Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 8/24 - Facebook Summons the Five Families

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

Tech’s version of the five families met today to get on the same page over election security, 23andMe shuts down its API just to be safe, robot puppies, and the weekend longreads suggestions.  Links:Google finds evidence of attack linked to Iran state media (Axios)Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy (Buzzfeed News)Microsoft Hit With U.S. Bribery Probe Over Deals in Hungary (WSJ)23andMe will no longer let app developers read your DNA data (CNBC)The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People (Motherboard) The Betterment Weekend Longreads Suggestions:Late to the Driverless Revolution (WSJ)Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job (The Atlantic)THE UNTOLD STORY OF NOTPETYA, THE MOST DEVASTATING CYBERATTACK IN HISTORY (Wired)The Vanishing Idealism of Burning Man (The New Republic)Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism (The Atlantic)A monstrous primer on the works of H.P. Lovecraft (Polygon) Bonus Link!Sony Aibo hands-on: An adorable robo-pup that needs training (Engadget) 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, August 24th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, tech's version of the five families met today to get on the same page over election security. 23 and Me shuts down its API just to be safe, robot puppies, and the weekend long read suggestions.

Here's which you missed today in the world of tech. You had to figure this was coming at some point. Google has announced that it has removed 39 YouTube channels, six blogs from the blogger platform, and 12 Google Plus accounts that it says are tied to an Iranian state media misinformation campaign. As with the recent takedowns by Facebook, Google was also tipped off by Fire Eye, the same cybersecurity firm that tipped off Facebook. Quote, technical data associated with the bad actors is strongly, linked to the official Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting IP address space.

And domain ownership information about these actors is strongly linked to IRIB account information, Google said. One other tidbit, I did notice this line in the Axios piece mentioning this news, quote, Google warns that phishing attacks, attempts by bad actors to trick users into hacking their devices and accounts, remain a threat to all email users. and it is recommending Gmail users to be vigilant, end quote. And given all this news about state-sponsored cyber activity this week, this is probably no surprise either.

Apparently, the representatives of the top U.S. technology firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat are all meeting today at Twitter headquarters to discuss their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections here in the U.S. They were invited by Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleiger, who wrote in an email, quote, as I've mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges, end quote. Turns out that nine of these tech companies met at Facebook headquarters back in May, along with representatives from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. So it's like in The Godfather when they summon all of the five families together to work it out amongst themselves.

David Carroll, a professor of media design at Parsons, tweeted, Not rocket science, make a cross company slack. Quarantine the same suspicious accounts in unison. Researchers have already clearly shown how the info ops are cross-platform. Oh, and get Reddit involved, end quote. And Justin Hendricks, from the NYC Media, lab snarked, quote, their success in keeping the meeting a secret must be intended to fill us with confidence.

But this story, though, is out of left field for sure, at least to me. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is being investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission over potential bribery and corruption related to software sales in Hungary. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, the investigation follows a series of similar probes into Microsoft business partners that surfaced in 2013 and five other countries. Microsoft made a push earlier this decade to expand in emerging markets as well as smaller middle-income countries like Hungary. In some cases, these bets have turned into legal and

reputational challenges. The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are probing how Microsoft sold software, such as Word and Excel, to middlemen firms in Hungary, that then sold those products to government agencies there in 2013. and 2014, according to these people. Microsoft sold some of its products to these intermediaries at steep discounts. And then these firms sold the products to the Hungarian government at closer to full price, these people said. Investigators are probing whether the middlemen companies use the difference to pay bribes

and kickbacks to government officials, the people said. One more headline that's a sign of these changed times for tech platforms. genetic testing company 23NMe has apparently sent an email to developers saying that it will disable its API in two weeks. From now on, third-party apps will only be able to make use of the company's generated reports, not the raw data. What's behind this? Well, privacy concerns, of course. The API data might have been running a foul of GDPR compliance, but also think about it. In terms of personal data, what could be.

more personal than your genetic makeup. That's also tied to an account with your name on it. I guess it's probably wise to take that sort of a threat vector out of play before someone does something truly awful with it. As Holden Page tweeted, quote, making any part of your business a platform appears to be more of a liability these days, especially when handling any amount of personal information. Motherboard has a long piece up about Facebook's sprawling,

content moderation apparatus and what a nightmare, it sounds like. Quote, how to successfully moderate user-generated content is one of the most labor-intensive and mind-bogglingly complex logistical problems Facebook has ever tried to solve. It's two billion users make billions of posts per day in more than 100 languages and Facebook's human content moderators are asked to review more than 10 million potentially rule-breaking posts per week. Facebook aims to do this with an error rate of less. than 1% and seeks to review all user reported content within 24 hours, end quote.

