Tech News: Signal Flares and Police Errors

let's just dive right into it. Parlor or Parley, the social networking platform that aims to be a place where free speeches held above all else, has a new home, at least for its u r L. You might remember that Parlor saw Apple, Google, and Amazon all close off support for the service, removing apps from stores, and, in the case of Amazon, shutting down the servers that actually hosted the site. All of this was done due to the content being posted to Parlor, much of it from

extremists advocating for violence. When the site proved either unwilling or unable to rein in the user base and moderate such things, the other companies started to pull the plug on the service. The site now has a registered domain on EPIC servers. That's e p i K founded in two thousand nine. Epic says it quote offers cheap domain names, hosting, domaining, and more end quote, but it might be better known as the hosting service that is home to many far

right extremist sites and services. It's the home for the social network gab, which is associated with far right extremist groups, neo Nazis, and white supremacists. So yikes, Parlor is not really back, at least not yet. It has its domain, but the homepage is just a landing page with a message on it. It will take time to transfer Parlor's data to new servers, and it isn't clear how much needs to be actually rebuilt from the ground up. There

are conflicting messages on that front. Some of those messages suggest that the code used for Parlor wasn't dependent upon Amazon's proprietary tools, which would make it easier to port over to a new home, but there are other messages that indicate that much of Parlor did depend on Amazon's tools, and since those tools won't be present at Epic, it will require rebuilding Moreover, the process of moving a service from one hosting company to another is time consuming and expensive.

It can take years, even if you are planning it in advance, to migrate to different servers, and, as The Atlantic pointed out in a recent piece titled what comes after Parlor. A lot of companies that offer tools to help with migration are refusing to work with Parlor because the association with that platform is pretty darn and toxic,

to say the least. Parlor has also been in the news for having truly atrocious privacy and security measures in place, which means the service effectively exposed users to a great deal of scrutiny. That's something that can benefit organizations like the FBI, as agents are conducting investigations regarding the siege at the Capitol on January six, but it's not necessarily a selling point for users. Here's my ultimate take on the subject. I understand the call for free speech. It

is incredibly important. I mean, that's why it is the first Amendment to the United States Constitution. But Parlor wasn't some sort of equal platform for all speech, as much as it was touting itself to be. It was funded by people who had previously funded Cambridge Analytica, and it was used by people who were employing the type of language that's used in white supremacist rhetoric. It's all designed to recruit new members. It wasn't a town square, it

was a radicalization engine. Now, this is a complex problem, one that holds up conflicting and foundational values, and it shows us that life is complicated. There are times when we as a society have to make a call whether to lean more on protecting free speech or more on protecting the underpinnings of democracy itself. As for Parlor's return, there's still no published timeline for that as of this recording.

There are other tools out there that extremists have been using for communication and organizing, some that predated Parlor, but most of them don't have the same amount of visibility that Parlor did, and so right now they're not necessarily as heavily trafficked. We'll have to wait to see if anything happens on inauguration day, that being January, and even more sobering is the thought that moving for Word will have to be vigilant in an effort to counteract the radicalization.

Otherwise we're going to see more acts of violence and terrorism, and we'll likely see reactions to that grow more extreme as well, from surveillance to enforcement. In other words, right now we are on the precipice of things getting a whole lot worse if we don't make very good decisions moving forward, and in the meantime, their entire vulnerable populations that are depending on the rest of us making those decisions.

So it creates even more responsibility for all of us to employ those two things I constantly call for compassion and critical thinking. We've got to make use of those to make sure that we forge a good path forward and we don't just sweep things under the rug where it can fester and grow worse and the status quo

is maintained. Because the status quo is not it's not good enough eyes And getting back to Parlor and security, that security was so poor that in the hours leading up to Amazon giving Parlor the boot, numerous hackers scraped the service to archive as much information as possible. And when I say hackers, it could be anyone. It could be Independence, it could be people working on behalf of the United States government. It could be people working on

behalf of other governments. The list goes on, and the content included not just the stuff that was posted publicly to Parlor, but also the locations and sometimes the identities of thousands of people on the service, and by linking locations to posts, people have found potential links to the riots and d C showing how participating on parlor could create a digital trail that agencies like the FBI could find particularly interesting, and it's a reminder that security and

privacy are really important. While I think it is also important for people who are subverting the democratic process US to be held accountable, I kind of find it disturbing to think about how a total failure in privacy for a social network like this leads to abuse anyway. One group that archived a lot of information, and it did so without needing to hack anything was Pro Publica, the

