Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/14 – Now Ransomware Is Shutting Down The Irish Health Service

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 TechMeme ride home for Friday, May 14th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. A ransomware attack has brought down large sections of the Irish Health Service. Why Disney Plus numbers are suddenly looking so weak to investors. A deep dive review on whether or not or even to what degree Elon's internet service from space can free us from ISP hell. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, I guess this sort of thing is just the new normal now. The Irish Health Service has shut down its IT systems after a, quote, significant ransomware attack that is having a severe impact on health and social care services, quoting the BBC. Speaking on broadcaster RTE, Ossian Smith said the attack, quote, goes right to the core of the health system. However, he also said that it was, quote, not espionage. The health service has temporarily shut down.

Starting point is 00:01:33 its IT system to protect it after the attack. Mr. Smith, who is minister for public procurement and e-government, said it was an international attack, he added, quote, these are cybercriminal gangs looking for money. What they're attempting to do is to encrypt and lock away our data and then to try to ransom it back to us for money, end quote. The health service executive said it had taken the precaution of closing down its systems to further protect them and assess the situation. Mr. Smith said the Irish government is deploying everything in its response. It's widespread. It is very significant and possibly the most significant cybercrime attack on the Irish state. It's a criminal investigation, so the Garda National Cybercrime Bureau is involved, and also we have brought in

Starting point is 00:02:16 world-class cybersecurity company for assistance, end quote. Ireland's health minister, Stephen Donnelly, said the incident was having, quote, a severe impact on the health and social care services, end quote. Emergency services continued, however, he said. Anne O'Connor of the HSC told RTE on Friday afternoon that if, quote, this continues to Monday, we will be in a very serious situation and we will be canceling many services. At this moment, we can't access lists of people who are scheduled for appointments on Monday, so we don't even know who to cancel, she said. A number of hospitals in the Republic of Ireland are reporting disruptions to services, end quote. Disney reported earnings yesterday, and Disney Plus missed on Q1 subscriber estimates, reaching 103.6 million subscribers versus the 109.3 million

Starting point is 00:03:13 subscribers expected. ESPN Plus subscribers did rise 75% year-over-year to 13.8 million. Hulu grew 30% year-over-year to 41.6 million subscribers, but it's the relative weakness of Disney Plus that has investors a bit spooked this morning, quoting variety. The Mouse House's flagship streaming service packed on 8.7 million global customers in the most recent quarter, up from $94.9 million at the start of 2021. The continued but slower growth for Disney Plus came amid the service's first price hikes. In the U.S., for example, the SVOD package went up a buck to $7.99 per month as of March 26. But it also came on the heels of a Blockbuster fourth quarter that saw Disney Plus grow by more than 20 million subscribers amidst. pandemic conditions. For the sake of comparison in Q1, Netflix gained about 4 million global streaming subscribers as it saw an even more dramatic slowdown after a COVID-fueled boom 2020, end quote.

Starting point is 00:04:14 Yes, but it is the Netflix comparisons that are sort of interesting here. Let me quote, a tweet storm from Rich Greenfield at Lightshed Ventures, quote, Disney Plus annual revenue per user is now under 4 at $3.99 per user. A year ago, annual revenue per user was $5.63 as more and more of their subscriber base is in Asia where it is being given away effectively for free. Price increase in most non-Asian markets only impacted six days in the quarter. Remember, all subs are not created equal. Disney Plus has broken 100 million subs just under half of what Netflix has, but annual revenue is one-sixth of Netflix. Netflix has 205 million subs, annualized revenues come in at 9.6 billion. Disney has 104 million subs, annualized revenues come in at 1.6 billion, end quote.

