Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 08/13 - Automattic & Tumblr & Snap & Spectacles 3

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

Tumblr finds its final home (hopefully), new Snap Spectacles, a new gaming startup tries to one-up Fortnite’s social model, why your DSLR camera is a prime ransomware target, and yes, Twinfluencers are apparently a thing. Sponsors: MacStadium.com/ridehome Metalab.co Links: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to WordPress.com Owner (WSJ) Snap Unveils a New Version of Video-Recording Spectacles (Bloomberg) Microsoft Cancels Super Duper Graphics Pack for Minecraft (Thurrott.com) Singularity 6 raises $16.5M from Andreessen Horowitz to create a 'virtual society' (TechCrunch) Security researchers find that DSLR cameras are vulnerable to ransomware attack (The Verge) Twinfluencers Are Taking Over the Internet (The Atlantic) Design Memes: The Origin of those Helvetica List T-Shirts (HowDesign.com) 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 TechMeme right home for Tuesday, August 13th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Tumblr finds its final home, hopefully.

New Snapchat Spectacles, a new gaming startup tries to one-up Fortnite's social model. Why your DSLR camera is a prime ransomware target, and yes, twin influencers are apparently a thing. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. WordPress.com owner Automatic says it will buy Tumblr from Verizon and take on around 200 Tumblr staffers. Sources originally reported that Automatic paid less than $10 million for Tumblr. But then Peter Kafka tweeted that the price tag might have been as low as $3 million. You might recall that Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013.

Then Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017. So, this sale represents a mere 0.27% of the original Yahoo purchase price, which was obviously already written down for Verizon years ago. Or as the next web snarked, Tumblr found a buyer for about the same price as a modest home in San Francisco. To be sure, one way to look at this is that it's quite a come down for a once-hot startup. But then again, the Tumblr founders did make a huge payday by finding some deep-pocketed dumb money to take them out all those years ago. The problem has always been no one has ever really found a way to monetize Tumblr properly, not even the founders. Thus, the original sale being a good deal for them, as I'm saying.

The question now is, can Automatic do any better? Can it preserve or even help reinvigorate what is one of the most unique corners of the internet, or at least was? The Wall Street Journal asked Automatics Matt Mullenweg what he planned to do with Tumblr. Quote, Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complimentary to WordPress.com. It's just fun, he said of Tumblr. We're not going to change any of that, end quote. Tumblr has a strong mobile interface and dashboard where users follow other blogs, he said. Executives will look for ways WordPress.com and Tumblr can share services and functionality.

end quote. Okay, so see, keeping that porn ban, that's kind of a bad idea. I don't know. Hey, if anyone wants to try to keep Tumblr alive, that has to be better than the alternative, no matter what the strategy they employ for doing so. As I've said before, it's impossible to under stress what a unique community Tumblr once brought into being. Before the era of influencers, Tumblr was one of the first and best ways people found a way to brand and express their unique points of view online. line. One generation had geocities, which it looks back on with fond nostalgia, but another generation had Tumblr, for which it has similar affection. Before the course modern internet landscape came into reality, Tumblr was a sea of mostly goodness and whimsy. The way people think positively of TikTok now, people once thought of Tumblr as a similar refuge of positivity and

light. Maybe it can become that again, because we could certainly use it. Snap has a announced Spectacles 3 with an updated design going on sale in November for $380. That would make these the most expensive spectacles yet, in fact twice as expensive as the second-gen version. But for the money, you now get two cameras instead of one, allowing you to create HD videos with depth perception and a steel wireframe rather than the old chunky plastic frames. back to that second camera it comes with apparently a whole range of 3D effects that you can

now do storage on the glasses works out to the ability to capture around 70 videos and more than 200 photos on a charge but the battery life is apparently the same as previous versions Snap also says this will be a limited edition product with production just a

fraction of what it dialed up for the original models quoting Kurt Wagner and Bloomberg so if Snap doesn't make money off spectacles and doesn't plan to sell many units, why bother making them at all? Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel is a big believer in augmented reality and the blending of digital and physical worlds. Snap already has a number of AR software products like face filters built into Snapchat.