nonprofit news organization. Pro Publica employees copied videos that were publicly uploaded to parlors, so they weren't, you know, scraping data or anything. They were literally grabbing the stuff that was available for anyone to look at, and collectively, Pro Publica preserved more than five hundred videos that the news organization determined had been taken during the riots on January six,

creating a thorough record of how those events unfolded. I don't recommend watching them if you are easily affected by scenes of violence and violent rhetoric. It is hard stuff to watch, but it's also incredibly important to maintain that as a record of what happened, and to remind people of again what happens if we sweep things under the rug and we try to pretend like nothing is wrong,

this stuff just gets worse. And sticking with the riots for a bit longer, the FBI filed an affidavit against a woman named Riley June Williams of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who

participated in the riots at the US Capital. There are images of her up online, so she was there on January six, and according to the affidavit, Williams had planned to steal the House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's laptop, so the Speaker of the House her laptop, and the goal was to ultimately sell this laptop to a contact in Russia. And the plan from there, presumably was to then sell the laptop to the Russian government, to an

intelligence agency in Russia. So this was to be a monetary transaction, so effectively, she would be selling out the United States to Russia. Now, as I'm recording this, Williams remains at large. I do not know if by the time you hear this, if that will have changed, but as I'm recording that is the case, she has deleted her accounts with various social media platforms. She discontinued her phone number as well. I imagine the FBI is using a lot of different resources to track her down. I'm

sure they have a lot of questions for her. I have a quick update on this story. It turns out that Williams turned herself into local police Monday evening after I had already finished recording that episode, but wanted to update it with the most recent news I had. Moving on, and my last story for this section is that on January eighth, twenty twenty one, get hub fired an employee. And obviously there's more to the story than just that

companies fire employees all the time. But get hub is in the business of offering a software development environment with version control features. In case you're not familiar with what they do, they sort of help other companies do the things they need to do in order to develop the software they either depend upon internally or that they incorporate

into external products. The get hub employee, who is Jewish, had posted an internal message on January six two colleagues located in Washington, d C. And said that they need to stay safe from Nazis. Now, the term Nazi is definitely a loaded one that is obvious, it really goes without saying, but it also happened to be appropriate, as a number of people at the riots and d C

belonged to neo Nazi organizations. However, a fellow get hub employee complained to HR about the use of the term Nazi, finding it objectionable, and HR first rep remanded, but then later fired the employee two days later. Following this action, around two d gethub employees demanded to know the reasons for the firing, and they also began to use the word Nazi to describe rioters in these various slack channels

at get hub. So essentially they said, if this is why you let that person go, we're all going to end up doing the same sort of thing, because it's calling something by its name. And this escalated, and on January six, the CEO of get hub, Nat Friedman, sent an internal message saying the company acted in the wrong and that he would extend a public apology to the fired employee and that that person's job would be offered

back to him should he want to return. Freedman also committed to keeping internal communications open allowing for a discussion of sensitive topics, provided that they are done in a professional manner. So in other words, you're not trying to use this freedom in a way to site, intimidate, or harass other people. Assuming you're not doing that, then they are allowing for the discussion of these sensitive topics, particularly

with regard of making maintaining a safe environment for their employees. Well, that is all of the news I have that relates to parlor and to the riots on January six. I certainly hope that on Thursday I won't have to talk about riots that relate to the inauguration, and when we come back, we will cover totally different stories. Have nothing to do with the rest of that, I promise. But first,

let's take a quick break. Our first story after the break is about Samsung and problems with corruption and leadership. Lee J Young, otherwise known as j y Lee, is facing a thirty month prison sentence in South Korea. Lee is a vice chairman of the mega corporation Samsung. Again out of South Korea. Lee has already served some of

that time for a previous day in prison. This is actually an order for him to return to prison, not just go to prison, and at the heart of all this are charges that Lee was bribing a close friend of the then president of South Korea, Park Gunner. The reason for the bribe Well j Y Lee was trying to grease the wheels to get government support for his ascension to the head of Samsung. Park herself was ousted as president and found guilty on charges of grafting, so

all this tracks. She is currently serving a sentence in the same prison where Lee is headed. Lee, for his part, served about a year a little less than a year of a five year long sentence at that prison previously from two thousand seventeen into two thousand eighteen UH but then an appeals court overturned part of those charges and suspended his sentence. But then the Korean Supreme Court reinstated that sentence and as demanding that Lee returned to prison

