Search Results for "september 21"

Google’s Big AI Day at I/O – DTNSB 5023

Plus Marshall comes for Sonos and Apple gets more heat from the Judge over Fortnite.

Starring Tom Merritt, and Jenn Cutter.

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Google and Apple Both Lost Appeals In The EU And Face $Billions In Payouts – DTH

DTH-6-150x150Apple and Google both lost appeals in the European Union Tuesday that could see billions paid out, Two former Samsung Executives have been arrested in South Korea, and iOS 18 will be out September 16th.

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Breve historia del podcasting en México – NTX 374

Google acusado de monopolio, adiós a las contraseñas compartidas de Disney+ en septiembre y la historia del podcasting en México.

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Temas:
-Trabajador de TI ayudaba a financiar a Corea del Sur
-Humane Pin tiene más devoluciones que ventas
-Disney+ limitará contraseñas compartidas en septiembre
-Google violó leyes antimonopolio
-Spotify reduce inversión en podcasts en LATAM

Análisis: Breve historia del podcasting en México

Puedes apoyar a Noticias de Tecnología Express directamente en Patreon o con suscripciones en Acast.
Gracias a todos los que nos apoyan. Sin ustedes, nada de esto sería posible.
Muchas gracias a Dan Lueders por la música.

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Show Notes
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About Ethernet

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Computers talk to each other via networking, most commonly over a wired ethernet connection. Tom explains how that started and why it was such a breakthrough.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

To describe Robert Metcalfe’s life might sound stereotypical for an American who grew up in the 1950s. He was born in 1946 in Brooklyn. His Mom was a homemaker and his dad was a test technician working in gyroscopes. He graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1964 and got bachelors in electrical engineering and industrial management from MIT in 1969. He got his Masters in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1970 and was cruising to a Harvard Ph.D. in computer science. A true American success story.

Until he wanted to connect to the brand new ARPANet node at Harvard. Metcalfe didn’t take no for an answer. He made his own fate. He used his contacts at MIT and got a job at the school’s Project MAC, which would eventually become the Computer Science and Artificial INtelligence Lab. He worked on the hardware that linked MIT’s minicomputers to the ARPANet.

It seemed like that was his thing. He proposed APRPANet as a topic for his thesis, but Harvard rejected it. While he tried to figure out how to revise the thesis, he got a job out in California at Xerox PARC. While there he read about the ingenious way scientists in Hawaii had figured out how to connect computers between the islands. It was called ALOHANet. He helped them fix some of the bugs in their connections and folded that into his thesis. This time Harvard accepted it.

It definitely seemed like connecting computers was his thing. And if you’ve ever plugged an ethernet cable in to get the internet, you’re glad it was.

Let’s help you know a little more, about ethernet.

Ethernet is a computer networking technology that lets you send data from one machine to another. Typically it’s used for internet traffic, but it can also be used for local area networks, or LANs.

While we think of ethernet as the wires and the funky plug with the little clip, the form factor of the wire isn’t the truly important part. It’s the protocol that makes it ethernet. I could conceivably plug any kind of wire between two computers but you need rules but it would be chaos without rules about which computer is sending and which one is receiving data. If both try to send at the same time you get collisions. Heck even when you do have rules you get collisions. The protocol works because it has good rules not only to try to avoid collisions but how to handle them when they happen anyway.

Ethernet is a very good set of rules.

To use ethernet, systems will divide data into short pieces called frames. Each frame contains info on where it originated, where its end destination is and some error-checking data to determine if the data has been corrupted. If it has, the frame will be discarded and in many instances can be retransmitted.

Think about it this way. When we have a conversation, we don’t both usually talk at once. You talk and then I talk. If we both start talking at once, we stop and one of us lets the other repeat what they said. The ethernet protocol does that too. It basically says for machines to wait until they don’t detect any incoming data before they start sending data. And yes there are rules to stop one machine from dominating the conversation. You have to take breaks every so often. The protocol also has rules for what happens when an accident causes two pieces of data to collide and get corrupted. Sometimes that means ignoring them, sometimes that means asking for them to be re-sent. It depends how important the data is. There are also origination points and endpoints. That’s important when data goes through an ethernet switch, so it knows where to send which frames of data.

