Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, May 18, 2018 - Fortnite Comes to Android

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

Today more leakage of your phone’s location data, Fortnite comes to Android, dataplans for seniors’ smartphones, robotic insects, drone sailboats, and the weekend long reads suggestions. Stories from: @briankrebs, @valleyhack Links: Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site (KrebsonSecurity)The first wireless flying robotic insect takes off (University of Washington)This Armada of Saildrones Could Conquer the Ocean (Bloomberg) Longreads Suggestions:Death in the alpine (High Country News)How Evan Spiegel Fumbled Snap’s Redesign (The Information)Apple and Its Rivals Bet Their Futures on These Men’s Dreams (Bloomberg)I Tried to Get an AI to Write This Story (Bloomberg) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors 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 TechMeet. ride home for Friday, May 18th, 2018. Today, more leakage of your phone's location data. Fortnite comes to Android, data plans for senior smartphones, robot insects, drone sailboats,

and the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. This will sound a lot like the same story as yesterday, but it's not. It's a similar story because TLDR companies seem to have access to the location data from our phones, and they seem to be doing a sucky job of protecting it. Yesterday, the story was about Sechorus, and now Krebs on Security and ZDNet, and a bunch of other places are reporting on a company called Location Smart, which also purports to sell real-time phone location data. It's unclear if Location Smart is a Sechrist competitor

or actually the intermediary that gives Sechorus the data that it resells. Anyway, location smart markets itself as a service to help advertisers do location-based marketing and to also help companies keep track of workers and assets in the field, that sort of thing. Until very recently, on Location Smart's website, they had essentially a Try It Now feature to show potential customers that the technology actually worked. To use the website demo, you just had to enter a mobile phone number into a form, and Location Smart would show you the location of that phone on a Google Street View map. The way it was supposed to work was that the demo would text the number in question first to get consent.

Problem is, quoting from the Krebs on security piece, which first reported on this after getting tipped off by Robert Zhao, a security researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, quote, the same service failed to perform basic checks to prevent anonymous and unauthorized queries. translation anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how websites work could abuse the location smart demo site to figure out how to conduct mobile number location lookups at will all without ever having to supply a password or other credentials end quote in other words as zd net notes in its piece before location smart took the demo page down recently nearly anyone could have looked up the location of nearly every cell phone in north america some two 200 million devices. Of course, location smart states that it has strong security measures in place, and of course the cell phone companies swear up and down that they value their customers' privacy.

But, and again, this is from the Krebson security piece, quote, none of the major carriers would confirm or deny a formal business relationship with location smart, despite location smart listing them each by corporate logo on its website, end quote. And this is what seems to be at the root of the problem, that people are up in arms about. Sell carriers seem to be allowed to sell the location data of their customers to third parties. I feel like not a lot of people were aware of this. Krebs also notes in its piece that according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's

Stephanie La Cumbra, wireless users in the United States cannot opt out of location tracking by their own mobile providers for the obvious reason that the providers need that data to provide reliable service and also to comply with 9-11 emergency service regulations. Again, begging the indulgence of Brian Krebs, let me finish this up by just reading from his post. Quote,

unless and until Congress and federal regulators make it more clear how and whether customer location information can be shared with third parties, mobile device customers may continue to have their location information potentially exposed by a host of third-party companies, Lecombra said. This is precisely why we have lobbied so hard for robust privacy protections for location information. PayPal confirmed last night that it is acquiring Swedish payments company IZettle for $2.2 billion in an all-cash deal, thereby making it PayPal's biggest ever

acquisition. Izzettel is often called the square of Europe and operates in 12 markets, including some in Northern Europe and Latin America where PayPal is not necessarily very prominent. But as Bloomberg points out, this is all about PayPal filling a, quote, square-shaped hole in its product offerings. To put it simply, PayPal doesn't feel it has a strong enough presence at the point of sale in the physical retail world. Quoting from Bloomberg, In-store payments have long been the weak suit of the San Jose, California-based company, and there has been repeated speculation that it would acquire Square Inc, a maker of point-of-sale software and devices, used by merchants across the U.S.

