Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 12/04 - Microsoft To Replace Edge with a Chromium Browser

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

Another day, another data breach, this time Quora, Microsoft might be replacing the Edge web browser, and maybe even replacing Windows, a review of some low-end smartphones and why 4k streaming and data caps are on a collision course.Sponsors:DatadogHQ.com/ridehomeMetalab.coLinks:Quora Security Update (The Quora Blog)Microsoft is building a Chromium-powered web browser that will replace Edge on Windows 10 (Windows Central)What is Windows Lite? It's Microsoft's Chrome OS Killer (Petri.com)NVIDIA's new AI turns videos of the real world into virtual landscapes (Engadget)MOTOROLA AND NOKIA’S NEW PHONES MAKE $350 LOOK LIKE $1,000 (The Verge)Your 4K Netflix Streaming Is on a Collision Course With Your ISP's Data Caps (Motherboard) 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, December 4th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, another day, another data breach, this time, Quora.

Microsoft might be replacing the Edge web browser and maybe even replacing Windows. A review of some low-end smartphones and why 4K streaming and data caps are on a collision course. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, another day, another data breach. As I said, Quora says it discovered. a data breach on November 30th, which affects about 100 million of its users. Data exposed includes names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and other non-public content. Also, all of your public content on Quora, your questions, answers, downvotes, upvotes, comments, etc., were compromised as well.

Anonymous questions and answers were not compromised for some reason. Quora wrote in a blog post, quote, on Friday, we discovered that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to one of our systems. We're still investigating the precise causes and, in addition to the work being conducted by our internal security teams, we have retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us. We have also notified law enforcement officials. While the investigation is ongoing, we have already taken steps to contain the incident and our efforts to protect our users and prevent this type of incident from happening in the future are our top priority as a company, end quote.

A bit of insta snark on this one. Jordan Reader tweeted, quote, Quora, you were the ones who insisted I get an account just to look at your website. Now you say there has been a security breach. Gee, I wonder why people avoid signing up for websites when they can, end quote. And the New York Times, yes, the actual official New York Times Twitter account, tweeted, quote, Quora users reacted to news of the security breach with surprise.

Not that their account information may have been accessed, but that they had a Quora account in the first place, end quote. Wow. Clause in, Kat. Two interesting Microsoft-related scoops today. Over at Windows Central, sources are reporting that Microsoft is working on a chromium-powered web browser that will replace Edge as the default browser on Windows 10. So real quick, because I feel like a lot of people might not know the background here. Edge was the replacement browser for Internet Explorer, which Microsoft launched in 2015.

Chromium is generally the browser framework that you would recognize as the Chrome browser. So Edge replaced Internet Explorer, and it used a completely new engine called Microsoft Edge built from the ground up. Only problem was not so many people have adopted the Edge Web Browder. browser, which is why I have to give you this explainer in the first place. So now that we're caught up, as Windows Central's Zach Bowden writes, quote, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge HTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser known as Blink.

Codenamed Anaheim, this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform, according to my sources, who wish to remain anonymous. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however, Edge HTML and Windows 10's default browser is dead. Long-live Chromium, end quote. What this means for users is that this new web browser, if it does come out, will render websites in generally the same way Google Chrome does. designers will especially be happy about that. Bowden says he expects Microsoft to introduce this browser during the 19 H1 development cycle, which if you're a Windows developer, I guess you know what that

means. And related news, I guess, over at Petrie.com, Brad Sam's reports that sources are telling him that Microsoft is also working on something called Windows Light, a super lightweight, instant-on, always-connected operating system to challenge Google's Chrome OS. Quote, Microsoft is working on a new version of Windows that may not actually be Windows. It's currently called Light, based on documentation found in the latest build, and I can confirm that this version of the OS is targeting Chromebooks. In fact, there are markings all over the latest release of the insider builds and SDK that help us understand where this OS is headed.

If you have heard this before, it should sound a lot like Windows 10S and RT. Windows 10 Lite only runs PWAs and UWP apps and strips out everything else. This is finally a truly lightweight version of Windows that isn't only lightweight in name. This is not a version of the OS that will run in the enterprise or even small business environments, and I don't think you'll be able to buy the OS either. OEM only may be the way forward. The reason Microsoft had to kill off Windows 10S was to make way for this iteration of Windows.

The goal of Windows Light is to make it super lightweight, instant on, always connected, and can run on any type of CPU. Knowing that this week, Qualcomm will announce a new generation of Snapdragon that can run Windows significantly better than the 835, fully expect to see this new chip powering many of the first devices running the new OS, end quote.

Sam's says this new OS might have a completely different user interface and might not even be called Windows at all. But as Sam's asks, can it succeed where Windows RT and Windows 10S have failed? And what was I saying just last week about Windows remembering that it's a software company, not just a Windows company? It's been a while since I've done a product review. There's that time of year when all the new phones come out. out and I end up having to do review roundups almost every day. And I guess, you know, be careful what you wish for because CES is in a month, so there's soon going to be a ton of new products to talk about. But here, let's talk about the Nokia 7.1 and the Motorola 1 smartphones.

They look like iPhones design-wise. They're sort of edge-to-edge screens, notches, no home buttons, but get this, instead of running you $1,000 or more, these are two super affordable phones in comparison. The Nokia 7.1 costs only $349, and the Motorola 1 costs $399. So what sort of quality does a value-priced phone get you these days? Jason Castronecki's in The Verge breaks down both phones and says these are the baseline for phones that fall just under flagship status. They're big screened, well-designed, and in easier to handle sizes than some phones. But there are obvious limitations built in that might remind you why it's sometimes worth it to pay up.

