Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's time for the tech news for let's
Speaker 1: see Thursday. That's it September seventh, twenty twenty three. Sorry,
Speaker 1: holiday weeks always mess me up, but let's get to
Speaker 1: the news. First up, we have an update on the
Speaker 1: European Union's efforts to push back against big tech companies
Speaker 1: via the Digital Markets Act or DMA. The European Commission
Speaker 1: has designated six tech companies as quote unquote gatekeepers of
Speaker 1: the digital market in the EU. Now. To qualify as
Speaker 1: a gatekeeper, a company has to have more than forty
Speaker 1: five million end users per month, more than ten thousand
Speaker 1: business users per year, to be active in at least
Speaker 1: three member states of the EU, and to have either
Speaker 1: a market cap of at least seventy five million euro
Speaker 1: or a turnover of seven point five billion Euro. The
Speaker 1: six companies that have the honor of being called gatekeepers
Speaker 1: include Alphabet that's Google's parent company, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft,
Speaker 1: and byte Dance, which is TikTok's parent company. Just in
Speaker 1: case you've forgotten now, I've talked about this a little
Speaker 1: bit this year about how Amazon has tried to fight
Speaker 1: this designation as gatekeeper. Amazon's argued that doesn't really qualify
Speaker 1: under those terms, but it appears that those arguments have
Speaker 1: fallen on deaf ears. The EU has singled out some
Speaker 1: specific platforms and services in these companies that will have
Speaker 1: to comply with new rules under the DMA. Those platforms
Speaker 1: include stuff like Apple's Safari browser or iOS, or Google's
Speaker 1: Android or Chrome browser, Google Search, Google Ads, metas, Facebook
Speaker 1: and Instagram, and messenger services. Those are just examples, that's
Speaker 1: not all of them. In fact, the EU identified twenty
Speaker 1: two services across the Big six, including some for the
Speaker 1: companies I mentioned that I didn't go into. The rules
Speaker 1: are meant to give EU citizens more control over the
Speaker 1: services they use. So, for example, one rule states that
Speaker 1: a company like Apple has to make all the pre
Speaker 1: installed apps on iOS devices uninstallable and replaceable with third
Speaker 1: party applications. So in other words, if you get an iPhone,
Speaker 1: then you should be able to remove all the pre
Speaker 1: installed Apple apps and just replace them with third party
Speaker 1: apps if you want to. Now, that is to put
Speaker 1: it lightly antithetical to Apple's approach, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of other rules. That's just one example, and they
Speaker 1: really do push back hard against some of the key
Speaker 1: strategies that tech company have been employing over the last decade.
Speaker 1: So this is a big deal. The gatekeepers have six
Speaker 1: months to comply with these rules. If they are found
Speaker 1: in violation of the rules, the EU can find the
Speaker 1: company up to ten percent of its total worldwide turnover.
Speaker 1: Remember we're talking like seven and a half billion at
Speaker 1: least here, so ten percent of that. But if a
Speaker 1: company continues to break the rules, that actually can go
Speaker 1: up to a twenty percent fine, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: twice as much if my math is correct. Also, the
Speaker 1: Commission asserts that it has the authority to force companies
Speaker 1: to sell off parts of their businesses if they're unable
Speaker 1: to apply comply rather with the DMA. So I'll be
Speaker 1: really interested to see how the gatekeepers respond to this.
Speaker 1: My guess is unfavorably. Microsoft has released information about an
Speaker 1: infiltration attack that ultimately had a Chinese backed hacker group
Speaker 1: called Storm zero five to five eight gaining access to
Speaker 1: email systems belonging to more than two dozen high value
Speaker 1: targets we're talking about like big companies and also big
Speaker 1: government agencies, And it sounds like the way this attack
Speaker 1: happened was a convergence of a whole bunch of stuff
Speaker 1: that wasn't supposed to happen, and it was like a
Speaker 1: perfect storm situation for the hackers. So first up is
Speaker 1: an expired account consumer signing key, kind of like a
Speaker 1: key to get into a system. I mean, that's kind
Speaker 1: of what this is. And the key could but should
Speaker 1: not have been able to but it could create tokens
Speaker 1: that would allow access to stuff like Microsoft's Azure service.
Speaker 1: Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform. But the beginning of
Speaker 1: the story actually dates all the way back to April
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, So see, the system that this key
Speaker 1: was on was meant to be a very heavily protected system.
