Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/05 - What If Self-Driving Cars Won’t Prevent As Many Accidents As We Hoped?

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Amazon and Slack form an interesting alliance. Google outlines evidence hackers are already attacking the Presidential campaigns. What if self-driving cars won’t prevent as many accidents as we hoped? And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Go.Rims.org/ridehome TinyCapital Links: Amazon licenses Slack for all employees, while Slack adopts AWS video-calling tech (CNBC) Google says Iranian, Chinese hackers targeted Trump, Biden campaigns (TechCrunch) Twitter has a record-breaking week as users looked for news of protests and COVID-19 (TechCrunch) Study: Autonomous vehicles won’t make roads completely safe (Associated Press) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Worst. Deal. Ever. (Forbes) The Font That Solves The Big Problem With Dark Mode (Forbes) Indie history: How shareware helped build Epic Games (Engadget) Charli D’Amelio is TikTok’s biggest star. She has no idea why. (Washington Post) From RealPlayer to Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush (OneZero) Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? (Nautilus) Subscribe to the Ad-Free Feed Right Here 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, June 5th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon and Slack form an interesting alliance. Google outlines evidence hackers are already attacking the presidential campaigns. What if self-driving cars won't prevent as many accidents as we had hoped?

And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Interesting times make for interesting allies, I guess. Amazon announced late yesterday that it was licensing Slack for all of its employees. As part of a deeper alliance, Slack has also agreed to use underlying technology from AWS's chime video calling service to improve its video and audio calls. So who is this tie-up designed to combat more? Would it be Microsoft with its team's product? Would it be Zoom? Would it be all of the above? Quoting from CNBC. Amazon and Slack have a long history. Slack has run its services on Amazon Web Services infrastructure since launching in 2014, and it has continued to lean on AWS to accommodate additional demand during

the pandemic. The new deal was negotiated separately from Slack's cloud contract, the company said, declining to disclose exact terms. A filing on Thursday disclosed that Slack will now pay AWS at least $425 million over a five-year period that ends April, 2026. up from a previous commitment of at least $250 million ending in July 2023. Some teams within Amazon had already used Slack, but this deal will bring it to all employees. Amazon is the second largest private sector employer in the U.S. with over 840,000 full-time and part-time employees in the first quarter. Amazon employees have been able to use an in-house video calling tool called Chime, which the company also offers to its customers. But Matt Garman, AWS's vice president for sales and marketing, admitted in an interview that Amazon has not invested in Chimes user interface to the extent that Slack has.

Quote, we have a client UI. It's nice, but it's not Slack. They're way better. It's a much richer experience. You can do a lot more, end quote. Google researchers say hackers backed by China recently targeted the Biden campaign, while Iranian-backed hackers targeted the Trump campaign, the Trump campaign. However, the researchers, at least for the moment, do not believe either of these attempts at penetration and infiltration were successful, quoting TechCrunch. Shane Huntley, director for Google's threat analysis group, said in a tweet that hackers backed by China and Iran recently targeted the campaigns using malicious fishing emails. But Huntley said there are, quote, no signs of compromise, and that both campaigns were alerted to the attempts. When reached by TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson reiterated.

the findings. Quote, we can confirm that our threat analysis group recently saw fishing attempts from a Chinese group targeting the personal email accounts of Biden campaign staff and an Iranian group targeting the personal email accounts of Trump campaign staff. We didn't see evidence that these attempts were successful. We sent the targeted users, our standard government-backed attack warning, and we referred this information to federal law enforcement. We encourage campaign staff to use extra protection for their work and personal emails, and we offer security resources, such as our advanced protection program and free security keys for qualifying campaigns, end quote. A spokesperson for the Biden campaign confirmed the report in a statement to TechCrunch, quote,

We are aware of reports from Google that a foreign actor has made unsuccessful attempts to access the personal email accounts of campaign staff. A spokesperson said, we have known from the beginning of our campaign that we would be subject to such attacks, and we are prepared for them. Biden for president takes cybersecurity seriously. We will remain vigilant against these threats and will ensure that the campaign's assets are secured, end quote. The Trump campaign said it was also briefed that, quote, foreign actors unsuccessfully attempted to breach the technology of our staff, but a spokesperson declined to discuss the precautions it was taking. Huntley said in a follow-up tweet that the hackers were identified as China's APT31 and Iran's APT-35, both of which are known to target government officials. And it's not. It's not. the first time that the Trump campaign has been targeted by Iranian hackers. Microsoft last year blamed APT-35 for targeting what later transpired to be the Trump campaign, end quote. For months now, we've been covering companies that seem to be well positioned to do well in the COVID moment, but without trying to be insensitive in any way about this, are times of turmoil

