Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 09/05 - Another Congressional Apology Tour

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

Tech CEOs hauled before Congress again, Theranos is no more, Google mulls big changes to URL’s and maybe the whole the-teens-are-abandoning-Facebook is a real thing after all? Links:Video of the Hearings (The US Senate)Facebook and Twitter testified before Congress. Conservative conspiracy theorists lurked behind them. (The Washington Post)Blood-Testing Firm Theranos to Dissolve (WSJ)HOW GOOGLE CHROME SPENT A DECADE MAKING THE WEB MORE SECURE (Wired)GOOGLE WANTS TO KILL THE URL (Wired)Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook (PEW Research)Instagram is building a standalone app for shopping (The Verge)Snap launches new styles of Spectacles that look more like traditional sunglasses (The Verge)Vimeo pivots business from media to tech (Axios)Vimeo launches stock video marketplace starting at $79 per clip (Venture Beat) 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, September 5th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, tech CEOs are hauled before Congress once again.

Theranos is no more. Google Mall's big changes to URLs. And maybe the whole, the teens are abandoning Facebook thing is a real thing, after all. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today, Facebook, C.O. Cheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, both testified before Congress about issues including Russian interference in U.S. elections, censorship, and in the case of Twitter, hate speech and harassment. Notably absent from the hearings today was Google. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence invited CEO Larry Page to testify, but Google counteroffered that they'd

send Senior Vice President Kent Walker instead. The Senate Committee declined, and so in a bit of a sub-tweet. The Senate set up an empty seat with a sign in front of it reading Google. It remained unoccupied throughout the hearings. But back to the executives who did show up. The key driver for today's hearings was senators trying to get a handle on how social media companies manage their platforms. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal and revelations that bots and troll farms manipulated public opinion about political matters, Congress is looking at whether and how to regulate social media. Discussing Russian election interference, Sandberg said, quote, we were too slow to spot this and too slow to act. That's on us. This interference was completely unacceptable. It violated the

values of our company and of the country we love. We are more determined than our opponents, and we will keep fighting, end quote. For his part, Twitter's Dorsey said, quote, we found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems we've acknowledged. Abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda through bots and human coordination, disinformation campaigns, and divisive filter bubbles. That's not a healthy public square. Required changes won't be fast or easy. Today we're committing to the people and this committee to do it openly, end quote.

On Twitter, Bloomberg tech reporter Sarah Fryer posted a thread about her take on the hearings. quoting from near the end, a big theme of this hearing, users don't know what's happening behind the scenes. When an account is suspended, users don't know why. If something becomes popular on a network, users don't know. It's because there's a coordinated campaign going on. They don't see bots versus humans.

And the company response is like, well, once we see bad things, we do stuff about it. We don't like bad stuff either. But that's not the big question. The question is, do they know enough about what's going on? on their own platforms to provide transparency for users in the moment, end quote. Peter Kafka summed up the hearings on Twitter by saying, members of the U.S. Senate Intel Committee appear reasonably well informed about the internet, social media, privacy, and security, and have reasonable questions for top execs at Facebook and Twitter,

who appear to be taking their concerns seriously. He followed up with this tweet, this discussion at the very least has improved significantly in the last year. That's good, end quote. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that blood testing firm Theranos is dissolving. And that's not a pun. They're going out of business. The company hopes to pay out its remaining cash, estimated at $5 million to creditors,

while it tries to reach a settlement with Fortress Investment Group to trade a patent portfolio as repayment for a loan. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former president and C.O. Ramesh Sunny Balwani are both facing criminal fraud charges, If found guilty, they could each be looking at a maximum of two decades in prison plus fines. The downfall of Theranos follows extensive reporting by John Kerry Row of the Wall Street Journal. Starting in 2015, Carriereau revealed that Theranos's signature blood testing machine was unreliable, and in fact the company used off-the-shelf analyzers for most of its tests. Despite excitement from early investors and seemingly disruptive technology,

that just didn't work as promise of the company, quoting Kerry Roo, became a symbol of the excess of the current technology boom. Its failure was dramatic and painful for many, end quote. In Kerry Roo's report on Theranos today, he wrote, quote, The Big Name investors who poured money into Theranos will get nothing. All told investors in Theranos have lost nearly $1 billion, end quote. On Twitter, many last jabs at Theranos also credited Carri Rho himself, for almost single-handedly reporting on all of this.

