DataDownload: A company you never heard of broke the internet

9 min readJun 12, 2021

DataDownload: A company you never heard of broke the internet A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

If you attended Machines + Media, then you know everything I’m about to say. Change is always a constant, but in the almost post-COVID environment… change has accelerated dramatically.

Microsoft is declaring a truce — of sorts — in the game-platform wars. Fastly broke the internet. Apple’s WWDC announcements were amazing, and got short shrift in the press in my humble opinion. Netflix is getting into selling swag. And this week on our podcast scan, deepfakes may not be that bad? Hmm… ok.

Overall, lots to ponder. Stay cool.

Best,
Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Steve@NYCMedialab.org
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read How Microsoft Is Ditching the Video Game Console Wars

Microsoft is betting that video game consoles will soon be a relic of the recent past. In 2014, Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, convinced newly minted CEO Satya Nadella to pay $2.5B for Mojang — the Swedish video game design studio behind Minecraft. The purchase was a bold first move in Microsoft’s shift away from competing with gaming console rivals like Sony and Nintendo. Since the Minecraft purchase, Microsoft “bought 15 other game studios and invested in new technologies, like a Netflix-style games subscription service and a mobile tool known as cloud gaming.”

Initially skeptical about gaming’s role in his vision for Microsoft, Nadella recently said, “Gaming is much more central to Microsoft today than it ever was in our history.” According to The Times: “Microsoft is betting that the future of gaming will be a post-hardware world where people may not want to spend hundreds of dollars for a console.” Even Xbox’s Spencer — once all in to win the console wars — has eased up. “We don’t look at Nintendo and Sony and say that company has to lose in order for us to win,” he said.

NY Times / 8 min read Read More How an Obscure Company Took Down Big Chunks of the Internet

Remember that day last week when the internet broke? You may be unfamiliar with Fastly, but if you were online on the morning of June 8th, you almost certainly felt the effects of its network outage. From From 5:47AM EDT until about midday, Fastly’s content delivery network (CDN) was offline or operating at greatly diminished capacity. Among countless smaller websites, the homepages of Fastly clients like The New York Times, The Guardian, Reddit, and the UK Government website couldn’t be reached.

Along with Cloudflare and Akamai, Fastly is one of the world’s largest CDN providers. A CDN’s primary utility is to serve content hosted on physical servers to users more quickly, regardless of their location. “It basically enables really high performance for content, whether that’s streaming video or a site or all the little images that pop up when you go to an ecommerce site,” says Angelique Medina, director of product marketing at the network monitoring firm ThousandEyes.

CDNs aren’t just about offering a better UX. They’re also the traffic cops of the internet. “It is like orchestrating traffic flow on a massive road system,” says Ramesh Sitaraman, Akamai consultant and professor of computer science at UMass Amherst. “If some link on the internet fails or gets congested, CDN algorithms quickly find an alternate route to the destination.” Outages of this sort have become more frequent, and, according to Medina, they’ll continue to get worse.

WIRED / 6 min read

Apple just announced two new features for its Apple Music subscription audio service — lossless-quality streaming and immersive Dolby Atmos spatial audio. But if you listen closely to the senior VP in charge of Apple Music, Eddy Cue, it’s crystal clear which feature he’s more excited about. “The reality of lossless is: if you take 100 people and you take a stereo song in lossless and you take a song that’s been in Apple Music that’s compressed, I don’t know if it’s 99 or 98 can’t tell the difference.”

Ask him about spatial audio, on the other hand, and he sings a different tune: “I think this is going to take over everything. It’s the way I want to listen to music when I’m in my car. It’s going to be the way I listen to music immediately with my AirPods. It’s going to be the way I listen to music in my house. In a way, it won’t feel very good when I’m listening to something that’s not Dolby Atmos because it’s so good. It’s like when I’m watching HD, it’s hard to go back.”

Spatial audio, in its current state, is a mixed bag, according to The Verge’s Chris Welch. “When it’s done well, spatial audio does indeed give music a unique feeling of breadth. But if you slap on your AirPods and expect to feel like an invisible person standing in the middle of a recording session, you’ll probably be underwhelmed. When engineers don’t put much care into an Atmos mix, it really shows.”

The Verge / 10 min read Read More Netflix: The Store!

