Tag: technology

I don’t think the tech startup observers fully understand just how deflating the next stage is going to be:

Now the layoffs have started coming in droves. Last month, robot pizza startup Zume and car-sharing company Getaround slashed more than 500 jobs. Then DNA testing company 23andMe, logistics startup Flexport, Firefox maker Mozilla and question-and-answer website Quora did their own cuts.

“It feels like a reckoning is here,” said Josh Wolfe, a venture capitalist at Lux Capital in New York.

It’s a humbling shift for an industry that long saw itself as an engine of job creation and innovation, producing ride-hailing giant Uber, hospitality company Airbnb and other now well-known brands that often disrupted entrenched industries.

Their rise was propelled by a wave of investor money — about $763 billion washed into startups in the United States over the past decade — that also fueled the growth of young companies in delivery, cannabis, real estate and direct-to-consumer goods. Unlike low-cost software startups, these private companies frequently took on old-line competitors by spending heavily on physical assets and workers while losing money.

Now a pullback is unfolding in precisely the areas that drew the most hype.

Around the world, more than 30 startups have slashed more than 8,000 jobs over the past four months, according to a tally by The New York Times. Investments in young companies have fallen, with 2,215 startups raising money in the United States in the last three months of 2019, the fewest since late 2016, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook, which track startups.

And those are not the only signs of change. Casper Sleep, which billed itself as the “Nike of sleep” by selling mattresses online, flopped when it went public this month. Once-hot companies like Lime, the electric scooter provider, have pulled out of some cities. Others, like e-commerce startup Brandless, game app HQ Trivia and electronics maker Essential Products, are on the verge of shutting down.

There are now “frantic mini-moments of panic, as one thing after another happens,” said Roy Bahat, an investor at Bloomberg’s venture arm in San Francisco. “At some point, one rock after another will fall away from the cliff and we’ll realize we’re not standing on anything in many, many companies.”

Let’s just say at least one of  “the next billion dollar startups” won’t be….

It’s astonishing to me that Amazon STILL can’t figure out how to fix fake reviews, so instead of doing the obvious and preventing people who have not bought a product from reviewing it on their site, they are trying to weight the star rating instead:

Fake reviews still exist on Amazon, but the dominant online shopping platform recently made a big change that might help drown them out instead.

The online retailer quietly introduced one-tap ratings for product reviews late last year, making it possible for shoppers to provide a star rating without needing to write a review to accompany it.

The change has already led to an increase in overall customer feedback, a competitive advantage that Amazon has over many of its biggest brick-and-mortar competitors. And new products are generating feedback on Amazon sooner, the company says, which could be a boon for new brands and sellers. But some industry observers believe another indirect impact of the change will be a significant increase in authentic ratings that will make it harder for fake reviews to break through the noise.

“As the number of ratings increase, customers can see a larger set and thus a more accurate rating,” said Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel Digital, an agency that helps large consumer brands sell on Amazon. “For brands, this means the black-hat review clubs and sellers will have less impact, as fake reviews as a percentage of legit reviews should decrease.”

The new rating feature arrives at a time in which fake product reviews have been attracting more attention from the media, regulators, and Amazon itself as more consumers conduct more of their shopping online. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission brought its first case involving paid fake reviews, settling a complaint against an Amazon seller who purchased fake five-star reviews for a weight-loss supplement. Amazon has also filed at least five lawsuits related to fake-review schemes over the last five years. On one end, fake positive reviews can simply lead to the purchase of poor-quality merchandise and distrust among shoppers. But in certain categories, a flattering review of a bad or faulty product can be flat-out dangerous.

The new one-tap feature asks customers to select from one to five stars for a product. It’s only available to customers who have actually purchased the item from Amazon — “verified” buyers. That barrier alone creates one hurdle that will make the new rating system harder to game, since Amazon does allow written reviews from non-verified buyers. And as the new rating feature attracts more and more feedback from verified buyers, it’ll get more expensive for schemers to buy enough phony reviews to try to break through the noise.

“The more customers who purchased the product [who] provide feedback, the more accurately the star rating reflects the experience of all purchasers,” is how Amazon spokesperson Angie Newman put it, without directly referencing fake reviews.

Amazon does not provide many specifics about how a product’s overall star rating is calculated, other than stating that it is not a simple average but instead uses “machine-learned models” that take into account factors such as how recent the rating or review is and whether it was a verified purchase or not. It’s not clear whether one-tap ratings will carry as much weight in these models as written reviews.

