Tech News: Musk's Twitter Deal On Hold

a potentially massive impact on other investors. But since then, a lot of other stuff has happened. Namely, last Friday, Elon Musk tweeted that the deal to purchase Twitter was on hold, at least temporarily, because Twitter reported that it estimated fewer than five pc of Twitter accounts are bought accounts, i e. Fake accounts that are driven by automated processes. Now must wasn't terribly clear at first about what the

actual problem was. Presumably the problem was that he didn't believe Twitter and felt that the real number is much higher. But here's the thing. He had already put in the offer of buying the company at forty four billion dollars and repeatedly was boasting about one of the main things he wanted to do was purge twitter body accounts and institute a verification system to make certain that every account

belongs to an actual human being. So naturally this led people like me saying, well, if part of your reasoning to purchase Twitter is to get rid of the bots on it, why does this particular estimate upset you? And that really comes down to money. I guess my assumption is that Elon Musk's argument is that Twitter is misrepresenting how many accounts on the platform are bots, and they did that when filing with the SEC, and that this, in turn has inflated Twitter's stock price. It it amounts

to fraud, either intentionally or otherwise. And it also means that Twitter is overvalued, and that Elon Musk's initial offer was based off Twitter's stock price, which has subsequently slipped quite a bit, largely due to Musk kind of waffling

about the deal. Now I can see how that can be a legit argument, except you would think that anyone willing to pop down forty four billion dollars to buy a company would already have done, you know, some pretty thorough investigations to determine if the value represented by the stock price actually reflected the real worth of the company,

you know, before you make the offer anyway. Musk also in a reply to someone, mentioned that Twitter's supposed methodology for determining how many bots are on the platform is to take a random sample of just one accounts and then investigate to see how many of those one hundred are bought accounts and then extrapolate that. Um that, if true, is is I mean to call it, to call it too small a sample size is an understatement, like that's that's nothing. You're talking about a platform that boasts a

couple of hundred million accounts on it. Just to take one hundred and then trying to extrapolate anything from one hundred random accounts, that's nothing. So if that is true, that is a laughable approach to making those kinds of estimates.

But then Musk said that Twitter accused him of of breaking a non disclosure agreement or in d a about all this, and at a tech conference in Florida, Musk said that the real percentage of body accounts is likely twenty or higher, possibly as high as n though I think that is ludicrously high and really doubted. I don't think only of the accounts on Twitter are real people. Um I think some of those real people are real jerks,

but they're still people. Musk then said that this deal will not move forward unless Twitter can prove that less than five percent of the accounts on the platform are in fact bots or fake or spam or whatever. Musk also said that if he could arrive at a lower deal for Twitter, a purchase might not be out of

the question. Now I should add there is a ton of speculation online that Musk is also scrambling because maybe the funding he secured to purchase Twitter is no longer sufficient to cover that already four billion dollar price tag, so some of the funding depends on Musk's shares in Tesla as uh as collateral, at least according to some reports.

But Tesla stock prices have also dropped significantly by around thirty percent, because you know, they've been dropping ever since this deal to buy Twitter was first announced, and Tesla shareholders have been worrying that they might be saddled with footing the bill for Musk's desire to own Twitter, which has nothing to do with their their interest in Tesla

as a company. Well, if that is in fact true, if you know things that he has as collateral has have dipped in value by like thirty that could mean that he might need to secure some additional funding sources to cover the forty four billion dollars. Now, yes, Ellen Musk is a multibillionaire. In fact, he's the richest person in the world. He has an estimated wealth of around two nineteen bill in dollars. But we have to remember

the vast majority of that wealth isn't liquid. It's wrapped up in stuff like his stock in Tesla or in cryptocurrency, and if Musk were to sell off assets for the sake of liquidity, it would affect the value of those assets, which means that he would get less for them than what they are currently worth, which really just nails down how insane wealth is, and that most rich people really just leverage their assets to get hold of cash when

they need it rather than sell stuff off. Because if you sell off a lot of it, well, it becomes like supply and demand. Right. If you're flooding the market with supply because you're offloading your massive shares in something, the demand goes down and the price goes down, so you get less than what you would have gotten if you didn't sell it off. It's it's like this weird

catch twenty two, right. Anyway, My point is that even though Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, he does not have forty four billion dollars in cash just laying around, so he had to secure additional funding, some of which has depreciated in value since the time of the announcement. So some people assume that Musk is really looking for a way to back out of the deal that will save face, or alternatively find a way to renegotiate the deal so that he can purchase Twitter at

