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's time for the tech news for August twenty two, and today we've got a lot of news items about hacking because def Con, the hacker convention, was just this past weekend. But first let's touch on some other news items. The advocacy group Global Witness has leveled some pretty nasty accusations against Facebook. And I say accusations, but really it sounds like in this case the group has a pretty open and shut argument. Now, this all has to do with some upcoming elections in Brazil, and I'm sure we're all aware of how Facebook has been under scrutiny for a few years now for its role in carrying and in some cases promoting misinformation, namely through its recommendation algorithm in English speaking countries. But in countries where the dominant language isn't English, this can be even more of a problem. It can go unresolved. So how does Global Witness know that Facebook has failed to live up to its promised that the platform is quote deeply committed to protecting election integrity end quote. When it comes to Brazil, well, Global Witness created political ads and they inserted outright misinformation into those political ads. Then Global Witness submitted those ads to Facebook, and Facebook accepted the ads without raising any objections to the content inside them. The advocacy group included ads that listed the wrong date for the elections. So these were ads that were targeted towards specific populations in Brazil. So the concept here is that you would be trying to miss need a specific target demographic so that they would not participate in voting, and you will give them the wrong date. There was there were other ads that that called for people to use voting methods that aren't sanctioned by Brazil, so an example that might be to vote by mail when there isn't a vote by mail option. Some of them even called into question the validity of the election and the election hasn't even happened yet, and Facebook accepted all of them, according to Global Witness senior advisor John Lloyd, Now what should have happened was that Facebook should have identified the misinformation in the ads and then denied the submitted advertisement. Instead, Global Witness received notification after notification that the fake ads had passed Muster, which the group rightfully points out brings into question Facebook's entire content moderation strategy. Brazil's upcoming election is likely to be a rough one, with current president Bolsonaro seeking out another term in office. He's also been accused of spreading disinformation, including calling into question the validity of results from certain voting machines. Global Witness points out that its experiment wasn't just an exercise to see if Facebook is living up to its promise. It's really a critical demonstration of Facebook's failure in a high stakes, real world scenario, something that is actually playing out right now. So yeah, not a good look. Now, let's switch gears for a little bit. So, misinformation and disinformation are clearly bad, right, Misinformation you want to avoid, and disinformation that that says there's a motive behind it where you are specifically seeking to mislead people. So we should really seek to eliminate misinformation and disinformation from platforms. However, we also have to take into account who is making the claim that a particular something is in fact misinformation in the first place. That requires critical thinking and sometimes it gets really hard to know what is true. Right, Like, if someone says that's fake news, and they offer no evidence to show that the claim is fake, and that the actual claim has evidence to show that it's valid, then you can't just say, oh, well, it's fake because this person said it was fake. Right. And I say all this because our next story is about how the Hong Kong Police Force has opened a public relations wing that has identified the elimination of online quote unquote smearring of police work as a high priority. Now, the police force is claiming that misinformation campaigns are portraying Hong Kong police in a negative way and that that has led to the deterioration of the relationship between the public and the police force, Whereas some of the critics would say the police using uh increased force against citizens is the deteriorating relationship that we should be concerned about. So you could argue that the Hong Kong Police Force is looking to censor voices that criticize the police or bring attention to situations that at least seemed to indicate an abuse of power. In other words, you could argue the police are using the label of misinformation to silence activists and critics in an effort to control the narrative. So dealing with misinformation is a tricky thing. I don't mean to suggest that it's super easy. You always have to examine the validity of the claim that something is misinformation to start with. Now, in the case of Global Witness, that was obvious, right because the group outright inserted falsehoods into political ads. There's no denying that they were testing it and saw that Facebook failed. But in the case of Hong Kong, it looks like it's more of an authoritarian move in order to try and limit dissent. So again, while we should be aiming to eliminate misinformation, we always have to be cognizant of where the claims of misinformation were coming from and to weigh them carefully to make sure that this isn't just an attempt to silence a critic. According to Bloomberg, Apple is looking to insert more ads into the iPhone experience, namely within certain first party Apple apps, uh the big one being Apple Maps. Now, you might also encounter ads within Apple's podcast app, And if that's the case, then that means you're going to hear and see ads that are not just inside a podcast, but also on the podcasting platform itself. That's interesting because the podcast business is largely dependent upon ads. I don't know if you've noticed, but we've had a couple in our show. Well, Apple doesn't get revenue from the ads that are in our show. Apple is a way