US Soldier Arrested for Hacking + Honey Plugin Scandal + Listener Creates Bitcoin Pizza Website

Speaker 1: I had this whole intro story written for this episode, and it concerned a 20 year old US army soldier arrested near Fort Hood, Texas recently, accused of being KyberPhantom, a hacker who leaked sensitive call records amongst that stolen data, logs of the then two presidential candidates. It's a fascinating tale. We're gonna get to it. And then I remembered something that a listener sent us after the last episode, and I think we got to start here with a little website called howmuchdidthepizzacost.com.

Speaker 2: How much did the pizza cost, Jordan?

Speaker 1: Oh, well, why don't we go ahead and refresh it and find out? So for anyone that, didn't listen to the last episode or maybe doesn't know, there's this thing called the Bitcoin pizza. It's the first commercial transaction ever done using Bitcoins. Laszlo Hanyecz, a Florida man, agreed to pay 10,000 Bitcoins for the delivery of two Papa John's pizzas. Goes on a Bitcoin forum, says, quote, I'll pay 10,000 Bitcoins for a couple of pizzas, like maybe two large ones, so I'll have some left over for the next day. British guy takes him up on the offer, bought the two pizzas in exchange for the 10,000 Bitcoins. It's the first commercial transaction using crypto. Pretty famous. People like to talk about it. And we talked about it on the show, didn't we, Scott?

Speaker 2: We sure did. And and one of our listeners and one of our Discord members Yep. Whose name is? Asher Parasini. Asher Parasini, made how much did the pizzacost.com, which you can visit at any time to see how much that gentleman paid for those two pizzas. And it is currently Oh, no. Do you wanna read it or you want me

Speaker 1: to read it? Yeah. So at the time of the original purchase,

Speaker 3: it

Speaker 1: was about 40 to $41 worth of Bitcoin. And at time of recording, I'm just gonna refresh it. That is, oh, 915,529,600 US dollars for two Papa John's pizzas. That's right. If you wanna know how much did the pizza cost,

Speaker 3: you can

Speaker 1: go to how much did the pizzacost.com, which we joked in the show. Surely, someone must have made a website where you can track how much the pizza cost, something like how much did the pizzacost.com. We were just really excited that Asher hacked this site together. It's 2025. It's a new year. It's a year of taking wacky ideas and making something out of it. So we're gonna start here with how much did the pizzacost.com, and then we're gonna work our way backwards to crazy hacks and browser plug in scandals and all manner of interesting hacked stories on this episode of Hack. Scott, how was your break?

Speaker 2: Fantastic. Glad to hear it. Fantastic. Yeah. It was really good. I actually it's been really sad because we were, for the first part of the Christmas break, we were actually down in California

Speaker 3: Oh, geez.

Speaker 2: And we were surfing in LA. And we were in the Pacific Palisades, and a lot

Speaker 3: of the

Speaker 2: places like, we stayed in Brentwood, which is currently being threatened by the fires as of date of recording. Oh, yes. And lots of the places we were, Topanga, you know, Pacific Palisades, edge of Santa Monica are all currently burning or have burnt. So heart goes out to all of those affected by it and tragic, tragic loss of a beautiful part of the world, honestly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. My partner was down in LA kinda near the end of last year as well, with a friend just sort of turn around and hanging out with folks that she she knows there. And there's a lot of, hope you're okay text messages going out over the last kind of week. And there's I know folks that listen to this show that live in that part of the world. So, you've been affected by this or you know someone who has hearts go out to you. It's it's just brutal.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What else? How was your break?

Speaker 1: Mine was fine. Comparatively speaking, it was it was it was good. Toured home, like, kinda came home, saw got to see a bunch of people, which is really, really nice. And then we came back here with just enough time to, like, couch lock, veg out, relax a little bit

Speaker 2: Recover.

Speaker 1: Recover, and get ready for what is, like, a very exciting, but a nice dense year.

Speaker 2: A lot of things going on. A lot of things like Hacked is now on YouTube.

Speaker 1: Hacked is now on YouTube. Part of the reason I wanted to open with the story of how much did the pizzacost.com top five website immediately added to bookmarks, was because we had spent, you know, a little bit of time before the break hacking together something ourselves. Just we're just trying to make things and put them out in the world and see what it does. And one of those was a YouTube page of the show. In order to do that, we didn't want to just slap the album art on it and upload it. We wanted to do something a little bit more interesting. So we worked with a collaborator and and friend, Nick, who cracked open a piece of software that I hadn't really worked with before called cavalry.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We I wrote a Python script that took the RSS feed, compiled all of the relevant information and the audio files into an Excel spreadsheet, CSV. Nick was then able to load that into cavalry. He built out a bunch of animation loops. So actually what you're seeing in the YouTube animations is real video footage that has been kind of broken down to a grayscale version of itself and then ASCII art, re rendered as ASCII art, with different characters representing different blocks of the grayscale. So so we managed to automate the process and we managed to animate a 100 back episodes. So we've been releasing one a day. I think we're on five as of time of recording. If you are a fan of the podcast, a fan of us, if you wanna help out, please visit youtube.com/@hackedpodcast. Sub, watch some of the videos, drop some likes, we would appreciate it greatly. The the URL again was youtube.com/@hackedpodcast. But we're trying to get to partner status. We need a thousand subs and and everyone helps. So if you have the ability to, we would greatly appreciate, you taking the effort. Right after you visited how much should the pizzacost.com, you can use that same tab to shoot over to YouTube. Give it a like, give it a sub, click the bell for the notifications. And, yeah, we've been putting out one a day just in the back catalog episodes. Something that some people don't know and most people don't know, I would say is that Jordan and I have been recording the more recent episodes with video and we're trying to figure out what we're going to do with that to release actually like a video version of the podcast as well as, we've been working on some, ideas and stories for some unique content pieces that will be coming in the new year. So the YouTube channel is something that we're gonna be putting a lot of effort into, so we hope you take the time to join us on that journey.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You guys did an awesome job. It looks fantastic. Like, if nothing else than to see a really, really cool visualizer made with some, like, neat newish tech, it's definitely worth checking out

Speaker 3: hacked podcast on YouTube. You'll recognize the

Speaker 1: album art. It's, you'll recognize the album art. It's a lot of fun. And, yeah, I think it could be a it I'm really excited for it. I think it's gonna be a fun project in 2025.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Same here. Same here.

