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 for the week ending July fifth, twenty twenty four. And y'all. One of the tricky things about designing a website is that you can't know which browsers your users are going to be relying upon when they visit it. So you might build a site that works great in certain current browsers, but if you go back a generation or three, maybe things aren't quite so seamless. But you still have people out there who are relying on those browsers. So what do you do. Do you try and design for the lowest common denominator. Well, for many web designers, one work around for this problem resided on an online code library called polyfilm. The project is an open source one that would put JavaScript code up on a polyfil account and that would allow websites to include just a particular URL link in the website design, and the library would work with older browsers and allow them to display web pages properly so that you know, you would still see the way the web page was supposed to be laid out, So it offloaded a lot of work for web designers. You could just include this link and it would do the work for you. But then earlier this year, a Chinese company called finuln Ul or Funnel maybe it's funnel funnel makes more sense anyway, they purchased both the GitHub account that hosted this library, as well as the domain name for the polyfil site, and last week a cybersecurity company called Sansec alerted the world that what you to be that JavaScript code is now code that redirects visits to other websites, mainly ones related to porn or gambling. That's not great. The security firm also said that the code was designed so that it wasn't redirecting all the time, and this was probably an effort to hide the fact it was doing it at all, right, Like if it was only doing it in certain hours, then it was going to avoid detection longer. But it wasn't long before various web companies began to block the domain entirely, and the guy who first built polypill posted a message urging website administrators to remove links to the Online Code Library. Ours Technica's Dan Goodin reports that nearly four hundred thousand sites are still linked to the library despite these warnings, including sites that are connected to the US federal government, which is a big old wompwomp. So these aren't just little independent websites out there that are falling victim to this. Some of those websites are connected to assive companies and other organizations, you know, groups that should absolutely prioritize removing malicious links and code from their web pages. But I can't bust the USA's chops too much on this because, as good In reveals in his article, more than half of all the websites that are still linking to Polythyl are actually in Germany, which is a big old achluliba. In the end, this story shows that supply chain attacks can really be effective. So that's when hackers aren't targeting end companies, organizations, or individuals. Instead they target the tools and services that those end targets are relying upon. So you poison the supply chain and you hit a lot of targets. It's also a black mark against Chinese companies continuing to cause chaos online. Speaking of supply chain attacks. What happens when the company that you count on for added security is the target of hackers. That's a question folks are asking after authe au Thhy, a two factor authentication app, got hit by hackers. More specifically, the company that makes Authee, a company called Twilio, revealed that hackers had managed to access a limited amount of customer information, apparently limited to just around thirty three million cell phone numbers. Now. Authee is an app that generates codes meant to authenticate users as they log into various services. I actually have an Authee account so that I can log into Twitch, for example. So I think there's a certain assumption among users that the service is also secure because it exists solely to aid in the security of other services. You think if it's a company that's in the security business, it should be pretty safe. And yet Twillio has confirmed that hackers access to and quote unquote unauthenticated endpoint to steal the list of customer phone numbers. While that information has limited value, it does mean that the hackers might rely on the data to conduct phishing attacks, or more likely sell the data for cheap on a black market where other people can use it for phishing attacks and such. We're not done with hacking news yet. A group called Shiny Hunters says its attack on Ticketmaster landed the group some really valuable information. I'm talking seriously valuable, like more than twenty two billion dollars valuable. And as such, the group has increased its initial ransom demand, which was originally one million dollars, up to eight million dollars. It has, in the mortal words of Darth Vader, altered the deal. Pray they do not alter it further. So what's going on here? All right? So the hackers breached Ticketmasters systems back in May, I'm pretty sure I talked about on our previous news episode, and in the process, the hackers were able to access a ton of information, and that includes around four hundred and forty thousand tickets to Taylor Swift shows. You know, she's like the hottest ticket in town, no matter what town it is. And the hackers have all the information they need to do stuff like produce fraudulent but working tickets. They could do that because they have all the data. So imagine that you show up to a Swift concert and then you find out that your legitimate ticket that you purchased months ago no longer works because you know someone else has beaten you to it, and this is a ticket you purchased for some ungodly amount of money, because, let's face it, Ticketmaster is a real beast of a company, and it also has beastly convenience and processing