A (7:43)

Not from ikea. So it's interesting you bring this up specifically the matter aspect of it, right? Because I recently tried. So I've had some relative success with matter devices that are plugged in. So I've maybe connected three or four different matter devices that have constant power and have not had an issue with those. I, my, my theory there is that part of it is because those are sort of higher, higher capability matter devices that are sort of, you know, up the chain and are capable of, of more communication and et cetera, et cetera. What I have struggled with specifically I got an Akara door and window sensor and for the life of me could not get it to. And I, you know, I know all the tricks, I, or many of the tricks at least, and tried so many different ways, ways that you know, they're not going to have in the, the owner's. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And nothing was working, which was very frustrating to get it to work. And so I ended up just having to pivot to a. I basically purchased a ring door sensor that would typically go on a door that is for your, you know, entering and leaving your home and put that where I needed it inside the home. Because I just wanted, you know, one little instance of this notification happening. And so, yeah, that was, that was a little frustrating. And it was the first time that I sort of. Since the, the new way of things where matter is supposed to be sort of, it's, it's figured out, folks, or it's mostly figured out where I said, okay, maybe it's not figured out. So, yeah, haven't had it with ikea, but certainly have experienced similar issues when it came to this. I'm also curious and perhaps you'll talk about like, I assume given your branding, smart home mama, that you hear from folks all the. So this Smarter Home. I think you said Smarter House.

B (10:02)

Sorry I said it wrong, but great name.

A (10:04)

Yeah, absolutely great name. Has experienced, you know, people talking about this. Have you as well?

B (10:10)

Yeah. So I started to see a lot of chatter right after the devices were released on the Tradfri Reddit forum. And Tradfri was the name of ikea's previous smart home incarnation, which is based on zigbee. So this move to Thread was a big one. It was a complete re architecture for the, for the platform and for ikea. And you know, I should make it clear here that this, while this is a problem that IKEA is experiencing, it's amplified because IKEA is such a big brand and well known and so many people obviously have gone out and bought these. Not as many people go out and buy Acara motion sensors is my guess than Ikea motion sensors. You know, it's, it's a, it's a much simpler product to get. You know, it's a mass market product, whereas most smart home products aren't there yet. One of the. So the point that I'm trying to make is that these problems aren't just IKEAs. This is a problem for the standard as a whole. And it's a problem I've been writing about since the standard launched. And they keep saying, you know, we're fixing it, we're fixing it. One of the issues I think is that so many different, there are so many different platforms. Like that quote I read from the Thread group. There are so many different pieces and parts that need to interact to make everything work. And like Apple, Google, Amazon, they're all on different versions of Matter. Products that you buy are all on different versions of Matter. They're on different versions of Thread. And like, so getting everything to sort of mesh, because that's the point of Thread, it's a mesh network, is causing a lot of problems. Now, this is probably down to the fact that this is still a relatively new protocol and a standard. So I said, what is it, four years? I think 2022 is when it launched. So, you know, in the scheme of things, that's new. If you think about when Bluetooth and WI Fi first came out, it took a long time for things to just work. But it's just, yeah, it's frustrating for users to have these complicated, you know, these frustrating setup processes and no obvious way to fix it. I mean, and my favorite thing when I was going through all this testing was I. This is the instruction manual that comes with the Bill Razor remote.

A (12:21)

Oh, wow.

B (12:23)

It's like, okay, so my remote didn't work. Now what do I do? Follow these little stick men on the piece of paper that came in the box. And it's like, I can understand why people have been getting frustrated. You know, IKEA is. It's the joke, isn't it, that the IKEA manuals are like, yeah, indecipherable. Try putting wireless connectivity along with an IKEA manual and you can get a recipe for tearing your hair out. So it's. Yeah, it's been, it's been an interesting thing to follow the last couple of months. From what I understand, talking to sort of people in the industry, there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to try and fix this. I'm hoping to have an update on that next week to follow up to this article. But, yeah, it's. It's. As someone who's covered this space for a long time, this was very exciting. Really, you know, a real sea change for the smart home. And so far it's been very frustrating, and that's disappointing. I mean, I'm glad for the people that have had good experiences here that shows that this can work. But it needs to be, as the title of my article implies, this needs to be good for everyone. This can't just be, you know, hit or miss. We can't roll out this kind of. These kind of products and promise this great, seamless, interoperable experience. And it only works for, like 60% of people.

A (13:49)

Absolutely. I mean, I agree wholeheartedly because that, that Puts people off and they don't want to try it again and be disappointed by it. And it puts forth a narrative that, you know, smart home stuff is too complicated and doesn't work. And that's. And I think that one of the quickest ways I see people get frustrated with technology is when they feel, because I think that there's even some patience that people will still maintain when something isn't working. It's specifically when they feel they cannot fix it themselves. That things go from, you know, not 0 to 100, but like 40 to 100 real quick.

B (14:38)

Yeah.

A (14:39)

And so that is frustrating. This idea that, okay, you are not going to be able to fix this yourself and good luck and then you have to go online and find something and then half the time the stuff that you find doesn't always solve the problem. And then you're stuck with this.

B (14:57)

There's so much out there. It's like turn off IPv6 or turn on IPv6 on your router, do a dance, turn off this one, spin around five times and flick the button.

