Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/18 – WhatsApp Shuts Down Taliban “Helpline”

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

A look at how all the platforms are dealing with the Taliban being a modern social media enterprise. Amazon is bigger than Walmart for the first time. Samsung stops cluttering its phones with ads. Attempting to hire the hacker who hacked you. And I get my answer to why all the platforms want to protect kids all the sudden. Sponsors: Tovala.com/ride Quantummetric.com/podoffer offer code Podcastcode Sponsors: WhatsApp shuts down Taliban helpline in Kabul (Financial Times) Platforms struggle with Taliban policy amid chaotic US withdrawal (The Verge) People Now Spend More at Amazon Than at Walmart (NYTimes) Samsung confirms it’s removing ads from its stock apps later this year (The Verge) Victim of Major DeFi Cyberattack Offers Its Hacker a Job (Bloomberg) TechScape: How the UK forced global shift in child safety policies (The Guardian) Eve Online’s yearlong war ends with an epic retreat (Polygon) 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 right home for Wednesday, August 18th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. A look at how all the various platforms are dealing with the Taliban being a modern social media enterprise. Amazon is bigger than Walmart for the first time ever. Samsung stops cluttering its phones with ads, attempting to hire the hacker who hacked you, and I get my answer to why all the platforms want to protect kids all of a sudden. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. WhatsApp has shut down the so-called Taliban helpline in Kabul that was allegedly for reporting violence and looting, as Facebook is also blocking other, quote, official Taliban channels, end quote.

Quoting from the Financial Times. The complaints number was supposed to act as an emergency hotline for civilians to report violence, looting, or other problems. The Taliban advertised the helpline on Sunday when it captured the city and has used similar WhatsApp hotlines in the past, for example, when it took over the city of Kunduz in 2016. After taking Kabul, the Taliban pledged to create a stable government and not to harm the, quote, life property and honor of citizens, Facebook WhatsApp's owners said it had blocked the number on Tuesday along with other official Taliban channels, adding that it was actively scanning group names, descriptions, and profile pictures on the messaging app to try to prevent the Taliban from using it. The social media

company added that its team of native Dari and Pashto speakers was, quote, helping to identify and alert us to emerging issues on the platform, end quote. Indeed, this is all evolving into a larger question for social media platforms, quoting from the verge to give us a rundown of the larger state of play for the major platforms here, quote, a particular question raised by the Washington Post is whether the group will be allowed to rest control of the official Facebook and Twitter accounts for the government of Afghanistan. while the Taliban has seized effective control over the government, granting access to official accounts could be seen as legitimizing their control over the country. Despite a number of official bans,

Taliban forces appeared to have embraced tech platforms when reclaiming territory. Early Monday, an official spokesperson for the Taliban used Twitter to claim control of the capital city of Kabul, saying the situation there was, quote, under control. The free beacon reported that Taliban officials were circulating WhatsApp numbers that could be used by former regime members to coordinate surrender, although some of those numbers have since been discontinued by WhatsApp. The Taliban is officially banned from all Facebook services, including WhatsApp, but the services end-to-end encryption makes it easy for Taliban accounts to avoid moderation action. A WhatsApp spokesperson told vice that moderators would take action against violating accounts when

moderators became aware of them, but without access to user communications, it is rare that WhatsApp would become aware of a Taliban account. Twitter does not have a blanket policy on Taliban activity but told the Verge that it takes action against accounts violating existing rules against violent content or platform manipulation. Quote, the situation in Afghanistan is rapidly evolving. A spokesperson said, we're also witnessing people in the country using Twitter to seek help and assistance, end quote. Reached for comment by the Verge, YouTube said it terminates all Taliban-linked accounts based on its interpretation of U.S. sanctions law. Quote, YouTube complies with all applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws, including relevant U.S. sanctions.

Representative said, as such, if we find an account believed to be owned and operated by the Afghan Taliban, we terminate it, end quote. Facebook has designated the Taliban as a dangerous organization, which means it removes accounts representing the group and prohibits praise or support of it in user posts. The company has devoted more resources to enforcing that policy in light of the ongoing unrest in Kabul. Still, the company said, it is waiting for guidance from outside organizations as to whether the Taliban should be recognized as the de facto government of Afghanistan, and quote. quote. As I've said before, sometimes round numbers are just round numbers. They don't mean much in the grand scheme of things. But I think this is a milestone that is actually meaningful enough to take note of. Amazon has surpassed Walmart as the world's top retail seller, outside of China, at least for the first time ever. Fact set says people spent more than

