Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/14 - Facebook Faces a GDPR Inquiry

Episode Date: December 14, 2018

Fri. 12/14 - Facebook Faces a GDPR Inquiryhttps://feedpress.me/RideHome - Direct RSS feed starting this weekend, just in caseThe bomb scare email scam that demanded bitcoin, Facebook’s Photo API gave away too many photos, Apple strikes back at Qualcomm, Apple kills its second music-based social network, an Apple analyst sounds alarm bells about iPhone unit sales, Instacart breaks up with Whole Foods, PlanetScale brings mega-scaling technology to the masses, and of course the Weekend Longreads suggestions.Sponsors:MacStadium.com/ridehome Tiny.websiteLinks:Bitcoin scammers send bomb threats worldwide, causing evacuations (The Verge)Facebook bug exposed up to 6.8M users’ unposted photos to apps (TechCrunch)Irish regulator to investigate Facebook after new data leak (Financial Times)Apple Says China iPhone Ban Would Force Settlement With Qualcomm (Bloomberg)Apple Music removes ability for artists to post to Connect, posts removed from Artist Pages and For You (9to5Mac)Ming-Chi Kuo cuts first quarter iPhone sales estimates by 20%, says iPhone XR demand is low (9to5Mac)Amazon has officially killed the Whole Foods-Instacart partnership (Recode)They scaled YouTube—now they’ll shared everyone with PlanetScale (TechCrunch)The Betterment Weekend Longreads:EV News Daily (Podcast)Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor (New York Times)The State of Technology at the End of 2018 (Stratechery)The rise of the recommendation site (Vox)How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight (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. Everyone, quick technical note, Brian wanted me to let you know that the podcast is transitioning hosts over the weekend. That's server hosts, not talking hosts. Now, he's tried to set up the feed so you shouldn't have to do anything, and hopefully you won't even notice the transition. But

in the off chance that you don't get a show in your feed on Monday, please try to search and resubscribe to the show in your podcast app. Again, if you get a show on Monday, don't worry. Everything transitioned smoothly, but if somehow you don't see a new show on Monday evening, please try to search and resubscribe. If for some reason you can't find the show on Monday, the manual feed is feedpress.me. And there is a link to that at the very beginning of today's show notes. Welcome to the tech meme ride home for Friday, December 14th, 2018. I'm Chris Higgins in for Brian McCullough.

Today, the bomb scare email scam that demanded Bitcoin, Facebook's photo API gave away too many photos, Apple strikes back at Qualcomm, Apple kills its second music-based social network, And Apple Analyst sounds alarm bells about iPhone unit sales. Boy, that's a lot of Apple news. I promise I'll make it quick. Instacart breaks up with Whole Foods. Planet Scale brings mega-scaling technology to the masses.

And of course, the weekend long-read suggestion is brought to you by betterment. Let's get into all of this. On Thursday, bomb threats delivered by email briefly caused turmoil around the world, triggering shutdowns and evacuations of transit stations, hospitals, schools, and businesses. The emails claimed that the sender would detonate a bomb if the recipient didn't send $20,000 worth of Bitcoin by the end of the day. The emails varied slightly, with different types of explosives mentioned, and different Bitcoin addresses included.

Investigating authorities quickly realized that the emails were just spam, with nearly identical messages sent seemingly at random to people around the world. After analyzing the messages, various police departments released statements saying that the ransom threats were not credible and could safely be ignored. Regardless, many locations were shut down. Brian Krebs wrote on Twitter, quote, willing to bet that when the dust is settled from this latest spammed bomb threat hoax, we're going to see the biggest impact was the economic hit from businesses and schools closing early today in an abundance of caution.

End quote. Another day, another Facebook privacy breach, oh my. Today, Facebook revealed that a bug in its photo API allowed developers of up to 1,500 apps, access to photos that up to 6.8 million users had not authorized. Quoting Josh Constine at TechCrunch, the bug allowed apps that users had approved to pull their timeline photos to also receive their Facebook stories, marketplace photos, and most worryingly, photos they'd uploaded to Facebook, but never shared. Facebook says the bug ran for 12 days, from September 13th to September 25th, end quote. Now, the timing of this bug's disclosure is interesting because it might trigger GDPR fines.

