Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, Apr. 9, 2018 - iPhone (PRODUCT)RED

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

A new (PRODUCT)RED iPhone, Uber gets into bike sharing, Zuckerberg crams for Congress, an open source AR headset, and why phishing attacks work. Stories:Amazon spent nearly $23 billion on R&D last year — more than any other U.S. company (Recode)17 percent of employees fall for social engineering attacks (betanews) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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, Ryan. for April 9th, 2018. Today, a new product red iPhone.

Uber gets into bike share. Zuckerberg crams for Congress, an open source AR headset, and why fishing attacks work. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple this morning announced new red models of the iPhone 8 and 8 plus. Apple made a similar announcement

for iPhone 7 models around this time last year. And with last year, Apple has partnered with Product Red, who campaigns to fight HIV and AIDS in Africa. The new phones will be available for pre-order tomorrow, April 10th, and we'll start shipping this Friday. Pricing for the phones remains the same as existing models, but an unspecified portion of each sale will go directly to Product Red. Apple says it has donated more than $160 million to the charity's global fund since it began partnering with Product Red in 2006. Apple also introduced a new product red iPhone 10 leather folio, which will be available tomorrow as well. A couple of notes, unlike last year's red phones, which still had a white bezel finish,

this year Apple is going with a black bezel. And as the Verge points out, last year's red models were discontinued when Apple announced the 8, 8 plus and iPhone 10 in September. So if you want to get your hands on these, you probably have until the end of the summer. to do so. The bike sharing and e-scooter markets have been an unusually hot space to be a startup in recently, and that continued today when Uber announced that it has agreed to acquire bike-sharing startup, Jump, formerly known as social bikes, for what sources say was around $200 million. Uber apparently intends to let Jump continue to run independently. As I say, bike sharing and more recently e-scooter startups have seen a lot of investor activity.

recently. They seem to be a strategically interesting adjunct to ride hailing services because they provide a solution for the so-called first and last mile trips, basically short trips of three miles or maybe less than a mile. In Asia, there's India's Ola and Didi and Grabb have launched bike share services themselves. Jump is one of the new breed of Doclis bike sharing companies, along with the likes of China's OFO, which raised a total of $2.2 billion in funding recently. Jump is currently the only dockless bike sharing company licensed to operate in San Francisco. In February, its first full month of operations in the city, the company said it saw on average around four trips per day per bike for each of its 250 bikes,

with an average trip distance of 2.6 miles. San Francisco's exclusive docked bike share. partner is Ford's go bike. But as I said, jumps bikes don't require a dock. You can just pick them up and leave them anywhere. The bikes have GPS, can be unlocked via app, and paid for the same way. Jump's statement regarding the acquisition read, quote, at our core, we are still the same team that is passionate about partnering with cities to increase cycling, but joining Uber presents us with the opportunity to realize our dreams faster and at a much larger scale. Jump will continue to operate in a way that remains true to our roots, and we will remain good partners to cities while delivering excellent services to our writers.

If you were on social media a lot today, especially Twitter, you might have seen a picture floating around of a woman wearing what looks like a VR-style headset or something out of the Tron remake. The company behind this headset is known as Leap Motion, and it's actually been around since 2010. Leap Motion develops hand-tracking software and software that lets you manipulate digital data with movements, sort of minority report style. But Leap Motion has pivoted first to VR and now to AR, and it turns out that the headset you saw was a prototype of a device called Project North Star. Project North Star is an AR headset designed to project images and data onto your field of vision using dual 1600 by 1440. LCD displays running at 120 hertz and allowing a combined 100 degree field of view. The device reflects images onto a visor that covers your face so that you perceive projections and data as an overlay onto what you're seeing in the real world.

The interesting part is Leap Motion says the headset could be produced at about $100 a pop at large-scale production, and the company is publishing the hardware and specs and releasing the software to power the device under an open source license next week. Leap Motion said in a statement, quote, We hope that these designs will inspire a new generation of experimental AR systems that will shift the conversation from what an AR system should look like to what an AR experience should feel like. So as we knew, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is preparing to testify before the Senate

Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees tomorrow, as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other issues. According to Reuters, he was in Washington today, actually, meeting informally and in private with some of the lawmakers on the committees in question. Around lunchtime, Zuckerberg was photographed going into Senator Bill Nelson's office, but took no questions from reporters. Axios rounded up a list of some of the key Congresspeople expected to grill Zuckerberg tomorrow,

including the committee chairman, Senators Chuck Grassley, and John Thune, as well as Representative Greg Walden. Senator Diane Feinstein is on the Judiciary Committee and is known as a Foreign Policy Maven, so expect Russia-related questioning from her. Senator Amy Koblocker is a lead sponsor of legislation that would regulate online political ads, a bill that Facebook says it backs. Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal are known to be data privacy hawks, so expect sharp questions from them. And according to Axios, GOP representative Marsha Blackburn and Senator Ted Cruz, quote, share the concerns of conservatives who think large web platforms could stifle right-leaning views. So expect some questions along those lines. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported on the prep sessions that Zuckerberg has reportedly been involved.

with in order to ready himself for his testimony. Facebook has apparently hired Reginald J. Brown, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, as well as a team from the law firm of William Hale to provide coaching for congressional testimony as well as to set up mock hearings to roleplay with faux members of Congress. Quote, for every major CEO and now for Mark Zuckerberg, this is a right of passage. so said Reed E. Hunt, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Quote, Facebook has become so important, not just to business but to society, it can't avoid having to run the congressional gauntlet, end quote.

