去年9月17日，WhatsApp创始人Brian Acton退出该公司创办了一个非营利性基金会。六个月后，在几位前Facebook高管站出来批评该公司后，阿克顿在推特上写道：“是时候了#从那以后，我们一直想知道到底是什么让他发推特的。

现在我们知道了。在离开Facebook后的第一次采访中，阿克顿告诉福布斯的帕米·奥尔森，他觉得自己在两个方面被公司背叛了。首先，阿克顿认为Facebook误导了欧盟监管机构，误导他们计划将WhatsApp和Facebook数据混合在一起，以提高其广告定位能力。第二，未经创始人同意，Facebook开始为WhatsApp“探索”基于广告的收入模式。在这两个案例中，阿克顿都觉得Facebook让他看起来像个骗子。于是他辞职了，留下了8.5亿美元的未上市股票。

阿克顿告诉福布斯：“最终，我卖掉了我的公司。”我被**了。我承认这一点。”

在推特上，专家们大多对阿克顿的心意转变嗤之以鼻。卡拉·斯威舍（Kara Swisher）引用一位匿名消息人士的话，对阿克顿的“罪过”进行了最滑稽的模仿：“我每天都带着这种罪恶感生活在斐济的这个海滨地产上。我几乎看不到我那艘崭新的200英尺长的游艇在港口里，因为我为我的用户的隐私流下了眼泪。”

但并不是每个人都认为这很有趣。

大卫·马库斯（David Marcus）曾是Facebook Messenger的负责人，现在掌管着该公司的实验性区块链部门，他被阿克顿的放肆激怒了。在一篇引人注目的帖子中，马库斯填写了他所谓的“故事的另一面”——WhatsApp创始人对于偿还马克·扎克伯格收购该公司所花费的220亿美元几乎没有什么可行的想法，而且无论如何，他们似乎都没有对其中任何一个付出过多努力。马库斯写道：

During this time, it became pretty clear that while advocating for business messaging, and being given the opportunity to build and deliver on that promise, Brian actively slow-played the execution, and never truly went for it. In my view, if you’re passionate about a certain path — in this case, letting businesses message people and charging for it — and if you have internal questi*** about it, then work hard to prove that your approach has legs and dem***trate the value. Don’t be passive-aggressive about it.

马库斯接着说：

I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It’s actually a whole new standard of low-class.

阿克顿和马库斯公开讨论的价值在于两者都可能是对的——而且他们都以自己的方式揭示了Facebook最昂贵（从投资回报角度看，可能是最糟糕的）的收购。

阿克顿描述了扎克伯格是多么渴望收购该公司快速增长的用户网络，这将使全球短信用户群黯然失色，并使其远离谷歌。扎克伯格非常希望做出几项昂贵的让步，包括五年（！）在这个窗口中，他承诺不会对创始人施加任何压力，使他们的应用程序货币化。他还承诺，该应用程序将保持端到端的加密，从而使WhatsApp在长期内更难盈利。

马库斯填补了Facebook做出的其他一些让步，其中一些让步是由Kirsten Grind和Deepa Seetharaman在6月份的一篇文章中首次报道的。WhatsApp要求不同的办公室，更大的办公桌，以及禁止在工作区大声说话的政策——据马库斯说，扎克伯格本人对此进行了辩护(创办人还要求厕所的门能到达地板，以保护隐私，《卫报》的奥利维亚·梭伦（Olivia Solon）今天将这一特点描述为“端到端的包围”（end-to-end Encropation）

另一方面，阿克顿的叙述揭示了扎克伯格对过去的耐心：有时间限制地承诺等待创始人的原则。在推特上，Facebook刚刚离职的首席安全官Alex Stamos为扎克伯格将WhatsApp货币化的兴趣进行了辩护(冒着重蹈覆辙的风险，他为此付出了220亿美元！）

斯塔莫斯在推特上写道：“指望FB股东永远资助免费的文字/语音/视频全球通信网络是愚蠢的。”如果阿克顿和他的联合创始人简·库姆（Jan Koum）关心创收问题，他们大概会在离开Facebook之前就开始尝试创收。

