Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 04/06 – Happy Quibi 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, April 6th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Happy Quibi Day, everybody. Check out your QuickBites for free while you can. Apparently, the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook is a hell of powerful laptop, but that's apparently why the battery life sucks. And the COVID-related conspiracy theory, inspiring people to set cell phone towers on fire in Britain. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Happy Quibi day, everybody. That much watched, greatly snarked. about Quickbytes video service has finally launched. Quibi has raised $1.8 billion in funding. It's mobile only, but you can watch it in portrait or landscape mode, as we discussed in

Starting point is 00:01:20 CES. It transitions seamlessly between the two. But let me stress, you can only watch Quibi on your phone. There's not even a tablet version of the Quibi app, much less support for things like Airplay or Chromecast or anything like that. You can't even take screenshots of Quibi content, the better to give them free viral marketing, which seems like a dumb hill to die on. But you can download the Quibi app right now on iOS or Android, and even though it will eventually be $4.99 a month with ads or $7.99 a month ad free, if you sign up at quibby.com before the end of April, you can take advantage of a 90-day free trial. U.S. and Canada only, for now. More details to remind you about with Quibi, each episode or chapter of Quibi content

Starting point is 00:02:14 runs between five and ten minutes only. If the overall show you're interested in is longer than 10 minutes, that doesn't matter. You still have to queue up the next 10 minute segment after finishing the first one. What shows are available at launch, quoting the verge? There are four lighthouse original movies broken up into smaller chapters, a remake of the most dangerous game, starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz. Survive with Sophie Turner and Corey Hawkins. Flipped, starring Will Forte, Caitlin Olson, Arturo Castro, Eva Longoria and Andy Garcia,

Starting point is 00:02:48 and When the Streetlights Go On, with no one you've probably heard of. There are also 19 unscripted series at launch, including Murder House Flip, Chance the Rapper's new take on Punked and more. Lastly, there are Quibi's Daily Essential News shows, which will be updated daily, sometime between 6, 30 a.m. and 12 p.m. Eastern time and a batch at 6 p.m. Eastern time to provide fresh content throughout the day, end quote. And quoting from a different verge piece, let's come back to that whole

Starting point is 00:03:18 landscape versus portrait thing. Quote, quote, at launch, Quibi has delivered an app that is, in a word, fine. It works reliably, even if the user experience comes off as a little basic compared to Netflix and other streaming giants. When you rotate your device, Quibi automatically flips between landscape and portrait presentation mode. and both orientations have been factored into the creative process. You'll notice different angles or shots when switching between them, and text slash credits are also optimized for these back-and-forth changes. Quibi calls this trick turnstile, and it's one of the app's headline features.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Katzenberg has boldly claimed that with turnstile, Quibi will usher in the, quote, third generation of film narrative. After a few days of testing, Quibi, I'm not about to call it revelatory, but I do find myself frequently rotating my phone just to see how the frame will change when I do. Some of the creative use cases, like seeing a FaceTime call or a character's Tinder app on your phone when flipping to portrait, aren't part of the launch shows, but they'll come. Quibi has said that some programming will utilize the clock, like Steven Spielberg's horror series, GPS, and even the sensors found in every smartphone, end quote. Chris Welch concluded his verge piece by stating the obvious, quote. But beyond all else, the lack of a TV experience is difficult to get over.

Starting point is 00:04:38 Quibi's entire selling point is that it's perfect for on-the-go viewing. When episodes are this short, it's easy to watch an episode on the bus slash train or during your lunch break. That brief, no-commitment entertainment is what all the commercials have underlined. That brief, no-commitment entertainment is what all the commercials have underlined. But the app is launching at a time when millions of people are isolating at home and trying to escape from the stressful news crunch whenever possible. I can't speak for you, but my instinct is always to go for the biggest screen at my disposal to take a break from the world, whether that's a TV, laptop, or tablet. Until some normalcy is restored, Quibi's phone-only philosophy is going to hand an easy win to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video,

