Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, jonvan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Speaker 1: Tech Are you. Welcome to my last Friday as the
Speaker 1: host of tech Stuff. You've almost made it. I've almost
Speaker 1: made it. It's really exciting. I thought it could be
Speaker 1: fun to look back on kind of like a big
Speaker 1: tech story from each year since I've been a host
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff. So that's from mid two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight to this year or this past year twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: It's weird for me to say this past year because
Speaker 1: I'm actually putting this together when it has not yet
Speaker 1: turned to twenty twenty five. I also figured this would
Speaker 1: take up a couple of episodes because I'm a chatty
Speaker 1: Cathy and a lot has gone on since mid two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. So this is part one, and in
Speaker 1: part two we will pick up and continue on. That's
Speaker 1: how parts work now. To be clear, the entries I
Speaker 1: submit to you, these are not necessarily the biggest or
Speaker 1: even the most important techt stories of each year. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's a story I picked for whatever capricious reason. Entered
Speaker 1: into my head as I was looking back over everything
Speaker 1: that's happened over the last sixteen and a half years
Speaker 1: in the world of tech. So we started off tech
Speaker 1: Stuff in early June of two thousand and eight. For
Speaker 1: that reason, I went to look at the back half
Speaker 1: of two thousand and eight for the tech story to
Speaker 1: talk about, So I ignored anything that happened up until June.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to Apple launching the iPhone app Store. Now,
Speaker 1: the iPhone had come out the year before, but the
Speaker 1: app store would end up becoming a thing one month
Speaker 1: after we started tech Stuff in July of two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight. That's when that app store came online. Now,
Speaker 1: before that, iPhone users had to be content with the
Speaker 1: apps that Apple made available on the iPhone that were
Speaker 1: preloaded on the device. Third party choices were not actually
Speaker 1: an option yet. Apple had spent a year, well more
Speaker 1: than a year technically, but a year since the iPhone
Speaker 1: had come out, just coming up with a way to
Speaker 1: create an app store, Like, what was the strategy there?
Speaker 1: They didn't want it to just be a fire hose
Speaker 1: of content because then the store would get flooded with
Speaker 1: all sorts of apps, many of which would be pretty terrible.
Speaker 1: So their plan included a vetting process for apps, and
Speaker 1: at the best of times, this process was rather opaque
Speaker 1: and obtuse. Sometimes a developer could get an app approved
Speaker 1: and in the store right away without any real revisions.
Speaker 1: Other times developers would get pushedback from Apple and they
Speaker 1: would have to tweak their apps for one reason or another,
Speaker 1: and that was not always clear, like it wasn't always
Speaker 1: apparent why one app would be accepted and another app
Speaker 1: rejected when they were, at least on the surface, very
Speaker 1: similar to one another. So it raised a lot of
Speaker 1: questions and confusion. And because Apple didn't allow for side loading,
Speaker 1: which is when users can install apps from outside an
Speaker 1: official app store, this meant that developers had no alternative
Speaker 1: pathway to get to their customer base. It was either
Speaker 1: played by Apple's rules or get shut out entirely. Now,
Speaker 1: the app store would have a huge impact on tech
Speaker 1: and how we interact with it, which is putting it lightly.
Speaker 1: Not to mention it would help propel Apple's revenue into
Speaker 1: the stratosphere. The company would take a chunk out of
Speaker 1: every purchase made through an app. Now that could also
Speaker 1: include if the app was one where customers had to
Speaker 1: pay to download the app, like if it wasn't a
Speaker 1: free app, if it costs five or ten bucks or whatever,
Speaker 1: Apple got a chunk that, But they also got a
Speaker 1: percentage of all in app purchasing options, assuming it wasn't
Speaker 1: an app like ordering a physical thing, like if you
Speaker 1: were using an app to order food from a restaurant,
Speaker 1: Apple wouldn't get a chunk of that. But if you
Speaker 1: were using an app and the app had features that
Speaker 1: were locked behind a paywall and you paid to get
Speaker 1: to those features, Apple got a cut. So developers were
Speaker 1: obliged to use Apple's own payment processing features, they couldn't
Speaker 1: introduce their own, and Apple took, like I said, a
Speaker 1: percentage with every transaction. And it was that sort of
Speaker 1: policy that would eventually land Apple in hot water with
Speaker 1: antitrust regulators who would argue that the company was using
Speaker 1: its dominant position to deny competition in the space. And
Speaker 1: that's something that still plays out to this day, Like
Speaker 1: there's still court cases going on that go one way
Speaker 1: or the other. Some have been kind of an Apple's favor,
Speaker 1: some have been against, but it's an ongoing thing. But
Speaker 1: on top of all that, the app store would bring
Speaker 1: about an era in which everyone and their doll began
Speaker 1: to develop apps for the web content creators out there.
Speaker 1: This became a real headache because it wasn't enough to
Speaker 1: just optimize your website so that it would look good
Speaker 1: on mobile devices. That was absolutely a necessity, because trends
Speaker 1: were showing that more people were starting to rely on
Speaker 1: mobile devices to access the web every single year, but
Speaker 1: you also had to go and make your own bespoke app,
Speaker 1: or at least that that was the philosophy. Countless apps followed.
Speaker 1: Some of these would stand the test of time, but
Speaker 1: a lot of them ultimately withered and died. I am
Speaker 1: reminded of the house Stuff Works app, which we actually
Speaker 1: mentioned in a recent episode when I had the boys
Speaker 1: of Stuff They Don't Want You to Know on the show.
