Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and this episode is the news episode for Tuesday, January twenty six, twenty twenty one. Let's jump right in and we will start with a follow up from a story from a previous tech stuff
news episode. The hackers who targeted the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency or SPA s e p A with ransomware followed through on their threat to publish documents from sipa's databases after the organization refused to pony up the ransom money. Now as a reminder, these hackers stole about one point two gigabytes worth of data from the organization about a month ago. The CONTI ransomware Collective has claimed responsibility for
the attack. That's CEO in t I. Now, CIPA has not confirmed that this match is what they are seeing. The CONTI collective is so called because when the ransomware infects the system, it changes all the affected files so that they have the extension dot c O and t I within the cybersecurity industry. It's known for being a very active type of attack, with hackers making frequent updates to the malware in an effort to stay ahead of
cybersecurity experts. It was first reported by cybersecurity analysts back in December two thousand, nineteen as a type of ransomware, but it really saw serious spikes in use by the spring of the Hackers published more than four thousand documents and databases from SIPA, including information that relates to the
organization's strategic operations and contracts with other entities. SIPA is working with Scotland Yard to verify the various published files, and then they're taking steps to contact any affected third parties. This is a particularly difficult situation. The data in some cases is sensitive and so there is an obligation to handle it with security and privacy. SIPA maintains it will not pay a ransom, which in my mind is still
the best option. While it can be disastrous to have something like this happen, it doesn't help if you pay off the attackers because that sends the message that the attack works. If SIPA can stay the course, it shows other organizations that while the outcomes of such activities as bad. It's better than encouraging future attacks. It's not the end of the world to have some of those files leaked, even if it does mean that for the short term
things will be pretty challenging. Sticking with the UK, there is a developing story that's pretty awful for an accountability standpoint, so obviously had an enormous and almost entirely negative impact
on education all around the world. In the UK, the Department for Education rushed to implement a program that would send refurbished laptop computers to students in the UK as part of an effort to support homeschooling during the pandemic, which on the surface sounds like a pretty good idea, but it has become clear that the Department for Education failed to vet these refurbished laptops properly, as some of them now proved to be infected with malware known as
the Gamma U trojan, sometimes also known as Andromeda. Teachers in Bradford noticed the malware, and now there's an ongoing investigation to see how many of the laptops that the d f E sent out could have been infected. According to Computer Weekly, a spokesperson for the Department for Education says that all known cases were caught at the school level when the machine were first booted up, which is good news assuming that all known cases actually represents all
cases period. Gamuru belongs to a family of malware that spreads through attachments in emails. A compromise computer becomes part of the attack strategy, sending out more spam messages to contacts with that computer, and then compromise attachments are part of that spam, and then the malware spreads from there. They will also copy itself onto stuff like USB drives.
