Tech News: Hack the Planet

Tuesday and Thursday. And I'll bring you headlines from the tech world and give you a little context and maybe some of that old Strickland flair which usually manifests as puns and stupid references. Spoiler alert, you'll get at least one of those in this episode. So let's hit the headlines now. In this first section, I thought I would cover some of the heaviest topics, and our first is

a big one. My top story is that a judge in the United Kingdom has denied a request from the United States to extradite Julian Assange to the u S. Assange is the founder of Wiki Leaks, or is often credited as such. That is, the organization dedicated to publishing internal documents from governments, companies, and other organizations in an effort to increase transparency. The official wiki Leaks site puts it like this, Our goal is to bring important news

and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure, an anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists. Then they mentioned that that way is their electronic dropbox. One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories, so readers and historians

alike can see evidence of the truth end quote. The organization has been connected to several high profile events around the world, just early involving clandest in government activities or ethically questionable corporate practices. Sometimes you end up getting both at the same time, and as such, the organization is frequently under let's call it intense scrutiny and pressure, political

and business and otherwise. It has also occasionally shown a tendency to promote baseless conspiracy theories and be used as sort of an end to push Asane's particular political views. For example, during the twenty sixteen election cycle, WikiLeaks published many reports that were seen as particularly harmful for Hillary

Clinton's ultimately unsuccessful campaign to become president. In addition, Julian Assange made statements saying Clinton would be a bad president and later investigations showed that WikiLeaks representatives had sent numerous messages to Donald Trump Jr. Coaching him on how the Trump campaign might contest election results of things not go

their way now. In the end, the election, of course, went to Trump in twenty sixteen, but as we see his administration push very hard to overturn the election results from twenty twenty, it seems like some of that playbook

might still be in use. Various agencies in the United States have been investigating Wiki leaks and Assange all the way back since in a federal grand jury indicted Assange, though at the time only a relatively small number of people actually knew what that indictment was because it was a sealed indictment. However, in twenty nineteen, Assange lost his asylum status at the Ecuador embassy in London. That in

itself is a long story. Assange had been there since, but in twenty nineteen British officers would arrest Assange once Ecuador no longer gave him asylum, and this all stemmed from a twenty twelve decision in which the UK was going to extradite Assange to Sweden after Assange had become the focus of a sexual assault case. Now that's when Assange skipped bail and sought asylum at the Ecuador embassy. So this arrest was in response to him skipping bail.

The Swedish authorities who were pursuing that sexual assault case against Assange had dropped charges in twenty nineteen. Now, Sange, for his part, said the only reason that he was fighting extradition to Sweden in the first place was that he saw that as a stepping stone for him getting extradited to the United States. In other words, he was saying, don't send me to Sweden because they're not really interested in pursuing a case against me. There's no case against me.

They just want to get me so that I can then be sent to the United States. So the UK authorities took a Sage into custody, and then American lawyers delivered a couple of indictments and demanded a Sange be extradited to the US to stand trial, which kind of you know, goes to report what Assange was saying would happen if he had been sent to Sweden in the

first place. So first up among those indictments was the sealed indictment which related back to a league from Chelsea Manning, and we learned that this indictment charges a Sange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. That's essentially a a hacker charge, and it has a maximum of a five year sentence. So while it's a crime, you wouldn't consider it something

that a country would spend a decade plus pursuing. However, closely following that was another indictment, this one including seventeen charges against a Sange and stating that he violated the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen. Now, this one is a much more serious charge or series of charges, I guess I should say, and it carries with it a potential maximum sentence of more than a hundred fifty years in prison.

