Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Wednesday, December 4th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, amid the salt typhoon hack, the U.S. government wants you and me to go encrypted. Ubisoft shuts down X Defiant, Spotify wrapped 2024, has Notebook LM baked right into it, and Google's text-to-video AI model has beaten Sora to market, but is Sam Altman about to get all Santa on us? Here's what you missed today in the world. of tech remember the salt
typhoon hacks. Basically, U.S. intelligence officials allege that Chinese hackers known as salt typhoon have burrowed their way into U.S. telecom systems. Like, they're listening to our calls, reading our texts, the FBI, and CISA. have given U.S. telecos best practices to harden their systems against attacks, but senior U.S. officials say salt typhoon hackers remain on their networks. They're still there. So now...
US officials are recommending that all Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers. Basically, if you're on AT&T, Verizon, etc., they're telling you and me to harden our systems. That's somewhat extraordinary, quoting NBC News. The hacking campaign nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated.
Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country's telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.
In the call Tuesday, two officials, a senior FBI official who asked not to be named, and Jeff Green, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, both recommended using encrypted messaging apps to Americans.
who want to minimize the chances of China's intercepting their communications. Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here. Encryption is your friend, whether it's on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible, Green said.
The FBI official said, quote, people looking to further protect their mobile device communications would benefit from considering using a cell phone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption, and phishing restraint. multi-factor authentication for email, social media, and collaboration tool accounts as well.
The scope of the telecom compromise is so significant, Green said, that it was impossible for the agencies, quote, to predict a time frame on when we'll have full eviction. The hackers generally access three types of information, the FBI official said.
One type has been call records or metadata showing the numbers that phones called and when. The hackers focused on records around the Washington DC area and the FBI does not plan to alert people whose phone metadata was accessed. The second type has been live.
phone calls of some specific targets. The FBI official declined to say how many alerts it had sent out to targets of that campaign. The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as the Office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, told NBC News in October that the FBI had informed them that they had been targeted.
The third type of information access has been systems that telecommunications companies use in compliance with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, or CALEA, which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track people's
communications. Kalea systems can include classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which processes some U.S. intelligence court orders. The FBI official declined to say whether any classified material was accessed, end quote. Ubisoft says it will shut down its free-to-play shooter X Defiant, but keep its servers on until June 3rd of next year.
but also plans to lay off around 277 of the production team staff as part of this closure. Quoting Polygon, Despite an encouraging start, the team's passionate work, and a committed fanbase, we've not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long run to compete at the level we aim for in the very demanding free-to-play FPS market.
The company wrote in an internal notice published on the Ubisoft website, As a result, the game is too far away from reaching the results required to enable further significant investment, and we are announcing that we will be sunsetting it. With X Defiant shutting down and the hundreds of layoffs, Ubisoft said it's closing its San Francisco and Osaka production studios entirely. Insider Gaming reported that a skeleton crew will be kept on to keep X Defiant running until its total closure.
X-Defiant players who purchase the $69.99 Ultimate Founders Pack will get a full automatic refund according to X-Defiant executive producer Mark Rubin in a letter to the community. All purchases made within the prior 30 days will be refunded too. According to a Ubisoft FAQ, the Founders Pack and Founders Pack Elite are not eligible for refunds. Rubin said players should expect any refunds within eight weeks.
X Defiant was released in May following the project's announcement in 2021. At launch, the game was seemingly a success. It reportedly reached 1 million players within hours of its official launch, according to Insider Gaming. No official player or revenue numbers have been released, but Ubisoft CEO Yves Gaimo said during an investor call in September that the game did not meet expectations.
In October, Rubin said on X that numbers were down due to, quote, very little marketing, a strategy designed to, quote, get the game in a better place before ramping up marketing to attract new and lapsed players. He wrote that he was crystal clear in that there were no plans to close X Defiant.
after its fourth season following an Insider Gaming report. In its most recent earnings report in late October, Ubisoft reported that its overall sales were down nearly 20%, but that engagement metrics for its games were up. The publisher also said that it decreased its staff by more than 2,000 people in the prior 24 months, a number that is likely a mixture of both layoffs and voluntary departures, end quote.
Spotify Wrapped came out today and there's something new as a part of it. They added an AI podcast of your Wrapped created with Google's Notebook LM Summarizer. They use Google's Gemini AI to allow you to explore a personalized audio overview of your music listening this year, including things like your top songs, top artists, top genres, and more. Basically, you'll listen to a podcast about your rap in the Notebook LM style.
to AI talking heads talking about your listening habits, quoting TechCrunch. The edition follows a breakout moment for Google's AI note-taking tool, which went viral in 2024 as people began using the service's new audio overview feature to create conversations between two AI hosts who riff on whatever topic you've fed into the app.
