2023 Year in Review

Speaker 1: Well, the end of twenty twenty three was eventful on our beat. Wouldn't you agree?

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Well, actually, I just think the entire year was an eventful year.

Speaker 1: It wasn't a sleepy one. Since we last talked, the OpenAI coup, the Insomniac hack, now hacked Rockstar in a hotel room with a phone guy. It's been it's been a few weeks, man.

Speaker 2: Lapsus guy. The the Insomniac hack is pretty fresh and pretty crazy.

Speaker 1: I thought it was like the story we were gonna talk about about crazy stuff that happened in hacking games. And then, like, I turned the page and it's like, you wouldn't believe what this guy did with a fire stick or whatever he did it with. Wild.

Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah. It's been a it's been a wild ride. Not to mention the good old crypto. I I was reading a crypto summary for this year the other day, and it was just talking about the collapse of all of the titans and, like, you know, the SEC is, like, loosely pandering to the to the crypto market. They haven't allowed or denied the EFTs, but there's, like, all of this

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: Discussion about whether it's a massive rug pull. So, like, it's inflated the value of, like, Bitcoin, obviously, and now everybody's talking about, like, well, if these EFTs don't get approved, like, that's essentially gonna be a rug pull. And it's like, okay. Well going. Essentially, I don't know. This this tends to tends to get into, so we can get into that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's been quite the year in crypto, quite the year in artificial intelligence, quite a year in hacking, quite the month, quite the end of the year. Happy New Year's to everyone listening to this Let's get into it. This is the hacked year in review

Speaker 2: happy New Year's

Speaker 1: happy New Year's

Speaker 2: How you doing, Jordan?

Speaker 1: I'm doing good, man. How are you doing? I know how you're doing.

Speaker 2: I have my annual sinus infection. It comes like clockwork every year at this time and turns my sinuses into balloons and puts a bunch of pain in my head and makes me take a bunch of, you know, non prescription drugs and sleep a lot. So that's what's what I'm up to.

Speaker 1: Got those dark web smart drugs just pumping through your system. I think before we started recording, you said you're at a hard four, which is just very telling.

Speaker 2: I'm, I'm I'm I'm mostly on the neocitrin. That's my dark web drug of choice. So Yeah.

Speaker 1: That that that hard hardcore shit.

Speaker 2: I've got I've got drugs in my body and coffee on my lips, and that's keeping me going. So I hope that's good enough for you people. For you people.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think, hey, man. It's the end of the year. It's the end of, like, the limbo week when people will be listening to this. We're keeping it loose, man. We're just talking about the year we got through.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: That's what we're here to do today. Is there a real name for holiday limbo week?

Speaker 2: There's I I don't even know, but I feel like and maybe this is just me, but I feel like this year, it's not just this week. I feel like holiday limbo week dates back, like, to the tenth. Like, I feel like people started checking out this year earlier than I've ever seen.

Speaker 1: It's just the vibe of the year.

Speaker 2: Just the vibe of the year. Like, I stopped getting response, like, replies to emails. And, like, if I did get a reply, it was like, let's just pick this up in the new year. And it's like

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: There are twenty working days. There are twenty working days left in this year.

Speaker 1: There are weeks left. That's funny. Meanwhile, I just had I just came out of my last meeting of the year today and for anyone listening to this we recorded it a few days before when you're listening to it. But not that far before so some people are working right up to the line. Yeah. I think my fellow procrastinators, I I I see you and I appreciate you. But if you're listening to this, it's you've just gotten through limbo week, December 26 to January 1, between which time is an illusion. I hope you're well. I hope you treated yourself terribly. I hope you were lazy as heck. Yeah. I think it's a perfect time to look back on a pretty wild year in Totally. We talk about here? Tech, hacking, security, crypto, just Internet nonsense. It's it's been quite the year, man.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think I think, you know, we both instantly messaged each other on this story the other day, and it's it's the the teenage leader of lapses, has just been given one of the most insane, like, prison sentences, if you wanna call it that, I would call it that, I've ever seen. So he's 18 years old and was given a life sentence in essentially a secured hospital or, you know, I don't know what we call those these days, but, essentially, an institution. He's been institutionalized as he has demonstrated that he is unwilling to change and has a, like, a a need to violate things in a cybersecurity sense. So they've deemed him on set to stand trial, and they've essentially committed him, for as long as it needs as he's such a high risk given the the I don't know, the the my brain is completely not functioning today.

Speaker 1: Hard four.

Speaker 2: Given the scale of the hacks that he has executed, which is pretty sure. Is crazy. Crazy.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a pretty wild story. The coverage of it is kind of its own little story. Aryan Kertaj, 18 year old hacker associated with lapses. The rest of this sentence is prickly because the BBC, Verge, a lot of really big name places ran the headline sentenced to life in prison. And there's a very important qualification. He's been placed under an indefinite hospital hold. Totally. Yes. Which is wild. And the story is wild. And you don't need to go to he will serve life in prison for it to be wild. And I think that is an important qualification, to this whole wacky, kinda dark situation. The story that's been going around is British judge determines that Kritaj poses a high risk to the public due to his, as you said, stated intent to continue committing cybercrimes and has been placed under indefinite hold. This is after a cyberattack against several companies, including Rockstar Games, who makes GTA six, which, dog, we gotta talk about, Uber, Nvidia. He's been deemed unfit to stand trial and has been sort of placed under this secure hospital hold indefinitely. Kirtaj was under was he was basically out under bail staying in a hotel room, and he was able to use a smartphone, and it sounds like an Amazon Fire Stick and a Bluetooth keyboard and a mouse, I've heard, to do this rock star hack. Quite quite as as as something something right there. I have questions about this. My my first question is, yo, what's your rig? Like, I wanna know specifically what phone were you using? Were you running decks? Were you able to get Linux going on it? Were you using the Fire Stick as an external display and it was basically just a computer? Like, I specifically wanna know, what the rig was, but Mhmm. This, teenager was able to get a hold of a bunch of Grand Theft Auto six footage back in September, leak it, and causing an alleged financial reputational damage of about $5,000,000 to Rockstar is the sort of number that's been floating around a little bit. It's quite the story.

Speaker 2: The the let's just talk about the hack initially because Jordan's immediate response is like, oh my god. Is this one is he the chosen one? Given the but it's like, at the end of the day, smartphones, even fire even, like, like, Android boxes for your TV at this point are essentially microcomputers. Like, they're

Speaker 1: Completely.

Speaker 2: A full blown like, an Android phone is a full blown Unix like, computer, essentially, with its own multiple radio Internet connections. Like, they're they're supercomputers, which is crazy. Like, if I go back to my youth, like, the idea of what my iPhone is today is wild. But, yeah, he I I assume his rig was Fire Stick to the TV projected from his phone, Bluetooth keyboard most in, probably Exactly. Rooted it, made it into a UNIX box, and then went went from there. But Yeah. I yeah. I don't know. I think crazy. Also, personal opinion, I don't think there was a lot of damage done to GTA six and Rockstar. Sorry, Sorry, guys.

Speaker 1: I think it'll be fine.

Speaker 2: I I I got very excited to see these leaks, so, which is, I think, a great transition to our next thing to talk about, which is GTA six is coming.

Speaker 1: GTA six is coming. I wanna briefly dwell on the fact this is a small detail. The press photo that was going around, for this story. I don't know why this is the only photo Yes.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Was of, Ariane Kertaj on a boat holding a very large fish, and I'm glad his face was blurred. He was a minor at the time that this happened, and that's a huge qualifier to this whole story. But it is pretty funny just the same photo of this

Speaker 2: fish over

Speaker 1: and over and over and over again. Anyway, yeah, Grand Theft Auto six.

Speaker 2: I I believe that was a shark.

Speaker 1: Is that a shark?

Speaker 2: I believe it's a smaller shark.

