Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/13 – China To Do NFT’s, Minus The Blockchain

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 for Thursday, January 13th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple is indeed removing wordal clones, but PubG sues them for not removing what they allege are clones of their game. Does Google Analytics run afoul of GDPR? China is going to do NFTs, but not on the blockchain. And will the new NeuroBot bring me my burrito? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple has confirmed it removed several wordel clones for. the App Store, quoting Bloomberg. As of Wednesday, the only remaining product on the App Store with that title appeared to be Wordle! Exclamation Point, a time-based game created by Stephen

Starting point is 00:01:19 Kravada more than five years ago. Apple confirmed the move to Bloomberg. Werdel games began to take off in the App Store in recent weeks, buoyed by a specific version that's caught on with entertainers. Created in October by former Reddit Software Engineer Josh Wardle, It's available to play once a day on his website and doesn't have an app for mobile users. But like named games have soared on the app store. Downloads of Cravada's Wordle, exclamation point, rose nearly to 40,000 in the week of January 1st, up 850% from the week before, according to the mobile data and analytics firm App Annie. It reached the top 10 among all word games in seven countries and was number one among word games in Ireland as of January 8th.

Starting point is 00:02:03 Wordle, exclamation point, is currently number four among word games in the U.S. App Store, end quote. I really like the fact that the dev that created a similarly named game five years ago is benefiting sort of like how microcap stocks sometimes rise because they accidentally have a similar ticker symbol to another actually hot stock. Normally, I might not have selected this to talk about, but given what we just spoke about, I find it interesting that Crafton, which makes Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, is suing Apple and Google, arguing that neither company has removed a game from their app stores that allegedly copies PubG. That's how I say it, right?

Starting point is 00:02:51 Gamers, PubG, quoting Reuters. Krafton Incorporated alleged Monday in a Los Angeles federal court complaint that Garina Online's Free Fire Games copy several copyrighted aspects of PubG battlegrounds, including its game structure and in-game items, equipment, and locations. Released in 2017, Battlegrounds was one of the first and most successful Battle Royale games, a popular genre that now includes Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone. Korea-based Crafton's complaint said Battlegrounds has sold more than 75 million copies. The complaint said Garina, owned by Singapore-based C, began selling Free Fire

Starting point is 00:03:28 through Apple and Google's App Stores in 2017, and started selling another infringing game called Free Fire Max last year. According to Crafton, Apple and Google have distributed hundreds of millions of copies of the Free Fire Games. The complaint says Garina generated more than $100 million in revenue from free fire sales in the U.S. in the first three months of 2021. Crafton also named Google's YouTube as a defendant for allegedly hosting videos of Free Fire gameplay, as well as a Chinese film that Crafton says is a live-action dramatization of its game. Kraften said it asked Guerrina, Apple, and Google to stop selling the Free Fire Games in December to no avail. It asks the court to block sales of the Free Fire Games in addition to requesting damages that include the company's profits from Free Fire Sales, end quote. It strikes me that this could end up being a pretty big deal. Austria's Data Protection Watchdog has upheld a decision that a local website using Google Analytics violates GDPR,

Starting point is 00:04:30 a potential issue for U.S. cloud-based services and, well, I mean, you know, most websites, right? Quoting TechCrunch. The decision raises a big red flag over routine use of tools that require transferring European's personal data to the U.S. for processing, with the watchdog finding that IP addresses and identifiers and cookie data are the personal data of site visitors, meaning these transfers fall under the purview of EU data protection law. In this specific case, an IP address anonymization function had not been properly implemented on the website. But regardless of that technical wrinkle, the regulator found IP address data to be personal data given the potential for it to be combined, like a puzzle piece with other digital data to identify a visitor.

