Tech News: Twitter Deals, Whistleblowers, and National Security, Oh My!

earlier this year. The shareholders voted in favor, which was not a surprise. Musk's offer was to buy Twitter at fifty four dollars twenty cents per share, which is higher than where it's trading right now. It was at eight cents a share as of the writing of this episode. Musk is currently in of in a lawsuit with Twitter. The company is attempting to force Musk to go through the deal, while Musk is trying to extricate himself from it.

One of Musk's arguments is that Twitter knowingly withheld information from him, then from agencies like the SEC that would have otherwise impacted the company's value, and thus that would negate the terms of the deal, and while I was skeptical about those claims at first, our next news item definitely muddies the waters a bit, and that is because of a former head of security at Twitter who has testified in front of Congress that Twitter has had truly

terrible security practices in place, including going so far as to accuse Twitter of having employed foreign government agents in positions where they could potentially access a huge amount of company data, including user data. Obviously, that poses as a massive security risk, not just for corporate security or even for personal security, but potentially national security. The former head of security, Peter Mudge Zako, was fired from his position

earlier this year. Twitter reps claim that zach Co's accounts are misleading and filled with misinformation. Zacho argues that Twitter has knowingly practiced poor security despite numerous warnings. The whole thing is ugly and definitely of massive concern. If zach COO's allegations have even a little bit of truth to them, and for the record, I have no reason to disbelieve za Co, but then I don't have any insider knowledge

one way or the other. If Zak's accusations are true, could this information be what Musk needs to get out of his acquisition deal. That is possible. A court will have to determine if the revelations were likely to have an impact on Twitter's valuation, which is kind of crazy to say, but from my understanding, that's what this boils down to. It's not so much about legality or responsibility

or anything like that. It's about whether or not Twitter's actions would have had a negative impact on Twitter's value, because if Twitter misrepresented its value, you could then argue that Musk's offer was based on a lie and that this would be grounds to allow him to back out of the deal, though not without paying a billion dollar

fee to do so. This massive chaotic mess with the Twitter acquisition might have been avoided with a different kind of deal in place, but Musk essentially waive the right to do diligence as part of the deal. Honestly, this whole story has become so complicated and controversial that I imagine I will have to do a really thorough episode about the whole thing once it concludes one way or the other. As for odds on whether the deal goes through,

I just don't know. It's still down to the courts to decide if any of this matters or if it doesn't, or whether the deal conditions remain unaffected. Up until the whistleblower story broke, the general sense I got from analysts was that Musk's legal team was failing to put up a solid argument for being able to back out of the deal. However, that might have changed. I haven't seen a whole lot of analysis about this yet, and I

am by no means an expert on the subject. So we'll just have to keep our eyes on this and we'll follow up as more develops. The United States Senate put social media, including Twitter, in the spotlight yesterday with a congressional hearing investigating how social media can escalate harmful narratives, how it can spread misinformation, and how it can present

a risk to national security. Representatives from YouTube, Meta, Twitter, and TikTok were present and had to answer questions from various senators that ran the gambit from a allowing misinformation to propagate across communities to the very tired accusations claiming that platforms have an anti conservative bias, which has been thoroughly disproven numerous times, but it's a favorite talking point at these sort of hearings and other questions would probe

things like TikTok's relationship with its Chinese parent company, Byte Dance. That's something that has also been a frequent topic of conversation for the past few years, and the tone in the hearings was reportedly pretty tense and antagonistic. Both sides of the political spectrum have access to grind with these tech companies, though the points of view can be pretty different, and there has been an increase in pressure on the tech industry from US regulators to pull back in some areas.

That's pretty tough to do when for years these companies were given a ton of freedom to expand without many checks and balances. You know, it's always harder to correct after the fact and prevent it in the first place. But here we are anyway. The cynical folks out there will likely say that the hearings, well uncomfortable for the reps,

are unlikely to lead to meaningful change. The more optimistic might say that this is another step on a journey for the United States that will see the country take a firmer stance against the increased influence of tech companies and how that influence can lead to dangerous situations. I honestly don't know where I fall on this. I would like to think that we'll see some real change in an effort to better protect citizens. But you know, fool

me once. Shame on you, fully three twenty nine congressional hearings, and something's actually gonna get done about this, and shame on me. One place in the United States that does tend to take a pretty tough stance against overreach in the tech industry is California. Considering that's where a ton