Speaker 1: He's holding a tiny shark. I I I misspoke. He's holding a tiny shark.

Speaker 2: The other the other thing I wanna talk about images related to this story, like, in publishing, is that a lot of the publications that I saw saw were actually just using Grand Theft Auto promo images. So there's this massive story running about this kid receiving this, like, you know, I would say, contemporary unprecedented institution sentence, medical sentence. Yeah. And and and Sure.

Speaker 1: We'll let historians debate the language, but, yes, a pretty wild, outcome.

Speaker 2: And the and the imagery that they're running with it is like Grand Theft Auto six coming 2025. And I'm like, are they talking about bad PR? This is getting millions and millions and millions of dollars in free PR.

Speaker 1: A 100%. And then you look at the album art of the Grand Theft Auto. If it didn't say Grand Theft Auto floating above these two characters heads, you would think that this was the hackers. And you're like, wow. They're they're really thriving in that Miami Beach.

Speaker 2: I think I think perfect time to cue the sirens in the background for you as well. Just reminds me

Speaker 1: of the grand theft. Yeah. We're in limbo week. Normally, I mute myself when the sirens go past my house.

Speaker 2: But they're thematic right now.

Speaker 1: But we're playing it loose. They're thematic. I think this is this is part of the vibe of the year in review episode. It's looser, isn't it? A little less edited, you might say, because we're on a break. Yeah. Grand Theft Auto six. You catch that trailer, man?

Speaker 2: I did catch the trailer. It looks wild. Yeah. It looks wild. Like, the the idea of doing, like, a Florida because, like, Florida is a meme of its own. Right? Like, they chose Yes. Just brilliantly.

Speaker 1: And it's

Speaker 2: like like Florida man is, like, its own meme. But Florida in itself and, like, Dade County, if you, like, go on the Internet and just look up anything that had to do with Florida, it's just endless reels of insane videos and photos and stories. And I think that that is just content heaven for the GTA team.

Speaker 1: So much of that trailer was really lovingly recreated, like, cell phone videos of crazy Florida stuff.

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: And I saw someone assemble a a sort of, like, mirror cut of all of they found the original TikToks and Reels and whatever it is, and they clearly had informed some of the stuff you're seeing in that trailer.

Speaker 2: Of course.

Speaker 1: And they sort of had them side by side. Very entertaining. I think one of the characters from that trailer has threatened or is in the process of suing Rockstar Oh my god. For allegedly using his, his appearance, which I'm reminded, I think actually happened on four or five with Lindsay Lohan Yeah. Who who alleged that one of the characters on the front of the cover was clearly inspired by her. I would say, the Florida joker man, might have a better case than it is riffing on him, but, you know, true life is stranger than fiction, so I'm not really sure where that that line lays.

Speaker 2: I I don't know if you're a new listener to this podcast, but Jordan and I occasionally find ourselves discussing video games, and GTA has been a running theme for years. Mhmm. Just given the fact that GTA five was such a masterfully built game, and we're both very excited for GTA six.

Speaker 1: Totally. One of the best to do it. And, Yeah. I'm very excited to see what happens. Yeah. Curious to see what's gonna happen with the Ariane Kertache case. I thought that our discussion about games and game hacking was gonna be the Insomniac hack that had happened, like, four days ago.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I

Speaker 1: thought that was gonna be the big end of year gaming story. Ransomware group, Rysaida, announced that they're holding this massive trough of Insomniac data, demanding 50 Bitcoin, which is about $2,000,000, or they're gonna drop this 1.67 terabytes of data, 1,300,000 files, HR documents, Slack communications, employee passport scans, like, a really, really big leak in doxing. Thought that was gonna be the big story.

Speaker 2: And it's it's pretty big. Like, because

Speaker 1: It's pretty big.

Speaker 2: It's pretty big. Apparently, there are playable versions of Wolverine floating around the Internet at this point. They have dropped some of the data.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's lovely.

Speaker 2: And it's a big deal. Like, this is a big

Speaker 1: That's right.

Speaker 2: Maybe maybe one of the largest hacks I've seen in regards to they've taken something hostage they didn't pay, and then they actually released the entire thing. So I'm not Interesting. I'm not entirely sure. I haven't seen the exact pieces of data, but, apparently, there are fully playable, you know, alpha versions of the new Wolverine game for download on the Internet, which is crazy.

Speaker 1: That's pretty wild.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's looking like it was a a remote access phishing attack, which is pretty expected for this thing. It does create, like, a really interesting these two stories dropping side by side. And in such recent history, we've had Rocksteady Studios hacks, Warner Bros hacks, CD Projekt Red hacks. Like, large gaming institutions at this point have become some of the biggest targets for ransomware. And I think probably because there's, like, a lot of overlap culturally between cybersecurity, infosec type communities, like Totally. Hacker spaces and people that just really love games, and they wanna see what game's coming out next. Yeah. There's a big prickly complicated conversation about the impact these things have on the staff and the teams, what it means to even report on them. It's complicated, but it's definitely accelerating Yeah. Is the thing that I feel like I'm noticing is that games companies are becoming the sort of, like, target du jour for a lot of these groups because they they're both culturally relevant, and they got a lot of money. It

Speaker 2: is like, this this hack is fascinating. I I agree with you largely that this they do seem to be accelerating in this space. I do also agree that, like, hacking is a very interesting puzzle game. And if you like puzzle games, you probably play other puzzle games.

Speaker 1: That's a great point. That's a really good point. No. That is it's like it it's it's the there's a self selecting group thing going on.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. The this this like, there's been other releases and other hacks and, like, you know, some some pre alpha gameplay videos and things like that. Like, there's been been a bunch of what I would call less serious. They're still very serious, but, like, less serious where this was, like, you know, all of the texture art files, the three d, the engine projects, the level designs, the code, and the logic in the gameplay. Like, this is they they got access, it seems like, to the entire build of the game and a bunch of other stuff. Like, it wasn't just Wolverine.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: Like, I think they have Spider Man stuff in the data. Like, it was terabytes and terabytes of data apparently and and and, like, critical stuff, like, high value IP stuff. So it's, like, really, really, really bad. I feel terrible for the Insomniac team. Actually, know somebody on the Insomniac team and and probably should fire him a message and see if he's doing okay, but that's it's bad news. Bad news.

Speaker 1: I think what I've really learned from this is we shouldn't have fire sticks and hotel rooms anymore.

Speaker 2: I think you guys

Speaker 1: should buy them at, like,

Speaker 2: 07:11. So I know. I know.

Speaker 1: It is interesting to think about how much that whole, shouldn't keep calling it a rig. How much that setup probably, ended up costing.

Speaker 2: Well, the the the truth is the Fire Stick was only saving his eyes, so he didn't have to look at the tiny screen on his smartphone.

Speaker 1: That's really that's really true. Yeah. You're just using it did make me think when I read that story. I kind of just glanced over at my phone, and I was thinking about DeX. I was thinking about that Samsung. I think it's Samsung's proprietary idea of The smartphone that you can connect to a display and connect the peripherals and it just functions as a computer Yeah, yeah, I'm like. Oh, that's an interesting road to go down That's something that I wouldn't be mad about. If suddenly iPhones could kick out an iPadOS signal to an external display in a few years, I would I think that would be cool.

Speaker 2: I thought I had I had this idea probably 2000 and, like, '4. I was like, at some point, we're gonna quit having, you know, centralized servers and sit down and log in with credentials, and it logs you into, like, a a terminal session in like, you know, when you're on a university campus and you, like, go into a computer lab and you, like, log into a computer and it, like, you know, it's kinda your profile, but it's, like, kind of on the network. It's like, I just carry my computer with me everywhere. Like, when am I just gonna get to sit down and, like, jack this thing into a little, like, terminal and then boom? You know? Originally, I thought it'd be, like, a USB key, but then once smartphones came out, it's like bang.

