This week we’re discussing the latest news making headlines in Big Hacks, Big Tech, Big Brother, Big Deals, and China.
This week we’re discussing the latest news making headlines in Big Hacks, Big Tech, Big Brother, Big Deals, and China.
Its The Next Wave Podcast Episode 46. I'm James Thomason;
Dean Nelson:I'm Dean Nelson;
Brad Kirby:And I'm Brad Kirby.
James Thomason:And this week we're discussing the latest news making headlines in big hacks. Big tech Big Brother big deals and China. Dean Nelson, you look like you're finally back from Hawaii. Where are you now?
Dean Nelson:I actually made it home and went back to California for 33 hours. Exactly. And jumped on a plane I'm in Austin now.
James Thomason:Oh, did you enjoy your smoke feature?
Dean Nelson:You know, flying back in watching the sky. So inside of the the Southwest plane, it was blue for some reason their lighting the way they do that. Then they had the windows open. It was an orange glow outside. So is that whole thing of apocalyptic view? So yeah, so lots of smoke as I was flying back in wonderful. California still on fire.
James Thomason:First blue sky day here in a while can actually see the sky. Remember what it looked like? I find it depressing. I think this is supposed to be like when people in the Northwest sorry Northwest people or maybe Canadians in the far West. But they feel like it's just like that every day. It's just gray. I couldn't deal.
Brad Kirby:Some people like it. But not me.
James Thomason:But not Brad. Definitely not Brad. Brad you have like 38 minutes of summer left before you go back down into your groundhog hole?
Brad Kirby:Pretty much. It's actually going to be a perfect week. Looks like blue skies, 80 degrees every day.
James Thomason:Canada is so nice when it's warm.
Brad Kirby:It is. We re-open our borders to international travelers next week. So you can come visit again, James.
James Thomason:I'd like to I like coming to Toronto.
Brad Kirby:Yeah. Preferably before November.
James Thomason:And Montreal. I guess if I go to those three. I've pretty much done Canada except for Calgary.
Brad Kirby:You're going to go there for Stampede.
James Thomason:I want to do that. I want to go meet Terry. From Terry's Tube man. I'm talking about? If you've not seen the FUBAR movie...
Brad Kirby:Terry and Deaner
James Thomason:Which I think is like a Canadian classic now. I mean, it's it's gotta be 20 years old, but there was FUBAR and a FUBAR sequel. It's about a couple guys in like the heavy metal scene in central Canada. It just doesn't get any better for comedy. You gotta watch that. And Terry, one of the lead characters has a YouTube Channel series to check out series to shout out to Terry.
Dean Nelson:Wayne's World.
James Thomason:Okay, it's very Wayne's World, by the way. I mean, it, it does have that vibe. Really dating ourselves now, if you know what Wayne's World is. Okay, big tech, big news. We covered this previously on the podcast, Apple was being sued to allow developers to use payment systems outside of the App Store. And Apple since the Steve Jobs days has steadfastly said no, you can't, you can't pay for things inside the app store unless use our payment system. However, the 30% commission structure will remain in place for purchases that are still made within the app store. So you can use an external payment system. But if you buy within the app store, Apple still gonna get that commission. But this is a huge victory, I think for the little guy, for independent developers, for everyone who's been having a cut taken out of them by the big platform. What do you do think about this Dean? Brad?
Dean Nelson:Well, it's nice that they're, they're actually making something of a break for the smaller, smaller companies. So I guess they said in the next three years, the App Store will have a lower commission fee for 15% for those small businesses. So that's a win. There also said there's paid 100 million to small developers based in the US everywhere from 250 bucks to$30,000. So really comes down to part of that settlement that the small business and developers that are in less than a million dollars a year in revenue, will get that pay up, but also have a lower commission and fee. So took a long time. I think competition is doing it, but I think this is good for the sellers.
Brad Kirby:Google had something similar to right, I believe. Did you know that they actually considered buying Epic Games when when they first started charging for Fortnite and whatnot on the store?
James Thomason:Really?
Brad Kirby:Yeah, I didn't know that.
Dean Nelson:That would have been an Epic acquisition.
Brad Kirby:That came out as part of the their lawsuit.
James Thomason:Haha I see what you did there.
Dean Nelson:Thank you thank you.
James Thomason:It's good. The Family Guy ostrich. Ha HA! Okay. Yeah. 100 million bucks to small developers 50% lower commission for a period of time that goes back to 30%. Basically, they got their a$$ kicked. I mean, this is a kid friendly show. They got their butts kicked. their butts kicked really bad. I think this is awesome. So it's good rats. That was a hard fought battle. I you know, go up against one of the world's if not the world's biggest, most expensive, powerful company very easily because they have a lot of attorneys over there.
And other big tech news:Facebook is expanding its plans to put less politics in newsfeed. I have a feeling which politics are going to be censored out of the newsfeed, don't you?
Dean Nelson:There might be a little bit of a bias there for sure.
James Thomason:There'll be certain politics. Facebook started its its politics reduction tests in February for some users in Canada, Brazil, us and Indonesia, as reported By The Verge also announced that it would emphasize inspiring and uplifting posts, and provide more avenues for people to explicitly indicate what they don't like reading directly from the verge piece by Andy Robertson there. Wow. Yeah,
Brad Kirby:They've expanded to include Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland. Now, on top of that, that's the latest.
James Thomason:it's hard to say how much I don't want someone else deciding what I see, for me in my newsfeed. Not that this is a problem for me, since I've thoroughly deleted Facebook, buried it and urinated on it in the backyard. But it's a cat box, now my cat uses it, I find this disturbing, who gets to decide what goes in your newsfeed, what you see, it's just it's awful.
