Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, Apr. 17, 2018 - Big Changes Coming to Apple News

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

Apple is readying a new subscription reading app, tech companies pledge not to help governments wage cyberwar, Facebook outlines its web tracking, and Netflix earnings. Tweets: @DaveLeeBBC, @geoffreyfowler Stories:These Ex-Spies Are Harvesting Facebook Photos For A Massive Facial Recognition Database (Forbes)Hard Questions: What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Why? (Facebook Newsroom) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 Right Home for Tuesday, April 17th, 2018. Today is Apple readying a new subscription reading app. Tech companies pledge not to help governments wage cyber war.

Facebook outlines its web tracking practices, and Netflix has an earnings blowout. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today, 34 tech companies signed what they are calling a tech accord, pledging not to help any government, including the U.S., launch cyber attacks against any other government or entity. The agreement is being called the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, and companies led by Cisco, Dell, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, and Nokia, all signed on to promise to defend customers around the world from hacks, regardless of who might be behind the hack. The agreement sets, quote, high cybersecurity standards that any,

company looking to join the Accord must adhere to. The devastating attacks from the past year demonstrate that cybersecurity is not just about what any single company can do, but also about what we can all do together. So said Microsoft President Brad Smith. Quote, this tech sector accord will help us take a principal path towards more effective steps to work together and defend customers around the world. I think what we have learned in the past few years is that we need to work together in much bigger ways, Mr. Smith told the New York Times, quote, we need to approach this in a principled way, and if we expect to get governments to do that, we have to start with some principles ourselves, end quote. Signers of the accord agreed to, quote, protect against tampering with and

exploitation of technology products and services during their development, design, distribution, and use. And other technology companies are welcome to join this consortium, but it's notable that among the tech companies not signing on to the accord, at least at this time, are Google, Apple, and Amazon. A couple of follow-ups to previous stories. If you'll remember a few weeks ago, we learned that Apple had acquired the so-called Netflix for magazines, the app texture. This morning, Mark German and Jerry Smith at Bloomberg are reporting that Apple plans to make use of texture quickly, integrating it into Apple News in order to launch a premium subscription offering. Texture currently allows users to subscribe to more than 200 magazines for $9.99 a month.

Apple is reportedly integrating texture staff into its Apple News team and is working on an upgraded Apple News app that will include a subscription feature with Apple sharing some of the revenue with publishers. The piece notes that Apple is looking to grow revenue in its services division, which grew 23% last year to $30 billion. Apple reportedly wants that number to reach $50 billion by 2021. In a recent earnings call, Apple revealed to analysts that it had 240 million paid subscribers to its various services, and subscribers were growing 58% year over year.

Obviously, a large number of those current subscribers represent users of iCloud storage, and Apple Music, which recently crossed the 40 million subscriber mark. Also, if you'll remember last week, I told you about Gray Key. The tool law enforcement agencies have been buying to unlock iPhones for the purposes of police investigations. As we said, Gray Shift, the company that sells Grey Key, claims that it is able to unlock some iPhones in as little as two hours, but that others take as long as three days to crack. It seems that Gray Key uses some sort of brute force technique to keep guessing passcodes until they hit the right set of digits. Apple, of course, has set iPhones to lock after a certain number of wrong passcode entries.

So the true hack of Gray Key seems to be that it has somehow figured out a way to bypass this and simply keep guessing passcodes in rapid succession. So motherboard and other outlets are suggesting if you feel like your phone, contains some really sensitive data, it's probably time to upgrade from a four-digit passcode or even a six-digit passcode. On Twitter, Assistant Professor of Cryptography at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, Matthew Green, pointed out the math behind this. Using a brute-force guessing technique, it takes on average six and a half minutes to crack a four-digit code. A six-digit code takes on average 11 hours. 8 digits, 56 days, 10 digits, an average of 4,629 days, in other words, 12 years.

That is all assuming the code was a truly random set of numbers and not something easily guessable like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And of course, you can do better than that if you move beyond simple digits. Ryan Duff, the director of Cyber Solutions for 0.3 security, told motherboard, quote, people should use an alphanumeric passcode that isn't susceptible to a dictionary attack, and that is at least seven characters long and has a mix of at least uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers. Adding symbols is recommended, and the more complicated and longer the passcode, the better, end quote. If you want to make your iPhone more secure, motherboard helpfully shared the steps to do so, simply go to settings, click on touch ID and passcode, click on change,

passcode, click on password options at the bottom of the screen, then tap on custom alpha-numeric code. Now when you enter your new passcode, it can include letters, numbers, and symbols. Netflix released earnings numbers yesterday, reporting revenue of $3.7 billion for the first quarter, which is an increase of 40.4% year over year. The company reported Global Net subscriber additions of 7.41 million, which is an increase of 50% year over year, and was ahead of its own 6.35 million forecast. Netflix's net income rose to $290 million or $0.64 a share, up from $178.2 million or 40 cents per share a year earlier. Wall Street was impressed at the time of this recording about noon today. Netflix shares were up

more than 8%. Hi M. Siegel, an analyst at Elizar Advisors, told Reuters, told Reuters, quote, I don't think this is a one-time thing. It's very similar to the results we saw last quarter. It's getting better, end quote. Subscribers are accelerating even at higher pricing, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfeld said.

