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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Friday, June 20th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Meta has some new smart glasses how long can the TikTok Groundhog Day go on? Masa San wants to create a Shenzhen like production city here in the US Are your smart cameras a national security threat to the home front in a war? And of course the weekend long? Read Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech Meta has some new smart glasses they're the $399 plus Oakley meta Houston, again pronounced Houston and they have the same features as the Meta Ray Ban glasses we're familiar with, but with 3K video recording, IPX4 water resistance and double the battery life. Quoting the Verge like the existing Meta Ray Ban glasses, the Oakley model features a front facing camera along with open ear speakers and microphones that are built into the frame. After they are paired with a phone, the glasses can be used to listen to music or podcasts, conduct phone calls or chat with Meta AI. By utilizing the onboard camera and microphones, Meta AI can also answer questions about what someone is seeing and even translate languages. Given the Oakley design, Meta is positioning these new glasses as being geared toward athletes. They have an IPX4 water resistance rating and offer double the battery life of the Meta Ray Bans, providing eight hours of use along with a charging case that can power them for up to 48 hours. The built in camera now shoots in 3K video, up from 1080p for the Meta Ray bans. They come in five frames and lens combinations, each prescription compatible for an added cost. Frame colors include warm gray, black, brown, smoke and clear, with lens options like transitions. A$499 limited edition version with gold accents and Oakley Prizm lenses launches July 11. The glasses will be sold in 15 countries including the US, UK, Canada, France and Australia. Meta recently signed a multi year deal with Essilor Luxottica, which aims to sell 10 million Meta smart glasses annually by 2026. This is our first step into performance, meta's wearable chief Alex Simmel told the Verge. There's more to come, end quote. More on Meta Aqua hiring Daniel Gross from Safe Superintelligence Apparently Meta tried to acquire all of SSI earlier this year, but founder and former OpenAI executive Ilya Suskever turned them down, so they moved on to grabbing Daniel Gross instead. Quoting CNBC earlier this year, sources said Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, which was reportedly valued at $32 billion in a fundraising round in April Suskever, who just launched the startup a year ago. Shortly after leaving OpenAI, rebuffed Meta's efforts as well as the company's attempt to hire him, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the information is confidential. Soon after those talks ended, Zuckerberg started negotiating with Gross, the sources said. In addition to his role at Safe Super Intelligence, Gross runs a venture capital firm with Nat Friedman called nfdg, their combined initials. Both men are joining Meta as part of the transition and will work on products under Scale AI founder Alexander Wang, one source said. Meta, meanwhile, will get a stake in nfdg, according to multiple sources. End Quote As I told you yesterday, on the latest episode of the Uncapped podcast hosted by his brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, revealed that Meta has attempted to recruit OpenAI employees with signing bonuses as high as $100 million and even more in total annual compensation. Despite the massive offers, Altman said as far as he knew, folks weren't biting at the offers. I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, altman said on the podcast. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped, and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try things. End quote. Of course, Meta's not alone in playing the AquaiHire game. Remember, OpenAI recently paid about $6.5 billion to Aquihire iPhone designer Jony I've As I said yesterday, President Trump has Indeed extended the TikTok ban deadline for a third time, but that leads to questions like is this legal? Also, how many times can the deadline be extended like infinity? Quoting the AP well, there is no clear legal basis for the extensions. So far, there have been no legal challenges to fight them. Trump has amassed more than 15 million followers on TikTok since he joined last year, and he has credited the trend setting platform with helping him gain traction among young voters. He said in January that he has a warm spot for TikTok. As the extensions continue, it appears less and less likely that TikTok will be banned in the US anytime soon. The decision to keep TikTok alive through an executive order has received some scrutiny, but it has not faced a legal challenge in court, unlike many of Trump's other executive orders. Jeremy Goldman, analyst at eMarketer, called TikTok's US situation a deadline purgatory. The whole thing is starting to feel less like a ticking clock and more like a looped ringtone. This political Groundhog Day is starting to resemble the debt ceiling drama, a recurring threat with no real resolution that's not stopping TikTok from pushing forward with its platform. Forrester analyst kelsey Chickering says TikTok's behavior also indicates they're confident in their future. As they rolled out new AI video tools at Con this week, Chickering notes smaller players like Snap will try to steal share during this uncertain time, but they will not succeed because this next round for TikTok isn't uncertain at all. End quote More signs of the strains AI is putting on the open Web Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says