Tech News: Row Row Row your Roboat

that some popular websites were not up. They were down, big big websites, including sites like Spotify, Twitch, Reddit, HBO, Max, Stripe, PayPal, and then news organizations like The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN and many more. Also, some government websites in the UK were down. So what was going on? One? I mean, when this kind of thing happens, clearly something major is going down on the back end. The possibility that all of these sites would suffer unrelated issues at the same

time is just too low, right, So what happened? Well, apparently the root cause was a problem with a c d N provider called Fastly, But that naturally raises a question, what in the blue blazes is a c d N. Well, that initialism stands for content delivery network, which kind of gives you an idea of what it does, but it's a little you know, misleading as well. So a c d N is a collection of Internet servers that are distributed across different regions that collectively work to deliver faster

Internet content to end users. It's kind of like an edge network strategy essentially, you can think of it. It It is almost like a dispersed team of experts who are all working on the same problem, except, of course we're talking about computer servers here. And interestingly, these servers don't actually host any content themselves. They aren't like holding the videos on HBO Max or anything like that, so they're not the repository of information that we find from the

various sites we visit and services we use. Instead, these servers will load content into a cash memory, so you can think of this as like very temporary storage, and then they can serve that up to end users. So if you're trying to watch a movie on HBO Max, the host server for that content could be sending out data to c d end servers, which in turn consent that to you, and that helps relieve the host server, the one that actually contains all the stuff for real zs.

It saves them from having to handle all of that load all by itself, and it helps ensure a faster experience for the end user. But Fastly apparently had some sort of massive malfunction that brought down the c d N system, and that meant that the support that these

these different sites usually have was suddenly gone. As a result, millions of people found that numerous websites and services were totally unreachable, and in the case of stuff like Stripe and PayPal, that could be a really big disruption for commerce. Plenty of small merchants depend upon these services, so this was more serious than just not being able to watch a twitch streamer or have a twitch stream or access

of Spotify playlist for an hour. Fastly was able to resolve the problem after about an hour, with service appearing to be restored by noon in UK time. So it's a really good thing that Fastly's response didn't move slowly.

Our next story for today's news makes me feel like I kind of got into a time machine and then somehow went back to the late nineties and early two thousand's and that's because this story involves big music labels suing the proverbial pants off of an Internet service provider because of alleged piracy committed by that I s P s customers. And y'all, we went through this two decades ago and the music companies did not come out looking real good back then, So what exactly is going on now?

While back in two thousand eighteen, a group of music companies that include Sony Music, no surprise there, Universal, and Warner filed a joint lawsuit against Cox Communications, and the claim was that Cox did not do enough to curtail piracy across its network as an I s P. The claim said that despite these companies direct in Cox to specific I P addresses that were linked to music piracy, the company didn't actually go so far as to ban people from its service, and thus Cox was culpable for

the losses that these companies suffered due to piracy. And by the way, it is actually impossible to calculate the losses from piracy because there's no way to establish if someone would have purchased a piece of media legitimately if they hadn't pirated it first. Because this isn't like physical media, right, It's not like someone broke into a warehouse and stole a palette of albums or something. They took a copy

of a digital file which can be copied infinitely. And so unless you can actually prove that that person was going to buy that digital media but didn't, then how can you actually say the company was out any money? I mean, if I don't buy an album, right Like, if I just decide, oh, I don't want that, well, it's not like I cost Sony Music money and that that seems like a pretty reasonable argument, right I decide I don't want that album, I didn't rob anyone of

that sale. So you can't actually establish how much money was lost as a result of piracy. There probably is some amount lost, I mean, it's not like it's not like it's a victimless crime. It's not that it's you know, you just can't actually put a value to that loss because there's no way of knowing what it could be. And yet the jury in this case back in two thousand eighteen, actually they found uh in the favor of

the music labels. In two thousand nineteen, not only did they agree with the music labels, they agreed to an award of nearly one hundred thousand dollars per instance of piracy, and there were more than ten thousand instances of piracy, which meant that Cox's court mandated fine is that the billion dollar mark yaws a one billion dollars in fines

to pay to these music labels. Anyway, obviously, Cox appealed that decision, and so that trial went to appeal, and earlier this year that appeals court upheld that first decision. So they said, no, the court got it right. And now groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or e f F, and the Center for Democracy and Technology and a couple of others have issued their own court filing regarding this case. These organizations point out that the court decision is incredibly harmful.

