Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, jonvan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are you. Welcome to my last Friday as the host of tech Stuff. You've almost made it. I've almost made it. It's really exciting. I thought it could be fun to look back on kind of like a big tech story from each year since I've been a host of tech Stuff. So that's from mid two thousand and eight to this year or this past year twenty twenty four. It's weird for me to say this past year because I'm actually putting this together when it has not yet turned to twenty twenty five. I also figured this would take up a couple of episodes because I'm a chatty Cathy and a lot has gone on since mid two thousand and eight. So this is part one, and in part two we will pick up and continue on. That's how parts work now. To be clear, the entries I submit to you, these are not necessarily the biggest or even the most important techt stories of each year. Instead, it's a story I picked for whatever capricious reason. Entered into my head as I was looking back over everything that's happened over the last sixteen and a half years in the world of tech. So we started off tech Stuff in early June of two thousand and eight. For that reason, I went to look at the back half of two thousand and eight for the tech story to talk about, So I ignored anything that happened up until June. And that brings us to Apple launching the iPhone app Store. Now, the iPhone had come out the year before, but the app store would end up becoming a thing one month after we started tech Stuff in July of two thousand and eight. That's when that app store came online. Now, before that, iPhone users had to be content with the apps that Apple made available on the iPhone that were preloaded on the device. Third party choices were not actually an option yet. Apple had spent a year, well more than a year technically, but a year since the iPhone had come out, just coming up with a way to create an app store, Like, what was the strategy there? They didn't want it to just be a fire hose of content because then the store would get flooded with all sorts of apps, many of which would be pretty terrible. So their plan included a vetting process for apps, and at the best of times, this process was rather opaque and obtuse. Sometimes a developer could get an app approved and in the store right away without any real revisions. Other times developers would get pushedback from Apple and they would have to tweak their apps for one reason or another, and that was not always clear, like it wasn't always apparent why one app would be accepted and another app rejected when they were, at least on the surface, very similar to one another. So it raised a lot of questions and confusion. And because Apple didn't allow for side loading, which is when users can install apps from outside an official app store, this meant that developers had no alternative pathway to get to their customer base. It was either played by Apple's rules or get shut out entirely. Now, the app store would have a huge impact on tech and how we interact with it, which is putting it lightly. Not to mention it would help propel Apple's revenue into the stratosphere. The company would take a chunk out of every purchase made through an app. Now that could also include if the app was one where customers had to pay to download the app, like if it wasn't a free app, if it costs five or ten bucks or whatever, Apple got a chunk that, But they also got a percentage of all in app purchasing options, assuming it wasn't an app like ordering a physical thing, like if you were using an app to order food from a restaurant, Apple wouldn't get a chunk of that. But if you were using an app and the app had features that were locked behind a paywall and you paid to get to those features, Apple got a cut. So developers were obliged to use Apple's own payment processing features, they couldn't introduce their own, and Apple took, like I said, a percentage with every transaction. And it was that sort of policy that would eventually land Apple in hot water with antitrust regulators who would argue that the company was using its dominant position to deny competition in the space. And that's something that still plays out to this day, Like there's still court cases going on that go one way or the other. Some have been kind of an Apple's favor, some have been against, but it's an ongoing thing. But on top of all that, the app store would bring about an era in which everyone and their doll began to develop apps for the web content creators out there. This became a real headache because it wasn't enough to just optimize your website so that it would look good on mobile devices. That was absolutely a necessity, because trends were showing that more people were starting to rely on mobile devices to access the web every single year, but you also had to go and make your own bespoke app, or at least that that was the philosophy. Countless apps followed. Some of these would stand the test of time, but a lot of them ultimately withered and died. I am reminded of the house Stuff Works app, which we actually mentioned in a recent episode when I had the boys of Stuff They Don't Want You to Know on the show. The House Stuff Works app served up articles and quizzes and such to users, but it was tough to convince people to download it. I mean, a lot of folks would just go to how Stuff Works if Google pointed them that way when they had the question about something. And it was also really tough to monetize apps. Optimizing articles to display in an app meant that you might have to issue advertising, So like, if they went to the web version of the article, they would get the ads and you would get the impressions and that would count against whatever the ad deal was. But if it was an app, you might not get that. And ads were a top revenue driver for a lot of companies, including How Stuff Works. So how do you both serve content up to people in a streamlined way via an app and how do you make money off of that as its sponsorships? As that what? A lot of people hadn't figured that out, and a lot of other outlets encountered similar issues to what we saw How Stuff Works. For a while, apps were seen as a possible lifeline for content companies that were struggling with the old business model. You know, maybe you could convince people to subscribe through an app and put content behind a paywall. That would help push back against the myriad of ways content could be shared outside of just visiting the website itself. Sure, stuff like social media could let you find more readers, so a lot of content companies embrace social media early on, But then people started just skimming content through social media and never bothered to click through to visit the home website, which meant again, you weren't actually monetizing any of that traffic. All the traffic was going to the social network, not to you. Anyway, the App store made a truly huge change on the tech sector. Entire companies built around apps were made possible by Apple's move. And while Google would launch the Android operating system in two thousand and eight, I don't think even the most hardcore Android fan out there would be able to stay with a straight face that Google would have accomplished the same thing that Apple managed to do. Google did some great things and continues to do some great things along with some not so great things. But honestly, without Apple, I don't think that this ecosystem really takes off. Now, let us move on to two thousand and nine, and we've got a whole year to play with this time, just half a year. So what tech story caught my eye? Well, there were a couple of contenders. One is a very sad one. Steve Jobs's health was in serious decline. And whatever you might have thought of Steve Jobs as a person or a boss, still hard to talk about someone's health deteriorating, at least it is for me. And journalists were swarming to find out the truth of what was going on with Steve Jobs, which was kind of achy. He initially said he was experiencing a quote unquote hormonal imbalance, but it later turned out that he had secretly had a liver transplant, and part of me is frustrated that he actually had to deal with journalists who were prying at his personal life at all. But then I also understand that since he was CEO of Apple at the time, there were reasons people needed to know about his health because if his well being impacted the company, well that's a huge thing, and it impacts thousands of other people. So I guess that's one of the trade offs you have to accept when you become the head of a supremely profitable company. And obviously, while his health was big news in two thousand and nine, his passing two years later would eclipse that. Another big story in two thousand and nine was that Microsoft released Windows seven, which would go on to be one of the more popular versions of the operating system. Microsoft has had an inconsistent track record in that regard. People loved Windows XP, but they weren't fans of Vista. For example. People liked Windows seven, but they wouldn't very much care for Windows eight and so on. But I feel the story I should really touch on is that in two thousand and nine, Facebook officially passed MySpace as far as the number of visitors going to each site per month within the United States is concerned. It is wild to me that tech Stuff was around back when MySpace wasn't just a thing, it was the dominant thing in the social network space here in the States. Of course, by the time time tech Stuff got started, MySpace was already getting into trouble and Facebook's star was on the rise. In fact, if we look at global numbers, Facebook had already surpassed MySpace in unique visitors worldwide back in April two thousand and eight, which was a couple of months before tech Stuff even launched. But, as I'm sure you all know, here in the United States, folks essentially behave as though nothing matters unless it happens here. I'm not saying that's right. In fact, I'm saying it's outright myopic and dumb, but it's still how a lot of people behave here in the United States. So the trajectory Facebook was on would propel the company to incredible heights as well as set itself up for scrutiny and criticism. In two thousand and nine, Facebook changed its terms of use. The new terms had a concerning clause in them that read, and this is a long one, but I'm going to quote it. Quote you