Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/22 - AT&T's "5G E" is.... zzzzzzzzz.....?

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

Might Apple’s Monday event be a huge anticlimax? Is AT&T’s “5G E” slower than 4G? YouTube is responsible for 37% of mobile Internet Traffic, what programming languages are on the up and the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Skillshare.com/ride Metalab.co Links: New York Times CEO warns publishers ahead of Apple news launch (Reuters) Apple’s plan for its new TV service: Sell other people’s TV services (Recode) 750,000 Medtronic defibrillators vulnerable to hacking (StarTribune) Facebook acknowledges concerns over Cambridge Analytica emerged earlier than reported (The Guardian) AT&T's fake 5G E is slower than Verizon's and T-Mobile's 4G (CNET) Mobile time-spent jumps up: YouTube corners ~40% of the traffic, Facebook less than 10% (WhatsNewInPublishing) The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2019 (RedMonk) Weekend Longreads: Meet Silicon Valley's 'China whisperer (CNNBusiness) Inside Garageband, the Little App Ruling the Sound of Modern Music (Rolling Stone) Grab vs. Go-Jek: Inside Asia’s Battle of the 'Super Apps' (Fortune) BETTER LIVING THROUGH CRISPR: GROWING HUMAN ORGANS IN PIGS (Wired) A MORE HUMANE LIVESTOCK INDUSTRY, BROUGHT TO YOU BY CRISPR (Wired) 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 Right Home for Friday, March 22nd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, might Apple's Monday event be a huge anti-climax?

Is AT&T's 5GE actually slower than 4G? YouTube is responsible for 37% of mobile internet traffic, what programming languages are on the up, and of course the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Mark German is reporting that Apple has signed up Vox for its upcoming news. subscription service, but only Vox. Other Vox Media properties will not participate in the service, at least initially. This report comes at the exact same time that the CEO of the New York Times

is warning fellow publishers that third-party distribution deals, like the one Apple is trying to get publishers to make for its new subscription service, can only lead to a loss of product control, comparing news outlets that partner with Apple to the Hollywood Studios that inadvertently helped Netflix grow. Quote, we tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else, Mark Thompson told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. We're also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of magimix blender with everyone else's journalism. If I was an American broadcast network, I would have thought twice about giving all of my library to Netflix. Thompson said in response to questions about any

talks with Apple to participate in the iPhone maker's new news service. Quote, even if Netflix offered you quite a lot of money, does it really make sense to help Netflix build a gigantic base of subscribers to the point where they could actually spend $9 billion a year making their own content and will pay me less and less for my library? Thompson asked. Meanwhile, back to the other subscription service coming on Monday. Peter Kafka says that Apple's new TV service will basically primarily just be a storefront for other streaming services, though Apple will host and serve

the streams. In other words, despite all the attention on Apple produced original content here, the goal is really just to sell other people's TV. So Netflix killer, this ain't? At least not yet. Quote, Apple's main focus, at least for now, will be helping other people sell streaming video subscriptions and taking a cut of the transaction. Apple may also sell its own shows, at least as part of a bundle of other services, but for now, Apple's original shows and movies should be considered very expensive giveaways, not the core product. That is much less exciting than Apple takes on Netflix in the streaming wars, but it is an accurate description. Even worse for people interested in exciting narratives, Apple has already been helping people sell video subscriptions and taking a cut of

the transaction for years. The difference, say people who've talked to Apple about its plans, is that instead of selling TV subscription apps surrounded by millions of other apps in its main app store, Apple plans on making a new storefront that's much more prominent for those who use Apple TV boxes and other Apple hardware. It will also be able to offer its own bundles. For instance, it could offer a package of HBO, Showtime and Stars at a price that's lower than you'd pay for each pay TV service on its own, end quote. Kafka goes on to suggest that basically what happened is that Apple looked at the rapid success that it experienced with Apple music adoption, 50 million subscribers and

counting, and thought, hey, we've got an install base of 1.4 billion users. This worked once. Let's just do that again. Now for video. Quote, another reason this could work, Amazon has already been very successful with its own version of the same idea. Facebook is also bullish on selling TV subscriptions and is pushing would-be partners to sign up so it can launch later this spring or summer, according to industry sources. Similarly, Comcast is rolling out Flex, a $5 a month service that gives you a bunch of free content, some of which you can also get in other places, and the ability to easily buy HBO, Showtime, etc.

Instead of offering exclusive content, Comcast is offering subscribers a Roku-like streaming box. If you are a fan of the Apple Can't Innovate Anymore Theory, some of the above will provide you more ammunition. Apple's big launch is a revamped version of something it's already doing and something its competitors are doing too. Quote, it's incremental shrugs in executive at a company that's working with Apple on the new new video store, end quote. Well, we'll know soon enough.

