Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/26 - The EU's Copyright Directive Cometh

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

The EU Parliament approves the “link tax” and the “upload filter.” Uber acquires Careem, McDonald’s makes a tech acquisition, and a wrap-up of the hot-takes from the Apple event. Sponsors: Datadog's Integration with Alibaba Cloud Tiny.website Links: Europe’s controversial overhaul of online copyright receives final approval (The Verge) HUAWEI’S P30 PRO IS A PHOTOGRAPHIC POWERHOUSE WITH A TINY NOTCH (The Verge) Uber announces $3.1 billion deal to buy Middle East rival Careem (CNBC) McDonald's is acquiring Dynamic Yield to create a more customized drive-thru (TechCrunch) Exclusive: First look at Apple’s new AirPods-like ‘Powerbeats Pro’ truly wireless sport headphones (9to5Mac) Very Brief Thoughts and Observations on Today’s ‘Show Time’ Apple Event (Daring Fireball) Subscribe to the Ad-Free Premium Feed Here! 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, March 26, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the EU Parliament approves the link tax and the upload filter. Uber acquires Kareem. McDonald's makes a tech acquisition and a wrap-up of the hot takes from the Apple event. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The European Parliament has officially approved the copyright directive, meaning the much-criticized link tax, otherwise known as Article 11, and the so-called upload filter. Article 13 will become law in EU nations.

The vote among members of parliament was 348 in favor and 274 against. There was a last-minute effort to remove Article 13, the upload filter, but that was rejected by just five votes. So now the directive goes to member states who will have two years to enact it into law. What does this mean for the Internet overall? Well, we don't exactly know, but this will certainly have an impact for European users. of major tech platforms. Whether the changes platforms will be forced to make to comply with the law will change the

platforms overall, because Europe is a pretty big market after all, remains to be seen. For example, quoting the verge, Article 11 lets publishers charge platforms like Google News when they display snippets of news stories, while Article 13 renamed Article 17 in the most recent draft of the legislation, give sites like YouTube new duties to stop users from uploading copyrighted content. In both cases, critics say these well-intentioned laws will create trouble. Article 13, for example, could lead to the introduction of upload filters that will scan all user content before it's uploaded to sites to remove copyrighted material. The law does not explicitly call for such filters, but critics say it will be an inevitability as sites seek to avoid penalties.

Experts say any filters introduced will likely be error-prone and ineffective. They also note that given the cost of deploying such technology, the law may have the opposite effect to its intent. solidifying the dominance of U.S. tech giants over online spaces. The effects of the link tax are equally tricky to predict. The law is mainly focused on services like Google Search and Google News, which show snippets of news articles. Google has said that if newspapers choose to levy licenses for this material, it will be forced to strip back the content it shows in search and shutter Google News altogether, unquote. When this originally hit our collective radar last year, people feared that, that if this law was passed, it would lead to the death of the meme,

as any filters would likely have to be so broad as to attempt to preemptively block anything that might even conceivably be copyrightable. So get your Game of Thrones animated Gifts in now. Not only will there soon be a finite supply of giffable Game of Thrones material. In the near future, you might not be able to even legally post them at all. Huawei has unveiled the latest version of its P-Series lineup of smartphones, the P-30 and P-30 Pro. The P-30 starts at 799 euro, and the P-30 Pro ranges from 999 euro at the entry to 1,249-0 at the most expensive end. For our purposes, I'm going to focus on the expensive end, the P-30 Pro, to get a sense of why this might be a bigger announcement than you might think.

take in the breathlessness of Vlad Savov's lead paragraph in The Verge, quote, What if you could have at all? Super Fast Performance, Marathon Battery Life, a bezel-starved screen, and a camera that competes with the Google Pixel for quality and pocket cameras for Zoom. Huawei would have you believe that its new P30 Pro Android flagship is precisely that sort of no-compromised device. Announced at another Gala event in Paris today, the P-30 Pro addresses the few down downsides of Huawei's already excellent mate 20 Pro from last year, and it adds a sophisticated new camera system that promises up to 10 times lossless zoom. You won't be able to buy it in a U.S.

