Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 9/20 - Airbnb Plans an Open House in 2020

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

Airbnb says it will have an IPO in 2020, Twitter exposes more bad state actors, a French court says Steam digital games may be resold in the EU, hold the phone on upgrading your iPhone to iOS 13, Amazon plays free with Allbirds, Tinder brings a new meaning to the word Bandersnatch, and this week’s long-reads suggestions, including a deep dive into the problems with pilot training and Boeing’s 737-MAX. Sponsors Mealime.com OpenVPN Links: Airbnb Says It Plans to Go Public in 2020 (New York Times) Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020 (Airbnb) Twitter suspends account of former top Saudi aide implicated in Khashoggi killing (Washington Post) Disclosing new data to our archive of information operations (Twitter) French court rules that Steam’s ban on reselling used games is contrary to European law (Polygon) New features available with iOS 13 (Apple) Facebook may copy your app, but Amazon will copy your shoe (The Verge) Inside Tinder’s Secret Streaming Series (Variety) What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max? (New York Times) How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen (Wired) The U1 chip in the iPhone 11 is the beginning of an Ultra Wideband revolution (Six Colors) Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis (Wired) iOS and iPadOS 13: The MacStories Review (MacStories) 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 ride home for Friday, September 20th, 2019. Today, Airbnb says it will have an IPO in 2020. Twitter exposes more bad state actors.

A French court says Steam digital games may be resold in the European Union. Hold the phone on upgrading your iPhone to iOS 13. Amazon plays free with all birds. Tinder brings a new meaning to the word bandersnatch. and this week's long read suggestions including a deep dive into the problems with pilot training and Boeing 737 Max. I'm Glenn Fleischman in for Brian McCullough, and here's what you missed in the world of tech today. Airbnb said Thursday afternoon it plans to go public in 2020. The company is one of the last of the biggest firms to emerge in the second wave of dot-com businesses after the early 2000s market crash that hadn't yet gone public.

Airbnb is currently valued at $31 billion. The company released no details offering a one-line statement. This came a day after its release of quarterly financials in which it took in over a billion dollars. The company says it has 7 million listings in 100,000 cities. Airbnb may offer equity to hosts who use its services, not merely an opportunity to buy shares at the IPO price, according to the New York Times, but it's clearly not settled whether that will happen or not. Airbnb's announcement came amidst roiling. The financial markets are jittery due to Trump's trade wars.

The Fed has lowered the prime lending rate twice since July, a sign of its attempts to bolster what it expects to be a weakening economy, and two prominent IPOs from earlier in the year, Lyft and Uber are both trading well under their offering price. The desk rental company, WeWork, now called We, pulled its roadshow when it was en route to becoming another kind of show, following widespread ridicule and dismay about potential conflicts of interest, corporate structure, and losses. Airbnb has a much different balanced sheet and seemingly hasn't burned money in quite the same way as Uber, Lyft, and We. Airbnb says it had a profit in 2017 and 2018, excluding some expenses, we'll get to see the full breakdown when they formally file with the SEC. Unlike Uber and Lyft, there's no confusion about whether hosts our employees.

Unlike we, Airbnb is more likely to see an upswing in business during a downturn as people offer more places to rent that are cheaper than hotels if they need to make extra money. Airbnb's primary purpose was to leverage effectively underutilized infrastructure in the form of rooms or homes that were otherwise empty, just like unsold hotel rooms or empty airline seats. However, because it's become such a juggernaut, there are reports from all over the globe of entrepreneurs building or buying effectively Airbnb hotels in which each room is rent as a separate property, typically in violation of local laws. Airbnb has also pushed back

heavily against local regulators who have wanted to enforce rules, such as licensing, levying taxes, or not allowing the rental of properties for fewer than 30 days if the owner doesn't live on site. However, the company appears to be weathering all its regulatory storms, far better than Uber and Lyft, and it's had a multi-year mission to diversify and expand as it acquires companies in related areas and offers travel experiences. Twitter announced that it has suspended many thousands of accounts that it identified as associated with state-sponsored propaganda. This includes the personal account of Saud al-Katani, a former advisor to Saudi Arabia's crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, and suspected of involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last