Dean Nelson:I'm conflicted on this, because I agree with you that the censorship and who deems what is appropriate or, you know, what it is that you should be seeing is, is a big, big question mark, what is going to be censored what is not. But on the other side of this, I keep thinking of news for the history of news has all been primarily sensationalism, and anything that catches your eye that makes you go back and look at something, we have an imbalance I think what it comes down to the good things that are happening in the world. And you know, me, Mr. optimist, if there's more good news is coming back through, there's a psychological aspect to that too, right? When you all you're seeing is something negative, you're going to be freaking negative, when you're seeing things that are starting to positive, you might have some more optimism in your life. So that's why I'm a little conflicted. I don't like the fact that somebody is going to be able to tell me what it is that I can see. But what I do like in this story is that it sounds like you can direct. So if that's the case, where I can now say, you know what, just like any of these other platforms allow you to say what I want to see, I can go look at these things, then I could say that I can start to tune it the way I want it and get rid of the crap. I don't want to see you do this with junk anyways. Right? It's stupid stuff in your email, and you keep junking it. But
Brad Kirby:Right, you're training the algorithm. I guess my issue is I don't necessarily know exactly how those algorithms work. And I think we could probably figure it out. But the average person can't. How do we go in and figure out what those algorithms are doing? How can we reprogram them, if we don't like what they're showing, I always like Feedly is another example. Right? I sometimes go off of Feedly, just because it does start to pigeonhole into certain areas. And it learns what we want to see it learns, yeah. And it's really just a matter of ensuring that you're training it, right. Whereas the three of us are training that together.
Dean Nelson:That reminds me of early iPhone, iOS, had this thing where it learned the typos I would make, and it would correct them for me. But something changed, where now it remembers
James Thomason:It still does that. the wrong words. And so I felt like I could type so much faster before something changed in the way it was programmed. That now all of a sudden, the mistakes keep popping back up. It's like it learned the word that was spelled incorrectly. And it keeps now saying that word like infrastructure, it puts an X in it, because there was a thing with ABC years ago called infrastructure with an X right. I'm like, s***, I gotta keep, I gotta keep go back and changing this thing. So it seems to learn the wrong way. So Brad, what you're saying I think is correct. Like, how do you correct what it learned about you that? No, I don't want you to learn that or that's incorrect, because that was a Tuesday and I was just bored and I looked at a certain direction, I don't want to look at all the other stuff that came out of that conversation
Brad Kirby:thing. In that case, it adds it to your dictionary, and then it's stuck there forever as a word that you use. And, and you could technically go back and delete it from your dictionary to retrain it. And that specific has happened to me too, recently, more so than often on Android. But so I agree with you there. But in terms of the algorithm itself, some of its proprietary, right, so it's IP, so that might not even be disclosed. And ultimately, it just comes down to using your brain and seeing past trends.
Dean Nelson:I have a problem using my brain, Brad, because that happens to me daily. I'm just saying. Talking about? I'm talking about being mad. Come on, what do you said,
James Thomason:You know, I read a lot of philosophy. And this is a lot more modern philosophy stuff. And one of the guys I read a lot is Kenneth Minogue, who was a Australian philosopher moved back to the homeland back to the UK, unfortunately passed on years ago, he wrote a piece called The Silencing of Society. And the subheading was the true cost of the lust for news. He was a obviously a deep thinker. It's a bit bit of a struggle of a read to get through in parts. But he makes the point that even back when he was writing this, the news is overwhelmingly negative, because that's what people have a lust for, you know, they have a brain, chemical desire for the dopamine reward they get when they get this gossip like information out of a news stream. For those of us that have kids and we we see this in children, right, children learn to gossip at a very, very young age. Like I'm a remarkably remarkably young age. And anyway, he went on to make the case that this was essentially poisoning discourse in society. And of course he didn't. He live quite far beyond now, but he didn't quite Left to see what we have now with the media dominance of Facebook and Twitter and Google dominating search, but he would be horrified I know by it but check that out for anyone who hasn't read it. Kenneth Minogue is the author. The Silencing of Society is interesting little is very short piece very short, very dense bit of a tough read. But but a good little book, that you might have originally been a very long essay that they converted into a book, but nonetheless pretty interesting. Well, moving on to the space race, things are about to get a lot uglier things are getting uglier. This week, there was an alleged email leak showing that the ULA is plotting against SpaceX and trying to, how would you say Dean massage things their way, frame SpaceX in a negative light? There's an apparent email conversation between VP Robbie Sabounhair, and Hanson Solomon, a lobbyist at the International Association of machinists and aerospace workers. I say alleged This is not confirmed yet in any way, but it's being reported on by various outlets. And there are excerpts from the email floating around, notably in which they call the leadership at NASA and competent. They're not aware of a lot of contracts in the near future. Yeah, at the same time, Bezos is stepping up his fight against Elan, musk and SpaceX, there was a letter sent from Blue Origin to the FCC, they previously tried to stop the award of Atlantic Atlantic contract and sued over it. And then they sent a letter this week trying to stop the internet based business, which is called starlink, which already 100,000 people are using, I think we're wider on starlink. And orders for Starling terminals have exceeded something like 600,000. So it's, it's the first really broad, successful low cost, satellite based broadband. That is actually low latency broadband. It's not like older satellites, like that's very like two to 300 milliseconds of latency.
Dean Nelson:Yep, I had that.
James Thomason:Yeah. Amazon has its own, of course, project hyper, to launch a constellation of satellites deliver internet as well. So obviously, if you have, there's only so much room up there. And it's like the virtual real estate of space, and there's only so much frequency as well, let's get nasty. Dean, what do you think about this?