here. By grant Facebook and irrevocable, perpetual, non exclusive, transferable, fully paid worldwide license would right to sub license to a use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly, perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works, and distribute through multiple tiers. Any user content you lowercase I post on or in connection with the Facebook service or the promotion thereof, subject only to your privacy settings. Or I enable a user to post, including by offering a share link on your website, and lowercase B to use your name, likeness, and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of lowercase A and lowercase B on or in connection with the Facebook service or the promotion thereof. End quote. Whew, Okay, that's a mouthful. I should have just said the headline of the consumerist piece about this particular change, which was quote Facebook's new term of service. We can do anything we want with your content forever. End quote. It's actually it's a great article. So there was a pretty swift and negative reaction to this policy change, understandably, and ultimately Facebook walked it back, putting up changes to vote among the user base, saying, hey, you should be able to have a say in this because it's going to impact you, and a very tiny percentage of users actually bothered to vote, but critics applauded Facebook's move to at least take user concerns into consideration. The honeymoon would not last very long, however. In twenty ten, Zuckerberg would claim that privacy was no longer a social norm, which I infer as a blanket excuse for Facebook to collect as much data from as many people and profit as much as possible. And obviously, in later years, Facebook would be held accountable for all sorts of problems it caused or facilitated. But yeah, two thousand and nine is a good year to point to and say, here's where Facebook's journey to becoming a huge company, one of the big five in tech really began. Okay, we're up to twenty ten. That's the year we'd get the iPad, which I thought would be a flop because no one had managed to make a tablet computer a viable consumer product up to that point. It's also the year of Antennagate. You might not remember Antennagate because we've had so many iPhones since then, but Antennagate was when folks were complaining about connectivity issues with the brand new iPhone four, and upon closer inspection, it looked like the issue was the internal antenna of the iPhone was placed in such a way that if you held the phone like you know, like a human being holding a phone, you could end up blocking the antenna from getting a solid signal. And we were all essentially told, you're holding it wrong. Thus, Apple pushed the blame onto consumers rather than owning up to the fact that the iPhone four had a design flaw. But the story that really jumped out at me in twenty ten was that the world learned of stucks net at stux and e T that was malware designed for a very specific purpose, specifically to sabotage nuclear centrifuges that were part of Iran's nuclear program. So in order to create a uranium based nuclear power plant, or indeed a uranium based nuclear weapon, you first have to get hold of the right kind of uranium, which is the isotope U two thirty five. Trouble is, that is really rare stuff. It makes up less than a percentage of the uranium we actually mind like zero point seven percent. But you need a concentration somewhere between three to five percent of uranium two thirty five in your uranium mix to have viable material. So we have to enrich the uranium. We have to get the right concentration. Part of that process typically involves using centrifuges to separate out you two thirty five from you know, the other stuff. Well, the stucks Neat virus would do a few things. One thing it would do is that it hit itself once it was installed in a target computer, so that you couldn't easily see that malware was on the device. These particular computers were not connected to the Internet, a very wise decision. They had what we would call an air gap, as in no connectivity to an outside network. So in order to get the virus on the computer in the first place, the malware makers would put this code on USB drives like little thumb drives, and then they tricked Iranian plant workers to install the malware on these air gapped machines, so human beings mostly unknowingly carried this and ended up installing them on the computers. The code would send commands to centrifuges and cause the centrifuges to rotate faster than what they were rated for, and the intent was to break the machinery and sabotage e Iron's nuclear program, and it worked. This was not your run of the mill hacker attack. Of course. While it's never been officially acknowledged, at least as far as I know, the generally accepted stories that Israel and the United States collaborated on this attack for several years before deploying it, and it made history by being the first major malware attack connected with industrial sabotage. That's a heck of a story for twenty ten. We got a lot more, but it's time for us to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back and now we're moving on to twenty eleven. Now. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, twenty eleven was the year that Steve Jobs passed away. By the time of his passing, Tim Cook was acting as the new CEO of Apple. That's a position he holds to this very day. And obviously Steve Jobs's passing was huge news. Like the tech news cycle and really the mainstream news cycle was dominated by that at the time, Steve Jobs was kind of he was the face of Apple like he was the guy who was a co founder of the company. He famously was banished from the company in the early mid eighties, left Apple, went and did his own thing for a while, came back to Apple as a consultant in the mid to late nineties, eventually reassumed control of Apple, turned it around from a company that was on the brink of potentially bankruptcy it was doing so poorly to becoming one of the most successful tech companies in the world, propelled by successes like the iMac and the iPod and of course, later on the iPhone, largely helped by Johnny Ive, the incredible designer who helped create the new look of Apple Like. It is a huge story that he passed away. He was also famous for being a really tough boss and sometimes a really really unkind boss. There are some pretty scary stories about encounter between employees and Steve Jobs. But while his passing was huge, news that wasn't the story I really wanted to focus on. Another big one that unfolded in twenty eleven was how protesters and countries across the Middle East took to social media to argue for massive social changes that technically actually started in late twenty ten, but the majority of the activity was really spread across twenty eleven. This became known as the Arab Spring, and there were, you know, variable degrees of success for social change throughout the nations that were part of the Arab Spring. But what that really did was it highlighted how important platforms like Twitter and other social networks at the time really are for the purposes of social change. Like we can forget that because we often will, or at least I will forget that because I will often focus on things that are happening, like at the corporate level, where the people in charge of those platforms are making questionable decisions or ones that I find ethically troubling, but the people actually using the platforms can often do so in ways that evoke positive social change. Also twenty eleven, Google launched Google Plus that year, but that network had shut down by twenty nineteen, so it barely merits mentioned it was just Google making another attempt to creating a social network similar to that of Facebook or MySpace before it, and Google just never really nailed that. They tried several times, and I'm sure they'll try again at some point, but it is just never stuck. Now, the story I really wanted to focus on is one that, at least on the face of it, seems like more of a novelty and not that important. But I argue it is important, and that is IBM's Watson AI computer famously took on two returning Jeopardy champions the game show Jeopardy in a display of natural language process sing an artificial intelligence powered problem solving. So Watson played against Ken Jennings and Brad Rudder, to former champions on Jeopardy. They played a game of Jeopardy and Watson came out the winner. Watson was able to navigate clues that incorporated wordplay and you know, references and pop culture and history, all without having an external connection to the Internet. So Watson did have access to a rather massive database of information that was connected to the computer, but it could not you know, dial out of the studio for example, to get information from the Internet. Itself. Watson essentially would buzz in if it calculated that the probability of its answer being the right answer was above a certain threshold. And that's interesting too, writ Like, it's not that it quote unquote knew the right answer. It had an answer. It would analyze the likelihood of that answer being the correct one, and if the likelihood were high enough, Watson would buzz in. Now, the reason I bring it up here is not because a machine beat humans in a game, because that's a story we've heard many times, like the famous one being Gary Kasparov when he faced off against IBM's Deep Blue in various chess matches. IBM has a long history of doing this kind of stuff too. Instead, the reason I wanted to talk about it is because in twenty eleven we would get a hint of where artificial intelligence, particularly AI that has natural language processing capabilities, would be headed. I would say that today's generative AI resembles Watson in many ways that we do have to remember that artificial intelligence isn't always right or trustworthy. So just as a reminder, you know, this year, this past year, back in twenty twenty four, I gotta say twenty twenty four. I'm recording in twenty twenty four. But I once had AI quote unquote write an episode of tech Stuff, and then I did kind of director's commentary on that. I suppose the AI ended up inventing supposed experts who didn't actually exist and was quoting them as support for the arguments being made in the episode. And that's just not cool. I mean, like any any teacher could tell you if you are if your students are rating essays and they're quoting made