Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/16 – Chip Shortage To Continue; Sucks For Everyone, Basically

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

The biggest semiconductor companies in the world warn than the global chip shortage might roll on for years. Could that recent batch of Facebook accounts showing up on the dark web lead to the dreaded maximal GDPR action? Apple says it pays artists more than Spotify does, but is that really true? Depends on how you run the numbers. And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Skiff.org/ride GivingMultiplier.org/techmeme Links: Intel, Nvidia, TSMC execs agree: Chip shortage could last into 2023 (Ars Technica) Facebook faces ‘mass action’ lawsuit in Europe over 2019 breach (Tech Crunch) Apple Music Reveals How Much It Pays When You Stream a Song (Wall Street Journal) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Dogecoin: The meme that somehow became a real cryptocurrency (Cnet) They were ancient internet memes. Now NFTs are making them rich (Wired) Why did Microsoft spend $19.7 billion to purchase Nuance? The answer may lie beyond health care. (Protocol) A Little-Known Upstart Might Just Beat Google to Autonomous Driving (Bloomberg Business Week) Hip-Hop Loves Cash App, and That Might Be Why Jack Dorsey Bought Tidal (GQ) Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a catastrophe for China and the world (Doxa) Strong Bad ... thank you: The Flash icon endures as the internet rapidly changes (Polygon) Subscribe to the RideHome+ Feed at: tech.supercast.tech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 right home for Friday, April 16th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. The biggest semiconductor companies in the world warn that the global chip shortage might roll on for years. Could that recent batch of Facebook accounts showing up on the dark web lead to the dreaded maximal GDPR action?

Apple says it pays artists more than Spotify does, but is that really true? Depends on how you run the numbers. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. President Biden held high-level talks about this this week. More headlines crossed the transom this week about major automakers being forced to take actual losses because of reduced car production. And now the heads of Intel, Nvidia, and TSM have, in various interviews this week, basically said the global chip shortage sucks for everybody, and they don't expect things to get better until at least 2022 and maybe 2023.

Quoting Ars Technica. How many years will the ongoing chip shortage affect technology firms across the world? This week, multiple tech executives offered their own dismal estimates as part of their usual public financial disclosures, with the worst one coming in at a couple of years. That nasty estimate comes from Intel CEO, Pat Gessinger, who offered that vague time frame to the Washington Post in an interview on Tuesday. He clarified that that was an estimate for how long it would take the company's to, quote, build capacity to potentially address supply shortages. The conversation came as Intel offered to step up for two supply chains, particularly pinched by the Silicon Drought, medical supplies, and in-car computer systems. TSM CEO, C.C. CEO, C.C. Way, offered a similarly

dire estimate to investors on Thursday, saying that the Taiwan-based company hoped to, quote, offer more capacity for meeting retail and manufacturing demand in, quote, 2023. TSM, coincidentally, is moving forward with a manufacturing plant of its own in Arizona, which Bloomberg claims could cost up to $12 billion, despite the company clarifying that it intends to prioritize research development and production in its home nation. Graphics card and system-on-a-chip provider, Nvidia, joined the Grim Estimate Club this week, though Nvidia has a more optimistic belief that it will emerge with, quote, sufficient supply to support sequential growth beyond fiscal Q1, 2020. according to CFO Colette Cress. Until then, quote, we expect a man to continue to exceed supply for much of this year, she added.

Having seen the comment sections of recent GPU reviews at Ars Technica, we sure believe that, end quote. I would not sleep on this chip shortage possibly becoming one of the biggest tech stories of the year, and unfortunately, maybe next year too. Remember when last week,

I think it was, there was word of that new batch of Facebook user data making its way out to the dark web, and it was unclear if this was some new tranche of data, and the confusion was certainly not helped in the least by Facebook, being sort of not clear if it was new or not. Well, maybe Facebook was being cagey because of this. An Ireland-based digital rights group has begun what is calling a mass action to sue Facebook, I believe, over this recent breach news, citing specifically the right to monetary

compensation as set out under GDPR. Quoting TechCrunch. Article 82 of the GDPR provides for, quote, a right to compensation and liability for those affected by violations of the law. Since the regulation came into force in May 2018, related civil litigation has been on the rise in the region. The Ireland-based digital rights group is urging Facebook users who live in the European Union or European Economic Area to check whether their data was breached via the Have I Been Poned website, which lets you check by email address or mobile phone number and sign up to join the case if so. Information leaked via the breach includes Facebook IDs, location, mobile phone numbers,

email addresses, relationship status, and employer. Since May 2018, the EU's data protection regime has, at least on paper, baked in fines of up to 4% of a company's global annual turnover for the most serious violations. Again, though, the sole GDPR fine issued to date by the DPC against a tech giant, Twitter, by the way, is very far off that theoretical maximum. Last December, the regulator announced a 450,000 euro fine equivalent to $547,000, against Twitter, which works out to just about 0.1% of that company's full year revenue. That penalty was also for a data breach, but one which, unlike the Facebook leak, had been publicly disclosed when Twitter found it in 2019. So Facebook's failure to disclose the vulnerability it discovered and claims it fixed by September 2019, which led to the leak of 533 million accounts now, suggests it should face a higher sanction from the DPC than Twitter received. However, even if Facebook ends up with a more substantial GDPR penalty for this breach, the watchdog's caseload backlog and plotting procedural pace makes it hard to envision a swift resolution to an investigation that's only a few days old, end quote.

