Tech News: Facebook's Very Bad Week

harmful to its users and two entire countries. As it would turn out, while Facebook went into damage control last week, some of the measures that were taken by PR spokespeople in an attempt to kind of deflect or to defend themselves ended up rubbing other current and former employees a Facebook the wrong way. One person who had already been critical of the company is Sophie Young. She used to

work as a data scientist for Facebook. Well. She first came forward with concerns about Facebook last year, and she even published a full blog post that contained her concerns, like she wrote this very long farewell message to Facebook employees, and then she also posted it to her own website. Facebook then subsequently sent a takedown notice to the the administrator for the website itself, so it got taken down. It's pretty bad anyway. Jiang has now said she's willing

to testify in front of Congress as well. She has said that she sent potentially incriminating documents regarding Facebook practices to a US law enforcement agency. Other people have also shown support for investigations into face Book, as well as condemning the company's tactics of trying to dismiss criticisms by questioning the credentials of the whistleblowers. My guess is that it's likely going to be another tough week for Facebook. Sticking with Facebook, I want to talk about Louis Barclay.

Barclay is an app developer from the UK app and software developer, and he created a browser extension specifically to use on Facebook called Unfollow Everything, and you know, it does exactly what it says on the tin, as they say across the pond. A user activating unfollow Everything would see that they had unfollowed every single friend and every

single page that they had previously followed on Facebook. So they would unfollow everything and you could still you know, connect to people on Facebook, but you unfollowed them, you would have to use other methods, And um, it is interesting because it would essentially mean that your news feed would be blank except for stuff that maybe you had posted.

I'm assuming I don't know. I haven't actually seen pictures of what this looked like when it was an action, but it it's it confuses me a little, only in the sense of I don't know what it would look like. Would it just be your posts? Would it become the true narcissists Facebook? I don't know. His extension, however, got the attention of researchers in Switzerland who wanted to see what impact there might be on this kind of thing.

Would would there be an impact on happiness for users who were still on Facebook but no longer had a real news feed. They also wanted to see what kind of impact it might have on the amount of time that users typically would spend on the platform. And I honestly wonder really what that experience is like. Maybe it would be like Facebook would become essentially your photo album or maybe a journaling exercise. If you were posting and

you were the only one posting there. Any ways, you can imagine Facebook was not happy about any of this. So the company booted Barclay off Facebook as well as Instagram and banned him from ever having an account with

either of those now. The article I read on Business Insider didn't indicate whether Facebook has also banned him from WhatsApp, the messaging app, but Barkley did say that he had been on the platform for about fifteen years and you used it a lot to stay in touch with friends and family, so this has had an impact on him.

Facebook says that Barclay's browser extension violates Facebook's terms of Service, which in parts says that users and developers are not not to do anything that would interfere with the intended operation of Facebook. And you know, Barklay said the tool had only been downloaded a few thousand times. The whole thing, to me is really interesting. I wonder how many people would actually use a tool like this, and whether they would continue to use it or if they would just

you know, turn it off after a it. I get why Facebook is kind of going nuclear because the entire revenue model for Facebook depends upon ads being served up in the news feed and keeping folks on the platform for as long as possible to sell as many things as possible, right to serve up as many ads as possible and rack up the big bucks. But if there's no news feed, then people would likely spend way less time on the platform and Facebook would make way less money.

Barclay is kind of without options here. He lives in the UK, and that means that if he took Facebook to court over the matter, and if he lost, he would be liable to pay Facebook's court costs. And you know, Facebook's a company with billions of dollars. Facebook could even if they fought this in a way where they weren't going to win, they could really drain Barclay's resources. And if they did win and they really drew this out so it was a very long court battle, it could

bankrupt him. So he's kind of resigned himself to being Facebook free. He sounds like he's both a little sad about it, but also kind of relieved because he had said that he was trying to cut back for a while now and now he has no choice but to go cold turkey. We usually hear about successful hacker attacks. It is fairly rare when we hear about a hacker attack that was unsuccessful, that had been defeated, but we

have a report like that. Now, Microsoft says that it's Azure Cloud service was able to mitigate a massive distributed denial of service ord DOS attack in late August of this year. Now, let's explain what that means. And we're gonna start first with a denial of service or DOS attack, because that's that's our basic unit here. That's an attack where someone tries to overwhelm a specific targeted server or system on the Internet, typically by sending tons of messages

to that system. And I often use a specific analogy here. So imagine that you live in a house. The house has a front door with a doorbell, and part of the condition of you living in this house is that if someone rings that doorbell, you have to answer the door. It doesn't matter what else is going on. If the doorbell rings, you've got to go answer it. And so someone is starting to ring your doorbell and then run away.

