Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 06/02 – Everything is Postponed

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

Facebook finally lets you clean out your old crap from your basement (I mean, past). AT&T won’t count HBO Max against your mobile data cap. Every tech event is postponed again. A whole bunch of OS update news, and a time capsule from another era. Sponsors: Tiny Capital ExpressVPN.com/techmeme Links: Facebook finally makes it way easier to trash your old posts (TechCrunch) HBO Max won’t hit AT&T data caps, but Netflix and Disney Plus will (The Verge) White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter (NBC News) Twitter takes action against Rep. Matt Gaetz for glorifying violence (The Verge) Cisco, Sony postpone events amid continued protests (Axios) Third Pixel feature drop improves AI-powered Adaptive Battery, integrates Recorder and Google Assistant (VentureBeat) Android update delivers new 'Bedtime' features focused on improving sleep (TechCrunch) Apple releases iOS 13.5.1 and watchOS 6.2.6 with ‘important security updates’ (9to5Mac) YouTube’s Chase for Streaming-TV Ad Dollars Faces Hurdles (WSJ) Samsung’s rotating mobile-friendly TV goes on sale for $1,999 (The Verge) 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, June 2nd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Facebook finally lets you clean out all your old crap from your basement, by which I mean your past. AT&T won't count HBO Max against your mobile data cap. Every tech event is postponed again, a whole bunch of OS update news, and a time capsule from another era. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Facebook finally added a feature to make it easier to delete or archive old. posts in bulk. Quoting TechCrunch. Called Manage Activity, the new feature lets users prune their posts in bulk, making it less of a headache to delete content aging badly, or anything else unnecessary that's built up from years of using the platform. The feature will be available to some users on the Facebook app today and will roll out more broadly in the next few weeks. Whether you're entering the job market after college or moving on from an old relationship, we know things change in people's lives and we want to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who you are today, Facebook wrote in the tool's announcement.

Anyone who'd like to batch, delete, or archive old content will be able to search their entire trove of Facebook posts using filters for dates, people tagged, and content type, like photo, video, text updates, etc. In a preview of the tool, it looked like a vastly more useful way to control aging content without having to manually scroll through years of old posts, end quote. You know how when a media or a tech company, especially a telecom company, wants to do a merger or acquisition, and the company in question wanting the merger or acquisition to happen, swears up and down that they will never, ever do specific things like, you know, favor their own content or services or whatever?

Yeah. So AT&T now says that HBO Max will be excluded from AT&T's mobile data caps via its sponsored data program, while competing services like Netflix and Disney Plus, will not be excused. So you will still hit your cap if you're streaming video, not owned by AT&T corporate. Quoting Nilai Patel, who is all over stories like this, quote, according to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T's sponsored data system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps. But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it's just paying itself.

The data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T mobility books as a revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeros out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be pure cost. That's why the last time we looked at AT&T's sponsored data system, the only three streaming services we could find using it were owned by AT&T. It's also why sponsored data systems fly in the face of net neutrality principles. AT&T's streaming services have a major advantage over its competitors, all of which run up against the cap.

But there's no net neutrality in the United States anymore, so AT&T is free to give itself preferential treatment, end quote. As Harold Feld tweeted, quote, I've lost count of the number of things Judge Leon said AT&T would never do once they acquired Time Warner that AT&T went and did. but add zero rating its own streaming service to the list, end quote. And as M.G. Siegler tweeted, we're a few steps away from needing to carry around a Disney phone, a Netflix phone, etc., end quote. Which is, you know, sort of why you do have things like laws around competition and conglomeration in the first place. If only we could actually do something with those laws. Twitter continues to be on the front lines in terms of editing.

editorial actions at this time of unrest. Twitter says it has suspended the account of a white nationalist group that was claiming to be an Antifa organization and in that guise was pushing violent rhetoric related to the ongoing protests, quoting NBC News. A Twitter account claiming to belong to a national anti-fah organization and pushing violent rhetoric related to ongoing protests has been linked to the white nationalist group, Identity Europa, according to a a Twitter spokesperson. The spokesperson said the account violated the company's platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts. Twitter suspended the account after a tweet that incited violence. This isn't the first time Twitter has taken action

