Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/03 – Google (Sorta) Pivots To Privacy

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, March 3rd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Google says it's getting out of the ad tracking game. Kind of. I'll explain what's really going on here.

Starting point is 00:00:44 Headline wrap-up from Microsoft's Ignite Conference includes some AR excitement. Brave is launching a privacy search engine and why Amazon's app icon redesign reminded people of Hitler's mustache. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. We are hopefully going to get some interesting and in-depth analysis. of this soon, because I could use it. Google has announced it is getting out of the ad tracking business, basically. Google has promised it will not build alternate identifiers to track users after phasing out third-party tracking cookies, quoting the verge. Google is slowly phasing out third-party tracking cookies, and today it's making clear that it won't just replace them with

Starting point is 00:01:29 something equally invasive despite the impact the change will have on Google's lucrative advertising business. In a blog post, Google explicitly states that it, quote, will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, end quote, after the third-party cookies are gone. Quote, instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs, which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers, writes Google. Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing, and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers, end quote. third-party cookies have been blocked for a while in Safari and Firefox, though the browsers

Starting point is 00:02:09 differed in how far they go, and Google plans on doing the same in Chrome. The cookies allow advertisers to track you as you move between different websites, which gives advertisers a better idea of what your interests are. These hyper-targeted ads are very valuable, resulting in the creation of an ad industry whereby individual user data is proliferated across thousands of companies, according to Google. For all the talk of privacy, Google makes a lot of privacy, Google it makes clear it's not trying to get rid of targeted advertising in general. It just wants to replace the more invasive methods of old with a new one of its own design, which it calls Privacy Sandbox. Part of Privacy Sandbox's job is to hide the individual inside a large crowd

Starting point is 00:02:49 of cohorts with similar interests. It will then target ads toward, end quote. So, antitrust scrutiny mixed with competition is a hell of a drug, isn't it? In this case, the competition comes from Apple's upcoming ad tracking changes. Am I reading this right? Quoting the Wall Street Journal. The decision coming from the world's biggest digital advertising company could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators. Google's heft means that its move is also likely to stoke a backlash from some competitors in the digital ad business, where many companies rely on tracking individuals to target their ads,

Starting point is 00:03:29 measure their effectiveness and stop fraud. Google accounted for 52% of last year's global digital ad spending of $292 billion, according to Jounce Media, a digital ad consultancy. If digital advertising doesn't evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web, David Temkin, the Google Product Manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday, end quote. So might this be sort of a classic case of doing the thing you were pushed to do and then acting like it was your idea all along just to reap the PR benefits? As Benedict Evans tweeted, quote, number one, inevitable and already happening, so get ahead of the story. Number two, regulation is good for incumbents. Who loses most if we only target on first party data, end quote. Yes, that is the key insight, I think. Google is not going to stop. tracking us. They're just going to track us in new ways. What this really means is that Google can use its own data to target ads. Google's not going to stop doing targeted advertising. They're just

Starting point is 00:04:39 going to target us using their own data that they already have collected on us over the years. That's what you can do if you're as big as Google. That's the competitive big data moat that the incumbents have. This is the definition of pulling up the drawbridge after you walked across it. Paul Graham tweeted, quote, what this news tells me is that Google has found a way to target ads just as effectively without using this data, end quote. Brave, the web browser I use every day, has launched a privacy-focused search engine as it acquires an open-source search engine developed by the team behind the clicks, anti-tracking browser, quoting TechCrunch. The tech acquired will underpin the forthcoming Brave search engine, meaning it will soon be pitching its millions of users

Starting point is 00:05:30 on an entirely big tech-free search and browsing experience. Quote, Under the hood, nearly all of today's search engines are either built by or rely on results from big tech companies. In contrast, the Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect but without compromising their privacy. Brave rights and a press release announcing the acquisition. Quote, Tailcat does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information

Starting point is 00:05:57 to improve search results, end quote. clicks, which was a privacy-focused European fork of Mozilla's Firefox browser, got shuttered last May after its majority investor, Hubert Bertha Media, called time on the multi-year effort to build momentum for an alternative to Google, blaming tougher trading conditions during the pandemic for forcing it to pull the plug sooner than it would have liked, end quote. Brave, again, is the privacy-focused browser co-founded by ex-Mozilla CEO Brendan Ike, who tweeted, quote, Brave search is coming. Waitlist sign up for early testers and users who will help us make it sing. Then, alternative engine in brave slash SERP, any browser can use. We will innovate on both sides, browser and service, to make search great. In time, bat adds two, end quote. We'd love to be an early tester of this.

