The new moneymaker at games company Hasbro is cards, rather than toys. CC-licensed photo by Jesper Währner on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Snap! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The man who killed Google Search • Where’s Your Ed At
Ed Zitron:
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The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the colour of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.
In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.
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This is a fantastic read. Zitron is never short of an opinion, but this is based on careful mining of Google emails released in the US DoJ lawsuit against Google, showing how a former Yahoo executive came along and poisoned a system that had worked wonderfully for more than 20 years.
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US bans TikTok owner ByteDance, and will prohibit app in US unless it is sold • Ars Technica
Jon Brodkin:
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The Senate on Monday night approved a bill that orders TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company within 270 days or lose access to the US market. The House had already passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law today.
The “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” was approved as part of a larger appropriations bill that provides aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It passed in a 79-18 vote. Biden last night issued a statement saying he will sign the appropriations bill into law “as soon as it reaches my desk.” He signed the bill into law today, the White House announced.
The bill classifies TikTok as a “foreign adversary controlled application” and gives the Chinese company ByteDance 270 days to sell it to another entity. Biden can extend the deadline by up to 90 days if a sale is in progress.
TikTok would maintain access to the US market if the president determines that the divestiture “would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” The same divestiture-or-sale requirement would apply to other applications subsequently designated as being controlled by foreign adversaries.
If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok, app stores in the US would have to drop the app, and Internet hosting services would be prohibited from providing services that enable distribution of TikTok in the US. Companies that violate the prohibition would have to pay civil penalties.
…ByteDance has said it will file a lawsuit in an attempt to block the law. “This legislation is a clear violation of the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s 170 million American users,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s public policy head in the US, reportedly told staff in a memo after the House vote on Saturday. “We’ll continue to fight… This is the beginning, not the end of this long process.”
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My dinner with Andreessen • The American Prospect
Rick Perlstein went to one of Marc Andreessen’s houses for a party:
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One participant was a British former journalist become computer tycoon who had been awarded a lordship. He proclaimed that the Chinese middle class doesn’t care about democracy or civil liberties. I was treated as a sentimental naïf for questioning his blanket confidence.
Another attendee seemed to see politics as a collection of engineering problems. He kept setting up strange thought experiments, which I did not understand. I recall thinking it was like talking to a creature visiting from another solar system that did not have humans in it. I later conveyed my recollection of this guy to an acquaintance who once taught history at Stanford. He noted a similarity to a student of his who insisted that all the age-old problems historians worried over would soon obviously be solved by better computers, and thus considered the entire humanistic enterprise faintly ridiculous.
I also remember I raised an objection to Silicon Valley’s fetish for “disruption” as the highest human value, noting that healthy societies also recognize the value of preserving core values and institutions, and feeling gaslit in return when the group came back heatedly that, no, Silicon Valley didn’t fetishize disruption at all.
The subject of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came up. They rose up in thunderous hatred at her for blocking potential “innovation in the banking sector.” (She’ll make a similar cameo in Part Two of this series.) I suffered an epic case of l’esprit d’escalier at that.
I thought it was pretty much universally understood by then that the fetish for “innovation in the banking sector” was what collapsed the world economy in 2008. Had I not been stunned into silence, I could have quoted Paul Volcker that the last useful innovation in banking was the automatic teller machine, and pointed out that it was only by strangling “innovation in the banking sector” that (as Elizabeth Warren always points out) the New Deal ushered in the longest period of financial stability in American history, and the golden age of global capitalism to boot.
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There’s a lot of puzzling about who the “British former journalist become computer tycoon” could be. Sir Clive Sinclair fits the bill (he was a journalist, very early on). Anyone else?
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Rabbit R1 hands-on: early tests with the $199 AI gadget • The Verge
David Pierce:
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After spending a few hours playing with the device, I have to say: it’s pretty nice. Not luxurious, or even particularly high-end, just silly and fun. Where Humane’s AI Pin feels like a carefully sculpted metal gem, the R1 feels like an old-school MP3 player crossed with a fidget spinner. The wheel spins a little stiffly for my taste but smoothly enough, the screen is a little fuzzy but fine, and the main action button feels satisfying to thump on.
