Tech News: Give Me Liberty And Give Me Tech

So on Wednesday of this week, the state of Maine past into law with unanimous support, a a law that places tight restrictions on how state agencies can use facial recognition technology. In fact, the restrictions are so tight that most state aid agencies are just flat out not allowed to use facial recognition technology at all. The state government

also banned it's used for the purposes of surveillance. Now, there are some exceptions that allow certain agencies to use facial recognition technology, so law enforcement is allowed to use it if they are investigating a serious crime. Uh. The state also might use it in order to identify someone who is deceased, missing, or endangered, so in cases where you're talking about someone's life or safety, that is an

exception as well. However, for the most part, the state is not to use facial recognition technology starting in October of this year. That's when the law takes effect. The law also requires police to go through proper channels and to obtain access to facial recognition technology on a case by case basis. UH civil liberties organizations had expressed approval of these new measures. They point to main as being the leading edge of protecting citizen privacy and shielding them

from surveillance. The essential argument was that you know this is this is technology that has disproportionate ability to do harm to someone, and the benefits do not outweigh that disproportionate harm. Maybe this will spur similar state laws across the country. We have seen a law in Washington that didn't go nearly as far as the one in Maine, so maybe we'll see other states follow suit. Perhaps will even eventually see a federal law that covers this issue

here in the US. Sticking with tech and civil liberties, during a government hearing, attorneys for cloud service companies plus one executive from Microsoft spoke to lawmakers about the government's practice of seeking personal information of company customers. In addition, the discussion included the practice of having such requests hidden

from public view. They're filed under secret court orders with the demand that whatever the cloud service company is, you know, like Microsoft, they aren't supposed to acknowledge that any investigation is ongoing. Very cloak and dagger kind of approach, and a lot of people for years have been raising concerns

about this kind of thing. This actually follows in the wake of a recent revelation that the Department of Justice under former President Trump sought phone records of Democratic representatives as well as certain reporters, and the d o J used secret subpoenas to seek out that kind of information.

And the cloud service companies, or rather the lawyers representing those companies, are arguing that the government should have to follow the exact same sort of processes they have to follow if they want to access, you know, physical files stored in filing cabinets, if you have to have a warrant to search at then you need to have the equivalent in order to search digital data stored in the cloud.

The executive from Microsoft, Tom Burt, said that over the last five years Microsoft has received between two thousand, four hundred to three thousand, five hundred secrecy orders each year, so at minimum two thousand, four hundred, at max around thirty undred, and that these orders appeared to be quote unsupported by any meaningful legal or factual analysis end quote.

So in other words, there didn't appear to be any you know, you know, reasonable purpose for the search orders, and yet these companies were being compelled to agree with them by the government. So, like the widespread use of facial recognition technology, this practice seems to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fourth Amendment protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures, and that amendment states that no warrants shall be issued but

with probable cause. According to Microsoft, that doesn't seem like that was the case in the majority of these secrecy orders that the company received. And you know, you could argue that if everything is valid and lawful, as in, if the government is following a valid and lawful process, why would the orders need to be secret. Why would these companies be not allowed to even acknowledge that they

had received the requests. Currently, it sounds as the lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are taking these proceedings to heart, though obviously we'll have to wait and see if any actual legislation follows, if we see the laws change as a result of this, But for the time being, it sounds like everyone's kind of on the same page as saying, yo, this is not in line with the basic tenants of US government. Now, we ain't done with tech in US politics yet, which seems fitting because of

heading into that fourth of July weekend. A federal judge on Wednesday slapped down a Florida state law that was aimed at social networking sites like Facebook. This Florida law would have given that state the authority to place enormous

fines on social networking sites should they ever ban political candidates. Now, as you might imagine, this too appears to stem from former President Trump, who received bands from Facebook and Twitter, among other platforms, for you know, violating platform policies like spreading misinformation and swing dangerous rhetoric that was unsupported by you know reality. The federal judge in this case said that the Florida law ironically was violating the First Amendment.