The problem is even 1% error rates at this scale, that's a lot of errors. In a way, this has always been Facebook's problem. Facebook followed in the wake of Google, and at the time, Google seemed to have solved the problem of smart algorithms being able to handle content at scale. I'm thinking of search, of course, but also things like placing relevant AdSense ads on different web pages without pissing off advertisers, or automated takedowns of copyrighted content on YouTube. It seemed like smart algorithms could do it all, and they could do it better than any humans ever could. The algorithms, the math, were actually better than people for a time. But over and over again in the last couple years, we're seeing that that's no longer true, especially when you're at, the scale of billions, and especially when you have people motivated to do bad things or motivated

to game your system. I mean, it's 20 years on, and Google still hasn't fully solved SEO spam. So Facebook's original sin is that it believed the math had cracked this nut, and it hasn't. The whole world is now functionally a black hat SEO trying to game Facebook's platform. It's almost like if you plot it out social content on a graph, it would look sort of like a bell curve. On the left-hand side, when a site is small enough, human moderators work fine. But then in the middle, when a site hits some level of scale, I don't know, like 100 million users or more, you have to switch to algorithms. It's the only way to function at that scale. But then on the right-hand side of the bell curve, it slopes back down because your site has passed, I don't know, a billion users.

and at that point you need to bring back the human moderators, and even then it's probably not going to work that well. And then there's the fact that realizing this, realizing that clever algorithms aren't a panacea anymore, it now forces Facebook into processes that it never wanted in the first place. Facebook doesn't want humans curating things on Facebook. It wants the perfect algorithms that Google promised. Motherboard spoke in the piece to Facebook's first ever head of content policy,

Dave Wilner. Illustrating my point, Wilner said that when Facebook had around 100 million users, there were just 12 people on the team moderating content. Today, there are roughly

7,500. This quote from Wilner in the piece is perfect in summing up what I'm talking about. People ask Facebook all the time, why don't you just use your best judgment?

Quote, we A, B, tested that, Wilner said. If you take two moderators and compare their answer is double-blind, they don't agree with each other a lot. If you can't ensure consistency, Facebook functionally has no policy, end quote. We A-B-tested human judgment. I love it. Nothing really new in this piece, but it's super interesting if you want to see the history of content moderation on Facebook and basically where Facebook is at in this moment in time.

And since that's a bit of a long read, these are the weekend. long read suggestions brought to you by Betterment, who's not only here to help you make the most of your money, but the most of your weekend as well. First up, this one really rang true for me. It's an insider's account of earlier in this decade when Silicon Valley first went to Detroit to try to get the big automakers interested in self-driving vehicle technology, and Detroit was unimpressed, to put it mildly. I actually lived in Ann Arbor in the mid-2000s for several years and got to know plenty of folk who work in the auto industry, and I experienced this whole sea change that's described in this piece about how Detroit thinks about technology. Early on when I live there,

the fact that I drove a hybrid car was considered an adorable eccentricity. My interest in the Tesla IPO was the subject of open ridicule, but today, when I talk to my auto industry friends, they use phrases like transportation as a service with complete sincerity. At the the same time, though, thanks to those car friends, I've developed a healthy balance of skepticism about self-driving technology as well. Every time a Silicon Valley friend has boasted that self-driving vehicles will be on the road in the millions by 2020, I've been like, okay, we'll see. Engineering millions of 4,000-pound vehicles is no easy feat, as Tesla has even proven out. And a self-driving vehicle that can navigate in the real world is not something

you can just throw software engineers at and have easy success. Someday someone's going to write a terrific book recounting this epic clash and then coming together of Silicon Valley and Detroit cultures that has happened over the last decade or so. And this article from the Wall Street Journal, the first link in the weekend long reads, is a good taste of that. It's called Late to the Driverless Revolution.

Next, Taylor Lawrence continues her excellent dive into the intersection of culture and social media by looking at the teens who make money shilling for brands on Instagram. Quote, while some teens spent the summer of 2018 babysitting, bagging groceries or scooping ice cream, thousands of others made hundreds of dollars, and in some cases much more, the new-fashioned way by doing sponsored content on Instagram.

