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Tech News: Twitter's Board Won't Be Musky

Published Apr 12, 2022, 9:26 PM

Elon Musk won't be joining Twitter's Board of Directors after all. Plus, what happens when cops pull over a driverless car? And we learn about a gorilla who is spending too much time looking at smartphones.

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 Tuesday, April twelve, twenty twenty two. Let's get to it. And what a difference just a few days make. So last week I talked about how Elon Musk had purchased a significant steak in Twitter and had subsequently been invited to join Twitter's board of directors. This was after Musk had started posting polls about stuff like Twitter's approach to freedom of speech, since the platform tends to push back on stuff like misinformation campaigns, something that Musk himself has been you know, kind of accused of spreading in the past. And Musk also needed a poll about including an edit button in in Twitter, and Twitter then said it was soon going to announce a button and and unveil it, which I'll also suggests that Twitter had been working on that for a while, that it was not you know, prompted necessarily by Musk himself. Then Twitter was arranging and asked me anything session with Elon Musk so that Twitter employees could get more information about where things were going next. There were a lot of people who had some pretty massive concerns about Elon Musk potentially joining the board of directors. But today things look a lot different. Musk is no longer going to be part of the board of directors. He has turned that down, according to reports on Bloomberg, and Twitter has subsequently canceled the Asked Me Anything session because it's moot, So instead employees were given the day off, which is probably a pretty nice gesture because the impression I get is that a significant number of Twitter employees were feeling uneasy about Musk's involvement. So why would Musk decline the invitation to join the board of directors. Well, there's a lot of speculation on that one possibility, though again I have to say, this isn't something that Musk himself as confirmed, at least as I'm recording this episode. But one possibility is that must decline the offer because to become a board member would mean that he would have to agree and then adhere to Twitter's code of conduct, which doesn't seem very musky to me. So that might have played a part. But Another potentially huge factor could be that the members of the board of directors are restricted from purchasing more than fourteen point nine percent of Twitter stock. Musk currently owns a little more than nine percent. Now, it could be that Musk just doesn't want to be confined to less than fifteen percent ownership in the long run um, and it might not be that much of a long run. Aaron Solomon, who is Esquire's did Agital's chief legal analyst, has suggested that perhaps Musk is actually positioning himself to hold a hostile takeover of Twitter. Now, for those of y'all who didn't grow up in the eighties when hostile takeovers were all the rage, the idea behind a hostile takeover goes like this. So typically, if you wanted to acquire a company, you would deal with that company's board of directors and set it all up. You would do all your negotiations with them, and they would set up the the plan, potentially putting it to a vote among stakeholders, uh in order to have it actually become a thing. But if the board isn't, you know, in the mood to sell, you have to take another pathway. So one way to do that as you buy up a lot of shares in the company. UH, if you buy up enough shares, like more than half of the company, then you your votes matter more than anyone else's, right. If you have fifty one percent of the vote, no one can outvote you on anything, and then you can vote to sell the company, to say Elon Musk. Another way of doing it is to convince other big shareholders to join with you in UH in an effort to pressure the sale or to force the sale. Like, it's not even pressure if you have enough votes. Now, the board of directors, even if this were to happen, would have some potential options to follow, some of which are kind of the nuclear extreme. There's a thing called a poison pill that could take place. All of that's just pure speculation, however, right like, we're nowhere close to that yet, at least not as I'm recording this episode. Maybe by the time it goes out at will, but right now it's not. That's not the case. So maybe by the next news episode will have a little bit more firm news and less speculation. Uh. I don't know if this is like an accurate read what's going on or not. It's hard to say a lot of people are playing kind of armchair psychologists and saying, well, of course Elon Musk wants to have access to his own social platform, and it's one that's already very well established, so it makes sense from that perspective. I don't know if it's that simple. Um, it probably is not. It probably is more complicated than that. But we'll have to follow up on this story as it develops. Now, let's get some Meta slash Facebook news out of the way. One bit of good news is that the company announced it had removed a disinformation network located out of Brazil that focused on climate change denial. Reuter's reports that Meta removed fourteen Facebook accounts, thirty nine Instagram accounts, and nine Facebook pages all related to this disinformation campaign. Now, apparently these groups were in some way connected to Brazil's military, although whether or not it was a military anctioned campaign remains to be seen. Like that that's not that's not firm as of right now. Uh, it may just be that it's a coincidence that these are connected, and you might wonder how big a deal this was. Well, based on Facebook's adversarial report, this particular group hasn't made a huge impact on the platform. Apparently the campaign had a fairly restricted reach and much maybe not all, but but you know, a significant amount of the engagement on the various profiles appeared to be essentially manufactured by the group itself, right, it was boosting itself in order to get more visibility. So it could have been that this was a campaign