Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 05/02 – EU Says Apple’s NFC Chips Don’t Play Well With Others

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

The expected EU hammer is coming down on Apple. Yuga Labs’ latest project didn’t bring down Ethereum, but made it hella expensive. Bots DID bring down Solana. Again. A new book looks at why Jony Ive left Apple. And what the heck is going on with Google and it’s AI researchers? Sponsors: Traceroute Podcast (Origins.dev for more info) Links: Apple charged by Brussels with abusing its market power in mobile payments (Financial Times) Bored Ape Metaverse Frenzy Raises Millions, Crashes Ethereum (Bloomberg) Bored Ape Yacht Club creator’s metaverse mint rocks the Ethereum blockchain (The Verge) Solana Goes Dark for 7 Hours as Bots Swarm ‘Candy Machine’ NFT Minting Tool (CoinDesk) Grindr User Data Has Been for Sale for Years (WSJ) How Technocrats Triumphed at Apple (NYTimes) Another Firing Among Google’s A.I. Brain Trust, and More Discord (NYTimes) 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 Techmeme ride home for Monday, May 2nd, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the expected EU Hammer is indeed coming down on Apple. Yuga Labs' latest project didn't exactly bring down Ethereum but made it hell of expensive. Bots did bring down Salana again. A new book looks at

why Johnny I've left Apple and what the heck is going on with Google and its AI researchers. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, here it is. in what is called a preliminary view, the European Union says Apple has abused its dominance in mobile payments by limiting competitors' access to the NFC chips inside of iPhones, quoting the Financial Times. Antitrust investigators are concerned that the U.S. Tech Group is preventing competitors from accessing tap and go chips or near-field communication, also known as NFC, chips to benefit its own Apple Pay system, the European Commission said in a statement on Monday. May. Margath Vestager, the EU's Executive Vice President in charge of competition policy, said Brussels had, quote,

indications that Apple restricted third-party access to key technology necessary to develop rival mobile wallet solutions on Apple's devices, end quote. She added that the commission had, quote, preliminarily found that Apple may have restricted competition to the benefit of its own solution Apple pay, end quote. If confirmed, such a conduct would be illegal under our competition rules, Vestager said, the company could face fines worth up to 10% of global turnover if the charges are upheld. The EU charge is the latest in a number of antitrust investigations open against the tech giant in Brussels. Apple is also facing scrutiny over the way it may be disadvantaging rivals on the App Store by taking 30% of some subscription fees while denying some services the option of telling users there are other ways of upgrading. This case was opened after a music streaming service Spotify complained to the commission more than two years ago.

The fresh charges come after Brussels approved two landmark pieces of legislation, including the Digital Markets Act aimed at curbing the power of big tech groups. In its preliminary findings in the latest case, Brussels said it considered that Apple, quote, enjoys significant market power in the market for smart mobile devices and a dominant position on mobile wallet markets, end quote. The findings of the investigation added Apple Pay is the only mobile wallet solution that may access the necessary NFC input on iOS. Apple does not make it available to third-party app developers of mobile wallets. The NFC tap-and-go technology is embedded on Apple mobile devices for payments in stores. Apple responded, We designed Apple Pay to provide an easy and secure way for users to digitally present their existing payment cards and for banks and other financial institutions to offer contactless payments for their customers.

Apple Pay is only one of many options available to European consumers for making payments and has ensured equal access to NFC while setting industry-leading standards for privacy. and security, end quote. Yuga Labs raised around $320 million over the weekend by selling 55,000 virtual land plots in its other side metaverse, which caused a great deal of Ethereum blockchain ripple effects, including skyrocketing gas fees, quoting Bloomberg. Holders of the ape coin token who verified their identities jockeyed to buy deeds for 55,000 parcels of virtual land in other side. The project's planned Metaverse game and the latest extension of the board ape franchise. Anticipation that interest would be strong for the plots,

