Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, Apr. 4, 2018 - The YouTube Shooting Incident

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

Everything we know about yesterday’s shooting incident at YouTube, rumors of iphones with curved glass, Zuckerberg’s going to testify to congress, Apple poaches Google’s AI chief, and a smart piece about social media overload. Stories from: @markgurman and @BenedictEvans Links:Apple Working on Touchless Control and Curved iPhone Screen (Bloomberg)The death of the newsfeed (Benedict Evans) 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 TechMeme ride home for Wednesday, April 4th, 2018. Today, everything we know about yesterday's shooting incident at YouTube, rumors of iPhones with curved glass. Zuckerberg's going to testify to Congress, Apple poaches Google's AI chief, and a smart piece about social media overload.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So here's what we know about the shooting incident yesterday afternoon at YouTube's headquarters. in San Bruno, California. Three YouTube employees were shot and are reportedly recovering from their wounds in area hospitals. The victims were reported to be a man, 36, in critical condition, a woman, 32 in serious condition, and a woman 27 in fair condition, according to a spokesperson from Zuckerberg, San Francisco General Hospital. Police have identified the shooter as Nassim Najafi Agdam of San Diego, of San Diego,

who was 39 years old. The timeline of the incident is as follows, according to various reports. On March 31st, Nassim Ogdom is reported missing by her family. On April 3rd, around 2 a.m., police find Ogdenham asleep in her car in Mountain View, California. They question her and reportedly let her go. Mountain View is about half an hour from San Bruno. Mountain View police have confirmed this contact, saying to BuzzFeed,

news, quote, officers located an adult female by the same name, asleep in a vehicle in a mountain view parking lot early this morning. The woman confirmed her identity to us and answered subsequent questions, end quote. At 12.46 p.m. Pacific time yesterday, San Bruno police received the first 911 calls from YouTube headquarters reporting gunshots. Police arrived on the scene approximately two minutes later. Agdam was reportedly carrying a handgun and the shootings took place in a courtyard at YouTube's offices. Ms. Ogdom reportedly took her own life at the scene. It turns out that Ms. Ogdom was quite active on YouTube herself,

where she maintained a number of channels in Persian, Turkish, and English. According to the New York Times, she had posted videos with music parodies, workout videos, and discussing topics like animal cruelty and vegan cooking. In February of 2017, Ogdom reportedly posted a video on Facebook, criticizing YouTube for algorithm changes that she felt decreased the number of views her videos were receiving. In the Facebook video, Ogdam reportedly said, quote, this is what they're doing to weekend activists and many other people who try to promote healthy, humane, and smart living.

People like me are not good for big business, like for animal business, medicine business, and for many other businesses. That's why they are discriminating and censoring us, end quote. According to BuzzFeed last year, Ogdom posted a photo on Facebook of a person holding a sign calling YouTube a, quote, dictatorship and alleging, quote, suppression of truth. Police are currently investigating this possible dissatisfaction with YouTube as they look for a possible motive. Ogdom had reportedly told her family in recent weeks that she, quote, hated YouTube because it was censoring her videos and paying her less. And when the family reported Ogdom as missing, her father said that he told police, she might be going to YouTube because she, quote, hated the company.

Ogdam had complained on her website that, quote, new close-minded YouTube employees had, quote, filtered my channels, causing the number of views on her videos to decline. According to the New York Times, she posted a screenshot of her YouTube page, showing that one video in particular had received 366,000 views, and claimed she would receive only 10 cents in advertising. revenue from that video. Quote, My revenue for 300,000 is 10 cents, Ogdam wrote. Hours after the events of yesterday, Google CEO Sundar Pachai sent employees a memo addressing

the incident. Pachai's email read, quote, It's with great sadness that I tell you, based on the latest information, four people were injured in this horrific act of violence. We're doing everything we can to support them and their families at this time. I'm grateful to everyone inside and outside the company for the outpouring of support and best wishes. I am especially thankful to the first responders and our own security team who acted so quickly to keep people safe, end quote. If you were following these events yesterday, you no doubt saw reports surface on social media first,

and a YouTube product manager named Vadim Lavrusik was one of the first to tweet about the shooting. In an unfortunate, unrelated story, about 20 minutes after Lavrusik had tweeted that he was safe, his account was hacked, and the hackers responsible began posting misinformation about the incident. Friends of Lavruc reached out to Twitter who were able to return the account to its rightful owner, so good on Twitter for being quick to react. But this serves as a timely reminder that in the case of breaking news events, posts on social media should always be taken with at least. a grain of salt.

