Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/12 - Netflix Is Cracking Down On Password Sharing

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme ride home for Friday, March 12, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Netflix is cracking down on password sharing. Apple sues a former employee for allegedly stealing trade secrets. Masasan is back, baby. I guess we have to watch ads on our $1,500 smart TVs now. And of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The free ride is over, and seemingly half of America is going to have to awkwardly. cut off that boyfriend or girlfriend they haven't spoken to in five years because Netflix is apparently running a test that cracks down on password sharing, prompting users to get their own

Starting point is 00:01:21 account if they don't live with the owner of an account, quoting the streamable. In the prompt, customers are told that if you don't live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching. In order to continue, they need to verify the account with an email or text code or create a new account within a 30-day free trial. We've heard the test right now is only on TV devices. A Netflix spokesperson told the streamable, quote, this test is designed to help ensure that people using Netflix accounts are authorized to do so. It isn't clear if users in the test all need to be on the same IP address to be considered in the same household. According to Netflix terms and account can only be shared with members of your household, quote,

Starting point is 00:02:03 the Netflix service and any content viewed through our service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household, end quote. Until now, Netflix has not done anything to police this except set limits on simultaneous streaming. Their basic plan allows streaming on a single device while the standard plan offers streaming on up to two devices and the premium plan on up to four devices. However, they don't limit you on the number of devices a single account can be logged into. There has been talk that companies will become more aggressive on password sharing as the industry becomes more mature, end quote. Yeah, we've known for years that Netflix has been aware for years, just how much password sharing was actually going on.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Don't think you were being that clever. So the interesting thing now is, why now? Why is this the time that Netflix decides to do something about all this? although some research suggests that the number of people digitally squatting, as it were, on other people's Netflix accounts could be as high as a third of the Netflix user base. So, you know, that's not an insignificant number. Potentially tens of millions of users, Netflix could suddenly monetize for the very first time. Apple is suing its former materials lead, Simon Lancaster,

Starting point is 00:03:29 for allegedly stealing trade secrets and leaking them to a tech reporter. Quoting 9 to 5 Mac. As first reported by Apple Insider, the court document detailing the lawsuit was made public on Thursday. Lancaster allegedly used his senior role at Apple to, quote, gain access to internal meetings and documents outside the scope, end quote, of his job as materials lead at Apple. In fact, on his last day at Apple, November 1, 2019, he allegedly downloaded a, quote, substantial number of confidential Apple documents. Lancaster departed Apple after a decade to join the materials research and development company ERIS,

Starting point is 00:04:04 which is actually an Apple vendor. The trade secrets he stole from Apple continued to benefit him in his new position at ERIS. The report explains. Lancaster described his role at ERIS as scratching a startup itch. But things get even more interesting when the media aspect of this story comes into play. The lawsuit explains that the reporter first contacted Lancaster in November 2018, a full year before he departed Apple. Apple trade secrets were allegedly exchanged throughout 2018 and 2019, the anonymous media correspondent who used the information in multiple articles and attributed the details to a source at Apple.

Starting point is 00:04:40 Details about the topics are unclear, but Lancaster attended multiple meetings about Project X at Apple and shared all of that information with the media correspondent, end quote. So nobody knows who the reporter is, who got this information, So believe me, those of us who traffic in these circles have spent all night gossiping about who we think it might be. And we're all assuming that Project X is referring to those AR and VR glasses being developed based on what we know about what Lancaster worked on for Apple. But I'll let friend of the show Ed Zittron sum up this whole thing from his Twitter thread last night. quote. Mad respect for the guy who stole a bunch of Apple trade secrets and texted a reporter them from his company phone with stuff like, here's the secret stuff, and I'm Mad, Apple is

Starting point is 00:05:30 secretly developing a competitor to one of my investors. When the guy in question resigned, he texted the reporter about some secret documents, and the reporter said, oh, can you get me some secret documents? And the guy said, sure, which ones? This guy rocks because he logged into Apple's network after he left on his final day and downloaded a bunch of stuff. You know, I think Apple might notice that, dude. This guy also literally asked for positive coverage of his investments to in return for the secrets. Like, did he not know Apple had lawyers, end quote? Ku Pang, the South Korean e-commerce company raised its IPO price yesterday above its range and then went public popping above the initial trading point, giving the company initially a market valuation of about $60 billion, but when all was said and done, Kupang was worth over $100 billion. And while this is yet another story of a tech company reaching public markets to great success at the moment, I probably wouldn't have covered this

