Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/18 - Did Google Almost "Rage Quit" the Cloud?

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

Everyone comes together to create a smart-home standard, did Google consider walking away from its cloud business, the last holdout comes to streaming, Gary Larson stops holding out on the web and the math behind that gift-wrapping video. Sponsors: Tiny Capital Aircall.io/ride Links: Apple, Google and Amazon are cooperating to make your home gadgets talk to each other (CNBC) We Tested Ring’s Security. It’s Awful (Motherboard) Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud (The Information) Cord cutters, you can finally stream your PBS stations online – on YouTube TV (USA Today) Virtual product placement is coming for TV and movies and Ryff has raised cash to put it there (TechCrunch) Far Side creator Gary Larson launches website with promise of new work (The Guardian) A Letter From Gary Larson (TheFarSide.com) The Internet Is Losing Its Mind Over This Gift-Wrapping Trick. Here's the Secret. (Popular Mechanics) The Gift Wrapping Video 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, December 18th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Everybody comes together to create a smart home standard.

Did Google consider walking away from its cloud business? The last broadcast holdout comes to video streaming. Gary Larson finally comes to the web and the math behind that gift wrapping video. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple, Amazon, Google, and the Zigby Alliance are announcing Project Connection, connected home over IP, a partnership to create a new smart home networking standard. Basically, no more trying to get your various Internet of Things devices to play nice together. Everybody's going to agree to the same set of standards, and hopefully it'll all just work,

quoting CNBC. The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use, the company said in a press release. By building upon Internet Protocol IP, the project aims to enable communications across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services, and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification, end quote. Zygby Alliance companies that are already creating products will also contribute. They include, among others, Samsung Smart Things, Schneider Electric, Signify, which is formerly

Phillips Lighting, IKEA, NXP semiconductors, and Residio. The group will focus first on physical safety smart home devices, such as smoke alarms and CO sensors, smart doors and locks, security systems, electric plugs, window shades, and HVAC controls, before expanding into other types of devices and commercial solutions. The group is working to release a draft specification and preliminary open source materials late next year. It's unclear when the first products will be on the market, end quote. But when they are available, you'll know by a little project, connected home over IP sticker. That'll be on the box.

And you know, maybe smart home devices could use some standards. We've been featuring a lot of negative stories about Ring lately because there have been a lot of negative stories about Ring lately. So add one more to the pile. Testing by motherboard shows that Ring devices lack some pretty basic safety safeguards that would deter things like credential stuffing or brute force attacks. Quote, Ring is not offering basic security precautions,

such as double-checking whether someone logging in from an unknown IP address is the legitimate user or providing a way to see how many users are currently logged in. Entirely common security measures across a wealth of online services. Ring doesn't appear to check a user's chosen password against known compromised user credentials, Although not a widespread practice, more online services are starting to include features that will alert a user if they are using an already compromised password. Other steps ring could take to better keep hackers out includes checking whether someone is logging in from an IP address ring has never seen before. And if so, carrying out additional checks, Cuthbert said. Another is checking for concurrent sessions, such as seeing whether the user is simultaneously logged in from, say, both Germany and the UK.

in case one of those might be a hacker accessing the account, end quote. Now, let me say this again. To a large degree, yes, the people that have been seeing their ring cameras and other smart cameras hacked recently, it's largely their own fault. Don't use your regular old password and credentials to sign into your smart camera. Use unique passwords. Use two-factor authentication if the device allows you to. But yeah, it also seems that ring itself has fallen into the same.

bad practices of thinking, oh, this is just a benign and harmless device that I shouldn't take that seriously on the security front. Again, this is a camera in your home, looking at you and your kids. Behind maybe your bank account password, this is the thing you should lock down maybe the most? Very interesting report from the information. Google slash alphabet has apparently set an ambitious timeline for its cloud computing business to become either number one or number two in the market by 2023. But before they set that goal early last year, they apparently strongly considered leaving the cloud computing market entirely because their efforts to date had been faring so poorly. Quote, that timeline was devised early last year after an intense

months-long debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told the information. The group, which included Google CEO of Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, and then CEO of Alphabet Larry Page discussed whether Google could win in the business, who would be best to lead the effort and the difficulties of competing on things other than technology, such as sales and marketing. The group even talked about, and eventually dismissed, the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said, end quote. A little bit of background on this.