Ethereum-based NFTs called other deeds, had pushed up the price of ape coin last week ahead of the sale. Each plot cost a buyer around $5,800 based on ape coin's price of $19 as of Saturday, plus transaction costs or gas fees in ether, which skyrocketed after the sale went live at 9 p.m. New York time as the land grab attracted heavy demand. Transaction costs just to mint other deed NFTs after the launch reached $123 million, with each other deed requiring about $6,000 or two ether in transaction fees to mint, according to data from Ether scan, or more than the price of the deed itself. Uglab's virtual land sale has triggered one of the highest spikes in transaction fees on Ethereum, said Jason Wu founder of Decentralized Lending Protocol Definer. I have seen

other NFT launches causing high gas fees, but this one is definitely one of the highest, end quote. Yuga Labs initially planned for the sale to be held in a Dutch auction format, in which the price of the other deed NFT would go down over time to prevent Ethereum from being congested with high transaction fees. However, it later scratched that format and went with another plan to cap the number of other deeds that could be purchased per wallet in each wave of the sale. The new plan failed to ease the anticipated congestion. Ugo Labs apologized on Twitter for, quote, turning off the light on Ethereum and suggested the possibility of establishing an ape coin blockchain, end quote, and quoting the verge. Such a large volume of transactions during the other deed mint

caused gas fees to soar, as noted by Coin Telegraph, Reddit user U underscore John FinTech, pointed out that some buyers shelled out anywhere from $2.6Eth or $6,500 to $5.Eth, $14,000 in gas fees alone, more than the cost of an other deed NFT, and in some cases, more than $2.5.00, and in some cases, more than twice the cost. By the time the virtual land deeds sold out, buyers paid a total of about $123 million just to execute their transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Yuga Labs issued an apology on Twitter shortly after the Mint ended. We're sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while, Yuga Labs said. It seems abundantly clear that Apecoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We'd like to encourage the Dow to start thinking in this direction, end quote.

The ape coin Dow, the entity responsible for making decisions within the ape coin community, exists separately from Yuga Labs. The Dow's decisions are carried out by the ape foundations board consisting of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Anamoka co-founder Yatsu, and others. The disruption slowed transactions on Ethereum-linked services like Uniswap and caused the Ethereum transaction tracker EtherScan to crash. A number of users also reported losing thousands of dollars to gas fees in failed transactions. Ugal Labs promised to reimburse users for the gas fees associated with failed transactions,

but it's unclear what the refund process will look like. The Verge reached out to Ugo Labs with a request for comment but didn't hear immediately back, end quote. Related, but not directly related, because, you know, different chains. Solana's network suffered another outage on Saturday, lasting a total of seven hours when NFT mining tool, Candy Machine, was hit with bots, a bot attack leading to around 4 million requests per second on chain, quoting CoinDesk. Bots had swarmed the popular NFT minting tool known as Candy Machine earlier Saturday with an unprecedented tsunami of inbound traffic, four million transaction requests, and 100 gigabits of data every second. A record for the network,

one source at the Salana Foundation said. For reasons not yet clear, this swarm pushed validators out of consensus. Block production became impossible, and the network went dark at 4.32 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. By 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time validators, coordinating through Solana's Discord channels and a Google Doc, created by one of the validators, restarted the cluster at slot, well, a bunch of numbers. Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who said he was traveling during much of the fracas credited the validator community for spearheading main net recovery. He'd caught flack on Twitter Saturday for allegedly being MIA during a network crisis. Unlike last September's 17-hour outage, Saturday,

Saturday's hard fork restart did not resolve with new and improved code populating across the validators. They simply picked up where the network flopped seven hours prior. In preparing for the restart, validators mold whether to implement code that would temporarily block candy machine transactions. Some debated in the Discord whether such a move constituted censorship. Regardless, it would only be effective if two-thirds of validators opted in. Few appeared to do so on Saturday night, end quote. Remember, Salana's whole selling point has always been to be a more efficient, more stable blockchain that can process more transactions per second than Ethereum and others can, except, you know, Solana keeps crashing under periods of heavy load. So sources are telling the Wall Street

Journal that location data from millions of Grindr users were collected from a digital ad network and sold since at least 2017. Grindr says it is cut the data flow. to this ad network. The commercial availability of the personal information, which hasn't been previously reported, illustrates the thriving market for at-time's intimate details about users that can be harvested from mobile devices. A U.S. Catholic official last year was added as a grinder user in a high-profile incident that involved analysis of similar data.

