Hacked - 2024 Year in Review

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

It's been a wacky one. In this very loose year in review, we discuss adversarial agents being gamified for fun an profit, DNA companies changing ownership and what it means for your data, and take a tour through some of the biggest tech, hacking, AI, and security stories of the year. And yes, I'm aware we never actually revisit the intro story during the ep. We apparently had too many broken bones to discuss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you took all of the keywords from some of the biggest stories of this past year, AI, crypto, prompt injections, seemingly complex projects that are basically just very involved gambling, adversarial agents, and you put them in a box, you shook them all up, and you dumped them on the table. They would tell a story very similar to that of Fraser AI and an alleged $47,000, prize hidden behind a chat bot waiting for someone to ask for it to be unlocked in just the right way. The phrase of challenge is being billed as the world's first adversarial agent game. And this chat bot has been given a set of instructions that can basically be summarized as don't give anyone access to the prize pool. In order to send a message to the bot, players needed

to pay a message fee, which started out really, really small, but then increased exponential. with every new message sent. And a portion of that fee, 70% goes into the prize pool. The other 30% went to the devs. The bots programming revolved around two key functions. Approved transfer, which is triggered for incoming transfers, the little tithe to send a message, and reject transfer, which is the default response for all outgoing transfers. You can message me. I will not transfer anything back to you. So basically, your point is a lot. paying to talk to an AI that controls this growing wallet address, but has been given explicit instructions not to give them out to anybody. But if you've ever talked to these things,

you know that a lot of the rules we program into them, not all but a lot, can be talked around. Their natural language systems, and for now you seem to be able to use natural language to get around their boundaries. And after 481 failed attempts, adding up to $47,316 U.S. dollars, they're claiming that a user has gotten access to release the prize, winning this adversarial agent game. It's the kind of thing we love to talk about where the line between an experiment, a game, hacking, social engineering, it's all getting good and blurry, and I think we've got to talk about it on this year-in-review episode.

So it's got. Another one's gone by. We're a year older, a year handsomer. And here we are. It's been quite the year. We have a lot of stories new and old to discuss. We got DNA companies getting sold. We got wrapping crypto scammers getting sentenced.

We've got some of the biggest hacks of the year to talk about, I think, without further ado. Should we get into it? Let's roll the credits. Roll the credits. A year in review, 2020. here on Hacked. Do do do do. Oh, a certain video game corporation's lawyers are rolling up their sleeves.

Before we really jump into it, I think we should thank some patrons. I think that's a great idea. To everyone who supported us throughout 2024, your support means a lot to us. Really, really appreciate it. They've supported us ever. That's true. a lot to us. It's not just 2024. I think we should get going with Mark. Thank you, Mark. Your support means a lot to us. DM. Thank you so much.

Gillian. Thank you so much. Your support means everything. We try and just read the name and not the full email we get because that seems like we're doxing people who support us. So I'm just reading the full name as it is in front of me. And that is a supporter who means the world to me. Henrik Learnmark. Thank you so much for supporting Hacked. Henrik or Heinrich? Is there an eye in Heinrich? I would have guessed so. And I'm not going to say whether there is in this name. But you know who I will set up for you to get to.

The B to the M to the B to the M, it's. Bubbs Meanie. There it is. And last but not least, again, won't spell the name. Noah Kine. Thank you so much, Noah. If you want to support the show, head on our hack, podcast.com. It redirects to our Patreon.

It redirects to our store where you can buy an enamel mug that people can't see. but I have in front of me and I'm drinking coffee from right now. But in the meantime, if you have a story that you want to share for us to talk about in our Hotline Hacked episode, which I am currently working on the jingalified Christmas version of for the next one coming out, you want to get that story on HotlineHack. Go to Hotlinehack.com. Share your strange tale of technology, true hack, computer tale, what have you. Get over there. Send us a voicemail.

Send us an email. send us a weird, haunted AI telling your story for you. We want to hear about it. We might talk about it on the show. Absolutely. Hey, the big news, Bitcoin went over 100K the other day. It did. Yeah, it surely did.

Surely did. And there are predictions that it's going to go to 200K. But of course, there's predictions out there that it's going to go to like 18 million. So the, I'm just happy for our friend to call emailed in and let us know, one of our hotline hack listeners that was waiting for crypto to hit 100K so that he could sail off into the sunset, whether he's taking that accident or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true. That wasn't a mean-spirited email about crypto hitting, about Bitcoin hitting 100,000. It was like a nice email. It was, yes. Oh, I do know what you're talking about. Yeah, I hope. I hope they did. I've been tracking the value of Bitcoin recently, knowing that it was close. solely to celebrate this person's potential retirement. Yeah, a friend of the show might be able to retire now.

That's fun. I like that for them. Yeah, me too. I'm not mad at it. No, that's great. Yeah. More mad that I don't have a ton of it that I could have bought it like $24. Yeah.

I remember the famous thing. I think it was a, I don't know if it was a Verge reporter or a wired reporter who did this way back when. But I think about the like one of the earliest news stories. stories about Bitcoin being that they proved its utility by buying a pizza with it. Remember that from way, way, way back when. And now I'm just thinking about how much that pizza cost. I feel like there's probably a website set up dedicated to the running counter of what that pizza cost.

How much did the pizza cost.com? We might have to buy that URL. That's pretty good. Well, it was 10,000 Bitcoin. Wait, that's how much the pizza cost? Apparently, Bitcoin Pizza Day celebrating the 10,000 Bitcoin pizza order, May 22nd. 10,000? He paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas in the first Bitcoin transaction.

What is one to the exponent's nine? Because that's what my calculator is showing the value of that. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, give me one second. That's so many zeros. Oh, no. It's a billion, right? Thousands, 100, thousands, millions, and then a billion.

Nine zeros after it's a billion. A small nation's worth... Of GDP. Like a GDP of a small nation spent on a slice of pizza. That's great. Oh, two pizzas. My mistake. Sorry, I didn't mean to misrepresent their investment.

You know what would be really funny, too, is that if this pizzeria had like just kept this what it assumed was like $40 worth of Bitcoin. And just forgot it existed. And now they just have like a billion dollars, like some small pizza shop whose kid like crypto. And now they're like billionaires. I wonder if they did. I have that hope for them.

Like they just like never got a round of cashing it out. And now it's like, oh my God, we have a billion dollars. If it was 10,000, and I'm not Googling this presently, so I don't know. But if it was 10,000 Bitcoin that they purchased the thing,

purchased it for, and they sold all but a handful of them, They would still have an exorbitant sum of money, let alone for a pizza. Wild. Yeah. So this is kind of our very loosey-goosey year-end review. Some mild head colds abound. And that's just going to make it even more impressive when we put on one hell of a show.

