Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/02 – An Amazon Prime Phone Service?

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

A check-in with Elon and Twitter sees things pretty much as they’ve been for about a year now. Is Amazon about to release a low-cost cell phone plan for Prime members? Airbnb is suing New York City over a new law it sees as an existential threat. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: The Traceroute Podcast Links: Twitter's head of trust and safety says she has resigned (Reuters) Elon 'The Dogefather' Musk Accused of Insider Trading (Gizmodo) Russia accuses US of hacking thousands of Apple devices to spy on diplomats (The Record) Amazon Is in Talks to Offer Free Mobile Service to US Prime Members (Bloomberg) Airbnb sues NYC over new rules requiring hosts to register their homes as short-term rentals (Gothamist) Planned Layoffs Have Quadrupled So Far This Year in the US (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How a $13 Billion Fintech That Angered Jamie Dimon Won Over Banks (Bloomberg) A Week With the Wild Children of the A.I. Boom (NYTimes Magazine) China Is Drilling a 10,000-Meter-Deep Hole Into the Earth (Bloomberg) 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 Techman. name right home for Friday, June 2nd, 223. I'm Brian McCullough today. A check-in with Elon and Twitter sees things pretty much as they've been for about a year now. Is Amazon about

to release a low-cost cell phone plan for Prime members? Airbnb is suing New York City over a new law it sees as an existential threat. And of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It's been a while since we checked in on Elon and Twitter. How's that going? Well, Twitter's Vice President of Trust and Safety. Ella Irwin says she has resigned from the company. Erwin joined Twitter in June 22 and took over the trust and safety role when Yol Roth resigned. So there's that. Quoting Reuters, an email to Twitter returned an automated reply with a poop emoji. Erwin declined for their comment and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Fortune earlier reported

that Irwin's internal Slack account appeared to have been deactivated, end quote. So, looks like things are pretty much the same over there. Though this is a new wrinkle for Elon Musk personally, a proposed class action lawsuit accuses Elon Musk of insider trading by manipulating Doge coin. Musk allegedly sold around $124 million in Doge after Twitter's logo change, quoting Gizmodo. On Wednesday, the folks suing the multi-company exec for $258 billion over his efforts to inflate the price of Dogecoin, now say Musk had prior knowledge of Doge's ups and downs and even had a fiduciary relationship with the meme coin.

The lawsuit was originally brought by investors of Musk's companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Company. They've been arguing since last year that Musk was running a kind of pyramid scheme, trying to get people invested in Doge coins so he could cash out and make a tidy profit. Last month, Musk's lawyers asked the court to toss out the lawsuit claiming it was a work of fiction. Late on Wednesday, the investors filed a motion to amend. the lawsuit to consolidate several of their claims, but also to add allegations that Musk had sway over the meme coin. The investors claim the self-proclaimed Doge father drove up the price 36,000% by May 2021, just before Musk called Dogecoin a hustle live during a stint hosting Saturday Night Live.

The lawsuit brings up Musk's eye-rolling crypto promotions such as in April when he changed Twitter's blue bird logo to the image of Cabuso. Cabusu. Gabosu, the inspiration for the Shiba Inu meme and by extension, the crypto coin. Musk's clowning shot the price of Dogecoin up 30%, though when it was eventually removed, the coin's value rapidly depreciated. The investors claim Musk sold about $124 million in Dogecoin that month. The lawsuit further calls him and quote, Apex Predator feeding on and manipulating the hordes below, including his Twitter following, which has grown to $141 million, end quote. Russia's Federal Security Service or FSB claims that Apple helped the National Security Administration

here in the U.S. hack Russian diplomats iPhones. Kaspersky reports that unknown malware leveraged zero-click exploits on iPhones running up to iOS 15.7, quoting the record. Russia's Federal Security Service or FSB is accusing U.S. intelligence of hacking thousands of Apple phones to spy on Russian diplomats. According to FSB's statement published on, Thursday, the U.S. used previously unknown malware to target iOS devices. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky also issued a report Thursday on iOS malware from an unknown source.

A spokeswoman from Kasperski initially told the record that the company couldn't verify if the two attacks were connected, but an hour later sent an updated comment saying that Russia's computer security agency already had publicly stated that the indicators of compromise in both reports are the same. Kasperski couldn't confirm all of the FSB's findings, quote, due to the absence of technical details reported by them, the spokeswoman said. The FSB said that in addition to impacting domestic users, the malware also targeted foreign subscribers and wireless subscribers who use SIM cards registered with diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia. The list included countries from the NATO block, the post-Soviet region, as well as Israel, Syria, and China. Russian intelligence claims that the

investigation revealed that Apple is collaborating with the U.S. National Security Agency, or NSA. this proves that Apple's stated commitment to protecting the privacy of user data is in fact misleading, the FSB said. The NSA declined to comment, and Apple's spokesperson disputed the FSB report, quote, we have never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into any Apple product and never will, the spokesperson said, end quote. I do have to say, I find it highly unlikely that Apple would voluntarily work with any government to compromise their products, but, and this is mostly tongue and cheek, but if this were true, it would explain how the U.S. government seemed to know the Ukraine invasion was happening ahead of time. This would be pretty big. Sources are saying that