Speaker 1: The House Stuff Works app served up articles and quizzes
Speaker 1: and such to users, but it was tough to convince
Speaker 1: people to download it. I mean, a lot of folks
Speaker 1: would just go to how Stuff Works if Google pointed
Speaker 1: them that way when they had the question about something.
Speaker 1: And it was also really tough to monetize apps. Optimizing
Speaker 1: articles to display in an app meant that you might
Speaker 1: have to issue advertising, So like, if they went to
Speaker 1: the web version of the article, they would get the
Speaker 1: ads and you would get the impressions and that would
Speaker 1: count against whatever the ad deal was. But if it
Speaker 1: was an app, you might not get that. And ads
Speaker 1: were a top revenue driver for a lot of companies,
Speaker 1: including How Stuff Works. So how do you both serve
Speaker 1: content up to people in a streamlined way via an
Speaker 1: app and how do you make money off of that
Speaker 1: as its sponsorships? As that what? A lot of people
Speaker 1: hadn't figured that out, and a lot of other outlets
Speaker 1: encountered similar issues to what we saw How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For a while, apps were seen as a possible lifeline
Speaker 1: for content companies that were struggling with the old business model.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe you could convince people to subscribe through
Speaker 1: an app and put content behind a paywall. That would
Speaker 1: help push back against the myriad of ways content could
Speaker 1: be shared outside of just visiting the website itself. Sure,
Speaker 1: stuff like social media could let you find more readers,
Speaker 1: so a lot of content companies embrace social media early on,
Speaker 1: But then people started just skimming content through social media
Speaker 1: and never bothered to click through to visit the home website,
Speaker 1: which meant again, you weren't actually monetizing any of that traffic.
Speaker 1: All the traffic was going to the social network, not
Speaker 1: to you. Anyway, the App store made a truly huge
Speaker 1: change on the tech sector. Entire companies built around apps
Speaker 1: were made possible by Apple's move. And while Google would
Speaker 1: launch the Android operating system in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: I don't think even the most hardcore Android fan out
Speaker 1: there would be able to stay with a straight face
Speaker 1: that Google would have accomplished the same thing that Apple
Speaker 1: managed to do. Google did some great things and continues
Speaker 1: to do some great things along with some not so
Speaker 1: great things. But honestly, without Apple, I don't think that
Speaker 1: this ecosystem really takes off. Now, let us move on
Speaker 1: to two thousand and nine, and we've got a whole
Speaker 1: year to play with this time, just half a year.
Speaker 1: So what tech story caught my eye? Well, there were
Speaker 1: a couple of contenders. One is a very sad one.
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs's health was in serious decline. And whatever you
Speaker 1: might have thought of Steve Jobs as a person or
Speaker 1: a boss, still hard to talk about someone's health deteriorating,
Speaker 1: at least it is for me. And journalists were swarming
Speaker 1: to find out the truth of what was going on
Speaker 1: with Steve Jobs, which was kind of achy. He initially
Speaker 1: said he was experiencing a quote unquote hormonal imbalance, but
Speaker 1: it later turned out that he had secretly had a
Speaker 1: liver transplant, and part of me is frustrated that he
Speaker 1: actually had to deal with journalists who were prying at
Speaker 1: his personal life at all. But then I also understand
Speaker 1: that since he was CEO of Apple at the time,
Speaker 1: there were reasons people needed to know about his health
Speaker 1: because if his well being impacted the company, well that's
Speaker 1: a huge thing, and it impacts thousands of other people.
Speaker 1: So I guess that's one of the trade offs you
Speaker 1: have to accept when you become the head of a
Speaker 1: supremely profitable company. And obviously, while his health was big
Speaker 1: news in two thousand and nine, his passing two years
Speaker 1: later would eclipse that. Another big story in two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine was that Microsoft released Windows seven, which would
Speaker 1: go on to be one of the more popular versions
Speaker 1: of the operating system. Microsoft has had an inconsistent track
Speaker 1: record in that regard. People loved Windows XP, but they
Speaker 1: weren't fans of Vista. For example. People liked Windows seven,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't very much care for Windows eight and
Speaker 1: so on. But I feel the story I should really
Speaker 1: touch on is that in two thousand and nine, Facebook
Speaker 1: officially passed MySpace as far as the number of visitors
Speaker 1: going to each site per month within the United States
Speaker 1: is concerned. It is wild to me that tech Stuff
Speaker 1: was around back when MySpace wasn't just a thing, it
Speaker 1: was the dominant thing in the social network space here
Speaker 1: in the States. Of course, by the time time tech
Speaker 1: Stuff got started, MySpace was already getting into trouble and
Speaker 1: Facebook's star was on the rise. In fact, if we
Speaker 1: look at global numbers, Facebook had already surpassed MySpace in
Speaker 1: unique visitors worldwide back in April two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: which was a couple of months before tech Stuff even launched. But,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure you all know, here in the United States,
Speaker 1: folks essentially behave as though nothing matters unless it happens here.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that's right. In fact, I'm saying it's
Speaker 1: outright myopic and dumb, but it's still how a lot
Speaker 1: of people behave here in the United States. So the
Speaker 1: trajectory Facebook was on would propel the company to incredible
Speaker 1: heights as well as set itself up for scrutiny and criticism.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and nine, Facebook changed its terms of use.