National security officials have also indicated concern about the issue. The grinder data were used as part of a demonstration for various U.S. government agencies about the intelligence risks from commercially available information according to a person who was involved in the presentation. Clients of a mobile advertising company have for years been able to purchase bulk phone movement data that included many grinder users, said people familiar with the matter. The data didn't contain personal information such as names or phone numbers, but the grinder data were in some cases detailed enough to infer things like romantic encounters between specific users based on their devices proximity to one another, as well as

identify clues to people's identities, such as their workplaces and home addresses based on their patterns, habits, and routines people familiar with the data said. Since early 2020, Grindr has shared less information with ad partners than any of the big tech platforms and most of our competitors, a spokesman for Grindr said in a statement, he said the company pays a price for reducing the data shared, including lesser ad quality for users and lower revenue. The spokesman added, quote, the activities that have been described would not be possible with Grindr's current privacy practices, which we've had in place for two years, end quote. Since we did a book recommendation or two recently, I wanted to hip you to a new book that's coming out tomorrow. It's called

After Steve, how Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost its soul by Tripp Mickle. One excerpt from this book came in the New York Times this weekend, and it basically outlined what it says were the reasons why Johnny Ive stepped down from his role at Apple. I'm going to give you a couple quick quotes. First, the moment the book says Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs became simple. Patico, quote. Mr. Jobs asked Mr. Ive to design what Mr. Jobs believed could be a hit that Apple needed at the time, a network computer focused on connecting to the internet. Mr. Ive pulled together the entire design team to work on the project and prodded the group to fulfill Mr. Jobs' request to make a computer that was joyful. They coalesced around the idea that it needed to be like

the Jetsons TV cartoon futuristic but familiar. The resulting IMAC featured a handle that Mr. I've thought would make it more approachable. It came in a brilliant blue-green shade inspired by the waters of Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where one of the designers served. Its translucent shell cost three times as much as a standard case, but Mr. Jobs supported the expense because it was essential to the design, and he planned to sell customers on how revolutionary it looked. As Apple prepared to unveil the IMAC in early May 1998, Mr. Jobs found what he considered a fatal flaw in its components. He expected the computer to feature a slot for a CD and instead. instead found it featured a tray. He was irate and threatened to cancel its introduction,

according to employees present. After Mr. Jobs finished cursing out his staff, Mr. Ive found his boss backstage. The designer sought to calm him down. You're thinking of the next IMAQ, Mr. I've said. Mr. Jobs took a breath. The anger began to leave his face. I got it, he said, I got it. The two men walked away together with the CEO's arm draped over the designer's shoulder. From then on, when Johnny was in the room, it was a relief for Steve, said Wayne Goodrich, Mr. Jobs' long-time executive producer, end quote. Then this next quote comes around the fallout when Ive decides he's going to leave. Ive was reportedly deep in mourning for years after Jobs' death. He threw himself into the design of the Apple Watch, and he was reportedly disillusioned by the fact that Apple pivoted the watch

from being marketed as a fashion-first accessory to being marketed primarily as a fitness gadget. Ive was allowed to step back from day-to-day operations for a time, stopped commuting into the Apple offices every day. And this is the description of the meeting where I've announced to his design team that he would leave a formal role in the company. Quote, Few knew the full extent of Mr. Ives' battles. Few were aware of his clash with Apple's finance team. Few understood how draining he found it to fight over marketing the watch, a product that had increased sales over time and became core to the company's $38 billion wearables business. Yet many could recognize the tediousness of annually updating the company's