and unrest unusually fertile times for Twitter usage? Sensor Tower and Apptopia say that Twitter broke U.S. and worldwide single-day download records this week, with more than 600,000 downloads and 40 million U.S. daily active users recently, quoting TechCrunch. According to data from Censor Tower, Twitter saw just over a million installs on Monday and around 1 million new installs on Tuesday, making Monday the day seeing the most single-day installs since at least January 1, 2014, when the firm began recording App Store data. At its peak, U.S. installs this week were at a four-year-old. year high for Twitter. On Wednesday, Sensor Tower estimates Twitter installs declined a bit,

causing the app to rank slightly lower on App Store global charts. Apptopia, on the other hand, found that Twitter topped its record for installs on Wednesday with 677,000 worldwide downloads. This included a near-record download figure of 140,000 installs in the U.S. with a larger number of installs coming from international markets, including the U.K., India, Brazil, and Mexico. However, this U.S. download figure was the second highest daily insoles. install number for the U.S. in Twitter's lifetime, the firm said, end quote. Super interesting new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In a study of more than 5,000 car crashes, the study posits that self-driving cars would

only have been able to prevent about a third of these studied accidents. This flies in the face of what we've long heard, which was that driverless cars could potentially cut car crashes by 90% someday. Now, yes, this data comes from the insurance industry, and yes, this is the first research that has been done that comes to these conclusions that I've seen thus far, but still super interesting if true, quote, the IHS studied over 5,000 crashes with detailed causes that were collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, separating out those caused by sensing and perceiving errors, such as driver distraction, impaired visibility, or

failing to spot hazards until it was too late. Researchers also separated crashes caused by human incapacitation, including drivers impaired by alcohol or drugs, those who fell asleep, or drivers with medical problems. Self-driving vehicles can prevent those, the study found. However, the robocars may not be able to prevent the rest, including prediction errors such as misjudging how fast another vehicle is traveling, planning errors, including driving too fast for road conditions and execution errors, including incorrect evasive maneuvers or other mistakes controlling vehicles. For example, if a cyclist or another vehicle suddenly veers into the path of an autonomous vehicle, it may not be able to stop fast enough or steer away in time.

Quote, autonomous vehicles need to not only perceive the world around them perfectly, they need to respond to what's around them as well, end quote. Just how many crashes could be prevented depends a lot on how autonomous vehicles are programmed, the researchers said. More crashes would be stopped if the robocars obey all traffic laws, including speed limits. But if artificial intelligence allows them to drive and react more like humans, then fewer crashes will be stopped, according to the researchers. Quote, building self-driving cars that drive as well as people do is a big challenge in itself, IHS research scientist Alexander Mueller said in a statement, but they'd actually need to be

better than that to deliver on the promises we've all heard, end quote. Time for the week on Long Read suggestions. This first one I've actually been sitting on for a while. It's one of those that I don't want you to think I've picked this as a pile-on story because I'm not piling on, but it is still sort of mind-blowing. One of the original founders of Stubbubb bought back his baby 15 years after being kicked out of the company. He paid $4 billion for the privilege. Only problem was the coronavirus hit within weeks.

the ticketing business basically doesn't exist anymore, at least at the moment. Quote, success is nearly always a matter of some luck and good timing. In this case, Baker, who declined repeated requests for a follow-up interview, had neither. It's rare that you can judge a deal within months of completion, but the verdict on this one is absolute. Baker's purchase of Stubhub will go down as one of the worst deals in history. closed just days before the pandemic eviscerated the live events business that, with regard to ticket reselling, he had so gleefully cornered, end quote. That one was from Forbes, and so is this one, even though it's much shorter. With the rise of dark mode, designers have faced a problem.

There are well-known optical and psychological effects that basically mean if you put white text on a black background, as opposed to black text on a light background, the text, The text is perceived as both larger and bolder. Quote, this presents a challenge for consistent visual hierarchy on different backgrounds, especially when designing for emissive displays, such as computer monitors and smartphone screens, the company claims. With more and more operating systems and devices offering a user-selectable dark mode, the issue is more prevalent than ever, end quote.

Consequently, Dalton Mag has released its new dark mode font, which offers two variants for each weight called Dark Mode On, and dark mode off. The modes are designed to make the appearance of the two fonts look identical, even though there are subtle differences between the two. The dark mode on variants are slightly skinnier than the dark mode off counterparts, fooling the eye into thinking they are exactly the same when presented on the different backgrounds, end quote. Check out the piece for visualizations that explain all of this supposed solution to the dark mode design problem. Next, if you're a child of the 90s, then you know the story, sort of by heart.

but shareware was how you got half of your PC games back in the day, and Engadget connects the dots on how shareware basically helped build epic games as we know it today. Actually, helped build Epic and Apogee and Id, I could go on and on, quote. And then he made Kingdom of Cros. It was an Aski-based adventure game with 60 levels, much larger than his previous efforts. Miller changed tactics. He broke the game into three chunks he called episodes and released just the first one on the boards. The other two episodes would be available to purchase only.

