Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 7/31 - Facebook Finds More Election "Bad Actors"

Episode Date: July 31, 2018

Facebook reveals fresh election meddling, Galaxy 9s might not be selling well, but Nintendo Switches sure are, and Playstation 4s still are, Uber stops truckin’ and Google Maps will predict which restaurant you’ll like.  Stories from: @kerby, @fredwilson Tweets: @LDrogen Links:Smartphone Slowdown Hits Profits at Samsung Electronics (Bloomberg)Sony can't stop making money from PlayStation (Engadget)Uber’s self-driving trucks division is dead, long live Uber self-driving cars (TechCrunch)Where Did you Go to School? (Richard Kerby)Where Did You Go To School? (AVC)WhatsApp group calls are rolling out to everyone, but don’t ditch Skype just yet (Android Authority)Google Maps can predict how much you'll like a restaurant (Engadget) 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, July 31st, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook reveals fresh election meddling.

Galaxy 9s might not be selling, but Nintendo Switches sure are, and PlayStation 4s still are. Uber stops trucking, and Google Maps will predict which restaurants you're going to like. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Facebook today announced that it is held. a series of briefings just this week on Capitol Hill to alert Congress about a new coordinated political influence campaign on its platform that Facebook believes is designed to sway or impact the upcoming U.S. midterm elections. Facebook says, as a result, it has banned and removed 32 pages and accounts from both Facebook and Instagram for, quote, coordinated inauthentic

behavior, end quote. The accounts in question were created between March 2017 and May of this year, and were only discovered by Facebook two weeks ago. As the New York Times notes, the number of accounts in question might seem small, but at least one of the pages that has been banned had already racked up 290,000 followers. Interestingly, you'll notice that I haven't mentioned the word Russia so far. That's because Facebook isn't sure yet who is exactly behind all of this. quoting from the New York Times piece on this quote Nathaniel Gleiker Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy

said that the activity bore some similarities to that of the internet research agency but that the actors had better disguised their efforts using VPNs, internet phone services, and third parties to purchase ads for them. He said the company had yet to see any evidence connecting the accounts to Russian IP addresses like the ones sometimes used in the past

by Internet research. agency accounts. But there were also connections between some of the accounts and others tied to the notorious Russian troll farm that were taken down by Facebook already. These bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks in part due to the actions we've taken to prevent abuse over the past year, Mr. Gleger said. The company has been working with the FBI to investigate the activity, end quote. But it sure sounds like this is similar to what the Russians were accused of doing in the 2016 election, i.e. creating groups and events and activity around hot-button social issues and divisive topics, this time including counter-protests of white

supremacy marches and the hashtag abolish ICE movement. On Twitter, Daray Obasanjo had two interesting observations. The first, quote, reading Facebook's post about the fake accounts they deleted shows how the honest ads act is already obsolete. The pages didn't run obviously political ads. The pages paid in U.S. and Canadian currency. And they were not supporting any particular candidate, end quote. Also, quote, many of the accounts came across as left-leaning slash liberal as well. If 2016 election is a guide, their intent would be to depress turnout at midterms among liberals

by pushing against mainstream candidates via purity tests. See Jill Stein slash Bernie. This won't get the headlines of last week, but there was another slight miss from a technology company reporting earnings yesterday. In Q2, Samsung had an operating profit of $13.8 billion, which was up 5.7 year over year on revenue of around $52 billion, which was down 4% year over year. Those numbers were actually right in line with guidance, but according to Samsung, the drop in revenue is due to, quote, softer sales of smartphones and display panels. end quote. Translation, Galaxy S-9s, and possibly also iPhone tens, aren't selling as well as they would have hoped. The culprit? Many on Wall Street are pointing to increased competition from Chinese phone makers, specifically Zhaomi and Huawei. Or as Paul Swartz, a management professor at George Washington University told Bloomberg,

maybe there's just nothing new to get excited about in the world of smartphones. Quote, consumers are losing the belief that the next version of a smartphone is actually smarter. Even those wanting to own the latest and greatest are having difficulties paying high margin prices for performance and features that have topped out. Meanwhile, over in the world of gaming, Nintendo just can't stop selling Switch gaming consoles. and even after all this time, Sony can't stop making money from PlayStation's. First, the Nintendo news. In its earnings report,

the company says it has sold 19.67 million Nintendo Switch consoles to date and 86.9 million games. Because of those numbers, Nintendo's profits were up 88%. In comparison with earlier consoles, the Nintendo 3DS has sold 72.9 million units over the course of its lifetime, and 367 million games. The poor Wii U has only sold 13.6 million consoles,

but 102.3 million games. Now, at Sony, the good old PlayStation 4 is rounding 80 million consoles sold over the course of its lifetime. But the interesting tidbit out of Sony's earnings report is that that nearly five-year-old console, the PlayStation 4, is still hanging tough. Quoting from Engadgett, PlayStation head John Kodera said a few months ago that he suspects Sony is getting close to selling as many PS4 consoles as it's ever likely to.