Dean Nelson:This is billionaires battling each other. But there's nothing different than what's happened in the past. So this is all about trying to dominate a market. You think of what that quote unquote alleged letter was saying. It seems that they're trying to cast some distrust, or even fake information, I guess, around that they're trying to tie something back with Musk and Trump and some of the things in this two, if I remember in the article, right, they're trying to tarnish the reputations of these different groups. I think it's Tony Bruno is the CEO of ULA. Yeah, I think they were saying there's kind of a brief bromance between Musk and Bruno. Right. And then they started spouting on social media back and forth. And so I think this is just powerful people trying to go back and get a position but SpaceX is leading in this ULA is having a more of a challenge from what I understand, right to stay competitive in this. So it'd be unfortunate that they're using this kind of tactic, if it's true to do that. But same thing into the other girl articles you're saying with vasos this kind of first little nice battle between the three billionaires go into space. You got musk and Bezos and Mr. Branson or Sir Richard Branson, all get in there all within the same kind of month. And I know the basis didn't go up but the whole point is they're all shooting stuff into space or going into space or doing something because they want to dominate that new market because it's going to be a massive market.
James Thomason:Maybe that business went up to the winner but
Dean Nelson:must didn't is my point must crisis you had. Yeah, he must go up musk at some point.
James Thomason:I think when he goes up, he's not planning to come back. He's just gonna head straight on to Mars. Two middle fingers out the window. Like he's not gonna be back. You think? along the way?
Dean Nelson:No, no, his Tesla's already out there.
James Thomason:He's something he's on the way and straight on to Mars.
Dean Nelson:Oh, where did he send that?
James Thomason:Well, it's, it's just drifting. It's just drifting out there.
Brad Kirby:I know, one of the things that Elon said during this social media battles was that he was chirping Lockheed and talking about the F 35. Spending and whatnot, I actually get to see an F 35. This weekend. I think there's the airshow here. So it's pretty exciting for me, because I usually don't see an F 35 flying over Toronto, but that'll be that'll be fun.
James Thomason:I mean, we get to see those, whenever someone violates the MOA, they scramble the F 35. So there's areas of Nevada, you know, you just you can't fly in as a very straight air corridor Area 51. So if you feed Israel over the border the wrong way, you will personally meet an F 35. And I, you know, we did that once in a small plane. Give me the feeling that you were being targeted by an active laser system. That's the feeling that I got when I was sitting there and they're like, I don't think they really want us to. I mean, GPS said we were still where we should be, but they're running training and they actually shoot down little planes like that. Little drones, so you don't want them to get the wrong idea.
Brad Kirby:I have no comment.
Dean Nelson:I've never had the feeling that I've been targeted by a laser system. James, that I think that's just you.
James Thomason:That's pucker factor when you're in a very slow moving propeller driven aircraft over active military airspace, and there are lots of jet fighters scrambled buzzing around you. That's that's not a good feeling. Don't do that. I don't recommend,
Dean Nelson:Okay. Wait. So you've been in that situation?
James Thomason:I've been in that situation. Yeah, we flew, we flew in a like a small turboprop, the friend of mine is a pilot and flew me from California to Vegas. We landed in Tahoe and we were from Tahoe back down to Vegas. And so you have to cross certain airspace there. There are corridors you can fly through, but they happen to be active at this time. And so we had to get clearance to go through there like cool moving target, you know, they're like, buzzing, buzzing around us. And it was very unnerving. I don't recommend.
Dean Nelson:Okay. Thrill seekers are gonna do that just for fun.
Brad Kirby:It's only a decade since I had that fear. That same laser fear.
Dean Nelson:Am I literally the only person on the show that has not had this fear? I guess I need to get into a small engine plane and actually go up and find out what this is all about.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, I can't really say publicly why I had that fear.
James Thomason:I could probably arrange this for you.
Brad Kirby:Offline.
Dean Nelson:I could you know, I'm really curious why you can't tell this publicly.
James Thomason:Now. I want to know, yeah, right.
Brad Kirby:Well, yeah, I'll tell you just not on this podcast. Like it is it is crazy that they spent almost a trillion dollars developing the F 35. And, I mean, it is a good argument, right, that they can't get the funding for these programs. So it makes sense, talking about your defense companies?
James Thomason:Well, I mean, we just print whatever money we need now. So it's all good. There's no no bad can come of this. Alright, latest in security. There's a new wave of hacktivists, which is turning the surveillance state against itself. This is a story that was reported by The Record has to do with some recent hacks in the Middle East in places like Iran, where cyber hackers are using the government's own surveillance infrastructure, to record the government doing things, basically abuses, and releasing those videos to Twitter. I think this is hilarious.
Dean Nelson:It's, it's pretty bad when your own systems are used against you. But I love the term by the way, "hacktivist".
James Thomason:Hacktivist, Hacktivism.
Dean Nelson:Hacking for good. Hacking for good.
James Thomason:They'll still put you in jail forever or in other countries probably execute you, but it is hacktivism. And video evidence resulted in a rare apology and acknowledgement from abuse at the head of Iran's entire prison system, I guess. So this was out of the Associated Press. And the official was forced to acknowledge that the videos of the even prison abuse was real. You love tech for good stories, Dean, this is kind of like a it's kind of a tech for good story, isn't it?
Dean Nelson:Yeah, except for the execution part.
