If it’s Thursday, that means it’s time for tech talk with Mark Starling and the First News 570 crew. This week, we talk about Apple shaking down its developers and Amazon halting their facial recognition technology programs, Occulus causing eye damage, and Tesla becoming the world’s most valuable car company. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
BASECAMP: APPLE USES GANGSTER RULES IN APP STORE
For real, for real. Apple operating its App Store with strong arm tactics is nothing new. For years developers have tried to skirt Apple’s 30% charge for protection money in exchange for approving and listing apps in the Store. Even I have written apps that use third party services to collect payment for products bought in-app. Basecamp has taken a whole new spin and requires users to sign up for its email filtering service ONLY through its website. Basecamp doesn’t provide for any payment methods inside of its Hey app, but Apple is demanding that they collect their fee. This is an interesting one for the reason that the Hey app DOES NOT offer ANY way for users to subscribe within the app, it must only be done via their website. I’m interested to see what happens.
ZOOM TO STOP SNITCHING AND WILL ENABLE E2E FOR EVERYONE FOR A CATCH
You must be a registered Zoom user however. Until yesterday, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan was all for giving law enforcement eavesdropping access to non-paying Zoom users’ transmissions. Privacy and human rights advocates protested Zoom’s stance and the company will not perform end-to-end encryption on all users’ transmissions, paying and non-paying alike. Zoom said their policy was to minimize the number of abusive accounts. Moving forward, Zoom users will need to certify that they are the certified owner of their phone number, similar to the authentication strategy used by WhatsApp and Signal.
280 CHARACTERS STILL NOT ENOUGH AS TWITTER UNVEILS VOICE TWEETS
As if Twitter wasn’t noisy enough, the company announced a new voice tweeting feature that will be available for iOS users. The new feature gives users the ability to express themselves in their own voice, and adds a more human touch to the service. Users can compose up to 140 seconds of audio, and if you run out of seconds, keep talking, the service will give you another 140 seconds so that you can make a whole thread of voice storytelling. The feature will be rolled out to a specific number of users as part of a test, and there is no word on when the feature will be available for Android users.
