Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 10/24 - Is TikTok A “National Security Risk?”

Episode Date: October 24, 2019

Is TikTok a national security risk? Inquiring Senators want to know. Earnings running the gamut from bad to surprisingly good from Twitter, Amazon and Tesla. And to paraphrase an old saw: if a voicemail system goes down how would anyone even notice? Sponsors: Mealime LegalForce RAPC (650-390-6461 or [e-mail]) Links: TikTok raises national security concerns in Congress as Schumer, Cotton ask for federal review (The Washington Post) Music Video Upstart ‘Triller’ Says It’s Taking On TikTok Amid $28 Million Series B (TubeFilter) Twitter Q3 misses bi on revenues of $824M and EPS of $0.05 on the back of adtech glitches (TechCrunch) Twitter’s Growth Sags, But That Wasn’t the Worst Part (Bloomberg) Microsoft Sales, Profit Top Estimates on Cloud; Azure Slows (Bloomberg) Tesla Shares Soar as Elon Musk Packs Profit Report With Positives (Bloomberg) AT&T claims a weeks-long voicemail outage will be fixed with a single device update (The Verge) Apple TV app launches on Amazon Fire TV devices (9to5Mac) 40 Major Music Festivals Have Pledged Not to Use Facial Recognition Technology (Vice) BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror (BBC News) Behold the massive social media explosion from Fortnite’s Season 10 finale (The Washington Post) Last week's Fortnite update helped Akamai set a new CDN traffic record (ZDNet) 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, October 24th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is TikTok a national security risk inquiring senators want to know. Earnings running the gamut from bad to surprisingly good from Twitter, Amazon, and Tesla. And to paraphrase an old saw if a voicemail system goes down in the wild, how would anyone even notice? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Tom Cotton have asked,

U.S. intelligence officials to determine whether or not TikTok poses, quote, national security risks, quoting the Washington Post. In a letter to Joseph Maguire, the director of national intelligence, the lawmakers questioned TikTok's data collection practices and whether the app adheres to censorship rules directed by the Chinese government that could limit what U.S. users see. TikTok, which provides users a feed of short videos, has become wildly popular among teenagers worldwide. With over 110 million downloads in the U.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore, wrote Schumer and Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Given these concerns, we ask that the intelligence community conduct an assessment of the national security risks posed by TikTok and other China-based content platforms operating in the U.S. and brief Congress on these findings, end quote. In somewhat related news, Triller is a U.S.-based TikTok rival.

who claims it has amassed 13 million monthly active users and has had 60 million downloads over the course of its lifetime. Triller has raised a $28 million series B following an $11.5 million series A in 2018. Tube Filter says that Triller is an AI-powered platform that enables creators to make music videos using licensed songs, quoting Tube Filter. The platform serves as a discovery hub for emerging artists, and to this extent, operates licensing partnerships with Top Studios, enabling creators to tap the catalog of the likes of Warner, Sony, and Universal. Triller says that it helped Tiga's taste go six times platinum, and it's helped fuel the discovery of burgeoning artists like rapper 10K Cash and 12-year-old rapper Seth Vandalgren. Established artists like Chance

the rapper, Halsey, and BTS have used the service to promote their new works, according to Triller, end quote. Earning season rumbles on. Twitter missed its Q3 estimates with revenue of $823.23 million. Now, that was up 9% year over year. The problem is the street was expecting $874 million. At the time of this writing, Twitter's stock is down 20%. There was good news on the Dow front.

Twitter says it has 145 million monetizable daily active users. up 17% year over year. But the problem was Twitter wasn't monetizing those users, for as best as I can understand it, reasons that Twitter itself introduced, quoting TechCrunch. Twitter said the huge drop in performance was, quote, impacted by revenue product issues, which we believe reduced year-over-year growth by approximately three or more percentage points and greater than expected seasonality, end quote. Specifically, it also noted that it discovered and took steps to fix bugs, quote, that primarily affected our legacy mobile application promotion product, impacting our ability to target ads and share data with measurement and ad partners, end quote.

