January 3, 2025 • 45 mins
Since TechStuff first launched in 2008, a lot of stuff has happened in the world of tech. Join Jonathan as he looks back on a big tech story for each year of his experience in hosting a technology podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, jonvan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech Are you. Welcome to my last Friday as the
(00:24):
host of tech Stuff. You've almost made it. I've almost
made it. It's really exciting. I thought it could be
fun to look back on kind of like a big
tech story from each year since I've been a host
of tech Stuff. So that's from mid two thousand and
eight to this year or this past year twenty twenty four.
(00:47):
It's weird for me to say this past year because
I'm actually putting this together when it has not yet
turned to twenty twenty five. I also figured this would
take up a couple of episodes because I'm a chatty
Cathy and a lot has gone on since mid two
thousand and eight. So this is part one, and in
part two we will pick up and continue on. That's
how parts work now. To be clear, the entries I
(01:10):
submit to you, these are not necessarily the biggest or
even the most important techt stories of each year. Instead,
it's a story I picked for whatever capricious reason. Entered
into my head as I was looking back over everything
that's happened over the last sixteen and a half years
in the world of tech. So we started off tech
Stuff in early June of two thousand and eight. For
(01:33):
that reason, I went to look at the back half
of two thousand and eight for the tech story to
talk about, So I ignored anything that happened up until June.
And that brings us to Apple launching the iPhone app Store. Now,
the iPhone had come out the year before, but the
app store would end up becoming a thing one month
(01:55):
after we started tech Stuff in July of two thousand
and eight. That's when that app store came online. Now,
before that, iPhone users had to be content with the
apps that Apple made available on the iPhone that were
preloaded on the device. Third party choices were not actually
an option yet. Apple had spent a year, well more
(02:16):
than a year technically, but a year since the iPhone
had come out, just coming up with a way to
create an app store, Like, what was the strategy there?
They didn't want it to just be a fire hose
of content because then the store would get flooded with
all sorts of apps, many of which would be pretty terrible.
(02:36):
So their plan included a vetting process for apps, and
at the best of times, this process was rather opaque
and obtuse. Sometimes a developer could get an app approved
and in the store right away without any real revisions.
Other times developers would get pushedback from Apple and they
would have to tweak their apps for one reason or another,
(02:58):
and that was not always clear, like it wasn't always
apparent why one app would be accepted and another app
rejected when they were, at least on the surface, very
similar to one another. So it raised a lot of
questions and confusion. And because Apple didn't allow for side loading,
which is when users can install apps from outside an
(03:21):
official app store, this meant that developers had no alternative
pathway to get to their customer base. It was either
played by Apple's rules or get shut out entirely. Now,
the app store would have a huge impact on tech
and how we interact with it, which is putting it lightly.
Not to mention it would help propel Apple's revenue into
(03:42):
the stratosphere. The company would take a chunk out of
every purchase made through an app. Now that could also
include if the app was one where customers had to
pay to download the app, like if it wasn't a
free app, if it costs five or ten bucks or whatever,
Apple got a chunk that, But they also got a
percentage of all in app purchasing options, assuming it wasn't
(04:05):
an app like ordering a physical thing, like if you
were using an app to order food from a restaurant,
Apple wouldn't get a chunk of that. But if you
were using an app and the app had features that
were locked behind a paywall and you paid to get
to those features, Apple got a cut. So developers were
obliged to use Apple's own payment processing features, they couldn't
(04:25):
introduce their own, and Apple took, like I said, a
percentage with every transaction. And it was that sort of
policy that would eventually land Apple in hot water with
antitrust regulators who would argue that the company was using
its dominant position to deny competition in the space. And
that's something that still plays out to this day, Like
there's still court cases going on that go one way
(04:48):
or the other. Some have been kind of an Apple's favor,
some have been against, but it's an ongoing thing. But
on top of all that, the app store would bring
about an era in which everyone and their doll began
to develop apps for the web content creators out there.
This became a real headache because it wasn't enough to
just optimize your website so that it would look good
(05:09):
on mobile devices. That was absolutely a necessity, because trends
were showing that more people were starting to rely on
mobile devices to access the web every single year, but
you also had to go and make your own bespoke app,
or at least that that was the philosophy. Countless apps followed.
Some of these would stand the test of time, but
a lot of them ultimately withered and died. I am
(05:32):
reminded of the house Stuff Works app, which we actually
mentioned in a recent episode when I had the boys
of Stuff They Don't Want You to Know on the show.
The House Stuff Works app served up articles and quizzes
and such to users, but it was tough to convince
people to download it. I mean, a lot of folks
would just go to how Stuff Works if Google pointed
them that way when they had the question about something.
(05:54):
And it was also really tough to monetize apps. Optimizing
articles to display in an app meant that you might
have to issue advertising, So like, if they went to
the web version of the article, they would get the
ads and you would get the impressions and that would
count against whatever the ad deal was. But if it
was an app, you might not get that. And ads
(06:15):
were a top revenue driver for a lot of companies,
including How Stuff Works. So how do you both serve
content up to people in a streamlined way via an
app and how do you make money off of that
as its sponsorships? As that what? A lot of people
hadn't figured that out, and a lot of other outlets
encountered similar issues to what we saw How Stuff Works.
(06:37):
For a while, apps were seen as a possible lifeline
for content companies that were struggling with the old business model.
You know, maybe you could convince people to subscribe through
an app and put content behind a paywall. That would
help push back against the myriad of ways content could
be shared outside of just visiting the website itself. Sure,
(06:58):
stuff like social media could let you find more readers,
so a lot of content companies embrace social media early on,
But then people started just skimming content through social media
and never bothered to click through to visit the home website,
which meant again, you weren't actually monetizing any of that traffic.
All the traffic was going to the social network, not
(07:20):
to you. Anyway, the App store made a truly huge
change on the tech sector. Entire companies built around apps
were made possible by Apple's move. And while Google would
launch the Android operating system in two thousand and eight,
I don't think even the most hardcore Android fan out
there would be able to stay with a straight face
(07:41):
that Google would have accomplished the same thing that Apple
managed to do. Google did some great things and continues
to do some great things along with some not so
great things. But honestly, without Apple, I don't think that
this ecosystem really takes off. Now, let us move on
to two thousand and nine, and we've got a whole
year to play with this time, just half a year.
So what tech story caught my eye? Well, there were
(08:03):
a couple of contenders. One is a very sad one.
Steve Jobs's health was in serious decline. And whatever you
might have thought of Steve Jobs as a person or
a boss, still hard to talk about someone's health deteriorating,
at least it is for me. And journalists were swarming
to find out the truth of what was going on
(08:23):
with Steve Jobs, which was kind of achy. He initially
said he was experiencing a quote unquote hormonal imbalance, but
it later turned out that he had secretly had a
liver transplant, and part of me is frustrated that he
actually had to deal with journalists who were prying at
his personal life at all. But then I also understand
that since he was CEO of Apple at the time,
(08:46):
there were reasons people needed to know about his health
because if his well being impacted the company, well that's
a huge thing, and it impacts thousands of other people.
So I guess that's one of the trade offs you
have to accept when you become the head of a
supremely profitable company. And obviously, while his health was big
news in two thousand and nine, his passing two years
(09:08):
later would eclipse that. Another big story in two thousand
and nine was that Microsoft released Windows seven, which would
go on to be one of the more popular versions
of the operating system. Microsoft has had an inconsistent track
record in that regard. People loved Windows XP, but they
weren't fans of Vista. For example. People liked Windows seven,
(09:30):
but they wouldn't very much care for Windows eight and
so on. But I feel the story I should really
touch on is that in two thousand and nine, Facebook
officially passed MySpace as far as the number of visitors
going to each site per month within the United States
is concerned. It is wild to me that tech Stuff
(09:51):
was around back when MySpace wasn't just a thing, it
was the dominant thing in the social network space here
in the States. Of course, by the time time tech
Stuff got started, MySpace was already getting into trouble and
Facebook's star was on the rise. In fact, if we
look at global numbers, Facebook had already surpassed MySpace in
unique visitors worldwide back in April two thousand and eight,
(10:14):
which was a couple of months before tech Stuff even launched. But,
as I'm sure you all know, here in the United States,
folks essentially behave as though nothing matters unless it happens here.
I'm not saying that's right. In fact, I'm saying it's
outright myopic and dumb, but it's still how a lot
of people behave here in the United States. So the
trajectory Facebook was on would propel the company to incredible
(10:36):
heights as well as set itself up for scrutiny and criticism.
In two thousand and nine, Facebook changed its terms of use.
