Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/08 - Google Gets A Data Scandal All Its Own

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Google has a data scandal and it's a doozy. Facebook portal is real, a Microsoft streaming gaming service is real, next generation Intel chips are manifest, no one knows what to believe in that blockbuster Bloomberg story, and how the Internet Archive works. Links: Facebook launches Portal auto-zooming video chat screens for $199/$349 (TechCrunch) THE NEW AMAZON ECHO SHOW’S IMPROVED SCREEN AND BETTER SPEAKERS AREN’T ENOUGH (The Verge) Microsoft’s xCloud service streams Xbox games to PCs, consoles, and mobile devices (The Verge) Intel Announces 9th Gen Core CPUs (AnAndTech) Google Exposed User Data, Feared Repercussions of Disclosing to Public (WSJ) Supply Chain Security is the Whole Enchilada, But Who’s Willing to Pay for It? (Krebs on Security) The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders—I like to say we’re archivists” (Ars Technica) 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. guys, Brian here. Real quick, another plug to buy my book, how the internet happened from Netscape to the iPhone. Again, this is the first one-volume history of the entire tech industry over the last 25 years. How did we get to the today in tech that I tell you about every single

day? Well, let me take you through it in the book. I got a lot of questions over the weekend after I talked about this last Friday. Is this a real book? Yes, it is. It's published by Norton live right. So, and this is no slight on self-publishing at all, but this is not some e-book that I just ginned up a PDF for. Editors, fact-checkers, et cetera, all took a crack at this thing. It was five years of work and research. But yes, there is an e-book version as well for sale on whatever platform you buy your e-books. And yes, tons of you asked if there was an audiobook version. There is, but no, I did not record it, which is probably a good thing for you. A professional voice actor read the book.

So, as I said, I won't bug you about this again for a little while, but please pre-order how the internet happened in whatever book form you prefer. It comes out two weeks from tomorrow, October 23rd. Thanks. Welcome to the tech meme ride home from Monday, October 8th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook's portal is real. A Microsoft streaming gaming service is real. next generation Intel chips are real. No one seems to know what is real in that Blockbuster Bloomberg story

and how the Internet Archive works. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. You might remember we first heard rumors that Facebook was going to announce a video calling hardware device, and then Cambridge Analytica happened, and then we heard rumors that Facebook was like, eh, maybe now is not the time for that. And then we heard rumors a few weeks ago that the device called portal was indeed coming, and then weeks of silence, so a lot of us were wondering what was going on.

And then out of nowhere this morning, with no fancy event to demo, boom, Facebook unveiled two video calling devices for your home, a $199 10-inch portal, and a $349.15.6-inch portal plus. Pre-orders begin today, and they ship in November. So what does Facebook's first ever hardware product do? Well, imagine something sort of like an Echo show. It's a video calling flat screen thingy designed to sit on your kitchen counter or a coffee table or whatever. It's got voice features so you can say, hey, portal, and it will do things for you.

It integrates with Alexa right now and Google Assistant sometime in the future. There's Spotify and Pandora for playing music, though no YouTube or Netflix for video. when you're not using it, the portal can double as a photo slash video frame, but the key feature is integration with Facebook Messenger for video calls. And the G-Wiz feature is that the camera on this device follows you around the room, which if you're like me and you're stuck basically being cameraman for all the FaceTime sessions with the grandparents, seems like a pretty useful feature, but also, of course, kind of creepy.

I feel like bringing a smart camera device into my house, already felt a bit icky, but now this one also follows you around the room. Facebook, of course, wants you to know it is totes serious about privacy with the portal. There's no facial recognition software, as had been rumored. Detection of someone being in front of the device only activates if portal hears its wake word. The device doesn't save recordings or calls, and the data connection is encrypted. And there's even a plastic privacy shield that you can. bring down over the camera lens.

