Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/20 – Apple Once More The Canary In The Covid Coal Mine?

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Apple puts a pause on its return to the office plans. Rumors of a new iPad mini redesign. Product Hunt launches an investment fund. If you want a tool to see if you’ve been pwned by NSO’s Pegasus software, I’ve got you. And Bezos in space… Sponsors: TinyCapital.com Links: Apple Delays Office Return by At Least a Month as Covid Spikes (Bloomberg) Exclusive: Apple planning redesigned iPad mini with A15 processor, USB-C port, more (9to5Mac) Hyper is a new fund that offers $300k checks and promise of a media slingshot for founders (TechCrunch) DuckDuckGo launches new Email Protection service to remove trackers (The Verge) Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus revelations (The Guardian) 'Best day ever': Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin rocket touch down after historic spaceflight (USAToday) 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 Tuesday, July 20th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple puts a pause on its return to the office plans. Rumors of a new iPad mini redesign. Product hunt launches an investment fund. If you want a tool to see if you've been poned by NSO's Pegasus Software, I've got you. And Bezos in space. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The stock market fell quite a bit yesterday. If you weren't, weren't aware, and most analysts were saying it was because investors are waking up to the fact that the COVID crisis is not quite over, what with the Delta variant leading to what is

clearly a fourth wave in a lot of places, even here in the U.S. Now, if you remember back to last year, tech was a bit of an early warning barometer when it came to the pandemic. Tech companies were among the first to close offices and tell workers to work. remotely, and Apple especially was a barometer. Where they closed or opened their retail stores was often a sign of where COVID cases were beginning to surge or were ebbing even before lockdowns were imposed. So take from this what you will. Mark German says that Apple is delaying its return to office deadline by at least a month to October amid rising COVID cases. They say they will give employees a month's notice before asking them to return to the office for reals.

Quoting Bloomberg. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in June that employees should begin returning to offices in early September for at least three days a week. In an internal memo, Cook cited the availability of vaccinations and declining infection rates. Some employees of the Cooper Tino-California-based technology giant have worked from Apple offices on certain days throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet even with half the U.S. vaccinated, COVID-19 continues to kill people.

faster than guns, car crashes, and influenza combined, according to a Bloomberg review of mortality data. After 10 weeks of global declines in COVID deaths, a highly transmissible delta variant is driving a new uptick. In the U.S. health officials have warned that a similar reversal may be underway. Daily cases have doubled from a low point last month, and hospitalizations are rising again. The iPhone maker becomes one of the first U.S. tech giants to delay plans for a return to normality, as COVID-19 persists around the world and cases involving the highly transmissible variant increase. Apple will give its employees at least a month's warning before mandating a return to offices, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing internal policy.

Separately, Apple is said to be testing a hybrid in-store and work-from-home arrangement for retail employees, acknowledging that consumers may continue to prefer online shopping even as the pandemic eases, and quote. And as John Gruber pointed out, on Twitter. Seems like a good bet that the September iPhone event will be virtual once again. 9 to 5 Mac is reporting on a redesign for the iPad Mini with an A15 chip and a USBC port among the expected tweaks. Quote, according to the sources, Apple is planning to use the A15 chip inside the new iPad Mini, just like the new iPhones expected to be released later this year. The A15 chip will use the same five-nanometer fabrication.

process as the A14, and our sources indicate Apple is also working on a more powerful A15x variant that could be used in other iPads down the line. The new iPad Mini will also feature USBC connectivity on the bottom, the sources say, similar to the iPad Pro, and the latest iPad Air. This will open the iPad Mini up to a wide array of peripherals and accessories beyond the lightning connector that the current iPad Mini uses. Finally, the redesigned iPad Mini will also feature a magnetic smart connector similar to the iPad Air and iPad Pro, our sources say. This could mean that Apple has plans to release smart connector capable accessories for the new iPad mini. Another tidbit, Apple is also planning a new version of the entry-level iPad, codenamed

J-181 with an A-13 chip inside. The current 10.2-inch entry-level iPad is powered by the A-12 bionic chip, so this would represent a notable jump in performance for Apple's most affordable tablet, end quote. Product Hunt has launched its own $6 million early stage fund slash mentorship program slash incubator, I guess, slash et cetera, quoting TechCrunch. Hyper is a $60 million early stage fund co-founded by Josh Buckley, Product Hunt's current CEO, along with writer, founder, and designer Dustin Curtis. Two ex-Sacoia operators are part of the team at launch as well. Malika Cantor as partner NGM and Ashton Brown as head of program. The fund launches today and is self-described as, quote, inspired by the product hunt community, end quote. The announcement today is hyper, the fund and the fact that they're opening applications to a small cohort of 25 companies. The applications are planned to open for roughly four weeks every quarter. And the deadline for this tranche is August 10th, 2021 at Midnight PT. The second cohort, will open in November 2021. The fund is launching as a straight-up venture effort with a bit of gas

