Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/13 – Microsoft and ESET Help Ukraine Keep The Lights On

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

ESET and Microsoft helped Ukraine stop an attack on a power plant. Might CNN+ become a high profile casualty of the streaming wars? Elon Musk is facing a Twitter shareholder lawsuit. People aren’t happy that Meta’s metaverse vig is higher than even Apple dares charge. And, the new privacy-focused browser from Duck Duck Go. Sponsors: Smith.ai promocode techmeme for $100 off signup Links: Researchers find new malware variant after stopping attack on Ukrainian energy provider (The Record) Former Ethereum Developer Virgil Griffith Sentenced to 5+ Years in Prison for North Korea Trip (CoinDesk) CNN+ struggles to lure viewers in its early days, drawing fewer than 10,000 daily users (CNBC) Big cuts coming for CNN+ after slow start (Axios) Elon Musk Sued Over Delay in Disclosing Twitter Stake (Bloomberg) Meta's New 47.5% Fee on Metaverse Items Has NFT Twitter Pissed (CNET) Meta: 124 Quest Apps Have Earned More Than $1M, 8 Have Earned More Than $20M (RoadToVR) DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Browser Finally Lands on Desktop (Wired) 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 TechMame Right Home for Wednesday, April 13th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, ESET and Microsoft helped Ukraine stop an attack on a power plant. Might CNN Plus become a high-profile casualty of the streaming wars?

Elon Musk is facing a Twitter shareholder lawsuit. People aren't happy that Meta's Metaverse Vig is higher than even Apple Dares charge, and the new privacy-focused browser from DuckDuck-Go. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Ukrainian officials say they stopped an attack on an energy facility with the help of ESET and Microsoft, while along the way identifying a new variant of the Industrioyer malware, an infamous piece of malware that was used by the Sandworm APT group in 2016 to cut off power in Ukraine, quoting the record. CERT UA, the governmental computer emergency response team of Ukraine, said the attack used in destroyer to target several, infrastructure elements, including high-voltage electrical substations, computers at the facility,

network equipment, and server equipment running Linux operating systems. It is known that the victim organization suffered two waves of attacks. The initial compromise took place no later than February 2022, CERT, explained. The disconnection of electrical substations and the decommissioning of the company's infrastructure was scheduled for Friday evening, April 8th, 2022. At the same time, the implementation of the malicious plan has so far been prevented, end quote. In an explainer on the situation. Eset said it also saw the attackers use several other destructive malware families, including caddy wiper, orc shred, solo shred, and awful shred. Eset said it was unsure of how the attackers compromised the initial victim or how they managed to move from the IT network

to the industrial control system network. But CERT UA said the attackers were able to move laterally between different network segments by creating chains of SSH tunnels. SSAH tunnels allow users to forward connections to a remote machine through a secure channel from a port on a user's desktop, end quote. Former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith has been sentenced to more than five years in prison and fined $100,000 for helping North Koreans use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions, quoting Coin Desk. In September, Griffith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate international

sanctions against North Korea. Griffith was arrested in November 2019 after giving a talk at a cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang in April of that year. Though the crime carried a maximum penalty of 20 years, Griffith's plea deal with federal prosecutors brought the sentence down to a range of 63 to 78 months, approximately 5 to 6.5 years. Griffith has already spent approximately two years in custody, though he was released on bail for 14 of those months. The court will count the remaining 10 months as time served. Judge Castell read a series of text messages and emails from Griffith in which the defendant admits to sharing information with North Korea for the express purpose.

of helping the repressive Kim regime evade sanctions. What the judge found most damning, perhaps, was a photo of Griffith presenting at the conference wearing a traditional North Korean suit and standing in front of a blackboard on which it read no sanctions with a smiley face. Quote, the fact of the matter is Virgil Griffith hoped to come home to Singapore or elsewhere as a crypto hero, Castel said, to be admired and praise for standing up to government sanctions for his fearlessness and nobility, end quote. Castel blasted Griffith's history of cooperation with the government both before and after his trip to Pyongyang, held up by the defense as evidence of his good nature as narcissism. Quote, this guy is willing to play both sides of the street as long as he is the center of attention,

