June 8, 2021 • 27 mins
A massive sting operation brings down 800 criminals around the world thanks to an "encrypted" messaging app. Bitcoin value sinks again after the US seizes a ransom paid in cryptocurrency. And in the future you might cruise Amsterdam's canals on a robotic boat.
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Episode Transcript
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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. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and all of all things tech. And this is the
tech news for Tuesday, June eight, twent d twenty one.
(00:26):
And if you were up in the wee hours of
the morning today, if you were in the US, or
you know, if you're not in the United States, if
you were just you know, up, you might have noticed
that some popular websites were not up. They were down,
big big websites, including sites like Spotify, Twitch, Reddit, HBO, Max, Stripe, PayPal,
(00:50):
and then news organizations like The Guardian, The New York Times,
CNN and many more. Also, some government websites in the
UK were down. So what was going on? One? I mean,
when this kind of thing happens, clearly something major is
going down on the back end. The possibility that all
of these sites would suffer unrelated issues at the same
time is just too low, right, So what happened? Well,
(01:13):
apparently the root cause was a problem with a c
d N provider called Fastly, But that naturally raises a question,
what in the blue blazes is a c d N. Well,
that initialism stands for content delivery network, which kind of
(01:36):
gives you an idea of what it does, but it's
a little you know, misleading as well. So a c
d N is a collection of Internet servers that are
distributed across different regions that collectively work to deliver faster
Internet content to end users. It's kind of like an
edge network strategy essentially, you can think of it. It It
(02:00):
is almost like a dispersed team of experts who are
all working on the same problem, except, of course we're
talking about computer servers here. And interestingly, these servers don't
actually host any content themselves. They aren't like holding the
videos on HBO Max or anything like that, so they're
not the repository of information that we find from the
(02:22):
various sites we visit and services we use. Instead, these
servers will load content into a cash memory, so you
can think of this as like very temporary storage, and
then they can serve that up to end users. So
if you're trying to watch a movie on HBO Max,
(02:42):
the host server for that content could be sending out
data to c d end servers, which in turn consent
that to you, and that helps relieve the host server,
the one that actually contains all the stuff for real zs.
It saves them from having to handle all of that
load all by itself, and it helps ensure a faster
(03:02):
experience for the end user. But Fastly apparently had some
sort of massive malfunction that brought down the c d
N system, and that meant that the support that these
these different sites usually have was suddenly gone. As a result,
millions of people found that numerous websites and services were
totally unreachable, and in the case of stuff like Stripe
(03:26):
and PayPal, that could be a really big disruption for commerce.
Plenty of small merchants depend upon these services, so this
was more serious than just not being able to watch
a twitch streamer or have a twitch stream or access
of Spotify playlist for an hour. Fastly was able to
(03:46):
resolve the problem after about an hour, with service appearing
to be restored by noon in UK time. So it's
a really good thing that Fastly's response didn't move slowly.
Our next story for today's news makes me feel like
I kind of got into a time machine and then
somehow went back to the late nineties and early two
(04:08):
thousand's and that's because this story involves big music labels
suing the proverbial pants off of an Internet service provider
because of alleged piracy committed by that I s P
s customers. And y'all, we went through this two decades
ago and the music companies did not come out looking
(04:29):
real good back then, So what exactly is going on now?
While back in two thousand eighteen, a group of music
companies that include Sony Music, no surprise there, Universal, and
Warner filed a joint lawsuit against Cox Communications, and the
claim was that Cox did not do enough to curtail
(04:52):
piracy across its network as an I s P. The
claim said that despite these companies direct in Cox to
specific I P addresses that were linked to music piracy,
the company didn't actually go so far as to ban
people from its service, and thus Cox was culpable for
the losses that these companies suffered due to piracy. And
(05:16):
by the way, it is actually impossible to calculate the
losses from piracy because there's no way to establish if
someone would have purchased a piece of media legitimately if
they hadn't pirated it first. Because this isn't like physical media, right,
It's not like someone broke into a warehouse and stole
(05:36):
a palette of albums or something. They took a copy
of a digital file which can be copied infinitely. And
so unless you can actually prove that that person was
going to buy that digital media but didn't, then how
can you actually say the company was out any money?
(05:58):
I mean, if I don't buy an album, right Like,
if I just decide, oh, I don't want that, well,
it's not like I cost Sony Music money and that
that seems like a pretty reasonable argument, right I decide
I don't want that album, I didn't rob anyone of
that sale. So you can't actually establish how much money
(06:20):
was lost as a result of piracy. There probably is
some amount lost, I mean, it's not like it's not
like it's a victimless crime. It's not that it's you know,
you just can't actually put a value to that loss
because there's no way of knowing what it could be.
And yet the jury in this case back in two
thousand eighteen, actually they found uh in the favor of
(06:43):
the music labels. In two thousand nineteen, not only did
they agree with the music labels, they agreed to an
award of nearly one hundred thousand dollars per instance of piracy,
and there were more than ten thousand instances of piracy,
which meant that Cox's court mandated fine is that the
(07:04):
billion dollar mark yaws a one billion dollars in fines
to pay to these music labels. Anyway, obviously, Cox appealed
that decision, and so that trial went to appeal, and
earlier this year that appeals court upheld that first decision.
