October 24, 2025 • 32 mins
Should facial recognition be available to everybody? This week, Oz shows off his new swag from the company of the moment, Colossal Biosciences, and tells us about his visit to the labs’ responsible for Woolly Mice and Dire Wolves. Then, Oz and Karah unpack how facial recognition is being used by viral sites like Cheaterbuster AI and investigate the Trump family crypto empire. They warn about satellites leaking data, Ubers new gigs within gigs, and a new health tracker that goes in your bowl. And finally, an international Chat and Me that will inspire your green thumb!
Additional Reading:
- Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles
- How the Trump companies made $1bn from crypto
- Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data | WIRED
- Uber wants drivers to train AI in their free time
- Kohler’s new toilet camera provides health insights based on your bathroom breaks
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff. I'm
os Volocian and.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm Cara Price.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Today we'll get into why websites claiming to catch cheetahs
using facial recognition should frighten us all and Trump's crypto empire.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Then unchat me.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Every story has two sides, even chat. This time she
has shown her green.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Side all of that on the Weekend Tech. It's Friday,
October twenty fourth.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
So, Kara, often you come in wearing a baseball cap,
that's right. Not today today, I come in wearing a
black windbreaker. Yes, I don't normally wear. What does it
say on it?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
It says the science of genetics, the business of discovery.
Colossal Labs.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Colossal Labs. So, a few weeks ago you sent me
an article about the company trying to revive the DODO.
I did, What did you say?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I said, we should have this guy on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I'm so glad your session avid listener when you're not
on the show, Cara, I interviewed him a few weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yes, I was like, well, that's great, I'm glad you
did that.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is Ben Lamb, the CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences.
Just for some background, this is the company whose mission
is to revive the wooly mammoth.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Have they been successful?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
They're getting there. So one of their big milestones along
the way was to gene edit mice to have wooly
mammoth fur. These were the so called they broke the
Internet around March April. And then of course you're with
the die wolves. Yes, majestic white wolves, beautiful wolves staring
out from the cover of Time magazine. Yes, was that
colossal Colossal as well?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
That was colossal as well.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And now the Dodos is on the agenda, so incredible.
Gives something to believe in about just how powerful the
new science and tech revolution really is. I got the
reason I'm wearing Colossal Bioscience is swag is not because
I've become an employee of Colossal Biosciences.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Or a hYP Well, you're a kind of a hype man.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I got to go to the lab yesterday in Dallas.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
It was really really cool.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Can you describe some of the environs.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yeah, I think it's a little on the top secret side,
but you basically go, you put on a lab code
and then you walk past all these different labs. Whether
each there's a team of scientists working on all different problems.
One is extracting DNA from ancient bones, another is implanting
DNA into eggs. Another is working on an artificial womb,
essentially growing animals without needing a parent animal. They're trying
(02:46):
to grow, growing uff from embryo to maturity. I mean,
it really is totally mind bobbling. There are two big
questions I think about this story. One is is it real?
And some people, when the die Walls came out, said, well,
you know you've basically gene edited normal wolves to give
them white fur and make them a little bit bigger, right,
(03:06):
And Ben Lamb, the CEO of Colossal Biosciences, pushes back,
including by saying, well have you done that exactly? The
other thing people say is what is the business case here?
And when Ban Lamb came on the show, I asked
him about exactly this is this really in your heart
of hearts? More about the de extinction project? Or is
(03:28):
the the extinction project the best meme in the world
to allow you to advance the cause of synthetic biology.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
So so it depends on who you ask, right, have.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Yeah, you know, because because I'm very passionate about, you know, conservation,
which I hope we get into, but you know, for me,
it is about the de extinction, right. I think that
that we are at this like truly at the the
doorway of what we can do with synthetic biology. And
I think that if Colossal word is your every major
(04:01):
disease and help conservation and build technologies that could radically
transform di directed evolution and genetic engineering in all species,
including humans, and make every single species that we wanted
except the mammoth, I would consider us a failure.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
So it's a little bit of both.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
But my heart is still kind of pretty much in
love with the pursuit of some of the really large
de extinction projects.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And just for the sake of clarity, the term de
extinction is defined by Colossal as quote, the process of
generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar
to an extinct species.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
All right, as I want to move on to the
big headlines of the week. As you know, my beat
on this show is dating in the age of tech,
and so of course I have to bring you a
video that's been replicated many times over. So I'm going
to show you a video of a girl who's been
interviewed on the street.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
You've been engaged for six months?
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, you're out here?
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Where's he?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
He's in?
Speaker 5 (05:04):
That never caused conflict. I know a lot of times
military men are like a red flag.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I mean I always have those thous in my mind.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
Well, yeah, you're a woman, of course.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Of course.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
I have an AI software called Cheeterbuster, and we can
find out using spacial recognition if anyone's on a dating app.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
What's his name, Cameron?
Speaker 1 (05:21):
How old is he? City? He said, Jacksonville, North Carolina.
Speaker 5 (05:25):
Can you have a picture of him on your phone
right now? Cheetabuster eye is gonna do its thing. And
remember it uses a marified photo recognition.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
So that selled me. That's on his ID.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
It uses that it's real. He's gonna find him. If
he's on here, we're gonna find him. Okay, I did
find an account.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Is this him?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
That's it searching for men? Is this real?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Well, the app is real. I can't promise that the
girl in it isn't a plant.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I have to say I definitely avoid the situation. This
woman found herself in of a man in the street.
Interview being taped to social media. Do it?
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Let's see what Cameron's.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
This is insane?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yes, So I just want to start by saying, this
is a real app called Cheaterbuster AI. So Joseph Cox,
who's a reporter for four or four, noticed that videos
like the one I just showed you were like flooding
feeds of Instagram and TikTok, and of course was like,
what the hell is this?
Speaker 1 (06:22):
This is well, this is Jerry's spring of the for
the age of Jerry. Jerry exactly, Everyone's Jerry now.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Well, no Jerry is using AI now, which is crazy.
So let me just break down how cheater Bus the
site asks I would say, OZ thirty six New York,
I would upload a photo of you, not all of
it has to be precise, by the way, which is
really interesting.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
You mean you could say, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Whatever, it doesn't have to be super precise. Then there's
an option called face matches different names to see results
of anyone who looks like the photo uploaded.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So, in other words, the name and the age and
the location are essentially narrowing criteria that's right to allow
the facial recognition matching software to do about a.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Job yes, Okay, then you get a list of Tinder
profiles and you can look to see if your person
is cheating. All of this twenty dollars a month, wow
to use.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Wow. What about really good looking people who other people
are using to catfish on Tinder? Their lives could be
ruined by this.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
That's absolutely that's a very good point. I didn't think
of that. So facial reognition, to me is the scariest
part of all of this. I mean, we obviously know
what facial recognition is. It's the biometric technology that identifies
a person by analyzing their features, like the distance between
their eyes or the shape of their nose and so.
