Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 01/29 - The FaceTime Bug

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

Pretty major FaceTime bug from Apple, the DOJ makes it’s case against Huawei, the first successful ICO of the year and what Bluetooth ‘direction finding’ might do for you. Sponsors: Tiny.website DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Major iPhone FaceTime bug lets you hear the audio of the person you are calling … before they pick up (9to5Mac) U.S. Charges Huawei With Stealing Trade Secrets, Bank Fraud (Bloomberg) BitTorrent Tokens Sold Out in Under 15 Minutes, Netting Over $7 Mln (CoinTelegraph) Bluetooth gains ‘direction finding’ for location accuracy to the centimeter (VentureBeat) After backlash, BuzzFeed says it will pay out earned paid time off to laid off employees (CNN Business) Aiming to change the way people take medicine, Lyndra Therapeutics raises $55 million (TechCrunch) 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 Ride Home for Tuesday, January 29th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, pretty major FaceTime bug from Apple.

The DOJ makes its case against Huawei, the first successful ICO of the year, and what Bluetooth direction finding might do for you. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. This might be fixed by the time you hear this, hopefully it is, but a significant bug has been discovered in Apple's, FaceTime system, which lets a caller hear audio or even video from a recipient's phone before a FaceTime call has even been accepted or rejected. According to 9 to 5 Mac, here is how the bug works. Start a FaceTime video call with an iPhone contact. Whilst the call is dialing, swipe up from the bottom

of the screen and tap Add Person. Add your own phone number in the ad person screen. You will then start a group facetime call, including yourself and the audio of the person you originally called, even if they haven't accepted the call yet. It will look in the UI like the other person has joined the group chat, but on their actual device, it will still be ringing on the lock screen, end quote. Now, obviously, don't do that. As 9 to 5 Mac notes, quote, the damage potential here is real. You can listen in to soundbites of any iPhone user's ongoing conversation without them even knowing that you could hear them. Until Apple fixes the bug, it's not clear how to defend yourself against this attack either,

aside from disabling FaceTime altogether, end quote. In response to the bug, Apple has disabled the group FaceTime feature on the server side, and some reports suggest that this has fixed the security flaw for most people. Apple also said the issue will be fixed comprehensively in a software update later in the week. In the meantime, if you want to be super safe until the past, comes, go to settings, scroll down to FaceTime, and switch it off. On Macs, you can disable FaceTime by opening up the app, then going to preferences, then unchecking, enable this account.

Ace Apple reporter Mark German tweeted, quote, In all my years following Apple, I've never seen a bug this bad and this ironic, end quote. Why ironic? Well, the bug was discovered on National Privacy Day. Late yesterday, the Department of Justice unsealed the January 16th indictment against Huawei, Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou, and affiliated firms. The charges include wire fraud, conspiracy in connection with doing business in Iran, contrary to U.S. sanctions, intellectual property theft, and conspiring to obstruct justice.

Separately, Canada's Justice Department said it has formally received a request to extradite Meng to the U.S. Meng was arrested on December 1st in Canada. Now, the sanctions violations were already alleged and widely known, but more yesterday came out about the specific allegations of IP theft and obstruction of justice. Among the particularly striking details, quoting from Bloomberg, prosecutors also alleged that Huawei began a concerted effort in 2012 to steal information from a phone testing robot developed by T-Mobile USA. and even offered bonuses to employees who could get their hands on the technologies of rivals. In the statement filed in Seattle, the government alleged Huawei violated confidentiality agreements with T-Mobile in an effort to build their own robot to test phones.