to serve out those two and a half years. He also faces a separate trial relating to charges that he engaged in stock manipulation and other illegal activities while overseeing a merger in two thousand and fifteen. His father, Lee Kunhi, had been chairman of Samsung, but he passed away in twenty twenty. J y Lee had in effect been leading the company since, but you know, not officially, and there's

been no formal restructuring at Samsung yet. The company has had other high level legal issues in the board chairman Lee Sang Hun resigned after being convicted for violating labor laws and under my a labor unions. Samsung is a conglomerate under the control of the Lee family, and in Korea, these families likely wield enormous influence in business and politics. Uh the the all of it is wrapped up together and has been a big concern for people who are

on the lookout for corruption. Last week, I talked about how WhatsApp users were abandoning the platform for other messaging services after Facebook updated the terms of service for WhatsApp, and in case you missed it, the big change is that Facebook will be mining WhatsApp for data to share it with Facebook proper. Now. Facebook has since said that it would not be reading the content of messages. It said it can't there's no way for WhatsApp to know

what is inside the messages sent between users. According to Facebook, Instead, the data would be more meta in nature rather than the content of the messages themselves, more like, who is it that you're messaging at? What time of day? And where did the two of you happen to be? Still kind of on the creepy side, And anyway, Facebook's messaging was too little, too late, and a lot of folks found the news upsetting enough to jump ship. One ship

to which they jumped was the messaging service Signal. Signals saw such a huge boost in numbers that the service couldn't handle the jump. For more than a day, Signal was offline, having collapsed under the weight of new users. This is almost a good problem to have because it shows a real enthusiasm for a product, but it's also a serious problem because people would be frustrated with the lack of service, and then they might migrate to a

competing messaging service instead. So this is a classic example of the challenges of scale. Creating a service that works for a relatively modest number of users is one thing, but building it out so that it can handle millions of new users that is entirely different. That being said.

Signal has recovered it is back online as I am recording this, and the company says it has expanded its capacity, which typically means adding more servers to run the service, but the company wasn't really specific, so it should be back up and running now. But the question is did this harm signals momentum? We're gonna have to wait a little bit longer to find out the answer to that.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon is the target of a new lawsuit that claims the company was colluding with five major book publishers in the US to fix

prices on e books. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon and the publishers have worked out a deal in which Amazon charges a high commission to carry the publishers books, and that in turn determines the price of the e books in the Amazon Store, so the prices are higher than they might otherwise be because that commission price, and then the publishers charge other retail organizations the Amazon price, which means those retailers can't offer the titles at a lower

price point than Amazon does, or they would be doing so at a loss. And since those five publishers are the major publishing companies in the United States, they account for more than of all the books published in the country. Considering that Amazon is one of the big companies under investigation for anti competitive and monopolistic practices. Along with Google, Facebook, and Apple, this is probably going to be a bit

rough for the company. Apple faced a similar lawsuit back in and they ultimately decided to settle out of court. They weren't given much choice in that. Actually, it was a pretty big settlement too. It remains to be seen what Amazon will do across the pond. The constabulary have a big blunder to answer for. The UK Home Office recently revealed that n dreds of thousands of lease records, including stuff like DNA records, are gone records that could

be instrumental in linking suspects with crime scenes. So we're talking active files here, not just archives. Stuff puff vanished, maybe as many as four hundred thousand as of this recording, that number might be higher by the time you hear this. And that includes two offense records, one thousand arrest records and fifteen thousand person records. Some of the data links to serious offenses and was too intended to indicate individuals who had perpetrated some pretty nasty crimes in the past,

and a lot of that is gone now. And how how is that possible? What what actually happened? Was it a hack. Was it some sort of massive equipment failure, Well, it seems as though human error caused it as and someone accidentally deleted all that stuff during what the Home Office calls quote unquote housekeeping. The Home Office Digital Data and Technology division is working to see if it can

restore any or maybe all of those files. It's a little difficult for me to get a handle on exactly how serious this is, apart from, you know, extremely serious. It's also amazing to me that there was apparently no secure backup system in place, and that these files were all on the type of centralized storage and not siloed out. That so many files could be wiped out through error is staggering. Hopefully the engineers at Home Office will figure out how to restore the data, but in the meantime

