Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/23 – Microsoft Joins The $2T Club

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Ticketed Space and Super Follows begin to roll out, and depending on how you slice it, folks stand to make a ton of money… or a ton of money for the app stores. Speaking of, Apple launches a PR campaign defending the App Store on security grounds. Microsoft becomes the second company to reach the $2 trillion dollar club. And you know about phishing scams, but let me introduce you to “brushing” scams. Sponsors: Kraken.com/techmeme or search Kraken in the app store Cybereason.com Links: Twitter is opening applications to test Ticketed Spaces and Super Follows (The Verge) Apple’s Fight for Control Over Apps Moves to Congress and EU (Wall Street Journal) Microsoft Rises to Join Apple in Exclusive $2 Trillion Club (Bloomberg) Vercel raises $102M Series C for its front-end development platform (Tech Crunch) Brave’s nontracking search engine is now in beta (Tech Crunch) What is the 'brushing' scam and how can you protect yourself? (Yahoo Life) 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 TechMeme right home for Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Ticketed spaces and super follows begin to roll out on Twitter. And depending on how you slice it, folks stand to make a ton of money or a ton of money for the app stores. And speaking of,

Apple launches a PR campaign defending the app store on security grounds. Microsoft becomes the second company to reach the $2 trillion club. And you know about fishing scams, but let me introduce you to brushing scams. Here's what you've been. miss today in the world of tech. Twitter has opened applications to test out ticketed spaces and super follows for a small number of users, among them, your friend and mine, Chris Messina. More on that in a second, quoting the verge. Twitter will select a small group of users to test its new monetization features, both of which were announced earlier this year. The super follows feature let's users charge $2.99, $4.99 per month for access to exclusive content. Ticketed spaces

lets them charge between $1 and $999 for access to one of Twitter's social audio rooms, and it offers extra features like setting a room size cap. Users can see if they're eligible to apply by checking a new monetization option in the mobile app sidebar. Test group participants will initially keep 97% of the money they make with ticketed spaces or super follows after the fee that iOS and Android charge for in-app purchases. Twitter will increase its cut from 3% to 20% if a user makes a total of $50,000 on both systems. Twitter's 20% commission is lower than that of some subscription platforms. Amazon-owned video service Twitch takes a 50% cut from subscriptions, and YouTube charges 30% of membership fees. The fee is only commiss.

menser it with only fans 20%. But it's substantially higher than the 10% commission from newsletter platform substack or the 5% base rate of membership platform Patreon, although both those services require additional payment processing fees. While Facebook introduced a subscription service in 2018, it says it won't take any commission besides Apple and Google's in app purchase costs until 2023, end quote. That's a nice little rundown of the state of play in this sudden war for the creator economy. Jack Nickus, though, ran the numbers and came out with this, specifically in regards to using super follows on Twitter. Quote, if someone pays $10 to subscribe to your tweets, you get $5.60, Apple or Google gets $3, Twitter gets $1.40, end quote.

So a lot more about all of this on our Twitter space tonight at the usual time, Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. We're going to talk about Facebook's live audio rooms, Spotify's Green Room, and also this new superfollow and ticketed spaces stuff. Chris shared with me yesterday some of the stats in terms of what Twitter thinks he could make from his large Twitter following. We'll see to what degree he wants to share that with us tonight. And also, we might have a very special guest right at the top. So do join us live or look for the episode tomorrow on Spacecast. Speaking of, Apple launched a bit of a PR push on not exactly the creator front, but on a related front in terms of breaking open the App Store. In a report they released this morning, Apple argued that allowing users to download apps directly under their iPhones without having to use the App Store would harm customers by damaging privacy and security, quoting the Wall Street Journal.

Apple's defense of its mobile operating system where iOS comes ahead of an expected debate Wednesday in the House, Committee on a package of bills aimed at reining in the nation's largest tech companies. Provisions in one of the bills known as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act could effectively give Apple's customers broader control over which apps to download on their devices. It could prohibit Apple from continuing to block a practice known as side-loading in which users install apps directly onto their iPhones without having to go through the company's app store. In Europe, the Digital Markets Act was introduced in December and is making its way through the legislative process. It too includes provisions to open the door to side-loading, end quote.

