Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/10 - The Race To Make The Cloud Redundant (For AI)

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

The DOJ says the Chinese were behind the Equifax hack, MWC is becoming a ghost conference, the Razr reviews are in, the Corp.com domain name is a weird story, and why ARM’s new edge chips could revolutionize the Internet of Things. Sponsors: Netgear.com/bestwifi Ashford.edu/ride Links: U.S. charges Chinese military hackers with massive Equifax breach (Politico) As top exhibitors pull out of MWC, organizers implement stringent safeguards (TechCrunch) Coronavirus: Sony and Amazon pull out of major tech show (BBC News) Motorola Razr review: It's the most personal phone I've used, but I have concerns (CNET) Motorola Razr review: A tragedy unfolds (Input Magazine) Netflix Spends Big for Oscars—Will Hollywood Give In? (WSJ) Dangerous Domain Corp.com Goes Up for Sale (KrebsonSecurity) ARM’s new edge AI chips promise IoT devices that won’t need the cloud (The Verge) 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 from Monday, February 10th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Department of Justice says the Chinese were behind the Equifax hack. Mobile World Congress is becoming a ghost conference. The Razor reviews are in. The corp.com domain name is a weird story. And why arms new edge chips could revolutionize the Internet of things. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Remember the huge Equifax hack? More than 150 million Americans, half of the country. had their personal information compromised. Well, today, the U.S. Department of Justice charged four Chinese intelligence officers with allegedly hacking Equifax back in 2017, quoting Politico.

Officials said the massive hack by the members of China's People's Liberation Army underscored Beijing's aggressive pattern of stealing private data to improve its intelligence operations and boosts the performance of its domestic companies. For years, we have witnessed China's voracious appetite for the personal data of Americans, Attorney General William Barr said at a press conference. This data has economic value, and these thefts can feed China's development of artificial intelligence tools, as well as the creation of intelligence targeting packages, end quote. A grand jury in Atlanta returned a nine-count indictment against People's Liberation Army operatives Wu Xiyong, Wang King, Zuki, and Liu Li on January.

28th, charging them with wire fraud, economic espionage, conspiracy to commit computer fraud, and other offenses. FBI director David Boutich described the Equifax breach as, quote, the largest theft of sensitive personal identifying information by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded, end quote. This follows a pattern because recently the government has pointed fingers at Chinese hackers in the cases of the Office of Personnel Management Hack and the Health Insurance Company. anthem hack. Of course, given that these gentlemen involved are probably members of the PLA, it is unlikely that U.S. officials will be able to apprehend the alleged hackers anytime soon. We should probably do a coronavirus slash mobile world Congress update. Mobile World Congress has banned visitors from attending if they come from China's who buy province and will require those who do attend who have been to China recently.

to prove that they were outside the country for at least 14 days before attending the event. In a press release, the GSM, which runs the event, says that temperature screening will be implemented at the event. There will be a general no-handshake policy, and attendees will need to personally attest that they have not been in contact with anyone known to be infected with the coronavirus, quoting TechCrunch. The GSM is clearly interested in addressing and concerns over the virus while limiting further attendee or exhibitor erosion. The release quotes Catalan health minister Alba Verges, who notes, quote, the Catalan health system is prepared to detect and treat coronavirus to give the most appropriate response,

and this must be clear to those attending MWC, Barcelona, end quote. Yeah, at this point, the number of exhibitors who have pulled out of the event include ZTE, LG, Invidia, Erickson, Sony, and Amazon. Which, I mean, who's left at this point? I guess the smaller companies? Quoting the BBC News. The GSM, which organizes the show in the Spanish city, said that while it could, quote, confirm some large exhibitors have decided not to come to the show this year.

With others still contemplating next steps, we remain more than 2,800 exhibitors strong, end quote. However, it revealed that it had put in place additional measures to, quote, reassure attendees and exhibitors that their health and safety are our paramount concern, end quote. Once again, I put something out into the universe, and the universe responded almost immediately. Motorola Razor reviews were unembarked this morning, and the early reviews are fairly mixed. Patrick Holland at CNET says the new foldable phone is the most personal phone he's ever used,

but it has some issues. He says the screen is good. he didn't detect any crease or bumps or lumps in his usage over the last week or so. The battery and the camera are just adequate. And as for the actual form factor, when closed up, quote, the outer screen on the razor is small but is more thoughtfully implemented. It doesn't try to do too much and instead provides a minimal way to interact with notifications, controls, and responses without having to open your phone, end quote.

