Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 07/24 – This Podcast Is Now Called X Ride Home

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Elon makes good on his promise to rebrand Twitter as… X. Moar price hikes in streaming! Worldcoin has officially rolled out its token, so long as you’ve scanned your eyeball. Let me introduce you to the Flipper Zero. And should it be titled: Hollywood Strike: Rise Of The TikTok Stars? Sponsors: Collective.com/ride startups.tech/techmeme Links: Twitter is being rebranded as X (The Verge) Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’ (TechCrunch) It’s Spotify’s turn to increase prices (The Verge) Peer-to-Peer Crypto Exchanges Lose Ground in Shrunken Market (Bloomberg) Sam Altman’s Worldcoin crypto project begins international rollout (FT) The Flipper Zero is a Swiss Army knife of antennas (The Verge) The Flipper Zero has an app store now (The Verge) The creator economy was already exploding. Then Hollywood went on strike. (Washington Post) 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, July 24th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Elon makes good on his promise to rebrand Twitter as X. More price hikes and streaming. WorldCoin has officially rolled out its tokens so long as you've scanned your eyeball. Let me introduce you to the Flipper Zero and should it be titled Hollywood Strike, Rise of the TikTok stars. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Over the weekend, Elon Musk tweeted, quote, and soon we shall bid ad due to the Twitter. Twitter brand, and if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll make it go live worldwide tomorrow, end quote. So this morning, Twitter rolled out an updated interim X logo, replacing the iconic Twitter bird

logo. X.com apparently redirects to Twitter.com now, though when I just tried it, it sent me to a domain parking page with GoDaddy, quoting from a Verge piece originally posted yesterday, around 12 a.m. Eastern Time last night. Musk started tweeting and did so for hours about the Twitter rebrand to X, the one-letter name he's used repeatedly in company and product names forever. It started with a tweet saying, quote, soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and gradually all the birds, followed by a second tweet adding that, quote, if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll make it go live worldwide tomorrow. Musk then, over the next several hours, gestured at the change in between other posts and replies, tweeting things like Deus X, or

replying to other users talking about it. At one point, he joined a Twitter spaces session called No-one Talk until we summon Elon Musk and sat silently for almost an hour before unmuting and confirming he would be changing Twitter's logo tomorrow, adding, quote, we're cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blow torches, end quote. Musk also reportedly sent an email last night to Twitter employees telling them that the company would become X and that it was the last time he would email from a Twitter address, according to a threads post, from platformer managing director Zoe Schiffer, She added that she assumes he was talking about the logo since Twitter's business was already renamed XCorp. The letter X has been on just about everything Musk has touched for the last two plus decades.

X.com was the original name for PayPal. It's in his SpaceX company name. It's in the name for the Tesla SUV. It anchors X.a.i and his kid, I actually never learned how to pronounce that child's name. and he has said he wants to turn Twitter into X, the everything app. Now he's finally doing something with the X.com domain. He bought back from PayPal in 2017, end quote. On the logo, quoting a later verge piece, the same X also appears on Twitter's homepage as a profile picture for its official at Twitter account and on a splash screen displayed while the website loads. The blue bird logo hasn't been expunged from the service entirely. It still serves as the website's Favicon. and remains prominent throughout the mobile apps, but were now knee-deep in a haphazard rebranding that was announced by Musk yesterday. The modern Twitter bird was actually the company's second logo

and replaced the company's earlier Larry the Bird logo it used between 2010 and 2012. The Twitter bird logo was designed by Martin Grasser alongside Todd Waterbury and Angi Che. The final design was one of 24 potential options presented to Jack Dorsey. Grasser previously told Fast Company that Twitter's co-founder and former CEO picked it out. almost immediately. The logo itself was constructed from 15 overlaid circles, which Grasser had said helps with its legibility. With a logo, sometimes that small, you want repetitive shapes and forms, Grasser told Fast Company. It makes it easier for the human eye to understand and it's less cluttered. The circles were also meant to symbolize Twitter's aim of democratizing information and giving

