Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 05/10 – No PlayStation For Me Until 2023?

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Sony warns that it might be literal years before I can finally win one of those PlayStation 5 sales windows on Walmart.com. The big ransomware attack that threatened fuel supply on the US East Coast, and the hackers allegedly behind it. Clubhouse hits Android. A researcher claims to have already hacked AirTags. And Elon Musk’s SNL appearance, and Dogecoin, and everything. Sponsors: Netgear.com/bestwifi Promocode: Tech10 Cybereason.com Links: Sony warns tight Playstation 5 supply to extend into next year (Bloomberg) Colonial hackers stole data Thursday ahead of pipeline shutdown (Bloomberg) Here’s the hacking group responsible for the Colonial Pipeline shutdown (CNBC) Clubhouse comes to Android after more than a year of iOS exclusivity (The Verge) AirTag hacked for the first time by security researcher [Video] (9to5 Mac) Apple's 2023 iPhone could ditch Qualcomm and launch with its own 5G chip (Laptop Mag) Apple Awards iPhone Glass Supplier Corning Additional $45M From Advanced Manufacturing Fund (Mac Rumors) Tesla privately admits Elon Musk has been exaggerating about ‘full self-driving’ (The Verge) SNL was a good night for Elon Musk — and a bad one for Dogecoin (Protocol) 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 Monday, May 10th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Sony warns that it might be literally years before I can finally win one of those PlayStation 5 sales windows on Walmart.com. The big ransomware attack that is threatening the fuel supply on the U.S. East Coast and the hackers allegedly behind it.

Clubhouse hits Android, a researcher claims to have already hacked air tags, and Elon Musk's SNL appearance and the dogecoin, Price Rollercoaster, and everything. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Look, if like me you've been looking to get your hands on a PlayStation 5, I don't know what to tell you. Sony has had to warn that the PlayStation 5 might remain in short supply all the way into the year 2023. Sony cited several challenges despite a supply boost recently, and they said they only have a goal of selling 14.8 million units this fiscal year, calling it a goal. suggests to me that even that number might not be achievable, quoting Bloomberg. I don't think demand is calming down this year, and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply won't be able to catch up with demand.

Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki said at the briefing, according to several people who attended and asked not to be named as it wasn't public. Totoki told analysts that Sony needs to ramp up production as soon as possible and make sure there are consoles on store shelves. Demand will remain high, regardless of the COVID-19 situation. The CFO assured an analyst wary about Sony's ability to fully capitalize on the stay-at-home entertainment surge triggered by lockdowns and emergency orders. We have sold more than 100 million units of the PlayStation 4, and considering our market share and reputation, I can't imagine demand dropping easily, he said. Still, the company's latest earnings report suggests that stay-at-home

demand is leveling off. Sony said monthly active users on PlayStation Network fell to 109 million at the end of the January March period from 114 million a quarter earlier, and sales of full games also declined in the period from a year earlier, end quote. So I understand that everybody is facing supply chain issues, even automakers, but could the PlayStation 5 go down as one of the worst product rollouts of all time? Not in terms of course. quality or eventual success, but in terms of missing your window, the COVID times perfect storm that Nintendo recently rode to record earnings and revenue is going away. So Sony has maybe missed a golden opportunity to more fully embed the PlayStation into people's homes and routines. Sony shares

are down recently, I think, reflecting this realization that the window is closing. I'm old enough to remember when it took months for Nintendo's Wii to get in stock. and I almost actually tried to buy one when I was in Vienna, Austria, because you couldn't get them anywhere in the States that summer, but that was because the product was an unexpected success, and the supply issues were ironed out, if I remember correctly, by the fall. So imagine how different this is. Imagine if it took three years for you to be able to get your hands on a flagship phone, for example.

How could it be that we could go almost half an entire console life cycle before most people, can get their hands on and start experiencing it. Over the weekend, you might have heard, we had our highest profile industrial hack incident yet. And if the Wall Street Journal headline notification that I just got is any indication, it's only getting started. Colonial Pipeline, which carries 45% of the fuel consumed by the entire U.S. East Coast, said it was forced to halt operations due to a ransomware attack. According to sources, cybercrime gang Darkside is allegedly responsible.

They allegedly stole and encrypted 100 gigabytes of data on Thursday before demanding a ransom from Colonial Pipeline, quoting Bloomberg. The move was part of a double extortion scheme that is one of the group's hallmarks. Colonial was threatened that the stolen data would be leaked to the internet while the information that was encrypted by the hackers on computers inside the network would remain locked unless it paid a ransom, said the people. people who asked not to be identified because the information isn't public. The company didn't immediately respond to request to comment on the investigation. It said earlier that it, quote, proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations and affected some of our IT systems, end quote. Colonial's decision late Friday to shut down a pipeline that is the main source of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel for the East

Coast without saying when it would reopen represents a dangerous new escalation in the fight against ransomware, which President Joe Biden's administration has identified as a priority, end quote. Yeah, you think? Darkside, meanwhile, wants people to know, get this. Its goal is making money, not causing problems. And so it will add some moderation to pick its next targets. Let me say this before what I'm about to quote, yes, I'm going to name check cyber reason, which yes, you've heard has been a heavy sponsor of this podcast this past month. But this is just Now the cookie is crumbled today. I'm quoting Cyber Reason, not because they're a sponsor, but because they're making the news, quoting CNBC. According to Boston-based Cyber Reason,

Darkside is an organized group of hackers set up along the ransomware as a service business model, meaning the Darkside hackers develop and market ransomware hacking tools and then sell them to other criminals who then carry out attacks. Think of it as the evil twin of a Silicon Valley software startup. On Monday, Cyber Reason provided CNBC with a new statement from, Darkside's website that appears to address the colonial pipeline shutdown. Under a heading about the latest news, Darkside claimed it's not political and only wants to make money without causing problems for society. Quote, we are apolitical. We do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government, and look for our motives, the statement said. Our goal is to make money and not

creating problems for society. From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future, end quote. Cyber Reason reports that Darkside has a perverse desire to appear ethical, even posting its own code of conduct for its customers, telling them who and what targets are acceptable to attack. Protected organizations not to be harmed include hospitals, hospices, schools, universities, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. Also apparently protected are entities based in the former Soviet Union countries. Fair game then are all for-profit companies in English-speaking countries. Darkside also maintains that it will donate a portion of its profits to charities,

although some of the charities have turned down the contributions. Quote, no matter how bad you think our work is, we are pleased to know that we helped change someone's life. The hackers wrote, Today we send it, their spelling, the first donations, end quote. Well, that's nice of them. Clubhouse has finally launched in beta on Android. but only in the U.S. for now, and it will remain invite only for now, or at least the foreseeable future, quoting the Verge. The Android app, which the company says has been the top request from its community by far,

will roll out to other English-speaking markets and the rest of the world in the days and weeks ahead. The company said, users outside the U.S. will be able to pre-register for access via the clubhouse page in the Google Play Store to be notified when the Android app is available in their area. The company acknowledged in its post, announcing the Android app that the platform had grown faster than expected. Quote, this has had downsides, as the load stressed our systems, causing widespread server outages and notification failures, and surpassing the limits of our early discovery algorithms, the post said. It made us shift our focus to hiring, fixing, and company building rather than the community meetup and product features that we normally like to focus on, end quote. going to do a quick sort of Apple news omnibus segment here. First, a German security researcher claims he was able to break into the microcontroller of Apple's air tags,

allowing him to modify its NFC URL, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The German security researcher Stack Smashing tweeted today via the 8-bit that he was able to, quote, break into the microcontroller of the air tag and quote and modified elements of the item tracker software. With that, we can say that the air tag was jailbroken, and a hacker could decide what it wants the device to do. For example, the security researcher was able to modify its NFC URL in the video. He compares a regular air tag with a modified one. While the regular item tracker opens the Find My website, the modified item tracker opens a non-related URL which could be used for fishing or anything else. As for now, we have to wait and see if Apple will be able to implement a server-side blocking

mechanism to prevent a modified air tag from accessing the Find My Network, end quote. Next, Ming Chi Kuo tells us something we already knew. Apple is going to ditch Qualcomm eventually and put its own Apple designed 5G modems into iPhones. It's just Kuo now has what he thinks is a timeline in mind, quoting laptop mag. Analyst Ming Chi Kuo claims Apple is set to introduce its own 5G baseband chip to iPhone models as soon as 2023, leaving Qualcomm modems behind. This This backs up Barclays, analysts Blaine Curtis's, and Thomas O'Malley's prediction that the Apple design 5G modem will appear in 2023. Previous reports have already indicated Apple was designing its own 5G chip since 2020, and it even looked like the tech giant was trying to nab a few engineers from Qualcomm, end quote.

