Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 05/18 – Apple Takes A Covid Step Back

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Apple is delaying its recent return to work policy indefinitely. If crypto mining is banned in China, how come it still the second biggest contributor to the global hashrate? Twitter’s board says it’s going to hold Elon’s feet to the fire. And the interesting raise for a startup looking to save encryption from quantum computing? Sponsors: LiveOuter.com/techmeme LCX.com/ride Links: Apple Delays Plan to Have Staff in Office Three Days a Week (Bloomberg) Apple Executive Who Left Over Return-to-Office Policy Joins Google AI Unit (Bloomberg) China Makes a Comeback in Bitcoin Mining Despite Government Ban (Bloomberg) Netflix Hit By Layoffs; About 150 Mostly U.S.-Based Employees Affected (Deadline) Acer Just Revealed External Monitors With Stereoscopic 3D, and I'm Dying to Try Them (Gizmodo) As Musk Tweets, Advisers Labor to Keep Twitter Deal on Track (Bloomberg) Elon Musk Does Not Care About Spam Bots (Matt Levine/Bloomberg) Cornami raises $68M to support quantum encryption (VentureBeat) 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, May 18th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple is delaying its recent return to work policy indefinitely. If crypto mining is banned in China, how come it's still the second biggest contributor to the global hash rate? Twitter's board says it's going to hold Elon's feet to the fire and the interesting raise for a startup looking to save encryption from quantum computing. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Something something tech companies, as the canaries in the coal mines, for COVID. Once more, tech is telling us about the COVID reality of the moment before almost anything else. Bloomberg got its hands on an internal memo which reveals Apple is delaying its three-day-a-week

return to the office program indefinitely, citing rising COVID-19 cases. The company still expects attendance by employees in person at least two days per week, quoting Bloomberg. Apple was set to require employees to work from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, beginning next week, a policy that has been controversial among some staff. Already, employees have been coming in two days a week as part of a ramp-up effort that began in April. For now, that mandate isn't changing. The company also told staff that they must again wear masks in common areas, at least in Silicon Valley offices.

Separately, retail employees were informed Tuesday about 100 U.S. stores will again require mask wearing by staff members as well. Apple had dropped that requirement in March. when cases eased. While the delay is related to COVID-19's recent rebound, some Apple employees have complained about the return-to-work plan, saying that it limits productivity. They've said that commute time takes hours away that could be put toward their work. Employees have also complained that the office return ignored the lack of a vaccine for young children, end quote. About those employee complaints, I never got to mention this, but Ian Goodfellow, Apple's director

of machine learning and godfather of an AI approach known as generative adversarial networks, has left Apple due to its return to work policy, saying in a note to the company that, quote, more flexibility would have been the best policy, end quote. Basically, he wanted to work remotely 100%. Well, Goodfellow has found a new home already joining Alphabet's Deep Mind team, quoting Bloomberg. Goodfellows jump to Google is a coup for the Deep Mind division, which is bringing him on as an individual contributor, said the people who asked not to be identified because the hiring isn't yet public. Goodfellow is known as one of the foremost machine learning researchers, and the move is a reunion of sorts. He worked as a senior researcher at Google until

2019. Deep mind declined to comment on the hire. Alphabet's return to office policy is generally looser than Apple's, though the search engine giant is also asking employees to come back to the office. It's approving exemptions for most employees seeking to work from home. Goodfellow hasn't yet started the new job. When Goodfellow departed Apple, he cited the policy. in an internal note to staff. The executive is credited with creating GANS or generative adversarial networks. The networks allow computers to create images or data sets with remarkable accuracy, making research much more effective. They've been used in fields as far-flung as video games and astronomy, but most people may be familiar with their use in deep fake photos or videos, and quote.

According to new research, remember how crypto mining was supposedly banned in China. well, despite China's crypto mining ban, China's global Bitcoin hash rate share grew to 21.1% from September 2021 to January 2022, suggesting a rise in underground Bitcoin and crypto mining, quoting Bloomberg. While the U.S. extended its leading position as the dominant location for Bitcoin mining, China has reemerged as the second largest locale despite a government ban on the activity last year. The U.S. accounted for 37.840. percent of global hash rate, a measure of computing power used to extract the digital currency between September 21 to January, according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance,