Quoting again from TechCrunch, Facebook initially didn't disclose when it discovered the bug, but in response to TechCrunch's inquiry, a spokesperson said that it was discovered and fixed on September 25th. They say it took time for the company to investigate which apps and people were impacted and build and translate the warning notification it will send impacted users. The delay could put Facebook at risk of GDPR fines for not promptly disclosing the issue within 72 hours that can go up to 20 million pounds or 4% of annual global revenue, end quote. TechCrunch also pointed out that September 25th was the same day that Facebook discovered the massive security breach that allowed hackers to scrape 30 million people's data,

but the two breaches were caused by different bugs. Shortly after the TechCrunch article was published, the Financial Times reported that Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner, had opened an investigation into Facebook. Quoting the Financial Times, the Irish DPC has received a number of breach notifications from Facebook since the introduction of the GDPR on May 25th, 2018, as spokesperson said.

With reference to these data breaches, including the breach in question, we have this week commenced a statutory inquiry examining Facebook's compliance with the relevant provisions of the GDPR. End quote. A quick update on Apple's woes in China where sales of various iPhone models are banned by an injunction granted by a Chinese court, but the sales ban is on hold while the court considers Apple's appeal.

Now, as Brian said on Monday, quote, In the end, might this just be the thing that brings Apple and Qualcomm together to settle all their various disputes? End quote. Well, today, Mark German and Ian King of Bloomberg have a report titled, wait for it. Apple says China iPhone ban would force settlement with Qualcomm. In a court filing in China, Apple wrote, quote, Apple will be forced to settle with the respondent, causing all. mobile phone manufacturers to relapse into the previous unreasonable charging mode and pay high licensing

fees, resulting in unrecoverable losses in the downstream market of mobile phones. Apple and various Chinese smartphone makers are actually aligned on this, since Qualcomm is the dominant player in the cellular modem space and owns a tremendous patent portfolio. The difference is that most of the other phone makers just pay the fees, use Qualcomm chips, and move on. But Apple's legal move here is notable, because it's telling a Chinese court that that this local case would hurt Chinese phone makers and Apple's Chinese supply chain, even though it's fundamentally dispute between two U.S.-based companies. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has also filed complaints

against Apple in Germany and in the U.S., providing three different paths for it to block iPhone sales, potentially forcing a settlement. The legal battle continues. In a move that is surprising to literally no one, Apple is ending Apple Music Connect, its social network that attempted to connect music artists with their fans inside the Apple Music app. At 9 to 5 Mac, Zach Hall reports Apple has informed artists that their Apple Music Connect content is being removed from the main interface of Apple Music and will be gone entirely by May 24th, 2019. For long-time Apple Watchers, this is eerily reminiscent of the time Apple introduced a different music-based social network called Ping, and then closed it after it turned out to be a ghost town. On Twitter, Benjamin Mayo summed up

the reaction writing, this is a good, and overdue change. It was dumb to browse around artist pages on Apple Music and see, quote, latest posts from two or three years ago on every single one. It was just annoying cruff that got in the way since nobody used it, end quote. And rounding out a rock block of Apple News today, another 9 to 5 Mac story reveals analyst Ming Chi Quo's latest predictions for iPhone, and they are not good. Quo predicts a major reduction in iPhone sales in 2019. In his latest report, he pegs iPhone sales in calendar Q1, 2019, around 38 to 42 million units compared to 50 million units from the same quarter in 2018. For the remainder of 2019, the picture is just as bleak and is

substantially lower than current consensus estimates. One important thing to remember is that Apple's financial quarters are shifted three months from calendar quarters. So Apple's Q1 2019 financial reporting will include the holiday sales period from the last three months of 2018. This means Quo is saying that Apple's Q2 2019 quarter is going to reveal major problems related to iPhone. Quo's forecast is that 2018 overall will see 210 million iPhone sales, but in 2019, he expects that number to decline to between 188 and 194 million. That's a dip of roughly 5 to 10%, which again is well below what most analysts expect. This certainly lines up with Apple's recent decision to stop reporting iPhone unit sales numbers.

