Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 12/03 - Tumblr Bans NSFW... And Dooms Itself?

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

Tumblr bans adult content, is Apple going to sit on the 5G sidelines, Uber has held talks about acquiring either Bird or Lime, a new self-driving car yardstick and resetting your web browser to square one.SimpleContacts.com/rideMetalab.coLinks:Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th (TheVerge)Apple Will Wait Until at Least 2020 to Release a 5G iPhone (Bloomberg)Kuo: ‘All-new design’ AirPods in 2020, wireless charging model in first quarter 2019 (9to5Mac)Uber Exploring Deal to Buy Bird or Lime (The Information)Tencent Music Moves Forward With IPO After Delay (WSJ)Microsoft PowerPoint is getting real-time captions and subtitles for presentations (The Verge)The first self-driving car you use will most likely carry your groceries, not you (Vox)How to Reset All of Your Browsers Back to Square One (Gizmodo) 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 Ride Home for Monday, December 3rd, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Tumblr bans adult content. Is Apple going to sit on the 5G sidelines?

Uber has apparently held talks about acquiring either bird or lime, a new self-driving car yardstick, and resetting your web browser to square one. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Right around lunchtime today, Tumblr. announced that it will be permanently banning all adult content on its platform beginning December 17th. Tumblr is apparently emailing users who have posted such content in the past and told them that the algorithms will soon make that stuff go away completely.

You might recall that recently Tumblr's app was taken down from the iOS App Store because apparently a bunch of child porn was discovered in private Tumblr blogs. We'll have to wait for details to be sure, but this sure looks like, oh, which is the owner of Tumblr, basically felt like whatever that child porn problem was, it was too difficult to solve completely, so they were just like, ban it all, and perhaps burn it all down.

I say that because if you're not familiar with Tumblr, I think you can think of it as the goth or theater kid in high school, the emo kid, the shy, sensitive, emotional, artistic kid among the high school crowd of social networks. I actually don't have time to flesh out that analogy further, like who in high school Facebook represents, maybe the jocks or who Instagram represents, maybe the cool rich kids, etc.

Though you can knock yourself out on the subreddit if you want to take that analogy all the way. But take my word for it, Tumblr has perhaps the most unique and uniquely expressive community of users of all of the social media platforms. And NSFW content has always been a big part of that in good and bad ways.

But Tumblr's community is also the most delicate and easy to get wrong. So you'll also have to take my word for it, but I can assert with a high degree of confidence that this move will likely prove to be a death knell for the Tumblr community as a going concern, or at the very least, as we have always known it. I'm not alone in this sentiment, by the way, as Matthew Panzerino tweeted, Eliminating porn from Tumblr is basically shutting down Tumblr. And Katie Natopoulos tweeted,

This is absolutely terrible between Tumblr banning adult content and Flickr getting rid of its free storage. It's impossible to imagine the millions of images and pieces of content that will be gone forever from the mid-2000s 2010's internet. Although, as Casey Newton,

pointed out, quote, Tumblr is deleting all porn. Massive opportunity for some other blogging platform to pick up the infinite niche fetish communities that lived there. It's been a while since we've had one of these, but today was a Mark German Apple Scoop Monday. Mark German along with Ian King and Scott Moritz at Bloomberg. According to their sources, Apple plans to wait until at least 2020 before releasing an iPhone that will work with 5G.

So this is not without precedent. If you'll remember, the original iPhone launched on the 2G network. And as late as the iPhone 4S, you couldn't get true 4G LTE speeds. from iPhones. But back in those days, especially the earliest days, the iPhone was so far ahead of the competition that people basically didn't care. You were still getting a far better phone experience than anything else out there. Let's be honest, though, today all smartphones are basically at feature parity. And other smartphone makers plan to charge full speed ahead to the 5G future, maybe because of that feature parity. Maybe just to stand out. 5G speeds are the biggest new feature that we can see coming down the pike for smartphones for the foreseeable future.

There was an article in CNET just this morning describing how Samsung and Verizon are partnering to deliver a 5G smartphone in the first half of 2019. Also, China, the biggest smartphone market in the world, is charging full speed ahead as well into 5G, and so Chinese smartphone makers are unlikely to sit on their hands. Now, as the Bloomberg piece that I am quoting from points out, to be sure for some existing Apple customers, the lack of 5G connectivity next year won't be a deterrent. A portion of consumers upgrade their current iPhones to the new models regardless of the changes to the device.

