Tech Time by Tim #24

This week I cover the complex state of ownership via a comparison of Pirates and Privateers and examine social media’s shift toward pay-to-play. I also look at the emergent space of corporate satellite networks and how that might affect future warfare and examine the potential risks of new technologies such as high-powered wearables. Last but not least, a walk down memory lane with some angry birds, and a look at how the fraud issues long plaguing platforms can no longer be ignored.

At A Glance:

A quick overview of this week’s content.

·      The Week that Was: Pirates And Privateers, Social Media Pay To Play

·      Technobabble: Head In The Cloud Boots On The Ground, To Wear Or Be Worn

·      Rules of Engagement: Angry Birds and Empty Nests, That’s Fraud My Dudes

The Week that Was:

A look back at the tech world of the past week.

Pirates And Privateers - The Complex State Of Ownership:

Do you know the difference between a pirate and a privateer? Privateers are state-sanctioned pirates. In a sense, so-called ‘ethical hackers’ could be considered the privateers of cybersecurity. But how thin that line can actually be… we saw it on full display this past week. Dutch authorities arrested cybercriminals involved with ransomware. Among the arrests was an ethical hacker.

That was particularly notable in a week where super stealthy cryptomining malware was covered in the press. It was distributed via pirated copies of the expensive Final Cut Pro software. A new class of bug was also covered, one that could facilitate a complete device takeover. I’d imagine this would be extra scary for the network of the pentagon, considering it’s not exactly airtight.

That brings me to talking about rights. Film studios want Reddit users to lose their right to anonymity if they are active on piracy subreddits. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party stands accused of using its courts to strip Intellectual Property (IP) rights from foreign entities. This behavior has been an open secret/problem for decades but is now extra sensitive due to the chip war. LINK

Social Media Pay-To-Play:

I don’t actually think that Facebook verification shows a company running out of ideas. Rather, I think it shows the economies of scale issue of ‘free’ as an onboarding tool. Great, you’ve attracted all these users, but you’re gonna carry that weight. Keeping users around is not free. How can you bear the financial weight of keeping them? It is this question that I believe lies at the heart of social media companies’ confused efforts to monetize whatever they can without compromising the ‘core’.

When you compromise the core of your product or service, you cross a red line that can lead to user revolts and even a total collapse of the value proposition. Unfortunately, platforms tend to grow and mutate around every 2-3 years. That means that over time, it becomes ever more challenging to keep a solid grasp on what the core actually is.

It can quickly turn into a catch-22 situation. If you don’t evolve, users get bored and leave. If you compromise the core though, you find yourself in situations such as the one Netflix now faces. Netflix has crossed the line. LINK

Technobabble:

Explaining complex techniques, technologies, and terminologies.

Head In The Cloud, Boots on The Ground – Satellite Internet For Warfare:

Did you know that ‘the cloud’ isn’t actually in the sky, but under the sea? Most critical internet infrastructure actually relies on relatively thin cables running through the oceans. Up until now, satellite bandwidth has been too limited to support our digital infrastructure. Perhaps that’s why a new Motorola satellite connection device sticks out to me as much as it does. It gives access to messaging, SOS service, and location tracking.

What I wonder about is to what extent this device would be useful in conflict areas such as Ukraine. That war is as much a digital war as it is a physical one. Since it is so chaotic, and little solid infrastructure is being left standing, satellite internet and mobile phones are particularly important. Yet Ukrainian precision strikes on Russian positions via cellphone tracking are well documented.

As such, I wonder how trackable satellite communications will be in the future. How stable will they be, what governments would be able to pressure the companies running the satellite network? Because the chances are that it will be a corporate network. Samsung recently announced a 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN). Qualcomm, makers of the Snapdragon chip, have also announced ‘Snapdragon Satellites.’ LINK

To Wear Or Be Worn – Wearable Risks And Technological Efficiency:

I still vividly remember how the machines in the Matrix trilogy harvested human bioelectricity to power themselves. So when I saw plans for new wireless tech to potentially harvest energy from the human body, I was intrigued.

Whilst we’re not quite at the level of health hazard that our tech might turn us into its batteries, it was curious to observe new research on wearables. Supposedly, some wearables might interfere with cardiac devices. Hopefully this won’t be an issue for a new bra that tracks vital signs.

When I look at massive efficiency gains in super computers, or I see new gadgets being revealed that do old things in new ways, I always wonder ‘why?’ To what end was this new thing made, who benefits, who loses out? So to do I wonder who super computers will be for, and at what cost they will come. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement.

Angry Birds and Empty Nests - Antitrust and Historical Preservation:

The one-time payment version of angry birds, Rovio’s hit 2009 mobile game got removed from the app Google Play and iOS app stores. It then got added again with a different name. Stated reason? It had an adverse effect on the studio’s broader portfolio. Which in plain English is widely taken to mean it kept people away from the company’s other games. Other games filled with ads and microtransactions absent from this original.

