Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/05 - Evan Spiegel's Plan For Snap's Survival

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

He said she said on that Bloomberg Bombshell, Evan Spiegel’s plan for survival, new Macs are un-repairable, why are Apple Watch faces such a mess, and the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Stories from: @jsnell, @bizcarson Tweets: @karaswisher, @AdamMinter Links: Instagram prototypes handling your location history to Facebook (TechCrunch) Instagram is testing the ability to share your precise location history with Facebook (The Verge) 9 highlights from Snapchat CEO’s 6,000-word leaked memo on survival (TechCrunch) iMac Pro and 2018 MacBook Pro Systems Must Pass Apple Diagnostics to Function After Certain Repairs (MacRumors) Facebook’s Oculus Looking to Invest in Location-Based Virtual Reality (EXCLUSIVE) (Variety) Why are Apple Watch faces such a mess? (Macworld) Norway's petabyte plan: Store everything ever published in a 1,000-year archive (ZDNet) The Betterment Weekend Longreads: The iPhone XS & XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets (AnAndTech) Sex Workers Pioneered the Early Internet—and It Screwed Them Over (Motherboard) Raised by YouTube (The Atlantic) Old Unicorn, New Tricks: Airbnb Has A Sky-High Valuation. Here's Its Audacious Plan To Earn It (Forbes) EA announces ‘FIFA 19’ PS4 esports tournament (Engadget) 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, October 5th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, he said, she said, on that Bloomberg bombshell from yesterday,

Evan Spiegel's plans for survival, new Macs are unreparable, why are Apple Watch faces such a mess, and the weekend Longreads suggestions? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So the fallout from that Blockbuster Businessweek story about Chinese spy, inserting chips into products for U.S.-based motherboard giant supermicro continues a pace, and frankly, I have absolutely no idea what to make of the state of things. Apple, especially, continues to push back vehemently, and at this point, they're basically straight up calling the Business Week piece a fabrication.

Listen to this statement from Apple, quote, The October 8th, 2018 issue of Bloomberg Business Week incorrectly reports that Apple found malicious chips in servers on its network in 2015. As Apple has repeatedly explained to Bloomberg reporters and editors over the past 12 months, there is no truth to these claims. Finally, in response to questions we have received from other news organizations since Businessweek published its story, we are not under any kind of gag order or other confidentiality obligations, end quote. Many, including me, were wondering if there was some sort of national security or homeland security or security clearance stuff going on here.

And Apple literally could maybe not talk about anything or fess up to anything without running seriously a foul of the law. But they're saying even that is not the case. Jessica Powell tweeted, I'm inclined to believe Apple, but I also remember a time when all the tech companies screamed about not knowing about an NSA program called Prism. Turned out they didn't know the name of it,

but they did have back doors, end quote. And of course, when Kara speaks, Listen, Kara Swisher tweeted, well, this is pretty definitive that Apple is saying it is all wrong and actionable if they are lying, end quote. For the record, here is Bloomberg's statement standing behind the story. Quote, 17 individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attacks. We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources. Over at TechCrunch, Josh Constine has seen some leaked screenshots that suggest that Instagram is testing a location history feature that would share users' location with Facebook in order for Facebook to target ads and content recommendations to users. Quote, this is sure to exacerbate fears that Facebook will further exploit Instagram now that its founders have resigned.

Instagram has been spotted prototyping a new privacy setting that would allow it to share. your location history with Facebook. That means your exact GPS coordinates collected by Instagram, even when you're not using the app, would help Facebook to target you with ads and recommend you relevant content. The geotag data would appear to users in their Facebook profiles activity log, which includes creepy daily maps of the places you've been, end quote. As the Verge notes, quote, Instagram is not the only service that Facebook has sought to share data between.

Back in 2016, the company announced that it would, be sharing user data between WhatsApp and Facebook in order to offer better friend suggestions. The practice was later halted in the European Union, thanks to its GDPR legislation, although WhatsApp's CEO and co-founder later left over data privacy concerns, end quote. A Facebook spokesperson gave the following statement to TechCrunch, quote, we often work on ideas that may evolve over time or ultimately not be tested or released. Instagram does not currently store location history. keep people updated with any changes to our location settings in the future.

Late last month, SNAP CEO Evan Spiegel circulated a 6,000-word memo internally to SNAP employees in what some people have characterized as a manifesto for the company's very survival. Spiegel set a firm goal of reaching full-year profitability in 2019 and admitted that the Snapchat redesign was rushed and was perhaps a bit of a disaster. quote, the biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate, Spiegel wrote. Spiegel wants to double down on messaging and chatting, perhaps ceding the stories battlefield completely. He wants to focus on growth in emerging markets, not just the U.S. market. He wants to focus on growing usership among adults, not just teens, but then wasn't that what led to the redesign in the first place?