With jobs, you need to do a lot of training, says Lucy, a 13-year-old in Pennsylvania, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym. Then you have to, like, physically go out and do the job for hours a day. Doing this, you can make one simple post, which doesn't take a while. That single post can earn you like 50 bucks. Last month, she started posting brand-sponsored Instagrams for her more than 8,000 followers.

So far, she says she's earned a couple hundred dollars, end quote. Wired has a great long read-up about NotPetya, the most devastating cyber attack in history. unleashed by Russian hackers, initially targeting Ukrainian companies, the virus spread around the globe, crippling supply chains, closing ports, disrupting shipping, causing an estimated $10 billion plus in damages. The whole piece reads like a spy thriller, quote, Disconnecting Merricks's entire global network took the company's IT staff more than two panicky hours. By the end of that process, every employee had been ordered to turn off their computer and leave it at their desk. The digital phones at every cubicle, too, had been rendered useless in the emergency network shutdown.

Around 3 p.m., a Mersk executive walked into the room where Jensen and a dozen or so of his colleagues were anxiously awaiting news and told them to go home. Mersk's network was so deeply corrupted that even IT staffers were helpless. A few of the company's more old-school managers told their teams to remain at the office, but many employees rendered entirely idle without computers, servers, routers, or desk phones. simply left, end quote. Burning Man starts tomorrow, and the New Republic has a look at what it says is the vanishing idealism of Burning Man.

Art has always been a big part of the festival, and this piece looks at the art that is actually making its way out of the desert and into permanent installations in museums. Is this spreading the Burning Man gospel to the wider world, or is it actually betraying the primary ethos, the you had to have been there to truly get it, non-permanence thing that has always been

at the very base level of Burning Man. In the Atlantic, Ian Bogos says, Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nialism. The personal data privacy war is long over and you lost. Bogos actually does a fine job of tracing the history of the technology that got us to now. Going back to IBM in the 50s, the invention of relational databases in the...

70s through the usual suspects today in social networking. The real difference between the old and the new ages of data intelligence-driven consumer marketing and the invasion of privacy they entail is that lots of people are finally aware that it is taking place. The postal mail comes once a day, but people see hundreds or thousands of new renditions of their own private information in the same time online. It's easy to mistake the proximate cause, big shadowy tech firms, for the ultimate one. Over half a century of business intelligence techniques that have been honed, productized, and weaponized out of sight.

Google and Facebook are just the tip of an old, hardened iceberg, end quote. Finally, we're all nerds here, right? Has there ever been a piece of a nerd culture that somehow you missed out on and it kind of left you feeling left out? Never got the references. For me, it's been the work of er horror fiction genius H.P. Lovecraft. who I only finally got around to reading this year. If you, like me, have never read Lovecraft, but keep vaguely grocking references to Chethulu

and the great old ones and the Necroman. Polygon has a nice little one-stop primer to Lovecraft's major works and themes. I have a link to the primer and the primer has links to places you can read most of the stories mentioned for free. So if you want to have a really screwed up weekend in the best, most bizarre way, check out the last link in the Longreeds, if you dare.

And that's been the weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment. Investing involves risk, but remember, tech meme ride home listeners can sign up with Betterment today and get up to one year of money managed for free. For more information, visit Betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash R-I-D-E. Man, this was a brutal day in terms of feel bad tech news story. There was actually more I could have gone with. There's a T-Mobile hack of 2 million customers. Russian trolls have been trying to spread misinformation about vaccines.

Facial recognition technology at airports. Geez, I'm going to leave you with one more link just to cleanse the palate. Puppies, robot puppies. If you check the show notes, you'll see a bonus link for a hands-on review of Sony's Ibo robot puppy from Engadget. Sony's been trying to flog this robot dog thing for decades now, but NGadgett says it might be getting there. Quote, it's easy to scoff at Ibo.

Sony's $2,799 robot dog, but seeing one up close might change your mind. It moves much more smoothly than before. It reacts to your pets and voice commands realistically, and best of all, it gets smarter over time. Yes, Ibo is undoubtedly a luxury, but it brings us one step closer to the robot companion, we've been waiting for, end quote. So there you go. Puppies. Check out the videos. They actually

have gotten pretty darn cute. Have a good weekend, everybody. I want to thank you for helping me organize this meeting here today. And also the other heads of the five families, New York, New Jersey. Carmine Cooney-O from the Bronx and Brooklyn, Philip Tataly. From Staten Island, we have with us, Victor Strachie, and all the other associates that came as far as from California, Kansas City, and all the other territories of the country. Thank you. How do things ever get so far?