James Thomason:But some of the abuse part of it.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, that's true. This always reminds me of what my mom said years and years ago, that if you're writing something down, assume that it can be read in front of a church. And then the other one, if you're if you're actually saying something, just assume that it can be recorded and actually broadcast on the radio. And that same thing, maybe you write a letter, and it could be on the front page, if you just keep using that part of it. So it drives a certain behavior, to say that, okay, I really do actually need to think about what I'm doing here. But if you think of abuse of power, and people that are able to do a lot of things, because they have the power. And remember those studies we're talking about with Stanford and things where when they're given that power, that shock syndrome, and things like we talked about a couple episodes, that thing, it starts to change the psyche of people, but when there is some, I guess, accountability, or check and balance on that, you do need to make sure that you're there if people's behaviors change. So in a prison system, when you're dealing with difficult people, and I don't know, I think it just changes people, the guards like so one of my relatives is the corrections officer, and he was a corrections officer for years. And it was, I just remember the stories about when you're around so many things so many times, you get jaded, and you get, it's just negative. Like we said earlier in this in this episode, that whole point of when you're constantly getting negative stuff, you're gonna start to become more negative. And so I wonder if first off, there's nobody checking what's going on in those systems and this video starts to bring it back out. I've got a perspective on people and psychology that's a little different in my later life than I had when I was younger, that you know, you are a victim of your influences. And those influences make you do certain things in a certain way. I think that's pretty common as people say it. And so if you don't have that built in, that you're going to make decisions the right way on it, you're going to constantly making the wrong decisions. And so if there's nothing in there that's checking it, and unfortunately, the hacktivists are showing the things that are not working. I mean, we talked about Snowden and, and others to start to show things that where power is used in the wrong way, even with the right intent goes the wrong way. It needs to be checked. I just finished a book. It's called. This is how they tell me the world ends and it's actually written by Nicole Perlroth. She was a reporter at the New York Times and she started covering back when Ukrainians were getting hacked by the Russians during that whole thing there. It's really just the history of state sponsored surveillance and activism, ethical hacking. I highly recommend it to read it because it's really just a history of some of the crazy things that have gone on back to the days back like 70 years ago, don't quote me on the facts here, but where they would have like these little dongles on typewriters, not even computers, but typewriters, that would then send some kind of seismic wave that there was like, like a way of keystroking a typewriter. And this was in like 50s, or 60s. Keystroking a typewriter? What would it actually do with that wave? Like make them not type certain things? Or what?
Brad Kirby:What it would do is then transfer it to, this was at the French Embassy, I believe, and effectively what it would do is recorded in the built in bugs in the wall that they could then transfer.
James Thomason:keystrokes through audio or vibration. Yeah, that's a long time.
Brad Kirby:Yeah. Yeah. So that but that like, Oh, that's just one example of many aren't even know why I brought that up. But it kind of blew my mind that this is before the internet and computers. And it really talks about the history, which I think is important to understand how we got to where we are today, and how it is today. But I would read it with caution. Interesting, because it is quite paranoia inducing. Not that James and I aren't paranoid already. But...
James Thomason:Increasingly, increasingly so. Yeah, by the way we keep just to clarify, I feel bad because we we keep referring to Stanley Milgram experiment being at Stanford because we're conflating two, sort of like vaguely similar things. But Milgram's experiment was at Yale, that's the one where electric shocks were administered, famously studied and Milgram wrote a book"Obedience to Authority", the published results and was wildly by but it's a great a great thing to understand and read, Stanford ran a Prison Experiment, where was a simulation where the subjective students simulated prison environment, you know, like, in the basement, had other students as guards and studied their psychology. So two radically different experiments at radically different institutions. Just to clarify that point. milgrim is the shock treatment study, fascinating stuff, highly recommended reading, we another article here, deep fakes and cyber attacks are coming. They're already here. They're already here. So in March, the FBI released a report declaring that malicious actors are leveraging synthetic content for cyber and foreign influence operations. And apparently with specific intel coming over the next 12 to 18 months. So like, synthetic content being completely fake audio, video, other media, which is categorically manipulated, not real. And if you've seen some of these things out there, like the Joe Rogan, simulated Joe Rogan, deep fake, it's pretty convincing. I mean, I'm not sure if it gets any better than it is like, I'm not sure I would be able to tell the difference. There's some very subtle cues and like the Joe Rogan one, but I mean, it is really inventing it certainly not. Those cues, were not audio cues within the video. So I would say like, I think, I think audio deep fakes are getting where like, you can't really tell if this is real or not.
Dean Nelson:This is where from the very first episode we've had of the show, this is the thing that scares me the most. And you kept threatening me with this. James, I'm glad you haven't followed through on that threat. I'm gonna do a deep thinker, please don't.
James Thomason:I have worked on it. By the way, I have worked on it. Just so you know.
Dean Nelson:Crap. This this is this really got to me this story, because a couple reasons in here, they talk about where these hackers and basically, people that are in the dark web are doing a lot of technology advancement in applications and distribution of how to use that tech in that specific way. And those deep fakes themselves, like they have a web tutorial on this, they start walking through and and they've done this before where they did ransomware as a service ransomware as a service, come on, think about it, like institutionalize this thing, like you'd get from Amazon or something. But the FBI really said that the goal is to use synthetic audio and video to evade the security controls. And so you remember that story back in 2019 was one of the first kind of audio fakes that they did this guy called up and use the software and call the CEO of another company acting like his boss or the CEO of the parent company, and demanded you need to wire $243,000 to this Hungarian vendor's account right now. And it was so convincing. He called the bank and actually did it. But it was literally just that software back in 2019. And so if you think about the implications of all this, that if you suddenly can't tell like if my if they use this thing and call me and it was my wife stating something to me over the phone, and I couldn't tell, think about that. Right, right. I've been kidnapped. I've been something like whatever that is.
James Thomason:Per the Milgram thing like few people have the tools necessary to resist authority, right? So if your boss calls you or someone you believe to be in authority, you're on the phone, you're listening to them or even if it's a deep fake video, you're video chatting with them, right? It's like the modern Max Headroom of deep fakes. What do you have to do? Right? Like,
Dean Nelson:I mean, this show alone right now. And along with all zoom calls, podcasts, webcasts, anything that's actually published is fuel. Because there's so much recorded content of our voices and our faces and I'm talking about everybody now. Think of Tik Tok. How many videos of people going out and doing things on there with literally millions and billions of views? All of that is content that can be used back in with this deep fake aspect. That's scary as hell.
James Thomason:I guess the good news is that since we've put so much audio content out there, we have total plausible deniability now, right? So if someone says that he said something, it's like, No, that wasn't us. It wasn't me. You can't prove that it was me. It was a deep fake. Anybody could reconstruct my voice from the hours and hours of podcast recordings that we have. So
Brad Kirby:Yeah, that is true. I like that.
