Major investigation Reveals Israeli-based NGO Group’s Pegasus spyware has been used to spy on journalists, activists and others via Apple’s iOS - Snowden pointed out., Amazon CloudFront, URL Shorteneing Servers, DNS Servers, and more. China was accused of backing cyber attacks in a rare co-ordinated effort by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU, Japan and NATO, followed by the DoJ charging 3 Chinese officials. Bezos landed safely and has since offered NASA $2B to reignite the space race. UFO or swarm of bugs? Object recorded over South Carolina ignites tabloid coverage.
Major investigation Reveals Israeli-based NGO Group’s Pegasus spyware has been used to spy on journalists, activists and others via Apple’s iOS - Snowden pointed out., Amazon CloudFront, URL Shorteneing Servers, DNS Servers, and more. China was accused of backing cyber attacks in a rare co-ordinated effort by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU, Japan and NATO, followed by the DoJ charging 3 Chinese officials. Bezos landed safely and has since offered NASA $2B to reignite the space race. UFO or swarm of bugs? Object recorded over South Carolina ignites tabloid coverage.
It's the Next Wave Podcast, Episode 42. I'm James Thomason here with co-hosts Dean Nelson and Brad Kirby. We've had a lot of news since Episode 41. Another very busy few days in tech news, so we're gonna pick it right up from there. Aloha Dean, are you back from Hawaii?
Dean Nelson:Yes, sadly, I got back on Sunday. It was an awesome workcation, though. And yes, I use that word. Specifically, I got up at 5am. Watch the moon set, you have never seen a moon set and why it's insane. The moon sets. It's so bright. It looks like the sun when you take a picture of the iPhone. Anyway, then I watch the sunrise and I do my meetings. I was done by noon. So I felt the safest on Maui than at any other time during the pandemic, primarily because they had to make everyone prove that they've been fully vaccinated. Or they tested negative for COVID. Before they would let them in to the island. So you're walking around going, I know everybody's had to go through the same criteria. So nobody's skirtin' all these different things. It was great. Anyways, I miss Maui. I should have been there during the pandemic. I should have been there for three months. That would have been awesome. You know, working from there.
James Thomason:Yeah, I have a very good friend who moved to Honolulu years ago and lives right on the beach. And that's the appeal for him as he gets up really early in the morning like 5am does his us business. And by noon. He's done. And then the kids would get out of school at one o'clock, so we'd have the whole day with him. That's great. It seems pretty nice.
Dean Nelson:My daughter brought her kit and she was doing full streaming on Twitch while I was doing my thing. So she had her. It was good. We were both working and getting our stuff down. And then we hung out and had fun.
Brad Kirby:You know, that's always nice. I actually downloaded twitch just to see what it's all about and watch some of Nina's first videos. Oh, nice. Cool.
Dean Nelson:I'll do some self promotion here we go to Nina and Nelson on Twitch and watch her write music live. It's just, it's awesome.
James Thomason:I still know how she does that. That will drive me nuts.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, a little bit of pressure there. She's in her element. She's just enjoying it. And just so people remember, our first guests on the podcast, right very first word, Nina, and Bill Kleyman. Alright, so Bill was a huge acapella fan. And that was fun. We had Nina step in and surprise Bill with her singing so and she's at the end of every one of our podcasts. So she's singing the outro she is it's almost time for her to come back.
James Thomason:I mean, she's on the on a cycle right? She's gonna come back since then,
Brad Kirby:Talk about her twitch experience, which is Yeah. Yep.
James Thomason:Brad are you out of quarantine?
Brad Kirby:Yeah, we finally opened up in Toronto on Friday last week. So the Blue Jays are coming back to town on the weekend, some baseball, so gonna go check out a game and actually see human beings in a stadium. But we had a bunch of forest fires here. So the air quality index rating was the highest on the planet yesterday. And so I know you guys are no stranger to that in California. But it's.. Yeah, it's been hot, muggy nd hard to breat
James Thomason:We have two seasons in California now. Flood and fire. Yeah, we skip the other seasons and go right to catastrophes. Yeah. Hey, you know what? I like our government in California. Oh, there you go.
Dean Nelson:Wait, politics and religion. Hold on, hold on. I know. I know.
James Thomason:Not a partisan statement. Okay. Okay. Yes.
Dean Nelson:It's been difficult it's been challenging. You know, the you enter dismiss to me Brad: IQ Air. I thought it was pretty cool.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, it's a neat app that shows kind of the airflow globally, and where the heat spots at least in North America, generally you can see the forest fires. Unless you're over New York City, in which case it's probably just pollution. But yeah, it's interesting to look around the world and see where these pollution ratings were and I first looked at it when I was in Hanoi a couple of years ago. In Vietnam you know, being in Southeast Asia and noticed it was pretty bad.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, I looked at it and you know, California has got new fires coming back up so there's the Dixie fire and the Park fire. But did you know, if you look on the map for fire.ca.gov you can see the where the the actual fires are, but then when you look in this map, you see the actual heat right in the same spot so of course because here we go with all the fires, but the concentration of of that so, boy, you go into Canada, and there's a lot of red across Canada.
