Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, June 22, 2018 - The Tesla Sabotage Story Gets Weirder?

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

The Supreme Court rules on cell phone tracking, YouTube gets channel memberships, Twitter literally smites Smyte, the Elon Musk sabotage saga gets weirder and the weekend longreads suggestions. Stories from: @sarahintampa, @drewharwell Tweets: @mathewi  Links:Supreme Court says police can't use your cellphone to track you without a court order (NBC News)Twitter ‘smytes’ customers (TechCrunch)Elon Musk Has Always Been At War With The Media (BuzzFeed) Weekend Longreads:How Twitter Made The Tech World's Most Unlikely Comeback (BuzzFeed)The Legend of Nintendo (Bloomberg)Intel now faces a fight for its future (The Verge)INSIDE THE CRYPTO WORLD'S BIGGEST SCANDAL (Wired) 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 TechMeme ride home for Friday, June 22nd, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Supreme Court rules on cell phone tracking.

YouTube gets channel memberships. Twitter literally smites smite. The Elon Musk sabotage saga gets weirder. And, of course, the weekend long-reads suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Supreme Court has seemingly decided that it's just going to make tech news headlines. this week. In another five-before decision, today the High Court ruled that law enforcement officials need a warrant to get mobile phone tower records, the method by which they can track

a person's location, where they've been over an extended period of time. The court said that obtaining such data without a warrant, as police have routinely done up to this point, amounts to an unreasonable search and seizure under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment. The ruling was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the liberal justices in the majority. Quoting Roberts in the decision, we decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier's database of physical location information, end quote. He added, however, that police can still avoid obtaining warrants for other types of business records. NBC's Pete Williams described the decision as a victory for privacy advocates, writing, quote, in recent years, the justices have

shown a willingness to extend digital age, privacy protections. The Supreme Court has ruled that police need warrants to search through the contents of smartphones or to attach a GPS tracking device to a car, end quote. To be clear, this is an entirely different issue than all those recent stories we've discussed about cell companies selling your location data to third parties. But both stories stem from the same fundamental reality. The very way cellular technology works is that your carrier has to triangulate your signal between various cell towers. As you move around, it has to ping your device to know where you are, so it can hand you over to successively different towers. Cell companies keep track of this movement for very fundamental things like signal strength

and billing you for roaming. And police can obtain these records and piece together a person's whereabouts over various days and months. In the case ruled on today, which was Carpenter v. the United States, there were a series of armed robberies of radio shacks in the Detroit area. Police then used cell data to track a suspect to 12,898 locations over the course of 127 days. Friday's ruling says police can still get phone records without a warrant in emergency instances, such as a fleeing suspect, or to, quote, protect individuals who are threatened with imminent harm or prevent the imminent destruction of evidence. Man, if you're a content creator, your options for scratching out a living online have really exploded in just the

the last few weeks. Last night, at VidCon, YouTube announced a whole slew of new monetization options, including channel memberships and integrations of merchandising. First, let's talk about memberships. YouTube had been testing the ability to sponsor channels on YouTube gaming for $4.99 a month. Sort of like how Twitch does it. This is now rolling out to YouTube proper, but there are a couple of catches. Creators will need to have 100,000 subscribers or more.

be over the age of 18 and be members of YouTube's partner program. But the $4.99 per month membership price point stays the same and includes custom badging and custom emoji. There will also be a members-only section in the community tab where creators can occasionally post live streams, additional videos, and other perks. As for the merchandising, starting today, creators can sell swag directly to their fans. Creators with more than 10,000 subscribers can offer things like t-shirts, hats, phone cases, or toys. Apparently, the creator of Lucas the Spider turned his character into a plushy and claims to have sold 60,000 of them, netting $1 million in profit in just 18 days. YouTube specifically announced a partnership with T-Spring to help creators sell T-shirts,

and the deal is structured in a way that you could actually make more money selling through YouTube than if you sold T-shirts directly. Finally, if you just want to make money off of live video, YouTube also announced a new feature called Premiers, where you can create a landing page, so you can do promotion ahead of a videos release with chats embedded. Upcoming premieres can appear on the YouTube homepage and in recommended videos as well as in YouTube search,

so this is a good new way to do promotion. YouTube also hinted that its version of stories will arrive for eligible creators later this year. YouTube said in a blog post, quote, YouTube creators are the heartbeat of our platform. That's why we're committed to building products that empower and support the creator community. We hope these tools help creators build a stronger community and earn more money while doing it. Because when they succeed, the entire YouTube community thrives, end quote.

