Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/21 – Apple Has Quantum Encrypted iMessage

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Signal finally rolls out usernames, but Apple goes one better security-wise, by quantum encrypting iMessage. Weirdly, Apple also launched a standalone sports scores app. Gemma is an open-source flavor of Gemini from Google. And Reddit wants to reserve some IPO shares for its users. Links: Signal Finally Rolls Out Usernames, So You Can Keep Your Phone Number Private (Wired) Apple is hardening iMessage encryption now to protect it from a threat that doesn't exist yet (Apple Insider) Apple’s iMessage Is Getting Post-Quantum Encryption (Wired) Apple Sports: New Free App Provides Real-Time Scores and Stats, Designed to Drive Apple TV Tune-In (Variety) Apple launches Apple Sports app with scores and betting odds (The Verge) Apple says iPhone 15 batteries have a longer lifespan than initially thought (9to5Mac) Apple retroactively doubles the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro’s battery lifespan (Macworld) Google Gemma: because Google doesn’t want to give away Gemini yet (The Verge) Meet 'Groq,' the AI Chip That Leaves Elon Musk’s Grok in the Dust (Gizmodo) Reddit Plans to Sell Stock to Loyal Users in Unusual IPO Wager (WSJ) Ed Zitron YouTube Bonus Episode 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 Wednesday, February 21st, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Signal finally rolls out usernames, but Apple goes one better security-wise by quantum encrypting iMessage. Weirdly, Apple also launched a standalone sports scores app. Gemma is an open source flavor of Gemini from Google, and Reddit wants to reserve some IPO shares for its users.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. At long last, Signal has finally rolled out usernames in beta letting users conceal their phone numbers for the first time. Signal still requires inputting a phone number to register, though, quoting Wired. Today, Signal launched the rollout in beta of a long-awaited set of features. It's describing simply as phone number privacy. Those features which Wired has tested are designed to allow users to conceal their phone numbers as they communicate on the app and instead share a username as a less sensitive method of connecting with one another. Rather than give your phone number to other, signal, to other, Cignell contacts as the identifier they use to begin a conversation with you. In other words,

you can now choose to be discoverable via a chosen handle, or even to prevent anyone who does have your phone number from finding you on Signal. The use of phone numbers has long been perhaps the most persistent criticism of signals design. These new privacy protections finally offer a fix, says Meredith Whitaker, Signal's president. We want to build a communications app that everyone in the world can easily use to connect with anyone else privately. that privately is really in bold, underlined in italics, Whitaker tells Wired. So we're extremely sympathetic to people who might be using signal in high-risk environments who say the phone number is really sensitive information,

and I don't feel comfortable having that disseminated broadly, end quote. In the new features, which are available in beta now, but which signal plans to roll out in a more final version in the coming weeks, signal has made three changes, one setting that's now switched on by default and two that are opt-in features. First, by default, your phone number will know, longer be visible in your Signal profile unless someone already has the number saved in their phone's address book. Second, you can now choose to create and share a unique username or a QR code

that contains it with anyone you want to connect with. Mine, for instance, is Andy.01. Once someone does start messaging you, a little confusingly, they'll see your chosen profile name instead of that username. That profile name just as before in Signal doesn't have to be unique, and the person you're interacting with can also change it in their own view of you in the app, end quote. Signal, of course, has always made its name as a secure messaging app, but this is taking it even further than that. Apple has announced PQ3, a post-quanim cryptographic protocol for iMessage that uses the Kiber algorithm launching in iOS17.4, iPadOS17.4, and MacOS14.4, quoting Apple Insider. Apple already includes end-to-end encryption in its secure iMessage platform, but while elements such as

contact key verification can help keep users secure from current generation computing threats, it could have a hard time taking on quantum computing. To thwart quantum computers, when they eventually become more commonly used, Apple is not waiting until they arrive to bolster its security. To try and minimize the risks from the use of quantum computing, cryptographers have worked on post-quant cryptography, or PQC. This consists of new public key algorithms that are becoming the basis of quantum secure protocols, namely protocols that can be used by current non-quantum computers, but that are still secure when put against quantum computers. Apple describes the state of quantum cryptography in messaging applications in a tiered approach,

increasing with the level number. Level zero and level one are deemed classical cryptography without quantum security, while level two and later are categorized as using PQC. Moving to PQC-level signal is the first and only large-scale messaging app to be classified as level two. Apple's announcement is that it has come up with a new cryptographic protocol it calls PQ3 that will be incorporated into iMessage. The change offers, quote, the strongest protection against quantum attacks with iMessage becoming the first and only to support Level 3 security. Existing iMessage conversations between devices that can support PQ3 will be automatically changing over to the new protocol. Apple adds that as it, quote, gains operational experience with PQ3 at the massive global scale of iMessage. PQ3 will replace existing cryptographic protocols.