fees to boot. But because hackers were able to steal your ticket information, they produced a copy. Maybe they produced a whole bunch of different copies. Maybe they scalped all those tickets to unsuspecting buyers. There could be one hundred other people who bought your ticket information and they're also stuck waiting outside because whomever got there first is currently sitting in your seat and they're waiting for blank Space to start playing. That's actually the only Taylor Swift song I know off the top of my head. Anyway, the hackers also have information about all the people who have bought tickets. They have personal identifiable information, and that could mean that they could reach out to the customers and pose as ticket Master. They could say, hey, we have recovered your tickets. They were part of this breach, but we have it. We need to secure x amount of money in order to send you the updated information and they're just exploiting you. That's a possibility. Maybe they sell your information online and other hackers use your information to conduct spear phishing campaigns against you. I mean, if you're the sort of person who has spent hundreds or one thousands of dollars on a concert ticket, then you could end up being a very attractive target for exploitation down the line. According to hack Read, the stolen information includes nearly a billion sales orders and half a billion unique email addresses, plus four hundred million encrypted credit cards records with partial details unencrypted. Now, the encrypted credit card information at the very least means the hackers don't have immediate access to that information. Encryption is a tough thing to break us, particularly if you're using really good encryption, so they might not be able to ever get that credit card information. But this is a really ugly hack that has affected millions of Ticketmaster customers. So what's the company going to do? Well? I do not know, but I bet this is not going to look good in the antitrust lawsuit that the US government has brought against Live Nation, which is Ticketmaster's parent company. Now, do you think we're done with hacker stories this week, don't bank on it literally. Ransomware hackers targeted the Patelco credit Union in California. According to John Broadkin of Ours Technica, we're going to have a lot of Ours Technica stories for the second half of this episode. But apparently the hackers used a phishing email to trick someone within the organization to activate malware that quickly began encrypting data in Patelco's systems, and it locked that information away from the credit union. Just as the credit card information being encrypted means that hackers can't easily get to the credit cards. Well, if hackers in encrypt all of an organization's data on their systems and their servers, then the organization has no access to their legitimate information. So among the many services that have been disrupted by this massive attack are online banking, which is a big one. The actual attack happened on June twenty ninth, and the credit union chose to shut down several of its services sort of as a protective measure to prevent the hack from spreading throughout the entire system. So, according to the credit Union, that includes stuff like quote transactions, transfers, payments, and deposits end quote, you know, the basic functionality of a bank, So direct deposits were also affected, but according to the bank, cash and check deposits are still working, So that sounds like for the time being, Patelco customers will have to go to a physical location in order to make deposits or withdrawals. They may also have had their personal information compromises part of this attack. In fact, patel coasys you should assume that's the case. They have also said that the credit union will work with law enforcement to provide protection to those customers. Now, if I were to guess, I would say that would be things like credit protection and maybe some id theft protection that will last for like a year. That's a pretty common thing that companies will offer in the wake of a breach like this, but this is a particularly bad one. It does really illustrate the fact that companies need to really drill home the proper security measures that employees need to follow in order to avoid these kinds of attacks. Hackers will take any advantage they can to do this sort of thing, and they will target organizations that are particularly vulnerable like banking. Medical organizations are another big one, because there's a huge incentive for the company to pay off the ransom and get regain access to all that information. But as I've always said, keep in mind, paying the ransom is typically a bad idea. One, there's no guarantee you're going to get everything back, or that the hackers aren't going to keep copies of all the information and then sell it on the black market. Two. Paying the ransom sends the message, hey, these attacks work, they make money, and then hackers will just step it up. So paying ransoms is typically pretty bad. But at the same time, if it's a mission critical kind of thing, I get how it's hard to just shrug your shoulders and say, well, we're just going to take a loss on this one. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more tech news stories to cover. Okay, we're back, and we've got some more Ours Technica stories, because there were a ton of good ones this week. So Ashley Bellinger of Ours Technica, she's actually got a couple of stories in this week's episode, has a disturbing piece about AI and it's titled AI trains on kids photos even when parents use strict privacy settings. So this piece is all about how AI companies with image generators have been using posted photos across the web to train those models, even in cases where the platforms that are hosting these photos have specific rules against data scraping, or platforms where parents have settings where they can opt into denying permission for the use of their children's pictures so they can explicitly say I do not want these photos used for anything else. And yet it appears that these image generator models have still been using those kinds of images to train up and that's awful. It is an enormous violation of privacy. And researchers with the Human Rights Watch have discovered that these companies have hundreds of photos of children from vulnerable populations. That makes us even more horrifying. It's not just kids, which is already bad enough, but kids from disadvantaged communities where they don't have access to the kinds of tools or services that others might have to fight this kind of thing. Not that fighting it is that easy in the first place, but it's even harder for these folks. So the researcher said that the metadata connected to these images sometimes also includes personal information about the children, which is obviously an even bigger privacy and security risk, and the generator also creates images based off these reference photos. Right Like image generator companies say that their AI isn't plagiarizing off of other people, just as AI text generator companies say that the text generator doesn't plagiarize. But there have been plenty of cases where people have pointed out, hey, that's not entirely true. Like you can spot elements that seem to be directly lifted from source material, and if not directly lifted, so heavily influenced by that source material as to constitute a copy. So I think it's really important to read this piece. There's a lot more that Ashley Bellinger writes about in her article. I highly recommend reading it again. That's on ours Technico if you want to check out the full story now. She also has a piece titled tool Preventing Aimmicry Cracked Artists Wonder What's next. This is kind of related because it also has to do with AI generation and specifically image generation. So as the headline indicates, a tool that some online artists use called Glaze has recently been called into question as to whether or not it is a really great defense So glaze works by inserting data into images, and that data alters the images in ways that aren't noticeable by humans. In a way, you could say it corrupts the information of the image itself. And a computer that's scanning these images doesn't know that the superfluous data isn't necessary. It thinks it's part of the image. Because computers aren't looking at pictures, they're looking at the information that makes up that picture and replicating or working off of that. So if you're poisoning the images by inserting some meaningless information that doesn't really show up in the finished picture when you're looking at as a human being, then the computer thinks, oh, well, this is a necessary component of this kind of image for this particular style. Like it's looking at the metadata and saying, oh, this is the artist who created this image. If someone asks me to create an image in the style of this artist, I will take this data in an effort to produce that kind of image. But because of the poison, right, because of the superfluous data, it might take that noise and boost the noise. So what you'll end up with is an image that does not look like the reference material, which is that's the whole point of glaze. It's to poison the reference material so that artists can retain their unique styles and not worry about computers copying it. But now there are a pair of orobloms facing artists who want to use glaze. So one is just that doing so requires going through an approvals process with Glaze, and the demand for the tool has exceeded the team's capacity for keeping up with those requests, so there's a bottleneck there. The other problem is that some researchers have come forward saying that Glaze's methods aren't really bulletproof and that AI will inevitably evolve to defeat these protections. So it's kind of like a seesaw approach, and we've actually seen that in other security measures like captures are a great example. You know, experts would design a new test that in theory is easy for humans to do but hard for machines. But then eventually the computer scientists train up machines so that they can do these tests as well as are sometimes even better than humans can, and it requires a complete redesign of the capture test, and so it goes. The same thing could be going on in image generating AI and the efforts to foil it and again. To learn more about this, read Bellinger's article on ours Tetnica. She does a phenomenal job breaking it all down again. That's titled tool Preventing AI mimicry. Cracked artists wonder what's next? Now, I'm sure all of y'all out there had the experience of setting up a new television and scrolling through all the options to find out how the heck you can turn off motion smoothing. This is that feature that removes motion blur, and that might look great if you're watching a live sports event, but for everything else, well, a lot of people really hate that effect, including me. This is what gives everything that kind of soap opera look. You could argue that the reason why classic films and television look the way they do really becomes part of a combination of limitations on the technology as well as the costs of production. But it means that we have certain concepts that we associate with what looks like cinema or looks like TV, and motion smoothing kind of violates that. Well, back in early June, Roku turned on motion smoothing by default and there's no way to turn it off, which has prompted William Joel of The Verge to write a very entertaining piece title Dear Roku, you ruined my TV. So Joel writes about how Roku has removed the choice from users, forcing them an experience that many people do not like. Well worth the