Rudy Giuliani ordered to pay $150 million; Verizon gives woman’s phone records to stalker; Discord bans misgendering; Twitter ads get gross; Women in AI are sick of sexist questions; Is ChatGPT on winter break? – NEWS ROUNDUP

Can you give me a low level, petty internet gripe that's been grinding your gears online or intech or in culture lately?

that I came here to do. Adobe Acrobat is a pretty bad offender in this category. I like, every time I open it, there's some little pop up telling me about something that I don't care about.

You know, your daily mails of the world, and you have to be so intentional and careful where you hover your mouth because if you accidentally click off the article in any way, you could be looking at a pop up like auto playing a video that breaks the entire thing. I can't tell you how many times I've pulled up an article on my phone, so many things start to load and break that I'm just like, oh, I guess I'll never know. I'd nope right out of that so quick.

these prices have really gone up. I was curious later when I got to my destination, so I did a bit of googling and I found this Reddit thread about how the prices at McDonald's maybe seem like they have gotten higher, but that if you use their app you can actually get really good deals with all these tips and tricks on how to combine purchases so that you

could really save money. And I was thinking, why do I have to You know, I understand that they want McDonald's wants to incentivize people to download their app, but shouldn't the prices just be the prices? Like why do I have to engage with an app just to get whatever price on my whatever I'm buying at McDonald's. I you know, I do a lot of traveling, and sometimes when I travel, I'll use wherever I'm at, like their version of the bike share program, like DC has Capitol

bike Share. I probably have four different apps on my phone from countries that not only do I not live in, I'll probably not be visiting again anytime soon for their specific bike share program. It just really adds up. Not everything needs to be an app people.

to download an app. I'm in my seventies. I'm not going to download your app. I think she called it, like, I will not cowtowt are these bully tactics, And I'm one hundred percent on her team, Like you should not if a city service requires you to engage with an app even if you don't want to, that is not an accessible city service. Not everything needs to be an app. I hope this woman never pays that. Fine. She is a hero in my eyes.

their home to try to make a citizen's arrest. Well, the verdict is in and Giuliani has been ordered to pay the women almost one hundred and fifty million dollars in damages. What's even wilder about this is that during the court proceedings, Giuliani's lawyers conceded that there was no proof to the lies that he spread about the women

who were just trying to do their jobs. But then Rudy Giuliani went outside the courthouse and told the media that he stood by those lies that the two women tampered with votes during the election, even as in court he and his attorneys conceded that wasn't true. Listen story, and it.

of trying to help folks in their community vote. They risked facing even more attacks by bravely testifying about what they experienced at the hands of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani. And while I am very glad that they got money for what they went through. God knows they deserve it. Nothing can make it right, and it should not have happened in the first place. We should have a country that values the women, and let's be clear, most of them are women statistically who do the work at polling

places and vote counting center that make democracy function. And when those folks face attacks, it threatens democracy for all of us. Protecting democracy ought to be a value that we stick to. Speaking of sticking to their values, as we know, Twitter has told their advertisers to go f themselves as a value. Let's find out how that's working for them. Bit of a warning here, because this is

going to get a little bit gross. I believe that it looks like Twitter has been really scraping the bottom of the barrel for advertisers these days, and this has got to be a new low. Because I saw this ad for some kind of a like semen stealing company. I know that sounds weird, but it's like a home insimination kit, basically advertising that you can collect semen and make yourself pregnant without the man's consent. So not only is that like just physically grows and like sticky and yucky,

but also it is ethically gross. The kit appears to be an actual, real product, but it's not clear to me if this is like an ad campaign that is real or just designed to get people talking about it to get viral attention. I mean, we're talking about it. Some people have suggested that the ads are promoting a legal behavior, but it actually turns out that there are not laws against stealing seamen, which I was surprised to find. I was like, oh, certainly this is Twitter making money

by promoting illegal activity. Not so. But just because it's not illegal does not mean that it is ethical behavior

even though it's not like technically against the law. I know this sounds kind of outlandish, but listeners might remember a rumor, and I want to emphasize rumor about a certain Canadian rapper Drake, from a few years ago that he would allegedly put hot sauce in all of his used condoms after sexual encounters to prevent people that he was sleeping with from doing exactly what this ad suggests, i e. Stealing his sperm to try to get themselves pregnant. I have no idea if this is true or not.

