Tech Time by Tim #54

It was the end of an era this past week as Rupert Murdoch quit as CEO of his media empire. We might also be at the dawn of a new era as cyber brain copilots inch closer and closer to becoming reality. Perhaps they’ll help us lay down the right building blocks of green infrastructure so that we can make climate accountability appealing. Last but not least, backends are back in fashion, which is good because cybercrime these days is starting to look like child’s play.

At A Glance

A quick overview of this week’s content.

·?????? The Week That Was: No King Rules Forever, Cyber Brain Copilots

·?????? G’day Climate: Building Blocks Of Green Infrastructure, Making Climate Accountability Appealing

·?????? Rules of Engagement: The Backend Is Back In Fashion, Is Cybercrime Child’s Play?

The Week that Was:

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

No King Rules Forever:

Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old founder of the Fox media empire, is stepping down as CEO of his companies Fox Corporation, which runs companies such as Fox News, and News Corp, which runs companies such as The Wallstreet Journal. Murdoch was the last US media mogul to personally lead the businesses he’d created. Though him actually ceding control of his empire in any meaningful way is debatable at best, the timing of his departure as CEO is certainly interesting. I’d argue that the current landmark antitrust trial of Google is best contextualized by Murdoch’s departure. In fact, I’d say that Unity’s failure to push its terms of service changes on unwilling users is the same. “No king rules forever” and there is always a limit to power.

There are several major factors at play here, first and foremost the fact that this man is about 8 years removed from being an actual century old. He was always going to retire at some point. As for the other factors, let’s look at them. Earlier this year, Fox News in particular suffered two major setbacks. First was a prominent election fraud court case. Dominion and Smartmatic made the software and hardware used to count votes in the 2020 US elections. Fox News elevated and actively pushed conspiratorial narratives, largely via star news anchor Tucker Carlson. After Fox settled with Dominion for $787.5 million to avoid the case actually going to court, Murdoch is widely believed to have directly ordered Carlson’s firing in what is still a poorly understood, highly secretive chain of events.

Tucker Carson being fired was as big a surprise as it was because no one thought he could even be fired. It was a stark reminder that there was only one god at Fox News, and his name was Rupert. But therein lies the rub for entities, be they people or companies, which wield absolute power. You can only play your ace once. The contemporary understanding of monopoly, which is presently being fought over in the Google trial about its alleged search monopoly, rests largely in the concept of plausible deniability. Plausible deniability means that you have a reasonably believable (plausible) excuse for why you are not actually doing something you stand accused of. In the case of Unity or Google, this would be forcing whatever you wanted upon unwilling users or actively ‘murdering’ rivals in broad daylight. In Murdoch’s case, it’d be showing that the ultimate source of authority and decision-making rests with you.

This is purely hypothetical on my end, but I believe that Murdoch is choosing to tap out now so that it will be more difficult to hold him personally accountable for the longstanding controversies that his empire has long managed to hold at bay until now. On top of, you know, the whole old age thing, the importance of which can’t be overstated. I wonder how Murdoch’s empire will fare without him though, perhaps it will start to buckle under its own weight, perhaps it’ll be fine. No king rules forever, so I’ll continue to monitor the situation with interest, whether by forceful removal or voluntary abdication, a media tech monarch vacating the throne is quite the occasion. LINK

Cyber Brain Copilots:

Fall is when all of the major tech companies have their big showcase events. I tend to cover Apple separately because it is so particular and showy about its events, which tends to warrant the extra coverage. This doesn’t make other companies smaller, but it does make their events easier to package and cover together. And so it goes that we’ll be talking about Amazon and Microsoft today, about copilots in the future cyber brains Elon Musk continues to work towards with his company Neuralink.

Over the course of my time at University, back in the distant past of uh…god I feel old, I was trying to explain to the professor and fellow students alike why voice assistants were being pushed so hard. You had Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana (not that one), Amazon’s Alexa, and I guess if we’re being charitable to Samsung, Bixby also existed. Voice assistants were being pushed so hard because the idea was to make them a proxy for the corporations. A friendly companion that you’d befriend, become emotionally invested in, and ultimately reliant upon. The tech just wasn’t ready, and consumers lost patience. The voice assistant push failed. Yet here we are, once again. People often talk, metaphorically, about how a ‘little voice in their head’ told them to do or not do something.

So what if that little voice in your head becomes a little more…literal, what if Neuralink’s clinical trials on humans yield a system that is able to either locally run, or connect to cloud-hosted assistive AI? So-called ‘second brain’ systems have existed for years, though they have traditionally been somewhat laborious and counterintuitive archiving software. What if, hear me out, brain implants and voice assistant 2.0 end up converging down the line? Voice Assistant 2.0 doesn’t need to literally be in your head to succeed, but the strategic decisions and priorities that I’m seeing in all of these showcases all point me towards that old research of mine, it feels like I’m going back to the (promised) future, in a sense. Maybe keep that in the back of your head when looking over Microsoft’s ‘copilot’ promises. LINK

G’day Climate:

Covering tech’s impact on the climate and our environment.