in a report released on Tuesday. The hash rate, also responsible for securing the Bitcoin network, has made a strong comeback to new highs after falling last year. Following the mining ban in China last year, the country has seen a sudden surge in activity through covert mining operations and has reemerged as a major mining hub, grabbing 21.1 of global hash rate, according to the CCAF. Quote, this strongly suggests that significant underground mining activity has formed in the country, which empirically confirms what industry insiders have long been assuming, CCAF wrote in the report. In May 2021, Beijing intensified its effort to curb the cryptocurrency

market. It seems covert mining is still happening in China, though routed through virtual private networks that make it appear the computers are operating in another country. Kazakhstan was third at the global hash rate at 13.22%, followed by Canada taking 6.48%. Russia accounted for 4.66% and has seen cryptocurrency mining operations relegated elsewhere, said the report, end quote. From the tech belt tightening file, Netflix has cut 150 jobs out of 11,000 across departments in a new round of layoffs, mostly in the U.S. as the company rains in costs amid slowing revenue growth. Quoting deadline. The layoffs are largely based in the U.S., with a significant portion in creative across both film and TV, sources said. A number of those laid off are in the executive ranks, including in original content I hear, with a couple of director-level original series execs rumored to be leaving. There is also rampant rumors that the indie film division

will suffer heavy casualties, but sources internally say that is not the case. Today's cuts follow the layoffs a couple weeks ago of editorial staffers and contributors at ToDOM, Netflix's fan site that's devoted to behind-the-scenes news relating to the streaming giant's content. On the recent Netflix earnings call, Netflix CFO Spencer Newman spoke about cost-cutting measures in the coming months. Quote, presumably for the next 18, 24 months, call it the next two years, we're kind of operating to roughly that operating margin, which does mean that we're pulling back on some of our spend growth across both content and non-content spend. but still growing our spend and still investing aggressively into long-term opportunity, he said. We're trying to be smart about it and prudent in terms of pulling back on some of that spend

growth to reflect the realities of the revenue growth of the business, end quote. Acer made a bunch of announcements this morning, including a refresh of its Chromebook lineup, introducing the Spin 714 with a 14-inch 16 by 10 display and 12th gen Intel Core I7 CPU, starting at $750 coming in August. Also, the Swift 3 laptop starting at $900 with a 14-inch OLED display, 12-gen Intel Core H-Series CPUs, and claimed 10-hour battery life all coming in July. OLEDs are poised to start taking over laptops, everybody. But what I'm going to focus on is this.

The Spatial Labs View and Spatial LabsView Pro, which are ACER standalone external 4K monitors with glasses-free stereoscopic 3D tech, all available from $1,09,000, quoting Gizmodo. You did indeed read that correctly. Two products revealed today, the Spatial Labs View and Spatial Labs View Pro, are standalone external monitors with 15.6-inch 4K displays with glasses-free stereoscopic 3D technology. We've seen this tech from ACER before when it debuted in Concept D notebooks, where it was meant for designers but never in this format.

Distinguishing these two monitors is their audience. The standard model is meant for entertainment, watching movies, gaming, etc., whereas the Pro Edition is for commercial users. The former Spatial Labs True Game is a portal for playing games in 3D. The app gives each of the 50 or so 3D compatible games a pre-configured profile so gamers can feel more immersed. The list of games that Acer shared by email includes some big titles like Forza Horizon 5, God of War, The Witcher 3, Wild Hunt, and more.

To use it, gamers need to launch the app, then go to the game they want to play, and press play. That's it. The app does the rest, automatically launching the game file while activating its associated true game 3D profile so it can boot in stereoscopic 3D mode. It's not just games, though, with Spatial Labs Go, you can turn just about anything into a 3D image, including photos and videos taken on your device. and designers can use plug-ins to render creations into stereoscopic 3D so the digital versions appear closer to the physical product. I haven't seen these monitors in person, so I can't say whether the 3D effect is convincing or a gimmick. What I do know is that the 15.6-inch 3820 by 2160 pixel iPS monitors have a 60-hertz refresh rate, an internal battery, and USB, and HDMI 2.0 ports. Acer says they can cover 100% of the SRGB color gamut and reach 323 nits of brightness.

