Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and how the tech are you? It is time for the tech news for Thursday, April twenty twenty two. Also, if this episode sounds a little different, it's because I'm actually in the office today and using a slightly different microphone set up. So that's why. Now let's get to the news. If you listen to Tuesday's news episode of tech Stuff, you heard me talk about how Elon Musk declined an offer to join Twitter's board of directors, and that one of the potential reasons for that might have been that if he had joined the board of directors, he would have to agree to a limit of no more than fourteen point nine percent of Twitter's shares. He would not be allowed to purchase more than that, So the implication there being that Ellen potentially wanted to control Twitter that would require him to own at least fifty of Twitter's stakes. Well, now it sounds like phase two of his plan has launched, because Bloomberg reports Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter for fifty four dollars and twenty cents per share. That would bring the total valuation of Twitter's purchase to around forty three billion dollars. Now, this would be an outright hostile takeover, or potentially a hostile takeover, with Musk attempting to convince current shareholders to sell off their shares at a premium markup. And in pre market trading, Twitter shares were around forty eight dollars per share, so Musk is giving a bit of a markup on that cost, and he's hoping the offer remakes is one that big shareholders just can't refuse. Now, Twitter's board was fairly diplomatic in its response, saying it would review the offer and respond in whatever way was in the best interest of Twitter stockholders. This is by no means a surefire deal. Last year, Twitter shares climbed to seventy dollars per share, so it shows the company has hit much higher highs than where it's at right now, and even higher highs than Musk's offer. So that has been enough to suggest, at least to some analysts, that Musk's offer, while significant, is still far too low for Twitter shareholders to take it seriously. And Musk himself has said it's the best and last offer that he'll he'll make. He also seems to have implicitly threatened that he's going to, you know, offload all his stock if this deal doesn't go through, which could have a negative effect on Twitter's share price. So it's almost like, like some people are saying, it's almost like he's he's committing almost a kind of extortion when you look at it that way. It's not what I'm saying because I don't want to get sued, but that is what some folks are, particularly over on Reddit, which you know, the most level headed people in the world are on Reddit, but a lot of them are kind of making that that argument. Whether or not that's the case, I can't say. But as for how I feel about this, Twitter is the one social platform that I still hang out on regularly now, but y'all have probably picked up on the fact that I am not the world's biggest elon Musk fans. So if his deal were to go through, I feel like I would just kind of fade away from Twitter too, and that would leave me no option but to scream my daily word all scores out the window to anyone who can hear me. But we're not there yet. In related musk news, a former Tesla employee sued the company last year, alleging that he was the target of racial abuse at the factory where he worked. He was an elevator operator there. And at the end of at that court case, a jury found in the employees favor and awarded him nearly a hundred thirty seven million dollars. So why am I talking about now, Well, we finally got to a federal judge upholding the verdict. But in the process, the judge slashed the jury awarded amount and reduced it down to fifteen million dollars. That's still obviously a huge chunk of change. That's far from the massive rebuke that the jury had intended against Tesla. In metaverse news, the tech world is a buzz after discovering that Meta the apparent company of Facebook, intends to slap a forties seven point five percent fee on all transactions that take place regarding digital experiences and items within Horizon Worlds, which is the company's virtual environment platform. So people are essentially saying this is showing us Facebook's plan for the metaverse, right that Facebook wants to dominate the metaverse, and then four anyone who wants to interoperate within that world to pay nearly fifty of every transaction to Facebook itself. And it really does sound like Meta is taking a big page out of Apple's book and then cranking the dial up to eleven. Uh again, like, if you want to do business within meta space, then you have to funnel that business through Meta's processing system, and by doing that you incur two different fees. One of those fees is a hardware platform fee that applies to all sales that go through the Meta quest Store, which is kind of akin to the app store on smartphones. It's where users would purchase you know, games and experiences and that kind of thing. And then there's a seventeen point five percent fee charged against the Horizon VR platform itself. And as you can imagine, being told to play in the space is gonna cost you nearly half of every sale you make. Hasn't floated over so well in the developer community, and I feel this is really where we're seeing Meta pour so much money into the metaverse. You know, this is why it's happening, because it's a mad dash to become the biggest and preferably the only metaverse game in town. If you dominate it, then you get to dictate what the what the the terms are, right, You're the one who sets