Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/20 – Actual Inflation Comes To The App Store

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Now the hackers have come for the crypto market makers. Spotify gets into the Audiobooks game. Slack gets in on the whole productivity apps renaissance. Actual inflation is coming to the app store and 1 Euro apps will soon be no more. And the chat room that only opens its doors when your phone’s battery is about to die. Sponsors: Online.UC.edu Links: Crypto market maker Wintermute hacked for $160 million (The Block) Uber links breach to Lapsus$ group, blames contractor for hack (BleepingComputer) Rockstar comments on GTA 6 leak and claims project won’t be delayed (VideoGameChronicle) Nasdaq is preparing to launch an institutional crypto custody service (The Block) Spotify Launches Audiobooks Business With A La Carte Pricing, No Discounts for Subscribers (The Hollywood Reporter) Slack’s new Canvas feature puts a document editor in your chat window (The Verge) Apple to raise App Store prices in multiple countries next month (9to5Mac) Apple says software update coming next week to fix iPhone 14 Pro camera shake issue (9to5Mac) This Chatroom Only Opens When Your Phone’s About to Die (Motherboard) 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, September 20th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Now the hackers have come for the crypto market makers.

Spotify gets into the audiobooks game. Slack gets in on the whole productivity apps game. Actual inflation is coming to the app store and one euro apps will soon be no more. And the chat room that only opens its doors when your phone's battery is about to die. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Uh-oh, looks like I might have to learn about how important. or not important maybe, market makers are for the crypto market, because crypto market maker Wintermute says hackers stole $160 million from its defy operations,

but the firm remains solvent, it says. In total, 90 assets were stolen, most of them worth less than a million dollars. Quoting the block. CEO of Jenny Gavoy said today on Twitter that the money was related to its defy operations and that its centralized exchange and over-the-counter offerings were not affected. We are solvent with twice over that amount in equity left. Gavoy said if you have a M-M agreement with Wintermute, your funds are safe. There will be a disruption in our services today and potentially for the next few days,

and we will get back to normal after, end quote. Gavoy said that 90 assets were stolen. Two amounts of tokens were worth between $1 million and $2.5 million, with the remaining below $1 million. He added that the firm was open to treating this as a white hat hack. In this case, the firm would let the hacker keep some of the money as a bug bounty if they returned the rest. Via Telegram, Gavoy confirmed that the tweets were accurate but had no further comment. Prominent crypto individuals were quick to offer their responses to the hack, quote, If it can happen to winter mute, stay safe, stay paranoid, said Dragonfly Capital Managing

partner, Haseeb Qureshi, end quote. Responding to last week, hack, Uber says a contractor's account was breached by Lapsis-linked hackers and exposed Hacker 1 bug reports have been remediated, quoting bleeping computer. The company added that the hacker used the stolen credentials of an Uber EXT contractor in an MFA fatigue attack, where the contractor was flooded with two-factor authentication login requests until one of them was accepted. This social engineering tactic has become very popular and has been used in recent attacks targeting well-known companies worldwide, including Twitter, Robin Hood, Mailchimp, and Octa. From there, the attacker accessed several other employee accounts, which ultimately gave the attacker elevated permissions

to a number of tools, including G Suite and Slack. Uber explained in an update to the original statement. The attacker then posted a message to a company-wide Slack channel, which many of you saw and reconfigured Uber's open DNS to display a graphic image to employees on some internal sites, end quote. The company added that it found no evidence that the threat actor could access production systems that store sensitive user information, including personal and financial data, e.g. credit card numbers, user bank account info, personal health data, or trip history. Uber added that it is yet to discover proof that the attacker has accessed and injected any malicious code within its code base. Leaping computer was also told by a source that the threat actor was

able to exfiltrate all vulnerability reports before losing access to. to Uber's bug bounty program, including reports that were waiting for a fix, presenting a severe security risk to the company. It would not be surprising if the threat actor had already put these vulnerability reports for sale to cash in and for other threat actors to use, if not fully patched in future attacks. The attacker known as T-Pots 2022 also claimed the breach of Video Game Studio Rockstar Games under the T-Pot Uber Hacker moniker over the weekend after leaking in-game videos and screenshots of source code from both Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto 6 as proof, end quote. On that, Rockstar officially confirmed what it calls a network intrusion by an unauthorized third party,

