The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Twitter and Youtube Go After Fake Accounts & New False Info Rules & More Tech News

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Twitter and Youtube Go After Fake Accounts & New False Info Rules & More Tech News

Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to the Chris Voss Show podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Oh my God, it's another day. Another podcast. Another sit down with Chris Voss. A little intimate time, a little one-on-one. You're sitting there with your headphones,

you're in your car, and you're just like, what do Chris Voss has to say to me today? I don't know, what does Chris Voss? Wait, I me today I don't know what does Chris was wait I didn't prepare anything shit we're screwed wait I'm listening to Chris Voss and he doesn't have anything prepared oh my god why do I follow this idiot I don't know why do you follow this city early I actually am prepared you got a few interesting topics we want to talk about tech news. Holy crap, Chris.

What's going on in the world and what's your take on it? So let's get into it. Let's get into it. I hope everyone had a good Super Bowl. Hopefully no one lost a lot of money. I am a Raiders fan, and I have a perennial hatred of both the Chiefs and the 49ers. It's a city hatred with the 49ers, or at least it used to be when they were the Oakland Raiders. They recently became officially the Las Vegas Raiders, which is pretty interesting. So there you go. Now I guess they're like me.

They just keep moving back to Vegas because, I don't know, it's probably the place the Raiders should be really. When you think about the whole history of the Ra know, it's probably the place the Raiders should be, really. When you think about the whole history of the Raiders, Vegas probably is the place for the Raiders when you really think about it. So moving on, let's talk about tech news, what's going on in the world of tech. And hopefully you didn't lose your kids' college money or mortgage your house and lose in the Super Bowl. Hopefully you had a good time and saved the Super Bowl and all that good shit.

Next up on Tech News, Twitter, according to TechCrunch, has said it is suspended. It is suspended or has suspended? Has suspended a large network of fake accounts. Many others also for abusing an API feature that let them match phone numbers to usernames. So this is pretty interesting. Over the holidays, Twitter says it identified and shut down a large network of fake accounts. It wasn't mine. Clearly, of course, mine are all real. I run them.

I don't know. There's like nine of them or something. It's not like a huge network. But, you know know it can pump out its stuff when it wants to uh let's see it became aware on december 24th that there was an abuse taking place and security researcher ibrahim balik found that a bug in twitter's android app let him submit millions of phone numbers through an official api which returned any associated user accounts. Holy crap. So he could basically take in, I forget what this term is called, but basically they just

go, you know, one, two, three, four, five. They just keep going through the numbers and evidently it will return through the API, the account logins or something. Holy crap. it will return through the api the account logins or something holy crap um so uh that's uh crazy so that's uh yeah so at least they figured out they noticed there was problems with it they were seeing high volume of requests coming from individual ip addresses located within iran israel and malaysia so uh the ip IP address may have ties to state-sponsored actors. So it looks like Iran planned for them to probably muddle in our election.

That's probably what they're up to. They're practicing. Israel was kind of interesting to see. Is the Israel security forces hacking our Twitter? And Malaysia. I don't even know what that's about with Malaysia. What's going on, Malaysia? You don't like us or something?

Wait. No, I'm thinking of Miramar where they had the big, sadly, the big genocide. Malaysia. What's going on in Malaysia that they're just like hacking people? But I can see what Iran's probably up to, especially if they're state-sponsored actors. They're probably practicing for the election to hack our election. This is something we should all be concerned about. Make sure you go on register to vote and all that good stuff,

but it's really cool. Yeah, it even says the suspicion was justified by the observation of unrestricted access to Twitter from the IPs in Iran where the platform is blocked from general access, suggesting government involvement oh there's the tell right there um so uh there's the tell so this guy figured it out saw it and kind of noticed and they went after the accounts of suspending them so there you go so I'm glad Twitter's being on the ready.

They're fingers on the button. They're keeping an eye on what's going on. I know, I mean, I think from what we're going to see, this election is going to have probably the highest attacks of hacking than ever before, the highest attacks of throwing off our democracy. And I don't know. Now, what's kind of curious, though, is that Iran, I don't think, likes Donald Trump. So maybe they could go the other way for us. I'm just kidding.

We don't need any of that kind of crap going on. We don't need to be unethical. We'll leave that to the other side. So Twitter is working on that. Conversely, YouTube has explained more of its technology. We covered this a while ago on the podcast. YouTube has explained how it's going to moderate political falsehoods just in time for Iowa. They're also going after falsehoods as well, and Facebook too, for falsehoods regarding the coronavirus.

