Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Heth Aaron, Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Joathan Strickland of an executive producer with iHeart Radio and all of all things tech, and it's time for the tech news for Tuesday, October nineteen twenty one. Let's get to it. Members of the United States House Judiciary Committee released a statement saying they are considering a criminal investigation into Amazon. This relates to the report I mentioned last week in which Reuters revealed that internal documents from Amazon that Reuters had come into possession of showed that the company had copied products in India to create Amazon branded versions of those same products, and then used Amazon's search algorithm to promote Amazon owned versions over the competing brands, so essentially saying, Amazon said, this particular product is making a lot of money, let's make our own version, and then let's make sure that people see that over the industry leader. Reuters published that again, this was happening in India, not necessarily in other parts of the world, but the five committee members of the House Judiciary Committee that we're concerned about this. Reached out to Amazon CEO Andy Jesse over this matter, saying that these reports contradict sworn testimony that Amazon executives, including Jeff Bezos, gave to Congress in the past. Now, for its own part, Amazon reps say that the reporting that Reuters has published is inaccurate and that the executives who provided testimony before US Congress did so truthfully. But again, these documents that Reuters says it's received suggest that at least two top Amazon executives were aware of the practices in India, and they paint a pretty anti competitive picture. Meanwhile, in India, a trade group is petitioning the Prime Minister of the country to sanction Amazon in light of the Reuters report. Facebook is changing how it charges for ads, and the news isn't great for advertisers. Okay, so let's talk about how Facebook's ads work in a nutshell from the advertiser perspective. Usually I'm talking about this from the user point of view, but now we're looking at it from the other way. So let's say we've got an advertiser. In fact, let's say we're being super lucky and it's a legitimate business, because if you're not lucky, it's a scam company that's fleecing customers. I run into those all the time on Facebook. They all lead to companies in China that ship out cheap knockoffs are sometimes just junk two people, and the cost of returning it would be more than what you spent on the item. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Facebook doesn't really care one way or the other if the company is legit or not, because it turns out all that money spends the same whether it comes from a legit source or an illegitimate one. You can still spend that money anyway. These advertisers set down a budget for Facebook and they submit an ad, so it costs money right up front to run an ad campaign, which makes sense, and the companies tell Facebook what actions would represent a successful ad delivery. Maybe the brand wants to count every engagement like they're saying, we want to see how many likes we can get and we're gonna pay X amount per like, Or maybe they only want to count the times that someone actually clicks through on an ad the click through rate, and Facebook runs the ad for a certain amount of time, like thirty days, and at the end of that campaign, Facebook talies up all the hits on that ad based on whatever criteria the client had selected at the beginning. Then Facebook gives the client a bill by delivering that many hits. So this can get pretty expensive if the ad is really effective, and if the company is asking for something that requires a particularly challenging user behavior like clicking through on an AD is typically a pretty big step compared to you know, just seeing the ad in your feed. So Facebook could charge a few dollars per click, and if tens of thousands of people actually click through on that ad, that bill can get pretty big. Well, here's where things take a turn for advertisers moving forward. Facebook has decided that it will now treat Instagram and Facebook accounts as separate accounts, even if the same user clicks on the same ad both in Instagram and in Facebook. So before Facebook would treat these as a single account, Like if you have a Facebook and an Instagram account, then you were to interact with the same ad on both. In the past, Facebook said well, that's just one user, so it only counts once. Now they're saying, no, it's going to count twice, because you know why not. On Facebook's point of view, this strikes a lot of people is weird because if you're serving the same ADD to the same person a couple of different times, it's not like you've just created a new customer each time, right. You can only become a new customer once. But now, if someone engages with an AD on Instagram and on Facebook, the company will treat that as if that one person is actually two people. So, in other words, add clients can potentially get charged twice for the same person seeing the same AD on two different platforms, both of which are owned by Facebook. Facebook says this will only happen if the user hasn't had their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in the account center. Now you might wonder, what's the account center, Well, this is an optional way for users to connect their Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger accounts together from an ad perspective. Uh. By the way, it's a fully optional feature. It's up to the user to engage it, and that feature has not been fully deployed. Only a selection of Facebook users have even had the option to activate it, so by default, most folks do not have their accounts linked together, and even when this gets rolled out in full deployment, it still will mean that users will have to take the step to enable that option. I'm guessing that Facebook is banking on the fact that most people won't bother to do this. Plus, there are plenty of folks who already don't like the idea of linking their activities together for the purposes of ads, which means that companies that are advertising on Facebook can look forward to paying twice per user for those who interact with an ad on more than one platform. I will not be shocked to see UH some opposition to this plan, but this is, you know, just the early days for it. Speaking of Facebook, over the past few years, the company has shifted UH to depend more upon AI algorithms in order to detect and potentially remove posts that contain harmful content or you know, stuff that just plane violates Facebook's policies, and that includes stuff like, you know, depictions of violence, hate speech, acts of cruelty, and so forth. But The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook's AI just isn't really up to the task. Guy Rosen, who is the head of integrity at Facebook, says that as recently as this past spring, one in every two thousand and posts on Facebook still contained hate speech. Facebook started using AI because there's so much content that's posted to Facebook that it's not really feasible to rely upon human beings to police everything, and that makes sense. Unfortunately, the