Mario Sundar tweeted, fitting that John Kerryrow writes the obituary. Theronos is the Ed Wood of Silicon Valley. As I mentioned yesterday, Google Chrome just turned 10 years old, and to mark the occasion, Chrome version 69 has shipped, introducing design updates, an improved password manager, and a grab bag of other improvements. You might have noticed these when you fired up your computer today.

The tabs are more rounded, and the address bar is simplified. Google officially calls it the Omnibox because it also serves as the search bar. In Chrome, Google has completely removed the longstanding HTTP and HTPS markers from the beginning of URLs. Instead, it continues pushing towards an all-encrypted web where sites with SSL encryption are no longer marked using the word secure. They're just labeled with a lock icon. Google says that eventually SSL encrypted sites will have no secure icon, but non-encrypted sites will sport warnings that they are not secure, with even bigger warnings if you start typing anything into the non-secure pages. In other words, the new normal is going to be encrypted browsing. Beyond Chrome 69, over at Wired security reporter Lily Hay Newman posted two articles today about Chrome's past and future.

In her history of Chrome, Newman runs through the greatest hits of Chrome's security features over the past decade, including sandboxing each tab, auto-updating the browser itself, integration with Google's safe browsing service, deprecating the Adobe Flash plugin, and of course the multi-year effort to encourage encrypted browsing. In Newman's other wired piece today, titled Google Wants to Kill the URL, she explores the Chrome team's thinking about how users interact with URLs and what to do about them going forward.

A few decades ago, you'd see printed ads that included not only www. but the HTTP colon forward slash forward slash at the beginning of a domain name because the HTTP protocol was new and people had to be educated about how to actually find a website

and of course that's technically part of a URL in the early days users actually had to type those letters to get anywhere. Today, desktop browsers don't bother displaying HTTP or HTTPPS in most contexts and on mobile browsers it's nearly impossible to find them at all.

browsers have also reduced the amount of text shown in the URL field overall, in part because most URLs today are not human generated. They're made by content management systems and are often full of junk that's not meaningful to humans. URLs are just hard to read, hard to trust, and generally a mess. So what's next for the URL? Adrian Porter-Felt, Chrome's engineering manager, says that's still being debated. Parissa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Chrome, says, quote, I don't know what this will look like because it's an active discussion in the team right now.

But I do know that whatever we propose is going to be controversial. That's one of the challenges with a really old and open and sprawling platform. Change will be controversial whatever form it takes, but it's important we do something because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck, end quote. There's a new Pew Research poll out today that reveals users changing relationships with Facebook specifically. More than half of users ages 18 and older have changed their Facebook privacy settings just within the past 12 months. That's what we'd expect given the Cambridge Analytica scandal and various efforts to enhance privacy controls on Facebook.

But the big findings jump off the page, quoting from Andrew Perrin at Pew Research, 42% say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while 26% say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cell phone, end quote. It seems that taking a break from social media really is a trend after all. Pew found that younger users of Facebook, those 18 to 29, were far more likely to actually delete the app from their phone entirely. Over the past year, 44% of those younger users have deleted. deleted the app. Contrast that with users in the 65 and older age range where just 12% have deleted the app. While the poll does not get into whether those phone app deletionists are still accessing Facebook through other means like a PC,

deleting Facebook from your phone is clearly an increasingly popular activity. On Twitter, Mary Branscombe tweeted, yeah, I only use Facebook for Messenger and through a separate app. It's not that I don't love you friends and family. It's that Facebook discussions become toxic too easily, end quote. Of course, even if people are, in fact, deleting Facebook, I'm still skeptical. They're still on Messenger, of course, and they still seem to love Instagram. And Facebook owns both of those, right?