For a company of Facebook's size, it would be negligent if Zuckerberg was not being prepared for this sort of thing. According to the New York Times, quote, Facebook's damage control efforts, which are being overseen by a policy and communications team of more than 500,000, employees, as well as a handful of outside crisis communication firms, are unprecedented in the company's 14-year history. Perhaps as a part of those damage control efforts today, Facebook announced a new initiative to support independent and academic research about the impact of social media on democracy. The social network said it was partnering with seven nonprofit foundations to, quote, help provide independent credible research about the role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally.

Facebook said it would provide anonymized data as well as funding to support the research, but would not have any right to review or approve research findings prior to publication in peer-reviewed journals. It's not clear when this initiative would begin, but as the verge notes, given the slow pace of academic research, it probably wouldn't deliver any actionable findings before the U.S. midterm elections in the fall. Also Friday, Facebook announced that it was suspending another data analytics firm from its platform. This time, a company called CubeU, and this came after CNBC notified Facebook that CubeU was creating Cambridge Analytica-style quizzes for Facebook users. QubeU reportedly misleadingly labeled its quizzes as being, quote,

for non-profit academic research, but then shared user data with marketers. CubeU's CEO denied any wrongdoing or deception, but a Facebook spokesman told CNBC, quote, These are serious claims and we have suspended QBU from Facebook while we investigate them. If they refuse or fail our audit, their apps will be banned from Facebook, end quote. On Twitter, technology lawyer James Grimmelman pointed out, quote, note that Facebook failed to discover this on its own, i.e., it wasn't willing to devote resources equivalent to one investigative reporting team to the problem. Quick, who's the biggest spender in tech when it comes to research and development?

According to Recode, it's actually Amazon, who spent $22.6 billion on R&D last year, up 41% over 2016. Amazon has of course been investing heavily in AWS, but also new technologies and products like Alexa and the Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores. Amazon was followed by Alphabet, who spent $16.6 billion on R&D in 2016, and Intel at $13.1 billion.

For all U.S. companies in total, the top five biggest R&D spenders were all tech companies, with Apple rounding off the top five. spending $11.6 billion in 2017. Facebook came in at number nine as it increased R&D 32% to $7.8 billion. One interesting caveat to the Recode numbers, recode was counting Amazon's technology and content, both as contributors to Amazon's R&D spends.

So spending to produce shows for Amazon Prime Video gets counted as well. And that means that number is seemingly only, going to increase, of course. A quarter billion dollars for Lord of the Rings writes, anybody? So if you're wondering why companies are getting hacked all the time, security experts have been telling us for years that the biggest threat vector is the human factor. The long and short of it is through what is known as social engineering techniques, a lot of us can't stop getting tricked into clicking on bad links.

According to beta news, an enterprise security company named positive technologies, imitated the actions of hackers by sending emails to employees with links to websites, password entry forms, and attachments. They sent a total of 3,300 messages, and around 17% of those messages were clicked on and would have led to a compromise on employee work computers. So, listeners, if you're a representative sample, about one in five of you, can be duped into clicking on fake emails from scamsters. Apparently, the most effective social engineering scam is to send an email with a fishing link.

About 27% of recipients click on these sorts of emails. Getting a message from a fake company is becoming a less effective tactic, though, causing only 11% of bad clicks. But sending messages from the account of a real company or a person you know leads to clicks about 33% of the time. According to Lee Ann Galloway, Cybersecurity Resilience Lead at Positive Technologies, quote, to make the emails more effective, attackers may combine different methods. A single message may contain a malicious file and a link, which leads to a website containing multiple exploits and a password entry form.

Malicious attachments can be blocked by properly configured antivirus protection. However, there is no surefire way to prevent users from being tricked into it. to divulging their password. So by the way, Facebook today did start rolling out those notifications that will let you know if you were affected by the Cambridge Analytica hack. If you check your news feed at some point, you should get a link at the top that talks about protecting your information and a button that will let you go remove any apps or websites

you don't want connected to your account. However, if you were affected by the Cambridge Analytica leak, you'll see a different button that will let you, tap or click to see how you've been affected. So maybe check on that today. That's been the TechMeme Ride Home. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Back tomorrow with some Zuckerberg congressional testimony.