Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/09 – Apple Mad At Pegatron

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Apple is not happy with a key parts supplier. If you’re running an old version of android, you might be shut out of some important websites soon. Is SoftBank’s Vision Fund, back, baby? Is the Raspberry Pi 400 any good to use? And what can Silicon Valley expect from a Biden administration. Sponsors: KiwiCo.com promocode: "ride" for 50% your first month TinyCapital.com Links: Apple Freezes New Business for Pegatron on China Labor Abuse (Bloomberg) Zoom and other ‘stay-at-home’ stocks are getting crushed on the positive vaccine news (CNBC) Many websites will stop working on older Android versions in 2021 (Android Police) SoftBank Recovery Gains Ground With Vision Fund’s Record Profit (Bloomberg) Raspberry Pi 400 review—the under-$100 desktop PC you didn’t know you needed (Ars Technica) 'Awakened a sleeping giant': Parler jumps to most popular app as conservatives rally support to leave Twitter and Facebook (Washington Examiner) Biden’s victory was just what tech wanted. Now what? (Protocol) 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, November 9th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple is not happy with a key parts supplier.

If you're running an old version of Android, you might be shut out from some important website soon. Is SoftBank's Vision Fund back, baby? Is the Raspberry Pi 400 any good to use? And what can Silicon Valley expect from a Biden administration? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple has suspended working with a key strategic supplier. Pegatron after discovering violations of labor rules relating to a student worker program, quoting Bloomberg.

The Cupertino-California-based technology giants said it discovered several weeks ago that the Taiwanese manufacturer misclassified student workers and allowed some to work nights and overtime in violation of Apple's supplier code of conduct. Employees then, quote, went to extraordinary lengths, end quote, to cover up the violations. It's since placed its partner on probation until corrective action is completed, the U.S. company said in a statement. Pegatron is one of just a handful of partners Apple relies on globally to assemble marquee products such as the iPhone. Like larger rival Foxcon or Han High Precision Industry, the Taiwanese company is an integral

part of Apple's global supply chain, which has been the target of criticism by labor activists over the years. Quote, Pegatron's current iPhone business should not be affected. However, it is likely that Pegatron will lose some orders for Apple's new handsets next year. to Lux Share, which is poised to become a new iPhone assembler in 2021, GF Securities Analyst Jeff Poo said, end quote. Like me, you might have woken up to the news that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine candidate has, at least in early data, suggested it might be 90% effective at preventing infection,

which is more than a lot of people were expecting, better than they were expecting. So certainly good news. That sent stocks ripping across the board this morning. I think I saw that, for example, the AMC movie theater chain was up 75% in early trading, and the various cruise lines and airlines were up like 20 or 30%. But are the good times over for our good in COVID times companies? Shares of tech companies we've discussed endlessly over these last six months were falling this morning. Zoom was down 15% pre-market.

Netflix and even Amazon were down in the 3 to 5% range, quoting Bloomberg. Traders had piled into stocks such as Zoom, Amazon, Netflix, Teledocococon, and Shopify this year, as the pandemic raged on and kept most people from leaving their homes. Zoom video has rocketed 635% year to date. Amazon and Netflix are up 79.2% and 59.1% respectively in 2020. Teledoc is up 146.2% this year, and Shopify has popped 162.8%. However, investors on Monday appeared to be rotating away from those high-flying names and into companies that would benefit from the economy reopening, end quote. The stock market is, of course, course, a forward-looking mechanism. It cares more about six years from now and especially more

about six months from now than it cares about today. So when Rob Zepeda tweets, quote, perfect example of the irrationality of market participants, nothing's changed about these companies' fundamentals, just a bit of good news, such as the reality of stock market investing today, end quote. And friend of the show, Alex Willem, tweets, quote, it appears that the stock market is treating COVID-19 as if it's over when by end of year, Pfizer's vaccine will only have enough doses to treat around 6% of the U.S. at most, end quote, they're not wrong. It's just, if you're a shareholder of Zoom or any good in COVID-Times company, you have to ask yourself this morning, to what degree have the COVID times changed things? Showed us a different way of doing

things that might last beyond the COVID times. We've spoken before about how COVID times might have accelerated trends that were already in motion. If that is true for your good in COVID Times company, then you should be fine. But if your good in COVID Times company was merely a crutch to get folks through the COVID times, then maybe evaluate your offering in normal times scenarios. As Miles Udland tweeted, quote, most interesting stay-at-home trade going the wrong way today is chewy. Last time I checked, pandemic puppies are still around when the pandemic ends, end quote. Let's Encrypt is warning that phones running Android 7.1 or older won't be able to connect to many secure websites beginning in 2021, as those sites will no longer trust the root certificate, quoting Android police.