a much lower price. Uh. I think that that's something Twitter's board might resist, and certainly Twitter's shareholders would probably

be less interested in it. You know, if they're being told they're gonna get bought out at fifty four dollars a share and then they're told no, I'm sorry, it's gonna be closer to you know, forty dollars a share, that's a big step down, right, And I'm just using those as hypothetical figures, right, But the point being that shareholders are probably not going to be as thrilled at thought of getting a smaller payout, so it could put

the deal at risk. Now, if Musk does back out of the deal on his terms, it will cost him a cool billion dollars to do it, because that was part of the negotiation, was that if either party called off the deal, then it would come at a cost of a billion dollars. Now, could it be that Musk will ultimately spend a billion dollars to not buy Twitter? Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Parague Agal dismissed Musk's objection, saying that he would discuss the issue of spam accounts quote with the

benefit of data, facts and context end quote. So the story is not over yet. A security consultant named Sultan CoStim Khan created a hack that exploits the keyless operation mode for certain automobiles, such as Tesla's, which is why

I'm mentioning this story right after the Elon Musk story. Now, according to con his method works on other types of vehicles too, but he specifically demonstrated it on Tesla vehicles that it works on things like the models and the model why his hack would allow him to not only unlock a vehicle's doors, but also start the electric motor and drive off in the car. So, in other words, you could totally steal a Tesla using this technology. Now, to pull it off requires a couple of pieces of hardware.

One piece is essentially a Bluetooth sniffer device, So this is something that can detect Bluetooth signals that are being

broadcast from a source. Now, Bluetooth signals have a relatively short range, so that means you would have to get this sniffer device fairly close to your target with then about fifteen feet or so, and you know, whether that that target is a smartphone that has a specific app that interacts with the Tesla or other vehicle, or it's a keyless fob or whatever it might be, and it then will sniff the signal that's being sent from that

device that would normally go to the vehicle. The sniffer device would then relay that signal to a laptop that is presumably close to the target vehicle, because again Bluetooth doesn't have a very long range, So then con could use the laptop that was coming in you know, that was detecting the signal from the sniffer to broadcast a similar signal to the car and unlock it and turn on the electric motor. So this method is not super

easy to pull off. It does require some hardware and some maneuvering in order to get it to work, but the point is it is possible and there's no defense against it. Con says that he contacted Tesla and other companies and made them aware of this vulnerability, but fixing this particular problem would require a fairly substantial overhaul of the keyless entry system as well as the hardware it

runs on. And further more, the risk of someone actually developing and then using this hack is fairly low, so there do not appear to be any plans to address this issue because the likelihood of it becoming a thing out in the wild is fairly limited. Cohn also revealed that other cars that use the quick set smart locks are vulnerable to this kind of attack, but that drivers who use their iPhones to access their vehicles have some

additional security measures that they can take advantage of. For one, they can enable two factor authentication, which in general you should pretty much always do for any system that offers it, and also the iPhone compatible locks have a time out that makes them harder to hack. The Android version locks lack these security factors, though quick Set lands on an upgrade later this year that will likely address that. We have lots more stories to cover, including some more hacking

stories as well as a lot of other stuff. But before we get to any of that, let's take a quick break. We're back. Cal Newport posted in his blog a really interesting piece about a scientific study titled taking a one week break from Social Media Improves well being, depression and anxiety. Well, the title of the paper pretty much tells you what you need to know. The researchers took on volunteers. They randomly divided those volunteers into two groups.

One group was the control group. They were given no instructions, They just went about living their normal lives. The experiment group was told to take a week long break from social media, including popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter. After a week, the researchers found that the experiment group reported they experienced less anxiety and depression, and they felt

an improved sense of well being. The improvements were significant even when adjusting for variables like age and gender, so it didn't just disappear once you started to factor those variables into it. Newport points out, we should always look at these kinds of scientific studies with some skepticism, largely because methodologies can get a bit fuzzy, especially when we're

talking about things like mental health. There are so many variables that impact our mental health that it can be pretty much impossible to narrow in on one or two variables and then eliminate all the rest. Right, Still, the study seems to support earlier hypotheses that a dependence on social media tends to bring with it an increased sense of depression and anxiety. Anecdotally, I have cut way back on my social network presence, having deactivated my Facebook account.

