 Coming up on DTNS, is hacktivism effective as a protest? We ask Annalie Newitz to help us figure that out, plus, why video of planes landing captured the internet, and tips for safe QR code use. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 18th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. And joining us, the author of Four Lost Cities, and so many things on the internet. Annalie Newitz, welcome back. Hello. Good to have you. It's so great to be back. Thank you for helping us expand our knowledge of Minions on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. You can get that longer version of the show at patreon.com. Big thanks to a few of our top patrons today. They include Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, and Reid Fishler. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Snap announced that Snapchat users will be able to change user names as of February 23rd, and user names can be changed just once a year, so choose wisely. Snap also announced a new live location feature letting users share real-time location data with trusted friends and family. Location can be shared for between 15 minutes and eight hours of a time, and must be shared on a friend-by-friend basis. So you're not going to share it with 10 people at once, for example. This builds off of SnapMap, which shows approximate location, and only updated with the app open. Bloomberg issued its list of the top 10 companies by market value. Market value, if you don't know, is based on the current market price of a company stock. Here they are in order, starting with the largest market value. First, Apple, Microsoft, Aramaco, Saudi Arabia's oil company, Alphabet, Google's owner, Amazon, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, that's Warren Buffett's company, Nvidia, TSMC, and Tencent. Did you notice one that was missing? Yeah, Netflix, no, no, no, that's not the one we were thinking of. Meta, Facebook's owner has fallen out of the top 10 in market value, but it is at number 11. Just. The latest dev channel build of Windows 11 Pro now requires an internet connection and Microsoft accounts during initial setup. Windows 11 Home Edition already required this. Windows 11 Pro production builds let you create a local user offline, and the change won't impact existing installs. Alphabet-owned DeepMind published an article in Nature describing how it has trained an algorithm to control superheated plasma inside a nuclear fusion reactor. Nuclear fusion, as you may have heard recently, could provide a relatively clean and practically unlimited source of energy that generally uses magnets to contain the superheated plasma because the reactions are as hot or hotter than those in the middle of the sun. DeepMind's reinforcement learning algorithm has been used around 100 times now on a nuclear fusion Takamak container at the Swiss Plasma Center. The benefits are more precise control than humans can do, certainly, and that even other computer control systems can do at a thousand of adjustments per second. Thousands, like a multiple. Baidu launched a self-driving taxi service in downtown Shenzhen. The vehicles still require human safety drivers and only operate between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Baidu set up 50 pickup and drop-off locations for the service across the city, and rides can be hailed with the Apollo Go app. Baidu has already launched autonomous taxis in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, but this is the first in a densely populated downtown area of a city. The company plans to extend service to 65 cities by 2025. All right, let's talk about QR codes. That Coinbase ad during the Super Bowl had a lot of people talking. We were, of course, referring to the ad that was just the QR code bouncing around the screen. We even talked about it on The Expanded Show, Good Day Internet, on Monday. Tom's take, that's me, was that it's no different than any other link. If you trusted the source, in this case, NBC, I argued, then you can decide whether you'll click or not, whether you trust NBC. It's not like it came out of total nowhere, but Axios notes that QR code abuse has caught the attention of the US FBI. It's a real thing. E-Marketer estimates that 76 million people in the US scanned a QR code in 2021, and that is up 44% over 2019. And of course, part of that has to do with restaurants that have replaced physical menus with web pages accessed by QR code, say on the table that you're sitting at. So the FBI issued an alert January 18th to raise awareness about criminals who tamper with QR codes to get people to access malicious websites with malware, phishing schemes, and the like. Like any URL you click, there are precautions you should keep in mind. Scanning a QR code is probably fine, just like clicking a link is probably fine, but before you tap into the link for a QR code or any link, consider the following. Look at the URL preview. When you scan it with your camera, it'll tell you what the link is, and make sure it's going where you expect it to, and that you know where it's going. Check the URL in the browser after you've tapped to make sure you ended up where you thought you were going to go, and be very cautious logging