James Thomason:Yeah, over California, you can see the smug cloud, not smog. Smug is a unique combination of reefer and self satisfaction.
Dean Nelson:Is that the concentration of billionaires?
Brad Kirby:It's a South Park reference.
James Thomason:I can't believe I said reefer though, who says reefer? The kids are smoking the reefer.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, it's usually the senior citizen.
James Thomason:Well moving briskly on to the news lab to see so glad to see that Jeff Bezos landed safely in a sense offered NASA 2 billion bucks to reignite the space race. I'm guessing there was no Coincidence in that timing, you wanted to make sure that he could fly a rocket and safely return before offering to do the same for NASA. But this comes on the heels of a few months ago after NASA chose SpaceX over Blue Origin for 2.9 billion contracts to build the next moon rocket. Ouch. Dr. Evil in an open letter Monday offered to cover billions of dollars in the US Space Agency's costs elements of the deal. Blue Origin will bridge the HLS budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all payments in the current index to government fiscal years up to $2 billion to get the program back on track. Right now. This is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments. The offer provides time for the government appropriation actions to catch up and so forth. And it will at its own cost contribute to the development launch of the Pathfinder mission to low Earth orbit of the lunar descent element to further retire, development and schedule risks. So he's trying to get Blue Origin back in the game.
Dean Nelson:Did you call him Dr. Evil?
James Thomason:I mean, I may have slipped that in there. Yes.
Brad Kirby:I watched it dog doesn't like it either.
James Thomason:Both dogs he did.
Brad Kirby:He did have a cat. Right. Mr. Bigglesworth.
James Thomason: :dr_evil:Mr. Bigglesworth :dr_evil:
Brad Kirby:I watched it because it was it was in Eastern time. It was 9am. I think so it was early. It wasn't too early. I found it fairly anticlimactic. And I didn't. Really there was no video on board. But
Dean Nelson:it's pretty quite other pictures afterwards. Yeah. You know, yeah, think about it. Basil spent $5.5 billion to go into space for four minutes. So how much is that a second? You know, I'm really bad at math team. So a lot, I think is what it is. But But remember, even though he did this, he's still not an astronaut. Let me give you some clarification on I found this really funny. NASA, the Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration and some astrophysicists consider the boundary between the atmosphere and space to begin at 50 miles up. So bases met that requirement by going up to 62 miles above sea level, that's great. But to earn your wings as an astronaut, the FAA said the passengers must have demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human spaceflight safety, given the automation of Blue Origin. In other words, it did fly itself. Basil basically didn't meet that criteria. So he was a passenger, and that means he's not an astronaut. Bummer.
James Thomason:I don't know. I mean, I don't know if I agree, Dean, I feel like he contributed to the to human spaceflight safety by building a big old phallic rocket for which to climb aboard and shoot himself into space. Okay, so he's, I mean, he's permanent. By the way, he's permanently agreeing to the Dr. Evil comparison, because not only has he gone full bald, and have the squidgy guy, but now he has a rocket ship, like a phallus. And that mean, all he needs is a bald cat. And we're there
Dean Nelson:for a minute, but you're gonna buy him a bald cat. Okay. But then the definition of this probably needs to change, right, because I said demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety. Not that he created the ability to go to space and those kinds of things. So I know it's, you know, semantics. But in the end of it, he didn't qualify. So Money can't buy everything. can buy quite a bit, though. Yes.
James Thomason:They can't all be winners, can they?
Brad Kirby:What is it per second is about 25 million per second or so. up my head 30 to 40 seconds.
James Thomason:Point 5 billion. That's how you know you've made it
Brad Kirby:25 to the power of 25 squared is
Dean Nelson:that's about 20 to
Brad Kirby:24 seconds. Yeah. Yep.
James Thomason:I don't think I make that much money yet. almost as fast as they're printing it right now. Well, there's another big hack this week. Brad, tell us about this. Apple iPhones were successfully hacked by nsos. Pegasus surveillance tool. What the hell is this thing?
