Tech News: Anti TikTok Bill Inches Closer to Becoming Law

and those include networks that belong to critical infrastructure. So this first news item, I would argue, is not really new news, but it is important. In fact, I've even talked specifically about Christopher Ray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warning us about Chinese infiltration of these systems. I talked about that earlier this year, but Ray and his warnings are back in the news because he gave

a speech this week at Vanderbilt University. In that speech, among other things, he said, Chinese agents have breached systems ranging from telecommunications networks to power grid networks and tons of other stuff as well, and that China is essentially just biting its time, and eventually it will use this presence in these networks to wreak havoc on the United States. Ray called this initiative volt Typhoon. He said, that's the name of this whole project of infiltration, and it said

it was the product of the Chinese government. Now, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for what it's worth, has said no, no, no, no no, that's a criminal hacker group and it has no connection to the government. Now what is the truth? Beats me? But a vault Typhoon is, as the government spokesperson had said, the efforts of a ransomware group. It does seem odd to me that the group hasn't, you know,

demanded a ransom. Ransomware only makes sense if you alert your victim to the fact that they've been breached and then demand a ransom. If not, then it's not ransomware. So if in fact it's a result of a criminal ransomware group, why has this group not done that? What is it waiting for now? It could be that it's waiting for the time to cause the maximum amount of chaos by striking all these various targets simultaneously, because maybe

that way, they'll net a much larger payoff. If everything looks like it's going haywire, then maybe that would create the situation where you get paid millions of dollars in order to stop. But whether that's the truth or whether China itself is actually behind the attacks, it's seriously bad news for America. It could mean that America has some really rough times to look forward to. And the thing is, we don't know when that will happen, only that because

it can happen, it will eventually happening. Of China. We have more news in the story of how the US government is going after TikTok. When last we left this tale, the US House of Representatives had voted in favor of either forcing Byte Dance, which is TikTok's Chinese parent company, to sell TikTok off to someone else, notably someone not considered a quote unquote for an adversary by the good old US of A, or they would face a nationwide

ban on the app. And I said it seemed less likely that the US Senate would actually push this bill through into being signed into law. Then we had one. US Senator, Maria Cantwell, suggests a change to the House bill to extend the deadline for byteedance to comply from six months to a year, and that helped move the

needle a little bit. Some other Senators started to be perhaps a little more comfortable expressing support for such a possible bill in the Senate, and that might be because that timeline also pushes the actual sale date to after

the US elections this year. And now things are getting even murkier because the House of Representatives, after making that alteration to the bill and extending the deadline, have lumped the TikTok stuff in with a larger package of bills relating to foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel, which is kind of sneaky, but it's very much typical in US

politics anyway. There are main questions as to whether such a law would even be constitutional, and there is no question at all that TikTok would immediately challenge such a law in court in an effort to force an official decision as to whether the law is valid or not. And behind all of this is a teeny tiny but lingering problem that the United States doesn't actually have evidence that TikTok has been acting as a kind of like

surveillance tool for the Chinese government. Now, that is an issue because the whole crux of the bill argues that there are these dangers of having a data howard app owned by a foreign adversary. That's the reason the bill has been written, at least according to the language of the bill. Now, of course, there are some leaders who have plenty of different objections to TikTok that have very little to do with whether or not Chinese officials have

access to the data. For the record, I don't like TikTok, and it is very true that China does have laws that, if those laws are enforced, compel citizens and Chinese companies to gather intelligence on behalf of the Chinese government. However, I'm also a stickler for proof and evidence, So just saying that something could happen is different than saying something has happened, And you can't, in my mind, punish people

for something that could happen, Like that's ridiculous, right. I mean, everyone could potentially commit a crime, but we don't just go and arrest everyone ahead of time. In order to avoid that, we wait till someone has committed a crime. Then there's the legal system gets in so This whole thing doesn't sit very well with me. Even though I am no fan of TikTok, I'm also not a fan of the government taking action against a perceived threat that