Starting point is 00:05:20 Disney Plus, and other multi-platform services. The app truly couldn't be launching at a moment more antithetical to its purpose, end quote. This is, in my opinion, the most sits down and eats popcorn gif that has happened in tech in a long, long time. We'll see what happens. After what feels like it's been a long while, today is actually a review day. How would you like a review of a laptop that is being called the Ferrari of laptops? That would be the $1,000 Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, which reviews say has an excellent keyboard, a beautiful display, a thin and light design with that Ferrari red sexiness that we're alluding to. and fast performance, but the battery life might kill it dead.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Quoting from Dan Seaford's review, he's the one that called it the Ferrari of laptops, quote, I'll start with the good things. The Galaxy Chromebook has a few standout features, but the most notable is what Samsung and Google are referring to as craftsmanship. At just 9.9 millimeters thick and 2.29 pounds, this is the thinnest Chromebook in the world. The chassis is aluminum and comes in mercury gray or a bold fiesta red color that looks orange in bright light. I had the red model and the silver panels on the sides add a modern chic touch. It's a really beautiful device, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:51 But you know there's a butt coming, and it's a pretty big one. First, it's pretty expensive. A thousand dollar Chromebook, remember? And second, it seems like the computer's thermal system has hampered it in a pretty significant way. quoting again. The bad news is that to maintain this user experience, the Galaxy Chromebook has to heat up. There's no fan in this thing, and its passive cooling system was inconsistent during my testing. The chassis's temperature seemed to be at best, loosely correlated with the stress the CPU was under. There were times when it was quite cool running 17 tabs or three apps and 15 tabs,

Starting point is 00:07:28 and times when it sweltered running just six tabs or three tabs and slack. When I say hot, I mean that the keyboard was slightly uncomfortable to type on, and the deck was beginning to fry my legs. I could usually cool everything down by closing a few things, but that didn't always last. The heat, while unpleasant, may not be a deal breaker for everyone. What is a deal breaker, though, is the battery life. Yeah, you didn't think that 4K screens 8 million pixels powered themselves, did you? Samsung claimed eight hours of battery life. I got four hours and 20 minutes on a charge, swapping between.

Starting point is 00:08:02 several apps and several Chrome tabs at 50% brightness. It also doesn't juice back up particularly fast. After an hour of charging via one of its USBC ports, the Chromebook's battery was only at 50%, end quote. And quoting Nathan Ingram at Engadget, who only got three hours and 52 minutes on a charge, quote, Samsung's latest Chromebook does many things right. It's a delight to type on. It impresses with a very compact design, and the screen looks brilliant. In many ways, it's a clear successor to Google's aging pixel book. But for $999, it's almost impossible to forgive the poor battery life, especially given that there are other options for powerful Chromebooks out there. Not to mention that you could get Apple's just-updated MacBook Air or Microsoft Surface

Starting point is 00:08:47 Laptop 3 for that price. I can accept that a laptop with a 4K display won't last 10 hours, but in 2020, I can't recommend one that won't even last 4, end quote. Over the weekend, Apple's Tim Cook was out with a video saying that Apple has now sourced more than 20 million masks for health care workers from its supply chain and has designed in-house and will ship a specially made face shield at the rate of $1 million a week, quoting Cook from the video. We've launched a company-wide effort bringing together product designers, engineering operations, packaging teams, and our suppliers to design, produce, and ship face shields for health. workers. Our first shipment was delivered to Kaiser Hospital facilities in Santa Clara Valley this past week, and the feedback from doctors was very positive. These pack flat, 100 per box. Each shield is assembled in less than two minutes and is fully adjustable. We're sourcing materials and manufacturing in the U.S. and China. We plan to ship over one million by the end of this week and over one million

Starting point is 00:09:57 per week after that. We are closely coordinating with medical professionals and government officials across the U.S. to get these where they're needed most urgently. We hope to quickly expand distribution beyond the U.S. in both these efforts. Our focus is on unique ways Apple can help, meeting essential needs of caregivers urgently and at a scale the circumstances require, end quote. There have been numerous incidents now in the past few days of cell phone towers in the UK being set on fire. Why? Well, apparently, there's a conspiracy theory making the rounds that posits that somehow the COVID-19 outbreak is related to the rollout of 5G technology, since Wuhan in China was one of the first places in the world that 5G was turned on,

Starting point is 00:10:49 and the virus has since spread around the world after 5G began getting turned on in other places. What this, of course, ignores is all the places in the world that the disease is currently running rampant where 5G technology has not yet been turned on, and also, there's the small matter of how it's simply impossible by the laws of biology and electromagnetism for radio waves to somehow be responsible for a virus. Yeah, I don't know, never mind. Anyway, the British government is begging Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to take down any content relating to this conspiracy theory. This is NHS director Stephen Powis, quote, The 5G story is complete and utter rubbish. It is nonsense. The worst kind of