up experts, that's unethical and it's going to get you a failing grade. But AI was doing it when I asked it to create an episode. That's not great. But let's now move on to two thy twelve. Microsoft pushed Windows eight out the door. It was redesigned to work in a world that was now filling up with touch screens. But while the touch screen layout may have, you know, really made sense for people who are on mobile devices, those who are still working on laptops and desktops were less enchanted by that user interface. Lots of people preferred sticking with Windows seven, even though there was a version of Windows eight you could activate that was less tile based. That's what Windows eight called the various little icons that you would navigate through the UI. So this was kind of another case of Windows Vista all over again, where people largely rejected the advancements that Microsoft had made and whether those advancements actually made sense or not. Users didn't like them, and so there was a resistance to adopting Windows eight in large part because of these issues I just mentioned. Apple also introduced Apple Maps that year. Apple Maps quickly became the subject of ridicule. You might not remember this because it's sense gotten much better, but when it was first released, Apple Maps was pretty bad. Users noted several deficiencies in the mapping features, you know, like guiding you to the wrong location or suggesting that you take a river instead of the highway. In all seriousness, it was bad. Maybe it wasn't like the worst thing in the world, but it was bad enough that Tim Cook was actually prompted to apologize for it. That's not a good look. That's not something that Apple would typically do. I don't know that Steve Jobs would have done that, even with the negative reaction that there was to Apple Maps. He might have said, you know, we were too enthusiastic and we released it too early, but I'm not sure he would apologize. No way of knowing. But no, the story I want to talk about is about Marissa Meyer. So she was one of the early employees at Google. She was actually employee number twenty way back in nineteen ninety nine. But in twenty twelve she had a huge career change. She left Google behind and became the president and CEO of Yahoo. She also scored a seat on the board of directors in the process. Old stomping grounds of Google had been kind of stomping on Yahoo for around the year, and so Meyer's appointment was intended to shake things up at the old search engine and web portal, and Yahoo had been through some pretty tough times. From two thousand and nine to twenty eleven, Carol Bart's was CEO, and her tenure was marked with making some really big replacements in the executive ranks, as well as a struggle over Yahoo's very identity. Was it a media company or was it a tech company? Because Yahoo was really getting into content creation as well, and it just felt like the attention of the company was divided and it wasn't doing either thing particularly well. Eventually, Yahoo's board of Director's lost patients with Carol Bart's and fired her over the phone Yike's not classy. Then, in early twenty twelve, and embarrassing situation reared its ugly head when it was discovered that Barts's replacement as CEO, a guy named Scott Thompson, not the guy from Kids in the Hall, that he had fibbed on his resume, that he had made up some information that was on his resume, And this was a bit of a black eye situation, and Thompson was very quickly given his walking papers just a few months after he took the job. Meyer would come in as the new head of Yahoo. She said in an interview with Wired's Virginia Hefferman that Yahoo as a business constituted all the different areas in tech that she had worked within over her years at Google, and she thought she might be able to bring her skill set to help a company that was clearly in need. So Meyer had a lot of work to do. Yahoo was in a pretty weird space. Morale was shaky, the company had lacked a solid sense of direction, and the board was eager to see change. On top of that, there was this ongoing problem that Yahoo would fail to address. This shift of user habits to a more mobile center online experience. While other services and sites were adapting to mobile, Yahoo had lagged behind, and according to that interview I mentioned a second ago, Meyer felt that the move to mobile happened far too late, like eight years too late, she had said. While she says she's proud of the work she did at Yahoo, ultimately it would prove to be too little, too late, and later on the board of directors would decide to sell Yahoo to Verizon, at which point Meyer would resign from her position. Meyer's tenure at Yahoo was marked by many attempts to right the wrongs that had plagued Yahoo over the previous few years, but without the support of the board, it was pretty much a doomed endeavor. Would it have worked otherwise? Well, I guess we're never gonna know. All right, now, we're up to twenty thirteen, and a lot of stuff happened that year. Twitter became a publicly traded company in twenty thirteen and would remain so until Elon Musk would announce he was going to buy it, try to back out of buying it, and then was forced to buy it. Many years later. Bitcoin's value took off for the first time in twenty thirteen. It would later crash and then rise and crash again. We've seen that happen numerous times. New consoles like the Xbox One and the PlayStation four would hit the market in twenty thirteen. But the big story, at least here in the United States, was a huge scandal about how an intelligence agency, or actually a few intelligence agencies here in the States, had been collecting enormous amounts of information about what were otherwise considered to be private activities of US citizens and others, and that would end up making world news. We'll talk about that more in just a moment, but we're going to take another quick break to think our sponsors. All right. Before the break, I alluded to this scandalous revelation of how intelligence agencies within the United States were apparently collecting truly huge amounts of data. So the story is a contractor with the NSA, A guy named Edward Snowden blew the whistle on these programs that seemed to be a massive breach of constitutional protections or at the very least a disturbing example of overly intrusive surveillance. Snowden revealed the existence of a program called PRISM. Now that's PRISM. Essentially, this described a sweeping program in which the NSA had, as the Guardian would put it, quote, direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US Internet giants end quote. And that alone was alarming. So what sort of data did the NSA have access to? Well, again, according to the Guardian, it was pretty much everything. I mean, it was everything from search histories to emails, to file transfers, voiceover Internet Protocol calls. Beyond all this information came directly from the provider's servers. Apparently, the documents that Snowden shared claimed that the NSA had cooperation of the various companies in this endeavor, although when The Guardian reached out for comment, representatives from the various companies denied knowing about PRISM. Curiouser and curiouser, as it would turn out, this was top secret stuff and companies weren't allowed to reveal that they were part of it. It was all part of the clandestine nature. So were they lying that they didn't know about it? I guess it depends on who was actually making the statement, because there were probably people who didn't know about it who were told hey, you got to tell them we don't know anything about this, and others who may maybe they did know about it, but they still had to say they didn't. Later documents would show that the intelligence community was actually paying millions of dollars collectively to these various platforms, and the program originated with a couple of pieces of legislation that were signed into law years earlier, namely the Protect America Act, which was signed into law in two thousand and seven and the FISA Amendments Act of two thousand and eight. Both of those were signed into law by former President George W. Bush, And it would turn out that the NSA didn't exactly have its own backdoor access to all these different platforms. So it wasn't like, you know, it's a slow day at the NSA. Let's go see what people have been posting on Facebook to each other in private messages. It wasn't quite like that. Instead, the way it works from a very very high level is that you send a request to the FBI. The FBI sends a directive to various Internet service providers, and by law, those providers have to hand over essentially raw communications data, and you just get this a massive amount of information that encompasses all the data sent an over a given amount of time. The FBI then sends this huge amount of information to THESA stores it on various databases. And presumably the reason there is that you have all this data that you can then sift through and search and look for clues for stuff that potentially threatened national security. So we're talking about things like terrorist plans, that kind of thing. The NSSA may try to decrypt encrypted information that can take quite some time, depending upon the level of encryption. But in theory, any investigation would first need to secure a warrant from a court before anyone would be allowed to search through all that communications data. However, in practice, well journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that analysts at the NSA can how much access communications anytime they like without securing any kind of warrant first, Like they could just you know, scan through it if they want to. They have that capability. There's nothing preventing them from doing this. And in fact that this is something that was and perhaps still is happening at the NSA. This is according again to Glenn Greenwald, and you know, people are people, there are people who will do dumb stuff, even though they might be burdened with great responsibility. So there have certainly been examples of people within the intelligence community making use of official tools for more personal reasons, like checking up on what an ex partner has been doing since a messy breakup, for example. That kind of stuff. Like you give someone the keys to a really powerful tool like that, I suppose the temptation to misuse it must be pretty great. Prism has not gone away now. I would