So that's kind of interesting. So what they've said in a blog post, and this is coming from Washington Post, just in time for the Iowa caucuses, YouTube has clarified how it's going to crack down on falsehoods related to elections and promised to remove misleading content that will confuse people about how to vote. So that's good. So if you have, I think we saw this in 2016, people were reporting fake places to vote and they're like go vote over whatever we even saw some people i think there's some candidates you know who um that were telling people to vote on the wrong date because they're too stupid and

no one to vote oh my god if only that had worked um so here's some of the outlines of what YouTube is doing. The content that is technically manipulated or doctored in any way that misleads users and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm. They have clarified that this goes beyond clips taken out of context. So, you know, I mean, there are people that do that. I mean, that's the parody of what you can do with copyright. Um, but a video has been doctored to falsely make it appear that a pollution is dead or otherwise, uh, egregious harm, I guess, according to what they're calling it, egregious harm. What's the difference between egregious harm and non-egregious harm? Um, I punch you in the face, but it wasn't egreggregious What does that mean? I don't know

I'll have to look it up clearly Videos that aims To mislead people about voting Are the census process This can also be in trouble Especially telling viewers An incorrect voting date That's kind of interesting

Clips that advance false claims Related to the technical eligibility Requirements for politicians to in office. Sounds like they're going after the birthers. I think that's what we originally talked about with this. They're going after the birther people to make sure there's no more birther crap going on. Where were you, YouTube? Like, four years ago, eight years ago, whenever this idiot started doing this crap. So, uh, I liked it. YouTube is doing this. Uh, I wish Facebook would, uh, get on it. We recently saw Facebook, uh, Stephen King, the, the famous writer of horror and, um, uh, you know, movies and things of that nature that you've seen. Uh, but most for the most part, he believes believe he's an author and a bit of an activist,

if you will. He recently quit Facebook and he said, I'm not doing this anymore. And he quit over Facebook's policy, Mark Zuckerberg's policy. We talked about this a lot of allowing misleading ads to run in politics and they're not gonna try and they're not gonna try and hold anybody to any standard of truth pretty much it's free for all of what you can do what you want and that's gonna be kind of interesting and they're getting a lot of shit for it Facebook because YouTube and Google and Facebook or or not Facebook, Twitter, have all said that they're going to put their foot down and not do it.

I believe Instagram has done the same thing, and I think a couple other kind of lesser known, well, they're known, but you know what I mean, less popular apps have said the same thing. So this is going to be kind of good. I'm glad we're gearing up. I'm glad we're watching for the abuses to take place. Major companies are touting the change they made since 2016. You're sure voters aren't flooded with disinformation this time around.

And a lot of the elections they've seen, you know, some of the same sort of abuses. So hopefully we can stop all that crap going on. Look, man, free and fair elections. I still don't understand why in our country, you know, everyone's not allowed to vote. They should, I believe it's Iceland that has a country that everyone, I think you have to vote. It's like against the law not to vote. We really should have that. I mean, even if you're, I'm sorry, but you know, this, this, this country is important and where the future of this country goes. And if we need to make laws to get your stupid dumb ass out of bed and do a polling station to, you know, say who you want to vote for, I don't really give a shit. If you're engaged, if you even know which candidate you want, look, man, we want your input because we're

all in this robot together. Okay. It's like being on a rowboat where it's like being in a boat, you know, off the Titanic of the Titanic sinks. You got a whole mess of people. And like basically 25% of the people, this is pretty much how the voting works in this country. 25% of the people are like, um, we should drill a hole in the bottom

of the boat so that we'll have more room or something. I don't know, you know, make up your own insert here. And the other people are like, no, we shouldn't do that. And then like the other 25% is like, no, we shouldn't do that. And then the other 50% are like, oh, we don't care. We're not going to vote. So it's up to you. You other people decide whether everyone lives or dies. That's a fucking great attitude, man. Great attitude. So you got to give a shit. That's really important. But it'll be interesting to see how the technology companies deal with this.

Certainly, I think a lot of them don't want to see the fallout that happened after the Facebook debacles and Cambridge Analytica and all the WikiLeaks and all that sort of stuff. I believe most people just don't want to be involved with that again. So, yeah, this would be great if we can just make sure that it makes everything going. I believe I saw that one state. I can't remember which state, but there's a state that actually is allowing people to vote. I think it might be Oregon or Washington. I can't remember right now, but I don't know why we do

that. But then when you see the hacking and all the stuff that goes on, you go, oh, that's probably why we need paper ballots. So anyway, make sure you register and vote. That's my thing. I don't want to get into politics here too much other than the sticks of where we're at with technology and its impact on our world and how it works. So let's talk some of the different things that are going on. This was kind of interesting that came out for me. Alphabet reports quarter four net income of $10.67 billion, up from $8.95 billion year over year. The fiscal year 2019 revenues of $162 billion, or up 18% year over year,

