Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 05/07 – The New Netflix

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Meta wins a case against that NSO Group in spyware allegations. Netflix is completely revamping its design for the first time in years. Amazon has a new robot that can do 70% of the work in its warehouses. And a big chip breakthrough that can bring about the ChatGPT moment for quantum computing? Sponsors: CornBreadHemp.com/ride and code ride Acorns.com/ride Links: Meta wins $168 million in damages from Israeli cyberintel firm in Whatsapp spyware scandal (Courthouse News Service) Netflix Overhauls Its Home Screen for the First Time in 12 Years (NYTimes) Amazon makes ‘fundamental leap forward in robotics’ with device having sense of touch (The Guardian) Generative AI tops cybersecurity in 2025 tech budget priorities, new AWS study finds (GeekWire) Mistral claims its newest AI model delivers leading performance for the price (TechCrunch) Cisco says its new entanglement chip could speed up practical quantum computing by a decade (Fast Company) 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 TechMean right home for Wednesday, May 7th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Meta wins a case against that NSO group in its spyware allegations. Netflix is completely revamping its design for the first time in years.

Amazon has a new robot that can do 70% of the work in its warehouses and a big chip breakthrough that might bring about the chat GPT moment for quantum computing. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. A U.S. jury has awarded meta nearly $168 million in damages from Israel. Raleigh-Spire Maker NSO Group in connection with the 2019 spyware attack on more than 1,400 WhatsApp users' phones. Quoting something called Courthouse News Service. An eight-person jury awarded the Silicon Valley Giant $4,719 in compensatory damages, the monetary

cost for meta for fixing the attack, and over $167 million in punitive damages meant to deter any similar actions by NSO in the future. The damages award also represents a major win for, privacy advocates and human rights organizations who have repeatedly criticized NSO for licensing its Pegasus, a powerful surveillance software that allows its users to remotely gain control over a device's microphone and camera, listen to phone calls in real time, and download nearly all user data from a target's phone, among other capabilities. Today's verdict in the WhatsApp case is an important step forward for privacy and security

as the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone, Meta said in a statement celebrating the win. after its loss in court, NSO reaffirmed its commitment to Pegasus as a valuable tool in anti-terror operations around the world. Quote, we firmly believe that our technology plays a critical role in preventing serious crime and terrorism and is deployed responsibly by authorized government agencies, NSO spokesperson Gil Lanier told Courthouse News. This perspective, validated by extensive real-world evidence and numerous security operations that have saved many lives, including American lives, was excluded from the jury's consideration in this case, end quote. Although it is unclear how the decision will affect NSO, the company's CEO, Yaron Schohat,

previously testified that the company was in dire straits financially and wouldn't be able to pay any damages awarded to META. However, the case isn't quite over yet. Meta still plans to argue a permanent injunction motion at an upcoming hearing, which would prevent NSO from using its platforms, emulating its technology, or creating future WhatsApp accounts. Meta is also asking the court to order NSO to delete any code it still possesses related to its platforms.

The judge indicated she will. schedule the hearing sometime in May or June. Originally designed as a tool for government law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Pegasus, NSA's flagship product licensed to governments around the world, reportedly compromised the privacy of 1,400 activists, journalists, and diplomats via WhatsApp servers in 2019. To embed the spyware into someone's phone, Pegasus clients send a text message, which then invades devices through a malicious code lurking in the messages sent via WhatsApp, telegram, or other messaging services. Once implanted, it can control a phone's microphones and cameras while extracting the personal and location data of its owner,

for example, by scraping browser history and contacts, grabbing screenshots and infiltrating communications. Pegasus can also infect users through missed phone calls and zero-click attacks, which do not require any action from the phone's owner to succeed. NSO Group says it only sells its spyware to legitimate government law enforcement and intelligence agencies vetted by Israel's Defense Ministry for use against terrorists and criminals, end quote. Things are about to look different when you log in to Netflix.

That's because they've unveiled a new homepour. page design for TVs, its first major update since 2013, featuring fewer titles, but more video and animations rolling out next week. Quoting the Times. The last time Netflix debuted a major homepage redesign, the streaming service had just over 30 million subscribers and was only starting to make its own original programs. It now has more than 300 million subscribers and has released thousands of original TV shows and movies and has remade the entire entertainment industry in its streaming image. It's a moment that the company is marketing as the new The new homepage will have a navigation bar across the top of the screen instead of being tucked away on the left side as it has been.

