Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 07/08 - The Rise of the Professional Dungeon Master

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

Your driver’s license is already being used for facial recognition surveillance, VC investment in Chinese startups is plummeting, I have an answer to my question around cities paying ransom to hackers, and if this podcast thing goes away, I know my next hustle: professional dungeon master. Sponsors: Metalab.co Legacybox.com/ride Links: FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches (The Washington Post) Apple tests Face ID and Touch ID sign-in for iCloud․com on iOS 13 and macOS Catalina betas (9to5Mac) China's Venture Capital Boom Shows Signs of Turning Into a Bust (Bloomberg) This Chrome extension lets you disguise Netflix as a Hangout to slack off at work (The Verge) Aircraft lands itself truly autonomously for the first time (Engadget) A City Paid a Hefty Ransom to Hackers. But Its Pains Are Far From Over. (NYTimes) Now Some Families Are Hiring Coaches to Help Them Raise Phone-Free Children (NYTimes) The Rise of the Professional Dungeon Master (Bloomberg Businessweek) Subscribe to the ad-free feed! Right INSIDE your podcast app! 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 Monday, July 8th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, your driver's license is already being used for facial recognition surveillance. VC investment in Chinese startups is plummeting.

I have an answer to my question around cities paying ransom to hackers. And if this podcast thing goes away, I know my next hustle. Professional dungeon master. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, stop worrying about the... surveillance state panopticon enabled by tech that is blooming in China because it's already here in America, or I suppose continue worrying about surveillance state panopticons aided by tech anywhere they happen because it seems like they're basically going to be everywhere soon.

According to reporting in the Washington Post, both the FBI and ICE have access to 641 million photos of American people's faces already, which they can. use to do facial recognition searches on. This includes even driver's license photos from 21 states. Basically, if you think that facial recognition as a tool to surveil you is right around the corner, it's worth coming to terms with the fact that this technology is already here. In fact, quoting from the Washington Post, the records show the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are

often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local contact, the record show. Quote, it's really a surveillance first, asked permission later system, said Jake Leperquay, a senior council at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. Quoting again, people think this is something coming way off in the future, but these facial recognition searches are happening very frequently today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs, end quote. To be clear, you never gave permission for your photos to be used in this way. There are constitutional questions around whether your photo can be used in these searches, since you have never been charged with a crime, and then there are

the issues surrounding using these photos to track down illegal immigrants who are encouraged to get driver's licenses, but then could face deportation if their faces turn up in the searches. However, you come down on that debate, note that these are your photos, your faces, your family's faces, quoting again from the post piece, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the House Oversight Committee's ranking Republican, seemed particularly incensed during a hearing into the technology last month at the use of driver's license photos in federal facial recognition searches without the approval of state legislators or individual license holders. Quote, they've just given access to that to the FBI, he said. No individual signed off on that when they renewed their driver's license, got their

driver's licenses. They didn't sign any waiver saying, oh, it's okay to turn my information, my photo over to the FBI. No elected official voted for that to happen, end quote. Apple is reportedly testing face ID and touch ID sign-ins for iCloud.com. on iOS 13 and MacOS Catalina Betas. Quoting 9 to 5 Mac, when you visit ICloud and Safari on a device running the iOS, iPadOS, or MacOS betas, you'll see a new pop-up asking if you'd like to sign in using your Apple ID with biometrics. When you visit iCloud.com on a device running the betas,

you should automatically be redirected to beta.icloud.com. If you aren't, you can manually enter the URL in your address bar to try out this new feature. Either way, however, you must be running iOS 13, iPad OS 13, or MacOS Catalina to use the new sign-in feature. It also doesn't require two-factor confirmation. This is a pretty nifty new feature and is likely part of Apple's early efforts to test out sign-in with Apple. The company has previously said that it will make sign-in with Apple tools available to developers this summer ahead of the feature's public launch in September, end quote. about manufacturing, has the trade war put a cooler on the burgeoning Chinese startup scene. For the last five years, VC money has poured into China, enabling the growth of Chinese