in after tapping any QR code or entering any kind of information in any forms or anything. Don't download apps from a QR code. Always go into your app store and find them. And don't make payments through a QR code unless you're absolutely certain it's legitimate, which if you're absolutely certain it's legitimate, you're probably in China, because that's really where people use QR code regularly for paying things with WeChat or Alipay. It's not terribly common here in the U.S. or even in most other parts of the Western world anyway. These are all good advice, right? I don't think I differ with any of the FBI's advice here, and it is more prevalent for sure. I can't remember. I was trying to think of, oh, what's the last QR code I scanned? Doesn't happen very often. Yeah, because, again, I'm in the U.S. and it's just not as prevalent here. I think it had to do with me moving some crypto money from one wallet to another. Again, it's like if I trust the app, and it's built into the app, and I'm sending it to potentially another app, or even within the same app, it's probably fine. But it's always given me pause, especially when money is involved, because there are other ways to do it. You can just copy and paste a particular wallet address and do it the long way. But, yeah, otherwise, not using a lot of QR codes. I definitely have done it a couple times over the last couple of years at restaurants in lieu of menus, which worked out perfectly fine. But again, I mean, yeah, maybe there's that criminal who's pretending to be a server and giving me a fake QR code. Or just going around to the tables to fix to the tables and cover them and over with their own QR code. Yeah, it's sort of like scraping ATM machines. It's super easy to do. And where I live in San Francisco, people are constantly scanning those QR codes. Almost all of the restaurants that have outdoor tables are doing that. So yeah, heads up. If you're a criminal mastermind, you heard it here first, just go stick your QR code on some table. See what you get. No, no, no, don't do that. Rob Dunwood on SMR podcast this week was talking about how he had a shirt with a QR code on it and he would just walk through an airport and then when he would get to on his plane, he could check and see how many people scanned it. He's like a dozen people in the airport would just scan his t-shirt. Thankfully he wasn't doing anything malicious, but you know. Where did it go? The code. I don't know. He didn't really make that clear smiley face. Yeah. I think it was a company. It was Rick Astley video. Yeah. It was Rick rolling people. That's a good one. Well, should we talk about planes? I think we should. Okay. Specifically, specifically planes landing in Heathrow airport. So let me set this up for you. A YouTube live stream from London's Heathrow airport during storm Eunice, which is an extremely powerful storm and has caused a lot of damage, particularly in the UK, has captivated the hearts and minds, not the storm, but the live stream. At least the views of over 4 million people. Last look where a company called Big Jet TV used a Panasonic HCVX1 camera. It's a powerful camera with 24 X zoom to show pilots landing amidst these gale force winds. Now with more than 200,000 people watching the feed when it was actually live, Big Jet TV host, sort of a beloved host. He's pretty well known. Also an aviation enthusiast, Jerry Dyer, explained each plane's details as they started to descend. Some of them are kind of coming at weird angles, looked pretty precarious. He was also cheering on the pilots during some of the rough patches of touchdown. Some of the pilots had to turn around, try again, try again. It was a little precarious. It almost felt like a sports match. There were no landing crashes. It was a very different live stream and not fun. But overall it seemed like people were having a lot of fun and a lot of people were watching, especially folks that are stuck inside because of the powerful storm. They feel some sort of a kinship with these planes. They want the planes to do the right thing. I was wondering, what is it about some live streams that go viral? There are a lot of live streams in the world. And I'm not talking about, you know, Twitch live streams, because that's sort of a different kind of category. I mean, we're a live stream right now. We have a live stream that sort of comes out of nowhere and becomes a thing that a lot of people want to check in on. You could say maybe it was the bald eagles that nested in Pittsburgh and still do. That's actually a pretty popular live stream. Water flooding the streets of Venice in Italy. One of the countless sunset cams around the world, of which there are many. But none of them seem to share the excitement of the big jet TV Heathrow stream. It was fun. I think that the thing that makes these kinds of streams go viral is if it has some kind of like plot arc, right? Like it's not just a sunset or it's not just like looking at a bay. You're like, what's going to happen next? Are they going to make it? Are they going to land? And I personally am completely addicted to this live stream at UC Berkeley on the Campanile, which is their clock tower. There's two Peregrine Falcons. Their