Also, its ad tech personalization was also not, quote, operating as expected. It also blamed the bad numbers on a slower summer for big events and launches compared to a year ago, end quote. Here's Shira Oviday in Bloomberg. Essentially, Twitter said it took a financial hit because it stopped abusing people's personal privacy choices. The company disclosed in August that it had been mistakenly ignoring people who said they didn't want some information about them shared with Twitter's advertisers or other partners. That meant, for example, that Twitter might have been allowing a mobile game

company to target ads at Twitter users based on whether they were using a recent model of iPhone, even if people explicitly told Twitter they didn't want marketers to have access to this type of information, end quote. She later tweeted, quote, Twitter stopped ignoring users express stated privacy preferences, and it hurt revenue growth by several percentage points. This is discouraging both about the state of the internet ad economy and Twitter's financial transparency, end quote. Microsoft reported Q1 revenue of $33.1 billion, up 14% year over year, as net income rose 21% to $10.7 billion. Intelligent cloud revenue rose 27% year over year to 10.8 billion, but it wasn't all good news because Azure Q1 revenue growth has slowed down to only 59% compared to 64% in Q4 and 73% in Q3.

And of course, even as Microsoft has been successfully building out its cloud business, it still has that huge legacy business there in the background that has actually been benefiting from favorable cyclicality recently, quoting Bloomberg. Microsoft still gets more than 15% of its sales from Windows, and that business remains heavily dependent on the cycle of companies replacing PCs. In the September quarter, global shipments of personal computers increased 1.1%, Gartner said earlier this month, fueled by businesses upgrading to the latest Windows operating system. Microsoft is ending support for Windows 7, which was released in 2009 in January, meaning companies need to upgrade to Windows 10 if they want to continue to receive updates

and service on their systems, end quote. Surface revenue, by the way, declined 4% year over year, which was blamed on the lack of new or refreshed hardware. Gaming revenue declined 7% for, again, cyclical reasons. The big earnings surprise came from Tesla, who at the time of this writing, is seeing its shares up 16%. Why? Because the electric car company reported earnings of $1.86.7.000. a share in the third quarter beating estimates that consensus said would be a 24 cent per share loss. So $1.86 a share gain instead of a 24 cent per share loss, quoting Bloomberg. On top of that, Musk peppered investors with positive updates. Tesla's new factory in China is

already starting production. The Model Y crossover will launch months earlier than expected next year, and the long-languishing energy business is showing signs of life. It all added up to a report that broke the mold for Musk, who's notorious for setting stretch goals that take longer to pull off than he plans. Tesla still faces challenges. Quarterly revenue fell for the first time since 2012, and the company has posted the occasional profit in the past that it's been unable to sustain. But after reporting rained in expenses that padded gross profit margins, the shares climbed in pre-market training to levels last seen almost eight months ago. If you look at the margins and the profitability, that's the major feather in the cap for the bulls, Dan Ives, an analyst

at Wedbush Securities said on Bloomberg Television, if they can maintain this, this could be a potential game changer for them going forward, end quote. AT&T says that a week-long voicemail outage has been affecting some customers across the country. The outage, apparently, is due to a software update, and the company says a patch is coming, but did not offer a timetable for when that would arrive. Here was AT&T statement to the verge, quote, a recent software update to some devices may be affecting our customer's voicemail. We are working with the device manufacturer to issue a patch to resolve this and apologize for any inconvenience this is caused, end quote. But this is the verge's assessment, quote, that statement seems to

suggest that only a single phone maker is affected and that phone maker might share the blame for the outage. But that wouldn't make sense because AT&T customers are reporting a wide array of different phones are having the same issue. Right now, there's a 40-plus page thread on AT&T support forums concerning the recent voicemail issues. It was marked as solved on page 8 by AT&T, by the way. In the thread, AT&T reps have attributed the issues to something much different than a recent software update. They've said it's because of a, quote, vendor server problem, as first stated on October 9th and reiterated as recently as today, October 23rd, end quote. Now, before you formulate that joke that's bubbling up in your head, let me beat you to it.

How did anyone notice voicemail wasn't working? Because who uses voicemail anymore? I mean, I never even answer my phone anymore unless I'm expecting a call. And if some unknown number leaves a voicemail, how often do you think I actually circle back to listen to that spam message? As several folks have suggested on Twitter, maybe don't fix this? Maybe shut down voicemail completely, and let's call it a day. The Apple TV app has officially launched on Amazon Fire TV devices, starting with the Fire TV stick 4K and HD models with support for other devices and models coming soon, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The TV app experience on Amazon's platform mirrors the functionality of the Roku app, which launched last week. Users can watch their purchased iTunes movies and TV

shows or access Apple TV channel subscriptions and watch Apple TV Plus content when this streaming service launches on November 1st. Apple is keen to get the TV app in front of as many eyeballs as possible with opportunities to sell customers on recurring subscriptions, whether that is through reselling channels like HBO, Showtime and Stars, or attracting subscribers. to its collection of original content TV shows and movies through Apple TV Plus. To get the app on the Firestick, search for Apple TV in the app store, or use Alexa and ask Alexa, find the Apple TV app, end quote. Oddly, you can't pay through the Fire TV app itself, as I understand it.