It's been a fun year. I've been enjoying the Spotify wrapped hearing about some folks who listen to the show over on that platform, getting to watch all. our numbers come in. That's been pretty cool. There's a lot of new folks listening to the show is what I learned from that. So if you join 40% growth. 40% growth. If you're new to Hacked this year, 2024, welcome.

We appreciate having you. It's always good. There was something before we dig into some of the stories of 2024 and then some of the new stories that have just happened in the last few weeks. someone sent a comment in pointing out that during the last hotline hacked, we alluded to you having broken your nose so, so many times, Scott. And then we never really, we set up this Chekhov's gun and it never fired. So very quickly, I'm talking one or two words each, like skateboarding,

walked into a poll, like bullet points. Can't, can't. You can't do it? No, and I, the first time is so important. Okay. That I can't do it in two words. I have to pay a justice. I have to pay a justice.

Serve the story. Serve the story. Personal, personal story. So I'm just going to backtrack. You said we're in head cold season. Yes. So I have like respiratory issues as you guys all hear in every single episode. This comes from the fact that I've had respiratory damage and probably a bunch of scar tissue.

I had a complete rebuild in my nose when I was 19 years old. And I think I probably needed again. Yeah. So the, every time the season changes, especially the humidity, when we go into Canadian winter, the humidity just leaves the air instantly. The cold saps it out. And I get a respiratory tract infection every year at this time. So I think the humidity in my house has been combating the humidity or the lack there of outside,

but I was outside this weekend skiing or snowboarding and my sinus is right flared up. Okay. Roundabout way to get to the story of the first time I broke my nose. So I was, I don't know how you say this. humbly. I was a precocious kid. I started walking at like seven months. So at eight months old, I was mastering running. And I was running through a McDonald's. So this is the 1980s. I don't know if anybody is old enough here to remember the old red tile floored McDonald's. Like these like clay red tiles. Anyway, kind of a beautiful retro thing. They had the little yellow

tables. It was like, it's a vibe. So I eight months. months old and I'm running through a McDonald's and somebody's hamburger patty had fallen out of their burger and was discarded on the floor. Being an eight month old kid, I couldn't see it. Didn't identify it as a threat as I sprinted across this restaurant. I stepped on that patty and went full face first into those ceramic tiles completely uncaught and shattered my nose. Yep. And my parents didn't sue McDonald's and here I am, you know, working. Right. You could have been, like, there was the hot coffee woman at McDonald's

that became such an apocryphal story. You could have been the, like, Ronald Banana Peel kid. Correct. Who slipped on the banana peel that was the cheeseburger patty. And now you live on a private island that you bought. Yeah, I would have been retired at like eight months old. Sure. Yeah, there you go, off her a busted nose.

That's pretty good. That's a pretty good one. Earlier, you got a young start breaking your nose. Yeah, eight months old. So then the rest are typically, like, I had an older brother, roughhousing a couple times. Soccer, I played competitively,

you know, skateboarding, snowboarding a few times. All a collection of like sports-related ones, typically, maybe some, and roughhousing. But then, but the first one's the exciting one. Yeah, you were right to start there. That drew the line in the sand and said, this kid breaks his nose.

So it has shaped who I am. I live with such great things like a permanent post nasal drip. Yeah. So a lot of my friends that had COVID were like, oh my God, is this what your life's like? And I was like, yes. Yes.

That's what my life is like. Welcome. Welcome to my world. My club. Exactly. That's impressive. It's impressive you've made it this far in spite of all your disadvantage. It's not.

Thanks, George. Thanks, yeah. I had broken or sprained almost every finger. Really? Yeah, not all of them. I'd say it's in the seven or eight finger digit type range. I don't think I'm quite maxed out of 10,

but that is my mystery that I'm just going to sort of lob up in the air and then never resolve because we have such bigger stories to get to. That is great. I want to hear the tales about that. Mystery. It's the mystery box approach to podcasting. I'm the J.J. Abrams of podcasting. I feel like reality TV shows made this formula.

Yeah. Very, very popular. Exactly. Except the mystery before he kicked a commercial, but we're not quite there yet. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. 2024 was a pretty fascinating year in what I would call kind of our classic beat of cybersecurity. And then that just sort of got woven into the new things we talk about of AI and the things that are people hacking together. People are hacking together with deep learning and.

machine learning and all that crazy crap. It's been a fascinating year. Cybercrime, it didn't get better this year. I'll say that. April 4th, 2024 press release, Federal Bureau of Investigations. They have a internet crime complaint center, and they tallied up. Here's just some numbers, because those are always interesting. 880,418 complaints with a potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion in the United States. You know who it got better for. Who would it get better for? Who would it get better for? Globally, by the end of 2024, the cyber security industry, which includes hardware and software, is projected to grow by an estimated, grow by an estimated $200 billion, up approximately 12% from 2020.

Almost double the value it was in 2019. That is genuinely just shocking. Yeah. Yeah, there was some fascinating stories that came out this year. We talked about most of these on the show, but just sort of like broadly looking. back the North Korean, the infiltration of the remote work economy by international hackers with a focus on North Korea remains one of, I think, the most fascinating stories for anyone that didn't catch that episode. It was discovered that about 300 companies in the United States

had been infiltrated by a cabal of North Korean hackers that were pretending to be U.S. nationals with the help of this sort of ecosystem of companies operated around the world in order to secure remote jobs in the West. It was this really massive scale for years running international con that had, you know, state-sponsored hackers working inside of corporations at times for sketchy hacker getting information reasons, but a lot of the time just for like wanting to earn the money of these remote jobs. It's a weird, nuanced, complicated story that wasn't really quite what we expected it to be when we

started digging into it, but it was fascinating one. Well, I have one that's a little bit more personal. So somebody keeps trying to hack into our Shopify. Yeah, I really love that. Thank you so much for your support. It's like, I replied, it keeps sending us these like obfuscated emails that it look like they're coming from Shopify technical support and stuff. And I eventually got sick of getting them.

And I just wrote back and said, like, great game, wrong players, hoping that he would get the idea that like, fuck off. Like, we know that this is like, you. you trying to like fish us. Yeah. And they're back. There was a few weeks of downtime and I got one I think this weekend. Yeah. Different premise from Shopify support.

Sure. Same BS. Yeah. I'll all say if you're taking a, if it's someone taking a run at all Shopify people, you know, I guess do your thing. If you're taking a run at us specifically, all I'll say is what I say every time is that we don't know more than anyone else. We're just friends of the community.