robot police in this case aren't really good at their jobs. One senior research scientists posted in two thousand nineteen that by his estimation, the AI was removing posts that represented about two percent of all the hate speech that was actually posted onto Facebook. Missing of posts that violate the ban on hate speech is pretty darn lousy by any metric, and when the AI can't draw a firm conclusion about whether or not a particular post violates Facebook's rules, the default response is just to reduce how frequently that post will pop up in other people's news feeds. You know, you kind of emphasize the algorithm, and so it's not muting the post, it's not removing the post or banning the user. It's just making sure that that particular post that may include hate speech doesn't spread quite as much on the platform. That's, you know, not good. Facebook reps claim that the company is working to improve the algorithms, but based upon the posts of other research scientists, it sounds like there isn't much cause to be optimistic that any improvement will be significant enough to make a serious dent in the spread of hate speech on the platform. Things to remember here that artificial intelligence is a difficult and complicated discipline. It is not always up to the tasks we assigned to it, and there are some pretty awful people out there who take advantage of this fact and they spread harmful posts on platforms like Facebook, knowing that you know, the company these own measures aren't really you know, up to the task. They have a really good chance of getting that message to spread, whether they specifically, you know, adhere to an ideology that they really believe in and they're trying to promote that, or they're just trying to cause chaos in the in the case of things like Russian misinformation trolls. So yeah, good things to remember. Speaking of Russia, the Russian government is pressuring companies like Facebook and Google to comply with orders to delete illegal content from their platforms. In Google's case, the government is threatening a fine of up to twent of Google's Russian turnover. By the way, I actually had to look up the word turnover because I think of turnovers as either a baked good or the number of employees who leave a business within a given amount of time, like that's what turnover is. But turnover in this case refers to the amount of any business brings in over an amount of time. I don't know why we use that instead of the word like revenue. But I mean, hey, that's the English language, right, Hey, English language. You're confusing. And I say that as a native speaker anyway. At least some of the content, this illegal content that Google refuses to remove is stuff that's critical of the Russian government. So in many ways, this is different from the pressure that these same platforms face when it comes to spreading hate speech, and it falls more in line with a government attempting to suppress any resistance to that government's authority. Now I should also add I don't know what all the illegal content is that Russia alleges Google has failed to remove. Some of that could fall into categories like hate speech or misinformation, things like that stuff that we would, you know, typically think should be removed in general, I don't know how much of that falls into those categories versus just plain old you know, government censorship that is, you know, designed to keep those in power to remain in power. But yeah, Google is facing some pretty massive fines in Russia. If they don't take those steps, we will have to see how that develops. I've got a lot more news to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. The green Ridge Generation power plant in New York State is the latest to come under the scrutiny of environmentalist groups, and this is because that particular facility has partnered with bitcoin mining operations. Now, the power plant had shut down, it was defunct, but it came back online in two thousand seventeen and it houses more than fifteen thousand computer services that are engaged in bitcoin mining. Now. As a reminder, bitcoin is based off a proof of work mining model, and from a very high, high level, just to kind of cover this, this means that the system generates what amounts to be a number guessing game, and the system makes this number increasingly more difficult to guess as more computational power joins the system, because the goal is to keep the solution time period to about ten minutes, so it should take around ten minutes to guess the right answer. Well, as the value of bitcoin goes up, more people spend more money to put together computer networks that are just trying to get the correct answer right, because they're going to make a lot of cash in the form of bitcoin. Well, that means the system has to make the number harder to guess in order to keep that ten minute goal in place. And this cycle feeds on itself as long as the currency remains really valuable, and right now it's you know, around sixty dollars per coin. Meanwhile, all these computers need electricity to run, and if the expense of running the system is more than what you're getting from mining, then the whole thing falls apart. Right, you're spending more money than you make in mining. And when you've got fifteen thousand servers, you need a lot of electricity. So a lot of bitcoin mining operations have looked too defunct. Power plants like the green Ridge Generation power Plant had been in order to bring them back online, specifically to provide electricity for bitcoin mining operations and then perhaps selling any additional electricity to the local power grid. Now, bitcoin mining operations do this because it brings the cost of electricity way down. If the cost is is higher than that cuts into your profits, right, And eventually you might get to a point where maintaining all the equipment plus spending all the money on electricity is more than what you get out of mining, and you you've got to cut your business or else you'll you'll you know, your your costs are greater than your profits, or actually you don't have profits. Your costs are greater than your revenue. Now that means that these previously defunct fossil fuel power plants are coming back online, and thus they're generating more pollution. Bitcoin mining operations say that they make sure that they purchase carbon offsets in order to remain carbon neutral, but a lot of environmentalists have said that carbon offsets tend to encourage more reliance on fossil fuel and that this is harmful behavior. Essentially that companies use it as an excuse in order to not make the changes needed to get off the dependence on fossil fuels, and in the meantime, we just continue to dump more carbon and into the atmosphere. And sure, we might use carbon offsets to fund things that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, but that's further into the future, and the harm that those carbon emissions can do is more immediate. So, in other words, carbon offsets can be a solution for a long term as long as you also are backing off on carbon emissions. But that's not what we're seeing here, and so the environmentalists are calling upon New York politicians to deny an air permit for Green Ridge and