By the way, more speculation on what Monday might hold in store for us on one of the weekend bonus episodes this week. Well, this is basically a nightmare scenario. The Department of Homeland Security is warning of two vulnerabilities discovered which affect about 750,000 medtronic and planable defibrillators worldwide. The vulnerabilities could allow hackers to take control of the defibrillation devices, quoting the Star Tribune. The Homeland Security Department, which oversees security in critical U.S. infrastructure, including medical devices, issued an alert Thursday describing two types of computer hacking vulnerabilities. in 16 different models of Medtronic implantable defibrillators sold around the world,

including some still on the market today. The vulnerability also affects bedside monitors that read data from the devices in patients' homes and in-office programming computers used by doctors. Medtronic recommends that patients use only bedside monitors obtained from a doctor or from Medtronic directly to keep them plugged in so they can retrieve software updates and that patients maintain, quote, good physical control over. the monitor, end quote. A court filing from the Attorney General of the District of Columbia

alleges that Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica's data misuse months before it was ever reported, quoting from The Guardian. After publication of this article, the spokesperson acknowledged that Facebook employees heard rumors of data scraping by Cambridge Analytica in September 2015. The spokesperson said that this was a, quote, different incident from Cambridge Analytica's acquisition of a trove of data about as many as 87 million users that has been widely reported on in the past year. Quote, in September 2015, employees heard speculation that Cambridge Analytica was scraping

data, something that is unfortunately common for any internet service, the spokesperson said. In December 2015, we first learned through media reports that Kogan sold data to Cambridge Analytica and we took action. Those were two different things, end quote. The filing raised questions about when Facebook first learned about the misuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, the now defunct political consultancy. This timeline has long been complicated by the different corporate entities involved in Cambridge Analytica's data misuse. The data of as many as 87 million people was extracted from Facebook by GSR, a company formed by the former Cambridge University academic Alexander Kogan, then transferred to Cambridge Analytica's parent company, SCL, end quote.

CNET says, and this is me quoting their headline, AT&T's Fake 5GE is slower than Verizon and T-Mobile's 4G. Apparently, AT&T's 5G phones get an average speed of 28.8 megabits per second. Compare that to T-Mobile's 29.4 MbPS and Verizon's 29.9 mbps. Both of those companies use similar 4G-LTE Advanced Tech. quote, open signal, a company that looks into mobile network performance on Friday published a study comparing the speeds of AT&T, sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Though there wasn't a raging gulf, 5GE clocked in slower than services from Verizon and T-Mobile that use the comparable enhanced 4G technologies. The 5G speeds which AT&T users experience are very much typical 4G speeds and not the step change improvements which 5G.5.000.

promises, the report says. Quote, speed test data purporting to show the real-world experience of 5G evolution without verifying the capable devices were tested in a 5G evolution coverage area as shown by the indicator does not accurately represent the 5G evolution user experience, AT&T said in a statement. YouTube is now responsible for 37% of all mobile internet traffic, which is ahead of Facebook's 8.4%. And interestingly enough, Facebook runs neck and neck with Snapchat when it comes to mobile traffic in North America, because both Facebook and Snapchat are basically at that 8% number, while Instagram trails at 5.7% interestingly. All that is amidst the continued overall transition

to mobile internet usage generally. This data comes from Nielsen's total audience report, which indicates, quote, there's been a significant jump in mobile times. spent among 18 to 34-year-olds from 29% to 34%. The growth came at the expense of television viewing. This trend continues from a year earlier as live and time-shifted TV was surpassed by Mobile in Q3 2017, and now that gap has widened even further. For all U.S. audiences, mobile went up from 21% to 24% of time spent with media consumption, otherwise remaining flat at about 10.5 hours per day. day, end quote. In a different report on a slightly different topic, the MPA said today that streaming video subscriptions have surpassed cable TV subscriptions for the first time. Now, this is total number of

subscriptions, not the number of people subscribing. But the MPAA says that in 2018, the total number of streaming subscriptions rose 27% year over year to 613.3 million total subscriptions, while the number of cable subscriptions dropped 2% to 556 million subscriptions. What programming languages are on the up? What should you maybe be boning up on or maybe learning for the first time on something like Skillshare? According to a Red Monk study, which combined data from GitHub and Stack Overflow, TypeScript, Kotlin, and Julia usage is up. On the waning side of the equation, usage of Go, R, Scala, Closure, and Grover.

is down. Overall, the top-tier programming languages are what you'd expect them to be, JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C, Ruby, etc. The rankings for the top-tier languages are mostly unchanged. It's in the movement among the second tier that it gets interesting. TypeScript continues to climb the rankings, now just outside the top 10 of Red Monks' rankings right behind Swift. Go seems to be stagnating. JVM-based languages grew across the board last year, but this year, Kotlin use continued to surge while its brethren Scala, closure, and Groovy either plateaued or actually declined. And Rust is just holding steady. This may be disappointing for its most ardent fans, which includes some high-profile and highly

accomplished technologists, but Rust's glacial ascent is relatively unsurprising. Targeting similar if lower-level workloads than Go, a language itself that has plateaued in terms of placement among these rankings. Rust suffers from the limits of a lower popularity ceiling while not receiving quite the same attention that Go did as a product of Google generally, and people like Rob Pike specifically. By comparison, Russ's assent has been much more workmanlike, winning its serious fans over one at a time, end quote. Much deeper dive into this data. If you want, check the link in the show notes. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. I still have not had time to go on a hunt for new podcasts to recommend.