I will say that, like, it does sound like an incredible amount of effort to go through to prevent someone from rooting through the garbage and then steal your seamen to impregnate themselves.

wants to see ads like this in their feed? It also has to be bad in terms of advertising revenue, which we know has been declining ever since Elon Musk took over, and I just think presumably it must have gotten worse since his whole telling advertisers to go at

themselves moment a couple of weeks ago. You know, ads on Twitter, Like, nobody likes looking at ads, but they used to be ads for things that you had heard of like real products that you're like, oh, sure, this product, that product, that brand, But lately I think they have really gone off the wall. I saw another set of ads on Twitter for one of those really gross newdify apps that promises to let users use AI to undress anyone without their permission. I actually find myself like blocking

certain obnoxious ads that just like keep popping up. I feel like they're like, at least when they were from real companies, they weren't so weird and over the top. So I could be wrong, but I imagine this company behind the you know, artificially surreptitiously infeminate yourself at home kit.

It's probably not a particularly large company, so the fact that their ads are all over Twitter really suggested to me that they got a great deal on these ads, which makes sense because Twitter's big advertisers are still fleeing the platform, so they probably have a ton of unsold ad inventory and they're just like giving great deals to whatever sketchy, borderline illegal or like, you know, maybe unechical

products want that space. Like right now, I've been getting so many ads on Twitter for clearly knockoff luxury handbags, which really takes me back to that conversation we had about TikTok, about how TikTok had to crack down on that, right, Like, if somebody is trying to sell you Louis Vuittona handbag that they say is legit for like forty dollars, it's probably a signal that like something weird, if not illegal,

is going on. But I say all this to say that if you are listening and you have a product that you would like to sell, and the brand alignment for that product is like Alex Jones denying that Sandy hook ever happened and calling murdered children crisis actors and ads for stealing semen, Twitter might be the place.

a transgender person. Glad outlined this change, and a report will link to the whole thing. Honestly, the whole thing

is worth a reading. It was very interesting. But something that they point out in this report is that transphobia, specifically things like misgendering and dead naming, has become a really reliable way for right wing grifters to build out their platforms online, which you know, I always knew innately, but I never really thought about it that much or really thought about how much I have seen that in

action until reading this report. The report reads the trope is extremely popular amongst high follower anti LGBTQ accounts, and is especially utilized to bully, mock, and harass prominent trans public figures. Admiral Rachel Levine, Dylan mulvaney, sixteen year old

Zaia Wade to name a few. This strategy of targeting well known people serves to escalate visibility and engagement on posts, while it also functions as a vehicle to express general hatred of trans and non binary people and the community

as a whole. They also make this other really interesting point which I never really thought about in these terms before, and that is the way that dead naming and misgendering famous people, especially as a way to get clicks and engagements through celebrity name dropping, is this like tried and true engagement tactic, which again I had just like never really thought about that before, because you know, your Ben Shapiro's and you're Jordan Peterson's of the world, Like, these

are people who certainly don't want to think of themselves as like making celebrity content, right, Like they would probably object to that, to that characterization of themselves. However, you do get attention and traction and engagement when you mention a celebrity because people like reading about celebrities, and so they're basically using celebrity, like using the meeting trans celebrities as a way to capitalize on the attention that comes

with talking about celebrity. But in a way that kind of lets them be like, well, because these people are like genuinely obsessed with celebrities like I. It's it's like a it's like a weird kind of anti standom where we're essentially, you know, the same thing that drives a young person to make an obsessive Tumbler account dedicated to

Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift fandom. It's like not totally dissimilar, just in the other direction, Like, these people are genuinely obsessed with celebrities and what's going on with them?

to help develop. Twitter actually used to be on the list of places that expressly prohibited dead naming and misgendering. However, it was like one of the very one of the first, if not the first policy that Elon rolled back once he took over Twitter. So now of course dead naming and transphobia runs rampant.

for everybody. So importantly, the announcement of these changes over at Discord also went along with some transparency around how it will be enforced, which is so important because a policy change without actual enforcement mechanisms is like just a wish, It doesn't really do anything. So critics of these kinds of policies usually make it seem like like, oh, just getting someone's name wrong once means they're gonna be banned, and that just like isn't really the case, and it's

not the case that Discord either. So Discord outlined the consequences of violating this new hateful conduct policy by explaining their warning system, so when a user is reported for breaking in the rules, they will get a direct message from Discord letting them know about that violation. Discord's actual actions and response to an infraction depend on the severity of harm, the type of user content, and that user's

