Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/04 - The Verge vs. AT&T And L.A. vs. The Weather Channel app

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

The Verge and AT&T have a trademark dispute, the city of Los Angeles and The Weather Channel app have a location data dispute, more on how shows like Bandersnatch really might be the future of storytelling and the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsor: Mealime.com (iOS App) (Android App) Links: AT&T tries to trademark ‘Verge TV’ as if we’re going to let them get away with it (The Verge) Los Angeles Accuses Weather Channel App of Covertly Mining User Data (NYTimes) D-Link debuts a 5G Wi-Fi router with 40 times wired broadband speeds (Venture Beat) BLACK MIRROR: BANDERSNATCH COULD BECOME NETFLIX’S SECRET MARKETING WEAPON (The Verge) Longreads: Podcast suggestion: Daily Fortnite Courier Prime He Hawks Young Blood As A New Miracle Treatment. All That’s Missing Is Proof. (HuffPo) Curbs on A.I. Exports? Silicon Valley Fears Losing Its Edge (NYTimes) The Bird Box Effect: How Memes Drive Users to Netflix (The Ringer) Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game (Audubon) How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code (Quanta) The Hacker News discussion of the Quanta piece Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Friday, January 4th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Verge and AT&T have a trademark dispute.

The City of Los Angeles and the Weather Channel app have a location data dispute. More on how shows like Bander Snatch really might be the future of storytelling and the weekend long reads suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Here's a weird sort of tech inside baseball story. AT&T has apparently filed trademark applications for a product that it is calling Verge TV. And this looks like it might be the name for its upcoming video streaming service. However, our friends at, you know, the tech news site, The Verge, have said, Not so fast.

We already have a trademark for things named Verge. As T.C. Sotic wrote on The Verge, quote, Unfortunately, AT&T, we simply can't let you have The Verge, if only because being a brand that people love and trust, wouldn't make sense to your customers. Why not try Go-90 instead? We hear it's available, end quote. That's certainly biting.

Dave Zatz joked on Twitter, Bet Quixter TV is available. Michael Gartenberg noted that Oath is probably also available as a branding idea. This is all very ironic because the verge and especially the verges, Nilai Patel, are notoriously combatant with big telecoms, and especially with AT&T in particular. So this is either a hilarious accident or absolutely AT&T has picked the wrong people to poke in the proverbial eye like this.

Also on the legal front, the city attorney of Los Angeles has sued the company behind the Weather Channel app, which is owned by IBM, if you'll recall, For, as the tech meme editor put it in the headline for this item, slightly using location data for commercial purposes. Quoting the New York Times, the government said the weather company, the business behind the app, unfairly manipulated users into turning on location tracking

by implying that the information would be used only to localize weather reports. Yet the company, which is owned by IBM, also used the data for unrelated commercial purposes like targeted marketing and analysis for hedge funds, according to the lawsuit, end quote. The lawsuit specifically cited an article also from the New York Times, which I think we talked about last month, about the big business that has sprung up in Location Aware app data, how IBM bought the Weather Channel app precisely to get at this data, how Foursquare basically reinvented its entire business model to become a location marketing company, and as we said, how

even hedge funds are buying location data from your apps. to do things like check how often people are visiting particular stores and such. Quoting again from the Times piece, in the complaint, the city attorney excoriated the weather company, saying it unfairly took advantage of its app's popularity and the fact that consumers were likely to give their location data to get local weather alerts. The city said that the company failed to sufficiently disclose its data practices when it got users' permission to track their location

and that it obscured other tracking details in its privacy policy. These issues certainly aren't limited to our state. Mr. Fuhr said, he's the city attorney. Ideally, this litigation will be the catalyst for other action, either litigation or legislative activity to protect consumers' ability to assure their private information remains just that, unless they speak clearly in advance, end quote. According to SEC documents, Neantik, the mobile AR gaming startup best known for producing Pokemon Go, has closed a $190 million funding round, bringing the total capital that it has raised over its lifetime to more than $415 million.

