Tech News: Virtual Real Estate Values Plummet in the Metaverse

been violated in Columbia. And if you didn't hear that story, you're pricing what the heck. So let's give a quick overview of what is going on. So, Apple's products that use five G make use of patented technology, and Ericsson is the company that owns those patents. Apple doesn't want to pay the licensing fees for the as patents from Ericson,

so it stopped. Ericson has reached out to several countries asking the court systems of those countries to ban the sale of any five G Apple products because those products are infringing upon Ericson's patents. And it worked in Columbia. So Apple filed an emergency motion about that, and then a Texas judge said, look, just because you don't like what's happening doesn't make this an emergency. You've got a court date coming up, We're you're supposed to hash this

out with ericson. Just wait until the court date and don't pull these shenanigans again. It's not an emergency if you just want to have an earlier court hearing. Then Apple filed another emergency motion, this time alleging that it's human rights have been violated under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anyway, the bit I didn't talk about on Tuesday was has been I hadn't even heard about yet,

is that this really is a bigger picture thing. It's not just this one thing that that is absurd just on the face of it. We have to look at

how absurd everything is. And according to Apple, Ericsson is demanding a higher licensing fee for these five G technologies than they should, that the price tag is exorbitant, it's predatory, and that Apple doesn't want to deal with that, and that was why Apple was going to take this whole matter to court to hash it out, to determine if those licensing fees were too high see Apple argues that the five G patents that Ericson holds should be grouped

under fair, reasonably and non discriminatory or FRAND terms f r A and d FRAND as a concept that's usually brought up in anti competitive disputes. The argument is that some patents are so important for general tech applications that the holder of the patent should be compelled to license them fairly to other parties, and refusing to do so

is akin to holding a monopoly over that technology. So Apple is saying Ericsson is asking for way too much money, which is why they originally asked to settle that dispute in court. But then so so they go and do that, right they get They get a court date which is for several months from now, It's like at the end of this year. But in the meantime, while that court date is off in the distance, Ericson then stepped up the pressure by getting Apple's stuff banned from sale in Columbia.

Ericson kind of did a blanket approach, and Columbia said, okay, so it actually happened in Columbia. I don't think it happened anywhere else. So In other words, what Apple is saying is that Ericsson has overstepped, rather than waiting for the court case to actually find out if in fact

the licensing fees are egregiously high or if they are fair. Further, Apple is implying that Ericson knew that the court was going to find that the fees are too high and then decided to throw this Hill Mary pass to get countries to ban the sale of Apple five G products. Uh, and that this was a sign that Ericson was trying to out muscle Apple, like to say, hey, if you don't pay our licensing fees, you're not selling anything at all, and that's gonna hurt your bottom line way more than

paying us what we're asking for. So Apple filed the emergency motion in an attempt to get that original court date moved up so that this could be resolved faster. And the courts resent that because the courts say, this is an emergency. That's not what emergency emotions are for. That's not an emergency. Yes, you know there's this ongoing dispute between these parties, but that doesn't meet the standard

necessary for it to be an emergency. So the courts have so far declined to acquiesce to Apple's requests, and I feel like that extra context was needed because my report on Tuesday, I feel like that was really harsh against Apple specifically. Honestly, I don't feel like there are really any good guys in this one. I feel like Ericsson's movements were not great. I feel like Apple's movements

were also not great. So I'm not willing to say one party is definitively the bully and the other ones definitively the victim, but rather to say like, no one here has behaved particularly well, except perhaps for the judge who keeps telling folks to stop putting up nonsense in their courtroom. Now it looks like we're in another big real estate bubble burst situation, which probably is something you didn't expect me to talk about on a Tech Stuff episode.

But in this case we should actually call it a fake estate situation instead of real estate situation. Also, I should add I totally stole fake estate from a sub creddit at some point that's not mine. I wish it were. I wish I had thought of fake estate instead of estate now. Anyway, the the virtual real estate I'm talking about is stuff that's related to the metaverse. So last year, specifically around November, when Facebook changed its name to Meta Metaverse,

hype was really on the rise. It was skyrocketing, and we saw a lot of ridiculous land rush like behavior, some of it ranging around stuff like n f T s, which really had peaked earlier, but still we're a big topic of conversation, and also to things like cryptocurrency. And then we saw people purchasing virtual plots of land on something that doesn't actually exist yet. By that's something, I

really mean a fully realized metaverse. The virtual blocks of land can exist on actual platforms, meaning there may be servers out there that host the virtual landscape that people are purchasing. I'm not suggesting that the the virtual plots don't exist at all, that it's just an idea and not you know, on a server somewhere, but you can't really use them for anything other than kind of acting like a placeholder, at least not as far as the

metaverse is concerned, because there is no metaverse yet. According to the Information the Journal of the Information, prices for virtual lots have dropped by eighty percent over just six months. Now. There are several different ways we can look at this.