If I s p s potentially face fines in the billion dollar range, they are far more likely to boot people off their service if they get a notice from a music label. But it's never as simple as that. For example, let's just take my house, right, I live with my wife as long as you know she lets me, which so far has gone pretty well. Don't mess this

up for me anyway. My wife and I use a household internet connection, right, It's not like we have two separate internet networks, and she uses one and I used the other. So if one of us were to run a foul because we were, you know, being a dirty, dirty pirate and I don't know, we were like trying to steal the SpongeBob SquarePants musical soundtrack, our I s P could get a notice from the copyright holder and

then give us the boot. But let's say that I was just the one who did this, right, Like it was just me that wanted that soundtrack so darn badly. My wife is completely innocent. She doesn't know about it, she's never listened to it. She certainly wasn't aware that I was stealing it. Well, clearly, if the I s P boots us, that doesn't just affect me, It affects my wife, who is completely innocent of having pirated the music. About how a simple sponge say bikini bottom And the

e f F points this out. It says, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and IP address could mean that the I s P has to boot off an entire college, or a hospital, or a library, or even municipality WiFi. I mean, the group rightly points out that these damages aren't anywhere close to the realities of any harm suffered, and that it punishes the innocent as

well as the guilty. So essentially, these groups are saying that the court got it totally wrong, that the court misinterpreted the law, and that allowing for an award that is completely out of alignment of any actual damage suffered is also unjust, and that the consequences will be catastrophic because I s p s will be far more trigger happy to boot people off of their service if the if the alternative means that these companies are going to get you know, hit by bill in dollar fines, so

this is just a bad situation. They also make the point that the internet access these days is really an integral component in participating in modern society, and if you cut someone off from that, that's a non trivial problem. It's like saying, all right, well, because you you know, stole a bottle of water at the local convenience store, we're shutting waters off at your house. Like that's not cool. And Cox has appealed the court's decision, so this is

going to go to another appeals court. Uh And currently the company, the I s P actually has a lot of support behind it from various legal scholars and advocacy groups, which is interesting. I s p s frequently get a lot of flak because of anti competitive stuff that I s p s tend to be at least tangentially involved in. But in this case, you have a lot of people siding with the I s P and we'll have to where this goes next. Meanwhile, it's still a bumpy ride

for bitcoin. Back in March, the cryptocurrency hit an all time high value of nearly sixty five dollars per bitcoin. Later that value plunged to nearly half of that, in fact lower than half of that at some points, hitting close to thirty dollars, and after a brief recovery, the value took another hit again earlier today. So what's going on, Well, there are a few things that are happening all at the same time, and it's really impossible to say which

things are chiefly responsible for this. But one thing is we could be seeing a bear market in which the value will be on the decline until enough people start buying into bitcoin again on a really large scale to cause this to switch over to a bowl market again. Bull market is where the value starts to climb because more and more people are buying into it. But a different contributing factor could be that recently, the US government managed to recover most of a ransom that Colonial Pipeline

paid to ransomware hackers earlier this year. Alright, so quick summary of that story. Colonial Pipeline supplies fuel to the eastern half of the United States, and the company was hit with a ransomware attack that shut down its pipeline, or really the company shut down its own pipeline sort of as a precautionary measure to make sure that the

malware did not spread throughout the entire system. But this caused a short term gas shortage and a massive spike in fuel prices in much of the US, and then the shortage got way worse because some people decided to hoard gasoline, which is both selfish and stupid. Gasoline does not keep forever, so if you hoard more than you need, there's a good chance that gasoline is going to essentially

lose its potency before you get around using it. And of course it's really dangerous to store gasoline unless you have the proper storage containers, and a lot of people were filling up all sorts of stuff with gasoline and

just creating massive potential disasters. Anyway, Colonial Pipeline actually got things back in action fairly quickly, but it turned out the reason they were able to do so was that the company actually complied with the hackers demands and paid the ransom, which is something that most people, including me, say is a dumb, dumb idea because it reinforces that strategy in the first place, and it makes future ransomware

attacks more likely. Bad move Colonial Pipeline. Now we hear that the US government was able to seize most of that ransom that was paid to the hackers, which of course had been paid in cryptocurrency. And these kind of stories definitely are a bad look for cryptocurrency in general, which frequently gets associated with illegal and unseemly active ds. Now, I want to point out that's not necessarily the fault