to send an example both to the state of New York as well as the country overall. They have warned that not doing that will seriously undermine state and national efforts to cut carbon emissions drastically over the next few years. I'm inclined to agree with the activists on this one. And while bitcoin miners might argue that their operations bring revenue to the state and they create high paying jobs, I would counter that when you've got increased carbon emissions, that kind of negates those benefits in the long term. I mean, what good is money if all the shops end up being either underwater or on fire. South Korea has adjusted its targets for reducing carbon emissions by twenty thirty. Speaking of carbon emissions, previously the country had a goal of reducing carbon emissions by twenty six point three by thirty but now the country is upping that to a commitment to reducing it by forty percent by with the overall goal to become carbon neutral by twenty fifty. Now, this is a really significant change. South Korea is a country that depends heavily on coal power plants. They generate about of the electricity that the country relies upon, and it has a long way to go to get to those goals that it's set. But South Korea's government has created an aggressive plan that calls for a coal power generation to drop to twenty one eight percent by twenty thirty and renewables would go from the current six point two percent of power generation to thirty by It is a very aggressive green plan. It will be interesting to see if the country can follow through. The U s Department of Justice has leveled charges against Mark Faulkner, who was the chief technical pilot for Boeing. Now, the heart of the matter relates to the seven thirty seven Max aircraft. You might remember that there were two tragic crashes, one near Jakarta, Indonesia and another one in Ethiopia that involved seven thirty seven Max aircraft and the aircraft's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System or m CAST, was at fault. Now, the m CAST is meant to stabilize flight and the seven thirty seven MAX has a design that means that the nose of the aircraft tends to go up during flight as you are are moving forward, and this can cause the plane to climb or even to reach a point where the aircraft could you know, suffer a massive stall. Engineers tweaked the MCAST system to counteract this tendency and thus force the nose back down to a level orientation. But the problem was that the system would start pushing the nose down prematurely, like during takeoff, it would mistakenly identify that the aircraft was in a dangerous angle of attack, that's the orientation of the aircraft in relation to the direction that it is traveling. Worst, Boeing had failed to include information about im casts in various training manuals. In fact, the whole point of the seven MAX was to decrease the amount of time that pilots would have to spend in training in order to fly the aircraft. So pilots had no idea how to shut off the system and they lost control the aircraft, thus leading to these tragic plane crashes. The d o J says that Wagner presented false and incomplete information to various airlines regarding mcasts, and again this was in order for Boeing to sell the aircraft with the essentially the advertising line of you won't have to bring your pilots off duty to complete hundreds of hours or dozens of hours of training in order to fly this aircraft. They're training and other aircraft will be sufficient and they'll just have to complete maybe a few hours and that's it, and then they're back in the air flying passengers around. So, in other words, it was it was being sold as a way to to save in a long run while also upgrading your your fleet. And now the d o J is saying that Forakner specifically, was leaving out critical information that could have saved lives. A grand jury has indicted Wargner, who faces multiple accounts of wire fraud. The United States Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, has already created rules for telecom companies in the United States regarding spam phone calls, and the major carriers have already reached an obligation to comply to those orders. Smaller carriers have a little bit longer. They have un til I think June and next year to implement those changes, and the goal is to cut down on spam calls. Now the FCC is looking to do the same thing with text messages. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosen Warsol says that the increase in robotexts aimed at tricking people into downloading nolware or sharing personal information has been on the rise, and the FCC and telecom companies have an obligation to respond. The f CC will propose rules for this response, which the public will be able to review and comment upon before they are implemented. This is just the normal operations for the f c C. You might remember that during the whole net neutrality battles, there were times where the f CC opened up things for public comment that became a whole mess depending upon which administration was in charge. There were cases where there were a bunch of uh comments that were suspected of being fake, that were intended to push one agenda over another. Anyway, the whole point of that process is to give the public an opportunity to to weigh in and to you know, argue what things matter most to them. So in this case, I hope that the public response by saying yes, I would like to have fewer spam text messages. At this point, I just want my phone to work whenever I needed to work, and I don't want people to be contacting me. Specifically, I don't want spam to be contacting me. We have a few more news stories to cover before we get into that. Let's take another quick break. The Sinclair Broadcast Group, which operates lots of television station across the United States, and which is also known for pushing conservative talking points through its numerous regional stations, you know, requiring local staff to repeat those particular talking points, it has been hit with a ransomware attack. Now, before I get into this story, I do want to say that while I do not agree with Sinclair's political philosophy, and I definitely don't agree with its policy of requiring staff to repeat those talking points, I also condemn ransomware attacks in general. Right, I don't think that that is the right way to go. Two wrongs do not make a right anyway. This attack happened this past Saturday and disrupted operations at numerous stations around the United States. It affected the station's ability to stream content, It disrupted services like email and even telephone service at some of these locations. In addition, the hackers appear to have access data on Sinclair's systems and locked Sinclair out of those systems at the time of this recording, it's not entirely clear what data that might be or how it will affect Sinclair moving forward. I've not seen any reports on how much the hackers have demanded in ransom. I mean, if it's a ransomware attack, that's typically part of it that I haven't seen any any reference to the demands. Uh, nor have I found any information on which hacker group is responsible. At least as of the recording of this podcast, no group has claimed responsibility. Now, it might be tempting