Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/25 - AI Can Beat Us At Starcraft II Too (Also?)

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

Now the AIs can defeat us at StarCraft II (too?), Zuckerberg wants to unify his collection of messaging apps, my grand unifying theory for the streaming video wars and of course the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Juniper.net/try Metalab.co Links: Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger (NYTimes) Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money (Reveal) Facebook ignored kids’ spending problems, internal documents reveal (BBC News) DeepMind AI Challenges Pro StarCraft II Players, Wins Almost Every Match (ExtremeTech) Coming to a TV near you: personalized ads (Axios) The SmartTouchUSA.com Weekend Longreads: From Founder to CEO (podcast) EVERYBODY DOES IT: THE MESSY TRUTH ABOUT INFILTRATING COMPUTER SUPPLY CHAINS (The Intercept) Katzenberg and Whitman: Hollywood’s New Odd Couple (Fortune) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: The Rolling Stone Interview (Rolling Stone) “The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging (ArsTechnica) Reddit’s r/changemyview is a template for how all online discussion should be (TNW) 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 ride home for Friday, January 25th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, now the AIs can defeat us at Starcraft 2.

Zuckerberg wants to unify his collection of messaging apps, my grand unifying theory for the streaming video wars, and of course the weekend Longreads suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Mike Isaac is reporting in the New York Times that Mark Zuckerberg plans to integrate the various messaging services of Facebook's three most popular apps. WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger are all currently completely separate platforms,

essentially, even and perhaps especially on the code and back end level. But, quote, while all three services will continue operating as standalone apps, their underlying messaging infrastructure will be unified, the people said. Facebook is still in the early stages of the work and plans to complete it by the end of this year or in early 2020, they said. By stitching the app's infrastructure together, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to increase the utility of the social network, keeping its billions of users highly engaged inside its ecosystem.

If people turn more regularly to Facebook-owned properties for texting, they may forego rival messaging services, such as those from Apple and Google, said the people who declined to be identified because the moves are confidential. If users interact more frequently with Facebook's apps, the company may also be able to build up its advertising business or add new services to make money, they said, end quote. So yes, this makes sense. If you have one unified platform, it would be easier to monetize without asking advertisers to spend across multiple platforms. There's definitely that, but there's also this, quoting Casey Newton on Twitter, quote,

Now if the government ever tries to force Facebook to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, it can throw its hands up and protest that it's actually all just one big app, ruthless as ever, end quote. Now, one other important detail here, one other really interesting bit of news. Apparently Zuckerberg has ordered that all of the apps that are going to be unified incorporate the end-to-end encryption, which WhatsApp already has, and which we had heard, at least through the grapevine, that Facebook proper was against bringing to its other apps in the past. So all of this together, it's a lot to think about. Let me give you a sample of what people smarter than myself are saying on Twitter. First, Vindu Goel, quote, lots of questions raised by this

Mike Isaac scoop. Will Facebook require WhatsApp users to provide real names? Will Instagram allow links? And why would a user want this? Zineptufecci, quote, significant and not surprising. makes antitrust action harder, increases monetization possibilities, but also big questions. Mr. Zuckerberg has also ordered all of the apps to incorporate end-to-end encryption. How? Tied to real name or not? Default or an option? Big impacts, end quote.

Here's Sarah Fryer. Quote, integrating these is very difficult in part because so much of Instagram is not the real identity internet Zuckerberg likes, which works for. integrating messaging. People may have multiple instas, some anon, to explore different parts of their identity. So the move they are saying will increase privacy, adding encryption across services also serves to make it clearer to Facebook and therefore advertising targeting, who is who in the real world. And it will be even less clear to the consumer what's happening because as the underlying messaging infrastructure becomes the same, they will still feel like

they are using separate branded services, end quote. And finally, let's end with this from Joanna Jarju, who takes a similar tack. Quote, is it just me that has different groups of people in my life on separate platforms so I can control the level of access slash shared information depending on the group? This is a terrible idea, end quote. This is not me editorializing by arranging the stories this way. I promise, as I write these words, these are. are the number one and number two stories on the tech meme homepage.

So, story number two today. Back in 2011, a bunch of parents noticed that their kids were racking up hundreds, even thousands of dollars playing popular games on Facebook. Games like Angry Birds, Petville, and Ninja Saga. So the parents filed a class action lawsuit. In the course of discovery, a lot of internal Facebook documents were uncovered. The lawsuit was settled in 2016, and the documents remained. sealed, but the Center for Investigative Reporting made a request to unseal the documents, and they were made public overnight.

