Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/05 - Cloudflare Breaks Up With 8chan

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Monday, August 5th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Cloudflare stops doing business with 8chan. Two big new smartwatch releases, why the athletic believes people will pay for sports news, the 22-year-old founder of the newest unicorn in the land, and why used electric vehicles might signal EVs are entering the mainstream. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Cloudflare says it will stop providing the site 8chan with services. This after the tragic, El Paso incident this weekend became the third mass shooting announced on 8chan. At the time of this writing, the 8chan site was unreachable, but as we explained last week, Cloudflare is not actually

Starting point is 00:01:23 hosting 8chan. Cloudflare is merely a content delivery network providing various caching and DDoS protection services. This does not mean that the 8chan site is gone, especially as its registrar two cows says it has no plans to ban the site. Cloudflare initially said that it too would not ban 8chan before changing its mind late last night. Here's how Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, explained his change of heart, quote, 8chan is among the more than 19 million internet properties that use Cloudflare's service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific time. The rationale is simple. They have proven themselves.

Starting point is 00:02:07 to be lawless, and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if A. Chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit. We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we've considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive, regardless of the content of those websites. Many of our customers run platforms of their own on top of our network. If our policies are more conservative than theirs, it effectively

Starting point is 00:02:48 undercuts their ability to run their services and set their own policies. We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. A. Chen has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services, end quote. Cloudflare actually has previous history terminating service for controversial sites, but it really doesn't want to have this history, quoting the Guardian. Cloudflare has long taken the position that it should be neutral towards content in providing its services, since it does not host content itself. But in 2017, shortly after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the company's chief executive

Starting point is 00:03:35 officer Matthew Prince stopped providing DDoS protection to the extremist neo-Nazi hate site, The Daily Stormer. The site was subsequently forced off the open internet and onto the so-called dark web areas of the internet that cannot be accessed with a normal web browser. It has since returned to the regular internet. At the time, Prince expressed deep ambivalence about his decision telling employees in an email, quote, this was an arbitrary decision. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet, end quote. He subsequently told the Guardian, quote, I am deeply uncomfortable with the decision we made. It doesn't align with our principles, end quote. And that is part of the conversation around this. It's unlikely that A. Chan will be

Starting point is 00:04:18 completely deplatformed. Like the Stormer, it will likely, maybe already has, find other companies willing to do business with it. And several people made this point this morning, perhaps most eloquently Ryan Broderick in BuzzFeed News, even if 8chan were to vanish. Its users would likely just flock to some other copycat site. Indeed, 8chan itself rose to prominence when users flocked there from 4chan. Quoting Broderick, in 2019, 8chan is no longer a refuge for extremist hate. It is a window opening onto a much broader landscape of racism, radicalization, and terrorism. shutting down the site is unlikely to eradicate this new extremist culture because A. Chan is anywhere. Pull the plug, it will appear somewhere else in whatever locale will host it.

Starting point is 00:05:09 Because there's nothing particularly special about 8chan. There are no content algorithms. Hosting technology is immaterial. The only thing radicalizing 8chan users are other 8chan users, end quote. It was an oddly big day in the world of smartwatches, just six months after. the first Galaxy Watch Active, Samsung has announced the new Galaxy Watch Active 2 with a new bezel control, 40 millimeter and 44 millimeter sizes, and optional LTE. It will be arriving September 27th, starting at $279. The Active 2 does not quite have ECG capability, but that is apparently

Starting point is 00:05:54 coming soon. As with the previous model, Samsung sticks with rounded sides for a circular watch face, But unlike the previous model, which did away with its trademark rotating bezel, quoting the verge, unlike the Galaxy Watch and earlier models, the Active 2 doesn't have a physically rotating dial. Instead, the black border that surrounds the screen is a touch-sensitive strip that lets you scroll through the lenses and menus on the watch when you run your finger over it. In practice, this worked surprisingly well, though I suspect it will be unusable if you have gloves on.