say that one lesson to take home is that encryption is your friend. It doesn't guarantee that the communications you participate in will be hidden away, but it makes it much harder for folks to just snoop on you. Of course, we're rapidly approaching a quantum computing future in which all previously reliable methods of encryption could potentially just become child's play to unravel. But that's the future. Our concern today right now is the past. So yeah, Snowden obviously his story still ongoing. He's been living in exile for the last decade, and some view him as a important whistleblower who alerted citizens to a program that appears to have a crazy amount of depth in surveillance, even if you accept the statements of the intelligence community that oh, sure we're collecting all of it, but we're not searching it, so we don't even know what we have, so you have nothing to worry about. That's not very That doesn't make me feel better. But not only have we had that, like, he's also obviously had to deal with finding a totally new life outside of the United States because there's some people who view him as a traitor to the country and he could face serious repercussions were he ever to return. So, yeah, a pretty dramatic story in tech. In twenty fourteen, we had a whole year of corporate changes happening in tech. Steve Balmer, who had led Microsoft as the CEO for fourteen years at that point, stepped down to make way for Satya Nadella to take over. Google bought Nest Labs. They're the makers of the smart thermostat, and had just at the end of twenty thirteen, had acquired Boston Dynamics. That's the robotics company that makes adorably terrifying four legged robots, among other things. Google would later divest itself of Boston Dynamics. They did so fairly recently found a new home at Hyundai. Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics for a whopping three billion With a B dollars, Facebook would make even larger purchases. Well, they made one that was smaller. They bought Oculus VR for two billion, but they bought wattsapp for twenty two billion dollars. At this stage, I think Facebook was still looking to solidify everything around the tent pole Facebook social network platform. Like Facebook itself, the platform was the core of its strategy. But in future years the company, especially once it changed its name to Meta, would take a less focused approach to creating what it hopes will be the future of online life. They're like, well, Facebook is just one part of our strategy as opposed to the central part. However, the story I want to focus on from twenty fourteen is the Sony Pictures hack. This was a big one, partly because of the sheer amount of data that was lifted during the hack, partly because of the sensitive nature of that information, which included everything from personal information about Sony employees, including stuff like salary information, all the way up to data about and even digital prints of unreleased Sony pictures films, but also the hack would end up becoming a case study in cybersecurity, with numerous researchers publishing papers on everything from how organizations can better protect themselves from intrusions two works detailing the appropriate way to address a crisis once it happens. Because Sony did a lot of things poorly, So what actually did happen? Well? In twenty fourteen, Sony Pictures was preparing to release a film titled The Interview. In this film, a pair of dufices, a celebrity interview show host and his producer are recruited by the CIA to use an opportunity to inter view North Korea's leader Kim Jong un and then assassinate him. So this is a satire. It makes fun of Kim Jong Un a lot. It also comments on the nation of North Korea in general and its government in particular, and apparently all that was enough to prompt North Korea to direct state backed hackers to attack Sony Pictures. Now. I say apparently because definitive evidence pointing to North Korea has never actually been made public. That doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that there are any other prime suspects that we could point at right like, there's there's no one who looks as good as North Korea in this. North Korea certainly had the capability to pull something like this off. The country has been implicated in other state backed cyber attacks. So, but I do want to make it clear that the working assumption is that North Korea was responsible, but there is a little bit of ambiguity there. A group called the Guardians of Peace ultimately claimed responsibility and claimed that this was not in direct connection with North Korea's government, but rather on behalf of North Korea. That is a claim that I think most security experts have dismissed as being unlikely. They think it really is more of a state backed attack. But muddying the waters further is Sony's own history with cybersecurity, which hasn't been great so Earlier in the two thousands, the company got into hot water when it was found that the music division within Sony had been using a digital rights management or DRM strategy on their compact discs. And the idea was that if you took a compact disc and you put it into the optical drive of a computer, because children back in those days, our computers had optical drives, meaning that you would put a disc in the drive. I know that that sounds strange, but that's how we used to do things before that. It was floppy disks. But I don't want to take you into prehistory anyway. If you were to do this, you might do it so that you could rip the music and make a digital copy for the purposes of, say, putting it on like an iPod or something. And you might also do it so that you could burn new CDs with the music that you just got from the one you bought. So Sony wanted to prevent people from doing that second thing. They didn't want people to make unauthorized copies of music. Never mind the fact that, at least here in the United States, you are legally allowed to make a copy of a CD for the purposes of a personal backup. That's completely within your rights. So if you bought a CD and you made a copy of it so that you could listen to it in case your original CD gets scratched or stolen or broken or something, that's fine. Oddly enough, however, it is against the law to try and circumvent the detective measures that people might place on things like CDs to prevent you from doing that. So, yeah, you have the right to make a copy, but you don't have the right to break the copy protection on a disc. It's odd, right, A's a catch twenty two situation. Anyway, Sony did a thing that really shook people up. They had installed DRM that would put in essentially a rootkit on your computer and allow someone to get remote access to your computer through the Internet. That obviously was a big no no. It did not go well, and later on in twenty eleven, Sony found itself the target of several cyber attacks, when networks being breached more than twenty times that year, and the company then declared a war on hackers, which I think mini hackers viewed as both amusing and potentially a personal challenge. And so there's an argument to be made that Sony's own approach to cyber security was one that incited hackers to find new ways to exploit the company's systems. Meanwhile, Sony was not doing a very good job at all in actually improving their security. The attacks ended up locking employees out of their computers at least temporarily, and the hackers stole truly huge amounts of data. They then released that information online, and that info included stuff like executive salaries, which is pretty sensitive information that companies typically don't want out in the open. And investigation showed that the hackers didn't have to do anything particularly spectacular to pull all this off, because again, Sony Pictures was not exactly up to date with good security hygiene, and employees had not been properly trained and they weren't really vigilant. The lack of multi factor authentication made it much easier for the hackers to find a compromise log in for systems without having to worry about additional layers of security. The hackers apparently tricked a few select employees with a fake Apple ID login page to get hold of their credentials. Then it was just off to the races, so this was kind of an example of spear fishing. Sony was obviously deeply embarrassed by this whole thing, and it was impossible for the company to cover it up. The hackers had dumped a ton of proprietary and private information online and the mess costs Sony a whole lot of money, though determining just how much money is actually pretty tricky. On the low end of things, Sony set aside around fifteen million dollars to address security concerns, which is not much at all in the grand scheme of things. Later on, the company also had to agree to pay around eight million dollars in response to a class action lawsuit that was brought against the company by employees who have been affected by this. You know, their personal information had been stolen as part of this hack. But because of the nature of what happened with all that proprietary information leaked and then shared online, it's actually really hard to put a figure on, ultimately how much it costs. I've seen estimates that have a wild range from around thirty five million dollars on the low end to almost two hundred million on the high end. It's I honestly don't know how much it costs. But it was embarrassing for Sony, and it was a real wake up call. I think for a lot of companies and organizations that they have to take cybersecurity seriously because something as small as a perceived slight might prompt a nation backed group of hackers to try and reach your systems. I mean, in this case, like I said, the straw that appears to have broken the proverbial camel's back was the fact that Sony Pictures was going to really release the interview, which y'all, in my opinion, was not even that funny of a comedy, no grit. That's me. I think there were a lot of funny people in it, but I didn't personally find it that entertaining. Then again, I'm probably the wrong audience. I'm such a stick in the mud. But that is our first part of our look back on some of the big tech stories that have unfolded since we launched tech Stuff in June two thousand and eight. Part two will be coming up next week, and then my final episode of tech Stuff host will follow that. So will I still have a chance to say this? 