names are Annie and Grinnell. They've been nesting there for about six or seven years. And I've been following them for three years now. I constantly check in on them. They come back all the time. There's two scientists who keep tabs on them and have created a YouTube channel for them. And it's drama because this past year, Grinnell, who's the boy, got attacked by another falcon. And then he got, he was almost killed and a student found him on a trash can, took him in to the vet, got him fixed up. And then he came back triumphantly, chased away another guy who was trying to hook up with Annie and retook the nest. And it was like, holy crap. And then they just... That's drama. That's drama. And then they posted, they just posted last week, Annie and Grinnell getting it on, which is like one second long. Now that's the fourth act. Yeah. That's the, you know, the fourth act. The day new mall. Now it's a romcom. Yeah. So I think that's the thing. I think you're right. There has to be a narrative to it. And like the eagles nesting, building the nest, or what was the one, there was one that took off just because like nobody had done it before, but it was some animal giving birth. And I can't remember which animal it was now, but this was years and years ago. But again, that still had a narrative of like, oh, you know, a new baby coming into being. Right. Yeah. I think it's that. You want everybody to be safe. I think it's the narrative combined with needing the distraction. So when the pandemic lockdown first came along, there were a lot of these took off because people were like, I just want to look at something that's outside my four walls. In this case, it's the storm. Everybody's like a little nervous stuck inside and the wind is there and seeing these pilots, you know, land in these conditions is like, ah, we're all prevailing over the storm together. So heartening. Yeah. Yeah. With the, with the Peregrine Falcons, it was just that sense of time going by, you know, like watching the babies grow up and leave the nest. And it was like, okay. And this was early pandemic. It's like things are moving. Life is continuing. Like, you know, there's still some people out there eating pigeon every day. You know, it's a little gross, but that's just what they're doing. Yeah. It's Falcon life. I really did. If you want to go back to the live stream to big jet TV's live stream, it's not live anymore, but it's, it's on YouTube. Um, you know, in perpetuity, I believe, but the host Jerry, he's, first of all, he's just very entertaining, but he's also while he's live, the BBC is calling him, you know, so he's like, and here we go with Emirates three to 60. Wait, the BBC is calling me. Hold on a second. Hey, I can't talk right now. Okay. You know, and then it's like Channel four is running across the field. No, you guys. No, no, get out of the way. You're going to ruin the camera. And it's really, it's truly, it sucks you in. Yeah. No, his pattern was a big part of it. Right. Yeah. He was, he was obviously playing for the crowd, but he's like, beers on me. If you bring this one in, son, you know, like, oh, let's see what you made of mates. Like there was all kinds of good pattern from him as well, which just, it's like the garnish on top. Right. Exactly. Well, um, the garnish of our brains is questionable. Uh, there's a lot of talk about how gadgets, gadgets and, and technology in general have shortened our attention spans. There's even been studies about how, uh, much that effect is real versus imagined. Mary Ann Thane, director of the center for attention studies at King's College, London wrote an overview of the research for the conversation.com. And here's some takeaways. One is that we underestimate our distraction in one study. People estimated they check their funds maybe about 25 times a day. One actuality it was between 49 and 80 times. But we do think that it is affecting us. About half the people in one survey believed their attention span is shorter than it used to be. Also about half of people believe a debunked claim that the average attention, attention span is eight seconds for adults. The fact is our attention span can't be boiled down to an average like that because it varies so much based on the person and also whatever thing is that they're doing that might be distracting them. And we're conflicted on multitasking. To be clear, a 2009 study published in PNAS, found that heavy multimedia multitaskers performed worse on a test of tasks switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant tasks set. And two thirds of people surveyed believe that switching between different media and devices harmed our ability to complete simple tasks. However, about half of the same group believed that switching frequently between email, phone calls or other tasks can create a more efficient and satisfactory work experience. You know, you got some variety in your day. They asked the question, well, maybe everyone's right. What if there are situations that haven't been studied where distractions have beneficial effects like circuit training for the mind? I think this is great. This is a great question to ask, right? And it's not saying it's true. It's saying, look, we've got this