Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland of an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: And how the tech are you. It's time for the
Speaker 1: tech news for Thursday, July two thousand twenty two. Let's
Speaker 1: get to it with some stories about Meta. A class
Speaker 1: action lawsuit filed against Meta means that CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: and former CEO Cheryl Sandberg will each have to testify
Speaker 1: in federal court regarding their alleged roles in the Cambridge
Speaker 1: Analytica scandal. And it seems like a lifetime since that
Speaker 1: scandal first became public. Now, in case you do not
Speaker 1: know what that scandal was all about, a British political
Speaker 1: consultancy firm that worked with conservative political campaigns here in
Speaker 1: the States leveraged data that had been scraped from Facebook.
Speaker 1: So there was this app developer slash professor who had
Speaker 1: created a political survey app and it was a pay
Speaker 1: for survey, so you would get paid if you took it.
Speaker 1: But what the people who took the survey didn't know
Speaker 1: is that by granting the app permission, it gave the
Speaker 1: app uh an elevated ability to see into not just
Speaker 1: their own personal information, but that of their friends on Facebook.
Speaker 1: So the app essentially made it possible for the app
Speaker 1: developer to look at friend profiles as if the developer
Speaker 1: were in fact that person's friend, and so the app
Speaker 1: was able to collect massive amounts of information from people
Speaker 1: who never consented to share that info in the first place.
Speaker 1: Right Like, if you were a friend of someone who
Speaker 1: took this survey, you didn't tell the survey that it
Speaker 1: was okay to scrape your data. Anyway, Cambridge Analytica mostly
Speaker 1: proved to be an ineffective entity as far as the
Speaker 1: political campaign consultancy gig is concerned, but it's still is
Speaker 1: true that the company relied heavily on information that violated
Speaker 1: consumer privacy laws. Meta already went through an investigation that
Speaker 1: was conducted by the Federal Trade Commission about this, and
Speaker 1: the company had paid out a five billion dollar fine.
Speaker 1: That's billion with a B, not chump change. But this
Speaker 1: case alleges that several key executives of the company were
Speaker 1: responsible for how the Cambridge Analytica story unfolded. They say
Speaker 1: that the executives knew more about what was going on
Speaker 1: earlier than they indicated, and that they may have even
Speaker 1: taken some steps within the company to try and conceal
Speaker 1: what was happening because it did not reflect well on Facebook.
Speaker 1: The court has demanded that Meta hand over more than
Speaker 1: one thousand documents that the company had previously withheld, citing
Speaker 1: them as privileged information. Looks like some of that privilege
Speaker 1: is gonna get stripped away. Sticking with Meta for a
Speaker 1: couple more stories, nonprofit organizations that focus on civil and
Speaker 1: digital rights are criticizing Meta for its Meta Human Rights Report.
Speaker 1: That's an eighty three page document that the company published
Speaker 1: last week. The report is supposed to document Meta's impact
Speaker 1: on human rights and how it tries to protect human rights,
Speaker 1: but these organizations are saying that the report fails to
Speaker 1: do this. Instead, it serves more as a whitewashing document
Speaker 1: meant to absolve Meta of its role in facilitating the
Speaker 1: spread of hate speech, extremism, misinformation, and that kind of thing. Further,
Speaker 1: the organizations say that Meta was citing its own press
Speaker 1: releases in the document to use that as evidence of
Speaker 1: how the company is working to support human rights, which
Speaker 1: kind of boils down into because I said so, right,
Speaker 1: like a like a a nonsensical argument like that. The
Speaker 1: organizations also say that the document mentions several safeguards that
Speaker 1: are meant to protect human rights, but that the document
Speaker 1: fails to disclose that Meta has subsequently removed many of
Speaker 1: those safeguards. So there's this growing criticism that Meta's reports
Speaker 1: in general, not just this one but others as well,
Speaker 1: that all claimed to increase transparency, failed to include anything
Speaker 1: of real substance within those reports, and that the company
Speaker 1: is really just kind of going through the motions or
Speaker 1: putting on a kind of responsibility theater while failing to
Speaker 1: make significant operational changes that would produce results. Pretty nasty
Speaker 1: criticism directed to the company. And to round out our
Speaker 1: Meta news, a company called Meta dot i S, which
Speaker 1: is an art installation company, is suing Meta for trademark violation.