within all supported conversations by the end of 2024, end quote. And quoting wired for why this is important. Billions of medical records, financial transactions, and messages we send to each other are protected by encryption. It's fundamental to keeping modern life and the global economy running relatively smoothly. However, the decades-long race to create vastly powerful quantum computers, which could easily crack current encryption, creates new risks. While practical quantum computing technology may still be years or decades away,

security officials, tech companies, and governments are ramping up their efforts to start using a new generation of post-quantum cryptography. These new encryption algorithms will, in short, protect our current systems against any potential quantum computing-based attacks. Quantum computing is serious business. Governments in the U.S., China, Russia, and tech companies, such as Google, Amazon, and IBM are plowing billions into the still relatively nascent efforts to create quantum computers. If successful, the technology could help unlock scientific breakthroughs and everything from drug design to creating longer-lasting batteries. Politicians are also vying to become quantum superpowers.

The current quantum computing devices are still experimental and not practical for general use. Unlike the computers we use today, quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in more than one state. Current bits are either ones or zeros. It means that quantum devices can store more information than traditional computers and perform more complex calculations, including potentially cracking encryption. Quantum computers, if deployed reliably and in a scalable manner, would have the potential to break most of today's cryptography, says Nukas-Alegnik, an independent security and privacy researcher and consultant. This includes the encryption in the messaging apps billions of people use every day. Most encrypted messaging apps using public key cryptography have used RSA, elliptic curve, or Diffie-Hellman algorithms, end quote. Guess what? Apple launched a new app today as well. Apple Sports is a free app. offering scores and stats for the NBA, Premier League, and more in the U.S., Canada, and the UK on iOS 17.2

or later. Quoting variety. Apple is releasing Apple Sports as a standalone app rather than as a feature in, say, Apple News, in order to deliver real-time scores and updates as rapidly as possible. The business case? The app also is designed to drive viewership to the Apple TV app to watch live sports, including all Major League soccer matches, which are available through Apple T's TV's MLS Season Pass subscription add-on under an exclusive 10-year worldwide deal the tech company struck with the league.

Apple Sports includes a watch-on Apple TV button for each game if applicable, which kicks open the Apple TV app to the service that's live streaming the event and where you can subscribe if you don't already. The Apple Sports app also displays live betting odds for each game, although users can turn those off if they don't want to see them as well as current game clock, play-by-play information, team stats, and lineup details. and customize their scoreboards on Apple Sports by following their favorite teams, tournaments, and leagues, and Apple Sports will sync users' favorites with the Apple TV app and Apple News, end quote. And quoting the verge. The app supports the NBA, NHL, NCAA, Premier League, and several other leagues at launch, including MLS, the Soccer League Apple has exclusive streaming rights to. Bundesliga, La Liga, Liga MX, Liga Un, and Siri A are also supported, and more services will be added after launch.

Apple says that MLB, NFL, NCAA-A-F, N-W-S-L and WNBA will be available, quote, for their upcoming seasons, end quote. By the way, Apple also says the iPhone 15 lineup can retain up to 80% of its original battery capacity at 1,000 charge cycles up from its original estimate of 500 charge cycles. This is notable considering the various controversies around iPhone battery life claims over the years, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Apple says that it's testing. involving charging and discharging the battery 1,000 times under specific circumstances representing common use cases. The improvement is due to Apple making continued updates to battery components and power management systems over the years. Apple says that this change in battery cycle lifespan only applies to the iPhone 15, 15 plus 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Previous

iPhone models continue to be rated at retaining up to 80% capacity at 500 complete charge cycles. The company adds, however, that it is currently investigating older iPhone models as well, end quote. And quoting Mac World. It's well known that the rechargeable batteries of iPhones and other electronic devices degrade over time and will eventually need to be replaced, but it's possible to slow this process by taking care of your handset and not wearing out the battery unnecessarily. The 80% charging limit feature Apple released is a good place to start, end quote. Google is not about to open source Gemini. It's big, bad, open. AI competitive AI model anytime soon. But Google still wants you to remember that it has a long

history of open source when it comes to AI development. To that end, today Google announced Gemma. New state-of-the-art open models based on the same research and technology that brought you Gemini. Developed by DeepMind and other Google teams, the model is available today with all the weights and tools to help developers begin working on it. Gemma comes in two flavors, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, each comes in pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. There are tool chains for inferences and supervised fine-tuning across all major frameworks, and the pre-trained and instruction-tuned models can run on your laptop. Gemma has been optimized for Nvidia's GPUs and Google Cloud TPUs as well.

