Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/02 – Apple Sacrifices iPad Production To Protect The iPhone

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Apple is cutting iPad production in order to allocate more components to iPhone production. The Biden administration is getting serious about stablecoins. Zoom is going to start showing you ads unless you pay up. Zillow misjudged the housing market. And a security flaw has been found, inside, of all things: Unicode. Sponsors: BoxOfAwesome.com code "techmeme" for 20% off your first box Arm Viewpoints Podcast Links: Apple trims iPad production to feed chips to iPhone 13 (Nikkei Asia) Nintendo to make 20% fewer Switch consoles due to chip crunch (Nikkei Asia) Biden Administration to Congress: Put Stablecoins Under Federal Supervision – Or We Will (CoinDesk) Zoom is testing showing ads to free users (The Verge) ‘Trojan Source’ Bug Threatens the Security of All Code (KrebsonSecurity) Zillow Seeks to Sell 7,000 Homes for $2.8 Billion After Flipping Halt (Bloomberg) Yahoo Pulls Out of China, Ending Tumultuous Two-Decade Relationship (WSJ) 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, November 2nd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple is cutting iPad production in order to allocate more components to iPhone production.

The Biden administration is getting serious about stable coins. Zoom is going to start showing you ads unless you pay up. Zillow misjudged the housing market and a security flaw has been found inside, of all things, Unicode. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. More supply chain issues. sources are telling Nika Asia that Apple has cut back on iPad production in order to allocate more chips to production of the iPhone 13. iPad production was apparently already down 50% from Apple's original plans for the past two months, so this has been something that's been ongoing, quoting NK Asia.

Parts intended for older iPhones were also being moved to the iPhone 13. The iPad and iPhone models have a number of components in common, including both core and peripheral chips. This allows Apple to shift supplies between different devices in certain cases. The company is prioritizing iPhone 13 output in part because it forecasts stronger demand for the smartphone than for the iPad as Western markets begin to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, sources said. Europe and the Americas account for 66% of Apple's revenue. The peak of new iPhone sales also comes within months of release, so ensuring smooth production for the iPhone 13, which was released on September 24, is a top priority.

for Apple right now. Demand for the iPad, however, has also been robust thanks to the rise of remote working and learning amid the pandemic. Global shipments of iPads climbed 6.7% on the year to 53.2 million devices last year, securing a 32.5% global market share far ahead of the number two Samsung's 19.1 share, according to IDC data. Total iPad shipments were 40.3 million for the first nine months of this year, up 17.83% from the same time a year ago. Global tablet shipments for 2020 came to 164.1 million units up 13.6% from the year before, end quote. But they're not alone, because also from Nika Asia, sources say Nintendo will only be able to produce around 24 million units of the Switch gaming console in its fiscal year 2021 due to chip shortages, which would be 20% below

Nintendo's original plan of producing 30 million units. The Biden administration has urged Congress to subject stable coin issuers to federal oversight, like Congress already does with banks, doing things like limiting their interactions with non-financial companies such as meta, quoting Coin Desk. Congress should also require custodial wallet providers to be regulated by a federal agency and limit stable coin issuers interactions with non-financial companies such as tech or telecom providers, president's working group for financial markets said. The latter recommendation appeared to be aimed squarely at Diem, formerly Libra, the controversial stablecoin project created by

meta, the social media giant previously known as Facebook. The report is part of an escalating effort by policymakers to rein in this $138 billion segment of the broader crypto market to mitigate the risks they believe stablecoins pose to consumers, markets, and the financial system. Stablecoins or cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of another asset, such as the U.S. dollar have seen explosive growth over the last two years despite lingering questions about their backing. Without the safeguards, I think the industry and regulators alike think we might miss out on some potential benefits of financial innovation. Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, Nellie Lang, told Coin Desk, so I think there's a common appreciation of needing a framework

that isn't too onerous, provides protections, and can keep the innovation moving forward, end quote. If Congress fails to pass such laws, the regulatory agencies have the authority to take their own measures. However, the group gave the impression it would prefer that it doesn't happen. Quote, we believe legislation is important, Liang said. This is a new technology, a new innovation. It shouldn't be surprising that the current regulatory framework isn't set up to address some of the new kinds of risks that this could pose, end quote. Congress may be willing to get involved. Members of both the Democratic and Republican parties have been engaged in discussions around regulating cryptocurrencies at large and stable coins in particular, Liang said.