So I'm just going to real quick recommend a show that I've mentioned a couple times before. Coin Talk is the only crypto podcast that I listen to every week. It's a very newbie-friendly show, very crypto-curious friendly, not deep-in-the-weed stuff, but a good dip into recent issues and news and trends. And I especially recommend the most recent episode, the one from this week with the title Mark Toshi Zuckermoto, which sums up exactly why. I have this sneaking suspicion. Facebook's crypto program and pivot to privacy and all of that are all of a piece and probably a bigger deal than people are thinking.

Seriously, it's like Aaron read my mind, which, and I know Aaron a bit, so maybe he's a listener of the show, but also maybe great minds think alike and all that. Anyway, search your podcast app for Coin Talk and especially listen to the most recent episode. First up for the long reads, it's actually a short piece, but CNN has a profile up of friend of the podcast, Andresen Horowitz's Connie Chan. Since Connie was one of our weekend episode guests, I thought I'd point you to this profile to learn more about her. CNN calls her Silicon Valley's China Whisperer. Next, Wired has a piece up looking at Airbnb's so-called guerrilla war with local and municipal governments. Quote, Airbnb is engaged in a city-by-city block-by-block guerrilla war against local government, says Ulrich Binsner,

CEO of host compliance, which helps cities draft and enforce. rules for short-term rentals, sometimes putting it at odds with hosting platforms. They need to essentially fight every one of these battles like it's the most important battle they have, Binser said, end quote. The reason they have to contest every battle is that this is about taxes and regulations, and Airbnb can't afford to lose a single fight in a single place because that might set precedent that could be applied elsewhere. So it has to sweat every single challenge in every single city.

Rolling Stone has a look at Garage Band, what it calls, the little app that rules the sound of modern music. Musicians' applause for Apple's garage band, which celebrates its 15th birthday this year, humbly, still living in the media shadow of many of the tech giants more glittering products, is similar across genres and skill levels. Artists from Radiohead to Kenrick Lamar

have used the app to demo, produce, and sometimes even finalize master recordings. It allows you to not be constrained by what you can or can't play, Dan Smith, frontman of British band Bastille tells Rolling Stone, I can quickly get something out of my head, where I can write a song from start to finish in a couple of hours, end quote. Other digital audio workstation apps that also splashed onto the scene in the 2000s tech boom, such as Pro Tools, Ableton, and Fruitiloup's studio are often dismissed as intimidating or time-consuming, especially when compared to the

bare, intuitive, and friendly interface that's become a signature of Apple design, end quote. Fortune looks at the competition between the rival Asian ride-hailing apps Gojek and Grab. But of course, a la the Connie Chan conversation, these aren't just ride-hailing apps, not in Asia. They're everything apps. They're super apps. Quote, Anthony Tan, 37, and co-founder Hui Ling Tan, a 35-year-old fellow Malaysian, to whom Anthony is not related, have aspirations stretching far beyond the taxi business. They aim to transform Grab into an everyday super app that engages consumers on multiple fronts,

offering food delivery, digital payments, financial services, and even health care along with rides. Most of the region's 650 million consumers are only now getting access to conveniences long taken for granted in China and the West. Grab hopes to be the app that connects them to whatever goods and services they demand. With a 2017 GDP of $2.8 trillion Southeast Asia, were it a single country, would be the world's seventh largest economy. At its current growth rate, it would rank number four by 2023. But for investors, market size is only part of the appeal. Super Apps promise a new mode of connecting with consumers and an opportunity to amass a vast data trove about their preferences and purchasing behavior. It's a model pioneered in China by Alibaba's AliPay and Tencent's

WeChat. Mark Zuckerberg, in a recent blog post, hinted that he hopes that Facebook can emulate it. many believe revenue from super app services and the data they generate will prove to be more stable, more profitable, and easier to scale than revenues from ride-haling where profits have been elusive even as growth skyrockets, end quote. Finally, this month's issue of Wired is devoted to looking at CRISPR, that gene editing technology that we've spoken about before. So I wanted to point you to two articles from this month's Wired that look at the promise and peril of CRISPR, quote, the science itself isn't the only thing that needs to progress. There also has to be a thorough debate about gene editing. Belmonte says scientists like him must have a strong voice in it, but so should physicians, the public, and the government.

DeVos agrees, quote, Einstein did basic research and physics, he says, but it was at a country level that it was decided to apply these findings to bomb Hiroshima, not at the scientist level, end quote. So first I point you, to better living through CRISPR, growing human organs and pigs, from which that quote comes. Then check out the piece, a more humane livestock industry brought to you by CRISPR.

Once again this Friday, I'm just going to let you off on your weekend adventures without any lengthy post-amble from me because I want to head home ASAP as well. So talk to you on Monday.