Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 03/09 - @Jack Lives To Fight Another Day

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 right home for Monday, May 9th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Another day of markets in turmoil and another Robin Hood outage. Jack Dorsey lives to fight another day. Apple is repairing some iPad airs for free and might be bringing 64 megapixel cameras to the iPhone 12. Gaming out the reality of an arm-based Mac and let me hip you to sleep streaming on TikTok. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. you might have noticed that global markets are in a bit of a tumult today. And once again, trading platform Robin Hood says it is investigating the cause of its third major outage in two weeks,

Starting point is 00:01:15 which earlier affected trading in equities, crypto, and options, quoting CNBC. Trading is currently down on Robin Hood and we are investigating the issue, the Silicon Valley startup set on Monday shortly after the opening bell. We are experiencing issues with equities, options, and crypto trading. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible, end quote. Around 10.30 a.m. Robin Hood tweeted that the platform was partially restored. The company is facing legal fallout from last week's outage. A Robin Hood client base in Sarasota, Florida, filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of himself and other traders Wednesday evening.

Starting point is 00:01:49 Travis Taffey alleges that Robin Hood was negligent and breached its contract by failing to, quote, provide a functioning platform, leaving traders unable to move money while stock markets surged, end quote. Jack Dorsey lives to fight another day. Twitter has apparently struck a deal with activist investor Elliott Management that will result in CEO Jack Dorsey keeping his job for now. The deal is actually with Elliott Management and another investment firm, Silver Lake. Silver Lake will invest $1 billion in Twitter and as a result, Twitter will launch a $2 billion share buyback program, quoting CNBC. The investment firms will each be awarded a seat on Twitter's board according to the announcement.

Starting point is 00:02:33 Silver Lake co-CEO. CEO and managing partner Egon Durbin and Elliot partner Jesse Cohn will join the board as Twitter continues to search for a third new independent director with expertise in technology and artificial intelligence. Twitter hopes to find a candidate, quote, that reflects the diversity of the Twitter service, according to the release. Twitter's board will create a temporary committee, quote, that will build on our regular evaluation of Twitter's leadership structure, end quote, led by independent director. Patrick Pichette, Twitter said in a statement.

Starting point is 00:03:04 Pichette will chair the committee, which, quote, will provide a fresh look at our various structures and report the findings to our board on an ongoing basis, he said, end quote. According to Reuters, Chinese government data shows Apple sold under 500,000 iPhones in February as the coronavirus outbreak halved demand for its products in that country. All smartphone shipments, not just apples, dropped 54.7% year over year, quoting Reuters, In total, mobile phone brands shipped a total of 6.34 million devices in February, down 54.7% from 14 million in the same month last year. Data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed. It was also the lowest level for February since at least 2012 when CAICT started publishing data.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Android brands, which include devices made by Huawei and Zhaomi, accounted for most of the drop, as they collectively saw shipments decline from 12.72 million units in February 2019 to 5.85 million, the data showed. Shipments of Apple devices slumped to 494,000 from 1.27 million in February 2019. In January, its shipments had held steady at just over 2 million, end quote. Also from Reuters, Amazon says it will start selling its cashierless store technology, which it uses in its Amazon Go stores to other companies. The technology is being branded as Just Walk Out. Quote, the world's biggest web retailer says it has several signed deals with customers it would not name.

Starting point is 00:04:44 A new website Monday will invite others to inquire about the service, dubbed Just Walkout Technology, by Amazon. Dilip Kumar, Amazon's vice president of physical retail and technology, had no market forecast to share, but said shopper's preferences will determine how big the business becomes. Quote, do customers like standing in lines, he asked. This has pretty broad applicability across store sizes, across industries, because it fundamentally tackles a problem of how do you get convenience in physical locations, especially when people are hard pressed for time, end quote. Still, high demand is by no means certain.

Starting point is 00:05:20 Other vendors, including Garbanjo and IFI, are offering automated checkout to retailers, which in the past have been loathe to hand deals to their rival Amazon. that has been the biggest disruptor of their brick and mortar businesses. Media reports have said Amazon was in talks to bring its technology to airport stores, for instance, rather than Walmart or Target. Kumar said Amazon potentially could sell the service to Big Box rivals but would not speculate. He declined to comment on the service's business model or pricing, saying, quote, a lot of these are bespoke deals, end quote.