Brad Kirby:Yeah. So this goes back to like what Snowden was talking about, but my understanding is that the Washington Post had a list of about 50,000 phone numbers from 50 countries, a number of countries where they have suspected terrorists and and there's some actual intelligence going on for national security interests. And another 16 organizations were involved with this review. I think about 37 journalists were here and Dean actually posted this first to us the other week. About Snowden I voted stone say again, the
Dean Nelson:Yeah, he was up on Twitter and basically saying you should stop what you're doing right now and read this. This leak is going to be the story of the year. And armor this Yeah, the way he explained it was forensic analysts on a small number of phones whose numbers appeared on the leaked list also showed that more than half had traces of the Pegasus spyware. So on that phone, which now brings up the question about how do they get on the phone, but the Guardian is media partners will be revealing the identities of those people. appeared on the list in the coming days. And they include hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers. But it also included close family members of one country's ruler suggesting that there really may have instructed their intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of monitoring their own relatives. You know, one thing that popped out that was really scary in this was the phone number of freelance Mexican reporter as the CTO of the Neda Berto was found in the list. And apparently, he was of interest to a Mexican client and the week leading up to his murder. Where's killers were able to locate him at a carwash, because of his phone, right? His phone was never found. So no friends accounts has ever been able to confirm that. They didn't know if it was infected. But everyone's assuming that the same kind of thing reporter is basically targeted by these people and taken out, and they know exactly where it was. So that's a bit scary.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, this is what the whole hack is a no click hack. So it's in the background. So you can there's no evidence in terms of a user. It's not like you're clicking on an application, it's executing an executive file. And therefore, this is like some real backdoor stuff that Snowden was has been warning both for since he came out and and released that those leaked those documents back and forget what year it was, but it was a long time ago now. So yeah, it's scary, because really, this means that anybody with an iPhone is that risk.
James Thomason:That sound immediate to the podcast, but yeah, there's a lightning strike here. Yeah. I heard that thunder. flicker the lights, so maybe there was a beat on like what I said about Bezos. He's he's got his lightning machine turned on. I'm pretty sure yeah.
Brad Kirby:attorney said no. got really dark there in a second. I can see it, James.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, I was wondering.
James Thomason:Yeah, darkened up in here really quick. It's just one of those tornado things we get down here.
Brad Kirby:In Alabama, right.
James Thomason:Yeah. visiting family in Alabama. So.
Brad Kirby:So yeah.
James Thomason:So the Five Eyes countries wanted. That's US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, along with global powers, like the EU, Japan, and NATO all coordinated to issue individual warnings on Monday. But I guess there's no site yet for you to go check and see if your phone is hacked. I mean, it would be fun logically possible in this case, right.
Dean Nelson:I would assume I haven't. I was looking at.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, I haven't found anything either. In terms of release, I guess. I don't know if those 1000 people were notified. But
Dean Nelson:yeah, I mean, I've got a really cool new screensaver that automatically popped up that says Pegasus, we own you. Yeah, that was that was all?
Brad Kirby:Nothing. That's a ransomware attack different than this.
James Thomason:But the Chinese are doing my new unicorn game. It's It's awesome. Yeah, flying unicorn. Okay, so this was an unusual move, because Has this ever happened before? Like all the Five Eyes countries in NATO?
Brad Kirby:It's really rare to Yeah, it's they all issued individual warnings. At the same time. It was a coordinated effort, but there were each unique releases. So it was the Five Eyes countries US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, as well as the EU, Japan, and NATO on a Monday morning. And then I think later in the day, there was also a release. Did you hear about that? What the DOJ did that they?
Dean Nelson:Oh, they announced charges? Yeah. against three Chinese MSS hackers from multi year campaign i remember correctly on various targets. So because this this is not the Pegasus, right, that we're talking about is just in general. Right. The actual cyber attacks, hacks. Yeah, this is exchange and other things as well. Yeah. So but it is kind of unprecedented that that many countries that quickly went back and said we're pointing the finger at a specific country for targeted hacks against us. So which means they gotta have some information in supporting that they wouldn't come out with something that's is blatantly not, I guess, fact checked. In some way they have to have some intelligence has said that that's real, to have that minute to charge and say something,
Brad Kirby:and to charge members of the Chinese government to write like three of them were part of that history of state security. So the right issuing formal arrest warrants for for these members of government really, that are part of Chinese MSS. So there's no getting them back. But nonetheless,
James Thomason:so a federal grand jury in San Diego on the 19th returned in a diamond in me, charging for nationals and residents of the People's Republic of China with a campaign to hack into computer systems of dozens of victim companies, universities, and government entities in the United States and abroad between 2011 and 2018. They have been busy little, little hackers, haven't they? Of course, this is probably one of those indictments. It's like their virtual people. They have no idea who these people are. So they're I don't know, I don't really like
Brad Kirby:them. They know they listed them out the list of their names and Yeah, well, they think they know who they are. Well, they don't really know exactly where they are. Yeah. Official. Yeah. So that's interesting and, and three of them work for directly for like the PRC government. It's like the equivalent of our the NSA effectively. So it would be like the Chinese charging for NSA hackers or for, you know, for work for unit 8200. At Mossad, right. It's the same type of that would be the equivalent.