Speaker 1: The only person allowed to access this workstation was a
Speaker 1: specific engineer who had been thoroughly vetted by Microsoft because
Speaker 1: they were working in a production development environment that other
Speaker 1: people were absolutely not supposed to be able to access.
Speaker 1: So that also meant the workstation was not allowed to
Speaker 1: have several basic applications and services on it because those
Speaker 1: are frequently attack vectors. For hackers. So there was no
Speaker 1: email on this thing, no web access on it, collaboration
Speaker 1: tools couldn't be on it, that kind of thing. Essentially,
Speaker 1: the workstation was approaching air gap status, although it still
Speaker 1: had network connectivity, so it wasn't truly air gapped. If
Speaker 1: it had been, then we'd have a different conversation going
Speaker 1: on here. It also had multi factor authentication protection, and
Speaker 1: all of this makes you wonder, well, then, how the
Speaker 1: heck did the hackers get access to this If it
Speaker 1: was such a heavily protected workstation, how did they manage
Speaker 1: to get this key that had already expired, and how
Speaker 1: then did they use to get access to all these
Speaker 1: different organization's email systems. Well again, back in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: in April, this particular workstation crashed and so Windows performed
Speaker 1: a crash dump process. So this is when the computer
Speaker 1: takes the data that's in the computer's memory and then
Speaker 1: saves that data to long term storage. And the reason
Speaker 1: for that is that someone can later look at the
Speaker 1: data and kind of see what actually happened, what caused
Speaker 1: the crash. Is there something that needs to be addressed
Speaker 1: to prevent it from happening in the future. Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out that this expired account consumer signing key was
Speaker 1: in the computer's memory at the time of the crash,
Speaker 1: so it was part of this crash dump. Now, it
Speaker 1: was supposed to not make it through the next step
Speaker 1: because Microsoft scans data to look for things that could
Speaker 1: potentially be a security vulnerability and to remove them before
Speaker 1: transporting the data to, you know, the the bug development group,
Speaker 1: and that step failed. It did not detect the fact
Speaker 1: that there was this key that was just sitting there.
Speaker 1: It's like a shiny key hidden in a big pile
Speaker 1: of dirty, old data, and so they didn't think that
Speaker 1: there was anything problematic there, so they moved it on
Speaker 1: over to the debugging environment. And sometime this year, hackers
Speaker 1: were able to compromise a different Microsoft engineer's corporate account
Speaker 1: and that gave them access to this debugging environment, which
Speaker 1: normally wouldn't have anything in it that would be particularly dangerous,
Speaker 1: but they were able to find that key, that gleaming
Speaker 1: shining signing key in that crash dump data. And then
Speaker 1: how could they then use an expired key, an expired
Speaker 1: consumer key at that it wasn't even an enterprise key.
Speaker 1: How could they use that to forge tokens that would
Speaker 1: allow them to access enterprise accounts on Azure. Well, Microsoft
Speaker 1: revealed that in twenty eighteen, the company created a new
Speaker 1: framework that messed things up. This new framework couldn't actually
Speaker 1: validate signing keys properly. It couldn't really tell the difference
Speaker 1: between a consumer key and an enterprise key, and unless
Speaker 1: system administrators had taken some pretty extraordinary steps, assuming that
Speaker 1: Microsoft had not addressed this and automated the validation process,
Speaker 1: which is a weird assumption to make, Like you would
Speaker 1: assume that all of this would be taken care of
Speaker 1: on Microsoft side, so there was no reason to take
Speaker 1: these extraordinary steps. Well, unless you had taken those steps,
Speaker 1: it meant that your system was potentially vulnerable to this attack.
Speaker 1: And that's in fact what happened. That was the perfect storm,
Speaker 1: and a lot of it ends up being the sole
Speaker 1: responsibility of Microsoft itself. It actually gets way more technical
Speaker 1: than the overview I just gave. I gave a very
Speaker 1: very oversimplified version of what happened, But if you would
Speaker 1: like to read up on the details, I recommend checking
Speaker 1: out an article in Ours Technika. It's titled Microsoft finally
Speaker 1: explains cause of Azure breach and engineer's account was hacked.