Starting point is 00:06:56 Microsoft is warning of a new Chinese state-sponsored threat actor that it says is exploiting four previously undisclosed zero days in exchange server. Sounds bad, but patches are already available, quoting TechCrunch. The technology company said Tuesday that it believes the hacking group, which it calls Hapnium, tries to steal information from a broad range of U.S.-based organizations, including law firms and defense contractors, but also infectious disease researchers and policy think tanks. Microsoft said Haffnium used the four newly discovered security vulnerabilities to break into exchange email servers running on company networks, allowing the attackers to steal data from a victim's organization, such as email accounts and address books, and the

Starting point is 00:07:43 ability to plant malware. When used together, the four vulnerabilities create an attack chain that can compromise vulnerable on-premise servers running Exchange 2013 and later. Hafnium operates out of China but uses servers located in the U.S. to launch its attacks, the company said. Microsoft said that Hafnium was the primary threat group it detected using these four new vulnerabilities. Microsoft declined to say how many successful attacks it had seen, but describe the number as, quote, limited. Patches to fix these four security vulnerabilities are now out a week earlier than the company's typical patching schedule usually reserved for the second Tuesday in each month, end quote. Speaking of, if you'll remember at the end of the year, I said that we should keep our eye on the fallout from the huge solar winds hack, the biggest hack of our government of all time, the biggest state-sponsored hack of all time, a digital Pearl Harbor, if you will. For various reasons of timing and politics, this whole story got swept under the rug just a bit, but it's worth keeping our eye on because, again, it's so huge. For example, Brandon Wales, the acting director of the CISA says that fully recovering from the solar winds hack could take the U.S. government as long as

Starting point is 00:09:02 18 months, quoting MIT Technology Review. I wouldn't call this simple, Wales says. There are two phases for response to this incident. There is the short-term remediation effort, where we look to remove the adversary from the network, shutting down accounts they control, and shutting down entry points the adversary used to access networks. But given the amount of time they were inside these networks, months, strategic recovery will take time, end quote. When the hackers have succeeded so thoroughly and for so long,

Starting point is 00:09:29 the answer sometimes can be a complete rebuild from scratch. The hackers made a point of undermining trust in targeted networks, stealing identities, and gaining the ability to impersonate or create seemingly legitimate users in order to freely access victims, Microsoft 365, and Azure accounts. By taking control of trust and identity, the hackers became that much harder to track. Quote, most of the agencies going through that level of rebuilding will take in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 months to make sure they're putting in the appropriate protections, well said, end quote. So let me give you a maya culpa. I shared some headline announcements with you yesterday from Microsoft, but it did not dawn on me until I had finished recording that the reason these headlines were

Starting point is 00:10:14 dribbling out was because Microsoft's Ignite conference kicked off yesterday, which I should have known. It was literally right there on the calendar at the bottom of the TechMeme homepage. So let me round up some of the announcements from yesterday that I missed. For example, Microsoft's Power Automate Desktop, an enterprise tool for creating automated desktop-centric workflows, is now free for all Windows 10 users. Microsoft launch Azure Percept, a hardware and software platform to implement its Azure AI services for various use cases, including object detection at the edge. And more interestingly, they announced PowerFX, a new open source, low-code language that takes its cues for, from Excel formulas. You know how the whole no-code, low-code movement says the promise of their

Starting point is 00:11:02 movement is programming made so simple. It's like just using a spreadsheet. Well, there you go. Microsoft says this will become a standard for Microsoft's Power Platform, quoting TechCrunch. Since Power Platform itself targets business users more so than professional developers, it feels like a smart move to leverage their existing knowledge of Excel and their familiarity with Excel formulas to get started. Microsoft says the language was developed by a team led by Vijay Mattel, Robin Abraham, Shone Katzenberger, and Daryl Rubin. Beyond Excel, the team also took inspiration from tools and languages like Pascal, Mathematica, and Miranda, a functional programming language developed in the 1980s. Microsoft plans to bring PowerFX to all of its low-code

Starting point is 00:11:46 platforms, but given the focus on community, it'll start making appearances in Power Automate, Power virtual agents and elsewhere soon. But the team clearly hopes that others will adopt it as well. Low-code developers will see it pop up in the formula bars of products like Power App Studio, but more sophisticated users will also be able to use it to go to Visual Studio code and build more complex applications with it. As the team noted, it focused on not just making the language Excel-like, but also having it behave like Excel or like a REPL for you high-code programmers out there. That means formulas are declarative and instantly recalculate as developers update their code, end quote. And finally, some augmented reality news. Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Mesh, a mixed reality