Speaker 1: But in the meantime Presently. We got some stories to talk about, Scott.

Speaker 2: Nothing's happened.

Speaker 1: Nothing's nothing's occurred.

Speaker 2: The world's the same as it was, like, four weeks ago. Is it not?

Speaker 1: Totally. There's, like so so there's some more urgent news type things. But there was this one story that I bumped into over the break. Krebs on security did a bunch of really cool reporting on it. There was it was touched on by a couple other sources. It ties back to a bigger story from last year, and I wanna dig into it a little bit. If for no other reason than it was going to be the intro story of the episode replaced by the far more urgent how much did a pizzacost.com. Pretty recently, at the end of last year, a 20 year old US army soldier was arrested near Fort Hood accused of being KyberPhantom, a hacker who leaked these sensitive call records inside of which were calls for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It was a big story. Weeks earlier, another hacker, Connor Riley Mucha, known as Judish or Waifu, we've talked about him before, they all have many handles, was arrested up here in Canada. Mooka was accused of breaching over a 160 companies, including Snowflake. It's a hack we talked about on this show. They're a cloud storage service used by major corporations around the world. His attacks exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, telecom records, financial information as a big breach of 2024. According to investigators, including some really fantastic reporting from Krebs on security, there is a connection between the two of them. Before his arrest, but after Mookas, Wegenius reportedly admitted to his mother. You know that guy on the news that we keep hearing about at the heart of this giant breach and hack and arrest? I know him. He was allegedly distributing stolen data as part of the same sprawling cybercrime network. And when Mook got arrested, their paths got even more tangled up in each other. And it becomes something bigger than a story of just the two of them, as individuals. You've got this soldier trained on secure communications and a Canadian with a reputation for, I guess, extortion and cybercrime, kind of orbiting one another in this really fascinating way that reveals all this stuff about systemic weaknesses in telecom security. Mhmm. 2020 kinda kicks off. That's when Mucha, Kitchener, Ontario, is already kind of a prolific half hacker going under the name Judiche. He specializes in data breaches, extortion. He's targeted over, like, a 160 companies by that point, allegedly. Major names, AT and T, Ticketmaster, and, as we mentioned, Snowflake. Then you've got Cameron. He's this tech savvy Minnesota native, joins the US army as a communications specialist. He's managing radio signals and network infrastructure stationed in South Korea. The fascinating part of this story is, oh, there's a soldier doing this on his spare time. For anyone that doesn't remember the twenty twenty four snowflake breach, a cybercrime group called UNC five five three seven, starts targeting accounts on Snowflake, this cloud storage platform. They exploited stolen credentials obtained through an info stealer malware to access a trough of corporate and government data. Mucha was allegedly the primary orchestrator. He accessed the sensitive information, outsourced some of the stolen data's distribution to associates, like, allegedly, Wegenius.

Speaker 2: Wegenius. The name.

Speaker 1: With genius. Write the name. It's got with genius. Write it. It's got genius in it.

Speaker 2: He's destined for something big.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Is he too a genius what Waluigi is to Luigi? That was it.

Speaker 3: And

Speaker 1: then that's not even meant as a dig. It's more just an observation of the wa prefix.

Speaker 2: I I like your I like your assessment.

Speaker 1: I appreciate that. So news of Mooka, the Canadian's arrest goes live, and Cameron Weginius under allegedly this alias, KhyberPhantom, makes a pretty bold move, which is where we start to see the connections between these two. He goes on breach forums, and he claims to have a bunch of AT and T call logs tied to Donald Trump, the then vice president. He put does a post that says, in the event that you do not reach out to us at AT and T, American news network, all presidential government logs will be leaked. It was signed with the hashtag, hashtag free waifu, in reference to Mooka's recent arrest. Wegenius then posted what he claimed was a data schema from the NSA, via AT and T and started, like, offering, like, Verizon push to talk call logs. He's just he's he's on a sales push push essentially after Mooka gets arrested. Marketer. He's marketing for this launch.

Speaker 2: He's a he's a he's a wegenius marketer.

Speaker 1: He's a wegenius marketer. So in November 26, Krebs on security, which is kind of where I started reading about this, identified that this Kyber Phantom character, this, Waluigi of marketing, for this larger operation is likely being a US army soldier. Despite some efforts to delete pretty incriminating Facebook content, Krebs' digital forensics tied Wegenius' activity to his real identity. There were telegraph messages, where Wegenius was claiming to maintain a botnet that had some connection to this. There were just small little strings that they started to pull on, bringing us to this moment now and why we're talking about it. December 2024, right before the break, the arrests. Cameron with genius is arrested near Fort Cavazos, Texas, charged with unlawful transfer of confidential phone records. It's a fascinating story about these two guys of the same generation, but from two totally different backgrounds, a Canadian and an American soldier, who found each other in this ecosystem of online sites and worked together. There's a real sense that Wegenius was, like, pretty upset when Mooka got arrested. Maybe potentially because of it what it foreshadowed for him, but also just because these guys worked together. They were doing this giant operation together, and it started to fall apart. It's a fascinating story.

Speaker 2: Well, the did did his bragging to his mother lead to what got him arrested?

Speaker 1: I didn't see any evidence of that. The only reference I could find to Wegenius's mother was that original piece of reporting from Krebs. I keep bringing him up because a lot of different platforms covered this story. There's a ton of other sources about Mucha and a bit about Wegenius, but he seemed to be the guy who went to the source and found that, connection. And that specific part of it, I'll flag, isn't a direct quote. It's alluded to that there was a reference, but the the text itself, I don't think was provided. So I don't think there's any evidence that his how do I put this? His mom narc'd on him. But, in retrospect, it was

Speaker 2: See, the thing the thing for me is, like, I feel like we could build a, like, a wall of hubris. And just, like, all of the the cyber criminals that get brought down not by their own, like, misdeeds and, like, their, you know, inability to cover their tracks, but actually just get brought down by bragging about it.

