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COVID is bigger than anything I write about here, but there are still interesting things happening. Stay at home and catch up on your reading.
🗞 News
Zoom has gone from 10m to 200m daily users in the past few weeks (!), and that comes with pain. On one hand, since it was designed for the enterprise it wasn't hardened against abuse, so 'Zoom-bombing' (eg crashing random open group calls and putting obscene things onto everyone's screen) is now a thing. On the other hand, it's now getting a lot more privacy and security scrutiny, and some... issues have come up. These are two sides of the same coin: you have to ask 'what would malicious people do with our software?' and the answer might be both human engineering and software engineering. A lot of the flaws people found look like simple product decisions to make installing and using easier - for example, it used the Facebook SDK so you could log-in with Facebook, but that sends some device data to Facebook. But it also claimed it was end-to-end encrypted and isn't, and some of the traffic goes through Chinese servers, and so one has to assume that the Chinese state could listen in to anything if it wanted to. To its credit, Zoom has responded pretty well to most of these concerns, and some of this can be over-played (it seems pretty silly for a school system to ban it in case the Chinese intelligence agencies are listening to drama class), but I'm not sure the UK cabinet should carry on using this.
Stepping back, it's striking that Zoom has made such a big impact despite every tech giant having a big mature product in this space (or even several - how many of these apps does Google have? That would be a good interview question). It's really not as hard to displace these companies as some would think, if you can find the right wedge. This also reminds me of the founding legend of Dropbox: everyone told Drew Houston 'there are dozens of these' and he said 'yes, but do you use any of them?' Links: Zoom goes to 200m users, Zoom response to issues
Apple's 30% commission cracks? For a decade Apple has had pretty rigid rules that if you sell anything digital (ebooks, music, subscriptions) in an app you have to offer Apple's in-app payment system (IAP) as an option, with an (up to) 30% commission. Now, Apple is letting Amazon sell videos in some ways, to some customers, without using IAP. I read the explanation of precisely how this qualifies three times and still don't quite understand it, which might be deliberate. People have been complaining about this rule from the beginning - it's one thing for Fornite to pay 30% on V-Bucks when it has no marginal cost, but Spotify or Kindle do have marginal cost and don't have that margin to give up, so have been effectively blocked from selling a subscription at all inside their apps. This is now a pretty significant anti-trust topic, and I don't think Apple can maintain this position indefinitely. I would argue very strongly that closed, curated app stores are good and necessary, but this is not. Link
Apple VR/AR moves: apparently, Apple has bought NextVR, a content house, for ~$100m. Apple has sat out VR so far (and no-one has come up with any content other than hard-core games that really works), but is clearly very interested in AR glasses - glasses that can map the room, understand what you're seeing and place things in the world in front of you. There are rumours that both AR and VR devices are imminent (2-3 years) but that rumour has been around for, well, 2-3 years. Certainly, if Apple does launch something it will want to have some real use cases and content in place pre-launch, which is why it's putting so much effort into AR on the phone and put LIDAR into the new iPad: to seed the market for glasses. Link
Facebook AR: meanwhile Facebook has apparently done a deal with Plessey for AR displays as well. Zuck is on record that he thinks AR/VR will merge and will be the next platform after smartphones. Link ($)
Newspaper ad collapse: everyone is online all day, but advertisers are out of money and pulling back, and those that aren't are blacklisting their ads from appearing next to COVID content, making the impact on news orgs worse. Link
🔮 Reading
NY Times on Zoom-bombing - there are lots of trolls organising in dark corners of the internet to find people to abuse. We connected the world, and that includes all the bad people. Link
Veteran computer security analyst Bruce Schneier gives the (very) negative case for Zoom. Link
Perspective on how EU attitudes to tech regulation are affected: both credit and expectations are being stored up, especially in content moderation. Link
Google on how it's using ML to fill in gaps in audio calls from dropped packets. ML is disappearing inside everything we use. Link
Ari Emanuel, WME, and the Great Hollywood IPO That Wasn't. Link
Online grocery in the age of COVID. Link
Fascinating Group M survey of consumer attitudes to privacy and digital marketing. Link (PDF)
How COVID is shifting consumer behaviour and attitudes in China. Link
Rosebud AI: auto-generate stock models of whatever gender, age and ethnicity you want. Link
😮 Interesting things
UK phone masts attacked amid 5G-COVID conspiracy theory. Idiots. Link
Colombia's narco-submarines. Link
Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots. Link
📊 Stats
Google used the anonymous location data it collects from Android phones to build global indices of how much people have stopped moving around, for every country and major city. Great data. Link
Nokia on global data traffic changes. Disney+ is 18% of SVOD traffic in some countries. Link
More US network data: Comcast, FCC, Verizon, US cable networks
Kids' daily screen time. Link
Nielsen: streaming's share of US TV time leaps to 23% and Disney+ drives share gain by 'other' platforms. Link
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