Tech News: Meta Is Going to Court Again

Mark Zuckerberg is going to have to appear in a federal court to answer questions about his alleged involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Meanwhile, an art installation company is also suing Meta for being a copycat. Plus lots more!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
Jonathan Strickland of an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you. It's time for the
tech news for Thursday, July two thousand twenty two. Let's
get to it with some stories about Meta. A class

(00:26):
action lawsuit filed against Meta means that CEO Mark Zuckerberg
and former CEO Cheryl Sandberg will each have to testify
in federal court regarding their alleged roles in the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. And it seems like a lifetime since that
scandal first became public. Now, in case you do not

(00:48):
know what that scandal was all about, a British political
consultancy firm that worked with conservative political campaigns here in
the States leveraged data that had been scraped from Facebook.
So there was this app developer slash professor who had
created a political survey app and it was a pay

(01:10):
for survey, so you would get paid if you took it.
But what the people who took the survey didn't know
is that by granting the app permission, it gave the
app uh an elevated ability to see into not just
their own personal information, but that of their friends on Facebook.
So the app essentially made it possible for the app

(01:33):
developer to look at friend profiles as if the developer
were in fact that person's friend, and so the app
was able to collect massive amounts of information from people
who never consented to share that info in the first place.
Right Like, if you were a friend of someone who
took this survey, you didn't tell the survey that it

(01:55):
was okay to scrape your data. Anyway, Cambridge Analytica mostly
proved to be an ineffective entity as far as the
political campaign consultancy gig is concerned, but it's still is
true that the company relied heavily on information that violated
consumer privacy laws. Meta already went through an investigation that

(02:15):
was conducted by the Federal Trade Commission about this, and
the company had paid out a five billion dollar fine.
That's billion with a B, not chump change. But this
case alleges that several key executives of the company were
responsible for how the Cambridge Analytica story unfolded. They say
that the executives knew more about what was going on

(02:37):
earlier than they indicated, and that they may have even
taken some steps within the company to try and conceal
what was happening because it did not reflect well on Facebook.
The court has demanded that Meta hand over more than
one thousand documents that the company had previously withheld, citing
them as privileged information. Looks like some of that privilege

(02:58):
is gonna get stripped away. Sticking with Meta for a
couple more stories, nonprofit organizations that focus on civil and
digital rights are criticizing Meta for its Meta Human Rights Report.
That's an eighty three page document that the company published
last week. The report is supposed to document Meta's impact

(03:19):
on human rights and how it tries to protect human rights,
but these organizations are saying that the report fails to
do this. Instead, it serves more as a whitewashing document
meant to absolve Meta of its role in facilitating the
spread of hate speech, extremism, misinformation, and that kind of thing. Further,

(03:40):
the organizations say that Meta was citing its own press
releases in the document to use that as evidence of
how the company is working to support human rights, which
kind of boils down into because I said so, right,
like a like a a nonsensical argument like that. The
organizations also say that the document mentions several safeguards that

(04:03):
are meant to protect human rights, but that the document
fails to disclose that Meta has subsequently removed many of
those safeguards. So there's this growing criticism that Meta's reports
in general, not just this one but others as well,
that all claimed to increase transparency, failed to include anything
of real substance within those reports, and that the company

(04:25):
is really just kind of going through the motions or
putting on a kind of responsibility theater while failing to
make significant operational changes that would produce results. Pretty nasty
criticism directed to the company. And to round out our
Meta news, a company called Meta dot i S, which
is an art installation company, is suing Meta for trademark violation.

(04:49):
Now I'm pretty sure I actually mentioned Meta dot i
s way back shortly after Facebook changed its name to
Meta last year. Now, according to Meta dot i S,
they tried to work with the Facebook version of Meta,
but they found no real success there, and the art
insplation company now says it has trouble securing clients because

(05:13):
people assume that Meta dot i S is associated with
meta slash Facebook. And why would that be a problem. Well,
according to the art company, Facebook's reputation is so bad
right now, with so much negative press and perception, that
this spills over to affect the art company, even though

(05:34):
there's no connection other than having the same name. And
since meta dot i s pre existed Facebook's Meta, they
they are arguing that they should have the valid claim
on that trademark. Whether or not that argument will stand
up in court remains to be seen, and it's always
possible or even probable that meta slash Facebook will settle

(05:55):
out of court if the law team feels their case
isn't strong enough to win. All right, now, let's talk
about Netflix and the world of business, which I clearly
do not understand. So earlier this year, Netflix held an
earnings call and revealed that for the first time, it
lost more subscribers than it had gained over a quarter,

(06:17):
and subsequently, the stock price on Netflix took a nose dive. Well,
the company recently had its earnings call for the second
quarter of the year and revealed it lost nearly a
million subscribers. So in the first quarter it lost two
hundred thousand. This time it lost like nine hundred seventy
thousand subscribers, so that's like way more than it lost

