TechStuff's Spooky Halloween Spectacular!

I I should feel badly about it, but I don't. Nope, But in celebration of Halloween, we are going to take a look at spooky thick or you know, scary tech, or at least some technology that could at least be kind of creepy. See here's the problem running into y'all. I've already done an episode about tech in Haunted House Attraction, so that's finished. I already did one on ghost hunting technology years ago where I gave a skeptical view of

what all that was about. And sooner or later, after you do a few years of a technology podcast, you start to run out of the fun stuff like that. So for this episode, I turned to the house Stuff Works website and I pulled up a classic article, which is also always a dangerous thing when you're talking technology. But this article is titled ten scary modern technologies. It was co written by David Ruse and my former editor

and Tech Stuff co host Chris Pallette. So get ready for some tech that goes bump in the night, I guess. And actually, to be more serious, the technology I'm listing here does not fall into the supernatural or ghostly categories at all. The technology represents stuff that could be unsettling or at worst could call as massive enormous problems due to overreach or unintended consequences. So there are some serious entries in here, even though I'm having a little bit

of fun with the presentation. So let us get started. Number ten on the list hollow Sonics and the Audio Spotlight System. This is more in the creepy, unsettling vein technology that focuses sound. That's what this is all about. It's focusing sound into a narrow beam, which provides the opportunity for ultra targeted sound for stuff like advertising. It's

not necessarily creepy, but not necessarily welcome either. But imagine that you're walking through a store and just as you're passing in front of a certain store item, let's say it's cookie crisp cereal, and you start hearing a voice whispering to you, Hey, that cookie crisp looks pretty good. It might seem really weird, this little disembodied voice, and as soon as you get past a certain point, you

can't hear it anymore. You just have this experience. As you're going through the store, you keep hearing these targeted sounds in very narrow spots, and as soon as you're out of those spots, you can't hear it. That sounds pretty creepy, right, Well, how does it work well? According to the company, the secret is in the size of the sound waves compared to the size of the sound source.

The company states that if you have a sound source that is much larger than the comparable size of the sound waves it's producing, you get more directionality out of your sound, so you can focus it more like a beam. So if you were to create loudspeakers that are much much, much larger than the sound waves they're producing, and sound waves can measure from a few inches up to several feet in size, you could direct those sound waves in a beam, more like a directional beam, rather than having

them propagate outward in all equal directions. But that would not work very well for something like targeted advertising, because you would have to have these enormous speakers perched behind the cheerios, and that would be very distracting. So this company has gone with an approach that has these devices producing ultrasonic beams of sound. Ultrasonic sound ways are very very tiny. They're also normally imperceptible, at least directly. They

are imperceptible to us. We cannot hear in this frequency. They do have a very strong directionality as a result of the way they are generated. Uh So, according to the company, as the ultrasonic beam travels through the air, the inherent properties of the air caused the ultrasound to change shape in a predictable way. This gives rise to frequency components in the audible band which can be accurately predicted and therefore precisely controlled. By generating the correct ultrasonic signal,

we can create within the air itself any sound desired. So, in other words, it's the interaction of these ultrasonic frequencies with the air itself that causes the ultrasonic frequencies to change, and then you produce these audible frequencies. And because this is all very controllable in a predictable environment, you can produce whatever sounds you want. This is based off the work of an inventor named Woody Norris. He demonstrated this technology at a TED talk in the early two thousands.

