Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 05/30 - Google Tells Adblockers To Jump Off A Bridge

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

Microsoft brings the Xbox Game Pass to PCs, Google gives the finger to adblockers (and all of us), the DOJ will only approve the Sprint/T-Mobile merger if there’s no actual market consolidation, GoGo wants to bring 5G to airplanes and when will an e-sports stadium come to your town? Sponsors: Mealime Sonic.com/ride Sponsors: Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass is coming to PC (Engadget) Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users (9to5Google) Apple, Google and WhatsApp condemn UK proposal to eavesdrop on encrypted messages (CNBC) U.S. Wants T-Mobile to Create New Rival Before Clearing Megadeal (Bloomberg) Hulu Says 70% of Its 82 Million Viewers Are on Ad-Supported Plan (Variety) Gogo plans in-flight 5G for U.S. and Canadian aircraft in 2021 (VentureBeat) Excel for iPhone now lets you take a picture of a spreadsheet and import it (The Verge) As E-Sports Grow, So Do Their Homes (NYTimes) 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 Tech Meme Right Home for Thursday, May 30th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Microsoft brings the Xbox Game Pass to PCs. Google gives the finger to ad blockers and all of us. The DOJ will only approve the Sprint T-Mobile merger if there's no actual market consolidation. Go-Go wants to bring 5G to airplanes and when will an ESports stadium be coming to your town? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Microsoft is bringing its Xbox GamePass subscription service to Windows 10 PCs with a curated library of more than 100 titles from big-name developers, including Bethesda, Sega, and

Deep Silver. Exclusive games will be made available through the pass on the same day as wide release, quoting and gadget. The new GamePass sounds, in short, just like the console equivalent that launched in June 2017. It's not clear, though, how much the PC service will cost and if you'll need separate subscriptions for both platforms. Microsoft says it will be, quote, sharing more at E3, including when and how you'll experience the new Xbox Game Pass service for PC gamers, so stay tuned. But that's not all. Microsoft has announced its intention to release more PC games on Steam and other digital

storefronts at launch. In a blog post, Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, confirmed that Gears 5 and Age of Vampires 1, 2, and 3 definitive editions will be coming to Valve's marketplace. They will build on the 20 or so Microsoft made games that are already available through Steam and its promise to bring Halo the Master Chief Collection to the platform this year. Clearly, Microsoft is trying to position itself as a neutral player-first organization on PCs. It's also an obvious shot at Epic Games, which has riled some PC players with its exclusive and timed exclusive deals on the Epic Games store. We believe you should have choice

in where you buy your PC games, Spencer said, end quote. Google says that Chrome's current ad blocking capabilities will be restricted to enterprise users in coming changes to Chrome extensions, despite widespread negative feedback that the move has already engendered. It was just in January that Google announced a change to the Chrome extension system that would stop current ad blockers from working effectively. This did not go over well because, clearly, this was Google kneecapping a popular tool that users enjoy to make web browsing easier, faster, and just less ad crummy. But which Google doesn't like because, well, you know, they make all of their money off of those very same ads.

Well, in a blog post today, Google acknowledged the criticism, but essentially said, unless you're paying us to make up for the ad revenue we'd be losing to ad blockers, you can go screw. So enterprise customers can set up custom ad blockers

and the rest of us are out of luck. It's not really worth me quoting the Google post about this. Lots of the chatter on Twitter has been people vowing to switch to Firefox, which of course still a lot of, full ad blocking plugins, and apparently Microsoft's new browser does also. So maybe, as Lori Voss tweeted, quote, if Chrome sticks to this decision, they will lose market share to browsers that don't, end quote. We haven't talked about this, I don't think, but the government communications

headquarters in the UK, which is the signals intelligence organization in that country, came up with a neat little proposal not too long ago. They won a law that, says any services that provide encrypted messaging must include a ghost protocol, essentially a backdoor that will allow law enforcement officials to drop in and listen in on any conversations as a ghost user that participants in the said conversation wouldn't even know was there. Quoting CNBC, details of the initiative were first published in an essay by two of the UK's highest cybersecurity officials in November 2018. Ian Levy, the technical director of Britain's National Cybersecurity Center and Crispin Robinson, GCHQ's head of cryptanalysis, the technical term for code breaking, put forward a process that would attempt to