Starting point is 00:06:34 except for one little detail, quoting from Bloomberg. Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, Kupang's biggest shareholder, has reaped a gain of more than $16 billion from the IPO, burnishing the reputation of founder Masayoshi Son in picking successful startups even after a number of missteps. In November 2018, SoftBank, Bank's Vision Fund invested $2 billion in the company in a deal that valued Kupang at $9 billion, people familiar with the matter said at the time. That funding followed $1 billion from SoftBank itself in 2015, valuing the startup at about $5 billion, end quote. So, again, after its pop in trading, SoftBank's stake now represents a $33 billion winfall. As we covered

Starting point is 00:07:17 Massasun's stumbles with SoftBank last year, with WeWork, with Wag, with Uber, that didn't pan out as maybe Masa hoped, I guess we owe it to him to acknowledge that things have turned around recently. SoftBank has done very well from its stakes in the like of DoorDash, very well to the tune of $11.2 billion. And even Uber has come back to the tune of around $10 billion, give or take. Grab, which SoftBank was very early on, is talking about doing a SPAC soon. So reminder, folks, VC investing is a hit.

Starting point is 00:07:53 business. One or two big successes can make up for a lot of disappointment. Why have there been so many stories about spamming ads invading places we don't want them? Our telecom companies selling our browsing data to advertisers, Google leveraging our spending to give us, quote-unquote, special offers. And now, Chris Welch at the Verge, looks at the recent trend of ads showing up in your smart TV, quote, now I'm fully aware that it's not unusual to see ads placed around a TV's home screen or main menu. LG, Samsung, Roku, Vizio, and others are all on this game. We live in an era when smart TVs can automatically recognize what you're watching, and TV makers are building nice ad businesses for themselves with all of the data that gets funneled in. This stuff can

Starting point is 00:08:42 come off as invasive, but it's also partially what's steadily brought the prices down on even high-end TVs. I got this 55-inch CX on sale for like $1,400, and it's pretty much the best TV on the market for NextGen gaming. But even if this beautiful panel came cheaper than it might have without ads plastered in random places, the level of ad infiltration on display here is still disheartening to see. LG recently announced it will be licensing WebOS to other TV brands, so maybe the company is trying to see how far it can push things. A random full-on commercial just popping up in LG's app store, is there no escape from this stuff? We're just going to cram ads into every corner of a TV's software, huh? Imagine if an autoplay ad started up while you were

Starting point is 00:09:26 updating the apps in your smartphone, end quote, to which I'd say, never say never? I mean, have you noticed that Apple helpfully invites you to sign up to their various services inside other apps and even inside the settings app? What is that, if not an advertisement? Time for the weekend long read suggestions. And first up, a couple of interviews. that people have been discussing all this week. The first was in an interview that friend of the show, Noah Smith, who you'll recall we did a recent weekend bonus episode with an interview he did with Stripe co-founder Patrick Coleson. Patrick has a reputation for being a prodigious intellect. He founded Stripe when he was 22 years old, you'll recall. But this interview, which,

Starting point is 00:10:17 since Noah is an economist and is therefore interested in any number of big issues, ranges among a number of fascinating topics really highlights why Patrick has this reputation for being a brainiac. Like, dude knows a lot about a lot. For example, in the middle of this interview, Patrick just lays down the best description of the innovation roadmap for the entire tech industry over the next 10 years that I've heard anywhere, quote, in terms of what the world needs, improvements in medical technology are probably still number one. Climate change mitigation technology, cleaner energy generation, and CO2 sequestration and so on, is also quite high up. More broadly, we need to make all of the things that you and I enjoy every day cheap

