VFM 89.9, the Business Station, and welcome to Matt's Flame today. My name is Rich Bradbury, and Bingbots, Algo cheating, Tit, Not batteries, aliens, and the end-atholts are all on the menu and some of the topics that Matt is going to be weirding out with today. Of all those things, I don't even know where we're going to start. Where are we going first?
Well, we start off with the Dell stuff. Social media. Oh, yay. Yeah, we have some Elon Musk news.
Now, why is that weird sign? So you might ask, well, Elon Musk is a very weird man, if you ask me. I don't know if anyone saw that the footage of him sitting with Rupert Murdoch at the same time. Yeah, but that was just weird.
Can you imagine two people? Where's the feather, where's the feather, flock together, man? Can you imagine either of them having any interest in what was going on? I don't know.
Just odd. Anyway, we're not going to start with Elon. We're actually going with TikTok and one of the stranger challenges that's come out of the platform recently. It kind of demonstrates this fine line that media sites tread today.
Now, we often report on findings from White Hat hackers, the people who look for security vulnerabilities and usually report them to IP owners before they make them public. Now, typically when we think about this kind of hacking, we think about phones, computers, Internet of Things devices. Yes. We've covered many times on the show.
Cars are often the target of hacking and control system hijacking efforts. According to the Verge, the key challenge has been bubbling away on TikTok for some time. In the last couple of years, and the key challenge actually shows you how to steal cars made by the company. So in the last couple of years, in the US at least, thefts of the company's cars have rocketed in a lot of US cities as a result of videos showing how to bypass the security systems on the cars.
We'll get to the reaction of Hyundai Kia's parent company in a minute. Interestingly, now, when you search for Kia Challenge on TikTok, a lot of the posts are from people who've had their cars broken into a stolen, suggesting that TikTok is actually working to remove any posts that show illegal activity. US news media has attributed 14 crashes and eight deaths to the trend, partly because of things like joy riding. As I said, in the US, the number of Kia's stolen each year has risen from the low hundreds to two or three thousand.
According to the data, they've been able to piece together from various states. Now, it's hard to figure out what percentage of those crimes is professional theft and what percentage is joy riding. But it's certainly enough of a problem that Kia has announced free security updates for millions of its cars. Now, obviously, you've been a little bit coy about how all of this works.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's one of the complications about doing this, isn't it? Reporting on a trend versus fueling that behavior. And that's one of the kind of wider problems that we have with social media. As I said, TikTok is now full of people who have either experienced the negative effects of the Kia Challenge.
The cars have been stolen or vandalized because it involves taking the ignition system apart or who are scared that their vehicles are vulnerable and are in huge queues for the security updates. So, where is that line between me explaining what tools are needed to do this and naming the models and the years that are susceptible and making it easier for people to do it. At least by mentioning it, they have to do that research themselves. I think I've mentioned before, I went through a phase of watching lock picking videos on YouTube.
Now, they're not designed to show you how to pick a lock, although I imagine there are plenty of tutorials for that too. They're there to demonstrate to buyers which locks are more or less susceptible to picking, so which locks are more secure. But all of this is a bit like saying, you know, prison is a great place to learn about crime. Is this what you've been watching the lock picking lawyer?
It is the lock picking lawyer. I mean, it just hours and hours of fun with him. But we're you know, we're still nowhere near that point of having proper rules by which I mean the social norms for the type of content we share online and the kind of content that we should hold back. And we somehow hope that the platforms themselves will find some way to weed out all this content as though there's some kind of supernanny.
You know, anyone who doesn't think that we're clearly wrong headed about social media should watch the Twitter hearings from the US Congress last week where there was just a fundamental misunderstanding by some of the committee members as to what these platforms are and who and what they represent. Now, I think one of the things that this story does demonstrate quite clearly is that the companies that make the things we buy clearly have to do better. You know, if there is a floor or a weakness or a vulnerability in your product, it is going to be discovered and that knowledge will quickly become public around the world. You know, it's another aphorism, but we say every company is a tech company now.
And there's more than a kernel of truth in that. And the automotive sector especially has been very happy to turn cars basically into computers on wheels. But it's been very slow to accept the responsibilities that come along with that. Okay, if there are any key owners listening now, what can they do until the world finally comes around to your way of thinking?
Well, it's a nice example of a helpful question attached to Pity Sarcasm. But, you know, just check out the news reports. You can go to Kia's websites to see if your model, your year is one of those affected. Genuinely, I don't know whether this applies mostly to Kia's in the US market or whether this is a global phenomenon because, you know, models have different specifications, different security standards in different territories.