The new terms had a concerning clause in them that read,
and this is a long one, but I'm going to
quote it. Quote you here. By grant Facebook and irrevocable, perpetual,
non exclusive, transferable, fully paid worldwide license would right to
(11:00):
sub license to a use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly,
perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt,
create derivative works, and distribute through multiple tiers. Any user
content you lowercase I post on or in connection with
(11:23):
the Facebook service or the promotion thereof, subject only to
your privacy settings. Or I enable a user to post,
including by offering a share link on your website, and
lowercase B to use your name, likeness, and image for
any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of lowercase A
and lowercase B on or in connection with the Facebook
(11:47):
service or the promotion thereof. End quote. Whew, Okay, that's
a mouthful. I should have just said the headline of
the consumerist piece about this particular change, which was quote
Facebook's new term of service. We can do anything we
want with your content forever. End quote. It's actually it's
a great article. So there was a pretty swift and
(12:08):
negative reaction to this policy change, understandably, and ultimately Facebook
walked it back, putting up changes to vote among the
user base, saying, hey, you should be able to have
a say in this because it's going to impact you,
and a very tiny percentage of users actually bothered to vote,
but critics applauded Facebook's move to at least take user
(12:29):
concerns into consideration. The honeymoon would not last very long, however.
In twenty ten, Zuckerberg would claim that privacy was no
longer a social norm, which I infer as a blanket
excuse for Facebook to collect as much data from as
many people and profit as much as possible. And obviously,
in later years, Facebook would be held accountable for all
sorts of problems it caused or facilitated. But yeah, two
(12:52):
thousand and nine is a good year to point to
and say, here's where Facebook's journey to becoming a huge company,
one of the big five in tech really began. Okay,
we're up to twenty ten. That's the year we'd get
the iPad, which I thought would be a flop because
no one had managed to make a tablet computer a
viable consumer product up to that point. It's also the
(13:15):
year of Antennagate. You might not remember Antennagate because we've
had so many iPhones since then, but Antennagate was when
folks were complaining about connectivity issues with the brand new
iPhone four, and upon closer inspection, it looked like the
issue was the internal antenna of the iPhone was placed
(13:35):
in such a way that if you held the phone
like you know, like a human being holding a phone,
you could end up blocking the antenna from getting a
solid signal. And we were all essentially told, you're holding
it wrong. Thus, Apple pushed the blame onto consumers rather
than owning up to the fact that the iPhone four
had a design flaw. But the story that really jumped
(13:57):
out at me in twenty ten was that the world
learned of stucks net at stux and e T that
was malware designed for a very specific purpose, specifically to
sabotage nuclear centrifuges that were part of Iran's nuclear program.
So in order to create a uranium based nuclear power plant,
(14:18):
or indeed a uranium based nuclear weapon, you first have
to get hold of the right kind of uranium, which
is the isotope U two thirty five. Trouble is, that
is really rare stuff. It makes up less than a
percentage of the uranium we actually mind like zero point
seven percent. But you need a concentration somewhere between three
(14:41):
to five percent of uranium two thirty five in your
uranium mix to have viable material. So we have to
enrich the uranium. We have to get the right concentration.
Part of that process typically involves using centrifuges to separate
out you two thirty five from you know, the other stuff. Well,
the stucks Neat virus would do a few things. One
(15:02):
thing it would do is that it hit itself once
it was installed in a target computer, so that you
couldn't easily see that malware was on the device. These
particular computers were not connected to the Internet, a very
wise decision. They had what we would call an air gap,
as in no connectivity to an outside network. So in
order to get the virus on the computer in the
first place, the malware makers would put this code on
(15:24):
USB drives like little thumb drives, and then they tricked
Iranian plant workers to install the malware on these air
gapped machines, so human beings mostly unknowingly carried this and
ended up installing them on the computers. The code would
send commands to centrifuges and cause the centrifuges to rotate
(15:46):
faster than what they were rated for, and the intent
was to break the machinery and sabotage e Iron's nuclear program,
and it worked. This was not your run of the
mill hacker attack. Of course. While it's never been officially acknowledged,
at least as far as I know, the generally accepted
stories that Israel and the United States collaborated on this
attack for several years before deploying it, and it made
(16:09):
history by being the first major malware attack connected with
industrial sabotage. That's a heck of a story for twenty ten.
We got a lot more, but it's time for us
to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're
(16:31):
back and now we're moving on to twenty eleven. Now.
As I mentioned earlier in this episode, twenty eleven was
the year that Steve Jobs passed away. By the time
of his passing, Tim Cook was acting as the new
CEO of Apple. That's a position he holds to this
very day. And obviously Steve Jobs's passing was huge news.
(16:51):
Like the tech news cycle and really the mainstream news
cycle was dominated by that at the time, Steve Jobs
was kind of he was the face of Apple like
he was the guy who was a co founder of
the company. He famously was banished from the company in
the early mid eighties, left Apple, went and did his
(17:13):
own thing for a while, came back to Apple as
a consultant in the mid to late nineties, eventually reassumed
control of Apple, turned it around from a company that
was on the brink of potentially bankruptcy it was doing
so poorly to becoming one of the most successful tech
companies in the world, propelled by successes like the iMac
(17:37):
and the iPod and of course, later on the iPhone,
largely helped by Johnny Ive, the incredible designer who helped
create the new look of Apple Like. It is a
huge story that he passed away. He was also famous
for being a really tough boss and sometimes a really
really unkind boss. There are some pretty scary stories about
(17:59):
encounter between employees and Steve Jobs. But while his passing
was huge, news that wasn't the story I really wanted
to focus on. Another big one that unfolded in twenty
eleven was how protesters and countries across the Middle East
took to social media to argue for massive social changes
that technically actually started in late twenty ten, but the
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majority of the activity was really spread across twenty eleven.
This became known as the Arab Spring, and there were,
you know, variable degrees of success for social change throughout
the nations that were part of the Arab Spring. But
what that really did was it highlighted how important platforms
(18:42):
like Twitter and other social networks at the time really
are for the purposes of social change. Like we can
forget that because we often will, or at least I
will forget that because I will often focus on things
that are happening, like at the corporate level, where the
people in charge of those platforms are making questionable decisions
or ones that I find ethically troubling, but the people
(19:04):
actually using the platforms can often do so in ways
that evoke positive social change. Also twenty eleven, Google launched
Google Plus that year, but that network had shut down
by twenty nineteen, so it barely merits mentioned it was
just Google making another attempt to creating a social network
(19:25):
similar to that of Facebook or MySpace before it, and
Google just never really nailed that. They tried several times,
and I'm sure they'll try again at some point, but
it is just never stuck. Now, the story I really
wanted to focus on is one that, at least on
the face of it, seems like more of a novelty
(19:45):
and not that important. But I argue it is important,
and that is IBM's Watson AI computer famously took on
two returning Jeopardy champions the game show Jeopardy in a
display of natural language process sing an artificial intelligence powered
problem solving. So Watson played against Ken Jennings and Brad Rudder,
(20:07):
to former champions on Jeopardy. They played a game of
Jeopardy and Watson came out the winner. Watson was able
to navigate clues that incorporated wordplay and you know, references
and pop culture and history, all without having an external
connection to the Internet. So Watson did have access to
a rather massive database of information that was connected to
(20:27):
the computer, but it could not you know, dial out
of the studio for example, to get information from the Internet. Itself.
Watson essentially would buzz in if it calculated that the
probability of its answer being the right answer was above
a certain threshold. And that's interesting too, writ Like, it's
not that it quote unquote knew the right answer. It
(20:50):
had an answer. It would analyze the likelihood of that
answer being the correct one, and if the likelihood were
high enough, Watson would buzz in. Now, the reason I
bring it up here is not because a machine beat
humans in a game, because that's a story we've heard
many times, like the famous one being Gary Kasparov when
he faced off against IBM's Deep Blue in various chess matches.
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IBM has a long history of doing this kind of
stuff too. Instead, the reason I wanted to talk about
it is because in twenty eleven we would get a
hint of where artificial intelligence, particularly AI that has natural
language processing capabilities, would be headed. I would say that
today's generative AI resembles Watson in many ways that we
(21:37):
do have to remember that artificial intelligence isn't always right
or trustworthy. So just as a reminder, you know, this year,
this past year, back in twenty twenty four, I gotta
say twenty twenty four. I'm recording in twenty twenty four.
But I once had AI quote unquote write an episode
of tech Stuff, and then I did kind of director's
(21:59):
commentary on that. I suppose the AI ended up inventing
supposed experts who didn't actually exist and was quoting them
as support for the arguments being made in the episode.
