 This 10th year of Daily Tech news show is made possible by its listeners. That's you. You're listening right now unless you got something in your ears Jeff Wilkes, Paley Glendale, Dr. X17 and our new patron lucky flute lucky us on this episode of DTNS Justin reports on what he learned from Defconn's voting village hackers We check in on his opinion on the fates of Twitter and threads and the law sets back AI authorship while YouTube tries to advance Making AI music This is the Daily Tech news for Monday, August 21st 2023 in Los Angeles on John Merritt and from studio keep away. Hillary. We're done with you. I'm Sarah Lane From deep in the heart of Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm a dried-out producer Roger Chang for those who missed the tropical storm named Hillary That's Justin here today that might have sounded more political than I meant to just making sure Yeah, yeah, just making sure Exactly. Well, Rod Rodger and I weathered it well. I think Roger. Would you agree? Like I was surprised at how less windy than The news reports suggest that it would be And Justin was even really nice to me as a Florida man in comforting me in my time of need. Thank you Yeah, I was giving you Lightly chiding You know because look because he did Tom text me says oh hurricane and earthquake. Is that ever happened to you? And I said you got it by a tropical storm. So yeah, not a hurricane All right, folks Well after 25 years Charles Martinette is stepping down as the voice of Mario in Nintendo's video games We salute you Charles and now the rest of the quick hits On Friday the main as in the state of Maine Attorney General's office said in a letter that Tesla's data breach that happened back in May impacted 75,735 people including nine residents of the state of Maine It also said quote the investigation revealed that two former Tesla employees Misappropriated the information violation of Tesla's IT security and data protection policies and quote the letter also says Tesla Filed lawsuits against against two former employees who are said to be responsible and that led to the seizure of electronic devices containing company information Smart lighting manufacturer Leviton's new outdoor plug the Decora smart Wi-Fi outdoor plug-in switch Works with matter. Yay appears to be the first outdoor switch to do so 55 bucks on Amazon or Home Depot connects over 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi and has a built-in light sensor It can also pair with Leviton's wireless anywhere switch companion if you would like to control the plug remotely Oh, yeah from inside the house. Yeah Rest of world org published a story on the trend of hackers Etikos that's ethical hackers growing across Brazil in particular to recover stolen Instagram accounts Although there isn't much hacking involved here instead people pay someone else to navigate Instagram customer support to help recover their account But hey if it works it works Others are using Brazil's consumer protection agency pro con which can legally compel Instagram to take action You know, it's a good point actually navigating customer support is a hack of its own in a way, isn't it? Photo-sharing app be real is known for its right now Authentic version of a social network and in that vein the app is replacing its discovery feed Which up till now has just been a firehose of updates from people you didn't know and in its place be real has a new Friends of friends feed where you can see more content from people who are a degree away Aka friend of a friend going forward on any post you can toggle whether you want to share with friends of friends Or just friends standard curating and blocking features still apply Pinterest announced new safety features designed to protect teenagers Including private profiles more control over who's following whom and safety controls for private messages So this could be for somebody event or any age, but obviously The teens are what? Instagram, sorry Pinterest is going for now, which is something that Instagram has done recently in the past Which is why it was on my mind a Pinterest user that is 16 or older can now opt into either a private or public profile If they choose to be private, let's say it was me I could selectively send a unique link to someone like Justin to connect But my account would still be private private profiles are on my default for users under the age of 16 And are not discoverable on the platform. Otherwise All right folks If you are a machine, I have bad news for you We have a legal setback for machines and a move towards setting rules around machine-generated content that's moving us forward Let's start with the legal decision judge barrel Howell of the US district court for the District of Columbia Ruled that the United States was correct in declining to issue a copyright for a work with no human Authorship you may have heard us talk about dr. Steven Thaler before he is trying to make a point by filing Machine-generated content related copyrights and trademarks and things like that He listed himself as the owner of this one So he was filing the copyright But and under the author he listed creativity machine in a work for hire situation So this would be like if I put a copyright on something Justin wrote for me And I said