Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/15 – “An Excel File Full Of The Howling Of Ghosts”

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

If you tell Elon he doesn’t know what he’s doing, you could get fired. Matt Levine looks into the abyss of the FTX balance sheet and finds the abyss staring back at him. Is the Alexa platform in danger? Nike still believes in NFTs. And what it’s actually like to use Apple’s Emergency SOS feature. Sponsors: Hover.com/ride for 10% off Split.io/techmeme Links: Musk Publicly Punishes Twitter Engineers Who Call Him Out Online (Bloomberg) Is Elon Musk’s Twitter about to fall out of the GDPR’s one-stop shop? (TechCrunch) FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad (Bloomberg) Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees (NYTimes) Nike to Open Its Own Virtual Sneaker Store and Trading Platform (Bloomberg) Nike Launches Web3 Platform Offering Virtual Apparel and Other NFT-Based Products (CryptoNews) Here’s what it’s like to use Apple’s Emergency SOS via satellite (The Verge) 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, November 15th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. If you tell Elon he doesn't know what he's doing, you could get fired. Matt Levine looks into the abyss that is the FTX balance sheet and finds the abyss staring back at him. Is the Alexa platform in danger? Nike still believes in NFTs and what it's like to actually use Apple's emergency SOS feature. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today in Twitter, quoting Bloomberg. Twitter owner Elon Musk, who has called himself a free speech absolutist, has resorted to firing company engineers who publicly criticize him on the social media service. In one case, Musk announced

the firing in a tweet. In another, the former employee said he was fired after he openly rebuked Musk. Engineer Eric Franhofer, who worked on Twitter's app for the Android mobile operating system, on Sunday, reposted one of Musk's tweets with a comment saying that Musk's understanding of a technical part of Twitter's app was, quote, wrong. Musk replied and asked Fronhoffer to elaborate before writing, quote, Twitter is super slow on Android, what have you done to fix that, end quote. After attempting to explain his thinking in a number of tweets, Fronhofer was asked by another user why he hadn't shared his feedback with his new boss privately. The engineer who has worked at Twitter for more than eight years replied, quote, maybe he should ask questions privately, maybe use Slack or

email, end quote. On Monday morning, Musk wrote that Fronhofer had been fired. Fronhofer retweeted that post and included a saluting emoji that many employees used when they were laid off earlier this month. Twitter and Fronhofer didn't immediately respond to request for comment on his status. Another engineer, Ben Lieb, was also fired after calling out Musk. He retweeted the same technical post from Musk writing, quote, as the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea WTF he's talking about. Lieb, who worked at Twitter for a decade, confirmed to Bloomberg that he was fired on Sunday, end quote. I think you might have seen this, but it seems like Twitter's two-factor authentication was down for a time yesterday,

so if you logged out, you couldn't log back in. And Chris Messina has been tweeting at Elon that he is currently unable to edit his profile on either mobile or desktop. So maybe we're lucky at this point that tweets are still happening at all, though, as many people have pointed out recently, the World Cup begins this weekend, so if there ever was a high-volume event designed to stress Twitter's current operations, this would be it. Digidae was reporting that another big advertising agency, Group M, has warned its client's Twitter is a, quote, high-risk media buy due to senior executive resignations, blue check abuse, and possible consent decree violations.

And a source has told TechCrunch that it's possible Twitter is no longer fulfilling its obligations for claiming Ireland as its main establishment under the EU's GDPR regime. Why? Because Chief Privacy Officer Damian Kiernan was one of those who resigned last week and he has yet to be replaced. Quote, under the EU's GDPR, meanwhile, Twitter is obliged in just one very basic requirement, to have a data protection officer or DPO to provide a contact point for regulators. Hence the departure of Kieran, its first and only, only DPO since the role was created at the company in 2018, has not gone unnoticed by its data protection watchdog in Ireland, as we also reported Friday. But the Irish Data Protection

Commission's concerns are already spiraling wider than Twitter's compliance with notifications about core personnel. Last week, the authority, currently Twitter's lead EU DPA under the GVPR's OSS, put the social media firm on watch by signaling public concern when it said it would be putting questions to the company about the status of its main establishment in Ireland at a meeting scheduled for early this week to discuss all the recent privacy changes since the Musk takeover. Twitter has not commented publicly on the DPC's warning nor on the departures of senior regulator-facing staffers. Indeed, since Musk took over, its communications department appears to have been dismantled and the company no longer responds to press requests for comment. So it was not possible

to obtain an official statement from Twitter about these departures or on the substance of our report. unquote. I could tell you about the New York Times's bizarre profile of Sam Bankman-Fried, which came out overnight, but I don't want to because it didn't offer any new details other than a sort of defense of SBF and his mental state. They're worried about whether or not he's sleeping well, which he says he is, which is what makes that whole piece weird. Instead, let's go with our buddy Matt Levine's newsletter yesterday, where he took a look at the FTX balance sheet that came out, of which we discussed yesterday. If you read the article to its conclusion, you can almost hear Matt's brain breaking in real time, but I wanted to quote these relevant passages. If a troubled company has a

