Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 12/03 - Pablo Escobar's Brother's Smartphone

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

Headlines from re:Invent, how tech is caught up in a tariff war with France, Facebook created a chatbot to help employees explain themselves during the holidays, and let me tell you about the new foldable phone from Pablo Escobar’s brother. Sponsors: Metalab Netgear.com/bestwifi Links: AWS Graviton2: What it means for Arm in the data center, cloud, enterprise, AWS (ZDNet) AWS launches its custom Inferentia inferencing chips (TechCrunch) Trump Administration Proposes Tariffs Against $2.4 Billion of French Goods (WSJ) Former Google employees who say they were fired for organizing are filing labor charges against the company (Vox) Google fired us for organizing. We’re fighting back. (Google Walkout For Real Change) TikTok curbed reach for people with disabilities (NetzPolitik.org) TikTok prevented disabled users’ videos from showing up in feeds (The Verge) DHS wants to expand airport face recognition scans to include US citizens (TechCrunch) Facebook Gives Workers a Chatbot to Appease That Prying Uncle (NYTimes) Pablo Escobar's Brother Has Apple In His Crosshairs With... an 'Unbreakable' Foldable Phone? (Gizmodo) 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, December 3rd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, headlines from Reinvent, how tech is caught up in a terrafore with France.

Facebook created a chat pot to help employees explain themselves during the holidays, and let me tell you about the new foldable phone from Pablo Escobar's brother. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As mentioned yesterday, Amazon is holding its Reinvent conference right now, and a couple of headlines from that today. First, AWS is updating its arm-powered processor line with Graviton 2, which it claims offers 40% better performance over comparable X-86-based cloud instances, and it will cost 20% less, too.

AWS is serious about arm processors in the data center, it seems, quoting ZDNet. Graviton 2, which is optimized for cloud-native applications, is based on 64-bit arm Neoverse cores and a custom system on a chip designed by AWS. Graviton 2 boasts 2X faster floating point performance per core for scientific and high-performance workloads, support for up to 64 virtual CPUs, 25 GBPS of networking, and 18 GBSPS of EBS bandwidth, end quote. And AWS has also launched its custom inferentia inferential. chips for EC2 instances, which promise to be more cost-effective than existing options. Quoting TechCrunch, these new chips promise to make inferencing, that is, using the machine

learning models you pre-trained earlier, significantly faster and cost-effective. As AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted, a lot of companies are focusing on custom chips that let you train models, though Google and others would surely disagree there. Infringing tends to work well on regular CPUs, but custom chips are obviously going to going to be faster. With inferentia, AWS offers a lower latency and three times the thorough put at 40% lower cost per inference compared to a regular G4 instance on EC4. The new instances promise up to 2,000 tops and feature integrations with TensorFlow, Pytorch, and MXNet, as well as the onyx format for moving models between frameworks. For now, it's only available

in the EC2 compute service, but it will come to AWS's container services. and its Sagemaker Machine Learning Service soon, too, end quote. The U.S. is proposing tariffs on up to $2.5 billion worth of French goods. Okay. The trade war stuff roils on, right? Except the reason for these proposed tariffs is where the tech angle comes in. These new tariffs would be in retaliation for France's recently passed digital services tax, which the U.S. says is unfairly discriminatory towards U.S.

tech companies, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The French tax, which was signed into law July 24th, applies a 3% tax on revenue that tech companies reap in France from such activities as undertaking targeted advertising or running a digital marketplace. In an investigation released late Monday, the U.S. Trade Representative's Office said the digital services tax, or DST, applies largely to services where U.S. companies are dominant and doesn't tax services where French companies are more successful. Quote, statements by French officials responsible for proposing and enacting the French DST show that the law deliberately targets U.S. companies, the U.S. Trade Representative's office said. It added that French officials, quote, repeatedly referred to the French DST as the

GAFA tax, which stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, end quote. In a statement, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, said the U.S. action, quote, sends a clear signal that the United States will take action against digital tax regimes that discriminate or otherwise impose undue burdens on U.S. companies, end quote. The U.S. trade representative also threatened that such tariffs could be enacted in the future against Austria, Italy, and Turkey, all of which also have digital services taxes, end quote. The proposed tariffs would be around 100% of the price of the imports. So you know, stock up on your good French wines and cheeses now, I guess. According to documents seen by NetsPolitic.org, TikTok wanted to prevent

users from being bullied on its platform. So as recently as September, in what can only be described as a misguided attempt to shield users from bullies, TikTok basically shadowband or curbed the reach that posts from LGBT users, disabled users, and, quote, fat and self-confident users, among others, curbed the reach that posts from those users had on the platform. Quote, the platform instructed its moderators to mark videos of people with disabilities and limit their reach. Queer and fat people also ended up on a list of, quote, special users whose videos were regarded as a bullying risk by default and capped in their reach. regardless of the content. Documents obtained by netpolitic.org detail TikTok's moderation guidelines.

