TechStuff Remembers 2014, Part Two

at all. That's fair. Okay, So last episode we got through July two thome we're ready to pick up in August and finish out the rest of the year. A lot of stuff happened in two thousand and fourteen, and if you haven't listened to the earlier podcast, I recommend you go back check that out. That's where we talk about some pretty big stories, and some of them are going to end up informing a few of the stories in the second half of the year, because that's the

way that time works. Anyway. August two, here's the one. I I almost didn't want to include this because I hate bringing attention to it. However, uh in August, that's when the actor Adam Baldwin created the hashtag gamer gate, and that was I had no idea gamer gate had anything to do with Adam Baldwin. Gamer Gate the name has everything to do with Adam Baldwin. Adam Baldwin, from Firefly Yes, and from Chuck Yes. He created the hashtag. So this was in response to a growing brew haha

in video game and video game journalism. And ostensibly it was about ethics and video game journalism. But effectively what it never really heard about that part. I just heard references to that part. Effectively, the most of it was about um attacking email, video game journalists, video game developers, anyone actually really and ultimately it was beyond female. It was essentially largely anyone who was not white and male,

although not not exclusively. There were some people and still are some people involved in in the gamer gate side of things. The people speaking out who are not who don't fit that demographic, but that's the vast majority of

that demographic. And whether or not there are ethics issues in video game journalism, putting that aside, the tactics being used by many in that movement to attack that they're perceived opponents were pretty rotten, like publishing people's address online so that they can be harassed, threatening them and their families, exactly to the point where people were seeking protection from

law enforcement, getting the FBI involved. Um So, here's here's my take on this is that if you feel there are legitimate issues in the ethics in video game production and video game uh journalism, video game coverage, all that kind of stuff, there are ways you can express that that are constructive that don't involve threatening someone or putting someone at risk, And those are the methods I think people should take. And that you know, this is just

pulling the whole argument aside. There's some who would say there's no argument there to be made at all, that the whole thing is just a straw man for the purposes of being able to attack anyone that they see as being uh not them right and uh of their privilege in the community. Right. I know there are some people out there who feel like they have a legitimate point, and that's fine if you're able to to uh to express that in a way that isn't harmful to other folks,

because the other folks aren't trying to harm you. It's crazy how this got out of control so fast, and it really showed a dark, sinister underbelly of misogyny, of racism, of homophobia, and a lot of communities. Now I'm not saying everyone who spoke out falls into one of those categories, but enough of them were doing things that certainly fall into that category to make it a real concern. And so I almost didn't cover this because it is a

controversial topic. I know, I've got a lot of listeners who care very deeply about video games, and that's fine. I think you should feel deeply about the things you're you're really interested and passionate about, but there are ways to express that constructively and ways to be a jerk. A jerk, yeah, And I would hope that people who like to listen to the show would take the constructive route, you know. And and if you you know, if you have legitimate beef, that's fine, but dude, don't. But what

if you have legitimate chicken? Uh, then I will come over to your house and have dinner because I eat chicken but not beef. Alright. So also, well, well let's hear all about your holy positions. Yeah, let's not have chicken Gate. August two, on with gamer Gates, straight out of the gates, and to be fair, to be fair, the issues of gamer gate had been going on throughout two thousand and fourteen. It's just that's when it got

the name, right. I mean, my sort of basic perspective is I've seen it back and forth about issues of of how, especially how women are treated in commentary on video games and in video games and themselves and in the industry that creates them. I've seen this going on for years, and just suddenly it seemed to be, I don't know, attached to this hashtag and I and I wasn't understanding exactly why this particular hashtag, gamer gate was now the name for this ongoing struggle I've been seeing

for years. Well, the the initial event that happened ended up being treated as if it were a conspiracy that was there was other companies were attempting to cover up. Thus the gate the idea of being like it's like water Gate. It's this conspiracy that's going on behind gamer's backs, where there's collusion between video game journalists and video game creators where for a and some form of exchange games

will get positive coverage that kind of thing. And whether or not that's true, it doesn't justify the incredibly evil tactics that were being used to punish quote unquote people who were supposedly perpetrating these events. Um, this this, this is the this is the issue we'll see. The Internet is strange world we live in. The Internet is great because it democratizes a lot of things that otherwise people

would not have access to, like content creation. Now, as a regular Joe, not not you, Joe, but a regular person, not that you're not a regular person. Let me start over as someone who is just an average human being. I can go and make a YouTube series. All I need is a camera and an Internet connection, so I can send that. Right before, if you wanted to produce stuff, you needed lots of infrastructure behind you to do it. Well, same sort of thing, Uh, unfortunately goes with your ability

to impact the lives of other people. You can do it in a positive way, which is fantastic, or you can do it in a very negative creative Twitter account and threaten somebody's safety and tell them you're going to come to their house and kill them. This is stuff that you know, if if you were to just set the clock back twenty years, then you'd be sent talking about sending stuff through the mail, like threatening letters in

the mail. Most people, I think would say this is evidence of someone who is has got some serious issues that need to be addressed. But today it happens online and you have entire communities dedicated to finding new ways to do it, which is disturbing. So anyway, let's move on. Yeah, obviously we could do a full episode on that entire issue. I haven't because it's so complex, but moving forward something

that's simple, putting the gaming into perspective. The Rosetta probe reached the comment that it would eventually land on much easier. This was, of course, the culmination of a ten year journey, which was preceded by ten years of planning to send a probe out to eventually rendezvous and then land on a commet to help us learn more about the composition and behavior of comments, So it was a big deal.

