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 I love all
Speaker 1: things tech, and it is time for the tech news
Speaker 1: for Thursday, April eighth, twenty twenty one. Yes, that pause
Speaker 1: is me looking at the calendar because every day is
Speaker 1: the same to me, but the news keeps changing, so
Speaker 1: I guess that's something right. And you know, there are
Speaker 1: spy films that start off with a villain sabotaging some
Speaker 1: sort of high security, high value target, like a nuclear
Speaker 1: power plant, for example, but it turns out that the
Speaker 1: same thing can be done by a gooey ocean critter.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about salps, which are a type of invertebrate.
Speaker 1: They're called tunicates. They look kind of like jellyfish, but
Speaker 1: they are a different species. They use water jet propulsion
Speaker 1: in order to get around, so they siphon in water
Speaker 1: and siphon it back out again and squirt ahead. Anyway,
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of them have gummed up the water
Speaker 1: intake valves for two nuclear reactors in South Korea, which
Speaker 1: is not you know great. The nuclear plants use water
Speaker 1: to cool the reactors as part of the heat exchanges
Speaker 1: that are at the heart of power generation, so those
Speaker 1: reactors are currently offline. Salt numbers usually swell in early summer,
Speaker 1: so we're actually seeing an early surge here. Now whether
Speaker 1: that has anything to do with climate change is an
Speaker 1: unresolved question. It would be premature for us to draw
Speaker 1: conclusions without a lot more data and looking at trends
Speaker 1: over time. This could just be an abnormality but not
Speaker 1: an indication of big changes. It's kind of like how
Speaker 1: if you had an unusually cool day in late May
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta, you wouldn't say that's counter evidence to
Speaker 1: climate change, that global warming is not a thing or whatever,
Speaker 1: although no one really wants to use the term global
Speaker 1: warming anymore. That's kind of reductive, But anyway, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: say that because weather and climate are not interchangeable. The
Speaker 1: story of the salps, I think is a little amusing
Speaker 1: because the thought that this little sack like critter could
Speaker 1: shut down a nuclear power plant sounds, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of bizarre and funny, but it's obviously serious business, both
Speaker 1: in terms of the impact on power generation and changes
Speaker 1: in wildlife. Routines. One story I did not report on
Speaker 1: earlier this week was about how hackers have been scraping
Speaker 1: information pertaining to more than half a billion Facebook accounts,
Speaker 1: including Mark Zuckerberg's. As it turns out, someone collected the
Speaker 1: data back in twenty nine teen, and it includes stuff
Speaker 1: like names, occupations, location, marital status, or relationship status in
Speaker 1: some cases, phone numbers. Facebook says that the hackers likely
Speaker 1: used a contact import tool to scrap data from various profiles,
Speaker 1: which means no one actually penetrated Facebook's systems and then
Speaker 1: rooted around for information that way. Instead, they just pulled
Speaker 1: it off Facebook directly. So prior to twenty nineteen, it
Speaker 1: was possible to do kind of a reverse search of Facebook.
Speaker 1: You could plug in a phone number and put that
Speaker 1: into a contact importer, and it would then search Facebook
Speaker 1: to see if there was a profile on Facebook that
Speaker 1: matched that phone number, which would then give you not
Speaker 1: just the personal information of the account, but it would
Speaker 1: confirm the link between the phone number and that person. Right.
Speaker 1: And if you automated this and you just went through,
Speaker 1: you know, a robo dial list of phone numbers, you
Speaker 1: could collect a huge amount of data. Now Facebook changed that,
Speaker 1: but the damage had already been done, the data was
Speaker 1: already collected, and it's not much of a relief to
Speaker 1: hear that the company has, you know, already done something
Speaker 1: about it when the information is already out in the wild.
Speaker 1: It's one of those shutting the barn door things after
Speaker 1: the horse has already kind of bolted. You can check
Speaker 1: to see if you were affected by going to have
Speaker 1: I Been zucked? That's zu ckeed dot com, and you
Speaker 1: can search against the database of all the stuff that
Speaker 1: was collected, so you can put in your phone number,
Speaker 1: your email address, or whatever. I tried my information. I
Speaker 1: was not in that twenty nineteen hack. But that was
Speaker 1: just pure luck. It wasn't that I did anything, you know,
Speaker 1: to prevent it from happening. I was just lucky that
Speaker 1: I wasn't in part of that grab. Another bad Facebook
Speaker 1: story coming your way. The Insider has an article titled
Speaker 1: Facebook did not higher black employees because they were not
Speaker 1: a culture fit. Report says the article is well worth reading.
Speaker 1: I think the headline kind of gives away the idea
Speaker 1: of what was going on, but we'll dive in. So
Speaker 1: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received reports from a few
Speaker 1: black applicants who were seeking jobs with Facebook, and they
Speaker 1: all reportedly had the qualifications necessary to do the posted jobs.
Speaker 1: But they were all turned away, apparently after being told
Speaker 1: they would not fit in with the corporate culture of Facebook.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to view this as anything other than
Speaker 1: grossly racist. A Washington Post article quoted an operating manager
Speaker 1: over at Facebook who said he was told that the
Speaker 1: people he recruited into the company needed to be a
Speaker 1: culture fit, but quote, Unfortunately, not many people I knew
Speaker 1: could pass that challenge because the culture here does not
Speaker 1: reflect the culture of black people end quote. Organizations like
Speaker 1: the Society for Human Resource Management have pushed back against
Speaker 1: companies that have culture fit requirements in their job postings.
Speaker 1: They've argued that this effectively creates an excuse to hire
Speaker 1: mostly white applicants and turn away people of color while
Speaker 1: attempting to maintain a sort of plausible deniability that there's
Speaker 1: any kind of racial discrimination going on. Facebook representatives have
Speaker 1: said that their company has policies and placement to detect
Speaker 1: and eliminate discrimination. But this culture fit thing strikes me
Speaker 1: as a way of kind of getting around that, maybe
Speaker 1: not a conscious way. It might not even have been
Speaker 1: consciously malevolent or malicious, but it has the effect of
Speaker 1: being discriminatory, and that's a problem. On Tuesday, the messaging
Speaker 1: app Signal rolled out a new beta in the UK
Speaker 1: with a feature that, well, let's say it's caused a
Speaker 1: little bit of a fuss. Signal is an encrypted messaging service.
Speaker 1: It offers end to end encryption between people using it.
Speaker 1: That's one that a lot of users have flocked to
Speaker 1: in order to switch to a messaging app that didn't
Speaker 1: commoditize relationships. When Facebook's WhatsApp started, when it was revealed
Speaker 1: that the app was going to be collecting data about usage,
Speaker 1: maybe not even personal data, but enough data about usage
Speaker 1: that would ultimately go to Facebook proper and other Facebook properties,
Speaker 1: a lot of people said, you know what, peace out,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go use something else, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people went to Signal, and signal sales pitch is
Speaker 1: that it lets you communicate privately and securely with your contacts.
Speaker 1: And there aren't really any bells and whistles thrown in,
Speaker 1: except now there appears to be one a cryptocurrency called
Speaker 1: mobile coin. Critics say that Signal is commercially exploiting its
Speaker 1: user base, introducing a company controlled digital cryptocurrency, pumping up
Speaker 1: the value of that digital currency, then pushing it all
Speaker 1: off onto users, and then pocketing profit from it. Stephen
Speaker 1: deal That's d I. E Hl wrote a great blog
Speaker 1: post that critiques this move, and it laments the fact
Speaker 1: that Signal seems to have taken a drastic turn from
Speaker 1: its philosophical anchor point. It's called ET two Signal. I
Speaker 1: really recommend you read it. His perspective, which I find
Speaker 1: pretty compelling, is that there's this growing trend in tech
Speaker 1: in general to rely on these digital tokens, whether they
Speaker 1: are cryptocurrencies or NFTs. That trend sees a small group
Speaker 1: of people trade digital goods a few times, thus driving
Speaker 1: up the perceived value of those digital goods. Then they
Speaker 1: can cash out, you know, they can build up some wealth,
Speaker 1: cash out, and then they have that wealth in some
Speaker 1: other form. And meanwhile, those digital assets are in a
Speaker 1: danger of having a total collapse in value, similar to
Speaker 1: what we have seen with Bitcoin in the past. Bitcoin's
Speaker 1: writing high, but there have been times where we've seen
Speaker 1: the value of bitcoin dip really low from pretty big high.
Speaker 1: So there's no guarantee that it's going to maintain that.
Speaker 1: While some might survive the ups and downs and stick around,
Speaker 1: and by some I mean cryptocurrencies and fts. There's never
Speaker 1: a guarantee that they will stick around. And the more
Speaker 1: we see companies employ these kinds of strategies, the more
Speaker 1: likely we're going to see governments take a closer look
Speaker 1: at the whole thing and potentially try to pass legislation
Speaker 1: to address it, particularly if people are at risk of
Speaker 1: losing significant amounts of money due to these types of strategies.
Speaker 1: And as we all know, it is not easy to
Speaker 1: address the consequences of technologies once they are out in
Speaker 1: the wild. It is way too easy to pass laws
Speaker 1: that have their own unintended consequences. The laws might be
Speaker 1: coming from a good place, but they can often not
Speaker 1: hit the actual problem and cause other problems as a results,
Speaker 1: so not necessarily a great move. Oh and just to
Speaker 1: link the Facebook privacy story with the signal story, is
Speaker 1: another story that a lot of people are having fun
Speaker 1: with right now, and that is that by using that
Speaker 1: screat data, some folks found out that Mark Zuckerberg, whom
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, his data was among that that was
Speaker 1: found in that more than half a billion accounts list.
Speaker 1: It turns out he's been using the Signal messaging app,
Speaker 1: which is interesting because Facebook is the owner of WhatsApp
Speaker 1: that is a Signal competitor. But if you run the
Speaker 1: company that owns a messaging app, why would you be
Speaker 1: using a different messaging app than the one you actually
Speaker 1: own as part of your company. Why would you use
Speaker 1: a different one for your personal communication? Well, Signal has
Speaker 1: d end encryption, and unlike WhatsApp, it's not coming through
Speaker 1: user data, or at least it's not supposed to in
Speaker 1: an effort to sell ads to users. So perhaps Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: prefers his messaging services to be a little less intrusive,
Speaker 1: but wanting a different set of rules for everybody else,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm just spitballing here. Amplify Media gave
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts a thorough look recently and found out some
Speaker 1: stuff that I didn't find all that surprising. Apple podcasts
Speaker 1: recently hit a milestone of having more than two million
Speaker 1: different podcast titles on it, but amplify discovered that twenty
Speaker 1: six percent of all those podcasts have only published a
Speaker 1: single episode. Thirty seven percent had only published two or fewer. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, you know, we went from twenty six
Speaker 1: to thirty seven percent having had published two or less,
Speaker 1: and then forty four percent had only published three or fewer.
Speaker 1: So once you hit the ten or more episodes, like
Speaker 1: how many podcasts on Apple Podcasts have published more than
Speaker 1: ten episodes, Well you're looking at just thirty six percent
Speaker 1: of all the podcasts up on Apple Podcasts, which tells
Speaker 1: us that there are a ton of shows that have
Speaker 1: not hit ten episodes on there. This didn't shock me
Speaker 1: because podcasting takes a lot of work and energy. I
Speaker 1: can name at least three shows I personally started recording
Speaker 1: and stopped before I hit episode number four, And what
Speaker 1: this tells me is that there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are trying to podcast, but many of them
Speaker 1: get discouraged for whatever reason and they give up on it.
Speaker 1: Of course, some of those shows might not have been abandoned.
Speaker 1: Some of them could have easily just been one offs
Speaker 1: or very limited series. For example, Till Death Do Us Blart,
Speaker 1: a show in which the hosts get together to watch
Speaker 1: Paul Blart Mall Cop two every year, had to run
Speaker 1: for four years straight before having more than three episodes,
Speaker 1: and it currently has eight. If you also include the
Speaker 1: trailer from twenty fifteen and a bonus episode from twenty twenty. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff is currently close again on fourteen hundred episodes,
Speaker 1: and that's if you're not counting classics. If you do
Speaker 1: count the classic episodes that we publish on Fridays, because
Speaker 1: I mean, at that point you're talking about one thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred twenty nine episodes. This will be one five
Speaker 1: hundred thirty one because I'm pretty sure the Wednesday episode
Speaker 1: hasn't published as I record this, and I think out
Speaker 1: of all of those, I'm only not in one of them.
Speaker 1: I mean every single one except one of them. I
Speaker 1: need to lie down for a moment. A recent court
Speaker 1: filing in a criminal case illustrates how sometimes smart city
Speaker 1: implementations can be dangerously stupid. And let me be clear here,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it's dumb to update city infrastructure. I'm
Speaker 1: saying it's dumb to do it poorly. In this case,
Speaker 1: the incident in question happened back in twenty nineteen. A
Speaker 1: man named Wyatt Tranacheck attempted to sabotage the water cleaning
Speaker 1: system of Ellsworth County in Kansas. Travnicheck had been working
Speaker 1: with the county, which had installed software in the county's
Speaker 1: water cleaning system and it let employees log into that
Speaker 1: cleaning system remotely, and the purpose was to let employees
Speaker 1: monitor systems without having to be on the physical premises.
Speaker 1: But the software also allows employees to make changes to
Speaker 1: that system, like shutting down various subsystems. So Travin to check,
Speaker 1: after having left his job, logged into the system months later.
Speaker 1: His access had never been revoked or limited in any way,
Speaker 1: so he logged in and he started to shut stuff down,
Speaker 1: allegedly with the intent to cause harm. He was found out, arrested,
Speaker 1: and if he's found guilty, he could serve up to
Speaker 1: twenty years in prison for this. Fortunately no one was
Speaker 1: actually harmed in this case, but it really illustrates the
Speaker 1: need for proper security measures and critical systems that includes
Speaker 1: everything from the power grid where we know foreign agents
Speaker 1: have infiltrated various systems, to our water systems, to communication
Speaker 1: systems and beyond. Good security is hard. It requires work,
Speaker 1: It requires maintenance, It requires updating passwords and changing logins.
Speaker 1: It includes revoking access when someone no longer merits having access.
Speaker 1: It's essentially all the stuff that we should be doing
Speaker 1: in our private lives with our own systems. But a
Speaker 1: lot of us don't do that because it's work, it's tedious,
Speaker 1: and there are only so many hours in a day.
Speaker 1: But if we insist on making these various systems accessible remotely,
Speaker 1: we have to take those measures into account or else
Speaker 1: we will suffer very serious consequences. This could have been
Speaker 1: a lot worse in the tell us something we didn't
Speaker 1: already know category. The Broadband Technical Advisory Group reports that
Speaker 1: broadband usage surged between thirty and forty percent in most
Speaker 1: of the United States during the pandemic, with some areas
Speaker 1: getting up to sixty percent. Of a surge. Seems like
Speaker 1: when a lot of folks are stuck at home, they
Speaker 1: turned to the Internet when it comes to things like
Speaker 1: getting work done, or finding entertainment, or researching ways to
Speaker 1: get vaccinated and so on. And also, while downstream data
Speaker 1: was way up, so was upstream activity. Again, no big surprise.
Speaker 1: I'm sure a lot of you have been on your
Speaker 1: share of video meetings over the course of the last year.
Speaker 1: And I mean working from home for me means that
Speaker 1: I'm regularly uploading large audio files to my producer Tari,
Speaker 1: and that adds up pretty quickly. While the infrastructure in
Speaker 1: most cities handled the increased load without too much of
Speaker 1: an issue, rural areas were a different story. Some of
Speaker 1: those were relying on older networking devices that weren't able
Speaker 1: to keep up with the demand as easily as the
Speaker 1: stuff we have in metropolitan areas. And what this tells
Speaker 1: me is that stuff like data caps sound like they're
Speaker 1: more about getting cash out of customers and less about
Speaker 1: guaranteeing a good Internet experience. If the US had a
Speaker 1: surge and we didn't see home service slow to a
Speaker 1: crawl across the country, seems pretty disingenuous to say that
Speaker 1: data caps are necessity. Amazon's Twitch service has a new
Speaker 1: policy in place that could see twitch streamers get banned
Speaker 1: indefinitely for things that they do offline. That is, you
Speaker 1: might have a perfectly acceptable streaming record, but you might
Speaker 1: do something really bad out there in the real world,
Speaker 1: and if Amazon finds out about it, you might find
Speaker 1: that your stream has been shut down. Now I don't
Speaker 1: object to this, by the way, but it is interesting
Speaker 1: to me. Twitch streamers can achieve a great deal of fame.
Speaker 1: They can attract a large and young audience, and if
Speaker 1: a streamer has been found to have engaged in some
Speaker 1: seriously bad behaviors, like being involved in acts of deadly
Speaker 1: violence or terrorist activities, or committing sexual assault. Twitch has
Speaker 1: rules now laid out to ban that user from streaming.
Speaker 1: According to Twitch, it will work with a law firm
Speaker 1: when cases arise to determine if any claims that were
Speaker 1: made against that streamer have validity to them, and that
Speaker 1: all has to happen before or Twitch does anything else.
Speaker 1: Only on confirmation that the streamer was actually involved in
Speaker 1: these activities will Twitch then act on the account. According
Speaker 1: to Twitch, a person who has been found to have
Speaker 1: engaged in these offline activities poses as a potential threat
Speaker 1: to the Twitch community in general, and that is unacceptable.
Speaker 1: Other platforms like Facebook and YouTube also sometimes take offline
Speaker 1: behavior into consideration when dealing with accounts, but it's more
Speaker 1: common to see most platforms focus solely on the behavior
Speaker 1: and activities that happen on the platform itself and not elsewhere. Finally,
Speaker 1: in the second McElroy family reference in this episode, let
Speaker 1: us all bow our heads in a moment of silence
Speaker 1: for yaho Answers, the platform which allows people to ask
Speaker 1: questions ranging from the mundane to the unintelligible with answers
Speaker 1: that frequently match or exceed the questions. Is going to
Speaker 1: go away? On May fourth? Wiped clear off the internet
Speaker 1: Star Wars Day. I mean, really, guys, that's low anyway.
Speaker 1: Yaho Answers has been a part of the web since
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, and it's been a part of
Speaker 1: the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me. There's the
Speaker 1: reference to our mackel Royce that had originally launched back
Speaker 1: in twenty ten. And sure there were really dumb questions
Speaker 1: and even more dumb answers on yaho Answers, and sure
Speaker 1: most of those questions you could probably find answered elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And sure some people use Yahoo Answers not to ask
Speaker 1: or answer questions, but to create a kind of rich
Speaker 1: metafiction of weirdness. But without yah who Answers, we never
Speaker 1: would have had the question how is Babby formed? And
Speaker 1: countless people too scared to ask a question that they
Speaker 1: really wanted to know the answer to and then potentially
Speaker 1: look foolish, would be able to go to yah Who
Speaker 1: Answers and ask it there, and sometimes they might even
Speaker 1: get a useful response. Now there are other sites that
Speaker 1: do sort of what yah Who Answers was doing, though
Speaker 1: usually not with the same level of surreal datastic activities.
Speaker 1: As for Mbimbam, that's my brother, my brother and me.
Speaker 1: To y'all who have never listened to that show, I
Speaker 1: suspect the show is going to be just fine. Yah
Speaker 1: Who Answers served a specific role on that show, well
Speaker 1: two of them really. One was to help buff up
Speaker 1: listener questions because, of course, in the early days, the
Speaker 1: show was still building its audience and so it only
Speaker 1: had so many questions per episode. Yah Who Answers helped
Speaker 1: fill that out. But the other was to sign off
Speaker 1: every episode with an unanswered and arguably unanswerable question from
Speaker 1: Yah Who Answers. There may now need to be a
Speaker 1: new way to close out shows, but I believe in
Speaker 1: the mackelroys. As for yall Who Answers, I'm sad to
Speaker 1: see it go. It was bizarre and weird, sometimes disturbing,
Speaker 1: but it also felt like a pretty accurate representation of
Speaker 1: the psyche on the Internet. So shine on you, Crazy Diamond,
Speaker 1: And that's it for today's episode. That's all the news
Speaker 1: that I care to report for Thursday, April eight, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one. If you have suggestions, for things I should
Speaker 1: tackle in episodes of tech Stuff let me know. The
Speaker 1: best way to get in touch is on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is text stuff HSW and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
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