Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/09 – Amazon To Release An Alexa ‘Command Center?’

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Amazon is ginning up a new Echo device that’s like a dashboard for your household. Big changes to Android leaked to the internet. Reddit raises a big round. Mark Cuban is gunning for Clubhouse. And I’ve been warning y’all of industrial hacking. We almost had a big disaster down in Tampa Bay. Sponsors: NewYorker.com/techmeme, promocode: techmeme AirMedCareNetwork.com/tech offer code TECH Links: Amazon Plans Wall-Mounted Echo as Smart Home Command Center (Bloomberg) This may be our first look at Android 12, Google’s next Android OS (XDA) Reddit’s Valuation Doubles to $6 Billion After Funding Round (WSJ) Mark Cuban is co-founding a podcast app where hosts can talk to fans live and monetize their conversations (The Verge) Qualcomm's new X65 5G modem downloads data at lightning-fast 10Gbps speeds (CNet) The Rust programming language just took a huge step forwards (ZDNet) Hacker Tried to Poison Florida City's Water Supply, Police Say (Motherboard) tech.supercast.tech 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 TechMeme right home for Tuesday, February 9th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Amazon is ginning up a new echo device that's like a dashboard for your household. Big changes to Android leaked to the internet. Reddit raises a big round. Mark Cuban is gunning for Clubhouse. And I've been warning y'all of

industrial hacking. We almost had a big disaster down in Tampa Bay. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It's Mark German Scoop Tuesday. though it's not an Apple scoop today. Sources are telling German that Amazon is developing a wall-mounted echo device with a large touchscreen that can serve as a smart home control panel, a video chat device, and a media player all in one. Quoting Bloomberg. The company's Lab 126 Hardware Division is designing the device to be a digital command center

showing users' upcoming calendar events, controlling accessories like lights and locks, and playing music and video. It would include Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and microphones, and a camera for video conferencing said the people who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. The product would compete with professionally installed smart home control screens from the likes of Control 4Corp as well as Apple's iPads framed into walls and even Amazon's own Echo Show used with a third-party wall mount.

Amazon is considering multiple variations with screens of either 10 or 13 inches in size, A 10-inch display would be on par with the current Echo Show, while a 13-inch model would be Amazon's largest device with a display. The company plans to launch the devices either at the end of this year or the end of 2022, the people said. Prices ranging from $200 to $250 have been discussed internally, though the plans are still early and could change or be scrapped altogether. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment, end quote. in the early 2000s, right, when text messaging was taking off, I thought somebody should produce a device that would sort of collect all of a family's text messages into one central location so that everyone could see them and coordinate activity accordingly.

I imagined it may be being embedded in a refrigerator or something like that. So is this sort of like that? A family hub sort of thing? As Adrian Weckler tweeted, quote, those home of the future stock images are suddenly closer to reality, end quote. More rumor-mongering today. Leaked images have shown up online that purportedly show mockups of Android 12, which include major UI changes, a privacy indicator, a conversation widget, new themes, a whole bunch of stuff, quoting XDA developers.

One of the alleged Android 12 screenshots showcases a new notifications panel UI, the transparency is gone and replaced with an opaque light beige background, though the color likely depends on the current theme and or whether or not dark mode is enabled. The separation between the Conversations section with the rest of the notifications is still there, and the rounded corners of each notification are now more pronounced. The number of quick settings tiles that are shown when the notification panel is partially expanded has been reduced from six to four, causing each icon to become larger. The positions of the date and clock have been swapped while there are also new privacy indicators in the top right-hand corner.

Speaking of which, it seems that Google may add new privacy features in Android 12. In the new Android version, you may receive a warning in the form of status bar indicators whenever an app is using the camera or microphone. Tapping on these status bar icons may show a pop-up at the top of the screen that tells you exactly which apps are using the camera or microphone. Google has been testing these privacy chips for over two years now. so it would be nice to see them finally make an appearance in Android 12. Related to this change is an alleged revamp to the privacy settings in Android 12. The new privacy settings may contain toggles to disable the camera and mute the microphone entirely

in addition to toggling location access. You can already disable all sensors on your device by using the sensors off quick setting tile, but this tile can only be shown once you enable developer options. Android 12 may make those sensor toggles more user accessible by play them in the privacy settings. Lastly, we have what appears to be a new addition to Android's widget section. When Apple recently added widgets to iOS, we argued that they're better than Android's implementation in some ways. While we don't know if Google is planning a major overhaul of widgets, it does look like they at least plan to make a few changes. In a few screenshots, we can see

an alleged new Conversations widget in Android 12 that may highlight recent messages, miss calls, or activity statuses. The widget that's shown is small. and only seems to be big enough to accommodate showing one message slash call slash status at a time in its smallest size, end quote. Quick, if I asked you to name the hottest startup of 2021 so far, what would you name? Well, if you can overlook the fact that it's like 15 years old, I'd argue you could make a strong argument for Reddit, right? So maybe it's no surprise that Reddit has announced a more than $250 million.