avoid breaking encryption. The pair said it would be, quote, relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call, end quote. In practice, the proposal suggests a technique, which would require encrypted messaging services. such as WhatsApp to direct a message to a third recipient at the same time as sending it to its intended user. Levy and Robinson argued the proposal would be, quote, no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips, which are currently used in wiretaps of non-encrypted communications. This refers to the use of chat and call apps that can silently copy call data during digital exchanges, end quote. Well, today, an open letter signed by 47 tech companies and organizations,

including Apple, Google, and WhatsApp, urged the agency to abandon these plans for the Ghost Protocol. Quote, the overwhelming majority of users rely on their confidence in reputable providers to perform authentication functions and verify that the participants in a conversation are the people they think they are, and only those people, the letter said. The GCHQ's ghost proposal completely undermines this trust relationship and the authentication process, end quote. As someone snarked on Twitter, though I lost the tweet, who it was, and even what exactly was said, so paraphrasing, snooping on our private messages, that's a tech company's job, not the governments. This almost sounds like a story from The Onion, but you know how the Department of Justice is still mulling over the T-Mobile Sprint merger and has concerns that allowing there to be only three major wireless companies? companies in the country might stifle innovation. Well, according to Bloomberg, sources are reporting that the DOJ is demanding concessions from the two companies that would essentially carve out

enough of a business that a fourth national wireless carrier could still emerge after the merger. Quote, from the start, the biggest concern surrounding the T-Mobile Sprint merger was it would reduce the number of national carriers from four to three, hindering competition. But the companies have argued that their deal would create a stronger number three to market leaders, Verizon and AT&T. So far, Justice Department Antitrust Chief McCann Del Ram hasn't yet been persuaded by that position and still wants four carriers, according to one of the people, end quote. Apparently, the thinking is that the merged company would somehow divest enough infrastructure and spectrum and the like that may be some sort of player, maybe from the cable industry, perhaps,

would be incentivized to pick up the pieces and create a new fourth player in the market from scratch. But, you know, if you really have your heart set on having four wireless carriers in the U.S. market, I can think of a super simple way to achieve that. You just block the merger from going through. The mobile version of Excel has a pretty cool new trick. You can now take a picture of a spreadsheet or table. and boom, it's like you've imported a spreadsheet or table into your phone or into your cloud account that you can begin working with and manipulating like you would any other spreadsheet.

I did not know this, but the feature first debuted in Excel for Android in March. And now it is coming to iPhone, quoting the verge. Microsoft is using artificial intelligence to bring this to Excel for iPhone, and it uses optical character recognition OCR alongside machine learning, models to convert paper-based data into a digital table. The image recognition will automatically detect financial spreadsheets, work schedules, task lists, timetables, and other tables. It's one of the more impressive features that has appeared in Microsoft's Excel mobile apps, and Microsoft has combined its work on the PDF reflow feature for Word, the Office Lens app, and seeing AI, to bring this to

life, end quote. As we track the streaming wars, I keep underlining the fact that that it's not all about subscriptions. There's a whole other side to this. There's a growing, serious market for ad-supported streaming as well, and there's serious money to be made therein. And Hulu essentially confirmed this today by saying the majority of its subscribers are on the $5.99-cent per month ad-supported plan. The ad-free Hulu service is $11.99 per month, quoting variety.

Hulu has previously disclosed subscriber numbers, announcing 28 million customer accounts earlier this month, but hasn't broken those out by plan type. Now Hulu, which in the past month, became fully ensconced under Disney's wing, has provided some context around the size of its audience base. Overall, it has 82 million viewers, meaning there's an average of 2.9 viewers per Hulu account. And of those, about 70% or 58 million are on the ad-supported plan. according to Peter Naler, senior VP, head of advertising sales, citing comm score estimates, end quote. So yeah, 58 million people you could advertise to. I bet there would be people willing to pay for that. And indeed, Hulu also revealed that ads on its platform last year generated $1.5 billion in revenue. In-flight internet provider Go-Go says it plans to deploy in-flight, $5,000. as early as 2021 that will serve smaller aircraft on routes in the contiguous United States and Canada. Quoting Venture Beat, according to GoGo, the new 5G network will initially combine advanced beam-forming technology with a proprietary modem and unlicensed 2.4 gigahertz spectrum, a wavelength with a respectable combination of speed and distance characteristics.