And that's just not cool. I mean, like any any
teacher could tell you if you are if your students
(22:20):
are rating essays and they're quoting made up experts, that's
unethical and it's going to get you a failing grade.
But AI was doing it when I asked it to
create an episode. That's not great. But let's now move
on to two thy twelve. Microsoft pushed Windows eight out
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the door. It was redesigned to work in a world
that was now filling up with touch screens. But while
the touch screen layout may have, you know, really made
sense for people who are on mobile devices, those who
are still working on laptops and desktops were less enchanted
by that user interface. Lots of people preferred sticking with
(23:03):
Windows seven, even though there was a version of Windows
eight you could activate that was less tile based. That's
what Windows eight called the various little icons that you
would navigate through the UI. So this was kind of
another case of Windows Vista all over again, where people
largely rejected the advancements that Microsoft had made and whether
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those advancements actually made sense or not. Users didn't like them,
and so there was a resistance to adopting Windows eight
in large part because of these issues I just mentioned.
Apple also introduced Apple Maps that year. Apple Maps quickly
became the subject of ridicule. You might not remember this
(23:50):
because it's sense gotten much better, but when it was
first released, Apple Maps was pretty bad. Users noted several
deficiencies in the mapping features, you know, like guiding you
to the wrong location or suggesting that you take a
river instead of the highway. In all seriousness, it was bad.
Maybe it wasn't like the worst thing in the world,
(24:10):
but it was bad enough that Tim Cook was actually
prompted to apologize for it. That's not a good look.
That's not something that Apple would typically do. I don't
know that Steve Jobs would have done that, even with
the negative reaction that there was to Apple Maps. He
might have said, you know, we were too enthusiastic and
we released it too early, but I'm not sure he
would apologize. No way of knowing. But no, the story
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I want to talk about is about Marissa Meyer. So
she was one of the early employees at Google. She
was actually employee number twenty way back in nineteen ninety nine.
But in twenty twelve she had a huge career change.
She left Google behind and became the president and CEO
(24:54):
of Yahoo. She also scored a seat on the board
of directors in the process. Old stomping grounds of Google
had been kind of stomping on Yahoo for around the year,
and so Meyer's appointment was intended to shake things up
at the old search engine and web portal, and Yahoo
had been through some pretty tough times. From two thousand
and nine to twenty eleven, Carol Bart's was CEO, and
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her tenure was marked with making some really big replacements
in the executive ranks, as well as a struggle over
Yahoo's very identity. Was it a media company or was
it a tech company? Because Yahoo was really getting into
content creation as well, and it just felt like the
attention of the company was divided and it wasn't doing
(25:40):
either thing particularly well. Eventually, Yahoo's board of Director's lost
patients with Carol Bart's and fired her over the phone
Yike's not classy. Then, in early twenty twelve, and embarrassing
situation reared its ugly head when it was discovered that
Barts's replacement as CEO, a guy named Scott Thompson, not
(26:03):
the guy from Kids in the Hall, that he had
fibbed on his resume, that he had made up some
information that was on his resume, And this was a
bit of a black eye situation, and Thompson was very
quickly given his walking papers just a few months after
he took the job. Meyer would come in as the
new head of Yahoo. She said in an interview with
(26:24):
Wired's Virginia Hefferman that Yahoo as a business constituted all
the different areas in tech that she had worked within
over her years at Google, and she thought she might
be able to bring her skill set to help a
company that was clearly in need. So Meyer had a
lot of work to do. Yahoo was in a pretty
(26:44):
weird space. Morale was shaky, the company had lacked a
solid sense of direction, and the board was eager to
see change. On top of that, there was this ongoing
problem that Yahoo would fail to address. This shift of
user habits to a more mobile center online experience. While
other services and sites were adapting to mobile, Yahoo had
(27:05):
lagged behind, and according to that interview I mentioned a
second ago, Meyer felt that the move to mobile happened
far too late, like eight years too late, she had said.
While she says she's proud of the work she did
at Yahoo, ultimately it would prove to be too little,
too late, and later on the board of directors would
decide to sell Yahoo to Verizon, at which point Meyer
(27:26):
would resign from her position. Meyer's tenure at Yahoo was
marked by many attempts to right the wrongs that had
plagued Yahoo over the previous few years, but without the
support of the board, it was pretty much a doomed endeavor.
Would it have worked otherwise? Well, I guess we're never
gonna know. All right, now, we're up to twenty thirteen,
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and a lot of stuff happened that year. Twitter became
a publicly traded company in twenty thirteen and would remain
so until Elon Musk would announce he was going to
buy it, try to back out of buying it, and
then was forced to buy it. Many years later. Bitcoin's
value took off for the first time in twenty thirteen.
It would later crash and then rise and crash again.
(28:08):
We've seen that happen numerous times. New consoles like the
Xbox One and the PlayStation four would hit the market
in twenty thirteen. But the big story, at least here
in the United States, was a huge scandal about how
an intelligence agency, or actually a few intelligence agencies here
(28:30):
in the States, had been collecting enormous amounts of information
about what were otherwise considered to be private activities of
US citizens and others, and that would end up making
world news. We'll talk about that more in just a moment,
but we're going to take another quick break to think
(28:50):
our sponsors. All right. Before the break, I alluded to
this scandalous revelation of how intelligence agencies within the United
(29:11):
States were apparently collecting truly huge amounts of data. So
the story is a contractor with the NSA, A guy
named Edward Snowden blew the whistle on these programs that
seemed to be a massive breach of constitutional protections or
at the very least a disturbing example of overly intrusive surveillance.
(29:31):
Snowden revealed the existence of a program called PRISM. Now
that's PRISM. Essentially, this described a sweeping program in which
the NSA had, as the Guardian would put it, quote,
direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and
other US Internet giants end quote. And that alone was alarming.
(29:57):
So what sort of data did the NSA have access to? Well, again,
according to the Guardian, it was pretty much everything. I mean,
it was everything from search histories to emails, to file transfers,
voiceover Internet Protocol calls. Beyond all this information came directly
from the provider's servers. Apparently, the documents that Snowden shared
(30:20):
claimed that the NSA had cooperation of the various companies
in this endeavor, although when The Guardian reached out for comment,
representatives from the various companies denied knowing about PRISM. Curiouser
and curiouser, as it would turn out, this was top
secret stuff and companies weren't allowed to reveal that they
(30:40):
were part of it. It was all part of the
clandestine nature. So were they lying that they didn't know
about it? I guess it depends on who was actually
making the statement, because there were probably people who didn't
know about it who were told hey, you got to
tell them we don't know anything about this, and others
who may maybe they did know about it, but they
still had to say they didn't. Later documents would show
that the intelligence community was actually paying millions of dollars
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collectively to these various platforms, and the program originated with
a couple of pieces of legislation that were signed into
law years earlier, namely the Protect America Act, which was
signed into law in two thousand and seven and the
FISA Amendments Act of two thousand and eight. Both of
those were signed into law by former President George W. Bush,
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And it would turn out that the NSA didn't exactly
have its own backdoor access to all these different platforms.
So it wasn't like, you know, it's a slow day
at the NSA. Let's go see what people have been
posting on Facebook to each other in private messages. It
wasn't quite like that. Instead, the way it works from
a very very high level is that you send a
(31:48):
request to the FBI. The FBI sends a directive to
various Internet service providers, and by law, those providers have
to hand over essentially raw communications data, and you just
get this a massive amount of information that encompasses all
the data sent an over a given amount of time.
(32:09):
The FBI then sends this huge amount of information to
THESA stores it on various databases. And presumably the reason
there is that you have all this data that you
can then sift through and search and look for clues
for stuff that potentially threatened national security. So we're talking
about things like terrorist plans, that kind of thing. The
(32:33):
NSSA may try to decrypt encrypted information that can take
quite some time, depending upon the level of encryption. But
in theory, any investigation would first need to secure a
warrant from a court before anyone would be allowed to
search through all that communications data. However, in practice, well
(32:54):
journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that analysts at the NSA can
how much access communications anytime they like without securing any
kind of warrant first, Like they could just you know,
scan through it if they want to. They have that capability.
There's nothing preventing them from doing this. And in fact
that this is something that was and perhaps still is
(33:15):
happening at the NSA. This is according again to Glenn Greenwald,
and you know, people are people, there are people who
will do dumb stuff, even though they might be burdened
with great responsibility. So there have certainly been examples of
people within the intelligence community making use of official tools
(33:36):
for more personal reasons, like checking up on what an
ex partner has been doing since a messy breakup, for example.
