Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, May 14, 2018 - Email Encryption Might Be Broken

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

Email encryption might be broken, Facebook suspends suspicious apps, why Google employees are resigning in protest, Silicon Valley could benefit from a gambling gold rush, and how Masayoshi Son is disrupting the entire technology world. Stories from: @Danny_Heifetz, @kateconger Tweets from: @F_Kaltheuner, @dcurtis Links:Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract (Gizmodo)New HP all-in-one houses Alexa, provides power with wireless charging base (Ars Technica)The Supreme Court Struck Down the Law Prohibiting Sports Gambling. Here’s What Could Happen Next. (The Ringer)Supreme Court allows states to legalize sports betting, opening floodgates for online gambling profits (TechCrunch)The impact of Masayoshi Son’s $100bn tech fund will be profound (The Economist) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors 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, May 14th, 2018. Today, email encryption might be broken. Facebook suspends some suspicious apps.

Why some Google employees are resigning in protest. Silicon Valley could soon benefit from a gambling gold rush and how Masayoshi Son is disrupting the entire world of technology. Here's what you missed today in that world of tech. Happy Monday, everybody. your email might not be secure. Late Sunday night, Sebastian Shinzel, a professor of computer security at Munster University of Applied Sciences, published warnings that there are critical flaws in PGP and S-MIME,

two of the Internet's most popular protocols for encrypting email. The vulnerabilities Shinzel found would make it possible for bad actors to reveal the plain text of encrypted emails, including emails that you might have sent in the past. Unfortunately, Shinzel says, there are currently no reliable fixes for the vulnerability. So if you use PGP or S-MIME for sensitive communications, you should disable that in your email client immediately. Now, chances are you probably send your email unencrypted, as most of us do. But if you do rely on encryption in your email, you can no longer assume that you can do so securely. If you're concerned about your vulnerability to this, aside from ceasing sending sensitive information over email and disabling encryption plugins in your email client, security experts are recommending disabling the loading of remote content in emails.

Also, the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests, quote, users should arrange for the use of alternative end-to-end secure channels such as signal and temporarily stop sending and especially reading PGP, Incrimination. email, end quote. Bottom line, if you only use web-based email like Gmail or the like, you probably don't need to worry about this. If you don't encrypt your email using a native email client, you don't have to worry about this. Generally, we all have to be somewhat worried about security at all times, but this is only absolutely critical if you're sending super important sensitive information over email.

No doubt every developer of email clients in the world will be working over time to publish a fix for this soon. Facebook is following up on its promise to review apps in its ecosystem in an attempt to prevent another Cambridge Analytica scandal from happening. In a blog post today, the company said it has suspended around 200 suspicious apps as a part of an extensive audit of thousands of apps it has reviewed so far. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that this investigation would be taking place back on March 21st, saying Facebook would quote,

investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity, end quote. In the blog post announcing this news, Amy Archibong, Facebook's VP of Product Partnerships, wrote, quote, the investigation process is in full swing, and it has two phases. First, a comprehensive review to identify every app that had access to. this amount of Facebook data. And second, where we have concerns, we will conduct interviews, make requests for information, which asks a series of detailed questions about the app and the data it has access to, and perform audits that may include on-site inspections. We have large

teams of internal and external experts working hard to investigate these apps as quickly as possible, end quote. So if a Facebook app you use might suddenly have disappeared on you, this could be why. Facebook says that if it discovers apps have misused your data, you will be informed shortly. Though data exploitation expert Frederica Calthuner said on Twitter, quote, Hi, Facebook, I appreciate the effort. However, since you've kindly removed old apps from my profile, I can no longer contact old apps that have my data. And as a result, I can't ask for a copy of my data or ask them to delete my data.