Let’s get back to our friend Robert Metcalfe. As we mentioned, while at Xerox PARC, Metcalfe read up on Hawaii’s ALOHANet, which solved the problem of inter-island communication in Hawaii. Starting in June 1971, ALOHANet worked by dividing outbound and inbound traffic into separate channels. Outbound traffic just broadcast everything as packets with each packet containing a destination. Packets were rebroadcast until it was acknowledged that they had been received. We have a whole episode on ALOHANet.

Metcalfe fixed a few bugs particularly about collisions in ALOHANet and included that work in his Harvard PhD Thesis. He used that knowledge at Xerox PARC when he and David Boggs started to develop a way of connecting computers by wire over short distances. At least short compared to islands separated by large distances of water.

Metcalfe was trying to make it easier for Xerox’s Alto computers to communicate. At one point he even called ethernet the Alto Aloha Network since he was using a lot of the methods from ALOHANet.

But the name ethernet was also there from the start. His ideas were first documented on May 22, 1973 in a memo called Alto Ethernet. He likened the ever present stream of data flowing through the wires to the “luminiferous Aether” once believed to be the way electromagnetic waves moved through space.

Ethernet itself first functioned on November 11, 1973.

Xerox filed for a patent on ethernet in 1975, listing Metcalfe, Boggs, Alto designer Chuck Thacker and distributed computing pioneer Butler Lampson as its inventors. Metcalfe and Boggs also published a paper on ethernet in 1976 that was used as the definitive reference work for it.

Metcalfe left Xerox in 1979 to start 3Com but he was able to convince DEC, Intel and Xerox to work together to make ethernet a standard so everyone could use it.

In February 1980, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE, started project 802 to standardize Local Area Networks. Ethernet, along with Token Ring and Token Bus were the most popular of the different ways you could connect computers to each other in a network. The 802 group divided into three subgroups to develop standardization for each of the protocols. The group working on ethernet had the reps from DEC, Intel and Xerox and were called the “DIX” group. They called their standard the Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection protocol or CSMA/CD. If you see that somewhere you can assume that means ethernet.

Ethernet originally worked at 2.94 Mbits/s. To make it more commercially acceptable, Yogen Dalal, Ron Crane, Bob Garner and Roy Ogus adapted the protocol to work at 10 Mbit/s.

The first standard at 10 Mbit/s was published September 30, 1980.

The first commercialization also came in 1980 but it was in March of the next year that Metcalfe’s 3Com shipped its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet 3C100 NIC.

Ethernet becoming a standard would be essential to 3COM, so Metcalfe and David Liddle of Xerox Office Systems, supported Siemens efforts for an alliance in office communications and Siemens helped push for standardization of Ethernet ahead of Token Ring and Token Bus.

Siemen’s Ingrid Fromm, a representative on the 802 group established a Task Group on local networks in Europe’s standards body ECMA TC24. By March 1982, ECMA TC24 agreed on a standard for ethernet based on the IEEE 802 draft. A second version of the DIX group’s works with some tweaks was published in November 1982, known as Ethernet II.

The decisiveness of the ECMA combined with the technical completeness of the DIX group’s work consolidated opinions around ethernet which was approved in December of 1982. IEEE 802.3 was published as a draft in 1983 and ratified as a standard in 1985. International adoption came with the adoption of ISO 8802-3 in 1989.

The rest is upgrades. 100 Mbps ethernet came along in 1995 and Gigabit in 1999. 10-Gigabit ethernet arrived in 2002, and 40 and 100 Gps in 2010. Research continues but 40 is the best you can get for your home because you can’t get any devices for your home that can take advantage of more than that.

So how does it work?

Let’s say you’re sending an email. The data that makes up the email would be broken into packets. Each packet will have three main parts. The bulk of it is the data, the bit of your email being sent. The beginning of the frame is a header which has the Media Access Control address or MAC address of the machine it’s being sent from, the MAC address of where it’s going as well as some other info like IP addresses encryption etc. And the end of the Frame is a frame check value which is used to detect if the frame has been corrupted during transit. That packet is then encapsulated in a. Frame which has information to synchronize the sender and the receiver. This makes sure that even though the frames may arrive at of order everybody knows where the frame fits in the full message.

