Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, Mar. 30, 2018 - The Facebook Memo Controversy

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

An internal Facebook memo causes controversy, Under Armour was hacked, SpaceX gets FCC approval for satellite internet, utility companies dream of electric sheep cars, and the weekend long read suggestions.  Stories from: @om, @sheelahk and @CaseyNewton Long Reads:At Uber, a New C.E.O. Shifts Gears (New Yorker)Microsoft is ready for a world beyond Windows (The Verge)The Curious Case of the Belkin Buy (Om.co)Mozilla's radical open-source move helped rewrite rules of tech (CNET) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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, March 30th, 2018. Today, an internal Facebook memo causes controversy. Under Armour was hacked.

SpaceX gets FCC approval for satellite internet. Utility companies dream of electric cars and the weekend long reads suggestions. This is what happened today in the world of tech. Last night, BuzzFeed's a team of tech reporters, Ryan Mack, Charlie Worsall, and Alex Cantorwitz dropped a bombshell by reporting on an internal Facebook memo written by Facebook Vice President Andrew Boz Bosworth in 2016. Best thing to do, I guess, is probably to just read from the memo directly.

Bosworth writes, We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly. We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive, maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves a life of someone on the brink of suicide. So we connect more people.

That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. Later on in the memo, Bosworth continues, The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people, more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we're concerned.

And later on, quote, that's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices, all the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends, all of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China someday, all of it. End quote. This full-throated defense of growth at all costs did not come off well to a lot of people.

User bumchillips on Twitter tweeted, Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. Maybe someone receives a five-year-old Farmville invite. It's a full day. Alec Muffet, a former Facebook employee, tweeted, quote, Ye gods at Boz Tank. Well, you know what I thought of that posting. I've never leaked my response.

I don't even possess a copy anymore except from memory, but I won't ignore that your post was a significant factor in why I left the company, end quote. Mark Zuckerberg himself tried to distance himself from the contents of the memo by giving Buzzfeed the following statement, quote, Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook, including myself, disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justify the means, end quote. And Bosworth even seemed to disown his own memo, writing on Twitter, quote,

I don't agree with the post today and I didn't even when I wrote it. The purpose of this post, like many others I have written internally, was to bring to the surface issues I felt deserved more discussion with the broader company. To see this post in isolation is rough because it makes it appear as a stance that I hold, or that the company holds when neither is the case, end quote. The verges Casey Newton tweeted, in my opinion, it's a good thing that senior executives at Facebook acknowledge some of their work is ugly and requires moral reckoning. Casey later posted his own story on the verge,

leaking some of the internal posts and discussions from Facebook employees themselves, responding to the news that Bosworth's memo had leaked. Newton summarized the discussion by saying Facebook employees were, quote, angry and heartbroken that their teammates were sharing internal company discussions with the media. Many called on the company to step up its war on leakers and hire employees with more, quote, integrity. In one of the posts Newton was able to take a look at,

one Facebook employee wrote, quote, How effing terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some God complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great. Other employees noticed that there was a certain amount of irony to be found in the fact that Facebook employees themselves might be upset that discussions had been shared given that Facebook's whole mission is to encourage everyone to share everything. Wrote another employee, quote, Can we channel our outrage over the mishandling of our information into an empathy for our users, situation? And this is a bit of a jumbled sentence, but I think you'll get the gist. Quote,

how we encourage ourselves to remain open while acknowledging a world that doesn't always respect the audience and intention for that information might just be the key to it all. Maybe we should be dogfooding that. Athletics brand Under Armour has been notifying users of its My Fitness Pal app that their data might have been compromised by hackers. Approximately 150, accounts are reported to be affected, and it appears that usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords may have been stolen. However, payment information which Under Armour collects under a separate system, was reportedly not compromised. Under Armour learned of the breach on March 25th, when the company discovered that an unknown party had accessed My FitnessPal user data back in February.

Under Armour is now working with data security firms and law enforcement to assist in its further investigation. The Federal Communications Commission has officially signed off on SpaceX's plan to launch a satellite-based broadband internet service. SpaceX wants to create a constellation of satellites, 4,425 in fact, to beam its Starlink Internet service down to Earth. The FCC has not only now officially given the go-ahead, but it has given SpaceX a strict timeline as well. SpaceX must launch at least 50% of the satellites by March 29, 24, or it will have to refile for authorization again from the commission. SpaceX's Starlink service was opposed by several existing satellite operators, who were worried that Starlink's thousands of satellites, would crowd out spectrum, not to mention cause actual physical crowding and orbit. In a nod to these concerns, the FCC has stipulated that SpaceX must study reliability issues

surrounding its satellites and put into place methods for deorbiting the spacecraft. In other words, SpaceX needs to study ways to prevent the creation of a cloud of space junk. SpaceX has already launched test versions of the satellites it intends to use, but to get to a full constellation, the company will need to start launching two at a time. SpaceX C.O. Gwen Shotwell provided a statement to TechCrunch that read, quote, We appreciate the FCC's thorough review and approval of SpaceX's Constellation license. Although we still have much to do with this complex undertaking, this is an important step towards SpaceX building a next-generation satellite network

that can link the globe with reliable and affordable broadband service, especially reaching those who are not yet connected. I'm going to do a little catch-all segment here with a popery of a bunch of little story nuggets. First, several outlets have been reporting rumors all day long that Walmart is in the early stages of acquisition talks with insurance company Humana. There's no guarantee that the deal will go through, but at one point in overnight trading, Humana's shares were up 10%. retailers, particularly pharmacy chains, have been hooking up with health insurance providers recently. CVS bought Aetna in December, Cigna bought Express Scripts. Why is this a tech story, though?