It sure looks a lot like Facebook orchestrated a multi-year effort to dupe children who played video games into spending their parents' money. Let me just quote here. Facebook encouraged game developers to let children spend money without their parents' permission, something the social media giant called friendly fraud, in an effort to maximize revenue. according to a document detailing the company's game strategy. Sometimes the children did not even know they were spending money, according to another internal Facebook report. Facebook employees knew this. Their own reports showed underage users did not realize their parents' credit cards

were connected to their Facebook accounts, and they were spending real money in the games, according to the unsealed documents. For years, the company ignored warnings from its own employees that it was bamboozling children. A team of Facebook employees even developed a method that would have reduced the problem of children being hoodwings, into spending money, but the company did not implement it and instead told game developers that the social media giant was focused on maximizing revenues, end quote.

If you read this whole piece, again, I don't see how there's any other way to parse it than to just say that the quotes from the internal messages are damning. Facebook employees refer to children gamers as whales, much as high rollers are referred to as whales at casinos. Let me quote, actually from a different article from the BBC here. quote, in another discussion, employees talked about how one so-called whale, an industry term for customers who spent a lot of money on in-app payments, should not be given a refund. The account had spent $6,545. That user looks underage as well, one Facebook employee noted, perhaps a 13-ish-year-old. A colleague replied, I wouldn't refund. Quoting from later in the original story, an internal Facebook survey of users found that many parents did not even realize Facebook was storing their credit card information according to an unsealed document, end quote. Charges from gaming were racked up to astronomical levels, which led to astronomical credit card chargeback rates because Facebook wouldn't refund the money as a matter of policy, as we

saw in those previous quotes. So what were parents to do when they couldn't get their money back, they went to the credit card companies and initiated chargebacks. Facebook gaming charges achieved chargeback rates of 9% when average chargeback rates for businesses in general is one-half of 1%. So internal Facebook employees developed a project to reduce chargebacks from credit card companies. It was a simple fix. You had to re-enter the first six digits of the credit card on file to prove you were in possession of the card at the time a charge was made. Facebook did not end up enacting the fix. Quoting again, Facebook launched an analysis to determine what was happening with Angry Birds.

It found that in nearly all cases about 93% of the time, it was because the credit card holder didn't realize the game was charging their account. In nearly all cases, the parent knew their child was playing Angry Birds, but didn't think the child would be allowed to buy anything without their password or authorization first. Like in iOS, a Facebook employee wrote. The average age of those playing Angry Birds was five years old, according to Facebook's analysis, end quote. So again, Facebook knew people didn't know their credit cards were tied to the games their kids were playing, allegedly.

Facebook new kids as young as five were racking up charges on their parents' cards, allegedly. Facebook wouldn't refund the charges, forcing customers to dispute the charges with the credit card companies, and then filing class action lawsuits to claw back the money, allegedly. Which all leads to one more quote. And for those customers who turned to their credit cards for help, Facebook was devising another strategy. It would design a program that automatically disputed customers' chargeback requests without even bothering to review the merits of those requests,

according to another unsealed document. At the time, the document was written. Facebook was waiting to see if it would win enough chargeback disputes to make it worth automating the process. It is unclear from the documents if Facebook won enough disputes and went ahead with its plan, end quote. This final quote is from that other BBC article on this brouhaha quote. Between February 2008 and June 2014, Facebook said it made just over $34 million from accounts belonging to minors in the United States, end quote.

DeepMind has introduced Alpha Star AI, a new AI bot to compete with we puny humans on our precious games. This time the game in question is StarCraft. 2. Alpha Star AI competed against pro Starcraft players, and the AI bot was successful, 10 to 1 in a series of matches. The story is one we're familiar with now, of course. Alpha Star is a convolutional neural network. It was trained on replays of professional matches. Deep Mind trained Alpha Star evolutionarily over time until the five best agents were determined, and it was those agents that were set loose. on the professional Starcraft playing humans. Check out the link to the story in the show notes

because you can actually watch a video of the matches, three full hours worth of video. Quote, Alpha Star demonstrated impressive micromanagement of units throughout the matches. It was quick to move damage units back, cycling stronger ones into the front lines of battles. Alpha Star also controlled the pace of battle by bringing units forward and dropping back

at just the right times to inflict damage while taking less fire itself. This isn't just a function of brute force, actions per minute, APM, because Alpha Star has substantially lower APM compared with the human players, but it's making smarter choices. The AI also had some interesting strategic quirks. It often rushed units up ramps, which is dangerous in StarCraft 2, as you can't see what's up there until you move in. Still, it somehow worked. AlphaStar also eschewed the tried and true tactic of blocking off the base ramp with a wall of buildings. That's StarCraft 101, but the A.A.combe, but the

AI didn't bother with it and still managed to defend its bases, end quote. It wasn't until the very final match that a human player spotted a flaw in one of the agent's strategies and ended up beating Alpha Star. But hey, you know, the way AI works, that was just a learning exercise, right? That particular flaw has no doubt been fixed, and AlphaStar will never make that particular mistake again. Here's a headline that just popped on the back-end tech meme console. Source, T-Mobile to launch a free ad-supported mobile video streaming service through the Layer 3 division it acquired last year and using licensed Zumotech. So a story about another, yet another, over-the-top video streaming service.

