Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, confounded by the ending of Bugonia and looking forward to seeing Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.
In this week’s newsletter: the head of Firefox talks AI-integrated browsers; the tech billionaires’ support of Trump and their successful request to defer national guard deployment to San Francisco; and the growing prevalence of face-scanning in online dating. Thank you for reading.
The head of Firefox on AI in browsers
Do you need an assistant for your online activities?
Multiple major players in artificial intelligence are moving on from chatbots like ChatGPT and are now focusing their efforts on new browsers with deep AI integrations. Those could take the form of an agent that shops for you or an omnipresent chatbot that follows you around and summarizes what you’re seeing, looks up related stuff, or answers related questions.
Last week alone, OpenAI released the ChatGPT Atlas browser, and Microsoft showed off Edge’s new Copilot Mode, both of which heavily feature chatbots. At the start of October, Perplexity made its Comet browser free. In mid-September, Google rolled out Chrome With Gemini, integrating its AI assistant with the most popular browser in the world.
In the wake of these releases, I phoned the general manager of Firefox, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, for his thoughts on whether AI-first browsers will catch on, if his own browser will go full AI, and whether users maintain any expectation of privacy in this new era of personalized, agentic browsing.
Read my Q&A with the head of Firefox.
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SF’s tech billionaires tell Trump to call off the national guard on their home turf
Last week, Donald Trump said he would not deploy the US national guard to San Francisco after proclaiming he would for weeks. What exempts SF from federal occupation but not Washington DC, Chicago or Los Angeles? The presence of tech billionaire donors, going by Trump’s Truth Social Post.
“Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday,” Trump wrote on Thursday, referring to the threatened “surge” of national guard troops.
Read more: Trump says tech chiefs convinced him to call off troop ‘surge’ to San Francisco
The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who has protested against the deployment of the national guard to Chicago for weeks, is also a billionaire. He is also an avowed Democrat and no friend of Trump. One can surmise why his phone calls to the White House didn’t have the same result as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang’s did.
Huang has traveled with the president to the United Arab Emirates to announce a gargantuan AI deal, agreed to pay the US government 15% of his company’s revenue from chip sales in China, and donated to Trump’s inauguration.
Marc Benioff has been at the center of the controversy from the start. The co-founder and CEO of Salesforce said in a controversial interview with the New York Times that Trump should make good on his threat and send in the troops. That was at the start of Salesforce’s major yearly conference, Dreamforce, which takes over downtown San Francisco like a homecoming reunion takes over a college town in the US. A few days of backlash later, Benioff walked back the remarks and rationalized them by saying he was only worried about conference security. Then he intervened with Trump to prevent the national guard’s deployment. The image that emerges is a billionaire who wants to have his cake (be close to Trump) and eat it too (seem a savior to San Francisco).
The tech billionaires are getting what they paid for when donating to Trump, a direct line and an exemption for their home turf from his capricious use of force.
Around the same time Huang and Benioff were gabbing with Trump on the phone, the East Wing of the White House met the business end of a backhoe. Backing that demolition is a coalition of tech companies and billionaires gifting hundreds millions of dollars to Trump for his grand ballroom project. What special treatment will they request after paying for a direct line to the president?
Read more about Trump and tech
Donors for Trump’s $300m White House ballroom include Google, Apple and Palantir
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Melania Trump’s meme coin architects accused of pump-and-dump fraud in lawsuit
US and China reach ‘final deal’ on TikTok sale, treasury secretary says
What caused last week’s disastrous Amazon Web Services outage?
Put succinctly, it was a bug in a piece of automation software. My colleague Josh Taylor reports on the cloud computing blackout that took everything from Signal to smart beds offline:
In a lengthy outline of the cause of the outage, Amazon revealed a cascading set of events that brought down thousands of sites and applications that host their services with the company.
AWS said customers were unable to connect to DynamoDB, an AWS database service that maintains hundreds of thousands of domain name system (DNS) records. It uses automation to monitor the system to ensure that records are updated frequently. The root cause of the issue, Amazon said, was an empty DNS record for the Virginia-based US-East-1 datacentre region. The bug failed to automatically repair and required manual operator intervention to correct.
Read more: Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together
How to decide if you need a new Apple product
Face-scanning is creeping into dating around the world
Tinder made a face-scan a requirement for new users in the US last week. Match Group, the app’s parent company, had already mandated facial verification when signing up in California.
The US requirement made headlines in the largely US-based tech press, but Match Group also rolled out its voluntary face check feature in Australia, Canada and India. In each of those markets, Tinder ranks among the most popular dating apps.
Match, which also owns Hinge and a slew of dating websites, plans to roll out the face-scanning feature to its other dating apps soon, paving the way for facial verification to become a near-universal requisite for online dating.
Any pretense of anonymity on Tinder is gone. The change poses substantial questions of privacy but also promises significant safety benefits. If Tinder is hacked, facial scans can’t be changed like passwords. Biometric personal data is immutable. Or will law enforcement enjoin Match to hand over users’ faces en masse? On the other side of the coin, serial rapists have been able to use Tinder as a hunting ground, seemingly unhindered by the app’s safety features. Victims’ families have blamed Match for failing to verify users.
A face scan might have been a shocking requirement for a signup in 2012, when Tinder debuted. Apple’s Face ID didn’t launch until 2017, although Samsung phones featured facial recognition features as far back as 2011. Users’ expectations of privacy and their willingness to trade it for new, more personalized features evolve over time, as Firefox’s Enzor-DeMeo said.
Read more: Rape under wraps: how Tinder, Hinge and their corporate owner chose profits over safety
The wider TechScape
Amazon plans to cut 30,000 corporate jobs in response to pandemic overhiring
Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows
Ultra-HD televisions not noticeably better for typical viewer, scientists say
Tesla reports steep drop in profits despite US rush to buy electric vehicles
Google hails breakthrough as quantum computer surpasses ability of supercomputers