Well, the reason all of this merger activity is boiling to the surface can be summed up in one word, Amazon. Next, we all know social media and search engines are big drivers of online traffic, but there might just be a new traffic fire hose in town. Google Chrome's Articles for You. Neiman Lab is reporting that Chartbeat is reporting that articles for you, also known as Chrome content suggestions or Chrome suggestions, is one of the fastest growing sources of publisher traffic on the internet. In fact, it's now the fourth largest driver of traffic that chartbeat measures behind Google Search, Facebook, and Twitter. Articles for you traffic grew an astonishing 2100% in 2017.

It went from driving 15 million visits per month to publishers to driving 341 million visits per month. If you're not familiar with articles for you, it's a feature of the Chrome browser on both Android and iOS that surfaces articles you might be interested in reading based on your previous browsing history. Gizmodo reports that Verizon will soon be charging. customers just to pay their monthly bill, but only if a customer elects to pay their bill over the phone. Apparently, it's just the latest ISP or wireless company to do this in an attempt to cut costs and encourage customers to pay online. Verizon will soon charge you a $7 fee every time you deign to speak to a representative over the phone to pay your bill. T-Mobile charges a similar $8 fee and AT&T charges $5 for the

same honor. Sprint does not currently charge you anything to talk to a real person over the phone. And NPR reports that North American utility companies are looking to electric cars to save them from an unprecedented decline in demand for electricity. Apparently, decades of more efficient devices, power-sipping light bulbs, and general energy conservation have combined to cause several year-over-year declines in electricity demand. So utility companies are hoping electric vehicles really do take off and soon. 36 utility companies co-signed a letter to Congress earlier this month, asking that the current cap on electric vehicle tax credits be removed.

Currently, Americans who purchase an electric car receive a federal tax credit of $7,500. But the government plans to phase out those credits after each auto company, sells 200,000 vehicles. Tesla will likely pass this mark this year with GM and Nissan probably soon after them. It's estimated that if all existing U.S. cars were converted to electric, it would add about 774 terawatt hours of electricity demand, which is roughly equal to the amount generated by the entire U.S. industrial sector. Of course, EVs currently only make up 1% of the U.S. car market, But a report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research group, says that there could be almost 2.9 million electric cars on the road in the next five years. Sounds like utility companies are crossing their fingers and hoping that this is true.

Okay, time for the weekend long reads. As always, there are links to these stories in the show notes for this episode. First up, the New Yorker has an extensive profile of Uber's new CEO, Dara Kosrohahi. A couple of key graphs from the story. Here's a quote from Koswar Shahi himself. The company brought me on board because of a lot of things that happened in the past. We were probably trading off doing the right thing for growth and thinking about competition maybe a bit too aggressively.

And some of those things were mistakes. Mistakes themselves are not a bad thing. The question is, do you learn from those mistakes? 2017 has been a really tough year, but this is going to result in us being a better company. company." Also, this is an interesting bit of color from Barry Diller. I'll just quote from the piece.

In August 2017, when Koswar Shahi called Barry Diller to tell him that he was pursuing the Uber job, Diller tried to talk him out of it. Diller and his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, were friends with Travis Kalanick, and Diller knew that the situation at Uber was fraught. I said, oh my God, Dara, you must be out of your mind. Diller told the New Yorker. That's a very dangerous place. If you're looking for some deeper context around yesterday's news of the major reorganization at Microsoft, the Virges Tom Warren has you covered with a piece titled, Microsoft is ready for a world beyond Windows.

Warren says that the reorg leaves little doubt that the future of Microsoft involves the cloud and AI. Windows isn't dead, Warren writes, but it's clearly not as important to Microsoft anymore, and it will play a very different role in the company's future. O'Mallek gives us some interesting context around Foxcon's decision to buy Belkin, which we talked about earlier this week. It's a great piece that outlines the strategic crossroads that Foxcon finds itself at. It's called the Curious Case of the Belkin Buy.

Finally, you guys know I have a bias for tech history, and CNET has published a piece looking back on Netscape's radical decision to open source the code base for its Netscape communicator web browser. This was 20 years ago. Netscape was in a desperate struggle to stay solvent as a business at the time, and though the move didn't end up saving the company, it did lead to today's Firefox web browser as well as set the precedent for open sourcing as a business strategy,

something that is now core to the way Facebook, Google, and many others in tech do business. As the piece notes, quote, Mozilla wasn't the first open source project, but it fanned the flames of a way of thinking that brought us ubiquitous social networks, mobile operating systems, and thousands of apps. It was a Hail Mary Pass, said Chris DeBona,

director of open source at Google, but somebody caught the ball and ran with it. Now open sourcing is the norm. Google releases five or six open source projects every single day, more than 12,000 in total, so far. And as the piece notes, it's common enough that Google has even automated the process so no humans are needed to review the decisions at all. It's hard to overstate how profound a change that is for people who program for a living. That's all for today. It's a Friday,

everyone. Holiday weekend for a lot of folks. We miss out on doing an episode on April Fool's Day, but that's no big loss because I actually find the tech industry's obsession with April Fool's jokes to be a bit annoying, so I probably wouldn't have done one. On that grumpy note, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. The show is produced in conjunction with TechMame.com. I'll be back with you on Monday. Enjoy your weekend, everyone.