Archives for June 2021

BuzzFeed to become a publicly traded company

NEW YORK (AP) — Digital media company BuzzFeed is setting its sights on growth. It plans to become a publicly traded company with an implied value of $1.5 billion through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.

BuzzFeed hopes the move will put it in a better position to capture lucrative digital ad dollars against much bigger rivals like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

The company, founded by Jonah Peretti in 2006 and initially known for listicles and online quizzes, has established itself as a serious contender in the news business, this year winning a Pulitzer for international reporting. Its other brands include Tasty, the world’s largest social food network.

It has been buying up competitors, including HuffPost, the media outlet founded in 2005 as The Huffington Post, from Verizon Media in November. BuzzFeed said Thursday that it plans to buy Complex Networks from Verizon and Hearst for $300 million. Complex is a global youth network that engages with millennials and Gen Z.

Digital advertising is a tough space to succeed in, and digital newsrooms have been consolidating, including Vox’s purchase of New York Magazine and its digital arms. Facebook and Google get the majority of digital-ad dollars. In a statement, Peretti said the acquisition of Complex would “open the door to even more revenue opportunities.”

A number of companies this year have chosen a non-traditional path to putting their shares on the public market, choosing to skip partnerships with traditional financial institutions, and instead merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

SPACs can cut up to 75% off the time it takes for a company to get its stock trading on an exchange, versus the traditional process of an initial public offering. SPACs can also make it easier to get prospective buyers on board. Companies going the SPAC route often feel more license to highlight projections for big growth they’re expecting in the future, for example. In a traditional IPO, the company is limited to highlighting its past performance, which may not be a great selling point for young startups that typically fail to put up big profits or revenue.

BuzzFeed, based in New York City, is merging with a SPAC called 890 Fifth Avenue Partners Inc.

BuzzFeed said that the parent company will be known as BuzzFeed Inc. Shares will trade under the ticker symbol “BZFD,” and will list on a market to be determined.

Dutch group launches data harvesting claim against TikTok

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A Dutch consumer group is launching a 1.5 billion euro ($1.8 billion) claim against TikTok over what it alleges is unlawful harvesting of personal data from users of the popular video sharing platform.

The Consumentenbond and a foundation called Take Back Your Privacy demanded Thursday that TikTok pay damages to 1.2 million to 1.6 million Dutch children who use the app.

“The conduct of TikTok is pure exploitation,” Consumentenbond director Sandra Molenaar said in a statement. “The company earns hundreds of millions per year on the backs of children. And that while privacy law prescribes that children should receive additional protection.”

TikTok is hugely popular with teenagers and young adults, who use it to post and watch short-form videos.

The consumer organization and privacy foundation are demanding that TikTok pay damages to Dutch children and delete what they call unlawfully collected personal data. They say if TikTok does not comply, they will take the company to court.

TikTok responded in an emailed statement saying the company is “committed to engage with external experts and organisations to make sure we’re doing what we can to keep people on TikTok safe.”

It added that “privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular.”

In February, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, agreed to pay $92 million in a settlement to U.S. users who are part of a class-action lawsuit alleging that the video-sharing app failed to get their consent to collect data in violation of a strict Illinois privacy law.

The social media app also is facing complaints in the European Union.

Late last month, the EU’s executive, the European Commission, gave TikTok one month to answer complaints from a European consumer group over its commercial practices. The Commission said some contractual terms in TikTok’s policies could be considered misleading and confusing for consumers, adding that concerns relating to issues including hidden marketing and advertising strategies targeting children were raised.

John McAfee, software pioneer turned fugitive, dead at 75

John McAfee, the outlandish security software pioneer who tried to live life as a hedonistic outsider while running from a host of legal troubles, was found dead in his jail cell near Barcelona on Wednesday.

His death came just hours after a Spanish court announced that it had approved his extradition to the United States to face tax charges punishable by decades in prison, authorities said.

McAfee, who was among other things a cryptocurrency promoter, tax opponent, U.S. presidential candidate and fugitive, who publicly embraced drugs, guns and sex, had a history of legal woes spanning from Tennessee to Central America to the Caribbean. In 2012, he was sought for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor in Belize, but was never charged with a crime.

McAfee’s body was discovered at the Brians 2 penitentiary in northeastern Spain. Security personnel tried to revive him, but the jail’s medical team finally certified his death, a statement from the regional Catalan government said.

“A judicial delegation has arrived to investigate the causes of death,” the statement read. “Everything points to death by suicide.”

McAfee’s death was confirmed after Spain’s National Court ruled in favor of extraditing McAfee, 75, who had argued in a hearing earlier this month that the charges against him by prosecutors in Tennessee were politically motivated and that he would spend the rest of his life in prison if returned to the U.S.