His conclusion, quote, Motorola took a mid-tier phone. and turned it into a clamshell filled with nostalgia, end quote. Josh Topolsky at Input magazine was more scathing, saying, quote, a tragedy unfolds. He bagged on the middling performance, mediocre camera, all coming with what he called a crazy price tag and no real justification for the design beyond again nostalgia. The more I used the razor, the more I wondered what the point was of its core folding

functionality. Where was the phone's ability to fold down into this half-size demonstrating the value of the concept? Unsurprisingly, I came up with few answers that actually justified the idea of a folding phone of this type. The prevailing reason I could see for having a phone that folds in half in this way is that it makes the phone smaller and easier to carry. That's nice, but a somewhat inessential problem for most people. Furthermore, the folding nature of the device and difficulty of opening it quickly and with a single hand made some things I normally do with my phone more difficult. To quickly reply to a message took more time. Glancing at Twitter became a two-handed affair. Taking a picture of something besides my own face couldn't be done single-handedly, end quote.

He concluded by saying this. It's cool. I like it. But it's not a very good phone. Just an okay one. And the fold doesn't make up for its shortcomings as much as I'd like to say it does. Maybe someday some company will figure out how to make this form factor into something greater than its slab brethren, but today is not that day. If you don't really care how your phone performs and don't need to take great pictures and really want to wow people with a parlor trick, Motorola has made the perfect phone for you. For everyone else, move on, end quote. By the way, if that doesn't entice you, Motorola this morning confirmed a gold-colored razor is coming this spring. I've got a tech angle for you from last night's Oscars. Netflix movies won only two Oscars last night despite getting 24 nominations.

The two wins were for Laura Dern for Best Supporting Actress and won for Best Documentary Feature. That Meager Hall came despite a super aggressive Oscar campaign on Netflix's behalf, spending more than $100 million mainly to promote two of its films, the Irishman and marriage story. Most studios usually spend around $5 to $20 million campaigning for a specific film. Obviously, earning a reputation as an awards-winning juggernaut could only help Netflix attract talent, something that it is very eager to do. Sort of how in the late 90s and early 2000s Miramax was where you went to make your film

if you wanted to win awards because they had a well-oiled machine to make that happen. Netflix even hired Lisa Tabak, who was a key player in the glory years of Miramax. Netflix bought her awards consulting company in 2017 and reportedly pays her a seven-figure annual salary. I found this particular detail about Netflix's campaign this year. Interesting, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The novel economics of subscription streaming means Netflix can justify spending more on awards and consider it part of the overall marketing effort for a movie that will live on its service. indefinitely. For a traditional movie studio, awards campaigning is usually an extra cost on top of

advertising for a movie's theatrical run, which is often over by the time award season rolls around, end quote. So, just like Netflix can produce movies and not worry about box office receipts, their accounting rules also allow them to amortize costs in a way that traditional movie studios cannot. This is a weird one. The domain name corp.com, C.com, C. is currently up for sale with an asking price of $1.7 million. The domain has been held for years by early domain name investor Mike O'Connor, who in 1994 bought the corp.com domain, along with the likes of bar.com, cafes.com, television.com, among a lot of others.

But O'Connor's decision to unload corp.com now is making people nervous because testing shows that whoever owns the domain could gain access to the proprietary data of companies who have adopted the default corp active directory path. O'Connor says he hopes Microsoft will snatch it up, but fears criminals might instead, quoting Krebs on security. Windows computers on an internal corporate network validate other things on that network using a Microsoft innovation called Active Directory, which is the umbrella term for a broad range of identity-related services in Windows environments.

A core part of the way these things find each other involves a Windows feature called DNS name devolution, which is a kind of network shorthand that makes it easier to find other computers or servers without having to specify a full legitimate domain name for those resources. For instance, if a company runs an internal network with the name, internal network. Dot example.com, and an employee on that network wishes to access a shared drive called Drive1, there's no need to type Drive1. Dot internal network. That example.com into Windows Explorer.

Typing forward slash, forward slash drive one alone will suffice, and Windows takes care of the rest. But things can get far trickier with an internal Windows domain that does not map back to a second-level domain the organization actually owns and controls. And unfortunately, in early versions of Windows that supported Active Directory, Windows 2000 server, for example, the default or example Active Directory path was given as Corp. And many companies apparently adopted this setting without modifying it to include a domain they controlled. Compounding things further, some companies then went on to build and or assimilate vast networks of networks on top of this erroneous setting.