Eventually, the idea is that people will wear cameras and lenses on their faces so they don't need to use AR through their phones. A Snap spokesman said, the latest spectacles are meant to, quote, draw our community closer to a future in which computing is overlaid on the world rather than confined to a small screen, end quote. So this is Snap continuing to believe in and continuing to position itself for an AR future. And for all the snark aimed at Snap for continuing this experiment, it is worth noting that Facebook, of course, owns Oculus, Microsoft has the HoloLens AR platform. And we're expecting Apple to announce an AR product sometime in the next couple of years, you know, so is it

possible we could look back someday in the not too distant future and realize that. Snap was just ahead of the game. From my interesting Ray's file, one of the things that people have been lauding Fortnite for is the fact that it blurs the line between gaming and social networking.

Gaming these days is not just something that you do to kill time, solo, increasingly, with things like Fortnite and the Roblox ecosystem, it's also where you go to hang out with your friends. Well, Singularity 6 is a stealthy

gaming startup that wants to build on that. That is apparently using AI to develop what is being called a virtual society. Singularity 6 has just raised a $16.5 million series A led by Andresen Horowitz. The company was founded by ex-Riot games folk. Here's one of them, quote, The near-term focus is our first product, building a world that begins to tackle the community simulation space, and that's really combining a strong virtual community with deep and compelling gameplay. CEO Anthony Long told TechCrunch in an interview. He says that the company's influences for its first title include Animal Crossing, Stardue Valley, and the Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. While the co-founder did specify that Singularity Six is a, quote, game and tech

company, he didn't have too much to say about what that tech was. Quote, we actually have to roll out a lot of custom tech because there aren't really any off-the-shelf solutions for the MMO aspects or the virtual community features, Lung told us, end quote. It's weird how the dream of Second Life will never really die, but maybe it helps if you put a battle royale feature in the middle of it. Minecraft was supposed to get a major new update, the so-called Super-Duper Graphics Pack. But Microsoft has apparently announced that that update has been canceled and will never be released because the update, according to a Minecraft blog post, is, quote, too technically demanding to implement as planned, end quote.

Quoting from Therat.com. Further, the company says that they were not happy with the performance across devices for this update, leading to it being scrapped. Considering this pack was announced as a way to showcase the power of Scorpio, Xbox 1X, and that it will now never see the light of day, to say it's disappointing as a bit of an understatement. This update would have brought to Minecraft features such as volumetric lighting, enhanced water, and reflective textures, dynamic shadows, edge highlighting,

and a lot more, end quote. The Rock goes on to speculate that Microsoft feared creating a haves-and-have-nots ecosystem, where some Minecraft players would be able to play with the new graphics and others would never be able to. The original Xbox might not have been able to handle the update at all, for example. But also, now that things like ray tracing are more common, perhaps Microsoft just decided the features the pack promised, would, in short order, be redundant. So it turns out that even DSLR cameras are vulnerable to ransomware,

to which you might say, that can't really be surprising, Brian. Anything with an internet connection, hack anything with a computer inside it is vulnerable to hacking in some way. But note, I said ransomware. Why? Well, think about it. You've probably got some photos sitting on your SD card that you'd probably pay money to get back if compromised. Quote, checkpoint software technologies issued a report today that detailed how its security researchers were able to remotely install malware on a digital DSLR camera in it. researcher A.L. Itkin found that a hacker can easily plant malware on a digital camera. He says that

the standardized picture transfer protocol is an ideal method for delivering malware. It's unauthenticated and can be used with both Wi-Fi and USB. The report notes that an individual with an infected Wi-Fi access point could deploy it at a tourist destination to pull off an attack or infect a user's PC. In a video, it can shows off how he was able to exploit a Canon EOS 80D over Wi-Fi and encrypt the images on the SD cards so that the user wouldn't be able to access them. He also notes that cameras could be a particularly juicy target for hackers because they're full of personal images that most people likely won't want to walk away from. In a real ransomware attack, a hacker will typically demand a small amount of money in exchange for the key that will decrypt the files.