of the currencies. The idea behind cryptocurrency is that it should be usable for any sort of transaction, not necessarily illegal ones. But just like technologies such as peer to peer networks, we see folks associate the technology with illegal

activity and these kind of stories don't help. And how did the US recover more than two million dollars in ransom Well, they apparently got access to the decryption key for one of the ransomware attackers digital wallets, which is kind of like handing someone the key to a vault. And hearing that a government managed to take money away from someone using cryptocurrency probably has at least some percentage

of bitcoin enthusiasts upset. Anyway, that may have contributed to another slip in bitcoin value, which dipped below thirty dollars this morning. Oh I should also mention that just a few days ago, Elon Musk once again managed to weigh in on this whole thing. He tweeted a breakup meme suggesting that he has fallen out of love with bitcoin, and the bitcoin value took a little hit at that point, to which of course lead to more complaints that Musk

is manipulating markets. That's something he's been accused of multiple times at this point. And what all this says to me is that people should just stop following Elon Musk on social media. That guy. All right, we have a few more stories to get through today, but first let's take a quick break. Having just spoken about, you know, government turning the tables on tech, let's continue that for a second and talk about the FBI's massive staying operation

with regard to an encrypted mess saging service. So here's the pitch. You got your criminal types right, you got your Tony sopranos and whatnot. These folks need to communicate with one another, but they also need those communications to be secure or else the heat catches on right next thing, you know, you've got the FEDS on your case. So you seek out services that allow you to communicate over encrypted lines so that anyone who intercepts that communication will

just get absolute nonsense out of it. They'll be unable to tell what has been said between the two or more parties. But what if it turned out that the FEDS were the ones who designed the communication tool in the first place. Well that's what's happened here with various law enforcement agencies around the world, not just the FBI. UH law enforcement in Australia and other places have played a major part as well, and they all work together

in order to make this happen. It started out back in and it became known in turn only as Operation Trojan Shield. So law enforcement created a what was said to be a secure messaging app called a NOM a n O M. The phones that a NOM we're on couldn't make calls. They weren't enabled to make phone calls or really do anything else other than use this app.

This a no mapp. They could only really communicate that way, And the FEDS made sure that these phones would only be available through the black market, and that made them look real legit shady, like this is this is illegal stuff, and so the only way to get it is through the black market, and thus it seems in a weird

way legitimate. Right. So some Australian agents who were deep undercover had phones with a NOM on it, and they gave those phones out to high ranking profile members of various crime groups and syndicates and families so like the mafia and outlaw biker gangs and stuff like that, and gave them recommendations to use the app for communication. Those recommendations filtered through the various organized crime groups with more people switching over to it, believing that this would mass

their activities from government agencies. But in fact, the law enforcement groups had backdoor access to that messaging the entire time, and they can monitor communications and set up a massive sting operation. So law enforcement intercepted millions of messages between folks like drug traffickers and weapons smugglers, Asian crime syndicates,

outlaw biker groups, and more. And the public only learned about this operation on Monday, when it was revealed that law enforcement had made hundreds of arrests, like around eight hundred of them all around the world. Yauza and now for a story about Apple, actually a couple of them. The company recently announced some privacy related features at the Worldwide Developers Conference or w w d C, and one of those is called Private Relay, which sounds really interesting.

It prevents any entity from tracking your browser history that includes your I s P and it includes Apple. So in other words, you can browse using Private Relay and there's no there's no one out there who's tracking which sites you have visited during that browsing session. However, this announcement, which I think is really cool. I think private Relay is really interesting. I'm very curious how it actually works. But there is a qualifier, and that is this feature

will not be available worldwide. Apple is not going to make it available in Saudi Arabia, China, South Africa, Belarus, Egypt, Kazakhstan and a few other countries. The company so far has not actually commented on why these regions will not have access to this particular feature, but I'm pretty sure most of us can make at least some educated guesses, because in many of these countries, governments are not too keen on citizens having unfettered and thus uncontrolled access to

the Internet for various reasons. In places like China, accessing sites outside of the country itself typically requires you to make illegal use of VPNs to spoof where your location is, and that way you can bypass the Great Firewall of China. But should China come after a VPN service, then the user data that that VPN service is steward of could be at risk. So let's say that it's a VPN that keeps at least a short term record of what

sites users have accessed. Well, if China goes after that VPN service, they could presumably get hold of that information and thus ultimately come after citizens who are making use of that VPN service. Now, some VPN services are great and that they wipe all that data very quickly regularly, so that there's nothing for anyone to get hold of. There's no there's no uh, no footprints left behind or anything like that. But not all VPNs are like that.