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, jonvan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are you. Welcome to my last Friday as the host of tech Stuff. You've almost made it. I've almost made it. It's really exciting. I thought it could be fun to look back on kind of like a big tech story from each year since I've been a host of tech Stuff. So that's from mid two thousand and eight to this year or this past year twenty twenty four. It's weird for me to say this past year because I'm actually putting this together when it has not yet turned to twenty twenty five. I also figured this would take up a couple of episodes because I'm a chatty Cathy and a lot has gone on since mid two thousand and eight. So this is part one, and in part two we will pick up and continue on. That's how parts work now. To be clear, the entries I submit to you, these are not necessarily the biggest or even the most important techt stories of each year. Instead, it's a story I picked for whatever capricious reason. Entered into my head as I was looking back over everything that's happened over the last sixteen and a half years in the world of tech. So we started off tech Stuff in early June of two thousand and eight. For that reason, I went to look at the back half of two thousand and eight for the tech story to talk about, So I ignored anything that happened up until June. And that brings us to Apple launching the iPhone app Store. Now, the iPhone had come out the year before, but the app store would end up becoming a thing one month after we started tech Stuff in July of two thousand and eight. That's when that app store came online. Now, before that, iPhone users had to be content with the apps that Apple made available on the iPhone that were preloaded on the device. Third party choices were not actually an option yet. Apple had spent a year, well more than a year technically, but a year since the iPhone had come out, just coming up with a way to create an app store, Like, what was the strategy there? They didn't want it to just be a fire hose of content because then the store would get flooded with all sorts of apps, many of which would be pretty terrible. So their plan included a vetting process for apps, and at the best of times, this process was rather opaque and obtuse. Sometimes a developer could get an app approved and in the store right away without any real revisions. Other times developers would get pushedback from Apple and they would have to tweak their apps for one reason or another, and that was not always clear, like it wasn't always apparent why one app would be accepted and another app rejected when they were, at least on the surface, very similar to one another. So it raised a lot of questions and confusion. And because Apple didn't allow for side loading, which is when users can install apps from outside an official app store, this meant that developers had no alternative pathway to get to their customer base. It was either played by Apple's rules or get shut out entirely. Now, the app store would have a huge impact on tech and how we interact with it, which is putting it lightly. Not to mention it would help propel Apple's revenue into the stratosphere. The company would take a chunk out of every purchase made through an app. Now that could also include if the app was one where customers had to pay to download the app, like if it wasn't a free app, if it costs five or ten bucks or whatever, Apple got a chunk that, But they also got a percentage of all in app purchasing options, assuming it wasn't an app like ordering a physical thing, like if you were using an app to order food from a restaurant, Apple wouldn't get a chunk of that. But if you were using an app and the app had features that were locked behind a paywall and you paid to get to those features, Apple got a cut. So developers were obliged to use Apple's own payment processing features, they couldn't introduce their own, and Apple took, like I said, a percentage with every transaction. And it was that sort of policy that would eventually land Apple in hot water with antitrust regulators who would argue that the company was using its dominant position to deny competition in the space. And that's something that still plays out to this day, Like there's still court cases going on that go one way or the other. Some have been kind of an Apple's favor, some have been against, but it's an ongoing thing. But on top of all that, the app store would bring about an era in which everyone and their doll began to develop apps for the web content creators out there. This became a real headache because it wasn't enough to just optimize your website so that it would look good on mobile devices. That was absolutely a necessity, because trends were showing that more people were starting to rely on mobile devices to access the web every single year, but you also had to go and make your own bespoke app, or at least that that was the philosophy. Countless apps followed. Some of these would stand the test of time, but a lot of them ultimately withered and died. I am reminded of the house Stuff Works app, which we actually mentioned in a recent episode when I had the boys of Stuff They Don't Want You to Know on the show. The House Stuff Works app served up articles and quizzes and such to users, but it was tough to convince people to download it. I mean, a lot of folks would just go to how Stuff Works if Google pointed them that way when they had the question about something. And it was also really tough to monetize apps. Optimizing articles to display in an app meant that you might have to issue advertising, So like, if they went to the web version of the article, they would get the ads and you would get the impressions and that would count against whatever the ad deal was. But if it was an app, you might not get that. And ads were a top revenue driver for a lot of companies, including How Stuff Works. So how do you both serve content up to people in a streamlined way via an app and how do you make money off of that as its sponsorships? As that what? A lot of people hadn't figured that out, and a lot of other outlets encountered similar issues to what we saw How Stuff Works. For a while, apps were seen as a possible lifeline for content companies that were struggling with the old business model. You know, maybe you could convince people to subscribe through an app and put content behind a paywall. That would help push back against the myriad of ways content could be shared outside of just visiting the website itself. Sure, stuff like social media could let you find more readers, so a lot of content companies embrace social media early on, But then people started just skimming content through social media and never bothered to click through to visit the home website, which meant again, you weren't actually monetizing any of that traffic. All the traffic was going to the social network, not to you. Anyway, the App store made a truly huge change on the tech sector. Entire companies built around apps were made possible by Apple's move. And while Google would launch the Android operating system in two thousand and eight, I don't think even the most hardcore Android fan out there would be able to stay with a straight face that Google would have accomplished the same thing that Apple managed to do. Google did some great things and continues to do some great things along with some not so great things. But honestly, without Apple, I don't think that this ecosystem really takes off. Now, let us move on to two thousand and nine, and we've got a whole year to play with this time, just half a year. So what tech story caught my eye? Well, there were a couple of contenders. One is a very sad one. Steve Jobs's health was in serious decline. And whatever you might have thought of Steve Jobs as a person or a boss, still hard to talk about someone's health deteriorating, at least it is for me. And journalists were swarming to find out the truth of what was going on with Steve Jobs, which was kind of achy. He initially said he was experiencing a quote unquote hormonal imbalance, but it later turned out that he had secretly had a liver transplant, and part of me is frustrated that he actually had to deal with journalists who were prying at his personal life at all. But then I also understand that since he was CEO of Apple at the time, there were reasons people needed to know about his health because if his well being impacted the company, well that's a huge thing, and it impacts thousands of other people. So I guess that's one of the trade offs you have to accept when you become the head of a supremely profitable company. And obviously, while his health was big news in two thousand and nine, his passing two years later would eclipse that. Another big story in two thousand and nine was that Microsoft released Windows seven, which would go on to be one of the more popular versions of the operating system. Microsoft has had an inconsistent track record in that regard. People loved Windows XP, but they weren't fans of Vista. For example. People liked Windows seven, but they wouldn't very much care for Windows eight and so on. But I feel the story I should really touch on is that in two thousand and nine, Facebook officially passed MySpace as far as the number of visitors going to each site per month within the United States is concerned. It is wild to me that tech Stuff was around back when MySpace wasn't just a thing, it was the dominant thing in the social network space here in the States. Of course, by the time time tech Stuff got started, MySpace was already getting into trouble and Facebook's star was on the rise. In fact, if we look at global numbers, Facebook had already surpassed MySpace in unique visitors worldwide back in April two thousand and eight, which was a couple of months before tech Stuff even launched. But, as I'm sure you all know, here in the United States, folks essentially behave as though nothing matters unless it happens here. I'm not saying that's right. In fact, I'm saying it's outright myopic and dumb, but it's still how a lot of people behave here in the United States. So the trajectory Facebook was on would propel the company to incredible heights as well as set itself up for scrutiny and criticism. In two thousand and nine, Facebook changed its terms of use. The new terms had a concerning clause in them that read, and this is a long one, but I'm going to quote it. Quote you here. By grant Facebook and