Usually a small enough amount that people would rather just pay to get rid of the inconvenience, end quote. reportedly this issue can affect most of Canon's camera lineup. Cannon was made aware of the vulnerability in March, and last week the company issued a security advisory telling people to avoid unsecured Wi-Fi networks and maybe turn off network functions when not in use. It can also warn that given the complexity of the picture transfer protocol, other vendors might be vulnerable as well.

Finally today, the great Taylor Lawrence checks in from the influencer beat. In case you thought you were imagining it, twin influencers are in fact a thing. There's a lot of twins floating around the internet. Famous teen twins. There's the Dolan twins who have 10 million subscribers on YouTube and Instagram. Then there's the Merrill twins, the Ribka twins, the Di Martino twins, and the Bailey twins, all massive YouTube stars. So what gives?

Why is having a twin seemingly a shortcut to influencer or YouTube fame at the moment? Well, for one thing, it doesn't hurt that the rate of twin births has risen by 76% since 1980. So there are just more twins out there, but also, quote, twins play into something the YouTube algorithm is favoring at the moment, says Dan Weinstein, the co-founder and president of Studio 71, an influencer management company. So they're surfacing more than they used to. Teenage twin content enthusiasts told me they liked to dream about what they would do if they had grown up with a twin, a fantasy identical twin, twin, play into happily, tricking their teachers and playing pranks on parents. Quote, much of twin content plays on this idea of challenges, Weinstein says, which frankly have been on YouTube for a long time as a general trend, but it's very, very easy to play into that subgenre as a twin, end quote. Having a twin also lowers the barrier to entry to

becoming a creator for influencers to grow online. Collaboration is actually key. Being a twin influencer means having someone around you to act as a sounding board, brainstorm with, or simply hold the camera. It also means splitting editing and promotion time between two people, while one twin responds to fans via Instagram DM, the other can cut together the day's YouTube video. This allows each twin to play into their strengths, together acting as one superfluencer. Quote, my sister Olivia is much more organized than me, says Ashley Messia, a 19-year-old influencer. I'm better when it comes to socializing, end quote. Okay, so I guess that explains it. And I acknowledge that the original twin fluencer,

were, of course, the Olson twins, right? But I don't know, chalk this up to me being old and out of touch. I just don't see why twins are more interesting than anyone else. But I do like Katie Natopoulos's wager, quote, how much do you want to bet there's an aspiring influencer out there pretending to be their own twin for some sort of reverse the prestige clout, end quote. So the hive mind really came through in a big way. I have my answer about those name t-shirt turns out that the Google search I should have made was for Helvetica Ampersand or Helvetica List T-shirts. Lots of you pointed me to this post from 2012 in Howdesign.com. They noted that the shirts function like cultural shibolus.

If you get the reference, then you're in the no, sort of a secret handshake-like thing. Here's the background. Quote, Amsterdam Design Studio Experimental Jetset claims the first iteration of the style, a John and Paul and Ringo and George T in 2001, a pay onto the Beatles made for the Japanese T-shirt label 2K by Gingham. Experimental Jet Set has this to say about the inspiration for the design. When we designed the shirt, our idea was to strip down the idea of a rock band to a list of four names in an attempt to reach for the essence of a group.

In a way, the shirt is very much about abstraction, the process of translating figurative images into something less figurative. There's also an iconoclastic streak running through the shirt, the idea of puncturing through the world of images by using text. In short, we took the idea of the most archetypical band ever, a band that has been a constant source of inspiration to us, and replaced the image with a simple list of names. The fact that we used an ampersand after each name had a purely formal reason. When we put the four names under each other without the ampersands, we thought the name George was sticking out too much, as this word is the longest. We solved this by putting the name George at the first. bottom on the list and adding ampersands to all the other names. This way, the list of names looked

more even. That's how the ampersands were introduced in the design, end quote. Turns out that the copycats to this spread like wildfire because they allowed people to reference tons of cultural things without having to worry about any copyright infringement. So, thank you, hive mind, mystery solved, but I do like this alternative answer tweeted at me by listener Elliot Shank. He says he always figured it was a reference to the 1969 movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, which uses a same name and ampersand convention.