Speaker 1: Totally. It's

Speaker 2: like everything you need is right here. Your entire profile can go with you everywhere, especially with things like iCloud and Google Cloud and and the cloud. So but yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's it's already got a it's already got all the routers in it. It's already happened to have a really good camera in it. Mhmm. I can already connect a Bluetooth keyboard to it. A lot of these people have already figured out how to get mouse input working on a mobile interface that isn't it's not great, but it's not terrible Yeah, we're better part of the way there Yeah, and when Apple decides they like money less and don't want to sell you two devices They could probably slap a you know, a nice a reasonable desktop computer inside of an iPhone, and I'm sure that day will happen any minute now.

Speaker 2: I think they're they're making the one that goes on your face first because the Yes. This is true. I'd be intrigued if they had actually they probably must have given the people at Apple and what they do. I would have assumed that somebody inside of Apple built essentially an iPad dock for your phone. And you just, like, slide your phone in. It has an extra battery life, has a bigger screen, and essentially, you just dock your phone into it. And it turns your phone from a seven inch device into a 14 inch device. Like, I don't they they must have played with that idea or built it and and have

Speaker 1: I would imagine the second they got a working USB c iPhone. Yeah. They're like, well, we're 95% of the way here. Like, we already know how to make this desktop basically scale up to, this OS basically scale up to a desktop with iPad OS, like Totally. Let's just give it a run. And I'm sure I'm sure it's working somewhere in an office in Cupertino.

Speaker 2: MacBook MacBook Airs are essentially running iPad Pro components. So, you know Totally. The the Apple ecosystem is so, you know, integrated that they could you can run OS, you know, x on your probably on your iPad or your phone. Probably wouldn't run run great. But essentially essentially, iOS is a tuned down version of that. So it's like the same same thing. It's all, you know, FreeBSD kerneled UNIX with a pretty interface. So Mhmm.

Speaker 1: So quite the end of the year in terms of hacking, specifically hacking gaming stories, quite quite the year in terms of big hacks. We've we've talked a lot about about a lot of them. You had the Vegas hack the other two big stories. I think This year that we really need to talk a little bit about Are gonna be AI and crypto We spent a lot of time which one of those should we start with? Where do we go next?

Speaker 2: I think I think a really easy one for us to go into is AI. I think there's a lot of things that we could chat about in AI where

Speaker 1: Oh, did something happen since we've last chatted in the world of AI?

Speaker 2: You know what? I just I just I just had a memory of us doing last year's end of year wrap up, and it was right after chat g p t was announced. And it was like we we we chatted about it during the end of the year wrap up, and it's interesting. Here we are one calendar year later looking at the impact that it's made, not only the, like, shit show that the business community is having, but the actual impact that it's made. So

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. We can talk about the OpenAI coup. I'm k. I have I have a name for that I'm trying. Everyone called it the failed coup, and I think that that is a failure of imagination. I've been calling it the OpenAI, coude na never mind.

Speaker 2: Coude na. I like that.

Speaker 1: Coude coude na. Never mind. Bring it back. I think that's what happened there. K. Nah. Forget it. Get back in here, Sam.

Speaker 2: That's good. That's That's

Speaker 1: what I'm calling about.

Speaker 2: That's good. That's like Yeah.

Speaker 1: Coude na everybody. Yeah. Could they not? Yeah. It's swinging big. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. It's been quite the year. I was thinking about that too. Like, there was this little New Year's Eve AI sandwich where midjourney had come out, and Chat GPT was, like, being murmured a little bit.

Speaker 2: I think it was right at

Speaker 1: the end of last year. Yeah, it was bit something like that Yeah, and then in November the previous year we'd gotten Dolly and midjourney There was a sense that something was going to be happening also if anyone's interested and wants to hear us talking about sort of the discourse state about image generation a year into it, check out our last episode with Sean Shand. It's a really fun conversation with him about a bit of the the response to that, but OpenAI and chat g p t represented this massive shift in how we see AI in these tools. Microsoft being a significant owner of OpenAI, it also represented the beginning of battle lines being drawn in traditional big tech. Microsoft has aligned itself with OpenAI. Google, meanwhile, has just been googling all year, just googling it up in a very googly way. They're like, we have 19 different products. Would you like Google Assistant powered by Bard built on top of Gemini turbo, which is it's like, woah, guys.

Speaker 2: You gotta bump the brakes.

Speaker 1: They've dropped 17 things. The thing I found interesting so there's this benchmark called MMLU. It stands for massive multitask language understanding. It's a set of discipline based tests. You could have one for econ, physics, social sciences, pick a thing, and it can be done by both a model and a human. A human. Yeah. It combines multiple choice text, reading comprehension, university level math. It's a really good thing for comparing how humans are doing at something to how these models are doing at something. The benchmark for a human expert in a field, say you gave a law one to an MMLU or a physics one or something, a human expert, I think this the number we've been using for a few years is 89%. That's what you're looking for for, like,

Speaker 2: pretty good Good.

Speaker 1: Expertise and one of the really good. An average human on, like, a a niche thing, like, you give me an MMLU on, like, American law, I'm gonna get 30%. And, like, I'm just guessing basically. Expert, 89. ChatGPT, over the course of the year, had bumped, I think, a spread of about five points on the MMLU. I believe 3.5 was clocking in at, like, in the eighties, and then four was in the mid eighties, which is really remarkable. Google and this announcement comes with a lot of asterisks because it was a very flawed announcement that played a video that kinda misrepresented some of what the tech can do. But their new model, at the end of this big first year, they're saying it just cooked past 90%. That's crazy. Human expertise, 89. Google saying they hit 90. I think if you told us that anecdote three years ago, we would say, oh, you're, like, cross some sort of delta. And that just sort of casually happened in a press release at the end of this year, and I think it speaks to what a wacky year it's been in AI.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think there's I think AI is is I think it's become such a talking point, like, in the finance world. Like, if you're if

Speaker 1: you're

Speaker 2: a tech company and you don't have AI, if you if you went if you went into a quarterly earnings call and we're we're not talking about AI, your stock fell 4%. If you went into this if you went into a into a into a quarterly call and you said that you had the latest, greatest AI, your stock popped 4%. And it's like, I I feel like we see that. Like, every company is creating an AI product, whether it's good or not. You know, you've got Twitter x is making one. You've got Google's got 18. You've got Apple and a pet rumored to have one coming. You know, Microsoft partnered with OpenAI. I don't know.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: It just seems I I'm still excited to see one of these things actually do something for me that I don't

Speaker 1: hate. Interesting.

Speaker 2: Like mid actually, I'll I'll say mid journey, like, when I when I was talking about text based things. And and actually, I I should recall that. Getting it to write basic pieces of code for you, very helpful. Be like, hey. You know, I need to we need a sort and search function for this, blah blah blah. You know, optimize it for this and bang it, like, pumps it out. Pretty great. You know, very threatening to my career as a software developer. The the the the but, like, mid journey is I will say that some of the art that I've seen coming out of those things, like, compared to their early days of, like, Dolly and stuff, very, very good. They're very cool.

Speaker 1: V six is, yeah, is is making the rounds right now, and it's like, oh, you're you're trudging up on they're all starting to specialize on different things. I saw someone doing a comparison of of prompt understanding

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And DALL E's, the new version of DALL E's, which is producing, I think, meaningfully worse results than midjourney Mhmm. Has significantly better prompt understanding. Mhmm. He was able to, like, parse through the text and make a very, very good it it got it. It got exactly

Speaker 2: what the person

Speaker 1: was asking for.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: It knew what you wanted with a level of, like

Speaker 2: But just couldn't make it. It it

Speaker 1: just didn't it didn't do as great a job. But meanwhile, Midjourney, which has, I think, worse really in-depth granular prompt understanding, like, not graded text, is getting the photorealism on a totally different level.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Those v six images that are coming out right now are out of control.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And not even just photorealistic stuff. Like, just everything. Like, anything that I see coming out of MidJourney now, I'm like, wow. This actually looks pretty good.

