Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/07 – Yes, There’s A Tech Angle To Yesterday’s Events…

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Some stuff happened yesterday at the US Capital, and there’s a tech angle to it. Is SolarWinds just the beginning of the supply chain compromises? There’s new wi-fi coming that is faster and broader. Did the Georgia runoff mean the floodgates are now open for tech antitrust? And what the final segment pre-supposes is: putting a 55 inch display inside a car is a good idea. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com Liftoff.to Links: Twitter and Facebook Lock Trump’s Accounts After Violence on Capitol Hill (NYTimes) Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking (NYTimes) SuperData: Games grew 12% to $139.9 billion in 2020 amid pandemic (VentureBeat) Wi-Fi industry launches next-gen 6E certification, and new devices are up next (CNET) Democrats have won the Senate. Here’s what it means for tech. (Protocol) Mercedes-Benz unveils its absolutely massive 56-inch ‘Hyperscreen’ display (The Verge) 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 for Thursday, January 7th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Yes, there is a tech angle to what happened at the U.S. Capitol yesterday. Is solar wins just the beginning of the supply chain compromises we need to be worried about? There's new Wi-Fi coming

that is faster and broader. Did the Georgia runoff mean the floodgates are now open for tech antitrust? And what the final segment presupposes is, putting a 55-inch-inch-inch-ditch. display inside a car is a good idea. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So, did anything happen after I pressed publish on the show yesterday? Yeah. Well, there is a tech angle to everything that happened because, of course, there is. I mean, social media is how we experience events like yesterday's, and shoot, social media is what enables events like that to happen to a large degree these days. At the time of this writing, President Trump's Twitter and Facebook accounts are locked, quoting the New York Times. Twitter said Mr. Trump's

account would remain locked for 12 hours, and the ban could be extended if several of his tweets that rejected the election results and appeared to incite violence were not deleted. Mr. Trump's account will be permanently suspended if he continues violating Twitter's policies against violent threats and election misinformation, the company added. Twitter said the risks of keeping Mr. Trump's commentary live on its site had become too high, quote, our public interest policy, which has guided our enforcement action in this area for years, ends where we believe the risk of harm is higher, a spokesman said. Facebook later followed by barring Mr. Trump from publishing on the social network for 24 hours

after finding that he had violated the company's rules with two posts, a Facebook spokesman said. Instagram, the photo sharing site owned by Facebook, said it would also lock Mr. Trump's account for 24 hours, end quote. Also, President Trump's Snapchat account is suspended. Facebook and YouTube removed that video that the president posted from the Rose Garden yesterday. Facebook said it risked adding to violence. YouTube said it violated election rules. As Andrew Ross Sorkin tweeted, So Trump has access to the nuclear codes, but he can't tweet or post to Facebook, end quote.

And I will fully admit that the recent Solar Winds hack has radicalized me in terms of making me way more concerned about digital security these days. But I also want to note that I see. saw a lot of tweets like these last night from the security folks that I've started following in the past few weeks. Here's Gillis Jones on Twitter, quote, every single piece of hardware in Congress needs to be replaced. Nothing can be trusted, end quote. He's suggesting that agents of foreign governments might have taken advantage of the chaos yesterday to go in and physically introduce vulnerabilities to hardware inside the Congress. But given the effectiveness, of Capitol Hill security, as we saw it demonstrated yesterday, something tells me that if Russia or

China or whomever wanted to swap out a congressperson's laptop or something like that, that probably never required any sort of Mission Impossible style operation to do so anyway. Now, as I was editing that segment, news just broke that Facebook will be blocking President Trump from posting to his Facebook and Instagram accounts for the next two weeks, or, in other words, the remainder of his presidential term. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the block on the president's accounts will remain in place, quote, indefinitely, and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete, end quote. I've been radicalized by the solar winds hack because I think it's gotten lost in everything else that has been going on recently, or at least maybe

there have been so many hacks over the years that people just can't pay attention anymore. But again, so far as we know, basically the digital systems of the entire U.S. government have been infiltrated, have been compromised. That's a huge deal, right? And that's just the government. Should we also assume that most of the Fortune 500 have been infiltrated as well? Also, the way we think this was possible points to a changing threat landscape. U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating jet brains as a possible entry point for the solar winds hackers, quoting the New York Times. Officials are investigating whether the company, founded by three Russian engineers in the Czech Republic, with research labs in Russia, was breached and used as a pathway for hackers to insert

backdoors into the software of an untold number of technology companies. Security experts warn that the months-long intrusion could be the biggest breach of United States networks in history. Jet brains, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 companies as customers is used by developers at 300,000 businesses. One of them is Solar Winds, the company based in Austin, Texas, whose network management software played a central role in allowing hackers into government and private networks. JetBrains said on Wednesday that it was not aware of being under investigation nor was it aware of any compromise. The exact software that investigators are examining is a JetBrains product called Team City, which allows developers to test and exchange software code before it's

