Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 05/17 – Sigh… More Elon/Twitter Stuff

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Now Elon says he can’t move forward with the deal until he gets solid answers from Twitter about the bot issue, even though, we have the paperwork of his original offer and there were no contingencies about bot numbers, and he totally could have written that into the deal. Will Apple use E Ink on their foldable device? Coinbase is slowing hiring, while Microsoft is boosting pay. And a big test of driver assist systems says they’re still not as reliable as we all hope they are. Sponsors: LCX.com/ride Links: Elon Musk Says Twitter Must Prove Bot Claims for $44 Billion Deal to Proceed (Bloomberg) Apple ‘testing’ foldable with secondary E Ink display, says analyst (The Verge) Apple Now Letting Developers Automatically Charge for Some Subscription Price Increases (MacRumors) Coinbase Expands Features, Allowing Some App Users to Access Ethereum-Based Dapps (CoinDesk) Coinbase slows hiring to help weather market downturn (The Block) Satya Nadella details Microsoft plan for ‘significant additional investment’ in employee compensation (GeekWire) Report spotlights vast scale of adtech's 'biggest data breach' (TechCrunch) Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests (The Register) 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. home for Tuesday, May 17th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Now Elon says he can't move forward with the deal until he gets solid answers from Twitter about the bot issue, even though, you know,

we have the paperwork of his original offer, and there were no contingencies about bot numbers, and he totally could have written that into the deal. Will Apple use E-ink on their foldable device? Coinbase is slowing hiring, while Microsoft is boosting pay, and a big test of driver assist systems says they're still not as reliable as we all hope they are. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, he gave us one day of respite, I guess. Elon Musk says the Twitter deal, quote, cannot move forward until Twitter proves bots are less than 5% of its users,

claiming that his original takeover offer is based on, quote, SEC filings being accurate, end quote. Quoting Bloomberg. Twitter's shares fell another 3.2% in pre-market trading in New York, after sliding more than 8% the previous day. The spread between Musk's offer price of $54.20 a share and its last trading price is currently about 40%, suggesting investors think there is little chance the deal will get done without a discount, if at all. Twitter said it is, quote, committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable

in a statement on Tuesday. If a revised deal does get done by Musk and Twitter, said Dan Ives analyst at Wedbush. It will likely be at a much lower price once negotiations take over, and the diligence happens around Twitter Dow and algorithms hot button issues, and quote. The battle over bots has become a sticking point for Musk, who told a tech conference in Miami on Monday that fake users make up at least 20% of all Twitter accounts, possibly as high as 90%. Twitter regularly states in its quarterly results that the average of false or spam accounts, quote, represented fewer than 5% of our monthly, daily active users during the quarter, adding that it applied significant judgment to its estimate and the true number could be higher. Musk encouraged Twitter users to run their own tests for bots,

crowdsourcing the effort to calculate whether they made up less than 5% of the service. Responding to Musk's assertions, Twitter CEO Parag Agraw-Agrwal, posted a long thread laying out his company's methodology. Musk replied by first asking why Twitter doesn't just call users to verify their identity, and then posting a poop emoji. The proposed takeover includes a $1 billion breakup fee for each party, which Musk will have to pay if he ends the deal or fails to deliver the acquisition funding as promised. It is unclear whether an update by Twitter on the number of fake accounts, if materially larger than 5%, would trigger a so-called material adverse effect clause releasing Musk from the breakup fee, and quote.

Rand Fishkin at Spark Toro, by the way, recently did his own analysis of 44,058 randomly selected public Twitter accounts that have tweeted in the past 90 days, and which would thus resemble Twitter's monetizable daily active users, their preferred metric for their counting of users, and his data said that 19.42% are likely spam or fake accounts. Not only that, he also ran an analysis of Elon's own 93 million Twitter followers, and he says that 70.23% of at Elon's Musk followers are unlikely to be authentic. He also analyzed only those 26.8 million at Elon Musk followers who tweeted in the last 90 days and asserted that 23.42% of those were likely fake or spam, which is close to his original assessment of the fake Twitter accounts overall.