Justin wrote it as work for hire, but I want to own the copyright They said no You can't list the machine as an author and if the machine is the author then you can't copyright it So Thaler plans to appeal. That's his whole deal He's he's trying to push these things forward in the court and and get arguments around them The US copyright office has said in the past the generated images based on text prompts alone Do not qualify for copyright protection But the answer depends on the circumstances particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work So the copyright office is saying you can't copyright something that just came out of the machine But if you start doing something with it, that's a different matter for example back in February We talked about Chris Krashtinova's Zarya of the dawn graphic novel Which received copyright protection for its text and layout just not for the images which were wholly generated by mid-journey So the law remains Unsettled but cautious is how I would describe this Which of course leaves space for private companies to set their own rules and Sarah is gonna tell you about the YouTube story Yeah, so YouTube says that it is going to embrace AI tools with music AI With that's an incubator called music AI working with artists and labels on how AI can and should be used It will also update its content ID management system to deal with AI generated music We'll see how that goes, but that's what YouTube says it wants to do It also wants to update policies on Manipulated content. So if something seems to be a generated, you know, it's not Being flagged as such that would be something that YouTube should be able to flag itself The company is also working with music labels to set rules on how AI generated music It will be treated going forward. So the Financial Times reports that YouTube and also UMG That's universal music group are in talks to license voices and melodies to train algorithms YouTube specifically mentioned Frank Sinatra's estate Which would be quite a quite a list of songs Roseanne cash Yogati all artists it will work with so definitely spanning a lot of genres here Justin But what do you think about the other details? well, it's interesting from the labels perspective because We've seen now over the last 30 years a couple of these sea changes. The first was the birth of piracy as rights holders had to navigate the world from physical media into digital media and That was obviously rocky. It was something that was dominated by The proof that there was a demand and an audience for stuff like this and then eventually the rights holders came to the table And then they wound up making a deal with Steve Jobs and iTunes that they eventually didn't like or they wanted to grow out of because it was not at a price point That they enjoyed and they fought and fought and fought they then got in with the streaming services And they haven't loved that which makes this moment very interesting Because it seems like compared to that sea change the labels are more willing to Experiment as opposed to just sue people out of oblivion I think it's a good move tactically and the reason why it's happening is because They don't have a big thing to protect in a way that they did with CDs or with movies They did with DVDs. That was a gigantic cash cow right now I think all labels would prefer and studios would prefer that there were more money in their product So why not try to experiment a little? I mean some of the you know, I mentioned Frank Sinatra's estate I don't think the estate is hurting, you know for for money Frank Sinatra songs particularly around the holidays are Pretty well beloved and and used but I wonder how many artists will emerge from this as saying like, okay You know the go back and you know, let's see what we have to work with. I'm not necessarily opposed to this I think this actually might be better for you know, my My my my work as a whole other artists clearly are not going to feel the same way But I think we will sort of see a divide here in Those who I think could be viewed as well forward thinking And others who say no, it's not forward thinking. This is this is not the way to go about that Yeah, it's a good point that they don't have as much to protect because there's not an existing market like CDs were And I think it's also worth noting that Google has an AI Product that they would like, you know people to use like Universal Music Group. So they're motivated to make this work Yep, and YouTube isn't an upstart. It isn't some weird tech company anymore Google alphabet have been around for a long time And so they're seen now by these companies like Universal Music Group as peers or even larger companies So I think there's more of a willingness to say when Universal sued YouTube over that Drake song with the weekend's vocals That was simulated. Yeah of them saying look, we have to do this lawsuit But I'd like to find another way around it versus What it was with YouTube and the TV networks back in the day when it was we're gonna sue you into oblivion via Com will take that lead and we'll create Hulu to try to crush you. It's a whole different attitude Yeah It is it is very very interesting to see that Sarah. Have you heard the Frank Sinatra AI generated cover of From the