Of course, it wouldn't land on the comment to a little bit later in the year, but this is when it actually reached the comment, so that's kind of cool. There was also in August a kerfuffle between Uber and Lift, which are too competing car service companies. There part of that shared economy. Although most people I think would say that it's more like a taxi service than a shared

ride service, but at any rate. Um the kerfuffle was that each company claimed that employees of the other company have been requesting and then canceling rides for drivers of the other service. So Uber was calling up lift rides and then canceling them and to disrupt their service. Can you come pick me up twenty miles out of town? Yeah.

The Verge also ran a story about Uber's slog program, which was supposedly designed to have Uber drivers call for a lift ride and then attempt to recruit lift drivers over to Uber. There's a script to follow like, Hey, do you ever hear about Uber? What about Uber? I hear Uber pays more than lift that kind of thing that would you ever think about driving for Uber? And if they said yes, then you would get their informations that someone at Uber could try and actually directly recruit them. Wow,

it's the new tell marketing. Yeah, the back seat Yeah, this this was this was one of those things that that again really gave Uber kind of a black eye for two thousand and fourteen. I was also August was also the month that Steve Bomber retired from the board of Microsoft. No. Yeah, he had to concentrate on his sports team that he had purchased. Um, the Cleveland Developers. Yes, that was the Cleveland Developers. Wasn't the Clippers or anything

like that. It was the Cleveland Developers. Amazon bought Twitch in August or just under a billion dollars nine d seventy million bucks. Twitch is the video streaming service that allows people to stream footage of video games as they play them. I've used this. I used this when I did a charity marathon where I was playing Minecraft for twenty five hours and I live streamed the whole thing. Yeah,

there were periods. You talked one time about how Twitch played Pokemon where they had all pressing buttons at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. The way it worked was that the the the text messages sent into the chat would be um interpreted as video game commands for this game of Pokemon, and so the game of Pokemon would behave in a very bizarre way because there was lag between when you would put in a command and when it

would be able to process it. So something that would have made sense at the moment that you put in the command wouldn't make sense by the time it finally got processed and an entire mythology grew up around the behavior of that particular Pokemon game, with like certain things given incredible significance, Like every time a particular item was opened up in the inventory because of the sequence of commands, they can considered it consulting the oracle, giving it this

important uh state status in the game, which was pretty funny. Oh that was just user created too, which just shows if you create anything sort of platform on the Internet, folks will be happy to to build a mythology around it. Um. At least to a point. There has to be some sort of hook to get people there. Also, in August, Google announced that it would launch literally a delivery drone service similar to the one that Amazon announced back in

two thousand thirteen. Um, I've seen some predictions saying that by the end of two thousand and fifteen we will have delivery drones. I think that's being a little optimistic. UM. I think I think the the f a A Is probably gonna have some things to say about that. UM, we'll see. But it's mean, would it really be cost

effective by then? I mean, I guess if people are willing to pay enough charge Yeah, I mean, I guess it also depends on you know, obviously which uh, which cities have distribution centers there, right, like if there's if if your item is already sitting in a warehouse in the city you're in, then it may make more sense to just go ahead and have an entire robotic line

robots delivering the package to the pickup line. Another robot, the drone, picks it up and carries it out to deliver it never has to be seen by human hands and human hands human eyes. If human hands are seeing it, then things have really changed. But at any rate, they'll be like that guy in Pans labyrinthon the Thin Man or whatever it was. Paleman was pale man in that movie. Uh. September we finally got into another month. Apple unveils the iPhone six and the iPhone six plus, which was the

first phone in the fablet category. You can almost fit in your living room, Yeah, exactly. Um I didn't mention the the breujaha that happened when a couple of people said that their iPhone six plus bent, you know, like they there and actually had like the metal itself was bending at certain point and denting in and there are all these jokes about hipsters in Brooklyn with tight genes that were ruining their phones just by putting them in

their pockets. That yeah, yeah, that there. It would introduce a curve that was not intended to be there. The story would unfold that it really wasn't happening as frequently as one would think based upon the number of stories that were coming out um and Apple denied that it was a design flaw. Apple also announced the Apple Watch,

which their first attempt to enter the wearable market. You don't count the iPod nano that would clip on to like your shirt or something, but that won't be available till two fifteen, So it was announced but not made available. Tell me more about Apple, Okay. They also unveiled Apple Pay, which is their NFC enabled payment system. Also, well not just NFC enabled payment system, but that's a large part of it. The idea being that you could go to a point of sale and use your phone or your

smart watch. Once you got it to pay for something, you would have an electronic wallet that would allow you to transfer funds and and buy stuff supposedly completely secure. Is the idea being that meets the requirements of making sure your credit card information remains safe. I mean, there were so many stories about information being stolen that that was a big deal. Not obviously a very new idea. NFC technology has been around for a while. We've had

