Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 06/04 - What's The Problem With Sign In with Apple?

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

It looks like Washington is serious about going after Big Tech in a big way, Firefox blocks cookies, why are developers trepidatious about that Sign In with Apple scheme, and why it’s time we really need to talk about the YouTube recommendation algorithm. Sponsors: Legacybox.com/ride Tiny.website Links: Facebook, Google and other tech giants to face antitrust investigation by House lawmakers (Washington Post) ITUNES IS DEAD. LET'S PAY OUR RESPECTS (Wired) Apple’s top spec Mac Pro will likely cost at least $35,000 (The Verge) Firefox starts blocking third-party cookies by default (VentureBeat) On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles (NYTimes) How YouTube Became a Breeding Ground for a Diabolical Lizard Cult (The New Republic) YouTube star who gave toothpaste-filled Oreo to homeless man gets 15-month jail sentence (Fox News) 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 Techmeme ride home for Tuesday, June 4th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, it looks like Washington is serious about going after big tech in a big way. Firefox blocks cookies. Why are developers trepidacious about that sign-in with Apple scheme

and why it's time we really need to talk about the YouTube recommendation algorithm? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. While the whole WWDC thing was happening yesterday, man, was there some news happening? on the regulate the tech companies front. First, news dropped that the FTC had secured the rights to begin an antitrust probe of Facebook, seemingly a part of that whole divying up the regulatory business with the DOJ that we talked about yesterday. Then, news hit that the DOJ had secured jurisdiction to probe Apple. So in the last few days, rumors have it that between them, the FTC and DOJ, might be preparing inquiries into Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Now, there's no guarantee that anything will come of this. It's just that both of these regulatory bodies seem to be getting their ducks in a row to do something. All of the companies I just mentioned saw their stocks hit significantly yesterday. At one point yesterday, $137 billion had been wiped off the market values of the so-called Fang stocks. And then lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives announced a sweeping antitrust investigation of big tech that will touch all of the just-mentioned companies and could lead to, you know, CEO testimony, depositions, more. Quote, the probe announced Monday by Representative David Sickoline of Rhode Island, the leader of the House's top antitrust subcommittee, is expected to be far-reaching and comes at a moment when Democrats and Republicans, find themselves in rare alignment on the idea that the tech industry has been too unregulated for too long. The sentiment spurred a sharp sell-off in tech stocks to start the week.

Sikilene said the investigation won't target one specific tech company, but rather focus on the broad belief that the, quote, internet is broken, he told reporters. In doing so, he pointed out problematic practices at tech giants such as Google, which has faced sanctions in Europe for prioritizing its own services and search returns over those of its rivals and Facebook, which sickoline criticized for acquiring competitors or copying their services to ensure its continued dominance in social networking, end quote. So generally, color me skeptical that the House probe will lead to anything more than good photo ops for politicians. But at the same time, it is worth underlining again that this is bipartisan. Both Republicans and Democrats in the House have come out in support of this investigation.

Stop and think about that, people. in this day and age, what other thing that you can think of has Democratic and Republican politicians on the same side of the issue? That alone should worry Silicon Valley. At the very least, it is going to make for some bad press and photo ops and sound bites and Tim Cook and Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, all being forced to answer occasionally tough questions from grandstanding congressmen. But, and I I have to admit, I've changed my thinking on this in just the last few days. It should worry Silicon Valley more that the regulators, the agencies, the FTC and DOJ seem to be willing to do serious

probes as well. When this first started rumbling over the weekend, it looked to me like maybe a company or two might be singled out for some wrist slapping. But now it feels like it's snowballing. Now it looks like the targets have been divvied up. And somebody wants to go after everybody. You add the congressional probe on top of this, and now I think this is very real and serious indeed. Someone in tech is going to have to give up a pound of flesh, and now it looks like that someone could be everyone in tech. Let's go ahead and talk about some of the aftermath from yesterday. You might have gotten the sense that Chris Higgins is more of a true blue developer than I'll ever be. So actually, this morning I asked him on our Slackch

for his overall impressions of yesterday's event. And here's what he said. This was Christmas for developers and people got like 98% of what they asked for. They got ponies they didn't even ask for. The Mac Pro is vastly more sane than anybody could have hoped for. We were genuinely expecting something too cute or clever. What we really wanted was a super overspecked PC tower and we got it. Overall, this is Apple roaring back and saying, Can't innovate anymore, my ass without having to say it, because it's so obvious. Same with software. The Swift UI thing is bananas, and you can expect an entire class of new developers to come to Apple just to use that thing, end quote.

A lot of the chatter overnight was about that whole sign-in with Apple thing. On the one hand, it's clearly taking a swipe at Google and Facebook and the whole surveillance capitalism business model. No one will ever even know your real email address. Some people even wrote about how this proves that Apple is serious about transforming into a privacy as a service company. But at the same time, lots of people notice that Apple is making sign-in support mandatory if you use any third-party sign-in systems at all, which seems like a huge power grab at an interesting time. Walt Mosberg tweeted, I can't see how Apple can make anything mandatory across the web, but the ad tech industry is a toxic spill that has polluted the entire web and app business.

