Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/31 - Apple Buys Dark Sky!

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Snapchat launches its Stories syndication program. Fitbit has a powerful new fitness tracker. Microsoft and Spotify release some family friendly features and apps. It’s time for Zoom to come under the spotlight for privacy concerns. And a court has ruled that simply breaking a site's terms of service does not constitute criminal hacking. Sponsors: F5.com/ride TinyCaptial.com Links: Apple purchases hyperlocal weather app Dark Sky, ending API and killing Android apps (9to5Mac) Snapchat preempts clones, syndicates Stories to other apps (TechCrunch) Surprise! Fitbit's First New Product Since Google Deal Is A Fitness Tracker (Gizmodo) Microsoft announces Teams for consumers, Skype daily active users up 70% to 40 million (VentureBeat) Microsoft 365 bundles Office 365 with AI and cloud-powered features (VentureBeat) Spotify Brings Standalone Kids’ App to U.S., Featuring a ‘Wash Your Hands’ Playlist (Variety) New York Attorney General Looks Into Zoom’s Privacy Practices (NYTimes) ZOOM MEETINGS AREN’T END-TO-END ENCRYPTED, DESPITE MISLEADING MARKETING (The Intercept) Comcast says voice and video calls have skyrocketed 212 percent during widespread self-isolation (The Verge) Apple Tests Its Secrecy Somewhere New: Employee Homes (Bloomberg) Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal hacking (Ars Technica) 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 Beam Right Home for Tuesday, March 31st, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Snapchat launches its story syndication program. Fitbit has a powerful new fitness tracker. Microsoft and Spotify release some family-friendly features and apps. It's time for Zoom to come under the spotlight for privacy concerns. And a court has ruled that simply breaking

a site's terms of service does not constitute criminal hacking. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You won't know it because of the edit, I'm throwing this one in late real quick because it's a whoa kind of news, and it just happened when I got done recording, but the company behind the super popular weather app Dark Sky says it has been acquired by Apple along with its entire team, which makes a ton of sense because Dark Sky rules and Apple's weather app is so worthless that I've had it stuck in a crap app folder for years.

But get ready for some bad news. The Android app is no longer available. and the API for Dark Sky will shut down December 31st, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. For now, Dark Sky for iOS will remain available for purchase, but Apple certainly will have plans to roll it into iOS natively at some point in the future. The native iOS Weather app hasn't seen a major overhaul since iOS 7. Back then, it was still powered by Yahoo Weather before making the switch to the Weather Channel with iOS 8. When it comes to Dark Sky for Android, the app is no longer available for. for download and existing users will have to find a replacement weather app come July 1st,

2020, end quote. Snapchat's big strategic parry to Facebook's copying basically everything they do has officially launched. It's called App Stories. And if you'll recall, it's basically a platform play, letting developers syndicate stories inside of other apps, quoting TechCrunch. Snapchat hopes to retain some grip on stories and dissuade more copycats, by letting developers bake the original version into their apps rather than building a bootleg

attempt from scratch. If you need Snapchat to share stories to popular apps, that could boost content production plus subsequent viewership and ad impressions inside of Snapchat. It could also remind people to shoot stories and make sure having a Snapchat account stays relevant. Quote, we definitely think there's a potential for monetization in app stories, but not yet, SNAP's VP of Partnerships Ben Schwaren tells me. For now, Snapchat isn't injecting ads alongside stories into other apps, though that's clearly the plan.

Quote, there are certain platforms out there that have decided they want to invest in building their own stories product and their own camera, but it's not a trivial thing to do. It takes resources and time. We think we can help developers do that, Schwerin explains. Getting more people out there, regardless of age and where they live, comfortable using stories, probably makes them more likely to be able to pick up and enjoy Snapchat, end quote. Fitbit's first new product, now that it's engaged to Google, is a fitness tracker. Fitbit has unveiled the Charge 4 Fitness Tracker with built-in GPS, NFC payments, and Spotify compatibility, all starting at $150 available for pre-order online today, quoting Gizmodo. Adding built-in GPS to the charge 4 makes it a much cheaper alternative to more expensive running watches

on a well-known platform with an active community. On top of the 20-something exercise modes that are already available, Fitbit is also adding seven GPS-specific modes for activities like outdoor hiking, running, and walking. The part I'm most interested in, however, is the addition of GPS-powered heat maps, so you can see exactly what part of your workout had you huffin and puffin the most. That's not a feature unique only to Fitbit. It was something that was available on the Timex Ironman GPS R-300 I recently tested, for instance. However, it is a more advanced feature that could perhaps allow Fitbit to compete with some more niche and more expensive running or outdoor activity watches.