to assume that the hackers have an ideological beef with Sinclair, but it's also possible that this was just an attack of opportunity, unguided by any sort of ideological stance. But as always, my advice is never pay the ransom. It encourages future attacks. UH. This is easier said than done for a lot of organizations because it could be critical infrastructure that's affected by the attack, and if there's not an easy fix to reverse that, then what do you do? But paying that ransom it really just sends the message of Hey, your tactic worked and you made money off of it, so you should do it again. Not a great situation for the rest of us. Now, on the subject of ransomware, the FBI, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CAESA, as well as the National Security Agency or n s A, have issued a joint advisory about the black Matter ransomware gang and how that group works. So the goal is to alert various organizations, essentially big businesses, to the tactics that this group uses in an effort to bolster cybersecurity and prevent future attacks. Black Matter has traditionally offered bribes to employees who work for really big organizations, sometimes up to a hundred thousand dollars for these emloyees to share log in credentials. Essentially, they're saying, if you have a key to the vault, we will pay you a hundred thousand dollars to let us in. The group does have some restrictions, however. They apparently don't want to target nonprofit organizations. They don't want to target hospitals or healthcare companies in that space. Uh. They say that government organizations are off limits. Companies that are in the defense industry are off limits stuff like that, so they're really looking to target like big businesses that are outside of those industries. You know, like financial institutions could be totally on target. Uh, big telecommunications companies, that kind of stuff, like any of those other companies could be considered fair game. And their attack methods include good old standbys, such as using compromise log incredentials to gain unauthorized access to a system. That's why they will offer that like hundred thousand dollar payout in order to get access to what are considered to be really high value targets. This is the sort of thing that the average person can prevent. So first, you know, you don't give into the temptation to sell out a company for a hundred thousand dollars. That kind of stuff can be tracked. It's more likely to get you into serious trouble than that hundred grand is worth. I mean a hundred thousand dollars. That's a lot of money, and I can see where the temptation would be. But uh not many people have any idea of how to hide a sudden flow of a hundred thousand dollars into their bank accounts. So really, for those who want to try and keep things safe, they need to set strong passwords. They need to keep those passwords safe. One thing you should not do, for example, is write your password down on a sticky note and attach that sticky note to your computer monitor. Not that I've personally seen that happen. The agencies revealed that the black Matter group also is something that a lot of other groups will not do. Instead of encrypt data backups, that's what a lot of ransomware groups will do, though, and cry crypt the backups so that the backups are not accessible, black Matter goes a step further. They will overwrite the data backup systems, so they will essentially erase all that backup data. That means that companies are left with encrypted systems and no backups. Whether those are backups are encrypted or otherwise. It's a pretty brutal attack, and obviously the best approach is to try and prevent an attack from happening in the first place. There are more details, and I would urge anyone out there who oversees large and critical networks to read the Joint Advisory. You can find it at the ces A website. It is alert A A to one DASH to nine one a catchy right, But seriously, if you are at all responsible for those sorts of networks, I highly recommend you read the advice ory. It could potentially save you and your organization a lot of trouble. Finally, as part of the Artemis program, which is the NASA program that includes sending astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since the early nineteen seventies, NASA plans to establish a communications network that it is currently calling Luna net Now. According to NASA, the goal is to have a system that will allow for communications on and around the Moon in a way that's similar to how WiFi works here on Earth. Now, I'm using vague language to describe this because what NASA has done involves setting the goals of what this system should be capable of doing, rather than laying out the design of the system itself. And this is because the agency has released a specification on what the system should be able to do, and it's looking to engage in technical discussions with various telecommunication and internet experts in an effort to design a system that will make those goals a reality. The system will need to take into account stuff that isn't necessarily as big a concern here on Earth, like solar flare activity. So it is possible for a particularly powerful solar flare to be strong enough to affect electrical systems here on Earth and to disrupt systems. It's it's like an electromagnetic pulse that can wipe out things like a power grid if it were really powerful and it hit Earth at just the right time. But our magneto sphere and Earth's atmosphere protect us quite a bit here on Earth. Out in space, it's a different story. You don't necessarily have that protection, So the system needs to be resilient. More importantly, the system should be able to alert astronauts of an impending solar flare ahead of time, and it gives them the chance to prepare for that faster than they would if the news first had to come from mission control on Earth, and any delay at all can be disaster risks in these sort of events. Assuming that lunar net all comes together, the astronauts of the future will be able to use the network to communicate with each other, just as some some of the folks water around the Moon and others remain in lunar orbit or beyond. It should also allow astronauts to conduct more extensive operations on the Moon's surface, using the network to aid in navigation so that they can range further from home base and still return easily. Right, you know, they don't get lost on the Moon's surface. There's not a whole lot of landmarks that you can look at besides things like craters and stuff. So the idea is that this communication system will allow for more robust and extensive lunar operations and that could help with science that could help with establishing moon bases and that sort of stuff in the future. So we will have to wait and see how this unfolds. I think it's pretty cool and um I look word to hearing about the Looney Communications Network. All right, that is it for the tech news I have for you today, Tuesday, October ninety one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a trend, a company, anything like that, let me know the best way to do that is to reach out on Twitter to handle for the show is tech Stuff's h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Heth