Late this afternoon, Facebook announced in a blog post that more people might have had their data collected from Cambridge Analytica than had previously been reported. Original estimates from the New York Times and other outlets had pegged the number at around 50 million people. But this afternoon, Facebook's CTO Mike Schrofer wrote in a blog post, quote, In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people, mostly in the U.S., may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica by apps that they or their friends used, end quote. According to Recode's Kurt Wagner, quote, Facebook says it will begin alerting those users that their data may have been part of this batch on Monday, April 9.

The company plans to put a link at the top of every Facebook user's news feed next Monday to help them understand which third-party apps have their data. That alert will also include whether or not your data was part of the set obtained. by Cambridge Analytica, end quote. In the same blog post, Facebook said it will begin to limit data available to apps from its Pages API, Events API, Groups API, and Facebook login. Facebook will now approve every app that uses these APIs, and Facebook also confirmed that the feature that users opted in for, which collected call and text history from people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android,

did not collect the content of their messages, and that going forward any data it did collect would be deleted after one year. Earlier this morning, it had been announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11th. This was confirmed this morning via a press release

from the committee itself. Committee Chairman Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, and ranking member Frank Polone, Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said Zuckerberg would speak to the committee at 11 a.m. next Wednesday regarding Facebook's use and protection of user data. The congressman said in their announcement, quote, this hearing will be an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans understand what happens to their personal information online.

We appreciate Mr. Zuckerberg's willingness to testify before the committee, and we look forward to him answering our questions. end quote. This might be only the first appearance that Zuckerberg will make before Congress in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, because both the Senate Commerce Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have also requested that Zuckerberg testify to them as well. Once again, Bloomberg's Mark German is back with another Apple rumor scoop. Apple is reportedly working on touchless gesture controls and curved screens for future iPhones. according to people familiar with the matter.

By gesture control, we're apparently talking about the ability to move your fingers close to the screen without actually tapping on it in order to get the phone to perform some specific tasks. Samsung actually launched a feature called Air Gestures several years ago, and a Google Research Group has been apparently working on similar technologies. As for the curved screens,

unlike LCD screen technology used in prior iPhones, OLED or organic light-emitting diode displays can be shaped into curves or even folded. Both technologies are in the research and development stage at Apple and are at least a couple years away from showing up in production versions of Apple devices. According to German, quote, the work comes as Apple looks to make its gadgets stand out. Smartphones have become increasingly similar as Apple, Samsung, Google, and others. adopt features like full screens, advanced cameras, and facial recognition at roughly the same time.

Apple said yesterday that it is hiring John Gian Andrea away from Google, where he was chief of search and artificial intelligence. At Apple, Gian Andrea will reportedly run Apple's machine learning and AI strategy and become one of only 16 executives at Apple who report directly to Apple's CEO Tim Cook. The news broke just earlier this week that Mr. Gian Andrea was unexpectedly stepping down as Google's AI executive. G&Mendra is quite the Silicon Valley veteran, having been an early Netscape engineer, and doing stints everywhere from Silicon Graphics to Tell Me Networks, to AOL Time Warner, to MetaWeb. According to the New York Times, quote, The higher is a victory for Apple, which many Silicon Valley executives and analysts view as lagging.

its peers in artificial intelligence, an increasingly crucial technology for companies that enable computers to handle more complex tasks, like understanding voice commands or identifying people in images. On Twitter, Benedict Evans noted, quote, Apple hires Google's AI chief, important. Probably more important. They persuaded him he'll have interesting problems to work on, and that he'll be able to get stuff done, which implies broader changes, end quote. technology analyst Patrick Moorhead tweeted, good stuff. One person alone rarely makes the only

difference, but he will likely pull people over from other companies. Historically, very rarely does Apple change its direct reporting structure. Big deal from that angle. Speaking of Google and AI, the New York Times is reporting that inside Google there is a letter circulating that has been signed by more than 3,000 Google employees protesting that company's involvement in a Pentagon program that uses AI to interpret video imagery from military drones. Reportedly, dozens of senior Google engineers have lent their signatures to the petition as well. I've spoken about this story before Google's involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program, and told you then that it was controversial inside the company.