few days to beg potential investors for a bailout before it files for bankruptcy, and it sends those investors its balance sheet so they can consider investing, and they all pass, and then the company files for bankruptcy, of course the balance sheet was bad. That is not a state of affairs that is consistent with a pristine fortress balance sheet. But there is a range of possible badness, even in bankruptcy. And the balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried's failed Cryptoexchange, FtX.com, sent to potential investors last week before filing for bankruptcy on Friday is very bad. It's an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane. Last week, I was shocked that one of the

main assets of FTX, one of the main assets it relied on to be able to pay out customer balances, was a token it had just made up. But I was wrong. It has two tokens that it had just made up. FTC's two largest asset balances before this week were $5.9 billion of FTT, $553 million at post-crash prices last Thursday, and $5.4 billion of SRM, $2.2 billion post-crash, something like two-thirds of the money that FTCS. owed to customers was backed by its own tokens that it had made up. I am not saying that all of FTCS's assets were made up. That desperation balance sheet lists dollar and yen accounts, stable coins, unaffiliated cryptocurrencies, equities, venture investments, etc. All things that were not

created or controlled by FTCS. And that desperation balance sheet reflects FTC's position after $5 billion of customer outflows last weekend. Presumably FTCS burned through its more liquid normal stuff, Bitcoin dollars, etc. To meet those withdrawals, so what was left was the weirdo cats and dogs. Still, it is striking that the balance sheet that FTCS circulated to potential rescuers consisted mostly of stuff it made up. Its balance sheet consisted mostly of stuff it made up. Stuff it made up.

You can't do that. That's not how balance sheets work. That's not how anything works. I tried in the previous section to capture the horrors of FTC's balance sheet as it spiraled into bankruptcy, but as I said, there is something important missing in that account. What's missing is the money. What's missing is that FDX had at some point something like $16 billion of customer money, but most of its assets turned out to be tokens that it made up. It did not pay $16 billion for those tokens, or even $1 billion probably. Money came in, but then when customers came to FTCS

and pride open the doors of the safe, all they found were cobwebs and serum. Where did the money go, end quote. Again, we seem to be caught in a time loop of the same depressing stories every day. Here's the third story raising its head again. Sources have told the New York Times that Amazon plans to cut around 10,000 corporate and tech jobs are around 3% of its corporate staff, the largest cuts in Amazon's history, and the cuts could come as soon as this week. Quote, the cuts will focus on Amazon's devices organization, including the voice assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and inhuman resources, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The number of layoffs remains fluid and is likely to roll out

team by team rather than all at once, as each business finishes plans, one person said. But if it stays around 10,000, it would represent roughly 3% of Amazon's corporate employees and less than 1% of its global workforce of more than 1.5 million, which is primarily composed of hourly workers. Amazon's planned retrenchment during the critical holiday shopping season, when the company typically has valued stability, shows how quickly the souring global economy has put pressure on it to trim businesses that have been overstaffed or under-delivering for years, and quote. This is something I've heard, too. We need to keep our eye on Alexa as a platform. To quote, Whoopi Goldberg and the movie Ghost.

Molly, you're in danger, girl. Substitute Alexa for Molly there. Considering how fundamental the smart home seems to be to Amazon's overall strategy, I can't see them killing Alexa, but who knows? We know that they know that people mostly use Alexa to set timers and ask about the weather. Voice really hasn't borne out as a computing platform, as some people thought. but asking to turn off the lights is pretty key to what Alexa does too, so I don't know. Unfortunate Alexa Death Watch alert.

Nike has announced a virtual sneaker store and trading platform it is calling Dot Swoosh, and plans to launch its first collection of digital collectibles in January. Registrations for this platform open on November 18th. Quite frankly, Nike is one of the companies for whom NFTs actually makes a ton of sense, right? goinging Bloomberg. The world's largest sportswear company will release its own goods on the dot-souche platform, and users will be able to collect and show off their items on it. The digital products will include various types of tie-ins, and some may unlock access to physical items,

make them available in video games, or provide entry to real-life events. Nike is focused on introducing the product category to consumers and will go on a six-city tour to educate shoppers on Web3 and blockchain technology. All products will be priced in U.S. dollars to reduce volatility, and keep the process familiar for new buyers with the first collection set to debut in January. Users eventually will be able to connect their own wallets to bring items to other marketplaces. Some athletes signed to Nike will have their own storefronts on the site. Individual creators may also be able to co-create products with Nike through community challenges

and earn royalties on their designs. Nike has been investing in the so-called Metaverse over the past year and now has a devoted design team for its digital wares. Last year, it began filing trademarks for virtual goods, opened its own virtual world on Roblox, and acquired virtual sneaker creator RTFKT. Its efforts are paying off. Nike has earned nearly $200 million to date from NFT products, far outpacing fashion peers, including Adidas, Gucci, and Dolce and Gabana,

