Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/19 - With Facebook, It's Eternally Groundhog Day

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Facebook finds a new way to handle the privacy scandal of the day, free, ad supported music from Amazon and Google, Dieter ended up reviewing the Samsung Galaxy Fold as best he could, and of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Mealime Joybird.com/RIDE Links: Facebook says it stored millions of Instagram passwords unencrypted on its servers (Recode) Emtek announces they will be closing BBM consumer services on May 31 (CrackBerry) Amazon Music Launches Free Streaming Tier, Through Alexa Only (for Now) (Variety) SAMSUNG GALAXY FOLD REVIEW: BROKEN DREAM (TheVerge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Google Maps Is Ready to Transform the World of Superapps: A Skift Deep Dive (Skift) These Women Are Only On Facebook For The Groups (BuzzFeed News) Beyond Prime: Inside the Race to Deliver Shipments to the Moon (OneZero) Robo-Rigs: The Scientist, The Unicorn And The $700 Billion Race To Create Self-Driving Semi-Trucks (Forbes) The Coming Obsolescence of Animal Meat (The Atlantic) Russian Gamer Brothers Are the Newest Hidden Billionaires (Bloomberg)   29-year-old journalist Lyra McKee shot dead in Northern Ireland violence (CNN) Lyra McKee GoFundMe 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, April 19th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook finds a new way to handle the privacy scandal du jour. Free ad-supported music from Amazon and Google.

Dieter ended up reviewing the Samsung Galaxy Fold as best he could, and of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Yesterday, in the textbook definition of a news dump, in the midst of a news cycle that was guaranteed to be, be dominated by the Mueller report. Hey, remember last month when Facebook admitted it had stored hundreds of millions of user passwords unencrypted on its servers? At the time in a blog post announcing the news, Facebook said that tens of thousands of Instagram passwords were also stored in this same insecure manner.

Well, quietly, yesterday, again in the textbook definition of a bad news dump, Facebook updated that same blog post to read, quote, Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying those users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed, end quote. Again, I think you all probably have gotten the sense by now. of my Groundhog's Daylike frustration about having to cover essentially the same story over and over

and over. But let me point out what Owen Williams said about all this. In a way, it is the Groundhog Day nature of this that pretty much assures that Facebook might never ever pay a price for things like this. Quote, the problem we face in media and in society as a whole is the exact thing you're feeling right now. Exhaustion over all the bad news about Facebook, which makes these types of serious missteps even easier to dismiss. If we're all tired of hearing about Facebook's failures, what will it finally drop when we just don't care anymore? End quote. BBM, nay, Blackberry Messenger is no more, at least for consumers. It is shutting down on May 31st, quoting crackberry.com. Back in 2016, Blackberry announced a new partnership with Indonesia-based MTech to help expand the consumer

BBM business. As part of the partnership, MTECH expanded the capabilities of BBM for consumers with new features and enhancements while BlackBerry maintained control over their BBM enterprise solution. Now, in a bit of surprising news, MTECH has announced their decision to end service of BBM for consumers on May 31st, 2019, end quote. But hold on. It's not all bad news. No need to go pouring one out for Blackberry Messenger just yet. Quoting again, although the announcement is certainly not the best for consumer users of BBM. It does not mean BBM, which has been running on Blackberry smartphone since August 1st, 2005 has come to an end. In light of MTECH's decision, BlackBerry has announced they will be making their enterprise-to-end encrypted messaging platform

BBM Enterprise available to individuals through the Google Play Store starting today and the Apple App Store soon. The change does not affect BBS or BlackBerry 10 users as BlackBerry continues to provide that service rather than M-TEC, end quote. Two somewhat overlapping stories now. Amazon Music has launched an ad-supported tier for Alexa-enabled devices in the U.S., allowing users to listen to Amazon Music's top playlist and stations for free with ads. Quoting Variety, the limited access that the new free service provides, it's only available through Alexa, and when the listener requests the song, it leads to an Amazon playlist or station

rather than an album is presumably the first phase of a full ad-supported, i.e. free with ads, streaming tier that will launch at some point in the future, end quote. And as Chris Messina tweeted, when it rains, it pours, because Google Home and Google Assistant-powered speakers also now have a free ad-supported version of YouTube music with limited functionality, but this is coming to 16 countries, not just the U.S., quoting from YouTube's official blog. If you already have a Google Home, navigate to account settings in your Google Home app, tap services, and select music. Then select YouTube Music as the default music service. If you are setting up a new Google home speaker, choose YouTube Music as the default music service during the setup process, end quote.

