Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and bitcoin: The most significant Tech Turkeys of 2018

Eleven months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his New Year’s resolution was to fix Facebook. He’d likely agree that he didn’t accomplish the task. In March, The New York Times and The Guardian’s Observer broke news that the social networking giant had covered up a massive data leak of its users’ names, emails, likes and friends that affected as many as 87 million people. Propelling the scandal further: Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that received the data, had worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. To make matters worse, Facebook didn’t reveal the leak for three years. In the end, Zuckerberg was called to Capitol Hill to give his first public testimony to the Senate and House of Representatives. Of course, that turned out to be a turkey of its own…

Cambridge Analytica: Everything you need to know.

To call bitcoin a mess would be an insult to messes. What began as a cryptocurrency with wild-eyed plans to become the world’s primary way of shuffling money around has since descended into madness. Prices on bitcoin exchanges (yes, there are many bitcoin exchanges, and there are many different cryptocurrencies) have fluctuated wildly. Bitcoin itself rose to more than $19,500 apiece at the end of last year before falling to around $5,500 now. Still, bitcoin — and the blockchain technology that helps keep track of how much of the cryptocurrency everyone owns — has become a joke in the tech industry. There are so many blockchain-based startups that it’s become a meme. Meanwhile, speculators hoping to make a quick buck off bitcoin have a new moniker: bitcoin bros.

Everything you need to know about blockchain technology.

Google+ had a more promising start than some earlier Google social network flops, like Google Wave and Orkut. Still, Google+ went the way of those earlier efforts when Google unveiled plans to shut the social network down because of a vulnerability that exposed data of a half million people. Google+ debuted in 2011 with great fanfare, a project intended to match Facebook’s explosive growth at the time. Google extended Google+’s tentacles into everything from Gmail and Google Photos to search results and Android in an effort to draw existing Google users into the fold. Still, it all fizzled, and it became a cliche to call the service a ghost town. Any remaining nonghosts have until Aug. 19, 2019, to decamp.

Life after social media dies.

For the first time, a self-driving car in full autonomous mode struck and killed a pedestrian. Uber was testing the vehicle in Tempe, Arizona, at 10 p.m. on a Sunday in March when it struck a woman at 38 mph as she was walking her bike across a dark street. After preliminary investigations by Uber, Arizona police, the National Transportation Safety Board and the US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it was initially concluded that Uber had disabled emergency braking maneuvers in the vehicle. Uber halted its self-driving car program at the time of the crash and it has yet to reinstate testing of its vehicles in full autonomous mode. The company said in a statement that self-driving cars will “ultimately make transportation safer, more efficient and more affordable,” and that it remains committed to making that future a reality.

Uber’s car crash could have been avoided.

Without a heads-up to lawmakers or residents, thousands of electric scooters were dropped onto city streets across the US this year. Some people took to the dockless, rentable motorized vehicles immediately, embracing them as a convenient and cheap way to get around town. Others hated them, calling the scooter phenomenon Scootergeddon, Scooterpocalypse and Scooter Wars, among other snide names. Some expressed rage by tossing the scooters into trash cans, hanging them from trees and even smearing them with feces. Cities from Austin, Texas, to San Francisco to Beverly Hills, California, temporarily banned the vehicles, while regulators in other cities have grappled with how to create laws around the new form of transportation. As the legal issues shake out, scooter companies just keep adding more and more cities to their rosters.

The mad, twisted tale of the electric scooter craze.

It sounded too good to be true: A $10 per month subscription that lets you watch a movie a day, every day, in most theaters around the US. Considering many tickets cost at least $3 more than that just to see one movie, this was an obvious steal. Well, it turns out MoviePass was built on a gym membership-like business plan, where the people who sign up but don’t use the service subsidize those who do. That seemed to work OK for the first six years it was in business and initially charging $50 a month. But then the company lowered its rates to $10 a month and things went nuts. More than 150,000 people subscribed in just two days, according to Deadline. But unexpectedly, many of those people aggressively used their benefits, causing the company to change its business plan in public several times. Today, it still charges $10 a month, but you can watch only three movies a month, and there are blackouts. The whole ordeal became the talk of the internet for the summer, which may have hurt MoviePass’ brand. The stock price for Helios and Matheson Analytics, its parent company, has crashed from around $1,800 per share at the beginning of the year to hovering around 2 cents a share since August. On the plus side, MoviePass pushed other companies like AMC and Cinemark to respond with their own offerings.

Where movie subscription services are now….