Gadgetory

welcome to the 359 I'm Ben Fox Ruben I'm Alfred I'm Google's parent alphabet today said it's making project shield available for election campaigns and candidates shield protects against distributed denial-of-service attacks and has already been available for journalists and human rights advocates Alfred do you think this tool will help with campaigns well when I spoke with the product manager app project shield he was mentioning that they always see a rise of DDoS attacks around election cycles they have seen it happen at the election and France they saw it happen in South Korea in the Netherlands where these attacks essentially just take down websites so it's not as high-stakes of a hack as you know what had happened with John Podesta when they got all this all these emails and all this information and leaked it to the public and it's not even close to actually changing people's votes which I think like when we talk about election hacking that's probably like the nightmare scenario that a lot of people are worried about but I think the bigger argument is that you know a lot of people go on like candidate websites to see you know when they're gonna be speaking next or you know what values they represent or try to figure out how they can donate to a campaign or anything like that so it is reasonable to say that it's valuable to protect a campaign website or a candidate's website or even like a political action committees website and it's not like these attacks haven't happened and you know it's a free tool and you know project and you know it's easy to say this is just something that's you know for the Democrats or Republicans but he didn't mention that it's available for all elections so like even if you're running for school board or if you're running for like City Council in your town of like 20 people or something like that like this tool will also be available to you so more broadly are we better prepared now for the midterms then maybe we were for 2016 at least from where I'm sitting it seemed like a lot of people were caught totally surprised by some of these election hacks and is it I mean is it at least gonna get a little bit easy it's hard to say if we're better or worse just because hindsight is always like I think we're better prepared for tactics that they were using in 2016 but you know obviously it's not like they're gonna be using the same playbook again and I can't say I know what that PlayBook is now mm-hmm yeah that's a good point next court documents revealed the name of the suspected leaker of valuable CIA tools used to hack electronics his name is Josh Schulte and for reasons that aren't yet known he hasn't yet been charged for the leak Alfred how damaging was this hack it happened last year sorry this leak it happened last year and what what exactly like how significant was this leak last year showed off all the CIA hacking tools that they had so one of them was you know how they were able to use any Samsung Smart TV and turn it into a listening device another one was a lot of it was like IOT based and how they were able to use that to like get your data or anything like that any any like leak of a major government organization is always damaging especially within like hacking department hacking tools because like that's what happened with the NSA when they lost the you wanna cry hacking tool and then it was used against you know the general public yeah pretty much not wanna cry but the hacking tool was eternal blue but they use that for wanna cry and the other thing is even even if it's not used against the general public at the very least it means that they can't use it anymore because anyone that they're targeting would you know basically know about it but they would have the antidote yeah and and they would basically have to develop like an entirely new set yeah last Twitter is working to clean up its social network a little bit more using quote behavioral signals to cut cut out trolls from Twitter threads can you tell me a little bit more about what is how does this work what's a behavior so surprise surprise they're using artificial intelligence oh god or this but the idea is that if you're like jumping into a thread that like if you and I are talking and then somebody else like just jumps into the thread on Twitter and they're AI 12 believes that like you're not really contributing to the conversation it'll basically like they're not gonna delete it or block it but like they're not gonna they're gonna basically bury it and then and it works in the same way that like like YouTube comments or reddit post where like if it has enough down votes much harder than I actually fine either way check back with Sienna to get the latest news today on a net neutrality vote in Congress and the ongoing Apple Samsung patent suit I'm Ben Fox Ruben I'm alfred a thanks for listening sorry little slow on the uptake there okay i was already trying to dig into the chat which is what i'm going to do now not even half as bad as when i forgot to say my name toward the end so yeah but anyways thanks everybody submit questions and comments now about the topics at hand will try to expand on them further cuz for minutes it's never enough until then go ahead guys you can just talk amongst yourselves okay I mean is this even going back to the Twitter thing I feel like they already rolled out some of this I'd seen it already before where you you just click at the bottom of a tweet thread and it says show more tweets and usually those tweets are you know they tend that might be based on like your own Twitter