Rather than generating the audible sound on the face of the speaker as a traditional speaker would, where the speakers moving a diaphragm in and out and pushing air around, the ultrasonic emitter creates a column of the air itself to act like a speaker, which is pretty nifty. I'm sorry, I meant spooky. Number nine DNA hacking. So back in two thousand three, scientists finished mapping out the human genome. But that was obviously just the beginning. That's just uh,

a long list of base pairs um. Next came the work to examine the genome closely and determine which bait base pairs in the more than three billion pairs that make up the human genome are responsible for different stuff like our uh possibility of developing a disease, for example, Because if you could determine that, and if you could determine a way of changing that part of the DNA so that it's eliminated, maybe you could make someone not

develop that disease. You could potentially wipe out certain diseases. And beyond that, what about hacking the human genome so that we can create designer human beings, human beings who have traits that we consider to be superior. Now that's the stuff of lots of science fiction and horror cautionary tales, stuff like Gattica saying, yeah, but who gets to decide

what is superior? And what happens to people who aren't able to take advantage of that technology, and what happens to the people who do take advantage of that technology. There are a lot of ethical questions around it. However, beyond that, there are other scary things to consider. DNA hacking could allow for individually focused biological warfare. So imagine that you're living in a world and someone can get access to your DNA. Maybe they get a skin sample

or some hair or something. They're able to get something from you that has traces of your DNA in it, and they're able to analyze your DNA and see what makes you you and look for any vulnerabilities. Maybe they find out that you have a predisposed weakness to a particular type of virus and then the engineer a virus

to attack you. Specifically. That was actually the premise of a two thousand twelve article in The Atlantic, and that article hypothesized the future in which the President of the United States could be targeted and assassinated through the use of a particularly nasty virus that was Taylor made for the aden yikes. Or imagine more than that, maybe a widespread plague unless Stephen King's the stand engineered through a deep understanding of DNA paired with a really crappy containment strategy.

So how realistic is all of that? Well, in the short term, it's probably not terribly realistic. It's certainly possible, but not necessarily plausible. But it does require a deep understanding of DNA and a means to manipulate it easily in order to pay it off. We've seen some advances in those areas. There are a lot more ways that we can manipulate DNA than there used to be, but not exactly easy to do. It's easy, year, but that's

that's a matter of degrees. However, you can make a convincing argument that it would not require too deep and understanding to cause real harm. Unintentionally, and that would be a very difficult argument to counter. And while DNA hacking could produce all sorts of different futuristic results, we do already have a culture of bio hackers also sometimes known as grinders, who have taken body alteration to new places. These folks are not working on a DNA level, They're

not changing themselves fundamentally in that way. Instead, they're doing alterations, you know, upgrades. So one example would be there are people who have chosen to have small magnets implanted under the skin of their fingertips. Say, these little nubby magnets sticking out on their fingertips kind of weird, right, Well, what's the purpose of that. Well, because of the effects of magnetism and electromagnetism, they would actually be able to

sense when they were near magnetic or electromagnetic fields. So it'd be kind of like Spider Man's spiky sense. They'd feel tugging on their fingertips as they passed through it. So instead of detecting danger like Spider Man would, you'd be able to tell like whether or not electricity was flowing through a conductor, for example, because you could bring your fingers close to that conductor. Maybe it's some wires.

You bring your fingers close and if you start feeling the pulses from an alternating magnetic field of fluctuating magnetic field, that would tell you, oh, electricity, alternating current is flowing through here, because I can feel it in my fingertips. That would be something you normally would not be able to feel. So you kind of have a sixth sense due to having these magnets implanted in your fingertips. And people have actually done this, however, a word of caution.

From what I understand, these operations are pretty painful. They usually are not done with an esthetic. There's not really a place you can go that's medically you know, license to do this because it's not a it's not a standard medical procedure. As far as I know, there are no accredited medical facilities that do it. I think any doctor who did practice this would have uh the danger

of being barred from practice. So you're usually talk about entrepreneuring body modification specialists, you know, like piercers, who will do this kind of operation. And anytime you're talking about introducing something foreign to the body, you're also raising other risks like infection. So you've got to be super duper careful about that kind of thing. In other words, you're not gonna find me putting magnets under my fingertips anytime soon.

