Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/09 – Amazon Wins The Union Battle

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

The counting is finally happening, and not to be all Nate Silver, but it’s looking fairly certain that Amazon won its big union battle. Apple and Epic Games are making their first arguments in that big lawsuit. A big new scraping hack, this time for half a billion LinkedIn users. Neurolink shows a monkey playing Pong with its brain. And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Blockchain.com FundRise.com/techmeme  Links: Partial tally in Amazon union drive favors ‘No’ votes. (NYTimes) Epic v. Apple discovery details ‘Project Liberty’ scheme to skirt App Store with Fortnite (9to5Mac) Apple Admits Purposely Keeping iMessage Off Android Helps Lock Users In (DroidLife) Hackers scraped data from 500 million LinkedIn users — about two-thirds of the platform's userbase — and have posted it for sale online (Insider) Neuralink's brain-computer interface demo shows a monkey playing Pong (Engadget) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Silicon Valley Is Flooding Into a Reluctant Austin (Bloomberg Businessweek) Don’t pick up! The rise and fall of a massive industry based on missed calls (Rest of World) DoorDash Drivers Game Algorithm to Increase Pay (Bloomberg Businessweek) Revenge Of The Winklevii (Forbes) Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days (Bloomberg Businessweek) 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 Beam right home for Friday, April 9th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. The counting is finally happening, and not to be all Nate Silver, but it's looking fairly certain that Amazon won its big union battle. Apple and Epic Games are making their first arguments in that big lawsuit,

a big new scraping hack, this time for half a billion LinkedIn users. NeuroLink shows a monkey playing Pong with its brain, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. This is an ongoing story, but with the weekend coming and all, I'm going to go with this now, so you're at least aware. Counting is not yet finished, but remember that big union drive among Amazon workers in Alabama. So far, with half the ballots counted, the union drive looks like it's going down to defeat by at least a two-to-one margin, quoting the New York Times. The incomplete tally puts Amazon on the cusp of defeating the most serious organized labor threat in the company's history. In a high-profile campaign since the fall, the retail,

wholesale, and department store union aimed to establish the first union at an Amazon warehouse in the United States. The result will have major implications not only for Amazon, but also for organized labor and its allies. The union said there were 3,215 ballots cast from 55% of the 5,805 eligible voters at the warehouse in the closely watched election. The union must get support from more than half of the votes cast to prevail. The ballots were being counted in random order in the National Labor Relations Board's office in Birmingham, Alabama, and the process was broadcast via Zoom to more than 200 journalists, lawyers, and other observers, end quote. And just as I went in to record this, I got a notification on my phone that indicates that the final tally is not yet official, but

most outlets are calling it. Around 71% of the warehouse workers voted again. joining a union, so the union has gone down to defeat. The big court case between Apple and Epic Games is getting underway, and in prep for that, both sides are releasing filings to sum up their arguments ahead of time. For example, in its filing, Apple argues that the App Store doesn't lead the gaming market so it cannot be considered a monopoly, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. A key argument that Apple has reiterated is that contrary to what Epic says, App Store doesn't lead the gaming market so, consequently it cannot be considered a monopoly.

Quote, Apple has no monopoly or market power in the relevant product market for game app transactions, and there is no claim that it had any such power when the restrictions at issue were imposed around the launch of the app store, said the company, end quote. But now, Epic has released its filing arguing that Apple has, quote, no evidence that its processes in place for approving apps, ostensibly in place to keep consumers safe, actually, quote, screens for security issues better than other methods of app distribution, end quote. And another juicy nugget in Epic's filing was a 2016 email from Phil Schiller, which said, moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, which Epic argues is proof of lock-in,