The rumored valuation is $3.9 billion, and among the investors are purported to be Founders Fund, Spark Capital, and Samsung. What to spend that money on? Well, sometime later this year, Niantic is expected to release its next major title. a little something called Harry Potter, Wizards Unite. What did we say about 5G devices and CES? DLink has announced a 5G Wi-Fi router ahead of CES that promises to deliver you internet at 40 times wired broadband speeds, provided you live, of course, in an area that has 5G coverage. The router uses a Qualcomm chip set that can transmit 5G data. through either millimeter wave or sub-6GgHz towers. Millimeter wave is currently only available in a handful of cities,

but that's what's supposed to be going wide later this year and next. The router can also support voiceover LTE if you're interested in just making traditional phone calls. But this is the promise of 5G, at least for home internet consumers. Quoting from Jeremy Horwitz in Venturebeat, DLink's key selling point for the DWR 2010 is convenience. Assuming there's a 5G network in your neighborhood and 5G data pricing is reasonable, a cellular carrier could offer you high-speed home broadband service with zero installation hassle. Just plug the router into a wall near a window and if the SIM cards pre-installed, join the network.

In theory, the router could work with current and future AT&T and Verizon 5G services, and DLink expects it will expand broadband availability to remote areas currently limited to dial-up and DSL services. A secondary selling point for the router is speed. The 5G Gateway's bandwidth promises to stream 4K video content with ease and to support little to zero lag in online gaming. This sort of reduced latency is a key feature of 5G networks and is expected to enable both ultra-high-resolution videos

and instantly responsive, immersive 3D slash VR streaming, end quote. Now, caveat, caveat, Verizon currently offers 5G data in only four U.S. cities, but their 5G plan offers unlimited data for $70 a month. AT&T, however, has hinted that its forthcoming 5G service will be capped at 15 gigabytes of data a month, which would be pretty dumb because you would basically be able to blast through, that in just a couple of days. But no one ever accused telecoms of not at least attempting to gouge you, at least at first, on the price of any new technology, before eventually bowing to the fact that any new technology

will eventually become commoditized, of course. They just can never get over the fact that in the end, they're nothing but a series of dumb pipes. I want to come back once again to Netflix's recent interactive Black Mirror episode, Bander, Snatch because far from just being a one-off gimmick, I've been reading and hearing a lot of things that suggests that this could actually be something of a watershed moment that maybe represents the ushering in of an entirely new format. Choose your own adventure style narratives. They're interesting, right? Intriguing. But more than interesting, such a format might actually have certain advantages that suggest that this is something we'll see a lot more of in the future, because such a format is, A, harder to pirate,

and B, increases viewer engagement, which, guess what, gives programmers like Netflix more data about users. Now, of course, we know that Netflix uses data to help make programming and production decisions. They know what we watch and what we don't, and crucially what we try and then abandon. But quoting from The Verge,

by putting the same kinds of interconnected decision-making to work within one title, Bander Snatch can generate more robust pattern discovery and insights into trend analysis than traditional content can. Where the company previously focused its data gathering on the ways users engaged with content, what they watched, when, and for how long, this new data is indicative of real-world decisions like product preference, musical taste, and engagement with human behavior. Bander Snatch only presents users with two options at any given moment. In the future, Netflix could present scenarios with a greater number of,

of choices, each tailor-made for data harvesting. Where sequencing is relative, such as the parallel branching storylines in Bander Snatch that portray different paths Stefan might take that have no bearing on each other, Netflix could position certain story beats before others, depending on who's watching and what their past choices have said about what they want out of a story, end quote. And wait, there's more. If you've watched Bander Snatch, even for four. five minutes, then you'll know that the first choice you're asked to make is what cereal

