Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - Amazon Vs. The ACLU

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

Another chip flaw found, privacy activists turn their attention to Amazon, ZTE might be saved by the Trump Administration, Zuckerberg’s European sojourn is a damp squib, and now you can mute annoying people on Instagram. Stories from: @katienotopoulos, @sarafischer Links:The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica (Slate)Impatient, distracted consumers upend the media landscape (Axios)Overall Q1 US Smartphone Sales Dip 11% YoY, Apple Grows a Record 16% YoY (Counterpoint)Instagram Finally Adds A Mute Button, Saving Countless Friendships (BuzzFeed) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors 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 Tech Meme Ride Home for Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018. Today, another chip flaw is found. Privacy activists turn their attention to Amazon.

ZTE might be saved by the Trump administration. Zuckerberg's European sojourn is a damp squib. And now you can mute annoying people on Instagram. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before European Parliament was today, and frankly it was a big nothing burger, largely due to the format of the meeting. Roundtable style, EU legislators spent the first hour of the event taking turns, posing questions. But Zuckerberg was only required to answer them once everyone was done.

So with just a half an hour of the schedule remaining, he was essentially able to cherry-pick the questions he wanted to answer. And frankly, the answers were the same he has given over and over again since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. Some of the legislators seemed to be upset that their questions weren't answered. Quote, I asked you six yes or no questions and got not a single answer. And of course, well, you asked for this format for a reason, end quote. That was what one member of parliament shouted at Zuckerberg. Well, I guess we know why Zuckerberg agreed to make this appearance, but not go before

British Parliament, where, in theory, questioning would have been a little more contentious. and frankly, EU legislators, the fact that you made the U.S. Congress look like downright hard-boiled district attorneys in comparison is really saying something. Given the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is in Europe, not for vacation, but because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I thought that Will Aramis had an opinion piece up in Slate

that made an interesting point. I think it's summed up by his tweet about the piece, quote, Facebook handed data to shady third parties about your Facebook likes and profiles. It stopped in 2015. Your wireless company is handing data to shady third parties about where you are at all times. It's still doing this today.

And you can't opt out, end quote. He's referring to the security breaches around companies like Securus and Location Smart that we've spoken about in recent weeks, where essentially the location data of your phone of where you are right this very minute was potentially compromised. Will wonders why that's not a bigger scandal than Cambridge Analytica.

Quoting from the piece, you might think that the major wireless carriers would be facing intense pressure to account for their lax handling of consumers' data. You might think the story would be all over the newspaper's front pages and cable news. You might think their CEOs would be hounded by the media as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was after the Cambridge Analytica story broke. you might think they'd be dragooned into testifying before Congress, end quote. So far there's been none of that.

So far. In all of these privacy and data controversies and scandals, Amazon has remained aloof. Jeff Bezos has even commented publicly about how he enjoys having a business model that doesn't involve hoaring out his customers' information and data. Well, Amazon might not be above the fray any longer. Civil rights groups are increasingly voicing concerns

about facial recognition technology that Amazon sells called recognition. That's recognition with a K. According to Freedom of Information requests, Amazon has been selling recognition to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando. Recognition falls under the Amazon Web Services wing, and the technology is apparently used by places like amusement parks to sift through surveillance footage to find lost children, say. Amazon introduced recognition in 2016,

and it uses pattern recognition and artificial intelligence to scan images for matches. But civil liberties groups are concerned that by selling to law enforcement, Amazon's recognition technology would enable police state surveillance tactics. A group of civil rights organizations today released a letter which said, quote, We demand that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country, end quote. Amazon spokeswoman Nina Lindsay told the Washington Post in response, quote,

Amazon requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services. When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customers' right to use our services, end quote. Does it feel like the stories about hacks, exploits, and security leaks never end? Late yesterday, Microsoft and Google jointly disclosed a new security flaw, that it says is similar to the meltdown and specter flaws that were disclosed earlier this year. So again, these flaws are in the chips themselves. This time, however, Intel says it has a patch ready to go. The problem is, like last time, the fix that it has prepared has the potential to slightly slow down CPU performance.

If enabled, we've observed a performance impact of approximately 2 to 8% based on overall scores for benchmarks, like Sysmark, 2014 SE, and spec integer rate on client 1 and server 2 test systems. That was Leslie Culbertson, Intel's security chief. As the Verge put it, quote, end users and particularly system administrators will have to pick between security or optimal performance. The choice, like previous variants of Spector, will come down to individual systems and servers and the fact that this new variant appears to be less of a risk than the CPU flaws that were discovered earlier this year. So in essence, most of us probably don't have to worry about this because it will mostly be a concern for enterprise users. Long-term Intel is redesigning its processors

to prevent the sort of flaws like Spectre and this new flaw, which is being called variant four. Intel's next generation, zion processors will have new built-in hardware protections. Like the previous issues, this new vulnerability has to do with something called speculative execution, which is a feature of modern computing architecture. What is speculative execution, you might ask? It has to do with how your CPU executes commands ahead of time to make your computer feel like it's faster. The best that I've seen this summed up for laypeople

was on Twitter by Scott Hanselman, hat tip to Owen Williams for turning me on to this. Imagine a husband and wife having a conversation. The husband says, you know how we finish each other's sandwiches? The wife interjects. The husband replies, No, sentences.