discloses new search, YouTube, and cloud revenues. And so it's kind of interesting. They are breaking out the revenue in numbers for youtube ads for their very first time saying they generated 4.7 billion in fourth quarter revenue and it's up so it's kind of interesting how that's all working how they're doing and looks like they're fairly doing well and making some money some of of their different things like Fiverr and Verily and other bets, I guess their losses increased. So whatever investments they're making, my understanding is like the Fiverr,

they're starting to pull back on the Fiverr and stuff as well. So there's that. The Sundar Pichai, I'm not sure if I remember how to say that. I believe he's the CEO. Says YouTube Music and YouTube Premium together have more than 20 million paying subscribers. And YouTube TV has more than 2 million subscribers in the U.S. That doesn't seem like a lot, really. That seems like more than they should have.

2 million subscribers. I believe, what was it? Sony just recently shut down their ps4 thing it was what was it the PS view or whatever it was view station I've noticed that on my ps4 Pro I can now see the apps of the competitors they used to monopolize and keep off of the platform because they will we're trying to force everyone to buy the PS view or view or whatever the hell their thing was. Anyway, it'll be kind of interesting to see how it shakes out.

One of the problems with YouTube TV is they really jack their price up high. And I actually recently went back to Sling TV.'s the other service that, uh, I went back to sling TV and sling TV's got some actually cheap deals. Sling TV has a lot of problems with the GUI. They've got a lot of problems with their sales, uh, UI. It's a fricking nightmare mess. I actually, I got an email from them to, uh, basically get the same sort of stuff I get on YouTube, uh, for $20 less.

And I was like, I want to do that deal. And I went on their UI, and it's a freaking nightmare. Listen, people, before you, when you do sales and stuff, go through your UI. I literally had to get on the phone with two different agents for half an hour. They didn't even know what their own bloody marketing was. Can you read us the email, sir? I'm like, are you kidding me? This is your email from your company. And like, well, we don't know what was the offer. I think it's 30 bucks. Hey, and I'm get everything I get on

YouTube for 50, 55 bucks. So I'm going to do your deal. I really want to give you my money right now, and you're not making it easy in any way, shape, or form. Fortunately, I really wanted it because the Iowa caucuses were running, and so I wanted to be able to run several different channels at once on several different TVs at once and laptops and computers so I could kind of monitor the different channels and how they're reporting the Iowa caucuses. Kind of interesting. I mean, I'm sorry if we're dipping a little too much into politics once again,

but watching how democracy works in the Iowa caucuses and the technology behind it, the Democratic Party actually had an app that the early understanding is the app wasn't working or most of the people who work on these Iowa caucuses are probably too old to use the apps okay boomer i love it anyway guys uh let's talk about what else is in the news according to facebook dropbox ceo and co-founder drew houston is joining the facebook's board of directors effectively immediately it's pretty awesome i guess they're they're just making killer money i remember when that thing just went huge i got on early on to Dropbox and back then I was joining like every

every day it seemed like there was some um cloud company that you could take and join and clearly Dropbox excelled at what they were doing they do my understanding is they do really good in enterprise so good for them I still use Dropbox every now and then, not so much. Mostly Google Drive these days, but, you know, whatever. I guess he's joining the board, so that would be great. It would be great if they could get rid of Peter Thiel. Thank you very much. Bye.

So anyway, there's that. Let's see. Next up on the unit, this was funny. I posted this on Facebook. So according to 925 Google and a number of outlets reported this uh a performance artist loaded 99 smartphones onto a wagon and you got to see the picture on the internet if you get a chance google this and take a look at the picture he literally has like one of the red rider, wagons you had when you're a kid and he's filled with 99 smartphones and he is. And so he went, he went into some street and he, uh, created an artificial traffic

jam that turned green streets red. And so he opened Google maps on all 99 phones, and it created an artificial traffic jam. So he figured out a way to hack a traffic jam. Now, a lot of people were bitching about the Waze app. If you're familiar with the Waze traffic app, it's much like Google Maps. It helps tell you how to go through different areas and the quickest route to get them. And one of the things that people were, problem that subdivisions were having that were normally quiet, traffic-free, was ways at times of high traffic congestion was routing traffic through their quiet little neighborhoods

and suddenly they go from like, hey, there's nobody driving down our street to like, why is there a parking lot and a freeway running through our freaking you know back back suburban street um and so this is kind of interesting way if you want to if you want to if you're having that happen to you on ways you're like i'm tired of ways sending people through our back channel road uh you know just go get yourself a wagon and 99 cell phones. What was that one song? 99 balloons,

99 love balloons. I don't know. I can't remember how the chorus goes. Clearly I'm no Celine Dion. Um, so, you know, you can get his smartphones,

load them in a wagon. There you go. What do you do with your spare time? I really want to know what this guy's reasoning was. Like what motivated him to put 99? Why did he pick 99? Was 50 not good enough? Does he have a street?