Overall, YouTube says the number of creators earning five figures a year on the platform is up 35% And the number of creators earning six figures is up by 40%. So yesterday morning, Twitter announced that it was buying Smite, a startup that described itself as trust and safety as a service. Smite was founded in 2014 by former Google and Instagram employees, launched out of Y Combinator in 2015, and offered tools to help mitigate online abuse, harassment, and spam. Terms of the deal were not disclosed,

but it was a notable story as A, it was Twitter's first acquisition since 2016, and B, hey, it's Twitter buying a startup that helps fight trolls and bots, and that sounds great, right? Smyte seemed to be well regarded with several high-profile clients, including Indiegogo, You Fund Me, Quora, Task, Rabbit, and more, who all plugged into Smite's Rest API, which allowed the company to spot trends in user behavior and then build machine learning models that would create custom rules that would block harmful actions. Sounds like that could be useful for Twitter, especially after they launched that automated algorithm to shush Twitter trolls. However, mere hours after the announcement, Twitter just shut down Smites API, just like that, with no warning to existing customers.

Apparently, some customers got a phone call letting them know the API would be going down, but that left them with basically no time to prepare. And existing customers were, shall we say, not please. On Twitter, user Jacamo said, holy S, Twitter, Twitter bought Smite. and immediately shut it down. We had a three-year contract with them, and they just disappeared overnight. No communication at all. They just turned their servers off,

closed our shared support channel, and walked away. What the actual F? Lori Voss on Twitter said, quote, a vendor notified us of their acquisition at 6 a.m. this morning, and shut down their APIs 30 minutes later, creating a production outage for NPM. The sheer unprofessionalism of this

is blowing my mind. It takes weeks to negotiate and sign an acquisition. You didn't find out at 6 a.m. You couldn't give us a week, even a couple of hours to take your service out of our critical path and avoid an outage. Effing, shocking behavior, end quote. As tech crunches Sarah Perez noted in her coverage of this, quote, to reiterate, smite is a provider of anti-abuse and anti-fraud protections, not something any business would shut off overnight. So yeah, even if Twitter always intended to buy smite just for its own use, that's not exactly a good way to handle an acquisition that has existing business relationships. And as Matthew Ingram pointed out on Twitter, quote,

for a company that already has a problem plagued history when it comes to its relationship with developers, this is a pretty bad look, Twitter. So remember that story of the employee Martin Tripp, who was being sued by Tesla after, allegedly hacking the company. We assume also that this was the same person Elon Musk was referencing when he emailed Tesla employees about sabotage. Well, Martin Tripp was interviewed by the Guardian, and Tripp claims far from a saboteur.

He's actually a whistleblower who was trying to report serious Tesla production problems to the press. Tripp told the Guardian, quote, I'm a scapegoat because I provided information that is absolutely true. This is obscene. It feels like I have no rights as a whistleblower, end quote. Tripp was a former process technician at Tesla's Gigafactory and said he leaked information to a reporter at Business Insider

because no one at the company would listen to his concerns. Tripp says he was worried about high rates of, quote, non-conforming material that ended up being wasted, as well as a batch of battery cells that were mistakenly punctured. Quote, I kept bringing this up to management, supervisors, anyone who would listen, Tripp told the Guardian. Everyone just said, yeah, whatever, end quote. And now, in addition to this, the sheriff's office in Story County, Nevada, where the Gigafactory is located, said it received information about a security threat to the Gigafactory, but determined, quote, after several hours of investigation, there was no credible threat, end quote.

Tripp says that he, coincidentally or not, was visited by Sheriff's deputies Wednesday night, and Tesla has said that it has increased security at the Gigafactory as a precaution. And then, on top of that, the Washington Post got records of an email exchange between Tripp and Elon Musk himself. I'll link to the emails in the show notes because they're too long to read here. But just to give you a taste, they include Tripp telling Musk, quote, don't worry, you have what's coming to you for the lies you have told the public and investors, end quote. And Musk responding by saying, quote, you should be ashamed of yourself for framing other people. You're a horrible human being.