it will almost certainly have a negative effect on ongoing cases. Meanwhile, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency or SIPA, has been the target of a ransomware attack, something that SIPA revealed right around Christmas time last year. According to reports, the attackers were able to steal around one point to gigabytes of data, which SIPA says included quote limited sensitive information end quote meaning most of the information was a lot of publicly

available stuff. There wasn't a whole lot of you know, really important data. They're important in the sense of secret or anything like that. It's all important, it's just a lot of it was also, you know, public stuff, not particularly precious data. The organization is working to recover its capabilities. Some of its systems were still inaccessible as of the

time of my recording due to that ransomware attack. Investigators are also looking into the matter, although you know, figuring out who did this doesn't necessarily make much of a difference. Frequently we're talking about organizations that get targeted from outside

the country, so jurisdiction becomes really tricky. And SIPA has reassured UK citizens stating that the organization is not going to be using any public funds to pay off the ransom, and that is for the best because as paying off a ransom sends a message to those who would carry

out ransomware attacks. For the record, that messages, hey, y'all, this totally works, so you don't you don't want to do that, you know, not paying the ransom is the right move because that sends the message that the attackers are going through the effort of compromising a system, but are not going to receive any sort of ransom in return. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that all ransomware attacks are

going to stop. I mean you can steal data, as is the case with this particular instance, and then try to sell that information, perhaps on the black market, but typically the information doesn't command a very high price. Like in in aggregate, you can get a lot of money for it, but data actually is is fairly cheap on the individual level, so there's not a huge return of investment for time and effort if you're not getting that ransom. So long story short, if you are hit with ransomware,

don't pay the ransom. In fact, there's no guarantee that the attackers will return any stolen data, or not keep a copy of it if they do return it, or that they will actually decrypt your hard drive if that's what they've done, or anything like that, So don't pay it. All it does is encourage further attacks, and it doesn't guarantee that any damage that was done to you will be reversed. So bad idea. All right, well, that wraps

up this segment. When we come back After this break, we'll have a few odds and ends to cover, but first let's take that quick break. Our first story in this segment is about an app and the more security breaches. So Amazon's Ring Team revealed that there was a security bug in the Ring Neighbor's app. The Neighbors app is a neighborhood watch tool allowing users to post about public safety concerns or neighborhood crime. That reminds me a lot of what next door tends to become, although in my

neighborhood it gets way worse than that. But that's of soapbox I can get on on some other podcast. The security bug in this case revealed that the app was pulling personal data off of neighbors, so it was revealing stuff like the home addresses of users, which really it shouldn't have been able to do. The Ring team changed the app so that it will only pull the city, state, and ZIP code of users, but not their actual street address. As far as security failures go, this one appears to

be fairly mild. The Ring Team claims that there are no signs that anyone was misusing the data or that any other party had access to it. It's more of a case of an app pulling more information than it needs to in order to operate, then that has now been resolved. If you have been following app news for a long time, you know that this was something that companies used to do on purpose. They would actually request more information than the app required in order to operate,

and often users were unaware of that. In fact, that was at its heart the working principle behind Cambridge Analytica. Uh. The app that was used was pulling a lot more information than people were aware of. And it wasn't until Facebook went and made major changes to its approach that things like that were harder to do and ideally impossible to do. But as we see, sometimes it happens. Anyway, let's talk about food, because it's almost lunchtime for me.

So a group of researchers with the Florida Institute of Technology road a paper for the International Journal of Society System Science, which I guess is called I just and I found it really interesting. The paper is about how there is a growing need for advanced technologies dedicated to supporting sustainable agricultural processes around the world as the global

population continues to rise. Among those advanced technologies is artificial intelligence, which presumably would be used to help farmers manage farms efficiently and effectively. The paper is more of a call to action, with the researchers pointing out that there needs to be a new generation of engineers and scientists working on technologies that are specifically applicable to agriculture. The challenges will be considerable, particularly with regard to finding ways to

maximize agricultural effectiveness in a way that's environmentally responsible. In other words, you don't want to try and solve one problem while making a different problem even worse. The title of the piece is exploring technological management innovations that include artificial intelligence and other innovations in global food production Snappy.