study. And I know ever since I saw this study, I'm like, okay, multitasking is not going to make me more productive, but I still do it sometimes. So why do I do it? I think that's an interesting thing to study. Maybe there are other benefits than just productivity. Maybe there are different ways of multitasking that maybe do provide a productive benefit, even if generally it does it. And I love that Mary and Thane is bringing this up as like, hey, let's study all the different aspects of this because you don't know what you're going to learn until you study it, right? I totally agree. And I mean, we've been living in an era for a long time where we're constantly getting the feedback that we should be standing up and walking around every hour, right, that you can't just sit at the keyboard for hours and hours. And, you know, that's not multitasking, but that's certainly a distraction, right? You stand up, stretch, walk around, and we all know that's good for us. So maybe there's a mental equivalent of that. Like, okay, after, you know, you do a writing sprint, work really hard for 45 minutes, maybe it's okay to check Twitter for 10 minutes. Maybe that gives your brain time to just kind of chill. So I think it makes a lot of sense. I'm looking forward to seeing what they find out because I'm terrible with distractions. So I want to believe that it's good. Yeah, I'm pretty bad with distractions too. I mean, I'm a person who has like 80 tabs open, and sometimes I'm just like, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I need to do all these things, and there's so many tabs, and I'm kind of like, wait, what am I really doing right now? And that happens on a daily basis. At the same time, there's some joy I get when I have, you know, I'm working on DTNS in the morning, checking Twitter that's not even necessarily about technology. Maybe my Wordle tab is open. And all of these things, I don't want to give full concentration to because I kind of like juggling them. But if, you know, my life were on the line, then I'd have to choose one. I think it's such a great point that we are also told to take breaks, like that taking a break increases productivity. So is there circuit trading where you're like, yes, but instead of doing 45 minutes and taking a break, I'm doing 10 minutes and then a one minute break. 10 minutes, like, is there something to that? Maybe there's not, but it would be interesting to try and find out. Yeah. Hey, folks, what do you like hearing us talk about on the show? You like this kind of stuff? There is a way to let us know in our subreddit. You can submit stories or just vote on the ones that other folks have submitted. We pull from the subreddit every single day, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Is hacking an effective protest tactic? Hactivism's not new since the 1990s and before hackers have been taking on causes they believe in and using their skills to further those causes. Annalie pointed out to me that Molly Sotter wrote a book about the history in the coming swarm, right? Yeah, it's a book about the history of hacktivism. Super great. Thursday, we talked about an insider using their legal access to DNS logs in that way. That was more of an insider establishment example though. More recent examples involve organizers of anti-vaccine mandates in Canada. You've probably heard about truckers being the start of a protest at several bridges between Canada and the U.S. and in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, most importantly. Rolling Stone notes that some folks protested the protesters by getting into the protesters' chats to disrupt the singing of the Canadian national anthem with a song called Ram Ranch, which is a metal song about gay cowboys by Grant McDonald. A lot of that has happened on an app called Zelo, which is a push-to-talk group chat app. And I think they just found the address of the chat and got in. There wasn't a sophisticated hack or anything. In fact, neither of these examples are very sophisticated. One's just leaking logs and the other's sneaking into group chats. A more serious attack happened against a crowdfunding site called GiveSendGo. Canadian protesters were using that site to raise funds after GoFundMe withheld funds and began refunding donations because of reports of unlawful activity by the groups that were being funded. On Sunday, attackers redirected the domain name of GiveSendGo to GiveSendGone and then posted text criticizing the site. Now, despite having patched one Amazon S3-related security vulnerability, GiveSendGo was still compromised after that and a group leaked names, email addresses, zip codes, and country of origin with about 93,000 entries. So we don't know how many people, but there were 93,000 entries from GiveSendGo. The group that accessed the information says that they only distributed it to journalists and security researchers. So the chat disruption might be considered harassment, maybe, but it's probably not actionable. The attack on GiveSendGo is an illegal action, even if the disclosure is responsible. But let's not get bogged down too much in what's legal or even necessarily what's ethical. What's ethical is going to depend on which side of the issues you're