Stefan eats for breakfast. You see where this is going, right? Product placement. But more than that, we know from recent history, recent examples like, say, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, that in the world of big data, when you can keep track of user preferences, eventually you get enough data points that you can slice and dice all of those thousands of data points to create a profile of anybody. The classic hypothetical example is Democrats say tending to select Heinz ketchup while Republicans tended to prefer hunts. So in a scenario where Netflix can now track preferences inside of narratives, boom, a universe of fresh marketing and advertising possibilities. How ironic would it be if Black Mirror, the show famous for giving us a glimpse

of a dystopian tech panopticon future is actually instrumental in ushering in a new dystopian panopticon media and marketing future. Now it's time for the weekend long reads brought to you by nobody. If you're a brand or company that wants to sponsor our most popular segment, the reason why Fridays are always the most downloaded day of the week, please get in touch at podcast at techmeme.com. First up, of course, the podcast recommendation for the week. We've been talking so much about Fortnite recently.

I thought, I wonder if there's a whole ecosystem of Fortnite podcasts out there. Guess what there is? And I found one podcast in that ecosystem in particular that I thought would be a good compliment to this show because, like us, it's a daily show. Daily Fortnite is a podcast that comes out seven days a week, just like this show, it's 15 to 20 minutes long. and like this show, you get the latest news, the latest updates in the world of Fortnite, but also, crucially, strategies, tips, tricks. The idea is to get better at the game.

Every day, in every way, a little better Fortnite player. I find that idea fascinating. It's a news show, but it's also coaching you, kind of. Talk about news you can use. So if you're a Fortnite fanatic or just Fortnite curious, if you want to get a sense of what all the fuss is about, maybe, search your podcast app for Daily Fortnite. and subscribe.

Next, this is not a long read suggestion, just a suggestion for you typography geeks out there. A group of designers have updated the Courier font, that classic holdover from the era of typewriters. It's called Courier Prime, and it's available to download for free under the open font license. Quoting the designers themselves,

since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates such as one page equals one minute of screen time. But there's no reason Currier has to look terrible. We set out to make the best damn courier ever, end quote. Check out the link in the show notes to Currier Prime.

I'm not being paid to suggest this. I just saw it and thought it was cool. The first actual Long Reads suggestion is from the Huffington Post, and it's about Ambrosia, the startup that claimed by giving people infusions of blood from young persons, they might be able to help cure diseases and reverse aging. That weird vampiristic notion of taking the blood of the young to keep the old alive made for obvious framing headlines, scare headlines, joke headlines,

along with rumors that Peter Thiel, among others, was interested in investing in the company, all that led to a lot of press attention for Ambrosia. But let's just say that when the Huffington Post took another look at the company recently, the science behind its service, the career of the 34-year-old founder, Jesse Karmazen. There were a lot of questions that popped up around Ambrosia. Chief among them, does the purported miracle medical treatment actually work? Next, we've been covering the evolving conventional wisdom that there is a new arms race among nation states to be the first to take advantage of the advances supposedly coming in artificial intelligence research. fears of competing countries getting a leg up has led to calls to nationalize certain aspects of AI research to some degree or even restrict research dissemination entirely on national security grounds.

But as the drumbeat to do something along those lines in the U.S. has grown louder, there is also a growing concern in Silicon Valley that tying up AI research in red tape, even on national security grounds, would only serve to do the thing. Such restrictions were designed to prevent, i.e., allow other companies. to leapfrog ahead of the U.S. in AI development. Quoting the New York Times piece on this, tech companies, academics, and policymakers are calling on the Commerce Department to take a light hand with AI export rules ahead of a January 10th deadline for public comment.