Google Wallet for a couple of years. And in Europe, NFC technology is so commonplace that they're not even like, at least in the UK, they're not even launching Apple Pay out there because there's already embedded systems that pre exist that are popular. It was here in the United States where there was still a lot of confusion in the marketplace. No one had come out as a real leader. You've got a lot of competing standards out there, and

so that's when Apple kind of pounced. Chinese company Ali Baba held an i p o and it became the largest tech I p O ever that's an e commerce site in China. Uh, it was a big, big deal. Also, Microsoft, in September two fourteen agreed to buy mo Yang Mojang, the company that makes Minecraft. Always say it both ways because just in case. But for two point five billion dollars for a game that's been out for several years, for a company that hasn't produced anything remotely as successful

as that one title. So some people were wondering if this was a smart move or not, because while Minecraft is undeniably a huge success, can you can you exist on a single title perpetually? Now, if you're Microsoft and you produce Microsoft Office, the answer might be yes, that's kind of what Microsoft does. Um, that's being unfair to Microsoft. Future versions of Minecraft will have Clippy. Yeah, I see that you're trying to build a house. Would you like

some help with that? Uh? Also September two fourteen, you know what we haven't talked about for a little bit, Joe Hackers. Oh in the so now that we've split this podcast into our opening discussion from the last one is kind of lost. But in that I I was saying that I was sort of thinking often as the year of the hack, that it's the year that I think the average person start starts becoming aware that cybersecurity threats are real and they're going to affect them pretty

frequently in the future. Well, especially when we see that it's affecting not just retail establishments or bitcoin exchanges, but other things as well. So we have two hacking stories at the end of September two thousand fourteen, one was that home Depot would investigate another massive hack against their systems, so similar to issues that had plagued target eBay, that kind of thing. And also that hackers would steal photos from Apple's online photos sharing service. And this was not

a blanket attack. This wasn't like a rod net that was cast out to see what they could catch. It was obvious that they were targeting specific individuals, celebrities in particular, and trying to get hold of photos, usually photos that put people in compromising positions, nude photographs, that kind of stuff. It was sad. It was it was seeing people's privacy

being violated and then seeing the justified arguments. And I used justified in the loosest means as possible, saying, well, they live their lives out in the public eye, so therefore they shouldn't have an expectation of privacy. My response to that argument, you just posted something on the Internet and it's public, you know, let us read your email. Yeah, my yeah. My argument is is that is a jerk face argument to make. Don't make that argument, folks, that

does any sense. No, it doesn't, it's not. It's not at all justifiable. It's terrible thing. But but also again displayed the need for security, and it also showed that this was not due to customer behavior. This wasn't like a customer issue where their problems lead to the UH to the breach. It was another issue behind the scenes that you know, the customer didn't have any any involvement with.

And if your argument is like, well, they shouldn't put you know, those kind of photos up on a online service. If you have every expectation that your information is going to be safe, then it's really no one else's business what information you put up there. Right, as long as you're not violating any terms of service with whatever that

service is, everything should be fine. Well, like we said in part one of this podcast, it's it's becoming clear more and more that you don't have to be somebody who doesn't really understand how to use the internet in order to get everything messed up to have your information still and you don't have to create weak passwords or you know, do everything wrong. You can do everything right

right and still have your information compromise. Yeah, so very frustrating, also eye opening, and it does mean that we have to take a more serious look at online security moving into October two thousand and fourteen. That's when Facebook Alternative l O opens up a bit. It had already been active for a while, so it had had a kind of an alpha slash beta sort of test with just a few people. But they opened up a bit allowing more people to join what was previously a very small community.

So people were getting email invites. You could actually apply, and I did, so I got an invite, I joined LLO, made a little account. It was meant to be um or. It is meant to be a social network that doesn't use any advertising, that is supposed to just be pure social interaction with users without any uh fiddling about with

the status updates or news update layout or money. Well right now, it was just it was getting investments, which some people pointed out, hey, if you can investment, that means that someone somewhere down the line believes that you're going to pay that investment back. So they can't perpetually exist on venture capital because they have to eventually be able to pay back investors. So that actually raised a lot of questions. People were saying, how are they going

to make money? And it was a question that wasn't really um answered to anyone's satisfaction as far as I could tell. Moreover, after an initial flood of activity, l O kind of faded off because it wasn't doing anything, you know, truly innovative that Facebook or some other social platform wasn't already doing apart from the fact that it wasn't serving you up ads or messing with your news feed,

but it it wasn't enough to pull people over. I checked back, because I had I was one of those folks who created an account, went there for a little while, stopped. I checked my account and pretty much no activity had happened within like the month that I had been offline. So maybe that's just because the people I know. It could be that there are pockets within that community that are very active, but most folks are like, hey, you remember when l O was the thing for two weeks.

