Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 04/05 – SCOTUS Rules: APIs Not Copyrightable

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

The Supreme Court has ruled on APIs in a way that should make most developers happy. Though, the punted on the President blocking people on Twitter. LG is exiting the smartphone business. And we already knew half a billion people’s Facebook data was out in the wild, but now that we’ve SEEN it in the wild, I’ll tell you why you should take notice. Sponsors: Blockchain.com NewYorker.com/techmeme promocode techmeme Links: Supreme Court rules in Google’s favor in copyright dispute with Oracle over Android software (CNBC) Supreme Court vacates lower court decision on Trump blocking Twitter followers (Axios) LG Electronics to end loss-making smartphone business (NikkeiAsia) Amazon Illegally Fired Activist Workers, Labor Board Finds (NYTimes) 533 million Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online (Insider) Is Apple's Privacy Push Facebook's Existential Threat‪?‬ (Kara Swisher's Sway Podcast) Sideloading Apps Would 'Break' the Security and Privacy of iPhone, Says Tim Cook (MacRumors) Tim Cook says Apple is committed to AR, TV+ and privacy but not to Apple Car (Cult of Mac) 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 right home for Monday, April 5th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Supreme Court has ruled on APIs in a way that should make most developers happy, though they punted on the president blocking people on Twitter. L.G. is exiting the smartphone business, and we already knew that half a billion people's Facebook data was out in the wild, but now we've seen it in the wild, and I'll tell you why you should take notice of that. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in Google's favor in that big copyright dispute with Oracle over the use of Java APIs. Basically, with a six to two vote, the justices overturned what had been a big Oracle lawsuit victory, quoting CNBC.

The case concerned about 12,000 lines of code that Google used to build Android that were copied from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. 10. Oracle sued Google over the use of its code and won its case twice before the specialized U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit's decision. Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, reasoned that Google's use of the code was protected under the copyright doctrine of fair use. We reached the conclusion that in this case, where Google re-implemented a user interface, taking only what was needed to allow users to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, Google's copying of the Sun Java API was a fair use of that material as a matter of law, Breyer wrote. Breyer was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice's Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan,

Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, Justice's Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, descended, end quote. So this is huge, huge news in terms of software and coding law. basically APIs to some degree are now fair use and therefore not copyrightable. Interesting unrelated ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court today also vacated a lower court ruling that said the ability of President Trump's Twitter account to block followers was in violation of the First Amendment, which means, quoting Axios. Though the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that the unprecedented

amount of control that Twitter and other digital platforms have over speech must be addressed in the future. Quote, Twitter barred Mr. Trump not only from interacting with a few users, but removed him from the entire platform, thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages, wrote Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the court, quote, today's digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms, end quote.

LG Electronics is getting out of the smartphone business, quoting Niki Asian Review. LG Electronics said Monday that its board decided to terminate the company's loss-making smartphone business, with analysts saying focus is now expected to shift to the more profitable home appliance and TV divisions. LG's seven-member board of directors approved the company's suggestion to kill the handset unit, which posted more than $5 trillion, or $4.4 billion of operating losses over the last six years. With determination of the MC mobile communications business, our sales could decline in the short term, but we expect it will improve our business portfolio and financial structure in the mid and long term, LG said in a regulatory filing announcing the move.

The decision comes three months after CEO Brian Kwan said that the company was open to all options for the Mobile Communications Division in an internal memo sent to employees, hinting that it would withdraw from smartphones. LG also said the wind down of the phone business is expected to be completed by the end of July, although inventory of some existing models may still be available after that, end quote. So in a way, this is not at all surprising. basically outside of China. Only Samsung makes any real money on non-IOS smartphones. But this tweet from David Pierce sort of sums up how I feel about this news, quote, RIP LG phones. Your ideas were funky, your software was terrible, your cameras were great, and I'd never buy you, but I'm sort of sad you're