That kind of stuff. Like you give someone the keys
to a really powerful tool like that, I suppose the
temptation to misuse it must be pretty great. Prism has
(33:56):
not gone away now. I would say that one lesson
to take home is that encryption is your friend. It
doesn't guarantee that the communications you participate in will be
hidden away, but it makes it much harder for folks
to just snoop on you. Of course, we're rapidly approaching
a quantum computing future in which all previously reliable methods
(34:17):
of encryption could potentially just become child's play to unravel.
But that's the future. Our concern today right now is
the past. So yeah, Snowden obviously his story still ongoing.
He's been living in exile for the last decade, and
some view him as a important whistleblower who alerted citizens
(34:43):
to a program that appears to have a crazy amount
of depth in surveillance, even if you accept the statements
of the intelligence community that oh, sure we're collecting all
of it, but we're not searching it, so we don't
even know what we have, so you have nothing to
worry about. That's not very That doesn't make me feel better.
(35:06):
But not only have we had that, like, he's also
obviously had to deal with finding a totally new life
outside of the United States because there's some people who
view him as a traitor to the country and he
could face serious repercussions were he ever to return. So, yeah,
a pretty dramatic story in tech. In twenty fourteen, we
(35:29):
had a whole year of corporate changes happening in tech.
Steve Balmer, who had led Microsoft as the CEO for
fourteen years at that point, stepped down to make way
for Satya Nadella to take over. Google bought Nest Labs.
They're the makers of the smart thermostat, and had just
at the end of twenty thirteen, had acquired Boston Dynamics.
(35:51):
That's the robotics company that makes adorably terrifying four legged robots,
among other things. Google would later divest itself of Boston Dynamics.
They did so fairly recently found a new home at Hyundai.
Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics for a whopping
three billion With a B dollars, Facebook would make even
(36:14):
larger purchases. Well, they made one that was smaller. They
bought Oculus VR for two billion, but they bought wattsapp
for twenty two billion dollars. At this stage, I think
Facebook was still looking to solidify everything around the tent
pole Facebook social network platform. Like Facebook itself, the platform
(36:36):
was the core of its strategy. But in future years
the company, especially once it changed its name to Meta,
would take a less focused approach to creating what it
hopes will be the future of online life. They're like, well,
Facebook is just one part of our strategy as opposed
to the central part. However, the story I want to
(36:56):
focus on from twenty fourteen is the Sony Pictures hack.
This was a big one, partly because of the sheer
amount of data that was lifted during the hack, partly
because of the sensitive nature of that information, which included
everything from personal information about Sony employees, including stuff like
salary information, all the way up to data about and
(37:17):
even digital prints of unreleased Sony pictures films, but also
the hack would end up becoming a case study in cybersecurity,
with numerous researchers publishing papers on everything from how organizations
can better protect themselves from intrusions two works detailing the
appropriate way to address a crisis once it happens. Because
(37:39):
Sony did a lot of things poorly, So what actually
did happen? Well? In twenty fourteen, Sony Pictures was preparing
to release a film titled The Interview. In this film,
a pair of dufices, a celebrity interview show host and
his producer are recruited by the CIA to use an
opportunity to inter view North Korea's leader Kim Jong un
(38:02):
and then assassinate him. So this is a satire. It
makes fun of Kim Jong Un a lot. It also
comments on the nation of North Korea in general and
its government in particular, and apparently all that was enough
to prompt North Korea to direct state backed hackers to
attack Sony Pictures. Now. I say apparently because definitive evidence
(38:28):
pointing to North Korea has never actually been made public.
That doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. It doesn't mean
that there are any other prime suspects that we could
point at right like, there's there's no one who looks
as good as North Korea in this. North Korea certainly
had the capability to pull something like this off. The
(38:50):
country has been implicated in other state backed cyber attacks. So,
but I do want to make it clear that the
working assumption is that North Korea was responsible, but there
is a little bit of ambiguity there. A group called
the Guardians of Peace ultimately claimed responsibility and claimed that
this was not in direct connection with North Korea's government,
(39:12):
but rather on behalf of North Korea. That is a
claim that I think most security experts have dismissed as
being unlikely. They think it really is more of a
state backed attack. But muddying the waters further is Sony's
own history with cybersecurity, which hasn't been great so Earlier
(39:33):
in the two thousands, the company got into hot water
when it was found that the music division within Sony
had been using a digital rights management or DRM strategy
on their compact discs. And the idea was that if
you took a compact disc and you put it into
the optical drive of a computer, because children back in
(39:53):
those days, our computers had optical drives, meaning that you
would put a disc in the drive. I know that
that sounds strange, but that's how we used to do
things before that. It was floppy disks. But I don't
want to take you into prehistory anyway. If you were
to do this, you might do it so that you
could rip the music and make a digital copy for
the purposes of, say, putting it on like an iPod
(40:16):
or something. And you might also do it so that
you could burn new CDs with the music that you
just got from the one you bought. So Sony wanted
to prevent people from doing that second thing. They didn't
want people to make unauthorized copies of music. Never mind
the fact that, at least here in the United States,
(40:37):
you are legally allowed to make a copy of a
CD for the purposes of a personal backup. That's completely
within your rights. So if you bought a CD and
you made a copy of it so that you could
listen to it in case your original CD gets scratched
or stolen or broken or something, that's fine. Oddly enough, however,
it is against the law to try and circumvent the
(41:00):
detective measures that people might place on things like CDs
to prevent you from doing that. So, yeah, you have
the right to make a copy, but you don't have
the right to break the copy protection on a disc.
It's odd, right, A's a catch twenty two situation. Anyway,
Sony did a thing that really shook people up. They
(41:24):
had installed DRM that would put in essentially a rootkit
on your computer and allow someone to get remote access
to your computer through the Internet. That obviously was a
big no no. It did not go well, and later
on in twenty eleven, Sony found itself the target of
several cyber attacks, when networks being breached more than twenty
(41:45):
times that year, and the company then declared a war
on hackers, which I think mini hackers viewed as both
amusing and potentially a personal challenge. And so there's an
argument to be made that Sony's own approach to cyber
security was one that incited hackers to find new ways
to exploit the company's systems. Meanwhile, Sony was not doing
(42:07):
a very good job at all in actually improving their security.
The attacks ended up locking employees out of their computers
at least temporarily, and the hackers stole truly huge amounts
of data. They then released that information online, and that
info included stuff like executive salaries, which is pretty sensitive
information that companies typically don't want out in the open.
(42:31):
And investigation showed that the hackers didn't have to do
anything particularly spectacular to pull all this off, because again,
Sony Pictures was not exactly up to date with good
security hygiene, and employees had not been properly trained and
they weren't really vigilant. The lack of multi factor authentication
made it much easier for the hackers to find a
compromise log in for systems without having to worry about
(42:54):
additional layers of security. The hackers apparently tricked a few
select employees with a fake Apple ID login page to
get hold of their credentials. Then it was just off
to the races, so this was kind of an example
of spear fishing. Sony was obviously deeply embarrassed by this
whole thing, and it was impossible for the company to
(43:15):
cover it up. The hackers had dumped a ton of
proprietary and private information online and the mess costs Sony
a whole lot of money, though determining just how much
money is actually pretty tricky. On the low end of things,
Sony set aside around fifteen million dollars to address security concerns,
which is not much at all in the grand scheme
(43:37):
of things. Later on, the company also had to agree
to pay around eight million dollars in response to a
class action lawsuit that was brought against the company by
employees who have been affected by this. You know, their
personal information had been stolen as part of this hack.
But because of the nature of what happened with all
that proprietary information leaked and then shared online, it's actually
(43:59):
really hard to put a figure on, ultimately how much
it costs. I've seen estimates that have a wild range
from around thirty five million dollars on the low end
to almost two hundred million on the high end. It's
I honestly don't know how much it costs. But it
was embarrassing for Sony, and it was a real wake
(44:19):
up call. I think for a lot of companies and
organizations that they have to take cybersecurity seriously because something
as small as a perceived slight might prompt a nation
backed group of hackers to try and reach your systems.
I mean, in this case, like I said, the straw
(44:42):
that appears to have broken the proverbial camel's back was
the fact that Sony Pictures was going to really release
the interview, which y'all, in my opinion, was not even
that funny of a comedy, no grit. That's me. I
think there were a lot of funny people in it,
but I didn't personally find it that entertaining. Then again,
I'm probably the wrong audience. I'm such a stick in
(45:03):
the mud. But that is our first part of our
look back on some of the big tech stories that
have unfolded since we launched tech Stuff in June two
thousand and eight. Part two will be coming up next week,
and then my final episode of tech Stuff host will
follow that. So will I still have a chance to
say this? I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
(45:30):
Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, jonvan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech Are you. Welcome to my last Friday as the
(00:24):
host of tech Stuff. You've almost made it. I've almost
made it. It's really exciting. I thought it could be
fun to look back on kind of like a big
tech story from each year since I've been a host
of tech Stuff. So that's from mid two thousand and
eight to this year or this past year twenty twenty four.