settings though okay I think I mean I don't really setup like that I don't mess around with the Twitter settings much so I guess they're gonna be doing more to just try to filter and I don't know maybe that'll be helpful mm-hmm um I don't I don't like I don't really I'm not a guy that's like affected by trolls or anything like that though not in the sense that like trolls don't bother read more so that like people don't really troll on my Twitter page or like I don't interact with enough people to warrant something like that but I do whole I do know that it's like a massive issue for Twitter and you know they announced that they would be doing something about this in March so it'll be interesting to see how this develops for them mm-hmm yeah wait how are we on questions well let's take one from the vet Kumar asks which companies are a part of alphabet can we stay for a couple of hours encounter mole off all the honey all 26 of them but I mean there's there's Google that fool jigsaw no nest way mow a sperm now we should yeah they have some other ones like calico which I think does health health tech capital G which I which I think off the top of my head does venture capitalist deepmind another a I think and Google Fiber which I don't even know what the the status of Google Fiber is but it used to be this big push to try to get fiber-optic cables to different different cities in the US but I shouldn't think it kind of went belly-up we should do a quiz where it's like crappy cyberpunk movie or alphabet company that's a pretty good BuzzFeed post right there or alphabet company or Pokemon no no I think somebody's gonna see something that says capital G and think it's a Pokemon yeah yes you'd have to mess with it a little bit more to make it sound like you've talked about it Alfred you may have opened the floodgates here Alex says uh challenge accepted about the trolls so buckle up get ready okay oh cool you've got a running scared Alex moving on to WWDC already because our we can't oh geez next month yeah so that's the question is when is WWDC for one and then Kevin wants to know when are we going to start talking about WWDC probably too soon I think the Undertaker has a good chance of being the new WWDC champion he he's never really performed well in ladder matches though so it'll be interesting to see how he like fares off when is it supposed to be though I'm trying to find out right now I think it's next it's a good month the first week of June isn't it it's oh it's June 4th to the 8th yeah so it's a little early for us to talk about it it's about two two-and-a-half weeks away but we certainly expect a lot of announcements from Apple I'm sure we'll start previewing it probably what like a week in advance we can preview it like you know well we're already sort of previewing it I think we even talked on the show previously about the idea that after Google i/o Apple would hopefully focus a little bit more on Siri to try to get Syria to catch up a little bit more to Google assistant and Amazon's Alexa but there's no telling whether that's actually gonna happen WWDC like I don't know like what did they focus on last year mostly software yeah so and they did talk a little bit a lot of they are stuff wasn't it yes yeah they focus a lot it's right last time mm-hmm yeah so you might expect to see a lot more AR stuff again I mean if they do a big focus on Syria I'd be a little surprised but they they definitely do need to catch up a little bit in that area they're really gonna need to dump or get off the pot with Syria with all what Google is doing with their assistant and duplex these days I mean like I don't think they're gonna I don't I don't think so necessarily either I'm just stating what's obvious people are buying home pods probably not in very big numbers I mean like it's three hundred and fifty dollars you're not gonna buy 16 of them for your house like you wouldn't echo died but it's you know I think they're probably selling as much as they wanted to because they put the price point pretty high they're swinging back we've got a lot of left fielders here today Jerry W says how quickly if we forget the vault seven scandal is your neighbor leading NSA doing all the moves yeah I'm gonna let you field this one I mean yeah I think that's how the news cycle like works you know I'm pretty sure there was like another scandal immediately after the vault seven hack had happened spoilers everybody's terrible yeah pretty much I mean it's it's how hard is it for the government to come up with new tools though like did they spend years developing this stuff and like I I mean that's that's if I remember correctly that was the big scare mongering or or the big to do that they mentioned right afterwards which wise we can't use these tools anymore it took us years to develop them we understand if people are really like freaked out that we do this but this is the work that we do to keep Americans protected yeah I remember that their defense was basically you know we're not really gonna be that ashamed or anything like that for doing our jobs like part of it like we stopped like terrorists with like these hacking tools are and you know well that sorts of stuff I mean yeah it's that part of I mean I get the argument like part of it is their job to like hack other countries and like figure out and tell any way that they can so III don't have any reasoning for why this blew over so quickly other than the fact that yeah this was you know that's that's how the news cycle works yeah especially these days there's a fantastic conversation going on to