TechStuffAre you sharing misleading Instagram stories? This week, Oz and Karah bring you a news roundup including a ChatGPT-powered gun and a free app that’s keeping people informed about the LA wildfires. On TechSupport with 404 Media’s Joseph Cox, they get to the bottom of why a group of hackers have become so fond of U-Haul user data; and a look at when the world split into digital natives and digital immigrants…and when it might split again.
Thanks for tunion to tech Stuff. If you don't recognize my voice, my name is oz Valoshan, and I'm here because the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed the baton to Karra Price and myself to host tech Stuff. The show will remain your home for all things tech, and all the old episodes will remain available in this feed. Thanks for listening. Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeart Podcasts and Kaleidoscope. I'm Anzaloshan and today co host Kara Price, and I will bring you three things first. The headlines this week, including new and scary uses of chatchipt and a sobering reminder of the climate impact of data processing. On today's Tech Support segment, we have a conversation with four or four Media's Joseph Cox about U haul criminals, and then finally with Thrill to introduce a new segment which we lovingly call when did This Become a Thing? We go on a wild ride with Cara, which ends with a revelation about what it means to be a digital native. All of that on this week in Tech. It's Friday, January seventeenth. Stay with us, Karen Good Afternoon. I actually wasn't expecting to Good afternoon, Good afternoon, I actually wasn't expecting to see you this afternoon.
Why am I not supposed to be here?
Well, now you are supposed to be here. I'm glad you're here, but I actually thought you were supposed to be in LA this week.
I was actually I was supposed to be on the other coast for work, and obviously I wasn't able to go. And I think I speak for both of us when I say that our hearts really go out to the people who were impacted by the fires and who continue to be impacted by the fires. And while I'm glad I'm here, I'm not glad about the circumstances.
No, obviously me neither. But actually what's been going on in LA has some interesting text stories around it, and so I actually, if you'll allow me, wants to go first in this week's news roundup.
We will forego the continentass and I will let you go.
So last week you actually sent me a screenshot of an Instagram story.
The only way to get you anything from Instagram. You're not on it, which I love about you.
I'm not I do have the application, I just he.
Goes on browser people.
But basically, this Instagram post that you screenshotted for me was a picture of this raging inferno, and overlaid was text that reads, quote, the average AI data center uses three hundred thousand gallons of water a day to keep cool, roughly equivalent to water use in one hundred thousand homes. Open brackets, NPR, close brackets. Please skip the silly ais, the questions to chat GPT, having AI write all of your emails. Life needs water, not tech.
Water is the essence of life.
To be fair, whata, it is the essence of life.
And it's also the essence of fighting fires in a city where droughts are just commonplace.
Totally, and I was actually pretty compelled by this post that you sent me until I dug a little deeper, say more. This was, of course misinformation.
I sent you misinformation.
You sent me misinformation, but I didn't amplify.
This is why I don't listen to news and Instagram stories.
But my first clue was this open brackets, NPR, close brackets, and that gave me an opportunity. Okay, thank you Watson. That gave me an opportunity to do some research and figure out what the source of this story was, and I actually found the original NPR story.
What was the NPR story.
Well, it was published in August twenty twenty two, Oh my god, and the headline was data center's backbone of the digital economy, face water scarcity and climate risk. Now, this was published three months before November twenty twenty two, which is when chat GPT three entered the world and generative AI became something that kind of has entered the mainstream discourse. But the NPR story makes no mention of it. The actual quote was quote a mid size data center consumes around three hundred thousand gallons of water. Again, no mention of quote the average AI data center from the Instagram story. The story was really just about regular old data centers that were processing Google searches and doing weather forecasts and helping bitcoin traders making lose fortunes. That wasn't the only distortion in the non My mind has been in the non AI slop that you sent me. It is human generated slop.
It distresses me to know end that we're in, like true crises, how easy it it is for people to get excited about information that seems compelling and not only believe it, but share it because it seems so compelling.
