Tech News: TikTok Might Be Working on a Contingency Plan

Published May 31, 2024, 4:34 PM

Reuters reports that TikTok is developing a US-only version of its recommendation algorithm, but the company disputes the report's accuracy. Plus, could AI make your next favorite TV show?

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech News Inning on Friday May thirty first, twenty twenty four, and let's start off with some news about TikTok. The Independent reports that part of TikTok's Project Texas plan. Project Texas was the company's attempt to reassure American politicians that TikTok isn't a data funnel that leads directly to China, was to give the US government a remarkable amount of control and oversight. So, for one thing, it would have let federal officials elect some of the board members for TikTok. The government would be given access to TikTok's source code to look for evidence of backdoor access and that sort of thing. And apparently there even would have been a kill switch feature built into TikTok should someone determine that it was serving as some sort of insidious tool belonging to a foreign adversary. But the White House rejected this plan and said it would not be sufficient to address national security concerns. Now, I have only read the reporting around this plan. I have not actually read the full details of the plan itself, so I don't really have any more insight into this. But we all know what actually happened instead of it right. Congress passed a law that, if it holds up to TikTok's legal challenges, will ultimately force TikTok to either separate entirely from its Chinese parent company, byte Dance, or face a nationwide ban in the United States. This brings me to the next TikTok story. Reuter's reports that TikTok has secretly been working on creating a recommendation algorithm that would be completely independent from the one that Byteedance uses for the sister app du Jin, which is the you know, the Chinese variant of TikTok, or you could argue TikTok's the American variant of Douyin. The implication is that this is a potential preparation in the event that TikTok is forced to separate from the mothership. Reuter's sites unnamed sources who say the project is massive and could take a year or so to complete. These sources claim that TikTok executives have talked about the project in all hands meetings and such, but TikTok representatives have disputed Reuter's report and said it was quote misleading and factually inaccurate in the quote, and that the divestiture from Byteedance is quote simply not possible. End the quote where the truth lies. I don't know. I have no doubt that divesting TikTok would be really challenging. I do not think it would be impossible. It might be very difficult, and it might also mean that the effort to do so would cost so much in resources that economically it's not viable. So maybe you know, from an economic standpoint, you could say, yeah, it's not possible, But I don't think that it's technologically impossible. And it is also within the realm of possibility that TikTok representatives are just saying this, because if they were to admit otherwise that the company is working on this independent algorithm, that could potentially give the US government a bit more leverage to say, well, you're already making preparations, so there's no problem here. But as I mentioned earlier, TikTok is already suing to challenge this law, and this matter is far from settled. So my guess is the US recommendation algorithm, if in fact that really does exist and Royer sources are truthful, I think that that's the contingency plan. I think that's TikTok having a worst case scenario for the company, the worst case being that it actually is forced to divest itself or for byte Dance rather to divest itself of TikTok. A security firm called black Lotus Labs has a report that might explain a massive technological failing that happened last year. So back in October of twenty twenty three, more than half a million customers of the internet service provider Windstream lost service. So what was the problem. Well, the customers found that their routers had become bricked, though they didn't actually necessarily know that's what had happened. Some of them did, but most people were probably just thinking, my Internet don't work no more. But it meant that like six hundred thousand customers or so were without Internet service and that's not good. And eventually Windstream would send out replacement routers once it finally kind of got to the conclusion that, yeah, it's the routers that failed, and there was nothing on the fault of the customers As far as anyone can tell. These failures happened over the course of three days. So what can make so many routers fail in such a short time. Well, according to Black Lotus Labs, it was malware. Now I should add that, as Dan Gooden of Ours Technica reports, Black Lotus Labs did not specifically name Windstream in their report. Instead, the firms spelled out the parameters of this malware attack and the effects it had, and Goodin makes the case that it's a pretty darn good match for what seems to have happened over at Windstream, and I would agree with that. Now, I would argue that the most concerning elements of this report are the things we still do not know. We do not know who carried out the attack. We do not know why they did this attack. We also don't know how the attacker