window to the wall Please please go ahead. Please go ahead and immediately after the show Commences now. Yeah Our god And it's exactly what you'd want to hear at Pottery Barn this holiday season Do you want new Frank Sinatra songs because this is the only way you're gonna get new Frank Sinatra songs? Well, you know part of it too is yeah, I mean Let's you know depending on who we're talking about some of the stuff could you know add some life and longevity. I Wish I were allowed to say any other lyrics to the song. I was singing except the ones that I did sweat and I'm Exercising Let's talk threads. Shall we the Wall Street Journal sources say full desktop version of Instagram's threads could launch early this week And right now you can see threads on a desktop browser. We can't post to it So everybody's very excited about the ability to have full threads on on the desktop. We'll talk about it when and if it happens It'll probably happen But this all comes as the drumbeat of X slash Twitter news continues over the weekend X chairman Elon Musk said the platform would remove the block feature causing another round of everyone leaving Twitter Quick explainer a block on Twitter means you can't see an account that posts and they can't see yours So it goes both ways if I block Justin Justin can't look at my posts. I won't see his he can't look at Contacted it's like they don't exist. You can log out, right? Yeah, that's that used to work Although I don't know if that works anymore Mute means I won't see Justin's post, but he'd still be able to see mine and reply to them so it's not quite it's it's only one way and Elon Musk is saying mutes good enough. You don't need to have the two-way thing There's also private if you're like, I just want to approve who can see any of my posts You can go totally private and only people you approve can see your posts all that said X has not yet Removed blocking as of this recording right now, but there have been other things happening on X, right Sarah? Indeed there have X is nothing if not consistent when it comes to blowing up every weekend for every journalist ever that covers X So a bunch of older images prior to December of 2014. So, you know, we're talking Almost ten years ago now started disappearing from X over the weekend Including the famous Oscar selfie that was taken by Ellen DeGeneres. Remember the one lots of people were in it It was one of the most viewed native Picks that was uploaded to Twitter at the time. So links from also that time stopped working had some You know some some headscratching here the verge notes that X developer documentation shows that previous Previews rather of pictures gifts and link metadata for tweets Began emerging in December of 2014. That's before enhanced URL enrichment was introduced in 2016 so there's a little bit of a gray area there for the better part of a couple years some folks on red Head have speculated this might be a result of moving the overall platform to use X.com As far as servers go instead of Twitter.com, but the company isn't talking about that So you might say move fast break things X very good at this You know 10 for 10. So Justin you Yes, he said in fact it was a conversation that you and I had right after threads had launched This is Instagram threads and you said this is not going to replace Twitter. Let's all not get too worked up over this This is just yet another option. It's not the option threads had a huge onboarding week Lot of press on how many people had signed up for threads. That was when Twitter was dead, right? Or X at this point, but then there was a huge decline in usage in threads first month So what are we thinking? Can it climb back? Let me please Clarify my take because I do want it played in the highlight reel when I die That it was during the press around threads having such a great first 48 hours That my take was is that a big number? Because I could see it totally falling apart and guess what friends. I believe it is can it is Proceeding exactly as I have foreseen threads is a boring product and it doesn't really bring a lot of anything and the here's the problem with trying to replace Twitter and With the understanding that people have been complaining about Twitter for as long as Twitter has existed every time That you hear about the Halcyon days when Twitter was really really fun I would challenge people to go back in their actual memories and remember the time that they were complaining about Twitter people hate message boards We love this message board. Therefore. We love to hate this message board. I Do think that there has been material degradation to the product of X I do go on to XLS Mostly because it has the exact same color scheme as uber and sometimes I don't want to get confused and hit the wrong button that being said especially as we move into a High American breaking and live news value period of time elections American football The fall television schedule that will be very reality television and live competition focused That will be the meaty time for X or for threads or for blue sky for anything else Right now we have yet to see and we'll see on Wednesday Whether or not another service can be the place where you talk about the Republican debate Because that's been Twitter's place in in in