Tech Brew Ride Home - Tues. 7/23 - Intel Outside

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Apple may buy Intel’s floundering 5G chip division, new rumored iPhone models seem like modest bumps, the attorney general dreams of an impossible encryption backdoor, a Facebook design flaw potentially exposed children to strangers, the NSA consolidates cybersecurity, Uber tests an all-in-one subscription plan, a suit against AT&T over a cryptocurrency theft can proceed, and winking face money bag 100% you should use emoji at work. Sponsors Pixel Union Marketing by Moe Links: Apple in Advanced Talks to Buy Intel’s Smartphone-Modem Chip Business (WSJ) Apple to release three ‘iPhone 11’ models this fall, including A13 chip, new Taptic Engine, more (9to5mac) US attorney general says encryption creates security risk (AP) AG Barr and Trump Want to Open Government Backdoors into Americans’ Personal Devices Video Available Here (Ron Wyden statement) Facebook design flaw let thousands of kids join chats with unauthorized users (The Verge) NSA Forms Cybersecurity Directorate Under More Assertive U.S. Effort (WSJ) Uber tests monthly subscription that combines Eats, rides, bikes and scooters (TechCrunch) Cryptocurrency investor’s $224 million suit against AT&T over stolen coins moves forward (CNBC) Yes, You Actually Should Be Using Emojis at Work (WSJ) 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 TechMeme ride home for Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019. Today, Apple may buy Intel's floundering 5G chip division. New rumored iPhone models seem like modest bumps.

The Attorney General dreams of an impossible encryption backdoor. A Facebook design flaw, potentially exposed children to strangers. The NSA consolidates cybersecurity. Uber tests an all-in-one subscription plan, a suit against AT&T over a cryptocurrency, and proceed, and winking face money bag 100%, you should use emoji at work. I'm Glenn Fleischman in for Brian McCullough, and here's what you missed in the world of tech today. Apple is reportedly in talks to purchase Intel's smartphone modem chip division,

an expected move after Apple suddenly settled its ongoing dispute over royalties and patents with cellular chip-making pacemaker, Qualcomm in April. The Intel deal could top a billion dollars in cover acquiring staff, technology, and patents, according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. Intel had capitalized on the Apple Qualcomm suit as the only company that could potentially provide the chips for new 5G networks that Apple would need to remain competitive. However, as soon as Apple and Qualcomm buried the hatchet, Intel announced it would exit the 5G smartphone modem business and figure out its mobile chip future. Apple inked a six-year licensing agreement and a chip purchase deal with Qualcomm, so this Intel acquisition

would be part of the long game that Apple has played so well. The journal says Intel is losing about a billion dollars a year on its smartphone division. It would continue to work on 5G connectivity for other categories of devices like laptops. Analysts suggested Apple's settlement with Qualcomm was intended to force a deal. Anshel Sog, consumer and chip tech analysts at more insights and strategy, tweeted, as predicted by me, what feels like eons ago, I always thought that Apple was going to use their only customer leverage position to buy up Intel's modem business. 5G networks can use a wider variety of frequencies than 3G and 4G networks,

requiring complicated new chip designs and networks. The potential is for much higher rates of speed and better support for massive numbers of devices. If your phone currently says 5G on it, don't believe it. That's marketing hype and nonsense. Carriers did the same thing with 4G. Apple used to rely on other companies for a lot, but when Steve Jobs turned around the company starting in the late 1990s, one of his key strategies was ensuring that Apple would be increasingly less dependent on other company's decisions about their own roadmaps and product plans in the future. That was reflected in moves both large and small.

On the small side, the company developed the consumer-oriented I-work suite of business apps, including pages and numbers. On the big side, it acquired a chip design firm in 2008 that licensed ARM, that's ARM technology, that ultimately allowed it to create its own A-Series chips for iPhones and I. iPads and some of its other devices, and it's anticipated at some point in the future for laptops. This Intel acquisition could help speed that date because Intel engineers would add to Apple's portfolio of knowledge and patents related to chipmaking. Intel has had a series of failures related to mobile chips. In 1998, it purchased Strong Arm from Deck to develop its X-scale products,

which were also armed-based. It sold that line to Marvell in 2006. In the early 2000s, it tried to develop a technology to compete with burgeoning high-speed cellular data technology, which was called YMAX, shipping its own mobile chips for this starting in 2006 and investing in Clearwire, a YMex carrier. YMAX was effectively dead a few years later, and the carrier shut down. Most of the innovations in YMAX did make it into later cellular standards, however. Intel also created and shut down a CPU designed for mobile phones that gained no traction. The cellular chip division Intel could sell to Apple rose out of a 2011 acquisition of Infinion Technologies' modem business. Until paid $1.4 billion for that. Sensing a trend? Speaking of Apple, the site 9 to 5

