February 2, 2024 • 36 mins
The Senate Judiciary Committee met with CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg with accusations that their companies are actively causing harm to children, and they weren't happy with the response. Plus, a judge tells Elon Musk that he will not be getting the massive compensation package promised to him by Tesla's board of directors. And TikTok says goodbye to Taylor Swift's music (and all other UMG tracks). Plus more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon
Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech
are you. It's time for the tech news for the
week ending on Friday, February two, two thy twenty four
(00:27):
and this week, tech leaders, including the CEOs of meta
x formerly known as Twitter, Snap, Discord, and TikTok all
met with the Senate Judiciary Committee here in the United States,
and it was a pretty sobering experience. The committee brought
forward families who had experienced tragedies in which children died
(00:48):
after they encountered various harmful people or situations or material
on these various platforms. The CEOs expressed their sympathy to
the families. Mark Zuckerberg even gave a somewhat emotional apology,
but the politicians found the response lackluster, as did many
of the parents, who said that the apologies kind of
(01:10):
rang hollow because there didn't seem to be any indication
that these companies were going to do anything different. The companies,
of course, said that they had been implementing various new
policies to protect children. You know, Meta has recently done that,
and so have some of the other platforms, But the
senators demanded to know why Section two thirty, which is
(01:31):
the US law that provides something of illegal shield platforms,
should protect these companies from being sued by the families. Now,
just as a reminder, these CEOs didn't draft section two thirty.
In fact, section two thirty was drafted before any of
these companies existed. The drafting was done by actual politicians,
(01:52):
and Section two thirty is not a blanket, get out
of court free card for platforms. So essentially, Section two
thirty says that a platform cannot be held responsible for
the material that's posted to that platform by users or
other parties. So if a user posts something illegal onto
a platform, that's the user's fault, not the platform's fault. Specifically,
(02:16):
section two thirty says, quote no provider or user of
an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher
or speaker of any information provided by another information content
provider end quote. But this protection itself has limits. If
a platform is violating federal criminal law, then it can
(02:38):
be held accountable. So if someone posts illegal material and
the platform is alerted to this, it's the platform's responsibility
to remove that material. This includes stuff like intellectual property violations. Right,
so if you were to post something that you don't
have ownership of and the platform allowed it to stay up,
(02:58):
the platform could be held account. This is why YouTube
is so aggressive when removing videos that get a copyright
removal request, because it's safer to take something down that
might be a copyright violation or it might not, rather
than to just leave it up long enough to determine
if it actually counts as a copyright violation. Anyway, politicians
on both sides of the aisle have issues with Section
(03:20):
two thirty, despite you know, not seeming to really understand
what section two thirty is all about. Complicating matters is
that these social platforms use algorithms to serve content up
to users. So if it were just a case of
users seeing the stuff that they personally followed, it might
be a different story. But some legislators argue that because
(03:42):
sites like Facebook or TikTok use an algorithm to determine
what a user actually sees on their timeline, then those
platforms are acting more like publishers because they are curating
material effectively and honestly This is an argument that I
at least think there's some merit to it. It's it's
hard to argue against it. I guess you could say
(04:04):
that these platforms don't actually know what their algorithms are
going to recommend to users, because it's completely dependent upon
what those users have interacted with and expressed interest in
in the past. So it's not like the platforms are
aware of what the algorithms are doing and the whole
process is automated. But at the same time, the platform
itself is determining what someone sees versus all the stuff
(04:27):
that's actually available. So it's a tricky situation. Anyway, a
lot of Senators weren't impressed with the CEOs and promised
to pass laws that would weaken Section two thirty and
place heavy requirements on the platforms to protect children. There
are critics of some of these laws. There's actually multiple
laws that are in various stages in the Senate and
(04:48):
the House right now. There are critics who say that
these laws compromise privacy and security, and they can infringe
upon the First Amendment, and that many of them could
be difficult, if not in possible, to enforce, and worse yet,
they could potentially pose a danger to people in the
LGBTQ community, because not everyone agrees as to what counts
(05:12):
as being harmful forward children, and some see just the
existence of say, transgender people as a danger, like just
the fact that they exist, that's dangerous. So that in
turn is a slippery slope. So, as I said, it's
a complicated issue. Speaking of Zuckerberg, he gave some insight
(05:32):
into Meta's AI strategy during an earnings call yesterday. He
claimed that the amount of publicly shared information on the
company's platforms represents a larger data set than what most
AI companies use when training AI, which is kind of
funny because you know, like Facebook, you Meta with Facebook
and Instagram and stuff. They do not want anyone crawling
(05:54):
their sites. They don't want any of that. That's they say,
that's against their terms of service. You cannot create bots
to crawl these sites to gather up information. They can
do it, though, but no one else can. And so
they're saying, hey, we have this huge repository of publicly
shared pictures and videos and other stuff. It's way bigger
(06:14):
than what anyone else has, So we could train up
a very intelligent AI as a result of that, and
Zuckerberg actually mentioned that general intelligence remains a goal of
general intelligence in the form of AI. I don't mean
that Zuckerberg is seeking general intelligence. They're too any jokes there.
So general intelligence would be AI that would work in
(06:35):
a way that's at least similar to how human intelligence works, right.
That seems to be able to think for itself. It's
a kind of strong AI. So this kind of work
AI research and development, it's really expensive. And Zuckerberg's team
hinted that Meta could increase spending by as much as
nine billion dollars this year compared to last year, and
that this could just be the beginning of additional expenditures
(06:59):
and research into development, which sounds to me a lot
like hol Zuckerberg warned that Meta would be spending increasing
amounts to build out the metaverse. For the record, they
gave the metaverse very brief mention in their earnings called document.
They called it their metaverse efforts had put it under
new business initiatives. I don't know how much momentum their
(07:23):
metaverse efforts still have. Like to me, it feels like
the whole metaverse craze has already significantly died down right,
like that was the huge thing more than a year ago,
and now people are not nearly as enthusiastic about it.
But maybe I'm just not listening to the right corners.
(07:44):
Maybe the Web three enthusiasts and the metaverse enthusiasts are
still going whole hog and I'm just not seeing. One
big news story that happened earlier this week is that
Amazon called off its planned acquisition of the company I Robot,
which is best known as the maker of the Roomba
vacuum robot. This actually surprised me, but that's because I
(08:04):
thought that this deal had already gone through. I thought
Amazon had already acquired I Robot. I was just under
the impression that they had already completed this. The two
companies originally agreed to this deal back in the summer
of twenty twenty two, so yeah, I just figured like
within a year and a half that they had closed
the deal. But no, they faced a lot of regulator opposition,
(08:24):
including here in the United States, and ultimately Amazon said
that they just didn't see a way forward. So Amazon said,
you know what, We're going to pay the ninety five
million dollar fee that's going to cost us to walk
away from this deal, and they did, and that's really
bad news for iRobot. So once upon a time, the
Rumba was like the dominant product in robot vacuums. In fact,
(08:48):
it was, to all intents and purposes, like the only
name in the space. But it didn't last because obviously
other companies were going to build competing products, and some
of those products lost less, sometimes significantly less than the Rumba.
