Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/23 – The Troubles At Truth Social

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Former President Trump’s new social network is number one on the app store, but has had a bunch of issues too. The politics leading to a surge in searches for DuckDuckGo. What ever happened to Amazon’s home robot? And Waymo successfully sues to keeps its failures secret. Sponsors: Napjitsu.com/techmeme Linkedin.com/ride Links: Trump’s Truth Social’s disastrous launch raises doubts about its long-term viability (Washington Post) Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo (NYTimes) OpenSea NFT Heist Likely Triggers Drop in Activity (Bloomberg) Amazon sues two companies that allegedly help fill the site with fake reviews (CNBC) Amazon’s Astro Home Robot Remains Elusive Six Months After Debut (Bloomberg) Waymo to keep robotaxi safety details secret, court rules (TechCrunch) Gaming Company Backbone Reveals Series A Funding Backed by Ashton Kutcher, The Weeknd, Kevin Hart, Post Malone and More (The Hollywood Reporter) 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 Wednesday, February 23, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Former President Trump's new social network is number one on the app store, but has had a bunch of issues as well. The politics leading to a surge in searches for Duck, Duck Go, whatever happened to Amazon's home robot, and Waymo successfully sues to keep its failures secret. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As I write these words, the number one app in all the land is truth. Social, which has risen to the very top of Apple's App Store. Truth Social is a new social networking app created by a company backed by former President Donald Trump. And yet, unfortunately,

for Truth Social, it has been a rough 48 hours or so dealing with that success, quoting the Washington Post. Truth Social has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage, and a 300,000-person wait list. Even Trump's supporters made jokes about the early slog. Jenna Ellis, a former member of President Trump's legal team, posted to Instagram a photo showing Trump with his finger hovering over a laptop, quote, letting us on to Truth Social one at a time, end quote. The site had been heralded for months as the crown jewel of Trump's post-presidential business ambitions with allies pledging it would revolutionize social media and take down the mainstream social networks where Trump is banned. But early glimpses at Truth Social suggests its offering are almost identical to what Twitter and other sites have offered for years, except tweets are called truths and retweets, retruths. And although Trump has criticized social networks, quote, wildly aggressive censorship, end quote, his site's terms of service mark some extensive restrictions for acceptable speech. People are banned from trying to trick or mislead other users,

violating anyone's privacy or publicity rights, or posting messages that depict violence, or include messages related to sexual fetishes, sugar babies, or sexually suggestive phrases. People are also forbidden from posting anything false, indecent, misleading, profane, obscene, filthy, or otherwise objectionable, end quote. Trump's company, the Trump Media and Technology Group also prohibits anyone from attempting to, quote, disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and or the site, end quote. Truth Social has already banned an account named for a Twitter parody that targeted former Congress Devin Nunez, who resigned from Congress to become the Trump company's CEO. The site's terms of

service also show it is designed to benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Trump has said should be, quote, completely terminated, end quote, because it protects tech companies from being sued for what their users post. The site was unavailable for most of its first day, President's Day, and its operators reported that, quote, overwhelming demand, end quote, had triggered an outage lasting more than 13 hours. During that time, even the company terms of service were offline. The developers wrote on an internal updates page Monday afternoon that they had stabilized the account creation process, but on Tuesday, many prospective users were still reporting that they were around 300,000th in line. Some even went backward. One person reported

that they'd gone from number 215,406 on the waiting list Monday night to number 295,046 by Tuesday afternoon. company representatives have not responded to request for comment. On Sunday, CEO Nunez predicted the site would be fully operational by the end of March. Last week, he told Sebastian Gorka, Trump's former Deputy National Security Advisor, quote, we're having to build this from scratch to make sure we can't be canceled and can't be shut down, end quote. But far from being built from scratch, the site's code shows it is based heavily on the open source software mastodon, which provides free pre-built social networking sites that users can then edit and customize. truth social also depends on code from eight other outside development teams to handle text,

images, security, and other data its own documentation shows, end quote. Meanwhile, politics seems to be giving a boost to Duck Duck Go. As Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and other right-wing commentators sour on Google, some have been pushing Duck, Duck Go as an alternative, arguing Google suppresses COVID-19 results, quoting the New York Times. Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who questioned COVID-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does. Duck. Duck Go, which has about 3% of the United States search market, holds little direct control over the links in its search results because they are generated by the search engine algorithm provided by Bing. which Microsoft owns. And all search engine algorithms are considered black boxes because the companies

that create them do not completely disclose what informs their decisions. In a statement, Duck Duck Goh said it condemned, quote, acts of disinformation, end quote, and said the company's internal surveys showed that its users had a wide mix of political orientations. The company said it was also studying ways to limit the spread of false and misleading information. Duck Duck Goh said it, quote, regularly flagged problematic search terms with Bing so they could be addressed. After the Times shared some data on search results for numerous terms spread by conspiracy theorists, several of the search results changed entirely, shifting to favor more trustworthy sources. Quote, finding the right balance between delivering authoritative results that match the intent of a search query and protecting users from being misled is a very challenging problem,

