Tech Brew Ride Home - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - Sending Secret Messages to Siri

Episode Date: May 10, 2018

The suspected Russian Facebook ads are released, a new Apple credit card, why Roku is a quiet powerhouse, Robinhood raises a ton of money, and how your digital assistant might be susceptible to subliminal commands. Stories from: @jank0, @mattlynley  Tweets: @ByronTau, @anildash Links:Link to the Russian Facebook ads (House.gov)Goldman Sachs, Apple Team Up on New Credit Card (WSJ)Roku Earnings Beat Expectations as Ads, Services Surpass Hardware Revenue (Variety)Free stock trading app Robinhood rockets to a $5.6B valuation with new funding round (TechCrunch)Google Grapples With ‘Horrifying’ Reaction to Uncanny AI Tech (Bloomberg)Google’s AI sounds like a human on the phone — should we be worried? (The Verge)Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t. (NYTimes)Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1 (The Flaming Lips) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 Ride Home for Thursday, May 10th, 2018. Today, the suspected Russian Facebook ads are released. A new Apple credit card is coming.

Why Roku is a quiet powerhouse. Robin Hood raises a ton of money and how your digital assistant might be susceptible to subliminal commands. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. House Democrats today released 3,519. Facebook ads that they say are from Russia-linked accounts spanning the years 2015 through 2017, showing the types of ads they say were attempting to so distrust and contention in U.S. politics. The ads were released today by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Adam Schiff of California, the ranking member of the committee,

released a statement saying, quote, the only way we can begin to enoculate ourselves against a future attack is to see firsthand the types of messages, themes, and imagery the Russians used to divide us, end quote. There's a website where you can download a sampling of the ads, which I will link to in the show notes.

It should be noted that these ads were not entirely one-sided, but were seemingly attempting to stir up passions on any side of a given issue. For instance, there was an ad spreading fake news that a Muslim was involved in a shooting incident in 2016 when that wasn't true, but there was also another ad encouraging Muslims to let their fellow Americans know that they don't support terrorism. There were competing ads encouraging people to protest for and against President Trump shortly after his election, but before his inauguration.

As Bloomberg's Sarah Fryer tweeted, I've looked through many of the Facebook ads, and it's clear that Russia was aiming to exploit the fault lines in American society. gun control, race relations, immigration, and get people angry on both sides. The Wall Street Journal's Byron Tao tweeted, Some Russia-linked ads are downright weird. At one point, they spent $10 to show an ad to male employees of Facebook who lived within 10 miles Apollo Alto.

Do you want to see the top five girls who applied for a job at Facebook? The ad said. It got 19 clicks. A little bit of Apple News, potpourri here. Apple announced today that it is canceling plans for a $1 billion data center in Ireland because of delays in the approval process that have stalled the project for three years now. The data center, which was supposed to cover 116,000 square meters, was initially scheduled to go online in 2017. But then came the issues around approving the project, which originally stemmed from environmental impact and energy usage concerns and eventually evolved. into individual complaints.

The Data Center was supposed to bring 300 jobs to Western Ireland, and according to the Irish Times, more than 2,000 people marched in support of the Data Center in November of 2016. Irish Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Heather Humphreys, said, quote, the government, together with IDA, Ireland, did everything it could to support this investment. Ultimately, in spite of these efforts,

Apple has taken a commercial decision not to proceed, making it clear that the delays that beset this project caused them to reconsider their plans, end quote. Apple had applied to build a sister center at the same time in Denmark, and that data center is about to come online shortly. Some news surrounding Apple and apps, 9-5 Mac is reporting that over the last few days Apple seems to have been cracking down on apps that violate its guidelines by sharing location data with third parties

without explicit user consent. Apple has been removing the offending apps from the App Store and informing developers that they're in violation. This appears to be yet another move in anticipation of the upcoming European GDPR law going into effect in a matter of weeks. Apple is generally very strict about privacy policies around apps, but it seems that in some cases,

