Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 02/21 - YouTube's Ad Problem (Again) and Galaxy Reactions

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

Take-aways from all the hands-on reports with the new Samsung Galaxy S10 phones, hands-OFF reports about the Galaxy Fold, Apple teams up with Goldman Sachs on a new credit card, YouTube faces yet another scandal running ads on horrible content, and a look at how law enforcement grabbing location data from Google using "reverse location search warrants." Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Castro Podcast App Links: Samsung Galaxy S10 and S10+ hands-on (Engadget)  You can remap the Bixby button on Samsung’s Galaxy S10 to do whatever you want (The Verge)   The Galaxy Fold makes no sense as a consumer device yet (The Verge)  Apple, Goldman Sachs Team Up on Credit Card Paired With iPhone (Wall Street Journal) Nestle, Disney Pull YouTube Ads, Joining Furor Over Child Videos (Bloomberg)  On YouTube, a network of paedophiles is hiding in plain sight (Wired UK) Youtube is Facilitating the Sexual Exploitation of Children, and it's Being Monetized (2019) (Matt Watson, YouTube)  YouTube terminates more than 400 channels following child exploitation controversy (The Verge) Close Enough (Slate/Future Tense) 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 Media. ride home for Thursday, February 21st, 2019. I'm Chris Higgins in for Brian McCullough. Today, hands-on reports with the new Samsung Galaxy S-10 phones. Hands-off reports with the

Galaxy Fold. Apple teams up with Goldman Sachs on a new credit card. YouTube faces another scandal running ads on horrible, horrible content. And a look at how police are grabbing location data using reverse location search warrants. Take out your pocket-concent. and let's get into it. The first hands-on reports with Samsung's new Galaxy lineup are in, and the reviews are solid. The theme seems to be a good year-over-year evolution and enough variety in the lineup to meet different needs. Here's a roundup of six key things we learned from all the hands-on reviews.

Number one. The Bixby button is still there, but you can reprogram it to launch other apps, including, you know, Google Assistant. You can reassign either the single or double press of that button to open any app you want. whichever pressing style you don't reassign remains the Bixby activator. While we're at it, Bixby now understands a few more languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, and finally, British English. Number two, the screens live up to the HDR 10 plus hype. These are displays capable of showing 10-bit color, and according to hands-on reports, they look awesome.

Number three, the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner under the front glass of the S-10 and S-10-plus field. feels futuristic and it works well, although it does require a little more training than you might be used to. On the S10E, the sensor is on a side button, but hey, at least it's not on the back, right? And yes, facial recognition is still there if you want that. Number four, the triple camera setup on the high-end S-10 models takes awesome pictures, but perhaps more interesting is video stabilization. Samsung is using that ultra-wide sensor, which happens to be 16 megapixels, to provide the stabilization data for the the other two 12-machixel cameras on the back. What this means in practice is smooth 4K video without a ton of cropping in to get rid of the shakiness. Oh yeah, and the front camera can also

shoot 4K video. Floggers, take note. Number five, the premium ceramic back options available on the highest end S-10 plus models are popular with reviewers. Sherilyn Lowe wrote for NGadgett, the material offers better scratch resistance than aluminum and just feels classier. End quote. And number six. The new S-10s include Samsung Knox, a feature that can securely store your private keys. Crypto nerds, here's your new phone. Now, after all the hands-on with the S-10 models, I was really hoping to see hands-on with the Galaxy Fold.

But no, just on-stage demos so far. Although it's supposed to launch on April 26th in the U.S., the ordering process is still unclear. The Samsung website has a little form you can find. out to, quote, hear more about the next galaxy. Okay, cool. So when do orders begin? I mean, this thing is supposed to ship in 64 days. Well, stay tuned, I guess. Meanwhile, the opinion pieces are landing. At the verge, Vlad Savov wrote an editorial titled, The Galaxy Fold Makes No Sense as a Consumer Device Yet. In it, he calls the fold, quote, Samsung's Google Glass, an exciting technical

showcase that is hitting the market far too soon and risked. souring everyone on the entire nascent category." He goes on to mention the thickness of the device, which, when closed, is, quote, equivalent to that of sandwiching two Galaxy S handsets together. Now, there are questions about how good the folding screen really is in practice. Does it have a visible ridge in the middle or not? This seems to be unanswerable right now,

as we haven't seen any hands-on reviews yet. Some photos from the announcement seem to show a small ridge in the middle, in the middle, but other demos and videos don't. Savov likened the fold to a beta product released to the public, with its prohibitively high price tag limiting it only to enthusiasts who will tolerate its quirks, like maybe that not totally flat screen, but we don't know for sure because nobody's gotten to touch it yet. On the other hand, there's real excitement about the technology. Let's not forget that. Over on Twitter, Nilai Patel wrote,