It's not a new type of malware. I mean, it's been around for almost a decade and it was the focus of a worldwide takedown operation in TV and now it looks like it's kind of back. Though it's also possible that these instances are really a holdover from the bad old days and not an indicator that hackers are actively using this old malware to infect systems again. Cybersecurity analysts say that the malware is attempting to contact servers
in Russia, so that's obviously a red flag warning. Nothing like having a UK government agency issue laptops to students that are collecting information for Russian hackers. At the very least, this story shows that the Department for Education had a massive failure when it comes to protecting the safety of students in the UK, and they didn't do the due diligence to make certain that the laptops they were using were in fact safe. I'm sure I will follow up
on this story as it develops. Over in Italy, the government there has issued an ultimatum to the video social platform TikTok implement a policy that blocks any user if TikTok is unable to verify that user's age. This follows in the wake of a truly tragic story in which a ten year old girl from Palermo passed away after allegedly attempting to participate in a TikTok challenge, which is
a truly horrifying story. TikTok's states that it actually has no evidence of the associated challenge on its platform, thus disputing that this was a case in which a user was trying to emulate other users. Italy's requirements on TikTok will hold until February, when the government will presumably have more permanent rules to put in place, and TikTok has
until Friday, January twenty nine to respond. If TikTok fails to act, the Italian government can take further actions authorized by the e use General Data Protection Regulation or g d PR. That's a set of policies that put privacy protections in place for EU citizens. Very complicated, obviously, because
the EU represents lots of different countries. It's the g d PR that forces companies like Google, Facebook, tons of companies to follow very different practices in the EU than they would elsewhere, and it also creates a lot of
complications for global businesses. And just note that I'm not saying that those complications are bad or that they're unmerited, just that companies have to follow different sets of rules depending upon where they are providing goods or services, and that just makes things more complicated, particularly for Internet services. TikTok has been the center of scrutiny and the EU for other reasons as well, mostly involving user privacy and security,
So this is another case of that in Europe. Following up on another story I covered earlier this month, Googlers have announced a union alliance for workers in ten countries, and it's called Alpha Global. The alliance consists of thirteen
different unions. Now, if you remember, here in the United States, a group of around two hundred Google employees founded the Alphabet Workers Union or a w U. Now more than seven hundred US Google employees are part of the a w U, But part of the challenge the employees wreck nizes that Google, or rather the companies under Google's parent company, Alphabet, are international in scope, so the goal is to have the different unions that are representing employee interests in various
places around the world stay in touch and coordinate in an effort to extend protections to all those who are employed by the company. As it stands, the a WU doesn't currently register as a legitimate union by the US National Labor Relations Board that's a US federal government agency. The n l RB can enforce US labor laws against companies and can force the companies to negotiate with employees over various labor matters, but since a w U is not yet recognized by the n l RB, they don't
have that option. Part of the a w u's challenge is that the group recognizes Google contract workers as eligible for inclusion in the union, but typically these types of unions only cover full time employees, not contractors. The new coalition will form a steering committee to guide the strategy
and activities of the various unions. And while these are early days and we don't yet know if these unions will be able to send into motion real change at the you know, Google's various companies, it does seem as though there is a growing momentum behind unionization in big tech companies, which could potentially lead to some massive changes in the tech sphere, which long has operated under a more fast and loose environment with very little oversight or
accountability to employees. In Russia, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the country to protest the arrest of Alexey Navalny, a Russian figure who opposes Vladimir Putin. In August twenty Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent while traveling to Moscow and was hospitalized. He was airlifted to Berlin to receive tree eatment. He survived the attack and recovered in September. Of Russian authorities
refused to pursue any investigation into the poisoning. Navalny returned to Russia earlier this month and was detained by police under the charge that he was violating terms of an earlier jail sentence. It should be noted that Navalny has been part of numerous investigations into Putant's activities, including numerous corruption investigations, so in other words, he's clearly dedicated to
opposing Putin. Upon his arrest, Navalny encouraged Russian citizens to protest, and many Russians have used various social media platforms in an effort to organize and spread word of the protests
and their message. Consequently, Russian authorities have tried very hard to take those kinds of posts down and have demanded that platforms like Facebook jump in and remove quote fake posts about protests end quote, which I mean this is pretty darn ironic, as there is a mountain of evidence that number one, the protests in Russia are very real and have incredible support, considering that you know, in some places people are coming out to protest in public despite
