Science Friday - Distorting Reality With AI, Cryptocurrency Mining, Science Standards In Idaho Schools. Feb 16, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

One woman’s dubious dance with a cow parasite left her rubbing her eyes—and medical experts scratching their heads. The Idaho legislature is debating how to address human-induced climate change in revised science education standards. A collection of AI-assisted tools could allow the average person to create videos of anyone saying or doing anything. The latest hacking could be used to steal your computer’s CPU power without you knowing it. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflito. A bit later in the hour, we'll be talking about a new kind of fake news, forged videos, and audio. But first, for everyone who celebrated Valentine's Day this week, love may have been in the air. But what happens when love is on your eyeball? One Oregon woman is in the news after finding yourself on the wrong side of a parasitic romance. Here to tell us the story, plus more short subjects, and scientist is my guest. Nidu Sabaraman, science writer for BuzzFeed News.

Welcome to Science Friday. How are you? Very well. It's nice to be here. Nice to have you. So what happened to this poor woman's eye? Right. This is a case that has fascinated parasitologists, Ira.

She became the first person known to be infected with eye worms that usually live on the eyeballs of cows. Wait a minute. What are they doing on her eyeball? It was a complete accident how they got there, but one day she felt a little prickling in her eye, you know, as if there was an eyelash stuck under there. And when it didn't go away, she just reached in and kind of pulled. And there was this long filamentous worm that sort of came out like a bit of thread.

And then she reached in again and she pulled, and there were a couple more. And between her and the doctors, they pulled out 14 worms. Oh, I hate it when that happens. She was okay? Was she okay after they pulled those worms out? Yes, fortunately, these parasites are harmless. If they are caught quickly, which it was in this case, she had a mild case of pink eye, and otherwise was fine besides being startled.

Yeah, but we don't have no. idea how she got the worms there in the first place? Researchers believe that the worms hang out on the eyeballs of cows and then hit a ride for part of their lives in flies called face flies. So the suggestion is that one of these face flies wound up on her face and she didn't brush it off and left behind a couple of worms that then proceeded to live and maybe meet there until they were pulled out. Wow, okay. We're going to move on to something, well, maybe just as weird. This is fossil bird poop. Tell us about that. Oh, yes. This is a fascinating study coming to us all the way from New Zealand. Now, New Zealand has a really rich and unique history because it broke away from the main land masses many millions of years ago.

And so it had this distinction of hosting a variety of humongous birds. The moas in particular, they're all dead now because they were eaten when humans arrived. But they grew up to six and a half feet tall and they were up to 200 kilograms. And these fossilized poop remains can tell us a little bit more about what they did and more about the ecosystem of the islands. So while we don't have any Moa moas, We do have the poop that's left over from them. And how do you find fossil poop in the first place?

You know, Ira, it's actually hidden in plain sight, they say. Since these birds were around just a few hundred years ago in dry places where the rain doesn't get to it, where the sheep hide, there are these bits of rock that are really dried up bird poop remains. They're called coprolites. What the researchers were able to do, they did a DNA. analysis of the particles in there and they were able to say what four different species of these extinct moors ate. So they were able to say, for example, that some, this one species ate pond snails and pond plants because they found a trace of a parasite there. Others ate

mosses and ferns. Others ate mushroom and fungi and ultimately helped them spread across the island. Interesting. Is this research? Can it help us understand any better how these remarkable birds went extinct at all? Besides just getting eaten. Not at present, but it does say why the forests of New Zealand are having trouble regenerating because they relied on the fungi and, in turn, the moas to help them spread. And with the moas gone, the forests are having a hard time coming back. I get it. All right. Let's move on to your next story, which is about a skate that walks.