Number eight on the list cyber war Oh boy. Well, the scenario the article specifically lays out is an all out cyber warfare attack where one nation targets another nation's infrastructure, like it's power grid system or water system. And sure enough, the U. S Department of Homeland Security has reported that there's lots of evidence to show that various hackers have infiltrated critical infrastructure with such tactics like Russian hackers and

the things like power plants and gas pipelines. And that's terrifying. And before that report had even made the news that was in security experts have for years been warning that Chinese hackers have been infiltrating American infrastructure. CNN reported on that back in two thousand and fourteen. So this is not exactly a new story. It's a continuing story that continues to be really problematic and concerning. So the infiltration

part is a reality. We know for a fact hackers from other countries have infiltrated various systems there have been traces found of their activities, so we know that there have at least been people snooping around our systems. Whether or not they've installed anything to help shut stuff down as another matter, but they've definitely been there, and they appeared to have been there from places like Russia and China.

That does not automatically mean that the infiltration was state directed, in other words, that it was a government backed project, but that seems to be the general role. Consensus is that these were likely the activities of a state back group of hackers. What about shutting everything down? Is that realistic? Well, it could be more challenging to do, but not necessarily impossible. Many utilities have started installing self healing systems. Self healing

system isn't quite as cool as it sounds like. It's not like it's Wolverine and infrastructure form, but it does involve having a system that when it detects problems, automatically tries to reroute services to get around those problems. So with a power grid, it might be if a smart power grid system detects that there's a short that some reason, or there's a a break in connectivity at some point, it may try to reroute power to work around that as much as possible. That could help confound a cyber

warfare attack a little bit. At least it might mitigate the impact of an attack, um though preventing one entirely maybe not. But then there are also attacks on other systems, not just power grids and and water and gas, which are all scary enough. But there's the evidence that showed Russian hackers were targeting election systems in the United States leading up to the twenty sixteen elections. I talked about this in a recent episode of Tech Stuff, so I'm

not gonna go all the way through it again. But the really insidious thing about those attacks is they don't even have to be super successful to be effective. If you can so doubt in the minds of a nation's citizens as to the validity of any given election, you have undermined the very foundation of that nation's government. A government that doesn't have the confidence of its population is on shaky ground and has to move more and more

towards totalitarianism in order to maintain power. If you don't have any confidence that your system works, then you don't have any confidence in your government at all. So cyber war is something that is continuing right now. It is actually happening. It is already in place. And obviously I've given examples of how the US has been the target of cyber warfare, but don't forget the US has engaged

in it too. We're not, you know, the United States has not been just the poor victim in all these cases. The United States has certainly played a hand in cyber warfare activities. One example would be stuck s net, the computer virus that was designed to sabotage uranium enrichment facilities in Iran. So this is not something that everyone else is doing and the United States is the victim. This is something that everyone is doing as much as they

can and stepping it up as much as they can. Well, we have a lot more scary technology to talk about, but I need to have a sip of tea to comfort myself. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Number seven is the technological singularity. Now, out of all the science fiction ideas I find particular liarly interesting, this one ranks near the top of them. The singularity refers to a general concept that could be brought about in several different ways, but from a very high level. The

idea goes something like this. Imagine that technology has advanced to the point that the newest stuff coming out is already designing the next generation of stuff. And imagine that the gaps between these generations are getting smaller and smaller, and eventually you reach a point where the present is defined by constant change, and that's the only way you can define it. Because things change so quickly it is almost impossible to describe the present in any coherent way.

That's how quickly everything is evolving. The thing that would fuel this would be the emergence of superhuman intelligence in most of the scenarios that involve the technological singularity. However, that would not necessarily require just, uh, you know, a computer AI. That's one possible version is pure artificial intelligence that has superhuman capabilities and processing information. This is your basic deep thought from the Hitchecker's Guide to the Galaxy

or sky Net from the terminator that scenario. This would be a scenario in which we humans have created an AI so powerful we are unable to control it, and then it goes on to redefine our world in ways that we could not anticipate because we cannot operate on the same level as this superhuman intelligence, but that is not necessarily the only pathway to the technological singularity. Another way might be that humans find a way to boost our own intelligence and thus we evolve beyond what we