read. It's over on the Verge. Go check that out. Particularly, you should read it if you happen to be an executive at Roku and you're wondering why your customers are so agitated. It's been a year since Meta launched its competitor to x, formerly known as Twitter. Meta's platform is called Threads, which takes its name from earlier abandoned Meta projects, and this week Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads hit one hundred and seventy five million users, which is impressive but also shows that Meta users have not been adopting Threads as quickly as they have other platforms like Instagram. Zuckerberg did not go into detail on stuff like daily users or anything like that, and if I were a betting man, I would wager that the reason Zuckerberg did not share those numbers is that they aren't very impressive, because I'm guessing on a daily basis, people just aren't going to threads that much. Yes, there's one hundred and seventy five million users total, but how many of those are going to threads regularly? So the question is will Threads gain more purchase and user mind share? And also how is X doing during all this stuff? Honestly, I have no clue. My perception is that things that X aren't going great, but that's largely down to how you know, there's these ongoing challenges the company is facing when it comes to convincing advertisers that the ads they are paying for are not going to show up next to hate speech. In November twenty twenty three, Amazon launched an ambitious product called Astro, which is a home robot, a little wheeled CTC robot that can roll around your house and keep an eye, well, you know, keep a keep cameras and sensors on how things are going. And the company also introduced an enterprise version of that bought Astro for business, so it's a device intended for corporations and such. Now, less than a year after launch, Amazon has announced is discontinuing the enterprise version. Customers that bought one will receive a full refund, which is around twenty three hundred and fifty bucks plus a few hundred dollars in credit because their security system is going to stop working. Once Amazon shuts down the servers on September twenty fifth, it will brick these little robots. The company has said it will continue to develop robotics for the home, so it sounds like the consumer version of Astro will continue to receive support at least for now, and that Amazon is apparently working on successors to that twenty twenty three model. As for Astro, for business models, they cannot be switched to work as consumer versions, so Amazon is sending customers shipping label so they can ship off these former security robots back off to Amazon so they can go to the recycling center, which seems like a pretty sad fate for the cute little fillers. Okay, that's it for the tech news for the week ending July fifth, twenty twenty four. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

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 for the week ending July fifth, twenty twenty four. And y'all. One of the tricky things about designing a website is that you can't know which browsers your users are going to be relying upon when they visit it. So you might build a site that works great in certain current browsers, but if you go back a generation or three, maybe things aren't quite so seamless. But you still have people out there who are relying on those browsers. So what do you do. Do you try and design for the lowest common denominator. Well, for many web designers, one work around for this problem resided on an online code library called polyfilm. The project is an open source one that would put JavaScript code up on a polyfil account and that would allow websites to include just a particular URL link in the website design, and the library would work with older browsers and allow them to display web pages properly so that you know, you would still see the way the web page was supposed to be laid out, So it offloaded a lot of work for web designers. You could just include this link and it would do the work for you. But then earlier this year, a Chinese company called finuln Ul or Funnel maybe it's funnel funnel makes more sense anyway, they purchased both the GitHub account that hosted this library, as well as the domain name for the polyfil site, and last week a cybersecurity company called Sansec alerted the world that what you to be that JavaScript code is now code that redirects visits to other websites, mainly ones related to porn or gambling. That's not great. The security firm also said that the code was designed so that it wasn't redirecting all the time, and this was probably an effort to hide the fact it was doing it at all, right, Like if it was only doing it in certain hours, then it was going to avoid detection longer. But it wasn't long before various web companies began to block the domain entirely, and the guy who first built polypill posted a message urging website administrators to remove links to the Online Code Library. Ours Technica's Dan Goodin reports that nearly four hundred thousand sites are still linked to the library despite these warnings, including sites that are connected to the US federal government, which is a big old wompwomp. So these aren't just little independent websites out there that are falling victim to this. Some of those websites are connected to assive companies and other organizations, you know, groups that should absolutely prioritize removing malicious links and code from their web pages. But I can't bust the USA's chops too much on this because, as good In reveals in his article, more than half of all the websites that are still linking to Polythyl are actually in Germany, which is a big old achluliba. In the end, this story shows that supply chain attacks can really be effective. So that's when hackers aren't targeting end