release. By compromising Team City or exploiting gaps in how customers use the tool, cybersecurity experts say the Russian hackers could have inconspicuously planted backdoors in an untold number of JetBrains clients. Because Team City is so widely deployed, experts said, it is imperative to determine whether its software contains a vulnerability or if attackers exploited Team City customers via stolen passwords or gaps in unpatched outdated software, end quote. At some point in the life of this podcast, I see, said, shouldn't we just assume that foreign spies are probably embedded and work in every tech company of any prominence? And after I said that, I got DMs to the tune of, yeah, Brian.

That's an open secret in the tech industry, but that's why no one wants to talk about it. Everybody knows it's going on, but no one really wants to know to what degree it is going on. But anyway, in this particular case, I wanted you devs out there to be aware, as a friend of the show, Parker Thompson tweeted, quote, what a bummer for fans of great IDEs. Back to them. And I said several times last year that gaming has become a bigger, more important industry than a lot of people appreciate. And gaming clearly is another one of those things that got accelerated by the COVID times we've been living through. Proof of that in data from a super data report that says the US game industry grew 12% year over year to a $139.9 billion industry in 2020.

Console games rose 28% and yet growth in the industry overall is projected to slow to 2% in 2021. Quoting Venture Beat. The pandemic shaped the game market in 2020 as players stayed home and went online to interact with people. Over half of U.S. residents, 55% played games during the first phase of COVID-19 lockdowns as events like pro sports and seeing movies and theaters became unavailable. Free-to-play games continued to generate the vast majority of revenue, 78% with Asian markets accounting for 59% of free-to-play earnings. Hardcore mobile games continued to appeal to players in Asia, honor of kings and peacekeeper elite, both Tencent titles, each generated over $2 billion during the year. On top of that, gaming video content or GVC

became a $9.3 billion industry in 2020, reaching 1.2 billion viewers. Game videos for Among Us helped that game become one of the most popular of all time. Overall, digital games alone earned $12.6.6 billion in 2020 up 12% year-over-year. For 2020, game earnings were up just 6% year-over year in January and February, but then jumped to 14% for the rest of the year. As COVID-19, lockdowns took effect worldwide in March, game spending, took off and never let up. The mobile market experienced 10% growth in 2020 and accounted for 58% of the total games market. That means that even while people were in lockdown, they chose to use mobile devices over PCs and consoles while they were in their homes, end quote.

The Wi-Fi Alliance today has launched its Wi-Fi 6E certification program for devices that can transmit in the 6 gigahertz band, thereby paving the way for all sorts of new gadgets that can make use of this super wide spectrum, quoting CNET. The move arrives just in time for CES 2021 and sets the stage for a flood of new next-gen devices capable of tapping into a massive swath of additional bandwidth at the fastest speeds Wi-Fi is currently capable of. Those speeds come by way of Wi-Fi 6, which began rolling out as the latest and greatest version of Wi-Fi in 2019.

Wi-Fi 6E builds on that standard without replacing it outright. by adding in access to the 6 gigahertz band, which the FCC opened for unlicensed use in a unanimous vote last year. With enough spectrum to accommodate 7 160 megahertz channels at once, that 6 gigahertz band is much wider than the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands most Wi-Fi users are already familiar with. And without any older generation devices slowing things down, it'll act as sort of an exclusive superhighway for devices equipped to take advantage. In addition to interoperability, Wi-Fi-certified focuses on standardizing security protocols. For instance, with Wi-Fi 6E devices will be required to support the latest protocol,

WPA3, which promises better defense against attempts to brute force your network's password, among other improvements. You can expect to see a steady stream of names jumping on the Wi-Fi 6E bandwagon in 2021. One of the first, as far as phones are concerned, will likely be Samsung. The Korean conglomerate was an early adopter of Wi-Fi 6 with its Galaxy S-10 lineup, and it stands to be one of the first to embrace Wi-Fi 6E as well, end quote. Yeah, maybe as soon as a week from today as that unpacked event is scheduled to occur. You know, I try to avoid politics generally on the show,

but we need to talk about the fact that the Democrats won control of the Senate. because for the last few months the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley was, yeah, we'd probably see a Democratic president, but as long as Congress was divided, it was unlikely that much of the status quo would be meaningfully disrupted, at least in terms of regulation and legislation. Well, protocol has a look at what is now possible or even possibly likely, now that Democrats are running the show. First of all, remember, it was the Democrats that were the most aggressive. with antitrust stuff, quote, antitrust reform actually has a shot in the 117th Congress,

