Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/09 – CAPTCHA Supremacy

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, August 9th, 2023. I'm Brian McCalla today. Slack announces its biggest ever redesign. Sony signals that the smartphone recession is real and is not getting better anytime soon. Is WeWork circling the drain? Why a Gizmodo editor is suing Apple over Tetris. And guess what? The bots are better at solving CAPTCs than you are. Something, something Turing test. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Again, maybe this is one of those things I don't have to tell you because you've already seen it, but, Slack has announced its biggest ever redesign, catering, they say, to power users, adding a new home section, a new sidebar on the left, a new DMs section, and an activity window.

Starting point is 00:01:18 Quoting the Verge. When you first load Slack, you'll be taken to a new home section that looks a lot like the existing Slack interface. It shows your channels, DMs, and apps like you see in the current app. After that is where things start to change. The most noticeable thing in Slack is a new sidebar on the left side, which shows all your Slack stuff in a few new ways. There's a new DMs section that looks like most other messaging and email apps and even resembles Slack's Arch Enemy Microsoft Teams. All your conversations on the left

Starting point is 00:01:48 and the active one on the right. The idea is to give you a way to manage all your chats in one place, no matter what channel or workspace they came from. Further down, the sidebar is a new activity window that Noah Weiss, Slack's chief product officer, calls a unified inbox. It shows all your messages, mentions, and reactions across all your Slack work spaces all in one place. It's not that different from using an app to bring all your email into a single timeline, and Weiss says he hopes it'll make it easier for employees to catch up on everything at the start of their day. The overarching goal of the new design, Weiss says, was to give users more context and more focus. We think of these as modes of work that you have, he says, I catch up on everything

Starting point is 00:02:29 that's going on, I respond to inbound, I triage and respond to all the activity, and then I go to my to-do list of what I need to follow up on. That's what this is organizing. Modes of working rather than types of objects, end quote. For more chaotic, everything all at once, Slack users, Slack has also been reworking its multi-windowing system so you can have multiple views open at a time. All those changes are designed to help with the same challenge, keeping tabs on all the stuff happening across all your Slack channels. Along with the new views, Slack also improved its workflow for saving stuff. There is now a dedicated later menu in the sidebar, and you can quickly save just about anything in Slack to that page and then add a

Starting point is 00:03:08 reminder or check it off when you're finished with it. The save for later functionality already exists, of course, but in the new design, more people are likely to find and use it. Later is the only one of the two hard-defined features that Slack is trying to display a little more prominently. The Huddles video chat feature is now in the top right corner of every chat window, right next to a button for creating a new canvas. And if you hit the big plus button on the left sidebar, which Slack calls the create button, you can start a new canvas or call the same way you'd start a new DM. It all adds up to not quite a total reorganization of Slack, but at least a slightly different way of thinking about the app. Before it was two things, the list of all your stuff

Starting point is 00:03:50 on the side and whatever you're currently engaged with in the middle. Now there's a third organizational layer in between, aiming to sort and filter all the stuff you care about in a few different ways, end quote. Netflix has launched a game controller app on the app store to let users play Netflix games on their TVs. The app description says the feature is coming soon, quoting TechCrunch. The app dubbed Netflix Game Controller lets you use your phone as a controller after pairing it with your TV in order to play the games available through Netflix's service.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Though the game has appeared in the app store, there's no news yet on which of Netflix's games will be making their way to the big screen or when. Though the app has appeared in the app store, there's no news yet on which of Netflix's games will be making their way to the big screen or when. Instead, the app's description simply teases coming soon to Netflix. While other cloud gaming services have failed like Google's Stadia, Netflix believes the issues were around the business models, not the technology. Netflix remarked recently that Stadia's games were fun to play, but the business itself is not sustainable. Netflix, on the other hand, bundles free games into the cost of its streaming subscription. As Netflix continued to roll out more games to its service, Netflix's

Starting point is 00:05:07 VP of external games, Leanne Loomby, this May, touted Netflix's cloud gaming ambition, saying, we do believe that cloud gaming will enable us to provide that easy access to games on any screen. Our overall vision is that our members can play games on any Netflix device they have, a statement that would clearly include users' TVs. The streamer also said around the same time that it had 40 games slated for launch this year, as well as 16 being developed in its in-house studios, plus 70 more in development with its partners. Since Netflix expanded into gaming in November 2021, it has released north of 50 titles, end quote. Sony reported earnings yesterday, and I don't usually tell you about Sony earnings, though I will note that PS5 sales were apparently

