Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/25 – Everybody Dumps (Reports) On Facebook

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Running down the headlines from all of those Facebook stories that we were promised would land this week. PayPal backs away from Pinterest, Tesla rolls back Full Self Driving, Microsoft keeps its eye on the ransomware gangs and a listener gives us an explainer on why Worldcoin wants to scan your eyeball. Sponsors: Betterhelp.com/ridehome enterprise.spectrum.com/techmeme Links: Here are all the Facebook Papers stories (Protocol) The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook’s CEO chose growth over safety (Washington Post) PayPal Says It’s Currently Not Pursuing Pinterest Deal (Bloomberg) Tesla pulled its latest ‘Full Self Driving’ beta after testers complained about false crash warnings and other bugs (The Verge) Hertz orders 100,000 Teslas in deal reportedly worth $4.2 billion (The Verge) Microsoft: Russian SVR hacked at least 14 IT supply chain firms since May (BleepingComputer) Privacy by Design (WorldCoin) How the Launch Works (Worldcoin) 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 Monday, October 25th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Running down the headlines from all those Facebook stories that we were promised would land this week. PayPal backs away from Pinterest. Tesla rolls back full self-driving. Microsoft keeps its eye on the

ransomware gangs and a listener gives us an explainer on why WorldCoin wants to scan your eyeballs. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So today is Facebook earnings day. Thus, today is the day that all of the Facebook papers stories were supposed to drop this morning. Some of it dropped on Friday night because certain outlets got itchy fingers, I guess. But among the newsrooms who were working in this consortium to drop the news this week were, and this is from Axios, the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, CBS News, USA Today, the Financial Times, the Atlanta, Fox Business, NPR, Bloomberg, Politico, Wired, K.C. Newton's platformer newsletter, LeMond, and German newspaper,

hold on. Suden-Deutsche Zeitung, in addition to a few other European outlets. So look, as these stories have been rolling in this morning, there's so many of them. There's no way I can cover everything. In the very first link in the show notes, you'll find an evolving list of every story thus far published, but let me run down some of the story. as of this morning. Internal documents show Facebook had no clear playbook for handling the dangerous content delegitimizing the U.S. elections ahead of the January 6 riots. Internal documents show how Facebook discussed hiding the like button to alleviate stress and anxiety, but users interacted with and shared fewer posts on Facebook, so Facebook, you know, didn't end up doing that.

Leaked documents show Facebook has known it has a problem related to human trafficking content, for people working inside private homes, but hasn't fixed it. Internal Facebook Docs Show employees touted its scale and dominance in presentations, including showing 78% of U.S. adults and nearly all teens use its services. But at the same time, internal documents also show Facebook is struggling to attract American users under the age of 30, with U.S. teenage users declining by 13% since 2019. Internal Facebook Docs show time spent by U.S. teenagers was down 16% year over year. Young adults were also spending 5% less time on the social network. Internal docs detail Facebook's struggles with violence inciting content in India, including failure

to designate some politically connected groups as dangerous. Internal Facebook docs detail its opaque tier system for providing protection to users in certain countries, leaving gaps in countries like Myanmar, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. Facebook docs detail issues with moderating non-English speech leading to inflammatory language in Afghanistan, bans on common words in Palestine, and more, and internal Facebook docs and interviews detail Mark Zuckerberg's decisions to prioritize growth over safety, including censoring anti-state posts in Vietnam. I'm sure more is trickling out even as I record these words. Let me just quote from that last one to give you a flavor of some of this reporting, quoting the Washington Post. Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg faced a choice.

comply with demands from Vietnam's ruling Communist Party to censor anti-government dissidents or risk getting kicked offline in one of Facebook's most lucrative Asian markets. In America, the tech CEO is a champion of free speech reluctant to remove even malicious and misleading content from the platform. But in Vietnam, upholding the free speech rights of people who questioned government leaders could have come with a significant cost in a country where the social network earns more than $1 billion in annual revenue, according to a 2018 estimate by Amnesty International. So Zuckerberg personally decided that Facebook would comply with Hanoi's demands, according to three people familiar with the decision,

speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal company discussions. Ahead of Vietnam's party Congress in January, Facebook significantly increased censorship of, quote, anti-state posts, giving the government near total control over the platform, according to local activists and free speech advocates. Zuckerberg's role in the Vietnam decision, which has not been previously reported, exemplifies his relentless determination to ensure Facebook's dominance, sometimes at the expense of his stated values, according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees, end quote. So actually, I wanted to pause here to make a bit of a point. Remember how we spoke recently about, does Facebook seem like a company firing on all cylinders right now to you?

