Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/10 – Streaming $$$+

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, August 10th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Oh, why not? Disney Plus is raising prices too. A new executive order targeting Chinese tech from the Biden administration, new features in threads, but not the ones they need. Are the robot card shufflers in Vegas easily hackable? And we did the flip. Now the Galaxy Z Fold 5 review. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Let no streaming service be left behind in the big price hikes. of 2023. Disney says it plans to raise U.S. prices of Disney Plus premium, Hulu without ads, and ESPN Plus, and also to expand Disney Plus ad-supported plans to Canada and nine European

Starting point is 00:01:20 countries, quoting variety. As of October 12th, Disney Plus Premium with no ads will jump 277% rising from 1099 to 1399 per month for U.S. customers. Hulu without ads will increase 20% from 1499 to 1799 a month. The price for Disney Plus. and Hulu standalone ad-supported tiers will remain at $7.99 a month each, and with the bundle of the two still $9.99 per month. In addition, the monthly price of the two Hulu Plus live TV packages will each go up by $7 as of October 12. The plans with ads increases to $7699. The tier with no ads on VOD rises to $8999, and ESPN Plus pricing will increase by $1 from $999 to $10.99 per month. Since long, launching the ad-supported version of Disney Plus in the U.S. in December 2020. The company has

Starting point is 00:02:12 signed up 3.3 million customers for the plan. CEO Bob Eiger said on the earnings call Wednesday. Iger also said that Disney will be exploring new ways of cracking down on illicit password sharing and plans to, quote, rollout tactics sometime in 2024. He declined to quantify how widespread the issue is, but said it was, quote, significant. For American customers, it's the second price hike in less than a year for Disney Plus premium after going up by $3 per month in December 2022 when the version with ads debuted in the U.S. at 1399 per month, it will have doubled from the original $6.99 per month introductory price four years ago. The price of Hulu without ads last increased in October 2022. At the same time, Disney is aggressively trying to push customers

Starting point is 00:02:52 into streaming bundles. Ahead of those price hikes, Disney on September 6 will launch a new ad-free bundled subscription plan with Disney Plus and Hulu for 1999 a month, a 37% discount from the standalone plans. Eiger has expressed his belief that Disney Plus's pricing has been way off. In May, he said the company would raise the price of Disney Plus premium this year, quote, to better reflect the value of our content offerings. He also said an integrated Hulu Disney Plus app experience is on deck for customers who take both services, end quote. President Joe Biden has signed an executive order banning U.S. investments in some Chinese companies developing advanced semiconductors and quantum computers starting in 2024, quoting the Wall Street

Starting point is 00:03:38 Journal. Beyond banning new private equity, venture capital, and joint venture investments in advanced semiconductors and quantum computers, the executive order will also require Americans doing business in China to inform the U.S. government about direct investments in artificial intelligence and other types of semiconductors. Washington is increasingly concerned that Beijing could use American technology and know-how to develop weapons that could be used against the U.S. in a military conflict. The Biden administration last year restricted exports of advanced semiconductors and chip manufacturing equipment to China, and the U.S. has also heightened scrutiny of Chinese investments in American technology companies. Even ahead of their release, the new capital controls have started to

Starting point is 00:04:16 reshape U.S. investor behavior. Venture capital funds Sequoia Capital split off its China business earlier this year after persistent scrutiny in Washington. Other firms have slowed or paused transactions in China as they await the new rules, according to people familiar with their thinking. The new investment restrictions risk free-freezing and attempted thaw in diplomacy between the two superpowers. Biden administration officials cast the rules as narrowly targeted attempts to protect national security. Still officials in Beijing say they are aimed at kneecapping China's economic growth and development. Chinese leader Xi Jinping complained to Biden about the export controls on semiconductors last year, and China banned its major companies from buying technology from micron technology,