Speaker 1: I remember the one that always pops into my mind was an episode from last year, Alexander Zhukov, the self proclaimed king of ad fraud. Yes. Can you guess what he got taken down for? Like, it's those kinds of things where

Speaker 3: Totally.

Speaker 1: You're, like, a couple mil deep into a thing, and there's no scent of law enforcement nearby. It's like, I I would imagine that the the people who do this persistently for decades are the folks that are able to suppress those instincts, to not and, again, Wegenius was was picking fights. There's a cybersecurity researcher who who spoke a bit about this, Allison Nixon from unit two twenty one b, who she had a great quote on this. It was, anonymously extorting the president VP as a member of the military is a bad idea, but it's an even worse idea to harass people who specialize in de anonymizing criminals. And that's what you see in the tone of this is, assuming Wegenius is Kyro Phantom, he was bringing a real, like, Internet gaming shit poster dialogue style of, like, kinda like scrapping over the Internet to a Breach forums post about, like, very, very, very high level serious cybercrime. And if nothing else, that's not a good idea on, like, an emotional level. It's like you you're just you're bothering them. Like, that that mode of communicating is to bother other people, and maybe don't bother them because you are doing international crime, allegedly.

Speaker 2: You're inciting Yeah. Your own downfall.

Speaker 1: A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating story that we were gonna open on, except

Speaker 2: We didn't. The pizzas. The pizzas, Scott. 10,000 Bitcoin for pizzas looks like

Speaker 1: We're just gonna keep looping on that all year long.

Speaker 2: Looping on it. Yeah. It's just you can't get away from it.

Speaker 1: No.

Speaker 2: $1,000,000,000, round it up to 1,000,000,000.

Speaker 3: I feel

Speaker 2: like that's We'll

Speaker 1: round it up to 1,000,000,000.

Speaker 2: We'll round

Speaker 3: it

Speaker 2: up to 1,000,000,000. Where should we go next? I feel like one of the big things that I saw a lot over the Christmas was the fall of honey.

Speaker 1: Yes. I think we gotta talk about that one. Have you ever used honey? No. Because Oh, I would never.

Speaker 2: This is falling into those, like, there's another another story that broke over the the holidays is kinda related to this. It was somebody leaked a list of common applications on your cell phone that are actually selling your personal tracking information, like your location data.

Speaker 1: Oh, sure.

Speaker 2: So it's like I feel like Honey was the OG of that. You know? Like, the second I saw Honey, I was like, this is just a company that's stealing my data and selling it. And I was like, I'm not gonna install this. Like, it it's demanding access to all of my browsing history, my live browsing pages, all this stuff. I was like, I know what this is doing. Yeah. And I was like, I'm not getting it. And now they're in trouble. Surprise.

Speaker 1: They they sure are. They were it's interesting because my joke we make Internet content, and we read ads sometimes. And my joke whenever I'm talking to people about my job is all just, like, randomly pepper in a reference to, like, brought to you by some drop ship mattress company that I won't say. But I feel like Honey was really the pioneer of that. Like, Honey was one of the first major brands that was sponsoring online creators, and that's why we all know about them even if we didn't use it. They were huge in that ecosystem. And it makes the nature of the alleged fraud all the more fascinating because they weren't like, to your point, they they they might have been stealing customer data, but that's not why they're in trouble.

Speaker 3: No. They're in trouble for what they were doing to that ecosystem of creators

Speaker 2: that they were in a very real sense,

Speaker 1: ecosystem of creators that they were in a very real sense, kind of pioneers of.

Speaker 2: Yes. I feel like this is gonna open up like a philosophical conversation about as content creators and content creation grows, as this ecosystem gets bigger, how much liability do the content creators have for their partners and advertisers? Like, you saw this with FTX. Like, Larry David got sued over the FTX scandal, and it's like he was just in a TV commercial. He was an actor, paid an acting fee to show up and read a lines. And next thing you know, they're like, you are part of the problem. Like I'm suing, I'm naming you in my, in my lawsuit because you convinced me to open an FTX account.

Speaker 1: A YouTube creator called Mega Lag posted this giant YouTube kind of essay breaking down what Honey is allegedly doing. It resulted in sort of a cascade of other content creators posting about it. For anyone that doesn't know, Honey is a essentially a coupon browser extension. The idea goes, you install Honey, you go to a website to buy something, you click a little button, and it goes and finds the best coupon code on the Internet. What Honey is being accused of doing, kinda has two different parts to it. If anyone's interested in this, the mega lag video is really good. It's worth watching. Suffice it to say, there's a bunch of content creators who are now suing PayPal, Honey's owner. Honey hasn't been found guilty, but we'll dig into why. When a content creator forwards someone to a website to go buy something, typically, they get a cut. It's a pretty big part. Like, we don't sell talk about products on the show, but that's a huge part of, like, the Internet content creator economy is just forwarding people to sites where they buy something and then the content creator gets cut. The the first of the two things that Honey was allegedly doing is stealing that affiliate revenue. So they're paying content creators to tell people how great Honey is. And then if at any point in the future, the viewer of that, you know, piece of content is installed Honey, and they get a direction from that original content creator saying, yes. I am gonna buy this based on your recommendation. Honey, at the very last second, does something called last click attribution where they scoop away the, money that would have been going to that original content creator, and they claim it themselves. This is the first major part of what Mega Lag was talking about in the video as Honey is doing that was a little bit This most people didn't know that for years, they were using this plugin that whether or not they clicked on the coupon code, whether or not they used anything, like, the second it was installed, all of that referred, like, money that should have been going to those content creators was now going to them. The second part of it had more to do with what the promise of the product actually is, which is that we go and we find the absolute best coupon code on the Internet for you. That's the reason you install it. There's a little bit of a deal between the user and Honey. And it turned out, that Honey had something called a partner store system where brands could go directly to Honey and say and I'm we're rounding off a lot of detail here. Don't serve them the best coupon, please.

Speaker 2: Serve them this this coupon, and we'll give you 5% kickback.