Cheeterbusters is a consumer app and is one of many
(07:47):
apps out there that use facial recognition to expose a cheater.
But this is also a technology that's used by the
Department of Defense. It just trips me out.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
And the police and the police. It's funny appropos the police.
I was told to somebody who had attended the No
King's protests yeah this weekend, and she said to me,
oh my goodness, I realized I probably should have worn
a mask, right, No, no, because I don't want to
be in a database if people matched to my identity
who attended to just totally can you imagine. I mean,
(08:19):
like five ten years ago, people said, you know, this
is the nightmare of living in a techno authoritarian state.
Now it's our life, yes, but it's not just being
used by the authorities. It's being used into into wider
culture for cheat busting and of course great social videos exactly.
And the thing is, I mean, obviously cheetahbusting is one
(08:39):
use case, but by far and away not the only one.
I mean, I could theoretically take a picture of someone
I saw on the subway and then trace it to
their Tinder profile, figure out geolocation where they're based, and
like hunt them down.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Eva Galprin, who was actually the director of cybersecurity at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said quote, I think that an
app that allows you to find the dating app profile
and general location of a person based on just one
photo is an excellent tool for stalkers. And I'm like,
you think, well, because you make a great point, which
is that, like I could come into an office any
(09:14):
day catt someone into giving me a photo of them,
or just take one, or take one of.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
You put on your meta ray bands or your o.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The meta ray bands, that's right, opens us up to
something new.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
I'm glad you brought this story because I think it's
it's a bigger story. Obviously, facial recognition technology in the
hands of authorities to do authoritarianism is really bad and
something we've been talking about for a while and something
we should all be scared of and is basically you're
already here. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Joseph Cox from four from Media has actually done multiple
stories on how ice in law enforcement is currently using
this exact kind of technology to track people.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But when any normal person walking around the street can
be identified and geolocated by anybody with camera, man.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I mean it makes you feel not like a member
of the human race, but a member of the database
in a strange way.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
What do you use cheap busters? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Probably it's I mean that's the thing. It's like, it's
the lure of this technology is like too strong. It's
the same thing as giving it. Would I give away
my data? Yeah, in exchange for something else? Sure? Why not?
So caro.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
We haven't done too many stories on tech stuff about crypto.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Crypto is something that I should be interested in, but
I'm just not.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
It's not, honestly, where my curiosity naturally leads me. I
prefer wooly mammoths and cheat Cheetahbuster. But it's obviously it's
it's impossible to an Yeah, yeah, and I saw a
store in the Financial Times that will be a perfect
way for us to have a little bit of it.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And if it's in your heart's.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
In my heart exactly. The headline is how the Trump
companies made a billion dollars from crypto and billion dollars.
By the way, there's a billion dollars of pre tax
profits last year. The FT asked Eric Trump for some
comment on the story. He said, quote, it's probably more's
(11:15):
did you have any idea about this?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
I did not realize they made this much money?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
But he knew that.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I knew that they were involved in crypto. Yeah, but
I did not know it was a billion.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
And that's a lot. That's a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
That's a ton of money.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
So before we kind of get into the whole story,
I want to give you a little bit of background
on Trump's own relationship with crypto. As recently as twenty
twenty four, he was actually in our camp. He labeled
crypto as a quote based on thin air and called
bitcoin a scam. But Trump, obviously he has a better
risk appetite than I do, and so he's all in
on crypto at the moment. The way it started, though,
(11:47):
was in twenty twenty four, Trump was in all kinds
of legal trouble, and this translated to financial trouble because
of huge civil penalties, and he actually claimed at a
certain moment that he would have to start selling his
real estate assets to meet this five hundred million dollar
civil penalty, so he needed money. And then separately, he
was also claiming that he was being debanked, in other words,
(12:09):
that big major financial institutions refuse to carry his accounts,
which is something that normally happens to people who are
criminals or have very bad credit, or people who the
banking system essentially doesn't want to integrate.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Didn't he have a coin? Wasn't there some sort of
coin related to him?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
You're exactly right. So there's actually a Millennia coin, right,
That's what I thought, and a Trump coin. Before we
get to those, there are two quick sort of definitional things.
We're going to talk about meme coins, which are like
the Trump coin and the millennial.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Trend coin like trend coin.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah, yeah, and their cryptocurrency, but anyone can issue them
and they're very much based on like internet hype. And
then you have stable coins, do you not? Stable coins
are but I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I've heard of it, but I don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
So a stable coin is a coin that's tied to
a real asset that the stable coin issuer has to
all so own. So, in other words, a stable coin
is backed by gold or by US dollars. And if
I own a stable coin, I can redeem it at
any point for the real asset. Oh interesting, so much,
that's White's stable. Let's start with those mean coins, dollar
(13:14):
Trump and Dollar Millennia. So these coins were both issued
right before the inauguration and have since lost over ninety
percent of their evaluation. Really but two important points here,
really important points. The Trump and Millennia coins, whenever they're
bought or sold, generate fees to the mean coin issuer.
(13:35):
So the trading volume, regardless of the price, enriches the
mean coin issuer. Guess how much the ft estimates that
the Trumps have made from the buying and selling of
these mean coins much? Four hundred million.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Dollars just on fees fees.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Bear in mind these Trump and Millennia coins made all
the headlines, but they aren't actually the real play. The
ft reports on World Liberty Financial. The company is set
up by Trump's sons and Steve Wickcoff sons. Wickcoff is
the Special Envoy the Middle East as well as kind
of an ambassador at large. Four for Trump the Suns,
it's the neo the Nebow crypto. This company, World Liberty Financial,
(14:17):
has released two major tokens. WLFI, which gives you governance
rights in World Liberty Financial if you're a holder. This
has owned five hundred and fifty million dollars so far,
and then USD one, which is a stable coin whose
price is paged to the US dollar, which has sold
two point seventy one billion dollars of this USD one
(14:38):
stable coin. Bear in mind, twenty twenty five is the
real boom kickoff of this stuff. In twenty twenty four,
Trump declared a personal income of fifty seven point three
million dollars just from World Liberty Financial.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Is it legal what he's doing?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I mean, I couldn't appine on that. I'm sure that
there will be legal plenty of legal challenges to this,
but he's also in a position of changing the laws.
