Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 03/14 - Facebook Under Criminal Investigation

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Facebook’s data sharing is now under criminal investigation, and the company had a bad night with its services intermittently down across the globe, Dropbox is cracking down on freeloaders, Silicon Valley wants to build a monument to itself, and Google makes a π Day statement. Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Tiny.website Links: Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation (NYTimes) Google launches Android Q Beta 1 (Venture Beat) Telegram gained three million new users during Facebook outage (The Verge) Tumblr traffic dropped by nearly 100M views the month after it banned porn (TNW) Dropbox device linking limits just got added for Basic accounts (SlashGear) Microsoft announces Xbox Live for any iOS or Android game (The Verge) In Silicon Valley, Plans for a Monument to Silicon Valley (NYTimes) Silicon Valley Wants a Monument to Itself. Will It Scale? (NYMag) Pi in the sky: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4 trillion digits of Archimedes’ constant on Google Cloud (Google Cloud Blog) 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 Thursday, March 14th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook's data sharing is now under criminal investigation. And the company had a bad night last night with its services intermittently down across the globe. Dropbox is cracking down on freeloaders. Silicon Valley wants to build a monument to itself. And Google makes a pie day statement. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. According to the New York Times, Facebook's data sharing deals are under federal criminal investigation. In fact, a grand jury in New York subpoenaed at least two mobile device makers who had previously partnered with Facebook.

Quoting from the Times, both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users. The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Sony that had cut. sharing deals with the world's dominant social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in the New York Times, let the companies see users' friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has phased out most of the partnerships over the past two years. We are cooperating with investigators and take these probes seriously, a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. We've provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledge that we will continue to do so, end quote. It's the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York

that has impaneled the grand jury inquiry. And it's easy to forget this, but prosecutors for the Northern District of California are still running an active investigation into the whole Cambridge Analytica, Bruhaha. And it's worth pointing out, as the Times piece does, while Facebook has gotten all the criticism for shopping your data around, plenty of other companies were more than happy to get access to that data

since Facebook was making it available. And again, maybe this news makes the timing of Mark Zuckerberg's blog post from a week ago pretty interesting. Or as Vice News editor-in-chief Ryan McCarthy tweeted, quote, Facebook's pivot to privacy now making a little more sense, end quote. Google today made the first previews of Android Q available to developers, available for download now at Google.com slash Android slash beta. so long as you're running a pixel device. This is the fourth year running

that Google has released the development preview of the next version of Android in March. Highlights from this new version of Android, quoting from Ventrabeat, if you want the short version, here are the first Android Q beta highlights, additional privacy and security features, enhancements for foldables,

new connectivity APIs, new media codecs and camera capabilities, NNAPI extensions, Vulcan 1.1 support, and faster app startup. With Android P, the feature that stood out the most in the first developer preview, was support for notches and other screen cutouts. The same would likely have been the case for Android Q in terms of foldables, but Google unveiled native support for foldables in November, end quote.

You might have noticed, but intermittently across the world last night, users were reporting issues using Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even Oculus. For some users, they could not even access these services. For others, various features like messaging or stories stopped working. Well, Facebook has officially said things have been fixed. Tweeting, quote, Yesterday as a result of a server configuration change,

many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We're very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone's patience, end quote. Now look, outages affected. everyone from time to time, and a lot of times I don't even report on these, especially because they're going to inevitably be fixed soon. But platforms do live in mortal fear of this sort of thing. Putting on the history hat for you for a second, Twitter managed to survive as a platform despite routine outages, though poor performance did kill Friendster. Early on in eBay's history,

they had a bug so severe that people were worried for a good 48 hours or so that the company might have to throw everything out and code the site up again from scratch. And while this never looked to be an existential threat or anything like that to Facebook, platforms never like to give their users a chance to see what life would be like without them. See how Reddit basically stole Diggs audience. And so I'm not saying there's anything here, but the CEO of Messaging Appel Durov posted a message on his personal telegram channel saying, quote, I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.

Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone, end quote. Interesting, if true. Telegram supposedly only had 200 million active users a year ago, so 3 million in a day is quite something. Again, if true. But anyway, things are fixed now, so move along, people. But before we do, my favorite bit of snark came from great friend of the podcast Chris Mims, who tweeted, quote, what if Facebook went down

because Harvard finally unplugged the tower PC in Mark's old room where it's still hosted, end quote. Really, the Reddit versus Dig thing that I was just telling you about was more about a site redesign, a disastrous one, and the community deciding Dig was no longer an amenable platform for what they wanted to do. Social audiences can be fickle. If you need more proof of this,

I point you to the fact that apparently, since it decided to ban pornography in December, Tumblr has lost more than 100 million views, which represents a 13% audience decline in about 30 days. Quoting from the next web, according to data from web analytics firm, Similar Web, Tumblr's problems started, predictably, with its adult content ban. In December, it was flying high with approximately 521 million page views that month. 30 days later, that had dropped to just 437 million. We can't say we didn't warn you.

We wrote about the ramifications of Tumblr's decision not once, not twice, but thrice, pointing out that Tumblr's users would flee to greener pastures, that its ban was breaking up safe spaces for women and other marginalized communities, and that the language in its ban was inherently sexist, end quote. No word on where this NSFW-loving audience has gone in lieu of Tumblr, a la Dig versus Reddit. but if you do have any insight on that, let me know in our own subreddit. Word of warning to you Dropbox freeloaders out there.

Dropbox has quietly updated its website, putting a cap on how many devices a free Dropbox account can now be used on. New users can get two gigabytes of storage for free, but unlike in the past where you could use that Dropbox account across an unlimited number of devices, even on the free plan, as of now, Dropbox basic accounts will be limited to just three devices, including mobile. To use the unlimited device account linking feature, you would need now upgrade to Dropbox Plus

or Dropbox premium plans, which start at $9.99 a month. Now, you can go into your Dropbox account and unlinked devices you don't use anymore, but according to Slashgear, quote, there are a few saving graces to Dropbox decision for a start. If you're a basic user who already had more than three devices linked prior to this change in policy, the company won't be forcing you to deauthorize some. Previously linked devices will remain linked, Dropbox says, but you won't be able to add any new ones. If you just want to access your files from another place, meanwhile, accessing Dropbox through the browser interface doesn't count as linking.

Of course, you don't then get automatic synchronization, but that may not be a concern if all you need is a file or two from a friend. or a colleague's computer, end quote. I guess we're going to be inundated with gaming news for the next few weeks. Everyone is gearing up for the next revolution in gaming and positioning themselves accordingly. Microsoft today launched a new cross-platform SDK that allows game developers to add Xbox live features to iOS or Android games. So achievements, gamer score, hero stats, friends lists, clubs, the whole shebang, quoting from The Verge. we believe so strongly in community

and Xbox Live really being at the heart of our gaming community explains Kareem Chowdry, Microsoft's Gaming Cloud Chief in a media brief this week. If you watch what we've done, especially with Minecraft over the past few years, we've taken Xbox Live to as many platforms as Minecraft is on as possible, really uniting all those communities together

with a consistent singular experience for those gamers, end quote. But no Xbox Live on Nintendo Switch yet, not clear if that is because Nintendo didn't want to play ball or what. And Valve has announced an early beta of SteamLink Anywhere, a SteamLink extension that allows users to connect to their computers and play games from anywhere in the world. I'll let Dean Takahashi of Venture Beat tell you about this. Quote, the service is available free of charge to all Steam users

through the SteamLink hardware or the SteamLink app and can be used to connect to any computer running Steam, Valve said. The SteamLink Anywhere feature will be automatically rolled out to SteamLink hardware customers with beta firmware, the Android SteamLink beta app, and the Raspberry Pi SteamLink app. Once users get the update and opt into the Steam client, dated March 11th or newer, they may connect by selecting other computer when searching for computers and following the instructions on screen, end quote. I didn't get to do this story last week, but Silicon Valley wants to build a monument to itself. Let me just quote from the lead from the New York Times piece that discusses this.