I don't go to Instagram, I don't have TikTok anymore, and I only use Twitter for this show. I don't I don't access my personal Twitter feed anymore. Are now I can't say that I have had a massive improvement in my mental health, but I do feel that I'm not getting worse, which wasn't necessarily the case when I was still on everything. But again, that's anecdotal evidence, which really that's not evidence at all. We all know that, right,

Anecdotal evidence is not actual evidence. And goodness knows, I would much rather feel like I was a totally new, well adjusted person. I'm just not there yet. Still, if you do find yourself feeling overwhelmed, it might be worth considering taking a weak vacation from social media. It could help. Now, I'm pretty sure. I talked about this next story in an earlier episode that Apple has rolled out changes that allow app developers to alter subscription prices and charge users

more money automatically, as long as certain conditions are met. Previously, developers were required to send a notification to users alerting them of an upcome main price hike for their services, and the user would then have the option to opt in to paying the higher price, or they could discontinue

their subscription. But Apple said that this method had the unintended consequence of leading to interruptions and service because users were missing or ignoring notifications so they didn't take the action to opt in, and their service would get discontinued once their subscription was over and the price hike had taken effect, and it would cause some friction. So now the policy has changed, developers still have to send out

a message to users alerting them ahead of time. If they're going to change the price, but the price change gets applied automatically and there's no opt in required, so if the user doesn't actively deactivate their account, they get charged more So, if you miss or ignore a message, then you might discover when you're looking at your bank statement that what used to cost X per month now costs X plus something else per month. Apple does have a few other requirements the developers have to meet in

order to qualify for this feature. Uh, the developers cannot hike a price more than once per year. Any increase that they give to any subscription cannot exceed five dollars or fifty of the current subscription price for monthly subscriptions, and if it's an annual subscription service, the max hike is fifty dollars or fifty of the subscription price. The

increase also cannot break any local laws. Now, if developers failed to meet some of those qualifications, they can still increase their subscription prices, but they will have to adhere to the old process of giving you know, users the opportunity to opt in, or otherwise their service will be discontinued. Darren Allen of tech Radar has an article titled bad news and video. A m D S new GPUs are in good stock and priced strictly at m s r

p UM. In case you're not familiar with the term m s r P, that stands for manufacturers suggested retail price. In other words, it's how much the company what makes the thing tells stores how much they should charge to sell that thing. It's their suggested retail price. Stores aren't obligated to sell things at m s r P, but it is what the manufacturers are suggesting. And obviously if stores charge weight more than that and other stores charged

closer to m s RP, that creates competition in the market. YadA, YadA, YadA. Well, when it comes to GPUs or graphics processing units, we've had a long run of graphics cards being incredibly difficult to find and grossly overpriced above m s r P. One really big reason for that was that crypto minors for currencies like ethereum, we're scooping up all the available GPUs before they could hit consumer mark markets and plugging them into mining machines, or they were buying GPUs at

way above market price and then putting them into mining machines UM. And this gave a few enterprising folks the chance to buy up cards very quickly and then hike the price up to obscene levels before offering them up on after market platforms like eBay. Uh. Then the you know, you got to take into account the semiconductor chip shortage that we're currently in, and there are all the factors you really need right. You have limited supply, you have

high demand that fuels crazy high prices. Well, Alan Over at tech Radar has pointed out that a m D has several GPUs that appear to be in stock on sites like new Egg, and more importantly, that these in stock cards are pretty much priced where they should be. Prices have been coming down a little bit recently, in large part because the value of cryptocurrency has plummeted in

recent weeks. Obviously, if it costs more money to run mining operations, then you get out of successfully mining cryptocurrency. You stop doing it, right, because otherwise you're operating at a net loss. You want to make profits. So if it costs you more to do the thing, then you get out of the thing, you stop doing it. That also means we don't quite see the same rush to

snap up all available GPUs. Now, don't get me wrong, there is still a rush, it's just not quite as vicious as it used to be, and I suspect we'll see GPU availability and pricing improve, assuming there's not a

huge surge in the crypto market specifically with Ethereum. Also, we have to remember Ethereum is currently running its proof of steak blockchain in parallel with its proof of work blockchain, and proof of steak is not going to require all that computational effort to verify transactions the way that proof of work a pro which is do so once Ethereum actually transitions to proof of steak, because right now the actual transactions are still happening on proof of work blockchain.