on, probably. What I'm curious about, Annali, is are these kinds of efforts effective protests? I mean, I think that, first of all, one of the things we learned from the hack on GiveSendGo was the country of origin for a lot of the donors to the truckers who were protesting in Canada. And that was essentially anonymized. The New York Times ran a piece showing that the United States was providing almost half the funding. I shouldn't say the United States, but people in the United States. People, I swear, identifying themselves as being from the United States. And that was particularly interesting to me that this is a Canadian protest, but it is being at least half funded by U.S. citizens. The other thing that they mentioned in this piece was that the number of donations, when you just break it down to numbers of people, far more United States people were giving than Canadians. But they were giving much smaller amounts, except in one case. One American, a Silicon Valley investor, gave $90,000 to the truckers. And that was by far the biggest donation they'd received. So this tells us something about how this protest is being funded. I think the real question comes when the names are given away. When we start to see at a granular level who those 93,000 people are, if you suddenly find out that your neighbor gave money to this protest that you think is just despicable, what does that do? I mean, it's a privacy violation. It could create friction where there doesn't need to be friction. But maybe it's good. Maybe naming and shaming is a way to prevent these really damaging protests that had really wide-ranging effects. I mean, they were blocking roads into Canada, which was affecting the supply chain. It was affecting people's ability to do their jobs. So I feel like there's a lot of questions here around that. I think the one thing I will say is that I think it was very important that we understand who the people were that were funding it at the national level. Not necessarily their names, but knowing like, oh, there are tons of Americans who were giving money to this. It's not just a Canadian thing. It's actually more Americans supported it than Canadians. I think it's also interesting that the group that apparently accessed these 93,000 entries say, well, don't worry. Only journalists and security researchers got this information. That could be anybody. I mean, journalists mean something to me, but it might mean something very different to whoever had the information in the first place. Yeah, on the one end, you have something like the Pentagon papers, right? And if you don't know what that is, the short version is classified documents were obtained and published in the Washington Post that shed light on the Vietnam War. And the idea was that's legal, that's ethical, and everything because the public had a right to know. This was bringing important information into the public sphere that would help the public in a democracy. And that's where the knowing that 50% of the money for the Canadian process was coming from the US kind of is on that end of the scale. That is, I agree with you there, Annaly. It's an important part of the conversation about what's happening. Like, well, maybe these protests aren't entirely Canadian in root given that one piece of information. And obviously I have to consider a lot of pieces of information. On the other end, though, is doxing, where it's like, well, we all talk about privacy when we talk about big tech and who should be allowed to have access to our information and we should be able to control our information. And you are taking that out of the hands of somebody you may disagree with them, but maybe they legitimately just believed in this protest and gave $5 and now they have to deal with the consequences of that. You might think they should deal with the consequences of that, but how would you feel if it was someone you supported? Maybe it was, Annaly, you came up with the example in our prep call about the Planned Parenthood. Or maybe it was just... Or ACLU. Yeah, yeah. Or something like that. Or even the EFF. You know, if that's going to get you in trouble somewhere. Like there is a line and there's a legal line and there's an ethical line that needs to be debated. Whether it's effective or not depends on how much blowback you're going to get for crossing those lines. Yeah, what if you donate a bunch of money to Planned Parenthood in your in Texas and then someone sues you under the Texas law saying that you're helping people to get abortions, you know? I don't know if that could happen. A similar Florida law allowing private lawsuits for certain things as well. So, you know, this is the kind of thing where hesitate to cheer too much if you're on one side or the other, right? Like you've got to think it through. Yeah, but I think we can agree that it was effective. It certainly had an effect. Yes. Yeah. Time will tell. Effective on some level. I have a bit of a sad story to tell. A few days ago, Twitter user... I'm hoping we can cheer up now. Well, you know, it's, you know, I'm sorry. It's Friday. What are you going to do? A few days ago, it was actually on Valentine's Day. Twitter user Sean Hect posted, it was a sad photo of a