Tech Brew Ride Home - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - Facebook and Twitter Label Political Ads

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

Facebook and Twitter label political ads, Apple’s self-driving car efforts fizzle, the DOJ is looking at cryptocurrency manipulation, there’s a PornHub VPN, and StumbleUpon is no more. Stories from: @jacknicas, @mat Links:Apple, Spurned by Others, Signs Deal With Volkswagen for Driverless Cars (NYTimes)Google Buys 20,000 SUVs, Apple Gets Two Dozen VW Vans (Bloomberg)The Techie Town Of San Francisco Gets A New Tower As Houses Remain Scarce (BuzzFeed) 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 24th, 2018. Today, Facebook and Twitter label political ads. Apple's self-driving car efforts fizzle.

The DOJ is looking at cryptocurrency manipulation. There's a Pornhub VPN. And StumbleUpon is no more. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. They said they would do it, and today they followed through. Facebook announced this afternoon that it, It would be rolling out a disclosure system for political ads on Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. that will let you know who paid for the ads.

This extends not only to actual politician ads, but also to so-called issue ads that deal with 20 specific topics. Advertisers wanting to run ads with political content in the U.S. will need to verify their identity and location. In the blog post announcing the changes, Facebook said, quote, these changes will not prevent abuse entirely. We're up against smart, creative, and well-funded adversaries who change their tactics as and when we spot abuse. But we believe that they will help prevent

future interference in elections on Facebook, end quote. Hot on the heels of this news, Twitter announced that it would be adding badges and disclaimers for U.S. federal political advertisers and require identity certification, and just like Facebook, require that advertisers confirm they are located in the U.S. Candidates and committees will have to provide their FEC IDs

and non-FEC registered organizations looking to advertise will have to submit a notarized form. In its blog post, Twitter wrote, This is just the beginning of our efforts and increased transparency for all advertisers on Twitter. We will continue to iterate and improve our efforts in this space and will be providing updates along the way. So Apple still has a self-driving car project, but more and more it's starting to feel like they don't really have their hearts in it.

We already know that Apple scaled back its vision to design an actual car on its own, choosing instead to focus on the software behind self-driving vehicles. Then it scaled that back to merely creating an autonomous vehicle for use by its own staff to shuttle Apple workers back and forth to their jobs. And it seems that Apple has finally signed a deal with Volkswagen to build those. autonomous vans, according to the New York Times. The only problem is Volkswagen was not Apple's first choice partner. Apple had approached luxury carmakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz to build the shuttles, but BMW and Mercedes-Benz turned Apple down. Apple's self-driving car project was codenamed Titan, and it was started all the way back

in 2014. It once had 1,000 employees devoted to the project as recently as two years ago, as Bloomberg's Chero V-V-Day pointed out, Apple spent $13 billion on R&D in the last year, a record 5% of revenue. We have to assume a large chunk of that was earmarked for Project Titan. And now the end result of these many years of back and forth is that Volkswagen, an auto manufacturer under a cloud of scandal because it was accused of cheating emissions tests, will be refitting fewer than two dozen of their T6 vans as electric self-driving shuttles at a facility in Turin, Italy.

Oh, and the vans were supposed to be finished by the end of this year, but according to the Times piece, that deadline will be missed. Over in Bloomberg, Alex Webb contrasts this state of affairs with Alphabet's Waymo, which has agreed to buy 20,000 electric SUVs from Jaguar Land Rover. Apple is still reportedly testing 55 autonomous cars on California roads, making that the second biggest fleet in the state, but it seems that in the race to actually get a consumer vehicle into people's garages, it sure is beginning to look like Apple has all but ceded the field entirely.

A whole pile of news from Uber, the company announced its financials yesterday, reporting $2.6 billion in Q1 revenue and profit of $2.5 billion, though that was largely due to $2.9 billion that Uber is getting after it merged its Russian and Southeast Asian businesses with local rivals. Without that windfall, Uber had a quarterly net loss of $312 million before interest, taxes, and other expenses. However, that loss is half the number that Uber reported for Q1 of last year. Quote, we had $3 billion of income on a gap basis because of the gain from the Yandex and grab deals, an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch.

