The Tech Policy Battles Of 2016

Encryption, drone regulation, and net neutrality are likely to be top of mind in both Washington and Silicon Valley this year.

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Encryption, or encoding messages to prevent unwanted parties from snooping, is regarded as a crucial tool for communicating and doing business on the web. But for American law enforcement, the mass adoption of strong encryption tools — which would prevent even technology companies from decrypting private messages — poses a national security dilemma.

The FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies say that encryption can lead to tremendous harm. Being prevented from reading encrypted communications, they say, interferes with their ability to solve crimes and prevent terror attacks. U.S. officials argue that criminals and members of ISIS use encryption to escape the reach of justice. But technologists, privacy advocates, and even the White House maintain that efforts to weaken American encryption standards would do more harm than good.

Proponents of strong encryption say that granting law enforcement special access to devices and apps would necessarily compromise our security. This would leave citizens, businesses, and government networks vulnerable to malicious hackers and foreign spies, they argue. (If a special "backdoor" is created for law enforcement, can't determined bad actors sneak in too?) While the Obama administration decided not to seek legislation to alter encryption standards in October, appearing to temporarily settle the issue, law enforcement officials have used the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks to make their case again.

While the FBI has not presented evidence that encrypted communication prevented law enforcement from thwarting the attacks, they will point to the looming threat of terrorism to push for Silicon Valley to change its stance this year.

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Lyft And General Motors Are Partnering To Bring You On-Demand Driverless Cars

Lyft

Silicon Valley companies have given the auto industry around the world cause for concern over the last few years as companies like Uber, Tesla, Google, and Apple increasingly encroach on legacy automakers' territory by beginning their foray into driverless technology. Keeping up with the tech behemoths is certainly not an easy task for some of these legacy automakers, but one company in particular is moving quickly to solidify its place in the self-driving arms race the auto and tech industries are currently embroiled in.

General Motors, which announced late last year that it expects to have a fleet of autonomous Chevy Volts on the road by the end of 2016, has invested $500 million in Lyft as part of a $1 billion round of funding at a $5.5 billion post-money valuation. As part of that investment, GM is partnering with Lyft to provide a fleet of on-demand autonomous vehicles that can be hailed exclusively on the Lyft platform.

"[GM president Dan Ammann and I] both believe that autonomous vehicles will be introduced through a service like Lyft rather than through individuals owning autonomous vehicles," Lyft co-founder John Zimmer told BuzzFeed News. "That will be how autonomous vehicles come on line and that's a unique message."

While this is just another chapter in GM's long journey into autonomous technology, which it started experimenting with at Carnegie Mellon in 2000, this marks Lyft's first official step into the driverless car arena. It's an arena ride-hail competitor Uber has already started exploring officially with its own partnership with Carnegie Mellon, which it struck up in September, and later with the University of Arizona. But, at least on its surface, Lyft's strategy for providing an autonomous service is markedly different than Uber's, which has involved pouring money and resources into building out its own Advanced Technologies Centers on each of the campuses. Uber is exploring developing its own autonomous technology and perhaps its own fleet of self-driving vehicles. Lyft is instead leveraging and contributing in the ways that it can to GM's already-in-development and (according to Ammann and Zimmer) soon-to-be-viable technology and enhancing its own on-demand platform to make it possible to hail a driverless car. And to add the Lyft touch, the company plans on having each of the vehicles in the fleet have different "experiences."

"We'll create the operating system of the future where people will be able to order an experience," Zimmer said. "If, you know, you're heading with your family to Tahoe, you'll get to order a specific kind of autonomous experience where you get to enjoy movies on your trip or after work you can get a sports Lyft and watch a Clippers game with friends. Now that we have this partnership we can create these sort of experiences with this network."

While the mere mention of the term "driverless cars" strikes fear into current Lyft and Uber drivers' hearts, and understandably so, drivers will be able to reap some benefits from Lyft's partnership with GM, at least in the short term. The companies are immediately beginning work on creating a network of rental hubs around the country for drivers to be able to rent vehicles on a short-term basis. But that sense of relief may not last too long. Drivers as well as consumers can expect this on-demand driverless Lyft service to be available within the next 10 years or "likely sooner," Zimmer said.