quoting droid life. There's an entire section in the filing about iMessage and how Apple uses it to keep users in their system. Taking it a step further, Apple executives openly admit that they were working on an Android version of iMessage, but decided against it because they had more to gain if iMessage remained off Google's operating system. During the deposition of Eddie Q, senior vice president of internet software and services, Q said that in 2003 there were plans to make iMessage for Android where it would have had, quote, cross capability with the iOS platform so that users of both platforms would have been able to exchange messages with one another seamlessly, end quote. Why didn't it happen? During a deposition with Craig Federigi,

senior vice president of software engineering, he acknowledged that putting, quote, iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families, giving their kids Android phones, end quote. That's funny enough, but you get what Apple is thinking. Android phones can be had for super cheap, and they would be the ultimate option for kids, assuming the messaging capabilities were right and worked with their parents' phones. By making messaging a mess, if a family were to split up operating systems, the thought was that they just give in and all buy Apple products. Keeping that in mind, my boy Phil Schiller, now an Apple fellow, agreed that Android

shouldn't get iMessage, but was apparently more blatant in admitting that it's because they want to lock people into iOS. In a response to an email from a former Apple employee who suggested, quote, the number one most difficult reason to leave the Apple universe is iMessage. IMessage amounts to serious lock-in, end quote. Schiller commented that, quote, moving iMessage to Android. will hurt us more than help us. This email illustrates why, end quote. So that big Facebook hack or scandal, the latest one, the one from this past week, was actually another incident of scraping.

Someone scraped a bunch of Facebook user data that hadn't been locked down properly, and then Facebook discovered it and prevented that vulnerability from being further exploited. Now, according to reports, hackers have scraped 500 million accounts. on LinkedIn and posted all of the data scrape there for sale online. So this was apparently publicly available data, but the question people are asking is, is this a dataset that can be combined with the Facebook data set to put together some sort of superfishing platform, quoting Insider? The data includes account IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, genders, and links to other social media accounts. It's been posted for sale

on a hacker forum, and the post author also leaked a sample of 2 million records as a proof of concept, according to cyber news. The hacker is attempting to sell the trove of data for a four-digit sum per the outlet and potentially in the form of Bitcoin. Paul Prudhomme, an analyst at Security Intelligence Company Insights, told Insider that the exposed data is significant because bad actors could use it to attack companies through their employees' information. Quote, such attacks may be more likely to succeed due to the rise of remote work and the increased use of home or personal devices for work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Prudome said. Attacking companies via their employees' personal accounts and devices is one way for attackers

to work around enterprise network security defenses, end quote. So again, if we see a wave of hacks and fishing attacks this summer, that will probably all be related in some way to all of this. News from Neurrelink, that brain computer interface startup from Elon Musk, NeurLink this morning released a demo video showing a monkey playing Pong, the video game Pong, but not using its hands just by thinking about it, quoting in gadget. Elon Musk's last update on Neurrelink, his company that is working on technology that will connect the human brain directly to a computer, featured a pig with one of its chips implanted in its

brain. Now, NeurLink is demonstrating its progress by showing a macaque with one of the link chips playing Pong. At first, Pager the monkey, is shown using a joystick, and then eventually, according to the narration, using only its mind via the wireless connection. This is quoting from said narration. Today, we are pleased to reveal the link's capability to enable a macaque monkey named Pager to move a cursor on a computer screen with neuroactivity using a 1,024 electrode, fully implanted neurorecording, and data transmission device termed the N1. link. We have implanted the link in the hand and arm areas of the motor cortex, a part of the brain that is involved in planning and executing movements. We placed links bilaterally, one in the left motor

cortex, which controls movements of the right side of the body, and another in the right motor cortex, which controls the left side of the body, end quote. In an accompanying blog post, Neurrelink says it's building on decades of research that developed systems connecting a few hundred electrodes that needed a physical connector through the skin compared to its N1 link with 1,024 electrodes, as just mentioned. According to Neurrelink, quote, our mission is to build a safe and effective clinical BMI system that is wireless and fully implantable that users can operate by themselves and take anywhere they go to scale up the number of electrodes for better robustness and higher information throughput and to automate the implant surgery to make it as rapid and safe as possible,

