No Australian News is Good News for Facebook

nothing to contribute to that. So let's talk about some tech news. And first up in the haven't We been here before? Category, we have a story about Meta potentially blocking news content on Facebook in Australia. Now, if that does sound familiar to you, it's because this actually stems from a twenty twenty one law that would require company like Meta and Google to negotiate with news media companies in order to allow the inclusion of the news company's

content on their digital platforms. The purpose of this law is to quote help support the sustainability of public interest journalism in Australia end quote, and the justification for the law appeared to be the assertion that platforms like Facebook can at least partly thank news media for the platform's popularity.

That because people can find news on social media, they spend more time on social media platforms, and so therefore Meta owes some of its revenue that it generates from user engagement to the companies that are providing this content that's being posted to Meta, whether you know Meta's doing it or a user's doing it. Further, there's an argument to be made that if people are just you know, scanning a headline and maybe a synopsis of an article,

they're not going to click through. They don't go to the website to read the article itself, which means the home website of that article doesn't receive a page impression and though therefore it doesn't receive any ad revenue. So the news media organizations are saying, you're benefiting from our content and people aren't clicking through, so we're not seeing any of that ad revenue, and that has been part

of this whole argument. Initially, Meta blocked news sites on Facebook in Australia when this law was taking shape, but eventually Meta backed off of that and negotiated with individual Australian media sites, but those agreements expire this year and Meta has already said it's not going to renew those agreements, and in fact, it will take whatever steps are necessary up to and including banning news on the platform in

Australia rather than continue to pay for that privilege. Meta reps have argued that news is not a major driver of user option or engagement, and that the absence of news isn't going to have a negative impact on Facebook's numbers. Essentially, and this Meta argues will contradict the point of view that news has made a significant contribution to revenue generation

for Facebook. So if Facebook says now we didn't allow news and we still did business like gangbusters in Australia, you can't say that news is a driver for user engagement if we're still doing just fine without you. That's kind of Facebook's take on this. So the Australian government has to decide whether or not to actually enforce this twenty twenty one law, and there are a lot of people wondering if that's going to happen. I don't know.

I have no insight into that, but it does sound like unless the government steps in, Facebook's just going to stop paying these negotiated fares that they have with all these different media outlets. There's a lot more going on here. There's a lot of conversation to be had about this law in general. There are plenty of people who argue that the law does little to help the smaller media outlets. It actually gives much more advantage to really large media

outlets that are already like multi billion dollar conglomerates. But honestly, I would have to do so much more reading to really get into that and to be able to give my perspective on it. But is an interesting thing to read about, and it's not like Australia's the outlier. There are other places, such as Canada that have explored similar policies. Meta is rolling out a suite of AI tools called the AI Studio to certain Instagram users, So it's kind of like an early test market. I think, sort of

like a closed beta. So AI Studio lets creators do lots of stuff, including they can make an AI chatbot version of themselves. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said quote, you might start seeing ais from your favorite creators and interest

based ais in the coming weeks on Instagram. These will primarily show up in messaging for now and will be clearly labeled as AI end quote, so based on that, from what I understand, this is a text based chat bot, and essentially the chatbot is trying to impersonate an influencer, And I guess I can see how influencers who don't want to spend all day chatting with followers might want to use this in order to drive further engagement without

actually having to do it themselves. But I honestly don't know how I would feel about having a robo Jonathan out there responding to people on my behalf. I'd be really concerned that it could say something I would personally object to, and that doesn't look good on me if the chatbot's doing that, and I don't want it to hurt anyone's feelings or to creep anyone out or anything like that. Instagram warns that some messages may be quote in acuate or inappropriate end quote, which does not raise

my confidence levels very much. Now, on the flip side, I don't really see where the value proposition is for fans right for the community. I mean, if I knew that the entity I was chatting with was just an AI copy of I don't know, insert influencer here, would I even bother chatting with it. I mean, it's not the person, it's just a chat pot. It's kind of like finding out that a celebrity doesn't run their own

twitter feed or whatever. You know, if you know that you're just interacting with a representative acting on behalf of a celebrity, it just doesn't have the same pizazz. But I don't know. Maybe some fans would just be thrilled that an AI copy of the person they follow is responding to them. I think that doesn't sound healthy to me,