And even though you know that there is a very good chance that you're going to go to the door and open it and no one's gonna be there, you still have to answer it. You're not allowed to ignore it. It would be really hard to get anything else done. If someone was continuously ringing your doorbell and running away. Well, denial of service attack is kind of similar. The attacker is directing messages to a targeted server, and the server

is trying to answer these messages. But those messages are coming in thick and fast, as you might say, and soon the server can't do anything at all. It's just overwhelmed by these incoming messages. It might even crash the server. In fact, that's often the goal. If it's not to just gum it up, it's to bring it down entirely. Well, a distributed denial of service attack is the same thing,

but on a much bigger scale. Typically, hackers will first use malware to infect as many computers as they possibly can to get sort of backdoor access to these computers and have them join what's called a bot net or sometimes called a zombie network. So the infected computers are the zombie army, and the hacker can use this army to direct messages to this targeted server. Now, instead of one machine just trying to overwhelm a target, you could

be talking tens of thousands, like seventy thousand computers. Is not unheard of for this sort of thing. For this reason, we often describe the magnitude of DIDOS attacks and how much data is being sent toward a target. In this case, it was a whopping two point for terra bytes per second. That's the largest DIDAS attack on record by volume. A terabyte is a trillion bytes, so a gigabyte is a billion bytes. Terabyte is a trillion bites. This was two

point four terabytes per second. Microsoft says Azure detected the flood of traffic and was able to mitigate it to hold it back so that the targeted server didn't get overwhelmed, which is pretty impressive. Microsoft did not identify the target, but only said it was located in Europe. Amazon has become the latest company to back off of an official

return to the office plan for their corporate employees. Like several other big tech companies, Amazon originally hoped to be back in the office this year, but had pushed back to a plan that would see corporate employees returned to at least three days a week in the office by January two. Now, the company has sent out another message saying employees will not have to return to the office in the new year. Rather, team leaders will make decisions on a team by team basis as to whether people

need to return or not. Uh, some people will be able to work remotely indefinitely. In addition, employees will still be able to work for up to four weeks in any location within their home country, but they should spend the rest of the year somewhere that would allow them to attend, say, an in person meeting, given a day's notice.

In the ongoing battle between Apple and Epic Games, Apple is now seeking an appeal to the court ruling that requires Apple to allow app developers and alternative payment option and not just go through Apple's own in app system. While seeking the appeal, Apple has asked for a stay on the injunction that would otherwise require them to follow the court order. So essentially, they're saying, until we've actually settled this matter for good, we don't want to have

to change stuff. And from that perspective, it makes kind of sense, right if Apple were to change things and then subsequently when their court appeal reversing that change after implementing, it would be a messy thing at best. Apple claims that allowing developers to use their own payment systems could lead to incorporation of other stuff like external links and potentially bring risks to Apple users. We think of the children.

So the argument here is that this could potentially lead to security risks, and it's hard to argue against that. But honestly, I don't think that's what Apple's main concern is. I think their main concern is that they take a fifteen to thirty cut out of in app purchases, and if you allow for alternative payment systems, you have to say goodbye to that kind of revenue. But then Apple

has lots of security concerns to think about. Two like how a company is like n s, a group have targeted eye message to create zero click attacks that turned phones into spy devices. Apple did subsequently patch out certain vulnerabilities. My point being that you know, there are security concerns that have nothing to do with the apps being developed by third parties. When you really dig into this case,

no one looks super awesome in the full light. I think I'm more on the developer side on this one. I feel that Apple and Google to have a real stranglehold that can hurt developers. At the same time, there's some legit arguments to make for a streamlined, trustworthy payment system. We've got a few more stories to go through before

we get to that. Let's take a quick break. So before the break, we were talking about Apple and Epic, and a large part of that court argument is about anti competitiveness and whether companies like Apple and Google are being anti competitive with demanding developers use their in app purchasing. Well, speaking of anti competitive issues, we've got a different story that falls into that category. And Video has run into a speed bump in its quest to acquire the chip

design company ARM. Now, if you listen to my episodes about ARM, that's a r M, you know that's a company that's based in the UK. And Video has a fifty four billion dollar acquisition deal to bring ARM into the company fold. But this move has raised some concerns,

and some of those originate in the UK itself. ARM is an important company in the UK, and there have even been some questions raised as to whether an acquisition by a foreign company, because in Video is based out of the United States, could constitute a matter of national security. Then there are the questions about competitiveness. ARM creates chip