for people to access podcasts. But unless the show was actually coming from Apple, then Apple doesn't really like revenue from the podcasts that are running. You know that it allows people to access, So putting ads into the podcast app itself is a way for Apple to monetize the podcasting phenomenon. Also, a CNBC article points out that Apple now has a huge advantage over third party apps on iOS. So you might remember that Apple introduced the app Tracking Transparency feature last year. This was a little notification that would pop up and let users decide whether or not they wanted to opt in too targeted tracking from apps. That's the source of stuff that lets companies like Meta capitalize on user activity. Now, a lot of folks opted out when they got that choice. They chose not to have their data shared with these third parties, and that's one of the major hits to Meta's revenue In the recent past. In fact, the loss of that customer data was a huge blow to Meta because Meta was heavily dependent upon using that data in order to market targeted ads and really make the most out of its platforms. But without that piece, without your information, then a lot of the value of that service is gone. They can't target with such precision. Thus they can't demand the same sort of prices from advertisers that they had in the past, and the whole thing starts to kind of fall apart. Now, Apple still has all that information, right, like they've collected that info. It's not, it's just that they're not sharing it with third parties. So you could imagine a future in which Apple builds out its own advertising business, for example, and leverages the data that other parties aren't allowed to access, at least not without users opting into the experience, right, And that's all speculation on my part, of course, It doesn't mean that that's what Apple is going to do. If Apple does design an advertising business, it doesn't mean that Apple is going to rely on that information without giving users the same opportunity to opt out with Apple that they had with other apps. None of that is is known. One way or the other. But if it did happen, it wouldn't surprise me, although it would bring more anti competitive scrutiny onto Apple, which the company is already dealing with across the world in various UH venues. So we'll have to see if that, in fact is where we're headed. Bloomberg also reports that Apple has once again set a deadline for corporate employees to spend at least three days of the work week in the office. Reportedly, employees are expected to come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus another day that was set by their team leaders. So that new deadline, at least according to one reporter, is September five. As far as I know, Apple has not confirmed that or officially announced that, but that's what a reporter's says. Is the plan that by September five, all Apple corporate employees will be expected to come into the office at least three days a week now. Apple has moved this goal post multiple times during the pandemic due to lots of reasons, mostly spikes in COVID transmission rates, and there have been more than a few reports of Apple corporate employees protesting this move. In fact, the former head of Apple's machine learning department, Ian Goodfellow left Apple reportedly because of this mandate that employees would have to return to the office. Of course, we're also in a time where a lot of companies are looking to downsize, so you could argue that Apple's continued insistence that employees returned to h Q might be a way to kind of put the squeeze on Apple employees and maybe shake out a few folks and slim down without actually having to hold layoffs. Of course, that's just a possibility. I'm not saying that Apple is doing that. I'm saying that their companies are doing that. I just don't know if Apple is um and maybe the reason for it has nothing to do with that. Maybe there is no desire to convince Apple employees, or at least some of them, to maybe leave the company. Maybe a big part of it is that, I don't know, Apple spent billions of dollars to build out this campus and barely got any use out of it before the pandemic hit, and by gum, Tim Cook once those folks in that expensive building, I'm sure the truth of the matter is far more subtle, far more nuanced and complicated, But It sure is fun to kind of boil these things down to an absurd level. Al Right, Well, that's enough absurdity for now, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll have some more news. Before the break, I was talking about Apple asking or telling employees that they need to come back to the office. Let's talk about what's going on over at A T and T. There's a similar battle brewing between employees and management now. Some of A T and T s employees have representation with the Communications Workers of America UH and the cw A has negotiated an extension for work from home operations until the end of March two thousand twenty three. However, some A T and T employees are saying that there are already groups within the company that management has forced to come back to the office now, so they're saying it just it depends upon which department you work in and what team you work for. Now, this has become an issue for employee morale because those who have been forced to go back into the office are kind of envying the departments that continue to work from home. A lot of folks have said that working from home had no negative impact on productivity, or performance, so there was no downside to the company for them work from home, and that moreover, workers were saving money on stuff like transportation and other expenses that led to a boost in quality of life for the workers. So the narrative that we're seeing develop across the entire industry is that workers feel the real reason employers want them in the office isn't so much about contributing to the bottom line. It's not so much about performance and productivity and creativity and collaboration. It's more about surveillance and control. If the employees are not in the