But you guessed sandwiches, and it was in your mind for an instant. And it was a password. And someone stole it while it was there, fleeting. Oh, that is bad, the wife says. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. and China have sketched out the broad outlines of a deal to lift the ban on Chinese phone maker ZTE

in exchange for major management changes and fines. If you'll remember, ZTE is the fourth largest maker of mobile phones for the U.S. market, and it buys a significant number of components and parts from U.S. companies. But after the U.S. government said that it had found ZTE had violated U.S. sanctions by doing business with Iran and North Korea, U.S. companies were banned from doing business with ZTE, basically putting the company on the brink of oblivion. According to the journal's sources, details are still being hammered out,

Quote, Beijing has also offered to remove tariffs on billions of dollars of U.S. farm products as part of the negotiations, although one person said the White House didn't offer up any quid pro quo. The White House was meticulous in affirming that the case is a law enforcement matter and not a bargaining chip in negotiations, the person said. Quick, what's the most widely adopted mobile payment system in America? Is it Apple Pay? Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Square, maybe? No, the mobile payment system with the greatest adoption in the U.S. is made by Starbucks.

Starbucks's mobile pay service, which launched all the way back in 2011, has 23.4 million users in the U.S., according to a new report by e-marketer. Apple Pay is close behind with 22 million users. Google Pay and Samsung Pay had 11.1 and 9.9 million users, respectively. Interestingly, while it's growing, e-marketers' data shows that mobile payment systems aren't exactly taking over the world overnight. 25% of U.S. smartphone users aged 14 and older will use a mobile payment service at least once this year. Users of mobile payment systems are increasing 14.5% year over year, but mobile payments might ramp up faster over the next few years, as more and more players are going to try to follow Starbucks' leave. According to e-marketer analyst Cindy Liu,

retailers are increasingly creating their own payment apps which allow them to capture valuable data about their users. They can also build in rewards and perks to boost customer loyalty, end quote. Sort of like how Starbucks's system is mobile payment and rewards and loyalty all in one. Over at Axios, Sarah Fisher has an excellent piece up looking at how the rise of streaming and our on-demand culture has upended the media landscape. There's a link in the show notes, of course. Here are some of the fascinating nuggets that I pulled out of the piece.

More than half of all of our total media time is now spent inside of apps, and while we're there, 90% of that time is spent in the top five most popular apps. Google and Facebook alone count for eight of the top 10 mobile apps. When I talk about how the big tech companies are writing a tidal wave of history, this is what I'm talking about. Our time is spent online now. The ad money will follow us. Also, there are now as many Netflix subscribers as cable TV subscribers in the U.S.

The average American cable package is around $92, while the average streaming package is roughly $40. So cord cutting really will cut into Hollywood's bottom line. 177.7.7 million U.S. adults, or 70% of the total population, will regularly use another digital service while watching TV. 58% of people admit to browsing the web while watching TV, so we're distracted consumers of content. Our attention spans are everywhere.

67% of TV viewers switch to another channel when an ad comes on, so not only is it harder for brands to track us down, it's harder to hold our attention once they find us. But despite the fact that there's an absolute plethora of things to watch these days, 500 scripted TV shows right now, according to Fisher's piece, 62% of surveyed American consumers say they have a hard time finding

something to watch. Read the piece. It's chock full of data points that makes so much of what we talk about on this show makes sense. Why is Disney looking to buy Fox? Why is AT&T trying to buy Time Warner? Why are Facebook and Google worth half a trillion dollars apiece?

This is why. The media landscape is absolutely being turned on its ear. Another quick data dump that will help you understand the contours of the current tech landscape. Analysts have long been anticipating that we would reach a saturation point for smartphones, at least in developed markets. Well, according to Counterpoint Research, that moment is probably upon us.

According to a recent research report from Counterpoint, in quarter one of this year, U.S. smartphone sales dropped 11% year over year to 38.7 million handsets. previous to this year, cell phone sales in a single quarter had never dipped below 40 million units in about three years. Interestingly, the growth part of the market is at the high end. And who owns the high end? Apple. Apple actually shipped a record 16 million iPhones in the U.S.

an increase of 16% year over year. That's the first time ever that Apple has reached those numbers in the U.S. in a single quarter, according to Counterpoint. The high end of the smartphone market, representing phones costing more than $800, grew to represent 28% of the overall ecosystem. Of the top 10 best-selling smartphones in the U.S., according to Counterpoint, iPhone models took six of the top 10 slots. Samsung Galaxy models took three of the top slots,

and the Motorola E4 was the sole other phone to even crack the top 10. Finally today, Instagram is rolling out. a new feature that will allow you to mute other users so their posts won't show up in your feed without having to unfollow them to achieve the same effect. You might know that it's been possible to mute someone's stories by tapping and holding on their profile icon, but now you can mute their photos as well. Instagram users have long asked for a mute button similar to what Twitter has, and of course Facebook allows you to unfollow without unfriending.

This new mute feature is only now rolling out so you might not. see it yet, but when it does show up in your app, all you have to do is tap the three dots on the top right-hand side of someone's photo, and under report or unfollow, you'll now see a mute option and be given the choice of just muting posts or muting posts and stories. The muted user won't be notified that you've shushed them, and you'll still be able to receive DMs from them. So you'll be able to get peace of mind in your Instagram feed without having to worry about burning any actual personal bridges. That's all for today, everybody.

I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Thanks as always for listening.