Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 05/15 - Is Google Effectively Deprecating Search?

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

There’s a new major chip flaw called ZombieLoad, the major tech companies sign on to the so-called Christchurch Call to Action, San Francisco bans facial recognition tech, is Google effectively deprecating search, and did Beyonce make $300M on Uber? Sponsors: Tech.FidelityCareers.com WeWorkRemotely.com Links: New secret-spilling flaw affects almost every Intel chip since 2011 (TechCrunch) Facebook changes livestream rules after New Zealand shooting (CNN) White House declines to back Christchurch call to stamp out online extremism amid free speech concerns (Washington Post) San Francisco passes city government ban on facial recognition tech (TechCrunch) Google’s combining all its travel planning features under a site called Trips (The Verge) New native Discovery ad campaigns from Google monetize Discover feed for first time (Search Engine Land) Beyoncé Is Going To Make Bank From Uber Going Public (Yahoo Finance) 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 Wednesday, May 15th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, there's a new major chip flaw called Zombie Load.

The major tech company sign on to the so-called Christchurch call to action. San Francisco band's facial recognition tech is Google effectively deprecating search? And did Beyonce make $300 million on the Uber IPO? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, once again, The silicon ain't safe. Security researchers have found a new side-channel flaw called zombie load that affects nearly all post-2011 Intel chips. Yes, this is a hardware flaw reminiscent of the meltdown and specter vulnerabilities,

which exploited speculative execution in modern processors, but with a new twist, quoting TechCrunch. Zombie load takes its name from a zombie load. an amount of data that the processor can't understand or properly process, forcing the processor to ask for help from the processor's microcode to prevent a crash. Apps are usually only able to see their own data, but this bug allows that data to bleed across those boundary walls. Zombie load will leak any data currently loaded by the processor's core, the researchers said. Intel said patches to the microcode will help clear the processor's buffers,

preventing data from being read. practically the researchers showed in a proof-of-concept video that the flaws could be exploited to see which websites a person is visiting in real time, but could easily be repurposed to grab passwords or access tokens used to log in to a victim's online accounts. Like Meltdown and Spector, it's not just PCs and laptops affected by zombie load. The cloud is also vulnerable. Zombie load can be triggered in virtual machines, which are meant to be isolated from other virtual systems and their home. host device. Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers who discovered the latest round of chip flaws, said it works just like it does on PCs and can read data off the processor. That's potentially a major problem in cloud environments where different customers' virtual machines run on the same server hardware, end quote. As of this moment, we have heard no reports of any attacks using this

new vulnerability, though researchers note that an attack if it did occur wouldn't leave any trace anyway, so shrug shoulders emoji, I guess. Should you worry? Yes, in the sense that you should immediately install all of the updates on all of your machines. Intel has released microcode to patch vulnerable processors, and Apple and Microsoft have released updates to protect your computers, while Google has done the same for your browsers. But remember how the fixes for Meltdown Inspector led to a hit to processor performance? Well, it's the same this time as well, a 3 to 9% performance hit in Dana Center environments after the patch, apparently. As Matt O'Dell tweeted, and this is maybe just a mantra for modern life at this point, quote,

number one, operate under the assumption that any device connected to the internet can be remotely compromised. Plan accordingly. Number two, patches have been released. Update your systems. The implications of the Christchurch massacre continue to ripple through the world of tech. That tragedy was, of course, live-streamed on Facebook, and Facebook announced that starting today, users who break Facebook's, quote, most serious policies will immediately be banned from using Facebook Live for a set period of time, such as maybe 30 days. And it's sort of a first strike situation, violate any of their, again, quote, most serious policies,

and you're locked out of Facebook Live without recourse. Facebook said it will also block the same offenders from purchasing ads. And led by the governments of New Zealand and France, there is now something called the Christchurch Call to Action, a nine-point plan to stop the spread of terrorist content online. This is an agreement and a framework by governments and social media companies to join forces to fight online extremism and Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, among others have all signed on to the plan, which was also formally unveiled at a major. International Comphab today in Paris. One government that will not be signing on is the United States, which declined to sign on to the framework on free speech grounds, essentially. Quoting the Washington Post, we continue to be proactive in our efforts to counter-terrorist