Speaker 1: It's quite it's quite good.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's being generated very quickly. And

Speaker 1: it's built on a problematic foundation. Yeah. It sure is. And, anyway, there's a a very dark story. I don't think I don't know if this is the vibe. There's a very dark story about the Lion five b, training dataset. You don't need to get into it. It's worth a Google, though. There's we're starting to learn more about the massive repositories of data that these things are based on that's have have essentially been black boxes up until this point. There's information that is inside of those training sets that we're all using tools built on that we just don't know what's in there and people are starting to find some of the stuff that's in there. And it is pretty bad. On the topic of different companies rolling out these new models, Amazon, this is a small one, but I I noticed that Amazon's play in this. They're rolling out one called Bedrock, and I found this really interesting. Their observation seems to have been, these tools are powerful, but they're a privacy nightmare. Recent, explorations into prompt injection Mhmm. With ChatGBT's new agents have revealed that some of the prompt injecting hacks can actually reveal training data, which is, catastrophic for privacy. The the one that everyone was using was, getting it to repeat a word infinitely. And at a certain point, it starts the model will start kicking back, nonsense, it seemed like. After it says the word toaster 50 times, it just starts saying chaos. And people started figuring out that in some cases, that chaos was training data. It was stuff that it had been trained on. People were finding, like, email, phone number, and signatures buried in the stuff that referred to real people. Crazy. So there's some privacy issues, and Amazon's response to that seems to be, well, what if we let you build your own models using corporate data without accidentally contributing that data to the underlying model? That is the way they're specializing.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: It's just your stuff isn't gonna get fed into the monster that someone else might be able to, with a good prompt hack, pull back out. Like, oh, so the emergence of the privacy specialization in these models is beginning. Mhmm. That's new. Mhmm. That's very interesting.

Speaker 2: Well, I think and, like, again, like, we've talked about that a number of times where I think the natural Totally. Natural next big first step for this is is, like, internal models for law firms and For sure. People like that who can train it, you know, teach it teach it what policies and procedures look like and then just generate them in real time and things like that. Like, I think that's where there's gonna be a ton of value add in the short term. Long term, you know Yes. That's a different conversation.

Speaker 1: Who does?

Speaker 2: Yeah. But part of the part of the adoption and the training of these models, part of the the power that we will give them will start with small steps to make our lives easier. So

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. We'll just hand over more and more to old Sammy.

Speaker 2: Sammy.

Speaker 1: Which is, Sammy is all Could they not? The could they not? We should talk about that.

Speaker 2: Who should?

Speaker 1: It's funny. We did two episodes where we were like, let's go bring in some other people to talk with us. And we talked with Sean about Nightshade, and we talked with Talking Sasquatch about Flipper Zero. Mhmm. And meanwhile, one of the biggest new tech companies on the world was losing its goddamn mind. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was fired by the OpenAI board for, quote, not being consistently candid with the board. We still don't know what that means.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I believe

Speaker 1: to date, we still haven't received a, like, public statement from the board that digs into why any of this happened. But about a week later, after a series of Sam is taking meetings at the building Yeah. Sam is talking with the board level of, like, kinda breathless coverage, a sort of very public Twitter campaign from a bunch of AI staff, you know, pledging their support to him. Sam Altman was then brought back as the CEO of Microsoft watched from a tower somewhere, making sure it was so.

Speaker 2: I'm sure I'm sure the Microsoft jet was fueled and sitting on the runway waiting to fly in and scoop up the entire OpenAI team the second they all quit.

Speaker 1: 100%. Well, because he he'd been he was briefly hired by them. I think that they, like, put this they put a a piece down on the on the playing board saying, like, he will just come do an OpenAI at Microsoft Yeah. If you stand by this decision.

Speaker 2: We we have given him a 200,000,000 profit share equity check or contract, and we are bringing him and the entire team on board. And OpenAI will now be just Microsoft's AI. But that didn't happen. But that didn't happen.

Speaker 1: It didn't end up needing to happen. Yeah. So instead, the resulted in former president of the board, Greg Brockman, who has now resigned. There is now a new board that consists of Brett Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. Mhmm. Some folks that are a little bit more aligned with Sam Altman. The the big meta narrative that came out of all this was that this was a conflict between the sort of, safety oriented side of the company and the more forge ahead side of the company. I don't wanna there's a lot of terms floating around Silicon Valley about effective altruists versus effective accelerationists. Yeah. I don't want to get into that world quite yet, but the sort of that was the big story that framed this was this idea that, and it concerns the mystery of the queue model, which no one quite knows what it does yet, but the idea was that sort of Altman and some cohorts had crossed some big sort of boundary and were accelerating forward and taking a big massive step. The safety oriented side of the board was concerned about this, and that's where the conflict started to emerge. Who knows? That could turn out to be what it was. It feels that story emerged so quickly in all this that it my gut was that it was a drastic, like, oversimplification of what was probably actually going on. Totally. It seems too clean that it was the, like, futurists versus the fearful. I'm like, no. That's too simple. Like, that I I don't think that's probably what actually happened. Could there be shades of that? Yeah. I guess we'll see in 2024.

Speaker 2: Well, the the cue is actually, like an AI term, like, in machine learning. It's I

Speaker 1: didn't know that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's it's it's when essentially in reinforcement learning, the the algorithm understands the value of output of a certain action. So it kind of allows itself to start valuing things. So it it it yeah. I wonder if that's what they've done. I wonder if that's where

Speaker 1: they're going. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyway

Speaker 1: I I I feel like a big silly nerd because I assumed I guess like a lot of I'm guessing like many would that, that it was a Star Trek Next Generation mod.

Speaker 2: Oh, maybe it is. It could be that too. But You know what

Speaker 1: I mean?

Speaker 2: Yeah. See, the first time I heard it, I thought we were talking about QAnon, so I was less excited.

Speaker 1: Like, the vibe of this show is gonna be really different in 2024.

Speaker 2: They've made a QAnon model. It's, like, great.

Speaker 1: Oh, no.

Speaker 2: Oh, no.

Speaker 1: I bet it's full of great ideas. The other big story, I think, for I mean, the other big story from AI this year, it was an a wild year in AI this year. Another one that felt representative of something. And when we start talking about this at the end of last year, started this year, it was, you know, ChatGPT 3.5

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Was the vanguard of the tech. And then partway through the year, we got four. And we said I don't need this pesky 3.5.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. End

Speaker 1: of this year, Mistral, a French AI company, big one, estimated value of about a couple billion bucks, decided at the end of this year to release its latest large language model via a torrent.

Speaker 2: They just gave it out.

Speaker 1: No prior explanation. Just dropped it. They just put it out there in the world.

Speaker 2: I like that.

Speaker 1: Mistral x eight x seven b. It's currently outperforming some of the other open source models like Meta's Llama two, and it seems to be beating ChatGPT 3.5 in certain benchmarks, which means that in the course of a year, the cutting edge state of the art of that technology that's, you know, sent OpenAI off on this crazy trajectory is now a similar product is now functionally open source. And I think that tells you a lot about the development of where this is going. In our conversation with Sean, we talked about, you know, the the sort of liminal space between what the tech is doing and what the regulation needs to be doing and that really constantly changing shape. And I I I think it's just very telling that we also have to now contend with the open source side of this. That is gonna become increasingly less niche Mhmm. And increasingly more of a viable option for people to just run their own, LLMs locally using open source models. That's just gonna get easier and easier and easier.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that I yeah. I completely agree. I think now that you're seeing more of these things exist in a space where you can get them locally, They're not just kind of controlled. I think it creates a a pool of interesting problems for, you know, codifying morality and ethics into them as well as, Totally. Like, it's just once they're out in the wild, they're gonna learn and be you know, it's like it's like it's like pets. If you have you know, if if if you're good dog owners and you train the dog well, you know, dogs behave properly in social situations. If you're a bad dog owner, you train the dog poorly. You know, you give it a lot of, like, negative reinforcements and stuff like that. All of a sudden, the dog becomes a bad dog, and then that has external implications. I I feel like we're gonna see that in in AI as well. You know, we're gonna have good AI owners and bad AI owners.

