Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/26 - Bad Guys Can’t Use iPhones

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Facebook bans ads around the Cornavirus, a deeper dive into how the Coronavirus crisis might be affecting iPhone development, Bob Iger is no longer Disney’s leader (kinda), why Waymo is hiring like crazy in hopes of a self-driving breakthrough, and if you see someone using an iPhone in a mystery movie, guess what? They’re probably not the bad guy. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com TryGrasshopper.com/ride Links: Facebook is banning ads that promise to cure the coronavirus (BusinessInsider) Coronavirus clouds Apple's timeline for new iPhones (Reuters) Disney has a new CEO, but its old CEO isn’t going away quite yet (Recode) Inside Waymo’s Hiring Binge (The Information) Plume raises $85 million to bring smarter Wi-Fi networks to more homes (VentureBeat) Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain (Vice) Smithsonian Institute just released 2.8 million high-quality images for free (TNW) Apple won’t let bad guys use iPhones in movies, says Knives Out director (The Verge) Jif settles the great debate with a GIF peanut butter jar (CNN Business) 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 Right Home for Wednesday, February 26th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook bans ads around coronavirus. A deeper dive into how the coronavirus crisis might be affecting iPhone development. Bob Eiger is no longer Disney's leader, kind of, why Waymo is hiring like crazy in hopes of a self-driving breakthrough. And if you see someone using an iPhone in a mystery movie, guess what? They're probably not the bad guy. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Facebook says it will now ban ads that promise to cure. or prevent COVID-19, the coronavirus. Quote, in a statement, a spokesperson told Business Insider,

we recently implemented a policy to prohibit ads that refer to the coronavirus and create a sense of urgency, like implying a limited supply or guaranteeing a cure or prevention. We also have policies for surfaces like marketplace that prohibit similar behavior, end quote. And quoting the verge, the statement comes less than a month after the company announced that would be removing misinformation about the new coronavirus from both its Facebook and Instagram platforms. At the time, it said that this policy would include any content about fake cures or prevention methods or misleading claims about what health resources are available, but it didn't mention

whether its policies also covered advertising on its platform. Today's statement clarifies its position. Facebook's position on coronavirus misinformation is similar to its position on anti-vaccination content. Last year, it said it would remove anti-vaccine groups. It would remove anti-vaccine groups and pages from its recommendations, and that it would not allow ads to target users based on related terms. However, doubts have been raised about Facebook's policing. BuzzFeed news reported in January that some anti-vaccination ads still appear on the platform which Facebook claimed did not violate its policies, end quote. And several people on Twitter made this point, quoting Petty Cosgrave, Facebook bans ads that promise to cure coronavirus,

except if you're a politician promising to cure coronavirus because, like, free speech, end quote. Continuing on the coronavirus tip for a minute longer, Reuters has an interesting piece talking to ex-Apple employees and supply chain experts, and they all make a point similar to what John Gruber was talking about last week, i.e., this would normally be a crucial time for Apple ramping up for production of this year's main iPhone release. And who knows what might be getting delayed because we presume that prep work is being affected. Quote,

high volume manufacturing is not scheduled until summer, but the first months of the year are when Apple irons out assembly processes with partners such as Foxcon, two former Apple employees said. Quote, they probably have one assembly line they're trying things out on, said one of the former employees

who asked not to be named discussing production matters. Are Apple's engineers with the Foxcon engineers? If they are, they're probably making progress. But if they're not, if they're quarantined, that could be bad, end quote. And from later in the piece, for new iPhone models, the transition from prototype to the assembly of millions of units starts in earnest when the lunar New Year holiday in China ends in late January and early February, people familiar with the process said. At that point, Apple has tested numerous prototypes and is in the late stages of what is called engineering validation in which Foxcon workers assemble small numbers of devices while engineers from both firms troubleshoot.

If delays occur at this stage, it would eat into the time Apple needs to finalize orders for chips and other parts, almost all of which are custom made for the iPhone. Because of the huge volumes needed, quote, they can't wait to make component selections, said Ron Keith, founder of Supply Chain Resources Group, which works with electronics makers such as Alphabet's Nest. In March and April, Apple engineers typically work with Foxcon counterparts to set up new assembly lines and do trial runs before making final adjustments in April and May. The aim is to have production lines up and running in June so others can be added progressively to ramp up output, end quote. A former Apple engineer quoted in the piece said this, quote,

you can fly those engineers somewhere else, but there's knowledge about how you make a product in that environment. It's not that it can't be taught, but it's a hard thing to move, she said, end quote. We know, for example, that senior Foxcon officials have been working remotely in Taipei recently and have not yet been able to return to China due to travel restrictions. And another source in the piece said there was no, quote, face-to-face work being done, end quote, but it sounded like they were maybe talking about component work in China generally. Final quote. And the word is, that's probably not going to change for another month at best. You're really talking about two lost months, which in the consumer electronics cycle is huge, end quote.