the chat with Michael and APEC and everybody else and I kind of want to just shut the show down and watch this unfold more entertaining but Michael Bradley they're talking about security issues and on that no Michael Brown asks does Apple's privacy stance entice you more into buying an iPhone than a pixel or Samsung phone I know that that is a really big selling point for a lot of security experts and like people like privacy folks in the sense that like yeah they're not collecting all this data on you but I would also make the argument that you know if you know Google's data collection and Facebook standard collection isn't entirely based on Hardware alone like if you're gonna get an iPhone for the privacy purposes that what like you use Gmail on it at the same time it kind of doesn't yeah self Gmail and Facebook for sure yeah yeah Apple still hasn't come out with its own social network so yet if they did it would be subscription a hundred dollars a month so I'm not getting it would be a really sad boring chatroom that's not true I would just go on that chat room as a hello fellow rich people how's it going from Alex Mitchell I just started using LastPass is there a smart tool to help with most hacks what I mean LastPass is yeah password managers are really useful I mean if you want to get the Chrome extension in the app for it that's also I'd say let's expand on his shopping list if he's already subscribed into LastPass you do pay for that right they have their yeah they're they have a it's like tiered so like you there's like free versions of it too there's if we're just talking about like password management for as far as like tools go them you can always always take the extra step and yeah Yubikey which is just basically like a small like USB Drive kind of thing that like works as a key for your password like you type in your password and it tells you like put it in as well Google has this whole like advanced protection program that they you can register for it with that what if you lose the key I'm sure you can contact Google okay so it's not like losing Bitcoin where like you it's just gone I mean data is money man yeah it's valuable Shane Thomas has a philosophical question if data is no longer private Facebook Google vault seven and it's a Equifax IRS OPM etc should our data just become open-source no I mean I think that kind of follows the argument of like if you don't have anything to hide like you know just show it out there or anything like that like I don't know everbody camera at all times like my name's not private but I don't go around everywhere if like a name tag like say hi my name is alpha ring I was born on this date and like no only Utah loggers do that yeah you do it online though I put my birth date no well some people a lot of people put their birthdays on Facebook yeah that's my point though but like that's like technically not private but my point is like you don't walk around everywhere in real life with like hey I'm Ben Rubin I'm I was born on this date and here's my social security number Facebook by the way thinks I'm 118 years old so I'd roll with that yeah I mean they don't like check what your birthday is I think I'm one of several people that do that where you just put a fake birthday and so so is there like a black market where we trade each other's data online like dark web stuff where sure there's monetary exchange to find more people's data to further exploit them yes I absolutely yeah but I I'm pretty sure it's like sold in bulk though like it's not exactly Costco for social security number nine it yeah because like you're not gonna buy like one person social security number on the dark web like people cyber criminals that like buy this stuff are using it to like try to pull off scams of course they're not looking for you yeah they're looking for everybody yeah I mean that's that's like we're like the money is that's why I like some of them can like come across like so cheap there's a lot of headlines I was like oh your social security number can be sold for like $15 but it's like yeah but one Social Security number in a pack of like five hundred or something like that so like you're not paying $15 for like one Social Security number that's not really how it works right easy ideas is that it's just like drive-bys where they get well that's that's what like spam and phishing and that kind of thing is that you said that like they're they're pretty they seem they seem pretty amateurish sometimes because the idea is just to like hit as many people as possible I like and and if it looks really professional that's like I mean that's kind of what happened with John Podesta and that was like that they've been calling that spear phishing now where like their specific targeting like a single person so what they had done for him was that they created a page that looked exactly like a google-like login page down to the point where like they had his email address already like filled in or that's why he thought that it was like his email page because this email was already filled in there and his login photo like you know how you have an avatar for goop for like Gmail so like his photo was already in place there they set up the page that specifically to make it look like it was made that was his page like so that's like spearfishing so pretty sneaky sis yeah but like considering that though how many of us are really that important that we would get hit with a spear phishing attack is this something that's actually like on the rise for I don't know John Q public I mean I don't know if like the