not just the threat of police response, but that there are temperatures in the neighborhood of minus fifty degrees celsius. And number two, Russia itself has been behind numerous misinformation campaigns in an effort to disrupt democracy all over the world, including the United States. Russia has a specific regulation media department that is in charge of handling these sorts of things. There are conflicting reports about whether or not various posts
supporting the protests have actually been removed. Russian government officials claimed that a lot of that material has been scrubbed from these various platforms because they leveraged YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and told them to remove it. But then Facebook and Google report that neither company has removed any posts and that the content doesn't actually violate their terms of service, so there's no reason to bring down those
those posts. Gizmodo reports that Andre Soldatov, an expert who has written about the media regulators, feels as though the government officials aren't really adept at handling situations that change so quickly, and so we'll likely see less of an effect as they attempt to deal with the protests online. We have more news to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back last Friday, January twenty second, Microsoft upset a lot of gamers with
an early morning announcement, but don't worry. We've got a happy ending on this one, so just stick around now. The original blog post was about how Microsoft planned to adjust prices for its Xbox Live Gold service. For those unfamiliar, this subscription service gives Xbox gamers access to online multiplayer networking for games that support it. Plus they get two pre selected free games available each month, so they you
can't pick which games you get for free. Microsoft says this month, these two titles are free for you, so you can download them. You can also get game discounts for certain titles in the Xbox Store and that kind of thing. It's what Xbox players have to pay if they want to play online with other folks, making it different from how Sony used to handle the PlayStation online
services back in the day. The blog post explained that Microsoft was going to increase the subscription fee by one dollar for a one month Gold membership, or by five dollars for a three month membership, and so on. In addition, the post encourage users to upgrade two Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which gives players access to dozens of different game titles as part of their subscription. And again, this is a
subscription service. Gold users were told they could upgrade and any remaining time on their Gold membership would be applied to their Ultimate membership. The reaction to this announcement was overwhelmingly negative. Now, I think the Ultimate Pass is actually a pretty darn good product in general, but I also think that trying to push gamers to adopt it is not a great move, and before long, Microsoft got the message.
On Friday night, about fourteen hours after the original blog post went live, Microsoft updated it to say that the company would not be changing the price for Gold subscriptions. After all, this is not the first time we've seen the Xbox division walk back an announcement. When in the company first unveiled the Xbox One, the original plan was that the console would need a twenty four seven connection
to the Internet. This would open up new features for the console, but it also promised to change how game companies would incorporate digital rights management into titles, and it threatened the resale market for games. Ultimately, Microsoft walked back those decisions before launching the Xbox One, so it's kind
of like history repeating itself. Meanwhile, let's talk about game stop for a second, because a sort of meta game was going on with the company's stock last Friday, and I think the story will also illustrate how bonkers stock market activity can be. So there's a practice in trading called the short cell, and it involves selling stock that you don't actually own and then buying it back later for a lower price. So here's how it works. From
a very high level. Let's say you are a trader, as in someone who trades stock, not a trade tour, and you're thinking that a certain stock such as game Stop is going to take a eating in the near future. The stock price is going to fall. Now, you don't own shares in game Stop, but you borrow stock from investors who do own shares in that company, and you
sell those shares at the current market value. Now you've made a promise to those investors that at some point in the future you will return to them their shares of stock. But your goal is to wait for the stock price to fall, and when it falls to whatever your comfort level is, you buy back those borrowed shares now to lower price. So if you are selling these borrowed shares at ten dollars a pop and buying them back at two dollars a pop, you made eight dollars
per share. In that process, that's selling short. But what happens if the price goes up, Well, then you are up a certain poopy creek without a certain paddle, because you will have to cover those shares for the folks you borrowed them from. If you sold off these borrowed shares at ten dollars but the stock price went up to twenty dollars, you would have to pay an additional ten dollars per share to buy back all of that
borrowed inventory and return it to the original investors. And because stock prices can just keep going up, there's not really any limit to how much money you can lose if you try this and the stock price goes the other way. Fun right, So game Stop announced that a guy named Ryan Cohen was joining the board of directors, and Cohen is the CEO of a company called Chewy.
A company called Citron Research, which looks for different companies that appeared to be right for the short sell approach, said hey, you know, we think game Stop stock is gonna take a dive because of this announcement, so get ready to sell short. But then some folks on a Reddit sub reddit called our slash Wall Street bets had been pushing to make the game Stop stock price go higher.