the world. We'll see if it's X's You know when you mentioned threads isn't a very interesting product at least not compelling in the way that You can't have on other networks and certainly You know harkens back to an earlier time of Twitter where there weren't as many features as Twitter Slash X has now. I still don't know what to call it But but but do do people not want that? I mean some people do right? Want what? the the the simpler time the Of course You can never you can never the king of the queen went back to the green And like this is there is there's no going back home that there is there is only going forward I do agree that X is something that has changed a bunch I don't know I personally wouldn't totally shift the branding of the platform until I added new features that people liked but You know, hey, I didn't build a space X so Go go Elon go Elon go all I will say is when we had an earthquake in the middle of a hurricane on Sunday Blue sky was the one I forgot to mention it on Mm-hmm Folks if you have a thought about something on the show, but don't know our email address here It is email us feedback at daily tech news show dot com The annual def con hacker conference ended last weekend in Las Vegas the event covers all sorts of hacking And hacking in the purest sense of the word like messing with stuff not not malicious hacking necessarily it deals with all kinds From general software connected devices anything else that you can play with that you can manipulate Justin you visited the voting village which dedicates itself to probing election security You wanted to learn a little more about what people are doing to hack voting machines at the security of voting machines What'd you learn? Well, I I primarily went with Eric Geller who is the cyber security reporter for the messenger and a friend of mine and we walked over and saw a Fantastic talk by two cybersecurity researchers Who hacked a dominion voting machine as part of a lawsuit a long-running lawsuit that voting Machine activists have brought against the state of Georgia the case itself is called curling versus Georgia And it initially was filed as I understand it to remove Daibald voting machines, which became very very controversial in 2004 after the Kerry versus Bush election Many consult your back issues for when Democrats were very very mad about voting machines in Ohio So these guys brought this case because they believe that the Daibald machines were not secure and so as part of that lawsuit or at least Attributed to that lawsuit was the removal of Daibald machines in Georgia. The replacement were these dominion machines and so The voting rights activists or the voting machine activists got a hold of a dominion voting machine as per that lawsuit And they gave it to two cybersecurity researchers to see whether or not it could be hacked It was the opinion of the researchers that indeed it could and you can read the report online It is a credited to Haldeman, but they proved that they could hack it because it was a sheet running or sorry it was a a a Tablet computer running an old Android OS system and they used a Device that is sold and manufactured from our friend Darren kitchens company hack five a bash bunny something that I Actually walked over from Darren's booth because I've been selling bash bunnies and many other fine hack five products for the previous part of the day walked over there found out that they used that and The hack when is such The way that you program a county's worth of machines is by setting the election definition the config file on one machine That essentially says okay in this election for example, you're going to be voting for President a senator and all these county-wide offices and then you make little separate alterations for whatever the The local issues are but all that's run through the county office That is then programmed onto a thumb drive that you plug into all the other machines when you are setting them up in the morning what the researchers say they were able to accomplish was To install malware in that file Meaning that if somebody wanted to hack Dominion voting machines or at least this brand of Dominion voting machines They would be able to do so by hacking one machine and then allowing that to be programmed throughout the entire county The way that it works from there is that a voter would come in and punch in who they wanted to vote for and The machine prints out a paper slip with a QR code and all of the choices that you made below it The way that the researchers found would be the most effective hack would be to Have somebody not voting so let's say Tom and Sarah were running against each other. I want to vote for Sarah the QR code would have a vote for Tom on it and The sheet below it would list Tom. I'll get to that in a second I would then bring that slip over to the person that counts the votes They would scan the QR code and that would be that my vote for Sarah would now be a vote for Tom The way that we could get around that or that I could foil this hack is if I checked the Listing down below and I said wait a minute. It says I voted for Tom. Indeed. I voted for Sarah I'm gonna go bring that up with the person who is running that preseason if I don't do that If I don't catch it there, that means