 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Johnny Hernandez, Hi Tech Oki and Logan Larson. Coming up on DTNS, Meta decides to reinstate President Trump to Facebook and Instagram, how TikTok proposes to protect U.S. data, and a big battle over Section 230 is looming. What the heck is Section 230 again? We're gonna tell ya. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 26th, 2023 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. Deep in the heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Yogg. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. Real quick, Justin, you're gonna go get a master's degree in AI at UT. Do you see they put in a new $10,000 a year degree? I already have it. I ran the course through JetGPT. Smart. Smart. Did that save you any money, though? No, no. Although, maybe I can strike a deal with Microsoft. Maybe you could ask ChatGPT how to fund it. All right, let's start with the quick hits. The FBI and Europol seized the Tor payment site and data leak sites for the Hive ransomware organization. This is not the little social network. This is a ransomware organization also called Hive. U.S. Department of Justice and Europol announced they coordinated to infiltrate Hive infrastructure in July 2022. With this access, law enforcement agencies alerted targets prior to attacks, provided decryption keys for more than 1,300 current and past Hive victims, and prevented up to $130 million in ransom demands. Hive runs a ransomware as a service operation that launched in June of 2021. The FBI estimates it generated $100 million in ransoms during that time. According to research from IDC and Canalist, the global smartphone market suffered its worst ever shipment decline in Q4 2022, reaching 300.3 million units. That may sound like a lot, but it's down 18.3% from the year before. Q4 was also the sixth consecutive quarterly decline for smartphones. IDC says that 2022 represented the lowest annual shipment total since 2013, due to significantly dampened consumer demand, inflation, and economic uncertainties. Despite seeing these declines, the top three of Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi remained the same in terms of market share. Although among the top five, Xiaomi saw the steepest decline in shipments in the quarter down 26.3% in the year. Joshua Browder of Do Not Pay was going to use an automated system to provide all the responses to a person fighting a traffic ticket on February 22nd. A lot of people were calling it a robot lawyer. It was sadly not an actual robot, but it was an automated system. If you recall, Browder had found a courtroom that technically allowed you to wear earbuds while being in trial. They would allow the automated system to hear what the judge said over a connected phone and then formulate responses that the defendant had agreed to repeat word for word. So allowing the bot to create the defense. Well, as many of you I know suspected, the lawyers came for Browder. And Browder has now told National Public Radio that multiple state bar associations said they would pursue criminal charges of practicing law without a license if he went through with the plan. So he's not going to go through with the plan. Enterprise tech companies are following the recent swath of job cuts we've seen in the overall tech sector. IBM CFO James Kavanaugh said Wednesday that the company would eliminate about 1.5% of its global workforce, around 3,900 jobs. This follows IBM's spin off of Kindrel and Watson Health units, though IBM still expects to hire in higher growth areas. Related news SAP said in a statement Thursday, it's also planning to cut about 3,000 jobs this year. That's about 2.5% of its staff. And it's also exploring selling its remaining stake in the Qualtrics International to refocus on its larger businesses and revenue streams, a.k.a. cloud services. Buzzfeed is going to use tools from open AI, you know, like chat GPT and stuff, to enhance and personalize its content. CEO Jonah Peretti told staff that the tools will be, and I'll quote, enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming and personalizing our content for the audience. So for example, it sounds like what they're talking about is something like a reader taking a quiz on Buzzfeed and then chat GPT could create a personalized response. Let's say it's what kind of Netflix show are you? You answer a few questions and then chat GPT spits out a personalized Netflix show pitch instead of the pre-populated ones they have now. Content is expected to launch in February and because journalists cannot resist talking about journalism, we're going to talk more about this after the show on Good Day Internet. Hell yeah. All right, let's talk about U.S. President Trump. Rich, what's going on with that guy these days? Well, on January 6, 2021, you may recall, Meta suspended the account of U.S. President Trump for two weeks and then extended that indefinitely. Facebook's Independent Oversight Board advised in May 2021 that an indefinite suspension was inconsistent with its own rules. Following that, in June, Meta announced the suspension would last two years. So two weeks indefinite, two years. Well, check your calendar. It's been two years. Wednesday, Meta's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said the company will reinstate President Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. But policies at Facebook and Instagram have changed in the past two years. So, Tom, what's changed? All right, Meta has put in place new policies that let them restrict the account of a public figure if that figure violates community standards and the penalty can be suspension of a month up to two years. Meta also introduced a crisis policy protocol. They put that in place in August that considers off-platform risks to imminent harm when making these kinds of decisions about suspending the accounts of public figures. Clegg also said it has the option to limit distribution of content, even if it doesn't technically violate community standards. This kind of content would remain visible on an account page, but not be posted into users' feeds. In other words, not promoted. Meta also has a newsworthiness policy that will leave up certain posts that otherwise might be removed if there's a public interest in knowing what was written. Meta will consider further violations of President Trump's account to be repeat offenses since they have already found him in offense once. And Clegg made clear that the platform would suspend him again if he violates their policies, specifically calling out him using the platform to talk about the 2024 election not being legitimate. In Clegg's words, to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election. So, Justin, will he take advantage of the restoration? And that is the question because he has not as of yet taken advantage of his reinstated Twitter account. The BBC notes that President Trump signed an exclusivity agreement with True Social, which is owned by Trump Media and Technology Group, that requires his post to be on Truth Social for six hours exclusively before appearing on other platforms. However, that window is reportedly set to expire in June. And keep in mind that reinstatement not only allows posting but also restores the ability to buy ads on the platforms through the ability to buy ads, sorry, though the ability to buy ads could be restricted if the platforms feel that posts or other behavior violates standards. It does seem like he is more interested in Facebook than he was in Twitter and I expect it's because Facebook ads do very well for him. So, at the very least we can expect that to happen. Justin, let's talk a little bit about the policy of this. How do you feel about the process that was used to make the decision? Well, as we laid out here in the news story element of this, there was a decision. Then the oversight board, which is fashioned to be kind of the Supreme Court of Facebook, although their rulings are non-binding. Facebook then took action on that, but there is a question of exactly how much they were going to have to abide by what happened at the end of two years. To me, it feels like they are at a point where they could either say, no, this suspension keeps going or they have to reinstate them. They've decided to reinstate them and it feels like this has from the very beginning to be a little bit of a make it up as you go along situation. I think it's interesting. Seeing the oversight board's comments, obviously these are several years old now at this point. The idea that I feel like Facebook meta was always going to follow that. I don't think that was up in the air until this policy was announced or anything like that. I think this gives them cover for what was making, whether it was not to do two years to reinstate in two years, cover to make a decision that's going to make some people upset regardless of what decision they ended up being made. It does feel like the terms specifically of a lot of these policies are backfilled to be like the thing that we did in this case is exactly what our policy is now, which doesn't feel perhaps that it comes from the most particular place. That being said, I do think this speaks to a lot of meta being, having a lot more, I guess, concerns about itself as an institutional platform for media and stuff like that. They are setting this out now realizing a situation like this could happen again, maybe not with President Trump, but it could happen with other leaders and kind of setting forth a policy so that it doesn't feel like it's making it up as you go. Facebook's been making it up as it goes along the entire history of its run, right? So I don't disagree with you that they've done that. What I do think they've done is tried to say we have learned from what happened. We took these two years to craft a policy that we are now going to follow. They're trying to reset. That's why they have Clegg making this, not Zuckerberg making this announcement to say, OK, OK, OK, the rules are now this. We're all going to be clear. These are the rules and we'll start again. And it's tempting to be too American centric here. Remember, these rules are also designed not just for Americans, but for President Bolsonaro out of Brazil, for Duterte in the Philippines, for the BJP in India, and for less legitimate leaders and other organizations that are that are para-governmental that are spreading things out there. So I do think that they mean it this time, which I know sounds pretty weak. But also what's different? These are still subjective decisions that Facebook is going to make. I mean, could they not be, though? I don't know that they could make them. You can't eliminate the subjectiveness of this kind of process. I think that's the underlying issue here. Well, I mean, yes, there has to be a decision making board that is there. I don't know. This does not feel particularly different to me. The one thing I will also highlight, you mentioned that Twitter and Facebook are different for the Donald Trump organization specifically politically. And I agree with you, but I don't think that one is more or less important than the other. Twitter is a connection to the news media, which is something in 2016 he utilized to perfection in terms of blocking out the sun of other narratives. And Facebook is very, very, very important for him in terms of fundraising. And that's where the ads do come in. Yeah, I don't disagree with you there. I think he's acting more amenable to coming back to Facebook because of the fundraising aspect. And that I wouldn't rule out that he comes back to Twitter for the PR aspect of it, once the Truth Social Agreement winds up. That's the larger question is why it's even doing this with Truth Social aside from maybe, you know, I guess that that he does take very seriously his licensing agreements, which would make sense because that was his business before he became president. And maybe maybe it's working in a way that that people don't don't see that could be true too. The debate about TikTok in the US feels less controversial than the debate about whether to let President Trump onto Facebook or not. And the debate continues. There's a really good read at the Lawfare blog about what's actually happening in the company in the US. That's called Project Texas, the details of TikTok's plan to remain operational in the United States. The details come from a press briefing given by TikTok about Project Texas. Yeah, so Project Texas is run by TikTok US Data Security or USDS, which was created in July 2022. It's a division of TikTok, but it's governed by an independent board of directors may say how independent. Well, the members of that board are nominated by TikTok and reviewed by the government agency called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States or CIFIAS. So there you go. TikTok's USDS, that's that that's this subsidiary. TikTok USDS's board will report to CIFIAS by agreement. They will not report to TikTok and therefore not to ByteDance, which is TikTok's parent company in China. Oracle will manage the data flowing into and out of the entity to ensure against national security risks. So ByteDance will also not be managing the data. Now, a lot of data does have to flow into ByteDance's other services. So public data, like things you post, you want everyone in the world to see your TikTok post, that's going to cross the US border. Interoperability data. So when you leave a comment or like someone else's post, that's going to flow across the border. What they call safety tools, which is a little misleading of a name, but like when you delete a video, you wanted to be deleted everywhere that it had access. Those will all cross the US boundary and CIFIAS has allowed that all other data, like your personal info, your phone number, that kind of thing will stay within the US on Oracle servers and Oracle will also review and vet all the code used in the US version of TikTok. So under this plan, about half of TikTok's US employees will become employees of TikTok USDS. That's subsidiary. That includes the teams that code the software and moderate content, but also things like, you know, engineering, HR, legal and security compliance. Only functions that do not require access to US user data. Thinking about things like public policy marketing, that kind of stuff will exist in the US outside of TikTok USDS. TikTok will be run by Andy Bonio. He's a former chief information security officer. He's worked at companies like AIG and a security professional named Will Ferrell, but no, it's not the actor. It's a security professional. He previously worked in cybersecurity of Booz Allen Hamilton. Those two will be running this USDS TikTok. You need to be a US citizen or hold a green card in order to work for TikTok USDS and the government can conduct background checks on any potential hires. So quick round around the table here. Justin, what do you make of this? Keep the cash cow alive. USA, USA. Yeah. For me, it's this is the US saying we learned it from watching you China because guess what? If you're a US tech company and you want to operate in China, you know what you have to do? Form a subsidiary that works with Alibaba cloud or one of their other cloud providers that plays by all of their local rules. This is the exact same playbook and Uncle Sam is following it. I think it's cute that tiktok thinks that this will somehow assuage people from folks. If you have a thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address. Well, here it is. Email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. This coming February. So just just a few weeks from now at the end of February, the US Supreme Court is going to hear two cases that bear on protections afforded to tech platforms by section 230 of the communications decency act. On February 21st, Gonzales versus Google will be heard. That will test whether section 230 protects Google from liability when it recommends content. The next day, February 22nd, Twitter versus Tamda will be heard and the court will hear arguments about whether a