traditionally think of as being human. We might do this through a deeper understanding of biology. We could boost our intelligence that way, going back to the concept of d n A hacking and things related to that. Or it might involve using technology to create cyborg like beings where we merge with technology on some level, and with tech and biology working to get other we boost our intelligence

to new levels and achieve superhuman intelligence that way. So bottom line, is this a possibility, Well, it beats me. But there are a lot of super smart people who are on either side of this issue. So some people say the singularity is essentially a foregone conclusion. It will happen. The only question is when will it happen. But there are other people who say there might be some fundamental barriers that were not likely to get over and those

barriers will block the singularity from ever happening. One of the frequent criticisms of various UH singularity scenarios is that a lot of it rests on the belief that we're gonna see progress continue on a pace that's similar to what Moore's law has observed with computer processing power. And the thing is that pace may not be realistic or

sustainable or even applicable to some technologies. So Moore's law applies to uh to the processing power of computers generally speaking, but they may not apply to other elements that would be necessary to bring about superhuman intelligence, because processing power by itself is not intelligence. You also have to have the software side. You've got a lot of other pieces that have to be in place. However, if it is possible, it could very well mean the end of the human

race as we know it today. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of humanity entirely. It just may mean that humanity will transition into something different, So it could be a new beginning. It's not necessarily the end of everything, but still spooky. Number six Google Glass, I mean that was the number on the on the article Google. You remember Google glass, the augmented reality glasses. Back when Chris and Dave were working on this article, Google glass

was still a real thing. It was it was poised to become an actual, a consumer product outside of the relatively small sample of bleeding edge adopters a k a. Glass holes. We were sometimes called that because I was one of them. I had a pair of Google glass The glasses were part augmented reality headset, part user interface

for the world around you. They included a camera which could pull in information, and a Bluetooth chips so the glasses could communicate with a paired mobile device, and through that mobile device, the glasses could also pair information like GPS coordinates. So these glasses, while giving you potentially incredible access to information about the world around you, could also gather information about the world around you for the benefit

of Google. And suddenly this company could potentially access information from cameras mounted on faces all over the world. And the glasses also had microphones, because you know, you could use voice commands to make your glasses do stuff. But that also meant that in very Google could listen in as well, not just see everything, but here thing, which raises some big privacy concerns, not just for the people

wearing the glasses, but for everyone around those people. And Google makes money with information, so you would effectively be generating product for Google to sell. By wearing a pair of those glasses and walking around everywhere, Google would be the head of a big surveillance state, far more invasive than a network of closed circuit cameras if such technology was used on ethically. And while Google Glass is now far more limited in its rollout, you know you only

see it in a few industries. At this point, the company Google is still very much in the business of knowing where it's customers are. In August two thousand eighteen, numerous tech journals reported on a study that was conducted by Douglas C. Schmidt of Vanderbilt University. That's say said that a stationary Android phone running Chrome in the background would ping Google servers with location data three forty times

in a twenty four hour period. Even if you turn the low in history feature off of the phone, the phones were still sending location data back to Google, according to the study. Google, by the way, has disputed the findings of the study. Then there are the numerous personal assistant devices that are out there, including Google Home, that also are always listening for commands. And of course that's just Google. There are other companies out there, like Apple

and Amazon that also have technologies similar to these. All of these could be monitoring users and sending data back so that the companies might later exploit that information for profit, usually to sell you stuff to advertise directly to you. But that's still pretty creepy, right. Even if the companies are not actively exploiting that information, the fact that the data could be transmitted and recorded at all is problematic.

