Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/08 – What Data Is Telsa Collecting On You?

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Masa Son takes another one on the chin, another record loss. The US Treasury is sanctioning a major crypto mixing service. Netflix Gaming is off to a good start or a terrible one, I can’t tell. One of the streaming services is biting the dust. And since we’re aware of the car industry data tracking issue, how much data is Tesla already tracking about your driving? Sponsors: Gusto.com/ride CyberSecurityInside.com/ride Links: SoftBank plans Vision Fund job cuts after record net loss (Reuters) US Treasury sanctions cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash (The Block) Twilio hacked by phishing campaign targeting internet companies (TechCrunch) Nvidia warns on second-quarter revenue, shares dip (CNBC) Netflix is expanding its push into video games, but few subscribers are playing along (CNBC) HBO Max, Discovery+ to Merge Into Single Streaming Platform Starting in Summer 2023 (Variety) The Radical Scope of Tesla’s Data Hoard (IEEE Spectrum) 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, August 8th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Masasan takes another one on the chin, another record loss. The U.S. Treasury is sanctioning a major crypto mixing service. Netflix gaming is off to a good start or a terrible one. I really just can't

tell. One of the streaming services is biting the dust. And since we're aware of the car industry data tracking issue now, how much data is Tesla already tracking about your driving? Here's what we missed today in the world of tech. Softbank has reported around a $17.23 billion loss for Vision Fund in Q1 as the value of its tech portfolio fell, including SenseTime and Uber. This of course follows a record Q4 loss, quoting Reuters. The world is in great confusion, Masasan said at an earnings news conference. The result caps a tumultuous six months for the Vision Fund, which posted a record 26.2 billion loss in May after SoftBank was caught out by rising interest rates and political instability that hammered markets globally. Sahn has already radically scaled back investment

activity. The Vision Fund Arm approved just $600 million in new investments in the first quarter compared with $20.6 billion in the same period a year earlier. On Monday, the billionaire pledge to go further, limiting the second fund to just managing its current portfolio of investments while planning workforce cuts at Vision Fund and cost reductions across the group. We need to cut costs with no sacred areas, Sons said. We were in a kind of bubble on valuations, he said. If we had been more selective and invested better, we wouldn't have received this heavy blow, Sons said, end quote. Which, right, kept an obvious award of the day there. Also, we were kind of in a bubble of valuations. Gee, who contributed to that bubble exactly. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned

crypto mixing service Tornado Cash and 44 associated ETH and USDA Wallets, citing Tornado Cash's use in high-profile hacks, including by North Korea, quoting the block. The regulator has added Tornado Cash and 44 associated Ethereum and USDC wallets to its specially designated nationals list, according to an August 8th announcement from the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control. The wallets named include the smart contract that runs Tornado Cash, its get-coin-grans address, and the Tornado Cash donation wallet. The SDN list bars U.S. persons and firms looking to operate in the U.S. from financial interactions with designated entities. In May, OFAC added Blender.io, its first designation of a crypto mixer. However, Tornado Cash is distinct

from Blender.io in being a decentralized protocol. It may well be the first example of a U.S. sanction targeting a defy operator. Despite barring SDN designated crypto wallets from its front end in April, Tornado Cash's association with high-profile hacks like Ronan and Harmony, continued to draw the Treasury's ire, particularly given that the Treasury has identified several as going to profit North Korea's Lazarus Group. A Treasury press release accused the mixer of laundering more than $455 million for Lazarus. Despite public assurances, otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks, said Brian Nelson, under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Speaking to reporters, a senior administration official noted seven major hacks that had gone through Tornado Cash.

A senior Treasury official said that while it is the agency's second action against the mixer, it would not be the last. Quote, eyes emoji here, Twilio has disclosed what it is calling unauthorized access by a sophisticated unknown actor using a phishing attack on multiple staff to gain info on some accounts on August 4th, quoting TechCrunch. The San Francisco-based company, which allows users to build voice and SMS capabilities such as two-factor authentication into applications, said in a blog post published Monday that it became aware of someone gaining unauthorized access to information related to some Twilio customer accounts on August 4. Twilio has more than 150,000 customers, including Facebook and Uber. According to the company, the as-yet-identified threat actor convinced multiple Twilio employees to

hand over their credentials, which allowed access to the company's internal systems. The attack used SMS phishing messages that purported to come from Twilio's IT department, suggesting that the employee's password had been expired or that their schedule had changed and advised the target to login using a spoofed web address so that the attacker controls. Tullio said that the attacker sent these messages to look legitimate, including words such as ACTA and SSO, referring to single sign-on, which many companies used to secure access to their internal apps. Octa was itself hit by a breach earlier this year, which saw hackers gain access to its internal