Once the Frame has been created, the transmitting station waits for the channel to go idle and then sends the frame.

At the other end the receiving station will check to make sure the frame has not been corrupted. If it has it will signal a collision so that the originating transmitter can re-send it. If it’s not corrupted it moves the data into the layer where the frames can be reassembled into the full data, in this case your email.

I skipped over cables earlier because they really are at the service of the protocol. But let’s talk about the cables available now and what they mean.

All ethernet cable use an RJ45 connector. It’s a bit of misnomer since it refers to the jack not the plug, and the jack has a key that twisted pair ethernet cables do not. But nobody really makes a big deal of that anymore. If you must know, ethernet actually uses a modular 8P8C interface, but try asking for that at the computer store and see how far it gets you.

The wire itself as I just mentioned is a twisted pair of wires with a plastic covering. Most ethernet cables are unshielded, known as UTP for unshielded twisted pair, making them more flexible. If you have problems with interference in your area for some reason, more likely in industrial situations than home use, you can get STP or FTP which stand for shielded twisted pair or foiled twisted pair. This has the tradeoff of making the cables thicker and less flexible.

There are 7 widely available types of ethernet cables and they mostly look alike except for the stamp that tells you which kind they are.

The different types can handle different data rates aka speed and bandwidth aka amount of data. I’m just going to give the speed numbers below since bandwidth numbers are less commonly used and won’t mean much to most people.

Cat 5 is the most common and can handle up to 100 Mbps. Cat 5e can do gigabit. Cat 6 which also does gigabit has more bandwidth than 5e. 6a can do 10 gig. Cat 7 does 10 gig with more bandwidth. Cat 7a does 40 Gig. And Cat 8 does up to 40 Gbps with more bandwidth.

If your ethernet cable gets damaged it may not stop working but instead get detected as a lower category. A pinch in a gigabit cat 6 cable might show up as a cat 5 cable.

Then there’s the ports. You may have an ethernet port on your PC or an adapter that gives you one on a laptop. There’s also ethernet ports on routers. And if you want to extend the range of Ethernet, or just need more ports than your routers, you’ll need an ethernet switch. The ports are rated by data rate. You’ll get the lowest of the speeds among all the ethernet ports in your chain. Those ports can be 1 Gbps, 2.5 or 10.

Ethernet is generally more stable, more secure and less prone to interference, even when unshielded, compared to WiFi. You may hear people refer to it as a “hard line” or wired connection. WiFi is pretty fast and reliable these days, but if you have any questions about the reliability of the connection you’ll want to go with ethernet.

Metcalfe received the ACM Grace Hopper award in 1980 for his work on ethernet. He stayed with 3COM until 1990 when the board passed him over for CEO and he left. He spent the next ten years writing a column for InfoWorld.

In 1995 he predicted the internet would collapse within a year or he would eat his words. The next year he blended a page with his prediction and swallowed it. He tried to get them to let him eat a cake with the words frosted on it. To no avail.

He eventually became a venture capitalist and teacher at UT Austin and in June 2022 returned to Project MAC at MIT now known as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as a research affiliate and computational engineer, working with the MIT Julia Lab.

So now you know where the inventor of ethernet is. And hope you know a little more about ethernet.

About ByteDance

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With all the talk about banning TikTok in the United States, Tom dives in to explain who actually owns and controls its parent company, ByteDance, and why there’s so much discourse about security.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

There’s a lot of concern about TikTok these days. It’s banned in India. And many members of the US government would like to ban it there as well or at least force a sale. They assert that it is a threat to national security. Is it? That depends a lot on how you see its parent company ByteDance.

Let’s help you know a little more about ByteDance

Bytedance grew out of real estate search engine called 99fang that was started in 2009 by Zhang Yiming and Jiang Rubo. Those two and some 99fang employees started work in 2012 on an app that would use big data algorithms to classify news stories according to user preference. They founded ByteDance to make that app which later become Toutiao.

