Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 09/10 - The End of the Jack Ma Era

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

Some juicy new Apple rumors for Wednesday, the end of the Jack Ma era is nigh upon us, there were some naughty apps in the Mac App Store and why following people whose politics you disagree with might not lead to peace in our time. Links:Kuo: USB-C on 2018 iPad Pro, Touch ID on 2018 MacBook, EKG and Ceramic Backs on All Apple Watch Series 4 Models, More (MacRumors)Snap just lost its chief strategy officer (Fast Company)Alibaba announces Jack Ma succession plan: CEO Daniel Zhang to take over as chairman in a year (CNBC)Additional Mac App Store apps caught stealing and uploading browser history (9to5Mac)No. 1 paid utility in Mac App Store steals browser history, sends it to Chinese server (9to5Mac)Twitter’s Flawed Solution to Political Polarization (NYTimes Opinion)Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? (The New Yorker) 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 Monday, September 10th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, some more juicy new Apple rumors for Wednesday.

The end of the Jack Ma era is nigh upon us. There were some naughty apps in the Mac App Store and why following people whose politics you disagree with might not lead to peace in our time. This is what you miss today in the world of tech. iPhone Day is only two days. days away and analyst Ming Chi Kuo has a scoop on what to expect at Wednesday's big event. The biggest surprise is that USBC might be coming to the new iPad Pro models, but there's also a lot

more. In Quo's latest research note, he hints that the iPad Pro may ditch Apple's proprietary lightning connector in favor of USBC with a rumored 18-watt USBC charger coming in the box. This is a controversial prediction as tons of peripherals I'm looking at you Apple Pencil rely on lightning to connect to the iPad. One way to read Quo's report is that lightning will stick around on the iPad and just the charger brick will have USBC on it instead of the old USBA.

That means we'd have to buy new USBC to lightning cables rather than the older USBA to lightning cables. But if USBC does come to the iPad as a port on the device itself, that would be huge. Maybe it's time to set aside budget for all new accessories, but I think you should probably also take this prediction with a bit of a grain of salt. We'll find out on Wednesday.

Next up, according to Quo, the rumored MacBook Air successor will have a touch ID for authentication, but will not have a full touch bar. Fans of physical keys rejoice. Many Apple Watchers believe that Wednesday's event will be focused on the iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad, leaving any Mac announcements for later this fall, but that MacBook Air replacement is still the subject of a lot of speculation.

Then there's a series of rumors about the Apple Watch Series 4. First Quo says that all new models will have a ceramic rear shell. Currently, ceramic is a high-end option, while the cheapest Apple Watch models have an aluminum body, and the mid-range models are stainless steel. If Quo's reporting is to be believed, the premium material is coming to everybody with the new devices, And the second item on the Apple Watch checklist is a new sensor.

An electrocardiograph. If you've ever had an ECG or an EKG test, this sensor would be a scaled-down version of that minus the sticky pads and wires. A mobile electrocardiograph sensor would use electrical skin measurements to figure out what your heart is up to. This new sensor would join the existing pulse sensor and presumably could alert wearers to heart problems.

Quo says the rumored mid-range, 6.1 inch LCD iPhone is experiencing manufacturing issues. So what's new, its production is being pushed back to early October, delaying it by a few weeks, which means there could be shipping and delivery delays. This lines up with Mark German's reporting for Bloomberg. Finally, Quo says Apple's air power charging mat announced a year ago in September 2017 will finally come out alongside updated AirPods with an inductive charging base. If you like magnets charging your gadgets, get ready finally for air power.

You know, on last Friday's show, I said it seemed like all we were going to talk about were tech executives and the revolving doors in the C-suite. Well, it seems like this is continuing as a trend because there are two important transitions that were announced over the weekend and into today. First up, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Snap gave notice that its chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, would step down soon. Khan has been in his current role at the company since 2015. The filing stressed that Khan's leaving was not due to any disagreement with Snap or its policies. In an exit memo addressed to his team, Khan was upbeat, listing accomplishments over the past four years and calling Snap, quote, an amazing company.