I don't think so. We talked about this on the weekend bonus episode at length, but more than that, does Facebook seem like a company entirely and always in chaos and turmoil to you? Like, was there ever a time when they were firmly in control and firing on all cylinders? I'm not sure about that increasingly. And not just when it comes to different opinions on what the company should do internally, etc. Someone recently made this point, I forget who it was, but at the scale it is operating, doesn't it increasingly feel to you like Facebook is a company that has and maybe has always, and certainly seems to continue to have no idea what to do with what it does. They make a decision to do one thing at one part of the product or the company, often to

put out a fire in that part of the company or product, and boom, that change inadvertently causes something horrible to happen somewhere else in the product or the company. A butterfly flaps its wings to change the algorithm a bit or change the like button or something like that, and boom, a genocide is kicked off somewhere in the world. It would almost be better if Facebook clearly had a plan. And even if we all agreed it was terrible or evil, at least we could see a through line for all of the decisions that they make. But we're kind of seeing the opposite. From the earliest days of apologizing for pissing off users after launching this product or that or the newsfeed or what have you, all the way to recent years testifying before Congress.

all the way through to today, and I read this in one of the papers, to this day, apparently not having hired very many content moderators who speak the majority dialects of Arabic in order to monitor people, possibly organizing terrorism events and things like that. It feels like a kid who constantly has to come up with new excuses for why they didn't do their homework. There's always a new excuse. There's a new one every time. Does Zuck actually believe in free speech? As he's a said in his last book report, and that's why he doesn't want to quote-unquote censor content, or does he believe in profit and engagement so much that he is thus happy to allegedly personally intervene to censor opposition speech in certain countries just in order to be

left alone to keep doing whatever it is he really wants to do today? Point I'm making is, what if nobody knows what they're doing at Facebook, or what they really want to do, or how they do what they really want to do? And when I say everybody, I mean everyone at the company from Zuck on down. All they really know in their bones, it seems like, is that they want to do things. They want to build more things for people to do on their platform. And the only consistent behavior that we really ever see from Facebook as a company, as a culture, all of these years of their existence is that they will say and do whatever it takes to get people off their back so they can just go back to doing things. Forget too big to fail. What if Facebook is too big

to function coherently? Let me quote from Olivia Salon at NBC. News. Quote, having spent a long time going through the leaked Facebook docs, its clear pockets of Facebook are painfully aware of how its platform can harm people. It has also conducted countless experiments to try to mitigate those harms. Its failure to do more seems partly strategic, business priorities, but a lot to do with the left hand not talking to the right hand at other structural inefficiencies in a sprawling bureaucracy. It certainly breaks things, but it doesn't, slash, can't really move fast due to significant corporate bottlenecks. It makes sense that the researchers paid to understand and mitigate the harms would expect

corporate overlords to act on their often horrifying findings, but you can also see that there are often messy tradeoffs. Sometimes those tradeoffs seem grubby, like intervention from Facebook's policy team to stave off political scrutiny, but other times it's about unintended consequences on speech or trying to prioritize long-term solutions over firefighting ones. In short, there seems to be a lot more ineptitude than malice, and the journey between quote, knowing about X and, quote, doing something about X is a lot more convoluted than one might expect from a company that publicly prides itself on being agile, end quote. Quick update. PayPal says it is not pursuing an acquisition of Pinterest at this time.

Sources say PayPal discussed paying around $70 a share for Pinterest, valuing Pinterest at around $45 billion. Perhaps the response of PayPal comes from the stock market response. thus far to these rumors, quoting Bloomberg. In response to market rumors regarding a potential acquisition of Pinterest by PayPal, PayPal stated that it is not pursuing an acquisition of Pinterest at this time, the company said in a one-sentence statement Monday. Analyst questioned the logic of the deal after the initial reports, quote, we are perplexed by this potential transaction and see little or no strategic rationale, Andrew Jeffrey, an analyst with truest security said, quote, we see such a move as an act of near desperation, end quote. Tesla said it has rolled back its full self-driving beta test from

version 10.3, which improved many items like brake lights and turn signal detection, all the way back to 10.2 after, quote, seeing some issues, quoting the verge. Version 10.3 began rolling out on Saturday night slash Sunday morning with a long list of release notes. The list mentions changes starting with introducing driver profiles that can swap between different characteristics for following distance, rolling stops, or exiting passing lanes. It's supposed to better detect brake lights, turn signals, and hazard lights from other vehicles, along with reduced false slowdowns and improved offsetting for pedestrians. However, on Sunday afternoon, Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla is, quote, seeing some issues with 10.3, so rolling back to 10.2 temporarily.

