Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/29 - Big Blue Gets Red Hat

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

IBM buys Red Hat, museums get new ways to preserve video games, Sony announces the full list of titles for its retro PlayStation mini-console, DJI has a drone for first responders, and a look at the service Gab. Links: IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion (CNBC) Forget Watson, the Red Hat acquisition may be the thing that saves IBM (TechCrunch) IBM’s Old Playbook (Stratechery) Copyright Law Just Got Better for Video Game History (Motherboard) Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies (PDF - US Copyright Office, Library of Congress) Here are the 20 games shipping with the PlayStation Classic (TechCrunch) DJI's latest Mavic 2 drone is built for search and rescue (Engadget) Two more platforms have suspended Gab in the wake of Pittsburgh shooting (TechCrunch) On Gab, an Extremist-Friendly Site, Pittsburgh Shooting Suspect Aired His Hatred in Full (New York Times) 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 from Monday, October 29th. I'm Chris Higgins in for Brian McCullough. Today, IBM buys Red Hat.

Museums get new ways to preserve video games. Sony announces the full list of titles for its retro PlayStation mini-consul. DJI has a drone for first responders. And a look at a site I just heard of starting this weekend called Gab. Let's go. Big news in the enterprise software world. Big Blue, that's IBM, of course. announced that it's acquiring Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion.

IBM will pay cash to buy all of Red Hat's shares in $190 each. By the way, that valuation is about 60% higher than Red Hat's closing price on Friday. At the time I wrote this story, Red Hat was up about 50% in Monday's trading. After the deal goes through, Red Hat will become part of IBM's Hybrid Cloud Division. Red Hat provides popular versions of the open source Linux operating system, along with services and support to keep them running. This is a big deal for lots of reasons, but the first is really the bigness of the financial transaction involved. Here's one way to put it in perspective, quoting CNBC.

The acquisition is by far IBM's largest deal ever and the third biggest in the history of U.S. tech. Excluding the AOL-Time Warner merger, the only larger deals were the $67 billion merger between Dell and EMC in 2016 and JDS Unifazes $41 billion acquisition of optical component supplier SDL in 2000, just as the dot-com bubble was bursting, end quote. Now, the other big deal aspect of this acquisition is the apparent trend of big software firms gobbling up younger, open-source-focused companies. Earlier this year, Microsoft paid $7.5 billion to buy GitHub, which was built atop Git, the open-source version control system invented by Linus Torvald,

also creator of Linux. And then there's Salesforce, which paid $6.5. $1.5 billion for MuleSoft, a firm that's all about integrating disparate software systems, in many cases using open-source middleware. Many in tech see this move as IBM refocusing on a core business that has always done well, enterprise software and services. Here's a tweet from Sineal Rwatt, in which he comments on a Wall Street Journal headline about the acquisition. Quote, also read as, IBM taps out on Watson as its growth engine and returns to basics, i.e. financial engineering and distribution, end quote. Now, you'll remember Watson as IBM's AI play,

famously won several Jeopardy games, and more recently has a focus on medical tech. IBM's Cognitive Solutions business, which includes Watson, has reported declining revenue lately. The problem there isn't necessarily that Watson isn't generating revenue. In fact, its revenue grew just a bit in the most recent quarter, but IBM's software suite overall is having trouble competing with the big cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Red Hat is going to help IBM compete in that arena. And here's a long quote from Red Hat founder Bob Young,

courtesy of Ben Thompson's Stratecre newsletter this morning. Thompson dug up this quote from the All Things Open Conference in 2014, and it shows how Red Hat's founders and the recent history of IBM have a lot in common. Quoting Bob Young here. Lou Gersner came into IBM and got it turned around in three years. It was miraculous. Gersner's insight was he went around and talked to a bunch of IBM customers and found out that the customers didn't actually like any of his products.

They were okay, but whenever he would sit down with any given customer, there was always someone who did that product better than IBM did. He said, so why are you buying from IBM? The customers were saying, IBM is the only technology company with an office everywhere that we do business. And as a result, Gersner understood that he wasn't selling products, he was selling a service. He talked about that publicly.