A (15:08)

Ah, yes.

B (15:10)

This should not be the solution. And I, you know, one of the conclusions I draw from my opinion for all of this is that one of the biggest problems here is the platform support. Platforms being Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon, Alexa, Home Assistant, I mean Home Assistant's the most progressive in all of this. But even, you know, it's hard to keep everything straight. And I think right now Apple, the big platforms, Samsung SmartThings, Apple Home, Google Home, they just haven't really committed enough to this. I think maybe the engineers, the people that are deeply involved have. But whether the companies are really pushing this forward as a whole still, I still remain skeptical that that's happening. And that's why we're stalling. And this is why, you know, standards need momentum in order to become, you know what? Every bit. To become a standard, to become the standard of, of the smart home. And that momentum just feels like it's falling away. And it could be tied on Apple's side to its slow rollout of its new Siri. I feel like that is causing a lot of knock on delays. I mean we just saw reported this week that the head of Apple Home hardware has left and gone to Oora, the ring people. Am I saying that right? Aura.

A (16:31)

I would pronounce it aura, but it's funny, I've got another British individual who also says Oora. So maybe it's just, yeah, an accent thing.

B (16:41)

So yeah, it's still, you know, interoperability is still a dream. But I think things like this will hopefully, you know, light a fire under some of these platforms because it's such a big, high profile product launch that has been going not very smoothly and that few people kind of have egg on their face here. So we'll see. I will be following this closely and if you want more, I've written a few articles about this already and I will be writing more. So keep following my work at the Verge and you can and let me know if you've been having great experiences or difficult experiences with these products or any thread or matter products, because this is, this is something I'm really interested in sort of getting, getting a deep deeper into and understanding what these issues are. They're going to start making me turn my hair out.

A (17:30)

Well, while we give Jen a moment to brush the hair she has left, let's take a quick break here so I can tell you about the first sponsor of this episode of Tech News Weekly. It's Out Systems the number one AI development platform, OutSystems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future, where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale. See, Outsystems enables them to build AI agents that can actually do work. They can take actions, make decisions, integrate with data rather than just answer questions. Outsystems provides the only AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven. When we talk about unified, you can build, run and govern apps and agents in one platform for agility, can innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control and enterprise proven. It's trusted by enterprises for mission critical AI applications and durable innovation. Outsystems is the secret weapon behind the world's most successful companies. They're not just for small apps. They are for the massive, complex systems that run banks, insurance companies and government services. Outsystems even helps companies with aging IT environments bridge the gap to the AI future Without a rip and replace nightmare. Outsystems provides the safest and fastest way for an enterprise to go from we need an AI strategy to we have a functioning AI application. So stop wondering how AI will change your business and start building the agents that will lead it. Visit outsystems.com TWIT to see how the world's most innovative enterprises use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. That's O u t s Y S t e m s.com twit to book a demo. Thank you. Outsystems for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break, joined by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of the Verge, who is drinking out of her Duff cup.

B (19:45)

I just realized I had this and I just grabbed it from my cupboard without thinking it was my son's birthday present. Isn't it fun?

A (19:53)

That is a wonderful cup. May or may not be having a beer right now. So I wanted to talk about something that we covered earlier, the Nvidia GTC conference. During that event, Nvidia showed off a tool, DLSS5. It calls it the most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since real time ray tracing, which of course was released back in 2018 and the Internet immediately roasted it. DLSS5, the next generation of the company's deep learning upscaling technology, moves beyond sharpening resolution and filling in frames to something a little more ambitious and unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your take, far more controversial. It uses generative AI to completely overhaul lighting, textures and materials in real time, and the results have gamers, developers and artists recoiling. As Kyle Orland reports for Ars Technica and Andrew Webster writes in the Verge, what Nvidia pitched as photo real lighting and materials landed like an unwanted Instagram filter slapped on top of beloved game characters, turning them into what one commenter described as, quote, yassified looks, maxed freaks.

B (21:19)

Gotta love commenters they are.

A (21:21)

I love it.

B (21:22)

I love it.

A (21:23)

So let's talk about what DLSS5 actually does, why the backlash has been so swift, and what it might mean for the future of how games look. So I think it's important to understand this is like the con. When I heard people talking about this, this is the context I think is a little bit important. Previous versions of dlss, which actually stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, just worked on upscaling lower resolution frames or generating entirely new ones that would help kind of smooth out performance. But this fifth version goes further. Jensen Huang called it a real time neural rendering model and one that can deliver a new level of photo real computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects. So the company says that the technology melds generative AI with what they call hallucinated rendering for this leap in realism as they see it, and will at the same time, the company very much asserts, preserve the control artists need for creative expression. Now the existing generative video models, Nvidia talks about how it's difficult to control them and you don't get predictability. And so with DLSS5, the company really focused on this to make sure that it uses a game's internal color and motion vectors as kind of anchors and will output to this 3D content. So what does that mean? It means that it's a little bit more anchored in reality and is not as focused on that hallucination part to make it so that things feel like they're still part of the game. It's supposed to help the system kind of differentiate as well between characters and then the hair and the fabric and skin and then also environmental lighting conditions.

B (23:20)

But I've seen all of these in the Discord.