So how do you do that? Well, the stock price depends in part on public perception of how a company is doing, So if you really talk up a company, you can push its stock price higher. It's literally psychology. Now this can't go on forever. If this gets done too much, you can end up with a bubble that bursts somewhere down the road. But it certainly works in the short term, and in this case it resulted in
what's called a short squeeze. People who are trying to sell short saw the stock price was going up, not down, so they started buying up shares of game Stop to cover the ones they were already trying to sell short, plus maybe buying extra in order to earn money through the increased stock price to help cover the losses they would have had otherwise from trying to sell short. But hey, if more folks start buying up shares of stock, that tends to push stock prices even higher. So more people
were getting in on it. They were jumping out of short selling and jumping into buying, and the cycle continued. The price rose nearly sevent before the stock exchange halted all trading for game Stop stock. That happens if the exchange detects that something really unusual is going on, so it's kind of a safety precaution. Citron meanwhile, has backed way the heck away from commenting on game Stop as people are mightily miffed at being told to sell short.
As for what will happen long term for the company itself, that's undetermined, but it does show how stock market activity can be chaotic and sometimes more of a game than video games can be. And sticking with games, let's do a quick update on Cyberpunk twenty seven, Everyone's favorite game to bully. The game has been the subject of a lot of controversy from crunch Times that the at CD prod Read the company that make it to a rushed launch despite the fact that the game had been delayed
a couple of times. Two major problems with bugs in the game, which were particularly egregious for people who are playing it on PS four or the Xbox One. But now we've got some more bad news. CD Project Read pushed out an update for the game, the one point one patch, in an effort to address some of the many problems that gamers have experienced as they played through this much anticipated title, But it seems as though this fix has broken something else. Specifically, a quest called Down
on the Street now seems to be affected. In part of this quest, the player receives a call that helps move the story forward, only now for some players, the call doesn't work properly, and so the players are unable to progress any further in that mission. The publisher has posted a work around, but that one is dependent upon the player having an earlier save of the game in order for stuff to work out properly. If you don't have that earlier save, you kind of out of luck.
The company does plan an even bigger patch one point two, which will include a quote more significant update end quote. No word on if it will address this new problem, or if CD Project Read will push out some other independent quick fix. The situation serves as a reminder that developing games is really hard, and sometimes when you fix one thing, you will break something else, which is why quality assurance is such an important part of the development process.
It's the job of the q A employee to try and break stuff, or to make sure that stuff ain't broken to begin with, and after every break fix new stuff can break. It's the joy of coding. Oh and how about we cover the story of Gabe Newell, president of Valve, talking about controlling them their video games with your brain stuff. Now, according to new Well, one of the things that Valve is working on is a research
software project that involves BC eyes. Now that stands for Brain computer Interfaces, and as the name suggests, it's a technology that aims to allow people to interact directly with computer systems using thought alone, kind of like telepathy for computers. Actually, in the ideal version of this technology, you would be able to have stuff go in either direction, person to computer or computer to person. You could create systems that people could control through thought, and you could build out
extensions of human intelligence by having computers augment our natural abilities. Now, that's the ideal version. That's something that we are far from being able to achieve right now, and honestly, we don't know if we will ever achieve that dream of making everyone computer smart. Like, just imagine having a literal computer database that stores memories perally, so when you remember, you're not recreating a memory, you're literally looking at the
actual memory as it was formed at that time. That is kind of the science fiction version of this. Now, there has already been a lot of work with various devices that respond to brainwave activity, largely in the medical field, and typically requires a great deal of training if you're creating a b c I, both on the part of the system that is running on the b c I side and the user who is trying to you know,
