Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 12/18 - Has Google Stopped "Dragonfly?"

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

Google presses pause on that Chinese search project, what’s delaying Facebook’s Clear History project, AT&T’s 5G goes live and Audi unveils its autonomous vehicle ambitions. Sponsors: FlatironSchool.com/podcast Metalab.co 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 18th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Google presses pause on that Chinese search project.

What's delaying Facebook's clear history project? AT&T's 5G goes live and Audi unveils its autonomous vehicle ambitions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Late yesterday, the Intercept reported that sources were telling it that Google's plans for a censored search project for China had been. been, quote, effectively ended after internal disputes about the product. It's a little complicated, but go with me for a second on this. In 2008, Google purchased the Beijing-based website 265.com, which is a web directory service,

which claims to be China's most used homepage. The search on 265.com redirects to Baidu, Google's main search rival in China, but Google engineers apparently used 265.com. as a honeypot to keep track of search trends in China before they were handed over to Baidu. Quoting The Intercept, according to two Google sources, engineers working on Dragonfly

obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese people were entering into the 265.com search engine. At least one of the engineers obtained a key needed to access an application programming interface or API associated with 265.com and used it to harvest search data from the site. Members of Google's privacy team however, were kept in the dark about the use of 265.com, end quote.

It was apparently this dataset that was being used to build a prototype search product, which, as we know, was codenamed Dragonfly. Again, quoting, the engineers used the sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. Then they used a tool called Beacon Tower to check whether any websites in the Google search results would be blocked, by China's internet censorship system known as the Great Firewall. Through this process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links to websites

prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and British news broadcaster BBC, end quote. And then, here's where it gets really interesting. Quote, under normal company protocol, analysis of people's search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company's privacy staff whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after the intercept revealed it and were quote really pissed, according to one Google source. Members of the privacy team confronted the executives responsible for managing Dragonfly.

Following a series of discussions, two sources said Google engineers were told that they were no longer permitted to continue using the 265.com data to help develop Dragonfly. which has since had severe consequences for the project. The 265 data was integral to Dragonfly, said one source. Access to the data has been suspended now, which has stopped progress, end quote. According to the Intercept, subsequent to this, the teams working on Dragonfly have had to use different datasets, and some engineers have been moved off of Dragonfly completely

and told to work on other projects related to search in India and other markets. The Intercept had reported previously key private. privacy and security employees at Google had been shut out of meetings related to Dragonfly in ways that, as one Googler put it, were, quote, quite outside the Google norm, end quote. So interesting, where does that leave us with Dragonfly? As Kevin Bansden tweeted, here's hoping that's the last we hear of this idea, thanks to the whistleblowers, investigative reporters, and internal agitators that have helped stop this project, end quote. but as David Auerbach tweeted some very interesting revelations in here though I wouldn't be so confident that Dragonfly effectively ended

maybe in its present form but the confrontation described doesn't seem quite so definitive end quote soon people without Google accounts will be able to view comment and edit Google Docs Google Sheets and Slide files this will especially be helpful

I suppose if you're collaborating on documents with people outside your organization. Access will be granted using unique pin numbers. File owners or administrators will be able to revoke access at any time and track where activity or changes originate. So if you're a G Suite admin, you can apply to join this beta test today. According to TechCrunch, quote, since intensifying their focus on enterprise customers,

Google has doubled the number of organizations with a G Suite subscription to more than 4 million. But despite Google's efforts to build its enterprise user base, G Suite hasn't come close to supplanting Office 365 as the cloud-based productivity software of choice for companies. Office 365 made $13.8 billion in sales in 2016 versus just $1.3 billion for G Suite, according to Gartner. Google has added features to G Suite, however, to make the two competing software suites more interoperable, including an update that enables Google Drive users to comment on office files, PDFs, and images in, the drive preview panel without needing to convert them to Google Docs, sheets, or slide files first, even if they don't have Microsoft Office or Acrobat Reader, end quote. AT&T's 5G network will go live in the U.S. on Friday, December 21st, if you live in the right

city. Oh, and you need to use Netgear's Nighthawk 5G mobile hotspot to create a Wi-Fi network to connect to because there are no phones currently available that can support the 5G natively. But if you do jump through these hoops, as I said, Friday you can pay $70 a month to jump on AT&T's 5G network in parts of Atlanta, Charlotte, North Carolina, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Florida, Louisville, Kentucky, Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Raleigh, North Carolina, San Antonio, Texas, and Waco, Texas.

Actually, the service will be free for select customers for 90 days, and then the $70 a month kicks in for a 15-gigabyte data cap. Quoting from CNET, AT&T and Verizon each pledged to launch 5G in 2018 and each made its deadline sort of. AT&T had a couple weeks to spare and addressed a limited number of people with a useful but not mainstream product. Verizon launched its 5G service first, but not with the actual 5G industry standard itself and serving only customers with wireless home broadband.

It's not easy to move to a new network, upgrading. thousands of cell towers and installing new ones to deal with 5G's higher speed but shorter range millimeter wave technology takes years. Add to that the fact that everybody has to buy new phones, like the ones we expect to see debut from Samsung and others at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona this February. It's not like an overnight switchoff of 4G, said Rudolf Vanderberg, a consultant at Dutch Telecom consulting firm Stratics. There are hundreds of millions of 4G capable phones and replacement cycles are growing. longer."

Seven months ago in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg announced clear history, a feature that would allow users to clear the browsing history connected to their Facebook profiles. Quote, this is an example of the kind of control we think you should have. Zuckerberg wrote in a post at the time. It's something privacy advocates have been asking for, and we will work with them to make sure we get it right, end quote. Well, it's been seven months, as I said, and Facebook.

now says that clear history will only begin testing in the spring of 2019. Why has this one feature taken so long to actually arrive? According to recode, quote, number one, Facebook data is not always stored in the same way it is collected. When Facebook collects web browsing data, for example, that data set includes multiple parts like your personal identifying information, the website you visited, and the timestamp for when the data was collected. Sometimes those pieces of data are separated and stored in different parts of the Facebook system.

