Techstrong Gang – January 17, 2025

More real time research. They got, they went to court to nine different courts in the US starting in August of last year to get explicit permission to delete. So they did have permission?

Yes. Yes. Alright, so then good for them.

Yep. I applaud them. Good work story's over.

There you go. Congratulations to the FBI and our good friends in the French government, it was probably Interpol or Someone. Right?

I, I, I think, I think more transparency is still required here to kind of say, okay, what exactly did the court approve and when and why and Well, you can make a freedom of information Act on that. Yeah, I'll get that. Well, hopefully with AI I might get that in a week, but right now I'll get it in nine months if I'm lucky.

Good Reason. Here's an AI tool. I would use uhhuh something to expedite the request of documents.

Mm-hmm. So how long though will it be before you think and, and I'm not throwing red meat out there down just for grins, but um, you know, so I take over your server, I insert malware and suddenly I'm deleting all the files going to the political opposition because, you know, I've met, oh, I'm sorry. They were all, are You saying that doesn't happen already?

I don't know. Maybe. Well, Mike, now take another example.

Who's being naive now? Mike, Maybe they should delete TikTok for us if they, once they ban it, maybe. You know, what about that scenario?

Right? That's a real scenario. That's The, that's a really good point.

Only if Elon doesn't get his hands on it. If he can't have it, no one can. Yeah.

It's one of the reasons, by the way, the head of the, I don't, By the way, there's a, there's a headline out that, that the head of TikTok will be, has been invited to the inauguration to sit near the swearing in. Um, Well he paid a million dollars to the inauguration he committee too. Why Me know.

Yeah. Yeah. Beware foreign entanglements.

George Washington, what was it? I know 1796, Mike. So what are they gonna do?

Just flip a coin and give it to one of the cronies for, is that how that's gonna work? Isn't that how Putin does it? I don't oligarch You parcel it out.

Uh, that's how land barons, that's how Barons work. Sorry, sorry, sorry. To set this On a back phone and say, oh boy, we got, I know I need to, I I I figured we'd get into TikTok given that there's, you know, we're talking Chinese government and this is obviously very fresh in our minds.

I think Elon running it is a non solution. Um, I, I just can't see that happening. I think more realistically we'll see an extension Twitter.

Oh yeah, that's going awesome. You know, it all could be, it all could be MO too. I mean, if there's also a Trump could issue an executive order and just say nevermind.

So anyway, I think that that's likely to happen because there's too, there's too much money at stake. Would you, would you sign up for an FBI service that would essentially do cyber hygiene on your system to delete all these files that, you know, essentially it's a national security issue. So maybe we should all just kind of, you know, subscribe to some service, hopefully one that we can turn off.

What a, What could go wrong? Well, That would make them a commercial interest. I don't know that that would ever happen.

Yeah, it's on a patriot. It be, It would be free. It's part of your tax dollars.

It's national security. Look, if you had, if you don't have anything to hide, what difference does it make? Mm-hmm.

That was always The thing. Well, yes, but I'm Never, I'm kidding. I'm being, I'm never gonna buy a car that has the ability to be shut off externally.

I have a very firm, how Do you know That these newer cars have kill switches and they do. Yeah. And I will never buy a car that has that.

I'm never gonna be in my space. So are you gonna stop walking and biking? What are you gonna do?

I'm gonna keep fixing up My old, my old Mercedes. You can Presume they'll take over your electric bike too. So.

Right. But, but the point is that I have no intent of ever, You know, I'm reminded of Just our principal don't like that capability. Mitchell and I are, it's still secure around 2006, seven, something like that.

6 0 5. We get, we we're doing NAC for the DOD, we get a call from SecDef office if we can write a NAC test, net network access control test to make sure that the USB port on laptops our are, are, um, disabled. Disabled, yeah.

Yeah. It's pretty easy enough for us to do what, you know, why you wanna do that, nevermind why you wanna do it. We just wanna know if we can and if they're not disabled, do not let the machine on the network.

Relatively simple thing. Mitchell has the engineering team do that. We edit to the next release for DOD and it goes in right away.

We find out about a year later, not through freedom of information acts that, you know, some foreign entity, probably the Chinese government just went into the Pentagon parking lot through USB thumb drives into you. Like they dropped a bag drop and the hyper intelligent people over there picked them up off the floor and said, oh, great. A USB driver, I could use one of these and plugged it into their laptops and hence the Chinese stealth fighter program was born.

Um, so, you know, this is real deal stuff happens and certainly when you're in the government or affiliated with the, because you know, only 20% of the people in the Pentagon work for the Pentagon. The rest of them work for the, you know, beltway bandits. Um, but when you are doing work, you, you do give up your right for them to come onto your machine.

And I, I don't, so that I don't have a problem with, I I do have a problem if I'm not, if it's not government affiliated my work or my laptop or my device or what have you. Um, we serve with like the, remember Mitch, there was a time at RSA all the rage was the bifurcated phone systems where really you couldn't, you couldn't pass through that. It was like a blood brain barrier, A blood brain or brain blood, whatever barrier.

Um, versus having two separate phones. I, I don't, you know, I could see us heading that way. That that's the way of it.

Um, I, I do think the gover our governments have a right to make sure that critical infrastructure, national secrets stuff that, you know, we need if they deem it necessary is, is uh, protected. It's the same thing during nine 11 or right after nine 11, remember they wanted to hack in all the phones and, and computers to see if there were plans for more attacks. And there was this whole debate raging that gave rise to the Patriot Act and the fees of court.

Right. Given, given the level of trust. You know, if you ask the question, do you trust your government, at least to US citizens, I think the overwhelming answer would be no.

Given the climate we're in. So them doing something like this would, I think would meet a, a lot of opposition. Sure.

What's interesting is the reason for the no. Yes, exactly. Depending if you're blue red here or there.

Right. The, the no has a very different thing right there. The Blue and who's in office and you know, red and who's in office and you know.

Exactly. Exactly. But that's, I think that's the world we live in.

But who knows, in this case, let me just wrap the bow here. In this case it does appear as if the French government and the US FBI went to appropriate courts, worked with the Japanese government and did the right thing here from a, you know, following the, the DOBIE rules. And, and so kudos to them for that.

And thank you for doing this And don't pick up any USB drives in the parking Lot. No. That, and that's the moral of that story Is airport wifi chargers that are public.

Arguably do it faster next time then because it takes too damn long to get it through the court system. Well, but, so, okay, so maybe we need a FEA court kind of setup. Where would, that can be expediated.

Mm-hmm. Well maybe ease AI to make it faster. Right.

And I, and I would say, you know, we should set up a red and a blue service. You can sign up to, depending on your personal Forum, shopping for that. That'll work.

Yeah. Excellent. Excellent.

I think you know what, it's time to start the weekend. Oh, boy. So we can write that, uh, spy novel we're all talking about.

Yeah. This has been, this has been a great Friday edition of Textron Gang. We hope you've enjoyed it.

We had a good time. Um, we've got a full on Textron TV day for you after this. Check it all out.

We'll be back Monday with lots of, lots of good fun here on Textron Gang. But we hope you have a great weekend. Stay away from that Chinese malware.

And until next time, this is Alan Shimel for Texture on Gang. We're out.