Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, April 2, 2018 - Apple to Drop Intel?

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

Is Apple replacing Intel’s chips? Is Grindr leaking users’ HIV status? Cloudflare wants to protect your browsing privacy, Zuckerberg gives a longer interview, Macron talks AI, a profile of Amazon���s headquarters search and how many tv viewers are going over the top? Links:Zuckerberg interview with Ezra Klein (The Ezra Klein Show)EMMANUEL MACRON TALKS TO WIRED ABOUT FRANCE'S AI STRATEGY (Wired) 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 ride home for Monday, April 2nd, 2018. Today is Apple replacing Intel's chips, is grinder-leaking users' HIV status? Cloudflare wants to protect your browsing history.

Zuckerberg gives a longer interview. McCrone talks AI, a profile of Amazon's headquarters search, and how many TV viewers are going over the top? Here's what you missed today in the world of, tech. With the never-ending news drip about privacy issues, accounts getting hacked, advertisers and publishers, seemingly knowing everything about what we do online, Cloudflare over the weekend announced a new product that couldn't have been better timed. In case you're not familiar, Cloudflare is a CDN or content delivery network that helps route traffic on the internet

and delivers web pages to load faster. On April 1st, Cloudflare announced 1.1.1.1, Cloudflare announced 1.1.1.1.1. A new consumer DNS service that promises to actually speed up your internet connection, but also to keep it private at the same time. Cloudflare says that this will be, quote, the internet's fastest privacy first consumer DNS service. This new service not only promises to hide you from those ads that follow you around the web just because you searched for something once three weeks ago,

it will also crucially hide your browsing history from the prying eyes of your internet service provider who by nature of how the web is structured knows every site you visit. Here's how Wired explains it. Whenever you visit a website using its domain name like Wired.com, software on your phone or computer looks up the domain using what is called a DNS Resolver. The DNS Resolver typically run by your broadband provider translates the domain name into a number called an IP address that your device can use to actually find the site you're looking for, end quote. So a VPN or a virtual private network, like the one Cloudflare is

touting, steps in between your device and your ISP to prevent them from logging your activity. As Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince said to CNET, quote, if you switch to 1.1.1.1, then that ledger of where you're going online is not being kept by your ISP. DNS services are, of course, nothing new. 1.1.1.1 will be competing with the likes of Open DNS, which is owned by Cisco, and Google DNS. But Cloudflare promises to wipe all logs and records of your activity in 24 hours. Cloudflare's DNS will offer support for both DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS. and claims that it currently has a global response time of 14 MS compared to 20 MS for Open DNS

and 34 MS for Google's DNS. And Cloudflare is clearly leading with privacy. It says it will be working with third-party auditors from places like KPMG to examine Cloudflare's methods and guarantee that they're not actually harvesting your data. How do you get started? You can right now open the web on any device and go. go to htttps colon forward slash forward slash one dot one dot one dot one numbers of course and it will guide you through the installation process. Speaking of concerns about privacy online, BuzzFeed News is reporting that dating and hookup app Grindr, which caters to the gay community and has 3.6 million daily active users around the world,

has been providing its user's HIV status to two outskirts. companies, Appdimize and locallytics. Both of these companies are described as app optimizers, which help improve app performance and reliability. But according to BuzzFeed, by way of operation, both companies receive information that Grindr users choose to include in their profiles, including their HIV status and last tested date. BuzzFeed says that because the HIV information is sent together with users' GPS data, phone ID, and email, it could be used to identify specific users and their HIV status. As you can imagine, activists and some users are not pleased to learn about this.

James Crelinstein, a member of AIDS Advocacy group ActUp, New York, told BuzzFeed News, quote, Grinder is a relatively unique place for openness about HIV status. To then have that data shared with third parties that you weren't explicitly notified about and having that possibly threaten your health or safety, that's an extremely, extremely egregious breach of basic standards that we wouldn't expect from a company that likes to brand itself as a supporter of the queer community, end quote. Cooper Quentin, senior staff technologist and security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News that because Grindr was sharing location information, along with phone ID,

sexuality and relationship status, it could easily be hacked and used to triangulate user identity. It allows anybody who is running the network or who can monitor the network, such as a hacker or a criminal with a little bit of tech knowledge, or your ISP or your government, to see what your location is. When you combine this with an app like Grindr that is primarily aimed at people who may be at risk, especially depending on the country they live in

or depending on how homophobic the local populace is, this is an especially bad practice that can put their user's safety at risk, end quote. Grindr released a statement to BuzzFeed News that defended its relationship with Appdimize and localitics, quote, thousands of companies use these highly regarded platforms. These are standard practices in the mobile app ecosystem. No grinder user information is sold to third parties.

We pay these software vendors to utilize their services. At the time of this recording, the stock market was looking pretty ugly today, but one stock in particular looked to be doing worse than even the broader market. At about 1.45 p.m. Eastern, traders began noticing that shares of chip Intel were sharply lower. Soon enough, a report from Bloomberg hit the wires, which reported that Apple might be planning to use its own processors in its Mac line of computers by the year 2020. This would, of course, be in place of the Intel chips that Apple currently uses.

The report came from Bloomberg News's Ian King and, of course, Mark German. It mentioned an internal Apple initiative codenamed Kalamata, which is still in urban, early stages of development, but as the piece notes is, quote, part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple's devices, including Macs, iPhones, and iPads, work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition, end quote. This is a developing story, so check techmeem.com for updated reporting and reaction.