that was kind of in fairly early development. It sounds like not that many people outside the campaign it self encountered the material. I mean, there were some. It wasn't like it was completely internal, but it wasn't as widespread as it could have been. As for the kind of stuff that the group was posting, it was messaging that related to stuff like DeForest station and how according to this disinformation campaign, DeForest station really isn't all that bad. It goes without saying that deforestation is pretty darn bad for lots of different reasons, including the reduction of habitat and the destruction of biodiversity in the Amazon region. Another Facebook note, meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent quite a few zuckbucks in one on flights and security, or rather, the company spent nearly twenties seven million dollars to pay for Zuckerberg's travel as well as a security detail for Zuckerberg and his family. Now, in case you're wondering if this is an outlier, like if one was really unusual, not really. Back in twenty nineteen, the company spent twenty three million dollars UH and in twenty which you would think you would see a reduction in that mount because it includes travel, right, and most of us were sitting at home for much of the year and not going anywhere. But the cost went from twenty three million to twenty five million, and then one went up to twenty seven million. Even during a pandemic, when you'd suspect there'll be less travel, the amount spent was increased. Meta's sec filings reveals the company spent more than fifteen million dollars on Zuckerberg's personal security. So of that twenty seven million, fifteen of it was security for Zuckerberg. That includes stuff like seven bodyguards and an office with bulletproof glass, among other things. And on the one hand, that might sound like it's excessive, but then again, Zuck, as they would say in the movies, made an awful lot of enemies. Uh, there's no shortage of folks out there and organizations out there and governments out there that aren't too keen on Zuckerberg and his company. Fifteen million dollars is a lot of money, and you might actually question whether you really need to spend fifteen million dollars to keep Zuckerberg alive and safe. But really there's only one way to find out if it isn't enough, and that way is, you know, not not appropriate. Like I don't like Zuckerberg, but I would never wish him physical harm. The online marketplace Etsy is hit hitting a bit of a rough patch. A group of merchants on the platform have decided to hold a week long quote unquote strike. Now strike is a weird word because the people who are using etc as a storefront, they aren't employed by Etsy. They're making you they're actually customers of etc. Because they're making use of Etsy's service. But at the heart of their complaint is Etsy's recent decision to increase transaction fees by thirty percent. So transaction fees are really the way that Ets makes revenue. It takes a cut of each transaction made through the online store. But an increase in transaction fees me means that those costs have to get passed on somewhere else. Right. Uh, Either the artists and creators have to find ways to say more, maybe by buying in bulk and thus in the long run saving more money, and they don't have to affect their prices at all and their revenue pretty much stays the same, or they have to pay out a pocket, you know, whatever the differences, or they have to increase the prices on their goods, which might mean it discourages people from buying them. So it's got a lot of people upset. Not everybody, not everyone on that see thinks this is a bad thing or the end of the world, but there are quite a few who have banded together in order to have this quote unquote strike. The company also promotes shop listings through ads on other sites, so off site ads, and in those cases they charge the merchants anywhere between twelve to fift and fees um, and some of the merchants say, like, we aren't even given the opportunity to kind of sidestep that. There are other factors that have encouraged sellers to go into vacation mode for a week. Another big one is that there's a problem on ets with people copying other artists work and then selling those copies or reselling original works under their own name on Etsy, and uh there's been a lot of people pushing at C to take more action against that. Now, for its part, Etsy says that the fee increases will actually provide the money for the company to market more effectively and to take steps against these same resellers and copycats. But if you happen to head over to Etsy this week and you see that the story you wanted to order from his offline, it could be that that person has become part of this quote unquote strike. We've got some more news stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back and it's been a little bit since we talked about the n s O Group. If you do not remember n s O that's the Israeli company that creates infiltration tool that compromise devices, notably Apple devices. Uh So. It is i would think best known for its product pegasusts that exploited a zero click vulnerability in Apple's eye message. It would be a vulnerability that Apple would later patch out of iOS. NSO group has long maintained that its customers are only to use these tools in connection with things like law enforcement to fight crime and terrorism. But a lot of people have said that those same customers have been using these tools to target innocent people, including journalists, politicians, activists, and more. And since this exploit would turn an iPhone into a surveillance device, I mean gives the the perpetrators practically unlimited access to the target's phone, including the phones camera, and its microphones, So you can turn the phone into a spy device for yourself. That is a huge deal. Well, now, Reuter's is reporting that at least five officials in the EU were hit by similar or malware attacks on their devices in late one This also includes the EUSE European Justice Commissioners, so we're talking like high ranking officials in the European Union. And while there is no smoking gun that links these attacks specifically to n s