but I'm not an expert. Maybe maybe there's nothing at all wrong with that, but it just seems I don't know, icky, But I can see this actually working better for businesses. I can see that being much more effective. So let's say that you run like a small business and you have a strong Instagram presence, having a chatbot that's able to answer questions and stuff on your behalf, I could see that being really helpful. So that part, I totally get the bit where there's a chatbot that is posing

as a person. That seems weird and creepy to me, even if it's labeled as such. So I don't know, maybe I'm just it's quite possible. I'm just too old. I did have a birthday this week. That's also in the Tech news. I had a birthday this week. It's also why this news is going to be a little shorter, because I got to get ready to head out of town to celebrate a belated birthday gathering. But yeah, I

don't really grock with this. Hackers have taken aim at the US auto industry by targeting software used by many car dealerships. So the software in question comes from a company called seed DK Global, and a lot of dealerships here in the United States use CDK Globals software in order to handle transactions, so it's a fundamental component of their operations. And because this software has such wide distribution,

it was a beautiful target for hackers. It was a way for them to infect many separate dealerships simultaneously, not by attacking the individual dealership like you didn't have to go one by one. Instead, you target software that a lot of these dealerships use, and that becomes your delivery system for your malware. You compromise the software and then you use that to push out updates that are really malware.

They're not updates and boom, you got these compromised businesses, potentially thousands of them, all of them tied to the auto industry and automakers themselves. So this is not an unusual thing. We've seen it happen before. A couple of massive hacker attacks over the last half decade have used a method like this where the hackers, instead of targeting individual businesses, go after a vendor that makes a software

package that's used by lots and lots of businesses. They secretly exploit, you know, they penetrate the vendors' systems, they exploit their software, they push out updates that include malware. Boom, They've got themselves a long list of exploited systems. It's

a pretty terrifying approach. The hacker group that did this is called Black Suit, and according to cybersecurity researchers, it's a relatively young group, like a year old, and it's spun off a more established Russian linked hacker group called Royal Locker. And like many hacker groups, it is a ransomware operator. So they lock target data away, usually behind encryption.

Sometimes they'll lock down entire systems, not just the data on those systems, and then they threaten to go nuclear and delete everything, or make it impossible for the target to access or possibly and or leak information on the black market unless the target hands over some ransom money. In this case, if in fact Black Suit is the party responsible, it all comes down between them and CDK

at the moment. Dealerships in the meantime have had to resort to desperate measures like using pen and paper for transactions, though I understand CDK has started to restore functionality with at least some dealerships. All right, we're gonna take a quick break when we come back. I've got a few more news items before we wrap this up. We're back.

So our next story is about Tim Griffin, Arkansas's Attorney General, Arkansas's estate here in the United States for those of you outside the US, and Tim Griffin has filed a lawsuit against the Chinese shopping app Temu. I believe that app is technically based in Ireland now, but all of

its major operations are still in China. Griffin alleges that Timu is dangerous malware that's posing as a shopping app, and that Timu is really designed to quote gain unrestricted access to a user's phone operating system, including but not limited to a user's camera, specific location, contacts, text messages, documents, and other applications. End quote. Essentially that if you install Timu on your phone, you are giving Timu access to

everything on your phone, ongoing access. So Griffin accuses Timu of ignoring the privacy settings that a user has in place. Like my phone, for example, I have it where if I launch an app that requires access to certain things on my phone, like my camera or my contacts, whatever, I'm given a pop up where I can allow or deny access to those things. Right, I can allow the app to have access to my contacts, or I can say no, don't bother my friends and family. I don't

want that to happen. So what Griffin is saying is that Timu has designed their app in such a way that it gets you install it on your phone, and afterward it circumvents those permissions and you don't get a pop up, you don't get the chance to allow or deny. It just grabs hold of access to these things. And that's a heck of an accusation, and it's a really big claim to make. Griffin is relying heavily upon a report that was created by an organization called Grizzly Research.

I am unfamiliar with that group. TIMU reps are saying that this report from Grizzly Research is all just misinformation and the accusation are unfounded. They accuse Grizzly Research of trying to essentially short sell Timu and that that's like, that's what Grizzly Research does, is that they make money by company's stock going down. Essentially is the implication. I don't know what the truth is, Honestly, I highly recommend you check out Ashley Bellinger's article about this on Ours Technica.

