Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/11 - Mooaaarrr... Cameras on Smartphones!

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

Motherboard shames the telecom companies into not selling us out, shareholders are suing Alphabet’s board, the government shutdown claims more tech victims, Apple says, “We can add more cameras also!” and the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Go.Bitrise.io/ride Metalab.co Links: I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone (Motherboard) AT&T says it’ll stop selling your location data, amid calls for a federal investigation (Washington Post) Google Board Sued for Hushing Claims of Executive Misconduct (Bloomberg) Government shutdown: TLS certificates not renewed, many websites are down (ZDNet) Apple Plans Three New iPhones This Year, Plays Catch-Up on Cameras (WSJ) Amazon Developing Game Streaming Service (The Information) The Smart Touch Weekend Longreads: Demon Underneath: John DeLorean and the Invention of the Future (The Outline) The Rise and Demise of RSS (Motherboard) Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber shaped Internet music journalism and now leaves it behind (Los Angeles Times) Inside look at modern web browser (part 1) (Developers.Google) The Race to Diagnose Cancer With a Simple Blood Test (2069 - Medium) Lasers vs. Microwaves: The Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage (ieee Spectrum) PREPARING FOR Y2038 (ALREADY?!) (blogs.akamai) VOTE FOR THE RIDE HOME FOR BUZZFEED'S 2019 PODCAST LIST Or: email [e-mail] and make sure "podcast" is in the subject line. Thx! 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 tech meme ride home for Friday, January 11th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, motherboard shames the telecom companies into not selling us out. Shareholders are suing Alphabet's board of directors.

The government shutdown claims more tech victims. Apple says we can add more cameras. And the weekend long reads suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. It's a story that fell through the cracks this week. and I apologize for that, but maybe you saw it anyway. I've got a link to it in the show notes. Earlier this week, Motherboard did an investigative piece

where they gave a bounty hunter some money to try to see if that bounty hunter could locate them just via their smartphone. And for a mere $300, the bounty hunter was successful, no problem. The reason was, as the piece highlights, it's simply been super, super easy to find anyone because U.S. telecom carriers routinely sell customer location data to third parties. It is something that we have spoken about on here before.

It's egregious that this business even exists. And even though there are legitimate uses for things like location data selling for, I don't know, like roadside assistance, there's all sorts of good use cases, we should still pass a law that at the very least makes it harder for, say, a run-of-the-mill stalker to be able to find, you in real time for just a couple hundred bucks. End of story. Well, the outcry to the motherboard piece was so intense that AT&T and T-Mobile have announced they will stop selling location data to third-party service providers by March. AT&T is terminating every location deal it has, what Owen Williams called the nuclear option.

T-Mobile said it will end location aggregation and Verizon says it is why. down existing deals and will only continue them when users actively consent. Notably silent on all this, at least at the time of this recording, Sprint. So, huge, huge win for all of us, although there are still all those pesky apps that sell your location data, and even baseband firmware on a lot of chips on the market now can track you. But again, all that really means is that it's time for some laws, people. This industry will only go underground until we put some defined sets of no-nows in place. A group of shareholders is suing Alphabet's board of directors claiming that the directors failed in their fiduciary duty by covering up sexual misconduct by alphabet execs,

approving big payouts to settle complaints about said misconduct. and specifically approving a $90 million exit payment to Android creator Andy Rubin after details of his alleged misconduct or misbehavior surfaced. The group of Google employees who organized that recent company-wide walkout said in a statement yesterday that they supported this shareholder lawsuit, quote, We have all the evidence we need that Google's leadership does not have our best interests at heart, the group's representatives wrote. Interesting little detail on this, though, quoting from Bloomberg, the complaint is a derivative case filed on behalf of the company against its board of directors, which means any damages recovered by the plaintiff would go back to Google, end quote. More government shutdown fallout that relates to tech. Over 80 government websites, including those for NASA and the Department of Justice, are down at the time of this recording. Because TLS certificates have not been renewed because nobody is at work and able to renew them.

Quoting from ZDNet, websites with expired certificates where admins followed proper procedures and implemented correctly functioning HSTS, HTP strict transport security policies, are down for good. And users can't access these portals, not even to browse for basic information. government websites with expired TLS certificates, but which didn't implement HSTS, show an HTPS error in users' browsers, but this error can be bypassed to access the site via HTTP, end quote. So again, you might be saying, big deal, I can't access government websites, do I care, although some of these might be hosting information you would need. I mean, the Department of Justice and the Court of Appeals, for example. But also, and we've mentioned this before, since IT staff for critical government infrastructure and departments haven't been considered vital government workers before, at least in a wholesale sort of class-based level, as many cybersecurity experts have warned, hey, this might be a great time for hostile countries to carry out cyber attacks on U.S. U.S. government systems. And that would be a big deal, wouldn't it?