The working group is nominally composed of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, and Acting Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair, Rosson Benham. Each of these individuals could designate a representative to participate in the group. Other bank regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, were also represented in the group, end quote. So this is something to keep an eye on because regulation is obviously coming for crypto, more than it has been in the past even, and probably especially for decentralized exchanges, but especially, especially for stablecoins. As I understand it, central banks and governments are wary of stable coins because they represent the possibility of systemic risk, like we saw

during the Great Recession when housing blew up, i.e., one stable coin blows up and it could create a chain reaction of defaults and losses that could cascade throughout the entire economy. Governments and central banks don't want that, of course, though, like that. Lots of folks in crypto also feel like the fix might be in, quoting George Selgin on Twitter. Quoting from the report, to address risks to stablecoin users and guard against stablecoin runs, legislation should require stablecoin issuers to be insured depository institutions, end quote. Translation, the Biden administration for all its anti-Wall Street rhetoric is catering to the big banks, end quote. I don't know if we ever talked about this, but Zillow got into the House for,

flipping business. Instead of just being a platform for others to sell property, the idea was Zillow could acquire and then sell properties itself, better margins, right? Plus, their platform has all the data, one would assume, so they could do this smartly. Plus, Open Door and Offerpad are competitors to Zillow who have been leading the way in doing something similar. So what could go wrong? Well, Zillow's stock is down sharply this morning on the news that the company is pitching institutional investors trying to interest them in buying up a batch of 7,000 homes Zillow bought recently for around $2.8 billion in order to offload them and recover from buying too many homes too fast, which Zillow blames on its bidding algorithm, quoting Bloomberg.

The move to offload homes comes as Zillow seeks to recover from an operational stumble that saw it buy too many houses, with many now being listed for less than it paid. The company typically offers small numbers of homes to single-family landlords, but the current sales effort is much larger than normal. If successful, the sale would make a dramatic dent in Zillow's inventory. The company acquired roughly 8,000 homes in the third quarter, according to an estimate by real estate tech strategist Mike Delprete. Zillow recently said it would stop making new offers in its home flipping operation for the remainder of the year, though it continues to close on properties that were already under contract. The decision came after the company tweaked the

algorithms that power the business to make higher offers, leaving it with a bevy of winning bids just as home price appreciation cooled off a bit. An analysis of 650 homes owned by Zillow showed that two-thirds were priced for less than the company bought them for, according to an October 31st note from Keybank Capital Markets. I think they leaned into home price appreciation at exactly the wrong moment, said Ed Ruma, an analyst at Keybank. Zillow put a record number of homes on the market in September listing properties at the lowest markups since November 2018, according to research from Yippet data. It also cut prices on nearly half of its U.S. listings in the third quarter, according to Yippet, signaling that its inventory was commanding prices lower than it expected.

The company bought more than 3,800 homes in the second quarter making progress toward its stated goal of acquiring 5,000 homes a month by 2024. The increase in purchases left the company struggling to find workers to renovate the properties, end quote. So again, not a lot of tech companies face worker shortages, but here's another headwind for at least this big tech company. Researchers have discovered a Unicode security vulnerability that affects most code compilers, including those for Go, C++, JavaScript, Java, Rust, and Python, according Krebson security. Virtually all compilers, programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine, code are vulnerable to an insidious attack in which an adversary can introduce targeted vulnerabilities into any software without being detected new research release today, warns.

The vulnerability disclosure was coordinated with multiple organizations, some of whom are now releasing updates to address the security weakness. Researchers with the University of Cambridge discovered a bug that affects most computer code compilers and many software development environments. At issue is a component of the digital text encoding standard Unicode, which allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. Unicode currently defines more than 143,000 characters across 154 different language scripts, in addition to many nonscript character sets such as emojis. Specifically, the weakness involves unicodes bi-directional or bi-di-di algorithm which handles displaying text that includes mixed scripts with different display orders such as Arabic, which is read right to left, and English, which is read left to right. But computer systems need to have a deterministic way of resolving conflicting directionality in text.

Enter the by-di-override, which can be used to make left-to-right, text read right-to-left, and vice versa. In some scenarios, the default ordering set by the bi-di-al algorithm may not be sufficient, the Cambridge researchers wrote. For these cases, by-dye override control characters enable switching the display ordering of groups of characters, end quote. By-di-overrides enable even single-script characters to be displayed in an order different from their logical encoding. As the researchers point out, this fact has previously been exploited to disguise the file extensions of malware disseminated via email. Here's the problem. Most programming languages let you put these by-dye overrides in comments and strings. This is bad because most programming languages allow comments within which all text, including control characters, is ignored by compilers and interpreters.