end quote. I often encourage you to watch the videos when I link to things like this in the show, but seriously, with this one, watch the video. I'm for the weekend long read suggestions, and first up we have more data on the so-called Silicon Valley Exodus. Miami might be getting most of the VC tweets, but according to Bloomberg, Austin, Texas is getting actually most of the California expats, quoting Bloomberg. Since the pandemic started a subset of the California-based tech industry has declared the need to relocate, citing the state's high taxes and prices, ineffectual government, and endemic wildfires. A few investors and executives loudly decamped to Miami, but an analysis of LinkedIn user data

shows that about six times as many tech workers went from the San Francisco Bay Area to Austin. For years, Austin has attracted far-flung newcomers with its food and music scenes, along with low taxes and cost of living. The city grew 30 percent from 2010 to 2019, making it the fastest growing major metro area in the country. It was adding about 170 people per day by the end of that period, according to the latest census count. So while rapid growth is nothing new for the city, the population shift associated with COVID-19 has intensified the struggle to,

as the motto goes, keep Austin weird. Even Congrove, a software engineer who moved from Florida seven years ago, is most concerned about how the new wave of tech workers is affecting his adopted city's culture. Lately, he's seen more T-shirts bearing startup logos than banned names. New condos have sprouted up where quirky bungalows once stood, and the commute time to his downtown office has tripled. They just keep coming, Congrove says. The fleece vests, the tech bros, that's definitely imported from California, end quote. Next, I'm coming to love the outlet rest of the world. Check it out if you've never done so, because I love that they're doing what they state in

their mission. Rest of the world says it is trying to report on global tech stories and doing sober feels great things like this. Check out this piece on the rise and fall of the missed calls industry in India. Quote, leaving missed calls in this way, effectively using a mobile phone as a kind of latter-day pager, was a consumer hack that in the 2000s, before India's cheap smartphone and data revolution, grew more popular than texting. The missed call emerged in India as a critical means of communication for those who counted every rupee spent on recharge credit. But the practice soon spread, became trendy, and even as call rates plunged in the 2000s to among the lowest in the world, evolved into a general tool of convenience. A missed call

could mean, I miss you, call me back, or I'm here. The fact that the miscall demanded only basic numeric literacy made them accessible to the third of India's population that was illiterate. In 2008, one study estimated that more than half of Indian phone users were in the habit of calling people with the expectation that they wouldn't pick up. Then, just as the miss call became ubiquitous, the Times of India wrote in 2009 of Indians marked fondness for hanging up swiftly, a company in Bangal called Zip Dial took the tool and transformed it. With a couple of rings to the appropriate zip dial hotline, customers received automated texts and callbacks that delivered live cricket scores for a big match, a deal on affordable shampoo.

rudimentary on-demand radio for Bollywood songs or celebrity tweets, content supplied by brands that were struggling to reach offline customers. In exchange, companies learned about their customers' preferences and created viral offline marketing campaigns for their products, end quote. Speaking of gaming the system, Bloomberg looks at how DoorDash workers are apparently trying to rig that company's algorithms in an attempt to increase their own pay. quote. The pair noticed that when one door-dash driver declined a delivery, the platform would

offer it to another for slightly more money. As independent contractors, there was nothing obliging them to take these orders, so they figured dashers could ban together to set a de facto minimum pay rate. In a relatively small market such as the Lehigh Valley, it didn't take many people declining low-paying jobs to make a significant difference. Then I said, that's it. That's the name. Why don't you just decline now, Levi said? says. In October 2019, they launched the hashtag Decline Now Facebook group. They urge members to reject any delivery that doesn't pay at least $7 more than double the current floor of $3, end quote. Forbes has the story of how the Winklevoss twins are finally getting their redemption, if you will.

