Good Monday Morning

It’s June 13. Spotlight is off next week as we observe Juneteenth. 

Today’s Spotlight is 1,355 words — about 5 minutes to read.

News To Know Now

Quoted:“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”

— Blake Lemoine, a Google AI ethicist to The Washington Post. The company disputed his claim that a machine learning program displayed sentience and put him on paid leave last week when he took the dispute public. Lemoine is the fourth high profile HR dispute between Google and its AI ethics team in two years.

a) Google is also being criticized for sending 11% of visitors searching for abortions to “crisis pregnancy centers” that are anti-abortion. We reviewed some of the listings and can see that some of those anti-abortion sites misrepresented themselves online. The terms those companies use appear to be designed to trick search engines into making that mistake. Regulatory agencies can challenge companies over such misrepresentations, but that’s relatively uncommon.

b) Apple’s future iOS update allowing people to delete or change messages is being criticized in a viral tweet posted by a family law attorney. Jennifer Nielsen of Columbus, Ohio, is instructing people involved in family litigation to turn off the future update to protect text messages that might be used in legal proceedings.

c) TikTok is adding digital well-being tools that advise users to take a break and provides screen time summaries. Use of the tools is optional, but the company said that it would start using proactive prompts to children between the ages of 13 and 17 who used the app more than 100 minutes in one day. We last wrote about TikTok usage in March, when US Android phone users were spending an average of 40 minutes per day on the site — far more than any other social media network.

Trends & Spends

Google’s Left Hand & Right Hand

We’ve written many times (okay, more than a decade) about Google’s often conflicting advice, but this latest takes the cake.

As part of its new digital marketing certification program, Google teaches about search engine optimization and suggests a variety of tactics related to keyword density and page length. 

Search Engine Journal brought that to the attention of Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan. That’s a good call because Danny is widely considered to be the inventor of the term “search engine optimization” and an early, if not its first, practitioner. 

Danny’s pay has come from Google for the past five years, and he told SEJ that there was no truth to either the keyword length or density claims. The slide was dropped from Google’s training, but it’s an outstanding example of how misinformation flourishes in a vacuum. 

We don’t begrudge anyone who took a Google course on SEO coming away with inaccurate beliefs. It’s a great cautionary tale for corporate secrets that transcend the mere proprietary. You may not know what exactly is in Coca-Cola or how Google ranks website pages, but it’s probably not cocaine any longer, and at least according to Danny Sullivan, it has nothing to do with keyword density.

Spotlight Explainer — Guns Online in 5 Clicks

This week’s explainer was inspired by a Quartz piece, “We ordered the same gun used in Uvalde. Here’s how easy it was.”

5 clicks
Spoiler alert. Quartz purchased a DDM4 V7 directly from the manufacturer. Daniel Defense sells the gun online for $2,057 and touts $92.94 monthly payments. Shipping to a local gun store is free, and Quartz says they were never asked for proof of age or the lack of a felony conviction. Instead that gun dealer provides the “background check” by checking the ID presented against a database and requiring a 3 page form to be filled out. 

You Can’t Get Caught Selling Guns Online 10 Times on Facebook
Technically, you’re no longer allowed (since 2016) to sell guns on Facebook, but a blockbuster Washington Post story last week reported that sellers aren’t banned from the site until their 10th violation. Facebook insists that “nearly 90 percent” of people who have a violation about selling guns online have only one. Meanwhile, competitors like TikTok ban accounts after the first violation. 

That doesn’t mean that selling gun accessories is prohibited. Everything imaginable that can be used with a gun is sold on most online networks and again serves as a gateway to generating personal information via advertising that can then occur in email or other methods.

The Raffle Catch
You can promote raffles on Facebook and other sites that give away guns. Along the way, the seller collects very personal information and has the ability to advertise the raffle throughout the U.S.

Sometimes that can be a public relations problem for groups. A police union in Columbia, MO, deleted a gun raffle post in early June after a public outcry. The union protested that it was “only raffling items that are 100% lawful to possess” before inviting the public to buy a ticket offline.

YouTube for Learning
The 18-year-old who is believed to have been the killer at the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket wrote that he learned to illegally modify his gun online after watching a training video on YouTube, reports NBC News. YouTube claimed that the video the teen watched was permissible under its rules. And while YouTube has specific rules about many gun videos, other second-tier social media sites with audiences in the millions may not.

Did That Really Happen? — A Dumb Conspiracy Theory

USA Today fact checked a viral social media post showing clips from NBC and CNN. The post claimed that the Uvalde shooting never happened, and was captioned, “Two men claim to be the father of the same child who allegedly died in the school. Maybe they’re gay and are both her parents but did separate interviews.”

