Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 8/13 - Does Google Track Even When You Say No?

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

Is Google tracking you even when you tell it not to? Big executive departure at Netflix, Elon expounds on taking Telsa private, and how machine learning can identify devs simply by the way they code. Links:Lenovo Launches Ultra-Thin ThinkPad P1: X1 Carbon Meets Workstation (AnAndTech)EVEN ANONYMOUS CODERS LEAVE FINGERPRINTS (Wired)Update on Taking Tesla Private (Tesla)China has outspent the US by $24 billion in 5G technology since 2015, study shows (CNBC)An 11-Year-Old Changed The Results Of Florida's Presidential Vote At A Hacker Convention. Discuss. (Buzzfeed News)Dozens of Vegas slots went offline simultaneously during a hacker convention (Mashable) 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 Memeride Home for Monday, August 13th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is Google tracking you even when you tell it not to. Big executive departure at Netflix.

Elon Musk expounds on taking Tesla private and how machine learning can identify developers simply by the way they code. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The AP has run an investigation and found that some Google apps on Android and iOS automatically store your timestamped location even when the location history setting is paused. Quote, Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states, you can turn off location history at any time. With location history off, the places you go are no longer stored. That isn't true.

Even with location history paused, some Google apps automatically store timestamped location data without asking. For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like chocolate chip cookies or kids' science kits, pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude, accurate to the square foot, and save it to your Google account, end quote. A Google spokesperson told the Associated Press, quote, there are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people's experience, including location history, web and app activity, and through device-level location services.

We provide clear descriptions of these tools and robust controls so people can turn them on or off and delete their histories at any time, end quote. Netflix announced this morning that its longtime chief financial officer David Wells will be stepping down from his role after more than a decade. quote, it's been a wonderful 14 years at Netflix, and I'm very proud of everything we've accomplished, Wells said in a statement about his plans. After discussing my desire to make a change with Reed, we agreed that with Netflix's strong financial position and exciting growth plans, this is the right time for us to help identify the next financial leader for the company. Personally, I intend my next chapter to focus more on philanthropy, and I like big challenges, but I'm not sure yet what that looks like, end quote. Wells and Netflix say that he will be involved in helping the company pick a successor to the CFO position.

Sometimes I hesitate to talk about executive job changes, but I think this one is particularly noteworthy because Netflix is such a phenomenon, and Wells was so key to Netflix's success. When Wells first stepped into the CFO position, Netflix was still a DVD by mail company. The big headlines at the time were competition with Blockbuster. Streaming didn't even begin until three years into Wells' tenure. So not only was Wells instrumental in the transition to the company and business model we think of when we talk about Netflix today, but he also oversaw the company's expansion to 190 countries around the world. And the fact that 10 years ago, it was all about licensing content from Hollywood Studios, but now Netflix can spend billions of dollars each year to produce its own content.

Wells is the guy that made that happen, financially speaking. In a statement, CEO Reid Hastings said, David has been a valuable partner to Netflix and to me. He skillfully managed our finances during a phase of dramatic growth that has allowed us to create and bring amazing entertainment to our members all over the world while also delivering outstanding returns to our investors. I look forward to working with him during the transition as we identify a new CFO who will help us continue to pursue our ambitious goals.

New laptop to Lustover Alert. Lenovo has announced the ultra-thinthens, sync pad P1 with a 15.6 inch 4K display, Intel's eighth generation Xion CPUs, up to 64 gigabytes of RAM, and up to 4 terabytes of SSD storage, all in a carbon fiber chassis. Pricing starts at $1949 and will begin shipping in late August. So this is a beast of a laptop, but by using carbon fiber, Lenovo kept the world. weight down to 3.76 pounds, which is super impressive for a 15-inch laptop. It also comes in at only 7 tenths of an inch thick.

In comparison, the 15-inch MacBook Pro is slightly thinner, but it comes in at over 4 pounds. And this bad boy Lenovo has two Thunderbolt 3 ports to USB 3.1 Type A connectors, an HDMI2 output, a card reader, web, webcam, fingerprint scanner, and T-R-R-S audio port. This was just announced today, so there are no reviews of the laptop yet, but Annand Tech calls it one of the thinnest and lightest laptops of its class on the market today. Interesting little tidbit from Wired, which has a piece up about how researchers can now use machine learning techniques to determine who wrote a bit of code with something like 90% accuracy.

It's sort of like how for years people have been able to occasionally figure out the author of a piece of writing by comparing it to other things they've written. Turns a phrase, word choice, that sort of thing. Well, researchers can now do a similar thing by looking at code you've written and then go out into the world and find other code likely written by you based on your coding ticks, habits, and piccadilios. Quote, for example, in a 2017 paper, Calliskan Greenstat and two other researchers demonstrated that even small snippets of code on the repository site GitHub can be enough to differentiate one coder from another with a high degree of accuracy. Most impressively, Caliscan and a team of other researchers showed in a separate paper that it's possible to de-anonymize a programmer using only their compiled binary code. after a developer finishes writing a section of code, a program called a compiler turns it into a series of ones and zeros that can be read by a machine called binary.

Two humans, it mostly looks like nonsense. Kalescan and the other researchers she worked with can decompile the binary back into the C++ programming language while preserving elements of a developer's unique style. Imagine you wrote a paper and used Google Translate to transform it into another language. While the text might seem completely different, elements of how you write are still embedded in traits like your syntax.