But once things merge and Ethereum has transitioned over to proof of steak, the demand for all those GPUs will drop again. I mean, other cryptocurrencies will still use proof of work, but they typically are valued much lower than Ethereum, which in turn is valued much lower than bitcoing. So it could mean that you know, the people who end up seeking out and acquiring those cards end up being you know, gamers who want to run their PCs so that they can be able to to run the latest

titles at the highest settings. Wouldn't that be nice? Earlier this year, I did an episode about the company San Sui, once famous for producing high end audio equipment, and that company is now really no more than a brand name, something that's happened to a lot of companies over the years. And we have another company that we can kind of add to that list, and this one is on Kyo, oh in k y O. Unlike san Sui, on Kyo's target market was more in the mid range for audio

equipment and video equipment. The company produced a v equipment that was a little more modest than the brands that were targeting, you know, the the wealthy audio file crowd. But on Kyo hit on hard times. It got delisted from the Stock Exchange last year, and now the company, which was originally founded way back in has gone bankrupt. However, last year, Sharp and the American Premium Audio Company formed

a partnership and purchased the Onkyo Home Entertainment division. So while on Kyo, the company that created that division is no more, the assets, the brand, the technology, and all the stuff that the company actually made now belongs to other companies that are actually in a much better position. So essentially it means we should still expect to see on Kyo products on the market. It's just that the

company that started it all is no more. I might have to do a full episode about this in the future. In fact, leave me a talk back message on the I Heart radio app if you agree. If you don't know what that is. On the I Heart Radio app, you will see a little microphone icon on the tech stuff page, either on the page itself or on the actual entry for this episode, and if you tap that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds

long and let me know what you think. All right, We've got some more stories to get through before we wrap up this episode, but first let's take another quick break. Well, the power grid in the United States state of Texas is back in the news again. So last year, during a particularly harsh into storm, thousands of people in the state of Texas experienced power outages and it really put

a spotlight on that state's unique situation. See. Unlike most of the other states in the US, which have power grids that interconnect with one another, Texas decided to go in house with its power grid. And you might wonder why well, Being interconnected means being partly dependent upon and partly accountable to other parties, and gosh dang it, that

just ain't a Texan thing to do. More seriously, being part of the interconnected system would bring texas As power grid within the jurisdiction of federal regulations, and that darn sure anna Texan thing to do. The state has always been fiercely independent, even when it meant that citizens were

bound to suffer as a consequence. There's also a lot of allegations that the various politicians who have maintained a status quo have done so at considerable personal benefit, meaning there's a lot of alleged greasing of politic coal wheels going on here if you believe the accusations. But let's

talk about the impact on the average person. Back in around folks lost their lives because they didn't have power during this incredible winter storm, and now the Texas power grid is struggling with electricity demands as the state experiences high temperatures, not an unusual thing in Texas. Uh. It's pretty hard to live in Texas without air conditioning, or at least without a lot of fans. And it's definitely

dangerous to do it. So a lot of folks are running their air conditioning when the weather gets hot, and it's already really hot. Some parts of the state hit a hundred five degrees fahrenheit or forty point six degrees celsius yesterday. But this over taxes the state's power grid, which is incapable of tapping into the rest of the United States as systems which would allow it to help

shoulder the load. It can't do that because it's an independent little island, and as a result, power stations have had outages recently, and the state has urged citizens to limit their power usage, asking people to set their thermostats to seventy eight degrees fahrenheit and for those of y'all who use the more civilized celsius, that's about twenty five point six degrees celsius. They also have been asked not to run any big appliances during the peak hours of

three PM to eight pm. And that's from our coat, the ironically named Electric Reliability Council of Texas. It seems to me like that reliability part of the name should really be revisited. All right, let's get back to hacking and exploiting hardware. Ours Technica reports that hackers have discovered how to install malware on an iPhone that can run

even if the phone itself is powered off. And you might think, well, how is that possible, Well, it's because when you turn your iPhone off, it's not really totally powered down. There are certain functions that the phone needs to be able to do even if the phone itself

has been turned off for normal operation. So there are certain features that run in a low power mode and they just sip as little juice as they can in order to continue to function even with the phone turned off, and the hackers figured out how to exploit this mode so that malware could run on a device that's even been powered down. The key is Bluetooth, just like with our our keyless entry conversation. Bluetooth was a big part

of that as well. The Bluetooth chip and an iPhone lacks any digital signature methodology or encryption on its firmware, which gave the hackers, which I keep saying hackers, they were security researchers at the University of Darmstadt in this case, gave them the opportunity to develop malware that could do stuff like track the phone's physical location even when it's turned off. That's one of the low power processes that

retain support even when a phone has powered down. It's the find my feature, right, So if you had turned your phone off and you left it somewhere, you want that find my feature to work. Well. This is an exploit of that. And considering that state backed companies like the NSO group have previously targeted iOS devices to convert those devices into surveillance tools, this new development is pretty concerning.