So they said, no, the court got it right. And
(07:26):
now groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or e f F,
and the Center for Democracy and Technology and a couple
of others have issued their own court filing regarding this case.
These organizations point out that the court decision is incredibly harmful.
If I s p s potentially face fines in the
(07:46):
billion dollar range, they are far more likely to boot
people off their service if they get a notice from
a music label. But it's never as simple as that.
For example, let's just take my house, right, I live
with my wife as long as you know she lets me,
which so far has gone pretty well. Don't mess this
(08:08):
up for me anyway. My wife and I use a
household internet connection, right, It's not like we have two
separate internet networks, and she uses one and I used
the other. So if one of us were to run
a foul because we were, you know, being a dirty,
dirty pirate and I don't know, we were like trying
to steal the SpongeBob SquarePants musical soundtrack, our I s
(08:32):
P could get a notice from the copyright holder and
then give us the boot. But let's say that I
was just the one who did this, right, Like it
was just me that wanted that soundtrack so darn badly.
My wife is completely innocent. She doesn't know about it,
she's never listened to it. She certainly wasn't aware that
I was stealing it. Well, clearly, if the I s
P boots us, that doesn't just affect me, It affects
(08:54):
my wife, who is completely innocent of having pirated the music.
About how a simple sponge say bikini bottom And the
e f F points this out. It says, this is
just the tip of the iceberg, and IP address could
mean that the I s P has to boot off
an entire college, or a hospital, or a library, or
even municipality WiFi. I mean, the group rightly points out
(09:19):
that these damages aren't anywhere close to the realities of
any harm suffered, and that it punishes the innocent as
well as the guilty. So essentially, these groups are saying
that the court got it totally wrong, that the court
misinterpreted the law, and that allowing for an award that
is completely out of alignment of any actual damage suffered
(09:41):
is also unjust, and that the consequences will be catastrophic
because I s p s will be far more trigger
happy to boot people off of their service if the
if the alternative means that these companies are going to
get you know, hit by bill in dollar fines, so
(10:03):
this is just a bad situation. They also make the
point that the internet access these days is really an
integral component in participating in modern society, and if you
cut someone off from that, that's a non trivial problem.
It's like saying, all right, well, because you you know,
stole a bottle of water at the local convenience store,
(10:24):
we're shutting waters off at your house. Like that's not cool.
And Cox has appealed the court's decision, so this is
going to go to another appeals court. Uh And currently
the company, the I s P actually has a lot
of support behind it from various legal scholars and advocacy groups,
which is interesting. I s p s frequently get a
(10:47):
lot of flak because of anti competitive stuff that I
s p s tend to be at least tangentially involved in.
But in this case, you have a lot of people
siding with the I s P and we'll have to
where this goes next. Meanwhile, it's still a bumpy ride
for bitcoin. Back in March, the cryptocurrency hit an all
(11:09):
time high value of nearly sixty five dollars per bitcoin.
Later that value plunged to nearly half of that, in
fact lower than half of that at some points, hitting
close to thirty dollars, and after a brief recovery, the
value took another hit again earlier today. So what's going on, Well,
(11:32):
there are a few things that are happening all at
the same time, and it's really impossible to say which
things are chiefly responsible for this. But one thing is
we could be seeing a bear market in which the
value will be on the decline until enough people start
buying into bitcoin again on a really large scale to
(11:52):
cause this to switch over to a bowl market again.
Bull market is where the value starts to climb because
more and more people are buying into it. But a
different contributing factor could be that recently, the US government
managed to recover most of a ransom that Colonial Pipeline
paid to ransomware hackers earlier this year. Alright, so quick
(12:13):
summary of that story. Colonial Pipeline supplies fuel to the
eastern half of the United States, and the company was
hit with a ransomware attack that shut down its pipeline,
or really the company shut down its own pipeline sort
of as a precautionary measure to make sure that the
malware did not spread throughout the entire system. But this
caused a short term gas shortage and a massive spike
(12:38):
in fuel prices in much of the US, and then
the shortage got way worse because some people decided to
hoard gasoline, which is both selfish and stupid. Gasoline does
not keep forever, so if you hoard more than you need,
there's a good chance that gasoline is going to essentially
lose its potency before you get around using it. And
(13:00):
of course it's really dangerous to store gasoline unless you
have the proper storage containers, and a lot of people
were filling up all sorts of stuff with gasoline and
just creating massive potential disasters. Anyway, Colonial Pipeline actually got
things back in action fairly quickly, but it turned out
the reason they were able to do so was that
(13:21):
the company actually complied with the hackers demands and paid
the ransom, which is something that most people, including me,
say is a dumb, dumb idea because it reinforces that
strategy in the first place, and it makes future ransomware
attacks more likely. Bad move Colonial Pipeline. Now we hear
(13:42):
that the US government was able to seize most of
that ransom that was paid to the hackers, which of
course had been paid in cryptocurrency. And these kind of
stories definitely are a bad look for cryptocurrency in general,
which frequently gets associated with illegal and unseemly active ds. Now,
I want to point out that's not necessarily the fault
(14:04):
of the currencies. The idea behind cryptocurrency is that it
should be usable for any sort of transaction, not necessarily
illegal ones. But just like technologies such as peer to
peer networks, we see folks associate the technology with illegal
activity and these kind of stories don't help. And how
(14:27):
did the US recover more than two million dollars in
ransom Well, they apparently got access to the decryption key
for one of the ransomware attackers digital wallets, which is
kind of like handing someone the key to a vault.