carrier store, but this will still be one of the best-selling high-end devices across the globe this year and probably one of the best, end quote. The P30 Pro has an OLED display, a Kieran 980 processor, 8 gigabytes of RAM, but it's in the battery life and camera system that Huawei is staking a claim. The 4,200 MAHBB battery can be charged up to 70% capacity in just 30 minutes of wired charging. It also sports wireless charging too and reverse wireless charging so you can do things like place earbuds on the phone to top those devices up wirelessly using your phone as a mother battery. The screen has the tiniest of notches, but otherwise this is basically as bezelless a display as you can get. And it is the cameras that have gotten most of the early

headlines. There's a 32 megapixel front facing camera for selfies. On the back, there's a three-in-one camera sensor array, a 40-migixel lens with a 27-millimeter focal length, a 20-megapixel ultra-wide angle lens with a 16-millimeter focal length, and an 8-mepixel telephoto lens, sporting five times optical and 10 times lossless hybrid zoom with a 125 millimeter focal length. And that 40 megapixel lens has what Huawei is calling super spectrum technology, quoting Anantec. This new sensor readjusts how it records light coming into it. Most camera sensors are RGGB, meaning that each pixel has one red sensor, two green sensors, and a blue sensor, which it then compiles into the correct color for that pixel. This new sensor replaces those two green subpixels with two yellow ones,

to make the sensor sensitive to RYYB instead. According to Huawei, based on the intensity of light typically absorbed into a camera module and through the lenses, this allows for more light into the sensor and thus more detail. Using a yellow subpixel also allows for additional red and green absorption, enhancing red colors, which can be deficient, according to Huawei, in modern smartphone photography, end quote. Here's a company that I bet none of us ever imagined I'd mention on this show. McDonald's has announced that it is acquiring a tech startup called Dynamic Yield for what is rumored to be $300 million. If that number is true, that would make this the fast food chain's largest acquisition in 20 years.

So what is the tech angle here? Quoting TechCrunch, Dynamic Yield works with brands across e-commerce, travel, finance, and media to create what's been described as an Amazon-style personalized online experience. McDonald's said it will use this tech. technology to create a drive-thru menu that can be tailored to things like the weather, current restaurant traffic, and trending menu items. Once you've started ordering the display can also recommend additional items based on what you've already chosen. In fact, the company said it tested this in several U.S. locations in 2018. The plan is to start rolling this out across the United States in 2019 and then to move into international markets. McDonald's also plans to

integrate this technology into other digital products like self-serve kiosks and the McDonald's mobile app, end quote. So if we're sticking with my recent construct of various segments coming from various files, then this one comes from the every company is a tech company now file. As Alexis O'Hanion basically tweeted, quote, been saying this since we started initialized. Every industry will be a software-powered industry. Either make it, acquire it, or pay for it, end quote. Or as Kevin Ruse snarked, would you like, recurrent neural network built by 40 PhDs, calculates 10 trillion order permutations to find the optimal personalized suggestion. Fries with that, end quote.

Uber has officially acquired its main rival in the Middle Eastern ride-sharing market, Kareem, for $3.1 billion, a deal comprised of $1.7 billion in convertible notes and $1.4 billion in cash. The Dubai-based Kareem claims more than 30 million registered users across North Africa, East and South Asia. Quoting CNBC, the companies characterize the deal as the biggest ever technology industry transaction in the Greater Middle East. Kareem co-founder and CEO Wadassir Sheika will stay on to lead the Kareem business, the company said. Kareem and Uber will continue to operate as independent brands, end quote. Let's end today with some of the fallout from yesterday's Apple event. First off, I want to note the notable absence again of the air power

charging pad. It didn't get demoed or announced yesterday. Though, as I said, that's maybe not surprising. Apple wanted to focus on subscription services, not hardware this time. More on that in a second. But Santa Tim didn't give us the air power

pad during our half week of surprises either. The wireless charging airpod case certainly pointed to the air power coming soon, and tipsters have been sending Mac Rumors pictures of the box for the new wireless charging case, for AirPods that literally shows a diagram for the air power on the back of the box.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple approved production of airpower earlier this year. So what's up with that? Is airpower real or not? 9 to 5 Mac is also reporting that images hidden in iOS 12.2 offer a first look at Apple's new Powerbeats Pro wireless sport earbuds with an AirPods-like case. This case looks similar to the AirPods. case and will theoretically charge your Powerbeats ProBuds when not in use. Powerbeats 3 today offer battery life of up to 12 hours, but it's unclear if the truly wireless version would be able to match that. The charging case, however, would make it easier for users to charge while on the go,

end quote. 9 to 5 Mac notes that Powerbeats remain a popular alternative to AirPods due to their workout-friendly design. And now to the roundup of the reactions to yesterday's event. Everyone's seems to be in equal parts bemused and confused by what happened yesterday. Multiple people came away with more questions than answers they wrote. Lots of people called it a weirdly boring Apple event. Why trot out Hollywood star after Hollywood star just to have them give stilted descriptions of their shows without actually showing trailers of the shows? If that sort of pizzazz and stuff wasn't ready, then why have the event now? And several asked, who was even the... the target audience for this particular event. Ben Thompson said it was Wall Street. He noted that