Starting point is 00:05:16 So again, underlying that, Disney Plus now has half of Netflix's subscriber numbers, but only one-sixth of their annual revenue. Remember that bonus episode we did with Peter Kafka, where I asked him, we were sure that the math actually pencils out in terms of streaming, ultimately being as profitable for Hollywood as the old model. And if you'll recall, he said that was, in fact, still very much an open question. Also, this points out what folks like Matthew Ball have been saying for a while now. In a lot of ways, Netflix is still so, so, so far ahead of the competition. How about a review? A gadget review and a long one about a gadget and a service and a technology that I have to admit I've been very curious about.

Starting point is 00:06:11 Over at the verge, Nilai Patel has a review of SpaceX's Starlink Internet from Space satellite service. He says that Starlink does have nice hardware, but it yields only a moderately fast, very inconsistent connection, which also has line-of-sight issues with, in Neelai's case, even one single tree able to block the signal. Quote, once you've got every single. everything set up, the Starlink dish sweeps across the sky, keeping track with the satellites, so finding a single open spot isn't enough. You need a wide swath of open sky. Starlink suggests a cone of about 100 degrees with a minimum elevation of 25 degrees above the horizon. So, low and wide. The app will tell you where and how the view to the satellite is obstructed,

Starting point is 00:06:58 and how much, and how many hours a day it will affect your signal. I have my dish 60 feet away from my house with clear views of the sky, and it is still obstructed for two hours a day because of the very top of my house and the trees behind it. If this wasn't a short-term review, I would certainly have it mounted on a pole on top of the structure. Once you're all set up and plugged in, there's not much to say. Starlink offers a moderately fast, very inconsistent broadband connection. I definitely saw speeds that exceeded the promise 100 mbPS down, topping out at 222 mbps down, and 24 mbPS up. But my usual speeds hovered between 30 and 90 down,

Starting point is 00:07:40 matching what others have reported, and the connection slowed down and dropped out with surprising frequency. If Starlink could offer consistently fast speeds, it would be competitive with the fastest package I can get from my rural cable provider, which tops out at $200 a month for $3.25 up and $25 down, but is still not attractively priced compared to the services available in more populated areas. In my week of testing, Starlink was perfectly fine for anything that buffers. I was able to stream Netflix and Disney Plus and 4K and jump around YouTube videos without significant

Starting point is 00:08:14 issues, but doing something faster-paced, like quickly scrolling through TikTok videos, would run into delays. Services that require a sustained real-time connection like Slack, Zoom, or gaming simply weren't usable for me, even when I was seeing the fastest speeds. I had high hopes that I could spend several days working over Starlink, and after just a few lost slack messages and Zoom calls where my video dropped to low resolution and then froze entirely, I gave up. Many Starlink beta testers report similar experiences, consistent dropouts of a few seconds every few minutes.

Starting point is 00:08:47 Starlink's latency also swings from fine, Zoom did not exhibit any delay when it worked, to pretty bad. My feeling is that the connection dropouts are going to be worse for gaming than latency, so I didn't spend any time testing gaming latency, but Starlink itself measures. ping times for Counter Strike Go and Fortnite in its app, and I rarely saw those numbers dip below 50 MS, mostly hovering around 85 to 115 MS. Those aren't numbers you'd want to game with unless you like losing. Some Starlink testers have been able to play games and even use Stadia, but that seems both inconsistent and heavily dependent on satellite coverage in your area.

Starting point is 00:09:25 All of the people dreaming of Starlink upsetting cable monopolies and reinventing broadband need to seriously reset their expectations. At best, Starlink currently offers reasonably fast access with inconsistent connectivity, huge latency swings, and a significant uptick in time spent considering whether you can just get out the chainsaw and solve that tree problem yourself. Maybe this will change as the company launches more satellites. Maybe it will eventually work better in areas that are dominated by tall trees. Maybe one day it will not drop out in wind and heavy rain. I didn't give Starlink a formal review score because the whole thing is openly in beta and the company isn't making many promises about reliability. But even when it's final, you're still looking at a