Virgin Orbit, part of the Virgin group of companies, is all about putting small satellites into orbit, as opposed to Virgin Galactic, which is a company that's all about creating a way for very rich people to go to outer space. Over the weekend, Virgin Orbit held a test flight in which it's modified seven forty seven airliner carried a rocket up to cruising altitude. Once they're the rocket detached from the seven seven and then ignited to push a payload

out into orbit. The successful test flight demonstrated that the process works. The goal was to reduce the overall cost of launching smaller payloads into space. Launching from the ground costs a lot of money, with the seven forty seven already several thousand feet up. The overall costs mostly with regard to how much fuel is needed in thus how

larger rocket you need those get deuced. Virgin Orbit isn't really seen as an alternative to the approach of companies like SpaceX, but rather as a complementary business for different clients. If you've got a larger payload, you're gonna need to go with a company like SpaceX to get it up into space. But if it's a smaller satellite, Virgin Orbit might be the way to go. Now, this was the first time a Virgin Orbit flight launched a rocket into

orbit successfully. Back in May, the company had attempted a similar test, but in that case, the rockets failsafe system initiated an automatic shutdown not long after it detached from the seven. Now, as failures go, that one was disappointing, but it wasn't catastrophic, and Virgin Orbit reps say that the failure taught their teams a lot, and the things they learned helped them achieve success the second time around. You know, people find different ways to pass the time.

For example, I practice playing guitar poorly, but some people, you know, they take up carpentry, like Justin McElroy, and some I suppose look over recent patent applications to find neat stuff that appears to be what happened when a Reddit user with the handle torrential snow posted a link

to a patent application filed by Take two Interactive. Take two is better known as the parent company for rock Star Games and two K, both of which are video game publishing companies, and the patent is all about NPC behaviors and games. The patent name is system and Method for the virtual navigation in a gaming environment, and it explains the challenges of creating non player characters that behave in a natural and believable way when it comes to

traversing a virtual world. For example, and NPC, left to its own, devices might travel to a seemingly random location, turnaround, and then retrace its steps over and over, or it might just do endless loops of a specific route in the game. The patent describes a system that aims to make NPC behaviors make more sense, particularly with regard to

a game that has a multiplayer element to it. Ideally, you would want NPC behaviors to be natural enough that another player wouldn't immediately be able to tell the difference between a human player and an NPC just by watching how they move, unless the other players are, you know, behaving in really erratic ways on purpose, which, hey, that's actually a pretty safe bet for most of these games.

But the whole patent is interesting, and because it's a public resource, it's free to read if you want to. But the thing that has most people excited is the idea that this patent could be related to an upcoming take to release, and the speculation seems to be centered on the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. That might be the case, or perhaps this has more to do with the online world of Grand Theft Auto five.

It remains to be seen, but it is interesting. And finally, Mica Price gets my award for smart Alec of the Week. Price created a bot for Reddit. Has a very specific set of directions pull text from arguments on Reddit and then turn those into captions on top of a scene from a video game called Ace Attorney. It's a it's an attorney game. It's pretty fun. And you find a suitable argument in Reddit when you find something that you would think, oh, this thread is really blowing up and

it's ridiculous, this is perfect. Preferably it's one where the argument has got really low stakes and it's overblown. And then you use the command exclamation point objection bot and the system will pull the text from the two most prolific posters in the thread to create the scene. One of the two gets assigned the role of Phoenix right, the other one becomes Miles Edgeworth. Other people can become supporting characters within the scene. According to Price, it took

him three old days to make the bot. The code, by the way, is open source, so other people can see prices work and improve upon it or alter it and use it to make their own version of this kind of stuff. He also mentioned that the bot doesn't work on all Subreddit's, only a subset of them, and I expect we'll see a lot of creative approaches to

framing out Reddit arguments. I also expect we're gonna see a lot more Reddit arguments, not that we didn't see enough already, but now if you know that this argument couldn't turn into like a meme, it's off to the races.

So yeah, all you people who love Reddit, get ready to read lots of ridiculous arguments specifically for the purpose of getting it turned into an ace attorney meme, and then get ready for all the moderators throwing down new rules to ban that kind of stuff so that the threads don't just turn into nonsense all the time, fun times. Why can't we have nice things, is what I'm saying. I like the idea of a bot that makes things

were aculous. I don't like the idea of people being ridiculous just for the sake of a bot doing stuff with it. Anyway, that wraps up the news items for Tuesday, January one. I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about on Thursday. Wednesday promises to be an eventful day. Uh. In the meantime, you will get a regular episode of tech Stuff on Wednesday. And that's all for me. If you guys have anything you want me to cover in

future episodes of tech Stuff. The regular episodes where I talk about technology or tech companies or anything like that. Let me know. The best way to reach out is 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 show.