简言之，WhatsApp创始人给这家公司带来了极其昂贵的麻烦，至少在本周之前，该公司以高层领导的低调而自豪。但阿克顿并没有错，真的：Facebook最终不得不为混合用户数据支付1.22亿美元的罚款。WhatsApp最终将通过广告赚钱的事实确实让他看起来像个骗子。

如果说这一切都有一个幸福的结局，那就是阿克顿最终把他的钱放在了他那张大嘴巴的地方。他向Signal背后的人捐赠了5000万美元，Signal是一款非盈利的端到端加密应用程序，并致力于寻找基于非广告的解决方案，以确保其未来的繁荣。实践你的原则可能会非常昂贵——但多亏了Facebook，布莱恩·阿克顿现在可以负担得起。

民主

在参议院听证会上，科技巨头推动立法者制定联邦隐私规则

Zack Whittaker在周三的参议院商务委员会听证会上报道，苹果、亚马逊、谷歌和Twitter，以及at&T和Charter，在听证会上讨论了隐私问题。两大收获：他们都希望国家隐私法取代（并削弱）加利福尼亚州最近通过的隐私法；谷歌也在中国遭受了打击：

Google to date has refused to confirm or comment on the reports, but Enright said that “there is a Project Dragonfly.”

“We are not close to launching a search product in China,” he said, in resp***e to one lawmaker. Later, he said that he didn’t think the company “could or would launch a product” without including its privacy and security policies.

前谷歌科学家在致参议员的信中抨击“不道德”的中文搜索项目

前谷歌科学家杰克·鲍尔森（Jack Poulson）要求参议员推动该公司实施备受争议的中国搜索引擎计划(泰德·克鲁兹做到了！）

英国首次就Facebook数据丑闻发布GDPR公告

与Facebook&Cambridge Analytica数据丑闻有关的加拿大公司AggregateIQ违反了新的通用数据保护条例，可能面临罚款。

英国报业要求对科技公司征税

英国人希望Facebook和谷歌为他们的报纸提供资金：

The British newspaper industry’s trade body has said the government should force social media sites such as Facebook and Google to pay an annual financial levy to fund journali**, and set up a regulator that would force them to take legal resp***ibility for all the content on their platforms.

俄罗斯新的干预策略是否隐藏在人们的视线中？

凯文·鲁斯（Kevin Roose）探索了UsaRealy，一家伪装成新闻机构的RT式宣传机构。创始人否认自己做了任何不愉快的事情，但本周Reddit刚刚禁止了这项活动：

The *******ish appearance of USAReally has led some critics to assumethat it is either a bizarre vanity project or a decoy meant to attract attention away from more covert Russian campaigns happening elsewhere. But some cybersecurity experts believe the website may be a part of a retooled Russian propaganda operation that is experimenting with new tactics ahead of November’s midterm electi***, and testing the boundaries of what American social media companies will allow.

“It’s a very overt operation,” said Lee Foster, an intelligence ****ysis manager with the cybersecurity firm FireEye. “Perhaps it’s an attempt to move this type of activity more into the mainstream, to try to legitimize it as a media entity so that it’s tougher to take action against it.”

在Reddit上，俄罗斯宣传人员尝试了新的伎俩

有些人在被禁止后会不惜一切代价重新使用Reddit。特别是俄罗斯黑客，Ben Collins报道：

Reddit users last week were able to trace links posted to a pro-Trump community back to a Russian propaganda website that shares web infrastructure with the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). The links appeared to have been custom-made to appeal to a particular community, /r/The_Donald, which is known to be the most fervent and active in support of the president.

The address-changing effort highlights how propagandists continue to push disinformation on digital media platforms, employing new strategies to hide their origins as companies begin to crack down on foreign influence campaigns.