Is there any way to think about this in an interesting way other than to just note there's yet another one of them. Well, yes, sometimes things that happen in tech happen for underlying economic and strategic reasons that we can't always see right at the surface. So, right, everyone is trying to go into streaming video right now. We know this. Everyone fears Netflix and wants to build a Netflix killer, right?

Plus, viewers are leaving traditional television in droves. So go where the eyeballs are, right? But guess what? There's also a specific, technological, economic reason why everyone wants their own OTT service all of the sudden. Think about it. TV advertising is still dumb advertising. Yes, ad spend has been flooding to digital because that's where the attention and our time is going. Ad money follows our attention and our time spends. But also, digital advertising is smarter advertising. On old dumb TV, you still have to rely on Nielsen surveys, on ratings. Want to advertise your beer brand? Basically, the smartest strategy is to advertise on the big game because that's when people are most likely to be consuming beer. It's dumb.

It's 20th century. It's brute force. But digital advertising allows you to slice and dice and target audiences precisely. So precisely, advertisers can advertise to me, specifically, not just people like me. And so, quoting Axios, the hottest new trend in TV tech is addressable ads, or TV ads that can be targeted to specific households via user data. By the end of this year, almost every major TV network and provider will have rolled out their version of an addressable ad product. Traditionally, TV ads could only be bought and sold by gender and age, not demographics.

This means that a cat lover could be served an ad for dog food or a healthy person could get an ad for medicine. Addressable ads aims to make the messages more relevant, end quote. And this is where all of these streaming services come in. Think about all the things we've spoken about in terms of the streaming video wars over the last year. And also think of a bunch of other related stories and then listen to this graph. NBC says its new streaming service will create a lot of new addressable TV ad inventory. Hulu lowered the price of its ad suburb. supported tier to be able to serve more addressable TV ads.

Viacom acquired a digital ad-supported TV streaming company. AT&T says the ability to build an addressable ad products for its direct TV and direct TV now customers was one of the driving factors in its decision to buy Time Warner last year for $85 billion, end quote. See how the pieces fit together? once you deliver video digitally, you can deliver to a person, to an account, to a household, a specific one. And you can target them not just by demographics, not just by ages 25 to 54 with incomes of X number of dollars per year. You can target Brian. And Brian watches soccer, not American football.

And he doesn't drink beer, but he does enjoy Pringle's potato chips a lot. And how would you know this about Brian? Well, you would know it because you've made a deal with Facebook or Google or Google or. or Twitter, or whomever tracks Brian around the web and knows he visits soccer websites all the time. Yes, the Cambridge Analytica scandal got all the headlines because Russians, because playing fast and loose with permissions on user data. But there's a larger game here.

The great game going on right now is this sort of slice and dice advertising. I'm just a consumer profile and a very specific one at that. But until now, Facebook and Google, not only were they the only ones, that knew the data about me, that had the data on me, they were also, by and large, the only venues where you could target ads against me. So getting into streaming allows the NBC Universals of the world to get in on that game as well, to try to compete with the Facebooks and Googles because now they too can deliver a very key part of this great advertising equation. And it solves a lot of other problems too.

Programmatic ads that can be bought and sold via algorithms, not served and sold by hand. These so-called addressable ads hold the promise of specific ads for specific people. Each person sees something different instead of every single viewer of a program seeing the same thing no matter what. And maybe, just maybe, more personalized ads would be less annoying to people because they would be, by definition, personalized and thus theoretically, more interesting and relevant. So, yeah, the streaming video wars are about keeping up with the Joneses, with Netflix being the Jones family in this particular analogy. also about television getting out of the dumb advertising business and joining the 21st century.

And even if you don't go the advertising tech route, well, you still have the option of getting a piece of that sweet, sweet subscription revenue. It's time for the weekend long read suggestions brought to you by SmartTouch. SmartTouch provides design, installation, and integration solutions for home automation, home audio, whole house audio, home security, home control, including lighting, HVAC, and more. Smart Home Control and Entertainment right at your fingertips. Check them out at smarttouchUSA.com. First up, the weekly podcast recommendation. I decided this week we needed to highlight an inspirational entrepreneurial-focused pod. So I chose from founder to CEO.