It will also feature what executives are calling responsive recommendations which will serve titles on the homepage based on what the subscriber has been searching for in near real time. Looking for horror, here comes a lot of more horror recommendations. And then the TV homepage will have the ability to more prominently feature its new content types like live programming. The real goal of this is how do we make it easier? how do we make it simpler, faster for you to make a great decision, Greg Peters, a co-chief executive of the company said in an interview. The redesign will start rolling out for all subscribers in the coming weeks and months. It will be only for television screens, which is where viewers do most of their Netflix viewing. 70% the company said. The implications for the industry could

be significant, though. Over the past decade, nearly all media companies copied Netflix's TV homepage when designing their own streaming services with rows upon rows of titles. Now, the gap between Netflix and the traditional entertainment industry is so vast that HBO and Max executives say they would be happy to be considered as an add-on in households that already subscribe to Netflix. But at the same time, Netflix is locked in a battle for streaming TV time supremacy in the United States with YouTube. The Google-owned company has a fairly comfortable lead against Netflix, according to Nielsen, the research firm, end quote. Not only that, though, Netflix says it plans to start testing a TikTok-like feed of vertical videos.

in its mobile app in the coming weeks to help users find more content to watch. Quoting the verge, from the clips, you'll be able to watch the show or movie right away, or you can add it to your list of save things to watch or pass the clip along to a friend. The controls are in the bottom right corner of the screen, much like on TikTok. We know that swiping through a vertical feed on social media apps is an easy way to browse video content. Chief Product Officer Eunice Kim said in a press briefing, and we also know that our members love to browse our clips and trailers to find their next obsession. This isn't the first time Netflix has experimented with a TikTok-style feed. It debuted a

comedy-focused fast laughs feed in 2021, and later a kids' clips feature for children's programming. But this new test seems to be much broader, end quote. Amazon has unveiled Vulcan, a sorting robot with a sense of touch that will be able to grab around 75% of its warehouse items, rolling out globally in the next few years, quoting the Guardian. The robots will be able to identify objects by touch, using AI to work out what they can and can't handle and figuring out how best to pick them up. They will work alongside humans who now stash and retrieve items from shelving units, which are maneuvered to them at picking stations by wheeled robots, of which Amazon now has more than $750,000 in operation. Vulcan will be able to stow items on the upper and lower

levels of the shelving units known as pods so that humans no longer need to use ladders or bend so often during their work. Robots now operating in Amazon's warehouse are able to shift items around or pick items using suction cups and computer vision. The development is likely to raise fears of job losses as retailers reduce human involvement in distribution centers, which employ thousands of people. Many retailers have said that they are increasing investment in automation as labor costs rise around the world. Amazon has faced industrial action in the UK and elsewhere over low pay in its warehouses. Economists at Goldman Sachs speculated in 2023 that 300 million jobs worldwide could be automated out of existence by 2030 as a result of

of the development of generative AI, with many more roles radically transformed. In the UK, between 60,000 and 275,000 jobs could be displaced every year over a couple of decades at the peak of the disruption, estimates from the Tony Blair Institute suggested last year. However, Ty Brady, the chief technologist of robotics at Amazon, said robots could not completely replace humans in the group's warehouses and were there to, quote, amplify the human potential and to improve safety in the workplace. The self-confessed Star Wars Geeks said the robots, he helps design could be likened to R2D2 as an amazing collaborative robot. People will always be part of the equation, he said, while machines will take on the

menial, the mundane, and the repetitive tasks. There's no such thing as completely automated. It just doesn't exist because you always need people to understand the value of the operation just using common sense, like, is that really doing the job? End quote. More signs that AI is probably not a fad, and that spending on it continues apace. An AWS survey of 3,739 senior IT decision makers across nine countries reveals that 45% of them say generative AI is now their top spending priority. 30% say security is the top priority, and 13% say compute. Quoting, geekwire, generative AI will surpass cybersecurity and many corporate tech budget

this year with 45% of global IT leaders naming it their top spending priority for 2025, according to a new report commissioned by Amazon Web Services. The finding from the inaugural AWS Generative AI Adoption Index released Tuesday morning made me step back and think, acknowledged Rahul Pathak, AWSVP of data and AI go-to-market in an interview about the survey results. Pathak said he interpreted the finding not as a sign that organizations view AI as more important than security, but as an indication of AI's growing impact on business. Within AI projects, he noted, security is also a top concern, including data protection and responsible AI use.