Dean Nelson:Okay, I'm going to say my previous rant in this actual episode, that wasn't me that was that was James playing around with something to make me sound stupid. It wasn't me making myself sound stupid. No, it wasn't, it could have been no way. The way happened. Wait, this is I'm not talking right now. This is something else. Anyway, this story was really interesting. And there's a guy named Russ McElroy over at VMware. He wrote this and he said, he's a security professional, it really got me thinking because this deep fake phishing, bypassing biometrics, this is really leading to a distortion of digital reality. What is real and what is not? That's just scary as hell.
Brad Kirby:And we've been talking about this for at least two years now, a year and a half on the podcast. I think last week, the UN had a had a meeting or summit, the UN Institute for Disarmament Research to discuss the implications of Deep Fakes on international security instability. So the point of where they were discussing whether or not nuclear weapons are at risk, it is something that is front and center. I'd like to say that maybe we were the leaders in talking about it.
James Thomason:You could spoof a call as the voice of a state leader, no problem. But I mean, how many how many hours of voice recordings of state leaders are there, right, or people in military command? It'd be trivial. So you have to have fortunately, you know, such things have many, many checks and balances along the way, but terrifying to say the least right?
Dean Nelson:To me, it seems that imagine just these attacks that allow people to convince somebody like, remember, I had a call where someone said, Oh, hey, this is john. I'm over in the the X Division of when I was working at eBay, right? and said, Hey, can you tell me who that was? Again, that runs a security Africa and then just off top? My head? What? Oh, yeah, it's this one. Then I realized, why am I saying this? I'm like, wait a minute. And then then I said, Who is this again, and then they hung up on my crap, I just got the social engineering aspect of it. Now having somebody voice to be able to use in a dynamic way, that if I can be sounding like James Thomason, because it's going to change my voice. And when I'm speaking into the James Thomason ish, then I could just be calling up Brad Kirby. And I could say, hey, Brad, you know, we're gonna have the episode this move this over here, but can you can you wire all your Bitcoin over to me? I know Brad would.
James Thomason:I'm gonna write to my friend and and you know the ultimate social engineer hacker was Kevin Mitnick infamously. I'm going to write to my friend and see if he can convince Mitnick to come on the show and tell us about his worries about deep fakes. Because he knows more about this than anyone I know. I think he'd be a fascinating guests anyway, I wonder what he's up to. That'd be really cool.
Brad Kirby:So I have one more deep fake story related to Joe Rogan, as you know, I was in the loop with that group that did it. And I listened to one that was never released publicly. And that person, someone has since done a similar fake voice of this iconic English broadcaster, who you may know from documentary after documentary. And he's actually they just did this two weeks ago. David Attenborough. Yeah, yeah. So that's the one that they were ethically toying with. And they didn't release it. And he is just absolutely appalled. And disgusted by it. He has publicly come out and said, I cannot believe someone has done this. So they made the right decision. Right.
James Thomason:Yeah, it's kind of an issue also, like post seamlessly, right? Because if they can recreate the voice or imagery of an actor, I mean, they they kind of had this problem with remember when they were doing hologram performances and the like, what, what was it Michael Jackson, and yeah, a couple of rap artists?
Dean Nelson:Can't remember what show?
James Thomason:It's their performance their body, it's their image. It's your voice. So there's serious intellectual property rights with respect to that right and the but the idea, it's spooky you can create new content out of dead people. That's just I don't like it.
Dean Nelson:[Haley Joel Osment Voice] "I see new content."[/Haley Joel Osment Voice]
James Thomason:So latest in China, US officials are fearing that China ransacked Exchange servers for data to train AI systems. This is a pretty interesting article that came out of the register, who's my personal favorite and tech reporting for their Brit tabloid style, shredding of most executives, including myself and including companies I've worked for. That's all fair game, so I love it. Did you read this piece? Dean was a big long piece.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, it was but there's there's some good stuff in it. I think the concern that was coming out primarily was that they're using this data, to understand their machines to be able to understand exactly what people are doing. And, you know, this goes all the way back down to T-Mobile, because there was, there was a break in and there were 48 million of its subscribers, information was stolen. So that's the PII information. Again, I'm wondering if these bad actors that are coming back in was it confirmed that it was China back again.
Brad Kirby:They denied it.
James Thomason:Attributed to. Yeah, I mean, Beijing denied any involvement. But..
Dean Nelson:Okay, whoever that group is that the thing is that they're trying to harvest this information to be able to now train machines. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, just the the fact that there's so much content out there that you can start to really get trends. And I'm trying to figure out exactly how this works with that data. Because if they're just grabbing the information, just like another security breach, that's one thing, but they're trying to go back and find more content of like, how many emails are written, the threads in those emails, the past and the trends that are happening with the people that are in that, right in those Exchange Server emails, that's different than just going back and grabbing PII information.
Brad Kirby:Also, the attachments within the emails could have a plethora of information, right? Just knowing how I used to communicate, the amount of information on email servers is almost mind blowing just from one company, they were able to utilize for zero day bugs. And going back to this book I just mentioned, it was written by the New York Times reporter goes into depth mostly about zero day bugs and the business for that and really just the grey market and the shadow brokers and the people that are trying to ultimately find these and bug bounties and everything related to that.
James Thomason:That's what scares me is that the treasure trove of zero days, you know not the ones that we know about the ones we don't know about people's secret trove of zero days, they're just saving for a rainy zero day, right?
Brad Kirby:And there's been points where hackers have been they'll offer to pay and then they've taken it back and said, Oh, what you're doing is illegal, even though it's ethical. So if they're able to find these holes, and share it, it's like some governments have said it's exploitation, really all they're trying to do is patch up these holes. It's a pretty complex and scary world. And ultimately, what the book concludes is that this is how they say the world ends. So...
