Tech News: Questions For Facebook, No More Answers from Yahoo

I guess that's something right. And you know, there are spy films that start off with a villain sabotaging some sort of high security, high value target, like a nuclear power plant, for example, but it turns out that the same thing can be done by a gooey ocean critter. I'm talking about salps, which are a type of invertebrate. They're called tunicates. They look kind of like jellyfish, but they are a different species. They use water jet propulsion in order to get around, so they siphon in water

and siphon it back out again and squirt ahead. Anyway, a whole bunch of them have gummed up the water intake valves for two nuclear reactors in South Korea, which is not you know great. The nuclear plants use water to cool the reactors as part of the heat exchanges that are at the heart of power generation, so those reactors are currently offline. Salt numbers usually swell in early summer,

so we're actually seeing an early surge here. Now whether that has anything to do with climate change is an unresolved question. It would be premature for us to draw conclusions without a lot more data and looking at trends over time. This could just be an abnormality but not

an indication of big changes. It's kind of like how if you had an unusually cool day in late May here in Atlanta, you wouldn't say that's counter evidence to climate change, that global warming is not a thing or whatever, although no one really wants to use the term global warming anymore. That's kind of reductive, But anyway, you wouldn't

say that because weather and climate are not interchangeable. The story of the salps, I think is a little amusing because the thought that this little sack like critter could shut down a nuclear power plant sounds, you know, kind of bizarre and funny, but it's obviously serious business, both in terms of the impact on power generation and changes

in wildlife. Routines. One story I did not report on earlier this week was about how hackers have been scraping information pertaining to more than half a billion Facebook accounts, including Mark Zuckerberg's. As it turns out, someone collected the data back in twenty nine teen, and it includes stuff like names, occupations, location, marital status, or relationship status in

some cases, phone numbers. Facebook says that the hackers likely used a contact import tool to scrap data from various profiles, which means no one actually penetrated Facebook's systems and then rooted around for information that way. Instead, they just pulled it off Facebook directly. So prior to twenty nineteen, it was possible to do kind of a reverse search of Facebook.

You could plug in a phone number and put that into a contact importer, and it would then search Facebook to see if there was a profile on Facebook that matched that phone number, which would then give you not just the personal information of the account, but it would confirm the link between the phone number and that person. Right. And if you automated this and you just went through, you know, a robo dial list of phone numbers, you

could collect a huge amount of data. Now Facebook changed that, but the damage had already been done, the data was already collected, and it's not much of a relief to hear that the company has, you know, already done something about it when the information is already out in the wild. It's one of those shutting the barn door things after the horse has already kind of bolted. You can check to see if you were affected by going to have

I Been zucked? That's zu ckeed dot com, and you can search against the database of all the stuff that was collected, so you can put in your phone number, your email address, or whatever. I tried my information. I was not in that twenty nineteen hack. But that was just pure luck. It wasn't that I did anything, you know, to prevent it from happening. I was just lucky that I wasn't in part of that grab. Another bad Facebook

story coming your way. The Insider has an article titled Facebook did not higher black employees because they were not a culture fit. Report says the article is well worth reading. I think the headline kind of gives away the idea of what was going on, but we'll dive in. So the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received reports from a few black applicants who were seeking jobs with Facebook, and they all reportedly had the qualifications necessary to do the posted jobs.

But they were all turned away, apparently after being told they would not fit in with the corporate culture of Facebook. And it's hard to view this as anything other than grossly racist. A Washington Post article quoted an operating manager over at Facebook who said he was told that the people he recruited into the company needed to be a culture fit, but quote, Unfortunately, not many people I knew could pass that challenge because the culture here does not

reflect the culture of black people end quote. Organizations like the Society for Human Resource Management have pushed back against companies that have culture fit requirements in their job postings. They've argued that this effectively creates an excuse to hire mostly white applicants and turn away people of color while attempting to maintain a sort of plausible deniability that there's

any kind of racial discrimination going on. Facebook representatives have said that their company has policies and placement to detect and eliminate discrimination. But this culture fit thing strikes me as a way of kind of getting around that, maybe not a conscious way. It might not even have been consciously malevolent or malicious, but it has the effect of

being discriminatory, and that's a problem. On Tuesday, the messaging app Signal rolled out a new beta in the UK with a feature that, well, let's say it's caused a little bit of a fuss. Signal is an encrypted messaging service. It offers end to end encryption between people using it. That's one that a lot of users have flocked to in order to switch to a messaging app that didn't

commoditize relationships. When Facebook's WhatsApp started, when it was revealed that the app was going to be collecting data about usage, maybe not even personal data, but enough data about usage that would ultimately go to Facebook proper and other Facebook properties, a lot of people said, you know what, peace out, I'm going to go use something else, and a lot of people went to Signal, and signal sales pitch is that it lets you communicate privately and securely with your contacts.