And we're not talking about Olympic skating here, are we? Not this time. So skates are these really flat fish. They look like pancakes with a long tail. And they have this wonderful gliding motion with which they move through the ocean, sort of flapping their large fins. Now, they found that they have a unique kind of walking motion. They have these large fins that they swim with, but they have tiny fins under them that they walk on the surface of the ocean width. and the same walking motion that they have, one fin and then the other fin and then the other fin is remarkably similar to the way humans walk. So do they have the same mechanism for doing it, you know, the muscles, the nerves like we have? Yeah, so the nerve cells that are in these gates are also in people. But this existed, they think, 420 million years ago. So up to 60 million years before the first life form walked out of the ocean.

to colonize land. Let's move on lastly to some kerfuffle over a new DNA emoji. Of all the things we're talking about, tell us about that. Yes. So the newest crop of emoji for this year includes some good science ones. There's a petri dish, a test tube, and the DNA double helix. Now, researchers, well, scientists, saw on Twitter that the DNA was twisted the wrong way. And this is an easy design flaw to make, but ultimately the right twist of the DNA is really what makes it unique and able to function as the basic element of life.

So the DNA helix is a ladder that's twisted, right? Right. So if you twist a jar, if we're holding a jar with your right hand and you twisted it in a closing motion, that's the wrong twist. If you open the jar lid in a twisting motion towards you, that's the right twist. twist. And while it's a very simple design element, it makes the difference between being the right key for life and the wrong one. Well, you've put a new twist on that story. You know, for years, we've had the news media TV shows where they start with the globe turning. They've always been turning it backwards. Earth has been rotating and revolving in the wrong direction. So now we have

DNA to match that. Thank you very much for enlightening us and welcome to Science Friday. Thanks to have you. It was great. Nidizu Baraman is a science writer for BuzzFeed in Washington. Now it's time for the state of science. This is KERNNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. KQAWPublic Radio News. Focusing on a science story near you. Today, what does a state legislature's education committee have to do with climate change?

Well, many decisions about a school's curriculum get made at the state level in the form of setting statewide standards that class. classrooms need to meet. And in Idaho, the legislature is currently working on revising standards for the state's science curriculum. And one topic at issue, how to address the topic of climate change for Idaho teachers, from those in rural one-room schoolhouses to big classrooms in downtown Boise. Joining me now is James Dawson, news director at Boise State Public Radio. He has been following the climate change curriculum issue as it wins its way through the legislature there. Welcome to the program. Hey, glad to be here, Ira. So walk us through what's going on there. For the past three years, the state has been working with extensions to temporary standards. Yeah, that's right. Like you mentioned, this has been a three-year process. The first time that these standards were brought to the Idaho legislature for approval,

the education committees wanted a little bit more public input into the standards themselves. So they convened this large, expansive committee to go ahead and take that public comment, maybe rewrite a little bit. Second year, the education committees did remove several standards with references to man-made climate change, and they continued to act under a temporary rule, kind of kicked it back to the Department of Education. And now this year, those standards are left in. There are still several references to man-made climate change in the standards themselves, but the lawmakers are taking aim at this so-called supporting content,

which is basically just more expansive references to maybe what aspects of climate change. should be taught in public schools. And these would be mandatory standards. In other words, these are the things the teachers have to teach. Yes, that's correct. And so can you give us any, get into the weeds a bit of what is missing and what's included? Well, what is included are, you know, how humans would impact climate change, how burning

fossil fuels does lead to climate change, but also included in these standards would be references to how the natural world can affect climate change, like volcanic activity, for instance. But there are references to sea level rise. What's excluded the House Education Committee last week did exclude or are trying to exclude one standard that would reference renewable versus non-renewable energy, for instance. But there's nothing in the standards that could prevent a teacher from voluntarily putting in, and his or him herself, what's missing from the standards? Yeah, that's correct.

So, for instance, I've spoken with folks from the Boise School District, and they've been teaching these aspects of climate change for a long time now. But what they and others are worried about is if the supporting content is removed ultimately, then maybe teachers in, like you referenced, one-room schoolhouses, we do have those here. and more conservative districts won't feel supported by their community who might be much more conservative than, say, Boise, for instance. So the main focus is then on how much autonomy the teachers have, and do you think eventually it is going to be left up to the individual teachers to decide how much to put in there? Well, that's always been the case.

