Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 12/22 – Caroline Drops A Dime

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

SBF is in the US just in time to see two of his lieutenants have flipped on him to the Feds. Twitter rolls out Cashtags that are actually useful. ChatGPT lead to a “code red” at Google. Justice is coming for those expiring car warranty robo callers. And, surprise, the weekend longreads suggestions. Links: Two Bankman-Fried colleagues plead guilty to fraud (Washington Post) Twitter adds BTC and ETH price indexes to search function (CoinTelegraph) A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business (NYTimes) YouTube Paying Roughly $2 Billion a Year for NFL Sunday Ticket (WSJ) FCC proposes record $300 million fine against auto warranty robocall campaign (CyberScoop) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis (NYTimes) How the algorithm tipped the balance in Ukraine (Washington Post) Bob Gottlieb Is the Last of the Publishing Giants The 91-year-old editor waits for his 87-year-old star writer, Robert Caro, to turn in his book. (Vulture) 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 Membrite Home for Thursday, December 22nd, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. SBF is in the U.S. just in time to see two of his lieutenants flip on him to the feds. Twitter rolls out cash tags that are actually useful. Chat GPT led to a code red at Google.

Justice is coming for those expiring car warranty robocallers and surprise the weekend long-rate suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, it looks like Caroline dropped a dime on Sam Bankman-Freed, so did Gary Wang. The Southern District of New York says that ex-Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and ex-FTX CTO Gary Wang both pled guilty to federal charges and both are cooperating with ongoing investigations. Both have been released on a $250,000 bond, quoting the Washington Post. Two former colleagues of disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman Freed pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that they helped him orchestrate a year's

long scheme to defraud investors in FTX, the crypto trading platform that collapsed last month. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said Wednesday, the news came as Bankman Freed was being transferred to New York from the Bahamas, where he had been held in prison for over a week. The guilty pleas by Ellison and Wang signaled swiftly mounting legal peril for Bankman Freed as prosecutors assemble an arsenal of evidence against him. Ellison, who in addition to running Bankman Freed's crypto trading firm, was also his ex-girlfriend, pleaded guilty to seven counts that mirror a significant portion of Bankman-Freed's indictment. Her charges include conspiracies to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, and commodities fraud,

and money laundering. She faces up to 110 years in prison. Wang, co-founder of FDX, pleaded guilty to four conspiracy and fraud-related counts. He faces up to 50 years in prison. They are both cooperating with the Southern District of New York, U.S. Attorney Damien Williams said, end quote. Separately, because remember, there are multiple, legal processes moving forward at the same time. The SEC also charged ex-Alamydia CEO, Carolyn Ellison, and ex-FTX CTO, Gary Wang, for their roles in defrauding FTX's investors at SBF's direction between 2019 and 2022. I guess SBF is going to be in court today here in New York, maybe as I'm saying these words. By the way, the shoehorning in of the whole ex-girlfriend line

to that story about Carolyn Ellison was from the original writer, not from me, seems a bit more relevant to me that she was the CEO of Alameda Research. But also, remember how people were like, why is SBF going around giving all these interviews? Wouldn't the lawyers tell him to not do that? The fear would be that he would incriminate himself, right? But maybe what actually happened is by running around basically telegraphing to everyone that everyone was at fault but him. He was just a dumb guy who made a bunch of mistakes but also was kept in the dark. Maybe doing that, you know, telegraphed to the others that he was planning on shoving them under the bus. And maybe that motivated them to cut a deal.

Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut after all. Actual legitimate and valuable product release from Twitter. Twitter has released cash tags offering stock, ETF and crypto prices within search results using data from TradingView. and adding a view on Robin Hood link. Cash tags have been around in a quasi-official way for a while, but people were always like, why can't I use them to look up actual useful financial info? Well, here you go. This is something the previous management was never able to pull off. Quoting Coin Telegraph. In a series of tweets from the Twitter business account last night, whenever one tweets the symbol of a major stock, exchange traded fund or cryptocurrency,

with the dollar sign in front of it, people will be able to see a, clickable link that takes them to search results that now will include the pricing graphs for those symbols. It also noted that simply searching for the ticker symbol, whether for a stock or a crypto, will also bring up the price graph. Shortly after that, on December 22nd, Twitter CEO Elon Musk retweeted the announcement of the new feature stating that this is, quote, one of many product improvements coming to financial Twitter, end quote. It appears that Bitcoin and ETH are the only two cryptocurrencies with price charts at the time of writing. Other top cryptocurrencies, including Musk's beloved Dogecoin have not made the cut. However, Twitter business said that

it expects to expand its coverage of symbols and improve user experience in the coming weeks. Tech blogger Jane Manchin Wong noted to her 158,000 Twitter followers on December 21st that the charts are sourced from Trading Analysis Platform Trading View. The price charts also include a view on Robin Hood link that can be clicked in the bottom left-hand corner, suggesting the retail trading platform has teamed up with Twitter for this integration. there users are brought to Robin Hood's price chart for ETH, which provides an additional link below stating sign up to buy Ethereum. The same links are provided for Bitcoin, too. However, no partnership details have been disclosed between Twitter and Robin Hood, end quote. Again, you'd be surprised if this hadn't happened.