leading to the Grand Theft Auto leak, but says that the game's development will continue as planned, quoting Video Games Chronicle. At this time, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services, nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects. We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you all in this way. Our work on the next Grand Theft Auto game will continue as planned, and we remain as committed as ever to delivering an experience to you, our players, that truly exceeds your expectations, end quote. The leaked build seemingly confirms the previous reporting that the next Grand Theft Auto would

take place in Vice City. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that the game, which it claimed began development sometime in 2014, is, quote, at least two years away, end quote. Back to crypto. Sources say NASDAQ is exploring an institutional crypto custody service pending regulatory approval and a crypto-focused division called NASDAQ digital assets, quoting the block. The firm which operates markets in U.S. and global equities is no stranger to the cryptocurrency market having served as a provider of market surveillance technology to cryptocurrency exchange venues since at least 2018. In February 2021, the exchange announced the debut of the hashtag

NASDAQ Crypto Index ETF, which is based on its own index. Historically, the firm has opted to provide technology to crypto market participants versus operating as a market itself to compete with the likes of Coinbase and FTX. The new offering is pending regulatory approval, according to a source. NASDAQ is also establishing a new crypto-focused division in tandem with its exploration into crypto custody called NASDAQ digital assets. In an announcement released after publication, NASDAQ said the units launch, quote, underpins NASDAX ambition to advance and help facilitate broader institutional participation in digital

assets by providing trusted and institutional-grade solutions focused on enhanced custody, liquidity, and integrity, end quote. Custody is a lucrative yet crowded market in the crypto space with institutional custody providers fetching multi-billion dollar valuations. Crypto wallet and custody firm Ledger clinched a one and a half billion dollar valuation in June 2021, while Anchorage closed a $350 million funding round. at a $3 billion valuation in December 2021, end quote. Spotify has launched an audiobook service in the U.S. with 300,000 titles,

letting users purchase and download individual books to play in its app, quoting the Hollywood Reporter. After spending the past few years teasing its literary ambitions and acquiring the audiobook platform Find Away for $19 million, Spotify has formally launched its audiobooks business as an a la carte model that will allow users to purchase and download individual audiobooks. At launch, Spotify's audiobooks catalog includes 300,000 titles from major and independent publishers for users in the U.S. audiobooks can be discovered via the search function on the Spotify app, and buyers will be redirected to a separate web page to make their purchase. Once completed, users can return to the Spotify app to listen to the book, online, and offline. Unlike other

audiobook competitors, like Amazon's Audible, which provides discounts and credits towards audiobooks for subscribers, Spotify is not offering audiobook discounts for premium subscribers at least at launch. During a call with reporters near Zickerman, Spotify's VP and Global Head of audiobooks and gated content, said the company is actively exploring other business models, but after speaking with industry partners, determined that the Alicart model was, quote, the best way to begin activating audiobooks and learning from how people interact with individual titles, end quote. Since Spotify is acting as the retailer for its catalog of audiobooks, the audio giant is determining pricing for each title. Zickerman described the pricing

as consistent with industry norms and noted that the royalty rates vary based on publisher. And unlike its podcasts, which include ads even for premium subscribers, Spotify will not be including advertising in its a la carte audiobooks business, though Zickerman said the company is well positioned to explore an ad-based model in the future, as well as other business models. Though there will be no Spotify exclusive audiobooks at launch, users can also likely expect to listen to those in the future, as the company previously experimented with the format last year, with celebrity-narrated versions of classic novels like Jane Austen's Persuasion and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The company will also add algorithmically curated recommendations based on a user's listening habits at a later date, but at launch, Spotify will lean on editorially curated recommendations for listeners, end quote. Something, something, the productivity space is wild all the sudden. Slack, which probably kicked off the current generation of productivity app innovation, has announced Canvas, a collaborative tool that

presents contextual information for each channel, helps users edit documents in app and more, coming in 2023, quoting the verge. Slack is becoming a document editor. The Salesforce-owned company announced today at its developer conference that it is building a new feature called Canvas that will let users create and edit full docs from within the Slack interface. It's one of Slack's biggest announcements in a while and maybe its biggest departure ever from its email killer roots. The idea behind bringing documents to Slack seems to have been to match everything about Slack that's productive and useful and pull it out of a fast-moving chat window and into a more permanent and findable space. Canvas documents, which Slack calls canvases,