Mac says Apple will release three new iPhone 11 models this fall. The site has a decent track record in breaking hardware news. These models would replace current iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR units. What's interesting about the phones is that they don't seem particularly interesting compared to previous models. Apple has always employed a sort of TikTok model of releases with the iPhone. It has a tick year in which it makes radical hardware changes, sometimes paired with big updates to the operating system, and then one or more talk years in which the underlying specs improve, such as the camera system, chip performance, or other factors. This seems mostly like a talk year. 9 to 5 Macs says Apple will add a third camera used for

wide-angle images and which will also capture photographic information outside of the frame of a picture a user sees in the camera app. That extra information will reportedly be briefly retained so a user can reframe a photo or perform other fixes that rely on computational computing. The three models 9 to 5 Mac says are coming. Use a lightning port, not USBC, as was speculated, might be about to come, and have the same screen resolutions as the models they replace. The site says the Taptic engine that provides force feedback will be improved in some unknown fashion. Separately, rumors have surfaced from Apple's supply chain that a 16-inch MacBook Pro might be coming in October, with a 3,072 by 1,920 pixel LCD along with some other laptop updates.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr banged a familiar drum this morning, claiming that law enforcement needed backdoors into encryption protocols that protect users. communications. At a security conference this morning, R said that the increased use of encryption puts American security at risk and that tech companies need to give law enforcement the ability to decrypt data. He said there have been enough dogmatic pronouncements that lawful access simply cannot be done. It can be and it must be. All security and encryption experts agree that it's impossible, not dogma, providing practical and theoretical detail about why that's so. nevertheless, governments persist that a golden backdoor key that only they possess and secure will not be misused or stolen.

And Barr and others in ostensibly democratically operated countries that nonetheless permit extra-legal and extrajudicial secret processes never address how backdoor access to encrypted communications would be used in undemocratic and totalitarian regimes under the dress of legal process in those countries. Senator Ron Wyden, a consistent, sensible voice on the topic, said, from the Senate floor this morning, quote, you can't only build a backdoor for the government. Once you weaken encryption with the backdoor, you make it far easier for criminals, hackers, and predators

to get into your digital life, end quote. He said that before, but he went a step further. And here's a little bit of a long passage. Today, I fear, rather, I expect that if we give this Attorney General and this president the unprecedented power to break encryption across the board and burrow into the most intimate details

of every American's life, they will abuse those powers. The public statements and the behavior of William Barr and Donald Trump, it is clear to me that they cannot be trusted with this kind of power. Tech companies and user privacy are always aligned, but on the matter of governments having access to encrypted communications, it nearly always is. Apple and others have a united or fairly united front.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, has consistently opposed proposals of the kind that Barr wants, A year ago, it said in a statement, cybersecurity experts have repeatedly proven that it's impossible to create any backdoor that couldn't be discovered and exploited by bad actors. It's why weakening any part of encryption weakens the whole security ecosystem. On the topic of privacy, security, and Facebook, the Verge reports that the company's Messenger Kids app, which is supposed to only let kids talk to a whitelisted group of people, had a flaw that let children participate in group chats that included unvetted strangers. The site says Facebook has been closing down these group chats and alerting users,

but Facebook hadn't made a public announcement until the verge asked for confirmation which Facebook provided. The bug didn't allow arbitrary people to initiate group chats, but rather someone that a kid was authorized to speak with could initiate a group chat that included other people with whom that kid was not authorized to speak. The Verge says this resulted in thousands of group chats with unauthorized users, whether the bug was present in December 2017 when the software was released or later isn't known. Facebook told The Verge, we recently notified some parents of Messenger Kids account users about a technical error that we detected

affecting a small number of group chats. Tech journalism legend Walt Mossberg tweeted, Here's Facebook's latest failure to protect privacy and security and to keep its promises, this time involving children. note that they didn't announce it publicly until confronted by the press, why should anyone trust this company on anything? Strong words. On a different government security front,

the National Security Agency or NSA will create a Cybersecurity Directorate launching in October. The idea of this directorate is to pull together siloed resources into one place and also emphasize a coordinated offensive strategy to eliminate threats and a stronger defensive strategy that will include greater sharing of information among allies. The NSA posted a fact about the new directorate. Yes, that's what 2019 is like. The NSA posts facts and said that it is, quote, charged with preventing and eradicating threats to national security systems and the defense industrial base. This group will coordinate activity better, making it more likely that it can detect and knock out foreign attacks as well as be better

prepared for them. That includes protecting the power grid, banking, and parts of the economy, as well as ensuring election integrity. Anne Newberger will be in charge. She was responsible for the NSA's efforts around the 2018 midterm elections to deter interference from Russia. This is a welcome bit of news, given how the Trump administration has played lip service

or denied the potential or actuality of Russian attempts to use electronic warfare to attack voting systems, but more generally in making sure that departmental fiefdoms don't prevent effective information sharing. Uber is testing an all-in-one subscription service that would combine all its current businesses into a $25 per month fee that would provide a variety of discounts across its car service, scooter and bike rentals, and Uber Eats food delivery. TechCrunch reports Uber is testing the subscription pass in San Francisco and Chicago in a few different versions. Subscribers would receive free delivery on Uber Eats orders, free or discounted scooter and bike rides, and discounts or fixed price guarantees on Uber car trips.