irrevocable, perpetual, non exclusive, transferable, fully paid worldwide license would right to sub license to a use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly, perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works, and distribute through multiple tiers. Any user content you lowercase I post on or in connection with the Facebook service or the promotion thereof, subject only to your privacy settings. Or I enable a user to post, including by offering a share link on your website, and lowercase B to use your name, likeness, and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of lowercase A and lowercase B on or in connection with the Facebook service or the promotion thereof. End quote. Whew, Okay, that's a mouthful. I should have just said the headline of the consumerist piece about this particular change, which was quote Facebook's new term of service. We can do anything we want with your content forever. End quote. It's actually it's a great article. So there was a pretty swift and negative reaction to this policy change, understandably, and ultimately Facebook walked it back, putting up changes to vote among the user base, saying, hey, you should be able to have a say in this because it's going to impact you, and a very tiny percentage of users actually bothered to vote, but critics applauded Facebook's move to at least take user concerns into consideration. The honeymoon would not last very long, however. In twenty ten, Zuckerberg would claim that privacy was no longer a social norm, which I infer as a blanket excuse for Facebook to collect as much data from as many people and profit as much as possible. And obviously, in later years, Facebook would be held accountable for all sorts of problems it caused or facilitated. But yeah, two thousand and nine is a good year to point to and say, here's where Facebook's journey to becoming a huge company, one of the big five in tech really began. Okay, we're up to twenty ten. That's the year we'd get the iPad, which I thought would be a flop because no one had managed to make a tablet computer a viable consumer product up to that point. It's also the year of Antennagate. You might not remember Antennagate because we've had so many iPhones since then, but Antennagate was when folks were complaining about connectivity issues with the brand new iPhone four, and upon closer inspection, it looked like the issue was the internal antenna of the iPhone was placed in such a way that if you held the phone like you know, like a human being holding a phone, you could end up blocking the antenna from getting a solid signal. And we were all essentially told, you're holding it wrong. Thus, Apple pushed the blame onto consumers rather than owning up to the fact that the iPhone four had a design flaw. But the story that really jumped out at me in twenty ten was that the world learned of stucks net at stux and e T that was malware designed for a very specific purpose, specifically to sabotage nuclear centrifuges that were part of Iran's nuclear program. So in order to create a uranium based nuclear power plant, or indeed a uranium based nuclear weapon, you first have to get hold of the right kind of uranium, which is the isotope U two thirty five. Trouble is, that is really rare stuff. It makes up less than a percentage of the uranium we actually mind like zero point seven percent. But you need a concentration somewhere between three to five percent of uranium two thirty five in your uranium mix to have viable material. So we have to enrich the uranium. We have to get the right concentration. Part of that process typically involves using centrifuges to separate out you two thirty five from you know, the other stuff. Well, the stucks Neat virus would do a few things. One thing it would do is that it hit itself once it was installed in a target computer, so that you couldn't easily see that malware was on the device. These particular computers were not connected to the Internet, a very wise decision. They had what we would call an air gap, as in no connectivity to an outside network. So in order to get the virus on the computer in the first place, the malware makers would put this code on USB drives like little thumb drives, and then they tricked Iranian plant workers to install the malware on these air gapped machines, so human beings mostly unknowingly carried this and ended up installing them on the computers. The code would send commands to centrifuges and cause the centrifuges to rotate faster than what they were rated for, and the intent was to break the machinery and sabotage e Iron's nuclear program, and it worked. This was not your run of the mill hacker attack. Of course. While it's never been officially acknowledged, at least as far as I know, the generally accepted stories that Israel and the United States collaborated on this attack for several years before deploying it, and it made history by being the first major malware attack connected with industrial sabotage. That's a heck of a story for twenty ten. We got a lot more, but it's time for us to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back and now we're moving on to twenty eleven. Now. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, twenty eleven was the year that Steve Jobs passed away. By the time of his passing, Tim Cook was acting as the new CEO of Apple. That's a position he holds to this very day. And obviously Steve Jobs's passing was huge news. Like the tech news cycle and really the mainstream news cycle was dominated by that at the time, Steve Jobs was kind of he was the face of Apple like he was the guy who was a co founder of the company. He famously was banished from the company in the early mid eighties, left Apple, went and did his own thing for a while, came back to Apple as a consultant in the mid to late nineties, eventually reassumed control of Apple, turned it around from a company that was on the brink of potentially bankruptcy it was doing so poorly to becoming one of the most successful tech companies in the world, propelled by successes like the iMac and the iPod and of course, later on the iPhone, largely helped by Johnny Ive, the incredible designer who helped create the new look of Apple Like. It is a huge story that he passed away. He was also famous for being a really tough boss and sometimes a really really unkind boss. There are some pretty scary stories about encounter between employees and Steve Jobs. But while his passing was huge, news that wasn't the story I really wanted to focus on. Another big one that unfolded in twenty eleven was how protesters and countries across the Middle East took to social media to argue for massive social changes that technically actually started in late twenty ten, but the majority of the activity was really spread across twenty eleven. This became known as the Arab Spring, and there were, you know, variable degrees of success for social change throughout the nations that were part of the Arab Spring. But what that really did was it highlighted how important platforms like Twitter and other social networks at the time really are for the purposes of social change. Like we can forget that because we often will, or at least I will forget that because I will often focus on things that are happening, like at the corporate level, where the people in charge of those platforms are making questionable decisions or ones that I find ethically troubling, but the people actually using the platforms can often do so in ways that evoke positive social change. Also twenty eleven, Google launched Google Plus that year, but that network had shut down by twenty nineteen, so it barely merits mentioned it was just Google making another attempt to creating a social network similar to that of Facebook or MySpace before it, and Google just never really nailed that. They tried several times, and I'm sure they'll try again at some point, but it is just never stuck. Now, the story I really wanted to focus on is one that, at least on the face of it, seems like more of a novelty and not that important. But I argue it is important, and that is IBM's Watson AI computer famously took on two returning Jeopardy champions the game show Jeopardy in a display of natural language process sing an artificial intelligence powered problem solving. So Watson played against Ken Jennings and Brad Rudder, to former champions on Jeopardy. They played a game of Jeopardy and Watson came out the winner. Watson was able to navigate clues that incorporated wordplay and you know, references and pop culture and history, all without having an external connection to the Internet. So Watson did have access to a rather massive database of information that was connected to the computer, but it could not you know, dial out of the studio for example, to get information from the Internet. Itself. Watson essentially would buzz in if it calculated that the probability of its answer being the right answer was above a certain threshold. And that's interesting too, writ Like, it's not that it quote unquote knew the right answer. It had an answer. It would analyze the likelihood of that answer being the correct one, and if the likelihood were high enough, Watson would buzz in. Now, the reason I bring it up here is not because a machine beat humans in a game, because that's a story we've heard many times, like the famous one being Gary Kasparov when he faced off against IBM's Deep Blue in various chess matches. IBM has a long history of doing this kind of stuff too. Instead, the reason I wanted to talk about it is because in twenty eleven we would get a hint of where artificial intelligence, particularly AI that has natural language processing capabilities, would be headed. I would say that today's generative AI resembles Watson in many ways that we do have to remember that artificial intelligence isn't always right or trustworthy. So just as a reminder, you know, this year, this past year, back in twenty twenty four, I gotta say twenty twenty four. I'm recording in twenty twenty four. But I once had AI quote unquote write an episode of tech Stuff, and then I did kind of director's commentary on that. I suppose the AI ended up inventing supposed experts who didn't actually exist and was quoting them as support for the arguments being made in the episode. And that's just not cool. I mean, like any any teacher could tell you if you are if your students are rating essays and they're quoting made up experts, that's unethical and it's going to get you a failing grade. But AI was doing it when I asked it to create an episode. That's not great. But let's now move on to two thy twelve. Microsoft pushed Windows eight out the door. It was redesigned to work in a world that was now filling up with touch screens. But while the touch screen layout may have, you know, really made sense for people who are on mobile devices, those who are still working on laptops and desktops were less enchanted by that user interface. Lots of people preferred sticking with Windows seven, even though there was a version of Windows eight you could activate that was less tile based. That's what Windows eight called the various little icons that you would navigate through the UI. So this was kind of another case of Windows Vista all over again, where people largely rejected the advancements that Microsoft had made and whether those advancements actually made sense or not. Users didn't like them, and so there was a resistance to adopting Windows eight in large part because of these issues I just mentioned. Apple also introduced Apple Maps that year. Apple Maps quickly became the subject of ridicule. You might not remember this because it's sense gotten much better, but when it was first released, Apple Maps was pretty bad. Users noted several deficiencies in the mapping features, you know, like guiding you to the wrong location or suggesting that you take a river instead of the highway. In all seriousness, it was bad. Maybe it wasn't like the worst thing in the world, but it was bad enough that Tim Cook was actually prompted to apologize for it. That's not a good look. That's not something that Apple would typically do. I don't know that Steve Jobs would have done that, even with the negative reaction that there was to Apple Maps. He might have said, you know, we were too enthusiastic and we released it too early, but I'm not sure he would apologize. No way of knowing. But no, the story I want to talk about is about Marissa Meyer. So she was one of the early employees at Google. She was actually employee number twenty way back in nineteen ninety nine. But in twenty twelve she had a huge career change. She left Google behind and became the president and CEO of Yahoo. She also scored a seat on the board of directors in the process. Old stomping grounds of Google had been kind of stomping on Yahoo for around the year, and so Meyer's appointment was intended to shake things up at the old search engine and web portal, and Yahoo had been through some pretty tough times. From two thousand and nine to twenty eleven, Carol Bart's was CEO, and her tenure was marked with making some really big replacements in the executive ranks, as well as a struggle over Yahoo's very identity. Was it a media company or was it a tech company? Because Yahoo was really getting into content creation as well, and it just felt like the attention of the company was divided and it wasn't doing either thing particularly well. Eventually, Yahoo's board of Director's lost patients with Carol Bart's and fired her over the phone Yike's not classy. Then, in early twenty twelve, and embarrassing situation reared its ugly head when it was discovered that Barts's replacement as CEO, a guy named Scott Thompson, not the guy from Kids in the Hall, that he had fibbed on his resume, that he had made up some information that was on his resume, And this was a bit of a black eye situation, and Thompson was very quickly given his walking papers just a few months after he took the job. Meyer would come in as the new head of Yahoo. She said in an interview with Wired's Virginia Hefferman that Yahoo as a business constituted all the different areas in tech that she had worked within over her years at Google, and she thought she might be able to bring her skill set to help a company that was clearly in need. So Meyer had a lot of work to do. Yahoo was in a pretty weird space. Morale was shaky, the company had lacked a solid sense of direction, and the board was eager to see change. On top of that, there was this ongoing problem that Yahoo would fail to address. This shift of user habits to a more mobile center online experience. While other services and sites were adapting to mobile, Yahoo had lagged behind, and according to that interview I mentioned a second ago, Meyer felt that the move to mobile happened far too late, like eight years too late, she had said. While she says she's proud of the work she did at Yahoo, ultimately it would prove to be too little, too late, and later on the board of directors would decide to sell Yahoo to Verizon, at which point Meyer would resign from her position. Meyer's tenure at Yahoo was marked by many attempts to right the wrongs that had plagued Yahoo over the previous few years, but without the support of the board, it was pretty much a doomed endeavor. Would it have worked otherwise? Well, I guess we're never gonna know. All right, now, we're up to twenty thirteen, and a lot of stuff happened that year. Twitter became a publicly traded company in twenty thirteen and would remain so until Elon Musk would announce he was going to buy it, try to back out of buying it, and then was forced to buy it. Many years later. Bitcoin's value took off for the first time in twenty thirteen. It would later crash and then rise and crash again. We've seen that happen numerous times. New consoles like the Xbox One and the PlayStation four would hit the market in twenty thirteen. But the big story, at least here in the United States, was a huge scandal about how an intelligence agency, or actually a few intelligence agencies here in the States, had been collecting enormous amounts of information about what were otherwise considered to be private activities of US citizens and others, and that would end up making world news. We'll talk about that more in just a moment, but we're going to take another quick break to think our sponsors. All right. Before the break, I alluded to this scandalous revelation of how intelligence agencies within the United States were apparently collecting truly huge amounts of data. So the story is a contractor with the NSA, A guy named Edward Snowden blew the whistle on these programs that seemed to be a massive breach of constitutional protections or at the very least a disturbing example of overly intrusive surveillance. Snowden revealed the existence of a program called PRISM. Now that's PRISM. Essentially, this described a sweeping program in which the NSA had, as the Guardian would put it, quote, direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US Internet giants end quote. And that alone was alarming. So what sort of data did the NSA have access to? Well, again, according to the Guardian, it was pretty much everything. I mean, it was everything from search histories to emails, to file transfers, voiceover Internet Protocol calls. Beyond all this information came directly from the provider's servers. Apparently, the documents that Snowden shared claimed that the NSA had cooperation of the various companies in this endeavor, although when The Guardian reached out for comment, representatives from the various companies denied knowing about PRISM. Curiouser and curiouser, as it would turn out, this was top secret stuff and companies weren't allowed to reveal that they were part of it. It was all part of the clandestine nature. So were they lying that they didn't know about it? I guess it depends on who was actually making the statement, because there were probably people who didn't know about it who were told hey, you got to tell them we don't know anything about this, and others who may maybe they did know about it, but they still had to say they didn't. Later documents would show that the intelligence community was actually paying millions of dollars collectively to these various platforms, and the program originated with a couple of pieces of legislation that were signed into law years earlier, namely the Protect America Act, which was signed into law in two thousand and seven and the FISA Amendments Act of two thousand and eight. Both of those were signed into law by former President George W. Bush, And it would turn out that the NSA didn't exactly have its own backdoor access to all these different platforms. So it wasn't like, you know, it's a slow day at the NSA. Let's go see what people have been posting on Facebook to each other in private messages. It wasn't quite like that. Instead, the way it works from a very very high level is that you send a request to the FBI. The FBI sends a directive to various Internet service providers, and by law, those providers have to hand over essentially raw communications data, and you just get this a massive amount of information that encompasses all the data sent an over a given amount of time. The FBI then sends this huge amount of information to THESA stores it on various databases. And presumably the reason there is that you have all this data that you can then sift through and search and look for clues for stuff that potentially threatened national security. So we're talking about things like terrorist plans, that kind of thing. The NSSA may try to decrypt encrypted information that can take quite some time, depending upon the level of encryption. But in theory, any investigation would first need to secure a warrant from a court before anyone would be allowed to search through all that communications data. However, in practice, well journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that analysts at the NSA can how much access communications anytime they like without securing any kind of warrant first, Like they could just you know, scan through it if they want to. They have that capability. There's nothing preventing them from doing this. And in fact that this is something that was and perhaps still is happening at the NSA. This is according again to Glenn Greenwald, and you know, people are people, there are people who will do dumb stuff, even though they might be burdened with great responsibility. So there have certainly been examples of people within the intelligence community making use of official tools for more personal reasons, like checking up on what an ex partner has been doing since a messy breakup, for example. That kind of stuff. Like you give someone the keys to a really powerful tool like that, I suppose the temptation to misuse it must be pretty great. Prism has not gone away now. I would say that one lesson to take home is that encryption is your friend. It doesn't guarantee that the communications you participate in will be hidden away, but it makes it much harder for folks to just snoop on you. Of course, we're rapidly approaching a quantum computing future in which all previously reliable methods of encryption could potentially just become child's play to unravel. But that's the future. Our concern today right now is the past. So yeah, Snowden obviously his story still ongoing. He's been living in exile for the last decade, and some view him as a important whistleblower who alerted citizens to a program that appears to have a crazy amount of depth in surveillance, even if you accept the statements of the intelligence community that oh, sure we're collecting all of it, but we're not searching it, so we don't even know what we have, so you have nothing to worry about. That's not very That doesn't make me feel better. But not only have we had that, like, he's also obviously had to deal with finding a totally new life outside of the United States because there's some people who view him as a traitor to the country and he could face serious repercussions were he ever to return. So, yeah, a pretty dramatic story in tech. In twenty fourteen, we had a whole year of corporate changes happening in tech. Steve Balmer, who had led Microsoft as the CEO for fourteen years at that point, stepped down to make way for Satya Nadella to take over. Google bought Nest Labs. They're the makers of the smart thermostat, and had just at the end of twenty thirteen, had acquired Boston Dynamics. That's the robotics company that makes adorably terrifying four legged robots, among other things. Google would later divest itself of Boston Dynamics. They did so fairly recently found a new home at Hyundai. Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics for a whopping three billion With a B dollars, Facebook would make even larger purchases. Well, they made one that was smaller. They bought Oculus VR for two billion, but they bought wattsapp for twenty two billion dollars. At this stage, I think Facebook was still looking to solidify everything around the tent pole Facebook social network platform. Like Facebook itself, the platform was the core of its strategy. But in future years the company, especially once it changed its name to Meta, would take a less focused approach to creating what it hopes will be the future of online life. They're like, well, Facebook is just one part of our strategy as opposed to the central part. However, the story I want to focus on from twenty fourteen is the Sony Pictures hack. This was a big one, partly because of the sheer amount of data that was lifted during the hack, partly because of the sensitive nature of that information, which included everything from personal information about Sony employees, including stuff like salary information, all the way up to data about and even digital prints of unreleased Sony pictures films, but also the hack would end up becoming a case study in cybersecurity, with numerous researchers publishing papers on everything from how organizations can better protect themselves from intrusions two works detailing the appropriate way to address a crisis once it happens. Because Sony did a lot of things poorly, So what actually did happen? Well? In twenty fourteen, Sony Pictures was preparing to release a film titled The Interview. In this film, a pair of dufices, a celebrity interview show host and his producer are recruited by the CIA to use an opportunity to inter view North Korea's leader Kim Jong un and then assassinate him. So this is a satire. It makes fun of Kim Jong Un a lot. It also comments on the nation of North Korea in general and its government in particular, and apparently all that was enough to prompt North Korea to direct state backed hackers to attack Sony Pictures. Now. I say apparently because definitive evidence pointing to North Korea has never actually been made public. That doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that there are any other prime suspects that we could point at right like, there's there's no one who looks as good as North Korea in this. North Korea certainly had the capability to pull something like this off. The country has been implicated in other state backed cyber attacks. So, but I do want to make it clear that the working assumption is that North Korea was responsible, but there is a little bit of ambiguity there. A group called the Guardians of Peace ultimately claimed responsibility and claimed that this was not in direct connection with North Korea's government, but rather on behalf of North Korea. That is a claim that I think most security experts have dismissed as being unlikely. They think it really is more of a state backed attack. But muddying the waters further is Sony's own history with cybersecurity, which hasn't been great so Earlier in the two thousands, the company got into hot water when it was found that the music division within Sony had been using a digital rights management or DRM strategy on their compact discs. And the idea was that if you took a compact disc and you put it into the optical drive of a computer, because children back in those days, our computers had optical drives, meaning that you would put a disc in the drive. I know that that sounds strange, but that's how we used to do things before that. It was floppy disks. But I don't want to take you into prehistory anyway. If you were to do this, you might do it so that you could rip the music and make a digital copy for the purposes of, say, putting it on like an iPod or something. And you might also do it so that you could burn new CDs with the music that you just got from the one you bought. So Sony wanted to prevent people from doing that second thing. They didn't want people to make unauthorized copies of music. Never mind the fact that, at least here in the United States, you are legally allowed to make a copy of a CD for the purposes of a personal backup. That's completely within your rights. So if you bought a CD and you made a copy of it so that you could listen to it in case your original CD gets scratched or stolen or broken or something, that's fine. Oddly enough, however, it is against the law to try and circumvent the detective measures that people might place on things like CDs to prevent you from doing that. So, yeah, you have the right to make a copy, but you don't have the right to break the copy protection on a disc. It's odd, right, A's a catch twenty two situation. Anyway, Sony did a thing that really shook people up. They had installed DRM that would put in essentially a rootkit on your computer and allow someone to get remote access to your computer through the Internet. That obviously was a big no no. It did not go well, and later on in twenty eleven, Sony found itself the target of several cyber attacks, when networks being breached more than twenty times that year, and the company then declared a war on hackers, which I think mini hackers viewed as both amusing and potentially a personal challenge. And so there's an argument to be made that Sony's own approach to cyber security was one that incited hackers to find new ways to exploit the company's systems. Meanwhile, Sony was not doing a very good job at all in actually improving their security. The attacks ended up locking employees out of their computers at least temporarily, and the hackers stole truly huge amounts of data. They then released that information online, and that info included stuff like executive salaries, which is pretty sensitive information that companies typically don't want out in the open. And investigation showed that the hackers didn't have to do anything particularly spectacular to pull all this off, because again, Sony Pictures was not exactly up to date with good security hygiene, and employees had not been properly trained and they weren't really vigilant. The lack of multi factor authentication made it much easier for the hackers to find a compromise log in for systems without having to worry about additional layers of security. The hackers apparently tricked a few select employees with a fake Apple ID login page to get hold of their credentials. Then it was just off to the races, so this was kind of an example of spear fishing. Sony was obviously deeply embarrassed by this whole thing, and it was impossible for the company to cover it up. The hackers had dumped a ton of proprietary and private information online and the mess costs Sony a whole lot of money, though determining just how much money is actually pretty tricky. On the low end of things, Sony set aside around fifteen million dollars to address security concerns, which is not much at all in the grand scheme of things. Later on, the company also had to agree to pay around eight million dollars in response to a class action lawsuit that was brought against the company by employees who have been affected by this. You know, their personal information had been stolen as part of this hack. But because of the nature of what happened with all that proprietary information leaked and then shared online, it's actually really hard to put a figure on, ultimately how much it costs. I've seen estimates that have a wild range from around thirty five million dollars on the low end to almost two hundred million on the high end. It's I honestly don't know how much it costs. But it was embarrassing for Sony, and it was a real wake up call. I think for a lot of companies and organizations that they have to take cybersecurity seriously because something as small as a perceived slight might prompt a nation backed group of hackers to try and reach your systems. I mean, in this case, like I said, the straw that appears to have broken the proverbial camel's back was the fact that Sony Pictures was going to really release the interview, which y'all, in my opinion, was not even that funny of a comedy, no grit. That's me. I think there were a lot of funny people in it, but I didn't personally find it that entertaining. Then again, I'm probably the wrong audience. I'm such a stick in the mud. But that is our first part of our look back on some of the big tech stories that have unfolded since we launched tech Stuff in June two thousand and eight. Part two will be coming up next week, and then my final episode of tech Stuff host will follow that. So will I still have a chance to say this? 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.