Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 06/15 – Everbody Does Ads Now

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

The every platform can be an ad platform too march continues. This time, it’s Uber. Intel drops the “I.” Google lens can check your skin condition. Another breakthrough in quantum computing. And why Apple bringing back the answering machine is a feature lots of folks, including me, are actually happy about. Sponsors: CrashPlan.com Links: Video Ads Are Coming to All Your Uber Apps (The Wall Street Journal) Intel To Launch New Core Processor Branding: Drop the i, Add Ultra Tier (AnandTech) Google Lens can now identify rashes and other skin conditions (9to5Google) Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human (TechCrunch) Fake zero-day PoC exploits on GitHub push Windows, Linux malware (BleepingComputer) Quantum Computing Advance Begins New Era, IBM Says (NYTimes) iOS 17 Live Voicemail will return the glory of the answering machine to your iPhone (TechRadar) 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, June 15th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The every platform can be an ad platform to March continues apace.

This time it's Uber. Intel drops the eye. Google lens can check your skin condition. Another breakthrough in quantum computing and why Apple bringing back the answering machine is a feature lots of folks, including me, are actually happy about. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Sort of an odds and sods day today. Lots of interesting little stories.

no big, real narrative to them. Sort of like this. Uber plans to add video ads to its main app, also to Uber Eats and the alcohol app Drizzly, starting in the U.S. more than 345,000 merchants actually bought Uber ads in Q1 of this year, up from $315,000 in Q4. Everybody does ads now. Instacart has made a big push into ads lately. Everyone has learned from Amazon, quoting the journal. Video ads will run on the primary Uber app while users wait for their drivers to arrive and during their trips, said Mark Grether, Vice President and General Manager of Uber Technologies advertising division. They will also appear on tablets installed inside certain Uber cars. The Uber Eats app will play video ads after customers place orders and continue until their deliveries arrive. Drizzly will run them in search results on its app and website as well as other areas of the site.

The video ads are the latest development in the recent rise of so-called retail media networks, ad platforms from consumer-facing companies that can often help target messages for brands by applying their own customer data. Marketers can now choose among such networks from companies, including not only Uber, but Lyft, Walmart, Marriott, DoorDash, Kroger, and CVS Health. Ad sales are a key part of Uber's growth strategy, according to Chief Executive Derek Kostra Shahi, who told analysts earlier this year that the company's active advertiser base had grown by 80% year over year. The company has sold static display ads on Uber Eats since 2019 and began offering ads on its ride-hailing app last year. Drizzly, which was acquired by Uber in 2021,

also debuted a new package of ad tools last year. 345,000 merchants bought ads with Uber in the first quarter of 2023 up from $315,000 in the last quarter of 2022. according to the company's most recent earnings report. Most of these ads appeared on Uber Eats, with more than 25% of all participating restaurants buying ads, Gretter said, and quote. And this is another little headline, but it's worth knowing, even if it's not huge in the grand scheme of things. Intel announced a chip naming refresh,

dropping the I and opting for a straightforward core 3, 5, and 7 branding structure, and placing premium chips under an ultra brand. quoting a Nantec. This shift is due to begin in the second half of the year when Intel will launch their highly anticipated Meteor Lake Cpules. Meteor Lake represents a significant leap forward for the company in regards to manufacturing, architecture, and design, and it would seem is prompting the need for a fresh product naming convention. The most important changes include dropping the I from the naming scheme and opting for a more straightforward core 3, core 5, and core 7 branding structure for Intel's mainstream processors. The other notable inclusion, which is now officially confirmed, is that Intel will bifurcate the core brand a bit and place its premium client products in their own category using the new

ultra-moniker. Ultra chips will signify a higher performance tier and target market for the parts and will be the only place Intel uses their top-end core 9, previously I-9 branding. The Core I-Series debuted in 2008 around 15 years ago, marking the end of the first core core 2 era and signaling a new dawn for Intel's client product lines. This change happened alongside the release of its 45-nanometer manufacturing process through the Nihalum architecture, and covered products such as Celeron, Pentium Core, and the Zeon brands. More recently in 2020, Intel initiated a more comprehensive overhaul of its corporate identity to modernize the messaging

from a 50-year-old company, the effects of which are still winding through the company today. This revamp of Intel's branding has involved the introduction of new, trademarks and logos characterized by cleaner typography and simplistic geometric backgrounds with a lighter blue-color scheme. As part of this process, Intel has previously bid farewell to its long-established budget CPU brands Pentium and Celeron. These branding changes were undoubtedly intended to convey a willingness to change, transcend, and solidify their position in an emerging market, end quote. Google Lens has gotten a feature that searches skin conditions, quote, visually similar to what you see on your. your skin, while also warning you that the results they give you are, quote, not a diagnosis. Quoting 9 to 5 Google.