Speaker 1: The new terms had a concerning clause in them that read,
Speaker 1: and this is a long one, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote it. Quote you here. By grant Facebook and irrevocable, perpetual,
Speaker 1: non exclusive, transferable, fully paid worldwide license would right to
Speaker 1: sub license to a use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly,
Speaker 1: perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt,
Speaker 1: create derivative works, and distribute through multiple tiers. Any user
Speaker 1: content you lowercase I post on or in connection with
Speaker 1: the Facebook service or the promotion thereof, subject only to
Speaker 1: your privacy settings. Or I enable a user to post,
Speaker 1: including by offering a share link on your website, and
Speaker 1: lowercase B to use your name, likeness, and image for
Speaker 1: any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of lowercase A
Speaker 1: and lowercase B on or in connection with the Facebook
Speaker 1: service or the promotion thereof. End quote. Whew, Okay, that's
Speaker 1: a mouthful. I should have just said the headline of
Speaker 1: the consumerist piece about this particular change, which was quote
Speaker 1: Facebook's new term of service. We can do anything we
Speaker 1: want with your content forever. End quote. It's actually it's
Speaker 1: a great article. So there was a pretty swift and
Speaker 1: negative reaction to this policy change, understandably, and ultimately Facebook
Speaker 1: walked it back, putting up changes to vote among the
Speaker 1: user base, saying, hey, you should be able to have
Speaker 1: a say in this because it's going to impact you,
Speaker 1: and a very tiny percentage of users actually bothered to vote,
Speaker 1: but critics applauded Facebook's move to at least take user
Speaker 1: concerns into consideration. The honeymoon would not last very long, however.
Speaker 1: In twenty ten, Zuckerberg would claim that privacy was no
Speaker 1: longer a social norm, which I infer as a blanket
Speaker 1: excuse for Facebook to collect as much data from as
Speaker 1: many people and profit as much as possible. And obviously,
Speaker 1: in later years, Facebook would be held accountable for all
Speaker 1: sorts of problems it caused or facilitated. But yeah, two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine is a good year to point to
Speaker 1: and say, here's where Facebook's journey to becoming a huge company,
Speaker 1: one of the big five in tech really began. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're up to twenty ten. That's the year we'd get
Speaker 1: the iPad, which I thought would be a flop because
Speaker 1: no one had managed to make a tablet computer a
Speaker 1: viable consumer product up to that point. It's also the
Speaker 1: year of Antennagate. You might not remember Antennagate because we've
Speaker 1: had so many iPhones since then, but Antennagate was when
Speaker 1: folks were complaining about connectivity issues with the brand new
Speaker 1: iPhone four, and upon closer inspection, it looked like the
Speaker 1: issue was the internal antenna of the iPhone was placed
Speaker 1: in such a way that if you held the phone
Speaker 1: like you know, like a human being holding a phone,
Speaker 1: you could end up blocking the antenna from getting a
Speaker 1: solid signal. And we were all essentially told, you're holding
Speaker 1: it wrong. Thus, Apple pushed the blame onto consumers rather
Speaker 1: than owning up to the fact that the iPhone four
Speaker 1: had a design flaw. But the story that really jumped
Speaker 1: out at me in twenty ten was that the world
Speaker 1: learned of stucks net at stux and e T that
Speaker 1: was malware designed for a very specific purpose, specifically to
Speaker 1: sabotage nuclear centrifuges that were part of Iran's nuclear program.
Speaker 1: So in order to create a uranium based nuclear power plant,
Speaker 1: or indeed a uranium based nuclear weapon, you first have
Speaker 1: to get hold of the right kind of uranium, which
Speaker 1: is the isotope U two thirty five. Trouble is, that
Speaker 1: is really rare stuff. It makes up less than a
Speaker 1: percentage of the uranium we actually mind like zero point
Speaker 1: seven percent. But you need a concentration somewhere between three
Speaker 1: to five percent of uranium two thirty five in your
Speaker 1: uranium mix to have viable material. So we have to
Speaker 1: enrich the uranium. We have to get the right concentration.
Speaker 1: Part of that process typically involves using centrifuges to separate
Speaker 1: out you two thirty five from you know, the other stuff. Well,
Speaker 1: the stucks Neat virus would do a few things. One
Speaker 1: thing it would do is that it hit itself once
Speaker 1: it was installed in a target computer, so that you
Speaker 1: couldn't easily see that malware was on the device. These
Speaker 1: particular computers were not connected to the Internet, a very
Speaker 1: wise decision. They had what we would call an air gap,
Speaker 1: as in no connectivity to an outside network. So in
Speaker 1: order to get the virus on the computer in the
Speaker 1: first place, the malware makers would put this code on
Speaker 1: USB drives like little thumb drives, and then they tricked
Speaker 1: Iranian plant workers to install the malware on these air
Speaker 1: gapped machines, so human beings mostly unknowingly carried this and
Speaker 1: ended up installing them on the computers. The code would
Speaker 1: send commands to centrifuges and cause the centrifuges to rotate
Speaker 1: faster than what they were rated for, and the intent
Speaker 1: was to break the machinery and sabotage e Iron's nuclear program,
Speaker 1: and it worked. This was not your run of the
Speaker 1: mill hacker attack. Of course. While it's never been officially acknowledged,
Speaker 1: at least as far as I know, the generally accepted
Speaker 1: stories that Israel and the United States collaborated on this
Speaker 1: attack for several years before deploying it, and it made
Speaker 1: history by being the first major malware attack connected with
Speaker 1: industrial sabotage. That's a heck of a story for twenty ten.
Speaker 1: We got a lot more, but it's time for us
Speaker 1: to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're
Speaker 1: back and now we're moving on to twenty eleven. Now.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned earlier in this episode, twenty eleven was
Speaker 1: the year that Steve Jobs passed away. By the time
Speaker 1: of his passing, Tim Cook was acting as the new
Speaker 1: CEO of Apple. That's a position he holds to this
Speaker 1: very day. And obviously Steve Jobs's passing was huge news.