Drawing that famous line from Frost Nixon, if the president
does it, it is the.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Law that was a good Franklin, thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
So we're in that era, I think again. To say
the least, this crypto thing has two levers in terms
of exerting influence potentially on the president. On the domestic side,
American crypto companies donate heavily to the Trump campaign and
the World Liberty, Digital Financial Freedom Pack and Go Figure. Basically,
there's been post Trump presidents did a lot of inflow
(15:33):
of like institutional capital into crypto, which is bolstering the
whole industry internationally. An Abu Dhabi based investment firm bought
two billion dollars of a Trump backstable coin. A Chinese
company called gd Culture Group announced it had raised three
hundred million dollars to spend on bitcoin and the Trump
meme coin, and Trump's sec stopped a fraud investigation into
(15:57):
the Chinese born crypto billionaire just in so after he
put seventy five million dollars into World Devity Financial.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Again, it just feels us.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
I mean, it's as little as to say the least,
But I've got some really good reassuring news. Actually, please,
The president's crypto adventures are actually in a trust really
managed by Donald Trump Junior. Now, this is a quote
in the Financial Time from Richard Painter, who was the
former chief White House ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush. Quote.
(16:30):
Every other president since the Civil War has avoided any
significant financial conflict of interest with their official duties. You know,
going back to the original Trump administration in twenty sixteen
to twenty twenty, people have fixated, Oh my god, he's
getting people spend money in the hotel right right, right,
right now. It's you know, the Trump family are going
(16:51):
to be billionaires for generations just from this.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
From this, Yeah, that's incredible. After the break, satellites reveal
private phone calls. Uber has drivers training, AI and a
new health tracker guaranteed to make a splash. Then on
chatting me, a listener's life gets a little greener.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Stay with us, Welcome back, Hello again, Kara. Do you
remember this sort of phrase the gig economy, Yeah, of course,
I mean this idea that you could like also be
a number driver for like two hours, or deliver a
package or whatever. It may be. So we're now in
(17:34):
the meta gig economy, the giga economy. I saw a
headline in Axios. Uber wants drivers to train AI in
their free time. No, yeah, So basically the idea is
you're driving for Uber and you might have some time
between picking up passengers. That's what do you do?
Speaker 2 (17:52):
You train AI?
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Basically you can do like a one to three minute
task in the Uber app and get paid, like, you know,
a dollar. So average time per task is one to
three minutes. Pay is between fifty cents and a dollar
per task. So let's see you pull over time for
your break, you're having your lunch. You basically you get
a notification saying would you like to do some work
(18:14):
to get additional income?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
And what are they training?
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Like?
Speaker 2 (18:17):
What are what is the data for?
Speaker 1 (18:19):
So there's a separate AI company which is part of
Uber called Uber Ai Solutions. It's really to do with
the kind of human labeling aspect of data that is
required to train.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
That a computer can't do exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And then Uber sells their human driven AI data labeling
and data to other AI companies. The other thing is
some of this data is being sold onto self driving
tech companies like Aurora and Tier four. So essentially, the
uber drivers in their free time, are training AI companies
(18:57):
to replace human drivers.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
So they're basically training themselves out of a job.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Do you remember Wiley Coyote.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Who's a coyote? What is that? That's like payota?
Speaker 1 (19:08):
What do you say?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Coyote?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Coyote, coyote.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
It's like a coy little coyote.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, I feel I feel suitably embarrassed now, but you
know that the image of the yeah, of course, running
coyote cliff, running off the cliff and he's pedaling his
feet like crazy. Underneath him, it's nothing but in there,
and then he realizes and all of a sudden he's
on the floor. Yes, that's us.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
That's a very good image.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I saw this week as well as a story in
Bloomberg about how Open a Eye has hired one hundred bankers.
Do you see this, No, they're paying them one hundred
fifty dollars an hour bankers former investment banker to train
open Aiy's new product to do financial modeling tool financial modeling.
So so bankers are now being paid one hundred fiey
dollars an hour to train an open air product to
(19:51):
do this instead of them.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
So I mean that's putting themselves out of I.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Mean, one hundred few dollars an hour is nice. Yeah,
it's better than fifty cents a task. Yeah, But it's
the same thing where it's like when an't we going
to wake up and realize that this intermediate opportunity of
getting some extra cash to train AI is potentially at
the expense of putting the entire human workforce out of
business as a business.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
It's really interesting. I I mean, I guess it's a
short term gain for a long term problem for these drivers.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I mean, I think that's exactly right. If you have
an opportunity to make some make sure money out of
your time while you're in your car, more power to
you as an individual. As a society, is it the
right thing to be doing?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Well? As you know, I like stories about things that
should not be happening that are happening that make me go,
wait a minute, that doesn't feel right. And so the
story that I want to bring you today is the
following quote. Satellites beam data down to Earth all around
us all the time, so you might expect that those
space based radio communications would be encrypted to prevent any
(20:57):
snoop with a satellite dish from accessing the torrent of
secret information constantly raining from the sky, you would, to
a surprising and troubling degree, be wrong. What there are
sky snoops? So researchers that you see San Diego and
the University of Maryland just found that roughly half of
geostationary satellite signals are entirely vulnerable to eavesdropping.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Huff half. Wow.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
For three years, researchers have developed and used an off
the shelf, meaning we could buy it, eight hundred dollars
satellite receiver system. They put it on the roof of
a university building in San Diego, pointed the dish at
different satellites and interpreted the obscure but unprotected signals. And
(21:42):
this team accessed all kinds of unencrypted consumer, corporate, and
government communications from these satellites. Wow, it's a ton.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
What kind of communications of these? I mean, it's like
phone calls, texts or the above.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
It's all of the above, calls and texts from t mobiles,
cell network data from airline passengers, from in flight Wi
Fi browsing. And this is the one that I mean,
it's all scary, but us and Mexican military and law
enforcement communications, which revealed the locations of personnel, equipment and facilities.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
This is really remarkable.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
But wait, there's more. I should say that some companies
in the study, like T Mobile and AT and T
Mexico have actually already addressed the issue, but there is
like a lot of data still out there. Researchers estimated
that what they were able to pick up was actually
only fifteen percent of global satellite transponder communications.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
To me, the craziest part of this story is that
anyone can access this data and that's because of two things.