Given that hardware upgrade cycles are slowing overall, a 2020 launch for 5G could create a super cycle of upgrades from iPhone users who would still be using an iPhone 10 or 10S two years from now, end quote. But this does still seem risky for Apple. They potentially miss out on a major consumer upgrade cycle. They potentially lose the title of latest and greatest, especially in China.

And if Apple's push towards services includes subscriptions for things like Apple Music and the forthcoming video product, wouldn't having super fast data capacity be a big part of that? equation as well. So why might Apple be taking this gamble? Quoting again from the Bloomberg piece, the decision to sit on the sidelines may be related to the company's feud with Qualcomm, the leader in 5G-enabled chips, and its alliance instead with Intel, which won't have chips available in time to support 2019 phones." And quote. And as the piece notes, Apple is unlikely to

turn to Huawei or Samsung to build 5G modems. But by the way, since we're on Apple, I have another rumor from another major Apple rumor monger, and I mean that in the best way, of course. Noted analyst Ming Chi Kuo says that Apple will be releasing updated AirPods with wireless charging capabilities and upgrades to the Bluetooth specs coming in Q1 of 2019. And not only that, apparently a completely redesigned model of the wireless earphones is slated for Q1 of 2020. Quo's recent report also notes the rather remarkable explosion in unit sales for the AirPods. He forecasts shipments of the device will surpass 100 million by 2021 from 16 million units in 2017.

Quo also noted that would make AirPods Apple's most popular accessory ever. Note, however, that Quo mentions wireless charging capability in his report, not notably. That was announced more. than a year ago, only to have disappeared into the witness protection program ever since. Tencent Music was going to roll out one of the biggest tech IPOs in the U.S. earlier this year when it filed to go public in October. Then it thought better of it, what with the tech stocks all crashing and that whole China-U.S. trade war thing. But now China's largest online music streaming service has reversed course again and is going

to go ahead with its U.S. IPO at a price range of $13 to $15.15 per thing. share. It's still going to be a monster IPO, even at the middle range of that pricing. Tencent Music plans to raise $1.15 billion at evaluation of $23.4 billion. Tencent Music boasts 800 million unique monthly active users, so that sort of blows even Spotify out of the water. And in the filing, Tencent Music cited a report that said, per capita spending on music in China is expected to quadruple by 2023. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, the music service was created in mid-2016 after Tencent Holdings

bought a controlling stake in China Music Corp and combined it with Tencent's existing streaming business. Tencent Music operates several popular apps, including QQ Music and an online karaoke platform. It is benefiting from a broad boom in streaming that has reshaped the music industry. This was interesting from over the weekend. According to the information, Uber has recently held talks about a possible acquisition with both bird and lime, the two biggest or most prominent startups in the e-scooter game.

So Uber has been building out its e-scooter offerings, as we've talked about on this show. Why then would it feel the need to make a major acquisition in this space, aside for maybe just wanting to take out one of the major. players. Well, the information thinks it might be something as simple as there are supply constraints on the number of e- scooters being produced at the moment. No one would comment on these rumors, and Bird CEO Travis van der Zanden emphatically told the information that Bird was not for sale. Okay, so no one can make e-scooters fast enough, and since everyone is jumping into the space, everyone from Lyft to Ford to Google, at least via investments. Why, then? from the other side of the coin, would bird or lime want to sell?

Quote, both bird and lime, each of which have boasted more than 10 million total rides since starting their businesses last year, have also been seeking to raise money privately in recent months. They're burning cash quickly and still face regulatory hurdles in many of the cities in which they operate. They also need cash to fuel the expansion of their scooter fleets around the world. Scooters break down quickly and can easily be vandalized. Lyme especially has faced disputes with its Chinese suppliers over scooters that have broken and suffered problems with their batteries, end quote. So supply constraints on all ends of this market, I guess.

It should be noted that the private scuttle butt in Silicon Valley all year has been that the scooter players were maybe only ever planning on being acquisition targets from one of the major car firms, either the ride-hailing car firms like Uber or Lyft, or the car firms, car firms, like, say, Ford. PowerPoint is getting real-time captions and subtitles for your presentations early next year. Live captions and subtitles will support 12 spoken languages and display on-screen in more than 60 different languages. This is obviously to support the heart-of-hearing community, but will also be useful, I guess, in multilingual situations.

