Tech News: Tech and the Crisis in Afghanistan

to help the people of Afghanistan. For example, Airbnb, which often gets lumped in with tech companies because of the software that handles bookings and such, has announced it will supply temporary housing to up to twenty thousand Afghan refugees. That's a lot of people, but that's less than half of those the US says it has evacuated for Afghanistan so far, with thousands more attempting to flee the country.

Airbnb says it will fund the stays for those refugees, giving them a safe place to live while they look for more permanent housing. Airbnb CEO Brian Cheski called quote the displacement and resettlement of Afghan refugees in the US and elsewhere one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time end quote, which I think is a pretty darn good summary. He also said he hopes that other leaders of business will step up to try and help as well,

and I hope the same thing. In related news and Afghan app called at t Sab, and my apologies for butchering the pronunciation of that is trying to help the people of Kabul stay safe. The app publishes real time reports of conflict, including you know, reports of gunfire or explosions. It also reports on traffic congestion as well, clearly very important if there's an incident going on in the area, and it's all in service of keeping the people of

the city informed and hopefully safe from harm. A ground team in Cabool actually supplies the reports, so this isn't some sort of automated service. It's rather one that's powered by real humans that are on the scene. The team posts the reports to a private WhatsApp group, and then there's another team of fact checkers who review the reports for accuracy. They remove any that are you know, unsubstantiated in an effort to cut down on misinformation or perhaps

even disinformation. The app includes the ability to use location data to send relevant alerts to people who could be affected that way. Let's say that there's an incident in your area, you would learn through it. You know about it through the app through a notification, but for stuff that would be happening, say across the other side of

the city, you wouldn't necessarily get that alert. Sarah Wa Hindi, who founded the app, actually escape Cable for a second time, I should add, and has worked to raise money from within Afghanistan to support her efforts. She also recently took steps to protect her employees in Afghanistan. She went to delete all information about the female employees of the company in order to protect them as the Taliban was advancing

across Afghanistan. The Taliban has extremist beliefs regarding women, such as they have to remain at home unless they are accompanied by a male relative. That's one of many incredibly extreme rules the Taliban seeks to impose upon the population. I'm sure I'll be reporting on more stories from Afghanistan in future episodes, but for now, let's switch our focus elsewhere. So from Afghanistan to Malaysia, it's time to talk about

the semiconductor shortage and COVID nineteen again. Now, we've been in a shortage of semiconductors for several months now, with practically retext sector affected as a result of this, from personal computers to video game consoles, to automobiles and beyond. We're seeing the shortage impact the supply chains of multiple industries and this has a ripple effect on stuff like pricing. For example, the auto market has seen skyrocketing prices, which

is in part a consequence of this shortage. Though it does get a bit more complicated than that. So what does Malaysia have to do with all of this, Well, the country has become an important part of the supply chain for semiconductors. UH. They are a large center in semiconductor testing, so they do a lot of the testing of the tech to make sure that it's actually working so q a UH. They also are a big part

of packaging, so they're part of that process too. But COVID cases have been on the rise in Malaysia and the seven day average of reported daily infections has gone above windy thousand cases, which is pretty astonishing. The Malaysian government has already granted certain exemptions to the manufacturing industries in the country in an effort to keep the economy going, essentially saying, you know, we're supposed to lock down, but we're dependent upon you for our economy, so you can

continue to operate. But that has also meant that some of these factories have had to shut down completely for weeks at a time due to infected employees coming into work. There's a serious vaccination push within Malaysia at the moment, and according to the Health Ministry, fifty seven percent of the country's population has received at least one dose of vaccine.

We're likely to see the effects of these disruptions for months to come across multiple product lines, and businesses are likely to struggle with keeping production going as they encounter component shortages. While the semiconductor shortage is a huge headache for the automotive industry, one company in particular is dealing with a different technical problem, and that company is GM, which has announced a recall of the Chevrolet Bolt as

in all of them. Every single Bolt vehicle that has been manufactured and sold, including the newest ones on the market, are all part of this recall. The issue is one that folks in the text space have seen before, which is battery problems, as in, you know, lithium batteries that catch fire on their own. The batteries and Chevy bolts come from the company l G. It's LG KIM to be specific, and GM says after an investigation, the company

discovered ten cases in which faulty batteries caught fire. GM traced the issue to two separate manufacturing problems that together created a short circuit. And just in case you've heard that term but you don't actually know what it means, I'll give you a quick explanation. So electricity flows through conductors right like you have a conductive substance, electricity can