Speaker 1: Like the tech news cycle and really the mainstream news
Speaker 1: cycle was dominated by that at the time, Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: was kind of he was the face of Apple like
Speaker 1: he was the guy who was a co founder of
Speaker 1: the company. He famously was banished from the company in
Speaker 1: the early mid eighties, left Apple, went and did his
Speaker 1: own thing for a while, came back to Apple as
Speaker 1: a consultant in the mid to late nineties, eventually reassumed
Speaker 1: control of Apple, turned it around from a company that
Speaker 1: was on the brink of potentially bankruptcy it was doing
Speaker 1: so poorly to becoming one of the most successful tech
Speaker 1: companies in the world, propelled by successes like the iMac
Speaker 1: and the iPod and of course, later on the iPhone,
Speaker 1: largely helped by Johnny Ive, the incredible designer who helped
Speaker 1: create the new look of Apple Like. It is a
Speaker 1: huge story that he passed away. He was also famous
Speaker 1: for being a really tough boss and sometimes a really
Speaker 1: really unkind boss. There are some pretty scary stories about
Speaker 1: encounter between employees and Steve Jobs. But while his passing
Speaker 1: was huge, news that wasn't the story I really wanted
Speaker 1: to focus on. Another big one that unfolded in twenty
Speaker 1: eleven was how protesters and countries across the Middle East
Speaker 1: took to social media to argue for massive social changes
Speaker 1: that technically actually started in late twenty ten, but the
Speaker 1: majority of the activity was really spread across twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: This became known as the Arab Spring, and there were,
Speaker 1: you know, variable degrees of success for social change throughout
Speaker 1: the nations that were part of the Arab Spring. But
Speaker 1: what that really did was it highlighted how important platforms
Speaker 1: like Twitter and other social networks at the time really
Speaker 1: are for the purposes of social change. Like we can
Speaker 1: forget that because we often will, or at least I
Speaker 1: will forget that because I will often focus on things
Speaker 1: that are happening, like at the corporate level, where the
Speaker 1: people in charge of those platforms are making questionable decisions
Speaker 1: or ones that I find ethically troubling, but the people
Speaker 1: actually using the platforms can often do so in ways
Speaker 1: that evoke positive social change. Also twenty eleven, Google launched
Speaker 1: Google Plus that year, but that network had shut down
Speaker 1: by twenty nineteen, so it barely merits mentioned it was
Speaker 1: just Google making another attempt to creating a social network
Speaker 1: similar to that of Facebook or MySpace before it, and
Speaker 1: Google just never really nailed that. They tried several times,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure they'll try again at some point, but
Speaker 1: it is just never stuck. Now, the story I really
Speaker 1: wanted to focus on is one that, at least on
Speaker 1: the face of it, seems like more of a novelty
Speaker 1: and not that important. But I argue it is important,
Speaker 1: and that is IBM's Watson AI computer famously took on
Speaker 1: two returning Jeopardy champions the game show Jeopardy in a
Speaker 1: display of natural language process sing an artificial intelligence powered
Speaker 1: problem solving. So Watson played against Ken Jennings and Brad Rudder,
Speaker 1: to former champions on Jeopardy. They played a game of
Speaker 1: Jeopardy and Watson came out the winner. Watson was able
Speaker 1: to navigate clues that incorporated wordplay and you know, references
Speaker 1: and pop culture and history, all without having an external
Speaker 1: connection to the Internet. So Watson did have access to
Speaker 1: a rather massive database of information that was connected to
Speaker 1: the computer, but it could not you know, dial out
Speaker 1: of the studio for example, to get information from the Internet. Itself.
Speaker 1: Watson essentially would buzz in if it calculated that the
Speaker 1: probability of its answer being the right answer was above
Speaker 1: a certain threshold. And that's interesting too, writ Like, it's
Speaker 1: not that it quote unquote knew the right answer. It
Speaker 1: had an answer. It would analyze the likelihood of that
Speaker 1: answer being the correct one, and if the likelihood were
Speaker 1: high enough, Watson would buzz in. Now, the reason I
Speaker 1: bring it up here is not because a machine beat
Speaker 1: humans in a game, because that's a story we've heard
Speaker 1: many times, like the famous one being Gary Kasparov when
Speaker 1: he faced off against IBM's Deep Blue in various chess matches.
Speaker 1: IBM has a long history of doing this kind of
Speaker 1: stuff too. Instead, the reason I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: it is because in twenty eleven we would get a
Speaker 1: hint of where artificial intelligence, particularly AI that has natural
Speaker 1: language processing capabilities, would be headed. I would say that
Speaker 1: today's generative AI resembles Watson in many ways that we
Speaker 1: do have to remember that artificial intelligence isn't always right
Speaker 1: or trustworthy. So just as a reminder, you know, this year,
Speaker 1: this past year, back in twenty twenty four, I gotta
Speaker 1: say twenty twenty four. I'm recording in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: But I once had AI quote unquote write an episode
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, and then I did kind of director's
Speaker 1: commentary on that. I suppose the AI ended up inventing
Speaker 1: supposed experts who didn't actually exist and was quoting them
Speaker 1: as support for the arguments being made in the episode.
Speaker 1: And that's just not cool. I mean, like any any
Speaker 1: teacher could tell you if you are if your students
Speaker 1: are rating essays and they're quoting made up experts, that's
Speaker 1: unethical and it's going to get you a failing grade.