Multiple lawmakers during these hearings have said that we trust these teachers, we expect them to know how to teach, and we support what they're doing. It's just opponents say, or supporters of the standards say that they worried that community opinion would actually stifle that teaching. So I guess it's going to wind its way through the Senate. Yeah, that's exactly right. So we actually had a hearing yesterday in the Senate Education Committee. Even more people testified in support of these standards. And that's been present all along.

It's just overwhelming support from the community, the business community, people in the public school system who say that they do support these standards as written and they don't want any edits made to them. All right. We'll be following that. Thank you, James, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Ira. James Dawson, news director at Boise State Public Radio, and you can find a link to his reports on our website at ScienceFriiday.com. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

Last December, Motherboard Assistant editor Samantha Cole found something strange on Reddit. Someone, a user named Deep Fakes, was making realistic-looking pornographic videos by swapping the faces of well-known actresses into actual not-safe-for-work films. Wonder Woman's, gal, Gadoe, Taylor Swift, others seemingly all becoming porn stars by having their faces swapped out. Then someone made an app that anyone could use to do the same thing. And the results have been more face-swap porn, endless iterations of Nick Cage and movies he's never starred in and other gags. But the app is also being used on real people's pictures and not just actresses, but you, your spouse, your friend, potentially it's all a new kind of revenge porn, if you like. Reddit has since banned the pornographic stuff saying it violates the rights of the women whose faces were used.

But the technology is still out there. You can't put the genie back into the bottle. And is this one more step to making reality, as we know, fuzzier than ever? We're going to get to that issue in a few minutes. But first, Samantha Cole is here with me to talk more about a deep fake story. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, great to be here. How did you stumble across this phenomenon?

We were made aware of it on Twitter. Someone spotted this person on Reddit going along about his hobby of putting celebrities' faces onto porn performers' bodies using AI. Now, I was wondering how this works because I saw one example that looks like a cheaper version of the way the 1970s Carrie Fisher has brought back to life at the end of Rogue One. How does this work? Well, basically, like you said, it's done using a machine learning algorithm. It takes a data set of lots of pictures of one person's face.

So hundreds of pictures of, say, Carrie Fisher and then. a video to put that onto. It runs these two together in the algorithm and what comes out after hours or days is what looks like that person in that video. You know, I know it's not that easy because we here at Science Friday try to make a fake video using my face at the office and paste me out to Humphrey Bogart at Casablanca and it was not pretty. It's harder than we expected, right? So how accessible is this to the average person right? Right. You're, um, You're right. It's not something that you can just plug into your computer or your iPhone. It's not an app in that way. It comes with tutorials and things like that so that you can follow along and do it yourself. We say that anyone can do it, but it does take a lot of patience, some curiosity and a little bit of knowledge about AI to begin with, a huge data set of the person's face, some decent computing hardware, pretty powerful GPU, things like that. that. So it's accessible and it's democratized, but it's not, I'm not going to say it's easy.

But I know, as I said before, platforms like Reddit are shutting down the pornographic fakes, but that doesn't really stop people from creating fake porn or distributing it in other ways, right? Not on Reddit, some other places. No, you're completely correct. It's not going away just because these platforms shut them down. They're just being driven to more scattered places on the web. So Discord, which is a chat platform, has done some work on banning them. A few of the image hosting sites. Pornhub even said that they won't allow it.

So they've denounced it, and that's a great step, but it's not going to disappear from the Internet. One of the face swap videos out there puts the face of Adolf Hitler onto Argentine leader, Mauricio Macri, which begs the question of what this kind of technology could do to diplomacy. Sure. Things are already pretty bad with fake news. all this had to become the big news item in 2016 with the election. People were splicing up videos to make it look like things happen that didn't. This is just the next level in that.

How we view things as true a lot of the times is if you see a video and you see that person in the video and you can say that happened. And now maybe that's not the case. Yeah, it's getting fuzzy. Reality is getting fuzzy. And so I want to expand the conversation and bring in two more guests now to help us take this conversation to the bigger picture. what this kind of technology means for reality and fake news.