The tech the actual satellite receiver system is eight hundred
dollars and this is the craziest part. The researchers are
releasing their software tool for interpreting satellite data on githubs.
So even though this data from satellites comes in obscured,
(23:00):
now anyone with access to GitHub, meaning everyone can interpret
the data.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Why why would they release it?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
So researchers actually argue that this could push companies to
secure their data, so they're sort of doing it to
force the hand of companies to be like, guys, this
is something that's possible. Get your act together. Well, they're
kind of like white hats.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Actually that's a good framing, and white hat hackers are
people who basically find the vulnerabilities in systems in order
that those systems can be repaired and made less vulnerable,
rather than to blackmail the people or steal their data
and for nefarious purposes exactly. In other words, if these
researchers hadn't released the open source tool to interpret the data,
(23:45):
maybe Wide magazine wouldn't to cover the story. Karen, what
if I told you you could turn your bathroom into
a connected, data informed health and wellness hub.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I'd say absolutely no, thank you, Let's stay out of
my bathroom.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
And this is quite a fascinating story for me. It's
about Cola and a new health tracker they've announced called
the decoder that lives in your toilet bowl.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I get it as in decoder exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
This is a very interesting story to me because it
actually harkens back to my childhood watching daytime television in Britain.
There was a TV doctor called Gillian McKeith whose concept
was to go into people's houses and examine their bathroom
to tell them about what they could do to improve
their health. Julie McKay's actually had a second life. I
(24:38):
recently saw a story about my favorite showbiz publication, Bang Showbiz,
with the headline my Pooh tiktoks have saved lives.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Someone just told me their pooh bobs around in the
bottom of the toilet bowl.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
It does not flash. Your toilet's not broken.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
No, no, no, but your digestion is waving a big
brown flag and begging for attention.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
But now everyone can have a Chillian McKee in their toilet,
up their toilet. So the decoder tracks a few things
the frequency, consistency, and shape of your waist, which in
turn can give you recommendations like are you probably hydrated,
are you absorbing nutrients? And of course, to Jillian's point,
(25:22):
you know, are you actually sick? Do you have some
kind of bowel issue that could be anything up to deadly?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
What's effective? In that way it.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Can be effective. The product comes in three parts. There
is a sensor that clamps to most toilet bowls don't
have to have a color, a wall mount that communicates
between the bowl sensors, and has a fingerprint sensor to
track different users. So one oh, so.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
It's not just it's anyone can lock into the ball.
That's just not stuff I want to get stolen data
that I don't want.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
There's also a health app for phones and per the
Verge advanced sensors that use spectroscopy to observe how light
interacts with your waist. The sensors are angled down so
they can only see the inside of the bowl. They're
not looking up to speak. And this is seven dollars
a month, or sixty ninety nine per month for single users,
(26:17):
or twelve ninety nine per month for family plants chebusters.
It's cheaper than cheap bust.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
It's just crazy, especially for the whole family.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And your point about privacy, and I'm not surprised you're
on the privacy track after our satellite story. The data
is end to end ENCRYPTID.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
It's as hard as the stool that's in it. I'm
sorry I had.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
To so, I mean, look, this is this is funny.
Health tracking is obviously a huge trend. I mean, I
wonder how many how many different do you get? The
or ring, the whip band, the decoder, the mattress insert You're.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Just a moving biometric yeah at that point, which I mean,
I don't know if I'm that interested in that like
do every day. I want to know that something is
inspecting my excrement, which it feels like inspector gadget.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And now it's time for Chat and me.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
This week we've got a listener's submission. All the way
from the Netherlands, Nina sent a recording called the green
Side of Chat.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
It is often said that the enormous rise of AI
poses a threat to the environment due to its high
consumption of energy and water, but perhaps you'd like to
hear that AI can sometimes also contribute to improving our
living environment.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
So lovely again. Nina said that the Netherlands is very
densely populated, which has caused a lack of green space.
So the government has actually been encouraging people for a
few years to start replacing the pavement in their yards
with more greenery.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
This summer, to tackle my garden and replace quite a
few square meters of stones with beautiful shrubs, plants and flowers.
But I didn't want to just plant any greenery. I thought,
why not kill two birds with one stone and choose
native plants that also attract bees, butterflies and birds. I
(28:22):
just didn't know where to start, because I also wanted
it all to look nice, of course.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Well, Anina, thank you for sending this in. I just
want to say to you directly, if you're not narrating
books already, you should be. You've got to be great.
You've got a great voice and a great delivery. And
this really hits home to me, Cara, because I had
just moved into a house with a yard, with a yard,
and it's a landlord owned property, and the landlord has
moved to another country, and part of the deal was
(28:49):
that I would take care of the yard. And David,
if you're listening, I promise I'm gonna do my best,
but I am pretty overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Do you have a green thumbers?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Well, my grandmother, my grandmother and my farm they were
both big gardeners, so I kind of grown up with
care for gardens in mind. But like, oh my goodness,
I went to mow of the grass, went to prune
the roses, like I don't. The last thing I want
is for this beautiful garden to turn into a healthscape.
And this for David, So Anina, I'm going to take
(29:18):
a leave out of your book haha, so to speak,
and follow your lead here. I assume what we're going
to hear about is how Nina is used Chat to
develop a green thumb.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Indeed, look what she says.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
I gave chat Jipt a description of the layout of
the garden, how much some the different parts get each day,
and my wishes regarding the types of plants I wanted.
To my surprise, I not only received a list of
plants that would fit well in my new ecologically responsible garden,
but Chap also offered to make a planting plant for me,
(29:54):
taking to account the height, color, and structure of the
various species.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
I'm very curious if this was a Chat hallucination or
if the garden was transformed into a paradise.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Well, I will let Anina tell you, because I just
never want to stop listening to her voice.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Well, I have now created my AI based garden, and
it looks completely wonderful. It meets my expectations in every way.
It has become a beautiful green garden where butterflies and
bees come and go, and all kinds of birds forage
for food. So you see, every story has two sides,
(30:32):
even Chat. This time she has shown her green side.
