Gadgetory

welcome to the 359 I'm Roger Chang I'm Ben Fox ribbon I'm alfred rang the facebook saga continues today with CEO Mark Zuckerberg set to testify before the Senate this afternoon but after that before that Facebook has rolled out notifications to users about whether they've been affected by the Cambridge and let akinator breach now I don't know about you guys I got a notification I didn't actually click on the app but when my friends did whoever that person is you are no longer my friend but I'm one of the 87 million affected were you guys affected not that I know of but apparently this is getting rolled out in stages so it's possible we find out about this a little later so this yet the rollout began yesterday at noon Eastern and I just got my notification today I might has been affected on my old profile but I to lead to that one and set up a new one where I only have like 30 friends yeah your new Alfred and we're not friends yep nor will we be so because you've been infected now that's true germs zombie rules right so you're actually a lot more active on Facebook than I am I haven't really shared regularly on Facebook for years I am on there more often than I'd like to be though but yeah after finding out that you are affected by this is this gonna have any sort of impact on the amount that you share the type of things that you share uh not really I mean I take proper safeguards with how I share things is we were talking to the head of this taping when the when I share photos of my kid I keep locked down to a fairly close network like if your yeah if you're my friend if you're really my friend you probably can see my kids photos yes yeah but it doesn't it doesn't take like your photos or anything like that so that don't matter like it's more so like looking at your likes your interest and yeah it's not things that you're sharing it doesn't matter it's the broader principle of being mindful of what yeah sure yeah so it's not necessarily about the date of that Facebook is taking yeah it's about having good I guess good practices good best practices when sharing the information that you want to share and then badgering your friends to make sure that they have best practices to pretty much although I mean the way I have a set I mean even if you like or share one of my photos their network of friends can't see them so yes it has nothing to do with this particular breach but I think it's more about just I just be smart on face I just think you shouldn't blame your friends for these kinds of things though like it's not like they like took this quiz like this personality quiz thinking like yeah this quiz that tells me what my digital life is is definitely gonna steal information on all my friends it's kind of don't they're not like don't blame them yeah no no I'm totally gonna blame them cuz it's a lame quiz and they should be wasting their time with this crap alright so the next up is net neutrality still kickin Oregon became the second state to pass a bill that protects the rules of an open Internet no it doesn't have its own net neutrality rule but basically requires any Internet service provider doing business with the state to adhere to the policies of our current rules now this comes ahead of the April 23rd deadline for when net neutrality ceases to exist so I mean to me this is this is all about introducing more complications right when I do PI and the FCC's that they want to dismantle the rules they want they wanted to add some stability and they wanted to basically make it clear for businesses or for ISPs trying to invest in their networks that these are the new laws of land the only problem now is now Oregon work with these governments yeah Oregon no now Oregon now Washington New York has proposed a similar rule New Jersey New Jersey there are tons of states now they say well if you if you want to work with us you've got to honor these other rules of dundar challenge the same rules that the FCC's dismantling so those are narrower those are only if you're an ISP working with that government but yes if yeah if you're working with the government like you kind of have to follow those rules for everyone if you're also working with those governments that's the principle behind this and so this in my mind causes more complication I don't disagree with that at all it's kind of a pain I've Verizon's latest data breach report paints a grim picture of hackers the amount of ransomware which locks up your computer until you pay a ransom to unlock it doubled last year now ransomware that was that was the hot word for 2017 is a silk for 2018 yeah it's definitely not on the scale that it was in 2017 in the sense of you know years like this massive attack that hit everything all at once but like it's still like slowly trickling out on like you know a lot of like municipalities a lot of universities offices and things like that like you know just a few weeks ago we had heard about the the entire like city government of Atlanta being shut down yeah by it yeah that's the thing that like you know all these reports always come out we say like here's all these crazy things that are happening with ransomware and it seems like nobody takes any action and it just continues to like grow but isn't there like like a new action you were telling me about this before there's a new effort beyond ransomware that's that's getting a lot more traction in 2018 right yeah crypto jacking but that's like just like cryptocurrency mining alright we're out of time for those stories check us out seen it I'm Roger Cheng I'm Ben Fox Ruben I'm Alfred Inge thanks for listening what all right thanks for joining us everybody I'm gonna go ahead and jump in and start pulling some great questions from the chat we already got a couple so let's jump right in from jane's h he's got a rumor in a question here does facebook and their crew own every single picture i've ever uploaded no no no I remember there was this like hoax going around Facebook before I was like Facebook just changed your policy and they own all your photos now unless you post this as your status and share it under the Roman statute like eighteen twenty-two CC blah blah blah that's worse than the quiz participate in those it's worse than the I mean it's the same I guess it's the same deal right they don't know I mean the most of the time it's shared with good intention because you think this is legit even though it's not for every like we get one more dollar towards cancer surgery same thing with those like spam emails that I remember from back in the day where Bill Gates is gonna give you $10,000 if you share this with five people yes oh yeah yeah the chain mails yeah you know it's just moving that over to Facebook or Twitter or whatever chain mails are the cockroach's of the Internet they will survive every every incantation they have they kind of like change form right you stop getting them an email you get them on your social networks now I guess I don't get a lot of those either