(00:47):
It's weird for me to say this past year because
I'm actually putting this together when it has not yet
turned to twenty twenty five. I also figured this would
take up a couple of episodes because I'm a chatty
Cathy and a lot has gone on since mid two
thousand and eight. So this is part one, and in
part two we will pick up and continue on. That's
how parts work now. To be clear, the entries I
(01:10):
submit to you, these are not necessarily the biggest or
even the most important techt stories of each year. Instead,
it's a story I picked for whatever capricious reason. Entered
into my head as I was looking back over everything
that's happened over the last sixteen and a half years
in the world of tech. So we started off tech
Stuff in early June of two thousand and eight. For
(01:33):
that reason, I went to look at the back half
of two thousand and eight for the tech story to
talk about, So I ignored anything that happened up until June.
And that brings us to Apple launching the iPhone app Store. Now,
the iPhone had come out the year before, but the
app store would end up becoming a thing one month
(01:55):
after we started tech Stuff in July of two thousand
and eight. That's when that app store came online. Now,
before that, iPhone users had to be content with the
apps that Apple made available on the iPhone that were
preloaded on the device. Third party choices were not actually
an option yet. Apple had spent a year, well more
(02:16):
than a year technically, but a year since the iPhone
had come out, just coming up with a way to
create an app store, Like, what was the strategy there?
They didn't want it to just be a fire hose
of content because then the store would get flooded with
all sorts of apps, many of which would be pretty terrible.
(02:36):
So their plan included a vetting process for apps, and
at the best of times, this process was rather opaque
and obtuse. Sometimes a developer could get an app approved
and in the store right away without any real revisions.
Other times developers would get pushedback from Apple and they
would have to tweak their apps for one reason or another,
(02:58):
and that was not always clear, like it wasn't always
apparent why one app would be accepted and another app
rejected when they were, at least on the surface, very
similar to one another. So it raised a lot of
questions and confusion. And because Apple didn't allow for side loading,
which is when users can install apps from outside an
(03:21):
official app store, this meant that developers had no alternative
pathway to get to their customer base. It was either
played by Apple's rules or get shut out entirely. Now,
the app store would have a huge impact on tech
and how we interact with it, which is putting it lightly.
Not to mention it would help propel Apple's revenue into
(03:42):
the stratosphere. The company would take a chunk out of
every purchase made through an app. Now that could also
include if the app was one where customers had to
pay to download the app, like if it wasn't a
free app, if it costs five or ten bucks or whatever,
Apple got a chunk that, But they also got a
percentage of all in app purchasing options, assuming it wasn't
(04:05):
an app like ordering a physical thing, like if you
were using an app to order food from a restaurant,
Apple wouldn't get a chunk of that. But if you
were using an app and the app had features that
were locked behind a paywall and you paid to get
to those features, Apple got a cut. So developers were
obliged to use Apple's own payment processing features, they couldn't
(04:25):
introduce their own, and Apple took, like I said, a
percentage with every transaction. And it was that sort of
policy that would eventually land Apple in hot water with
antitrust regulators who would argue that the company was using
its dominant position to deny competition in the space. And
that's something that still plays out to this day, Like
there's still court cases going on that go one way
(04:48):
or the other. Some have been kind of an Apple's favor,
some have been against, but it's an ongoing thing. But
on top of all that, the app store would bring
about an era in which everyone and their doll began
to develop apps for the web content creators out there.
This became a real headache because it wasn't enough to
just optimize your website so that it would look good
(05:09):
on mobile devices. That was absolutely a necessity, because trends
were showing that more people were starting to rely on
mobile devices to access the web every single year, but
you also had to go and make your own bespoke app,
or at least that that was the philosophy. Countless apps followed.
Some of these would stand the test of time, but
a lot of them ultimately withered and died. I am
(05:32):
reminded of the house Stuff Works app, which we actually
mentioned in a recent episode when I had the boys
of Stuff They Don't Want You to Know on the show.
The House Stuff Works app served up articles and quizzes
and such to users, but it was tough to convince
people to download it. I mean, a lot of folks
would just go to how Stuff Works if Google pointed
them that way when they had the question about something.
(05:54):
And it was also really tough to monetize apps. Optimizing
articles to display in an app meant that you might
have to issue advertising, So like, if they went to
the web version of the article, they would get the
ads and you would get the impressions and that would
count against whatever the ad deal was. But if it
was an app, you might not get that. And ads
(06:15):
were a top revenue driver for a lot of companies,
including How Stuff Works. So how do you both serve
content up to people in a streamlined way via an
app and how do you make money off of that
as its sponsorships? As that what? A lot of people
hadn't figured that out, and a lot of other outlets
encountered similar issues to what we saw How Stuff Works.
(06:37):
For a while, apps were seen as a possible lifeline
for content companies that were struggling with the old business model.
You know, maybe you could convince people to subscribe through
an app and put content behind a paywall. That would
help push back against the myriad of ways content could
be shared outside of just visiting the website itself. Sure,
(06:58):
stuff like social media could let you find more readers,
so a lot of content companies embrace social media early on,
But then people started just skimming content through social media
and never bothered to click through to visit the home website,
which meant again, you weren't actually monetizing any of that traffic.
All the traffic was going to the social network, not
(07:20):
to you. Anyway, the App store made a truly huge
change on the tech sector. Entire companies built around apps
were made possible by Apple's move. And while Google would
launch the Android operating system in two thousand and eight,
I don't think even the most hardcore Android fan out
there would be able to stay with a straight face
(07:41):
that Google would have accomplished the same thing that Apple
managed to do. Google did some great things and continues
to do some great things along with some not so
great things. But honestly, without Apple, I don't think that
this ecosystem really takes off. Now, let us move on
to two thousand and nine, and we've got a whole
year to play with this time, just half a year.
So what tech story caught my eye? Well, there were
(08:03):
a couple of contenders. One is a very sad one.
Steve Jobs's health was in serious decline. And whatever you
might have thought of Steve Jobs as a person or
a boss, still hard to talk about someone's health deteriorating,
at least it is for me. And journalists were swarming
to find out the truth of what was going on
(08:23):
with Steve Jobs, which was kind of achy. He initially
said he was experiencing a quote unquote hormonal imbalance, but
it later turned out that he had secretly had a
liver transplant, and part of me is frustrated that he
actually had to deal with journalists who were prying at
his personal life at all. But then I also understand
that since he was CEO of Apple at the time,
(08:46):
there were reasons people needed to know about his health
because if his well being impacted the company, well that's
a huge thing, and it impacts thousands of other people.
So I guess that's one of the trade offs you
have to accept when you become the head of a
supremely profitable company. And obviously, while his health was big
news in two thousand and nine, his passing two years
(09:08):
later would eclipse that. Another big story in two thousand
and nine was that Microsoft released Windows seven, which would
go on to be one of the more popular versions
of the operating system. Microsoft has had an inconsistent track
record in that regard. People loved Windows XP, but they
weren't fans of Vista. For example. People liked Windows seven,
(09:30):
but they wouldn't very much care for Windows eight and
so on. But I feel the story I should really
touch on is that in two thousand and nine, Facebook
officially passed MySpace as far as the number of visitors
going to each site per month within the United States
is concerned. It is wild to me that tech Stuff
(09:51):
was around back when MySpace wasn't just a thing, it
was the dominant thing in the social network space here
in the States. Of course, by the time time tech
Stuff got started, MySpace was already getting into trouble and
Facebook's star was on the rise. In fact, if we
look at global numbers, Facebook had already surpassed MySpace in
unique visitors worldwide back in April two thousand and eight,
(10:14):
which was a couple of months before tech Stuff even launched. But,
as I'm sure you all know, here in the United States,
folks essentially behave as though nothing matters unless it happens here.
I'm not saying that's right. In fact, I'm saying it's
outright myopic and dumb, but it's still how a lot
of people behave here in the United States. So the
trajectory Facebook was on would propel the company to incredible
(10:36):
heights as well as set itself up for scrutiny and criticism.
In two thousand and nine, Facebook changed its terms of use.
