Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/24 - RIP Clayton Christensen

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

Quick Share is coming to challenge AirDrop, how iOS 13 has blown up location marketing, Google takes the wrapping of Dataset Search, an interesting eSports raise and, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: DoubleUp.agency BelovedRobot.com/nolowcode Links: Clayton Christensen, guru of disruptive innovation and Latter-day Saint leader, dies at 67 (DesertNews) Exclusive: Quick Share is Samsung’s alternative to AirDrop for Galaxy phones (XDADevelopers) Apple, Broadcom Strike $15 Billion Worth of Chip-Supply Deals (Bloomberg) Apple and Google’s tough new location privacy controls are working (Fast Company) Shlayer, No. 1 Threat for Mac, Targets YouTube, Wikipedia (ThreatPost) Google’s search engine for scientists upgraded for better data scouring (The Verge) Esports Training Site ProGuides Raises $5 Million In Seed Funding (Forbes) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Inside the World's Highest-Stakes Industrial Hacking Contest (Wired) We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point. (NYTimes) The Secret History of Facial Recognition (Wired) Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes (Wired) Jobs, Cook, Ive—Blevins? The Rise of Apple’s Cost Cutter (WSJ) The Tesla Skeptics Who Bet Against Elon Musk (Bloomberg Businessweek) The Internet of Beefs (Ribbonfarm.com) The Hacker News Thread on The Internet of Beefs 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 right home for Friday, January 24th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Quick Share is coming to challenge AirDrop, how iOS 13 has blown up location marketing. Google takes the wrapping off of dataset search, an interesting e-sports raise, and of course the weekend long read

suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, that was fast. After the backlash that we spoke about, wasn't it just yesterday, Google has apparently backtracked on its desk top search redesign, which made it hard to distinguish ads from organic results, and will instead what it's calling experiment with favicon placements, quoting the Google Search Liaison Twitter account. Quote, last week we updated the look of search on desktop to mirror what's been on mobile for months. We've heard your feedback about the update.

We always want to make search better, so we're going to experiment with new placements for favicons. are experimenting will begin today. Over the coming weeks, while we test, some might not see favicon, while some might see them in different placements as we look to bring a modern look to the desktop, end quote. And some sad news. Clayton Christensen, the author of the theory of disruptive innovation, has died at the age of 67, quoting the Desert News. His brother, Carlton, told the Desert News that Christensen died Thursday evening of complications from cancer treatment in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had been a notable part of the Latter-day Saint community for over 40 years.

He was considered an equally robust spiritual thinker. Christensen introduced disruptive innovation in the Harvard Business Review in 1995, but the theory and the term burst into the public consciousness in 1997 when he published The Innovators Dilemma, when new technologies cause great firms to fail. Soon afterward, Intel CEO Andy Grove stood up with a copy of the book at Comdex in Las Vegas and declared it the most important book he'd read in a decade. The two men appeared together on the cover of Forbes magazine in 1999, and both Christensen and the business world were changed forever. Christensen initially used the term disruptive technologies. Grove dubbed it the Christensen effect.

After Christensen altered it to disruptive innovation, the term became ubiquitous. Five years ago, the economist said it had long since entered the zeitgeist, end quote. Indeed it has. I'd argue Christensen's writing influenced the entire direction of startup thinking for at least the internet generation of companies, the internet era we are currently living in. More from Max Weinbach at XDA developers. Sources are telling him that Samsung is working on what it is calling QuickShare, an airdrop-like feature to allow sharing of files between enabled Galaxy phones,

likely launching with the upcoming Galaxy S20 Plus. Quote, this will basically work like most of these other nearby sharing services. If you are near another user with a supported device, they will show up, and you can share the picture, video, or file. You will have two options for sharing, contacts only, or with everyone. Contacts only will only allow you to share files with other Samsung social users who you have in your contacts. Everyone will let you send or receive files from anyone with a supported device in your area.