Now, none of this was much of a security concern back in the day when it was impractical for employees to lug their bulky desktop computers and monitors outside the corporate network. But what happens when an employee working at a company with an active directory network path called Corp takes a company laptop to the local Starbucks? Chances are good that at least some resources on the employee's laptop will still try to access that internal corp domain. And because of the way DNS name Devolution works on Windows,

that company laptop online via the Starbucks wireless connection is likely to then seek those same resources at corp.com. In practical terms, this means that whoever controls corp.com can passively intercept private communications from hundreds of thousands of computers that end up being taken outside of a corporate environment which uses this corp designation for its active directory domain, end quote. Back in 2019, a security researcher found more than 375,000 Windows PCs were trying to send the Corp domain information in just one small window of testing. The data sent included 12 million emails. Researchers estimate that whomever controls corp.com would have instant access to computers

at about 30 of the world's largest companies. Apparently, Microsoft offered to buy the domain a few years ago for $20,000, which would be way below market value for a four-letter domain name of a well-known sort of word, when asked why he doesn't just give it to Microsoft to be a good citizen. O'Connor says this, quote, "'It seemed to me that Microsoft should stand up and shoulder the burden of the mistake they made,' he said. But they've shown no real interest in doing that, and so I've shown no interest in giving it to them. I don't really need the money.

I'm basically auctioning off a chemical waste dump because I don't want to pass it on to my kids and burden them with it. My frustration here is that the good guys don't care and the bad guys probably don't know about it. But I expect the bad guys would like it,' end quote. Finally today, the Verge takes a look at Arm's new AI chips that promise a future where smart devices won't need servers in the cloud in order to enable AI. Remember that Apple just bought a company that specializes in doing Edge AI stuff like this? Google's Coral Initiative is all about making Edge AI work easier, and now Arm has two new chips, the Arm Cortex M55 and the Ethos U55. They're supposed to work in conjunction for more debilers. demanding AI cases, quoting Hyam Gartenberg at the verge.

What makes Arm's new chip designs particularly interesting is that they're not really meant for phones and tablets. Instead, Arm intends for the chips to be used to develop new Internet of Things devices, bringing AI processing to more devices that otherwise wouldn't have those capabilities. One use case arm imagines is a 360-degree camera in a walking stick that can identify obstacles or new train sensors that can locally identify problems and avoid delays. As for the specifics, the Arm Cortex M-55 is the latest model in Arms Cortex M line of processors, which the company says offers up to a 15x improvement in machine learning performance and a 5x improvement in digital signal processing performance compared to previous Cortex M generations.

For truly demanding edge AI tasks, the Cortex M-55 or older Cortex M processors, can be combined with the Ethos U55 NPU, which takes things a step further. It can offer another 32x improvement in machine learning processing compared to those base cortex M55 for a total of 480x better processing than previous generations of Cortex chips. While those are impressive numbers, Arm says that the improvement in data thoroughput here will make a big difference in what Edge AI platforms can do. Current CortexM platforms can handle basic tasks like keyword or vibration detection. The M55's improvement let it work with more advanced.

things like object recognition and the full power of a cortex M chip combined with the ethos U55 promises even more functionality with the potential for local gesture and even speech recognition, end quote. These new chips are expected to arrive by 2021 at the earliest, and I wanted to do this segment because there have been a whole bunch of scare stories recently that I've passed on telling you about where people are imagining the scary security future where everything is connected and thus everything is hackable to say nothing of the soft intrusion of companies harvesting your data for various purposes. So frankly, any processing that can be done on device maybe mitigates that dark future to one degree or another. It's funny. The cloud is clearly the future of computing, but there seems to be this parallel arms race to render the cloud as redundant as it can possibly be made.

Not that anyone asked, of course, but my wife and I watched Parasite just this past Friday. And I have to say, I haven't had a movie stick in my head this much since I first watched Ex Machina. I also enjoyed once upon a time in Hollywood, too, and given my history biases, I'm sure I'll absolutely love 1917 whenever I get a chance to see that. Quick programming note about tomorrow's episode, Samsung's event tomorrow doesn't get started until 2 p. Eastern Time. That's usually around when I like to start recording. So given that the event itself might not even be done until four, tomorrow is one of those days when I might be either a bit late getting the show out or maybe as much as an hour late or more. I'll do my best, but, you know, it does take time to actually watch the event, digest it, and write it all up. So all I can tell you

is I'll post as soon as I can post. Talk to you tomorrow.