Now there's a lot to say about those charges, including the implications of what it would mean for journals if Assange were found guilty of them, but as of right now that's a moot point because the UK judge denied the extradition demands. The UK judge stated that Assange is not mentally fit for such a thing, that he might be a suicide risk were that to go through. So, in other words, the request is denied due to concerns

for the health of the accused. The US can appeal this decision, but as of this recording, Assange remains in custody in the UK. There have been talks of a possible presidential pardon from Donald Trump. That would be interesting because it was largely his administration that has pushed for the charges under the Espionage Act. The Obama administration chose not to do that, largely because of those concerns of

how it would affect journalists. It's not like they had a soft spot for Assange, but more that it was hard to justify those charges if journalists would not be held to the same measure. I'm sure we're gonna have all lot more to talk about this story later on this year. But moving on over at Google, more than two hundred employees have signed cards supporting the formation of

an employee union called the Alphabet Workers Union. Employee union is a difficult phrase for me to say, but Alphabet, in case you weren't aware, is the name of the holding company under which Google sits, along with companies like Weymo. The unionization follows several instances and which employees collectively protested Google corporate moves from being involved with military projects like

Project Maven to Google's forced arbitration policy. Now that last one is a policy in which Google requires employees to first pursue any concerns they might have that could even be, you know, legal concerns. They have to first pursue them internally with Google HR before they can then look to

external solutions like lead election. This became particularly important when Andy Rubin, a former Google executive and father of the Android smartphone platform, left Google amid sexual harassment allegations very credible ones, while also pocketing a ninety million dollar exit package. Membership in the union is being extended or will be extended, not just a full time employees, but also Google contractors, who lack many of the benefits that full time Googlers have.

They also represent the bulk of the workforce at Google. The plan is for the Alphabet Workers Union to work with the Communications Workers of America or c w A in order to unionize, and if the process succeeds, Google employees will devote a percentage reportedly one per cent of their salary or their earnings from the company to union fees, which will pay for organization and legal fees, among other things.

Wings The hope is to put pressure on Google leadership, which has been under criticism from multiple parties, both internally and externally over the past few years for everything from protecting executives from investigations into sexual harassment allegations to suppressing employee attempts to organize protests. Next, Tesla just fell short of its goal of producing five hundred thousand vehicles in

even with a global pandemic in play. The company reported that it had shipped four hundred thousand, five hundred fifty vehicles in the year, and that's pretty impressive. But also it's a reminder that Elon Musk was a vocal opponent of government measures aimed at reducing the spread of COVID nineteen. He frequently promoted unscientific statements on Twitter, where he has lots of followers, and that's a very polite way of saying he was spreading misinformation like crazy, and he did

that several times about the virus throughout the year. He also reopened his Tesla factory early. He defied a county order that said that businesses like that were to remain locked down and closed, and he just up and up said no, we're going to reopen, and it didn't take long at all for COVID cases to break out among the factory staff. As for Musk, he actually contracted COVID as well in November. His case was reportedly a mild one, and he perhaps changed his tune a little bit after that.

So Tesla very nearly made its production goal for twenty but one does wonder what the cost of that was. Let's switch on over to SpaceX, another company associated with Elon Musk. SpaceX recently announced some interesting plans on how the company is going to retrieve the super heavy rockets

for reuse. Uh So, right now SpaceX launch vehicles used Alcon nine boosters, and these boosters have legs on them, so the boosters actually will use their thrusters their engines to orient themselves vertically and slow their descent and land on those legs at the base of the boosters. But SpaceX plans for the super heavy boosters to not have legs. So how are those going to land safely so that

they can then be retrieved and prepped for future use. Well, it's going to come down to the launch tower that's used as a stabilizer for when the space vehicle initially launches from Earth. If you've ever seen images or been at a launch, you've seen, you know, the rocket, the thing we think of as a rocket being very close to a giant tower, a stabilization tower. That's the secret here. So when the booster is returning to Earth after it has launched its payload, the tower will help catch the

returning super heavy booster. The launch vehicle will use its engines to orient itself and slow it's descent, just like a Falcon nine would. So it's not like, you know, they're just gonna rush up to the top of the tower and put a big old catcher's mid on the end of it so that it can, you know, try

and and catch that pop fly super booster. The arm will have a essentially kind of a hook on it in order to catch the booster as it descends slowly, so the engines on the booster will be engaged, it will be descending, and then it will descend next to the tower so that the tower can hook on to this super booster, and thus it never really touches down on the ground. It hangs there at the end of the the arm on the tower. Now, according to SpaceX.