The court’s ruling was made public on Wednesday and was open for appeal, with any final extradition order also needing to get approval from the Spanish Cabinet.

McAfee was arrested last October at Barcelona’s international airport and had been in jail since then awaiting the outcome of extradition proceedings. The arrest followed charges the same month in Tennessee for evading taxes after failing to report income from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consulting work, made speaking engagements and sold the rights to his life story for a documentary. The criminal charges carried a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

Nishay Sanan, the Chicago-based attorney defending him on those cases, said by phone that McAfee “will always be remembered as a fighter.”

“He tried to love this country but the U.S. government made his existence impossible,” Sanan said. “They tried to erase him, but they failed.”

Born in England’s Gloucestershire in 1945 as John David McAfee, he moved to Virginia as a child and grew up troubled, with a father who “beat him mercilessly” and killed himself with McAfee’s shotgun when the boy was 15, said Steve Morgan, who spent time with McAfee in Alabama in 2016 to talk about his life for a biography he’d been contracted to write. Morgan is also the founder of market research firm Cybersecurity Ventures.

“He told me his father never showed him an ounce of affection,” Morgan said, adding that recounting his father’s death was the only time during their long meeting that McAfee cried.

While McAfee’s tech legacy may have been overshadowed in recent years by his tumultuous life, Morgan said he sees his most lasting impact as a software and security pioneer.

“I think that’s how ultimately he’d really most like to be remembered. I think a lot of people will remember him as a very troubled soul. Some people will remember him as a criminal. It depends on your age and your exposure to him,” Morgan said.

McAfee founded his eponymous company in 1987. At the time, Morgan said, he was operating a BBS, a bulletin board system that served as a precursor to the World Wide Web and working with his brother-in-law. When the first major computer virus, called “Brain,” hit in 1986, “John instantly dialed up a programmer he knew and said, there’s a big opportunity. We need to do something. You know, we want to write some code to combat this virus,” Morgan said. He called the program VirusScan and the company McAfee Associates.

“He was a true pioneer, not just as a security technologist but as one of the first companies to distribute software over the internet,” Morgan said.

California chipmaker Intel, which bought McAfee’s company in 2010 for $7.68 billion, for a time sought to dissociate the brand from its controversial founder by folding it into its larger cybersecurity division. But the rebranding was short-lived, and Intel in 2016 spun out the cybersecurity unit into a new company called McAfee.

In the software industry, McAfee’s claim to fame was that he offered the first all-in-one virus scanner, said Vesselin Bontchev, a Bulgarian computer scientist and an early antivirus researcher. Prior to that, said Bontchev, researchers would only scan for one virus at a time. But there were only about a dozen computer viruses back then.

“Technologically, as a scanner, it wasn’t anything outstanding. It was just the general idea that was good. Not the implementation,” said Bontchev, a senior researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Bontchev said McAfee was “a peculiar guy,” even back then. He said he wrote McAfee asking for a part-time job about the time the Soviet Union was breaking up so he could work on a post-doctoral dissertation in the U.S.

In response, McAfee told Bontchev in a letter that the Bulgarian was believed to be a Soviet agent so “they cannot work with me,” he said. “This is a really bizarre way to say no to somebody who is asking for a job.”

The two later met in the U.S. at the annual Virus Bulletin conference, said Bontchev. “I don’t think he was a typical American. He was just weird.”

McAfee twice made long-shot runs for the U.S. presidency and was a participant in Libertarian Party presidential debates in 2016. He dabbled in yoga, ultralight aircraft and the production of herbal medications.

In 2012 he was wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Gregory Viant Faull, who was shot to death in early November 2012 on the island in Belize where both men lived.

McAfee told AP at the time that he was being persecuted by the Belizean government. Belizean police denied that, saying they were simply investigating a crime about which McAfee may have had information. Then-Prime Minister Dean Barrow expressed doubts about McAfee’s mental state, saying, “I don’t want to be unkind to the gentleman, but I believe he is extremely paranoid, even bonkers.”

A Florida court ordered McAfee in 2019 to pay $25 million to Faull’s estate in a wrongful death claim. He refused to pay it, writing in a statement posted on Twitter that he has “not responded to a single one of my 37 lawsuits for the past 11 years.” He claimed to have no assets, writing that the order was a “mute point” — an apparent misspelling of “moot.”

In July of that year he was released from detention in the Dominican Republic after he and five others were suspected of traveling on a yacht carrying high-caliber weapons, ammunition and military-style gear.

Wired Magazine reporter Joshua Davis spent six months investigating McAfee’s tumultuous life in 2012, when he was living in Belize and being sought for questioning in connection with his neighbor’s murder. He described watching as McAfee took out a pistol to illustrate a point.