Speaker 1: Provide a different coupon for less money. Provide our preferred coupon. I'm guessing this is on a case by case basis between the companies and Honey. But between the fact that Honey was engaged in this last click attribution system and the fact that they were selling people on finding them the best coupon code. But if you paid Honey, they wouldn't. That's sort of why the whole thing melted down. And now you have a bunch of people suing Honey.

Speaker 2: A bunch of high profile people. Really high profile people.

Speaker 1: I think Legal Eagle, if anyone is familiar with his stuff, it's great. It's good content. You should watch it. Mhmm. Marquez Brownlee posted a big long video about it. I think Linus tech tips, these aren't folks necessarily involved in the lawsuits, but they've all posted some piece of content saying, boy, sure does suck what Honey did.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It does. We, we here at Hatch, we we only read ads. We have not had any kind of deal like this, but I could see that being a massive thorn in in someone's side, especially when so much of their audience, so much of their their, like, credibility went to pushing something. Yes. And then to have all of the rewards of that execution to be taken away is ad fraud, king of ad fraud. How expensive you guys? Allegedly.

Speaker 1: It's alleged for ad fraud. Alleged alleged ad fraud. It's a lot of allegeds in this episode. One thing that isn't alleged that we think I can just talk about, trying to work through stuff that happened over the break. Are you familiar with a technology product called I wanna make sure I'm pronouncing this right. Siri?

Speaker 2: Do you want my phone to go off? Is that what you're

Speaker 3: trying to do?

Speaker 1: I'm trying to avoid everyone's phone going off by saying

Speaker 3: it wrong.

Speaker 1: Apple's intelligent assistant

Speaker 2: Yes. Siri. One that's on your phone and watch and laptop.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I

Speaker 2: think it's too easy.

Speaker 1: S I r I. I think I've avoided triggering it both times.

Speaker 2: I've I I have noticed over the break, I, was doing some research on some smart home stuff, and a lot of it talks about Amazon's smart home system, which has the name Alex, and and I noticed in all of the content, everybody that reads that word, they, like, dub it down 40 decibels so that it doesn't trigger all their devices. So so I think we have to do the same thing here. It's s Erie. S Erie. S Erie.

Speaker 1: Well, Apple has agreed to a $95,000,000 settlement with users whose conversations were captured inadvertently by a voice assistant whose name we will not mention and potentially overheard by human employees. Proposed settlement, it's been reported on a little bit. I think Bloomberg broke the story. Could be paying, US based Apple product owners for up to five Siri enabled devices $20 a pop. Still requires approval by a judge, but it's a it's a pretty big story. It's not all iPhones, but it's a very large subset of US based people. Because it's iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, iMacs. Like, their whole product line has this thing woven into it, $20 a pop.

Speaker 2: $20. 95,000,000 to Apple is like a rounding error. The currency fluctuations between European and US dollars on a daily basis are way more than 95,000,000 in their in their books. So it's it's I would call this negligible, which is funny. Only a 100,000,000 negligible to them.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Totally. It's you you could call it a slap on the wrist, but you would notice a slap on the wrist.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 1: It's a class action lawsuit brought against Apple. There was a report in The Guardian in 2019 which alleged that, third party contractors hired by Apple could, quote, regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex. That is pulled from the original, Guardian report, when they were working on Siri's quality control specifically. Siri is supposed to be triggered by a deliberate, like, wake up. Oh, I just triggered her. It's it's supposed to be triggered by a wake word like I just used. The whistleblower in this Guardian report that led to this lawsuit alleged that, like, accidental triggers are extremely common. Something the one that I liked was the sound of a zipper. Sounds enough like saying that word that it could wake her up, and then suddenly you have whatever audio it's receiving being, kicked on over to Apple where it is, in some cases, allegedly handled out to third party contractors. And Apple might notice if they lose this lawsuit. They might not notice if they lose this lawsuit.

Speaker 2: They probably don't notice. I think as long as their, stuff with the Federal Trade Commission goes well, they'll be just happy.

Speaker 1: I and I I bet it does, and I bet they will for a bunch of reasons. Why don't we

Speaker 2: Why don't we kick it over? I think we kick it out.

Speaker 1: We kick it out. Oasis. And then when we come back, I think we've got a big old location data breach to talk about, As well as just a really really weird story set into school. Starting some new isn't just hard. It can be downright terrifying. You put a lot of work into a thing. You're not entirely sure it's gonna work out. You're taking a huge leap of faith. I've started a few things. Now I know I was right for believing in, you know, the idea, the product, despite all of those fears and hesitations. But boy, does it sure help when you have a partner like Shopify on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 of all e commerce in The US. From household names like, well, hacked podcasts merch, to brands just getting started, you can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Did I mention that that iconic purple shop pay button is used by millions of businesses around the world? I don't know why I wouldn't. I should. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less carts sort of getting abandoned in the parking lot and more sales for you. It's time to turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/hacked. Go to shopify.com/hacked. One more time, that's shopify.com/hacked. Study

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Speaker 1: And we're back.

Speaker 2: And we're back. Here we are. Learning together.

Speaker 1: Speaking of learning. Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, just before the break. It was it was December 19 on a on a a sleepy little Monday. By a four three vote, they approved something called Unbound Academy. It's a private school serving grades four through eight. And I wanted to talk about it because they approved a fully online AI based instruction. So there's gonna be kids throughout, Arizona getting taught pretty much entirely by chatbots.

Speaker 2: It's it's already running in Texas, which is how it got approved.

Speaker 1: So cool. Love this.

Speaker 2: So they're yeah. So a two two hour learning model. I think they're looking at going to Arkansas and Utah as well for this, which is, like, great. Why not? Why not? But but but it's, apparently, it's largely AI driven. The, the curriculum is constructed, but it uses a lot of Khan Academy, IXL, other like online resources for the actual training pieces, which is good. There's still

Speaker 3: humans in those. If you've ever done a Khan Academy thing,

Speaker 2: which I have, humans in those. If you've ever done a Khan Academy thing, which I have,

Speaker 3: they're pretty good.