Keep in mind that these weigh 3.3 pounds, making them considerably heavier than non-3D options. The Spatial Labs View will be available starting this summer for Clutch Your Wallet's tightly, $1,99 to start, end quote. Today in Elon, Twitter's board says it intends to, quote, close the transaction at the agreed price, and quote, enforce the merger agreement, end quote. So they're basically saying, Elon, tweet what you want, but you signed your name to a contract, and we intend to enforce it. Meanwhile, people are wondering why anyone on either side actually wants this deal to happen, because as Bloomberg is reporting, the deal as it's currently constructed, would increase Twitter's annual debt interest burden to an estimated $750 to $1 billion a year,

up from a mere $51 million a year in 2021, adding pressure on Twitter to find new revenue streams or else, like seriously, a debt load like that could put Twitter into bankruptcy if it can't be serviced. But sources are also saying that despite Elon's recent tweets, Twitter, Musk's legal team, and the various banks are continuing to work to close the deal, including preparing the 139-page SEC filing, quoting Bloomberg. One potential sign that the deal is still on track, the 139-page filing that hit early Tuesday, detailing how the offer came together and Twitter's rationale for accepting it. That document was the result of weeks of coordinated work by both Musk and Twitter's teams, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk himself signed off on the

final version, complete with a deal price of $54, 20 cents a share before it was filed, the people said. The situation is similar at the banks that promised to finance the transaction, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private, while texts are flying among bankers in disbelief at Musk's antics, their days are still filled with preparing documents needed to proceed and close the purchase, the people said. In a recent meeting at Twitter's San Francisco office between Musk and Twitter executives, including Agrawal and Finance Chief Ned Siegel, the group discussed operational matters, and the tone was generally positive, according to a person familiar with the details of the gathering, end quote. Meanwhile,

Twitter lost more execs. Amid this takeover bid, Twitter service VP, Katrina Lane, head of data science Max Chemizer, and VP of product management, Ilya Brown, all are leading. And as I always talk about reading Matt Levine to give me, you know, a way to think about all this, let me just quote from his newsletter yesterday. Quote, nothing has changed about the bot problem since Musk signed the merger agreement. Twitter has published the same qualified estimate that fewer than 5% of monetizable accounts are fake for the last eight years. Musk knew those estimates and declined to do any non-public due diligence before signing the merger agreement. He knew about the spam bot problem before signing the merger agreement, as we know, because he talked about it constantly, including while announcing the merger agreement. If he didn't want to buy Twitter

because there are spam bots, he should not have signed a contract to buy Twitter. No new information has come to light about spam bots in the last three weeks. So arguably, Twitter's best option is to do nothing. Let Musk tweet, ignore him, and continue acting as though everything is normal and the deal is going to close. Don't give him any more pretext to walk away. just keep trying to get regulatory and shareholder approvals, and then come to him ready to close and see how serious he is about all of this. The basic problem with Musk for Twitter is that he changes his mind a lot. Maybe he'll change it again, end quote. And finally today, an interesting raise. The universe was listening to me. Remember when I asked if people were, you know,

worried about and working on the possibility that quantum computing could break encryption and thus our entire digital ecosystem. Well, here you go. Fabulous chip startup Kornami, whose architecture is optimized for fully homomorphic encryption and quantum threats, raised a $68 million Series C led by Vision Fund 2, quoting Venture Beat. Kornami's solution provides enterprises with a foundation they can use to accelerate fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, to encrypt data against post-quantum threats faster. Kornami's approach not only reduces application latency in the cloud and at the network's edge, but also lowers the overall power consumption of apps. The announcement comes as organizations

are starting to recognize the potential risks of post-quantum threats. This comes after the White House released a memorandum noting that quantum computing poses a, quote, significant risk to the economic and national security of the United States. Kornami is aiming to accelerate the race towards FHE by providing a high-performance computing solution that enables post-quantum encryption to function more efficiently. FHE has long been described as transformative for data privacy and cloud security. The algorithm was developed to enable computing unencrypted data sets. However, it is extremely compute-intensive, said Wally Rhein, CEO of Kornami. Current processors cannot scale to meet performance requirements, making it impractical for

commercial deployment. The existing approach for encryption schemes requires decrypting the data before using, thereby creating vulnerabilities, he added. According to Rines, Kornami's focus on FHA enables organizations to extract valuable data analytics from enterprise apps without decrypting data and exposing it in plain text, whether it's intellectual property, personally identifiable information, or financial information, end quote. Update on my boy, Max, he's still COVID-negative. In fact, all of us are in this house, so I guess Max is going back to school tomorrow.

My wife and my daughter went back today. I'm sure we're all tired of playing the game of, is this just allergies, or is it a run of the called or is it COVID? Seems like this is never going to end. Talk to you tomorrow.