Fitbit is also using the Charge 4's launch to introduce a new tracking metric, active zone minutes, which tracks the time spent in specific heart rate zones to determine whether you've made progress toward the 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, recommended by the American Heart Association and the World Health Organization. You can earn credit for each minute of moderate activity in the fat burning zone and double the credit for each minute in more vigorous cardio or peak zones. In the past, I've been critical of Fitbit's focus on steps. That famous 10,000 step goal is more about clever marketing than research, and health benefits associated with that goal are dubious. It's a small shift, but an important one for actually helping folks who want to meaningfully improve their health. Those are the big updates, but they're far from the only ones. The charge four will also get Fitbit's smart wake alarm feature, an alarm that wakes you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle whenever that comes out, end quote.

For Spotify support, though, you'll still need a smartphone tether. This is not a completely standalone device, at least if you want to work out with tunes on. And I should point out, as I said at the beginning, the Fitbit acquisition by Google is still pending. It has not been officially approved by regulators yet. Thank you. Whole slew of announcements from Microsoft yesterday. First, the company launched Microsoft Teams for Consumers, which lets non-enterprice folks do things like plan trips,

share photos, share grocery lists, and a lot more. Quoting Venture Beat. Additionally, you will soon be able to collaborate over shared to-do lists, assign tasks to specific people, and coordinate schedules. And for your daily life, Microsoft is promising features to share grocery lists, organize across family calendars, and store important information like Wi-Fi passwords and account info. You'll even be able to get location updates via the Microsoft Family Safety app, also announced today.

Microsoft Teams for Android and iOS will get these new features in preview in the coming months, end quote. Yes, speaking of Family Safety, Microsoft also debuted a Family Safety mobile app and AI-powered PowerPoint and Excel features as part of its 365 family and personal subscriptions. Quoting Venture Beat again. Microsoft Family Safety is a new Android and iOS app for Microsoft 360 subscribers. The app manages screen time across Windows PCs, Android, and Xbox. It also offers location sharing and notifications when a family member arrives or departs a location like home, school, or work. It even offers driving reports to help build better habits behind the wheel. The main purpose, however, is to protect your kids as they explore and play games. It shows you how they are spending their time, lets you set limits and steers them away from content that you feel is not age-appropriate. Microsoft said kids will be able to opt out of the app and dispute their parents following their movements. A limited preview of the app will be available in the coming months, end quote. And Spotify wants to be family-friendly too, launching Spotify for kids in the U.S., Canada, and France, as part of its $14.99 per month Spotify Premium Family Tier.

Quoting Variety. The ad-free Spotify Kids app features 125 playlists handpicked by a team of editors. Those include playlists for sing-alongs, soundtracks, stories, and artists like Taylor Swift, Shakira, and Justin Bieber. In the U.S., the app features playlist for Disney's Frozen and Disney Princess franchises, as well as Universal Pictures' Trolls World Tour,

which is slated for direct-to-digital release April 10th. There are also Spanish language, country, Christian, Motown, and Soul Dance Party playlist. In addition, Spotify Kids includes a coronavirus-related Wash Your Hands playlist with songs to help youngsters learn how to wash hands properly and ensure good hygiene when they cough or sneeze. The playlist includes Pink Fong's newly released Wash Your Hands with Baby Shark song, which for some may be a dubious selling point. The app also provides educational music content like a learning playlist hub with songs teaching kids about counting, ABCs, science, and other topics. Spotify Kids first launched in beta in Ireland last October and has since expanded to Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.

According to Spotify, roughly 50% of the content on Spotify Kids is localized by market, end quote. This has been kicking around for the last week or so, but we haven't talked. about it yet. Folks have been upset when they noticed that Zoom's iOS app was sending data to Facebook's servers via many different Facebook SDKs, even if there's no Facebook account linked to your Zoom account. Now, lots of folks said that that's fairly common among mobile apps. Facebook is just a big part of mobile infrastructure at this point, but still, Zoom's privacy policy did not clearly mention this practice. So Zoom then updated its iOS app to remove Facebook's SDKs after the controversy blew up. And now New York's Attorney General has sent a letter to Zoom

expressing concern over security vulnerabilities and privacy practices more broadly, quoting the New York Times. On Monday, the Office of New York Attorney General Letitia James sent Zoom a letter asking what, if any, new security measures the company has put in place to handle increased traffic on its network and to detect hackers, according to a copy reviewed by the New York Times. While the letter referred to Zoom as, quote, an essential and valuable communications platform, it outlined several concerns, noting that the company had been slow to address security flaws, such as vulnerabilities, quote, that could enable malicious third parties to, among other things, gain surreptitious access to consumer webcams, end quote.