”‘Let’s do this one more time,’ he says, and puts it to his head,” Davies wrote. “Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing happens. ‘It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber,’ he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow proven faulty. I’m missing something.”

Associated Press writers Aritz Parra in Madrid, Renata Brito in Barcelona, Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tenn., Matt O’Brien in Providence, R.I. and Frank Bajak in Boston contributed.

Google delays phase out of tracking tech by nearly 2 years

LONDON (AP) — Google will delay by nearly two years the phase out of Chrome web browser technology that tracks users for ad purposes, saying that it needs more time to develop a replacement system.

The tech giant on Thursday moved its deadline to remove so-called third-party cookies to late 2023 rather than January 2022 as was initially planned.

“We need to move at a responsible pace, allowing sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions and for publishers and the advertising industry to migrate their services,” Vinay Goel, the director of privacy engineering for Chrome, said in a blog post.

Third-party cookies are snippets of code that log user info and are used by advertisers to more effectively target their campaigns, thereby helping fund free online content such as newspapers and blogs. However, they’ve also been a longstanding source of privacy concerns because they can be employed to track users across the internet.

Google is retiring third-party cookies as it overhauls Chrome to tighten privacy, but the proposals have shaken up the online advertising industry, raising fears that replacement technology will leave even less room for online ad rivals. European Union and British regulators have been investigating Google’s plans, known as Privacy Sandbox.

To resolve the U.K. probe, the company has offered the country’s competition watchdog a role overseeing the cookie phaseout. It has also promised not to discriminate against rival digital advertising companies when designing the new technology and pledged to give the U.K. competition watchdog 60 days notice before removing third-party cookies.

Goel said Google aims to have the new technology available by the end of 2022 for developers to start adopting, which would allow third-party cookies to be phased out of Chrome over three months “ending in late 2023.” That timeline is in line with the commitments Google has made to the U.K. competition watchdog, Goel said.

One of the leading ideas to replace third-party cookies is a technique that hides users in large online groups based on their interests while keeping web browsing histories on devices to maintain privacy.

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For all of AP’s tech coverage, visit https://apnews.com/apf-technology

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Follow Kelvin Chan at https://www.twitter.com/chanman

Microsoft debuts Windows 11, first major update in 6 years

Microsoft has unveiled the next generation of its Windows software, called Windows 11, that has sleeker visual features and is more open to third-party apps.

The newest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system announced Thursday will be a successor to today’s Windows 10, which the company introduced in 2015.

In a challenge to rival Apple, the company also announced that it won’t force app developers to pay fees to Microsoft for using its app store; and that Google’s popular Android apps will run on its new system.

Windows 11 is expected to become available later this year on new computers and other devices and as a free update for those with Windows 10. It includes a host of cosmetic upgrades, such as a new Start button, a revamped task bar and sounds, and under-the-hood features designed to boost speed and efficiency.

While opening more doors to third-party developers, it also further entrenches Microsoft’s workplace chatting tool Teams by making it easier to contact people when starting up.

Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder said the aesthetic, user-friendly improvements reflect CEO Satya Nadella’s promise to build products that people will “love,” not tolerate, though Gownder questioned whether Windows 11 is truly a new generation of software. The fact that it is built on the same core code base as Windows 10 might actually be a good thing, he added, because it could avoid the technical glitches that plagued the release of Windows Vista in 2007.

Microsoft’s virtual announcement event was itself affected by technical difficulties Thursday, forcing the company to recommend some viewers watch it on Twitter instead.

When it launched Windows 10 six years ago, Microsoft was hoping that the new operating system would help it rebuild loyalty among users who were increasingly relying on tablets, smartphones and other devices.

Windows has been a PC workhorse for decades. Its first version launched in 1985, offering computer novices a “graphical user interface” so they could click on icons and menus with a mouse button rather than simply type commands into a blank screen.

It’s been a core part of Microsoft’s business ever since, though its influence waned as PC sales declined with the rise of smartphones.

Microsoft said it would allow developers to bypass the payments system in its app store if they have their own commerce engine.

That could create problems for Apple, which has faced government scrutiny over its app store and a legal battle from Epic, the maker of the popular Fortnite game, which contends Apple has been gouging app makers by charging commissions ranging from 15% to 30% for in-app transactions because it forbids other options on its iPhone, iPad and iPod.

“I believe this will be problematic for Apple in its antitrust dealings,” said tech analyst Patrick Moorhead. “Apple charging 30% in its store and Microsoft charging 0% and 15% if you use its commerce engine. Global antitrust units are currently scrutinizing Apple on this very point.”

Moorhead said the easier access to third-party apps, combined with the better user interface promised with Windows 11, could help Microsoft get a stronger hold in the premium tablet market, now dominated by the iPad.

Archives for June 2021

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