Speaker 1: But AI was doing it when I asked it to
Speaker 1: create an episode. That's not great. But let's now move
Speaker 1: on to two thy twelve. Microsoft pushed Windows eight out
Speaker 1: the door. It was redesigned to work in a world
Speaker 1: that was now filling up with touch screens. But while
Speaker 1: the touch screen layout may have, you know, really made
Speaker 1: sense for people who are on mobile devices, those who
Speaker 1: are still working on laptops and desktops were less enchanted
Speaker 1: by that user interface. Lots of people preferred sticking with
Speaker 1: Windows seven, even though there was a version of Windows
Speaker 1: eight you could activate that was less tile based. That's
Speaker 1: what Windows eight called the various little icons that you
Speaker 1: would navigate through the UI. So this was kind of
Speaker 1: another case of Windows Vista all over again, where people
Speaker 1: largely rejected the advancements that Microsoft had made and whether
Speaker 1: those advancements actually made sense or not. Users didn't like them,
Speaker 1: and so there was a resistance to adopting Windows eight
Speaker 1: in large part because of these issues I just mentioned.
Speaker 1: Apple also introduced Apple Maps that year. Apple Maps quickly
Speaker 1: became the subject of ridicule. You might not remember this
Speaker 1: because it's sense gotten much better, but when it was
Speaker 1: first released, Apple Maps was pretty bad. Users noted several
Speaker 1: deficiencies in the mapping features, you know, like guiding you
Speaker 1: to the wrong location or suggesting that you take a
Speaker 1: river instead of the highway. In all seriousness, it was bad.
Speaker 1: Maybe it wasn't like the worst thing in the world,
Speaker 1: but it was bad enough that Tim Cook was actually
Speaker 1: prompted to apologize for it. That's not a good look.
Speaker 1: That's not something that Apple would typically do. I don't
Speaker 1: know that Steve Jobs would have done that, even with
Speaker 1: the negative reaction that there was to Apple Maps. He
Speaker 1: might have said, you know, we were too enthusiastic and
Speaker 1: we released it too early, but I'm not sure he
Speaker 1: would apologize. No way of knowing. But no, the story
Speaker 1: I want to talk about is about Marissa Meyer. So
Speaker 1: she was one of the early employees at Google. She
Speaker 1: was actually employee number twenty way back in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1: But in twenty twelve she had a huge career change.
Speaker 1: She left Google behind and became the president and CEO
Speaker 1: of Yahoo. She also scored a seat on the board
Speaker 1: of directors in the process. Old stomping grounds of Google
Speaker 1: had been kind of stomping on Yahoo for around the year,
Speaker 1: and so Meyer's appointment was intended to shake things up
Speaker 1: at the old search engine and web portal, and Yahoo
Speaker 1: had been through some pretty tough times. From two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine to twenty eleven, Carol Bart's was CEO, and
Speaker 1: her tenure was marked with making some really big replacements
Speaker 1: in the executive ranks, as well as a struggle over
Speaker 1: Yahoo's very identity. Was it a media company or was
Speaker 1: it a tech company? Because Yahoo was really getting into
Speaker 1: content creation as well, and it just felt like the
Speaker 1: attention of the company was divided and it wasn't doing
Speaker 1: either thing particularly well. Eventually, Yahoo's board of Director's lost
Speaker 1: patients with Carol Bart's and fired her over the phone
Speaker 1: Yike's not classy. Then, in early twenty twelve, and embarrassing
Speaker 1: situation reared its ugly head when it was discovered that
Speaker 1: Barts's replacement as CEO, a guy named Scott Thompson, not
Speaker 1: the guy from Kids in the Hall, that he had
Speaker 1: fibbed on his resume, that he had made up some
Speaker 1: information that was on his resume, And this was a
Speaker 1: bit of a black eye situation, and Thompson was very
Speaker 1: quickly given his walking papers just a few months after
Speaker 1: he took the job. Meyer would come in as the
Speaker 1: new head of Yahoo. She said in an interview with
Speaker 1: Wired's Virginia Hefferman that Yahoo as a business constituted all
Speaker 1: the different areas in tech that she had worked within
Speaker 1: over her years at Google, and she thought she might
Speaker 1: be able to bring her skill set to help a
Speaker 1: company that was clearly in need. So Meyer had a
Speaker 1: lot of work to do. Yahoo was in a pretty
Speaker 1: weird space. Morale was shaky, the company had lacked a
Speaker 1: solid sense of direction, and the board was eager to
Speaker 1: see change. On top of that, there was this ongoing
Speaker 1: problem that Yahoo would fail to address. This shift of
Speaker 1: user habits to a more mobile center online experience. While
Speaker 1: other services and sites were adapting to mobile, Yahoo had
Speaker 1: lagged behind, and according to that interview I mentioned a
Speaker 1: second ago, Meyer felt that the move to mobile happened
Speaker 1: far too late, like eight years too late, she had said.
Speaker 1: While she says she's proud of the work she did
Speaker 1: at Yahoo, ultimately it would prove to be too little,
Speaker 1: too late, and later on the board of directors would
Speaker 1: decide to sell Yahoo to Verizon, at which point Meyer
Speaker 1: would resign from her position. Meyer's tenure at Yahoo was
Speaker 1: marked by many attempts to right the wrongs that had
Speaker 1: plagued Yahoo over the previous few years, but without the
Speaker 1: support of the board, it was pretty much a doomed endeavor.
Speaker 1: Would it have worked otherwise? Well, I guess we're never
Speaker 1: gonna know. All right, now, we're up to twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: and a lot of stuff happened that year. Twitter became
Speaker 1: a publicly traded company in twenty thirteen and would remain
Speaker 1: so until Elon Musk would announce he was going to
Speaker 1: buy it, try to back out of buying it, and
Speaker 1: then was forced to buy it. Many years later. Bitcoin's
Speaker 1: value took off for the first time in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: It would later crash and then rise and crash again.
