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Free registration at MyFIM.My.com to a digitalised franchising. This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury.
This is Matt Splain. Science is weird. It made Matt Armitage. Although the lab that created him was reportedly destroyed in one of the early Marvel movies.
Since that day, he's lent on BFM to give his life meaning, Disney and Facebook. It must be time for some Matt Splaining. I believe we have the return of the killer robots today. Hey Rich, well it's not much of a return because they never really go too far away where I'm concerned.
But you know, a lot of us have seen those recent Austin Dynamics videos, so there was the Atlas robot doing parkour, which is really cool until you get that feeling that actually this is really creepy. And you know, it's the same with their canine like robot spot, which just skips that whole cool bit and is just plain creepy, especially the way it, you know, it prances around on those weird pin legs that it has. And I know that Boston Dynamics has supposedly good intentions. So the latest video of Spot in Action is actually from inside a really deep mine where bots like Spot can look for imperfections, you know, they can look for structural imperfections in the in the mine or they can look for toxic gas accumulations and they do all of that without risking people's lives.
I think they've used drones and things like that before, but you still need a remote operator quite nearby. So we know all of these things at an intellectual level, but that doesn't really help when you close your eyes and imagine one of these machines chasing you. But at least they're not sentient, right? Sure.
And that's something that we've noted on shows before, you know, with the more prominent role that robots and drones are playing in military and law enforcement operations, we find ourselves having these conversations about how much autonomy the machines should have. At the moment, the best case scenario for the machines is to have a human operator, because then that human operator can make the decisions that have potentially life altering implications and often life taking implications. But it's quite hard to draw that mental line from something that's really cute like Pepper, which is Softbank's AI guided robot to assist customers in its stores in Japan, to a Boston Dynamics robot jumping across buildings and scrambling along rooftops to hunt you down like something from Gemini Man. So it might come as a surprise to many people that one of the companies at the forefront of developing these sentient robots is actually Disney.
You don't think they're trying to build a battle droid army to rule the galaxy, do you? No, because we're definitely nowhere near the point where clone troopers are possible, though you could potentially imagine Donald Trump as a kind of Palpatine slash Darth Sidious figure. I'm not sure what character that would make Joe Biden Yoda possibly. You know, it's easy to forget or overlook, but Disney has always been one of the pioneers when it comes to robotics.
We just don't tend to think of them in that way, because they give their characters that, nice folksy name of animatronics, and they have an entire division there, imagine, is that's dedicated to this kind of futuristic research and development, because Google and Amazon, they're not the only multi-billion dollar businesses that have this vested interest in AI technologies and robotics. So often the early Disney robots were a way to bring animals to life on the rides and attractions and the theme parks, things like birds and bats. And there was a Ben Franklin robot in the early 1980s that appeared to walk up some stairs at the Epcot Center. I've got to say, I never really paid you for a Disney fan.
Actually, I'm not. I mean, for the most part, Disney stuff leaves me quite cold. I'm really not into the whole Snow White Mickey Mouse thing, let alone that whole frozen kind of franchise. Let it go.
Hey, you've just incurred a bill of about three million ringgit for seeing that. And you know, even with the addition of Marvel and Star Wars, I can't imagine myself ever going to a Disney think part. So actually, I'm getting a lot of the information about Disney from something I read in the New York Times. A piece called, Are You Ready for Sentient Disney Robots?
I think that probably gives the game away in terms of where the story's heading. But since those early days of the animatronic birds and presidents, Disney's machines have become much more sophisticated. And today, the company reportedly has more than 6,000 robots located within its theme parks around the globe. Now, most of those machines are not wandering around.
They're fixed into the rides and attractions, which they then helped them to life. Now, you know, one of the hallmarks of Disney is the characters played by actors in suits, you know, goofy and Mickey or Donald Duck. Why would they want to change that and replace them with machines? Well, I don't think that's their purpose.
In fact, their stated position is that it isn't their purpose. But companies like Disney find themselves in a strange position. You know, people come to their parks expecting to see a realistic recreation of characters and moments from the movies they love. And very often now, those characters are CGI enhanced, not just animations.
So when you're looking at those characters from the old cartoons, you know, you're not breaking down any walls, you're not destroying anyone's dreams and perceptions by putting a human actor inside a 2.5 meter tall duck suit. But it's much harder when you have all those realistically acting CGI characters from the current sort of raft of movies and TV shows. So, you know, you can't go from a fluidly behaving Hulk or rocket on the movie screen to a glitchy robot version at the theme parks. Now, I understand why Disney wants to make the robots more realistic than in the context of those rides and attractions.