That's the amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech here in the United States. So see, the Florida legislators were arguing that social networks were prov ending the free speech of candidates. But here's the problem with that. The amendment to the Constitution that only guarantees protection from the government infringing upon free speech. It's saying that the government is not allowed to do that. Facebook, while it is bigger than a lot of governments around the world, is not

the government. It's not the U. S. Government. So the company has the right to decide who can and cannot publish on that platform. The federal judge argued that restricting Facebook from being able to make that determination would in effect violate the free speech of tech companies like Facebook.

The Florida law would have allowed for fines of up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars per day of any band that went beyond fourteen days for statewide candidates, you know, smaller candidates in local elections would have been a smaller fine, but quarter million dollars per day according to that law. The federal judge also pointed out that the Florida law was clearly unbalanced, I mean, beyond the fact that it

had this enormous scope. It also had allowances for certain companies, like certain companies would not be held to this standard, namely companies that operate theme parks in the state of Florida. You know, companies like Disney and NBC Universal. So why is that, Well, it's because those are huge money makers. They bring in lots of cash to the state of Florida. So the sacred right of candidates being able to spread misinformation and violate social platform policies does not extend to

big companies that make Florida lots of money. Now you might sense that I'm a bit fed up with Florida, and You're right. This is honestly just a thinly veiled attempt to create a state run media agency, and that would not serve the citizens of Florida well at all. All right, more laws and tech. This is also in the United States. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or nht s A has passed a law, or rather a rule.

It's not a law, but it's a new rule that will require all companies that offer semi autonomous driving assist features within vehicles to report all crashes in which an autonomous or semi autonomous feature was involved. So, in other words, if someone is in a Tesla vehicle and they get into a wreck and it's determined that the vehicle was in autopilot mode, Tesla would be legally required to report that crash to the nh T s A. Uh not just Tesla, mind you, this rule applies to all companies

operating vehicles that have autonomous features. Tesla tends to be the one that a lot of people single out simply because it's the one that's had some of the most high profile accidents while in this autopilot mode. The n h T s A aims to have a better understanding of how safe or unsafe these autonomous systems are, and there then we'll be able to identify any that are particularly unsafe. So like, statistically, if we were to say Tesla actually is more unsafe, we would be able to

know that because of this information. Right now, it's anecdotal, right, I mean, the Tesla accidents are very high profile, so at least on the surface level, it seems like you could argue that those are potentially the most unsafe, but without data across the industry, that's impossible to say for sure. It may just be because those happen to be very

high profile accidents. So it could turn out that like you know, way Mo vehicles get into more traffic accidents than Tesla does, and that would be, you know, something we would be unaware of without this kind of rule. Uh, there is a threshold for accidents. The nh T s A is not asking for every single accident to get reported.

It's really interested in tracking the more serious cases, including those with quote a hospital treated injury, a fatality, a vehicle tow away and air bag deployment, or a vulnerable road users such as pedestrian or bic cicklist end quote. So it's not about like minor fender benders or paint scrapings or something. It's rather ones that represent a potential

threat to life and safety and property damage. So companies are also to submit monthly reports that detail any and all incidents with self driving vehicles in that self driving mode that include injury or damage to property. If they do not submit a monthly report, they will be find nearly twenty three thousand dollars per day that they failed

to respond, up to a maximum of one hundred million dollars. Ideally, this sort of reporting will lead to federal and state governments having a better understanding of the performance of autonomous and semi autonomous vehicles and whether it's wise to allow them on public roads, or if new legislation should apply to the companies that are operating or offering these kinds

of vehicles. It will also give a more accurate view of how effective or ineffective these technologies actually are, something that right now is impossible to do because for the most part, these companies keep all of those sorts of records internally, and obviously the companies have a vested interest in promoting the technologies as being safe because that's you know, where they're going to get their revenues. So hopefully this new rule add some accountability to the picture and ultimately

lead to better, safer, and more reliable vehicles. Now, I fully believe that the future of cars is autonomous, but I also believe that we're still pretty good ways away from having vehicles that can safely operate in all scenarios that a human driver might find themselves in. So this is a good step toward getting more information so that we can start to make decisions about when is it appropriate to kind of transition to an autonomous vehicle. Uh reality,

