Technology

Last week someone knocked out 5% of world oil production with a small swarm of drones and cruise missiles, and in doing so, inaugurated &a change in the nature of warfare globally,& to quote The Independent. These were relatively crude drones, too. Letpause a moment to imagine what happens if and when sophisticated autonomous drones become cheap enough for even small groups of technically capable insurgents and terrorists to use at scale.

Therecontroversy over where and whom the Abqaiq&Khurais attack came from. Even in cases like this, where video exists and wreckage is indicative — &serial numbers on some of the missiles used by the Yemeni rebels in past attacks reveal their Iranian origin& — attribution is hard. What happens if and when autonomous attack drones can be built relatively easily from off-the-shelf parts?

We&re already in the midst of a new arms race. Heresome video of Indraanti-drone system. HereRaytheonWindshear. HereBoeingCompact Laser Weapon System. Startups are in on the action too: Dedrone and especially Fortem.

The need for these defenses is obvious. Remember when small, unarmed commercial drones basically shut down the second busiest airport in the UK for days last year?

But, looking forward, will those detect small autonomous drones which hug the ground while avoiding obstacles like a Skydio? Or kamikaze drones which can conceivably defend themselves? Iterations will continue, on both sides, in a classic arms race. One side builds better defenses; he other side builds bigger drones that fly faster/farther and carry more explosive and nosedive onto their targets, or smaller nimbler drones that outswarm defenses; then the defenders upgrade; then the attackers innovate. All in a highly irregular, punctuated way, over the space of years.

That future already seems all but guaranteed. But the bigger question is: even if you can protect hard targets — oil infrastructure, airports, the White House, etc. — how do you defend against the innumerable soft targets out there? What happens when autonomous drones can recognize and target a particular license plate on the highway, and are all but impossible to track back to the attacker?

I&ve been asking these questions for more than a decade now and I still don&t have any good answers. What I do know, though, is that we&d best start analyzing and answering these questions before we are thrown into collective irrational panic and fury by some kind of widespread coordinated drone attack, high-profile assassination, and/or soft-target drone massacre … because if we wait until that hits, we&re pretty much guaranteed to get our answers wrong.

Hey all. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.

Last week, I talked about Appleaggressive moves to change the gaming market.

(Photo by Andrew Eccles/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

The big story

If you pay attention to your NBC and CBS sitcoms, you may have skimmed over news this week that Seinfeld and The Big Bang Theory picked sides in the streaming wars, selling out for glorious paydays. HBO bought TBBT for a billion dollars for its upcoming HBO Max service and Seinfeld went to Netflix for a cool half-billion. Both of the five-year deals carried hefty price tags but they also offered people pause to consider just how many dedicated streaming networks there are now.

Legacy sitcoms bringing people to streaming networks isn&t new, see &Friends,& but something feels particularly different now with HBO set to launch an expanded service, Apple ready for a $4.99 full-court press with TV+ and Disney about to leverage their content mega-franchises. Oh, and this week NBC announced its own service &Peacock.& Wheee.

The old age of paying for 50 channels with nothing left to watch because you haven&t paid for the upgraded package seems to be growing more familiar. All of this makes me wonder, where the tipping point is for internet users to return en masse to their pirating ways.

One could argue that TV and movie piracy subsided, in part, because networks learned how the internet functioned and took shows that were stuck on dated platforms and aggregated them inside products that were dead simple, easy to access and cheap. The latest paradigm shifts of streaming seem to be moon-walking back to where they once were before Netflix and Hulu.

We&re not there quite yet, but everything seems to be moving in that direction while the phrase &cable cutter& seems to be growing a bit quaint.

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On to the rest of the weeknews.

(Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Rivian)

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Amazon places a big order for electric delivery trucks There was a good deal of interesting stuff that went down this week, the most intriguing was that Amazon placed a massive order from the electric vehicle maker Rivian for 100,000 electric vans, a number that will approach the number of UPS trucks out in the wild. Read more here.
• Review: iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro The new iPhones are here and my boss has some thoughts on the new cameras. Read more here.
• Facebook lands on your TVFacebook is still making smart home hardware for some reason that I truly don&t grasp, but their latest product is at least pretty interesting. The Portal TV is a $149 camera that sits near your TV and brings Messenger video-chatting and some more odd features to your TV watching experience. Read more here.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. Facebook slaps its developer base on the wrist: [Facebook has suspended &tens of thousands& of apps suspected of hoarding user data]

Our biggest event of the year is right around the corner and we&re bringing in some of the most important figures in the tech industry. Herewhocoming to Disrupt SF 2019.

• Theresia Gouw and Ann Miura-Ko are coming to Disrupt
• Chris Dixon is coming to talk crypto and much more at Disrupt SF

In addition to taking in the great line-up of speakers, you can roam around Startup Alley to catch the more than 1,000 companies showcasing their products and technologies. And of course the Startup Battlefield competition that launched the likes of Dropbox, Cloudflare and Mint will once again be one of the biggest highlights of Disrupt SF.

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After conducting trials earlier in the year, Transport for NSW will begin rolling out a host of world-first cameras that are exclusively designed to catch drivers using their mobile phones on the road.

Cameras will be placed in 45 separate locations around the state by December this year and, unlike speed cameras, will come with no warning or