Indeed, Apple's head of user privacy told Fast Company that side-loading is actually, in his words, eliminating choice and would negate technical and policy defenses, quoting Michael Grothuss in Fast Company. Proponents argue that Android allows side-loading, so Apple should too, allowing users to install apps on their iPhones and iPads without Apple serving as an intermediary would alleviate concerns about its App Store rejections and fees, which have been part of an ongoing drama since the first authorized third-party iPhone apps debuted 13 years ago. Side-loading would also weaken arguments that Apple's control of the App Store amounts to an illegal monopoly. To help the public better understand, Apple's stance on sideloading. The company has

released its newest privacy white paper, which focuses on the topic. In advance of the paper's release, I spoke to Apple's head of user privacy, Eric Nuzenshwander, about the practice and why Apple, judging from our conversation, remains vehemently opposed to it. Quote, side-loading in this case is actually eliminating choice, he says. Users who want that direct access to applications without any kind of review have sideloading today on other platforms. The iOS platform is the one where users understand that they can't be tricked or duped into some dark alley or side-road where they're going to end up with a side-loaded app,

even if they didn't intend to, end quote. Without iOS, users wouldn't have a mobile operating system platform they could choose from that is impossible to be targeted by malicious sideloding. In Apple's view, in other words, do you want the best privacy and security possible? Your choice is iOS. Do you want sideloading? Your choice is Android. Some may argue that the drawbacks of sideloading would hit only those who sideload apps. Wouldn't those who still choose to download apps only through Apple's App Store be safe? But New Enchwander points out, as the company's white paper does, that the mere existence of side-loaded apps would encourage

bad actors to target unsuspecting users more by trying to lure them to download their malicious ones from unofficial stores or sites. You might be savvy enough and cautious enough to know a fake app store when you see it, but is your 15-year-old nephew or 75-year-old father. Quote, even users who intend, they've consciously thought themselves that they are going to only download apps from the app store. Well, the attackers know this, so they're going to try to convince that user that they're downloading an app from the app store, even when that's not happening. New Enchwander says, really, you have to think very creatively, very expansively, as an attacker would, trying to go after so many users with such rich data on their device,

and so users will be attacked regardless of whether or not they intend to navigate app stores other than Apple's, end quote. Yes, but then the debate is becoming, is a 30% tax on every transaction, a hell of a steep stipend to pay Apple for this sort of antivirus protection? By the by, as always when this sort of thing comes up, to what degree these round numbers matter is an open question. But I think it is worth at least keeping track of these things. Microsoft has become the second public U.S. company to reach a $2 trillion market value after Apple did it first in August of 2020. And two years after Microsoft itself surpassed the $1 trillion market cap barrier for the first time. Quoting Bloomberg. It shares rose as much as 1.2%

in New York on Tuesday, enough for the software company to briefly join Apple as one of only two companies trading at such a lofty value before closing pennies short of the mark at $265.51. Saudi Aramcoe eclips that threshold briefly in December 2019, but currently has a market value of about $1.9 trillion. Microsoft has gained 19% so far this year, outperforming Apple and Amazon as investors piled into the stock on expectations of long-term growth for both earnings and revenue and expansion in areas like machine learning and cloud computing, end quote. Since we're on the topic, Facebook is closing in on the $1 trillion club for the first time. Facebook showed up in my tech stock screener today as hitting a new all-time high, sitting at a

$961 billion market cap. If anyone is going to hit the $2 trillion market cap next, it looks like it will be Amazon, which is sitting at a $1.77 trillion market cap. Interesting raise for developers, Versel, which develops the popular open source Next.js React framework, raised $102 million in a Series C led by Bedrock Capital at a $1.1 billion valuation, quoting TechCrunch. As Vercell notes, the company saw strong growth in recent months with traffic to all sites and apps on its network doubling since October 2020. About half the world's largest 10,000 websites now use Next.js. Given the open source nature of the Next.js framework, not all of these users are obviously Versal customers,

but its current paying customers include the likes of Carhart, GitHub, IBM, McDonald's, and Uber. Quote, for us, it all starts with a front-end developer. Versal CEO Guillermo Roch told me, our goal is to create and empower those developers and their teams to create delightful, immersive, web experiences for their customers, end quote. With Versal, Roch and his team took the Next.J.js framework and then built a serverless platform that specifically caters to this framework and allows developers to focus on building their front ends without having to worry about scaling and performance. Older solutions, Roch argues, were built in isolation from the cloud platforms and serverless technologies, leaving it up to the developers to deploy and scale their solutions.