Starting point is 00:11:36 fake news. The reality is that the mobile phone networks are absolutely critical to all of us, particularly in a time when we are asking people to stay home and not see relatives and friends. But in particular, those are also the phone networks used by our emergency services and our health workers, and I am absolutely outraged, absolutely disgusted, that people would be taking the action against the very infrastructure that we need to respond to this health emergency. It is absolute utter rubbish, and I can't condemn it in terms stronger than that, end quote. Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, is to hold talks with platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Twitter, quote, to hammer this message home, the source said.

Starting point is 00:12:20 YouTube, for one, has said it will remove content spreading the conspiracy theory specifically, but will leave up content that is simply conspiratorial about 5G health effects in general. Quoting the Guardian. The company's decision to reduce the visibility of content linked to the false theory came as Vodafone said that two of its own masts and two it shares with O2 were targeted. Three other masks were subject to arson attacks last week. Nick Jeffrey, Vodafone UK's chief executive, said, quote, it beggars belief that some people should want to harm the very networks that are providing essential connectivity to the emergency services, the NHS, and the rest of the country during this lockdown period, end quote. Twice this past week, traffic to more than 200 of the world's largest CDNs and other cloud hosts was redirected through a Russian state-owned telecom company, Rostelcom, in what was likely a BGP hacking attack.

Starting point is 00:13:26 quoting ZDNet. The incident affected more than 8,800 internet traffic routes from 200-plus networks and lasted for about an hour. The impacted companies are a who's-who of the cloud and content delivery network market, including big names such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Akamai, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, DigitalOcean, Joint, Leaseweb, Hetzner, and Linode. The incident is a classic BGP attack. BGP stands for the border gateway protocol and is the de facto system used to route internet traffic between internet networks across the globe. The entire system is extremely brittle because any of the participant networks can simply lie and publish an announcement, BGP route, claiming that, say, Facebook's servers are on their

Starting point is 00:14:15 network and all internet entities will take it as legitimate and send all the Facebook traffic to the hijacker's servers. In the old days before HTTPS was broadly used to encrypt traffic, BGP hijacks allowed attackers to run man-in-the-middle attacks and intercept and alter internet traffic. Nowadays, BGP hijacks are still dangerous because it lets the hijacker log traffic and attempt to analyze and decrypt it at a later date when the encryption used to secure it has weakened due to advances in cryptography sciences, end quote. And finally today, what was it I said recently about what can happen when you prioritize

Starting point is 00:14:55 and invest in web browser development. According to Net Market Share, Microsoft's Edge Browser has become the second most popular desktop browser for the first time, with a market share on the desktop of 7.59% thereby beating Mozilla Firefox's 7.19% share,

Starting point is 00:15:16 quoting bleeping computer. In March 2019, Net Market Share recorded Mozilla Firefox's popularity at 9.27%. But over the year, the browser has slowly been losing market share as it reached 7.19% in March 2020. Microsoft Edge, on the other hand, had a market share of 5.2% in March 2019 and finished off a 12-month run at 7.59% percent, 0.40% higher than Mozilla Firefox.

Starting point is 00:15:43 Microsoft's Edge lead is not large by any means, but it continues to show how Firefox loses ground as Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge increases in popularity. With Microsoft Edge now being chromium-based, it gains the advantage of being able to use all of the extensions available in the Chrome Web Store and also increases its compatibility and performance to the same level as Google Chrome. As Windows 10 is running on a billion devices and the new Microsoft Edge will soon be pushed out to all of them via Windows Update, we should expect to see Edge continue to outstrip Firefox as it eats into Chrome's market share, end quote.

Starting point is 00:16:19 thus far with this crisis, at least in our house, we've been able to get almost all the food deliveries we've needed. But since last Friday, not a single delivery window has been open here in New York City across everything. Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Instacart, Fresh Direct, P-Pod, anything. We're not in trouble by any means. We've got milk and such through the end of the week, and I did buy $400 worth of rice and canned stuff back before Valentine's Day, So this is not a cry for help. We're not going to starve over here. But if anyone is listening out there in New York City, who's had some success ordering groceries somewhere recently, let me know where and how.

Starting point is 00:17:08 Thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 04/06 – Happy Quibi Day!

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