It is in fact ByteDance’s core product. You may have run into its video hosting service which is similar to YouTube in that users can upload their own video. Or sometimes, like YouTube, videos owned by somebody else. Like TV shows.

ByteDance has also operated many other news apps mostly in India and Southeast Asia.

Among its many efforts at apps was one called A.me, launched in China in September 2016 and later changed to be called Douyin. Within a year it had more than 100 million users in China.

As Chinese companies often do, ByteDance decided to market Doyin under a different name globally. It launched TikTok in September 2017 in India. In November of that year it acquired startup musical.ly which was also growing fast and in addition to its Shanghai office had a headquarters in Santa Monica. Doyin was only available in China and TikTok only in India but musical.ly was available worldwide. ByteDance decided to merge it into TikTok on August 2, 2018. After the merger, Douyin operated in China and TikTok operated everywhere else.

ByteDance has gone to great lengths to offshore itself as much as possible while still being able to operate in China. ByteDance itself is registered as a Cayman Islands company with a principle business address in China. TikTok Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary also a Cayman Islands company, which itself operates several LLCs which are registered in Singapore, the US, Australia and the United Kingdom.

So is it a Chinese company? Depends who’s asking and what you mean. It’s not a lie to say no, it’s a Cayman Islands company. It’s not a lie when you’re talking about the US version of TikTok, to say no, it’s a Delaware LLC. But in the end a lot of people who work on TikTok, work for ByteDance which has offices in Beijing.

So if you’re asking whether ByteDance or TikTok is a Chinese company, you’re asking the wrong question. The question is how much of what TikTok does happen in China?

For Douyin, all of it. For the other regional variants of TikTok, some. The main algorithm appears to be developed by ByteDance employees in Beijing. So it’s not impossible that someone in the Chinese Government could ask someone at ByteDance to give them some information or make certain tweaks in the algorithm. The way things work these days in China, it wouldn’t even have to be an order. An insinuation that people in power would be pleased if certain things happen would be enough.

So let’s look at each of those scenarios, both data access and algorithm tweaks.

There is no evidence of either happening. But let’s start with data access.

For the US in particular, US user data is stored on Oracle servers in Texas, as part of something called “Project Texas.” The data is handled by an independent company called USDS, which has member of the US Committee on Foreign Investment on its board. USDS acts as a contractor to The Delaware LLC, TikTok LLC in the US. Im practice ByteDance employees in Beijing have reportedly been copied on coding projects that included US user data. Those instances have all been incidental. An engineer needs help on something. Or a moderator needs help on something. So they share a screen or file that they technically shouldn’t. This wouldn’t necessarily deliver useful info into the hands of a ByteDance employee and therefore makes it less likely that this path is how the Chinese government would get data on people.

It would be easy for Oracle or CFIUS to catch any more widespread accessing or searching of US user data and there have been no reports of that. So we’re left with the possibility that maybe some of the US user data might have made its way into the hands of people in China. But it would be much less useful data than anyone in the world could buy from a data broker on the open market.

So an objective evaluation would seem to say that the exposure of US TikTok user data to Chinese authorities is not very high, and in fact more guarded from access by Chinese authorities than data stored with other internet companies.

Next would be the algorithm. Again in the US the algorithm is implemented by USDS and audited by Oracle. That said, it’s a complicated algorithm and it takes a long time to audit. It’s quite possible to miss certain effects of changes. Especially because even the engineers in Beijing creating the algorithm don’t always know exactly how it will act.

One suspicion is that China would order the algorithm to push out recommendations of divisive topics in order to foment unrest in the US. To do that engineers in Beijing would have to make tweaks and hope they are not noticed by engineers in Texas. An achievable goal if not done too often. However it would not be certain to succeed, since it could either be caught and altered by USDS employees, or just not work.

From the other side, the difference between China manipulating the algorithm, and humans just causing the algorithm to do what it does best is indistinguishable. Algorithms at YouTube, Facebook and elsewhere are known to push some people into extreme or divisive content. So the fact that the algorithm did that would not itself be evidence of anything.

However I think an objective evaluation would say that China putting its thumb on the scale of the algorithm is possible, while its effects would not be guaranteed. And the risk here is probably slightly greater than the risk to society from domestic algorithms from US companies.