Our friend Ming Chi Kuo claims Apple is testing a foldable device with a secondary e-ink display. Quoting the verge. The color e-p3.0. The color e-p3. electronic paper display has the potential to become a mainstream solution for foldable devices must have cover slash second screen thanks to its excellent power saving. The analyst wrote in a tweet. He adds that the E-ink display is also being tested in tablet-like applications. Most tablet-style foldables on the market today pair a large folding inner display with a smaller outer display for quickly checking notifications. But existing devices like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 or the ApoFindN,

use OLED panels for both. Apple's use of an e-ink screen would almost certainly make for a less responsive outer display with fewer colors, but as quote notes, it could be far more power-efficient. Although E-ink is best known for its monochrome displays that Amazon uses in its Kindles, the company also has a line of color screens. Most recently, it announced E-Inc Gallery 3, a new version of its color E-ink technology that's capable of producing more colors at a higher resolution. It can also refresh far quicker than the company's previous color screens, although it's still nowhere near as responsive as an equivalent OLED or LCD panel. Promotional videos released by E-ink showed how the display can be folded or rolled. There have been persistent rumors that Apple is

planning on joining the likes of Samsung and Huawei in releasing a foldable device. In 2021, reports emerged that Apple was prototyping folding displays internally, and as of April this year, Quo was predicting that Apple could release a device with a 9-inch foldable display in 2025 at the earliest. Bloomberg has also reported that Apple could have an additional device with a larger 20-inch foldable display in the works, though it wouldn't be eligible for release before 2026. Quo's latest prediction doesn't mention the size of the foldable equipped with an E-ink display, end quote. Also, Apple, they now are allowing developers to auto-renew users for increased subscription prices once a year, as long as the increase doesn't exceed $50 or $50% of the annual price. In other

words, they'll increase your subscription without telling you, kind of, quoting Mac rumors. Apple today informed developers that it is implementing a new subscription feature that will allow customers to be charged automatically when an app subscription price goes up, which is not the way that subscriptions work at the current time. Right now, customers must explicitly agree to a price change when the cost of a subscription increases through an agree-to-new-price interface. If a customer does not tap on agree when the warning comes up, their subscription is automatically canceled, but that's changing. Going forward, developers will be able to increase the price of a subscription and have it auto-renew with customers simply being informed rather than needing to outright agree.

Apple says that, quote, under specific conditions and with advanced user notice, end quote, developers can offer an auto-renewable subscription price increase without the user needing to take action and without their subscription being impacted. There are specific limits that Apple is placing on developers to make sure this functionality is not abused. A pricing increase cannot occur more than once per year, and it cannot exceed $5.50% of the subscription price or $50 and $50 for an annual subscription price. Apple says that it will always notify users of the pricing increase in advance via email, push notification, and a message within the app. Apple will also provide instructions on how to view, manage, and cancel subscriptions, end quote. Coinbase is going to let a, quote, small set of users access Ethereum-based decentralized apps,

also known as DAPS directly from its own app, quoting CoinDesk. This edition will help users purchase NFTs on various marketplaces, including OpenC and Coinbase's own NFT platform, trade on decentralized exchanges including Uniswap and Sushi Swap, and borrow and lend through DFI platforms, including Curve and Compound. These features will be powered by Coinbase's new DAP wallet and browser. The company said it's rolling out the new services in the U.S. on Android first to a limited subset of users with plans to expand to all users and platforms soon. Over 95% of the nearly 300 million cryptocurrency investors worldwide have not ventured beyond a centralized exchange. Andrew Thurman,

a blockchain analyst firm, Nansen told CoinDesk, this move by Coinbase has the potential to give a new wave of users the chance to explore the frontier of defy and NFTs, he said, and quote. But meanwhile, from the tech downturn file, Coinbase also says it will, quote, slow hiring and reassess our headcount needs due to the market downturn after originally saying it planned to triple its workforce in 2022. Quoting the block. Emily Choi, Coinbase's president and chief operating officer said in a blog post on Tuesday that the firm would be slowing hiring to, quote, reprioritize our hiring needs against our highest priority business goals, end quote. The note had been circulated among staff earlier. Heading into this year, we plan to triple the size of the company.