And there aren't really any bells and whistles thrown in, except now there appears to be one a cryptocurrency called mobile coin. Critics say that Signal is commercially exploiting its user base, introducing a company controlled digital cryptocurrency, pumping up the value of that digital currency, then pushing it all

off onto users, and then pocketing profit from it. Stephen deal That's d I. E Hl wrote a great blog post that critiques this move, and it laments the fact that Signal seems to have taken a drastic turn from its philosophical anchor point. It's called ET two Signal. I really recommend you read it. His perspective, which I find pretty compelling, is that there's this growing trend in tech in general to rely on these digital tokens, whether they

are cryptocurrencies or NFTs. That trend sees a small group of people trade digital goods a few times, thus driving up the perceived value of those digital goods. Then they can cash out, you know, they can build up some wealth, cash out, and then they have that wealth in some other form. And meanwhile, those digital assets are in a danger of having a total collapse in value, similar to

what we have seen with Bitcoin in the past. Bitcoin's writing high, but there have been times where we've seen the value of bitcoin dip really low from pretty big high. So there's no guarantee that it's going to maintain that. While some might survive the ups and downs and stick around, and by some I mean cryptocurrencies and fts. There's never

a guarantee that they will stick around. And the more we see companies employ these kinds of strategies, the more likely we're going to see governments take a closer look at the whole thing and potentially try to pass legislation to address it, particularly if people are at risk of losing significant amounts of money due to these types of strategies. And as we all know, it is not easy to address the consequences of technologies once they are out in the wild. It is way too easy to pass laws

that have their own unintended consequences. The laws might be coming from a good place, but they can often not hit the actual problem and cause other problems as a results,

so not necessarily a great move. Oh and just to link the Facebook privacy story with the signal story, is another story that a lot of people are having fun with right now, and that is that by using that screat data, some folks found out that Mark Zuckerberg, whom I mentioned earlier, his data was among that that was found in that more than half a billion accounts list. It turns out he's been using the Signal messaging app, which is interesting because Facebook is the owner of WhatsApp

that is a Signal competitor. But if you run the company that owns a messaging app, why would you be using a different messaging app than the one you actually own as part of your company. Why would you use a different one for your personal communication? Well, Signal has d end encryption, and unlike WhatsApp, it's not coming through user data, or at least it's not supposed to in

an effort to sell ads to users. So perhaps Zuckerberg prefers his messaging services to be a little less intrusive, but wanting a different set of rules for everybody else, I don't know, I'm just spitballing here. Amplify Media gave Apple podcasts a thorough look recently and found out some

stuff that I didn't find all that surprising. Apple podcasts recently hit a milestone of having more than two million different podcast titles on it, but amplify discovered that twenty six percent of all those podcasts have only published a single episode. Thirty seven percent had only published two or fewer. So, in other words, you know, we went from twenty six to thirty seven percent having had published two or less, and then forty four percent had only published three or fewer.

So once you hit the ten or more episodes, like how many podcasts on Apple Podcasts have published more than ten episodes, Well you're looking at just thirty six percent of all the podcasts up on Apple Podcasts, which tells us that there are a ton of shows that have not hit ten episodes on there. This didn't shock me

because podcasting takes a lot of work and energy. I can name at least three shows I personally started recording and stopped before I hit episode number four, And what this tells me is that there are a lot of people who are trying to podcast, but many of them get discouraged for whatever reason and they give up on it. Of course, some of those shows might not have been abandoned. Some of them could have easily just been one offs

or very limited series. For example, Till Death Do Us Blart, a show in which the hosts get together to watch Paul Blart Mall Cop two every year, had to run for four years straight before having more than three episodes, and it currently has eight. If you also include the trailer from twenty fifteen and a bonus episode from twenty twenty. Meanwhile, Tech Stuff is currently close again on fourteen hundred episodes,

and that's if you're not counting classics. If you do count the classic episodes that we publish on Fridays, because I mean, at that point you're talking about one thousand, five hundred twenty nine episodes. This will be one five hundred thirty one because I'm pretty sure the Wednesday episode hasn't published as I record this, and I think out of all of those, I'm only not in one of them. I mean every single one except one of them. I

need to lie down for a moment. A recent court filing in a criminal case illustrates how sometimes smart city implementations can be dangerously stupid. And let me be clear here, I'm not saying it's dumb to update city infrastructure. I'm saying it's dumb to do it poorly. In this case, the incident in question happened back in twenty nineteen. A man named Wyatt Tranacheck attempted to sabotage the water cleaning

system of Ellsworth County in Kansas. Travnicheck had been working with the county, which had installed software in the county's water cleaning system and it let employees log into that cleaning system remotely, and the purpose was to let employees monitor systems without having to be on the physical premises. But the software also allows employees to make changes to

that system, like shutting down various subsystems. So Travin to check, after having left his job, logged into the system months later. His access had never been revoked or limited in any way, so he logged in and he started to shut stuff down, allegedly with the intent to cause harm. He was found out, arrested, and if he's found guilty, he could serve up to

twenty years in prison for this. Fortunately no one was actually harmed in this case, but it really illustrates the need for proper security measures and critical systems that includes everything from the power grid where we know foreign agents have infiltrated various systems, to our water systems, to communication systems and beyond. Good security is hard. It requires work, It requires maintenance, It requires updating passwords and changing logins.