It’s better than nothing, but it’s downright embarrassing that a company as heavily invested in AI and machine learning, and as dependent upon an algorithm, as Amazon is can’t figure out how to write an algorithm that can easily distinguish an obvious fake review from a legitimate one.

The Soros-funded app that ruined the Iowa caucuses was written by amateurs:

Motherboard asked six cybersecurity and app development experts we trust to analyze the app. The app was built on top of React Native, an open-source app development package released by Facebook that can be used for both Android and iOS apps, according to Kasra Rahjerdi, who has been an Android developer since the original Android project was launched, and Robert Baptiste, a white-hat hacker who has exposed security flaws in many popular apps and reviewed the code. Rahjerdi said that the app contains default React Native metadata and that it comes off as a “very very off the shelf skeleton project plus add your own code kind of thing.”

“Honestly, the biggest thing is—I don’t want to throw it under the bus—but the app was clearly done by someone following a tutorial. It’s similar to projects I do with my mentees who are learning how to code,” Rahjerdi said. “They started with a starter package and they just added things on top of it. I get deja vu from my classes because the code looks like someone Googled things like ‘how to add authentication to React Native App’ and followed the instructions,” Rahjerdi said.

“The mobile app looks hastily thrown together,” Dan Guido, CEO of cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits, told Motherboard.

Hey, look at the bright side of the debacle. At least journalists are finally learning to code!

If the Iowa caucuses don’t demonstrate the importance of women in technology, I don’t know what will:

Hours after a debacle that marred Monday’s Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses, investors in a company hired to tabulate votes through a new mobile app worked to distance themselves from the company at the center of the chaos, scrubbing digital trails publicly connecting them to the firm.

The chaos in Iowa on Monday evening put a microscope on one of Democratic Party’s youngest and fastest-rising digital stars, Tara McGowan, prompting serious questions—and some conspiracy theories—about the constellation of advocacy, technology, and quasi-news organizations she’s built.

“It is a pattern of fake it till you make it,” one top Democrative operative said of McGowan and her firm, ACRONYM. “You talk a big game and then sort of hope it becomes true.”

On Monday, all eyes turned to one company in McGowan’s portfolio, Shadow Inc., as Iowa precinct chairs reported serious flaws with the app it had developed tabulate the vote. As complaints about the app trickled in on Monday, McGowan, who is the chief executive of Shadow investor ACRONYM, took to Twitter to describe her group as just that, an investor.

Miss McGowan probably should have stuck to talking about the need for more women in technology on the conference circuit. I sincerely commend the Democratic Party’s commitment to women and diversities in technology, and recommend they boost that commitment to the 100 percent level. Remember, diversity is your strength and straight white male technology is witchcraft!

Anyhow, it’s not a big mystery as to why ACRONYM bombed so badly despite being founded by “the Democrats most dangerous digital strategist.”

Acronym has taken hardly any time in breaking the strategy-firm ecosystem in the nation’s capital. By the end of 2018, it had raised and managed more than $18 million, registered 60,000 voters, run 105 targeted ad campaigns in 15 states, helped elect 63 progressive candidates and won 61 percent of the races it invested in. Its staff has grown from five to 38 and it has quickly become one of the go-to digital organizing forces for everyone from Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List to Everytown for Gun Safety and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

McGowan is just another Elizabeth Holmes. And never trust a “strategist” who couldn’t beat a 9-year-old boy in checkers.

Given all the other problems with the F-35, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned out that the overdesigned grand compromise didn’t even stay in the sky:

The latest news about the F-35 isn’t just bad – it’s CATASTROPHIC. It turns out that this utter turkey of a plane is so badly built and designed that its gun can’t even shoot straight:

Add a gun that can’t shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws.

The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has “unacceptable” accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that’s cracking, the Pentagon’s test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system.

The annual assessment by Robert Behler, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, doesn’t disclose any major new failings in the plane’s flying capabilities. But it flags a long list of issues that his office said should be resolved — including 13 described as Category 1 “must-fix” items that affect safety or combat capability — before the F-35’s upcoming $22 billion Block 4 phase.

The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That’s down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October.

“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant‘’ ones to address, the assessment said.

Settle in with a stiff drink, chaps, because carving up this turkey is going to take a while.

