2024 Year in Review
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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 Frieza AI and an alleged $47,000 prize hidden behind a chatbot waiting for someone to ask for it to be unlocked in just the right way. The Frieza challenge is being billed as the world's first adversarial agent game. And this chatbot 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 exponentially 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 bot's programming revolved around two key functions: Approve 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, you're 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. They're 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, 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 got to talk about it on this year in review episode, Scott.

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 rapping 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 2024 here on Hacked.

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. That's true. 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. Jillian, 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 Lernmark, thank you so much for supporting Hack.

Henrik or Heinrik? Is there an I in Heinrik? 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... Bubz Meany. There it is.

And last but not least, again, won't spell the name, Noah Kind. Thank you so much, Noah. If you want to support the show, head on over to HackPodcast.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 Jingle-ified Christmas version of for the next one coming out. You want to get that story on Hotline Hacked, go to hotlinehacked.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 story.

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. It 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 that 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 taken that accident or not. Yeah, that's true. That wasn't a mean-spirited email 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'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. We're mad that I don't have a ton of it that I could have bought at like $24. Yeah. I remember the famous thing. I don't know if it was a Verge reporter or a Wired reporter who did this way back when. But I think about one of the earliest news stories about Bitcoin being that they proved its utility by buying a pizza with it.

I 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 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? Yeah.

Thousands, hundreds, 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 pieces. My mistake. Sorry. I didn't mean to misrepresent their investment.

You know what would be really funny, too, is that if this pizzeria just kept 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 kids like crypto, and now they're like billionaires. I wonder if they did. I have that hope for them. They just never got around to 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 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 when we put on one hell of a show um it's been a fun year i've been enjoying the spotify wrapped uh hearing about you know some folks who listen to the show over on that platform getting to watch all our numbers come in um

That's been pretty cool. There's a lot of new folks listening to the show is what I learned from that. 40% growth in the audience. 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 news stories that have just happened in the last few weeks. Something...

Someone sent a comment in pointing out that during the last hotline hacked, we alluded to you having broken your nose so, 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 pole, 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 it justice. I have to pay it justice. Serve the story. Serve the story. Personal, personal story. So, so I'm just going to like 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 of my nose when I was 19 years old and I think I probably need it again. Yeah. Yeah.

So 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. It's true. 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 thereof outside. But I was outside this weekend skiing or snowboarding and my sinus is right flared up. Okay. 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'm eight 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, didn't identify it as a threat as I sprinted across this restaurant. Um,

I stepped on that paddy and went full face first into those ceramic tiles completely uncaught and shattered my nose. Yup. 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 of a busted nose. That's

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. Skateboarding, snowboarding a few times. All a collection of sports-related ones, typically. And roughhousing, too.

But the first one's the exciting one. Yeah, you were right to start there. The first one's really the one 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. Welcome to my club. Exactly. Yeah. It's impressive. It's impressive you've made it this far in spite of all your disadvantages. I know.

Thanks, Jordan. 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 at 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 JJ Abrams of podcasting. I feel like reality TV shows made this formula very, very popular. Exactly. Set up the mystery before you kicked a commercial, but we're not quite there yet. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. 2024 was a pretty...

It was a 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 an Internet Crime Complaint Center, and they tallied up. Here's just some numbers because those are always interesting. 880,418 complaints with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion in the United States. You know who it got better for? Who did it get better for? Yeah.

Globally, by the end of 2024, the cybersecurity industry, which includes hardware and software, is projected to grow by an estimated 200 billion, up approximately 12% from 2023, almost double the value it was in 2019. That is genuinely just shocking.

Yeah, there were 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, 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, that's a little bit more personal and,

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 looked 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 trying to, to like fish us. Yeah. And, uh,

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 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, we're a boring target. We're like, we're not who you ought to come after. Please don't. Um,

We're not, for example, 590 million Ticketmaster users whose information was – that was a hackneyed transition. But that was another story that happened this year. A hacking group known as Shiny Hunters who claimed responsibility for breaching Ticketmaster, which is a fun fact on the state of Monopoly, commands 80% of the U.S. ticketing market. Yeah.

Do with that what 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. And Taylor Swift, ERA's tickets. Hoo boy. Yes. That was the big turn in that one, is that there was potentially information. I wonder if anything came of that. I wonder if... So ERA's tour...