O Groups products, that appears to be at least a working hypothesis. Now, ns O Group denies any involvement of the company or its products in these attacks. And to be clear, n s O Group is not the only company that's creating tools like this that exploit vulnerabilities. In fact, it's not even the only Israeli company doing that. There are a couple of very secretive surveillance companies in Israel, some of which you know, like you've heard of n s A Group if you listen to this podcast, But there's some that get mentioned maybe once or twice, and they don't get nearly the same notoriety even though they're in the same business. So it is entirely possible that the EU officials fell victim to a hack from a competing company that it wasn't from an n s O Group product. But the really scary thing is that these attacks frequently take advantage of something that the end user has no control over. Right. We often talk about how we're all responsible for our Internet safety, and in many ways that is true, right, that our behaviors can make us safer or put us more at risk. But in this case, the the only safe issue would be if you didn't have an iPhone at all, because the way Pegasus worked, at least initially, was that you could send an attack message through I message. As long as you had the target phone's phone number, you could do this, and just by receiving the message that would be enough to be able to exploit this vulnerability and install the malware on the phone, so the user didn't have to do anything, They didn't have to open the message, they didn't have to download something or activate something. It just would happen. Like in those cases, you know it, there's nothing user behavior that you can do to avoid it again, unless you're talking about just getting rid of tech. So uh yeah, scary world. Next year, South Korea will lean on SpaceX to launch the country's first ever spy satellite. Further, South Korea announces it intends to have five such satellites in service by the end of Traditionally, South Korea has had to rely upon allies like the United States to provide satellite intelligence to South Korean officials. The country is also pursuing the development of its own launch vehicle system. A test launch late last year saw the country's solid fuel rocket designed lift off successfully. So it has successful takeoff, but it failed to get into lower orbit. It wasn't able to put its payload into lower thorbit and fell back to Earth. The payload in that case was a dummy satellite. It was not an actual working satellite, which is a good thing, you know, because the mission did fall short. But the country has its sites set on being another space power on Earth and could potentially end up supplying very useful intelligence to its allies in that particular part of the world. Like when you think about North Korea, China, Russia, Uh, you know, South Korea having those capabilities would be a huge strategic benefit to its allies. Comedian and last Week Tonight host John Oliver send a message to US Congress, namely that the government needs to step up when it comes to protecting citizens against predatory data practices. Oliver pointed out that senior citizens are frequently the target of insidious data tracking campaigns and that those, in turn can lead to even greater exploitation. Right like, step one, get all the information you can about someone. Step to exploit that information, and in turn that person happens all the time. And so Oliver, presumably in an effort to really drive home how sensitive the issue can be, hired some data brokers to scrape information in and around the Washington, d C. Area, And he gave the data broker's criteria that would most likely lump in politicians. So, in other words, like he specifically crafted his request to target people who would potentially also be politicians so instead of saying like, can you target politicians, would be like, can you target people within this particular age range and these other demographics, and knowing that that happens to cover most of Congress. Uh. He has indicated that the data that the company's provided him were interesting, that they gave insights onto how various politicians are using the Internet, as well as their search history, which you know, certainly sounds like there could be something salacious going on there. And his message to the government is that they might want to take some steps to protect people in general from you know, having their data leve bridget and exploited in this way and preventing people from just gobbling up information and then making use of that information in various ways. The implication here is that if the government does not, you know, swing into action on this and address the very long standing problem that Oliver might do something with that data. Who's to say what he could do with it. And his whole point is that he could totally use the data because there's just this lack of laws protecting U. S citizens from just that. That's his whole point. He's saying. It's not that he wants to use the data to embarrass someone or compromise someone, but rather he could because there aren't any laws preventing that from happening. And it's not like Congress could just say don't you dare, because you know, without legislation, there's nothing to enforce. And so Oliver saying, hey, this is something people have needed for a really long time. Now you're one of those people who need it, so can we get it please. It's really an interesting move. The weather it amounts to anything remains to be seen. I tend to get a little cynical when it comes to political action and technology. We often see that politics moves at a pace that is much slower than tech. Then this brings us into problems over and over again. It's why we will frequently have these giant bills that try to address tons and tons of stuff that piled up over the years. And even while we're debating that and getting that all hashed out, technology continues to change. So even by the time you pass that legislation, there at least some points that are no longer relevant. Uh this is not news, I mean, it happens all the time. But yeah, very interesting that Oliver made this point. Obviously, as a