"We have a common view of the future and of the potential of mobility as a service," Ammann told BuzzFeed News of the partnership. "As we think about the capabilities that we have at General Motors from a technical perspective around autonomous vehicles and our leadership position, the fact that we have by far an order of magnitude of the largest fleet of connected cars already on the road today through OnStar, and bringing that together with our engineering and financial resources, together with what the Lyft team has accomplished over the last few years, we have the capability of bringing to market a network of on-demand autonomous vehicles which we see as being the centerpiece of the future of urban mobility."

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Meet The New Year’s Resolution That Will Kick Your Butt If You Mess Up

Like most American men, I dream of a future where I’ll be able to wear skinny jeans, drink fancy coffee and listen to music I don’t quite understand. The only problem is, I love eating so much I can’t quite pull off the jeans part.

For that reason, I spent the past month working on my New Year’s weight loss resolution in advance, both to get a head start on 2016 and to test out Rise, an app I heard was pretty effective at helping people shed the pounds.

Rise is a simple but wicked smart tool. You use it to snap photos of all the food you eat and a registered dietician or nutritionist rates each meal and snack with a green (good), yellow (not so good) or red (did you really need to eat five donuts??). When you join the app, you are assigned a dedicated ‘coach,’ so as you post your food the person reviewing it understands your specific eating habits and leaves comments, helping you figure out how to eat right. You can also message your coach with questions and feedback via a dedicated messaging line. The app costs $40 a month on a three month plan.

After telling Rise a little about myself and my goals, I was presented with a few options for coaches and settled on Nicole, a registered dietician based in California. Nicole immediately became significant part of my life.

Every time I’ve thought about food since, or actually consumed it, I’ve had an imaginary Nicole avatar in my head, ready with her red stamp in case I deviated from the healthy straight and narrow. I mentioned Nicole so much to friends and coworkers, she became an honorary part of our groups. They learned her name and warned me of her judgement at meals. When I posted a picture of a stir fry I cooked to Instagram, one coworker couldn’t help but comment: “Nicole will love this.”

Instagram: @alexkantrowitz

She did.

The specter of Nicole kept me in line. And that’s one part of what you get with Rise: fear. (Or for the optimist: positive reinforcement.) The other part is education.

I may have been petrified to show Nicole the garbage I ate, but when I did post it, she was never too harsh and gave me constructive criticism after every foul up. A 520 calorie snack that received a red mark came with the following advice: “Your meals should be around 500-600 calories and snacks around 100-200 calories. So this snack was as much as a meal.” Good advice. In another instance, a dinner of chicken and rice was paired with the following comment: “One thing to work on when plating your food, you want to cover half your plate with veggies, ¼ with grain (rice) and ¼ with protein (chicken). So although you had all the components of a great meal here, your portions just need some work.” More good stuff. Education, though, is half the battle. The more important aspect of all this is actually executing the plan.

Plan the work, eat the plan

The Michael Moss book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, should be required reading for anyone thinking about their relation with today’s food economy. The book, in painstaking detail, lays out how some food companies in the United States have engineered our food to the point where the product is essentially addicting. Some soft drink companies, for instance, optimize towards a “bliss point,” pumping their beverages with enough sugar to make consuming them as pleasurable as possible without leaving us feeling rotten. Similar calculations are made by other food producers who find optimal levels of salt and fat. These operations made unhealthy food so enjoyable and crave-inducing, it’s often very hard to quit them.

And so perhaps unsurprisingly, in this first month with Rise, despite paying more attention to my food consumption than perhaps ever before, I haven’t been able to kick a junk food habit. Worse, I’ve cheated and kept many of my deviations secret, not telling Nicole due to a sense of shame.

Rise likes to pitch itself as something of an anti-diet. “Diets don’t work. #truth,” read the subject line of a recent email the company sent to me. So I wondered if it was possible for the app to help me break free from the bad stuff that’s a fundamental part of my food experience.

When I posted the question to Suneel Gupta, Rise’s CEO (and brother of famous neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta), he told me that eliminating bad food completely is not Rise’s goal. Gupta’s instead insisted that traditional diets aren’t strong enough to win against engineered food. Losing weight very difficult, he argued (I agree), and to achieve sustainable weight loss, you need more than a set of foods you can and cannot eat. You need real behavioral change. “We have to fight fire with fire,” Gupta explained.

To help its users succeed, Gupta said, Rise emphasizes cutting down on bad food instead of totally eliminating it, offering healthy substitute suggestions and teaching you how to balance the bad with the good. This feels a little weight watchers-y, but it’s helpful to receive constant feedback from someone on your approach to meals.