Speaker 1: Yeah. They're fine. Pretty good. Yeah. No. So, yeah, like you said, they use something called a two hour learning model. Yeah. Kids are getting two hours of, like, traditional academic instruction daily, and they've taken a bunch of content from things like Khan Academy, IXL, and they've processed it through an AI system. It seems this is based on my initial reading of this, proposal. And then they have AI's analyzing students' responses, the amount of time they spend on tasks, even, they describe them as emotional cues in some of their documentation. There's a private school in Texas run by and bound

Speaker 2: The Alpha School.

Speaker 1: The Alpha School.

Speaker 3: The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School.

Speaker 1: The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha School. The Alpha It's basically just trying to figure out, like, how how much time can a student not be in front of a teacher and instead be talking to a chatbot that was trained on real teachers through services like Khan Academy. I don't really know what to do with this story

Speaker 2: What?

Speaker 1: Other than to say I'm very infrequently I I don't feel, like, doomer ed. Like, I don't feel black pilled or anything by tech stories all that often. I think it's a it's a slow march, and it is what we make of it. But, man, there's something about kids in a classroom getting taught by chatbots that just really bums right the fuck out. I don't like it one little bit.

Speaker 2: Well, so so so this is an interesting one for me because I'm surrounded. Like, a lot of my in laws

Speaker 1: are all teaching.

Speaker 2: They're all education people. And when COVID hit, we had really intense philosophical conversations about learning. And and for me, like and this is gonna be putting a foot in the risky category, but it's like, there's been nothing disruptive in the educational space for a long time. You know, the educational space is is a public service that's largely controlled by massive, powerful unions that any disruption to it would affect their membership base. So they don't want major disruptions. I can see your the look of and comfort coming on your face, but but but but in reality, that system hasn't evolved much. It's been the same since our parents, and our parents' parents were were students. And and and in reality, we know way more about the way that people learn. Different children learn in different ways. Different children recall in different ways. And and and the system hasn't been really truly modified at a systemic level to affect that. So it's like I am actually a large fan of us disrupting and evolving the education system because, like, it didn't work for me. I was like a high performing student that got good grades, but, like, I didn't need to be in class for those grades class. I was a disruptor in the class. I affected other kids learning where if they could give me, if you'd given me something like this, two hours a day to just brutally consume information, I would have loved it. I would have crushed it. And I would have had the rest of my day to go about my pursuits and hobbies and activities and cybercrime.

Speaker 1: Sure. Doing crimes. I hear you. I hear you.

Speaker 2: So so so for me, it's like I I'm I'm more pro on this issue than I am dystopian about it. I think that there there there should be that the education system does need some disruption to to be better suited to handle all of the different types of learners in it because I feel like it's set structured for, like, the lowest common denominator baseline student, where I think that we see now that there are so many different ways to teach and distractions and kids that have anxieties and and different different things that impact their learning. You know, not even now. Like I would say that I've carried that into my professional career. Like my most effective hours are between 9PM and 1AM. So it's like I save all of my like hardest, most brain tasks till till 9PM at night. And like, I happily work those hours because that's when I'm most effective at writing, you know, doing advanced thought, things like that because my brain slows down enough for me to focus on it. And the same thing went for school. Like, I was never a great student. I had good grades, but I was never a great student.

Speaker 1: The larger point that a one size fits all educational system for kids isn't good is, like, couldn't agree with you more. I think we've known for a really long time that trying to fit, heck, 30 kids into the same box doesn't work. And then you scale that to the level of a school, a school district, it kids fall through the cracks. And hopefully, they're shrewd enough to fall in kind of the right direction. The idea that there hasn't been disruption, I'm fascinated by that. Because on one hand, yes. But that word gets used in different ways. Right? Like, there's the business way that we talk about disruption. And then so maybe it isn't disruption. Maybe it's natural evolution. Mhmm. Teachers Google things and use AI in their own, like, work processes in ways that are completely unrecognizable to when I

Speaker 3: went to school. And there

Speaker 1: were things teachers doing that were completely unrecognizable when my parents went to school. And there were things teachers doing that were completely unrecognizable when my parents went to school. I'm not sure that a move fast and break things approach to pedagogy, like in situ with kids is like, I don't know that we I don't know that that is the mode for how that progress should take place. I think it I think it should be more incremental.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But, like, the one of the things, like so in in Canada, the province of Ontario Yeah. Had spent ten years building essentially an online content delivery education platform for students to be able to take courses from wherever they wanted to, etcetera, etcetera. That system was never implemented, even though it existed for ten years until COVID hit. The second COVID hit, they turned it on instantly because they're like, well, we have a solution to this new problem of kids not being able to come to the classrooms. And it had spent ten years on the LAM because the unions wouldn't allow it to happen because it meant it might affect educational assistants, teachers, and other roles that were unionized, which causes essentially an inhibitor to evolution.

Speaker 1: I I totally hear what you're saying about the existing system slowing down that kind of evolution or progress. I don't know that a race to reduce costs using this technology is For sure. Is the is is the way to get over that hurdle, which you've correctly identified as a hurdle. But the last thing, I wanna bring this up because I think this matters so much. I also bristled at parts of my educational history.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Like, there were things that I was really good at, and then there were parts of it that I I wasn't great at. Some of it had to do with authority of teachers. Some of it had to do, as with all students, with other students. I think that if there had been a system that someone could have just said, you know what? Let's let him avoid all of that friction. Let's let him just he just talks to a teacher for two hours and the rest of the time he's just just using this software. That's this nice and it go wonderful software. The bots talking. It knows everything. It's training all the best experts.

Speaker 2: There's videos here that explain videos. That's great.

Speaker 1: I would be such a like, this is just me I'm talking about. I think I would be, like, deeply stunted in a bunch of ways. Because having to learn I'm an only child. Like, I had to learn to be around other kids.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I had to learn to talk and engage with adults that weren't my parents and, like, butt up against them. Like, it's something about that. It might be that the educational content could be just as good. It's that. I'm like, oh, I that that one stresses me out.