history of past violations. Discord says that if the violation was not particularly severe, that person may lose these features for a few hours. If it was a repeated violate or a higher severity violation, they may lose some features

for a few days up to one year. And yeah, I think that really making it clear how this will work is key to any policy on social media, Like I think there needs to be transparency and also consistent enforcement, because that's when those when when policies don't have transparency and consistent enforcement, not only does it undermine those policies obviously, but it also just gives credence of people who are like, oh, well, this is just like the PC police that don't let

you say anything. You really need to have that consistency and transparency for these policies not just to have any teeth, but also to like help people understand that these policies are a good thing to actually allow people to have discourse online, and that these kinds of policies are not incongruous with you know, fostering Internet spaces to be places where people can actually meaningfully have discourse and enjoy the free speech that people you know love to talk.

anybody who is not a US citizen. But because of how broad that law is, many US citizens actually end up getting caught in it and surveilled as well, oftentimes without even really knowing it. This law has been widely

criticized by civil rights groups and privacy groups. So the bill Congress was supposed to be voting on this week would have specifically reformed a part of FIZA called Section seven ZH two, which allows the US government to demand access to data from communications companies like internet and cell phone service providers. So it's a pretty like astonishing and frightening level of surveillance because it allows law enforcement to not only see who is talking to who, but also

the content of their communications. It not only allows the government to target any foreign nationals communicating from outside the country, which is already pretty intense, but also the communications of whoever they might be talking to inside the country, including US citizens. So it is bad news for anybody who values things like privacy, and there is already a pretty well documented history of this being abuse already. It is one of those rare instances where there is bipartisan consensus

that this law is too broad and needs to be reformed. However, the bill Congress was planning to vote on this week would have taken things in another direction and expanded the surveillance aspect of FAISA to include not only telecommunication companies but also devices like Wi Fi routers. We'll throw a link in the show notes to a really good Vice article that does a nice job going into further details for anybody who's curious. Okay, Hi, this is Friday Bridget.

We've recorded this on Thursday, and there's actually been some new updates on this, So in the two days since we originally recorded this, the situation has changed. Although the house build that was designed to expand FISA was pulled at the last minute on Tuesday for lack of support. On Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson added a four month extension of FISA into the must pass National Defense Bill, which

Congress then approved. This was a pretty controversial move that's gotten a lot of criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, many of whom understandably did not want to extend the warrantless surveillance of Americans. So it looks like for now, faiza's Section seven h two will continue to be the law of the land until April twenty twenty four, and hopefully then Congress will finally reform this egregious violation of

all of our civil liberties. So speaking of telecommunications companies and our privacy just being put in the wrong hands, this is one of the most outrageous stories I have ever read in my entire life. So quick heads up that this story does involve stalking and abuse, and just like is one of the most horrific things I've ever heard. So Verizon, the cell service provider, gave a woman stalker her home address and phone records after he pretended pretty

badly to be from law enforcement. He was then arrested near her home while carrying a knife. So Robert Michael Glong and his victim met this year online and they had an online romantic relationship. When this woman ended the relationship, he continued to try to contact her over and over

and over again. Ours technical reports that he basically tricked Verizon into releasing her home address and her phone records to him by sending an email with a fake search warrant to the email address for Verizon's Security Assistance team, which handles those kinds of legal requests. Verizon did not realize that this request was fraudulent, even though it came from a proton mail email address rather than like a police department or some kind of government agency email address.

So this is like a basically like the same thing as a Gmail. It's an incredibly popular and common used email domain. So the email address was Stephen nineteen sixty six c at Proton dot me and the Honestly, the email also sounds like if that's not fishy enough, this was the email that he sent that was effective. It's super badly written in full of typhos. So I'm going to read it as is and you tell me if this would have fooled you into thinking this is actually

from law enforcement. So here is the PDF file for search warrant. We are in need if the this cell phone data as soon as possible to locate and apprehend this suspect. We also need the full name of this Verizon subscriber and the new phone number that has been assigned to her. Thank you. So that email just does not sound right to me. I truly don't know how somebody at Verizon read that and was like, oh, checks out.

charge of stalking an ex girlfriend. In that case, a police report documented that the victim had changed her phone number four times in the last four months, but somehow he keeps getting her number. I wonder how it sounds like this was not the first time that he's done this kind of thing.

is from the police report. Glanner stopped directly in front of her house before entering the neighbor's yard and standing in a darkened area, at which time members of the Raleigh Police Department arrested him. He was found with a folding razor blade knife on his person two mobile phone devices. One of these phones displayed the image of the victim

as the lock screen. When police searched his car, they found a glass meth pipe, eight grams of suspected methmphetamine, and two brand new bundles of rope that were still in plastic wrap. So he has been arrested in jail now with a five hundred and fifty thousand dollars bond.