Thank you Chat, I.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Like the Chat genders.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Chat. She takes a leaf out of your book. That's
true and thank you. That was one of my favorite
ever chat That is incredible. It'll be good and personally
useful as well, which was part of the idea for
doing a segment. So thank you. Just to close, we
really want to hear from you, our listeners. Please send
us all of your chat stories, the good, the bad,
(31:00):
and the ugly, Tech Green and the Green, the good,
the bear, the green and the ugly. Tech Stuff podcast
at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
That's it for this week for tech Stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
I'm Cara Price and I'm as Voloshin. This episode was
produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and Melissa Slaughter. It
was executive produced by me Kara Price, Julian Nutter, and
Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvell for iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Bihid Fraser and Jack Insley mix this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrotear theme song.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Join us next Wednesday for a conversation all about tech
induced paranoia.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff. I'm
os Volocian and.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm Cara Price.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Today we'll get into why websites claiming to catch cheetahs
using facial recognition should frighten us all and Trump's crypto empire.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Then unchat me.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Every story has two sides, even chat. This time she
has shown her green.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Side all of that on the Weekend Tech. It's Friday,
October twenty fourth.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
So, Kara, often you come in wearing a baseball cap,
that's right. Not today today, I come in wearing a
black windbreaker. Yes, I don't normally wear. What does it
say on it?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
It says the science of genetics, the business of discovery.
Colossal Labs.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Colossal Labs. So, a few weeks ago you sent me
an article about the company trying to revive the DODO.
I did, What did you say?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I said, we should have this guy on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I'm so glad your session avid listener when you're not
on the show, Cara, I interviewed him a few weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yes, I was like, well, that's great, I'm glad you
did that.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is Ben Lamb, the CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences.
Just for some background, this is the company whose mission
is to revive the wooly mammoth.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Have they been successful?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
They're getting there. So one of their big milestones along
the way was to gene edit mice to have wooly
mammoth fur. These were the so called they broke the
Internet around March April. And then of course you're with
the die wolves. Yes, majestic white wolves, beautiful wolves staring
out from the cover of Time magazine. Yes, was that
colossal Colossal as well?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
That was colossal as well.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And now the Dodos is on the agenda, so incredible.
Gives something to believe in about just how powerful the
new science and tech revolution really is. I got the
reason I'm wearing Colossal Bioscience is swag is not because
I've become an employee of Colossal Biosciences.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Or a hYP Well, you're a kind of a hype man.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I got to go to the lab yesterday in Dallas.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
It was really really cool.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Can you describe some of the environs.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yeah, I think it's a little on the top secret side,
but you basically go, you put on a lab code
and then you walk past all these different labs. Whether
each there's a team of scientists working on all different problems.
One is extracting DNA from ancient bones, another is implanting
DNA into eggs. Another is working on an artificial womb,
essentially growing animals without needing a parent animal. They're trying
(02:46):
to grow, growing uff from embryo to maturity. I mean,
it really is totally mind bobbling. There are two big
questions I think about this story. One is is it real?
And some people, when the die Walls came out, said, well,
you know you've basically gene edited normal wolves to give
them white fur and make them a little bit bigger, right,
(03:06):
And Ben Lamb, the CEO of Colossal Biosciences, pushes back,
including by saying, well have you done that exactly? The
other thing people say is what is the business case here?
And when Ban Lamb came on the show, I asked
him about exactly this is this really in your heart
of hearts? More about the de extinction project? Or is
(03:28):
the the extinction project the best meme in the world
to allow you to advance the cause of synthetic biology.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
So so it depends on who you ask, right, have.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Yeah, you know, because because I'm very passionate about, you know, conservation,
which I hope we get into, but you know, for me,
it is about the de extinction, right. I think that
that we are at this like truly at the the
doorway of what we can do with synthetic biology. And
I think that if Colossal word is your every major
(04:01):
disease and help conservation and build technologies that could radically
transform di directed evolution and genetic engineering in all species,
including humans, and make every single species that we wanted
except the mammoth, I would consider us a failure.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
So it's a little bit of both.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
But my heart is still kind of pretty much in
love with the pursuit of some of the really large
de extinction projects.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And just for the sake of clarity, the term de
extinction is defined by Colossal as quote, the process of
generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar
to an extinct species.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
All right, as I want to move on to the
big headlines of the week. As you know, my beat
on this show is dating in the age of tech,
and so of course I have to bring you a
video that's been replicated many times over. So I'm going
to show you a video of a girl who's been
interviewed on the street.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
You've been engaged for six months?
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, you're out here?
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Where's he?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
He's in?
Speaker 5 (05:04):
That never caused conflict. I know a lot of times
military men are like a red flag.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I mean I always have those thous in my mind.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
Well, yeah, you're a woman, of course.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Of course.
Speaker 5 (05:13):
I have an AI software called Cheeterbuster, and we can
find out using spacial recognition if anyone's on a dating app.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
What's his name, Cameron?
Speaker 1 (05:21):
How old is he? City? He said, Jacksonville, North Carolina.
Speaker 5 (05:25):
Can you have a picture of him on your phone
right now? Cheetabuster eye is gonna do its thing. And
remember it uses a marified photo recognition.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
So that selled me. That's on his ID.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
It uses that it's real. He's gonna find him. If
he's on here, we're gonna find him. Okay, I did
find an account.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Is this him?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
That's it searching for men? Is this real?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Well, the app is real. I can't promise that the
girl in it isn't a plant.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I have to say I definitely avoid the situation. This
woman found herself in of a man in the street.
Interview being taped to social media. Do it?
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Let's see what Cameron's.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
This is insane?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yes, So I just want to start by saying, this
is a real app called Cheaterbuster AI. So Joseph Cox,
who's a reporter for four or four, noticed that videos
like the one I just showed you were like flooding
feeds of Instagram and TikTok, and of course was like,
what the hell is this?
Speaker 1 (06:22):
This is well, this is Jerry's spring of the for
the age of Jerry. Jerry exactly, Everyone's Jerry now.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Well, no Jerry is using AI now, which is crazy.
So let me just break down how cheater Bus the
site asks I would say, OZ thirty six New York,
I would upload a photo of you, not all of
it has to be precise, by the way, which is
really interesting.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
You mean you could say, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Whatever, it doesn't have to be super precise. Then there's
an option called face matches different names to see results
of anyone who looks like the photo uploaded.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So, in other words, the name and the age and
the location are essentially narrowing criteria that's right to allow
the facial recognition matching software to do about a.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Job yes, Okay, then you get a list of Tinder
profiles and you can look to see if your person
is cheating. All of this twenty dollars a month, wow
to use.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Wow. What about really good looking people who other people
are using to catfish on Tinder? Their lives could be
ruined by this.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
That's absolutely that's a very good point. I didn't think
of that. So facial reognition, to me is the scariest
part of all of this. I mean, we obviously know
what facial recognition is. It's the biometric technology that identifies
a person by analyzing their features, like the distance between
their eyes or the shape of their nose and so.