One would be to engage in schaden freuda. If you happen to be someone who does not care about virtual land grabs, you didn't participate, you have no stake in that, and you saw people going bonkers over it, maybe you're feeling kind of pleased with yourself and a little happy at their you know, misfortune as they see the investment they make dropped by. Another reaction is to feel a little sympathy for people who are swept up in the

excitement of the metaverse through no fault of their own. Really, I mean, there was so much hype. I mean, they didn't lacked the use of critical thinking, so I guess you could argue that was some what their fault. But when you are in a hype cycle, it can be hard to see reality. And some folks just got carried away, and my heart does go out to those And then, of course there's a range of other reactions you could have.

I personally find myself going back and forth between being snarky schadenfreuderman and being kind of feeling a lot of

compassion for the people who were hit by this. And we've seen a lot of related markets take a few hits this year, right, n f T s were kind of the canary in the coal mine, because even before we got to the whole meta stuff, people were already starting to lash back against n f T s. I feel like n f T S came too hard, too quickly, at too many different people, and the reaction was rejection, especially in places like the video game community. That was that was kind of a litmus test for how certain

population would reject the n f T value proposition. I think there was a really enthusiastic investor community around n f t s, but a lot of the rest of the world just said, Yo, this is kind of stupid. And now, to be clear, I am not saying n f T s are inherently stupid. I think there can be legit uses for n f T s. However, I will say I think n f T speculation is stupid. I think that treating it like a commodity is stupid.

I don't think ultimately that's the right way to use n f t s, but that was the way that that got the spotlight, and we saw such ridiculous examples of it, and to this day it's still happening. It's just happening on a smaller community. Right, we also saw cryptocurrency values tank and then virtual real estate prices tank. And we've seen this play out in grand scale with Meta. Right.

If you look at Meta and you look at how Meta has to communicate it's approach to developing a metaverse, that's kind of, again an early example of the difficulties that are across the entire landscape. You know, Zuckerberg actually tried to get ahead of that fairly early on. He cautioned investors that the creation of a fleshed out metaverse was going to take many years and a ton of investment,

billions upon billions of dollars of investment. But I think shareholders get antsy when they just start to see how big the costs and losses are out of the reality labs division at Meta. Now does that mean does all this mean that virtual real estate is dead in the water, that we're not going to hear about ever? Again? No, I don't think so. I think what we're seeing is, you know, what someone might call a market correction, or that we've seen the hype peak and now we're on

the downside slope of the hype cycle. But eventually, I think we're gonna see things level out and then climb at a more sustainable rate. It seems pretty clear that we are going to get something that we might call

a metaverse. We might get several some things that we call metaversees, and that real estate is going to matter when those somethings emerge, right, because if people are actually going to these metaverses to interact with one another, having a a position, a stance within that virtual space will be really important because otherwise you will miss out on any kind of interaction you could have there. So if you're a business, then yeah, I guess it does make

sense to think about this. I just don't think it made sense to pour enormous amounts of money in an unproven and and not ready market so quickly. Uh So, I figured it will take a little bit longer before things start to look stable enough to support a robust virtual real estate market, but we will get there, I'll so.

As for me, I'm just gonna live in a real world hut somewhere, just the real world, not the virtual world, and I will remain blissfully ignorant of all the virtual mansions and sky palaces and underwater villain layers and whatever else folks might make in the metaverse. Y'all have fun. Uh, it's not for me, alright. One thing that is for me are several more news stories. But before we get

to those, let's take a quick break. All fifty states attorneys general here in the US, so the attorneys general for each of our fifty states. It's a confusing thing to even have to say. They have all united to fight a common enemy robo calls, specifically, in this case, robo calls coming from foreign numbers. So a few years ago we saw a real movement to curtail robo calls

and spam calls within the United States. The government would require carriers to incorporate tools designed to detect and prevent these kinds of calls, to create databases to help UH cut back on robot calls and spam calls. And those requirements first applied to the major carriers because they held the bulk of the responsibility. They also had the most capability to respond quickly, and then the smaller carriers were

given a bit more time to comply. They were still expected to comply, they just didn't have to do so at the same speed as the major telecommunications companies, and now this new push is to task what are called gateway carriers. These are telecommunications companies that field calls from outside the country, so foreign calls that are coming into the United States, and they are tasked with the the responsibility of determining whether or not the calls are legal.