They also weren't necessarily as good as the Rumba, but
for a lot of consumers out there, cheaper is more
(09:11):
important than performance, so I robots It's market share decline
year over year as more and more of these products
came out. The Amazon acquisition would have given I robot
the financial security to really stay in business and to
really invest in innovation. But with the deal falling through,
there's a big question mark hanging over I Robot and
(09:31):
whether or not it can even continue to function, at
least in the long term. Already, the company has announced
it will hold layoffs that will affect around three hundred
and fifty employees, and I Robots CEO Colin Engel is
also stepping down, as he said that he and the
board both felt that the company really needed a leader
with quote unquote turnaround experience. I feel really badly for
(09:56):
everyone affected by these layoffs, and I hope that I
Robot make a recovery because the company has been responsible
for numerous innovations in the robotic space, you know, the
robotic vacuum space in particular, like there have been a
lot of innovations that I Robot has driven that then
got adopted by the larger industry, and without I Robot
there to actually forge that path, we may see a
(10:19):
real decrease in innovation in that space. After a Tesla
shareholder brought a lawsuit against Tesla five years ago, a
judge in the state of Delaware has ruled that Elon
Musk is not, in fact entitled to a compensation package
with a value of upwards of fifty five billion dollars.
(10:41):
He's not going to get that, and like I said,
it only took five years of languishing through the court system,
because justice is swift here in the United States. So
the lawsuit argued that the board of directors was misusing
company funds by enriching Elon Musk when that money probably
should have gone somewhere else. Either reinvesting in the company
or distributed among shareholders whatever. The plaintiff argued that the
(11:02):
directors were not really independent of Musk, Essentially they were
his friends and cronies, and that he was using his
connections as personal connections among some of the board members
to get this incredibly favorable compensation deal, and that the
lawsuit also argued that Musk himself was effectively creating his
own compensation package, like Musk was the one who drew
(11:25):
it up and then got the board to sign off
on it, and gosh, I bet we all wish we
could do that, right. Ap News also has a really
helpful graphic to assist in understanding exactly how much money
fifty five billion dollars is for one thing. It illustrates
that you could spend a dollar for every second of
every day and it would take you oney seven hundred
(11:48):
and forty four years to spend all that cash. Crazy, right,
No one needs that much money. Nobody needs that much money.
He also said that you could give one hundred and
sixty three bucks to every single person in the United States, Like,
that's just it's just way too much money for any
one person to have. I don't care who you are anyway,
Musk as is his custom, went to X to vent
(12:10):
his spleen and said, never incorporate your company in the
state of Delaware. I recommend incorporating Nevada or Texas if
you prefer shareholders to decide matters. Ironically, it was a
shareholder who helped decide this matter, because it was a
shareholder who brought the lawsuit forward in the first place.
But yeah, I'm not surprised he's upset. Fifty five billion
dollars is like when you think you're gonna get it
(12:32):
and it turns out you're not. And also when, like
a couple of years ago, you spent forty four billion
dollars to buy a company that you are steadily running
into the ground. I mean, this is a lot to
take in, you know, speaking of a lot to take in,
We've got more news to cover, but before we get
to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay,
(12:59):
we're back. So this week, Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality
headset finally launched. As a reminder, this is the headset
with a starting price point of three thy four hundred
and ninety nine dollars and according to various sources, Apple
has sold more than two hundred thousand units so far.
I should point out that the company first made the
headsets available for pre order back in January, and the
(13:22):
majority of those sales were made in the first couple
of days that pre orders were open. After that they
trailed off significantly. But it's also two hundred thousand units.
That's also more than what analysts predict Apple actually has
available like manufactured, so some folks are going to be
waiting a little bit longer to get their new, very
(13:43):
expensive toy. Brian Heater of tech Crunch has some articles
about his experiences using the vision Pro. I recommend checking
those out. He mentions that he felt some motion sickness
on that first day, but he also admitted he's using
this device a lot because that's his job, right to
really put it through the paces and then report back
(14:05):
on it. You know, you might only be able to
use it for two and a half hours because that's
how long the battery lasts, and then you have to
recharge it. But he's been using it over and over
and over again. But he also makes a really good point.
He says the average vision Pro owner is also likely
to go ham at least initially upon purchasing their mixed
reality headset, because if you've spent three four hundred and
(14:28):
ninety nine bucks at minimum on something, you want to
get your money's worth. Anyway, I still think Apple's product
is really a niche one. Two hundred thousand units is
a lot, right that we should not dismiss selling two
hundred thousand of these things. But two hundred thousand units
is a fraction of what you would see with say
a new iPhone launch, for example. And while all the
(14:52):
reviews I've read praise the headsets, pass through video quality
and the image quality, I'm still not seeing a whole
lot of conversation about like any real killer apps. Now.
Maybe that will come in time, or maybe developers are
going to hold back and wait for a larger user
base before they invest the resources in developing apps for
(15:13):
this thing. And if that's the case, we could really
have a vicious cycle thing going on, sort of catch
twenty two, where developers won't make apps until they are
more users, but users aren't going to buy the product
until there are more apps running on it. That's a possibility.
I don't know. Maybe I'm ultimately wrong, Maybe this will
become the next like common household technology. But I don't
(15:35):
think that's possible at that price point, but who knows.
I've been wrong so many times before. The US Federal
Communications Commission or FCC, would very much like Congress to
make it illegal for anyone to use AI generated voices
for the purposes of robocalls, pretty please. Apparently someone used
an AI impersonation of Joe Biden's voice to make robocalls
(15:58):
in the state of New Hampshire to tar voters, presumably
to attempt to suppress the vote by telling people not
to bother voting. This spurred the FCC into action. And
we've all known for a while now that AI impersonations,
you know, deep fakes and that sort of thing could
play a big part in the creation and spread of misinformation.
(16:21):
And that's the FCC's main concern and why the agency
wants to make this practice illegal. They can't do that themselves, obviously,
they're not a lawmaking body, but they can recommend that.
To con Chris, the FCC proposes expanding the Telephone Consumer
Protection Act, which originally was drafted in the nineties, and
to expand that so it will protect against this AI
(16:43):
generated voice robocall practice, and I'm all for it, because
we're speeding down the road toward a pretty darn chaotic destination.