The goal is to cut down on the costs of building and operating the boosters because they won't you know, need that extra material for legs, and it will also potentially cut down on the time spent between launches. Now ideally, the returning booster could be serviced on the very pad that it launched from, prepping it for its next mission. In fact, the company has the ambitious goal of making the turnaround time less than an hour between touchdown and

the next launch, which is crazy. If SpaceX can make that work, it would create the opportunity for an unprecedented number of space applications, from satellite launches to spacecraft with you know, actual human beings aborted. But all of this right now is just in the planning stages. The super heavy boosters themselves will not be ready for testing until later, but it could be a super nifty way for us to launch stuff into space and then reuse those very

expensive boosters. We've got a lot more news, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Welcome back, and now let's all get ready to be terrified as we enter a news section I'd like to call I just can't hack it because well, all has to do with hacking. Now, when it comes to hacks, the Solar Winds story just gets worse as time goes on. All right, to catch you up, a company called Solar Winds makes enterprise level software and it helps customers manage various I assets.

And we're talking about heavy duty software here, the type of thing that would be used by you know, big

companies or even bigger government agencies and organizations. One of those pieces of software is called Orion, which is a particularly popular piece of I T management software that thousands of Solar Winds customers rely upon, tens of thousands in fact, and at some point hackers compromise the Orion software on the Solar Winds side, So they managed to infiltrate and inject malicious code directly into the Orion code at the

Solar Winds location. And then that meant that whenever Solar Winds would push out an update or a patch to its customers, that malicious code went along for the ride. So, if you're familiar with typical information security procedure, you know it's usually a good idea to install patches when they come out because those patches could address security vulnerabilities and

thus make you less likely to become a target. But in this case, a patch would push out the malware that would then infect customer systems and give hackers administrative level access to their systems. According to Microsoft, a hacker could impersonate any of the affected organizations existing users, which is yawza. Microsoft said that its own systems were affected quote beyond just the presence of malicious solar winds code end quote, which does not sound like good news at all.

What is slightly better is that, according to micro Soft, the hackers couldn't actually make changes to critical stuff. They could snoop and they could view source code, so they could go and look at the source code for various Microsoft products. Which that's not great news for Microsoft. It represents a potentially disastrous existential crisis for the company if the source code for their products were to be released, Um, that could mean that someone else could potentially, you know,

make their own version of Microsoft products. Well. The company has also stated that none of its resources appear to have been used by the hackers to attack other targets, so that's also some good news. Now. The prevailing theory, based on investigations, is that these hacks originated out of Russia, and they constitute one of the largest espionage projects ever conducted.

Affected systems include those belonging to the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Health, among numerous other high profile, highly sensitive department in US government. So how is this attack so successful? Well, there are a few contributing factors. One is that in an election year, much of the US cybersecurity assets were focusing on the election, which may have meant fewer assets were available to monitor

everything else. Another is that the hackers were targeting a trusted tool, compromising that tool, and then counting on the software supply chain to do all the rest of the work for them. They didn't have to distribute the malware to all their various targets. They hit this one source and it did the distribution for them, so they just

let solar Winds do all the work that way. And of course all these companies and agencies had no reason to suspect that solar Winds was going to compromise their systems. They were a trusted partner. So the hackers themselves are really careful, and they were able to escape detection until December twenty and we still don't know when this attack officially started. It looks like it started at least as

far back as March, but maybe earlier than that. We don't know how bad the attack was, how how widespread it is, and how deeply ingrained it is in various systems, But I think it's safe for us to call it really, really, really bad. I think that's on track. On Monday, January three, twenty one, T Mobile revealed that it had been the target of a security breach. Moreover, the hackers may have gained access to sensitive information, including call related information made

by T Mobile customers. Now, according to the company, this breach did not include stuff like customer names or their addresses either snail mail or email, or their pen or their social Security number or their payment information or other supersensitive data that would be really handy if someone had the hint of stealing identities, so that part is good that that information was not compromised. But at least some accounts, maybe as many as two hundred thousand of them, were accessed.