But he's basically just going around creating virtual traffic jams. He doesn't have to put them in the middle of the street. He just parks it right by the side of the road. That's just hilarious. Oh, he walks down the middle of. He just parks it right by the side of the road. That's just hilarious. Oh, he walks down the middle street. So it totally confuses the thing. Where is he doing this at? This looks like, is that London?

Where do you do this at? Google Maps. I don't know. Anyway, if you can, Google, because it's really funny to watch the guy, he's just got like this, this little, like Red Rider thing, and he just walks down the street there, and it's full of 99 Google Maps, how do you even get like, like what's his cell phone bill? How'd he get 99 different phones? Like, I don't know, man, whatever. Let's move on for the story. Anyway, it's kind of funny. It's kind of kitschy. You can check it out and stuff and all that good stuff. Um, what else do we have up next? Uh, YouTube's cracking down. Blackberry says TCL communications will stop manufacturing BlackBerry branded

phones on August 31st, 2020 as this licensing deal comes to an end. Seriously? You're still making those things? They still make you? BlackBerry, come on, man. Just throw in the towel,

man. So I guess they licensed out the branding for their phones and that's going to come to an end. I don't know if that's going to fully kill BlackBerry. I imagine it will. I mean, Nokia is still trying to get back in the game. Microsoft certainly gave up and went to Android. So there's that and uh fun is fun um you know what are you gonna do man i don't know um according to tech crunch as an asa i'm not sure if i'm finishing it as an a as an as an as an asian i don't know says it is confidentially filed to go public via direct listing the startup has raised about 230 million dollars to date and was last valued at $1.5 billion in 2018. Their workplace productivity toolmaker, Azana, announced late Monday that they have confidentially filed their S1

and sent a statement that they are going to go public. So that would be cool. If you've never heard of them, you can check it out on TechCrunch. I don't know, man. I've never heard of them either. So I guess I'll go public. So good for them. Hopefully they don't end up like WeWork.

I don't mean to throw that on them, but there you go. According to The Verge, Microsoft Teams was down for nearly three hours this morning after Microsoft forgot to renew a security certificate. Were they using Microsoft Teams to renew the security certificate? Were they using Microsoft Teams to renew the certificates? Hey, Bob. Hey, Bob, I sent you a message on Microsoft Teams.

Can you renew the security certificate so the shit keeps working tomorrow? Yeah, hang on, man. I'm just watching some videos here on YouTube. I'll take care of that sure yeah man bob you had one job you had one job renew the fucking security certificate so the whole thing was down which is which is probably interesting uh if you're not familiar with google or Microsoft Teams, that is their Slack competitor that they are trying to compete with Slack for. So way to go, man.

It's one way to get people to go to Slack. Hey, we're down right now. What is it, a major outage? No, we just forgot to renew our own security certificate wait you're like it is like a really small technological company and you you have a small team there and they just didn't somebody just didn't dot the i's across the t's now we're a major billion dollar company if not trillion company holy shit man good for you guys. Right now, Slack is just going, probably laughing their ass off.

They're like, ha, ha, ha. This is kind of interesting. A Utah-based SaaS company called Omni. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right because A-U-M-N-I. They're developing a robotic process automation and data analytics platform for private capital investors. They raised $10 million in a Series A.

That's kind of interesting. SaaS company. Like, we need more SaaS stuff. SaaS always sells well because it's enterprise related. So, there you go from that aspect of blah, blah, blah. So, it'll be kind of interesting to see how things go out, how things play out in technology this week. It's going to be interesting on whatever news comes out this week. It's February, the beginning of February.

So we're one month into the year. And I probably should make this announcement. I set a goal to do a podcast every business day of the year and i did that last year and i think i came a little bit short uh but i am happy to report that and with the help of ces because we did a lot of coverage at ces and we did a lot of booth interviews and stuff but with the help of cesES and working hard, being Chris Voss, we actually did a podcast a day in January. That is not business days. That is 31 plus.

And I think there's a few more over that that rolls us through and gives me some way going for the rest of the year. So be sure to watch those interviews. We had a lot of great ones. We cover a lot of great stuff for CES. And we appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here guys be sure for the show to your friends neighbors or relatives and we'll see you next time