of tech companies make their headquarters. That's impressive. Now. I say that because we have to acknowledge that the influence of tech companies extends beyond their influence in the market, and it then rolls over into political influence through things like lobbyists and other means. Anyway, the state of California has brought a lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the company of

practicing anti competitive behavior. Specifically, California's Attorney General accuses Amazon of burying or even preventing listings that are from other companies like Target, if those listings are for products that are priced at a level that's below Amazon's own products,

if it's too competitive against Amazon. Then that, according to the allegations, means the Amazon will bury it far down in the listing so that likely no one's going to see it, or just outright prevents it from being listed in the first place, and thus presents the the cuss summer with the idea that Amazon's version is the most uh you know, cost effective and the best for the

whatever the product is. So they're saying anything that doesn't uh beat Amazon's price, that's fine, but anything that does gets treated like this. That's that's the accusation. It also says that Amazon has reportedly collaborated with third party sellers to fix pricing on various products, so, in other words, essentially forcing smaller businesses to adjust their prices so that they do not go below the kind of stuff that Amazon offers. Now, price fixing is illegal, it is anti competitive.

It hurts the consumer. If all parties that are selling widgets agree upon a price for widgets, then there's no competition there. Right, there's no fair market. No one is going to offer a budget widget for less because of this agreed upon price fixing. Now, Amazon reps say that

this lawsuit is baseless. They actually point to a similar court case that was brought against the company in Washington, d C. The court in that instance dismissed that earlier case, and so the reps are saying that's evidence that this California lawsuit is without merit because these same issues were brought up in d C and the court dismissed the case.

That's true, But it's also true that the Attorney General in d C has appealed that court decision, so it could turn out that this matter heads back to court in d C as well, So it might not be the best long term defense for Amazon. Over in South Korea, the Personal Information Protection Commission or p i p C has issued a fine to Google and to Meta for the way that those companies have collected personal information for the purposes of advertising, which appears to violate the laws

of South Korea. The finest for one hundred billion one that's equivalent to about seventy two million dollars. Most of that, in fact, nearly se of that is going to Google and Meta has to cover the rest of it, and it's the most that the agency has ever find companies for allegedly violating laws pertaining to personal information in South Korea.

That's impressive though, you know, with companies like Google and Meta, it's not that much money when the grand scheme of things, I mean, obviously, no executive ever wants to have to pay a fine, no matter how small or large it might be. No word yet on whether Google or Meta will appeal this decision. Okay, we've got a few more news stories to cover before we get to that, Let's

take a quick break. Research company news Guard issued a report yesterday that says nearly d percent of TikTok videos that popped up in search results for specific topics would contain misinformation, and those topics are ones that you can probably guess for yourself. It's stuff ranging from COVID nineteen and vaccines to Russia's invasion of Ukraine to US politics,

including very polarizing things like the January six insurrection. TikTok has a policy to remove videos that spread misinformation, but even so, the researchers claimed that a casual search frequently pulls up videos that push misleading or outright false statements, and that these videos are spreading harmful lies, such as ones that claim vaccines against COVID can cause quote unquote permanent damage in children's Organs. Steve Brill, the founder of NewsGuard,

didn't mince words. He said that TikTok's practices show either the company is incompetent when it comes to dealing with misinform nation or quote it's something worse end quote. Now, to me, that implies that the spread of misinformation might

not be a bug, it's a feature. And when you keep in mind the fact that TikTok does have a Chinese parent company, and China has long had a reputation for using tech to spread misinformation and otherwise disrupt business and life in countries like the United States, that accusation

can get real ugly, real quick now. TikTok has long maintained that it doesn't have that kind of relationship with its parent company, Byte Dance, but that hasn't gone very far to quell fears that the opposite might be true. TikTok has pointed out that it has removed more than a hundred million videos that were posted in the first quarter of this year alone, But according to news outlets like ABC, TikTok removed many of those videos for other reasons.