It was 1987 and Kingdom McRawes was the first game published under the Apogee Banner. We were using all these platforms to freely distribute our games and people were downloading them by the hundreds of thousands, in some cases by the millions, Miller said. And some small percentage of these people, we estimated one to two percent, there really was no way to track, would finish the game and think, wow, I really like this. I want more of this, and here's this big splash screen telling the person exactly how to order it, end quote. It's a familiar system nowadays, but 33 years ago, the idea of episodic releases and free game demos was fresh, and it worked even without the conveniences of online banking.

At first, they would just send my company a check, which is a pretty high hurdle, Miller said, but it worked out well enough to where we were making a lot of money that way. And eventually we added a 1-800 number, which was standard for the day, people would call in, make the order, give us their credit card, and we ship the game, end quote. Miller brought in about $1,000 a week with this. When he released another Kroes trilogy in 1990, he made about $2,000 a week. Quote, when I realized I was on to something with this pre-internet online marketing, I realized that, as just myself, I couldn't make games fast enough to capitalize on this,

Miller said. So it was back in 1990 that I quit my job and I started to basically search for other game developers that were out there who I could fund their projects and have them release their games through Apogee, end quote. He recruited a handful of now legendary names and games, including John Romero, Adrian Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Carmack, a group of soft-disc developers that would go on to form ID software. Apogee published their first game under the Id banner, Commander Keene in 1991, end quote. And from Commander Kean, again, if you were there, as I said, you can draw a direct line to Doom

all the way through to Fortnite and the gaming industry, as we know it today. Great, great piece. I occasionally try to keep you up to date on what the kids are up to, according to the Washington Post. Charlie Diomelio is TikTok's biggest star, and she claims she doesn't know why. Quote, Charlie is simultaneously a completely ordinary teenager and a complete anomaly. This spring, she had two events to celebrate. She turned 16 with a quarantine-style party where family and friends drove. by her home in Norwalk, Connecticut. Oh, and she became the most popular creator on TikTok.

For her May 1st birthday, she created a short video of herself dancing to 16 by Aisha Erotica while wearing a hoodie printed with the words Charlie's 16 Squad. The hoodie was only for her inner crew, but it looked like a piece of merchandise that her more than 58 million TikTok followers buy in droves, end quote. Next, 1-0 looks at the facial recognition gold rush, profiling the 44 five or so companies ranging from Real Player to Toshiba, who now advertise some form of facial recognition product or service. Some of the companies behind these technologies are household names, Microsoft, Amazon, NEC, and Toshiba.

Others are small startups of 10 to 200 people that exist outside public scrutiny, like Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that was secretly in the hands of thousands of government and corporate users. But the scope of facial recognition activity of almost all these kinds of. companies is often overlooked. Increasingly, individuals around the world are being recorded, identified, and tracked by companies that remain in the shadows, end quote. And finally, facial recognition tech, of course, is a testament to the AI boom of the 2010s. So if you'll forgive a sort of crude segue here, let's end with a piece from Nautilus that asks why exactly the human

brain is so efficient. It turns out its massive parallelism is what lifts the brain performance above AI, at least for now, quote, this massively parallel strategy is possible because each neuron collects inputs from and sends output to many other neurons on the order of 1,000 on average for both input and output for a mammalian neuron. By contrast, each transistor has only three nodes for input and output altogether. Information from a single neuron can be delivered to many parallel downstream pathways. At the same time, many neurons that process the same information can pull their inputs to the same downstream neuron. This latter property is particularly useful for enhancing the

precision of information processing. For example, information represented by an individual neuron may be noisy, say with a precision of one in 100. By taking the average of input from 100 neurons carrying the same information, the common downstream partner neuron can represent the information with much higher precision, about one in a thousand in this case. End quote. That is all for me for this week. No weekend bonus episode again this weekend. But let me take this time to remind you all that you can follow me 24-7 on Twitter at Brian MCC, our show subreddit, where you can tip stories to me to use on the show is our slash ride home, the show's YouTube channel is YouTube.com forward slash tech meme podcast.

And if you want to support the show directly and enjoy ad-free episodes, of the show. The link to do so is the very bottom one in today's show notes. You can sign up right inside your podcast app. Be well, everybody. Talk to you on Monday.