Let's Encrypt is one of the world's leading certificate authorities and the group's certificates are used by approximately 30% of all web domains. When the group was first founded, it applied for its own ISRG root X1 root certificate to be included in all browsers and operating systems. All certificates to date have also been cross-signed with IdentTrust DST Route X3 root, which has been in Windows, MacOS, Android, and most other software platforms for years. Let's encrypt's original partnership with IdentTrust expires on September 1st, 2021, and the group doesn't plan on entering another cross-signaling agreement. This means that all browsers and operating systems without Let's Encrypt's Route certificate will

no longer work with sites and services using the group's certificates. The announcement pointed out that devices running Android 7.1 or lower is among the affected group. Even though the agreement doesn't end until September of next year, Let's Encrypt will stop cross-signing by default, starting on January 11, 2021. The option will still exist for sites and services to continue generating cross-signed certificates, but only until September. The only workaround for legacy Android devices is to install the Firefox browser, which uses its own certificate, store that includes the ISRG route. However, this doesn't prevent applications and other functions outside the browser from breaking, end quote. Imagine a scene from a movie where Masasan

jumps out of a fireball or rises from the ashes that have been 2020 like a Phoenix. It's possible SoftBank's Vision Fund has posted $7.6 billion in profit in its fiscal Q2, quoting Bloomberg. The Japanese conglomerate reported a record $784.4 billion, or $7.6 billion, profit in its vision fund business for the first three months ended September 30th, assigned the funds investments in startups are paying off amid a broad rally in technology stocks. One Chinese startup quadrupled softbanks money after going public in August. Masayoshi Son also addressed nagging concerned about his stewardship. He revealed details about a controversial stock and options training program making clear the effort was relatively modest in scope and strategy.

He even took steps to improve corporate governance by increasing the proportion of outside directors with the removal of four insiders, including Chief Operating Officer Marcello Claree and Vision Fund Chief Rajiv Mizra. Masa, myself, should be the most supervised, Sond joked in a question-and-answer session after the results. More external directors mean better governance. The Japanese billionaire took the stage at a briefing in Tokyo to explain how the company he founded four decades ago is coming back from record losses in the last fiscal year. The Vision Fund

unit's highest ever profit came as a global surge in technology shares lifted the value of stakes in public firms like Uber and improved the prospects for startups in its portfolio. Quote, the Vision Fund's performance was very encouraging, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Analyst, and Thea Lay said they have pulled off a U-turn, end quote. The standout success for the quarter was a little-known Chinese startup called K-E Holdings. It runs an online property platform called BK, and its shares have surged since an initial public offering in August handing SoftBank an unrealized gain of $5.1 billion on the investment for the quarter. In his presentation, Son said his original $1.35 billion investment is now worth $7.9 billion because shares have kept

surging since the end of September. Still, he said that after we work, another real estate bet that lost in billions, BK, quote, wasn't very popular at first, end quote. Because I find it such an interesting device, I thought I'd share another review, not of a flagship phone or laptop this time or anything like that, but of the Raspberry Pi 400. Jim Salter at Ars Technica says, The 400 is a functional $100 desktop PC running either the Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu desktop, but that the integrated keyboard is narrow, and I had not heard this before, the lack of a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack is unfortunate, quote, Unboxed and plugged in, the Pi 400 is functional, but not particularly lovely. On the plus side,

the integrated keyboard means fewer cables to deal with. Unfortunately, the remaining cables are unusually likely to snarl and look a bit feral. They are both stiffer and shorter than I'd prefer in an ideal world, making it difficult to impossible to end up with a setup that doesn't look like a rat's nest. The red cable for the mouse clashes pretty violently with the off-white cables for USBC power and micro-hdm i.m.i. which doesn't help any. That said, it's important to remember that the entire kit retails for $100. Within the limits of the Pi 400's very generous price, it's not really fair to complain too hard about a few aesthetic gaffs here and there.

Consumers with a few extra dollars to spend might want to consider replacing the Pi 400's mouth with something a bit more functional, though, and a full-size keyboard might not be a bad idea while you're at it. The integrated keyboard is functional, but noticeably narrower than a standard keyboard. I'm not generally sensitive to variations in keyboard layout due to a long career involving other people's computers in large numbers, but I was plagued with constant mistyping problems the entire time I tested the Pi 400. It's also worth noting that while the Pi 400 supports dual displays, it does so with micro-hdmi ports, not full-sized ones, and it ships with a single cable.

You'll need an extra cable if you want to use your Pi-400 with dual displays, and since it ships with a micro-hdmi to HDMI cable, not an adapter, things will get complicated if you want to use it with portable LED displays that have off-size ports themselves. Finally, there's no 3.5 millimeter audio jack on the pie. If you've got it hooked to a television or monitor with speakers, it can deliver audio over HDMI. Otherwise, you'll need a supported USB audio device. I tested with an inexpensive USB gaming headset, which worked fine, end quote. What was his conclusion?

Quote, it is functional, especially when using Raspberry PiOS, rather than Ubuntu, with hardware offload capability for video playback, alleviating the worst of the problems a typical user might otherwise have with the underpowered system. I can imagine getting the majority of my work done on a Pi 400 if I needed to, even if I wouldn't particularly want to. And it doesn't cost as much as a cheap laptop or even a Chromebook. You'd be hard pressed to find a current model low-end Chromebook for three times the asking price for an entire Pi-400 kit, let alone the standalone device.