So honestly, the fact that this kind of low effort attempt to trick Verizon was successful is just genuinely baffling to me, not to mention terrifying, like it would be like making an email address that's like Stevenpolice at gmail dot com and then sending that email and having it work like I cannot believe that it worked.

I hope she is safe now. But yeah, It's terrifying to think about, and it really makes me wonder like how often, Like is you gotta think that maybe Verizon is just getting these kind of subpoenas for people's phone records, and just like maybe it's the kind of thing that happens so often that it is routine that they don't even think twice about this, handing people's private data and information over to whoever without even being like, wait, is

this sketchy? Like it makes me think that maybe this is something that is happening at such a scale that they have been trained to not even think twice about it.

was just nothing. I really hope that like this is that we hear more about this story and like what went wrong at Verizon, Like were their protocols that weren't followed or is there truly just nothing And anybody who knows the magic email address can just send fake emails to it and get people's personal information.

plan is to make sure it never happens again. I use Verizon right, Like, I'm concerned about how this happened, and it is genuinely terrifying that Verizon could basically enable a woman's almost murder without doing the basic bare minimum of keeping our information from falling on the wrong hands, Like do better. Just we should be able to expect better, We deserve better. Do better.

And I also think it's like important because I think it can really change the face of who we see speaking about technology like AI with authority, like it should look like the people who actually use technology, which is women, trans folks, queer folks, black folks, folks of color, and so those are the same people that we should get used to seeing talking about that technology with authority. It's one of the reasons why I started this very podcast. So the many women who work at Hugging Face have

been doing this and it's great. However, they did notice that when they were doing public speaking about AI with the press, they sometimes would get sexist or otherwise just kind of messed up questions. So Margaret Mitchell, who is Hugging Face as chief ethic Scientist and also just like a top ten a Twitter follow, I've learned so much just from like following her Twitter. So if you don't follow Margaret Mitchell, you definitely should, being the data driven

person that she is. She framed this as a research question, what are the patterns and how journalists talk to and about women in AI. She writes, we've discovered that compared to our male peers, there is a disproportionate focus from press on our ages, our motherhood, our physical appearances, or behaviors, our failures, or what AI gossip we can provide rather

than technical work. After the most recent double whammy in which I was described in one news outlets flirtatious and also cagey about my age, and Sasha Luconi was described as a mother balancing work and life, we decided to be put together some good practices. So doctor Sasha Luconi, who's an AI researcher and the climate lead at Hugging Face, was did this pro There was this profile of her in Adweek and the headline read this AI ethics expert

juggles motherhood and a tech career. People really had to raise hell to get them to change it. I will say like, I don't know. I would have been like, I think that that title is really problematic. I think that if you are being interviewed about your technical work and your technical expertise, like stuff that you are good at, stuff that you went to school for, I don't I don't. I do think that it's disrespectful to shoehorn in conversations about you being a parent or a mom, or your age.

And I don't think we would see that if the subject was a man. However, I do want to be careful because I think that you know, there should be I believe that there should be places and spaces where you can talk about the challenges that we that you have as professionals and also the fact that we are

humans that have lives, right. I don't think that an article and ad week about your technical expertise is the place to do it, but I do want there to be spaces where people can have those conversations because you know, your professional work does intersect with your actual human life. So I actually am like very interested in that. But I think it should be something that all adults who work and also you know, balance personal and professional lives

as we all do, not just for women. It shouldn't just be something that's like, oh, because it's a woman researcher, let's ask about her kids, Let's ask about if she's a wife or whatever. I think that we could benefit as a society from there being spaces where we can talk about the reality of balancing our personal and professional lives.

But that should be the case for everybody of every gender, and it certainly doesn't have a place where the framing of the article is meant to focus her expertise like that is incredibly sexist.

traveling for work, who's watching your kids? I I But when you are a woman, that is like but like they ask about it all the time. It is frustrating how we have like just created this association that it is only women who should be concerned about who are juggling parenthood and profession, when it is everybody who has a child. It is not just women. So the women of Hugging Face developed a guide for how journalists can get it right and be better when they are talking

to and about women in AI. The guide reads, the real achievements of women on our team often get overshadowed by a focus on personal and sometimes very intrusive details that are not relevant to their work. With all the amazing press attention that we get at Hugging Face, we're bound to see some journalists rely on outdated tropes. We've seen more reporters ignoring the amazing achievements of our shees and these and instead focusing on stereotypes about women in tech.

