Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, Apr. 13, 2018 - Instagram Saves Poetry?

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

Is Telegram the new refuge for pirated content, more police departments buy a device to unlock iPhones, Chinese cops use facial recognition to pick criminals out of crowds, more leaks of upcoming Gmail features, the long reads suggestions, and how Instagram might be making poetry popular again. Stories:Telegram is the Hot New Source for Pirated Content (The Outline)Cops Around the Country Can Now Unlock iPhones, Records Show (Motherboard) LongReads:Web apps are only getting better (The Verge)In pursuit of the perfect AI voice (Engadget)Silicon Valley Powered American Tech Dominance—Now It Has a Challenger (WSJ)Arcade fame turns to infamy as Billy Mitchell's record-setting Donkey Kong score is invalidated (TechCrunch) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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. That's betterment.com slash ride home. Welcome to the tech meme ride home for Friday, April 13th, 2018. Today, is Telegram the new piracy refuge?

Police departments apparently have a device that can unlock iPhones. Chinese cops use facial recognition to literally pick criminals out of crowds. More leaks of upcoming Gmail features, the weekend long reads suggestions, and how Instagram might be making post. poetry popular again. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Over at the outline, Manish saying is reporting on the instant messaging app Telegram, which is a favorite of journalists and activists because of its end-to-end encryption features and its secret chat channels. It seems that increasingly, telegrams more than 200 million users are trading pirated files of movies, music,

and other stuff on those secret chat channels. Interestingly, the outline discovered that one of the more popular markets is for stolen login credentials for sites like Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, at all. This is because telegram users can create channels which they can administer on their own and set their own rules for. Some channels have more than 100,000 members and many of them are devoted to things like file sharing. I think people love the simplicity of telegram. It's akin to the 1990-2000s websites when internet was really a freedom island for all. One Russian-based telegram, user told Singh. Quoting from the piece, instead of linking to annoying ad-filled file-sharing websites or asking users to install additional software, as is common on Torrent websites such as the Pirate Bay

and 1337X, and other questionable forums like mobilism.org and mega.co.n.z. Many channels upload the content directly to Telegram's cloud-based servers. This has enabled users to download a movie or a song directly to their phone or computer with a single tap, end quote. There seems to be a combination of telegram being generally permissive as to how channels operate. The copious storage, Telegram offers users for free, and a willingness of existing users to stay mum for fear that if word gets out, the general free-for-all that seemingly exists right now on Telegram would come to an end. If you're of a certain age and you remember the lawless days of Usenet news groups, it's an

analogy that a lot of people have made. A spokesperson for the RIAA told the outline that it was aware of the issue. The question would become, at what point might Google and Apple be pressured to take these apps down from their respective app stores? Neither Google nor Apple provided comment for the piece. Telegram was founded by the Russian entrepreneur Pavaldorov, who also seems to be aware of the potentially problematic activities of some users, but he maintains the purity of his intentions to make Telegram a platform free of oversight and control. In a Twitter thread late last year responding to Edward Snowden, Durov tweeted, quote, FYI, thousands of opposition channels are thriving on Telegram, and we don't care what local politicians have to say about it. We enforce

rules only if a particular public channel violates our very simple terms of service, no public calls for violence, no porn, no copyright infringement. And even those limitations we do have are forced on us by the mobile platforms, which threatened to kick Telegram from App Store slash Google Play, every once in a while for being too libertarian. Realistically, you can't have more freedom than on Telegram in a mobile app for iOS or Android. You might be familiar with the fact that iPhones are encrypted and therefore difficult to unlock, a fact that has caused difficulties for law enforcement agencies. But what you might not know is that there is a device called gray key, which can break into iPhones, including the flagship iPhone 10 running the latest

versions of iOS. And police forces around the country, including the Maryland State Police, Indiana State Police, and possibly the Miami-Dade County Police, might have already purchased these devices. The Secret Service is reportedly planning to buy Grey Keys. The State Department has apparently already done so. And the DEA and FBI seem to be looking into it as well. This is all according to a long-running investigation by Motherboard. The gray keys are made by a company called Gray Shaft, which reportedly has an ex-Apple security engineer on its staff.