Facebook in October purchased What's App for nearly twenty two billion dollars. Joe, before we came in here, you said, what is What's App? You had not heard of it? You are not unusual in that fact, A lot of people in North America had not heard of What's App. It's a mobile messaging service that's very popular in other parts of the world, not so much in the United States. So it's understandable why people would wonder why would you pay twenty two billion dollars for something like that? But

the truth is it does. There are millions of people who use the service in other parts of the world, and Facebook views them as potential customers, so that is the reason. Also, yeah, I guess that's good enough. October that's when HB announced it would split up, separating its PC and printer business from its enterprise business. So the idea of being that by splitting up, they'll be able to make much more focused companies deliver upon those kind

of promises. Surely, October had some more good hacks. Yeah. Kmart announced that store registers were hacked and then people's credit card information was stolen as a result, So yeah, it wasn't just online attacks, it's store registers in this case. Um. Also, HBO finally announced that they were going to have a new service that would allow people to access HBO programming without a cable subscription, starting in two those fifteen. Hallelujah.

I am so excited about this because I mean, I love some HBO shows, but I'm sorry you are not going to get me to subscribe to cable. Yeah, I don't want all those channels. I'm not interested. Yeah, I'm the same way. I dropped cable years ago. And there have been lots of shows on HBO that I wish I could have watched, but I don't. I don't happy to pay to watch them. Sure, I just don't want to pay for all this other stuff I have no

interest in whatsoever. Yeah, for the longest time, there was no way I could get it unless I went out and bought an entire seasons worth on DVD, and I didn't. I didn't know which shows I might like and which ones I don't like, and I haven't watched them. And I I might catch an episode when I was out on a trip someplace, but it would be completely out of context, Like I, I can't tell if I like this or not because I don't know what's going on.

Uh and uh. It is interesting that HBO has become sort of a big name in high quality content, and not all of the content they've created what I argue is high quality, but much of it is. And like things like Game of Thrones is incredible or um uh, you know Sopranos that kind of thing six Ft Under the Wire. The Wire, in my opinion, maybe the best show that's ever been on TV. Yeah, okay, that's that's interesting. All the seasons, would you say that all the seasons

hold up? Yeah, they're all great. Season two was a little but yeah, but that was by the Wire standards. But you also have like Carnival, which I've never seen it. It's it's very atmosphere, but you could tell there was gonna be some story issues early on. But but the cinematography in the atmosphere was phenomenal. It's just really like you were thinking, this might have needed a little bit more of a firmer hand at the beginning for this to to really work. But that's my own personal opinion.

At any rate, I'm excited to see this come to fruition. We don't know all the details yet about how this will actually be put into practice, so we'll have to wait and see. Also in October tragic news, there was a malfunction during a test flight for the Virgin Galactic spaceship Too, which resulted in a crash in the California desert,

which killed the co pilot, Michael Ellsbury. It was I was I was in California at the time, and I remember I was actually just having to pass a television when I saw the news and it was so upsetting, terrible story. Obviously, Uh, this was a big issue personally, it was a big issue as far as the private space industry go is. An's a reminder that this stuff is hard, you know, we we we start to downplay it when you hear about the different launch every other

week or whatever. You start to think of it as commonplace. But this is rocket science. I mean, this is hard, hard stuff to get to work correctly. And the stakes are pretty high, so extremely high. I mean, their their life and death. So it's one of those things we need to keep in perspective. Not that it's not worth tackling, it's not worth doing. I fully believe it's worth tackling

and worth doing. It's just we've got to remember that, you know, these are the these are the stakes that are involved, and we've got to keep working to get better at it um And so, yeah, that was a tragic tale to end out October. Moving on into November, we have some more security issues. In this case, not so much hacking into a system as creating malware to

spread chaos and disorder where ever it might go. That was when multiple security labs in November revealed the existence of malware called Reagan r e g I N which affects Windows based computers. Now, most of the computers affected by this malware happened to be in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Ireland. The main targets included telecom companies, small businesses and private individuals. And the people in the security industry have known about this malware for a while, but

it was only in November. This is typical only in November when it was publicly revealed. But there are folks who said, yeah, we've known about this in some form or another for a few years, and suspicions right now kind of point to the n s A as the originator of the malware, that it was a way of infiltrating these systems to create means of surveillance. Yeah, it's been compared to Stuck's net, which was the that was the virus that in the infected UH computer is Iranian

Iranian centrifuges. Yeah, so it made him spin at a at the incorrect speed and thus cause damage to the equipment. UM yeah. So there are a lot of suspicions that this is in fact state sponsored software that was meant to be a you know, cyber warfare tool. So, um, we don't have all the details on that. That could end up all being incorrect, but that was where the

suspicions were. Also in November, President Obama urged the FCC to reclassify broadband service as a regulated utility, which would actually give the FCC authority to enact the rules they had proposed earlier than the year. That sounds like Obamacare for the internet, thank you. Oh no, no, no, that is not my opinion. Uh, we revisit net neutrality again. It's been big this year. Yeah. And it matters, it does.