The new terms had a concerning clause in them that read,
and this is a long one, but I'm going to
quote it. Quote you here. By grant Facebook and irrevocable, perpetual,
non exclusive, transferable, fully paid worldwide license would right to
(11:00):
sub license to a use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly,
perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt,
create derivative works, and distribute through multiple tiers. Any user
content you lowercase I post on or in connection with
(11:23):
the Facebook service or the promotion thereof, subject only to
your privacy settings. Or I enable a user to post,
including by offering a share link on your website, and
lowercase B to use your name, likeness, and image for
any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of lowercase A
and lowercase B on or in connection with the Facebook
(11:47):
service or the promotion thereof. End quote. Whew, Okay, that's
a mouthful. I should have just said the headline of
the consumerist piece about this particular change, which was quote
Facebook's new term of service. We can do anything we
want with your content forever. End quote. It's actually it's
a great article. So there was a pretty swift and
(12:08):
negative reaction to this policy change, understandably, and ultimately Facebook
walked it back, putting up changes to vote among the
user base, saying, hey, you should be able to have
a say in this because it's going to impact you,
and a very tiny percentage of users actually bothered to vote,
but critics applauded Facebook's move to at least take user
(12:29):
concerns into consideration. The honeymoon would not last very long, however.
In twenty ten, Zuckerberg would claim that privacy was no
longer a social norm, which I infer as a blanket
excuse for Facebook to collect as much data from as
many people and profit as much as possible. And obviously,
in later years, Facebook would be held accountable for all
sorts of problems it caused or facilitated. But yeah, two
(12:52):
thousand and nine is a good year to point to
and say, here's where Facebook's journey to becoming a huge company,
one of the big five in tech really began. Okay,
we're up to twenty ten. That's the year we'd get
the iPad, which I thought would be a flop because
no one had managed to make a tablet computer a
viable consumer product up to that point. It's also the
(13:15):
year of Antennagate. You might not remember Antennagate because we've
had so many iPhones since then, but Antennagate was when
folks were complaining about connectivity issues with the brand new
iPhone four, and upon closer inspection, it looked like the
issue was the internal antenna of the iPhone was placed
(13:35):
in such a way that if you held the phone
like you know, like a human being holding a phone,
you could end up blocking the antenna from getting a
solid signal. And we were all essentially told, you're holding
it wrong. Thus, Apple pushed the blame onto consumers rather
than owning up to the fact that the iPhone four
had a design flaw. But the story that really jumped
(13:57):
out at me in twenty ten was that the world
learned of stucks net at stux and e T that
was malware designed for a very specific purpose, specifically to
sabotage nuclear centrifuges that were part of Iran's nuclear program.
So in order to create a uranium based nuclear power plant,
(14:18):
or indeed a uranium based nuclear weapon, you first have
to get hold of the right kind of uranium, which
is the isotope U two thirty five. Trouble is, that
is really rare stuff. It makes up less than a
percentage of the uranium we actually mind like zero point
seven percent. But you need a concentration somewhere between three
(14:41):
to five percent of uranium two thirty five in your
uranium mix to have viable material. So we have to
enrich the uranium. We have to get the right concentration.
Part of that process typically involves using centrifuges to separate
out you two thirty five from you know, the other stuff. Well,
the stucks Neat virus would do a few things. One
(15:02):
thing it would do is that it hit itself once
it was installed in a target computer, so that you
couldn't easily see that malware was on the device. These
particular computers were not connected to the Internet, a very
wise decision. They had what we would call an air gap,
as in no connectivity to an outside network. So in
order to get the virus on the computer in the
first place, the malware makers would put this code on
(15:24):
USB drives like little thumb drives, and then they tricked
Iranian plant workers to install the malware on these air
gapped machines, so human beings mostly unknowingly carried this and
ended up installing them on the computers. The code would
send commands to centrifuges and cause the centrifuges to rotate
(15:46):
faster than what they were rated for, and the intent
was to break the machinery and sabotage e Iron's nuclear program,
and it worked. This was not your run of the
mill hacker attack. Of course. While it's never been officially acknowledged,
at least as far as I know, the generally accepted
stories that Israel and the United States collaborated on this
attack for several years before deploying it, and it made
(16:09):
history by being the first major malware attack connected with
industrial sabotage. That's a heck of a story for twenty ten.
We got a lot more, but it's time for us
to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're
(16:31):
back and now we're moving on to twenty eleven. Now.
As I mentioned earlier in this episode, twenty eleven was
the year that Steve Jobs passed away. By the time
of his passing, Tim Cook was acting as the new
CEO of Apple. That's a position he holds to this
very day. And obviously Steve Jobs's passing was huge news.
(16:51):
Like the tech news cycle and really the mainstream news
cycle was dominated by that at the time, Steve Jobs
was kind of he was the face of Apple like
he was the guy who was a co founder of
the company. He famously was banished from the company in
the early mid eighties, left Apple, went and did his
(17:13):
own thing for a while, came back to Apple as
a consultant in the mid to late nineties, eventually reassumed
control of Apple, turned it around from a company that
was on the brink of potentially bankruptcy it was doing
so poorly to becoming one of the most successful tech
companies in the world, propelled by successes like the iMac
(17:37):
and the iPod and of course, later on the iPhone,
largely helped by Johnny Ive, the incredible designer who helped
create the new look of Apple Like. It is a
huge story that he passed away. He was also famous
for being a really tough boss and sometimes a really
really unkind boss. There are some pretty scary stories about
(17:59):
encounter between employees and Steve Jobs. But while his passing
was huge, news that wasn't the story I really wanted
to focus on. Another big one that unfolded in twenty
eleven was how protesters and countries across the Middle East
took to social media to argue for massive social changes
that technically actually started in late twenty ten, but the
(18:21):
majority of the activity was really spread across twenty eleven.
This became known as the Arab Spring, and there were,
you know, variable degrees of success for social change throughout
the nations that were part of the Arab Spring. But
what that really did was it highlighted how important platforms
(18:42):
like Twitter and other social networks at the time really
are for the purposes of social change. Like we can
forget that because we often will, or at least I
will forget that because I will often focus on things
that are happening, like at the corporate level, where the
people in charge of those platforms are making questionable decisions
or ones that I find ethically troubling, but the people
(19:04):
actually using the platforms can often do so in ways
that evoke positive social change. Also twenty eleven, Google launched
Google Plus that year, but that network had shut down
by twenty nineteen, so it barely merits mentioned it was
just Google making another attempt to creating a social network
(19:25):
similar to that of Facebook or MySpace before it, and
Google just never really nailed that. They tried several times,
and I'm sure they'll try again at some point, but
it is just never stuck. Now, the story I really
wanted to focus on is one that, at least on
the face of it, seems like more of a novelty
(19:45):
and not that important. But I argue it is important,
and that is IBM's Watson AI computer famously took on
two returning Jeopardy champions the game show Jeopardy in a
display of natural language process sing an artificial intelligence powered
problem solving. So Watson played against Ken Jennings and Brad Rudder,
(20:07):
to former champions on Jeopardy. They played a game of
Jeopardy and Watson came out the winner. Watson was able
to navigate clues that incorporated wordplay and you know, references
and pop culture and history, all without having an external
connection to the Internet. So Watson did have access to
a rather massive database of information that was connected to
(20:27):
the computer, but it could not you know, dial out
of the studio for example, to get information from the Internet. Itself.
Watson essentially would buzz in if it calculated that the
probability of its answer being the right answer was above
a certain threshold. And that's interesting too, writ Like, it's
not that it quote unquote knew the right answer. It
(20:50):
had an answer. It would analyze the likelihood of that
answer being the correct one, and if the likelihood were
high enough, Watson would buzz in. Now, the reason I
bring it up here is not because a machine beat
humans in a game, because that's a story we've heard
many times, like the famous one being Gary Kasparov when
he faced off against IBM's Deep Blue in various chess matches.
(21:15):
IBM has a long history of doing this kind of
stuff too. Instead, the reason I wanted to talk about
it is because in twenty eleven we would get a
hint of where artificial intelligence, particularly AI that has natural
language processing capabilities, would be headed. I would say that
today's generative AI resembles Watson in many ways that we
(21:37):
do have to remember that artificial intelligence isn't always right
or trustworthy. So just as a reminder, you know, this year,
this past year, back in twenty twenty four, I gotta
say twenty twenty four. I'm recording in twenty twenty four.
But I once had AI quote unquote write an episode
of tech Stuff, and then I did kind of director's
(21:59):
commentary on that. I suppose the AI ended up inventing
supposed experts who didn't actually exist and was quoting them
as support for the arguments being made in the episode.
And that's just not cool. I mean, like any any
teacher could tell you if you are if your students
(22:20):
are rating essays and they're quoting made up experts, that's
unethical and it's going to get you a failing grade.
