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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Wednesday, April 2, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, all the details from the big Nintendo Switch reveal this morning. Wikimedia says AI bots are increasing its cost by 50%. North Korean IT workers allegedly continue to go after remote IT jobs worldwide. Meta is readying its more ambitious, more expensive smart glasses for maybe later this year. And I just caught this Amazon Made a bid for TikTok here's what you missed today in the world of tech Breaking Breaking news Sources are telling the Times that Amazon has put in a bid to acquire all of TikTok ahead of the April 5 deadline, but various parties involved don't seem to be taking the bid seriously. I have to say, this would make a ton of sense for Amazon because they don't have a social network and you know how TikTok has been moving toward doing commerce on the platform? Yeah, Quote the bid came via an offer letter addressed to Vice President J.D. vance and Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, according to a person briefed on the matter. Amazon's bid highlights the 11th hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok's ownership. Policymakers in both parties have expressed deep national security concerns over the app's Chinese ownership and passed a law last year to force a sale of TikTok that was set to take effect in January. Mr. Trump is slated to meet with top White House officials Wednesday to discuss TikTok's fate. People familiar with the talks have outlined a potential deal that could involve bringing on a number of new US Investors, including Oracle, the technology giant, and Blackstone, the private equity firm, while sidestepping a formal sale. But it isn't clear that such a structure would satisfy the conditions of the federal law. Amazon has some existing ties to TikTok. The video app, which counts 170 million users in the United States, has become a major hub of retail shopping, with influencers recommending products to viewers. While the company has its own e commerce operation known as TikTok shop, many influencers encourage people to buy products on Amazon, which gives the influencers a cut of the transactions. It has also provided some technical infrastructure. Amazon have previously tried to make a TikTok clone of sorts, called Inspire, inside its own app. Internally, it was a high profile initiative but was widely seen as unsuccessful at attracting shoppers. The company removed it from the app this year. Amazon isn't the first retailer to express interest in the app in 2020, when TikTok was first pressured to sell to American owners Microsoft and Walmart made a bid for the company. But Amazon would be the most high profile bidder for the company, which has also attracted interest from billionaire Frank McCourt as well as Jesse Tinsley, the founder of the payroll firm employer.com, end quote. But again, there's this line at the beginning of the piece saying the bid is not being taken seriously by various parties. I don't know what that means. Certainly Amazon would have a ton of money to throw around. But also at the very end of all this is the problem that the Chinese government says TikTok is not for sale. That ultimate issue never gets addressed when these rumors surface. The big Nintendo event was this morning where we got all the details of the Nintendo Switch 2 except for one big detail. There were so many people watching 1.4 million towards the end that the YouTube stream crashed. They started by announcing a new Mario Kart world game, which is big, big news in this house, at least. On the new Joy Con controllers there is now a microphone allowing you to chat with your friends in real time, Discord style. But more than that, there's a new Nintendo Switch 2 camera that you can buy separately and use to have your little face down on the bottom. Sort of like how it works on say a Twitch stream for again live chatting, when as for the console itself, it basically looks the same, but it has a bigger 7.2-inch display with double the pixels, so it's slightly wider, but they said with the same thickness. The screen supports 4K HDR at 120 frames per second, though only 60 frames per second when docked. The new Joy Con controllers connect magnetically instead of sliding on, and if you put the Joy Con down on a table on the flat side, you can use it as a mouse for entirely new control input. There's also 3D audio available on headphones or if you have a surround sound system. The storage starts at 256 gigabytes of storage, which is good because the original Switch had only a measly 32 gigabytes, which was crazy. They're still supporting micro SD cards, but apparently proprietary ones, and you will be able to port your Nintendo Switch storage to your Nintendo Switch 2. And they confirmed they would support compatible Switch 1 games as well. But also Nintendo Switch 2 Edition games are a new category of old games upscaled to support the new graphics capabilities. Speaking of those new capabilities, here's a partial list of the titles the better hardware can now support. Elden Ring Borderlands 4, Split Fiction, Hogwarts Legacy, Hades 2, Street Fighter 6, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and 4, Cyberpunk 2077, World of Assassination, and a whole suite of EA Sports games. The launch of the new console is June 5th, but weirdly they didn't announce the pricing or the pre order date or process, though they did say they were putting up a website for the Switch 2 later this afternoon. So I guess we'll have to wait for that. Quick Edit Late Breaking news Various outlets are reporting that the Switch 2 will cost $450 for the console or $500 for a Mario Kart World bundle. North American pre orders open on April 9th. Once again, another story about how AI crawlers are beginning to wreak havoc with the web. The Wikimedia foundation says the base bandwidth demand for downloading Wikimedia Commons multimedia content is up 50% since January 2024, driven by AI crawlers. Quoting TechCrunch Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs, a Wikimedia reads. Wikimedia Commons is a freely accessible repository of images, videos and