After the post’s author dismissed the men as “crisis actors” and opined that “the dude in the cap is a poor actor,” USA Today reported that NBC’s Savannah Guthrie interviewed murdered 10-year-old Amerie Jo Garza’s father while CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed Amerie’s stepfather.

 Following Up — Google’s Turn After Facebook Payout?

We wrote a lot about the facial recognition suit brought against Facebook in Illinois and its settlement for nearly $400 for each affected person. Now Google has settled a similar suit for an amount estimated to be worth $200-$400 per affected person in Illinois.

Protip — Speeding Up the iPhone

Clearing memory on an iPhone (any iOS device, really) is not exactly an intuitive process, but can speed up your device quite a bit. Here’s a Tom’s Guide explainer on how to make your phone go vroom.

Screening Room — iRobot

iRobot’s funniest in its latest series of looks inside the vacuum’s decision making process.

Science Fiction World — Pizza Machine 

We’ve talked about automated cooking devices and servers, but how about a vending machine that makes a custom pizza from the flour and water-level for you in three minutes? Yay Food Technologies is selling its Lets Pizza unit for about $30K although my family insists that I can’t save to put one in my home office. Have a look at this.

Coffee Break — AI Imagery

It’s not sentient (yet, I hope), but Open AI’s DALL-E image model is now available in a mini-format for you to use free. They’re the same organization that introduced a then state-of-the-art language called GPT-3.

Dall-E mini creates images based on your text prompt.

Sign of the Times

Good Monday Morning

It’s June 6. Students who survived the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, four years ago are leading another march Saturday. The main protest is in Washington, D.C. Dozens of local events will be held throughout the country.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,355 words — about 5 minutes to read.

News To Know Now

Quoted: “[Stripe], dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, processed $640 billion in payments last year across 50 countries. Its gross revenue, still mostly the 2% to 3% it collects on such volume, reached nearly $12 billion in 2021… up about 60% year over year. Net revenue, which excludes the cut Stripe passes along to partners like Visa and Chase, reached nearly $2.5 billion.”

— Forbes reporting on 33-year-old Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and his younger brother co-founder, John

a) Employees at crypto firm Coinbase are using mobile technology created by hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio to rate each other based on interactions with each other. The firm’s quirky guidelines also prohibit negotiating compensation and lately, Coinbase has been rescinding job offers amid a hiring freeze.

b) Delivery service GrubHub is opening its own ghost kitchens in twenty US cities. The virtual restaurants feature recipes created for the brand by winners of the MasterChef cooking show. That means the company’s partners will compete for consumer business against the same delivery service its restaurants use.

c) DuckDuckGo acknowledged that its partnership with Microsoft allowed that company to track the search engine’s users when they clicked on ads. I may be the most privacy-centric advertising person you’ll ever know, and I’ll say again that you are tracked everywhere you are online. Your internet service provider tracks everything, the websites you visit track you, and your workplace, school, and other intermediaries track you online. That’s fine if you know that and make an informed decision, but this was bad for the privacy-focused search engine.

In June, we’ll be running our 3rd annual Law Enforcement Technology Issue (last year’s is here). We’ll follow that in July with our second Workplace Privacy issue and in August with School Privacy. Reply to this email and let us know if there’s a topic you would like to see a deep dive on.

  Trends & Spends 

Snap Cuts Forecast, Analysts Blame Apple Privacy: A Snap disclosure at the end of May triggered a brief selloff that crushed the company’s share price more than 40%. Now AdAge is suggesting that at least part of the reason may be due to Apple opting out all of its users from ad data tracking unless they explicitly opt-in. Facebook told investors in February that the initiative cost the company $10 billion this year.

Spotlight Explainer — Here Come The Robots

Last week’s Internal Conference on Robotics and Automation in Philadelphia brought a surprise announcement from appliance manufacturer Dyson. The company famous for vacuums, fans, and other well regarded machines used the opportunity to announce that it has secretly been working on robotics for years and will be hiring 700 roboticists over the next 5 years.

Dyson joins a crowded field with other well established companies like Boston Dynamics owner Hyundai and Walmart in addition to hundreds of smaller firms looking to merge machine learning and engineering.

About the Dyson Announcement

The big news might be the company’s deep pockets and willingness to hire. TechCrunch coverage lauded their attachments, including a hand with soft graspers that could pick up plates and (naturally), a vacuum attachment. Dyson plans to spend $3.45 billion on the initiative during its five year push. Their plan is as simple as selling a cleaning robot in 10 years.