It wasn't because they misinformation, it was because they violated some other policy of TikTok, and that the ones that were removed from because they reportedly contained misinformation represent only a small percentage of the overall group that TikTok purged. Further, the researchers at news Guards said that when they were searching for terms like COVID vaccine, TikTok's own search tool

started to suggest autocomplete options like COVID vaccine injury. So, in other words, the researchers are saying that TikTok's own search tool is helping push misinformation campaigns out to users, and considering that a large number of TikTok users are young people, the real fear is that kids who use TikTok extensively are going to be depending heavily on TikTok has a source of information, and if that information isn't valid,

if it's misinformation, if it's purposefully misleading people, that's a huge problem. One really interesting bit of news this week is that cryptocurrency Ethereum has made the transition from a proof of work coin to proof of steak. So what does that actually mean. Well, a proof of work cryptocurrency like Bitcoin relies on computers that are connected to the crypto network to compete against one another in order to validate the most recent block of transactions. This is what

mining really is. The validation process is meant to take a specific amount of time. In the case of bitcoin, it's about ten minutes. It's much shorter, or it was much shorter for ethereum. But how do you guarantee that it's going to take ten minutes to complete a computer problem when you cannot predict how powerful the computer systems connected to your network are going to be. Well, you do it by tweaking the difficulty of the computer problem.

So if you notice that computers are starting to solve problems more quickly, you make that problem harder to solve.

Has more powerful machines under the network, the task continues to get harder and harder, which prompts people to add even more powerful machines to the network, and this escalates until you get to a point where it wouldn't make sense to add a more powerful machine because the cost of operating the machine is greater than the profit you would get from mining the crypto in the first place.

So while this is happening, it means that the miners are using up more and more electricity as they're dedicating increasingly powerful processing networks in order to be the first to mind the next block of transactions and thus read the rewards. Because this is how new cryptocurrency gets minted. It is minted and then awarded to whichever system managed to validate the transaction that last block of transactions, and until Ethereum transition to proof of stake this week, that's

how all things worked on ethereum. Uh. You know, if the the ether value was not anywhere close to bitcoin, so it was much less valuable than Bitcoin was. So your typical Ethereum mining system did not run on the same sort of mega powerful rigs that are used for Bitcoin, but still really chunky machines, and they use things like graphics processing cards to power the actual operations. Bitcoin had

graduated beyond graphics processing cards. It is into custom built rigs that are way more expensive to buy and operate, and thus, you know, again, it would make no sense to use that kind of machine for ethere Um because you'd be spending more money on the machine than you would make in the mining process. Anyway, the proof of

stake approach is different. It requires Ethereum holders who want to participate in the mining process to put up a stake a percentage of their Ether holdings in order to participate, and essentially, parties that have the most ether put up at steak end up being the ones that even stand a chance at mining the next block of transactions successfully.

So while proof of steak means Ethereum is going to put a much smaller demand on electricity, which is a good thing, don't get me wrong, that's important, it does, however, mean that the parties most likely to earn newly minted ether are the ones that are already swimming in the stuff, so the rich get richer. You could actually argue that this approach centralizes what is supposed to be a decentralized

form of currency. It centralizes it into a cabal of ether's biggest holders, but that is a matter for a different episode. In fact, I've actually recorded an episode like that in the past, so if you want to learn more, you can go through the back catalog and find my discussion about proof of work versus proof of steak. The Register reports that John Deer, the company known for making farm machinery, expects software fees to make up to ten percent of the company's revenue by the end of the

twenty twenties. That's kind of wild, right, that a company that makes farm machinery expects ten percent of its revenue to come from software fees. You know, if you're a company that makes tractors, you probably you aren't thought of as being a software company. That seems counterintuitive, but it's true that new farm machinery is surprisingly sophisticated, or at least it's surprising if you aren't familiar with farm equipment. If you're a farmer and you've worked with the stuff,

you know it already. But for you know, hay seeds like myself, it can come as a bit of a shock. But yeah, farm machines can be InCred doably complex, and they can include features like an autopilot setting that heavily automates operations. That's something that's really important to farmers in a market where there might be labor shortages. Now there is another edge to this here plow as it happens, and that's the fact that companies like John Deer are

frequently criticized as resisting the right to repair movement. That that a part of John Deere's strategy is to make it difficult or impossible for farmers to maintain and repair their own equipment or to take that equipment to a shop of their choice. Instead, they are locked into John Deere's ecosystem, which means they can only bring their equipment to officially licensed parties, parties that the company has granted a license to in order to work on these machines.

