Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/18 – Does Mark Zuckerberg Have No Taste?

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Why the date of Apple’s iPhone event is interesting. Why Netflix will take away downloads for its ad-tier. Is the VPN built into iOS a lie? Streaming has finally slain linear television. Cameo will let you actually call celebrities. And does Mark Zuckerberg have no aesthetic taste? Sponsors: Zengo.com/ride code: ride Sponsors: Apple Targets Sept. 7 for iPhone 14 Launch in Flurry of New Devices (Bloomberg) Netflix’s Ad-Supported Plan Will Block Downloads of Shows, Films (Bloomberg) VPNs on iOS are a scam (Michael Horowitz) U.S. Streaming Tops Cable TV Viewing for First Time, Nielsen Says (Variety) Windows 11’s widgets can now trigger notifications on your taskbar (The Verge) Cameo Now Lets You Have 10-Minute Calls With Celebs (Gizmodo) Does Mark Zuckerberg Not Understand How Bad His Metaverse Looks? (Forbes) 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 TechMeet. right home for Thursday, August 18th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Why the date of Apple's iPhone event is interesting. Why Netflix will take away downloads for its ad tier. Is the VPN

built-in to iOS a lie? Streaming has finally slain linear television. Camio will let you actually call celebrities and does Mark Zuckerberg have no aesthetic taste? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As of the time of this writing, I don't believe the official invites have gone out yet, But sources are telling Mark German that Apple is aiming to hold an online event on September 7th to unveil the iPhone 14 lineup. The phones are expected to be released on September 16th, quoting Bloomberg. The new phones will kick off a busy fall product season, which will also include multiple new Macs, low-end and high-end iPads, and three Apple Watch models. The Cupertino-California-based tech giant typically announces other products alongside the iPhone, including the latest Apple Watches. The company usually releases the new iPhone in stores about a week and a half after it's unveiled,

and Apple is expected to stick to that pattern this year. Some retail store employees have been told to prepare for a major new product release on September 16th. The standard iPhone 14 will look similar to the iPhone 13, though the company will eliminate the 5.4-inch mini version and add a model with a 6.7-inch screen. This will mark the first time Apple launches a non-pro iPhone with a display of that size. The company is planning bigger changes for the iPhone 14 Pro line. Apple will replace the front-facing camera cutout known as the notch with a pill-shaped hole for face ID sensors and a hole-punched-sized area for the camera. This will give users slightly more screen space.

The company is also adding a faster chip to the iPhone 14 Pro. Apple, meanwhile, will retain the A15 chip for the iPhone 13 in the regular iPhone 14 models. The most significant iPhone 14 pro changes will be to the camera system, which will appear slightly, larger to consumers. The pro models will gain a 48-mixel wide-angle camera alongside 12-machixel ultra-wide and telephoto sensors. Apple is also planning improvements to video recording and battery life. For the latest Apple watches known as Series 8, Apple will add features for women's health and a body temperature sensor. The standard watch will look similar to the Series 7, but a new pro model will go after sportier consumers. It will have a larger display, rugged titanium case, new fitness

tracking features, and more battery life. also is planning a new Apple Watch SE, its low-cost smartwatch with a faster chip, end quote. Now, normally, timing of an Apple event isn't worthy of a full segment for this show, but the timing of this event, two days after Labor Day, thus on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, is interesting for a couple of reasons. Ming Chi Quo tweeted, the iPhone 14 announcement slash shipping date may be earlier than iPhone 13 slash 12, which could be one of the reasons why Apple Apple offered a positive outlook for Q3 2020 from the last earnings call. The global recession risk is still growing and unpredictable, so announcing slash shipping the iPhone as soon as possible may

minimize the impact of recession risk on demand, end quote. And as at Sharma Vishal tweeted, How Apple will handle the inflation and cost pressures will be worth watching in the price point of the new phones, end quote. Also from Mark German, Netflix's iOS, app code suggests that the upcoming ad-supported tier of Netflix arriving in early 2023 won't let users download shows for offline viewing or skip ads. Downloads available on all plans except Netflix with ads, according to the text in the app that was discovered by developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News. The code also suggests that users won't be able to skip ads, a common move in the streaming

World, and playback controls won't be available during ad breaks. With its regular plans, users can download content for viewing in places without reliable internet access such as airplanes. The lack of that option could help Netflix upsell users to its higher-end tiers after it hooks them on the ad-supported version. The Los Gatos California-Based company has already said that it won't offer all of its content on the ad tier, end quote. Really, though, this is a practical issue. They can't offer downloading because they wouldn't be able to insert the ad. right? A researcher says iOS devices do not actually fully route all network traffic through VPNs, leading to data leaks. Proton VPN first publicized this issue back in March of 2020,

but the researcher in question this time is Michael Horowitz, who writes on his blog, quote, VPNs on iOS are broken. At first, they appear to work fine. The iOS device gets a new public IP address and new DNS servers. Data is sent to the VPN server. but over time, a detailed inspection of data leaving the iOS device shows that the VPN tunnel leaks. Data leaves the iOS device outside of the VPN tunnel. This is not a classic slash legacy DNS leak. It is a data leak. I confirm this using multiple types of VPN and software for multiple VPN providers.