As usual, it comes down to the screens. Kasternickies says the Nokia has the better screen, a bit over 1080p in resolution, while the Motorola is probably closer to 720p. Though the Motorola's screen did have a bit better color, he says. and of course you're not getting high-end chips here either. The Nokia phone has a Snapdragon 636, but the Motorola uses a two-year-old Snapdragon 625. There are corners cut on the cameras too,

but both phones are both part of Google's Android 1 program, so you get that bare-bones Google-style Android goodness, which also assures you of timely updates to say things like Android Pie. Kasternicke's concludes his piece, by saying this. Quote, as phones continue to jump toward and beyond the $1,000 mark,

there's a growing space for devices that can bring the flagship experience to a much more accessible price. The Motorola 1 and the Nokia 7.1 make an argument that those devices are worth looking at, even if they aren't always worth buying.

Where they succeed, they can make you feel foolish for ever having spent so much more. The Motorola 1, despite its smooth and stylish package, cuts the wrong corners and ultimately falls flat, beside the even cheaper,

Nokia 7.1. It's a disappointment, especially given how remarkably well Motorola's $200 to $300 MotoG line strikes that balance of price and performance. The Nokia 7.1, on the other hand, feels like a bargain. It has its flaws, obvious ones like the screen colors and sometimes irritating ones like the camera, but not ones that ever make the phone unusable. So think of those big virtual worlds like in Red Dead Redemption or basically any video game built on the Unreal Engine. They're cool. It's amazing how vast and realistic a virtual world can be these days. But now imagine this. Imagine you could go out into the real world, Google Maps style, capture real world environments,

and then make a photorealistic virtual world out of that. That is what Nvidia showed off at a recent AI conference, a project that uses objects and scenery from existing videos to build a new interactive environment in realistic city landscapes. Quoting from Engadget, quote, here's how it works, Brian Catanzo, NVIDIA's vice president of Applied Deep Learning told reporters

that researchers trained the fledgling neural model with dash cam videos taken from self-driving car trials in cities for about a week on one of the company's DGX-1 supercomputers. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

once called the DGX-1 the equivalent of 250 servers in a box. So pulling off something similar at home might be all but impossible. Meanwhile, the research team used Unreal Engine 4 to create what they called a semantic map of a scene, which essentially assigns every pixel on screen a label. Some pixels got lumped into the car bucket, others into the trees category or buildings. You get it. These clumps of pixels were also given clearly defined edges,

so Unreal Engine ultimately produced a sort of a sketch of a scene. that got fed into Nvidia's neural model. From there, the AI applied the visuals for what it knew a car looked like to the clump of pixels labeled car and repeated the same process for every other classified object in the scene. That might sound tedious, but the whole thing happened faster than you might think. Katanzaro said the car simulation ran at 25 frames per second and that the AI rendered everything in real time, end quote.

If you click through on the link in the show notes, I have to say, it's pretty, pretty impressive the video, not quite as detailed or graphically rich as Red Dead Red Dead Redemption, say, but, I mean, pretty impressive as this is something AI rendered in real time based on video from the real world. Nvidia is open sourcing all of the underlying code behind this, but it might be a while before, say, VR developers can get their hands on this

and also a while before it can be closer to photorealistic. But imagine this possibility. You know how movie productions still go into the real world to at least get some real world sets in the foreground and whatnot, even if 80% of a given shot in a given movie is green screen and CGI magic? Well, so maybe someday video game developers and VR developers might be doing the same thing. Some new Lord of the Rings video game release, five years from now, say. Like Peter Jackson, the developers of that game might go to New Zealand

to capture some of the landscapes they use to render a Middle Earth. Finally, today, this is something that you might not have thought of before, but I can assure you your Internet service provider has. You know all that 4K streaming content that you're doing on your fancy new TV? As Motherboard points out, that could very much be on a collision course with your ISP's data caps. Quote, Cisco's 2018 Visual Networking Index, an annual study that tracks overall internet bandwidth consumption to identify future trends, predicts that global IP traffic is expected to reach 396 exabytes per month by 2022.

Cisco's report claims that's more traffic than has crossed global networks throughout the entire history of the internet thus far. The majority of this data growth is video. Cisco found that 75% of global internet traffic was video last year, up from 63% just two years earlier. Cisco says this number could climb to 82% in 2022 with 22% of overall video consumption coming from bandwidth-intensive 4K streaming, end quote. So here's the deal. The report also says that the number of households that consume one terabyte or more of data each month, more than doubled between 2016 and 2017, and cord cutters are contributing to that heavily because they consume 72% more bandwidth than, quote, normal households.

But of course, guess what? A lot of ISPs have data caps in place, usually starting around the one terabyte number. If your ISP is Comcast, for example, you're facing a terabyte monthly cap unless you want to pay a $50 a month fee to make all caps go away. Now, here's the thing. Usage caps on broadband are a fantasy, basically. Capping traffic at some arbitrary number doesn't fix anything in terms of network management or network accessibility or even pipeline problems. Structurally, they can't. So what are they there for? Well, they're basically a sneaky way to make up the losses from you cord cutters. Don't want to pay for the perfectly

stellar video Comcast is willing to serve to you in the traditional way. They can make up that difference. As Philip Dampier, a consumer broadband advocate, says in the piece, quote, as cord cutting takes the country by storm the same companies that have profited handsomely selling you channel TV packages you don't want or need, will effectively claw back any savings from watching TV online instead. That's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Our podcast, subreddit is R slash ride home. As always, I follow the lead of the 24-7 slate of editors over at techmeme.com. You can follow them at TechMeme to get the headlines tweeted at you in real time. Talk to you tomorrow.

Thank you.