office, they can't be watched and they can't be controlled. And whether that's a realistic narrative or not, I don't know. I'm certain that most bosses aren't thinking of it in those terms, but I know that that's a narrative that is growing in in uh in size across the industry. Right. You're seeing more and more people essentially boiled down the the matter into those kind of terms. It's oh, I know that any company out there there really wants to bring its employees back into offices needs to be able to address that concern in a satisfying way, or then that narrative will continue to grow there as well. If your employees are convinced that the only reason they're being brought back into the office is so that the boss can keep an eye on them and that's it, then that's not a good narrative, right that that's that's going to paint the company as a bad place to work. That it's unreasonable. So again, I don't think that that's necessarily where most companies are. I can't imagine most bosses actually thinking in that that way, but they need to get ahead of it if they want people to come back into the office and not have it be a catastrophic effect on the morale of the employees. Signal, the encrypted messaging service, reported that a fishing attack on Twilo Incorporated could mean the up to one thousand, nine hundred Signal users had their phone numbers revealed to the attackers. So here's the breakdown. Twilo is a verification services provider and Signal uses Twilo's verification services, so Signal was not compromised. The hackers did not target and and compromise Signal. Instead, they compromised a company that Signal partners with for the verification services. So the good news is that the attackers seem to only have been able to get the phone numbers, not even like the names of the people that the phone numbers correspond to, just the numbers that represent devices that have signal installed on them, and it's just nine of them. That really limits what the attackers can do with that information. They could conceivably attempt to reregister a device's number, but that's about it. They didn't have access to message history or profile information or anything like that, so it could have been much worse. But it does bring into focus the interconnected nature of tech companies and how challenging it is to create a secure process because if you're relying on another party to provide services that make your company, you know, services possible, you might not have total control over your own security procedures because some of them are dependent upon another company entirely. So yeah, it's complicated. Not long ago, a security researcher named Lenart Wilder's and my apologies for butchering the name, revealed that he was able to use a homemade device to hack into Starlink, the satellite internet service provider arm of SpaceX now. Starlink has since congratulated him on his find as it you know, it uncovered a vulnerability that the company needed to address. And you know he wasn't being a malicious hacker. He was testing the security of starlinks technology and found a an inroad. And the way I think about this is that if researchers did do this and didn't reveal their findings, there would be a danger that these vulnerabilities would go unpatched, and then someone eventually who has bad intentions would discover those vulnerabilities and then do nasty evil things with that information. To that end, starlinkin SpaceX have announced a bug bounty program inviting security researchers to poke and prod and look for vulnerabilities, and if they discover and report one, they get rewarded up to twenty five thousand bucks, depending upon the nature of the vulnerability, which is a responsible way to try and keep systems safe, because if you're not supporting some sort of bug bounty, you're inviting hackers to make money from those same vulnerabilities in more nefarious ways. And finally, this past weekend, as I said, was def Con a hacking convention and a place where you absolutely want to make sure you're only carrying a burner phone that has none of your personal information on it, and one of the hackers attending goes by the handle sick codes, and among sick codes as accomplishments is jail breaking. John dear farm equipment. Now, I've talked about this on past episodes, but John Deer installs computers and software on its equipment like tractors that not only provide extra functionality and features to the equipment, it also really restricts how farmers can maintain and repair their stuff. In fact, you could argue that really the main reason for this technology is to create a closed off ecosystem where the farmers have no option but to take their equipment to authorize John Deer Associates to have their equipment serviced and repaired. And that's why this company comes up a lot in conversations around the right to repair, which has this radical notion that once you purchase something, you should be able to maintain it, repair it, and customize it without limitations. Take it to whomever you want, not just an authorized dealer you know because you bought the ding dang darn thing. But companies like John Deer have these systems in place to make that difficult or impossible. Well, sick Codes had already demonstrated that he could compromise a John Dear piece of equipment that he could hack and get control root control of the computer system underneath. But this year at dev Coon, he partnered with a Doom model named Skelegant or handle Skelegant, and she created a version of Doom that you could play on a John Dear tractor like it had you mowing down demons in a corn field. So great since the humor Skelegon, I really dig that and just showed that, Yeah, ultimately, this is just a computer system and all you have to do is get around the various gates that John Dear has put up blocking you from having root access, which sick Codes has already demonstrated he can do interesting stuff. Well that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you're having a great week and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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's