It sort of feels super early in the cycle for rumors like this to me, but then Tim Cook has been on a media tour talking to Allensundry after that guidance restatement. So maybe truthful details are being leaked out to set a narrative here. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that despite rumors of sluggish sales for the iPhone 10R. Despite rumors of sluggish sales, perhaps because of the confused iPhone lineup with the cheap iPhone 10R seemingly in the middle of the lineup, remember the 10R is the cheaper LCD iPhone. Despite all that, Apple intends to stick with a three iPhone lineup this year, and it will stick

with a lower priced LCD model as well. Why? The sources tell the journal that it, quote, partly because the planned LCD handset has been in the product pipeline for months and the plan can't be altered easily, they said, end quote. But hey, the little birdies also tell the Wall Street Journal that Apple is ready to jump on that more cameras bandwagon. The sources also say that the high-end iPhone model later this year will sport a triple rear camera.

More rumor-mongering, and I say that, in the most polite possible way, sources are telling the information that Amazon is developing a game streaming service, a video game streaming service, but it isn't likely to launch until next year at the earliest. So, I mean, look, why not, right? Amazon owns Twitch, and I can super, super see an interesting streaming gaming option if you integrated closely with Twitch. And Amazon actually already has a service called Twitch Prime, which offers a link. limited number of streaming games. Streaming gaming is what the whole industry is moving toward, and the information points

out this key detail that should have been obvious, given all that. Quote, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are in especially strong positions to offer game streaming services because they are the three most important providers of cloud computing services with data centers around the world. With its Amazon Web Services Unit, Amazon is by far the lead. in the sector with a 32% share of the cloud services market in the third quarter of last year, compared with 17% for Microsoft and 8% for Google, according to Canales, a research firm, end quote. And then there's the whole Alexa platform to think about.

Are you seeing it? Perhaps we're witnessing already the early moves of a whole consumer voice and cloud-based ecosystem that Amazon is prepping right in front of our noses. And hey, if the future of entertainment is subscriptions, for video, for games, for whatever, I mean, who's got subscriptions down better than Amazon Prime? Another CES is soon to be in the books. So let's wrap up our wrapping up of CES with a brief selection

of a few of the more off-the-wall products that flew by my transom over this. last week, which may or may not be good ideas. First up, everyone tweeted about the NUMMI 2.0, the $7,000 smart toilet unveiled by Kohler. Actually, Kohler wants to stress it's an intelligent toilet. It's got built-in surround speakers with Amazon Alexa built-in to the speakers so you can ask about the weather, listen to news, and order more toilet paper. but it also has ambient mood lighting, a heated seat, and warm water cleaning, and a dryer,

and automatic lid opening and closing and flushing, which for $7,000, it's sure better. But what joke to go with here? The mind reels, do I want to go with, do I even want my toilet to be intelligent? Or maybe I should have gone with when I said they want to put Alexa in everything. everything, I wasn't kidding. Along a similar line, Korean startup Monit debuted a new diaper monitor. That's a little hockey puck style sensor that you stick on a diaper and it monitors the moisture level and even the air quality around your child's diaper so that you can get a smartphone alert to let you know Junior needs changing. And lots of people had a lot of snarking things to

say about this, but it also lets you track your baby's toilet habits over time to keep track of regularity and health issues. And I have to say, as someone with a member of my household still in diapers at this very moment, that's not a completely insane thing to me. And finally, also in what I would categorize is the category of maybe not needed, but maybe not insane, the Weld Smart Belt is being touted as an Apple Watch for your waist. It's a belt with sensors to track your physical activity and even do fall detection, just like the Apple Watch does. But the main idea here is to keep track of your expanding waistline and send that data over time to a connected app. Quote, Weld takes the health tech industry to an entirely new level with its customized plans

for fitness goals, said Weld CEO and co-founder Sean King in a statement. Which look may prove to be true, already available to purchase in Korea and Japan. It's time for the weekend long reads suggestions brought to you this week by SmartTouch. We have spoken a lot about CES this week, and there was a lot of smart home tech that debuted at CES. But if you want to fully trick out your home with any new smart tech, I point you to SmartTouch. SmartTouch provides design, installation, and integration solutions for home automation, home audio, whole house audio, home security, home control, including lighting, HVAC, and more. Smart Home Control and Entertainment right at your fingertips. SmartTouch. Check them out at smarttouchUSA.com.

First up, the weekly podcast suggestion, which is this week, the Cloudcast. The Cloudcast is the number one independent cloud computing. podcast. Every single week, they talk about the companies and the technologies that will change the cloud computing landscape for the coming years. Maybe they'll talk this week about Amazon's possible streaming video game service. The Cloudcast recently did a 2018 year-in-review episode that I listened to to Bone Up on this stuff. In their most recent episode, they spoke with Jeff Maerson about the state of cloud-native application development. So if you're a dev working in this area, and you're not aware of this show. Search your podcast app for the