Unlike other services like Airdrop, QuickShare will have a cloud aspect to it. QuickShare will let you temporarily upload files to Samsung Cloud. These files will then be streamed to Samsung Smart Things devices and downloaded locally. These files can be up to one gigabyte, with a total of two gigabytes being sent per day, end quote. And reading the tea leaves, one little Apple Mystery Saw, involved, Broadcom has signed two new multi-year agreements with Apple, saying it expects to generate $15 billion over the course of the contracts by supplying wireless chips for Apple devices released through mid-20203. So again, we now know that Apple won't be attempting to become

fully chip independent to spin up all its own chips until at least 2023. As Mark German puts it in Bloomberg, quote, Broadcom put its radio frequency chip unit up for sale last year. Thursday's disclosure lets potential acquirers know that they're buying into a substantial business relationship with Cupertino-based Apple, end quote. And we've got some data on another major Apple initiative and its impact on various ecosystems. Since iOS 13, Apple has been warning users when apps are trying to track their location. Since they've implemented that, marketers have apparently collected 68% less background and 24% less foreground data. This information comes from location sciences, which helps marketers analyze location data,

and it comes on top of a Digidae report last week that said apps are seeing opt-in rates under 50% for collection of location data when the app is not in use. Quoting Fast Company, none of this means that. that location tracking is going away, but with more people opting out of sharing their precise location with apps, advertisers now have to make do with less accurate information. That, in turn, could make them rethink overly invasive tracking in the first place, end quote. Which, that was the whole point, right? So good. But actually, you should read the piece because it goes on to talk about where marketers are turning to next in order to track you all the time. From the news you can use file, according to Kaspersi Lab, last year, 2019, around 30% of all MacOS malware detections derived from variants of a single Trojan, the Schlaer Trojan, which is a relatively unsophisticated bit of malware that spreads via fake app installs and targets users of YouTube and Wikipedia, among others, quoting from ThreatPost.

Schlayer generally arrives on users' desktop via a malicious download. Caspersky noted that the cybercriminals behind the code have set up an elaborate distribution system with a number of channels leading users to download the malware. Schlaer spreads via a partner network of thousands of websites, often targeting visitors of legitimate sites, including YouTube and Wikipedia. Kasperski explained in an analysis of the code released Thursday, quote, YouTube where links to the malicious website were included in video descriptions, and Wikipedia where such links were hidden in the article's references, end quote. To put this affiliate network together, Schlayer's operators, court website owners, and those willing to say, upload a YouTube video or edit a Wikipedia page with a promise to monetize their sites in exchange for pushing malicious links, pointing to Schlaer downloads. The Crooks offer websites relatively high payment for each malware installation made by American users, prompting over 1,000 partner sites to distribute Schlaher, according to the research. Most of the campaigns hinge on entertainment themes on winning web users, searching for, say, a popular TV series episode,

or a sports broadcast will be redirected to a fraudulent site claiming to offer content streams. In reality, the links on the site are pushing the malware. Kaspersky has also seen advertising landing pages redirecting victims to fake flash player update pages, end quote. And FYI, Dataset Search, Google's search engine for datasets, is now out of beta. It has a mobile version and a bunch of new tools to better filter searches. And it also has access to around 25 million datasets, quoting the verge. Dataset search launched in September 2018, with Google hoping to slowly unify the fragmented world of online open access data. Although many institutions like universities, governments, and labs publish data online, it's often difficult to find using traditional search.

But by adding open source metadata tags to their web pages, these groups can have their data indexed by dataset search, which now covers a huge range of information, everything from Skisorke. skiing injuries to volcano eruptions to penguin populations. Google would not share any specific usage figures for the search engine, but it said hundreds of thousands of users have tried dataset search since its launch, and the reaction from the scientific community was overall positive, end quote. And let me squeeze in a quick, interesting raise here. Proguides is a startup that has raised a $5 million seed funding round, and the best way to describe what Proguides does is to say that they're sort of a master class, but for competitive gaming.

In other words, you can get tutorials on how to be a better gamer from the best in the business, or as the copy says on the Pro Guide homepage this morning, learn how to master your AD carry play from one of the greatest bot laners in the world. That has something to do with League of Legends, apparently. Quoting Forbes, for $7.99 a month,

Pro Guides offers online classes for improving performance in competitive games from popular professional gamers like Haidu Lam in League of Legends or Alexander Simple Kosleev in CounterStrike Global Offensive. Founded in 2015, Pro Guides currently counts 1 million registered users accessing 55 courses for eight games including Fortnite, Harstown, and Overwatch, and it expects to expand to 20 titles by 2020, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. I think I did this last year, but first up, let me point you to Wired's look inside the annual Pone to Own Hacker Conference, because it speaks to something that you know is a big fear of mine.