Starting point is 00:05:14 Consequently, the Austrian DPA found that the website in question, a health-focused site called netdoctor.at, which had been exporting visitors data to the U.S. as a result of implementing Google Analytics had violated Chapter 5 of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, which deals with data transfers out of the block. U.S. intelligence services use certain online identifiers, such as the IP address or unique identification numbers, as a starting point for the surveillance of individuals. The regulator notes in the decision via a machine translation of the German language text, adding, quote, in particular, it cannot be excluded that these intelligence services have already

Starting point is 00:05:55 collected information with the help of which the data transmitted here can be traced back to the person of the complainant, end quote. In researching its conclusion, the regulator assessed various measures Google said it had implemented to protect the data in the U.S. such as encryption at rest in its data centers or its claim that the data, quote, must be considered as pseudonymous, but did not find sufficient safeguards had been put in place to effectively block U.S. intelligence services from accessing the data as required to meet the GDPR standard. The DPA's wholesale dismissal of any legally relevant impact of the bundle of aforementioned technical and organizational measures, such as standard encryption, which were cited by Google to try to fend off the complaint, is significant because such claims are the prevailing tactic used by U.S.-based cloud giants to try to massage compliance and ensure EU-to-U.S. data transfers continue so they can continue business as usual. So if this tactic is getting called out here as a result of a single website's use of Google Analytics,

Starting point is 00:06:55 it can and will be sanctioned by EU regulators elsewhere. After all, Google Analytics is everywhere online, end quote. I guess we're getting this flood of data points because it is the turn of a new year, and if your data folks, you're going to data, right, you're going to do your thing, I guess. Two more data points to make note of today. First, according to Canales, Worldwide PC. shipments grew 15% year over year in 2021 to 341 million units, the highest annual number since 2012. Apple shipped 28.3% more units, Acer, 21.8% more, and Dell 18%. Quoting TechCrunch.

Starting point is 00:07:40 As Canales, senior analyst Ishan Dutt pointed out, PCs had a great year in spite of chip supply issues, and he sees PCs as firmly entrenched as part of our work and leisure lives, with it becoming the norm to have multiple PCs in the same home in developed areas of the world. For the market to post double-digit growth over an impressive 2020, despite the constant cloud of supply chain constraints, speaks volumes about how strong PC demand has been over the last 12 months. Taking a long-term view, the most important development in 2021 was the large increase in PC penetration and usage rates, he said in a statement. In terms of market share, Lenovo and HP were the clear winners with 24.1 and 21.7 percent, respectively. Dell was third with 17.4% with Apple, fourth, with 8.5%. Although chip shortages

Starting point is 00:08:28 are expected to persist into the new year, there is speculation that the education market may be saturated. Canales still believes that 2022 will be a strong year for PC sales, though. In fact, Canada's analyst Rubash Dashi says the market would likely have been bigger in 2021, if not for the supply issues. Quote, the primary reason we are in a shortage situation is that demand is out stripping supply. It is definitely true that had the supply situation been better, the PC industry would have grown faster and be even bigger, Doshi told me, end quote. And back to the app market, Censor Tower says Instagram became the world's most downloaded app in Q4 of 2021. That app's best quarter since 2014, with installs up 10% quarter over quarter, followed by TikTok and Facebook.

Starting point is 00:09:21 TechCrunch again. Instagram is benefiting from TikTok's ban in India and has now claim the top spot in terms of total global downloads as of the fourth quarter of 2021. In fact, Q4, 2021 was only the second time in the past two years that TikTok wasn't the number one app by worldwide downloads, the firm says. The only other time TikTok dropped from its top position during that time was at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when Zoom beat TikTok to become the number one app by downloads in Q2 of 2020. Instagram's move to the top of the global non-game app market comes from an increase in installs from Android users specifically. For the second quarter in a row, meta-owned apps claimed both the number one and number two spots on the chart of the top

Starting point is 00:10:06 Google Play apps by worldwide downloads. Instagram was number one in the quarter followed by Facebook. TikTok, meanwhile, was number three. On the chart showing the most downloaded apps on the Apple App Store, things look a lot different. Here, TikTok and YouTube continue to hold the number one and number two positions respectively, spots they've held since Q2 2020. In Q4, TikTok surpassed 50 million app store installs for the eighth straight quarter in a row, sensor tower says. The rest of the top five was rounded out by meta's apps with WhatsApp at number three, Instagram number four, and Facebook number five. Meanwhile, an unusual appearance by China's national anti-fraud center app took the number six spot after being promoted by an in-state sponsored campaign. The rest of the list is filled out with the