Starting point is 00:05:52 One issue that may arise is who owns the shopper data, something that businesses typically want in order to tailor marketing office. offers and build their customer base, end quote. Kumar tells Reuters that, quote, these are the retailer's customers, end quote, but did not discuss how just walk out would integrate with, say, a retailer's existing loyalty programs. No doubt you've heard the news already, but I thought I'd put this here for continuity's sake. South by Southwest has been canceled after Austin itself declared a local disaster due to COVID-19, quote, local government officials announced the update at a news conference Friday afternoon discussing the status of the outbreak and events in the city.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Austin Mayor Steve Adler said he had declared a local disaster in the city and issued an order canceling the conference. In a statement to its website, South by Southwest said it would faithfully follow the city's directions. Quote, we are devastated to share this news with you, organizers wrote on the South by Southwest website. The show must go on is in our DNA, and this is the first time in 34 years that the March event, not take place. We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation, end quote. No details I could find in terms of refunds or anything like that. The conference was supposed to begin March 13th. And hat tip to the listener that got in touch with me over Twitter to point out that conferences likely would be waiting to cancel until they got some sort of act of God or

Starting point is 00:07:25 official governmental response that forced them to cancel for insurance purposes. Certainly seems like that's what went on here. Apple has announced a free repair program for third-gen iPad Air models made between March 2019 and October 2019. These models are apparently susceptible to a blank screen issue that leaves the display permanently disabled. Quote, under certain undefined circumstances, the screens of impacted units may go blank permanently. Users might see a brief flicker or flash appear before the screen goes blank, the company said. Apple failed to provide additional detail on the issue, but noted the problem should impact only a limited number of iPad Air units. Owners of eligible iPad Air models can take their device to an Apple authorized service provider or brick-and-mortar Apple store for assessment and free repairs.

Starting point is 00:08:18 Alternatively, customers can arrange to mail in their device by contacting Apple support. Typical of other Apple service programs, the iPad Air Initiative does. not extend standard warranty coverage and covers affected devices for two years after first retail purchase, end quote. Also today, an Apple rumor from Max Weinbach, the prolific YouTuber is reporting Apple plans a 64 megapixel sensor for the iPhone 12 and will also expand night mode to the front ultra-wide and telephoto cameras, quoting Tom's guide. Having continued to use the same 12 megapixel resolution for its cameras since the iPhone 6S, Apple may finally be upgrading to a substantial 64 megapixel sensor for its main lens. That would send it ahead of

Starting point is 00:09:08 many of its rivals, including the 48 megapixel Galaxy S20 and Galaxy S20 plus, but behind the 108 megapixel Galaxy S20 Ultra, at least in terms of raw megapixels. While the iPhone 12 Pro will reportedly keep the same triple camera array, it will also be getting a time-of-flight sensor, according to Weinbach. This is something we've heard and suspected before, so it's good to have it reconfirmed. With a time-of-flight sensor added, the iPhone 12 Pro would, in theory, be able to create more compelling portraits and offer much better performance when running AR apps, end quote. Weinbach also says the 12 Pro Max will be getting a 4,400 MAHBH battery, a 400 MAHBH improvement over the iPhone 11 Pro Max. I suppose these things come in waves from Tom's hardware. researchers have detailed two new side-channel attacks that can leak secret data from all AMD CPUs made between 2011 and 2019.

Starting point is 00:10:13 Like we've seen with many of the recent attacks against modern processors, the two AMD vulnerabilities center on side-channel approaches. In this case, a specter-based attack that enabled researchers to tease out what would normally be protected information. We've become accustomed to news of new Intel vulnerabilities being disclosed on a seemingly weekly basis, but other processor architectures like AMD and ARM have also been impacted by some vulnerabilities, albeit to a lesser extent. It's hard to ascertain if these limited discoveries in AMD processors are triggered by a security-first approach to hardened processor design, or if researchers and attackers merely focus on Intel's processors due to their commanding market share. Attackers almost always focus on the broadest cross-section possible. We see a similar trend with malware being designed for Windows systems,

Starting point is 00:10:58 by far the predominant desktop OS much more frequently than Mac OS, though that does appear to be changing. In either case, we expect AMD's architectures to gain more attention from researchers as the company gains more prominence in the semiconductor market, end quote. Also on the chip front, Apple gadfly Jean-Louis Gasset had a piece up over this weekend, wondering if the idea of an arm-based Mac is for real this time. The gasey believes that as Arm narrows the performance gap with X86 and chips from startups like that Ampier that I just learned about and told you about recently, begin to rival Intel's Xeon, transitioning even Mac pros to arm CPUs may at least be theoretically feasible. Quote, this isn't wild speculation. The iPhone and iPad have run on Apple designed arm chips since birth, and while early end up. in the AXX line were underpowered. The latest chips created by Apple's silicon design teams