The New York Attorney General's office is, quote, concerned that Zoom's existing security practices might not be sufficient to adapt to the recent and sudden surge in both the volume and sensitivity of data being passed through its network, the letter said. Quote, while Zoom has remediated specific reported security vulnerabilities, we would like to understand whether Zoom has undertaken a broader review of its security practices, end quote. And then today, the Intercept has been reporting that even though Zoom's marketing and product, make the claim that it uses end-to-end encryption, video and audio from meetings held on Zoom might not actually be actually end-to-end encrypted. Quote, as long as you make sure everyone in a Zoom meeting connects using computer audio instead of

calling in on a phone, the meeting is secured with end-to-end encryption, at least according to Zoom's website, its security white paper, and the user interface within the app. But despite this misleading marketing, the service actually does not support end-to-end encryption for video and audio content, at least as the term is commonly understood. Instead, it offers what is usually called transport encryption, explain further below. And from further below in the piece, the encryption that Zoom uses to protect meetings is TLS, the same technology that web servers use to secure HTTP websites. This means that the connection between the Zoom app running on a user's computer or phone

and Zoom's server is encrypted in the same way the connect. between your web browser and this article is. This is known as transport encryption, which is different from end-to-end encryption because the Zoom service itself can access the unencrypted video and audio content of Zoom meetings. So when you have a Zoom meeting, the video and audio content will stay private from anyone spying on your Wi-Fi, but it won't stay private from the company. In a statement, Zoom said it does not directly access mine or sell user data. For a Zoom meeting to be actually end-to-end encrypted, the video and audio content would need to be encrypted in such a way that only the participants in the meeting have the ability to decrypt it.

The Zoom service itself might have access to encrypted meeting content, but wouldn't have the encryption keys required to decrypt it. Only meeting participants would have those keys, and therefore would not have the technical ability to listen in on your private meetings. This is how end-to-end encryption in messaging apps like Signal work. The Signal service facilitates sending encrypted messages between users, but doesn't have the encryption keys required to decrypt those messages and therefore can't access their encrypted content. Quote, when we use the phrase end-to-end in our other literature, it is in reference to the connection being encrypted from Zoom endpoint to Zoom endpoint.

The Zoom spokesperson wrote, apparently referring to Zoom's servers as endpoints, even though they sit between Zoom clients. The content is not decrypted as it transfers across the Zoom cloud through the networking between these machines, end quote. Comcast says internet traffic from voice and video calls on its network has risen 212% over the past month and the overall peak traffic is up by 32%. Although in cities like San Francisco and Seattle, peak traffic is actually closer to 60% up. But what I find interesting are statistics like these, quote,

Comcast says it's seen other major shifts in data usage over the past month to accommodate working from home, uploads are now at their peak throughout the workday, whereas they used to spike in the evening. And as you'd expect, streaming video and gaming have seen increases too. Video consumption is up 38% and game downloads are up 50% on Comcast's network, end quote. I find this interesting because it just sort of reinforces the notion that while everyone's stuck at home, they're not watching more TV, they're watching more streaming stuff. So again, I guess first, first, furthering the transition into our new era of media consumption. Quick follow-up to an earlier story.

Sources are telling Mark German that back at the beginning of March, Apple did, in fact, start letting some engineers take home early versions of future devices to continue working on those devices during the lockdown period. Quote, typically Apple is a company built on in-person meetings. Designers, for example, gather around kitchen-like tables to dream up future products, hardware experts, engineer, and test devices together, things that simply are either more difficult or impossible over the internet. Taking home a future product requires the green light from the vice president of an employee's organization. That list of staff with future devices at their homes is also sometimes reviewed by Apple's senior vice presidents,

the management team run by chief executive officer Tim Cook. As part of the work from home order, Apple has clamped down on which employees are allowed to take home future versions of software, including the next release of iOS, the platform that runs the iPhone and iPad. Like with hardware, employees working on unreleased software such as the upcoming iOS 14 require approval from the highest levels of the organization, the people said, end quote. And finally, some good news. A U.S. federal court has ruled that simply breaking a site's terms of service does not constitute actual criminal hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which I can't believe that was even in question, but at least common sense has prevailed at this point,

quoting Ars Technica. The lawsuit was initiated by a group of academics and journalists with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union. The plaintiffs wanted to investigate possible racial discrimination in online job markets by creating accounts for fake employers and job seekers. Leading job sites have terms of service prohibiting users from supplying fake information, and the researchers worried that their research could expose them to criminal liability under the CFAA, which makes it a crime to, quote, access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access, end quote. So in 2016, they sued the federal government seeking a declaration that this part of the CFAA violated the First Amendment. But rather than addressing that constitutional issue, Judge John Bates ruled on Friday that the plaintiffs proposed research wouldn't violate the CFA.

CFAA's criminal provisions at all. Someone violates the CFAA when they bypass an access restriction like a password. But someone who logs into a website with a valid password doesn't become a hacker simply by doing something prohibited by a website's terms of service, the judge concluded. Quote, criminalizing terms of service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into its own legislature, Bates wrote. Bates noted that website terms of service are often long, complex, and change frequently. While some websites require a user to read through the terms and explicitly agree to them, others merely include a link to the terms somewhere on the page. As a result, most users aren't even aware of the contractual terms

that supposedly govern the site. Under those circumstances, it's not reasonable to make violations of such terms a criminal offense, Bates concluded, end quote. Wow. Goodbye March. Did we have any inkling what this month would be like when we started it? No way. Here's hoping the end of April. We're looking at a different, better world. Talk to you tomorrow.