Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 05/14 - The Insane WhatsApp Flaw

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

WhatsApp discovered one of the craziest flaws I’ve ever heard about in mobile, Disney now controls all of Hulu, now we’ve got folding laptops, the One Plus 7 Pro is another strike against $1,000 phones and is bitcoin back? Sponsors: Joybird.com/ride Promocode: RIDE WeWorkRemotely Links: WhatsApp voice calls used to inject Israeli spyware on phones (Financial Times) WhatsApp discovers 'targeted' surveillance attack (BBC) Disney to take full control over Hulu, Comcast has option to sell its stake in 5 years (CNBC) Lenovo shows off the world’s first ‘foldable PC’ (The Verge) Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon (CNBC) Apple announces support for Apple Pay NFC stickers, partners with Bird scooters and more (9to5Mac) ONEPLUS 7 PRO REVIEW: PROOF THAT OTHER BIG PHONES COST TOO MUCH (The Verge) Uber Misses the Enchanted Forest (Bloomberg) Uber's underwater investors (Axios) Up $1,200 on the Day, Bitcoin’s Price Surges Above $8K (CoinDesk) 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 Tuesday, May 14th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. WhatsApp discovered one of the craziest flaws I've ever heard about in mobile.

Disney now controls all of Hulu. Now we've got folding laptops. The One Plus 7 Pro is another strike against $1,000 smartphones. And is Bitcoin back? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So this is absolutely wild. WhatsApp discovered a flaw in its software for both iOS and Android that would allow hackers to install NSO Group surveillance software on phones via the app's call function. What's especially wild is hackers only had to call you on WhatsApp to install the software.

The software would allow an attacker to read your WhatsApp messages and possibly take over the camera and microphone as well, although I'm seeing conflicting statements about that. You didn't even have to answer the call to get infected, and the calls often disappeared from call logs. WhatsApp discovered the flaw, fixed their servers on Friday, and issued an app patch yesterday. If you have WhatsApp and use it regularly, update it immediately because, yeah, this is a big deal. But maybe not necessarily for you and I, because who is NSO Group, quoting the BBC? The NSO Group is an Israeli company that has been referred to in the past as a cyber arms dealer. While some cybersecurity companies report the flaws they find so they can be fixed, others keep problems to themselves so they can be exploited or sold to law enforcement.

The NSO Group is part owned by the London-based private equity firm Novolpina Capital, which acquired a stake in February. NSO's flagship software, Pegasus, has the ability to collect intimate data from a targeted device including capturing data through the microphone and camera and gathering location data, end quote. And quoting the Financial Times. NSO advertises its products to Middle Eastern and Western intelligence agencies and says Pegasus is intended for governments to fight terrorism and crime. NSO was recently valued at $1 billion in a leveraged buyout that involved the UK private equity fund, Novo Pina Capital. In the past, human rights campaigners in the Middle East have received text messages over WhatsApp that contain links that would

download Pegasus to their phones, end quote. At Eva, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation tweeted, NSO Group has been bragging that it has no-click install capabilities for quite some time. The real story here is that WhatsApp found the damn thing, end quote. And finally, quoting from the New York Times, the WhatsApp hole was used to target a London lawyer who has been involved in lawsuits that accuse NSO group of providing tools to hack the phones of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident in Canada, a Qatari citizen, and a group of Mexican journalists and activists,

the researchers said. The researchers believe the list of targets could be much longer, end quote. Huge news in the streaming wars. Comcast has agreed to sell its stake in Hulu to Disney at a $27.5 billion valuation. Actually, the sale will only go through five years. years from now, but Disney will take full operational control over Hulu effective immediately. Comcast is guaranteed at least $5.8 billion for selling its stake, quoting CNBC. As part of the deal, Disney has agreed to pay Comcast for its Hulu content for the next five years.

NBC channels will be on Hulu Live at a higher rate than previously agreed. NBC Universal will also be able to run the same content on its own streaming service, which is expected to launch in the spring of next year, end quote. There are plenty of hot takes swirling around online about this at the moment, but from what I understand, one obvious play for Disney here is to have that premium subscription service with Disney Plus and then that rising ad-supported video play now with Hulu. So suddenly, Disney would have a serious beachhead in both sides of the streaming video Battlefield.