but it looks like we'll have to wait a few quarters to see what happens. If Quo's predictions come true, and they often do, Apple's got a lot to worry about in its core iPhone business. Recode reports that Instacard and Whole Foods are breaking up. The grocery delivery business has partnered with Whole Foods since 2016, when Recode reported that the companies had signed a five-year deal. Now, just about three years into that deal, Instacart is preparing to remove its workers from Whole Foods. Why? Well, because Amazon bought Whole Foods in June 2017, and it's pushing its own delivery service for the chain. Instacart has employees inside 76 Whole Foods locations, and we'll start pulling them out in February.

Quoting Recode, the company expects to be able to offer 75% of those workers employment at another nearby retailer that partners with Instacart for deliveries. End quote. On a surprising note, the loss of Whole Foods should only reduce Instacart's revenue by less than 5% according to Recode's source. This is apparently due to a burgeoning market for Instacart deliveries from other grocery retailers, including recent deals with Kroger, Aldi, Sam's Club, and Walmart, Canada, among others. There's speculation that Amazon had to pay Instacart to end its contract early, which might also reduce the financial blow. From TechCrunch, an exciting story about a company you've probably never heard of.

Planet Scale is a startup devoted to helping internet companies handle massive scale using technology that was first developed to solve YouTube's scaling problems. And let's face it, if the tech is good enough for YouTube, it's probably good enough for anybody. Planet Scale has seed funding from the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook, and Dropbox, along with C-level players from PayPal and MuleSoft, plus Google's director of engineering. Planet Scale's product is called Vitesse, a relational database system built explicitly for scaling across multiple infrastructure providers, solving the scale problem, and also providing backend diversity. VETES clusters will allow startups to integrate with their preferred cloud

provider, like let's say AWS, while keeping replicas in Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. If the preferred partner gets too expensive or prevents some other kind of business or technical problem, Vitesse allows its users to easily switch to another provider. So what could make this even better? Well, Vitesse is open source. Planet Scale isn't selling the software itself, it's going the Red Hat route by selling training, support, and database hosting. Quoting TechCrunch, the big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend,

with Google's Cloud Spanner and CloudSQL and Amazon's AWSSQL and AWS Aurora. Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat, but founder Jiten Vidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out. Planet Scale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality, so their eggs aren't all in one basket. End quote. These are the weekend long read suggestions brought to you by Betterment,

who's not only here to help you make the most to you. your money, but the most of your weekend. First up, the weekend podcast suggestion. It's called Evie News Daily. It's a daily podcast just like this one, but it's all about the latest news in the world of electric vehicles. Instead of just telling you about it,

Brian spoke to Martin Lee, the host of the show, who will tell you all about it himself. You're going to get 20 minutes of the absolute best EV stories from around the world with platform agnostic and everything you need to know. You could spend hours looking at EV blogs,

but when you walk into the office and someone says, Hey, did you hear what Elon Musk did? You can listen to this podcast for 20 minutes every single morning. We publish in the middle of the night, UK, which ends up being sort of late your time, Eastern, and then a little bit earlier. So basically, when if you get up in the morning, there is a podcast waiting for you with everything you need to know about electric cars. That's the background of the podcast. I do it every single day, which is somewhat slightly bonkers. It's a seven-day-a-week podcast, and if you want to know anything about electric cars and the whole community around it, things like charges,

vehicle to grid where you can use your car to power your house, all those kind of things. Check out EVNewsDaily.com or just search for it, and we should pop up everywhere. And you know how Brian likes to make his wagers on when stuff is actually going to happen? Well, Brian asked Martin when he thought the majority of cars sold would be some form of electric vehicle. According to Martin, it's coming way sooner than you might think. When that change happens, it will be brutally fast. So I'm going to say 2025, for my outright bundetry, that in North America,