All of this needs to be considered under the knowledge that if China got caught doing any of the things its government is suspected of doing, it might tank the value of TikTok and therefore ByteDance. That might be a risk China’s government would be willing to take, but what about ByteDance’s investors?

ByteDance is 20% owned by its founders and 20% owned by employees. China’s state-run Internet Investment Fund owns 1% of the Beijing subsidiary. So the government owns a small part of ByteDance but that in itself is not unique to ByteDance. It’s true of many Chinese companies that do not face the kind of scrutiny Bytedance has faced. 60% of ByteDance is owned by global investors. That includes Jeff Yass’ Susquehanna International Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group. Those groups are based in Dublin, New York, Tokyo, Menlo Park, California, New York and Singapore.

Suffice to say the only interest behind Bytedance is mostly American. The exception is Hillhouse Capital, which is Asian, run by a Yale graduate who was born in China.

Let’s take a look at the board of directors to see if we can detect any indication of more Chinese control than we see from the investment side.

The chairman is co-founder Rubo Jiang.
Then there’s Arthur Dantchik from Susquehanna. William E. Ford from General Atlantic. Philippe Laffont from a New York investment management company called Coatue. And finally Neil Shen, a Chinese-born investment manager who now lives in Singapore and runs Susquehanna’s Chinese investment arm.

The Chinese influence on the board appears to be the co-founder and an employee of a western company who no longer lives in China. Not nothing,. But not a smoking gun for Chinese influence on the board.

For comparison, 5 of the 8 board members for rival TenCent were born in China and 4 of them still live there. Of the three- non-Chinese board members, one is from Hong Kong, one from South African and the other Russian.

ByteDance appears to have a heavily western-influenced board of directors and slate of investors.

So let’s recap what have we found.

Technologically it is possible but not easy for the Chinese government to somehow make changes to the algorithm of TikTok. It would be hard to detect from background noise and difficult to predict how effective it might or might not be. It’s less likely that the Chinese government would use its rather inconsistent access to US user data in any useful manner when it has much better options.

And the motivations behind the company appear to be mostly western. While it has obfuscated its ownership with several paper companies, the trail leads back to western, and mostly American investors.

One name I haven’t mentioned in this entire explanation is Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok LLC. That’s the one that runs the other subsidiary LLCs in multiple regions. Chew is a Singaporean. Born in Singapore, schooled in London, and previously employed by Golden Sachs as well as Russian Yuri Milner’s DST Global.

I haven’t mentioned him because he’s somewhat immaterial to the deduction. He makes a nice face for TikTok in the US because he can credibly say he’s not Chinese. He’s not. But his ultimate boss is Liang Rubo, the CEO and Chairman of the board of ByteDance.

You are more likely to have heard of Zhang Yemin, who cofounded ByteDance and is the more colorful of the two. But Zhang resigned as CEO in May 2021 to focus on long-term strategy. Often code in tech companies for being bored with being a manager and wanting to do fun stuff. Like Larry and Sergei from Google did.

And to my way of thinking, that covers all the angles on ByteDance related to TikTok in the US. So what are we left with?

Concerns about TikTok’s treatment of user data and the effect of its algorithms on public opinion are well founded. However they do not seem to be particularly unique from similar concerns at all other tech companies who operate in the same space, such as Meta and Google. There are some areas where the risk might be less because of the strict oversight of US user data in Texas. There are areas where the concern may be more such as the influence on the algorithm by a non-US government.

But neither of those appear to be in any way extreme concerns or reassurances. It may be that strict rules on how to protect user data or a solid system for users to guard it themselves could solve many of these problems.

Preventing TikTok from operating in the US would certainly solve it for TikTok but likely with little effect on overall public safety. Forcing Bytedance to sell TikTok to a US owner would only change who might influence the algorithm or misuse private data. And would likely not be able to replicate the user experience.

In other words, I hope you know a little more about ByteDance.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

About Black Friday

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What’s really being celebrated on Black Friday and is it the biggest shopping day in the world?

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible. Become a supporter at the Know A Little More Patreon page for exclusive content and ad-free episodes.

Thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com for the theme music.

Thanks to Garrett Weinzierl for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, Jack_Shid, KAPT_Kipper, and scottierowland on the subreddit

Send us email to feedback@dailytechnewsshow.com

Episode transcript:

At the end of the civil war the US government was deeply in debt, both from the cost of fighting and reconstruction. When General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president 1868 it had grown to $2.8 billion. That would be around 103.8billion in 2023.
To help pay for the war the government had begun issuing “greenback” dollars. These were not backed by gold or silver but promised an unspecified future payment. They had the effect fo driving up the price of gold.
So Grant’s administration pursued a policy of selling gold to buy up wartime bonds and by May 1869 the debt had been reduced to $12 million and the price of gold was suppressed.
All that cheap gold gaveJay Gould an idea. He was friends with Abel Corbin, who just happened to be married to Jennie Grant, the president’s sister. If they could prevail not he president to stop selling gold, the price would start going up. Knowing this in advance they could start buying up gold drilling up the price faster. Done right, they could corner the gold market and get unreasonably rich.
Gould enlisted one of his fellow directors at the Erie railroad, James Fisk into the plant.
On September 1, 1869 they started buying up large amounts of gold under other people’s names and driving up the price. Corbin planted the idea with Grant that selling gold would hurt western farmers and the plan should be suspended. But they got greedy. And when Grant’s personal secretary turned down an offer to open a gold account, they did it anyway. When he told the president about it Grant figured out what was happening. And on Friday September 24, 1869, the government resumed selling gold. Gold prices plummeted. And hundreds of people who were riding the gold wave along with Gould and Fisk, lost everything.
Stock prices plummeted 20 percent between that Friday and October 1st. Brokerage firms went bankrupt. Farmers really did get hurt this time with wheat and corn prices dropping by half. The economic turmoil lasted for months. Anti was all traced back to that one Friday. That Black Friday, in September 1869.
And it was that day that would, somewhat ironically, lend its name to what would become the biggest shopping day in the US.
Let’s help you Know a Little More about Black Friday.

Thanksgiving day was established by the US first constitutional president, George Washington in 1789. On the recommendation of Congress, President Washington proclaimed Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a Day of Public Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving days were proclaimed by subsequent presidents on a regular basis but the dates varied. It wasn’t until 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that Thanksgiving should be commemorated on the Last Thursday of November each year.
The regularity made it a nice signpost not he calendar. Retailers began promoting holiday shopping starting the day after Thanksgiving.
That lasted until another economic depression, the great one. In 1939, the economy was showing signs of recovery. But Thanksgiving that year would fall on the very last day of the month. That meant the shortest possible holiday shopping season, meaning the smallest boost to the economy So President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation that Thanksgiving would take place on the second to last Thursday of November, adding a week to the shopping calendar.
16 states refused to move the date and for two years, a third of the country celebrated Thanksgiving a week after the rest of the country.
So in October 1941, Congress passed a resolution declaring the fourth Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving. This kept it as the last Thursday most years, unless November happened to have 5 Thursdays. That kept the holiday shopping from getting too small without pushing it so far up the calendar.
Once that pattern was set, the Friday after Thanksgiving started to take on a character of its own. Workers began to call in sick on Friday in order to have a four day weekend. In 1951, the journal Factory Management and Maintenance began to refer to this phenomenon as Black Friday, referencing the panic of 1869. Friday also became a huge shopping day of course, and police in Philadelphia and Rochester began referring it to Black Friday as well because of the crowd management.
But the reference did not become common. The New York Times first called the Friday after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” in tis November 29, 1975 issue referring to the traffic in Philadelphia. But even as late as 1985, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that merchants Cincinnati and Los Angeles were unaware of the term.
Meanwhile merchants were trying to avoid the usages connotations of a panic and disasters. As early as November 28, 1981, the Philadelphia Inquirer picked up an explanation put out by merchants that it was being called Black Friday because it was when retailers got “in the black” – aka profitable.
But by the late 1980s the term had gained wide acceptance. Retailers across the US began advertising Black Friday sales. More companies began to just give in and give workers Friday off since they were going to call in sick anyway.
By the mid 2000s the day had inspired “Cyber Monday” when workers came into their offices with computers and high bandwidth and shopped for deals online. Giving Tuesday was a counter-celebration to encourage people to spend money on charities instead of products.
The lockdowns because of COVID caused a lot of people to shift to online shopping on all days and by 2021, the Black Friday sales were no longer limited to Friday.
The prevalence of US-based retailers have caused the promotion of Black Friday sales outside of the US, even though those countries do not have the November Thanksgiving holiday. Some countries even promote Black Week or Black Month sales.
The success of Black Friday sales may have inspired Alibaba to co-opt a dating holiday in China called Singles day – on November 11th – to be a big sales day which now has passed Black Friday as the largest shopping day in the world.
Steely Dan wrote a song called Black Friday, released in 1975 just as the New York Times was picking up on the phrase in its post-Thanksgiving context. Steely Dan was writing about the 1869 panic but its words could apply to both

