Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 06/27 - The Mystery That Is Superhuman

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

Twitter still allows public figures to break its rules, but it will warn you when they do, Zuckerberg says you need him on that wall, the US Wireless Emergency Alert system can be easily spoofed, and the mystery that is Superhuman. Sponsors: SVB.com/next WeWorkRemotely.com Links: Twitter will now hide — but not remove — harmful tweets from public figures (The Verge) Mark Zuckerberg Is Rethinking Deepfakes (The Atlantic) Mark Zuckerberg: We can’t stop Russian election interference by ourselves, US government must help (CNBC) Amazon partners with retailers for new Counter package pickup service, starting with Rite-Aid (GeekWire) Second Florida city pays giant ransom to ransomware gang in a week (ZDNet) Researchers Demonstrate How U.S. Emergency Alert System Can Be Hijacked and Weaponized (Motherboard) Would You Pay $30 a Month to Check Your Email? (NYTimes) Ad-Free Feed! 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, June 27th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter still allows public figures to break its rules, but it will warn you when they do. Zuckerberg says, you need him on that wall. The U.S. wireless emergency alert system can easily be spoofed,

and the mystery that is superhuman. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Following endless criticism, Twitter announced today that it is rolling out a notification system for tweets from political figures, verified users, and accounts with more than 100,000 followers that break its guidelines. See, the criticism has been, if you're a big enough public figure, you can say or do whatever you want on Twitter, even things that are obviously in violation of their user guidelines, even things that mere mortal users would face immediate outright bans for. Quote, if a tweet is flagged as violating platform rules, a team of people from across the company will decide whether it is a, quote, matter of public interest, and quote, if so, a light

gray box will appear before the tweet, notifying users that it's in violation, but it will remain available to users who click through the box. In theory, this could preserve the tweet as part of the public record without allowing it to be promoted to new audiences through the Twitter platform. If a tweet receives this notice, Twitter will feature it less on the platform. It will no longer appear in safe search, the top tweets timeline, live events pages, recommended push notifications, the notifications tab, or the explore page. The notice will not be applied retroactively, and it will only appear on tweets in violation beginning today. In the past, we've allowed certain tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public's

interest, but it wasn't clear when and how we made those determinations. Twitter's safety team wrote in a blog post. Serving the public conversation includes providing the ability for anyone to talk about what matters to them. This can be especially important when engaging with government officials and political figures, end quote. I'll just leave this here with a tweet from Paris Martineau. Quote, when I asked Twitter whether it will inform world leaders that their tweets have been quarantined, the spokesperson laughed, end quote. Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed at the Spend Ideas Festival yesterday and he made some headlines. For example, Facebook has always given its users a lot of leeway about what they can post, even if they're posting something false.

But Zuckerberg says that when it comes to deepfakes, those AI generated videos that can make it look like people are saying things they never said, Facebook might be thinking hard about how to handle that going forward. Quote, there is a question of whether deep fakes are actually just a completely different category of thing from normal false statements overall, he told the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and I think there is a very good case that they are, end quote. Zuckerberg today, however, said that Facebook is working through its policy process to figure out what to do about deep fakes. He offered that the problem, from his perspective, was that any definition had to be precisely scoped, end quote. You might have heard about the controversy surrounding

a deep fake video of Nancy Pelosi that Facebook allowed to stay up recently. And there was even in response to that, a deep fake video of Zuckerberg himself that Facebook also allowed to remain up. Later on in the conversation when the subject turned to Russian interference in the U.S. elections using Facebook as a platform, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government's weak response to the meddling has only made the problem worse. Quote, one of the mistakes that I worry about is that After 2016, when the government didn't take any kind of counteraction, the signal that was sent to the world was that, okay, we're open for business, Zuckerberg said. Countries can try to do this stuff and our companies will try their best to limit it, but fundamentally there isn't going to be a major recourse from the American government, end quote. And when it comes to government regulation, Zuckerberg continued to literally ask Congress to regulate him, especially around things like bad.

add content, election interference, et cetera, quote, whether regulation comes in the form of democratic process, legislation, or industry self-regulation, were past the point where it makes sense for Facebook to unilaterally make these decisions, he said. But at the same time, quote, breaking up these companies wouldn't make any of these companies better. You would have those issues. You'd just be much less equipped to deal with them, end quote. This is how Brian Fung, who was in the audience reported on the interview on Twitter. Quote, Zuckerberg pushes back against Chris Hughes's call for a Facebook breakup, saying, breaking up Facebook into smaller companies wouldn't solve issues like misinformation.