It matters a lot. I mean it matters to people like like you and I Joe, because we make our living working on a website and on shows that are delivered over the internet. Right. What if somebody said, well, I make some content that competes with yours, and I'm best buddies with Comcast or with whatever other provider, or

suddenly my content gets preferential treatment. What happens if some other individual who puts out a great show, but they're an individual goes up against our company, and our company might have the assets to be able to play ball and pay agociate with the content exactly with the service providers. Yeah, it just it creates an unfair playing field. And so that's what is trying you know what what people like President Obama are trying to suggest we avoid by reclassifying

internet service as a type of utility. I think one way to sell this to people who are you know, they're like, I don't know, net neutrality sounds kind of touchy feely, I don't believe in it. Just explain it to them like this. This is going to severely negatively impact your Internet using experience, no matter who you are. It really doesn't matter who you are, what services you use. This is almost definitely going to make your web experience worse.

At least, something that you rely upon regularly is no longer going to work the way you are used to because it doesn't fit into that. Now a lot of people have pointed out that what this does is it creates different internets depending upon which provider you have, because the experience is different. So it maybe like you think, oh, Netflix is great because I happen to use Comcast and Netflix and Comcast have made some sort of crazy deal.

But my friend has Time Warner and he thinks Netflix is the worst because he can never get a movie to load because Time Warner. Netflix never made a deal. You know. That's the sort of thing. And for for a company like Netflix, it's it's one thing because it's a big company and it has the money to be able to make these sort of deals. They don't. No one wants to do that. One of the providers do, but not not the content companies. Um, but it could do that. But for smaller sites that that may not

have that option, it's it's a real problem. And so that's one of the big arguments against it really is just that this hurts business in the long run. It benefits a few really large companies at the expense of hundreds or maybe thousands, or maybe millions of smaller businesses and private individuals as well. So we'll still have to see how that develops, because obviously that's that's an ongoing story.

Did you ever hear of the company area not at all? Okay, So Areo was a company that their their business model was that you would subscribe to this service and the service would allow you to access content that was grabbed by one of their over the air antenna. So this was just for broadcast over the air content. It the same as if you went out and put a giant antenna on your house and you were just pulling information down, except instead of doing it yourself, you're renting time on

someone else's antenna to get that content. And UH content creators hated this, like, think of it this way, you could get over the air content from a region that's not your own and watch things like sports games that might have blackouts for certain regions, but you could see it if you rented it on this because the antennas in the region that is allowed even if you are not, so there were. There was obviously huge resistance and so the companies took Area to UH Court. It all went

completely up to the Supreme Court. It was eventually decided against Ario, and in November of two fourteen, Area went into bankruptcy after they had lost all hope of having their business model legit legitimized. So Areo is no more, which is a shame. It also shows kind of how weird our distribution world is. Right, It's it doesn't always seem to make a whole lot of sense, especially like Ario's argument was, Look, this is content that's free. If

you have an antenna, you can freely access it. There's no subscription for this. This is broadcast. It's not cable. This is these are air waves that go out and anyone with an antenna I can pick them up and there's no descrambling or anything. Um. But because of this other these other issues, you know, they were they were being told like, well, essentially, what you're doing is rebroadcasting something that doesn't belong to you. So it was kind

of ugly. Um. There was another ugly story. Uber senior vice president Emil Michael said he would like to unveil details about the private lives of journalists who write critical pieces about Uber, which followed us an incredible, a bad PR move. It's odious, is it not. Yeah. This also followed an ad campaign Uber had put out advertising quote hot chick unquote drivers. I know a lot of people

who deleted their Uber app after this event. There's been a lot of people who asked me to cover Uber and to specifically cover some of the missteps and and weird decisions that have been made over the course of this year. In particular. Uh, yeah, this is that's definitely got some criticism, and then you had the response to the criticism, which gained more criticism. His response, he believed at the time, was going to be off the record,

and it clearly was not. Uh. This is also November was when hackers calling themselves the Guardians of Peace, although that was after the fact, targeted Sony and stole internal documents as well as screener copies of several films from Sony, which were then leaked to torning sites. And there were suspicions laid or that the hacker group might be tied to North Korea, although that wasn't really the initial response. From what I understand, this is still up for debate.

