Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 09/26 – Darth Vader’s Voice Is AI Now

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, September 26th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. UK police make an arrest many believe is related to those recent Uber and Rockstar hacks. Will the iPhone get a design overhaul next year? Cloudflare's interesting new zero-trust sim.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Maybe the first copyright for that new AI art stuff and why AI is allowing Darth Vader's voice to live on forever. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Police in the United Kingdom have arrested and charged a 17-year-old with computer misuse and breaches of bail, believed to be related to the recent Uber and Rockstar hacks, quoting Bleeping Computer. While there are no details about the investigation, the arrest is believed to be tied to the Lapsis Hacking Group, which is suspected to be behind recent cyber attacks on Uber, Rockstar Games, and 2K. During attacks last year, the Lapsis Hacking Group was said to be led by a threat actor named White or Breach Base, who was doxed as allegedly a 16-year-old teen from the UK. The Hacking Group is responsible for numerous high-profile attacks, including Microsoft, Cisco, Nvidia, Samsung, and Octa. In April, the City of London Police arrested seven people aged 16 to 21, including the alleged 17-year-old ringleader. However, the UK soon released the two boys on bail as they were minors.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Last Thursday, Uber disclosed they were responding to a cyber attack after a hacker known as T-POT, gained access to their Slack server and began posting screenshots of their access to other internal services. Three days later, on Sunday, a threat actor calling themselves T-Pot Uber hacker, began leaking previously unseen Grand Theft Auto 6 video footage and snippets of source code for Grand Theft Auto 5 and 6 on GTAFORums.com. This threat actor claimed that they breached Rockstar Games Slack and Confluence servers to steal the data, and also said they were behind the recent attack on Uber. The owner of the breached hacking forum, POMPOM PURR was the first to claim that White was behind the Rockstar games in Uber hacks.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Soon after, Uber also attributed the attack to the Lapsis Hacking Group, which used MFA fatigue attacks and other tactics that are known to be associated with this hacking group. More recently, Gaming Company 2K also suffered a security breach where the threat actor used their help desk to send malware to customers. While there is no formal attribution to Lapsis 2K is owned by Take 2 Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games. Due to the recent attacks, the attribution and the age and location of the arrested individual, many in the cybersecurity community believe that the arrest is linked to the Lapsis group. Journalist Matthew Keyes says that it was a 17-year-old boy who was arrested over the hack of Rockstar and likely Uber.

Starting point is 00:03:18 However, as a suspect is a minor, their name cannot be released by law enforcement under UK law, end quote. In his weekly newsletter over the weekend, Mark German basically hit the reset button. 2022 is in the rear view for Mark, and he's focusing now on what we can expect from Apple next year. For example, with the iPhone in its third year of a three-year design cycle, Mark says it may be completely overhauled in 2023. Also, Apple may delay pay later to next year and may not host an October event at all this year. Quoting Bloomberg, In the early days of the iPhone users could expect a major overhaul every two years. At the time, that coincided with two-year carrier agreements that dominated the cellular industry.

Starting point is 00:04:07 That changed in 2016 when Apple switched to a three-year redesign cycle, lengthing the amount of time between major iPhone updates. Apple retained the iPhone 6's look through the iPhone 8. The iPhone 10's design was kept through the iPhone 11 and iPhone 12's form factor stuck around through the iPhone 14. Based on Apple's current pattern, we can explain. expect a revamped iPhone design next year, coinciding with a shift to USBC and the potential of a new ultra-model replacing the Pro Max. iOS 16 was released on September 12th, and by the way, Apple pay later was a no-show. The company didn't make any fuss or major disclosure about the delay, and I'm hearing there have been fairly significant technical and engineering challenges in rolling out the service