That's why we prefer to focus on Ibetta as the best number to show our underlying business in the quarter, end quote. As for total bookings, the total amount of money that Uber generates before paying drivers, the company reported $11.3 billion up from $7.3 billion year over year. Following on this news, Uber announced yet another tender offer for existing investors and especially employees that will allow them another chance to unload their shares in an attempt to clean things up a bit before the expected IPO. These insiders will be able to sell their holdings at $40 a share, which would value the company at $62 billion. According to Recode, quote,

The deal should appease some Uber loyalists who may feel they were unable to use their startup stock to buy a new house or pay off existing loans. Uber shareholders were only able to sell about 58% of what they initially hoped to sell in the initial tender offer because too many employees and investors sought to part with their shares. The National Transportation Safety Board finally released its official report on that accident in March that saw an Uber self-driving car strike and kill a pedestrian in Arizona. According to the report, the Uber car failed to identify the pedestrian or attempt to slam on the brakes until it was too late. The report says the vehicle's radar system detected the pedestrian six seconds before impact, but quote, the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object as a vehicle. and then as a bicycle.

At about 1.3 seconds before impact, the system attempted to apply emergency braking. However, the emergency braking maneuvers were not enabled. The human operator engaged the steering wheel less than a second before impact and began breaking less than a second after impact. But by then, again, it was sadly too late. Bloomberg is reporting that the U.S. Department of Justice is working with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to open a criminal probe into alleged manipulation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The CFTC oversees futures and derivatives tied to Bitcoin. According to Bloomberg, quote,

the illicit tactics that the Justice Department is looking into include spoofing and wash trading. Forms of cheating that regulators have spent years trying to root out of futures and equities markets, the people said. In spoofing, a trader submits a spate of orders and then cancels them once prices move in a desired direction. Wash trades involve a cheater trading with herself to give a false impression of market demand that lures others to dive in, too. Coins the prosecutors are examining include Bitcoin and Ether. Authorities worry that virtual currencies are susceptible to fraud for multiple reasons. Skepticism that all exchanges are actively pursuing cheaters, wild price swings that could make it easy to push valuations around,

and a lack of regulations like the ones that govern stocks and other assets, end quote. At the time of this recording, the price of Bitcoin stood at $7,546, down around 20% from the recent high. The cryptocurrency hit on May 4th. In a related story, a group called the Anti-Fishing Working Group released a report today that estimates that criminals have stolen $1.2 billion in cryptocurrencies just since the beginning of 2017. The group further estimates that less than 20% of those stolen coins have been recovered. covered successfully. Pornhub today announced that it is launching its own VPN or virtual private network called

VPN Hub. The idea of a VPN is that it allows users to transmit data anonymously and protects users from data collection, ISP bandwidth throttling, and geographic limitations. VPN Hub is available right now on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. There is also a premium option called VPN Hub Premium, which costs a, 1299 a month. That will get you the same service with no ads and what Pornhub claims to be faster connections. Pornhub's VP, Corey Prince, told the verge that incognito browsers don't offer enough cover from, quote, prying eyes. So this will allow users a greater degree of privacy

and security. I missed covering this last month, but Pornhub recently began accepting cryptocurrency as a payment option, theoretically offering greater privacy as well. because the alt coin they are accepting is called Verge, which is a privacy coin. With Verge, anyone can view transactions on the public ledger, but you can also use tools like Tour to mask your IP address and location. So that's one way to keep those porn charges off your credit card bill, I guess. This really isn't a proper news story, just some facts to keep you updated on the state of things. Netflix yesterday passed Comcast in Market Value.

Netflix stock gained 4% on Wednesday for a total market cap of $149 billion. Comcast, on the other hand, has a market cap of $147 billion. Guess who's just up ahead with a market cap of $153 billion? Disney. Again, this sort of data goes a long way to explaining the insanity in the media space. Remember the story about Comcast trying to block Disney from buying Fox's enormous library of content from yesterday? Disney wants the Fox Library so it can have even more content to entice people to pay monthly for a streaming service.

Comcast is a cable company, so it has little interest in seeing any over-the-top streaming service from Disney becoming successful and thereby giving people less reason to pay for traditional cable. Why does Disney want to create a standalone streaming service in the first place? One word? Netflix. Netflix's stock, by the way, has gone up 70% of the way. has gone up 70% just since the first of the year. Yes, the rich tech companies get richer, which reminds me. Wall Street generally has been quietly anticipating

that one of these rich tech companies will soon become the first company to ever pass $1 trillion in market cap. The leading candidate, of course, is Apple. This morning when I researched it, Apple had a market cap of $926 billion. So it has about $74 billion. to go till it reaches a trillion,

which seems like a lot, but another way to look at this is Apple shares would only need to go up by about 8% to hit that magic trillion dollar mark. Not impossible. New iPhones are coming later this year. A little bit of internal news now. We, of course, thank you for making

the TechMeme Ride Home podcast a part of your daily podcast diet, but a person can't live on podcasts alone. So if you also have an email news, newsletter habit, we've got some good news for you. TechMeme now has a daily newsletter. Whereas we post the podcast at 5 p.m. Eastern, the newsletter will hit inboxes at 5 p.m. Pacific. And what will the newsletter be? It'll be the day's top tech news, of course, as well as commentary with an assortment of detailed headlines and links organized by topic categories. It also will have a timely reminder of upcoming events like conferences and corporate earnings.