everyone a voice. The new X logo, meanwhile, is whatever. Musk has called it an interim X logo, which he suggests will be refined over time. It appears to have been picked from a design submitted by Sawyer Merritt, who says he based his submission on a font found online. It's so generic that it appears almost identical to the Unicode character, mathematical, double-struck capital X, aka Uplus 1D-54F, aka X, which is how Musk has been able to tweet in an entirely text-based tweet. The bird-theming runs deep, and it's not clear that X-Corp, as Twitter has legally been known for months now, will be able to replace. it entirely. What are tweets called now? Ask Merritt, to which Musk replied, X's, end quote.

This is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but there's a theory that's been running around for weeks that Elon actually wants us all to quit Twitter, and we keep disappointing him. Okay, maybe changing the name to X will do it this time. Let's see. Nope. I'm back again on the inflation beat, at least in the realm of streaming. Spotify confirms it is raising U.S. premium packages to $10 99 cents a month, up from 999, the first increase since its U.S. launch back in 2011. The duo price rises by $2 a month, family and student plans by $1 a month, quoting The Verge. Spotify is charged $999 for its premium subscription ever since its launch in the U.S. in 2011. So that we can keep innovating, we are changing our premium prices across a number of markets around

the world. The company wrote in a post announcing the increase. These updates will help us continue to deliver value to fans and artists on our platform, end quote. Similar price increases are being made internationally. Spotify's increase isn't entirely unexpected considering every other major music streaming service has announced a price increase in recent months. Apple was first last October. Amazon followed in January this year, and both title and YouTube music premium announced increases this month. In every case, the core price change was the same, a dollar increase in the cost of a standard individual monthly subscription from 999 to 1099. Spotify's CEO Daniel Eck previously hinted at

a price increase during an April earnings call when he said the company was, quote, ready to raise prices. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Spotify would announce its price increase this week. Although the price of Spotify's premium plan has remained consistent for over a decade, that hasn't been the case for its other subscription tiers. In 2021, the company increased the price of its family subscription from 1499 to 1599 in the U.S., for example. While in the UK and some European countries, it also hiked the prices of its student and two-person duo plans alongside its family plan, end quote. It might not be the full-on crypto winner, as a lot of crypto prices are up significantly right now from their lows, but according to Kiko, there is a bit of a crypto trading winter.

Monthly spot trading volumes on decentralized crypto exchanges dropped 76% year-over-year to $21 billion in June 2023. Centralized exchanges slid less, but still down 69% year-over-year to $429 billion. And that all points to something deeper and more interesting. quoting Bloomberg. Crypto diehards predicted a golden period for peer-to-peer trading venues such as Uniswap and D-YDX after last November's collapse of the FTX Exchange, which undermine trust in centralized platforms that take control of tokens. But that hasn't panned out.

Monthly spot trading volumes on decentralized exchanges slid 76% by June of this year versus January 2022, more than the 69% drop for their centralized rivals. The market share of peer-to-peer digital asset platforms has dropped to 5% from a 2023 peak of 7% achieved in March, according to the figures, end quote. Sam Altman's side hustle, the World Coin Foundation, has officially rolled out its World Coin token, received after using an eye-scanning orb. This is rolling out to 35 cities, apparently. World Coin plans to retain 20% of its tokens, quoting the FT. The Berlin and San Francisco-based startup announced on Monday that its technology, including its World Coin token, a cryptocurrency traceable on the blockchain that requires users to prove their

identity first will be available in 35 cities across 20 countries. Central to the effort is an eye-scanning physical orb, which World Coins founders say is necessary for a future in which distinguishing between humans and robots becomes increasingly challenging due to a surge in artificial intelligence technology. Once users have proved they are not robots, they can be issued one of the company's tokens. But the company's goals face being stymied by U.S. regulators cracking down on digital assets based on fears over cryptocurrencies being used as a vehicle for speculation and fraud. For this reason, World coin tokens will not initially be available in the U.S. When we started thinking about this, we didn't think it would end up as world minus the U.S.