This expands on Ride Pass and option launched last October that reduces per trip costs with the payment of a monthly fee. Uber is wildly unprofitable, and its stock is currently hovering just above its IPO price of a few months ago. Nonetheless, its market cap is nearly $74 billion as I record this. Uber has a competitive struggle for passengers, so it can't just raise prices arbitrarily. While it would like to pay drivers, as little as possible, it's clearly hit that limit, too, and New York may be part of a trend with its requirement passed earlier this year to pay out a minimum hourly rate regardless of rides. The company needs to find a path to profit as it burns money and recurring subscription revenue that would provide a soft lock-in for customers who value it could be part of a greater alliance of businesses that it operates or partners with.

The next story requires a little bit of explanation. Otherwise, it sounds like tech jargon soup. A judge ruled that a case against AT&T involving cryptocurrency, and sim swapping can go forward. Michael Turpin sued AT&T last year for $224 million because he alleges that the telecom firm's employees didn't stop hackers from gaining access to his phone number. He says he lost $24 million in cryptocurrency as a result

and wants $200 million in punitive damages. Turpin, however, has already won a judgment in May 2019 for $76 million against the person alleged to have committed the actual theft. That person is facing a number. of criminal charges. If the judge's decision stands and Turpin wins his case, it could prompt similar lawsuits from others who have faced losses in cryptocurrency and in other ways because of AT&T's alleged failure to protect accounts. The hijacking works like this. Many online accounts are

protected by two-factor authentication in which you first log into an app or website with a standard username and password and then receive or generate a token that is further verification. Depending on the site or service, the token can be generated by. by an authentication app, by a hardware dongle, using a proprietary method that requires previously registering apps or devices, or by a text message. It's that last method that's problematic, because text messages are sent to phone numbers,

and it's relatively easy in hacking terms, to hijack a phone number by using social engineering, i.e., talking someone into something, or telecom account hacking to get the number transferred from one SIM to another. A SIM is the subscriber identity module used on most phone numbers, networks worldwide, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. Sprint and Verizon use a different system but can still transfer phone numbers among devices via its centralized network.

Turpin claims that an account hijacker was able to get an AT&T store employee to do a sim swap even without providing necessary personal and password information. In fact, he claims it was done twice. Cryptocurrency can be stored on disconnected offline drives as so-called cold storage where the underlying data can't be stolen. But many people, especially sophisticated traders who are actively engaged with moving cryptocurrency back and forth keep currency in online wallets. That's led to massive heists when Bitcoin and other exchanges are cracked. But it can also be an issue when individual accounts are hijacked.

Over $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency, ostensibly the price at exchanges at the time at which it was stolen has been lost across the history of the technology through the end of 2018, according to CoinDisc. That's a lot of ones and zeros. Finally, smiley face, thumbs up, taco, taco, crying cat face. Using emojis at work isn't unprofessional, nor is it a distraction. Chris Mim summarizes research and company culture at the Wall Street Journal, showing that using emojis well is an aid to better working relationships and better understandings. Researchers from Columbia, that's the country, not the university, flag emoji would help right here,

recently confirmed what social scientists have speculated, that we process emoji in the part of the brain that processes faces. Now, presumably, that's for emoji with faces. I don't think I think a bowl of rice or a floppy disk has a face. However, every company has its own dialect of emojis. Mims paraphrases Ella Glickson, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, who says in some, if you don't know the local emoji parlance, attempting to use one can make you seem unsurious and damage your subsequent ability

to collaborate with others. Well, it's all Greek to me. Hashtag lamb sandwich tahini sauce. And that's the news. I'm Glenn Fleischman, and thank you for letting me talk in your ears for the last four episodes. Brian McCullough will be bringing back his mollifluous tones on desk duty tomorrow, refreshed and full of salmon. You can find me in the future at Glenn F. That's with two ends on Twitter or at Glog, glog, glenf.com on the interweb tubes.

Thank you to the editors at TechMeme who tweet out every headline they post every hour of the day at TechMeme. It's a great way to keep current. Thanks again for giving me your attention and have a great evening.