When I first got the device and connected it to Wi-Fi, it then immediately asked me to sign up for an account at Rabbithole, the R1’s web portal. I did that, scanned a QR code with the R1 to get it synced up, and immediately did a software update. I spent that time logging in to the only four external services the R1 currently connects to: Spotify, Uber, DoorDash, and Midjourney.
Once I was eventually up and running, I started chatting with the R1. So far, it does a solid job with basic AI questions: it gave me lots of good information about this week’s NFL draft, found a few restaurants near me, and knew when Herbert Hoover was president. This is all fairly basic ChatGPT stuff, and there’s some definite lag as it fetches answers, but I much prefer the interface to the Humane AI Pin — because there’s a screen, and you can see the thing working so the AI delays don’t feel quite so interminable.
Almost immediately, though, I started running into stuff the R1 just can’t do. It can’t send emails or make spreadsheets, though Lyu has been demoing both for months. Rabbithole is woefully unfinished, too, to the point I was trying to tap around on my phone and it was instead moving a cursor around a half-second after every tap. That’s a good reminder that the whole thing is running on a virtual machine storing all your apps and credentials, which still gives me security-related pause.
Oh, and here’s my favorite thing that has happened on the R1 so far: I got it connected to my Spotify account, which is a feature I’m particularly excited about. I asked for “Beyoncé’s new album,” and the device excitedly went and found me “Crazy in Love” — a lullaby version, from an artist called “Rockabye Baby!” So close and yet so far.
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Better than the Humane thing, but still some way to go.
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NASA’s Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth • Voyager
Naomi Hartono:
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The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the flight data subsystem (FDS) memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
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This is so mindblowing. I can’t even think of an analogy that gets close to it.
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Almost every Chinese keyboard app has a security flaw that reveals what users type • MIT Technology Review
Zeyi Yang:
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Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing.
The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto.
These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps—built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek—basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China.
What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found.
In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties.
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This seems more like mistake than malice – Sogu fixed the issue on being told about it. But it preexists and won’t be fixed in many devices.
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S&P says regulation could increase stablecoin adoption as number of holders* nears 100 million • Coindesk
Omkar Godbole:
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Stablecoins are hotter than ever. The number of addresses holding dollar and crypto-pegged stablecoins has increased 15% this year to above 93.6 million, the highest on record, according to data source rwa.xyz.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies with values pegged to an external reference, like the U.S. dollar. They can be broadly categorized as fiat-backed, crypto-backed, or algorithmic stablecoins. As of the time of writing, there are 35 stablecoins in existence, boasting a combined market capitalization of $157bn.
Tether (USDT) holders, with an industry-leading market cap of $114.07bn, accounted for just over 80% of the total stablecoin addresses, followed by USDC and BUSD.
The tally of the so-called holding addresses increased even during the 2022 crypto bear market. The Fed raised interest rates rapidly in 2022, boosting investor demand for the US dollar and greenback-equivalents like the dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies.
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One hates to point out that “number of addresses holding” is emphatically not the same as “number of people”, and it’s amazing that Coindesk should make such an obvious mistake. Also amazing that Tether is nearly three-quarters of the “value”, and yet more than 80% of the addresses. “Capitalisation” is also doing a lot of work there; it’s notional, of course, and could never be recovered.
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Meta’s Threads now has more daily US users than Musk’s X • Business Insider
Kali Hays:
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Meta’s newest app, launched last summer on the back of Instagram’s tech, has seen daily active users grow consistently since November, according to usage estimates from Apptopia. Threads is a direct rival of X, formerly Twitter, which has struggled to maintain its user base since Elon Musk acquired the platform about 18 months ago.
Now, Threads has more daily active users (DAU) in the US than X, a trend that’s been ongoing since December, when Threads became Apple’s most downloaded app.
“Threads DAUs in the US passed X in December 2023 and it has not looked back,” Thomas Grant, Apptopia’s VP of research, said. It’s currently the third most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store, while X is in 41st place. In the Google Play Store, Threads is in 12th place among free apps, while X is in 44th place.