I mean, we we still don't know for sure whether it was North Korea or not. No, in fact, North Korea denies that it had any involvement in this. In fact, okay, we might as well do this whole story right now, because it doesn't make sense to unveil it later on. We're gonna cover Sony right now. It just started November. It's still going on now today as we record this

is December, so the story is nowhere near resolved. Yet well, obviously they were in the process of releasing a film called The Interview Yes And a film in which two stupid characters, one of whom is a stupid celebrity host of a celebrity news program. This is This movie is a comedy by the Yes, Yes and This and his

stupid producer are. They land an opportunity to an interview with Kim Jong june, the um, the leader of North Korea, who it is revealed to be a huge fan of the show, and are then contacted by I believe it's the CIA. Anyway, They're contacted by US government officials UH to try and assassinate Kim Jong un as part of their trip over there, and they're given the tools to

do so. And so as the story is unfolded, Like I said, the initial attack didn't really have as far as I can tell, any indications of the motivation behind the attack. It was, Uh. They stole a lot of information. They shut down Sony Pictures systems. People came in and their screens went black and they were unable to do

any work. This was the week of Thanksgiving, so a lot of people said, well, it's a holiday week anyway, I'll just take the holiday, and then they came back and there were still problems and said, this might be worse than I thought. I found out that a ton of information was stolen, including internal communications at Sony that caused lots of embarrassment for the company, a lot of problems. They revealed things like payment disparities between male and female

employees at various levels of executive management. That also was really embarrassing for Sony UM. And then later there was a threat that that was kind of leveled at any theater that would show the interview. From what I read, it was a very vague threat that they just sort of promised violent reprisal. Yeah, they essentially compared it to nine eleven, which I mean, if you want to if you want to hit a a a nerve in in the American psyche, that's a very powerful one obviously, for

for lots of reasons. So, uh, first you had theaters canceling the interview that they weren't going to run it, law the major chains that they wouldn't. Then of course Sony itself said that actually we're not going to release the film in any format. It's not gonna be on DVD or Blu ray, or anything like that or online on demand. And then you had a couple of UM theaters offer to show Team America in its place, which makes fun of Kim Jong Ill, Kim Jong UN's father

deceased father. And then Paramount said, no, you can't do that. Alamo Draft House was going to do this and then was told by Paramount that they couldn't do it, so they pulled that movie too, do that UM. President Obama essentially kind of said that Sony made the wrong choice to pull the movie. UH. Today, the day we're recording this podcast, there has been a story about North Korea Internet UM services being disrupted in some fashion. I read about it on the Verge. It was an article just

today where UH in today is December. Apparently, over the past twenty four hours, North Korean users have been experiencing severe Internet connectivity problems. Keeping in mind that the people allowed to have even access the Internet in North Korea, it's pretty limited, right, But some people have speculated on the internet. Well, you know, President Obama just said that there would be a sort of like appropriate UH response,

sort of proportionate. I think those are where it's proportional response, UH. And so the question is well as the United States striking back against North Korea. That we don't even know for sure that North Korea is behind the initial attack on Sony, and subsequently we don't know that the United States is behind what's happening today. But I don't know. Everybody's everybody's got a theory. Yeah, there's a lot of

there's a lot of that. That guy from Office Space would be making a ment off his jump to conclusions Matt today. Um, yeah, there's there's a lot of things we don't know, and yet people are to dry conclusions

based on that. Uh. For example, there have been a lot of sites that have suggested that apart from some some circumstantial evidence, it doesn't really there's nothing that's there's no smoking gun that North Korea was in fact behind the original attack, and North Korea representatives say we weren't responsible. In fact, we will offer to have a joint investigation into this, which the United States declined because one, we don't know if they're being since here, and that it's

North Korea is an enigma right to us. It is a it is a country that a lot of US are very much ignorant of because it is secretive it's cloistered. It is got a very peculiar culture from the perspective of the United States. So this is a really weird mystery that's unraveling slowly at the end of two thousand fourteen. It does again portray the the the the year of the hack. Yeah, it's another great example, and in fact

it's not the only one that happened. In November two thousand and fourteen, there was a group of hackers, although some people don't call them hackers, called the Lizard Squad, that brought down Xbox Live with d d o S attacks, which is distributed denial of service attacks. Um. The reason why simpler approach, Yeah, it's it's kind of I mean, you have to know what you're doing in order to get the software you need, but that that's a pretty

low bar. Uh. There's software out there that you can get that you can use to help launch a d d o S attack against a target, and if the target is vulnerable to such things, then you can really slow down or perhaps even crash that system. And that seems to be what happened a couple of times at

the end of November two fourteen with Xbox Live. Uh. And then There was also at the end of November a bill that would have limited essay surveillance tactics that fail in the the U. S. Senate, although it had already been approved in the House of Representatives and had executive backing. So we almost got a bill that would have placed some sort of limitations and checks on n s A surveillance,

but at the last minute that did not happen. You know, after all of these hacks and security compromises and people being jerks on the Internet, I need something to inspire me. Okay, how about the next step in space exploration being a complete success or Bell's complete success as you can imagine. Are you talking about Orian? I'm talking about Orion, so Ryan. The Orian spacecraft was originally part of the Constellation program

at NASA. Now, the Constellation program was eventually dissolved, but the Orion spacecraft was obviously maintained. It was going to continued to be developed and uh. In December of two thousand and fourteen, NASA launched the Orion spacecraft in an unmanned test of the new capsule. It's designed to take astronauts below low Earth orbit. You know, when the last time anyone went beyond low Earth orbit was h I do.