Here’s to hoping the empire goes out with a whimper and not a bang.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Amazon’s Ring automatically sends private user data to Facebook:

Amazon’s Ring smart doorbell surveillance product has been caught sending user data to Facebook and other companies without making Ring users aware their data was being shared. That’s according to an investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). What’s even more alarming is Ring users are having their data sent to Facebook even if they themselves don’t have Facebook accounts.

The EFF examined Ring’s latest Android app and found that it had four unlisted trackers sending Ring user data back to four websites including branch.io, mixpanel.com, appsflyer.com, and facebook.com. This is despite Ring’s privacy policy, which purports to list all the trackers being used in its software. That privacy policy was last updated over a year and a half ago and doesn’t list three of the four new trackers discovered.

So what data is Ring sending to Facebook and other companies? The EFF says the information includes “the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.”

This really isn’t that hard. Don’t use smart home technology. It’s all spy-on-you-in-your-home technology.

I’ve seen this facial recognition software in action. It’s both creepy and impressive.

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Being publicly recognizable is not really a concern to someone like me, since I was never given a choice about going public on the Internet or not. But it is a massive problem for the average individual, even those who have been careful to avoid social media. Sooner, rather than later, nations and their lawmakers are going to have to decide whether to embrace or reject the use of identification technology. I assume that most of them are going to embrace it, although the governments that come after the complete collapse of the neo-liberal world order may not.

It’s not right, of course, but I can’t say I’m going to shed copious tears over Nick Fuentes being demonetized by Google:

Nicholas Fuentes, who gained headlines earlier this year, has been banned from streaming on YouTube, demonetized, and likely will be banned outright soon.

Now I suppose we’ll find out if he’s genuinely a fighter or if he’s just another ex-YouTuber playing victim. Either way, it’s a great time to go after YouTube, as the parent organization’s top-flight legal chief is currently exiting Alphabet:

The changing of the guard at Alphabet  continues. Roughly one month after Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they’d be stepping down as the CEO and president of the search giant’s parent company, one of their top lieutenants, Alphabet’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, told employees that he is also leaving the company.

I understand he is retiring in order to spend more time making new families.

The former employee with whom he shares a child, Jennifer Blakely, published a post on Medium last summer in which she described Drummond as a serial philanderer who left his wife for her, then left her and the son that he fathered with her for another now-former Google employee.

Blakely also claimed Drummond had had “an affair with his ‘personal assistant’ who he moved into one of his new homes.”

One day later, Drummond issued a statement of his own, acknowledging his relationship with Blakely and their “difficult break-up 10 years ago.” He went on to state that, “Other than Jennifer, I never started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet. Any suggestion otherwise is simply untrue.”

Days after issuing the statement, Drummond married a Google employee he’d been dating.

Subscribe to Unauthorized, because no one knows how much longer the Darkstream will be on YouTube.

But someone did:

The surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing federal sex-trafficking charges, was found semiconscious in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, in New York around 1:27 a.m. on July 23.

But that video is now gone because MCC officials mistakenly saved video from a different floor of the federal detention facility, prosecutors said in a court filing. The MCC “inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists,” the court papers say.

It’s time to outlaw the surveillance state. The cameras quite obviously don’t work well enough to permit it to function at all.

The Quartering, previously banned by Patreon, receives an invitation to join Patreon and disrespectfully declines.

Hi Jeremy,

My name’s Tom and I work on the Creator Partnerships team at Patreon. We help creators build long-term creative businesses by investing in a direct relationship with their fans.

I’m reaching out to you to see if you’re interested in discussing what Patreon membership could look like for you. We’ve previously partnered with creators like Tolarian Community College, Strictly Better Mtg and Dungeon Dudes to help them launch on Patreon. We’d love to see if something similar could be a fit, especially given the recent COPPA ruling which has unexpectedly impacted channels despite their content not being for kids.

Are you free this week?

Best,
Tom

Unlike the December 20th TOS change, which was a direct reaction to the Legal Legion’s actions, I very much doubt this had anything to do with Patreon changing its policies or its attitude towards creators it had previously banned. We already know that Patreon’s processes are shockingly amateurish and disorganized, and that people in one team have no idea what the people in another team are doing.

So, it’s much more likely that Tom and the others in Creator Partnerships is working from a list of creators with a good-sized audience that has never been compared with the list of creators that Sydney and the others in Trust & Safety have banned.

One of the interesting things Jeremy observes is that Patreon processes about $1 billion per year. Since they take about 4 percent after the processing fees, that means their annual revenue is only around $40 million. Which, of course, means that they are even more fragile than we had originally calculated.