Ex-Cloud CEO Diane Green was about to leave the company earlier this year, and Google eventually ended up doubling down and hiring Thomas Currian. Google apparently decided that the cloud computing business was too big an opportunity to give up on. But this does suggest that the clock. might be ticking on the project overall, quoting again. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn't continue investing money if it failed to meet its goal, the person said. The group's leaders told staffers that if Google couldn't reach a certain size with its computing and storage business, two of the most commonly used cloud services, the cloud unit

might never become profitable, the person said. To reach such scale, they said Google would need to be in a top two position in the market, end quote. Now, if true, I find the... report interesting because it would explain a bunch of stuff, not the least of which would be Stadia. Google apparently budgeted $20 billion in capital expenditures to build out its cloud business. So, you know, you're going to want to show some kind of results on that level of investment somehow, right? Let me quote one more time. From the perspective of Google co-founder

page, getting into the cloud business was a big leap. He never wanted Google to be a traditional enterprise software company with big direct sales teams, splashing marketing, and long sales cycles, said people who have worked with him. After seeing limited progress in the first six years of the project, he had a nagging question, which still remains, of what exactly Google Cloud would provide for customers that they couldn't get from AWS and Microsoft, end quote. So maybe Stadia was a proof of concept, or is a proof of concept, although it is worth noting that page is sort of gone now, right? So there's that. But also, might this explain some of the Google Civil War pressures? If this is the company's big priority for the coming

years, remember what being in the cloud business means. It means government contracts, military contracts, things like Jedi, things like Project Maven, that Pentagon AI project that Google employee agitation made Google back away from. You see how I'm connecting the dots here. But also, you know, this is probably news Google doesn't want getting out. I mean, how many times have we talked about on this very podcast, you can't trust Google to stand behind any new product or new initiative for very long. As John Daniel Trask tweeted, quote, this gives me zero confidence in adopting Google Cloud Computer now. Ryan Block, co-founder of Begin, tweeted, one of the top questions we get about Begin. and ARC serverless is, why don't we support GCP yet?

There are many reasons, but Google's cultural willingness to scrap its products, even the ones people use and love and rely on, remains at the center of that decision. And Will Hamill tweeted, quote, If you needed any reason not to pick GCP instead of AWS, then how about they're going to rage quit in 2023, end quote. More than 100 PBS-affiliated stations have now launched on YouTube TV, Google's $50 a month cable alternative. So this means you can now get PBS content from almost any station. Well, a hundred of the more than 330 total affiliate stations on the web and in apps beginning today, quoting USA Today.

Public television stations had remained a holdout from streaming TV services since the debut in 2015 of DISH Network's Sling TV, the first major streaming offering to include the more popular channels in pay TV bundles. Soon, you'll be able to stream PBS's Downton Abbey. Fans of shows such as Downton Abbey Masterpiece and PBS News Hour could watch them live only with a cable or satellite bundle unless they tuned in their stations free over-the-air digital broadcasts with an antenna. Online viewers could catch up on programming via stations sites, PBS streaming apps and on-demand services such as Netflix. PBS executives acknowledged the demand for a cheaper alternative for viewers without good reception. In April 2018, Chief Digital Officer Ira Rubinstein

told USA Today's Jefferson Graham that, quote, it's a high priority for us. But the holdout continued even as regional sports networks that had long been mainstays of cable and satellite began showing up on streaming services. People have been waiting, Bob Kemp, Vice President for Digital Services at Boston-based WGBA. H said in an interview on Monday. If you're thinking about cutting the cord, this may have been a reason why you haven't. Now, voila, end quote.

And speaking of, here's an interesting raise in the streaming space. RIF is a startup that uses proprietary tech and machine learning to identify objects in TV or movie scenes so that you can later, after the fact, go back and insert branded products. So, for example, if there was a Coke can sitting on a table and a scene, but your streaming service knows that you're actually a Pepsi family, well, they can change that to become a Pepsi can. So on-demand product placement. Riff just announced that it has raised $5 million to bring advertising like this to things like Stranger Things.

