🤜 Welcome to Dog Jail Tech Beat, where we pummel fresh, dripping insights out of the week’s biggest tech news.
In today’s edition: the wet billionaire’s lament, Teslas detained for questioning, and one weird trick to ending automation.
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From “friendly fraud” to ethnic cleansing, Facebook has a long history as one of Silicon Valley’s most innovate companies in the field of corporate misconduct. Indeed, “Criticism of Facebook” is a subject that has its own Wikipedia page — one that runs over 15,000 words long. After all this time, you might think that Mark Zuckerberg would have run out of things to be sorry for. But this week, the company’s chief apology officer shared a brand new regret: Asking you dumb fucks for forgiveness so many times.
At an event in San Francisco last week, Zuckerberg announced he was done apologizing. If anything, he was sorry for being so sorry. According to Platformer, Zuckerberg said on Tuesday:
One of the things that I look back on and regret is, I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong, or were responsible for, that I don't actually think we were. There were a lot of things that we did mess up and that we needed to fix. But I think that there's this view where, when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue, … the right instinct is to take ownership. Say, maybe it’s not all our thing, but we’re going to fully own this problem, we’re going to take responsibility, we’re going to fix it.
Zuckerberg’s comments pose an interesting question for Facebook users: If the last 20 years is what we got when Zuckerberg was “tak[ing] responsibility,” what might things look like now that he stops?
Arrest Report
💀 DEATH ROW: Cybercrime’s love affair with Telegram. 404 Media reports that a variety of “hackers, fraudsters, and drug dealers” are splitting up with the messaging app Telegram in the wake of CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest. “Final call! I am deleting my account,” read one cybercriminal’s tearful break-up message.
🚔 IN CUSTODY: The Bay Area’s snitching Teslas. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, police in Oakland are now seeking court orders to tow Teslas when they believe the vehicles’ onboard cameras may have recorded a crime. This development brings us closer than ever to the dream of fully self-incriminating cars.
🐑 AT LARGE: The search giant that kidnapped news. At the antitrust trial over Google’s iron-fisted grip on the online ad market, a former News Corp executive told the court that she “felt like they were holding us hostage.” An executive with another publisher, Gannett, testified that he feels like he has “no choice” but to continue using Google’s ad tech, a message he presumably conveyed through a series of blinks in morse code.
One Big Number
The age of James Napier, the recently sued creator of a virtual reality game where monkeys in top hats play tag with each other. The child is accused of making his monkeys-in-top-hats game “as addictive as possible.”
The lawsuit is one of several recent filings against video makers accused of encouraging addiction in children. While most have targeted large companies like Nintendo and Sony for predatory monetization schemes, “Banana Analytics,” the company owned by Napier and his parents, has also been served.
In the lawsuit, Napier is accused of developing his game “in concert with psychologists and neuroscientists to discover the best addictive aspects to include in their games, and/or based their game design on that of another game that included features designed in concert with psychologists and neuroscientists to be as addictive as possible.”
Napier, who began making video games when he was 10 years old, offers a slightly different account. “It was made by me in my room,” he told Polygon. “It just sucks.”
Action Center
🔔 Alert 🔔
“We Called on the Oversight Board to Stop Censoring ‘From the River to the Sea’ — And They Listened”
⚠️ Warning ⚠️
“Facebook is blocking emergency warnings as wildfires roar through West”
“Australia threatens fines for social media giants enabling misinformation”
“CrowdStrike ex-employees: ‘Quality control was not part of our process’”
‼️ Jesus Christ ‼️
“Anti-abortion center stole patient data from nearby clinic, lawsuit alleges”
“Google’s AI Will Help Decide Whether Unemployed Workers Get Benefits”
The Ungovernable Force
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