was able to get initial access to these routers in the first place. Like they used a specific kind of malware in order to overwrite the firmware on the router. We know that, like we know what kind of malware they used, but how they got that entry point in to the routers in the first place. That is still an unknown variable. It could be that there's a vulnerability that's in these routers that the cybersecurity community doesn't know about yet but the attacker does, or it could be something else. We also don't know if the attack was you know, backed by a nation state. Was this a state back hacking attack? No clue, And because we know so little about the actual attack, like who carried it out and how it was done, we don't have a lot of good advice on how to avoid this kind of thing in the future and how to protect ourselves against future attacks, apart from just you know, the general words of wisdom, like you know, when you get a router or a modem or whatever, change the default password, change it to something that only you know and it's a strong password, or you know, reboot your router on occasion in order to try and protect yourself against attacks, that kind of thing, which I mean, those are good rules to follow, but it's not very reassuring, like it's not specific to this particular case. Blake Montgomery reports in the Guardian the US authorities shut down a botnet and not just any botnet, but the world's largest buttonnet ever. So a botnet, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a network of comprised computers. I mean, the name kind of gives it away, a network of bots. So typically a hacker uses malware or phishing attacks in order to establish some kind of backdoor access to a network of computers. So these are computers belonging to people and companies and such and organizations that the hacker then is able to at least take some partial control over. And then typically the hacker puts these computers to work to do something. This can include anything from using this network of zombie computers zombie computers. That's another kind of term for a botnet, a zombie army. You might use those to blast some web server with Internet traffic in an attempt to overwhelm it. Now that's a distributed denial of service attack. Or you might put this network of computers to work in the cryptocurrency minds. But in this particular case, this compromised network was used to do several different things, but the big one was an alleged COVID insurance fraud scam that amounted to around six billion dollars in fraud. The takedown operation, which was code named Endgame because I guess cybersecurity folks like to feel cool and presumably really enjoy the Avengers movies. It relied upon joint cooperation of authorities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and France. The US Department of Justice arrested Yunhi Wang, who is a Chinese national, and accused Wang of essentially spearheading the botnet operations. Wang did not do it on his own, but was allegedly a large part of this, and if Wang in fact has found guilty, he could face up to sixty five years in prison. He's thirty five years old now, so that's a big old wolf. The United States National Security Agency, or NSA, says it's a good idea for smartphone owners to completely power it down their devices at least once a week. The agency says that doing this can help mitigate issues like spearfishing, but it's not a guarantee that you'll be free and clear of all risks. It just helps. So essentially, just the turning your device off and on again on a regular basis should be considered a best practice, and the NSSA should know because they are experts at spying on people. If you'd like more information on that, look up stories about prism or main way that kind of thing. But to be less cheeky, I agree that regularly doing a full power down and then power up of your device is probably a good idea for lots of different reasons, not least of which is that it could provide an extra bit of security against threats. All right, we've got a lot more tech news stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back and now for a couple of stories about using technology to spread propaganda and misinformation. First up, META says that it identified and subsequently removed six influenced campaigns. This is coming from an article I saw on the Verge by Nick Barclay. Meta says that a couple of these campaigns were using AI in an attempt to push certain political viewpoints and to make it seem as if that particular point view had a larger amount of support than it really did. Meta disclosed that the campaigns originated out of places such as Croatia, China, Bangladesh, Israel and Iran. Apparently, the Israeli campaign made use of AI to create comments to try and boost engagement and the spread of messaging, and the Chinese campaign allegedly used AI to generate images as part of that campaign. Now, according to Meta, these attempts weren't particularly sophisticated or hard to identify. But obviously folks expect that AI will get better at creating this kind of stuff that people will not be as readily available to detect. It'll be easier for the stuff to kind of pass casual glance and considering discourse on some social platforms, I expect it is not going to take a whole lot of work to craft something that fits right in, because goodness knows, I've seen some garbage on social networks. On