Aaron, Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Joathan Strickland of an executive producer with iHeart Radio and all of all things tech, and it's time for the tech news for Tuesday, October nineteen twenty one. Let's get to it. Members of the United States House Judiciary Committee released a statement saying they are considering a criminal investigation into Amazon. This relates to the report I mentioned last week in which Reuters revealed that internal documents from Amazon that Reuters had come into possession of showed that the company had copied products in India to create Amazon branded versions of those same products, and then used Amazon's search algorithm to promote Amazon owned versions over the competing brands, so essentially saying, Amazon said, this particular product is making a lot of money, let's make our own version, and then let's make sure that people see that over the industry leader. Reuters published that again, this was happening in India, not necessarily in other parts of the world, but the five committee members of the House Judiciary Committee that we're concerned about this. Reached out to Amazon CEO Andy Jesse over this matter, saying that these reports contradict sworn testimony that Amazon executives, including Jeff Bezos, gave to Congress in the past. Now, for its own part, Amazon reps say that the reporting that Reuters has published is inaccurate and that the executives who provided testimony before US Congress did so truthfully. But again, these documents that Reuters says it's received suggest that at least two top Amazon executives were aware of the practices in India, and they paint a pretty anti competitive picture. Meanwhile, in India, a trade group is petitioning the Prime Minister of the country to sanction Amazon in light of the Reuters report. Facebook is changing how it charges for ads, and the news isn't great for advertisers. Okay, so let's talk about how Facebook's ads work in a nutshell from the advertiser perspective. Usually I'm talking about this from the user point of view, but now we're looking at it from the other way. So let's say we've got an advertiser. In fact, let's say we're being super lucky and it's a legitimate business, because if you're not lucky, it's a scam company that's fleecing customers. I run into those all the time on Facebook. They all lead to companies in China that ship out cheap knockoffs are sometimes just junk two people, and the cost of returning it would be more than what you spent on the item. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Facebook doesn't really care one way or the other if the company is legit or not, because it turns out all that money spends the same whether it comes from a legit source or an illegitimate one. You can still spend that money anyway. These advertisers set down a budget for Facebook and they submit an ad, so it costs money right up front to run an ad campaign, which makes sense, and the companies tell Facebook what actions would represent a successful ad delivery. Maybe the brand wants to count every engagement like they're saying, we want to see how many likes we can get and we're gonna pay X amount per like, Or maybe they only want to count the times that someone actually clicks through on an ad the click through rate, and Facebook runs the ad for a certain amount of time, like thirty days, and at the end of that campaign, Facebook talies up all the hits on that ad based on whatever criteria the client had selected at the beginning. Then Facebook gives the client a bill by delivering that many hits. So this can get pretty expensive if the ad is really effective, and if the company is asking for something that requires a particularly challenging user behavior like clicking through on an AD is typically a pretty big step compared to you know, just seeing the ad in your feed. So Facebook could charge a few dollars per click, and if tens of thousands of people actually click through on that ad, that bill can get pretty big. Well, here's where things take a turn for advertisers moving forward. Facebook has decided that it will now treat Instagram and Facebook accounts as separate accounts, even if the same user clicks on the same ad both in Instagram and in Facebook. So before Facebook would treat these as a single account, Like if you have a Facebook and an Instagram account, then you were to interact with the same ad on both. In the past, Facebook said well, that's just one user, so it only counts once. Now they're saying, no, it's going to count twice, because you know why not. On Facebook's point of view, this strikes a lot of people is weird because if you're serving the same ADD to the same person a couple of different times, it's not like you've just created a new customer each time, right. You can only become a new customer once. But now, if someone engages with an AD on Instagram and on Facebook, the company will treat that as if that one person is actually two people. So, in other words, add clients can potentially get charged twice for the same person seeing the same AD on two different platforms, both of which are owned by Facebook. Facebook says this will only happen if the user hasn't had their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in the account center. Now you might wonder, what's the account center, Well, this is an optional way for users to connect their Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger accounts together from an ad perspective. Uh. By the way, it's a fully optional feature. It's up to the user to engage it, and that feature has not been fully deployed. Only a selection of Facebook users have even had the option to activate it, so by default, most folks do not have their accounts linked together, and even when this gets rolled out in full deployment, it still will mean that users will have to take the step to enable that option. I'm guessing that Facebook is banking on the fact that most people won't bother to do this. Plus, there are plenty of folks who already don't like the idea of linking their activities together for the purposes of ads, which means that companies that are advertising on Facebook can look forward to paying twice per user for those who interact with an ad on more than one platform. I will not be shocked to see UH some opposition to this plan, but this is, you know, just the early days for it. Speaking of Facebook, over the past few years, the company has shifted UH to depend more upon AI algorithms in order to detect and potentially remove posts that contain harmful content or you know, stuff that just plane violates Facebook's policies, and that includes stuff like, you know, depictions of violence, hate speech, acts of cruelty, and so forth. But The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook's AI just isn't really up to the task. Guy Rosen, who is the head of integrity at Facebook, says that as recently as this past spring, one in every two thousand and posts on Facebook still contained hate speech. Facebook started using AI because there's so much content that's posted to Facebook that it's not really feasible to rely upon human beings to police everything, and that makes sense. Unfortunately, the robot police in this case aren't really good