Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/01 - The Zuckerberg Tapes

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Listen in on Mark Zuckerberg rallying the troops, GoPro hopes newer cameras revive its fortunes, prepping for the Microsoft event tomorrow, the SEC slaps a crypto company on the wrist, and Tesla’s new Smart Summon feature has made for some viral videos. Sponsors: PixelUnion.net Capterra.com/ride Links: All Hands on Deck (The Verge) READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT OF MARK ZUCKERBERG’S LEAKED INTERNAL FACEBOOK MEETINGS (The Verge) GoPro launches two new cameras as it tries to become profitable this year (CNBC) GOPRO HERO 8 BLACK REVIEW: SMOOTH OPERATOR (The Verge) Appeals court upholds FCC’s cancelling of net neutrality rules (The Washington Post) Microsoft makes Windows Virtual Desktop generally available globally (ZDNet) EOS Maker Block.One Settles With SEC Over Unregistered Securities Sale (Coindesk) People Using Tesla's New Smart Summon Feature Are Already Running Into Trouble And It's Hard To Be Shocked (Jalopnik) 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 right home for Tuesday, October 1st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Listen in on Mark Zuckerberg rallying the troops. GoPro hopes newer cameras will revive its fortunes. Preping for Microsoft's big event tomorrow, the SEC slaps a crypto company on the wrist, and Tesla's new smart summon feature has made for some interesting viral videos. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Verge got its hands on some leaked audio from open meetings.

that CEO Mark Zuckerberg held with Facebook employees in July. Quoting The Verge, The Verge obtained two hours of audio from the meetings, which include extended question and answer sessions between Zuckerberg and his employees. In language, that is often more candid than he typically uses in public comments. Zuckerberg seeks to rally the company against Facebook's competitors, critics, and the U.S. government, end quote.

So let me take some of these in reverse order, saving what is probably the most newsworthy audio for last. on those reports of straight up PTSD that Facebook's contractors allegedly face when moderating content on the platform. A lot of people think that TikTok is the new rising competitor that Facebook is facing slash wants to emulate slash maybe wants to kneecap. A Facebook employee asked, quote, are we concerned about TikTok's growing cultural clout among teens and Gen Z and what is our plan of attack? To which Zuck answers that TikTok has indeed surpassed Instagram in India in terms of what he calls scale, which I assume means number of users, but... First see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big,

or we go and compete with TikTok and countries where they are big. On how the rollout of Libra is going, and the pushback from governments, remember this audio is from July, and then the section that has made most of the headlines so far, the question from a Facebook employee was, quote, with the recent FCC fine investigation and with the rise of politicians like Senator Warren, I was wondering how personally worried you are

about regulators coming in and breaking up Facebook, end quote. Zuckerberg says this later in his answer. It's just as likely it makes it more likely because now the companies can't coordinate and work together. But he initially began his answer by saying this. That still sucks for us. lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that's not like the position that you want to be in when you're, you know, I mean, it's like we, we care about our country and like want to work

with our government to do good things. But, but look, at the end of the day, if someone's going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the back. To which Senator Warren herself tweeted this morning, what would really suck is if we don't fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anti-competitive practices. on consumer privacy rights and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy. I'm not afraid to hold big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon accountable. It's time to hashtag break up big tech, end quote. As many people pointed out this morning,

the Warren campaign is likely counting its lucky stars this morning, quoting Jennifer Bendry on Twitter. Yet another thing at E. Warren can make a campaign ad about. Facebook, like Wall Street, is scared of her, end quote. Yes, one imagines that it might be useful to have quotes like this floating around in a Democratic primary season. Laura Olin tweeted, quote, the gifts to Warren's fundraising team keep coming, end quote. GoPro has unveiled the $399 Hero 8 Black and $499 Hero Max cameras available for pre-order today, shipping in October and coming with three new modular add-ons. Quoting CNBC, the Hero 8 Black is 149.5.000.