designs and then issues licenses to manufacturing companies. So a chip manufacturing company makes a deal with ARM and gets the design for a specific type of processor and then they go and make it. Now, the fear is that if in Vidia, which also makes chips, acquires ARM, maybe in Video would say no more of doing that. Right, Maybe in Video would prevent ARM from licensing designs to in videos competitors. The EU plans and antitrust investigation to

look into the matter further. And this does not mean that the acquisition is off the table, but it could take a bit longer than in Video was hoping for. Last year, many school systems in the United States shifted to a distance learning model due to the pandemic. However, that meant that, you know, kids needed access to computers in order to participate in class, and not everyone comes

from a family where that's a possibility. There is a real digital divide in the United States, so numerous programs popped up to provide hardware to students. Now, a research paper from the Center for Democracy and Technology shows that a lot of these computers contained monitoring software on them that logged student activities on these computers. Essentially, many computers come loaded with spyware, and it gives schools the ability to see what students are doing on those computers. This

opens up a pretty difficult series of topics. So the argument to support this initiative says that students are vulnerable and monitoring could allow school systems to detect a problem early on and potentially address it before it gets worse. For example, a student writing about you know, self harm might need counseling to help them, or someone who's engaging in some form of online bullying might similarly need someone to step in and intervene and help that person before

that gets worse. On the other hand, the argument against this points out that this becomes a surveillance state and it places an unhealthy burden of responsibility on teachers who end up having to serve multiple roles in addition to

making lesson plans and educating children. Plus, it disproportionately harms the less fortunate, like the less economically fortunate, because those are people who likely don't have any other computer to use, or smartphone or anything like that, so they rely even more on the school supplied devices than another students do, and thus they are disproportionately affected by this monitoring. The

Guardian has a great rite up on this. It's called us Schools Gave Kids laptops during the pandemic, then they spied on them. It was written by Jessa Crispin. I think it's a good read if you want to learn more about what happened, why it happened, and whether or not it's a good idea and spoiler alert. Jess thinks it's a bad idea and I am inclined to agree.

One news item from last week that I did not get to is that NASA has pushed back the launch of a test flight for the Boeing star Liner spacecraft. This would have been the second test flight for the Boeing star Liner, and the plan was to conduct it within this year, but now it's gonna happen next year

at the earliest. The reason for the delay is that a component on the spacecraft and oxidizer isolation valve isn't functioning correctly, and this component is not exactly in an easy to access spot in the spacecraft, so it requires a lot of planning just to figure out how to address this and fixed the issue without causing more damage

along the way. Boeing Starliner did have an earlier unscrewed test flight this year, but that one encountered problems with its onboard software, which prevented it from docking with the International Space Station. So for right now, the only U S space craft that can make the journey to the I S S is space X's Crew Dragon. Finally, Magic Leap, which was a company I thought might be headed towards insolvency, has turned things around, at least for the time being. Now.

If you're not familiar with this company, it started creating Buzz several years ago as a pretty secretive business aimed at creating an incredible augmented reality headset, presumably meant for the consumer market. They released some promotional material that truly made it look magical, so the name seemed fitting. The company raised billions of dollars and investments like three billion dollars.

But over the years things changed, and I'm guessing that some of the engineering challenges is were far more significant than they had first anticipated, and this in turn drove costs up. Ultimately, Magic Leap released a professional level headset called Magic Leap One Creator. A name like that suggests that this headset was intended for developers so that they could build useful or compelling augmented reality experiences that would rely on this headset. But it definitely wasn't priced at

or targeted for a consumer user base. It was professional only. Magic Leap also laid off about half its workforce last year. One of the co founders, Ronnie abbo It's, left the company in July last year. But now the company has raised an additional half billion dollars, which pretty phenomenal that they were able to do that after all these issues. And they plan to release a new a R headset

called the Magic Leap To next year. Some early headsets are reportedly already in circulation, and this new headset is light and it has a larger field of view than the previous model. But it is however, still being targeted at enterprise level customers. So this is not something you or I would purchase in order to you like, turn

our homes into like a Willy Wonka Wonderland or something. Nope, these are meant for companies that might use it for design departments, or maybe they might use it for really technically complicated installations like the a R headset could show you exactly where you might need to solder something, or where you need to connect cables or lay certain electronics in a very compact space. I'm glad to see that

magic leap, hasn't you know, leapt off a cliff? But I'm left wondering how long it will take before we eventually do see a good consumer targeted air headset. And that's it for the news for Tuesday, October twelve, twenty one. We'll be back with more news later this week. If you have suggestions for things I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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