according to August data from the blockchain research firm, Dune Analytics, end quote. And quoting crypto news. Notably, Nike's NFT apparel will be minted on Polygon, a layer two, scaling solution that runs alongside the Ethereum blockchain. According to a fast company report, Nike plans to sell digital sneakers for less than $50 a pair. In a Twitter thread, RTFKT clarified that the studio is actually aiding Nike as it expands further into Web3. The company added that Nike will release digital apparel for RTFKT's CloneX NFT avatars,

which those owners could then use in supported Web3 gaming and Metaverse worlds. It is worth noting that Nike has been the most successful with its foray in two NFTs. Last November, the company filed seven patents that revealed plans to make and sell virtual footwear and apparel. Days later, it launched Nike Land, a Roblox universe full of online games and virtual products. Within five months of its launch, Nike land amassed seven million visitors. Meanwhile, Nike's purchase of RTFKT started paying off. By September, the company had raked in over $150 million from the sale of its NFTs and received over $93 million in royalties, end quote. And we'll end today with a review again. A review of what it's actually like to use Apple's emergency

SOS via satellite feature, which has begun rolling out today. The Verge says that the feature works well, though texting via satellite takes a while, quoting Victoria's song. I spent last Friday morning turning around in circles atop a hill in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. I had an iPhone 14 in hand, and I was trying to catch a clear view of the sky so I could connect with a satellite. I wasn't exactly alone or lost in the wilderness, but I pretended like I was in order to get a feel for Apple's new emergency SOS via satellite feature. To start an emergency sOS text, you have to try calling 911 first. Even if your carrier isn't available, emergency calls can be sent through another carrier's network if available. If your iPhone 14 can't

connect whatsoever, you'll see an emergency text via satellite SOS icon in the lower right-hand corner. This took around 30 seconds to pop up. Once you tap that, button, you'll see a prompt to report emergency. After that, you'll be taken through a brief questionnaire where you can specify what type of situation you're in. At this point, you can choose if you also want to notify your emergency contacts. The questionnaire is easy to understand overall, though I was of sound mind and uninjured during my demo. I'd imagine it being more challenging if you're in pain or delirious. After that, you'll see a graphic of a grade-out satellite with an arrow indicating which way you should turn. Your job is to point your phone in that direction until it turns green. And then

you wait, a lot. Regular texting is pretty instantaneous, but texting via satellite requires more patience. If you're blessed with a clear open sky, it takes around 15 to 30 seconds to send a message. But if there are hills blocking the horizon or you're in an area with dense foliage, you could be waiting for a minute or longer. I was on a hill under a big oak tree in Prospect Park. Sometimes my messages sent relatively quickly, and by quickly I mean about 15 to 30 seconds. Other times, I was distinctly reminded of loading pages on 56K dial-up. The initial text you send will include the emergency questionnaire, your medical ID, if you set that up, and your location. There will be a few back and forths, mainly so you can give emergency services a description of your location.

After you've been alerted that emergency services are en route, you can sit tight and wait some more. I went through the process a couple of times, and there truly is no predicting how long each message will take to send or receive. After a bit, you learn to keep your text descriptive and snappy to minimize waiting. For example, it'll be much faster if you send near big rock on hill next to an oak tree than a few sentences. It feels slow compared to regular texting, but on average, the whole process only took about three to five minutes. I was chuffed to find out you don't have to raise your arm or hold your phone in any particular way to connect to a satellite, so long as it's not in a backpack or pocket, you can hold your phone normally. My arms got a bit tired, but that's only because I was trying to film the demo and take pictures.

Because satellites move quickly across the sky, there's a high chance you'll have to turn around a lot, sort of like a dog chasing its tail. I was concerned about that, given you might not be able to move around easily if you break a leg, so it was reassuring to know that you can rotate the phone around if you're immobile. It's just easiest to get the clear signal if you can move. Although satellite connectivity is mostly for emergencies, you can use it in other ways via the Find My app. Say you're in charge of setting up a picnic at a state park, but your phone's got zero bars and you've no way to communicate where you are. You can instead send your location via satellite to anyone you share your location with in the Find My app. You probably won't use it much if you live in a

city, but I can see it coming in handy in rural areas. Now, the last thing you want is to learn how to use this during an emergency. Thankfully, there's a demo mode. You can access it by going to settings, emergency SOS, emergency SOS via satellite, and then try demo. The demo mode gives you a good idea of how the actual feature works. You'll be shown a brief overview of how it works, and then you can temporarily turn off your cellular to try connecting to a satellite. After that, you'll get to partake in a sample conversation with faux emergency services. Ideally, you'll never have to actually use emergency satellite texting. That said, it worked rather well, and I'd rather have this in my back pocket than nothing. I'll caveat that my experience was in a city park,

so I was never in any real danger, so your mileage may vary in a more challenging location or during an actual emergency. My only gripe is that it requires a lot of patience, but that's to be expected when you're sending things via satellite. If this is a feature you can see yourself using, I highly recommend trying the demo and taking the time to set up your medical ID and emergency contacts beforehand. You know, as the Boy and Girl Scouts say, it pays the to be prepared, end quote. Whenever I'm alone with you, you make me feel like I am young again. Whenever I'm alone with you, you make me feel like I am fun again.

Talk to you tomorrow.