Starting point is 00:10:51 typical selection of social, chat, and entertainment apps, end quote. Speaking of China, China is going to get into NFTs. China's state-backed blockchain services network, or BSN, is going to roll out infrastructure to support NFTs, but here's the catch. The NFTs will not be linked to cryptocurrencies, quoting the South China Morning Post. China's state-backed blockchain services network, BSN, plans to roll out infrastructure at the end of this month to support the deployment of non-fundible tokens. NFTs, a major step to creating a Chinese NFT industry that is not linked to cryptocurrencies.

Starting point is 00:11:31 Although Beijing has banned cryptocurrencies, he Yafan, chief executive of red date technology, which provides technical support to BSN, told the South China Morning Post that NFTs, quote, have no legal issue in China, as long as they distance themselves from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The infrastructure named the BSN distributed digital certificate to differentiate it from crypto-transacted NFTs will offer application programming interfaces for businesses or individuals so they can build their own user portals or apps to manage NFTs. Only Chinese Yuan is allowed for purchases and service fees. NFTs in China will see annual output in the billions in the future, Yifan said in in an interview. NFTs are launched and traded on public blockchains, which are decentralized platforms

Starting point is 00:12:16 that provide access to anyone wanting to write and read data. However, public chains, quote, are illegal in China, end quote, as the state requires all internet systems to verify user identities and permit the regulator to intervene in the event of, quote, illegal activities, Yifun said. As such, red date turned to a solution called the Open Permissioned Chain, an adapted version that can be governed by a designated group. BSN, the NFT project's underlying platform backed by state-owned China Mobile, China Union Pay, and State Information Center, has already localized more than 20 public chains since its 2018 debut. He said that BSN-D-C will integrate 10 chains, including the adapted version of Ethereum and Korda, plus domestic ones like Fisco B-COS, initiated by Tencent-backed FinTech firm Weebank. Although NFTs are not illegal in China, several big tech companies have chosen to call their NFT projects digital collectibles for compliance reasons.

Starting point is 00:13:14 Ant Group, the FinTech affiliate of post-owner Alibaba Group holding and Tencent Holdings, were the first Chinese tech giants to embrace NFTs, launching dozens. of products since last summer. JD.com and Baidu followed with their own digital collectibles. Even state-run media, Genoa News Agency, jumped on the bandwagon, giving away more than 100,000 digital collectibles on Christmas Eve, end quote. So that's interesting because of, of course, the unique situation for crypto in China, but it does also suggest an argument that I've been hearing made increasingly this month,

Starting point is 00:13:48 i.e. that for all of the energy around decentralized technology, what if the blockchain itself is holding these ideas back? What if some of these ideas would be better off-off-chain? The slavish adherence to crypto-idealism might be blinkering or at least hobbling some projects. This argument is summed up as ever by the great Dar Obisancho, who tweeted about this exact story by saying, quote, China is building a state-backed NFT platform that will not use blockchain, but instead will be based on the new BSN distributed digital certificate infrastructure. I just wrote about how I think NFTs have product market fit, but the tech sucks. Seems China agrees.

Starting point is 00:14:27 The core idea of digital goods with provenance makes a bunch of sense. However, a slow and expensive ledger of transactions that doesn't even provide a cryptographically signed version of the item being sold, enforce IP rights or define meaningful interchange formats, is Bush League, end quote. Finally today, checking in on my, when can I get a burrito delivered to me for lunch by a Death Star Ankle robot wager. Nero has unveiled its new autonomous delivery bot, and this seems to be their big swing at mass adoption. It even has external airbags so that if it runs into you, it doesn't harm you, or it, I guess. Quoting TechCrunch.