James Thomason:The CSO for Microsoft Office 365, was interviewed by NPR, his name is Shane Kawaguchi. And he said that this is the fastest scaled up cyber attack you'd ever seen. They went from breach to just like all out data theft at maximum bit rates as much data as they could copy as fast as they could copy. Check out that NPR interview. Pretty interesting. And another thing to note was the testimony from Eva Nina, CEO of the Eva Nina Group, before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of the hearing concerning the comprehensive threat to America posed by the Communist Party of China CCP, August 4 of 2021. There's about 10 pages of testimony there on Eva Nina's assessment of the Chinese threat to the US.
Dean Nelson:So he talked about that breach itself, and he was quoted in there. So you have the OPM data breach continued and then said you have an entire security clearance file for someone. You have the anthem records, you have the Marriott point record credit cards, Equifax, loans, mortgages, credit scores, right? They know everything about you before they even bump into you on a cruise or on a vacation. And they're saying that basically, they have more information on us than we have on ourselves.
James Thomason:Yeah, it's exactly what you said that the Chinese have more data than we have on ourselves.
Dean Nelson:And these breaches aren't slowing down.
James Thomason:So you take all this information you have about someone, you get a copy of their voice, create a deep fake out of it. Now you're having a credible keyboard based conversation with someone who thinks that it's you. They know everything about you. They know what you did last week, where you went to dinner, what you said when you were there. terrifying. The other news out of China was that this came out yesterday. I thought this was crazy regulators and trying to ban minors from online gaming for more than three hours per week. Unless your head was in the sand. You probably saw this headline. But I immediately wondered like, how are they going to enforce this? And so the the depth of it is like you have to register? Apparently there's a national registry for playing video games. So effectively, it's like licensure, like you have to have a license to play the game. Yeah,
Dean Nelson:There's a setting for this in PlayStation. I was on a zoom call this earlier last week. And the guy was on with his son came over in the zoom call and was basically standing next to his dad looking at him. And it was because his PlayStation wouldn't allow him to play anymore. But they they have the restriction and he his son went away. And he said, Yep, so I limit how many hours they can do. And they hit that for the month. And then they can work and play in and try to you know, barter with me to figure out how to get more hours. So yeah, I think that's in the systems. But this is the first I've heard of it actually being a national registration
Brad Kirby:And now requiring every platform to have this.
Dean Nelson:I mean, I can understand too much right from a minor of anything is bad, but government actually doing that versus the parent?
Brad Kirby:Yeah, they're doing parenting, right? Yeah, that's Yeah, they're trying to parent, not saying that limiting screentime is a bad thing, but for the government to require a facial recognition to limit it? I don't know.
Dean Nelson:Is that in there too wait, how are they doing that?
Brad Kirby:Well, in order to access the gaming, they have that database of facial recognition. And that is, yeah, how are they doing that? Not every platform has that.
Dean Nelson:The Chinese government has a facial recognition database of minors, pretty much everybody. But in this case, yes. But for the miners have to basically go use facial recognition to login and to prove it to them. And then they can validate that they've done this more than three hours of whatever. That's how it's working?
Brad Kirby:Right.
Dean Nelson:Wow.
James Thomason:This happened back in 2018. Actually, they created a verification system, which is a real name based registration system mandated for players of Honor Kings, if memory serves and so this was Honor Kings. What's that mean? Well, is a game a popular game? Okay, they've since added to that apparently cross referencing with facial ID and they're basically using it to verify minor, so crazy,
Dean Nelson:but the intent of this the regulars here is to do anti-addiction. And there's something a gaming is an addiction.
James Thomason:Right? Yeah, the gaming in general is bad for society. Hmm. It's pretty dubious. Yep.
Dean Nelson:So it said Tencent and Netease is restricting gaming from minors between 8pm on Fridays and weekends or restricting it to 8pm on Fridays.
James Thomason:Just a small, small little window of time that you're allowed to play video games. Oh, I mean, I assume this can be bypassed easily by using your parents account. That is until they apply the facial recognition you can get your parents to unlock it for you. But this is always to my fear Dean of like technology being used to control every every aspect of your life, every aspect of society. You won't be able to do anything without being on the vaccine registry or you don't I mean, like it's either these things have a way of sliding very quickly into dystopia.
Brad Kirby:I think this should be in the control of parents hands, really. And there should be some kind of recommended guidelines for parents, because most parents won't understand how to implement this kind of technology. I don't have kids yet, but I think when I I'm pretty sure when I do I will have screen time limits and controls and authorizations for that I don't want the government telling me what's right for my child.
James Thomason:Oh, you think you will and so you realize it's like dad gonna have more screen time. And I'm more screen time and I'm more screens. I need more screen time because x any more screen time because of doing homework.
Brad Kirby:I take it you have tried it with with Amelia.
James Thomason:At a certain point, the burden of screen timing becomes a little too intense for I think at once.
Brad Kirby:I've watched john do it many times.
James Thomason:Our CEO John Cowan, he's always wrapping screen time, but at a certain point. He's got three kids. So I mean imagine the amplification of that, as they say they're not teenagers yet. That's the difference. Wait for it. Yep. We've we've waited till they're teenagers right now. They're little kids, and they can they ask for screentime here and there. But as soon as they become a teenager, it's gonna become like a constant barrage of "Dad I need more time."
Brad Kirby:I will say that playing Grand Theft Auto as a teenager for 12 hours a day was probably not healthy. But that's just my personal experience.
Dean Nelson:You turned out okay, right. Hold on.
James Thomason:Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure me playing poker for 20 hours at a time isn't healthy either. And it's not healthy to sit that long. But you know, I know what I'm doing. I know it's wrapping up the China news, Nokia paused its 5G project due to fear of US penalties. So this has to do with topic we've covered many times in the show the idea that critical infrastructure in western countries, the US the UK, most of Europe is purging Chinese manufacturing components for fear of exactly the stuff that we've been talking about on this show today, but for the fear of security risks. So this is one of the first manufacturers to just stop dead in their tracks and try to figure out what to do. Nokia issued a statement saying their commitment to O-RAN and the O-RAN Alliance remains strong. But we are simply pausing technical activity with the Alliance as some participants have been added to US entities lists, and it's prudent to allow the Alliance time to analyze and come to a resolution.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, they said they have no choice but to suspend all of our technical work activities.