average person would but I'm like if you're saying how many of us I think as journalists like you're probably much more liable to be a target that's right I'm not thinking about it from yeah from us as in us in the room more that like you know people in the general public is not really on like an issue that's on a lot of people's radars but I would still like we're like explain to people that they should be cautious about stuff like this like you know look at the URL that you're clicking on Google's gotten a lot better at that we're like they'll tell you if you're going on a page it's like not really a Google like site like that claims to be like it's a Google site or anything like that so that's like yeah it's not it's not a common issue for you know people that like don't have to worry about like Russian spies trying to find out what's in their email address but I mean you know like these kinds of things like do evolve and like people should be aware of them you seem to know an awful lot about this I'm gonna tell us something no I just get paid to do it for a living never cyber security he's the guy to talk to alright we are down to the 11th hour let's go lightning round on a couple of last minute questions from pas booba is there a new privacy clause in Gmail in the new Gmail I think I got that over the weekend oh yeah that's part of the gdpr stuff oh yeah ever so if you've been noticing a lot of emails lately from like every online surface you've ever signed up for sale under privacy policy that is because they've had to do that too meet European regulations with the global data protection regulations or something like that so the EU has actually set forth new data policies that basically say like your privacy policy has to be a lot clearer like this is this has to be stuff that people can actually understand people have to give their consent to for you to like harvest their data and stuff like that this only applies to the EU but you know as it turns out there's a lot of companies that do operate in the EU we are getting some of those protections yeah I mean you one from Twitter and from SoundCloud and from a bunch of others yeah the idea is that like even like they're changing it for like the GDP our standards but the idea is like okay well if we're doing that for like the UN we're just there for everybody so it's kind of like when California changes their emission standards car manufacturers basically have to obtain nationally yeah because so many cars are sold in yeah for it that's a good analogy that's pretty sweet so I'm basically getting GDP our protection yeah even though I'm in America so Facebook has done it a little differently where they're like they have different privacy policies for like different regions so I think we're using the one that like Ireland is using right now that's good but there have been other companies that like just straight-up have stopped service in the EU because of that we're just like you know what if we can't if we can't keep our privacy policy the way it is we're not gonna do it anymore screw this wow that was really helpful and informative that this guy knows a lot of stuff we should talk more about the thing that he covers then Alfred will you no no no that was really helpful to spell it out that way cuz I was kind of curious as to why I was getting all these update emails even though ultimately no I don't uh yeah well at least you're getting the TLD it's it's just covering their ass which is fine mm-hmm okay before we let everyone go Michael Brown says I have an unrelated question if Apple has such a strong stance on privacy why do they continue to allow Facebook or apps and companies that share user data to install on their iPhone devices consumers and analysts claim having an iPhone gives them special privacy features but then they turn around and install Facebook Instagram Google and etc I mean like they want to sell their phone it's a it's a good point from Michael no ever privacy is in your own hands not only that but like nobody's gonna buy an iPhone if you can't download Facebook or Instagram it would be way too or restrictive I would argue if Apple was gonna kick out so many different yeah at ease I think Apple is making it more so from their own perspective like we don't take your data like we're not the ones like doing it but if you choose to like put Facebook on it like we're allowing you to do that but like you should know that like you're like your data's going to Facebook so it's like Facebook takes your data but like we're not we're not good guy yes yeah there's probably a good way to think about it that's actually a good way to end it oh yeah a little bit of a think piece to kind of go out on okay unless you want one more Michael Browns got a fun one here it says on a scale from zuker burg to Edward Snowden how much do you care about your data by way of social media and apps ooh that's a good one why don't snow turns on Twitter and though you didn't go with that cardi B that's somebody right sure person where she's holding you it's listening to somewhere in the middle I don't know anyway thanks fine 3:59 podcast is available on itunes tune in stitcher feedburner google play music the amazon echo and of course sienna calm thanks everybody for watching we've got something special lined up for you tomorrow let's say what it is right so tune in for episode what is it episode 404 right yeah it should be it should be a good one 404 and a before we do go one quick shout out we want to dedicate this one to Ricky B dammit nice take care everybody see you tomorrow you