audio files that are available under open licenses or are otherwise in the public domain. Digging down Wikimedia says that almost 2/3, 65% of the most expensive traffic that is the most resource intensive in terms of the kind of content consumed was from bots. However, just 35% of the overall page views comes from these bots. The reason for this disparity, according to Wikimedia, is that frequently accessed content stays closer to the user in its cache, while other less frequently accessed content is stored further away in the core data center, which is more expensive to serve content from. This is the kind of content that bots typically go looking for. While human readers tend to focus on specific, often similar topics, crawler bots tend to bulk read larger numbers of pages and visit also the less popular pages, Wikimedia writes. This means these types of requests are more likely to get forwarded to the core data center, which makes it much more expensive in terms of consumption of our resources. The long and short of all this is that the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability team are having to spend a lot of time and resources blocking crawlers to avert disruption for regular users. And all this before we considered the cloud costs that the foundation is faced with. In truth, this represents part of a fast growing trend that is threatening the very existence of the open Internet. Last month, software engineer and open source advocate Drew Devolt bemoaned the fact that AI crawlers ignore robots txt files that are designed to ward off automated traffic. And pragmatic engineer Gurgly Oros also complained last week that AI scrapers from companies such as Meta have driven up bandwidth demands for his own projects. While open source infrastructure in particular is in the firing line, developers are fighting back with cleverness and vengeance, as TechCrunch wrote last week. Some tech companies are doing their bit to address the issue, too. Cloudflare, for example, recently launched AI Labyrinth, which uses AI generated content to slow crawlers down. AI, AI, AI. Seemingly half of the show these days is AI news, but do you still feel like you barely understand the technology? Well, this podcast is sponsored by Udacity Want to learn skills that command higher salaries? Udacity is an online learning platform with courses in AI, data programming, and more. Instead of wasting your time scouring YouTube or prompting ChatGPT, Udacity removes the guesswork so you can learn what you need to know and nothing that you don't. When you learn with Udacity, you're not just passively watching videos or reading articles. You're doing practical exercises and projects that prepare you for the job you want. That's why 87% of Udacity graduates say that they achieve their enrollment goal. I've used Udacity in the past to brush up on my programming skills. They're way more useful and informative than YouTube videos alone. There's tons of options for learning tech skills, but only Udacity is consistently ranked as the top skill development platform because, unlike the others, it actually works. The tech field is always evolving and you should be too. You can try Udacity risk free for seven days. Head to udacity.com ride and use code ride for 40% off your order. Once again, that's udacity.com ride for 40% off and make sure you use my promo code ride so they know I sent you. If you're a security or IT professional, you've got a mountain of assets to protect. You've got devices, applications, employee identities, plus the scary stuff outside your security stack like unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps, and non employee identities. It's a lot. 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Google researchers say North Korean IT workers are fraudulently securing remote roles at companies in Germany, Portugal and the UK after facing sanctions in the US Quoting Bleeping Computer Also referred to as IT warriors, they hide their true identities and pose as workers based in other countries by connecting via laptop farms to fraudulently secure positions as remote freelance IT employees at companies worldwide to generate revenue for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or dprk, regime. A security researcher with the Google Threat Intelligence group GTIG found North Korea's IT army has increasingly targeted positions at companies in Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom after many of its members have been charged and targeted with sanctions in the US in their efforts to secure these positions, DPRKIT workers employed deceptive tactics, falsely claiming nationalities from a diverse set of countries, including Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Ukraine, the United States and Vietnam. The identities used were a combination of real and fabricated Personas, said Jamie Collier, a lead threat intelligence advisor at gtig. IT workers in Europe were recruited through various online platforms, including upwork, Telegram, and Freelancer. Payment for their services was facilitated through cryptocurrency, the TransferWise service, and Payoneer, highlighting the use of methods that obfuscate the origin and destination of funds. For instance, GTIG investigators discovered user credentials at European job websites and human capital management platforms linked to DRPK IT worker Personas looking for employment at German and Portuguese companies. North Korean IT workers have also been linked to many projects in the United Kingdom, ranging from AI and blockchain technology to web bot and content management systems development. Another DPRK IT worker targeted multiple European organizations in the defense, industrial base and government sectors in late 2024, using fabricated references and Personas to make it EAs to trick job recruiters into hiring them. We are increasingly seeing North Korean IT workers infiltrating larger organizations to steal sensitive data and follow through on their extortion threats against these enterprises, michael Barnhart, a mandiant principal analyst at Google Cloud, told Bleeping computer in January. GTIG's report follows multiple warnings issued by the FBI regarding North Korea's massive army of IT workers sent abroad to generate revenue who have tricked hundreds of companies in the United States and worldwide into hiring them over the years. However, the North Korean regime keeps up to 90% of wages collected this way, generating hundreds of millions every year to fund its weapons programs after being discovered and fired. Some of these undercover North Korean IT workers have also used insider knowledge to extort former employers, threatening to leak sensitive information stolen from company systems. In January, the US Justice Department indicted two North Korean nationals and three facilitators for their involvement in a multi year fraudulent remote IT work scheme involving at least 64 U.S. companies between April 2018 and August 2024. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control also sanctioned North Korean Front, linked to North Korea's Ministry of National Defense and accused of generating revenue via illegal remote IT work schemes. The US State Department now offers millions in exchange for any information that could help disrupt their fraudulent activities. End quote Mark Gurman Sources say Meta is ramping up work on its first glasses with a display codenamed Hypernova, which it could debut as early as the end of 2020 for 1000 to maybe even 1400 bucks. The company's current smart glasses, the Ray Ban Meta glasses, start at $299 and have been a surprise hit. Meta will continue to sell that entry level version and is banking on their popularity to push users toward the higher end models. Other companies, including Amazon, have pledged new versions of their own glasses to better compete with the social networking giant. The significant price increase for the new model is driven almost entirely by the screen, which is a monocular panel that will be located in the low right quadrant of the right lens. That means information will only be displayed in front of the wearer's right eye and will appear most clearly when they are looking downward. The company has also already begun work on a second generation version of the product, codenamed Hypernova 2. The major difference is the inclusion of a binocular display system, which means the device will have two screens and show information in both eyes. That device is currently planned for 2027, the people said. A look at a prototype version of the first Hypernova glasses indicates how the glasses are likely to work when they go on sale. When they are turned on, the display shows a boot screen with logos for Meta and other partners such as chipmaker Qualcomm on the product. Once the device is on, the user will see a home screen comprised of circular icons laid out horizontally, similar to the App Dock on Apple's devices or Meta's Quest's Mixed Reality headset. The glasses include dedicated apps for taking pictures, viewing photos and accessing maps. There is also support for notifications from phone apps including Meta's messenger and WhatsApp app. The glasses will otherwise work similarly to the current Wayfarer style Ray Ban Metas, focusing on capturing images and video, accessing AI via built in microphones, and pairing with a phone for calls and music playback. The new version will continue to rely heavily on the metaview phone app. Like Meta's other new devices, the glasses will run a highly customized version of the Android operating system from Alphabet's Google. The company isn't currently planning to include an onboard app store. Users will be able to control the glasses using capacitive touch controls on the sides of the glasses, meaning they can scroll through apps or photos by swiping against the temple bars and then tapping to open something specific. Meta also plans to begin offering a so called neural wristband for the first time, which will allow a wearer to control the glasses with gestures such as rotating their hand to scroll through apps and photos and pinching their finger and thumb to select items. Meta is currently planning to bundle the accessory codename series in the box with the glasses End quote We have another one Circle has filed for a US IPO with plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CRCL. Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin, is reportedly seeking a 4 to 5 billion dollars valuation. Quoting CNBC, this marks Circle's second attempt at going public. A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, collapsed in late 2022amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart Finance, including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade center in New York. Circle reported $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income in 2024, up from $1.45 billion in 2023 and $772 million in 2022. The company reported net income last year of about $156 million, down from $268 million a year earlier. A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent pure play crypto companies to list on a US exchan through a direct listing in 2021 and has a market cap of about $44 billion. Remember the discussion last week about Coreweave's IPO maybe being a bust? Well, yesterday Coreweave's stock closed up a whopping 41.77% at $52.57 in its third trading day, bouncing back above its $40 IPO price and bringing the company's market cap to around 24.89 billion. It was briefly up another 20% this morning before dropping down to about break even. Don't know what's going on here, but quoting CNBC Shares of the artificial intelligence cloud company, which rents out access to Nvidia's graphics processing units to other technology companies, dropped more than 10% on Monday and fell below the initial public offering price of $40. The stock opened at $39 on Friday and closed flat at $40. Markets have also sold off against a backdrop of macroeconomic uncertainty spurred by President Donald Trump's tariff agenda. Core Weave lowered its offering price to $40. Last expected pricing range of $47 to $55. The company also downsized the offering to 37.5 million shares from $49 million. CEO Marc Intrator told CNBC's Squawk Box on Friday that the company had to scale or right size the transaction for where the buying interest was against a backdrop of macroeconomic headwinds. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.