Speaker 2: I I don't disagree with you. Like like like, when you come to the realization that the educational system is like a socialization system as much as it is an education system. But the but the the thing for me is is like, I think that that's a case by case basis. Like, I like, I get that you were an only child and it like, and I'm not saying that we should like, this is the thing

Speaker 1: is like No. You're not defending it. You're not defending this specific thing.

Speaker 2: No. But I like I like the idea of advancements in educational delivery because I think that that truly people don't understand, or like people do understand, they're just not adapting for it. But but the learning models that work for you might not work for me and learning models that work for me won't work for Johnny. And that's fine. It just the system should be able to adapt to it. Like like, one of the things that gets me is, like, the removal of, like high like high performing students, like IB and AP education programs and stuff. Like like if you are a shooting star of a student, the system should have a runway for you. And I hate that the those runways seem to be going further and further away. Like, they seem to be removing more of them. And I just don't think that's great for society. I think that the all stars in society, the people that were born with the genetic ability to do highly active like, highly academic functions should be harnessed and utilized by society. Like, you know, there there are gonna be a large creator of utility in society, and they need to be identified early and adapted. And anyway, I just I have strong strong opinions

Speaker 3: on this.

Speaker 1: No. I find it fascinating. This feels like, I mean, I'll there's two things there. There's what I think this is, which is a a frantic rush towards austerity at all measure at at any cost, and, boy, we can sure replace a lot of buildings and human beings with bots. And whether or not those human beings have organized themselves in in in a labor context, it's like, oh, I don't think that's good. I don't think this is where we find that those austerity measures. But systems like this, I feel like I had teachers who, again, figured out the ways I don't think that being exceptional is like a single stat slider in a video game. It's like, there's a myriad of ways people can be great at things. 100% agree. And it was teachers recognizing the things that I was good at that made me different that had a really big impact on me.

Speaker 2: Then you had good teachers.

Speaker 1: I did have good teachers.

Speaker 2: I would say that I had the opposite.

Speaker 1: I had some shit teachers. I had some really shitty teachers, but it only takes one. Yeah. Agreed. There's there is a world in which and I know t I I'll have a lot of teacher friends, and they're using AI in ways that to me, is, like, interesting and compelling. Like, they're just using it the way that we use it as a tool. It can expedite certain processes.

Speaker 2: Well, knowing a lot of teachers and seeing them plan coursework, I would say that they're just doing what the AIs are doing here. Like, they're putting a Khan Academy video up in their classroom and being like, watch this and learn how to do fractions.

Speaker 1: In a very brief small part of their job

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: They're able to use these tools. But to say that the tool is then doing their job is like, nope. Yeah. That's a that's a bad conclusion based on the previous point.

Speaker 2: Agree. Agree. I I I do think that the like, for me, I don't see this as a race to austerity. I don't see this as a way to get rid of bodies in a building. I see this as a as another form of delivery. Like, you gotta imagine like, say there's an exceptional athletic student who's been identified and he's gonna be the world's greatest lacrosse player. But his becoming the world's greatest lacrosse player requires physical training, sport training, sports specific training, all these other things that consumes way more time. And if he was gonna be spending seven hours sitting in a classroom like you and I did, he would never achieve that goal. Where here, they can give him a concentrated version of his or their curriculum. They can learn the the academic things, which allows them to go pursue the other goals that they're gifted at. And to me, like, I see that as more of where this is. It's like, opening up time and space to pursue greatness in other regions while still meeting the barriers and bars that society holds as norms for educational and pedagogy.

Speaker 1: It's hopeful. It's Yeah. I sure wouldn't have wanna got taught this way.

Speaker 2: I I would have liked it. The the thing for me that this would have like, even from my personal story, like, as of grade 10, I went down to a three hour school day, and I worked the rest of the day. Like, I worked in tech. I built educational online course delivery systems for universities, and it was like you know, that was in when I was, like, 14, 15 years old. So it's like this, to me, would have been great. Like, if I could have got my entire school day done by 10:10 o'clock in the morning and work from ten till six, I would have been ecstatic.

Speaker 1: But I I I guess this isn't a story about a tool available to a a tall poppy or whatever it is. This is a story about school boards seeing if they can administer this at scale with no mind towards whether or not this is gonna be good for kids.

Speaker 2: Totally. Well, the

Speaker 1: To me, that's where it feels like a it it's not about a custom built learning opportunity for a specific kid and it's like, what can we get away with?

Speaker 2: Yeah. See, this is why you're the pest it's weird that I get to find myself as the optimist role in this podcast so often, but for me, it's an optimism. Like even right in their in their statements, they say that the the theory is is that you spend less time on your traditional curriculum

Speaker 3: to

Speaker 2: free your rest of your days up for life skills stuff, which they also train, be it financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, creative problem solving, and other like what I would consider to be more exciting topics than the traditional like pedagogy of, of school. So, so for me, I'm optimistic about this. I, I like, I think this is, it could be a huge failure. And if it is, at least we tried. There's more lost in indecision than a wrong decision in my eyes. So I'm happy I'm happy people are trying new things and looking at different things to to better adapt and suit for every child so that every child gets the best quality education for them.

Speaker 1: We're agreed there. K. I'm hopeful. I'm always hopeful. I'm optimistic.

Speaker 2: The, while we're while we're ranting about AI, I did see some less well, in this almost in the exact same similar light, you know, optimism, pessimism. The Zuck put out a story. It might have been in his interview on Joe Rogan. I haven't watched it yet. I don't know if you've seen it yet. I really need to watch it just from like a social understanding, cultural perspective. But apparently they're finding AIs to be as good as most of their mid level engineers. I saw this. And they're looking at ways to, essentially integrate AI into their engineering core and reduce their headcount on engineers.

Speaker 1: It's a wild thing not to be trying to do. It's very intuitive that he would try to do. It's a wild thing to say publicly.

Speaker 2: Very much so. To to to me to me, I actually think it's not, like having used AI to facilitate development. It's like, like I have said it before on the show, it's like a junior programmer. Like I'm like, write me a function that takes these inputs and outputs these things and checks these condition cases and it's like, here it is. It's like, that would have taken a junior programmer two hours to do, and you just did it in fifteen seconds.