Starting point is 00:06:26 The watch emits a click-like haptic buzz as you move your finger over the bezel. simulating the clicks of the physical wheel, end quote. The Active 2 has NFC for mobile payments, has GPS for working out without a phone, and Samsung says it has improved the heart rate monitor and accelerometer, which will work with Samsung's Bixby personal assistant for things like keeping your pace and stuff like that. The ECG capabilities are built in right now,

Starting point is 00:06:56 but they won't be activated at launch. and almost at the same what I imagine was embargo lifting time. Fossil announced Gen 5, its latest smart watch running Ware OS, with an updated Snapdragon chipset, a 44-millimeter case, and a built-in speaker. It's available now for $295, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Fossil upgraded its Gen 5 watches with a speaker for Google Assistant responses and taking phone calls on your wrist. Even music playback is possible.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Despite the speaker, both watches still offer 3 ATM water resistance, meaning it's swimproof. Rounding out, the spec sheet, Fossil has GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and NFC. The company also mentions an updated heart rate sensor and rapid charging. Apparently, Fossil Gen 5 watches can get an 80% charge in under an hour. That's done with the same magnetic charger as the Gen 4, though. Quite a lot of users had trouble in terms of durability with that design, but Fossil tells me that for Gen 5, nothing has changed. Rather, that issue was apparently remedied on Gen 4 hardware, end quote. Chinese state media is reporting that we might actually see that custom OS that Huawei has reportedly been working on sooner rather than later.

Starting point is 00:08:20 According to Reuters, the company is testing a $288 smartphone running its self-developed Hong Meng OS. which could go on sale later this year. This would, of course, be a big deal for Huawei, as U.S. government actions are threatening its access to Google's Android operating system. Quoting Reuters, Huawei executives have previously described Hong Ming as an operating system designed for Internet of Things products. Last month, the company said the first major devices powered by Hong Ming would be its upcoming line of honor brand smart TVs.

Starting point is 00:08:53 Company leaders have publicly downplayed the possibility that, the software could power a smartphone. Just last week at an event announcing the company's earnings for the first half of 2019, Huawei Chairman Lianghua said the company preferred to use Google's Android operating system for its mobile devices and referred to Hong Meng as part of Huawei's quote long-term strategy, end quote. Sports fans, have you subscribed to the athletic? I've got to admit that the athletic has flown under my radar because I mostly follow English soccer and U.S. college football when the Gators have a decent team, but that hasn't been the case for a couple years. The athletic, which if you're like me and didn't know, is a completely ad-free

Starting point is 00:09:44 sports news site, which has racked up half a million paying subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, and it is now firmly on my radar because it has launched a British site just this morning. The athletic strategy in Britain has been to hoover up basically all of the journalistic talent in that country, or it certainly seems like it. Sure enough, I pop on Twitter this morning to read the latest transferred deadline rumors only to meet paywalled articles on the athletic from some of my go-to tweets like David Ornstein, formerly of the BBC, and Daniel Taylor, formerly of the Guardian. Indeed, the Athletic has spent 10 million pounds in the last couple months hiring journals like these in an attempt to attract readers like me in hopes of gaining 100,000 subscribers in the UK. The Athletic is three years old and has raised $90 million from investors. Here in the U.S., a subscription is $60 a year if billed annually and $9.99 a month if billed monthly. And look, this is a weirdly refreshing take on the whole idea of,

Starting point is 00:10:52 death of media slash media startups, a startup who is banking on the star power of the journalists themselves to attract readers, quote, it's a pretty contrarian idea that people would pay for sports content when there is so much out there. Adam Hansman, the athletics co-founder and chief operating officer told the Financial Times, quote, but fans really took to the model of an ad-free reading experience, end quote. The world thought that sports fans were over served, but they were actually underserved. So says Daniel Galati, managing director of Comcast Ventures, which has invested in the site. Adding that around 80% of the athletics U.S. readers stayed with the site when their annual subscription came up for renewal. Quote, we see ourselves soon in a class with

Starting point is 00:11:40 companies like the FT and Wall Street Journal that have proven subscription models, founder Hansman says. Staying on the digital media tip, there's a new unicorn that has so far flown under my radar. Smart News is an AI-powered news aggregation app that just raised a $28 million series E led by Japan Post Capital, valuing the Japanese company at $1.1 billion. Quoting TechCrunch, the company founded in Tokyo in 2012 boasts 20 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Japan, growing at a rate of 500 percent per year, its audience checks into the app for a mix of political sports, global, and entertainment news curated for each individual reader. To make money, the company sells in-line advertising, video ads, and deals with publishers to sell ads against smart views.