Starting point is 00:05:54 up 38% year over year, and Sony expects to sell a total of 25 million PS5s by March, but that's not what I wanted to talk about. I thought since we've been discussing this idea of a smartphone recession recently, it was worth noting that in its Q1 report, Sony, which is, by the way, the world's largest camera sensor supplier, was pushing back expectations for a smartphone market recovery to 2024 at the earliest. In other words, they don't see things improving for smartphones in the near term. Quoting Bloomberg, device leaders, including Apple, had earlier express confidence in a second half bounce back in global phone sales. Sony now joins Apple and other tech companies that in recent weeks have warned of persistently sluggish demand as China struggles

Starting point is 00:06:39 to reboot its post-COVID economy and inflationary pressures weigh on spending elsewhere. Sony is the world's largest supplier of the sensors that underpin cameras in the iPhone and other devices. The Japanese company on Wednesday raised its full-year revenue and income outlook, though it credited gaming and entertainment and warned the smartphone market remained depressed. Those comments came as major customer Apple, faces its longest sales slump in decades, hurt by an industry-wide slump that sap demand for phones, computers, and tablets, end quote. From the Deadpool question mark file, is WeWork at long last, not long for this world? Quoting Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:07:24 WeWork shares plummeted more than 25% in extended trading after saying there's, quote, substantial doubt about its ability to continue operating. The company cited sustained losses and canceled memberships to its office spaces. The co-working business will focus over the next 12 months on reducing rental costs, negotiating more favorable leases, increasing revenue and raising capital, WeWork said in a statement Tuesday. The warning comes mere months after WeWork struck a deal with some of its biggest creditors and soft bank to cut its debt load by around $1.5 billion and extend other maturities. Its bonds trade at deeply distressed levels. The company's 7.875% unsecured notes due

Starting point is 00:08:02 2025 last-changed hands for 33.5 cents on the dollar, according to data from Trace. New York-based company has been weathering a change in leadership. Sandeep Mathrani, who took over as CEO in early 2020, left in May to become a partner at private equity firm Sycamore Partners. WeWork currently has an interim CEO. On Tuesday, WeWork said three of its independent board members are being replaced by four new board members, end quote. Checked shares of WeWork this morning, and they were trading at 15 cents with a $472 million market cap. This is a weird one. Gizmodo's editor-in-chief, Dan Ackerman, is suing Apple and the Tetris Company, as well as some others, claiming that they adapted his book about Tetris into that recent feature film on Apple TV Plus without his permission.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Quoting Reuters. Ackerman said he sent his book The Tetris Effect in 2016 to the Tetris Company, which allegedly copied it for the movie and threatened to sue him if he pursued his own film or television spin-offs. The Tetris film premiered on the Apple TV platform in March. Ackerman asked the court for money damages equaling at least 6% of the film's $80 million production budget. Representatives for Apple and the Tetris Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit on Tuesday.

Starting point is 00:09:28 Ackerman's attorney, Kevin Landau, said on Tuesday that the lawsuit, quote, aims to right a wrong and provide the respect and justice to the work, diligence, and ownership of someone who is entitled to such respect and acknowledgement under the law, end quote. Ackerman's The Tetris Effect, the game that hypnotized the world, was published in 2016. The book describes the Soviet history of the popular puzzle game and the fight for its global licensing rights as a Cold War thriller with a political intrigue angle, according to Ackerman's lawsuit. The lawsuit said that Ackerman sent a pre-publication copy of the book to the Tetris Company earlier that year. He said the company refused to license its intellectual property for projects related to his book, dissuading producers who were interested in adapting it, and sent him a, quote,

Starting point is 00:10:11 strongly worded cease and desist letter. According to the complaint, the company's CEO, Maya Rogers, and screenwriter Noah Pink, began copying Ackerman's book for the Tetris screenplay starting in 2017. Ackerman said the film, quote, liberally borrowed numerous specific sections and events of the book and was similar in almost all material respects to it, end quote. Intel has fixed a flaw found by a Google researcher that could have let attackers steal passwords and other secrets, affecting the Intel Sky Lake, Tiger Lake, and Ice Lake chips. Quoting Wired. Intel is releasing fixes for a processor vulnerability that affects many models of its chips going back to 2015, including some that are currently sold, the company