leverage that system. It's tricky to even pick up on brain waves in the first place, because it's kind of hard to get accurate read of what's going on in our noodles due to our thick skulls. It's why some earlier b c I implementations actually required transcranial operations, meaning that part of that interface had to be surgically implanted into the U user, typically with a wire extending from the implant sticking out of their skull and connecting to
the external system. This has mostly been done with patients who are paralyzed or otherwise cannot move and are unable to communicate through other means, and so it is really
not common at all. Obviously, it's an extremely intrusive type of surgery UH and typically is only used in extreme cases, so that is probably a bridge too far even for the most hardcore of gamers, so any computer game system with a b C I component would have to settle for something that could pick up on brain activity through the skull. There are a lot of technical hurdles to get beyond in order to ever make this work beyond a really basic implementation, but it's kind of cool. The
Valve is working on it. Perhaps in a few years will have game systems that don't include any sort of handheld controller. You'll just think jump and then little Mario will throw a fireball, then you'll rage quit. We have a few more stories to cover in this episode, but first let's take another quick break over this past weekend, Connor McGregor, professional Fighter, faced off against Dustin Poire at UFC two. He lost, by the way, but this story
isn't about McGregor getting knocked out in the second round. Instead, it's about a failure of ESPN Plus, a subscription streaming service that was streaming the event for the cool admission price of sixty nine dollars and nine cents. And that's on top of the regular subscription fee for ESPN Plus,
which is fifty nine dollars and nine cents per year. Anyway, early on during UFC two five seven, ESPN Plus had some technical difficulties and made it impossible for some customers in the US to watch the event, and it largely affected users in the Western United States. Disney, that's the company that actually owns ESPN, was able to resolve those issues before the headlining fights on the ticket took place,
so the really anticipated fights weren't affected. But to make good on those glitches, the company is offering partial refunds two affected users. Anyone who tried to watch the event through a third party platform like you know, YouTube or on Apple, they will have to go directly to those third parties in order to get a refund, but Disney is working with them to create a refund policy. Now, this reminds me a lot of the w w E
s streaming platform ww E network. I used to be a subscriber to w w E network, and without fail during every major pay per view event, the service would have some hiccups. Sometimes you would have buffering issues, sometimes it would drop entirely. And that brings me to the next story. The w w E is going to shut down the w w E network here in the United States and they're going to incorporate the services of w w E Network with the NBC universal streaming service Peacock.
The integration will happen in the middle of March. The w w E Network isn't just the streaming source for big events like WrestleMania or The Royal Rumble, which I maintain is really the best show of the year at least most years. The w w E Network also serves as a massive repository for the w w e s deep library of wrestling videos. Ww E owns a ton of libraries due to a series of acquisitions that the
company has held over the years. This gives w w E the chance to reach a broader audience, as the network subscriptions had plateaued some time ago, and Peacock will get access to a mountain of content. The deal reportedly was for a billion dollars, which is a stone cold stunner if I've ever heard one. For folks in other countries, the w w E Network will live on as an independent streaming service for the people here in the United States.
It means that things get a little less complicated in that if you are a w w E fan, you can subscribe to Peacock, and then you also get the access to all the regular NBC Universal stuff over there as well. For once, we're talking about streaming services consolidating, not multiplying, which I think is a good thing for the moment. I feel like we've got a few too many services already, But I also don't want to see
them all morph into a single monopolistic entity. I think there needs to be a few in order for competition to exist. But at the moment, there's just there's there's just too many. Man, I can't subscribe to anymore. Give me a break. Netflix, one of the services I do subscribe to, announced in a blog post that a new change in the Android version of Netflix should create a better experience for users. The challenge, the company said was
to create a better audio experience. So I don't know if this has happened to you, it's definitely happened to me. Have you ever watched the movie, whether on Netflix or otherwise. It could be a DVD, it could be some other streaming service, but you had real trouble because the dialogue was really quiet, but the action scenes were super loud.
