Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/01 – Surface Laptop Go Update

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

The Surface Laptop Go gets a refresh. The Supreme Court has blocked that Texas social media law. For now. Twitter is really gonna take TweetDeck away from us? Really? And the really interesting new Android phone that attempts to strip every Googly thing it can, out of the Android experience. Sponsors: Work Check Podcast Links: Microsoft’s compact Surface Laptop Go updated with 11th Gen Intel processor (The Verge) High Court Halts Texas Law Targeting Social Media Platforms (2) (Bloomberg Law) Twitter shutting down TweetDeck for Mac on July 1, here are alternatives to the web (9to5Mac) TikTok is testing a ‘clear mode’ for a distraction-free scrolling experience (TechCrunch) Fidelity Slashes Reddit, Stripe Valuations After Tech Rout (Bloomberg) The Murena One shows exactly how hard it is to de-Google your smartphone (The Verge) Apple’s Safari browser now has more than 1 billion users (AtlasVPN) 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, June 1st, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Surface Laptop Go gets a refresh. The Supreme Court has blocked that Texas social media law for now. Twitter, is it really going to take TweetDeck away from us? Really? And the really interesting new

Android phone that attempts to strip every Googly thing it can out of the phone, out of the Android experience. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Microsoft has updated the Surface Laptop Go with 11th Intel CPUs, alongside a so-called improved webcam and thermals, starting at $600 shipping on June 7th, quoting the Verge. The original Surface laptop Go was released in 2020 as Microsoft's attempt to compete with Chromebooks. It had a lower starting price than the rest of the Surface laptop lineup and a smaller 12.4-inch touch display that maintained Microsoft's signature 3x2 aspect ratio. Resolution sits at 1536 by 1024. Little of this is a little of this is a little bit of changed for its successor, which measures in at just 10.95 by 8.12 by 0.62 inches and weighs a

little under 2.5 pounds. That said, there have been some tweaks with the Surface laptop go-to. Its starting price has gone up by $50, likely because Microsoft has cut the base version that shipped with just 64 gigabytes of storage. It's also available in a new green-slash-grey sage color, which joins the pre-existing blue, sandstone, and platinum option. The rated battery life has gone from 13 hours to up to 13 and a half hours, and the laptop is also shipping with Windows 11 this time around. Finally, Microsoft says that the Surface laptop go has more replaceable components, including the keyboard and trackpad, display, and battery, though they're designed to be replaced by one of Microsoft's authorized repair providers. There are fewer tangible details about the other upgrades, which will likely only get a better idea for once we've used the laptop ourselves.

Microsoft's press release boasts that the Surface Laptop Go2 has, quote, quieter improved thermals that make it easier to focus as well as an improved HD camera. But the webcam's resolution continues to be 720P, same as the previous model, which suggests its upgrades are more about image processing than raw resolution. The Surface Laptop Go2 is powered by an 11th-gen-I-5-135G7 processor up from 10th gen in the previous model, with prices starting at $599.99 for a model with four gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage, end quote. The Supreme Court of the United States has blocked Texas's social media content moderation law in a five to four vote, putting the measure on hold while a constitutional challenge proceeds in a lower court, quoting Bloomberg Law.

Over four dissents, the justices on Tuesday put the measure on hold while a constitutional challenge goes forward in a lower court, granting a request from tech groups that represent the platforms. A federal appeals court let the law known as HB20 go into effect earlier this month. The tech groups, which also represent Alphabet's Google, said the measure would unconstitutionally bar platforms from removing neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan Screes or Russian propaganda about its invasion of Ukraine. The Supreme Court order, quote, means that private American companies will have an opportunity to be heard in court before they are forced to disseminate vile, abusive, or extremist content under this Texas law, said Matt Schurrers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association,

one of the groups pressing the case. The court, as is its custom with emergency requests, gave no explanation. An unusual collection of justices dissented, however, liberal Elena Kagan and conservative Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch. The Texas law bars social media platforms with more than 50 million users from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other Republicans say the law is needed to protect conservative voices from being silenced. Quote, this law provides accountability for social media companies and protections for social media users, said Texas Senator Brian Hughes, a Republican who co-sponsored

HB20. The court's ruling today merely pauses the law's effect until the case is resolved, but in doing so, it hampers the state's ability to protect free speech. Hughes said, end quote. Rutro, Twitter is showing tweet deck for Mac users a launch message. suggesting the app will be, quote, removed on July 1st. TweetDeck for Web will remain, but Jesus. I don't know how I would live without TweetDeck as a separate app, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. In a surprise move, Twitter has announced that it's canceling tweet deck for Mac

prompting users to use the web version going forward. Details are slim as a banner in the app only shares that June will be the last month for the Mac app. When launching the TweetDeck for Mac app today, Twitter has started placing a blue banner at the top warning users that it will only be available for one more month. TweetDeck for Mac is saying goodbye beginning July 1st. The TweetDeck for Mac application will be removed. You can continue accessing TweetDeck on the web, end quote.