all the rules. So it would give Meta all the leverage in the world to charge whatever they wanted and restrict access however they liked, and exploit the technology and whichever ways are going to make the most money. From a business perspective, that's kind of what capitalism is all about, right, Like it's that's that's what the machine is geared for. But from a quality of life and fairness perspective, it really kind of bites. Meanwhile, Apple took the opportunity to fire a shot across the bow of Meta. Market Watch got a quote from Fred Sayings of Apple that blasted Meta for repeatedly criticizing Apple in the past for its thirty percent cut for in app transactions. But then, of course Meta turns around in heaps and even bigger cut for its own community of merchants and developers in the Horizon world space. So Apple isn't so much defending its own practice instead of saying, Facebook really wants to use Apple for free, and they say we're greedy. But then look at the Shenanigans their pulling. Now. Now I'm paraphrasing, but I feel like that's an accurate depiction of what is going on here. Meanwhile, Apple still faces opposition all around the world when it comes to how it conducts itself within app purchases and Apple's own payment processing system. My guess is that Meta's plan will similarly become the focus of scrutiny by regulators everywhere at some point. But right now the company could be in the clear simply because we're so far away from a metaverse actually being a thing anyway that regulators might not see that there's very much to regulate as of yet. But yeah, things are starting to get a little spicy. Vice has a couple of Arcticle goals about Amazon and its ongoing struggles against unionization attempts. On April thirte Lauren Kory Gurley's article Amazon cracks down on organizing after historic union win, and then today Gurley has another article titled Amazon Labor union is inspiring Amazon workers around the country to unionize. So we've got kind of two sides of a coin going on here. So the first bit concerns the employees at the Staten Island, New York Warehouse. Uh, these Amazon employees recently passed a vote to form a union and now they're going to have union elections coming up later this month. Meanwhile, according to employee complaints, Amazon reps have been busy removing pro union literature and signage and holding mandatory anti union meetings on an even you know, more frequent basis, and the company has hired high powered union busting consultants to work on this. The complaints include allegations of illegal activity because it is against the law for a company to remove or toss pro union literature that's in designated break areas. And if that is in fact what has been happening, because again I'm basing this purely unemployee reports and the reporting of vice that um that you know, the company could really get into trouble for doing this, for for conducting illegal union busting tactics. However, that is something that could take months just to get into the court system and months more to resolve, and that's assuming anyone actually presses formal charges on this matter. So Amazon could just be employing a strategy to cause as much trouble as possible in order to head things off, mitigate the impact of unionization, break the union spirit as as quickly as possible, and then just deal with any consequences that happened later on. However, all that might actually end up biting Amazon on the butt, because the second of those two articles indicates that a lot of other Amazon on facilities around the United States are showing signs of organizing in the wake of the Staten Island warehouse vote. And it's even possible that Amazon's actions could anger more people into taking action. And I've been saying for a while now that I'm getting the sense there's this growing labor movement here in the United States. I feel it's still in that growing phase, and it does have the potential to snowball into a full on labor revolution. But I want to stress I'm talking about potential here. Nothing is ever a guarantee. It's also possible that down the road we're gonna look back on this time in history just see it as kind of a brief flash in the pan that quickly fizzled out. That could happen too. It really just depends upon the will of the workers. But I don't know. I think I can hear the people sing By the way, both of those articles on Vice are well worth a read. You should definitely check those out. We've got some more news stories to cover in today's episode. Before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back. There's an ongoing blacklist in the United States against certain companies in China. That blacklist means ain't no one here in the US supposed to sell components to those companies without the express permission of the U S government in the form of a special license. Now, a US company called Synopsis is under investigation for doing just that. The company makes software for electronic design automation. So this is a kind of software that helps chip designers, like semiconductor chip designers, lay out their architecture, and it's one of many important pieces in the microchip and semiconductor industries. The U S. Department of Commerce is investigating to see if Synopsis supplied either directly or through affiliates, this kind of software. Two companies connected to the telecommunity aaitions company Huawei. Now, if you've been following tech news for a while, you might remember that Huahwei is a company that fell into the U. S. Government's cross hairs. A couple of years ago. Huawei makes lots of stuff, including components