Basically, the idea here is for devs to run wild with this, fine-tuned Gemma models on their own datasets. They're even offering $300 in credits for new Google Cloud users to get started, but you can also use Gemma for free in Kaggle. Quoting the Verge. Well, Gemini is a big, closed AI model that directly competes with and is nearly as powerful as OpenAI's ChatGPT. The lightweight Gemma will likely be suitable for smaller tasks like simple chatbots or summarizations.

But what these models lack in complication they make up for in speed and cost of use, despite their smaller size, Google claims Gemma models, quote, surpassed significantly larger models on key benchmarks and are, quote, capable of running directly on a developer laptop or desktop computer. They will be available via Cagle, HuggingFace, Nvidia's Nemo, and Google's Vertex AI, end quote. Seemingly another AI breakthrough to tell you about here, demos from AI chipmaker GROC have gone viral after the startup's inference engine showed lightning fast speeds when running LLMs, including for real-time conversations. This is GROQ, not GROK, which is Elon Musk's

AI chatbot, quoting Gizmodo. GROC claims to provide the world's fastest large language models and third-party tests are saying that claim might hold up. In a split second, GROC produces hundreds of words, in a factual answer, citing sources along the way, according to a demo posted on X. In another demo, founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, let a CNN host have a real-time verbal conversation with an AI chatbot halfway across the world on live television. While chat GPT, Gemini, and other chatbots are impressive, GROC could make them lightning fast, fast enough to have practical use cases in the real world. GROC creates AI chips called language processing units or LPUs, which claim to be faster than

NVIDIA's graphics processing units or GPUs. InVIDIA's GPUs are generally seen as the industry standard for running AI models, but early results show that LPUs might blow them out of the water. GROC is an inference engine, not a chatbot like ChatGPT, Gemini, or GROC. It helps these chatbots run incredibly fast, but does not replace them altogether. On GROC's website, you can test out different chatbots and see how fast they run using GROC's LPUs. GROC produces 247 tokens per second compared to Microsoft's 18 tokens per second, according to a third-party test from artificial analysis published last week. That means chat GPT could run more than 13x as fast if it was running on GROC's chips.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and GROC could be significantly more useful if they were faster. One current limitation is that these models can't keep up with real-time human speech. Some delays make conversations feel robotic. Google recently faked its Gemini demo to make it look like Gemini could have a real-time multimodal conversation, even though it can't. But with GROX's increased speeds, that video could be a reality, end quote. Finally, today, sources are telling the journal that Reddit plans to reserve some of its IPO shares for around 75,000 loyal users. An unusual move that could build loyalty as it lists its shares on the NYSE in March. Quote,

the company plans of reserve an as yet undetermined number of shares for 75,000 of its most prolific so-called Redditors when it goes public next month, according to people familiar with the matter. The users will have the opportunity to buy Reddit shares at its initial public offering price before the stock starts trading, a privilege normally reserved only for big investors. Ideally, for the company and its underwriters, Reddit shares will rise in their stock market debut, bestowing big gains on those who buy in at the IPO price.

If the stock falls, however, it could anger those members of Reddit's community, a group that, broadly speaking, hasn't shied away from boycotts in the past. Banks generally favor selling the bulk of an IPO to big money managers that tend to hold stocks for a relatively long time. Individual investors are viewed as more fickle and prone to selling at the first sign of weakness. Robin Hood, a stock trading platform on which many of the meme stocks were traded, sold a chunk of its IPO to its users in 2021. That made for a volatile first day of trading with the stock falling more than 8%. The stock recovered for a bit, but now trades more than 60% below the IPO price. In October 2021, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference that he wanted to make any offering more accessible to individuals. I want our users to be

shareholders and I want our shareholders to be users, he said, end quote. Final link in the show notes today is to the YouTube video of the bonus episode, I'll post to the podcast feed this weekend. I spoke with Ed Zittron about two things. We actually haven't spoken a lot about. First, the whole substack Nazi controversy, which we really didn't cover at all. And second, breaking down where we think the Twitter diaspora is settling, threads, blue sky, Mastodon, who is still on X even. Ed is extremely online, so he helps me break all that down.

Again, final link in the show notes is to the video or wait for it to post right here this weekend.