And while some potential users may also be content with using a headless content management system, Roch argues that increasingly developers need to be able to build solutions that can go deeper than the off-the-shelf solutions that many businesses use today. Roch also noted that developers really like Versel's ability to generate a preview URL for a site's front-end every time a developer edits the code. So instead of just spending all your time in code review, we're shifting the equation to spending your time reviewing or experiencing your front-end. That makes the experience a lot more collaborative, he said. So now, designers, marketers, IT, CEOs can now come together in this collaboration of building a front end and say,

that shade of blue is not the right shade of blue, end quote. Privacy browser, Brave, has launched a non-tracking search engine into beta at search.brave.com to offer, and quote, all in one alternative to Google Search and Chrome, quoting TechCrunch again. Users interested in checking out Brave's non-tracking search engine, which is built on top of an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance tech products like Google Search, will find it via Brave's desktop and mobile browsers. It can also be reached from other browsers via search.brave.com, so it doesn't require switching to Brave's browser to use.

Brave Search is being offered as one of multiple search options that users of the company's eponymous browser can pick from, including Google's search engine, but Brave says it will make it the default search in its browser later this year. As we reported back in March, the company acquired technology and developers who had previously worked on Clicks, a European anti-tracking search browser combo, which closed down in May 2020, building on a technology they'd started to develop called Tailcat to form the basis of the Brave-branded search engine.

The now-beta search engine has been tested by more than 100,000 early access users at this point per Brave. The company recently passed 32 million monthly active users, up from 25 million back in March, for its wider suite of products, which, as well as its flagship pro-privacy browser, includes a news reader, Brave News, and a firewall plus VPN service. Brave also offers privacy-preserving brave ads for businesses wanting to reach its community of privacy-preferring users, end quote. Finally today, news we can all use. Let me introduce you to the brushing scam.

No, it has nothing to do with your dentist, quoting Yahoo Life. If you've ever received a package you didn't order, from a shopping platform and nobody owns up to having sent it, you might have been caught up in a brushing scam. While receiving parcels you haven't paid for might seem like a nice problem to have, it could be you've experienced the latest scam technique. According to which, this type of fraud involves third-party sellers of online shopping platforms, setting up accounts in a stranger's name, then sending their products to an unsuspecting recipient. They then use the account they've set up to write fake verified reviews in a bid to improve their

seller ratings. But if you've received an unsolicited package, it could also mean that your data may have been compromised. Here's how it works. The seller sets up a series of fake accounts. They also create a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of real people. These could be from a leak of data resulting from a hacked provider, from the electoral role, or from the phone directory, etc. The seller orders their own goods using the fake accounts they have set up and then ships the goods to people at their address. Finally, they write up product reviews from their faked accounts, i.e. the accounts used to pay for the goods in an effort to boost their ratings. Though the person receiving the unordered package isn't a victim of cybercrime as such,

they're simply being used as a cover for a marketing fraud. Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee Total Protection Advisor, recommends that anyone receiving unsolicited goods should report it to Amazon or other seller. According to Carra Wern, head of e-crime at Cybersecurity Specialist mimecast, these sorts of scams are usually a sign of a previously compromised account that is allowed personal data to fall into the hands of cybercriminals. Quote, it is likely that this would have happened as a result of a data breach with the leaked information then being sold on the dark web to be used in scams such as this one, he explains, end quote.

But when you put it that way, in a way, if you're a victim of brushing, it's kind of like good news, bad news, good news. Like, you get free stuff, which is good, but it's also a sign that your data might be out there floating around in the bad parts of the internet, which is bad. But also, this would be a very obvious warning sign of such alerting you to that fact so you can take steps to mitigate it, which is good, right? Hey, it's been a while since I asked you to rate and review this podcast. I checked various platforms yesterday, and two of the most recent reviews were bad ones. One, accused me of being anti-Windows and anti-PC, which was probably from that time. A couple weeks ago, I complained about my cheap laptop purchase for Penny.

You'll recall people got pissed about that. But funny enough, the other most recent one accused me of being an obvious Apple hater. So hilarious. Anyway, if you like this show and have never done so, give us a rating and write up a nice review for us on Apple Podcasts, on Google Podcasts. Does Spotify allow you to do reviews? I'm not ever clear on that. Wherever you're listening to me right now, take the time to give us a rating and review,

helps people find the show, and we can bury those two recent contradictory negative reviews. Thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow.