News Tiktok goes with Oracle (?) Late on Sunday night Bytedance said that it's chosen Oracle to 'buy' the US operations of Tiktok. It's rather unclear what this means, but it's mostly bad. China had responded to Trump's 'close/sell' order by saying that it wouldn't let the underlying recommendation systems be exported - without that you have an app and a hundred million users but no idea what to show them. That prompted Microsoft to pull out, but Oracle (a very old-fashioned enterprise software company that happens to be a Trump donor) has apparently agreed a deal with some sort of licensing or partnership deal, but it's not clear what, or how that would address any of the underlying issues raised if you can't see the data or the source code. There are real issues here (would you let a company based in today's China buy Youtube, or Netflix?), but you do need to react to that with a repeatable set of policies and rules (and maybe an actual privacy law), not chaos. Link Softbank selling ARM to Nvidia. Also on Sunday night, Softbank agreed a deal for $40bn: it bought it for $32bn in 2016 and said it was the centre of a Strategy For The Next 100 Years (but then, Masa always says things like that). Coupled with the news that SB has taken out huge options positions in US tech stocks (contributing to the recent price surge), it's hard not to see it as more a huge hedge fund than a visionary tech investor. Or maybe Masa is the Keyser Söze of tech. Meanwhile, this means that Nvidia has a leading position in both CPUs and GPUs: ARM tech is in the CPU in every mobile device and is moving into the data centre, and GPUs matter a lot in both. However, the rest of the industry will be nervous about buying from a single source. Link Apple subscriptions. Apple has a product announcement event on Tuesday: normally this would be new phones, and we're due for a bigger update than in the last year or two (though new phones are much less interesting than they used to be, as the market matures), but apparently the extra work integrating 5G, plus COVID disruption, means that's being pushed back a few weeks, which means this event is probably about updated watches, 'tags' (bluetooth tracking widgets), a refreshed iPad and, more interesting, a new Apple subscription bundle of some kind: instead of lots of $5 and $10 charges for music, games, storage etc, one unified package called, apparently, 'Apple One'. That might roll up hardware upgrade / instalment plans as well. Apple has effectively been a subscription service for a while (pay $700-1000 for a phone every 2 years), but they want to deepen that with more stickiness and less friction. No news to link to yet, but last year I wrote an explainer on 5G and why you probably don't need to pay much attention to it. Link Apple's app store muddle continues. Apple updated its store rules ahead of the event next week (and upcoming iOS14). It had previously blocked streaming games services from Google and Microsoft; now it says they must make a separate client for each game on the service and put each one on its app store, so that each game gets its own reviews, parental controls (and IAP) etc. That makes streaming a high-end game to iOS viable, but makes 'Netflix for games' services very hard. (They also addressed some other issues that have come up, such as charging for lessons and the Hey fuss last month; all apps that are clients for paid services are now OK if there's no 'Buy' button). Apple seems to be planning to tough this out, making case-by-case adjustments but not changing the principle: I don't think that will hold once the EU gets its teeth into Spotify's complaint. Link Election hacking. Microsoft reported that it's seeing a new wave of state actors trying to hack both Biden and Trump campaigns (and political consultants) in the USA. Set up your 2FA, please, and buy a Yubikey. Link Tech censorship: Belarus has been using Sandvine products to block and filter the internet in the face of protests (Does this actually work? See also the Africa study below). I'm sure they tell themselves 'we just sell tools', but they're not obliged to do business in Belarus. Of course, there are plenty of Chinese companies that would be happy to sell the same thing, and plenty of countries that want to copy China's 'managed internet' model. The SF Bay Area doesn't set standards for the internet anymore, for better and for worse. Link Facebook for Students. FB is launching 'Campus', which is Facebook but just for students (you need an .edu address to access it). There's an obvious joke here, but there could well be value to stripping back FB from the universal substrate it has slowly bloated into and instead making it just for one social circle (remember Path?) and just having one targeted set of tools. Link Fake fever cameras? A lot of Chinese companies are selling heat-sensitive cameras, claiming that they can detect someone with fever, as a measure against COVID. The science of this is very doubtful, given that you can be a spreader without having a temperature, and detecting body temperature from a distance is very unreliable anyway, but apparently many of these cameras can't even detect temperature at all: they just use machine learning to look for faces and claim 'normal temperature detected!'. Where there is money, there are cheats... Link Movie releases and broken habits. Part of lockdown is new behaviours and broken habits, and Hollywood is testing this with Mulan (Disney live action) and Tenet (Christopher Nolan's latest 'action movie you can pretend is Serious Drama'): do you put it in theatres that people don't want to go to, or break the traditional windowing and go direct to premium VOD? Hollywood question: what are we training audiences to expect? Mulan tried going direct (on Disney's own platforms, because it can and to boost them) and seems to be flopping (even in China); Tenet is going for what theatres it can get and downplaying expectations. Links: Tenet, Mulan Reading Analysis of the effect of internet shutdowns in African countries on political protest: these are happening more and more now, so do they work? Not really. Link Bessemer Ventures has published its investment memos for a bunch of important deals: Twillio, Shopify, Pinterest and more. Essential reading, both to see the process and for the historical perspective. Link McKinsey report on how lockdown is changing retail. Link The Verge reviews the new Microsoft Duo two-screen fablet. Verdict: 'OK, not great'. I am skeptical, both of the product and of Microsoft's strategy, but we will see. Link When an expert on content moderation gets their Twitter account suspended. False positives and false negatives. Link In defence of Rocket Internet. Link Interesting things Christies' catalogue of the 2009 Yves Saint Laurent / Pierre Bergé estate sale. 🐐. Link The André Trigano collection sale. Cars. Lots of cars. No, seriously. Link The Winamp skin museum. Link Michael McKean bought a 4D printer. Link Portraits of Ancient Playthings. Link Stats Statistics on remote medicine in the US during lockdown. Link Uber operating metrics in its 'going green' announcement. Link | 
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شغل الشاعر سعيد فرج باحريز رحمه الله الناس في المكلا وحضرموت عموماً باشعاره التي كانت لها مدلولات عميقة وثاقبة ومعانٍ بليغة وحكيم...