A Huawei engineer secretly took photos of T-Mobile's robot called T-Mobile, took measurements of parts of the robot and in one instance stole a piece of the robot, prosecutors said. Huawei then blamed rogue actors within the company when T-Mobile threatened to sue, the U.S. said. The Chinese company also obstructed justice by preparing a report claiming to be an investigation of rogue employees, even though, quote, Huawei clearly knew that the thefts were part of an organized effort by the company, end quote. During the time period of the alleged crime, Huawei announced a bonus for stealing confidential information from competitors, end quote. Now, yesterday was the deadline for the U.S. government to make its charges official so that it could request extradition for trial. Canada's Justice Minister has up to 30 days to assess the U.S. request. But, as so often happens with this particular case,

continued trade talks between the U.S. and China were scheduled for this week. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said the Huawei law enforcement actions, quote, are wholly separate, end quote, from the trade talks. But as Bloomberg's own Shira Ovidi tweeted, quote, I don't think the Chinese government sees it that way. It feels a little like olden times over in CryptoLand. BitTorrent completed its closely watched token sale today, netting $7.1 million in under 15 minutes with the sale of 50 billion tokens. The token, BTT, was launched on the Binance launchpad platform.

You remember BitTorrent right, the protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing. Quoting Coin Telegraph. BTT is based on a TRC10 token and will be used on the platform to transact in computing resources shared between BitTorrent clients and any other participating service requesters and service providers. BitTorrent speed, the system which will integrate the Tron-based BTT token into the popular U-Torrent Windows client will purportedly launch by summer, end quote. This marks the first successful initial coin offering of 2019. If you're wondering how a file-sharing protocol can launch a coin, the company behind the sale is BitTorrent Inc, which is responsible for the development and maintenance of the BitTorrent protocol,

and also the development of BitTorrent software clients like U-Torrent, or Micro-Torrent or Moo Torrent, if you're nasty. No one really has settled on an official name. How will the tokens be used? Apparently, to pay for speedier downloads, though the exact mechanism for doing so remains to be. be seen. Bluetooth, along with Wi-Fi, is the key standard, ushering in the connected Internet of Things future, at least until that promised revolution of 5G shows up. Well, in the upcoming

Bluetooth 5.1 standard, there's an interesting new feature, something called direction finding, which will allow location accuracy down to the centimeter. What will that do for us? Here's how Venturebeat describes it, quote. With Bluetooth 5.1, which is available for developers today, companies will be able to integrate new direction-finding features into their Bluetooth-enabled products. As things stand, Bluetooth can be used for proximity-based services, as is the case with object trackers, so long as you're within range, you can find your item by activating a little alarm sound and then following your ears. While Bluetooth is often used as part of other location-based services, including BLE beacons in Inde,

door positioning systems, IPS's, it wasn't really built to provide exact locations, sort of like GPS does. The technology has been more about establishing that two Bluetooth devices are in a close proximity and figuring out roughly how far apart they are from each other. But now with direction finding thrown into the mix, a smartphone, for example, could pinpoint exactly where another Bluetooth 5.1 enabled object is down to the centimeter rather than within a few meters. This is a potential game changer for how location services are delivered by hardware and software developers. Beyond consumer object trackers, it could be used in numerous industrial situations, for example, to help companies locate specific items on shelves, end quote.

It was just with Bluetooth 5.0 back in 2016 that we got the upgrade to Bluetooth low energy, which allowed for longer battery life, and which made your wireless head. headphones feasible. So no telling what this might give us going forward, perhaps improve navigation in places like airports, museums, or even out in the real world. Because we covered this last week, and of course over the weekend with the bonus episode with Rafat Ali, some follow-ups on the digital media layoffs, especially at BuzzFeed. Management at BuzzFeed UK has reportedly told staff that 17 of 37 editorial roles. there will be cut, largely in the news and celeb sections. BuzzFeed Australia, which employees around 40 people, says 11 positions are facing redundancy there. And over the weekend, there was a kerfuffle because it seemed that BuzzFeed did not intend to pay laid-off employees in the U.S.

for paid time off that those employees had earned but not used. Employees would have accrued that paid time off for doing things like, you know, working late and coming in on weekends to help their young media startup get off the ground. Quoting CNN, over the weekend, a group of employees wrote a letter about the issue, posted to medium, and addressed to BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed News, editor-in-chief Ben Smith, and Lenkey Taylor, the company's chief people officer. And on Monday, Isaac Fitzgerald and Saeed Jones, the two hosts of BuzzFeed's AM-To-D-M morning show, excoriated their company for its handling of the issue.