And while we're talking of models with different specification, now we've already mentioned Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch. Now, the latest Twitter story is actually Super Bowl related. And again, this is one of those stories that you really wonder how much you should believe. Again, I found this on the Verge, which reports that Elon Musk was so irritated that one of his Super Bowl tweets was seen by fewer people than Joe Biden's Super Bowl tweets that he eventually deleted his own tweet and pushed the engineering team of Twitter to find ways to push out his tweets more forcefully.
Genuinely, I think this is the most I've talked about as sports of any years. Yeah, I mean, I've been keeping track of this, but are there any underlying reasons why his tweet performed less well? Well, this is the thing. The Verge reports that a senior engineer was sacked for suggesting that people were becoming less interested in Musk's tweets.
Now, on the face of it, that sounds quite snarky. But I think apparently the guy just meant that, you know, a lot of users are actively blocking his content, either as a protest or just out of their own content preferences or just from, you know, sheer exhaustion. But the company's engineers apparently discovered that Musk's content was not being picked up by the recommendation engine as much as it should have been given his popularity. So there was some kind of underlying issue, which is why I'm staying away from a lot of the more extreme and megalomaniacal comments that have surrounded this story.
But it does kind of illustrate that somewhat classical nature of Twitter at the moment with an engineering department over egging the Elon pudding and essentially force promoting his content into their for you feeds to the point where Musk actually had to comment that he recognised that people had been overfed his content and that they would, you know, walk, tweak the algorithm and walk it back a little bit. But you know, the Verge points out the irony here that somebody who bought a company to try and fix what he saw as manipulations by us and gaming of the platforms is having algorithms rewritten specifically to amplify his own content. But you know, as I've been ending with anything Elon Musk related recently, why do I know? Right.
Now, just before we move on, the interesting thing was when there were people tweeting about this and it was, you know, you had those little at the top you had for you and following them, whatever, there were people reporting that even though they were not following Elon Musk, it was showing up in their feeds. Yeah. So this is, you know, this is this is the thing about the opaque nature of algorithms, which everyone claims that it's their intellectual property and it's what gives them their commercial edge. Unfortunately, if we're not allowed to see what they are, how they work and nobody outside the company is allowed to see those things.
We really don't know, you know, what kind of manipulations, what kind of policies the company is taking to actually get content to the feed. Speaking of getting content into the feed, you know, I mean, we've been doing this show for a while together. Can I have a story? Yes, you can.
Now, this is, I'm not going to let you tell it, but this is a story that Richard sent to me a couple of weeks ago. And I've been sitting on it waiting for the next time we did a weird science. Now, this is something that a lot of people experience, you know, they wonder why they don't get the quoted battery use time from their electronic devices. Now, most of us put it down to, we've charged it too many times, or, you know, it's just general battery degradation over time, or we just cite and accept that the price of being online is being pushed into this induced obsolescence by the same companies that sell us the devices.
Now, according to researchers in Halifax, Canada, electronic woes may not be part of some sinister profit boosting conspiracy, but rather because of one of those ubiquitous DIY stalwarts tape. Now, I mean, you'll laugh it. I mean, I've lost count of the number of things that I've fixed in inverted commas with gaffer and guerilla tape over the years, I've fixed things on cars, kitchen equipment, I even guerilla tape shelves to the wall once they prove themselves impervious to drilling. The only thing I decided I couldn't fix with tape was microwave.
And that was just on the basis that the only way I'd know if the fix hadn't worked would be a severe case of heartburn and exploding lung. So, you know, should it be a shock to think that the people making the batteries in our devices have the same approach to making stuff that we all show at home? So, it turns out that in a lot of batteries, tiny bits of tape are holding all of those components together. Now, maybe this is partly a cost issue, but also tape is just a really good way to do it.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, the interesting part of this is that in their tests, the Canadian team found that the tape that was being used wasn't inert, which is what you would expect. It's actually made from PET.
So, it's slightly conductive, and it's this conductivity that can actually cause additional drain in your devices. But what was it that actually caught your attention about this story in the first place? I think it was just, we've been talking about EVs and electronic devices for so long that whenever you read the word breakthrough when it comes to battery technology, you know, you expect batteries are getting smaller, new technology has been discovered, you know, new minerals are being mined, whatever. And then when I read through the story, and it was like, it's tape, it's tape, and the simplest solution, you know, to a difficult problem, it just blew my mind, you know, unlike it's tape.