and Democrats have already put together a 449-page report laying out their game plan. Conversations about updating centuries-old trust-busting statutes will likely begin with that blueprint from Representative David Cicillene, which claims big tech has, quote, monopoly power and should be broken up. Cicillane campaigned aggressively for President-elect Joe Biden and made. maintains close relationships on his transition team. While he won't be able to get all of his biggest ideas through a narrowly divided Senate, which still requires 60 votes for most legislation, even moderate Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar have said it's time to overhaul antitrust laws

for the digital age. Reforms could include making it harder for big tech to acquire potential rivals and passing new rules around how corporations can muscle into new markets. At the very least, Congress is more likely than ever to inject real money into the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to support their antitrust lawsuits against the tech giants. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell will likely become the new chair of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee if she wants it. If she does, she'll no doubt elevate her Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, a comprehensive federal privacy framework that she first introduced last year. Earlier this year, Cantwell criticized the array of other privacy bills in Congress,

particularly those from her Republican counterparts on the committee. Quote, these bills allow companies to maintain the status quo, varying important disclosure information in long contracts, hiding where consumer data is sold, and changing the use of consumer data without their consent, she said. Cobra would give users the right to see and delete any personal information that companies have amassed about them and require tech companies to clearly explain what they are doing with user's data. It also includes provisions that would allow individuals to sue companies over privacy violations and enable states to pass their own separate privacy legislation. Those line items

will certainly spur partisan wrangling and invite significant pushback from tech giants who have consistently argued that federal legislation should override state laws. Those line items will certainly spar partisan wrangling and invite significant pushback from tech giants who have consistently argued that federal legislation should override. state laws. And Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have pledged to focus on civil rights across all policy areas, and tech won't be any exception. It's safe to expect that Congress will work to tackle issues including discriminatory algorithms and biased facial recognition technology over the next year, especially considering Harris herself, has signed on to legislation

that would tackle racial bias in AI, end quote. Also likely on the agenda, expanding high-skilled immigration, which is something that tech actually wants. And also, if any reform happens around Section 230 over the next couple of years, the piece says it's likely it'll be just that. A reform, not a repeal, as some Republicans have been pushing for. Finally, today, screen sizes in our home are routinely in the 50 inches and larger category for TVs these days. Thus, as we discussed recently, the desire to create decisions. displays that you can somehow stow away when not needed. But would you want a 50-inch display in your car? Maybe as the dashboard or even as, heck, the whole dash? Could you even fit a 50-inch display in a car?

I mean, that famous Tesla touchscreen is a 15-incher. The Cadillac Escalade has a 14.2-inch display, but then again, you could fit a lot inside an Escalade. And then hold Mercedes-Benz's beer because they've unverselyer. a massive 56-inch, what they are calling a hyper-screen display, to debut in their upcoming EQS luxury electric car. Quoting The Verge. To be sure, the hyperscreen isn't one screen, but several displays embedded in one solid piece of curved glass that spans the entire dash. Based on early images, there appear to be at least three screens embedded in the display, an instrument cluster behind the steering column, a central infatement screen, and an additional screen facing the front passenger. Mercedes says the hyperscreen will include something called zero layers

in which the user no longer has to scroll through a variety of submenus or give voice commands, quote, as the most important applications are always available in a situational and contextual way at the top of the driver's field of vision, end quote. The automaker provided a couple of examples, including if you always call one particular person on the way home on Tuesday evenings, you will be asked to make a corresponding call on that day of the week and that specific time of day. A business card appears with their contact information and if it's stored, their photo will appear. All MBUX suggestions are linked to the user's profile. If someone else drives the EQS on a Tuesday evening, this recommendation would not be made

or another one is made, depending on the preferences of the other user. The hyperscreen will include a total of 12 actuators beneath the touch-sensitive surface for haptic feedback. Two coatings of the cover plate are said to reduce reflections and make cleaning easier. The curved glass itself consists of particularly scratch-resistant aluminum silicate, and analog air vents are embedded in the surface at either end, offering an interesting blend of the digital and the physical, end quote. The EQS isn't being released until later this year, but it's coming with Mercedes's second-gen MbUX infotainment system, which I just mentioned, which goes completely buttonless in favor of relying heavily on voice controls.

Also a fingerprint sensor on the touchscreen, and voice recognition will allow the car to recognize drivers and automatically adjust things like seat settings, interior lighting color, favorite radio station, more, depending on who's doing the piloting. There's also apparently an option with cameras for face recognition as well. Busy day today, because I got to head out to Jersey to do that videotaping I told you about, My first business trip since March. If there are any fun pictures from my journey, I'll post them on Twitter.

At Brian MCC, of course. I'm legitimately jazzed to be traveling again, like giddy, like a little school kiddie. What a weird year it's been. Talk to you tomorrow.