time for the tech news for August twenty two, and today we've got a lot of news items about hacking because def Con, the hacker convention, was just this past weekend. But first let's touch on some other news items. The advocacy group Global Witness has leveled some pretty nasty accusations against Facebook. And I say accusations, but really it sounds like in this case the group has a pretty open and shut argument. Now, this all has to do with some upcoming elections in Brazil, and I'm sure we're all aware of how Facebook has been under scrutiny for a few years now for its role in carrying and in some cases promoting misinformation, namely through its recommendation algorithm in English speaking countries. But in countries where the dominant language isn't English, this can be even more of a problem. It can go unresolved. So how does Global Witness know that Facebook has failed to live up to its promised that the platform is quote deeply committed to protecting election integrity end quote. When it comes to Brazil, well, Global Witness created political ads and they inserted outright misinformation into those political ads. Then Global Witness submitted those ads to Facebook, and Facebook accepted the ads without raising any objections to the content inside them. The advocacy group included ads that listed the wrong date for the elections. So these were ads that were targeted towards specific populations in Brazil. So the concept here is that you would be trying to miss need a specific target demographic so that they would not participate in voting, and you will give them the wrong date. There was there were other ads that that called for people to use voting methods that aren't sanctioned by Brazil, so an example that might be to vote by mail when there isn't a vote by mail option. Some of them even called into question the validity of the election and the election hasn't even happened yet, and Facebook accepted all of them, according to Global Witness senior advisor John Lloyd, Now what should have happened was that Facebook should have identified the misinformation in the ads and then denied the submitted advertisement. Instead, Global Witness received notification after notification that the fake ads had passed Muster, which the group rightfully points out brings into question Facebook's entire content moderation strategy. Brazil's upcoming election is likely to be a rough one, with current president Bolsonaro seeking out another term in office. He's also been accused of spreading disinformation, including calling into question the validity of results from certain voting machines. Global Witness points out that its experiment wasn't just an exercise to see if Facebook is living up to its promise. It's really a critical demonstration of Facebook's failure in a high stakes, real world scenario, something that is actually playing out right now. So yeah, not a good look. Now, let's switch gears for a little bit. So, misinformation and disinformation are clearly bad, right, Misinformation you want to avoid, and disinformation that that says there's a motive behind it where you are specifically seeking to mislead people. So we should really seek to eliminate misinformation and disinformation from platforms. However, we also have to take into account who is making the claim that a particular something is in fact misinformation in the first place. That requires critical thinking and sometimes it gets really hard to know what is true. Right, Like, if someone says that's fake news, and they offer no evidence to show that the claim is fake, and that the actual claim has evidence to show that it's valid, then you can't just say, oh, well, it's fake because this person said it was fake. Right. And I say all this because our next story is about how the Hong Kong Police Force has opened a public relations wing that has identified the elimination of online quote unquote smearring of police work as a high priority. Now, the police force is claiming that misinformation campaigns are portraying Hong Kong police in a negative way and that that has led to the deterioration of the relationship between the public and the police force, Whereas some of the critics would say the police using uh increased force against citizens is the deteriorating relationship that we should be concerned about. So you could argue that the Hong Kong Police Force is looking to censor voices that criticize the police or bring attention to situations that at least seemed to indicate an abuse of power. In other words, you could argue the police are using the label of misinformation to silence activists and critics in an effort to control the narrative. So dealing with misinformation is a tricky thing. I don't mean to suggest that it's super easy. You always have to examine the validity of the claim that something is misinformation to start with. Now, in the case of Global Witness, that was obvious, right because the group outright inserted falsehoods into political ads. There's no denying that they were testing it and saw that Facebook failed. But in the case of Hong Kong, it looks like it's more of an authoritarian move in order to try and limit dissent. So again, while we should be aiming to eliminate misinformation, we always have to be cognizant of where the claims of misinformation were coming from and to weigh them carefully to make sure that this isn't just an attempt to silence a critic. According to Bloomberg, Apple is looking to insert more ads into the iPhone experience, namely within certain first party Apple apps, uh the big one being Apple Maps. Now, you might also encounter ads within Apple's podcast app, And if that's the case, then that means you're going to hear and see ads that are not just inside a podcast, but also on the podcasting platform itself. That's interesting because the podcast business is largely dependent upon ads. I don't know if you've noticed, but we've had a couple in our show. Well, Apple doesn't get revenue from the ads that are in our show. Apple is a way for