Starting point is 00:04:50 leading to the delays. As for the October event, Apple may ultimately end up feeling differently, but I think the company as of now is more likely to release its remaining 2022 products via press releases, updates to its website and briefings with select members of the press, rather than via a major iPhone-style keynote, end quote. Cloudflare has announced Zero Trust Sim, a US-only device-specific e-sim for iOS and Android devices that uses VPNs and DNS filtering. And they've also announced Zero Trust for mobile operators. but let's get to that first thing first, quoting TechCrunch. Are smartphones ever entirely secure? It depends on one's definition of secure, particularly when dealing with corporate environments.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Most companies with Bring Your Own Device Policies, install apps or agents on worker's smartphones to help secure them, leveraging the management capabilities built into operating systems like Android and iOS. But those might not be sufficient. That's what Cloudflare argues anyway in the pitch for the new services it's launching this week. Today, the company announced Zero Trust Sim and Zero Trust for Mobile Operators to product offerings targeting smartphone users, the company's securing corporate phones, and the carriers selling data services. Let's start with Zero Trust Sim.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Designed to secure all data packets leaving a smartphone, Zero Trust Sim, once launched in the U.S. to start, will be available as an e-S. deployable via existing mobile device management platforms to both iOS and Android devices. It'll be locked to a specific device, mitigating the risk of sim-swapping attacks and usable either in a standalone configuration or in tandem with Cloudflare's mobile agent, warp. In a recent email interview, Cloudflare CTO, John Graham Cumming, made the case that Zero Trust Sim can accomplish what VPNs and other secure layers can't. Cell-level protection.

Starting point is 00:06:48 A SIM card that can act as another security factor and, in combination with hardware keys, make it nearly impossible to impersonate an employee, he argued. Specifically, Graham Cumming said that Zero Trust Sim will enable Cloudflare to rewrite DNS requests leaving a device to instead use Cloudflare Gateway for DNS filtering. It will also support validating every host and IP address before it reaches the internet and identity-based connectivity to services and other devices. And it can be used as a second factor for authentication, he added. While pricing hasn't been decided, Zero Trust Sim, which will launch in the next few months, will be treated as a part of Cloudflare's Zero Trust platform. from a billing perspective. Graham Cumming says it'll be an extension of the per seat pricing zero-trust customers have today. He expects that most devices will be compatible, and even more once Cloudflare begins providing physical SIM cards for the service, which it plans to do in the

Starting point is 00:07:40 near future. Cloudflare has less to share on the Zero Trust for Mobile Operators front. A carrier partner program, Zero Trust for Mobile Operators, will allow service providers to offer subscriptions to mobile security tools from Cloudflare Zero Trust platform, Graham Cummings, interested operators can sign up starting today for more information. One presumes that zero-trust for mobile operators, and for that matter, the new zero-trust sim, is pilot in what could be a lucrative line of business for Cloudflare Beyond Warp, which the company launched on a freemium model three years ago. According to Allied market research, the global mobile security market was valued at $3.3 billion in 2020,

Starting point is 00:08:17 and could reach $22.1 billion by 2030, end quote. Hmm, this sort of breaks the narrative I've been going with, recently, but if it's broken, it's broken. Sources are telling the New York Times that the U.S. government and TikTok have reached a preliminary deal to resolve national security concerns without bite dance being forced to sell TikTok, although some details remain. Quote, the two sides have hammered out the foundations of a deal in which TikTok would make changes to its data security and governments without requiring its owner, the Chinese internet

Starting point is 00:08:56 giant bite dance to sell it, said three of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity, because the negotiations are confidential. The two sides are still wrangling over the potential agreement. The Justice Department is leading the negotiations with TikTok and its number two official Lisa Monaco has concerns that the terms are not tough enough on China to people with knowledge of the matter said. The Treasury Department, which plays a key role in approving deals involving national security risks, is also skeptical that the potential agreement with TikTok can sufficiently resolve national security issues to people with knowledge of the matter said. That could force changes to the terms and drag out a final resolution for months. Completing an agreement may also be difficult at a tricky political

Starting point is 00:09:36 moment for the Biden administration, which has stepped up its cadence of criticism and executive actions addressing China. The policy toward Beijing, while expressed in more diplomatic language, is not substantially different from the posture of the Trump White House, reflecting a suspicion of China that now spans the political spectrum. Nevertheless, Republicans have criticized the administration for being too soft on China. Anything short of a complete separation of TikTok from ByteDance will likely leave significant national security issues regarding operations, data, and algorithms unresolved. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. Under the draft terms, TikTok would make changes to three main areas,

Starting point is 00:10:15 the people with knowledge of the discussion said. First, TikTok would store its American data solely on servers in the United States, probably run by Oracle instead of on its own servers in Singapore and Virginia, two of the people said. Second, Oracle is expected to monitor TikTok's powerful algorithms that determine the content that the app recommends in response to concerns that the Chinese government could use its feed as a way to influence the American public, they said. Lastly, TikTok would create a board of security experts reporting to the government to oversee its U.S. operations, three people with knowledge said, end quote. A New York-based artist has received copyright registration on a comic featuring artwork by