iPhones, iPads, and Macs, end quote. Look, I stand second to no one in my respect for Johnny Ive and his talent and his vision. I believe he did as much as Steve Jobs did to save Apple, to make Apple what it is today. But, and even though people get mad at me for saying this, This discussion on Twitter kind of sums up how I feel about Ives' eventual departure. From Kieran Healy on Twitter, quote, Ive seems to have become almost a maligned force at Apple without jobs to counterbalance him. He lacked interest in how products are used, preferred sheer purity of form. Jobs liked purity, but he also wanted to make things people would love to use.

Post jobs, Apple made several bad product decisions, especially with Macs. Some were amplified by cook-like bean counting as they reuse components, etc. But what made the decisions bad was the way they expressed Ives' obsession with form and a total lack of interest in users, in people, end quote. Finally today, this is another story that I've been sort of sleeping on because I figured at first it was a one-off. I thought there were maybe just personality conflicts or politics involved or something. But no, there seems to be something much deeper going on here.

Google has confirmed it is fired yet another of its AI researchers. This time, it's a researcher by the name of Satraget Chatterjee. Sources say he was fired after Google declined to publish his paper rebutting a celebrated nature paper. Quoting the New York Times. The researcher, Satraget Chatterjee, led a team of scientists in challenging the celebrated research paper, which appeared last year in the scientific journal Nature, and said computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and faster and better than human beings. Dr. Chatterjee, 43, was fired in March shortly after Google told his team that it would not publish a paper that rebutted some of the claims made in nature, said four people familiar with the situation who were not permitted to speak openly on the matter. Google confirmed in a written statement that Dr. Chatterjee had been terminated with cause. Google declined to elaborate about Dr. Chatterjee's dismissal, but it offered a full-throated defense of the research

he criticized and of its unwillingness to publish his assessment. We thoroughly vetted the original nature paper and stand by the peer-reviewed results. Jubing Gamarami, a vice president at Google Research said in a written statement, we also rigorously investigated the technical claims of a subsequent submission, and it did not meet our standards for publication, end quote. But this was the graph from later in the piece that made me curious about what the deeper story actually is here, quote. The recent dispute also follows a familiar pattern of dismissals and dueling claims of wrongdoing among Google's AI researchers, a growing concern for a company that has bet its future on infusing

artificial intelligence into everything it does. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet, has compared AI to the arrival of electricity or fire, calling it one of humankind's most important endeavors, end quote. So I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like Google is all in on AI, and some of the researchers that they've hired to go in on AI, all in, I mean, kind of don't think that Google's maximalist approach is right. Given the Temit Jibru firings and others, what if the bigger thing that is happening here is the broader debate slash civil war that all of society might soon have about AI and its place in society? What if that is happening right now inside of Google and something similar perhaps could be

coming for the rest of us in what, I don't know, five years or so? So this power, Weekends Twitter space, here's what happened. Chris usually records the spaces. I also try to record a backup just in case. Well, Chris's file unfortunately got corrupted, so I just uploaded my backup when I uploaded the show this weekend, and I hadn't listened back to it. But somehow, the gain and all the settings were all messed up on my end. I had been fiddling with the settings for my secondary mic, and I didn't realize how bad it sounded. Thankfully, listener Jason DiFilippo, fix the audio. And thanks to him, I want you to check out his podcast, the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. If you've never done so, that show has been going longer than just

about any other tech podcasts in existence. So you probably know about them, but if you weren't aware, there you go. Search Grumpy Old Geeks wherever you get your podcast. Anyway, if you listen to the first file on Saturday and gave up on the episode because it sounded bad, delete that file and download again because, again, it has been fixed. Jason saved it. If you wondered why you got two downloads of the bonus episode this weekend, that is why. Thank you, Jason. Talk to y'all tomorrow.