And hearing that a government managed to take money away
from someone using cryptocurrency probably has at least some percentage
(14:51):
of bitcoin enthusiasts upset. Anyway, that may have contributed to
another slip in bitcoin value, which dipped below thirty dollars
this morning. Oh I should also mention that just a
few days ago, Elon Musk once again managed to weigh
in on this whole thing. He tweeted a breakup meme
(15:12):
suggesting that he has fallen out of love with bitcoin,
and the bitcoin value took a little hit at that point,
to which of course lead to more complaints that Musk
is manipulating markets. That's something he's been accused of multiple
times at this point. And what all this says to
me is that people should just stop following Elon Musk
on social media. That guy. All right, we have a
(15:37):
few more stories to get through today, but first let's
take a quick break. Having just spoken about, you know,
government turning the tables on tech, let's continue that for
a second and talk about the FBI's massive staying operation
(15:58):
with regard to an encrypted mess saging service. So here's
the pitch. You got your criminal types right, you got
your Tony sopranos and whatnot. These folks need to communicate
with one another, but they also need those communications to
be secure or else the heat catches on right next thing,
you know, you've got the FEDS on your case. So
(16:19):
you seek out services that allow you to communicate over
encrypted lines so that anyone who intercepts that communication will
just get absolute nonsense out of it. They'll be unable
to tell what has been said between the two or
more parties. But what if it turned out that the
FEDS were the ones who designed the communication tool in
(16:40):
the first place. Well that's what's happened here with various
law enforcement agencies around the world, not just the FBI.
UH law enforcement in Australia and other places have played
a major part as well, and they all work together
in order to make this happen. It started out back
in and it became known in turn only as Operation
(17:01):
Trojan Shield. So law enforcement created a what was said
to be a secure messaging app called a NOM a
n O M. The phones that a NOM we're on
couldn't make calls. They weren't enabled to make phone calls
or really do anything else other than use this app.
(17:21):
This a no mapp. They could only really communicate that way,
And the FEDS made sure that these phones would only
be available through the black market, and that made them
look real legit shady, like this is this is illegal stuff,
and so the only way to get it is through
the black market, and thus it seems in a weird
way legitimate. Right. So some Australian agents who were deep
(17:44):
undercover had phones with a NOM on it, and they
gave those phones out to high ranking profile members of
various crime groups and syndicates and families so like the
mafia and outlaw biker gangs and stuff like that, and
gave them recommendations to use the app for communication. Those
(18:04):
recommendations filtered through the various organized crime groups with more
people switching over to it, believing that this would mass
their activities from government agencies. But in fact, the law
enforcement groups had backdoor access to that messaging the entire time,
and they can monitor communications and set up a massive
sting operation. So law enforcement intercepted millions of messages between
(18:29):
folks like drug traffickers and weapons smugglers, Asian crime syndicates,
outlaw biker groups, and more. And the public only learned
about this operation on Monday, when it was revealed that
law enforcement had made hundreds of arrests, like around eight
hundred of them all around the world. Yauza and now
for a story about Apple, actually a couple of them.
(18:52):
The company recently announced some privacy related features at the
Worldwide Developers Conference or w w d C, and one
of those is called Private Relay, which sounds really interesting.
It prevents any entity from tracking your browser history that
includes your I s P and it includes Apple. So
in other words, you can browse using Private Relay and
(19:16):
there's no there's no one out there who's tracking which
sites you have visited during that browsing session. However, this announcement,
which I think is really cool. I think private Relay
is really interesting. I'm very curious how it actually works.
But there is a qualifier, and that is this feature
will not be available worldwide. Apple is not going to
(19:36):
make it available in Saudi Arabia, China, South Africa, Belarus, Egypt,
Kazakhstan and a few other countries. The company so far
has not actually commented on why these regions will not
have access to this particular feature, but I'm pretty sure
most of us can make at least some educated guesses,
(19:57):
because in many of these countries, governments are not too
keen on citizens having unfettered and thus uncontrolled access to
the Internet for various reasons. In places like China, accessing
sites outside of the country itself typically requires you to
make illegal use of VPNs to spoof where your location is,
(20:19):
and that way you can bypass the Great Firewall of China.
