
Twitter has a new chief twit in the form of Elon Musk and he’s causing problems, scientists say artificial intelligence may help us communicate with animals, and is the office of the future set in the metaverse?
All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of the award-winning “Smashing Security” podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault, joined this week by Mark Stockley.
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So just so I've got this right, what you're saying is in order that nothing bad appears on Twitter has suspended the account of the people who stop bad things from appearing on Twitter?
Right, yeah, this sounds so smart. I just don't think we're smart enough to understand what's really happening here guys.
Smashing Security, episode 296. Twitter turmoil, AI animal chatters, and metaverse at work with Carole Theriault and Graham Cluley.
Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security, episode 296. My name's Graham Cluley and I'm Carole Theriault and this week, Carole, we are joined by a special guest to return to the show, it's Mark Stockley. Hello, Mark. Hi, I'm back. Yay. Marvellous.
We're going to have a quick and crazy show. Mark, anything to report since the last time you've been on?
I've appeared on Twitter wearing a hoodie.
Okay, wicked. Before we kick off, let's thank this week's sponsors, Bitwarden, Akamai and Collide. It's their support that help us give you this show for free. Coming up on today's show, Graham, what do you got?
I'm going to be talking about how Twitter's gone down the sh\\ter and maybe the rest of the world as well. What about you, Mark? Well, you might want to sit down for this. I have found, I think, a useful application for AI. Although I will say this, all good things, there's a reasonable chance it'll kill us.
Great. And I will be circling the rim of the virtual world called the Metaverse. All this and much more coming up on this episode of Smashing Security. I'm looking forward to this rim circling. I'm not. I've actually refused to read anything about this in the last week, so this is all new to me, so fantastic.
Well, no, that's good, Carole. That's good. Put your head in the sand. Why not? Why not just be completely ignorant as the world gets flushed down the lavatory?
I know that you have a bromance with Elon and that you would talk about it this week. No, no, no, no, no. He has, of course, bought Twitter. Under duress. Well, was it or not? It's hard to tell. Really? Literally? Yes. Shift-P?
Print out pages and pages of their code, which they've been doing, because they said, bring it round to Elon and his team of coders, because they want to go through your code with you and see what you've been working on. Now, there's nothing a programmer likes more than having someone else look at the coding. I think you could have done that a little bit more optimally, couldn't you?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. What if there's some security flaws in it, though? You know, you want those highlighted so that you...
Yeah, famously printing out code and having people read it is an excellent way of finding
security flaws. How many letter pages would it be to print out the code for all of Twitter? I don't think it's all of Twitter. I think it's the code they've submitted in the last 30 days or so. So first of all he wants to see, have you actually been doing any work? And him determining the quality of your work. greatest fk you developer. Exactly. They just throw it into the rest of the dumpster fire that is Twitter at the moment, I suspect. It's just fuel, isn't it? I still don't even get it. So okay, whatever. Do you ever watch The Simpsons? Yes, but you know... Amanda Huggenkiss. "Can I find Amanda Huggenkiss?" "Mike, Mike Rotch." "Has anyone seen Mike Rotch?"
So you can probably understand at the moment that there might be some slightly disgruntled people at Twitter who work there, maybe a little bit concerned about the new boss. I don't think he's such a great guy. And there is a concern, apparently, that some disgruntled staff might go slightly rogue. Rogue? Yes, rogue. What does that mean? Define. Well, they might be sat at their desks with powers on Twitter. They might have certain rights, and they could cause problems if they think Elon is... if they wanted to sabotage it. If they imagine they're going to lose their jobs within the next couple of days, they might decide, "Well, I'm just going to..." Do you remember when, back in 2017, there was a Twitter employee who suspended Donald Trump's account? I think he suspended it for a grand total of 11 minutes.
I was thinking it was about 10 minutes.
