Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/28 - Google Fi (née Project Fi) Comes to iPhones

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

The biggest ad fraud ever? Amazon gets into medical records, Project Fi comes to iPhones, one of Elon’s LA tunnels is canceled, and the Big Mouth Billy Bass enters the 21st Century. Links: 8 People Are Facing Charges As A Result Of The FBI’s Biggest-Ever Ad Fraud Investigation (BuzzFeed) Big Tech Expands Footprint in Health (WSJ) Project Fi is now Google Fi, and it will work with iPhones and most Android devices (The Verge) Waymo taps former NTSB chair to oversee safety of self-driving ride-share fleet (CNBC) YouTube to Make New Originals Available for Free, Ad-Supported Viewing With ‘Single Slate’ Strategy (Variety) Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective bought Pop-Up Magazine Productions (Recode) Community Activists Kill Elon Musk's Plan for an Underground Freeway Tunnel in LA (Motherboard) Big Mouth Billy Bass Will Now Annoy the Shit Out of You With Alexa Support Built In (Gizmodo) 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, November 28th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today. The biggest ad fraud ever?

Amazon gets into medical records. Project Phi comes to iPhones. One of Elon's L.A. Tunnels is canceled, and the Big Mouth Billy Bass enters the 21st century. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. But by the way, I'm sure you might have noticed our little feed snafu yesterday. If you missed yesterday's episode, it is available. So please check your podcast feed and download Tuesday's episode since most likely you missed it. Apologies for that, and I'll explain at the end of the show.

Are you in the mood for a riveting sort of crime story straight out of the movies? Late yesterday, BuzzFeed published the play-by-play of the FBI's biggest ad fraud investigation ever, which resulted in Justice Department indictments of eight people on charges related to a global ad fraud scheme that was discovered with the help of around 15 tech companies, including Google and White Ops. The indictments came down yesterday, and in them the government alleges that the eight men indicted stole tens of millions of dollars by using, quote, sophisticated computer programming and infrastructure around the world to exploit the digital advertising industry through fraud. Three of the men indicted have been arrested and are awaiting

extradition to the U.S. The remaining five remain at large. What kind of fraud are we talking about here? Well, if you've ever bought online advertising, you've probably had the thought, how do I know the clicks are real? How do I know the page views are real? I mean, how hard could it be to set up bots to act like real people and spend my ad dollars without real people ever actually seeing my ad? All of the online advertisers swear up and down that they have complicated systems in place to prevent this. But the group of men, which the government alleged did this crime, and they nicknamed Thrieve, did essentially what we've all imagined was possible. They set up websites, put ads on them, and then created bots to visit those

websites and trigger the ads. Quoting from BuzzFeed, at its peak, Threve involved about 1.7 million PCs infected with malware, an array of servers that could generate mountains of fake traffic with bots, roughly 5,000 counterfeit websites created to impersonate legitimate web publishers, and over 60,000 accounts with digital advertising companies to help fraudsters receive ad placements and get paid. The indictment also alleges the fraudsters created their own advertising networks to help facilitate the fraud. This complex infrastructure served one goal to steal as much money as possible from the $250 billion global digital ad industry while avoiding detection, end quote. I also want to quote one more passage from the BuzzFeed piece before summarizing this story because I found this part fascinating.

Ad fraud is the world's most lucrative yet low risk form of criminality today. Billions are stolen every year by people and companies that exploit the complex systems used to buy and sell digital ads. But it's rare for perpetrators of ad fraud schemes to face criminal charges or serious consequences. That's one reason why ad fraud is on page. to be eclipsed only by the illicit drug trade in terms of annual revenue, according to the World Federation of Advertisers, an estimated $19 billion will have been stolen this year by ad fraudsters. Ad fraud is one of the most profitable crimes with the least amount of risk,

said Tamer Hassan, the chief technology officer of White Ops, end quote. To catch and shut down Thrieve, advertisers like Adobe, the Trade Desk, Amazon advertising and oath joined Google and Whiteops. They were then joined by security firms like malware bytes, Trend Micro, Symantec, and McAfee, to set their trap and bring Thrieve down. The group had to let the botnet run once they discovered it so that they wouldn't tip off the criminals that the cover was blown. That meant that advertising companies had to make good to publishers for a ton of fraudulent ads

to the tune of an unknown amount of money while they slowly closed the noose. There was also a malware component, by the way, at least 1.7 million Windows computers were infected and harnessed to generate the fake traffic. The old standby of the fake critical update or Adobe Flash update was used by the criminals in this case.