year. Twitter suspended accounts originating in or suspected to be controlled by several other countries surrounding war, politics, and conflict. In the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, Twitter removed what it called a network of 273 accounts that engaged in a coordinated pattern primarily to attack Qatar, but also to disparage Iran and promote Saudi Arabia. It disrupted a network of over 4,000 accounts that originated in the UAE that engaged in impersonation and directed messages at Qatar and Yemen. Twitter also suspended accounts engaged in something closer to astroturfing and promotion. This included over 1,000 fake accounts associated with the Alianza Paiz party in Ecuador, which Twitter said engaged in promoting the administration

of President Lenin Moreno. In Spain, Twitter removed 265. accounts, it said were operated by Partido Poplar and used briefly for spamming and retweeting. Twitter began both disclosing accounts it had suspended for this reason nearly a year ago, and this is its fourth update since then. It puts the tweets of suspended accounts into a database to which it's provided access to researchers. It says that thousands of researchers have independently analyzed the information and release their own reports and made their own conclusions. A French court said that the Steam games offered by Valve aren't rentals, but purchases,

and that buyers in the European Union have the right to resell them. Valve was given three months to implement the change, but Senate will appeal, which puts that change on hold. This strikes to the heart of media business models worldwide for digital purchases. When you buy a CD, DVD, or game cartridge, or a book, in the United States, you can resell it to someone else. A so-called first sale doctrine gives a copyright holder only the right to control their first sale. Similar principles apply in the EU, called more technically Article 4, Sub 2 of the European Union,

copyright directive. A purchaser has the right to sell a thing they bought and own. Digital purchases overturned that principle by converting a purchase into a license. When Apple introduced the iTunes store, I had a briefing from Phil Schiller, Apple's product marketing head. He said, unlike other services at the time, when you buy a song, you own it. I asked him if I could sell it. If I own it, he said, after a pause, no. The French court essentially overturned that notion, but don't get too excited. It seems to only apply to software licenses rather than media licenses. The High Court of Paris said that Steam isn't a subscription service because the license to use

the game is in perpetuity. An owner would be able to sell just a single digital copy, not multiples, under the court's interpretation of EU law. This decision builds on a number of previous EU decisions that date back as far as 2012. Apple shipped its latest iPhones today, the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max. The pro models include far more battery life and OLED display. and three cameras, which apparently induce a feeling of nausea to people with a condition known as tripophobia, a reaction to the site of clusters of small holes. I get it, though I don't

have it. But I bring this up because yesterday Apple released iOS 13. That's 13.0. The company has decided to shift to separate OS releases for the iPhone and the often forgotten iPod Touch, and for its increasingly laptop-ish iPad. Here's where it gets confusing. iOS 13 shipped on September 19th, but the company delayed the new release of iPadOS, also numbered 13, that was supposed to be released September 30th. But iOS apparently wasn't entirely ready with all its promised features, so Apple had already been preparing iOS 13.1 and was going to release that on September 30th as well. Now, as of yesterday, the date was pushed up.

iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1, I think, one, will both be released on September 20th. The conclusion by me and many other tech folks don't update your iPhone to 13.0, but wait for 13.1.1 or even 13.1. Which is sure to follow soon after. 13.0 is a little buggy, and it's worth waiting to avoid troubles and the time to update twice. Meal Kit apps advertise on podcasts all the time, but did you know that Meal Lyme is the most popular meal planning app in the world? Everybody eats. Some just do it better than others. Have you ever had trouble sticking to a diet? Or wondered the grocery store aimlessly with no real menu in mind? Meal Lyme gets you organized with quick and easy meals matched up with your personal dietary preferences.

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to eat in the first place. Mealim is M-E-A-L-I-M-E. It's a completely free app available in the App Store and Google Play. Or check out Mealime.com to learn more. Your busy weeknights are about to get so much easier because Mealime has made meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking as easy as getting takeout. Mealim, M-E-A-L-I-M-E. I want you to open a free account with OpenVPN today.