The latest version of iOS that I tested with is 15.6. This data leak was first publicized by ProtonVPN in March 2020 and iOS version 13. Horowitz then goes on to describe his methodology. I won't get into that. It's too long in detail, but he concludes by saying this. Comedian Stephen Wright used to joke that he had to get a new shadow because the old one wasn't doing what he was doing. That's what we have here, a VPN that is not doing what it is supposed to do. Data is leaving my iPad and not traveling through the VPN tunnel. It is surprising to find this problem has persisted for so long. My testing took very little hardware, software, or expertise. With the billions of iOS users, it is hard to imagine that no one

else bothered testing this. Then again, the world was a bit distracted in March of 2020. It also seems that Apple has a level of trust that they do not deserve. Back in March 2020, Steve Gibson said, quote, Apple's going to fix this. I'm sure it's already been fixed in-house. They're probably moments away from pushing out a fix to this because it's gotten a lot of attention in the industry. Imagine within a few days this will be fixed, end quote. A slightly more skeptical John Dunn of Sophos wrote at the time that, quote, a patch might not appear for weeks. It's been over two years. I emailed Apple at their special email address for reporting security issues on May 19, 2022, and for a week, there was no response. On May 26, I emailed again,

and this time Apple responded the next day. More on this below in the section on where this stands. If you're thinking about Tor as a solution to this, don't. For one thing, there is no official tour software for iOS. More importantly, Tour does not work. at the operating system level. The software given out by the Tor project is a web browser, end quote. I can't resist marking number milestones like this. According to Nielsen, in July, for the first time ever, streaming had the largest share of U.S. TV viewing at 34.8 percent, quoting variety. For the month of July, streaming among American TV households represented a record 34.8 percent share of total consumption while cable and broadcasts came in at 34.4% and 21.6% respectively.

Streaming usage has surpassed that of broadcast before, but this is the first time it has also exceeded cable viewing. Netflix again held the largest share of overall TV viewing among streaming platforms with 8%. That was driven by nearly 18 billion viewing minutes of Stranger Things for alone for July, along with almost 11 billion minutes of combined viewing of Virgin River and the Umbrella Academy. In addition, Netflix's original movies The Seabees and The Grey Man, starring Ryan Gosling, Anna Darmus, and Chris Evans contributed over 5 billion minutes per Nielsen. Hulu's record 3.6% share for July 2022 was helped by the second season of Only Murders in the building and The Bear, which combined for about 3 billion minutes viewed. Amazon's Prime Video's

3% share was driven by the new series The Terminal List and the new episodes of The Boys, which garnered over 8 billion combined viewing minutes. Overall, streaming usage in July increased 3.2% compared with June and gained 1.1 share points. Time spent streaming in July averaged nearly 191 billion minutes per week, and each of the five measurement weeks in July 2022 now account for five of the six highest volume streaming weeks on record, according to Nielsen. Cable viewing in July declined 2% and dropped 0.7% share points compared with June, and year over year, cable usage was down 8.9 and negative 3.3 share points. Sports viewing posted the biggest decline for the cable TV category dropping 15.4% from June and 34% from a year ago when the

rescheduled 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics began, end quote. Microsoft is rolling out widget notifications on the Windows 11 task bar with live updates from widgets such as weather, finance sports, and breaking news. Quoting Tom Warren in The Verge. All Windows 11 users will start to see these new widget notifications in the coming days and weeks, thanks to an update to the Windows Web Experience Pack that powers Microsoft's widgets feature. The notifications appear as live animations on the Taskbar Weather widget and include alerts for thunderstorms and even ticker alerts when stocks you're following go up or down. I've been seeing some of these notifications in recent days on my Windows 11 machine,

and they can be rather distracting, especially if you have the taskbar centered. While the weather ones are useful to alert you to thunderstorms and other elements of nature you'd rather avoid, the alerts for stocks are far less so, at least in my experience. You can just ignore the notifications and the taskbar widget will return to the static weather one, but the animations certainly catch your attention if you're in the middle of a meeting or you're busy figuring out why your V-lookup table isn't working in Excel. Microsoft doesn't appear to offer a way to easily disable these notifications either. I'd like to keep the weather alerts but ditch the stock animations and any other notifications,

so my task bar is a little less distracting. Given we can fine-tune news content inside the main widgets panel, I'm hoping that a setting to fine-tune widget notifications is on the way, end quote. Cameo has announced Cameo Live, which lets users have 10-minute live video calls with celebrities, expanding on DMs and cameo calls, which they already offer, quoting Gizmodo. From the platform statement on the new feature, quote, Our newest fan experience cameo live comes from direct fan and talent feedback for longer video calls, the option to include friends and family and more flexible scheduling. With the new format, you will now book the 10-minute live video call