handful of delivery robots on a university campus that had come to a bit of an impasse. Sean wrote, difficult situation on campus, traffic jam of automated food delivery robots apparently all stuck behind a carelessly discarded scooter. I just observed a couple of students clearing the path out of pity for the robots. This is our future, I guess. Well, I got a lot of traction. Twitter erupted with all sorts of thoughts, replies ranged from which one is our future exactly? The carelessly discarded scooters, the food robots or the humans who out of sheer good will make up for the failures of big multinational companies. Another was, did I miss the advent of delivery robots? I've never even heard of these things existing out of Amazon warehouses and apparently they're just wandering around college campuses. Someone also posted a link to a post. So the original post was from way back in 2018 that read, so a delivery robot caught fire on Berkeley's campus and students set up a candlelight vigil for it and included photos as proof. And also thanks to Tim who emailed us that the campus where the delivery robots were fighting the scooters was the UCLA. Well, so this all makes sense to me. Berkeley, home of the free speech movement, obviously has a robot catching fire in some sort of protest. And UCLA, in LA, home to horrible traffic. I mean, why would the robots be an exception to that? I'm just glad that the humans came in and helped the poor confused robots. You know, it's hard to find your way around and, you know, they just needed a little quiz. They still need us. They still need us. They're still going to be jobs for us. They're also bringing candy and stuff to students. They're just trying to help. The students that helped might have been the students that said that's my delivery. Exactly. The robot's like, I am bringing you stoner food. Get the scooter out of your way. I know you were too stoned to move it earlier, but could you move it now? Yes. It has been a long time since I lived. It's been a long time since I lived somewhere with a high scooter population. When I lived in LA, they were everywhere. So I feel for the robots. This is something that, you know, is going to be half to figure it out. A scooter versus a robot, clearly we know how that ends. So Ed has some good news for you, Tom. Just wanted to say I went through the process and he's talking about your AirPods Pro process of having to go to an Apple store in the fact that you just don't want to leave your house. He says, I didn't want to go to the store either. I started an online service request for them with Apple. They overnighted a custom empty box made for the AirPods Pro that had everything you needed to ship it back. So I dropped them off at a FedEx store. And I was like, I don't want to go to the store. I don't want to go to the store. It sounds like a lot of work. When I could just squeeze the thing and it works. And it works for a couple of I know. My excuses are getting thinner and thinner. I realized this. Yeah. Just squeeze. I actually emailed Ed and thanked him for this. This is good info and will probably shake me out of my irrational opposition to getting them fixed. I'm going to be back for them from Apple. And Apple will do the same thing. They'll send you all the materials you need so that is almost, you know, I mean, you'd have to really not want to recycle them to not take advantage of it. So that's kind of nice. And we have some new brand new bosses to thank. They include. Yeah. There's three of them. Sam Moyer, Daniel, and Chuck Navish all started back in us on Patreon since our show yesterday. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Daniel. And thank you, Chuck. Also, thanks to you, Annalie Newitz. Always a pleasure to have you. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. You can find me on Twitter at Annalie N. That's A-N-N-A-L-E-E-N. Or you can find me on the internet all over the place. I write for a bunch of spots. You can Google my name or you can go to my website. If you like websites, that's all folks. We are live on the show Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTCs. When we kick off, you can find out more from DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Join us live if you can. Monday is president's day here in the U.S. So we'll be back on Tuesday with Laura Shin with an explainer on decentralized autonomous organizations, a.k.a. DAOs. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, First producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and twitch producer Joe Kuntz, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Dedderty. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottish One, Biocow, Capkipper, Jack Shid, Steve Guadorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Video feed by Sean Wei. Music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A., A-Cast and Len Peralta. A-Cast adds support from Trace Gaynor. Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's shows included Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young, James Thatcher and Chris Christensen. Guests on this week's show were Trisha Hershberger and Annalyn Newitz. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.