It was the most beautiful silence on Twitter. It was a wonderful thing. Anyway, so that was done by someone at Twitter who was actually leaving that day, and they thought, "Well, as I'm going, why don't I do the world a favour?" And so they deleted his account for 12 minutes. Now, it's possible if someone doesn't like Elon Musk, they might go rogue on Twitter now and may do something mischievous. And this is why Twitter says at the moment it has locked down a number of its staff from doing things on Twitter. Just little things on Twitter, like maybe handling all the offensive posts and hate speech so that they can't suspend accounts. So just so I've got this right, what you're saying is in order that nothing bad appears on Twitter, Twitter has suspended the account of the people who stop bad things from appearing on Twitter? Yes. Okay, right. This sounds so smart. I just don't think we're smart enough to understand what's really happening here, guys. And there is a concern about this lack of moderation of the misinformation happening on Twitter because there are these elections coming up very soon in America. 8th of November. There's some important elections, the midterms happening. And so there is a worry because there are some very high profile people with verified accounts on Twitter who have posted misinformation. For instance, there is an account called Elon Musk. And this chap, Elon Musk, posted a link to a conspiracy theory the other day claiming that — I don't know if you heard, Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, his home got... Someone broke into his home with a hammer saying, "Where's Nancy, where's Nancy?" and they attacked Paul Pelosi with this hammer. He's now in hospital getting some cranial surgery or something. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, posted a link to a story claiming that it was a domestic fracas. He claimed that this, in fact, was a gay prostitute who was having a relationship with Paul Pelosi.
Oh, my gosh.
Right. Now, that's the kind of conspiracy nutty theory that normally Twitter would shut down and prevent from being amplified. But unfortunately, it was posted by the owner of Twitter and all these Twitter safety and integrity people have been told they're locked out. They can't do shit. And people now are retweeting the head of safety and integrity, Joel Roth, at Twitter, because back in May, he said, you know, whenever there's harmful misleading claims we're going to post up a warning message. We're going to hide them properly. And people are saying, well, are you going to do this to Elon Musk? And of course, Joel Roth doesn't want to lose his job. Meanwhile, this conspiracy theory and much more stuff... Apparently, there's been this huge surge in offensive slurs, derogatory terms, really nasty stuff happening on Twitter since Elon took over because people are testing the system. So there's been this, in Twitter's own words, there's been this ton of tweets which have come out, posting all of these messages, 50,000 tweets using one particular word, which we don't like, on Twitter, which has happened since. So everything's great. Everything's gone really, really well. That tweet has now been taken down. Yes, Elon has deleted the tweet, yes. But the question is, was it him? I imagine it was like a scene from The Thick of It inside Twitter, trying to work out what is the moderation procedure for moderating the guy that pays the monthly checks. Well, what Elon Musk actually did was there was a news report from New York Times saying that Elon Musk had tweeted a link to this conspiracy website. Elon Musk took a screenshot of that New York Times story and said, "This is not true. I haven't linked to the New York Times."
Oh, like ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yes, yes. I know. It's like we have an eight-year-old.
I know. I work with one every week on a podcast. I'm not talking about Maria.
I understand. So, you know, you do have an option, Graham, and all of you other people out there have an option. Get off Twitter. Don't get off on Twitter, but get off it.
I'm also on Mastodon. They were unfortunately named a Twitter-like site, which is somewhere where there aren't ads and it's all sort of lovely.
Thank God. I don't know what we could do without a daily message from you online.
Well, it's being bombarded with new messages because some people are suddenly leaving Twitter or at least creating accounts elsewhere. And I think Twitter needs to be careful because do you remember Digg? Do you remember when it redesigned itself like 10, 12 years ago and in the space of about a couple of weeks everyone left Digg and went to Reddit? Digg, which had been this company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, suddenly was worth nothing. Down the poop hole. I don't know if that'll happen to Twitter. Maybe that's going a bit far but it may take less than people think for people to think, "You know what? I just don't like this."
It took you so much time to build all those followers, Graham. This is probably devastating for you.
I would like everyone to follow me on Mastodon just in case. Oh my God. Links in the show notes. I'm going to pin my colours to the mast here and say no one is leaving Twitter.
Oh, I don't know. I think... I don't say it.
This is just... Look, you remember Cambridge Analytica? And all those people, hashtag delete Facebook. It's happening now, though. Facebook's got two and a half billion users. It didn't even notice. If we can survive Cambridge Analytica, then no one's going to leave Twitter. You heard it here first.