Bing said in a statement, adding, quote, we won't always get that balance just right, but that's our goal, end quote. I think I knew that duck, duck go results were mostly Bing, because, I mean, It's hard and very, very expensive to do search for the entire web, but I did not know that Duck Duckgo had achieved 3% market share. According to DAPR, OpenC's seven-day trading volume is down 37% as active traders dropped 19% following a hacker using a fishing attack to steal 254 NFTs on that platform. What I didn't know is that the NFT thief has... has apparently been successful in fencing the goods. Quoting Bloomberg.

David Finzer, OpenC's chief executive officer, valued the total amount stolen at $1.7 million on Sunday, but researchers since have valued the pile at anywhere between $2 and $3 million. Among the stolen NFTs included four board apes, three of which were later sold on rival platform looks rare for a combined $667,000, according to data from blockchain security service Pek Shield. The number of traders using OpenCe dropped. by 19% to about 227,000 over the seven days ended Tuesday per DAP radar. Over that period, trading volume on looks rare plunged nearly 65%, while volume on Blockdobeau rose by more than 215% according to DAP radar, end quote.

Amazon is suing two companies, App Sally and Rabatist, alleging the sites had their combined 900,000-plus users post fake Amazon reviews to boost third-party sellers, product rankings. rankings, quoting CNBC. The company's allegedly connected third-party sellers with consumers who would leave a positive review of their product in exchange for free products or payments. The case represents Amazon's latest effort to root out fake reviews on its sprawling third-party marketplace. The marketplace now accounts for more than half of e-commerce sales and has helped the company bring in record revenue. But fake reviews have proven to be a particularly thorny issue for Amazon as the marketplace has grown to include millions of third-party merchants. Amazon said in a statement

the lawsuit seeks to, quote, shut down two major fake review brokers that it claims helped mislead shoppers by having their members try to post fake reviews in stores, end quote, like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Etsy. The statement added that App Sally and Rabatist say they have more than 900,000 users, quote, willing to write fake reviews, end quote. App Sally and Rabatist have been in operation since 2018, according to court filings. The complaint alleges App Sally orchestrated a scheme wherein sellers would pay the company a fee, in some cases as little as $25 to receive, quote, verified reviews. After providing App Sally with a link to their product, the sellers would ship out empty boxes and provide App Sally with photos to be included with a user's review, according to the suit.

Sellers would allegedly pay for the service with the hope that it boosted their product in Amazon search results. App Sally's website allegedly promised sellers that they'd be able to, quote, outrank your competitors from your bedroom, according to the complaint. Similarly, Rabatis offered sellers a cache of reviews and other services to manipulate their product rankings the suit alleges. Users would place an order for a product on Amazon and leave a review. Rabatis allegedly refunded a user's purchase through services like PayPal, end quote. Speaking of Amazon, sources say Amazon has shipped at most a few hundred Astros since the home robots September 2021 debut. Amazon says Astro is our first robot, not our last, but I got to

be honest with you, I 100% forgot that Astro even existed, quoting Bloomberg. Last September, Amazon.com debuted a household robot named Astro that was supposed to usher in, or at least point to, a Jetsons-like future. 53 minutes into a press conference otherwise focused on new ring cameras, a thermostat, and a giant echo speaker with a wall screen, the three-wheeled robot rolled onto stage at the command of Amazon Devices chief Dave Limp. With Astro looking on, Limp ticked off the gadget's attributes, advanced computer vision that lets the bot know where it is, home monitoring, media playback, and the ability to summon emergency help for elders. Astro would eventually sell

for about $1,450, but limp and people lucky enough to score an invitation could get their hands-on-one for $1,000 or about the price of an iPhone 13 Pro and test it out at home. Six months later, Astro is tough to find. Hardly anyone is talking about the robot, which is confounding because early adopters typically love to share their experiences online. A scan for Astro users on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram turned up just two people who posted brief videos of the bot. Turns out Amazon has so far shipped at most a few hundred Astros according to people familiar with the situation. In response to questions about Astro and Amazon spokesmen said that, quote, invite requests and customer orders have been significantly above our expectations, end quote.