systems. Twilio said it worked with U.S. carriers to stop the malicious messages as as well as registrars and hosting providers to shut down the malicious URLs used in the campaign. But the company said that the threat actors seemed undeterred. Quote, despite this response, the threat actors have continued to rotate through carriers and hosting providers to resume their attacks. Tullio's blog post said, based on these factors, we have reason to believe the threat actors are well organized, sophisticated, and methodical in their actions, end quote. TechCrunch has since learned that the same actor also set up fishing pages impersonating other companies, including a U.S. Internet company, an IT outsourcing company, and a customer service provider,

though what impact on these organizations, if any, isn't currently known. When reached, Twilio spokesperson Larel Remsey, declined to say how many customers were affected or what data was accessed by the threat actors, end quote. Again, is this company-specific, or games industry specific, or is a global chipmaker signaling a global recession? NVIDIA reported Q2 preliminary earnings showing revenue was down 19% from Q1 and below its $8.1 billion guidance. Driven by lagging gaming revenue, the stock is currently down around 7%. Quoting CNBC, the company said the shortfall primarily reflects weaker than forecasted gaming revenue,

which is down 44% sequentially and 33% from the prior year. Invidia said the report is, quote, primarily attributable to lower sell-in. of gaming products, reflecting a reduction in channel partner sales, likely due to macroeconomic headwinds, end quote. It also said that its data center segment has been impacted by supply chain disruptions and preliminary revenue of $3.81 billion is below the company's expectations. That figure is still up 1% over last year and up 61% year over year, however. Collette Cress, EVP, and CFO of Nvidia, said she believes the company's long-term gross margin profile remains intact, end quote.

Speaking of games, according to Aptopia, Netflix's recent experiment with gaming has resulted in 23.3 million total downloads and an average of 1.7 million daily active users. Now, help me out here. That is less than 1% of Netflix's overall subscribers, but at the same time, if all Netflix cares about is time spent on their service and keeping their service valuable enough for people to pay the subscription every month, 1.7 million daily users, is good, right, or bad? I'm not sure. Quoting CNBC. The importance of games to Netflix's overall strategy has arguably increased in recent months as the company faces intensifying competition for user attention. In the second quarter, Netflix lost nearly a million subscribers after losing

200,000 subscribers during the first quarter. Its first subscriber decline in more than a decade. In a letter to shareholders last year, Netflix named Epic Games and TikTok as among its biggest rivals for people's time. One of the many advantages to Netflix in pursuing the strategy is the ability to drive engagement beyond when the show first comes out on the platform. DA Davidson, senior analyst Tom Forty said, still Netflix chief operating officer Greg Peters said last year, the company was, quote, many months and really, frankly, years into learning how games can keep customers on the service. We're going to be experimental and try a bunch of things, Peter said during the company's

fourth quarter earnings conference call. But I would say the eyes that we have on the long-term Prize really center more around our ability to create properties that are connected to the universes, the characters, the stories that we're building, end quote. The company's current catalog of 24 game apps covers a variety of genres and Netflix shows such as Stranger Things 1984. Several are modeled after popular card games such as Majong Solitaire and Exploding Kittins. The catalog will grow to 50 games by the end of the year, including Queen's Gambit Chess based on the hit Netflix series according to a company representative, end By the way, I wanted to make note of this. On its Q2 earnings call last week, Warner Brothers

Discovery announced plans to launch a combined HBO Max and Discovery Plus streaming service in the U.S. in the summer of 2023 with other countries to follow after that. So in a way, we'll have one less streaming service to play musical chairs with, quoting variety. The media company announced a timeline for the two services to be fused together, HBO Max and Discovering Discovery Plus will launch in the U.S. as a single service in the summer of 2020, according to J.B. Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and games for Warner Brothers Discovery, speaking on the company's Q2 earnings call. At the end of the day, putting all the content together was the only way we saw to make this a viable business, Peret told analysts.

Bringing HBO Max and Discovery Plus together is aimed at cutting churns, so quote, there's something for everyone in the household, he said. In the second quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery's HBO Max, HBO and Discovery Plus, subscribers combined were 92.1 million, up 1.7 million from 90.4 million in the prior quarter. That's up 22% from 75.8 million on a pro forma basis versus a year earlier. Warner Brothers Discovery did not announce what the new brand name for the merged service will be, nor did execs discuss pricing for the unified streamer. Warner Brothers Discovery is initially focused on the ad-supported and ad-free versions of the combined HBO Max Discovery Plus,

Perrette said, but is also, quote, how to reach customers in the free ad-supported space with content that is totally different from what's on the premium VOD services. HBO may or may not be part of the name of the Unified Direct-to-C Consumer WBD platform. Pratt said the company is doing research on consumer perception of the HBO Max's name, but HBO will continue to be a major brand, quote, HBO will always be the beacon and the ultimate brand that stands for quality television, he said on the call, end quote. Yeah, I'm not a branding expert, but I feel like if you're not leaning into the HBO brand, you're probably doing it wrong.