Speaker 1: We've seen that happen numerous times. New consoles like the
Speaker 1: Xbox One and the PlayStation four would hit the market
Speaker 1: in twenty thirteen. But the big story, at least here
Speaker 1: in the United States, was a huge scandal about how
Speaker 1: an intelligence agency, or actually a few intelligence agencies here
Speaker 1: in the States, had been collecting enormous amounts of information
Speaker 1: about what were otherwise considered to be private activities of
Speaker 1: US citizens and others, and that would end up making
Speaker 1: world news. We'll talk about that more in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but we're going to take another quick break to think
Speaker 1: our sponsors. All right. Before the break, I alluded to
Speaker 1: this scandalous revelation of how intelligence agencies within the United
Speaker 1: States were apparently collecting truly huge amounts of data. So
Speaker 1: the story is a contractor with the NSA, A guy
Speaker 1: named Edward Snowden blew the whistle on these programs that
Speaker 1: seemed to be a massive breach of constitutional protections or
Speaker 1: at the very least a disturbing example of overly intrusive surveillance.
Speaker 1: Snowden revealed the existence of a program called PRISM. Now
Speaker 1: that's PRISM. Essentially, this described a sweeping program in which
Speaker 1: the NSA had, as the Guardian would put it, quote,
Speaker 1: direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and
Speaker 1: other US Internet giants end quote. And that alone was alarming.
Speaker 1: So what sort of data did the NSA have access to? Well, again,
Speaker 1: according to the Guardian, it was pretty much everything. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was everything from search histories to emails, to file transfers,
Speaker 1: voiceover Internet Protocol calls. Beyond all this information came directly
Speaker 1: from the provider's servers. Apparently, the documents that Snowden shared
Speaker 1: claimed that the NSA had cooperation of the various companies
Speaker 1: in this endeavor, although when The Guardian reached out for comment,
Speaker 1: representatives from the various companies denied knowing about PRISM. Curiouser
Speaker 1: and curiouser, as it would turn out, this was top
Speaker 1: secret stuff and companies weren't allowed to reveal that they
Speaker 1: were part of it. It was all part of the
Speaker 1: clandestine nature. So were they lying that they didn't know
Speaker 1: about it? I guess it depends on who was actually
Speaker 1: making the statement, because there were probably people who didn't
Speaker 1: know about it who were told hey, you got to
Speaker 1: tell them we don't know anything about this, and others
Speaker 1: who may maybe they did know about it, but they
Speaker 1: still had to say they didn't. Later documents would show
Speaker 1: that the intelligence community was actually paying millions of dollars
Speaker 1: collectively to these various platforms, and the program originated with
Speaker 1: a couple of pieces of legislation that were signed into
Speaker 1: law years earlier, namely the Protect America Act, which was
Speaker 1: signed into law in two thousand and seven and the
Speaker 1: FISA Amendments Act of two thousand and eight. Both of
Speaker 1: those were signed into law by former President George W. Bush,
Speaker 1: And it would turn out that the NSA didn't exactly
Speaker 1: have its own backdoor access to all these different platforms.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't like, you know, it's a slow day
Speaker 1: at the NSA. Let's go see what people have been
Speaker 1: posting on Facebook to each other in private messages. It
Speaker 1: wasn't quite like that. Instead, the way it works from
Speaker 1: a very very high level is that you send a
Speaker 1: request to the FBI. The FBI sends a directive to
Speaker 1: various Internet service providers, and by law, those providers have
Speaker 1: to hand over essentially raw communications data, and you just
Speaker 1: get this a massive amount of information that encompasses all
Speaker 1: the data sent an over a given amount of time.
Speaker 1: The FBI then sends this huge amount of information to
Speaker 1: THESA stores it on various databases. And presumably the reason
Speaker 1: there is that you have all this data that you
Speaker 1: can then sift through and search and look for clues
Speaker 1: for stuff that potentially threatened national security. So we're talking
Speaker 1: about things like terrorist plans, that kind of thing. The
Speaker 1: NSSA may try to decrypt encrypted information that can take
Speaker 1: quite some time, depending upon the level of encryption. But
Speaker 1: in theory, any investigation would first need to secure a
Speaker 1: warrant from a court before anyone would be allowed to
Speaker 1: search through all that communications data. However, in practice, well
Speaker 1: journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that analysts at the NSA can
Speaker 1: how much access communications anytime they like without securing any
Speaker 1: kind of warrant first, Like they could just you know,
Speaker 1: scan through it if they want to. They have that capability.
Speaker 1: There's nothing preventing them from doing this. And in fact
Speaker 1: that this is something that was and perhaps still is
Speaker 1: happening at the NSA. This is according again to Glenn Greenwald,
Speaker 1: and you know, people are people, there are people who
Speaker 1: will do dumb stuff, even though they might be burdened
Speaker 1: with great responsibility. So there have certainly been examples of
Speaker 1: people within the intelligence community making use of official tools
Speaker 1: for more personal reasons, like checking up on what an
Speaker 1: ex partner has been doing since a messy breakup, for example.