Cheeterbusters is a consumer app and is one of many
(07:47):
apps out there that use facial recognition to expose a cheater.
But this is also a technology that's used by the
Department of Defense. It just trips me out.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
And the police and the police. It's funny appropos the police.
I was told to somebody who had attended the No
King's protests yeah this weekend, and she said to me,
oh my goodness, I realized I probably should have worn
a mask, right, No, no, because I don't want to
be in a database if people matched to my identity
who attended to just totally can you imagine. I mean,
(08:19):
like five ten years ago, people said, you know, this
is the nightmare of living in a techno authoritarian state.
Now it's our life, yes, but it's not just being
used by the authorities. It's being used into into wider
culture for cheat busting and of course great social videos exactly.
And the thing is, I mean, obviously cheetahbusting is one
(08:39):
use case, but by far and away not the only one.
I mean, I could theoretically take a picture of someone
I saw on the subway and then trace it to
their Tinder profile, figure out geolocation where they're based, and
like hunt them down.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Eva Galprin, who was actually the director of cybersecurity at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said quote, I think that an
app that allows you to find the dating app profile
and general location of a person based on just one
photo is an excellent tool for stalkers. And I'm like,
you think, well, because you make a great point, which
is that, like I could come into an office any
(09:14):
day catt someone into giving me a photo of them,
or just take one, or take one of.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
You put on your meta ray bands or your o.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The meta ray bands, that's right, opens us up to
something new.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
I'm glad you brought this story because I think it's
it's a bigger story. Obviously, facial recognition technology in the
hands of authorities to do authoritarianism is really bad and
something we've been talking about for a while and something
we should all be scared of and is basically you're
already here. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Joseph Cox from four from Media has actually done multiple
stories on how ice in law enforcement is currently using
this exact kind of technology to track people.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But when any normal person walking around the street can
be identified and geolocated by anybody with camera, man.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I mean it makes you feel not like a member
of the human race, but a member of the database
in a strange way.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
What do you use cheap busters? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Probably it's I mean that's the thing. It's like, it's
the lure of this technology is like too strong. It's
the same thing as giving it. Would I give away
my data? Yeah, in exchange for something else? Sure? Why not?
So caro.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
We haven't done too many stories on tech stuff about crypto.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Crypto is something that I should be interested in, but
I'm just not.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
It's not, honestly, where my curiosity naturally leads me. I
prefer wooly mammoths and cheat Cheetahbuster. But it's obviously it's
it's impossible to an Yeah, yeah, and I saw a
store in the Financial Times that will be a perfect
way for us to have a little bit of it.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And if it's in your heart's.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
In my heart exactly. The headline is how the Trump
companies made a billion dollars from crypto and billion dollars.
By the way, there's a billion dollars of pre tax
profits last year. The FT asked Eric Trump for some
comment on the story. He said, quote, it's probably more's
(11:15):
did you have any idea about this?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
I did not realize they made this much money?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
But he knew that.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I knew that they were involved in crypto. Yeah, but
I did not know it was a billion.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
And that's a lot. That's a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
That's a ton of money.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
So before we kind of get into the whole story,
I want to give you a little bit of background
on Trump's own relationship with crypto. As recently as twenty
twenty four, he was actually in our camp. He labeled
crypto as a quote based on thin air and called
bitcoin a scam. But Trump, obviously he has a better
risk appetite than I do, and so he's all in
on crypto at the moment. The way it started, though,
(11:47):
was in twenty twenty four, Trump was in all kinds
of legal trouble, and this translated to financial trouble because
of huge civil penalties, and he actually claimed at a
certain moment that he would have to start selling his
real estate assets to meet this five hundred million dollar
civil penalty, so he needed money. And then separately, he
was also claiming that he was being debanked, in other words,
(12:09):
that big major financial institutions refuse to carry his accounts,
which is something that normally happens to people who are
criminals or have very bad credit, or people who the
banking system essentially doesn't want to integrate.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Didn't he have a coin? Wasn't there some sort of
coin related to him?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
You're exactly right. So there's actually a Millennia coin, right,
That's what I thought, and a Trump coin. Before we
get to those, there are two quick sort of definitional things.
We're going to talk about meme coins, which are like
the Trump coin and the millennial.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Trend coin like trend coin.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah, yeah, and their cryptocurrency, but anyone can issue them
and they're very much based on like internet hype. And
then you have stable coins, do you not? Stable coins
are but I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I've heard of it, but I don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
So a stable coin is a coin that's tied to
a real asset that the stable coin issuer has to
all so own. So, in other words, a stable coin
is backed by gold or by US dollars. And if
I own a stable coin, I can redeem it at
any point for the real asset. Oh interesting, so much,
that's White's stable. Let's start with those mean coins, dollar
(13:14):
Trump and Dollar Millennia. So these coins were both issued
right before the inauguration and have since lost over ninety
percent of their evaluation. Really but two important points here,
really important points. The Trump and Millennia coins, whenever they're
bought or sold, generate fees to the mean coin issuer.
(13:35):
So the trading volume, regardless of the price, enriches the
mean coin issuer. Guess how much the ft estimates that
the Trumps have made from the buying and selling of
these mean coins much? Four hundred million.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Dollars just on fees fees.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Bear in mind these Trump and Millennia coins made all
the headlines, but they aren't actually the real play. The
ft reports on World Liberty Financial. The company is set
up by Trump's sons and Steve Wickcoff sons. Wickcoff is
the Special Envoy the Middle East as well as kind
of an ambassador at large. Four for Trump the Suns,
it's the neo the Nebow crypto. This company, World Liberty Financial,
(14:17):
has released two major tokens. WLFI, which gives you governance
rights in World Liberty Financial if you're a holder. This
has owned five hundred and fifty million dollars so far,
and then USD one, which is a stable coin whose
price is paged to the US dollar, which has sold
two point seventy one billion dollars of this USD one
(14:38):
stable coin. Bear in mind, twenty twenty five is the
real boom kickoff of this stuff. In twenty twenty four,
Trump declared a personal income of fifty seven point three
million dollars just from World Liberty Financial.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Is it legal what he's doing?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I mean, I couldn't appine on that. I'm sure that
there will be legal plenty of legal challenges to this,
but he's also in a position of changing the laws.