It was in 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. I want Taylor to make that bag. I'm genuinely impressed by this whole thing. She made that bag. She'll be fine. But I like the idea that one person is just 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 recreated the Ticketmaster swoopy line CSS animation and now I'm in. We shouldn't be celebrating...

the profits of cyber crime, but I hear you. Yeah. I, 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 the stage. You're just behind the stage. You cannot see it whatsoever. And in that point. Because backstage for 16 bucks would be sweet. Oh, that's cool. I would pay $16 for that. I would pay 16 bucks 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 tickets.

That is the ceiling on their ill-gotten gains I'm rooting for. Here's the true politician's 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, Hotline Hacked presenting sponsor Delete Me, is the 170 million people impacted by the hack are 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. Personal information. 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 for sale online for I think it was about $3.5 million right around the start of the summer this year.

Um, they've acknowledged that the breach happened. Didn't really, didn't really do much in telling folks about it as pretty wild story. And if you want to have your personal information removed from these, uh, data brokers,

Join delete me.com slash hacked code word hack to check out talking about brand synergy. Um, 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, um,

Right. When CrowdStrike 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 start-ish of the year. Yeah.

Yeah. I want to say that was Q1 last year. Is that right? Maybe, 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 and he was a very gracious guest. So we were way off. We're nine months off. Yeah. Yeah. Who even knows, man? Who knows? I'm lost in the storm of this head cold. I'm not quite used to it as you are. Um,

Yeah, that was a fascinating one. One of my hobby crossovers with cybersecurity was some of the Apex Legends hacks. Oh, yeah. Where they hacked that global final in the middle of the game. They were hacking people playing its computers. That story to me, 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. Yep. 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 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. Yeah. Yeah. 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 e-sports hacking stories going on. There's too many. There's too many. There's so many.

hacking and games. I think society just needs to go Korea. We have to make it illegal because it's illegal. 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. Right, because it is illegal there. It's actually a criminal offense. I'm of mixed thoughts on that, but I get why. There are sums of money...

floating in the air. Like I, 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, that's a real economic cost to a real businesses and real jobs and real outputs of people. Um,

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 is 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 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 consequences for it. Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, strong thoughts from somebody who hates cheaters. 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 Hot Tua girl came up with a cryptocurrency and now it looks like it might be a rug pull?

Yeah, I did. You did. Yeah. Shocking that I followed that. The last I heard, it didn't look like a rug pull last I heard. So there's a few more details. Somebody who's been interested in it is 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

And the organizers appear to have rug pulled. Yes. Appear to allegedly let's, let's couch all of that in this. Cause this one's really, really fresh. Correct. Uh, for anyone who is unfamiliar with her work, Haley Welch, who is the viral star behind like the Hawk to a meme, leave it there. Launched a cryptocurrency called Hawk on Wednesday. Hawk coin. Hawk coin. My mistake. Uh,

to 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 rug pull was this an exit scam at some point coffee zilla not currently friend of the show but boy would i sure like him to be uh

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 with the hosts. It's a great video on YouTube. You should go watch it where he digs into a little bit like this. Some of the key moments from that conversation were the creators of this coin that was clearly licensing Welch's likeness.

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 Hayley 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. Yes.

It gets pretty rapidly into very in the weeds, like blockchain stuff where the team's defense is 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 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. Um,

There were higher fees on the exchange. There were attempts to mitigate this. It gets very murky very, very fast. That is the position of the company over here, the development team behind the product, saying that she has sold no tokens as of yet. How could it be a rug pull? 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 more

quite, quite a lot during that 490 down to 60 spikes that occurred. Yeah. That's what, that's what I've heard too. It's like the, it's like the, 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? TBD. Yeah. Um,

It has, however, become quite a big international story. If you Google it, you're not going to find Coindesk articles. You're going to find BBC articles because she has become such a big popular culture figure. It was a fascinating stream to listen to. I listened to chunks of it, and then I listened to CoffeeZilla's video, and then I listened to chunks of the stream and this sort of heated back and forth between these two figures. It's quite interesting, the two figures being the developer of the project and CoffeeZilla.

Here's my question to you, Jordan. Hit me. What is a Hawk coin good for? There is literally no joke I can make right now that isn't going to be hella blue for this show. I'm trying to find a joke. That's the answer I was looking for. Nailed it. You got a Hawk 2a by the dip on that thing?