I've actually find the truth of this story as interesting as the misinformation. So the Instagram story said that these three hundred thousand gallons per day of water could otherwise serve one hundred thousand US homes per day, it's just made up. No, In the NPR story, it's one thousand. So that's quite a big difference. As we know, there's been this kind of explosion in demand for data centers exactly because of AI. The La Times actually reported that a single query on a chatbot that uses AI is estimated to require at least ten times more electricity than a standard search on Google. So there is this spiritual truth of the story you shared, which is data centers create heat. Heat needs water to cool it down, and the explosion in generative of AI is putting a lot more strain on data centers. So there is actually weirdly lot of truth in the story.
But the connection directly between data centers and the fires in Los Angeles.
There is no suggestion there is a direct connection, and that's primarily because there aren't that many data centers in the Los Angeles area. There are a lot of data centers in northern California, and there is now actually a big program to build more data centers in southern California, so this could become kind of a bigger problem. But Cara, I know, I'm really only allowed one story, but this one is sort of very much connected, and it's in one of my favorite news sources. Can you guess what it is?
The Daily Mail?
No?
I really one of your favorite the New York Posts?
No? No, no, Yeah, you're embarrassing. Sorry, this is the Sacramento Bee.
I love the Sacramento Bee.
Sacramento is a great paper. On December eighteenth, twenty twenty four, The Bee ran a prescient op ed by Dean Flores, a former California State Senator, under the headline California's next water war won't concern agriculture. It will be about AI.
Mmmm, so it's not the almonds, it's the AI.
It's the AI is the AI and the almonds, And and Flores continues that the struggle for water, of course, is not a new topic in California. It used to be farms versus cities, agriculture versus know, urban development, but now there's this third great demand on the water supply of a drought prone state. There are actually more than two hundred and seventy data centers already in California, and in California, water consumption from those data centers is in the billions of gallons each year and there.
And Flores points this out in his.
Exactly and says that data centers could double or triple their water demand in the next decade in California. And I just think what Flora's ended his piece saying was this story hasn't yet been written. AI infrastructure is being built in real time, so there are opportunities to kind of do better when it comes to figuring out how to to meet this demand.
Yeah, so I do agree with you, Oz, and I think it's important on this show when we cover things that can be a little bit paranoia inducing or anxiety provoking, for us to talk about technology that really is solving a human problem. I have a ton of friends in La. My sister lives in LA, and they are all using this technology called watch Duty. Do you know what watch to do? So? Watch Duty is an app that is so beta looking that it kind of looks like the Oregon Trail. And unfortunately it does look like the Oregon Trail as of last week, because it's just like firefire, firefire, horrible, don't be there, don't do this. But what watch Duty is in practice is this free app that shows active fires, evacuation zones, and air quality indexes in the LA area. And it's actually, you know, anecdotally been a lifeline for people living there. And it's just this really great act of humanity and that it's not selling people data, it's not showing you ads. You don't have to log in, and it is completely donation based. It's a nonprofit. Well, you know, I wanted to highlight this because I think often about disaster capitalism, and this, to me is more disaster troubleshooting.
Yeah. One of the fundamental interesting things about tech is it often does emerge in response to real world problems and can help solve them or at least mitigate them. It's just what happens a day after, which is often where things go wrong. So carry you've already over delivered by telling me something interesting about the story.
Nothing new.
I didn't know about Watch Duty, But what have you got for me?
Well, the last decent man on the internet read it. Our old friend served me with something so demented. Just just bear with me because this is there's a lot of like R two D two in this But there's a video that I'm going to show you in a second that shows this guy who goes by the online name STS three d. He's created a robot rifle what that can shoot automatically and he's giving this robot rifle directions using chat GPT.
Are you serious?
I got it? Did you? Did you know this?
I didn't know this.
This is okay, So let me let me just show you this video.
Oh my god.
Chat gpt, we're under attack from the front left and front right.
Respond to bording with it.
Oh my god.
If you need any further assistance, just let me know. By the way, that's chat gpt talking back him.
One round. There is a rifle following this guy's voice commons.
Like an automated assault leaptip cheez.
Wow. What did you think when you saw this?
Well? I thought to myself, Am I going to do another story this week where chat gpt is being used by individuals to create weapons?
Yes?
Yeah, you know.
