Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, Mar. 23, 2018 - The Dropbox IPO

Episode Date: March 23, 2018

Low-cost iPads are coming, Dropbox IPOs, touchscreen issues with Galaxy S9s, Craigslist pulls all personal ads, and the weekend long-read suggestions. Long-reads links:How IKEA's future-living lab created an augmented reality hit (WiredUk)My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data (The Atlantic)The Glory that Was Yahoo (Fast Company) 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. Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Friday, March 23rd, 2018. Today, low-cost iPads are coming, Dropbox IPOs, there are touchscreen issues with Galaxy S-9s, Craigslist pulls all of its personal ads, and the weekend long reads.

Here's what happened today in the world of tech. If Bloomberg's Mark German is right, and to be fair, he usually is, the next Tuesday's Apple event will end up being exactly what everybody kind of thought it would be. German reports that Apple will unveil new low-cost iPads in an attempt to win back the education market from rivals like Microsoft and especially Google, which has seen its Chromebooks have much success recently in schools. The global educational technology market is apparently worth $17.7 billion a year, and Apple used to dominate it.

If you're of a certain age, it was basically only, Apple twos and Apple II E's that you had in your classrooms growing up. But over the last decade or so, Google especially has been aggressively targeting this market. According to German's report, devices running Google's operating systems on Chromebooks or Android tablets held 60% of the education market, with Windows PCs coming in at 22%, and Apple devices accounting for only 17%. Tuesday's Apple event will also reportedly feature new school-centric

software. Apple already makes a classroom app for the iPad, which lets teachers manage Apple devices that are assigned to students. And there is the iTunes U app, which lets teachers issue homework assignments and post lessons online. One interesting note is that

the rumored new cheaper MacBook that people think will be coming soon to replace the MacBook air as the entry-level laptop in Apple's lineup, probably won't be ready in time to be announced next week. Dropbox made its debut on the NASDAQ this morning, opening at $29 a share, representing a 40% jump from its listing price of $21 a share. Beginning trading under the ticker symbol DBX, the company raised $756 million in the offering,

and at the highs of the day, the market was valuing Dropbox at around $12 billion. Sources also reported to CNBC that the offering had been oversubscribed by about 25 times. Dropbox, of course, is the highest profile-so-called unicorn startup to go public since Snap made its debut last year. And there was an interesting little tidbit in the paperwork filed for Spotify's own upcoming IPO. Earlier this month, it was reported that Spotify was cracking down on some users who were using modified versions of the Spotify app to stream music for free while also blocking the ads. Well, it turns out that it wasn't just a few users. In its IPO filings, Spotify revealed that roughly 2.3% of Spotify users on the free tier

were using modded apps to skip the ads. But 2.3% of free listeners adds up to roughly 2 million listeners. Something tells me that Spotify will be taking increasing steps to keep users from skipping the ads in the very near future. Some users of the recently released Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus phones are reporting problems with the touch screens on the phones not actually registering touches. It seems that where on the touchscreen the problem is happening

varies from device to device, so this is not a you're holding it wrong situation. Some users have apparently been able to be able, to resolve the issue by doing a factory reset or turning up the sensitivity of touch responsiveness, but a lot of users experiencing this problem are apparently having to resort to replacing the phone entirely. A Samsung spokesperson told Engadget that, quote, we are looking into a limited number of reports of Galaxy S9 S9 plus touchscreen responsiveness issues and encouraged anyone experiencing problems with their touchscreens to contact the company,

directly. Craigslist today took down all of its personal's advertising category entirely. This comes after Reddit announced on Wednesday that it was taking down some subreddits that allowed users to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services. These moves come after both houses of Congress just this week, past the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, otherwise known as, Fasta. The bill, which was designed to be an anti-sex trafficking law, awaits President Trump's signature. Many in the tech industry opposed this bill on the grounds that it would have a chilling effect on online services and platforms that allow users to trade services, whether those services are of a sexual nature or not. The bill, which is an amendment to sections of the Communications Decency Act, states that websites can now be punished.

for, quote, facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking. The Landmark 1996 Communications Decency Act shielded website operators that host third-party content from civil liability. In other words, the owner of a blog can't be sued for comments made on a blog post and eBay can't be sued because somebody sold stolen goods on its platform. But with that liability protection potentially about to go away,

Craigslist said that it was simply too great a risk to host any personals advertising at all. In a statement, Craigslist wrote, quote, Any tool or service can be misused. We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking Craigslist Personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back someday. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through Craigslist, we wish you every happiness, end quote.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other digital rights advocacy groups opposed the legislation. Elliot Harmon and EFF activist wrote, quote, It's easy to see the impact that this ramp up and liability will have on online speech. Facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice, but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussions and what sorts of users they allow. censoring innocent people in the process, end quote. And interestingly enough, the Justice Department itself had warned Congress in February that the bill raised, quote, a serious constitutional concern, as the law was apparently

written to apply retroactively, something that would seemingly be an obvious violation of the Constitution's ex post facto clause. And ironically, the bill was opposed by some. anti-sex trafficking advocates as well, because it failed to distinguish between trafficking victims and sex workers. It potentially also does more harm than good to victims because it would eliminate sex workers' sources of income and would hamper existing anti-trafficking investigations. The House version of the bill is actually an update to the century-old Man Act, which prohibited prostitution across state line.