If the calls are not legal, then they should be blocked. Josh Stein, the Attorney General for North Carolina and one of the leaders of this effort, said that the team plans to hold phone companies responsible for allowing a legal traffic to pass over US phone signals. And you might wonder how all this is going to be managed, And I don't know, but I am in favor of having fewer fishing and spam calls hit my phone, So I

hope whatever plan is put into place works. SpaceX says that it's next generation of Startling satellites, which the company uses to provide Internet service to satellite customers, will be quote invisible to the naked eye when at their standard operational altitude end quote. This move is in response to the global astronomy community, which has grown concerned that huge networks of small satellites will block views of the Cosmos

and interfere with terrestrial observations of the universe. And I think this is Startling getting ahead of any regulations that would otherwise force the company to change how it does business. As to how Starlink has achieved this all, I don't

have any details. If I had to guess, I would say that this next generation of Startling satellites are going to be a little bit smaller and may be placed in a slightly higher orbit than earlier satellites, and that's how they are quote unquote invisible to the naked eye. According to UK supply chain management company Fleet Assist, electric vehicles on average are twenty two percent less expensive to

service compared to similar internal combustion engine vehicles. The firm says that some factors that likely contribute to this lower cost of maintenance are things like electric vehicles have fewer moving components, so there's less stuff that wears down through normal use. On average, it takes thirty three percent less time to repair or maintain e vs than I sees for comparable jobs, so that means labor costs are also down and e V parts are frequently less expensive than

I see parts. Again because the design tends to be simpler with fewer moving parts. However, Fleet Assist warrens that we might not see this go on forever, right, We might not see that EVY expenses are lower than I see expenses at the garage, because there's a thought that garages are going to increase their prices in order to maintain profitability. Like the garage is not going to say, well, cost less for us to do the work, so I

guess we'll just make less money. They might say it costs less for us to do the works, less charge more, so we can make more money. So while EVIS would continue to be easier to work on compared to I c ES, the advantage from a cost to consumer perspective might dwindle over time. Streaming digitally has asked an interesting question, what happened to HBO max original movies that just plane disappeared? The piece mentions several Warner Brothers films that were on

HBO Max but aren't there anymore. And HBO is part of Warner Media, which now in turn is owned by Discover and just in the interest of full disclosure, once upon a time, Discover was my corporate overlord. This was several years ago, however, and all of this has led to speculation that Discover is planning on making some big changes to its streaming strategy, which we should hear more about today. The company is going to hold its earnings

call for Q two two. Analysts expect that we should hear at least something about a new unified streaming service. Maybe Discovery Plus will lump in HBO Max underneath it

and it'll appear as a tab. There's also an expectation that we're going to see a massive change in production that anything that would overlap between HBO and Discover that is like you know, reality television and stuff that's going to be smoothed out so that Discover becomes kind of the reality TV side and HBO becomes the more fictional side. So it could be that some reality series that are

under HBO go bye bye. Also, it sounds like we're going to move away from producing expensive content just for streaming platforms. One big example of that is the film bat Girl. It was supposed to be released to HBO Max, It was in post production. It has now been shelved probably forever at least indefinitely, and the reason for that is David Zaslov, the CEO of Discover, doesn't feel like the reward of streaming this content is worth the expense

of producing it. This is expensive stuff, and if you're gonna make expensive stuff, you should darn well be releasing it to theaters and getting money there. So I think this is a case where Zaslov said, Yeah, it's not worth pouring more money into bat Girl to fix it because it had been testing poorly reportedly. Uh, let's just not worry about it. Let's cut it as a loss. There's also a general feel that Zaslov is going to be holding some layoffs later on down the road and

and kind of whittled down the organization. Uh. I know that. I've seen a lot speculation on that. I'm kind of curious to see what happens. There's a lot of HBO content I actually really like, and I'm kind of worried about whether or not such stuff will continue to be produced. A lot of it ends up being produced for the cable channel as well as the streaming service, so we'll have to see. Zaslovs a cable guy. That's where he comes from, and that's where he's done the bulk of