Starting point is 00:10:07 service whose near-term best-case scenario is being competitive with a solid LTE connection. I am no fan of cable companies and wireless carriers, but it's simply true that my cable broadband and 5G service are both faster and more reliable than Starlink, and they will almost certainly remain that way, end quote. Read the entire thing for much, much more, including an indictment of the incumbent ISP industry for being so terrible that even with all of those caveats just mentioned, people like me still find Starlink pretty tempting as some sort of possible way out of our ISP hell. It's a bit of a long read, but it's worth it. Which means it's time for the actual weekend long read suggestions. And first up, Brad Stone wrote the definitive book on the history of Amazon

Starting point is 00:10:59 about a decade ago. It's a book called The Everything Store. But that's the thing. It was the definitive book on Amazon in the first few decades of its life. In the years since, Amazon has become not just the everything company, but certainly one of the biggest and most powerful companies of all time. So an update was needed, and with this new book, Amazon Unbound, Stone has delivered it. I've just started diving into it myself, but if you want a more detailed review before considering buying the book yourself, read this from the New York Times, quote. Significantly, the book is also very much a biography of Bezos, and that makes it timely at a moment when our economy is dominated by giant firms headed by a small handful of men, whose personalities and whims we need to understand whether

Starting point is 00:11:46 we like it or not. Amazon in the 2010s was an intensely personal venture, run by one of the wealthiest men in the world according to his own desires and reflecting his own personality. end quote. So give the book a try to understand Bezos perhaps and thus understand Amazon better. Next, a sort of corrective, or maybe even a mea culpa. Remember me saying recently that the PlayStation 5 launch has been such a disaster. Maybe it's one of the worst hardware rollouts of all time. But this piece from Peter Rubin in Wired makes the exact opposite argument, making the really convincing case that in fact this might be one of the most successful gaming platform launches ever, quote, six months after its November 12th debut, the PlayStation 5 is well on its way to being a success

Starting point is 00:12:32 story for Sony. As of March 31st, the company had sold 7.8 million of the new game consoles worldwide enough in both units and dollars to make it the biggest console launch in U.S. history. Bigger than Nintendo Wii, bigger than the Xbox One, bigger even than the PS4. And who knows what that number might be if everyone who wanted one was actually able to buy one. Whether you're among the 7.5 million who already have a PS5, or the millions who might have one, if not for that whole unprecedented global disruption thing. The real question is whether the PS5 is delivering the experience. Are developers harnessing its feature set to create games that weren't possible before, have first party and indie studios navigated the pandemic well enough to keep the pipeline

Starting point is 00:13:13 of exclusive titles stocked? Is the PS5 proving to be, as PlayStation chief architect Mark Serney promised two years ago, a revolution rather than an evolution? The short answer is yes. The slightly longer and more accurate answer is, it's getting there, end quote. Another piece that people have been shattering a lot about this week is the joint essay from Lee Jin, Nathan Beshetz, and Yash Bogle, wherein they argue that Apple's restrictive and inconsistent app store policies are holding back the entire creator economy, quote, What would creators' lives be like if Apple's 30% take rate hadn't made it less economical for them to get direct support from fans. What kinds of premium experiences would be possible if creators were able to charge

Starting point is 00:13:58 more than $999? What kinds of apps would exist if Apple didn't take it upon itself to judge which apps are valuable or moral and which are not? We can imagine some pretty compelling possibilities for businesses like Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, Twitch, and Substack, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's much harder to imagine what new services might emerge or what shape the economy might evolve into in the long run. Obviously, we think the impact of opening up iOS would be massive for creators, but we also suspect it wouldn't be that bad of a deal for Apple. Sure, they'd miss out on billions in app store revenue, but the total lock-in of iOS would only increase as more and more content and commerce flows through it

Starting point is 00:14:41 without friction. Not a bad consolation prize, end quote. Then back to company profiles. If you want the biggest deep dive into the history of Robin Hood that I've seen anywhere, check out this rather long piece from the New Yorker, quote. Companies such as Uber, Instagram, and Foursquare were introducing new products designed for mobile devices. Tenev and Bott decided to turn Kronos into a free stock trading application aimed at millennials. There were already many companies such as e-trade that offered low-cost stock trades to non-professional investors, but they weren't designed to function well on mobile devices. Tennev and Bot started referring to their company as Cash Cat, inspired by Bot's deep fondness for and serious allergy to cats.