Though again I should say the companies generally say they do not record user data in that way, so that's a relief right. Number five drones. Drones are legit creepy. Many drones have cameras mounted on them. That does allow potential filmmakers unprecedented access and capabilities. Now, a low budget film can have the equivalent of an expensive crane shot. It's a fraction of what it would cost to rent and operate a film crane with all the associated personnel,

the safety features, all that kind of stuff. You could reduce all that down to an operator and a drone and it would be much less expensive. But it also means a drone operator who's using one of these devices could use it to do stuff like peeping. Super darn creepy to be spying on neighbors and stuff. That's just the consumer technology version of drones that is already troubling. But then you have to remember there's also tons of military grade drones, and they're being used to do everything

from surveillance work to active strikes on military targets. Weaponized drones. These drones may be semi autonomous or completely under the control of an operator who's potentially hundreds of miles away. They greatly extend the surveillance capabilities of various government agencies

and divisions, from military to law enforcement. In the United States, Congress passed a bill in two thousand twelve giving the Federal Aviation Administration or f a A, the authority to drop rules for commercial and police drones in US airspace. The FAA hasn't been super fast to share that information.

That prompted the Electronic Frontier Foundation or e f F to sue the f a A under the Freedom of Information Act to at least share a list of the public entities and private drone manufacturers that applied to flight drones in the United States, as well as thousands of pages related to license applications. But the f a A didn't, you know, explain how those entities were planning on using

the drones. So that's a problem. Number four three D printers. Well, I just recently talked about Maker Bought, and maybe you think the scariest thing about three D printers is that they could lead to minor RNs as you try to deal with melting plastic. But in fact there are other things to worry about as well, like fake A t

M facades. See back in two thousand eleven, some thieves used a three D printer to create a false front for an A t M terminal, and they installed a skimmer on some A t M s so unsuspecting customers would come up and it would look like a real A t M front that you couldn't necessarily tell immediately that there was a projection on there that was a false front. So they would put their uh, their A

t M card into this. They would then type in their pen and meanwhile the skimmer was actually scanning the data on the card and recording it with the pin and allowing the thieves to steal more than four hundred thousand dollars in the process. And you know, all it took was a three D printer to create that that convincing a t M facade. In two thousand thirteen, a guy named d Wilson made headlines when he published files for his three D printed Liberator handgun, which fired three

a D ammunition. That's scared a ton of people because it means that anyone who had access to a three D printer and the appropriate materials could have the opportunity to make an untraceable weapon. There'll be no background check required because you just print the thing out. And it

also raised other possible problems. If the plastic were not of a sufficiently good enough quality, it could mean that the printed gun would not contain the explosive reaction properly when you fire the bullet, so it could end up breaking a part in the person's hand, causing injury to

the person holding the guns. So even if the person who had printed the three D gun did so as kind of just a proof of concept and they're firing at, you know, just a paper target, there's the possibility that the gun itself could explode or or fracture as part of this if it weren't made out of sufficiently strong material, and severe injury could follow. Cody Wilson, I should add,

has recently been in the news again. He resigned his role as director of Defense Distributed, the company that he used to promote the design and distribution of three D printaple gun files. It's unrelated to the gun side of things, so that organization still exists and continues to push Wilson's

vision even without Wilson at the helm. I've got some more spooky things to talk about, but I grew tired, so I need the goal and drink from blood, and by blood I mean Earl great t I'll be right back if through this word from our sponsors number three driverless cars, this is a h's still a big worry. UM. Back when Chris and Dave we're writing this driverless cars, we're still kind of out of the very very limited

testing situations. Google was the best known version. But now we actually have some at least some rudimentary UM automated car systems out there in the real world, like Tesla's autopilot, which has contributed to some notable accidents, including a fatality. UM. Tesla has said that this system was not meant to be used as h and a driverless car solution, but people have still done it because you hear a word like autopilot and you want to test it out, I guess. Um,

So that has been an issue. It has raised concerns that perhaps this autonomous car technology is nowhere near ready for full rollout, which I think most companies that are working on the technology would say is correct. They're still

working on the tech to make it a reality. Um. There have been a lot of stuff, a lot of stories published about various problems, philosophical problems that you need to resolve in order to make a consistent and predictable autonomous car solution, one of them being the infamous trolley problem. The basic version of the trolley problem is that you've got our out of control trolley. It's going down some tracks and there's a switch that will allow you to

change the pathway of the trolley. And if the trolley continues where it's path where it's going now, um, it's going to collide with a group of people. If you throw the switch, it will change the direction of the trolley and it will collide with one person. Do you throw the switch? If you do nothing, then maybe you feel like I'm not involved. Therefore, my decision did not affect anybody that it just played out the way it

was gonna play out. If I throw the switch, is that I am actively condemning that other person to death? Other people would say no, by not choosing, you've actively chosen to condemn the first group to death. Uh. There are variations of this problem. Maybe you say, all right, well you've got a choice. You can uh not throw a switch, which means the out of control trolley will eventually come to a stop, but everyone in the trolley is going to die as a result of this accident.

