Tech News: Fake Reviews, Fake Products and Fake Currency

half of the United States. In fact, according to Colonial, it's responsible for about of all fuel delivered to the Eastern seaboard yells Now. Details about the extent of the attack are a little bit scarce at the time I'm recording this, but essentially, hackers were able to lock up at least some of Colonial Pipelines computer systems, and the company shut down operations, probably as a measure to make sure that the mal air wasn't spreading to those operational systems.

In case you're not familiar with the term, ransomware refers to malware that locks up computer systems, and there are a few different ways to do this. You might encrypt everything on a system so that no one can see any of their files or anything anymore, or you might

just lock it down by getting some sort of administrative access. Typically, the attackers will leave messages explaining what their demands are and how to meet them, and they promised to return the system control over to the owner once those demands are met. These days, those demands typically involved paying a large sum of money using cryptocurrency like bitcoin, and paying off ransomware attackers tends to be a pretty bad idea

for a couple of reasons. You don't want to pay that ransom One reason you don't want to do it is because there's no guarantee that the hackers are going to make good on their promise to return control. Another is that pay off attackers just encourages more attacks because it proves that the strategy works. It proves that it's profitable.

So the shutdown means that colonial can't pump fuel the way it normally would, and so US President Joe Biden has signed a measure to allow for more fuel transport trucks on the highways to help compensate. As I write this, we don't have confirmation on the identity of the attackers, but according to a former US official and a few other unnamed sources in various news reports. The group responsible

is likely one called Dark Side. It appears that dark Side is a relatively new hacker group, having formed perhaps in the last year. Circumstantial evidence suggests they are based somewhere in the former Soviet Block, as the group doesn't target infrastructure in that part of the world, so it's quite possible they are part of, you know, or located

within the one of those countries. We've already seen fuel prices rise in several markets, including here in Atlanta, and if it takes a few more days to restore operations to colonial pipelines infrastructure, things could get worse. The attack marks the most extreme cyber attack against US infrastructure to date, and it really makes it clear how important cybersecurity is, and it also illustrates the companies have to be extremely

thoughtful when implementing automation and connected systems. Automation can bring down costs and it can boost efficiency, and it also can mean that some of the more dangerous and dull jobs can go to machines rather than people, freeing the people up to do you know, more interesting work. But it also represents a potential attack point for hackers if it is not properly protected. So fuel prices might go up, particularly in the short term, but I do have some

good news. According to Bloomberg, an e F electric cars should be cheaper to produce than cars that run on gas or diesel in the near future. We just gotta wait until about twenty seven for that to happen. Now, I should add that other organizations like UBS, which is an investment bank, are a bit more optimistic with their predictions. They suggest we might see price parody by four. This

is really big. I think most people see the value of electric cars from an environmental standpoint, but more on that in a second. Using electricity rather than fossil fuels to get around has a lot of benefits, right, But so far, electric vehicles come at a pretty hefty premium. Sometimes governments might offer incentives like tax breaks and stuff to encourage people to buy an electric vehicle, and that

can help offset the purchase price. But generally speaking, the only people who can afford an electric vehicle are in a position of relative privilege. And I'm sure there are a lot of folks who would love to switch to an e V, but they really just can't meet that sticker price. Now, the main reason we could see a drop in prices for electric vehicles is that the price of producing batteries is coming down, Plus companies are making dedicated production lines for e vs. The increase in efficiency

and the drop in manufacturing costs translates to lower vehicle prices. Meanwhile, the UK plans to ban the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles starting in twenty thirty, with the EU following suit by and surely you've heard numerous ads from car companies about a growing line of e V options. It's the way of the future, which is also kind of funny because the electric car has been around about as long as the internal combustion automobile. It actually dates all

the way back to the nineteenth century. Anyway, I did say that electric vehicles are more environmentally friendly, but that needs to come with an asterisk because there are some things that we also have to take into consideration. One would be that the electric components, like the battery can potentially really have some environmental costs to them, batteries in particular, and also how we handle those when it comes time

to junk a car. That matters a lot too, because batteries have some stuff in them that you don't want to have leach out into the environment. Another is the source of electricity. While more of the world is switching over to renewable energy sources, if your area is serviced by fossil fuel power plants, then the electricity you depend upon is generated at a facility that's still dumping a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, assuming that there