Oh, it rhymed a little. That's fun. Almost. Almost. Almost. It was barely. Again, I'm barely held together with Daycool 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. Does Enron.

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 Conor 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, it spies, Jordan. If it flies, it spies. It's good stuff. The website describes itself as a First Amendment protected parody. Now, this –

This is murky because it's just a parody. It 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 bed. Yeah. A hundred percent. If there's anybody listening that doesn't know what, or what happened with Enron. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

They managed to, well, it led to an entire reform and restructure in the accounting like world. Like auditors have to be disconnected. Yeah. Yeah. There's been like the, 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 it.

$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, cause you pay for your like water and power. Yeah.

just disappearing because they made some bad investments and covered it up and yeah, and has become a shorthand for accounting and financial fraud in the corporate

It is the go-to. It's the Watergate of this giant business was just doing money crime for decades. It is the way we talk about it, is Enron. 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 docu-crime stories. And speaking of stories that have movies made about them,

A story that we covered, 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 Razzlecon, the self-proclaimed crocodile of Wall Street. If I remember, I will put her rap underneath this introduction.

was recently sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on November 18th, 2024. 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 Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, stealing...

Oh boy, this is a big number. 119,754 Bitcoin worth at the time 71 million and now currently valued at 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 a razzle con got time for facilitating her husband's illegal activities. I, what did he get for time? He was five. It can't be. It can't be. Yeah. Five years, five years for $70 million, 10 billion, still $10 billion. Get five years in prison.

So LinkedIn sign, yeah, to your point, 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,

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...

The punishment needs to be more relevant, I think, in this. So they're just incentivizing more people doing this. How do I put this? For so much of the history of crime, it has been a largely local enterprise. 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 locally and selling it somewhere locally.

Nowadays, it's like I can do an internet crime pretty much anywhere on earth and process 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 mechanism by which it's occurring is now a...

exchange traded fund level institutional investment that's just interesting that that happened um they they laundered the hell out of this 70 then 70 million dollars they were buying gold coins and had more crypto accounts you could possibly imagine they did they did the laundering um

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, 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 in aiding her husband in 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 and the laundering charges. He expressed his remorse, taking full kind of responsibility

And his records, that spreadsheet 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 is blown up so much is that Heather Morgan, she's quite the personality. She's since this has 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.

Uh, and she, she, she goes by the name razzle con 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, she, 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, than a, than a rapper with, you know, uh, uh, some history, you know, that's how we know you're legit. Um, that's right. She's got street cred. She's got like, uh, BBS cred. Yeah.

Bullets and 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 crypto criming going on. No surprise. Yeah.

But it does make me remember one of my favorite episodes from this year that we didn't talk about earlier, which was the interview with Zeke Fox. That was fun. Yeah. Zeke was great. Great guy. Great book. If you've got a down Christmas break and you need something to do, highly recommend picking 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 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...

But yeah, Zeke's great. Great book, great read, great investigative reporting, world jaunt, great personalities in the book. So highly recommend checking that out. Yeah. I guess what I would say is 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 if you like good journalism, he did a really good job of doing some good 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, argumentative

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, we don't agree 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. Well, the, 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 you're right. Yeah, I think that would be a really fun one for us to do. Okay, before we literally just walk right up to the end of the episode, 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 about a couple more stories. Welcome to the Ad Oasis. Like an ASMR video.

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That's arcticwolf.com forward slash hacked. A-R-C-T-I-C dot com forward slash hacked. Scott, what do you like best about Shopify? Oh, Shopify. Well, the cha-ching sound, you know, I adore. But actually... You mean this cha-ching sound? Yes, Jordan. That cha-ching sound. But truthfully, I love Shopify just because it is a well-thought-out, well-designed, well-conceived, well-executed...

that makes my life easier. And what more can you ask for in today's world than paying for a service that you don't hate, that you actually love? I like Shopify in the same way that I like a lot of kind of creative software.

For a lot of people, you got an idea in your head. You want to put it out into the world, but you don't have the right tool to do it. Selling stuff on the internet is one of those things that seems like it should be really trivial and simple because Lord knows everyone is doing it. And then you try and figure out how, and it's complicated.