Only question is, can Mark Zuckerberg make as much money off of these sister apps as he has done with Facebook? Well, interestingly, Casey Newton at The Verge reports that Instagram is working on a shopping app, quoting The Verge. The app, which may be called IG Shopping, will let users browse collections of goods for merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app, according to two people familiar with the matter. Instagram declined to comment, end quote. Facebook has tried commerce before, of course, by trying to cram a sort of Craigslist-style shopping feature into the Facebook mobile app, the plans for IG shopping sound considerably bigger, and again, this would be breaking out an entirely separate app. Having a separate app might preserve the user experience of the core Instagram app, and perhaps that's a good thing, given the Pew poll I just mentioned. But having

a universe of different Facebook-owned apps, is that really what the company wants? Perhaps in such a world where there are standalone Instagram and shopping apps, the odds are at least one of them remains in use. It's worth noting that Instagram already has some basic shopping features inside it. In March of 2017, Instagram introduced a feature allowing companies to tag posts with products, allowing users to basically shop from a photo. Instagram is also testing a feature that will let viewers shop with Instagram stories. Instagram's increasing focus on commerce is clear and maybe it's inevitable, but it has me wondering, Instagram is a social network that already has ads and already allows users to initiate purchases from both the ads and the business account posts and now

stories. So where's the boundary between social network and shopping? As we've been saying, people seem to be flocking to Instagram because it's an app that has a slightly separate use case in their lives. Then again, as Casey Newton points out, Instagram has already spun out both a messaging app called Direct, and it's recently introduced IGTV, a very very very. video YouTube competitor. Well, it sure seems like they're bound to determine to make this thing work come hell or high water.

Today, Snap announced new styles of its latest Spectacles 2 video recording glasses. The new styles have polarized lenses and look more like traditional sunglasses. Dubbed Veronica and Nico, the designs are a bit chunky, but the look is far more conventional than the original Spectacles to shiny circular lens design. Both new designs are available starting to starting. today for $199, and they also come with a black case rather than the yellow case of the originals that practically screamed, I am wearing internet goggles, and I am probably recording you right now. The new designs can be made with prescription lenses, just like existing

spectacles, two models, and Snapchat says it's working on a new feature for the fall that will automatically curate your best spectacles captures of the day into a highlight story. Unlike the original spectacles that were rarely used, if purchased at all, the new models seem to be increasing user adoption. Quoting the verge, Snap says that since the introduction of Spectacles 2, users have been posting on average, 40% more photos and videos captured with

the glasses, end quote. And finally today, Axios reports that Vimeo is picking its battles, specifically no longer trying to be a video viewing destination to rival YouTube. The 14-year-old service has never been as big as YouTube, but increasingly has found

a niche serving professional video creators with software. Anjali sued, Vimeo CEO said, quote, Today, 100% of our business model is software as a service, like Dropbox or Slack. We just saw so much organic growth from the software tools side among the creators that it became a no-brainer that this is what we should focus on, end quote. So Vimeo today launched Vimeo Stock, yet another stock video library, but with a competitive edge offering creators a higher take of the money gained from licensed video than its competitors.

Vimeo says it will give 60 to 70% of licensing money to creators, which is roughly twice what competitors like Shutterstock offer. This, coupled with Vimeo's existing status as a platform where video professionals privately post their rough drafts for comment and reviews by clients, gives the new service a chance. If you're a video pro who's already using Vimeo to run your work by clients, why not buy your stock footage from them too? Why not sell your stock footage there if the rates are so good? This all adds up to a crucial business point. Vimeo is supported by user subscriptions, not ads. And the users who subscribe are video creators, not viewers. Today's announcements confirm that Vimeo has definitely pivoted and is doubling down on the creator side

of the business and effectively seating the ad-supported viewer model to giants like YouTube and Facebook. This doesn't mean regular users won't be able to watch videos on Vimeo, but it does mean that Vimeo will no longer try to chase that almighty ad dollar. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough, and the show was nearly 100% written by Chris Higgins today. Chris will be back next Wednesday to help out on iPhone Day. In the meantime, remember, you can follow Chris on Twitter at Chris Higgins or check out his work at chrishiggins.com. Talk See you tomorrow.