Starting point is 00:10:58 and efficient enough for billions more people to afford, with safety and security high on that list. But need is a tough framing. There's obviously so much stuff that would be fabulously valuable, and it's hard to predict the magnitude of the impact up front. Besides the obvious diseases, better cures for depression and mental illness and other psychiatric conditions would be hugely beneficial. $100 robotic surgeries, a machine for cheaply manufacturing arbitrary food, a 3D printer for nourishment into which you just insert elemental ink cartridges, and not just for replicating already existing foods, the possible design space is very large. Flying cars, obviously, plus space-based earth-to-earth transportation, fast-growing trees so that everywhere can be as blissfully arboreal as you

Starting point is 00:11:46 like, technology for comprehensively eliminating air pollution, not just from internal combustion engines, but also sand, dust, etc. ubiquitous detectors for toxins like lead, arsenic, and benzene, smart books that are better fit for purpose, a babblefish that works, programming environments that are less hopefully primitive than those today, take Mathematica, squeak, genera, and go far beyond them. Better education technology for everyone. What's Khan Academy, but 10 times better. too cheap two meter water desalination, batteries with so much energy density that they need never be recharged, nanotechnology, self-reparing wood, flexible glass, translucent steel, quantum computers that accurately simulate physical chemistry, completely new kinds of matter, better catalysts

Starting point is 00:12:37 for all major existing chemical processes, end quote. So basically there you have it. Make a successful company out of any one of those areas mentioned, and you can probably have a trillion-dollar company in a couple decades. These are the things technologists will be working on for the next few years laid out for you for free. And then over at the verge, Nilai spoke to Kavon Bakepour, Twitter's head of consumer product about all the things that Twitter has been doing lately and also why they're suddenly doing all the things all of a sudden. There are a lot of tea leaves to read in this one, like I noticed how Kvon was careful to tiptoe pass any criticism of Apple's app store tax. We're in an environment now where when someone elects not to pick a fight,

Starting point is 00:13:24 it's probably more interesting because it makes you wonder why. Could an Apple acquisition of Twitter be possible in this regulatory environment? Just leaving that there for now. Anyway, quote, fast forward to about a year ago, we really started investing in audio and thinking about how we can enable audio as a new form factor for conversations on Twitter. The same team that's driving spaces today really started focusing on that. The first product that they built was what we call voice tweets, which we put in market late last year on iOS. It lets you record your voice and tweet it out basically. Around the same time, they were thinking about the sort of conversational experience, and this is when audio really started heating up and Clubhouse was getting a lot of

Starting point is 00:14:05 attractions. So we had a long and winding road to refocus back on that sort of multi-person conversational format for audio. But the team that's building spaces now has had their heart in this for quite some time. Obviously, hindsight is 2020. We found much more customer success and impact and excitement around the multi-party experience than we did with the voice tweets experience. We still see a lot of really awesome use cases there, but we've shifted all of our focus to spaces now, end quote. Next, I've said a bunch of times recently how the whole no-code, low-code movement takes inspiration from Excel and how it trained millions of normies essentially to program without knowing they were programming. Well, Not Boring takes a look at the spreadsheet that launched a million companies, quote, Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It's a canonical example of Steve Jobs' bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers.

Starting point is 00:15:01 Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains. These programs often serve as high fidelity prototypes of domain-specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form. Hundreds of B2B startups have been built by taking a job currently being done in Excel and trying to accomplish the job in more optimized purpose-built B2B software. Every time you hear an entrepreneur say, we're replacing siloed spreadsheets and outdated processes with purpose-built software, you're hearing

Starting point is 00:15:36 the unbundling of Excel in real time. Many popular SaaS applications fall into this category, and yet, despite being unbundled, Excel keeps getting stronger. That resiliency has inspired entrepreneurs to look more deeply at what makes Excel tick and why. Adventurous builders are creating new software that doesn't unbundle Excel but is inspired by Excel. Excel's balance of usability and flexibility can be found in popular no-code and low-code products created over three decades since Excel first grace the screen. This source of inspiration is less direct and more meta. It is less about recreating anything concrete that happens in Excel and more about capturing the essence of what makes Excel so successful. And I didn't do this as a full-fledged segment because I'm

Starting point is 00:16:19 not convinced that there's really new news here, but everyone has been discussing this MIT technology review piece about how Facebook allegedly sidelined AI experts and weekend initiatives internally to clean up misinformation because leadership didn't want to hurt Mark Zuckerberg's desire for growth. I'm linking to it, though, so that you're up on the conversation. And I think that Gideon Litchfield's tweetstorm is a decent summation of the piece, quote. The narrative Facebook has been pushing over these last few years is that limiting misinformation and hate speech for billions of pieces of content posted daily is an incredibly hard technical challenge that its best minds are working tirelessly to solve. What Karen Howe figured out over months of reporting is that

Starting point is 00:17:04 this narrative is both true and false. People at Facebook like Jay Quignanero are indeed brilliant, sensitive, hardworking, and deeply committed to doing the right thing. But Facebook itself cannot let them do it. And the reason Facebook cannot let its good people do the right thing and limit toxic content is that Facebook is addicted to toxic content, and its leadership is unwilling to make the one change that would allow it to kick the habit. Facebook has built content moderation systems to try to filter out the worst misinformation and hate, but those systems are in a losing battle with the content recommendation algorithms that promote the stuff that doesn't get caught by the filters, end quote. And this month, we might talk about this

Starting point is 00:17:45 more in coming months, the one startup that was new to me that has pushed its way onto my radar as potentially the next big thing, or the latest next big thing, is Billy Billy. What is Billy Billy? Well, see, I didn't know either. So here's a great explainer intro piece from the South China Morning Post. How a Chinese site dedicated to the anime subculture grew up with its Gen Z users to become a mainstream success. Quote, since launching in 2009, Billy Billy has grown into one of the most recognizable names in video streaming in China. It now boasts 54 million daily active users who spend an average of around 75 minutes on the platform each day. Most of them are from what Billy Billy calls Gen Z Plus, which the company defines as people who were born between 1985 and 2009,

Starting point is 00:18:31 and many grew up with the site. By the fourth quarter last year, Billy Billy said it had 1.9 million content creators who were contributing more than 5.9 million videos each month. Some longtime users, like Ku Chang, consider themselves part of a community made up of uploaders and their fans. She checks Billy Billy Daily to see if her favorite uploaders have posted new content, end quote. And finally today, a piece from Wired that I'm directing at whomever needs to hear it. Sometimes it's okay to give up. Just because you devoted 100 hours of your life to a given video game doesn't mean you have to finish it, especially if it now bores you, quote. Ultimately, I know I'm only playing this game because I've already played it

Starting point is 00:19:15 for 100 hours and giving up at this point feels tantamount to wasting 4.167 days of of my life. It's like avoiding breaking up with someone simply because you've already been dating for a year and they met your family and I no longer look forward to this game, but if I stop now, what sense of accomplishment will I have? It becomes even more complicated when you think of the concept of game chores, which anyone who's been playing Animal Crossing New Horizons for the last year will tell you as a whole thing. I can't begin to explain to you how many times I've opened that game just to check in at stores, talk to my villagers, get my nook miles for the day, and log off. For weeks on end, it's the only interaction I had with the game.

Starting point is 00:19:50 I wasn't playing or deriving entertainment, just doing chores in my video game. I forgot to log in one day, broke my Nook Miles streak, and that's the very boring story of how I stopped playing Animal Crossing, end quote. No weekend bonus episode this weekend at all. Sorry, I just need one weekend off. But also, I'm going to use this weekend to finalize the writing of the first Elon Musk miniseries episode. Never fear, especially you ride home plus subscribers. The next interesting raise episode is in the works for next weekend. And for the weekend after that, we're going to have the next office hours episode,

Starting point is 00:20:34 this time with Chris Fralick of First Round Capital. He's the guy that led first round's investment in Roblox, so we're definitely going to hear some of the story behind that. But also Chris and I have been friendly for many years. He's the guy who first got me involved with Ted some years ago, so I know for a fact. He has some interesting insights into investing, and entrepreneurial success plus, as I'll reveal,

Starting point is 00:20:57 dude has a full-on gadget museum in his house. You'll hear, I'll explain. Also, we've got another regular bonus episode interview in the pipeline as well. Talk to y'all on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/12 - Netflix Is Cracking Down On Password Sharing

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