When I saw it, I couldn't really wrap my head around how it was actually working and how chat GPT's API was being used to operate operate.
So I have this friend, you have another friend you talk about tech stuff with I knew, oh geez, and he's straight.
So I sent this video and he basically said that STS three D. The guy in the video is using voice to text and is basically feeding that to chat GPT, and then he's running a separate program that can control the robot gun's movements, like you know how many degrees to move the gun, when to shoot it. And that program that he is designed is communicating with chat GPT.
His speaking to check GPT, which is then interpreting his requests and passing it on to the robot, but presumably not in natural language, presumably translating natural language into a computer command.
That's correct. Okay, that's correct, And that's why he's talking to something that sounds like Siri. The other thing that I want to mention, of course, is that open Ai got wind of this because the video went viral, right and they came out and said that what this user is doing goes against company policy. There's a very interesting loophole that I found accidentally through reading about this on futurism, which was actually reported by the intercept last year, which is that open Ai quietly removed language prohibiting the use of its tool for military purposes. And of course this makes sense because just last month it was reported that open ai is launching a partnership with Andrel, the American defense company. Yeah, you know, for open Ai to stand up and say okay, yes, for an individual user using open Ai in this way goes against company policy, but quietly in the background take out language opposing the use of it for military defense.
I mean it is that, isn't It's like you always talk about how things get faster and faster. It took Google like fifteen years to ten years to abandon their don't be evil policy. Yeah, it has taken open Ai five minutes to make an exception for military use of that technology.
Well, they pivoted from a five oh one c to a private company quickly.
There you go.
Coming up, we'll discuss another reason to hate moving. Stay with us. So today for our tech support segment, we have a story about how cybercrime is meeting good old fashioned IRL crime and somehow it all comes together thanks to well as a lesbian, it's an important company, you haul, and we're going to get this story from Joseph Cox, who's one of the brilliant tech writers at four or for Media.
Joseph, Welcome, it's great to have you on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
So you wrote this story in four of for with the headline quote violent hackers are using you Haul to dox targets.
So when I read this story or saw this headline originally, I'm sort of like, well, what does you Haul have to do with doxing and hackers?
Yeah, and it's not obvious at first, and I don't think anybody really thinks of you Haul of being a juicy hacking target. But when you take a step back and you think about it, people who use you Haul, they're probably going to give their real phone number because obviously they need to pick up the truck and they need to organize that. They might give their real address as well, because you know, you all needs to verify that, and maybe they're real payment information because obviously they need to pay for the truck as well. So it's actually a really good source for accurate information if a hacker is trying to reveal somebody's identity and you Haul has been hacked multiple times over the years. You know, happened in twenty twenty and I think twenty thirteen as well, and in at least one of those cases it did include driver license information. But at the time we didn't really have any context of oh, well, why do hackers care about you whole? And I think this story shows why some people may care about that sort of target.
So who's doing this and what do we know about them?
So it's predominantly a group or a nebulous network of people known as comm which is short for community, and this is made up of a lot of young hackers who take over phone numbers, they break into companies, but the main thing is that they try to get as much data as they can on potential targets.
As a practical matter, Joseph, how are the hackers getting this information from you Hall?
So they're not not targeting individual you Haul customer accounts. What they're doing is they're making phishing pages which will trick people into handing over passwords, but specifically for you Haul employee accounts.
This is like the Sony pictures.
Heck, yeah, So when the hackers have the loging credentials for a you Haul employee, you know, they essentially become that employee with all of the sort of access to information they might have, so they can rifle through customer data. And this is a constant problem across companies where you have it, especially with US and UK telecoms as well. These hackers will break into employee accounts so then they can look up customer information.
What do they tend to be going after and who is the typical victim?
In writing this story, I spoke to somebody who writes the tools to steal you haul logins and they told me that basically people inside the com use to dox one another or dos other targets, and they were, you know, it sounded like quite surprised the amount of data you can get in there.
Doxing is when you sort of get somebody's private details and then publicize them.
Yeah.
