Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/03 - Google's Credibility Problem When It Comes To Products Dying

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, April 3rd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Facebook stops asking people to reveal their email passwords.

Starting point is 00:00:44 WhatsApp gives you more control over group chats. Google has a credibility problem when it comes to product shutdowns. And 5G is kind of finally officially here. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So just two weeks after the news broke that Facebook had stored the passwords of its own users insecurely. The Daily Beast yesterday was reporting that Facebook was recently asking new users to give Facebook the password to the email account that they used to sign up to Facebook originally. And everyone on the internet was like, what? To quote Gizmodo on the subject, it is never,

Starting point is 00:01:29 ever advisable for a user to give out their email password to anyone except possibly to a 100% verified account administrator when no other option exists, which there should be. Email accounts tend to be primary gateways into the rest of the web because a valid one is usually necessary to register accounts on everything from banks and financial institutions to social media accounts and porn sites. They obviously also contain copies of every undeleted email message ever sent to or from that address as well as additional information like contact lists. It is for this reason that email password requests are one of the most obvious hallmarks of a fishing scam, end quote. Well, Facebook immediately said it will stop asking for

Starting point is 00:02:16 email passwords to verify new accounts, saying it had only done so to verify accounts whose email addresses didn't use OAuth. Quoting from Axios, Facebook told Axios that, quote, a very small group of people have the option of entering their email password to verify their account when they sign up for Facebook, end quote, but noted that people could choose instead to confirm their account with a code or link sent to their phone or email. That said, we understand the password verification option isn't the best way to go about this, so we are going to stop offering it, the company said in a statement, end quote. Again, the question, aggressiveness, sketchiness, or incompetence. It's getting really difficult to tell at this point.

Starting point is 00:03:06 WhatsApp has gotten rid of one of its most annoying features. No longer will you be dragged into group chats on WhatsApp against your will because WhatsApp users can now control who can add them to group chats. According to the next web, here's how to take control for yourself. Quote, open WhatsApp on your phone and go to settings, then accounts, then privacy. Tap on groups and select the option that suits you best. The first one will prompt the user adding you to first send an invitation that you can approve. Nobody? This prevents anyone from adding you to a group without an invitation.

Starting point is 00:03:44 My contacts. Only your contacts can add you to a group without an invitation. And then anyone, anyone can add you to a group without an invitation. If you value your privacy, you'll want to select either of those first two options, end quote. So this is a welcome move to eliminate a pretty nutty feature. if you ask me, the fact that if someone knew your phone number, they could just insert you into a group chat at their own discretion, though it is worth noting that iMessage has this same feature, I guess.

Starting point is 00:04:16 But also, this is a move to cut down on political spam, quoting from The Verge. The BBC reported that ahead of Brazil's elections last year, political campaigners were using software to automatically add swathes of people to politically motivated WhatsApp groups without their consent. time reports that similar practices are widespread in India, end quote. I find this story a little hilarious. The Department of Justice has warned the group behind the Oscars that any potential rule changes that would limit the eligibility of Netflix

Starting point is 00:04:52 and other streaming services to receive awards could raise antitrust issues. In case you were unaware of this controversy, no less than Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences board member Stephen Spielberg has recently been pushing for changes to Oscar eligibility that would make it so that if a film debuted on a streaming service around the time it debuted in theaters, it could not compete for an Academy Award. One such film that recently did just that? Roma.

Starting point is 00:05:25 Spielberg told ITV in an interview just last year, quote, once you commit to a television format, you're a TV movie. If it's a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar, end quote. So, seems like a petty squabble, right? Well, apparently not to the Department of Justice, quoting from Variety. According to a letter obtained by Variety, the chief of the DOJ's antitrust division, McCandellarim, wrote to AMPAS CEO Don Hudson on March 21st to express concerns that new rules would be written, quote, in a way that tends to suppress competition.