(06:38):
in the first quarter. That's not as bad as what
Netflix thought it was gonna be. The initial forecast was
going to be a two million drop in subscribers, so
it's not as bad as what they thought it was
gonna be. It was half as bad, less better than
half as bad, I guess it's a weird way to
say it, but less than half of what they they

(07:00):
had forecast, so still worse than they did in the
first quarter, but not nearly as bad as they thought
it was going to be. In the second quarter, and
revenue was actually up by eight point six so yeah,
the company has, you were, subscribers, but it's earning more money,
largely because of, according to the company, the dollars standing
in the world economy. And consequently, Netflix's stock price increased

(07:24):
by seven point four percent on Wednesday, which is wild, right,
Like def flix Is stock price dropped when they lost
two hundred thousand, but when up when they quote unquote
only lost nine seventy thousand subscribers. I'm just not able
to see the matrix when it comes to the stock market,
and you know, it's such a relief that I'm not

(07:47):
a day trader, because I would have completely lost my
mind at this point. Microsoft and Google are both pumping
the brakes on hiring new employees due to economic pressures.
Bloomberg reports that Microsoft has been shut down open job
listings in various departments like Azure and security. Company reps
say there's essentially a hiring freeze for most departments, but

(08:09):
Microsoft will continue to honor job offers that have already
been extended to prospective employees, and they may make the
occasional exception for positions that are considered to be critical
to operations. Business Insider reports that Google has entered into
a two week hiring freeze while the company assesses its
actual quote unquote headcount needs, and like Microsoft, Google is

(08:34):
also going to honor any job offers that have already
been extended to future Googlers. So yeah, things are are
still looking pretty rough in the tech sector in general.
Will probably see that spill over into other industries as well,
or continue to spill over because it's already happening over
in the UK, the g c h Q and the

(08:54):
U k's National Cybersecurity Center are calling on tech companies
to practice client side scan ending in an effort to
seek out illegal material, namely images and videos related to
child abuse. Now, this is an ongoing struggle and it
is a highly charged topic because on the one side,
you have people who want to leverage technology to uncover

(09:15):
instances of child abuse so that the perpetrators can be
held accountable, and that's completely understandable. Child abuse is absolutely horrifying.
And on the other side, you have privacy advocates arguing
that any sort of client side scanning mandate is a
huge threat to privacy. It's an enormous amount of surveillance,

(09:35):
and it would also arguably necessitate the outlawing of end
to end encryption, because if you have true end to
end encryption, no other parties other than those involved in
that communication would be able to read the messages. So
even the service carrying the messages would not be able
to see what was inside that communication. So there's no

(09:58):
way they could do scanning in that event, And if
they're required to do scanning, then the logic goes, you
can't have end to end encryption. Now you can see
the validity of both sides, I imagine, because yes, child
abuse is terrible, it should be stopped. It absolutely needs
to be detected and halted and better yet prevented. Now,

(10:21):
on the other side, eliminating secure means of communication and
introducing more surveillance can put people into danger, people who
are innocent of committing any crimes. You know, maybe they
are a political activist or a journalist or something along
those lines. And if you have a government that turns
against those kinds of things, then having a client scanning side, uh,

(10:46):
you know technology in place, one that law enforcement could
theoretically access, puts those people at risk. So some of
the privacy side argue that using technology to address a
societal problem isn't effective, that all technology really does is
go after a symptom or the outcome, it doesn't actually
address the root causes, and that the money and effort

(11:08):
that would be spent making this technological approach would be
better directed at creating social programs that aim to prevent
child abuse in the first place. Okay, we've got other
stories to talk about, some of which are not nearly
as heavy as what we just talked about. But before
we get to those, let's take a quick break. Okay,

(11:34):
we're gonna talk about some stories that relate to electric vehicles,
and first up, the US Post Office or USPS UH
for the United States Postal Service had initially committed to
purchasing five thousand all electric mail trucks because it's adding
fifty vehicles to its fleet, but now the USPS says

(11:56):
it will actually be closer to half of those fifty
thousand that will be all trick vehicles, and that when
looking at all vehicles the USPS plans to purchase in
the near future, which goes beyond just the mail trucks,
goes to everything, that's about eighty four thousand vehicles total.
The USPS plans for around those to be electric vehicles.