Now according to T Mobile, the information that was accessible may include stuff like phone numbers, number of lines subscribed to, and in a small number of cases, some call related information collected as part of normal operation and service. I don't actually know what that means now. T Mobile has a history of security breaches, so this is not great

news for them. There's currently an investigation into where those hacks may have originated, and the company has reached out to customers who were affected by this, the people who own the accounts that were accessed. Moving on, ticket Master is a big ticket sales and distribution company, and it

has venues as its clients. I often think of myself as a ticket Master customer if I'm purchasing something to go see a show or whatever, but really the big customers for Ticketmaster are the theaters and concert venues and things like that. And the way this works is that the venues will set aside tickets for Ticketmaster and they get to decide what the face price value of those tickets are. So if you see a ticket on Ticketmaster, know that that price was decided upon by the venue,

not by Ticketmaster. But Ticketmaster does put in service fees that generates revenue for the company. So if you've ever seen a ticket where there's crazy high service fees, just that's where Ticketmaster's revenue comes in. I have personally seen tickets where the service fees were fifty of the ticket price, which I think is truly ridiculous. Anyway, Ticketmaster was found guilty of illegally accessing computer systems belonging to a competitor. So,

in other words, they were found guilty of hacking. And in this case, the competitor was crowd Surge. Live Nation that's a Ticketmaster's parent company hired a guy named Stephen Meade in two thousand thirteen, and Mead was crowd Surge's former general manager of US operations. Mead revealed passwords to a tool called artist Toolbox, and that was an app that provided real time data about tickets that were being sold by crowd Surge. So Ticketmaster had an inside view

as to crowd surges actual business. Now, according to the charges, quote, Ticketmasters employees brazenly held a division wide summit at which the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company's computers, as if that were an appropriate business tactic end quote. Crowd Surge filed the lawsuit against Live Nation, you know, Ticketmaster's parent company, in so this shows that these cases take a real long time to get through the entire

court system. Ticketmaster was found guilty. They're going to have to pay a ten million dollar fine, and they also have to create and maintain a compliance and ethics program to prevent this sort of stuff from happening again in the future. Also, the people who were primarily responsible for this whole thing are no longer with the company. And to round out our hackasan let's talk about Adobe Flash.

You remember Adobe Flash. It's the browser plug in that was designed to allow for more rich web based content and experiences. So Flash enabled a lot of that sort of rich content stuff like audio and video, and and games and other elements that became common on the web. But the plug in also became a focal point for various criticisms, especially by the time you get to about

twenty ten or so. And the plug in was also owned to expose users to security vulnerabilities, which been it offered up chances for hackers to exploit that plug in and thus cause mischief. And generally speaking, it's a bad idea to install the security vulnerability into your system, as all the people who are affected by this Solar Winds hack have learned. Now over the past several years, there's been a pretty consistent move away from Flash to the

point that very few sites online still use it. Most of them have switched to other tools, primarily HTML five, which supports a lot of the functionality of Flash, so you could build out web tools and web features that did the same thing Flash did, but without having to actually use the plug in in. Adobe announced it was going to end support for the Flash player by the end of twenty looking at my calendar, it is now so.

Adobe says it will block content from running in Flash players starting on January twelve of this year, and Adobe also urges all users who have the Flash browser plug in to uninstall it on their computers because it will at that point only represent a potential open door for hackers. There will be no legitimate use for Flash at that stage. Okay, we've gotten through the hacking news for this Tuesday. Let's move on to something else after we take this quick break.

Let's wrap up our first tech stuff news episode with a few eclectic items, and we're gonna go back to Microsoft. So besides the fact that they're dealing with the solar winds problem, which I'm not gonna go back into, that's the bummer, right, Microsoft has planned a revamp for Windows, apparently,

not that the company has necessarily said anything officially. However, The Verge reported that a job listing on Microsoft's site would be the source of this big piece of news, and that job listing, which was for a software engineer, says, quote, on this team, you'll work with our key platform Surface and O e M partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences, to signal to our customers that Windows is back, and ensure that Windows is

considered the best user OS experience for customers. End quote. Now, I don't think they should call to come back. Windows has been here for years, so I don't know if the ladies love Windows. Interestingly, it's kind of cool and weird to see Microsoft really turn its attention two Windows.