against fake accounts engaged in hateful conduct linked to Identity Europa, according to the spokesperson, end quote. So I guess that's kind of the definition of outside agitation. Also, Twitter has restricted a tweet from U.S. House representative Matt Gates of Florida. They did not remove the tweet. In essence, they did the same thing to this particular tweet as they did to the president's tweet from last week. Quote, in a tweet published Monday, Gates wrote, now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East? And quote, the post was retweeted over 12,000 times before Twitter took action against it. Hours after it was posted Twitter determined that it violated its policies against glorifying violence. In doing so,

the tweet is hidden from Gates's profile and users must click a view button before seeing. Likes, retweets, and replies are all disabled from the tweet in an effort to limit its reach. Quote, we have placed a public interest notice on this tweet from at Matt Gates. The tweet is in violation of our glorification of violence policy, a Twitter spokesperson told the verge, end quote. Yeah, no sooner did I hit Publish on yesterday's show, then Sony announced that it was indeed postponing the planned June 4th PlayStation 5 event. Quote, while we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration, said Sony in a Twitter message.

And for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard, end quote. I did not know this, but EA also delayed its Madden NFL 21 event yesterday, for similar reasons. I did manage to tell you that the Android event Google had planned was postponed, and Cisco just announced that it is postponing the online version of Cisco Live, its annual customer event that was supposed to begin today, quoting Axios. Cisco announced the postponement of its event, which was scheduled to start tomorrow, in a YouTube video from CEO Chuck Robbins, who condemned as, quote, horrific, maddening and truly abhorrent, the murder of George Floyd, as well as the killings of Ahma Aubrey and Breonna Taylor.

Quote, people across the U.S. and the world are dealing with so much pain, frustration, and anger, Robin said. We want to give you the space this week to do what you need to do within your own organizations and communities, end quote. So mark your calendars, I guess, because it seems like all events are postponed until further notice. There's a whole bunch of OS update news all at once. First of all, Google has pushed an update to its pixel line with improved adaptive battery, Google Assistant Integration with Recorder, a personal safety scheduler, and more. As a reminder about how the pixel phones are on a different update cadence, quoting Venture Beat, in December, Google decided to take a new approach with updates to its pixel phones.

In addition to monthly security updates, pixel phones would receive new functionality as part of a feature drop every three months. The first feature drop included more photo controls, automatic call screening, improved video calls, memory management improvements, and existing pixel features rolling out to more phones. The second feature drop included motion sense, pause resume, new AR effects, and power button tweaks, as well as improvements to dark theme, long press, and adaptive brightness. The third feature drop keeps the goodies coming, especially in the AI department, end quote. In other words, if you want to know what's coming to Android soon, always keep your eye on what's coming to pixel phones now. Speaking of Android, Google has added a suite of

bedtime tools to Android, building on its wind-down feature to turn on, do not disturb, and enable a grayscale effect at a pre-arranged time. And guess what? It is, in fact, coming to pixel phones first, quoting TechCrunch. Android's bedtime mode, previously known as wind down, uses Do Not Disturb to silence calls, texts, and notifications while gray scale fades the colors on your phone to black and white to reduce the draw to your screen. With the updates to this feature, Google is making it easier to customize when and how bedtime mode is enabled. Based on your bedtime schedule, you can now opt to have it automatically turn on after your phone is plugged into its charger. You can also add bedtime

mode to your Android phone's quick settings to instantly turn it on or off with a single tap. And if you need a few more minutes, you can choose to pause bedtime mode without needing to adjust your schedule. The update to digital well-being, which includes the ability to automatically enable bedtime mode when the phone is charging and add it to quick settings, actually rolled out earlier in May, but Google is announcing the features today as part of its other bedtime mode changes. The clock app on the Android is also being updated with a new bedtime tab. Here you can set daily sleep in wake times. In the app, you'll be able to see a preview of your calendar for the next day and then tally the total number of hours of sleep you'd get.