Starting point is 00:04:59 the largest memory chipmaker in the U.S. earlier this year. A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington said China was, quote, very disappointed. The U.S. moved forward with the investment restrictions, end quote. Related, remember when NVIDIA had that, like, historic, insane blowout sales quarter last quarter? This might have contributed to that, I'm guessing. Sources are telling the financial times that Baidu, Bightdance, Tencent, and Alibaba, all Chinese tech companies, of course, have made orders collectively worth $5 billion to acquire Nvidia chips because they're worried the U.S. will clamp down on the export of those chips sometime soon. Better grab what you can now if you plan to do any AI stuff in the near term, I guess.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Meta has rolled out the ability to let users verify their threads profiles on other social media platforms like Mastodon, using the rel me link, R-E-L-E-L-E-L-E-E-S-E-S-I. Sorry, it sounds dumb when I have to verbalize code out loud, quoting the verge. Meta has rolled out the ability to verify a link to... your threads profile on social media platforms like Mastodon, according to a threads post from Instagram head Adam Masseri. To be clear, this isn't a free way to get a blue checkmark next to your thread's name. You'll probably need to pay meta to get one of those. Instead, this new feature helps you prove on other platforms that a threads profile that you link to is one that you own, but it also represents something bigger, an actual threads feature from meta that

Starting point is 00:06:28 connects with decentralized social media. I got this to work in just a few minutes on my Massadon profile, meaning that a URL to my threads account now has a green checkmark. Mouseri announced the update as part of a thread about some other new features announced on Wednesday. We've also rolled out thread support for rel equals me links to help you verify your identity on platforms like Macedon, Maseri said. You can now add your threads profile link on supported platforms to verify your identity, end quote. I'll admit that I didn't know what rel equals me me links were when I read Moseeri's post, so I found a Macedon support page that explained how they work. If you put an HTPS link in your profile metadata, Macedon checks if that link resolves to a

Starting point is 00:07:08 web page that links back to your Macedon profile with a special rel equals me attribute, according to the document. So you get a verification checkmark next to that link since you are confirmed as the owner, end quote. If your eyes are glazing over, reading all that, never fear. I found it was ultimately pretty straightforward to make my Macedon account show a verified checkmark for my threads profile. Here's how I did it. On my threads profile, I changed my featured link to be. be my Macedon profile URL. Then on my Massadon profile profile, I changed one of the featured links to be my Threads profile URL. After I saved that change, my Macedon profile profile URL, success, end quote. Mark Zuckerberg himself is also saying that Threads plans to add several other new features this

Starting point is 00:07:52 week. Share posts to Instagram DMs is one. A mention button is another, and a way to add custom alt text for media. But dude, if you're not prioritizing desktop and web above all else, it's not really going to move the needle at all for threads usage. Like you should have people sleeping under their desks to work on a web app, Elon style. Did you know that Apple had a case in front of the Supreme Court? I did not. But apparently yesterday, the Supreme Court of the U.S. let Apple keep its app store payment rules for now, rejecting an epic request that would have let developers start directing users to cheaper options. Quoting Bloomberg. Justice Elena Kagan said she wouldn't let a federal appeals court decision take effect immediately as Epic had sought. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of

Starting point is 00:08:43 Appeals said earlier this year that Apple violated California's unfair competition law by limiting the ability of developers to communicate about alternative payment systems, including purchases through the Epic Games store. Kagan, who gave no explanation, is the justice assigned to handle emergency matters from the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit? Kagan's rejection of Epic means Apple will get a reprieve from the Ninth Circuit ruling, though perhaps only a temporary one. The appeals court put its decision on hold to give Apple time to file a Supreme Court appeal later this year, but the ruling will kick in if the justices refuse to hear the case, end quote. This is a bit out of our lane, but the Black Hat security conference is going on in Las Vegas right now,

Starting point is 00:09:27 and I saw this interesting little article about them turning their hacks on Vegas itself. It's fun, so here you go. Researchers at Black Hat have detailed a month's long investigation into Deckmate, the most widely used casino shuffling machine, finding a flaw that allowed them to get full control of such machines. Quoting Wired, they ultimately found that if someone can plug a small device into a USB port on the most modern version of the deckmate, known as the Deckmate 2, which they say often sits under a table next to players' knees with its USB port exposed, that hacking device could alter the shuffler's code to fully hijack the machine and invisibly tamper with its shuffling.