But should China come after a VPN service, then the
user data that that VPN service is steward of could
be at risk. So let's say that it's a VPN
that keeps at least a short term record of what
sites users have accessed. Well, if China goes after that
(20:41):
VPN service, they could presumably get hold of that information
and thus ultimately come after citizens who are making use
of that VPN service. Now, some VPN services are great
and that they wipe all that data very quickly regularly,
so that there's nothing for anyone to get hold of.
There's no there's no uh, no footprints left behind or
(21:03):
anything like that. But not all VPNs are like that.
And if you've got, you know, the power of the
Chinese government coming after you, you might be compelled to
hand over user data. So a feature like private relay
could serve as a protection against that. You can use
private relay in conjunction with a VPN and leave no
(21:24):
trace behind and thus have better access to information. Well,
I would hazard a guess that the Chinese government really
doesn't want Apple to include a feature that would allow
citizens to potentially bypass national restrictions on Internet access. And
China represents a truly huge market for any company. I mean,
(21:45):
that's more than a billion people live in the country,
so obviously it's an enormous market. So most companies are
not so firm in their convictions about providing stuff like
privacy and security in order to give up on that
lucrative a market. Apple is by no means the only
company to make allowances for governments that a lot of
folks would refer to as oppressive. So while I am
(22:08):
singling out Apple here because that's what the story is about,
I do want to make it clear they ain't the
only ones who do this sort of thing. It's not
like Apple is being particularly disingenuous. Uh, this is pretty
much across the board. Next, we have a story about
a lawsuit aimed at Apple. This one claims that the
most recent versions of iOS have caused older phones to
(22:31):
encounter performance issues, namely around slower processing speeds and shorter
battery life. Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because we've
actually seen this happen a few times before. But the
argument now is that as Apple releases new hardware and
new versions of iOS, it is at least somewhat intentionally
(22:51):
designing the OS to make older iPhones perform at a
substandard level as part of a planned obsolescence strategy, thus
incuraging customers to upgrade to the latest version of the iPhone.
The complaint actually includes this passage quote Apple benefits from
not having to tell existing and prospective iPhone users that
(23:12):
updates touted to add desirable features and to fix security
and other bugs have a significant countervailing downside in the
form of decreased processing speed and battery life end quote. So,
in other words, this complaint is saying Apples hyping up
all the new features of the more recent versions of
iOS in an effort to convince people to download those updates.
(23:36):
But then the update allegedly nerves older iPhone models and
thus pushes customers to have to buy new iPhones. So,
in other words, they're saying that this is this is
unfair market practices essentially, is what this comes down to.
So I'll have to keep an eye on this and
see how this goes. Typically you see issues like this
gets settled out of court. It's very rare that it
(23:57):
actually goes the distance. In drone news, for the first time,
an unmanned aerial vehicle served as the refueling aircraft for
a piloted US jet fighter in mid air. The drone,
manufactured by Boeing, connected via hose to the jet fighter
as the two flew over the midwestern United States in
(24:18):
a four and a half hour long test flight. So
the drone flew ahead of the jet fighter and so
it extended a hose behind it, and it was the
jet fighter pilot's job to position the jet so that
it could follow the drone at the proper distance and
dock with the end of that hose, and then the
refueling followed more than three gallons of fuel were transferred
(24:42):
from the drone to the jet fighter. So the test
was a success, and it could point to a future
in which militaries are able to free up pilots from
flying refueling missions. You know, they could shift that responsibility
over to unmanned drones and the human pilots could be
then go on to perform or mother tasks, presumably you know,
(25:02):
ones that are are more oriented towards specific mission goals
as opposed to support. So that is interesting. And finally,
we've talked about autonomous cars and trucks and drones and stuff,
but now it's time to talk about autonomous boats. Over
in Amsterdam, the city is testing out autonomous boats in
(25:24):
its various canal systems. The row boats, which is not
a rowboat as in row row row your boat, but
as in a robot boat, are part of a five
year project to test how the boats will be able
to navigate the various waterways of Amsterdam and how they
might become an integral part of Amsterdam's transportation infrastructure. So
(25:47):
some of the proposed uses for these boats include promoting tourism.
That's a big one, so allowing tourists to get around
the city in an interesting way, also to reduce traffic
congestion Sterdam's roads, because the canals are actually underutilized compared
to the surface roads of Amsterdam, and because the boats
(26:09):
are actually modular in design and thus can easily fit
together to create larger structures. They could possibly serve as
floating bridges or stages should the need arise. But that's
all going to be in the future, because as of
right now, the engineers at M I T and other
places who are working on this project, they say that
(26:29):
the boats are probably two to four years out from
having a sophisticated enough navigation and UH and and motor
system to get around reliably and safely without having an
operator on board, So it will be a little while
longer before they can enter full operation, assuming it all
works out. But next up, I say, is Venice, because
(26:52):
I want my robot gondolier baby. I want that that
robo voice singing out as we go through the canals
of Venice. A guy can dream. I'm wouldn't a robot
be cute wearing a little striped shirt and little straw hat.