Docting is where you will take and find somebody's personal information, maybe their physical address, email address, phone number, and then maybe some more sensitive data as well, and either using that for your own means or publishing it online. Now I don't know exactly what a specific member of the comm has used this data for, but you can easily see it potentially being used for physical violence. Members of the com often shoot at each other's houses or hire people to do so. They throw bricks through them, they rob one another armed with hammers or other weapons. And I absolutely put the harvesting of this U haul data inside that context and that it is being you by violent criminal hackers.
So this is really about being an admin. It's not about getting individual information.
Yeah, exactly.
I kind of feel like a lot of people when it comes to Internet privacy, unless they've been like scanned in some way themselves. You know, their eyes can glaze over a little bit. But in your story, people actually got shot after being dogsed.
Yeah. I think people have a pretty old understanding of what cybercrime is. They imagine, you know, somebody in a hoodie overall, laptop in a dark basement or whatever doing these sort of abstract, obscure crimes. Cybercrime today's done by people who are a lot younger, and they're a lot more violent in some cases. If they want to get hold of maybe login tokens, you know, the two FA tokens to get into an account. Some will even threaten to go shoot up some of the's house. And that's why I'm so fascinated by this community. Because it's a complete intersection of digital and physical crime. You know, as a crime reporter for more than ten years, I've never quite seen as latent an intersection as these guys.
This is the metaverse, but not the one that all the investors were hyping.
Yeah, it's the metaverse, but not the very cringe one from Mark Zuckerberg. Is unfortunately, the very real way. And it's funny you bring up metaverse because actually a lot of the people that get into this community, they actually fall into it through video games such as Minecraft or Roadblocks, which arguably are the metaverse, and then they end up in this world of cybercrime.
And do you think there's a part of playing those games that kind of like blurs the line between like the reality of what they're doing and the games that they're used to playing.
Yeah. Absolutely. And when I've spoken to many different members of the com Roadblocks and Minecraft keep coming up over and over again where even hackers will break into each other's Roadblocks accounts to steal, you know, their rare hat or their rare eye or something, and eventually that escalates into well, there's steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency, as well.
Is there a single story or a single real world crime that for you, really throws this into relief for the kind of non tech news junkie.
So recently I wrote about something called the Colm World War, which is obviously not an entirely serious term. This is what members of the comm called it themselves. But there were a series of robberies, shootings and brickings between different rivals inside the como and.
Before the West Side story of Legs exactly.
And I would say it's sort of bubbled over out of calm and into the wider public, because I've seen videos where Colm will hire people to go throw a brick at somebody's house, but they throw it at the wrong home and then it's just impacted the completely random person and now they have a smashed door or smashed ring door, camera or whatever. So it is starting to bleed over into the world of just ordinary people who have no idea why somebody is throwing a brick through the window because something happened on roadblocks.
You know.
Fortunately, if you are a general member of the U haul using public, you probably don't need to worry about this in that maybe somebody you know or somebody nearby unfortunately becomes a target of calm. You know, that's kind of impossible to say, and I would just be very bad luck. But they do predominantly go and try to rob people or target people who hold a lot of cryptocurrency. They have various tools which can determine, Oh, this person has x amount of bitcoin in their coin base account, let's go after them. So, I mean, the threat to a bitcoin investor is very, very different to a sort of ordinary member of the public, and you should be worried then.
So if you're a lesbian bitcoin investor.
Is the center of the ven diagram, you're going to calm You probably already the bricks already have lesbian lucky don't drive. Joseph, thank you for joining us today and we hope to see you on the program again soon.
Thanks Joseph, thank you so much.
Coming up, Kara's Big Adventure stay with us. I'm excited to be launching this new segment that we're calling when did this become a thing? We've got a few listener emails to our account tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com and they were very touching and very encouraging, but also directive and one of the listener emails. Basically said Jonathan, over the course of sixteen years, had so many interesting segments about the history of various technologies, and you know we're hungry for more of that. And so when did this become a thing? It's kind of in service of trying to scratch that itch.
Yeah, each week we're going to bring you a story or observation from the real world and try to figure out when it became a thing.
And this has a little bit of our favorite pair of historical platonic freelance detectives.