Starting point is 00:15:14 The startup, which has raised more than $2.13 billion since former Google engineers Dave Ferguson, and Ja-Jun-Ju founded the company in June 2016, unveiled a third-generation electric autonomous delivery vehicle designed for commercial operations and manufactured in partnership with B.YD. North NERO has dropped the alpha-numeric nomenclature, R-1 and then R2, for this delivery bot that is designed to haul packages, not people. Instead, the vehicle is called Nuro, a self-titled album of sorts meant to introduce the robot to the masses, and a name that illustrates where this flagship model sits within the company. If it's not clear, the Nero is at the top.

Starting point is 00:15:53 The Nero bot is not a sidewalk delivery bot. This new generation and all of Nero's previous iterations are meant for the road. The new NeroBot, which has twice the cargo volume of the previous model, customizable storage and temperature-controlled compartments to keep items warm or cool, is an automotive production-grade vehicle. This means the bot is designed and produced to handle the toils one might expect a delivery vehicle to endure, including weather, potholes, human abuse, and long hours on the road.

Starting point is 00:16:19 The neurodelivery bot also contains safety features which are designed to protect people like pedestrians and cyclists who might encounter the vehicle. The vehicle is equipped with several types of sensors including cameras, radar, lightar, and thermal cameras to provide a 360-degree view that has built-in redundancy in case one fails. One notable item is an exterior airbag that will deploy at the vehicle where to come into contact with a person or other object. Initially, the company used modified Toyota Prius sedans for testing, as well as for pilot grocery deliveries in Arizona and Texas. The company transitioned in December 2018 to the R1, its first step toward a vehicle designed exclusively for packages. Its second-generation vehicle called the R2 was introduced in February 2020. The R2, which was designed and assembled in the U.S. in partnership with Michigan-based Roush Enterprises, was equipped with LiDAR, radar, and cameras

Starting point is 00:17:10 to give the, quote-unquote, driver, a 360-degree view of its surroundings. However, it was missing a few features typically required by the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. After three years of working with regulators, Nero received a driverless exemption from the NHTSA for its R2 vehicle. The exemption allows the vehicle to operate, even though it doesn't have side-view mirrors, a windshield, and a rear-view camera that shuts off when driving forward. Nero has also received all of the necessary approvals and permits to operate an autonomous vehicle delivery service that can charge customers in California. The new NuroBot is the final step, at least for now, towards its commercial goals, end quote. Today I learned that Nero has

Starting point is 00:17:53 more than 1,200 employees, and has existing partnerships with 7-11 CVS pharmacies, Dominoes, FedEx, Kroger grocery stores, and Walmart. No word on when or where these bots will be deployed first, and, you know, I'm not in California, but Nero, I'd be happy to be a PR stunt first delivery for you. The best burrito place here in Park Slope is Fat Daddy Taco. You just got to bring it up 9th Street, and I'll meet you at the Lafayette Memorial right there at the entrance to the park. I have a whole slew of calls to jump on this afternoon, but I'm trying to block out some completely uninterrupted time to watch the final episode of Station 11. Today, HBO Max, if you're listening, I know. this was a limited series. I know there's only one book this is all based off of, but I would

Starting point is 00:18:50 watch these characters do anything. If you could find it in your heart to somehow do another season, even another few episodes. I know, for example, half of the whole Jeevan storyline wasn't in the book, and that turned out so well. So, you know, more episodes, please. Most art these days I consume distracted or half interested. This is the one new thing in the last decade that has completely absorbed me. So look into your heart, as my park slope neighbor, John Totoro once said in maybe my second favorite movie of all time. Look into your heart.

Starting point is 00:19:25 I'm begging you. Talk to you tomorrow. It's the wrong situation. They're giving us different people that we are. Well, not muscle, Tom. I never killed anybody. I used a little information for a chisel. That's all.

Starting point is 00:19:36 It's my nature, Tom. I can't help. If somebody hears me and angle, I play it, I don't deserve to die for that. Look at your heart. I'm praying to you Look in your heart I'm praying to you

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/13 – China To Do NFT’s, Minus The Blockchain

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