It makes the viewing experience a real pain, sometimes literally because you're constantly adjusting the volume so that you can hear what's going on when people are talking and not blow out your speakers the next time John McClane makes something go boom. Well, for Android users, Netflix has moved to a CODECK called x H E DASH A A C. But the important thing for us to know here is that the CODEC uses dynamic range control. Now that automatically boosts the volume of quiet parts and it lowers the
volume of loud parts. Essentially, it's pulling everyone closer to a middle ground. It's reducing the dynamic range of the softest sounds and the loudest sounds. It's kind of the same thing that the MP three compression format can do with audio, and in general, with stuff like music, that's a bad thing because you're reducing the dynamic uh qualities of a piece of music, But in this case, it's
all to make that viewing experience more pleasant. The volume for stuff like dialogue should also be consistent between different videos, which means you shouldn't have to make adjustments after you finished binging one show and then switch to an other. I've had that happened to where I was watching one thing and had to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue switched to something else, and everybody seems like they're shouting at me all the time. I think
it's kind of a nifty approach to the problem. Now, you've got a couple of short Tesla stories to include in this episode. One is that the company is suing a former Tesla engineer named Alex Katilov, accusing him of actually stealing software from the company. The software is called warped Drive, and it's a back end software for the company itself. It does stuff like automates, you know, purchasing processes and things like that. Apparently Kettlov wasted absolutely no
time in this effort. The company claims he was copying sensitive files to a personal dropbox account within just three days of starting at his job. I'll try to keep up with the story as more develops, because this is the very early days and we don't know a whole lot. Meanwhile, John kraft Sick, the CEO of Weymo that's Google's self driving car spinoff, through some shade at Tesla in an
interview with Manager magazine. In that interview, crafts Sick said that Tesla will never achieve full autonomous car technology based
on its current strategy. Now, essentially, he is saying that Tesla Autopilot is designed in such a way that it's not heading toward a more robust form of autonomy, and just as a refresher, generally we look at self driving car capabilities in terms of levels, So a level zero would be a car that's fully under manual human control there are no computer or machine assisted systems in that, with a level five being a car that is autonomous to the point that no human interaction is required under
any circumstance. In other words, the car should be able to drive in any conditions that a human could drive in, and there will be no need or maybe even no ability for a human to interact with the car apart from saying, hey, you know, take me across town or whatever. Tesla's offerings hover at around level two, which involves some automation, but obviously there's still the requirement for a human to be able to take control at any given moment, so
it's not really autonomous. And what way moos Ceo is saying is that Tesla doesn't really have a pathway toward autonomy while pursuing this particular type of technology. And our final story today is also about a car. It's about a British car called Bloodhound. Now, this unique vehicle exists for only one purpose, and that is to crush the world land speed record, which currently stands at seven d
sixty three miles per hour. But here's the problem. It's real darn expee and back in, the whole project was on the brink of collapse, having burned through let's see, let me check my notes says here a metric ton of money. But then businessman and car enthusiast Ian Warhurst
swooped into the rescue. He had recently sold his company, Millette, and he must have been feeling, you know, that cash from that sale just burning a hole in his pocket, because then he decided to purchase Bloodhound and rescue it from being sent to the equivalent of a chop shop for parts. His goal was to find a sponsorship for the car in order to fund the ongoing process, but
he would float operations until that was viable. However, despite some progress among the engineering team, complete with some test runs and a documentary about the car, that sponsorship money never really came in. Then the pandemic hit and Obviously, that made matters worse. Plus the UK was flailing about as the Brexit deadlines were approaching, and Warhurst has had enough.
The engineering team behind the car estimates that they need another eight million pounds as in the currency in order to achieve their goals, which includes not just breaking that previous record of seven hundred sixty three miles per hour, but eventually getting the vehicle up to one thousand miles per hour. That's well beyond the speed of sound, which means this car will be generating a sonic boom if it ever does go that fast, But it remains to be seen if someone else will pull a Warhurst and
help shepherd the team to the finish line. That wraps up the stories for today's episode. There was more to talk about, including some stuff with Twitter, but we'll probably save that for Thursday. Unless something really phenomenal happens between now and then, we will have to wait and see. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for topics that I should cover on our normal episodes of Tech Stuff,
let me know. The best way to get in touch with me is over on Twitter and the handle is text stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again, really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.