Starting point is 00:12:31 platform on Azure that demoed a meeting service that will allow users to join virtual rooms using devices like the HoloLens too, quoting Tom Weren at the verge. Last week, Microsoft's Alex Kippman, the inventor of Connect and HoloLens, appeared in my living room to hand me jellyfish and sharks. That might sound like I had a weird dream, but it was a meeting made possible through Microsoft's new mesh platform. I donned a HoloLens 2 headset, joined a virtual meeting room, and Kipman immediately appeared next to my coffee table, ready to demonstrate Microsoft's vision for the future of VR and AR, or as Microsoft calls it, mixed reality. It all felt like a Microsoft Teams meeting set in the future. Mesh is a collaborative platform that allows anyone to have

Starting point is 00:13:12 shared virtual experiences on a variety of devices. This has been the dream for mixed reality, idea from the very beginning, explains Kipman. You can actually feel like you're in the same place with someone sharing content, or you can teleport from different mixed reality devices and be present with people even when you're not physically together, end quote. Initially, Mesh will present people as virtual avatars taken from the AltSpace VR social network that Microsoft acquired back in 2017. Mesh will eventually support what Microsoft calls holo portation, allowing people to appear as themselves in a virtual space. During my hour-long meeting, in Microsoft Mesh, I constantly felt like this could be a far-future version of Microsoft Teams.

Starting point is 00:13:52 Kittman appeared next to me as an avatar and started handing me virtual jellyfish and sharks. I could reshape the animals, pass them back, or just place them down in front of me. Although we weren't working on the same grand design or 3D model, it felt more immersive than the Zoom video calls I have to attend on a near daily basis. You can completely imagine a mesh-enabled Microsoft Teams where the key thing there is, Think about colleagues from across the globe collaborating as if you and I are in the same physical location, says Kipman. Mesh enables teams to allow organizations to essentially do mixed reality gatherings with everyone in the same room, and so you should think about that in a Mesh-enabled team's type of an environment.

Starting point is 00:14:30 Mesh isn't just an app for holding virtual meetings, though. It's an entire platform built on top of Azure that Microsoft hopes developers will tap into. Microsoft is hoping architects, engineers, and designers will all see the promise of Mesh, particularly during a pandemic when it's difficult to work with 3D physical models without all being in the same room. Microsoft is also making mesh available on a variety of devices, including the HoloLens 2, most virtual reality headsets, tablets, smartphones, and PCs. A preview of the Microsoft Mesh app for HoloLens 2 will be available today, alongside a preview version of AltSpace VR that is Mesh enabled.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Microsoft is planning to integrate MESH into Teams and Dynamics 365 in the future, which might help bring the unique meeting experience I had into a reality for more people, end quote. So I'll try to look that up on the Oculus store, but maybe we need to invest in a HoloLens too for research purposes. I would, but $3,500 is a bigger ask than just buying an Oculus Quest too. So we shall see. Finally today, a bit of a non-story, but in case you're interested, you might have heard that Microsoft recently launched an app I Re-Design. And then you might have heard that they had to change the appearance of the icon redesign because it reminded people of Hitler's mustache. See, it had this strip of perforated tape at the top

Starting point is 00:16:01 that when you put it above that swooping arrow of the Amazon logo, which has always looked like a smiling mouth, well, click through to see the picks for yourself, quoting the verge. Amazon's ads have portrayed the swooping A to Z arrow that adorns its packaging. as singing mouths. And in that light, the ragged edge and width of the blue tape on the previous icon design looks uncomfortably similar to the tonsorial trim. The updated icon looks to avoid the issue entirely swapping out the mustache-style adhesive for a two-tone folded piece of tape that alludes to the presumed join of tearing open an Amazon package instead of one of the most brutal dictators in modern history. Amazon's design team can take some consolation, though,

Starting point is 00:16:46 in joining the story annals of modern companies that have been forced to digitally shave controversial mustaches. Plus, the new icon is already getting much more favorable comparisons. Apparently, the angular tape now makes it look like Avatar the Last Airbenders, Ang, instead, end quote. So I'm not sure, but I might have just minted the first podcast episode NFT. If you check the very last link in today's show notes, it points you to an auction for that recent weekend bonus episode interview with Gary Tan that I turned into an NFT.

Starting point is 00:17:29 I'm not sure it's the first podcast episode to do this. And I mean, I was informed last night that we were actually not the first podcast to broadcast into Clubhouse that had been done months before. But who knows, this might be the first podcast episode, NFT. So if you're so inclined, check it out and bid on maybe history. I don't know. This is totally a lark, and I'm sure I did everything wrong. But hey, I think it's there.

Starting point is 00:17:57 It cost me about 50 bucks and gas fees. Worth an experiment, right? Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/03 – Google (Sorta) Pivots To Privacy

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