Netflix’s growth shows signs of slowing down, but the launch of its new ecommerce venture, Netflix.shop, provides a new revenue stream for the streaming service. Built on the Shopify platform, Netflix’s ecommerce boutique will sell a variety of products — many of them limited edition — tied to a select few Netflix shows.

Like Lupin? You’ll soon be able to binge-watch it while resting your head on an official Lupin throw pillow, produced in collaboration with The Louvre, no less. Other Netflix shows lined up to get the official merch treatment include Stranger Things, Money Heist, and a Yasuke x Hypland collaboration with designer Jordan Bentley.

So can Netflix convert streamers into shoppers? “Mark A. Cohen, the director of retail studies and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, said he was skeptical about the longevity of the Netflix store after the excitement around its opening fades, in part because of the come-and-go cycle of Netflix hits. ‘Most of them have a short shelf-life, unlike a Disney property, which is a generational long ride,’ he said.”

NY Times / 6 min read Read More The Brain Isn’t Supposed to Change This Much

Ever feel your mind start to drift? It turns out our brains may “drift” much more than previously thought. Historically, neuroscientists have believed that “specific groups of neurons reliably fire when their owner smells a rose, sees a sunset, or hears a bell. These representations — these patterns of neural firing — presumably stay the same from one moment to the next.”

Recent research on mice by Columbia neuroscientists Carl Schoonover and Andrew Fink found that the way neurons respond to various stimuli is far from static. “Put it this way: The neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time.” This relatively new discovery in neuroscience has been dubbed representational drift.

So, does the discovery that mice brains have more plasticity than expected fundamentally change our understanding of how humans learn and form memories? Maybe not. John Krakauer, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, says that Schoonover and Fink’s study, though a “a technical tour de force,” is also “very slightly straw-mannish”: “Mainstream neuroscience relies on taking very specific methods and results and packaging them in a vague cloud of concepts that are only barely agreed upon by the field,” he said. “In a lot of neuroscience, the premises remain unexamined, but everything else is impeccable.”

The Atlantic / 10 min read

Trusted Reviews sums up WWDC’s 2021 event. With not a single piece of new hardware announced, the emerging online consensus is that this year’s event was somewhat underwhelming. Check out this video and judge for yourself.

Trusted Reviews (YouTube) / 12 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Deepfakes are like Hollywood Body Doubles (feat. Descript + MIT Media Lab)

In 2017, a little-known startup called Lyrebird practically broke the internet when it released deepfake audio clips of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. On this episode of Same Same But Tech, host Máuhan M Zonoozy, Head of Innovation at Spotify, speaks to Lyrebird Co-Founder and Head of Research, Kundan Kumar, who shares the inside story of how the company developed their voice clones and released them to the world. Zonoozy also interviews MIT Media Lab Professor Pattie Maes about the ethics and future of deepfake technology.

Player FM / 33 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Free Event: Data Driven NYC
Date: June 15, 5PM EDT
This month’s Data Driven event features CEOs and founders Nick Schrock (Elementl), DeVaris Brown (Meroxa), and Abe Gong (Superconductive). Register Here.

Free Event: IBM CDO/CTO Summit Series — Getting Fans, Employees & Customers Back In The Building
Date: June 16, 12PM EDT
As pandemic restrictions continue to lift, CDOs and CTOs from McDonald’s, the City of New York, and IBM discuss how data and analytics can help get people “back in the building” safely. Register Here. A Deeper Look Engineers at MIT Have Created Actual Programmable Fibers

At this point, we’re all used to wearable tech like FitBit and Apple Watch tracking our activity and vital signs. But engineers at MIT have taken wearable tech beyond accessories, having recently developed “the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt.”

According to the senior author of the MIT study, Yoel Fink, digital fibers could help “uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection. This work presents the first realization of a fabric with the ability to store and process data digitally, adding a new information content dimension to textiles and allowing fabrics to be programmed literally.”

According to Interesting Engineering, “The fiber also has a pretty decent storage capacity too — all things considered. During the research, it was found to be possible to write, store, and recall 767-kilobit full-color short movie files and a 0.48-megabyte music file. The files can be stored for two months without power.” In addition, the fibers were able integrate a neural network with thousands of connections. “This… could give quantity and quality open-source data for extracting out new body patterns that we did not know about before,” says study co-author Gabriel Loke.

IE / 4 min read