Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, Mar. 26, 2018 - The First Chrome OS Tablets

Episode Date: March 26, 2018

The first Chrome OS tablet, Uber exits Southeast Asia, Tim Cook thinks Facebook should be regulated, The Fitbit Versa smartwatch, and a billion dollar ATM hacker gang is taken down. Stories from: @thepacketrat, @VranicaWSJ Tweets from: @alexhern 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. Today is Monday, March 26, 2018. Welcome to the TechMeme ride home. Today, the first Chrome OS tablet is revealed.

Tim Cook thinks Facebook should be regulated. Uber exits the Southeast Asia market. The Fitbit Versa Smartwatch is reviewed. And a billion-dollar ATM hacker gang is taken down by authorities. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Tomorrow is the Apple Education event, which will tell you, all about, of course, but today, Google tried to bite Apple's style a bit by announcing the first-ever tablets to run Chrome OS. So far, the standalone tablets that Google has produced

have run Android, but the Acer Chromebook Tab 10 is a 9.7-inch tablet with a built-in stylus that starts at $329, and will run ChromeOS, the operating system found on the the laptops in the education market that Apple is reportedly targeting with tomorrow's event. The $329 price point matches Apple's current entry-level iPad model. Apple is expected to release an iPad that costs $259 tomorrow, but currently the Apple Pencil is a separate $99 purchase. So it's notable that the Tab 10 has stylus support. Like on the Galaxy Note series, the Stylus Slice.

slides into the device for storage and it doesn't require a battery or charging to work. As for the specs, the Tab 10 has a 9.7 inch 248 by 1536 display, as I mentioned, and has front and rear-facing cameras, a nine-hour battery life, an OP1 processor, 4 gigabytes of RAM, 32 gigabytes of storage, and a USBC port. There's also a micro SD card slot for greater storage, And wait for it, a headphone jack. The Tab 10 is supposed to be available in April. Uber has apparently agreed to sell all of its Southeast Asian operations to Grab,

Uber's main ride-hailing competitor in that market. According to Bloomberg, Grab will acquire all of Uber's operations in the region, including its food delivery service Uber Eats. In exchange, Uber will get a 27.5% stake in Grab, and Uber's CEO will join the Singapore-based company's board of directors. After an Uber aggressive, forgive the pun, move to grab market share around the world over the last several years, Uber the company has been retrenching from foreign markets of late in an effort to stem losses. In 2016, Uber sold its China operations to D-D, and just last year ceded the Russian market to Yandex in a merger of its Russian operations.

Today's acquisition marks the beginning of a new era. The combined business is the leader in the platform and cost efficiency in the region. Grabb's CEO Anthony Tan said in a statement. Grab began as a ride hailing app in Kuala Lampur in 2012 and became the most popular ride-sharing service in Southeast Asia over the last several years, a market, as Bloomberg points out, of 620 million people. Grab's largest single shareholder is SoftBank, because of course it is, and it has raised $4 billion so far from investors. The problem that Uber has had with its foreign market expansion is that in almost every foreign market that Uber has competed in,

there has been a local rival that has sprung up to do battle with it. In such a land grab scenario that has meant heavily subsidizing rides in order to compete on cost with an eye towards grabbing market share. That has been, to say the least, extremely expensive. Recode reports that Uber has reportedly spent $700 million already in Southeast Asia alone. It's these sorts of losses that Uber is looking to cut down on as it looks towards its own presumptive IPO in the near future. Well, we got to check in with Facebook again. Over the weekend, the company took out a full-page ad in various newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, and in Britain on the back pages of the Sunday Telegraphs, Sunday Times, and many others.

The ad was a personal note signed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that continued some of the key talking points that Facebook has been hammering home relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. We're now taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again, Zuckerberg wrote in the ads. Continuing, we're also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fix this. We expect there will be others, and when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected, end quote. The ads did not mention Cambridge Analytica by name. These ads came as controversy swirled over the weekend after several users began reporting that when they downloaded

an archive of the data Facebook had collected about them over the years, they found that, inside that archive metadata that had logged their phone calls including names, phone numbers, call times, and more. The call log data was apparently only stored on users with Android phones, and apparently users allowed the apps to do this if they granted permission to read contacts during the Facebook app installation process. Ars Technica's Sean Gallagher reported, quote, while data collection was technically opt-in, in both the cases the opt-in was the default installation mode for Facebook's application, not a separate notification of data collection. Facebook responded to this new controversy with a fact-check

blog post that said many of the assertations around this call history collection were incorrect, said Facebook, quote, call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about and provides you with a better experience across Facebook. People have to expressly agree to use this feature. If at any time they no longer wish to use this feature, they can turn it off in settings. Facebook also said, quote, we never sell this data and this feature does not collect the content of your text messages or calls, end quote. This of course did little to stem outrage online. The Guardian's Alex Hearn tweeted

LMAO. Facebook's only response is technically we got your permission though so you can't be mad. The Verges Tom Warren said Facebook rank and file were actually reaching out to him directly. Quote, a Facebook software engineer just emailed me. It's clear even Facebook employees don't understand why people are surprised the company even needs to collect call history and SMS data.

