Tech News: Meta Is Going to Court Again

get to it with some stories about Meta. A class action lawsuit filed against Meta means that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former CEO Cheryl Sandberg will each have to testify in federal court regarding their alleged roles in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And it seems like a lifetime since that

scandal first became public. Now, in case you do not know what that scandal was all about, a British political consultancy firm that worked with conservative political campaigns here in the States leveraged data that had been scraped from Facebook. So there was this app developer slash professor who had created a political survey app and it was a pay for survey, so you would get paid if you took it.

But what the people who took the survey didn't know is that by granting the app permission, it gave the app uh an elevated ability to see into not just their own personal information, but that of their friends on Facebook.

So the app essentially made it possible for the app developer to look at friend profiles as if the developer were in fact that person's friend, and so the app was able to collect massive amounts of information from people who never consented to share that info in the first place. Right Like, if you were a friend of someone who took this survey, you didn't tell the survey that it

was okay to scrape your data. Anyway, Cambridge Analytica mostly proved to be an ineffective entity as far as the political campaign consultancy gig is concerned, but it's still is true that the company relied heavily on information that violated consumer privacy laws. Meta already went through an investigation that was conducted by the Federal Trade Commission about this, and the company had paid out a five billion dollar fine.

That's billion with a B, not chump change. But this case alleges that several key executives of the company were responsible for how the Cambridge Analytica story unfolded. They say that the executives knew more about what was going on earlier than they indicated, and that they may have even taken some steps within the company to try and conceal what was happening because it did not reflect well on Facebook.

The court has demanded that Meta hand over more than one thousand documents that the company had previously withheld, citing them as privileged information. Looks like some of that privilege is gonna get stripped away. Sticking with Meta for a couple more stories, nonprofit organizations that focus on civil and digital rights are criticizing Meta for its Meta Human Rights Report. That's an eighty three page document that the company published

last week. The report is supposed to document Meta's impact on human rights and how it tries to protect human rights, but these organizations are saying that the report fails to do this. Instead, it serves more as a whitewashing document meant to absolve Meta of its role in facilitating the

spread of hate speech, extremism, misinformation, and that kind of thing. Further, the organizations say that Meta was citing its own press releases in the document to use that as evidence of how the company is working to support human rights, which kind of boils down into because I said so, right,

like a like a a nonsensical argument like that. The organizations also say that the document mentions several safeguards that are meant to protect human rights, but that the document fails to disclose that Meta has subsequently removed many of

those safeguards. So there's this growing criticism that Meta's reports in general, not just this one but others as well, that all claimed to increase transparency, failed to include anything of real substance within those reports, and that the company is really just kind of going through the motions or putting on a kind of responsibility theater while failing to make significant operational changes that would produce results. Pretty nasty

criticism directed to the company. And to round out our Meta news, a company called Meta dot i S, which is an art installation company, is suing Meta for trademark violation. Now I'm pretty sure I actually mentioned Meta dot i s way back shortly after Facebook changed its name to

Meta last year. Now, according to Meta dot i S, they tried to work with the Facebook version of Meta, but they found no real success there, and the art insplation company now says it has trouble securing clients because people assume that Meta dot i S is associated with

meta slash Facebook. And why would that be a problem. Well, according to the art company, Facebook's reputation is so bad right now, with so much negative press and perception, that this spills over to affect the art company, even though there's no connection other than having the same name. And since meta dot i s pre existed Facebook's Meta, they they are arguing that they should have the valid claim

on that trademark. Whether or not that argument will stand up in court remains to be seen, and it's always possible or even probable that meta slash Facebook will settle out of court if the law team feels their case isn't strong enough to win. All right, now, let's talk about Netflix and the world of business, which I clearly do not understand. So earlier this year, Netflix held an earnings call and revealed that for the first time, it lost more subscribers than it had gained over a quarter,

and subsequently, the stock price on Netflix took a nose dive. Well, the company recently had its earnings call for the second quarter of the year and revealed it lost nearly a million subscribers. So in the first quarter it lost two hundred thousand. This time it lost like nine hundred seventy thousand subscribers, so that's like way more than it lost in the first quarter. That's not as bad as what