Along with Maps Live View lens is Google's most promising AR service, and it now has the ability to recognize skin conditions. Today, the company is also announcing other new generative AI features across search and shopping, but first to the skin stuff. This new Google lens capability will, quote, search skin conditions that are visually similar to what you see on your skin. You can crop into the affected portion, while results will appear in a carousel above visual matches. The company notes, quote, search results are informational only and not a diagnosis.

Consult your medical authority for advice, end quote. Besides skin, it will also work with, quote, a bump on your lip, a line on your nails, or hair loss on your head. Google says it built this feature because, quote, describing an odd mole or rash on your skin can be hard to do with words alone, end quote. Google also previewed Glanceable Directions earlier this year to bring live trip progress directly to the directions slash route overview screen and your lock screen. You will get current ETAs, reroutes, and directions on where to turn without having to actually start navigation. This information will also appear as lock screen notifications on Android and live activities on iPhone. Glanceable directions are rolling out globally starting this month for walking, cycling,

and driving on Android and iOS. On the shopping front, search is getting a virtual try-on tool that uses generative AI to predict how clothes will drape, fold, cling, stretch, and form wrinkles, and shadows on a diverse set of real models in various poses. This can be achieved from just one clothing image. This is starting in the U.S. for women's tops from brands like Anthropology, Everlane, H&M, and Loft. Look for the tri-on badge and then select a model that resonates most with you with support for men's tops coming later this year, end quote. what AI has already disrupted file. In a case study, researchers estimated that between 33 and 46% of mechanical Turk workers are already using large language models when completing a text

summarization task, coding TechCrunch. Amazon's Mechanical Turk lets users divide simple tasks into any number of small subtasks that take only a few seconds to do and which pay pennies. But dedicated piecemeal workers would perform thousands and thereby earn a modest but reliable wage. It was, as Jeff Bezos memorably put it back then, artificial intelligence. These were usually tasks that were then difficult to automate, like a captcha or identifying the sentiment of a sentence or a simple, draw a circle around the cat in this image, things that people could do quickly and reliably. It was used liberally by people labeling relatively complex data and researchers aiming to get human evaluations or decisions at

scale. But a study from researchers at EPFL in Switzerland shows that mechanical Turk workers are automating their work using large language models like Chatchip-T, a snake biting its own tail or perhaps swallowing itself entirely. To get a general sense of the problem, they assigned an abstract summarization task to be completed by Turkers, by various analyses described in the paper, still not published or peer-reviewed. They, quote, estimate that 33 to 46 percent of crowd workers used LLMs when completing the task, end quote. To some, this will come as no surprise. Some level of automation has likely existed in turking ever since the platform started. Speed and reliability are incentivized, and if you could write a script

that handled certain requests with 90% accuracy, you stood to make a fair amount of money. With so little oversight of individual contributors' processes, it was inevitable that some of these tasks would not actually be performed by humans as advertised. Integrity has never been Amazon's strong suits, so there was no sense relying on them. But to see it laid out like this, and for a task that until recently seemed like only a human could do adequately summarize a paper's abstract. It questions not just the value of mechanical Turk, but exposes another front in the imminent crisis of AI training on AI-generated data in yet another Oroboros-esque predicament, end quote. Warning, some hackers are apparently impersonating cybersecurity researchers on Twitter and GitHub

in order to post fake zero-day proof-of-concept exploits that push Windows and Linux malware instead. quoting bleeping computer. These malicious exploits are promoted by alleged researchers at a fake cybersecurity company named High Sierra Cybersecurity, who promote the GitHub repositories on Twitter, likely to target cybersecurity researchers and firms involved in vulnerability research. The repositories appear legitimate, and the users who maintain them impersonate real security researchers from Rapid 7 and other security firms even using their headshots. The same personas maintain accounts on Twitter to help aid legitimacy to their research, and the

code repositories like GitHub, as well as draw victims from the social media platform. This campaign was discovered by Vonchek, who reports that it has been underway since at least May 2023, promoting supposed exploits for zero-day flaws in popular software like Chrome, Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, and Microsoft Exchange. In all cases, the malicious repositories host a Python script, P-O-C-P-Y, that acts as a malware downloader for Linux and Windows systems. The script downloads a zip archive from an external URL to the victim's computer depending on their operating system with Linux users downloading CVES Linux.ZIP and Windows users receiving CVESWindos. Zip. It's not clear what type of malware is