The same holds true for code, end quote. So the idea that you can throw anonymous code out into the world might be a thing of the past. An update on the Taking Tesla Private saga from the man himself, Elon Musk in a blog post titled, Update on Taking Tesla Private, said that it is the Saudis that he, was referring to when he tweeted about funding being secured for his goal of taking the company

private. Quoting Elon himself, going back almost two years, the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has approached me multiple times about taking Tesla private. They first met with me at the beginning of 2017 to express this interest because of the important need to diversify away from oil. They then held several additional meetings with me over the next year to reiterate this interest and to try to move forward with a going private transaction. Obviously, the Saudi sovereign fund has more than enough capital needed to execute on such a transaction. Recently, after the Saudi fund bought almost 5% of Tesla stock through the public markets, they reached out to ask for another meeting.

That meeting took place on July 31st. During the meeting, the managing director of the fund expressed regret that I had not moved forward previously on a going private transaction with them, and he strongly expressed his support for funding a going private transaction for Tesla at this time. I understood from him that no other decision makers were needed and that they were eager to proceed. I left the July 31st meeting with no question that a deal with the Saudi Sarvan Fund could be closed and that it was just a matter of getting the process moving. This is why I referred to funding secured in the August 7th announcement, end quote.

Elon says he has continued discussions with the director of the Saudi Fund. He clarifies that most of the capital required for going private would be funded by equity, not by debt. So this would not be a standard leveraged buyout structure. He therefore debates the assertion that $70 billion would be the price tag needed to make this happen. Elon says talks are ongoing and a special committee of the board is being set up to pursue them. He expects that when a formal proposal is ready, it will be presented to Tesla shareholders for a vote. As CNBC's Steve Kovach tweeted, quote, Musk took six days to clarify that funding secured actually means the funding was not secured.

But, of course, this means we get to have a debate over the definition of secured. If Musk's definition is ongoing talks with Saudis, then that clarification probably should have come last week. not six days later. Obviously, the Trump administration's relationship with China is complicated. The trade war that seems to be bubbling up has its roots in lots of causes, but from a tech perspective, a lot of it has to do with anxiety over which country has control of the networks and the technology that most people can see

will be foundational to the global economy going forward 20, 30, even 50 years. And this is especially true, as I've said before, with 5G technology. 5G is such a leap forward in speed, bandwidth, and just capabilities that it's easy to imagine that it will be the structural underpinning of whatever the economy will become. It will power everything from self-driving cars to banking to run-of-the-mill commerce. So the greatest anxiety that some in Washington have

is that the U.S. will fall behind countries like China in 5G. It's like how hundreds of years ago people measured the structural. of a country's development based on the number of miles of railroad a given country had. The U.S. increasingly fears that it's falling behind in 5G, the crucial infrastructure that new economies will be built on. And there's a report published by Deloitte that brings these fears into stark relief, quoting from CNBC's article about this report. Since 2015, China has outspent the U.S. by $24 billion in 5G infrastructure, Deloitte's study found. China has built 350,000 new cell sites, while the U.S. has built fewer than 30,000 in the same time frame.

Deloitte's report noted that China plans hundreds of billions of dollars in 5G-related spend. And it could be tougher for the U.S. to match China on investment. Deloitte estimated that the equipment necessary to add a carrier in China costs about 35% less than the U.S., suggesting that Washington would need to spend 2.67 times the amount that China does to generate an equivalent amount of wireless network capacity. China and other countries may be creating a 5G tsunami, making it near impossible to catch up, Deloitte said in its report, end quote. A separate report by HIS Market estimated that by 2035,

5G technology could enable as much as $12.3 trillion in global economic output. For years now, hackers have, have been trying to raise the alarm about how easy it is to hack electronic voting machines. Well, the DefCon Hacker Conference is going on in Las Vegas right now, and the hackers are trying to raise the alarm again. Quote, this weekend saw the 26th annual DefCon gathering. It was the second time the convention has featured a voting village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment,

and watch hackers find creative and alarming ways to break in. In last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year's voting village was bigger in every way with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the U.S. In a room set aside for kid hackers, an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida Secretary of State's website within 10 minutes and changed the results. end quote. Apparently on some of these voting machines, hacking requires no special tools and can be done in under two minutes. Campaign finance lawyer and former speechwriter to Jack Kemp, one Mr. Robert Kellner wrote on Twitter, quote, I've said it many times and I know some other election lawyers who agree. The move to electronic voting after Bush v. Gore was a colossal mistake. Bring back the mechanical voting booths. meantime air gap and D-network all current electronic voting systems end quote in a slightly related story on early saturday morning around one or two a m at the link casino across the street from caesar's palace where defcon takes place dozens of slot machines on the casino floor all went down simultaneously conference attendees gleefully shared pictures of the seemingly dead machines

on social media. Mashable, which reported on this story, said that the silence on the casino floor from all of the slot machines going dark all at once was eerie. And I found this quote from Mashable's piece pretty funny. A link spokesperson told us

the casino is investigating the incident, and while the cause isn't yet known, he said they viewed the outage coinciding with one of the world's largest hacker conventions happening literally across the street as, quote, purely coincidental. And that's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. My thanks to the TechMeme editors for finding and organizing all the stories we talk about every day. Follow them on Twitter at TechMeme to get Tech News headlines in real time. Talk to you tomorrow.