Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/23 – Meta To Turn Off The (Canadian) News Spigot?

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Are Canadians about to lose their access to news on Instagram and maybe Google too? More details about what that Apple headset will actually be like to use. The newest claimant to the supercomputer crown is about to come online. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Grammarly.com/go Collective.com Links: Meta says it's blocking news on Facebook, Instagram after government passes online news bill (National Post) Apple Vision Pro has a speed limit, Travel Mode required for use on flights (9to5Mac) The Aurora Supercomputer Is Installed (AnandTech) Randomly received a smartwatch? Don’t turn it on, investigators warn. (ArmyTimes) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Dolby Atmos Wants You to Listen Up. (And Down. And Sideways.) (NYTimes) The hottest new perk in tech is freedom (Vox) This Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted (SFGate) Meet the Vocal Coach Who’s Helping Timothée Chalamet Sound Like Bob Dylan (GQ) 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, June 23, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Are Canadians about to lose their access to news on Instagram and maybe Google too? More details about what that Apple headset will be like to actually use.

The newest claimant to the supercomputer crown is about to come online. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Meta says it plans to remove news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada. This comes after the Online News Act passed Canada's Senate and received Royal Ascent. Quoting the National Post, the act, which was known as Bill C-18, is designed to force Google and Facebook to share revenues with publishers for news stories that appear on their platforms. By removing news altogether, companies would be exempt from the legislation.

Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act, Bill C-18, taking effect. Facebook said in a blog post on Thursday afternoon, we have repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C-18 passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada, end quote. Canadians could also see news content disappear from their Google searches if Google does the same. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez is holding last-minute talks with Google Thursday afternoon, the minister's office and a Google source confirmed. In an emailed statement, Rodriguez said,

quote, Facebook knows very well that they have no obligations under the act right now. Following royal assent of Bill C-18, the government will engage in a regulatory and implementation process. If the government can't stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will, end quote. Rodriguez and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have both previously said Google and Facebook's statements that they will pull news from their platforms if the bill becomes law are. threats that won't work. Bill C-18 doesn't specifically name Google and Meta, but it does apply to companies that, quote, make news content available and have a, quote, significant bargaining power imbalance with news businesses. If Google and Meta stop making news content available, the bill

would no longer apply to them, meaning they would be under no obligation to share revenues, end quote. More details are trickling out about the Apple Vision Pro, this time because, as I think I said yesterday, developers have gotten their hands on the Vision OS SDK. So what sort of new details have they uncovered? Quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Internal Vision OS code seen by 9 to 5 Mac suggests that the Apple Vision Pro will limit its functionality or even stop working entirely when the user is moving too fast. The system has alerts that tell the person wearing the headset that they're moving at unsafe speed. Another alert message found in the Vision OS code warns the user, virtual content has been temporarily hidden until you return to a safe speed. The system may act as a

protection so that users don't try to interact with Vision Pro while driving a car, for example. At the same time, it could be related to the complexity of detecting the environment while the person is moving fast. In addition to limitations with high speeds, Vision Pro may also not work when the person is too close to objects. Messages like you're too close to an object and move back were added to the system, therefore using the headset in very tight environments may be difficult. But if users can't use Apple Vision Pro at high speeds, how will it be possible to use it on airplanes? After all, Apple demonstrated a person using the device during a flight at the keynote. It turns out VisionOS has a travel mode designed to let users interact with the device even on a plane. If you're on an airplane,

you'll need to keep travel mode on to continue using your Apple Vision Pro. A message reads. However, based on Vision OS code, the inputs when using Travel Mode will be limited and the user must remain stationary for it to work. This also leads us to think that Apple Vision Pro may not be ideal for workouts as some have thought. For instance, Apple never showed demos of people using Fitness Plus on the Vision Pro, which may be due to movement limitations. The VisionOS SDK has also revealed that Apple Vision Pro will have a guest mode so that owners can let other people interact with the device without having to authenticate with optic ID. Of course, personal data such as photos and passwords will be hidden when this mode is enabled, end quote. The Argonne National Laboratory and Intel say

they have installed the Aurora supercomputer. This is a system that was announced all the way back in 2015, and which is slated to come online later this year with two exoflops of processing power. Quoting a Nantec, the system promises to deliver a peak theoretical compute performance over two exaflops using its array of tens of thousands of Xon Max Sapphire Rapids CPUs with on-package HBM2E memory, as well as data center GPU Max Poanevecchio compute GPUs. The system will come online later this year. The Aurora supercomputer looks quite impressive even by the numbers. The machine is powered by 21,248 general purpose processors with over 1.1 million cores for workloads that require traditional CPU horsepower, and 63,744 compute GPUs that will serve AI and