Drawing that famous line from Frost Nixon, if the president
does it, it is the.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Law that was a good Franklin, thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
So we're in that era, I think again. To say
the least, this crypto thing has two levers in terms
of exerting influence potentially on the president. On the domestic side,
American crypto companies donate heavily to the Trump campaign and
the World Liberty, Digital Financial Freedom Pack and Go Figure. Basically,
there's been post Trump presidents did a lot of inflow
(15:33):
of like institutional capital into crypto, which is bolstering the
whole industry internationally. An Abu Dhabi based investment firm bought
two billion dollars of a Trump backstable coin. A Chinese
company called gd Culture Group announced it had raised three
hundred million dollars to spend on bitcoin and the Trump
meme coin, and Trump's sec stopped a fraud investigation into
(15:57):
the Chinese born crypto billionaire just in so after he
put seventy five million dollars into World Devity Financial.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Again, it just feels us.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
I mean, it's as little as to say the least,
But I've got some really good reassuring news. Actually, please,
The president's crypto adventures are actually in a trust really
managed by Donald Trump Junior. Now, this is a quote
in the Financial Time from Richard Painter, who was the
former chief White House ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush. Quote.
(16:30):
Every other president since the Civil War has avoided any
significant financial conflict of interest with their official duties. You know,
going back to the original Trump administration in twenty sixteen
to twenty twenty, people have fixated, Oh my god, he's
getting people spend money in the hotel right right, right,
right now. It's you know, the Trump family are going
(16:51):
to be billionaires for generations just from this.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
From this, Yeah, that's incredible. After the break, satellites reveal
private phone calls. Uber has drivers training, AI and a
new health tracker guaranteed to make a splash. Then on
chatting me, a listener's life gets a little greener.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Stay with us, Welcome back, Hello again, Kara. Do you
remember this sort of phrase the gig economy, Yeah, of course,
I mean this idea that you could like also be
a number driver for like two hours, or deliver a
package or whatever. It may be. So we're now in
(17:34):
the meta gig economy, the giga economy. I saw a
headline in Axios. Uber wants drivers to train AI in
their free time. No, yeah, So basically the idea is
you're driving for Uber and you might have some time
between picking up passengers. That's what do you do?
Speaker 2 (17:52):
You train AI?
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Basically you can do like a one to three minute
task in the Uber app and get paid, like, you know,
a dollar. So average time per task is one to
three minutes. Pay is between fifty cents and a dollar
per task. So let's see you pull over time for
your break, you're having your lunch. You basically you get
a notification saying would you like to do some work
(18:14):
to get additional income?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
And what are they training?
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Like?
Speaker 2 (18:17):
What are what is the data for?
Speaker 1 (18:19):
So there's a separate AI company which is part of
Uber called Uber Ai Solutions. It's really to do with
the kind of human labeling aspect of data that is
required to train.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
That a computer can't do exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And then Uber sells their human driven AI data labeling
and data to other AI companies. The other thing is
some of this data is being sold onto self driving
tech companies like Aurora and Tier four. So essentially, the
uber drivers in their free time, are training AI companies
(18:57):
to replace human drivers.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
So they're basically training themselves out of a job.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Do you remember Wiley Coyote.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Who's a coyote? What is that? That's like payota?
Speaker 1 (19:08):
What do you say?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Coyote?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Coyote, coyote.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
It's like a coy little coyote.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, I feel I feel suitably embarrassed now, but you
know that the image of the yeah, of course, running
coyote cliff, running off the cliff and he's pedaling his
feet like crazy. Underneath him, it's nothing but in there,
and then he realizes and all of a sudden he's
on the floor. Yes, that's us.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
That's a very good image.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I saw this week as well as a story in
Bloomberg about how Open a Eye has hired one hundred bankers.
Do you see this, No, they're paying them one hundred
fifty dollars an hour bankers former investment banker to train
open Aiy's new product to do financial modeling tool financial modeling.
So so bankers are now being paid one hundred fiey
dollars an hour to train an open air product to
(19:51):
do this instead of them.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
So I mean that's putting themselves out of I.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Mean, one hundred few dollars an hour is nice. Yeah,
it's better than fifty cents a task. Yeah, But it's
the same thing where it's like when an't we going
to wake up and realize that this intermediate opportunity of
getting some extra cash to train AI is potentially at
the expense of putting the entire human workforce out of
business as a business.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
It's really interesting. I I mean, I guess it's a
short term gain for a long term problem for these drivers.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I mean, I think that's exactly right. If you have
an opportunity to make some make sure money out of
your time while you're in your car, more power to
you as an individual. As a society, is it the
right thing to be doing?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Well? As you know, I like stories about things that
should not be happening that are happening that make me go,
wait a minute, that doesn't feel right. And so the
story that I want to bring you today is the
following quote. Satellites beam data down to Earth all around
us all the time, so you might expect that those
space based radio communications would be encrypted to prevent any
(20:57):
snoop with a satellite dish from accessing the torrent of
secret information constantly raining from the sky, you would, to
a surprising and troubling degree, be wrong. What there are
sky snoops? So researchers that you see San Diego and
the University of Maryland just found that roughly half of
geostationary satellite signals are entirely vulnerable to eavesdropping.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Huff half. Wow.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
For three years, researchers have developed and used an off
the shelf, meaning we could buy it, eight hundred dollars
satellite receiver system. They put it on the roof of
a university building in San Diego, pointed the dish at
different satellites and interpreted the obscure but unprotected signals. And
(21:42):
this team accessed all kinds of unencrypted consumer, corporate, and
government communications from these satellites. Wow, it's a ton.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
What kind of communications of these? I mean, it's like
phone calls, texts or the above.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
It's all of the above, calls and texts from t mobiles,
cell network data from airline passengers, from in flight Wi
Fi browsing. And this is the one that I mean,
it's all scary, but us and Mexican military and law
enforcement communications, which revealed the locations of personnel, equipment and facilities.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
This is really remarkable.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
But wait, there's more. I should say that some companies
in the study, like T Mobile and AT and T
Mexico have actually already addressed the issue, but there is
like a lot of data still out there. Researchers estimated
that what they were able to pick up was actually
only fifteen percent of global satellite transponder communications.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
To me, the craziest part of this story is that
anyone can access this data and that's because of two things.
The tech the actual satellite receiver system is eight hundred
dollars and this is the craziest part. The researchers are
releasing their software tool for interpreting satellite data on githubs.