Also, it's bad because most programming languages allow string literals that may contain arbitrary characters, including control characters. So you can use them in source code that appears innocuous to a human reviewer that can actually do something nasty, said Ross Anderson, a professor of computer security at Cambridge, and co-author of the research. That's bad news for projects like Linux and WebKit that accept contributions from random people, subject them to manual review, then incorporate them into critical code. This vulnerability is, as far as I know the first one to affect almost everything, end quote. The research paper, which dubbed the vulnerability Trojan source, notes that while both

comments and strings will have syntax-specific semantics indicating their start and end, these bounds are not respected by by-dye overrides. Anderson said such an attack could be challenging for a human code reviewer to detect, as the rendered source code looks perfectly acceptable. If the change in logic is subtle enough to go undetected in subsequent testing, an adversary could introduced targeted vulnerabilities without being detected, he said. Equally concerning is that bide-eye override characters persist through the copy and paste functions on most modern browsers, editors, and operating systems, end quote. Rust, by the way, has apparently already released a fix,

and more are certainly coming very soon. Zoom says it is testing showing ads to users on its free membership tier. The ads appear on the browser page shown to users at the end of a so don't worry about that, but still annoying, quoting the verge. Zoom says ads are being rolled out to free users in certain countries, though its blog post doesn't detail exactly which these are. Users of the service's basic tier will only see ads if they join a meeting hosted by another basic tier user. Although ads won't be shown during meetings themselves, it's still a potentially big shift for the video conferencing service. Zoom has typically imposed only minor restrictions on its free tier, which helped the service explode in popularity last year as people around the world

adapted to working and socializing from home. Even its end-to-end encryption, which Zoom initially said would be limited to paid users, ended up coming to free users after all. Until now, arguably, the biggest restriction on Zoom's free tier is its 40-minute limit on the length of group calls. But Zoom's chief marketing officer, Janine Pelosi, writes that it needs to start showing ads to help it, quote, support investment and continue providing free basic users with access to our robust platform. This change ensures that our free basic users are able to continue connecting with friends, family, and colleagues with the same robust platform we have always offered Pelosi writes, end quote. Finally today, another Western tech platform has pooled its services from China,

citing, and quote, increasingly challenging business and legal environment, end quote, but the platform in this case is Yahoo. So it's largely a symbolic gesture because it's Yahoo, but also to give them credit, Yahoo was early to cutting ties with China in a way, quoting the Wall Street Journal. In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1, a Yahoo spokesman said. Yahoo's pullout coincided with the implementation of China's personal information protection law, a privacy law that will curb data collection by technology companies that went into effect on November 1, though Yahoo didn't refer to it directly. Yahoo's China departure was largely

symbolic as the company had already begun shutting down its main services such as email, news and community services in China starting in 2013. Still, Yahoo's exit is a reminder of the increasing challenges foreign companies face in operating in China, including tighter data security and privacy regulation, geopolitical tensions, and tough COVID-19 related rules. On Tuesday, China internet users browsing websites run by Yahoo! Such as AOL.com and media outlets, tech crunch and gadget, were told that Yahoo services will no longer be accessible from mainland China. Chinese users of apps such as Yahoo Weather also received prompts beginning in October that the apps would be discontinued from Monday. The newly introduced regulations governing privacy and data security have increased the uncertainty and compliance costs of operating in China,

and some companies are preferring to pull out rather than deal with the added business risk, said Cameron Johnson, a Shanghai-based management consultant at FAO Global. Modeled after the European Union's general data protection regulation, China's new privacy regulations kicked in on Monday and require organizations and individuals that handle the personal information of Chinese citizens to minimize their collection and obtain user consent, end quote. So my parents were here last week, and I did the thing that you're always told you should do before it's too late. I sat down with them and had them recount for me how they met and how they fell in love and got married, while I recorded them on video for posterity.

I did something similar for one of my grandmothers before she died, and it's an invalid. you know, hairlum, airloom for us. I wish I had gotten other grandparents on tape as well. Anyway, I used my iPhone to do the recording. I recorded in 4K 60 frames per second to try to future-proof the video quality as best I could. And indeed, the video quality is fantastic. But my question now is, how should I preserve the video? Yes, I've transferred the video to my desktop and then a copy to my network attached storage device. And yes, I will put copies on backup solid state hard drives that I have in my closet. But what are my other options? Should I invest in a Blu-ray burner, which I just learned exists, and have hard copies on disk so we could throw

them on the TV easily when we want to? Plus, I want to send copies to my brother and my niece. Should I just put the video on a USBC jump drive then? Have any of you been in a similar situation? because this is not a case of me digitizing old photos or VHS tapes. This is a large 4K high-quality digital video. What's the best way to preserve that so I can easily pass it down to my kids? Will disks still be a thing in 20 years, you think? Will USBC still be a thing? I'm torn on my options, so any advice is welcome.

Talk to you tomorrow.