$610 billion on Amazon in the 12 months ending in June, while Walmart recently posted sales of $566 billion for the last 12 months ending in July. So Amazon is officially now bigger than Walmart in terms of retail sales. Not sure if I'm surprised it took this long or if I can't believe that it happened this quickly. Still, it's a historical marker to note one way or the other, quoting the New York Times. Alibaba, the giant online Chinese retailer is the world's top seller. Neither Amazon nor Walmart is a dominant player in China. It is a historic moment, says Joseph Kazikwainas, founder of the Marketplace Pulse, a research company,

quote, Walmart has been around for so long, and now Amazon comes around with a different model and replaces them as number one, end quote. Wall Street firms had been expecting this retail baton to change hands in the coming years, but the pandemic accelerated the timeline as people stuck at home relied on deliveries. Walmart's sales rose sharply during the pandemic, but it has not matched Amazon, which has added hundreds of new warehouses and hired about 500,000 workers since the start of last year. Walmart's sales grew $24 billion in the last year. The company said Tuesday, during roughly the same period, the total value of everything people bought on Amazon rose by nearly 200 billion, analysts estimate.

While the figures are calculated differently, analysts regularly use them as a rough comparison. Knowing the full value of Walmart's sales is simple because they nearly all come from its own inventory and are disclosed. publicly each quarter. But analysts must calculate an estimate of the value of Amazon's overall sales because most of what people buy on its site are products owned and listed by outside merchants. The company publicly reports only the fees it takes from those transactions, and quote. Samsung has confirmed that it will stop showing ads in the default apps on Samsung devices, which include weather, pay, and theme starting later this year, which, yes, Yeah, I would think that would be a good idea, quoting the Verge.

In our review of this year's Galaxy S-21 Ultra, we said it was unforgivable that Samsung would choose to show the, quote, kind of ads that's normally at the bottom of a crappy overloaded website in its default weather app. Yes, it's been possible to dodge or disable these ads and switch to non-Samsung versions of each app, but you shouldn't be expected to have do that after spending $1,199 on a flagship smartphone. They're part of the reason why Samsung's otherwise clean one-UI software has started to feel messy over the past year. Samsung did not share a specific date for when the ads would be removed from its software, but Jan Hap previously reported that the change will be made via a forthcoming one-UI software update.

9-5, Google has published a collection of screenshots if you want to see just how bad Samsung's apps currently look, end quote. As the great Walt Mossberg tweeted, quote, this smacks of a long Samsung tradition, making great hardware and then ruining the phone experience with a bloated collection of duplicative, second-rate, or poorly performing first-party software, end quote. And quoting Dan Seaford on Twitter, quote, It's incredible that Samsung ever thought this was a good idea and wouldn't get endless blowback for it, but I'm glad to see the company is fixing the problem. Hopefully that update doesn't take forever to roll out, end quote. I'm going to do two follow-up stories now in one segment. The first being, Remember that big defy hack that happened last week, and then the hacker started to give all of the stolen money back? And the platform in question, Polly Network called the hacker a white hat. Well, they've now even gone so far as to actually offer the hacker a job. But there might be an interesting reason for that, quoting Bloomberg.

The hacker claimed the attack against the Polly Network platform, which lets users swap tokens across multiple blockchains, was an act of hacking for good to, quote, save the project. The attacker has since promised to return the money and so far delivered about half of it. Poly Network has responded by lavishing praise on the hacker, who it dubbed Mr. White Hat, a term used to describe so-called ethical hackers who find vulnerabilities in computer networks and alert companies and organizations to fix them. On Tuesday, in an act of gratitude or perhaps exasperation, Polynetwork offered Mr. White Hat a job as chief security advisor, quote, to extend our thanks and encourage Mr. White Hat

to continue contributing to security advancement in the blockchain world, together with Poly Network, we cordially invite Mr. White Hat to be the chief security advisor of Poly Network, the company said in a statement. Quote, again, it is important to reiterate that Poly Network has no intention of holding Mr. White Hat legally responsible, as we are confident

that Mr. White Hat will promptly return full control of the assets to Polynetwork and its users, and quote. In the meantime, Polynetwork is still struggling to get all of its clients money back. After returning half of the network's assets, the hacker deposited the rest, around $235 million worth, into a joint account that is protected by two keys needed to unlock the funds. One of the keys was given to Polly Network, and the hacker has kept the other. Poly Network has been pleading with Mr. White Hat to turn in

his key so the funds could be accessed ever since. The hacker has yet to do so, despite the job offer, and another offer that would allow the hacker to keep $500,000 of the funds, end quote. So interesting. Maybe this is just paying the ransom by another name. And then for the second follow-up, remember me asking why everybody was announcing all sorts of new policies to protect children? I was like, why now? YouTube, Instagram, even TikTok made weirdly coincidental announcements all at the same time. Was there some regulatory push behind it that I didn't know about? Well, Alex Hearn answers my question, quoting from his newsletter in The Guardian. In just over two weeks' time, the United Kingdom is going to begin enforcing the age-appropriate