A (23:25)

Yeah, the Discord images are cracking me up. The other catch, though, apparently the current demo that we've seen requires two RTX 5090 GPUs, and one of those GPUs is entirely dedicated to running DLSS5.

B (23:44)

Oh, my gosh.

A (23:45)

So, yeah, it requires quite a bit. John, can we please show the discord because someone has DLSS5 and that is cracking. Oh, my goodness. If you are not watching and listening, you gotta join the club because you got to see these hilarious. It was actually Anthony who shared it. But anyway, DLSS5 is getting lots of. Oh, no. Is getting lots of complaints for, as they say, yassifying people. Now, I. First, I don't. I. I'm just curious, Jen, are you or anyone close to you? I. I just want to imagine you playing like Call of Duty and just being really good at Call of Duty. It just would be so fun to me. But tell me, is anyone. Are you or anyone else gamers?

B (24:44)

My son is a big gamer. In fact, I should have kept him. He was here a second ago. I should have put him on the show. Um, he's a big. He's a big. Oh, Grand Theft Auto.

A (24:54)

Oh, okay.

B (24:55)

Yeah, that's his. His jive jam. And my daughter is too, but not. She doesn't do the scary ones. I don't let her. She really wants to, but she's doing the fortnite thing now. She's kind of hit that age.

A (25:07)

Yeah.

B (25:09)

But, you know, the. The filter thing is the interest for me. I mean, it. Is that the sort of uncanny valley here of what we're seeing and having watched video games change so drastically.

A (25:24)

Yes.

B (25:24)

My youth, I was a big gamer. As in I played a lot of Mario. Very different kind of gaming.

A (25:32)

Equal. Yeah. Then we are both those kinds of gamers.

B (25:36)

I love computer gaming too. Like some. Like, I loved games when. Computer games when I was a kid. But you know, this was in the. I'm talking like in the 80s when it was like little eight bit things going on. And I walk in on my son playing Grand Theft Auto him like are you in a movie?

A (25:52)

It's so photorealistic.

B (25:54)

It's like crazy. And actually he's been doing flight simulator because he's training to be a pilot. I mean you may as well. It's as good as flying a plane. It's like insane how much video games have progressed and become so realistic. But it's almost like you're kind of losing the game when it becomes like real life. Like the game part of it. You went into this world, it was an ex. It's an experiential and it's not real. And this sort of shift towards realism and like I should feel like I'm actually in the real world rather than playing a video game. I'm not a fan of. I think you know that that's not. I'm not a gamer so I cannot speak authoritatively here. But my personal opinion here is I want games to feel like games. I want movies to feel like movies and I want the real world to feel like the real world. I don't think that the three should meet. I don't like this uncanny valleyization of video games. Especially as. And I see this with today's youth being online, being terminally online is so has become such a big issue. People live their lives online and when it feels like the real world it becomes even easier to block out the real world.

A (27:10)

Yes, yes.

B (27:11)

That's maybe getting a little philosophical here.

A (27:14)

No, but I think it's important I do. That is absolutely a part of it. I think that when I've seen the reactions to. So I've tried to take in sort of the different observations and understandings of this. And I did see somebody who. Who was talking about this experience and saying that people are really focused on the faces and Nvidia's people, I mean what would you expect but for them to have reasons why people should calm down and be okay with it. But I thought they made a very good point in saying that, you know, for the longest time environments, particularly lighting has come a long way. And so there's been so much focus on the environment getting this ultra realistic look. And it's just now switched to focusing on faces. And given people's reaction anytime their phones get updated to a new look or feel. It's not surprising that people would be more apt to be to have negative thoughts about this simply because it is new. As opposed to it being that the faces are. The face rendering is bad or gross. Or this or that. Could it be, they argue, they ask that simply, what's happening here is you're seeing something different in your brain because of the way that we are goes. That's new. That's different. And so I don't like it by default because it's giving me these bad feelings of anxiety because it's new. So. So I get that point. Somebody said that honestly, it's a mistake to focus on the faces when they were looking at a scene. They said that it was much more amazing to look at the background and see how a table scene, a table setting before was sort of flat and one dimensional within this 3D space. But because of this rendering, it made every individual object feel like the person had taken time to almost write a story for every single piece or item that's on the table. And I think that that part is cool to me in this idea of if the artist is able to focus on what the artist is really good at and the parts that would otherwise just be a. Well, we just gotta, you know, let it be standard that that could be improved by this system. That's kind of a cool idea to me. And so I'm not fully 100% anti. But it's also true that I'm not a big gamer, right? Like I don't, I don't do a lot of gaming and my partner is and he had quite a few thoughts about this. It doesn't help that one of the. I think this is another aspect of it too is that people identify with their favorite games and their sort of favorite franchises. And a lot of people, big fans of Resident Evil. So for Nvidia to show these Resident Evil characters sort of redone with the Yassified filter. That was particularly upsetting for people who said now Grace, who's a character, doesn't look anything like Grace. And so, yeah, I guess I'm of two minds in the sense that I almost like the earlier versions of DLSS where it was specifically focused on hardware that maybe couldn't do all of the magic. Being able to do more magic by way of a like post processing filter. Right. Versus where before, where maybe this game wasn't or this, this console wasn't able to render something like this. It. There's always going to be, and I think reasonably so complaints around the AI slop around stealing people's people's creations around the thing.