history of doing some very biting social commentary on all sorts of different topics, and this one about protecting senior citizens. You know, it's it's pretty easy to get behind him, because there is no question that there are plenty of organizations and companies out there that prey upon senior citizens in particular and leverage these kinds of uh data collection agencies in order to be as effective as possible. Not great, So, I again, I'm skeptical that will see anything kind of really actionable happen due to this, But it would be nice to see. Not because I have not because I think that Congress is going to be scared of it. But my hope is that it's a way of really just shaking home this idea that millions of people lack that basic protection and they could really use it. All Right, we've got a few more stories to go before we get to those. Let's take another quick break. Hackers have targeted thousands of sites running on the word press, Us and Jumla hosting services. I want to be clear here, I don't think that this is necessarily, uh the fault of WordPress or Jumla. I don't want to give that impression, uh that while these sites all seem to have that in common. That does not mean that WordPress and or jumla is inherently bad. Rather, it just looks like the hackers were able to compromise numerous sites on these platforms, and that the one thing that these had in common, besides the fact that they were on these two big publication platforms, is that whomever was making those sites were they were using really bad passwords, just very weak passwords. And um, I'm not sure if the hackers used a classic dictionary attack, it sounds to me like that's possibly what they did. Uh. In a dictionary attack, hackers use essentially a digital document that just contains tens of thousands of common passwords. So when we say dictionary, you might think, oh, like a like an actual diction neary where it's just every word the English language. Well, it can be that, but it's usually also lots of common passwords that people have used that like, there are a bunch of that people just use all the time, like one two three four five or password one two three four, that kind of stuff. So these dictionaries typically have those kinds of phrases and words in them, and then they use that to brute force their way into various accounts, and that seems to be at least to me what has happened in this case, although um again I didn't get confirmation on that, so I could be wrong. Once the hackers did get access to these sites, they began to insert malware into the sites in an attempt to lure visitors into installing that malware on their own devices. So the malware would send a message to users that would claim that they would need to know update their browser, for example, in order to view the content on the page due to a recent change in the site. But of course it wasn't a browser update at all. It was rather a way to convince people to install malicious code on their devices so that they would download this trojan malware that would then infect their computer. So with that in mind, I want to give a double message out there for all of you listening to this show. First, always be supremely suspicious about any request to upgrade or update or download something to your device. If it's not coming from your typical you know, um OS company or whatever it may be, you need to be triple sure that those requests are coming from a trustworthy source like it is important to keep things like operating systems and browsers up to date because updates can often address vulnerabilities and close off pathways for hackers to get access to systems. So you are so spposed to keep updating, but you want to make sure that those messages are coming from the actual official source, not through some third party, because that's a red flag that something hainky is going on. And then for all the web administrators out there who use platforms like WordPress and joom La, for goodness sakes, use strong passwords, a unique, strong password to protect your your resource. I mean for a lot of these these people, I'm assuming that those websites are critical to some part of their mission, whether it's a company thing or a personal thing. So use a strong, unique password, and whenever possible, use two factor authentication. These practices will eliminate the vast majority of attempts to compromise your site. And you know, we've got to keep in mind that premature to call any system bulletproof. But yeah, if you want to take some basic precautions, then you remove yourself from nearly every tard a pool out there, because hackers are going to go for the low hanging fruit. If you make sure that you even have just just the moderate security practices in place, you eliminate like of attacks just by doing that. So do it. A driverless car in San Francisco went on the run from the cops. Sort of, not really, but it's fun to say so. A company called Cruise has got these driverless vehicles in San Francisco, and one of its vehicles, which had no one in it at all, was roaming the streets of San Francisco when a cop car pulled up behind it to pull it over. And it turns out this autonomous vehicle didn't have its lights on. It was after dark and the cars lights weren't on. So the car came to a stop at an intersection, at which point a cop got out in order to talk to the driver of the vehicle. But there was no driver of the vehicle. There was no one in the car. And there's actually a video of this. A bystander took video of it. The cop tried the door, but the door must have been locked, and then the cop turns back to their own squad car, and from that perspective of the bystander, uh, the light at the intersection changed and the autonomous car just kind of drove away. So like the feeling I got, and I might have just seen a short clip of this video, but the video I saw hit like the cars like CIA and just ditches the cops. That is not what happened. And it turns out that the cruise vehicle cleared the intersection because that's what's supposed to do in order to make sure that traffic is safe, then pulled over out of the way to allow the cops to come up to the car, and the cops contacted the company explained