installed, but both executables install a tour client and the Windows version has some detections as a password-stealing Trojan. While the success of this campaign is unclear, Vonchek notes that the threat actors appear persistent and create new accounts and repositories when the existing ones get reported and removed, end quote. IBM has detailed another breakthrough in quantum computing using its 127 qubit quantum processor to simulate the behavior of 127 atom scale bar magnets known as the ISing model in less than a millisecond for the first time, quoting the times. What IBM showed here is really an amazingly important step in that direction of making progress towards serious quantum algorithmic design,

said Dorrit Arhanov, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not involved with the research, while researchers at Google in 2019 claim that they had achieved quantum supremacy, a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than on a conventional one, IBM's researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named. We are entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility, said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum, the era of utility. end quote. The IBM researchers in the new study performed a task that interests physicists. They used a quantum computer with 127 cubits to simulate the behavior of 127 atom scale bar magnets,

tiny enough to be governed by the spooky rules of quantum mechanics inside a magnetic field. That is a simple system known as the ISing model, which is often used to study magnetism. This problem is too complex for a precise answer to be calculated even on the largest, fastest supercomputers. On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable. Fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induced errors, but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly. In essence, the researchers were able to subtract the effects of noise from the unreliable quantum calculations,

a process they call error mitigation. Altogether, the computer performed the calculation 600,000 times, converging on an answer for the overall magnetization produced by the 127 bar magnets, end quote. And finally today, one of the things we mentioned briefly during the WWDC keynote was how iOS 17 is essentially bringing back the answering machine from the 1980s, from Tech Radar and a piece that takes the time to explain for younger folks what the answering machine was and why it was quietly kind of great. More details on how this new feature will work for you, on your iPhone when you get it later this year.

Quote, there was another benefit of answering machines that disappeared, and that is call screening. When someone called your house, you could listen while they talked to the machine. You didn't have to listen, but your caller often assumed that you were listening and might plead with your machine.

In fact, the answering machine led to a genre of communication that has disappeared. We don't care much what our outgoing voicemail message says about us now, but when we had answering machines and when our caller knew that we could be screening the call and we were not just away from home, a new subtext emerged. With the next major version of iOS, iOS 17 coming in the fall to every iPhone from the iPhone 11 forward, you'll be able to see a live transcript of your calls as your caller records a voicemail message. If you like what they're saying,

you'll be able to interrupt the recording and start a live conversation. The voicemail will be transcribed from text to speech, so you won't actually hear the pleading in their voice as they beg you to pick up the phone. This was part of the answering machine message. First, you let the machine know that you know they are home, then you plead with them to pick up the phone so that you don't have to talk to a machine. Of course, there's a bit of creepy and invasive element to this. Right now, there is nothing a caller can say on a voicemail to convert the voicemail into a conversation. There is no possible coercion that can make someone pick up the phone once a call has been sent to voicemail. If you don't want to talk to someone, you send them

to voicemail, and that's the end of it. With live voicemails, callers might assume that they can convince you otherwise. It's not hard to imagine the types of colors who might abuse this privilege, Being able to call someone to connect with them directly is a privilege. Apple has an amazing track record with privacy concerns. Hopefully this is a privilege that can be easily revoked. While the first generation of smartphone users moved away from phone calls and voicemails in favor of text messages, I'm seeing the next generation moving back to more personal phone calls. My kid is squarely within Generation Z, and he calls me after I text him.

His generation is going to love this call screening feature. It isn't just your phone voicemail that will get an upgrade with iOS 7, In addition to live transcription for voicemail screening, Apple is also adding voicemail to FaceTime, or rather, face mail, as it should be called. If you call someone over FaceTime and they don't answer, you can leave a voice message or a video recording. How long before Apple lets you watch a video message as it's being recorded, like screening a FaceTime chat? It makes a lot of sense now that the feature is coming to phone calls. In fact, once today's generation of smartphone users becomes accustomed to screening voice calls through the phone, they'll probably want to screen everything, end quote.

credit to Mark McConville on the most recent episode of the podcast, Mall Walking, for making my favorite joke of the year so far. Describing what it was like to walk past the perfume counter in a Macy's, Mark said, It smells like everyone I ever went to church with all doing yoga at the same time. That's exactly right. Ten comedy points, Mark. Talk to you tomorrow.