Aviva Vadja is chief technologist for social media responsibility at the University of Michigan's School of Information. Welcome, Aviv. Hi. Hi. And Sway Liu is an associate professor of engineering and applied sciences at State University of New York and Albany, and he works on detecting digital forgeries.

Welcome, Dr. Liu. Hi. Good to be here. Thank you. You're welcome. of if you were recently profiled in an extensive buzzfeed piece talking about face swapping AI, but also other kinds of video forgery. What else is out there? Yeah, so it's, I mean, it's not just video also.

It's also audio. And that can have a really big impact on, as we've talked about diplomacy, where, you know, for example, let's say there's a hot mic of Trump ordering a missile attack of North Korea. It didn't actually happen. It doesn't mean North Korea won't launch a missile attack back. In fact, we actually have an example of this. How are we seeing audio forgeries? Speaking of the president, here's one that recently came to my attention. It's a great thing to build a better world with artificial intelligence.

AI first. The first is the first. I didn't know the president could speak Mandarin. That was from a Chinese company called I-Fly Tech. They also created the audio of President. Obama speaking Mandarin and an Adobe previewed a Photoshop for Voice two years ago, you know, it's not hard to see why you're warning about worsening fake news of Eve. I mean, what is it happening?

Is this something that, yeah, is this something we should really worry about or is it just for fun now? It's something that we should really worry about. It affects the foundations of our democracy and a lot of our civil institutions. And let me ask you, Dr. Liu, what is the technology powering all of these fakes? Is it just old image manipulation, getting more advanced, or is there something new here? Actually, I will say, research and techniques for manipulating digital images and videos exist many years. And this actually goes back to the film industries if you have seen Forrest Gump or, you know, computer graphics generating whole feature movies. However, previously, this has...

the need to use special hardware tools, software systems, and a technical artistic training, and tons of manual processing. What has been changed recently, exactly as Samantha mentioned, is this new artificial intelligence-enabled algorithms that can take a lot of data and bypass a lot of this manual process and a need for technical facilities and make this technology accessible to many, many of the users

who may not afford this kind of. of technical setups. Are we seeing other kinds of forgeries, you know, fake signatures, you know, other kinds of fraud out there? Dr. Liu? Yeah, well, I think the fake, actually the fake images exist. I mean, we are, we're paying a lot of attention to this high profile cases. But actually this forgery, media frauds exist.

in a much wider range. Actually, I myself has experience with cases in insurance or where, you know, you take a photograph or a car accident and you digitally multi-doctor it, make it either severe or less severe depending on what you need. Or it also swapping scientific papers. You know, there are a lot of papers. So people realize that the figures in the paper were actually doctored.

And this, again, there's a lot of social, other than social and political, economical impacts. There's also this impact of, you know, eroding our trust for the regional media. Right. Aviv, I know you must see a lot of cases of stuff, forgeries, fake stuff out there. What's the worst one you can share with? I mean, there hasn't been something that's actually deeply affected diplomacy using video or audio manipulation yet. So I would say that the worst is yet to come.

But I think what's terrifying is that even stuff that's really bad, even without using any of this technology, without having it be convincing at all, just a tweet about a fake news story can lead to, you know, the Pakistani, I can't remember what took a position they had in government. But they sort of responded sort of rattling sabres around nuclear weapons. So, and that was about a year ago, if I recall correctly. So if that alone can have this impact, then what happens when you have something that's extremely believable? that can be that can why is fake news so much worse

Samantha Navee if the video is involved is a video make it seem like it's got to be real Samantha I mean if I see it then

you know seeing is believing yeah I think that for a long time video has been our kind of gold standard of truth and not

maybe not legally but definitely in our mind You see something, you say, oh, my gosh, that happened. You see it for five seconds. You hit share and retweet, and it gets a million shares on Facebook. And then that is what happened. And that's the scariest part of this is it doesn't have to be that believable to actually be seen as true. So the video aspect is definitely concerning.

