Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, Mar. 20, 2018 - Google Wants to Save Journalism

Episode Date: March 20, 2018

Google wants to support journalism, more on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica saga, more on the self-driving car fatality, YouTube rolls out a “go live” feature, and scandal rocks the world of HQ Trivia. Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 ride home for Tuesday, March 20th, 2018. Today, Google wants to support journalism, more on the Facebook Cambridge Analytica saga, more on the self-driving car fatality, YouTube rolls out a go-live feature, and scandal rocks the world of HQ trivia.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google announced today that it will spend $300 million over the next three years to support journalism, and fight disinformation through a new program known as the Google News Initiative. According to Google, the initiative will have three specific goals, highlighting accurate journalism while fighting misinformation, helping news sites to grow their business, especially in a digital context, and creating new tools to help journalists do their jobs. Google has, of course, had several high-profile run-ins recently

with disinformation appearing on its various platforms, as YouTube and Google News. Google also announced that it would launch a new disinfo lab to fight fake news, especially during times of breaking news and around elections. The initiative will apparently have 17 launch partners, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, McClatchy, Telegraph, La Republica, but as Professor Jeff Jarvis noted on Twitter, quote, amusing that the Church of Paywall's News Corp is not there.

In a related story, Google also announced as one of the first programs in the news initiative, a new subscribe with Google feature, which lets users buy subscriptions to news sites using Google accounts, and access them from their apps, the individual websites, and Google's own search results. According to Google, subscribe with Google lets you buy a subscription, using your Google account on participating news sites. Select the publisher offer you'd like to participate in, click subscribe, and you're done. From then on, you can sign on with your Google account,

with the same persistent credentials that keep you logged into, say, Gmail. You can manage your subscriptions via Google and pay with a stored credit card you've used before on Google. If you have an existing subscription, the new system will allow you to link subscription, previously purchased to this new Google account. We think having to only log in once can actually improve the user experience in a very small but powerful way, said Benita Stewart, VP of Global Partnerships at Google.

Once we know a user is a subscriber, we can honor that subscription and ensure they have easy access to publisher content across Google. One added benefit, users who enroll in the subscription service, will also see that. content from their chosen publications highlighted in a dedicated module when searching for things on Google. So if you subscribe to, say, the New York Times, expect to see more relevant Times articles popping up when you search. A couple of follow-ups from yesterday's news.

The Guardian is reporting that the UK's Information Commissioner has demanded that Facebook halt a data audit of Cambridge Analytica. You might remember that Facebook had engaged the services of security firm. Strauss Friedberg to seemingly determine if Cambridge Analytica really had the Facebook profile data that it has been alleged to have collected. Also possibly to retrieve that data so that it could not be used anymore. Strauss-Friedberg representatives were apparently already at Cambridge Analytica's offices in London when the Information Commission asked them to leave so that their activities would not interfere with the commission's own investigation. The Information Commission is reportedly

seeking an urgent court warrant to investigate Cambridge Analytica's premises itself. Also last night, the New York Times reported that Facebook's chief security officer is going to leave the company amid disagreements with top Facebook executives over disinformation on the social network. The chief security officer Alex Stamos will apparently stay on at Facebook. until August, but the piece suggests that his duties have been reduced recently. Alex Stamos himself pushed back on this news, tweeting that, quote, despite the rumors, I'm still fully engaged with my work at Facebook. It's true that my role did change. I'm currently spending more time exploring emerging security risks and working on election security, end quote.

And Facebook issued what Slate's April Glazer called a non-denial denial, saying, quote, Stamos continues to be the chief security officer at Facebook. He has held the position for nearly three years and leads our security efforts, especially around emerging security risks, end quote. So why is it interesting that a Facebook executive you've never heard of is stepping down from Facebook? Well, clearly the timing on this news is interesting, given the Cambridge Analytica controversy over the last several days. Several outlets are reporting that in 2017, Facebook security team, which Stamos headed, uncovered evidence of Russian meddling on Facebook, but when Stamos was pressured to downplay his findings, tensions mounted between Stamos and the executives

he reported to. Recode reports that Stamos lost his day-to-day role overseeing Facebook's security team this past December, and that he, quote, didn't always see eye-to-eye with Facebook C-O, Cheryl Sandberg, about how the company should handle the aftermath of the 26th. presidential election. It's also interesting to note that Stamos stepped down from another high-profile security job in 2014 when he left Yahoo after disagreements with CEO Marissa Meyer over security standards at that company. Also interesting to note was the reaction to this news on Twitter.

The New York Times' Zaynep Tufetchi tweeted, quote, I've disagreed plenty with Alex, but unlike those Facebook executives who are still in hiding, he was out there advocating for what he thought was the right path forward. And I can attest that he was always concerned about what Facebook policies meant in authoritarian contexts. If things are bad now, wait and see what happens when they replace Alex with someone more pliable. I guess it was bound to happen. Facebook needs to have security people oversee product, not the other way around.

And Pando Daily on Twitter said, quote, last year, Paul Bradley Carr said that if Alex Stamos quit Facebook, then we should all get our data far away from Zuckerberg fast. Also, following up on that self-driving car fatality story yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Uber was likely not at fault for the incident that killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, overnight on Monday. From the report, the victim was, quote, pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags when she was,

walked from a center median into a lane of traffic before being struck by the vehicle. The self-driving vehicle was traveling 38 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone, but the driver monitor behind the wheel had reportedly no time to act. Tempe police chief Sylvia Moore told the chronicle, quote, The driver said it was like a flash. The person walked out in front of them. His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision. The deceased woman was identified as Elaine Hertzberg, aged 49.

