Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 6

• How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide: Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been banned. The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials who were trying to clamp down on the ride-hailing service. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities like Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China and South Korea. Greyball was part of a program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The program, including Greyball, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team. Greyball and the VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents. The four spoke on the condition of anonymity because the tools and their use are confidential and because of fear of retaliation by Uber. One technique involved drawing a digital perimeter, or “geofence,” around the government offices on a digital map of a city that Uber was monitoring. The company watched which people were frequently opening and closing the app — a process known internally as eyeballing — near such locations as evidence that the users might be associated with city agencies. Other techniques included looking at a user’s credit card information and determining whether the card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.Enforcement officials involved in large-scale sting operations meant to catch Uber drivers would sometimes buy dozens of cellphones to create different accounts. To circumvent that tactic, Uber employees would go to local electronics stores to look up device numbers of the cheapest mobile phones for sale, which were often the ones bought by city officials working with budgets that were not large. In all, there were at least a dozen or so signifiers in the VTOS program that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were regular new riders or probably city officials. If such clues did not confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other information available online. If users were identified as being linked to law enforcement, Uber Greyballed them by tagging them with a small piece of code that read “Greyball” followed by a string of numbers. When someone tagged this way called a car, Uber could scramble a set of ghost cars in a fake version of the app for that person to see, or show that no cars were available. Occasionally, if a driver accidentally picked up someone tagged as an officer, Uber called the driver with instructions to end the ride.

• Why newspaper subscriptions are on the rise: A recent Nielsen Scarborough study found that more than 169 million U.S. adults now read newspapers every month, in print, online or mobile. That’s almost 70 percent of the population. The New York Times picked up 130,000 new subscribers last November — 10 times their average monthly growth rate. Subscriptions at The Wall Street Journal spiked 300 percent, the LA Times went up 61 percent and Vanity Fair picked up 13,000 new subscriptions in one day. The now-profitable Washington Post is hiring 60 new writers. NPR recently said that “Big Newspapers Are Booming.” Sure, those papers can thank the incoming president for some of their new business, but this isn’t just a political story. All sorts of reader-supported publishers are enjoying a resurgence. In the technology industry, for example, Jessica Lessin’s sharp, pointed (and subscription-only) The Information now has the second largest team of tech reporters in Silicon Valley. Ben Thompson has several thousand readers who are happy to pay him $100 a year for his excellent Stratechery newsletter. Why are readers and publishers alike embracing paid subscriptions for content services over ad-based business models? There are several reasons, but the dismal state of online advertising is a big one. People hate ads. More than 80 million Americans will use ad blockers this year, costing digital media companies around $10 billion in revenue. And despite all the media industry talk about relevant “native advertising,” most of us are still drowning in pop-ups. It says a lot about advertising that many publishers are pitching its complete absence as a way of incentivizing paid subscriptions. Even Google is doing it — take a look at YouTube Red. Ads have all sorts of other insidious effects, like turning content providers into clickbait factories. Ex-Politico president Jim VandeHei calls it the “crap trap.” “The number of people with access to the Internet is huge and lots of niches are underserved right now because they’re not broad enough for advertisers to care about,” says Ben Thompson. All successful subscription services, from Adobe to Dollar Shave Club to the Weekly Standard, can take advantage of predictable recurring revenue to stay razor-focused on their audiences, create distinctive new features (The New York Times now has a sizeable revenue stream just from its crossword app) and avoid the commodification crap trap. As Jessica Lessin says: “I still believe it’s much safer to build a business that doesn’t need any advertising to survive. Doing so forces you to focus 100% on your value to your readers. It’s the only way to make sure that what the news publishers deliver to readers in the future is smarter, more informed and more relevant than in the past.”

• NBCUniversal invests $500 million in Snap's IPO: Comcast Corp's (CMCSA.O) NBCUniversal has invested $500 million in Snapchat owner Snap Inc (SNAP.N), according to a memo on Friday, its latest move aimed at driving digital growth as more viewers go online for their favorite content. Like other traditional U.S. media companies, NBCU is pushing more into digital media, and over the past 18 months it has invested $400 million in online publisher Buzzfeed and $200 million in Vox Media, operator of The Verge and Recode news.NBCUniversal has agreed to hold Snap's shares for at least a year, according to CNBC. Snap disclosed last month that it expected investors buying up to a quarter of its shares in the IPO to agree not to sell them for a year. Lock-up periods help companies moderate stock volatility by preventing company insiders from selling their shares within an allotted time.

• Facebook tests reactions and Dislike button (!) on messages: Facebook finally has a Dislike button, but it’s not where you’d expect. How do you reply to a specific message in a rapid-fire chat thread? Facebook wants you to attach emojis to your friends’ messages the same way you do with News Feed posts.TechCrunch reader Hoan Do sent us a tip that Facebook Messenger is showing some users a Reactions option. When you hover over messages friends have sent in a chat thread, you can tap the emoji button to pick from attaching a little thumbs-up Like, thumbs-down Dislike, or a heart-eyes, lol, wow, sad, or angry emoji. Everyone in the thread will then see that Reaction counted below the specific message you attached it to, and you can tap to see a full list of who left which Reaction. Facebook confirmed this new feature to TechCrunch, saying “We’re always testing ways to make Messenger more fun and engaging. This is a small test where we enable people to share an emoji that best represents their feelings on a message.” That means not everyone has access now, but if people enjoy it, Messenger Reactions could roll out to all users. Notably, the Messenger reaction list differs from the News Feed one because of the addition of much-requested and always-denied Dislike button. Though it’s known as Facebook’s most asked for feature, the company didn’t want to inject too much negativity into the feed so it never built one. Instead, it built Reactions so people could share more nuanced emotions quickly, but left disliking for the comments. Facebook launched Reactions almost exactly a year ago, and they proven popular, with over 300 billion sent so far. “Love” is the most frequently used, making up more than half of all Reactions.