B (31:51)

That's where this is coming from a lot, isn't it? Right? People are really like, there's just a backlash against AI in general. In every field. And I think, yeah, in the comments I've seen, some people are like, why, what's the problem? This is great. But others are like, oh, this is, you know, the slippery slope and is it all going to be what happens to the creatives? And yeah, there's an instinctive sort of negative reaction to changes like this and I don't know that, that it's going to be a while, isn't it, until people actually see this. This isn't sort of like happening tomorrow, right?

A (32:26)

I mean, if it requires those two cards and one of them completely devoted to rendering this, then yeah, I mean, you're not going to get a PlayStation that has, you know, the, the, the necessary hardware to pull this off right now. And I think more than that, you're game development studios doing this right now because it's just not feasible or possible. And I think that in and of itself the company said that this technology won't be ready until the fall. But I think ready versus sort of deployed on. Yeah, deployed and industry ready are two different things for sure.

B (33:09)

Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's gonna be interesting to follow. I mean, we have a great reporter, I mean, Andrew is a great gaming reporter, but Jess Weatherbed is a reporter on the Verge who's been following sort of the impact of AI on creators and creative industries and she has some great reporting on, on all across the board about backlash to AI and in the creative world, you know, there's always this balance, isn't there? Like, how much benefit are we getting? How much value is this giving the user versus is, you know, the. What you're losing, what you are potentially losing. And I think changing the creativity or changing the characteristics of a fictional character in a game has far less concern and implications than, you know, the deep, deep fake videos that we're seeing of like actually using real people. So, you know, I think I feel like this is definitely a very niche concern and a niche focus.

A (34:10)

Yes, that's a good point.

B (34:11)

But I do think it's one that it's a very passionate niche gamers and gamers gaming and gamers are, you know, very passionate about their, their craft. So I can see why this is potent, upsetting people with its potential, even though it's not actually deployed yet. So we'll see what, whether this turns any of those smaller gaming companies off of trying to start implementing any of this type of technology, even if they can. I mean, it's hard enough right now, isn't it?

A (34:43)

Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot more in these I pulled from two pieces, Ars Technica and the Verge. The Verge is Andrew Webster and Ars Technica's Kyle Orland as I mentioned. So go check those out to learn more about DLSS5 and the blowback therein. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, thank you so very much for being here today. It's always a pleasure to get to chat with you and learn about cool new things going on in your life. If people would like to stay up to date with the work that you're doing, where should they go to do so?

B (35:26)

Just most of my work you can find on theverge.com authors JenniferPatterntui. You can see all my articles and I have a new episode of Version History Podcast that will be coming out in a couple of weeks, which is one of our one of the Verge's new podcasts and it's a deep dive on the origins of the Echo and Alexa. So if you're interested in that, be sure to subscribe to Version History Podcast and follow me on the socials Marthome Mama Awesome.

A (35:57)

Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it.

B (36:00)

Thanks. Bye bye bye.

A (36:02)

Alrighty folks, we're gonna take another break. Before we come back with an interview, I want to tell you about pebble bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. Here's a question for you. Are you hiring in another country right now? Because once you do, things can get complicated fast. But that is where pebble can help. You can send offers to anyone in the world in minutes and get them onboarded fast. See, pebble is an AI powered global human resources platform built for founders, HR leaders and operators who are hiring and supporting teams around the world. Pebble helps you hire, pay and manage talent in over 185 countries with fast onboarding that can be done in minutes. Instead of juggling separate tools for contracts, payroll, benefits and compliance, pebble brings everything together with built in guidance and local expertise to support you. This is especially helpful if you're managing teams internationally or planning to grow. The fastest growing companies in the world use pebble to stay organ and reduce risk and founders use it to scale faster without having to become HR or compliance Experts. Rated number one in compliance on G2, the customer testimonials speak for themselves. For example, Page needed global talents to align with its bold mission as a digital diagnostics company revolutionizing cancer pathology with AI, Pages, VP of Finance and Operations said, over the past year we've doubled, if not tripled our global headcount. That growth has been largely thanks to our partnership With Pebbles. Bottom line, it simplifies global people operations so you can spend more time growing the business and supporting your team. Pebble's new standard, discounted pricing at $399 USD per month per employee helps you contain costs. Go to hypl AI to get a free estimate. That's H I P E B L A I for a free estimate. And we thank pebble for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break and as I promised, here's an interview I recorded earlier this morning. A powerful new iPhone hacking technique called darksort has been found in the wild. And it's not just a threat to high profile targets. It could affect hundreds of millions of devices discovered by researchers at Google and more. Dark Sword has already been tied to campaigns and surveillance. It works simply by luring a phone to an infected website. Here to break it all down for us is Wired's Andy Groff. Greenberg, welcome to the show.

C (38:35)

Andy, glad to be here.

A (38:37)

Yeah, pleasure to have you join us. Now, I've got a few questions for you, and I was hoping that we could kind of kick things off for folks who may not be familiar with how iPhone hacking has traditionally worked. I was kind of curious. Could you please walk us through what made these kinds of exploits so rare in the past and then what's changed now with the discovery of dark souls?