Starting point is 00:06:04 Quote, in the event that the Academy, an association that includes multiple competitors in its membership, establishes certain eligibility requirements for the Oscars that eliminate competition without pro-competitive justification, such conduct may raise antitrust concerns. Del Aram wrote, Del Aram cited, Section 1 of the Sherman Act that, quote, prohibits anti-competitive agreements among competitors. Quoting again, accordingly, agreements among competitors. among competitors to exclude new competitors can violate the antitrust laws when

Starting point is 00:06:34 their purpose or effect is to impede competition by goods or services that consumers purchase and enjoy, but which threaten the profits of incumbent firms. Deliram added, quote, if the Academy adopts a new rule to exclude certain types of films, such as films distributed via online streaming services, from

Starting point is 00:06:52 eligibility for the Oscars, and that exclusion tends to diminish the excluded films sales, that rule could therefore violate section one. According to the New York Times, more than 200,000 people subscribed to Apple News Plus in its first 48 hours that the service was available, which I'm unclear here and I'm open to opinions. Does that sound like a lot or a little to you? I mean, 200,000 people is more users than texture, which is what Apple bought to create News Plus, ever had even at its peak. Given Apple's billions of installed base users, I mean, Apple Music rocketed to 50 million users in just a couple years. I'd be curious to know what the uptake on that was in the first 48 hours. I've also found it fascinating the amount of back and forth about the whole concept of News Plus

Starting point is 00:07:54 and the controversy that it is engendered in the media. I could be pointing you to think pieces about this every single day. There's not a small segment of media folk out there that believe that this is nothing short of the final death now of independent media. The most recent bickering about this took place prominently on Twitter as the New York Times chronicles, quote, the day after the splashy announcement, the New Yorker found itself on the defensive after a Reuters headline blared, is it time to dump your New Yorker subscription? In reply, Michael Lowe, the editor of the New Yorker's website sounded off in a 13-part tweet storm, advising readers not to dump the magazine.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Only a portion of its archive would be available on the Apple service, he wrote, and readers could miss out on certain articles by Ronan Farrow, Jane Mayer, and Doreen St. Felix, not to mention the weekly crossword. Quote, the best way to read all that we do at New Yorker every day and every week is to subscribe, Mr. Lowe tweeted. Link to the tweet storm in the show notes. But yeah, count me on the side of the people that are wondering why, any publisher, would want to make it easy to even slightly tempt me to cancel my subscription. Google Duplex, that G-Wiz slash controversial service that allows an AI robot assistant to do things like

Starting point is 00:09:20 book a restaurant reservation on your behalf is rolling out for the first time to non-pixel devices, including iOS devices in the U.S. The ability to use Duplex is being pushed out piecemeal, but it has now gone wide to 43 states and phones that don't necessarily have the Google logo embossed on the back of them. Google has officially started the process of shutting down and deleting all consumer accounts on its failed social network platform Google Plus. According to Chris Welch in The Verge, quote, the company says that the process of completely deleting

Starting point is 00:09:59 all personal Google Plus accounts, quote, will take a few months. And you might still see some pages left standing, perhaps even your own in the interim. But content deletion, including photos and videos in your Google Plus album archive starts now. I really hope you've moved everything over to Google Photos at this point, end quote. So one new Google service emerging and one huge Google service sunseting. That's just the way Google rolls, right? Never depend on a Google service because you never know how long they'll actually support it. I mean, Chris just told you

Starting point is 00:10:42 to move your photos over to Google Photos, but how sure are you that Google Photos will be around forever? That's the wrap on Google. You can never depend on their ecosystem. And actually, as Ron Amadeo argues in Ars Technica, that's becoming a bit of a problem for Google, for Google's brand. By Amadeo's count, so far this year,

Starting point is 00:11:07 a Google branded product, feature, or service has died every nine days or so. So far this year, we've lost Chromecast Audio, YouTube annotations, Google Fiber, Google Allo, the Google URL shortener, now Google Plus, and the same day, Google Inbox. This is becoming an issue. How can you be an ecosystem play if your ecosystem gains a reputation for being ephemeral? Consumers want to know their content, their photos, their videos, their emails will always be there. Corporate customers want stability, platforms they can rely on. hardware partners? Well, can't you imagine a scenario where a few years from now