Speaker 1: It goes into more detail and explains on a technical
Speaker 1: level what was happening. So if you want to check
Speaker 1: that out, I recommend it. Okay, we have now come
Speaker 1: up to the section of tech news I like to
Speaker 1: call AII because it's all about AI and so leading
Speaker 1: the charge is Go Media that's the parent company of Gizmodo. So,
Speaker 1: according to the Verge, on August twenty ninth, Geomedia fired
Speaker 1: the entire staff of Gizmoto and Espanol, which, as I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've gathered, is the Spanish language version of Gizmodo.
Speaker 1: So the company replaced the staff with AI translators so
Speaker 1: they would translate the English language articles into space Now.
Speaker 1: Articles on the Spanish language site include a bit at
Speaker 1: the end of the article at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: page that says something like contents have been automatically translated
Speaker 1: from the original. Due to the nuances of machine translation,
Speaker 1: there can be slight differences. Well, readers have reported some
Speaker 1: slight differences and some major ones too. They say that
Speaker 1: this tool is far from perfect. They say there are
Speaker 1: examples of articles that start in Spanish but then at
Speaker 1: some way through the article, they change to English and
Speaker 1: stay that way. As many have pointed out in recent months,
Speaker 1: the shift toward using AI for content creation or even
Speaker 1: auto translation isn't necessarily as cost saving or labor saving
Speaker 1: as you might first imagine, because you have issues with
Speaker 1: factual errors, technical hiccups, the AI hallucinating and inventing information
Speaker 1: that is incorrect, and that means that humans still have
Speaker 1: to pour over AI's work to make sure that the
Speaker 1: work is right. And at some point you have to
Speaker 1: ask yourself the question, isn't it just easier and smarter
Speaker 1: to just use humans rather than to have to deal
Speaker 1: with all the instances of robot goofa mups? But then,
Speaker 1: what do I know? Just a dumb human. Earlier this year,
Speaker 1: a music creator with the handle ghost writer made headlines
Speaker 1: when they released a song they had written called Heart
Speaker 1: on My Sleeve. This was the song that was voiced
Speaker 1: by an AI version of real human artists Drake and
Speaker 1: The Weekend, and that prompted a big old brew haha
Speaker 1: in the music industry. Music companies argued that it was
Speaker 1: a copyright violation. That doesn't track for me at all
Speaker 1: because ghostwriter apparently wrote the actual song. So Ghostwriter has
Speaker 1: the copyright for the song, at least the lyrics and
Speaker 1: presumably the music, and you can't copyright a person's voice.
Speaker 1: So I don't know where you could actually argue, you know,
Speaker 1: in a valid way, that this is a copyright violation.
Speaker 1: But the issue raised a lot of questions and it
Speaker 1: pointed out that there are some big old gaps that
Speaker 1: we have in IP law as far as AI generated
Speaker 1: content goes. And now The Verge reports that one Ghostwriter
Speaker 1: has released a new song called Whiplash that features AI
Speaker 1: impressions of Travis Scott and twenty one Savage and two
Speaker 1: Ghostwriter has posted a message stating that they're going to
Speaker 1: release a record of music with impersonated voices if the
Speaker 1: artists who were impersonated sign off on it. So it's
Speaker 1: not that Ghostwriter is saying this is going out. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna sell this whether you like it or not.
Speaker 1: Ghostwriter saying, if you consent, then we'll start selling this
Speaker 1: and I'll direct royalties to you. So you're gonna make
Speaker 1: money and you never had to do anything now. According
Speaker 1: to Harvey Mason, junior head of the Recording Academy, the
Speaker 1: other thing Ghostwriter wants to do is a distinct possibility,
Speaker 1: which is ghostwriter wants to submit Hard on My Sleeve
Speaker 1: for Grammy consideration. The Recording Academy is the organization that
Speaker 1: essentially runs the Grammys, and so the head of the
Speaker 1: Academy says, well, from a creative standpoint, he totally or
Speaker 1: they totally can submit this song for consideration because it
Speaker 1: was written by a human. Might not have been performed
Speaker 1: by one, but it was written by one. That's all
Speaker 1: that matters. However, there are other metrics that the song
Speaker 1: has to meet in order to qualify for consideration. These
Speaker 1: are metrics that involve things like distribution, and because so
Speaker 1: many platforms pulled the song after being pressured by the
Speaker 1: music labels, chances are this song does not meet those qualifications.