Cloudcast. The first long read suggestion comes from the outline, and it's a long one, like tens of thousands of words. Before there was Elon Musk, there was John DeLorean. If you think Elon Musk seems a little erratic at times, have you read about John DeLorean? If you've never taken a deep dive into the Delorean legend. This is one of the wildest entrepreneurial stories of all time. Check out, Demon Underneath, John Delorean and the Invention of the Future. Amazingly written and beautifully designed, as the outline always does it. Next, an important history lesson from motherboard that helps you understand how the internet got to be the way it is right now. It's called the rise and demise of RSS. As the tagline to the story says, before the internet was consolidated

into centralized information silos, RSS imagined a better way to let users control their online personas. The great Dave Weiner is, of course, all over this story. And so if you read this and want even more background on the history of RSS, check out the, I think it's an hour and a half long interview I did with Dave for the Internet History podcast. Next, more history. If you're of a certain age than one of the most formative website,

when it came to music and shaping your whole musical aesthetic was, and maybe for some people still is, Pitchfork. The L.A. Times has a profile up of Ryan Schreiber who founded Pitchfork.com as a teenager. Schreiber recently announced he is stepping down from Pitchfork and the piece hints that possibly there might be some sort of curated musical streaming service in Schreiber's future. Next, I swear I didn't plan this, but on the ride home subreddit user KV underscore 87 also pointed me to a long multi-part history of the modern web browser and how it got to be the way it is.

It's from Google's developers' website, and it's not just history. It's also a very in-depth, almost schematic look at how modern web browsers function and how they evolved into how they currently function. It's another multi-parter, so another super deep dive if this is your bag. But enough history. Let's jump back to the future on Medium's 269 magazine, which is devoted to predicting what life will be like in the next 50 years, science journalist Ron Winslow looks at the race to diagnose cancer with simple blood tests. No, this is not a sub-tweet of Theranos.

There have been promising advancements made in the area of blood testing for cancer, cancer diagnosis in recent years. And a lot of researchers and I should also mention venture capitalists are very excited about this area all the sudden. And the IEE's Spectrum magazine has a look at the future of magnetic storage with a long read about how Seagate and Western Digital are pursuing rival technologies to push the limits of hard disk drives. For 50 years, the aerial density of hard disks increase on average 40% a year. Lately, that has slowed to an advance of around 10%. So when am I going to get my 20 or even 40-terabyte hard drive? Well, Seagate and Western Digital are trying to get there, and the billion-dollar bet is between using either lasers or

microwaves to do so. Finally, let's split the difference between history and the future. A blog post from Eric Nygren at Akamai talks about the past and the future. If you're old enough to remember Y2K, you'll remember there was not an insignificant chance that the world could blow up simply because legacy software never imagined you need to allow for there being a new century or a new millennium. That all got fixed, of course. The world did not blow up then. But guess what? quote, in 2038 on January 19th, the Unix epoch time will exceed the size of a signed 32-bit

integer time underscore T value or roughly 2.1 billion seconds since the epoch of 0,000,000 on January 1st, 1970. We have somewhat more time to deal with the systems that will break 19 years from now. However, as we get closer, there will be increasing impacts. on software working with future dates. Shortly after Y2K, we made jokes about next up, Y, 2038, but back then it felt an eternity in the future and likely to be someone else's problem.

Now that we're halfway there, and we have already reached the point where Y-2038 issues can cause software failures, it is a good opportunity to start planning for Y-2038. For example, software may already be having issues working with 20-year certificate lifetimes or 20-year mortgages and the frequency of these issues will only increase as we get closer to Y-2038, end quote. So maybe not Apocalypse now so much as Apocalypse Maybe.

Once again, Part 2, the Unixing. That's all for the weekend long-reed's suggestions brought to you by SmartTouch. The folks at SmartTouch are regular listeners of this show, just like you. They answered my call for someone to pick up the Long-Ready's. sponsorship mantle. So if your New Year's resolution is to finally jump into the smart home future, especially if you're in the New York City or D.C. area where SmartTouch is based, get in touch with SmartTouch at SmartTouchUSA.com.

There's two T's in that, by the way, smarttouch USA.com. SmartTouch. Smart technology designed for you. And because these are friends of the pod, if you get in touch to have them help you trick out your home, tell them Brian sent you. Hey, Mutant Podcast Army, time to assemble once more. The final, final link in the show notes today after the Long Reads link is to a page where you can submit podcasts to BuzzFeed's 2019 podcast suggestion list. You're supposed to suggest podcasts that they should include in their 2019 list in the comments of that post. So, you know, if you felt like spreading the

word about the tech meme right home, please do that there. I think you can also email the dude who's compiling the BuzzFeed list directly at Scott. Brian at BuzzFeed.com. That's Scott. Brian, B-R-Y-A-N. He spells it the wrong way at BuzzFeed.com. Though he does want to make sure that you put the word podcast in the subject line if you email him. It's funny, I've been going through the back catalog of the Flop House podcast for a couple of months now, and there's this one episode where they get mentioned on the AV club's podmas column, and all of the sudden, everyone is listening to them, just overnight. Man, that pod mask column used to be so freaking good until they changed formats and kind of ruined it.

I discovered so many podcasts from that. Anyway, vote for us in this BuzzFeed thing, which I guess is the closest thing we have to that now. they used to have podcasts on product hunt too, but that went away. Anyway, enjoy your weekend, everybody, and be sure to check your feeds because a little birdie tells me the first weekend bonus episode is coming.