Over at the verge, Dieter Bone didn't let his broken review unit stop him. Today, he's out with his Samsung Galaxy Fold review, and it's summed up by this tweet from Deeter, quote, Here it is, my Galaxy Fold review. Even if you assume the broken screen issues will be resolved, there are still many issues. I have never used the device with this many problems that I have liked this much, end quote. Among the issues that Dieter ran into, aside from, of course, that whole thing about the screen stopping working, basic user experience issues confounded him like, yes, there is a crease there, and actually on either side of the crease,

the two sides of the screen seem to have slightly different color temperatures. And not only that, it has dreaded jelly scroll. As you scroll down, one side of the screen scrolls faster than the other. Check the video in the piece. Once you see it,

it's actually pretty noticeable. Quote, and yet, using the Galaxy Fold in tablet mode is a joy. It's great to have a huge screen for watching videos and reading. You can get real tabs in your browser. across the top where they belong. You can get a full three-column layout in Gmail. Plus, this might actually be my favorite Kindle book reading device, and I own a Top Flight Kindle Oasis.

You can rotate it sideways and get two columns of text, and you get all of the Android app features that work better with a touchscreen than they do on a traditional Kindle. The screen is terrible, but quite often using the screen is wonderful, end quote. When the phone is closed, Dieter says that it's... It's so tall and thick that fitting it in your pocket is difficult. But that narrow screen on the outside when the phone is closed, Dieter says he came to think of it as a superpowered lock screen. Again, as M.G. Siegler and I talked about, he ended up using it for notification triage and whatnot.

Quote, when I was using the tiny screen, I just wanted to get something done quickly and put it away because the screen was small and I wasn't in a place where I wanted to unfold it. On the flip side, when I was using Galaxy Fold unfolded, I was really using it. I had to hold it in two hands and it felt much more like using a tablet, an active device I was choosing to use. It requires some small measure of intentionality, more than a phone anyway. I found myself using it in meetings and nobody bad in an eye. I was reviewing docs for the meeting, but I could have just as easily been messing around

on social media. But think about the social rules of a work meeting. Somebody messing around with their phone is a jerk, but somebody using a tablet is more likely to be doing something relevant. The fold feels like a different device with different social rules, and that's fascinating, end quote. Does Dieter think you should risk $2,000 on a first-generation device that maybe isn't quite fully baked? Hard no on that one, but he does conclude by being intrigued, quote, there might be the start of something really new here, something really different, end quote. Time for the weekend long read's suggestions. We've been talking a lot. about super apps lately, right? Mostly they exist in Asia right now. Grab, Maitwan, WeChat.

But what existing Western app is best positioned to become a super app, a place where you can manage basically your whole life in one go? Skift thinks it's Google Maps. Quote, even beyond navigation and travel, the Google Maps app is becoming fairly comprehensive as well. Through its explore tab, the Google Maps app on your phone offers everything from information about grocery stores in dry cleaning to health and wellness, car dealerships, electronics, and a couple dozen additional categories, end quote. Google says in the piece they are still committed to Google Maps' core functionality right now, but the skiffed piece does make a really compelling argument, and with one billion monthly

active users already? In BuzzFeed News, Anne Helen Peterson voices something that my own mother recently expressed to me. She hates Facebook, which is she. could get off it. But she doesn't want to leave because there are one or two key Facebook groups that she absolutely loves. And she loves them mostly because they're free of all the crap that she hates about the rest of Facebook and the rest of the internet. Peterson, too, describes a group that she has been running since 2009. Quote, for many of us, these groups are one of the few

remaining things tethering us to a platform that's proven itself ineffective at combating toxicity, misinformation, and abuse in nearly every way. They provide community for people from all around the world doing a bunch of different stuff with a bunch of different and interesting identities, end quote. Ironic then, but apparently for a lot of women especially, according to this small sample set of my mother and Anne Helen Peterson, I guess, Facebook groups are actually a refuge from the refuse of the larger internet for some people. Next, space tech.