Speaker 1: So I don't think it's going to be considered for
Speaker 1: a Grammy, not because of the creative side, but because
Speaker 1: of the business side. But according to the head of
Speaker 1: Recording Academy, it totally could be Grammy eligible. Interesting. Okay,
Speaker 1: We've got a lot more stories to cover before we
Speaker 1: wrap up today, but first let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsors. NBC News reports that platforms like
Speaker 1: Instagram and TikTok are being inundated with sexualized AI generated content. Essentially,
Speaker 1: we're talking about chatbots and AI generated images. Here. The
Speaker 1: news agency found thirty five app developers running more than
Speaker 1: one thousand ads for these kinds of services on Meta's
Speaker 1: various platforms, and that's notable for a few reasons. A
Speaker 1: big one is that Meta has really cracked down hard
Speaker 1: on sexualized content from human beings, so people like sex
Speaker 1: workers have been pushed off the platform. Companies that make
Speaker 1: sexual aids and sexual toys have been deny aid the
Speaker 1: ability to run ads on the platform. And yet here
Speaker 1: we have this influx of AI powered services, adult oriented
Speaker 1: services that aren't just appearing on the platform. They're running
Speaker 1: in ads like this is this is a paid service there,
Speaker 1: they're working with Meta. And yet despite the fact that
Speaker 1: Meta has cracked down on this in these other situations,
Speaker 1: they don't seem to have done it here. The same thing,
Speaker 1: or a very similar thing is happening over at TikTok.
Speaker 1: NBC only found fourteen app developers running ads over there, however,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot going on here. Obviously, there's this
Speaker 1: double standard that disenfranchises you know, human beings who are
Speaker 1: working in this space, but doesn't do that to AI.
Speaker 1: And then there's the concern about security and privacy. This
Speaker 1: is my big concern because we already know that AI
Speaker 1: can be real loosey goosey with your private information, right Like,
Speaker 1: if the AI model is taking the stuff you communicate
Speaker 1: to the model in account, then you are feeding that
Speaker 1: AI model, which then can regurgitate the stuff you fed
Speaker 1: to it to other people. So maybe you don't want
Speaker 1: to express your most intimate desires and preferences to an
Speaker 1: AI chatbot. It just might not turn out so well
Speaker 1: for you in the long run anyway. NBC News rightfully
Speaker 1: raises the question as to why these AI powered ads
Speaker 1: seem to be getting a pass when it would be
Speaker 1: against the rules for a human to post something similar.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe the robots already got to them.
Speaker 1: Starting in November, Google will require political ads that rely
Speaker 1: on AI for content generation to prominently disclose the involvement
Speaker 1: of the AI. Specifically, Google will require ads that contain
Speaker 1: quote synthetic content end quote that appears to show realistic
Speaker 1: people or events to label it as such. So let's say,
Speaker 1: for example, that you had a political ad and it
Speaker 1: shows a certain politician appearing at a certain event, and
Speaker 1: that event is absolutely overflowing with a huge, enthusiastic, supportive audience.
Speaker 1: But perhaps in reality they did appear at an event,
Speaker 1: but maybe it was poorly attended. So AI has been
Speaker 1: used to generate this crowd. Well, the ad would need
Speaker 1: to disclose that it had used AI to augment these images.
Speaker 1: I don't think it would have to get as granular
Speaker 1: as to say what actually was done to the images,
Speaker 1: but it would have to alert you that AI was
Speaker 1: used as part of that ad generation. Now there is
Speaker 1: a threshold here. If someone were just using AI to
Speaker 1: do some minor tweaks like removing red eye or something
Speaker 1: like that, they don't have to disclose that. That doesn't
Speaker 1: meet the criteria. But if you're doing something like making
Speaker 1: someone appear someone that somewhere where they weren't or with
Speaker 1: someone who was not there, anything like that, that would
Speaker 1: have to be disclosed. All right, we are now done
Speaker 1: with AI for this episode, but I'm not done with Google.
