Nilay Patel

I spent hours in The Print Shop as a kid; it truly was a perfect piece of software.

The idea here is that an attacker would tamper with the early results sent via insecure modem, and then no one would trust the final certified results. I’d say that was a fanciful scheme but… well, shit.

Apple’s foray into producing MLB broadcasts has had some pretty spotty moments, so Eddy Cue saying they would only take Sunday Ticket if the company is allowed to have ”great ideas” is pretty strange. The bar is: don’t crash every weekend!

Meta’s attempt to buy Within, the company behind the great VR workout app Supernatural, ran into an immediate FTC lawsuit seeking to block the deal because, well, Zuck keeps buying up everything in VR. Meta has always said the entire argument is bad because the VR market is so nascent, and now it’s filed to have the case thrown out.
We’ll see — but in the meantime you can listen to Within CEO Chris Milk talk about Supernatural on Decoder.

Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw has a deep dive into the state of Netflix, which still sits atop the streaming TV charts most weeks, but is in the middle of a huge shift from growing users to extracting more revenue from the huge user base it already has. The two biggest plans, from CFO Spencer Neumann? Ads, and cracking down on password sharing.

EV companies like Tesla and Rivian have invested billions in building proprietary automotive software platforms. Legacy automakers like Ford are building their own software as well. But the Polestar 3 represents a different approach: it runs Nvidia’s driver-assistance stack, Qualcomm’s infotainment platform, and Google’s Android automotive software. Polestar CEO Thomas Ingelath was on Decoder last year, if you’re curious for more on this strategy.

The Helium network, which gives you tokens for running mesh network hardware, was once the go-to counterexample of things crypto might create. Sadly, it didn’t really make anyone any money, there’s a lot of alleged corruption, and things are so bad that Binance — which is itself mired in investigations and was just hacked today — is delisting Helium tokens. Oh, and the story is in Forbes, which just took $200m in funding from... Binance! Everything in crypto is so messy all the time!

The funniest thing about this is that even more things happened while we were taping this episode of The Vergecast.

The new Prologue EV has a new Honda wordmark on the back, which is fun and cyberpunk-y in the way that monospaced fonts can be fun and cyberpunk-y. Apparently this is the new branding for Honda’s EVs, which will also get a little blue “e” badge so everyone knows you’re running on electrons under the hood.