It was in nineteen seventy two, the last Apollo mission December nineteen seventy two, and Apollo seventeen went to the Moon. It's kind of hard for people to imagine that and sit there and think about it for a second. It's been more than forty years since anybody went more than a few hundred miles from the surface of the Earth. Right. Yeah, you might think, well, what about all that time in between, but that was all spent in lower th orbit, which extends out quite a ways before you get to medium

Earth orbit and then high Earth orbit. I'm still not positive about this, but I think that the highest altitude we ever achieved in the meantime was for the Hubble servicing missions, which is just a little bit farther out than the I S S. So, you know, this is a big deal. This is us going beyond that relatively nearby field of lower th orbit on so you have to couch everything in the term relative relatively because it's

still quite a ways out there. But yeah, but this is this is the program that would eventually allow us to send astronauts to first a captured asteroid. Is yes, Oriyan, Yeah, it has a crew capsule, yeah, that can hold up to four astronauts, so larger than the Apollo ones that could eventually land on an asteroid. And that was that

would be important for a lot of different reasons. Largely it would be a testing grounds for other technologies for us to for the for the next step, which is to eventually send a crew to Mars, which is phenomenal. That's a huge deal. We've talked about that several times

on our our sister podcast, Forward Thinking. So go to fw thinking dot com if you want to learn all about our quest to get to Mars, because we've covered it multiple times and had some great discussions about it, including how Mars is trying to kill you some of my favorites. Uh. Also in December, Microsoft begins to accept

bitcoin in a semi convoluted way. I didn't understand this note, I didn't read anything about this, all right, So you can purchase stuff through Microsoft services with bitcoins, but instead of buying things directly with a bitcoin, like saying this thing is worth point zero zero seven bitcoins or something, you apply bitcoins to an account, it gets converted into a different currency and then you can purchase things. So

there's a there's like a mid stop in there. Uh. Part of that is because the value of bitcoin fluctuates greatly and in just a short amount of time. There was one day when I was I was looking at it earlier this month, from nine am to noon, it fluctuated thirty dollars in value, from around three thirty bucks per bitcoin to three sixty And it was around the three mark when I when I actually looked. But it fluctuated.

When it fluctuates that much, it's really difficult to price something it seems like that's not like a currency, that's like a stock share. That's what I've often called it. I've thought of it more as a property than as a currency. Um. Sometimes I get yelled at for doing that, but that's what I I really think of it. When you've got a fluctuating value that that's that big in scale, you know, it's it's hard to call it a currency

at any rate. That That's how Microsoft is accepting bitcoins now. Um. Also in December, Ralph Bayer, who invented the home video game consoles, Yeah at age I need to he built something called the brown box, which sounds attractive, don't it. This became the Magnavox Odyssey. Uh so this was a game that would end up being copied and turned into one of the most famous arcade games of all time. Whoa, yeah, so the Magnavox Odyssey was the first game call sold

to hit the consumer market way back. Same year was the last time we went beyond lower thorbit in ninet so big year n went beyond lower thorbit for the last time, got home video game consoles for the first time. So there's a bright side to everything, I guess. At any rate, he's also known as the guy who invented the memory game Simon frustrating mess. I'll tell you what's frustrating the game Simon plays an important part in Paranormal

Activity five, and that movie is awful. You are kidding, right, They made a five. Yeah, they're made. They're working on six now. They they turned out two in one year, I think. But at any rate, yeah, Paranormal Activity five. Simon ends up being the equivalent of a Wuiji board

in that movie. Alright then, yeah, so at any rate, Uh, we're gonna skip over the next little note that I have in my notes because it's going back to the Sony Hack, which we pretty much covered, I think, but we do need to talk about one last thing that kind of is a story that branches the entire two thousand fourteen beyond hacking. If it weren't for the fact that the hacking storyline wasn't so pervasive in two thousand fourteen, I would say that two thousand and fourteen was the

year that the sharing economy really was put through the ringer. Now, this is the idea of services like Airbnb or Uber or lift, allowing people to kind of democratize these services. But as a lot of people have pointed out, these don't always come across as sharing so much as replacements for already existing industry, some of which are under lots of regulation. Right. I mean, I have been to some cities before where we could have gotten a hotel room

but instead we got Airbnb, and that's that. Could have gotten a taxi but instead we got an Uber. Uh. I've used Uber and Uh, and I would think of it as more of a taxi service. I don't think of it as like something of the sharing economy. I think of it as a replacement for a taxi service. And and that's the that's the issue. Right, You've got these other industries like the taxi the taxi industry saying, look, we have to obey by this these regulations that have