But there's one more issue, of course, and that's simply the fact that this was made by Facebook. The reaction on Twitter has basically been a chorus of, absolutely not, there's no way I'm letting Facebook have a video camera inside my house like this. Josh Constine's summation in TechCrunch was, quote, overall portal could replace your favorite Alexa device and add seamless video chatting without building a new social graph thanks to Messenger, if you're willing to pay the price. That's both in terms of the higher cost, but also the brand tax of welcoming the data

gobbling giant with a history of privacy stumbles into your home, end quote. And on Twitter, Internet of S tweeted, I can just imagine the 300 PR people that would have screamed at Zuckerberg not to launch this, and it's still a thing. Talk about tone deaf, end quote. Which, okay, that's harsh. I mean, maybe it is really strategically important for every internet company to be in this smart home device assistant video chat space, whatever you want to call it. Maybe it really is. And maybe Facebook really believes its true mission is to help people stay connected to each other, actually. I believe they believe that. So if you're Facebook and you have mainlined that particular Kool-Aid, I can see how this is a device that you almost

couldn't have helped yourself, couldn't have resisted making. Had this come out five years ago, it totally would have been on brand and made a lot of sense to people, but, well, let's put it this way. Facebook could have had a quiet week this week with possibly no headlines about Facebook and privacy issues, but, well, just turn on cable news right now and see if even a single segment about this product doesn't somehow mention privacy or Cambridge Analytica or cause the cable news talking heads to make some sort of joke similar to what everyone is saying on Twitter right now. In related news, reviews for the Echo Show 2018 are out. That's Amazon's smart video device thingy. Consensus is the Echo Show 2018 has improved sound quality, a bigger screen.

The software is easier to use, but the YouTube experience is poor. And interestingly, given that previous segment, some people were complaining that there's no hardware shutter to block the camera like Facebook's portal has. The Virges Dan Seafurt complained that in the end, the Echo Show is just an access point for Alexa and not a full-fledged computing platform like it could be. Quote, at the end of the day, if I'm going to commit to having an always-on internet-connected screen sitting on my countertop all the time,

I want it to do more than the Echo Show. Also this morning, Microsoft announced its take on the move to gaming streaming services, which have become all the rage. Microsoft's effort will be called Project XCloud, and it will work across consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. All existing and future Xbox games will be compatible with the service thanks to custom data centers. Microsoft is currently building out. Microsoft's research teams are also working on creating ways to combat latency, even on 4G networks, but it's not quite here yet. Public trials will only begin next year.

Microsoft's cloud gaming chief, Kareem Chowdry, told the verge, scaling and building out Project XCloud is a multi-year journey for us. We'll begin public trials in 2019 so we can learn and scale with different volumes and locations, end quote. Microsoft is entering a crowded field here that now includes G-Force Now, PlayStation Now, Shadow, and Liquid Sky. And this morning, Intel made a bunch of product announcements. new 28-core CPUs for workstations, updated Skylake processors ranging from 8 to 18 cores, but I think I'll stick to the headline most likely

to be interesting to at least some of you. Intel unveiled its ninth-generation core I-5, I-7, and I-9 chips, including the I-9-9900K, 8-core gaming chip. All these chips are drop-in compatible with current Coffee Lake and Z-370 platforms, but there's also a new Z-390 chips. set as well. Pre-orders begin today and the chips ship October 19th. A lot of those specs are a bit beyond my ken, but if this sort of thing is your bag, hit up the NN Tech link and get all of the juicy details. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google Plus had a bug which gave outsiders potential

access to private profile data from 2015 to mid-2018. Now, this story, came late in the day for me, which is why I'm wedging it in here. And I was even originally tempted to push it to tomorrow because, you know, ha ha, who uses Google Plus anymore, right? But the details here are rather shocking. And not only could this put the final nail in the coffin for Google Plus as a product, but this is potentially a huge, huge black eye for Google. Why? Because according to the Wall Street Journal, Google opted not. to disclose this bug because it didn't want to get a reputational black eye. So this is like, you know, chef's kiss emoji cowardice.