HPC workloads. On the memory side of matters, Aurora has 1.36 petabytes of on-package HBM2E memory and 19.9 petabytes of DDR5 memory that is used by the CPUs as well as 8.16 petabytes of HBM2E carried by the Pontavecchio compute GPUs. The Aurora machine uses 166,000,000 racks that house 66 blades each. It spans eight rows and occupies a space equivalent to two basketball courts. Meanwhile, that does not count the storage subsystem of Aurora, which employs 1,024 all-flash storage nodes offering 220 terabytes of storage capacity and a total bandwidth of 31 terabytes per second. For now, Argonne National Laboratory does not publish official

power consumption numbers for Aurora or its storage subsystem. The supercomputer, which will be used for a wide variety of workloads from nuclear fusion simulations to weather prediction and from aerodynamics to medical research uses HPE's Shasta supercomputer architecture with slingshot interconnects. Meanwhile, before the system passes ANL's acceptance tests, it will be used for large-scale scientific generative AI models. While we work toward acceptance testing, we are going to be using Aurora to train some large-scale open-source generative AI models for science, says Rick Stevens, Argo National Laboratory Associated Laboratory Director, Aurora, with over 60,000 Intel MaxGPUs, a very fast IOS system, and an all-solid state mass storage system, is the perfect environment to train these models, end quote.

Even though Aurora Blades have been installed, the supercomputer still has to undergo and pass a series of acceptance tests, a common procedure for supercomputers, once it successfully clears these and comes online later in the year, it is projected to attain a theoretical performance exceeding two exesflops, which is two billion billion floating point operations per second. With vast performance, it is expected to secure the top position in the top 500 supercomputer list, end quote. This is just a weird story, but any military folks out there heads up. The government is warning you not to turn on a smart watch if someone just sends you one out of the blue. Yes, this seems to be happening. It also seems to me to be a very obvious honeypot attack that is apparently become common

in the last few months, quoting the Army Times. Smartwatch is capable of automatically connecting to cell phones and Wi-Fi and gaining access to user data are being shipped to members of the U.S. military seemingly at random raising cybersecurity concerns. The Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division or CID in an announcement last week warned the watches may contain malware, potentially granting whoever sent the peripherals, quote, access to save data to include banking information, contacts, and account information such as usernames and passwords. A more innocuous tactic may also be to blame. So-called brushing used in e-commerce to boost the seller's ratings through fake orders and

reviews. The CID, an independent federal law enforcement agency consisting of thousands of personnel, did not say exactly how many smartwatches were so far distributed. Wearable tech and downloadable applications have long clashed with the national security ecosystem where security is paramount. Smartwatches and their software log personal info and location data can record audio and often lack a sufficient means to validate users. The New York Times in 2018 reported that Strava, a fitness app that posts a map of user activity unwittingly revealed locations and habits of military bases and personnel, including those of American forces in the Middle East.

And in 2020, Bellingat reported military and intelligence personnel could be tracked via untapped a beer rating social network. The investigation division said, troops that receive a smartwatch unsolicited should not turn the device on and should instead report the matter to a counterintelligence or security official, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. This first one is one that I didn't know I needed, but now that I've read it, I'm thankful I found it because it answers a question I had. You know how basically every product announced these days for a gadget mentions Dolby Atmos? It's like the table stakes these days for modern media, and especially because of their stated goal

to create truly immersive audio. So what's the deal with Dolby Atmos? I didn't know. Quoting the Times. For Dolby, the audio company that developed Atmos and Apple Music, which has invested heavily in it, the technology could lead to the most dramatic shift in audio in 65 years. The recording industry went from mono to stereo decades ago, and it didn't move from there. John Kuling, senior vice president of Dolby Laboratory, said in a phone interview, there have been efforts to convince the public to adopt new advanced technologies in the years since, including quadraphonic sound in the 70s and 5.1 surround sound in the 90s, but with little success. We've changed formats, we've changed delivery methods, we've changed all sorts of things,

cooling said. But it was still fundamentally the same sound. Atmos is a completely new experience, end quote. Oliver Schusser, a vice president at Apple Music, said that his company, which has incentivized record labels to deliver catalog material in Atmos, sees it as a way to bring sonic value back to music, something that's been lost among a whole generation that has come up during the streaming era. There was no appreciation of the art and work of sound engineers and mixing and mastering, Schusser said over a video call this spring. That really pained us. We wanted to fix that. Today, all three major record labels and hundreds of independents are delivering tracks in Atmos. Apple Music, Amazon Music, Title, and QQ Music are among the 15 streaming

services bringing Atmos to 160 countries and over 500 million listeners. But mention the word Atmos to anyone in the general public and they don't know what the hell you're talking about, said the veteran engineer and producer Bob Clear Mountain, one of the most respected and influential figures in the recording world. Clear Mountain was initially dubious of Atmos' staying power, but he has come to believe in its future, end quote. So yeah, if like me you didn't know what Atmos was, read the piece to change that. Then Vox has an interesting piece that makes a provocative suggestion, as the bigger tech platforms, shall we say, are strongly hinting that you should come back to the office these days. What if one way,

smaller startups can compete for talent is to lean into remote work, like it's still 2020 or something. Quoting Vox, as their stock prices have suffered, Big Tech has not only dialed back on many on-site perks, they've also called workers back to the office. Facing hard times, they've retrenched into what they knew before the pandemic, typically asking workers to come into the office three days a week. Google is even factoring office attendance into performance reviews. Smaller tech companies have since picked up the mantle of remote work. They are much more likely than their larger peers to allow people to work fully remotely, with 81% of those with fewer than 5,000 employees either allowing remote work or only having remote options, according to new data from