Netflix thought it was gonna be. The initial forecast was going to be a two million drop in subscribers, so it's not as bad as what they thought it was gonna be. It was half as bad, less better than half as bad, I guess it's a weird way to say it, but less than half of what they they had forecast, so still worse than they did in the first quarter, but not nearly as bad as they thought

it was going to be. In the second quarter, and revenue was actually up by eight point six so yeah, the company has, you were, subscribers, but it's earning more money, largely because of, according to the company, the dollars standing in the world economy. And consequently, Netflix's stock price increased by seven point four percent on Wednesday, which is wild, right, Like def flix Is stock price dropped when they lost two hundred thousand, but when up when they quote unquote

only lost nine seventy thousand subscribers. I'm just not able to see the matrix when it comes to the stock market, and you know, it's such a relief that I'm not a day trader, because I would have completely lost my mind at this point. Microsoft and Google are both pumping the brakes on hiring new employees due to economic pressures. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft has been shut down open job

listings in various departments like Azure and security. Company reps say there's essentially a hiring freeze for most departments, but Microsoft will continue to honor job offers that have already been extended to prospective employees, and they may make the occasional exception for positions that are considered to be critical

to operations. Business Insider reports that Google has entered into a two week hiring freeze while the company assesses its actual quote unquote headcount needs, and like Microsoft, Google is also going to honor any job offers that have already been extended to future Googlers. So yeah, things are are still looking pretty rough in the tech sector in general.

Will probably see that spill over into other industries as well, or continue to spill over because it's already happening over in the UK, the g c h Q and the U k's National Cybersecurity Center are calling on tech companies to practice client side scan ending in an effort to seek out illegal material, namely images and videos related to

child abuse. Now, this is an ongoing struggle and it is a highly charged topic because on the one side, you have people who want to leverage technology to uncover instances of child abuse so that the perpetrators can be held accountable, and that's completely understandable. Child abuse is absolutely horrifying. And on the other side, you have privacy advocates arguing that any sort of client side scanning mandate is a

huge threat to privacy. It's an enormous amount of surveillance, and it would also arguably necessitate the outlawing of end to end encryption, because if you have true end to end encryption, no other parties other than those involved in that communication would be able to read the messages. So even the service carrying the messages would not be able

to see what was inside that communication. So there's no way they could do scanning in that event, And if they're required to do scanning, then the logic goes, you can't have end to end encryption. Now you can see the validity of both sides, I imagine, because yes, child abuse is terrible, it should be stopped. It absolutely needs

to be detected and halted and better yet prevented. Now, on the other side, eliminating secure means of communication and introducing more surveillance can put people into danger, people who are innocent of committing any crimes. You know, maybe they are a political activist or a journalist or something along those lines. And if you have a government that turns against those kinds of things, then having a client scanning side, uh, you know technology in place, one that law enforcement could

theoretically access, puts those people at risk. So some of the privacy side argue that using technology to address a societal problem isn't effective, that all technology really does is go after a symptom or the outcome, it doesn't actually address the root causes, and that the money and effort that would be spent making this technological approach would be better directed at creating social programs that aim to prevent

child abuse in the first place. Okay, we've got other stories to talk about, some of which are not nearly as heavy as what we just talked about. But before

we get to those, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're gonna talk about some stories that relate to electric vehicles, and first up, the US Post Office or USPS UH for the United States Postal Service had initially committed to purchasing five thousand all electric mail trucks because it's adding fifty vehicles to its fleet, but now the USPS says it will actually be closer to half of those fifty thousand that will be all trick vehicles, and that when

looking at all vehicles the USPS plans to purchase in the near future, which goes beyond just the mail trucks, goes to everything, that's about eighty four thousand vehicles total. The USPS plans for around those to be electric vehicles. It's a good move, especially for the mail trucks. They

are notoriously gas guzzling vehicles. The Grumman Long life vehicles, which are the kind that the USPS has as most of its fleet, they average around UH somewhere around ten miles per gallon due to the stop and go nature of postal workers duties. So I switched to e v S would mean the USPS would significantly reduce its carbon

emissions across its fleet. Over at the Foreign Motor Company, it's planning on cutting eight thousand jobs in order to reallocate resources towards building more electric vehicles of its own. The layoffs will affect Ford's Blue Division, which is the part of Ford that focuses on building internal combustion engine

or i c E vehicles. This follows the recent reorganization of Ford into the Blue Division and the Model E Division, and it's another sign of the massive shift in the automotive industry as more companies are transitioning to building non i c E vehicles. Now, when it comes to e V companies, you could argue that none is more famous than Tesla, which is back in the news because of cryptocurrency.