By one of our guests, not one of the hosts. Plausible deniability. What story have you got for us this week? Well, as I said at the intro, I think I might have found a useful application of artificial intelligence. Yeah, if only we tried that. Getting warmer. Right. But you're sort of onto something because one way or another, the way it looked to me, it was always us asking them to learn a new language of some kind, whether it's symbols on a board or English. Yeah. It's like Stephen Hawking teaching grade five math, you know? So we should have got them to teach us Belgian, is what you're saying. And then we've been able to communicate. Good. You're on top of this. Carry on, Mark. You're doing great. I don't even know if Belgian is a language. I presume it isn't, actually. I may blunder there. Oh, that's lovely. I've discovered that birds have a kind of thing. They operate this kind of collective early warning system. So what they do is one of them sees a predator and they will communicate how dangerous the predator is. Herbert the spider is going to take over from me right now so yeah.
I'm a bit busy so here's my chihuahua. You know, had you considered a career as the sole director of Twitter?
Yeah, you get all the animals on Twitter after this AI. Carry on with your story. Could they get on Twitter? That's my question.
That's a brilliant idea, hold that thought. Okay, so anyway, so Vox has just published an interview with Dr. Karen Bakker, who's written a book. Vox writes, "Automated listening posts have been set up in ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the depths of the ocean, and all of this recording creates a great deal of data which can't be sorted manually. Enter AI." Which, of course, can sift through mountains of data and find patterns, and even, perhaps, make dictionaries from different animal species' words. And one day she conjectures that all of this sifting and sorting of animal communication could lead to a sort of Google Translate for animal languages.
You see. And act as—
An intermediary between us and other animal species. So we might be able to use AI to create two-way communications between us and—
The animal kingdom. I'm loving that for England and the pheasants, right, during hunting season? These birds that are kept in cages without their mothers and then released into the wild with absolutely no information so that rich people can go hunt them easily. I wonder what they're saying to the people. I think what they're saying is, "Fuck, will you stop shooting me?" I think I was thinking, "Fuck off, will you? Jeez." Fascinating.
We needed AI to tell us that.
Yeah. Thank God for AI.
Wonderful. So, fascinatingly, the earliest stages of interspecies communication have already begun. Excellent. So, in the interview, Dr. Bakker tells Vox about rudimentary communications with honeybees, dolphins, and elephants. And all of that sounds rather wonderful to me, until you realize that humans are involved. And of course no sooner does she say that we have started to communicate with these things than she offers a great big warning that we might screw it all up and turn it into a weapon and crash an ecosystem. So I'll give you an example. This is the example that she gave to Vox. She says, "I'll give you an example. A research team in Germany encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they then sent into a hive." I hate humans sometimes. "The robot was able to use the honeybees' waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving and is able to tell them where to fly to find a specific nectar source. The next stage in this research is to implant these robots into honeybee hives so that the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth. And then we would have an unprecedented degree of control over the hive. We'll have essentially domesticated that hive in a way that we've never done before. And this creates possibilities of exploitative use of animals. And there's a long history of the military use of animals. So that's one path I think raises a lot of alarm bells." No, no, no. When you said that there's a danger of us exploiting animals through this technology, I thought maybe we'd give them phone calls saying, "Have you been missold PPI or had a recent car accident?"
"Hi, this is your Auntie Marsha, and I need some money. I need some honey deliveries."
So she talks about military use of animals, and you probably know about dogs in the military. Maybe you know about dolphins in the military? Yeah. You work with military dolphins. Yes. And pigeons and doves and everything. Everything they get their hands on. Dolphins, aren't they? They're the ones who wear the berets. Well, apparently, as I was doing some research this morning, there were rumors in the 70s and the 80s that the dolphins were being trained to kill divers. And the person who is responsible for this program says, basically, you can't teach dolphins to kill people. And him saying that implies that they've tried. Doesn't it? Turns out they won't do that. Anyway, I think there is another equally world-altering possibility here and you kind of hinted at it with the pheasants. Okay, so one of the projects that is talking about I think is CETI, which is spelled C-E-T-I, which is obviously supposed to make you think of SETI, which is S. If you heard of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?
Yeah.