Anything we can do to mitigate that would be really nice,
in my opinion. Christopher Ray, the director of the US
Federal Bureau of Investmentation, is warning anybody who will listen
that the dangers of Chinese hackers and their ability to
(17:05):
disrupt critical US infrastructure such as electrical grids, is reaching
an alarming height. It has been no secret that for
years now, state backed hackers have worked to infiltrate these systems.
Like I remember reading articles from like a decade ago
about discovering Chinese code embedded into US infrastructure systems, proving
(17:30):
that there were these kind of markers where Chinese hackers
had managed to get access to these things, and there
have been fears that this work could lead to massive
cyber attacks in the future. Let's say that there's some
sort of event that ends up escalating and then China
orders to kind of take advantage of all this infiltration.
(17:53):
That's scary, Like you could have entire sections of the
electrical grid shut down or overwhelmed and have it break.
So what's new here? If all this stuff has been
going on for a while. Why is Ray speaking of now, Well,
there's not that much that's new. But Christopher Ray's statements
were made largely in frustration over the fact that despite
(18:14):
these things not actually being breaking news, despite the fact
that we have known about this stuff, we haven't done
enough about it. So he's calling for action. He's pointing
out how Chinese backed hacker groups have already caused massive problems,
like in the private sector. We've seen that over the
last few years. Plus. We're in an election year here
in the United States. It feels like we're always in
(18:36):
an election year. This time like it just it doesn't
matter what year it is, it feels like it's an
election year. But that becomes a huge incentive for a disruption.
We have seen Chinese and Russian backed groups attempt to
influence US politics through hacking and misinformation campaigns. So I
guess we'll see if anyone listens to him and actually
(18:58):
mounts a decent response to this warning. An Australian company
called Morse Micro has demonstrated a Wi Fi protocol that
they call Wi Fi Halo and it's HaLow. This uses
lower frequency radio signals to transmit Wi Fi over greater distances.
So these radio signals have longer wave links, lower frequencies
(19:23):
than what you would typically see with like your usual
Wi Fi transmitters, and the range they're getting is pretty impressive.
We're talking like three kilometers or around one point eight miles,
which is good, Like that's a good distance to be
able to transmit Wi Fi signals. And they say their
(19:43):
goal is to develop this technology so that it can
facilitate communications for stuff like Internet of Things applications, because
it wouldn't really be suitable for a high throughput application.
These transmission speeds are down to around one megabit per second.
You could have some grainy video for example, but that's
(20:04):
probably the extent of it. But as a solution for IoT,
you know, Internet of things, it could be a really
helpful technology. You wouldn't need as great a density of
transmitters because of this extended range. The longer radio waves
also have far better penetration for solid surfaces like walls,
(20:26):
so you know, with high frequency, low wavelength a small
wavelength Wi Fi signals, walls are a big obstacle, right
if you have those ultra high frequency Wi Fi solutions,
they don't penetrate walls very well, so you lose signal
as soon as there's any kind of barrier between you
(20:48):
and the transmitter. But these it penetrates really well, so
you can be inside a building and still have access
to these signals. As a bonus, the technology has lower
power requirements than higher frequency Wi Fi solutions, so it's
a pretty interesting approach. But it remains to be seen
if it will receive widespread adoption because there are already
(21:10):
a lot of different protocols for wireless data transmissions out there,
and some of them have even greater range than Halo does,
but they also have lower throughput. Right they can only
transmit data at a lower rate. But I figure the
more the merrier if it means we can find an
ideal balance between transmission rain and transmission speeds. Negotiations broke
(21:35):
down between TikTok and the music label Universal Music Group,
and the two parties were unable to agree on a
new licensing agreement. The previous one expired earlier this week
on Wednesday, so as a consequence, UMG demanded that TikTok
remove any UMG published tracks from the platform. And there's
some really big artists who are on the UMG label,
(21:58):
including one one of the biggest in the world, Taylor Swift.
I'm sure TikTok fans are going to shake it off,
shake it off, but they're not going to do it
with the help of her music because it's being removed
from TikTok. UMG officials said that TikTok's proposed compensation rate
was far below industry standards, and that the platform also
(22:20):
has tons of AI generated recordings that infringe upon artists
and music companies intellectual property. That's a big problem. It's
one of those problems we've been talking about for a
while now about how AI generated material can serve as
not just a threat from a competition standpoint, but a
threat in that it can be, you know, using an
(22:44):
artist's work to generate new work without compensating the original artists.
And that's a problem. So TikTok fired back, you know,
UMG said, hey, you're not paying enough. You pay less
than other platforms do. TikTok says UMG just wanted more
money for the label itself, and that any argument that
this is harming artists is disingenuous because UMG wasn't planning
(23:06):
on sharing that money with artists anyway, it was just
going to go to the company. Now, let me be clear,
all companies are greedy, full stop. TikTok is greedy. UMG
is also greedy. There are no good guys on the
corporate side here. Maybe the artists you could argue are
good guys. Wasn't it easier in your firefly catching days?
(23:30):
That's a that's a shout out to all you swifties
out there. So yeah, this is not an unusual thing
to see happen, and I'm sure that a lot of
TikTok users are frustrated by it. But it all comes
down to the argument of who's who gets that money,
and sad thing is it's almost never the artists, and
(23:53):
that's the worst of it, right, It just comes down
to which company ends up holding on to that money.
The most we learned that Mercedes Benz suffered a big
old it whoopsie this week. It's actually a whoopsie that
happened something like four months ago and lasted that whole time.
Like it was, it was essentially an ongoing issue. So
(24:14):
at the heart of the matter is a gethub token.
There was a developer at Mercedes who apparently accidentally published
this token on some publicly viewable source, and that meant
anyone who went to that source and saw it could
potentially use that token to access all sorts of very
secret proprietary data, including stuff like designs for vehicles and
(24:39):
source code for software. The fact that this system didn't
have multi factor authentication enabled really blows my mind. I mean,
typically you would want this kind of critical information, like
it's essentially your trade secrets, to be locked securely and
have multi factor authentication there to protect it. And you know,
(25:00):
token access is part of that strategy, but it shouldn't
be the start and end of it anyway. Mercedes has
not yet said if any third parties were able to
access the various databases that the token would have granted
access to. Apparently, like this database that you could access
would have included keys to other repositories, including on Amazon
(25:22):
Web Services and Microsoft Azure. So it's like, yeah, you've
got the keys to this and only that, but inside
there are all the other keys. Truly terrible stuff. There's
some who wonder if Mercedes would even be able to
detect if anyone outside the company had accessed the information
in the first place. This is wild stuff. And if
(25:42):
you're wondering how bad is this from a kind of
a how important could that data be? Stance, I would
put it at a solid nine out of ten, maybe
even a ten, Like this is real bad. The only
reason that it's not easily a ten le the gate
is just that we don't know if anyone else accessed it.
(26:03):
If they did, then that's a ten out of ten.