OpenVPN's access server is free to install and use for a maximum of two simultaneous VPN connections, so you can trial it without having to pay first. And this free trial doesn't ever expire. OpenVPN Access Server is a full-featured SSL VPN solution that accommodates a wide range of configurations, including remote access, site-to-site VPN's Wi-Fi. security and enterprise scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access controls. It's a software-only solution that is cost-effective and easy to deploy.

OpenVPN Access Server is built with the OpenVPN Code, a critical open-source project. That is the de facto industry standard for VPN protocol. OpenVPN Access Server was named a top 25 Amazon Cloud solution provider in 2018. So what are you waiting for? Again, all Access Server downloads come with two free devices for testing purposes, so get started today by going to openvPN.net.net slash ride. That's Openvpn.com.com.com slash ride to test drive access server for free. Facebook and Apple are usually the ones accused of copying features developed by third parties and sold on their platforms. But now Amazon is getting the finger pointed at them.

The Verge reports that Amazon has allegedly directly copy the shoe style of Allbirds, a startup shoe provider that makes affordably priced woolshed. shoes. Like Warby Parker, Allbirds takes the fuss cost and decision-making out of routine purchases while also being by some lights stylish. The Verge says in an intersection of startup amazingness that the Tinder app's product chief called out Amazon on Twitter for what he called quote straight copying, unquote, of Allbirds through the e-commerce giants brand 206 collective. 206 is the area code for the Seattle region, by the way. Amazon's shoe costs $45 to Allbirds, The Verge didn't ask Amazon for comment, but I did. An Amazon spokesperson told me via email, quote,

We have nothing to share at this time. Speaking of Tinder, Variety says that Tinder is prepping a choose-your-own-ending adventure. It will air a streaming series a la Netflix's Bander Snatch, and doesn't this give rise to new interpretations of the name of that pioneering interactive movie? Of course, Tinder's show is about an impending apocalypse, because that's very romantic. and the six-episode series asks, Who would you spend your last night alive with? The series will be available within the Tinder app

and uses its swipe right for a match and swipe left to move along to choose paths along the adventure. The show may appear later on other platforms, including as a straightforward edited series. Variety says the show was shot inexpensively at a bit above $5 million and features, quote, up-and-coming actors, unquote, meaning nobody that most people have heard of. Weekend is coming up, and I'm sure you need something to read,

so here are our Long Read suggestions. Boeing is to blame for building an odd and complicated system for its 737 max aircraft intended to compensate for rare conditions of flight. Writes freshly minted New York Times Magazine writer at large William Longavisha, but the system of training pilots in some developing nations is at fault for the deaths, he concludes. Longavisha was a commercial pilot himself, and he pulls together first-hand experience, black box recorder information, data tracked by aviation regulators, testimony, research, and interviews to provide a comprehensive picture of exactly what wrong. Probably the best one will ever read, except for a book-length dissection by him or someone

with a similar degree of technical expertise. Right after the first crash of a 737 max by Indonesia's Lion Airline, Blame was put on the pilots, with a strong air of developed nation paternalism that implied that pilots in a country like Indonesia couldn't be that great. When a second crash occurred with an Ethiopian airline's flight, that whiff became a stench of accusation. And Longavie should put my backup when I started reading the article and at several points throughout. I thought he was leading up to explaining how Boeing may have made a few errors in design,

but excusing them and saying that the pilots really were bad in the cause. But that's not where he goes. Instead, he indicts the entire system of pilot training in Indonesia, Ethiopia, and several other countries that have developed a buy-the-checklist method of teaching that produces pilots who are effectively robotic. Without general experience, they can't handle edge cases. He notes that the two crashes weren't caused by the pilots per se, but that more experienced pilots, like those found in most airlines around the world, would have been able to save the flights,

as in fact the previous flight by the line aircraft that crashed was saved in similar circumstances through the likely assistance of an unnamed pilot who is dead heading the route. Quote, it is certain that thousands of similar crews are at work around the world, enduring as rote pilots and apparently safe, but only so long as conditions are routine, he writes. Longavisha notes that China was on a similar track as it ramped up aviation, but instead of continuing that route, it opted to listen to pilots and airplane manufacturers and develop a more robust pilot training system that now puts it alongside other nations of the world in terms of safety. But he doesn't let Boeing off the hook at all. He questions a host of choices they made, and he wonders if the 737 Max will ever get back in the air at all. Next up, a Wi-Fi industry insider recounts that wire the early history of the standard, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary. a few days ago. Jeff Abramowitz explains how Wi-Fi almost didn't happen. The technical standard,