startups like TikTok and financial, Pindu-Duo, etc. But now, according to Bloomberg VC investment in China, tumbled 77% year over year to $9.4 billion in Q2 of this year. While the number of deals was halved to 692. A year ago, the second quarter marked the peak of China's venture deal bonanza with a total of $41.3 billion invested. Quoting Bloomberg. China has never been through a widespread bust like the U.S. did after the dot-com boom, in part because the country's venture market is so new. Quote, we're seeing real stress in the system for the first time, said Gary Richel, a founding partner at Quimming Venture Partners who has worked in China and the U.S. Quote, we have never seen a downturn in the China market.

For 20 years, it's been pretty much up and to the right, end quote. But a couple of questions I have. First, what if this is just a cooling on a certain type of Chinese startup? In other words, what if this is cyclical? Quoting again, so-called sharing economy startups have also tested the patience of their investors. companies like DD, Maituan, and bike-sharing provider, OFO, blitz the market with heavy subsidies to grab market share from rivals, making up for their losses with venture money. Now there's skepticism that many such companies will ever turn a profit. Quote, you're really reaching the end of the shared economy.

This idea of let's give away services for free and make it up in volume, Rieschel says. Some companies, D.D. is the classic case, are just not showing any ability to become profitable, end quote. But my second question would be, how healthy is the local Chinese VC ecosystem? Like if foreign or Western VCs are gun-shy, to what degree can the Chinese startup ecosystem now just do it for itself? In other words, to what degree could Western pullback accelerate the trend of a Chinese tech scene, mostly or even wholly becoming independent of Silicon Valley? And Gadget has the story of the first aircraft that can, can land itself truly autonomously.

Wait, Brian, planes have been landing on autopilot for decades now. How is this new? Well, consider this, quote, many airliners can land automatically, but they don't really land autonomously. The airport is guiding them in with a radio signal, the instrument landing system. And when many smaller airports don't have this feature, it's not even an option. Researchers at Technis Universitat, Munchin might just make truly autonomous landing a practical reality, though.

They've successfully tested a system that uses a combination of computer vision and GPS to have the aircraft land itself. The technology uses GPS to navigate, but allies that with both visible light and infrared cameras to spot the runway and obtain an accurate sense of its position, even when fog or rain hurts visibility. From there, the aircraft can calculate a glide path and otherwise touchdown all on its own, end quote. The first test of this only happened in May, but with all of the talk recently of Robo Air Taxis,

something tells me this might be coming sooner than you think. From the news you can use file, Netflix Hangouts is a new Chrome extension that lets you disguise Netflix as a hangout session in order to make it easier to waste some time catching up on your latest bingeable obsession whilst at work. Quoting The Verge. just go to the show you want to catch up on during work hours and press the extensions icon in your Chrome menu to bring up a fake four-person conference call. Then you can sit back and watch the show in the window's bottom right feed while three fake colleagues get down to business. Depending on the show you're watching, you could just about get away with it as long as no one notices that your conference call consists of three strangers alongside the cast of Stranger Things, end quote. So the verge ends their write-up on this extension by cautioning you not to get fired by getting caught slacking off on the job,

but I'm more worried about marriages and relationships. This sort of tool makes it oh so tantalizing to break the sacred covenant of that show that you and your significant other committed to watching together. What? You finished season two of Fleabag without me? So I asked recently for some sort of follow-up on those hacker hijacking cases where data from municipalities is stolen and ransom for Bitcoin. I mostly wanted to know if paying the ransom actually worked if the city's got their data back after paying up. Well, the New York Times does follow up on the malware attack on Lake City, Florida, which paid around $460,000 to free up 16 terabytes of data, including more than 100 years' worth of municipal records.