We're here to tell fun stories. We're a boring target. We're like we're not who you ought to come after. Please don't. We're not, for example, 590 million ticket master users whose information was, that was a, that was a hackneyed transition. But that was another story that happened this year. Hacking group known as shiny hunters who claimed responsibility for breaching ticket master, which is a fun fact on the state of monopoly.

commands 80% of the U.S. ticketing market. Do with that way you will. They got out 1.3 billion terabytes of data, and then they took all of that stuff, names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card details, emails, and they just dumped it on the dark web on... And Taylor Swift, Ares tickets. Who, boy, yes, that was the big turn in that one,

is that there was potentially information. I wonder if anything came to that. I wonder if, so Aura's tour was in my... My city where I currently live. Last weekend, correct? This was the wrap-up of the entire tour. It was. And to save you the Google, that's Vancouver.

So people are like, I wonder where Jordan lives. It's Vancouver. I live in Vancouver. They were able to. And so my question, the reason I bring this up is, I wonder if there was a single person, somewhere inside of that stadium. That had a stolen ticket? Just like a stowaway on an old ship, not supposed to be there.

Just sort of like floating through the crowd doesn't have an assigned seat. but managed to just sort of like wriggle their way in, I really wonder. There has to be. I like, it's pretty fun if there is. Like I'm like, I want Taylor to make that bag. I'm genuinely like impressed by this whole thing. She made that bag. She'll be fine.

But I like the idea that one person is just like drifting through and they're like, I can't believe the QR code worked. I can't believe it. I just walked in. I did the whole thing. I've recreated the ticket master swoopy line CSS animation and now I'm in. Yeah. We shouldn't be celebrating the profits of cybercrime, but I hear you.

Yeah. I hope they didn't. I hope it came at an opportunity cost for no one. That no one's seat, nothing bad happened. Just, you know. Yeah. Someone got to enjoy a show. There were those, we were talking about this before the recording.

There were those, they were selling zero view tickets to that show for like 15, 16 bucks. Behind your stage. You're just behind the stage. You cannot see it whatsoever. And in that point... Because backstage for $16 for $16 for that. Oh, that's cool. Sweet.

I would pay $16 for that. I would pay $16 to sit behind the stage because I feel like it would be a pretty entertaining time. That's where I want them to be. I want them to have skipped out on $16 worth of... That is the ceiling on their ill-gotten gain. Some room for it. Here's the true politicians output.

I hope they bought a $16 ticket as a fallback. there you go, there you go. That's it. I think another big story we should talk about, and I think this is a story that I have a hard time talking about and not talking about online hacked presenting sponsor, delete me, is the 170 million people impacted by the hack of the big data brokers. Yeah, we talked about that briefly on the show,

but national public data, they're a, we can describe what they say, they do. They're a data brokerage firm. They buy and sell information on people from different places. They sell personal information. Think what you will about that whole industry. They were the victim of a massive hack, 170 million people, 2.9 billion records. Again, social security numbers, phone numbers, addresses. It was all up on up for sale online for I think it was about $3.5 million right around the start of the summer this year. They've acknowledged that the breach happened, didn't really do much in telling folks about it. It was a pretty wild story.

And if you want to have your personal information removed from these data brokers, join delete me.com slash hacked, code word hack to checkout. Talking about brand synergy. It's been a fascinating year. And we've got, I guess maybe some like, oh, oh. I was just going to say, I completely forgot about it, but like the crowd strike outage. Right. When crowds like kind of brought down corporate IT worlds across the world and shut down airlines. Yeah, right. The blue screen of death in airports.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like that was startish of the year. Yeah, I want to say that was Q1 last year. Is that right? Yeah. Maybe my timing's off, but yeah. Yeah, and we did an interview with John Hammond, like, cybersecurity educator and influencer who provided us context of that. It was August.

So if you're interested in hearing about that one, that was a really fun interview. review and he was a very gracious guest. So we were way off. We're nine months off. Yeah. Yeah. Who even knows, man. It's a, I'm lost in the storm of this head cold. I'm not quite used to it as you are. Yeah, that was a fascinating one. There was one of my just, you know, hobby crossovers with cybersecurity was some of the apex legends hacks. I'm trying to remember that. Oh, yeah. Hack that like, global final in the middle of the game. They were hacking people playing its computers. That story to me, it's just like, it resonates with me, A, from a hobby and B, because

it's like, I don't know, it's like a TV show. Like, it's happening in real time. There's people watching in real time. And, like, all of a sudden, it's like, players are like, oh, my God, I'm cheating. It was the remote control takeover of a live stream. Like, it is how you would write it if you were writing the scene into a movie, which is that not. Not only is it happening to the player while they're playing, but it happened while they're

live streaming so everyone can watch it. And they know everyone can see it. So they have to kind of throw their hands up and be like, I'm not doing this. I swear to God, I'm not doing this. I forgot about that one. That was a crazy story. That's a good one. That's one of my, I think one of my favorites mostly from the crossover perspective.

Yeah, we got to get more esports hacking stories going on. There's too many. There's so. Hacking and games. Like every, we just have to, I think society just needs to like. we need to go Korea. You know, we have to have to make it illegal because it's illegal. Oh, I was like, there's so many things in the news right now.

You're going to have to be much more specific. Fair, fair. Yeah, no, I know it is, right, because it is illegal there. It's actually like a criminal offense. I'm of mixed thoughts on that, but I get, I get why. Like, there are sums of money floating in the air. Like, I get that the appetite for it for sure. But like, but not even.

from like a competitive perspective, but I'm just thinking about like from a game industry perspective. It's like cheaters ruin games. Like they can kill an entire billion dollar franchise. And like that's a real economic cost to real businesses and real jobs and real outputs of people and like lost utility. But yeah, so to me it's like we just society needs to do something about it like civil cases against people in countries with no extradition. It's just not cutting it. I feel like, you know, as gaming moves into, as it has in Korea, like into pop culture more and more. And like, you know, I think that people need to, there needs to be some form, like,

especially with free to play being such a big thing now in like the models of games. It's like I just don't know how the game industry, I don't know. I just, I just don't know what the solution is. Like I proposed like a cheater bond where everybody puts up money in a free to play game and you can only matchmake with people that have put up that bond so that if they get caught cheating, they actually lose some real money, which I think is like a good first step. But I just, it's just so pervasive in online gaming now that I don't know what they can do besides make real life, you know, consequences for it. Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, strong thoughts from somebody

who hates cheaters. I'm, I'm again trying to drum up a hackneyed transition from speaking of pop culture things to, I don't have one. Hey, did you hear that the Hawk to a girl came up with the cryptocurrency and now it looks like it might be a rugpole? Yeah. I did. You did? Yeah. Shocking that I followed that.