It includes revoking access when someone no longer merits having access. It's essentially all the stuff that we should be doing in our private lives with our own systems. But a lot of us don't do that because it's work, it's tedious, and there are only so many hours in a day. But if we insist on making these various systems accessible remotely, we have to take those measures into account or else

we will suffer very serious consequences. This could have been a lot worse in the tell us something we didn't already know category. The Broadband Technical Advisory Group reports that broadband usage surged between thirty and forty percent in most of the United States during the pandemic, with some areas

getting up to sixty percent. Of a surge. Seems like when a lot of folks are stuck at home, they turned to the Internet when it comes to things like getting work done, or finding entertainment, or researching ways to get vaccinated and so on. And also, while downstream data was way up, so was upstream activity. Again, no big surprise. I'm sure a lot of you have been on your share of video meetings over the course of the last year.

And I mean working from home for me means that I'm regularly uploading large audio files to my producer Tari, and that adds up pretty quickly. While the infrastructure in most cities handled the increased load without too much of an issue, rural areas were a different story. Some of those were relying on older networking devices that weren't able to keep up with the demand as easily as the

stuff we have in metropolitan areas. And what this tells me is that stuff like data caps sound like they're more about getting cash out of customers and less about guaranteeing a good Internet experience. If the US had a surge and we didn't see home service slow to a crawl across the country, seems pretty disingenuous to say that data caps are necessity. Amazon's Twitch service has a new policy in place that could see twitch streamers get banned

indefinitely for things that they do offline. That is, you might have a perfectly acceptable streaming record, but you might do something really bad out there in the real world, and if Amazon finds out about it, you might find that your stream has been shut down. Now I don't object to this, by the way, but it is interesting to me. Twitch streamers can achieve a great deal of fame.

They can attract a large and young audience, and if a streamer has been found to have engaged in some seriously bad behaviors, like being involved in acts of deadly violence or terrorist activities, or committing sexual assault. Twitch has rules now laid out to ban that user from streaming.

According to Twitch, it will work with a law firm when cases arise to determine if any claims that were made against that streamer have validity to them, and that all has to happen before or Twitch does anything else. Only on confirmation that the streamer was actually involved in

these activities will Twitch then act on the account. According to Twitch, a person who has been found to have engaged in these offline activities poses as a potential threat to the Twitch community in general, and that is unacceptable. Other platforms like Facebook and YouTube also sometimes take offline behavior into consideration when dealing with accounts, but it's more common to see most platforms focus solely on the behavior

and activities that happen on the platform itself and not elsewhere. Finally, in the second McElroy family reference in this episode, let us all bow our heads in a moment of silence for yaho Answers, the platform which allows people to ask questions ranging from the mundane to the unintelligible with answers that frequently match or exceed the questions. Is going to go away? On May fourth? Wiped clear off the internet Star Wars Day. I mean, really, guys, that's low anyway.

Yaho Answers has been a part of the web since two thousand and five, and it's been a part of the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me. There's the reference to our mackel Royce that had originally launched back in twenty ten. And sure there were really dumb questions and even more dumb answers on yaho Answers, and sure most of those questions you could probably find answered elsewhere. And sure some people use Yahoo Answers not to ask or answer questions, but to create a kind of rich

metafiction of weirdness. But without yah who Answers, we never would have had the question how is Babby formed? And countless people too scared to ask a question that they really wanted to know the answer to and then potentially look foolish, would be able to go to yah Who Answers and ask it there, and sometimes they might even get a useful response. Now there are other sites that do sort of what yah Who Answers was doing, though usually not with the same level of surreal datastic activities.

As for Mbimbam, that's my brother, my brother and me. To y'all who have never listened to that show, I suspect the show is going to be just fine. Yah Who Answers served a specific role on that show, well two of them really. One was to help buff up listener questions because, of course, in the early days, the show was still building its audience and so it only had so many questions per episode. Yah Who Answers helped

fill that out. But the other was to sign off every episode with an unanswered and arguably unanswerable question from Yah Who Answers. There may now need to be a new way to close out shows, but I believe in the mackelroys. As for yall Who Answers, I'm sad to see it go. It was bizarre and weird, sometimes disturbing, but it also felt like a pretty accurate representation of the psyche on the Internet. So shine on you, Crazy Diamond,

And that's it for today's episode. That's all the news that I care to report for Thursday, April eight, twenty twenty one. If you have suggestions, for things I should tackle in episodes of tech Stuff let me know. The best way to get in touch is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an

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