Although I didn't review that part of the device, it's also important to note that the Pi 400 is still a pie in the good ways, not just the inconvenient ways, while the integrated keyboard and large chassis might not lend themselves as well to the typical maker projects that a standard pie's smaller blockier form factor, there is still a 40-pin GPIO header, and it still can do all the things it would on a normal pie. I suspect that many schoolchildren will be introduced to desktop computing early on the Pi 400, and the more technically fascinated kids will likely use it as both a gadget and PC, with the GPIO header making it possible to play around with hats and gadgets for one-off

just for fun projects, not too different in scope from the vintage 101 project kits I played and learned with as a child many years ago, end quote. Over the weekend, Parlor became the top downloaded app in the U.S. As American Conservatives rally support to leave platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which they feel are unfriendly to their views. I believe we talked about this at one point on the listener Colin episode this weekend. I pointed out that for all the ways we have been polarized and exist in bubbles that don't overlap,

one day down the road we might marvel at the fact that for so very long we were to a large degree all arguing in the same place on the same shared platforms. One could easily see a polarization of apps coming where discourse only happens in certain areas friendly to whatever side you identify with. In other words, could we be entering an era where there are red apps and blue apps, quoting the Washington Examiner. The media and anti-Trump lunatics have awakened a sleeping giant. We gave a collective middle finger to the tech tyrants as Parlor remains the number one most downloaded app in the world. Thank you, end quote. That was conservative commentator

Dan Bongino Sunday morning. Parlor is in the top spot for most popular free apps on Apple as a Sunday morning, beating out TikTok and YouTube. Parlor was founded in 2018 and has been lauded as a platform that protects free speech. Quote, Parlor is an unbiased social media focused on real user experiences and engagement. Our content is moderated based off the FCC and the Supreme Court of the United States, which enables free expression without violence and a lack of censorship. Parlor never shares your personal data, the platform's description reads. Bongino announced a partnership with Parlor in June, taking an ownership stake in the

company. I've decided it's time to fight back against the tech tyrants. I'm beyond fed up with the censorship and bias of Twitter and Facebook, and I'm not going to stand back and watch as they target us. As a result, I've taken an ownership stake in Parlor, the hottest social media alternative in the market right now, Bongino said at the time. Fellow conservatives such as Mark Levin and Newt Gingrich have called on others to give up Facebook and Twitter and move to the platform, end quote. As I also said on the weekend episode, are we sure it should be pronounced Parlor? Shouldn't it be Parlay? Which means to speak or to talk

in French. I'm going to quote from Wikipedia here. Parlor is a micro-blogging service that is both a website and an app. The name was originally intended to be pronounced as in French parley, but is often pronounced as the English word parlor, P-A-R-L-O-R, meaning a reception room or public space. Just saying, if it's a free speech platform, parley kind of works perfectly so long as you can handle it being a French word, I guess. And finally, briefly, if we're going to have a Biden administration for the next four years, over the weekend, Izzy Lopowski at Protocol took a stab at what that might mean for the tech industry. As president, Izzy thinks for sure Biden will overturn Trump's immigration executive orders, which Silicon Valley will like.

She thinks a return of net neutrality is a near lock, but she thinks that the Democrats might not prioritize Section 230 reform, and Biden's approach to antitrust issues is unclear at best. Throughout his campaign, the president-elect has neither hugged the industry close like Obama did nor punched it in the nose like Trump has. Instead, he's held the industry at arm's length, making it hard to predict exactly what comes next. That's especially true given that Biden may well lead a divided Congress. It could be a similar situation for Chinese tech companies like TikTok, which President Trump has attempted to strong arm into a sale in recent months, further souring relationships with China. Biden will enter office with an agenda that requires China's cooperation

on everything from climate action to containing the COVID-19 pandemic, so he'll need to tread a fine line between diplomacy and confronting the range of ways that Chinese technology could pose a threat to Americans. Experts say that it's unlikely he'd go about addressing that threat in quite the same way as Trump did. Perhaps the biggest unknown for the tech industry heading into a Biden administration is his approach to antitrust issues. More specifically, will the president-elect make good on the progressive wing of the party's calls to break up big tech companies? During the primaries, that was a core campaign message of both Senator Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have rallied their fervent followers behind Biden. Quote,

The progressive wing of the party held their fire and did everything they could to help him get elected, said Jesse Lerick, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer and co-founder of the Advocacy Group, Accountable Tech, quote, there will be momentum on this stuff and he'll be responsive to it, end quote. It's also one of the few policy areas around which there is actual bipartisan support, quote, there might not be a big difference between a Trump or Biden antitrust division, said Robert McDowell, a former Republican FCC commissioner, who is now a party. at Cooley. If antitrust investigations and legal battles against big tech continue, the next four

years may not prove as challenging for the tech sector as the last four have been, but they won't be easy either. Given the outpouring of financial support for Biden from tech employees and the innumerable crises they faced under President Trump, it seems that was a chance they were willing to take, end quote. Recorded a panel for Web Summit this morning. Web Summit should have been in Portugal this year, which would have been nice. Imagine being in Portugal right now. Well, given this morning's vaccine news, maybe next year, fingers crossed, talk to you tomorrow.