Speaker 1: YouTube is removing some control options for content creators when
Speaker 1: it comes to ads. So right now a content creator
Speaker 1: has a decent amount of freedom of where they will
Speaker 1: allow ads to run against monetized content. So, for example,
Speaker 1: a lot of ASMR artists will allow pre roll ads
Speaker 1: these are the ads that play before a video plays,
Speaker 1: but they turn off mid roll ads, which of course
Speaker 1: play in the middle of a video. Like the video stops,
Speaker 1: you get an ad and then the video keeps going,
Speaker 1: kind of like the ads in this podcast. Also, they'll
Speaker 1: turn off post roll ads. Those are the ads that
Speaker 1: play after a video has finished playing. And the reason
Speaker 1: why ASMR artists turn off mid role in post roll
Speaker 1: ads as a rule is because they can be really
Speaker 1: jarring to listen to if you are using ASMR to
Speaker 1: try and relax or to lull yourself to sleep, because
Speaker 1: chances are having some obnoxious ad playing right after the
Speaker 1: video ends will kind of spoil the effect anyway. YouTube's
Speaker 1: changes mean that creators can select whether or not ads
Speaker 1: can play on either side of a video, but they
Speaker 1: don't get to choose whether those ads will be pre
Speaker 1: roll or post roll or both. They can say yes,
Speaker 1: I will allow ads to play before or after, but
Speaker 1: they don't get to say which one. Just it's before
Speaker 1: or after collectively, and YouTube gets to decide whether the
Speaker 1: ads will play before the video or after the video
Speaker 1: or both. They also are not going to be able
Speaker 1: to choose whether or not the ads are skippable or
Speaker 1: non skippable. There are also going to be some other
Speaker 1: changes to things like mineral ads as well, but they're
Speaker 1: not quite to the extreme that I just mentioned. And
Speaker 1: for a lot of content creators this may not be
Speaker 1: that disruptive, but for folks in the meditation or ASMR
Speaker 1: or relaxation spaces, it's causing a lot of anxiety. Heads
Speaker 1: up to Chrome users, Google has been rolling out an
Speaker 1: enhanced ad privacy feature. Some might say this feature is
Speaker 1: perhaps a bit misleading because the name when have you think, Ah,
Speaker 1: this feature will help keep my data private from advertisers.
Speaker 1: Now it kind of does that, but it kind of doesn't.
Speaker 1: So this ties into an application programming interface that's called Topics,
Speaker 1: the Topics API, and what's going on here is that
Speaker 1: Chrome uses your browser history to serve you targeted ads.
Speaker 1: So based upon the kinds of sites you visit and
Speaker 1: how often you visit them and how long you stay there,
Speaker 1: Chrome will be able to serve ads to you that
Speaker 1: it judges are more relevant to your interests. So Topics
Speaker 1: is supposed to help replace third party cookies something that
Speaker 1: Chrome will stop supporting in the not too distant future.
Speaker 1: Cookies can act as trackers for your behavior across the web.
Speaker 1: So the benefit of topics, according to Google, is that
Speaker 1: it doesn't hand your browser history over to advertisers. It
Speaker 1: doesn't explicitly say, oh, you went to site X, site y,
Speaker 1: and site z. Instead, what Google does is hold on
Speaker 1: to that information and it just indicates the types of
Speaker 1: stuff you're interested in. So for me, it might tell
Speaker 1: an advertiser something about me without going into details. So
Speaker 1: for example, it would not say, oh, yeah, Jonathan, he's
Speaker 1: on the I Fix It page like five times a week.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't say that. Instead, it might say Jonathan is
Speaker 1: interested in technology, gadgets, dioy repair, et cetera. And you
Speaker 1: can argue that's an improvement, right, Like, it's not as
Speaker 1: explicit as listing out all the different specific sites you
Speaker 1: went to. But the way Google has rolled this out
Speaker 1: has left some people upset because users are seeing a
Speaker 1: pop up that alerts them to the enhanced privacy from ads.
Speaker 1: But what this really means is that it's already opting
Speaker 1: you into this browser history rec recording feature that Google
Speaker 1: that you're enabling this, you're enabling Google to use your
Speaker 1: browser history as a way to target ads to you. Like,
Speaker 1: that's that's what happens. If you just hit got it,
Speaker 1: it just it opts you in. And people are saying, oh,
Speaker 1: it makes it sound like by the name of the
Speaker 1: feature that if you hit got it it opts you out.
Speaker 1: The opposite is true. It opts you in, And in
Speaker 1: order to opt out, you then have to go to
Speaker 1: your browser settings, go to the privacy settings. There's a
Speaker 1: selection called ad privacy. If you do that, then you
Speaker 1: can go in and turn off this feature, but you
Speaker 1: have to do it manually at that point because you've
Speaker 1: already said got it. Well they got me because I
Speaker 1: said got it. I probably didn't read it properly. But
Speaker 1: even if I had, like, there's a chance I would
Speaker 1: have just thought, oh, by clicking got it, it means
Speaker 1: I've opted to be out of this program, when in
Speaker 1: fact the opposite was true. And when I went into
Speaker 1: the settings, that's what I saw. The settings were all
Speaker 1: turned on and I needed to turn them off manually.