Lenovo has demoed a prototype foldable think pad with a 13.3 inch 4x3 2K OLED display. The company has apparently been developing this foldable device for three years and plans to launch it as a product in the first half of next year as a part of the ThinkPad X1 brand. Quoting Hyam Gartenberg at The Verge, the resulting device is a display that can fold up to about the size of a hardcover book. We don't have the exact weight yet, but Lenovo says it's less than two pounds, which is about as much as a hardcover copy of one of the larger Harry Potter books. That's already enough to put it on the lighter side of the portable computer spectrum,

but the size savings are really when you fold it in half, making it dramatically smaller than a regular laptop. I will say that I really did like the size of it more than I expected. Fold it up, it's far smaller than even a regular-sized 13-inch laptop, and while it's not exactly something you'll fit into a jacket pocket, even a large one. It's comparatively compact. The fold mode was also really nice to hold in my hand, like a giant glowing book, end quote. Apparently, you can use this device as a sort of laptop form factor using the bottom half as a digital keyboard or writing pad. The battery is on the bottom end of it, so weighted so that it won't tip over. But there's also a kickstand,

so you can stand it up and use a wireless keyboard if you'd like. It will run Windows and an Intel CPU. Lenovo says it is working overtime to make sure this device does not have the same problems that the Galaxy Fold has experienced. This is one of those stories where you really need to click through to check out the pictures. It's a pretty sexy looking device, if you ask me. Walmart has wasted no time matching Amazon Tit for Tat announcing next day delivery on more than 200,000 items and orders over $25. This next day delivery option is coming first if you live in Phoenix and Las Vegas and Southern California, and it's expanding to 75% of the U.S. population by the end of the year. Quoting CNBC, Walmart isn't disclosing the cost of its latest delivery push, but the company says it has been working on it for quite some time.

In January 2017, Walmart started offering free two-day shipping for orders totaling more than $35, lowering its minimum purchase threshold from $50. It had already bought Jet.com for $3 billion in 2016 to juice its online business, and compete with Amazon. That deal helped it reach shoppers in bigger cities, like New York, in less time, end quote. Apple has announced Apple Pay NFC stickers that can trigger purchases when you wave your phone over them without the need to download a dedicated app. At launch, partners will include Bird Scooters, Bonobos, and Pay-by- Phone parking meters, quoting 9-to-5 Mac. Right now, physical Apple Pay transactions require bulky terminals like those you find at retail store checkouts. With the new support, an iPhone will know how to read a specially encoded NFC tag that can be as inert as a sticker

and automatically show the Apple Pay purchase interface when a user holds their device near it. No third-party apps or other setup required. The obvious example is a user can ad hoc top up their miles on a hired electric scooter simply by tapping their phone or watch to an NFC sticker on the bike. For Bonobos, it will enable simpler self-service show. with the ability to place NFC tags directly onto clothing rails, end quote. It's been a while since we've had one of these, but a new smartphone was unveiled today, actually two of them, the One Plus Seven and the One Plus Seven Pro.

But at the risk of upsetting you overseas, listeners, since only the Seven Pro will be available here in the U.S., I'm going to focus on that one. For $669, the One Plus Seven Pro, gets you a 90-hertz edge-to-edge screen, a retractable camera, an in-screen fingerprint sensor, a 48-mixel megapixel telephoto to boot, a Snapdragon 8-55, same as the Galaxy S-10 series, and as much as 12 gigabytes of RAM and either 128 or 256 gigabytes of storage. Is the phone any good? Well, Dieter Bone already has a review out, and he tweeted this. unless you really need iOS or the camera on a pixel, which I still personally prefer,

I can't think of a reason you shouldn't get a one plus seven pro, at least if you want a big phone. It's a damn fine big phone. The screen is one of, if not the very best I've seen on a phone. The performance is great. The build quality is great. The price is great. And for the first time on a phone like this, I didn't have to say, but the camera, End quote.

