October 5, 2021 • 35 mins
Facebook and all its services disappeared on Monday, October 4th. What caused the outage? Also, the US Senate interviews a Facebook whistleblower, a former Tesla employee wins a lawsuit against the company and Amazon pushes out a very expensive robot.
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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 I love all things tech and it is time
for the tech news for Tuesday, October five, twenty one.
(00:26):
Let's get at it. Chances are you are aware that
yesterday Facebook and all of its services went offline for
several hours. That includes Facebook itself, Messenger, Instagram, What's That,
and Oculus VR. The outage began at approximately eleven forty
(00:46):
a m. Eastern time. That's when facebooks records on the
domain name system suddenly went So. The domain name system
or d n S is like an address or or
phone book for the Internet. So you probably know about
IP addresses, those numerical addresses, especially I p v four
(01:09):
is numerical, I p v six is a mix. But
this is how say a web browser connects to a
specific web page. It actually connects through an I p address.
But IP addresses are not easy for most humans to
remember because again they just look like a jumble of
numbers or with I p v six numbers and possibly letters.
(01:30):
So we use words for our u r ls like
Facebook dot Com, for example, and the d n S
translates those words, which doesn't you know, words don't really
mean anything to web browsers. That's just how we navigate
the web. And so d n S says, all right, well,
let me look and see what I P address that
particular series of words relates to, and then serves that up. Now,
(01:54):
on Facebook's case, the problems seemed to be that Facebook somehow,
probably through a miscon figuration, eliminated its Border Gateway Protocol
or b GP route. This is kind of like a
map of how data can get to Facebook's servers. Facebook
servers published this route to neighboring servers, and they propagated outwards.
(02:16):
So it's kind of like if you're driving through an
unfamiliar town and you stop to ask a local for directions.
You say something like, hey, do you happen to know
the way to get to Facebook, and they say, well, yeah,
go down this road a peace and when you see
the sign for Old Donigan's farm, you turn left. Now,
if you pass an ambulatory scarecrow, you've done gone too far,
(02:37):
except because Facebook withdrew the b g P. If you
were to stop and ask for directions, and say do
you know the way to Facebook? You would get the
answer you can't get that from hreh. But wait, it
gets worse. See Facebook's systems are all internal ones built
on these computers that connect to these particular servers. That
(02:58):
got effect of Lee severed from the Internet and the
loss of the b g P meant that not only
could you as a user no longer check your Facebook
or Instagram or use WhatsApp, and you couldn't play Oculus VR.
If you were a Facebook employee, you couldn't access your
internal systems. You might not even be able to access
(03:21):
the building I saw. One person suggests that the security
system itself is tied into those servers and that your
security badge wouldn't work to let you in in that case. Also,
Facebook has Facebook log In. This is where you know
various apps use your Facebook login for you to access
the app. That way, you don't create a user name
and a password for that specific app. Instead, you use
(03:43):
your Facebook login. Well, with Facebook servers down, there was
no way to authenticate that. So if you were not
actually actively signed into those services, you might have found
it impossible to connect to all those apps. It took
several hours to reconfigure the b GP routes, and that
has made more complicated because obviously the computers that you
would normally use to reconfigure that were the same ones
(04:06):
that were you know, quote unquote disappeared from the Internet.
So it was a pretty rough day for Facebook. Now,
this was just part of the drama that Facebook is
currently going through. On Sunday this past Sunday, former Facebook
employee Francis Howgan appeared on Sixty Minutes and it turns
out that Francis is the person who leaked internal research
(04:30):
documents to the Wall Street Journal. You know, the studies
that showed that Facebook researchers were concerned that Instagram was
harmful to mental health, particularly for teenage girl who girls
who were using the service um and that Facebook was
well aware of how misinformation was spreading across the platform
and how the algorithm was elevating misinformation campaigns. On the interview,
(04:56):
she alleged that Facebook, when faced with a decision to
either go for making a profit or go with an
option that would be better for users, would always choose
the profit option every single time. Today, she has scheduled
to appear before the United States Senate to answer questions
about her former employer, And of course we have been
(05:16):
having ongoing conversations within the government, the US government and
the European government as well about whether or not Facebook
represents a monopoly and if perhaps it might be a
good idea to, you know, force the company to divest
itself of properties like Instagram and WhatsApp. Now, I've also
(05:36):
seen some people suggest that somehow the outage yesterday was
linked to the hearing that's happening today and and the
sixty minutes expose that had happened on Sunday, that perhaps
someone over at Facebook was trying to hide something and
just took extreme measures. But that doesn't seem like that
(05:57):
doesn't seem to hold up even under casual screw utiny.
I would argue that the outage hurt the company big time,
and at the worst possible moment for Facebook, for one thing,
because Facebook went down and all these various integrated services
then became unavailable. The people who say Facebook has too
(06:18):
much influence have way more ammunition, right, because millions of
people rely on, say, WhatsApp to stay in touch with
family and friends around the world, including vulnerable populations who
use WhatsApp in order to maintain contact with people, like say,
back in Africa or in South America. But because WhatsApp
(06:40):
runs on Facebook's systems, that whole service became unavailable globally
for like six hours. This, the critics argue, is what
happens when we put all of our digital eggs in
one social media platforms basket. Right, If we have our
logins tied to Facebook, If the service as we rely
upon to stay in touch with everybody are part of
(07:03):
Facebook and Facebook goes down, all of that becomes unavailable
to us. That, as the argument goes, is an argument
against this kind of consolidation that we've been seeing with
platforms like Facebook, where you know, they're not just building
out their own tools, they're buying up tools that overlap
what Facebook already does. A lot of people have pointed
(07:26):
out over the years that Facebook has acquired companies when
it became clear that Facebook itself was not going to
be able to compete against those companies, and those companies
potentially stood as a threat when it comes to getting
people to spend more and more time on Facebook. Now,
beyond those pieces of evidence that suggests that this is
(07:49):
not something that the company would have wanted Bloomberg estimated
that the outage and the dip and Facebook's stock price,
which has been going on since, you know, earlier in September. UH,
that also meant that CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his wealth
decreased by around seven billion dollars. Now that is beyond
(08:10):
a princely some obviously, and that's not to say that
he won't regain that wealth now that Facebook is back
up and running. Maybe he will. Maybe the company's UH
stock prices will improve, although with the hearing in front
of the U. S. Senate that's not certain. I would
argue no one would authorize some sort of extreme pull
(08:31):
the plug UH strategy at the cost of seven billion bucks.