This is one of those podcasts where you can hear the interviews with the actual founders, the raw personal struggles as they scale themselves to leaders while they're scaling up their products at the same time. This is one of those founder podcasts that is after the unfiltered truth about startup life, not the speaker circuit hagiography stuff. From founder to CEO has spoken to Seth Godin, Rand Fishkin, Brad Feld, Mike McDermott of Fresh Books, Brian Scudamore of 1-800 Got Junk, Sarah Margulis of Honeyfund,

tons more. From founder to CEO wanted me to tell you, you that FeedSpot recently selected from founder to CEO as the number two podcast on their top 25 CEO podcast you must subscribe and listen to right below Dave Ramsey and above Gary V's podcast. So that's Hedy Company Indeed. Search your podcast app for From Founder to CEO and give it a listen. First up for the long reads, I've long suspected that this had to be the case. But when it comes to infiltrating computer and technology supply chains, as the title of the piece says, Everybody does it, quote,

what's clear is that supply chain attacks are a well-established, if underappreciated, method of surveillance, and much work remains to be done to secure computing devices from this type of compromise, end quote. Read this super detailed piece to confirm my long-held suspicion that every device I own has been compromised by somebody, because why wouldn't it be? Why wouldn't everyone do this? And they do. Next, Fortune has a long piece looking at a dark horse in the streaming video wars. Quibi.

Quibi is a short-form video platform, which is interesting in and of itself. People have been trying to crack that particular nut for a while. And it's supposed to be high-quality, Hollywood-level quality video, not some YouTuber in his bathroom sort of stuff. Well, that too is something that Hollywood types have been trying to crack going back to the dot-com bubble days, and that's what makes Quibi especially interesting. They've raised a billion dollars from the likes of Disney, Fox, Time Warner, and NBC Universal, and the they in question are former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Hollywood mega-mogel Jeffrey Katzenberg, who are behind Quibi. Check out the fortune piece to see why Whitman and Katzenberg think they can succeed where so many have failed in the past. And you might already have read it, but I couldn't resist including the Rolling Stone profile slash interview with Twitter and Square CEO, Jack Dorsey.

Come for the following passage, which you've probably already read, but stay for another tech CEO trying desperately to prove he's a normal human, just like you are, fellow human. Here's the quote that you probably saw on Twitter. What was your most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg? Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat. In front of you? No, he killed it before.

I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun and then the knife. Then they send it to the butcher. A laser gun? I don't know. A stun gun. They stun it. And then he knifed it.

Then they send it to the butcher. Evidently in Palo Alto, there's a rule or regulation that you can have six livestock on any lot of land. So he had six goats at that time. I go, we're eating the goat you killed? He said, yeah. I said, have you eaten goat before? He's like, yeah, I love it. I'm like, what else are we having?

Salad. I said, where is the goat? It's in the oven. Then we waited for about 30 minutes. He's like, I think it's done now. We go in the dining room. He puts the goat down. It was cold.

That was memorable. I don't know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad, end quote. And you know I can't resist tech history, so please check out the long read from Ars Technico. about LiveJournal, the pioneering, blogging, and social network site that set a lot of the groundwork for and then lost both of these platforms. Somehow I missed that George R.R. Martin finally took his blog off of LiveJournal. But yeah, if that's true, put a fork in it, it's done. LiveJournal's moment was ever so brief, but man, in its moment, it was something special.

And finally, this is not a long read, but possibly another weekend project suggestions. slash rabbit hole to go down. Check out the next web piece about this and then go check it out itself. The subreddit R slash change my view. Yes, strangers coming together to debate controversial topics and attempt to change each other's mind. But in a reasoned, highly structured and more often than not civil way. I know.

Sounds antithetical to everything else on the internet right now. and I haven't played around with it enough to see if it actually fulfills its mission entirely, but the threads I read were interesting enough to suggest that you guys give it a try this weekend as well. Read the next web piece and then check out R slash Change My View. That's all for the weekend long read suggestions brought to you by Smart Touch. It's time to finally jump into the smart home future. The folks at SmartTouch are the people to help you do it, especially if you live in New York or D.C.

But really anywhere in the country, if you're ready for a smart home, get in touch at smarttouchUSA.com. There's two T's in that, so it's smarttouchUSA.com. And because these are friends and regular listeners of the pod, if you get in touch,

tell them Brian sent you. That's all for today. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Consider doing a weekend long read with my book about the history of the modern tech era. It's called How the Internet Happened. You could have it on your Kindle in about 30 seconds. Check out Techmeme.com, 24-7, 365 days a year for the latest tech news by the minute. And be good to yourselves and each other this weekend, as a wise man used to say.

Super interesting bonus episodes coming at you, and I'll be back to talk to you again on Monday.