But software engineer Callum Jones tweeted, quote, Facebook would have at least hashed the phone numbers from contacts, but I'm lost why they need call duration and call logs. And all of this came after Apple's CEO Tim Cook made headlines speaking at the China Development Forum in Beijing. Asked about his thoughts on what should happen in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook said, quote, I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so.

so large that probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary. The ability of anyone to know what you've been browsing about for years, who your contacts are, who their contacts are, things you like and dislike in every intimate detail of your life, from my point of view, it shouldn't exist, end quote. Related to that, Josh Elman tweeted, and now the privacy conversation shifts from just Facebook to Android 2. I think Apple is going to look pretty good here.

Jean-Louis Gasset delivered another nice summation of user outrage in his Monday note once again. He said that Zuckerberg and Facebook were delivering, quote, a call center style broken record reassurance. Your privacy is important to us. Yes, of course, our privacy is important to you. You made billions by surveilling and mining our private lives. One wonders how aware Zuckerberg is of the double entendre. Late this morning, CNBC reported that the FTC has confirmed it is indeed opening a, quote,

non-public investigation into Facebook's privacy practices. That news sent Facebook stock down another 5% this morning, meaning that Facebook shares were now off 20% from their 52-week highs in just a matter of weeks. There's an interesting article today in the Wall Street Journal from Suzanne Veronica about how major advertisers like Procter and Gamble are pushing back against the online advertising duopoly of Facebook and Google, given all of the recent scandals and controversies surrounding their platforms. Procter & Gamble, for example, is preparing to return to running ads on YouTube after it had pooled all of their spots following revelations that ads were running alongside extremist and racist videos.

As a condition of coming back to the platform, Procter & Gamble is insisting that it handpick a list of YouTube channels to run ads on instead of relying solely on Google's algorithms to match ads to content. We realized we can't count on them. We have to take this into our own hands, P&G's chief brand officer Mark Pritchard told the journal. Several major brands are reportedly cutting back on their online advertising budgets this year, not only concerned with questionable content, but also speculating that some digital ads are simply a waste of money. According to the journal, quote, One global beverage company is planning to cut its spending on Facebook ads

by about 30% in the U.S. and UK this year because of a decline in effectiveness, end quote. Advertisers are reportedly directing more ad spend towards Amazon and Snap. According to research firm e-marketer, Google and Facebook combined for 56% of the U.S. digital ad market this year, but that's a drop in market share from 58% last year. The days of giving digital a pass are over. It's time to grow up.

Procter and Gamble's Pritchard has reportedly said recently. Reviews for the new Fitbit Versa Smartwatch were out today, and the reviews were generally along the lines of it's better than Smartwatch's Fitbit has done before, but it still has issues that to many reviewers failed to make it fully competitive with Apple's smartwatch. The Versa is a lower cost, GPS-free version of Fitbit's Ionic smartwatch. The Versa starts at $200 now, and it boasts a four-day battery life, which is certainly impressive.

But a lot of the reviewers said that the way the watch handled notifications of messages especially was not so great. Also, bizarrely, it seems that switching out the watch bands on the new one, watch is a cumbersome process. The Versa does notably lack NFC for payments, but in May, a new female health tracking feature is scheduled to roll out. The Verges Lauren Good concluded by saying, quote, I think the Versa has a chance to appeal to everyone other than hardcore Apple users. And that's saying something for Fitbit right now.

TechCrunch's Brian Heater said that, it's not perfect, but the Versa is a step in the right direction after last year, ionic misfire. And in gadgets, Sherilyn Lowe said, quote, this is a Fitbit that finally looks

more like a smartwatch than a fitness tracker. Finally today, a story alert for Hollywood script writers because something tells me this would make a great movie someday.

European criminal authorities have announced that they have arrested the leader of a hacker gang who has been targeting banks around the world over the last five years stealing from

financial transfers and ATM transfers. The gang has reportedly made off with well over a billion dollars. The gang known as Carbonac, after one of the malware tools it's employed, then laundered the stolen money via cryptocurrencies, using prepaid cards linked to cryptocurrency wallets, and then buying things like luxury cars and houses. According to Fortune, quote, the malware was spread across networks by duping bank employees

with spearfishing emails containing malicious attach. It instructed ATMs to spew out money at predetermined times, prompted the transfer of money into the gang's bank accounts, and modified bank databases to inflate the balances of certain other accounts. The arrest of the gang's leader was apparently made in Spain, and there was a real global hunt for these hackers, with reportedly the FBI, Europol, the European Banking Federation and authorities in Spain, Romania, Belarus, and Taiwan, all involved. Catch me if you can, too, anybody? That's been the tech meme right home for today. Hey, if you haven't done so already, please don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, on Google Play, on whatever podcast app you're using

to hear the words coming out of my mouth. Rating and reviewing will help more people find out about us. And to that end, how about simply telling a friend about us? Do you know a tech news obsessed person in your life? If they don't know about TechMeme Right Home, don't be afraid to turn them on to us. I've been your host as always, Brian McCullough. We'll meet again tomorrow afternoon.