You know, I'm just saying. Anyway, that's it for the
news for today. June one. If you have suggestions for
(27:17):
topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to
me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hs W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
My Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(27:39):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and all of all things tech. And this is the
tech news for Tuesday, June eight, twent d twenty one.
(00:26):
And if you were up in the wee hours of
the morning today, if you were in the US, or
you know, if you're not in the United States, if
you were just you know, up, you might have noticed
that some popular websites were not up. They were down,
big big websites, including sites like Spotify, Twitch, Reddit, HBO, Max, Stripe, PayPal,
(00:50):
and then news organizations like The Guardian, The New York Times,
CNN and many more. Also, some government websites in the
UK were down. So what was going on? One? I mean,
when this kind of thing happens, clearly something major is
going down on the back end. The possibility that all
of these sites would suffer unrelated issues at the same
time is just too low, right, So what happened? Well,
(01:13):
apparently the root cause was a problem with a c
d N provider called Fastly, But that naturally raises a question,
what in the blue blazes is a c d N. Well,
that initialism stands for content delivery network, which kind of
(01:36):
gives you an idea of what it does, but it's
a little you know, misleading as well. So a c
d N is a collection of Internet servers that are
distributed across different regions that collectively work to deliver faster
Internet content to end users. It's kind of like an
edge network strategy essentially, you can think of it. It It
(02:00):
is almost like a dispersed team of experts who are
all working on the same problem, except, of course we're
talking about computer servers here. And interestingly, these servers don't
actually host any content themselves. They aren't like holding the
videos on HBO Max or anything like that, so they're
not the repository of information that we find from the
(02:22):
various sites we visit and services we use. Instead, these
servers will load content into a cash memory, so you
can think of this as like very temporary storage, and
then they can serve that up to end users. So
if you're trying to watch a movie on HBO Max,
(02:42):
the host server for that content could be sending out
data to c d end servers, which in turn consent
that to you, and that helps relieve the host server,
the one that actually contains all the stuff for real zs.
It saves them from having to handle all of that
load all by itself, and it helps ensure a faster
(03:02):
experience for the end user. But Fastly apparently had some
sort of massive malfunction that brought down the c d
N system, and that meant that the support that these
these different sites usually have was suddenly gone. As a result,
millions of people found that numerous websites and services were
totally unreachable, and in the case of stuff like Stripe
(03:26):
and PayPal, that could be a really big disruption for commerce.
Plenty of small merchants depend upon these services, so this
was more serious than just not being able to watch
a twitch streamer or have a twitch stream or access
of Spotify playlist for an hour. Fastly was able to
(03:46):
resolve the problem after about an hour, with service appearing
to be restored by noon in UK time. So it's
a really good thing that Fastly's response didn't move slowly.
Our next story for today's news makes me feel like
I kind of got into a time machine and then
somehow went back to the late nineties and early two
(04:08):
thousand's and that's because this story involves big music labels
suing the proverbial pants off of an Internet service provider
because of alleged piracy committed by that I s P
s customers. And y'all, we went through this two decades
ago and the music companies did not come out looking
(04:29):
real good back then, So what exactly is going on now?
While back in two thousand eighteen, a group of music
companies that include Sony Music, no surprise there, Universal, and
Warner filed a joint lawsuit against Cox Communications, and the
claim was that Cox did not do enough to curtail
(04:52):
piracy across its network as an I s P. The
claim said that despite these companies direct in Cox to
specific I P addresses that were linked to music piracy,
the company didn't actually go so far as to ban
people from its service, and thus Cox was culpable for
the losses that these companies suffered due to piracy. And
(05:16):
by the way, it is actually impossible to calculate the
losses from piracy because there's no way to establish if
someone would have purchased a piece of media legitimately if
they hadn't pirated it first. Because this isn't like physical media, right,
It's not like someone broke into a warehouse and stole
(05:36):
a palette of albums or something. They took a copy
of a digital file which can be copied infinitely. And
so unless you can actually prove that that person was
going to buy that digital media but didn't, then how
can you actually say the company was out any money?
(05:58):
I mean, if I don't buy an album, right Like,
if I just decide, oh, I don't want that, well,
it's not like I cost Sony Music money and that
that seems like a pretty reasonable argument, right I decide
I don't want that album, I didn't rob anyone of
that sale. So you can't actually establish how much money
(06:20):
was lost as a result of piracy. There probably is
some amount lost, I mean, it's not like it's not
like it's a victimless crime. It's not that it's you know,
you just can't actually put a value to that loss
because there's no way of knowing what it could be.
And yet the jury in this case back in two
thousand eighteen, actually they found uh in the favor of
(06:43):
the music labels. In two thousand nineteen, not only did
they agree with the music labels, they agreed to an
award of nearly one hundred thousand dollars per instance of piracy,
and there were more than ten thousand instances of piracy,
which meant that Cox's court mandated fine is that the
(07:04):
billion dollar mark yaws a one billion dollars in fines
to pay to these music labels. Anyway, obviously, Cox appealed
that decision, and so that trial went to appeal, and
earlier this year that appeals court upheld that first decision.