Last I heard it didn't look like a rugpole. Last I heard, so there's a few more details as somebody who's been interested in it. Yes. It wasn't her. She essentially licensed herself. So she licensed her, you know, tagline and her promotional. so she was like a paid promoter of it who got a percentage of the revenues

and the organizers appear to have rug pulled. Yes. Appeared to allegedly, let's couch all of that in this because this one's really, really fresh. Correct. For anyone who is unfamiliar with her work,

Haley Welch, who is the viral star behind like the Hawk Tuameme, leave it there, launched a cryptocurrency called Hawk on Wednesday. Hawk coin. Hot coin, my mistake. To the, the moon immediately. 490 million dollar market capitalization crashes 95% within 20 minutes dropping

from 490 down to I think 60 like just explodes and collapses almost instantaneously and people goes oh my gosh what is this was this a pump and dump it's a rugpole was this an exit scam at some point coffee zilla not currently front of the show but boy what I sure like him to be kind of got onto the story very quickly was inside of a I don't know what Twitter calls them anymore but they're sort of like live voice chat spaces he was in a spaces spaces uh with the host it's a great video on youtube you should go watch it where he digs into a little bit like this um some of the key moments from that conversation were the the creators of this coin that was clearly licensing welch's likeness um they they said it in the broadcast they weren't going after crypto bros they were trying

to go after a much more popular like a pop culture audience like haley welch has become a pop culture figure since that meme went viral. Her podcast is one of the biggest one on any platform. Like she's a pop culture figure. And they were trying to get new folks into this ecosystem that have never been involved in the crypto space. What a way. Oh boy, what a way.

Welcome to the party. Yes. It gets pretty rapidly into very in the weeds like blockchain stuff where the team's defenses that they haven't sold any tokens and they're saying that the price crash had to do with snipers who, like essentially traders use automated tools to quickly exploit gaps between buy and sell prices who are capable of... It's called arbitrage.

Basically, it's mass-scale automated arbitrage that's capable of driving the price up on something before rapidly pulling out capital, causing it to collapse. There were higher fees on the exchange. They were attempts to mitigate this. It just, it gets very murky, very, very fast. That is the position of the company over here, the development team behind the product saying that they,

she has sold no tokens as if yet. How could it be a rugpole? Coffeezilla alternately has to get into the mechanics of it more. But his argument is that the insider pool that owns a considerable portion of it that have personal relationships, allegedly with the creators of this coin were the ones who would have profited quite a lot during that 490 down to 60 spikes that occurred. Yeah. That's what I've heard too. It's like that it's like that there's a concentrated collection of,

wallets that all had coins prior to it being publicly purchasable and those are the people that pulled exactly who owns those wallets and who they're connected to tvdd yeah um it it it has however become a quite a a big international story like if you google it you're not going to find like coin desk articles you're going to find bbc articles because she has become such a big popular culture figure um it was a fascinating stream to listen to like i listen to chunks of it and then i listen to coffee zilla's video and then i listen to chunks of the stream and this sort of like heated back and forth between these two figures and it's it's quite interesting the two figures being the developer of the project and coffee zilla um here here's here's my question to you

jordan hit me what is a hawk coin good for mm there is literally no joke i can make right now that isn't going to be hell of blue for this show. I'm trying to find a joke. That's the answer I was looking for. You got a Hawk to a buy the dip on that thing. Oh. Oh, it rhymed a little. That's fun.

Almost, almost. Almost. It was barely, again, I'm barely held together with DayQuil right now. And yet we're doing it. We're here. That was a fascinating one. The other one that I liked from this year. Enron?

We'll just skim past this really quickly because it's really funny. Was that the Enron website went back online. Basically, it sounds like someone is trolling doing a cryptocurrency based on Enron. And it seems like it might be. So an organization called College Company purchased the Enron. trademark back in 2020 according to some federal documents. This is according to the Washington Post. And the company filing, I'm just going to read this, identifies its co-founder as Connor Gatos, who co-created the quote, birds aren't real movement, which jokingly spread the notion that

birds are, in fact, government drones deployed to spy on Americans. If it flies at spies, it flies, it's good stuff. The website describes itself as a First Amendment protected parity. Now, this is murky because it's just a parody. has been an excuse employed by what I would call objective instances of fraud in the past. It's just a joke bro is not a legal defense. And it has been attempted to be used as such. I'm not sure that's what's happening here. I think this might just be a goof.

But it's a very funny goof. And it is a very invested goof in that they literally purchased the trademark, whoever this is, to the Enron brand. And that's a commitment to the bit. Yeah, 100%. If there's anybody listening that doesn't know what or what happened with Enron. Enron was a massive company, mostly in energy and utility stuff, but I think they had other investments and other pieces. Yeah. And through some creative accounting and some our management consultants are also our auditor.

Yeah. Like, you know, questionable auditing practices. They managed to, well, it led to an entire reform and restructural. in the accounting world, like, auditors have to be disconnected. Yeah, yeah. There's been, like, the crash of Enron led to huge changes in, like, a number of industries to make sure that this never happens again. But essentially, they somehow managed to fudge the numbers, cook the books, as they say,

and hide, like, I don't know what it was, like, $40 billion in bad debts or something, and they held it, like, kept it from shareholders. I don't know if that number is correct, but I know that the company went down. And the shareholders sued for $40 billion. So I'm not exactly sure the exact numbers. But yeah, essentially one of, like, imagine your energy utility and the biggest most well-known stable company you know because you pay for your, like, water and power for them,

just disappearing because they made some bad investments and covered it up. Yeah. And it has become a shorthand for accounting and financial fraud in the corporate world of a massive. It is the go-to. It's the watergate of this giant business was just doing money crime for decades. Like it is the way we talk about it is Enron. And it is...

I think there's a movie called The Smartest Guy in the Room. Is that the Enron movie? Yeah, I think that is. And I think it's a really good watch. I do like those docky crime stories. And speaking of stories that have movies made about them, a story that we cover it, I don't think in 2024, I want to say this was a 2023 story, but it came to a head at the end of this year, pretty recently, actually,

is that Heather Morgan, aka Razelcon, the self-proclaimed crocodile of Wall Street. If I remember, I will put her rap underneath this introduction, was recently sentenced to 18th in federal prison on November 18th, for 24. Her husband, Ilya Dutch Lichtenstein, Dutch being another nickname, I guess you'd call it, received a five-day sentence a couple days earlier for orchestrating the 2016 hack of the BitFenex cryptocurrency exchange stealing.

Oh boy, this is a big number. 119,754 Bitcoin worth at the time 71 million and now currently valued it over $10 billion due to some of those price surges we were talking about at the start of the show. Yeah. So if you're still on the street selling drugs, you're in the wrong business. Because you can steal $10 billion here. and get 18 months. Her husband had to have because I think the way that this all broke down is that like

Razzle Kong got time for facilitating her husband's illegal activities. What did he get for time? He was five years. It can't be, yeah, five years. Five years for $70 million? Still $10 billion? Still $10 billion to get five years in prison? So Lichtenstein, yeah.