what had happened, that the car didn't have its lights on. Uh. The company rep explained that this was due to human error, it was not the car's fault. They addressed it. They essentially turned on the lights, and the cops did not choose to issue a citage in the matter. Uh. So it is kind of funny. I mean that a lot of people have made jokes about it. It's made the rounds on Twitter. But it also reminds us that there are still several questions that we haven't really officially answered yet when it comes to accountability and autonomous systems. So, yeah, this particular case is kind of like quirky and fun, but it does. It does really drive home, no pun intended that we need to think about these things and make sure that there are sufficient laws in place so that when something happens where you know, you would typically cite a driver, for example, for failing to do something, that there's an actual legal process to follow to make sure that accountability still is maintained and that we don't just have you know, untouchable driverless cars out there that are above the law. That's that's just that's just one pathway to the eventual robot uprising. We all know that. And finally, I'm sure the parents among you out there know the kind of struggle there is to trying to limit kids screen time because, on the one hand, sometimes you just need to get stuff done or just a moment's peace, and a distraction is exactly how you need to do it, you know, giving giving the kid a tablet with a video on it or a simple game that just might give you a chance to recapture your sanity. Now, on the other hand, obviously you don't want your kids to become glued to a screen and develop a lifelong habit of doing so that could end up being really destructive for a child. So it turns out that human parents aren't the only ones worried about this um or at least parents of human children aren't the only ones worried about this because in the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, zookeepers are going through a similar struggle with m R. A A a gorilla. This gorilla as a teenager, and this teenage guerrilla has become fascinated with smartphones. Now Amari is not allowed to have uh their own smartphone, but um, but the gorilla does eagerly check out smartphones when visitors show them off through the glass window of his enclosure. He's particularly fond of hanging out next to the window. That's like his favorite spot, and people would hold up pictures like they might take a picture of him, and then hold it up, and he was really interested. It was shiny and interesting to him, and so he would really stare at it, and that would encourage other people to show their phones to him, and he would pay attention to those and ultimately started to get really fixated kind of on these screens, to the point where apparently he didn't even notice when another young gorilla practiced certain social behaviors such as a demonstration of aggression, which is a way that you know, gorillas used to kind of figure out their pecking order within a social group. Um And because he wasn't noticing, he wasn't engaging this behavior that could potentially, with enough time, lead to problems down the road. Now we're not at that phase yet, but zookeepers were concerned. They wanted to make sure that everyone was able to enjoy being able to see m R. A, that Amory was still having a positive experience in his enclosure, but also to limit this behavior of showing off these the smartphones to the gorilla. So now they have put up a rope that's a small distance away from the window in an effort to discourage people from holding up their phones and distracting the gorilla. Then, you know, just kind of kind of letting people know, hey, let's let's enjoy this, but let's not don't don't create distractions because potentially that could be harmful to the animal. And UM, hopefully they will take that into consideration and take it to heart because certainly we we wouldn't want to see an animal come to harm because of this. I'm actually reminded of a gorilla that lived at the Atlanta Zoo. So you know, sit down, I'm gonna tell you all the story. Many many years ago. Um, there was a gorilla at the Atlanta Zoo named Willie Be. This gorilla was named after former Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield, also known for giving the Atlanta airport it's name, Hartsfield International Airport. Uh. So, Willie Be the gorilla was back when I was a kid, lived in a small like concrete enclosure. It was, you know, the old school, nineteen seventies era zoo enclosures, back before a lot of zoos had really moved beyond that and created large enclosures for animals to wander around. So Willie Be was in a fairly small like a cell essentially, and had a tire swing and an old TV in there and would just watch television. And it was really sad. And eventually the Atlanta Zoo expanded dramatically and created a much better outdoor enclosure for Willie B. Took him a while to get used to it. He was so used to being in his concrete enclosure that it took him a little while to get used to being outside. But once he did. Uh, he was able to acclimate to it. He eventually ended up being introduced to other guerrillas. He became a father. Uh. He was a beloved, beloved representative of the of the zoo. Passed away back in two thousand. He was forty two years old when he passed away. So uh, when I think of the story about him, are a I think back to Willie B. And I think back to how Willie B was. You know, he was in an indoor environment till he was almost thirty, I want to say, and and and just seeing clearly this quality of life increased so much once they got him away from that. Uh. It's it's what kind of Ryan drives at home for me with this story. So again it becomes one of those that's a little cute on the surface, but um, I feel pretty strongly about it when you really get down to it. Anyway. That is the news for Tuesday, April twelve, two thousand twenty two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of Tech Stuff, please reach out to me and let me know. The handle for the show on Twitter is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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