has not been proven to actually be a threat. So yeah, still a complicated, big old mess, and we still don't really know where it's going to go. It just seems now that it is more likely to get passed into law than it would have been, say, a month ago. So maybe it turns out that by the end of this month we're going to see a law that's going to either compel byt Dance to sell off TikTok or to face a national ban, and then that'll precipitate all these other legal actions. I'm sure. Now I've got a

few AI stories today. First up is a pretty concerning one. The US Air Force, in partnership with DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have announced that an AI powered X six ' too a Vista air araft, has engaged in simulated dog fights against actual human pilots. Now,

to be clear, the Vista is a real aircraft. It is derived from the F sixteen D fighting Falcon aircraft, and last year Lockheed Martin issued a press release saying that an AI piloted Vista aircraft had been flying under AI control for more than seventeen hours. Now, we're talking about simulating air to air combat with actual human pilots, and during the dogfights, human pilots were also on the Vista aircraft, so it wasn't like it was just robot

controlled and there were no other people. There were humans in the cockpit as well. They were there to intervene if it were necessary, but it turned out not to be, so the AI piloted the Vista within human safety norms. Now that is interesting to point out because if you think about it, a jet being controlled by AI would not necessarily have to obey the safety norms because you don't have a human pilot who's going to black out if the aircraft engages in maneuvers that would put too

much force upon the humans inside. So it's possible for an AI aircraft to do stuff that human piloted aircraft just can't do. It's also possible for an AI powered aircraft to rip a plane apart by trying to make it do something that it just physically cannot do. Anyway, we're still quite a ways out from aircraft that will fly and engage in actual combat all by themselves. But this is a big step closer to that, and that's something that concerns a lot of people, not just in

the tech field, well beyond that, including me. I mean, I really worry about how quickly a nation might enter into armed conflict if they can do so just by sending in the robots. I worry that would lead to a future that would be more violent, with more civilian casualties. But then I also read a lot of science fiction where this kind of stuff has been talked about ad nauseum, moving to a less violent but arguably equally as scary AI story. Meta recently released an early version of its

latest large language model, which is dubbed Lama three. It also released an AI image generator that, according to Reuter's quote, updates pictures in real time while users type prompts end quote. Now, that last bit is quite impressive. I've used image generators just to kind of test them out, and they take a prompt typically and usually it calculates a response that takes between thirty seconds to a minute before showing you

an image. So to have a model capable of making dynamic changes as you type in new edits tier prompt. That's really impressive, and you could also see how someone could use a tool like that to create an image and then refine it or alter it until they got something close to what they wanted, and that you could see as being an enormous concern to you know, actual

human artists. There are also still massive questions about how companies like Meta are actually training these AI tools to begin with, including potentially the use of other people work

without their consent. Meta's messaging around AI is similar to what you would see with companies like Microsoft or open ai, and to be clear, open ai is heavily funded by Microsoft, namely that AI tools are there to help take certain tasks off your hands and that future versions of this tool will allow for things like making detailed, multi step

plans that actually make sense. So I guess it all depends on where you come down on generative AI as to whether you see this as a positive step toward greater productivity or a more concerning step toward copyright infringement and displacement of people that kind of thing. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. When we come back. I've got some more news stories to talk about. Okay, we're back. I still have another AI story here. So Microsoft also introduced new AI tool

this week and it's getting a lot of buzz. It's called Vasa one Vasa one, and this is an AI image to video tool, which means you can feed it a still image like a photograph in other words, and you can give it an audio clip, and then Vasa one will create a fully animated video incorporating those two things.

So if you took a selfie, let's say, just you take a selfie and then you upload audio from some other source, like maybe it's Alec Baldwin's monologue in Glengarry Glenn Ross, well, Vasa one would manipulate your selfie image so it looked like video of you explaining that second place is a set of steak knives and third blazes, you're fired. Or as Daniel John of creative block dot Com puts it, quote, it's capable of creating deep fake

videos based on a single image end quote. That being said, Microsoft has said that the Vasa one is an internal tool and it's being used for research purposes and the company has no intention of releasing it as a product, so folks like you and me wouldn't be able to get our grubby little hands on it unless you happen to work for Microsoft in their AI research department. That is, I've seen some short animations of this thing in action.

