Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/24 – TikTok Turns On The Money Machine

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

The fire sale on tech companies has begun. More big important hacks to be aware of. Another crypto bridge has been compromised. Amazon wants you to know about their AI coding tool. TikTok turns on the money spigot. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Setapp Playlists on Spotify KeeperSecurity.com/techmeme Links: Zendesk to be acquired by investor group for $10.2 billion (CNBC) Google is notifying Android users targeted by Hermit government-grade spyware (TechCrunch) CISA, US Coast Guard warn of Log4Shell attacks after 130GB data breach in May (The Record) Breaking: Harmony’s Horizon Bridge hacked for $100M (CoinTelegraph) Amazon launches CodeWhisperer, a GitHub Copilot-like AI pair programming tool (TechCrunch) TikTok Turns On the Money Machine (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Web3 Use Cases: Today (Not Boring) Where are all the crypto use cases? (Evan Conrad) How Russia’s vaunted cyber capabilities were frustrated in Ukraine (Washington Post) Self-Driving Big Rigs Are Coming. Is America Ready? (WSJ) How Townscaper Works: A Story Four Games in the Making (Game Developer) 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, June 24th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the fire sale on tech companies has begun. More big and important hacks to be aware of. Another crypto bridge has been compromised. Amazon wants you to know about their AI coding tool. TikTok turns on the money spigot and of course the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Given the current market environment, we should expect more headlines like this, as even high growth companies have seen. their share prices beaten down so much that they're suddenly in play in Wall Street's parlance. Zendesk is set to be acquired by an investor group in an all-cash deal valuing the company at around

$10.2 billion, and we'll go private once the deal closes. The stock is up more than 30% this morning on the news, but there was a private equity offer for Zendesk at a $17 billion valuation a mere few months ago. And this is another example, another one of those stocks that, that has been down significantly, more than 50% from its all-time high, quoting CNBC. The deal led by investment firms Permira and Helman and Freeman will give shareholders $77.50 per share a premium of about 34% over the company's closing stock price Thursday, according to the press release. Shares were up about 30% during pre-market trading on Friday. The investment firms planned to take Zendesk private once the deal closes,

also included in the investor group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and GIC. Zendesk's board unanimously approved the deal, which it expects to close in the fourth quarter of this year the company said, end quote. And by the way, this won't just be happening on the public side of things. Also this morning news that Zomato is acquiring struggling instant delivery service Blinket, formerly Grofers, for $568.1 million. $1.00 had raised about $700 million in total and was valued at more than $1 billion as recently as 2021. So maybe get used to headlines like that. Sometimes feels like Groundhog Day. We get headlines like this all the time now. Google has detailed the commercial spyware hermit used in Kazakhstan and Italy so far, targeting Android and iOS. The iOS version, by the way, has six exploits, including two zero days.

Quoting TechCrunch. Hermit is a commercial spyware known to be used by governments with victims in Kazakhstan and Italy, according to Lookout and Google. Lookout says it's also seen the spyware deployed in northern Syria. The spyware uses various modules, which it downloads from its command and control servers as they are needed to collect call logs, record ambient audio, redirect phone calls, and collect photos, messages, emails, and the device's precise location from a victim's device. Lookout said in its analysis that Hermit, which

works on all Android versions, also tries to root an infected Android device granting the spyware even deeper access to the victim's data. Lookout said the targeted victims are sent a malicious link by text message and tricked into downloading and installing the malicious app, which masquerades as a legitimate branded telco or messaging app from outside of the app store, end quote. And the CISA and U.S. Coast Guard Cyber Command are warning companies of log-for-shell exploits that it is found out in the wild, citing one incident of threat actors exfiltrating over 130 gigabytes of data, quoting the record. As part of this exploitation, suspected APT actors implanted loader malware on compromise systems

with embedded executables enabling remote command and control, the agency explained. In one confirmed compromise, these APT actors were able to move laterally inside the network, gain access to a disaster recovery network, and collect and exfiltrate sensitive data, end quote. In the second incident detailed in the alert, CISA said it was forced to conduct an on-site incident response engagement. During the attack, which began in late April and continued through May, CISA said it discovered the organization had been, quote, compromised by multiple threat actor groups. One of the groups had been in the organization's network since January and may have been inside even earlier, according to CISA, which added that it gained access by exploiting

Log 4 shell in an unpatched VMware Horizon server. By January 30th, one of the groups began using PowerShell scripts and eventually managed to move laterally to other production environment hosts and servers. The group was able to then use Compromise Administrator accounts to run a loader malware, end quote. What was I saying about Groundhog Day? Another bridge has been hacked. Quoting Coin Telegraph. The Horizon Bridge to the Harmony Layer 1 blockchain has been exploited for $100 million in altcoins which are being swapped for Ether. The hack may vindicate pre-eastern.