Speaker 1: Sure. All of our ability I think there's a very real chance a lot of the regulation will come in the shape of, well, these these are the bumpers. You gotta put this bumper into your system. You gotta put this bumper into your system.

Speaker 2: Wow. But we saw how fast they ripped those bumpers off with chat g b d three.

Speaker 1: The thing. Exactly. And that's using their product. Yeah. That's not even talking about running your own version of a similar open source model. That's just breaking the one that has all the bumpers built into it.

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: So it's I I think that prompt injection and prompt hack like that world of figuring out how to talk these models into breaking themselves, it's gonna kinda fork off from the or you could just run your own model and have it do precisely whatever the heck you want.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And we're gonna see that more and more in the coming years.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Very, very. I'm I'm intrigued given how far we've come in one year, how far we'll come next year. The, yeah. Yeah. I think it's it's gonna be obviously something that we talk about until we can't talk about it anymore.

Speaker 1: Starting something 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 that's 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.

Speaker 4: Whatever your thing, it could be anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design with our magic AI tool things. You can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks or presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

Speaker 2: Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get The best

Speaker 1: of both worlds.

Speaker 3: Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft three sixty five premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate

Speaker 2: with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

Speaker 3: Learn more at windows.com/studentoffer. While supplies last, ends June 30, terms at aka.ms/collegepc.

Speaker 5: Thinking about refreshing the carpet in your home? Now's the time to do it. For a limited time at The Home Depot, get 10% off installed carpet projects on trusted brands like Lifeproof, Lifeproof with PetProof Technology, Home Decorators Collection, and Traffic Master. Plus, with installation starting at just 49¢ per square foot, upgrading your space is more affordable than ever at The Home Depot. Offer valid 06/11/2026 through 06/28/2026. Exclusions apply for licenses. See homedepot.com/ license numbers.

Speaker 1: Oh, it is some cybersecurity in gaming. AI. I I'm sure we summarized in the last eighteen minutes. The last one that seems before we just maybe tear off on some small strange funny little stories to wrap it up, should probably talk about crypto. Quite the year in crypto. Yeah. The year that crypto got in grown up trouble, I would say.

Speaker 2: That makes me smile. I like that. That makes me laugh.

Speaker 1: Know it

Speaker 2: does. The I think it was I think, you know, I was reading an article by Ars Technica. It was the 2023, the year of the fall in crypto, bro. I was laying in bed reading it this morning, and I was like, this hard four. It's true because, like, you know, this time last year, we were making jokes about how, you know, Sam Bankman Fried was had essentially fallen from grace. And then and then see other guy's name, CZ. He runs, Iran.

Speaker 1: Oh, by by by chance,

Speaker 2: Changpeng Zhao. Yeah.

Speaker 1: He's the he's what I wanna talk about.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Changpeng Zhao, he he has now fallen from grace. And, yeah, I think we're just Yep. I don't I don't understand. I don't understand. It's like the like, people should just go read this article. It just kind of summarizes all of these insane things and, like, collapses. Like, it actually talks about a lot of things that we talked about, too, over the course of the year. But it's just the the the amount of scamming is still so alive in the crypto space that the lack of regulation and the lack of control has just caused such an issue. You know? The the I don't I don't know I don't know how they just continued to turn a blind eye to it, and I feel like people are pushing them on both sides. People don't want them to to to regulate it and don't want it. They want, you know, more libertarianism, more wild wild west, which they don't allow people to do in the normal equity space. Like, I can't just go sell shares in my company to anybody on the side of the street corner. But it's like I can create a fake security called the ICO, sell a bunch of tokens off, which doesn't give you any equity and control in my company. And then people have zero regulation of that. It's like, how how is this any different to, like, you know, old stocks, scams, and frauds? Like and I I just don't understand how people have let it get this far. People that are in power have let it get this far. And I don't understand why they're even remotely considering allowing exchange traded funds to spot price cryptocurrencies on regulated exchanges where people will trade regulated money. I just it it Yeah. Blows me away. Blows me. Like, I just do not understand.

Speaker 1: It's interesting. I feel like the FTX story this year feel like a generation of people that have certainly awareness of, you know, economic crime for lack of a better word are getting a little bit of a speed run through it in the context of the crypto space Yeah, we won't get too much into fdx because we've talked about it at length on the show but to make the distinction between it and what happened with finance, and I think it is important to make is that FTX was a, like, a fund misappropriation based crime. Totally. It's that the money was supposed to go over here, and it didn't. Like, that if you zoom out far enough, that's what that was about. Yep. How much of that money has ever been recovered will be recovered? Complicated, interesting story, but that's what that was about. Binance Very different crime. Sort of a case study in The is a very, very different crime, and it's so useful to look at them as part of, like, a, like, a dichotomy. Because Binance was all wasn't about what the money was going towards. It was about where the money was coming from. There are laws about doing transactions with certain countries based on what country you're in. Doing financial transactions with Iran, Russia, Cuba, if you're in The US is just that's just not legal. You can think whatever you want about that, but there's a law against it. And for a very long time, if you existed in this crypto space, those laws didn't really apply to you. And for the first time this year, they applied. Billions of dollars in what are illegal transactions, inside of Binance, it came to a head. And Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty, resigned, and along with the company faced a significant financial penalties because not only were they, knowingly accepting money from people that they weren't supposed to receive money from, There's a lot of detail to dig into in that. They were, shopping for those clients. They were going out of their way to secure that money. Of course. And those initial lax policies led to significant allegedly violations of US money laundering laws. In any other space on Earth, we would understand those as financial crimes. And for the last decade, there's been this little corner carved out where they were just sort of like special Internet whoopsies. And this year, we all kinda went, those are money crimes. It's if you're saying this is money, those are money crimes.

Speaker 2: This is this is I'm just gonna go to my my hat.

Speaker 1: You're trying to decide how hard to go.

Speaker 2: It's it's just like you allow the creation of a shadow financial system

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: That is completely unregulated, that has, you know, elements of privacy and security. Like, it has become the de facto tradable I'm gonna use quotes air quotes here, currency of online crime, of fraud, of money laundering, of human trafficking, of, you know, you name it. Why did we let this happen? Like, you you sit down. You find me somebody out there. Somebody out there come and tell me aside from the fact that cryptocurrency allows the transfer of money faster than traditional bank systems, a fault in our existing banking systems, not a fault in the currency. What other value does it offer that traditional currency doesn't, except for if you're human trafficking, buying firearms, buying illegal drugs. It is bad. We have allowed something bad to happen, and people should be shutting this down rather than promoting it and sponsoring it. Like, when I hear of people who work for large investment companies that are now starting crypto divisions, it's like, sure. There's money to be made, especially because it's unregulated. Like, why do you think rug poles exist? Like, these used to exist in in stock problems a hundred years ago until the Securities Exchange Commission came around and said, we're gonna allow something called a qualified investor. If you're gonna invest seed capital in a company, then you have to meet these certain requirements to show that you can accept this loss. We don't have those in the crypto space. We don't even we don't even consider them securities, but we allow people to use them like securities. And it's like Mhmm. If I'm a lawmaker in this situation, like, I'm talking to you politicians, like, you're the fucking problem. Like, this is not okay. What you have done is not okay. Like, I'm gonna pull up coin market cap right now. Coin market cap. There's $1,700,000,000,000 in cryptocurrency right now. That means that you have allowed a shadow economy to generate $1,700,000,000,000 in wealth that typically wouldn't have existed. It's like that. I don't know. Blows me away. Binance shopping for bad clients who have lots of money makes total sense to me. It's totally unregulated. They don't have to respond to anything. Like, it's it's money for them. It's like, why wouldn't they? You know, creating a platform where they get rewarded based on people doing bad things, of course, they're gonna go look for people to do bad things.