But AI was doing it when I asked it to
create an episode. That's not great. But let's now move
on to two thy twelve. Microsoft pushed Windows eight out
(22:40):
the door. It was redesigned to work in a world
that was now filling up with touch screens. But while
the touch screen layout may have, you know, really made
sense for people who are on mobile devices, those who
are still working on laptops and desktops were less enchanted
by that user interface. Lots of people preferred sticking with
(23:03):
Windows seven, even though there was a version of Windows
eight you could activate that was less tile based. That's
what Windows eight called the various little icons that you
would navigate through the UI. So this was kind of
another case of Windows Vista all over again, where people
largely rejected the advancements that Microsoft had made and whether
(23:28):
those advancements actually made sense or not. Users didn't like them,
and so there was a resistance to adopting Windows eight
in large part because of these issues I just mentioned.
Apple also introduced Apple Maps that year. Apple Maps quickly
became the subject of ridicule. You might not remember this
(23:50):
because it's sense gotten much better, but when it was
first released, Apple Maps was pretty bad. Users noted several
deficiencies in the mapping features, you know, like guiding you
to the wrong location or suggesting that you take a
river instead of the highway. In all seriousness, it was bad.
Maybe it wasn't like the worst thing in the world,
(24:10):
but it was bad enough that Tim Cook was actually
prompted to apologize for it. That's not a good look.
That's not something that Apple would typically do. I don't
know that Steve Jobs would have done that, even with
the negative reaction that there was to Apple Maps. He
might have said, you know, we were too enthusiastic and
we released it too early, but I'm not sure he
would apologize. No way of knowing. But no, the story
(24:34):
I want to talk about is about Marissa Meyer. So
she was one of the early employees at Google. She
was actually employee number twenty way back in nineteen ninety nine.
But in twenty twelve she had a huge career change.
She left Google behind and became the president and CEO
(24:54):
of Yahoo. She also scored a seat on the board
of directors in the process. Old stomping grounds of Google
had been kind of stomping on Yahoo for around the year,
and so Meyer's appointment was intended to shake things up
at the old search engine and web portal, and Yahoo
had been through some pretty tough times. From two thousand
and nine to twenty eleven, Carol Bart's was CEO, and
(25:18):
her tenure was marked with making some really big replacements
in the executive ranks, as well as a struggle over
Yahoo's very identity. Was it a media company or was
it a tech company? Because Yahoo was really getting into
content creation as well, and it just felt like the
attention of the company was divided and it wasn't doing
(25:40):
either thing particularly well. Eventually, Yahoo's board of Director's lost
patients with Carol Bart's and fired her over the phone
Yike's not classy. Then, in early twenty twelve, and embarrassing
situation reared its ugly head when it was discovered that
Barts's replacement as CEO, a guy named Scott Thompson, not
(26:03):
the guy from Kids in the Hall, that he had
fibbed on his resume, that he had made up some
information that was on his resume, And this was a
bit of a black eye situation, and Thompson was very
quickly given his walking papers just a few months after
he took the job. Meyer would come in as the
new head of Yahoo. She said in an interview with
(26:24):
Wired's Virginia Hefferman that Yahoo as a business constituted all
the different areas in tech that she had worked within
over her years at Google, and she thought she might
be able to bring her skill set to help a
company that was clearly in need. So Meyer had a
lot of work to do. Yahoo was in a pretty
(26:44):
weird space. Morale was shaky, the company had lacked a
solid sense of direction, and the board was eager to
see change. On top of that, there was this ongoing
problem that Yahoo would fail to address. This shift of
user habits to a more mobile center online experience. While
other services and sites were adapting to mobile, Yahoo had
(27:05):
lagged behind, and according to that interview I mentioned a
second ago, Meyer felt that the move to mobile happened
far too late, like eight years too late, she had said.
While she says she's proud of the work she did
at Yahoo, ultimately it would prove to be too little,
too late, and later on the board of directors would
decide to sell Yahoo to Verizon, at which point Meyer
(27:26):
would resign from her position. Meyer's tenure at Yahoo was
marked by many attempts to right the wrongs that had
plagued Yahoo over the previous few years, but without the
support of the board, it was pretty much a doomed endeavor.
Would it have worked otherwise? Well, I guess we're never
gonna know. All right, now, we're up to twenty thirteen,
(27:47):
and a lot of stuff happened that year. Twitter became
a publicly traded company in twenty thirteen and would remain
so until Elon Musk would announce he was going to
buy it, try to back out of buying it, and
then was forced to buy it. Many years later. Bitcoin's
value took off for the first time in twenty thirteen.
It would later crash and then rise and crash again.
(28:08):
We've seen that happen numerous times. New consoles like the
Xbox One and the PlayStation four would hit the market
in twenty thirteen. But the big story, at least here
in the United States, was a huge scandal about how
an intelligence agency, or actually a few intelligence agencies here
(28:30):
in the States, had been collecting enormous amounts of information
about what were otherwise considered to be private activities of
US citizens and others, and that would end up making
world news. We'll talk about that more in just a moment,
but we're going to take another quick break to think
(28:50):
our sponsors. All right. Before the break, I alluded to
this scandalous revelation of how intelligence agencies within the United
(29:11):
States were apparently collecting truly huge amounts of data. So
the story is a contractor with the NSA, A guy
named Edward Snowden blew the whistle on these programs that
seemed to be a massive breach of constitutional protections or
at the very least a disturbing example of overly intrusive surveillance.
(29:31):
Snowden revealed the existence of a program called PRISM. Now
that's PRISM. Essentially, this described a sweeping program in which
the NSA had, as the Guardian would put it, quote,
direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and
other US Internet giants end quote. And that alone was alarming.
(29:57):
So what sort of data did the NSA have access to? Well, again,
according to the Guardian, it was pretty much everything. I mean,
it was everything from search histories to emails, to file transfers,
voiceover Internet Protocol calls. Beyond all this information came directly
from the provider's servers. Apparently, the documents that Snowden shared
(30:20):
claimed that the NSA had cooperation of the various companies
in this endeavor, although when The Guardian reached out for comment,
representatives from the various companies denied knowing about PRISM. Curiouser
and curiouser, as it would turn out, this was top
secret stuff and companies weren't allowed to reveal that they
(30:40):
were part of it. It was all part of the
clandestine nature. So were they lying that they didn't know
about it? I guess it depends on who was actually
making the statement, because there were probably people who didn't
know about it who were told hey, you got to
tell them we don't know anything about this, and others
who may maybe they did know about it, but they
still had to say they didn't. Later documents would show
that the intelligence community was actually paying millions of dollars
(31:04):
collectively to these various platforms, and the program originated with
a couple of pieces of legislation that were signed into
law years earlier, namely the Protect America Act, which was
signed into law in two thousand and seven and the
FISA Amendments Act of two thousand and eight. Both of
those were signed into law by former President George W. Bush,
(31:26):
And it would turn out that the NSA didn't exactly
have its own backdoor access to all these different platforms.
So it wasn't like, you know, it's a slow day
at the NSA. Let's go see what people have been
posting on Facebook to each other in private messages. It
wasn't quite like that. Instead, the way it works from
a very very high level is that you send a
(31:48):
request to the FBI. The FBI sends a directive to
various Internet service providers, and by law, those providers have
to hand over essentially raw communications data, and you just
get this a massive amount of information that encompasses all
the data sent an over a given amount of time.
(32:09):
The FBI then sends this huge amount of information to
THESA stores it on various databases. And presumably the reason
there is that you have all this data that you
can then sift through and search and look for clues
for stuff that potentially threatened national security. So we're talking
about things like terrorist plans, that kind of thing. The
(32:33):
NSSA may try to decrypt encrypted information that can take
quite some time, depending upon the level of encryption. But
in theory, any investigation would first need to secure a
warrant from a court before anyone would be allowed to
search through all that communications data. However, in practice, well
(32:54):
journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that analysts at the NSA can
how much access communications anytime they like without securing any
kind of warrant first, Like they could just you know,
scan through it if they want to. They have that capability.
There's nothing preventing them from doing this. And in fact
that this is something that was and perhaps still is
(33:15):
happening at the NSA. This is according again to Glenn Greenwald,
and you know, people are people, there are people who
will do dumb stuff, even though they might be burdened
with great responsibility. So there have certainly been examples of
people within the intelligence community making use of official tools
(33:36):
for more personal reasons, like checking up on what an
ex partner has been doing since a messy breakup, for example.