I do find it unsettling, but then again, I'm easily unsettled. Now let us turn to the matter of bots. Those little automated critters that typically rank lower on our robo terror meters than AI powered fighter jets. Are generative AI determined to turn creativity into an algorithm. There's still something we got to deal with. So Sean Mitchell wrote a piece that I saw in Security Brief, which is a New Zealand publication, and it's titled half of online traffic

in twenty twenty four generated by Bots report fines. So that report comes from a cybersecurity company called Thales, and it said that forty nine point six percent of all Internet traffic is from bots forty nine point six and that this is a continuation of a trend, and it's been going on for years. So like each year we've seen that trend higher. That means that perhaps next year we could see more traffic generated by bots on the Internet than by actual human beings. You know, bots will

be making content for other bots. Eventually the rest of us will just disconnect and go for a walk or something, or maybe read some poetry, or probably probably just stay online and complain about how ding Dan cluttered everything is. So the piece really has much more of a cybersecurity focus, which is legit. I mean, that's understandable both for the publication and for the actual issues. Because a significant amount of bot traffic does relate to malicious intent, whether that

is to spread misinformation or perpetuate malware across networks. That is a big thing to be worried about. But I'm also generally worried that we're rapidly reaching a point where the stuff that is actually generating content is going to be making that not for people, but actually for other bots.

If bots are making up the majority of the traffic, then they're going to be a feedback loop of bots making stuff for bots, and that can mean that over time we start to encounter content that's deviating significantly from what you know, human beings would care to consume. It's a weird thought, right that you could go on and be like none of this makes sense or is at all compelling or interesting, But it's because it wasn't made for you. It was made for where all the traffic's

coming from, which is from other bots. That's a weird thing to think about. But here's the crazy thing is that we may not have to wait too much longer to actually see that start to unfold. So if you think AI generative hallucinations are weird, now we're just getting started. Next up, the great halving of bitcoin is upon us having,

as in cut in half. So the way bitcoin works is that the bitcoin network creates what is essentially a very hard math problem, and all the computers that are connected to the network that are trying to mine bitcoins, what they're really doing is they're trying to solve this very hard math problem. You could argue that really this just comes down to guessing a very very very large number.

So upon solving the math problem, a couple of things happen. First, that solution verifies the current block of transactions on the blockchain, the one that's just being finished up, and then that block becomes the newest link in the blockchain. The computer or system of computers that's responsible for solving the problem receives some bitcoin as a reward. It's like your fee

for solving this issue. And there is a finite number of bitcoin that will ever be issued, and so to control circulation and distribution, the system periodically has the number of bitcoins that are rewarded upon solving the math problem. For the last few years, if you were the one who solved the math problem, you would get six point

two five bitcoins for each time you did that. Currently, bitcoin is trading it around sixty five thousand dollars per bitcoin, so that means if you solve it, you get around four hundred and six thousand dollars worth of bitcoin for solve that problem. And there's a new problem every ten minutes. So that's what drives bitcoin minors to do stuff like takeover old power plants in order to use their their sources to have these massive computer networks tackling these problems,

which interestingly makes the problems even more difficult. Because the system is dynamic, it detects if people are solving problems too quickly, it makes the problems harder. So if you can make four hundred grand every ten minutes, then it's worth the expense to have this massive computer network running off incredible amounts of electricity. Well, soon that number of bitcoins awarded is going to go down to three point

one two five per solution. So, assuming that the value of bitcoin remains in the general neighborhood of sixty five grand, which by the way, is not a sure thing, but we'll get to that, that would mean that now a solution would net you two hundred three thousand dollars, which is obvious, right. You just cut in half the amount that you would have made previously. So this raises some questions. Does this mean that the really huge mining operations will

start to shut down? Because if you're making half as much per solution, you could reach a point where it costs too much to operate your mining operation compared to how much you make in solving these problems. And then there are other questions like what if the value of bitcoin itself changes? Well, if the value of bitcoin goes up, then it might very well mean that it's still worth it to use as much electricity as some countries do