raised community concern about the robustness of two of four multi-sig that reportedly secures the bridge. Starting at about 708 a.m. Eastern Standard Time until 7.26 a.m., 11 transactions were made from the bridge for various tokens. They have since begun sending tokens to a different wallet to swap for ETH on the Uniswap decentralized exchange, then sending the ETH back to the original wallet. The Horizon Bridge facilitates token transfers between Harmony and the Ethereum network, Binance Chain, and Bitcoin. Harmony, the operator of the bridge, announced late on Thursday that the bridge has been halted. It said the BTC bridge and its assets have not been affected by the attack. The Harmony team also said it was working with national authorities and forensic specialists

to determine who was responsible. A post-mortem is sure to follow, end quote. And headlines like this are suddenly common. Amazon wants you to know that it too has an AI codewriter, officially launching Code Whisperer, a GitHub copilot-like AI pair programming tool, in preview within the AWS IDE toolkit supporting Java, JavaScript, and Python, quoting TechCrunch. It's now available in preview as part of the AWS IDE toolkit, which means developers can immediately use it right inside their preferred IDs, including Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ Idea, PiCharm, Webstorm, and Amazon's own AWS Cloud 9.

Support for the AWS Lambda console is also coming soon. ahead of today's announcement, Vassi Filiman, Amazon's VP in charge of its AI services, stressed that the company didn't simply create this in order to offer a copy of co-pilot. He noted that with Code Guru, its AI Code Reviewer and Performance Profiler, and DevOps Guru, its tool for finding operation issues, the company laid the groundwork for today's launch quite a few years ago. Quote, I think the technology is at a point where we thought it was the right time to do it, Philomen said, and it fits nicely with the other pieces that they have. It's been a journey, and we've just done different parts at different times, and quote. This might be stepping on Longreed's territory just a bit, but Bloomberg has a long piece out outlining how TikTok is starting to cash in on its exploding popularity. Sources say that TikTok plans to grow its e-commerce gross merchandise volume to $2 billion this year and then $23 billion in 2023. That's quite the ramp up. Talk about turning on the money machine. Rock these quotes. TikTok ranked in nearly $4 billion in 2021, mostly from advertising,

and is projected to hit $12 billion this year, according to the research firm e-marketer. That would make it bigger than Twitter and Snap combined three years after it started accepting ads on the platform. It's definitely a threat to Google and Facebook, said Peter John DeCroon, chief executive officer of the online ad firm EntraVision Media Donuts. TikTok is starting to command a percentage of the media budget that's more in line with its audience size, end quote. Alphabet's Google and Facebook, now meta platforms, are the giants of online advertising a duopoly so powerful they have been hit with antitrust complaints in the U.S., the UK, and European Union. TikTok and parent bite dance is shaping up to be the most serious threat to that

chokehold since the pair rose to power over the past two decades. With a billion monthly active users, TikTok is still smaller than Facebook at 2.9 billion users and Instagram at around 2 billion users also part of meta. Yet TikTok's programming is proving unusually compelling. Its average user in the U.S. now spends around 29 hours a month with the service, more than Facebook at 16 hours a month, and Instagram at eight hours a month put together, according to mobile researcher data.a.i, end quote. Read the whole thing to get the best single deep dive I've seen outlining our new TikTok overlords. Time for the weekend. Longreads proper. and given the crypto winner that is descended across the land, I find it interesting that pieces like these are popping up.

First, you might have seen online that Pachy McCormick got some serious shade from people for being caught on a podcast. Unable in the moment to articulate a clear use case for crypto, at least in the mortgage space, I think it was, to be fair. So he has a new piece out that is literally like three tangible use cases of Web3 today. It takes him thousands of words to get to it, but he name checks NFTs, decentralized exchanges, the wireless network helium, and also talent marketplaces like Brain Trust. He also name checks a piece from Evan Conrad called Where Are All the Crypto Use Cases? So that's the second piece in the show notes. Evan says crypto may be more bad than good, right now at least, but it has use cases like cutting out middlemen via decentralization. So the claim that it has no use cases,

is not rational. Quote, a blockchain is an escrow without a third party. That is the use case. It lets you surrender control of some data to a computer that no one has control over. Because no one has control over it, you can have it keep track of a ledger and create money, create marketplaces that don't charge rent, and companies that are controlled by everyone.

For example, say you attempted to create file coin without crypto. You instead need to route the money through a bank somewhere. Whoever controls that bank controls file coin and has an incentive to charge money on every transaction. As more people use the marketplace, centralized file coins network effect would grow, making it harder and harder for anyone to compete and remove centralized file coins cut.