All right, let's keep this train going. So the f c C, the Federal Communications Commission here in the United States, passed rules to require carriers, that is, like cell phone carriers in the US, to combat spoofing. Now, that's when someone uses a system to mask a real phone number, and typically spoofing involves presenting a number to your caller

I D that's pretty close to your number. That way, when you get a call and you see it's from a phone number that's similar to yours, it's in your local area code, psychologically, you might be more likely to answer that call. You might think, oh, this is probably someone I know. I just don't recognize the number. It's a pretty scummy way for various entities to try and

get you on the phone. The FCC said we've had enough of this, and they gave a mandate to the major carriers to implement systems that would prevent people from spoofing numbers. And now all three major carriers in the US those being T Mobile, Verizon, and A T and T have systems in place to do this. The carriers will verify that a number calling into you is in fact the actual number of the originating call before allowing

it to go through. The protocol that the companies are using is called stir slash shaken, which feels very James Bondy to me. Maybe James Bondage. No wait, no, never mind, no scratch that. The deadline for implementing the protocols was yesterday, June one, for all the major carriers. Smaller regional carriers will actually still have two years to implement the protocols. So it's a good thing that the major carriers are compliant,

or else they would be held liable for it. And this is all part of an ongoing battle against robo calls and spam calls and and stuff like that. And I don't know about you, but I almost never answer my phone. I definitely don't answer it. If I don't recognize the number, I just let it go to voicemail. And usually there's never you know, it's pretty rare that I get a voicemail. Most people just give up, nor most robots give up. I don't think it's even people

most of the time. And that's just to me that whomever was trying to call me it wasn't about something important because they didn't bother to leave a message. Now, all these protocols won't mean the end of nuisance calls. I think every little bit helps. We've got a few more news items that I want to cover today, but we're running a bit long, so let's take a quick break. Okay,

we're back and back. In April, hackers managed to gain access to a folder in Sony's network that contained the serial I D numbers for PlayStation three consoles, like all of them, every number relating to every gamer with a p S three that was registered with Sony's network. And subsequently, some gamers have noticed that their PlayStation accounts appeared to be inaccessible. They receive an error message. That error message

has a number. That number is eight zero seven one zero zero six, and some players, after going to reregister and activate two factor authentication, managed to regain control of their accounts, but for others it's a bit more complicated. So it looks like hackers have started to use some of those exposed accounts in order to act as proxies for malicious activity, essentially stuff that violates Sony's policies. So Sony sees that these particular ideas connected to these particular

consoles are doing shady stuff. They've gone and started to ban those accounts. Unfortunately, that means that the legitimate players who had their information exposed are now not able to get access to their accounts, even though they didn't do anything wrong, and considering that some of those accounts likely belonged to players who are miners, that's another really thorny element to the story because the information is out there now. Knowing that credentials are making the rounds on the dark

web isn't great. It appears as though Sony took no real steps to secure this folder, which made it easy pickings for the hackers once they actually gained access to Sony systems, and that too has raised some pretty tough questions. I have not yet seen a company response from Sony to this issue, but I will continue to update the story if we learn more. Speaking of data breaches, the social network LinkedIn has experienced something similar to one, though

technically it's not actually a breach. The company saw a massive data scrape, that is, someone collected a ton of data off of linked In profiles, and that happened back in May. Hackers scrape data from half a billion linked In user profiles. But now a VPN called privacy Shark says that a user with the handle tom Liner showed that they have a document that includes seven hundred million LinkedIn user records in it. That represents more than of

all LinkedIn users. So, in other words, if you have a LinkedIn account, the odds are very good that your information is in that big file. Tomliner, by the way, is planning to sell that information off because data has a price. Just you know, those of us who are actually creating the data rarely get to reap the benefits of that data apart from you know, having the privilege of using these various online platforms. That is what the same ones that are unfortunately allowing that data to roam free.