It's titled shopping app Timu is dangerous malware spying on your texts lawsuit claims. I think it's well worth reading. Bellinger did a great job laying out all the facts and also does a great job not like applying opinion to it. It's very much a well, here's what's being claimed. Here is how TIMU is trying to refute those claims, and this is all we know at the moment. But it's a it's a very well done piece. I recommend

reading it. YouTube is getting ready to launch more tiers of YouTube Premium, so right now, the company offers three tiers of service. There's a student version for seven dollars ninety nine cents a month, there's the individual tier, which is thirteen dollars ninety nine cents per month, and there's a family tier for twenty two dollars ninety nine cents per month. So that makes you wonder like, well, what other tiers are they going to offer and how will

they be different from those three. YouTube has not shared this information yet. We expect to hear more about it in the weeks ahead. But these premium plans give you access to YouTube videos without all those ads. You can also do things like download videos to your local device. You can access YouTube music without ads. I've had YouTube Premium for several years now, although I never actually signed

up for it. Instead, I was subscribed to a different Google service that, in true Google fashion, was later shut down by the company and they just ported my subscription over to YouTube instead, and I stuck with it because I like watching YouTube videos without having ads. But it comes at a cost. But honestly, I don't don't mind paying it. I'm at a position where that is something I can fit into my budget. I'm not suggesting that

everyone just fork over the money each month. A lot of people are not in that position, and so I get it. But other features that are coming to YouTube Premium include some stuff like picture and picture capabilities with YouTube shorts and a conversational AI assistant, which at first I was not really jazzed about, but then I thought about it. I thought, maybe I need one of those something that can help me find, you know, like interesting

video essays. I really love in depth, interesting entertaining video essays, but I want them that are coming from people who are not like hateful people. Sometimes there's something that's posing as a video essay and you get into it, like you get five or ten minutes in, you're like, oh wait, this is like propaganda for a hate group, and you know it's not necessarily evident at the beginning, and you start saying, I don't I don't want to be here.

If the AI assistant can help me figure those things out from the get go without me having to watch some of it first, I'm all for that, because I do love watching really good content and I love avoiding the kind of content I find to be upsetting. NASA plans to bring down the International Space Station in a few years, and it's going to pay SpaceX to get

the job done. Now, I'm tempted to turn this entire news item into a spoof of mafia cliches, something like you know, uh, this is a nice space station you got here? Is suit would be a shame as someone I don't know deorbited it. Well, A real story is that the International Space Station was always going to have a limited lifespan. The modules that make up the ISS were mostly designed to have around a fifteen year lifespan, longer if you did really good maintenance and repair on it.

And the very first of the ISS modules to go into orbit is Zaria, and that actually went into orbit back in nineteen ninety eight, so it's been up there twenty five years. Reports say that there are cracks in some of those older modules, particularly the Russian ones, and that a lot of astronaut time is spent maintaining and repairing the station in order to make sure it remains safe to operate within. So it's growing close to time for us to say goodbye to the old station and

make way for a new one. NASA's plan is to deorbit the station in twenty thirty. To do so, the agency has turned to SpaceX to design a deorbiting vehicle. It's a vehicle that's going to guide the ISS down so that it breaks apart and burns up over an ocean as opposed to say, a continent, and the price

tag is eight hundred and forty three million dollars. As for the successor to the International Space Station, NASA is exploring the possibility of relying on commercial space stations, which would be operated by companies and consortiums, and that NASA would negotiate to have some space set aside for the agency to be able to conduct experiments aboard these commercially operated space stations. So we'll see how that goes. All right,

that's it for this episode. I do have a reading recommendation on top of all that, I recommend Elizabeth Lopotto's piece in The Verge titled Perplexities Grand theft Ai. So Lopato reveals how a startup AI company is taking shots at Google and how the biggest losers might be journalists and subject matter experts. It's a story of ambition and in my opinion, a flagrant disregard of copyright laws, not Lopato.

Lopato's work is solid. I mean it sounds like perplexity AI is playing fast and loose with copyright law, but yeah, you should check that out. That's it for this week. I hope you are all well. Wish me a happy birthday, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iheartrate, you visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.