Finally today, a follow-up to something we talked about recently. I-Triple-E Spectrum takes a look at the data that Tesla collects from its 3 million vehicles on the road and found, among other things, breadcrumb GPS trails and gateway log files. Tesla uses this data to train its autopilot program, of course, but who owns the data might be another interesting question. Quote, every recent model Tesla reportedly records a breadcrumb GPS trail of every trip it makes and shares it with the company. While this data is supposedly anonymized, experts are skeptical. In a series of articles, IEE Spectrum is examining exactly what data Tesla vehicles collect,

how the company uses them to develop its automated driving systems, and whether owners or the company are in the driver's seat when it comes to accessing and exploiting that data. There is no evidence that Tesla collects any data beyond what customers agree to in their terms of service, Even though opting out of this completely appears to be very difficult. Almost every new production vehicle has a battery of sensors, including cameras and radars, that capture data about their drivers, other road users, and their surroundings. There is now a worldwide connected car data industry, trading in an anonymized vehicle driver and location data aggregated from billions of journeys,

made in tens of millions of vehicles from all the major automotive equipment manufacturers. But none seemed to store that information and send it back to the manufacturer as regularly or in such volume or have been doing so for as long as those made by Tesla. As far as we know, Tesla vehicles collect the most amount of data, says Francis Hoijink, a researcher at the Netherlands Forensic Institute who began investigating Tesla's data systems after fatal crashes in the United States and the Netherlands in 2016. Tesla is like over 99% of new vehicles have event data recorders or EDRs. These black box recorders are triggered by a crash and collect a scant five seconds of

information including speed, acceleration, brake use, steering input, and automatic brake and stability controls to assist in crash investigations. But Tesla also makes a permanent record of these data, and many more, on a 4-gibabyte SD or 8-gibite micro-SD card located in the car's media control unit, or MCU. These timestamped gateway log files also include seatbelt, autopilot, and cruise control settings, and weather drivers had their hands on the steering wheel. They are normally recorded at a relatively low resolution, such as 5 Hertz, allowing the car to store months or years worth of data even up to the lifetime of the vehicle. Because the gateway logs can use data from cars' standard control area network or can buses,

they can include the unique vehicle identification number or VIN. However, no evidence suggests that these logs could include information from the car's GPS module or from its cameras or for earlier models radars. Teslas also have a separate autopilot Linux computer, which takes input from the car's cameras to handle driver assistance functions like cruise control, lane keeping, and collision warnings. If owners plug their own USB thumb drives into the car, they can make live dash cam recordings

and set up Sentry mode to record the vehicle's surroundings when parked. These recordings do not appear to be uploaded to Tesla. However, there are many occasions in which Tesla vehicles do store images and, in 2016 models onward, videos from the cameras and then share them with the company. These autopilot snapshots can span several minutes and consist of up to several hundred megabytes of data, according to one engineer and Tesla owner, who, has studied Tesla's data collection process using salvage vehicles and components, and who tweets using the pseudonym Green. As well as visual data, the snapshots include high-resolution log

data, similar to that captured in the gateway logs, but at a much higher frequency, up to 50 hertz, for wheel speed information notes, Hoydink. In addition to the snapshots, the autopilot computer also records a complete trip log every time a mid-2017 or later Tesla is shifted from park to drive, says Green. Trip logs include a GPS breadcrumb. trail until the car is shifted back into park and includes speeds, road types, and when or weather autopilot was activated. Green says that trip logs are recorded whether or not autopilot or full self-driving is used. Like the snapshots, trip logs are deleted from the vehicle after being uploaded to Tesla. But what happens to this treasure trove of data? Tesla has sold

about 3 million vehicles worldwide, the majority of which are phoning home daily. They have provided the company with billions of miles of real-world driving data and GPS tracks and many millions of photos and videos. What the world's leading EV Automaker is doing with all that data is the subject of our next installment, end quote. So the first weekend of Premier League actions saw Arsenal record a win, which was great, but my fantasy efforts decidedly were not great. The first week of the Mutant Podcast Army Fantasy League saw me tally 38 points, which puts me at, let me see, carry the one, second to last in the league. Not the last, but the second to last in the league.

Congratulations to VOA, whose leaders team racked up 88 points, nearly double my points hall. Never told you I was any good at this fantasy thing. Talk to you tomorrow.