Amazon has been in talks with Verizon T-Mobile Dish Network and AT&T to roll out a low-cost or possibly free mobile phone service to U.S. prime subscribers, quoting Bloomberg. The talks have been going on for six to eight weeks, and have also included AT&T at times, but the plan may take several more months to launch and could be scrapped, one person said. Amazon's U.S. Prime subscribers pay $139 a year for privileges like speedy-free delivery, video streaming, and access to 100 million songs. Analysts say Prime membership has stagnated in the country since Amazon boosted the annual price from $119, a sign that a subscription is less attractive to consumers struggling with a

stubbornly high inflation rate. About 167 million Amazon shoppers had Prime memberships as of March, unchanged from a year earlier, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners for the wireless industry. An Amazon deal could be seen as a welcome boost to wholesale revenue and a way to attract more traffic to newly expanded 5G networks. But Amazon's entry could be detrimental if Prime Wireless becomes popular and starts to chip away at the big carrier's customer base. A deeply below market price from one of the world's largest retailers could easily undercut the pricing power of the Big Three national carriers, making it tempting for subscribers to flee to Amazon. Unlimited plans start at $60 a month at Verizon and T-Mobile with

AT&T starting at 65. With Prime Wireless, Amazon would become a new national brand, reselling mobile service from one of the Big Three carriers. The retailer could choose to offer wireless to its Prime members at an attractive price, prompting customers to cancel their current mobile service. Or Amazon could go wider and offer prime wireless to anyone who wants to switch service and become a prime member. The carriers aren't really in a position to say no to Amazon, having poured billions of dollars into super-fast high-capacity 5G wireless networks. The mobile operators have little to show for the effort and are eager to find new applications and sales outlets that can generate some return on the investment, end quote. This would be huge, but, you know, something, something

fire phone? A little bit of local news here. that I was completely unaware of. Airbnb is apparently suing New York City over a new law that the company calls a de facto ban against short-term rentals. The city plans to begin enforcing the law in question in July, quoting Gothamist. In a pair of lawsuits filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan on Thursday, the online platform and three hosts claim that new rules requiring short-term rental properties to be registered with the mayor's office of special enforcement will, quote, all that eliminate the market for home-based vacation stays in the city. The registration requirement known as Local Law 18 stems from legislation passed by the City Council last year and applies to

anyone planning to rent out their property in the city for less than 30 days. The city finalized the new rules earlier this year. They went into effect in March and enforcement is scheduled to begin in July. But Airbnb argues that the new rules are overly burdensome and complex, in part because they require hosts to obtain a unique identification account with the city, provide proof of identity and contact information and clear all existing building violations on their properties, among other requirements. The regulations will also force Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms to cross-reference registrations with the listings on their sites. The company says, a process that it claims can be easily hindered by typos or abbreviations. It is literally

impossible for regular people to comply with the rules, said Airbnb's attorney Karen Dunn at a press conference on Thursday. These are regulations that experts will tell you no regular person could understand unless they had a history of working in building code engineering. quote. The company's complaint states that the city had only approved nine host registrations as of the beginning of May, less than two months before the enforcement deadline, according to information provided to Airbnb from the city, end quote. According to a new Challenger report, U.S. tech companies have announced 136,831 layoffs thus far in 2023, more than in any full year since 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst, when job cuts reached 168,395.

quoting Bloomberg. Plan layoffs reach about 417,500 jobs through May, more than four times the jobs cut during the same period last year, Challenger said in a report, tech remains the industry with the most layoffs, Challenger found. Companies have announced about 136,800 cuts in the year through May. That's more than any full year since 2001, when the total eventually reached almost 168,400 in December. In the media industry, the total through May at about 17,400 was the highest on record for that period, banking also saw a surge in layoffs this year. Financial firms have announced almost 37,000 cuts through May more than four times the figure in the same period last year, end quote. On the tech angle, though, I'd note that tech was a tiny, tiny industry in 2001, at least compared to the behemoth

that it is today. Like, what's the percentage of the overall tech workforce represented by these layoffs today? Is it even 5% of the overall tech employment economy? In 2001, I'd hazard a guess that somewhere in the neighborhood of half of all tech jobs disappeared. So I'd argue that this is really not apples to apples. Time for the week on long-range suggestions. Let's check in with Plaid. Remember how they were blocked by regulators from being acquired by Visa? And at the time, I said, they're probably going to look back on that as a good thing. Quoting Bloomberg. The company is so good at what it does, that giant Visa offered to buy it three years ago for $5.3 billion.