And software plays a really big part in that strategy, and farmers have argued that John Deer has purposefully withheld tools and software that are needed in order to make necessary repairs. So the story illustrates both the incredible innovation that is powering agriculture as well as the ongoing struggle between customers and companies when it comes to the right to repair devices and machines. Okay, we've got a couple more stories that we want to cover. Before we get

to that, Let's take another quick break. E A, the company that once um actually twice upon a time, was voted as the worst company in America. That was in The Consumerist several years ago, I think twelve and maybe anyway. E A is rolling out a new anti cheat tool

that has some security and privacy experts concerned. Now just to be clear e A is not the first video game company to do this kind of thing, but e A is a big deal in the video game industry because it's a gargantuan company and it publishes some of the most popular game titles in the world, like FIFA. Anyway, this tool will install a driver that gets kernel level access to a player's computer. But if you're not a computer person, you might wonder, well, what the heck does

that matter? What is kernel level access? What does that even mean? You can think of a computer's kernel as the core of its operating system, like this is the nexus at the center of the operating system, which I realize is both redundant and repetitive, but forgive me. The kernel ultimately has complete control over everything happening within the computer system. So it's like being in the room where it happens. As Aaron Burr would say, Well, say, I'm

getting off track again. Kernel level access is a big deal. You're at the very heart of the operating system. Potentially that can lead to big, be big t bad things. So why is e A seeking kernel access in the first place. Why is a company that previously has been called the worst in America saying hey, trust us, let

us into the heart of your operating system on your machine. Well, company reps say this is really the only way to detect and prevent specific types of cheating software that are meant to give players an advantage in online multiplayer games. That there are cheap programs that get all the way down to the kernel level, and these programs use methods to mask their presence, so it's very hard for anti

cheat software to detect and prevent them. And then you get these events online where legitimate players are beside themselves because they can't get a fair match in whatever game they're playing. The people they're playing against are using these sophisticated cheat programs and are just wiping the floor with them. And you know, that's an issue when we're talking about

competitive multiplayer online games. If you've ever had that experience where you've played in an online game and you were absolutely certain that the person you were playing against cheated in order to beat you, or you watch content creators who you know they play games for a living they frequently encounter cheaters, is very upsetting, you know, it's it's anytime you encounter a cheater who uses unfair advantage against you,

it's upsetting. And while e A promises that the company takes privacy and security very seriously and that kernel level access is necessary in order to detect and prevent this kind of cheating, critics still worry that giving more programs kernel level access in reduces potential weak points that others might exploit. For example, a hacker might design a tool that uses this sort of anti cheap process as an entry point to target systems and get kernel level access

to other machines. Now, whether that could actually happen or not, I don't know. I don't know how this particular tool has been created. I don't know if there are any vulnerabilities, but the potential for it is something to be concerned about. I don't feel super comfortable with the idea of granting kernel access to an anti cheap program, or really, to know,

any program really if I can avoid it. At the same time, it's hard to come up with a strong cheat prevention model when the cheaters have no resistance to installing kernel level cheat software, like they're not holding back. But by the way, I also think that that is a terrible idea. It does open up your computer to

potential exploitation. UM like, out of all the companies that make software, I would trust the ones that are making or not just companies, but programs that are making software, I would trust the ones that are making cheat software the least, like pirated material is slightly above cheat software. Finally, in China, there's a text to image tool called ernie v I l G which does something similar to other AI powered image generators like doll E two or mid

Journey UH. These tools allow a user to create a text prompt, and then the text prompt sends that information to the image generation tool, which will then create an image based off that prompt. Sometimes the AI generated image is incredible, Sometimes it's really upsetting, sometimes it's hilarious. Sometimes it's a combination of the three or more. But the Chinese tool has another feature. It is heavily censored. There are some prompts that the tool will filter out immediately.

For example, you can't really generate any image relating to politics. That includes if you put in a political leader's name in the prompt that will trigger this, or if you try to create an image that incorporates the Chinese flag, or if you mentioned Tianamen Square, which is really a a taboo subject in China. To put it lightly, but if you put anything like that in the prompt of this tool, you get an alert that says that the request violates the rules of the tool and that you

have to reword it. And while most AI text too image tools do contain filters that prevent users from making outright objectionable material, in those cases it's self imposed. It's it's an effort to create a healthy, stable, non contentious community, but it's not something that is dictated to the companies from some other outside source. In China, it's pretty much mandated by the state, or rather by the Chinese Communist Party, which many people equate with the state because in many

contexts that's fair. So yeah, political censorship in the Chinese image to our text to Image tool not a big surprise, but an interesting story that I thought I would throw in here. That's it for this episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. One way to do that is to download the I Heart radio app. It's free to download and use. You can navigate over

to tech Stuff. There's a little microphone icon click on that you can leave a message up to thirty seconds in length let me know what you would like to hear about, or you can reach out on Twitter handle for the show is Text Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. YEA. 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.