Speaker 1: Now I'm pretty sure I actually mentioned Meta dot i
Speaker 1: s way back shortly after Facebook changed its name to
Speaker 1: Meta last year. Now, according to Meta dot i S,
Speaker 1: they tried to work with the Facebook version of Meta,
Speaker 1: but they found no real success there, and the art
Speaker 1: insplation company now says it has trouble securing clients because
Speaker 1: people assume that Meta dot i S is associated with
Speaker 1: meta slash Facebook. And why would that be a problem. Well,
Speaker 1: according to the art company, Facebook's reputation is so bad
Speaker 1: right now, with so much negative press and perception, that
Speaker 1: this spills over to affect the art company, even though
Speaker 1: there's no connection other than having the same name. And
Speaker 1: since meta dot i s pre existed Facebook's Meta, they
Speaker 1: they are arguing that they should have the valid claim
Speaker 1: on that trademark. Whether or not that argument will stand
Speaker 1: up in court remains to be seen, and it's always
Speaker 1: possible or even probable that meta slash Facebook will settle
Speaker 1: out of court if the law team feels their case
Speaker 1: isn't strong enough to win. All right, now, let's talk
Speaker 1: about Netflix and the world of business, which I clearly
Speaker 1: do not understand. So earlier this year, Netflix held an
Speaker 1: earnings call and revealed that for the first time, it
Speaker 1: lost more subscribers than it had gained over a quarter,
Speaker 1: and subsequently, the stock price on Netflix took a nose dive. Well,
Speaker 1: the company recently had its earnings call for the second
Speaker 1: quarter of the year and revealed it lost nearly a
Speaker 1: million subscribers. So in the first quarter it lost two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand. This time it lost like nine hundred seventy
Speaker 1: thousand subscribers, so that's like way more than it lost
Speaker 1: in the first quarter. That's not as bad as what
Speaker 1: Netflix thought it was gonna be. The initial forecast was
Speaker 1: going to be a two million drop in subscribers, so
Speaker 1: it's not as bad as what they thought it was
Speaker 1: gonna be. It was half as bad, less better than
Speaker 1: half as bad, I guess it's a weird way to
Speaker 1: say it, but less than half of what they they
Speaker 1: had forecast, so still worse than they did in the
Speaker 1: first quarter, but not nearly as bad as they thought
Speaker 1: it was going to be. In the second quarter, and
Speaker 1: revenue was actually up by eight point six so yeah,
Speaker 1: the company has, you were, subscribers, but it's earning more money,
Speaker 1: largely because of, according to the company, the dollars standing
Speaker 1: in the world economy. And consequently, Netflix's stock price increased
Speaker 1: by seven point four percent on Wednesday, which is wild, right,
Speaker 1: Like def flix Is stock price dropped when they lost
Speaker 1: two hundred thousand, but when up when they quote unquote
Speaker 1: only lost nine seventy thousand subscribers. I'm just not able
Speaker 1: to see the matrix when it comes to the stock market,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's such a relief that I'm not
Speaker 1: a day trader, because I would have completely lost my
Speaker 1: mind at this point. Microsoft and Google are both pumping
Speaker 1: the brakes on hiring new employees due to economic pressures.
Speaker 1: Bloomberg reports that Microsoft has been shut down open job
Speaker 1: listings in various departments like Azure and security. Company reps
Speaker 1: say there's essentially a hiring freeze for most departments, but
Speaker 1: Microsoft will continue to honor job offers that have already
Speaker 1: been extended to prospective employees, and they may make the
Speaker 1: occasional exception for positions that are considered to be critical
Speaker 1: to operations. Business Insider reports that Google has entered into
Speaker 1: a two week hiring freeze while the company assesses its
Speaker 1: actual quote unquote headcount needs, and like Microsoft, Google is
Speaker 1: also going to honor any job offers that have already
Speaker 1: been extended to future Googlers. So yeah, things are are
Speaker 1: still looking pretty rough in the tech sector in general.
Speaker 1: Will probably see that spill over into other industries as well,
Speaker 1: or continue to spill over because it's already happening over
Speaker 1: in the UK, the g c h Q and the
Speaker 1: U k's National Cybersecurity Center are calling on tech companies
Speaker 1: to practice client side scan ending in an effort to
Speaker 1: seek out illegal material, namely images and videos related to
Speaker 1: child abuse. Now, this is an ongoing struggle and it
Speaker 1: is a highly charged topic because on the one side,
Speaker 1: you have people who want to leverage technology to uncover
Speaker 1: instances of child abuse so that the perpetrators can be
Speaker 1: held accountable, and that's completely understandable. Child abuse is absolutely horrifying.