Quote, a memo reviewed by the journal, prepared by Google's legal and policy staff, and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger, quote, immediate regulatory interest, end quote, and invite comparisons to Facebook's leak of user information to data firm, Cambridge Analytica. Chief executive Sunder Pichai was briefed on the plan not to notify users after an internal committee had reached that decision, the people said, end quote. So what have we been saying all this time about Google trying its damnedest to let Facebook take all the heat for privacy issues? Google's defense so far is that since there was no evidence anyone actually took advantage

of the bug to do anything nefarious, it thought it would be better not to disclose this so that no one would make use of the bug to do something nefarious, which, I mean, that's not how this sort of thing works, right? In the wake of the incident, Alphabet has announced that it is shutting down Google Plus access for consumers. So as I said, this likely means Google Plus is dunzo. And Google has made Google account permissions more granular and added restrictions to the Gmail API. So it seems like there was a lot more here than just a bug, well. Ron Amadeo tweeted, quote, we screwed up Google Plus's privacy controls so badly, we're just going to shut down everything. Wow, what a legendary mic drop. It's like the highest

possible social network failure state, end quote. What's the old saying, Google? It's not the crime. It's the cover up, right? Congratulations, guys, by trying to avoid your own data scandal. You've created your own even bigger data scandal. Enjoy. Over the weekend, the rolling debate over that Bloomberg story on China spying via microchips just kept going on and on and on. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said over the weekend it had no reason to doubt statements from Apple, Amazon, and others, saying the Bloomberg story was false. Specifically, the statement from DHS read, quote, The Department of Homeland Security is aware of the media reports of a technology supply chain compromise. Like our partners in the UK, the National Cyber Security Center, at this time, we have no reason to doubt the statements from the companies named in the story, end quote.

So I don't know, man, your guess is as good as mine. Brian Krebs from Krebs on security fame weighed in over the weekend himself, writing, quote, I heard similar allegations earlier this year about Super Micro and tried mightily to verify them but could not. That in and of itself should be zero gauge of the story's potential. merit. After all, I am just one guy, whereas this is the type of scoop that usually takes entire portions of a newsroom to research, report, and vet. By Bloomberg's own account, the story took more than a year to report and write and cite 17 anonymous sources as confirming the activity, end quote. But Krebs goes on to say, here's the thing. Even if you identify which technology vendors are guilty of supply chain hacks, it can be difficult to enforce their banishment from the procurement chain. One reason is, that it is often tough to tell from the brand name of a given gizmo who actually makes all the multifarious components that go into any one electronic device sold today. Still, the issue here isn't that we can't trust technology products made in China. Indeed, there are numerous examples of other countries, including the United States and its allies,

slipping their own backdoors into hardware and software products. Like it or not, the vast majority of electronics are made in China, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. The central issue is that we don't have any other choice right now. The reason is that by nearly all accounts, it would be punishingly expensive to replicate that manufacturing process here in the United States. And if you've ever wondered how exactly the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine work, Ars Technica has a fascinating profile of the organization. Currently, the Internet Archive is 22 petabytes.

They add four petabytes a year and use around 7,000 different processes to crawl the web and capture 1.5 billion items each and every week. Quote, the longtime non-profit's physical space remains easy to comprehend, at least, so Graham starts there. The main operation now runs out of an old church, pews still intact, in San Francisco, with the Internet Archive today employing nearly 200 staffers. The archive also maintains a nearby warehouse for storing physical. media, not just books, but things like vinyl records too. That's where Graham jokes the main unit of measurement is shipping container. The archive gets that much material every two weeks. The company currently stands as the second largest scanner of books in the world next to Google. Graham puts the current total above four million. The archive even has a wish list for its next 1.5 million scans,

including anything cited on Wikipedia. Yes, the way. Wayback machine is in the process of making sure you're not finding any 404s during any wiki rabbit hole. Graham recently told the BBC that Wayback bots have restored nearly six million pages lost to LinkRot as part of that effort. Today, books published prior to 1923 are free to download through the Internet Archive, and a lot of the stuff from afterwards can be borrowed as a digital copy, end quote. The Graham being quoted there was Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham, who said in the piece, quote, Some might call us hoarders. I like to say we're archivists.

I have to admit I've never understood Columbus Day as a holiday, and not just for all the obvious political problems with the holiday. It's just I grew up in the South, and Columbus Day just was not a thing down there. We didn't get school off. No one took work off. Ever since I've been living in the Northeast where it most definitely is a thing, I've always been amazed every year when people take this day off.

Like, I was able to get a seat on the F train this morning at 8.30 in the morning, which never happens. So I don't know if you had a three-day weekend. Congrats on that. But I guess I just will never buy into Columbus Day as a holiday. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow.