Week In Review for the Week of 1/27/2020
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| Week In Review for the Week of 1/27/2020 | |
| Number | 1038 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 1, 2020 |
| Episode Length | 6:50 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
EU votes in favor of a common mobile charger, Apple proposes new 2FA standard, Google experiments with paid search results design.
Headlines
- The Vine successor Byte launched on iOS and Android on Friday. The app was created by Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann, and lets users upload and share 6-second looping videos. At launch the interface offers a main feed, Explore page, notifications, and profiles. Byte plans to launch a pilot partner program soon to provide popular users integrated monetization options, something Hofmann hopes will differentiate the service from TikTok and Snapchat.
- Google is changing its newly-created presentation of paid search results on the desktop. Google had changed the paid results to look just like regular results, but with an "ad" icon in the upper left where a publisher's favicon would otherwise go. In a tweet Google said, "We’ve heard your feedback about the update. We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons." The test will try different placements of the icons.
- In response to a San Francisco Chronicle investigation, Grubhub stated it began adding some restaurants to its sites for delivery without a formal agreement with the restaurant. These are usually high demand restaurants, and in these instances, Grubhub sends someone to the restaurant to place the order, with a driver coming for delivery. Grubhub did state that it partners with over 140,000 restaurants, and that most listings are with explicit partners. Restaurant owners say in these cases, Grubhub often has inaccurate or out dated listings and prices.
- UK Ministers on the National Security Council agreed the National Cyber Security Centre should issue guidance that high risk vendors should be excluded from the core of telecom operations and no high risk vendor should make up more than 35% of the edge access network, like phone masts. In addition, high risk vendors will be barred from sensitive locations like nuclear sites and military bases as well as any Critical National Infrastructure. The NCSC does not keep an exhaustive list of high risk vendors but Huawei is considered one of them. Huawei has more than 35% of the equipment in UK access networks. Telcos have three years to modify their implementations to reach the recommended levels. The guidance has been issued to telecoms but Parliament will need to enact legislation to implement the guidance as law.
- Facebook made its "Off-Facebook Activity Tool" available to all 2 billion plus members. It shows 180 days of data Facebook collects from code used by non-Facebook sites to serve ads or offer Facebook interactivity such as likes or embedded posts. You can see how Facebook received information, such as whether you logged in using Facebook or did a search etc., and you can disconnect the third party from accessing your Facebook data with a clear history button, though any data it has already collected would not be affected. It also isn't the setting that will stop the third party from collecting data in the future. That's a different section of settings. Over the next two weeks, Facebook also plans to prompt all users to review those settings in the Privacy Checkup tool.
- The Information's sources say Google may unify its existing communication services into a workplace-oriented app to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams. The unified app is said to include Gmail messaging and the company's two Hangouts apps, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, plus Drive access so teams can share content more easily, offered as a part of G Suite.
- US Interior Department officials plan to formally adopt a no-fly rule for all non-emergency uses of drones while it assesses them for security risks. Interior officials say all of the department’s roughly 800 drones are made in China or have Chinese parts, and it temporarily grounded its fleet last year over concerns the devices could be used for espionage. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told The Wall Street Journal that his department will grant exceptions for training flights, tracking wildfires, and in emergencies where human safety or property damage are at risk, such as search-and-rescue operations.
- Bitmoji TV will launch on Snapchat on February 1st. The new offering will have its own Snapchat Show page that users can subscribe to, with new episodes showing up on the Discover page. Content will feature the Bitmoji avatar of users as the protagonist and the last person they interacted with on Snapchat as a co-star, user avatars are silent while friends will be voiced. Shows are designed to be PG-13 rated, with mild violence and bleeped out swearing. Content for the first season was written and directed by Bitmoji co-founder and CEO Ba Blackstock. Snap says that 70% of its 210 million daily active users have created a Bitmoji avatar.
- Jody Hunt, Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Justice Department Civil Division, announced its first-ever enforcement actions against two groups that facilitated hundreds of millions of robocalls per month. The Justice Department is seeking court approval to stop the organizations from operating, which include two Arizona-based companies: TollFreeDeals.com, SIP Retail and their owner-operators, plus New York defendants Global Voicecom, Global Telecommunication Services, KAT Telecom and their owner-operators. The DoJ says the companies serve “gateways” for fraudulent call operators and get paid for facilitating the calls and passing them into the regular U.S. telecommunications network using digital voice over IP technology.
- The European Parliament voted 582-40 in favor of the resolution on a common charger for mobile radio equipment. Lawmakers now have until July to adopt an act related to the charger "harmonization" directive from 2014 or introduce a similar legislative measure. The resolution hopes the adoption of a common charger will cut down on e-waste, and warns against fragmentation in the wireless charging space as well.
- Apple's WebKit team published a proposal on GitHub to standardize the format of one-time passcodes sent over SMS, used in two factor authentication. The format would send a two line SMS, one for human verification with the code, and confirmation of what website sent it, the second line would have the site URL and the code preceded by a pound sign. The goal is to have browsers and messaging apps recognize the domain automatically from the message, and extract the code to complete the login without user interaction. The proposal claims feedback from Google has been positive, with Google Product Manager Steven Soneff and software engineer Sam Goto providing feedback in development.
Links
| Preceded by: "The European Parliament Approves Resolution on a Common Charger Standard" |
Week In Review for the Week of 1/27/2020 |
Followed by: "West Virginia To Allow Mobile Voting for People with Disabilities" |