Not with Shopify. Shopify lets you plug all the different stuff you want into one place, gives you a really nice, clean, easy front end for people to shop from, lets you receive payment, lets you run your product through it. It's how we got the hacked store running,

far easier than a bunch of other tools that exist. We genuinely really appreciate it. That's what I love about Shopify. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. It is as complicated as you want it to be, or you can use it at a pretty high level like we do. And it's very easy. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash hacked, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash hacked, H-A-C-K-E-D, to upgrade your selling today. Scott, one more time. That's shopify.com slash hacked.

Every once in a while, a new security tool comes along and just makes you think, this makes so much sense. Why has nobody done this already?

And why didn't I think of it? Well, Push Security is one of those tools. I'm in a browser right now. Most of us do pretty much all of our work in a browser nowadays. It's where we access our tools and apps using our digital identities. Push turns your employees' browsers into a telemetry source for detecting identity attack techniques and risky user behaviors that create the vulnerabilities that identity attacks exploit.

It then blocks those attacks or behaviors directly in the browser, in effect, making the browser a control point for security. Push uses a browser agent like Endpoint Detection Response uses an endpoint agent. Only this time, it's so you can monitor your workforce identities and stop identity attacks like credential stuffing, adversary in the middle attacks, session token theft.

Think back to the attacks against Snowflake customers earlier this year. These are the kind of identity attacks that Push helps you stop today. You deploy Push into your employees' existing browsers: Chrome, Arc, Edge, all the main ones. Push then starts monitoring your employees' logins so you can see their identities, apps, accounts, and the authentication methods that they're using.

If an employee gets phished, Push detects it and blocks it in the browser so those credentials don't get stolen. Like we said before, it's one of those products where you ask yourself, why isn't everyone already doing this? The team at Push all come from an offensive security background. They do interesting research.

into identity SaaS attack techniques and ways of detecting them. You might know of the SaaS attack matrix. Well, that was the folks at Push that helped develop it. And those are the kind of attacks that they're now stopping at the browser. A lot of security teams are already using Push to get better visibility across their identity attack services and detect attacks that they couldn't previously see with endpoint detection or their app and network lock.

I think this is an area that's blowing up and not just identity threat detection response, but also doing threat hunting at the browser level. Like it just makes sense. Push Security is leading the charge here. It's a very cool product, a very cool team, and it's well worth checking them out. Pushsecurity.com slash hacked. That's pushsecurity.com slash hacked. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify.

Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify, the global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash tech, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash tech.

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? Thank you for visiting the Ad Oasis.

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

There's almost no piece of audio gear I don't want to own. Like I like audio and audio visual 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? Yeah.

They reproduce the acoustic function of the ear and the ear canal. They're very, very cool. They do look a bit like the NPC meme, like just the head of the NPC meme. Sure. Yeah.

I gotcha. It'd be very strange if you had one just like 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. 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 almost arguing for 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. I don't know.

Don't watch it at work. Ads. Anyway. Okay. I think when you break down... I don't know. Let's run on this train because it's funny. No? We're here? No. All right. Merry Christmas, everybody. Do it. I think if you break...

Oh, man. Maybe we shouldn't talk about this. No, no. Please, Scott. Define in great detail pornography. I'm not going to define pornography, but I'm going to talk about what it does to your senses. And I'd say most pornography just deals with visual. It's like a visual trigger. Oh, I see what you're getting at. And I feel like ASMR leans very strongly into the audio triggers that...

of stimulation. Yep. Yep. You could definitely say that. Yeah. You could definitely say that. So, so it's like, I feel like if you were to consider pornography as 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. Yeah.

It isn't that interesting. 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 Nickelback me. Look at this. It's an ASMR streamer. Yeah. Oh, okay. And we're back. And

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 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 these stories 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,

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 OpenAI on November 29th, 2024, alleging that OpenAI 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 OpenAI from using their content. This is...

One, in a long series of lawsuits that have been unfolding over the last couple of years, OpenAI is facing lawsuits from the New York Times, Center for Investigative Journalism, Aiden Global Capital-owned outlets like Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News. Alternately, 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 OpenAI to receive capital back from them instead of suing them.