Okay, so there's that, and then there's CETI with a C, which is the Cetacean Translation Initiative, which is using machine learning and what it calls gentle robotics, because it's 2022, and if you don't say your robots are gentle, you just assume that they're just Boston Dynamics dogs with guns on. Anyway, they're using gentle robotics and machine learning to decipher the communication of sperm whales. And I remember hearing about this a couple of years ago. And when I first heard that, I thought the idea of finding out what whales have got to say to each other sounded fantastic. And then I realized that we are probably quite a hot topic among the whales, particularly the sperm whales. And we might not actually want to hear what they've got to say. Oh, my God. I want to start the gossip rag. Well, I imagine we could have one on sticky pictures. That would be great. A whole other vista of possible guests. I love it.
Oh. Giraffes. Like, do they get sore necks?
I bet gerbils have got some interesting stories to share.
Oh, let's end there, please.
Crow, what have you got for us this week? All right, we are heading once again into the metaverse. Get your tinfoil hats. Unfortunate use of the word digital there, I suspect. Glancing past.
So now here we are a year later, and Meta has recently had its Meta Connect event, where many a tech journo were hoping to get an answer to a pretty simple question. Why? What's the point? Right?
Of the metaverse. What's the point of the metaverse?
Yes. Can you answer that?
Are they suggesting the emperor has no clothes?
It's a wonderful, wonderful… Legs. The emperor's got no legs.
The emperor's got no… just floats there.
They're coming. They're coming. The legs are coming. Because it's not there's a massive demand for this kind of world from the consumer market. I mean, of course, it's maybe fun to play around, but it's not TikTok. Aren't there 38 regular users or something? Well, the Zuckinator came out at MetaConnect and said, the answer, guys, to what's the point is work, he said. And at first, you might think that workers are clamoring for this virtual environment, you know, where they can interact. But that's not what I'm seeing or hearing. I was talking to our listeners, Graham, actually. But you see, at MetaConnect, Zux announced that Meta is working with tech business leader Microsoft to make available virtual sessions of business software such as Office and Teams, and these will be incorporated into the Horizon Workroom virtual office platform which has been widely ridiculed for its low quality graphics and floating legless avatars. So does this partnership with Meta and Microsoft make sense to you guys? What do you see there? It's genius you think really or no?
It's brilliant. I think both of them should put all of their resources into this rather than anything else. Great for all the other tech companies, I imagine. What you have to understand about Microsoft is that Microsoft has two decent products, Office and that mouse that it makes. And what it's done is, because everybody uses Windows and it does all this bundled licensing, it has foisted all sorts of software that people absolutely hate into businesses very successfully over a long period of time. So Internet Information Server, absolutely terrible web server full of security holes when it came out, very widely used. Microsoft Teams, nobody likes Microsoft Teams, it's way more widely used than Zoom because it just gets bundled in. Microsoft SharePoint, possibly the worst piece of software ever invented anywhere by anyone, it's all through the corporate world because you just get it free once you've paid the sky high license fees for everything you want, you just get it. And that's what will happen with this. And thanks to our sponsors this week, Microsoft, for supporting the show.
Mark, you're exactly right, right? Because think about how Microsoft became a household name by cracking the enterprise market first. And Meta needs to gain some credibility in the enterprise market if it's going to sell its work theory. So why not partner with, you know, Microsoft, who has a history of building trusted business software.
Shit software. Well, yes, but successful. Think of the typical cynical IT person, right? Now picture them wearing a headset. Yes, imagine them saying, oh, this sounds a good idea. Yes, we'd love to have the workers in headsets. They're not going to go for this, are they?
An article by Smart Company on the topic, Graham, said, by focusing on the enterprise market, firms can normalize this technology in society. And this might not be something that consumers want to use, to Mark's point, but rather that workers are forced to use. Like, because you may not like Microsoft products, but you're forced to use it in your business environment, and it somehow trickles down into your home.
Won't this just normalize leaving a job because they make me wear a stupid headset? It's a bit like wearing Google glasses and going to a sensible company, which just gets on with work.
Why would a company want you to do that, you think? Why would they want everything to be virtual? Would it not be because then they can actually record every single behavior you've ever done in your life?
Ah, the security angle. The security angle. The privacy and security angle. Yes, it's appeared. Half an hour into your story. Wonderful.