in a full year. We've seen the value of bitcoin fluctuate quite a bit this week, like even more than it usually fluctuates, which is already a lot, but it's still hard to say where things ultimately are going to go. I will say that bitcoin's value has grown way more than I thought it would back when it was still trading at around twenty thousand dollars per crypto coin. After it had its kind of crash, I was like, well, I don't know if we're ever going to see it

go up as high again, but we did. It got higher than it had ever been before. However, it's also not as valuable as what some evangelists were predicting last year when they said it was going to hit one hundred thousand dollars per bitcoin before twenty twenty three was over. That did not happen. So I guess what I'm saying is that no one really knows where it's going to

go from here. No one knows if it's going to keep going to the moon and continue to feed this cycle of crazy bitcoin mining operations, or if it's going to level out or even start to dip and thus change that nature. Nobody knows. If someone tells you otherwise that they definitively know where it's going to go, they're

probably heavily invested in cryptocurrency. They're probably trying to get other people to buy in to cryptocurrency because that protects their investment, right, Like, if more people are interested in it, and more people are investing in it, it drives the value up and their own investment increases by comparison, I put this for like all of the crypto community. By the way, if you run into someone who is extremely passionate about the crypto community, it's not a hard and

fast rule, but chances are they're in pretty deep. Like they've invested in that, and so their investment only pays off if the value increases, and the value increases only if enough people share that same belief that the value is greater. If people lose confidence in it, then the value goes down and then you start losing money on your investment. So I always view anyone who is really a hardcore cheerleader of the crypto community with some skepticism. Okay,

we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I do have a couple more news items I want to talk about, but first let's take another break to thank our sponsors. Okay, We've got a few more news stories to cover before we close out today. Google is making an interesting or organizational change within the company. They

are combining departments focused on Android and Google Chrome. So these are software focused departments in other words, with Google's hardware division, so they're integrating the two, and the purpose of making this change is to create tighter integrations with AI. Of course I could have put this with the AI stories. I didn't think about that. So this does continue a trend in which Google has leaned on its Pixel series of Android phones to feature the company's various AI implementations.

So I think we're going to see that continue and become more apparent with future Pixel releases, probably not this year's, but maybe like a couple of years down the line. Now, what I'm really curious about is how this is going to affect Google's relationship with other hardware companies like Samsung.

For example, Samsung makes some very popular Android phones, and by tying the Android department with the Google hardware departments so closely together, it makes me wonder if that's going to put other companies at a disadvantage when it comes to using Android. Right, Like, the idea of your purpose built hardware was made with this specific version of Android in mind. That's different than say, oh, here's a hardware platform, let's put Android on top of it. So I'm very

curious to see how this affects those relationships. I'm wondering if it's going to cause some friction. Samsung is kind of going through its own crisis right now. I didn't really put this in the lineup, but right now that company has mandated a six day workweek, not for their regular staff, but for their executives executives. It's kind of a little bit of shot in freuda for those of us who are used to the rank and file having to work super duper hard while executives are off on

their yachts or whatever or golf courses. In this case, Samsung executives will have to work either Saturday or Sunday in addition to their normal work week, because that company is currently going through a pretty rough time. But that has more to do with their semiconductor business, not their

mobile hardware business. Anyway, I guess Google's decision really is understandable if you want to push the envelope of AI features, because then you really do need a tight integration between the software side and the hardware side to make sure that you can actually support the stuff you want to do, you need to have a lot more control over all the elements involved. And it doesn't really work for you to just build a solution that will hopefully work on

whatever platform it ends up on. It's not going to be as good of a product as you could do if you had everything under your control. I'm just not sure how it's going to impact other companies that use Android operating systems. Maybe we'll see a branching Android where one version is what you would find on Google made hardware and one version is on everything else. That's possible. I haven't read anything about it, so it don't there's

no guarantee that that's what's going to happen. Just thinking kind of off the cuff here and now to segue into our cut the cable segment. To be clear, this isn't about cord cutters getting rid of cable TV. All of that continues to be a big thing. Instead, this is about literal instances of physical cables being cut and the problems that arise because of it. So, first up, earlier this week here in America, four states Nevada, Nebraska,