Coin. And here we are, Altman told the Financial Times. I'd say there's 95% of the world's population not in the U.S. does not make or break a project like this, end quote. Let me catch you up on a cool gadget that I don't think we've spoken about before. This is quoting a verge piece from November of last year. Few devices have captured the imagination of your friend who works in IT quite like the flipper Zero, a hacking multi-tool shaped like a playful child's toy and adored with a friendly dolphin. Packed with a range of sensors, chips, and antennas, the flipper lets you make playful mischief

with all sorts of devices, from security gates to card readers. To the untrained eye, the flipper Zero looks like a toy. It's a small orange and white plastic device with a playful Tamagotchi-like dolphin on its monochrome orange 1.4 inch display. Cute. But in reality, the flipper Zero is a multi-tool that covers many of your hacking needs. Imagine a leatherman or Swiss Army knife, but for talking to electronics. And you have a general sense of what the Flipper Zero can do. To nobody's surprise, it's open source and was successfully funded on Kickstarter to the tune of roughly 4.6.5. million dollars. What really sets it apart from other tools, aside from the stylish Y2K design, is its flexibility. While some tools like the Camillion Mini have a limited number of tools at their disposal, the flipper has several. It can talk to sub-1 gigahertz devices like old garage doors, and low and high-frequency RFID, NFC cards, infrared devices, and even Bluetooth. You may have seen viral videos of people using the flipper to mildly annoy Tesla owners by remotely. opening up their charging ports. But the real power of the flipper is its versatility. Just about

every wireless device is vulnerable to it in some way or another. What can it do? It's best to answer this question one antenna at a time. The sub 1 gigahertz transceiver allows it to interact with old-fashioned devices like Raj Doors, Restaurant, Pagers, Gates, gas station, price signs, and doorbells. The 125 kHz antenna lets you read, clone, and emulate older prox cards. In conjunction with the NFC module. It can read, write, and emulate both low and high-frequency NSC devices like tap cards. And the infrared transceiver lets it learn any IR device on the fly. Lose that remote to your air conditioner or soundbar in a move. The flipper can not only learn how to do that, but it's also probable that someone else has figured out the code already. Want to turn off your robot dog for

comedic effect? Go nuts. On top of that, the flipper allows you to run bad USB attacks by connecting the device to a computer via USB and running a whole array of ducky scripts, some more annoying than others. If you already know about the USB rubber ducky, then some of this may be familiar to you. For something a little less malicious, you can use it to store U2F keys to do two-factor authentication. And you're not limited to using the tiny screen. You can also connect your phone to the flipper via Bluetooth and control it with this very handy app. There's also a micro-sd-card slot for storing data. importantly, the flipper does not have Wi-Fi out of the gate. However, the device has quick access to the GPIO pins, allowing you to add a Wi-Fi devboard or ESP 8266 to it for various fun projects like pen testing, deoth probes, and more. Aside from the basic capability of the device, the Flipper has a robust and vibrant community out there supporting it. There are tons of resources online and folks are finding fun new ways to use the device all the time. Obviously, it can run a weird version of Doom, and and Tetris and Flappy Bird, you can use it to emulate Skylanders and amoeboes.

If you somehow stumble upon a working payphone, you can do good old-fashioned phone-freaking. And because the project is open source, there's nothing stopping you from installing your own firmware, and many people do, end quote. Which brings us to why I'm telling you about this today. The Flipper Zero now has an app store. Quoting from the verge piece from today. It's not that it's been hard to add apps and features to the Flipper. it's mostly been a matter of finding stuff on GitHub and dropping it onto your flipper's micro-sd card.