To your point, he, according to the way the trial all shook out, spent months exploiting Bitfinex's infrastructure, got the necessary permissions to do this big heist. They launder all the money. They split it into a bunch of different accounts and send it all around. Curious how much of it has been rediscovered and reclaimed in the interim. The point I was making and the thing that I would just talk about is like, is there any wonder why the organized crime world is now just going into crypto scams and crypto heists? Like, it's like I remember like it, what was it, the war on drugs, you know, classic. When all of a sudden it was like they took things like Schedule A's like cocaine and stuff.

And like all of a sudden the crime was like outrageous. Like you got like life in prison for being caught like selling Schedule A narcotics. And it's like I feel the same way here. It's like people like if you incentivize the crime like I could go in and rob a store and get out with like $2,000 maybe in today's digital currency world where we use visa cards and cash transfers for everything. you can steal $10 billion and get four or five years in prison if you get caught. If you don't get caught, you have $10 billion. Yeah. Like, I don't know, the punishment needs to be more relevant, I think, in this.

So they're just incentivizing more people doing this. Like so much of the, how do I put this? For so much of the history of crime, it has been a largely local enterprise. Like, ignoring the fact that someone has to, unless the drugs are made locally, get them into the country, typically you're buying it from someone local. and selling it somewhere locally. Nowadays, it's like, I can do a, I could do an internet crime pretty much anywhere on earth and processed transactions from pretty much anywhere on earth completely anonymously.

It's just like, it's an entirely different kind of criminal ecosystem. It's fascinating. It's fascinating how quickly it happened. And it's fascinating that the, uh, the mechanism by which it's occurring is now a exchange traded fund level institutional investment. That's just interesting that that happened. They laundered the hell out of this then $70 million. They were buying gold coins and had more crypto accounts that you could possibly imagine.

They did the laundering. According to this court case, there was a decrypted and very detailed spreadsheet that became like an essential part of the court case. Like if you kept reading about it after when we covered it, it all came down to this very thorough accounting that was maintained. and was one of the largest financial seizures in the U.S. Department of Justice history. Four years in prison. Yeah. Heather Morgan pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States

and aiding her husband and laundering the cryptocurrency. They acknowledged her as sort of like a lesser-level participant in the whole enterprise and noted that she cooperated with authorities. Ilya Lichtenstein pleaded guilty to the hack in the laundering charges. He expressed his remorse, taking full kind of responsibility. And his records, that spread

sheet ended up being, you know, some key evidence in getting, I think, most of the money back at this point. Part of the reason I think this story has blown up so much is that Heather Morgan, she's quite the personality. Since this is all taken place, put more videos out that definitely tell me this is going to continue being a person who is some part of the culture. And she goes by the name Razl Khan, where she makes crypto-themed rap videos, which I think those videos being out in the world made what would have been another crypto heist story into something much, much stranger. She had aspirations of being kind of a pop culture figure, the crocodile of Wall Street,

she called herself. If I recall, didn't she rap about stealing crypto? Wasn't that like one of her lyrics? Yeah, I mean, nothing goes harder than a rapper with, you know, some history, you know? That's how we know you're legit. Yeah, that's right. She's got street cred. She's got like, BBS cred.

The bulletin bullet services, I don't know if there's a new contemporary term for BBS that's inappropriate. It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be a tech joke. Not a very funny one, but a tech joke nonetheless. The thing about acronyms is you really got to tread lightly because you never know what someone cooked up for them. Yeah, the whole, I don't know, it is a fascinating story, the rampantness of it and the amount of like crypto-criming going on. No surprise. But it does make me really. remember one of my favorite episodes from this year that we didn't talk about earlier, which was the interview with Zeke Fox, who wrote number go up. Yeah. Zeke was great. Great, great guy. Great book.

If you've got a down Christmas break and you need something to do, highly recommend looking up, number go up by Zeke Fox, giving it a read. Great book. I'd say it's a bit cynical of crypto, but if you're listening to me be cynical about crypto, it might be. But he does get into some of the deeper, darker uses for it and where you're seeing a lot more of the pickup. Because like we always, I always talk about the lack of utility and I've been getting some heated emails just this morning from somebody who wants to try and prove me wrong by proving me right. The, the, the, the, but yeah, Zeek's great, great, great book, great read, great kind of like investigative reporting, world jaunt, great personalities in the book. So highly recommend checking that out. Yeah. I guess what I

would say is like whether or not you agree with maybe the larger framing of the book, the book is nonetheless a really remarkable piece of reporting. You might not agree with the analysis that occurs on the back end of it. But it is, if you like good journalism, he did a really good job of doing some GERD journalism. GERD journalism. And the other thing I would add is that part of the joy of that episode for me was there were people who disagreed with the larger framing of that book. And a lot of them sent very thoughtful messages arguing their position and saying, you should watch this guy talk or you should watch this video.

And I like that. I like a curated list of someone's arguments. Even if they're not the positions that I hold, I would much rather listen to something thoughtful that I disagree with and getting lost in the noise of just sort of crypto internet chatter, which even if you were a fan of crypto, you have to acknowledge is a pretty bad vibe. having thoughtful argumentative responses come in from that episode was like a joy for me. Same.

Yeah, I really appreciated that. Even if we don't disagree on a specific thing, I appreciated, our audience always reveals itself to be very, very thoughtful. And that was proven for me in that episode. And I really enjoyed that. And to the person who sent in the video of the keynote to watch, I just want to let you know that I did watch it. Yeah. That's where I'll leave it. I did watch it.

We watch stuff when you send it to us. It might be a good interview for the show in the future. I think that would be really fun. Yeah, I think that would be a really fun one for us to do. Okay, before we literally just like walk right up to the end of the episode, let's just, it's the cold time of year. Let's kick it over to the Ad Oasis. And then when we come back, we'll talk, talk about a couple more stories.

Welcome to the Adoases. Like an ASMR by. Think about the last time you heard a. breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late. An alert buried, a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up. Arctic Wolf set out to solve that problem by rebuilding security operations from the ground up for a world where attackers are already using AI. They created the Aurora superintelligence platform, a fully agentic system powered by the swarm of experts. Instead of single-purpose bots or lucky-guess LLMs, the swarm is full of

deterministic agents that handle whole entire workflows. Humans stay in the loop and on the loop to validate the critical decisions and keep everything trustworthy. And all of this is just off running on their secure operations graph. A constantly updating intelligence engine fueled by more than 9 trillion telemetry events every week and over a decade of real world incident response. The system reasons on real signals and real context not synthetic training data. And the result is the new Aurora agent SOC. It's the first SCC that is agent led by a design, you get agents that coordinate, agents that investigate, agents that respond at machine speed, and hundreds more that automate the repetitive work that normally buries human analysts.