$1.3Trust worries derailed the deal, but no matter. Now privately held Plaid is valued at more than $13 billion. At some point, as the company pushes into new businesses such as payments and anti-fraud tools, a stock market listing might beckon. Plaid today has helped one in three U.S. bank account holders connect to an outside app. It's reached data sharing agreements with 45 financial institutions, J.P. Morgan, Capital One Financial, and Wells Fargo among them. Those accords paved the way for Plaid to gain access to customers' bank data in a more secure way. but it still hasn't reached an agreement with some banks, including PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. In 2013, in New York City, Plaid was born. Early on, the challenge was clear, find enough fintechs that wanted a doorway into banks. Parenthood and Hockey's solution was to have software developers build fake apps as demos so they could pitch banks on the potential value of their new network.

It was slow going at first. U.S. banks weren't exactly early adopters of open banking, the idea that customers should have control over their own financial data for many executives' application programming interfaces or APIs, the now ubiquitous ways that multiple programs communicate, seemed like something only tech support might handle. Things started to change in 2014 when Venmo, a unit of PayPal, turned to Plaid. Until then, Venmo required new users to provide bank routing numbers, and the whole sign-up process could take several days. It's not what anyone expects out of a financial service or really any service, John Pitts, Plad's global head of policy says of the old arrangement. Plaid changed that, verifying and linking accounts in seconds instead of days.

It used its screen scraping technology to log into bank apps as if Plaid were the customer and surfaced the data back to Venmo. Plad says it used screen scraping back then because APIs weren't available. A Venmo representative declined to comment. Venmo's popularity soared. Plaid was in business, end quote. Then the New York Times magazine, as it is want to do on occasion, swooped down anthropologist style to take a survey of Cerebral Valley, the generation of folks building this new AI moment out in San Francisco. Quote, one appeal of generative AI is that it offers something for every would-be entrepreneur. For the technically minded, there is research to be done.

For the business types, it's easy to create applications on top of the open AI platforms. For the philosophically inclined, AI offers interesting avenues through which to explore what it means to be conscious and human. And unlike crypto, especially now, AI is a more credible field to be in for mainstream techies. Its products have already achieved significant traction among consumers. ChatGPT is believed to be the fastest app ever to hit 100 million users. And some of the figures at its forefront are familiar faces now in their second acts like Sam Altman, formerly the president of Startup Accelerator Y Combinator, and Greg Brockman,

formerly the chief technology officer at Stripe, the payments processing company. In short, you can't help thinking that as one friend, proclaimed to me, everyone in San Francisco is either starting or running an AI company or starting or running an AI fund, end quote. AI in turn seems to love San Francisco back during the pandemic as tech workers went remote and Twitter pundits evangelize the tax benefits of being in Austin or Miami. The San Francisco area seemed poised to cede its startup primacy. But recently, that trend has reversed. There's a sense that if you want to be working in AI, this is still the place to be. We actually first considered doing the batch in New York, but when I went to New York and asked people what they thought of GitHub co-pilot and AI-powered coding assistant, people told me they maybe tried it once, Fought and not said. On the other hand, people in San Francisco told me they were using it to write 50% of their code, end quote. And finally, just posting this because it's weird or cool or something, but China is drilling a 10,000 meter deep hole in the middle of the desert, an attempt to go deeper into the earth.

crust than maybe anyone ever has before, quoting Bloomberg. The narrow shaft into the ground will penetrate more than 10 continental strata or layers of rock, according to the report, and reach the Cretaceous system in the Earth's crust, which features rock dating back some 145 million years. The project will provide data on the Earth's internal structure, while also testing deep underground drilling technologies, according to China National Petroleum, which is spearheading the project. The drilling is expected to take 457 days. President Xi Jinping called for greater progress in deep earth exploration in a speech addressing some of the nation's leading scientists in 2021. Such work can identify mineral and energy resources and help assess the risk of environmental disasters, such as earthquakes

and volcanic eruptions. The deepest man-made hole on earth is still the Russian kola super-deep borehole, which reached a depth of 12,262 meters in 1989. after 20 years of drilling, end quote. All righty. Reminder that the WWDC keynote is Monday. So the show will post later than usual on Monday for the usual reasons that I can't tell you about what happened until it actually happens, and it doesn't start until 1 p.m. Eastern, by which time I usually have this show out already.

One more Internet History podcast reposts for you this weekend. I'm going to pause doing these for a while, but one more. I've gotten such great feedback from folks excited. to hear nuggets of internet history that they weren't aware of, and that's why I did that project in the first place to keep history alive. So this Saturday, if you were alive in the late 90s, you probably remember how AOL put their CDs into everything.

Magazines, your movie box from Blockbuster Video, on the seats at sports stadiums, Omaha Stakes even. Well, let me introduce you to Jan Brandt, the marketing legend who made all this possible, who quite possibly is single-handedly responsible for getting Americans online for the first time. It's one of the most popular IHP episodes I ever did. It's a fascinating story, and she tells it in a really entertaining way.

So enjoy that. Talk to you on Monday with WWDC.