Speaker 1: And on the other side, you have privacy advocates arguing
Speaker 1: that any sort of client side scanning mandate is a
Speaker 1: huge threat to privacy. It's an enormous amount of surveillance,
Speaker 1: and it would also arguably necessitate the outlawing of end
Speaker 1: to end encryption, because if you have true end to
Speaker 1: end encryption, no other parties other than those involved in
Speaker 1: that communication would be able to read the messages. So
Speaker 1: even the service carrying the messages would not be able
Speaker 1: to see what was inside that communication. So there's no
Speaker 1: way they could do scanning in that event, And if
Speaker 1: they're required to do scanning, then the logic goes, you
Speaker 1: can't have end to end encryption. Now you can see
Speaker 1: the validity of both sides, I imagine, because yes, child
Speaker 1: abuse is terrible, it should be stopped. It absolutely needs
Speaker 1: to be detected and halted and better yet prevented. Now,
Speaker 1: on the other side, eliminating secure means of communication and
Speaker 1: introducing more surveillance can put people into danger, people who
Speaker 1: are innocent of committing any crimes. You know, maybe they
Speaker 1: are a political activist or a journalist or something along
Speaker 1: those lines. And if you have a government that turns
Speaker 1: against those kinds of things, then having a client scanning side, uh,
Speaker 1: you know technology in place, one that law enforcement could
Speaker 1: theoretically access, puts those people at risk. So some of
Speaker 1: the privacy side argue that using technology to address a
Speaker 1: societal problem isn't effective, that all technology really does is
Speaker 1: go after a symptom or the outcome, it doesn't actually
Speaker 1: address the root causes, and that the money and effort
Speaker 1: that would be spent making this technological approach would be
Speaker 1: better directed at creating social programs that aim to prevent
Speaker 1: child abuse in the first place. Okay, we've got other
Speaker 1: stories to talk about, some of which are not nearly
Speaker 1: as heavy as what we just talked about. But before
Speaker 1: we get to those, let's take a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about some stories that relate to electric vehicles,
Speaker 1: and first up, the US Post Office or USPS UH
Speaker 1: for the United States Postal Service had initially committed to
Speaker 1: purchasing five thousand all electric mail trucks because it's adding
Speaker 1: fifty vehicles to its fleet, but now the USPS says
Speaker 1: it will actually be closer to half of those fifty
Speaker 1: thousand that will be all trick vehicles, and that when
Speaker 1: looking at all vehicles the USPS plans to purchase in
Speaker 1: the near future, which goes beyond just the mail trucks,
Speaker 1: goes to everything, that's about eighty four thousand vehicles total.
Speaker 1: The USPS plans for around those to be electric vehicles.
Speaker 1: It's a good move, especially for the mail trucks. They
Speaker 1: are notoriously gas guzzling vehicles. The Grumman Long life vehicles,
Speaker 1: which are the kind that the USPS has as most
Speaker 1: of its fleet, they average around UH somewhere around ten
Speaker 1: miles per gallon due to the stop and go nature
Speaker 1: of postal workers duties. So I switched to e v
Speaker 1: S would mean the USPS would significantly reduce its carbon
Speaker 1: emissions across its fleet. Over at the Foreign Motor Company,
Speaker 1: it's planning on cutting eight thousand jobs in order to
Speaker 1: reallocate resources towards building more electric vehicles of its own.
Speaker 1: The layoffs will affect Ford's Blue Division, which is the
Speaker 1: part of Ford that focuses on building internal combustion engine
Speaker 1: or i c E vehicles. This follows the recent reorganization
Speaker 1: of Ford into the Blue Division and the Model E Division,
Speaker 1: and it's another sign of the massive shift in the
Speaker 1: automotive industry as more companies are transitioning to building non
Speaker 1: i c E vehicles. Now, when it comes to e
Speaker 1: V companies, you could argue that none is more famous
Speaker 1: than Tesla, which is back in the news because of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: So back in one, Tesla purchased a large amount of bitcoin,
Speaker 1: to the tune of about one point five billion dollars
Speaker 1: worth of the digital currency, but in a recent earning statement,
Speaker 1: the company revealed it had sold off or three quarters
Speaker 1: of its bitcoin holdings. Now, considering how far the value
Speaker 1: of bitcoin has dropped since twenty one, that could mean
Speaker 1: that Tesla took up fairly big loss on that investment.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say exactly how much, because the company
Speaker 1: did not reveal at what price it's sold that its
Speaker 1: coin holdings. Brian Johnson and analyst at Barclays estimated that
Speaker 1: Tesla was looking at a four hundred sixty million dollar
Speaker 1: bitcoin impairment from the sell off, which is an big
Speaker 1: old alchi Elon Must said that the decision to sell
Speaker 1: off the chunk of bitcoin holdings had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with the cryptocurrencies value. He said, This is not a
Speaker 1: condemnation on crypto, he said, instead, it was just a