for telecommunications infrastructure, and many US based telecommunications companies relied on Huawei technology. But after critics raised concerns that Huahwei could use embedded tech to potentially spy on Americans and share that information with the Chinese government, there was a seismic shift. Telecommunications providers were given deadlines to extract Huawei tech from their systems, and Huawei in general was put on this blacklist. Now, in order to sell legally to Huahwei, as I mentioned earlier, a company first has to obtain a special license from the U. S government. According to these allegations, that's something that Synopsis may not have done. Now. For its part, Synopsis denies it has done anything wrong. It claims that it has abided by all laws and regulations. So we'll have to wait for the outcome of the investigation to see if the authorities agree. And it could possibly be the case. It could very well be that this is just a very complicated thing. Synopsis did nothing wrong, and we go from there. We have to wait and find out. But speaking of China, the conglomerate ten Cent will be cracking down on a service that previously would allow Chinese gamers to access certain foreign games that weren't on the approved list by the Chinese government for Chinese consumption. Now, one story we've seen play out over the last couple of years is China's authorities pushing back against the tech sector. In particular, the government has issued tighter regulations and restrictions and closed a lot of loopholes that existed earlier. One of those was this platform that would let people in China use apps that would give them a speed boost, and that would allow them to access certain games, including games from overseas. Now ten Cent is going to restrict those apps so that they only interface with games that operating within China itself. So those apps are essentially, like I said, it's a speed boost. It's a way for users to make use of higher bandwidth internet connections, because the typical internet connection in China is far too slow to allow for things like gaming. You you just it's not practical for that. Uh, so you could use these apps. You can become a customer and use these apps and by that way access gaming, and some people are doing it to access games from other countries. Uh, this is gonna be tough not just on gamers, but also for all those game companies that saw the apps as a kind of hush hush way to tap into the truly massive market of Chinese gamers. US cryptocurrency enthusiast Virgil Griffith has been sentenced for more than five years in jail after bleading guilty on charges of helping North Korea find ways to sidestep sanctions. Griffith advised North Korean government officials and how they could leverage cryptocurrencies like a theory them to ignore sanctions against them from other countries, as well as to do stuff like launder money. You know, the stuff that regulators have said for a long time is something they are concerned about when it comes to cryptocurrency, but it's something that a lot of crypto bros often wave off or ignore. They're like, oh, you're just scared of losing your power. But then we get actual instances of this happening. It's really, I think a big step back for the crypto community when one of their recognized experts in the field is practicing the very thing that regulators have been scared about the whole time. And to be clear, I'm not saying that cryptocurrency is inherently bad, or that it's even mainly used for illegal activities. What I'm saying is that cryptocurrency is very well suited for those types of illegal activities, and so it shouldn't surprise us when some people put it to that very specific use. Anyway, North Korea is by no means a in lee country to the United States, so it comes as a little surprised that Griffith received a fairly stiff penalty here. And my guess is it would have been even more severe had he pled not guilty and it had gone to trial, assuming of course, that he had ultimately been found guilty of the crime. So it could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yesterday, several US agencies issued warnings that cybersecurity researchers had discovered malware tools created by quote unquote unnamed advanced threat actors. This comes from an article from The Guardian which is titled US Federal alert warns of the discovery of malicious cyber tools. So the threat actors in question designed malware tools specifically meant to interface with industrial control systems. Now, these are not like your standard personal computers. These are purpose built systems that are in charge of handling really important and really specific tasks. Like it might be a system that connects to a power grid or the system that connects to a natural gas facility, and it controls not just computer systems but also actual like you know, valves and things like that. Um. Anyway, we're talking about these similar, large industrial complex systems that typically are very tightly integrated into our infrastructure. Now, this is not a new thing for us to see threats to these types of institutions. Several years ago, a link the investigation found evidence that cyber spies had compromised computer and electro mechanical systems in the power grid and the United States, as well as other infrastructure, and that those spies were likely either from China or working on behalf of the Chinese As for this latest realm, the current suspicion is that the attackers are connected to Russia, but there's no firm evidence on the matter that has been shared so far. Details on the matter are scarce, but according to one US official, AGE