Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/09 – Why The Pandemic Might Be Long-Term Good For The Internet

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Disney+ continues to blow the doors off the place. Good old phone calls are back, along with the Desktop web. Don’t expect to see new emoji for a while. Stadia is free for anyone with a Gmail account, COBAL skills are in high demand and why the pandemic might be a long-term good for Internet infrastructure. Sponsors: Caramba.store CognitoHQ.com Plume.com/techmeme Links: Disney+ Surpasses 50 Million Paid Subscribers After Launches in Europe & India (The Streamable) Zoom removes meeting IDs from client title bar to boost security (Bleeping Computer) MICROSOFT THINKS CORONAVIRUS WILL FOREVER CHANGE THE WAY WE WORK AND LEARN (The Verge) The Humble Phone Call Has Made a Comeback (NYTimes) Microsoft: Don't expect any Windows 10X devices this calendar year (ZDNet) No one’s getting new emoji in 2021 because of the pandemic (The Verge) Google Stadia now free to anyone with a Gmail address (Polygon)  Now It’s Falling Apart (OneZero) Why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever (MIT Technology Review) Twitter notifies users that it’s now sharing more data with advertisers (The Verge) 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 Thursday, April 9th, 2020. I'm Brian McCalla today. Disney Plus continues to blow the doors off the place. Good old phone calls are back, along with the desktop web. Don't expect to see any new emoji for a while. Stadia is free. Coval skills are in high demand and why the pandemic might be a long-term good for internet infrastructure.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Even more blockbuster numbers in the streaming space. Disney has announced that Disney Plus now has more. more than 50 million paid subscribers globally, and that its April 3rd launch in India alone added 8 million new subscribers there, quoting the streamable. In February, Disney announced that their widely popular streaming service, Disney Plus, has amassed 26.5 million subscribers in its Q1 2020 and 28.6 million subscribers as of February 4th. That means that the company has added 21.4 million subscribers in just over two months, We're truly humbled that Disney Plus is resonating with millions around the globe, and we believe this bodes well for our continued expansion throughout Western Europe and into Japan and all of Latin America later this year, said Kevin Mayer, chairman of Walt Disney's direct-to-consumer and international division. Great storytelling inspires and uplifts, and we are in the fortunate position of being able to deliver a vast array of great entertainment rooted in joy and optimism on Disney Plus, end quote.

During the initial launch, 20% of Disney Plus's 26.5 million subscribers came as a result of the partnership with Verizon, while 50% came directly on the Disney Plus website with the rest coming through partnerships with companies like Apple and Roku, end quote. Also, I didn't mention this earlier in the week, but Censor Tower reported that Quibi got more than 300,000 downloads on its launch day a couple days ago, reaching number. three among all apps on the Apple App Store, although it only reached number 29 on Google Play. Now, before you think that I'm bringing this up here, just to rag on Quibi's numbers by comparison, let me tell you not at all. I actually think 300,000 downloads in a single day is quite impressive. Still need to give Quibi a try myself, maybe this weekend. Zoom just pushed out a new update that hides meeting ID numbers in video conference call title bars by default.

thus preventing the accidental dissemination of meeting IDs from screenshots. This is obviously aimed squarely at cutting back on the Zoom bombing phenomenon, quoting bleeping computer. In the past, when participating in a Zoom meeting, the meeting ID would appear in the title bar of the conference. When screenshots of these meetings are posted to the internet, it exposes the meeting ID and allows trolls or malicious users to attempt to zoom bomb the meetings to pull pranks and spread offensive images and language. For example, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted an image of the first ever digital cabinet that exposed the meeting ID in the title bar. This led to numerous people tweeting that they tried to connect to the meeting, end quote.

We are clearly just in a whole new race now for this sort of remote computing platform stuff. If before we had Web 1.0 and then we had the mobile web, what then is this new war all about? I guess, is it the meeting wars, the conferencing wars, the modern communication wars, the modern workforce wars. Everyone is rushing out numbers to show how they're hashtag winning in this war at the moment. Microsoft, for example, says it has seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes for its team's product, up 200% from 900 million minutes in mid-March. And video calls for Microsoft grew more than 1,000% from March. March, quoting the Verge. Microsoft engineers are rushing about behind the scenes to make sure the company