companies, organizations, or individuals. Instead they target the tools and services that those end targets are relying upon. So you poison the supply chain and you hit a lot of targets. It's also a black mark against Chinese companies continuing to cause chaos online. Speaking of supply chain attacks. What happens when the company that you count on for added security is the target of hackers. That's a question folks are asking after authe au Thhy, a two factor authentication app, got hit by hackers. More specifically, the company that makes Authee, a company called Twilio, revealed that hackers had managed to access a limited amount of customer information, apparently limited to just around thirty three million cell phone numbers. Now. Authee is an app that generates codes meant to authenticate users as they log into various services. I actually have an Authee account so that I can log into Twitch, for example. So I think there's a certain assumption among users that the service is also secure because it exists solely to aid in the security of other services. You think if it's a company that's in the security business, it should be pretty safe. And yet Twillio has confirmed that hackers access to and quote unquote unauthenticated endpoint to steal the list of customer phone numbers. While that information has limited value, it does mean that the hackers might rely on the data to conduct phishing attacks, or more likely sell the data for cheap on a black market where other people can use it for phishing attacks and such. We're not done with hacking news yet. A group called Shiny Hunters says its attack on Ticketmaster landed the group some really valuable information. I'm talking seriously valuable, like more than twenty two billion dollars valuable. And as such, the group has increased its initial ransom demand, which was originally one million dollars, up to eight million dollars. It has, in the mortal words of Darth Vader, altered the deal. Pray they do not alter it further. So what's going on here? All right? So the hackers breached Ticketmasters systems back in May, I'm pretty sure I talked about on our previous news episode, and in the process, the hackers were able to access a ton of information, and that includes around four hundred and forty thousand tickets to Taylor Swift shows. You know, she's like the hottest ticket in town, no matter what town it is. And the hackers have all the information they need to do stuff like produce fraudulent but working tickets. They could do that because they have all the data. So imagine that you show up to a Swift concert and then you find out that your legitimate ticket that you purchased months ago no longer works because you know someone else has beaten you to it, and this is a ticket you purchased for some ungodly amount of money, because, let's face it, Ticketmaster is a real beast of a company, and it also has beastly convenience and processing fees to boot. But because hackers were able to steal your ticket information, they produced a copy. Maybe they produced a whole bunch of different copies. Maybe they scalped all those tickets to unsuspecting buyers. There could be one hundred other people who bought your ticket information and they're also stuck waiting outside because whomever got there first is currently sitting in your seat and they're waiting for blank Space to start playing. That's actually the only Taylor Swift song I know off the top of my head. Anyway, the hackers also have information about all the people who have bought tickets. They have personal identifiable information, and that could mean that they could reach out to the customers and pose as ticket Master. They could say, hey, we have recovered your tickets. They were part of this breach, but we have it. We need to secure x amount of money in order to send you the updated information and they're just exploiting you. That's a possibility. Maybe they sell your information online and other hackers use your information to conduct spear phishing campaigns against you. I mean, if you're the sort of person who has spent hundreds or one thousands of dollars on a concert ticket, then you could end up being a very attractive target for exploitation down the line. According to hack Read, the stolen information includes nearly a billion sales orders and half a billion unique email addresses, plus four hundred million encrypted credit cards records with partial details unencrypted. Now, the encrypted credit card information at the very least means the hackers don't have immediate access to that information. Encryption is a tough thing to break us, particularly if you're using really good encryption, so they might not be able to ever get that credit card information. But this is a really ugly hack that has affected millions of Ticketmaster customers. So what's the company going to do? Well? I do not know, but I bet this is not going to look good in the antitrust lawsuit that the US government has brought against Live Nation, which is Ticketmaster's parent company. Now, do you think we're done with hacker stories this week, don't bank on it literally. Ransomware hackers targeted the Patelco credit Union in California. According to John Broadkin of Ours Technica, we're going to have a lot of Ours Technica stories for the second half of this episode. But apparently the hackers used a phishing email to trick someone within the organization to activate malware that quickly began encrypting data in Patelco's systems, and it locked that information away from the credit union. Just as the credit card information being encrypted means that hackers can't easily get to the credit cards. Well, if hackers in encrypt all of an organization's data on their systems and their servers, then the organization has no access to their legitimate information. So among the many services that have been