can obviously contain text and images, but one big advantage they have is Slack's ability to grab important content from any link pasted into the app. Put a YouTube link, a tweet, or now a document, and it'll embed the content automatically. Through Slack's many integrations with other apps, you can also interact with third-party tools right from within a canvas. Each canvas is part document, part low-code website, with all the features inside Slack. The most immediate purpose the feature will serve is as a big upgrade for Slack's pins and bookmarks. Both were designed to make important messages and links easier to find, but too easily turn into context-free places where you can't find anything, and nobody bothers to look anyway. I just checked one Verge Slack channel, and there are 51

pinned items. That's not helping anybody. Instead of pinning a bunch of messages with helpful links for new hire Slack imagines, you might just make a canvas with all of the forms they need, information to know and workflows to follow on their first day. You can create one-off documents through Canvas, but each channel will also now automatically have its own associated page. Slack imagines you might use those as a hub for all the important details, links, and information users need for that channel. That extends the way people are already using Slack today, said Nate Botwick, a VP of product at Slack. Botwick previously worked at Quip, which Salesforce acquired in 2016, and which powers a lot of the technology underlying canvas.

It takes their channels, which have already been built out and mapped to their organizational priorities, and adds a space to curate and organize information for that channel, end quote. At first, Botwick says Slack Canvas is less a competitor to Google Docs and Notion and More a way to find your Google and Notion stuff more easily. In the long run, though, it sure sounds like Slack is trying to compete with Google Docs and Notion, end quote. Something, something in this economy? Well, if everything about the economy these days is inflation, then I guess this makes sense. Apple has announced plans to increase the price of apps and in-app payment on the app store in all territories that use the euro as their currency, as well as some Asian countries.

This is all starting October 5th, and the rationale is the relative strength of the U.S. dollar, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. regions affected are Chile, Egypt, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, Vietnam, and every territory that uses the euro as its currency. For those in the Eurozone, apps and in-app purchases price at 99 cents, will now cost 1 euro-19. An item that costs 9 euro-99 will have its price increase to 11 euro-99. Apple reminds developers that the new App Store prices will take effect on October 5, 2022. can keep the subscription prices for current subscribers if they want to, end quote. And another Apple Nugget real quick.

Apple says a software update is coming next week to fix the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max camera shake issue that has been showing up in third-party apps, 9 to 5 Mac again. This issue appears to be related with the firmware controlling the optical image stabilization system of the camera lenses. This would manifest with audible rattling inside the camera. camera module and the output video would feature visible shaking artifacts. If you have an iPhone 14 Pro or 14 Pro Max exhibiting this camera issue, then stay tuned for the fix in a software update arriving next week, likely version iOS 16.0.2. In the meantime, it's probably not advised to play around

with the dodgy camera system if you are seeing the bug, as that could potentially cause some permanent physical damage to the hardware. Another software bug currently plaguing new iPhone 14 buyers is the deluge of Cut, copy, paste, clipboard permission alerts. Apple has acknowledged this problem, and the Wall Street Journal says that next week's software update for Camera Shake will address the clipboard problem, end quote. Finally today, let me hip you to this chat room that only opens up when your phone is about to die. Quoting motherboard, die with me.

An app launched Wednesday on iOS and Android is a chat room that's only accessible during those dark moments where your phone's about to kick it. Like Chris Bullen's offline-only webpage, it tinkers with the idea that letting go of our digital connections might reveal whole new possibilities. We wanted to do something positive with a low battery. Dries Depuder, the Belgian-based creator of the app told me in an email. The idea of incorporating a chat room into that concept came later. And now we see people happy with a low battery, having low battery conversations.

We had so much fun creating this, end quote. Getting the final version of Die With Me through the App Store approval process was much more difficult, Deep-Pooter told me. Just before launch, the news broke that Apple was throttling iPhone performance on phones with old batteries, and Apple started rejecting every update of this app. Eventually, they were able to push it through a long update process to get it live on the app store. The current version of Die With Me is a simple, clever, anonymous toy, but DePooter told me that their original plans included potential for a romantic connection. We had ideas to make a dating app where you can find someone around you with a low battery, he said, and when you meet,

the battery is dead, so you can have a offline real conversation, end quote. Nothing for you today. I'm off for that second trip to the dentist chair. Yippie. Talk to you tomorrow.