Starting point is 00:12:05 have yielded laptop or even desktop class performance. Couple that with Apple's well-established drive toward vertical integration and control over its products key technologies, and the rumor seems inevitable. To that mix, one should add power efficiency. For a roughly equivalent amount of computing power, armed chips need and dissipate 40 to 60 percent less electric power. This is especially nice for laptops, and as we'll see when discussing Amper armchips, a relief from the voracious power consumption of cloud servers, end quote. Gassay then goes on to mention the whole idea of forks that a switch to armchips would create across the Mac ecosystem. Gassay says that if Apple does take the plunge, it would be probably introducing armchips one product at a time.

Starting point is 00:12:52 So essentially, he's calling it a rolling fork. What happens when that rolling fork meets the Mac Pro, would there be a fork sealing because Mac pros need to be so overpowered? No, Gassay says, quote, enter Ampere Computing, founded by ex-Intel President Renee James in 2017, and well supported by investors such as the Carlisle Group, Oracle and Arm Holdings, itself owned by SoftBank. Ampeer designs and sells high-powered arm chips that compete with the zion processors used in cloud servers. Amper, top-of-the-line chips, consume less power, about 210 watts, then competing Zeon CPUs, needing as much as 400 watts for about the same amount of computing power. Hence, investors' interest in a device that could progressively supplant

Starting point is 00:13:37 Intel products in tens of millions of servers around the world. Ampeer shows us that the arm architecture can yield the class of chips a Mac Pro would need, and as it happens, the chips are manufactured by TSMC, the same company that makes Apple's AXX processors, end quote. He concludes by writing, Today the Mac line represents a little less than 8% of Apple total revenue. How much of a temporary revenue disturbance would Apple be willing to endure in order to secure an armed future for its iconic personal computer? Could the iPad's rising revenue, 6.5% of total revenue, help cover the hit once its user interface and keyboard with trackpad makes it more laptop-like? I, of course, have no idea, but this one.

Starting point is 00:14:22 arming the max is easier said than done, regardless of its intuitive desirability, end quote. Finally today, as she is wont to do and does better than anyone else, the great Taylor Lawrence, these days writing for the New York Times, tells us what the kids are up to these days on TikTok. Let me introduce you to the growing TikTok trend of sleep streams, where users live stream their sleep to others to earn digital coins and gain new followers. quote, before they go live, TikTok sleep streamers usually create a promotional video that they post to their feeds, advertising the sleep stream happening that night. When bedtime approaches, they prop up their phones on their nightstands, crawl under the covers, and hit the live button.

Starting point is 00:15:09 I've seen so many people start doing it, Mr. Hector said. The first time I saw it, I thought it was honestly the weirdest thing, but also the coolest thing, end quote. For users who watch sleep streams, the appeal isn't necessarily the person's streaming, but the pop-up community that forms in the stream's chat section. Live streams on TikTok aren't archived, so sleep streams, many of which are simply a dark, blank screen, provide a time and place for users to meet. Quote, I think it's about trying to find online friends, Ms. Stevens said. Todd Neer, 32, has watched a handful of sleep streams and even done one himself. Quote, it creates a chance for a live online chat that's really not available anywhere else in TikTok, he said.

Starting point is 00:15:49 The sessions aren't saved, so you just chat with whoever is there. It's just an opportunity to have more real-time dialogue than the comment section on someone's post. It's a hub for people to have conversations, end quote. As J.A. Anande said on Twitter, and I have to agree with him. Quote, this is where the generation gap is at its widest point for me, end quote. So a little bit of ride home media news that was not planned. If you're looking for a daily 15-minute podcast that will catch you up on the latest coronavirus news, please search your podcast apps for coronavirus daily briefing.

Starting point is 00:16:29 We literally did not plan to do this show even a week ago. But subsequently several people convinced us that we should do one, that our format is suited for summarizing this sort of breaking news story where headlines just tumble down hourly like an unending waterfall. I'm hosting that show as well for now, but we'll see how long that can physically last. This show will always be my primary show, though Glenn Fleischman will be filling in for me here tomorrow while we get our workflow for this new show in place. But anyway, if you've been nervously refreshing your, well, refreshing the everythings for the latest coronavirus news all

Starting point is 00:17:06 weekend, please search and subscribe to Coronavirus Daily Briefing.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 03/09 - @Jack Lives To Fight Another Day

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