SCOOP Technologies, a software firm that builds tech to help hybrid teams coordinate and also tracks the office policies at major companies. Meanwhile, just 26% of companies with more than 25,000 employees are fully flexible. Tech companies with fewer employees are using remote work as a way to pull in more talent in what had been a notoriously difficult hiring environment, and to signify that they, unlike big tech, are where progress is happening. People in the tech industry especially are more likely to be lured by remote work, according to Gartner, which has found that better work-life balance and greater flexibility, where the top benefits tech employees would choose over 10% higher compensation.

That's a big deal for smaller tech companies, which haven't always been able to compete with the Googles of the world in terms of salary. Airbnb, which employs more than 6,000 people has used its work from anywhere policy to attract not only more applicants, its career page saw twice the traffic last year as it had the year before, but also more diverse ones with 21% of new hires being underrepresented minorities, end quote. Not suggesting that Airbnb is some kind of small tech upstart, but you get the point. Then SFGate has a look at a Bay Area woman who is on a one-person crusade to prove her assertion that most reviews online on the internet are fraudulent, quote.

Since then, Dean 60 has mounted a years-long crusade against Yelp and the broader online review ecosystem from her home office in San Jose. Yelp, founded in San Francisco in 2004, is deeply entrenched in American consumer habits and has brood itself into the larger consciousness through partnerships with the likes of Apple Maps. The company's crowdsource reviews undergird the Internet's web of recommendations and can send businesses droves of customers or act as an insurmountable black mark. Dean follows fake reviews from their origins and social media groups to when they hit the review sites, methodically documenting hours of research in spreadsheets and little-watched YouTube videos, targets accuse her of having an unreasonable fixation. Yelp claims it aggressively and effectively weeds out fakes, but Dean disagrees, and she's out to convince America that Yelp, Google, and other purveyors of reviews cannot be trusted. This is an issue that affects millions of

consumers and thousands of honest businesses, she said in her YouTube pages introductory posts on April 30th, 2020, facing the camera dead on. I'm creating these videos to expose this massive fraud against the American public and shine a light on big tech's culpability. I don't do it lightly. If I put a video up, it's serious. She told SFGate and May, I'm putting myself out there, end quote. Finally, this is not tech, but GQ takes a look at Eric Vettro, the go-to guru for when a Hollywood star needs help singing. He helped Ryan Gosling get through Lala Land without embarrassing himself. He taught Austin Butler how to sing like Elvis. He's teaching Timothy Chalameh, how to be Bob Dylan, and an upcoming biopic. Quote, what exactly makes Vettro so sought after? He says that rather than having

any sort of trademark method, he's skilled at divining and deducing exactly what style each client needs from him. He's also just plain nice. Vettro compares one early mentor of his to J.K. Simmons's brutal drum teacher character in Whiplash. I became very supportive and kind and sympathetic to people, Vetro explains. When he worked with Wiplash director Damien Chazel on Lala Land, I brought my old teacher's picture and showed it to him, he said. It all comes down to building up the singing voice first. What I always do with anybody, as I first say, before trying to sound like anyone else, let's really have you understand your voice and have it be as healthy and and flexible and limber as it can possibly be, Vettro says. For awesome Butler's Elvis,

Vettro actually met the star when he was 16 through another one of his clients, Butler's then-girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens. They kept in touch over the years before Vettro helped him nail Elvis's singing voice for his audition. Butler famously has continued to talk like Elvis, whether it was when I interviewed him for GQ or during his Golden Globes' acceptance speech. Now Vettro is in the midst of getting another A-list young star prepped for a biopic of an iconic musician with a highly distinct accent. Before Vettro jumped into preparing Shalame to play Bob Dylan and his co-stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Monica Barbara to play Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, respectively. Vetro worked with Shalameh on Wonka. Timothy has this magical aura around him. Vetro says, almost like he has a

light around him. He takes what he does very seriously, but he has a lot of fun with it. So we have a of fun. The two have been watching performances of songs like A Hard Raines, A Gunna Fall, Masters of War, and Blowing in the Wind. Funnily, as he worked with John C. Riley on Walk Hard, he technically also helped prepare another Bob Dylan-esque performance, end quote. So this weekend, we have a portfolio profile episode for you, another great company from the Ride Home Fund. And this one is interesting. What if I told you that the Ride Home Fund is investing in a startup that is going to help college athletes make money? now that they're allowed to do that, if you hadn't heard.

It's a super interesting company. I guess you could look at it as a creator economy play. But it's also a super interesting founder. If you know college football, you might actually recognize his name. Get ready to learn a lot about the industry. That is college athletics. Super interesting stuff. Enjoy that.

Talk to you on Monday.