So even though this data from satellites comes in obscured,
(23:00):
now anyone with access to GitHub, meaning everyone can interpret
the data.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Why why would they release it?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
So researchers actually argue that this could push companies to
secure their data, so they're sort of doing it to
force the hand of companies to be like, guys, this
is something that's possible. Get your act together. Well, they're
kind of like white hats.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Actually that's a good framing, and white hat hackers are
people who basically find the vulnerabilities in systems in order
that those systems can be repaired and made less vulnerable,
rather than to blackmail the people or steal their data
and for nefarious purposes exactly. In other words, if these
researchers hadn't released the open source tool to interpret the data,
(23:45):
maybe Wide magazine wouldn't to cover the story. Karen, what
if I told you you could turn your bathroom into
a connected, data informed health and wellness hub.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I'd say absolutely no, thank you, Let's stay out of
my bathroom.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
And this is quite a fascinating story for me. It's
about Cola and a new health tracker they've announced called
the decoder that lives in your toilet bowl.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I get it as in decoder exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
This is a very interesting story to me because it
actually harkens back to my childhood watching daytime television in Britain.
There was a TV doctor called Gillian McKeith whose concept
was to go into people's houses and examine their bathroom
to tell them about what they could do to improve
their health. Julie McKay's actually had a second life. I
(24:38):
recently saw a story about my favorite showbiz publication, Bang Showbiz,
with the headline my Pooh tiktoks have saved lives.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Someone just told me their pooh bobs around in the
bottom of the toilet bowl.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
It does not flash. Your toilet's not broken.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
No, no, no, but your digestion is waving a big
brown flag and begging for attention.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
But now everyone can have a Chillian McKee in their toilet,
up their toilet. So the decoder tracks a few things
the frequency, consistency, and shape of your waist, which in
turn can give you recommendations like are you probably hydrated,
are you absorbing nutrients? And of course, to Jillian's point,
(25:22):
you know, are you actually sick? Do you have some
kind of bowel issue that could be anything up to deadly?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
What's effective? In that way it.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Can be effective. The product comes in three parts. There
is a sensor that clamps to most toilet bowls don't
have to have a color, a wall mount that communicates
between the bowl sensors, and has a fingerprint sensor to
track different users. So one oh, so.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
It's not just it's anyone can lock into the ball.
That's just not stuff I want to get stolen data
that I don't want.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
There's also a health app for phones and per the
Verge advanced sensors that use spectroscopy to observe how light
interacts with your waist. The sensors are angled down so
they can only see the inside of the bowl. They're
not looking up to speak. And this is seven dollars
a month, or sixty ninety nine per month for single users,
(26:17):
or twelve ninety nine per month for family plants chebusters.
It's cheaper than cheap bust.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
It's just crazy, especially for the whole family.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And your point about privacy, and I'm not surprised you're
on the privacy track after our satellite story. The data
is end to end ENCRYPTID.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
It's as hard as the stool that's in it. I'm
sorry I had.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
To so, I mean, look, this is this is funny.
Health tracking is obviously a huge trend. I mean, I
wonder how many how many different do you get? The
or ring, the whip band, the decoder, the mattress insert You're.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Just a moving biometric yeah at that point, which I mean,
I don't know if I'm that interested in that like
do every day. I want to know that something is
inspecting my excrement, which it feels like inspector gadget.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And now it's time for Chat and me.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
This week we've got a listener's submission. All the way
from the Netherlands, Nina sent a recording called the green
Side of Chat.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
It is often said that the enormous rise of AI
poses a threat to the environment due to its high
consumption of energy and water, but perhaps you'd like to
hear that AI can sometimes also contribute to improving our
living environment.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
So lovely again. Nina said that the Netherlands is very
densely populated, which has caused a lack of green space.
So the government has actually been encouraging people for a
few years to start replacing the pavement in their yards
with more greenery.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
This summer, to tackle my garden and replace quite a
few square meters of stones with beautiful shrubs, plants and flowers.
But I didn't want to just plant any greenery. I thought,
why not kill two birds with one stone and choose
native plants that also attract bees, butterflies and birds. I
(28:22):
just didn't know where to start, because I also wanted
it all to look nice, of course.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Well, Anina, thank you for sending this in. I just
want to say to you directly, if you're not narrating
books already, you should be. You've got to be great.
You've got a great voice and a great delivery. And
this really hits home to me, Cara, because I had
just moved into a house with a yard, with a yard,
and it's a landlord owned property, and the landlord has
moved to another country, and part of the deal was
(28:49):
that I would take care of the yard. And David,
if you're listening, I promise I'm gonna do my best,
but I am pretty overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Do you have a green thumbers?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Well, my grandmother, my grandmother and my farm they were
both big gardeners, so I kind of grown up with
care for gardens in mind. But like, oh my goodness,
I went to mow of the grass, went to prune
the roses, like I don't. The last thing I want
is for this beautiful garden to turn into a healthscape.
And this for David, So Anina, I'm going to take
(29:18):
a leave out of your book haha, so to speak,
and follow your lead here. I assume what we're going
to hear about is how Nina is used Chat to
develop a green thumb.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Indeed, look what she says.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
I gave chat Jipt a description of the layout of
the garden, how much some the different parts get each day,
and my wishes regarding the types of plants I wanted.
To my surprise, I not only received a list of
plants that would fit well in my new ecologically responsible garden,
but Chap also offered to make a planting plant for me,
(29:54):
taking to account the height, color, and structure of the
various species.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
I'm very curious if this was a Chat hallucination or
if the garden was transformed into a paradise.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Well, I will let Anina tell you, because I just
never want to stop listening to her voice.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Well, I have now created my AI based garden, and
it looks completely wonderful. It meets my expectations in every way.
It has become a beautiful green garden where butterflies and
bees come and go, and all kinds of birds forage
for food. So you see, every story has two sides,
(30:32):
even Chat. This time she has shown her green side.
Thank you Chat, I.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Like the Chat genders.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Chat. She takes a leaf out of your book. That's
true and thank you. That was one of my favorite
ever chat That is incredible. It'll be good and personally
useful as well, which was part of the idea for
doing a segment. So thank you. Just to close, we
really want to hear from you, our listeners. Please send
us all of your chat stories, the good, the bad,
(31:00):
and the ugly, Tech Green and the Green, the good,
the bear, the green and the ugly. Tech Stuff podcast
at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
That's it for this week for tech Stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
I'm Cara Price and I'm as Voloshin. This episode was
produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and Melissa Slaughter. It
was executive produced by me Kara Price, Julian Nutter, and
Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvell for iHeart Podcasts.
The engineer is Bihid Fraser and Jack Insley mix this episode.
Kyle Murdoch wrotear theme song.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Join us next Wednesday for a conversation all about tech
induced paranoia.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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