Twitter doesn't appear to have included a dismiss option for the warning, only a visit web button. TweetDeck for Mac just got an overhaul last year that brought it in line with the web version, and at the time the company admitted the app hadn't been getting a lot of love, and that it was an example of a, quote, Twitter-owned and operated service that we will continue investing in, end quote. Another strange part of the abrupt cancellation of the TweetDeck Mac app is that it shouldn't require any maintenance effort for Twitter since it's a website wrapper implementation.

What looks like a solid alternative to keep using a native Mac app is Tweetin. It's based on TweetDex so you get the powerful column-based interface. It's also got lots of customization, interactive notifications, support for multiple accounts, schedule tweets, advanced search, and more, end quote. So, downloading Tweeting in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. TikTok is testing a so-called Clear Mode feature with select users that removes usernames, captions, audio information, and more for distraction-free scrolling, according TechCrunch.

The new feature, which is called Clear Mode, is currently in limited testing with select users. Clear Mode gets rid of all of the clutter on screens, such as captions and buttons, when viewing content on the app. The new setting was spotted by users and highlighted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, note also friend of the show. The screenshots posted by users show that once clear mode is activated, you'll no longer see usernames, captions, audio information, and more. In some cases, it appears that you can get rid of the like, comments, and share buttons as well in order to have a completely distraction-free viewing experience. Users who are part of the limited test and have

access to clear mode will see the option when they tap and hold the screen. Once you do so, the Clear Mode setting will appear under the Add to Favorites button in the menu. Clicking on that will trigger the distraction-free viewing experience. If fully rolled out, the new feature could be a welcome addition for people who want to get rid of the clutter on screen and just focus on the content they're viewing. Clear mode could also be useful in instances where usernames and captions end up covering important parts of a video. In addition, viewers will often comment crop on a video, indicating that they want the user

to re-upload the video so that it can be screenshot and cropped without any captions or buttons obstructing the content. Activating Clear Mode could get rid of this problem, end quote. More signs of slippage in tech. Filing's and Holdings data at the end of April show that Fidelity cut the valuation of Instacart by 50%, Reddit by 33%, byteance by 13%, and striped by 13%. Now, again, this is just internal accounting. These aren't actual down rounds, still, quoting Bloomberg. The changes track a broad decline in public equity markets that punish technology stocks in particular with the NASDAQ 100 tumbling 21% through the first four months of the year. Venture-backed growth companies that debuted since the start of the pandemic lost almost half of their value. According to

pitchbook data, the fallout could bode ill for other firms that hold stakes in the companies mentioned. Andresen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital both backed Stripe and Reddit pitchbook data show. Chase Coleman's Tiger Global Management has also been among Stripes investors. Dan Sunheim's D-1 Capital Partners wrote down its investment in Instacart earlier this year. Fidelity funds cut Reddit to $39.65 a share from $61.79 a share, where they had been valued for the previous nine months. Stripe shares were reduced to $32.5 a piece, the lowest since March. The payments firm raised $600 million that month at a valuation of $95 billion, making it the most valuable U.S. startup. Reddit was valued at more than $10 billion as of August.

shares of Instacart were pegged at $64.85 at the end of April down by almost half from their peak a year earlier, while Beijing-based bite dance was reduced to $1.28 and $7.7 a share, a 13% decline from the preceding month, end quote. Today I learned of the existence of Murina 1. Note I'm saying Murrina with an M, Murina 1, not Purina 1, which I believe is a dog food. Anyway, Mirina 1 is a privacy-focused $369 Android smartphone that replaces all of the Google apps and services you usually get with an Android device. It replaces them with its own custom versions when it can, quoting the verge, an Android phone without Google. No Google apps, no Google Play services, no peppy Google Assistant, no Google surveillance and data snooping, no incessant ad targeting, no feeling like privacy is a pointless exercise. Some companies like Huawei have been forced to figure out how to build this kind of device. A few others have tried for the sake of maintaining your privacy and as a way to fight back against the tyranny of big tech.

