Talking Points Memo: “A Huge, Huge Deal”

Now sure enough, this evening Forbes reported that the bankroller of the Hogan suit is none other than Peter Thiel, a prominent Silicon Valley billionaire who styles himself a libertarian but somewhat incongruously is a big time supporter of Donald Trump in addition to numerous other right wing causes, most of which have a distinctly Randian cast.

Regardless of his politics, this news should disturb everyone. People talk a lot about the dominance of the 1% or in this case more like a tiny fraction of the 1%. But being able to give massive political contributions actually pales in comparison to the impact of being able to destroy a publication you don’t like by combining the machinery of the courts with anonymity and unlimited funds to bleed a publication dry.

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It all comes down to a simple point. You may not like Gawker. They’ve published stories I would have been ashamed to publish. But if the extremely wealthy, under a veil secrecy, can destroy publications they want to silence, that’s a far bigger threat to freedom of the press than most of the things we commonly worry about on that front. If this is the new weapon in the arsenal of the super rich, few publications will have the resources or the death wish to scrutinize them closely.

Josh Marshall

The sad and ironic side of this chilling story: the (alleged) reason why Peter Thiel secretly funded this coordinated legal assault on Gawker was he was upset that some ten years ago the publication revealed he was gay. At the same time, Thiel is a board member at Facebook, the social network which routinely ousts gay teenagers by carelessly changing privacy settings and pushing everything in public, regardless of personal consequences. If Thiel would really care about gay people’s privacy, you would think he would do something about it from his position at Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal: “What to Know About Live Video, Social Media’s Latest Craze”

Why live video? My cynical take: It’s the latest gimmick to get us to record, share and watch more video. By 2020, 75% of the world’s mobile traffic will be video, according to an ambitious estimate by networking-equipment maker Cisco. The big brands want to get the jump on any competition and keep us locked into their money machines.

My optimistic take: It’s a powerful, spontaneous way to share your life and interact with people. Think of it as one-way video chat with two-way texting. A reporter live in Syria can read a viewer’s suggestion to move a little to the left to get a better view of the scene. A musician in his bedroom can take song requests. Aunt Ida and the rest of the fam can tune in to Stacy’s dance recital from across the country.

It may very well be the future of live TV. But live doesn’t always mean thrilling, and for now, everything looks more “Wayne’s World” than “World News Tonight.”

Joanna Stern

A couple of valid points regarding live video here. As I mentioned before low quality is a sore point that could drive people away after a few poor experiences. More challenging still: the privacy questions around live broadcasting when it isn’t very clear who the audience is – an issue that comes up again and again every time Facebook launches a new feature or tweaks the News feed. There are already reports of people accidentally broadcasting a live birth and of teenagers live-streaming sexual acts (on purpose in this case). Live Video might turn out to be a fad in social media, the porn business on the other hand could make big bucks from adopting this format.

MIT Technology Review: “What if Apple is Wrong?”

Although locked smartphones have held up a small percentage of cases, Vance is convinced a law is needed before the number climbs much higher. To illustrate his point, he describes a case from 2012. A man in Manhattan was taking a video on his iPhone when he was shot and killed by someone who threatened to go after the eyewitnesses if they talked. Investigators got that video and convicted the killer. Now imagine that shooting happening today. If the victim made the video on a stand-alone digital camera, it would be fair game for cops with a warrant. Why should they be unable to see it just because he used an iPhone?

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Instead, he says, Apple and Google should stop expecting special treatment not accorded to other corporations. For example, financial institutions had to build complex systems for catching money laundering and other crimes. Two companies that own 96 percent of the world’s smartphone operating systems have independently decided they’re going to choose where the line between privacy and public safety is to be drawn, Vance says. We should ask them to make the same kind of adaptations that we require banks to do.

Brian Bergstein

This battle between Apple and the FBI over the right to break into an encrypted smartphone has caused a heated debate over the past couple of months, unfortunately ending without a clear resolution, as the FBI found another way in and withdrew the formal request. I expect the issue to come up in force again and again, and this article comes very close to my own opinion. Apple’s position has been that it considers breaking the iPhone encryption ‘a slippery slope’ to more government surveillance (even though the company regularly lets law enforcement access cloud backups); but the opposite is equally true: refusing to comply with a legally issued court order is a slippery slope to granting private companies special rights in relation to democratic institutions – and in my mind this constitutes a bigger threat to free society.

Marguerite Duras – Ochi albaștri, părul negru

În căldura plăcută a unei seri de vară la malul mării, un tânăr privește ca lovit de fulger în holul unui hotel, recunoscând în mulțime chipul bărbatului de care e îndrăgostit. Acesta vorbește cu o femeie care stă cu spatele, apoi, la auzul propriului nume strigat de undeva din sălile ticsite de lume, dispare rapid fără să remarce prezența care‑i urmărește. Distrus de durerea despărțirii, tânărul se refugiază plângând într‑o cafenea, unde o femeie îl descoperă, și, copleșită de compasiune și curiozitate, i se adresează. Frapat de înfățișarea ei, cu ochi albaștri și părul negru, care i se pare leită bărbatului plecat, tânărul o invită în casa lui, o plătește să doarmă împreună cu el acolo. Iar ea, urmărită de propriile fantasme și iluzii, acceptă.

Stă în fața lui, gata să‑l ucidă fiindcă o trezește în felul acesta și tot atât de pregătită să stea în picioare în fața lui întreaga noapte. El nu știe de unde le vine femeilor această capacitate de a răbda tot ce li se întâmplă ca pe o poruncă divină.