Speaker 1: I I tend to agree. I I take the like, to try and be generous, I get that currency that does not reinforce or depend on the power of the state is different from wanting a currency explicitly to do illegal things, things that are illegal in accordance with the state. I get why that would be appealing to someone. We talked about this in a previous episode. Like, I I get that root. I don't hold it. I'm not concerned about it, but I get why a libertarian person would feel that way. Maybe that's a good

Speaker 2: way of putting it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I'm not a libertarian. I get why you would feel that way. We are so far away from that right now Yeah. When we're talking about taking that asset and turning it into an exchange traded fund that is, like, the whole point is that that is regulated by the state that you are trying to escape, and it's like, right, but it'll really pop off in value. Yeah. It's like so I come back to the thing I said before which is that it's not about that to a lot of you to a lot of people It's not about

Speaker 2: yeah, it's a speculative asset

Speaker 1: It's a speculative asset and like you've if you want me to take any of this discussion seriously We got to at least acknowledge that

Speaker 2: well this speculative asset. Oh, it's a spec

Speaker 1: I want the speculative asset to go up in value because then it'll get more people into it and then that Reinforces my libertarian views. It's like so you're Cuddling up to the state to stick it to the state. No apologies. It's money. It's it's it's it's and it's good money, and it might really be profitable. I'm not saying it won't go up. It might go to the moon, but I'm I do take exception to that philosophical argument.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. There there's an old saying in, like, startup worlds and tech where it's like, if your company is a feature of another product, it's not gonna be a good product. You know? Like, I think we've had this conversation. And

Speaker 1: We've talked about this, and that's true here too. Yeah. That's a good point.

Speaker 2: And everybody when I'm like, what is the value of cryptocurrency? They explain to me how it's better than a feature of the existing currency. And I'm like, sure. But but, like, what is the It's

Speaker 1: the current

Speaker 2: Like, as as a functional product, What what value does it bring the world asides from a bunch of negative value? Like, where are the offsetting externalities in the positive space? Like, it is entirely to me, it is such a speculative asset that the sec has just turned a blind eye and the governments have turned a blind eye to regulating that it's allowed it to create such a problem that it's now covered on major financial news. Like if we tune into CNBC right now, we will see a bug on the screen that shows us the current value of of specific cryptocurrencies. That is crazy to me. Like like we're treating it like it's the valuation of Apple and Microsoft companies that have balance sheets, intellectual property, reoccurring cash flows. When you buy equity in them, you become a part owner. They have reporting responsibilities to you, dividend responsibilities to you if so declared, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It gives you power as a shareholder. If I go buy a crypt like, I take whatever $42,000 and go buy a Bitcoin today, there's a good chance it'll just be stolen from me in a year. Like and by by no means of my own, or I'll lose it. I'll put it on a USB key or a cold storage device that I forget the passcode to. Like, it's I I don't know. Whatever. Let's change the topic. I'm done 2023. Fuck crypto. I'm fucking done with it. I don't ever wanna talk about it again.

Speaker 1: Dude, we gotta record at a hard four more often. This is great. I just wanna My goal for 2024.

Speaker 2: I'm I think in 2024, maybe what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start another podcast where I just bring people on, and we just talk about crypto every month. And I just like, I wanna get somebody in from an investment bank who works in in, like, an investor role. And I want them to sit across from me and explain to me the value that cryptocurrency brings to their portfolio, except for that it's a highly speculative asset that is completely unregulated. It allows for manipulation. It's like I just and then vice versa. I wanna bring on somebody who's like a climate justice advocate and be like, explain to me why you like crypto, because all it's doing is consuming real utility, I e power, people's time, etcetera, and turning it into useless digital tokens. It's like anyway, I'm going off.

Speaker 1: On this episode of the Scott Winder Crypto Rage Cage, the top tech podcast, we're spinning off. I think we get a winkle. I think we get one or both of the winkle losses

Speaker 2: Oh my god.

Speaker 1: On next year. I think that's my goal. In terms of big ticket interviews, I would like to get a winklev eye on. I have so many questions, and you are right. We need to move on. Just tacking that to the end of that sentence. Okay. So we've talked We

Speaker 2: should probably count some of that, actually.

Speaker 1: Talk to what I you'll know if we did if you didn't just hear that. Talked about cybersecurity. I I just wanna do some miscellaneous ones, man. Yeah. We're we're at an hour. I wanna talk about some of these. My my favorite little story at the end of this year or one of them has been the saga of the blue bubbles on Android. Have you been following the, like, 1,700 stories about this?

Speaker 2: Loosely. Very, very loosely. No.

Speaker 1: Good. Pops

Speaker 2: up in my newsroom.

Speaker 1: Respect for your time.

Speaker 2: And I I largely ignore it as I kind of understand it and don't care about it.

Speaker 1: Good. That's great. Well, I do, and I'm gonna talk about it now. It's so dumb and so unimportant, but I find it so interesting. And this idea of, like, yeah, messaging app protectionism, it's so petty. So, like, two months ago, nothing, the Android phone OEM that makes, like, clear phones, I think it was Carl Pei, the OnePlus guys spun it up. They're cool cool Android phones. They kinda just look like clear iPhones.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: They have a wacky user interface. They decide they announced that their Nothing Phone two's messaging app is going to, support iMessage. You're gonna be able to receive iMessages in the Nothing Phone app. They had partnered with, a secondary company whose basic business model involves, logging into iCloud on a computer somewhere that they control.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: It'd be like a virtual machine or like a Mac mini somewhere sitting. They log in, and they forward you the messages. That was their entire business model. Nothing announces partnering with this company. That will be brought natively to their Nothing Messages app. Nothing. The first Android phone that has iMessage, wait, never mind, because everyone freaks out at the massive privacy implications of logging into some random computer with your iCloud account. Totally. That gets shuttered immediately. Like, the one of the fastest turnarounds on a story that I think I'd seen in a while. Almost faster than the OpenAI coup d'etat. Then, like, a week later, another company called beeper mini says but we've actually figured out a way to get, iMessage onto Android and it doesn't involve logging into an account it involves like we it's a hack basically we figured out a way to get this working and Apple will not be able to fix it. Boom. Apple immediately patches it.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Beeper mini gets taken down. In his, like, in two weeks, we had two someone's coming for the blue bubble. Wait. Never mind. Someone's coming for the blue bubble. Wait. Never mind. And meanwhile, the really exciting story, which is that iOS is probably gonna support RCS next year

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 1: Bringing more data to messaging, responses, typing indicators, all the good stuff about iMessage except for the color. That just kinda went under the radar. And that's the really exciting story, I think, in the world of messaging, and I just wanted to

Speaker 2: talk about that. Well, I think I think I think I think here here we sit again with a with a company that is a feature, not a product. And it's like 100%. If like, I like it. Good good for you guys, bleeper and everybody else. Like, all you're doing is forcing Apple's hand. If one of you actually solves it

Speaker 1: Bingo.