Are we all just taking it for granted that an actual folding phone exists and will ship next month? It might be a medium good product, but holy b***, this was absolutely the stuff of dreams when I was a kid. There wasn't even CGI to fake it properly. End quote. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is teaming up with Goldman Sachs to release a credit card offering tight integration with Apple wallet on iPhone. The card will reportedly offer features like setting spending budgets, tracking tax. purchase rewards and 2% cash back. It'll be a MasterCard and its plan for launch later this year. Apple plans to beta test the offering with its own employees, testing integration with new Apple

wallet features coming in future versions of iOS. While it's unclear specifically what those new features will be, the journal reports that Apple executives are borrowing ideas from the Apple Watch and its fitness rings analogy and applying those ideas to budgets. So perhaps with this card, your phone will be able to act as a kind of financial coach, warning you when you're spending more than normal or encouraging you to pay down credit card debt. In general, the idea here seems to be a credit card that encourages healthy spending activities.

On Twitter, Maya Zahavi wrote, fascinating partnership between Apple and Goldman Sachs, looking for revenue through a digitally encompassing financial management platform in the iPhone Garden. Wonder how that squares with the biz model could very easily become predatory, end quote. This will actually be the first credit card issued by Goldman Sachs, and it's expected to help draw customers to the company's online consumer bank called Marcus. On the Apple side, this is all about pumping up that sweet, sweet services revenue by expanding use of Apple Pay.

Okay, quick content warning. This next story mentions pedophilia, though obviously we've avoided using any graphic language or descriptions. But if you need to skip this one, you know where the skip ahead button is. Once again, YouTube's algorithms are causing headaches for advertisers, but this time it's a toxic combination of algorithm and policy, both of which are failing to protect children from exploitation, and seemingly facilitating the interests of pedophiles on YouTube. Bloomberg reports that Disney has pulled all of its advertising from YouTube in the wake of this latest scandal, joining Nestle and Epic Games.

Let's dig into this awful story. On Sunday, YouTuber Matt Watson reported, quote, Over the past 48 hours, I've discovered a wormhole, as I would call it, into a softcore pedophile ring on YouTube. Here, pedophiles are trading social media contacts, they're providing links to actual child porn in YouTube comments, they're trading unlisted videos in secret, and YouTube's algorithm, through some kind of glitch or error in its programming, is actually facilitating their ability to do this. This is something that a lot of people have been aware of for a long time, end quote. What Watson found was that videos showing kids were often targeted by pedophile commenters who listed video timestamps in the comments, allowing users to jump directly to parts of the video where children did something of interest to other pedophiles.

Many of the videos are seemingly innocuous to the rest of us. These are things like kids doing gymnastics routines, or just like home movies filmed by their parents. But these commenters have found specific moments and share. those moments and gone a step further. They've used the YouTube comments to share contact information so they can exchange info off the platform in apps like WhatsApp or Kick. Many of the videos in question have huge view numbers, way out of proportion with other videos in the same channel, meaning that one video of your kid doing gymnastics was identified and promoted by the YouTube recommendation algorithm, sometimes to the tune of millions of views. Now, since November

2017, YouTube is at a policy of turning off comments on videos where users are saying things that YouTube deems, and I quote, inappropriate. However, that policy doesn't always work. A report by Wired UK writer KG Orphanides uncovered video after video featuring just these sorts of comments and advertisements on the videos. According to Orphanides, it appears that Google's filtering doesn't work as well on non-English comments, so many of those threads are in Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese. And this is gross. There are even instances where pedophile commenters got children to respond to them in the comments. It's a clear failure on YouTube's part, whatever the technical or human errors or both that caused it.