Deeter headlined his review, saying the 1 Plus 7 Pro is proof that other big phones cost too much. He gave it a verge score of 8.5 out of 10. But is this quality mid-range phone another blow against the March above the $1,000 price point for smartphones? Deeter ends his review by saying this, quote, It might be more than previous one plus phones, but it's still a lot less than comparable big phones. screened phones. A Galaxy S-10 plus is $300 more and comes with half the storage, for example. If the 1 Plus 7 Pro has a haymaker in this fight, it is the price. Well, in the spirit of covering the triumph, but also the struggle, even though the stock is up this morning slightly at the time

of this writing, Uber's stock got slammed yesterday its second day of trading as a public company, leaving Uber 18% below its IPO price of $45. The stock is currently sitting at $37.50. At that price, quoting Axios, a whopping 81% of the $29.55 billion in equity that Uber has raised is underwater. IPO investors have lost $655 million, while investors from 2016 and 2018 have between them lost $2.27 billion. investors who bought Uber shares three years ago have lost 15% of their money before fees. The opportunity cost is even greater. Investors in the S&P 500 have seen their money grow by 50% over the same period, end quote.

But there's another metric to think about here. Remember, Uber wanted a valuation much, much more than the market cap it's currently sitting at. So from that perspective, this is even more disappointing. Quoting Matt Levine at Bloomberg as a recap, quote, in a certain light Uber Technologies valuation peaked last fall when investment bankers pitching to underwrite its initial public offering told Uber that it could be worth $120 billion when it went public. That was not a firm offer or anything, just a number that they wrote down in their pitch books, but at least it was a big number. By the time Uber actually filed to go public, the rumored valuation was down to $100 billion. And it launched the IPO late last month with a price range of $44 to $50 a share or a market capitalization.

of up to $84 billion. The IPO priced at $45 on Thursday evening, then the stock cracked immediately and kept going down. It opened the next morning at $42 and never got above the IPO price. It closed at $41.57 on Friday and fell below $40 this morning. Today's opening price was $3879 for a market capitalization of about $65 billion. Since its entirely hypothetical peak in October, Uber has lost almost half its value. end quote. And in the spirit of, if you covered it on the way up and then covered it on the way down, it's probably worth covering it on its way back up, maybe. Whisper it quietly, but at the time of

this writing, the price of Bitcoin is back above $8,000. In fact, the price jumped $1,200 just yesterday. It jumped $1,000 in price just two days before that. In the past 90 days alone, the cryptocurrency has appreciated 120% in value and nearly 60% in the last. 30 days. Nobody, of course, knows for sure what is causing the jump, but traders are beginning to talk about a parabolic pattern again, quoting Coin Desk. Interestingly, a very similar and parabola-shaped price increase like the one Bitcoin has just witnessed occurred at the end of the previous bear market in 2015. Bitcoin's price trend entered a parabolic rise after reaching a low of $198 on August 25, 2015, followed by a near 150% increase before 2,000.

temporarily topping out at $499 on November 4th of that year. Indeed, history seems to be repeating itself, or at least rhyming, as Bitcoin's market has once again entered a parabolic structure having increased nearly 150% from its most recent low of $3,128 set on December 15, 2018, end quote. Wow, absolutely jam-packed day of news. I could have done a whole second episode with stories I couldn't make room for it today. It's weird how that works out sometimes. All the usual things. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Our slash right home is our show subreddit. And I've not asked for ratings and reviews on a while, so if you've never done that, much appreciated if you do as it helps folks find out about the show. And to that end, why not tweet about the show or post on Facebook or

Insta or whatever. I'll even give you a suggested message to post. I love the TechMeme Ride Home podcast. It's the only podcast I listen to every day. I love it so much. I want to marry it. I'm only kind of joking. Some of you might have noticed that Chris Messina tweeted a message almost exactly like that last week after I jokingly put him up to it. But hey, the sentiment is real. and if you spread the word about the show and help grow our mutant podcast army, that is real and really appreciated as well, however you decide to do it. Thanks and talk to you tomorrow.