were able to discover the malware before they could actually be used in an attack, so that's a good thing. Finally, Disney has shut down an unauthorized copy of the game Club Penguin. It was called Club Penguin rewritten and thus evicted thousands of online players. All Right, you might not know what this is. Club Penguin was this online RPG that was marketed to younger audiences, and in the game, players would be little cartoon penguins, and they could do all sorts of cute c stuff, playing various little games and things. Well, Disney bought that property in two thousand seven, spinning at an incredible seven hundred million dollars to do so. I'm not sure what seven hundred million dollars for Club Penguin comes out to in terms of per pound of penguin, but it's got to be a lot. However, over the course of the following decade, Club Penguin's relevance began to fade, and Disney ultimately decided to shut down the main game. They launched a couple of related products that didn't last very long either, and fan would occasionally decide that they would get a copy of the code for the game and host it on a private server or a shared server, and they would invite other folks to come and play. Now, sometimes this led to pretty shady situations and dangerous situations where you know you had some some schevy stuff happening, and Disney, perhaps the most enthusiastic defender of copyright and IP that ever existed, would go after these servers after discovering them, and that is what happened with Club Penguin Rewritten. The server hosting the copy was in England, and Disney got hold of the City of London Police and pretty soon the server administrators willingly surrendered the server to the authorities and it got shut down. This is one of those situations where I can kind of see both sides of the issue. For fans, it is really frustrating when a big company purchases an I P and then doesn't do anything with it. They just hold onto it and that means no one can do anything with it. Meanwhile, you might really want to see another game or another product in that line, and there's nothing you can do about it. On the other hand, this is also a property that Disney owns, so it has the right to do nothing with it if it wants to. It stinks, but it can um and if someone is ripping off the game and shady stuff is going on, that can reflect badly on Disney. I mean they do own the property, it can still tarnish Disney's reputation. So they have a vested interest in going after those kinds of things and shutting it down. But we end this episode saluting our fallen penguin friends. May you sled merrily through the cyber afterlife. That's it for this episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, you better get in those requests quick on Twitter because once Elon Musk owns the place, I am out. But the handle we use is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really. So, tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and how the tech are you? It is time for the tech news for Thursday, April twenty twenty two. Also, if this episode sounds a little different, it's because I'm actually in the office today and using a slightly different microphone set up. So that's why. Now let's get to the news. If you listen to Tuesday's news episode of tech Stuff, you heard me talk about how Elon Musk declined an offer to join Twitter's board of directors, and that one of the potential reasons for that might have been that if he had joined the board of directors, he would have to agree to a limit of no more than fourteen point nine percent of Twitter's shares. He would not be allowed to purchase more than that, So the implication there being that Ellen potentially wanted to control Twitter that would require him to own at least fifty of Twitter's stakes. Well, now it sounds like phase two of his plan has launched, because Bloomberg reports Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter for fifty four dollars and twenty cents per share. That would bring the total valuation of Twitter's purchase to around forty three billion dollars. Now, this would be an outright hostile takeover, or potentially a hostile takeover, with Musk attempting to convince current shareholders to sell off their shares at a premium markup. And in pre market trading, Twitter shares were around forty eight dollars per share, so Musk is giving a bit of a markup on that cost, and he's hoping the offer remakes is one that big shareholders just can't refuse. Now, Twitter's board was fairly diplomatic in its response, saying it would review the offer and respond in whatever way was in the best interest of Twitter stockholders. This is by no means a surefire deal. Last year, Twitter shares climbed to seventy dollars per share, so it shows the company has hit much higher highs than where it's at right now, and even higher highs than Musk's offer. So that has been enough to suggest, at least to some analysts, that Musk's offer, while significant, is still far too low for Twitter shareholders to take it seriously. And Musk himself has said it's the best and last offer that he'll he'll make. He also seems to have implicitly threatened that he's going to, you know, offload all his stock if this deal doesn't go through, which could have a negative effect on Twitter's share price. So it's almost like, like some people are saying, it's almost like he's he's committing almost a kind of extortion when you look at it that way. It's not what I'm saying because I don't want to get sued, but that is what some folks are, particularly over on Reddit, which you know, the most level headed people in the world are on