Archives for March 2019

The writer and technologist Paul Ford has suggested that the growth of YouTube, through its millions of videos shot on webcams, allowed a narrow but illuminating glimpse into peoples’ homes. “The curtains are drawn. Some light comes through, casting a small glow on the top left of the air conditioner. It’s daytime. The wall is an undecorated slab of beige,” he wrote.

“That is the American room,” he explained — or at least an American room: in some ways generic and literally standardized, in color and dimension and through the catalogs through which it was built, but distinctly recognizable; spacious, suggesting a large home, but barely filled.

Later, the video app Vine could be said to have given us a glimpse of life of the American teen, who is extremely diverse, but who posted from another set of conspicuously standardized places outside of the home: the American retail store, the American sidewalk, the American car.

TikTok has arrived at a time when mobile devices are far more integrated into our daily lives and in which sharing from one, wherever you are, is a default behavior. It makes sense that for now, at least, it’s a portal to the vastness of American jobs. (Or, a few taps away, the Chinese job, the Indian job, or the Russian job.)

In the long run, social platforms have a tendency to professionalize. You can seek out virtually any line of work on Instagram, but you’ll have to do some looking and get permission to follow; the most visible form of labor on the platform is influence, which isn’t meant to look like labor at all.

YouTube is now a workplace unto itself. It pays creators according to the size of their audiences, and so while there are vibrant YouTube subcultures adjacent to various jobs, these jobs tend to be obviously fascinating or exclusive. In the long run, the successful YouTuber’s job ends up being YouTube.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/style/tiktok-at-work.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“Dumbo” was no runt — but it was no mammoth hit, either.

Nearly eight decades after the 1941 original, Disney’s live-action “Dumbo” arrived in theaters this weekend to $45 million in ticket sales, topping the domestic box office. But that figure fell slightly below analysts’ expectations of around $50 million, and overall made for a moderately disappointing opening for the Tim Burton film, which reportedly had a production budget of $170 million. An additional $71 million in overseas sales brings its global weekend total to $116 million.

Like the animated original, Burton’s “Dumbo” follows the trials and eventual triumph of an elephant outcast. Unlike the original, the new film is led by famous flesh-and-blood actors: Danny DeVito, Colin Farrell, Eva Green and Michael Keaton. It’s a darker (if PG-rated) take on the story, with DeVito playing the owner of a scrappy circus that gets bought by a powerful big-city entrepreneur and amusement-park owner (Keaton), who intends to exploit the circus’s discovery of Dumbo, the flying elephant.

[Read our critic’s review of “Dumbo.”]

“Dumbo” is the latest in a string of live-action, C.G.I.-buttressed Disney remakes. Its slight underperformance may be due in part to the unenthusiastic reception it received from most critics — it currently holds a 50 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. By comparison, last year’s Winnie-the-Pooh tale from Disney, “Christopher Robin,” received 72 percent positive reviews, and 2017’s live-action “Beauty and the Beast” holds 71 percent. Remakes of “Aladdin” and “The Lion King” are slated for release later this year.

There probably wasn’t much competition between “Dumbo” and this weekend’s other big movie.

Universal’s “Us,” Jordan’s Peele’s family-unfriendly follow-up to his landmark 2017 feature debut, “Get Out,” easily landed in second place, selling $33.6 million in tickets according to Comscore, which compiles box-office data. That’s more than enough to send its cumulative sales past the $100 million mark: after two weekends, the film has now made about $128.2 million domestically.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/movies/dumbo-box-office-us.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The songwriters of “Obvious” included Mr. Prince, three members of a British music collective called the Six and another singer, Jasmine Thompson. They claimed that one line in “Friends” (“Haven’t I made it obvious, haven’t I made it clear?”) infringed on a similar line in “Obvious” (“Did I make it obvious, did I make it clear?”).

Ms. Dunn, one of the writers of “Friends,” said in an interview that she believed the claim was “ridiculous,” but that her advisers had instructed her not to fight it and potentially end up in court, where the outcome would be unpredictable.

“Everyone was like, ‘Let’s just clear it up and make it go away,’” she recalled. “I reluctantly settled.”

Ms. Dunn declined to divulge any details about the settlement terms. Marshmello and Anne-Marie declined to comment, and representatives of the writers of “Obvious” did not respond to inquiries.

Copyright disputes are nothing new in music. In the United States, they go back at least as far as a lawsuit over the illicit publication of the sheet music of W. J. Wetmore’s “The Cot Beneath the Hill” in 1844.

Occasionally, an outlying case will force industrywide adjustment. In 1976, for example, songwriters had to reckon with the idea of unintended infringement after George Harrison was found to have “subconsciously” based his first solo hit, “My Sweet Lord,” on a girl-group classic, the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” After the decision, Mr. Harrison wrote in his memoir, he felt a “paranoia about songwriting that had started to build up in me.”

The “Blurred Lines” case, many lawyers and executives say, has become the latest watershed, putting the commonly understood rules of songwriting up for debate.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/business/media/plagiarism-music-songwriters.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Mr. Bezos added that he had asked Mr. de Becker, his longtime security consultant, to investigate who had leaked information and photos about him.

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that two people with direct knowledge of The Enquirer’s reporting said that everything the tabloid received on Mr. Bezos’ affair, including the “below-the-belt selfie,” came from a single source. The Wall Street Journal later reported that AMI had paid Ms. Sanchez’s brother, Michael Sanchez, $200,000 for the texts.

