Tech News: Military Coups and Net Neutrality

This is the hack that primarily targeted the Solar Winds software product Ryan, which is a network management software that's used by thousands of companies, including many of the Fortune five hundred, as well as government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. In the US, the United States Congress is holding sessions focusing on the hack and its scope

and any next steps that we should be taking. To that end, Microsoft and a security company called fire I are calling upon Congress to draft legislation that would create a mandatory process for companies to follow after the discovery of a data breach. The idea here is that the longer a company stays quiet about a breach, the more harm that can be done by the attackers, particularly if it turns out that other companies have also been targeted

by that same group and have yet to detect an intrusion. Moreover, the company has urged that there should be a way for victims to come forward with these issues, even those that could potentially involve national security concerns, without the threat of having legal action leveled against those companies. So, in other words, if a defense contractor detects a breach, it should be able to report it without worrying about being sued to eternity and back by the government, just as

an example. As it stands at the moment, in the United States, the sort of thing is handled mostly on a state by state basis, with most states having their own rules in place to protect companies in the event that they need to report a security breach, but there

is no existing federal legislation on the matter. On the whole, I think this is a pretty good idea and encourages companies and agencies to share information with one another, which could drastically improve the response time to problems like security breaches, that in turn could reduce the potential impact of those breaches. Now, these are still very early talks, and it's also important to remember that any legislation has to be crafted responsibly, or else it runs the risk of making a problem

worse or at the very least more complicated. Hannah Beach and Paul Mosur wrote a piece for The New York Times titled A Digital Firewall in Myanmar Built with guns and wire cutters. If you have access to The New

York Times, I recommend reading this piece. The reporters tell the story of how the military coup in Myanmar, which has overthrown a democratically elected administration forcibly, confronted telecoms and their employees in an effort to shut down communication systems within Myanmar, limiting the citizens access to information and their

ability to organize. It's a primitive but effective way to limit the resource of the Internet, and the military in Myanmar appear to be determined to follow in the footsteps of China, which of course is famous for its own digital barriers to the outside Internet. Often we call it

the Great Firewall of China. The situation in Myanmar is distressing, to say the least, and people like Tom Andrews of the United Nations have argued that there has to be an unequivocal global response to this coup, and countries like the UK, the United States, and Canada have already imposed sanctions on the coup leaders. Meanwhile, Myanmar citizens continue to organize protests, amassing in the streets and holding a general strike with a truly enormous display on February twenty two.

This story is important all on its own, but it also stands as a reminder of how crucial the Internet is. If it's something that an oppressive regime has to shut down in order to secure control, then you know it's important. Something else that's important is understanding how influential for companies are when it comes to the World Wide Web. That's what the Big Tech Detective browser extension aims to do. The extension comes from the Economic Security Project, and it

does something rather peculiar. Most browser extensions aim to make a browser more useful, but the Big Tech Detective kind of does the opposite. So what it does is block access to any web page that connects to any IP

address that belongs to Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook or Google. Now that includes some of more sneaky tricksy stuff, you know, like trackers, which are the sort of things that monitor your browsing behavior and report back to another entity, usually so that these companies can market the most relevant ads to you. That's why if you ever spend a few minutes looking at I don't know websites about pet care, you'll start to see more ads for pet care products

and services pop up on Facebook. But a web page my contact one of these big four companies for less intrusive reasons, such as to pull fonts from a Google database. Anyway, it doesn't matter if the web page you're trying to look at is tracking you, or if it's just hosted on Amazon Web Services or whatever. If this extension sees that that web page is at all connected to Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft, it blocks you from seeing that web page.

As Mitchell Clark of The Verge points out, this makes the web parractically useless, and that's kind of the point. It's an exercise to show people exactly how influential these four companies are when it comes to the web. Practically every page on the Web has some sort of connection to these four companies. Now it might be a light touch in some cases, or it might be a tight integration, but it really shows that those four companies wield significant

influence on the web. And maybe that's not always a good thing. Oh and as you might suspect, to get the extension for a browser like Google Chrome, you have to sideloaded, meaning you're not going to find it on the actual Google Extensions website. In previous episodes of tech Stuff, we've looked at how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have removed

posts and band users for spreading misinformation. Well now we can add TikTok to that list, as a report this week from the company shows that TikTok removed more than three hundred forty thousand videos from its platform for breaking

the rules regarding election misinformation, disinformation, and manipulation. The transparency report covers TikTok's activities over the second half of twenty twenty, so in addition to those videos that were taken down, the company also removed more than four hundred forty thousand videos from its recommendation engine. That means that you wouldn't see that pop up as a potential hey, why don't