So they said, no, the court got it right. And
(07:26):
now groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or e f F,
and the Center for Democracy and Technology and a couple
of others have issued their own court filing regarding this case.
These organizations point out that the court decision is incredibly harmful.
If I s p s potentially face fines in the
(07:46):
billion dollar range, they are far more likely to boot
people off their service if they get a notice from
a music label. But it's never as simple as that.
For example, let's just take my house, right, I live
with my wife as long as you know she lets me,
which so far has gone pretty well. Don't mess this
(08:08):
up for me anyway. My wife and I use a
household internet connection, right, It's not like we have two
separate internet networks, and she uses one and I used
the other. So if one of us were to run
a foul because we were, you know, being a dirty,
dirty pirate and I don't know, we were like trying
to steal the SpongeBob SquarePants musical soundtrack, our I s
(08:32):
P could get a notice from the copyright holder and
then give us the boot. But let's say that I
was just the one who did this, right, Like it
was just me that wanted that soundtrack so darn badly.
My wife is completely innocent. She doesn't know about it,
she's never listened to it. She certainly wasn't aware that
I was stealing it. Well, clearly, if the I s
P boots us, that doesn't just affect me, It affects
(08:54):
my wife, who is completely innocent of having pirated the music.
About how a simple sponge say bikini bottom And the
e f F points this out. It says, this is
just the tip of the iceberg, and IP address could
mean that the I s P has to boot off
an entire college, or a hospital, or a library, or
even municipality WiFi. I mean, the group rightly points out
(09:19):
that these damages aren't anywhere close to the realities of
any harm suffered, and that it punishes the innocent as
well as the guilty. So essentially, these groups are saying
that the court got it totally wrong, that the court
misinterpreted the law, and that allowing for an award that
is completely out of alignment of any actual damage suffered
(09:41):
is also unjust, and that the consequences will be catastrophic
because I s p s will be far more trigger
happy to boot people off of their service if the
if the alternative means that these companies are going to
get you know, hit by bill in dollar fines, so
(10:03):
this is just a bad situation. They also make the
point that the internet access these days is really an
integral component in participating in modern society, and if you
cut someone off from that, that's a non trivial problem.
It's like saying, all right, well, because you you know,
stole a bottle of water at the local convenience store,
(10:24):
we're shutting waters off at your house. Like that's not cool.
And Cox has appealed the court's decision, so this is
going to go to another appeals court. Uh And currently
the company, the I s P actually has a lot
of support behind it from various legal scholars and advocacy groups,
which is interesting. I s p s frequently get a
(10:47):
lot of flak because of anti competitive stuff that I
s p s tend to be at least tangentially involved in.
But in this case, you have a lot of people
siding with the I s P and we'll have to
where this goes next. Meanwhile, it's still a bumpy ride
for bitcoin. Back in March, the cryptocurrency hit an all
(11:09):
time high value of nearly sixty five dollars per bitcoin.
Later that value plunged to nearly half of that, in
fact lower than half of that at some points, hitting
close to thirty dollars, and after a brief recovery, the
value took another hit again earlier today. So what's going on, Well,
(11:32):
there are a few things that are happening all at
the same time, and it's really impossible to say which
things are chiefly responsible for this. But one thing is
we could be seeing a bear market in which the
value will be on the decline until enough people start
buying into bitcoin again on a really large scale to
(11:52):
cause this to switch over to a bowl market again.
Bull market is where the value starts to climb because
more and more people are buying into it. But a
different contributing factor could be that recently, the US government
managed to recover most of a ransom that Colonial Pipeline
paid to ransomware hackers earlier this year. Alright, so quick
(12:13):
summary of that story. Colonial Pipeline supplies fuel to the
eastern half of the United States, and the company was
hit with a ransomware attack that shut down its pipeline,
or really the company shut down its own pipeline sort
of as a precautionary measure to make sure that the
malware did not spread throughout the entire system. But this
caused a short term gas shortage and a massive spike
(12:38):
in fuel prices in much of the US, and then
the shortage got way worse because some people decided to
hoard gasoline, which is both selfish and stupid. Gasoline does
not keep forever, so if you hoard more than you need,
there's a good chance that gasoline is going to essentially
lose its potency before you get around using it. And
(13:00):
of course it's really dangerous to store gasoline unless you
have the proper storage containers, and a lot of people
were filling up all sorts of stuff with gasoline and
just creating massive potential disasters. Anyway, Colonial Pipeline actually got
things back in action fairly quickly, but it turned out
the reason they were able to do so was that
(13:21):
the company actually complied with the hackers demands and paid
the ransom, which is something that most people, including me,
say is a dumb, dumb idea because it reinforces that
strategy in the first place, and it makes future ransomware
attacks more likely. Bad move Colonial Pipeline. Now we hear
(13:42):
that the US government was able to seize most of
that ransom that was paid to the hackers, which of
course had been paid in cryptocurrency. And these kind of
stories definitely are a bad look for cryptocurrency in general,
which frequently gets associated with illegal and unseemly active ds. Now,
I want to point out that's not necessarily the fault
(14:04):
of the currencies. The idea behind cryptocurrency is that it
should be usable for any sort of transaction, not necessarily
illegal ones. But just like technologies such as peer to
peer networks, we see folks associate the technology with illegal
activity and these kind of stories don't help. And how
(14:27):
did the US recover more than two million dollars in
ransom Well, they apparently got access to the decryption key
for one of the ransomware attackers digital wallets, which is
kind of like handing someone the key to a vault.
