote, until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with regulars. It's just a few seats, but it was a pretty happening place. Ray Mosher, the restaurant's general manager, told me, I can't tell you how sad I've been about it, she went on.

I know it hinders communications between customers and staff to have to-go bags taking up the whole bar. but there's nowhere else for the food to go and there's no one in the seats. She put up a sign. Bar seating closed. The sign on the bar is a sign of the times for the restaurant business. In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to take away, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74% of all restaurant traffic came from off-premises customers,

that is, from takeout and delivery, up from 61% before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association. The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years. There's an isolationist dynamic that's taking place in the restaurant business. The Washington, D.C. restaurateur Steve Salis told me, I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They've decided that their home is their sanctuary.

It's not easy to get them to leave. Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform open table, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The number one reason is the need for, quote, more me time. The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in person, socializing slowly declined. From 2003, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the

American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent, end quote. Okay, this weekend, we have the first proper bonus episode of 2025. You know how I quote from Simon Willison a lot when he blogs about the latest and greatest in AI. So, for more than an hour this week, I spoke to Simon about just that. The state of AI as a technology, full stop in the broadest 30,000 feet sense of things as we enter 2025. The Great Swix also joined me as a co-host. If you want a shorthand about where we're at with AI, where Open AI is at, where things like agents in AI are when or if we'll get a step change like a GPT5 level

of advancement this year or not. If you want to know all that stuff, listen to this. It will be tomorrow. Talk to you on Monday.