The way the attack played out is the way you would expect. There were spearfishing emails and a smaller municipality without the resources for sophisticated IT systems, but also, and crucially, a city with a strong insurance policy. In the case of Lake City, quote, the city had fallen victim to what is called a triple threat, Riyuk attack, which is usually spread through spearfishing emails. The city does not know who clicked on what attachments and said it could not disclose some information because of a pending FBI investigation. Nearly all of the city's systems, including its water and gas payment systems, were unusable. The copy machines, also linked to the computer network, did not work.

There was no email. The phones were down. The searchable database that Ms. Sykes and her team had spent so long setting up, which allowed city workers and the public to look up everything from deeds to permits and city resolutions on any topic of interest was gone, end quote. And then, here's the key detail I have been waiting for. After the payment, the hackers provided a decryption key, and recovery efforts began in earnest. As it turned out, recovery would not be simple. Even with the decryption key, each terabyte has taken about 12 hours to recover.

Much of the city's data, nearly a month after the onset of the attack, has still not been unlocked. I thought it would be restored a lot sooner, Mr. Healthenberger said. My entire career, the most I lost data was maybe three days, end quote. Weeks after the city insurer paid the ransom, the phones are back on, and email is once again working, but the city still has not recovered all of its files. There is a possibility that thousands of pages of documents that had been painstakingly digitized by Ms. Sykes and her team will have to be manually scanned again, end quote. So, bottom line is, it does look like you get the data back from the hackers, but it's not a matter

of just throwing a switch and getting everything working again. And then the problem is, this is just the beginning. The hackers haven't quite sized up the market entirely yet. Like how much money is just enough to make it worthwhile for cities to pay up, I mean, have their insurance companies pay up to get the data back, and how much is too much so that the cities are just like, screw it, we'll rebuild everything from scratch. until that magic number is hit, expect these ransom numbers to slowly creep upwards.

Finally today, two stories that feel of a piece to me. First, the New York Times has a look at how some families are paying so-called screen time consultants, parenting coaches, that help wean their kids off of their devices. Quote, Gloria de Genteno was a private coach working in Seattle to wean families off screens when she noticed the demand was higher than she could handle on her own. She launched the Parent Coaching Institute, a network of 500 coaches and a training program. Her coaches in small cities and rural areas charge $80 an hour. In larger cities, rates range from $125 to $250.

Parents typically sign up for eight to 12 sessions, end quote. So there's that. But then there's also this. I got into a Twitter conversation this weekend about the sudden resurgence of Dungeons and Dress. dragons. Some people credit stranger things for that. I credit the fact that there's a whole subgenre of podcasts where funny and entertaining people record their D&D games for podcast purposes, but also live streaming D&D sessions on Twitch is becoming a thing as well. So Bloomberg has a look at the rise of professional dungeon masters who are paid to service this neo-nerdy craze.

The following quote describes Devon Chulik of San Francisco, who runs games. games for a bunch of Google employees. Quote, you can hire Chulik, for example, to lead an individual beginner campaign, which will set you back $300 and last up to four hours. For $500, he'll come to your office and run a D&D team building activity. He rents a full studio setup to stream the games he runs weekly on the gaming platform Twitch, where he has 150 subscribers who pay $4.99 a month. He also has an email list of 4,200 people, and four sponsors who provide detailed custom

game pieces, beer, or maps in exchange for on-air endorsements. For a negotiated fee, he'll drop custom battle maps, consult on purchases of various game accessories, and host bachelor parties, family gatherings, or kids' birthdays. At present, he's booked out several months and has a wait list. It's a new trend, and we're aware of it, says Nathan Stewart, vice president of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise at Wizards of the Coast, which has published the game since 1974. The idea that people are making a living being a professional dungeon master is cool and mind-blowing, end quote. That is all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough.

Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show subreddit is R slash right home. The last link in the show notes allows you to sign up for the ad-free podcast feed. And I haven't asked for ratings and reviews in a while. So if you've never done that before, please consider doing that. Rate and review this podcast and Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify? Does Spotify have ratings and reviews? Whatever. Rate and review us wherever podcast ratings happen because it helps us grow the mutant podcast army. Thanks in advance.