The fake websites they generated mimicked legit brands, like websites such as TBS.com. The fake traffic was program to mimic human behavior like mouse movements and clicks on videos. And then on October 22nd, the feds and the tech companies joined forces to take Thrieve down from roughly 375,000 fake bids on ads per second on midnight of October 22nd. By 6 p.m. that same day, the fake clicks were down to almost zero. This is a big news story, possibly the biggest ad fraud organization ever brought down by law enforcement, but it's just a fun long read as well. So first link in the show notes. Enjoy.

Amazon is serious about getting into health care, it seems. If you'll recall, they spent $1 billion earlier this year for online pharmacy pill pack. And yesterday, Amazon announced it is now selling a new text analysis software tool to help health care professionals mine medical records for information that doctors and hospitals can use to improve treatment and cut costs. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, the new Amazon software can read digitize patient records and other clinical notes, analyze them, and pluck out key data points, Amazon said. The company announced the software first reported by the journal on Tuesday. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing division, has been selling such text

analysis software to companies outside medicine for use in areas such as travel, booking, customer support, and supply chain management, end quote. According to the journal, the market for storing and analyzing health information is worth more than $7 billion a year. And, of course, in the U.S. alone, the overall health care market is $3.2 trillion in size, which is why tech companies are always nibbling around the edges of this market. But it has proven to be a devilishly difficult nut to crack. As the article notes, simply digitizing things like doctor's notes has thus far proven to be impervious to algorithms because of misspellings, abbreviations, and frankly, doctors idiosyncrasies in descriptions,

handwriting, what have you. But Amazon says its deep learning techniques have led to a breakthrough. Quoting again from the journal, we're able to completely automatically look inside medical language and identify patient details, including diagnoses, treatments, dosage, and strengths with incredible, high accuracy, said Matt Wood, General Manager of Artificial Intelligence at Amazon Web Services. During testing, the software performed on par or better than published efforts and can extract data on patients' diseases, prescriptions, lab orders, and procedures, end quote. I guess it's a sign of the times that the first thing I thought of when I saw this headline was,

oh, no, are they going to be mining our medical data now? So it is worth noting that Amazon assures us that AWS won't see the data processed by this algorithm. The data is encrypted and can only be unlocked by customers who have the proper key. Google's Project Fi, its MVNO or mobile virtual network operator, is graduating from merely pixels and other phones sold directly by Google to the vast majority of Android phones. And the iPhone as well. It will be a bit more complicated to set up on an iPhone, but there's a new Google Fi iOS app if you want to give it a try. Oh, and by the way, Project Fi is now officially Google Fi.

They're rebranding it. Not familiar with Google Fi, nay, Project Fi. Essentially, it's like getting your cell service from Google itself, even though the actual service is being routed via other services pipes. Apparently, largely T-Mobile's network. Here's how Dieter Bone describes Google Fi in The Verge. It's $20 for a phone line and $10 per gig of data you use, capped at $60 under a newer program it calls bill protection. The reason I like it is that you can get a data-only SIM,

which costs no additional money per month beyond the data you use on it. I think it's one of the best deals in wireless. But depending on your data habits, the same might not. not be true for you, end quote. By all accounts from industry watchers, Waymo continues to be the furthest ahead and the most serious of all the players when it comes to getting actual self-driving cars on the road at scale. And to that end, nothing signals seriousness like, I don't know, hiring the former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board as your first ever chief safety officer. That's exactly what Waymo has done by hiring Deborah Hursman.

to fill the chief security officer role. Herman was chairwoman of the NTSB under the Obama administration and has also been the CEO of the National Safety Council for the last four years. Quote, I've dedicated my career to promoting safety in our communities, and I'm joining Waymo because of the potential to make an even greater impact on reducing road injuries and fatalities, Herman said in a statement released by Waymo. Remember, for those of you keeping an eye on my open-ended speculative wager about these things, Waymo is scheduled to launch the country's first ever true autonomous ride-sharing service in Phoenix in just a matter of weeks.

