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Tech News Weekly 437: What To Expect at Google I/O
01:24:32
The Preamble to Google I/O 2026
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A
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jake Ward is here. We talk about the ongoing Altman vs Musk case. Jason Howell stops by to give us the lowdown on what Google has already announced and will announce at Google IO before I round things out. Talking about Canvas being hacked and what to expect after the company paid the ransom. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.
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B
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
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This is Tweet. This is Tech News Weekly. Episode 437 with Jake Ward and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, May 14, 2026. What to expect at Google I o. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Micah, and this week I am joined by someone who's making and breaking tech news. It's Jake Ward. Hello, Jake.
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C
Hello. What's up, Micah? I hope I'm not making it, but I like, I do try to break it. If I make news. You should have me on right away. I'll call you immediately.
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A
Yeah, please. Okay. Something's happened and you gotta know about it.
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C
Oh, my God. He got in a fight with Elon Musk. That's crazy.
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A
Yes. So that's actually a great segue into the first half of the show. For people who are tuning in for the first time, we like to kick off the show with our stories of the week. These are the stories that we think are interesting and want to share with all of you. And Jake, you have been covering and attending the ongoing court case. I was hoping you could start. If people didn't get a chance to check out our last episode together and if they haven't been up on the news, what's going on in your neck of the woods?
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C
Yeah, they might as well. Just a little funny local matter. So Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI and OpenAI itself, and kind of by extension Microsoft, I guess, for converting from a nonprofit to a for profit, although it's a B corp, so kind of whatever you want to call that, a hippie, hippie profit. And the question is essentially, did, sorry, did Altman and Brockman trick Musk into donating a bunch of money to get OpenAI off the ground and then pull a bait and switch on him, kick him out, and make it into a for profit company that's now poised to eat the world? And what Altman's side is arguing is Musk is a, you know, a megalomaniacal control freak who wanted total control over OpenAI when he and Altman began it together in 2015. And when he was not given that amount of control, he walked away. He took his football and went home. And now that he has seen OpenAI succeed, where Xai Musk's AI company has fallen so far behind, he's now suing to try and slow them down. So that's the. Those are the two signs of it. And the implications of this are right. The stakes here is that what he's asking for is the money back that he put in, which doesn't really matter because money comes up out of the ground for these guys. But he's also asking for Brockman and Altman to be deposed, to be taken off of, you know, kicked out of the company, and that it be converted from a for profit back to a nonprofit. And that would be complicated for many, many reasons. But one thing that it would really complicate is the IPO that OpenAI is planning, according to many, many, many reports later this year, which would probably be the largest public offering in, like, the history of capitalism or something. So, you know, if you switch back to a nonprofit, you can't do that. In order for them to keep going, they need to raise incredible amounts of money. So that would be a real problem if they lost. So the stakes are pretty high. But of course, I don't care about any of that. I only care about going and sitting alongside the richest and most powerful people in the world and seeing what they're like in court, right. And listen to them talk about themselves, talk about each other. Like, it is such a fabulous ringside seat at the billionaire circus. You know, that's really what this experience of going to court has been like for me. And so that's what draws me there.
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A
Morning after morning, Mr. Ward goes to Oakland. I. Before we, we get into that even more, I, I know neither of us, as far as I know, are lawyers, but let me know if that's changed.
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B
Nope.
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C
Nope.
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A
But you can sue to have someone removed from, like, can. Could I sue to have the head of Pepsi? I, I don't know why I thought of Pepsi, but removed as the CEO.
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B
How.
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A
How did, how can you do that?
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C
Right? So in this case, right, it's a, it's a civil action. And so you can sue and, and demand all kinds of weird things. You know, demand that he has to wear his underwear on the outside for a week or, you know, you can make you. The remedy that you ask for. Can. Can on paper be, you know, almost anything you want there you know, some remedies are more likely than others. And in this case, these remedies, Musk's side can argue, are not just, like, invented. They are a reasonable. A common, you know, reasonable with air quotes around it, accommodation for, you know, for Musk's situation and his history with the company and the rest of it. So, yeah, like, that. That is the kind of thing. But an important thing to consider here is that, like, first of all, like, it's a jury trial, which is very cool, but it is also that the jury's verdict is only advisory. It's the judge that makes the final determination. And she's. Who can say, now you got to wear your underwear on the outside or whatever. You know, whatever it is, she's the one who will ultimately decide whether there should be punishment and what the punishment should be. So. So all of it is kind of up to her in the end, no matter what crazy stuff Musk asks for.