Starting point is 00:12:36 It's equivalent of Google's AMP or Facebook Instant articles. Smart News has nearly 400 U.S. publishing partners, including the Associated Press and Bloomberg. It competes with the likes of Apple, which unveiled Apple News Plus earlier this year, a subscription news product that offers access to more than 300 magazines and newspapers for $9.99 per month, end quote. And let's real quick make room for another unicorn sighting. Scale AI, which counts Waymo and Uber among its customers, specializes in helping computers to see. The three-year-old company has a set of software tools that it uses to try to identify objects in pictures, as well as then 30,000 contract workers who step in to check the AI's work,

Starting point is 00:13:22 and refine the results. This work can be especially useful to self-driving car companies, as well as anyone that needs to identify objects in real time in the real world, even things like Amazon's Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores. Today, Scale AI announced funding that valued its business at more than a billion dollars, so it's a newly minted unicorn. One interesting wrinkle, the unicorn Wrangler in this case, its founder and CEO is just 22, quoting Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:13:55 Even by Silicon Valley standards, Alexander Wang is something of a phenomenon. He grew up in New Mexico, the son of two physicists. During his teenage years, Wang excelled at coding competitions and got job offers from tech companies as a high schooler. This put him on a path to graduate early, work in Silicon Valley, and then start scale by the time he was 19. Now, at the ripe old age of 22, Wang has a fresh $100 million from investors, including Mike Volpe, a general partner at Index Ventures.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Quote, when we signed the term sheet and went out to dinner, I ordered a nice bottle of wine to celebrate, says Volpe, and then had to ask him if I'm breaking the law, end quote. Wang was indeed of legal drinking age by then, end quote. Finally today, people like to throw around the very true. statistic that battery-powered cars still make up fewer than 2% of the overall North American vehicle fleet. But what that doesn't take into account is the fact that EVs are still relatively new. And so once they start trickling down the overall vehicle ecosystem, things should change. And that seems to already be happening in the used car market. Wired has a piece up that says new data is showing that, for example, on the used car shopping site Shift,

Starting point is 00:15:21 electrics have tripled their share of sales this year up to 4%. And the CEO of Shift says that when you include hybrid cars into that number, 20% of sales on their platform are either hybrid or electric. This change is important because while Americans bought 17.3 million new cars last year, they bought 40.2 million used ones. And actually, used electric vehicles do have some attractive advantages, quoting from Wired. While EVs are far from mainstream, we're starting to see them expand past the bleeding edgers, says Carl Brower, an industry analyst with Kelly Bluebook. Partly because used EVs are so inexpensive, end quote. Indeed, it's easy to find a Nissan

Starting point is 00:16:08 Leif or Fiat 500E on shift for well under $10,000. And while those cars offer ranges around or below 100 miles, the 2019 leaf reaches over 200, that limitation stops their previous owners from racking up serious mileage. That, plus, EV's minimal maintenance requirements compared with engine powered cars, should ease worries about spending extra money to keep them running. Quote, should ease worries about spending extra money to keep them running? Federal and state tax credits also help on the pricing front. A California driver can take $14,500 off the sticker price of a new electric car, a point that used car dealers account for. A Nissan Leafs, MSRP, might be $30,000, but a dealer will buy and sell it as if it were a $15,000 car that, like the average ride, loses about 50% of its value after a few years. Newer and longer range EVs like the Tesla Model S and Chevy Bolt EVVs hold their value better, Brower says, end quote. And with the slew of new battery powered cars coming from Ford, GM, Volkswagen, and the like, as these cars make their way through the ownership life cycle,

Starting point is 00:17:21 it's not hard to imagine a scenario where EVs suddenly become among the most sought after used cars. As Brower says in the piece, quote, if you're the slightest bit curious, he's talking about EVs here. It's not going to cost you much to give it a try, end quote. And as another analyst says in the piece, quote, ultimately, consumers are going to be more concerned about saving money than saving the environment, end quote. That is all for today. As always, I'm Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show's subreddit is R slash Ride Home. The ad-free subscription feed is the bottom link in the show notes. And if you want to try out a podcast classified ad for yourself, hit up ridehome.com.

Starting point is 00:18:05 Slashclassifieds. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/05 - Cloudflare Breaks Up With 8chan

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