platform that works to prevent terrorists from using its services. In other words, Twitter avowedly tries to keep terrorists off its platform can be found to have knowingly provided assistance to terrorists if it fails to remove terrorist accounts. In other words, if it doesn't do a good job. In the first case, Gonzales bears directly on whether a particular activity is protected by section 230. The second Tamna asks if the failure is a violation of the anti terrorism act. Since section 230 does not protect against liability for content that breaks criminal law, if it were found to be in violation, they could then ask for a court to rule that section 230 does not apply. So these are going to be big deals about either expanding or keeping section 230's application where it is. Now we have a whole episode of Know a Little More that just came out today that explains how section 230 came about and what it does and does not do. I highly recommend you listen to that if you really want to form a solid opinion, know a little more dot com. But the short version is that without section 230, the law prior to its enactment says you're either a distributor or you're a publisher. A distributor is like a bookstore. You're not expected to know what's in every single book in your bookstore. A publisher is like a book publisher. It's expected to be responsible for what it put in its books or its magazines or its newspapers, no matter who wrote them. Now before section 230, there were two lawsuits, one against CompuServe, one against Prodigy. And those two lawsuits established that if a tech platform does any kind of moderation, it's considered a publisher and therefore responsible for everything anyone writes on its platform. The situation then was that if you're a tech platform, you had to choose either don't do moderation at all, then you're not responsible for the posts on your platform, but then your platform goes wild, or restrict every post for approval so that you're only allowing the posts up that you're sure you won't get sued for, which would be prior restraint. You'd probably be killing some posts that might otherwise be fine. Section 230 was put in place to say a tech platform should not be considered a publisher of third party posts. That's all it did. It said a platform should not be punished for attempts to moderate itself. A platform is still responsible for its own content, but it can withdraw, postpone or alter content of third parties and still not be considered the publisher. Okay, so this is how it might apply to these two new cases. If companies are found to be considered publishers when making recommendations, it could cause tech platforms to have to choose. They could either do away with any kind of recommendations or have to screen any recommendation very strictly. Any trending topic, for example, would have to be approved. It could not just surface automatically. Yeah, and I've actually heard some people advocate this. They're kind of rooting for that to be the decision in Gonzalez to say, yeah, I know it won't be as nice, but just get rid of the algorithms. Just everything's chronological, which would be one of the things that would happen here. Which would have a material effect on their bottom line considering they want to maximize for ad space. Tom, what has changed technically between when these 230 laws were created based on those court cases and now? Technically speaking, meaning like what? Like in the way the platforms are operating, if at all. Any of the technology that was used in those two court cases? Yeah, I mean, one thing that was interesting is between CompuServe and Prodigy, moderation began. When CompuServe was doing it, there weren't that many people publishing on the platform, so you didn't need to moderate. Prodigy put in moderation and that's what got itself in trouble. However, in the intervening years, the biggest thing that's happened is we have billions of people on the internet. We have a scale problem that dwarfs the scale problem that they were trying to address with Section 230. So it's not like Section 230 was only for small platforms. Section 230 thought it was for big platforms like Prodigy and Facebook now is much bigger than that. Is that what you're getting at or am I missing them? I think that although what a biblical thought you've just put in my head that it was the first troll that fell from Heaven and invented the concept of moderation on Prodigy. That anti-diluvian troll. Yeah, but Tom, on the other end, kind of on the other end of the scale spectrum, we're obviously been talking a lot about Mastodon this year. That has a very unique architecture unlike a highly centralized platform like Twitter or Facebook, Meta's platforms. What impact, obviously, would this apply to the server level or supply to the overall like federated, you know, Mastodon instance? Like how does that kind of? No, it's a good question. And I'm not a lawyer. Let me just preface by that. But best of my estimation, if you're operating a Mastodon server, not the Fediverse at all, not the Fediverse entirely, not the open source project, you're operating the server, then you are the tech platform that Section 230 immunizes. So if you're operating a Mastodon server and people say something on your Mastodon server that is defamatory, the person that's being defamed can't sue you for operating the