In addition, we spoke with a source at TikTok who has knowledge of content moderation policies at the video sharing platform. The relevant section in the moderation rules is called imagery depicting a subject highly vulnerable to cyberbullying. In the explanations, it says this covers users who are, quote, susceptible to harassment or cyberbullying based on their physical or mental condition, end quote. According to the memo, mobbing has negative consequences for those affected. Therefore, videos of such users should always be considered as a risk, and their reach on the platform should be limited.

TikTok uses its moderation toolbox to limit the visibility of such users. Moderators were instructed to mark people with disabilities as risk for. This means that a video is only visible in the country where it was uploaded. For users that were considered particularly vulnerable, TikTok had even further reaching regulations. When their videos popped up on the screens of TikTok moderation teams in Berlin, Beijing, or Barcelona, after 6,000 to 10,000 views, they were automatically tagged as AutoR. As a result, if these videos exceeded a certain number of views, they automatically ended up in the not recommended category. Such a categorization means that a video no longer appears in the algorithmically compiled for you feed, which users see when opening the app. strictly speaking, such videos are not deleted, but in fact, they hardly have an audience, end quote.

And quoting from the verge, a spokesperson from TikTok called the rules an early and flawed attempt to fight conflict. The spokesperson told netpolitic.org that they were, quote, never intended to be a long-term solution, although the anonymous source said moderators were instructed to follow them as recently as September. Quote, early on in response to an increase in bullying on the app, we implemented a blunt and temporary policy, a spokesperson told the verge. While the intention was good, the approach was wrong, and we have long since changed the earlier policy in favor of more nuanced anti-bullying policies and in-app protections, end quote. Well, the seeming civil war inside of Google roils on, a group of four former Google employees who say they were fired for organizing workers inside

the company are filing unfair labor practice charges against Google. The four ex-uglers are Rebecca Rivers, Lawrence Burland, Paul Duke, and Sophie Waldman. In a statement, the Quartet wrote, quote, Google wants to send a message to everyone. If you dare to engage in protected labor organizing, you will be punished. They count on the fear, the sadness, and the anger that we are all feeling to stop us all from exercising our rights and to chill all attempts to hold one of the most powerful organizations in history accountable for its actions. But what they didn't count on is the strength, the resolve, and the solidarity of Googlers and our allies. Even as you read this, our co-workers are organizing with a renewed passion.

More are joining in the efforts every single day, as the company shows its true face. Our co-workers have heard Google's excuses and they aren't buying it. Meanwhile, we too will continue to fight alongside a broad coalition of those who understand the stakes of Google's power and the company's lack of accountability. As a first step, unfair labor practice charges will be filed with the National Labor Relations Board. We look forward to hearing the NLRB's findings, which we expect will confirm that Google acted unlawfully. Google fails to understand that workers are the ones who built the company and its most successful products and that we can stop building them. No company. Tech giant or otherwise should be able to interfere with workers' rights to organize for better working conditions, including ethical business practices, end quote.

Now quoting from Recode. In response to workers' plans to file labor charges, a spokesperson for Google, wrote in an email, that the company prohibits workplace retaliation. The spokesperson also reiterated points made by management in a recent memo, Google sent staff, announcing the firings, in which company leaders said the employees were engaged in, quote, systematic searches for other employees' materials and work, end quote. The former employees deny that allegation, saying that they searched for material widely accessible to the entire company and in a way that is routine in day-to-day work at the

company. Under U.S. federal labor law, employers are not a lot. allowed to retaliate against employees for engaging in collective action relating to working conditions. If the NRLB finds reasonable evidence to support, Google did that in this case, the company could be forced to reinstate the fired employees, issue back wages, and inform all its employees about their labor rights, according to UC Hastings Law Professor Vina DuBal, end quote. Until now, if you're a U.S. citizen or green card holder coming to or leaving the U.S. via an airport, you have had the right to opt out of the facial recognition systems that are increasingly being