Dean Nelson:So it's pretty
Brad Kirby:Yep. Unprecedented territory's in what seems to be a new Cold War. I mean, in my opinion, we're fully into that. And we have been for a while, clearly, if you look at the scenes. Yeah. And I think, you know, moving from Russia, and I think it's almost a new age of Cold War. Really, it's, it's almost a second Cold War. Obviously, there's carryover, but correct me if I'm wrong. Tornado coming out, um, but
James Thomason:obviously the other the window to see if I'm going to get a few minutes, but it's a little dark.
Dean Nelson:And it got awfully quiet. Are you in the I have?
James Thomason:No, it's coming down pretty good. It's looking kind of serious. But I think this is an average thunderstorm here. The sirens haven't gone out yet. So
Dean Nelson:Alabama can handle it. It's all good.
James Thomason:Bring it This house was hit by a tornado about six years ago. And I wasn't here at the time. But my whole family was here besides me. And was an f5, which pretty much is as big as they get. And it came right over the house put down 16 trees I think on the house, destroyed all the cars and left a Volkswagen sized hole in the roof. But other than that it was fine and went on up the road and just leveled the town pretty much.
Dean Nelson:So the house survived.
James Thomason:Wow, people a little jittery around here when these storms come up.
Dean Nelson:rightfully so. Like wildfires in California are all jittery. Well, yeah, I'm gonna house in the fire zone. So
James Thomason:do you Dean so he gets old after a while the constant pivoting between natural disaster flood, earthquake fire. And here hurricane eater? hurricane Eric connaitre.
Dean Nelson:heard tonight, like that. Don't come up one of them her containers. Her canola like night or you know, tomato without the night? Yeah. I don't know where they came from.
James Thomason:All right. So do you think it's happening is kind of the combination of I think we talked about this in a previous podcast, the combination of big tech and big government the idea that basically these big tech companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. They're kind of like, not so stealth divisions of the US government that do their bidding these days, to zacky came out on TV the other day and let it slip that they were flagging posts for Facebook to delete. So they were considering at least misinformation. So obviously, that's been going on a long time. We always knew there's that certain data center in San Francisco, where fiber optics disappear into a sheet rock wall and then come out the other side. So we always knew there was something going on in there. All of the Snowden revelations, but I do find this concerning, it seems like you are to a degree who you do business with, right and how you do business. So clearly, the Chinese and United States economies have become very intertwined in the last 20 years. And so they've become more like us. And that's more like them, it would seem a lot more like a lot more like China than we might like to admit. And they're a lot more like us than they would like to admit I'm sure. So do you think, can you really retain your privacy and identity in the modern world Diem? What do you think? I mean, is there Can we individually survive the onslaught of technology with our individual? I'm gonna give you some identities or
Dean Nelson:what do you I'm gonna give you two points. I'm gonna give it two points. So the first one is, I'm going to quote scabbing, nearly from 1992 or something, right? There is no privacy get over it. I think that's what it works out to be. He said that he didn't mean to with the reporters, but it's stuck with for so long, because in the end of it, you know, it's really difficult to keep your information private, and it's just gotten worse. So the second thing is, James, you and I are kind of polar opposites on a number of things, which I really like. And then Brad, you're kind of in the middle. From this, but you know, take the Yep, he Switzerland. Yes. He's not only crypto bad. He's Brad Switzer. Oh, so wait, that's good. So now on Facebook and all the other applications on the iPhone. Remember when it came out? And they said now they are putting that thing in to say you can select whether you want to allow this to be shared or not. So that kept popping up on my phone. I'm like, Oh, well, this one this one? Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. Yes. I find myself clicking. It's fine. A lot for myself. And it wasn't like, Oh my god, I want this one, although I want this stuff like not blocked and not done, because I use a lot of these applications and I thought, Okay, well, I do want some of those targeted things and all that it's okay. And I found this psychologically that I was okay with sharing my information that way. So, and I know, I know, we differ on that opinion, which I think is good. But the I think that the numbers that came back from the people that were saying, Yes, assoicated track was over 70%. So you've got a small number of people are saying, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. But the majority of people are saying, it's okay. And I look at like, the younger generations, Gen Z, millennials, etc. It's like, yeah, it's okay. It's what it is like, my daughter the same thing.