C (39:01)

Well, I mean, to put it simply, hacking an iPhone is still very difficult. You know, the iPhone has great defenses. It also has very restrictive rules about what you can install. I mean, if you're not jailbreaking your phone, then you can only install apps from Apple's app store. And that makes it very difficult to get a piece of malware onto an iPhone or really to hack it in any way. I mean, what we've seen really in, in recent years until now is that iPhone hacking is this kind of extremely rare and very, very targeted phenomenon where the victims are usually people like opposition politicians or activists or journalists or human rights defenders, usually in countries with dictatorial authoritarian regimes that target those kinds of high risk users. And, and the victims are very limited to these few individuals because those regimes don't want to burn their techniques, essentially. They don't want those very rare and expensive iPhone hacking techniques to be discovered, which would result in those hacking techniques being patched by Apple and also in the hacking campaign itself being exposed. So these are. We even talked about iPhone hacking as almost like it was like a rare unicorn in recent years. And that's kind of backed up by the fact that maybe the most famous iPhone hacking exploit is known as Pegasus, you know, created by NSO Group, this kind of hacker for hire firm. And I think that's all changing with these couple of recent iPhone hacking incidents that I think we'll get into.

A (40:41)

Yeah, so Dark Sword doesn't require, this is interesting, a user to click a link or download anything, which I think makes it something we got to be paying attention to. Apparently you just have to visit an infected website. So can you tell us a little bit about how that works technically? And then I think more importantly, if you're not sort of taking initiative there, what kind of data is actually able to be stolen from the device in this instance?

C (41:08)

Right, well, as I was saying, you know, what makes this whole incident so different from what we've seen in recent years is that this was what's known as a watering hole attack, where the hacking technique is planted in a website. And if you simply visit that website, then your phone is compromised. So the hackers are like, you know, choosing a website where, where they're essentially like, you know, attacking everybody who goes to that watering hole, as we call it in cybersecurity. So that means that this technique is, it's what people call a one click exploit, meaning that you can't simply like choose a target and hack their phone without any interaction from them. They have to visit a website, but once they do, their phone is silently and completely taken over. And you know, I can't promise to say that like I can truly explain how this hacking technique works. It is absolutely incredible, the level of technical sophistication that's necessary to fully take over an iPhone. But you know, Google has said that Dark Sword, this, this particular exploit contains six different vulnerabilities and that allowed it to like, you know, exploit WebKit, the basis of, of iOS browsers that then break out of the sandbox that is meant to contain the security of the browser and prevent any kind of intrusion technique from breaking out of the browser and getting into data on the rest of the phone. Then it has to do a kind of privilege escalation to get kind of like beyond user access to essentially what we would call Windows operating system admin access, access to the, the full phone. And then it does, yeah, it does exfiltrate essentially every kind of data you can imagine from the phone. It grabs, you know, photos, browser history, passwords, calendar data and notes data. It even takes like Apple health data from the phone. And, and maybe the most interesting thing is that, or strange I should Say is, is that it also steals cryptocurrency credentials to be able to drain crypto wallets that might be stored on phone. So everything else about this looks like kind of typical espionage. And in fact, Google has tied this to what they say is a Russian state sponsored espionage actor group. But that cryptocurrency theft part of it is, is weird and it seems like, you know, maybe it is a sign that these Russian spies were also moonlighting as cyber criminals, which is certainly not unheard of. It's something we have seen in the past as well.

A (43:36)

Well, now another thing that I think really stuck out to me, one of the most alarming details is that this code apparently was just accessible, well documented. Can you tell us kind of what do we understand about the hackers behind this and kind of if people are suddenly becoming aware, right. Of the exploit market, what would you tell them about, about what they need to kind of be mindful of and understand is going on out there?

C (44:10)

Well, that is in fact probably the most disturbing thing about the Dark Sword exploit is how sloppily it was used by these Russian hackers who deployed it. It was, it was embedded on Ukrainian websites. Clearly, you know, Russians target Ukrainians almost obsessively. Like this is, you know, the Ukrainians are the number one hacking target of any Russian spy agency. So that's not surprising. But they put it on these Ukrainian websites, including website and news websites, in a form where it could so easily be grabbed by any hacker and reused. The it was fully, you know, not obfuscated. You could read all of the code. You could even read the comments from the developer of Dark Store explaining how to use different pieces of it. So, you know, that makes it really all too easy for another hacker group to simply pull down this exploit if they can find it on one of these websites and start reusing it themselves to, you know, in fact, to target, target any victims that they choose.

A (45:07)

And then there's apparently a connection here between one hacking toolkit and another. I was hoping you kind of talk a little bit about that that was discovered. What do we understand about the origins of Dark Sword and the, perhaps the origins of this latest round of hacking toolkits?