Jerry Nixon once called Windows tend the quote last version of Windows end quote, meaning that Microsoft would push out updates to that OS over time, but Windows ten would just remain the official operating system of Microsoft, rather than going with an all new version. So this story seems to support that because we're not talking about Windows eleven, so that to me is kind of fascinating. Various reports say that Microsoft is planning some changes to the user

interface of Windows ten and to modernize it. Now, here's hoping that they make changes in a way that doesn't totally alienate the user base. I find that most users tend to despise change, even if the changes are good ones. But often they are not good ones. I think about every time that Microsoft has tried to make a bold move from a UI perspective, it frequently gets a lot of pushback. Now, sometimes those implementations are just not great.

Windows Vista was a problem. Windows eight, A lot of people really hated a specially the tiles version, which seemed to be more geared toward a touch screen experience. And I don't know about you, but I still primarily interact with my computers using a keyboard and mouse, not a touch screen. So here's hoping that this revamped look for Windows is not going to make some similar missteps, and

that what we get our actual genuine improvements. That's my hope. Microsoft, by the way, has said that they are doing this, or rather analysts have said Microsoft is doing this largely because there was an uptick in Windows use during the pandemic. Not a big surprise there as people started to turn to their computers to access more stuff in what I am told is the outside world. I assume it still exists.

I just haven't seen it in a long time. Okay, So our next story is about Netflix and Amazon Prime and other streaming po platforms in India. So these platforms have really given Indian filmmakers and series creators a new outlet and a new way to reach audiences, not just within India but beyond. Amazon Prime recently reported that one fifth of all the people who are watching content that's

originating from India are actually outside of India. So, in other words, Indian series and Indian movies are being watched by people outside of India of the time, which is pretty cool. That extended reach also means that more series from India and more films from India are being recognized by awards organizations. You know know, they're getting some critical reception that otherwise they never would get. It be very insular where most of the the cinema and series out of

India remain in India, so that's kind of neat. But Indian television and cinema is also highly controlled in that country. The Indian government has strict regulations in place and those put incredible restrictions on what filmmakers and series makers can show. There's a lot of stuff they are not allowed to do, and the streaming platforms were not subject to those regulations.

Once again, we see technology outpacing the legal system. It doesn't just happen here in the United States, happens everywhere, and so the platforms became a place where people could tell stories that otherwise they would be unable to tell

in traditional media because of those restrictions. However, that inevitably drew criticism from people who said that that kind of content was harmful to Indian society, essentially saying, you're doing the stuff that we've already told TV and movies they can't do because we think it's harmful, so we have to stop you now too. In November of the government declared that streaming services should fall under the same sort of regular lations as traditional media. In India, the streaming

platforms kind of banded together. You know, normally they compete against one another. They don't necessarily want anyone else to do as well as they're doing. However, this is an act of self preservation. They want the government to allow them to adopt a self regulation code and then use that rather than government intervention. So this would be similar to stuff like the m P A A or the E S R B for video games. This is the idea of having an industry regulate itself and protecting itself

from government intervention. I don't know if that's going to work out. We'll have to keep an eye on this and see how the story progresses. Now, how about a little bit of Atari. And that was a big Autari fan growing up in the early eighties. Atari was synonymous with video games. The Atari twenty video game console was a breakout success. One of my favorite memories as a kid as playing on my old Attari. But the video

game Crash really did a serious number on Atari. The company would split into two, with different parts going to different owners, and the Attari of today is not really related to that Attari of the late seventies and early eighties. It's more of a product of various companies purchasing the brand name of Atari and then selling it or going bankrupt and some other entity comes in and swoops it up.

It's more like that, So it's more like the name exists and it can still be stamped on two different products. And some of the intellectual property still belongs to the Atari brand. But it's a very different company today than what it was in the eighties. Back in Atari was in bankruptcy, but since then it has made a nice little recovery. In it reported a two point four million

dollar profit. It made thirty million in revenue, and that's not too bad, but much of that profit is dependent upon video game licenses that are set to expire before too long, so they're looking ahead to say what do we do next in order to remain a viable company. Uh. Today Atari is a very modest company. There's something like twenty eight employees there, and it announced things like the VCS console in which was a throwback to the Ayred.

