Technology

You&ve probably already heard that HBO&Succession& (which recently completed its second season) is amazing. And as three East Coast tech reporters, we were probably the easiest targets for the showmany charms.

Still, we felt like we had to talk about it. In fact, our &Succession& review on this episode of the Original Content podcast is perhaps our most epic discussion so far. And we probably would have gone for even longer, if we thought anyone would still be listening.

The series revolves around the Roy family, whose patriarch Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) founded and still leads the Waystar Royco media empire. Throughout the course of the two seasons, his four children — heir apparent Kendall (Jeremy Strong), political fixer Shiv (Sarah Snook), snarky smart aleck Roman (Kieran Culkin) and libertarian weirdo Connor (Alan Ruck) — all take turns vying for their fatherattention and scheming against him.

All three of us loved &Succession,& but even without a long argument about the showmerits, there was still plenty for us to debate: How a story with such morally bankrupt characters can still be so compelling, to what extend those characters are motivated by love versus hate versus greed (and whether they can even tell the difference) and who, in the end, deserves to sit on the corporate throne.

We also discuss next weeklaunch of Disney+ and Apple TV+, and which shows we&re most excited about finally watching.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you want to skip ahead, herehow the episode breaks down: 0:00 Intro 0:41 Apple/Disney discussion 10:16 &Succession& spoiler-free review 25:50 &Succession& spoiler discussion

A new space race is forming globally, energized by venture capital and the hype around companies like Elon MuskSpaceX and Jeff Bezos& Blue Origin. The privately-funded space industry is still in its infancy, but there has been an explosion of startups and investors in the sector, and the fever has, in the last few years, spread to Europe. The development of SpaceTech startups will be crucial to the advancement of services we have come to rely on in our daily lives, be it navigation, delivery services or more.

For the past ten years, the SpaceTech sector has seen over $9 billion invested in it, roughly 60% of the space industryinvestments. This is in part because the ‘delivery& mechanisms (basically, rockets) are now delivering enough capacity to meet demand. So what you put up in the sky and what you ‘get out of the sky& is now the new focus of the industry. And in Europe, the European Space Agency has been increasingly effective at providing significant amounts of grant funding to innovative startups, even as venture capital ramps up its own interest.

STRUCTURE OF THE INDUSTRY The European SpaceTech industry has structured itself across two main sectors. The first is the components manufacturers (thrusters, antennas, sensors, etc). The second is the huge and booming area of the data analytics market which is the underlying value of satellites.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry in 2018 saw194 billion downloads and more than $100 billion in purchases. This past quarter, consumer spending exceeded $23 billion and installs topped 31 billion. And thereno sign of the app economy slowing down.

But with app marketplaces growing this large and powerful, they&re also now coming under more scrutiny from government officials as this intersection between apps and politics can no longer be overlooked.

This week, U.S. Senators asked for a TikTok security check, Google hosted its Android Developer Summit, a whole bunch of malicious apps got booted off Google Play (and a few on the App Store, too.) Plus, a great alternative to Apple Arcade launched; itcalled GameClub and delivers some of the best App Store games for $5 per month.

Headlines

TikTok comes under more political pressure

The worldmost downloaded app, TikTok, continues to draw attention not for its fun skits and lip-synced songs, but for censorship issues and potential security risks. This week, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) sent a letter (PDF) to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, formally requestingthat the Intelligence Community conduct an assessment of the national security risks posed byTikTok and other China-owned content platforms in the U.S.

Their concerns revolved around the storage of U.S. TikTok user data (TikTok parent company ByteDance claims itin the U.S.), its data collection capabilities, censorship concerns, and the potential for the app to be a counterintelligence threat. As a Chinese-owned company, TikTok still has to adhere to Chinese law. Thata potential problem.

By the way, a press release circulated about the letter, which said the senators claimed TikTok was a &national security threat.& They actually did not write those words in the letter — and ita step beyond what they were claiming. The senators wanted a risk assessment performed.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. TikTok said it was &carefully reviewing& the letter. Good thing they just hired those lawyers.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is now the top advisor to a business school called ChinaHarvard

The issues around the App Storeintersection with U.S. politics aren&t limited to TikTok.

Apple, already under scrutiny for removing a crowdsourced mapping app that showed police presence in Hong Kong, last week attracted a letter from a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers who urged to have the app reinstated.

Now (with a lack of concern over the optics apparently), Apple CEO Tim Cook has been appointed as chairman of Tsinghua Universitybusiness school advisory board. The university is known as &ChinaHarvard,& and is one of the most countrymost elite institutions; Chinese President Xi Jinping is a noted alumnus. The university has a history of relationships with Western leaders — last year, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Satya Nadella were listed as board members, and its previous chairman was American VC Jim Breyer.

But given the issues around Applecapitulation to Chinademands to censor its App Store in the region — not to mention the U.S.-China trade war, or how Apple had told Apple TV+ showrunners not to anger China — everyone pretty much agrees it was not the best timing for this news.

Unfortunately for Apple, it can&t abandon China now, as itgrown too dependent on its business there. As Vox recently reported:

Unlike tech companies that haven&t broken into the country or only do minor business in it, Apple is now so deep in China that leaving it could be catastrophic. Even if the company was willing to forgo the $44 billion a year in sales it makes in China, it can&t leave the deep network of suppliers and assemblers that build hundreds of millions of iPhones every year.

Millions of malicious apps get booted from Google Play…and malicious apps spotted on the App Store, too

Malicious apps were found on both Google Play and the App Store this week. But these stories are not at all the same.

Security researchers found dozens of Android apps in the Google Play store serving ads to unsuspecting victims as part of a money-making scheme. The 42 apps containing adware had been downloaded more than 8 million times since they first launched in July 2018. The apps were also sending back data about the userdevice, TechCrunch reported — including if certain apps are installed and if the device allows apps from non-app store sources — which could be used to install more malicious software.

Sadly, this kind of thing happens a lot on Google Play.

Whatless common, however, is to find malware on the App Store — which happened this week, when 17 malicious apps were removed.