But wait, I thought Netflix swore up and down that it would never do advertising. Well, quoting TechCrunch, product placement is an increasingly big business in the U.S. raking in some $11.44 billion in 2019, according to data collected by Statista. That figure is up from $4.75 billion in 2012. The same report indicated that roughly 49% of Americans took action after seeing product placement in media. The effectiveness of product placement has even been proven by researchers from Indiana University, and Emory University, they found that, quote, prominent product placement embedded in television

programming does have a net positive impact on online conversations and web traffic for the brand, end quote. And while streaming services enjoy the dollars their subscribers are throwing at them, they're also looking at ways to diversify their revenue streams. Netflix and Hulu are both expanding their product marketing divisions, and analysts like those from Forster Research predict that product placement will be a huge moneymaker for the company. as traditional ad rates decline, end quote. So maybe even Netflix has a way to turn on the advertising tap without ever admitting that they're turning on the advertising tap. Even if you insist on no ads in your stuff, even if you are fleeing to subscription services just to get away from ads, that might not mean anything.

The ads will find you. And now that you're a subscriber and you have a connected smart TV, the ad companies will know who you are and they're going to find you in ways that you've never even imagined. You can have your Star Wars nostalgia, your comic book nostalgia for me. This is news that really takes me back to my childhood in the 1980s. Gary Larson has launched TheFarside.com to feature some of his clubs. classic far-side strips, but also unseen sketches and doodles, and also maybe even feature occasional new work. If you've never seen a far-side strip before, I won't ask you to Google it because actually one of the reasons Larson is doing this after so long is to dampen the success

of infringers of his copyright online all these years. At the height of its power, the far side was in nearly 2,000 newspapers, 40 million books were sold, and crucially, 70 million calendars were sold. Larson retired the strip in 1995. As the internet grew to prominence in subsequent years, he fought hard to prevent his work from being digitized because he didn't want the material to leave his control, quoting Larson himself. Truthfully, I still have some ambivalence about officially entering the online world. I previously equated it to a rabbit hole, although black hole, although black hole sometimes seems more apropos. But my change of heart on this has been due not only to some evolution on my own thinking,

but also in two areas I've always cared about when it comes to this computer slash internet stuff, security and graphics. Okay, so better security is, of course, just better security. But it helps. If they wanted to, I'm sure the Russians could get inside this thing and start messing with my captions. I know they're thinking about it. But the other one, the achievement in graphics has been a big and sense. for me. Man, did those old computer screens suck when it came to visual nuances. Finally,

I also concede I'm a little exhausted. Trying to exert some control over my cartoons has always been an uphill slog, and I've sometimes wondered if my absence from the web may have inadvertently fueled someone's belief my cartoons were up for grabs. Please, whoever you are, takeeth down my cartoons, and let this website become your place to stop by for a smile, a laugh, or a good old-fashioned recoiling. And I won't have to release the crack and cow, end quote. Finally today, no doubt you've seen the video that has been making its way around social media. The one gift wrapping trick to wrap a gift even if you think you don't have enough wrapping paper to do so. I've got a link to the video in the show notes. If you haven't seen it yet, TLDR, the big secret is you just turn the

paper 45 degrees. But guess what? There's actual science behind this, or actually math, simple geometry. Basically, you get better coverage economy wrapping diagonally without redundant overlap, quoting popular mechanics. The secret is how you're wrapping all the way around the item. A diamond orientation means you're folding over right triangles with the longest side of each one, the hypotenuse, covering the entire edge of your item. If the tails of each end wrap all the way around your book and overlap even a little bit, your entire book is enclosed. Our effective wrapping length increased from seven or nine to over 11 inches for each diagonal. A folded fortune teller shows us how elegantly this can work when our piece of paper is square,

forming a perfect juncture with no overlap, end quote. You know, every couple of years, a video makes its way around the internet that kind of changes my life fundamentally. I know how to tie a tie now because of a video. I fold my shirts every time using that one's one. special trick I learned in a video, and now, just in time for the holidays, I finally know how to wrap a present efficiently. That's all for today. Be excellent to yourselves and each other. Talk to you tomorrow.