That's correct. I get to be the Watson to your Sherlock.
And this week you have something that you encountered in the wild that made you question when something became a thing.
Yeah, it was more of a rescue mission. So I recently had this experience where I came face to face with one of the twentieth centuries most prolific writers and feminist icons. And it wasn't the best case scenario. She had fallen on the street and was a little bit disoriented, and my first thought was, we will not lose a feminist icon on my watch. My second thought was, we won't lose her because I'm going to call an ambulance on my cellphone. That took too long, and so we headed to an urgent care that Margo we can call her. Margo knew about and she was adamant that she'd been there many times before. So I Google mapped the address. Google Map says it's closed, closed, like permanently. She's like, it's not closed. I was there recently. It's closed.
Are you gaining her trust? By this point is she likes sign to know?
And then I'm like, all right, I'm gonna call an uber to go to another urgent character CityMD. She insists on paying for the uber. I said, you can't play for the uber. It doesn't work that way. We get to CityMD. I see it that freaking iPad that they want to use to scan her ID. I'm like, no, we're not using an iPad. We're using paper. Then, And this is my favorite part of the story because it's kind of sweet. She has this like lightning thought where she's like, oh, my cat has a vet appointment today in the afternoon. I said, okay, I'll use Google and I'll look up what animal hospital you go to in the phone number. She goes, you can do that. I said, yeah, all right, So I call the vet and I'm thinking to myself, well, when you go to the vet, they have everybody listed by the animal name, not the parent name. So I turned to her and I say, Margot, what's your cat's name? And dead stare Puss and I'm like, okay, here we go. I said, my friend's cat, Puss, has an appointment today and we're gonna need to cancel because Puss's mother has been in an accent. She's okay, thank you so much for telling us. Okay. Then the last point of sort of technological contact was when we ended up in the er where she had to go after CityMD because she was having trouble breathing, and they said, you need a chest X ray and I told her I can't stay here for four hours, but I'll come pick you up and take you home when you are ready to leave. How well you have an iPhone? It was off. I never seen an iPhone off. It was fully off. I said, you know this nurse here who is about my age, will help you call me. And I think each touch point here made me reflect upon how easy it was for me to navigate, and not that she is well. She's certainly more intelligent than I am intellectually speaking, but that there is a digital divide between us that made this experience far less harrowing. Because I was with her and she said as much. I think she realized very early on that, like all of those things that I think that are so second nature to me, we're not even like on Margo's radar as possibilities.
I mean, this story raises the perfect question, almost as though we planned it. When did this become a thing? When did the world sort of cleave into two where you're either totally able to navigate everything because of having a tool which makes it easy, or you're just kind of struggling to translate. In other words, when did digital natives become a thing. Yes, but let's start by defining our terms, which always a good thing to do at the beginning. What is a digital native?
You know, I actually have no idea, but I've always considered myself a digital native. I'm a New Yorker first, but I'm definitely a digital native second.
I also always consider myself a digital native, even if somewhat reluctantly. Weirdly, because as a child, I was diagnosed with dyspraxia, which basically means can't catch a ball, can't do nice handwriting.
You haven't really grown out of that, No, I haven't tell you. I haven't.
But I got my prescription was a laptop, like aged eight years old, to do my homework on and stuff, and so I became a digital native basically in the late nineties.
You know, I did not know this about you, And this might be one of our sort of unspoken personal connections because I went to one of those kooky laptop schools that I think has ultimately netted out to be the wrong idea. But I went to one of those schools where they taught us C plus plus before they taught us basic algebra.
So we both had this feeling of being digital natives. But I thought I would do some research on what that term actually means and where it comes from. Turns out it was coined in the year two thousand and one, around the same time we both got our laptops by an educational consultant called Mark Prinsky, and he had this idea that education needed to change in response to young people whose brains were literally different from the brains of the generation before because they'd already been shaped by gaming and spending time online and being more used to finding information on the web than, for example, in a book. And he had this quite powerful quote, which was today's students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothed, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously, but a really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a singularity, an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back.
Wouldn't you say, that's like the fact that I now say google it, then look it up.
That's the singularity.