The guide is actually really helpful. We will throw it in the show notes. It includes tips like avoid gendered language. At the moment, we see lots of over associating women with certain words and concepts such as children and family. Proofreader articles to eliminate gendered descriptions that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes. Yeah, and so I do think there is a time, in a place for talking about what it's like to be

a working parent. But if you're writing a piece that is about highlighting someone's technical expertise, that is not the place for that. Like, do not like it is so deeply gendered. And here's another tip from the guide, don't rely on antiquated stereotypes about women in tech. This includes describing women as outsiders in the field, which only serves to reinforce the idea that women don't belong in tech.

They give this example of a problematic sentence. Despite being a woman in a male dominated field, Brooke Brooksy has made a name for herself in the tech industry. Here's how they would change it through her brilliant results on magic in LM's Brooke Brookie made a name for herself in the tech industry, and that really is so key because I think that we have this misconception that people who are not cis white men are like the rightful

owners of technology and those adjacent spaces. And so the story that we've told of like women and queer folks and trans folks trying to like break into this boys club that is not correct. We have always been in these spaces since the very beginning, and we got to normalize the fact that if our presence is not always represented, that is because of intentional choices, not because we were

not always there. And so really it's like a reframe of who belongs in these spaces, who these spaces are for. And I'm really glad that they're trying to help educate journalists to not unintentionally reinforce this attitude that is just not correct. So Mitchell explains that they're hoping that this guide actually does make the space more hospitable to women.

She writes, to help lessen the tendency for press to perpetuate concepts of women that harmor ability in tech, to inspire, recruit, and retain women, to help create a culture and press where technical women who speak with journalists don't have to undergo feeling alienated, demean regularly, misrepresented, or d She makes a really good point about the importance of women disagreeing

in public. She writes, one thing about hugging face that I deeply value after my years in tech is that employees are permitted to speak to the press even in the face of clear disagreements across different employees. The approach is one of value pluralism, nurturing and respecting expertise. This has the side effect of magically producing more women to

speak on different AI questions. By grounding on expertise rather than seniority or alignment to a pr COMMS narrative that all must share, we've magically been able to have more women be more public than is typical in tech, and I love that. I think that. I mean, I have been in situations where the organization has a party line or a stance, and anybody who is speaking publicly has

to abide by that party line. But what Mitchell is saying is that actually, when you get a pluralism of opinions and attitudes, all grounded and expertise, you can actually be happy having much more dynamic conversations in public, and those conversations can really spotlight women and there are accomplishments and achievements much better. It just it just it just elevates the whole conversation and makes the space better for everyone.

Open Ai, the company that makes Chatgypt, is aware and has admitted that this is an issue, but the company was not really sure why, and the answer might be what some people are calling the winter break hypothesis, which is that since the people who train AI train it by feeding it our writing, our language, our behavior, and so on, is it possible that AI has learned things like seasonal effective disorder or like an end of year holiday slowdown. That is what people are wondering. This is

really funny. The day after Thanksgiving, a Reddit user wrote that they asked chatchept to fill out a CSV file with multiple entries, but Chatgypt was like, nah, you do it. Chatgebt gave this answer due to the extensive nature of the data, the full extraction of all products would be quite lengthy. However, I can provide the file with this single entry as a template and you can fill in the rest of the data as needed.

fingers does seem to help produce lengthier outputs. So it does seem to suggest that it is learning from human behavior that that has an impact on what it eventually outputs. That doesn't seem so so like, it doesn't seem so wild to me to extrapolate that, like maybe it has also learned that you can al sort of like take it a little bit easy at the end of the year.

taking a winter holiday break. And we'll definitely let y'all know if the folks researching this come up with any concrete data one way or the other, but it'll have to be in twenty twenty four, because yeah, it's almost the end of the year and we're not going to do all that work. Do it yourself, why don't you look into it If you're so interested, round up your

own tech news. I'm just kidding. Unlike lazy chat ept, I actually do really enjoy breaking down the news with you all, So thanks so much for listening, and I will talk to you soon. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangody dot com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody

dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unboss Creative, edited by Joey pat Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almada is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Toad. If you want to help us grow, rate and review.