Though designed to help you summarize notes and research, people began feeding all sorts of content into Notebook LM, like blog posts, books, or even diary entries, leading to interesting insights and sometimes hilarious commentary. When you play your wrapped podcast accessible from the home screen on Spotify's app. The AI host will compliment your music taste and summarize your listening activity. You can also save the AI created audio clip to your mobile device or publish it to social media.
Spotify is also rolling out a new data story called Your Music Evolution, which lets you see how your musical interests evolved over the past year. This will track up to three distinct musical phases you went through during the year, for a year that saw Beyonce doing country, the celebration of a brat summer, a continuous Taylor Swift era's tour, an Oasis reunion, and a number of notable collabs.
Spotify will have a lot to choose from when it comes to tracking users' changing interests. The feature will also come with a personalized playlist that will be available from the wrapped feed in Home, end quote. Spotify also announced that Joe Rogan was its top US podcast in 2024 for the fourth year running, followed by Call Her Daddy. And more than 33% of the top 50 podcasts were video first. I wonder why Brian keeps experimenting with video.
Remember those rumors of Apple wanting to make a concerted push into the smart home? Well, Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple is delaying the mass production of a smart home-focused display-equipped HomePod until after WWDC... 2025 or Q3 of 2025, mainly due to software development issues. Quoting Quo himself, the display-equipped HomePod is expected to feature an A18 processor, a 6.7-inch display, and support for Apple Intelligence.
Compared to the current HomePod lineup, the display-equipped HomePod will emphasize smart home functionalities more. It can be seen as Apple's strategic repositioning of the HomePod product line. Apple has a history of successfully repositioning existing products. A notable example is the Apple Watch. transition from an iPhone accessory and fashion product to a health management device. I previously predicted that Apple would launch a smart home IP camera in 2026.
which will be able to wirelessly connect with the display-equipped HomePod. I believe Apple will tightly integrate these two new products with its existing ecosystem and HomeKit to deliver a seamless smart home experience. Apple's patents related to authentication demonstrate the company's strong interest in the smart home market. Similar to the importance of Face ID and Touch ID for mobile and portable devices, Apple has proposed solutions for identity authentication in the smart home space.
which will help promote smart home applications. The display-equipped HomePod is expected to ship around 500,000 units in the second half of 2025. If the market response is positive, this product's annual shipments could reach the million-unit level, end quote.
Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workout, sleep, even stress management. to do is breathe into your lumen first thing in the morning and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism.
You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time. And Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy.
through hormonal shifts so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. Your metabolism is your body's engine. It's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. So if you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to lumen.me. That's L-U-M-E-N dot M-E slash ride for 15% off your purchase. Lumen makes a great gift too. Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode.
A lot of times when a business is successful, it's actually the business behind the business that makes it all happen. I'm thinking of runaway successes like Cotopoxy. What's the secret rocket fuel behind Cotopoxy's success? The business behind their business. For them, as for millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.
Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not-so-secret secret with ShopPay. That boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going. you
So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling, on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. The secret's out. Businesses that want to grow, grow with Shopify. upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Cotopoxy uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash ride. All lowercase, go to shopify.com slash ride to upgrade your selling today.
Google has launched Veo, an AI video model for generating high-quality 1080p videos in visual and cinematic styles to businesses. What is interesting here is that they beat OpenAI's Sora to market, but more on that in a second. Quoting The Verge, VO is capable of generating high-quality 1080p resolution videos in a range of different visual and cinematic styles from...
text or image-based prompts. When the model was first announced, these generated clips could be vaguely beyond a minute in length, but Google doesn't specify length restrictions for the preview release. Some new example clips in Google's announcement are on par with what we've already seen from Vio. Without a keen eye, it's extremely difficult to tell that the videos are AI generated. The latest version of Google's...