So back in one, Tesla purchased a large amount of bitcoin, to the tune of about one point five billion dollars worth of the digital currency, but in a recent earning statement, the company revealed it had sold off or three quarters of its bitcoin holdings. Now, considering how far the value of bitcoin has dropped since twenty one, that could mean that Tesla took up fairly big loss on that investment.

It's hard to say exactly how much, because the company did not reveal at what price it's sold that its coin holdings. Brian Johnson and analyst at Barclays estimated that Tesla was looking at a four hundred sixty million dollar bitcoin impairment from the sell off, which is an big old alchi Elon Must said that the decision to sell off the chunk of bitcoin holdings had nothing to do

with the cryptocurrencies value. He said, This is not a condemnation on crypto, he said, instead, it was just a free up resources due to the ongoing challenges of operating in China, which has strict COVID lockdown policies that have been disrupting Tesla's operations there. When pressed if Tesla would reinvest in bitcoin later down the line, must refer to bitcoin as quote a side show to a side show end quote, which does seem like kind of a condemnation

of cryptocurrency, So who ne who knows? And this follows Tesla's previous move to stop accepting bitcoin as payment for car purchases. It did do that briefly, but it has curtailed that practice for quite some time now. That was a move that the company credited to a concern about

the environmental impact of bitcoin mining. Whether or not that was the one and only reason, I don't know, but that's the reason they gave James Murray, the director of the United States Secret Service, has announced his retirement and he's moving on to join the private sector. And you might wonder why am I talking about the director of the Secret Service in a podcast that's about tech. Well, it's because the company he is going to join is

Snap Incorporated, the parent company of Snapchat. So Murray will oversee security at Snapping, which makes sense, though I have to admit, if I were working in the security division at Snap, I feel pretty intimidated when the former director of the Secret Service came on board. A security researcher has found an interesting way to compromise computer systems that

have an air gap. But before I even get into this story, let me just say this exploit is technically possible, but it isn't in any way practice at coals, so I don't think there's any need to panic about it. But it is an interesting security vulnerability. So let's talk about this. First of all, what is an air gap. Well, that's when you make sure a computer system isn't connected to the Internet in any way. It is self contained, uh, and it's isolated, so it makes it very difficult to

breach the system. If there are no pathways, you know, into the system online, then hackers can't really gain access, at least not remotely. But Mordecai Gurry, a security researcher, it came up with a way that theoretically would let someone steal from an air gapped system and to do so wirelessly. And that sounds impossible, right, and it almost is.

So to get this to work, first you would have to inject malware into the air gap system, which pretty much means you or someone under your direction or you know, maybe you trick them or whatever. They have to physically deliver malware to the system in some way. Maybe it's playing a USB stick into a machine and transferring malware that way. So that's reason number one that this is impractical,

but not impossible. You know, people have been able to get physical access to air gap systems before, but it's not always easy. I mean, you you might find it easier if you're able to trick someone on the inside to do it for you, but even that's risky. So then the researcher discovered that these SATA cables s A t A cables that are used in these computer systems EMIT a low power radio signal between five point nine and five point nine six giga hurts, and that's not surprising.

If you run current through a wire, it will generate an electromagnetic field. So these signals could act kind of like Morse code. You know each character as it goes over this wire. Uh emits a slightly different signal. So if you set up a receiver near a compromised air gapped system, and by near I mean you'd have to be within a hundred times or three point nine feet in order to not have too much of an error rate introduced into the signal, and you limited your transmission

bit rate to about one bit per second. Remember a bit is a zero or a one. Then it means you would have to sit really close to the system for a really long time in order to get anything useful. Presumably, if you could somehow get access to this air gap system and then planned to computer with wireless capability close enough to it in a way that folks are not likely to see it and thus remove it, you could

very slowly siphon information from that target system. So it's good to be aware that this vulnerability as possible, but it's an unlikely scenario you would ever encounter in real life. And that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. Hope you enjoyed it. Please reach out to me and let me know about any topics you would like me to

cover in the future. You can do so on Twitter that's tech stuff hs W, or you can do so on the I Heart Radio app by navigating over to tech Stuff and using a little microphone icon and you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and I will talk to you again really soon. Yeah. 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.