Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, 7/10 - Netflix Smart Downloads

Episode Date: July 10, 2018

Microsoft unveils a new Surface tablet, police can probably still break into iPhones, YouTube fights fake news, the new silicon gold rush, and Netflix makes binging even easier. Links:Microsoft’s $399 Surface Go aims to stand out from iPads or Chromebooks (The Verge)Microsoft's $399 Surface Go is here to nuke Apple's iPad (Mashable)The AI revolution has spawned a new chips arms race (Ars Technica)Netflix Binge-Watching Just Got Even Easier: Now It Automatically Downloads New Episodes To Watch Offline (BuzzFeed) 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 10th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Microsoft unveils a new Surface tablet.

Police can probably still break into iPhones for the time being. YouTube fights fake news. The new Silicon Gold Rush is on, and Netflix makes binging even easier. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Late last night, Microsoft unveiled a new 10-inch 390-190. $19. Surface Go tablet with a USBC port, microSD slot, and a Pentium Gold CPU. Lots of people are headlining this by calling it Microsoft's iPad killer. But I'm not sure that that gets it exactly right.

As Wired says, Surface Go is an attempt to bring most of the premium features of a $1,000 Surface Pro to something that's both ultra-portable and more affordable. In other words, it's an iPad competitor if an iPad was trying harder to be a full laptop replacement. Like the Surface Pro, the Surface Go comes with the detachable keyboard slash cover that we're used to. It has a built-in kickstand, pen support, and the three-to-two aspect ratio that we're used to as well. There's even a so-called Surface Mobile Mouse that you can buy separately. But at 9.6 by 6.9 by 0.33 inches and weighing in at 1.15 pounds, this is about as portable a device as you can get. And it's the cheapest surface that you can get. Again, the 64-gabyte version starts at 399 and ships with Windows 10 home in S mode.

You can pre-order today and it will ship August 2nd. There's no LTE model yet, but that is expected, later this year. It feels to me that with this device, Microsoft is carving out its own corner of the market. It's not exactly iPad pure tabletry, and it's not quite in the Chromebook cheap laptop sweet spot. Here's Tom Warren's take from The Verge, quote, Microsoft appears to be targeting the area of the PC market between budget and premium. The Surface Go, like the $799 Surface Pro, is a tablet with a keyboard and stylus support that offers more than a regular iPad or Chromebook. It's still dropping into a tricky part of the PC market, though, because the $400 to $700 price point is where PC makers typically try to shove their slower components into a more

premium chassis. Microsoft is pulling the same trick, and the $399 base price is a typical marketing move meant to generate interest, with the hope that you'll buy the $549 model instead. Owen Williams, who has recently, in a high-profile way, made the switch back to Microsoft machines, had this to say in his newsletter. Quote, I'm already in the surface ecosystem myself and like the look of the surface go because it's a mix of both worlds. A real PC merged with an ultra-portable

but with LTE as well, even if that's shipping later. The form factor lends itself to a much more casual audience and I can imagine this selling extremely well with students, but what's not clear is if anyone is actually looking for something like this. If you're looking for this, you're also likely considering an iPad, but perhaps that's the point, an alternative, end quote. Mashable's Raymond Wong got a hands-on with the Surface Go,

and with all the caveats that will need to wait for more testing, his first impression was, quote, I liked what I saw. The value also seems to be much better than a 10.5-inch iPad Pro, which starts at $650 without keyboard. For the same price, you can get a Surface Go with 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage, for $550 and a keyboard, end quote.

Paul Haddad tweeted, quote, The iPad is a better tablet than the Surface Go. The Surface Go is a better computer than the iPad. I want one. As you might be aware, yesterday Apple released iOS 11.4.1 with the usual bug fixes and slight performance tweaks, but the big feature was supposed to be USB restricted mode,

which is designed to stop. data transfers over the lightning cable after an iOS device has been locked for an hour. The intention is to stymie tools like Graykey, which law enforcement agencies have been using to break into devices. Well, in a matter of hours, researchers at cybersecurity firm ElcomSoft had found a loophole that resets USB restricted modes one hour counter, and the loophole is pretty simple. All you have to do is plug in a USB accessory within that hour window. for example, Apple's own lightning to USB 3 camera adapter.