people to access podcasts. But unless the show was actually coming from Apple, then Apple doesn't really like revenue from the podcasts that are running. You know that it allows people to access, So putting ads into the podcast app itself is a way for Apple to monetize the podcasting phenomenon. Also, a CNBC article points out that Apple now has a huge advantage over third party apps on iOS. So you might remember that Apple introduced the app Tracking Transparency feature last year. This was a little notification that would pop up and let users decide whether or not they wanted to opt in too targeted tracking from apps. That's the source of stuff that lets companies like Meta capitalize on user activity. Now, a lot of folks opted out when they got that choice. They chose not to have their data shared with these third parties, and that's one of the major hits to Meta's revenue In the recent past. In fact, the loss of that customer data was a huge blow to Meta because Meta was heavily dependent upon using that data in order to market targeted ads and really make the most out of its platforms. But without that piece, without your information, then a lot of the value of that service is gone. They can't target with such precision. Thus they can't demand the same sort of prices from advertisers that they had in the past, and the whole thing starts to kind of fall apart. Now, Apple still has all that information, right, like they've collected that info. It's not, it's just that they're not sharing it with third parties. So you could imagine a future in which Apple builds out its own advertising business, for example, and leverages the data that other parties aren't allowed to access, at least not without users opting into the experience, right, And that's all speculation on my part, of course, It doesn't mean that that's what Apple is going to do. If Apple does design an advertising business, it doesn't mean that Apple is going to rely on that information without giving users the same opportunity to opt out with Apple that they had with other apps. None of that is is known. One way or the other. But if it did happen, it wouldn't surprise me, although it would bring more anti competitive scrutiny onto Apple, which the company is already dealing with across the world in various UH venues. So we'll have to see if that, in fact is where we're headed. Bloomberg also reports that Apple has once again set a deadline for corporate employees to spend at least three days of the work week in the office. Reportedly, employees are expected to come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus another day that was set by their team leaders. So that new deadline, at least according to one reporter, is September five. As far as I know, Apple has not confirmed that or officially announced that, but that's what a reporter's says. Is the plan that by September five, all Apple corporate employees will be expected to come into the office at least three days a week now. Apple has moved this goal post multiple times during the pandemic due to lots of reasons, mostly spikes in COVID transmission rates, and there have been more than a few reports of Apple corporate employees protesting this move. In fact, the former head of Apple's machine learning department, Ian Goodfellow left Apple reportedly because of this mandate that employees would have to return to the office. Of course, we're also in a time where a lot of companies are looking to downsize, so you could argue that Apple's continued insistence that employees returned to h Q might be a way to kind of put the squeeze on Apple employees and maybe shake out a few folks and slim down without actually having to hold layoffs. Of course, that's just a possibility. I'm not saying that Apple is doing that. I'm saying that their companies are doing that. I just don't know if Apple is um and maybe the reason for it has nothing to do with that. Maybe there is no desire to convince Apple employees, or at least some of them, to maybe leave the company. Maybe a big part of it is that, I don't know, Apple spent billions of dollars to build out this campus and barely got any use out of it before the pandemic hit, and by gum, Tim Cook once those folks in that expensive building, I'm sure the truth of the matter is far more subtle, far more nuanced and complicated, But It sure is fun to kind of boil these things down to an absurd level. Al Right, Well, that's enough absurdity for now, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll have some more news. Before the break, I was talking about Apple asking or telling employees that they need to come back to the office. Let's talk about what's going on over at A T and T. There's a similar battle brewing between employees and management now. Some of A T and T s employees have representation with the Communications Workers of America UH and the cw A has negotiated an extension for work from home operations until the end of March two thousand twenty three. However, some A T and T employees are saying that there are already groups within the company that management has forced to come back to the office now, so they're saying it just it depends upon which department you work in and what team you work for. Now, this has become an issue for employee morale because those who have been forced to go back into the office are kind of envying the departments that continue to work from home. A lot of folks have said that working from home had no negative impact on productivity, or performance, so there was no downside to the company for them work from home, and that moreover, workers were saving money on stuff like transportation and other expenses that led to a boost in quality of life for the workers. So the narrative that we're seeing develop across the entire industry is that workers feel the real reason employers want them in the office isn't so much about contributing to the bottom line. It's not so much about performance and productivity and creativity and collaboration. It's more about surveillance and control. If the employees are not in the