All Aboard the Hellscape Train
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| All Aboard the Hellscape Train | |
| Number | 3290 |
| Broadcast Date | MAY 24, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 29:06 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
| Guests | Justin Robert Young |
Elon Musk goes on a tweet storm about the truthiness of major media outlets. Musk wants to setup a website where the public can rate the credibility of news outlets and ‘core-truth’ of news stories. We examine the issue, the problem and proposed solution.
Guest
Quick Hits
- Sources tell Bloomberg The US Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into price manipulation of Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Spoofing and flooding the market with fake orders to trick other traders are reportedly both being reviewed. Federal prosecutors are working with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission which oversees derivatives tied to Bitcoin.
- The New York Times reports Apple was developing prototypes of its own car for 4 years, but chose instead to partner with Volkswagen to supply a fleet of T6 California vans with “computers, sensors and a large electric car battery.” Sources say Apple previously tried to ink a deal with BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and McLaren to build an Apple car, but no deals were made.
Top Stories
- Vevo announced is shutting down its mobile apps for Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and its consumer website to focus on its YouTube presence. Vevo has a distribution deal with YouTube, and Google also owns a minority stake in the company. This new strategy move follows departures from Vevo's CEO, CTO and head of product. The company will give users of its service a playlist tool to import their Vevo playlists to YouTube, and will still operate select smart TV apps for now.
- The National Transportation Safety Board says Uber disabled an emergency braking system in a self-driving vehicle that struck and killed a woman in Arizona in March, and failed to properly ID the pedestrian. The NTSB's report said, “the modified 2017 Volvo XC90's radar systems saw the pedestrian six seconds before impact, but first classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle.” In better Uber news, business mergers with Yandex in Russia and Grab in Southeast Asia helped Uber turn a profit of $2.5B in its latest Q1 earnings report.
- Facebook said it will not shut down political ads reasoning that it would unfairly favor incumbents and wealthy candidates. It will, however, place a "paid for by" label on political, candidate and issue ads on Facebook and Instagram in the US. This will include ads run by news publishers and others that promote stories with political content. The system will also archive these items for 7 years and made searchable by keyword or by who ran them, display ad budget, number of people who saw it and their anonymized age, gender and location.
- A Portland, Oregon woman's Amazon Echo recorded an audio clip of her conversation and sent it to a person on her contact list. A spokesperson for Amazon says “Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future.” An engineer looking into the incident speculated that the Echo speaker “guessed” the command to send a message via Alexa Voice Messaging without asking for verbal confirmation. Normally, Alexa and Google Assistant — which has similar messaging capabilities — both alert users when they’re about to send an audio message.
- Pornhub has launched its own VPN service called VPN Hub. The app is available for Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows, and offers “free and unlimited bandwidth” for $12.99 with no ads and faster connection speeds. The service will not be available in some countries the US doesn’t do business with including Cuba, Iran, Sudan, North Korea and Syria. Pornhub added it has reports of the service being blocked in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China.
Discussion
Mailbag
- Dave from Twitter wanted to give us a heads up on Uber's decision to shut-down testing of self driving cars in AZ and focus their efforts in Pittsburgh. He re-tweeted the Pittsburg mayor's tweet stating.
"You never responded to our requirements. You never informed us of today’s announcement. You never followed up on my requirements after fatality in Arizona. Your PA lobbyist has ignored everything & instead has reached out to other electeds to cover your mistakes. Time to change!" - Sent by Dave from Twitter
- Dave from Twitter wanted to give us a heads up on Uber's decision to shut-down testing of self driving cars in AZ and focus their efforts in Pittsburgh. He re-tweeted the Pittsburg mayor's tweet stating.
YouTube
Links
| Preceded by: "Comcast vs Disney, Fight!" |
All Aboard the Hellscape Train |
Followed by: "GDPR Consent Debris" |