Dr. Lee, let's talk about how we can fight forgeries. I know you told my producer about one method that you were still. researching. This has sounded amazing that it involves heartbeats? Yes. Actually, we are actually tackling this problem of fake videos generated with AI synthesized faces. So one clue we're using, actually working with my student at University at Albany, and also Professor Honeyford from Dartmouth College, we're actually exploring this idea of using some physiological signals to detect fake videos generated by algorithms like dig fake. So basically, our algorithm identified tiny fluctuations in the skin colors

due to changes from the blood flow. As you know, every person has heartbeats. So this heartbeat, when they pump flow in and out of the skin, there was actually a very tiny change of the skin colors. Now, with a technique that is developed by researchers from MIT, we actually can enhance the video, enhance that effect, and then use that as a signal to differentiate between a video generated from a real person

or video actually generated from an algorithm. So if we assume that if you have, the video is actually from a real person, we should see this signal very prominently. On the other hand, from a generated fake video, video, the signal of this kind of physiological phenomena will be much weaker. So we have some preliminary results seem to be promising, but we're still exploring this idea. And Samantha, you noted on your website already enlisting AI to spot AI-generated videos.

Does it seem like algorithms will be enough to fight this? I mean, it's definitely an option. It's something that a lot of really smart people in the AI space have been working. on for a really long time. This didn't come out of nowhere. It's just that more people have their hands on it now. So there are people working on things like the heartbeat detection aspects like that. Video fingerprinting is definitely a big one. It's tricky because AI algorithms are still written by humans. So yeah, it's interesting to watch these kind of chase each other around to tackle the problems that we have now.

Aviv, what are you looking at you? Anything about fighting back? Well, I'd say that one of the challenges with all of these approaches is that once you have a system that can detect a fake, then you can train your system that creates fakes to counter that system. And so as long as there's access to that system for detection, you can just get better and better at sort of getting past it. So I don't see that as sort of a super long-term solution. I mean, it's a cat and mouse game. I think that we really need sort of a defense in-depth approach here where you're tackling this across different aspects of the way this is impacting society in addition to these sort of technical solutions. And even if you can detect whether or not something has been manipulated, that still needs to be shown in some way when it's being represented, you know, on Facebook, on YouTube, wherever.

And so this is sort of a not just can you detect it, but also how does this actually affect the ecosystem around which we share information? I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International, talking about fake video voices, creating fake identities, fake conversations. Let me ask all my panels, you know, you got face swapping and lip syncing, voice imitation, weather alteration. when you consider the potential to alter reality as we know it really makes it makes me wonder why are we researching these technologies in the first place are there good you know you go out and are there any good reasons to have them are there beneficial uses yeah there are good things that come out of this all right let me let me go ahead let you go first sorry um there are definitely good things to come out of this there are i mean this is technology that's been in use in hollywood for you We saw the same thing happen in Rogue One with Princess Leia's face. They put Carrie Fisher's face basically using the same technology or a really similar technology. So there are uses in like security and someone wants to obscure their identity in a video and things like that. I mean, I don't think that it's a bad thing that we're looking at this stuff and researching it.

I think putting it all out there in the light is always good. Anyone else have a suggestion? Good stuff we can come in? Yeah, I think at the very beginning, all this research are from the scientific and scientific curiosity. So what kind of system we can build that can simulate human behaviors and can help us understand the world better? And I think that's the ground goal of artificial intelligence at the very beginning.

I think all we are seeing this is actually a sort of byproduct of development of technology. So it is not really right or wrong for this technology. This is, I think, with a very innocent purpose on that level, it is just how we actually use this. So it's being abused in this case. But there are many other ways we can use AI to help us. For instance, predicting value, running on tons of tons of data,

how we can actually relieve this intensive manual processing or intensive computation by just directly using data and train this algorithm to do this automatically. I think there will be a lot more positive impacts of the AI technology development, but this by product is something we should also take it very seriously. A number 844-724-8255, you can call us and also get us on site talk about a minute to go before the break. Aviv, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's important that as we develop this sort of technology,

that we really ensure that we have organizations in place that can invest in understanding what these impacts might be on society, on elections, on democracy, on our courts. And I think that that's something that hasn't even happened in that. We're sort of going to start seeing the impacts of us not investing in that as we do invest in these new technologies. And I think that that's something to really keep in mind how to ensure that 10% of the budget going into AI is also going into mitigating some of the negative impacts in addition to sort of thinking about the positive. Yeah. Okay. We're going to come back and talk more about this and how it might do.

affect, you know, upcoming future events. Our number 8447-24-8255. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about the future of our information ecosystem. Trust in the news in an age when AI might soon be able to forge seamless videos and audio of world leaders, news events, and more.