Series E, valuing the front page of the internet at $6 billion, doubling its value since its last funding round in February of 2019. Quoting the Wall Street Journal, it's a good market to fundraise, Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman said in an interview, valuations are very high right now, it never hurts to raise money when there's an opportunity to do so, and Reddit had a strong year, end quote. For example, advertising revenue for the company shot up 90% in the the December ended quarter from a year earlier, he said. Mr. Huffman said Reddit plans to use the new funding to invest in areas such as video, advertising, and consumer products, as well as to expand into international markets. Late last year, Reddit bought Video Sharing app Dobsmash to expand its presence

in user-created video, one of the hottest corners of the internet for an undisclosed sum. Our strategy isn't materially changing, Mr. Huffman said. Reddit is also planning to double its employee headcount this year to around 1,400, Mr. Huffman said, noting that one reason the company raised new funding was to help it attract talent, end quote. So I guess they could have bought a longer Super Bowl ad than that five seconds that they bought over the weekend, but also, why not a SPAC? As I've recently said, anyone remotely close to being a hit startup can probably do a spec right now. Surely Reddit could. The fact that it appears not to be interested in doing one is interesting. Qualcomm has unveiled its next-gen-x65 5G modem, which will likely start

showing up in new phones next year. The new modem can apparently download data at 10 gigabits per second and has a better battery life, quoting CNET. Coverage will improve, latency will decoues. and applications will be even more responsive than they are with Qualcomm's earlier X-60 modem technology, and capacity will be massive, letting more people on a network make reliable and crisp video calls with their doctors and face-off against rivals and streaming games. Coverage will improve, latency will decrease, and applications will be even more responsive than they are with Qualcomm's earlier X-60 modem technology, and capacity will be, quote, massive, letting more people on a network make reliable and crisp video calls with their doctors or face off against rivals in streaming games. Qualcomm on Tuesday

also unveiled its X62 5G modem RF system that's capable of downloading data at up to 4.4 gigabits per second and aimed at less expensive smartphones with the previous generation X60 modem just now arriving in smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy S21. You can download data over 5G networks at up to 7.5 GbPS and upload information as fast as 3.3.5.5. You can download information as 3 GPS, only slightly faster than the previous generation of modem. But the X60 also has the ability to aggregate the slower but more reliable sub-6 networks with the faster but finicky millimeter wave spectrum, boosting overall performance and helping users see faster average speeds. The X-85 has the same benefit. While it's unlikely that you'll regularly, or even maybe ever,

see 10-GPS download speeds, you'll consistently see speeds that are magnitudes faster than your current 4G smartphone. That's partly because the X-65 system has eight antennas instead of the four traditionally found in phones, something that will improve the connection, end quote. The programming language Rust is now backed by the Rust Foundation, a new independent organization that will make it easier to keep the Rust ecosystem healthy and also to accept financing beyond its current Sugar Daddy Mozilla, quoting ZDNet. Rust, hatched at Mozilla, as a safer alternative to C and C++, has quickly become one of the most favored languages for system development, even though it's not widely used for application development. Google is backing Rust for a key component of the Apache HTTP Web Server project.

Amazon Web Services is investing in the rest community and is a key sponsor, while Microsoft is eyeing it to replace some components of Windows written in C or C++, and to develop components for the Azure Cloud. Establishing the Rust Foundation is an important milestone for the language as Nico Metzakis, an ex-Mozilla engineer, core Rust contributor, and now AWS engineer pointed out recently, there is a misperception that Rust is owned by Mozilla. The Foundation creates a vehicle to accept financing from organizations beyond Mozilla, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, end quote.

Another thing that's interesting to me is how sometimes a new startup idea breaks through and is sort of sui generis. No one tries or at least successfully attempts to copy it. It just sort of lives on its own in its own little corner of the marketplace. But then other times, everyone kind of has the same idea all at once. Like with ride hailing, sometimes it's an idea that lends itself to being leveraged in different ways, the canonical example being Uber but for X, that whole phenomenon. But sometimes everyone just wants to clone the latest, greatest, big idea. People forget this now, but after Friendster and then MySpace hit big, there was this entire generation of dozens of social networks, of which Facebook and LinkedIn were only two among dozens, and no one at the time knew which ones would take off and which ones wouldn't. There was seriously a time when it looked like maybe Bebo would be as big as Facebook. I'm not kidding. Anywho, I've never been. never been able to figure out which ideas lend themselves to a Cambrian explosion of clones,

but it certainly looks like Clubhouse is likely to be one of them. There are several Clubhouse clones bubbling to the surface, but today, Sharks, let me try to sell you on Fireside, a podcast app where hosts can talk to fans live and monetize their conversations, rumored to be launched by the Sharkmaster himself, Mark Cuban, quoting the verge. Alongside, co-founder Falon Fatemi, Cuban is planning to launch Fireside, a next-gen podcast platform that facilitates live conversation according to an email sent to possible creator partners seen by the verge. Fatemi, who co-founded and sold the AI customer relations service node, promises a platform where creators will be able to broadcast, record, and monetize conversations while using

Fireside's built-in analytics tools to figure out what content performs best. The app, according to a now-expired engineer job posting has raised a multi-million dollar seed round to get started. The source close to the company says creators will be offered various deals and ways to monetize and the app won't let just anyone speak publicly. It'll be a highly curated experience. The startup is still seemingly in stealth mode. It's unclear when it was founded, but job postings went live as early as September. Fatemi left Node in August saying at the time that she would be moving on to a new venture. She hasn't listed Fireside on her LinkedIn yet. Cuban and Fetemi previously collaborated on Node with Cuban investing in the product. His co-founder status on Fireside brings him back to the audio space.