are not carbon capture measures in place. That is, and most of these facilities don't have carbon capture in place because it's expensive to put those in and unless they are required to do it, facilities typically don't. So as always, it is important that we take a wide look at these issues to make sure that the solutions we put in place actually are solutions, and it's not just shifting pollution sources for on one spot to another but not

making any kind of progress. Now, personally, I'm all in favor of evs taking the place of old fossil fuel vehicles, and when paired with stuff like renewable energy, I think it could be an enormous benefit, particularly in places where people drive a lot, like here in Atlanta or in Los Angeles, that kind of thing. I also have another hacking story, but this one is from a totally different point of view. The United States Department of Defense has

created a bug bounty program. Now, bug bounties are away for organizations to identify and then address vulnerabilities and exploits in their systems. Essentially, the organization says, hey, we built this thing. You shouldn't be able to get into it, but if you can, let us know how you did it so we can fix it and you'll get a reward. Some companies have been known to award really big bounties in return for being told about various exploits and bugs.

With the d o E. The program involves all of its publicly facing systems, So in other words, this is all the stuff that someone should be able to interface with without having to get behind the scenes. Uh. It may be that if there is a vulnerability or bug that someone could exploit that and get behind the scenes access that would be of critical importance to know about. So this program is looking for ethical hackers to look

for these issues. However, when it comes to rewards, it turns out the public sector is a little bit miserly with the payouts. When the d o D did a trial program of this back in it paid out a mere fourteen thousand dollars total to one thousand, four hundred ethical hackers. Now, I do not condone criminal activity in any sense, but I do think there might be a lot of people out there who say, huh, well, I could turn this bug I found in for ten bucks, or I could exploit it or sell my knowledge of

it to someone else and potentially make way more money. Now, of course doing that would put you at a huge risk, but finding flaws is work. Sometimes it's a lot of work. Ten bucks is hardly compensation for that. So hopefully the bug bounty will maybe up the anti a little bit. I've got a couple of stories related to Amazon I want to cover. I've talked about the issue of fake

reviews before. Vendors will pay an organization to generate five star reviews for their products and give Amazon customers a false expectation of quality and value. It's always good to dig through reviews a bit and to read them over and see if they come across, as you know, genuine or not. Earlier this month, a site called Safety Detectives discovered a database containing the information of more than two

hundred thousand fake reviewers and their vendor contacts. So In other words, this database showed both who are the people who are creating fake five star reviews and which vendors are requesting fake reviews. Not cool, huh. Apparently this database was just sitting on a server and was completely unencrypted. It didn't even have password protection, so this database was freely accessible to anyone who had ability to get on

that server, which is a big old yikes. The scammers thus were flying really freaking close to the sun, as the information in the database would provide someone else ample opportunities to turn them in or even commit identity fraud against the scammers. Criminals making crime on other criminals, y'all. Also in Amazon News, the company bowed to pressure from multiple fronts, including lawmakers and brands, to crack down on

vendors offering counterfeit goods. The company first announced the development of anti counterfeit tools back in two thousand nineteen. Those tools got quite the workout, as over the course of the pandemic, more customers were turning to online shopping is a way to do pretty much everything while sitting at home.

According to Amazon, the company blocked ten billion listings suspected of being counterfeits and phonies over the last year ten billion with a B. Apparently, a machine learning system is powering Amazon strategy. Now, these systems, if they're created properly, get better as they get used. They spot telltale signs of counterfeits, and that creates a flag that allows Amazon to block the listing before anyone can try and buy

the bogus product. Typically, the way counterfeiters get stuff on Amazon in the first place is to use third party vendors who have virtual store fronts on Amazon. The company benefits from these relationships, and I think this approach to detecting counterfeiters is in many ways a measure to head

off potential legislation. One proposed bill in the US is called In for Consumers Act, which would require third party vendors to include their name and address so that shoppers could see who they were and where they are, and they would also need to go through a verification process with Amazon. Now, I'm all for the verification process and accountability, but i also think this particular approach has some privacy and security risks associated with it. Anyway, it's an interesting

use of technology to handle an age old scam. You know, hey, kid, you want to buy a watch? If you're still trying to get a PlayStation five, I've got some discouraging news. Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki has said that shortages and components have slowed down production, and that he anticipates the demand for the PS five will outpace the supply all the way into twenty two. The company has sold nearly eight million units so far and plans to produce nearly fifteen

million more by next April. So it's not like there won't be any new consoles out there, but rather of that, depending on where you are and when you check, you might find it difficult to get your hands on one. I'm sure a lot of factors came into play here, from the pandemic to supply chain problems to semiconductor shortages. Personally, I'm still rocking the last gen consoles, and if I'm being totally honest, I haven't played anything on them in

ages because I shifted mostly to PC games. But I do plan on getting the next gen consoles, you know, Maybee. Sticking with video games, video game developer and publisher Capcom has posted its fourth consecutive record breaking year in terms of profits. The company has been writing a string of big successes, having recently released the eagerly anticipated Resident Evil