When Black Friday comes
I’ll collect everything I’m owed
And before my friends find out
I’ll be on the road

I hope you appreciate the probably unintentional double meaning. And hope you know a little more about Black Friday.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

About Collaborative Editing

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Douglas Engelbart demonstrated how two people connected over a network could work together editing a document at the same time in 1968. It took much longer to see a real product.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

MP3

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Episode transcript:

Douglas Adams is a hero to computer geeks everywhere. His Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy right there with Monty Python in the Hall of Geek memes. Legend has it Adams was one of the first people in the UK to get a Macintosh computer. And on that Mac he used a program called FullWrite. We could probably do a whole episode on the rise and fall of FullWrite. It had one of the first true What You See is What You get interfaces, handled long documents particularly well and included an outliner. A true dream list of features for writers in 1988. Scientist and writer Douglas Hofstader was also a big fan. But it was also buggy and eventually it was crushed by Microsoft Word.
So why bring it up? Its lead engineer was a guy named Steve Newman. And in 1989, a young programmer named Steve Schillace joined as a programmer on FullWrite. Those two got to know each other, and later, with the help of a self-described party person, Claudia Carpenter, they would revolutionize how everyone works every day.
Let’s help you know a little more about Collaborative Editing.
That’s Douglas Engelbart in 1968, demonstrating how two people connected over a network could work together editing a document at the same time. It was one of the many impressive technological advancements Engelbart showed off- the mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing and more. if you missed our episode on that, you definitely want to go back and take a listen.
One of the themes from that episode, that people who did listen already know, is that almost nothing came out of that demo directly. It was oddly too far ahead of its time. But Collaborative editing takes the cake on that point. It would be 35 years or so between Engelbart’s demo of collaborative editing in 1968 and the rise of mainstream use of that technology.
One of the *earliest* examples that had any significant use was Instant Update for the MacOS. And it didn’t arrive until 1991. Multiple users of Instant Update could edit a single document at the same time over a LAN – a local area network– so they had to be in the same location. And it needed a workgroup server to work. It didn’t catch on.
It wasn’t until the internet became widespread that real-time collaborative editing became common. One of the first successful efforts was from a student at Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland. Tom Dobrowolski created Multi-Editoro in 2003, later renamed MoonEdit. It used code from Ken Silverman’s BUILD video game Engine. Up to 14 users could edit at the same time, text from each person was highlighted a different color and it featured infinite undo and a time-slider so you could replay edits. It was available for Linux, Windows or FreeBSD, and it needed somebody to set up a server for it to work.
Then there was SubEthaEdit, named after the communication network in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide. Oddly it was originally named Hydra but had to change the name to SubEthaEdit for legal reasons. It was put together in early 2003 in an attempt to win an Apple Design award, which it did, at Apple’s WWDC 2003. It was mainly a word processor but you could turn on a collaborative mode that worked without configuration on a LAN or with a little set up, over the internet. It’s still developed and you can get it on GitHib.
But neither Moonedit or SubethaEdit used the Web. And we were fast moving into a world where people didn’t want to download an app if they didn’t have to. That was thanks to Ajax, a name for a collection of web development techniques that could send and receive data in the background on a web page. Without Ajax a web page usually had to reload to significantly update itself. It wasn’t even new in 2003. It had been around since 1999. It wasn’t a language, just a way of using HTML, CSS, and javascript. But in 2003 it exploded in popularity as part of the Web 2.0 movement. Everybody was scrambling to make more dynamic web pages like Google’s Gmail.