It is the cause of the rampant surveillance online. It should be exterminated. Not ads, but ad tech. So I'm for this, end quote. To which Casey Newton replied, even if it's just required on iOS apps, that could have huge ramifications. And seems like a strange time to launch a feature dependent on the App Store monopoly at a time of dawning antitrust regulation, end quote. To which Walt responded, yep, it may be a risky time. I believe they are going to fool out war against the Ad Tech Mafia step by step, maybe even aiming to become a single sign-in hub for TV, sites, etc. That would give them power, but assuming they stick with their privacy approach, not direct money, end quote. Owen Williams wrote in his newsletter this morning, it's wild that Apple is willing to so brazenly force such a move and impressive that it's willing to go so far for privacy.

But if the feature is so compelling and users desire this level of privacy, it should make its sign-in service compete on its own merit as every other system has in the past. I love that the company is pushing back on Facebook and Google sign-in becoming standard, but something about a trillion-dollar company wielding its platform to force adoption sits so uncomfortably for me. And the reality is that even if it's being obscured, Apple just will. wants to be your identity provider instead, end quote. Few other odds and ends. I don't know if Chris mentioned this, but limited mouse and cursor support is coming to the iPad. Developer Steve Trouton-Smith discovered this as soon as he got his hands on the developer beta and he posted a video, quoting in Gadget.

At least for the time being, mouse support is available as an assistive touch accessibility feature. It's not clear yet whether the OS supports Bluetooth mice, though there seems to be a Bluetooth devices section in the pointing devices settings. The cursor looks like a large circle in Trout and Smith's video, but there's a menu for cursor options in the clip 2, end quote. And there were plenty of obituaries written for iTunes, which is finally being broken up into its constituent parts, finally killing the bloated Frankenstein monster that it became, though it should be noted. not if you're on Windows. If you're on Windows, you're still going to have to wrestle

with the iTunes monster with all its tacked-on body parts. Still, as Wired noted, Apple has essentially killed iTunes. Quote, in its earliest iteration, iTunes revolutionized

how and where people could access music. Its later bloat tells the story of how digitization ate the world. And in the negative space of its obsolescence, you can see a fourth age

take hold in which streaming reigns. iTunes is dead, fine, good riddance, but farewell and thanks end quote and finally that mac pro which gave everyone everything they hoped for PCI slots so many ports not some sphere or pyramid or some other dumb design but how much would it cost you if you absolutely souped this bad boy up to the gills with top of the line everything Well, The Verge thinks you'd be looking at at least $35,000, give or take, quote, and that's before factoring in the four GPUs, which could easily jack that price up to around $45,000.

For all that dough, big budget video editors and other creative types get a lot of firepower, a 28-core Intel ZonW processor, and almost impossible to comprehend 1.5 terabytes of RAM, 4 terabytes of SSD storage, and 4 AMD Radion Pro Vega 2,000. duo GPUs, assuming you can afford one. Add in a Pro Display XDR monitor and a pro stand to go with it, and you're looking at a workstation that could clear $50,000. Keep in mind, too, that these estimates are based on market prices for these or similar parts. Apple historically has charged more for its pre-built configurations than for a computer you'd build on your own, end quote. Sort of in a similar vein to what we were just talking about to disrupting the

Ad surveillance market. Firefox today announced that it will now block third-party cookies by default. What's more, it's bringing its lockbox password manager to the desktop, but let's go back to that blocking cookies because that's the more interesting thing. Quoting Venture Beat. If you download a fresh copy of Firefox today, enhanced tracking protection will be on by default as part of the standard setting. That means third-party tracking cookies are blocked without users having to change a thing.

You will notice enhanced tracking protection working if there is a shield icon in the address bar. If you click on the shield icon and open the content blocking section and then cookies, you'll see a blocking tracking cookies section. There you can see the companies listed as third-party cookies and trackers that Firefox has blocked. You can also turn off blocking for a specific site. If you already have Firefox, Mozilla will be rolling out enhanced tracking protection by default in the coming months. You can turn it on yourself sooner by clicking the small eye icon in the address bar and clicking on the gear on the right side under content blocking. Or you can go to preferences, privacy and security, and then content blocking, choose custom, mark the cookies checkbox, and select third-party trackers, end quote.

This also got lost in the shuffle of news yesterday, and you're going to need to buckle up because it's gross and maybe turn the podcast off if kids are currently. listening to it. But it's important that this be addressed, so forgive me, but we need to talk about YouTube. According to the New York Times in a piece published yesterday, researchers have found that YouTube's recommendation algorithm is apparently curating home movies of unwitting families into a catalog that seemingly sexualizes children. The piece opens with the story of a family that uploaded pictures of their kids playing in a backyard pool. They were shut up. And they were shocked to discover that the video suddenly had 400,000 views. Now, before we go any further, I want to stipulate that there are dark, dirty, horrible corners of the internet, there always have