Given current market conditions, we feel its prudent. to slow hiring and reassess our headcount needs against our highest priority business goals, she said. Headcount growth is a key input to our financial model, and this is an important action to ensure we manage our business to the scenarios we plan for, specifically the potential adjusted EBITDA. We are aiming to manage two, end quote. But Microsoft is coming at this from a different angle, telling employees that it will nearly double its global budget for merit-based salary bumps and raise its range for annual stock-based

compensation by more than 25 percent. In other words, these are the sort of moves you make because your employees are concerned about their stock options, potentially being underwater. If you can't get the stock price to go up, you got to make salaries and bonuses go up. Quoting Geekwire, it follows Amazon's decision to more than double its maximum base pay range for corporate and tech workers. Time and time again, we see that our talent is in high demand because of the amazing work you do to empower our customers and partners. Microsoft CEO Sachin Adela writes in the memo, a copy of which was a copy of which was a obtained by Geekwire. Across the leadership team, your impact is both recognized and deeply appreciated and for that, I want to say a big thank you. That's why we're making long-term investments

in each of you, end quote. Nadella writes in the memo that the company is making, quote, a significant additional investment in our compensation programs beyond its normal budget for annual compensation increases. Microsoft is making the move as its 2022 fiscal year draws to a close ending June 30th and before its time frame for determining rewards-based compensation in the fall. The company reported stock-based compensation expenses of $6.1 billion in its last fiscal year ended June 30, 20,21 equivalent to 10% of its $61 billion in annual profits, end quote. Ever curious to know how much you're actually tracked? Well, according to a new report, the real-time bidding industry, or RTB, exposes an average person's online activity and location 747 times per day, on average, in the U.S., and 3756.

times per day in Europe. Quoting the verge. New data about the real-time bidding RTB system's use of web users' info for tracking and ad targeting, released today by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, or ICCL, suggests Google and other key players in the high-velocity surveillance-based ad auction system are processing and passing people's data billions of times per day. RTB is the biggest data breach ever recorded, argues the ICCL. It tracks and shares what people view online and their real-world locations 294 billion times in the U.S. and 197 billion times in Europe every day, end quote. The ICCL's report, which is based on industry figures that the rights organization says

it obtained from a confidential source, offers an estimate of RTB per person per day across U.S. states and European countries, which suggests that web users in Colorado and the U.K. are among the most exposed by the system with 987 and 462 RTB broadcast apiece per person per day. But even online individuals living in the bottom of the chart, District of Columbia or Romania, have their information exposed by RTB an estimated 486 times per day or 149 times per day, respectively, per the report. The ICCL calculates that people living in the U.S. have their online activity and real-world location exposed 57% more often than people in Europe, likely as a result of differences in privacy regulation across the two regions.

collectively, the ICCL estimates that U.S. Internet users' online behavior and locations are tracked and shared 107 trillion times a year, while Europeans' data is exposed 71 trillion times a year, end quote. Finally, today a reminder that we aren't quite there yet. The Automobile Association of America tested a Hyundai Santa Fe, a Subaru Forrester, and a Tesla Model 3, and found that the active driver assist platforms of each often failed to prevent hitting cyclists or oncoming cars, which, you know, not ideal, quoting the register. According to the AAA, all three systems represent the second of five autonomous driving levels, which require drivers to maintain alertness at all times to seize control from the computer when needed. There are no semi-autonomous cars generally available to the public that are able to operate above level two. The AAA reviewed multiple scenarios, how active driving assist or ADA systems respond to