In case you're unaware, the pair have been big in crypto for a while now. They founded one of the biggest exchanges, Gemini. And years ago, they sunk most of their wealth, which of course, to a large degree derived from the legal settlement around the question of, if you'll recall, who had the original idea for Facebook into Bitcoin. Their Bitcoin holdings alone now make them multi-billionaires. And quoting Forbes and the 39-year-old brother's hottest venture, digital art auction platform Nifty Gateway, is basking in the glow of a sale at Christie's, where the gavel is about to fall on the 255-year-old auction house's first ever sale of a non-fungible token artwork. a one-of-a-kind computer file tracked on a digital ledger known as a blockchain. Nifty Gateway put the artist

Mike Winkleman, who goes by Beeple, on the map through a series of drops starting last year. Before the day ends, Gemini's custodial business, which houses digital assets securely, will receive a $69 million cryptocurrency payment for Beeple on behalf of Christie's, making his every days, the first 5,000 days, the third most expensive work sold by a living artist after Jeff Coons and David Hockney. Much of the world still thinks of the six-foot-five twins as the crew rowing chumps, played by Army Hammer in the social network, the hit 2010 movie about Facebook. At Harvard, classmate Mark Zuckerberg had swiped their idea for a social networking site, building an empire with 2.8 billion worldwide users

and a personal fortune now worth 97 billion. A dozen years after they settled with Zuckerberg for 65 million in Facebook stock and cash, the Winklewe, as they are widely known, have emerged as leaders of a technological movement whose core operating principle involves digitizing the records of all assets globally decentralizing control and cutting out gatekeepers, including Facebook, end quote. And finally, since we're on the topic of fortunes won and lost, I know this is not a tech story necessarily, but I can't resist sharing Bloomberg Business Week's huge cover story this week on the whole Bill Wong, Archego's Capital story. In case you missed it, Wang was a billionaire who had quietly become one of the biggest traders on all of Wall Street.

And then in two days, a couple weeks ago, his positions blew up in his face and he lost $20 billion in two days. And I'm recommending this piece in particular because it does what I was waiting for somebody to do, which is write a blow-by-blow forensic piece explaining how something like that is even possible. And it turns out the thing that blew up in Wang's face was something we talk about all the time. The streaming wars, quote. The first and a cascade of events during the week of March 22nd came shortly after the 4 p.m. close of trading that Monday in New York, Viacom, CBS, struggling to keep up with Apple TV, Disney Plus,

HBO, and Netflix announced a $3 billion sale of stock and convertible debt. The company's shares, propelled by Huang's buying, had tripled in just four months. Raising money to invest in streaming made sense, or so it seemed, to the Viacom CBS C-suite. Instead, the stock tanked 9% on Tuesday and 23% on Wednesday. Huang's bets suddenly went haywire, jeopardizing his swap agreements. A few bankers pleaded with him to sell shares. He would take losses and survive, they reasoned, avoiding a default. But Wang refused, according to people with knowledge of those discussions. The long-ago lesson from Robertson evidently forgotten. That Thursday, his prime brokers held a series of emergency meetings. Wang say people with swaps,

experience likely had borrowed roughly $85 million for every $20 million, investing 100 and setting aside five to post margin as needed. But the massive portfolio had cratered so quickly that its losses blew through that small buffer as well as his capital. The dilemma for Wang's lenders was obvious. If the stocks in his swap accounts rebounded, everyone would be fine. But if even one bank flinched and started selling, they'd all be exposed to plummeting prices, end quote. That's all for this week. No new Ride Home Plus content this weekend, but we've got a bunch of stuff coming down the pike beginning next weekend. Everybody gets our most recent Twitter Spaces experiment, which was really great this week, I thought.

We got really deep on that whole Coinbase revealing their numbers and revealing they have a hell of a great business on their hands thing. So enjoy that. And maybe I'll release some of that Chris Fralick Office Hours episode two as a team. These are for folks to maybe think about signing up for Ride Home Plus. I haven't decided if I'll do that yet, but I might at some point. Talk to you on Monday.