C (45:34)

Right. So this kind of whole news cycle began with the discovery of a different iOS iPhone hacking technique called Karuna. So earlier this month, Google and Iverify, the cybersecurity company focused on smartphones, revealed this, this iPhone hacking toolkit, actually a whole collection of iPhone hacking techniques called Karuna, which was even more sophisticated than Dark Sword. And was being used again on these Ukrainian websites in a similar web based attack. But what was interesting about Karuna in part is that despite it being used by Russians, it was written by English language developers and it shared similarities, shared pieces of, you know, features essentially with this thing called triangulation, an older iPhone hacking technique that was discovered in 2023 and attributed by the Russian government to the US government. So, and then subsequently just last week, TechCrunch reported that in fact Karuna was created by this US contractor called Trenchant, part of this larger contractor firm, L3Harris. So it appears that Karuna was actually created for the US government and leaked to foreign adversaries, in this case Russian spies. It was then used by for profit cybercriminals who were targeting Chinese crypto users to steal their cryptocurrency. So, so that is actually the beginning of this story. Then just this week, Iverify Google Lookout, another cybersecurity firm, found that the same Russian hackers were also using Dark Sword. So that's really how Dark Sword has come to light is because of the scrutiny around this one Russian spy group that was using this other hacking technique called Karuna, that was a US origin technique. I mean, this is a very rare and troubling phenomenon. When a sophisticated hacking technique is created for the US government to carry out surveillance and then leaks and is used by foreign adversaries and cyber criminals. It kind of calls into question like whether it's safe for our tax dollars to be used to create hacking techniques that are then, you know, used against innocent victims by, you know, rogue actors.

A (47:45)

Now this, I think is an interesting aspect of the, the system as well. You talk about this being this, you know, fileless approach. That's that, you know, it's sort of the, the writing is there on the tin. But can you tell us a little bit about why this matters in terms of detection? And then what does this mean in for someone whose phone has actually been compromised?

C (48:11)

Right, well, and you know, Karuna, of the two of these techniques was definitely more sophisticated. But Dark Sword is interesting in that it is, as you said, a kind of file list, file lists technique, meaning it doesn't leave behind a kind of spyware payload on the phone that can be, you know, easily found and analyzed afterwards. It uses the phone's own processes to grab this data. And it doesn't actually like implant a piece of malware, an application on the phone that does all of this, you know, dirty work of stealing the data. So that means that it actually doesn't persist on the phone. If you restart your phone, it's to going gone. Which is actually maybe an important thing to note for potential victims. Like if you are worried about a dark sword infection on your phone, simply restart it. In fact, a lot of iOS malware does not have that persistence to survive a reboot. But you know, what it does do, essentially, is what the CEO of Iverify Rocket Coal described to me as a kind of smash and grab attack, where it just steals all the data in the first few minutes, exfiltrates it to some hackers server and the data is gone. And that's certainly damaging enough. And then I should say, despite this kind of smash and grab description, this is also very stealthy. Fileless malware does not leave behind a lot of artifacts that can be easily used to detect a dark sword intrusion. So that's really what's troubling about this, is that it's quite difficult to know if you have been victimized if you don't know exactly where to look. I mean, I mean, Iverify and Lookup both say that their apps are capable of finding a dark sword intrusion, but that's probably based on very specific clues and tells of this use of that hacking technique. And I would imagine that with a few tweaks, somebody else could repurpose this same iOS exploit and use it in a way that would be undetectable.

A (50:12)

Yes, and one of the things that that kind of stuck out to me is that we still have a significant number of iPhone owners running iOS 18. Do you have anything to say about maybe what's driving the gap here and how it sort of factors into the risk, given that those exploits exist on what is now an older operating system.

C (50:37)

Right. I mean, I should say really clearly here that if you have updated your phone to iOS 26, Darkstore does not affect your phone. It works on iOS 18. Karuna works on older versions of iOS, iOS 13 through 17. So these are not like what we would call zero day exploits. But it was kind of surprising to me as I heard about this, just how many iPhones out there remain on iOS 18 in particular, it's really almost like could be as many as a quarter of all iPhones. And that seems to be. I'm not like an Apple nerd who obsessively tracks adoption rates of every operating system version, but it does seem like the adoption of iOS 26 has been slower than usual because people actually hate this liquid glass Interface and other iOS changes that I don't have very strong feelings about. But for Whatever reason, people have remained on iOS18 and that's very dangerous in this case. You now have to choose, it seems. And you know, this is like the response from many people reading my article about this between essentially like, you know, these, what people kind of think are like, you know, these crappy new iOS features that they don't like, I guess because they're sort of slow and overly animated or the threat of Russian spyware. So that is not like a happy decision to have to make. But I do think that people need to to update their iPhones. I think that this is a serious hacking technique that more than maybe any that I remember ever hearing about is likely to proliferate and to be used against Western victims, not just Ukrainians. In fact, I should say Dark Sword has been used against Ukrainians, Turkish people, Saudi Arabians, Malaysians already by various hacker groups, according to Google. And given how easily reusable it is, it seems like it's only a matter of time until it starts to hit us in the United States, in the west, for any kind of, you know, espionage or for profit hacking, just given how easy it is to repurpose this for whatever motive hackers may have.

A (52:54)

Lastly, I would love to know, given that we're now seeing these kinds of exploits deployed indiscriminately rather than against these carefully chosen targets, what do you think that shift means for the average iPhone user who might have said, you know what, I don't need to really worry about this. This isn't an issue for me.