And cleverly, Spiegel notes that Facebook's big. problem is the sprawl in your social graph. Snapchat wants to double down on only your best friends and make it frictionless to share with them. Quote, your top friend in a given week contributes 25% of snap send volume. By the time you get to 18 friends, each incremental friend contributes less than 1% of total snap send volume each. Finding best friends is a different problem than finding more friends. So we need to think about new ways to help people find the friends they care about most, end quote. So that sounds like I guess it's back to first principles.

Snapchat, of course, took off because once everyone and their grandmother was on Facebook, some people, especially young people, wanted a place to go to curate only the most personal BFF stuff. We'll see if they can get people to refocus on that again. If you get one of those fancy new IMAQ pros or 2018 MacBook pros, and you need a repair, guess what? You might only be able to get repair work done by Apple itself. That's because those fancy new T2 chips that offer advanced security features are also, Mac Rumors has learned, tied to proprietary Apple diagnostics that only Apple can run, and if the diagnostics are not run, will result in an inoperable system and an incomplete repair. This diagnostic suite is limited to internal. use by Apple stores and Apple authorized service providers, part of what Apple calls the Apple Service Toolkit. The requirement applies to repairs done on the display, logic board, touch ID keyboard, battery, trackpad, and speakers for the MacBook Pro. For the IMac Pro, only repairs

to the logic board and flash storage are affected. As many pointed out on Twitter, what happens to you if you live anywhere without ready access to an Apple store or an authorized repair store? What if you live in rural Alaska or the South Pacific? I guess you have to hop on a plane to Australia just to get your computer working again. Quinn Nelson tweeted, Apple will say it's for security reasons, and it kind of is, but it's also not. Apple is doing it to be a turd, and it's shameful that it's not illegal, end quote. Bloomberg's Adam Mintner tweeted, Apple has been trying to be. to squeeze independent Apple repair shops for a long time.

It's anti-competitive behavior, and if the DOJ is looking for another reason to go after big tech, I'd suggest this one. Oculus is in a bit of a sticky situation. Well, I guess actually all of the VR space is, but everyone feels VR has reached a critical point in terms of the technology. It's good enough now for the mainstream to finally embrace, but there's one small problem.

The mainstream is not embracing VR. at least not yet. So what to do about that? Well, according to variety, Oculus is looking backwards to good old video arcades to try to get VR experiences in front of the masses. The Facebook subsidiary is, quote, looking to embrace VR centers and arcades in malls and movie theaters

and has plans to strike deals with producers of location-based VR content. Ultimately, Oculus wants to use location-based VR to get more consumers interested in buying VR headsets. end quote. Variety noticed some job openings for producers of location-based entertainment VR. So after focusing so much on getting us to bring these headsets into our living rooms, bringing VR out into IRL is an interesting move. But I say they should go whole hog on the whole 80s video arcade thing and just make people have to actually insert quarters in order to get some playing time.

Over at Macworld, Jason Snell kicked up an interesting. debate with a post asking, why are Apple Watch faces such a mess? Quoting extensively from the piece, since the day the Apple Watch was announced, developers have clamored for the opportunity to design custom watch faces. That may never happen. There are plenty of reasons for Apple to consider the face designs sacred and something the company must control itself. But if Apple insists on having a monopoly on face design, it's incumbent upon the company to be a better steward of those faces. Every face needs to be modern. Every face needs to be modernized and support the new complication styles, at least on series four.

Key systems apps and features like messages and cellular status should be available on all faces. Every face design should be more flexible. And moving forward, Apple should allow developers even more power in building complications. Complications should be able to appear when they have something to say and disappear when they don't. For example, I'd love for a timer complication to appear when I'm running a timer, but the rest of the time I'd rather not see it. If complications truly are the best face of Apple Watch apps, the developers of those apps need more power to build good ones, end quote.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with this piece, and it's worth reading the whole thing as Jason goes into the weird design decisions that constrain even the best watch faces available, and the whole history of Apple figuring out what the watch was actually good for. Turns out dumping a bunch of apps in there is not actually useful. Surfacing info at a glance is useful,

but as Jason makes the point, they're still hiding the full power of that functionality behind, forgive me, design complications for the complications. I always like stories like this next one because I guess I like to imagine myself in some sort of a post-apocalyptic canical

for Leibowitz situation where I'm holed up in some bunker underground somewhere protecting all of humanity's stored knowledge. But do check out ZDNet's piece about Norway's plan to store everything that's ever been published in Norway ever, up in the far north of the country near the Arctic Circle in the National Library of Norway's Secure Storage Facility. The project has been going on for 12 years now, and they estimate they still have 30 years to go. The library currently has 540,000 books and over 2 million newspapers, all. scanned and searchable. The digital collection now amounts to 8.1 petabytes of data and is growing