Tim Cook closed the event with these words, quote, from everything we've shared with you, you can see how important these services are for us, and for all the ways they extend the experiences of our customers even further. They entertain, inspire, inform, and enrich our lives, because at Apple, the customer is and always will be at the center of everything that we do, end quote. Well, quoting Ben, I thought Cook's most telling phrase was how important these services are for us. If Cook wanted to signify how important Apple was taking its efforts in developing these services, to us would have been a more natural turn of phrase. And while I grant that is probably what Cook meant,

the preposition change in my estimation gets at the heart of the matter. The iPhone isn't going anywhere. Apple is very much not doomed, but it is no longer growing, leaving Apple no choice but to look elsewhere, end quote. Later on in the conclusion to his newsletter this morning, quote, that leaves Cook's final line. At Apple, the customer is and always will be at the center of everything we do. Frankly, with the possible exception of Apple Arcade,

it's hard to see this sentiment in yesterday's announcements. I'm not saying any of these services are customer hostile, but most of them are imitations of what other companies are already doing, the revenues of which Apple wants a cut of, end quote. Owen Williams echoed Ben by saying in his newsletter, charged, quote, if there's anything to take away from Apple's March event yesterday, it's that the company wants investors to know that there's nothing to worry about.

It's got plenty of new monetization strategies coming down the pipe, and consumers will clamor to pay for them, end quote. Owen was most excited, as were many, by the gaming service, quote, essentially how this works is you'll pay a monthly fee, which was not announced, and get unlimited access to 100 or so games across iOS. SNTV OS. Strangely enough, this service won't launch until the fall, which makes me wonder, is Apple delaying this in order to ship it alongside cross-platform support for Mac OS?

End quote, yes, indeed. We know Marzipan is coming, right, Owen? That grand unification of the OS's. And that would probably be announced at WWDC. Owen also said, quote, this subscription will be a big hit with parents, I imagine, who are already faced with kids hounding them to buy a, individual games endlessly.

Paying a flat fee to access a bunch of stuff is genius and will rake in revenue for sure, but it's a lot more work for Apple to curate that library, end quote. And I would add, Apple wants developers to move two subscriptions and away from pay to play on the app store anyway, right? On the other hand, Owen said the TV announcements were genuinely confounding to him. Quote, going into the TV part of the segment I was expecting to get my wallet out, but ended up wondering what this thing even really is, which was genuinely surprising.

Apple is the master of announcing new hardware, then magically finishing with it's already available in stores, and couldn't ship this with any type of certainty attached. How it stumbled when trying to describe a service with such an impressive list of celebrities then failed to even deliver on much in the way of further information was surprising, end quote. And in an oddly grumpy summation of yesterday's event in Daring,

Fireball, John Gruber, pretty much echoed a lot of the same. Quote, this whole thing was weird. I get what channels is, the infamous skinny bundle that Eddie Q has been trying to put together for years. Paying only for the channels you want is the right way to do this, but obviously a nightmare to negotiate with the actual networks and channels. It's also coming to Roku and Amazon Fire TV, which I understand, but feels so strange. The whole TV Plus segment felt like a presentation from another company. like Google or Amazon, not Apple.

Apple does a good job keeping events moving along, and they tend not to parade a long series of people on stage. This was a parade of a bunch of A-list celebrities, Spielberg, Oprah, but it just went on and on. It should have been as tight as the Apple arcade segment. It feels like Apple was Starstruck. And why weren't their trailers for these TV shows? Why don't we know what this is going to cost yet?

We started the day with a lot of unanswered questions about Apple's original content strategy, and were ending the day with most of those questions still unanswered, end quote. John also called the promised low interest rates on the Apple credit card a crock of, you know what, because it turns out they're not really that low after all. He also wondered aloud, didn't Apple try something exactly like Apple News Plus back with Newsstand on the original iPads? And how did that turn out? He wondered, are magazines even still a thing to be chasing? But he, too, thought that the Apple arcade offering was great.

Quote, easy to understand what it is, why you'd want it, and what the value proposition is, end quote. But again, how come they couldn't even tell us the price? So my apologies to premium feed subscribers who got the show several hours late last night. In my rush to get the show out the door in the wake of the Apple event, I accidentally misconfigured the feed, and it never actually published. I didn't discover this until I got home. Usually I don't leave the office until I see the shows in my own feed, but last night I didn't. The irony is not lost on me that it was my rush to hit the 5 o'clock deadline that caused me to miss that deadline for some of you by as much as two hours.

Nothing wrong with the system, just something wrong with your host, and by host, I mean me, not the web host. Anyway, won't happen again. Don't let what happened last night discourage you from subscribing to the ad-free feed. Link is in the very bottom of the show notes. Talk to you tomorrow.