Castel said, end quote. When the streaming wars kicked off, we used the analogy many times of musical chairs. There were so many players in the streaming war game that surely there wasn't room for everybody, right? And yet to various degrees, even some of the weaker players have shown varying degrees of success. There didn't appear to be much danger of a quick washout until now. According to various outlets, two weeks after the launch of CNN Plus, CNN's streaming effort, the premium streaming service has garnered under 10,000 daily active users amid reports that CNN has spent around $300 million thus far on trying to make CNN Plus a thing. Quoting CNBC. CNN Plus launched

launched on March 29th. The subscription news streaming service, which charges $5.99 a month, or $59.99 annually, only became available on Roku on Monday and still isn't on Android TV. Still, the paltry audience casts doubt on the future of the application following the recently completed combination of Discovery and WarnerMedia into Warner Brothers Discovery. To put that daily user number in perspective, CNN's cable network suffered a sharp decline in viewership last year, but still rang up an average of 773. thousand total viewers a day. We continue to be happy with the launch and its progress after only two weeks. A CNN spokesperson said, CNN sought to make a huge splash with CNN Plus, luring big name talent

from rival news networks such as Cassie Hunt from NBC News and Chris Wallace from Fox News. But there is broad skepticism whether there's enough demand to sustain a standalone news streaming service with entertainment first options dominating the landscape. Disney Plus, for instance, posted more than 10 million subscribers on its first day. CNN hasn't released an exact number of CNN-plus subscribers. Disney's ESPN Plus, which offers sports news programming in addition to live-event broadcasts recently reported 21.3 million subscribers. NBCUniversals Peacock, which also features news programming, reported 24.5 million monthly active accounts in the U.S., more than 9 million of which were paid members. ESPN Plus charges $699 a month, and Peacock offers premium tiers starting at $4.99 a month. Werner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zazlav hasn't commented publicly on CNN Plus's long-term future. He told CNBC in February he'd need to see how the application performed before deciding on any next moves, end quote. But Axios is reporting the vultures might already be circling for CNN Plus.

They say, quote, the news giant was initially planning to invest around $1 billion in the service over the next four years. Hundreds of millions of dollars are expected to be cut from that original investment total. To date, around $300 million has been spent on the subscription service, which includes a sizable marketing investment. CNN executives with help from consulting firm McKinsey originally expected to bring in around 2 million subscribers in the U.S. in the service's first year and 15 to 18 million after four years, end quote. Ah yes, product development by consultant. Always a good move. I suppose this was inevitable. Elon Musk is facing a proposed shareholder class action lawsuit that alleges Musk's delayed SEC filings, disclosing his stake, kept Twitter's share price artificially low.

Quoting Bloomberg, Mark Bain Rasella sued Musk for securities fraud in Manhattan Federal Court Tuesday, claiming Musk was required to disclose his holdings to the SEC by March 24th. Musk's delay in filing the disclosure allowed him to buy more shares at a lower price and cheated the sellers. of Twitter sales of increased profits, Rasella claims. Musk didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter declined to comment on the suit. The investor said that when Musk filed the form revealing his Twitter stake, company shares rose 27% from $39.31 on April 1st to $49.97 on April 4th. Rasella is seeking to represent a class of investors who sold Twitter shares from March 24th to April 1st, end quote.