with one of the thousands of athletes, actors, musicians, comedians, creators, reality stars, and other pop culture personalities available. opt for a one-on-one conversation, invite up to nine friends and family members to join you, or gift the call to a loved one. Propose three date slash time options that work best for you, giving you more scheduled control than ever before, end quote. Gizmodo would be remiss if we didn't point out that Cameo Live could be ripe for abuse on all sides. It's hard to imagine a world where this doesn't lead to targeted harassment of certain celebrities, and users should be well aware that their privacy is no guarantee. Camio spokesperson Brandon Kazimer did tell Gizmodo over email that

talent can decline a Cameo Live call for any reason, leaving an ongoing call at any time, and selectively block users on the platform. Casimir also claimed that, quote, Cameo uses technology to auto-moderate the chat function of Cameo Live to protect against things like profanity and hate speech. Further, unlike with pre-recorded cele messages, live videos won't be posted to the Cameo website and screen recording is prohibited and blocked. But concerns aside, admittedly, it also sounds like fun. My first reaction to the feature announcement was to ponder aloud to my editors if I could expense a 10-minute cameo-based celebrity interview, end quote.

For my mom's birthday recently, I got her a cameo from Loretta Swit, who played Hot Lips Hulahan on MASH, which has always been her favorite show. And just for fun, for no good reason, I got my brother, A cameo from the football star Canu, who if you're an old school Arsenal fan, you'll know why that was a choice that I couldn't resist. It was funny, though, since I needed to give him something to talk about, I told Canu that my brother had just gotten COVID, which he actually had. And Canu took it weirdly seriously, telling my brother how certain he was that he would pull through all of this, these tough times, and that he had to, because he was such a beloved father and husband and brother. you know, Canoo on Cameo would endorse. Finally today, you might have seen this happen online, but after Mark Zuckerberg shared a screenshot from Horizon Worlds for an announcement,

people absolutely piled on online to criticize the graphics in Horizon Worlds and Meta's $10 billion investment in the Metaverse, which seemingly can't get you better-looking stuff. Quoting Forbes. The image shows my image shows. Mark's dead-eyed avatar standing in an empty landscape populated only by a small version of the Eiffel Tower and Barcelona's Tibadaboo Cathedral. The image made Second Life trend on Twitter for a while yesterday, with people saying it somehow looked worse than the decades-old life sim. I made the comment that this is what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with his Metaverse. On the same day, Fortnite introduced its mega-popular crossover with Dragon Ball Z, bolstering its much more fun,

better-looking version of the concept. The thing is, this happens all the time with Zuckerberg and his Metaverse because Horizon Worlds has looked terrible since its inception and has barely gotten any better over the years, where its avatars still look like Mees from 2012, and they still don't have legs. Granted, I understand that showing 2D screenshots of VR is difficult, and that VR generally lags behind traditional console and PC gaming in terms of graphics, and yet that doesn't change the fact that even within VR, Horizon Worlds is one of the worst-looking offerings I have seen, and that meta has spent something like $10 billion chasing its horizon, VR-centric version of the Metaverse, even embarrassingly changing their company name to reflect

that. And this is the result. The problem here is pretty obvious. If you're a meta investor and you have the head of the company saying that the Metaverse is the future, meta has a huge role to play in it, and then they keep posting things that look worse than PlayStation Home in 2008. I don't know how you would have any confidence in that vision or in that. that person. It is just embarrassing, and yet Zuckerberg seems entirely immune to the embarrassment or really just does not understand how bad this looks, both literally, the graphics are garbage and it's bizarre, no one has legs after five years of this, but also for him and his company and his grand vision of the metaverse, which he seems to understand less than all of his competition.

This is not going to go well for him or meta if he continues down this path, end quote. Yeah, it puzzles the hell out of me, too. Like, you can go lower-res with graphics and still make things look amazing. Like, Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact are both like generationally simpler in terms of graphics than, say, Eldon Ring. But they look beautiful, wide open, wonderful, beautiful, immersive worlds. And I think they're pretty close to being functional in VR. Like, you could port Genshin Impact to VR right now, I would think. Heck, even Mario Kart graphics look better than this. Also, say what you want about the look of

NFTs, and we have discussed how bored apes yacht club just sort of ripped off the 20-year-old guerrillas look. But you can't deny that NFTs have, you know, sort of tapped into or maybe have shaped an obvious vein in the cultural zeitgeist. But what meta is doing looks so basic. It's weirdly, like no one is even trying. Like, does no one at Facebook have any taste? duck really the reincarnation of Bill Gates when it comes to aesthetics? Forget May the 4th being May the Force Be With You Day. Today, Rich DeMorrow taught me that today is San Fernando Valley Day. Get it?

818. Of course, that doesn't work if you don't use the American Date Order. But anyway, I guess what you can do is watch Boogie Nights tonight in celebration. Talk to you tomorrow.