Mastodon server with Section 230. However, if Section 230 were not there, it would be a question of whether you did moderation on your server or not. If you did, then you could be on the hook for the defamatory comment. If you didn't do any moderation, you'd be fine, but also your server would probably be accessible. Well, that leads me to another question in terms of, again, talking about scale and just the kind of the unimaginable scale that we are at now than when Section 230 was initially written. Facebook for a long time has argued that its scale allows it to do things that other platforms can't do much better, right? Whether it comes to algorithmic or human curation of that kind of stuff. Do you feel like if the Supreme Court has a ruling that impacts Section 230, does that still preference that large scale versus a 100-person Mastodon server or something like that? Or do you think that will incentivize, I guess, more distributed kind of forms of networks? I doubt it. I mean, I guess it depends on how they rule. I think what's going to happen is, if anything, if they find that algorithms are not protected by Section 230 somehow and that recommendation engines fall outside of the protection, I don't know that that affects Mastodon because Mastodon doesn't use a lot of algorithmic recommendations, right? It does chronological. So I also think we overestimate the effect that these things will have. These big platforms will find workarounds for that sort of thing. I'm just very curious what the legal reasoning would be if they find that recommendations are outside of the protections of Section 230. It seems pretty clear to me that what Congress's intent was was, hey, we want to let these companies operate their platforms without being on the hook for what third parties post. Recommendations seem like it's covered in that, especially in a follow on case AOL versus Zarin where they said, yeah, you can modify things. You can delete them. You can move them around like it. Zarin versus AOL seems pretty clearly to say, oh yeah, recommend how you pick recommendations is fine, too. It was just prior to algorithms being really used in that situation. All right, let's get to the traveling news. Chris Christensen has a statistic you should hear before you jump on that public Wi-Fi when you're on vacation. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. I saw a piece of research that came out last year that surprised me. It said that 25% of travelers are hacked via public Wi-Fi while abroad. Now we know that there's a problem with connecting with public Wi-Fi and you might get the wrong one that's not the real one and it may not be open and all sorts of security problems. So using a VPN is probably a good idea. 25% did seem kind of high. Of course, this research was done by a VPN company, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Yeah, either way you believe it. Probably good to use a VPN while you're on a public Wi-Fi, right? Yeah, especially if you're scared because you read a study on the internet. All right, let's check out the mailbag, Rich. Yeah, we've been talking a lot about generative AI and OpenAI specifically over the past couple of weeks. Well, Norm Physicus wrote in about something he's excited about using OpenAI's tools that could be an immediate help for him, technical documentation. If I could let OpenAI scan through half a dozen change requests for a release and have it create a draft summary of impacts in Word, I'd be better off than I was before. I need an installation guide that a new system administrator could use. Well, I could just point it to a vendor site, then to draft a document of what it will, what will be in the release and let it know how to dumb it down. Even reviewing existing documents for consistency would be a value add. And then he's kept thinking about it, and then I start thinking about all of the Excel spreadsheets I've created. If I could just type what I wanted to do and get the formulas to leverage it, I need to stop. I might get happy. Careful. Thank you, Norm. Hey, I might make you happy there, Norm. Watch out. All right. Thank you, Justin, Robert Young for being with us today. What do you got going on these days? On the Politics, Politics, Politics program, I know a lot of people have followed along with Representative George Santos, congressman from New York, and the colorful life or lack of life or different life for which he has claimed to lead. He is a bit of a fabulous. And on the PX3 episode that comes out on Friday, I will tell you the two ways that I believe this story will end. One of them is a suspicious trail of money, and the other is whether or not George Santos is an American citizen after all. Hmm. That sounds racy. Check it out, folks, at where'd they go? Where'd they go to get it? That is Politics, Politics, Politics wherever you get your podcasts. Special thanks to our top lifetime supporter, George. No, no, I'm kidding. Special thanks to James Alexander, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all of your years of support. James, you could not do it without you. Patrons, stick around. The extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to talk a little more about that Buzzfeed thing. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Back tomorrow with Lamar Wilson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.