Building Blocks Of Green Infrastructure:

In last week’s newsletter I explained how even if it isn’t perfect, Apple’s attempts to lower the carbon footprint of its products and supply chains was necessary and commendable. Unfortunately, it appears as if Apple’s new environmentally friendly ‘FineWeave’ iPhone covers are apparently pretty shit. Much of the early criticism seems to boil down to early adopters feeling like these cases are sloppily produced and surprisingly fragile. They contest that the cases don’t match up to Apple’s usual standards. I kind of wonder if it would have made a difference for industrial spider silk to have been available at the time, but that’s sadly still just an experimental material. And that, or so I believe, is the likeliest cause of many issues with first-generation alternatives to pollutive materials. Building things is hard, really hard. Finding satisfactory replacements for very particular materials is harder, so much harder. Just ask Lego.

Lego started getting serious about moving away from its oil-based Lego brick recipe around 2 years ago in 2021. The idea was to use recycled plastic instead of constantly producing entirely new plastic for each new brick. The intent was to use polyethylene terephthalate (PET) instead. There are a few things to comment on here, firstly how lethargic Lego has been at cleaning up its act, and secondly that it is now moving the goalpost for its climate targets from 2030 to 2032.

Lego is also reducing those targets to be less ambitious, and at least temporarily abandoning attempts to switch its world-famous bricks to recycled plastic as it looks for alternative production processes. This is incredibly disappointing and nowhere near good enough for a company with Lego’s resources and creative talent.to lay devil’s advocate a bit though. Part of Lego’s problem is, I suspect, the same problem faced by ‘FineWeave.’ Structural integrity and component precision. Sadly, one of the reasons why the green transition can’t be rushed, and why we should have started so much sooner, is exactly because all the necessary research and development takes a lot of time. ?

On the one hand, the failure of greener products such as the FineWeave cases and recycled Lego bricks is sad. On the other hand, failure is the mother of invention, and it’s exactly because the green transition is difficult and time-consuming and we need to keep pushing for it. Lego is actually the biggest tire producer in the world, and its business revolves entirely around oil. Whilst I’m not saying that we should cut it slack for overpromising and underdelivering as far as environmental efforts are concerned, I do believe that closely scrutinizing and learning from Lego’s failures will ultimately help both Lego and other companies complete their transitions successfully. LINK

Making Climate Accountability Appealing:

New research published in the Journal of Physics and Fluids shows that some people apparently breathe in a credit card’s worth of microplastics per week. Microplastics are named that way because they are particles so small that they are invisible to the human eye. They are so small as to be capable of passing through various different barriers in the body to get to places they’re really not meant to be, such as our bloodstreams. Research is alarming, but rather inaccessible to the average person. Which doesn’t help the climate disinformation crisis that still pervades platforms such as Twitter. Apparently ‘X’ marks the spot where the truth is buried.

Back when it was still called Twitter, this particular platform was often referred to as the ‘digital town square.’ Even after the X rebrand, many people still use Twitter as such. This is relevant because we, as a scattered yet globalized society, do need such environments to debate with one another, to exchange thoughts and opinions. Yet actually getting through to people who don’t speak your language is an issue that’s long plagued scientists. New initiatives exist that use creative mediums like art to convey the importance of biodiversity, hoping to impress upon viewers the importance of maintaining such amazing things as San Diego’s 700 different bee species.

Storytelling is how you get a message across. Fail in your storytelling, and either no one will listen, or they’ll think you’re trying to deceive them. Corporations seeking to reduce their carbon footprint don’t just need to keep practicalities such as logistics in mind. Even more important for getting customers on board is the philosophical reasoning behind why certain products and services might change. You need a clear message delivered with grace and conviction. A consistent, honest push towards tangible targets. Fear shouldn’t stop companies from fighting back against those who think saving the planet is a political issue, it isn’t. Saving the planet is an existential issue, and I’d like to continue existing. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement.

The Backend Is Back In Fashion:

Super apps are a class of apps that mostly exist in Asian countries. They combine a vast array of products and services within the singular interface of either one app, or one company’s tightly intertwined collection of apps. The key is a unified user experience that makes it ‘feel’ like just one app, that’s what makes a super app super. TikTok has made some interesting decisions lately which do a good job illustrating wider industry shifts within the social media space towards foundational super apps. Foundational in this case refers to the basic frameworks of super apps, rather than the finished examples seen in countries like China or South Korea. Up until now, super apps have not materialized in the West. There are many, many reasons, but for the most part, the infrastructure just wasn’t there.