14% lighter than the current Hero 7 black and has a 12 megapixel camera sensor with improved HDR, which will improve pictures and video in low light areas. It has new hyper-smooth 2.0 video stabilization to help smooth out bumpy video, wind noise reduction, and can shoot 4K video in addition to slow motion video. The Hero Max has two lenses and can record sharper 5.6K video and 360 degrees. A new Max Superview ultra-wide camera mode for fitting more of the scene into pictures and videos. It can live stream in 1080P and offers an option that lets people automatically back up videos and photos to the cloud. It also has six microphones, which GoPro says will offer the best stereo sound ever from one of its cameras.

GoPro also announced three modular add-ons for the cameras. There's an $80 display mod with a 1.9 inch display that can fold into the front or back of the camera and help you better frame your pictures and videos. Also a $50. waterproof light mod and a media mod which lets you attach both the display mod and the light mod to the top of your GoPro, end quote. Brett Rose at the verge already got his hands on the Hero 8 black, and he already has his review up. He likes it.

He likes that the Hero 8 black doesn't require special housing for mounts. He likes that it's got improved image stabilization, but he does note that the camera tends to get a tad hot when recording. In his conclusion, he wrote, quote, overall, the Hero 8 Black is a worthy successor to the throne. It's easily going to be my go-to action camera starting now, at least until I get my hands on the GoPro Max in a month or so. And I'm more likely than ever to use it as a B camera on upcoming productions. Just wait until vloggers get their hands on this thing, end quote. An appeals court has upheld the FCC's 2017 repeal of net neutrality, but at the same

time ruled that the FCC can't stop states from setting up their own net neutrality regulations, quoting Tony Rahm in The Washington Post. In a nearly 200-page opinion, judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the FCC and its Republican chairman Ajit Pai, who was appointed to his position by President Trump. While it said the agency must return to the drawing board on some elevates of its appeal, the court upheld the legal underpinnings of the FCC's work, finding that net neutrality supporters had made, quote, unconvincing arguments in their efforts to override the FCC's deregulation of companies such as AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. But the ruling still appeared to offer a lifeline to net neutrality supporters. It overruled an effort by the FCC to block states from adopting open internet protections of their own.

The FCC preempted those regulations as part of its prior repeal, but the court determined the telecom agency had overstepped its authority. lawmakers in California adopted their own net neutrality rules last year only to be met by swift opposition from the Justice Department, which sued to stop their implementation, citing the FCC's legal blockade, end quote. Tomorrow, Microsoft will be hosting a hardware event here in New York City, and I'll be there live to hopefully come back with some hands-on impressions of the new gear. In prep for that, Microsoft appears to be clearing the decks of other news. For example, Microsoft is now allowing OneDrive users to explain. expand to 1 terabyte of storage on OneDrive in 200 gigabyte increments. Also, Microsoft has launched OneDrive Personal Vault to protect folders using two-factor authentication.

Both new features are already available globally, quoting from Therot.com. OneDrive's new personal vault provides users with a secure place within their OneDrive cloud storage. The vault can only be accessed using a PIN or your phone's biometric authentication system. Personal Vault includes other features like, automatic locking, bitlocker encryption on Windows 10, and restricted sharing. The feature first launch in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, but Microsoft is rolling the feature out to all users worldwide today.

For those users with the free or standalone 100-gigabyte plan of OneDrive, you will only be able to store up to three files in your personal vault, while everyone else will be able to store as many files as they want. Expandable storage on OneDrive is also launching today, meaning those with an Office 365 subscription can now expand their 1 terabyte storage in 200 gigabyte increments starting at $1.99 a month for an additional 200 gigabytes of storage, end quote. And Microsoft has rolled out its Azure-based Windows Virtual Desktop, globally, with a Windows Virtual Desktop client app also available now for Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, and HTML 5, quoting Mary Jo Foley in ZDNet.

WVD is a new service that provides Windows 10 virtualization along with MULD, multi-session Windows 10 capabilities and support for Windows server, RDS, desktop, and apps. WVD will allow users to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 Pro Plus apps, and other third-party applications by running them remotely in Azure virtual machines. Microsoft also will provide to WVD users the ability to virtualize their Windows 7 desktops with free extended security update support through January of 2023. That means customers who license and purchase WVD will continue to get security updates for Windows 7 after Microsoft officially and support and security updates for the product after January 14th, 2020 for no additional cost, end quote.