disrupted by this massive attack are online banking, which is a big one. The actual attack happened on June twenty ninth, and the credit union chose to shut down several of its services sort of as a protective measure to prevent the hack from spreading throughout the entire system. So, according to the credit Union, that includes stuff like quote transactions, transfers, payments, and deposits end quote, you know, the basic functionality of a bank, So direct deposits were also affected, but according to the bank, cash and check deposits are still working, So that sounds like for the time being, Patelco customers will have to go to a physical location in order to make deposits or withdrawals. They may also have had their personal information compromises part of this attack. In fact, patel coasys you should assume that's the case. They have also said that the credit union will work with law enforcement to provide protection to those customers. Now, if I were to guess, I would say that would be things like credit protection and maybe some id theft protection that will last for like a year. That's a pretty common thing that companies will offer in the wake of a breach like this, but this is a particularly bad one. It does really illustrate the fact that companies need to really drill home the proper security measures that employees need to follow in order to avoid these kinds of attacks. Hackers will take any advantage they can to do this sort of thing, and they will target organizations that are particularly vulnerable like banking. Medical organizations are another big one, because there's a huge incentive for the company to pay off the ransom and get regain access to all that information. But as I've always said, keep in mind, paying the ransom is typically a bad idea. One, there's no guarantee you're going to get everything back, or that the hackers aren't going to keep copies of all the information and then sell it on the black market. Two. Paying the ransom sends the message, hey, these attacks work, they make money, and then hackers will just step it up. So paying ransoms is typically pretty bad. But at the same time, if it's a mission critical kind of thing, I get how it's hard to just shrug your shoulders and say, well, we're just going to take a loss on this one. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more tech news stories to cover. Okay, we're back, and we've got some more Ours Technica stories, because there were a ton of good ones this week. So Ashley Bellinger of Ours Technica, she's actually got a couple of stories in this week's episode, has a disturbing piece about AI and it's titled AI trains on kids photos even when parents use strict privacy settings. So this piece is all about how AI companies with image generators have been using posted photos across the web to train those models, even in cases where the platforms that are hosting these photos have specific rules against data scraping, or platforms where parents have settings where they can opt into denying permission for the use of their children's pictures so they can explicitly say I do not want these photos used for anything else. And yet it appears that these image generator models have still been using those kinds of images to train up and that's awful. It is an enormous violation of privacy. And researchers with the Human Rights Watch have discovered that these companies have hundreds of photos of children from vulnerable populations. That makes us even more horrifying. It's not just kids, which is already bad enough, but kids from disadvantaged communities where they don't have access to the kinds of tools or services that others might have to fight this kind of thing. Not that fighting it is that easy in the first place, but it's even harder for these folks. So the researcher said that the metadata connected to these images sometimes also includes personal information about the children, which is obviously an even bigger privacy and security risk, and the generator also creates images based off these reference photos. Right Like image generator companies say that their AI isn't plagiarizing off of other people, just as AI text generator companies say that the text generator doesn't plagiarize. But there have been plenty of cases where people have pointed out, hey, that's not entirely true. Like you can spot elements that seem to be directly lifted from source material, and if not directly lifted, so heavily influenced by that source material as to constitute a copy. So I think it's really important to read this piece. There's a lot more that Ashley Bellinger writes about in her article. I highly recommend reading it again. That's on ours Technico if you want to check out the full story now. She also has a piece titled tool Preventing Aimmicry Cracked Artists Wonder What's next. This is kind of related because it also has to do with AI generation and specifically image generation. So as the headline indicates, a tool that some online artists use called Glaze has recently been called into question as to whether or not it is a really great defense So glaze works by inserting data into images, and that data alters the images in ways that aren't noticeable by humans. In a way, you could say it corrupts the information of the image itself. And a computer that's scanning these images doesn't know that the superfluous data isn't necessary. It thinks it's part of the image. Because computers aren't looking at pictures, they're looking at the information that makes up that picture and replicating or working off of that. So if you're poisoning the images by inserting some meaningless information that doesn't really show up in the finished picture when you're looking at as a human being, then the computer thinks, oh, well, this is a necessary component of this kind of image for this particular style. Like it's