Speaker 1: Sure. I guaranteed all of their existing engineers are already using these tools.

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: It's a fat hi. I'm just curious why a person would go well, I guess I'm not really curious. I He has shareholders, Jordan.

Speaker 2: That's why he I

Speaker 1: was gonna say. I was like, I I know the answer to this, and it's that you care more about pissing off or rather making happy shareholders than existing, engineers and employees. And so you go on Joe Rogan, you say that. Yeah. That was a fascinating one is, quote, we will get to a point where all the code in our apps and the AI it generates will also be written by a engineers, AI engineers instead of people engineers. And this is shortly after Meta's, call it failed rollout of AI bots inside of Instagram, I think, primarily was where it was. They had a series of these AI generated personas, and they were labeled to their credit as AI, that I think were largely there for, like, data gathering purposes, like, just seeing how people interact with different pieces of content, different demographics interact with certain types of

Speaker 2: Sure. Just data mining.

Speaker 1: Data mining for lack of a better word. So it's it's a fascinating one two punch of that story followed immediately by this.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And then followed immediately by the, OpenAI whistleblower being found dead in their apartment. K. What happened there? So there's, some some engineer who'd been three or four years at OpenAI left

Speaker 1: Oh, jeez.

Speaker 2: And didn't like what was happening in the for profit conversion of the of OpenAI. It started as a not for profit Yeah. Converting into a for profit entity. And, this young engineer left and was perceiving themselves as a whistleblower. I don't know all the details on it, but, they were found dead in their apartment. So, you know, I'm not sure if it's a Boeing esque situation, allegedly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But OpenAI whistleblower, Sushir Balaji. It's a young man's family believes he was murdered. Yeah. Wow. So there's some reporting on this in the San Francisco standard. His mother has started publicly claiming not only was her, her son killed as opposed to dying by suicide, which is what the medical examiner at the city ruled is the cause cause of death. But that yeah. You you can assume where it goes from there. That's,

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: That's a rough one.

Speaker 2: Yeah. There you go. Real dystopian. Real dystopian. Yeah. And I think he was blowing the whistle on where a lot of the datasets had come from and, like, what the training data they've been using was. So Brutal. Which I think is gonna be the the haunted closet in the AI ecosystem.

Speaker 1: I think you're dead. Right? I think that we're gonna be untangling that for years. And it's kinda just this race to, like, how woven into the world, economy can this technology become before we realized it's built on a foundation of

Speaker 2: Stolen.

Speaker 1: Stole stolen shit. Yeah. And a big debate about whether or not that is stealing, which I will say that I is a fascinating

Speaker 2: I used OpenAI the other day to so there's, like I don't know if I should even say this, but but it's like open AI. There's a lot of like market research companies that produce port reports on things like, you know, an industry sector spec like like breakdown and, you know, be it marketing, finance, trending, you know, all these things. So there's these large research groups that make these large reports that they then charge large amounts of money for. It's like we've spent months putting compile of, like, highly intelligent people doing research and compiling this data and putting out this report. It's $5,000 if you want to read it. And it's like, okay. I asked OpenAI to summarize one for me that I did not have a copy of. Actually, it started giving me bullet points about the report in other questions. So I was

Speaker 1: Oh, you didn't feed it the report. You just asked it if it knew about the content inside of a very specific like, an a dated And then like, real

Speaker 2: And then I asked it I asked it if it could give me a very extensive long form summarization of the report.

Speaker 1: Leave out no detail.

Speaker 2: Leave out no detail.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And it did. And I was like, this is a $5,000 piece of information that I'm pretty sure they don't have a license to be giving to me on my $9 a month AI plan. And No. It just gave me $5,000 worth of information summarized by AI, so I didn't even have to read it. Didn't even have to upload it. So maybe somebody else uploaded it and was like summarize this for me, and then it became part of its knowledge base. But that's another like, if I'm if I'm if I'm one of those companies, I'm throwing up the flags right now being, like, hold up.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Especially if oh, there's a really wonderful piece of, like, investigative journalism to be done there of because I I'm sure that whatever that report was, there's other writing on the open Internet about that report, and you could imagine it having parsed that kind of content. But what I'm curious about is if there's anything in there that is only contained inside of the original report, will it produce stuff that is hidden behind the wall that is this $5,000 document that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce blah blah blah blah. Because if so, we found another one.

Speaker 2: Yes. I I think I think we found another one.

Speaker 1: Oh, no. Oh, that's really interesting. I'm super curious. Off mic, we're gonna talk about what that report

Speaker 2: is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: But if you found any content that shouldn't be indexed inside of an artificial intelligence, or you have any other, fascinating story that you wanna share with us, you should get get it at us at hotlinehacked. Why don't we?

Speaker 2: Hotlinehacked.com.

Speaker 1: Hotlinehacked.com. Let's go throw it in here. Why not? Because I'm curious about this. If anyone out there

Speaker 2: Maybe maybe I'll do that story as as maybe I'll have an AI make a version of my voice and I'll be on my Hotline Hacked episode.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Throw it in. Yes. Send it through the email. Oh, Oh, that's that's a good one.

Speaker 2: Alright.

Speaker 1: Okay. Why don't we wrap it up with just like a just like a big old data breach? Sure. Let's do a big old just a nice

Speaker 2: classic

Speaker 3: Classic. Nice

Speaker 1: data breach. Just a classic one. Yeah. This one's fascinating because it's locations. Extremely, extremely specific locations. It's great. You can put them on a map. You can see where stuff is that you shouldn't. Gravy Analytics, a major location data broker, in The States suffered a data bridge exposing location data of millions of people. The alleged hacker published samples of stolen data from consumer apps, fitness apps, dating apps, transit platforms. There were tens of millions of location points revealing where, individual users of these platforms live, work, travel. The the breach occurred. There was a misappropriated key in Gravy Analytics Amazon cloud environment. January 4, the hacker contacted Gravy Analytics directly, saying, hey. We got several terabytes of data. We got it. It was posted on a Russian cybercrime forum. 30,000,000 location data points leaked so far, including sensitive sites. To say that the location of the White House was leaked or the Kremlin is a little bit silly, but there are sure people in those locations. Some pretty high risk stuff. And again, these are dating apps in some cases. Information from Tinder, Grindr, information from Flight Radar.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Though these companies are, denying direct ties to Gravy, the original aggregator of this stuff, the data sure seems to be in there.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So funny enough, I actually talked about this exact data hack earlier when I mentioned all of the apps that track data started getting on Firebase. Oh, with Honey. It was because of this.