Hertzberg is the first reported fatality of a pedestrian due to a self-driving vehicle accident. Bloomberg's gadfly column had an interesting follow-up on this story, noting that even when transportation technologies improve safety, there is nonetheless often a long period of time when they are first deployed in the real world that they can cause incidents like the one in Tempe, and when they do, they will, like,

cause headlines just like this. Said Bloomberg's David Fickling, quote, The lesson from other transportation technologies is that autonomous cars should eventually become very safe. But the same history indicates that the most likely route to that destination involves learning the grim lessons of fatalities as accidents start to spike in line with adoption of the technology.

Transportation safety advances the same way Max Planck saw science progressing. one funeral at a time. Fickling noted that as air travel became more prevalent in the 20th century, the death toll from air accidents spiked. The bottom line was the more people flew, the more chance there was for crashes and accidents. Flying is, of course, far and away the safest form of travel statistically,

but that really only began to be true in the 1970s as safety technology and the number of passengers reached equilibrium. Fickling suggests that a similar scenario, will play out in the early years of self-driving cars, and that, especially at the beginning of a transportation technology's adoption, fatalities will inevitably generate headlines. Proponents of self-driving technology need to be willing to acknowledge this inevitability, says Fickling, quote, the fact that we may feel more at risk around cars whose accident responses are governed by algorithms is a problem the industry needs to overcome rather than wish away

by pointing to theoretical safety gains. Fickling pointed to a scenario in the near future where self-driving cars make up 10% of the U.S. vehicle fleet. While they might cause 90% fewer fatal accidents in aggregate, simply by being in the real world in increasing numbers, accidents will occur with increasing regularity, and they will likely always be accompanied by scare headlines. Fickling wondered how the accidents caused by self-driving cars

will be perceived if, quote, the owners of the robots skew toward the wealthiest 10% of the country, who use the technology to get more time sleeping, posting on Instagram, getting over drinking binges, and watching cat videos. The victims, meanwhile, might skew towards the poor and underprivileged. YouTube today rolled out a new feature that lets users go live directly from their desktops without having to use any special software, encoding programs, or anything other than their Chrome browsers.

This new feature is currently only supported by Google's Chrome browser, but if you have one, you will see a go-live button right on the YouTube homepage. Hit that and boom, your live streaming. Obviously, the idea here is to make the process of streaming from the desktop as quick and easy as it is to stream to something like Twitter's Periscope using your smartphone. And of course, YouTube is eager to do battle with Amazon's Twitch platform, which is largely used to live stream video gameplay. Sources are telling TechCrunch that the company DocuSign, which pioneered the e-signature business of signing forms and documents remotely, digitally and securely, has filed to go public. You might not be familiar with DocuSign as a brand, but chances are you've used them.

Real estate agents, insurance agents, financial services companies, and health care providers. have adopted remote digital document signatures in recent years, finally pushing the sign-in facts or sign-and-scan paradigm to the dustbin of history. DocuSign has a tiered business structure wherein larger corporate entities pay more to use their services than small and mid-sized businesses. There's also limited functionality for individual consumers to use DocuSign's products. DocuSign has raised over $500 million in funding. since it was founded all the way back in 2003. TechCrunch's sources report that DocuSign is targeting an IPO in the second or third quarter of this year.

Finally today, a quiz show scandal has hit the world of HQ trivia. There was no winner of Sunday nights running of the popular live trivia app after a final contestant and presumptive winner was kicked off the app for what HQ called inappropriate behavior. If you've played HQ trivia, then you know that usually any players that make it to the end of the game, after having answered every question correctly, get to share in whatever prize money is on offer that day. But on Sunday night, the entire $25,000 jackpot was supposed to go to one winner. The game was going to keep popping up more questions until there was only one, Highlander style. HQ had experimented with this format a week earlier when a 20,000. year old school teacher took home the full $25,000 prize after answering 18 questions correctly.

This past Sunday night, when the game reached its 20th question, many of the viewers in the live chat began to suspect that cheaters had to be among the finalists. After 30 minutes in reaching question 26, only two players by the names of Jerich Browell and Kayla were left standing. Both answered question 26. correctly and Kayla went on to answer question 27 incorrectly, but before Brual could submit his answer, he was kicked out and the game was declared Nallin Void. After the game, the official HQ Twitter account tweeted, HQ moderators kick out players that violate HQ's terms of service and contest rules. The Daily Beast, which investigated this brouhaha, reported that user Brual has

tweeted more than once about hacking HQ using bots. Apparently, there is an entire subculture of people hanging out on Discord, either collaborating to beat the recent slate of trivia game apps in real time, or playing the games using bots that plug into the game APIs and scrape search engine results to try to generate correct answers. If you haven't played HQ trivia before, it has become quite popular. nearly 1.7 million people logged in to play the disputed Sunday night game. And HQ seems to have been undaunted by this most recent abortive experiment.

This Sunday night's game will sport a $50,000 winner-takes-all jackpot. And that's all for today. I've been your host at Brian MCC. Check out Techmeme.com for all your tech news needs. And I'll be back with you tomorrow. Same bat time. Same bat channel.