Or you can throw the switch and the trolley will hit somebody, but the trolley will stop and everyone who's in the trolley will survive. So either you actively kill someone but everyone in the trolley lives, or you don't do anything and everyone in the trolley dies, but the person who is just innocently crossing the pathway they live.

These sort of ethical problems are things that people talk about and debate amongst themselves, but it turns out to be an actual practical problem when you're designing autonomous car systems, because eventually you have to build in some sort of decision making system for a car in the event that it it encounters a non avoidable car accident that all the problems have aligned in such a way that there is no possible outcome in which there isn't a car accident.

So what does the car do? Does it behave in a way that preserves the life of the person writing in the car? Does it behave in a way that preserves the life of the people in the surrounding area. There are a lot of tough questions to answer, So M. I. T. Published a paper from a quiz called the Moral Machine. This quiz was designed to find out what people thought should be given priority in these situations, and it was distributed globally across social media platforms. They recorded forty million

ethical decisions in total. Global preference had certain consistencies. By the way, generally speaking, people prefer to spare human lives over animal lives. So if you had an option where you can make a choice, but this animal will die as a result, or you can make a choice or that human will die, people would say, well, it's a shame, but I'd rather choose where the animal dies. Also, people in general would choose to spare more lives rather than

fewer lives. So in my example with the group of people versus the one person, more people would feel comfortable with the one person losing their life as opposed to the group of people. Also, people in general want to spare children's lives more than adult lives, so this really just showed people's preferences in ethical decisions. However, the study authors stated that experts really should be the ones to make the final call when designing these algorithms, that just

going by public preference alone may not be the best decision. However, another thing to remember is that in st seven thousand people died from car accidents. If driverless cars can reduce that number year by year, if we can find a way to driverless cars more reliable so that it reduces the overall number of fatal accidents, that would be an incredible thing and it would definitely be a good argument

in support for autonomous cars. It is, however, that there is possible that there's a psychological barrier of a machine quote unquote causing deaths, and that that could be enough to screw things up, because while you might be able to statistically state fewer people died because there were autonomous cars, the fact that the cars were autonomous and then people died has a psychological effect. You're thinking, oh, it's a

machine killing a person. Number two geo engineering. So this is the use of science and technology to you know, quote unquote hack the planet. This is one of those ideas that's meant to help counteract problems like climate change. So the scientific consensus tells us, yes, there is climate change, and yes it is largely due to human causes, chiefly the increase of CEO two in the atmosphere along with

other greenhouse gasses. So by creating technologies designed to capture and sequester carbon dioxide so that it's not in the atmosphere anymore, we could help slow or maybe even stop the process of climate change. But the thing is, we don't know for sure that some of these proposals would work or what the other consequences of those actions might be. One of the uh, well, some of the proposed methods

would definitely have nasty consequences. We know that. So, for example, one possibility would be, let's put some more iron in the oceans in order to spur algae blooms to soak up carbon dioxide, which that could help you could actually soak up CEO two from the atmosphere. However, that would also have a huge negative impact on the ocean itself.