Imagine 3 text-to-image generator will also be available to all Google Cloud customers via Vertex starting next week, expanding its initial U.S. release on Google's AI test kitchen back in August. Users on Google's allow list can also access new features like prompt-based photo editing and the ability to infuse your own brand, style, logo, subject, or product features into generated images. Google says VO and Imagine 3...
carry built-in safeguards to prevent them from generating harmful content or violating copyright protections, though we found the latter wasn't difficult to bypass. Everything produced by Veo and Imagine 3 is also embedded with DeepMind's SynthID technology, a kind of invisible digital watermark that Google says can decrease misinformation and misattribution concerns. It's a similar concept to Adobe's content credentials system,
which can be embedded into content produced by the creative software giant's own image and video generative AI models, end quote. Now, about them beating OpenAI to market. OpenAI had promised to release Sora by the end of this year. Clearly, we're running out of time, but... Sam Altman says OpenAI plans to kick off a shipmas period of features and products for 12 days beginning on December 5th, sources say, including the release of Sora. Quoting The Verge again.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the 12 days of announcements on stage at the New York Times' Dealbook Conference on Wednesday morning, though he didn't say exactly what was coming. OpenAI plans to launch or demo something every day for 12 days straight. Just ahead of the launch, a few OpenAI employees began teasing the coming releases on social media. What's on your Christmas list?
A member of the technical staff posted, got back just in time to put up the shipmas tree, another staffer wrote. Sora lead Bill Peebles responded to a staffer who posted that OpenAI is unbelievably back with one word. Correct. The startup's senior vice president also responded with IYKYK, if you know, you know.
The imminent launch of Sora comes just weeks after artists leaked the model in protest of being used by OpenAI for what they claim is unpaid R&D and PR. Hundreds of artists have been alpha testing Sora throughout 2024, thanks to an invite-only research preview that allows... them to generate videos with Sora. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told the Wall Street Journal in March that Sora would be available by the end of the year, end quote.
This is quite in the weeds, so it's for you devs out there, but AWS has introduced Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless distributed SQL database that promises high availability, strong consistency, and Postgres. SQL compatibility. Quoting TechCrunch. At its reInvent conference, Amazon's AWS Cloud Computing Unit today announced Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless distributed SQL database that promises high availability 99.999% for multi-region availability.
Strong consistency, Postgres SQL compatibility, and, the company says, 4x faster reads and writes compared to other popular distributed SQL databases. AWS argued that Aurora DSQL will offer significantly lower latency than Google Spanner, its closest competitor. Interestingly, AWS stresses that there is no database sharding involved here to scale the service and that it can scale reads.
and writes independently. The company also highlights that Aurora DSQL will offer strong consistency, ensuring that if users opt for a multi-region approach, all regions will always show the same data at the same time.
AWS notes that to ensure resiliency, Aurora D-SQL uses an active active architecture, meaning there is always a standby server ready to take over, which guarantees that a customer's application is always available by enabling an application to read and write to any Aurora DSQL endpoint. Since this is a fully managed service, AWS handles all of the security updates and manages the overall infrastructure.
To make all this happen, the AWS team says it had to reinvent relational database transaction processing, typically ensuring strong consistency across multiple regions and having those globally distributed servers sync. With what AWS describes as microsecond accuracy is a rather difficult feat to achieve. AWS says it can do this because it decoupled the transaction processing from the storage.
Traditional methods, the company explains, would be bottlenecked by having to pass information back and forth multiple times. Aurora, however, only checks each transaction when it's time to commit the changes, and then when the commit happens, it parallelizes those rights across regions.
One nifty twist here, to make sure that each region sees the commits in the right order, Aurora DSQL uses the Amazon TimeSync service, which adds very precise reference clocks to every EC2 instance and synchronizes them using the... clock on GPS satellites, end quote. Finally today, a quick review of the Kindle Scribe 2. Sherilyn Lowe at Engadget says it gives you a smooth reading and writing experience. The updated premium pen with a rubberized eraser.
is nice, and it keeps that svelte design, but it is relatively pricey. Quoting her conclusion, Amazon's new Kindle Scribe has a lot of competition from companies like Kobo, Books, and Remarkable. And with a price of $399, the new Scribe is a whopping $60 costlier than its predecessor. which will also get a lot of the new software updates. To be fair, the new Scribe comes with a premium pen for the price, while the cheaper model only includes a basic pen, so your...
partially paying more for a better stylus. While I do like the new color option and slightly improved annotation capabilities, I'm not sure Amazon has done enough to justify the additional cost here. I'd much rather see the company focus its efforts on improving its notebook syncing and mobile editing software as well as investing in innovating on the write-on-book format, then chase the generative AI trend. No matter how much restraint it's exercised in doing so."
So I'm scheduled to interview Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber again, about right after I hit publish on this episode. If it goes off without a hitch, I will post the interview to YouTube right after we record it. so check our YouTube channel if you want to see that right away. But I will also, of course, share it here, either this weekend or at the end of tomorrow's episode. Talk to you later.