Among the folks playing with Ajax were Steve Newman and Steve Schillace. Since last we saw them working on the doomed FullWrite, they had worked together on Claris Home Page, a what you see is what you get HTML editor, and started a company called BitCraft that developed a JavaScript application engine. They sold Bitcraft to Macromedia in 2000 and by 2002 were consulting with Intuit to build a customer manager for QuickBooks.
In the usability lab there they met Claudia Carpenter.
That’s how Carpenter described her teen years to the Clickup podcast. But by 1980 she was studying computer science at Cal State Chico and regularly topping her class. Out of college she worked as software engineer for HP for 6 years before moving over to Intuit where she eventually found herself working on QuickBooks and one day, in a conference room with Newman and Schillace.
After Carpenter had her second child, she wanted to try something new and get out of the office. So she, Newman and Schillace left Intuit to try some stuff. They worked in Newman’s attic room above his garage. A classic Silicon Valley story.
They didn’t know exactly what they were going to do but Schillace later told The Verge they knew they wanted to work with Ajax. In fact they started by just trying to find a way to keep document locking from getting in the way of two people working on the same document and eventually that led to a basic word processor. They referred to it as Docster, but later changed the name to Writely. They bet that users would want speed and the convenience of always having the latest version of a document available, so they wrote a lean 10 pages of javascript that didn’t include more advanced functions like rich formatting, margins or pagination. It was a version of collaborative editing that would have looked familiar to Douglas Engelbart.
They didn’t even include a save button which was one of the earliest complaints from a generation of computer users trained to save regularly or face the peril of a lost document. Carpenter’s brother was an MBA professor and made one of his classes do their assignments in Writely. Students complained about the limited features and lack of save button, so much, so, that Carpenter said they tried to get the dean to overrule her brother.
That experience led them to add the only other employee their small company would ever have, Jennifer Mazzon, another Intuit colleague, who Carpenter convinced to work for them as a second job. Mazzon eventually left Intuit to work on Writely full time.
Writely officially launched in August 2005. How did it go? Again Carpenter talking to the Clickup podcast:
It was popular. And they knew they would need help somehow to keep it working.
The group had always thought that Google was a likely home for their product but they spent the better part of a year being told no by Google then saying no to Google themselves and so on.
Sam Schillace took the meetings with Google and they eventually did lead to Google acquiring Writely on March 9, 2006.
Writely became Google Docs.
And as you know it didn’t stand alone.
That same year, Google acquired 2Web Technologies which was working on a collaborative spreadsheet, and the next year made two acquisitions to create Google Slides.
The popularity of Writely continued as Google Docs. And eventually Microsoft, the titan of word processing, bowed to the pressure and introduced Office Web apps in 2010.
And now collaborative editing is the norm. People use Google Docs and Office for the Web, every day. It’s normal. But it took a while to get there.
And the heroes of our story?
Steve Newman worked for Google as an engineer until 2010, then left for online storage company Box in 2011 and after his stint there, founded a data service company called Scalyr which he left after acquisition in February 2023. He now says on his LinkedIn that he’s “Blogging on AI and Climate Change while I think about what to do next.”
Schillace pursued a lot of projects. Among them he went to Box with Newman in 2010, then came back to Google in 2016 to work on Google Maps. But in September 2021, he left Google again, this time to become a deputy CTO at Microsoft.
And Claudia Carpenter left Google in 2010 to work on her own projects as Restartle & Girl Power Software, then worked with Steve Newman again at Scalyr until February 2021.
On her LinkedIn she says she’s retired but also that she is “absolutely terrible at retiring.”
And that wraps up the last and latest of the innovations of the Mother of all demos to come into the mainstream. This episode was written in Docster, wait no Writely, no, Google Docs.
In other words, I hope you Know a Little More about collaborative editing.
CREDITS
Know A Little More is available without ads to direct supporters at patreon.com/knowalittlemore. It was researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

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