I'm pretty confident this was all coincidental. It was a
miss configuration, It was not done on purpose, and it
was just supremely bad timing for Facebook for all this
to happen at once. Will the U. S. Government force
Facebook to say bye bye to Instagram and WhatsApp? I
(08:54):
honestly don't know. There is precedent. We have seen the
government break up big company years before, but it hasn't
happened in a long time, and I'm not sure that
it will happen in this case. However, I figure there's
never been a time with more obvious support for that
argument than right now. Yesterday really brought that into, you know,
(09:17):
into the light. Last week, I reported that Amazon would
hold a hardware reveal event, but that my recording session
happened before the event occurred, so I couldn't actually say
what they were going to show off. I did mention
that the Verge had predicted a wall mounted echo device,
and we got one. It's called the Echo Show. But
(09:38):
that site also predicted we wouldn't see anything about the
robot that Amazon had had in development for a few
years at that point. However, Amazon surprised us all and
in fact brought out a robot that it now calls Astro.
The robot will initially sell to a limited customer base
by invitation only, so you actually have to request and invite,
(10:00):
and you must hand over the princely sum of nine
dollars to buy it. Later on, that price is actually
going to go up to around one tho. The robot
has a tablet like screen for a face, like it's
got these digital eyes. Essentially kind of looks a little
bit like Wally from the Pixar film. It moves around
(10:23):
on two twelve inch wheels, and it's got a little
castor like wheel in the back to provide more stability.
It's got cameras, including a five megapixel camera built into
the screen, but it's also got a periscope camera it
can extend and use to look around at surroundings. It's
got a speaker, it's got a microphone. It has facial
recognition technology built into it. It can learn a map
(10:46):
of your home, so you can have it learned the
layout of your home and assigned specific names to specific rooms. Thus,
you could tell your robot, hey, you know, go to
the kitchen and it would navigate over to the chin
from wherever it happened to be. Um. It's got all
the Alexa capabilities built into it so that it can
(11:07):
respond to the request that you would typically use to
ask Alexa for stuff like what the weather is, or
to play a certain song and all that kind of stuff.
Not everyone is sold on this robot. The m I
T Technology Review has called the robot stupid. The Verge
ran a follow up piece saying that developers who had
(11:27):
worked on the robot had reportedly called it terrible and
claimed it would make dumb mistakes such as throwing itself
off the stairs, So if you have stairs in your home,
you might not want to have this thing on an
upper level. I think I would advise folks to maybe
pump the brakes a bit before shelling out a grand
or more for this thing. While we have stuff like
room Buzz and those are reasonably popular, we're really still
(11:49):
waiting on the household robot that is a must buy.
I've seen a lot of people suggest that this robot
doesn't do a whole really when you get down to it,
and the stuff that it does do, it doesn't necessarily
do super well, so it's not like a wise purchasing decision. Um.
(12:11):
I mean, it would potentially give Amazon a lot more
opportunities to figure out how to sell stuff to you.
I mean, if they've got essentially a computer that can
move around your house and observe stuff, then you could
argue this could just be another way for Amazon to
position itself in order to sell more products to customers.
And frankly, I suspect that that is a large part
(12:34):
of it. And you you have to pay for that privilege, right,
You have to pay like a thousand dollars or more
in order to have the privilege of having a surveillance
device that is potentially giving more information to a company
to sell you more stuff. Anyway. Besides the robot and
the wall mounted Echo Show, which again is like a
smart display that you can attach to a wall, we
(12:57):
also saw the Echo Glow. This is a table top
tablet for video conferencing for kids, and it's meant to
appeal to children so that they video conference with distant
friends and family and they don't get bored and just
wander off. That was what Amazon said. The purpose was
behind the design. So in this case, the tablet actually
(13:18):
has incorporated inside of it a projector. The projector can
display stuff on the tabletop in front of the tablet.
It even comes with like a white mat. It's kind
of like a movie screen, so you lay the mat down,
you put the tablet behind the mat, and it can
project a screen down on the mat that's on the table.
Uh that can become an interactive story book, you can
(13:40):
become a game. And there are infrared sensors inside the
tablet so it can track things like hand motion, so
when you're you know, moving stuff around on this screen,
it's acting almost like a touch screen. It's kind of
a neat idea. I'm not entirely sold on it, but
then I also don't have any kids, so um. Amazon
also revealed a smart thermostat fitness track your devices, and
(14:03):
also a version of its Echo device specifically designed for
Disney properties. So in the future, should you stay at
like a Walt Disney World resort, you might find that
there is a Disney themed Echo and you can use
it to ask questions like checking on dining reservations or
asking about park hours, that kind of stuff. Um, I
(14:27):
was not super impressed with the Amazon presentation, but then
I also don't want this to be an Amazon ad.
So we're just gonna go to break and listen to
other ads and then come back with some more news
(14:48):
and we're back. Researchers at Trendy College in Dublin, Ireland,
which by the way, is one of my favorite spots
in Ireland, have released a research paper that looked into
how much data iOS and Android devices gather from their
respective users. The paper says that both operating systems send
packets of data back to you know, their their respective
(15:09):
h q s approximately every four and a half minutes.
Whether you're using it or not. This happens even if
you've gone to the trouble of setting all data sharing
options to off. Keep in mind, some data sharing isn't optional,
it's mandatory. And the study did find some differences between
the two. Google, they said, collects much larger volumes of data.
(15:33):
The size of packets that Google sending back is much
greater than what Apple is doing. However, Apple, while sending
less data, overall, sent a wider variety of data, including
data about other devices that are connected to whichever network
you connect to. Android doesn't do that, so Apple is
(15:54):
interested in what other devices are on the same network
you're on. I guess. The Google reps have said this
is really just kind of how smartphones work. They compared
it to how modern day vehicles have components that send
data back to car companies for safety purposes. The researchers
said that if users really want to limit how much
of your data your phone collects and shares, you should
(16:17):
really go with an Android phone because despite the fact
that it's sending more data, you have more options. You
can have network connections disabled when you activate your phone,
and you should also disabled Google Play and YouTube, and
the Google Play Store. That cuts down on most of
the data collection. You would still need to sideload apps
and get them from someplace other than the Google Play
(16:40):
Store in order to avoid that data collection. Even then,
you're just minimizing the amount of data that's being collected
and shared. They did say that Apple users are just
out of lock because Apple requires a network connection to
activate an iPhone. So Apple users are subjected to data
collection no matter what they do. Speaking of Apple, the
Wall Street Journal parts that Apple made more operating profit
(17:02):
from games than Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Activision Blizzard combined.
And Apple doesn't make games, but profited more from games
than all those other companies. Al Right, so in some
ways this actually is not a big surprise, right. I
Mean we're talking operating profit, we're not talking revenue. So
(17:22):
companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and Activision Blizzard they actually
make games. Now that means that there are costs associated
with that business. You know, Profit is what you've got
after you've accounted for the costs of producing whatever it
is you're producing. So if I decide I'm going to
go and make a chair, and I sell that chair
(17:45):
for fifty dollars, but it turns out the materials cost
me sixty dollars. Well, I lost money on that, right,
I didn't make a profit. That's a loss. While Apple
generates revenue by taking a cut of all digital sales
up to in some cases, so Apple gets a slice
of the pie, which is I guess, Apple pie. Every
time someone purchases a game from the Apple App Store,
(18:08):
or and this is really important, they get a slice
of the pie if a person makes an in game
purchase on an app that was taken from the Apple
App Store. Apple has been going through a series of
court cases about those in game purchases, having recently been
ordered by a judge to offer alternatives or allow for
alternatives to Apple's own in app purchasing system. This would
(18:31):
give users the option to go with something else and
not go through Apple. This is at the heart of
the matter between Apple and Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite.
So again, yes, Apple has made more profiting games than
official game companies, but then Apple also doesn't have to
have the expense of development for those. A man named
(18:52):
O N. D As, a former elevator operator at Tesla,
sued the company, charging that Tesla is a hostile work environment,
and that he and other employees were the targets for
things like racial slurs and intimidation. A court found in
his favor, and the court has awarded him some one
seven million dollars or so in damages. Now, one thing
(19:13):
that makes this story really important is the fact that
Diaz was even able to sue at all. Tesla, like
a lot of tech companies, has a policy that requires
employees to sign an arbitration agreement. Now, these agreements say
that employees must work within company systems to resolve problems.
They are not allowed to go outside the company and say,
(19:35):
address the media or sue the company in a court
and take it to a public trial. However, Diaz never
signed that kind of an agreement, so he wasn't held
to those restrictions. He could sue without breaking an agreement
he had made with the company. And you might even say, hah,
kind of sounds to me like these sorts of agreements
(19:55):
would allow for a toxic work environment to flourish, and
that there would be no real way you could address
it because all the disputes have to be handled internally,
and if the system is rotten, then you'll never come
out on top because the game is stacked against you
from the beginning. You would not be the only person
to think that way. In fact, one of one of
(20:19):
the the investors of Tesla, an organization called NIA Impact
Capital Um, has sent uh the board of directors a
request to review this arbitration policy, raising concerns that the
policy enables harassment. Now, I would go even further than that.
I would say it encourages harassment. Also, I mean, is
(20:40):
it just me or do you sense that there's like
a growing labor movement in the United States? You know,
I think we're still in the very early stages and
it could just fizzle out. But I also feel like
younger generations in particular are getting a bit more head
up about the status quo, and they're demanding things change
or they won't play ball. And hey, young folks, I
(21:03):
am with you on this one. You know, I might
not understand your squid games and your TikTok's, but I'm
all for overhauling the labor system. Also, here's hoping Tesla
cracks down on those internal problems and really does try
to change that toxic work environment. It would be really
nice to hear about companies actually making substantial transformational changes
(21:28):
in workplaces and find a place where employees are all
treated with respect and dignity, which I know that's crazy talk,
but it would be a nice change of pace from
the stories we constantly get about companies that have terrible
work environments, really demoralized employees, and just it just sounds
(21:49):
like the worst. So I am hoping that Tesla makes
those changes. Also, I hope that we start to see
more resistance to this trend of arbitration agreements being put
in place. It's just a way for companies to protect
themselves at the expense of their employees. And I don't
think that's I don't when we're talking about protection, I
(22:11):
don't think it's the companies that need to be protected.
I think it's the individual employees who need the protection. Again,
that's my own opinion. Sticking with cars, since we just
talked about Tesla, let's chat a bit about California because
it's that state's Department of Motor Vehicles that just granted
permits to a pair of self driving car companies, that
(22:34):
being Way Moo and Cruise. They both have been given
permits to operate light duty self driving taxi cabs in
San Francisco and in way most case beyond. But these
permits do come with some restrictions. However, they're not open ended.
So in cruises case, that company's cabs will only be
(22:55):
able to operate between ten pm and six am, so
they can only operate it overnight. They are allowed a
maximum speed of thirty miles per hour, and they can't
operate during particularly foggy or rainy conditions. I actually find
that ten pm to six am really odd. I mean,
maybe it's to avoid traffic. Um. I was trying to
(23:16):
find more confirmation on this and make sure that it
wasn't just a transcription error and that they didn't they
didn't mean between six am and ten pm, but rather
ten pm and six am. I I don't know, so
I'm just going with what the press release said. So,
since we're talking San Francisco, and this does limit when
(23:38):
the vehicles can operate and they can't operate in bad weather,
it really does restrict when they would be able to
two autonomously drive the streets of San Francisco. WAYMO, which
is part of Alphabet that's the company that's also apparent
to Google, gets a bit more leeway the way MOO
cars will be authorized to travel up to sixty five
(24:00):
miles per hour, so they could go on too highways.
They can go beyond just San Francisco, but not the
entire state. Uh. They don't appear to have a limitation
on when they are allowed to operate, so we don't
have like restricted hours for waymo as far as I
can suss out. They also are not allowed to drive
if the weather is too nasty, so that restriction does
still apply. But does this actually mean that robo taxis
(24:23):
are right now prowling the streets of San Francisco. Not
quite yet, because the companies will still need to get
approval from California's Public Utilities Commission, and that commission might
have more restrictions or more requirements. Uh, so we'll have
to just keep an eye out for it. Last week,
the website Lyons posted an essay written primarily by Alexandra Abrams,
(24:47):
who used to be the head of Blue Origins employee Communications.
Blue Origin, in case you don't recall, is Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos's space industry company anyway, Abrams, in around twenty
other folks who either work or have worked for Blue Origin,
detailed that the company has a truly toxic work culture
seems to be a common theme. The essay alleges that
(25:08):
numerous male senior leaders have acted inappropriately with women, including
one who CEO Bob Smith, would then appoint as part
of a hiring committee for a senior HR position. Now,
in case that didn't quite register with you, I'll put
it in in another way, a guy who had numerous sexual
harassment claims against him was then put on a committee
in charge of finding a human resources executive. That's like
(25:32):
giving an inmate in solitary confinement the authority to choose
who the warden is for the prison. The essay lists
several incidents and examples and makes the case that Blue
Origins work environment is harmful, and it's harmful to productivity,
it's harmful to mental health and Abrahams also said that
many of the authors of the essay would never go
(25:53):
up on a Blue Origin rocket out of concerns for safety,
because they said that the work conditions were so intense
and so rushed that they feel that safety has been
uh neglected too much. Meanwhile, Blue Origin has announced that
William Shatner is scheduled to go up on the next trip,
so they're going with all systems go. I guess Today
(26:15):
representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will be meeting with
the US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy at
the White House to talk about quantum computing. Now, for
those who are not familiar with that term, quantum computing
involves the strange world of quantum mechanics. So your classic
computers operate by processing information in the form of binary
(26:36):
digits or bits, and a bit can be a zero
or a one. It's kind of like a light switch.
It's either off or it's on. But quantum computers use
what we call cubits or quantum bits. Now, these can
be a zero, a one, anything in between, and all
of them at the same time. Quantum computing get involve
(26:57):
strange stuff like superposition. That it's what we were just
talking about. Superposition is where you have a quantum element
that can occupy all possible states simultaneously. It would be
like if you could be awake in a sleep at
the same time. You know, those are two different states.
That's kind of what superposition is, but it only applies
to the quantum world, alright, So anyone who's trying to
(27:20):
sell you anything about superposition that could be observed in
our classical universe, they're full of it. That is not
the way the world works. Quantum computers can also involve entanglement. Now,
this is where you have the state of one quantum
element tied to the state of another, no matter how
far apart those two quantum elements are, and by observing
(27:43):
one of those two you can tell what the state
of the other one was at that exact moment. So
let's talk about electron spin. This is a pretty common one.
Let's say that you've got two entangled electrons. One of
them is spinning up and the other one spinning down.
And let's say that they're a universe apart. It doesn't
matter as long as they're tied together. So while one
(28:04):
spinning up, the other one spinning down, you observe the
one of them. You see that spinning up, You know
the other one was spinning down. However, the crazy thing
about the quantum world is that when you start to
observe things, you actually change their behavior, and things like
entanglement breakdown. So while you might be able to say
(28:25):
at that specific moment that other electron was spinning down,
you don't know what it's doing now because the entanglement
has been severed. Now quantum computers can solve a subset
of computational problems with insane speed, assuming that the quantum
computer has enough cubits to do it, and that you
have developed an algorithm that can tackle that sort of problem.
(28:48):
And these are computational problems that would take classic computers
hundreds or thousands or millions of years to complete, and
you can do it relatively quickly with a quantum computer. Now,
it doesn't apply for all types of computational problems. So
in other words, you wouldn't want to use a quantum
computer to play call of duty because it wouldn't work
nearly as well as a classic computer would. Anyway, the
(29:12):
experts from Microsoft and Amazon and Google are meeting today
to talk about possible future applications of quantum computing, some
of which relate to security. Encryption is one of those
things that quantum computers could really disrupt, because with a
sufficiently powerful quantum computer and the right algorithm, you could
potentially break even the toughest encryption schemes in a very
(29:35):
little amount of time. It's amazing and also kind of scary.
We have a couple more stories to get to But
before we do that, let's take another quick break. So,
in the continuing battle against robo calls, the United States
(29:56):
Federal Communications Commission or FCC is considering new restrictions on
domestic gateway providers and they would have to follow these
new rules to cut back on robocalls that originate outside
the United States. All right, this gets to how do
you deal with a problem that doesn't necessarily originate inside
your own country? Right? We see this with the Internet,
(30:19):
and we see it with the telephone system because the
FCC doesn't have jurisdiction outside the United States, right Like,
they can't, you know, the f c C can't go
to a German telephone company and say, hey, knock it off,
because the FCC has no authority over telecommunications companies that
are outside the United States, and yet illegal robocalls from
(30:41):
other nations are a real problem. So the FCC's proposal
is to require gateway phone companies. These are US based
companies that accept and facilitate calls that are coming from
outside the country and routing them to the correct you know,
phone line in inside the country. They will be required
(31:02):
to verify the accuracy of color I D and to
authenticate that a call is legitimate, or presumably they would
have to block it. The FCC has already created protocols
called Stir and Shaken, which are meant to crack down
on US based robo calls. And here's hoping that these
proposals become actual rules and that we see a dramatic
(31:22):
decrease in robo calls as a result. I don't know
about any of you, but for me, I answer maybe
one call out of twenty that comes to my phone
because the vast majority of calls I get our numbers,
I don't recognize. Most of them never bother to leave
a message once it goes to voicemail. The ones that do,
it's prerecorded nonsense. That doesn't you know, it's nothing important.
(31:47):
It's like you need to renew this warranty that I
don't have on often on something that I don't own,
so it's not not something that I really want. And
it would be really nice if you know, when my
phone rings, I could be reasonably sure that it's from
someone I know and possibly someone I want to talk to,
or maybe like I know, oh, that call is coming
(32:10):
from you know, the power company, and they're letting me
know about maybe a planned outage in order to do
some work in the neighborhood. Those are the kind of
calls where, yeah, I'd kind of like to be able
to get them, but I don't get anything because I
just let them all go to voicemail because there are
too many robocalls. All right, I know, you know this
is a problem. If you have a phone, you're aware
(32:32):
of it. I'll be quiet now. Finally, the activist group Anonymous,
which honestly I kind of lost tabs on for a while.
They I'm not sure if they went quiet or if
I just stopped, you know, hearing about their exploits. Anyway. UH,
some group that's associated with Anonymous has been actively defacing
(32:53):
a Chinese government website that promotes tourism in China. The
group has repeatedly altered that website, adding in images, a
lot of them images of various leaders that the Chinese
government has vilified, and UH also sending in messages that
call for people who visit the website to reject communism
(33:14):
and authoritarianism. I'm not sure how effective those strategies are
when you're targeting a tourism page, but it does show
how Anonymous will use a combination of subversion and you know,
kind of juvenile memes to poke at a target. The
group says it discovered that the server hosting the site
was using default password credentials. That speaks really poorly of
(33:35):
that website's approach to security. As a rule, you should
always change the default password settings on all your network devices,
otherwise you run the risk of someone using the default
password credentials to access your stuff and mess with it.
I don't have to guess your password if you've never
changed it. If I try to log into your router
(33:55):
and I use admin and password as the credentials and
it gets in, that's really on you because you didn't
take the steps to I mean it's on me too,
I'm the jerk who's trying to access your system, but
it's on you for also for not taking the steps
to change those defaults. So changing defaults is really good
Anonymous in case you're not familiar with them. It's a
(34:19):
very loose organization, actually using the word organization as even
a little grandiose. It's a collective of hackers and activists
who will target various companies and individuals for different reasons.
Sometimes it's to fight against what is seen as authoritarian regimes.
(34:41):
Sometimes it's to fight against companies that are seen to
be hypocritical. Uh, it really just depends, and there's no
centralized leadership. Really. You can have people who sort of
take the lead on specific initiatives, but it's a very
loose collective at which works to the group's both benefit
(35:02):
and detriment. It all depends on what anyone's trying to do.
All right, that's it for the tech News for Tuesday,
October one. Will be back later in the week with
more tech News and more episodes of tech Stuff. If
you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on
the show, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle
is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to
(35:24):
you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 I love all things tech and it is time
for the tech news for Tuesday, October five, twenty one.
(00:26):
Let's get at it. Chances are you are aware that
yesterday Facebook and all of its services went offline for
several hours. That includes Facebook itself, Messenger, Instagram, What's That,
and Oculus VR. The outage began at approximately eleven forty
(00:46):
a m. Eastern time. That's when facebooks records on the
domain name system suddenly went So. The domain name system
or d n S is like an address or or
phone book for the Internet. So you probably know about
IP addresses, those numerical addresses, especially I p v four
(01:09):
is numerical, I p v six is a mix. But
this is how say a web browser connects to a
specific web page. It actually connects through an I p address.
But IP addresses are not easy for most humans to
remember because again they just look like a jumble of
numbers or with I p v six numbers and possibly letters.
(01:30):
So we use words for our u r ls like
Facebook dot Com, for example, and the d n S
translates those words, which doesn't you know, words don't really
mean anything to web browsers. That's just how we navigate
the web. And so d n S says, all right, well,
let me look and see what I P address that
particular series of words relates to, and then serves that up. Now,
(01:54):
on Facebook's case, the problems seemed to be that Facebook somehow,
probably through a miscon figuration, eliminated its Border Gateway Protocol
or b GP route. This is kind of like a
map of how data can get to Facebook's servers. Facebook
servers published this route to neighboring servers, and they propagated outwards.
(02:16):
So it's kind of like if you're driving through an
unfamiliar town and you stop to ask a local for directions.
You say something like, hey, do you happen to know
the way to get to Facebook, and they say, well, yeah,
go down this road a peace and when you see
the sign for Old Donigan's farm, you turn left. Now,
if you pass an ambulatory scarecrow, you've done gone too far,
(02:37):
except because Facebook withdrew the b g P. If you
were to stop and ask for directions, and say do
you know the way to Facebook? You would get the
answer you can't get that from hreh. But wait, it
gets worse. See Facebook's systems are all internal ones built
on these computers that connect to these particular servers. That
(02:58):
got effect of Lee severed from the Internet and the
loss of the b g P meant that not only
could you as a user no longer check your Facebook
or Instagram or use WhatsApp, and you couldn't play Oculus VR.
If you were a Facebook employee, you couldn't access your
internal systems. You might not even be able to access
(03:21):
the building I saw. One person suggests that the security
system itself is tied into those servers and that your
security badge wouldn't work to let you in in that case. Also,
Facebook has Facebook log In. This is where you know
various apps use your Facebook login for you to access
the app. That way, you don't create a user name
and a password for that specific app. Instead, you use
(03:43):
your Facebook login. Well, with Facebook servers down, there was
no way to authenticate that. So if you were not
actually actively signed into those services, you might have found
it impossible to connect to all those apps. It took
several hours to reconfigure the b GP routes, and that
has made more complicated because obviously the computers that you
would normally use to reconfigure that were the same ones
(04:06):
that were you know, quote unquote disappeared from the Internet.
So it was a pretty rough day for Facebook. Now,
this was just part of the drama that Facebook is
currently going through. On Sunday this past Sunday, former Facebook
employee Francis Howgan appeared on Sixty Minutes and it turns
out that Francis is the person who leaked internal research
(04:30):
documents to the Wall Street Journal. You know, the studies
that showed that Facebook researchers were concerned that Instagram was
harmful to mental health, particularly for teenage girl who girls
who were using the service um and that Facebook was
well aware of how misinformation was spreading across the platform
and how the algorithm was elevating misinformation campaigns. On the interview,
(04:56):
she alleged that Facebook, when faced with a decision to
either go for making a profit or go with an
option that would be better for users, would always choose
the profit option every single time. Today, she has scheduled
to appear before the United States Senate to answer questions
about her former employer, And of course we have been
(05:16):
having ongoing conversations within the government, the US government and
the European government as well about whether or not Facebook
represents a monopoly and if perhaps it might be a
good idea to, you know, force the company to divest
itself of properties like Instagram and WhatsApp. Now, I've also
(05:36):
seen some people suggest that somehow the outage yesterday was
linked to the hearing that's happening today and and the
sixty minutes expose that had happened on Sunday, that perhaps
someone over at Facebook was trying to hide something and
just took extreme measures. But that doesn't seem like that
(05:57):
doesn't seem to hold up even under casual screw utiny.
I would argue that the outage hurt the company big time,
and at the worst possible moment for Facebook, for one thing,
because Facebook went down and all these various integrated services
then became unavailable. The people who say Facebook has too
(06:18):
much influence have way more ammunition, right, because millions of
people rely on, say, WhatsApp to stay in touch with
family and friends around the world, including vulnerable populations who
use WhatsApp in order to maintain contact with people, like say,
back in Africa or in South America. But because WhatsApp
(06:40):
runs on Facebook's systems, that whole service became unavailable globally
for like six hours. This, the critics argue, is what
happens when we put all of our digital eggs in
one social media platforms basket. Right, If we have our
logins tied to Facebook, If the service as we rely
upon to stay in touch with everybody are part of
(07:03):
Facebook and Facebook goes down, all of that becomes unavailable
to us. That, as the argument goes, is an argument
against this kind of consolidation that we've been seeing with
platforms like Facebook, where you know, they're not just building
out their own tools, they're buying up tools that overlap
what Facebook already does. A lot of people have pointed
(07:26):
out over the years that Facebook has acquired companies when
it became clear that Facebook itself was not going to
be able to compete against those companies, and those companies
potentially stood as a threat when it comes to getting
people to spend more and more time on Facebook. Now,
beyond those pieces of evidence that suggests that this is
(07:49):
not something that the company would have wanted Bloomberg estimated
that the outage and the dip and Facebook's stock price,
which has been going on since, you know, earlier in September. UH,
that also meant that CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his wealth
decreased by around seven billion dollars. Now that is beyond
(08:10):
a princely some obviously, and that's not to say that
he won't regain that wealth now that Facebook is back
up and running. Maybe he will. Maybe the company's UH
stock prices will improve, although with the hearing in front
of the U. S. Senate that's not certain. I would
argue no one would authorize some sort of extreme pull
(08:31):
the plug UH strategy at the cost of seven billion bucks.
I'm pretty confident this was all coincidental. It was a
miss configuration, It was not done on purpose, and it
was just supremely bad timing for Facebook for all this
to happen at once. Will the U. S. Government force
Facebook to say bye bye to Instagram and WhatsApp? I
(08:54):
honestly don't know. There is precedent. We have seen the
government break up big company years before, but it hasn't
happened in a long time, and I'm not sure that
it will happen in this case. However, I figure there's
never been a time with more obvious support for that
argument than right now. Yesterday really brought that into, you know,
(09:17):
into the light. Last week, I reported that Amazon would
hold a hardware reveal event, but that my recording session
happened before the event occurred, so I couldn't actually say
what they were going to show off. I did mention
that the Verge had predicted a wall mounted echo device,
and we got one. It's called the Echo Show. But
(09:38):
that site also predicted we wouldn't see anything about the
robot that Amazon had had in development for a few
years at that point. However, Amazon surprised us all and
in fact brought out a robot that it now calls Astro.
The robot will initially sell to a limited customer base
by invitation only, so you actually have to request and invite,
(10:00):
and you must hand over the princely sum of nine
dollars to buy it. Later on, that price is actually
going to go up to around one tho. The robot
has a tablet like screen for a face, like it's
got these digital eyes. Essentially kind of looks a little
bit like Wally from the Pixar film. It moves around
(10:23):
on two twelve inch wheels, and it's got a little
castor like wheel in the back to provide more stability.
It's got cameras, including a five megapixel camera built into
the screen, but it's also got a periscope camera it
can extend and use to look around at surroundings. It's
got a speaker, it's got a microphone. It has facial
recognition technology built into it. It can learn a map
(10:46):
of your home, so you can have it learned the
layout of your home and assigned specific names to specific rooms. Thus,
you could tell your robot, hey, you know, go to
the kitchen and it would navigate over to the chin
from wherever it happened to be. Um. It's got all
the Alexa capabilities built into it so that it can
(11:07):
respond to the request that you would typically use to
ask Alexa for stuff like what the weather is, or
to play a certain song and all that kind of stuff.
Not everyone is sold on this robot. The m I
T Technology Review has called the robot stupid. The Verge
ran a follow up piece saying that developers who had
(11:27):
worked on the robot had reportedly called it terrible and
claimed it would make dumb mistakes such as throwing itself
off the stairs, So if you have stairs in your home,
you might not want to have this thing on an
upper level. I think I would advise folks to maybe
pump the brakes a bit before shelling out a grand
or more for this thing. While we have stuff like
room Buzz and those are reasonably popular, we're really still
(11:49):
waiting on the household robot that is a must buy.
I've seen a lot of people suggest that this robot
doesn't do a whole really when you get down to it,
and the stuff that it does do, it doesn't necessarily
do super well, so it's not like a wise purchasing decision. Um.
(12:11):
I mean, it would potentially give Amazon a lot more
opportunities to figure out how to sell stuff to you.
I mean, if they've got essentially a computer that can
move around your house and observe stuff, then you could
argue this could just be another way for Amazon to
position itself in order to sell more products to customers.
And frankly, I suspect that that is a large part
(12:34):
of it. And you you have to pay for that privilege, right,
You have to pay like a thousand dollars or more
in order to have the privilege of having a surveillance
device that is potentially giving more information to a company
to sell you more stuff. Anyway. Besides the robot and
the wall mounted Echo Show, which again is like a
smart display that you can attach to a wall, we
(12:57):
also saw the Echo Glow. This is a table top
tablet for video conferencing for kids, and it's meant to
appeal to children so that they video conference with distant
friends and family and they don't get bored and just
wander off. That was what Amazon said. The purpose was
behind the design. So in this case, the tablet actually
(13:18):
has incorporated inside of it a projector. The projector can
display stuff on the tabletop in front of the tablet.
It even comes with like a white mat. It's kind
of like a movie screen, so you lay the mat down,
you put the tablet behind the mat, and it can
project a screen down on the mat that's on the table.
Uh that can become an interactive story book, you can
(13:40):
become a game. And there are infrared sensors inside the
tablet so it can track things like hand motion, so
when you're you know, moving stuff around on this screen,
it's acting almost like a touch screen. It's kind of
a neat idea. I'm not entirely sold on it, but
then I also don't have any kids, so um. Amazon
also revealed a smart thermostat fitness track your devices, and
(14:03):
also a version of its Echo device specifically designed for
Disney properties. So in the future, should you stay at
like a Walt Disney World resort, you might find that
there is a Disney themed Echo and you can use
it to ask questions like checking on dining reservations or
asking about park hours, that kind of stuff. Um, I
(14:27):
was not super impressed with the Amazon presentation, but then
I also don't want this to be an Amazon ad.
So we're just gonna go to break and listen to
other ads and then come back with some more news
(14:48):
and we're back. Researchers at Trendy College in Dublin, Ireland,
which by the way, is one of my favorite spots
in Ireland, have released a research paper that looked into
how much data iOS and Android devices gather from their
respective users. The paper says that both operating systems send
packets of data back to you know, their their respective
(15:09):
h q s approximately every four and a half minutes.
Whether you're using it or not. This happens even if
you've gone to the trouble of setting all data sharing
options to off. Keep in mind, some data sharing isn't optional,
it's mandatory. And the study did find some differences between
the two. Google, they said, collects much larger volumes of data.
(15:33):
The size of packets that Google sending back is much
greater than what Apple is doing. However, Apple, while sending
less data, overall, sent a wider variety of data, including
data about other devices that are connected to whichever network
you connect to. Android doesn't do that, so Apple is
(15:54):
interested in what other devices are on the same network
you're on. I guess. The Google reps have said this
is really just kind of how smartphones work. They compared
it to how modern day vehicles have components that send
data back to car companies for safety purposes. The researchers
said that if users really want to limit how much
of your data your phone collects and shares, you should
(16:17):
really go with an Android phone because despite the fact
that it's sending more data, you have more options. You
can have network connections disabled when you activate your phone,
and you should also disabled Google Play and YouTube, and
the Google Play Store. That cuts down on most of
the data collection. You would still need to sideload apps
and get them from someplace other than the Google Play
(16:40):
Store in order to avoid that data collection. Even then,
you're just minimizing the amount of data that's being collected
and shared. They did say that Apple users are just
out of lock because Apple requires a network connection to
activate an iPhone. So Apple users are subjected to data
collection no matter what they do. Speaking of Apple, the
Wall Street Journal parts that Apple made more operating profit
(17:02):
from games than Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Activision Blizzard combined.
And Apple doesn't make games, but profited more from games
than all those other companies. Al Right, so in some
ways this actually is not a big surprise, right. I
Mean we're talking operating profit, we're not talking revenue. So
(17:22):
companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and Activision Blizzard they actually
make games. Now that means that there are costs associated
with that business. You know, Profit is what you've got
after you've accounted for the costs of producing whatever it
is you're producing. So if I decide I'm going to
go and make a chair, and I sell that chair
(17:45):
for fifty dollars, but it turns out the materials cost
me sixty dollars. Well, I lost money on that, right,
I didn't make a profit. That's a loss. While Apple
generates revenue by taking a cut of all digital sales
up to in some cases, so Apple gets a slice
of the pie, which is I guess, Apple pie. Every
time someone purchases a game from the Apple App Store,
(18:08):
or and this is really important, they get a slice
of the pie if a person makes an in game
purchase on an app that was taken from the Apple
App Store. Apple has been going through a series of
court cases about those in game purchases, having recently been
ordered by a judge to offer alternatives or allow for
alternatives to Apple's own in app purchasing system. This would
(18:31):
give users the option to go with something else and
not go through Apple. This is at the heart of
the matter between Apple and Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite.
So again, yes, Apple has made more profiting games than
official game companies, but then Apple also doesn't have to
have the expense of development for those. A man named
(18:52):
O N. D As, a former elevator operator at Tesla,
sued the company, charging that Tesla is a hostile work environment,
and that he and other employees were the targets for
things like racial slurs and intimidation. A court found in
his favor, and the court has awarded him some one
seven million dollars or so in damages. Now, one thing
(19:13):
that makes this story really important is the fact that
Diaz was even able to sue at all. Tesla, like
a lot of tech companies, has a policy that requires
employees to sign an arbitration agreement. Now, these agreements say
that employees must work within company systems to resolve problems.
They are not allowed to go outside the company and say,
(19:35):
address the media or sue the company in a court
and take it to a public trial. However, Diaz never
signed that kind of an agreement, so he wasn't held
to those restrictions. He could sue without breaking an agreement
he had made with the company. And you might even say, hah,
kind of sounds to me like these sorts of agreements
(19:55):
would allow for a toxic work environment to flourish, and
that there would be no real way you could address
it because all the disputes have to be handled internally,
and if the system is rotten, then you'll never come
out on top because the game is stacked against you
from the beginning. You would not be the only person
to think that way. In fact, one of one of
(20:19):
the the investors of Tesla, an organization called NIA Impact
Capital Um, has sent uh the board of directors a
request to review this arbitration policy, raising concerns that the
policy enables harassment. Now, I would go even further than that.
I would say it encourages harassment. Also, I mean, is
(20:40):
it just me or do you sense that there's like
a growing labor movement in the United States? You know,
I think we're still in the very early stages and
it could just fizzle out. But I also feel like
younger generations in particular are getting a bit more head
up about the status quo, and they're demanding things change
or they won't play ball. And hey, young folks, I
(21:03):
am with you on this one. You know, I might
not understand your squid games and your TikTok's, but I'm
all for overhauling the labor system. Also, here's hoping Tesla
cracks down on those internal problems and really does try
to change that toxic work environment. It would be really
nice to hear about companies actually making substantial transformational changes
(21:28):
in workplaces and find a place where employees are all
treated with respect and dignity, which I know that's crazy talk,
but it would be a nice change of pace from
the stories we constantly get about companies that have terrible
work environments, really demoralized employees, and just it just sounds
(21:49):
like the worst. So I am hoping that Tesla makes
those changes. Also, I hope that we start to see
more resistance to this trend of arbitration agreements being put
in place. It's just a way for companies to protect
themselves at the expense of their employees. And I don't
think that's I don't when we're talking about protection, I
(22:11):
don't think it's the companies that need to be protected.
I think it's the individual employees who need the protection. Again,
that's my own opinion. Sticking with cars, since we just
talked about Tesla, let's chat a bit about California because
it's that state's Department of Motor Vehicles that just granted
permits to a pair of self driving car companies, that
(22:34):
being Way Moo and Cruise. They both have been given
permits to operate light duty self driving taxi cabs in
San Francisco and in way most case beyond. But these
permits do come with some restrictions. However, they're not open ended.
So in cruises case, that company's cabs will only be
(22:55):
able to operate between ten pm and six am, so
they can only operate it overnight. They are allowed a
maximum speed of thirty miles per hour, and they can't
operate during particularly foggy or rainy conditions. I actually find
that ten pm to six am really odd. I mean,
maybe it's to avoid traffic. Um. I was trying to
(23:16):
find more confirmation on this and make sure that it
wasn't just a transcription error and that they didn't they
didn't mean between six am and ten pm, but rather
ten pm and six am. I I don't know, so
I'm just going with what the press release said. So,
since we're talking San Francisco, and this does limit when
(23:38):
the vehicles can operate and they can't operate in bad weather,
it really does restrict when they would be able to
two autonomously drive the streets of San Francisco. WAYMO, which
is part of Alphabet that's the company that's also apparent
to Google, gets a bit more leeway the way MOO
cars will be authorized to travel up to sixty five
(24:00):
miles per hour, so they could go on too highways.
They can go beyond just San Francisco, but not the
entire state. Uh. They don't appear to have a limitation
on when they are allowed to operate, so we don't
have like restricted hours for waymo as far as I
can suss out. They also are not allowed to drive
if the weather is too nasty, so that restriction does
still apply. But does this actually mean that robo taxis
(24:23):
are right now prowling the streets of San Francisco. Not
quite yet, because the companies will still need to get
approval from California's Public Utilities Commission, and that commission might
have more restrictions or more requirements. Uh, so we'll have
to just keep an eye out for it. Last week,
the website Lyons posted an essay written primarily by Alexandra Abrams,
(24:47):
who used to be the head of Blue Origins employee Communications.
Blue Origin, in case you don't recall, is Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos's space industry company anyway, Abrams, in around twenty
other folks who either work or have worked for Blue Origin,
detailed that the company has a truly toxic work culture
seems to be a common theme. The essay alleges that
(25:08):
numerous male senior leaders have acted inappropriately with women, including
one who CEO Bob Smith, would then appoint as part
of a hiring committee for a senior HR position. Now,
in case that didn't quite register with you, I'll put
it in in another way, a guy who had numerous sexual
harassment claims against him was then put on a committee
in charge of finding a human resources executive. That's like
(25:32):
giving an inmate in solitary confinement the authority to choose
who the warden is for the prison. The essay lists
several incidents and examples and makes the case that Blue
Origins work environment is harmful, and it's harmful to productivity,
it's harmful to mental health and Abrahams also said that
many of the authors of the essay would never go
(25:53):
up on a Blue Origin rocket out of concerns for safety,
because they said that the work conditions were so intense
and so rushed that they feel that safety has been
uh neglected too much. Meanwhile, Blue Origin has announced that
William Shatner is scheduled to go up on the next trip,
so they're going with all systems go. I guess Today
(26:15):
representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will be meeting with
the US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy at
the White House to talk about quantum computing. Now, for
those who are not familiar with that term, quantum computing
involves the strange world of quantum mechanics. So your classic
computers operate by processing information in the form of binary
(26:36):
digits or bits, and a bit can be a zero
or a one. It's kind of like a light switch.
It's either off or it's on. But quantum computers use
what we call cubits or quantum bits. Now, these can
be a zero, a one, anything in between, and all
of them at the same time. Quantum computing get involve
(26:57):
strange stuff like superposition. That it's what we were just
talking about. Superposition is where you have a quantum element
that can occupy all possible states simultaneously. It would be
like if you could be awake in a sleep at
the same time. You know, those are two different states.
That's kind of what superposition is, but it only applies
to the quantum world, alright, So anyone who's trying to
(27:20):
sell you anything about superposition that could be observed in
our classical universe, they're full of it. That is not
the way the world works. Quantum computers can also involve entanglement. Now,
this is where you have the state of one quantum
element tied to the state of another, no matter how
far apart those two quantum elements are, and by observing
(27:43):
one of those two you can tell what the state
of the other one was at that exact moment. So
let's talk about electron spin. This is a pretty common one.
Let's say that you've got two entangled electrons. One of
them is spinning up and the other one spinning down.
And let's say that they're a universe apart. It doesn't
matter as long as they're tied together. So while one
(28:04):
spinning up, the other one spinning down, you observe the
one of them. You see that spinning up, You know
the other one was spinning down. However, the crazy thing
about the quantum world is that when you start to
observe things, you actually change their behavior, and things like
entanglement breakdown. So while you might be able to say
(28:25):
at that specific moment that other electron was spinning down,
you don't know what it's doing now because the entanglement
has been severed. Now quantum computers can solve a subset
of computational problems with insane speed, assuming that the quantum
computer has enough cubits to do it, and that you
have developed an algorithm that can tackle that sort of problem.
(28:48):
And these are computational problems that would take classic computers
hundreds or thousands or millions of years to complete, and
you can do it relatively quickly with a quantum computer. Now,
it doesn't apply for all types of computational problems. So
in other words, you wouldn't want to use a quantum
computer to play call of duty because it wouldn't work
nearly as well as a classic computer would. Anyway, the
(29:12):
experts from Microsoft and Amazon and Google are meeting today
to talk about possible future applications of quantum computing, some
of which relate to security. Encryption is one of those
things that quantum computers could really disrupt, because with a
sufficiently powerful quantum computer and the right algorithm, you could
potentially break even the toughest encryption schemes in a very
(29:35):
little amount of time. It's amazing and also kind of scary.
We have a couple more stories to get to But
before we do that, let's take another quick break. So,
in the continuing battle against robo calls, the United States
(29:56):
Federal Communications Commission or FCC is considering new restrictions on
domestic gateway providers and they would have to follow these
new rules to cut back on robocalls that originate outside
the United States. All right, this gets to how do
you deal with a problem that doesn't necessarily originate inside
your own country? Right? We see this with the Internet,
(30:19):
and we see it with the telephone system because the
FCC doesn't have jurisdiction outside the United States, right Like,
they can't, you know, the f c C can't go
to a German telephone company and say, hey, knock it off,
because the FCC has no authority over telecommunications companies that
are outside the United States, and yet illegal robocalls from
(30:41):
other nations are a real problem. So the FCC's proposal
is to require gateway phone companies. These are US based
companies that accept and facilitate calls that are coming from
outside the country and routing them to the correct you know,
phone line in inside the country. They will be required
(31:02):
to verify the accuracy of color I D and to
authenticate that a call is legitimate, or presumably they would
have to block it. The FCC has already created protocols
called Stir and Shaken, which are meant to crack down
on US based robo calls. And here's hoping that these
proposals become actual rules and that we see a dramatic
(31:22):
decrease in robo calls as a result. I don't know
about any of you, but for me, I answer maybe
one call out of twenty that comes to my phone
because the vast majority of calls I get our numbers,
I don't recognize. Most of them never bother to leave
a message once it goes to voicemail. The ones that do,
it's prerecorded nonsense. That doesn't you know, it's nothing important.
(31:47):
It's like you need to renew this warranty that I
don't have on often on something that I don't own,
so it's not not something that I really want. And
it would be really nice if you know, when my
phone rings, I could be reasonably sure that it's from
someone I know and possibly someone I want to talk to,
or maybe like I know, oh, that call is coming
(32:10):
from you know, the power company, and they're letting me
know about maybe a planned outage in order to do
some work in the neighborhood. Those are the kind of
calls where, yeah, I'd kind of like to be able
to get them, but I don't get anything because I
just let them all go to voicemail because there are
too many robocalls. All right, I know, you know this
is a problem. If you have a phone, you're aware
(32:32):
of it. I'll be quiet now. Finally, the activist group Anonymous,
which honestly I kind of lost tabs on for a while.
They I'm not sure if they went quiet or if
I just stopped, you know, hearing about their exploits. Anyway. UH,
some group that's associated with Anonymous has been actively defacing
(32:53):
a Chinese government website that promotes tourism in China. The
group has repeatedly altered that website, adding in images, a
lot of them images of various leaders that the Chinese
government has vilified, and UH also sending in messages that
call for people who visit the website to reject communism
(33:14):
and authoritarianism. I'm not sure how effective those strategies are
when you're targeting a tourism page, but it does show
how Anonymous will use a combination of subversion and you know,
kind of juvenile memes to poke at a target. The
group says it discovered that the server hosting the site
was using default password credentials. That speaks really poorly of
(33:35):
that website's approach to security. As a rule, you should
always change the default password settings on all your network devices,
otherwise you run the risk of someone using the default
password credentials to access your stuff and mess with it.
I don't have to guess your password if you've never
changed it. If I try to log into your router
(33:55):
and I use admin and password as the credentials and
it gets in, that's really on you because you didn't
take the steps to I mean it's on me too,
I'm the jerk who's trying to access your system, but
it's on you for also for not taking the steps
to change those defaults. So changing defaults is really good
Anonymous in case you're not familiar with them. It's a
(34:19):
very loose organization, actually using the word organization as even
a little grandiose. It's a collective of hackers and activists
who will target various companies and individuals for different reasons.
Sometimes it's to fight against what is seen as authoritarian regimes.
(34:41):
Sometimes it's to fight against companies that are seen to
be hypocritical. Uh, it really just depends, and there's no
centralized leadership. Really. You can have people who sort of
take the lead on specific initiatives, but it's a very
loose collective at which works to the group's both benefit
(35:02):
and detriment. It all depends on what anyone's trying to do.
All right, that's it for the tech News for Tuesday,
October one. Will be back later in the week with
more tech News and more episodes of tech Stuff. If
you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on
the show, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle
is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to
(35:24):
you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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