Actually, eight minutes. Eight minutes, but thanks. So the bossware angle, that's a big privacy concern. And this typically refers to software that's installed across enterprises to monitor employees. And this approach, if we push everyone into the metaverse, it does have a bit of a whiff of the Orwellian, doesn't it? But not everyone is surprised, right? For example, there's journalist Janice Rose, who in The Intercept in 2016, after watching Mark Zuckerberg's first stage flirtation with the VR headset, said this could only mean one thing. Zuckerberg wants to build a virtual environment where all human behavior can be recorded, predicted and monetized.
You don't think it's just because Mark Zuckerberg is so socially awkward that he was being promoted in the metaverse so much because he knows that people find him really, really weird. So if he makes everybody else just as weird by putting them into the metaverse, he begins to look a little bit more normal.
Another concern here, Graham, is almost, I don't know if it sounds lofty, but mind control through nudge behavior. So for example, you may have to use this at work, but you'll turn on a lot of safety features. And then others might kind of say, hey, you should turn those off. You know, it's not seen as cool. You don't seem as part of the team. And it could have negative impacts on marginalized workers. So behavior nudging based on a gazillion data sets with Zuck as our unesteemed leader at the helm, pulling all the levers like the Wizard of Oz master. But I'm being cynical.
No, I don't think you are because I remember going to a tech conference in 2007, which is when Second Life was failing to take off. It was sort of taking off and then sputtering and then gently landing in a swamp at the end of the runway. The people who were talking about it at this tech conference were talking about the fact that you could see which billboards people were looking at online and where their eyes were, where their virtual eyes were looking and how long they lingered on something. Web analytics can tell where your cursor is and where that's hovering, but it can't track your eyes. It can't tell you where your attention is. It can only approximate that. So this has been an overt selling point for these sorts of virtual environments. But the thing is that's a reason why the people who make it want it to happen. And what I don't see with the metaverse... I see lots and lots of things with the metaverse that the people who make it want to happen. And I haven't seen anything at all. It looks like a thing that genuinely solves a problem.
I don't know. Oh, I've seen one. You know, people who do concerts could have concerts where anyone in the world can attend them live. Well, in this digital live world.
See, I can watch them on YouTube and I just don't. Yeah. I'd rather watch them in their full 4K glory than some sort of weird blobby wax approximation of them.
But, you know, if you're worried about any security element in this, don't worry. Because Meta Technical Chief Andrew Bosworth says he's adamant that they can be trusted to forge this new generation of the internet. He has a quote. Frankly, he says, frankly, there's no one who's investing more in privacy and data security. Nobody is more focused on this problem than Meta.
We are keeping the data that we have taken from you very secure. I tell you that the most convincing explanation that I have seen so far for what all this metaverse stuff is really about is the idea of the billionaire's curse, which is that, you know, you make all the money in the world. You've got more money than God. And then one day you wake up and you realize that you're going to die just like everybody else. And when you get into that sort of fraction of a trillionaire kind of rarefied air suddenly they get gripped by the need to go and populate other planets and do things like that and I think that the metaverse, this is not my original thought I have glommed onto someone else's, but I think the metaverse is Zuck's retirement plan so when he dies he's going to upload his consciousness to a fully immersive, fully realistic reality. And the only way he can get there and fund that is if he comes up with something that businesses will buy that looks like a bunch of legless waxworks now.
Yeah, exactly. Anyway, have fun, guys. New VR headset only available for $1,500 to $2,000. So, you know, cheap. Have fun.
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The challenge with endpoint security has always been that it's difficult to scale and when remote work took over that challenge got exponentially harder. You need visibility into your fleet of devices in order to meet security goals and reduce service desk tickets but how do you get that visibility when different parts of your company run on Mac, Windows and Linux? Well you get Kolide. Kolide is an endpoint security solution that gives IT teams a single dashboard for all devices, regardless of operating system. Kolide gives you real-time access to your fleet's data and can do things that traditional MDMs can't. And instead of installing intrusive agents or locking down devices, Kolide takes a user-focused approach that communicates security recommendations to your workers directly on Slack. You can answer every question you have about your fleet without intruding on your workforce. Visit kolide.com slash smashing to find out how. If you follow that link, they'll hook you up with a goodie bag just for activating a free trial. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash smashing. And thanks to Kolide for supporting the show. And welcome back. Can you join us at our favourite part of the show, the part of the show that we like to call Pick of the Week. Pick of the Week Pick of the Week Pick of the Week is the part of the show where everyone chooses something. Could be a funny story, a book, a movie, a record, a podcast, a website or an app. Whatever they wish. Doesn't have to be security related necessarily. Better not be. Well, my Pick of the Week this week. Is it security related? I'll tell you. Anyway, right. I've been going around on the internet for a little while and in the last few weeks, I've been a little bit irritated because I go to a website and suddenly in the top right hand corner pops up a message saying, oh, sign into Google or, you know, you can register for this site with your Google account. Why don't you? It's, what? Bugger off. Bugger off. This pop-up appears all the time in the top right hand corner. Why is it doing this all the time? And all these websites are suddenly saying to me, oh, you can log in with that. You can log in with Google. I don't want it to, right?