Decentralized file coin has the same network effect, but the value accrues to the protocol, making it harder and harder over time for any single party to extract rent. Thus, file coin becomes the cheapest possible commodity market with no single intermediary taking a cut. In other words, crypto's use case is the one that it claims.

decentralization. Its use case is to cut out middlemen, break up monopolies, and fight aggregators. It's certainly not the case that crypto is entirely useless, end quote. This Washington Post piece answers a question I've certainly had. Why hasn't the war in Ukraine unleashed just a tsunami of hacks and exploits? Maybe because a quiet partnership between U.S. tech companies, U.S. and NATO intel agencies, and Ukrainian hackers helped blunt Russia's offensive cyber capabilities. Quote, Russia's cyber reversals haven't resulted from lack of trying. Microsoft counts nearly 40 Russian destructive attacks between February 23rd and April 8th,

and Rob Joyce, the National Security Agency's cybersecurity director, said the Russians had attempted an enormous cyber offensive. But Ukraine, working with private tech companies, Western intelligence and its own expert software engineers, has quickly fixed most of the damage. The Ukrainians have gotten really good at repairing networks, says Dmitri. Alperovich, a Russian-born cybersecurity expert who co-founded CrowdStrike, when a network gets wiped, they rebuild it in several hours, end quote. The close partnerships that have emerged between U.S. technology companies and Western cybersecurity agencies

is one of the unheralded stories of the war. A White House cyber official explains the new cooperative approach this way, quote, where companies see destructive attacks, that has driven partnerships with the intelligence community and other government agencies to see how best we can share information to protect infrastructure around the world, end quote. Then in the journal, our friend Chris Mims says that self-driving cars might still be a ways away, but self-driving trucks, self-driving highway big rigs, they're coming soon, quote. Some of the companies involved say they will have the first trucks without drivers in the cab on America's highways by the end of next year. Those include Aurora, which has partnerships with

FedEx and Werner Enterprises, and Too Simple, which has joined up with UPS and Ryder. When it gains widespread traction, robot trucking will have big implications for how we move goods around America and for the companies and people involved in that process. For starters, it could help alleviate a chronic shortage of drivers who are retiring faster than they can be replaced, leading to what the American Trucking Association's claim is a historic shortage of 80,000 drivers. Here's the promise of robot trucks. While full self-driving in all conditions is still a pipe dream, engineers seem to be close to achieving it in limited circumstances, such as on highways on clear days. And highway driving in good weather happens to be exactly the context in which long-haul trucks operate for a substantial portion of the time.

One reason for that, highways are what Aurora Chief Executive Chris Ermson calls self-similar. Another way to put it is that a bit of freeway in Texas looks very much like a bit of freeway in Phoenix or Minnesota, says Mr. Irmson, a former faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Google Executive, who co-founded Aurora in 2017. The similarity is good for the artificial intelligence technology that underpins self-driving, which can be great at handling things it has seen before and terrible at adapting to situations that are novel. Anyone who has tried GM's Supercruz, Nissan's Pro Pilot Assist or Tesla's autopilot system, has experienced this firsthand.

Highways also have the virtue of being relatively free of pedestrians, bicyclists, animals, and children chasing after balls, and they tend to be well-marked and well-maintained. highways in southwestern states where the weather is generally good are where autonomous trucking companies are currently testing their systems, carrying real loads for actual clients like FedEx and UPS, albeit with safety drivers behind the wheel in case the AI systems make a mistake, which they still do, end quote. And finally today, this is complicated stuff that is way beyond my ken, but the game Townscapeer has been one of my favorite games over the last year by far, and if you've ever played it,

you might enjoy this deep dive into the rather complicated design that makes the game so serendipitously fun by using procedural content generation. First released on PC and Mac in June of 2020, Townscapeer is, by Stalberg's own admission, more of a toy than a game. It does not have any explicitly defined objectives, and instead, you are left to craft towns based on your own design principles. Players have a very limited number of interactions. You can decide where a block is added or removed, and you can customize the color of the

blocks you place, and that's it. Everything else that you see is achieved courtesy of the game's procedural generation system. This creates what we would typically consider to be a mixed initiative AI system, meaning that the player gives input to where the game needs to expand the structure, and the system assesses the current shape, identifies what pre-built chunks of architecture are valid for that space, and then injects them into the game world. Despite this lack of direct control, the system is highly flexible and can handle a myriad of different scenarios that players can come up with, resulting in a variety of fun, interesting, and aesthetically varied settlements. And it's the simplicity in gameplay, combined with the game's bright, abstract, yet detailed

aesthetic that has led to Townscapeer transcending boundaries, developing a huge following across social media that has captured the imaginations of many who don't typically play video games. The secret to Townscapers' success is one that many aspiring and current game developers should reflect upon, end quote. So our Twitter space last night was all over the place. Chris and I both basically emptied our notebooks of stories that have fallen through the cracks recently, under-discussed stories that maybe the show needs to do more to cover. And also, I revealed my long-term commitment that I recently made to a cloud provider,

which means that I can no longer title my show files or ad files with forward-slashes. It's all explained in the space. We'll go live tomorrow, enjoy. and hopefully you ad-free subscribers now have your missing episodes. Supercast assures me that things are working again, fingers crossed. And don't worry, those of you who got in touch last night and implored me, I do plan to keep the ad-free option alive, despite all the frustration you heard in my voice yesterday.

I know you value it, so it's not going anywhere. Talk to you on Monday.