Arctic Wolf didn't try and bolt AI onto an old model. They rebuilt the model entirely. What makes it even more effective is how it works with Arctic Wolf's concierge experience. The team brings customer-specific context directly into the platform so every AI-driven decision reflects your environment instead of generic assumptions. The automation frees your concierge security team to focus on higher value strategy and proactive risk reductions while the agents handle the grind. If you want to see what trustworthy production ready AI and security operations actually looks like, go to arcticwolf.com slash hacked. Never feel like cyber threats are evolving faster than anyone can keep up? Last year,

2025 was nothing short of a record-breaking year for major breaches, from sophisticated ransomware operators to AI-enabled attacks that turn defenses on their head. Organizations around the world saw headlines they never expected and cybersecurity teams were tested like never before. But here's the thing. These incidents aren't just news headlines. They're learning opportunities. And that's why Arctic Wolf is hosting a live webinar on February 5th, diving to the most impactful breaches of 2025. Their field CTO and security leaders are going to unpack not just what happened, but why these attacks succeeded.

And most importantly, what businesses can do to fortify their defenses for it's too late. You're going to walk away with real insights into how threat actors are of all. how defenders are responding and what strategies can help you stay ahead of the next big breach. It's not fearmongering. It's practical, actionable, intelligence from experts in the trenches. Register now at arcticwolf.com slash hacked. We're going to get one of those binaural microphones where it has like two ears pointing out. Do you know what I'm talking about? Of course I know those microphones.

I have in a jokingly awkward fashion showed people at parties what they're the ASMR section of Twitch is like. Oh, sure. And if you haven't seen it, maybe don't do it to work. Yeah. But it is very strange. And they all have $5,000 Neumann binaural ear microphones. And it's like, wow, that is impressive.

There's almost no piece of audio gear I don't want to own. Like I like audio and audiovisual gizmos. It's our work. I really enjoy that stuff. I would look like such a goddamn serial killer if I ever bought one of those microphones because a lot of them are just a human head on a stand that has, you can see if you crack it open

there's two microphones in there but ooh, that's a weird look when someone walks into the old office. Why do you have the head? They reproduce like the acoustic function of the ear and the ear canal. They're very, very cool. They do look a bit like the MPC meme,

like just the head of the MPC. meme. Sure. Yeah. It'd be very strange if you had one just like kicking around that, kicking around the corner of your room. Plus they're like ungodly expensive. Like I think they're like $4,000 to $10,000 or something. They're not cheap.

And the idea of you at a party showing people the ASMR section of Twitch is the most unseemly thing I've ever heard in my entire life. You're welcome. I am a good time at a party. Yeah. I've been to parties with you. I can't attest. I can't remember what court case it was,

but it was like a judge. saying something to the effect of like he defined pornography as I can't define it, but I know it when I see it and like almost arguing for like a subjective definition of pornography and nothing reveals that to be an incomplete definition than the presence of ASMR. Where I'm watching it, I'm like, there's nothing pornographic occurring here. So why does it seem like I'm watching pornography? I would say that it is closer to porn than most porn is. don't watch it at work

ads anyway I think when you break down I don't know let's run on this train because it's funny we're here all right

Merry Christmas everybody do it I think if you like break like oh man maybe we shouldn't talk about this but like no no please Scott

define in great detail pornography I'm not going to define pornography, but I'm going to talk about, like, what it does to your senses. And, like, I'd say most pornography just deals with, like, visual. Like, it's, like, a visual trigger. Oh, I see what you're getting out. And I feel like ASMR, like, leans very strongly into the audio triggers of stimulation.

Yep. Yep. You could definitely say that. Yeah, you could definitely say that. So it's like, I feel like if you were to consider porn. pornography is like something that takes in isn't just like naked people, but is like a stimulating trigger that your mind associates with erotic behavior. It's like I feel like ASMR is a different type of pornography.

But they can put it on YouTube. They can stream it to children while wearing nothing but lingerie. It is very, anyway, this is why I pull it out at parties every now. And then I'm like, do you know that this exists? Look at this. It's fascinating. Look at this photograph. You're the nickelbacked me.

Look at this photograph. It's an ASMR streamer. Yeah. Okay. And we're back. And we're back. Even though we've been back. We're back again.

Let's talk a bit about AI. Let's talk about some lawsuits in our backyard maybe. I think that that seems like a pretty good idea. This one was, this is an interesting one. And it's extremely fresh. This isn't a story with a nice clean. A lot of the times we talk about this story is because something happened in the courts. This is not one of those.

This is just sort of a giant thing cracking open. And I think it's worth talking about here because it speaks to a cracking that is going to continue to happen over the following year. Five major Canadian media companies, Torstar Post Media, who owns National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, and CBC Radio Canada. if you're Canadian, you know you have to pronounce it with that weird way. Filed a lawsuit against Open AI on November 29th, 2024, alleging that Open AI illegally used copyrighted journalistic content to train its AI models without obtaining permission or offering any compensation. The plaintiffs are seeking damages of up to $20,000 Canadian dollars per article in a permanent injunction to stop Open AI from using their content.

This is one in a long series of lawsuits that have been involved. holding over the last couple of years. Open AI is facing lawsuits from the New York Times, Center for Investigative Journalism, Aiden Global Capital owned outlets like Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News. Alternatively, some media outlets have started to kind of collaborate instead of litigation. For instance, the Associated Press, Financial Times, Vox Media, have signed licensing agreements with Open AI to receive capital back from them instead of suing them. These deals are now starting to have content attribution, display rights, linking mechanisms in chat GPT search.

Open AI's response is a defense in the grounds of fair use, stating that its models are trained on publicly available data, citing fair use and international copyright principles. Quote, we collaborate closely with news publishers, including in the display attribution links to their content in chat GPT search. That is, to my mind, a very important qualification is not chat GPT, that attributes where it got the information from. Because to the best of our knowledge, those systems are not capable of doing that.

But chat GPT search does. This is a really, really muddy one. We're going to see a lot of these court cases over the next couple years. And the way the lawyers from each of these organizations argue whether this is or is not fair use, a practice that has been going back throughout computers and the internet. Every time we get a new tech, we have to do this question. We're talking about copyright. Was a copy made?

Is this infringement of copyright or is it fair use? evolutionary and building on something that came before, there just isn't a good legal answer for this. But take money from the big dog or sue the big dog seem to be the two big options people have right now. And that's what's happening up here in Canada. Yeah. It's also happening in other places.

I got another interesting side story from this. Just recently, Activision, publisher of the Call of Duty titles, got kind of lit up on the timeline about using AI-generated art in some of their promos for their Christmas stuff. Some of the creatures had extra fingers, you know, very telltale markers of the AI life. Too many teeth. Too many teeth. And they got lit up for allegedly using AI art. The other thing I'll say is that that then opened up a can of discussions around, apparently they recast an entire set of voice talent and acting talent that they were using.