In its statement on Sunday, AMI said directly that its source was Mr. Sanchez. “The fact of the matter is, it was Michael Sanchez who tipped the National Enquirer off to the affair on Sept. 10, 2018, and over the course of four months provided all of the materials for our investigation.” AMI added, “There was no involvement by any other third party whatsover.”

Mr. de Becker on Saturday said that the effort against Mr. Bezos went beyond Mr. Sanchez and also involved the Saudis. Mr. de Becker pointed to an article published on Saturday by The New York Post in which Mr. Sanchez said The Enquirer “had seen text exchanges between the secret couple” before he was in touch with the tabloid on the matter.

“Reality is complicated, and can’t always be boiled down to a simple narrative like ‘the brother did it,’” Mr. de Becker wrote.

Mr. de Becker said his investigation included interviews with cybersecurity experts and “people who personally know the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.” But he stopped short of saying what methods he believed the Saudis may have used to access Mr. Bezos’ personal information.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/technology/jeff-bezos-saudis-hack.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Here’s an annotated analysis of Mr. Zuckerberg’s post and what he is seeking to do with each area.

Harmful Content

First, harmful content. Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice, and that creates real benefits — from sharing experiences to growing movements. As part of this, we have a responsibility to keep people safe on our services. That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more. We continually review our policies with experts, but at our scale we’ll always make mistakes and decisions that people disagree with.

So-called harmful content across Facebook is an enormous category, spanning abuse and bullying to the recent live-streamed shootings at two mosques in New Zealand. With more than 2.7 billion people regularly using Facebook’s services, policing such content is far and away the most difficult issue facing the company.

By saying that “Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice,” Mr. Zuckerberg makes something clear: The social network’s sheer size means there will forever be errors, mistakes and things that it misses. Tens of billions of posts are shared to the network every day, making it impossible to keep the platform clear of harmful content.

Facebook has had a difficult time deciding what is and isn’t allowed on its site. Its policies often seem to be defined by its most extreme cases, which often spur outrage when handled poorly by the company’s content moderators.

If Facebook’s policy determinations will always cause dissatisfaction, then it may be better to leave it up to lawmakers to write the rules for it. By adhering to the letter of the law, Facebook can effectively shield itself from blame when something inevitably goes awry.

Election Protection

Second, legislation is important for protecting elections. Facebook has already made significant changes around political ads: Advertisers in many countries must verify their identities before purchasing political ads. We built a searchable archive that shows who pays for ads, what other ads they ran and what audiences saw the ads. However, deciding whether an ad is political isn’t always straightforward. Our systems would be more effective if regulation created common standards for verifying political actors.

For years, Facebook has maintained little oversight over its political advertising practices. The company raked in revenue by the billions of dollars on the back of its automated advertising system. Wall Street loved Facebook’s reliable blockbuster financial results and the company’s stock soared.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/technology/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-regulation-explained.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The prosecutor who dropped disorderly conduct charges against the actor Jussie Smollett defended the decision, saying her office was uncertain it had enough evidence to gain a conviction and wanted to focus on bigger crime in Chicago, she wrote in an op-ed.

The prosecutor, Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, wrote in an op-ed in The Chicago Tribune on Friday that she welcomed an “outside, nonpolitical review of how we handled this matter.”

The case involved Mr. Smollett, a star of the television show “Empire,” who claimed he was a victim of a hate crime in Chicago. Mr. Smollett, who is black and gay, told the authorities that he was attacked in January by two men who yelled homophobic and racial slurs at him, tied a rope around his neck and poured a chemical substance on him.

[Read about key questions in the Jussie Smollett case.]

Nearly a month later, he was arrested by the police, who maintained he had staged the assault and falsely reported it. Initially there was an outpouring of support for Mr. Smollett but as the story turned, so did public sentiment. Mr. Smollett, who denied the allegations, was charged with 16 counts of disorderly conduct but on Tuesday the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office dropped all of the charges.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/kim-foxx-chicago-smollett.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Here’s your checklist of everything to know in business and tech for the coming week, so you can feel up-to-date and well-rounded even if all you want to talk about is Meghan Markle’s baby. (Any day now!) Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

MARCH 24-30

What’s Up?

Follow the Money

Eight members of the Sackler family, owners of the pharmaceutical company that makes the potent (and highly addictive) opioid OxyContin, have been sued for fraud by New York State. They are accused of hiding profits and siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from their company, Purdue Pharma, into personal offshore accounts while the business was under investigation for its role in stoking the opioid epidemic. Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people in the United States have died from overdoses involving prescription opioids, and the Sacklers have become one of the country’s wealthiest families.

Unicorn Stampede

If you take a Lyft this week, pay attention — does it feel any different to use the world’s first publicly traded ride-hailing platform? Perhaps not, but at least you’re both going places. The company made its market debut on Friday, hitting the Nasdaq with much fanfare at $72 a share. It finished its first day of trading at $78.29 (putting its value at more than $26.4 billion), and its Silicon Valley brethren will be closely watching its progress. A wave of other big tech start-ups — known as “unicorns” once they cross the threshold of a $1 billion dollar valuation, although these are now technically “decacorns” — plan to follow in Lyft’s footsteps later this year, including Uber (Lyft’s bigger competitor), Slack, Pinterest and Postmates.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/business/the-week-in-business-sackler-opioid-brexit-boeing-apple.html?partner=rss&emc=rss