In the memo, Khan thanks CEO Evan Spiegel and assures the team that he'll stick around for a bit to help identify a replacement. Bloomberg tech reporter Sarah Fryer, noted on Twitter that Khan is one of the last members standing from the management team that took SNAP public last year. She wrote, SNAP since the 2017 IPO has lost or replaced its chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, head of product, head of engineering, chief counsel, head of sales, head of hardware, end quote. That's a long list. Friar then published a scoop for Bloomberg saying that Kahn was leaving SNAP to start an investment firm. Shortly afterwards, she noted, quote, Snap shares down now to $9.76

near an all-time low. Snap reached a high of $27 and $9 after the IPO, end quote. A little math from her piece on Khan's new venture reveals that Snap has now lost 33% of its value just in the year 2018. And this news is a bit epic. On Sunday, the New York Times first reported that Alibaba's co-founder and chief executive, Jack Ma would step down from the Chinese e-commerce giant to focus on philanthropy. The company later clarified via the South China Morning Post that Ma would remain executive chairman for a year while he helps smooth the transition for his successor.

Ma is only 54 today, actually, his birthday. So perhaps that explains the timing. Ma is one of China's wealthiest men. His fortune is estimated at $40 billion. He's a former English teacher who founded Alibaba with just a $60,000 investment. The company is now currently valued at $420 billion. Ma was very much one of the pioneers of the modern Chinese internet startup ecosystem. Perhaps now he intends to pioneer the philanthropic template for his generation of Chinese tech entrepreneurs.

Just last week, he told Bloomberg television, quote, There are a lot of things I can learn from Bill Gates. I can never be as rich, but one thing I can do better is to retire earlier. I think someday and soon I'll go back to teaching. This is something I think I can do much better than being CEO of Alibaba, end quote. This morning it was revealed that Ma's chosen successor as chairman of Alibaba's board would be Alibaba's CEO Daniel Zhang, who is best known for his previous roles as CEO of Taubo and president of T-Mall.com.

In a letter to shareholders, Ma said, quote, starting the process of passing the Alibaba torch to Daniel and his team is the right decision at the right time, because I know from working with them that they are ready, and I have complete confidence in our next generation of leaders, end quote. And indeed, he says he is planning to go back to teaching in some capacity, though that probably means that education will be the primary focus of his philanthropy. Quote,

I also want to return to education, which excites me with so much blessing because this is what I love to do, Ma wrote. 9 to 5 Mac writer, Guillermo Rambo reports that yet more apps from Apple's Mac App Store have been quietly recording sensitive user data and sending it to a third-party server. This is now officially a trend after just last week an app called AdWare Doctor was caught uploading user data to a server. China. Apple has pulled the new offenders, but this leaves us all to wonder what's next. How pervasive is this problem? The new report covers a group of apps distributed by Trend Micro, which is ironically a cybersecurity company. The affected apps include the popular utilities Dr. Unarchiver, which was the number 12 free app on the charts before Apple yanked it, and Dr. Cleaner. The apps, much like last week's culprit, were scanning users' home directories to find

sensitive information including web browser history from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, Google search history from the same browsers, and a list of every app installed on the system. All this data was bundled into a zip file and sent back to home servers where it's unclear what happened to it. So you might ask, how is this possible? I thought the whole point of the Mac App Store was to improve security. Well, here's the thing. Apple's Mac App Store enforces a policy called Sandboxing, in which each app is given

extremely limited permission to access data on a user's system. This puts each app in its own sandbox where it is free to create and modify a set of data specific to that app. If an app tries to poke around outside its limited sandbox without direct permission from the user, Mac OS blocks that attempt. The problem here lies in a simple trick. These apps, like all apps, that want to play outside their sandboxes, simply ask users for permission to read everything in their home directory.

The home folder is the default location. for all that person's personal files, browser history, offline email, you name it. If you click yes to a dialog box allowing an app to access your home folder, the app breaks out of the sandbox and does pretty much whatever it wants within that new folder. Uh-oh. Well, technically this means the apps are working as designed. Most users probably don't understand that. In the case of Dr. Cleaner and last week's AdWare Doctor,

the app's advertised utility functions that would require access to the home folder logically. For example, Dr. Cleaner offered an option to find and delete what it called junk files. If a user pressed the scan button for that feature, Dr. Cleaner popped up a dialog box asking for permission to access the home folder. This would be a reasonable thing to expect because it would need to dig around in that folder in order to find junk. But the average user probably has no idea what broad powers that dialog box allows. Users typically said yes to the dialogue. When that happened, the app increased its scope from a tiny secure sandbox to pretty much all your personal data on the system.

