I need y’all to wish me luck. I have to dance with the devil this coming Friday. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, Facebook adds podcasts to its products, the long arm of John Law finds Commander X in Mexico, and a bipartisan bill barrage threatens tech dominance. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

CONGRESS TAKES ON BIG TECH

In less than a week’s time, the US Congress has launched a bipartisan-backed salvo of bills aimed at chipping away the power of technology companies. The bills are aimed at forcing tech companies to sell away parts of their businesses if they grow to big, disallow favoring their own bundled services in search results, and charging higher filing fees for mergers so antitrust lawyers have a bigger budget. These bills are stemming from 16 months of congressional investigations on Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. I’m not convinced we’ll see much action on these bills, but we’ll have to see.

In another bipartisan move, technology critic, Lina Khan, was selected as the Biden administration’s chair of the FTC. The Senate confirmed in…two hours.

COMMANDER X CAUGHT IN MEXICO

Hactivist, Chris “Commander X” Doyon was arrested by Mexican police. The homeless hacker had lived an elusive life by evading authorities for 10 years after performing a massive denial of service attack on computers owned and managed by the city of Santa Cruz, California. Commander X has been hanging out on Twitter, wrote a memoir, appeared on documentaries and has met a couple of journalists telling his story. Mexican police arrested Commader X on June 11th. He was arrested for the 2010 take down of Santa Cruz computers and subsequently skipped bail going on the lamb until June 11th.

FACEBOOK GETS PODCASTS…TOO

Just as we finished talking about tech companies getting too big, Facebook has been shouting from the roof tops about how they will begin offering a podcast service to their products. Facebook will be providing tools for listeners and content creators on their platform. Facebook encouraging content creators to choose their platform by providing a product called Clips that makes it easier to create sound bytes for easy sharing. Facebook is billing itself as THE place to listen to podcasts because they’ll be shareable in the big blue app like every thing else. One strange thing about FB’s licensing is that they are asking for rights to make derivative works. I swear.

Do you ever feel like every week is a test, and you’re confronted by a brand new monster of the week? It’s Thursday and tomorrow is Friday. I came off of my bi-annual weekly fast this week and I’m no longer light headed. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, Feds collect Colonial Pipeline’s crypto cash, the fruit company announced new software products and nothing new on the hardware front, and one Fastly customer caused an Internet blackout. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

FEDS COLLECT COLONIAL CRYPTO CASH

Seriously, think about it. The US government, searched the blockchain, found DarkSide’s transactions in the ledger, figured out the public keys of their digital wallets, and seized MOST of the ill-gotten BitCoins Colonial Pipeline paid to the hacker gang. The FBI recovered $2.3 million of the original $5 million ransom by somehow cracking the private keys of DarkSide’s digital wallet. I think that’s pretty damned amazing if its true. DarkSide was operating a “ransomware as a service” business and had ultimately received $90 million in BTC payments for running the scam. The $2.3 million sum is less than the original $5 million because BitCoin has been falling out of favor lately losing value from its $60,000 high to closing at $32, 000 per BTC yesterday.

NEW SOFTWARE, NO HARDWARE AT THIS YEAR’S WWDC

About this time every year, fans of a certain fruit company look towards California to be dazzled and amazed at what’s to come in the Fall. Repeating last year’s announcements, this year’s Apple WorldWide Developer Conference was held virtually at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. WWDC is for the developers, and while there were no hardware announcements there were plenty of new things for people to look forward to. Apple announced new operating systems in virtually every class with updates for iOS15, iPadOS, watchOS, and surprisingly an update macOS with the announcement of a new Monterrey operating system. A macOS update is somewhat surprising since Apple release Big Sur in December 2020. There wasn’t much to write home about which signals a point in product lifecycles that resemble evolutions more than revolutions.

There are some things to like however, FaceTime will be getting spatial audio enhancements which promise more lifelike sound during phone calls. Apple is clearly positioning FaceTime to take on applications like Zoom and others. At the height of the pandemic, FT just wasn’t up to snuff, and updates promise to put the app on par. Also coming out of the height of the pandemic is a new feature called SharePlay which allows people to have shared viewing experiences. I don’t know about your but watching Tiger King and Lovecraft Country using Netflix Party was a delight. You have to be on an FT call to make it work.

Apple is also touting you’ll be able to check in to your hotel using the Wallet app and will also be able to store your Driver’s License info in Wallet. macOS will get widgets and the Shortcuts app if you’re about that life. iPadOS will be getting better multitasking and allow remote control from a Mac! Now that is a useful feature. Developers will be getting beta editions of each product this week.

FASTLY CUSTOMER CHANGES SETTINGS AND INTERNET BLACKS OUT

Talk about vulnerabilities. Earlier this week, Internet provider, Fastly experienced a software glitch that caused a blackout on a huge swatch of Internet. Fastly isn’t naming names, but the customer made a configuration change in their service which trigger the bug. The bug then knocked out Internet service to a number of notable companies including Amazon, Reddit, The Guardian, Spotify, Hulu, BBC, CNN the New York Times, the UK Government…you get the point. Fastly’s engineers restored service after 50 minutes of discovering the bug. Even though the Internet is global in nature, and use routing to send traffic when significant parts of the network go down, most traffic on the Internet is routed by a small number of companies. This experience just showed how vulnerable we are when trusting our utility to a handful of companies.

I’ve had to use all of my super powers this week. I’m glad it’s Thursday. I’m taking tomorrow off! I can’t remember the last time I did that. I’m on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, cold cash up cryptos down, El Goog comes in the clutch with Google I/O, a Waymo driverless vehicle pulls a runner. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.

SAN JOSE APPROVES GOOGLE’S CITY IN A CITY PROJECT

I don’t know about you, but all I can think of is Racoon City. The City of San Jose, California has approved an 80-acre commercial and real estate development project its calling Downtown West. The project will consist of 4,000 housing units, 7.3 million square feet of office space, and large open space for Google employees. The project hasn’t gone on without controversy. Affordable housing advocates have protested the meager 1,000 affordable housing units given San Jose is one of the hardest places to buy a house in the country with an average price of $1.1 million. The San Jose Sharks protested the development until they were guaranteed parking at their nearby arena, and I keep thinking about that failed, fictional company town Racoon City which produced zombies.

AMAZON BUYS MGM, BUT NOT ALL OF BOND

In the latest of content distribution mega deals, Amazon has bought movie production studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM as we all know it. In a sign of too much money the deal is valued at $8.45 billion with a ‘B’. The smart money says that the deal should be valued at $6.5 billion. The key properties in the deal is of course, Bond. But Amazon might have to take their martini stirred. They’ll get 50% of a controlling interest in Bond while the Broccoli family will retain the other half. The Broccolis have retained an iron-fisted control of Bond, being directly involved in the creative direction and reach of the franchise. These people are people who know what they own. Side Note: this little purchase has raised Amazon’s anti-trust profile with anti-trust scholar and general critic Lina Khan possibly gaining a seat on the Federal Trade Commission.

EMOTION DETECTION SOFTWARE TESTED IN CHINA

Xinjiang province is known as the most surveilled municipality in the world. The province is home to 12 million ethnic Uyghurs most of whom are Muslim. Earlier this week, a Chinese software engineer said he installed camera systems and software that used emotion-detection software powered by AI. The systems have been installed in police stations around the province and have allegedly been tested on Uyghurs. Precedents like this are dangerous in my opinion. There’s something to said that machines do what they’re told, but we all know that bias has been baked in AI. Many technology companies have canceled AI projects used by US law enforcement agencies because of mistakes in the tech. Re-education centers, providing DNA to law enforcement, and emotion-detection cameras… more reasons why I have no desire to travel to China.