Reddit, but a lot of them are kind of making that that argument. Whether or not that's the case, I can't say. But as for how I feel about this, Twitter is the one social platform that I still hang out on regularly now, but y'all have probably picked up on the fact that I am not the world's biggest elon Musk fans. So if his deal were to go through, I feel like I would just kind of fade away from Twitter too, and that would leave me no option but to scream my daily word all scores out the window to anyone who can hear me. But we're not there yet. In related musk news, a former Tesla employee sued the company last year, alleging that he was the target of racial abuse at the factory where he worked. He was an elevator operator there. And at the end of at that court case, a jury found in the employees favor and awarded him nearly a hundred thirty seven million dollars. So why am I talking about now, Well, we finally got to a federal judge upholding the verdict. But in the process, the judge slashed the jury awarded amount and reduced it down to fifteen million dollars. That's still obviously a huge chunk of change. That's far from the massive rebuke that the jury had intended against Tesla. In metaverse news, the tech world is a buzz after discovering that Meta the apparent company of Facebook, intends to slap a forties seven point five percent fee on all transactions that take place regarding digital experiences and items within Horizon Worlds, which is the company's virtual environment platform. So people are essentially saying this is showing us Facebook's plan for the metaverse, right that Facebook wants to dominate the metaverse, and then four anyone who wants to interoperate within that world to pay nearly fifty of every transaction to Facebook itself. And it really does sound like Meta is taking a big page out of Apple's book and then cranking the dial up to eleven. Uh again, like, if you want to do business within meta space, then you have to funnel that business through Meta's processing system, and by doing that you incur two different fees. One of those fees is a hardware platform fee that applies to all sales that go through the Meta quest Store, which is kind of akin to the app store on smartphones. It's where users would purchase you know, games and experiences and that kind of thing. And then there's a seventeen point five percent fee charged against the Horizon VR platform itself. And as you can imagine, being told to play in the space is gonna cost you nearly half of every sale you make. Hasn't floated over so well in the developer community, and I feel this is really where we're seeing Meta pour so much money into the metaverse. You know, this is why it's happening, because it's a mad dash to become the biggest and preferably the only metaverse game in town. If you dominate it, then you get to dictate what the what the the terms are, right, You're the one who sets all the rules. So it would give Meta all the leverage in the world to charge whatever they wanted and restrict access however they liked, and exploit the technology and whichever ways are going to make the most money. From a business perspective, that's kind of what capitalism is all about, right, Like it's that's that's what the machine is geared for. But from a quality of life and fairness perspective, it really kind of bites. Meanwhile, Apple took the opportunity to fire a shot across the bow of Meta. Market Watch got a quote from Fred Sayings of Apple that blasted Meta for repeatedly criticizing Apple in the past for its thirty percent cut for in app transactions. But then, of course Meta turns around in heaps and even bigger cut for its own community of merchants and developers in the Horizon world space. So Apple isn't so much defending its own practice instead of saying, Facebook really wants to use Apple for free, and they say we're greedy. But then look at the Shenanigans their pulling. Now. Now I'm paraphrasing, but I feel like that's an accurate depiction of what is going on here. Meanwhile, Apple still faces opposition all around the world when it comes to how it conducts itself within app purchases and Apple's own payment processing system. My guess is that Meta's plan will similarly become the focus of scrutiny by regulators everywhere at some point. But right now the company could be in the clear simply because we're so far away from a metaverse actually being a thing anyway that regulators might not see that there's very much to regulate as of yet. But yeah, things are starting to get a little spicy. Vice has a couple of Arcticle goals about Amazon and its ongoing struggles against unionization attempts. On April thirte Lauren Kory Gurley's article Amazon cracks down on organizing after historic union win, and then today Gurley has another article titled Amazon Labor union is inspiring Amazon workers around the country to unionize. So we've got kind of two sides of a coin going on here. So the first bit concerns the employees at the Staten Island, New York Warehouse. Uh, these Amazon employees recently passed a vote to form a union and now they're going to have union elections coming up later this month. Meanwhile, according to employee complaints, Amazon reps have been busy removing pro union literature and signage and holding mandatory anti union meetings on an even you know, more frequent basis, and the company has hired high powered union busting consultants to work on this. The complaints include allegations of illegal activity because it is against the law for a company to remove or toss pro union literature that's in designated break areas. And if that is in fact what