Declining hardware sales are part of the natural life cycle of consoles, of course, but that doesn't seem to be having any effect just yet. From April to June, Sony shifted 3.2 million PS4s, only 100,000 less than were sold during the same period last year. Just over 40 million games were purchased, and the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers is holding relatively steady at 33.9 million, although that is down from 34.2 million at the end of March. In total, Sony's PlayStation arm brought in nearly 750 million in profit, which is more than twice as much money as any other department within Sony. Uber says that it is ceasing development of its self-driving truck initiative to focus exclusive. on self-driving cars. Uber got itself into the self-driving truck game by purchasing auto for $680 million in 2016. Auto was the self-driving startup founded by former Google engineer Anthony Lewandowski. This is what led to that nasty trade secrets lawsuit with Waymo,

Google's self-driving car project. The case went to trial in February, but both parties reached a settlement, yada, yada, yada, you remember all that. So bottom line, self-driving trucks was sort of an expensive cul-de-sac for Uber in more ways than one. Uber's self-driving program just returned to streets for the first time last week after that fatal accident involving one of its self-driving vehicles in Arizona back in March. Quote, we recently took the important step of returning to public roads in Pittsburgh, and as we look to continue that momentum, we believe having our entire team's energy and expertise focused on. this effort is the best path forward. Eric Meyerhofer, head of Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. And by the way, Uber Freight, that other business unit that helps truck drivers connect with shipping companies, is unaffected by this decision.

Apparently, Uber Freight is actually growing, having expanded threefold in just the last 15 months. Venture capitalist Richard Kirby has a medium post up that has been getting a lot of attention today. Kirby reviewed around 1,500 VCs using publicly available data, and he found probably what you'd expect. 82% of VCs are male, 70% are white, 26% Asian, 3% black, and just 1% Hispanic. But the level of exclusivity in the VC world is even more stark. 40% of those 1,500 VCs attended only one of two colleges, Stanford or Harvard. Why has this been getting so much attention? Well, as Kirby writes, quote,

when you couple the lack of gender and racial diversity with the lack of educational institution diversity, you not only end up with teams that look similar, but you also end up with teams that think in a similar fashion. Not only is our industry lacking in gender and racial balance, but we also suffer from a lack of cognitive diversity. end quote. On his blog, your friendly neighborhood VC Fred Wilson says he's not at all surprised by this data, but, quote, we can do better and we must do better. And I hope we will do better. Looking in the mirror and not liking what you are seeing is the first step to rehabilitation. I learned the VC business from a man who went to Case Western Reserve University. My co-founder of Flatiron Partners went to Queens College. And my co-founder of Union Square Ventures went to West. We have hired analysts at USV that did not graduate from college and maybe didn't even go.

I really don't know and don't care. What I've learned from all of these individuals is that curious and brilliant people come from all places, all genders, and all ethnic and racial backgrounds, end quote. And maybe they can possibly come from more than just two elite colleges as well. When was the last time I spoke about Yahoo? But you know, there are certain Yahoo products that are still. quite popular, and one of them is, and always has been, Yahoo Finance. Axios is reporting that Yahoo is looking to capitalize on that popularity by launching a full-day, live streaming video network by the end of the year.

The network will cover global financial news as well as the daily machinations of the stock market. Quoting from Axios, the network will include eight hours of live market and global financial news updates, which would make it a rival to the new digital streaming business network, Cheddar. and to an extent, CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg. Sources say the company is in active discussions with OTT providers and bundles about getting the content on platforms other than its owned and operated channels, end quote. But as Lee Drogan said on Twitter, I'm really confused. I thought CNBC viewership was declining.

Bloomberg TV is great content, but I believe it loses money, right? Is Cheddar really doing that well that there needs to be another full-day financial? financial TV network for millennials. Who's watching all of these? Well, they teased it at F8, and now it's here. Group calling for voice and video has rolled out across the globe to users of WhatsApp on both iOS and Android. Since it's WhatsApp, you'll get end-to-end encryption and support for up to four users. All you have to do is tap on the ad participant button and start group chatting away. Adding end-to-end encryption is quite a feat, considering that the so-called secure messaging app Telegram hasn't been able to encrypt its group messaging chats, not to mention group calls.

This is the latest in a slew of additions that WhatsApp has made to its service in recent months, including suspicious link detection, the ability to hide photos from your gallery and group administration controls. And finally today, as with the previous story, this one was teased, but this time at Google's I.O. development conference. The next time you use Google Maps to find a restaurant, try tapping on the name of the restaurant. If you do so, you might find a new Maps feature called Maps Match, which will take all the data that Google knows about you and your eating habits, and suggest restaurants that you might like based on things like previous restaurants visited or previous orders made. Google will let you know if they think a particular restaurant is like a 95% match, a 75% match, a 20% match, etc. The so-called match card that will pop up as well will explain exactly why the restaurant got its rating.

This restaurant is similar to those other two you went to. You tend to like healthy Mediterranean food, etc. Here's how Google described it. Our new match feature will help you find your one true love, and by love we mean your next favorite cheeseburger. tap on a food or drink spot to see how likely you are to enjoy it based on your unique preferences. So you can spend more time eating and less time searching for places to go. And that's all for today, everybody. By the time you hear this, Apple earnings will be out.

Check techme.com right now for the headline numbers. And we'll delve into all the details and analysis tomorrow. As always, I've been Brian McCullough. I'll talk to you then.