Quote, this isn't like previous Pone to Own events, which have run for more than a decade and pitted hackers against everything from web browsers to phones to cars. Pone to Own Miami held at the S4 Industrial Control System Security Conference has focused its participants' skills for the first time exclusively on industrial control software. Every target is an application that touches physical machinery. The compromises could in many cases have catastrophic effects from blackouts to life-threatening industrial accidents, end quote. Next up, you know how municipalities and governments in various places have implemented, are implementing or are considering implementing facial recognition bans, bands on the technology. I didn't cover it, but there has been discussion of doing something like this in the EU just this past week.

And then today there was a story that London police will begin using facial recognition cameras within a month, which I guess is going in the other direction, but also will no doubt be controversial. I point you to this op-ed from Bruce Schneier, who says, focusing on only facial recognition technology is missing the point. The surveillance state, and the surveillance economy sits on a kind of three-legged stool, and facial recognition is only one leg of that stool, one vector, the identification vector. Quote, regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won't make any difference if, in response, surveillance system switched to identifying people by smartphone Mac addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible, end quote.

Well, shot and now Chaser. Check out Wired's piece about the history of facial recognition technology, focusing on the pioneering work of one Woody Bledsoe 60 years ago, quote. Early in his career, Woody had been consumed with an attempt to give machines one particular relatively unsung but dangerously powerful human capacity, the ability to recognize faces. Lance knew that his father's work in this area, the earliest research on facial recognition technology had attracted the interests of the U.S. government's most secretive agencies. Woody's chief funders, in fact, seemed to have been front companies for the CIA.

Had Lance just incinerated the evidence of Washington's first efforts to identify individual people on a mass automated scale? End quote. Read to find out. Also from Wired, a behind-the-scenes look at Rotten Tomatoes, a site where humans, not algorithms, still run the show. The meeting works like this. Curators submit articles that may or may not be reviews, and the room decides if they are. That's it. Rotten Tomatoes will not consider reported features, tweets, or, to its eternal credit.

Recaps. Today's submissions include a Guardian piece on 30 Rock's over reliance on celebrity guests, a rambling discussion on a culture podcast, and a 2008 Entertainment Weekly piece about the short-lived daytime program, the Bonnie Hunt Show. All were swiftly labeled non-reviews, end quote. Next, we know that Tim Cook made his bones at Apple by creating the supply chain marvel that was the envy of the tech world 20 years ago. So is Tony Blevins the new name you should get to from Apple's executive suite because he's the man running the supply chain now. Quote, Tony Blevins, Vice President of Procurement, will stop at little to get a favorable deal. He has paraded manufacturers past competitors in Apple's lobby and spurred a UPS contract

by sending it back to UPS executives through FedEx. He persuaded subcontractors not to pay a chipmaker that Apple was in litigation with, depriving the chip company of $8 billion, according to, quote, court documents and people who recall the case. For years, Mr. Blevins wore a tourist trinket from Hawaii, a cheap puka shell necklace. He had negotiated to a $2 price from $5. It was a reminder to his staff that nothing should fetch full price, said Helen Wang, who worked on his procurement team for years. Quote, if he's like that for himself, you can only imagine how he is with company money, she said,

end quote. The piece notes that under Blevins's negotiating regime, for example, Apple paid Intel around $10 per modem chip in recent years, which was roughly 50% less than what Samsung paid Qualcomm for its wireless chips. And that can add up over billions of devices. Finally, let's end with a few things that are all sort of on the same theme. I've kind of become obsessed lately with internet cults, although I don't mean that entirely in the full-on negative way. Maybe fanboys or fan culture is the better word. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. You see it all the time, some person or company or product or movie or idea can attract essentially armies of worshippers ready to defend to the death their idol, whatever that idol may be. You know exactly what I'm

talking about. There's the wars over Star Wars, the wars over Marvel movies, the Apple fanboy wars versus the Android stands. Crypto is a space absolutely rife with fights between, say, Bitcoin maximalists and XRP heads. You see it with presidential candidates. You see it with like everything in modern life. And you see it happening on both sides is the thing. For every fanboy, there's somebody that is passionately against whatever we're talking about. Take Tesla, for example. We know that there's a whole crowd of folks for whom Tesla is nearly a religion, and Elon Musk is a little short of God. But you also know there's this whole other opposing culture that feels Tesla is a fraud and Musk is nothing short of a con artist. For example, read the Bloomberg