Like it's as bad as it gets. Hopefully, for the
company's sake, no one noticed the issue and exploited it.
But that's kind of like the weakest form of security
you could possibly have is just hoping that no one noticed.
It's like security through obscurity, not a great, great strategy,
really bad, And I bet that software developer is having
(26:28):
a really stressful week, is my guess. My heart goes
out because if it were truly an accident, that's just
I mean, it's a terrible accident, but it's not like
someone was being malicious or whatever. Okay, we've got a
couple more stories to get through before I can do that.
Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. We're back.
(26:59):
Spotify podcast strategy has long included a reliance on exclusive
shows that would only publish on the Spotify platform, and
I should mention right now, I guess that Spotify clearly
is a competitor to iHeart podcasts. We all work in
the same space. But the days of Spotify's exclusivity appear
(27:22):
to be coming to an end, at least for all
but one of Spotify's shows. Anyway, the platform had actually
gone down to just two exclusive shows. It had already
opened up other shows for wider distribution, and the two
shows that remained exclusive were The Joe Rogan Experience and
another one called Call Her Daddy. But now Call Her
(27:45):
Daddy can distribute on other audio platforms. Spotify is holding
on to exclusive rights for the video version of the show,
so it's not like going to be seeing that on YouTube.
It's just going to be exclusive to Spotify, so that
will remain on Spotify's platform, but the audio version will
be available wherever you get your podcasts. So now the
(28:07):
Joe Rogan Experience is the only exclusive audio podcast remaining
on Spotify, and people are wondering how long that will
stay true, you know, will the Joe Rogan Experience follow
in the footsteps of these other shows and then shift
to wider distribution, because once that contract comes up, then
(28:28):
they're going to have to decide how are they're going
to move forward with renewing it. Spotify has already spent
tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on these
exclusive agreements, most of it to the Joe Rogan experience,
Like the rumor is that the deal for his exclusive
contract with Spotify was somewhere in the one hundred million
(28:49):
dollar range. Holy cats. My guess is that Spotify has
not seen a great return on investment for most of
its exclusive shows, which explains why they shifted to wider distribution.
And that makes sense, right, Like, if you're exclusive, then
the very nature of exclusivity, you have limited the reach
(29:11):
of your podcast because not everyone is going to use
your platform. A lot of people might, but not everyone will.
And we all know that for the majority of podcasts
out there, the source of revenue for these podcasts is ads.
I mean, we just had an ad break on this show.
That's how we are able to pay for the production
(29:32):
of these shows and to pay people who work on them.
It's through ad revenue. So if you are limiting who
can actually listen to your show, you're limiting how much
ad revenue you can generate. So it makes sense to
shift to wider distribution for these other shows, and it
makes sense that they probably weren't making enough money to
(29:55):
pay off those exclusivity agreements. The question is will the
Joe Rogan Experience follow suit or will that be seen
as such an important feather in the cap of Spotify
that they will hold on to it to retain exclusivity.
Here at iHeart Podcasts, we tend to favor wide distribution
from the get go. We maybe looked at possible exclusive podcasts,
(30:21):
but as far as I'm aware, we never did that
because we want folks to find our shows wherever they
happen to get their podcasts right, we don't want to
dictate how people have to listen to our shows. We
want them to be able to access it however they prefer.
It's kind of like how Netflix became known for making
sure that they developed an app for every single screen
(30:44):
that's out there, with the exception of the Apple Vision
pro because they specifically did not make an app for
that anyway. Could it be that we will see Spotify
totally abandon exclusivity at least for audio, or will the
company continue to spend ass of truckloads of money to
keep Joe Rogan. I do not know the answer to
that last story. Here is that a hacker made use
(31:07):
of ours Technica as part of a malware campaign in
a way that was very clever and unfortunately also difficult
to detect and stop. So here's how ours Technica's Dan
Gooden explained what happened. Quote. A benign image of a
pizza was uploaded to a third party website and was
(31:28):
then linked with a URL pasted into the about page
of a registered RS user. Buried in that URL was
a string of characters that appeared to be random, but
were actually a payload end quote. So the picture itself
was nothing like. The picture could have been of anything.
It didn't have to be of pizza, it could have
(31:50):
been any kind of web asset. It was really just
something that the hacker could use that they anchored this
URL on in this about page of this RS Technica user,
and the URL had this long string that would not
impede the web page from loading, like you would still
(32:10):
get the webpage to load without an error. But that URL,
that string that was appended to the URL was actually
a set of instructions for malware that was already on
victimized machines. So, in other words, the payload on ours
Technica did not contain malware itself. It contained a set
of orders. So the way this works is step one,
(32:33):
you infect a whole bunch of computers with malware through
whatever means you have at your disposal. In this case,
it was through infected USB drives, so you get people
to connect USB drives to different computers. This injects malware
into the computer system. That malware is then installed essentially
(32:53):
into those target computer systems, and it's just a waiting
further orders. Now Step two is you hide the orders
for that malware at the end of an otherwise benign
looking URL, and you find someplace on the web where
you can plant this URL. Really, you're just looking for
a host, and it doesn't matter which one you'd choose,
(33:15):
So in this case it was this about page for
a user on ours TECHNICAP Step three, the instructions dependent
that URL are telling the infected machines what to do.
They're actually seeking out those instructions. They receive the instructions
and then they execute them. So the malware on these
machines jumps into action and then step four profit. In
(33:36):
the case of this particular instance, the malware was part
of a cryptocurrency mining scheme, So chances are anyone visiting
ours tetnco is actually fine because the first stage of
the malware again had to be injected through these USB drives.
So unless you had grabbed one of those USB drives
(33:58):
and then thoughtlessly plug it into your computer and infected
your computer with malware, you're fine because visiting the urs
Technica site, even visiting that particular page, would not have
delivered any malware to your machine. It was only the
instructions for malware that already existed on machines. But this
does illustrate how hackers can hide malware instructions in plain
(34:22):
sight and it can be incredibly difficult to detect them.
All Right, that's it for the news. I do have
one recommended article to read if you have a subscription
to the Wall Street Journal. Rolf Winkler has a piece
titled twenty three and Me's Fall from six billion dollars
to nearly zero dollars. It includes quotes from CEO and
(34:46):
Wojiski regarding her strategy to recover from the massive dip
the company has faced in the wake of a devastating
data breach, and it's a really interesting read. I know
not everyone has access to the Wall Street Journal, but
if you do, that article is reading to just kind
of get a handle on Woojiski. Who I mean, I
(35:06):
don't know. She's got so much money that I I
don't think I can I can relate to her on
any on any human level. It's just it's beyond me.