Starting point is 00:11:48 Google suddenly announces it's exiting the hardware business entirely only to a few years later jump back in? And developers, who will think of the poor developers? Quoting Amadeo. I think we're seeing a lot of the consequences of Google's damaged brand in the recent Google Stadia launch. A game streaming platform from one of the world's largest internet companies should be grounds for excitement,

Starting point is 00:12:10 but instead the baggage of the Google brand has people asking if they can trust the service to stay running. In addition to the endless memes and jokes you'll see in every related comment section, you're starting to see Google skepticism in mainstream reporting too. Over at The Guardian, this line makes the pool quote. A potentially sticky fact about Google is that the company does have a habit of losing interest in its less successful projects. IGN has a whole section of a report questioning Google's commitment from a digital foundry video, Google has this reputation for discontinuing services that are often good out of nowhere. One of Slashgear's Stadia questions that need answers is, quote, can I trust you Google?

Starting point is 00:12:52 End quote. Amadeo's piece goes on to outline the history of Google's product development culture and how the Google folks love to throw anything against the wall to see if it sticks. The problem is no one knows the definition for Google of what sticking means. Romeo calls for some sort of public roadmap on Google's part or some sort of statement of what products it considers core and crucial, thus seemingly immune to the chopping block. But then again, if you had asked them five years ago, I am absolutely sure Google would have sworn up and down

Starting point is 00:13:27 that Google Plus fit that definition absolutely. Finally, today, let's catch up on the 2019 narrative watch. First, UK-based wave, that's, W-A-Y-V-E, has claimed what it is calling a world's first, a car that can drive autonomously on roads it has not seen before during training, using only its AI and a satellite navigation system. See, the way that most self-driving systems work at Waymo, at Cruise, at Uber, is that they throw engineers at the problem of autonomy and just hope they can sort it out,

Starting point is 00:14:07 as TechCrunch says, quote, basing most of their platforms on rule-based systems that try to preempt and deal with every edge case, whilst also peppering the cars with more sensors to capture more data. This can work in relatively controlled environments, but has the drawback of not being able to flexibly adapt in real time to fast-changing situations, end quote. Wave's system is different, according to Alex Kendall, co-founder and CTO of Wave, who told Mike Butcher at TechCrunch, quote, we don't tell the car how to drive with hand-coated rules. everything is learned from data. This allows us to navigate complex, narrow urban European streets for the first time.

Starting point is 00:14:47 End-to-end deep learning. Every time a safety driver intervenes and takes over, the car learns to drive better. We don't tell the car how to drive, rather it learns to drive from experience, example, and feedback just like a human. This is more safe and scalable than any other approach today, end quote. Also, 10% cheaper, wave claims. So cheaper and better as a learning method, as they say, huge, if true. And customers in Chicago and Minneapolis have become the first in the world to get 5G-enabled smartphones that can connect for the first time to an actual 5G network.

Starting point is 00:15:30 Quoting from a press release from Verizon, quote, Today Verizon officially turned on its 5G ultra-wideband network in select areas of Minneapolis and Chicago, a week ahead of schedule. For the first time ever, customers can access a commercial 5G network with the world's first commercially available 5G-enabled smartphone, the MotoZ3 combined with 5G MotoMod. Customers using Verizon's 5G ultra-wideband network in Chicago

Starting point is 00:15:55 or Minneapolis could see speeds of up to one GPS, end quote. This is all part of Verizon's plan to roll out 5G coverage to parts of 30 cities over the next year. So super baby steps, but I think we can say, the era of 5G is finally officially upon us. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough.

Starting point is 00:16:22 Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Our show's subreddit is at R slash ride home. If you feel like supporting the show directly and saving some time while you do it, you can subscribe to the ad-free version of the show directly from your podcast app by tapping on the link at the very bottom of the show notes. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/03 - Google's Credibility Problem When It Comes To Products Dying

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