a similar note, the New York Times reports that open Aye has said it identified five online campaigns that were making use of AI to boost messaging. These campaigns originated in places like Russia, China, Iran, and Israel. There's no word on whether or not any of these are the same ones that Meta mentioned. This week, The Register had a rather snarky article about this that talks about how these campaigns were relatively low stakes because they hadn't seen much penetration. They were largely you know, unseen by actual human people. Instead, they mostly consisted mainly of bots posting stuff that other bots had created, or maybe the same stuff that those same bots had created. At any rate, it sounds like the actual impact of these campaigns was minimal. And again some of that has to do with the fact that the efforts of using AI are not terribly sophisticated yet. But I do stress the word yet, because there's every reason to expect these attacks will get more sophisticated over time, and the real concern is whether open AI will be as effective at detecting and disrupting such campaigns when they inevitably surface. And now in the AI is Coming for Creatives category, I submit for your approval a story written by Winston Show for The Hollywood Reporter about a company called Fable Studio. This company is launching an AI powered platform called Showrunner, which the studio claims will be able to create AI generated television series. So it sounds to me like the idea is you give AI some guidelines on what you want, and then the AI creates an animated episode and voice acted episode that consists of scenes that are based off your prompts. So imagine that you're sitting there and you're thinking, man, I really wish they hadn't canceled Firefly. And then imagine you're thinking, hey, wait a minute, I can create new episodes of Firefly using this tool and wash lives in my version. Spoiler alert if you haven't seen Serenity. So the actors might not look quite right, because again, the tool can only make animated characters at the moment, it can't do video AI generation. They might not sound right. And sure, it probably won't come across like a real Firefly episode and sound like something that Joss Whedon wrote, but you could technically do it. If you're also thinking, hey, this kind of sounds like the sort of stuff that the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were really worried about, you would be right on the money. Fable Studio is launching a closed beta test of the platform in the near future that will likely last the rest of this year before it is able to launch the service for reals's I will not be joining the waitlist for this test. I have serious ethical objections to AI generated entertainment, and they are far too numerous to get into here. Now. I say that, but our next story actually goes into one of the big reasons why so. Jesus Diaz, a fast company, reports that Instagram is training AI models using user data on the platform, and worse, most users have no way to opt out of it. So if you're an artist of any type and you use Instagram to showcase your work, whether that's dance or visual arts or photography, whatever it might be, your work is being used to train up Meta's AI generative models. The only people who even have the option to opt out of this are citizens of the European Union, where the rules of General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR provide some protection. But as Das reports, Meta has taken some rather extraordinary steps to obfuscate the option to opt out. First up is the initial message alerting users in the EU to the practice. In the first place, there's this big old blue clothes button, and if you hit clothes, essentially that serves as a I'm cool with this, you know, it's essentially sending the opt in message, so your opt out option is gone. Within the message itself is a phrase that says quote this means you have the right to object to how your information is used for these purposes end quote, and the right to object phrase within that is a link to the actual opt out feature. Now, as you might imagine, this is much smaller than the blue close button. Now, if you did click the right to object phrase, it takes you to a rather intimidating looking form that I would argue appears to be designed to discourage users from taking the time to opt out. That is my opinion. I am just saying. My opinion is this was a calculated move to discourage people from opting out. And what's more, Das rightly points out that GDPR makes it illegal for Meta to deny anyone their request to opt out of data capture and usage practices. You don't have to give a reason, you don't have to justify it. You just have to say I opt out and that's it. So Meta has made this more complicated than it needs to be. However, the form makes it seem like you have to make a case to opt out and then Meta has the right to deny your request. They do not have that right. So if you do live in the EU and you want to opt out of this and you see that message pop up. I suggest that when Meta asks you to explain why you want to opt out, you write in something like GDPR says, I don't have to give you a reason, you jark face, or something to that effect. I feel like Meta is really playing it fast and loose in the EU with this approach, as I believe certain regulators, and I'm thinking specifically of ones who happen to live in Ireland