Remember yesterday I told you about META's plan to take up to, to a 47 and a half percent cut of each virtual transaction in its Horizon World's sort of platform. Well, as also was probably inevitable, this has drawn criticism, not the least of which from NFT proponents because, well, you know, you thought a 30% App Store Vig was usurious. As comparison, as of right now, OpenC only takes a two and a half percent cut, quoting CNET. For every item sold in Horizon Worlds, a 30% cut goes to meta via the Oculus platform, and 25% of the remaining amount goes to the meta app store. That's more than Apple's off-criticized 30% app store fee and much larger than what NFT traders are accustomed to. In the NFT space, Marketplace OpenC takes a 2.5% cut of each transaction, and creators typically take between 2.5 and 7.5%.

To clarify, the items meta is selling aren't non-fungible tokens. They're more similar to the skins and animations that you could currently buy in games like Fortnite. But the Metaverse meta is building is competing with crypto-native metaverses like Sandbox and DeCentraland where in-world items are owned as NFTs. At the heart of the issue is a philosophical point about how metaverses should be constructed. A metaverse is any digital world that's frequented by large groups of people, think Second Life or even games like World of Warcraft. The question is whether the next wave of metaverse is shepherded by the world's biggest social media company should be open or closed. A closed Metaverse is run by a central authority where lands and items are

owned by the company that built the world. An open Metaverse allows people to buy and own Metaverse land and items as NFTs and exchange them for cryptocurrency. Take for instance Sandbox. It's a blockchain integrated world now in beta testing made up of a fixed 166,44 blocks of land, which can be bought and used like real-world property. Creators make in-world items, which they sell for sand, the native cryptocurrency that can then be exchanged for ether. The argument is that open metaverses will be more organic virtual societies when compared to centrally designed metaverses like Horizon Worlds. Quote, Facebook charging 47 and a half percent for every NFT sale is the best thing to ever happen to us. One tweet reads, with the implication being that

meta's excessive fee will drive creators toward open metaverses like sandbox and Decentraland. Crypto boosters say that buying an in-world item as an NFT allows you to try. truly own it. You can sell it, trade it, or hold it as an investment just like real life items. It appears that meta is aiming to replicate some of this benefit, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday said, quote, clearly the ability to sell virtual goods and be able to take them with you from one world to another is going to be an important part of the metaverse, end quote. Quoting Michael Gartenberg on Twitter, 50% tax rate in the metaverse, I think I'll stay in the real world because taxes are bad enough here.

This is related, though, according to analysis in February, Meta's Quest store surpassed $1 billion in content revenue since its launch. The Quest store is where you buy things for your Oculus, formerly Oculus Quest headset. 124 Quest apps have earned more than $1 million in revenue, it is believed, eight of which might have exceeded $20 million in revenue. So we're getting to the point where this is maybe a viable marketplace, quoting Road to VR. With 124 Quest apps exceeding $1 million, that means roughly 36% of apps on the Quest store have earned more than $1 million, which I take to mean that Meta is making fairly good decisions about which apps are going to perform well in the store if we measure success by the $1 million milestone. For reference, $1 million

at the most common Quest app price is $20 by 50,000 units sold. If we take the latest data shared by meta at face value, i.e. we assume all the apps in the $1 million bucket have made exactly that much, all the apps in the $2 million bucket have made exactly that much, etc. We can conclude that about 55% of the $1 billion meta says was spent in the Quest store has gone to these 124 apps. And we know for a fact that games like Beat Sabre have made far more than the top $20 million bucket of data that meta has shared. So that means even more than 55% of the store's revenue is going to just 124 or 36% of Quest apps. This isn't an unexpected outcome. After all, gaming generally tends to be a hits-driven business, but it does make one wonder why a smaller number of apps are running away with

the bulk of the earnings, especially when meta is handpicking which apps are allowed onto the Quest store. Is it that only a small number of games on the store are actually good, or are other factors causing certain games to snowball in success, like how they are promoted in the store? tough to say, end quote. Finally today, DuckDuckGo has launched its privacy-focused browser on MacOS in beta through a private waiting list, quoting Wired. The desktop app, which is being released in beta, comes years after the company launched its Android and iOS browsers, and it continues to push to create a suite of privacy-first web tools.