And finally, remember we speculated a while ago that Apple might someday bring every single component in-house for the iPhone to basically become completely self-reliant for everything that goes into iPhones. save maybe the glass. Well, speaking of, Apple has awarded $45 million from its advanced manufacturing fund to Corning, manufacturer of iPhone glass, bringing Apple's total investment in the precision glassmaker over the years to $495 million, quoting Mac rumors. Building on its $200 million award in 2017 and $250 million award in 2019, the combined $495 million investment will support Corning's ongoing research and development into, quote, state-of-the-art glass process. which led to the creation of ceramic shield, a new material that is tougher than any smartphone

glass, end quote. With support from Apple's advanced manufacturing fund, experts at both companies work together to develop a new glass ceramic, which gets its strength from nanosuramic crystals produced in Corning's plant in Herodsburg, Kentucky, the facility where every generation of iPhone glass has been made. Quoting Apple C.O. Jeff Williams, the new material was enabled by a high-temperature crystallization step, which forms nanocrystals within the glass matrix. Those specialized crystals are kept small enough that the material is transparent. The resulting material makes up the revolutionary ceramic shield, which Apple used to fashion the new front cover featured on iPhone in the iPhone 12 lineup. Prior to ceramic shield, embedded crystals have traditionally affected the material's

transparency a crucial factor in the front cover of iPhone because so many features, including the display of the camera and sensors for face ID need optical clarity to function, end quote. Established in 2017, Apple's Advanced Manufacturing Fund was designed, quote, to foster and support the innovative production and high-skilled jobs that will help fuel a new era of technology-driven manufacturing in the United States, according to Apple, end quote. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has officially ruled that Tesla is at level two in terms of autonomy after Tesla's head of autopilot had to admit that Elon Musk had been exaggerating about full self-driving capabilities for Tesla's, quoting the verge.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been overstating the capabilities of the company's advance or driver assist system, the company's director of autopilot software, told the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The comments came from a memo released by Legal Transparency Group PlainSight, which obtained the documents from a public records request. Elon's tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ. Tesla is at Level 2 currently. The California DMV said in the memo about its March 9th conversation call with Tesla representatives, including the director of autopilot software, CJ Moore.

Level 2 technology refers to a semi-automated driving system which requires supervision by a human driver. In an earnings call in January, Musk told investors that he was, quote, highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year, end quote. It would appear the DMV was referring to these January comments, which more misunderstood as a tweet from Musk. Tesla is unlikely to achieve level five autonomy in which its cars can drive themselves anywhere, under any conditions without any human supervision by the end of 2021, Tesla representatives told the DMV. Quoting the memo now, the ratio of driver interaction. would need to be in the magnitude of one or two million miles per driver interaction to move into

higher levels of automation. Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn't say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by the end of calendar year, end quote. And speaking of Elon, he was on Saturday Night Live this weekend as the host, as you might be aware, and his appearance sent Dogecoin on a roller coaster ride. Quoting Protocol. Saturday's SNL had been billed as something of a coronation for the cryptocurrency, with watch parties set up all over YouTube and plenty of people hoping the coin would hit the crucial $1 per coin mark.

But almost as soon as the show began, Dogecoin's price promptly collapsed, dropping nearly a third before recovering slightly. It was such an eventful night for the currency that Robin Hood couldn't even keep up. It all culminated with Musk joining the weekend update crew after repeatedly answering all those what is Dogecoin questions, eventually calling it a, quote, hustle. Musk was, by all accounts, a pretty good host. He led the show by saying he was the first ever SNL host with Asperger's. He made jokes at his own expense, talked about renewable energy and Mars without talking too much about renewable energy and Mars. He played an awkward doctor, an awkward party guest,

the Doge father, a cowboy inventor, and himself. But Musk as Wario, saying, I'm not evil, I'm just misunderstood, it's surely going to be the skit people remember, end quote. Yes, looking at the coin desk chart for Doge, it looks like it hit an all-time high of around 72 cents right before Musk took the stage, then crashed all the way down to 45 cents. As of the time of this writing, it is sitting right at 50 cents a coin. Not much for you really today, so talk to you tomorrow, except, actually, the Mitchells versus the machines is very good. on Netflix. Check it out. Good for the whole family. Okay, really. Now talk to you tomorrow.