Their argument has three main points. Restrictions could harm companies in the United States and help international competitors. They could stifle technology improvements, and they may not make much of a difference anyway. Next, more on Netflix. The Ringer has a piece up about Birdbox, that other recent Netflix original

that has gotten a lot of attention. This is the movie starring Sandra Bullock, which Netflix took the rare step of bragging about, bragging about how many people watched it over the holidays. Netflix claimed 45 million accounts watched the film, the best ever debut for an original movie on the platform, they said. If you're like me, You never heard of Birdbox, and then boom, sometime over the holiday weekend, you couldn't

stop hearing about it because it was on all of social media all the time, especially that photo of a blindfolded Sandy Bullock in the boat. Well, this ringer piece has a look at exactly that sort of memeification about how getting a movie or a song to turn into a meme has suddenly become the most effective promotion you maybe don't even have to buy. And whether or not those Birdbox challenges, on YouTube, those bird box dances on TikTok, and all the rest of it are actually organic, or if they're really just the clever long arm of Netflix, PR, and promotion behind all of this?

Spoiler alert, the jury is still out on that question. Next, I'm quite sure this is the first time I've ever linked to a story from Audubon magazine, the magazine of the Audubon Society. But there is a tech angle here, trust me. We knew Red Dead Redemption 2 was a huge, huge open universe game where you could do all sorts of things beyond just shooting people and riding horses. In fact, it turns out that if your hobby is birding, you can actually do some extensive birding in game. So consider this a game review from a professional birder. Quote, in all there are about 200 distinct interactive species of animals in RDR2 and more.

more than 40 different plant species. I spent most of my time finding birds and was impressed with the breadth and relative accuracy of the species represented. Birds change with habitat. Rosiette's spoonbills and great eagrots feed in the bayous of Sandinie. Laughing galls and red-footed boobies roost along the coast while eagles and condors soar over mountain peaks. Each of these are crafted with accurate field marks and habits.

There are dozens of species I couldn't even find, including Carolina parakeets, for guineas hawks, and pilliated woodpeckers. Just like real-life birding, you're never guaranteed to see anything, end quote. And finally today, this is a piece that you're either smart enough to understand, so it's going to be right up your alley, or else you're like me, and you try to understand it as best you can, because you really want to feel like you're just the sort of person who is smart enough to read and understand pieces like this. It's from Quantum Magazine, and it's titled How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error Correcting Code.

Here's a taste. Quote, a funny thing happened in 2014 when physicists found evidence of a deep connection between quantum error correction and the nature of space, time, and gravity. In Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is, is defined as the fabric of space and time, or spacetime, bending around massive objects. A ball tossed into the air travels along a straight line through spacetime, which itself bends back toward Earth. But powerful as Einstein's theory is, physicists believe gravity must have a deeper quantum

origin from which the semblance of a space-time fabric somehow emerges. That year, 2014, three young quantum gravity researchers came to an astonishing realization. They were working in physicists' theoretical playground of choice, a toy universe called anti-desider space that works like a hologram. The bendy fabric of spacetime in the interior of the universe is a projection that emerges from entangled quantum particles living on its outer boundary. Ahmed Amheri, Z. Dong, and Daniel Harlow did calculations suggesting that this holographic emergence of space time works just like a quantum. error correcting code. They conjectured in the Journal of High Energy Physics that space time itself is a code, in anti-desider universes at least. The paper has triggered a wave of activity in the

quantum gravity community and new quantum error correcting codes have been discovered that capture more properties of space time, end quote. So, if like me, you probably needed some helpful explainers just to get through some of that. I've also linked to the Hacker News thread about this piece, which does contain a lot of good links and summaries, helpfully provided by the super nerds there. That is all for today and for this week. Quick programming note that those promised weekend bonus episodes will not be starting this weekend. I knew with the shortened week this week that folks would be coming back from vacation, and this would not be the weekend to try to schedule interviews

to launch the new episodes. But I have got them penciled in to start next weekend, and even then that's flexible depending on how things go. But I promise they'll be coming soon. I've already actually recorded about three interviews for bonus episodes, and I think you're really going to love them. Deeper dives, as I said, into specific things we've spoken about, maybe even things we spoke about on today's show.

Anyway, enjoy your weekend. Talk to you on Monday.