Pittsburgh-based startup Astrobotic is set to be the first. private company to make a lunar landing. Quote, with just 19 employees, Astrobotics ambitions are ripped from a science fiction novel. Astrobotic CEO John Thornton and his team hope to establish a courier service to the moon, the first of its kind, with regular, possibly annual missions

on the back of rockets from companies like United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Say you want to send scientific equipment, a time capsule, or your grandmother's ashes to the lunar surface, but you're not NASA or Jeff Bezos? so you pay someone to arrange it all for you. Thornton wants to be that someone, end quote. AVTech. Forbes has a profile up of Too Simple,

one of the many companies trying to revolutionize the $700 billion trucking market with autonomous trucks. But Too Simple might actually be the segment leader. It has raised $178 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, which makes it the first self-driving truck unicorn. And Too Simple says it has its own proprietary vision system that can see as much as a kilometer down the road. I think I've said before that I'm actually bullish on self-driving trucks for this reason. Quote, most self-driving car programs are still experiments, at least five years out from being sustainable businesses.

Autonomous trucking looks like it could become a commercial success earlier, propelled by a driver shortage that the American Trucking Association puts at $60,000 a year for semi-drivers. Too Simple also hopes to benefit from the relatively easier challenge of navigating interstates rather than crowded city streets. The plan is to have self-driving trucks haul goods long distance between depots on the outskirts of big metros and then transfer the cargo to smaller manned trucks for local delivery, end quote. And food tech. The Atlantic looks at companies racing to develop real chicken, fish, and beef that doesn't require the killing of sentient animals to produce. So that sounds cool and kind of grody at the same time. Quote, The thought I had when the $100 chicken nugget hit my expectant tongue was the one

cartoon villains have when they entrap a foreign critter and roast him over a spit. It tastes like chicken. That's because it was chicken, albeit chicken that had never laid an egg, sprouted a feather, or been swept through an electrified water bath for slaughter. This chicken began life as a primordial mush in a bioreactor whose dimensions and brand I'm not allowed to describe to you for intellectual property reasons. Before that, it was a collection of cells swirling calmly in a red-hued nutrient-rich media with a glass flask for an eggshell. The chicken is definitely real and technically animal flesh, but it left the world as it entered it. A mass of meat ready for human consumption with no brain, wings, or feet, end quote. people are generally calling this tech lab-grown meat or cultured or cell-based meat,

but the startups involved are trying to get this term to catch on clean meat, and they want it to catch on for, I think, obvious reasons. Finally, today, Bloomberg has a profile up of a gaming powerhouse you might not be aware of. Russian company PlayRicks is, quote, the creator of popular games similar to Candy Crush, including fishdom and gardenscapes, with more than 30 million daily users from China to the U.S. and annual sales of $1.2 billion, according to NewsZoo. That makes the company one of the top 10 iOS and Google Play app developers

buy revenue data from researcher App Annie show, putting PlayRicks in the same league as Tencent Holdings, net ease, and Activision Blizzard, end quote. The two brothers who founded PlayRicks are each worth about $1.4 billion a piece from their holdings in the company, which got started back in 2000. in a bedroom in a remote Russian city with a single Pentium 100 powered computer. No closing music today because I have something very sad to talk about.

You might have seen the news headlines about the shooting death of Northern Irish journalist Lira McKee overnight. It's somewhat weird or maybe it's somewhat modern. to say this when you work in a virtual company, but Lira was a colleague of mine, and I'm proud to say that she was. There's a sister site to tech meme called MediaGazer covering media news. And for many years, Lira was an editor, primarily at MediaGazer, but the editors do this every day. They go back and forth between the two sites, and so Lira did a lot of work on tech meme stories as well. I saw her on the tech meme Slack daily. Indeed, she contributed to this podcast every single week, directly and indirectly. I never actually met her in person, but in my

year working alongside her, I grew to know her and respect her as a talented, passionate, committed journalist and an amazingly gifted writer. My thoughts and prayers go out to Lyra's loved ones. There's a Go fund me in her memory. That is the very bottom last link in the show notes today. Rest in power, Lira.