You would create dead zones in the ocean because of this algae bloom, and that means messing up a really complicated ecosystem that lots of life forms depend upon, including life forms that aren't, you know, directly in the ocean, so you would have a ripple effect. Fittingly enough, since we're talking about water, you could have die offs happening other places in the world that are a result of this, and you know, not even places where there are oceans,

so unintended consequences could be really, really nasty. Another tactic besides trying to capture CEO two is to find ways to reflect more of the Sun's energy back off into space without it getting absorbed by the Earth and then

admitted back into the art's atmosphere. The message here is that the cure could end up being worse or at least just as bad as the disease, though in a different way, and ultimately we'll be taking a lot of potentially irreversible actions without a full appreciation of what was going to happen. However, if we employ these sponsibly and carefully, it's likely that we could use them as part of an overall plan to help reduce climate change. Experts warn

us that these are not magic bullets. These are not going to miraculously reverse the course that we've seen over the last few decades. They would at best be a good additional strategy along with reducing our carbon dioxide emissions, that would be our most important action to take. We can't just assume that we're going to come up with a technological solution that will allow us to continue to behave the way we've been behaving and magically erase the

consequences of those actions. That's just not a realistic outlook at this point. Number one on the list from Chris and Dave was internet surveillance, which kind of ties back into that Google problem I mentioned earlier, but it goes well on that. So internet surveillance comes in all sorts

of forms. Right the social media we use when we do our actions on their, all of that's getting tracked, All of that is going into various tech boxes based on our profiles, so that we are encountering the ads that are closest tied to our behavior, so that we have the most uh the most incentive to click on

those ads or to act on them. In some way, thus benefiting the company that makes the social platform as well as the company that's doing the advertising, and whatever company is ultimately in charge of the product or service

that is being advertised. So there's that there are companies like Google that are taking this to extremes, tracking all sorts of behaviors for all sorts of stuff, so that whenever we're doing searches, we're also getting served up search results that are catered to us more and more, which in some ways is good, you know, you're getting stuff that is more relevant to you, and in other ways comes across as super creepy because it means that there's

this enormous corporation out there that might know you better

than you know yourself, and that's kind of worrisome. But then you have other things like the n s A, which a couple of years ago was famously revealed that the n s A was tapping into all sorts of different communication tools two spy on on communications between lots of different people in an effort to to promote national security, But you could argue it was also a huge violation of people's expectation of privacy and that it also took

almost a presumed guilty approach and applied it to absolutely everybody who uses these these forms of communication, from cellular phones too, website traffic, to all sources of stuff. Then you have hackers, either state backed hackers who are are working too i on behalf of a government, or independent hackers who are just trying to gather as much information as possible to exploit it. Maybe that information is your

bank account, or maybe it's your social Security number. It could be all sorts of stuff, but ultimately they're doing it so they can make money and they have no real concern about what happens to you and your information. UH. Information is valuable, whether it's for a government to try and protect itself or the citizens that it represents. Ideally, we would like to at least see a government try

to protect the people it represents. Maybe that's being naive, uh, or if it's a you know, a corporation that's doing this in order to make a profit, or a hacker that's doing this in order to make a profit in an even more unethical way than the corporations are. Information is valuable. It's also a good reminder of why you should do stuff like use VPNs when you can so that you can protect your activity from prying eyes and not have to worry quite so much about your every

move being spied upon. Uh, don't use public WiFi, especially to do anything sensitive. You know, be careful, be responsible with your browsing activities so that you limit the ways that you can be exploited. I'm not saying don't make use of these various platforms social media. I'd be a hypocrite if I did. I use them all the time. Just know what you're getting into and be aware of what could potentially happen. If you're comfortable with those consequences,

I say, you're all good. If you're not, then you need to think about ways you can change your behavior, whether it's using VPNs or backing off on using the Internet as much, or whatever it may be, so that you feel you're using technology to benefit you as opposed to having other people receive a benefit because of you. Don't be used. In other words, now, as I say that, I think you should also go to t public dot com slash tech stuff. We got a merchandise store. It's awesome.

You can go buy stuff and every purchase helps the show. Again, hypocrite, I know, but that's why it's spooky. Hey, guys, if you want to get in touch with me and talk about how scared you are after the spooky episode, you can go over to text stuff podcast dot com. That's our website. You'll find all the contact information there. Check it out, and uh I will haunt you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com