None of it has ever really worked. The team at Murina, though, has been working on de-googling Android phones for the last few years, starting back in 2017 when Gail Duval created an operating system he originally called Elo. Like millions of others, I've become a product of Google, Duval wrote in 2017. He said he wanted to build something just as good as other. other Android software minus all the surveillance. I need something I could even recommend to my parents or my children, he wrote, something appealing with guarantees of more privacy, something that we

could build in a reasonable amount of time, something that will get better and better over time, end quote. The operating system now called EOS has been available on a few devices for a while now, but now the product is supposedly ready for prime time. Murina is releasing what it calls EOSV-1, along with the company's first ever smartphone, the $369, Murina, As a first hardware effort, it's reasonably impressive, a slick slab of glass with a 6.5-inch display, an eight-core media tech processor, a fingerprint reader on the side, and three cameras and a small bump on the back. The photography specs are impressive, too, including a 48-mixel main sensor on the back and a 25-mixel pinhole camera on the front for selfies. The camera with the one-place

Murina seems to have splurged here, which COO Alexis Nottinger says was by necessity. quote, people are ready to make quite a lot of tradeoffs when they move to an environment that is more oriented toward privacy, he said, but we've seen that the camera is the most likely thing people can be very picky about, end quote. In order to rid its device of every possible remnant of Google, Murina had to build an incredible amount of stuff. The EOS software comes with a custom-made messaging app so you don't need Google messages, a browser to replace Chrome, a Maps app that uses open street map data instead of Googles, an email client, a calendar, a file storage system, a contacts app, and practically everything else you'd get in the Google Workspace Suite, apps for notes and tasks and music and even voice recordings. Marina is even planning its own virtual assistant named Olivia, so you won't miss out on Google Assistant. Murina built cloud backends for many of those services, too, so you can check your email in the EOS email app, but also use your email or EOS email address instead of one

ending in Gmail.com. All your online services live in Murina Cloud instead of on Google or Microsoft services, to some extent all you're really doing here is swapping one centralized provider for another, but Murina says all its products are designed with the same anti-surveillance privacy principles as its smartphones. It's an admirable effort, but even Murina can only go so far in ditching Google. Every company that has ever tried this from Huawei's Harmony OS to ill-fated projects like Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS eventually discovered the same thing. Without the Android app ecosystem, your phone is dead on arrival. So, Murina tried to have its cake and eat it too. The company swapped

Google's Play Store for the App Lounge, which lets you install all major Android apps, including, yes, those made by Google, but has no sign of Google branding. When you do log into Google or use its services, Mirina tries to mitigate the data Google can collect. It leans on a project called MicroG. That's essentially a more private clone of some of the libraries that Google requires to run its apps, so you can use apps that require Google Play services without actually using Google Play Services. It mostly works, though it took a lot of digging around in settings to actually log

into my Google account on the Murina 1. I can't even imagine many people are buying EOS devices and then rushing to install Google Maps and Chrome, but it's still a frustrating bug. Murina's overall approach to privacy seems to focus less on stopping data collection altogether and more on security by obscurity. If you turn on advanced privacy on EOS, it uses a VPN to mask your location, either by picking a random plausible location somewhere in the world or letting you choose where you want to be and even hides your IP address from the sites you visit. It also tries to block trackers in every app you download and seems to do so pretty successfully. All of EOS is still based on Android, of course. The device I'm using is running a forked version of Android 10 based on

Lineage OS, an Android spinoff based on the old Cyanogen mod project. It's a fork of a fork, and Lineage OS is all the way up to Android 12, though. So it's a bummer. to see EOS lag behind. And for all of Murina's work, it still looks like Android. The organization has said that it plans to rethink the way notifications work, for instance, and make other changes to how Android works. But right now, it's just a simple iPhone layer launcher on top of an otherwise familiar version of Android. The Mirina One is an ambitious device and EOS is an even more ambitious operating system, but so far, they've mostly shown me just how ingrained Google is in our digital lives and how much more control the company has taken over its supposedly open source operating

system. The only way to get Android free of Google, it seems, is to make everything about Android a little worse. And the only way to eventually make it better is to rebuild it from the ground up. That's going to be tough for anyone to pull off, no matter how fervently they believe in the mission, end quote. Finally today, I do like to track macro stats when I find them, as you know. And here's one for you. Safari, the web browser, now has an estimated more than a billion users, making it the second browser to pass that billion user milestone behind Chrome's 3.37 billion users estimated, but ahead of Edge's estimated 212 million users, and Firefox is estimated 179 million users, quoting Atlas VPN.

Compared to last year's statistics, Microsoft Edge overtook Firefox for the third most popular browser with over 212 million users. Since the release of Windows 11, Microsoft set it as the default browser on all devices and made it difficult for users to change their preferred option. Therefore, Edge received a significant increase in its user base. Firefox browser ranks fourth with 179 million internet users. Firefox is oriented toward more privacy-concerned users as it offers quite a few features for their protection. The private browsing mode includes security against tracking, malware, fishing, and pop-up blocking. Samsung Internet browser found on the company's smartphones and tablets is used by more than 149 million users.

At the same time, over 108 million users are utilizing the Opera browser for their everyday tasks, end quote. Nothing for you today, because I'm still slugging through the new computer transition. Remember, I'm starting from scratch, so even after transferring over every file and folder, I could think of every hour or so. I try to do something, and I'm like, oh yeah, I need to redownload that. But this is fun, also. Very fun. Let's see if processing the show today is quicker than normal. We'll report back tomorrow.