Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 12/03 – A Law To Turn Crypto Basic?

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

A new bill could regulate crypto in a way that crypto folks say would defeat the point of decentralization. Facebook antitrust could be coming next week. Loon is the first to turn the skies over to artificial intelligence. Hackers are targeting the vaccine rollout. And now, you too can contribute to Street View on Google Maps. Sponsors: Impartner.com/ridehomedemo Liftoff.to Links: US Lawmakers Introduce Bill That Would Require Stablecoin Issuers to Obtain Bank Charters (Coindesk) PhonePe raises $700 million, becomes a separate entity (TechCrunch) FedEx to Buy ShopRunner in Quest for Closer E-Commerce Ties (Bloomberg) U.S. states plan to sue Facebook next week: sources (Reuters) Alphabet’s Loon hands the reins of its internet air balloons to self-learning AI (The Verge) Hackers Are Targeting the Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Cold Chain’ (Wired) Hulu’s Watch Party feature is now available to all subscribers (The Verge) Google Maps now lets you create Street View photos with just a phone (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 ride home for Thursday, December 3rd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, a new bill could regulate crypto in a way that crypto folks say would defeat the point of decentralization in the first place. Facebook antitrusts could be coming as soon as next week. Loon is the first to turn the skies over to artificial intelligence. Hackers are targeting the vaccine rollout. And now you too can contribute to Street View on Google Maps. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would require stable coin issuers to obtain a banking charter, approval from the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve before they can roll out any

further stablecoins, which sounds like a lot of hoops to jump through, but also maybe points the way to this sort of thing becoming government sanctioned and thus becoming mainstreamed, quoting CoinDesk. The three representatives introduced the stablecoin tethering and bank licensing enforcement or Stable Act on Wednesday, writing in a press release that it would focus on regulating stable coins, naming the stable coin of the Facebook-led Libra project, since renamed Diem, as one example. Quote, digital currencies whose value is permanently pegged to or stabilized against a conventional currency like the dollar pose new regulatory challenges while also representing a growing source of the market, liquidity, and credit risk, the press release said.

The 18-page bill would specifically require stablecoin issuers to obtain a banking charter, require approval from the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and bank regulators to issue a stablecoin, require those same entities to conduct an ongoing analysis of any systemic risk, and require issuers to have FDIC insurance or maintain reserves for easy conversion back into U.S. dollars. This would apply to stablecoins pegged to other national or state currencies, the bill said. Rohan Gray, an assistant professor at the Willamette University College of Law, told CoinDesk that the bill is really defining what a deposit is as far as digital assets are concerned.

In his view, stable coins are effectively an internet-native form of a deposit. Quote, any entity that wants to issue something that walks and talks like money, or like a deposit, should be regulated like a depository institution, he said. Gray is an advisor for the bill, end quote. So the crypto folks are absolutely up in arms about this because it basically would charter crypto projects like any other banking project. You'd need the same reporting and reserves in place just to launch a stable coin, just as you would need if you were going to launch a bank. Thus, basically turning crypto projects into the thing that they've always said they've been against. I think I can summarize the pushback by quoting this tweet storm from,

Jeremy Aller, quote. The Stable Act would represent a huge step backwards for digital currency innovation in the United States, limiting the accelerating progress of both the blockchain and fintech industry. Our industry is delivering solutions that materially improve the speed, accessibility, and cost efficiency of payments and banking in the U.S. and around the world. Any act of Congress in this sphere should be focused on embracing, investing in, and supporting the incredible pace of open innovation that is happening with stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure. An enormous amount of the innovation brought to the underbanked and small businesses has been driven by non-bank fintech companies, Stripe, Square, PayPal, Circle, Coinbase, Apple, Google, and

many others. Forcing crypto-finTech and blockchain companies into the enormous regulatory burdens of Federal Reserve and FDIC regulation and supervision is inconsistent with the goals of supporting innovation in the fair and inclusive delivery of payments that comes from stablecoins, end quote. then again, maybe this is just targeting shitcoins. That's an actual term, by the way. Those crypto projects on the murky end of things that basically invent wealth out of thin air, would regulating that end of crypto really be such a bad thing? Phone pay is being spun out as an independent enterprise,

which is worth noting because phone pay is pretty much the crown jewel of Flipkart, which Walmart paid $15 billion to acquire a majority stake in. So think of Flipkart being Walmart's big play in India, and Phone Pay being the big FinTech play of Flipkart, quoting TechCrunch. The partial spinoff, which had been in the works for more than a year, means that Flipkart's stake in phone pay will reduce from 100% to 87%. This partial spinoff gives phone pay access to dedicated long-term capital to pursue our vision of providing financial institutions to billions, said Samir Nagam, founder and chief executive of phone pay. in a statement. Flipkart will remain phone pay's majority shareholder, and the two businesses will