PayPal's competing offering has made little headway against it. Buying IZettle should help expand revenue from existing clients' physical stores and allow PayPal to offer customers of the Swedish company lucrative additional accounting and financing services. But given that PayPal already has its own product, it looks to be a defensive move and admission that it's not gaining traction fast enough. Who's winning in the smart speaker race? According to Strategy Analytics, it's Amazon.

but their lead is slipping. In the latest numbers on this still really nascent market, 9.2 million smart speakers shipped in quarter one of 2018. And according to strategy analytics, Amazon shipped 4 million echoes, Google shipped 2.4 million home speakers and Apple shipped 600,000 home pods. Amazon is in the lead with 43.6% market share

and 102% year-over-year growth in terms of units shipped. But last year, Amazon had a commanding 81.8% of the market. Others, especially Google, are catching up, and entrants from Alibaba and Zhaomi are making serious strides in the Chinese market. Who tends to be the heaviest users of mobile data? Well, teenagers, of course, but if your family is anything like mine, then a close second tends to be grandma. T-Mobile recognized this last year by launching an unlimited data plan for users 55 years and older that it called one unlimited 55 plus. Today, Sprint is following suit with a plan that it is calling unlimited 55 plus. If you're in this age group, $50 a month gets you one line with unlimited talk, text, and data.

And $70 a month is an even better deal because it gets you two lines. The only caveat is that streaming video over mobile will only come in at 488. resolution and music streaming at 500kbPS. But for $10 more a month, you can bump that up to 1080p video and 1.5 mbPS for music. Good news, gamers, Fortnite is coming to Android. Epic Games said today that the massively popular Battle Royale shooter will be coming to Android in a couple of months

and that soon all versions of the mobile edition of the game will be getting a bunch of new features. in the blog post announcing the move, the Fortnite team wrote, quote, we know that communication is key when you're squatting up for that victory royale, so we're working to bring voice chat to mobile. On top of that, you'll be able to chat with your teammates regardless of platform. We're also looking to make it really easy to mute yourself, other players, or open up all communications with a simple tap.

There will be a button on the screen that lets you mute yourself, mute everyone in your party, or go back to open microphone, end quote. Other improvements announced will be better auto-run, better statistics, and more firing options for picking off opponents. Fortnite has been available on iOS since March, where it has sat pretty much atop the Apple Store download charts. Yeah, this is straight out of a black mirror episode, but engineers at the University of Washington announced the first wireless flying robotic insects. The key here is wireless, because these drones need to be so tiny, they can't use propellers, and until now, The electronics they needed to carry, as well as their power supply, made them too heavy. They had to be tethered to power supplying wires.

But with what the engineers are calling Robofly, tiny drones, no heavier than a toothpick, now have onboard circuitry that converts energy from a laser beam aimed at the device to power its tiny electronic wings. The voltage from the laser comes in pulses that mimic the fluttering of real insect wings. Of course, if the tiny bot ever goes out of line of the sight of the laser, it powers down and has to land. But future roboflies could harvest energy from radio frequency signals. What would be the positive use case for roboflies? The researchers mentioned things like surveying crop growth in agricultural settings

or detecting gas leaks, but obviously they'd basically just be useful in any situation that larger drones would be too big for. And of course, if you want to imagine the worst-case, scenarios for insect-sized drones, I point you, as I said, to Hated in the Nation, the final episode of Season 3 of Black Mirror. It seems like whenever we speak of drones or autonomy, we're talking about flying things or self-driving cars, but what about drone boats?