They think that shutting down any online platform is going to miraculously end human trafficking. Jessica Pena Ronda, director of strategic initiatives at the Sex Workers Project, told the website Injustice today. But real solutions aren't so easy, Pena Randa says. The U.S. Department of Justice today charged and sanctioned nine Iranian nationals and an Iranian company for what it alleged were hacking attempts targeting hundreds of of universities worldwide, dozens of companies, and parts of the U.S. government. The hackers were not accused of being directly employed by Iran's government, but justice said the hacking attempts were on behalf of Iranian interests. The cyber attacks began in 2013 and resulted in the theft of 21 terabytes of academic data

from 114 U.S. universities and 176 universities overseas. The hackers targeted the email accounts of 100,000 professors worldwide, half of them U.S.-based professors, and successfully compromised at least 8,000 of them. The hackers also reportedly targeted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Department of Labor, the United Nations, and the computer systems of the U.S. states, Hawaii, and Indiana. Apparently, the hackers were after academic data related to science and technology,

engineering, social sciences, and medicine. U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said U.S. authorities, quote, will aggressively investigate and prosecute hostile actors who attempt to profit from America's ideas by infiltrating our computer systems and stealing intellectual property. In related news, the Department of Justice also reportedly reached out quietly to several tech companies on Friday and warn them to expect cyber attacks from Iran in retaliation for this crackdown announced today. Well, it's Friday, so it's time for some weekend long-read recommendations. First up, Wired UK has a neat piece entitled

How Ikea's Future Living Lab created an augmented reality hit. It's about the augmented reality app IKEA Place, which IKEA launched last September, and allows people to drop virtual furniture into their own homes and view the results through their smartphone camera. One of the first apps to make use of Apple's AR kit framework, the app has proven popular with IKEA fans for obvious reasons. But what I found interesting in the piece was that IKEA knows

that the app could potentially provide it with a ton of data on its own customers. After all, by using the app, you're showing IKEA the dimensions of your... actual home. But for the time being at least, IKEA is resisting the urge to mine this data. We want to help you, but we don't want to intrude on you. Michael Valsgard, digital transformation lead at IKEA told Wired UK, quote, we could do a crazy amount of commercial things with the data, but I've instructed the company to delete it. Given recent events, that comes off as sounding pretty good right now. Well, we almost made it all the way through this entire episode without mentioning Facebook,

but not quite. In the Atlantic, Ian Bogost has a really fascinating story, given the context of the last few days, entitled, My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data. It describes how, on a lark in 2010, Bogost coded up a frivolous Facebook app called Cow Clicker. As I say, it was a lark, but over 180,000 users, installed it. And after the news of the last week, Bogos was inspired to go back and look at all of the data that his app harvested from Facebook, since it's still stored on his private server.

It gives a really interesting context about how the Facebook app ecosystem functioned in the old days and possibly allowed the events of the last week to come to pass. Finally today, a story that's really after my own heart. Fast Company has a great piece, by Dan Tynan called The Glory That Was Yahoo, which outlines how, as I've said in other places, Yahoo really was the web's first truly great company. It outlines Yahoo during its heyday in the portal wars and the dot-com bubble, the somewhat heroic way that it survived the bubble, but then also the ways that surviving the bubble made it miss the revolution that Google was bringing to the web. It also highlights some of the firsts that most people don't remember Yahoo was responsible for,

like providing online file storage before the likes of Dropbox, online music streaming before the likes of Spotify, and broadcast.com, which is the whole reason that Mark Cuban is a billionaire today. It's really, really a great piece. Some of you might be aware that I do another podcast called the Internet History Podcast, so this sort of thing is right up my alley, which, by By the way, good time for a shameless plug. Check out the Internet History Podcast if you haven't heard of it. I did two entire episodes on the history of Yahoo! And have interviewed several early Yahoo employees, including Yahoo's employee number three.

And if Yahoo's not your bag, the most recent episode that dropped this week was an interview with Eugene Way, who was an early Amazon employee as well as an early Hulu employee. Check out the Internet History Podcast. Also a good weekend long listen. That was the TechMeme ride home for today. Enjoy your weekend, everybody. You've earned it. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC and check out TechMeme.com on the web.

And come back Monday afternoon so we can dive into all of this again.