retain their close collaboration, phone pay said. Phone pay, which means on the phone in Hindi, phone pay, which means on the phone in Hindi, currently leads the mobile payments market in India by some metrics. In October, it surpassed Google Pay to become the top UPI payments app. UPI is a four-year-old payments infrastructure built by India's largest banks. It is the most popular way people transact money digitally in India. Phone pay reported 835 million UPI transactions in October ahead of Google pay, which had processed about 820 million transactions that month. In a recent report to clients, analysts at Bernstein identified phone pay as one of the startups in India that could file for an IPO within three years. Phone pay's, quote, reliance on parent flip cart has shrunk from 50% of

monthly transactions to less than 1% today. Phone pay was first to launch on UPI and has extended into new use cases, including travel booking, bill payments, financial services, etc. The company has also launched Switch, which allows users to switch between phone pay and other apps like food, grocery delivery, etc. They wrote, end quote, phone pay, which has amassed over 100 million monthly active users, could look to expand outside of India, the analysts wrote in the report, which was obtained by TechCrunch. Phone Pay and Google Pay Today also compete with Paytm, which is backed by softbank and Alibaba. Paytm, which was privately valued at $16 billion last year when it raised $1 billion, has shifted its attention to cater to merchants in recent quarters as UPI currently offers

no way for companies to make any money on its platform, end quote. FedEx has agreed to buy e-commerce shipping service shoprunner, which will operate as a subsidiary of FedEx services for an undisclosed sum, quoting Bloomberg. The acquisition tightens FedEx's embrace of of surging e-commerce deliveries, adding to earlier moves such as adopting seven-day service and investing in handling large residential packages. ShopRunner allows online shoppers to choose its two-day shipping and free return service for brands, including Bloomingdale's, Sacks, Fifth Avenue, and Under Armour. The deal is part of FedEx's continued efforts to create an open collaborative e-commerce ecosystem that helps merchants deliver seamless experiences for their customers,

said Chief Operating Officer Raj Supermanyam. In the three-month period ending, August 31st sales at FedEx's U.S. ground delivery unit jumped 36% to $7 billion from a year earlier, end quote. As Brian Romella tweeted, quote, Amazon became FedEx to some degree. FedEx becomes Amazon to some degree. All become payment companies to a greater degree in the end. This is the way of it, end quote. Obviously, we'll talk about it when it actually happens, but I'm telling you this now, as a heads up in the interest of keeping you in the know. A source is telling Reuters that a group of more than 40 states, led by New York State, plan to file an antitrust suit against Facebook as early as next week. Quote, the Federal Trade Commission, whose commissioners met on Wednesday, could file a related complaint with an administrative law judge or in district court. It is not known what the state's plan to include in their complaint. One allegation often made against Facebook is that it has strategically sought to buy small,

potential rivals, often at a big premium. These include Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, end quote. Alphabet is transitioning its navigation systems for its fleet of loon, high-altitude balloons, to one controlled by artificial intelligence, making this the first time a commercial aerospace system has been turned over to AI, quoting the verge. Alphabet's Loon, the team responsible for beaming internet down to Earth from stratospheric helium balloons has achieved a new milestone. Its navigation system is no longer run by human design software. Instead, the company's internet balloons are steered around the globe by an artificial intelligence.

In particular, a set of algorithms both written and executed by a deep reinforcement learning-based flight control system that is more efficient and adept than the older human-made one. The system is now managing Lune's fleet of balloons over Kenya, where Loon launched its first commercial internet service in July after testing its fleet in a series of disaster relief initiatives and other test environments for much of the last decade. Similar to how researchers have achieved breakthrough AI advances in teaching computers to play sophisticated video games and helping software learn how to manipulate robotic hands in life-like ways, reinforcement learning is a technique that allows software to teach itself skills through trial and error. Obviously, such repetition

is not possible in the real world when dealing with high-altitude balloons that are costly to operate and even more costly to repair in the event they crash. So Loon, like many other AI labs that have turned to reinforcement learning to develop sophisticated AI programs, taught its flight control system how to pilot the balloons using computer simulation with help from Google's AI team out of Montreal. That way, the system could improve over time before being deployed in a real-world balloon fleet, end quote. One thing that I haven't heard anything about, so someone who knows more about this should probably enlighten me. If folks think we're maybe a decade or maybe two away from turning our roads and our cars over to automation and AI,

wouldn't it logically follow that we could turn over our skies and our airplanes to automated systems sooner than that? Surely the sky is an easier place to go autonomous, right? And maybe you'd be able to achieve the similar improvements over human inefficiency and inaccuracy that Loon is achieving. or maybe I'm wrong. Something else that I'm potentially wrong about that people can enlighten me over are watch parties. Hulu's watch party feature is now expanding to all subscribers, allowing up to seven other people to join in on your watch, and will now also have a click-to-catch up button, quoting the verge.