He points to YouTube and Reddit, which he says are smaller, yet still face some of the same challenges. He says the prospect of a breakup, quote, feels nice, but, quote, we want to make sure the things we do actually address the problems, end quote. That last bit is actually seemingly becoming the official party line that Facebook is rolling out as it takes a defensive stance towards possible regulations. I've literally heard almost that exact phrasing used by other Facebook executives recently. What do you want? You want us to fix the bad things?

Well, we're the only ones big enough with the resources enough to fix the bad things. Don't break us up so we can have a chance to clean up the bad things. Who else is going to do it? Quoting from Owen Williams in his newsletter, as Facebook increasingly finds itself on defense, it's getting really good at playing these angles, trying to look like it invites oversight and review, while still dominating the process to ultimately control the conversation.

Like in a salary negotiation where you shouldn't name a number before the other side to avoid anchoring expectations, Zuckerberg is trying to define that ground floor for antitrust regulators. Don't break us up, but do anything else, end quote. You want us on that wall. You need us on that wall. You can't handle the truth. Amazon has officially launched Counter, a package pickup service.

Only in the U.S. for now. Its launch partner is Right Aid, with the service currently available in 100 right aid stores as of today, expanding to 1,500 locations by the end of the year. Quoting from Geekwire, The new service counter turns physical retail locations into package pickup centers, giving customers another delivery option for their Amazon orders at no extra charge. It went live today in more than 100 right aid stores and will reach 1,500 locations by the end of the year. Amazon plans to ink deals with other businesses and chains.

It's under the Amazon Hub umbrella, which also includes Amazon lockers for picking up packages. It's not clear how these partnerships are structured financially. In any case, it's a fascinating deal. physical retailers such as right aid hosting package pickup hubs for Amazon, the e-commerce giant that has taken business away from brick and mortar retail companies over the past several years. How does right aid feel about lowering last mile shipping costs for Amazon and helping its customers, the very ones that may have otherwise purchased products from physical right aid stores before Amazon rose to e-commerce dominance, quote, creating a seamless, convenient customer experiences,

a key element of our strategy and digital transformation. So said Jocelyn Conrad, Executive Vice President, Pharmacy and Retail Operations of Rite Aid in a statement, end quote. Well, it's happened again, less than a week after a different Florida city paid $600,000 in ransom to hackers. A different Florida town, Lake City, population 65,000, voted to pay around $500,000 in Bitcoin to ransomware hackers. The decision to pay the ransom demand was made after the city's, suffered a catastrophic malware infection earlier this month on June 10th, which the city described as a triple threat. Despite the city's IT staff disconnecting impacted systems within 10 minutes of detecting the attack, a ransomware strain infected almost all its computer systems, with the exception of the police and fire departments,

which ran on a separate network. Lake City government work has been crippled for nearly two weeks because of the incident. A ransom demand was made a week after the infection with hackers reaching out to the city's insurance provider, the League of Cities, which negotiated a ransom payment of 42 Bitcoins last week, end quote. Apparently, a third city now. The village of Key Biscayne near Miami has also reported a data breach. No word on if they are facing ransom demands as well. And actually, for all of my Googling, I couldn't find the answer to this, which to me seems like the key question. Does paying the ransom work?

That first city, Riviera Beach. After paying the ransom, did they get access to their systems again? If anyone knows the answer to this, please get in touch. Sort of on a similar tip, researchers have demonstrated how the U.S. Wireless Emergency Alert System can easily be spoofed with pirate cell towers. So someone could cause mass panic by sending emergency alerts to all of our phones, warning of, say, a terrorist attack or a nuclear bomb or what have you. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, quote, built a mini-pirate cell tower

using easily available hardware and open-source software. Using isolated RF shield boxes to mitigate any real-world harm, they then simulated attacks in the 50,000-seat Folsom Field at the university. 90% of the time the researchers say they were able to pass bogus alerts on to cell phones within range. The WEA system is currently co-managed by BOR. both the FCC and FEMA. The system is used to send cell phone users, everything from Amber Child Abduction alerts to severe weather warnings, and, as was first tested last October, presidential alerts. Given these broadcasts importance, they're blasted over a specific cellular LTE channel