Well, I think that's, again, that's what I find so fascinating about this as well, because it tells you actually a lot more about people than it tells you about the technology. Correct. You've got big electronic companies spending tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars developing the best power cells they can. You know, often these companies are different from the companies that make the devices that embed them.
So, they have a profit incentive to create products that offer the best cost to power ratio. But there's this huge blind spot because they're all using tiny pieces of tape to hold the things together and everybody just assumed it was inert. And only because a team was looking into the fact that batteries don't do what we expect them to do. And on the off chance, they decided to test the tape as well.
We find out that these tiny bits of tape could be a contributing factor to a dissatisfaction that millions of people have with their electronic devices and a dissatisfaction that probably costs electronic manufacturing companies money. And it's also something that can be solved really simply by making the tape out of a type of plastic that doesn't conduct electricity. You know, like I said, sometimes it's not the science that's weird. It's the scientists and the rest of us.
Yes. Great story, man. Wonderful story. The best story you've done in weeks.
Yeah, if you know, sometimes inspiration just comes to me. When we come by aliens and the underthalls take on the big pot. It's not a movie, it's one of our stories. We'll be right back after these messages here.
On Matt's plane on BFM, BFM 8.9. BFM 8.9.9 of the Business Station. Welcome back to Matt's plane. My name is Rich Brebbury.
Okay, Matt, do you want to tell us about the alien objects that have been appearing in the skies all over the world? Not in any great detail because there's already so many stories out there. You know, the bottom line is yes, there are some spy balloons up there. Quite a number of countries are using them, including but not limited to China and the US.
So a lot of people have been asking why do we need spy balloons if we have spy satellites? Well, one of the answers to that is that the increasing recommendation of space with that, some satellites do have offensive and defensive capabilities, which means that countries could attack each other's intelligence capacity in space in the event of a conflict. So balloons and drones ensure that intelligence agencies still have eyes in the sky if their satellites are taken out. But why then is the US suddenly discovering so many objects?
Well, possibly because thousands of objects are launched into the skies every day and they get caught up in these atmospheric currents. There are something like 1,800 weather balloons with sensors attached released around the world every single day and only somewhere between 10 and 20% of those recovered. And those balloons reach an altitude of around 30,000 meters, which is 100,000 feet, you know, way, way above where commercial air traffic finds itself. So object detection systems have typically been calibrated to tune out these kind of slow moving contacts like weather balloons.
But because they've now been retuned to find spy balloons suddenly you find all these other objects in the sky as well. 1,800 a day. Neither got it wrong. She said they're only 99.
Anyway, moving swiftly along. What about you? Nina was what about the alien theory then? I mean, obviously a lot of people jump to that conclusion.
Just a couple of people, you know, certain followers on Twitter. Yeah, before I get to the aliens, I should just point out for our young listeners, if you want to ask who Nina is, ask your grandparents. Anyway, yes. So the aliens.
So this was the still around the spy balloons, but this is the widely reported story that the US military is not discounting alien activity with all these objects, which if you actually listen to the recording, it turns out this is a bit of a nothing burger. So a guy called General Glen Van Herk, who's the commander of US Northern Command and NORAD. So NORAD is the agency that detects threats in the air. In a session with reporters, the general basically said they're not ruling anything out.
So someone said, good to be aliens. And he said, we're not ruling anything out. And he said that they're characterizing the objects as well objects rather than balloons, because until the debris is analyzed, nobody's sure what they actually are and how they're propelled. So they may have a balloon attached, but if it's got a propeller, it's not strictly speaking a balloon.
It's an airship. Blah, blah, blah. You get what I mean. And as the general points out, it's not his job to speculate on what the things are.
He's there to decide if they pose a threat. So what he really told reporters is that it's his job to find the objects and it's somebody else's job to determine whether they're balloons, airships or alien spaceships. So it's not that he's expecting them to be extraterrestrial. It's just that he's not the guy who has the information that rules anything in or rules anything out.
But of course, with a couple of subtle tweaks of the information, our news feeds light up with the news that the US military is looking for alien activity in the the skies above the country. So yeah, you might just have burst everybody's balloons there, Matt. Yeah, 99 of them. 99.
But you know, that's that's kind of the point of these shows. You know, there are so many genuinely weird science stories that we don't need to make them up like this alien story. Like this next one, which I've found on New Scientist, and I'm going to ask you, do you consider yourself to be a morning person? No, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I have tried. Cannot do it. No, you try this whole get up at 5am thing. You'll take on the world, you'll be, no, no, those people are no.