The information contained with tom Liner's collection includes stuff like full names, phone numbers, addresses, that kind of stuff. It does seem that this is the result of entities just scraping public data off of LinkedIn files, which is similar to something I talked about recently when LinkedIn when after another company that essentially did the same sort of thing ing.

So in a way, you could say that people who are selling this information are able to do so simply because we as users have allowed this information to be public It's just that the people who are collecting this information were able to do it at scale, and they likely exploited LinkedIn's application interface in order to create an app that automatically ended up collecting all this data. Since

it's not a breach, this gets a little complicated. I mean, LinkedIn didn't make our data vulnerable so much as it had an ap I that facilitated the mass collection of data publicly available on the platform. What does this mean for you? If your data was in there? Probably means you're gonna end up on a lot of other lists for stuff like spam and robo calls, possibly with phishing

or maybe even spear phishing attacks. Spear Fishing is when you've actually got some data about your target to work with, which means you can craft your attack to be potentially

more effective and increase its likelihood of success. It's a bummer. Next, the investing platform of robin Hood is going to have to pay almost seventy million dollars in fines to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority or finn raw f I n r A in order to settle allegations that robin Hood caused quote widespread and significant harm end quote to customers

mostly through misinformation. That misinformation includes charges that the company misled customers on how much money they had in their accounts UH and whether or not they would be allowed to place trades on margin. Finner found that the misinformation meant customers collectively lost around seven million dollars, and honestly, I think that's supposed to be the opposite of what

investment firms tend to promise their customers. It's a rare thing to see an investment platform say, use us, we can lose your money more effectively than anyone else can. Robin Hood was in the news earlier this year when independent investors were jumping on the game Stop stock roller coaster. Robin Hood ended up placing tight restrictions on game Stop stock trades, meaning if you were an independent investor and you wanted to get in on the game Stop action,

you hit a major roadblock. The company's official statement at that time was that it was trying to protect the company and investors UH in a situation that had volderle stock trades and also some regulatory issues, But some skeptical investors argued that major parties that own a stake in robin Hood had a vested interest in game Stop stock going down and value, and thus the company was acting

in a conflict of interest with its customers. Google is rolling out a new feature for Android users starting in the United States that will let them store a digital vaccine card called a COVID card. It will also support storing COVID test results. The card will include information such as where you received your vaccination, when that vaccination happened, and possibly some other information sation like which vaccine you received.

Google designed the system so that the information remains on your device, so, in other words, there's no copy of this information sent to the cloud that could represent a possible privacy risk. Google will collect some meta information about the app, such as how frequently you actually use the card.

This could come in handy should vaccine cards become a requirement for certain things, you know, like travel to specific countries or attending specific events, though here in the US we're seeing an awful lot of resistance to those sort of things, going so far as to have some state governors declare that a vaccination requirement will not be tolerated for big events because I guess it's just more important for potentially sick people to be able to go to

these public events than it is to ensure the safety of those who are already in attendance. I don't know, because I can't see the logic in it. Next half a century ago, Stephen Hawking proposed a theorem that stated a black holes event horizon, that is the boundary around the black hole that marks the point of no escape. If you cross the event horizon, you will be pulled into that black hole. You cannot escape. That theorem says

that the event horizon would never shrink. The math worked out that way, but that was all you could say about it, is that mathematically it makes sense. And for fifty years that's all we had to go on because we had no real means of making observations that could either confirm or deny that theorem. But that has changed.