you watch this video next kind of thing again. The purpose for the removal was that the videos had been flagged as containing misinformation, presumably not bad enough that TikTok would need to remove the video entirely, I guess, but it was no longer in recommendations, which really decreases their discovery. And TikTok also eradicated one point seven five million accounts, and TikTok says that it appears that they only existed

for the purposes of elevating specific misinformation messaging. Weather We'll continue to see platforms like TikTok and it's older social networking siblings stay on top of restricting the speed and spread of misinformation that remains to be seen. Twitter has now added a warning to alert users to tweets that link out two sites that host stuff that was obtained illegally, like pirated content. The message reads, quote these materials may

have been obtained through hacking end quote. So it's kind of like saying, okay, but for reals, these stereo systems didn't actually fall off the back of a truck like that guy keeps saying they done dang stolem. In related news, people discovered that Twitter's methodology for identifying a bad link to hacked material is itself a bit shoddy. Tom Warren posted a link on Twitter to The Virgin's website. And The Verge is a respectable tech news side. I use

them all the time. In fact I cite them in these episodes, and the warning showed up on that post. But as Warren explained, quote so there's a way to trick Twitter into displaying its hacked materials warning. This will be today's Twitter meme until they fix it. End quote. The trick, by the way, was to type out a legitimate u r L first, like www dot the Verge dot com, then a slash, then a hashtag followed by a U r L that would trip the warning message. So a U r L to a an actual site

that had pirated material on it. The good u r L is what would show up in the tweet as the link, but Twitter would identify the bad u r L and use that to generate the warning message. So it's not the end of the world, but it's definitely enough fodder for people to have a bit of fun posting links to legitimate sources and sites but have them appear to be clearing houses for illegal spoils on the Internet.

Sony announced that the company is working on virtual reality hardware for the PS five console, which can still be pretty hard to get your hands on these days. The PS four had proved to be a good platform for VR Unlike other or VR products, it didn't require users to invest a couple of grand in a gaming rig just to run the software and power the hardware. And this announcement seems to indicate that virtual reality is really

establishing its place in gaming and home entertainment. Now. It's certainly not as widespread as we were led to believe it would be back in the nineteen nineties when virtual reality was first really firing in the imaginations of the general public. But I still take this as an encouraging move because I like the idea of VR. I want

to see it continue to grow. I want to see new experiences and games crafted for the virtual reality ecosystem, and I think having something that connects directly to a console where you don't need to do any upgrades or anything like that in order to make it work just makes a lot of sense. In sadder news, the US electronics chain Fries is going out of business. This in

itself isn't a huge surprise. The company was already teetering before the pandemic in twent Like a lot of brick and mortar retail stores, Fries saw a lot of its business siphoned away by that behemous Amazon. But back in the day, Fries was one of those places where computer geeks could go in order to buy various components. You could stroll the aisles and select all the different pieces you needed to build a PC, and you could build it yourself for less than it would cost to buy

a pre assembled one to your own specifications. But the process did require a bit of research if you wanted to avoid making embarrassing mistakes like I don't know, picking a motherboard and a CPU that aren't compatible with each other. But who would do that? Not this guy, let me tell you. Anyway, it looks like it's the end of Fries and that is a real shame. Although from what I understand, in more recent years, the experience of shopping

Fries has taken a bit of a dip. And even in its heyday when I used to go to Fries, it was kind of a scavenger hunt to find all the stuff you needed. It wasn't necessarily laid out in a way that was user friendly. And finally, in California, a federal judge has denied the request made by telecom and cable companies to block the state from enforcing a net neutrality law. The law and makes it illegal for telecom companies to favor their own services over those provided

by another party. So, in other words, a company like Comcast would not be allowed to throttle a service like Netflix in an effort to persuade customers to use Comcasts owned video on demand services instead. A few years ago, this was also the stance of the f c C in the United States, the federal level administration that oversees these kinds of matters, but those restrictions were phased out during the Trump administration. In the wake of that event,

California passed its own state law regarding net neutrality. A collection of telecommunications and cable companies are suing the state over the matter, but the general consensus seems to be that that effort is destined to fail, and with the Biden administration now overseeing federal operations, the FCC as a whole might reinstitute some of the restrictions that the previous

administration had ended. It might be a good time for net neutrality and a slightly tougher time for all those gigantic, almost monopolistic telecommunications companies that are dominating all realms of communications and media. I'm not crying over that, honestly. And that wraps up the news stories for this Thursday, February one. If you guys have suggestions for future topics I should cover on episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Reach

out to me on Twitter. The handle is stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y 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