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While most of us now need Buzzfeed quizzes about "things only '90s kids would recognize" to remember what a Blockbuster is, the franchise's inevitable demise is still something to be commemorated — if only by finally returning that VHS copy of Batma…
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Foursquare’s unusual pitch: The ethical data company
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Over the last decade, Foursquare has moved beyond app check-ins and mayoral skirmishes to mostly serve other companies. It’s a platform for apps that change according to your location, whether you check in or not. The combination of its ability to ambiently pinpoint locations and having what Crowley calls its “base map of the world” — basically, understanding what all these coordinates that people gravitate towards actually are — has led it to work with Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more. The company has over 100,000 clients and has seen revenue growth of over 50 percent for three years running.
Amid all that change was President Donald Trump’s travel ban on citizens from seven majority Muslim countries in January 2017. Crowley said it triggered an introspective moment at Foursquare, just as they were about to share their Pilgrim technology with other companies.
“Could someone use our tools to build something that we thought was evil?” he said to Engadget. “You do an audit and make sure that the company has stated its values, and the tools that we build adhere to those values, and there’s actually code in the stack that enforces that.”
The result, Crowley says, was an ethics committee that does legal research and formalizes company policy on, say, whether they should help a fast food company target customers who have visited cannabis dispensaries (they did — in areas of the country where marijuana is legal).
Foursquare vets the companies it works with for whether they use location tracking for a genuinely useful feature or just to sell data. Foursquare also tracks whether their partners are explicit with users about how they use location information.
“The stuff that comes naturally to us because we’ve been doing it for a long time does not come naturally to other companies,” Crowley said.
Moreover, Crowley says Foursquare has identified “hidden categories” — locations that are not targetable for ads — such as a chemotherapy center or divorce lawyer’s office. While Foursquare holds that data, it doesn’t go to partner companies.
CEO Jeff Glueck has said he’s turned away millions of dollars for data that was “against our sense of ethics.” But consumer trust is really Foursquare’s currency.
“The stuff that comes naturally to us because we’ve been doing it for a long time does not come naturally to other companies.”
They need that trust, because they handle some of our most intimate information and customers pretty much have to take these location data gatekeepers on their word when they say they won’t abuse it.
Trust in a tech company is also a currency that’s appreciating as customers get savvy to shady data practices, and other companies who are aggregating location data and encouraging check-ins continue to swan-dive into blunders.
“We need to differentiate ourselves in this space and we’ve always been a good actor and we’ve always been very thoughtful, so let’s continue making sure that people know that as it’s becoming clear that other companies may not have had the same thoughtful approach we had,” Crowley said. “Let the users decide, who do you wanna trust with this?”
But as society continues to reckon with data privacy, it’s unclear if the convenience of new restaurant suggestions or heat maps for hot parties are a compelling enough proposition for us to let our phones passively track our bodies.
Crowley thinks that in three-to-four years’ time every crucial app on your smartphone will use background location understanding in some new form, whether it’s in a game or social network. “All of these apps will go through some reinvention as contextually aware technology becomes more mainstream,” he said. “I think it’s just going to be baked into everything.”
So for you, the customer, the real question is not whether Hypertrending can help you find the fanciest corporate marketing stunt at an arts and tech festival in Texas. It’s whether this show of openness makes you feel secure about the data you’re disclosing, and whether you trust Foursquare — and its numerous corporate partners — to continue to handle it preciously.
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Series will give Snap’s founding story the ‘Social Network’ treatment
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According to The Hollywood Reporter, the script depicts Spiegel as a hard partier in his college days who elbowed out one of the app’s original programmers, replacing her with a male counterpart. One part of the script even shows the Snap chief exchanging text messages with Taylor Swift. “Hamptons?” the singer asked in the screenplay, to which Spiegel replied: “Want to be straight with you, I don’t have time for a relationship rn.” He also told Swift to “[f]eel free to write a song,” and that didn’t sit well with the artist who responded with a crisp “Fuck you, Evan.”
And now to the featured scripts! First up: @Elissits‘ FRAT BOY GENIUS, illustrated by @boxbrown. pic.twitter.com/GW8KQclrrB
— The Black List (@theblcklst) December 17, 2018
“We want to tell a story that’s as compelling and interesting about Snapchat and Evan as The Social Network was for Facebook,” Katzenberg said at SXSW. When the moderator during his panel said Snap HQ is feeling alarmed about the project, Katzenberg said that Spiegel “should be flattered” instead.
The film exec has also revealed that they’re planning to launch Quibi in April 2020 and that they’re aiming to publish over 100 pieces of content every week. That doesn’t necessarily mean the platform will run as many as 100 titles all at once, though, since it will break long-form content into shorter pieces for easier consumption on a smaller screen.
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'Crackdown 2' is free on Xbox One ahead of updates to its sequel
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Just because you're playing Crackdown 3 doesn't mean you've played its predecessor — in fact, that's not too likely when the second game launched nearly nine years ago. The developers want to plug that hole in your gaming history. In addition to t…
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Tesla extends delivery times for base Model 3 by one month
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The company isn’t shy about the reason for the additional wait time: demand. In a statement to Electrek, a spokesperson said Tesla sometimes tweaked delivery times “based on order volume.” In other words, it took about a week for interest to outstrip expected supply.
This isn’t a complete surprise. Tesla may have started taking orders for the starter Model 3 in February, but Elon Musk later warned that large-scale production wouldn’t be ready until the middle of 2019. Even so, it’s a confirmation that there’s pent-up demand for the lower-cost vehicle. If there’s a challenge for the company, it’s catching up to that demand while keeping the new customers pouring in.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes we should be excited about automated jobs
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When asked her thoughts on machines replacing humans in the workplace, Ocasio-Cortez said people should be excited about automated jobs, but they can’t because of bigger, systematic problems. “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she said. “We should not feel nervous about the toll booth collector not having to collect tolls anymore. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where, if you don’t have a job, you are left to die.” Ocasio-Cortez pointed to Bill Gates’ proposed solution of taxing robots 90 percent, which she said really means taxing corporations at that rate.
She added that the government needs to get to a point where it restructures its systems to distribute wealth created by automation, which could come with plenty of benefits. “If we approach solutions to our system and start entertaining ideas like that, then we should be excited about automation,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “What it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing and investigating in the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in. Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”
As more companies, particularly in the tech industry, invest in artificial intelligence and other automated systems, politicians now have to think carefully about how they plan to tackle what some Americans see as a major issue. And Ocasio-Cortez clearly doesn’t seem automation as a problem, but rather an opportunity.
On the Green New Deal, which aims to address climate change and economic disparity, Ocasio-Cortez said that technology isn’t what’s holding its proposals back. Instead, she said, it’s the politicians who aren’t willing to make a change. “The position should not be ‘Let’s not do it because we haven’t figured out all the details,'” Ocasio-Cortez said. “When [John F.] Kennedy said we are going to go to the moon by the end of 10 years, people thought that he was crazy. He didn’t have a plan. So many of the technologies required to get there weren’t even invented yet, but it was taken seriously enough as a mission.”
She said that the government needs to welcome forward-thinking ideas: “It should be our mission right now to make sure that all people have health care. Our mission should be that all jobs are paid a dignified living wage. Our mission should be to save our freakin’ planet.”
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Iranian hackers stole terabytes of data from software giant Citrix
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Resecurity understood that hackers from Iridium, an Iran-linked group, stole data in December 2018 and again on March 4th. They made off with at least 6TB of documents and as much as 10TB, and they seemed to be focused on project data for the aerospace industry, the FBI, NASA and Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company. The intruders may have been lurking for a long time, too. Resecurity’s Charles Yoo said that Iridium broke into Citrix’s network roughly 10 years ago and had been hiding since then.
The researchers said they’d told Citrix about the first attack on December 28th. It’s not clear if Citrix addressed the issue then, although it took a number of steps after the FBI got in touch on March 6th. The company said it launched a “forensic investigation” with the help of an unnamed security firm and took “actions” to lock down its network.
Citrix stressed there was “no indication” that the intruders compromised its products or services. However, that’s not the major concern here. As a government contractor that focuses on networking and the cloud, Citrix could hold sensitive data on other companies. It may be aware of their network layouts and security measures, for instance. Like the OPM hack, the consequences could reach well beyond the initial target.
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HBO’s ‘The Inventor’ explores how Theranos happened, but not why
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The Inventor gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of Theranos, thanks to some internal footage (including promotional material shot by fellow documentarian Errol Morris); CG renderings of the Edison box; and interviews with former Theranos employees, from a receptionist to the head of product development.