C (53:13)

Well, you know, I verify and look out. You know, being mobile, cybersecurity companies would say that it means that you need to think of your iPhone as something you need to actively protect. I'm, you know, I still, I hesitate to tell people you have to run antivirus on your phone the way you do on a Windows machine. I think we're on the cusp of that, perhaps. I do myself use these apps on my phone. I'm a journalist who worries about these more targeted attacks. It may be that we are on the horizon of a world where everybody has to worry in the same way. I think, most importantly, and this is what Apple wanted to stress, is that you need to keep your phone updated, you know, like enable auto updates of iOS even if you don't like liquid glass. I think it's worth it to keep your phone protected. And Apple is not doing a bad job of that. They patched these attacks as soon as they found out about them. They've even pushed out patches for like, older versions of their devices that can't run the latest operating systems. So they're taking this seriously. But users do have to enable those updates. So, you know, I would say from a user perspective, that's one. You know, it's important to update your phone. I would say that actually it's Apple maybe who really also need to change their mentality about this. I mean, Apple keep just kind of rhetorically saying that, you know, iPhones are so well defended that the only attacks we've ever seen against them are extremely targeted against just a few individuals. They say this publicly after most instances of iOS malware, and that does not seem to be the case anymore. They need to actually help raise the awareness that normal people are also getting hit by these attacks, these extremely indiscriminate attacks. If you so much as visited the wrong website, then you would have had your phone hacked in all of these cases.

B (55:10)

So.

C (55:10)

So that's a new reality and Apple needs to acknowledge it.

A (55:14)

Absolutely. Well, Andy, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I think this is an incredibly important story and I'm glad that you were able to be here to tell us about it. If people would like to follow you online and check out the work that you're doing, where are the places they should go to do so?

C (55:31)

You can follow me on bluesky, I'm A. Greenberg on bluesky and of course on wired.com, and we also have a YouTube series that I host these days called Hacklay that you can subscribe to on YouTube.

A (55:43)

Awesome. I'm looking forward to checking that out. Thank you again for your time and hopefully we'll see you again soon.

C (55:49)

Thank you, Micah.

A (55:51)

All right, thanks so much to Andy for joining us earlier today. We will head into my final story of the week, but before we do, I want to tell you all about Club Twit at Twit tv. Club Twit, that is where you go to sign up. Or you can also just. Just use that QR code in the top corner there. When you head there and subscribe, $10 a month, $120 a year, you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits. First and foremost, you gain access to every single one of our shows ad free. It's just the content. You also gain access to some special feeds. That's right. You will get to check out our feed that has behind the scenes, before the show, after the show. You'll also gain access to to our feed that has our live coverage of tech news events like the recent Nvidia GTC and access to a feed that has our club shows like My Crafting Corner just did an episode yesterday and Stacy's Book Club. Plus so much more. If all of that sounds good to you, great Twit TV Club Twit. If you'd like more, well, I've got it. You also get an invite to our wonderful Discord, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at at twit again twit tv club twit. Look forward to seeing you in the Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go get ready for a new case.

C (57:14)

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A (57:39)