at their jobs. One senior research scientists posted in two thousand nineteen that by his estimation, the AI was removing posts that represented about two percent of all the hate speech that was actually posted onto Facebook. Missing of posts that violate the ban on hate speech is pretty darn lousy by any metric, and when the AI can't draw a firm conclusion about whether or not a particular post violates Facebook's rules, the default response is just to reduce how frequently that post will pop up in other people's news feeds. You know, you kind of emphasize the algorithm, and so it's not muting the post, it's not removing the post or banning the user. It's just making sure that that particular post that may include hate speech doesn't spread quite as much on the platform. That's, you know, not good. Facebook reps claim that the company is working to improve the algorithms, but based upon the posts of other research scientists, it sounds like there isn't much cause to be optimistic that any improvement will be significant enough to make a serious dent in the spread of hate speech on the platform. Things to remember here that artificial intelligence is a difficult and complicated discipline. It is not always up to the tasks we assigned to it, and there are some pretty awful people out there who take advantage of this fact and they spread harmful posts on platforms like Facebook, knowing that you know, the company these own measures aren't really you know, up to the task. They have a really good chance of getting that message to spread, whether they specifically, you know, adhere to an ideology that they really believe in and they're trying to promote that, or they're just trying to cause chaos in the in the case of things like Russian misinformation trolls. So yeah, good things to remember. Speaking of Russia, the Russian government is pressuring companies like Facebook and Google to comply with orders to delete illegal content from their platforms. In Google's case, the government is threatening a fine of up to twent of Google's Russian turnover. By the way, I actually had to look up the word turnover because I think of turnovers as either a baked good or the number of employees who leave a business within a given amount of time, like that's what turnover is. But turnover in this case refers to the amount of any business brings in over an amount of time. I don't know why we use that instead of the word like revenue. But I mean, hey, that's the English language, right, Hey, English language. You're confusing. And I say that as a native speaker anyway. At least some of the content, this illegal content that Google refuses to remove is stuff that's critical of the Russian government. So in many ways, this is different from the pressure that these same platforms face when it comes to spreading hate speech, and it falls more in line with a government attempting to suppress any resistance to that government's authority. Now I should also add I don't know what all the illegal content is that Russia alleges Google has failed to remove. Some of that could fall into categories like hate speech or misinformation, things like that stuff that we would, you know, typically think should be removed in general, I don't know how much of that falls into those categories versus just plain old you know, government censorship that is, you know, designed to keep those in power to remain in power. But yeah, Google is facing some pretty massive fines in Russia. If they don't take those steps, we will have to see how that develops. I've got a lot more news to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. The green Ridge Generation power plant in New York State is the latest to come under the scrutiny of environmentalist groups, and this is because that particular facility has partnered with bitcoin mining operations. Now, the power plant had shut down, it was defunct, but it came back online in two thousand seventeen and it houses more than fifteen thousand computer services that are engaged in bitcoin mining. Now. As a reminder, bitcoin is based off a proof of work mining model, and from a very high, high level, just to kind of cover this, this means that the system generates what amounts to be a number guessing game, and the system makes this number increasingly more difficult to guess as more computational power joins the system, because the goal is to keep the solution time period to about ten minutes, so it should take around ten minutes to guess the right answer. Well, as the value of bitcoin goes up, more people spend more money to put together computer networks that are just trying to get the correct answer right, because they're going to make a lot of cash in the form of bitcoin. Well, that means the system has to make the number harder to guess in order to keep that ten minute goal in place. And this cycle feeds on itself as long as the currency remains really valuable, and right now it's you know, around sixty dollars per coin. Meanwhile, all these computers need electricity to run, and if the expense of running the system is more than what you're getting from mining, then the whole thing falls apart. Right, you're spending more money than you make in mining. And when you've got fifteen thousand servers, you need a lot of electricity. So a lot of bitcoin mining operations have looked too defunct. Power plants like the green Ridge Generation power Plant had been in order to bring them back online, specifically to provide electricity for bitcoin mining operations and then perhaps selling any additional electricity to the local power grid. Now, bitcoin mining operations do this because it brings the cost of electricity way down. If the cost is is higher than that cuts into your profits, right, And eventually you might get to a point where maintaining all the equipment plus spending all the money on electricity is more than what you get out of mining, and you you've got to cut your business or else you'll you'll you know, your your costs are greater than your profits, or actually you don't have profits. Your costs are greater than your revenue. Now that means that these previously defunct fossil fuel power plants are coming back online, and thus they're generating more pollution. Bitcoin mining operations say that they make sure that they purchase carbon offsets in order to remain carbon neutral, but a lot of environmentalists have said that carbon offsets tend to encourage more reliance on fossil fuel and that this is harmful behavior. Essentially that companies use it as an excuse in order to not make the changes needed to get off the dependence on fossil fuels, and in the meantime, we just continue to dump more carbon and into the atmosphere. And sure, we might use carbon offsets to fund things that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, but that's further into the future, and the harm that those carbon emissions can do is more immediate. So, in other words, carbon offsets can be a solution for a long term as long as you also are backing off on carbon emissions. But that's not what we're seeing here, and so the environmentalists are calling upon New York politicians to deny an air permit for Green Ridge and to send an example both to the state of New York as