A lot of live service games are biting the dust lately. Not only that, but consumers are also gradually tightening their purse strings and re-evaluating what they do and do not need. Rovio can’t afford to have its old game cannibalise its new ones.

The lasting legacy of a single powerhouse game, as it so happens, is still the big point of contention in the Activision Blizzard takeover saga. History is being wielded as a weapon by all participants in this court case. Rovio needs people to forget history to have a future. And against this backdrop, Google is now in hot water for purposefully erasing history it was ordered by the courts to preserve. Isn’t that interesting? LINK 

That’s Fraud My Dudes - The New Moderation Challenge Of 2023:

Are you familiar with the analogy of the boiling frog? For those that don’t know, it is based on the idea that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it will jump out right away. But if you put it in cold water that you slowly heat up, it will calmly await being boiled to death as it fails to notice the rising temperature.

The way social engineering attacks continue to evolve reminds me of the slowly boiling frog. Companies can stop it, but it is dangerously intertwined with key money printers such as advertising and recommendation algorithms. This is how scams can be at the top of search results, as we already saw back in 2022, and how fake two factor authentication apps (2FA) can spread on app stores.

The problem isn’t that platforms don’t want to deal with these issues. The problem has always been that their business models actively facilitate and benefit from these issues. The new moderation challenge of 2023 then, is to try and surgically remove fraud from the business model because it’s begun to fester (become infected). LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web.

Roblox ISIS LINK

Blast From The Past LINK

DOTA Trap LINK

Bill’s Beer LINK

Steam Sale Schedule LINK

Forbidden Planet LINK

IRL Rom Hacks LINK

Fleeing Fords LINK

Magic The Dumping LINK

Vegan Fish Struggles LINK

Love/Hate Brutalism LINK

Forest Cabin LINK

The Deep End:

A weekly batch of longform content recommendations.

The Nvidia 4th Quarter Financial Results:

I’ve talked in the past about Nvidia’s ambitions to move upstream and become an infrastructure owner rather than a consumer facing hardware platform. In this earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang explains those ambitions in his own words. LINK

In Cod’s Shadow, Redfish Rise:

Yes, we’re talking about actual fish in the deep end this week. This isn’t a metaphor or a reference, actual fish. Thirty years after the population collapsed, the Atlantic redfish fishery is getting a second chance at making itself sustainable. LINK

The Conceptual Failure Of Orbital Lasers:

A video essay that I rewatched again recently that studies the history of orbital lasers in fiction, and the efforts to actually build them for real. LINK

GSHADE Is Dead:

A video about the surprise unravelling of a beloved mod for popular online game Final Fantasy XIV. This case highlights the singular point of failure of free plugins and mods. Their developers. LINK

Testing AI performance on less frequent aspects of language:

An exploratory paper investigating if, and to what extent, Large Language Models (LLM’s) are capable of grasping nuance and depth of meaning in language. LINK

One More Thing…

The song of this week is ‘Hello’ by Lionel Richie. The particular lyrics ‘hello, is it me you’re looking for?’ are stuck in my head. I learned a really interesting thing the past week about LinkedIn newsletters. Did you know that you can promote practically anything on LinkedIn except for newsletters? In other words, discoverability on LinkedIn is…a bit of a problem. I wasn’t mad to find out, I was inspired. Does that sound weird? Let me explain.

Being beholden to a big tech company is quite like waiting for a bus during a strike. You don’t know when it will show up, you don’t know if it will show up. Yet there you stand, at the central station. Waiting.

Because there were public transport strikes again this week, I decided to walk to work again, this time in the pouring rain. I had my phone on, set to max volume. I wanted to make doubly sure work could reach me if necessary. Upon arrival at the office, I found that I had two missed calls and a voicemail. My phone had not gone off whilst in my pocket. No sound, no vibration, nothing but the wind, the rain, and my thoughts for the company the entire trip. The marvel of engineering in my pocket had failed, utterly, at its core function. I had a newsletter platform that made my newsletters hard to find, and a phone that wouldn’t take calls.

But my legs still worked, I made it to the office without issue. My quality jacket kept out the rain and the wind, my hair and glasses were trivial to dry. In my personal life, I went back to an old game that used to dominate my time. I did not play it. I trashed a huge amount of my carefully hoarded junk. Never has my inventory been so clean. I felt good, like I could breathe again.

How funny it was then, that my colleagues were having a passionate debate about Buddhist principles of impermanence on Tuesday. There I was, all week, experiencing so powerfully the ephemeral nature of physical and digital stuff. There they were, talking about it. It was great. We think a lot at the innovation department, about what innovation truly is. And I guess this might be it, the realisation that instead of waiting at the station for that bus that might never show up, you just go where you want to go with your own strength. You always have options if you keep your mind’s eye open enough to see them. Modern problems, as they say, require modern solutions.