Something something circular firing squad in tech at the moment. Spotify wants Apple to open up the app store, but it's also been making moves recently to be seen as an artist-friendly platform. Should artists care if Spotify cuts a better deal with Apple for itself, if they might not actually share in that deal? Can it be a coincidence that Apple just released an open letter to artists today saying that it pays them, on average, a penny a stream when their songs stream on Apple Music, which would be roughly double Spotify, which pays, depending on how you count this, an average of about one-third to one-half a penny per stream. Do those numbers math out cleanly, not really because it's complicated, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The disclosure made in a letter to

artists delivered Friday via the service's artist dashboard and sent to labels and publishers is part of a growing effort by music streaming services to show they are artist friendly. For Apple, it can be seen as a repost to Spotify, which last month shared some details on how it pays the music industry for streams on its service. As the discussion about streaming royalties continues, we believe it is important to share our values, Apple said in the last. letter. We believe in paying every creator the same rate that a play has a value and that creators should never have to pay for featuring music in Prime DisplaySpace on its service. Artists aren't paid directly by streaming services, so a single play of a song doesn't result

in a penny going into that artist's account directly. Instead, streaming services pay royalties to rights holders, which include labels, publishers, and other distributors, which in turn pay artists based on their recording, publishing, and distribution agreements. Both Apple and Spotify pay rights holders based on the share of total streams their artists garner on each service. Yet artists cite the per-stream pay rate as an indicator of their earnings. Major labels say the average monthly streams per user is a better measure of the streaming economy, and growing numbers of streams mean more money coming in for artists. Both Spotify and Apple, they say, are at or near the 1,000 streams per listener per month benchmark that many see as a success. In the letter, Apple says it

pays 52% of subscription revenue or 52 cents of every dollar to record labels. Spotify, which generates revenue both from subscriptions and its free ad-supported tier, says it pays two-thirds of every dollar of revenue to rights holders, with 75% to 80% of that going to labels, which translates to 50 to 53 cents on the dollar depending on agreements between the service. and different labels. Spotify delivers much more revenue to the music industry than Apple does, since it has many more users. Its average per stream payout rate is lower, though, because the average Spotify subscriber listens to more music per month than listeners on other services do. Plus, on Spotify's free tier, ads don't generate as much revenue as its premium service does.

Spotify has said that while its free version generates less income than it's paid one, it brings in eventual subscribers, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. And this morning I woke up to tweets that people were buying Dogecoin again. Christina Warren, friend of the show, tweeted that she had. Nicholas De Leon said he had. And sure enough, I looked and the price of Dogecoin has surged again, up 400% in the last week. Top headline on the TechMeme website right now is Dogecoin hitting a market cap of $40 billion.

If you're curious why a lot of us shake our heads and amazement every time we hear that Doge has stirred to life again, check out this piece from CNET outlining the history of Doge. It is, as I've said before, literally the meme currency, which I guess makes it perfect for this moment in time. Quote, if you're familiar with cryptocurrency at all, you know Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum. Those are the two biggest cryptocurrencies, but underneath them is an entire market of smaller ones called altcoins or sometimes shitcoins. These are like the penny stocks of the cryptocurrency world. Many aim or claim to have utility or improve facets of the Ethereum blockchain upon which most altcoins are built. Others are meme coins, which rise and fall in popularity simply because they're kind of funny.

Created in 2013, Dogecoin was the first such meme coin. There are many others, and they're preposterous. One simply called meme launched last August at a dollar and now trades over $2,000, end quote. Speaking of memes and money, and I know I'm sick of NFTs as much as you are, but one thing that I do love about the phenomenon so far is how NFT art tends to be meme art, and this has allowed some of the original meme subjects to get paid for their past, shall we say, celebrity, notoriety, quoting Wired UK. The auction returns so far have ranged from very nice to have to totally life-changing.

Lina Morris, the overly attached girlfriend, landed 200 ether in cryptocurrency, equivalent to around 335,000 pounds from her auction on April 4th. Bad luck Brian, whose real name is Kyle Craven, finally saw his fortune's change when he raked in nearly 35,000 pounds worth of crypto. Chris Crocker's Brittany, NFT, took home a similar amount. Scumbag Steve nabbed 50,000 pounds. They're not all rolling in it, though. or my god, girl, scored around 3,000 pounds, and ridiculously photogenic guy is awaiting a first bid.