It looks a lot like the Atari twenty. However, it can play not just classic games, like classic Atari titles, it can also stream modern games, so think of something like Google Stadium, but in an Atari twenty form factor. And reportedly it can stream games of four K resolution at sixty frames per second, assuming you've got the pipes big enough for that kind of Internet activity. And that's a big step up from the old twenty six hundred days.

I can't even begin to stress that these consoles finally started shipping in after a couple of big delays on the horizon. Attari has made a licensing deal with a hotel chain to develop Atari themed hotels in eight different markets, probably looking at twenty two as the earliest date for those to start to open, which not a big surprise. The pandemic has had an enormous impact on construction, not

to mention travel and hospitality. But the idea is that these hotels will convey that retro sense of gaming that Atari evokes, and that gaming will be worked into the themes of the hotel. I assume you would even be playing games in your hotel room. I can't imagine going to an Atari themed hotel and not having that capability built into the entertainment system. So that'll be really interesting to see. And maybe this is the start of a new era in Atari his tree, which would be pretty cool.

And our last story is about Epic Games, the company that is behind the incredible success Fortnite. Uh this is not another story about Epic versus Apple or Epic versus Google. Instead, it's Epic versus the mall, or rather Epic and the Mall, so Epic Games is taking control of a shopping mall in Carrie, North Carolina, and it's called the Carrie Town Center. And the idea here is that Epic is going to

turn this into their headquarters for Epic Games. And the long term plan is for this to open by twenty four and it will have offices in it, it will have recreational spaces in it. At the time that I'm recording this, there aren't any like artist renditions of what it's going to look like or anything yet. But the idea is to convert this dormant space into something useful,

and that's really important. I mean, malls have been in a serious decline even before we had the pandemic, with you know, more people turning to online shopping and other means of shopping for stuff. Then the pandemic of course made that way worse. It created an environment where in

person shopping is frankly dangerous. So as a result, many malls are becoming waste lands, and shops can't afford to maintain a space in a place where people can't go anyway, So a lot of of the customers of malls, the stores are closing down or at least removing their presence

from malls around the country. Some malls and shopping centers near me were already practically empty well before the pandemic hit, just that the economics of shopping had changed so much that it didn't make sense to maintain the space there. So then the question rises, what do you do with this real estate? How do you pivot to putting it to good use so that it isn't just a blight on communities and epic games. Taking over this mall to turn it into a headquarters is one way that we're

seeing that kind of stuff happen. It's interesting to me because we've also talked about how things like autonomous cars if they ever do become a practical reality, and there are fleets of autonomous cars operating kind of like uber or lift or a taxi cab service. What do you do once those have reached a level of saturation that people no longer really worry about a personal vehicle, so there's no longer a need for stuff like parking lots. What do you do with that space? How do you

reclaim it? It's kind of interesting that we're seeing this play out in the space of malls right now, because it's it's perhaps going to teach us some lessons of good things to do versus mistakes to avoid that we

might apply in the future. And now that we're in a world where a lot of people are working from home and a lot of companies are determined to keep that going even after we have gotten to the other side of the pandemic, these are questions that we have to continually revisit because we don't want all that space to just go to waste. That would be a real shame. But how do you make the best use of it

in a way that's responsible and actually adds value. These are the sort of questions we're gonna be asking and answering over the next couple of years, I would imagine, and maybe we'll see other types of reimagining of spaces, allah epic games taking over a mall. I guess that's my way of saying that my hope is to one day take over a large, previously occupied space and turn it into a big paintball UH facility so that people can do their own versions of counter Strike in person,

and because I'm a kid at heart, all right. That wraps up our first episode of tech News Headlines for Tech Stuff. We'll be doing this again on Thursday. And remember the episodes that air on Mondays and Wednesdays will be our traditional tech Stuff episodes, and Fridays, of course will be our classic tech Stuff episodes. And so on that note, I'll talk to you again really soon. Text

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