I've got to... So you press the X and then carry on with your day. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay.
Until I go... And that's my pick of the week is pressing the X. I'm going to mess it up. And I've been a little bit annoyed about this. And because I don't want to sign in with Google, I've got a password manager that I trust to look after all my passwords securely. All the passwords are different. I don't want to sign in with my social login malarkey and it's always every website I'm going to. So I'm going to tell everyone how to turn off the sign in with Google prompt. I found it on the web how to do it. I've done it myself and now I'm very very happy. So I'll put a link in the show notes but I will tell you all because I'm sure you're all just as upset as I am about this. Outraged. Go to myaccount.google.com, navigate to security, click on signing in with Google and you will find a toggle next to Google account signing prompts which they have helpfully turned on without asking you and just turn it off.
I must have turned mine off ages ago because I don't have that ever.
Well maybe you're just better than me Carole but...
I doubt that very much. Very much, alternatively... Just click on the X in the top right-hand corner, and then it disappears. Just be cool. Yeah. Okay. Good for you. Good for you. So it's predicting actions based on indirect messaging through propagandist tactics. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. What do we want the population to understand about this conflict now, even if it's direct opposite of what we said yesterday? What's your pick of the week? Well, my pick of the week is about where I was this past weekend, because I was in Vienna for a friend's birthday shindig. And on Saturday, we went to the opera at the Wiener. I'm going to try and say this, the Wiener Staatsoper. It's one of the leading opera houses in the world. And I know absolutely nothing about opera world. But I can say my mind was pretty blown in more ways than one. I tell you that I went to see La Traviata, a 19th century melodrama in three acts by Verdi. This big, fancy opera house. What do you imagine?
Oh, costumes. Very, very large lady. Lots of people on the stage. An orchestra. Imagine you're dressed up to the nines.
Not everybody was. Some people were, and some people were almost wearing jeans. I read the rules and it says, please do not come in flip-flops or have suitable... Fair enough. Let me just read this. This is the best way to explain it. So, Violetta is not only a prostitute in this show, she's also an influencer with millions of followers on Instagram and Twitter. She has her own perfume line and is a huge celebrity. So this is Robert Carsen's stage is an enormous revolving cube corner with three sides adjacent sides of a cube. So it's like I don't know it's hard to explain but imagine a cube on stage that spins, it revolves. Is it meant to be a phone? No, it's kind of like they just keep spinning it and then there's different scenes happening. It was quite cool. It's all made of screens. Yeah, it's quite cool. So during the prelude, these screens show us Violetta's social media feed, her Instagram selfies, comments from her followers, but also emails from doctors advising therapy for her cancer. So they replaced consumption with cancer as the illness that kills her. In Act 2, okay, this is where my jaw dropped. In Act 2, the party at Flora's is a mix between a fancy dress ball and an orgy with explicit images in neon lights in the background and the chorus wearing the weirdest costumes with many with BDSM overtones. So Dr. Grenvil has a dildo strapped on his forehead sideways but not in the front thank God, Alfredo came out as Donald Duck and there was this other character with a dildo strapped to the bottom of his back. So it was super surreal for me to watch all this craziness on stage. And then, you know, you just look around and you see people in ball gowns and all the glitz and the gold of, you know, this huge opulent opera house.
Did you feel like you're being warmed up for something? Like someone's going to sidle over and say, my wife and I have been watching you from the other side of the bar and we like your vibe. You'd been taken there by someone because it was his birthday. It sounds like he knew about this in advance.
Okay, but we also had drama off stage. Okay, you have to imagine there's like a thousand people, okay? Lots of them gussied up in this massive opera house.