Brad Kirby:And James, I do I do. I actually talked about this. I don't think we talked about on the last episode, because we You and I were talking about it on slack quite a bit. So we feel like we talked about it, but Okay, okay. Yeah, like biting chemo into that Facebook was killing people. That was the release that we were chatting about. And I think, a day or two after we recorded last episode, so yeah, it feels like we've talked about it on here. But we actually we haven't. Hmm. Alright, so let it loose. So let's hear it. Well,
James Thomason:I mean, lightning have to say on this on this topic, as usual. I'll tell you what, I'll link this into a really interesting piece of research news that came out this week. And the research question was, can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? And how would we measure that? And so researchers at Princeton University tried to answer that question in a new study examining cognitive distortions, which are exposed in language using a corpus from Google Books. And so the analyzed in a number of different languages, I believe, English, Spanish, German, over 14 million books for the past 125 years. And then looked at the structure of the language and as they say, the engrams in language. Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking known as cognitive distortions, where they think about themselves in the world in the future, in overly negative ways, or they distort basically reality into an overly negative and unhealthy pattern of thinking. And these researchers hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology. And that those changes would be reflected in the historical records of language use, you'd basically be able to detect these specific patterns of language which are associated with these distortions. And so that's what they did, they looked at 14 million books in different languages from over 125 years. And they basically showed a hockey stick type of patterns since the 1980s. But in particular, since the year 2000. So two levels exceeding those of the Great Depression, and both World Wars so that, in other words, the prevalence of these linguistic patterns are at all time highs, essentially, at least, for the corpus in question. And then he went on to, yeah, just a few million bucks. Just over tonight, I just looked at books. So nothing social media, nothing internet content, or anything like that, just books. And they went on to hypothesize as to the cause of this observation that we now since 1980, or have a rocket ship headed towards, you know, collective depression. And they hypothesized that the widespread adoption of communication technologies such as the internet, the World Wide Web, social media, may have driven greater societal political polarization at a global level. I think we all know that. I think we know that intuitively. Right? Yeah. And they say the language of such polarizations may correspond to cognitive distortions in particular us versus them thinking, labeling and Miss labeling, dichotomous reasoning, mind reading, overgeneralizing emotional reasoning and catastrophizing. So I think, you know, being very dramatic, right. And so the record, the language record reveals that in recent decades, so I've This is something that I've written about and spoken about, to members of the Senate and to delegates from United Nations, that basically the modern communication systems have disrupted patterns of communication that have existed in humanity. For millions of years, it took us millions of years to evolve our patterns of verbal communication, and we've only been writing for comparatively short time, just a flash in the pan, right, 2 million years of verbalizing and then a few 1000 years of writing. And if you think about mass media, you know, mass media really is 70 years old now, right? Yeah, the internet is 20 years old ish, right? A little older. So these things are flashes in the pan, and we're not equipped. I don't think cognitively as human beings to deal with the either the rate of inflammation or to deal with the emotional consequences of trying to process so much information. So you know, we naturally all have emotional responses to the things that we see here and read. And it's just a dailies, right? I mean, Twitter. For me, as I've described recently is like an open sewer in your house, it's like opening the windows and plumbing putting a sewer pipe in your house, Facebook to a lesser degree, but these feedback loops, it's possible to get, I mean, as other researchers have noted, right, that it's possible to get stuck in these self created feedback loops and so forth. So I, you know, I think part of the danger of sharing is when you start to people who are in whatever loop they're in, you know, interpret what you're saying within the context of their framing, whatever they're dealing with, or whatever loop they've been in. And I think the algorithms, in effect, what they do is they push your communications into places that generate clicks, and what generates clicks is emotional response. And so you naturally, I mean, it's so easy to start a fight on Facebook or Twitter, I mean, it's really, all you have to do is say something the other, you know, the other side and, and it's like, as I say, dog whistling, everybody comes into the fight, and it's just, I have not missed it since banishing Facebook for my life. I think Twitter is next. There's still about you guys, there's still some information value, I get off of Twitter. But I'm so irritated by the censorship, you know, because that censorship also contributes to the feedback effects, right, these these
Dean Nelson:tight loops that people get into, for me, this reminds me of 911. And when that happened, the just flood of news that was coming in, it was everyday, all the time, everything, and my wife and I talked about it, where it immediately caused, you know, depression in people. And you found that you're just, it's so bad, and so much that you just had to turn it off and right, it affected. Yeah. And it literally affects your psyche, I think. And so I think that we've got so much stuff coming into us so fast, as you said, as compressed down to the last 20 years, you think about the deluge of data that's come in, and the amount of ways in which you can be reached with the stuff and then the pointed sensationalism, to be able to get those clicks that you said, James is it's targeting those reactions, because it's, the algorithms are gonna make more money. And so hence, that is a perpetual, right? It's just constantly building up. And so I can see that this makes a lot of sense. What's interesting, you said, 14 million books, but over 125 years. So when you think about printing, and then you think about, right how that stuff was shared. And then we get into this last 20 years, it's accelerated, the whole world can see stuff immediately versus what it was 125 years ago, where you had to wait for something, print something and had very small reach,