Speaker 1: free up resources due to the ongoing challenges of operating
Speaker 1: in China, which has strict COVID lockdown policies that have
Speaker 1: been disrupting Tesla's operations there. When pressed if Tesla would
Speaker 1: reinvest in bitcoin later down the line, must refer to
Speaker 1: bitcoin as quote a side show to a side show
Speaker 1: end quote, which does seem like kind of a condemnation
Speaker 1: of cryptocurrency, So who ne who knows? And this follows
Speaker 1: Tesla's previous move to stop accepting bitcoin as payment for
Speaker 1: car purchases. It did do that briefly, but it has
Speaker 1: curtailed that practice for quite some time now. That was
Speaker 1: a move that the company credited to a concern about
Speaker 1: the environmental impact of bitcoin mining. Whether or not that
Speaker 1: was the one and only reason, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: that's the reason they gave James Murray, the director of
Speaker 1: the United States Secret Service, has announced his retirement and
Speaker 1: he's moving on to join the private sector. And you
Speaker 1: might wonder why am I talking about the director of
Speaker 1: the Secret Service in a podcast that's about tech. Well,
Speaker 1: it's because the company he is going to join is
Speaker 1: Snap Incorporated, the parent company of Snapchat. So Murray will
Speaker 1: oversee security at Snapping, which makes sense, though I have
Speaker 1: to admit, if I were working in the security division
Speaker 1: at Snap, I feel pretty intimidated when the former director
Speaker 1: of the Secret Service came on board. A security researcher
Speaker 1: has found an interesting way to compromise computer systems that
Speaker 1: have an air gap. But before I even get into
Speaker 1: this story, let me just say this exploit is technically possible,
Speaker 1: but it isn't in any way practice at coals, so
Speaker 1: I don't think there's any need to panic about it.
Speaker 1: But it is an interesting security vulnerability. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about this. First of all, what is an air gap. Well,
Speaker 1: that's when you make sure a computer system isn't connected
Speaker 1: to the Internet in any way. It is self contained, uh,
Speaker 1: and it's isolated, so it makes it very difficult to
Speaker 1: breach the system. If there are no pathways, you know,
Speaker 1: into the system online, then hackers can't really gain access,
Speaker 1: at least not remotely. But Mordecai Gurry, a security researcher,
Speaker 1: it came up with a way that theoretically would let
Speaker 1: someone steal from an air gapped system and to do
Speaker 1: so wirelessly. And that sounds impossible, right, and it almost is.
Speaker 1: So to get this to work, first you would have
Speaker 1: to inject malware into the air gap system, which pretty
Speaker 1: much means you or someone under your direction or you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you trick them or whatever. They have to physically
Speaker 1: deliver malware to the system in some way. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: playing a USB stick into a machine and transferring malware
Speaker 1: that way. So that's reason number one that this is impractical,
Speaker 1: but not impossible. You know, people have been able to
Speaker 1: get physical access to air gap systems before, but it's
Speaker 1: not always easy. I mean, you you might find it
Speaker 1: easier if you're able to trick someone on the inside
Speaker 1: to do it for you, but even that's risky. So
Speaker 1: then the researcher discovered that these SATA cables s A
Speaker 1: t A cables that are used in these computer systems
Speaker 1: EMIT a low power radio signal between five point nine
Speaker 1: and five point nine six giga hurts, and that's not surprising.
Speaker 1: If you run current through a wire, it will generate
Speaker 1: an electromagnetic field. So these signals could act kind of
Speaker 1: like Morse code. You know each character as it goes
Speaker 1: over this wire. Uh emits a slightly different signal. So
Speaker 1: if you set up a receiver near a compromised air
Speaker 1: gapped system, and by near I mean you'd have to
Speaker 1: be within a hundred times or three point nine feet
Speaker 1: in order to not have too much of an error
Speaker 1: rate introduced into the signal, and you limited your transmission
Speaker 1: bit rate to about one bit per second. Remember a
Speaker 1: bit is a zero or a one. Then it means
Speaker 1: you would have to sit really close to the system
Speaker 1: for a really long time in order to get anything useful. Presumably,
Speaker 1: if you could somehow get access to this air gap
Speaker 1: system and then planned to computer with wireless capability close
Speaker 1: enough to it in a way that folks are not
Speaker 1: likely to see it and thus remove it, you could
Speaker 1: very slowly siphon information from that target system. So it's
Speaker 1: good to be aware that this vulnerability as possible, but
Speaker 1: it's an unlikely scenario you would ever encounter in real life.
Speaker 1: And that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. Hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it. Please reach out to me and let
Speaker 1: me know about any topics you would like me to
Speaker 1: cover in the future. You can do so on Twitter
Speaker 1: that's tech stuff hs W, or you can do so
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