EV sales, not the installed cars on the road, not the legacy stock, but in terms of the new car market in 2025, more cars will have a battery, and that includes plug-in hybrids, more cars will have a battery than not. We're seven years away. So search your podcast app for EV News Daily, and we'll see if Martin ends up being right. Next up, the New York Times brings us an obituary for Evelyn Bereson, who built the first computerized word processor. She founded Redactron Corporation in the late 1960s selling a purpose-built computer called the Data Secretary. Quoting the Times, it was 40 inches high the size of a small refrigerator and had no screen

for words to trickle across. Its keyboard and printer was an IBM Selectric typewriter with a rattling printhead the size of a golf ball. The device had 13 semiconductor chips, some of which Ms. Bereson designed, and programmable logic to drive its word processing functions. End quote. Later versions did have screens, by the way, and were truly pined. devices. But Bereson made a bunch of other stuff, too, and she deserves a place in the pantheon

of computing pioneers. Read the piece for more on how she created the first computerized airline reservation system for United before American Airlines much better known Sabre. As is now tradition, Ben Thompson of Straterey has posted his mid-December review called the State of Technology at the end of 2018. He examined the current tech landscape through the lens of recent congressional hearings in which Sundar Pichai handled questions which were, to quote Thompson, freaking delusional. He admits in a footnote that he used a more forceful adjective in his personal notes while watching the hearings. One exchange in particular comes up again and again, so I'm going to quote it here. This is Congressman Lamar Smith, representing the 21st district in Texas.

Quote, Smith. To my knowledge, you have never sanctioned any employee for any type of manipulating the search results whatsoever. Is that the case? Pichai. It's not possible for an individual employee to manipulate the search results. We have a robust framework including many steps in the process. Smith, I disagree. I think they can manipulate the process. End quote. To me, that's 2018 in a nutshell. Someone asks an expert for the truth. The truth is given. Then the person says, eh, I don't buy it. I think I'm going to stick with my gut feeling in place of your facts. Read Thompson's article for an analysis of not just this hearing, but larger questions about where we are, how we got here, and what's next. Vox has a

long read by Eliza Brooke examining the growing industry of recommendation sites. You've probably used one of these, whether it's the wirecutter or best products or the strategist or BuzzFeed reviews or the inventory or the zillion YouTube channels devoted to reviewing and recommending specific products. And let's not forget consumer reports, which basically invented the category. Brooke writes, quote, as ever more authorities enter the fray, the question is this. when everyone claims to have identified the best product in a category, who do you trust? The question may also be, why would we ever turn to the internet the vast sea into which the world dumps its opinions to find the single superlative of anything? End quote.

This article is valuable because it gets into the incentives that are behind all these sites, as well as the specific processes each of them uses to generate its recommendations. Some of them rely on rigorous testing, others rely on cool authors with quirky ideas, and still others are based on who provides the best affiliate revenue. Read up before you turn to these sites so you can better understand their motivations. Finally today, Wired's Angela Watercutter brings us a video on how and why the CIA uses disguises. Featuring interviews with John Mendes, a former CIA disguise chief, the video gets into specifics on how spies change their appearance, including various visual demos.

I particularly enjoyed the quick change executed by a guy walking along a public sidewalk. He really does look like two different people within the span of about 30 seconds. If you ever watched the TV show The Americans and wondered whether the disguised techniques you saw on TV are realistic, you'll want to check this out. And if you're an actual American planning to visit Paris soon, you'll pick up some tips here on how to avoid being clocked as a tourist by local pickpockets. Now, that's news you can use. And that's been the weekend long reads, brought to you by Betterment. Investing involves risk, but tech meme ride home listeners can sign up today and get up to one year of your money managed to free. For more information, visit betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash

R-I-D-E. Today is a special milestone for this podcast. It's actually the 200th episode. I'm glad to be here today standing in for Brian, who is in Boston today talking about his book. If you haven't ordered it yet, please pick up how the internet happened from Netscape to the iPhone, available everywhere that fine books and audiobooks are sold. But book plugs aside, just thank you for joining us in this wild ride of tech news. We've been at this since March. We'll talk to you on Monday and then for many hundreds of weekdays after that.