If you order content, the Apple TV app will ask you to log into an Apple ID and then share any content that you own via that account to other devices. After a successful musician and activist-led campaign, 40 music festivals, including South by Southwest, Coachella, and Bonaroo have promised that they will not use facial recognition technology, quoting Vice. In recent years, many music events have become increasingly Orwellian experiences. Biometric surveillance companies and venture capitalists have identified music festivals as a huge potential market for facial recognition technologies, which can be marketed as a way for concert growers to bypass long lines.

But musicians and activists have concerns. Rage against the machines Tom Morello, the glitch mob, and Speedy Ortiz were leading voices in the campaign, demanding concert promoters ban technologies that can be used to police concert goers for drug use, target individuals for specific advertising content, or worse. Quote, I don't want Big Brother at my shows targeting fans for harassment, deportation, or arrest. Morello tweeted in September. In perhaps the biggest victory, Ticketmaster took a step back from a surveillance technology company that it invested in last year with plans to develop a facial scan for concertgoers' faces instead of having them wait in line to enter a venue.

That surveillance company, Blink Identity, helped build out the U.S. military's facial recognition technology during the war in Afghanistan. On its website, Blink Identity brags that it, quote, spent the last decade building and deploying large-scale biometric identification systems in the Middle East for the Department of Defense. end quote. Good to see that 25 years on, Tom Morello still has our back. As the internet continues to devolve into several splinter internets, often behind the censorship regime of one country or another, some folks are seeing opportunity. Among them, BBC News, which has launched a dark web mirror of its international site, accessible via tour, in order to thwart the censorship from states like China.

China, Iran, and Vietnam, quoting BBC News itself. Instead of visiting BBC.co.com forward slash news or BBC.com forward slash news, users of the tour browser can visit the new BBC News V2VJPSUY.O.J.P.SUY.O.N. Web address. Clicking this web address will not work on a regular web browser. The dark web copy of the BBC News website will be the international edition as seen from outside the UK. It will include foreign language services such as BBC Arabic, BBC Persian, and BBC Russian. In a statement, the BBC World Service news content is available on the tour network to audiences who live in countries where BBC news is being blocked or restricted. This is in line with the BBC World Service's mission to provide

trusted news around the world, end quote. So we've done it, everybody. In 2019, in order to fulfill the original premise of the web, which was all of humanity's collective knowledge and information accessible to everyone worldwide, we've had to set up a recreation of the original promise of the open web on the dark web. Progress. Finally today, a quick follow-up on that whole Fortnite Season 10 stunt where everything went down a black hole for a couple days and no one could play the game. It turns out the stunt worked, at least by some pretty impressive yardsticks, quoting the Washington Post. Twitch has confirmed that Fortnite now owns the services record for concurrent views of a single game

as 1.7 million people watch the game go offline just ahead of the current Chapter 2 season. More than 4 million tuned in across various streams on YouTube, according to the company, and at one point hit 4.3 million concurrent viewers, according to a tweet from YouTube's Global Head of Gaming and Virtual Reality, Ryan Wyatt. Twitter also reports that the event is now the most, viewed gaming event on that social media platform with 1.4 million concurrent viewers. Video of the event eventually saw 42.8 million views with 50.7 million minutes watched, end quote. And according to ZNet, if you check out the numbers from CDNs, it's even more impressive,

quote, traffic numbers during the updates rollout peaked at 106 terabits per second on Akamai's network, surpassing the 100 TBPS threshold for the first time in the company's history. While exact numbers were not released, the Fortnite update is believed to have accounted for more than half of the peak traffic. Adam Karen, Executive Vice President and GM Media and Carrier at Akamai, said the company is regularly reaching peaks of 50 TBPS every day, usually comprised of live streaming video, including live sports, music, e-commerce transactions, financial services, banking, soft patches, healthcare information automobile software updates, and others.

It was just 2008 when we marveled that peak traffic on Akamai crossed the one TbPS mark. Now, hardly a decade later, we're talking about a peak two orders of magnitude greater, Karen said, end quote. Well, yeah, a decade ago, we weren't streaming all of our videos and games over networks, so that's one takeaway. But the other takeaway, at least for Fortnite, is, hey, P.O. R stunts still work. That is all for today.

I am seeing a book event for a friend tonight, so I've got to jump on a G-train to get me to Williamsburg quickly. So, nothing to share right now. Talk to you tomorrow.