content online while also continuing to respect freedom of expression and freedom of the press, the White House said Wednesday. Further, we maintain that the best tool to defeat terrorist speech is productive speech, and thus we emphasize the importance of promoting credible alternative narratives as the primary means by which we can defeat terrorist messaging, end quote. And San Francisco has become the first major American city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by city agencies, quoting TechCrunch. The stop secret surveillance ordinance introduced by San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin is the first ban of its kind for a major American city and the seventh major surveillance oversight effort for. a municipality in California. I want to be clear, this is not an anti-technology policy, Peskin said during Tuesday's board meeting.

Peskin de-emphasized the ban aspect of the ordinance, instead framing it as an outgrowth of the sweeping data privacy reforms signed into law by California Governor Jerry Brown last year and an extension of prior efforts in other counties around the state, end quote. The ordinance passed by a vote of 8 to 1. And note that this is not an outright ban of the technology, just a ban, of the use of the technology by the city of San Francisco itself. Private companies and individuals are still free to deploy facial recognition inside San Francisco city limits. What if I told you there was a financial services company that pours $2.5 billion every year into game-changing tech platforms?

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You can access it by going to Google.com forward slash travel, which, why not, forward slash trips? And also, Google hasn't specified how this integrates with their offline mobile app, Google Trips. But, hey, no one ever accused Google of having a simple, unconfusing system when it's comes to product lineup naming conventions. This is more in the weeds, but possibly more important. Google has announced Discover Ads, a new visual, carousel, or gallery-like ad format that will run across the YouTube Home Feed, Gmail, and the Discover Feed, and it's coming later this year. So a new visual ad unit, because Google knows that visual ads perform better, especially on mobile. I said something recently about how we've come a long way from a plain white page with just a search bar and blue text links, right?

And actually, that's what the story is here that I want to highlight. I mentioned that these new ad units will be coming to the Discover feed. What is the Discover feed? It's Google's fancy name for essentially its mobile homepage. Let me quote from Search Engine Land. What is Discover? It's a feed, first known as Google Now, then Google Thurr, feed that appears on the homepage of the Google app for iOS and Android and the Google.com homepage on mobile.

Users can customize their feeds to include topics of interest to them. Google began testing ads in Discover last fall with a small set of advertisers. Depending on users' account settings, Google may use web and app activity, device information, location history, and home location to personalized feed content, which is largely AMP-enabled. Turns out, Discover has become a quiet giant, for Google. The company claims more than 800 million people use Discover monthly, end quote. So the point that I'm making here is that Google is, for all intents and purposes, for the first time ever, if you look at it from a certain angle, putting ads on the Google homepage.

Forget about a long way from a blank white page with a search bar and blue text links. Google is finally doing the thing that they said they would never do. I'm old enough to remember when people flock to Google from places like Yahoo because they were chock full of annoying ads, as Google at long last become the thing that it was born to rage against. Well, this has been a long time coming. It's been years since the ads on Google were just a rail along the right-hand third of a Google search page. The ads slowly crept into the top of the search results themselves, then the bottom, and then like the majority of the page. And the ads stopped just being clearly labeled text links.

They look like regular search links now, and they can have pictures and callouts and maps and everything. Google has flooded everything they can think of with search ads now, especially on mobile. Google itself does things on mobile that if you were a webmaster running AdSense on your site or what used to be called AdSense, Google will penalize you for. things like flooding the page with nothing but ads above the fold.

Again, this has been a long time coming. For years, everyone has known that to hit their quarterly numbers, Google has had to time and time again come up with inventive new ways to jam ads anywhere they could. People have wondered if there might be some tipping point. Could Google ever reach a stage where there were so many ads that people start to get turned off and maybe start searching less? I don't know if you recall. Last quarterly earnings report for Google was quietly very bad, especially in its search advertising numbers.