might argue that the UX design that Meta has employed is purposefully attempting to trick users into opting in without necessarily wanting to, And if I had to lay money on it, I would say that they're going to face some lawsuits about this in the future. The US Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, has given Amazon the clearance to operate delivery drones outside of the direct view of a ground spotter. So previously, the FAA required Amazon to employ ground spotters to make sure that drones weren't putting people in property at risk while zooming around delivering you know, socks and Taylor Swift albums and that kind of thing. Without that requirement, Amazon will now have the chance to expand operations beyond a few test markets and potentially make it a viable means of delivering packages to more customers. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean the air is soon going to be buzzing with drones in the near future, because the company has made some staffing cuts to the Prime Air division in the recent past, and Amazon announced just a few weeks ago it would be ending drone operations in California entirely. So it might be a while before you start seeing these suckers dropping off impulse purchases in your neck of the woods, But a major regulatory hurdle is now out of the way. Today mark's the last day of employment for Twitch's current Safety Advisory Council. This group of nine folks, which included industry experts and streamers, were responsible for advising Twitch on how to improve safety measures on the plot and to build trust among the community of creators and users alike. They were alerted at the beginning of this month that their services would no longer be required at the end of May. Instead, Twitch plans to create a new group consisting solely of Twitch ambassadors. As Hayden Field of CNBC puts it, the language around this decision is aligned with the general corporate speak that typically boils down to we're cutting costs and safety is a real hassle. That's me paraphrasing. By the way, Field is far more professional and responsible than i am. Field also points out that in twenty twenty three, Twitch sacked around fifty folks in their trust and safety team, so this move seems to be in alignment with that one from last year. Considering the numerous stories that have come out around how important security is and how risks and threats are growing each year, partly due to the use of AI, this to me seems like a short term decision that could potentially have disastrous long term consequences. But then Twitch has also made several policy chain over the last couple of years that have really blown up in the company's proverbial face, so maybe this is just the platform saying the council hasn't been a good fit. In gadgets, Will Shanklin reports that Spotify, after some resistance, has agreed to issue refunds to folks who purchased a car thing. That's the actual name for the product, the car Thing. Spotify launched this a couple of years ago. It's a device that attaches to your car's entertainment system, and it provides streaming media from Spotify to your vehicle. But the company announced last week that it was going to end support for the devices on December ninth of this year, at which point all those car things will become useless things because they'll be bricked. Those puppies cost ninety bucks a pop, and since the service is only a couple of years old, that cheesed a lot of people off. Reportedly, Spotify wasn't going to offer refunds at first, but the company subsequently didn't about face, and did so just before a class action lawsuit rolled in against them that was accusing them of unfair business practices. So whether the change of heart was in anticipation of that lawsuit or Spotify just arrived at the conclusion that maybe it was a bad idea to ignore customer complaints independently, I don't know. But if you bought one, you can reach out the customer service for a refund. You do have to provide proof of purchase, however, And finally, it's the end of an era. ICQ. The Venerable Instant Messenger service will shuffle off this mortal coil. On my birthday, which doesn't mean anything to you. But on June twenty sixth, the Russian company VK, which is where ICQ ultimately landed, is going to shut down the service, so anyone still using ICQ will have to shift to some other instant messenger client. Now, if you've never used the service, it was a bit peculiar. You didn't get to choose a handle or use your name or anything like that. Instead, the service would assign you a number, you know, nice and personal like, and it worked kind of like a phone number, and you could initiate chat sessions with other users. And I used it a lot back in my younger days, though honestly, I can't remember the last time I popped on. It's likely been at least two decades or more at this point. Honestly, if you had told me that ICQ would outlive Aol instant Messenger which shut down at the end of twenty seventeen, I would have thought you were bunkers. But that's how it turned out. Well, you had a good run ICQ. I'll give you one final uh oh. That's the sound that would play when you got a message on ICQ. That's it for this episode, and the news for the week ending on May thirty first, twenty twenty four. I hope that you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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