James Thomason:Certain members of the Alliance, who could they be talking about? Who were they alluding to? It could be anyone they did they didn't say who it was, it could be anyone could be anything?
Dean Nelson:Yeah. And just just for our listeners O-RAN is that Alliance is basically open radio access network that allows smaller companies to compete for contracts on specialized services, you know, software and kit and the 5G market. So I don't know how many companies are in overran itself in that Alliance. Do you know?
James Thomason:A bunch, the founding members was like a really long list.
Dean Nelson:Which includes Nokia.
James Thomason:One of the early members on if it were a founding member, they were an early member, there's bunches of workgroups, but I wonder I wonder who it could be. Companies include at&t, China, mobile, Dutch telecom NTT DoCoMo, orange, I wonder who it is.
Dean Nelson:Oh, there's over 200 companies in the O-RAN aAlliance that are working together with blacklisted Chinese firms, or at least the US until the US issue similar licenses for the Alliance.
James Thomason:Do not deploy 5G. 5G is a lie anyway. It's gonna be a lie. Well, it'll be a very, very lie.
Brad Kirby:It's immature.
Dean Nelson:It's there we go. Okay. There's a difference between immaturity and a lie right?
James Thomason:Immaturity? Yeah. Yeah, it's Yeah, well, 5G. 5G is another way of saying LTE.
Dean Nelson:FYI, that's CYA.
James Thomason:FYI CYA.
Dean Nelson:So remember, when I was in Hawaii, and we had the bandwidth problem, and we tethered with the at&t phone, it was insane how fast that was over 100 megabits, right? 130 some odd megabits on a quote, unquote, 5G phone. It's not a 5G phone. It's 5Ge, but it still was really, really good bandwidth. But I went down down the beach to another hotel. And the 5G I was getting like two megabits. So we must have just been sitting literally right next to the tower. That's the only way.
James Thomason:Or the building you're in.
Dean Nelson:Yeah. Yeah. Because it was just blazingly fast.
James Thomason:You roam cells. You know, you're you're in a different tower for sure. Well, speaking of Big Brother, the Australian police, Australia, I mean, are you guys watching the news out of Australia? And what's going on over there with all the COVID lockdown some like they arrested a COVID fugitive yesterday, I think. But in any case, the Australian police get new online account takeover and data disruption powers. Brad, this is a new bill, I guess in the Australian Government. What is this new bill do? What kind of powers is a grant the Federal Police and criminal intelligence commission.
Brad Kirby:So it just passed house and senate I think yesterday so as to pass Royal Assent before it becomes 100% effective. But really what it does, it grants both the federal police and also the Australian criminal intelligence commission, to take control of anyone's online account and gather evidence about serious offenses without their consent, as well as add, copy, delete, alter any material to disrupt criminal activity, and collect intelligence from online networks, which is quite broad now, like, effectively, what they're saying is it gives them extraordinary powers. It's limited to crimes that are punishable by jail through three years, three years or more. which typically should be, you know, child abuse and exploitation, terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking, identity theft, etc. Maybe the odd assassination here and there. But honestly, there's, there's Yeah, so that's the gist of it from my understanding, which I mean, I don't know about you, but giving federal police authority to just access your account on those assumptions is pretty, pretty invasive powers.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, the question that comes up for me is what is the criteria? So if they're going to be able to say I have the authority to go do exactly what, you know, access all this information? What is it that's actually determining it? You said certain types of crimes, right. But there's alleged crimes, there's people that have been convicted of crimes, like what what is it that actually makes them say, Okay, I'm gonna go do this.
Brad Kirby:It gives them the ability to get warrants for certain activities that meet a certain threshold effectively.
Dean Nelson:Okay. But they have to justify that with some judge to say, I want to warrant this, and from there, I can go get anything I want. But, you know, in the US, there's rules in place to ensure that people can't just get warrants willy nilly. So there's there's something that says I've criteria that says that allows me to go back and grant this and a judge, right defines what that is, but I can't see in here what it says. It's basically reasonably necessary and proportionate, right, rather than simply justified and proportionate, reasonably necessary.
Brad Kirby:That was one of the amendments they made.
Dean Nelson:But that's a judgment call on like, what what is reasonably necessary.
James Thomason:Somebody has to make that call, presumably the judge who's granting the warrant,
Brad Kirby:It would be a judge yeah, right?
James Thomason:But here, you know, we have we have five courts, right? So they just do a lot in secret. It's not like you ever entitled to any due process. It just happens on autopilot without you a judge, you know, file stamp copies a piece of paper and then they're off collecting your data. Green Party senator Lydia Thorpe said unsurprisingly, the two major parties are in complete lockstep with each other and they are leading us down the road to a surveillance state in effect. This bill would allow spy agencies to modify, add, copy, delete your data with a data disruption warrants collect intelligence on your online activity is where the network activity warrant and take over your social media and other online accounts and profile with an account takeover warrant. So apparently, it's a bunch of new, specific warrants that enumerate the specific powers to police in the dystopian hell state of Australia.
Dean Nelson:Fundamentally reminds me of the Patriot Act.
James Thomason:It's worse than every measurable way though, like every everything that you're doing is like amplified compared to what we've done so far, and I hate I hate to say Like the US, we've traveled a lot Dean I mean, we've been all over right? The US still enjoys the highest level of freedom in the world, and in particular since COVID. That's doubly true now. It's amazing how to me just stunning how fast pretty much all Western countries abandoned civil liberties in like, a day. But not to be outdone, US government agencies announced this week they are planning an expanded use of facial recognition technology. I'm sure nothing bad can happen as a consequence of this. There's definitely no way a database of people's faces could ever be abused by a government.