has been happening, because again I'm basing this purely unemployee reports and the reporting of vice that um that you know, the company could really get into trouble for doing this, for for conducting illegal union busting tactics. However, that is something that could take months just to get into the court system and months more to resolve, and that's assuming anyone actually presses formal charges on this matter. So Amazon could just be employing a strategy to cause as much trouble as possible in order to head things off, mitigate the impact of unionization, break the union spirit as as quickly as possible, and then just deal with any consequences that happened later on. However, all that might actually end up biting Amazon on the butt, because the second of those two articles indicates that a lot of other Amazon on facilities around the United States are showing signs of organizing in the wake of the Staten Island warehouse vote. And it's even possible that Amazon's actions could anger more people into taking action. And I've been saying for a while now that I'm getting the sense there's this growing labor movement here in the United States. I feel it's still in that growing phase, and it does have the potential to snowball into a full on labor revolution. But I want to stress I'm talking about potential here. Nothing is ever a guarantee. It's also possible that down the road we're gonna look back on this time in history just see it as kind of a brief flash in the pan that quickly fizzled out. That could happen too. It really just depends upon the will of the workers. But I don't know. I think I can hear the people sing By the way, both of those articles on Vice are well worth a read. You should definitely check those out. We've got some more news stories to cover in today's episode. Before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back. There's an ongoing blacklist in the United States against certain companies in China. That blacklist means ain't no one here in the US supposed to sell components to those companies without the express permission of the U S government in the form of a special license. Now, a US company called Synopsis is under investigation for doing just that. The company makes software for electronic design automation. So this is a kind of software that helps chip designers, like semiconductor chip designers, lay out their architecture, and it's one of many important pieces in the microchip and semiconductor industries. The U S. Department of Commerce is investigating to see if Synopsis supplied either directly or through affiliates, this kind of software. Two companies connected to the telecommunity aaitions company Huawei. Now, if you've been following tech news for a while, you might remember that Huahwei is a company that fell into the U. S. Government's cross hairs. A couple of years ago. Huawei makes lots of stuff, including components for telecommunications infrastructure, and many US based telecommunications companies relied on Huawei technology. But after critics raised concerns that Huahwei could use embedded tech to potentially spy on Americans and share that information with the Chinese government, there was a seismic shift. Telecommunications providers were given deadlines to extract Huawei tech from their systems, and Huawei in general was put on this blacklist. Now, in order to sell legally to Huahwei, as I mentioned earlier, a company first has to obtain a special license from the U. S government. According to these allegations, that's something that Synopsis may not have done. Now. For its part, Synopsis denies it has done anything wrong. It claims that it has abided by all laws and regulations. So we'll have to wait for the outcome of the investigation to see if the authorities agree. And it could possibly be the case. It could very well be that this is just a very complicated thing. Synopsis did nothing wrong, and we go from there. We have to wait and find out. But speaking of China, the conglomerate ten Cent will be cracking down on a service that previously would allow Chinese gamers to access certain foreign games that weren't on the approved list by the Chinese government for Chinese consumption. Now, one story we've seen play out over the last couple of years is China's authorities pushing back against the tech sector. In particular, the government has issued tighter regulations and restrictions and closed a lot of loopholes that existed earlier. One of those was this platform that would let people in China use apps that would give them a speed boost, and that would allow them to access certain games, including games from overseas. Now ten Cent is going to restrict those apps so that they only interface with games that operating within China itself. So those apps are essentially, like I said, it's a speed boost. It's a way for users to make use of higher bandwidth internet connections, because the typical internet connection in China is far too slow to allow for things like gaming. You you just it's not practical for that. Uh, so you could use these apps. You can become a customer and use these apps and by that way access gaming, and some people are doing it to access games from other countries. Uh, this is gonna be tough not just on gamers, but also for all those game companies that saw the apps as a kind of hush hush way to tap into the truly massive market of Chinese gamers. US cryptocurrency enthusiast Virgil Griffith has been sentenced for more than five years in jail after bleading guilty on charges of helping North Korea find ways to sidestep sanctions. Griffith advised North Korean government officials