But also, I thought this was cool news, because it's a real-world example of how artificial intelligence is slowly having an impact in everyday computing situations. Quoting from The Verge, the captions are based on Microsoft's ongoing artificial intelligence work, and the company has been using similar software to power its own presentations in recent years to provide captions and translations to audiences. Presenters will be able to customize the appearance of subtitles to match a presentation, and the speech recognition should adapt for more accurate terminology based on content.

text. Microsoft had previously used an add-in to provide this type of PowerPoint functionality, and Google also provides similar features in G Suite. Microsoft is planning to bring these features to the Office 365 version of PowerPoint in late January, and they'll be available across Windows, PowerPoint for Mac, and online versions of PowerPoint, end quote. Regular listeners would, of course, all know my running sort of tongue-and-cheek wager about whether self-driving cars will really arrive in a meaningful way by 2020. Well, a new sort of caveat to that speculation. Over the weekend, Vox had a piece up that claimed,

the first self-driving car most of us will engage with regularly will be carrying groceries, not us. The Vox piece pulls from a KPMG report on e-commerce. A couple of interesting details just on the e-commerce side of this. E-commerce sales have doubled in the past 10 years and are expected to double. again in the next five. And by 2022, 20% of the grocery retail market will be e-commerce. But also, note this bit. Quote, the KPMG report posits that autonomous vehicles will spur this growth by allowing for faster, cheaper delivery than services like FreshDirect and Yummy.com can offer,

as self-driving cars would eliminate the need for grocery stores to pay or protect drivers. As the report authors put it, for an individual. additional 40 cents, who wouldn't want their stuff to arrive in an hour? Using self-driving cars to transport goods rather than people might also get around a big issue with AVs. Americans are scared of them. An Axios poll found that 64% of Americans are scared to be the passenger in an AV, though the same poll found a third of people would at least consider buying one, end quote. According to a different report, this one from McKinsey, 80% of all packages will be delivered autonomously in the next 10 years.

There has been a slate of news, of course, some of which we've covered, about Walmart, Kroger, Amazon, of course, even Pizza Hut investing in autonomous delivery. So, okay, the very first time I get my groceries delivered via an autonomous vehicle, that will be sufficient to constitute at the terms of the wager have been fulfilled. When my milk arrives in a driverless car, then yes, driverless cars will have arrived in a meaningful way as well. Let's end today with some news you can use. Have you ever reinstalled an operating system on a computer just to sort of wipe the slate clean and start from scratch to eliminate all the cruff that accumulates over the years?

Over in Engadget, David Neald notes that that's also worth doing from time to time to your web browser. to, quote, squash annoying bugs, clear out dodgy and outdated extensions, and get a browser that's good as new with a hard reset, end quote. So the last link in the show notes day goes to Neald's piece about how to do a clean reset on every major browser step by step. Now, you might be worried about losing things like bookmarks and passwords if you do this, though those files are usually stored separately so that shouldn't be an issue. and if you follow Nield's directions closely, you can make sure to keep the stuff that you want to keep. Or not, if you choose.

I can see doing a hard reset on things like your bookmarks from time to time as well, sort of like cleaning your desktop or starting fresh on your smartphone every few years as a brute force hack to get rid of page after page of apps that you don't really use anymore. You can discover that, the apps that you don't use anymore, by not missing or noticing when you don't reinstall them. Anyway, if you want a fresh start on your browser, mainly for speed and ease of use purposes, as I said, last link in the show notes.

That is all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Our podcast subreddit is R slash ride home. And as always, I follow the lead of the 24-7 slate of editors over at TechMeme.com. You can follow them at TechMeme to get the headlines tweeted at you in real time.

Last week, I mentioned how Chris Messina retweeted the podcast recently, inventor of the hashtag Chris Messina. So, if you have the time and you have a Twitter following like Chris Messina, maybe in the five figures, why not follow his lead? Why not tweet that you listen to this show just now? maybe tweet that the TechMeme Right Home is the one podcast you listen to every single day.

And all you tech journalists out there that I know listen every single day, why not make a year-end top tech podcast list and put us on there? Or, I don't know, write up a full feature in your publication about this podcast, about how I put my head in a little two-by-two box every day and tell you what happened today in the world of tech. Spreading the word about this show is always welcome. makes the mutant podcast Army grow ever stronger. Thanks and talk to you tomorrow.