And if you've got, you know, the power of the Chinese government coming after you, you might be compelled to hand over user data. So a feature like private relay could serve as a protection against that. You can use private relay in conjunction with a VPN and leave no trace behind and thus have better access to information. Well, I would hazard a guess that the Chinese government really doesn't want Apple to include a feature that would allow

citizens to potentially bypass national restrictions on Internet access. And China represents a truly huge market for any company. I mean, that's more than a billion people live in the country, so obviously it's an enormous market. So most companies are not so firm in their convictions about providing stuff like privacy and security in order to give up on that lucrative a market. Apple is by no means the only company to make allowances for governments that a lot of

folks would refer to as oppressive. So while I am singling out Apple here because that's what the story is about, I do want to make it clear they ain't the only ones who do this sort of thing. It's not like Apple is being particularly disingenuous. Uh, this is pretty much across the board. Next, we have a story about

a lawsuit aimed at Apple. This one claims that the most recent versions of iOS have caused older phones to encounter performance issues, namely around slower processing speeds and shorter battery life. Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because we've

actually seen this happen a few times before. But the argument now is that as Apple releases new hardware and new versions of iOS, it is at least somewhat intentionally designing the OS to make older iPhones perform at a substandard level as part of a planned obsolescence strategy, thus incuraging customers to upgrade to the latest version of the iPhone.

The complaint actually includes this passage quote Apple benefits from not having to tell existing and prospective iPhone users that updates touted to add desirable features and to fix security and other bugs have a significant countervailing downside in the form of decreased processing speed and battery life end quote. So, in other words, this complaint is saying Apples hyping up all the new features of the more recent versions of iOS in an effort to convince people to download those updates.

But then the update allegedly nerves older iPhone models and thus pushes customers to have to buy new iPhones. So, in other words, they're saying that this is this is unfair market practices essentially, is what this comes down to. So I'll have to keep an eye on this and see how this goes. Typically you see issues like this gets settled out of court. It's very rare that it

actually goes the distance. In drone news, for the first time, an unmanned aerial vehicle served as the refueling aircraft for a piloted US jet fighter in mid air. The drone, manufactured by Boeing, connected via hose to the jet fighter as the two flew over the midwestern United States in

a four and a half hour long test flight. So the drone flew ahead of the jet fighter and so it extended a hose behind it, and it was the jet fighter pilot's job to position the jet so that it could follow the drone at the proper distance and dock with the end of that hose, and then the refueling followed more than three gallons of fuel were transferred from the drone to the jet fighter. So the test was a success, and it could point to a future in which militaries are able to free up pilots from

flying refueling missions. You know, they could shift that responsibility over to unmanned drones and the human pilots could be then go on to perform or mother tasks, presumably you know, ones that are are more oriented towards specific mission goals as opposed to support. So that is interesting. And finally, we've talked about autonomous cars and trucks and drones and stuff, but now it's time to talk about autonomous boats. Over in Amsterdam, the city is testing out autonomous boats in

its various canal systems. The row boats, which is not a rowboat as in row row row your boat, but as in a robot boat, are part of a five year project to test how the boats will be able to navigate the various waterways of Amsterdam and how they might become an integral part of Amsterdam's transportation infrastructure. So some of the proposed uses for these boats include promoting tourism.

That's a big one, so allowing tourists to get around the city in an interesting way, also to reduce traffic congestion Sterdam's roads, because the canals are actually underutilized compared to the surface roads of Amsterdam, and because the boats are actually modular in design and thus can easily fit together to create larger structures. They could possibly serve as

floating bridges or stages should the need arise. But that's all going to be in the future, because as of right now, the engineers at M I T and other places who are working on this project, they say that the boats are probably two to four years out from having a sophisticated enough navigation and UH and and motor system to get around reliably and safely without having an operator on board, So it will be a little while longer before they can enter full operation, assuming it all

works out. But next up, I say, is Venice, because I want my robot gondolier baby. I want that that robo voice singing out as we go through the canals of Venice. A guy can dream. I'm wouldn't a robot be cute wearing a little striped shirt and little straw hat. You know, I'm just saying. Anyway, that's it for the news for today. June one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hs W

and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech 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.