Speaker 1: That kind of stuff. Like you give someone the keys
Speaker 1: to a really powerful tool like that, I suppose the
Speaker 1: temptation to misuse it must be pretty great. Prism has
Speaker 1: not gone away now. I would say that one lesson
Speaker 1: to take home is that encryption is your friend. It
Speaker 1: doesn't guarantee that the communications you participate in will be
Speaker 1: hidden away, but it makes it much harder for folks
Speaker 1: to just snoop on you. Of course, we're rapidly approaching
Speaker 1: a quantum computing future in which all previously reliable methods
Speaker 1: of encryption could potentially just become child's play to unravel.
Speaker 1: But that's the future. Our concern today right now is
Speaker 1: the past. So yeah, Snowden obviously his story still ongoing.
Speaker 1: He's been living in exile for the last decade, and
Speaker 1: some view him as a important whistleblower who alerted citizens
Speaker 1: to a program that appears to have a crazy amount
Speaker 1: of depth in surveillance, even if you accept the statements
Speaker 1: of the intelligence community that oh, sure we're collecting all
Speaker 1: of it, but we're not searching it, so we don't
Speaker 1: even know what we have, so you have nothing to
Speaker 1: worry about. That's not very That doesn't make me feel better.
Speaker 1: But not only have we had that, like, he's also
Speaker 1: obviously had to deal with finding a totally new life
Speaker 1: outside of the United States because there's some people who
Speaker 1: view him as a traitor to the country and he
Speaker 1: could face serious repercussions were he ever to return. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: a pretty dramatic story in tech. In twenty fourteen, we
Speaker 1: had a whole year of corporate changes happening in tech.
Speaker 1: Steve Balmer, who had led Microsoft as the CEO for
Speaker 1: fourteen years at that point, stepped down to make way
Speaker 1: for Satya Nadella to take over. Google bought Nest Labs.
Speaker 1: They're the makers of the smart thermostat, and had just
Speaker 1: at the end of twenty thirteen, had acquired Boston Dynamics.
Speaker 1: That's the robotics company that makes adorably terrifying four legged robots,
Speaker 1: among other things. Google would later divest itself of Boston Dynamics.
Speaker 1: They did so fairly recently found a new home at Hyundai.
Speaker 1: Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics for a whopping
Speaker 1: three billion With a B dollars, Facebook would make even
Speaker 1: larger purchases. Well, they made one that was smaller. They
Speaker 1: bought Oculus VR for two billion, but they bought wattsapp
Speaker 1: for twenty two billion dollars. At this stage, I think
Speaker 1: Facebook was still looking to solidify everything around the tent
Speaker 1: pole Facebook social network platform. Like Facebook itself, the platform
Speaker 1: was the core of its strategy. But in future years
Speaker 1: the company, especially once it changed its name to Meta,
Speaker 1: would take a less focused approach to creating what it
Speaker 1: hopes will be the future of online life. They're like, well,
Speaker 1: Facebook is just one part of our strategy as opposed
Speaker 1: to the central part. However, the story I want to
Speaker 1: focus on from twenty fourteen is the Sony Pictures hack.
Speaker 1: This was a big one, partly because of the sheer
Speaker 1: amount of data that was lifted during the hack, partly
Speaker 1: because of the sensitive nature of that information, which included
Speaker 1: everything from personal information about Sony employees, including stuff like
Speaker 1: salary information, all the way up to data about and
Speaker 1: even digital prints of unreleased Sony pictures films, but also
Speaker 1: the hack would end up becoming a case study in cybersecurity,
Speaker 1: with numerous researchers publishing papers on everything from how organizations
Speaker 1: can better protect themselves from intrusions two works detailing the
Speaker 1: appropriate way to address a crisis once it happens. Because
Speaker 1: Sony did a lot of things poorly, So what actually
Speaker 1: did happen? Well? In twenty fourteen, Sony Pictures was preparing
Speaker 1: to release a film titled The Interview. In this film,
Speaker 1: a pair of dufices, a celebrity interview show host and
Speaker 1: his producer are recruited by the CIA to use an
Speaker 1: opportunity to inter view North Korea's leader Kim Jong un
Speaker 1: and then assassinate him. So this is a satire. It
Speaker 1: makes fun of Kim Jong Un a lot. It also
Speaker 1: comments on the nation of North Korea in general and
Speaker 1: its government in particular, and apparently all that was enough
Speaker 1: to prompt North Korea to direct state backed hackers to
Speaker 1: attack Sony Pictures. Now. I say apparently because definitive evidence
Speaker 1: pointing to North Korea has never actually been made public.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. It doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that there are any other prime suspects that we could
Speaker 1: point at right like, there's there's no one who looks
Speaker 1: as good as North Korea in this. North Korea certainly
Speaker 1: had the capability to pull something like this off. The
Speaker 1: country has been implicated in other state backed cyber attacks. So,
Speaker 1: but I do want to make it clear that the
Speaker 1: working assumption is that North Korea was responsible, but there
Speaker 1: is a little bit of ambiguity there. A group called
Speaker 1: the Guardians of Peace ultimately claimed responsibility and claimed that
Speaker 1: this was not in direct connection with North Korea's government,
Speaker 1: but rather on behalf of North Korea. That is a
Speaker 1: claim that I think most security experts have dismissed as
Speaker 1: being unlikely. They think it really is more of a
Speaker 1: state backed attack. But muddying the waters further is Sony's
Speaker 1: own history with cybersecurity, which hasn't been great so Earlier
Speaker 1: in the two thousands, the company got into hot water
Speaker 1: when it was found that the music division within Sony
Speaker 1: had been using a digital rights management or DRM strategy
Speaker 1: on their compact discs. And the idea was that if
Speaker 1: you took a compact disc and you put it into
Speaker 1: the optical drive of a computer, because children back in
Speaker 1: those days, our computers had optical drives, meaning that you
Speaker 1: would put a disc in the drive. I know that
Speaker 1: that sounds strange, but that's how we used to do
Speaker 1: things before that. It was floppy disks. But I don't
Speaker 1: want to take you into prehistory anyway. If you were
Speaker 1: to do this, you might do it so that you
Speaker 1: could rip the music and make a digital copy for
Speaker 1: the purposes of, say, putting it on like an iPod
Speaker 1: or something. And you might also do it so that
Speaker 1: you could burn new CDs with the music that you
Speaker 1: just got from the one you bought. So Sony wanted
Speaker 1: to prevent people from doing that second thing. They didn't
Speaker 1: want people to make unauthorized copies of music. Never mind
Speaker 1: the fact that, at least here in the United States,
Speaker 1: you are legally allowed to make a copy of a
Speaker 1: CD for the purposes of a personal backup. That's completely
Speaker 1: within your rights. So if you bought a CD and
Speaker 1: you made a copy of it so that you could
Speaker 1: listen to it in case your original CD gets scratched
Speaker 1: or stolen or broken or something, that's fine. Oddly enough, however,
Speaker 1: it is against the law to try and circumvent the
Speaker 1: detective measures that people might place on things like CDs
Speaker 1: to prevent you from doing that. So, yeah, you have
Speaker 1: the right to make a copy, but you don't have
Speaker 1: the right to break the copy protection on a disc.