flow to it. Well. Circuits are essentially a pathway made out of conductive elements, and electricity will follow down this pathway and somewhere along the way, the electricity does some work. So like the classic example is it lights a lightbulb or whatever before it continues on the rest of the pathway and ends at the other terminal. But if you were to create a shortcut that bypassed the lightbulb and went from one terminal to the other directly, electricity would

take that path. It would be the easiest path for it to get to where it quote unquote wants to go. And when you're talking about batteries, if you create a shortcut for electrons to go from the negative terminal to the positive terminal really quickly, well, the battery tends to heat up because the electrochemical process that generates the electrons in the first place, it ramps up faster and faster, and this can lead to a fire or even an explosion.

That was the case with Samsung's Galaxy phone a few years ago, and it appears to be a similar issue with a Chevy Bolt. GM says that the recalls, which cover more than one thousand vehicles, are likely to cost the company nearly two billion dollars, and it also said it plans to seek reimbursement from LG, which just makes me think of a very advanced version of the joke from Better Off Dead two billion dollars, I want my

two billion dollars. I don't know how many of you out there have actually seen Better Off Dead and recognize that reference, but never mind. Making dense batteries is a challenge, like making batteries that can hold enough energy storage so that they can do what we need them to do that's already very hard to do, making them in mass quantities, while ruling out defects is even harder. But these are challenges that will need to overcome as the world creeps

towards electrification of vehicle fleets. Right if we start to push more and more towards electric vehicles, which you know, we should in an effort to remove transportation as a big source of carbon emissions, while we obviously have to make sure that the batteries that were depending upon are reliable and safe. US President Joe Biden is reportedly hosting a cybersecurity meeting in the near future, and big names like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

are among the guest list. The assumption is that this group will be called to discuss recent high profile cybersecurity issues such as the rise of ransomware and the emergence of supply chain cyber attacks. And just to define some terms, ransomware is a specific subset of malware that locks down systems or otherwise makes data inaccessible to users unless they pay a ransom to the hackers, typically in the form

of cryptocurrency. These attacks can center on individuals like you could get targeted by a ransomware attack, but it's more common to see hacker take aim at really big organizations where they can have a really big payday, particularly ones that rely heavily on digital information, such as healthcare organizations where that is critical to their operation, or you know, companies in the tech sector in general. A supply chain attack is a an attack where hackers focus on the

company that supplies software to other companies. So imagine a company that creates like administrative software that's used in corporate offices, and you've got a lot of organizations, like big companies that rely on this particular administrative product. That's what they use to keep their records or whatever. So these hackers in this case would go in and target that software company. They would try to infiltrate that company systems and then

plant malware into the code of a software patch. And then when the patch goes out to all the company's customers, the customers, because they trust the software patch because it's coming from a known source, it's coming from a vendor they work with, they install that patch, and unknowingly they introduced the malware into their own systems. This is the sort of thing we suspected happened with solar winds, though later reports made that a little more muddy and complicated.

The Verge published an article about this. But the companies I see listed, which include the Southern Company, IBM, Google, JP, Morgan Chase, and Amazon in addition to Google and Apple, all these companies are are obviously big tech companies. They or they are related to tech, or depend heavily on tech. Undoubtedly, they all have departments that focus on cybersecurity, but none

of them are actual cyber security companies. And I'm curious if the White House is also inviting security researchers from one of or maybe more than one of the big security research firms out there, in addition to these high profile companies. I don't know. The White House hasn't really commented on it. We have some more stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break.

We're back turning to Apple. Apple turnomer. The company recently announced that employees will not be returning to the office in October after all, and October was already delayed. The original plan was to come back in September, but then the company pushed that back to October, and CEO Tim Cook famously posted a memo that talked up the benefits of being at work in an office environment with the announcement that employees would be expected to go into the

office at least three days a week. While Apple employees objected to this, and an internal survey showed that the majority of employees were not in favor of a return to the office while the pandemic was still going on well due to coronavirus numbers continuing to rise and the dangers of the delta variant as well as other ants. Now Apple employees won't be expected to return to the

office until January of next year. Now I'm thankful for that, because I really think pushing to go back to the office while the numbers are so bad is beyond irresponsible. Other tech companies like Facebook and Amazon have made similar decisions for a corporate employees, and that brings me to another point that I need to stress this really does only apply to corporate employees. The people who work in

the corporate offices of these companies. Amazon and Apple both still have employees who have to go to work in various like warehouses and stores and whatnot, so there is a sharp divide here. Right. The corporate employees are allowed to continue to work remotely, but other employees they're required to go in and that's a pretty tough issue to get into. I'm gonna save that for a full episode because I do think it's something that we need to

talk about. In other Apple News, employees are organizing at the company to voice concerns about the company these policies, processes, and culture. As part of that strategy, the employees have launched a website. That website is Apple to dot us. That's Apple t oo dot us. They have issued a statement about their plans, which I'll read part of right now. Quote.