It's interesting that we're talking about this today when Council Mueller indicts 13 Russians for elections. meddling and talks about all the kinds of different tricks and stuff that they were using. Dr. Liu, does that have any relevance to upcoming elections, all this fraud and stuff that's going on with video and audio? I can't predict the future, but I think if this technology keep advancing, then we will reach a level where it will become very difficult to tell if a video is a real one or is a fake one just by a casual glance. So I think this is potentially something that is very serious. Aviv, do you agree? Yeah. And I think that that actually helps sort of the other side win.

If we can't believe anything, that's sort of what a failed state looks like. That's what happens in conflict regions. And it's really hard to run a democracy like that. And so how much time do you give us then? I mean, to get to that failed democracy? I mean, it's not going to be quite that much of falling off a cliff that quickly, but I would say that our information ecosystem is going to fairly rapidly get worse as this stuff develops. And we need to really put stuff in place to help prevent that from accelerating as fast as it might otherwise. So what can we do in the meantime until we get there? Well, I think investing in the forgery stuff is,

is stumbling that's really important to do for now, forger detection? Right. Actually, I'm actually working in a program that is supported by, sponsored by DARPA, known as a media forensic program. So this is a four-year large-scale program that aims to ensemble teams across academia, industry, and the government, as well as international partners, to provide technical solutions to this problem.

So the Holy Grail, after the completion of this program, we hope, is we're able to provide a platform, an interface, or something you can think about as a credit checking platform where every image or video, the user can actually upload that media to a place, and then some kind of objective decision about the authenticity of those medias will be returned back. we as a research community, we're working very hard toward that goal. So just this is a little bit hope for, you know, give a little bit hope for this problem. I think we're not, we're working hard. We're trying to fight back this trend. And as Alia just mentioned, there's a cat and mouse game.

So, you know, we keep growing both sides of the war. Samantha Cole, you found, as you say, you sort of stumbled on this, stumbled upon this on Reddit. Yeah, pretty much. I always have the one or the 10% theory of like the iceberg. You only see like a tiny tip of something sticking up. There must be so much more of this going on. Sure. I mean, that was the case when it was just one person that we saw at the time.

There could have been more. He was the first that we saw doing it. And then from that, it grew into a community that was nearly 100,000 subscribers strong on one subreddit. So he was definitely the tip of the iceberg that was to come. Let me see if I get a call in here before we run. out of time. Let's go to John in Maryland. Hi, John. Hey, Sarah, how you doing? Hey there. Go ahead. Well, listen, I listen to this show because I love science and I

love this show, but I got to tell you, when the guest mentioned earlier, one of the reasons to do it is pure scientific curiosity. My reaction is this. To me, it's the adult version of playing with matches and gasoline as a child. I really think This opens a door to destroying public trust in information during an electoral process, during emergencies, and God only knows what.

Yeah. That's a good point. Let me ask Aviv. What do you think about that? I mean, is everything just now going to be untrustworthy? I definitely think that there is an element of truth to that, and that's sort of why I say that we need sort of countervailing investment when we're investing in new technology. around video production and creation and also invest in ways of mitigating those harms.

I think it's also really important that the companies that are actually the distribution platforms for this really invest in ensuring that they're part of this ecosystem in a healthy way and that they're ensuring that they're not necessarily rewarding the things that are fake, which is sort of the default that might have happened in the past just because of the way that they sort of reward things that get a lot of attention and a lot of that's seem very sensationalist. The new technologies of blockchains are supposed to be very secure. Is that something sway that might be useful?