Bloomberg has a piece up profiling a startup named Sail Drone, Inc., which is backed by $90 million in venture capital. The company creates 1,200-pound, 23-foot-long sailboats that the company hopes will soon be tooling around every corner of the ocean all around the globe. Sail drone was partially funded by Wendy Schmidt, the wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Wendy is the co-founder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute. And the idea is that having a fleet of autonomous, data capturing, self-sustaining floating drones could do insane things for everything from researching sharks to tracking hurricanes, to monitoring shipping,

to research into global warming. That's because each sailing drone contains $100,000 worth of electronics, batteries, and sensors. They have satellite internet connections, can be tracked via smartphone from anywhere in the world, and telling them where to go is as simple as picking a spot in the ocean on a map. The drone uses AI software to pilot itself wherever you want it to go. Scientists can rent a drone for $2,500 a day. sail drone's stated goal is to one day have a fleet of 100,000 ships, but that would cost around $100 million to get there. But that's less than the cost of a single research ship that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to collect data.

What's fascinating in the piece is how much the development of self-driving boats feels like it's mimicking the research into self-driving cars. In essence, it's all about putting in the miles, at least in this case not a lot. miles. Quote, scientists and the more business-minded felt Jenkins had little hope of protecting his robotic boats and their data from all the storms and salt that threaten even the largest of ships. Undeterred, he began testing in 2013. By the end of the year, one drone had traveled 2,100 nautical miles from San Francisco to Hawaii and 34 days, the first unmanned vehicle to cross an ocean by wind power alone. Since then, sail drones have survived 40-foot waves in the Bering Sea and pushed through the low-wind doldrums near the equator.

Our longest mission has been eight months and 10,000 miles, and we've gone 200,000 miles overall, Jenkins says. They've all come back without a single scratch, just a beard of barnacles. The Jenkins mentioned there is Sail Dron founder Richard Jenkins, who is enough of a character that it's worth reading about this just to learn about him alone. Well, that last one was obviously a long read, but he's. Here's the weekend Longreed's suggestions proper. First up, high country news has an interesting piece

about how social media is changing our relationship to risk. In essence, it makes the argument that the Internet's ability to make expert-level endeavors seem accessible to the average person often comes with tragic consequences. In this case, they're looking at it through the lens of novice mountain climbers. Quote, just a few decades ago, few but seasoned mountaineers attempted to climb Capital Peak. Much of the route involves difficult rock scrambling with a lot of exposure, the kind of terrain where the simplest mistake can be deadly. But the internet has opened up a world

of free online guidebooks filled with detailed route descriptions like 14ers.com, while social media has helped fuel a new appetite for outdoor excitement broadcast through electrifying GoPro videos and Instagram selfies, end quote. Second, we've been talking a lot about Snap's recent struggles after its disastrous redesign of the Snapchat app. Over at the information, they have a long piece up that they say is the definitive behind the scenes look at how the redesign happened.

A tweet from the author of the piece sums it up rather nicely. Quote, How Evan Spiegel cooked up the new design for Snapchat on a flight from China, instituted it by Fiat, announced it on earnings, surprising execs, and ignored the warnings from his designers, and how the rebellion from users and the design team may save the company.

Finally, two pieces from Bloomberg, first in oral history of modern artificial intelligence, including quotes from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, by the way. In essence, the oral history describes how the idea of neural networks, creating computers that are structured and function like the human brain, was dismissed as unworkable for a long time, but a core group of true believers never lost their faith

and their persistence in this idea has led to the latest in AI advances. Second, the other Bloomberg piece is a rather hilarious one from the great Paul Ford that kind of flies in the face of the previous piece. The title says it all.

I tried to get an AI to write this story, then I gave up and wrote it my damn self. Paul tried to feed a neural network everything he had ever written to see if it could passably write an article or even just a paragraph that sounded like him. As they say in clickbaiting headlines, you'll never believe what happened next, and I'm not going to spoil it for you. Go read it.

Links to all the long reads are in the show notes. It's always a joke that no matter what the news, tech writers seem to find a way to find a tech angle to piggyback on the coverage. So I searched Royal Wedding for a tech angle, And I found one. Both the Register and CNET are reporting that video of guests entering the wedding will be run through an AWS video processing limb to quickly identify celebrity attendance for a Sky News app. So, cloud and AI and facial recognition tech.

If you happen to find any more egregious, but there's a tech angle to the Royal Wedding posts over the weekend. Flag them for me on Twitter. Enjoy your Royal Wedding weekend. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Talk to you on Monday.