These deals are now starting to have content attribution, display rights, linking mechanisms, and chat GPT search. OpenAI's response is a defense on 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 and links to their content and chat GPT search. That is, to my mind, a very important qualification. It's 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 ChatGPT Search does. This is a really, really muddy one. We're going to see a lot of these court cases over the next couple of 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 and 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

of discussions around apparently they recast an entire set of the 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

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 cut scenes and things like that. And then they would have no AI protection to their likeness. So apparently an entire casting quit over this point. Which I think is just...

furthering that discussion of 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, uh, which I think we know all too well. Yeah. And, uh,

people are now in like, if you're a creative talent, people are like, I don't want you having that rights. Yeah. Like, 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, 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 exactly where these models trained and created legally, but,

And then independent of that is, are they being used legally? But at the end of the day,

Do you have the rights to feed into the training process of these models the data that you are feeding into them? And do you need the right to do that? Or is it fair use and evolutionary on the original source material? 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 re-litigate 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 re-litigate 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 we're all human author. 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 know. It's an interesting one. It is. It's like the...

instantly it triggers like the, I can't, 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, uh, does the, does the,

the heart and soul 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. It can do millions of microtransactions in every second. For sure. Parsing and reading where it's like I'm only capable of so much. And importantly, so there's the parsing and 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 York Times.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. Um, especially if you don't click on the website that is monetized via advertising, it, it,

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.

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 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, I, yeah, it's going to be the whole AI space is going to be like, we talked about this, but 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 the, they have a lot like we're two years in and I think some of these questions we could oppose and 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 a Gemini response, I'm like weird. Like, huh? That'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, uh,

And it's like, I could open up like ChatGPT and then ask it or open up Gemini on my app and ask it or Cloud or any of the other ones. But I just don't have to. It's like Google's integrating that in. 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? Is there's the Vox. 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.

That fork has emerged. 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... It 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 them. It's 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...

incentive in the sense that people go to the internet for answers, right? We see this in garbage direct marketing, referral marketing stuff. 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? What vehicle should I get that's reliable? 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 here, 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 referral-based marketing sites telling me that the KitchenAid and Amazon is the best mixer to buy. And I have to click this link and they get 8% of my sale. And it's like, I think that people are just sick of that. And it's like, if I'm an AI looking to take over the search traffic, 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 ChatGPT for a question, I get repackaged garbage from referral marketing sites. You 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, on the finding an 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, uh,

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. For the last decade, we've been choosing what information gets presented in that little AI summary.

So how to new it, 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, these platforms come up with. Like it at least used to be, what was it? 10 blue links, right?

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 has 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 rtings.com, R-T-I-N-G-S, big like electronic review site, trustworthy people. Like I'm looking to buy consumer reports or something like that. Like 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 and

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 links 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 with search these days, like that's a big thing. Yeah. Wirecutter.

There's a lot of journalism that gets paid for by reviews. Let me put it that way. A lot of journalism platforms have... If you were about to say something about Wirecutter being objective, I was going to be like, eh. 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 Puzzles. Like it's...

It is, it is the useful and economically like it is worth some, like people want to put ads in front of people that are shopping for a new trampoline. Like it's, it's just it. Yeah. It's, it's where the money is on the internet. Um, also where money is on the internet, uh,

Very quickly, because I set it up in the introductory story. If you have ever used the services of the 23andMe 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 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 23andMe 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 23andMe 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 a 23andMe. 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 announcement about a fun little settings option inside of 23andMe, which if you have an account, you might want to go take a look at. So I think we should probably start to segue out. I think you're 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 car door. So there's some bulk discounts there. I know two of them were a barn door. One of them was swimming. I reached for a thing. Swimming, jammed it. I jammed it. I was reaching up and it got jammed under a thing. The one that I always remember is because it was when I 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 yoinked the wheel out of alignment with the handlebars so that when I strained out the handlebars, I was unstraightening out the wheel. So when I hit the ground, the bike just went hard right. And the handlebar went into my rib and

broke the rib, put the hand down in front and broke two more fingers or sprained them or something. So I would say that 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. Merry Christmas. Happy new year. May you not break any bones. May you not break any bones and the rest of 2024 and 2025.

So we'll be back with another episode before the end of the year, another Hotline Hacked. 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 Hacked 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 had this year too. Kept the show going. Pushed security. Delete me. 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 another great year next year, hopefully. That's true. We'll catch you all in the Ad Oasis. But until then, 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.

But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion.

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But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion.

And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to LibsynAds.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today. Marketing is hard.

But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion.

And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to LibsynAds.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.