There were a couple of newsmaking interviews that dropped over the weekend. I'll have links to both of them in the show notes, but I'm going to just read you a few interesting quotes from each to give you a taste. First up, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Ezra Klein on the latest episode of his popular the Ezra Klein Show podcast to talk about what has been billed. in the podcast title as Facebook's hardest year and what comes next. It's a wide-ranging interview, so I recommend you just download the podcast yourself and listen to the whole thing. But about the problem of fake news, Zuckerberg told Klein, quote,

It's tough to be transparent when we don't first have a full understanding of where the state of some of these systems are. In 2016, we were behind having an understanding and operational. excellence on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference. And you can bet that's a huge focus for us going forward. Concerning governance over the type of content that appears on the site, both fake news and user-generated content that's controversial, Zuckerberg said, quote, over the long term, what I'd really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can impose some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that

is made up of independent folks who don't work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world. And finally, in response to criticism from Apple's Tim Cook especially, Zuckerberg responded to Cook's assertion that platforms like Facebook are, quote, gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it, Zuckerberg responded by saying, you know, I find that argument that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't

afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people. But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, there are companies that work hard to charge you more and there are companies that work hard to charge you less. And at Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use.

Zuckerberg concluded this line of thinking by saying, quote, I don't think at all that means that we don't care about people. To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you because that sounds ridiculous to me. Second here, I thought that French President Emmanuel Macron had a fascinating interview about artificial intelligence

and how France is looking to tackle AI, both in an effort to benefit from its development, but also to try to lay the ground rules for how to govern it. Macron sat down over the weekend with Nicholas Thompson, the editor-in-chief of Wired. And the key takeaway from the interview is that France is committing $1.5 billion to AI research over the next four years. quote, we missed all the big technological revolutions of recent years,

but France has a card to play in the field of artificial intelligence, an aid to the president told Politico in an unrelated story. Again, quoting, either we seize the chance now or we watch another wave pass us by, end quote. In the wired piece, Macron told Thompson, it's not all about being competitive with AI leaders like the U.S. and China. France also hopes to make a contribution to shaping this technology going forward before it has a chance to warp society in unexpected ways. Quote,

I want my country to be the place where this new perspective on AI is built, on the basis of interdisciplinarity. This means crossing maths, social sciences, technology, and philosophy. Another quote from Macron, Don't block the change because it's coming, and people will accept it. but try to be at the forefront of change to better understand it and deal with it. Change can destroy jobs in the very short run, but create new ones in other sectors at the same time. Another key takeaway from the pieces that Macron told Wired

that all of the algorithms developed by the French government's initiatives would be open, and so would the algorithms developed by, quote, any company getting money from the French government. Said Macron, quote, at some point as citizens, people will say, I want to be sure that all of this personal data is not used against me, but used ethically and that everything is monitored. I want to understand what is behind this algorithm that plays a role in my life.

There are plenty of other great perspectives and quotes in the piece on a wide range of topics, self-driving cars, AI and warfare, the current state of Silicon Valley. Check it out. As I said, there's a link in the show notes. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article this morning profiling the various ways and methodologies cities have been using in an attempt to convince Amazon to locate their so-called second headquarters in their municipality. Amazon officials have apparently already visited 10 of the 20 finalist cities for so-called HQ2, and the cities are pulling out all of the stops to try to anticipate what will impress the company, but not doing the things that you might expect them to be. be doing. Cities apparently have a scant two days to make their case to visiting Amazon

representatives, and officials have been doing things like sharing ACT and SAT scores of local high school students, as well as touring around their Amazon visitors via things like bikes and ferries to show off the range of transportation options that might show off their city's flexibility. What the cities are not doing is going the traditional route of trips to the governor's mansion or private planes on the city dime. Quote, we were concerned that if we went over the top, it would push them away.

A person involved in one site visit, told the journal. Said another, Amazon is a, quote, frugal-ass company, end quote. According to the journal, Amazon, quote, appears to be leaning toward a more urban site, despite requesting proposals that included sites in the suburbs. It also wants to come to a city prepared to handle its growth, and the influx of high-paid employees.

In its home base of Seattle, the company has faced criticism for contributing to traffic and higher housing costs. The number of Americans using so-called over-the-top streaming services, otherwise known as OTTs, to exclusively get their television, has tripled over the past five years, according to a report from the Video Advertising Bureau.

The households we're talking about are those who have cut the cord to traditional TV and now solely rely on services like Hulu, Netflix, at all. According to the report, there are 14.1 million over-the-top only households. However, that number represents only about 11% of all U.S. TV households, as comparison, 12% of U.S. households still rely on over-the-air TV antennas. And 74% or 90 million households still get, get their TV from cable or satellite or some other subscription service, even if they're

dabbling in streaming at the same time. So streaming cord cutters are still a small number, but they're a growing number. 193.3 million U.S. consumers are currently using an over-the-top video service, at least once per month, a figure that is reported to grow to 200 million U.S. consumers by 2021. Because of this viewer shift, a related report from the firm e-marketer found that traditional TV ad spending will drop half of a percentage point in 2018 to $69.87 billion. TV's total share of U.S. media and ad expenditure will decline from 33.9% in 2017 to 31.6% this year. Of course, as the OTT services gain audience, it seems likely that ad dollars will be

shifting their way. As tech crunches Sarah Perez noted this week, Hulu's ad revenue is projected to grow more than 13 percent to 1.12 billion this year alone. In a slightly related story, ESPN today announced it will launch its new, over-the-top streaming app next week. For $4.99 a month, ESPN Plus will feature live programming, live sports events, and a library of other programs like ESPN's popular 30 for 30 series. That's all for the TechMeme ride home for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough, at Brian MCC on Twitter. Techmeme.com is, as ever, your place for tech news, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Thanks for listening.