Over at Gizmodo, Kate Conger is reporting on a story. that was turning a lot of heads today. According to her sources, about a dozen Google employees are resigning in protest over the company's continued involvement in providing image classification AI to the Pentagon's Project Maven drone program. I've spoken about this a couple times before as a contract with the military that many inside Google are stridently opposed to. More than 4,000 Google employees have signed an internal petition stating their disagreements with Google. Google's participation in a program that helps the military analyze video and data collected by battlefield drones. The fact that there are now actual resignations is another sign not only of the growing

awareness within tech of the moral implications of some of the new technologies coming to the fore. It's also a sign, though, that increasingly Silicon Valley is becoming more and more politicized along a whole range of fault lines. There have been tweets in support of the resigning employees, and as, as, you know, Schererrenkel, the New York Times' cybersecurity reporter, posted, quote, people in tech like to talk big, but are rarely willing to walk away from the money. This report that Google's employees are resigning in protest of a Pentagon contract is huge. You may have heard the big news today that the Supreme Court struck down a law that had banned sports gambling nationwide,

thus clearing the way for individual states to possibly allow gambling within their borders. It's really hard to understate the floodgates that have potentially been opened here. And a New York Times editorial NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said sports gambling could potentially be a $400 billion market. Over at the ringer, they broke down the immediate implications for the short term. Expect gambling to begin popping up first in New Jersey and then West Virginia. But decisions after that will have to be made on a state-by-state basis. so depending on where you live, bookmaking might take a while to get to you

if it ever comes to your state at all. A study last year suggested that 32 states were likely to allow gambling in their jurisdictions if allowed to do so. The various sports leagues have been lukewarm to gambling getting legalized, but now that that seems to be in the cards, they really, really want some sort of federal framework for it,

so expect them to begin lobbying Congress for some sort of legislation. The ringer piece notes that with this particular president, we have someone in the White House with considerable experience in the gaming industry. But why am I talking about this news on a tech podcast? Because this is obviously a wide open industry ready for tech startups to flood into. And there are already some incumbents there, of course, quoting from a tech crunch piece on this news.

Quote, draft kings and fan duels seem like clear early winners, but really there's a market for, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the major networks that hold sports broadcasting rights to open up to new sources of revenue. For the two leaders in online sports betting, the decision is a new lease on life, although both companies had argued that they were games of skill and not chance and should not be regulated as odds-based gambling companies to begin with. This news is also what Neiman Lab is calling a huge business model subsidy for the sporting leagues, and especially the attendant media and journalism. outlets that cover them. We've been talking about the land rush to streaming services over the top video services and the like, and a lot of people have felt that the rights to live sporting events would be the Holy Grail that would mainstream those services. So imagine some sort of new

sports-centric streaming service slash app that not only would offer you live video of sporting events, but also some sort of hybrid of fantasy sports leagues and actual betting and gambling. That is very much what could be in our near future. HP has announced a whole range of updates to its premium NV and Elitebook computer lines. I have a link in the show notes to an article that has pictures of the new machines. The standout among them is the NV curve, all-in-one desktop computer that sports a huge wraparound display in 27 and 34-inch sizes. If you get the 34-inch model, it features built-in Alexa support. The NV-13-inch laptop will also have Alexa built in, but the 34-inch NV-curve

all-on-one desktop also has a base that supports key and PMA wireless charging. So if you have the latest iPhones or Android smartphones that support wireless charging, you can just set your devices on the computer and they will charge. Generally, all the NV and elite computers announced this morning we're sporting new designs, plus upgrades to processors and display specs. Most of the models will go on sale on HP's website later this month, though some are coming later this summer. Trouble for Apple laptops, though, after widespread complaints about keys becoming unresponsive on the latest MacBooks, those super thin and light ones with the butterfly keyboards, Apple is now facing a lawsuit related to the keyboard malfunctions that is seeking class action status.

While not quite reaching the level of the iPhone 4, you're holding it wrong, brouhaha, complaints about the butterfly keyboards have been widespread, especially among prominent tech journalists like the outlines Casey Johnston. Apparently, Apple Genius Bar employees blame the malfunctions on specs of dust getting inside the keyboard mechanism.

If users encounter a problem when the machine is under warranty, Geniuses offer to replace the entire top case of the computer, though you'll need to be without your machine for about a week. If you're out of warranty, the replacement part will run you $700. Designer Dustin Curtis tweeted, The new MacBook Pro's comically fragile keyboard has made me absolutely terrified of small crumbs. I was at the grocery store earlier and caught myself specifically picking out items that don't produce crumbs.

