Good morning. I was scrolling through this thorough New York Times Magazine article about Netflix—though it’s really about the push and pull of creativity and commerce, Hollywood art and Silicon Valley science—when one line caught my eye:
“A $115 million movie budget is hard for Netflix to justify at almost any level of viewership, given that at the end of the day it supplies just two hours of content for a subscriber base that’s paying for a sense of infinity.”
Then it hit me: Wasn’t the budget for Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed Megalopolis something like $120 million? Oof. —Andrew Nusca
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An Epic win over Google
Google must make it easier for Android users in the U.S. to download mobile apps from stores other than its own, a judge ruled Monday.
Epic Games (Fortnite, Gears of War, Unreal) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google back in 2020 arguing that Google Play used an array of anti-competitive practices to make itself the preferred app store on Android devices, at the expense of rival app stores.
Epic’s effort has now culminated in a permanent injunction that Google—which often takes a 15% to 30% cut of sales in its app store—says it will appeal.
The decree covers a lot of ground. For three years beginning next month, Google will not be able to pay app makers for exclusive app launches, pay companies to avoid launching their own app stores, pay partners to preinstall Google Play on new devices, or require app makers to use Google Play’s billing. (Phew.)
The order also forces Google and Epic to form a three-person committee to review technical issues related to Google’s compliance. (Doesn’t that sound fun.)
If you’re thinking, “This seems bad for Apple, too,” you’re on the right track. Epic has a similar lawsuit with the iPhone maker that nearly made it to the Supreme Court; it remains an active battle in district court. The battle over your mobile ducats continues. —AN
Malaysia’s unlikely AI boom
A quiet, swampy corner of Malaysia has become an unlikely hot spot, all due to the growing demand for AI.
Johor, a Malaysian state previously known for palm oil plantations, is undergoing a data center building boom, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. A number of server farms—one as large as 19 football fields—are planned or under construction in the area to help power the huge global appetite for training artificial intelligence.
Tech giants like TikTok and Microsoft are among the new arrivals in Johor as are companies that lease data centers to corporate customers. The goal is to make the region the world’s second-biggest data center hub, just after Northern Virginia, the current world leader.
This corner of Malaysia has a few things in its favor. It’s just across the border from Singapore, where many trans-ocean Internet cables converge. It also has enough water and electricity (much of it from not-so-clean coal) to supply the resource-hungry facilities. And Malaysia is on friendly terms with the U.S. and China.
Malaysia, of course, is more than happy to be the beneficiary of billions of dollars in data center investment. —Verne Kopytoff
Who will police facial recognition tech?
Many police are using facial recognition technology to identify suspects, but the results are decidedly mixed.
Officers in at least 15 U.S. states have used the software in more than 1,000 criminal investigations, contributing to the arrest of hundreds of people, according to the Washington Post. Yet at least seven of those people were arrested wrongfully, it turns out, and six of them were Black.
Secretive facial recognition company Clearview AI, which sells a database of billions of images scraped from the web, is among the vendors that police use in their searches. However, studies show that Clearview and other leading algorithms are more likely to misidentify people of color, women, and the elderly than white men.
Police rarely informed defendants that they used the controversial software and even actively obscured the fact when documenting investigations, the Post reported. Critics say police should be required to disclose the fact out of fairness to suspects, yet only seven states have passed laws mandating it.
Now, um, smile for the camera. —Jenn Brice
Ukraine hackers take out Russian news network
Nearly three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the bullets-and-bombs war between the nations is not lost on anyone with access to the news. But the ongoing cyberwar? That’s sometimes easy to forget.
A massive cyberattack—reportedly connected to the Ukraine government—on Monday knocked out the website and Rossiya-24 news channel of VGTRK, the state media company that runs Russia’s national TV stations.
A Kremlin spokesperson called it an “unprecedented hacker attack” (which, please note, is a fantastic name for a punk band) and said the government would raise it in various international forums. In truth, it’s more likely to retaliate—but not in the way that you might think.
As Microsoft noted in a 2022 report detailing early cyber lessons about the war, Russian hackers seek targets well beyond Ukrainian government servers. They’re trying to break into the networks of allied governments like the U.S. and Poland as well as think tanks, humanitarian organizations, IT companies, energy providers, and other infrastructure suppliers.
What’s more, Russian cyber influence operations are not just working civilian populations of all those nations mentioned, but also “populations in nonaligned countries, potentially in part to sustain their support at the United Nations and in other venues.” So keep your digital head on a swivel, webmaster. —AN
Samsung is sticking to its chips
Beating Taiwan Semiconductor Co, the world’s dominant contract chipmaker, ain’t easy. Just ask Samsung, which declared it would eat TSMC’s lunch by 2030.
Samsung loses billions in the effort every year, analysts reckon, weighing down its broader business. But it’s not giving up or spinning out the foundry business, the company’s chairperson recently told Reuters. “We are hungry to grow the business. Not interested in spinning off,” Jay Y. Lee said.
The South Korean conglomerate is the world’s largest memory chipmaker, but it dreams of becoming the manufacturing partner of choice for the likes of Apple and Nvidia, which outsource production of their advanced “logic” chips to TSMC.
If Samsung’s dream sounds familiar, it’s because it’s also Intel’s comeback plan. Given the massive costs of building chip fabrication foundries, Samsung and Intel are among just a handful of companies with a real shot at challenging TSMC—and at risk of losing billions if they fail. Here’s to the dreamers! —Alexei Oreskovic
More data
—Meta and Uber, “scale insurgent” former unicorns. The only two tech startups in the last 20 years to find the revenue to justify their funding, according to Bain & Co.
—Cybercrime in Southeast Asia is hella lucrative. $37 billion stolen last year, per the UN.
—Pinduoduo and other Chinese retailers are in a race to the bottom. And the price wars are pushing China’s deflation in the wrong direction.
—Who’s investing in European defense startups? Americans. A sign of maturation, observers say—or perhaps inhibition.
—Elon Musk pops up at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. “I am Dark MAGA,” he said. (No word on whether he added, “Avada Kedavra!”)
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