and how they could leverage cryptocurrencies like a theory them to ignore sanctions against them from other countries, as well as to do stuff like launder money. You know, the stuff that regulators have said for a long time is something they are concerned about when it comes to cryptocurrency, but it's something that a lot of crypto bros often wave off or ignore. They're like, oh, you're just scared of losing your power. But then we get actual instances of this happening. It's really, I think a big step back for the crypto community when one of their recognized experts in the field is practicing the very thing that regulators have been scared about the whole time. And to be clear, I'm not saying that cryptocurrency is inherently bad, or that it's even mainly used for illegal activities. What I'm saying is that cryptocurrency is very well suited for those types of illegal activities, and so it shouldn't surprise us when some people put it to that very specific use. Anyway, North Korea is by no means a in lee country to the United States, so it comes as a little surprised that Griffith received a fairly stiff penalty here. And my guess is it would have been even more severe had he pled not guilty and it had gone to trial, assuming of course, that he had ultimately been found guilty of the crime. So it could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yesterday, several US agencies issued warnings that cybersecurity researchers had discovered malware tools created by quote unquote unnamed advanced threat actors. This comes from an article from The Guardian which is titled US Federal alert warns of the discovery of malicious cyber tools. So the threat actors in question designed malware tools specifically meant to interface with industrial control systems. Now, these are not like your standard personal computers. These are purpose built systems that are in charge of handling really important and really specific tasks. Like it might be a system that connects to a power grid or the system that connects to a natural gas facility, and it controls not just computer systems but also actual like you know, valves and things like that. Um. Anyway, we're talking about these similar, large industrial complex systems that typically are very tightly integrated into our infrastructure. Now, this is not a new thing for us to see threats to these types of institutions. Several years ago, a link the investigation found evidence that cyber spies had compromised computer and electro mechanical systems in the power grid and the United States, as well as other infrastructure, and that those spies were likely either from China or working on behalf of the Chinese As for this latest realm, the current suspicion is that the attackers are connected to Russia, but there's no firm evidence on the matter that has been shared so far. Details on the matter are scarce, but according to one US official, AGE were able to discover the malware before they could actually be used in an attack, so that's a good thing. Finally, Disney has shut down an unauthorized copy of the game Club Penguin. It was called Club Penguin rewritten and thus evicted thousands of online players. All Right, you might not know what this is. Club Penguin was this online RPG that was marketed to younger audiences, and in the game, players would be little cartoon penguins, and they could do all sorts of cute c stuff, playing various little games and things. Well, Disney bought that property in two thousand seven, spinning at an incredible seven hundred million dollars to do so. I'm not sure what seven hundred million dollars for Club Penguin comes out to in terms of per pound of penguin, but it's got to be a lot. However, over the course of the following decade, Club Penguin's relevance began to fade, and Disney ultimately decided to shut down the main game. They launched a couple of related products that didn't last very long either, and fan would occasionally decide that they would get a copy of the code for the game and host it on a private server or a shared server, and they would invite other folks to come and play. Now, sometimes this led to pretty shady situations and dangerous situations where you know you had some some schevy stuff happening, and Disney, perhaps the most enthusiastic defender of copyright and IP that ever existed, would go after these servers after discovering them, and that is what happened with Club Penguin Rewritten. The server hosting the copy was in England, and Disney got hold of the City of London Police and pretty soon the server administrators willingly surrendered the server to the authorities and it got shut down. This is one of those situations where I can kind of see both sides of the issue. For fans, it is really frustrating when a big company purchases an I P and then doesn't do anything with it. They just hold onto it and that means no one can do anything with it. Meanwhile, you might really want to see another game or another product in that line, and there's nothing you can do about it. On the other hand, this is also a property that Disney owns, so it has the right to do nothing with it if it wants to. It stinks, but it can um and if someone is ripping off the game and shady stuff is going on, that can reflect badly on Disney. I mean they do own the property, it can still tarnish Disney's reputation. So they have a vested interest in going after those kinds of things and shutting it down. But we end this episode saluting our fallen penguin friends. May you sled merrily through the cyber afterlife. That's it for this episode. 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