Business Week piece about the Tesla skeptics, the TSLAQ crowd on Twitter. I spoke about them recently. Quote, under normal circumstances, Tesla Q would be just another way for obsessives to find each other online, like hashtag paleo diet or hashtag juggalo. But these obsessives have proved they can shape perception and move the stock of America's most valuable carmaker. They've put Tesla under a microscope and they have succeeded in diluting the company's success, says Gene Munster, a managing partner at Loop.

ventures and a prominent bull. It leaves the average person who follows Tesla confused and concerned, end quote. Okay, so read that and then pair it with this essay titled The Internet of Beefs from Venkatesh Rao. Let me quote the opening here. You've heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It's a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems where there is, by design, no graceful way to shut it down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crash state, which might be impossible. Well, I came up with a term for the human version of this, beef only thinking. A beef only thinker is someone you simply cannot talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect,

and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode or block away and dish engage, end quote. And then from the conclusion, the end of history is why beef-only thinking is crash-only thinking for humans. The internet of beefs is a way of shorting our collective humanity and crashing old ways of being entirely with no promise of recovery and reboot. To participate is to lose. But building and maintaining increasingly costly defenses in the form of progressively thickening skins and strengthening force fields of passive-aggressive resistance is also unsustainable. And to retreat into what I call Walden Ponding, or to the cozy web, is to seed public spaces entirely to the MOOC-minorial economy and accelerate the crash. It is a no-exit,

hellish condition. The conclusion is inescapable. The Internet of Beefs will shut down and give way to something better only when we know who we want to be individually and collectively when the beefing stops and regenerate into that form. Only that will allow history to be reboot. and time to be restarted, end quote. Yes, this is a really interesting philosophical piece about all of internet culture and sort of how it's been designed to arrive at the state that it's in. And then, if you want to do one more thing just for pure irony's sake, I've also posted the link to the hacker news thread about this piece because Lordy, if there's a place in the tech

world where the internet of beefs takes place, it is there, of course. but also people made a lot of interesting points in the thread, and also in the comments to the original poster. So now, having said all of that, clearly I can't be one of those guys who just has to give you his take on the first episode of Picard, though I do have a take. I'm going to keep it to myself.

But without going into whether or not I think it was good or bad, suffice to say, there is some big mystery that's being unraveled on the show. Picard is probably going to have. to save the universe one last time or something. And watching that unravel, I found myself actually being annoyed that there was a plot. Like, it kind of got in the way of what I really wanted the show to be. I just like John Luke, so I just want to hang out with him.

I mean, I can see why you think you need to do all of the saving the universe stuff, but, you know, maybe you don't really need it. You know how people have been saying for a while now, Why not just give us a Star Wars show about little corners of the Star Wars universe without people named Skywalker in it? Why not give us a show about what it's like to be a Stormtrooper or maybe 10 episodes of what goes down every day at the Moes-Eysley Cantina? Like, this is a huge universe and we just like being in it. So let us be in it. Sure, I'm not saying that you have to do plotless doll shows or movies, but why does it always have to be saving the universe before it's going to explode again?

Like raising the stakes is a drug that wears off after about the 200th time. And especially for the Picard character, you don't need this. He's old. He's a character with pathos now. You could literally just do a season where Picard is retiring and he's doing a farewell tour around the universe and we just check in with this old friend and that planet and maybe solve the mystery here or have some fun there. Like maybe he has a nephew or something at Starfleet Academy who gets into trouble and

by the end of the season Picard goes in. to save him scent of woman style or something like that. There's lots of things that I can think of that would be interesting and even more interesting than just saving the universe again. Not everything needs to be defeating Thanos every time, guys. So owners of IP universes, we're begging you for more corners of those universes. We want to luxuriate in them. We're hungry for smaller stakes.

That's why the Mandalorian works so well. I mean, yes, there's the overarching Baby Yoda mystery, but, you know, one episode was essentially a heist film, the Bill Burr episode. One episode was basically seven samurai, you know, save the farmers from the Imperials thing. It was a day in the life of a bounty hunter kind of stuff. So makers of Picard, fine, I'll let you have your Picard Saves the Universe plot this season. But next season, can we have something quieter? Like, not only does it fit the character better, but geez, that's all I want to hang out with my friend Jean-Luc.

It's why people binge friends in the office and stuff like that all the time. We just want to hang out with our friends and sometimes stopping the world from exploding just gets in the way. Anywho, there endeth the rant. One weekend bonus episode coming at you tomorrow. Talk to you on Monday.