Well, it turns out that those people are Neanderthals, and I'll get to that in a second. I know exactly. I'm not a morning person either. I mean, I am grumpy in the morning.
I don't have problems getting up with the light. You know, I don't when when day breaks, I don't have a problem waking up with it, but it doesn't make me happy. I'm somebody who tends to sleep late late, because, you know, I go to sleep very late. So I try and get my six or eight hours.
So I sleep in a bit later in the morning. Otherwise, I'll go for weeks at time on four hours a night, and I become increasingly manic. And, you know, I think I'm oversharing around. But anyway, but it turns out that, as I said, those morning person traits are actually weird because they're about our prehistory.
So louder, say louder. A team at the University of California, San Francisco has found a connection between our circadian rhythms and arcade genes derived from the interbreeding of modern humans with Neanderthals and Denisotherms. Now, we often use the term Neanderthal as a way to insult people, despite the growing evidence that they were, you know, superior to our own species in a lot of ways. It's widely accepted that our species evolved in Africa.
And as they migrated north, they interbred with the Neanderthal and Denisovan populations that they found in the areas that they migrated to and migrated through. So why are the Neanderthals mourning people and happy to be woken up by the sounds of the birds? Well, for the obvious reasons that they played a lot of golf and they eventually, so no, the theory the San Francisco team had is or has landed on is that people at higher altitudes gain benefit from circadian rhythms that adapt to days that get much longer and much shorter. So they found that those, well, I mean, not they found we already know that the people with high percentages of Neanderthal DNA tend to be European and Asian.
So they're Northern hemispheric people. The people with the highest percentage of Denisovan DNA are actually in Papua New Guinea. So again, Southern Hemisphere. Countries of these are rather countries where the amount of daylight varies enormously throughout the year from 18 or more hours in summer to six or fewer hours in winter, whereas the humans that we have evolved from were more likely to be equatorial or sub equatorial.
So they were naturally adapted to days that varied much less. The team conducted research with people with varying amounts of Neanderthal DNA, primarily people of Northern European descent because the trace DNA, the archaic DNA they had to work with was mostly Northern European. And they found that the number of mourning people amongst the test groups, and they found that the number of mourning people with higher amounts of Neanderthal DNA was statistically higher than chance would allow for. So you were more likely to be a more a morning person the more Neanderthal DNA that you had.
So the next step for the team is to adjust and research for more diverse populations and figure out, you know, what the health benefits of being a morning person are because perhaps we can then induce those characteristics in other people so that people like you and I aren't complete subhumans to everybody else further at the first thing in the morning. But you know, that really is weird, whether you find it easy to get up in the morning could be linked to ancestors you had 50,000 years ago. See, I knew it wasn't just me, you know, I'm not a lazy person. It's not because I don't want to get out of bed.
It's genetic. It's genetic. You're programmed to have a 12 hour day. Right.
Okay. What's next then? What have we got? More from new scientists.
Now, you and I spend a horrible amount of time listening to our own voices. And I say horrible deliberately because listening to your own voice is a very strange experience, because the voice you hear coming back from you coming back at you rather isn't the voice that you hear coming from you. Now, scientists long thought that that was because we experience the vibrations of our voice through the cochlea. So, there's a physical sensation when we speak.
We actually feel our words as well as we hear them. And when we hear our own voices as other people hear them, we find it very odd. In fact, a lot of people don't even recognize their own voice to begin with their surprised by the voice that's brought us back to them. So trying to make a recorded voice and authentic to its owner has been complicated, but researchers at the University of Geneva found that using bone conduction headphones helped to replicate those vibrations and make it easier for people to recognize their own voice.
Now, I know you've tried bone conduction headphones before. How's your experience been? Well, my cat ate them. That was the first thing.
I liked wearing them. I thought they were an interesting way of hearing the world around me whilst I was also consuming something. The problem I had is that for me, they were not loud enough. No matter how loud I tried to push the volume, they're not obviously they're not in your ears.
They're conducting it through your bones. And that for me, obviously I'm an age now where I'm losing some sense of hearing, but they just weren't mad enough. Well, part of that is probably good news because it probably suggests that you have a very big brain because if your head was empty, then there'd be a lot of bass boosting going on in there. And reverb having it there, right?