slow-moving cars or cyclists ahead of them in the same lane, how they respond to oncoming vehicles crossing the center line, and how they respond to cyclists crossing their lane of travel. The first two scenarios evaluated adaptive cruise control, or ACC, which decelerates or breaks a vehicle in response to slower or stopped objects ahead. All three vehicles detected their vehicle and cyclist targets and were able to match speed or stop in response. The AAA said that their tests of ACC systems were encouraging and supportive of previous. AAA research concluding that the ACC component of ADA systems are well developed and perform according to expectations for typical closed-course scenarios and naturalistic driving environments,

the report reads. Controlled deceleration when faced with predictable scenarios is one thing, but when faced with emergency situations, the response was far worse. In tests involving an oncoming car passing into the lane of the ADA-enabled vehicle only, only one, the Tesla Model 3, detected the oncoming car and slowed the vehicle, but still hit it. To make matters worse, the AAA said the head-on test was performed at, quote, unrealistically low vehicle speeds in which the ADA vehicle was moving at 15 miles per hour and the target vehicle at 25 miles per hour. When tests were done, quote, at higher speeds characteristic of rural two-lane highways, it is unlikely that evaluated ADA systems would provide meaningful mitigation

in the absence of driver intervention. AAA wrote in the report. The response to collisions with cyclists was a bit more encouraging, but not by much. Instead of all three vehicles smacking into the cyclist without slowing, only the Subaru failed to detect and struck the cyclist in each of the five test runs. On the one hand, driver assistance software is just that, a tool for attentive human drivers and should not be used or relied upon as a true self-driving system. On the other hand, poor performance of level two driving systems had better not be indicative of the safety performance of higher levels. complicating this issue is some of the marketing around driver assistance technology already painting it as a no-hands competence solution. Drivers tell us they expect their current driving assistance technology to perform safely all the time, the AAA said, but unfortunately our testing demonstrates spotty performance is the norm rather than the exception, end quote. As I said, not ideal, or as, you know, Pete Campbell says in that madman meme, not great, Bob. Also not great, Bob. Our household is experiencing what? Our 10th COVID scare of the year. My son woke up in the middle of the night throwing up and with a 100 degree fever, so we're all home again today to be on the safe side.

But none of us have tested positive for COVID yet, including my son. If you'll remember, my daughter and I did test positive back in December, but we figure that was a false positive at this point, since we never tested positive. Even though the original test was a lab PCR test, and also no one ended up having any symptoms after that, I honestly don't know what I would do if or when I get COVID vis-a-vis this show. Friends who have gotten COVID recently have been like, yeah, you're so knocked out for at least a few days, you'll be unlikely to be able to do a show for a few days. So like I said, I have no idea what I would do in that case. Hire somebody to fill in, I guess, or just not do shows for a few days, which reminds me. Ever since lockdown, this show has been coming out regularly at around noon or around one o'clock

Eastern time. That's because since I don't have a morning commute anymore, I sit down in the mornings after I get the kids to school and I just bang the show out. And when I'm done, I put it out. Why leave it sit and wait for some arbitrary release time? Longtime listeners, though, will remember that this show used to come out at 3 or 4 p.m., thus the name ride home. Anyway, I'm considering that this summer, because of the kids' various camp schedules, I'm going to put the show out a bit later. Not 4 p.m. like in the old days, but not noon, like I've been doing recently, maybe closer to 2 p.m.

So just fair warning, if you've gotten used to the show coming out at noon for lunch or dinner, I guess if you're in Europe or whatever, it might start coming out two hours later than that going forward. Not the 4 p.m. of all, but still, I thought I'd warn you, folks, before I started doing it. Anyway, hope to talk to you tomorrow, hoping for another negative rapid test for Max this afternoon.