Dean Nelson:I'm going to stop you from playing games online for one and a half hours, James. Yeah, the US government facial recognition database.
James Thomason:And last but not least in big deals this week, we have data bricks, reaching a $38 billion dollar valuation after a new $1.6 billion injection crypto Brad Kirby. I understand this was a Series H, finance, and we just gonna stop talking about series this series as finance, I mean, when you're getting the series z doesn't really matter anymore. Like anything
Brad Kirby:Pretty up there. Yeah.
James Thomason:It's like an antiquated way of thinking about financing. There's no, there's no series. It's just, it's just perpetual financing. So what is this, Brad?
Brad Kirby:Well, Databricks was recently on Forbes top 100 Cloud companies a couple weeks ago listed as number two, just behind Stripe. And effectively, they're planning to add 700 employees up to 3000 in four months, so they're scaling from 2,300 to 3,000. Mostly for sales marketing r&d, I'm sure engineering teams as well. And effectively their big product is a "data lakehouse". So when you think of I hate the term, "big data", but to use the term big data, the products really a big play to enhance their machine learning and data analytics, BI, predictive maintenance to really push through, like all the prep and validation that's been done historically, in big data. I remember a decade ago, it was so much work just to train those models, even just to it's just a lot of hands on human interaction. I was actually listening to your podcast Dean with Yevgeny over at data center knowledge. And I heard you mentioned Hadoop, which is a, you know, the alarm bells went off with the big data and data lakes and data warehouses. So I wanted to hear if you had any comments around data, bricks or experience with them or just this industry in general.
Dean Nelson:Well, first off, I want to say one thing about this, we keep talking about these billion dollar valuations and like $38 billion valuations. unicorns are no longer a word. Because they're "Decacorns". So have you heard that? Decacorns, it's $10 billion valuations. This isn't I'm not making this up. So unicorns are a billion, like, okay, now we got trillion dollar $2 trillion companies, right? So Databricks is reaching 38 billion.
James Thomason:When you realize the likely inflation rate this sort of makes sense.
Dean Nelson:Oh, it all adds up. Yeah, it's just decimal places again. But look, the company's...
James Thomason:38 billion is the new 1 billion.
Dean Nelson:Totally. Right, yeah. Well, Databricks founders are seven University of California at Berkeley researchers. They created Spark, the predictive data processing tools, that's at the core of databricks AI software. And some example use cases are, you know, shell using it to predict shell the oil company, when its oil rigs are likely to break AstraZeneca using it to as a recommendation system for data scientists choose the best target sites for potential drugs. So the CEO Ally Goetze said the data lakehouse market, and by the way, I hate that term. What is data lake? data lake house? What What is that this
Brad Kirby:I guess it's the evolution of a data lake that they're using at data bricks.
James Thomason:The data lakehouse is where the federal government reviews their database of, of employees facial recognition photos while smoking cigars. And now I don't know. But that's not it. That's in all seriousness, you might use data bricks to store all of that facial recognition data when you that's their thing, right? There a data warehouse. Yep. Lake House. Yeah,
Dean Nelson:yeah, they're a data lake house. And it's a sprawling data lake house is just to expand on that. But this market really has exploded. So in 2021, there's more firms outside Silicon Valley, you know, like at&t and McDonald's that are adopting that approach. So there's 450 partners across that data market landscape, so it's pretty significant. I understand why the valuation is going up. I don't know about 38 billion, but it definitely is increasing because remember, this started with data warehouse and I went to a data lake and now they call it a lake house. And again, I still don't understand the difference between the data lake and the lake house because it seems like we've gone...
James Thomason:I think this is 100% marketing. This is a marketing, it's fantastic. Spin tastic. Spin tastic, fantastic, to the tune of $38 billion, but honestly, I'm not familiar with this term at all. So I was calling my own ignorance and just say like, data lake house isn't a thing to me.
Brad Kirby:This is the thing with big data, right? Just buzzword, buzzword, buzzword.
Dean Nelson:Well, the structure they put in place, you know, if you think about what data was coming into the data lake before, and she had structured semi structured unstructured data, and then it had, you know, multiple paths it could take so Data Prep and validation, then it could ETL. And then it would go into data mart's and reports and business intelligence stuff. But you know, ETL could also go to real time databases, and the Data Prep and validation was really meant for data science and machine learning. Now, it seems like they've restructured it. So that data coming in goes one of four ways, goes to business intelligence directly, goes to streaming analytics, to data science and machine learning? So it seems like they have organized this flow cleaner? Again, yes, zero sense with a lake house. But I get the concept of what they're trying to do from a structure change. It's more streamlined.
James Thomason:Apparently we're not the only ones. There's an analyst from S&P Global, who wrote back in January 2021. "So the data lake house is now officially a thing." So yeah, we're not the only ones that rang a bell lake house architecture is something that vaguely rings a bell, but I didn't think it was a thing. But apparently it's now a thing.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, Redshift uses it, Apache Spark, even Microsoft Azure has a lake house product. So it's the evolution of the data warehouse to the data lake to the data lake house.
Dean Nelson:This had been coined by Databricks, right? They must have coined this.
James Thomason:I think lake house architecture comes from somewhere else, but I guess they latched on to it with yet with great gusto.
Dean Nelson:Okay, so they Yeah, they did so here that they've used this it's emerged independently across many customers and use cases. But Databricks still kind of structured it that way.
Brad Kirby:Yeah. I think they're running with it the most.
Dean Nelson:They are definitely do it. We got a lake house. Now.
James Thomason:Let's see what's$38 billion between seven founders. Let me see. That's probably it might be a large now. 1-3% per founder. He probably be okay.
Brad Kirby:The CEO is worth 1.8 billion now so he's doing okay.
Dean Nelson:Hey, maybe he's the next guy going to space and go battle Bezos. And Musk. Right. But yeah, and Sir Richard Branson.
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