The browser uses Duck.Docco's private search engine as the default option, blocks ad trackers on each site you visit, and shows how much. many have been blocked. It also includes a built-in option for saving passwords, and it incorporates the company's recently launched email protection, which blocks hidden trackers in the emails you are sent. Everything that we build, we want to make as frictionless and simple and easy to understand as possible, Berger Lennon says, and just to default to the most private thing without tradeoffs in that experience, end quote. In the new browser, this includes taking on one of the internet's most annoying experiences, cookie consent pop-ups, which were provoked by the introduction of the GDPR, the EU's landmark data privacy law.

While browser extensions can help you avoid cookie pop-ups, Duck Duck Go's browser automates the process. The first time you use the app, you'll be asked if you want to let it manage the pop-ups that appear. If you give it permission to do so, it will use JavaScript to automatically set the cookie preferences on each site you visit and pick the options to maximize privacy. What this means in practice is that you don't see cookie pop-ups. This feature works on about 50% of cookie pop-ups that you might encounter, Berger Lennon says, adding that the percentage should significantly increase when more people use the beta. I've been trying the Duck. Dot Go desktop app for several days, and I feel like I got fewer cookie pop-ups than usual.

Using the web is much more pleasant without them. The browser currently has a minimal interface, though, with few buttons or icons clogging up the view. Performance appears to be relatively quick. A fire emoji button, familiar to users of Duck. Mobile Apps allows cookies and other data to be erased with a couple of clicks. For now, the rollout of the browser is limited. DuckDuckGo's Mac app is being released as a beta that people can access by signing up to a private waiting list through the company's mobile app. The beta launch means Duck.com go can make changes and iron out bugs before its full release.

At the moment, it does feel like some common browser features are missing. There isn't a bookmark bar for easy access to saved sites or folders, but the company says it's working on this. There's also no way to get a detailed history of all the sites you visited. There are different ways to access your browsing history, including a privacy feed of previous websites visited, and auto completes when you start typing a previously visited site, but these don't feel comprehensive. What perhaps makes Duck, Duck Go's app stand out is how the browser is built.

The vast majority of alternative web browsers, including Microsoft's Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera, all used, to some extent, altered versions of Google's browser codebase, chromium and its underlying browser engine, blink. Mozilla's Firefox is one of the only other browsers that doesn't use this Google-created setup. DuckDuck-Go shunned chromium and instead uses Apple's WebKit rendering system, which converts code into the web pages you see. We wanted complete control over the code and the experience. Berger Lennam says that decision was taken in part because adapting chromium would have meant the browser would inherit cruft and clutter. His words from Google's design process, Berger Lennon says. Instead, quote, every bit of code is owned by Duck, Duck,

Go, and written by Duck, Duck Go, end quote. Hey, tomorrow, not today, tomorrow afternoon, we're going to do a Twitter space at an unusual time, specifically the afternoon, 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, which means, especially for those of you in Europe, if you've never participated in one of our Twitter spaces for time zone reasons, here's your opportunity. And I'm I'm excited about this one. Remember when in the long reads last week I suggested that post from Pragmatic Engineer about how things blew up over at Fast? The author, Gargeli Oros, took a very inside baseball from the point of view of an employee at a high-profile startup perspective. He followed that up with a post about the expectations versus the reality of joining a fang company. Chris and I

started talking to him offline and he agreed to come on a space and talk more deeply about his experiences and perspective on, well, you know, playing the tech worker game, the perils and promise and best practices of joining a startup versus the perils and promise and best practices of joining a big tech company. Hopefully, if you're a tech worker, an engineer, a designer, what have you, there will be some valuable learnings for you in this conversation. And also, you could always bring your own experiences and questions to the table. So look for that tomorrow, an hour or so after tomorrow's episode drops on Twitter, 2 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. GMT, I guess. See you then.