For too long, Apple has evaded public scrutiny. The truth is that for many Apple workers are reality faced disproportionately by our black, Indigenous, and other colleagues from minoritized, racial, gender, and historically marginalized groups of people. The culture of secrecy creates an opaque, intimidating fortress. When we press for accountability and redress to the persistent injustices we witness or experience in our workplace, we are faced with a pattern of isolation, degradation,

and gas lighting. No more. We've exhausted all internal avenues We've talked with our leadership, we've gone to the people team, we've escalated through business conduct. Nothing has changed. It's time to think different. A group of Apple workers have joined together to organize and protect ourselves. We are asking fellow Apple workers who want to see real change at Apple

to share their stories. End quote. This statement goes on there's actually a lot more at the website, but you can read the whole thing at Apple two dot us. According to the Verge, the group of employees consisted of around fifteen current and former Apple employees, so not not a huge group. However, they are already getting support among other current and former Apple employees who are posting their

stories and the site is publishing them as well. As some of these stories are getting published in internal communications channels like Slack channels and stuff at Apple. So we will continue to follow this story as it develops. And now for some stories about hacking and cryptocurrency. The Verge reports that a hacker who stole around six hundred million dollars worth a cryptocurrency from a company called the Polly

Network has returned the assets. And you might be saying, what, and I mean, I know I was, well it turns out that this particular hacker found an exploit and decided to take the assets and then store those assets, those stolen cryptocurrencies into a trusted account while the hacker then communicated with Polly Network and Polly Network worked to patch the vulnerability. Apparently, the hacker decided to do this because they felt it was just a matter of time before

someone else spotted this vulnerability and then stole crypto. But for real zes, this hacker a a white hat hacker type, was really making a big statement, and so once Polly fixed the problem, the hacker returned all those assets, and the Polly network then invited the hacker to serve as the chief security adviser for the company, which was kind of cute, and the hacker even asked that some of the hacker's own money taken from a half million dollar

bounty that Polly Network paid for the reporting of the bug in the first place, that some of that might should be distributed to the quote unquote survivors of the escapade to make up for the inconvenience and stress of having money stolen, even though it was just a temporary thing. No word yet on whether Polly customers will stick with the company in the wake of this experience, or if

they'll look to port their assets to some other organization. Meanwhile, in Sweden, authorities are legally required to return bitcoins to a convicted drug dealer because of the way things were worded during the dealer's sentencing. See after being convicted of the crime of dealing drugs, the court ruled that the dealer should be stripped of his earnings as a drug dealer.

Those earnings were in bitcoin. He had earned thirty six bitcoin as a drug dealer, and around the time when he was arrested, those bitcoin were worth around a hundred thirty seven thousand dollars. Now, apparently the sentencing framed this in the form of standard Swedish currency rather than bitcoin, saying all right, well, we need the the equivalent amount

in cash seized from this drug dealer. But by the time the Swedish enforcement authority was ready to actually auction off the cryptocurrency to get the equivalent cash, the value of bitcoin had increased dramatically and the whole one seven thousand dollars worth of fine only required three bitcoins to

cover it. And because the court didn't demand the bitcoin instead, they demanded that cash equivalent of bitcoin at the time of sentencing, which was around a hundred thirty seven thousand dollars. That meant that the other thirty three bitcoin could not be auctioned off because the court had already received the amount of money and had demanded and those thirty three bitcoin had to be returned to the drug dealer and that is now worth around one point six million dollars.

Apparently crime does pay, and this is another example of how courts around the world are really struggling to keep up with how things change in the text space. Uh and a lot of people have said, well, this just shows that the sentencing needs to be more specific about taking the bitcoin that was earned as opposed to the cash equivalent of whatever the bitcoins value was at that time. Lesson learned. Alright, that wraps up the big news stories for Tuesday, August one. Will be back later in the

week with some more. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on Tech Stuff, reach out to me. The easiest way to get in touch with me is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.