But why the pursuit of sentence? That's worrying. Well, it doesn't have to be that worrying. So there were a few Spider-Man themed attractions that would debut this year at the Disneyland Resort, which is the park in Anaheim, California.
I had to look that up on Google because I know so little about where Disney has theme parks. So there's an incredible Spider-Man robot that does and he's full size. He does this amazing acrobatic routine. He swings from a web, he somersaults midair, he climbs up and down walls.
Now, that's not anything that a human stunt actor couldn't do. But it's certainly not something that you would expect human actors to do over and over on a loop, you know, on the hour, day in and day out. Then there's the web slinger Spider-Man adventure ride itself, which blends CGI action with real world and animatronic elements that can actually be manipulated by the riders. It's very much a kind of interactive game, even though it is a ride where you move from location to location.
And motion detection systems allow those riders to do things like spin webs around renegade robots and manipulate the action on the screens in front of them. But when you look at this diverse list of characters that Disney possesses, they're not all as easy to recreate as Spider-Man simply by putting a person in a light crijempsuit. You're talking about a character like Baby Yoda? Well, that's a good example.
And Elsa from Frozen, as you just said to the world, is another good example. Baby Yoda, of course, is too small to recreate with a human actor. And that CGI enhanced animation of Elsa already appears to be three-dimensional on the screen. So to achieve that suspension of disbelief, any recreation of her character within the parks has to be as good as that representation in the movies.
So if you can link those advances in robotics with advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, suddenly you've got another layer of interactivity for those rides and attractions. And that's where Disney's Project Kiwi comes in. The Imagineers have already put a baby group prototype together that can walk and interact with people or independently. Now, don't expect these machines to have an enormous conversational range, but they can take emotional cues from the people they interact with.
They can look happy or sad or they can decide to act mischievously. And there are already quite a few clips on YouTube that Disney has released of the prototype. So it's worth checking those out. And presumably that model then can be applied to Elsa or a Baby Yoda or I guess any other Disney character?
Yeah, as an example, you would probably have someone in a suit playing the role of the Mandalorian, at least in those one-on-one walking around the part-type interactions. But the Baby Yoda could be AI enhanced and programmed to spontaneously decide which of its programmed routines to follow or combine. And I know everyone is expecting me to say until the day it goes Westworld and the machines turn on the customers. But I don't have to say that because you're already imagining it.
And Disney is all about dreams. There you go. The one person who can make Frozen a dystopian nightmare. Let's stick with it.
Shall we stick with a dystopian nightmare? Sure. This is just a quick one before we go into the break. So we mentioned last year that Singapore had trialled the use of those Boston Dynamics Spot Robots as part of its Pandemic Control Initiatives.
So the Dogwood Patrol Parks and One People to Maintain Safe Social Distancing. A new robot trial in Singapore is using a locally developed wheels robot called Xavier. It's being used to patrol retail and residential areas and look out for anti-social behavior, which of course in Singapore includes the extremes of incorrectly parking your bicycle or smoking in the wrong places. So Singapore is already full of CCTV cameras and other measures to track social behavior.
But there was a rare case of public outrage that led to legislation limiting the use of surveillance and tracking. When it came to light that the Singapore police were accessing information in the pandemic, tracking apps and databases that the country was using to manage the pandemic. And do you think the Singapore government will be swayed by public sentiment? Well, I guess we have to wait and see how Singaporeans react to the machines, whether the positives outweigh the negatives.
So on the positive side, the use of machines like this could potentially be used to give people more of a sense of safety. You can't expect a police patrol in every basement car park, for example. But with these machines, you potentially have a tool that is more flexible than a CCTV camera because you have that potential to get a human police operator on the line while the machines cameras film everything and move around. And potentially, if you factor in the possibility of facial recognition, they could actually be identifying any would-be robbers or attackers in real time.
Now, on the other hand, that type of policing using these machines hasn't really gone down very well in Tunisia. And of course, that country is in the middle of another round of public demonstrations and social disruption. So the jury is very much out when it comes to the public willingness to accept this kind of global transition to rubber cops. Matt and his machines.