office, they can't be watched and they can't be controlled. And whether that's a realistic narrative or not, I don't know. I'm certain that most bosses aren't thinking of it in those terms, but I know that that's a narrative that is growing in in uh in size across the industry. Right. You're seeing more and more people essentially boiled down the the matter into those kind of terms. It's oh, I know that any company out there there really wants to bring its employees back into offices needs to be able to address that concern in a satisfying way, or then that narrative will continue to grow there as well. If your employees are convinced that the only reason they're being brought back into the office is so that the boss can keep an eye on them and that's it, then that's not a good narrative, right that that's that's going to paint the company as a bad place to work. That it's unreasonable. So again, I don't think that that's necessarily where most companies are. I can't imagine most bosses actually thinking in that that way, but they need to get ahead of it if they want people to come back into the office and not have it be a catastrophic effect on the morale of the employees. Signal, the encrypted messaging service, reported that a fishing attack on Twilo Incorporated could mean the up to one thousand, nine hundred Signal users had their phone numbers revealed to the attackers. So here's the breakdown. Twilo is a verification services provider and Signal uses Twilo's verification services, so Signal was not compromised. The hackers did not target and and compromise Signal. Instead, they compromised a company that Signal partners with for the verification services. So the good news is that the attackers seem to only have been able to get the phone numbers, not even like the names of the people that the phone numbers correspond to, just the numbers that represent devices that have signal installed on them, and it's just nine of them. That really limits what the attackers can do with that information. They could conceivably attempt to reregister a device's number, but that's about it. They didn't have access to message history or profile information or anything like that, so it could have been much worse. But it does bring into focus the interconnected nature of tech companies and how challenging it is to create a secure process because if you're relying on another party to provide services that make your company, you know, services possible, you might not have total control over your own security procedures because some of them are dependent upon another company entirely. So yeah, it's complicated. Not long ago, a security researcher named Lenart Wilder's and my apologies for butchering the name, revealed that he was able to use a homemade device to hack into Starlink, the satellite internet service provider arm of SpaceX now. Starlink has since congratulated him on his find as it you know, it uncovered a vulnerability that the company needed to address. And you know he wasn't being a malicious hacker. He was testing the security of starlinks technology and found a an inroad. And the way I think about this is that if researchers did do this and didn't reveal their findings, there would be a danger that these vulnerabilities would go unpatched, and then someone eventually who has bad intentions would discover those vulnerabilities and then do nasty evil things with that information. To that end, starlinkin SpaceX have announced a bug bounty program inviting security researchers to poke and prod and look for vulnerabilities, and if they discover and report one, they get rewarded up to twenty five thousand bucks, depending upon the nature of the vulnerability, which is a responsible way to try and keep systems safe, because if you're not supporting some sort of bug bounty, you're inviting hackers to make money from those same vulnerabilities in more nefarious ways. And finally, this past weekend, as I said, was def Con a hacking convention and a place where you absolutely want to make sure you're only carrying a burner phone that has none of your personal information on it, and one of the hackers attending goes by the handle sick codes, and among sick codes as accomplishments is jail breaking. John dear farm equipment. Now, I've talked about this on past episodes, but John Deer installs computers and software on its equipment like tractors that not only provide extra functionality and features to the equipment, it also really restricts how farmers can maintain and repair their stuff. In fact, you could argue that really the main reason for this technology is to create a closed off ecosystem where the farmers have no option but to take their equipment to authorize John Deer Associates to have their equipment serviced and repaired. And that's why this company comes up a lot in conversations around the right to repair, which has this radical notion that once you purchase something, you should be able to maintain it, repair it, and customize it without limitations. Take it to whomever you want, not just an authorized dealer you know because you bought the ding dang darn thing. But companies like John Deer have these systems in place to make that difficult or impossible. Well, sick Codes had already demonstrated that he could compromise a John Dear piece of equipment that he could hack and get control root control of the computer system underneath. But this year at dev Coon, he partnered with a Doom model named Skelegant or handle Skelegant, and she created a version of Doom that you could play on a John Dear tractor like it had you mowing down demons in a corn field. So great since the humor Skelegon, I really dig that and just showed that, Yeah, ultimately, this is just a computer system and all you have to do is get around the various gates that John Dear has put up blocking you from having root access, which sick Codes has already demonstrated he can do interesting stuff. Well that's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you're having a great week and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.