If you were able to hear yesterday's episode, then you heard that Facebook is scaling back its Facebook watch streaming video initiative. And today, word from variety that YouTube is also changing strategy as well, in a way, at least when it comes to investment in scripted shows that YouTube produces itself. According to Variety, starting next week, all YouTube originals will now be available for free on the ad-supported side of YouTube. Previously, these shows were only available on the $11.99 a month YouTube premium offering. Quoting Variety, the company calls the new YouTube original strategy its single slate, which will combine ad-supported and subscription VOD programming initiatives. By 2020, YouTube's original shows and movies will be available in four. free windows for all YouTube users. In the near term, some original productions will remain behind the paywall, including next

year's season two of Cobra Kai, an offshoot of the Karate Kid movies. Regular listeners to this show will know all about rich tech folk investing in media and journalism trophies. It's a common thing these days, Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post, the Benioffs with Time magazine. But I'm not sure we've discussed before just how much Lorene Powell jobs. has been involved in journalism projects as a part of her investments

and philanthropic efforts. Through personal investments, as well as through Emerson Collective, a social impact firm that she runs, Powell Jobs, has bought stakes in the Atlantic, ProPublica, Mother Jones, the Texas Observer,

the Committee to Protect Journalism, the Internet News site Axios, podcast maker, Gimlet Media, even several Hollywood production companies. And now, in Recode, Kara Swisher, breaks the news that the Emerson Collective is purchasing pop-up magazine productions for an undisclosed amount of money. The San Francisco-based pop-up runs live magazine events across the country and also publishes the online and offline California Sunday magazine,

which is distributed in big newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. The purchase came after an investment of at least 10 million in pop-up last year by the Palo Alto-based Emerson. pop-up, which launched in 2014, had previously raised $4 million, end quote. Setback for the Boring Company, Elon Musk's tunneling venture is withdrawing its plans for a 17-mile tunnel running underneath L.A.'s 405 freeway after a bunch of local community groups sued the city of Los Angeles over the boring company's plans. Quoting motherboard, the planned freeway tunnel known as the Sepulveda Test Tunnel was announced last year by the Boring Company, but construction quickly stalled due to legal troubles. The Boring Company sought to bypass a lengthy environmental review process for the tunnel and managed to get the city on board with a fast track to construction. This invoked the wrath of a number of community groups in Los Angeles who sued the city and demanded a full environmental review of Musk's testing tunnel. The pressure from the community groups worked,

and this week the Boring Company dropped all its plans for the Sepulveda Tunnel, end quote. All is not lost, however, the Boring Company is still pushing ahead with its plans for the so-called dugout loop, a test tunnel to ferry people to the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball stadium. And as of now, the company still has permission to go ahead with a 12-mile tunnel between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and an 18-mile tunnel circling. Chicago. Though I do say, as of now, as there are also community and regulatory questions surrounding these projects as well. And possibly a setback for good taste. I don't know. I can see being on either side of this next segment, either really charmed by this or appalled.

But guess what? The Big Mouth Billy Bass, that animatronic fish from the 90s in 2000, that you put on the wall to sing and talk to you. Well, guess what? You can now officially put in a pre-order for an AL-E-X-A enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass for only $40. By the way, yes, I'm abbreviating so as not to trigger your AL-E-X-A devices, as we discussed recently.

So how did this happen? Well, it turns out that a developer named Brian Cain first suggested hacking ABM-BB, Big mouth Billy Bass, to the AL-E-X-A API back in 2016. The original makers of BMB were on board, and guess what? The thing is now real, or as real as a tacky animatronic talking fish can be. You are going to have to connect the BMB to an existing echo device for it to work, but once you do that, it will do anything an echo device can already do,

including playing music on demand. So look, again, your viewpoint on this might vary, as Gizmodo's Andrew Lzeski writes, if you've been trying to convince your tech cautious family to try out a smart assistant, this could be the irritating gateway drug that gets them hooked, end quote. Or if what you're going for is the practical joke gift thing, and you already did the thing last year where you got your sibling the ugliest sweater you could find, To be honest, $50 isn't that much money to elicit a few eye rolls and groans and maybe even a few laughs. So order now, and you can take delivery in time for Christmas.

Ah, it's finally fixed. As you may have noticed, for most of you, the podcast did not show up yesterday. So we did record and post it. If you check the podcast subreddit at R-slash-right-home, you can see the whole sorry saga play out in real time. the how and why this happened. But anyway, it's fixed now, short-term fix, long-term fix coming. I'll explain on the subreddit later what the problem ultimately was. If you're listening to this now and you didn't download Tuesday's episode, again, please do.

I had some great things to tell you about. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow. At least I hope so.