Potentially, yes. I mean, you can, well, one way actually to protect authenticity of digital media is actually actively invite some, I would say, fingerprint or a hidden characteristic to those media, so that anybody making any change, there's a potential. potential way to recover that. So this new technological blockchain because it's secure and so that's provide some hope to protect the authenticity of this media.

But it doesn't solve the problem of if something that's completely generated by AI algorithm. So I think it solves one part of the problem which is like protecting the original media, but probably for this new generated synthetic media is not as effective. Do you think that big business, that real money is going to have to be lost on this. And that's when business

gets in really serious about doing something about something like this. For example, someone is tweeting from Ryan, can you talk about copyright law on this technology? I mean, once, you know, people start losing money that way. Sam, what do you think? Well, that's true that celebrities and people who are in the public eye have a little more control over their images. So if they made a lot of noise about this. Maybe that would be something that some of these platforms would take some notice on. There are definitely, they could sue for misappropriation of their images, things like that, but laws that protect the average person are not quite equipped to handle this. It doesn't mean that we need new laws to cover it, but we need to improve the laws that we already have.

But no one is getting off the internet, that we know. That's here to stay. Except for me. Are you going to get it up to you? No. No, okay. Unfortunately. I want to thank my guests. Aviva Vajadje, Chief Technologist for a social media responsibility, University of Michigan School of Information,

Samantha Cole, assistant editor at the motherboard. And Swayview, assistant associate professor of engineering and applied sciences at State University of New York in Albany. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Thank you very much. Speaking of high technology, the Bitcoin bubble really. took off last year. The cryptocurrency increased a thousand percent in 2017. And it's peak in December. One coin was worth nearly $20,000. Not there anymore. It's dropped a little bit. Hope

you sold at the peak. But then there are still speculators mining for their coin on computers all over the world. In fact, there is not just one Bitcoin. There are thousands of them. And the blockchain technology behind the cryptocurrencies is the basis for secure business transactions. of a growing number of businesses, not just for cryptos. And like any piece of futuristic technology, the cryptocurrency craze has caused unforeseen consequences.

You have huge mining server farms popping up in Mongolia. The energy-intensive mining process is straining electric grids. They're threatening to overwhelm electric utility. It cause brownouts and hackers now. Well, they certainly are. have tapped into this, there is now malware out there that could turn your computer into a

cryptocurrency mining machine, something called cryptojacking, cryptojacking, where without even you knowing it, your laptop is being hijacked to mine Bitcoin. Yeah, you hear that fan coming on on your laptop? Maybe it's all working over time a little bit. My next guest is here to tell us about that story. Dan Gooden is security editor at Ardard. as Technica based out of San Francisco. Welcome to Science Friday. It's great to be here. Is that fan?

Will I tell you if you're being cryptojack? The fan suddenly spurring up and making a whole bunch of noise is a good indication that it's happening. It's not guaranteed that that's going to happen. But if somebody is browsing a site and suddenly their fan comes on, that's a good reason to be suspicious that something is happening. And so how does that malware get into your laptop? Well, in some cases, the attackers are actually infecting the laptop.

You know, we're using some sort of Trojan, which is just a program that is something other than it purports to be. But in some cases, over the weekend, for instance, 4200 sites, almost 4,300 sites were hijacked, and they actually fed the code that caused anyone visiting. the site to suddenly start, you know, mining a cryptocurrency coin known as Monaro. And in that case, the computer wasn't hijacked. It was some of the code that all 4,300 of these sites were using and linking to. So when you went to the site, you got hijacked? Exactly. Suddenly, your computer would start mining this currency. And of course, that's putting a strain on your computer or in some cases your your your smartphone and it's either draining the smartphone's battery or it's electricity that you are paying for so for someone else somewhere

halfway around the world probably to to benefit from and gain you know currency to to their account you know if the fan goes on in my laptop i imagine that my cell phone is going to start heating up a little bit if this is happening yeah well in in some cases some of the really aggressive digital currency mining software running on cell phones has actually caused physical damage. The phone works so hard and it draws so much current from the battery that the battery bulges and causes the case to kind of pull away from itself or kind of explode. It wasn't actually an explosion per se, but it did actually cause physical damage. to the phones.