The film builds upon WSJ reporter John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood, which details the company’s founding and brief-yet-tumultuous life, but it doesn’t unearth anything truly groundbreaking. And even though Holmes’ is the star of the story — with her wide unblinking stare, Jobs-ian black turtleneck and alien speech cadence — we don’t learn much more about her side of the story. The Inventor desperately calls for an on-camera interview with Holmes, where Gibney could have pushed her out of her comfort zone. Unfortunately, she never agreed to one.
Instead, Holmes invited Jessie Deeter, one of the film’s producers, to an awkward five-hour dinner. “I was definitely being interviewed, it wasn’t going the other way,” Deeter said during the media event. “She wouldn’t let me take notes and wouldn’t let me record the conversation. I’m sure it was recorded one way, for sure. She wanted all the information she could get, she wanted to know who we were talking to and what Alex’s questions would be.”
During that dinner, Holmes said critics were maligning her because she was a woman, even though men were allowed to fail over and over again in Silicon Valley. When I asked Gibney if she has a bit of point, he was quick to note that Theranos is different than most startups because “she was putting people’s’ lives at risk.” Holmes is held to a higher standard, he said, because she was dealing with human healthcare. Her role as the young genius female founder was also a major reason Theranos attracted plenty of attention early on. “I think it was an inspiring idea,” he said. “But when you cross the ethical line having to do with people’s health, you can’t really hide behind that.”
If you’ve only casually followed the Theranos story, The Inventor has enough juicy tidbits to leave you slack-jawed. How did an unknown health startup with an untested founder get so much support from early investors like Tim Draper? (Spoiler: He was a family friend.) How did Holmes convince the likes of Henry Kissinger and former US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to join Theranos’ board? How did so many people willingly work for a company where they didn’t fully understand its flagship product? The film doesn’t answer most of these points, mostly because he never get Holmes’ actual point of view, but it’s still a fascinating exploration of Silicon Valley privilege and excess.
Holmes wasn’t the only notable person Gibney couldn’t get on camera. Errol Morris, who shot some slick commercials for Theranos (like the one above), didn’t reply to any calls or letters for comment. In the footage Gibney unearthed for The Inventor, Morris’s fawning and loving treatment of Holmes looks laughably naive today. When the two ran into each other during an industry event, Morris firmly refused to talk about Theranos and told Gibney “you can’t make me.” Even going off the record was too much. “For God, there is no off the record, and he can be a very unforgiving person,” Morris said.
In the end, Gibney couldn’t quite let go of the connection between Elizabeth Holmes and Steve Jobs. “The one lesson she never took from Jobs was what he learned from his biggest failure,” he said. The re-invented “Steve Jobs 2.0” surrounded himself with people like Avi Tevanian, who served as Apple’s chief software technology officer; Jon Rubenstein [former Apple hardware head]; and superstar designer Jony Ives. “Those people were great at what they did and they could also tell Steve Jobs no. They were kind of a feedback loop. And I think he learned to listen in ways that are constructive, it’s incredibly valuable. But that’s not a lesson Elizabeth learned.”
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Flickr protects all its users’ Creative Commons photos
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Flickr has taken extra steps to protect the photos on its platform uploaded under the Creative Commons license. On March 12th, the service will purge free tier users’ photos until they only have 1,000 items saved — not including CC-licensed items, that is. Flickr clairifed after it first announced the purge last year that it will not delete any Creative Commons photo. Now, its VP of Product, Andrew Stalden, has revealed that the platform will leave all CC images untouched, even those uploaded in the future. Further, Flickr will now memorialize accounts owned by deceased members to make sure they never get affected by the new free tier policy.
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Steven Spielberg denies campaign to stop Netflix from winning Oscars
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Spielberg hasn’t really said anything, according to Katzenberg. The industry figure also denied that Spielberg was heading to the Academy governing board meeting in April with an agenda to thwart streaming movies.
Provided the remarks accurately reflect of Spielberg’s intentions, they suggest that Netflix, Amazon and others won’t have to worry about their chances for Roma-level critical glory at the 2020 Oscars. Whether or not that’s true in the long run is less than certain. While it’s still relatively novel for streaming movies to win the most prestigious awards, they may compete more frequently in the future. That could increase pressure on the Academy to change the rules and keep theater-focused movies in the limelight.
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