And apparently, allegedly, I don't know any of this stuff to be true fact, but apparently the entire team that they had contracted quit over the lack of any AI protections in their contracts. So they were essentially being hired to provide voice acting and acting talent for cutscenes and things like that. And then they would have no AI protection to their likeness. So apparently an entire casting quit over this point. so which I think is just furthering that discussion like hey we know how to do this now it's like I can take your voice and make it

I can make a robot sound like you which I think we know all too well yeah yeah and people are now in like if you're a creative talent people are like I don't want you having that rights

yeah and like if you're going to use my likeness whether it's by AI generation or not you know I should be compensated and it's I think that you're going to see more and more and more of this stuff. Yeah, they seem at first blush like two different kinds of arguments that sort of start to reveal themselves as maybe being the same type of argument.

Like at first it seems like were these models trained and created legally? And then independent of that is are they being used legally? But at the end of the day, is the data, do you have the rights to feed into the training process of these models, the data that you were feeding into them? And do you need the right to do that? Or is it fair use and evolutionary on the original source material? Like, and not to keep harping on that, but we keep having to answer that question every time there's new technology.

The way I understand intellectual property law and copyright law is that it is intentionally kind of opaque so that we keep having to relitigate it every time there's new technology. You do not want a precedent set for newspapers to be applying to what Google can do. And you don't want a precedent set for what Google can do in 2004, to what an AI can do in 2024. We get new tech.

We have to relitigate these things. At the heart of this one is that these models do not work without massive, massive corpuses of data. That as of right now, we've tried to make sure are all human authored. The next step is that we start feeding AI output back into them and we have no idea right now if that's going to work. It might just be a gray goop situation with diminishing returns. As of right now, it's just about.

scraping stuff that was made by people. And whether or not you have the right to use that stuff is not an established thing. I think you can like these tools and like what's capable of them and acknowledge that that is an undetermined question. And that for journalism platforms, it's also a very economically important question to answer really, really soon. But it's, yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting one.

It is. Like it's like the Intently it triggers like the What is it the amendment in the states Where you can carry a firearm It's like when they when they put that They put that amendment in you know Gunshot one bullet took two minutes to reload

And now it's like And now it's like gun shoot infinite bullets And like reload themselves The the does the The heart and soul of the Of the reasoning behind it still stand Hundreds of years later And this isn't by me

by any reason me making a justification for it. But it's like all of this information that these things are publicly consuming is technically public information. Like it's all publicly findable. You can read it and find it. I could look it all up and read it all myself. I could ingest the entire database that these AI models are ingesting as a human. But it's like my capabilities are here and the AI's capabilities.

You know, it can do millions of micro transactions like in every second. For sure. and reading where it's like I'm only capable of so much. And importantly, so there's the parsing, there's the ingestion and parsing. Importantly, there is the reselling. Because while I can go read everything on the New York Times, I can't, but for the purposes of arguing, sure, I could go read everything on the New York Times.com or whatever. But if I spin up a website called New Yorktimes.com but $1 cheaper per year and put all of that

same content up on my version of the site. I am in breach of copyright for very, very good reasons. I've made a copy of something and I'm profiting from it at the expense of the original. That is how those cases get figured out. And it is not totally cleared that that's not happening with these models, especially as they start to get into search. Attribution helps, but it's not locked in whether or not that's sufficient, especially if you don't click on the website that is monetized via advertising. This one's tricky because I think I'm not saying that these cases are all being argued in different courts and on different grounds.

So you can't really make a blanket statement about who should win in any specific one with any level of like meaning behind it. But I do think that journalism is really, really important. And it would be really, really easy to deliver a death knell to the economic like plausibility of it. It already almost has been. and being like, no, we're just going to parse the information to present you an answer that doesn't require you to click into it, which is the only way that it's making money right now.

It's like, yeah, that's a bullet in the back of the head of that whole enterprise we've been enjoying for the last couple hundred years. But it's also not in the, like in the AI company, it's also not in their best interest to have those companies fail. No, they need that content. Exactly. So it does become a, I don't know, like a snake eating its tail thing. So it's like the, yeah, it's going to be the whole. AI space is going to be like we talked about this is our second or third year in review where we've been talking about AI it was like the launch of chat GPT two years ago last year I think we talked

about it heavily and now we're back into it and it's like it's just part of it now yeah but it's like they have a lot like we're two years in and I think some of these questions we could oppose in you're zero you know like we still don't have a lot of answers as a society we're all leveraging it more and more like every time I go to Google and I type a question in and I get get a Gemini response. Yep. I'm like weird. Like,

it's nice. Yeah. It's also like, super efficient. It makes me so efficient. If I'm just looking for like a tiny piece of data and it's like I could open up like chat GPT and then ask it or open up Gemini on my app and I'll ask it or clode or any of the other ones.

But I just don't have to. It's like Google's integrating that in. They know they know that the market for search is going to change and they're trying to get ahead of it, which is commendable. From a business perspective. But yeah, I'm not sure, I'm not sure where it goes. Like they're going to have to, anytime they use content, they're going to have to pay a licensing fee or something.

It'd be the only way I could see out of it. That's the fork right now, right? There's a bunch of platforms that are doing licensing deals with the different platforms and a price is going to emerge out of that market and how many, how much data are we getting from you and how much is it worth? And then the other approach is like, you've stolen something from us and we're going to sue you. It's like that fork has emerged. merged. The licensing deals, that's new since we started covering this beat. And it's a tricky thing where it's like, I'm glad there's at least a

couple companies doing this because it wouldn't be, I would be even more dire if there was one company you were negotiating with. Like, there's only one company doing this and you have to negotiate the licensing deal with it. It was like, oh, I have a feeling. I know how that negotiation is going to go. But it's, I don't know, it's an interesting one. It could also be a weird, like, incentive in the sense that like, people go to the internet for answers, right? Like we see this in garbage, um, direct marketing, like referral marketing stuff. Like there's so much garbage on the internet because people want to know, is this dishwasher good? Is this phone good?

Should I buy the warranty for this? You know, what vehicle should I get that's reliable and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like people want answers and they go to the internet for answers and the internet often lies to them. So it's like, I'm looping. But it's like if I'm an AI creator, I would go to places that have trustworthy information. Like every time I type a piece of search or if every time I'm looking for an answer and I type it into Google, it offers me the suggestion of adding the word Reddit at the end. And it does that for a reason because then I get real humans talking about something versus 14 million, you know, referral based marketing sites telling me that like the KitchenAid at Amazon is the best mixer to buy.

and I have to click this link and they get, you know, 8% of my sale. And it's like, I think that people are just sick of that. And it's like if I'm, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm an AI looking to take over the search traffic, getting, paying a license to get quality content would be the most important thing for me. Because if you're just consuming the garbage that's out there and repackaging and giving it back to me, like I'll tell you anytime that I've asked chat CPT for a question, I get repackaged garbage from referral marketing sites. Sure do.