Crypto startup Block 1, the team behind the EOS token, has settled with the SEC for $24 million and penalties for conducting an unregistered security sale. This was one of the closest watched security enforcement actions made by the SEC in crypto space surrounding initial coin offerings. Block 1 had raised around $4.1 billion via an initial coin offering. So this fine represents 0.58% of the initial raise, which is, you know, not exactly going to deter people from doing something like this. An SEC press release, quote, highlighted that Block 1's token sale began shortly before the SEC released its DAO report, but, quote, continued for nearly a year after the report's publication, end quote.

The company did not secure an exemption from securities registration requirements and did not otherwise register the sale, the SEC said. In its own press release, Block 1 said the settlement only applies to the sale of the original ERC 20 token it sold. EOS holders swapped their Ethereum-based tokens with the proper EOS tokens when the network first went live. More significantly, Block 1's statement said that its ERC 20 token is no longer in circulation and, quote, will not require the token to be registered as a security with the SEC, end quote.

So the way I'm reading this is, the pre-product, the pre-launch version of what eventually became EOS, was a security in the SEC's eyes, but after the swap out to the EOS token, the EOS token itself is not a security. And beyond paying the fine, Block 1 doesn't have to give any of the money back to investors that it raised. So, here's Ryan Taylor's take on Twitter, quote, The settlement actually doesn't state one way or the other, whether the post-launch EOS token is a security or not. It doesn't even attempt to opine either way. However, the fact that the SEC focused only on the initial sale is telling of their priorities, end quote. On top of that, it's actually hard to read the SEC's tea leaves here because the SEC still seems to be coming down hard on kick for something essentially similar.

I have no skin in this game whatsoever, but I will quote Mike Dutas here from Twitter, quote, Champagne Corks are flying at Block 1 HQ tonight. Cheers, we got away with it, end quote. Finally today, remember when I told you that the biggest software update in the history of the Tesla platform finally brought that new smart summon feature to Tesla cars last week, the feature which allows the car to drive to you in, say, a parking lot situation. Yeah, well, videos of owners actually trying out the feature have gone viral online since then, showing, shall we say, varying degrees of success. To see some of the videos yourself, do click through to the link from Jolopnik in the show notes, who says, quote,

On the plus side, sure, smart summon is great for impressing people and not getting wet in the rain or having to walk to your car, possibly with a bunch of heavy crap. but at the same time, when has it ever been okay to attempt to be in control of your car from potentially across a parking lot? There's plenty of cases where SmartSummon has worked just fine, and yes, people do stupid stuff in parking lots every day. Tesla does specify that it's a beta release, which is fine for most software, but does it make sense when that software is driving a full-sized car in a public space? This is a tricky one. I'm pretty sure we'll see more SmartSummon issues and fenderbenders because the world is messy, and confusing. I reached out to Tesla for comment, and we'll update when I hear something, end quote. Again, watch the videos. There have already been fender benders documented. There's been cars shown to run

into garage walls in their own driveways. But the larger point here is it's absolutely amazing that Tesla has just thrown this admittedly beta-labeled product out into the world. On this weekend bonus episode, you're going to hear a story that I did. never heard before about the reason Waymo decided it had to go for full autonomy, the reason it decided it couldn't do half measures with limited versions of autonomy was because with humans still in the equation making decisions, it was just too potentially messy. And yet here's Tesla just being like, go ahead, give this a go, just like they've done with their autopilot feature. Actually, I'm going to straight up plug this right now. This weekend's bonus episode is an interview

with Waymo's head of hardware. Satis Jaya Chandran. Guess where Satish worked before moving to Waymo? Tesla, where he was the director of hardware engineering for Tesla's autopilot team. That is all for today. Get ready for some big Microsoft News tomorrow, kiddos. Talk to you then.