gone anyway, end quote. Yes, let me quote from the verge to explain further why I'm sad about this news. As it lost shared arrivals, LG released a series of eye-catching devices with unusual form factors. There was the LG Wing, whose main display rotated to reveal a smaller secondary screen beneath it or its recent dual-screen devices. LG also tried its hand at a modular smartphone with the LGG5, only to abandon the initiative a year later. Unfortunately for LG, none of these features were useful enough to turn the phones into mainstream hits, and meanwhile, the company's more traditional handsets fell behind their rivals in core areas like camera performance, end quote. Yeah, point I'm making is in their desperation to stand out, LG was willing to be

experimental, which, as I've said a thousand times, I feel like phones need. No more, alas, I guess we'll never see that rollable phone that LG has been teasing for a couple years now. We still don't have the results of that big union vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama. yet, and I tried over the weekend to find out when we might know the results, but I came up empty. In the meantime, the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees various labor and management relations, has found that Amazon illegally retaliated against two prominent internal critics when it fired them last year, quoting the New York Times. The employees, Emily Cunningham and Marancosta, had publicly pushed the company to reduce its impact on climate

change and address concerns about its warehouse workers. The agency told Ms. Cunningham and Ms. Costa that it would accuse Amazon of unfair labor practices if the company did not settle the case, according to correspondents that Ms. Cunningham shared with the New York Times. It's a moral victory and really shows that we are on the right side of history and the right side of the law, Ms. Cunningham said. The two women were among dozens of Amazon workers who in the last year told the labor board about company retaliations, but in most other cases, the workers had complained about pandemic safety. Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham, who worked as designers at Amazon's Seattle headquarters, began criticizing the company publicly in 2018. They were part of a small group of

employees who wanted the company to do more to address its climate impact. The group, Amazon employees for climate justice, got more than 8,700 colleagues to support its efforts. Over time, Ms. Cunningham and Ms. Costa broadened their protests after Amazon told them that they had violated its external communications policy by speaking publicly about the business. business. Their group organized 400 employees to also speak out purposely violating the policy to make a point. They also began raising concerns about safety in Amazon's warehouses at the start of the pandemic. Amazon fired Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham last April, not long after their group had announced an internal event for warehouse workers to speak to tech employees about their workplace

conditions, end quote. Do you remember a couple years ago when word came out that data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users had been scraped because of a vulnerability that Facebook didn't patch until 2019. Well, over the weekend, personally identifiable data of 533 million Facebook users showed up online on a low-level hacking forum, thus indicating that that data breach has now been weaponized. And basically, the data was being peddled on this forum for free, Quoting Insider. Insider reviewed a sample of the leak data and verified several records by matching known Facebook user's phone numbers with the IDs listed in the dataset.

We also verified records by testing email addresses from the dataset in Facebook's password reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user's phone number. While it's a couple of years old, the leak data could prove valuable to cybercriminals who use people's personal information to impersonate them or scam them into handing over login credentials, according to Alon Gall, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, which discovered the trough of leaked data on Saturday. A database of that size containing the private information, such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook's users, which certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering

attacks or hacking attempts, Gall told Insider, end quote. So while it might be tempting to think of this as old news, and certainly that's the line Facebook PR took over the weekend, it's actually worth paying attention because while the goods had been stolen a while ago, the news here is that the stolen goods are now being weaponized. And the list of phone numbers might be key, along with things like birth dates. Here's what Troy Hunt of Have I Been Poned, said on Twitter, quote, so what's the impact? For a targeted attack where you know someone's name and country, it's great for mobile phone lookup. Much harder to do en masse, as there's no reliable key. I couldn't take a big list of emails and resolve them to phone numbers, as email is rare in the data.

But for spam based on using phone number alone, it's gold. Not just SMS, there are heaps of services that just require a phone number these days, and now there's hundreds of millions of them conveniently categorized by country with nice mail merge fields like name and gender, end quote. There has been some chatter online that Mark Zuckerberg's own phone number is among the leaked numbers and that his account number four was on the list, though there's some debate around that, quoting Lee Edwards. Fun fact, in Ruby MRI, every object has an ID at runtime. The fourth object it creates happens to be the null singleton. Every Rails developer knows this because the ID on RO object, that's null, returns four. early Ruby Facebook Connect apps would sometimes get Mark Zuckerberg, end quote. But basically, the point here is, I guess if we see a flood of hacks or maybe even, what, spam, actual text and call spam this summer, then maybe this is from that.