But it is interesting to see kind of what do
you do when your company has gone from an incredibly
high valuation of like six billion dollars to almost nothing
(35:28):
like the twenty three and meters stock price now is
under a dollar. It is under threat of being delisted
from the Nasdaq. It's a dire situation, so interesting article
worth a read. In the meantime, I hope all of
you are well and I will talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For
(35:55):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast Guests,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon
Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech
are you. It's time for the tech news for the
week ending on Friday, February two, two thy twenty four
(00:27):
and this week, tech leaders, including the CEOs of meta
x formerly known as Twitter, Snap, Discord, and TikTok all
met with the Senate Judiciary Committee here in the United States,
and it was a pretty sobering experience. The committee brought
forward families who had experienced tragedies in which children died
(00:48):
after they encountered various harmful people or situations or material
on these various platforms. The CEOs expressed their sympathy to
the families. Mark Zuckerberg even gave a somewhat emotional apology,
but the politicians found the response lackluster, as did many
of the parents, who said that the apologies kind of
(01:10):
rang hollow because there didn't seem to be any indication
that these companies were going to do anything different. The companies,
of course, said that they had been implementing various new
policies to protect children. You know, Meta has recently done that,
and so have some of the other platforms, But the
senators demanded to know why Section two thirty, which is
(01:31):
the US law that provides something of illegal shield platforms,
should protect these companies from being sued by the families. Now,
just as a reminder, these CEOs didn't draft section two thirty.
In fact, section two thirty was drafted before any of
these companies existed. The drafting was done by actual politicians,
(01:52):
and Section two thirty is not a blanket, get out
of court free card for platforms. So essentially, Section two
thirty says that a platform cannot be held responsible for
the material that's posted to that platform by users or
other parties. So if a user posts something illegal onto
a platform, that's the user's fault, not the platform's fault. Specifically,
(02:16):
section two thirty says, quote no provider or user of
an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher
or speaker of any information provided by another information content
provider end quote. But this protection itself has limits. If
a platform is violating federal criminal law, then it can
(02:38):
be held accountable. So if someone posts illegal material and
the platform is alerted to this, it's the platform's responsibility
to remove that material. This includes stuff like intellectual property violations. Right,
so if you were to post something that you don't
have ownership of and the platform allowed it to stay up,
(02:58):
the platform could be held account. This is why YouTube
is so aggressive when removing videos that get a copyright
removal request, because it's safer to take something down that
might be a copyright violation or it might not, rather
than to just leave it up long enough to determine
if it actually counts as a copyright violation. Anyway, politicians
on both sides of the aisle have issues with Section
(03:20):
two thirty, despite you know, not seeming to really understand
what section two thirty is all about. Complicating matters is
that these social platforms use algorithms to serve content up
to users. So if it were just a case of
users seeing the stuff that they personally followed, it might
be a different story. But some legislators argue that because
(03:42):
sites like Facebook or TikTok use an algorithm to determine
what a user actually sees on their timeline, then those
platforms are acting more like publishers because they are curating
material effectively and honestly This is an argument that I
at least think there's some merit to it. It's it's
hard to argue against it. I guess you could say
(04:04):
that these platforms don't actually know what their algorithms are
going to recommend to users, because it's completely dependent upon
what those users have interacted with and expressed interest in
in the past. So it's not like the platforms are
aware of what the algorithms are doing and the whole
process is automated. But at the same time, the platform
itself is determining what someone sees versus all the stuff
(04:27):
that's actually available. So it's a tricky situation. Anyway, a
lot of Senators weren't impressed with the CEOs and promised
to pass laws that would weaken Section two thirty and
place heavy requirements on the platforms to protect children. There
are critics of some of these laws. There's actually multiple
laws that are in various stages in the Senate and
(04:48):
the House right now. There are critics who say that
these laws compromise privacy and security, and they can infringe
upon the First Amendment, and that many of them could
be difficult, if not in possible, to enforce, and worse yet,
they could potentially pose a danger to people in the
LGBTQ community, because not everyone agrees as to what counts
(05:12):
as being harmful forward children, and some see just the
existence of say, transgender people as a danger, like just
the fact that they exist, that's dangerous. So that in
turn is a slippery slope. So, as I said, it's
a complicated issue. Speaking of Zuckerberg, he gave some insight
(05:32):
into Meta's AI strategy during an earnings call yesterday. He
claimed that the amount of publicly shared information on the
company's platforms represents a larger data set than what most
AI companies use when training AI, which is kind of
funny because you know, like Facebook, you Meta with Facebook
and Instagram and stuff. They do not want anyone crawling
(05:54):
their sites. They don't want any of that. That's they say,
that's against their terms of service. You cannot create bots
to crawl these sites to gather up information. They can
do it, though, but no one else can. And so
they're saying, hey, we have this huge repository of publicly
shared pictures and videos and other stuff. It's way bigger
(06:14):
than what anyone else has, So we could train up
a very intelligent AI as a result of that, and
Zuckerberg actually mentioned that general intelligence remains a goal of
general intelligence in the form of AI. I don't mean
that Zuckerberg is seeking general intelligence. They're too any jokes there.
So general intelligence would be AI that would work in
(06:35):
a way that's at least similar to how human intelligence works, right.
That seems to be able to think for itself. It's
a kind of strong AI. So this kind of work
AI research and development, it's really expensive. And Zuckerberg's team
hinted that Meta could increase spending by as much as
nine billion dollars this year compared to last year, and
that this could just be the beginning of additional expenditures
(06:59):
and research into development, which sounds to me a lot
like hol Zuckerberg warned that Meta would be spending increasing
amounts to build out the metaverse. For the record, they
gave the metaverse very brief mention in their earnings called document.
They called it their metaverse efforts had put it under
new business initiatives. I don't know how much momentum their
(07:23):
metaverse efforts still have. Like to me, it feels like
the whole metaverse craze has already significantly died down right,
like that was the huge thing more than a year ago,
and now people are not nearly as enthusiastic about it.
But maybe I'm just not listening to the right corners.
(07:44):
Maybe the Web three enthusiasts and the metaverse enthusiasts are
still going whole hog and I'm just not seeing. One
big news story that happened earlier this week is that
Amazon called off its planned acquisition of the company I Robot,
which is best known as the maker of the Roomba
vacuum robot. This actually surprised me, but that's because I
(08:04):
thought that this deal had already gone through. I thought
Amazon had already acquired I Robot. I was just under
the impression that they had already completed this. The two
companies originally agreed to this deal back in the summer
of twenty twenty two, so yeah, I just figured like
within a year and a half that they had closed
the deal. But no, they faced a lot of regulator opposition,
(08:24):
including here in the United States, and ultimately Amazon said
that they just didn't see a way forward. So Amazon said,
you know what, We're going to pay the ninety five
million dollar fee that's going to cost us to walk
away from this deal, and they did, and that's really
bad news for iRobot. So once upon a time, the
Rumba was like the dominant product in robot vacuums. In fact,
(08:48):
it was, to all intents and purposes, like the only
name in the space. But it didn't last because obviously
other companies were going to build competing products, and some
of those products lost less, sometimes significantly less than the Rumba.