South Dakota, and Texas experienced nine one one outages. So For those of y'all not from the United States, nine to one one is our number for emergencies phone number, So as you can imagine, a nine to one one disruption is a really big deal because suddenly folks who are in need of help have a reliable line disrupted,

they cannot reach the emergency services that they need. So what actually happened, Well, a telecommunications company called Lumen Technology is explained for at least some of these cases that a third party company quote physically cut our fiber d quote, and that this happened while that third party company was trying to install a light pole, so they were just trying to install this thing and in the process they cut through a telecommunications cable that caused this nine to

one one outage, which is a powerful reminder of how our communications capability is still really dependent upon a lot of physical hardware. Right. It's easy to forget that because we've gone so cordless over the years, like it seems like everything just works by magic. But no, there's like physical equipment that's making all this work, and if that

physical equipment is damaged or destroyed, we lose that connectivity. Now, I should also add that according to a representative from Lumen that particular cable would not have been responsible for any service in Texas. So the outage in Texas appears to be, at least based on what I could read, unrelated to the loss of service in those other states. So that's odd. It's a weird coincidence that it would

happen in Texas as well. According to one thing I read, people in Texas were saying that it appeared to be a T mobile disruption and that you could still reach nine one one if you were using a landline or some other mobile company. So yeah, it's just odd that it seemed to coincide with this other outage that was due to a physical cable being cut. And the other story I wanted to talk about with cables getting cut

happened in Sacramento, California. Someone cut an AT and T cable and disrupted internet service for the Sacramento Airport for a whole bunch of airlines, And as you might imagine, the disruption meant that tons of passengers and crew experienced very long delays as the various companies tried to find

a solution. In the meantime, now, amazingly, no flights were actually canceled, but things did move at a much more deliberate pace, as airlines had to go back to some pretty old methods like handwriting out boarding passes and such.

And according to sources who spoke with The New York Times, the damage to the cable happened about two and a half miles from the airport itself, and they based upon the nature of that damage, it looks like it was an intentional act of sabotage, though at the time I'm recording this, I don't have any information on any suspects or motive behind it. That was it. But now time

for some recommended reading. So first up Mara vistaal and I apologize Mara for butchering her name, but of the New York Times, she has a piece titled A Trove of Byte Dance Records Mistakenly went public. Here's what they say. So her piece details and error made by a court

that led to a bunch of files going public. And these files give a lot more information about the origins of Byte Dance and how they connect to an investment company headed by a conservative political donor named Jeff Yas I imagine Yaes is very much opposed to legislation that would either force byte Dance to divest itself of TikTok or to have the app outright band. Next up, John Broadkin at Ours Technica has a piece titled cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint US court rules.

The question about how authorities are allowed to access things like locked phones or locked computers has come up several times, and it is a very tricky and sticky legal subject, not just a technical subject. So Broadkin's article explains how a particular set of circumstances could be seen as being legal, like the law would be well within its rights to compel you to unlock your phone, but under other circumstances it could be viewed as unconstitutional. Sometimes it almost feels

like it's down to semantics. You need to read the article to get a full appreciation for it, because it does show exactly how tricky the situation is. Finally, Kate NIBBs at Wired has an article that's titled how one author pushed the limits of AI copyright. Now, you might remember previous news stories in which a judge ruled that in order for a work to be eligible for copyright

at all, it has to be of human origin. This Wired article covers the story of an author named Elisa Shoop who wrote a novel with the assistance of chat GPT and Shoop's efforts to secure a copyright for that work. And it's pretty interesting stuff, and it does raise more questions about where's the line. At what point can you

say a work is eligible for copyright protection? And in which case would you say no, that's too much, Like do you actually have a hard and fast rule of how much material can be generated by AI versus a human before you get to a point where you say copyright is or isn't you know? Valid? Really fascinating kind of problem to think about, and it is going to be a problem, like it's a problem now, but it's going to be a bigger problem the more advanced this

AI gets. So yes, those are some articles that are well worth your time if you're looking into reading some other tech news or tech opinions, I recommend those And I hope you are all well and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio product. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,