Touch Remains a Big Challenge

Last week Nature profiled Tyler Schrenk who became a quadriplegic after a diving accident ten years ago. Schrenk is working with a feeding robot that allows him to live more independently. The robot was created at the University of Washington and faces a tough tactile challenge: how forcefully to use a fork to pick up a piece of banana or a piece of carrot.

The challenge that the Washington team and others have is how to create sensors throughout a gripper or arm because camera-based systems are limited in both size and function. Stanford researchers have developed an electronic “skin” that fits over robotic appendages and contains 25 capacitors that act as sensors. The feedback from those sensors allow the robot to tap the top of a raspberry and pick up a ping-pong ball without crushing either.

Firefighters in India

The Delhi government has purchased several firefighting robots that can be operated from up to 100 yards away. In addition to tank-like construction and hoses, the robots have huge industrial fans that can clear smoke from an area. Water is sprayed on blazes at a rate of more than 600 gallons a minute. That spray can be diffused over a one thousand square foot area.

Robot Companions for Seniors

New York’s Office for the Aging has announced that it will place 800 ElliQ units with older residents, mirroring a similar, successful Japanese program. ElliQ is a countertop device that moves on its base and comes paired with a tablet. The big difference is that ElliQ is proactive in starting conversations and suggesting activities. That makes the unit different from voice activated smartphone assistants like Alexa and Siri. 

Have a look at her, I mean it, in action below.

Did That Really Happen? — CT To Hire Security Analyst for Fringe Sites

The Connecticut Secretary of State is hiring an Election Information Security Analyst. That person will be tasked with monitoring mainstream and fringe websites to find misinformation and disinformation about elections in the state. State officials expect the effort to begin soon after funding becomes available July 1.

 Following Up — Autonomous Vehicle Blocked Fire Truck

We’ve written a lot about autonomous vehicles in the past few years. The industry is continuing to experience growing pains — moving as fast as regulators allow to deploy taxi and truck fleets while simultaneously learning how to operate in a non-autonomous environment. One example came from a Wired report that a double-parked garbage truck with autonomous operation blocked a Fire Department truck in San Francisco in early April.

Protip — How to Dispose of Your Computer

Do you know how to erase your personal settings from your computer when it’s finally time to upgrade? How about knowing what is safe for the trash that won’t hurt the environment? This Popular Mechanics guide answers all of the questions you might have. 

Disclosure:CyberCrunch, mentioned prominently in the article, is a past Silver Beacon client.

Screening Room — Virgin Voyages

Science Fiction World — Walmart Delivery Drone Program Expands

Walmart said that it is expanding its delivery drone program again. Packages weighing no more than 10 pounds will be delivered by drone this year from 37 stores in 6 states. The company said that it expected emergency supplies to be ordered, but was surprised to see convenience items delivered for a fee of only $3.99 per order. One store’s top delivery item:  Hamburger Helper.

Coffee Break — Supercook

Head over to Supercook if you don’t want to waste food or remain uncommitted to our new robot overlords delivering Hamburger Helper. The site lets you add ingredients you have on hand and then prompts you for others you might have while searching its recipe index. When you click on a match that it provides, you’re whisked away to the website that published the recipe.

Sign of the Times

Good Monday Morning

It’s May 23rd although much of Colorado saw snow last Friday, including 8 inches in Boulder and even a couple of inches in Denver. 

Housekeeping note: we’re off next week for Memorial Day. It’s a three-day weekend for many people, but remember that there have been 6,894 U.S. service members killed in combat during the past twenty years. Please spare some thoughts for them, their families, and friends.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,252 words — about 5 minutes to read.

News To Know Now

Quoted: “After Abbott Laboratories recalled several powdered formulas in February, leading to nationwide shortages, parents began submitting requests to stock-monitoring platforms including NowInStock.net, ZooLert.com and HotStock.io. The websites … run software that recurrently checks inventory at major online retailers.”

— Technology reporter Dalvin Brown writing in The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday

a) A Grubhub promotion in New York went horribly wrong last Tuesday. A $15 free lunch promo code advertised in the nation’s largest city led to 6,000 orders per minute. BuzzFeed spoke with a bagel shop that averages fewer than 10 orders each day, but received 50 from Grubhub in the first hour.

b) Google and a Harvard sociologist have announced that the company will begin using a 10-shade scale to represent diverse skin tones in its products. Google will also make the scale free to others so it can be used in non-Google products.
c) Google will also help you practice for job interviews. Along with their new free technical online courses, they’ve launched a free practice interview website where a chatbot transcribes your answers to questions and then an algorithm analyzes your replies. I did three practice sessions last week, and I’m not even looking for work.