După acest debut palpitant și nonconformist, povestea de iubire în trei își pierde însă tot avântul și se dizolvă în repetiții și scene confuze despre care nu putem fi măcar siguri că au loc în realitate sau în imaginația febrilă a unuia din protagoniști. Stilul nu ajută prea mult la clarificare, cu frazele scurte, parcă smulse în fugă, și continua ambiguitate a subiectului – de altfel nici unul din personaje nu este identificat cu un nume propriu, ci doar prin pronume sau atribute fizice. Dacă e să ghicesc după inserțiile scurte scrise ca niște indicații regizorale, autoarea intenționa ca scrisul să fie convertit într‑o piesă de teatru și jucat într‑un cadru sumbru și intim, cu cei doi în centrul atenției, luminați de o singură sursă de lumină; o dramă psihologică complexă despre secrete care se nasc într‑un cuplu, despre intimitatea care nu are nevoie de împlinire sexuală, despre izolarea de lumea exterioară, care nu poate întrezări ce se întâmplă cu adevărat în interiorul zidurilor. Rezultatul însă dezamăgește profund: în afara câtorva sclipiri de interes undeva pe la jumătate, când se discută tangențial despre bărbatul misterios și relația lui cu femeia, paginile se înlănțuie monoton fără să se întrezărească vreun scop sau rezolvare. Mi‑e greu să‑mi amintesc ultima carte atât de scurtă (puțin peste 100 de pagini) pe care mi‑a fost atât de greu s‑o citesc, în consecință v‑aș recomanda să nu vă apucați niciodată de ea.

The Motley Fool: “Apple’s problems could get much worse”

In 2012, U.S smartphone users upgraded their phones every 22 months on average. The two-year contract, where smartphones were subsidized and sold at a discounted price by the major wireless networks, created an incentive for consumers to buy a new phone every two years. Also driving sales was the fact that smartphones were getting substantially better each year. Gains in performance and quality were meaningful, and two years was enough time to make most phones largely obsolete.

Today, the two-year contract is dead, and smartphones no longer improve dramatically each year. The upgrade cycle is getting longer while developed markets like the U.S. approach saturation.

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Longer upgrade cycles will also put pressure on Apple. In the United States, the smartphone upgrade cycle has reached 29 months, according to Citigroup. This shift was likely a major contributor to Apple’s first iPhone sales decline, and there’s no reason why the upgrade cycle can’t continue to get longer. Apple’s phones in particular are high-quality and long-lasting, and without major improvements each year driving users to upgrade, the move to a three-year upgrade cycle isn’t out of the question.

Timothy Green

Wait, but I thought without carrier subsidies the upgrade cycle would become shorter, not longer?! Could all those ‘fanboy’-analysts (Apple itself included) have been wrong all along? – see the article below from 8 months ago. Lesson of the day: except for hard-core fans, people don’t simply throw money out the window whenever a new gadget hits the market.

Todd W. Schneider: “Taxi, Uber, and Lyft Usage in New York City”

A study by Jonathan Hall and Alan Krueger reported that 42% of UberX drivers in New York work fewer than 15 hours per week, while another 35% work 16–34 hours per week. If those numbers are true, then a very rough guess might be that about half of those 25,000 vehicles make at least one pickup on any given day.

Yellow taxi utilization rates are much higher: the TLC statistics report that the average medallion is active 29 days per month, 14 hours per day (note that multiple drivers can share a medallion).

Todd Schneider

Interesting data about the competition between classic taxis and ride-sharing in New York. Some remarks based on the graphs in the article:

• Although the number of trips provided by yellow taxis is in decline and Uber is on the rise, the total number of rides is more or less unchanged across the years – in January 2016 for example there were some 10,000 more trips per day compared to a year before, an insignificant increase (2%) compared to the total number of about 520,000 trips per day in New York. While the sample looks at a single city, in this case Uber’s narrative that it will ‘significantly expand the market’ for transportation services doesn’t really hold out.
• The inefficiency of the ridesharing alternative is also striking: the combined fleet of Uber and Lyft had about 32,400 vehicles compared to 13,300 yellow cabs (2.4 times more), but it served only 165,000 trips per day compared to 352,000 trips by yellow cabs (2.1 times less). So overall a New York yellow cab is around 5 times more efficient in terms of car utilization. In the long run, it would therefore be preferable to expand the fleet of yellow cabs to cover demand instead of bringing more and more cars into car-sharing.

Dan Grover: “Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.”

This recent “bot-mania” is at the confluence of two separate trends. One is agent AIs steadily getting better, as evidenced by Siri and Alexa being things people actually use rather than gimmicks. The other is that the the US somehow still hasn’t got a dominant messaging app and Silicon Valley is trying to learn from the success of Asian messenger apps. This involves a peculiar fixation on how these apps, particularly WeChat, incorporate all sorts of functionality seemingly unrelated to messaging. They come away surprised by just how many differently-shaped pegs fit into this seemingly oddly-shaped hole. The thesis, then, is that users will engage more frequently, deeply, and efficiently with third-party services if they’re presented in a conversational UI instead of a separate native app.

It’s that part which, having spent the past two years in my current job eating and breathing messaging, seems a major misattribution of what makes chat apps work and what problems they’re best at solving.

As I’ll explain, messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI”. What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, particularly in other parts of the world. Chat apps have responded by evolving into “meta-platforms.” Many of the platform-like aspects they’ve taken on to plaster over gaps in the OS actually have little to do with the core chat functionality. Not only is “conversational UI” a red herring, but as we look more closely, we’ll even see places where conversational UI has breached its limits and broken down.

Dan Grover

Very – and I mean very! – long and insightful article about the recent ‘bot-fever’, including major initiatives from Facebook and Microsoft. The best case the author makes is comparing the number of taps needed to perform an action via a bot (over 70 to order a pizza) versus through the WeChat app (less than 20). And that’s assuming the bot understands your commands in the first place…