They also weren't necessarily as good as the Rumba, but
for a lot of consumers out there, cheaper is more
(09:11):
important than performance, so I robots It's market share decline
year over year as more and more of these products
came out. The Amazon acquisition would have given I robot
the financial security to really stay in business and to
really invest in innovation. But with the deal falling through,
there's a big question mark hanging over I Robot and
(09:31):
whether or not it can even continue to function, at
least in the long term. Already, the company has announced
it will hold layoffs that will affect around three hundred
and fifty employees, and I Robots CEO Colin Engel is
also stepping down, as he said that he and the
board both felt that the company really needed a leader
with quote unquote turnaround experience. I feel really badly for
(09:56):
everyone affected by these layoffs, and I hope that I
Robot make a recovery because the company has been responsible
for numerous innovations in the robotic space, you know, the
robotic vacuum space in particular, like there have been a
lot of innovations that I Robot has driven that then
got adopted by the larger industry, and without I Robot
there to actually forge that path, we may see a
(10:19):
real decrease in innovation in that space. After a Tesla
shareholder brought a lawsuit against Tesla five years ago, a
judge in the state of Delaware has ruled that Elon
Musk is not, in fact entitled to a compensation package
with a value of upwards of fifty five billion dollars.
(10:41):
He's not going to get that, and like I said,
it only took five years of languishing through the court system,
because justice is swift here in the United States. So
the lawsuit argued that the board of directors was misusing
company funds by enriching Elon Musk when that money probably
should have gone somewhere else. Either reinvesting in the company
or distributed among shareholders whatever. The plaintiff argued that the
(11:02):
directors were not really independent of Musk, Essentially they were
his friends and cronies, and that he was using his
connections as personal connections among some of the board members
to get this incredibly favorable compensation deal, and that the
lawsuit also argued that Musk himself was effectively creating his
own compensation package, like Musk was the one who drew
(11:25):
it up and then got the board to sign off
on it, and gosh, I bet we all wish we
could do that, right. Ap News also has a really
helpful graphic to assist in understanding exactly how much money
fifty five billion dollars is for one thing. It illustrates
that you could spend a dollar for every second of
every day and it would take you oney seven hundred
(11:48):
and forty four years to spend all that cash. Crazy, right,
No one needs that much money. Nobody needs that much money.
He also said that you could give one hundred and
sixty three bucks to every single person in the United States, Like,
that's just it's just way too much money for any
one person to have. I don't care who you are anyway,
Musk as is his custom, went to X to vent
(12:10):
his spleen and said, never incorporate your company in the
state of Delaware. I recommend incorporating Nevada or Texas if
you prefer shareholders to decide matters. Ironically, it was a
shareholder who helped decide this matter, because it was a
shareholder who brought the lawsuit forward in the first place.
But yeah, I'm not surprised he's upset. Fifty five billion
dollars is like when you think you're gonna get it
(12:32):
and it turns out you're not. And also when, like
a couple of years ago, you spent forty four billion
dollars to buy a company that you are steadily running
into the ground. I mean, this is a lot to
take in, you know, speaking of a lot to take in,
We've got more news to cover, but before we get
to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay,
(12:59):
we're back. So this week, Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality
headset finally launched. As a reminder, this is the headset
with a starting price point of three thy four hundred
and ninety nine dollars and according to various sources, Apple
has sold more than two hundred thousand units so far.
I should point out that the company first made the
headsets available for pre order back in January, and the
(13:22):
majority of those sales were made in the first couple
of days that pre orders were open. After that they
trailed off significantly. But it's also two hundred thousand units.
That's also more than what analysts predict Apple actually has
available like manufactured, so some folks are going to be
waiting a little bit longer to get their new, very
(13:43):
expensive toy. Brian Heater of tech Crunch has some articles
about his experiences using the vision Pro. I recommend checking
those out. He mentions that he felt some motion sickness
on that first day, but he also admitted he's using
this device a lot because that's his job, right to
really put it through the paces and then report back
(14:05):
on it. You know, you might only be able to
use it for two and a half hours because that's
how long the battery lasts, and then you have to
recharge it. But he's been using it over and over
and over again. But he also makes a really good point.
He says the average vision Pro owner is also likely
to go ham at least initially upon purchasing their mixed
reality headset, because if you've spent three four hundred and
(14:28):
ninety nine bucks at minimum on something, you want to
get your money's worth. Anyway, I still think Apple's product
is really a niche one. Two hundred thousand units is
a lot, right that we should not dismiss selling two
hundred thousand of these things. But two hundred thousand units
is a fraction of what you would see with say
a new iPhone launch, for example. And while all the
(14:52):
reviews I've read praise the headsets, pass through video quality
and the image quality, I'm still not seeing a whole
lot of conversation about like any real killer apps. Now.
Maybe that will come in time, or maybe developers are
going to hold back and wait for a larger user
base before they invest the resources in developing apps for
(15:13):
this thing. And if that's the case, we could really
have a vicious cycle thing going on, sort of catch
twenty two, where developers won't make apps until they are
more users, but users aren't going to buy the product
until there are more apps running on it. That's a possibility.
I don't know. Maybe I'm ultimately wrong, Maybe this will
become the next like common household technology. But I don't
(15:35):
think that's possible at that price point, but who knows.
I've been wrong so many times before. The US Federal
Communications Commission or FCC, would very much like Congress to
make it illegal for anyone to use AI generated voices
for the purposes of robocalls, pretty please. Apparently someone used
an AI impersonation of Joe Biden's voice to make robocalls
(15:58):
in the state of New Hampshire to tar voters, presumably
to attempt to suppress the vote by telling people not
to bother voting. This spurred the FCC into action. And
we've all known for a while now that AI impersonations,
you know, deep fakes and that sort of thing could
play a big part in the creation and spread of misinformation.
(16:21):
And that's the FCC's main concern and why the agency
wants to make this practice illegal. They can't do that themselves, obviously,
they're not a lawmaking body, but they can recommend that.
To con Chris, the FCC proposes expanding the Telephone Consumer
Protection Act, which originally was drafted in the nineties, and
to expand that so it will protect against this AI
(16:43):
generated voice robocall practice, and I'm all for it, because
we're speeding down the road toward a pretty darn chaotic destination.
Anything we can do to mitigate that would be really nice,
in my opinion. Christopher Ray, the director of the US
Federal Bureau of Investmentation, is warning anybody who will listen
that the dangers of Chinese hackers and their ability to
(17:05):
disrupt critical US infrastructure such as electrical grids, is reaching
an alarming height. It has been no secret that for
years now, state backed hackers have worked to infiltrate these systems.