Wow. You know, if these really centralized crypto mining places are using so much electricity, wouldn't it be better that, you know, maybe the good news is that we're spreading the electrical burden to a network of computers instead of all in one place? Well, you know, I mean, it's certainly, that's the case, but you're paying for it, I'm paying for it. So, you know, this is no longer, you know, the case of a single entity who is presumably getting some sort of credit, you know, to their account, it's, you know, they're, they're leaching just a

little bit from you and just a little bit from me and just a little bit from, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. And they're all paying for it. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with Dan Gooden, security editor at Ours Technica, about crypto hijacking. Give me an idea of how widespread it is? And is it growing or have we got it early enough maybe to damp it down? There's really no sense that it is actually damping down. We keep on hearing of these incidents. You know, the most recent one that I just alluded to, you know, it happened to 4,300 sites. And these were just, you know, these were, you know, the state of Indiana. These were the U.S.

court system here in the U.S. It was a U.K. court site. U.K. government sites. And so we have a whole lot of anecdotal evidence that shows that we have, you know, there are these rashes of incidents that will affect a whole bunch of sites. And then the sites will go and clean things up. And it's, you know, for a time being, there's no sign that it's happening. And then another one will happen. And in addition to that, you know, we're hearing of large servers that corporate businesses

used to, you know, manage their payroll or run their websites, these things have a large amount of bandwidth and they have a large amount of computing power. And attackers will find vulnerabilities in the way that these servers are set up and they will use, they will exploit those vulnerabilities to install crypto mining, you know, crypto currency mining software onto them. So, you know, I mean, crypto currency is the new hotness. And, you know, you look at what the price of Bitcoin and a bunch of the other currencies have done over the last year. And it's inevitable that the attackers are going to start trying to harness your computer and mine to generate these types of currencies. Is there anything I can do?

Any software I can install? Anything, how I detect that my – I'm being crypto-highjacked. Well, in general, people should always install their operating system and browser updates as soon as possible. That's just sort of security 101, and that's probably the most important thing any of us can do. A large number of antivirus programs are now detecting and warning people when their browser is trying to mine crypto coin. And so that's another way that people could try to protect themselves. and there are, for some people, they might consider using an ad blocker. The problem with ad blockers is that, you know, my business, for instance, relies on ads to pay my salary.

So it's a little bit hard for me to, you know, there's some cognitive dissonance in me recommending that somebody use an ad blocker because it actually hurts my business, even as it protects people against threats like these. Well, it's just, you know, we've had ransomware, now we have cryptocurrency hijacking. It's a Wild West out there. I mean, not to put the West down, but... Yeah, I mean, it truly is. And, you know, these cryptocurrencies have really revolutionized the whole business of, you know, malware. You know, once upon a time people needed use, you know, malware to steal your bank account information and then try to. to withdraw money from your account, that still happens, but that's gotten a lot harder.

You know, banks now use two-factor authentication and a whole lot of other ways to prevent that from happening. And of course, once the crooks get the money, they have to launder it somehow. The way that cryptocurrency works is it's so anonymous, it's so fluid, it's much more, you know, it's much easier for it to be transferred around. And so it really has driven, you know, it's Two years ago, the new hotness, of course, was ransomware. And about six months ago, you're calling it cryptojacking. The other thing that people call it is drive-by cryptocurrency mining. I'm going to have to keep it right there because we have to leave, Dan.

This is Dan Gooden, security editor at Aris TechTica. One last thing before we go next month is Women's History Month. And to celebrate, we're screening our complete breakthrough portraits of women in science series at select Alamo draft house locations across the country, followed by live conversations with women working in STEM in each of our featured cities. Visit ScienceFraudy.com slash Alamo for tickets and information. We hope to see you there.

That is Women's History Month, breakthrough portraits of women in science at select Alamo draft house locations. Our website is ScienceFriiday.com slash Alamo for tickets and information. I'm Ira Flato in New York.