design code, one of the world's most wide-ranging regulations controlling the use of children's data. We talked about it before on the newsletter. In one of the B stories in July, I covered it in this observer story, quote, The code, which was introduced as part of the same legislation that implemented GDPR in the UK, sees the Information Commissioner's office laying out a new standard for internet companies that are, quote, likely to be accessed by children, end quote. When it comes into force in September this year, the code will be comprehensive, covering everything from requirements for parental controls to restrictions on data collection and bans on nudging

children to turn off privacy protections. I asked the platforms whether the changes were indeed motivated by the age-appropriate design code. A Facebook spokesperson said, quote, this update wasn't based on any specific regulation, but rather on what's best for the safety and privacy of our community. It's the latest in a series of things we've introduced over recent months and years to keep young people safe on our platforms, which have been global changes, not just the UK, end quote. TikTok declined to comment on whether the changes were prompted by the code, but I understand that they were, though the company is rolling them out globally because once it built the features, it felt it was the right thing to do. And according to Google,

the updates were core to the company's compliance with the AADC, and the company said it was aiming beyond any single regulation, but also wouldn't comment on the record. I also called up Annie Burroughs, the head of Child Safety Online Policy at the NSPCC, who shared my skepticism that claims that the timing of these launches could be coincidental. It's no coincidence that the flurry of announcements that we've seen comes just weeks before the age-appropriate design comes into effect, he said, and I think it's a very clear demonstration that regulation works, end quote. The lack of public acknowledgement from the companies that regulation has influenced their actions

is in stark contrast to the response to GDPR two years ago, when even Facebook had to acknowledge that it didn't suddenly introduce a whole array of privacy options out of the goodness of its heart. And the silence has correspondingly led to an odd gap at the heart of coverage of these changes. They've had widespread coverage in the tech press, as well as many mainstream American papers, with barely a whisper of acknowledgement that they are almost certainly down to a regulatory limitation in a mid-sized European market. That, of course, is exactly how the tech companies would want it. Recognizing that even a country as comparatively minor as the UK can still pass regulations that affect how platforms work globally is a shift in the power

relationship between multinational companies and national governments and one that might spark other nations to reassess their own ability to force changes upon tech companies, end quote. Finally today, I've covered this war before because I just love stuff like this. When I was a kid playing text-based Star Trek role-playing games on Prodigy message boards, I worked my way up to captain of a ship called the Taekondoroga, by the way. I always imagine that one day you could play massive online multiplayer games where there was actual historical events like wars and revolutions and stuff that people could actually participate in and play their little part in history, I guess. Well, quoting Polygon, EVE Online's latest player-led war has come to an end, not with a bang, but with a cavernous whimper. Those on the offensive have turned tail and the defenders are putting everything they have into running them down.

The massive coalition known as Pappy campaigned for 55 weeks in a quest to destroy the Imperium, led by Alex the Matani Gian Turko, before losing the will to fight. Along the way, Eve Online developer CCP Games told Polygon the combatants destroyed more than $3 million worth of in-game ships and virtual infrastructure in the conflict dubbed World War B2. This is as real as real talk gets, said Brave Collective's Dunkdinkle in a live address to his fleets in what amounted to Poppy's concession speech. Quote, the war is over, and we have lost, end quote. Things kicked off in the summer of 2020 when on July 5th, war was officially declared. A fleet commander known in-game only as Vili told Polygon at the time that he led some 52,000 player accounts.

By the end of the conflict, CCP says that more than 100,000 accounts were involved in one way or another. The conflict raged for months before the first big engagement, which took place in October 2020. That's when some 8,825 accounts logged in for the single largest player versus player battle in video game history. But the battle was inconclusive, and just a few months later in January 2021, players once again committed their ships in record numbers. Some 13,700 accounts were poised for battle when Eve itself buckled under the weight and spoiled their plans. While players in distant corners of the game who rely on exploration for their fun, benefited, replacing the ships that Pappy and the Imperium had brought to bear, became increasingly

difficult. For these and other reasons, Pappy fleet commanders and players themselves balked at the prospect of launching the final push into enemy space. As its fleets assembled for that offensive, word came that allies all along the front line were pulling out. With their flanks exposed, most of the assembled capsuleers chose to turn and run. The Imperium, for its part, refuses to mark the end of hostilities. CCP said it took Gian Turcos, forces less than two weeks to regain the territory that they had lost over the last 13 months. Now they are out for revenge, quote, You chose this path, said GianTurco in a fiery live stream on Twitch.

Shortly after Pappy began its withdrawal, quote, You were given every opportunity to choose a different way. My people hunger for vengeance. You have failed, and you have failed ugly, end quote. By the by, Chris and I are not doing a Twitter space as usual tonight. we're taking the week off. But next week's Twitter space will be the one we will record to release as our special thousandth episode, I don't know, celebration. So look for that next week. Talk to you tomorrow.