And hearing that a government managed to take money away
from someone using cryptocurrency probably has at least some percentage
(14:51):
of bitcoin enthusiasts upset. Anyway, that may have contributed to
another slip in bitcoin value, which dipped below thirty dollars
this morning. Oh I should also mention that just a
few days ago, Elon Musk once again managed to weigh
in on this whole thing. He tweeted a breakup meme
(15:12):
suggesting that he has fallen out of love with bitcoin,
and the bitcoin value took a little hit at that point,
to which of course lead to more complaints that Musk
is manipulating markets. That's something he's been accused of multiple
times at this point. And what all this says to
me is that people should just stop following Elon Musk
on social media. That guy. All right, we have a
(15:37):
few more stories to get through today, but first let's
take a quick break. Having just spoken about, you know,
government turning the tables on tech, let's continue that for
a second and talk about the FBI's massive staying operation
(15:58):
with regard to an encrypted mess saging service. So here's
the pitch. You got your criminal types right, you got
your Tony sopranos and whatnot. These folks need to communicate
with one another, but they also need those communications to
be secure or else the heat catches on right next thing,
you know, you've got the FEDS on your case. So
(16:19):
you seek out services that allow you to communicate over
encrypted lines so that anyone who intercepts that communication will
just get absolute nonsense out of it. They'll be unable
to tell what has been said between the two or
more parties. But what if it turned out that the
FEDS were the ones who designed the communication tool in
(16:40):
the first place. Well that's what's happened here with various
law enforcement agencies around the world, not just the FBI.
UH law enforcement in Australia and other places have played
a major part as well, and they all work together
in order to make this happen. It started out back
in and it became known in turn only as Operation
(17:01):
Trojan Shield. So law enforcement created a what was said
to be a secure messaging app called a NOM a
n O M. The phones that a NOM we're on
couldn't make calls. They weren't enabled to make phone calls
or really do anything else other than use this app.
(17:21):
This a no mapp. They could only really communicate that way,
And the FEDS made sure that these phones would only
be available through the black market, and that made them
look real legit shady, like this is this is illegal stuff,
and so the only way to get it is through
the black market, and thus it seems in a weird
way legitimate. Right. So some Australian agents who were deep
(17:44):
undercover had phones with a NOM on it, and they
gave those phones out to high ranking profile members of
various crime groups and syndicates and families so like the
mafia and outlaw biker gangs and stuff like that, and
gave them recommendations to use the app for communication. Those
(18:04):
recommendations filtered through the various organized crime groups with more
people switching over to it, believing that this would mass
their activities from government agencies. But in fact, the law
enforcement groups had backdoor access to that messaging the entire time,
and they can monitor communications and set up a massive
sting operation. So law enforcement intercepted millions of messages between
(18:29):
folks like drug traffickers and weapons smugglers, Asian crime syndicates,
outlaw biker groups, and more. And the public only learned
about this operation on Monday, when it was revealed that
law enforcement had made hundreds of arrests, like around eight
hundred of them all around the world. Yauza and now
for a story about Apple, actually a couple of them.
(18:52):
The company recently announced some privacy related features at the
Worldwide Developers Conference or w w d C, and one
of those is called Private Relay, which sounds really interesting.
It prevents any entity from tracking your browser history that
includes your I s P and it includes Apple. So
in other words, you can browse using Private Relay and
(19:16):
there's no there's no one out there who's tracking which
sites you have visited during that browsing session. However, this announcement,
which I think is really cool. I think private Relay
is really interesting. I'm very curious how it actually works.
But there is a qualifier, and that is this feature
will not be available worldwide. Apple is not going to
(19:36):
make it available in Saudi Arabia, China, South Africa, Belarus, Egypt,
Kazakhstan and a few other countries. The company so far
has not actually commented on why these regions will not
have access to this particular feature, but I'm pretty sure
most of us can make at least some educated guesses,
(19:57):
because in many of these countries, governments are not too
keen on citizens having unfettered and thus uncontrolled access to
the Internet for various reasons. In places like China, accessing
sites outside of the country itself typically requires you to
make illegal use of VPNs to spoof where your location is,
(20:19):
and that way you can bypass the Great Firewall of China.