Speaker 1: So just want to let you folks know that, so
Speaker 1: that if you use Chrome, you can go into those
Speaker 1: privacy settings check that ad privacy. See if it's on,
Speaker 1: and you know, if you have no problem with that,
Speaker 1: that's fine, just leave it on. But if, like me,
Speaker 1: you thought you were opting out and it turns out
Speaker 1: you were opting in, you might want to make some changes. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got some more news stories to come, but before
Speaker 1: we jump into all of that, let's take another quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: quick story here. The FAA is extending how far UPS
Speaker 1: is allowed to fly delivery drones. So this week the
Speaker 1: FAA updated its rules and will allow deliveries that go
Speaker 1: beyond line of sight. So previously, an operator or a
Speaker 1: spotter need to be able to maintain eyes maintain sight
Speaker 1: on a delivery drone as it was dropping off a package, which,
Speaker 1: of course, you could argue eliminates the benefits of having
Speaker 1: a delivery drone in the first place. So now, for
Speaker 1: the first time, companies will not have to employ spotters
Speaker 1: to keep an eye on a drone as it makes
Speaker 1: its way to the drop off. So the days of
Speaker 1: robots delivering our small packages are closer than ever. Next up,
Speaker 1: have you ever had the problem of running out of
Speaker 1: disk space? Maybe it was on a video game console
Speaker 1: and it told you that no, you cannot download Starfield
Speaker 1: because your console's disk drive is already full, so you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to uninstall some stuff to make room, or
Speaker 1: maybe you've encountered it on a work or home PC. Well,
Speaker 1: if you have, just be comforted in knowing that you
Speaker 1: are not alone. Because last week, a disk capacity issue
Speaker 1: shut down Toyota, like all of Toyota's assembly plants in
Speaker 1: Japan had to shut down, and some of the company's
Speaker 1: servers just detected that there was insufficient disk space to
Speaker 1: continue operations, and so operations stopped continuing. This raised concerns
Speaker 1: that perhaps the auto company had been the target of hackers,
Speaker 1: but in fact it turned out to be a pretty
Speaker 1: simple problem with a pretty simple solution. Toyota transferred the
Speaker 1: data to a server that had much more storage capacity
Speaker 1: and then things got back on track. But it really
Speaker 1: does show that the little frustrations that can irritate us
Speaker 1: as end users can cause much larger problems in other contexts.
Speaker 1: The Mozilla Foundation recently conducted a study on the privacy
Speaker 1: practices of certain segment of technology, and they found that
Speaker 1: this particular sector of technology underperforms across the board when
Speaker 1: it comes to privacy, and that segment is drum roll, please,
Speaker 1: the automobile industry. So, according to the Mozilla Foundation, ninety
Speaker 1: two percent of auto manufacturers give drivers very little or
Speaker 1: no control over how their private information is gathered and used.
Speaker 1: More than eighty percent of them will share driver data
Speaker 1: with outside partners. Out of the twenty five car companies
Speaker 1: that the Foundation studied, not a single one of them
Speaker 1: even met the minimum privacy standards that they had established
Speaker 1: they being the Foundation, I should say. Plus, the Foundation said,
Speaker 1: these companies aren't just collecting and sharing data, they're collecting
Speaker 1: more information than they need in order to provide services
Speaker 1: to drivers. So this reminds me of how platforms like
Speaker 1: Facebook used to let developers get access to all sorts
Speaker 1: of data, even if their app didn't need that data
Speaker 1: to operate. That's part of what led to the whole
Speaker 1: Cambridge Analytica scandal in fact, and it turns out a
Speaker 1: very similar thing is playing out in our vehicles to
Speaker 1: an extent. Anyway. Some other stuff that the study discovered
Speaker 1: includes the fun fact that more than half of auto
Speaker 1: manufacturers are willing to share driver information to law enforcement
Speaker 1: upon request. If you can trast that with Internet based platforms,
Speaker 1: they are known to exert a pretty decent deal of
Speaker 1: effort to try and keep user data secure, because otherwise
Speaker 1: you lose the trust of your user base. But the
Speaker 1: car companies don't seem to have that same perspective. Seventy
Speaker 1: six percent of those auto companies claimed that they actually
Speaker 1: have the right to sell driver information to data brokers,
Speaker 1: like they just have that right inherently doesn't require you
Speaker 1: to consent to it. If you're wondering which company scored
Speaker 1: the lowest on the test results, that would be Tesla.