Speaker 1: It's odd, right, A's a catch twenty two situation. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Sony did a thing that really shook people up. They
Speaker 1: had installed DRM that would put in essentially a rootkit
Speaker 1: on your computer and allow someone to get remote access
Speaker 1: to your computer through the Internet. That obviously was a
Speaker 1: big no no. It did not go well, and later
Speaker 1: on in twenty eleven, Sony found itself the target of
Speaker 1: several cyber attacks, when networks being breached more than twenty
Speaker 1: times that year, and the company then declared a war
Speaker 1: on hackers, which I think mini hackers viewed as both
Speaker 1: amusing and potentially a personal challenge. And so there's an
Speaker 1: argument to be made that Sony's own approach to cyber
Speaker 1: security was one that incited hackers to find new ways
Speaker 1: to exploit the company's systems. Meanwhile, Sony was not doing
Speaker 1: a very good job at all in actually improving their security.
Speaker 1: The attacks ended up locking employees out of their computers
Speaker 1: at least temporarily, and the hackers stole truly huge amounts
Speaker 1: of data. They then released that information online, and that
Speaker 1: info included stuff like executive salaries, which is pretty sensitive
Speaker 1: information that companies typically don't want out in the open.
Speaker 1: And investigation showed that the hackers didn't have to do
Speaker 1: anything particularly spectacular to pull all this off, because again,
Speaker 1: Sony Pictures was not exactly up to date with good
Speaker 1: security hygiene, and employees had not been properly trained and
Speaker 1: they weren't really vigilant. The lack of multi factor authentication
Speaker 1: made it much easier for the hackers to find a
Speaker 1: compromise log in for systems without having to worry about
Speaker 1: additional layers of security. The hackers apparently tricked a few
Speaker 1: select employees with a fake Apple ID login page to
Speaker 1: get hold of their credentials. Then it was just off
Speaker 1: to the races, so this was kind of an example
Speaker 1: of spear fishing. Sony was obviously deeply embarrassed by this
Speaker 1: whole thing, and it was impossible for the company to
Speaker 1: cover it up. The hackers had dumped a ton of
Speaker 1: proprietary and private information online and the mess costs Sony
Speaker 1: a whole lot of money, though determining just how much
Speaker 1: money is actually pretty tricky. On the low end of things,
Speaker 1: Sony set aside around fifteen million dollars to address security concerns,
Speaker 1: which is not much at all in the grand scheme
Speaker 1: of things. Later on, the company also had to agree
Speaker 1: to pay around eight million dollars in response to a
Speaker 1: class action lawsuit that was brought against the company by
Speaker 1: employees who have been affected by this. You know, their
Speaker 1: personal information had been stolen as part of this hack.
Speaker 1: But because of the nature of what happened with all
Speaker 1: that proprietary information leaked and then shared online, it's actually
Speaker 1: really hard to put a figure on, ultimately how much
Speaker 1: it costs. I've seen estimates that have a wild range
Speaker 1: from around thirty five million dollars on the low end
Speaker 1: to almost two hundred million on the high end. It's
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know how much it costs. But it
Speaker 1: was embarrassing for Sony, and it was a real wake
Speaker 1: up call. I think for a lot of companies and
Speaker 1: organizations that they have to take cybersecurity seriously because something
Speaker 1: as small as a perceived slight might prompt a nation
Speaker 1: backed group of hackers to try and reach your systems.
Speaker 1: I mean, in this case, like I said, the straw
Speaker 1: that appears to have broken the proverbial camel's back was
Speaker 1: the fact that Sony Pictures was going to really release
Speaker 1: the interview, which y'all, in my opinion, was not even
Speaker 1: that funny of a comedy, no grit. That's me. I
Speaker 1: think there were a lot of funny people in it,
Speaker 1: but I didn't personally find it that entertaining. Then again,
Speaker 1: I'm probably the wrong audience. I'm such a stick in
Speaker 1: the mud. But that is our first part of our
Speaker 1: look back on some of the big tech stories that
Speaker 1: have unfolded since we launched tech Stuff in June two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. Part two will be coming up next week,
Speaker 1: and then my final episode of tech Stuff host will
Speaker 1: follow that. So will I still have a chance to
Speaker 1: say this? I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.