And so at Red Hat, we go, OK, we don't have a product to sell because ours is open source. And everyone can use our innovations as quickly as we can. So we're not really selling a product, But Gersner at IBM is telling us the customers don't buy products. They buy services, things that make them more successful. And so that was one of our early insights into what we were doing. This idea that we were actually in the services business,

even back when we were selling shrink-wrapped boxes of Linux. We saw that as an interim step to getting big enough so that we could sign service contracts with real customers. End quote. Following up on last week's story about the right to repair and new rules about when Americans can legally get around DMCA protections, here's a new benefactor. abandoned video games, specifically abandoned online multiplayer games that museums are trying to preserve.

Quoting the Librarian of Congress here, the Acting Register found that the records supported granting an expansion in the relatively discrete circumstances where a preservation institution legally possesses a copy of a video game's server code and the game's local code. In such circumstances, the preservation activities described by proponents are likely to be fair uses, end quote. All right, historical context time. Back in 2015, a ruling allowed preservationists to get around the DMCA in cases where an abandoned video game was just trying to phone home to a server as a copy protection measure.

So if you were a games museum trying to preserve that game or a player at home, that carve out meant you could legally circumvent that checking mechanism if your intent was to preserve the software. Now, two important things. One, that was specifically for single player games. And two, that provision was set to expire this year because these rules come out every three years. so it's time to revisit how it had worked out over this last little while. Well, this year's revision applies to both single and multiplayer games, and it started yesterday.

So that's good news for game historians. Now, there are a bunch of gotchas in this ruling. One of them is that the stuff about running server-side code applies only to archivists working for institutions like museums or libraries, so that leaves your free-range archivists out in the cold unless they become attached to an institution. A further bummer is where players have to be in order to experience a multiple multiplayer game with a server component. The ruling suggests that if an institution can get a multiplayer

game running, with the client and the server code all happily going, people can only play the game if they're physically at the, quote, eligible library, archives, or museum, end quote. Now, this kind of ruins the experience of a massively multiplayer online game, which is designed to run with potentially tens of thousands of people or more. You're just not going to get that full experience inside a museum with your buddies. And this brings up a core question about what it means to preserve online multiplayer software. Is it preserved in the sense that it technically exists in a museum somewhere? Or is it preserved in the sense that people around the world can actually experience it how it used to be? For now, it's the former. Another gigantic gotcha is that the rules require archivists to legally obtain the server-side

code for multiplayer games that depend on servers. And that's going to be really tough. For one thing, companies that run multiplayer online games and shut down their servers generally do a terrible job of preserving their server code. The typical approach is to wipe the servers and liquidate them, leaving the actual production code in limbo. Maybe it's in a source repository somewhere, but even if it is, the production configuration of the servers is just gone. The deployment mechanism to put the code onto the servers is probably gone too.

And even if a company does preserve its server code and the mechanisms to deploy it, it seems unlikely that they would voluntarily hand it over to archivists unless the company is going out of business. But, and this is a substantial thing, now at least they can. If the game is commercially dead and the company knows it, this is a new way to sunset the game without literally destroying it. Instead of computer historians trying to emulate a reverse engineer or steal server code, there is now a clear legal path for the preservation of this work. If an online game company shuts down in the near future, we'll see a test of whether they embrace this new way of preserving their work. In other vintage video game news, Sony released a full list of 20 titles that will

ship with its PlayStation Classic coming on December 3rd for $100. Now, I'm not just going to read out all 20 titles. That's what links are for. Check out the show notes. But here's a few highlights that jumped off the page. These are exciting to me because we've got a lot of different genres represented on that list. All right, my top picks, Final Fantasy 7, Grand Theft Auto, the original one, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Directors Cut, Tekin 3, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6.

So if you're keen to relive the games of the 90s, get your pre-order in now and get your game on in early December. Today, DJI announced the Mavic 2 Enterprise, a $2 drone aimed at emergency services and first responders, plus others in the enterprise space. The device is similar to the existing Mavc2 Zoom, but it's been beefed up to carry heavier payloads and has some pretty cool payloads ready to go. In key specs, the new drone has a 12-mixel camera mounted on a 3-axis gimbal, including 2x optical zoom and 3-X digital zoom. DJI says the camera can, quote, identify and inspect hazardous areas. The new drone has a modular expansion system, making it a flying platform for extra stuff.