Sources are telling the New York Times that OpenAI releasing ChatGPT led Google to declare a code red, including reassigning teams to respond to the threat chat GPT poses to its search business. For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm. Some fear the company may be approaching a moment that the biggest Silicon Valley outfits dread, the arrival of an enormous technological change that could upend the business. Google has spent several years working on chatbots and, like other big tech companies, has aggressively pursued artificial intelligence technology. Google has already built a chatbot that could rival chat GPT. In fact, the technology at the heart of OpenAI's chatbot was developed by researchers at Google. Google may be reluctant to deploy this new tech

as a replacement for online search, however, because it is not suited to delivering digital ads, which accounted for more than 80% of the company's revenue last year. Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, has been involved in a series of meetings to define Google's AI strategy, and he has upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that chat GPT poses, according to a memo and audio recording obtained by the New York Times. Employees have also been tasked with building AI products that can create artwork and other images like OpenAI's Dali technology, which has been used by more than 3 million people. From now until a major conference expected to be hosted by Google in May,

teams within Google's research, trust, and safety, and other departments have been reassigned to help develop and release new AI prototypes and products. As the technology advances, industry experts believe, Google must disarmes. decide whether it will overhaul its search engine and make a full-fledged chatbot the face of its flagship service. Google has been reluctant to share its technology broadly because, like chat, GPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic, and biased information. Lambda is available only to a limited number of people through an experimental app, AI Test Kitchen. Google sees this as a struggle to deploy its advanced AI without harming users or society, according to a memo

viewed by the Times. In one recent meeting, a manager acknowledged that smaller companies had fewer concerns about releasing these tools, but said Google must wade into the fray or the industry could move on without it, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by the Times, end quote. The Wall Street Journal says it's official. Their sources say that YouTube has agreed to pay around $2 billion per year for seven years for NFL Sunday ticket, at least the residential rates. This is starting in 2023, putting that price above the $1.5 billion. direct TV had currently been paying. Quote,

YouTube will offer Sunday ticket as an add-on to YouTube TV and in the video platform's main app through a service called Primetime Channels that allows viewers to subscribe to individual channels. Technological and product innovation is one of the things that is particularly exciting about bringing this type of content, said Neil Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, will be able to showcase these NFL games in a way

that I think no other platform can, end quote. Mr. Mohan declined to comment on pricing detail, YouTube TV costs $64.99 per month before add-ons. Direct TV currently has a $300 per season version of Sunday Ticket and a $400 version that features extra NFL-related content. Direct TV, which has had exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket since 1994, had been losing about $500 million annually on the package, the Wall Street Journal has reported. Mr. Mowen declined to comment on YouTube's ability to make it a profitable package,

saying only we view it as a long-term investment. Sunday Ticket is popular in the United States. in bars and restaurants, and the NFL will need a distribution partner there. DirecTV has those relationships in place and joined with Amazon to handle bars and restaurants for its Thursday night football package. The NFL will also seek to license the commercial rights for bars and restaurants for an additional $200 million, the people said, end quote. All right, U.S. listeners, you know you've all gotten these calls about 100 times. Well, guess what? They got them. The FCC has proposed a record-breaking around $300 million fine against an auto-war

warranty scam robocall campaign that made more than 5.1 billion calls to more than 550 million U.S. phone numbers just in the first quarter of 2021, quoting Cyberscoop. The fine is a follow-up to an FCC investigation launched earlier this year into the massive scam campaign that hounded consumers with relentless calls prompting recipients to seek a warranty specialist about extending or reinstating their car's warranty. The FCC investigation determined that since at least 2018, two California men, Roy Cox Jr. and Michael Aaron Jones orchestrated the scam that sent billions of calls using a network of domestic and international voice services. Furthermore, the investigation found that the campaign harassed health care workers during the pandemic and in some cases

spoofed the phone numbers of actual hospitals, resulting in consumers tying up the lines of hospitals with confused complaints. Cox Jr. and Jones, alongside 20 others, are also defendants in a lawsuit brought by the Ohio Attorney General in July, seeking millions and fines for violating that state's telemarketing and consumer protection laws as well as federal laws. Both have been sued before by the Federal Trade Commission for other telemarketing violations, end quote. Time for the weekend long-read suggestions. First up, a long look at how bite dance and TikTok, which owe their existence to intermingled Western and Chinese ideas, capital and people, became entangled in the U.S.-China Rift, quote, the app's extraordinary success has made even more