Village title. Now, I can't say anything about Resident Evil Village or Resident Evil eight because I haven't played it, but I will say it has already had an enormous impact on the cosplay community. As it turns out everyone wants to dress up as Lady Demotrusk, a tall vampire lady, and honestly, who could blame them? Games like the remaster of Residentieval three and the release of Monster Hunter Rise

have been big smash successes for the company. I think Capcom's success is due to multiple factors that are all converging simultaneously. First, the company has been making some really

compelling games. Second, Capcom's titles have started to really catch on in the West, not that Capcom was a newcomer to Western audiences, but rather that titles are starting to get more of a following here when in the past some of them were more of a niche interest in gaming in the West, and the pandemic also saw a

big boost in people playing video games. Finally, Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live over the weekend, and during that appearance he referred to the cryptocurrency doge coin as a quote unquote hustle, and then the value of doge coin dropped more than thirty And this is a great time for us to talk about how stupid this whole thing is. Like all of it is dumb. So here goes grumpy Jonathan. Y'all get ready. Doge Coin is a joke cryptocurrency. It literally was started as a joke. It was created by

Jackson Palmer and Billy Marcus. And it doesn't say it's a joke if you read the Wikipedia article, but it was totally a joke. It started with a supply of one hundred billion coins. It was the anti bitcoin. They were taking a totally different approach to Bitcoin on purpose. Today, doge coins are mined at a rate of around ten thousand new coins every minute, which means every single day

another fourteen point for million doge coins hit circulation. That means doge coin miners mine more than five billion coins per year. This is fundamentally different from Bitcoin, which has a cap of twenty one million total bitcoins. That's it, that's all that will ever be mined. Over time, the number of coins mind per block on the bitcoin system

goes down. So right now, if you were to successfully mine a block of of the transactions on the bitcoin chain, you would be rewarded with six point to five bitcoins per block. Every so often, once a certain number of bitcoins have been released into circulation, the system will have how many coins get released per block mind, So after a while it won't be six point to five, it will be three and some odd percentage, and then after that it will be one and a half or so.

Eventually it will actually get to all the bitcoins ever released, although technically if you just kept having forever, you would never you would never get through all the bitcoin, right because you could always have it again. Um, except that bitcoin does have a limit of how many decimal points you can go down to. Anyway, at the rate is going right now, we would expect to see the final bitcoins inter circulation in twenty so that's the good ways away. However,

like I said, dogecoin is totally different. It just keeps dumping more coins into circulation. So when Musk called it a hustle, that's kind of true. Now speculators were driving up the value of doge coin, but it requires getting more people excited about a resource that is never going

to run out, it only just increases. That kind of thing is unsustainable, Like you can drive up the value of it by getting people excited and they're buying into it, and that increases the perceived value, which thus increases the actual value. And you can try and ride that train for as long as you want, but eventually that value was gonna take a drop because it's just not something you can continue to sustain. And definitely you constantly we have to bring more people in to be investing into

the resource which is constantly growing. So yeah, it was a hustle. Also, Elon Musk is a hustler. He's someone who has helped drive that price up. He was one of the people investing in dogecoin and talking about it, and that was what was making the price go up, or helping make the price go up, because money is

like a toy to people like him. It's kind of gross. Anyway, if you want an investment that is a sound investment, And I am by no means an expert on this, but I would say it's probably better to look someplace else other than a cryptocurrency that might plunge in value after a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Because when you do have a resource whose value drops after an s n L sketch of all things, that's a real clear

example of something that is not a stable resource. And yeah, I still find cryptocurrencies to be kind of are tating because they are totally just a digital asset that people are investing in. No one's really using it as currency non a regular basis, And it's just frustrating because it requires people to buy in to agree that has value. If they stopped doing that, it stops having value and

ultimately the whole thing just crashes in on itself. The question is do people get out of it before it comes crashing down or are they, you know, covered by the collapse and themselves. I mean, it's it's mind boggling. But that's it for the news for today, Tuesday, May eleven one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. M. Tech Stuff is an I

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