added by the Product Hunt Association. The team will be writing $300,000 checks for 5% of very early companies in any arena that seems promising to the partnership in a fixed deal structure that mirrors Y Combinator. The fund is taking applicants worldwide, though notes that some countries present legal complexities for investment. The fund will exist as a sister company to Product Hunt, though it's going to technically own it. Product Hunt, however, is the first of what the team says will be many companies. It will own, create, and operate in order to provide, quote, direct value to its portfolio companies. A short list of some of the people involved as advisors, mentors, or investors themselves includes Alexis and Serena Williams, Alfred Lynn of

Sequoia, Gary Tan of initialized, Harry Stebbings, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Neval Ravacant, Owen Van Nata, Ryan Hoover, Ryan Teter of One Republic, and Serum Krishnan of A16Z. It's a pretty eclectic group, but if you squint, you can see the shape of the ambitions that Hyper has reflected in the parties involved. A mix of media, venture, and product figures is probably the right way to go if you want to back yourself into a media empire funded by venture capital returns. Hyper itself is trying to establish two lines of business. A portfolio of wholly owned companies like Product Hunt, which still counts Angel List as a majority investor and Ravikant on its board, and other new media brands. And the other component, which includes the portfolio of hyper

funds, plural theirs, and a founder program that includes mentorship, twice a year events, and other future efforts eventually. The mentorship component that Hyper hopes to add for founders in the fund is an eight-week founder program that includes individuals from partners like Andresen Horowitz, Angelis, Sequoia, the 20-minute VC podcast, and Product Hunt, helping founders to solve key challenges. Some of the participants are investors in Hyper, though none of the funds participated themselves. The group includes some close-to-home figures as well in Product Hunt GM, Ashley Higgins, and founder Ryan Hoover, end quote. Duck, Duck Go has launched a new email protection service that forwards emails from a free at duck.com address. to users regular inbox after scanning them for trackers, quoting the verge.

iPhone users might recognize the concept of a relay email address, a feature that Apple introduced with iOS 14 called Hide My Email. When signing up for an app through an Apple device, your iPhone can suggest a randomized Apple email address. Emails hit the random address, preventing the app from knowing your real email. In Apple's iOS 15, the company is introducing similar features to confuse email trackers and protect privacy. Duck.comgo explains that their e-mail. email protection is different than Apple's offerings because it's cross-platform, meaning you have a unified experience with disposable email addresses on mobile, desktop, iPhone, or Android. But it also

differs in how the software zags on trackers. Apple loads trackers on its own servers, which send erroneous information back to the tracker's servers. Duck. Dot. Go just removes them from the email before they are ever loaded. This difference to most users is negligible, but it is indeed a difference. Setting up the tool is straightforward. Users sign up through DuckDuckGo's mobile app by going to the settings page and tapping on email protection. Then they can join the wait list, which Duck, DuckGo says, is novel because it doesn't collect an email address. It stores a timestamp in the app, which is designed to designate the person's order in line. Duck. Duck. Go estimates the wait will be a couple of weeks, after which users will get a notification to set up the feature. The setup process

includes a bit of light reading about the privacy features and choosing a new duck.com email address. One feature that the process stresses is that DuckDuckGo doesn't see or save your email. The tracker removal is done in its server's memory or RAM and not ever written to a disk or hard drive. Duck.como also built the forwarding feature from scratch, so it didn't have to rely on a third party, also processing the emails before they hit your inbox, end quote. The fallout from that blockbuster NSO spyware story continues. Various outlets are reporting around the world and digging through the information to reveal nuggets like this. About 15,000 Mexicans, including politicians, reporters, and activists as well as 50 people close to Mexico's president

appeared in the leak as potential NSA targets. And the phones of 22 Indian people who were on a list of hundreds were checked and seven had been infected with NSO malware. The list included top opposition politicians. Edward Snowden called for a spyware trade ban amid the news, saying the industry should not exist, and they don't make vaccines. The only thing they sell is the virus, end quote. In fact, let me quote more from the Guardian, quote, Snowden, who in 2013 blew the whistle on the secret mass surveillance programs of the U.S. National Security Agency described for-profit malware developers as, as, quote, an industry that should not exist, end quote. Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, Snowden said that the consortium's findings illustrated how commercial malware had made it possible