to maximize reception in geographically targeted areas. But researchers found that it wasn't particularly difficult or expensive to hijack this process and send out the bogus messages. The transmission of these messages from the government to the cellular tower is secure. It's the transmission from the cellular tower to the end user that's open to manipulation and interference. The researchers found. The vulnerability potentially impacts not just US-LTE networks, but LTE networks from Europe to South Korea, end quote. Finally today, I've been waiting to do a segment on this for a while now. Superhuman is a $30 a month email service designed for email power users. Superhuman recently raised a $33 million series B round led by Andresen Horwitz at a $260 million valuation.

As of right now, Superhuman only has 15,000 users. Again, because Superhuman costs $30 a month. That's right, $30 a month just to check your email. Well, the New York Times finally has a profile up of the company that really is one of the busiest in Silicon Valley right now, believe me. starting about a year ago, the VC types and founder types that I know, all of their emails suddenly had that little message at the bottom sent by superhuman. It's the oldest viral marketing trick in the web book going all the way back to how Hotmail took off. But this time with an elitist twist. Only the coolest of the cool, the powerfulest of the powerful, seem to have superhuman. You ain't anybody if you ain't on superhuman seemed to be the thing. And beyond that,

Superhuman users swore by the product. We're downright evangelical about it. In fact, here's Hunter Walk, someone whose opinion and judgment I trust quite a bit. Quote, $1 a day for something that saves me a minimum of 50 to 30 minutes a day is a bargain. I'd pay another $10 a month for superhuman CRM and another $10 a month for superhuman calendar. It's not an email app. It's a vertical software as a service company for a segment of knowledge workers, end quote. And quoting from the Times profile, some of the apps features, such as ones that let users undo sending, track when their emails are opened, and automatically pull up a contacts LinkedIn profile, are available in other third-party email plugins. But there are bells and whistles

that I hadn't seen before, like instant intro, which moves the sender of an introductory email to BCC, saving you from having to manually re-enter that person's address, or the scheduling feature, which sees that you're typing next Tuesday and automatically pulls up your calendar for that day. These features will appeal most to power users who spend most of their day typing on a laptop or desktop. Superhuman has a mobile app, but much of the heavy-duty functionality requires a keyboard. Superhuman founder Rahul Vora said the app was targeted at people who spend three or more hours a day checking their email. When you're doing three-plus hours of email every day, it's your job, Mr. Vora said, and every single other job has a tool that makes you do it faster, end quote.

So a couple months ago, curiosity got the better of me, and I got someone to get me an invite to try superhuman out. See, that's actually the thing. It's invite only, and not only that, they will straight up reject you. They send you a lengthy, detailed questionnaire about what technology you use and what your workflow is. I've heard from people that if you answer wrong, admit that you're on an old MacBook Air, say, or a Windows PC or Android, say, and you'll never hear back from them. Now, I must have answered correctly because, again, two months ago, I got an email saying, Rahul would love to sit down with me over Zoom to do an hour-long onboarding to the superhuman platform. So again, look at all these hoops. They have to invite you,

you have to pass their test, then you have to spend an hour learning how the system works, all so you can have the privilege of paying them $30 a month to do your email, which is why I actually never responded back to them. That's actually the biggest mystery to me about superhuman. All of these erstwhile masters of the universe types that use superhuman, that evangelize superhuman, where did you find an hour in what I'm assuming is your jam-packed busy week to even get started with it. I'm sorry I didn't follow up, Rahul. Maybe this will totally revolutionize email for me

and instantly save me hours a week that I'm otherwise wasting. But unlike everybody else, it seems, I just don't have a spare hour to spend learning about a new product that maybe I'll use and maybe I won't. Who knows? Maybe that's my mistake. Summer cold, day three status update. Basically just don't ask. By the way, shortly after this show drops, another thing will drop in your feed, the trailer to another podcast.

Yes, this is essentially an ad. They call these RSS drops or RSS takeovers. I've been offered these before, and I've turned them down before, but I accepted this one because A, it's a podcast I actually have listened to and like. B, it's from a guy that I know and respect, and C, I actually think that it's right up your alley for a lot of you. So give a listen to the trailer, because, again, I think you might like it. Talk to you tomorrow.