This is to be expected with beta software. It is impossible to test all hardware configs in all conditions with internal QA, hence public beta, end quote. Meanwhile, in potentially way more consequential news, at least for Tesla as a business, quoting a different story from the verge. Rental car company Hertz has ordered 100,000 Teslas as part of an ambitious plan to electrify its fleet. A first tranche of Tesla's Model 3 sedans will be available to rent from Hertz in major U.S. and European markets from early November, said the company in a press statement. The announcement comes just months after Hertz escaped bankruptcy. News of the purchase was first reported by Bloomberg, which says the deal is the single largest order ever for electric vehicles and worth $4.2 billion

in revenue to Tesla. The automaker stock was up 4.3% on the news in pre-market trading. It was also reported this morning that Tesla's Model 3 became the first electric vehicle to top monthly sales charts in Europe this September. Earlier this month, the company reported record sales in its third quarter, despite chip shortages denting the automotive market. Anyone renting a Tesla from Hertz will be able to use the automakers network of 3,000 superchargers across the U.S. and Europe. Hertz says it's planning on supplementing these chargers with thousands of its own, dispersed, quote, throughout its location network, end quote.

Microsoft says the Russian-backed Nobelium group, responsible for the Solar Winds Hack, is still targeting global IT supply chains with 14 breaches just since May of this year. I wonder if this news might be related. Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket chain was hacked on Saturday, halting online grocery orders through Sunday. Tesco says its site and app are back up and running. But back to that Microsoft report, quoting bleeping computer. The main targets of these new attacks are resellers and technology service providers

that deploy and manage cloud services and similar tech for their customers. Microsoft notified impacted targets of the attacks after spotting them and also added detections to their threat protection products, enabling those targeted in the future to spot intrusion attempts. Since May, we have notified more than 140 resellers and technology service providers that have been targeted by Nobellium, said Tom Burt, corporate vice president at Microsoft. We continue to investigate, but to date we believe as many as 14 of these resellers and service providers have been compromised, end quote. As Bert added, in all, more than 600 Microsoft customers were attacked thousands of times, although with a very low rate of success, between July and October. These attacks have been a part of a larger wave of Nobellium activities this summer.

In fact, between July 1 and October 19 this year, we informed 609 customers that they had been attacked 22,868 times by Nobellium with a success rate in the low single digits, Bert said. By comparison prior to July 1st, 2021, we had notified customers about attacks from all nation-state actors 20,500 times over the past three years, end quote. This shows that Nobelium is still attempting to launch attacks similar to the one they pulled off after breaching solar wind systems to gain long-term access to the systems of targets of interest and establish espionage and exfiltration channels, end quote. Finally today, if you'll remember last week, I put out a call for someone to explain WorldCoin to me and why the whole project, which is ostensibly to give everyone

in the world cryptocurrency for free so that they could eventually support some sort of a universal basic income scheme, why that all required, you know, scanning everybody's eyeballs. Well, listener Ryan reached out to answer the bat signal, quoting his tweet thread to me. Number one, decentralized identity is one of the biggest challenges of blockchain. The most obvious necessity of identity is for voting, whether at the consensus level of a protocol or for keeping track of real-life votes, it all breaks down if there is no way to track identity. Number two, most solutions to identity require some level of centralization.

The most robust and promising solution for everyday life seems to be the DID or decentralized identity standard, being developed by the W3C, which requires a trusted third party to issue an identity that can be used by an individual as easily as a digital crypto wallet for better or worse. Various other protocols like at Proof of Humanity, at IDNA network, and of course WorldCoin attempt to achieve identity in a more decentralized way. Number three, enter biometrics. WorldCoin is chasing the concept that a biometric signature is the perfect replacement for the private key used in most crypto networks. It's very easy to lose a private key. Difficult to lose an eyeball, though. There is an entire

follow-up tweet storm about why biometrics as private keys are probably a terrible idea, especially when funded and developed behind closed doors, but the internet can do that topic far better justice, end quote. To which, an apparent member of the WorldCoin team tweeted in response, quote, the whole WorldCoin team agrees that biometrics make terrible private keys, and that's why we're not using them in that way. And then he linked to a privacy blog post from WorldCoin and a How How It Works post, both of which I've linked to in the show notes, but counterpoint from an unrelated thread posted by Edward Snowden, quote, this looks like it produces a global, hash database of people's iris scans for, quote, fairness and waves away the implications by saying,

quote, we deleted the scans. Yeah, but you save the hashes produced by the scans. Hashes that match future scans. Don't catalog eyeballs. Don't use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don't use biometrics for anything. But we use ZK proofs. Great. Clever. Still bad. The human body is not a ticket punch, end quote. That's all for today. day, nothing pithy for you. Talk to you tomorrow.