Speaker 1: And I know I have a tendency to criticize Tesla
Speaker 1: a lot on the show, but it's stuff like this,
Speaker 1: I would argue that kind of justifies that approach. As
Speaker 1: for what you, as a driver can do about this,
Speaker 1: the answer is not a whole lot. Mozilla Foundation has
Speaker 1: called out to car companies to make substantive changes to
Speaker 1: how they collect and utilize data because this problem is
Speaker 1: too big for individual drivers to tackle in any meaningful way.
Speaker 1: Hey do you remember Clubhouse. That's the app that debuted
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one made a real big splash. It
Speaker 1: let people create virtual spaces where they could broadcast audio
Speaker 1: to an audience. So it's kind of like you could
Speaker 1: have a live streaming podcaster, or you could be even
Speaker 1: a DJ if you wanted to be. You could have
Speaker 1: shows with guests and allow folks to listen in. And
Speaker 1: initially Clubhouse had this air of exclusivity. Originally the app
Speaker 1: was invitation only and it was also limited to the
Speaker 1: iOS platform at first, and there's nothing like an exclusive
Speaker 1: club to make people want to become a member. But
Speaker 1: the shine wore off of Clubhouse, and while the app
Speaker 1: did have sort of a meteoric rise, it faded from
Speaker 1: conversations not too long after that. Now the company has
Speaker 1: laid off about half its staff and it's looking to
Speaker 1: reframe Clubhouse as more of a message app than a
Speaker 1: live audio app. So rather than being a bunch of
Speaker 1: virtual town halls that could be hosted by anybody you know,
Speaker 1: from a no one like me to an actual celebrity,
Speaker 1: the focus now is for Clubhouse users to form groups
Speaker 1: with people they actually know, like real life friends and family.
Speaker 1: In fact, it sounds a lot like what Twitter was
Speaker 1: intended to be when it was first launched. It wasn't
Speaker 1: thought of as like broadcasting to everyone. The use case
Speaker 1: was more like you would follow people you actually know,
Speaker 1: so that you could keep up with what they were doing.
Speaker 1: Now users will be leaving audio messages for each other.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure how this is at all different
Speaker 1: from other messaging apps that also incorporate audio elements, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if Clubhouse can actually leverage this approach
Speaker 1: to regain relevancy in the market. But then I never
Speaker 1: actually joined Clubhouse because I'm not one of the cool kids,
Speaker 1: So I'm out of the loop here. I don't know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. I guess now. I was going
Speaker 1: to talk about a secret rocket launch at Cape Canaveral
Speaker 1: this week, one that isn't part of SpaceX, it's not
Speaker 1: part of NASA, it's not part of any other like
Speaker 1: space agency. But it turns out this secret launch was
Speaker 1: scrubbed and didn't happen. Technically, it was a secret for
Speaker 1: at least a while, but folks figured out pretty quickly
Speaker 1: that it was a US military operation and that it
Speaker 1: was most likely meant to conduct a test launch of
Speaker 1: hypersonic missiles. So as that term suggests, these are missiles
Speaker 1: that travel faster than the sweet of sound, and with
Speaker 1: this incredible speed and their maneuverability, they would be more
Speaker 1: capable of avoiding anti missile weaponry. But today, or rather yesterday,
Speaker 1: I should say, the military scrubbed those plans. They also
Speaker 1: acknowledged that this was meant to test hypersonic missile technology,
Speaker 1: but the reason for scrubbing was very vague. It just
Speaker 1: said that during pre flight checks they had to make
Speaker 1: the call to scrub launch. This would have been the
Speaker 1: first surface test of a US hypersonic missile, but other
Speaker 1: countries like China, which actually leads the world in this technology,
Speaker 1: and Russia have already deployed, in Russia's case, even used
Speaker 1: hypersonic capable weaponry. We haven't heard the last of this,
Speaker 1: I don't think or I mean maybe we won't hear it.
Speaker 1: We'll see it. I mean we'll hear it, because hypersonic
Speaker 1: you'll get a sonic boom afterward, and then an actual
Speaker 1: boom if it's a missile. I'm getting off track now.
Speaker 1: If you were going to remake Alanis Morissett's song Ironic Today,
Speaker 1: you might include this last news item there. So, Rockstar Games,
Speaker 1: the company behind popular franchises like Grand Theft Auto, has
Speaker 1: included some of the same technology the company has previously
Speaker 1: campaigned against in some of its games. That's now selling
Speaker 1: on Steam. So this all has to do with Digital
Speaker 1: Rights Management or DRM. So the purpose of DRM is
Speaker 1: to prevent or discourage piracy, though advocates often argue that
Speaker 1: pirates will find ways around DRM, so then the only
Speaker 1: people who have to deal with DRM are actual valid customers,
Speaker 1: which means you're just making the experience worse for people
Speaker 1: who were already paying for the experience, and the people
Speaker 1: who didn't want to pay for the experience, they just
Speaker 1: found ways to get around the protections you had put
Speaker 1: in place. And anyway, a hacker group called Razor nineteen eleven,
Speaker 1: years and years and years ago created a bunch of
Speaker 1: cracks for Rockstar Games, for certain titles in Rockstar Games.
Speaker 1: So these were pieces of software that are meant to
Speaker 1: get around DRM. Really just files that allow you to
Speaker 1: bypass DRM. And the interesting thing is that now Rockstar
Speaker 1: has put some of those old titles for sale on Steam.
Speaker 1: But Rockstar needed a way to get around this DRM
Speaker 1: that they themselves had put on these old games, and
Speaker 1: to do that, what the company apparently has done is
Speaker 1: to include some of the very same cracks made by
Speaker 1: those hackers. A hacker group that Rockstar Games was very
Speaker 1: gung ho on going up against back in the day,
Speaker 1: and now they're using the hacker's own tools because these
Speaker 1: old games have DRM on them that otherwise would make
Speaker 1: the playing experience suboptimal. Bleeping Computer uncovered this and has
Speaker 1: screenshots of code that indicate that, yeah, some of those
Speaker 1: cracks do appear in certain Rockstar game files, which is
Speaker 1: pretty wild stuff. Okay, I've got a couple of recommendations
Speaker 1: of articles for you all this week. First up is
Speaker 1: an article and Wired. It's titled The Burning Man Fiasco
Speaker 1: is the Ultimate Tech culture Clash. So obviously this goes
Speaker 1: into detail about how thousands of people found themselves stranded
Speaker 1: in the desert at the Burning Man Festival while torrential
Speaker 1: rains move through the area. But it's also about how
Speaker 1: a cultural subset essentially appropriated and you know, took over.
Speaker 1: They hijacked an art festival, and how that in turn
Speaker 1: has changed the festival itself, so well worth a read.
Speaker 1: The second recommendation I have is titled Airbnb bookings dry
Speaker 1: up in New York as the new short stay rules
Speaker 1: are introduced. I think this is a really interesting read.
Speaker 1: It's in the Guardian and it's only partly tech related.
Speaker 1: I would argue a lot of people put Airbnb and
Speaker 1: tech company status, so it kind of fits in that regard.
Speaker 1: But it's also really about how the tech startup culture
Speaker 1: that's centered around disruption can be i can have some
Speaker 1: really negative consequences. So in this case, the disruption was
Speaker 1: meant to be to the hospitality industry, right, that's what
Speaker 1: Airbnb is taking aim for. They're taking aim at like
Speaker 1: hotels and cabin rentals and things like that in an
Speaker 1: effort to you know, democratize it to some extent and
Speaker 1: also just to make a a ton of cash in
Speaker 1: the process. But New York. The response to New York
Speaker 1: was that we need to make up rules to curtail
Speaker 1: this because people who are owning properties rather than selling them,
Speaker 1: they are renting them out for these short stays. And meanwhile,
Speaker 1: we have a housing crisis in the city. There's not
Speaker 1: enough housing for the people who need it. And part
Speaker 1: of the reason is because there are all these landlords
Speaker 1: who are renting out these spaces in short term. So
Speaker 1: we're going to make it really really hard for them
Speaker 1: to do that. The rules are making it very challenging
Speaker 1: to run an Airbnb kind of business in New York
Speaker 1: City in order to address this issue. So I just
Speaker 1: thought it was interesting to see the interplay between disruption
Speaker 1: and legislative response, so I recommend that one as well. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's it for the tech News for Thursday, September seventh,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. I hope you're all well, and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
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