Intel’s newest chip being such a big departure from the previous generation has a reason to it. Microsoft abandoning its more experimental surface devices has a reason, the reason is infrastructure. ?Indeed, Y Combinator’s recent Demo Day only had 3 out of the 200 participants pitch crypto-based projects. Y Combinator is Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capital fund, and a big power player in the tech industry at large because of that. Noticeable at this year’s demo day was a renewed focus on the backend, on the underlying systems that actually make something work. As opposed to the previous blitz of frontend projects such as NFTs, the industry appears to be sobering up and having frank discussions about what is actually necessary on the practical level to fulfill ambitions as lofty as revolutionizing economic systems.

Proof? Data has been called the new gold, the new oil, or whatever other traditional carrier of value floats your boat. And digital communications technology conglomerate Cisco does not pay $28 billion to acquire a data filtration company for nothing. Acquisitions don’t happen in a vacuum. The point is that for all the talk of building super apps that happened in the past, we appear to be witnessing an industry-wide shift towards actually laying the groundwork to build them in the West. It might seem simple, but just asking ourselves ‘What’s in a domain name?’ is already an example of thinking about the ground beneath our feet that we’ll need to tread if we wish to get to our desired destination. LINK

Is Cybercrime Child’s Play?

There’s a worrying cybersecurity trend that I’ve covered in previous newsletters, and which continues to ramp up in scale and frequency. The trend concerns teens and young adults aligning themselves with ransomware gangs and other threat actor collectives in order to carry out increasingly complex and destructive attacks against high-profile targets. When I say high-profile targets, I mean major multinational corporations such as MGM, and even the International Criminal Court.

These rather dramatic breaches make for a weird contrast at a time when it seems as if companies are going out of their way to keep as many legal documents out of the public eye as possible. Google, for example, is being accused of not just consciously destroying evidence, but also of pressuring the legal apparatus not to make court case proceedings publicly available. Perhaps they were extra spooked by the biggest leak in Xbox history, part of the ongoing probes into Microsoft’s attempts to acquire gaming publisher Activision Blizzard.

That brings us to the UK’s struggling Online Safety Bill. One of the most contentious parts of that bill has been age-checking measures that at present can’t be practically enforced. If the law passes though, the UK telecom regulatory office ‘Ofcom’ would be granted a massive degree of surveillance leeway. It feels like such a seemingly overbearing and misguided attempt to ‘protect the children’ again fails to take them seriously. So long as you don’t take teenagers and young adults seriously, they’ll continue to be courted by threat actors promising such validation. LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web.

Brain Freeze LINK

3DS Structure LINK

Ghibli Dungeons LINK

Electric Blue Arachnid LINK

Pleasant Unboxings LINK

Unity Is Very Sorry LINK

Dall-E 3 LINK

Amazon’s Anthropic? LINK

Space Lego LINK

Exoskeleton LINK

Open Tofu LINK

The Deep End:

A weekly batch of long-form content recommendations.

Distilling Step By Step:

Google research on using less training data to get better results from Large Language Models (LLMs). LINK

The Man Who Trapped Us In Databases:

The profile of Hank Asher, a former drug smuggler that invented database methodologies still widely used today around the world. LINK

Expensive Air:

The research paper about microplastic inhalation alluded to in ‘Making Climate Accountability Appealing.” LINK

Magic Colour Couples:

An explanation on every colour pairing in the popular Trading Card Game (TCG) Magic The Gathering. LINK

One More Thing…

I spilled my own blood in the weirdest way this past week. I punched out a mosquito that had been tormenting me for over three hours between 2am and 5am Wednesday morning. I had a nasty bite on my right cheek to show for it, but it wouldn’t be until I started writing the newsletter that I’d realize that there was an interesting analogy in here somewhere.

What if mosquitos were like the data harvesters of nature? DNA is kind of like our storage, it’s in our blood too, and companies are even experimenting with DNA storage for computing already. So that got me wondering about the non-argument that many people have with regard to why they don’t practice good data hygiene. That argument goes like this “I have nothing to hide, let them look!” These people are the ones who leave our shared windows and doors open at night because the mosquitos don’t like them. They then wonder why their housemates are scratching so furiously the next morning with huge bags under their eyes.

I suppose if were to continue the analogy, good data hygiene is like a mosquito net, or I guess taking care not to let the buggers inside too easily. As data breaches continue to become more frequent, and ongoing consolidation makes the impact of each breach that much bigger of a potential risk, I feel like it’s high time people got more serious about their data hygiene. Like sure, you may be able to swap the mosquito after the fact, but preventing is better than repairing it. Why spill your own blood when you don’t have to, that makes no sense.

Wait, hold on, what if I’m just overthinking this and I’m just extra tasty to the mosquitos now because of all the smoothies I’ve been drinking lately? Oh my god is this really just a smoothie criminal coming for me after all!?