Half a billion users, again, it's really hard to wrap your mind around a number that big. Want to see if your phone number is in jeopardy, quoting Gizmodo. The website, The News Each Day, has a simple, tool where you can input your phone number and see if it's in the leak. Gizmodo tested the tool against some data from the actual Facebook leak and found it to be accurate. For example, we tested Mark Zuckerberg's phone number, which is included in the leak. It worked. We assume Zuck has changed his phone number by now. All you need to do to check is input your phone number without any hyphens or periods. You also need to include the International Country Code at the beginning. For example,

if you're used to seeing your phone number in this form, 555-5-212-0-0-0-0. You'll also, you should get rid of the hyphens and add the digit one in front. Using the same fake number above, the number you input should look like this, 1555-215-2-0-0-0. If you include a variation, that's anything but the string of numbers, the tool will falsely tell you that your number is not included in the leak. In reality, it very well could be, end quote. And finally today, Tim Cook was on the most recent episode of Kara Swisher's Sway podcast. I'll link to the episode in the show. notes, but also TLDL too long didn't listen, among other things. Cook says he's not focused on Facebook. Apple is confident in its case against Epic Games and AR is critically important for Apple's future.

Quoting Mac rumors. Apple is in the midst of a heated public spat with Facebook over privacy, particularly over an upcoming feature on iOS that will require apps to ask for users consent before tracking them. The new feature called ATT or app tracking transparency coming with iOS 14.5 in a few weeks, according to Cook, will force apps to ask users for permission to track them across other apps and websites. Facebook has argued vehemently against the new features saying it impacts small businesses that rely on personalized ads derived from tracking to keep afloat. Tim Cook says he disagrees with that argument, indirectly saying that Facebook's point of view is, quote, flimsy. Cook calls privacy the, quote, top issue of the

21st century, adding that with tracking, companies such as Facebook are able to, quote, put together an entire profile of what you're thinking and what you're doing, end quote. And then quoting Cook himself, what ATT tries to get at is companies that are taking advantage of tracking you across apps of other companies and therefore putting together an entire profile of what you're thinking, what you're doing, surveilling you across the web 24-7. They'll see a simple pop-up that basically prompts them to answer the question, are they okay with being tracked or not? If they are, things move on. If they're not, then the tracking is turned off, end quote. When asked how the new feature will impact Facebook, Cook says he's not focused on Facebook,

saying Apple adds new tools and features every year that improves and doubles down on user privacy. Cook, in typical Apple fashion, never comments on future unreleased Apple products. However, possibly hinting at Apple glasses, Cook says AR is, quote, critically important for the future of Apple. The CEO envisions a future where conversations include more than just words, but include charts and other things appearing in virtual space. And I'm going to quote from Cook again, well, I can't talk about anything that we may or may not have in the pipeline, but in terms of AR, the promise of AR is that you and I are having a great conversation right now. Arguably, it could even be better if we were able to augment our discussion with charts or other things to appear. Your audience would also benefit

from this, too, I think. And so when I think about that in different fields, whether it's health, whether it's education, whether it's gaming, whether it's retail. I'm already seeing AR take off in some of these areas, and I think the promise is even greater in the future. So it's a critically important part of Apple's future, end quote. Though, cult of Mac noted this, quote, another potential Apple product that's been the subject of many rumors and leaks is the Apple car. Tim Cook didn't try to pretend his company isn't exploring making one, but he wouldn't make any promises either, quoting Cook for a final time. If you sort of step back the car in a lot of ways is a robot, an autonomous car is a robot, said the Apple executive, and so there's lots of things you can do with autonomy, and we'll see

what Apple does. We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day. I'm not saying that one will not, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.