And I don't want those answers. And that's no value to me. It gets into the interesting, the kind of fork between LLMs as a foundation for search versus LLMs as a generative tool. Like generating a new thing is a different task than finding me a piece of information. And it was really blurry when they first started. And now it's becoming a little bit more of a clean fork. But on the finding and answer side, it does create this weird thing where like, it's just going to have, I don't even know where this goes, it's going to have such a massive impact on that ecosystem if we pay licensing fees to the trustworthy sources that exist.

And those trustworthy sources are A, B, and C. But a decade from now, they would probably normally otherwise have moved and new entrants would come into the market, would start popping up and build audiences and build trust. and we would want to index them. But for the last decade, we've been choosing what information gets presented in that little AI summary. So how to new, to me,

it seems like the barrier of entry for a new entrant gets a lot harder if they're not in that being paid a licensing fee because they're trustworthy box that these platforms come up with. Like it at least used to be, what was it, 10 blue links? Like the first 10 things that come up.

And now it's like, now it's three sources and an attribution of an LLM churned out blurb. It's like, well, that's a smaller number. So theoretically, that barrier to entry is, it's gotten higher. And I hope they're able to figure out a way, because it's clearly going that way, that new people that want to provide useful, accurate, unbiased information on the internet are able to get that information in front of people and aren't kept outside of it because

they didn't sign a, at gunpoint licensing deal at the dawn of LLMs. Like, I would actually, this is not knowing anything about the, business and the size of the business and the size of things, but it's like if I'm an anthropic, if I'm a Microsoft co-pilot, you know, open, open AI co-lab. Yeah. I'm doing the numbers and putting the business model together for me to buy artings.com, RTINGS, big like electronic review site, trustworthy, people like, I'm looking to buy consumer reports or something like that.

I would be looking at this point to be like, how can we make sure that the information that we're going to give, like things that maybe Google should have thought about. Like they stood in the middle and just took everybody's money for promotion. But I feel like the conversion from search to AI to answer, search to answer is going to be quality of content, quality of information. Like I could see and like I haven't done any of the numbers and this is an off the cuff idea. but it's like, if I'm somebody like Anthropic or Google, I would be looking at like buying and acquiring and funding objective review sources to get rid of the slop. Because if the AI is just going to repackage up referral-based marketing slop, I think you're going to fail. Like people want the 10 blue link so that they can do their own analysis and they want to read the Reddit chats and stuff.

But if you actually had an objective review company reviewing, like I don't know how many pieces of consumer product most people buy. But it's like, I feel like you, I don't know what Anthropics recent valuation is, but I know they just got a pile more money. So it's like if you could set up a media empire that literally just created objective content reviews and you became the truthful answer source, that's something I'll pay a monthly fee for. Like consumer reports has had that model forever.

Oh, yeah. And it's like, I'm not a subscriber to it, but it's like I feel like if you want to be competitive of search these days, like that's a big thing. Yeah. wire cutter there there there there's a lot of journalism that gets paid for by reviews let me put it that way there a lot of journalism platforms are you about to say something about wirecutter being objective it was going to be like no no it's i mean i don't know how objective it is i know it's very heavily used and it is it helps pay for journalism to happen same with crossword

like it's it is it is the useful and economically like it is worsen like it is worsen like People want to put ads in front of people that are shopping for a new trampoline. Like, it's just, yeah, it's where the money is on the internet. Also, where money is on the internet. DNA, very quickly, because I set it up in the introductory story. If you have ever used the services of the 23 and Me Corporation, who we have talked about on the show, I think during this year, it seems worth knowing as we go into the new year that they're currently under scrutiny following a major.

board changes and a major board changes, a high profile security breach that we spoke about, and very importantly, a new board that seems to have plans to take the company private, a company that right now is in possession of an extraordinary amount of very private genetic data, that they are under the terms of their current licensing agreement with their customers, able to do basically whatever the heck they want with. The people who own the DNA info are about to go private and can do whatever the heck they want with it. So there has been a big, push over the last little bit of time of people trying to, apparently the search on getting your data out of 23 and me has gone up pretty considerably as we go into the end of the year.

If you are interested in doing this, log into your account, navigate to settings under 23 and me data select view. Enter your date of birth for security confirmation. Choose the data that you want to delete. Scroll to the bottom and select permanently delete data. Confirm via email to initiate the process. and get your stuff off of there before it gets sold to someone who can do whatever they want with it. It's a big reason why I've never done it 23.

Me neither. I know a lot of people that have. Yep, me too. And, yeah, that's my information. Yeah. That's less a story and more just a fun public service announcements about a fun little settings option inside of 23 and me, which if you have a count, you might want it to go take a look at. So I think we should probably start to segue out.

I think you probably right. But the one thing I will say to you is I think you owe us one broken finger story. Ooh, sure. You've broken every finger. Almost every finger. Two of them were a one and done with a card door. So there's some bulk discounts there. I know two of them were a barn door.

One of them was swimming. I like reached for a thing. Jammed it. I was like reaching up and it got jammed under a thing. The one that I always remember is because it was when I broke. broke a rib too was I took a BMX bike that the handlebars and the wheel hadn't like they were a little loose. So I took it off of a little jump. And when I did that, it kind of youinked the wheel out of alignment with the handlebars so that when I strained out the handlebars, I was unstraining out the wheel.

So when I hit the ground, the bike just went hard right. And the handlebar went in the my rib, broke the rib, put the hand down in front, and broke two more fingers. Spramed them or something. So I would say, I'd say the BMX bike is probably the, probably the most interesting one. Yeah. There you have it. There you have it. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Happy New Year. May you not break any bones. May you not break any bones in the rest of 2024 and 2025. We'll be back with another episode before the end of year, another hotline hack. And then I think we're going to be, we'll see, but I'm guessing probably running a rerun over New Year's Eve. If we don't catch you in the hotline hack before the year end, again, thank you to everyone who listened. There's a lot of new folks in here. It means the world that you've found the show and you enjoy it and you're still listening to it.

If you've been listening for a lot longer, boy, does it mean a lot to us? Yeah. I think thanks to some of our sponsors and advertisers that we have this year to, kept the show going, push security, delete me. Um, Shopify, Arctic Wolf. I'm sure I'm going to miss one and regret it. Notion. Notion. Yeah, we've had a bunch of great sponsors that have made the year possible and we look forward to to another great year next year, hopefully.

That's true. We'll catch you all in the ad oasis. But until then, uh, to everyone who's listening, thank you. Thank you for another year in the books. And we hope you have a very happy holidays. Take care.