So far in April, Threads has averaged an estimated 28 million daily active users, so people who have opened the app at least once in a 24-hour period. That’s a roughly 55% increase in DAUs from December when Threads averaged an estimated 18 million users each day.
DAUs in the US have been choppier on X, and fewer than Threads overall during the same time period. In April so far, X has averaged 22 million DAUs, a usage rate that’s 21% lower than Threads. DAUs on X have been relatively flat for the last three months but are up since December when the platform saw 17 million DAUs. That was the first month Threads beat X on DAUs in the US.
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This is interesting, because it suggests that eX-Twitter has some real problems ahead. Musk hasn’t made any financial pronouncements for a while, and silence isn’t golden. One point: I don’t set much store by “more downloaded than”, though, when one app is more than 15 years old and the other less than a year. Those who want eX-Twitter already have it. Apparently Threads still has fewer monthly active users.
And one has to wonder how Apptopia gets its numbers. That isn’t answered. Which leads us on to…
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Best way to measure internet audience? It still doesn’t exist • Bloomberg
Reyhan Harmanci:
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It’s not just big media companies that want bespoke analytics. A nonprofit news site, the 19th, has announced that it’s created its own engagement metric called “total journalism reach,” which includes site views as well as podcast listens and event attendees.
“There is no perfect data. All data has its inaccuracies, biases and imperfections. All data is opaque,” says Brandon Silverman, creator and former chief executive officer of CrowdTangle, an analytics tool that Meta Platforms Inc. acquired in 2016. Even so, advertisers and content creators have been particularly ill-served by the gatekeeping platforms.
Witness, for instance, the recent “correction” from Apple Inc. about its podcast numbers. A bug (or was it a feature?) had inflated the numbers of people downloading podcasts; many hit shows took a 20% haircut overnight. It brought to mind the situation in 2018, when a class-action lawsuit forced Facebook to admit that it had misreported its video metrics for more than a year, inflating views by 60% to 80%.
According to Ben Smith, author of Traffic and co-founder of the news site Semafor, the problem isn’t so much that audience numbers are simply made up. “The scale is exaggerated, but the numbers are directionally true,” he says. “Instagram is, in fact, really popular. TikTok is really popular.” But there are powerful incentives to believe in the biggest possible numbers; venture capital (and other jackpot-based industries, with a small number of big winners and many losers, like book publishing) demands the hockey stick curve. “They are fake in some spiritual sense, as the tech industry is addicted to growth,” he says.
It’s hard not to be addicted to growth. Foster, who left Substack for another service at the start of the year, doesn’t track his readers manually anymore. (Substack has had its own problems with its writers complaining that the company was trading growth in audience metrics at the expense of paying subscribers.) But he also doesn’t avail himself of more complicated metrics than in the past. “I still don’t care about analytics that much. If you are like, say, MrBeast, you live to maximize analytics—my brain doesn’t do that,” he says.
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It is a bit astonishing that we’re 30 years into the commercial internet and still don’t have rigorous ways to measure this stuff. OK, we never did with newspapers, radio, or TV, but they didn’t require the same level of presence or attention.
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Hasbro pretty much entirely depends on Magic: The Gathering to make a profit • Sherwood News
Matt Phillips:
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genuine transformation is taking place at struggling toymaker Hasbro, which on Wednesday morning crushed expectations in its Q1 report.
The massive profitability of the company’s Wizards of the Coast division — which makes Magic the Gathering cards, and the game’s digital spinoffs — drove the results. The division’s sales rose roughly 7% year over year, helping to offset a 21% year over year sales slump in the toy division.
But the real story is the near-40% margins of the the Wizards division, where operating profit jumped 60% to $123m and accounted for outsized performance of the company on the bottom line.
Meanwhile, the toy division lost $47m. Thanks to Wizards, the company posted an overall operating profit of $116m, helping Hasbro more than double Wall Street’s earnings-per-share expectations.
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The other day I was passing a video games store, and noticed the window displays for a new Pokémon game – involving cards. Nintendo started out as a card game company in the 19th century, and it’s still going at it. Hasbro’s just catching up.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Michael Moritz?
Don’t think he’s British, nor a peer, nor formerly a journalist.