even on a hand recount The wrong vote would be tallied This has been very controversial the talk that I saw technically was not even about their hack. It was about the criticism that an Organization that's not technically the government but only has governmental clients mitre and their election security division Criticized that report and so the talk that I saw was The initial authors firing back on the mitre report the mitre report said that this hack was possible But not probable because it would require hackers to get into heavily fortified and secured county voting offices for which The authors of this paper said well, and they didn't even know this was happening But I will give them the benefit of the doubt that only 72 hours later the Fulton County prosecutor Fawney Willis brought An indictment against former president Donald Trump and many of his associates in part enlisted there because the county of Fulton alleges that Sydney Powell dispatched people down to Coffey County, Georgia a rural County 200 miles south and Indeed got into their county voting office at the invitation of the people that ran it Where they copied all of the software for Dominion voting systems and put it online No allegation that they actually executed this particular hack But what you're saying is you have yet they got into the room And let me let me also make very clear from the authors of this both on their website and in their talk They are not alleging that this hack was executed in 2020 or 2022, right? They are making it available and Dominion has created a patch for it allegedly Brad Raffensperger the Secretary of State of Georgia believes the mitre report not the initial report and therefore says that since this is Unlikely he will not patch the Georgia voting machines until after the 2024 election now Here's my take on this as a security story with the caveat that when you're talking about election machines We have a lot little even less Tolerance every security story is a story of how close to zero not can you get zero? You can never get zero you can never get perfect security But how close can you get and this reminds me of so many Microsoft and Google stories where someone says hey I figured out a vulnerability and Microsoft and Google refused to patch it and Microsoft and Google say the chances of This being exploited are so low that it is not worth the cost to patch it That is a legitimate situation where you're like it's so unlikely We might cause more problems by patching it than not patching it And then there's always arguments about whether that's true in this case That's what mitre is saying mitre is saying well You have to have physical access and normally that's a big one like to have to have physical access to a machine makes the hack much less likely and that's true and you have a A defense against it, which is every voter should look at their ballot before they're handing it in So you have you have two things one It's it's hard to get physical access as Justin said not impossible But it's hard to get it and there's a check even if they do get physical access It just takes one voter in that precinct to go. Well, wait a minute. This isn't what I voted for For their alarm bells to be raised That is how I approach it as a security story. Yes I also and I'll also throw in for Raphson burger that if you do believe it's a very low Likelihood of being exploited you might not want to mess with your voting machines ahead of a big election Because whenever you put in a patch, there's unforeseen consequences to it And you might be safer to just patch it afterwards again if you don't think it's going to be exploited. I Will push back very lightly on the idea that One person getting a piece of paper with a name that they don't believe that they entered would in any way Affect this process because let's remember that election day is a tremendous opportunity And I don't believe that it would take one person bringing over a piece of paper and saying I didn't vote for this person to shut down a pre-seed let alone a county because if this is a county-wide Scalable hack then you're telling me one person who says I didn't vote for this person is going to shut down that county Well, I know that there are certain counties from an election perspective that the various parties would be very upset If something were to be shut down and the threshold to do that would have to be very very high so I All I would say is that yes and in dummy elections that these researchers ran 80% of the people that had their vote change did not catch it when they looked at their sheet So let's assume that it's 20 percent My assumption is that if somebody walked over with a changed ballot and they went to their precinct person and said I didn't vote for this person even it was changed by the computer the assumption from the polling precinct worker would be No, you probably either just screwed up or you're ashamed of the fact that you voted for somebody and you want to change your vote Let's just invalidate this vote. Let's do another one at which point the randomized malware would just let you go And or most likely statistically would just let you go And then none would be the wiser and yet the 80 percent that have their vote change would continue to affect the total