The letter, which is addressed to Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, says, quote, we believe that Google should not be in the business of war. Therefore, we ask that Project Maven be canceled, and that Google draft publicize and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technologies, end quote. Google's work on Project Maven apparently involves using AI techniques

to analyze drone video to pick out things like enemy combatants versus civilians in an effort to reduce the accidental killing of innocent people. Google has described its work on Project Maven as, quote, non-offensive in nature, though as the New York Times notes, quote, the Pentagon's video analysis is routinely used in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, and Defense Department publications make clear that the project

supports those operations. Both Google and the Pentagon said the company's products would not create an autonomous weapon system that could fire without human operators, which is a much debated possibility using artificial intelligence. One more Google tidbit today. Google announced in a blog post that it had purchased enough renewable energy on markets to exceed for the very first time the amount of electricity the company uses across its entire global operations, including offices and data centers. According to the blog post, quote, what do we mean by matching renewable energy over the

course of 2017 across the globe, for every kilowatt hour of electricity we consumed, we purchased a kilowatt hour of renewable energy from a wind or solar farm that was built specifically for Google. This makes us the first public cloud and company of our size to have achieved this feat. Today, we have contracts to purchase three gigawatts of output from renewable energy projects. No corporate purchaser buys more renewable energy than we do. To date, our renewable energy have led to over $3 billion in new capital investments around the world. Finally today, I've already mentioned a Benedict Evans tweet in an earlier story, but I also wanted to highlight a blog post that he put up over the weekend on his

Ben-dash-Evons.com personal website. It's titled The Death of the News Feed, and it essentially makes the case that social sharing is moving away from algorithmic news feeds and toward formats like stories and one-to-one messaging as a result of Evans' Puzzits, content overload. According to Evans, who is quoting data from Facebook, the average Facebook user could possibly see, on average, 1,500 items per day if he or she were to consume every post available on their news feed on a given day. Evans says, quote, this is the combination of two factors.

Dunbar's number, a rule of thumb that implies that you probably do know several hundred people well enough to friend them on Facebook, and Zuckerberg's law, the supposed tendency to share more and more on social media over time. Combine those two, and you get overload. Evans goes on to reference the tragedy of the commons, quote, we're supposed to post stuff, but by posting stuff, we overload each other's feeds. Facebook's growth team was too good at its job. Evans says that this is why it's foolhardy to ask for Instagram. for example, to bring back the chronological feed, as there's simply too much content being posted for you to reasonably be able to keep up with it,

no matter how much a chronological feed might give you the illusion of control. Evans argues that things like Snapchat stories and other similar projects that especially messaging apps have been evolving toward, is a partial solution to the overload problem. By bundling what you want to share into one unit instead of many separate items, even if you do then share that to many people, any feed is more manageable, end quote. What happens, though, when everyone jumps to stories and message apps to avoid the crowds in the news feed? Well, probably those venues will get crowded up as well, a phenomenon that Evans summed up with the following tweet.

All social apps grow until you need a news feed. All news feeds grow until you need an algorithmic feed. All algorithmic feeds grow until you get fed up of not seeing stuff or seeing the wrong stuff and leave for new apps with less overload. Then all those apps grow until, obviously, the cycle goes on. As is often the case with Evans' blog posts, this is a really interesting, deeply thought-out piece. Check it out. Link in the show notes.

And that's all for today, but I did want to take a moment here to address something real quick. Several of you have been tweeting and emailing that I should be more comprehensive and conscientious about including links to the stories and items that I end up talking about on this show. And indeed, if you look at the first couple of episodes of this podcast, that was, in fact, the idea. But my linking has fallen by the wayside a bit for the simple reason that it's just too time-consuming. I simply don't have the time in a given day to read all the stories, write the scripts, record, and edit every segment, and also post comprehensive links or even chapter points in the show or show notes. Now, hopefully this will change in the near future.

The plan is to hire some folks to help me out with writing and editing in the coming weeks and months. But until then, please bear with me. If I do specifically mention a piece to check out, like the Benedict Evans piece just now, I will try doubly sure to make sure that there is a link in the video. show notes and hopefully we'll have more comprehensive notes again down the road aways. Anyway, until then, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me and yell at me for not linking to stories at Brian MCC on Twitter.

Follow at TechMeme on Twitter for breaking news headlines as they're posted. And thank you guys for listening to the podcast. If you are listening closely enough to want to follow up and read the stories I'm talking about, then we must be doing something right.