In a little over three weeks on the app, I’ve made small improvements in my approach to food. I’m eating more vegetables, cooking for myself more often (even trying out a few recipe suggestions sent over by Nicole) and thinking long and hard before scarfing down a bag of chips. If there’s a drawback, it’s that the app makes you think so much about food, it’s easy to become obsessed with your intake. This is dangerous territory for some.

By now you’re probably wondering how many pounds I lost with Rise. The answer is zero. Yes, it’s pretty embarrassing, especially considering I knew I’d be disclosing my results in this post. But though I may have fallen short of my goal, I like the direction I’m headed in. Or at least the one I think I’m headed in. And heck, not gaining weight during the holiday season is a small victory if you ask me.

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11 Italian Phrases We Said Out Loud While Looking At Pictures Of Jack Dorsey's Beard In 2015

Mi scusi, mi scusi!

Magnifico!

Instagram: @thequietrevolutions

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People Tried Really Hard To Figure Out What's Going On With Airbnb In 2015

Here’s what — if anything — we learned.

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2015 was a huge year for Airbnb. It earned a $25 billion valuation. It was used to book over 1 million stays per night. It launched its services in Cuba.

But 2015 was not a year without obstacles for the tech startup that, for many, has — until this year — represented the softer side of the so-called "sharing economy." Facing regulatory pressure in big cities like New York, L.A., and San Francisco, Airbnb spent much of the year — and its marketing budget — trying to convince the world that the platform is good for cities, good for middle-class families, and good for people in general.

But it's been hard — maybe harder than it should be — to prove that that's true. And meanwhile, Airbnb's opponents have argued that not only is the company not good for regular old middle-income city dwellers, but that its short-term rentals are actually causing a decline in affordable housing in certain cities and neighborhoods.

There's no doubt that some people do rely on Airbnb revenue to stay in homes that, what with rising costs of living, they couldn't otherwise afford. But it's also true that, in certain cases, unchecked short-term renting can have an adverse impact on rent.

Over the course of the last year, city governments, news outlets, and nonprofit organizations of all stripes have strived to figure out whether the net effect of Airbnb is positive or negative. But because Airbnb has been reluctant to share much information about where and how much the platform has been used, they've have had to cobble together a picture of the company's impact by scraping publicly available information from its website. They've been able to draw some conclusions from analyzing that data, many of which Airbnb has actively contested. The company, in turn, has released data reports of its own — reports that, unsurprisingly, tend to confirm that the platform is helping, not hurting, regular Americans.

With all the reports and counter-reports on Airbnb that have emerged this year, what have we actually learned? Given the efforts of housing advocates, attorneys general, data journalists and, to an extent, the company itself, are we actually any closer to understanding the impact of Airbnb?

Via Flickr: therichbrooks

The easiest way to spot rule-breaking on Airbnb is to count the number of hosts who list multiple properties on the site, since those people are likely not renting out a room in their home, but operating as a small business.
* In New Orleans, 46% of hosts listed multiple properties.
* In Vancouver, 35% of hosts listed multiple properties.
* In Boston, 15% of hosts listed multiple properties.

Murray Cox is the amateur data scientist behind Inside Airbnb. In 2015, he made it his mission to scrape and analyze as much data about short-term renting on the site as possible — from 50 cities globally. He found that, in most cities, hosts with more than one property listed accounted for a third of the overall listings in that city.

In fairness, Airbnb has taken steps to shut down users running such operations.
* Before April 2014, there were nearly 100 hosts with more than 10 properties listed on Airbnb in New York City. After April 2014, when the company cracked down on these "bad actors," there were less than 10 such hosts. But by early 2015, there were 22 hosts with more than 10 properties listed, according to a report by travel site Skift.

Despite Airbnb's attempts, the problem persists. As of early 2015, 29% of Airbnb listings in New York City belonged to hosts who had listed two or more properties, according to The Verge. And as of mid-November, at least 46 hosts were listing six or more entire-home properties in NYC, according to Airbnb's own data.

Those numbers might seem small, but multi-property hosts actually account for a lot of Airbnb's revenues.
* During a recent 12-month period, hosts with more than one entire-home listing in New York City accounted for more than 30% of all New York revenue. (And that includes share-home and shared-room listings.)
* And hosts with at least three entire-home listings accounted for more than 18% of all New York City revenue.

Airbnb seems fairly committed to getting the major offenders off the site, a development that happened in the last year. But the so-called "bad actors" that remain are still making a solid chunk of change off the site.

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