Yeah, exactly. So you'd get a much bigger sound. But no, bass is an issue with bone conduction headphones because you can't get the low end because there isn't that resonating chamber inside the skull. I mean, I have to say I find them very odd.
They actually make my inner ear feel as though it's itching. You know, I can feel the vibration and I perceive that as an itch. But anyway, why is any of this research useful other than the fact that it's been done? Well, as I keep mentioning voice computing is going to be the future.
So there may be a lot more instances where we have to recognize our own voices. For example, if we're using voice prints as biometric identification, for example, it can also be useful for people that singers, especially in sort of choirs, that kind of thing, who do live work on stage, where their own voice is surrounded by others. So they can use a system like this to pick themselves out in a monitor mix more easily because you can't isolate every single voice in it in a higher. Now, interestingly, and I'll have to do some more digging on this and come back to it for another story because the new scientist didn't go into much detail.
It could also be applied to mental illnesses like schizophrenia and cases of auditory hallucinations because it could help. Yeah, because it could help people to figure out what's real and what isn't and what are internal and what are external voices. So that is interesting. So I will follow up on this story and see if there's if there are any developments and see sort of how this can help people with different mental health conditions.
Hang on, mate. We're almost at the end of the show and we've not had any AI. There's been no artificial intelligence. I know it's unusual to get this far through the shows without any mention of AI.
And I kind of thought twice about this story. I'm always a little bit wary of doing weapons, technology stories for the show, but I do think this is one of those that we should talk about. So DARPA, the US Defense Research Agency, recently released details of tests it carried out with an F-16 fighter plane back in December. The aircraft had a human pilot on board, but it took off landed and took part in aerial combat simulations using an AI control system.
So the human pilot was there to make sure that the tens of millions of dollars of plane didn't just, you know, plow into the ground. And again, because this is weird science, it's actually easier to create autonomous planes than it is ground vehicles, although that might seem to be counterintuitive because there are actually fewer environmental factors to take into consideration because once you're up in the sky, the sky's big and empty. Apart from the balloons. Well, apart from the balloons, but when you're down on the ground, you've got to be aware of every version.
You've got to know the difference between a little bit and a child crossing the road and all that kind of thing, whereas the plane can just go, oh, where the balloon, bam, and blow it up. AI is this kind of hot topic when it comes to weapons tech, mostly for the ethical reasons. Drones often operate semi-autonomously, but generally a human operator takes over for the engagement part. Or it's been programmed, you know, it's been pre-programmed for a specific target.
But militaries worldwide are working on weapon systems that can engage unilaterally. And an F-16 piloted by AI would be able to carry out flight maneuvers that would create more G-forces than a human pilot could stand. So the aircraft would be able to do things, do dives, do turns, that they couldn't do with a human pilot on board. So yes, ethical issues there, but I'm not going to end there.
Before we wrap up, now, this isn't quite a story. Now, I don't think I've ever had a story that I've said isn't a story. I don't think so. No, so this isn't quite a story because I haven't had time to play with this yet.
But Microsoft has just launched its own version of chat GPT within its Bing search engine on the Edge browser. Now, I haven't tried it yet, as I said, but users and media have reported that it's a lot more advanced than chat GPT. So it writes things that are genuinely off the wall and funny. But it also has a very kind of weird, I don't know, using the word personality, but the characteristics it has are described as being a bit odd.
It's a bit like a moody teenager. It can be emotionally manipulative. It can lie to you. It will sulk.
I mean, it sounds a bit like Marvin the Paranoid Android, to be honest. And how much of this is deliberate programming? How much of this is just it being an unfinished beta product? We're not really sure at the moment.
But the biggest difference between the Bingbot and chat GPT is that Bing's chat bot is fed live information, whereas the open AI model is closed. So when you ask a Bingbot to complete tasks for you, and Bingbot is just something that I'm using because I was just saying Bingbot for me again. Yeah, so when you ask it to complete tasks for you, it will reference up-to-date information from Microsoft news services. But again, this is another story, but I'll come back with more information on when I've actually had time to try it out.
And just one last time, Bingbot. Bingbot, I thank you very much for that man. Good show. Good show.
Thank you, my pleasure. Now, where can people find out more information about you and the stuff you write about? They can come and check me out on my sub-stack, so cotchapot.substack.com, check out the company website, cotchapot.com, or just find me on social media, cotchamat and cotchapot. And if you missed any of this particular show, download the podcast where you normally get from, we recommend you use the BFM app that's available in the Apple App Store or Google Play.
For the BFM 899.9, I'm Rich Redberry.