Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/11 – Microsoft Says The Hackers Are Coming For The Election

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

Microsoft warns that hackers working for Russia, China and Iran are escalating their attacks surrounding the upcoming US Presidential election. I lied…. Apple has blinked in the Epic Games/App Store battle, at least a little bit. A profile of everyone’s favorite note taking startup, Roam. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: DoubleUp.agency Today In Digital Marketing Podcast Links: Russia, China and Iran launched cyberattacks on presidential campaigns, Microsoft says (NBC News) Epic says that Sign in with Apple for Fortnite will still work after all (iMore) ‘Apple One’ subscription bundle confirmed by Apple Music for Android ahead of Sept. 15 event (9to5Google) A $200 Million Seed Valuation for Roam Shows Investor Frenzy for Note-Taking Apps (The Information) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Apple's Rising Class of Leaders Will Shape a Post-Tim Cook Era (Bloomberg) Your Phone Wasn’t Built for the Apocalypse (The Atlantic) Esports Pros Have ‘Dream’ Jobs—but Game Publishers Have All the Power (Wired) How Netflix's Reed Hastings Rewrote the Hollywood Script (Forbes) I was skeptical about attending Burning Man in VR, but it’s great (Fast Company) 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 ride home for Friday, September 11th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Microsoft warns that hackers working for Russia, China, and Iran are escalating their attacks surrounding the upcoming U.S. presidential election. I lied. Apple has blinked in the Epic Games App Store battle, at least a little bit, a profile of everyone's favorite note-taking startup Rome, and of course the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Microsoft has made a big announcement saying, Packers working for the countries of Russia, China, and Iran have recently escalated their attacks on people and organizations involved in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. There was a time

when maybe it would be our own government that would be the one to warn us about things like this, but just like with the coronavirus, I guess it's tech companies these days who have all the data, who have all of the power and have, I guess, the remaining competency to keep us all informed, on useful information like this, quoting NBC News. Microsoft's Vice President of Customer Security and Trust, Tom Burt, wrote in a blog post published Thursday that the company's cybersecurity experts had recently seen an uptick in hackers' targeting campaigns. Quote, in recent weeks, Microsoft has detected cyberattacks targeting people and organizations involved

in the upcoming presidential election, Bert wrote. While hackers from all three countries have been spotted targeting people tied to Joe Biden and President Donald Trump's campaigns, Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, remains the biggest threat, said John Hiltquist, the director of intelligence analysis at Mandate Solutions, a cybersecurity company. Quote, we remain most concerned by Russian military intelligence, who we believe poses the greatest threat to the democratic process, Hiltquist said in a text message, end quote. No sooner do I pop off and say, like I did yesterday, that Apple doesn't look like it will give

even an inch in the fight with Epic games, then Apple does go ahead and give an inch. Blank just a little bit. Epic says Apple will indeed still allow existing Fortnite players on iOS to continue to use the Sign-In with Apple system, something that Epic claimed Apple had been threatening to cut off on top of everything else, quoting I'more. In a tweet sent out from Fortnite's status account on Twitter, the company has announced that Apple has reversed course on removing sign-in with Apple support for the Fortnite app on iOS. According to Fortnite, Apple has, quote, provided an indefinite extension for the feature,

so players should be able to keep signing into the app with their Apple ID for the foreseeable future. On September 9th, Epic said that Apple would be disabling sign-in with Apple for Fortnite soon. In fact, the company said Apple may remove support for the feature as soon as September 11th. Though in a statement to The Verge, Apple said yesterday that it had no plans to remove support for sign-in with Apple for Fortnite. It would not be surprising if it takes the trial in order to figure out who is telling the truth here, end quote. This show tries to keep you all in the know, ITKs, as they say in British football circles. So this is a little nugget, but it is something to keep you an ITK in good standing. 9 to 5 Google noticed that inside the Apple Music 9.4.0 beta APK, there's a reference to something called Apple One.

And 9 to 5 Google figures, that is the likely name of the rumored Apple subscription bundle. Quote, with the latest release of Apple Music version 3.4.0 beta, we find that Apple may have settled on the name Apple One alongside an internal code name Aristotle. These new strings in the app all but confirm that Apple Music will be included with Apple One when it launches. Interestingly, Apple One has clear messaging in place that Apple One and your existing Apple Music subscription will not overlap, ensuring you won't double-pile. pay. Notably, it seems you will not be able to manage or renew your Apple One subscription from the Android version of the Apple Music app. Instead, it seems you may need to use an iOS, MacOS, or TVOS device to do that. Unfortunately, no other details could be found in the app, such as pricing or when Apple plans to launch this new subscription bundle, end quote. Although this coming

Tuesday, there is an Apple event which could provide a platform for doing just that. Interesting raise Friday from another one of those new apps slash services that everyone in Silicon Valley has been raving about recently. Rome Research is essentially a note-taking startup. And Rome has raised $9 million at a $200 million valuation from among other people, the Collison Brothers, true ventures, and Lux Capital. And when I say this app is popular, some people are downright religious about it, quoting the information. Launch last fall by CEO Connor White Sullivan and his co-founder Joshua Brown. Rome's software is intended to help users identify relationships between their ideas. Users can link to past notes on similar topics using hashtags and other keyboard shortcuts

or simply create bulleted lists. The design should help people to think better and have better space for problem solving and mapping out domains, basically a different type of Google, said White Sullivan, age 32. Though in early development, the No-Frill service has attracted. a following in the research community and among an influential set of tech CEOs like Patrick Collison. Under the hashtag Rome cult on Twitter, they share accolades and tips. More than 100,000 people have signed up for Rome with a much smaller number paying for the service, which costs $165 per year or $15 per month. Those sales have been enough to generate $1 million in annual recurring

revenue, said White Sullivan, who noted that the 11-person company is currently profitable. But it's competing in an increasingly crowded market for note-taking apps and charging a higher price. Coda, which allows teams to collaborate on documents, charges $10 per month for its pro version, and Notion, which also offers note-taking and task management tools, costs only $4 per month for the personal pro plan. The sudden flood of investor enthusiasm for note-taking apps has been a reversal of fortune for Rome's founder who spent years trying and failing to drum up interest in his idea. Startup Accelerator Y Combinator rejected him five times, he said. Perhaps because he sent his application

video from his van where he was living in order to keep costs for Rome as low as possible. Seed investors had a similarly cool reaction. Nobody would touch us, he said. It just sounded like a really insane idea to people, end quote. Chain smoking and sipping red bulls, he kept pitching, collecting an unlikely group of investors that included Richard Meadows, a freelance journalist known for eating pizza for 222 days straight, the Center for Effective Altruism, and Skype founding engineer Jan Tallin. Later, Rome raised $1.4 million from early-stage venture firms Chapter 1 and Village Global. White Sullivan sees many different types of professionals and consumers beyond the Technorati using his tool, including journalists, therapists, academics, and researchers.

But to realize Rome's full value, these users will need to stick with the product for several weeks unlike mainstream note-taking tools. Quote, it's okay to have a tool that requires a little bit of a paradigm shift, White Sullivan said, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. And first up, as Tim Cook enters his 10th year in charge of Apple, Mark German in Bloomberg says that Apple is increasingly thinking of succession plans. So he takes a look at the next generation of executive talent at Apple, the folks that will shape a post-tim Tim Cook era at Apple. Quote, the CEO has given no indication he's ready to retire, but if the 59-year-old cook moved on tomorrow looked no further than Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, 57, to take over.

Williams is seen as the era parent, having run the company's global operations under Cook for the past several years. In 2013, he took over development of the Apple Watch and Apple's health initiatives, and last year he added oversight of hardware and software design. In many ways, Williams is seen as pragmatic as Cook and someone who wouldn't let the company miss a beat. He is an operations focus executive like Cook rather than a product visionary like Jobs or former design chief Johnny Ive. With the company's decade of success under Cook, it's unlikely the board would want to shift away from this proven formula, end quote. And then, baseball card style, the piece goes on department by department

to speculate about the next generation looking to someday take over everything from marketing to software engineering to operations. So if you're an Applehead, again, if you want to be an Apple, ITK, learn these names and you can buy stock in their careers before everyone else does. Next, with those insane pictures out of San Francisco this week, those orange skies straight out of the Dune trailer, everyone seemed to discover all at once that the white balance settings on smartphone cameras is a bit off. Everyone was posting pictures of the sky and being like, trust me, it's way more orange than this picture is showing you. And subsequently, lots of folks were hunting around for apps or filters to better compensate for the lacking in white balance.