James Thomason:obviously, the costs of reach was significantly higher, right? The cost of reach. Now, if the algorithm likes what you're saying, now it calls the reach now is essentially zero. If you go back further than 125 years into the prehistory of modern civilization, and if you wanted to convey a message between communities of people, there was an extraordinarily expensive thing to do, when you basically had to send a runner, and not everyone could read and write. Right? So you had to basically information was constrained through people who either had tremendous power or who were very trusted. And so it is sort of humanity's default to be in a hierarchical structure that way from, you know, from a position of authoritative information and would it trust not to trust and it also reminds me that like the, the KGB defectors and such, those Canadian KGB defectors like that's one of they wrote about active measures to sort of undermine Western civilization using Western civilization's own tenants as weapons basically weaponizing the tenets of Western civilization. And I remember basment off saying, when it was done, you know, when you've done it, people would no longer be able to discern fact from fiction, you know, they wouldn't, people would just swarm into whoever they were aligned with politically, or, you know, in real life, and all information, all objective information would be set aside in favor of so that I remember reading that quote, recently again, and thinking, Wow, that is so uncanny. Because that's what it feels like now, people are just in these tight loops, and everything is so politicized and polarized, it's hard to know what information you can trust and not just political but like economic interest as well. Right? They control our streams of information. So I wouldn't say like, it's just politics. It's not it's also economic.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, so that's a go back to the micro point as to why Biden came out on Facebook killing people and whatnot around the anti vaccine censorship. There was another report that came out about the disinformation doesn't and that report said that 12 people accounted for 73% of all content on Facebook. With respect to anti vaccine posts. This report was about 40 pages long. At least half of them had their own profit motives behind it, whether it was you know, natural supplements or there was a number of different motives behind it. But some of them still have accounts, you know, they're not censored. There's haven't been, they haven't been deleted. So I think they had when the government comes in, they're not necessarily saying you need to censor them, they're flagging it. The platform still has that choice. They still have their freedom of speech rights. There was a couple things said that made it sound like what they were doing was illegal in terms of actually requiring censorship. And I don't know if that was necessarily the case. But again, it does raise the question as to how far can the government go with respect to freedom of speech? And,
Dean Nelson:Brad, this, this brings back a discussion topic we had before that what rings true in that, for me is when everyone has an equal footing, and you can have somebody like 14 people can influence that many people with misinformation, 14 people, like that's there's no balance anymore. You know, so I think that's where the platforms have made it very easy to spread things. And at the same time, if you have a motivation financially, like you're saying to say, the more that spreads, the more money I make, but how do you check all that stuff? Because just on this podcast, right now, it's depressing in this topic. We're influencing right now, right depression on the topic. But you know, for us, like, it's just very eye opening, or at least for me to look at that going, Okay, what do I let influence me? What do I see? What do I believe? And we said, like, what's the source of trusted truth? And we really have kind of lost that. James, you talked about that many times, where there used to be a certain amount with fact checking and other things to say that when this comes out here, I'm pretty confident what's being said is true. Versus whatever's on the internet is open.
James Thomason:Well, particularly in the former of journalism, journalist strived for balanced writing, that was the the mantra was to achieve balance and tell both sides of the story. And Right, right, and we talked about this in the previous podcast, as well, that, you know, in the 1980s 50, companies controlled 95% of traditional media. And today, three or four companies control 95% of media. And two companies basically control money via digital media. And so that that consolidation has led to a few companies having a massive amount of control and influence over the information that we are all able to consume, not just what they want us to see, but like what they don't want us to see. And it's not conspiratorial to say that because there's only like, a couple of days, you know, it's not like, as I've said many times on the podcast, it's I don't believe in conspiracies at all require, like, coordination between 1000s of people to achieve their ends, I believe in conspiracies that take a couple people making decisions together. 14, I think that's what we have. Yeah, I think that's what we have in media. As you know, my previous company was a company called Symantec, and my co founder of that company, have been the victim of cyber stalking. She's the eldest daughter of a very famous actress. And she and her family had been cyber stalked rather relentlessly. And we were working together to try to overcome the hidden abuse that takes place to particularly young children, but also middle aged children, and teenagers, you know, who who encounter that actors on the internet. And we're trying to do that by giving parents tools that used NLP to alert them of these things that were taking place. So you know, not to be like a big brother style, but like, just to give parents tools to say, Hey, you know, this is something you should look at specifically, because it you know, it's redlining. And but one of the interesting outcomes of that research was that these bad actors, in particularly, let's see, the case I would often bring up in an investor pitch was pretty nasty was the case of a similarly adult male, picking on a 12 year old girl. And what we found is that when we analyzed the kind of like these researchers analyzed the engrams of the millions of books, we analyzed all of the tweets that this person had ever made. And we found that this was a repeated, not a one time thing, but they were always out there, like sort of harassing young girls. Right. And not just that, but they were tenfold more likely to associate with other assholes who are harassing 12 year old girls. So the old saying birds of a feather flock together and so forth. Like they, they were not only perpetrating these acts over and over again, but they were freely associating with people who did the same thing and often working in concert. Yeah, because they're the algorithms will optimize what they see, obviously, their preference was to see this kind of information, right. And so these people would cluster together in the graph. And I found that that also really disturbing, right? Like it facilitated more cooperation between people who were doing great harm to children. And, you know, we were trying to like, trying to solve that algorithmically, but very, very difficult problem in a world where the platform's don't want you doing that. And so, you know, when Biden said that the other day, you know, Facebook is killing people, you know, my gut reaction was like, Yeah, they kind of are because they're doing the things that are in the best interest of Facebook and their shareholders which don't really relate to the best interest of 12 year old girls on Facebook or Yeah, that's an extreme example. But to be clear, that wasn't Facebook, and that, you know, the research I was speaking of it was it was Twitter. But I think that that was my gut. reaction to that was like, you know, they kind of do. And they're kind of damned if they do and damned if they don't. And that's the other side is like, if you look at Facebook side of this, the problem is really intractable. The only way that they could deal with this problem really is by applying human beings, as I said, the other week on the podcast, like I'm really bearish on virtual assistants and AI powered tools and all that, and we're going to get a
Dean Nelson:Yes, sir. Yeah.