In existing 250 tower infrastructure will be upgraded to support 5G data speeds and latency. It will be capable of supporting additional spectrum types and bands in the future and have the ability to fall back to 3G and 4G service as necessary. For travelers, the 5G data is likely to be accessible via Wi-Fi connections, which is to say that while the aircraft will be sending and receiving cellular signals, passengers will still log into Go-Go's service using Wi-Fi. The key difference Go-Go suggests will be that the 5G service will deliver, quote, lower costs of operation and lower latency.

compared with satellite technologies. This could keep GoGo's 5G service pricing low, while improving currently sluggish in-flight response times, end quote. Finally today, the New York Times has a look at the continuing success of e-sports. And I don't know why this is hard to wrap my mind around, but e-sports are becoming so successful, people are actually starting to build actual sporting venues and arenas for them. There's already a $10 million e-sports stadium in Arlington, Texas, and a planned $50 million fusion arena in Philadelphia that will have 3,500 seats and an on-site training facility. Quoting the Times, other places are outfitting themselves for e-sports on an occasional basis, like Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, a 1929 building, that typically puts on

comedy shows, concerts, and arena football. In April, a chandelier adorn theater in the building presented in e-sports competition, a college tournament that included games like Dota 2, Apex Legends, and NBA 2K. It came after a makeover by H.O.K, a sports-focused architecture firm with a growing e-sports practice, which helped reconfigure the stage, changed the lighting, and set up a broadcast studio for live streaming, said Rachev Shingbe, a firm senior associate whose previous work includes the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons. H-O-K, based in Kansas City, is funneling more resources into the growing field. Two years ago, it had no designers working on e-sports. Today, it has 15, said Mr. Singaba Bay,

who added he has had commissions for five e-sports projects in the past year. Developers are knocking on H-O-K's door, including owners of empty big box stores, hoping to repurpose them, Mr. Singabay said. The numbers don't lie, he added. the commitment to this ecosystem has been gigantic in the last 10 years. We don't think it's going away, end quote. But conversions and remodeling pale in comparison with the planned Fusion Arena in Philadelphia, which will be the first space built specifically for e-sports.

The 3,500-seat $50 million project will be the home of the Philadelphia Fusion, a two-year-old team that competes in the Overwatch League, a franchise in which players from all over the world battle in a futuristic first-person shooter. Groundbreaking for the arena, which is being developed by Cordish companies, is expected this summer for a planned opening in 2021. Equipped with a production studio, a training center, and three private suites lined with bars and fridges, the 60,000 square foot development will sit in the middle of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex, which includes the Wells Fargo Center where the Flyers and the 76ers play, end quote. Reading about this made me think about how weird it must have been for people when sports,

stadiums as we know them first started springing up in the late 1800s. I know you had things like arenas going back to Roman times and bull rings and theaters and whatnot, but cities weren't designed to plop giant stadiums down in the heart of them to house tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, also they could pay money to watch people play games. Like, you think it feels weird that people pay money to watch other people play video games now, but imagine you're in 1860 and you're like, people will buy tickets to watch other people hit a ball with a stick? And what happened when all of a sudden somebody was like, I'm going to bulldoze these very valuable blocks of real estate in the middle of Boston to put up a stadium for baseball? Or have you ever seen those pictures from Edwardian Britain where something like 120,000 people would show up for early soccer matches and just stand there shoulder to shoulder?

No seating at all. I mean, back then, there had to be people tisking about how this was a huge waste of space and resources and money all over something that was just frivolity. And also, is this the future? Will there someday be 10,000 seat venues for e-sports in every reasonably sized city with huge screens and stuff? Or is this the first thing that should logically just go directly to VR? Oh, Arsenal, my poor, poor sweet Arsenal. Well, look on the bright side. At least Tottenham aren't...

Oh, wait, never mind. Good luck Liverpool fans this weekend. My thoughts and prayers are with all of you. But it's a funny thing. If Liverpool and Man City fans could trade places, don't you think they would? I feel like Liverpool fans only want the league title and could take or leave the Champions League at this point. They won it so much.

And city fans only want the Champions League trophy to prove that they're really, truly among the big boys now. Anyway, that's all for the European football ride home for today. Talk to you tomorrow.