Bob Chappek has been named CEO of the Walt Disney Company, effective immediately. Chepec was the executive most recently in charge of Disney's theme park division. Again, it's weird that we cover Disney news at the moment, but, you know, streaming wars. and hey, Bob Eiger stepping down as CEO is pretty monumental news one way or another, but especially because it seems like it was a bit of a surprise. Iger was the guy, of course, that made Disney into a company capable of even doing Disney Plus. And the weird thing is, Iger kind of isn't going anywhere because he's sticking around as Disney's executive chairman, and Chepec will still report to him.

Here's Peter Kafka's take, quote, All of which means, insert shrug emoji here for now, Eiger had previously said he was going to leave his Disney job, but he kept finding reasons to stick around. Now he says he actually has left his Disney job, but is still sticking around. Iger's for the record logic, which he laid out in a quickly scheduled conference call with investors,

was that after buying much of Rupert Murdoch's 20th century Fox and then launching his company's big move into streaming last year, the major structural changes he wanted to make have been made. Now he said he has decided that, quote, I should be spending as much time as possible on the creative side of our business, because that becomes the biggest priority, end quote. So Disney's board apparently had Chappak in mind as the successor for a while. And Iger reportedly told the board he was going to do this around Thanksgiving, but I don't know about all of that. Because the conventional thinking has been that Iger was going to stick around for at least a couple more years,

and that Kevin Mayer, who runs Disney's streaming business, was the obvious choice probably being groomed as Iger's successor. Also, the timing of this is just downright weird for the reasons that the great Matthew Ball laid out on Twitter last night, quote, Bob is 14 months into a 36-month extension. He didn't announce this during the Blow Them Away earnings report a few weeks ago. There's no transition. It's immediate. It's coming during the coronavirus parks slash theatrical scare that is crushing the stock right now. Also, it's a random Tuesday news drop. And it comes after months of Iger's press tour around his book, end quote. To which Brett Biven's tweet replied, quote, book launch went so well, Iger's pivoting to start a

substack newsletter, end quote. Let's real quick do another sort of reading the tea leaves piece. There's a growing sense inside of and outside of Waymo that the self-driving revolution isn't happening as quickly as Waymo maybe thought it would. The latest indication of that is Waymo is apparently throwing tons of engineers at the problem at a prodigious rate, quoting from the information. Waymo nearly doubled its headcount to 1,500 employees known as Weimanauts from 800, about a year ago, said a person with knowledge of the figure. Much of the the expansion came from the hiring of hundreds of engineers, Waymo hopes will help it to achieve a technological breakthrough and developing a reliable self-driving vehicle. The workforce expansion

suggests Waymo's annual cost is nearing $1 billion while its brand new automated taxi business is yielding just hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue. One signal that Waymo is a long way from developing into a business was the departure last fall of Waymo's first chief commercial officer, Amy Chandy, after just 10 months on the job. Her departure hasn't previously been reported. Chandi had arrived with fanfare from Alibaba Group, the large Chinese e-commerce firm, but Waymo hasn't replaced Chandy, suggesting there aren't many money-making opportunities at the company beyond its small robot taxi service, serving about 1,500 suburban Phoenix residents. In addition, two of Waymo's senior-most engineers stepped down from their roles as the company entered its second decade of trying to

solve one of the world's hardest computer science problems underscoring the technical challenges that still lie ahead, end quote. The information goes on to say that Waymo is putting additional resources into simulation software to work out the kinks in its software before it sends it out into real roads, and is also throwing bodies at the machine learning software to try to make breakthroughs in areas like perception, or how quickly the software can categorize objects that it encounters in the real world. Former employees say Waymo has been trying to grab all the good machine learning engineers it can get its hands on, including poaching them from Google. From the interesting raise file, Plume is a startup that has developed an AI-powered,

adaptive home Wi-Fi Mesh Network. And they've raised a $60 million series D at a $510 million evaluation to keep doing so, quoting Venture Beat. Founded in 2014, Plum is one of a number of companies seeking to improve Wi-Fi connectivity by strategically placing multiple routers throughout the home. Plum continuously learns and adapts to each household, monitoring internet usage and allocating bandwidth based on the devices that need it most. The increase in connected devices in the home, from fridges and smart speakers to TVs and light bulbs, has created more potential for internet black spots, something mesh network companies are eager to fix. Charter Communications, which trades under the Spectrum name, is one of the largest cable