Speaker 2: All that's gonna happen is that iMessage for Android will be released twenty four hours later. I'm sure they already have it built. Like, let's be honest. So yeah. I I I I don't know. I I I think it's I think it is interesting. I think that the RCS supports the real big news there. You know, even even I've noticed in the last probably ninety days, how group messaging with people on cross platforms has gotten better on iOS. So I'm assuming that that's probably, again, just byproduct of people forcing their hands, which I like because not everybody has an I iPhone. Not everybody has an Android. And I don't particularly love WhatsApp and don't particularly like, you know, any of the other messaging platforms. So prefer to keep it all Yeah. Keep it all local.

Speaker 1: You know? Agreed. You should be able to talk to anybody on any platform. I think the more interoperability we have I think interoperability, those are that's that's my software goals for 2024. I want everything talking to everything else as much as it's safely possible.

Speaker 2: So there there's there's a there's a story that I wanna talk about, which is about sleep. So I don't know how you and your partner sleep, Jordan, but I sleep very warmly and my wife sleeps very coldly. And we we have we have looked at great detail about getting an eight sleep. I have a friend of mine that has one, and he swears by it. He swears that you can have both sides of the bed. Like, one can be a minus ten and one can be a plus 10. And both parties that share a bed can have perfect sleeps. Like, I wear a Whoop, so I can track a lot of my, like, heart and skin, respiratory rates, etcetera, heart rate variability. I track all of that stuff and how well my sleeps are. And if I sleep in a warm room in a hot bed, my sleep is probably 50% worse than if I sleep in a cold room in a cold bed. So it's like the value of that, like the value of the tech. The reason why I haven't got an Eight Sleep is the point of the story. Because they try I

Speaker 1: think I know where you're going

Speaker 2: with this. Like they're expensive. So an Eight Sleep is essentially a water cooler heater that goes on your mattress, and it has two zones. And one half of the bed can be hot, and one half of the bed can be cold. They cost a ridiculous amount of money, like, $34,000. But then they charge you a monthly subscription fee, and I refuse to pay a monthly subscription fee to have a $4,000 product I just bought work. And that drives me crazy.

Speaker 1: Oh, I k. Yes. I got you.

Speaker 2: But the reason why they charge that fee is because they collect all your data. Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1: They sure do. I was like, wait. Is he getting towards the data thing? Because if it's just that about subscriptions, I'm like, I feel you, dawg. No. But also there's a pretty big story about this product specifically. Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2: Yes. So not only am I paying a monthly fee for for, like, no value to me, but I'm then just giving them access to all of my sleep information, quality of my sleep, what my preferred sleep temperatures are, health information that I don't particularly wanna give a mattress cooler brand. And and it's like, I don't know. So anyway, do you wanna talk about the actual release of the data and when the story started from? Because I can just say what you're saying to that, but I feel like you know that part.

Speaker 1: I mean, I'm And

Speaker 2: you wanna hit it. So go ahead.

Speaker 1: Happy to to spike it off. Totally. It was the weird I made a little link towards this was like we got to talk about this back when I thought we were gonna talk about the open AI leak so during the the sort of crescendo of the Sam Altman open AI coup The CEO of that company Matteo French francischetti francischetti francischetti

Speaker 2: francischetti francischetti francischetti francischetti. I'm Italian. I should know how to pronounce this.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. You you watch right into that one Kenny had all my practice rounds to

Speaker 2: Kenny Francis

Speaker 1: Kenny. Francis Kenny. Mateo drops a tweet. He's the CEO of this company that says, breaking news. The OpenAI drama is real. We checked our data, and last night, San Francisco saw a spike in low quality sleep. There was a twenty seven percent increase in pot in people getting under five hours of sleep. We need to fix this. Source, eight sleep data. And I've never really seen a confession nested in the works cited of a tweet quite like that before. But the the real point of that is not that people in San Francisco aren't sleeping good. It's, hey. Do you wanna tell us more about this, window you have that tells us where people were sleeping well based on geography?

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: Mateo? Maybe? You wanna you wanna tell us a little bit more about that?

Speaker 2: You just have this portal of access to personal information regarding people's, like, health and recovery?

Speaker 1: Totally. What

Speaker 2: the be like if Apple started, like, pumping out blind stats about people's, like, Apple Watch health things, which honestly might just be good if they did. The average person walks 7,000 feet steps a day. You only walk four. Maybe you should.

Speaker 1: Totally. But it it's the, like, it's the sharing of information based on geography. Like, San Francisco is a big place. I get that no one is was doxed by that, but there's something very ominous about it.

Speaker 2: I I don't particularly like it when things that don't need to be on the Internet are on the Internet, like your washing machine, your coffee maker. I don't want those things. Like, I forgot what I was looking at the other day, like a fridge, and it was like, it can go on your Wi Fi. I'm like, I don't want it on my Wi Fi. And it's like, this is one of those things where it's like, hey, I don't know why I have to pay you a monthly fee to use the hard physical product that you've put in my house. And and then I have to give it Internet access so that you can steal information on me about it from it. It's like not only am I paying a stupid monthly fee for nothing, that's no value added to my like, you know, sleep. The product is functioning as expected, whether it has an Internet connection or not. I'm literally just paying to give you more information about me. And it's like, I don't I don't love that. I don't love that business model. It's like, if I'm gonna give you pay you a monthly fee, then I want the product for free. If I'm gonna pay you a monthly fee and give you personal information, then I want, you know, value from that information.

Speaker 1: I agree. I'm I'm in a ranty mood today. You're in a ranty vibe. I think that, there's three pick two type approach

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: To this. Feels reasonable.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: You can charge me money up front. You can charge me a subscription. You can gather my data. But so help you, God, if you try

Speaker 2: and do all three.

Speaker 1: I'm not even sure I'm comfortable with two. Yeah. The idea of charging me for a maybe it's just one now that I really think about it. It might be pick one. Yeah. Because if you're gonna charge me upfront for the product, there's edge cases where a recurring subscription becomes necessary. I would hope you could figure out the cost of providing the service and bake it into the upfront price. I'd prefer that.

Speaker 2: Totally. But I

Speaker 1: at least get that. But to be like, also, we're gonna harvest that on you. It's like, well, then you can fuck right off with your fancy bed. Like I'm not no. Thank you not for me Yeah, pretty pretty wild one Weird showing of your hand Matteo because it's now the second you said eight sleep is the only thing that popped into my head And it was a self inflicted injury. I don't know why he did that. Kind of adjacent to that, there was this other story that, I think it was Joseph Cox over at four zero four Media. Great new tech media property

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: That everyone should check out. Broke this. They're just crushing it right now. They're so good. They they dropped a story, and it has to do with a marketing company. And I wanted to talk to you about this one because it seems relevant to this Eight Sleep story. And it was that a marketing company had announced so there's always been this

Speaker 3: I'd go

Speaker 1: I'd go as far as to call it a myth that the reason your ads seem shockingly, serendipitously accurate is because they're activating the microphone on your phone and listening to you. A lot of people are walking around with a vague sense this is the case. As we've talked about in the show before, the truth is much more insidious. It's just the fact that your activity and the activity of other people on your sometimes literally same network, can be triangulated so accurately as to give it the sense of listening to you when in reality, it's just a predicting future behavior based on past behavior on the Internet. Generally speaking, that's what's actually going on. They're not actively listening to you. This marketing company had a thing on their website claiming that it actually listens to your phone and smart speakers to target you with ads, and the story went quite viral as a result the company CMG had this page on the website by the time I got over to their website to try and find it it had been taken down but I was able to find it on the web archive which I was quite pleased about and the website reads It's true Your devices are listening to you. With active listening, CMG can now use voice data to target your advertising to the exact people you are looking for. Imagine this. Someone says, the car lease ends in a month. We need a plan. Or do I see mold on the ceiling? And suddenly, they're being targeted with ads for mold removal services or car leases. This is the sales pitch that CMG was putting out. This story goes viral. My initial instinct when I read this was that I actually think that CMG is probably just buying a massive repo of data purchased from somewhere else that includes audio based data from exceptionally low cost products that have somewhere in their terms and conditions that they're allowed to listen to you. Like, person with

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: $19 automated cat feeder that has a microphone doesn't realize it is legally allowed to listen. That that quality data is getting into this thing that they have purchased that they are reselling to people. That was my guess, not that CMG had developed, a nation state actor level compromise of all phones. That's kinda where I figured it was going, and the CEO shortly after confirmed that that was the case. This was them sort of upselling a repo of data they'd bought. And, they did it in a really bad way, and it got them in a in a lot of hot a lot of heat.