been, and any platform that operates on the internet, some section of that platform is inevitably going to have the worst people in it. But this is different, quoting from the piece. YouTube had curated the videos from across its archives, at times plucking out the otherwise innocuous home movies of unwitting families, the researchers say. In many cases, its algorithm referred users to the videos after they watched sexually themed content. It's YouTube's algorithm that connects these channels, said Jonas Kaiser, one of three researchers at Harvard's Berkman-Kline Center for Internet and Society who stumbled onto the videos while looking into YouTube's impact in Brazil. That's the scary thing, end quote. YouTube never set out to serve users with

sexual interests in children, but in the end, Mr. Kaiser said its automated system managed to keep them watching with recommendations that he called disturbingly on point. Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations. So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children's clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as five or six, wearing bathing suits or getting dressed or doing a split, end quote. Okay. So as I warned you, this is gross, but we need to deal with this because this is not an isolated incident.

I apologize, but I have sort of steered away from this. Otherwise, I'd be doing segments like this every day. but do you know the amount of stories that have come across my transom lately that have had the same common denominator? Literally, the amount of stories that I could pull from just in the most recent months that have been raising alarm bells about YouTube's recommendation algorithm. Yet another mass shooter whose mind was poisoned by YouTube videos or white supremacists or anti-Semites radicalized by YouTube videos. People turned on to anti-vaccination propaganda by YouTube videos. An investigative report on people that believe the earth is flat and every single person interviewed in the piece saying they got turned on to the idea by going down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. It's all because of the recommendation algorithm. It's an algorithm designed to juice engagement and seemingly the most surefire way for engagement is shock or disgust or controversy or anger or something.

In short, the dark side of the force. When we talk about tech fraying the edges of our society, Facebook has gotten all the headlines. Mark Zuckerberg has been trotted before Congress. Screen time overload is blamed for a whole range of ills. Google is chastised for selling our data to All in Sundry. But YouTube's algorithms, specifically its recommendation algorithm, that's the true atrocity at this moment in time. And when we talk about bad design and tech, designing for engagement, designing for addiction, serving up, more content and more content and more provocative content and more provocation, just in the service of running more ads, this is what we're talking about. This is the worst, most cynical example of this type of behavior and business model in tech right now, because it is all of it about

greed. YouTube swears there is no rabbit hole effect, but it's time we call BS on that. Just yesterday, just yesterday, the same day that the story I just told you about Landt's, The New Republic had a different story about a cult, the foundational belief of which is that a race of sentient, devil-worshipping, shape-shifting reptiles from outer space has infiltrated human civilization. Guess how that cult is spreading? Of course, YouTube. Link in the show notes if you want to learn more about that particular horror show. Look, Google is a company, as we've discussed, that might be hitting the proverbial wall when it comes to the money it can squeeze out of ads. We don't know to what degree YouTube is a supplement or solution.

to that problem because they don't break out numbers for YouTube. And I also get it. The viral nature of YouTube's system is foundational to what has made the site successful. It's how you get a lazy Sunday or a Charlie Bit My Finger or a Justin Bieber or a Logan Paul. Disrupting the viral nature of the site would break what YouTube is on a fundamental level. But that doesn't change the fact that somehow the basic calculus on YouTube's recommendation algorithm is just wrong. morally. If you start watching videos about bicycling and 20 minutes later you're being served up videos of shocking bike crashes, that is on some very basic level wrong. It's wrong because it's also what incentivizes YouTube creators to do increasingly bizarre stunts because they seem to

have intuited what YouTube seems to want to deny, which is that the algorithms like the dark stuff, the shocking stuff, the wrong stuff. Why can teenagers figure this out, but YouTube can't? like the YouTube star who was sentenced to 15 months in prison for filling Oreo cookies with toothpaste and feeding them to a homeless man on camera so that he could serve it up to YouTube and go viral. Again, this is a story from just yesterday. Again, link in the show notes. Anyone that works at YouTube, this is what you are morally complicit in on some level

as the system currently exists. Googlers like to organize for change within their company, and that is commendable. Well, start here also. Fix YouTube's algorithm. It is, as I say, one big thing that is fraying the very fabric of our society, and it's something that can be fixed. YouTube has mostly successfully combated terrorist propaganda videos for years, so you can fix the recommendation algorithm.

Fix the algorithm because it's possible to do so. It will cost you revenue and it will require you to rethink how YouTube works on a very basic level, but it's the right thing to do. The only reason I can see not to work on fixing this is cold, cynical greed, more money from ads. And anyone in YouTube management that continues to deny or obfuscate or stonewall this should be, at the very least, shamed and shunned out of polite society. There's usually a big news hangover after WWDC, and today was no exception. But so much was going on yesterday, even outside of the WWDC keynote, that it really did require that we pause and take the lay of the land today.

Hopefully we'll get a normal newsday tomorrow so we can get back to business as usual. Sorry for the show posting late last night, but what can I tell you? That keynote went two and a half hours. Like, I like to have the show edited by 330. And by 330 yesterday, we were just getting started writing the Apple segment. More civilized is when people hold events that start at 11 a.m. Eastern. Anyway, hope you understand. And talk to you all again tomorrow.