The TechMeme newsletter is yet another way for you to keep from missing out on any major tech news stories. To sign up, go to TechMeme.com on desktop or mobile and hit the newsletter tab right at the top. I've seen you San Franciscans talking on social media about how it's changed the skyline forever, but the new Salesforce Tower saw its official grand opening Tuesday and BuzzFeed's Matt Honan has a piece of. up that captures the flavor of your lovely city at this particular moment in history. It's a beautifully written long read, so I'll let you discover it yourself, but let me quote

from these sections. Quote, much like Google or Facebook, the Salesforce Tower is unprecedented in its scale, and it is hard not to think of the building as a manifestation of the radical transformation wrought upon San Francisco by the tech industry. Of course, what goes up must come down, and in tech, as in earthquake country, that can happen very quickly, no matter to which heights you once soared. See MySpace, the collapse of the Nibbets Freeway, Pets.com, the collapse of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, vine, zinga, jawbone, jelly, color, yikyak, the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.

But for a company like Salesforce, which passed 10 billion in its annual run rate last year, and its gleaming new tower, these seem like distant concerns, end quote. Speaking at the opening event, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff boasted that Salesforce Tower was the greenest in the world, but he also addressed exactly the sort of cultural, economic, and other changes that tech has wrought in San Francisco. Quote, we see extreme wealth, a community with over 70 billionaires, but also grinding poverty in the shadow of this building.

Beniof went on, quote, the challenges I've described today are not all the fault of the tech community. Just as I'm challenging the tech community to step up, I'm challenging others not to scapegoat the tech community, end quote. Benioff then went on to announce plans to raise $200 million to combat homelessness in San Francisco. Then, quoting from Honan's piece, at the end of the ceremony, the press was ushered into the nave of this newest tech temple. We were offered little cups of curds and weigh with fresh spring vegetables to snack on. Finally today, pour one out for StumbleUpon, arguably the first Web 2.0 company,

certainly one of the first of the modern breed of web discovery tools. StumbleUpon is shutting down on June 30th after 16 years of operation. I can tell you firsthand that Stumbleupon could deliver a massive amount of traffic in its day, and this was before things like Dig even. eBay bought StumbleUpon for $75 million in 2007, original founder Garrett Camp bought back the company in 2009 and has been running it ever since. Over the course of its life, there have been 60 billion stumbles for 40 million users, according to a medium post by Camp himself.

Quote, 16 years ago, we started stumble upon to help people discover new web pages. The idea was simple. Click a button and find a cool web page. It was easy and fun. Stumble upon pioneered content discovery on the web before the concepts of the like button. newsfeed, or social media were mainstream. According to Camp, StumbleUpon's existing user base will be transitioned to Camp's new project,

Mix.com, which Camp describes as combining social and semantic personalization to help users find obscure but interesting content that has been recommended by people they know and trust. FYI, in case you weren't aware, Garrett Camp was the original founder of Uber, back when it was known as Uber Cab, right around the same time he was taking control of Stumble Upon back from eBay.

Hey, quick bit of pod housekeeping here. There will be no show on Monday. It's a national holiday here in the U.S., so under the assumption that it will also be a slow news day, we're going to take the day off. Also, my brother and sister-in-law just had a baby, so we're going down to meet her. So I won't be here for tomorrow's show or Tuesday's show.

but I'm leaving you in more than capable hands. The host for the next two pods will be Glenn Fleischman, with whom I'm sure you're familiar. Glenn's been a longtime freelance contributor to places like the Economist, Increment, Fast Company, and Macworld. But most importantly, he's a podcaster extraordinaire. So be gentle with Glenn, although I know he'll be great. And in my absence, I'll leave you with this mashup

of Jerry Springer and Bill and Ted. Be excellent to yourselves and each other over this Memorial Day weekend. Oh, and since I know you're listening, happy birthday, Lisa.