Google's ratio of pages crawled per visitor sent to a publisher fell from 2 to 110 years ago to 18 to 1 now. So 18 bots are coming to a webpage for every one actual human. For OpenAI, the ratio is 1500 to 1. Quoting Axios, people aren't following the footnotes, Prince said. While search engines and AI chatbots include links to original sources, publishers can only derive advertising revenue if readers click through. People trust the AI more over the last six months, which means they're not reading original content, he said. The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not the original content. Prince said Cloudflare is working on a new tool that will stop content scraping. That's the easy step, and that's coming very, very soon. And every publisher you've ever heard of is on board, he said. Cloudflare, which provides a number of tech services including cybersecurity and content delivery networks, recently launched a tool that obstructs bots that ignore no crawl directives. The bottom line? Prince's optimistic Cloudflare can pull this off. I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites. And you're me. I can't stop some nerd with a C corporation in Palo Alto. End quote Sources are telling Bloomberg that Masayoshi San is pitching a Shenzhen like $1 trillion AI and robotics manufacturing hub in Arizona, codenamed Project Crystal Land in partnership with tsmc, Quote San envisions a version of the vast manufacturing hub of China's Shenzhen that would bring back high tech manufacturing to the U.S. according to people familiar with the billionaire's thinking. The park may comprise production lines for AI powered industrial robots, they said, asking not to be named as the plan remains private, Softbank officials are keen to have the Taiwanese maker of Nvidia's advanced AI chips play a prominent role in the project, although it's not clear what part san sees for TSMC, which already plans to invest $165 billion in the US and has started mass product production at its first Arizona factory. Nor is it clear that TSMC would be interested. A person familiar with the chipmaker's thinking said that SoftBank's project had no bearing on TSMC's plans in Phoenix. Codenamed Project Crystal Land, the Arizona complex represents the 67 year old SoftBank chief's most ambitious attempt in a career that's spanned numerous bet the house bids, thousands fold returns and billions of dollars in losses. Son, who's often expressed disappointment in his own legacy, has repeatedly said he means to do everything he can to hurry AI development. SoftBank officials have spoken with federal and state government officials to discuss possible tax breaks for companies building factories or otherwise investing in the industrial park, including talks with U.S. secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. The people said the Japanese billionaire is also personally sounding out interest among an array of tech companies. They said the project has been floated to executives at South Korea's Samsung Electronics. They said the plans are preliminary and feasibility hinges on support from the Trump administration and state officials. While the cost of the project as envisioned by San may require as much as $1 trillion to execute, a sum previously reported by the Nikkei, the actual scale depends on interest from big technology companies. If successful, San has floated building multiple cutting edge industrial parks across the US End quote. I've tried other green supplements and they kind of never took tastes like drinking a bunch of grass, right? 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Polos fit my work style. Being just professional looking enough but feeling casual enough to wear comfortably in any situation, Quintz has my back there. Literally. Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quince Go to quince.comridehome for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com ridehome to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com ridehome Looks like all those warnings for years from governments and security experts about tech being an insecure vector on the home front are being proven real right now in real time. Israeli authorities are urging citizens to turn off home cameras as they say Iran is tapping into security cameras in Israel to gather real time intelligence for attacks. Quoting Bloomberg earlier this week, after Iranian ballistic missiles tore through high rise buildings in Tel Aviv, a former Israeli cybersecurity official went on public radio to issue a stark turn off your home surveillance cameras or change the password. We know that in the past two or three days the Iranians have been trying to connect to cameras to understand what happened and where their missiles hit to improve their precision, Rafael Franco, the former deputy director general of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, said on Monday. He now runs the cybersecurity crisis firm Code Blue. A spike in cyber attacks has accompanied the war between Israel and Iran with a pro Israel hacking group known as Predatory Sparrow claiming responsibility for disrupting a major Iranian bank and a breach that struck an Iranian crypto. Exchan, Iran's state run IRIB News reported that Israel had launched a full scale cyber attack on the country's critical infrastructure. A spokesperson for the Israel National Cyber Directorate, a government agency, confirmed that Internet connected cameras were increasingly targeted for Iran's war planning. We've seen attempts throughout the war and those attempts are being renewed now, the spokesperson said on Monday. Photos of impact sites in Israel, those circulating on social media, are under an official blackout. It isn't the first time Israel's foes have