But the app store is built right into the flipper mobile app. It's much easier to browse and use, and it installs apps directly to your flipper over Bluetooth. All the apps are reviewed by the Flipper team, which should give you some confidence that they won't break your device. Flipper Devices C.O. Alex Culligan said in a statement, the team hopes the launch of the store will provide developers with a massive distribution channel for their apps and experiments, end quote. Now, if you're the type of person who can take full advantage of the flipper Zero's capabilities right out of the gate, this might seem like unnecessary handholding. But in the email announcing the app Marketplace, Uri Mladstoff, Flipper's external spokesperson wrote,

over 350,000 customers use Flipper Zero to interact with wireless devices such as IoT sensors, TVs and ACs, and access control systems like garage doors, boom barriers, remote keyless systems, and RFID card systems. Milotsov told the Verge that there should be close to 100 applications when the marketplace launches, i.e. now. There are plenty of neat little utilities like a dice roller, a tuning fork, a resistor calculator, Bluetooth camera remote, and a couple of Pomodoro apps, as well as more ambitious programs like a hex editor, apps that let you interface with external devices like temperature and humidity sensors, and plenty of games, end quote. Finally today, a provocative argument from the Washington Post.

If you're old enough to remember, the previous Big Strikes reshaped Hollywood largely by fueling reality TV's rise. The current one, the post says, will likely turn established actors into TikTok stars and vice versa. The world will flip, in essence. Quote, studios and streamers will likely try to fill out their release calendars with new deals for influencers' content if the stoppage stretches on for months, said David Craig, a University of Southern California professor who researches creators and once worked as a film and TV producer. Though some still see creators as basically brand ambassadors for advertising, they're in fact a much more broad and complex class of cultural producers that preoccupies

vast swaths of people's attention, he said. Hollywood is still the king of long-form premium storytelling, he said, but if that goes away for the next year, there's less incentive for people to stay on to see old libraries of content. And the industry, quote, may start to realize that the creators are the only ones left to do business with, end quote. The worry that creators could spy an opportunity to break into Hollywood's turf has led some writers and actors to post warnings against undermining the strike on TikTok, where armies of fans have started chastising creators they believe are considering scabbing jobs.

But many in the industry expect the strike will further nudge traditional entertainers into becoming creators themselves, allowing them to use social media to pursue and help fund independent projects, secure greater ownership of the product and profits, and show sides of their personality and creativity, they hope will secure them audiences that outlast anyone production. Since the strikes began, Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director known for his TV roles on the league and Veep, has invested more time into Friend Zone, a Twitch channel where he and comedians like Rob Hewbel tell jokes and perform skits for a sprawling digital audience. When Shear launched his first Twitch channel in 2020 after the pandemic froze Hollywood,

it proved so successful that he and Hubell hosted a two-episode comedy game show called Celebrity Yard Sale that won a sponsorship deal from Hyundai and became a genuine hit. We had over a million people watch each day for two hours. That was better than a lot of television, he said in an interview. I love that just because we're in a moment where our industry is on pause. It doesn't mean that we have to be on pause. We can make our own stuff, end quote. Speaking of, I know I've mentioned them in the past once or twice, but my all-time favorite podcast, is the flop house. The flop house is the granddaddy of, you know, watch a bad movie and then

joke about it podcasts. It got started back in 2007, I think, maybe even sooner than that. I think around the time of the last big Hollywood strike, at least. Going back in their archives is fun because you can hear them go from nobodies to eventually both Elliott and Dan become writers and then headwriters of the Daily Show. Stuart, meanwhile, gradually becomes the barkeep mogul of Mid-Brooklyn. Anyway, since Ellis Elliot and Dan are on strike. The podcast is currently their sole source of income, and so they've been looking to boost their audience. And thus, as a loyal listener, I'm going to try to do my part right here. Search your podcast app for the Flop House and give it a try on my recommendation.

If you scroll a couple of episodes back in their catalog, you'll notice that they just passed their 400th episode, and in honor of that, they posted three Flop House classics episodes. Give any of those episodes a try, just the ones posted earlier in July, because they're a great starter episode or two to give you a sense of why so many people find the Flop House so funny. There's a Nicholas Cage movie lampooned, a Neil Breen, a Frank DeAngelo movie. Also for the 400th episode, they did Troll 2. As I said, any of those would be a great entree into what they do, so check out the Flop House wherever you get your podcasts. not an ad, just a recommendation from a fan. Talk to you tomorrow.