Finding them all so they can be cleared, especially once they've been separated, has been a challenge. Number two, Facebook currently stores browsing data by time and date, not by which user it belongs to. That means there was no easy way within Facebook's system to see all the browsing data linked to an individual user. Facebook had to build a new system that stored browsing data categorized at the user level, end quote. By the way, there's a reason the product, whenever it does arrive, is called Clear History and not Delete History. It turns out, Clear History will only disassociate your browsing data from your specific account. It will essentially de-identify you, but Facebook will not be erasing any of that data on its servers. Audi has finally revealed details about its efforts in the self-driving car space.

Audi has actually been pretty aggressive about adding semi-autonomous features to its existing vehicles, but now it says it wants to put self-driving cars on the road by 2021 by spending $16 billion on self-driving technology through 2023. Audi's Autonomous Intelligent Driving Group was founded a year and a half ago as a wholly owned Audi subsidiary with 150 employees and headquarters in Munich, where all of the testing is currently taking place. quoting from The Verge Alexander Haig, the group's chief technology officer, says

AID is to Audi, as Cruz is to General Motors or Argo is to Ford. But rather than acquire an outside company to kickstart its AV program, the German automaker sought to build its self-driving team from scratch. Our goal is to develop the full level four stack,

Haig told the Verge. The Society of Automotive Engineers defines level four as a car that completely drives itself from start to finish within a specific designated area. The first application is to be Robotaxy, Hague added, and in the long term, provide the

whole group with a self-driving stack for ownership vehicles, trucks, buses, food deliveries, everything in the long term, end quote. Like everyone else, Audi is using a combination of deep learning based software and a suite of LiDAR and radar echoes to detect

the environment. Yesterday, Audi announced a partnership with Palo Alto based Luminar, which makes LIDAR sensors and software, Luminar already works with Volvo and Toyota. One more quote from Hague gives us a sense of how close Audi thinks it is in terms of perception, which is when an autonomous vehicle has the ability to see nearby objects and know what to do about them, which is pretty much table stakes for Level 4 autonomy. Quote, getting to 90% in perception is fairly easy.

Getting to 95% starts to get interesting. And then you still need to go way beyond that. 9.999, adding each 9 is 10 times harder. When you're at 75%, you've just scratched the surface, end quote. In order to increase profits, Amazon is asking brands with cheap but heavy or bulky items to change their packaging and ship those items from their own warehouses, not Amazon's warehouses. Quoting the Wall Street Journal.

Inside Amazon, the items are known as crap, short for can't realize a profit. Think bottled beverages or snack foods. The products tend to be priced at $15 or less are sold directly by Amazon and are heavy or bulky and therefore costly to ship, characteristics that make for thin or non-existent margins. Now, as Amazon focuses more on its bottom line,

in addition to its rapid growth, it is increasingly taking aim at crap products, according to major brand executives and people familiar with the company's thinking. In recent months, it has been eliminating unprofitable items and pressing manufacturers to change their packaging to better sell online, according to brands that sell on Amazon

and consultants who work with them, end quote. So again, remember my speculation from a few weeks ago about there being some new team or team turnover inside of Amazon? This is another notable change. change of strategy for Amazon, among several recently, actually chasing margins and profitability on individual items instead of just chasing growth and selling everything under the sun. Recodes Jason Del Rey, who specializes on the Amazon Beat, tweeted something about this, saying, quote, this is interesting and a profitability cycle that started in earnest almost two years ago,

but have talked to a bunch of people who said Amazon has taken foot off profitability pedal for some brands recently as revenue growth has slowed, end quote. The smartphone industry keeps wanting to give us thinner and lighter, but then at the same time bigger screens. Some of us, however, are left wondering why nobody seems to be chasing a different vector that might reveal an underserved market. Bigger batteries for longer battery life.

Imagine, if you will, a smartphone that could go a solid week on a single battery charge. Well, in The Verge, Sam Bifford has been testing just such a phone. It's a Chinese phone, the Dogey S-80, quoting Bifford. The S-80 belongs to a niche class of Chinese phones with really, really big batteries. This particular unit is built around a 10,080 MAH battery. For comparison, most Android flagship phones come in between 3 and 4,000 MAHH. Dogey claims it'll be good for 76 hours of continuous video playback, 136 hours of talk time, and 1,308 hours of standby.

I quite literally do not have the time to test these claims directly, but what I can say is that you probably can't expect about a week of regular use out of the S-80. As I said, I've been using my unit for eight days, and while it admittedly hasn't been a particularly hardcore week for me in terms of phone usage, I'm still impressed with the endurance, end quote. As Bifford notes, the design of the phone is sort of reminiscent of the Nolan movies, Batmobile with angular edges and deep dark grays and blues. The phone weighs almost a pound and is approximately three iPhone 8s in thickness. But, hey, some people want rugged phones. And, hey, remember, a week's worth of use on a single charge.

It's got a 6-inch 18 by 9, 1080p LCD screen. It runs Android 8.1 Oreo, and it costs only $379. There's also an S-70, which has half the battery capacity and thickness, but also has a snap-on gaming controller complete with analog stick. Real quick, I wanted to give a quick shout out to Barry, who was also one of those listeners who met with me last Friday in Boston. Thanks for coming out to see me, Barry. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough.

Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. My book, How the Internet Happened, would make an excellent stocking stuffer. And the podcast Reddit is R slash Ride Home. Talk to you again tomorrow.