This way you can adjust your bedtime if needed to sync up with tomorrow's schedule, even if that means diverting from your typical bedtime schedule. In addition, users will receive a reminder before bedtime and have the option to play calming sounds from Calm, Spotify, YouTube music, and other sources. If they have digital well-being installed, they can pair with bedtime mode to limit the interruptions during sleep, end quote. And finally, Apple has hurriedly pushed out iOS and iPadOS 13.5.1, saying that this patches the flaw which allowed that uncover jailbreak technique we told you about, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. In addition to iOS 13.5.1, Apple is also releasing watchOS 6.2.6 to the public as well as

iPadOS 13.5.1 and updates to HomePod and Apple TV. The updates should be available to all users shortly. Apple's release notes for today's updates are short. This update provides important security updates and is recommended for all users, the company says. Apple directs users to its security webpage, but no additional details are available there yet, end quote. On the one hand, this is yet another story about viewing behavior changes in a COVID-19 world. YouTube and YouTube TV now have more than 100 million people in the U.S. watching YouTube on big screen TVs each month. And that number rose 80% year over year in March, obviously reflecting the fact that we're all staying home at the moment. But also, this is a story about YouTube's efforts to take over

traditional TV spend, TV advertising spend, I should be clear. But YouTube isn't even seen as being in the same tier as Hulu or Disney Plus because, well, everything is on YouTube, right? and that makes advertisers nervous, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Their soul is social media with user-generated video online, said Gianluca Tocofondi, integrated media manager for IKEA Group, the largest IKEA franchisee and operator. Such video is important, but offers marketers less control and less visibility into where their ads appear, he said. Becoming a TV platform requires a lot of fieldwork in curating the content and really defining

the audiences you're curating this content for. Mr. Tokofandi added. YouTube isn't pitching its TV inventory as an improvement on mobile and desktop ads, but as an additional option for advertisers, albeit one that can help YouTube compete for the ad dollars allocated for TV. Advertisers spend more than $6.5 billion in the U.S. on advertising that appeared on Internet-connected TV screens in 2019, according to e-marketer. YouTube is proposing upfront deals in which marketers commit to ad buys further ahead than they typically would, for digital video for its apps running on smart TVs and streaming TV devices. YouTube on May 19th announced an ad-buying category for marketers seeking to reach its users on

streaming TV screens. The lineup includes videos by personalities on the platform, YouTube's own programming, and traditional TV shows and movies available through YouTube's main app or its pay TV service. It is available only in the U.S. and as part of the platform's YouTube select program, which reserves ad inventory across categories of top-performing YouTube channels. Streaming TV inventory through YouTube Select can cost two to three times as much as TV ads available through YouTube's auction, ad buyers said. More and more, marketers are having a dedicated line item in their media plans for streaming, said Debbie Weinstein, Vice President of Global Solutions for YouTube, a unit of alphabet. We want to make sure they are considering YouTube as well,

she said, end quote. And here's another sort of time capsule message from the before times, from the CES in the before times. I don't know if you remember me telling you about this, but Samsung has what it calls CeroTV, which tries to be all millennial modern by sporting the ability to rotate the actual screen between landscape and portrait mode. I'm not saying adjusting the screen,

I'm saying literally physically rotating the screen, depending on the sort of content you're watching. Well, it's now available in the U.S. and the U.K. for 1,900, $199, quoting the verge. The thinking is that the Sero TV's portrait orientation will mean it's better at showing Instagram stories, TikTok videos, Snapchat content, and other videos typically shot vertically rather than horizontally. If you've got a compatible smartphone, like a Samsung Galaxy phone, you can tap it

against the TV's frame to begin screen mirroring, and the TV will automatically rotate to match the phone's orientation. iPhone users, meanwhile, will have to use a remote, voice command, or the TV. the Smart Things app to manually rotate the TV and then use a protocol like Airplay 2 to stream content. It's a neat idea, but this lifestyle TV probably won't be for everyone. Plenty of people don't like vertically shot videos in the first place. Even if you're a fan, you might not have the space in your home for the Ciro's big and non-removable base. This stand includes a 4.1 channel 60-watt front-firing speaker system, though,

so at least Samsung is putting the space to good use, end quote. You know, yesterday when I told you all about going out today to buy a car, my cousin, who listens every day, shot out Kev, was like, oh, you think you can just walk into a dealership and buy a car and walk out an hour later? Good luck with that. Turns out he was right, so we don't actually have the car yet, but we know which one we want now, so it wasn't a total loss, and it didn't take all day as feared. and since dealerships are eager to sell anything in theory, now we know what we want.

We should just be able to have someone deliver it to us. So all's well that ends well, and since I busted my butt this morning to pre-record a whole bunch of this stuff already, here you go. Early release after all. Talk to you tomorrow.