Quote, content spend is having a direct effect on subscriber growth. In the Investor Conference call after earnings, Netflix CEO Reid Hastings says that even though Netflix is increasingly lumped together with other companies like Facebook and Google as a tech behemoth, he says that Netflix is somewhat insulated from the controversies swirling around Silicon Valley generally at the moment. Quote, I think we're substantially inoculated from the other issues that are happening in the industry, Hastings said. And that's great. I'm very glad that we built this business not to be advertising support.

but to be subscription. We're very different from an ad-supported business, end quote. One of the ways Netflix is different, Hastings pointed out, is that it is expecting to spend $10 billion this year developing original content, but only about $1.3 billion on technology. Netflix is currently the top performer on the S&P 500 this year, gaining more than 60%.

The company's market capitalization is 137.2. billion dollars, more than double a year ago. Netflix now boasts 125 million subscribers worldwide. Yesterday, TaskRabbit, the online marketplace that lets you hire freelance labor and is owned by furniture chain IKEA, reported that it had been hit by cybercriminals. On account of this, it temporarily took down its app and its website. All customers of TaskRabbit were urged to change their passwords, and the company also notified all the so-called taskers in its marketplace to do the same and said it would compensate them for any tasks that couldn't be completed because of the downtime. Quote, as an immediate precaution, if you used

the same password on other sites or apps as you did for TaskRabbit, we recommend you change those now, TaskRabbit told users in an email. We regret any inconvenience this may cause our clients and taskers and will reschedule any uncompleted tasks as soon as possible. For any tasker who had a task scheduled today and is unable to complete the task, we will compensate them appropriately." The company is now reported to be working with an unnamed cybersecurity firm to get to the bottom of the breach. Forbes has a profile of the surveillance firm Terrigence, which is a U.S. government vendor and has been building a massive facial recognition database from photos it has been able to

freely accumulate from sources like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other websites. Terragents has a facial recognition product it calls face int that boasts of a database of thousands of profiles and pictures, quote, harvested from such online sources as YouTube, Facebook, and open and closed forums all over the globe, end quote. Quoting from the Forbes profile, these faces were extracted from as many as 35,000 videos and photos of terrorist training camps, motivational clips, and terror attacks. That same marketing page was online in 2013, according to the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine, indicating the product is at least five years old. The age of the product also suggests far more than 35,000 videos and photos have been rated by the Face Int Technology by now, end quote.

Terragents is now owned by an Israeli company named Varent, which is a longtime vendor for U.S. government agencies like the NSA, the U.S. Navy, and other intelligence and security. agencies. Jay Stanley, the senior policy analyst at the ACLU, told Forbes that face-int, quote, raises the stakes of face recognition. It intensifies the potential negative consequences. When you contemplate face recognition that's everywhere, we have to think about what that's going to mean for us. If private companies are scraping photos and combining them with personal info in order to make judgments about people, are you a terrorist, or how likely are you to be a shoplifter, or anything in between, then it exposes everyone

to the risk of being misidentified or correctly identified as being misjudged, end quote. Jennifer Lynch, the senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Forbes, quote, we know that face recognition

performs poorly with people of color, and especially with women and those with darker skin tones. Combining these two known problems with face recognition, there is a high chance this technology would regulate misidentify people as terrorists or criminals.

This could impact the travel and civil rights of tens of thousands of law-abiding travelers who would then have to prove they are not the terrorist or criminal the system has identified them to be. Following CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress last week, Facebook yesterday outlined its data collection policies and web tracking of users in a detailed 1500-word blog post. Facebook's project management director David Becer wrote, Whether it's information from apps and websites or information you share with other people on Facebook,

we want to put you in control and be transparent about what information Facebook has and how it is used. As many outlets pointed out in the post, Bacer describes in great detail how data is passed through Facebook every time you use it, but in almost every paragraph he took pains to point out that essentially everyone does what Facebook does. Quoting again from Bacer, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. all have similar like and share buttons to help people share things on their services. Google has a popular analytics service, and Amazon, Google, and Twitter all offer login features. These companies and many others also offer advertising services. In fact, most websites and apps send the same information to multiple companies each time you visit them, end quote.

So it seems like Facebook wants to make the very valid point that a lot of the stuff it does that people are increasingly finding creepy, is basically just standard practice in Silicon Valley generally. The BBC's Silicon Valley reporter David Lee tweeted, Facebook is seemingly done with being the only tech company in the dock here, and it's hard to blame them. Washington Post tech columnist Jeffrey Fowler tweeted, Facebook's hard questions blog tackles what shouldn't be so hard to answer, what data does Facebook collect.

But in terms of giving us control, all it says is we can stop Facebook from using this info to target ads, not that we can stop it from collecting. And Slate's Will Aramis pointed out, quote, Facebook's recent blog posts on how newsfeed works was a snappy three-minute video with cute graphics. Its new blog post on what data does Facebook collect when I'm not using Facebook and why

is 1,445 words of confusing text. That's all for today. The TechMame Right Home was produced by Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. and I had the help of the TechMeme editors. Visit TechMame.com anytime day or night for the latest tech news headlines.