He wouldn't provide numbers, but said that shipments were in line with the company's plans and would, quote, continue to ramp over the coming weeks and months, end quote. The spokesman said Amazon is receiving positive feedback, end quote, learning a lot about how customers want to use a consumer robot, end quote. Amazon expects Astro will eventually drop its day one status, but the spokesman said, quote, it's too early to say when that may happen. The company is already talking up future models and sees Astro as, quote, our first robot, not our last, end quote. A court has granted Waymo a preliminary injunction in its lawsuit against the California DMV, allowing Waymo to keep autonomous vehicle tech and safety details secret, quoting TechCrunch.

The company filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Motor Vehicles in late January in order to keep some information about its autonomous vehicle deployment permit, as well as emails between the DMV and the company redacted from a public record request, which was originally filed by an undisclosed third party. The ruling by the California Superior Court, Sacramento, could set a precedent for broader trade secret protection, at least in the autonomous vehicle industry involving public access to information that has to do with public safety, but which businesses claim contain trade secrets. In its lawsuit, Waymo argued being forced to reveal trade secrets would undermine its investments into automated driving technology and have a,

quote, chilling effect across the industry, where the DMV is no longer a safe place for companies to transparently share information about their tech. Like any other autonomous driving technology company looking to test and deploy in California, Waymo had to submit information about its safety practices and technology to the DMV, which then followed up with more specific questions. When the DMV received the public records request for Waymo's permit application information, the agency gave Waymo the chance to censor any sections it deemed might reveal trade secrets. Waymo did so, and the DMV sent the package to the third party with major portions blocked out. The requester challenged the blackouts, and the DMV, not wanting to get caught in the

middle, advised Waymo to file a temporary restraining order against the DMV, according to Waymo. A judge then issued the restraining order on February 2nd, giving Waymo more time to seek an injunction prohibiting the disclosure of the material in unredacted form forevermore. Waymo filed the lawsuit because it wants to protect details about how its AVs identify and navigate through certain conditions, how they determine the circumstances under which the AV will revert control to a human driver, when to provide support to an AV fleet, and how the company addresses disengagement incidents and collision incidents according to the lawsuit. It is difficult, however, to determine whether or not the information actually contains trade secrets without

being able to see any of it. The question is, can the company derive economic value purely from not sharing that information with others? Matthew Wansley, former General Counsel at Newtonamy, and a law professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law in New York, told TechCrunch, software failures that detail problems perceiving objects or predicting how other agents in the world are going to behave, for example, is highly confidential information because it could reveal information about how the technology works, allowing competitors to either copy it or just assess where they are relative to a certain business, said Wansley. It makes sense, therefore, that a company wouldn't want to share that information publicly. However, if a regulator wanted more

information under the promise of confidentiality, Wansley said he'd be much more inclined to share because he trusts the regulator knows the tech isn't perfect and is more concerned with reducing risk rather than bringing it down to zero, end quote. And finally today, an interesting raise for an idea that couldn't be simpler. Backbone, which makes game controllers for the iPhone, raised a $40 million Series A led by Index Ventures, quoting the Hollywood Reporter of all places, but you'll see why in a second. Gaming Company Backbone revealed Wednesday a $40 million Series A funding round, led by Index Ventures with participation from Ashton Couture, Gary Ocery's venture capital firm Sound Ventures,

Nico Wittenborn's adjacent, and top talent including The Weekend, Kevin Hart, Post Malone, Sean Diddy Combs, Amy Schumer, and existing investor Christopher Comstock, known as Marshmallow. Tech CEOs, including Discord's Jason Citron, recrooms Nick Fatched, and Sonos Patrick Spence also participated in the fundraise. Backbone was founded in 2021 by 24-year-old Google Gaming, employee, many Kaira, and launched its first product in the same year. Soon after, Backbone partnered with Microsoft to bring Xbox gaming to mobile devices, which effectively turned the Backbone One device into a portable Xbox. With Backbone 1, players simply plug their iPhone into the device that allows them to access the App Store and Apple Arcade gaming titles,

and stream games through services such as Xbox GamePass and Luna, end quote. Seems like an obvious case of skating to where the puck is going to be. If gaming is going to happen on every screen, then gamers will want tools to help them game effectively on any screen. In the city, there's a thousand things I want to say to you. Talk to you tomorrow.