Paris has the Eiffel Tower. St. Louis is inseparable from the gateway arch. Seattle boasts the space needle. Washington has its monument. Silicon Valley wants its own universally recognized landmark, something that symbolizes its power and reach. If the San Jose City Council approves the project this month, an international design competition will be announced this spring. The winning entry could be built on a city park as soon as 2021.

Capturing the tech world in one sculpture or structure or art installation will be a difficult job. The devices and platforms that made Silicon Valley famous were created in low-slung office parks of limited architectural distinction by entrepreneurs who risk their investors' capital, not their lives. It's not really an underdog story, nor, as many filmmakers have found out, a particularly visual one, end quote. Apparently, an entity titled the San Jose Light Tower Corporation, has raised $1 million to build some sort of monument and expects to raise tens of millions more, which you'd figure they could do in Silicon Valley. They hope not to have to use any tax money on the project, and they plan to erect the monument in a community park called Arena Green. next to a highway. So first up, everybody, maybe a better name for the park.

But also, this isn't a terrible idea. I mean, if you've ever been to the Googleplex or Apple HQ, you'll know that in Silicon Valley, tourists are literally limited to visiting company headquarters and taking pictures outside of signs by the side of the road, or going to garages with people still living in the houses that are attached to them. It's just, though, what would a monument to Silicon Valley be exactly? A giant arrow icon as if a disembodied giant mouse was clicking on the city? And also, wouldn't you run into a bit of an issue here that is pretty unique to tech?

If you had commissioned a giant monument to the PC, say, in the early 90s, say, it would be a giant beige tower sitting next to a CRT screen, right? outmoded, outdated. Who knows if anyone will even be using computers 20 years from now? As Justin Davidson wrote in New York Magazine, quote, we run the risk, face the certainty, of putting up a monument to last year's breakthrough. For instance, now everything is about the cloud, right?

The most interesting way I can imagine to honor an industry built on insubstantial energy would be to design an equally vaporous monument. How can you make something fixed and permanent that encompasses constant, change, fluidity, obsolescence, and ubiquity. That would be an interesting brief for the RFP. Design a memorial that can be updated instantly and often for as long as we choose to support it, end quote. To which Max Reed responded, quote,

Not many memorials these days require firmware updates, but there's a first for everything. Finally, today it is Pi Day, 3.14. I think I've said before, I don't know how I feel about the Internet's tendency to love dad joke holidays. Pie Day, May the 4th. I know for a fact I abhorred the obsession with April Fool's jokes. But Google has never been a company to shy away from making numerical-based jokes. Even their initial public offering was an elaborate math joke.

In their IPO, Google sold exactly $2,718,281,888,8.000 worth of equity. If you know your math, you know, that that represents the first nine decimal places in the mathematical number E, Euler's number, which is, of course, an irrational number. Well, in honor of Pi Day, Google today announced that it has broken the world record for the most accurate value of Pi, using cloud computing to calculate Pi out to 31.4 trillion digits. Quote, we achieve this feat using Y Cruncher, a Pi benchmark program developed by Alexander J. Yee, using a Google compute engine virtual machine cloud.

cluster. 31.4 trillion digits is almost 9 trillion digits more than the previous world record set in November 2016 by Peter Trob. Ye independently verified the calculation using Bellard's formula and BDP formula, end quote. This feat got an official tweet of recognition from the official Guinness Book of World Records Twitter account and officially the Google employee who did the work and so deserves the world's record kudos is Emma Haruka Owau, who works as a cloud developer advocate at Google in Japan. Though as GVs, Ken Norton tweeted, quote, I found that once you memorize pie to a trillion digits or so, you can just start making it up and nobody knows, end quote. That's all for today. I do want to apologize for the late posting of the show yesterday. I just got behind in my normal processes.

So the show was going to be late one way or another. Then when I went to post, there were all sorts of issues with the feeds. Anchor assures me that whatever the hiccup was yesterday, it's been fixed, so hopefully you'll get this show well before 5 p.m. Eastern, although I'm writing these words at 252 p.m. Eastern, so I am running a bit behind again today. Anyway, off to record this now. Talk to you tomorrow.