been put down on us. These guys don't have that. They are operating under a different set of rules, and it's not fair to us. And you know, you could argue, well, the taxi industry, that's not really fair because it's you might have multiple companies, but really it's the only game in town, right. They're all so closely related that you can't you can't really judge one against the other to say, oh, well, I'll go with this one because it's a better deal

for me or whatever. However, if you have a business move in that's essentially doing the same thing but doesn't have to obey the rules, that's not really fair either. So there's there's this ongoing discussion about one does it really does it really make sense to call it a sharing economy too? How do we regulate this? How does how do we make sure that they're obeying the rules the way we've said, these other companies have to obey

the rules. So, um, if it hadn't been for all the hacks, I think that that's really what we'll be talking about the most today. But the hacks take president obviously. I mean, they're they're more spectacular, and they really do impact us. I mean everybody, not just the big companies

that got targeted. Oh no, I mean when the companies were targeted, it was a lot of times consumers who were the real target that they were the the hackers were either trying to influence consumer behavior, public opinion, or we're trying to get consumer data in order to make use of that. Um. I mean, it's something that we're all facing. It's the the year of cyber insecurity, right right, So you know that kind of wraps up the year that I mean, that was a pair of episodes to

really go into those big stories. Joe, is there anything else about two thousand and fourteen that you just feel that, you know, we didn't didn't address that needs to be said. I would say something clever here, but there's nothing clever in my entire brain. Yeah, I'm I'm at that to be fair, Joe. We are at the end of this year and it has been a really tough, awesome, but tough year. So we're we're starting to feel it. We're slogging through the last few days of two thousand and fourteen.

Why don't you talk us out, sir. I will. So here's one thing I would say that we have to look forward to in two thousand and fifteen. Uh, you guys may not be aware of this, but how stuff works dot Com, we are relocating our office. We're moving to a totally different part of town. We're still still going to be in Atlanta, but it's we're really excited about the new office space are our podcast studio is going to be a little more cozy, a little less

exposed to the sirens of outside. Yeah, if you've heard any sirens today in this podcast, then Uh. We hope that because the new audio studios are going to be internal rooms, they're not going to share a wall with it the outside wall, that we won't have that problem anymore. So we're looking forward to that. We're looking forward to having two different video studios to shoot in, not just one. We're looking forward to being directly over a collection of

amazing sounding restaurants. They're all going to be really close to us. So it's we're really excited. So in two thousand and fifteen, after we get through the first month or so, you're going to hear probably some enthusiasm and your various how stuff Works podcasts that you listen to that hasn't been there for a while, simply because we're all going to be excited about our new digs. So

keep an ear out for that. And maybe at some point we'll do a neat little video tour of the office, kind of like the way Chuck did when we moved into the space where in Now. That would be fun. I think to do that once we've got it laid out, because we're gonna have an amazing table. We've heard so much about this table. We're going to have the question mark table. Oh yeah, question mark table. It's shaped like

a question mark. Yeah. We'll have us all walking around asking why yeah, or or someone sitting at the top curve of the question mark called dr Evil style and laughing maniacally. That's somebody trying to sit across from him. But I called I called Dibbs. All right, Well, that wraps up this discussion. Guys. If you have any suggestions for a future episodes of tech Stuff, please let us know. Send us an email the addresses tech stuff at how

stuffworks dot com. You can drop me a line on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumbler. The handle there is tech Stuff hs W. Joe, I didn't ask you in the last episode. Where can people find your stuff? Well, you can head over to fw thinking dot com where I am one of the co hosts of the podcast there along with Jonathan and Lauren Vogelbaum, and you can find the videos we do

for Forward Thinking and the blog posts. And also I write for House to Works video So if you want to check out brain Stuff show dot com or are what the Stuff videos on our on the House to Works YouTube channel, I'm there as well. Awesome. And then occasionally you pop up another series like I remember seeing you on the Food Series as a oh yeah, sauce aficionado. You know, one time I ate the hottest pepper in the world and got some video of it and that

was exciting. I showed up on YouTube. It was great. It was great. So thank you so much Joe for joining me. Hey, guys, I just need to add one little thing. At the end of this episode. I know some of you will be at ce S two thousand fifteen, and I wanted to invite you to swing by and say hello to me. I'll be at the Sharp Booth on Tuesday and Wednesday checking out the cool stuff they're unveiling this year. Now, I made a stuper secret pinky swear not to reveal the goodies will be showing, but

let's just say jaws are going to drop. Sharp will be in the Central Hall Booth eleven O one eight, and I heard they'll also be giving away some exciting prizes from their new two thousand fifteen lineup. I look

forward to seeing you guys there. To learn more about all of the exciting things Sharp is doing, follow the hashtag Sharp c E S. And remember, if you want to send me a message, just write me at text stuff at how stuff works dot com or drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler to handle it. All three is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot Com