well as the country overall. They have warned that not doing that will seriously undermine state and national efforts to cut carbon emissions drastically over the next few years. I'm inclined to agree with the activists on this one. And while bitcoin miners might argue that their operations bring revenue to the state and they create high paying jobs, I would counter that when you've got increased carbon emissions, that kind of negates those benefits in the long term. I mean, what good is money if all the shops end up being either underwater or on fire. South Korea has adjusted its targets for reducing carbon emissions by twenty thirty. Speaking of carbon emissions, previously the country had a goal of reducing carbon emissions by twenty six point three by thirty but now the country is upping that to a commitment to reducing it by forty percent by with the overall goal to become carbon neutral by twenty fifty. Now, this is a really significant change. South Korea is a country that depends heavily on coal power plants. They generate about of the electricity that the country relies upon, and it has a long way to go to get to those goals that it's set. But South Korea's government has created an aggressive plan that calls for a coal power generation to drop to twenty one eight percent by twenty thirty and renewables would go from the current six point two percent of power generation to thirty by It is a very aggressive green plan. It will be interesting to see if the country can follow through. The U s Department of Justice has leveled charges against Mark Faulkner, who was the chief technical pilot for Boeing. Now, the heart of the matter relates to the seven thirty seven Max aircraft. You might remember that there were two tragic crashes, one near Jakarta, Indonesia and another one in Ethiopia that involved seven thirty seven Max aircraft and the aircraft's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System or m CAST, was at fault. Now, the m CAST is meant to stabilize flight and the seven thirty seven MAX has a design that means that the nose of the aircraft tends to go up during flight as you are are moving forward, and this can cause the plane to climb or even to reach a point where the aircraft could you know, suffer a massive stall. Engineers tweaked the MCAST system to counteract this tendency and thus force the nose back down to a level orientation. But the problem was that the system would start pushing the nose down prematurely, like during takeoff, it would mistakenly identify that the aircraft was in a dangerous angle of attack, that's the orientation of the aircraft in relation to the direction that it is traveling. Worst, Boeing had failed to include information about im casts in various training manuals. In fact, the whole point of the seven MAX was to decrease the amount of time that pilots would have to spend in training in order to fly the aircraft. So pilots had no idea how to shut off the system and they lost control the aircraft, thus leading to these tragic plane crashes. The d o J says that Wagner presented false and incomplete information to various airlines regarding mcasts, and again this was in order for Boeing to sell the aircraft with the essentially the advertising line of you won't have to bring your pilots off duty to complete hundreds of hours or dozens of hours of training in order to fly this aircraft. They're training and other aircraft will be sufficient and they'll just have to complete maybe a few hours and that's it, and then they're back in the air flying passengers around. So, in other words, it was it was being sold as a way to to save in a long run while also upgrading your your fleet. And now the d o J is saying that Forakner specifically, was leaving out critical information that could have saved lives. A grand jury has indicted Wargner, who faces multiple accounts of wire fraud. The United States Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, has already created rules for telecom companies in the United States regarding spam phone calls, and the major carriers have already reached an obligation to comply to those orders. Smaller carriers have a little bit longer. They have un til I think June and next year to implement those changes, and the goal is to cut down on spam calls. Now the FCC is looking to do the same thing with text messages. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosen Warsol says that the increase in robotexts aimed at tricking people into downloading nolware or sharing personal information has been on the rise, and the FCC and telecom companies have an obligation to respond. The f CC will propose rules for this response, which the public will be able to review and comment upon before they are implemented. This is just the normal operations for the f c C. You might remember that during the whole net neutrality battles, there were times where the f CC opened up things for public comment that became a whole mess depending upon which administration was in charge. There were cases where there were a bunch of uh comments that were suspected of being fake, that were intended to push one agenda over another. Anyway, the whole point of that process is to give the public an opportunity to to weigh in and to you know, argue what things matter most to them. So in this case, I hope that the public response by saying yes, I would like to have fewer spam text messages. At this point, I just want my phone to work whenever I needed to work, and I don't want people to be contacting me. Specifically, I don't want spam to be contacting me. We have a few more news stories to cover before we get into that. Let's take another quick break. The Sinclair Broadcast Group, which operates lots of television station across the United States, and which is also known for pushing conservative talking points through its numerous regional stations, you know, requiring local staff to repeat those particular talking points, it has been hit with a ransomware attack. Now, before I get into this story, I do want to say that while I do not agree with Sinclair's political philosophy, and I definitely don't agree with its policy of requiring staff to repeat those talking points, I also condemn ransomware attacks in general. Right, I don't think that that is the right way to go. Two wrongs do not make a right anyway. This attack happened this past Saturday and disrupted operations at numerous stations around the United States. It affected the station's ability to stream content, It disrupted services like email and even telephone service at some of these locations. In addition, the hackers appear to have access data on Sinclair's systems and locked Sinclair out of those systems at the time of this recording, it's not entirely clear what data that might be or how it will affect Sinclair moving forward. I've not seen any reports on how much the hackers have demanded in ransom. I mean, if it's a ransomware attack, that's typically part of it that I haven't seen any any reference to the demands. Uh, nor have I found any information on which hacker group is responsible. At least as of the recording of this podcast, no group has claimed responsibility. Now, it might be tempting to assume that the hackers have an ideological beef