Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Friday, July 19, 2024, I'm Brian McCulloch today. The Big Tech Outage caused by a single software update that even my mom is texting me about. The new mini AI models are bringing prices down as we hoped, how Netflix completely write it its ship seemingly, and of course, the week on long-range suggestions. Okay you know how every time there's a hacker security story I'm like, what is my threshold for talking about it, less I do a breach story every day?
Well I have a New York stick I guess, because my mom texted me this morning, guess you have a big morning of news to get to and on her way out the door, my wife said something similar. So I guess if it's big enough to break through to them, before I can even log in to Big Outage, here's what's happening, quoting the verge.
Thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a blue screen of death, BSD issue at boot today, impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses worldwide. A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so machines can't start properly. CrowdStrike is widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.
Australian banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters first raised the alarm as thousands of machines started to go offline. The issues spread fast as businesses based in Europe started their work day. UK broadcaster Sky News was unable to broadcast its morning news bulletins for hours this morning and was showing a message apologizing for quote, the interruption to this broadcast.
Ryanair, one of the biggest airlines in Europe, also said it's experiencing a third-party IT issue, which is impacting flight departures. The Federal Aviation Administration says it's assisting airlines like Delta, United, and American Airlines due to communications issues. The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at US Airlines says FAA spokesperson Jeannie Schiffer in a statement to the verge.
Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops for their fleets until the issue is resolved. The Berlin Airport is also warning of travel delays due to technical issues. Many 911 emergency call centers in Alaska have also been impacted by the issues. One airline in India has even turned to handwritten boarding passes due to the outages.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in a post on X. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyber attack end quote. So it's kind of been hard for me to get a handle on what exactly has gone down here. CrowdStrike says the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.
But from what I can see, it just seems a software update, bricked a bunch of PCs. Apparently this was a kernel-level driver that CrowdStrike uses on Windows machines and a ton of people use CrowdStrike. Basically, they reverted this update, but that does nothing to help you if you're already seeing the blue screen of death. Basically, if you slept through all this, you could be fine. And again, also Windows and Linux systems appear not to be affected.
But quoting again, in a Reddit thread, hundreds of IT admins are reporting widespread issues and the work around steps involve booting affected Windows machines into safe mode and navigating to the CrowdStrike directory and deleting a system file that will be troublesome on some cloud-based servers or even for Windows laptops that are deployed and used remotely. Our entire company is offline, said one Reddit poster. Well, another says 70% of their laptops are down and stuck in a boot loop.
Happy Friday says one Reddit poster. It looks like it's going to be a long day for IT admins worldwide. End quote. Now this is also apparently completely unrelated to several issues that took down Microsoft 365 apps and services over the last 24 hours or so that was an Azure specific problem apparently. But, and this is something that I've heard before, this actually points to a systemic concern here.
CrowdStrike and other endpoint security tools need access to the core of operating systems, giving them the ability to disrupt the very systems that they're trying to protect. quoting Bloomberg. CrowdStrike was founded by former executives of anti-virus pioneer McAfee and launched in 2012. It has grown into the leading maker of a relatively new type of security software that's considered among the best defenses against ransomware and other hacking threats.
It controls about 18% of the $8.6 billion global market for so-called modern endpoint protection software just ahead of arch-rival Microsoft according to market research firm IDC. The type of software CrowdStrike supplies is separate and distinct from older, more limited types of security software. Traditional anti-virus software was useful in the early days of computing and the internet for their ability to hunt for signs of known malware.
But it has fallen out of favor as attacks have become more sophisticated. Now products known as endpoint detection and response software that CrowdStrike develops do far more continually scanning machines for any signs of suspicious activities and automating a response. But to do this, these programs have to be given access to inspect the very core of the computer's operating systems for security defects.
This access gives them the ability to disrupt the very systems they are trying to protect, and it is how Microsoft's Windows systems came into play in Friday's outage. While cybersecurity professional state CrowdStrike's technology is a strong way to defend against ransomware, its costs, which in some cases can be more than $50 per machine, means that most organizations don't install it on all of their computers.
What that means, however, is that the computers that have the software installed on them are among the most important to protect, and if they go down, key services can fall with them. Experts are also coming out this morning to say CrowdStrike's fix requires tampering with system files with no way to automate that at scale, meaning outages could persist for longer than expected. So IT folk, I'm sorry to hear about your weekend plans.
Samsung has halted Galaxy Buds 3 pro shipments over quality issues. Quoting the verge. Samsung has temporarily stopped shipping its new Galaxy Buds 3 pro to retailers following complaints about quality control. Early customers who received the wireless earbuds ahead of its wider July 24 release reported that the ear tips were fragile and prone to breaking when removed.
The pause was confirmed in a statement to Android Authority in which Samsung said it had quote, temporarily suspended deliveries of Galaxy Buds 3 pro devices to distribution channels, to conduct quality control assessments before the product is delivered to customers. We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences may cause the company said, directing customers who had already received the earbuds to contact Samsung support or visit their nearest Samsung service center.