But should China come after a VPN service, then the
user data that that VPN service is steward of could
be at risk. So let's say that it's a VPN
that keeps at least a short term record of what
sites users have accessed. Well, if China goes after that
(20:41):
VPN service, they could presumably get hold of that information
and thus ultimately come after citizens who are making use
of that VPN service. Now, some VPN services are great
and that they wipe all that data very quickly regularly,
so that there's nothing for anyone to get hold of.
There's no there's no uh, no footprints left behind or
(21:03):
anything like that. But not all VPNs are like that.
And if you've got, you know, the power of the
Chinese government coming after you, you might be compelled to
hand over user data. So a feature like private relay
could serve as a protection against that. You can use
private relay in conjunction with a VPN and leave no
(21:24):
trace behind and thus have better access to information. Well,
I would hazard a guess that the Chinese government really
doesn't want Apple to include a feature that would allow
citizens to potentially bypass national restrictions on Internet access. And
China represents a truly huge market for any company. I mean,
(21:45):
that's more than a billion people live in the country,
so obviously it's an enormous market. So most companies are
not so firm in their convictions about providing stuff like
privacy and security in order to give up on that
lucrative a market. Apple is by no means the only
company to make allowances for governments that a lot of
folks would refer to as oppressive. So while I am
(22:08):
singling out Apple here because that's what the story is about,
I do want to make it clear they ain't the
only ones who do this sort of thing. It's not
like Apple is being particularly disingenuous. Uh, this is pretty
much across the board. Next, we have a story about
a lawsuit aimed at Apple. This one claims that the
most recent versions of iOS have caused older phones to
(22:31):
encounter performance issues, namely around slower processing speeds and shorter
battery life. Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because we've
actually seen this happen a few times before. But the
argument now is that as Apple releases new hardware and
new versions of iOS, it is at least somewhat intentionally
(22:51):
designing the OS to make older iPhones perform at a
substandard level as part of a planned obsolescence strategy, thus
incuraging customers to upgrade to the latest version of the iPhone.
The complaint actually includes this passage quote Apple benefits from
not having to tell existing and prospective iPhone users that
(23:12):
updates touted to add desirable features and to fix security
and other bugs have a significant countervailing downside in the
form of decreased processing speed and battery life end quote. So,
in other words, this complaint is saying Apples hyping up
all the new features of the more recent versions of
iOS in an effort to convince people to download those updates.
(23:36):
But then the update allegedly nerves older iPhone models and
thus pushes customers to have to buy new iPhones. So,
in other words, they're saying that this is this is
unfair market practices essentially, is what this comes down to.
So I'll have to keep an eye on this and
see how this goes. Typically you see issues like this
gets settled out of court. It's very rare that it
(23:57):
actually goes the distance. In drone news, for the first time,
an unmanned aerial vehicle served as the refueling aircraft for
a piloted US jet fighter in mid air. The drone,
manufactured by Boeing, connected via hose to the jet fighter
as the two flew over the midwestern United States in
(24:18):
a four and a half hour long test flight. So
the drone flew ahead of the jet fighter and so
it extended a hose behind it, and it was the
jet fighter pilot's job to position the jet so that
it could follow the drone at the proper distance and
dock with the end of that hose, and then the
refueling followed more than three gallons of fuel were transferred
(24:42):
from the drone to the jet fighter. So the test
was a success, and it could point to a future
in which militaries are able to free up pilots from
flying refueling missions. You know, they could shift that responsibility
over to unmanned drones and the human pilots could be
then go on to perform or mother tasks, presumably you know,
(25:02):
ones that are are more oriented towards specific mission goals
as opposed to support. So that is interesting. And finally,
we've talked about autonomous cars and trucks and drones and stuff,
but now it's time to talk about autonomous boats. Over
in Amsterdam, the city is testing out autonomous boats in
(25:24):
its various canal systems. The row boats, which is not
a rowboat as in row row row your boat, but
as in a robot boat, are part of a five
year project to test how the boats will be able
to navigate the various waterways of Amsterdam and how they
might become an integral part of Amsterdam's transportation infrastructure. So
(25:47):
some of the proposed uses for these boats include promoting tourism.
That's a big one, so allowing tourists to get around
the city in an interesting way, also to reduce traffic
congestion Sterdam's roads, because the canals are actually underutilized compared
to the surface roads of Amsterdam, and because the boats
(26:09):
are actually modular in design and thus can easily fit
together to create larger structures. They could possibly serve as
floating bridges or stages should the need arise. But that's
all going to be in the future, because as of
right now, the engineers at M I T and other
places who are working on this project, they say that
(26:29):
the boats are probably two to four years out from
having a sophisticated enough navigation and UH and and motor
system to get around reliably and safely without having an
operator on board, So it will be a little while
longer before they can enter full operation, assuming it all
works out. But next up, I say, is Venice, because
(26:52):
I want my robot gondolier baby. I want that that
robo voice singing out as we go through the canals
of Venice. A guy can dream. I'm wouldn't a robot
be cute wearing a little striped shirt and little straw hat.
You know, I'm just saying. Anyway, that's it for the
news for today. June one. If you have suggestions for
(27:17):
topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to
me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hs W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
My Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(27:39):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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