I think it's embarrassing and absurd to work for a company that puts such an emphasis on this idea that all of us are in it together. All of us are a family and then refusing to pay out PTO, paid time off, except where it's law, Fitzgerald said. In tweets on Monday, Jonah Peretti said it was, quote, very common for companies based in New York City not to compensate employees who are let go for their accrued paid time off, end quote. but late last night, Pretty apparently had a change of heart, emailing staff that furloughed employees will be paid their accrued time off. And one interesting casualty in this round of layoffs, not even Matthew Perpetua,

BuzzFeed's director of quizzes, those famous BuzzFeed quizzes, is safe from the axe. On his website Flux blog, Perpetua wrote this, quote, you might be wondering, wait, why would they lay you off? You were doing the quizzes, and that brings in a lot of money. Well, that is true. But another thing that is true is that a lot of the site's overall traffic comes from quizzes,

and a very large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users. In the recent past, the second highest traffic driver worldwide has been a community user in Michigan, who is a teenager in college who, for some reason, makes dozens of quizzes every week. It's kind of amazing how much revenue-generating traffic the site gets from unpaid community volunteers. So in a ruthless capitalist way, it makes sense for the company to pivot to having community users create almost all of the quizzes going forward. I understand math. I get it, end quote. Apparently, there's a contributor who wrote nearly 200 quizzes like that. last year, with the most popular one drawing 1.2 million views.

And funny enough, yesterday's most popular quiz on BuzzFeed had the title, Do you still have a job at BuzzFeed? Its final question asked you to pick a color. Red, blue, green, and the fourth option, unionize your media company. Just below the headline of the quiz read, this post has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed community is a place where anyone can create a post. Learn more or post your buzz, end quote.

Finally today, speaking of the weekend bonus episodes, we recently spoke with Christina Farr about healthcare tech. That one has been one of my favorites so far because I learned a ton of stuff along with all y'all. So now health tech has been piquing my interest a lot more, and this recent raise caught my eye when it ran. across my transom yesterday. Lindra Therapeutics

is a startup that made headlines in 2016 for a breakthrough in drug delivery, specifically a breakthrough pill. See, there are a ton of people that have to take pills every single day, often several pills a day, spaced out at specific times

of the day just to be effective. Problem is, people are people, people sometimes forget to take a pill, and that can cause serious problems ranging from less effective treatments to life-threatening dosage issues. Well, Lindra Therapeutics thinks it has a solution for this. Pills that, when swallowed, release medicine over an extended period of time,

essentially an ultra-long delivery mechanism, so patients don't have to worry as much about timing their pills religiously because they get to take less pills. Here's TechCrunch describing how it works. The technology depends in part on the novel structure of the pill itself. Encapsulated within a digestible pill is a star-shaped structure that has six arms folded in on itself. As stomach acid dissolves the casing for the pill, the arms unfold and release their payload over time. As the star unfolds, it expands in size so it can remain in the stomach rather than being pushed down the digestive tract.

Eventually, the arms break off and the remaining pieces of the pill are naturally expelled like undigested food. End quote. Linder Pharmaceuticals has just raised $55 million in a new round to continue developing its technology. Lindra is beginning phase two trials of these new pills. Phase two is required before it can be okayed by regulators. Linda is working on a pill to treat schizophrenia first, but then is evaluating other drug candidates for this technology after that. Among the original investors in Lindra, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Why the interest from them? Well, you know how much work they do combating disease in developing countries.

Now consider this quote from Amy Schulman, Lindra's co-founder and CEO, quote, that approximately 50% of patients in the developed world do not take their medicines as prescribed. A statistic is even more challenging in the developing world has a demonstrable effect on health care outcomes and a cost-estimate. to the U.S. health care system alone of over $100 billion annually. Lindra's long-acting technology should make a dent in this protracted problem and help change the lives of millions of patients who feel tethered to the daily pill, end quote. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough.

Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Follow the TechMeme editors at TechMeme, where they tweet all the headlines, all hours of the day and night. out the podcast subreddit at our slash ride home talk to you tomorrow