And voila, the timer is reset. ElcomSoft's Oleg Afanin described it this way, quote, we performed several tests and can now confirm that USB restricted mode is maintained through reboots and persist software restores via recovery mode. In other words, we have found no obvious way to break USB restricted mode once it's already engaged. What we discovered is that iOS will reset the USB restrictive mode countdown timer even if one connects the iPhone to an untrusted USB accessory, one that has never been paired to the iPhone before. Well, in fact, the accessories do not require pairing at all. In other words,

once the police officer seizes an iPhone, he or she would need to immediately connect that iPhone to a compatible USB accessory to prevent USB restricted mode lock after one hour. Importantly, this only helps if the iPhone has still not entered USB restricted mode, end quote. Most security experts think this was just an oversight on Apple's part, a pretty silly one, but probably something they will probably fix Toot Sweet. Until then, however, if law enforcement cares to go through the trouble, tools like Greaky are probably still functional, even after this most recent update. In a major blog post last night, YouTube announced the steps that it is taking to improve the way it handles breaking news in order to cut down on the spread of misinformation and hoaxes.

beginning in the U.S., YouTube will now show relevant articles next to developing news stories, and internationally, it will link to fact-checking articles when searching for videos around topics that tend to attract bogus theories, topics like, say, the moon landing. This is all part of a $25 million investment that YouTube is making in its news experience. That involves actually working with outside news outlets to fight the spread of fake news. YouTube says that after a breaking news event occurs, they will show previews of news articles in the search results on YouTube that link to authoritative posts by trusted news institutions. Users will also see information from the likes of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.

And YouTube is straight up giving money to help news organizations build out video operations of their own, quoting from the blog post, provided on an application basis to news organizations of all types, these grants will enable our partners to build key capabilities, train staff on video best practices, enhance production facilities, and develop formats optimized for online video, end quote. As Casey Newton opined in his daily newsletter,

quote, these changes are encouraging because they acknowledge the realities of the modern media environment better than YouTube ever has to date. The first change acknowledges that video lags text in the wake of catastrophes, and so offers text a privileged place on a video platform. platform. The second change acknowledges that settled historical events are often the subject of insane conspiracies, and so it surrounds these conspiracies with facts. The third change, which comes with 25 million in grants, acknowledges that video creation is expensive and difficult,

and publishers need help, not just in video creation, but in creating sustainable businesses, end quote. Casey says these moves are not nearly enough to solve the problems of fake news on YouTube, but they're a start. It's been a while since we've spoken about the fallout from GDPR. But here's something I heard rumblings about many weeks ago that feels to me like a pretty major case of fallout. If you've ever registered a domain name, then you're probably familiar with ICANN,

the U.S.-based nonprofit that runs the global Who Is database. Essentially, you can look up who owns any website thanks to ICAN and who is. But in the first decision applying GDPR and the real world, world, a German court has rejected ICANN's request to compel EPAG, a German domain registrar, to collect contact information from people who register domains through their services. Epag refused to pass on this information because it felt that that violated Article 5 of GDPR, and the German court has agreed.

Apparently, European regulators have long felt that ICAN's who is service needs updating, but many observers feel that ICANN has sort of been in. in denial that GDPR would actually affect what it does. Everything seems to be in limbo now because of this ruling, but it seems to me the ability to know who is behind what website is a pretty fundamental aspect of the web that might now be in peril, at least in Europe. This is a bit of a long read, but an important one.

There's a piece up in Ars Technica discussing how the rise of AI and machine learning has spawned a whole new arms race among tech giants and chip startups to basically own the next generation market for processors. As they say early on in the piece, there's no X-86 in the AI chip market yet, no gold standard against which all others are measured, and that is leading to a bit of a gold rush.