Now, when we come back, Facebook's hard stop and a little bit of twitching. You're tuned in to BFM 89.9. This is Matt's plane. Before Friday materialises, BFM 89.9.
BFM 89.9 of the Business Station. I'm Rich Brandbury. This is Matt's plane. Matt, it's not often we talk about current events on Matt's plane, is it?
That's true. I prefer to look at current events and discuss the trends that surround them. For one thing, it helps to make the shows a little bit more evergreen. So someone won't just see Facebook service outage in the description and think, well, there's no point listening to that.
It's old news. But also, it's because we record these shows a little bit in advance. And of course, you guys tend to handle the more topical stuff during the live broadcasts. So a lot of people know that Facebook experienced its most widespread outage over the last weekend and the early part of this week.
That's its most widespread in its history. And it was unusual because the entire organisation went offline. So not just Facebook, but Instagram, WhatsApp and all the internal platforms that the company operates as well, which is one of the reasons that it was so complicated. And it took so long for the company to fix because their own tech support guys also had no access because everyone works on those internal Facebook systems and the entire infrastructure was down.
So it was that worst case scenario. Your systems are down and because your systems are down, you've got no way of coming back up online. A little bit like that. So obviously, Facebook as a company is back online.
So we weren't talking or we weren't seeing anything that was terminal. And the first thing anyone asks in a situation like this is, was it hacked? Certainly, in this instance, that doesn't seem to be the case. Now, one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this issue on the show is because of the episode that we did last year, MSP147, the Cobol Cowboys, when we talked about the layered structure of the internet and the fact that it's built a little bit like a trifle, one layer is added on top of rather than replacing another.
So buried in that structure, platforms and languages that very few people are still competent in coding. And the Cobol Cowboys were a collection of retired computer programmers who were reactivated and tasked with trying to make some of the social payment infrastructure in the US able to cope with the demands of COVID-19. I mean, that can't be Facebook's problem though, surely? No, not exactly.
I mean, systems are all too new to have that kind of issue. But the parallels are there. We think of the internet as this fantastic integrated system. Now, it's an incredibly complicated one, but it's not really integrated.
There are different bits all over the place. And where Facebook seems to have gone wrong is that it rolled out some internal updates that included the addresses of the servers being updated, but not the routing information. So it's a bit like trying to use grab or Uber without Satnav. In the old days, we just called that driving.
You've got in a car armed only with a destination and you had to actually figure out where you were headed. And any maps in the car were usually shredded and covered in takeaway food. Getting lost wasn't expected part of the journey. Yeah, as was scraping off some of the stuff on the maps and thinking, well, maybe it's edible.
But where I grew up, that often meant ending up on a featureless back lane in a flat featureless landscape. So in the morning, what we used to call happy days on the internet, though, getting lost is pretty much the same as not existing. If you want the explanation in more technical terms, the Facebook updates seem to have included the DNS addresses, so the specific servers they were for, but not the BGP, the border gateway protocol information. And that's the kind of satnav part.
So that's the information that tells the information how it's going to get to those DNS servers. So once the updates were rolled out, the servers went dark because the information didn't know how to get to that destination. Now, we're not sure how Facebook made the fixes, but one likely explanation that I read is that the technicians manually reset the servers that the outage was sparked from. I heard they took an angle grinder to the cages that the servers were in.
Anyway, to be clear, there were no data risks for this outage. No, and thankfully there are still some tech nodes who know how to use angle grinders, because they don't appear to have been any breaches of the system. This was simply something that happened when they updated a bit like when I download a Mac OS or an iOS update, and I'm never sure whether it's going to be my Wi-Fi or my Bluetooth that suddenly not going to work properly. But it's come during what seems to have been a pretty disastrous couple of weeks for Facebook.
For most of us, Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp being offline for a few hours or a day or two, it's not a disaster. But we are increasingly seeing companies, particularly small firms using and relying on Facebook and its partner platforms has sales tools. So not just handling customer requests, but directly selling to customers using those tools and even embedded online stores. Yeah.
And as we've spoke about before, even in parts of the world, Facebook is essentially the internet. Yeah, particularly in developing countries, where people may be using feature phones or basic smartphones may need you to cost. And the telcos will often bundle Facebook or WhatsApp with the phone or data connection. In those instances, accessing the open internet might cost you more money, but those Facebook services are included so you can use them as much as you like.