Starting point is 00:10:07 They found that the Deckmate 2 also has an internal camera designed to ensure that every card is present in the deck and that they could gain access to that camera to learn the entire order of the deck in real time, sending the results from their small hacking device via Bluetooth to a nearby phone, potentially held by a partner who could then send coded signals to the cheating player. In sum, their shuffler hacking technique gives a cheater 100% full control,

Starting point is 00:10:31 says Tartaro, who demonstrates IOactive's findings in the video, below, basically allows us to do more or less whatever we want. We can, for example, just read the constant data from the camera so we can know the deck order and when that deck goes out into play. We know exactly the hand that everyone is going to have, end quote. For now, the IOactive researchers say they haven't yet had time to engineer a technique that would cause the deckmate to put the deck in the exact order of their choosing, although they're certain that too would be possible. Regardless, they argue merely knowing the full card order rather than changing it offers an even more practical cheating strategy, one that's far harder to detect. Tartaro says the technique

Starting point is 00:11:09 could be used to cheat in any number of card games, but that it would be particularly powerful in Texas Holden. The popular version of poker played in most casinos, including in the notorious hustler live casino hand. That's because in Texas Holden, knowing the order of a deck would allow someone to predict the exact makeup of everyone's hand, independent of any decisions they make in the game. Even if a dealer cuts the deck before dealing, as most do in high-stakes casino, games, Tartaro says the cheating player would still be able to immediately figure out the order of the cards on the top of the deck and in every player's hands as soon as the three flap cards are exposed, the public-facing shared cards dealt out at the beginning of a hold-em hand.

Starting point is 00:11:46 The IOW Active team also looked at the earlier model of the deckmate known as the Deckmate 1, which has no external USB port and no internal camera. The researchers say that the earlier model, which was the one actually used in the notorious Hustler Live Casino game, could nonetheless still be hacked to cheat in a game if a rogue casino staffer or maintenance person had an opportunity to open the shuffler's case and access a particular chip that stores its code. In that case, despite the lack of an internal camera, the cheater could still hack the shuffler to reorder cards, or they could simply prevent the deckmate from shuffling the deck when a dealer picks up everyone's cards after a hand,

Starting point is 00:12:22 giving the cheater information about the location of those previously played cards. A skilled player with that little bit of an edge would 100% clean up, says Tartaro, end quote. Finally, the Galaxy Z-Fold 5 reviews are out. I'm not going to quote quite as extensively because I figure the cheaper Flip 5 is what most people will get. Plus, the concerns about the two phones are basically the same. Foldable phones allow for powerful multitasking. We know that. It's great that these new phones have a hinge that folds flat, but this is still pricey, heavy, and clunky,

Starting point is 00:12:58 with unknown durability, quoting the verge. It's easy to measure the difference between the Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold 4 and the Z-Fold 5. 2 millimeters, or 2.4 millimeters to be exact. At its thickest point, last year Z-Fold 4 measured 15.8 millimeters when folded, the Z-Fold 5 uses a new hinge to fold totally flat and measures 13.4 millimeters thick. It's a bit lighter, the screen inside gets a bit brighter, and it includes this year's flagship Qualcomm processor. And that's about it. Samsung isn't pushing the envelope here. It's nudging it forward by the tiniest margin. It's certainly not the phone that will truly take foldables into the mainstream. There's still no dust-resist.

Starting point is 00:13:36 It's still a relatively heavy device, and at $1,800, it still costs a small fortune. These are all major barriers when you consider that any current slab-style flagship will be lighter, more durable, and cost at least $600 less than the Fold 5. If you weren't convinced by the Fold 4, then you shouldn't feel any differently about the Fold 5. Calling the Galaxy Z-Fold 5 a better phone than the Fold 4 feels like a stretch. It's marginally better at most. For most people, it's probably not better than any of the countless slab-style phones you can buy

Starting point is 00:14:04 for much less. The more interesting question is whether the Z-Fold 5 is a better phone than the pixel fold. Generally, it is. I think there's a significant subset of people interested in a folding phone that would be happier with the pixel. If you prefer Google's photo processing over Samsung's, or you dislike the tall and narrow form factor of the Fold 5 when it's closed, then you might be better off with the Pixel Fold. Overall, though, the Fold 5 comes out just ahead. It's meaningfully lighter, which makes a difference when you're using it folded for long periods of time. There are more multitasking options and ways to take advantage of that big inner screen and battery life is better. Those aren't huge differences, but they're important ones when you're talking about

Starting point is 00:14:41 a folding phone. You'll want to get the most out of. Samsung may still have the lead in the foldable race, but the gap is closing. If it wants to stay ahead, it'll have to do more next year than just nip a few millimeters and pop in a new chipset. For now, though, that's just enough, end quote. Last link in the show notes today is to an article from TechCrunch last night profiling the new ride home AI fund. I won't quote from it since it's not news. You already know about it, but the link is there. If you want to read it, talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/10 – Streaming $$$+

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