Trends & Spends

Welcome to our newly revamped section showing hot Google searches and the advertisers spending the most — with a little dash of social and search engine news.

Going for The Duopoly: eMarketer was out last week with a nice analysis showing that the Google-Facebook advertising duopoly is seeing lots of activity directly below from Alibaba, Amazon, and TikTok-parent ByteDance. 

Spotlight Explainer: Social Media Crisis Communications

After each national crisis, very often a massacre, the big tech companies face a social media crisis. There are many reasons to criticize giant technology companies, but they are not often the reasons that you hear about.

Stopping People From Uploading Horrors

Following the shooting of thirteen people in Buffalo, The Washington Post was not alone when it headlined that “only twenty-two people” were watching the livestream as it unfolded, and Twitch executives were able to halt the live video within two minutes. Yet millions of people later saw the video, and this somehow got laid at the feet of the tech companies.

Facebook challenged the article’s criticism saying that it had experienced adversarial instances of users breaking the site’s rules. Many times, those people alter the video to evade the company’s software. They can also link to a third party site that hosts the actual video to obscure the video from a Facebook or YouTube software program designed to stop it.

That thousands of people attempt circumventing these program after these horrific events is more of an indictment of them than the social media companies. Millions of hours of video are uploaded daily. Much of the content is benign — a baby’s first steps, a swim meet, or a birthday party. And some of it is horrific pornography or suicides. The same technology that allows you to livestream from a family picnic to absent relatives also lets horrors be livestreamed.

Texas Law Overreaches

Yet some states are attempting to legislate social media companies in ways that will make moderation more difficult. A new Texas law forbids social media companies from moderating content based on a user’s “viewpoint.”

More than twenty advocacy groups including the ADL, Stop Child Predators, and the NAACP have filed a brief with the Supreme Court that cautions about the new law’s overreach. In part, the groups say that Texas’ law may result in not blocking children from age-inappropriate content and increasing the amount of financial fraud online. Those are example of a social media crisis caused by legislation.

Twitter Launches Crisis Misinformation Policy

Only last Thursday, Twitter waded into the fray with a new “Crisis Misinformation Policy” that will lead the platform to hide inaccurate tweets behind a warning label. Those tweets will then be unable to be retweeted, liked, or commented upon. But as Facebook and YouTube have described, there will be plenty of people on Twitter who post slightly altered images of inaccurate tweets.

Also remember that Elon Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter that the Twitter board has said it intends to enforce despite his subsequent reluctance.  As the new owner, the capricious Musk could end this or any other Twitter policy at will.

Did That Really Happen ? — New Disinformation Governance Board Pilloried, Paused

An onslaught of complaints from conservative media sources caused the U.S. government last week to announce that its “Disinformation Governance Board” would be “paused.” NPR interviewed Nina Jankowicz, who quit Wednesday as the new board’s leader. She described the board’s mission as “to coordinate among the Department of Homeland Security’s components — agencies like FEMA or the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency or Customs and Border Patrol — and make sure that Americans had trustworthy information about issues connected to homeland security.”

The opposition to the board was almost exclusively from conservative media outlets. The Washington Post reports that approximately 70 percent of Fox News’ one hour segments for a week mentioned the board or Jankowicz. Those reports fed conservative pundits online in social media, resulting in multiple violent threats to Jankowicz along with lots of bigoted and misogynistic public comments.

Following Up — $397 Checks Roll Out To Illinois Residents

We reminded you last week that Facebook was preparing to make good on its $650 million settlement with Illinois residents over the company’s facial recognition software. Illinois Facebook users began receiving their $397 payments last week.

Protip — Record Calls On Your Android

Google has slowly been removing the ability for Android users to record telephone calls on their devices. As of May 11, the company has now blocked third party apps from being able to record calls on Android phones. If you really must have that functionality, Lifehacker descibes how to do it (for now).

Screening Room

Science Fiction World — A Robot Moves in With Penguins

Scientists studying climate change’s effects have been monitoring an Emperor Penguin colony in Antarctica for thirty years. In order to remove any human interactions from the colony, researchers deployed a robot called ECHO. Scientists say that they planned to camouflage the robot to look like an ice formation, but that the penguins were curious about the robot and undisturbed by its presence. Now it just needs to learn how to eat fish. See ECHO and his bird buddies at Live Science.

Coffee Break — Extraordinary Elizabeth Bonker

Elizabeth Bonker is this year’s Rollins College valedictorian. She has non-speaking autism and communicates solely by typing. You can watch her commencement address or read the transcription for a healthy dose of inspiration.

Sign of The Times