it feels it might not have been strict enough and is now airing on the side of caution. Also this morning, Bloomberg is reporting that sources have told it that Apple soon plans to let users buy subscriptions to some third-party video services in its TV app starting next year. Obviously, you can subscribe to any number of subscription streaming services inside their own apps, but this would be the first time Apple would allow other services to sell within its TV app, the intention of which is to aggregate all sorts of content into one place so that you don't have to go searching around a dozen

different apps just to find what you want to watch. Amazon currently does something similar, allowing you to subscribe to various providers like HBO or Showtime right within its Amazon Prime Video app. As Bloomberg points out, this would be an interesting new way for Apple to further boost its much-scrutinized services revenue, as presumably it would take a cut from any subscriptions made from within the TV app. Finally, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is partnering with with Goldman Sachs to launch a new Apple Pay branded credit card.

Apple already has an Apple rewards credit card with Barclays, but this looks like a replacement for that partnership. What's the angle here? Quoting from the journal piece, as new iPhone sales growth slows, Apple is focusing on services such as mobile payments, streaming music subscriptions, and Apple Store sales. Apple Pay, which generates revenue on each transaction,

is a key contributor, but adoption has been slower than executive. hoped. Goldman, meanwhile, is pushing into consumer banking to compensate for a slump in its securities trading, where revenue has fallen by two-thirds since the financial crisis. It launched a retail banking business called Marcus in 2016 for online savings accounts and personal loans, and executives have been exploring adding credit cards and wealth management tools. Speaking of streaming video in the previous segment, this is an earnings report from a company I might not have mentioned normally, but Roku reported earnings yesterday and said that Q1 revenue was 136 million,

beating expectations, and its net loss narrowed to $6.9 million, also beating expectations. But what was super interesting in the numbers was the news that for the first time, Roku made more money from advertising and licensing fees than from hardware sales. You might be familiar with Roku as that maker of hockey puck-like devices that are custom made to hook up to TVs and provide a platform for streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, at all. But Roku has diversified of late, licensing its hardware and software to smart TV manufacturers to put into their products. In fact, half of Roku's new users last quarter came thanks to smart TVs, made by the likes of TCL, with Roku inside them. Roku claims that one in four TVs sold in the U.S. last quarter were Roku TVs.

But Roku also has what it calls platform revenue. In other words, it takes a cut for. from subscriptions to streaming services on its platform, much like Apple might be attempting to do it in the previous story. And it sells ads against content it streams. So Roku has quietly pulled off quite a feat here if ad revenue and content revenue are delivering more

to the company now than hardware sales. So Roku has quietly pulled off quite a feat here if ad revenue and content revenue are now delivering more to the company than hardware sales. Ad and content revenue would obviously be a higher margin business, meaning that Roku has become a streaming platform to be reckoned with. When asked about this shift in revenue, Roku CEO Anthony Wood told Variety, quote,

that shows our business model is working. A couple of other interesting tibits from the Roku earnings announcement. The company has 20.8 million active accounts up from 14.2 million a year ago, and streaming hours by users were up 19% sequentially. Roku says that half of its active users are what might be turned. as cord cutters or people who never had a traditional pay TV subscription to begin with. Huge raise from free stock trading app Robin Hood. Various outlets are reporting that the company has raised a $363 million series D round that values Robin Hood at $5.6 billion.

Robin Hood started out as a simple stock trading app that didn't charge transaction fees and was targeting especially millennial investors. but it has been expanding into all sorts of things recently, including cryptocurrency trading, and the company says it has 4 million users, which would give it a larger user base than e-trade, and it has passed $150 billion in transaction volume. As Axios points out, Robin Hood seems to want to become a full-fledged consumer finance company, and quote, this is enough cash to help it pursue that goal, end quote. Robin Hood is the only place right now where you can trade crypto,

stocks and options all in one place, CEO Vlad Tenev, told TechCrunch. For us to construct an experience that feels seamless and natural for customers, that, for example, want to sell an equity and use the proceeds to buy crypto seamlessly, that's been challenging not just from a product and design standpoint, but also an infrastructure standpoint. There's complexity under the hood, and our goal is to make it as seamless as possible in the process and make that complexity go away, end quote. Robin Hood launched its free cryptocurrency trading just this past February, and though it's only available in 11 states at the moment, Robin Hood is having to get all the necessary licenses and regulatory approval, the company said there are 1 million users waitlisted for access to the Robin Hood crypto platform.