The study conducted by Access Partnership is based on a global survey of 3,739 senior IT decision makers across nine countries, including the U.S, UK, Germany, Japan, and India. The study found that 90% of organizations are already using generative AI tools in some capacity with nearly half-moving beyond experimentation to full integration. AI is rapidly, rapidly being adopted, Pattec said. The fact that 9 out of 10 folks are looking at this actively and putting it into play, you can't afford to wait around. More findings from the study. New leadership roles. 60% of organizations have already named a chief AI officer or similar role with another 26% planning to do so by next year. Moving beyond testing, 44% of organizations have gone past

pilot programs and are starting to use generative AI in real workflows. Then there's the focus on skills. More than half of organizations have launched training programs and 92% planned to hire people with generative AI experience in 2025. Mixing of off-the-shelf models and custom tools is interesting. Most companies are using existing AI models and building custom tools on top of them rather than starting from scratch, end quote. Mistrel has released Mistral Medium 3, which it says focuses on efficiency without compromising

performance for 40 cents per 1 million input and $20.80 per 1 million output tokens. Quoting TechCrunch, Mistral Medium 3 performs at or above 90% of Anthropics' costly are Claude Sonnet 3.7 model on benchmarks across the board claims Mistral. It also surpasses recent open models including Meda Zalamma 4 Maverick and coheres Command A on popular AI performance evaluations. Tokens are the raw bits of data models work with, with a million tokens equivalent to about 750,000 words, roughly 163,000 words longer than war in peace. Mistral Medium 3 can be deployed on any cloud, including self-hosted environments of four GPUs and above, explained Mistral in a blog post sent to TechCrunch.

On pricing, the model beats cost leaders such as Deepseek V3, both in API and self-deployed systems. According to Mistral, MidsRaeum 3 is best for coding and STEM tasks and excels at multimodal understanding. The company says the clients in financial services, energy, and health care have been beta testing the models for use cases like customer service, workflow automation, and analyzing complex datasets. In addition to Mistral's API, where enterprise customers can work with Mistral to fine-tune it, Mistral Medium 3 is available on Amazon's SageMaker platform starting Wednesday. It'll soon come to other hosts, including Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry and Google's Vertex AI

platforms, the company added. The launch of Mistral Medium 3 follows on the heels of Mistral's Mistral's Small 3.1 in March. In its blog post, the company teased the release of a much larger model in the coming weeks. Mistral on Wednesday also launched LayChat Enterprise, a corporate-focused chatbot service that offers tools like an AI agent builder and integrates Mistral's models with third-party services, including Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint. Lay-chat Enterprise rolled out in private preview earlier this year, but today marks its general availability, end quote. Finally, today, Cisco says it has built a prototype entanglement source. chip that could cut the timeline for practical quantum computing by up to a decade.

Quoting Fast Company, the chip was developed in partnership with UC Santa Barbara and is novel in that it generates up to 1 million entangled photon pairs per second and does so at room temperature, saving considerable resources. Additionally, Cisco is also announcing the opening of Cisco Quantum Labs, which will be the company's dedicated quantum research hub in Santa Monica, California. The chip itself was developed at Cisco's outshift incubator where Viljoy Penn, PANDA, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco, says the company works on projects that are, quote, slightly out of the comfort zone. Where a networking company, says Pande, we're looking at quantum networking and quantum security.

Our thesis is pretty straightforward. To make quantum computing practical, you need to scale it out, he adds. You need a network, and to have a quantum network, you need a quantum entanglement chip. That's the first building block. In practice, the chip will allow quantum computers to be networked together, similar to existing networks for classical computers, enabling distributed quantum computing. While other companies are focused on building quantum computers themselves, Cisco is working on the infrastructure to make quantum computing actually work, and it's attempting to get ahead of things by developing the network and security frameworks,

while large-scale quantum demand is still likely years away. Moreover, while some experts have mused that quantum computing could be as far as 20 years down the road, Pandey says that Cisco's breakthrough likely cuts that timeline by between five and ten years. Building the chip took between three and four years, and now Cisco is looking at moving it into production, says Reza Nejibati, head of Quantum Research and Quantum Labs at Outshift by Cisco. We're working toward more commercial fabrication, he says. There's a whole bunch of hardware and software technology that we're bringing up. The quantum proof of concept is happening.

As for what's next, Pande says Cisco will work on software to help build out a quantum network and continue to work on a quantum roadmap. There's going to be a chat GPT moment for Quantum, he says. We need to start putting the fundamental building blocks together to prepare, end quote. Hey, just a reminder that if you listen to this pod on Apple Podcasts, take a look at today's episode, bring it up in the app. In the top right corner, you see that arrow, hit it, and turn on automatic downloads. So you never miss an episode.

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