选举安全危机

金·泽特（Kim Zetter）在一篇新的专题文章中指出，美国的电子投票系统比以往任何时候都更加脆弱。那么为什么没有人试图修复它们呢？

Two years later, as the 2018 electi*** approach, the American intelligence community is issuing increasingly dire warnings about potential interference from Russia and other countries, but the voting infrastructure remains largely unchanged. D.H.S. has now conducted remote-scanning and on-site asses**ents of state and county election systems, but these are still largely Band-Aid measures applied to internet-facing servers. They don’t address core vulnerabilities in voting machines or the systems used to program them. And they ignore the fact that many voting machines that electi*** officials insist are disconnected from the internet — and therefore beyond the reach of hackers — are in fact accessible by way of the modems they use to tran**it vote totals on election night. Add to this the fact that states don’t conduct robust postelection audits — a manual comparison of paper ballots to digital tallies is the best method we have to detect when something has gone wrong in an election — and there’s a good chance we simply won’t know if someone has altered the digital votes in the next election.

在别处

Facebook允许广告商访问您的影子联系人信息

克什米尔山有一个伟大的调查Facebook做什么，一旦你把你的电话号码给该公司的目的是双重认证。广告商可以在几周内将目标锁定在这个数字上。

Instagram创始人的退出意味着没有人挑战扎克伯格

莎拉·弗里尔（Sarah Frier）巧妙地将Instagram创始人的离职视为马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）冒险整合权力的最后一步：

Instagram will probably become more integrated behind the scenes, sharing some teams and product goals with Facebook, people familiar with the matter said. No longer will anyone have founder-level authority to challenge Zuckerberg’s ideas with a discrete vision for the app’s future and brand. While absorbing Instagram more completely could help Facebook reach the goals it’s set for the app’s contribution to revenue growth targets, it may also threaten the unique culture that Instagram’s founders sought to preserve. Amid mounting scrutiny around Facebook’s data practices and its role in the spread of misinformation and hate speech, people have flocked to Instagram as an alternative. Any shift to become more Facebook-like could risk the very thing that has attracted new users and kept them coming back to Instagram.

在竞争对手Instagram失去创始人后，Snap短暂地跳了起来

毫无意义但很有趣的数据：凯文·Systrom和迈克·克里格退出Instagram后，Snap股价上涨了5%。

Facebook内部故事在3亿用户中寻求创意

Josh Contine报道了Facebook的little Love Stories产品，尽管它是用户打开应用程序时看到的第一件事，但在市场上运行了18个月后，它的日用户数仅为3亿（每月22亿用户）。不过，这显然足以开始在故事中销售广告，所以Facebook正在这样做(这里最有趣的是lede，它揭示了Facebook沙盒应用程序Blink的存在，员工可以在该应用程序中测试新功能。我很想找个时间看看！）

WhatsApp不是印度暴民暴力的主要问题

亚历克西斯·马德里加尔说，WhatsApp对印度的社区暴力负有太多责任(对位法：它似乎也没有多大帮助！）

It could be that centering the technology in these cases obscures more important soluti*** in the civic, governmental, or social realms. WhatsApp might be successful, and, therefore, heavily used now, but its basic utility is duplicated by several other services. “If it weren’t WhatsApp, it would be Telegram. If it weren’t Telegram, it’d be iMessage. If it weren’t iMessage, it would be Signal,” Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told a Brazilian publication. “Fake news is spreading, and it would spread whether it was any other communicati*** app that people want to use.”

Instagram有药物问题。它的算法让情况变得更糟。

Lizza Dwoskin调查Instagram的毒品问题(她的研究结果非常丰富，足以引发Facebook的莫妮卡·比克特（Monika Bickert）在博客上的回应。）

Recent searches on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, for hashtags of the names of drugs — such as #oxy, #percocet, #painkillers, #painpills, #oxycontin, #adderall and #painrelief — revealed thousands of posts by a mash-up of people grappling with addiction, those bragging about their party­going lifestyle and enticements from drug dealers.

Following the dealer accounts, or even liking one of the dealer posts, prompted Instagram’s algorithms to work as designed — in this case, by filling up a person’s feed with posts for drugs, suggesting other sellers to follow and introducing new hashtags, such as #xansforsale. Ads from some of the country’s largest brands, including Target, Chase and Procter & Gamble, as well as Facebook’s own video streaming service, appeared next to posts illegally selling pills.