There are whispers all over the place that Google might be nudging up to the very edge of the precipice where they've jammed all the ads into any of the places that makes sense. They're running out of places to jam ads. Now they're even looking to monetize the homepage effectively, so it is starting to feel like they're getting desperate. Look, you know how one of the theories about Uber is that if they can just keep things afloat long enough until self-driving cars become a reality, then boom, they can suddenly have amazing unit economics and a profitable business. Well, there's been a similar long-term theory about Google in the sense that Google still makes 90% of its money from advertising, and a huge percentage of that still comes from search advertising. Search advertising is essentially

Google's golden goose always has been and still mostly is. But once everyone in the world is online and once everyone in the world is using Google search and once every addressable advertiser is on Google's ads platform and once Google has jammed as many ads into as many nooks and crannies as they can, is there some sort of brick wall that can be hit where further growth for search advertising is impossible beyond just, you know, population growth. The way this theory runs, Google has known all this for years. And I believe that, believe that, that there's no company that is as good at extrapolating large numbers and placing bets on what they're seeing in the data. And so, according to this theory, that's always what

these other bets as a strategy has always been about. To use the cash cow of search ads to fund the creation of other huge businesses and hopefully one or more of them catch fire before, search hits that proverbial inevitable wall. Are we there at this point? At that wall? A couple of things. First, if Google really does continue to stuff us all full of ads like so much foie gras, might there be an entrepreneurial angle opening up here to do a search engine competitor and search ads competitor that isn't so onerous? Like how many billions does Google make from search advertising each quarter? If you did a startup that did a little less ads and only generated, I don't know, a billion dollars a quarter, you might have a nice little business there, right?

I've heard entrepreneurs and VCs whispering about exactly that might the need to juice quarterly numbers on Google's part open up an opportunity to disrupt Google by basically just reinventing Google how it used to be. But the other point I'd make is what happens to the web if Google continues to OD on ads? Do a search for something on mobile. How many ads do you have to sift through before you get to actual organic results? How much scrolling do you have to do? And you might say, Brian, I'm a sophisticated web user. I know how to weed out the ads. And that's fine, but Google is effectively the discovery infrastructure for the internet.

You know that old saw that if you're on page two of search, you're nowhere. For most people, how much of search, and thus the internet, is now completely controlled by Google's ad search results. If you're not actively paying Google, to what degree are you basically unlikely to be found by common users doing common searches at this point? Not because Google is actually blocking you from their algorithms or something, but because they have effectively crowded out their own organic search results. Are we reaching some tipping point where Google's search is effectively deprecated? Now, nothing I've just said is new. People have been making the sky is falling arguments like this for years. years around Google search. I just kind of wonder if the most recent couple of earnings reports

for Google might be hinting that this time it might finally be different. And finally, I know this might sound like a dubious clickbait generated headline, but as best I can vet it, this very much looks to be a true story. Beyonce might have made $300 million from Uber's IPO, because it seems that in 2015, Bay was offered $6 million to perform at a corporate Uber event in Las Vegas. And instead of cash, it seems that she requested the $6 million be paid in restricted stock units. Well, if this is true and Bay made bank, it turns out that there were other celebs that were smart enough to get in on Uber early as well. Ashton Coucher famously invested $500,000 in Uber early on. Chris Saka's lowercase capital fund.

Others, including Gwyneth Peltro, JZ, Olivia Munn, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jared Leto also reportedly invested in Uber along the way. And quoting Forbes, It's saved our family, said cyclist Lance Armstrong, who had to pay millions to settle legal issues related to taking performance-enhancing drugs, told CNBC in December, end quote.

Armstrong was apparently another of the lucky ones to get in on the Uber action via lowercase capital. So, according to my Twitter timeline this morning, Viva Tech is now the big tech conference that nobody can miss, apparently. Seemingly, anyone who is anyone, seems to be in Paris right now to attend.

I mean, it was pretty big last year. Mark Zuckerberg, Satchanadella, Darakoswashiahi, they all spoke. Still, where is the secret text chain or Slack channel that I'm not on? that alerts everyone to what the new hotness is. And can I get on that chain? Not because I need to go to all of the coolest tech conferences,

just because I like to be in the know about what the new Cool Kids Club is. But actually, a tech conference in Paris is a pretty unbeatable proposition. So, anyway, talk to you tomorrow.