Like I remember reading articles from like a decade ago
about discovering Chinese code embedded into US infrastructure systems, proving
(17:30):
that there were these kind of markers where Chinese hackers
had managed to get access to these things, and there
have been fears that this work could lead to massive
cyber attacks in the future. Let's say that there's some
sort of event that ends up escalating and then China
orders to kind of take advantage of all this infiltration.
(17:53):
That's scary, Like you could have entire sections of the
electrical grid shut down or overwhelmed and have it break.
So what's new here? If all this stuff has been
going on for a while. Why is Ray speaking of now, Well,
there's not that much that's new. But Christopher Ray's statements
were made largely in frustration over the fact that despite
(18:14):
these things not actually being breaking news, despite the fact
that we have known about this stuff, we haven't done
enough about it. So he's calling for action. He's pointing
out how Chinese backed hacker groups have already caused massive problems,
like in the private sector. We've seen that over the
last few years. Plus. We're in an election year here
in the United States. It feels like we're always in
(18:36):
an election year. This time like it just it doesn't
matter what year it is, it feels like it's an
election year. But that becomes a huge incentive for a disruption.
We have seen Chinese and Russian backed groups attempt to
influence US politics through hacking and misinformation campaigns. So I
guess we'll see if anyone listens to him and actually
(18:58):
mounts a decent response to this warning. An Australian company
called Morse Micro has demonstrated a Wi Fi protocol that
they call Wi Fi Halo and it's HaLow. This uses
lower frequency radio signals to transmit Wi Fi over greater distances.
So these radio signals have longer wave links, lower frequencies
(19:23):
than what you would typically see with like your usual
Wi Fi transmitters, and the range they're getting is pretty impressive.
We're talking like three kilometers or around one point eight miles,
which is good, Like that's a good distance to be
able to transmit Wi Fi signals. And they say their
(19:43):
goal is to develop this technology so that it can
facilitate communications for stuff like Internet of Things applications, because
it wouldn't really be suitable for a high throughput application.
These transmission speeds are down to around one megabit per second.
You could have some grainy video for example, but that's
(20:04):
probably the extent of it. But as a solution for IoT,
you know, Internet of things, it could be a really
helpful technology. You wouldn't need as great a density of
transmitters because of this extended range. The longer radio waves
also have far better penetration for solid surfaces like walls,
(20:26):
so you know, with high frequency, low wavelength a small
wavelength Wi Fi signals, walls are a big obstacle, right
if you have those ultra high frequency Wi Fi solutions,
they don't penetrate walls very well, so you lose signal
as soon as there's any kind of barrier between you
(20:48):
and the transmitter. But these it penetrates really well, so
you can be inside a building and still have access
to these signals. As a bonus, the technology has lower
power requirements than higher frequency Wi Fi solutions, so it's
a pretty interesting approach. But it remains to be seen
if it will receive widespread adoption because there are already
(21:10):
a lot of different protocols for wireless data transmissions out there,
and some of them have even greater range than Halo does,
but they also have lower throughput. Right they can only
transmit data at a lower rate. But I figure the
more the merrier if it means we can find an
ideal balance between transmission rain and transmission speeds. Negotiations broke
(21:35):
down between TikTok and the music label Universal Music Group,
and the two parties were unable to agree on a
new licensing agreement. The previous one expired earlier this week
on Wednesday, so as a consequence, UMG demanded that TikTok
remove any UMG published tracks from the platform. And there's
some really big artists who are on the UMG label,
(21:58):
including one one of the biggest in the world, Taylor Swift.
I'm sure TikTok fans are going to shake it off,
shake it off, but they're not going to do it
with the help of her music because it's being removed
from TikTok. UMG officials said that TikTok's proposed compensation rate
was far below industry standards, and that the platform also
(22:20):
has tons of AI generated recordings that infringe upon artists
and music companies intellectual property. That's a big problem. It's
one of those problems we've been talking about for a
while now about how AI generated material can serve as
not just a threat from a competition standpoint, but a
threat in that it can be, you know, using an
(22:44):
artist's work to generate new work without compensating the original artists.
And that's a problem. So TikTok fired back, you know,
UMG said, hey, you're not paying enough. You pay less
than other platforms do. TikTok says UMG just wanted more
money for the label itself, and that any argument that
this is harming artists is disingenuous because UMG wasn't planning
(23:06):
on sharing that money with artists anyway, it was just
going to go to the company. Now, let me be clear,
all companies are greedy, full stop. TikTok is greedy. UMG
is also greedy. There are no good guys on the
corporate side here. Maybe the artists you could argue are
good guys. Wasn't it easier in your firefly catching days?
(23:30):
That's a that's a shout out to all you swifties
out there. So yeah, this is not an unusual thing
to see happen, and I'm sure that a lot of
TikTok users are frustrated by it. But it all comes
down to the argument of who's who gets that money,
and sad thing is it's almost never the artists, and
(23:53):
that's the worst of it, right, It just comes down
to which company ends up holding on to that money.
The most we learned that Mercedes Benz suffered a big
old it whoopsie this week. It's actually a whoopsie that
happened something like four months ago and lasted that whole time.
Like it was, it was essentially an ongoing issue. So
(24:14):
at the heart of the matter is a gethub token.
There was a developer at Mercedes who apparently accidentally published
this token on some publicly viewable source, and that meant
anyone who went to that source and saw it could
potentially use that token to access all sorts of very
secret proprietary data, including stuff like designs for vehicles and
(24:39):
source code for software. The fact that this system didn't
have multi factor authentication enabled really blows my mind. I mean,
typically you would want this kind of critical information, like
it's essentially your trade secrets, to be locked securely and
have multi factor authentication there to protect it. And you know,
(25:00):
token access is part of that strategy, but it shouldn't
be the start and end of it anyway. Mercedes has
not yet said if any third parties were able to
access the various databases that the token would have granted
access to. Apparently, like this database that you could access
would have included keys to other repositories, including on Amazon
(25:22):
Web Services and Microsoft Azure. So it's like, yeah, you've
got the keys to this and only that, but inside
there are all the other keys. Truly terrible stuff. There's
some who wonder if Mercedes would even be able to
detect if anyone outside the company had accessed the information
in the first place. This is wild stuff. And if
(25:42):
you're wondering how bad is this from a kind of
a how important could that data be? Stance, I would
put it at a solid nine out of ten, maybe
even a ten, Like this is real bad. The only
reason that it's not easily a ten le the gate
is just that we don't know if anyone else accessed it.
(26:03):
If they did, then that's a ten out of ten.
Like it's as bad as it gets. Hopefully, for the
company's sake, no one noticed the issue and exploited it.
But that's kind of like the weakest form of security
you could possibly have is just hoping that no one noticed.
It's like security through obscurity, not a great, great strategy,
really bad, And I bet that software developer is having
(26:28):
a really stressful week, is my guess. My heart goes
out because if it were truly an accident, that's just
I mean, it's a terrible accident, but it's not like
someone was being malicious or whatever. Okay, we've got a
couple more stories to get through before I can do that.
Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. We're back.
(26:59):
Spotify podcast strategy has long included a reliance on exclusive
shows that would only publish on the Spotify platform, and
I should mention right now, I guess that Spotify clearly
is a competitor to iHeart podcasts. We all work in
the same space. But the days of Spotify's exclusivity appear
(27:22):
to be coming to an end, at least for all
but one of Spotify's shows. Anyway, the platform had actually
gone down to just two exclusive shows. It had already
opened up other shows for wider distribution, and the two
shows that remained exclusive were The Joe Rogan Experience and
another one called Call Her Daddy. But now Call Her
(27:45):
Daddy can distribute on other audio platforms. Spotify is holding
on to exclusive rights for the video version of the show,
so it's not like going to be seeing that on YouTube.
It's just going to be exclusive to Spotify, so that
will remain on Spotify's platform, but the audio version will
be available wherever you get your podcasts. So now the
(28:07):
Joe Rogan Experience is the only exclusive audio podcast remaining
on Spotify, and people are wondering how long that will
stay true, you know, will the Joe Rogan Experience follow
in the footsteps of these other shows and then shift
to wider distribution, because once that contract comes up, then
(28:28):
they're going to have to decide how are they're going
to move forward with renewing it. Spotify has already spent
tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on these
exclusive agreements, most of it to the Joe Rogan experience,
Like the rumor is that the deal for his exclusive
contract with Spotify was somewhere in the one hundred million
(28:49):
dollar range. Holy cats. My guess is that Spotify has
not seen a great return on investment for most of
its exclusive shows, which explains why they shifted to wider distribution.
And that makes sense, right, Like, if you're exclusive, then
the very nature of exclusivity, you have limited the reach
(29:11):
of your podcast because not everyone is going to use
your platform. A lot of people might, but not everyone will.
And we all know that for the majority of podcasts
out there, the source of revenue for these podcasts is ads.
I mean, we just had an ad break on this show.
That's how we are able to pay for the production
(29:32):
of these shows and to pay people who work on them.
It's through ad revenue. So if you are limiting who
can actually listen to your show, you're limiting how much
ad revenue you can generate. So it makes sense to
shift to wider distribution for these other shows, and it
makes sense that they probably weren't making enough money to
(29:55):
pay off those exclusivity agreements. The question is will the
Joe Rogan Experience follow suit or will that be seen
as such an important feather in the cap of Spotify
that they will hold on to it to retain exclusivity.
Here at iHeart Podcasts, we tend to favor wide distribution
from the get go. We maybe looked at possible exclusive podcasts,
(30:21):
but as far as I'm aware, we never did that
because we want folks to find our shows wherever they
happen to get their podcasts right, we don't want to
dictate how people have to listen to our shows. We
want them to be able to access it however they prefer.
It's kind of like how Netflix became known for making
sure that they developed an app for every single screen
(30:44):
that's out there, with the exception of the Apple Vision
pro because they specifically did not make an app for
that anyway. Could it be that we will see Spotify
totally abandon exclusivity at least for audio, or will the
company continue to spend ass of truckloads of money to
keep Joe Rogan. I do not know the answer to
that last story. Here is that a hacker made use
(31:07):
of ours Technica as part of a malware campaign in
a way that was very clever and unfortunately also difficult
to detect and stop. So here's how ours Technica's Dan
Gooden explained what happened. Quote. A benign image of a
pizza was uploaded to a third party website and was
(31:28):
then linked with a URL pasted into the about page
of a registered RS user. Buried in that URL was
a string of characters that appeared to be random, but
were actually a payload end quote. So the picture itself
was nothing like. The picture could have been of anything.
It didn't have to be of pizza, it could have
(31:50):
been any kind of web asset. It was really just
something that the hacker could use that they anchored this
URL on in this about page of this RS Technica user,
and the URL had this long string that would not
impede the web page from loading, like you would still
(32:10):
get the webpage to load without an error. But that URL,
that string that was appended to the URL was actually
a set of instructions for malware that was already on
victimized machines. So, in other words, the payload on ours
Technica did not contain malware itself. It contained a set
of orders. So the way this works is step one,
(32:33):
you infect a whole bunch of computers with malware through
whatever means you have at your disposal. In this case,
it was through infected USB drives, so you get people
to connect USB drives to different computers. This injects malware
into the computer system. That malware is then installed essentially
(32:53):
into those target computer systems, and it's just a waiting
further orders. Now Step two is you hide the orders
for that malware at the end of an otherwise benign
looking URL, and you find someplace on the web where
you can plant this URL. Really, you're just looking for
a host, and it doesn't matter which one you'd choose,
(33:15):
So in this case it was this about page for
a user on ours TECHNICAP Step three, the instructions dependent
that URL are telling the infected machines what to do.
They're actually seeking out those instructions. They receive the instructions
and then they execute them. So the malware on these
machines jumps into action and then step four profit. In
(33:36):
the case of this particular instance, the malware was part
of a cryptocurrency mining scheme, So chances are anyone visiting
ours tetnco is actually fine because the first stage of
the malware again had to be injected through these USB drives.
So unless you had grabbed one of those USB drives
(33:58):
and then thoughtlessly plug it into your computer and infected
your computer with malware, you're fine because visiting the urs
Technica site, even visiting that particular page, would not have
delivered any malware to your machine. It was only the
instructions for malware that already existed on machines. But this
does illustrate how hackers can hide malware instructions in plain
(34:22):
sight and it can be incredibly difficult to detect them.
All Right, that's it for the news. I do have
one recommended article to read if you have a subscription
to the Wall Street Journal. Rolf Winkler has a piece
titled twenty three and Me's Fall from six billion dollars
to nearly zero dollars. It includes quotes from CEO and
(34:46):
Wojiski regarding her strategy to recover from the massive dip
the company has faced in the wake of a devastating
data breach, and it's a really interesting read. I know
not everyone has access to the Wall Street Journal, but
if you do, that article is reading to just kind
of get a handle on Woojiski. Who I mean, I
(35:06):
don't know. She's got so much money that I I
don't think I can I can relate to her on
any on any human level. It's just it's beyond me.
But it is interesting to see kind of what do
you do when your company has gone from an incredibly
high valuation of like six billion dollars to almost nothing
(35:28):
like the twenty three and meters stock price now is
under a dollar. It is under threat of being delisted
from the Nasdaq. It's a dire situation, so interesting article
worth a read. In the meantime, I hope all of
you are well and I will talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For
(35:55):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast Guests,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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