Scientists at M I T and a few other research facilities announced in a paper that was published in Physical Review Letters that they have observed gravitational waves that confirm Hawking's theorem for the first time. Now, I wish I could explain the process of how they did this, but I read over it about three or four times and

it's well beyond my ability to really understand it. So rather than attempt to explain something and then get it all wrong, I'm instead just going to report that the scientists say they have a confidence that their observations mean

that Hawking's theorem is correct. This is another example of how super deeper smart people have looked at the world and the universe and they've used mathematics to describe it and then predict something that is unobservable or at least unobservable at the time, and then later we found out it proved to be true. Einstein is famous for this kind of stuff, and it really floors me. And I suppose it shows that there is a logical order when you get down to the nuts and bolts of the universe,

and if there weren't, then stuff like math just wouldn't work. Really, nothing would work the way we understand it. Reality would be fundamentally different. I may see if I can get an expert on tech stuff at some point to talk about this in greater detail and to kind of answer questions about it and the actual process of validating or or confirming Hawking's theorem, because I would love to learn more myself, and I just know that I lack the

understanding necessary to be able to explain it properly. More than a decade ago, I wrote an article for How Stuff Works about quantum computers, talking about stuff that's difficult to understand. At the time when I wrote the article, there were only a few very rudimentary quantum computers even in development. A quantum computers basic unit of information is the cubit or quantum bit. So a normal bit is either a zero or a one. It has to be one or the other. Cubits can be different. They can

technically inhabit both values simultaneously. In fact, they can technically inhabit all values in between zero and one. That means that with the right kind of computational problems, a quantum computer could arrive at solutions far faster and more reliably than a classical you know computer could. It wouldn't be great for everything, right, A quantum computer would not be

better than a classical computer in every application. You wouldn't want to use a quantum computer to run the latest version of Call of Duty, for example, But for this subset of computer problems it could change the world. Now, IBM has become the first company to make practical use of a quantum computer in a way that proves it

is advantageous over classical computing. The researchers at IBM published their work in Nature Physics in an article titled Quantum advantage for Computations with limited space, which sounds like they were trying to use a computer in my old dorm room at college, but no. They performed an experiment in which they pitted a classical computer against a quantum computer.

They tried to control for as many variables as possible, and they found that for a specific subset of computational problems, the quantum computer could perform flawlessly, while the classical computer would have at best an error rate of around twelve percent. Quantum computers have the potential to disrupt fields like encryption, because a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could be able to brake encryption essentially through brute force, in a fraction of

the time it would take a classical computer. For classical computers, you might be looking at, you know, tens of thousands of years to do this, whereas a quantum computer might do it in a few minutes. Now, if that's the case, if that in fact does come to pass, then this will necessitate a massive change in how we encrypt digital information, because it's effectively the same thing as handing out skeleton keys for all the locks that are out there, which

is both scary and exciting stuff. Finally, Tim Burner's leave recently auction off and n f T or non fungible token representing the original source code for the Worldwide Web. This n f T sold for five point four million dollars at auction and quick reminder and n f T is kind of like a receipt or a certificate of ownership. It doesn't actually give anyone access to the thing it represents necessarily, nor does it prevent anyone from making copies

of that thing. It's more like the representation of ownership. And he might ask the question, well, what practical good is that? And my response is, oh, n f T s have become a bit of a commodity. However, I would say they aren't quite in the same space as they were a couple of months ago when people were really going gaga for them. That's when the popularity really spiked.

They are built on top of a blockchain. That means it is easy to trace and authenticate the ownership of an n f T, so While you might not be able to do anything practical with the thing that the n f T represents, you could at least point to the blockchain and say, but I for reals own it, and you can see right here because it's part of the blockchain of transactions. So I don't know. Humans are weird. And that wraps up the news for Thursday, July one,

twenty twenty one. I hope all of you out there in the United States have a safe Fourth of July weekend as you celebrate. Do be careful if you are celebrating. For those of you with dogs, I wish you a quiet night or quiet weekend because I know how my dog is with fireworks going off nearby, so my heart goes out to you. For everyone everywhere else, obviously, have a safe weekend a happy one. You just probably won't

be celebrating Fourth of July. And if you have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, reach out to me. Do so on Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows