Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/18 – Chinese Drone Maker DJI Blacklisted By The US

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 tech meme right home for Friday, December 18th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, drone maker DJI is blacklisted by the Commerce Department. Group video comes to echo devices, Twitter launches spaces, Sony offers refunds for cyberpunk 2077, Coinbase files to go public,

Starting point is 00:00:52 and of course the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The U.S. is reportedly going to add around 80 more Chinese companies to its trade black list, and that includes, shockingly, China-based drone maker DJI, quoting the verge. The ban was put in place through the same mechanism as the U.S. government's ongoing ban on Huawei products and is primarily focused on blocking the export of U.S. technology to the drone maker. However, the ban will make it difficult for U.S. businesses to provide parts or components for D.J.I to use in its drones, which is likely to disrupt the company's supply chain. Depending on China's response to the action, it may also make it difficult for U.S. stores to

Starting point is 00:01:38 directly sell DJI products. The ban is set to go into effect when the list is officially updated at 1115 a.m. Eastern Time. The new additions to the entity list come alongside a more specific action against China's semiconductor manufacturing international corporation, or SMIC, which was listed in response to purported ties between the company and the Chinese military. Less explanation was given for DJI's addition to the list, although Commerce said other companies were added, quote, for actions deemed contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States, end quote. This is likely a reference to DJI's involvement in providing drones to the Chinese government to surveil detention camps as detailed in a Bloomberg Business Week report.

Starting point is 00:02:21 But the United States government has also cited several concerns in the past over security issues with the drones, which are largely made in China and contained Chinese parts. The Department of the Interior has announced plans to ground its drone fleet as it reviews whether there are any major security concerns of Chinese spying or cyber attacks, and the Department of Justice banned buying foreign-made drones, which includes DJI's products, using agency funds back in October, citing similar security concerns. The Department of Defense has certified several other drones

Starting point is 00:02:50 from competitors like Parrot and Skydeo for governmental use instead, after several years of review, end quote. Amazon has launched group video and audio calling on echo devices for up to seven participants. Quoting the Verge. Originally announced back in September, group calling will allow up to seven participants to join an audio or video call on supported echo devices like the Echo, Echo, Echo, Echo, Dot, and Echo Show. Echo owners will be able to create and name groups using the Alexa app, and Amazon is also planning to support group calling through its Alexa app soon. You'll be able to add adult contacts into groups, and friends and family will have to opt in to be part of group calling.

Starting point is 00:03:34 This new feature also supports Alexa commands like, you know who, call my family to connect to a group you've created, end quote. Group chat is hot. Lookout Clubhouse. Twitter has officially launched spaces. It's Clubhouse-like audio service into private beta on iOS, limited right now to select individuals largely from underrepresented backgrounds, quoting TechCrunch. There are two ways to create a space, Twitter says. You can either press and hold the computer. pose button in the lower right corner of the screen, or you can create a space through the fleet creation screen by swiping right. Hosts on spaces will also be able to invite people to join a space through DMs by tweeting links or by sharing a link elsewhere. As the test rolls out, everyone can see and join spaces when they're invited to do so, but hosts will control who's speaking. Soon, hosts will also have more options to control conversations. The test additionally adds new reaction emojis,

Starting point is 00:04:36 the 100, raised hand, fists, piece sign, and wave, along with reporting and blocking tools, a quote, very early version of automatic transcriptions, and the ability to share tweets into a space. Many of these features were already spotted last month by Eagle-eyed reverse engineer and listener to the show Jane Manchin Wong, but today Twitter is confirming they will be part of the beta test at launch. The company will also tweet about spaces from a dedicated Twitter account at Twitter spaces. Twitter says the beta test will involve around a couple hundred people and will roll out over the course of the coming weeks on iOS, end quote. I mentioned in passing that Cyberpunk 277 has had a reputation for being buggy since its launch. But if you're not

Starting point is 00:05:27 plugged into the whole gaming space, get this. It's gotten so bad that Sony is removing cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation store until further notice. And it is offering full refunds to anyone who bought it. That's pretty unprecedented, especially for the big high-profile game that everyone was looking forward to this year. Quoting the verge, players have found that Cyberpunk 277, which has only been out for a little more than one week, has been riddled with bugs. And while the game looks and performs well in backwards compatibility mode on the PS5, it is prone to routine crashes and a number of distracting visual glitches. On PS4, however, the game fares a lot worse.

Starting point is 00:06:07 Eurogamer reported poor performance, low frame rate, and texture pop-in. Sony's move comes just days after Cympunk 277 developer CD Project Red said people unsatisfied with their purchase on the PS4 or Xbox 1 should request a refund. Yet due to Sony's stringent refund policy, many who bought digital versions of the game from the PlayStation Store were unable to get refunds. Players who bought the Xbox One version of the game have reported better luck with Microsoft's more generous refund policy. CD Project Red has also committed to releasing patches to improve cyberpunk 2077. The company has already released one post-launch update, and in a December 13th statement,

Starting point is 00:06:46 the studio said another update is, quote, coming within the next seven days. More significant patches are planned for January and February. Together, these should fix the most prominent problems gamers are facing on last-gen consoles, the company said, end quote. That new antitrust case against Google was indeed announced yesterday afternoon, making this the third case that Google is facing in the U.S. Yes, I agree. It's hard to keep track of all of these litigations now, and I don't know how we're going to cover all of it going forward once they move to trial. There are already so many cases and more to come, so I'm going to outsource my analysis of this one to David Pierce's protocol newsletter because they

Starting point is 00:07:34 helpfully did a useful little summation. Quote, self-preferencing is on trial here. The case alleges that Google makes partners sign anti-forking agreements that make it harder to use other operating systems, prevents Android manufacturers and others from pre-installing apps like Bing and Duck Duck Go, and Barry's search results from other providers below its own stuff. Google's response, users want the best information at the top and we have it. It even pointed out that Bing offers similar-looking results pages as evidence that this is simply good product thinking. Protocols Emily Burnbaum ranked the five antitrust suits currently in play, three against Google, two against Facebook, in order of their likelihood of succeeding.

Starting point is 00:08:17 She said the DOJ's case against Google, the one from October, which alleges that Google shouldn't be allowed to pay billions to be the default search engine everywhere, has the best chance. That, of course, is entirely by design. It's the least ambitious and a carbon copy of the 1990s Microsoft case because of the government wants an actual win, end quote. I know that this is also a rolling story that might be getting confusing as well, but I think the whole Solar Winds hack is shaking out to be maybe the biggest cyber warfare attack ever to occur, so it's probably worth keeping an eye on.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Let me just summarize the latest developments here. sources have told Politico that the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains checks notes, the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile have also seen evidence that their networks were accessed as part of the Solar Winds hack. So again, the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, that's my textbook definition of not good. I've seen security folks on Twitter say that the most important computers in these systems would have been air-gapped. But still, Microsoft has also identified more than 40 customers targeted in the Solar Winds hack, 80% of them in the U.S., and says that the attack is ongoing. Again, I want to underline that.

Starting point is 00:09:42 The hack is still happening. And I've seen security folks on Twitter warn that the mitigation of all of this, the actual going into all of these affected systems and rooting out the hackers, could take years since the hackers have been inside these systems undetected for so long. and the CISA yesterday issued a new alert saying that they've seen evidence suggesting that attackers use malware beyond the solar winds vulnerabilities that have been disclosed thus far. But unhelpfully, they offered no other details like which other pieces of malware might have been involved.

Starting point is 00:10:20 If you're marking your bingo cards, I've got another one for you. Coinbase has filed for an IPO. so I suppose we could expect an S-1 by the end of the year, or maybe not, because of the holidays coming up. Coinbase represents a milestone for the entire crypto industry with this IPO, but then again, Coinbase was always the most traditional startup in a non-traditional industry. They might be tempted, nonetheless, to do things a bit crypto-e with their IPO, quoting Fortune. In a recent interview, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ersham told Fortune,

Starting point is 00:10:58 the company is, quote, spiritually built to go public via an offering involving digital tokens on a blockchain, the ledger technology that underpins Bitcoin and which crypto enthusiasts view as the future of financial infrastructure. It is far from clear, however, whether the Securities and Exchange Commission would sign off on such an arrangement. If the agency refuses to do so, another option would be for Coinbase to pursue a direct listing in which it sells shares directly to the public. This model was recently employed by Spotify and Slack, and veteran tech journalist Alex Willem has noted that Coinbase is an atypical candidate for such a listing in part because of its hefty balance sheet, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. We might do a weekend bonus episode about this soon, about the whole idea of Silicon Valley being over, folks moving to Texas, folks moving to Florida. I just recorded an office hours episode with Gary Tan that will come out sometime in the new year.

Starting point is 00:12:00 And he pushed back hard on the idea that the Bay Area is over. He argued that the big guys might leave the valley. But that just makes room for the new up-and-comers to come in and, you know, disrupt. Anyway, our friend Alex Cantowitz, in his big technology substack, actually crunched the numbers from LinkedIn, and he says, no, everyone is not moving to Austin. Maybe they're moving to Madison or Cleveland. Quote, the country's biggest tech migration increase took place in Madison, Wisconsin. The city was gaining 1.02 tech workers for each one that left last year, and it's now gaining 1.77, a 74% jump.

Starting point is 00:12:41 Sacramento and Richmond, meanwhile, were losing tech workers before the pandemic and have turned it around. Sacramento was adding a fraction of a tech worker, 0.87, for each one that left last year, and now it's adding 1.02. Richmond was adding 0.95 last year, and it's now adding 1.06 this year. Other Midwest cities, including Minneapolis, Minnesota and Cleveland, Ohio have significantly reduced the rate at which tech workers were leaving their cities. Austin, for its part, is not experiencing a pandemic-induced tech worker surge. Last year, Austin was gaining 2.06 tech workers for everyone that left. Now it's down to 1.84, a drop of 10.78%. Though Austin is still gaining tech workers this year, the notion that 2020 was a watershed year for tech workers moving there is a myth, end quote. But it's not

Starting point is 00:13:30 all a myth because San Francisco, according to these LinkedIn numbers, is seeing a 35% year-over-year increase in tech worker outflow, followed by New York City with a 20% year-over-year increase in outflow. Speaking of Substack, Jacob Donnelly runs a very successful newsletter there called a media operator. And his most recent post outlines why he he's decided to leave substack. As someone that runs a tiny media outlet myself, his reasons made a ton of sense. In short, he said that substack is currently too limited for what he wants to do, quote, when you come to a media operator, you are my customer. I am then the customer to Pico, the customer relationship management slash registration system. I choose to power AMO's business,

Starting point is 00:14:18 but you're not actually Pico's customer. I pay Pico, you pay me, the relationship is crystal clear. can't say the same for Substack. You can learn a lot about who the customer of a business is based on their product development. As new features are introduced, who do they benefit? For Substack, I don't get the feeling that it knows who its customer is, and therefore its product development looks a little haphazard. Subsdack built a great tool for sending a newsletter, publishing a blog, and even hosting a podcast, but then it sort of stopped. It never dove into building tools for audience development. It pivoted its focus to serving the reader. That's fine. but slow iteration for your primary customer, the creator, is just not great business, end quote.

Starting point is 00:15:01 Next, we've mentioned Jason Collar a couple times, the dude who is behind the whole HBO Max Hollywood Shake Up. He shook up Hollywood before with the launch of Hulu, and Business Insider has a nice profile of Collar up that continues to paint a picture of a sort of clash of cultures and philosophies, quote, Jason Collar is eight months into his new job running Warner Media, and he's already replicated a decades-old playbook from his days at Hulu, leading some insiders to wonder if he has what it takes to run a complex $34 billion business. That playbook might be best described as burning down the house so that the consumer can get access to as much premium content for free.

Starting point is 00:15:42 After all, West Coast tech titans have often used the content wants to be free or cheap mantra to dismantle media's established business models. But at WarnerMedia itself, Kalar's tech routes, have also been met with suspicion. Is he the change agent doing what old media needs to do to monetize, or just a product guy who doesn't care about the substance? End quote. I continue to be unable to get my hands on a PlayStation 5. Anyone out there that can help, please get in touch. Maybe the problem is this. The Washington Post looks at the so-called Grinch bots that snipe hot consumer products as soon as they become available so that mere mortals like my

Starting point is 00:16:23 don't stand a chance. Quote, Ted Brack, 47, chases down new PlayStation's in front of two computer monitors in Las Vegas with very different results. Brack has bought eight of the consoles so far from the online retailers, including Walmart, selling them for as much as $1,000 on eBay. His secret weapon, bots, or software that helps him know when products are in stock and can hammer retailers with orders faster than any regular customer could hope to on their own, end quote.

Starting point is 00:16:53 Our tech history lesson for this week is Alta Vista, which 25 years ago was the most popular search engine in the world. It was the Google of its day, arguably the best and most loved brand on the web. But then Google did Google. Quote, a quarter century ago, one of the first major search engines came to life on the internet as an experiment of sorts, a public test of a server manufacturer's primary product that anyone with a web connection could take a part in. The experiment for a time proved more successful than anyone could have ever imagined, but the problem was it was an experiment at heart that was never intended to be a business, and that meant better suited companies would eventually topple this innovation, end quote.

Starting point is 00:17:38 Finally, as Bitcoin crosses the $23,000 mark, I think, overnight, a fun little story that a lot of tech journalists have in common, it turns out. Back in 2013, Cashmere Hill bought some Bitcoins so she could do a story on the whole phenomenon. And the angle she wanted for the story was to see where and how she could use Bitcoin to buy something with. She bought a bunch of Bitcoins for about $136 apiece. She then found a sushi place in San Francisco that would take them as payment. And so she bought meals for everyone in the restaurant, a thousand dollars or so worth a Bitcoin at the time. Basically, she emptied her Bitcoin wallet. And today, that sushi splurge, would be worth north of $200,000, quote.

Starting point is 00:18:26 Fast forward to 2020, this month with Bitcoin surging, I called Young Chen, owner of the restaurant, to check in. He and his wife had retired from the restaurant business a few years back, tired of the long hours, he said, and they were able to do so thanks in part to their cryptocurrency earnings of about 41 Bitcoin in total. In 2017, after they shut down Saki Zone, and when Bitcoin was worth a few thousand dollars, Mr. Chen sold about a quarter of his Bitcoin. He now regrets that decision given how much the digital money has appreciated. Quote, I sold some. I feel so bad, he said. Now, I just keep it. I just put it

Starting point is 00:19:03 there like stock and weight. The Bitcoin has become one of the major saving assets in my portfolio, he added. It's a lot. It's close to like half a million dollars in my account, end quote. That's all for today and for this week. No weekend bonus episodes this weekend. Actually, We shouldn't have another bonus episode until the new year, I think. But quick note that according to our pod host, this is our 800th episode. So congrats to us, I guess. In honor of the milestone, here's a little treat for you. Link to the YouTube of what you're about to hear in the final link of the show notes.

Starting point is 00:19:50 Our customers have made Apple AirPods the most popular headphones in the world. And we here at Apple are now returning that love by taking our AirPods. To the Max! With the new AirPods Max. They're the AirPods you love, but maximal. Just try fitting these in your ears. Hot shot. You can't.

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Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/18 – Chinese Drone Maker DJI Blacklisted By The US

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