with Sinclair, but it's also possible that this was just an attack of opportunity, unguided by any sort of ideological stance. But as always, my advice is never pay the ransom. It encourages future attacks. UH. This is easier said than done for a lot of organizations because it could be critical infrastructure that's affected by the attack, and if there's not an easy fix to reverse that, then what do you do? But paying that ransom it really just sends the message of Hey, your tactic worked and you made money off of it, so you should do it again. Not a great situation for the rest of us. Now, on the subject of ransomware, the FBI, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CAESA, as well as the National Security Agency or n s A, have issued a joint advisory about the black Matter ransomware gang and how that group works. So the goal is to alert various organizations, essentially big businesses, to the tactics that this group uses in an effort to bolster cybersecurity and prevent future attacks. Black Matter has traditionally offered bribes to employees who work for really big organizations, sometimes up to a hundred thousand dollars for these emloyees to share log in credentials. Essentially, they're saying, if you have a key to the vault, we will pay you a hundred thousand dollars to let us in. The group does have some restrictions, however. They apparently don't want to target nonprofit organizations. They don't want to target hospitals or healthcare companies in that space. Uh. They say that government organizations are off limits. Companies that are in the defense industry are off limits stuff like that, so they're really looking to target like big businesses that are outside of those industries. You know, like financial institutions could be totally on target. Uh, big telecommunications companies, that kind of stuff, like any of those other companies could be considered fair game. And their attack methods include good old standbys, such as using compromise log incredentials to gain unauthorized access to a system. That's why they will offer that like hundred thousand dollar payout in order to get access to what are considered to be really high value targets. This is the sort of thing that the average person can prevent. So first, you know, you don't give into the temptation to sell out a company for a hundred thousand dollars. That kind of stuff can be tracked. It's more likely to get you into serious trouble than that hundred grand is worth. I mean a hundred thousand dollars. That's a lot of money, and I can see where the temptation would be. But uh not many people have any idea of how to hide a sudden flow of a hundred thousand dollars into their bank accounts. So really, for those who want to try and keep things safe, they need to set strong passwords. They need to keep those passwords safe. One thing you should not do, for example, is write your password down on a sticky note and attach that sticky note to your computer monitor. Not that I've personally seen that happen. The agencies revealed that the black Matter group also is something that a lot of other groups will not do. Instead of encrypt data backups, that's what a lot of ransomware groups will do, though, and cry crypt the backups so that the backups are not accessible, black Matter goes a step further. They will overwrite the data backup systems, so they will essentially erase all that backup data. That means that companies are left with encrypted systems and no backups. Whether those are backups are encrypted or otherwise. It's a pretty brutal attack, and obviously the best approach is to try and prevent an attack from happening in the first place. There are more details, and I would urge anyone out there who oversees large and critical networks to read the Joint Advisory. You can find it at the ces A website. It is alert A A to one DASH to nine one a catchy right, But seriously, if you are at all responsible for those sorts of networks, I highly recommend you read the advice ory. It could potentially save you and your organization a lot of trouble. Finally, as part of the Artemis program, which is the NASA program that includes sending astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since the early nineteen seventies, NASA plans to establish a communications network that it is currently calling Luna net Now. According to NASA, the goal is to have a system that will allow for communications on and around the Moon in a way that's similar to how WiFi works here on Earth. Now, I'm using vague language to describe this because what NASA has done involves setting the goals of what this system should be capable of doing, rather than laying out the design of the system itself. And this is because the agency has released a specification on what the system should be able to do, and it's looking to engage in technical discussions with various telecommunication and internet experts in an effort to design a system that will make those goals a reality. The system will need to take into account stuff that isn't necessarily as big a concern here on Earth, like solar flare activity. So it is possible for a particularly powerful solar flare to be strong enough to affect electrical systems here on Earth and to disrupt systems. It's it's like an electromagnetic pulse that can wipe out things like a power grid if it were really powerful and it hit Earth at just the right time. But our magneto sphere and Earth's atmosphere protect us quite a bit here on Earth. Out in space, it's a different story. You don't necessarily have that protection, So the system needs to be resilient. More importantly, the system should be able to alert astronauts of an impending solar flare ahead of time, and it gives them the chance to prepare for that faster than they would if the news first had to come from mission control on Earth, and any delay at all can be disaster risks in these sort of events. Assuming that lunar net all comes together, the astronauts of the future will be able to use the network to communicate with each other, just as some some of the folks water around the Moon and others remain in lunar orbit or beyond. It should also allow astronauts to conduct more extensive operations on the Moon's surface, using the network to aid in navigation so that they can range further from home base and still return easily. Right, you know, they don't get lost on the Moon's surface. There's not a whole lot of landmarks that you can look at besides things like craters and stuff. So the idea is that this communication system will allow for more robust and extensive lunar operations and that could help with science that could help with establishing moon bases and that sort of stuff in the future. So we will have to wait and see how this unfolds. I think it's pretty cool and um I look word to hearing about the Looney Communications Network. All right, that is it for the tech news I have for you today, Tuesday, October ninety one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a trend, a company, anything like that, let me know the best way to do that is to reach out on Twitter to handle for the show is tech Stuff's h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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