So suddenly that information source goes dark for tens of millions of people. Effectively their version of the internet has been cut off. So there's been a lot of comment, especially from lawmakers in the US, about the amount of power that Facebook has over the information that we access. What's exacerbated the issue is that Facebook has very publicly had to postpone the launch of Instagram for kids, which I think was due very recently.
And of course, there's the potentially damaging testimony of our Facebook whistleblower, the former Civic Integrity Product Manager, Francis Hagen, who has gone public in both the US media and before the US Senate with claims that the company knew that some of its products were causing mental harm to teenage girls. Are we likely to see though any real regulatory action against Facebook and any of these other tech companies? Well, we know that the left and right of the political spectrum in the US has been hating on Facebook, you know, as well as Google and Apple and Twitter for different reasons. So progressives dislike their monopoly power.
Conservatives say that they're silencing right-leaning voices. But this may end up being one of the rare issues where these different perspectives actually come together in the form of legislation. So we may see a unified push for more regulation of American technology companies. Now, how long that's going to take is pretty much anyone's guess.
But we do seem to have reached that tipping point where no one is happy with the way that these monopoly occupying companies in the tech sector are conducting their business. And it's not just Facebook that's in the spotlight. You know, 2020 and 2021 have been marked by enormous hacks and data leaks. There was the release of the Pandora Papers this week.
There was, of course, the colonial pipeline hack in the US earlier this year. And we've seen that huge rise in ransomware attacks since the start of the pandemic, as companies have expanded their remote working capacity much faster than their security infrastructure in some cases. Or even that some of those remote work tools had flaws that could be exploited by hackers. Yes.
I mean, we've mentioned zero-day exploits on the show a number of times recently. So Twitch, the live streaming service is the latest platform to have been targeted and breached. It's unclear what the aims of the hackers are as we record this. They've released a part one drop of more than 125 gigabytes of data via torrent feeds.
And that implies that there's more to come. So we don't know at this point if user data has been compromised. Users have been advised to turn on two-factor authentication for their accounts if they haven't done that already. And there are reports that some users have been advised to change their passwords.
Do we know what information has been released in this arena? Well, there's been information about how much money some of the creators on the platform, those top live streamers are earning from their work now. That's information that many probably didn't want to disclose. There's also source code from the company's streaming service.
And there's also code from a planned release from Amazon Game Studios that was going to put the company head-to-head with Steam as we record this, which is still coming to terms with the extent of the hack and trying to determine which systems have been breached and what information has been compromised. But this really goes back to an old trope that we've used on the show time and time again. And it's something that we've seen echoed in the recent data leaks here in Malaysia. Which is that we shouldn't assume our personal data is secure if it's online.
Yeah. And there's also that imbalance. Private companies are often better at securing your information than governments or public bodies simply because they are commercial entities. So they have a vested interest in investing in security.
A bank that can't secure customer data is likely to lose those customers. Governments and public bodies typically have less money available. They tend to be using older systems that may have more flaws and vulnerabilities. But crucially, they may have less internal talent available to secure and protect that data against attacks.
So we should assume that if it's online, it's out there. Well, yeah, I know that's not something that anyone wants to hear. So if a system is online, then your information is potentially at risk. When you hear about state actors using vulnerabilities in word processing software to access entire networks, you start to see how difficult it is to control and manage this problem.
Because the back door may not even be inside your system. It might be a trap door hidden inside some of the service you're using. That's not an excuse for companies, for bodies and systems that let hackers in. But we should also be taking our own mitigation measures.
You know, we're starting to see companies adapt with things like temporary logins, transfer bins that hide your identity, and your financial information when you're making online transactions. So it's not as though the industry is unaware of these problems and the way that systems can be accessed. But you know, breaches can be as simple as a low level exec having an unprotected Excel file of user-dated in a directory on their computer. That allows the hackers to bypass that complicated process of going after the well-defended customer information centres for the system.
So, you know, it's not our fault that information is stolen or systems are compromised, but we shouldn't make any assumptions that they're not going to be either. And you're going to have to know as I see again, Matt. I do try. I mean, it's not a death robot.
Well, that's true. That's true. Anyway, you can find Matt on Instagram and Twitter at culture. You can also head over to culturepop.com for transcripts of these shows and information about CulturePop and its consulting services.
And if you missed any part of the show, go for it. You can download the podcast wherever you normally listen to it from. I recommend using BFM app. It's available at the Apple App Store or Google Play.
And rich bribery for BFM is your 9.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9 to the business station.