his leadership so maybe I don't know. I don't know how to predict. I do worry about some of the smaller UH departments and companies that Warner Media owns, and whether or not those are long for this world. I suspect we might see some of those gets sold off in the months to come. Well, I've got a couple more stories that I want to talk about, but before

we get to those, let's take another quick break. Chinese mega company Tencent wants to increase its steak in game developer UBI Soft or you be soft, whichever pronunciation you prefer. I'll probably go back and forth between the two, because I'm a mercurial imp. Now. I did a couple of

episodes about ubi soft last year. I kind of detailed the history of the company as well as how it recently had to go through our reckoning due to allegations of a corporate culture where harassment and worse had been tolerated for years, really really ugly stuff. The company has kept a fairly low profile since then, with a lot of layoffs and and firings of people who were associated with that scandal. Anyway, they are now looking at ten Cent coming in and buying up more of the company. Now.

Tencent already owns about five percent of ubi Soft and reportedly wants to increase its steak in ownership so that

it becomes the largest single shareholder in the company. Ten Cent also has a stake in a lot of different companies, and particularly in video games, and reportedly one reason for this move to increase its hold on Ubisoft is that ten Cent wants to focus more of its resources on global markets, and one potential reason for that is that within China there's been a bit of a crackdown on the video game industry, with the Chinese government taking the

stance that games can potentially be harmful and thus should be regulated. So that might explain why ten Cent is wanting to take this this extra steak. No telling yet if this is going to happen. The family that Ownscent of Ubisoft would have to agree to sell it, so we'll have to see if that happens, but maybe Tincent will make an offer that they can't refuse. We'll have

to see. Finally, one of the scary realities of the oncoming quantum computing era is that the encryption methods we rely upon today will at some point become useless now, for this to happen, you first have to design to write algorithm for a sufficiently powerful quantum system. But if you were able to do that using quantum computing, you could break standard encryption so quickly that it would be trivial.

So another way to think about this is that at some point these systems will be powerful enough and have the correct algorithm necessary to create the equivalent of a skeleton key that can unlock every luck in existence, and there will be no more secrets or something. So knowing this, computer scientists for years now have been working on developing new encryption systems that, in theory, would foil quantum systems.

So this is like the next generation of encryption. To keep systems safe even in an era of quantum computing, this means it requires a totally different approach than the way a lot of encryption works right now. And one of those approaches, called psych s i k E, which by the way, is short for super singular isogeny key encapsulation, was looking pretty promising. The U s Department of Commerce

has a National Institute of Standards and Technology. That's the that's the entity in the United States that UH that credits standards in tech. They held a competition, and the competition had the goal of creating the next generation encryption schemes capable of holding off quantum superiority and PSYCH and made it through several stages of the competition. It was doing really well, and then some researchers, using a perfectly ordinary standard computer with a single processing core, found a

weakness in psych's algorithm design. Now I am not going to pretend that I understand what happened and as sure as heck, and not going to try and describe it because I would just muck it all up. But I will say that using a mathematical approach, the researchers were able to predict and then retrieve encryption keys from the algorithm. So this would be like getting hold of any key coming out of this system and being able to make an instant copy of it. Uh, at least for that

particular encryption method, So it is not secure. The PSYCH creators said they were surprised by the researchers approach. This was something they hadn't anticipated, so they were kind of surprised to learn about the weakness of their design. They hadn't looked at it from that perspective. And I think of this kind of like if you were to build something that has really strong strength against compression, really strong strength, real well spoken there, Jonathan, anyway that you could compress

it and this thing would hold up really well. But someone ends up coming after your your structure using a shearing motion, and it turns out your structure is not secure against shearing. Yeah, it was really strong against compression, but not strong against this other kind of attack, and the whole thing crumbles. That's kind of what we saw here.

I think of this as actually a great story. It's one of the illustrates the making robust solutions is hard to do, and that we need to put them to the test or else we find ourselves dependent upon a flawed system that's sooner or later someone's going to figure

out how to exploit. So it's better that we find out something isn't going to work early on, rather than not figure that out, implement it, and then find out the hard way later, especially when you think that if someone is really clever and they exploit a system, they might not let anyone know about that until things have really reached a catastrophic point. So this was a good thing. It does, however, illustrate the challenges we face moving forward

in the quantum era. And that's it for today's episode. Hope you're having a great day a great week. If you have suggestions for future topics, reach out me. One way to do that is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download. Just navigate over to the tech stuff part. There's a little microphone nicon there you can click on that leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. The other way to

get in touch with me is on Twitter. The handle we use is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon y. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.