The first round of stuff DJI will release for the system are a 2400-lum spotlight, a loud speaker, and a flashing strobeacon. That last one is designed to visually alert nearby aircraft to the presence of the drone. And that's a vital function if you're flying the thing during, say, a search and rescue operation or near helicopters during fire suppression.

Although these are the accessories announced today, We can expect more in the future, presumably whatever the enterprise needs for a given use case. And the tech specs are pretty good. The Mavic 2 Enterprise can fly 31 minutes on one battery and has a top speed of 45 miles per hour. Here's a quote from NGagget. An additional highlight is DJI's onboard AirSense Tech, an integrated receiver that alerts drone pilots of ADSB signals from nearby aircraft via the DJI Pilot Mobile app in real time.

The company describes it as an extra layer of protection for operators who fly in congested airspace or near complicated operations such as wildfire suppression, disaster recovery, and infrastructure monitoring. And for those navigating extreme weather conditions, there's the new self-heating battery for sub-zero temperatures. Ultimately, this is a drone for scalability and rapid deployment. End quote. After the horrific attack on a synagogue this weekend in Pittsburgh, suddenly we're hearing

the word gab pop up because the alleged murderer was a user of the service. But I, for one, had never heard of this gab thing before, so let's dig into what gab is. Gab was founded in 2016 by Andrew Torba, a conservative programmer who wanted to create a social network similar to Twitter but without restrictions on speech. In his announcement posts on Medium, Torba explained that Gab would allow users to post 300 character Gabs, similar to tweets. They'd be able to follow other gabbers, similar to Twitter. Users could up or downvote Gabs, much like the voting system used on Reddit. The site would show the top voted Gabs, and it would also show a chronological home feed rather than one put together by an algorithm. Also in that announcement post, Torba described political correctness as, quote, a cancer on discourse and culture, end quote.

He was reacting to the big social site's policies of removing certain kinds of speech, including hate speech as part of their terms of service. Torba went on to describe these policies as censorship. And then that announcement post takes kind of a big turn. What started out being, you know, a technical explanation of how a new web service works, turned into a massive dump of screenshots depicting various stuff on the web that Torba apparently disagreed with. He also chose to quote Milo Yianopoulos in the closing line of his post, all while repeatedly and explicitly denying that his service was designed for the alt-right. Okay, so who ended up using this service? Well, a lot of them are what many people would call extremists.

Gab became a place where people who were banned from other platforms because of their speech could congregate. Quoting the New York Times here, within months, Gab had become a last refuge for internet scoundrels, a place where those with views considered too toxic for the mainstream could congregate and converse freely. The site's guidelines prohibit threats of violence, but not hateful speech." End quote. On Saturday, the site's hosting provider, Joyant, said it would take the site down for violating its terms of service. Gab went down on Sunday night. And then GoDaddy, which was the registrar providing their three-letter domain name, informed Gab that it had 24 hours to move

someplace else. GoDaddy said it did this after reviewing the site and finding content that promoted violence. Incidentally, Google had already banned Gab's app from the Play Store last year, and Apple never approved the GAB app in the first place. Also this weekend, the payment platform Stripe froze Gab's account for violating Stripe's terms of service. Gab has a Gab Pro membership level in which users can pay the service directly and used Stripe to process those payments. PayPal also closed Gab's account and issued this statement, quote, when a site is allowing the perpetuation of hate, violence, or discriminatory intolerance, we take immediate and decisive action, end quote. After the mass shooting in Pittsburgh, Gab released a statement saying it, quote, unequivocally

disavows and condemns all acts of terrorism and violence, end quote. The Gab service is currently offline, but the website does show a statement from Torba explaining his take on the situation and promising to bring the site back soon. And I'll end this bit with another quote from the New York Times. Quote, asked if Gab would be changing any of its policies in response to the mass shooting, Mr. Torba gave an unequivocal answer. Absolutely not. End quote. That's it for today's show.

You can follow me on Twitter at Chris Higgins. Brian will be back with you tomorrow to cover that big Apple event in Brooklyn. My prediction? iPads. All the great iPads. Big iPads, little iPads, medium iPads, accessories for iPads. If we're lucky, I think we'll see a bunch of Mac models updated with spec bumps, and maybe even a rethink of the good old Mac Mini,

which as of this recording has not been updated for 1,474 days. You know, I have nieces and nephews younger than the current Mac Mini, and they can talk, and they can talk to Siri. Yai! Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.