has enough capacity for all these new users. We've had to really make sure we had the infrastructure necessary to respond, and we have just been scrambling like everyone else, explains Jared Sparado, head of Microsoft 365 in an interview with the Verge. Microsoft had a brief team's outage in Europe, just as demand skyrocketed in countries like Italy, and that caught the company by surprise, quote, as things really started to heat up in Europe, the pattern we saw geographically was not what we were expecting, says Spataro. It was a surprise to us, frankly. The issues we saw were the result of us having to make quick adjustments, end quote. Businesses have also been transitioning their town halls, all-hands calls, and customer meetings online, so Microsoft has seen big surges

in demand for stream, the company's video streaming service. Microsoft has had to raise the limit from 10,000 participants to 100,000 as more companies look to Microsoft to help them facilitate bigger meetings and events, end quote. And actually, just as I told you yesterday that the desktop web was back, guess what's also back? Actual old school phone calls. This is from the New York Times. While the nation's biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift towards more internet use from home, what they didn't expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that has been going out of fashion for years. Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother's Day,

historically one of the busiest call days of the year. Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33% from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35% and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times. In contrast, internet traffic is up only 20 to 25% from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said. This rise is stunning, given how voice calls have long been on the decline. Some 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to U.S. telecom. Wireless calls replaced much of that calling activity,

but the volume of minutes spent on phone calls hasn't changed much over the past decade as people turn to texting and to apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp, according to wireless carriers and analysts, end quote. Microsoft apparently won't be delivering those promised Windows 10X powered Surface Neo dual screen devices this year, as they promised. Those were the devices promoted at that last Microsoft event from what was it, like late fall or something. Also, shipments of Windows 10X to third-party OEMs won't be happening this year either. It's all because of, yes, coronavirus. This is from Mary Joe Foley. Microsoft is setting internal expectations that it won't deliver any Windows 10X devices in calendar

2020, my contacts say. This isn't really surprising given what's going on externally with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, but for enthusiasts who are looking forward to dual-screen surface neo devices this holiday season, the reality is taking root. My contacts say that chief product officer Penos Penae informed some of his team internally today, April 8, that Microsoft wouldn't be delivering its own Surface Neo dual-screen 10x devices this calendar year. In addition, Microsoft also won't be enabling third-party dual-screen Windows devices to ship with 10X in calendar 2020, I hear. Microsoft's new priority is to get Windows 10x on single-screen devices first, which could be good news for those who are hoping that Microsoft's

10X push might help the company in its Chromebook compete effort. Single-screen devices mean both two-on-one type form factors and traditional clamshell type devices. I am hearing, though, Microsoft is not saying that it plans to delay its Android-based Surface Duo to sometime beyond this holiday season, end quote. Also, and this is not Microsoft related, but I'm going to squeeze it in here nonetheless, we're not getting any new emoji anytime soon, quoting the verge. Unicode says the delay is happening because it relies on volunteers who are currently overwhelmed dealing with the pandemic. Under the current circumstances, we've heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interest of our volunteers

and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date, said Mark Davis, president of the consortium in the group's blog post. This year, we simply can't commit to the same schedule we've adhered to in the past, end quote. This happened yesterday, but I didn't get a chance to mention it. Google has made Stadia free to use for anyone with a Gmail address, and will give new users two months of free access to nine games on Stadia Pro. So if you like me, we're thinking of giving Stadia a try at some point, now's your big chance. But also existing Stadia Pro users, you're not going to be charged for the next two months of service either, quoting Polygon. As of April 8th, access to the base level version of Stadia, games stream at a maximum

resolution of 1080P, will be free by signing up at the Stadia website. Users still have to purchase games to own them, but those games can be played on a PC, Chrome OS tablet, Google Pixelphone, and other supported Android devices. A Stadia controller, which can be purchased separately for $69, is not required. Users can also play with a supported USB controller or mouse and keyboard. The two free months of Stadia Pro will give users access to the following games as of April. Destiny 2, the Collection, Grid, Guilt, StreamWorld Dig 2, Stream World Quest, Hands of Gilgamesh, Sirius Sam Collection, Splitlings, Stacks on Stacks on Stacks, and Thumper.