I'll I'll only add one small counter That is in a world where no one knew about this potential exploit And I would love to hear from county clerks and poll workers What you think is is justin right you very well may be But now that this hack is a possibility Has it been discussed in your local county clerk office? Has it been discussed by poll workers? I'm very very curious about that because maybe justin's right. Maybe it's like it's out there, but nobody's talking about it Well, I mean, yeah, I know I know we have maybe maybe in the aftershare Maybe we'll talk more about it, but but it is a very fascinating subject. All right. Let's check out the mail bag Well, we got some really really good feedback on experiment week If you're not familiar of dts over the last what three four years now has taken a week off in the summer to You know let everybody take a breath from the regular show But also try out different shows and some really fun shows have come out of that Of our week last week Paul wrote on patreon One show that was a standout for me was the tech tv scrapbook hosted by roger chang Had some great insights gabby agreed In fact, several of you said we really like roger and we hope to hear more from him thomas also wrote of experiment week if you can only green light one show I would argue it absolutely must be the ai named this show show. It was great. It was nuanced It was in-depth conversations from people Who clearly know what they're talking about on a subject that's overwhelmingly relevant and best of all no hyperbole It's a breath of fresh air something that I think the world needs more of Hey roger chang Definitely definitely the favorite of the week That episode with capetella was fantastic and the episode with jen cutter that ended the week was fantastic as well So, uh, we we haven't actually talked about it, but roger and I are going to discuss What where we want to go with that, but we definitely need to go somewhere with it and uh tristan's ai named the show Or we're already got an email out to tristan to find out, you know, what they're going to do with that That's their show. We're happy to help them with it if they want that So, uh, thank you everybody for for indulging experiment week during the doldrums of august I hope you enjoyed the experiment Even if you didn't necessarily enjoy every single show, I hope you enjoyed the idea of like trying out some stuff Uh and seeing how it goes more shows where shows are born. Uh, we like to think so. Anyway, justin robert yang Uh, we couldn't do the show without you so let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of what you're up to these days Well, we are hard at work for you dear friends with the new season of know a little more and I gotta say Listening to what uh some of the episodes for next season. I think you are going to absolutely love it So much that we are bringing you an opportunity to get it in a way that you've never heard it before On patreon patreon.com slash know a little more tell them tom Yeah, if you want to get the show ad free, uh, you can get it from patreon.com slash know a little more now patrons of dtns You are going to continue to get the unedited version of know a little more in your feet So this will be the one without any of the clips Anything it's just my straight read Because a lot of you were saying hey, I want to keep getting that and even preferred that so if you are a dtns patron You'll get that if you want the fully produced version if that's your cup of tea That takes a little extra work So we have a separate patron just for that at patreon.com slash know a little more and now Well, yeah, I will also say with know a little more uh for patrons Bonus content coming your way Including I think tom's bank account. Yes, we're going to give you yet. No a little more about tom's personal, uh personal You're gonna have mine y'all you're not gonna like it No, it'll be the first tom and justin Uh, just by ourselves show. I think since fsl tonight I think you're right if you are into uh Into just me and me and tom chatting it up about the subjects that we are covering on know a little more and some stuff That did make it in the show That's the content that you're gonna get Exclusively on the patreon Oh, and we're also going to talk to amos about the the editing process He amos went and put all of season nine of know a little more in the patreon So if you sign up right now, there's stuff there already all of last season is in there as well Uh patrons so many things you can stick around right here for the extended show good day internet We're going to kick around a couple of stories about ways to combat the negatives of social media One study says it's not the social media that inflames you it's that you already are experiencing Inflammation physical inflammation in fact Yeah, uh, but just a reminder Inflamed or not, please catch the show live if you can we're always on demand But we also are live at 4 p.m. Eastern 200 utc We do a monday through friday and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live We'll be back tomorrow with a pixel fold round table with three pixel fold owners Tom shannon morris and wen tweedow Talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Prime man club hopes you have enjoyed this bro