802.11, came out of the I-Triple-E technical group, and heavy hitters had lined up around HomeRF, a competing wireless effort backed by Microsoft, Intel, and others, using technology that I believe a company then called Proxim had championed. Several other firms banded together to form the ponderously named Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance or Weka, and used a branding firm to come up with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi isn't an abbreviation. It doesn't stand for wireless fidelity, but it sure as heck implies it. Weka changed its name to the Wi-Fi Alliance years later. But the author notes that one name discarded along the path was Flank Speed, which I had never heard before. I followed Wi-Fi closely with a daily blog from 2001 to 2011. I remember this

period very well, and I talked to Abramowitz a number of times in that period. The release of 802.11B in 1999 doomed HomeRF because 802.11B was fast at 11 megabits per second and used a different encoding standard from HomeRF. The FCC had already approved the method Wi-Fi used. Home RF had a wait to push its faster version out until began supporting both Wi-Fi and HomeRF and by 2003, HomerF, was gone. Abramowitz concludes, be thankful that you're not connecting with the world at FlankSpeed. On the subject of wireless over at six colors.com, my good friend Jason Snell drives into ultra-wideband or UWB, a wireless technology that ships in the new iPhones. UWB uses extremely wide channels.

hence its name, to send information and was originally developed over a decade ago as the successor to frequency hopping and coding that was used in Bluetooth. It wasn't robust enough to meet the bar then, however, and had a number of other technical issues that were later solved. Now it's back because it can be used to pinpoint locations with a precision of 5mm to 10 centimeters over short distances. Apple is the first company to put UWB into a phone, and the only use so far is for two people with one of these new models to point at each other to exchange a file over AirDrop without having to figure out which person in their list to pick. Jason says there's a lot more to watch for in the security area

because proximity and security can go hand in hand. On the issue of artificial intelligence over at Wired, Gregory Barber digs into the problem of reproducibility. Deep learning systems are black boxes. You pour a lot of data into an algorithm and train it by telling it what matches and what does not. But the internal workings aren't comprehensive. to researchers. The AI doesn't have true intelligence and doesn't really know what it's doing either. That's why adding a little noise to an image or stickers on a road can confuse a vision AI into

misinterpreting a cat as a turtle or lane markings as veering from its course. As a result, researchers trying to replicate the results of other people's experiments in AI often can't get the same match or can't even build a system that approximates it. The headline calls it a crisis, but it's being worked on and it's more like a wake-up call. Finally, if you'd like a deep, deep, deep, deep dive into iOS 13 and the upcoming iPad OS 13. It's a yearly ritual for Frederico Vatici at Mac Stories to produce an exhaustive accounting of all that's new and changed from top to bottom. It's extremely useful for anyone who wants to get the most out of the new operating systems,

which I will remind you, you should wait a few days to install. For troubleshooting and understanding the changes, Mac Stories, deep dive is invaluable as well. And that's the news. I'm Glenn Fleischman and thank you for your attention. Ryan McCullough is currently storming Area 51, and he'll be back Monday unless he has been beamed up. I just released two books, one on connecting and security for your iPhone and iPad, using the latest operating system releases. Yes, the ones I warned you about this report to wait to install, and the other about Apple ID management and troubleshooting. Go to take controlbooks.com to get a copy.

You can find me at Glenn F, G-L-E-N-N-F on Twitter, thanks to the editors at TechMeme, who tweet out every headline they post. every hour of the day at TechMeme. It's a great way to keep current. Have a great