Everyone is trying to get a piece of this new AI-centric silicon. We've spoken recently about Intel reorienting itself for the future, about Microsoft, Google, Apple, and reportedly even Amazon working on AI and machine learning chips of their own. And according to The New York Times, there are now more than 45 chip startups competing to own this market as well. Quoting from the Ars Technica piece, Why the sudden explosion in hardware after years of chipmaker stasis? After all, there is general consensus that Nvidia's GPUs are excellent for AI and are widely used already. Why do we need more chips now?

and so many different ones at that? The answer is a bit complex, just like AI itself. The actual task of processing AI is a very different process from standard computing or GPU processing, hence the perceived need for specialized chips. An x86 CPU can do AI, but it does a task in 12 steps when only three are required. A GPU in some cases can also be overkill.

AI calculations can be done with simple precision calculations, So while CPUs and GPUs can both do it very well, they are in fact overkill for the task. A single precision chip can do the work and do it in a much smaller lower power footprint, end quote. If you want a crash course on how AI and machine learning actually function, check out this piece to get an understanding of how this new market is evolving to meet the new AI and machine learning realities. If history is any guide, this will be an enormous market that probably will only have room for one or two dominant players. Quoting from the end of the Ars Technica piece,

there will be a tough foot race. I agree, IBM's McCready says. There has to be a narrowing down. One day, that may mean this new chip field looks a lot like those old chip fields, the X-86, Nvidia GPU, Arm Worlds. But for now, this AI chip race has just gotten off the starting line

and its mini entrance intend to keep running, just to keep up. I've got a grab bag, of startup stories here that don't involve any of the usual names. There's a new unicorn in the land and its name is Toast. The Boston-based company makes management software for restaurants, has some big-name customers like Jamba Juice, Dos Toros Takaria, and many more, and has a presence in some tens of thousands of restaurants across the country. And with a $115 million series D round led by T-Roe Price, Toast has achieved a $1.4 billion valuation.

As the restaurant industry is estimated at around an $800 billion industry in the U.S., Toast thinks there is plenty of room for growth and said its sales are up 150% in the last year. Toast CEO Chris Comparado says the company has the scale to go public already, but isn't prioritizing that as an option at the moment. New York-based ad tech company MediaMath has raised a monster round of its own, with $225 million coming in, from investment firm Searchlight Capital Partners, thereby making MediaMath an official unicorn as well. As the Wall Street Journal describes it, MediaMath operates a demand-side platform, or DSP, technology that lets advertisers and their agencies buy online ads

using automated systems, and a data management platform or DMP, which lets advertisers store and analyze their data. MediaMath has raised a total of $500 million to date. Finally, Philo is a low-cost, over-the-top streaming TV service that just raised a $40 million series C round, led by some of its existing investors, AMC networks, Discovery, and Viacom. As Variety describes it, FILO offers a so-called skinny bundle

aimed at people who are scared off by the high price of cable packages. For just $16 a month, FILO gives you 40 entertainment and lifestyle channels, and for $20 a month you can get 49 total channels. Philo can achieve those prices because it stays away from offering expensive sports channels and broadcast TV. Philo launched last fall on Roku devices, the web, and iOS devices. And in addition to the funding, Philo has just announced that it is also coming soon to the Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV devices. Netflix just made binge watching a bit easier. A feature called Smart Downloads is rolling out today in the Android app version of Netflix.

that will automatically download shows you begin watching so you can binge them on your device later on, even when you're offline. So let's say you download an episode or two of Stranger Things just to give it a try. Smart download will automatically download the next episode in the background in anticipation of you watching more,

and it will also automatically delete episodes you've already watched. Quote, downloading is a very manual process today, said Netflix's Director of Product Innovation, Cameron Johnson. and you have to manually go back and delete episodes. Johnson told Venturebeat, quote, we know how annoying it can be to go through all your apps and delete files you no longer need. We also understand that when it comes to Netflix, the faster you can get to the next episode you want to watch, the better, end quote.

The feature only works when you're connected over Wi-Fi, so don't worry about just burning through your data caps. And it only works for shows and serieses, not movies. You can toggle smart downloads on and off if you don't like them. But in none of the stories on this could I find any definitive word on when this feature would make it to iOS, though Mac Rumors confidently states in its piece that the feature will be coming, quote, later this year.

So my request to the technology gods is to not make too much news tomorrow afternoon. I have to gear up for the England-Croat semifinal, of course. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough, and hopefully when I record this sign-off tomorrow, it will be one step closer to football coming home. Talk to you then.