looking at the metadata and saying, oh, this is the artist who created this image. If someone asks me to create an image in the style of this artist, I will take this data in an effort to produce that kind of image. But because of the poison, right, because of the superfluous data, it might take that noise and boost the noise. So what you'll end up with is an image that does not look like the reference material, which is that's the whole point of glaze. It's to poison the reference material so that artists can retain their unique styles and not worry about computers copying it. But now there are a pair of orobloms facing artists who want to use glaze. So one is just that doing so requires going through an approvals process with Glaze, and the demand for the tool has exceeded the team's capacity for keeping up with those requests, so there's a bottleneck there. The other problem is that some researchers have come forward saying that Glaze's methods aren't really bulletproof and that AI will inevitably evolve to defeat these protections. So it's kind of like a seesaw approach, and we've actually seen that in other security measures like captures are a great example. You know, experts would design a new test that in theory is easy for humans to do but hard for machines. But then eventually the computer scientists train up machines so that they can do these tests as well as are sometimes even better than humans can, and it requires a complete redesign of the capture test, and so it goes. The same thing could be going on in image generating AI and the efforts to foil it and again. To learn more about this, read Bellinger's article on ours Tetnica. She does a phenomenal job breaking it all down again. That's titled tool Preventing AI mimicry. Cracked artists wonder what's next? Now, I'm sure all of y'all out there had the experience of setting up a new television and scrolling through all the options to find out how the heck you can turn off motion smoothing. This is that feature that removes motion blur, and that might look great if you're watching a live sports event, but for everything else, well, a lot of people really hate that effect, including me. This is what gives everything that kind of soap opera look. You could argue that the reason why classic films and television look the way they do really becomes part of a combination of limitations on the technology as well as the costs of production. But it means that we have certain concepts that we associate with what looks like cinema or looks like TV, and motion smoothing kind of violates that. Well, back in early June, Roku turned on motion smoothing by default and there's no way to turn it off, which has prompted William Joel of The Verge to write a very entertaining piece title Dear Roku, you ruined my TV. So Joel writes about how Roku has removed the choice from users, forcing them an experience that many people do not like. Well worth the read. It's over on the Verge. Go check that out. Particularly, you should read it if you happen to be an executive at Roku and you're wondering why your customers are so agitated. It's been a year since Meta launched its competitor to x, formerly known as Twitter. Meta's platform is called Threads, which takes its name from earlier abandoned Meta projects, and this week Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads hit one hundred and seventy five million users, which is impressive but also shows that Meta users have not been adopting Threads as quickly as they have other platforms like Instagram. Zuckerberg did not go into detail on stuff like daily users or anything like that, and if I were a betting man, I would wager that the reason Zuckerberg did not share those numbers is that they aren't very impressive, because I'm guessing on a daily basis, people just aren't going to threads that much. Yes, there's one hundred and seventy five million users total, but how many of those are going to threads regularly? So the question is will Threads gain more purchase and user mind share? And also how is X doing during all this stuff? Honestly, I have no clue. My perception is that things that X aren't going great, but that's largely down to how you know, there's these ongoing challenges the company is facing when it comes to convincing advertisers that the ads they are paying for are not going to show up next to hate speech. In November twenty twenty three, Amazon launched an ambitious product called Astro, which is a home robot, a little wheeled CTC robot that can roll around your house and keep an eye, well, you know, keep a keep cameras and sensors on how things are going. And the company also introduced an enterprise version of that bought Astro for business, so it's a device intended for corporations and such. Now, less than a year after launch, Amazon has announced is discontinuing the enterprise version. Customers that bought one will receive a full refund, which is around twenty three hundred and fifty bucks plus a few hundred dollars in credit because their security system is going to stop working. Once Amazon shuts down the servers on September twenty fifth, it will brick these little robots. The company has said it will continue to develop robotics for the home, so it sounds like the consumer version of Astro will continue to receive support at least for now, and that Amazon is apparently working on successors to that twenty twenty three model. As for Astro, for business models, they cannot be switched to work as consumer versions, so Amazon is sending customers shipping label so they can ship off these former security robots back off to Amazon so they can go to the recycling center, which seems like a pretty sad fate for the cute little fillers. Okay, that's it for the tech news for the week ending July fifth, twenty twenty four. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,