When Orphine Days reached out to advertisers whose ads were running on this content, they were shocked and vowed to pull the ads and investigate. That's why the story has blown up so much because Disney and Nestle and Epic are all doing that. But that's not where it ends. YouTube's video recommendation algorithm is very good at suggesting. these niche videos, leading viewers down what Matt Wilson called the wormhole. Multiple reporters followed Watson's lead and confirmed that it's incredibly easy to get YouTube to start recommending pedophile-friendly videos, including those that are monetized with ads, and that those videos serve as a hub for pedophiles to organize online.

Matt Burgess on Twitter summed it up by saying, The technical fixes YouTube tried don't seem to have worked, but a huge problem is the algorithm, end quote. Then he goes on to cite the Wired UK article by Orphanides, quote, YouTube doesn't just recommend you watch more videos of children innocently playing. Its algorithm specifically suggests videos that are seemingly popular with other pedophiles.

End quote. Late breaking update this morning YouTube told the verge that it has terminated more than 400 channels and deleted tens of millions of comments. They have also reported comments and certain accounts to launch, enforcement complying with legal requirements. In a statement to the verge, YouTube said, quote, any content including comments that endangers minors is abhorrent, and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube, there's more to be done, and we continue to work to improve and

catch abuse more quickly. End quote. And last today, in Slate, Aaron Mack takes a deep dive on so-called reverse location search warrants that police are using to locate piles of Google app and Android users after crimes have been committed. Let me quote this bit here to get started. Quote, police departments across the country have been knocking at Google's door for at least the last two years with warrants to tap into the company's extensive stores of cell phone location data. Known as reverse location search warrants, these legal mandates allow law enforcement to

sweep up the coordinates and movements of every cell phone in a broad area. The police can then check to see if any of the phones came close to the crime scene. In doing so, however, the police can end up not only fishing for a suspect, but also gathering the location data of potentially hundreds or thousands of innocent people, end quote. Google told Slate after the piece was first published that they always require a warrant for this kind of thing, and, quote, always push back on overly broad requests, end quote, where their user's privacy is concerned. But that doesn't quite square with a series of specific investigations that Mac details in the story. For instance, in Minnesota, an investigation by Minnesota Public Radio found that at least 22 reverse location search warrants have been obtained since August of last year. Quoting the piece again, the warrants have at times sought location data in 33-hour windows, potentially giving officers information on tens of thousands of people, end quote. And while these requests may sound similar to the cell phone tower records that have been used for years in criminal cases, they're far more grand.

Google has data from devices that use GPS and Wi-Fi signals to determine a very precise location on an ongoing basis rather than the broad triangulation possible using cell phone towers and intermittent pings. So going back to that Minnesota example though, there are clear problems both based on Fourth Amendment rights under the US Constitution as well as state law. Quoting the piece here, law enforcement needs to suspect a particular person or criminal activity, not just go, for example, search every home in a given area, says Jennifer Lynch, who serves as the surveillance litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Minnesota also has a statute dictating that police must name a person of interest in tracking warrants, so it would seem that these reverse location searches should be technically illegal in the state, end quote. Reminder, 22 warrants approved in Minnesota just since August of last year. Some police departments pushed back on the reporting. In Maine, investigators said

that they follow a process in which Google assigns anonymous IDs to each phone in the data set provided to police. Then, when investigators pinpoint a specific phone of interest, they go back and get another warrant to identify that specific device. The problem with this approach is that it's at the discretion of the local police department. Quoting Jerome Greco, a state attorney for the Legal Aid Society here, just because one police department does it this way doesn't mean the jurisdiction next to it is going to do the same, Greco said. For us have to rely upon an internal policy of a particular police department that could change at any time is not sufficient."

End quote. That's all for today's tech meme ride home. Brian will be back with you on Friday. You can follow me on Twitter at Chris Higgins. Also, I want to give a quick shout out to the Twitter bot Endless Jeopardy, my new addiction. It posts procedurally generated clues on the hour, and the most liked response gets a retweet. So here's an example. The clue is, a typical storm contains.

about 73 pounds of this. And the winning response from Twitter user Matt, What is men? Hallelujah. Endless Jeopardy on Twitter. Go win yourself some internet joke points.