I'll let Motherboard describe how the devices work. The gray key itself is a small 4 by 4 inches box with two lightning cables for connecting iPhones, according to photographs published by cybersecurity firm Malware Bites. The device comes in two very four-bytergey. versions, a $15,000 one, which requires online connectivity and allows 300 unlocks, or $50 per phone, and an offline $30,000 version which can crack as many iPhones as the customer wants, end quote. Malwarebytes previously reported that Gray Key can unlock an iPhone in as little as two hours,

but it could take three days or longer if it's a phone with a six-digit passcode on it. In recent years, law enforcement officials have repeatedly called, for backdoors to be built into phones so that authorities can access information when pursuing criminal investigations. Rihanna Pfeffercorn, a cryptology fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told motherboard, quote, the availability and affordability of these tools undercuts law enforcement's continual assertions that they need smartphone vendors to be forced into building exceptional access capabilities into their devices, end quote. But also one has to wonder how long these devices might be effective tools for law enforcement in the first place,

as business insiders kift Leswing tweeted, quote, when iOS 12 comes out, these will be $30,000 paperweights. Various outlets are reporting that police in China apprehended a crime suspect recently after he attended a concert and officials were able to find him in the crowd using facial recognition technology. The 31-year-old suspect was wanted in connection with what is being described as an economic dispute. The concert in question was attended by more than 60,000 people, but the suspect was identified because law enforcement had set up cameras at the ticketing entrances.

The facial recognition software reportedly was connected to the police database, and police made the arrest during the concert itself. This is not the first time Chinese law enforcement has employed facial recognition to identify and apprehend suspects. In August, police arrested 25 fugitives using facial recognition at the Quingdao International Beer Festival. And Shenyang police have used the software to nab suspects using cameras set up at subway stations. Quick follow up on a previous story, the chief executive officer of Backpage.com, the Personals Ads website that was accused of being a marketplace for prostitution in human trafficking, pled guilty to federal and state charges of conspiracy and money laundering.

As a result of the plea deal, CEO Carl Ferrer will serve no more than five years in prison. Under the plea agreement, Ferrer reportedly will make available to law enforcement the company's data so that investigations and prosecutions can continue. Backpage was originally founded by Michael Lacey and James Larkin, former owners of the village voice. Larkin and Lacey remain jailed in Arizona. awaiting hearings on their own cases, and five other employees of the website were recently arrested and pled not guilty, but only Lacey and Larkin remain in custody. Changes to Twitter's emoji library are rolling out, and among the changes, the pistol emoji has been replaced by a green water gun.

Apple recently made a similar change to its gun emoji, as has Samsung and WhatsApp. But the change is especially notable on Twitter, of course, a platform where cyberbullying and threats have been a problem that the company has increasingly been trying to combat. In an email to TechCrunch, Twitter seemed to shy away from suggestions that the change had any political implications, perhaps relating to gun rights versus gun control debates. Twitter said the change was made for, quote, consistency. The new emoji will appear to Twitter users on desktop, mobile, and tweet deck. If you'll remember there was recently news of a Gmail redesign coming down the pike, and today The Verge is reporting that there will be some pretty big new features coming soon as well. Apparently, Gmail will also be gaining a confidentiality mode,

which will let users stop recipients from forwarding, copying, downloading, or printing, emails. Also, passcode protected emails are coming, which will allow you to generate an SMS code for a recipient, which would force them to confirm their identity. If they don't have the code, they don't open the email. Some of these features already exist for users of Microsoft's Outlook app, but it's not clear how these features would work if you're sending email to non-Gmail users. And again, we don't know when these new Gmail features are coming, although several outlets noted that Google's I.O. Developer Conference begins May 8th, so an official announcement could be coming fairly soon. For all the ways that podcasting is a new medium, it's still very much based on the old broadcast model. I talk, you listen. But interactivity and social elements might be coming to podcasting soon. Today, the podcast platform and one-stop podcast production app, Anchor, announced something it is calling

co-hosts. Anchor already allows listeners to call in to podcasts, and producers can then edit that audio into a show, but co-hosts will now allow podcasters to find other podcasters to podcast with. Starting today, you can go into the Anchor app, choose a topic, and get matched with someone who also podcasts around that topic. Then you can hook up on the app and begin recording a podcast together. Both podcasters will receive a copy of the recording

and can publish it to their own feed right away or edit and save it for later. One thing we've heard over and off, I don't have someone to record a podcast with. So that's what co-host is all about. It's about finding somewhere to talk to you about a specific

topic that you want to start your podcast about. That was Mike Magnost. CEO of Anchor. He told me that this could potentially just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of ideas Anchor might have for bringing podcasting more into the social fabric of the web. Part of democratizing audio, which is our mission, has always meant more than just making it easy to create a podcast. We've always wanted to innovate on the format of podcasting as well and make it more fun and social and interactive. and this is just another really fun way for people to interact with each other. So you can imagine us doing a lot more things in the social podcasting space in the future.