Right. When you talk to some people who are older, they'll say, call for one one, where's four one one going.
To get me? And it's interesting, you just made that point about calling four one one. Prince Ki also has this concept of digital natives versus digital immigrants and digital immigrants, of people like Margo who kind of live in the digital world but carry the accent of where they come from. Whether it's like printing out an email is one of the examples that Prince Key uses, or kind of beckoning someone over to look at your computer screen rather than sending them a link.
And you know, I think that there are definitely those things that mark people today as digital immigrants. You know, I think, my poor mother, but you know, sometimes she'll say, oh, you know, let's call for takeout. What nobody's home. There's actually this book called the Victorian Internet, which is by Tom's Standage, and it's all about the history of the development of the telegraph and how it parallels to the Internet. And in it he tells the story from when the telegraph was first introduced around the time of the American Civil War. And I mean, this could have been my mom. A mom goes to the telegraph office with a bowl of sour kraut to send her son to the battlefront, you know, like by wire.
So she really was a digital immigrant, bringing a native cuisine and then trying to send day with a telegraph.
That's correct. And you know, back in the time of the Civil War, change felt fast. It did not feel as fast as it feels now. Where you know, by the time you have a software update, you need to like learn how to use a whole new phone. You could blink and miss an entire technological evolution. And I do blink and miss entire things sometimes.
Well, I know you think of yourself as a digital native since you grew up with tech. Do you still you know, I do in.
The sense of the idea of new technology is not incredibly daunting to me.
I think it was subtractive to you.
Yes, And I think we were born at a time when technology was changing so rapidly that we are not completely thrown by the idea of like the facts not being the predominant form of communication for ten years, right, right.
But do you think if you kind of got given a grand tour of downtown New York by an eighteen year old, they will be surprised by your use of technology?
I think it's more if like I spent five days with an eighteen year old, they'd be like, why are you not charting your every move on Snapchat? Which is not to say that like I couldn't live in the world with them, but they live in the world different.
Yeah, truly, we're living Margo's living in more or less an analog world. We're probably living in a hybrid world. And many the younger people are living in a fully digital world.
Well, and that's the irony of connectivity, I think, right, Which is this idea that like the world is actually quite siloed by like how you use technology. If you use it properly, you can be very connected, but it can also be very isolating totally.
And we should point out that the framing of native versus immigrant is rather loaded.
Yeah, And one of the things that really struck me with what Margo experience was that there was friction at every turn in her accident. And that's just not only because she was in an accident. It's because we are constantly encountering, like almost every day, a more and more digitized world, right. And you know, the thought that I'm left with is that even though there is a definition for digital needs and we fit into that definition, it's not a permanent state.
I do wonder if there will emerge another term, something to supplant digital natives the way postmoderns are planted modern. You know, one of the guests that we were most excited and proudest to have on Sleepwalkers, our former podcast, was uv Al Noah Harari, who wrote a book called Homodeus, which is basically all about how using technology and merging with technology was changing Homo sapiens into almost this new species Homodeus human but with these godlike powers enabled by new technology. I found it as a young pre teenager pretty crazy getting a laptop in the early two thousands, which was theoretically to do my homework because I was dyspraxic, but more realistically to play the Oregon Trail and Cassel Wolfenstein. And I remember sort of having this laptop and other kids didn't, and it was sort of this little It didn't change too much, but it was a kind of moment of like I was ahead of the curve in some way. But imagine going to school now as a nine year old in the age of chech GPT three. What does that experience of having not only the whole world's information at your fingertips for a search, but having any answer which is probably better than the answer or teacher or your parent can provide, at the click of a button. What does that do to a developing brain. That's it for this week on Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Valoshin and I'm Kara Price.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Domingez, and Lizzie Jacobs. It was executive produced by me, Kara Price, Ozwalashan, and Kate Osbourne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Charles Demontebello and it's mixed by Kyle Murdoch, who also wrote our theme song.
Join us next Wednesday for tech Stuff The Story, when we'll share an in depth conversation with Jessica Lesson, CEO of the information about a vibe shift in Silicon Valley.
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We want to hear from you
