Bits: Farhad’s Week in Tech: A Power and News Outage at CES

Farhad goes it alone while Mike acts like he's writing a book. View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Friday, January 12, 2018 [For the latest updates, go to nytimes.com/bits »]( A Power and News Outage at CES [A large portion of the convention center for the CES electronics trade show was without power for more than an hour.] A large portion of the convention center for the CES electronics trade show was without power for more than an hour. David Becker/Getty Images Each Friday, Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist at The New York Times, reviews [the week’s news]( offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? [Sign up here](. Hello, readers! Usually in this space, my colleague Mike Isaac and I chat about the week’s tech news. But Mike is now fixing to become a big-time author. For the next few months, he’ll be out on book leave, which leaves me free to run this show on my own! Strap in. Let’s talk about some of the big stories in tech this week. CES IS BACK, AND IT’S … MEH It’s that time of the year — CES! The world’s largest technology convention is again taking place in Las Vegas, bringing thousands of nerds to see some really cool stuff that will probably never be released. I kid, but that’s generally how this goes. CES used to be cool for all the new stuff companies unveiled there, but then it got so crowded that it didn’t make sense to put out your product in the torrent of announcements. Now the biggest companies skip the event, so we’re left with a lot of strange news from unheard-of companies. I didn’t attend this year, but from what I gathered from the coverage (including [this fun report by my colleague Brian X. Chen]( CES is full of robotic pets, luggage that drives itself, and lots and lots and lots of voice assistants for everything you can imagine. If you’d love to see a cavernous room full of talking refrigerators, this is the show for you. Also, there was a huge power failure on Wednesday. Fun! We should probably get used to such slim pickings at CES. As I’ve been saying for a while now, traditional “gadgets” seem to be dying. We saw more evidence of that trend this week when GoPro, the extreme-camera company, [lowered its revenue forecast,]( shut down its effort to build a drone, laid off 20 percent of its staff and said it would be open to a sale. More and more gadgets, now, are really run off services or content in the cloud — Amazon’s Alexa, for instance, or the fitness videos created by Peloton, [the fitness start-up I wrote about this week](. On the other hand: When the self-driving suitcase is perfected, I’m buying one. TWITTER ISN’T STOPPING TRUMP When President Trump tweeted a threat of nuclear war against North Korea this month, it at the very least seemed to constitute a threat of violence that might violate Twitter’s terms of service. The company has lately been trying to crack down on abusive accounts. So some people on Twitter started to wonder, would the company possibly decide that Mr. Trump had crossed the line? Oh, no, not at all. On Monday, [Twitter said]( the tweets of world leaders got special deference from the company; world leaders can now essentially say anything on Twitter. “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” it said. I don’t think anyone is surprised by this. And I saw some good arguments for allowing the president to stay on Twitter. As Will Oremus at Slate [argued]( barring Mr. Trump from the site is a “misguided fantasy” that wouldn’t really stop the underlying problem of his saying things that many people consider outrageous. Still, I do think there’s something to the argument that Twitter — by its very nature a platform meant for people to yell things at the news, usually without nuance — [encourages the sort of reflexive communication that we probably don’t want in our world leaders](. Sure, if Twitter barred him, he could always just go on TV and say what he had planned to tweet. But that would be slower and less automatic, and perhaps — I’m going out on a limb here — he might not blurt out threats of nuclear war. COMPUTER SECURITY IS A MESS, ALMOST BY DESIGN We’re still seeing fallout from Meltdown and Spectre, the two big computer chip flaws that were announced last week. Intel said this week that its fixes for the two flaws would [slow computers down by single-digit percentages]( the exact performance hit depends on what you’re doing on your machine. This is a small slowdown, but it’s not insignificant. After all, people buy new computers for speed, so being hit with a slowdown after you’ve already purchased the thing is going to make lots of customers seethe. There’s a bigger story here: When technology is found to be insecure, many companies evade any great degree of responsibility for the problems. As Nathaniel Fick, chief executive of the security company Endgame, [wrote in The Times]( “Cybersecurity today is being treated like accounting was before the fallout from the Enron scandal.” There are few lasting repercussions for flaws, and after a time everything goes back to normal. Equifax, for example, has already partly recovered after its massive breach. Unless the government steps in with stricter penalties, this system seems headed for catastrophe. Everything is interconnected now; it’s only a matter of time until there’s a hack big enough to cause widespread social and economic disruption. We should probably do something about that, maybe? BIG CHANGES TO THE NEWS FEED Finally, in a late-breaking update, Facebook said on Thursday that it would be making huge changes and to make you feel less terrible about using the service. It’s an unusual goal for a tech company — Facebook plans to alter its News Feed to increase your interactions with friends and family and reduce how many posts you see from brands and publishers, all in an attempt to make the service more “meaningful” for users. The move could have wide repercussions for the media — which depend on Facebook for traffic — and potentially for Facebook’s own bottom line. But as with all Facebook product changes, it will likely be months before we know how the move plays out. One thing is for sure: initially, you’re bound to hate it, because that’s just how it goes with anything new online. O.K., that’s it for now. Tune in next week for another Mike-free newsletter. Bye! Farhad Manjoo writes a weekly technology column called [State of the Art](. You can follow him on Twitter here: [@fmanjoo](. ADVERTISEMENT In Case You Missed It [Tech Backlash Grows as Investors Press Apple to Act on Children’s Use]( By DAVID GELLES Apple should give parents more tools to curb technology use by children and study the health effects of excessive screen time, two big funds said. [AT&T Drops Huawei’s New Smartphone Amid Security Worries]( By PAUL MOZUR The telecommunications giant canceled a deal to sell the Mate 10 after U.S. lawmakers expressed misgivings about what they said were Huawei’s ties to the Chinese government. [States Push Back After Net Neutrality Repeal]( By CECILIA KANG At least six, including California, New York and Washington, are considering bills to restore protections that the F.C.C. ended, but political and legal obstacles may stand in the way. [CES 2018: What the Gadget Fest Looks Like in ‘the Year of A.I.’]( By WHITNEY RICHARDSON AND BRIAN X. CHEN Thousands of electronics enthusiasts flooded the trade show to see the latest devices, but the darling of the event was the artificial intelligence software that helps these products run. [YouTube Drops Online Star Logan Paul From Premium Advertising]( By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI The online service also suspended production of a movie with Mr. Paul a week after he posted a video of a dead body hanging from a tree in Japan. State of the Art [What a $4,000 Treadmill Means for the Future of Gadgets]( By FARHAD MANJOO Peloton, which sells an internet-connected spin bicycle, unveiled a $4,000 internet-connected treadmill. The company’s insight: The gadget is not as important as the service. [India Clings to Cash, Even as Tech Firms Push Digital Money]( By VINDU GOEL AND SUHASINI RAJ India’s Paytm and global heavyweights like Google are moving aggressively to persuade reluctant Indians to give up their rupee notes. HOW ARE WE DOING? We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [bits_newsletter@nytimes.com](mailto:bits_newsletter@nytimes.com?subject=Bits%20Newsletter%20Feedback%20223). ADVERTISEMENT LIKE THIS EMAIL? Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up [here](. [The All-New DealBook Newsletter]( Our columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them. 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