Open AI yesterday launched GPT 40 mini, a smaller cheaper off-shoot of GPT 40, replacing GPT 3.5 Turbo with support for all multi-modal inputs and outputs coming soon. Quoting CNBC. The company called the new release quote, the most capable and cost efficient small model available today and it plans to integrate image video and audio into it later.
The mini AI model is an off-shoot of GPT 40, open AI's fastest and most powerful model, which it launched in May during a live streamed event with executives. The O and GPT O stands for Omni and GPT 40 has improved audio video and text capabilities with the ability to handle 50 different languages at improved speed and quality according to the company.
The mini AI model announced Thursday is part of open AI's push to be at the forefront of multi-modality or the ability to offer a wide range of types of AI-generated media like text, images, audio and video inside of one tool, chat GPT. Last year, open AI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC, quote, the world is multi-modal. If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things.
The world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to show how powerful these models are and what they can do. GPT 40 mini is available for free users of chat GPT along with chat GPT plus and team subscribers and it will be available to chat GPT enterprise users next week. The company said in a press release and quote, yes, and also this is pretty notable.
GPT 40 mini costs 15 cents per 1 million input tokens and 60 cents per 1 million output tokens, prices lower than those of Cloud 3, Hikou and Gemini 1.5 Flash and it beats the early version of GPT 4 and it costs 30 times less than GPT 40. So at least on the end user side, we are starting to see cost deflation as we've come to expect from tech products generally over the last 30 to 50 years or so. Also say goodbye to GPT 3.5 Turbo since again, this replaces that and quoting from Ben's bites.
It's not just about the cost savings GPT 40 mini is seriously smart. It outperforms other small models in math, coding and multimodal reasoning on the MMLU benchmark general intelligence, it scores 82% surpassing GPT 3.5 and some larger models. This little model can handle a massive 128,000 token context window and output 16,000 tokens opening up a ton of new possibilities. Companies like RAMP and Superhuman are already using it to great success in real world tasks.
This model and other kiddos like Gemini 1.5 Flash and Cloud 3, Hikou are great for low logic tasks. Click translations, rewrites, getting data from forms and images, etc. just don't expect them to use their own brain and you'll be fine. With almost any project, it can be hard to visualize it, to even keep your vision in your head or share that vision with others.
Many tools like Gira can be restrictive in the way they organize information, your ability to see all tasks is restricted by the size of your screen, which can make it harder to understand the relationships between tasks, especially between different teams or epochs.
Miro is a visual collaboration platform that gives your team more clarity through comprehensive functionalities that work together with your existing tool sets to make any sprint ritual, whether it be a stand up estimation, sprint planning or retrospective, more efficient, clear and ultimately more productive. When I did the AI project, I used Miro to work with my remote team because I wanted to do it quick and dirty, it was a sprint. And we got it done.
With Miro planning team tasks is smoother and gives everyone a clear sense of mission for every sprint. You can even plan sprints with ease using Miro's plan or widget. Connect your team's Gira or Azure instance to your Miro board to visualize and filter tasks by sprint week, status, epic and team. Whether you work in product design, engineering, UX, agile or marketing, bring your team together on Miro. Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com.
That's three free boards at MIRRO.com. AI is all the rage right now. It's the buzzword on everybody's lips. It's seemingly every other segment on this show lately. So you may be feeling overwhelmed with the constant barrage of information and not sure how to apply it, but don't want to get left behind either. Well, enter the next wave. If you're curious about AI and want to understand how to implement it in your business strategy, the next wave is the podcast for you.
The next wave is your on-demand chief AI officer giving you the latest trends, actionable takeaways and guidance on implementation strategies for AI in your world. Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lans connect on this weekly show to share their insights on AI for business leaders and introduce other key players in the AI space. The next wave offers data back insights from thought leaders across industries and simple easy to understand practical advice on how to implement AI into your world.
Check out the next wave wherever you get your podcasts. That's the next wave. Netflix kicked off tech earnings season yesterday, reporting Q2 revenue up 16.8% year over year and net income up 44% year on year. At the big news was that Netflix added 8 million subscribers in Q2 versus only 5 million estimated as it benefited from a crackdown on password sharing and popular titles like Bridgerton and Baby Raindeer.
And Netflix says it's add tier now accounts for over 45% of all signups in the markets where that's available. And add tier membership grew 34% quarter on quarter in Q2. In other words, remember when Netflix had that big crisis earnings misses growth slowing. They quickly reached for two break in case of emergency levers to turn things around, getting less laissez faire about passwords and adding ads, something it's where it would never do.
The bottom line here is both of those panic levers seem to have worked out for them. quoting the rap. Netflix and YouTube are pulling further ahead of rival studios nascent streaming businesses in Nielsen's latest gauge report for the month of June. Netflix reported an 8.4% share with only YouTube ahead of it with a 9.9% share. The next closest competitors are prime video at 3.1% and Hulu at 3%.
Netflix estimated that it's streaming pay TV film games and branded advertising currently account for 6% of a $600 billion market opportunity. Our biggest opportunity is winning a larger share of the 80% plus of TV time, primarily linear and streaming that neither Netflix nor YouTube has today.