Starting point is 00:10:58 revealed today. The flaw does not impact Intel's latest processor generations. The vulnerability could be exploited to circumvent barriers meant to keep data isolated and therefore private on a system. This could allow attackers to grab valuable and sensitive data from victims, including financial details, emails, and messages, but also passwords and encryption keys. It's been more than five years since the specter and meltdown processor vulnerabilities sparked a wave of revisions to computer chip designs across the industry. The flaws represented specific bugs, but also conceptual data protection vulnerabilities in the schemes chips were using to make data available for processing more quickly and

Starting point is 00:11:34 speed that processing. Intel has invested heavily in the years since these so-called speculative execution issues surfaced to identify similar types of design issues that could be leaking data. But the need for speed remains a business imperative, and both researchers and chip companies still find flaws and efficiency measures. This latest vulnerability dubbed downfall by Daniel Mogimi, the Google researcher who discovered it, occurs in chip code that can use an instruction known as gather to access scattered data more quickly in memory. Intel refers to the flaw as gather data sampling after one of the techniques. Mogami will present his findings at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. The vulnerability affects the Sky Lake chip family, which Intel produced from 2015 to 2019,

Starting point is 00:12:20 the Tiger Lake family, which debuted in 2020 and will discontinue earlier this year, and the Ice Lake family, which debuted in 2019 and was largely discontinued in 2021. Intel's current generation chips, including those in the Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and Sapphire Rapids families, are not affected because attempts to exploit the vulnerability would be blocked by defenses Intel has added recently. The fixes are being released with an option to disable them, because of the potential that they could have an intolerable impact on performance for certain enterprise users. For most workloads, Intel has not observed reduced performance due to this mitigation. However, certain vectorization-heavy workloads may see some impact Intel said in a statement, end quote.

Starting point is 00:13:04 Finally today, from the AI is better than you now already file, it turns out that AI is better than you at proving that it is not a bot, which is funny because it is a bot. the Independent. Bots are better and significantly faster than humans at cracking capture tests, according to a comprehensive news study that inspected the security system deployed in over 100 popular websites. Automated bots pose a significant threat to the internet because they can masquerade as legitimate human users and perform harmful operations like scraping content, creating accounts, and posting fake comments or reviews, as well as consuming scarce resources. If left unchecked, bots can perform these nefarious actions at scale, warned scientists,

Starting point is 00:13:46 including those from the University of California, Irvine. For over two decades, CAPTCHAs have been deployed as security checks by websites to block potentially harmful bots by presenting puzzles that are supposed to be straightforward for people to solve, but very difficult for computers. Earlier forms of CAPTCHA, for instance, asks users to transcribe distorted text from an image, but with advances in computer vision and machine learning, bots soon caught up to recognize the text with near-perfect accuracy. Engaged in an arm race with the bots, captcha's have since evolved into an annoying presence on the internet, becoming increasing more and more difficult to solve for both humans and bots. However, the new yet-to-be-peer-reviewed

Starting point is 00:14:22 research posted in archive finds bots are able to quickly crack capture tests with ease, suggesting global effort users put into cracking these puzzles every day may be more trouble than they're worth. In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still-use capture. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds, varying in location, age, sex, and education level, to take 10 capture tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy. Some capture tests took human participants between 9 and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84%, while it took the bots,

Starting point is 00:15:06 less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. The bot's accuracy ranges from 80 to 100%, with the majority above 96%. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed 50 to 85%. Scientists wrote in the study, end quote. Realheads know the Premier League is back starting this weekend, so I'm going to do what I do every year. Final link in the show notes is to a mutant podcast Army Fantasy Premier League League league just for listeners to this show.

Starting point is 00:15:42 If for some reason the link doesn't work, the code to join is 9JP-C-O-F. I never do very well in these leagues, usually finish middle of the pack. But hey, it's a new season. Hope Springs Eternal. Like my hope that after falling short last year, this is the year they do it. Arsenal to Pip Man City to the title. I don't expect anyone else in the league to be even remotely competitive. It's us against them.

Starting point is 00:16:10 We'll see. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/09 – CAPTCHA Supremacy

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