James Thomason:Who's gonna counter me on that. But the reason I feel that way is because I've worked very deeply with the tech and I feel like it's so sorry, you know, like, it's just, it's like the fourth time, we've gone through a hype cycle on artificial intelligence. And we're still not there in terms of computing power, like it's way better than it was four decades ago, but and during the last artificial intelligence, boom cycle, but now, it's way better. But it's still like woefully inadequate. And that's how I feel like every time I talk to one of these automatons, I remind myself how much I hate them. And so I'm, I'm interested to have that guest, Facebook,
Brad Kirby:they did counter that that statement from Biden about it, just saying specifically that they have several 1000, like two or 3000 employees that are specifically dedicated to censorship. They wrote an open letter. And they actually cited a number of studies that were done independently, showing that, in fact, they were contributing to vaccinations. So it was a bit of, you know, they wanted to make sure that that wasn't actually a thing, if anything, they had some evidence that they were saving lives. So I
James Thomason:in this case, I'm actually spent a tremendous amount of money on censorship. And this has been covered previously, also, because the sensors themselves are traumatized. They're being cognizant contractors, you know, a decent hourly clip, but the contractors have reported themselves becoming depressed because of all the horrific stuff that they have to see and sensor. And so they are spending a tremendous amount of money. I mean, I do you think that humans are the only thing that can accurately analyze that language? And language speakers who understand the context? But then, of course, humans have biases, don't they? And so that really does open the door to oppressive censorship. Where is a really
Dean Nelson:tough problem? I mean, there's so many factors in this one, it's not something I saw overnight. This is very difficult, whether it's the platforms or people or the just a so many elements to worry about in this. I don't know how you solve that. I mean, we remember we said this before, like, Can we get some trusted sources that you would have your own truth meter or your own thing that you are controlling? Like this a start up in this
James Thomason:device or the Senate. In fact, I told the Senate, you know, what, instead of the big hammer of break up big tech, as much as I would like that, that's not a lot of ways is impractical, right? So what you need to do is open up the data, and then empower users to decide what their experience is going to be and how their data gets used. And I think that's got serious potential. Because if you trust a new source, and I trust the different news source, if we had the capability of designating those as like our, you know, as our trusted filter bubble, or you know, some nonprofit or someone else, you know, that's in my network, basically give the user control of the algorithm to make those determinations themselves give them knobs and dials that they can turn in conjunction with API's that make the data accessible to third parties to work with. And that right there is where I think the big platforms have been really nasty, is in walling off their data, and making it inaccessible to those who would do good with it, for the sake of trying to preserve some kind of competitive advantage. Or some First, I would say, even perceived competitive advantage, like in reality, probably no one wants to bear the cost of storing the data that they store, but they would just consume it, right. And in that way, being the locus of API, like they would be more integral than they are now even if they were to open their platforms data. So I think if any regulator is listening to this, you know, any, any lawmaker, that's the thing to do is mandate that these platforms, open their data through open standards, and then put control back in the hands of users. Because humans have had to work together cooperatively for an awful long time. And we know how to do that. We do that through hierarchical structures, where we understand and know the people in question. And so that's, I mean, if I were to try to put a really broad stroke on the problem, the problem is that these big flat platforms break humans. He said, they break our way of communicating and they break our way of trusting. And we need networks that work the way that humans organize themselves normally now under normal More conditions are the last 2 million years. And I think a backlash is coming, you know, someone's going to introduce a new social platform that more conforms to the way that people live their lives ordinarily, Sunday, because nobody wants to be censored. And nobody wants to feel rage every time that they open a social media app, because the algorithm has decided that's the best way to get clicks. So I think I think a backlash, I think awareness is rising, and the backlash is coming. Maybe not this year. But certainly by the next election cycle. I think it's coming.
Dean Nelson:So to bring the happiness wave back in isn't the depression elements and the next wave that we have, I think we should talk about or end this show with a UFO story, don't you? James? Don't you think we should do that? salutely Yeah, I know, I know. You don't like UFO stories.
James Thomason:Not at all, when we're harvesting stories as we do. And curating you know, the the space theme was kind of emerging this week. Lots of Space News. Yep. Yeah. But my cousin lives in goose Creek, South Carolina. And this story from goose Creek, South Carolina has been getting tabloids to cover it. Basically, a mother and daughter were sitting at an intersection down the street from my cousin. And they got a 45 second video clip of a really strange flying phenomena, it looks like once you if you haven't seen the video, you should go online and check this out just search for goose Creek UFO. It looks like a cloud and controlled flight. So it looks like a cloud might be shrouding a vehicle and the vehicles in control flight that you don't In this clip, see a maneuver. But the reports were saying there were multiple of these flying objects. And so what I think is really interesting, because, you know, if you're just consuming media, you wouldn't notice but there's in about three total seconds of this clip, they actually accidentally recorded another UFO. And I think I don't know if I'm the first person to notice this. But in the first few seconds of the clip, the actually caught a disc what appears to be a flying disc on the lower right frame of the film. In the next few frames as they were focused on this weird flying cloud thing. The disk actually goes zipping through the cloud below, in the bottom of frame and so in total, you'll see this thing maybe three seconds out of all the 45 seconds of footage. And of course you're completely distracted by looking at the weird flying cloud. But you got to check this out because they actually got a two for one UFO video you don't get those very often where someone's recording a UFO and you accidentally record another UFO. I don't think I've ever seen that before. And I you know me I watch all the UFO videos so religious enough to check out this one's worthwhile just looking at because it's weird. It's very weird.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, I didn't notice that. So you've got the eagle eye. But, you know, people said this can be bugs. It can be birds, it can be something else. But it is pretty weird. Ever seen the like when all the birds attack a tree, and then they do that swarming thing, right? They look like it reminded me of that. And then if I'm in Hawaii, we were doing snorkeling. And I looked down and I thought the sea was dark. But it was so many fish. It was a big massive school of fish. And even whether this float in there, they're all kind of floating in a similar way. And I just swam down and you know, got them and they moved out but it reminds me of that, but it's it's big and it's moving as very high.
Brad Kirby:So I'm not sure if they still call them bird parts of me that hired wasn't called them. She's like, Look, it's a bird party. I don't know if you ever heard that before. But she's a bat.
Dean Nelson:I've not heard of bird party bred.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, she always says she Oh, she's just put up a bird party. That was she probably says it to this day, to be honest. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:Well, UFOs are definitely things that we love to touch on here. And by the way, we definitely got to get the skinwalker owner on here. I've reached out. Agree, we can get him to join us because I've been binge watching that too. You know, because I've seen a few episodes. And then when I met him at dinner and have a conversation, I'm like, I got to look at this and like, Whoa, if you haven't watched skinwalker Ranch, watch it. It's just interesting. It's free on on history channel so you can go on there and download. And it's just, it's really interesting. I didn't think I would like it as much and I actually enjoyed it.
James Thomason:We have to have him on I hope he agrees to come on. That would be such a good show.
Dean Nelson:Yep, we'll see we can do.
Brad Kirby:All right. Well, next week see AI episode right. So that'll be that'll be fun.
James Thomason:Who's gonna be next week?
Brad Kirby:Cause read those for my piece off. It's Josh Schecter correcting
Dean Nelson:Yep, yeah, as you Josh is an expert in basically cognitive AI, digital labor. And so I reached out to him and based on our conversation, I just think it's gonna be really fun because James, it's not what you think. Okay, it's a lot more advanced anything.
James Thomason:I can't wait because, you know, I feel like you know, I'm kind of like in the analogy, I would be like the, I'd be the mechanic trying to use AI tools in the shop, right. And there are so many people who are just leaps and bounds above me from a research standpoint in the in the practice of the science here, but the You know down here in mechanic land working on the car, you know, things still kind of suck so I'm interested to close that gap and get more educated myself. It's gonna be a great show. Nice. Nice. Awesome. Well thank you audience if you enjoy shows, such as this one where we bring you the latest news information in tech, along with a bunch of cool guests, please give us a like and helps us grow our audience. Our podcast is sponsored by infrastructure masons whose uniting builders of the digital age, learn how you can participate by going on the web to ai masons.org that's AI masons dot o RG. And by projects, we're building a new platform for all the things visit us on the web at Ed J. x.pi. Oh, that's Ed j x.pi.