Speaker 2: When I when I first saw this, I thought this is a troll. Like, I thought it was like

Speaker 1: Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2: Like, we have a friend who is a strong ethical vegan, and he once was making a troll website about a restaurant where they fed dogs to people. I don't know if you remember this.

Speaker 1: Oh, I I more than remember it, but continue.

Speaker 2: As a yes. As as a way way to troll meat eaters is like a way of of, like Yes. You know? What is the difference between eating one animal from eating another you know, man's best friend?

Speaker 1: Of course.

Speaker 2: And and I felt like Artful trolling. Artful trolling. I feel like this is was when I first saw this, I thought this was the same thing. I was like, this is my mom's worst nightmare. Like This is it. This is it. Like Yeah. Sure. Like, someone's talked to their mother enough to be like, yeah. The phones aren't listening to you. They definitely do. And it's like we've we've we've known for a long time like and then I found out I should actually backtrack there. And then I found out that it's actually owned by, like, a massive, you know, conglomerate of companies. Cox Enterprises, they own ISP, Cox Communications in The States, which we're not Americans, but a a lot of people know Cox. It's like the equivalent of our, like, Rogers. And, it's a big, big, like, a big company. And I was like, oh, this isn't a troll. This is real. This is like a a sub company of of this massive conglomerate. And then I was like, well, this is, I guess, not unfamiliar. Like, we've done so many discussions about I remember it would have been, what, about two years ago, we were talking about, like, micro targeting, like, the ability to deliver ads when you, like, you know, go into a specific Starbucks or geo fenced area. And all of these third party apps that allow you have to sign off on their their rights. A lot of them are microphone access. Like, if you open up your settings in your in your smartphone and go to privacy microphone, you'll see what apps have access to it. And if you've given one of those apps permission to listen to you, chances are they are listening to you. It's probably been anonymized so that they can't track it back to you in, like, a a personal perspective, but they can track it back to your advertising ID. So if you mentioned something like car lease is expiring, I'm yelling at my phone now. I'm I'm I'm excited to see what I'm gonna get back.

Speaker 1: It just like another in a weird long line of companies inadvertently inviting a bunch of trouble on themselves by confessing that they're doing something sort of dodgy, but trying to spit it up as being even dodgier because they think it sounds cool.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Very interesting one. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. So we've got to active listening. We've talked about all the big tent stuff.

Speaker 2: I ranted about crypto for way too long.

Speaker 1: You rapped in about crypto for a hot second. I'm sure there's something we're forgetting. Folks in our Discord have been, like, dropping some really fantastic stories.

Speaker 2: Totally. I know

Speaker 1: there's one from that that I wanted to mention that I'm totally ghosting on. Oh, the nuclear story.

Speaker 2: Nuclear story. I was gonna say we should also thank patrons. That

Speaker 1: that's a great one.

Speaker 2: But Let's go. We could talk

Speaker 1: about we could

Speaker 2: talk about the nuclear story.

Speaker 1: Let's let's go to patrons and say the nuclear story maybe for the New Year. I actually think that there could be maybe, an interview to be done on that. So why don't we well, let's save that bad boy and go ahead and thank some patrons on Patreon. It's been a minute. We've dropped two interview episodes since we since we've done this. We got some names to get through, my dude.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm trying to remember. I think our last one was p. So which means

Speaker 1: Was p.

Speaker 2: That I would like to thank and welcome Broderick Duncan. Thank you, Broderick.

Speaker 1: Broderick Duncan, thank you so much for your support. Micah Sanchez, thank you for your support. Scott, drop that great name.

Speaker 2: Diego Fierro, Thank you for your support. Daniel Fletcher

Speaker 1: Quality.

Speaker 2: Thank you for your support. Everett w, thank you for your support. I'm gonna throw this one back to you, buddy.

Speaker 1: I saw that coming. Agatha Stasiak, thank you so much for your support. Ian May, thank you for your support. I saw this one come in, and I practice it. Wait. Thank you for your support. We're we're Wirzelburnt. Yeah. It has no vowels. If anyone's trying to guess, I I'm gonna spell, but it has no vowels. It's challenging. Wirzelburnt. Appreciate it. Robert Hunt, thank you so much. And this last one, we're gonna say it in perfect sync to ring in the new year. Give me, on 0321, Martin. Amazing. I hope they're slightly staggered.

Speaker 2: AKA Marty.

Speaker 1: Thank you all so much for your support. AKA big Marty. Thank you for your support. That was disastrous, but, this has been a really fun year making the show. We've experimented a lot in the, like, format and what kinds of stories we cover and who we interview. And everyone's just kinda kept up and stuck with us through the whole thing. And it just means a lot, and we really appreciate you being here. Did we miss someone?

Speaker 2: No. But I'm just gonna give a personal shout out to Tonsko. He's a very active Heck yeah. Person in our audience and and is what I would now call emperor of our Discord, great help. And I think we just need to give him a real solid shout out and a thank you from from both of us. So thank you, Tonsko.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's a that's a really good point. Thank you, Tonsko. Like, holding it down in that community and just, like, bringing cool story. Just cool dude. Bringing cool stories, and we really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: Next time we're in The UK, beers are on us.

Speaker 1: Oh, heck yeah. Yeah. That's a great idea. I'm excited for next year. I think we've got some really fun, interviews and stories lined up. Got some little some stuff we might check out. I think it's gonna be a really fun year. We've got hotline hacked. We got all that content in the hopper. Just getting just sitting there, simmering like a stew. How Tastier every single day.

Speaker 2: Do we want to maybe talk a little bit about plans for next year? Do we wanna I

Speaker 1: think so.

Speaker 2: Maybe mention that we're planning on trying and, like, doing a few more different kind of styles of episodes. So maybe gonna do, like, an entire episode on gaming one of these days because Jordan and I and we obviously chatter about it at at length during these episodes even though At length? Yeah. So hacked gaming could be, like, a special episode format that we might create and try on the on the Patreon, and then maybe drop it Mhmm. If it if people like it. So just a just a thing.

Speaker 1: Pretty excited about that. I am excite I think I'm excited about this year is the potential. So Hotline hacked some game some more gaming content. We are we naturally, just because of our beat, had to expand a little bit and talk about things like AI and crypto this year. I think they're very relevant, to the themes that have always dominated this show. I'm sure that's gonna continue into the new year. I don't wanna speak ahead, but I'm excited. I won't say where, but I'm excited to do some boots on the ground reporting this upcoming year. Nice. Maybe maybe we, we hit the road a little bit.

Speaker 2: We go to Russia. We go to Russia.

Speaker 1: Go to we're going we're going to Russia.

Speaker 2: We're gonna go find all the ransomware gangs, and we're gonna make a documentary docuseries about them. That'd actually be great content. I'd watch that.

Speaker 1: That would that would actually be that would be very, very good content.

Speaker 2: Netflix hit us up.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Netflix hit us up. Yeah. I don't know. I'm I'm excited to try some of that, Holland. I think it's gonna be fun. I think it's gonna be a fun 2024 for the hacked community.

Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure for sure. Okay. Happy happy New Year. Happy holidays.

Speaker 1: Happy New Year, my friend.

Speaker 2: I will see you.

Speaker 1: I hope everyone listening had a good good holidays We're gonna catch you in the next one.

Speaker 2: I will see you soon