used the devices to spy. For instance, Hamas hacked into private security cameras ahead of its invasion on October 7, 2023, said Gabby Portnoy, who recently completed a three year term as director of the Israel National Cyber Directorate. The intelligence gathering that Hamas did from private cameras in the Gaza periphery was a disaster, portnoy said in an interview. Thousands of cameras were hacked over the years, both public and private, and were used to collect intelligence. Similar tactics have been used by Russia after its full scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia likely used access to private cameras at key locations such as near border crossings, military installations and rail stations to track the movement of materials, according to a joint cybersecurity advisory in May by the U.S. national Security Agency and other Western intelligence agencies. The actors also use legitimate municipal services such as traffic cams. End quote Ukraine banned surveillance cameras in 2022amid a warning that Russia was using them to plan airstrikes. The next year, Ukraine's government called on the owners of street webcams to broadcasting online. Russia is exploiting vulnerability of modern webcams to launch missile attacks at Ukraine and adjust them in real time, according to a government statement at the time. End quote Time for this week's edition of the Weekend. Long Read Suggestions first up from Mars Technica Scientists used to have to hoard steel. Are we going to have to hoard pre AI Internet data soon? Quote Former Cloudflare executive John Graham Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, Low BackgroundSteel AI, that treats pre AI human created content like a precious commodity, a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI generated content, graham Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason to preserve what made non AI media uniquely human. The archive name comes from a scientific phenomenon from the Cold War era. After nuclear weapons testing began in 1945, atmospheric radiation contaminated new steel production worldwide for decades. Scientists needing radiation free metal for sensitive instruments had to salvage steel from pre war shipwrecks. Scientists called this steel low background steel. Graham Cumming sees a parallel with today's web, where AI generated content increasingly mingles with human created material and contaminates it. With the advent of generative AI models like ChatGPT and stable diffusion in 2022, it has become far more difficult for researchers to ensure that media found on the Internet was created by humans without using AI tools. ChatGPT in particular, triggered an avalanche of AI generated text across the web, forcing at least one research project to shut down entirely. Graham Cumming is no stranger to tech preservation efforts. He's a British software engineer and writer best known for creating popfile, an open source email spam filtering program, and for successfully petitioning the UK government to apologize its persecution of codebreaker Alan Turing, an apology that Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued in 2009. As it turns out, his pre AI website isn't new, but it has languished unannounced until now. I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources that hadn't been contaminated with AI generated content, he wrote on his blog. The website points to several major archives of pre AI content, including a Wikipedia dump from August 2022 before ChatGPT's November 2022 release, Project Gutenberg's collection of public domain books, the of Congress Photoarchive, and GitHub's Arctic Code Vault, a snapshot of open source code buried in a former coal mine near the North Pole in February 2020. End quote and then from quanta we know evolution and complexity works on life and organic material. But what if it's just the nature of the universe to have everything become more complex given a long enough timeline? Quote A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers suggests nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of ENT in the universe increases over time, with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics, the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they're right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread. In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter, living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special and perhaps inevitable case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function. This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hanson and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie institution in Washington, D.C. along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not complete in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena rather than evolution, biological or otherwise, introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle, be predicted from physics alone. I'm so glad they've done what they've done, said Stuart Kaufman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. They've made these questions legitimate. Hazen came across this idea while thinking about the origin of life, an issue that drew him in as a mineralogist because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. I concluded that talking about life versus non life is a false dichotomy, hazen said. I felt there had to be some kind of continuum. There has to be something that's driving this process from simpler to more complex systems. Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the increasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend. Go out and get your summer on, depending as ever on which hemisphere you're listening to me in right now. Talk to you on Monday.