TV and internet companies in the U.S. and recently announced that it was adopting Plum's open source open-sync framework. The framework which launched back in 2018 in partnership with existing customer Samsung is available for any company developing its own services, such as Wi-Fi, parental control systems, or any new product that requires managed Wi-Fi. Today, Plum claims more than 650 million devices communicating with 16 million open-sink switches across 14 million households, according to a statement, end quote. Let's end today with a big old grab bag of some sort of fun smaller stories. First, two programmer musicians have algorithmically generated every eight-note 12-beat MIDI

melody in one octave and openly licensed it all to help others in future copyright suits, quoting vice. Programmer, musician, and copyright attorney Damien Reel, along with fellow musician programmer Noah Rubin, sought to stop copyright lawsuits that they believe stifled the creative freedom of artists. To determine the finite nature of melodies, Rail and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible eight-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers used to guess passwords, churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained.

Real says this algorithm worked at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted, and in MIDI-forms, notes are just numbers. Quote, under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright or no copyright at all, real explained in a talk. So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we're just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable, end quote. Now, there is some debate about that. Parker Higgins, who I trust about this stuff implicitly,

suggests that this probably wouldn't stand up in court, but hey, you know, some real Robin Hood stuff here, so good job. Slightly related, the Smithsonian Institute just released 2.8 million high quality images, both two and three-dimensional images under a Creative Commons zero license, so all the images are completely free to use, quoting the next web. The Smithsonian says it plans to release 200,000 additional images this year. The Institute says this collection is merely 2% of its archives as it plans to digitize all 155 million items from its archives, end quote. And next, spoiler alert. Seriously, spoiler alert. If you see someone using an iPhone in a movie or TV show, that most likely means they aren't going to end up being the bad guy. That's according to director

Rand Johnson regarding Apple's policies for using their products in films and TV shows, quoting the verge. Apple, they let you use iPhones and movies, but, and this is very pivotal if you're ever watching a mystery movie, bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera, the director said in a video interview with Vanity Fair. He joked that revealing this information could potentially spoil future mystery movies by revealing who the goodies and baddies are. Quote, every single filmmaker that has a bad guy in their movie that's supposed to be a secret wants to murder me right now, he joked. It's a particularly important detail in a movie like Knives Out. where at one point or another, basically every character is suspected of murdering wealthy crime novelist Harlan Thromby.

Don't worry, though. The specific screenshot Johnson shares isn't too much of a spoiler if you're yet to see the film. There have long been rumors about Apple's control over how its products are shown in TV shows and movies. According to Mac Rumors, the company says that its products should only be used, quote, in the best light in a manner or context that reflects favorably on the Apple products and on Apple Inc, end quote. And as far back as 2002, people noticed that on the original seasons of the show 24, all the good guys used Macs and all the bad guys used Windows PCs. As The Verge asked, so what should we take away from the fact that everyone on Succession seems to use Samsung devices? And finally, finally, just the other day, a listener got in touch over Twitter, got in touch politely, to suggest that I'm pronouncing the word, Jif wrong. Well, you might have seen this. Jiff the peanut butter company in conjunction with Giffy, the, I don't know, meme company, released limited edition jars of Jif peanut butter.

Jif, J-I-F, but on the jars, it's labeled G-I-F and has the sub-label animated looping images. So apparently the J-M-Smuckers company, which owns J-F-Pinatter, wants to suggest, that it owns the GIF pronunciation with a soft G, while GIF should be a hard G. This is all despite the fact that Steve Wilhite, who created the graphics interchange format, said in 2013 that it's pronounced GIF. And he invented the darn thing, so, you know, look, how about this? Every time I have to talk about this word, what if I just rotate the pronunciation so that it'll piss everyone off? equally. This time I'll pronounce it GIF, next time I'll pronounce it GIF, and on and on, because

actually, I really don't know how I tend to pronounce it most times, so I probably have been saying it both ways already, depending on which way the wind is blowing that day. And also, you know, clearly, there's nothing else going on in the world right now that people should be getting riled up about, right? I like this idea from the great hunter walk on Twitter this morning. here's his pitch. New York Times wedding section style write-ups and picks, but for how startup co-founders met each other, end quote. Talk to you tomorrow.