I mean, imagine being able to exploit a target device and turn it into at least a partial surveillance tool, even if it had been turned off. Even if the owner thinks they're being savvy by turning their phone off as they traveled to some sensitive location, they could potentially be tracked by someone running malware and using a process similar to the find my iPhone, which is not good now.

Security researchers and hackers in our last story, they're working to improve security, but obviously there are other hackers who have more extreme agendas, such is the case with CONTI, a gang of Russian speaking hackers who not long ago in full traded computer systems belonging to the government of Costa Rica and then locked down those computer systems in a ransomware attack. They recently have demanded a ransom of

of twenty million dollars UH. They increase that in fact to twenty million, possibly because Costa Rica just installed a new president, Roderigo Chavez, and then that president held a press conference and hypothesized that the attack involved people inside Costa Rica cooperating with the presumably Russian hacker group. And that's something that the hackers themselves have said is true.

They claim that there are insiders in the government who are working with them in order to compromise the systems. The hackers have been implying that their goal is to overthrow the government, but most researchers say that's likely just posturing and that really all they want is cash, cash, money. And I do talk a lot about hackers on tech stuff, but one thing I frequently don't have information on is who is actually developing the malware that's being used out

there in the real world. Some hacker groups rely on tools that are made by people from outside the group itself. They're deploying tools that were developed somewhere else. In fact, there are plenty of hackers who do that exclusively, and in hacking communities, they at least they used to be referred to as script kiddies, people who, you know, we're taking the programming code that someone else made and just using it. But they don't develop code themselves. They don't

even necessarily understand how to code well anyway. The U S Department of Justice claims it has identified someone responsible for developing two different malware suites that have been used in ransomware attacks. That person is a cardiologist living in Venezuela named Boises louise A Gala Gonzalez. Now, according to the d J, Zagala is the developer responsible for malware

called Jigsaw and another one called Thanos. Now. Apparently, one of the zagala As relatives tipped off authorities that this doctor was moonlighting as a sort of cyber warfare arms dealer, supplying hacker groups with tools and providing technical support and getting relatively modest payouts in the process. But Zagala was using this relative to kind of funnel the money through and not go directly back to him. And then the relative got investigated as part of this overall investigation into

the hack and tipped the authorities off to Zagala. One of the groups that Zagala was allegedly helping was a state backed Iranian hacking group that targeted Israeli companies. So Zagala is now charged with two counts of attempted computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit computer intrusions. He has not been arrested. He's charged with this by the United States, but he's living in Venezuela and has not been arrested. Now, should he be arrested and should he be uh extradited

and stand trial for those charges? He could face five years in prison for each of the charges. It seems that Zegala is a self taught hacker as well. And it's really going to be a heck of a thing for a cardiologist to devote spare time towards learning how to code and then creating malware, particularly when you consider that medical facilities are frequently the prime target for ransomware attacks. Kind of disturbing. Finally, have you ever asked yourself how

many times are companies sharing my personal data with one another? Like? How many times are the various entities out there, like say a data broker, making transactions where your personal information is part of the deal. Well, if you live in the EU, the answer is probably around six times a day on average. So that's how many times companies are sharing your personal information with stuff like you know, advertising companies. But you know, y'all in the EU can rest easy.

Those of us in the good old U s of a. It's a walking seven hundred forty seven times per day on average. This is according to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties or i c c L. That keep in mind, these companies aren't singling you out personally. Your data gets lumped in with the data from millions of other people. And one way this works is that when you visit a web page, your browser exchanges information with that page.

The page bundles that information up with all the data from folks who also went to that page at that same time, and this becomes a block of info that then gets auctioned off at a market and the winning bidder gets the privilege of serving their ad to you. This whole process takes less than a second to happen. That's just the little delay that happens before an ad loads in onto your page, and it's happening all the time.

The process is called real time Bidding or r t B. You can read the full report on the I c c L website. The report is titled the Biggest Data Breach and it really pulls back the curtain on the data trading industry. This is something that more governments around the world are starting to look into and consider regulating, so it's possible that this rampant exchange of people's personal

information will eventually get reined in. And that's it for the Tech News for May seventeen, two thousand twenty two. As a reminder, if you want to reach out to tech Stuff, there are a couple of ways to do it. One way is to use the I Heart radio app. Navigate to the tech Stuff page and use that little microphone icon to leave a talkback voice recording of up to thirty seconds to make suggestions for topics, comment on episodes.

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