(12:17):
It's a good move, especially for the mail trucks. They
are notoriously gas guzzling vehicles. The Grumman Long life vehicles,
which are the kind that the USPS has as most
of its fleet, they average around UH somewhere around ten
miles per gallon due to the stop and go nature
of postal workers duties. So I switched to e v

(12:38):
S would mean the USPS would significantly reduce its carbon
emissions across its fleet. Over at the Foreign Motor Company,
it's planning on cutting eight thousand jobs in order to
reallocate resources towards building more electric vehicles of its own.
The layoffs will affect Ford's Blue Division, which is the
part of Ford that focuses on building internal combustion engine

(13:01):
or i c E vehicles. This follows the recent reorganization
of Ford into the Blue Division and the Model E Division,
and it's another sign of the massive shift in the
automotive industry as more companies are transitioning to building non
i c E vehicles. Now, when it comes to e
V companies, you could argue that none is more famous

(13:21):
than Tesla, which is back in the news because of cryptocurrency.
So back in one, Tesla purchased a large amount of bitcoin,
to the tune of about one point five billion dollars
worth of the digital currency, but in a recent earning statement,
the company revealed it had sold off or three quarters
of its bitcoin holdings. Now, considering how far the value

(13:45):
of bitcoin has dropped since twenty one, that could mean
that Tesla took up fairly big loss on that investment.
It's hard to say exactly how much, because the company
did not reveal at what price it's sold that its
coin holdings. Brian Johnson and analyst at Barclays estimated that
Tesla was looking at a four hundred sixty million dollar

(14:08):
bitcoin impairment from the sell off, which is an big
old alchi Elon Must said that the decision to sell
off the chunk of bitcoin holdings had nothing to do
with the cryptocurrencies value. He said, This is not a
condemnation on crypto, he said, instead, it was just a
free up resources due to the ongoing challenges of operating
in China, which has strict COVID lockdown policies that have

(14:31):
been disrupting Tesla's operations there. When pressed if Tesla would
reinvest in bitcoin later down the line, must refer to
bitcoin as quote a side show to a side show
end quote, which does seem like kind of a condemnation
of cryptocurrency, So who ne who knows? And this follows
Tesla's previous move to stop accepting bitcoin as payment for

(14:52):
car purchases. It did do that briefly, but it has
curtailed that practice for quite some time now. That was
a move that the company credited to a concern about
the environmental impact of bitcoin mining. Whether or not that
was the one and only reason, I don't know, but
that's the reason they gave James Murray, the director of
the United States Secret Service, has announced his retirement and

(15:16):
he's moving on to join the private sector. And you
might wonder why am I talking about the director of
the Secret Service in a podcast that's about tech. Well,
it's because the company he is going to join is
Snap Incorporated, the parent company of Snapchat. So Murray will
oversee security at Snapping, which makes sense, though I have

(15:36):
to admit, if I were working in the security division
at Snap, I feel pretty intimidated when the former director
of the Secret Service came on board. A security researcher
has found an interesting way to compromise computer systems that
have an air gap. But before I even get into
this story, let me just say this exploit is technically possible,

(15:57):
but it isn't in any way practice at coals, so
I don't think there's any need to panic about it.
But it is an interesting security vulnerability. So let's talk
about this. First of all, what is an air gap. Well,
that's when you make sure a computer system isn't connected
to the Internet in any way. It is self contained, uh,
and it's isolated, so it makes it very difficult to

(16:19):
breach the system. If there are no pathways, you know,
into the system online, then hackers can't really gain access,
at least not remotely. But Mordecai Gurry, a security researcher,
it came up with a way that theoretically would let
someone steal from an air gapped system and to do
so wirelessly. And that sounds impossible, right, and it almost is.

(16:43):
So to get this to work, first you would have
to inject malware into the air gap system, which pretty
much means you or someone under your direction or you know,
maybe you trick them or whatever. They have to physically
deliver malware to the system in some way. Maybe it's
playing a USB stick into a machine and transferring malware
that way. So that's reason number one that this is impractical,

(17:07):
but not impossible. You know, people have been able to
get physical access to air gap systems before, but it's
not always easy. I mean, you you might find it
easier if you're able to trick someone on the inside
to do it for you, but even that's risky. So
then the researcher discovered that these SATA cables s A
t A cables that are used in these computer systems

(17:29):
EMIT a low power radio signal between five point nine
and five point nine six giga hurts, and that's not surprising.
If you run current through a wire, it will generate
an electromagnetic field. So these signals could act kind of

(17:50):
like Morse code. You know each character as it goes
over this wire. Uh emits a slightly different signal. So
if you set up a receiver near a compromised air
gapped system, and by near I mean you'd have to
be within a hundred times or three point nine feet
in order to not have too much of an error

(18:12):
rate introduced into the signal, and you limited your transmission
bit rate to about one bit per second. Remember a
bit is a zero or a one. Then it means
you would have to sit really close to the system
for a really long time in order to get anything useful. Presumably,
if you could somehow get access to this air gap

(18:35):
system and then planned to computer with wireless capability close
enough to it in a way that folks are not
likely to see it and thus remove it, you could
very slowly siphon information from that target system. So it's
good to be aware that this vulnerability as possible, but
it's an unlikely scenario you would ever encounter in real life.

(18:55):
And that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. Hope
you enjoyed it. Please reach out to me and let
me know about any topics you would like me to
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(19:23):
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