Should I Stadia or should I Go

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Should I Stadia or should I Go
Number 3547
Broadcast Date JUNE 6, 2019
Episode Length 33:22
Hosts Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang
Guests Justin Robert Young

Google released details about its upcoming Stadia service. We examine what was said, pricing and decide if this is a service that has a market.

Guest

Quick Hits

The FCC voted unanimously Thursday to let carriers block robocalls by default. The FCC also voted to move forward on a proposed rule requiring carriers to adopt the SHAKEN / STIR caller ID authentication system if they don't voluntarily adopt it themselves by the end of the year. The rule doesn't require carriers to turn on robocall blocking by default, and also doesn’t require these services have to be free to consumers.
Google announced updates to SOS alerts, providing more detailed visual information about areas effected by natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. Google Maps will also show this information. Earthquake visualizations will appear on desktop, Android and iOS versions of the app, with navigation warnings available in the smartphone apps. Flood visualizations are coming to Android, desktop and mobile versions of Maps, with hurricane visual forecasts available on all platforms.
Huawei signed agreements with MTS telecom to develop 5G networks in Russia over the next year. MTS said it expects the pilot launch of 5G networks in Russia starting later this year. China granted 5G licenses to state-owned telecoms China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom as well as state-owned broadcaster China Broadcast Network. The telecoms have planned commercial deployment of 5G service in China for 2020. Telecoms in the UK, US and South Korea have already started offering 5G services in limited areas.

Top Stories

An algorithm developed by scientists at Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University, and Adobe lets a user alter text in a transcript in order to change what a person in an accompanying video says. The algorithm learns a speaker's characteristics from the original video and creates a model of the speaker's head to attempt to replicate movements and speech. Right now the algorithm needs at least 40 minutes of video for training.
On May 15 we mentioned Microsoft had issued a patch for the BlueKeep vulnerability in Remote Desktop Services for otherwise out of support versions of Windows like Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The only unaffected versions of Windows were Windows 8 and Windows 10. Microsoft reinforced the warnings to patch the vulnerability last Friday. Tuesday, researcher Sean Dillon posted a video showing his working exploit. The workable exploit is estimated to potentially be as bad as WannaCry and NotPetya which allowed vulnerable computers to potentially break into any machine on the same network, patched or not. NotPetya is considered by many to be the most expensive malware attack in history.
Uber Copter will begin helicopter service in New York City July 9th, with 8-minute rides from a pad in Lower Manhattan by the Staten Island Ferry to JFK Airport. The service is only available to Platinum and Diamond Uber Rewards members, Monday through Friday afternoons. Each helicopter can seat five passengers, and can be booked up to five days in advance or right when you need it. Price will vary by demand but Uber estimates an average ride will cost between $200 and $225 per person. Two pilots will be on each flight.
Google says it will acquire data analytics company Looker, the first major acquisition since former Oracle exec Thomas Kurian took over as CEO of Google Cloud in November. It's Google's fourth biggest acquisition ever behind DoubleClick, Motorola and Nest. Looker analyzes data across multiple cloud services from multiple companies like Salesforce, AWS, Oracle and Microsoft Azure. Similar competing services to Looker include Microsoft Power BI and AWS QuickSight. Google needs to offer services like this to gain marketshare in cloud business. Kurian has previously said he wants to hire more salespeople and target retail and finance industries.
Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote an open letter to the US Congress last year asking for proper regulation of facial recognition. Microsoft has blocked sales of its facial recognition technology to California law enforcement. Now Microsoft has deleted its MS Celeb database, which contained more than 10 million images of some 100,000 people. Microsoft published the database in 2016 as the largest publicly available facial recognition data set in the world, meaning it to be used to train facial recognition systems. The images in the database were supposed to be of public figures and all had Creative Commons licenses. Berlin researcher Adam Harvey told FT.com he found images of arguably private individuals. The deletion comes after an investigatory report from FT.com on facial recognition with reference to Microsoft's activities.

Discussion

Thing of the Day

Chris Christensen is back with a tip for folks outside the US who might want to ride-hail and ride-share for longer distances.

Mailbag

One of the most appealing and innovative features of Google Stadia is the controller, which directly connects to Google’s servers, bypassing the local machine and decreasing latency.

I know there a lot of us who grew up on PC games, and prefer to play with a keyboard and mouse. Do you think that there is a market out there for a Stadia keyboard and mouse set that also directly connects to Google’s servers? This launch seems geared towards the console market (perhaps to outrace the next generation consoles).

Thanks,
Sent by Nick from Montana


I wanted to share my perspective on the newly announced Apple Login. I work for an Education Service Agency. A few years ago we started making web / mobile apps. We've been using Google Login for our apps because: it's a relatively simple, secure and cheap (free) way for our apps to handle login. Many school districts (our customers) have adopted GSuite for education.

We can easily limit login to the email domain of paying customers (we use a site license model rather than per user model) - e.g. you have to use your school email that ends with @myschool.org
We do not sell any personal data from our users. We're a non-profit mission focused organization. If we're required to add Apple Login to our apps... well I'll take a wait-and-see approach, but my first reaction is to suspect it would be not optimal. I'm not sure we'd be able to verify users by domain if they use Apple Login (especially if they use the hide my email feature). On top of that, their Apple Login would likely be for their personal account and not their work account. If that's the case we'll either need to do a lot of extra work to include something none of our customers were asking for, or slap the Apple Login button there but not "hook it up" on the back end and tell our customers to ignore it.

The Apple Login is a cool idea for consumer apps, but doesn't make sense for apps that require work / enterprise login. I'm interested to see where this lands.
Sent by Josiah

YouTube

Links



Preceded by:
"Don’t Wack Wacom"
Should I Stadia or should I Go
Followed by:
"Destiny's Child"