After these apps were revealed to be exfiltrating sensitive user data, Apple remove them from the Mac App Store, though Trend Micro's app marketing websites are still up. Changes coming in MacOS Mojave, which is likely to ship in just a few weeks, introduce a few new protections for user data,

for instance in Mojave, even if you give an app access to your home folder, that app can't read your Safari browsing history or cookies, but Mojave isn't out yet, and lots of other data is still up for grabs, even with the tightened restrictions. To sum it all up, be very careful when you grant any app access to your home folder or really any folder on your computer. There's just no telling what it might be doing in there.

Also, maybe think twice about apps that call themselves a doctor. Finally today, one of the complaints comment about social media is that we end up in echo chambers of our own design, often following people we agree with and thus reinforcing our existing beliefs. The most commonly proposed solution to that problem, involves exposing ourselves to opinions we don't agree with. Just follow some people on the other side, right? That should fix it. That's even what Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said his company

was actively working toward when he testified before the Senate last week. But what if that's not the solution? In a New York Times opinion piece, Duke Sociology Professor Christopher A. Bale tackles Twitter specifically and political polarization in general. Here's the most important line in the piece. Quote, forcing Twitter users to encounter political views they disagree with, my research shows, can make them become even more wedded to their own, end quote. So much for easy fixes, I guess. Bale says that in research by himself and others, evidence shows that social media encourages people of different political persuasions to segregate themselves.

He cites the statistics that 85% of retweets are made by people who share a political orientation. end quote. In order to test whether social media is the cause or the effect of political polarization, Bale and his team ran an experiment. After a survey of 1,200 Republicans and Democrats with active Twitter accounts, bail paid half of the users to follow a bot that retweeted statements from people on the other side of the political divide. After a month, he surveyed the users again to measure their partisan leanings. So did this exposure to other viewpoints decrease partisanship? Of course not. It did the opposite, in fact. Quoting bail, Republicans who followed a Democratic bot for one month expressed social policy views that were substantially more conservative at the conclusion of the study, end quote.

He goes on to note that a smaller but similar effect was present for Democrats who followed Republicans, though the effect was not statistically significant. Exposure to the other side actually made people more partisan. Bale writes, quote, Why did some social media users political views become more entrenched after we disrupted their echo chambers? One possibility is the structure of Twitter itself. Social psychologists have long argued

that positive, intimate contact between members of rival groups across an extended period can produce compromise, but that is not what Twitter offers. Its character limits, combined with the anonymous, spontaneous nature of so many exchanges on the platform,

simply may not be conducive to mutual understanding, end quote. So that's a deep insight. Maybe Twitter's greatest strength inevitably leads to polarization. It's a real bummer when your product's killer feature is also perhaps its fatal flaw. Bale lists some things that Twitter should, and perhaps more importantly, should not do to attempt to remedy this. First, he suggests that Twitter remove its character cap on posts, allowing for more nuanced discussion, Second, he says that Twitter should not simply force users to see opposing political views, but instead should give a general alert to users to make sure people know when they're being exposed to only one point of view.

Third, Bail says that Twitter should experiment with exposure to different views on specific issues because, quote, Twitter users appear already to have broad conversations about politics, end quote. Yeah, that's the understatement of the day, Professor Bale. So I didn't go with it as a segment today, but there's a lengthy interview slash profile up of Mark Zuckerberg and the New Yorker today. I have a link in the show notes. It's the very last one. But the news in our Slack channel today was that in that piece he's quoted as saying he's a loyal tech meme reader, which is actually something that he's said in the past. Shame they didn't ask him what podcasts he listens to.

Mark, if you're listening right now, have my Facebook app. me a notification or something that says pods are cool, but you know, don't spell out R, make it the letter R and spell cool with a K. Anyway, the tech meme right home was produced by myself and written by me and Chris Higgins again today. Chris will be back on Wednesday to help us tackle the iPhone day. Talk to you tomorrow.