Watch party is available on Hulu's website. You'll see the icon on a title's details page. From there, you can share a watch party link with up to seven other Hulu subscribers so that everyone can watch the same content together from afar. Hulu says that while watching, group members will be able to react in real time through the chat function and control their own playback. If you find yourself having to pause while your friends keep watching, there's a click to catch up button to get right back to the same spot as everybody else. You can use Watch Party with thousands of titles from Hulu's On Demand Library, including the

company's new original rom-com film The Happiest Season, which Hulu says broke streaming records when it premiered over Thanksgiving weekend, end quote. So the last time we talked about this sort of thing, I remember predicting this would be a feature that would take over all of streaming in no time. And while Prime Video, Disney Plus, and Sling TV do have some sort of watchtogether feature right now, the whole thing really hasn't exploded like I thought it would. Maybe it's a harder technical thing to pull off. But I mean, why not try? This could be a useful feature for after COVID times too. The kids will always want to watch movies along with grandma, won't they?

In extremely 2020 news, Wired is reporting that IBM is reporting that a sophisticated global fishing campaign is targeting the companies involved in the cold supply chain necessary for the distribution of the upcoming COVID-19 vaccines. Two of the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates by Pfizer and Moderna have been submitted to the FDA for emergency authorization. The agency is scheduled to evaluate. Pfizer's application on December 10 and Moderna's one week later. UK regulators approved Pfizer's vaccine on Wednesday, which means that the next challenge

for both vaccines is transporting them. They must be kept at frigid temperatures, minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit for Moderna and 94 degrees below for Pfizer, requiring a network of specialists known as the cold chain. Today, security researchers at IBM are releasing findings that a campaign has for months targeted a significant number of those companies across six different countries. Quote, this activity took place in September, which means that someone's looking to get ahead, looking to be where they need to be at the critical moment, says Claire Zabova, senior cyber threat analyst with IBM Security X-Force. It's the first time we've seen that level

of pre-positioning within the context of the pandemic, end quote. The campaign seems to have focused on companies and organizations associated with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance's cold chain equipment optimization platform, an effort to streamline and strengthen the cold chain. The only target IBM identified by name was the European Commission's Directorate General for Taxation and Customs Union, which among other things determines tax relief associated with transporting vaccines across borders. Seemingly, any part of the cold chain was within bounds for the attackers. Other targets mentioned by IBM include manufacturers of solar panels, which might power trucks carrying the vaccine to more remote locations, and a German website developer

whose clients include pharmaceutical, biotech, and container transport companies. The attackers sent emails purporting to be from Hair Biomedical, a Chinese company that advertises itself as, quote, the world's only complete cold chain provider, end quote, under the guise of routine requests for quotations. The emails contain HTML attachments that ask the recipient to enter their credentials, which the hackers could then harvest to infiltrate the targeted company. IBM says it doesn't know if any of the attacks were successful or what the ultimate objective of the campaign might be. The door is really open, says Zobovia. Once you get the keys to the kingdom and you're inside the city walls or on the network, there's a myriad of objectives that you can attain,

whether it's critical information like timetables and distribution, or disruptive attacks, end quote. Finally today, with a recent update, Google Maps now lets you create and submit your own street view photos to Google Maps, provided you are on Android and a specific sort. of Android, quoting the Verge. Android users with AR-core compatible devices can now capture imagery and publish it to Google Street View in certain areas. Google is allowing submissions initially in Toronto, New York, Austin, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Costa Rica.

More regions will support this feature soon, and Google will use this user-generated content when it doesn't have its own Street View imagery available. While our own Street View trekkers and cars have collected more than 170 billion images from 10 million miles around the planet, there are still many unmapped. parts of the world, says Stafford Mark Quart, product manager of Google Maps Street View. Where people contribute connected photos, they will appear in the Street View layer on Google Maps as dotted blue lines, end quote. The new beta feature has been in testing for months, and Google will automatically rotate and position the series of connected photos that are captured in its Street View app for Android.

While users have been able to submit Street View imagery in the past, it required a special 360-degree camera. This new feature just makes use of a standard phone camera. It opens. It opens, opens up the street view feature to many more areas, including hard-to-reach places that even Google's street-view trekkers and cars haven't visited, end quote. That's all for today. I need to run into the office real quick to record this weekend's bonus episode. So here's hoping there's some e-bikes available. Wish me luck. Talk to you tomorrow.