But as Ian Bogost in the Atlantic explained, quote, the unoranged images were caused by one of the most basic features of digital cameras. Their ability to infer what color is in an image based on the lighting conditions in which it is taken. Like the people looking up at it, the software never expected the sky to be bathed in orange. It's a reminder that even as cameras have become a way to document every aspect of our lives, they aren't windows on the world, but simply machines that turn views of that world in images. Before digital cameras, film set the look of a photograph, but when digital photography was created decades ago, color had to be recreated from scratch. Camera sensors are actually colorblind. They see only brightness, and end. And

engineers had to trick them into reproducing color using algorithms. A process called white balance replaced the chemical color tone of film. Most cameras now adjust the white balance on their own, attempting to discern which objects in a photo ought to look white by compensating for an excess of warm or cool colors. But automatic white balance isn't terribly reliable. If you've tried to take a smartphone photo of a scene with multiple types of light, such as a city sunset, you've probably watched the image change tones from redder to blue,

as you frame or reframe it. The device struggles to figure out which subject should look white and which exposure, the amount of light to capture, might best represent it, end quote. Bogos offers us a timely reminder that images and videos really never have captured the world as it truly is. Professional photographers talk about making images, not capturing them. Photography always was a collaboration with materials and equipment, and that's even more true now that it's all bits and megapixels. Next, we've touched a couple times on these new modern professional video game players, e-athletes, if you will.

Franchised leagues are a modern experiment in creating a new sport, a new multi-billion dollar industry. But remember, with e-sports, you're playing a sport or a game that someone else actually owns the intellectual property of. Wired looks into this and reminds entrepreneurs in the space. No matter how big your industry gets, you're still playing someone else. else's game, the publisher's game, in every sense of that sentence, quote. E-sports is what sports would look like if traditional sports could have monopolistic control

over their ecosystem, says Will Parton, an esports consultant writing a book on the industry. Esports is an attempt to create a version of a sport aligned with the financial incentives of game publishers, end quote. Executives in charge of e-sports leagues disagree with this characterization, quote, there's no question a healthy e-sports program can keep a game healthy, says Pete Vilectia. both CEO of Activision Blizzard Esports and Commissioner of the Overwatch League. But he adds, Our top priority as Activision Blizzard Esports is not to market the game.

That's not how our success is measured. We're trying to build successful e-sports programs, period, end quote. Reed Hastings of Netflix has a new book out about his career and about how Netflix does business, how it sees the world, its philosophy. So Hastings has been making the rounds for promotional purposes. there's been, I don't know, two or three different articles and interviews that I could point you to, but I think I'll just give you the profile from Forbes, quote, the company's pay packages come fully as salary with as much or as little compensation as you wish in stock options.

Netflix doesn't believe in bonuses, which Hastings thinks can reward the wrong things. Quote, it's the specifics of trying to hold someone accountable that trips you up, he says, adding, we do evaluate people, but we don't micromanage. the goals, end quote. A corollary, though, these stars, all paid like stars, must continue to perform like stars. No part of the company tolerates resting on one's laurels, quote, adequate performance gets a generous severance package. Hastings and McCord wrote in a 129 page slide share presentation on Netflix culture that was widely shared a decade ago and for years was on the company's website. Quote, we describe it as like getting cut from an Olympic team, and it's super disappointing. You've trained

your whole life for it and you get cut and it's heartbreaking hasting says but there's no shame in it at all you had the guts to try end quote finally like everything else silicon valley's favorite in-person event burning man was canceled this year but the festival went on virtually inside virtual reality and daniel turterman at fast company attended the virtual event and said actually burning man in vr wasn't that bad and he took away a whole bunch of lessons as to why it ended up being not that bad that might be useful to a bunch of other event businesses in this time period. Not all events are mostly participant created like Burning Man, but all have some element of community involved.

And the benefit of leveraging that energy is that as people discover and encounter the things they love from their event, they'll tell everyone about it. That's exactly what's happening in BRCVR. You stop somewhere, start talking to random strangers, and they tell you about all the amazing projects they just found. And then you run off and check it out for yourself, and then tell everyone you meet about it,

just like you do at Burning Man, end quote. That's all for this week. As soon as I get done recording this, I've got to pop over and attempt to record that weekend bonus episode with Alex Cantorwitz talking about the whole TikTok sale saga. Again, hopefully the news won't completely overtake us on this, but I think there are enough angles to this whole story that even if by tonight, it suddenly announced that TikTok was sold to, I don't know, McDonald's or something bizarre.

The episode would still have some interesting analysis to it, so look for that on Saturday. And enjoy your last true weekend of summer, you Northern Hemisphere denizens out there. I'll probably be inside most of the weekend playing Crusader Kings 3. Talk to you on Monday.