but I definitely do want to clarify though that Facebook or Instagram whatever or whatsapp anything on Facebook owns they do not own your photo like that's not that's not you still own it yes you could do with it what you want alright next in line we got one from Mike Shaw this is a comment molest of a question by an interesting perspective and I think we could all editorialize on it net neutrality net free market forces will protect Internet freedom less government regulation is always good for innovation and more competition means lower prices can we expand on that thought because I don't know if it's so black and white know that it's definitely not that's definitely more position taken by Internet service providers Republicans folks folks who ya believe in the free market system believe in competition that's true to some extent I would say there's lots of competition in the wireless business but when it comes to your local internet service like there's not a lot of competition you get one or two players service generally prices are going up you know network speeds haven't progressed as fast as they should have and really the the big concern here is with these larger companies especially as your inner service provider owns the content that you enjoy as well that if you they're like the single source for that then that's a lot of power to give to a company yeah and then yeah there's competition but the problem is there are fewer and fewer players all the time these companies are gobbling each other up and so the whole competition argument isn't quite as strong when they're you know one or two players as opposed to four or five right that being said whether we like it or not i GT PI has pushed the ball forward to ensure that we're gonna see what this is gonna look like and this is gonna be a living experiment to see what happens when net neutrality rules get removed that but the thing of it is is I don't think that's gonna be the case I think like it has been for the last couple years it's probably gonna get tied up in litigation there were lawsuits filed what you're seeing now with with Washington Oregon these various states they're they're kind of like pockets where net neutrality rules still kind of exist in the kind of a loophole and so for a lot of these Internet's or US Internet service providers these cable companies phone companies it's a weird situation to be in like the whole deal was they they want a little bit of stability of clarity to know what the law the land is and now the law of the land is like different depending on where you are and that's I think it's even more chaotic now than it's ever been well not only that but like it continues though as you said it continues the limbo that they were experiencing over the past couple years anyway yeah exactly as a rebuttal for Mike choices I agree with Roger that we need more competition that is coming with 5g in Starling but I'd like to see more in the interim so excellent points all around yeah definitely from Danny Green following back up to the photos he says don't worry about Facebook itself doing anything with your photos be concerned by the trolls who steal your pictures and build a fake page using them it's funny how far and wide photos can leak and what they can be put to use for haven't we seen people in the past wind up on like text books and didn't that actually happen to you yeah somebody stole my name there was there was a Facebook page for it was Ben Fox Ruben won and I reached out to the guy and we just because what ended up happening was Facebook accidentally started using that page and not my page at Facebook and face box face box and box that's my new name but any any link for a story of mine would go to that page instead of my own actual page oh my gosh so I reached out to him and I said you have to like change the name or take this page down it was really kind of funny instead of apologizing he said I'm gonna send this to a competing media outlet and I've never been you know harassed and assaulted like this before you know this is totally unfair and ridiculous bro know my name I would just like just change your name or don't I don't quite so is he also a Ben Foxworthy oh there's no other Reuben out that maybe he is no he isn't and he changed the name and Facebook got to the bottom of it so good for them for like I reached out to them and said hey these links are wrong they should they're linking to the wrong page and that did actually fix it up but yeah it was interesting that the guy was trying to troll me and like threaten me when when I just reached out to him and was just like this isn't fair like your wasn't he also like sharing your articles that you wrote on so that's platelet it's not even just Oh weird you have the same name which I strongly doubt there's other Fox Reubens outside he said like I'm helping drive traffic to your stories at understand like why you're complaining about that like I mean he's probably sees it as a fansite you got a label it like that because it happens when he turns around and starts posting some really offensive propaganda with your face like what offense what was obviously like advertising for like online course work so okay trying to make it appear like it was like a fan page or it's just so funny that they would choose you oh why would anyone want to be bed choose someone who's you know never mind you know what on that Senator Chris Coons a Democrat from Delaware he actually tweeted this out just this morning he found that there's two fake facebook accounts impersonating him like a like a US senator and he's saying that all of the friends on both of those accounts like are Russian like BOTS yeah yeah I sent it to you on slack if you want to like to show it to our audience but making me sick I'm gonna dig it up but yeah I mean yeah I'm looking at the photo at the screenshot that he took and both of them are like his photo saying that like he works one of them says he works with the Department of Justice and the other one says works at Chris Coons for Delaware like United States enter but it's like when was the you know the black lives matter story that yeah yesterday yeah it was another one where one of the biggest black lives matter pages was tied to some guy you know some white dude in Australia that really just want to make a quick buck off that was trying to raise money and then would just essentially pocket it yeah yeah which is which is crazy and this is where we are yeah that is a u.s. senator who has two profiles set up like in person well that should make for an interesting testimony today yeah fence Ben though that I I find it much easier to swallow that somebody wants to pretend to be a senator than you kick me in the face of few more times you should be flattered look I mean like that is a very good reason why Zuckerberg is gonna be in Washington for the next two days he has a lot to answer for they haven't been minding the ship the way that they should have right talked