Starting point is 00:15:24 They rented a garage-like space in downtown Palo Alto to use as an office. Ten have said that when Selena first introduced him to her friends, she would tell them that he, quote, worked in finance, quickly adding that he was a good finance, the Robin Hood of Finance. Tenev and Bott seized on that name and applied for a license to operate as a broker-dealer, which would allow the company to buy and sell securities on behalf of customers. In April 2013, while they waited for approval, they launched Robin Hood as a financial news platform where users could rate stocks and predict their performance. In an interview, Tennev described the company's philosophy by paraphrasing a quote from Gordon Gecko,

Starting point is 00:15:58 a character in the movie Wall Street. The most important commodity that I have is information, end quote. Next, of course, every time Matthew Ball delivers a big new essay, it's worth reading, and given the Disney Plus news from earlier in the show, I give you what is an entertainment company these days and why does the answer matter? Quote, after years of dodging the question, is Netflix a tech or media company? Netflix founder and co-CEO Reid Hastings recently declared, quote, we're really an entertainment company. So what is that?

Starting point is 00:16:32 Why does it matter? And what's the takeaway? At its core, an entertainment business does only three things. Create slash tell stories, build love for those stories, and monetize that love. A good way to learn about this is through Disney, end quote. Read on as he uses Disney as a lens to make some compelling and interesting points about creator economies and the like. Finally, in Vice, the great Lane Nooney points out that, you know, from the very beginning,

Starting point is 00:17:01 computers have been bad for our health, by which I mean bad for our bodies. Decades before Zoom fatigue broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with a world of pain previously unknown to humankind. There really was no precedent in our history of media interaction for what the combination of sitting and looking at a computer monitor did to the human body. Unlike television viewing, which is done at greater distance and lacks interaction, monitor use requires a short depth of field and repetitive eye motions. And whereas television has long accommodated a variety of postures, seating types, and even distances from the screen, personal computing typically requires less than two to three feet of proximity

Starting point is 00:17:43 from the monitor with arms extended for using a keyboard or mouse. The kind of pain Getson experienced was unique to a life lived on screen and would become a more common complaint as desktop computers increasingly entered American homes over the course of the 1990s and into the early 21st century. Forty years later, what started with simple complaints about tired eyes has become commonplace experience for anyone whose work or school life revolves around to screen. The aches and pains of computer use now play an outsized role in our physical and increasingly our mental health as the demands of remote work force us into constant accommodation. We stretch our wrists and adjust our screens, poor money into monitor arms and ergonomic chairs,

Starting point is 00:18:25 even outfit our offices with motorized desks that can follow us from sitting to standing to sitting again. Entire industries have built their profits on our slowly curving backs, while physical therapists and chiropractors do their best to stem a tide of bodily disfinding. function that none of us opted into, end quote. I remember when we bought our first computer in 1986. My dad also bought at the same time one of those ergonomic kneeling chairs because his bad back didn't allow him to sit at the computer for any length of time. Otherwise, so basically, the first five years of my computing life, I learned how to type

Starting point is 00:19:01 and code and hack and game on a kneeling chair. I wonder if maybe I should go back to that. That's all for today. Chris and I are doing a Twitter space tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. So if you're around, open up Twitter around then and join us. Be there or be square. Or also, of course, you could just listen to the space when I release it as an episode sometime tomorrow. No Ride Home Plus content this weekend, but more coming next weekend. And, of course, Ride Home Plus listeners can listen to the Twitter space episode ad, free. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/14 – Now Ransomware Is Shutting Down The Irish Health Service

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