for repressive regimes to place vastly more people under the most invasive types of surveillance. For traditional police operations to plant bugs or wiretap a suspect's phone, law enforcement would need to, quote, break into somebody's house or go into their car or go to their office, and we'd like to think they'll probably get a warrant, he said. But commercial spy, made it cost-efficient for targeted surveillance against vastly more people. Quote, if they can do the same thing from a distance with little cost and no risk, they begin to do it all the time against everyone who's even marginally of interest, he said. If you don't do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it's not just going to be 50,000

targets, it's going to be 50 million targets, and it's going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect, end quote. Part of the problem arose from the fact that different people's mobile phones were functionally identical to one another, he said. When we're talking about something like an iPhone, they're all running the same software around the world. So if they find a way to hack one iPhone, they found a way to hack all of them, end quote. He compared companies commercializing vulnerabilities in widely used mobile phone models to an industry of, quote, infectioneers, deliberately trying to develop new strains of disease. Quote, it's like an industry where the only

thing they did was create custom variants of COVID to dodge vaccines, he said. Their only products are infection vectors. They're not security products. They're not providing any kind of protection, any kind of prophylactic. They don't make vaccines. The only thing they sell is the virus, end quote. One bit of, I don't know if you'd call it good news, but Amnesty International Researchers published a toolkit to help anyone scan their iPhone or Android devices for evidence of compromise by NSO's Pegasus spyware, quoting from TechCrunch. The mobile verification toolkit or MVP works on both iPhones and Android devices, but slightly differently. Amnesty said that more forensic traces were found on iPhones than Android devices, which makes it easier to detect on iPhones.

MVT will let you take an entire iPhone backup or a full system dump if you jailbreak your phone and feed in for any indicators of compromise known to be used by NSO to deliver Pegasus, such as domain names used in NSO infrastructure that might be sent by text message or email. If you have an encrypted iPhone backup, you can also use MVT to decrypt your backup without having to make a whole new copy. The toolkit works on the command line, so it's not a refined and polished user experience and requires some basic knowledge of how to navigate the terminal. We got it working in about 10 minutes, plus the time to create a fresh backup of an iPhone, which you will want to do if you want to check up to the hour. To get the toolkit ready to scan your phone for signs of Pegasus, you'll need to feed in Amnesty's IOCs, which it has on its. its GitHub page. Anytime the indicators of compromise file updates, download and use an up-to-date copy.

Once you set off the process, the toolkit scans your iPhone backup file for any evidence of compromise. The process took about a minute or two to run and spit out several files in a folder with the results of the scan. If the toolkit finds a possible compromise, it will say so in the outputed files. In our case, we got one detection, which turned out to be a false positive and has been removed from the IOCs after we checked with the Amnesty researchers. A new scan using the updated IOC's returned no signs of compromise. Given it's more difficult to detect an Android infection, MVT takes a similar but simpler approach by scanning your Android device backup for text messages with links to domains known to be used by ANSO. The toolkit also lets you scan

for potentially malicious applications installed on your device, end quote. Finally today, maybe you watched this live this morning, but yes, Jeff Bezos went to space this morning. Quoting USA Today, Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his new Shepard rocket crew blasted off Tuesday from the West Texas Desert, reached space and returned to Earth with a smooth parachute landing minutes later. Best day ever, Bezos said after landing. The crew was treated two spectacular views of Earth from space, along with three or four minutes of weightlessness. The booster rocket touched down smoothly about seven minutes after liftoff. The craft containing the astronauts landed with parachutes a few minutes later. Bezos launched not only a quick trip to space, but what the world's richest man hopes will be a profitable business. Blue Origin plans two more flights this year alone. Tuesday's flight marked the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew hurtled historically to the edge of space last week.

Bezos and his Blue Origin team say they breached it today. It's the 16th flight for New Shepherd, but the first to include people. Bezos and Blue Origin have been somewhat dismissive of Branson's flight nine days ago, saying Virgin Galactic's top altitude of 53 and a half miles came up short of reaching true space. NASA, the Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration, and some astrophysicists consider the boundary between the atmosphere and space to begin 50 miles up. Thus, passengers on Virgin Galactic tourist trips, which can reach a maximum altitude of about 55 miles, will earn astronaut wings. Blue Origin intends to send tourists about 66 miles up.

That's past the so-called Carmen Line, 62 miles above Earth, recognized by most international aviation and aerospace federations as the threshold of space. New Shepard, a fully automated 60-foot rocket and capsule, is designed primarily for space tourism thanks to automated flight systems, large windows, and a modern interior. After liftoff, the booster returns to the facility for a vertical landing, while the capsule briefly floats in space, then touches down near the launch site

with the help of parachutes, end quote. Again, busy day today, so I'm just going to talk to you tomorrow.