used at border entry points. Well, maybe not for much longer. Quote, in a filing, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed that all travelers, and not just foreign nationals or visitors, will have to complete a facial recognition check before they are allowed to enter the U.S., but also to leave the country. Facial recognition for departing flights has increased in recent years as part of Homeland and securities efforts to catch visitors and travelers who overstay their visas. The department whose responsibility is to protect the border and control immigration has a deadline of 2021 to roll

facial recognition scanners to the largest 20 airports in the United States despite facing a rash of technical challenges. But although there may not always be a clear way to opt out of facial recognition at the airport, U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, also known as green card holders, have been exempt from these checks, the existing rules say. Now, The proposed rule changes to include citizens has drawn ire from civil liberties groups in the country, end quote. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong if the government has your face registered in a database? Remember that data breach involving 100,000 license plate and traveler images from this past June. And has anyone seen what's been going on in China lately with the government and facial recognition tech?

Let's say you're a Facebook employee and you head home for the holidays. Maybe in the past your job at Facebook was caused for envy and celebration on the part of your relatives. But with all the myriad controversies Facebook has faced over the last couple of years, what do you do when your uncle asks you uncomfortable questions about one controversy or another, about whether or not Facebook is spying on him, about whether or not Facebook is spying on him, about whether or not Facebook is destroying democracy, stuff like that. Well, don't worry, Facebook employee, your employer has got you covered because they've created a chatbot which coaches employees on official company talking points to respond to family

and friends if they critique Facebook, quoting the New York Times. If a relative asked how Facebook handled hate speech, for example, the chatbot, which is a simple piece of software that uses artificial intelligence to carry on a conversation, would instruct the employee to answer with these points. Quote, Facebook consults with experts on the matter. It has hired more moderators to police its content. It is working on AI to spot hate speech. Regulation is important for addressing the issue.

It would also suggest citing statistics from a Facebook report about how the company enforces its standards. The answers were put together by Facebook's public relations department, parroting what company executives have publicly said. And the chatbot has a name. The Liam bot. The providence of the name is unclear. Quote, our employees regularly ask for information to use with friends and family on topics that have been in the news, especially around the holidays, a Facebook spokeswoman said.

We put this into a chat bot, which we began testing this spring, end quote. I literally do not know what to say about this story. Finally, today, this is like that Ryan Reynolds buying Mint Mobile store. story from last week. Pablo Escobar's brother has released a foldable phone. Yes, that Pablo Escobar. The phone is called the Pablo Escobar Fold 1, and it retails for $350. Take it away, Gizmodo.

Quote, the Fold 1 is the brainchild of Roberto Escobar, brother to famed Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, whose death also happened to disastrously unleash a horde of wild hippos into the country's rivers. As for the gadget itself, the fold one is an Android 9 phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 series CPU. It features two 16 megapixel and 20 megapixel cameras as well as two 7.8 inch Amel-led screens, plus, you know, a fingerprint sensor. The Escobar Inc. website also says the phone is unlocked and, quote, works on all networks

in USA and worldwide. The $350 phone features 128 gigabytes of storage. and there's a $500 version with $512 gigabytes. The fact this phone exists is pure chaos energy. But there's more. Commenting to digital trends, Escobar said he wasn't gunning for Samsung. Oh no. The tech company in his crosshairs is Apple.

Quote, I have told many people that I would beat Apple and I will, Escobar told Digital Trends. I cut the networks and retailers to sell to customers' phones that can fold for only $349. phones which in stores cost thousands of dollars by Samsung and others. This is my goal to beat Apple and by doing it myself like I always have, end quote. Escobar then goes on to say he plans on slapping Apple with a class action lawsuit on January 6th for 30 billion dollars and that he spent $1 million of his own mullah just to begin the legal process, end quote. Escobar says that the phone is unbreakable because he's used, quote, a special type of plastic. So that's what's been missing all this time with these folding phone experiments.

See, special plastic? Gizmodo closes its reporting on this phone by saying this, quote, A peep at the Fold One's website is illuminating on other levels. For instance, one of the marketing photos is just the phone with a Pablo Escobar wallpaper, very on brand. There's also a video where Bucksum, scantily clad women in outrageous heels walk around with the phone, also on brand. There's another video that begins with the narrator stating, quote, Appleboy Steve once looked into space. He saw Pablo Escobar with a phone beyond anybody's imagination, end quote.

Super on brand. But perhaps the most on brand thing is, the fold one is clearly a rebranded Royola FlexPy. right down to the marketing graphics and specs, end quote. Nothing to share today, just counting down the days until more Baby Yoda. Talk to you tomorrow.