Here are a few of the stories from Monday and Tuesday that caught my attention. This is less heavy on the fun gadget stuff and more on the less fun “technology as news” stuff
US House Judiciary Committee Releases Report on Big Tech Companies
Over the last several months, the Judiciary Committee in the US House of Representatives has been looking into the power the big tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook (among others) have. I won’t pretend to have read the entire 449 page report, but people much smarter than me tell me that the report paints a damning picture of these companies, and is recommending sweeping changes on how the United States regulates big tech. I mostly agree with the ideas here. We have seen the influence these companies have over our day to day lives increase dramatically, and they have largely operated without any regulation. The hard part is deciding how to regulate, how far to regulate, and where that line is. There’s no one good answer there, and if anything ever comes of this, it will likely be years from now, and after much debate and with the big companies fighting it every step of the way.
To me, it is becoming more and more clear that something has to be done, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to figure it out.
Google vs Oracle Heads to the US Supreme Court
Speaking of things that take years, a court case that is almost a decade long has made its way to the Supreme Court in the United States. All the way back in 2011, Oracle sued Google for copyright and patent infringement. The lawsuit is over 37 Access Programming Interface (API) systems in Android that Oracle claims are part of Java, which Oracle owns. Google did not copy the API’s directly, but instead built API’s that are designed to interoperate with those Java API’s to the point where code that is written to work with Java will work on Android without much or any modification, and vice versa. Oracle has acknowledged that Google did not copy and paste the API’s directly, but rather that they copied the exact functionality.
reaching consequences across the entirety of the software programming landscape, and could actually cripple programming languages. For as different as programming languages can be, at the end of the day they all mostly aim to do the same things. This has led to programming languages being developed as derivatives over the years. This makes it easy for people to learn multiple programming languages, and makes software easier to develop across a wide range of devices.
API’s are standardized, structured ways to access processes that make writing complex applications much easier. Instead of a developer needing to write an entire function from scratch, they can use an API built into the system to make it work. Think of it almost like a set of instructions. The developer can tell the app to follow a standardized set of instructions to accomplish a task instead of writing their own. This also ensures greater compatibility across the entire system, as anything that uses that API will work the same, since it is a standard set of instructions.
The main argument here has always been whether an API can be copyrighted. The US Copyright Act does not apply to any “idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation.” This is the crux of the argument. Google is trying to define an API as a procedure or a process that cannot be copyrighted, where Oracle wants to define an API as something that is owned, and thus can be copyrighted.
This case has gone through several trials dating back to 2012. There have been many split decisions and appeals that have led us to the Supreme Court this week. One of the more interesting things is how each court handles cases that get very, very technical. In once case, a judge who actually knew how to write and develop code as a hobby ruled in Google’s favor because that judge had a first hand understanding of exactly how the systems worked. It is not likely that any of the Supreme Court Justices will have that kind of experience. Another complication is that with only 8 Justices on the court, a split decision is possible. The article below actually describes a court case from 1996 that was similar to this, but was unable to establish national precedent because at that time there was an open seat on the court, and that resulted in a 4-4 split decision.
This is worth watching, and while the results are likely a few months away, I am very interested to see how this goes.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/6/21504715/google-v-oracle-supreme-court-hearings-android-java
Contact Tracers Missed 15,000 people in the UK Because of an old Excel File Format
The UK had a bit of a snafu with how it accomplishes contact tracing. The government and health agency built a tool that would take all confirmed cases of COVID-19 and export them into files that would be sent to contact tracers to import into their systems and start their work. This tool was built to export the data into Microsoft Excel, but for some reason used the older .xls file format instead of the newer .xlsx file format. And I use the term “newer” very generously here. Microsoft introduced the .xlsx file format in 2007, and as of today the .xls format that dates back to the first releases of Excel in 1987 is supported only for compatibility reasons. The .xlsx file format includes many improvements over the older format, but the one that matters here is that the older format only supports roughly 65,000 rows in a spreadsheet. .xlsx also has a maximum but it is exponentially higher, and for all intents and purposes infinite.
What happened in this case is that over the course of a week, when the data export was done it was producing excel sheets with over 65,000 rows of data, which meant that anything after that point was cut off and not included. This meant that over the course of a week, there were about 15,000 people that needed to be contacted for contact tracing that fell through the cracks. The Government and health agency discovered the error after about a week and fixed it, and was able to go back and get the data that was missed, but those were valuable days that were lost in trying to contain the spread of COVID-19.
Big, public mistake that could have significant consequences, all because some programmers chose the wrong file formats.
Facebook Bans all Accounts and Groups related to QAnon, Still Misses the Mark
Facebook was so close to getting this right. The company announced that it will ban any Facebook Group, Page, or Account that is related to the QAnon conspiracy that has no basis in fact. That is good. Facebook, however, clarified that it will not stop individual people from posting pro QAnon content. That is bad.
So close, yet so far.
Google Comes to its Senses over Chromecast Support in YouTube Music
YouTube Music has a free feature that allows you to upload your own music to the service and play it on your devices. This is a carryover from the soon to be killed Google Play Music service. While this service was always free on Play Music, for some reason in YouTube Music you were not able to use Google’s Chromecast functionality to play that uploaded music to smart speakers, displays, or TV’s without paying for YouTube Music’s Premium Streaming Service. Google has come to its senses and updated YouTube music to allow users to play their own music on their own speakers without having to pay for it.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/10/youtube-music-opens-up-google-cast-support-for-everyone/
Lastly, a couple quick things.
Donald Trump and his re-election campaign have had Tweets that claim the seasonal flu is deadlier than COVID-19 labelled as misinformation, and Facebook has outright removed similar posts from its platform. Just another instance of the President of the United States pushing provably false information.
The new Google Apps icons are bad, and Google should feel bad for releasing them. I cannot overstate this. They are bad. Very bad.
And Apple will announce the 2020 iPhone lineup on October 13th, among other things.