The company wrote in its quarterly shareholder letter, if we execute well, better stories, easier discovery and more fandom, while also establishing ourselves in newer areas like live, games and advertising we believe that we have a lot more room to grow and quote. Time for the weekend line read suggestions. Next up, I wasn't kidding with that Mark Rober reach out yesterday. Creators are becoming interesting to me again because they're clearly becoming more powerful.
I'm also especially interested in one person band creators like Carlos Espina profile here by the New York Times who has 9.4 million TikTok followers and who posts in Spanish about immigration and politics and whom the White House is treating as a fully legit broadcaster. Yes, I'm aware of the analogy of me also being a one man band news provider myself, but you know, I don't have anywhere near Carlos's reach, quoting the New York Times.
On a recent scorcher of a Houston afternoon, Carlos Eduardo Espina was driving to a restaurant that specializes in Nicaragua and Puerto Rican food when he received a news alert on his iPhone. The former president of Honduras had been sentenced to 45 years in a US prison for drug trafficking. Oh, I need to make a video actually in the car, Mr. Espina, 25 set apologetically as he pulled his Honda crossover SUV into the restaurant's parking lot.
He skimmed a Honduran newspapers Instagram post about the news and then opened TikTok where he has 9.4 million followers. He turned the camera on himself while his girlfriend who was sitting behind him, crouched out of the frame, clearly used to this sort of drill. His hazel eyes widened and he boomed in portante noticia de última hora. Spanish for important breaking news then shared a one minute recap.
The video racked up more than 100,000 views during lunch, which Mr. Espina received for free because the restaurant owner was thrilled to recognize him from TikTok. Mr. Espina, a recent law school graduate who lives in college station Texas, has become something of a one man, Tel Amundo, for millions of Latinos in the United States and one of the White House's favorite social media personalities.
He posts almost constantly, sharing earnest and personal news about immigration and the Latino community, along with videos about food, sports and politics, and often championing the Biden administration's agenda. Despite having more TikTok followers than Beyonce or Reese Witherspoon, he has received little attention in the national press, perhaps because his videos are mainly in Spanish.
But he drew attention last month with videos that he filmed with President Biden as he announced two new immigration measures. I've basically become, for many people, their main informer on immigration said Mr. Espina, who's often found in jeans and a man bun, people will be watching Tel Amundo and if they see something on immigration, they'll immediately go to my profile and say, hey, what is Carlos saying about this?
And finally, from Wired, let me just go with the title that Wired used itself, pooping on the moon is a messy business. If humans are to return to the moon, space agencies and governments need to figure out the legal ethical and practical dimensions of extraterrestrial waste management. Coding from the long-reads summary of this piece, ever thought about what might happen if you passed a bowel movement in space?
My guess is no. Here on Earth, gravity pulls your poop down and flush toilets immediately whisk it away. On the moon, where would it go?
Let this squeamish thoughts sink in and then buckle up as you read Becky Ferreira's fun, wired story, quote, at the dawn of the space age she writes, American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module, and quote, more than 50 years ago, the first astronauts on the moon left nearly 100 poo bags across six landing sites and they're still sitting there today.
I didn't count how many unexpected phrases and laugh out loud lines there are in this piece, but I was thoroughly entertained from Ferreira's opening paragraph to her last line. Patti Hummer aside, she provides a fascinating look into this less appealing aspect of space travel, for NASA and other space agencies to return to the moon and for companies and billionaires like Richard Branson to launch a new era of tourism, a solid waste management system pun intended must be in place.
And what about those very old Apollo poo bags left on the lunar surface, teaming with microbiota, what can they tell us about the emergence of life in outer space? Quote answers to some of the most profound and ancient questions about our place in the cosmos writes, Ferreira may indeed be waiting in Neil Armstrong's 54 year old spent diapers. Quote. No bonus episode for you this weekend, but I did want to share an interesting raise.
The very last link in the show notes today is to a Bloomberg story from this week about San Francisco compute one of the earliest companies, the ride home AI fund invested in. Jack Altman, Sam Altman's brother led the latest round by putting in $12 million, we participated in that round, doubling down from our participation in the preceded round as well. What do they do?
Quote Bloomberg to help get small players a piece of coveted AI chips and their compute resources, San Francisco compute company wants to make it easier to buy a chunk of access at a time. The company's idea is to create a kind of trading platform for coveted compute power and quote. So a kind of spot exchange to buy time on H100s and the like say.
Remember how I said there's an economics problem for AI startups where you have to raise millions of dollars just to create an AI product because the compute is so expensive, but what if you could get the compute piecemeal? Yes, SF compute helps do that. Hashtag proud investor of course, but if this sounds like a problem you're encountering, if you need only a month or a week of access to H100s say hero runs is the term and you don't want to commit to like year long terms, get in touch.
I'll put you in touch with SF compute. We'll tell them Brian sent you like the good old days, Brian at RideHomeFun.com if interested, talk to you on Monday.