That kind of stuff. Like you give someone the keys
to a really powerful tool like that, I suppose the
temptation to misuse it must be pretty great. Prism has
(33:56):
not gone away now. I would say that one lesson
to take home is that encryption is your friend. It
doesn't guarantee that the communications you participate in will be
hidden away, but it makes it much harder for folks
to just snoop on you. Of course, we're rapidly approaching
a quantum computing future in which all previously reliable methods
(34:17):
of encryption could potentially just become child's play to unravel.
But that's the future. Our concern today right now is
the past. So yeah, Snowden obviously his story still ongoing.
He's been living in exile for the last decade, and
some view him as a important whistleblower who alerted citizens
(34:43):
to a program that appears to have a crazy amount
of depth in surveillance, even if you accept the statements
of the intelligence community that oh, sure we're collecting all
of it, but we're not searching it, so we don't
even know what we have, so you have nothing to
worry about. That's not very That doesn't make me feel better.
(35:06):
But not only have we had that, like, he's also
obviously had to deal with finding a totally new life
outside of the United States because there's some people who
view him as a traitor to the country and he
could face serious repercussions were he ever to return. So, yeah,
a pretty dramatic story in tech. In twenty fourteen, we
(35:29):
had a whole year of corporate changes happening in tech.
Steve Balmer, who had led Microsoft as the CEO for
fourteen years at that point, stepped down to make way
for Satya Nadella to take over. Google bought Nest Labs.
They're the makers of the smart thermostat, and had just
at the end of twenty thirteen, had acquired Boston Dynamics.
(35:51):
That's the robotics company that makes adorably terrifying four legged robots,
among other things. Google would later divest itself of Boston Dynamics.
They did so fairly recently found a new home at Hyundai.
Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics for a whopping
three billion With a B dollars, Facebook would make even
(36:14):
larger purchases. Well, they made one that was smaller. They
bought Oculus VR for two billion, but they bought wattsapp
for twenty two billion dollars. At this stage, I think
Facebook was still looking to solidify everything around the tent
pole Facebook social network platform. Like Facebook itself, the platform
(36:36):
was the core of its strategy. But in future years
the company, especially once it changed its name to Meta,
would take a less focused approach to creating what it
hopes will be the future of online life. They're like, well,
Facebook is just one part of our strategy as opposed
to the central part. However, the story I want to
(36:56):
focus on from twenty fourteen is the Sony Pictures hack.
This was a big one, partly because of the sheer
amount of data that was lifted during the hack, partly
because of the sensitive nature of that information, which included
everything from personal information about Sony employees, including stuff like
salary information, all the way up to data about and
(37:17):
even digital prints of unreleased Sony pictures films, but also
the hack would end up becoming a case study in cybersecurity,
with numerous researchers publishing papers on everything from how organizations
can better protect themselves from intrusions two works detailing the
appropriate way to address a crisis once it happens. Because
(37:39):
Sony did a lot of things poorly, So what actually
did happen? Well? In twenty fourteen, Sony Pictures was preparing
to release a film titled The Interview. In this film,
a pair of dufices, a celebrity interview show host and
his producer are recruited by the CIA to use an
opportunity to inter view North Korea's leader Kim Jong un
(38:02):
and then assassinate him. So this is a satire. It
makes fun of Kim Jong Un a lot. It also
comments on the nation of North Korea in general and
its government in particular, and apparently all that was enough
to prompt North Korea to direct state backed hackers to
attack Sony Pictures. Now. I say apparently because definitive evidence
(38:28):
pointing to North Korea has never actually been made public.
That doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. It doesn't mean
that there are any other prime suspects that we could
point at right like, there's there's no one who looks
as good as North Korea in this. North Korea certainly
had the capability to pull something like this off. The
(38:50):
country has been implicated in other state backed cyber attacks. So,
but I do want to make it clear that the
working assumption is that North Korea was responsible, but there
is a little bit of ambiguity there. A group called
the Guardians of Peace ultimately claimed responsibility and claimed that
this was not in direct connection with North Korea's government,
(39:12):
but rather on behalf of North Korea. That is a
claim that I think most security experts have dismissed as
being unlikely. They think it really is more of a
state backed attack. But muddying the waters further is Sony's
own history with cybersecurity, which hasn't been great so Earlier
(39:33):
in the two thousands, the company got into hot water
when it was found that the music division within Sony
had been using a digital rights management or DRM strategy
on their compact discs. And the idea was that if
you took a compact disc and you put it into
the optical drive of a computer, because children back in
(39:53):
those days, our computers had optical drives, meaning that you
would put a disc in the drive. I know that
that sounds strange, but that's how we used to do
things before that. It was floppy disks. But I don't
want to take you into prehistory anyway. If you were
to do this, you might do it so that you
could rip the music and make a digital copy for
the purposes of, say, putting it on like an iPod
(40:16):
or something. And you might also do it so that
you could burn new CDs with the music that you
just got from the one you bought. So Sony wanted
to prevent people from doing that second thing. They didn't
want people to make unauthorized copies of music. Never mind
the fact that, at least here in the United States,
(40:37):
you are legally allowed to make a copy of a
CD for the purposes of a personal backup. That's completely
within your rights. So if you bought a CD and
you made a copy of it so that you could
listen to it in case your original CD gets scratched
or stolen or broken or something, that's fine. Oddly enough, however,
it is against the law to try and circumvent the
(41:00):
detective measures that people might place on things like CDs
to prevent you from doing that. So, yeah, you have
the right to make a copy, but you don't have
the right to break the copy protection on a disc.
It's odd, right, A's a catch twenty two situation. Anyway,
Sony did a thing that really shook people up. They
(41:24):
had installed DRM that would put in essentially a rootkit
on your computer and allow someone to get remote access
to your computer through the Internet. That obviously was a
big no no. It did not go well, and later
on in twenty eleven, Sony found itself the target of
several cyber attacks, when networks being breached more than twenty
(41:45):
times that year, and the company then declared a war
on hackers, which I think mini hackers viewed as both
amusing and potentially a personal challenge. And so there's an
argument to be made that Sony's own approach to cyber
security was one that incited hackers to find new ways
to exploit the company's systems. Meanwhile, Sony was not doing
(42:07):
a very good job at all in actually improving their security.
The attacks ended up locking employees out of their computers
at least temporarily, and the hackers stole truly huge amounts
of data. They then released that information online, and that
info included stuff like executive salaries, which is pretty sensitive
information that companies typically don't want out in the open.
(42:31):
And investigation showed that the hackers didn't have to do
anything particularly spectacular to pull all this off, because again,
Sony Pictures was not exactly up to date with good
security hygiene, and employees had not been properly trained and
they weren't really vigilant. The lack of multi factor authentication
made it much easier for the hackers to find a
compromise log in for systems without having to worry about
(42:54):
additional layers of security. The hackers apparently tricked a few
select employees with a fake Apple ID login page to
get hold of their credentials. Then it was just off
to the races, so this was kind of an example
of spear fishing. Sony was obviously deeply embarrassed by this
whole thing, and it was impossible for the company to
(43:15):
cover it up. The hackers had dumped a ton of
proprietary and private information online and the mess costs Sony
a whole lot of money, though determining just how much
money is actually pretty tricky. On the low end of things,
Sony set aside around fifteen million dollars to address security concerns,
which is not much at all in the grand scheme
(43:37):
of things. Later on, the company also had to agree
to pay around eight million dollars in response to a
class action lawsuit that was brought against the company by
employees who have been affected by this. You know, their
personal information had been stolen as part of this hack.
But because of the nature of what happened with all
that proprietary information leaked and then shared online, it's actually
(43:59):
really hard to put a figure on, ultimately how much
it costs. I've seen estimates that have a wild range
from around thirty five million dollars on the low end
to almost two hundred million on the high end. It's
I honestly don't know how much it costs. But it
was embarrassing for Sony, and it was a real wake
(44:19):
up call. I think for a lot of companies and
organizations that they have to take cybersecurity seriously because something
as small as a perceived slight might prompt a nation
backed group of hackers to try and reach your systems.
I mean, in this case, like I said, the straw
(44:42):
that appears to have broken the proverbial camel's back was
the fact that Sony Pictures was going to really release
the interview, which y'all, in my opinion, was not even
that funny of a comedy, no grit. That's me. I
think there were a lot of funny people in it,
but I didn't personally find it that entertaining. Then again,
I'm probably the wrong audience. I'm such a stick in
(45:03):
the mud. But that is our first part of our
look back on some of the big tech stories that
have unfolded since we launched tech Stuff in June two
thousand and eight. Part two will be coming up next week,
and then my final episode of tech Stuff host will
follow that. So will I still have a chance to
say this? I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
(45:30):
Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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