remarkable by the fact that it's a product of America's greatest geopolitical rival. Despite decades of trying, no Chinese company has ever conquered American society like TikTok. It's difficult to imagine a Russian or Iranian company or increasingly even another Chinese company pulling off a similar feat. What often goes on notice in these conversations is that TikTok is as much a product of the West as it is of China. Bight Dance owes its very existence to the inner mingling of ideas, capital, and people that defined the last five decades of U.S.-China engagement. Bight Dantzes founder Zhang Ye Ming, internalized the mythos of Silicon Valley taking to heart the idea, long promoted by Washington, that the American market was the ultimate prize and that it welcomed any

entrepreneur with the talent and ambition to succeed. In 2014, Zhang visited Silicon Valley with a group of Chinese founders touring the offices of Facebook, Tesla, and Airbnb. The fidelity to American business culture ran deep. Zhang was known to quote Jack Welsh and Steve Jobs frequently, particularly Jobs' famous injunction to stay hungry, stay full of. when Zhang organized a book exchange within the company. The title he chose was the seven habits of highly effective people. The first tenant of bite dance company culture reinforced through banners and posters throughout the office, including on occasion in the bathrooms, is always day one, a maxim taken directly from Amazon, end quote. Next, this piece from David Ignatius in the Washington Post makes the claim that software developed by Palantir is what has been giving Ukraine a previously unreported edge. in its war with Russia. Quote, This is the wizard war in the Ukraine conflict, a secret digital campaign that has never been reported before in detail,

and it's a big reason David is beating Goliath here. The Ukrainians are fusing their courageous fighting spirit with the most advanced intelligence and battle management software ever seen in combat. The power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems is now so great that it equates to having tactical nuclear weapons against an adversary with only conventional ones, explains Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir in an email message. The general public tends to underestimate this, our adversaries no longer do, end quote. For us, it's a matter of survival, argues Stefan, the senior

Ukrainian officer in the Kiev demonstration, who before the war designed software for a retail company. Now he tells me bluntly, our goal is to maximize target acquisitions. To protect his identity, he stripped his unit insignia and other markings from his camouflage uniform before he demonstrated the technology. The names he and his colleague used were not the real ones. I agreed to their requests for anonymity to protect their security. Lisa, the other officer, was also a computer scientist in peacetime, as she looks at the imagery of the Russian invaders on a day when their drones are savaging civilian targets in Odessa in Ukraine's southern coast. She mutters a wish for revenge and a hope that Ukraine will emerge from the war a tech power. Although the Ukrainians now

depend on technology help from the United States, she says, quote, by the end of the war, we will be selling software to Palantir, end quote. Finally, today, you know I love the author Robert Caro, but I also love this piece about his longtime editor, Bob Gottlieb. Like, this description of his daily routine is exactly how I want my life to be when I'm 91, except for the east side of Manhattan part. I hate the east side. I'd frankly stay in Brooklyn, but if I was going to go to Manhattan, I'd go to the

Upper West Side. quote, the life of the editor Bob Gottlieb at a spry 91 years old is nowadays largely limited to a single room on the second floor of his East 48th Street townhouse. By choice, not necessity. He can bound up Second Avenue just fine to the diner that he considers an extension of his home, where the waitress knows he takes his chocolate milkshakes extra thick. But everything he needs, his library and his pencils is right here, so why go farther? To receive guests like this one, he didn't even have to put on shoes or tan. the gullswing sweep of his silver hair, burbling away in a leather club chair in his book-lined office. They are arranged according to a system, he says, with a point to his head that's up here. With piles of more books on the floor and in the corners beneath giant MGM publicity posters of

Marion Davies, Clark Gable and Norma Shearer from the early 1930s, he is a man in his element. I don't want to go anywhere because there's nowhere I want to go, he says, in his flutie register. my life is very calm, just the way I like. It is here that he waits for one of his most famous writers, and he has edited many of the past century's most famous ones, including Cheever, Rushdie, Lessing, and Nepal, to turn in a long-awaited manuscript. Assuming that is, the pair beat what Gottlieb notes dryly are the actuarial odds, Robert Caro, 87, whom Gottlieb has edited since his first book, The Power Broker, published in 1974, is at work on the fifth and final volume of his list. and B. Johnson biography. Their long relationship is the subject of a documentary, turn every page

directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie, which arrives well before the Johnson book on December 30th, end quote. Yes, the weekend long reads, because the upcoming holiday weekend. So this is the last show of this week. The next new show will be on the 27th, and I'm only doing three shows next week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and maybe one of those is iffy as well. Like, we'll have to how much news there actually is. Maybe I'll only do a Tuesday and a Thursday or Tuesday and Wednesday. We'll see. If you really, really miss my voice, remember the internet history podcast exists, 200 plus hours of interviews by me with founders, as well as the early drafts of the chapter episodes of my book. I had that podcast sitting on a crappy web host for years that had inserted

really dumb ads and really dumb places, but I recently brought all the episodes back over to the hosts that hosts this show, and I cleaned it all up a bit, edited things here and there, so should be easier listening. If you've never checked out the internet history podcast before, maybe this is a good week to do so. Anyway, happy, hapies to all who celebrate whatever you celebrate, talk to you next week.