about it like a ton on this show and we have Facebook it's about time questions really good answer yeah pushing that forward a little bit usually these types of hearings are so structured that I'm very skeptical that he's actually gonna say anything that's materially newsworthy maybe some of the questions from the Senators or the representatives are gonna be newsy because they're really gonna go after oh yeah this is like this is like the optimal grandstanding opportunity for these guys so for these senators so I imagine the questions are gonna be fairly harsh the tones gonna be pretty harsh I am looking forward to seeing how he responds to this I mean he's like I said this boys word guy right he's not super polished when it comes to interviews I know he's been prepping for it but we'll see how he handles this is several hours of testimony so his prep work I would anticipate would be say as little as possible do not make news that is generally what ends up happening in these types of situations so you saw that subscribe he saw that CNN interview right like pretty much went off-script right away right he admitted to calling he called it a bridge when facebook said it wasn't a breach initially he even admitted to being open to regulation that said that's like a big no-no for all these tech companies right they're always about like oh yeah we respect consumer privacy unless there's regulations involved right so we'll see that was only like what a 15-minute interview like this is several hours we've seen one person effectively go off-script and that's the president I think very few people are capable of going off-script and actually talking about like none of us are on script right now think about that yeah we're not famous you got you there we're not famous I mean facebook.com slash Ben Fox Rubin one it's so rad but seriously follow the real page all right we are out of time but let's get a couple more questions in here hashtag respect the Reuben from alien or Sutan or certain I can't yes outen I will I wrote a Facebook app this is a great perspective to have as a developer and thanks for including this I wrote a Facebook app and was shocked at the amount of data my app had access to basically everything they my network of friends posted shared anything with me any app would have done that and logged it and it's everything we've seen but it's nice to get the perspective that even I was a developer out there first hand is like whoa yep there have been just the other side of the coin from Amazon where a lot of Alexa developers complain that they don't get enough information from Amazon and it causes their product to suffer to a certain extent now we actually see that Facebook was providing way too much information and you know it's the balance is obviously very important yeah for sure from piece of potato great name I have a question those internet service from the carrier company is that also affected by a net neutrality because now they have wireless Wi-Fi routers that get that use SIM cards and internet plans from them yeah so wireless internet mobile Internet is well was part of net neutrality rules although I think they were they were enforced but there was some leeway because you know unlike like a home DSL cable connection the the spectrum in the air is finite so there are just physical limitations for how fast you can deliver service so there was definitely Wireless definitely underdone in Charlie rules but I think there's a little bit more flexible I just remember that come April 23rd once these rules are dismantled there won't be any regulations basically the ISPs are free to do whatever they want they can prioritize if they want to they just have to I guess they have to make it clear to consumers they have to tell people that's what they're doing I think that's the only real burden for them it's like well oh you said those starvation might be coming so might not materially change for customers that right well now legislation but these are action litigation yeah yeah litigation might stop it Congress might step in and pass their own rules there are all kinds of different X factors at this point but yeah I would say early on like it's nothing gonna happen right away like April 24th ISPs aren't gonna start rolling out all these crazy plans I think if there are any changes they will be gradual they'll be longer-term and no one's dumb enough to do anything on day one or even like the first couple months because it sorry alright let's take a sharp left turn into Verizon territory a piece of potato also wants to know didn't Microsoft already release an update on Windows eight through ten to protect us from ransomware well that is fine so I know what he's talking about so this was like last week or so Microsoft released an update for onedrive that doesn't exactly protect you from ransomware more so that it like has a contingency plan so onedrive now automatically backs up all your stuff like all the time so if you are hit with ransomware you can just revert it back to a stage like and have all your files like pretty small but if he's talking about like ransomware in general like 8 through 10 because this is only really for Windows 10 so I think what he might be talking about is the patch that was released after wanna cry yeah they they updated a patch that that was only for that specific strand of ransomware and they released that to like even older models like XP and all this stuff the problem with that is that people don't always patch which is what like how like a majority of like you know ransomware really spreads they like kind of target old systems and yes so they did already release it but it really doesn't matter if nobody's like installing it on their systems yeah a moment of silence for Windows XP we are out of time one question to put in the back ear heads to hang on to for a future show Michael Brown says where do we all think Facebook will be in two four or six years I think that's a great question to ask because I do think we're gonna see some significant changes in the platform in the near future exactly how can't answer that right now I think it's good to think about though let's just remind everybody where they can watch and keep track of the hearings that are going to be taking place over the next couple of days it'll be streaming on us units site correct if you check out the top story on Facebook on our Facebook main story the stream will be live will be embedded in the story you'll be able to watch both the Senate hearing today as well as the the House hearing tomorrow and that link will be in the show description from today's episode and be on the lookout for your notifications from Facebook about the privacy settings forthcoming yeah and yeah thanks Aguila everybody great discussion as always yep if you liked anything you saw or heard ear checks on SEANET our podcast is available on itunes tuna and stitcher Feedburner google play music and the Amazon echo see y'all tomorrow see you tomorrow