Club back from the break and I just wanted to mention there's some stuff going on in the self driving car world. NITSA is continuing to monitor the situation, as it were. The push toward hands free driving is frankly running up against some turbulence. A series of reports from the Wall Street Journal, written by Ryan Felton, Ben Glickman and Don Nico Forbes, paints a troubling picture of where automated driving technology stands right now. Internal documents from Ford reveal the company knew drivers were confused by its Blue Cruise system well before launching it. And Tesla's full self driving system is under an escalating federal investigation after crashes in poor visibility conditions. And just today NHTSA expanded that Tesla probe to cover 3.2 million vehicles, upgrading it to an engineering analysis, a step that could lead to a recall. These stories together raise a fundamental question. Are automakers moving faster than the technology and the drivers using it can safely handle? Let's start with a Blue Cruise problem, because people, I think when they hear about full self driving or self driving at all, they immediately think of Tesla. Right? Right. Well, other cars are doing this too. And the sort of US darling that is Ford is also part of this. Ryan Felton's deep investigation which was published earlier this month, or excuse me, earlier this year in February, reveals that Ford actually had extensive internal evidence that drivers misunderstood how hands free driving systems work even years before its Blue Cruise launched in June of 2018. Ford conducted a benchmarking study and used GM's Super Cruise system for this. More than 40 people drove a Cadillac CT6 on a Michigan highway. And the results confirmed the company's own concerns that drivers worry they will be too complacent behind the wheel with the system active. The numbers of this 40 people. So what can you really say about a study of 40 were stark. One in four drivers incorrectly believed that Super Cruise would reposition the car if it veered out of a lane. So again, they incorrectly believed that using Super Cruise would mean that the car would be repositioned in the lane if it veered out of the lane. 80% of drivers failed to notice the initial flashing green light warning them to resume control. And then a follow up study of Ford's own developing system in 2019 found that more than half 60% of drivers incorrectly believe the technology would steer the vehicle back into its lane if it drifted. So. So people don't know what self driving can and can't do. It's still not clear to the driver they are responsible for steering the vehicle back into the lane. That's what the presentation said. Then there were some fatal crashes leading to a federal inquiry. Ford launched Blue cruise in 2021 despite knowing that this was an issue and the consequences have been severe. In September of that year. In 2021, Barry Wooten was killed in Foresight in Geor after losing control of his F150. His family said that he was in self driving mode. His daughter Wendy Wells said her father was a lifelong car enthusiast and so he of course wanted the latest and the greatest in 2024. Two more deadly incidents then drew federal attention. In February, a Ford Mustang Mach E using Blue Cruise struck a stopped Honda CRV on a San Antonio highway. It did kill the Honda driver. Ford told NHTSA that warnings to take control of the wheel were ignored for 30 seconds before the collision. And then weeks later, another Mach E that was also using Blue Cruise in a Pennsylvania construction zone slammed into a stopped Hyundai Elantra, pushing it into a Toyota Prius. Both drivers of those vehicles died at the scene. Arguably, this becomes a conversation not of just people understanding self driving vehicles, but also the deadliness of these gigantic trucks that we have on our highways. But I don't think people want to hear about that, so I'm not going to get into it. Ford maintains that neither accident was caused by its system. The company says these incidents unfortunately illustrate that driving, whether by humans alone or with technology, require adequate time Adequate. No adequate time to perceive, classify, confirm and react to events. So let's talk about what Ford told nhtsa. Ford says, hey, NHTSA Blue Cruise's adaptive cruise control was designed to stop decelerating in response to stationary objects when traveling at or above 62 miles per hour. So this is a feature that's supposed to avoid what's called phantom braking, where the system incorrectly reacts to bridges, overhead signs, or other objects aren't actually in the roadway. So other safety features like automatic emergency braking are functional at higher speeds. But the design choice means the system may not slow down for a stopped vehicle in a travel lane at highway speeds. So to be clear, if the speed of the vehicle is above 62 miles per hour, Blue Cruise's adaptive cruise control does not decelerate upon discovering a stationary object in front of of it. So when you're driving even faster and there's a stationary object, it won't slow down. And the idea is that too many times it was detecting a bridge or some other item in front of it that then caused it to slow down. NITS's administrator Jonathan Morrison said in a January conference, we want to be crystal clear that the systems available in today's vehicles are driver assistance systems, systems you're driving. And I think that that's important like that. Yeah, that needs to continue to be the conversation now. Ford, of course, is dealing with the Blue Cruise scrutiny. But Tesla faces its own escalating federal investigation. In October of 2024, Ben Glickman and once again Don Nico Forbes reported that NHTSA opened a preliminary evaluation into Tesla's full self driving system system after identifying four crashes involving the technology. One in which a Tesla fatally struck a pedestrian. The crashes occurred in these reduced visibility conditions due to sun glare, fog, airborne dust, and the agency started looking to see if the system could even, you know, respond whenever it's in those scenarios, because those scenarios are going to come up a lot. That investigation covers an estimated 2.4 million vehicles, all Tesla models that can be equipped with the optional driver assistance software, including certain versions of Model 3, Y, X and S, as well as the cybertruck. Now, that is one part of it. The probe came just a week after Tesla's Robo taxi event, where the company outlined its plans to become a robotics and AI focused business. Elon Musk said Tesla would offer its driverless taxi service only where permitted, but gave no details on navigating regulatory hurdles. Now, as of today, March 19, 2026, that probe is expanding due to the escalation of the investigation to an engineering analysis that means that recalls could result the scope again to now 3.2 million vehicles. This has to do with several crashes, including a fatal one where self driving, full self driving failed to alert drivers appropriately about reduced visibility conditions. So it needed to set I can't tell what's going on due to these changes. That almost started to sound like Christopher Walken, but anyway I can't tell what's going on with the stuff that's happening outside and so I need you to take control of of the wheel. I think if Christopher Walken was telling me to do that, perhaps I'd pay more attention. Tesla, you should be listening to this. Anyway, if this is seen to be enough of a problem, then that does mean that we could be looking at a huge recall. And this has to do in part with Tesla's choice to go with these vision based setups. No radar, no lidar. We still don't really understand Tesla's true thinking here on switching away from radar and lidar and only going with vision based systems. But yeah, not a good idea. Automakers are marketing increasingly sophisticated driver assistance systems despite the fact that internal research and let's be real, real world crashes show that drivers fundamentally misunderstand what these systems can and can't do. So federal regulators are having to respond, ramping up scrutiny. Unfortunately, automakers continue to push this technology technology forward. Ford is working toward eyes off highway driving by 2028 and of course Tesla has claimed full self driving for a while, but is also working towards fully driverless robo taxis that don't even have steering wheels or brake pedals. The gap between what's being promised and what's been proven and is the actual situation continues to work widen. So to those of you out there with vehicles like this, please be mindful, be aware and don't think of these systems as something that can completely take over driving for you because they just simply are not that. Thank you all for tuning in to this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday Twitter TV tnw. That is where you can go to subscribe if you're not to the audio and video versions of the show. We'd love to love to have you join us tell other people about the show as well. If you would like to get all of our shows ad free plus so much more. I mentioned Club Twit, Twit tv Club Twit. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm ichasargent on many a social media network or you can head to the now back in back and functioning Chihuahua Coffee. That's C H I H u a H u a Coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows that'll publish later today. IOS today and hands on Apple as well as as hands on tech which publishes every Sunday. Thanks so very much for being here. We'll catch you again soon on a future episode of Tech News Weekly. Bye Bye.