科技公司花费800亿美元建立竞争优势

科技巨头正在大量购买设备，Shira Ovide报道：

Google parent Alphabet Inc. and the other four dominant U.S. technology companies—Apple, Amazon​.com, Microsoft, and Facebook—are fast becoming industrial giants. They spent a combined $80 billion in the last year on big-ticket physical assets, including manufacturing equipment and specialized tools for assembling iPhones and the powerful computers and undersea internet cables Facebook needs to fire up Instagram videos in a flash. Thanks to this surge in spending—up from $40 billion in 2015—they’ve joined the ranks of automakers, telephone companies, and oil drillers as the country’s biggest spenders on capital goods, items including factories, heavy equipment, and real estate that are c***idered long-term investments. Their combined outlay is about 10 times what GM spends annually on its plants, vehicle-assembly robots, and other materials.

眼球连接

Oculus Quest是一款售价399美元的全新独立VR耳机，将于明年上市

今天出席Facebook虚拟现实大会的Adi Robertson报告说，Oculus的下一款耳机是Quest：一款售价399美元的独立虚拟现实耳机，将于2019年春季推出：

Zuckerberg says that the Oculus Quest combines “the key attributes of the ideal VR system” — a wireless design, virtual hand controllers, and full positional tracking. “If we can bring these three qualities together in one product, we think that will be the foundation of a new generation of VR.”

The Oculus Quest is a c***umer version of what was previously known as Project Santa Cruz. It uses motion controllers similar to Oculus Touch, and four wide-angle cameras provide positional tracking that lets people walk through virtual space. It’s supposed to support “Rift-quality” experiences, with a starting catalog of over 50 titles, including well-known existing games like climbing simulator The Climb and adventure-puzzle game Moss. Oculus VR head Hugo Barra describes the Oculus Quest as “made for games,” distinguishing it from Oculus’ other, more video-focused mobile headsets. “We are going to invest significantly in this new platform,” he says.

Oculus正在推出新的“表现型”头像，以实现更逼真的虚拟现实表现

Nick Statt报道说，Oculus的新头像将更加逼真，使用“模拟的眼和嘴运动以及微表情”。

YouTube终于进入所有Oculus移动VR耳机

好啊

拿

Facebook的红旗

本·汤普森今天在Instagram创始人的离开对公司意味着什么方面表现出色：

Not only was Facebook slowing its efforts to grow Instagram, it appears the company was increasingly doing the opposite: using Instagram to drive Facebook usage, both in terms of users (through notification in the Instagram app) and content (through cross-posting without indicati*** that the content was from Instagram).

For me this is a huge red flag: it reminds me of late Ballmer-era Microsoft trying to use Office to prop up Windows, when the core of the company’s business model had always been the other way around. In this case, yes, I understand that Facebook ads still monetize better than Instagram ads, but Facebook should be able to handle its own growth and engagement while Instagram continues to ramp up. That there appears to be a pressing need — so pressing that Zuckerberg was willing to risk losing Systrom and Krieger — to leverage Instagram to prop up the blue app suggests that usage and engagement for the latter are at best flat-lining, and most likely deteriorating.

最后。。。

Zendaya是Meechee是后藤

加布里埃尔·冈达克（Gabriel Gundacker）在Vine上**了80万粉丝，Twitter将其扼杀。现在，他又回到了作家乔纳·恩格尔·布罗姆维奇（Jonah Engel Bromwich）所谓的“后葡萄藤”（post Vine Vine）：这是一段略微延伸的即兴段，与传统的YouTube视频相比仍有一点差距。冈达克的《后藤藤藤》（post Vine Vine Vine）是达达主义者对一张电影海报的致敬，该海报以女演员泽达娅（Zendaya）饰演的一个名叫米奇（Meechee）的角色为主角，为这一天的结束提供了一个恰到好处的荒谬结局。

跟我说

向我发送提示、评论、问题和Brian Acton故事：[email protected].