After the two-month trial period, Stadia Pro will still cost $9.99 per month. Subscribers can cancel their subscriptions online if they choose to do so, end quote. And this chatter has been making the round since late last week, so let me clue you in if you haven't heard. Many U.S. government websites and banking systems still use COBOL, the 60-year-old programming language on the back end. Now, a lot of state unemployment systems have been built on COBOL,

and what with the flood of unemployment claims over the last few weeks, folks that know cobal are suddenly in great demand. In fact, states are asking retired software engineers to come out of retirement if they know cobal to help them in this time of crisis. This is from one zero. To cobal programmers, it was a familiar ask. In times of bureaucratic crisis over the last 50 years, Americans have been faced time and time again with the dusty dated systems that undergird much of our government and economy. In response to Y2K, when it was unclear whether the date of the new millennium might cause cascading errors across the entire world's computing systems, legions of programmers fluent and largely forgotten languages like Cobol were specifically hired

to fix government and enterprise code. As a result, Y2K was largely a non-issue. Over 20 years later, much of the state federal and banking systems still run on these very same programming languages. The scarcity of COBOL programmers has led to increased interest in startups like Cobol Cowboys, made up of older experienced programmers who have the know-how to operate these systems. Cobol debuted in 1960 and was largely used on IBM mainframes for business tasks like accounting. IBM continues to sell mainframes compatible with COBOL. The government accountability office has repeatedly warned about the use of legacy programming languages for critical systems. In 2019, the GAO issued a report summarizing 10 federal computing systems that were in desperate

need of an overhaul. For instance, the Department of Education's system for processing federal student aid applications was implemented in 1973. It takes 18 contractors to maintain the system, and since it's written in COBOL, it requires specific hardware and is difficult to integrate with newer software languages. GAO considers COBOL a legacy language, which means agencies have trouble finding staff that knows how to write the code at all. And when they can't, and the specialist contractors charge a premium. It also means that when a system breaks, there might be nobody there to fix it, end quote. But at the same time, there is evidence that the global pandemic has pushed companies

to expedite their network and server upgrades, leading some experts to say that we might be witnessing the largest expansion of internet infrastructure in years. This is from the MIT Technology Review. Far from bringing networks to their knees, COVID-19 is driving the most rapid expansion in years. To make sure they meet demand internet giants like Netflix and Equinix, which operates 200 data centers around the world, are rushing out upgrades as quickly as possible. Equinix is in the middle of upgrading its traffic capacity from 10 to 100 gigabytes. The work was going to have been carried out over a year or two, but it is now being done in a few weeks.

Netflix is expanding its infrastructure too. It typically partners with the largest data centers in a region, which stream local copies of Netflix catalog to people's homes. Being as close as possible to viewers makes delivery far faster. So the company is now looking to install hundreds of extra servers in the second and third biggest hubs in each region as well, says Dave Temkin, vice president of network and systems infrastructure. Zoom is also trying to get closer to its users. It is monitoring where most of its traffic comes from and partnering with broadband providers in those locations to set up dedicated connections, end quote. And finally, don't know if you noticed this this morning, but I know I did.

Twitter notified me when I logged in today that it has removed a tool that lets mobile users prevent some data from being shared with advertisers. EU users are exempt, of course, thanks to GDPR, but quoting the verge. The setting prevented Twitter from sharing information like the ads you saw or interacted with and the tracking identifier for your phone. For most users, that information will now be shared by default and can't be turned off. The shared data is used to show the efficacy of advertising on Twitter, the company says. It helps Twitter prove that people are actually watching, interacting with,

and otherwise seeing the ads that advertisers are paying for, which helps the company continue operating as a free service, end quote. An option in Twitter's privacy settings called Share Your Data with Twitter's business partners used to let you disable sharing of this information. That settings still exists, but Twitter now. says it has removed your control over mobile app advertising measurements. Disabling, the setting can still prevent sharing of other information such as your interests. Other Twitter privacy settings like disabling web tracking are still available.

Twitter will not share your name, email address, phone number, or username. The ability of ad data has had a big impact on Twitter's earnings in the past. Last year, Twitter blamed an earnings miss on a bug that prevented it from properly using and sharing this kind of ad data, end quote. Time for your local Brooklyn grocery shopping report, I guess. Junior's bodega in Park Slope had basically everything I needed, so we're back to being in good shape in my household. Toilet paper does continue to be completely sold out everywhere,

and I would disingenuously tisk-tisk everyone about that, but had there been any TP on the shelves, I would definitely have scooped it up, so I guess snarker snark thyself. Anyway, talk about. you tomorrow.