And obviously, Anchor is hoping that a bit of kismet can happen. Maybe the next big podcast will be born when a couple of producers discover they have the right sort of on-air chemistry by discovering each other on Anchor. Four different long-read suggestions for you this week. First, in The Verge, the inimitable Paul Miller has, a piece up talking about all the upcoming technologies that are coming to the four to make web apps even more comprehensive. He outlines things like progressive web apps, web assembly, and Houdini, technologies that could make web-based apps functionally indistinguishable from apps that

sit natively on your device. The piece in question is called web apps are only getting better, and it's on the Verges Circuit Breaker. Next, and Gadget has an interesting article about the quest to improve virtual assistance by achieving that holy grail of making them seem more lifelike and human. One of the keys to achieving this is improving the voice of virtual assistance to make them seem less, well, robotic. Quoting from the piece, until fairly recently, voice and the ability to form words, sentences, and complete thoughts was a uniquely human attribute. It's a complex mechanical task, and yet nearly every human is an expert at it. Human response to voice is deeply ingrained, beginning when children hear their

mother's voice in the womb. The piece is called In Pursuit of the Perfect AI Voice, and it's about the researchers that are trying to achieve just that. The Wall Street Journal has a piece titled Silicon Valley-powered American tech dominance. Now it has a challenger, and it's about a trend that venture capitalists have been worrying about for a while now, how Asian venture money is increasingly beginning to muscle in on the race to fund the next $100 billion companies. Quoting from this piece a decade ago, nearly three quarters of the world's financing of innovative, tech-heavy startups, and young companies took place in the U.S.,

with American investors plowing money into mostly U.S.-based venture firms. Now a surge of new money, mostly from China, has helped drive funding totals into the stratosphere and has transformed the venture landscape, according to an exclusive Wall Street Journal analysis of venture funding data. And speaking of analysis, this whole piece is chock full of charts and statistics and really interesting numbers that show the stark realities of how Silicon Valley no longer has the venture field to itself. Finally, this last story has been picked up by a bunch of places,

but I'm choosing the TechCrunch article as the long-read suggestion. If you ever saw that great documentary, The King of Kong, a fistful, of quarters, you might remember Billy Mitchell, the man who had claimed to set the record on the classic arcade game Donkey Kong. The documentary is loosely about essentially whether or not Mitchell rightfully owned the Donkey Kong high score record or if Underdog Steve Weeby had it. Well, it was announced this week that Twin Galaxies, the Guinness Book of World Records for video game high scores, had invalidated Mitchell's infamous Donkey Kong record and given it instead to Weeby. If you saw the documentary, then you know how big a deal this is. If you haven't

seen the documentary, then maybe consider this a weekend streaming suggestion. It's absolutely a positively fascinating watch. Again, it's the King of Kong, a fistful of quarters. As always, links to all of the long-read suggestions are in the show notes. Finally, a couple of quick items that aren't really full-fledged stories, but I thought you might find interesting. Today might be the last day you ever have to sign a credit card receipt. All four major credit card companies were scheduled to eliminate the in-person signature for credit card charges sometime in April. American Express, MasterCard, and Discover are all reportedly flipping the switch today, and Visa is doing so sometime later this month. Second, I learned on Twitter this morning that one of the hottest genres in book

publishing lately is poetry, and we might actually have social media to thank for that. At the ongoing London Book Fair, people are apparently talking a lot about so-called insta poets, poets like Nikita Gill, Kate Tempest, Holly McNish, and Rupi Kaur, who have developed followings

for their poetry on platforms like YouTube, but especially Instagram. These social media poets are not without their critics. In January poet Rebecca Watts published a piece called The Cult of the Noble Amateur, in which she said that, quote,

The new poets are products of a cult of personality, which demands from its heroes only that they be honest and accessible, where honesty is defined as the constant expression of what one feels, and accessibility means the complete rejection of complexity, subtlety, eloquence, and the aspiration to do anything well, end quote. But apparently, these poets are rejuvenating the practice of poetry. According to Nielsen Bookscan, one million poetry books were sold in the UK in 2017, which represents the best sales year on record. And in the Canadian book market, sales of poetry grew 79% in 2016 alone. Overall, Nielsen BookScan reports

that poetry book sales have seen a 66% increase in the past five years, though I couldn't confirm if that included a breakdown of the American market. Coincidentally, though, this month. April is National Poetry Month in the U.S., so maybe celebrate by opening up Instagram and searching for a poet to follow. So a bit of an odd day today, lots of little nuggets of stories, but then it is Friday the 13th, so it's supposed to be a little odd, right? Although, as notorious internet killjoy, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted today, quote, if you do the full calculation, you will find

that Friday the 13th is no less rare on the calendar than Thursday the 12th. Okay, Neil. Anyway, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. I and everyone at TechMeme.com are hoping that you had a day of good fortune and are wishing you a lovely weekend. Talk to you on Monday.