Gussied. Some with dildos. Donald Duck. First intermission is almost at the end, so everyone's back in their seats. And I see a few cops on the ground floor, right? And they're rushing into a room and they've got this guy. And I'm like, hey, look, look, look, look. And other people are noticing. We're all kind of noticing. This does sound awful. It sounds like a terrible show.
It wasn't awful. It wasn't awful. Well not if you like that kind of thing. But apparently there's also a story that this guy had a fight at Austria versus Poland and that this guy kicked off at the match and, you know, did a bit of busting up and then went off to the opera and they found him at the opera. Football hooligans are different. So who knows what happened? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Anyway, my pick of the week is La Traviata. Listen to the opera because it's beautiful. Or you can go see the website. There's lots of history on the opera house as well.
That just about wraps up the show for this week. I'm sure lots of our listeners would love to follow you on any social media network which you might be a member of. Or the Metaverse. What's the best way for folks to do that? You'll never find me on the Metaverse. But you will find me on Twitter. I'm staying. You'll find me at Mark Stockley. And if there are any sperm whales listening, you can follow us on Twitter at Smash Security. No G. Twitter wouldn't allow us to have a G. But maybe Elon Musk will. We'll have to wait and see. And we also have a Smash Security subreddit. And don't forget, if you never want to miss another episode, follow Smashing Security in your favourite podcast app. You can do that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.
And huge shout out once again to our episode sponsors, Collide, Bitwarden and Akamai, and to our wonderful Patreon community. It's thanks to them all that this show is free. For episode show notes, sponsorship information, guest lists and the entire back catalogue of more than 295 episodes, check out smashingsecurity.com.
Until next time, cheerio. Bye-bye. Bye. That's my dolphin noise. I was speaking to the dolphins.
Hosts:
Graham Cluley:
Carole Theriault:
Guest:
Mark Stockley:
Episode links:
- Twitter employees are sleeping on the office floor to meet Elon Musk’s deadlines – The Verge.
- Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend – The Register.
- Pranksters pretending to be laid-off Twitter employees leave San Francisco HQ – YouTube.
- Twitter Limits Content-Enforcement Work as US Election Looms – Bloomberg.
- Twitter’s Yoel Roth comments on the firm’s trust and safety staff having their access to moderation and enforcement tools frozen – Twitter.
- Paul Pelosi Conspiracy Theory Trends on Twitter After Elon Musk Pushes It – Rolling Stone.
- Yoel Roth describes how Twitter will warn users of misleading information – Twitter.
- Yoel Roth describes “surge in hateful conduct on Twitter” – Twitter.
- The Demise of Digg: How an Online Giant Lost Control of the Digital Crowd – Harvard.
- Follow Graham on Mastodon.
- How tech is helping us talk to animals – Vox.
- “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants” – Book by Karen Bakker.
- Project CETI – The Cetacean Translation Initiative. Not to be mixed-up with Project SETI.
- The Dark Side Of VR – The Intercept.
- The Metaverse Is the Ultimate Surveillance Tool – Vice.
- What I Learned From Diving Headfirst Into The Metaverse – CNN.
- Zuckerberg thinks the metaverse is the future of work. So what will this look like? – Smart Company.
- Is the Metaverse Really the Future of Work? An Unbiased Investigation Gizmodo.
- How to Turn Off the “Sign in with Google” Prompt on Websites – How-To Geek.
- Julia Davis and the Russian Media Monitor – Twitter.
- Weiner Staatsoper Opera House.
- Emojis instead of emotions in Simon Stone’s Traviata in Vienna – BackTrack.
- Smashing Security merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, stickers and stuff)
Sponsored by:
- Kolide – the SaaS app that sends employees important, timely, and relevant security recommendations concerning their Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, right inside Slack.
- Bitwarden – Password security you can trust. Bitwarden is an open source password manager trusted by millions of individuals, teams, and organizations worldwide for secure password storage and sharing.
- Akamai – Make the most of Cybersecurity Awareness Month by connecting with Akamai’s experts on how you can achieve unmatched security. Where else can you take advantage of insights from 7 trillion DNS queries per day?
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Thanks:
Theme tune: “Vinyl Memories” by Mikael Manvelyan.
Assorted sound effects: AudioBlocks.