So given that, I give you this. The reason this Martin Tripp news was greeted by collective headscratches when it first surface earlier this week is because Elon Musk has been, shall we say, colorful of late with weird late night tweets. outbursts at federal officials, direct confrontations with the press, and even analysts on actual Tesla earnings calls. What with Tesla's perilous cash position, according to some analysts, and the companies admitted production troubles with the Model 3, frankly, some people were beginning to wonder if Elon Musk might be cracking up a bit under the pressure. But over at BuzzFeed, they have a piece up that points out,

Elon Musk has always been sort of at war with the media. quoting from the piece None of this is new for Musk He has always been the architect of his own image And has long run roughshod Over journalists and his own communications team alike In interviews with BuzzFeed News Nine people who previously worked with Musk

And who requested anonymity To preserve their personal and professional relationships Said that while the level of scrutiny on the CEO May be new His behavior is not What we are seeing is less a crack in his well-being Than his facade it is Elon Unbound, end quote.

Quoting from several of the former employee interviews, here's one. Quote, it doesn't strike me as some drastic change in his personality. Said another former employee, quote, you don't sleep very much when you're in communications at Tesla because you don't know what's going to happen, end quote. And finally, another unnamed former employee says that a lot of this is down to Musk's relentless personality, Quote, I would never say he has this controlling desire to do all the things.

He frankly just loses confidence that others can do it. And hey, who's to blame him? He's the smartest guy in the room. It's that time again, the weekend long-read suggestions. Let's start with two comeback stories. Two years ago, Twitter stock was trading at $14 a share, and people were writing obituaries for the company. But now Twitter's user count is actually growing.

It's actually been making money for several quarters, and its stock is back at $46 a share. How did Twitter rise from the ashes to make the obvious bird-related metaphor? Over at BuzzFeed, Alex Cantorowitz takes a look and decides that it was a combination of luck, ironically a pivot to video, a decision to stop trying to be Facebook, and most importantly, a decision to focus on news. quoting from the piece It's hard to overstate the importance of Twitter's decision to tie its identity to news

For years you could ask Twitter What exactly are you And not get a straight answer Because Twitter itself didn't really know The abundance of communities that formed on the service Sports Twitter, Black Twitter, Weird Twitter, Meme Twitter, celebrity Twitter and so on Made it difficult to pin down

And Twitter couldn't settle on one thing It did really well But in April 2016 Twitter made that call It moved itself from the social networking section of the iOS App Store to news, seating the former to Facebook and its satellite apps, end quote. In Bloomberg, a similar piece about Nintendo. A few short years ago, people were saying that Nintendo was doomed

because it had missed the boat in modern gaming. And then Nintendo came out with the Switch, and suddenly it's the hottest thing in gaming, alongside Fortnite, which, of course you can play on the Switch. in a piece called The Legend of Nintendo, Felix Gillette looks at exactly how and why. Every time you think Nintendo is down and out, it can reinvent itself so successfully. The big news yesterday was the resignation of Brian Krasanich, the CEO of Intel. At the verge, Tom Warren says that Intel now faces a fight for its very future.

Intel is in an odd position of market dominance and emerging threats that, in many ways, echoes Microsoft's position before Satcha Nadella took over. Intel and Microsoft have followed in each other's footsteps for decades under the famous Wintel Alliance. While Microsoft has diversified its business, thanks to the reach of software and its focus on the cloud, Intel has reacted more slowly. Intel now needs to find its own Satcha Nadella,

who has the engineering knowledge to steer the company in the right direction, all while accepting that the company's consumer relevance doesn't necessarily matter anymore, end quote. Finally, I cannot recommend highly enough the cover story in this month's Wired magazine. It tells the inside story of cryptocurrency Tezos, which once had the largest ICO ever and raised $232 million,

but then devolved into a bizarre story of infighting, backstabbing. There's also a love story in there, and as the author of the piece, Gideon Lewis Krause writes, quote, what began in utopian ambition would blow up into one of the crypto world's biggest scandals, end quote. I have a link to the story in the show notes, of course, as with all the long reads, but also why not go out and buy the physical magazine? Wired always has such lovely cover stock.

It's Friday, everybody, so get down to that Friday music. I meant to make this joke earlier in the week, but I can't. couldn't find a decent recording. So hopefully if I jack up the volume all the way, you'll be able to hear this. Enjoy. Spock sabotage the system. Spock restore the atmosphere. Spock sabotage the system. I wish I knew what to do. Observations, Mr. Spock. Okay, can we have line 193 again with sabotage and a sabotage and sabotage? I don't say sabotage. You say sabotage. I say sabotage. I say habitat.