Speaker 4: No shit.

Speaker 3: It was

Speaker 2: because of this data breach that they'd linked all the apps up and they could figure it out. Yeah. I could see Gravy Analytics not being the person that they have the licensing agreements with, but I'm sure Gravy Analytics licenses that information from whomever they have the licensing agreements with. So

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. There's a they they rely on something I found this interesting. It's called bid stream data, which I hadn't heard of this term before. It's data that's exposed during ad auctions. So the vulnerability seems to have been where if those sites have ads inside of them. The auctioning process, I guess, is how they

Speaker 2: Grabs the grabs the location data.

Speaker 1: And that seems to be sort of where it came from. There's a lot missing in that explanation, but it seems to be rooted in the ad side of things, which again brings us back

Speaker 2: to ad fraud. King of ad fraud.

Speaker 1: To to ad fraud. Friend of the show, Alex Zuboff.

Speaker 3: He's not a friend of the show.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a fascinating story. And just, like, it we hit a point where we kinda just stop talking about, like, more data got leaked. Like, there needs to be more to it than that. But this one was interesting, I think, just because of the location side of things. Mhmm. And there's sure gonna be more of those this year.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think, like, we talked extensively about location based advertising in a previous episode of which I cannot recall the number of. Watch for it on the YouTube channel. Youtube.com/adhikepodcast. The the the this to me is like a whole thing. You know? Like, it's I don't think people fully grasp how much advertisers know about them. Mhmm. And that's that's speaking is somebody who works with this data in advertising. So

Speaker 1: It's truly dizzying. Yeah. And a lot of it is I think there's a lot of people that have a sense of, like, you know what? I use this app, and I don't pay any money for this app. So presumably, my data is being used to pay for this app. And I think a lot of people understand that. A shit ton of people don't understand that, and that sucks. I everyone should understand that if you were using a lot of these services that you are basically paying with your your private data and that that's the deal you're making. Yeah. And that deal was unpacked across 300 pages of terms and conditions that you certainly didn't read because no one can read all of that shit.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: But that is the deal you're making.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And, like, the behavioral analysis on your locations, like like, how much do I wanna unpack here? So, like, if you have location services on your phone, you have one of these apps that tracks your information and sells it to advertising data brokers.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: A little bit of analysis tells them where your home is because the device is often there, especially overnight. Then I can tie that to census data and others like statistical information to figure out, you know, what the average household income probably is. I can look at your frequent stops, like, you know so the the the thing is is like the the Sure. The double edged blade of location information is that it's not permanent, like it's not real time tracking you. So it's only when you get a ping. So like if you have notifications on on your apps and you have an app that has a location tracker in it, they're pinging you notifications all the time to make you open the app so that they could take a location ping.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: It has nothing to do with, like, just driving you to the content, but it also to to to get another ping for your location. So it's it's it's a dirty business, and it's very valuable for us as marketers. But for privacy and other things like that, maybe not the greatest.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's fascinating. I would have assumed that that deluge of, hey. Do you remember that this app exists? I won't name one. But that kind of pop up that I just sort of systematically turn off every single time I get a new device. Yeah. I think of them as being we're just trying to boost our Content. User hours. Yeah. We're just trying to get people in this thing looking at it because some subs of them will either watch the content or click on the ad or use the service or pay for the thing. A little, hey, quickly give us a GPS ping so we can check out where you're at. Assuming you've enabled that you, on your phone. That's interesting. Yeah. We've And I hadn't thought about it. And that's a, yeah.

Speaker 2: I know back in the day, like, a lot of these were sports apps, like getting updates for games that are underway and things like that. Like, those updates essentially did the same thing. Same with, like, weather apps because you always have location services on for a weather app. So if you're using a free a free weather app full of ads, chances are your location data is being sold on you. Like there's it's like a

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's a it's an interesting expose waiting to happen because I don't think I think as much as you and I take it for granted and probably listeners of the show, I don't think the general public knows it.

Speaker 1: I think people have post Cambridge Analytica a better sense that the, like are they listening to us through our phones? No. It's more insidious. But, like, that that whole question and the advertising and just side of the of the Internet essentially are like, this is the same thing. If you're trying to understand the degree to which you are tracked and monitored on the Internet and how the advertising ecosystem of the world works, it's like you were trying to understand the same thing. Because there's not really much other reason to do it. No. Other than to try and sell people shit. Like

Speaker 2: And on that bombshell

Speaker 1: Not on that note.

Speaker 2: Listening to another episode of Hack podcast. Please

Speaker 1: Pizza costs $920,000,000.

Speaker 2: Oh, went up. Or did it go down?

Speaker 1: Who knows?

Speaker 2: I thought it was $9.15 maybe at the beginning of the show. Who knows?

Speaker 1: It might have been $9.19. Anyway very volatile. Continue with the the the show wrap up.

Speaker 2: Hotlinehack.com. Tell us your crazy stories. Store.hackpodcast.com, buy some crazy stuff. Hackpodcast.com redirects to Patreon, also redirects to the YouTube now. Please visit the YouTube. Asking politely, please. And subscribe.

Speaker 1: Type in hacked podcast on YouTube. Check out a cool visualizer and subscribe because we're gonna be making some content that won't really be anywhere else at some point. Yeah. So so jump in. Join us, please.

Speaker 2: And yeah, I think, a little teaser. We got a bit of a bit of an announcement in the works for later this month. So a little tease there. A little salt.

Speaker 3: Just go drop it. Just leave it at the side of the tape.

Speaker 2: And, we'll see you next time.

Speaker 1: We'll catch you in the next one. Thanks for listening.

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