Starting point is 00:10:58 Mid Journey, the first known U.S. copyright for latent diffusion AI art. quoting Ars Technica. In what might be a first, a New York-based artist named Chris Kachtonova has received U.S. copyright registration on their graphic novel that features AI-generated artwork created by latent diffusion AI, according to their Instagram feed and confirmed through a public records search by Ars Technica. The registration, effective September 15, applies to a comic book called Zaria of the Dawn. Kachanova created the artwork for Zaria using Mid-Journey, a commercial image synthesis service. Going by their announcement, Cachinova approached the registration by saying the artwork was AI-assisted, not created entirely by the AI. Cacheanova wrote the comic

Starting point is 00:11:44 book's story, created the layout, and made artistic choices to piece the images together. It's likely that artists have registered works created by machine or algorithms before, because the history of generative art extends back to the 1960s. But this is the first time we know of that an artist has registered a copyright for art created by the recent round of image synthesis models, powered by latent diffusion, which has been a contentious subject among artists. Speculation about whether AI artwork can be copyrighted has been the subject of many articles over the past few months. Despite popular misconceptions, the U.S. Copyright Office has not ruled against copyright on AI artworks. Instead, it ruled out copyright registered to an AI

Starting point is 00:12:25 as the author instead of a human. Zaria of the Dawn, which features a main character with an uncanny resemblance to the actress Zendaya. is available for free through the AI comic books website. AI artists often use celebrity names in their prompts to achieve consistency between images, since there are many celebrity photographs in the dataset used to train mid-journey, end quote. Finally today, you might have heard the news. James Earl Jones is retiring from voicing the, well, the voice of Darth Vader after 50 years of doing so. But the voice itself will go on.

Starting point is 00:13:05 That's because, quoting variety. The 91-year-old actor has signed off on archival voice recordings being used by young filmmakers who plan to utilize artificial intelligence, synthetic speech technology, to recreate Jones's younger voice from his previous films for future Lucasfilm projects. The company has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher's relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney Plus series, The Book of Boba Fett, for which they recreated the voice of a young, Luke Skywalker. The two also teamed for the voice performance of Darth Vader on the series

Starting point is 00:13:44 Obi-1 Canobi, which debuted on Disney's streamer this summer. Bogdan Belyeyev, a 29-year-old speech artist, was tasked with delivering the new recordings to Lucasfilm, but tragedy struck on February 24th when Russia invaded the country. As air raid sirens powered through the city of Leviv, Believ hurried to finish the project and sent his work to Skywalker Sound in Northern California. If everything went bad, we would never make these conversations delivered to Skywalker Sound, he says. Following the debut of Obi-1 Canobi, Jones's family informed Wood that they were pleased with the result of the synthesis between the actor's voice and re-speecher's technical work. Jones is credited for guiding the performance of Darth Vader in the Disney Plus series with Wood describing the actor as a benevolent godfather, end quote. Want to know more about this process? Well, I've got you covered with a full piece from Vanity Fair.

Starting point is 00:14:36 quote, what Rees-Speacher could do better than anyone was recreate the unforgidably menacing way that Jones, now 91, sounded half a lifetime ago. Wood estimates that he's recorded the actor at least a dozen times over the decades, the last time being a brief line of dialogue in 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character, says Wood. So how do we move forward? When he ultimately presented Jones with Rees-speecher's work, the actor signed off on using his archival voice recordings to keep Vader alive, and vital even by artificial means. Appropriate perhaps for a character who is half mechanical. Jones is credited for guiding the performance on Obi-1 Canobi, and Wood describes his contribution as a benevolent godfather.

Starting point is 00:15:17 They inform the actor about their plans for Vader and heed his advice on how to stay on the right course, end quote. Many more details in the piece, especially how the company coped with continuing work while the war raged around them, so check out the very last link in the show notes. everyone, we are currently taking investments for year two of the Ride Home Fund. As ever, it's a rolling fund. The minimum investment period is four quarters and the minimum investment amount is $5,000 per quarter, though you can go higher or longer if you so choose. You've heard about the fund all year, so you know what it's all about. But if you have specific questions, email me at Brian, B-R-I-A-N-R-Homefund.com, or so you know what it's all about. But if you have specific questions, email me at Brian, B-R-Homefund.com, or subscribe to invest easily by going to ridehomefund.com and following the links.

Starting point is 00:16:17 Excited to put another 20 or so companies into the portfolio this year. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 09/26 – Darth Vader’s Voice Is AI Now

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