Cuban and Todd Wagner famously sold internet radio company Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999 to Yahoo. Fireside's job posting claims social media has failed us by creating, quote, antagonistic echo chambers with mediums for communication that only further an outrage culture and business models that incentivize spreading disinformation, end quote. Fireside, the posting says, is looking to foster, quote, civil intelligent discourse, shared connected experiences, and genuine relationship building virtually through its broadcasting platform, which will promote driving social impact through meaningful conversations at scale, end quote. As part of that goal, Fetemi is reaching out to establish

podcast creators about founding firesider spots, seemingly to build an initial roster of fireside users, end quote. Hey, Fatemi and Cuban, I'm a podcast creator partner, potentially. We love to experiment with various new audio tools on the show, collaboratively with the audience, so you know, get in touch. Finally today, this is what I've been worried about for a long time now. several times over the life of this podcast, I've taken pains to highlight stories learning about the dangers of industrial hacking, by which I mean hackers, you know, doing something like making a chemical factory down the road from your city go boom, or something like that. I don't mean to be alarmist, but if you're a believer in keeping an

eye out for black swan phenomena, I think that this sort of hacking is probably one of the most proximate and worrying black swans out there right now. And it looks like we just dodged one. Police say a computer in a water treatment plant in Florida set up for remote access was breached by an intruder who then tried raising the sodium hydroxide levels in the water. This was in Pinellas County, sort of the Oakland to Tampa's San Francisco, basically the community across Tampa Bay from Tampa, quoting Vice. During a press conference, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gultieri said that a legitimate operator saw the change and quickly reversed it, but signaled that the hacking attempt was a serious threat to the city's water supply. Sodium hydroxide is also

known as lie and can be deadly if ingested in large amounts. Quote, the hacker changed the sodium hydroxide from about 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, Gulte. Galtieri said, adding that these were dangerous levels. When asked if this should be considered an attempt at bioterrorism, Galtieri said, quote, what it is, is someone hacked into the system, not just once, but twice, open the program and change the levels from 100 to 11,100 parts per million with a caustic substance. So you label it however you want. Those are the facts, end quote. In smaller quantities, sodium hydroxide can cause severe skin burns and eye damage. amounts of sodium hydroxide are put into some city's drinking water supplies to prevent

corrosion to pipes and bring up the pH level. It's a strong base, apparently. Quote, the person who remotely accessed the system for about three to five minutes, opening various functions on the screen, Galtieri said during the press conference, one of the functions opened by the person hacking into the system was one that controls the amount of sodium hydroxide in the water, end quote. Galtieri said that on Friday at 8 a.m., a plant operator at the Old Marr water treatment facility noticed someone remotely accessing the system that he was monitoring. The system was deliberately set up with a piece of remote access software so that, quote,

authorized users could troubleshoot system problems from other locations, Galtieri added. Quote, the intruder exited the system and the plant operator immediately reduced the level back to the appropriate amount of 100, Galtieri added. Galtieri said that steps were taken to, quote, stop for the remote access to the system, end quote, and that there are other safeguards to protect the water integrity in place. The county sheriff's office has started a criminal investigation along with the FBI and the Secret Service, Galtieri said, and quote. So I don't know. Seems like something that should be bigger news, maybe. an entire city was almost potentially poisoned, and it didn't end up happening only because we got lucky, and someone just happened to see it. Also, why in God's name does a system like

this need to be connected to the internet in any way, shape, or form in the first place? Air gaping people, for F's sake. Hey, look at that. Tech news from Southwest Florida, where I grew up. Trust me, that's not a common thing, not to rag on where I'm from, but there's not a ton of industry in Southwest Florida, to say nothing of tech industry. But then again, when I was growing up, the whole idea of the Buccaneers winning a Super Bowl was downright absurd. We had Vinnie Testerverdi, of course, but the Bucks never even made the playoffs for most of the 80s and until I think the late, late 90s. They were routinely like the worst team in the NFL. And the dolphins were the great hope of Florida sports, but even they haven't made a Super Bowl since 1984, the first

Super Bowl that I can remember when the dolphins got spanked by Joe Montana's 49ers. We didn't even have major league baseball teams in Florida back then. We didn't get our first NBA teams until 1988 and 89, so hard to believe. But growing up as a Floridian in the 1980s was to live in a sports desert. The only highlight of which was seeing Dan Marino showed up in that first Ace Ventura movie. This has been Florida Sports Talk. I've been your host, Gator Sal. Talk to you tomorrow.