Great design, Apple. Uber keeps making additions to its core app that when they're announced keeps having me shake my head and say, wait, you couldn't do that already? A few weeks ago, it was the addition of a button to quickly call 911 or emergency services from within the Uber app. Today it's the news that Uber users can now rate their trip mid-ride with categorized and written feedback

instead of having to wait until the end of the trip when, you know, you might forget. This is all part of the ongoing year-long Uber effort to rebrand itself in users' minds as being not only more safety conscious, but also more trustworthy and user-friendly. Peter Dang, Uber's head of writer experience, told TechCrunch's Josh Konstine that the company was shifting more to listening to writers and users. Finally, I wanted to point you to a piece that is a bit of a long read, but it's too important to get lost in the Friday Longreed Scrum.

It's a profile in the economist of SoftBanks, Masayoshi Son, and his $100 billion vision fund. You simply cannot understand the current state of venture capital or even the startup ecosystem as a whole without understanding the Vision Fund. There's hardly a story about fundraising or mergers or IPOs that I talk about on the show that doesn't include some mention of the Vision Fund these days. Recently, they were a part of the FlipCart investment by Walmart, the Sprint T-Mobile merger, the last monster raised by Uber, and that's just off the top of my head. Bill Gurley of Benchmark has called Vision Fund, quote, the most powerful investor in our world, end quote. In essence, it all comes down to size.

Let me underline this again. The Vision Fund is only one venture investing fund, but it has $100 billion to spread around. And that's simply unprecedented. As a way to think about this, the $30 billion that the fund has already invested across approximately 24 startups equals the $33 billion that the entire American venture capital industry raised in 2017.

Where did Son and Vision Fund get this money? Well, Masayoshi Son has been in the internet investing game from the very beginning, actually. SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that Son founded, was a huge player in the Web 1.0 era, investing in hundreds of dot-com companies, especially Yahoo. But then the bubble burst and about 99% of the value of those investments, investments simply evaporated. Fortunately, the $20 million it had invested in a young Alibaba turned into a stake worth $140 billion. So Masayoshi Son has a history of making huge tech bets,

and this time around, if anything, he's only willing to bet bigger. He was able to finance the Vision Fund with some of SoftBanks proceeds from that Alibaba stake, but also by raising $63 billion for Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and even get to the Vision Funds, and even get the Vizion Funds, and even getting $5 billion from Apple. It's not just the amount of money Son has to throw around, it's also the alacrity with which he's willing to meet it out. Quoting from the piece, time and again he has cajoled and bullied founders and chief executives

into accepting his money, often handing out much more than they were asking for. Fundraising pitches are atypical of the tech world. A video conference call to Tokyo with an awkward audio delay makes for stilted dialogue. After 10 minutes, Mr. Sond often interrupts, as one founder tells it, Stop, I know, I've heard enough. How much do you want? He then offers up to four or five times what the entrepreneur suggests.

Any question over what the firm would do with that much money, and Mr. Sahn threatens to put the cash into a rival, usually leading to capitulation. During talks with Uber, he threatened to invest in Lyft, SoFi, D, D, D, Grab, and Brain Corps, which builds machine. brains for robots, all got variations of the treatment, end quote. Some people think Sun is crazy to place so many large bets on so many companies. Some investors are nervous. SoftBank, which has a huge stake in the Vision Fund, is currently trading at a 30% discount

to the value of its assets. And more traditional VC firms are jealous or even outright scared away by the Vision Fund's ability to throw its weight around and muscle others out of deals. Some are fearful that Vision Fund is stuffing too much capital into immature startups who probably don't need that much money, like so much entrepreneurial foie gras, and companies like Sequoia are being forced to raise larger, multi-billion dollar funds just to compete for deals with Vision Fund's deep pockets. Again, I don't think you can understand the current tech landscape without understanding Son and the Vision Fund,

so please look for the piece in the show notes with the title, the impact of Masayoshi Son's $100 billion tech fund will be profound. And that's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. As always, I had the help of the great techmeme.com editors. Check out their work any hour of the day or night at www.com. Talk to you tomorrow.