Robin Hood told Fortune that it hopes to be either the largest or one of the largest crypto platforms by the end of the year. FYI, this investment round was led by Yuri Milner's DST group and was joined by a murderer's row, including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Thrive Capital. I've told you several days in a row now about duplex, that voice-based assistant service that Google debuted at I.O. So I should probably tell you about the backlash as well. I'll link to two different pieces in the show notes that are coming at it from slightly different angles. But there's been tons of chatter all over the social medias as well. Zaynep Tufetchi tweeted, Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human,

not only without disclosing that it's a bot, but adding um and ah to deceive the human on the other end, with the room cheering it. Horrifying. Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless, and has not learned a thing, end quote. And Anil Dash tweeted, this stuff is really, really basic,

but any interaction with technology or the products of tech companies must exist within a context of informed consent. Something like hashtag Google Duplex fails this test by design, and that's an unfixable flaw, end quote. The Bloomberg piece talking about the backlash that I've linked to notes that the controversy

over the new technology has made it to talk radio, where DJs have been wondering out loud if their colors were even real. And that's because the crux of the controversy seems to center around ideas of trust in veracity, quoting from Bloomberg, there's a thin line between Google's aim of making its assistant like a human and not deceiving real humans with software like duplex, end quote.

In his piece, the Verges James Vincent asks, quote, does Google have an obligation to tell people they're talking to a machine? Does technology that mimics humans erode our trust in what we see and hear? And is this another example of tech privilege where those in the know can offload boring conversations they don't want to have to a machine, while those receiving the calls, most likely low-paid service workers, have to deal with some idiot robot, end quote. Vincent notes that Google is still calling Duplex an experiment, and no timeline has been announced for it to roll out for consumer use. Also, as we discussed yesterday, Duplex currently only works in three very constrained contexts,

making reservations at restaurants, scheduling haircuts, and asking businesses for their hours. So it's not that I'm defending duplex or anything, but I do want to point out that this is still very early days. We're not at the level of passing a Turing test yet, or even a Blade Runner-style replicant test. Not yet, at least. Okay, here's another similarly concerning story about new technology and fears of a robot dystopia.

You know all those cool new voice assistants, Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, What could go wrong with them? Well, what if I could send audio commands to your digital assistant that you couldn't hear, but could maybe nonetheless command it to do things like, I don't know, buy things without your permission or unlock your front door if your smart speaker is connected to your smart home system? There's a piece up in the New York Times outlining how researchers in the U.S. and China

have demonstrated techniques to embed audio commands in music or spoken text that the human ear can't hear, but a smart assistant can. As of yet, there's no indication that bad actors are using this sort of technique in the wild, but one of the researchers is quoted in the Times piece as saying, quote, my assumption is that the malicious people already employ people to do what I do, end quote. So, yeah, BuzzFeed's Charlie Worsell tweeted, probably once every four months I read something like this, and am made aware of a new threat embedded in some new technology that I have never even considered,

and then I let out a deep guttural moan. The only solace that I can offer, Charlie, and you, is to maybe end with this story. Carnegie Mellon announced today the first undergraduate degree offered by a U.S. University in the field of artificial intelligence. Andrew Moore, Dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, said, quote, specialists in artificial intelligence have never been more important in shorter supply or in greater demand by employers, end quote. So maybe we can just train a whole new generation of scientists to do battle with the robots, or at least mitigate the work done by the other scientists who are unleashing these robots on our world. If I could somehow secure the right to the flaming lips song Yoshime battles the pink robots,

I'd be playing that in the background right now. So go ahead and do that for me. Open up Spotify and search for Yoshime Battles the Pink Robots. I put a link in the show notes. That's the tech meme ride home for today, everybody. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Talk to you tomorrow.