Others, Disaster Girl, Clarinet Boy, and David After Dentist, among them, are lining up their own offerings for the coming days and weeks, end quote. Next, Protocol says Microsoft's purchase of nuance this week might not be all about health care, as everybody says, or at least not only about the health care angle. quote, there is a health care component that you can't ignore, said Gartner, Senior Director Greg Pesson, but, quote, the crown jewel that they bought is the AI engine. Microsoft can make that part of its base capabilities, end quote. Speech recognition software is in high demand, everything from analyzing customer service calls to allowing consumers to control home appliances with their voices. Microsoft's big offering in this space was supposed to be Cortana, but the company has struggled with building out the tech, particularly when compared to rivals like Amazon.

Now Microsoft is ending support for the program on iOS and Android instead of doubling down on Cortana's capabilities as a virtual assistant within Office 365, basically Clippy 2.0. Without nuances tech, that could have been more difficult, end quote. Bloomberg Business Week updates us on the self-driving car race and makes the bold claim that Aurora Innovation, the dark horse backed by Uber and Amazon, might be. be pulling ahead of Waymo in, I guess, the measurement of having a meaningful autonomous business on real roads someday soon. Quote, the plan is to begin with long-haul trucking. Earlier this year, Packar and Volvo signed agreements to install Aurora's automated driving systems in their trucks.

The two companies would then offer these trucks, capable of operating themselves for long stretches, to their shipping customers who would pay Aurora for the hours of automated driving. After establishing itself in trucking, Aurora would then begin cherry-picking the easiest most lucrative trips from Uber's ride-hailing network. A customer looking to go 25 miles, mostly by highway and light traffic, might be greeted by a driverless car. Aurora already has a deal with Toyota to build RoboTaxi fleets. A 2019 investment from Amazon sets the company up for a similar strategy in delivery, allowing it to service the easiest routes for e-commerce customers.

If all goes right, its robot drivers would take over entire fleets of cars, trucks, and vans, end quote. And then we talked about the chip shortage earlier, and that whole story has an unfortunate tendency to butt up against the geopolitical brouhaha between the U.S. and China, especially vis-à-vis China's designs on the island of Taiwan, where most of the world's semiconductors are made. We've heard U.S. generals say publicly that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is their number one geopolitical fear. So John Stokes talked to some experts and ran the actual war games looking at scenarios like, what if China actually invaded Taiwan just to stick it to the West on semiconductors? Like, what if they simply tried to grab the TSM Fabs? Quote, simply put, a PRC controlled TSM

would be a dead man walking in terms of its ability to participate in the March of Moorslaw. It would be frozen at whatever its smallest feature size is at the time of a Chinese. takeover, and it wouldn't progress further until China could replace all the U.S.-based fab equipment and toolchain inputs with domestic equivalents. That would take a very long time if it's even possible. China is actually trying and failing to break this dependency on the West and to gather all the inputs to the chip fabrication industry on its soil. It's planning to throw over $100 billion at the problem over the next decade, and it's way behind schedule. Again, this is just not the kind of problem you can solve by throwing money at it, or with a national

mobilization. If it were, China would already be winning at it. To make its silicon sovereignty dreams a reality, China needs TSM's cooperation and know-how. It seems unlikely to secure that by military means, which is a good reason to think that if China does invade Taiwan, it's not because they're trying to take TSM by force, end quote. Finally, I think I've shared an appreciation of Strongbad before, but I'm a sucker for Strongbad, so if you're too young to be familiar, with the meme lord, check out the piece from Polygon that catches you up on the history. Quote, one of the biggest sins on the modern internet is trying too hard to be funny. It has caused the internet's sense of humor to turn cruel in the last decade and our

knee-jerk response to earnest humor to be negative. Putting oneself out there creates a risk of ending up in a cringe compilation or as the subject of a devastating quote tweet. Strongbad is a representative of a time in the internet's past when there was something new every day and there was room for simple jokes. The world of Homestar Runner sprung from a place of passion and caring. It's possible that nostalgia for the character is rooted in a desire to go back to a time when we embrace that type of enthusiasm. And who wouldn't want to? At the end of the day, like Strongbad himself, none of us are truly as cool or as mean as we pretend to be online, end quote. Ride Home Plus subscribers, you will be getting a new interesting gadgets episode in your feeds,

probably a few short hours after this episode arrives in your feed. I've got to actually record and edit it. It's already written, but I need to actually do the other bit. Among the highlights, the startup that wants to bring DVRs back and why, if you're living that dongle life, I think I've found the ultimate dongle hub, a new Game Boy clone, an RV that can transform so that you have basically a second floor, an actual upstairs for your camper, and an actual transformer. That $700 self-transforming Optimus Prime people have been sharing on social media, among other things as well. And non-subscribers, I'm going to give you a taste of the recent Chris Fralick Office Hours episode that Right Home Plus subscribers have already heard because it's,

so good. Maybe it will encourage you to give the Ride Home Plus subscription a try. That will drop on Saturday. But if you want to hear it sooner and the interesting gadgets episode as well, you know what to do. Go to tech.comcast.com. Talk to you on Monday.