by between 5 terabytes and 10 terabytes every day. Svan Arne Solbach is the director of the project, and I don't know, this just seems like a job I wish I had. Imagine going to work every day and just preserving everything. It seems so contemplative, restful, zen-like, and yet you're doing something tangibly good for humanity. Solbach says the mission is not just long-term storage, but also keeping things available at any present moment. Quote, he illustrates this point by explaining that they've already had to complete their first large-scale format conversion involving 50 million image files. This process took 10 servers three months of 24-7 processing to complete,

even though the files were stored on hard disks. Furthermore, given the relatively short life of hard disks, the NLN's approach is to have a rolling program of disc replacement, swapping out entire disk cabinets when they reach their expected lifespan of five years. In addition, the NLN stores everything in triplicate. One copy is on hard disk with two more copies on tape. The tape storage is an archive system based on Oracle's SamfS, so it's not a traditional tape backup system, end quote.

Yeah, again, this is the job I want when I retire. Or maybe I just want to be some sort of future Samwell Tarley and be sent up north to the great library in the snow to find out the secrets of the others. And then I just end up getting lost in a lifetime of long reads. How's that for a segue? Clearly that means it's time for the weekend long read suggestions brought to you, as always, by betterment. Here's a smart way to start your weekend. After you listen to these weekend long reads, head to your search engine of preference and type in betterment.

Your long-term financial health will thank you for it. First off, you guys really seem to like those super detailed NAND Tech reviews when they come out, those encyclopedic reviews of every inch and cranny of a new device. So guess what? Hit up the first link. It's the NAND Tech review of the new iPhone 10S and 10S max. Motherboard has a really fascinating piece about how sex workers pioneered a lot of what we take for granted now, back in the days of the early Internet.

But as the Internet has evolved, it has started making their lives more difficult. quote, these sex workers populated early chat rooms fueled the rise of e-commerce that began with online porn and later adopted cryptocurrencies as a means of survival long before they hit the mainstream. Though they were some of the first to use the internet commercially, legislation against sex workers continues to push them further into the margins. Women in the adult industry pioneered the early internet and made it profitable until eventually it screwed them over, end quote. If you've got kids, then you're no doubt aware of the massive power, the incredible hold that YouTube seems to have on even the youngest kids. The Atlantic has a look at Choochoo TV, the Chennai-based Kids Entertainment Company that is built an empire of kids' entertainment

on YouTube with nearly 20 billion views of their content and 29 million aggregate subscribers, and they're apparently adding 40,000 subscribers every. single day. The drumbeat towards IPO is getting louder over at Airbnb, and Forbes, in its most recent cover story, checks in with that company to see where it's at in terms of earning the audacious valuation it hopes to achieve when it hits the public markets. Quote, call it the curse of the unicorn.

How can Airbnb justify a valuation that is higher than Expedia, Hilton, or American Airlines? Although Airbnb has a $3 billion war chest, it earned just a hundred. $100 million last year on a cash flow basis from $2.6 billion in revenues, or about 4%. Its larger publicly traded competitors have margins of about 27%. How can Airbnb keep growing amid sharpening competition and increasing regulatory scrutiny and deliver the 10x return their venture capitalist demand, end quote? And finally today, this is really more of a long afternoon activity recommendation. If you're a fan of the FIFA gaming franchise, there is an e-sports competition running this weekend on the PlayStation 4.

It's like something out of an 80s movie like The Last Starfighter. Starting tomorrow, October 6th, you can participate in a qualifying tournament to earn a spot in the Continental Cup 2018 presented by PlayStation e-sports tournament. That will take place during Paris Games Week, which runs later this month. There are apparently 31 spots up for. grabs, so break out your FIFA 19, limber up your thumbs, and earn a trip to Paris, I guess. That's all for the weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment. Investment involves risk, of course, but never forget. Tech meme ride home listeners can get up to one year of their investment money managed for free by Betterment. Just go to Betterment.com slash ride. That's

betterment.com slash R-I-D-E. Betterment. Outsmobile. average. Friday, everybody, so Friday music. I hope the weather, wherever you are, is as amazing as it is here. October really is the best month to be in New York City. There's something about a chill in the air, about the soft light and the browning, blowing leaves. They do wonders for this place. It's Paris and the spring, of course. I know that, but New York in October really can't be beat. By the way, real quick, because people have asked about this before, yes, the tech meme right at home is finally on Spotify. So if you prefer to use Spotify for all your listening needs,

you can now search and subscribe and listen to the podcast there. As always, I've been Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And now, officially, please buy my book, How the Internet Happened, available wherever books are sold. Talk to you on Monday.