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A
Now, one of the things that I've seen recently, since the last time we spoke is a lot of conversation about characterizations of these. These individuals. Obviously, in building a case and in trying to get the jury on one side or the other, it does involve sort of understanding who these people are. And when it comes to. Well, I think when it comes to anyone, Right. You. You have only the data that you have to go on. And we as humans have to often make split decisions about. About people that are around us and people who aren't around us. We also make split decisions about and sort of categorize them in one place or the other. And I'm curious, as you have have watched these. The case play out, first and foremost, has anything. Have any of the behaviors stood out to you as different from what you expected? And then also there's this ongoing conversation about lies, lies, lies. You're a liar, you're a liar. Can you talk about that as well?
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C
Sure. Yeah. So it's been a really interesting parade of characters, and as a result, it's been a really amazing tour of the sort of social realm that these people occupy. The weird sort of background assumptions, like the sort of underlying assumptions of their lives that we can get into. And one of those is that they should just have, like, unimaginable amounts of money and yet somehow be above money is a weird thing that keeps coming up. And then, as you say, the accusation levied against Altman by many of the witnesses, including people that he founded the company with, including people he has worked with for years, board members, all of them saying, this guy's a liar. He's. He lies and lies and lies. And so, so I'll just give you sort of a rundown of a couple of the sort of most interesting character stuff that has sort of jumped out at me. So one really core person that I think was really the sort of heart and soul of this is Ilya Sutskever. So Ilya Sutskever is one of the co founders of the company. He, at the age of 24 back in 2012, wrote a paper when he was at the University of Toronto about an image recognition software system that he'd created with Geoffrey Hinton and this other guy, I can't remember the third guy's name, his name was Alex something. Anyway, it was called Alexnet and it was like it is that that paper is to AI people what like the discovery of the electron is to physicists. It's this just like totally mind blowing change to how they understood how AI should go forward. And Sutzkever became the hottest thing ever. He got hired at Google and then he walked away from Google because he was hired away by, by OpenAI at a time when OpenAI was like nothing. Like there was, it's like a nothing nonprofit. And. And Altman, what's so interesting is that every single person in that trial loves Ilya Sutskever. You just hear it over and over again from everybody who's ever worked with him. I mean Geoffrey Hinton, who, who he co wrote that paper in 2012 with him, described it later as Ilya saw it. Alex made it happen and I won the Nobel Prize.
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Right.
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Like people just are, are so into this guy's ability to see the future. He's such a brilliant thinker about what should come next. And so he became the Chief Scientist of OpenAI and essentially became the guy who turned all these transformer model breakthroughs in 2017, 2018 into ChatGPT. So he's like the brains. And if. And these guys, you can just sense in both Altman and in Musk that the intimation that they are somehow not technical people and are only sort of administrators or money guys makes them crazy. Like they hate to hear that because they clearly hold the technical people in such high regard and they want to be thought of as technical people. So Sutskever is the ultimate technical guy. And in his testimony he revealed that he. Well, so one thing he said pretty recently is that he doesn't think any of this LLM stuff is going to lead us to AGI. Okay. And that we're on the wrong track that somehow just scaling up what we're currently doing is not going to get us there. Which is a big deal for the smartest guy in this industry to be saying, yeah, and it's something. And it's. And it's something echoed by other people. Yann Lecun at Meta, who left Meta, a lot of other people are starting to say that stuff. So. So the whole raison d' etch of OpenAI, he's basically saying is. And that's really. That's really amazing and interesting. But he took the stand specifically to be asked about Musk. I mean, about Altman, about various things, but about Altman. He revealed that he was sort of one of the guys who, who he. He put together a dossier on Altman over the course of a year in which he documented what he called, quote, a consistent pattern of lying. That Altman is just a guy that's sneaky as hell. He'll just say one thing to one person, another thing to another person. He just says, whoever, whatever you want to hear basically in that room to get his way is basically what he sort of accused him of. And so that just. I can just imagine that for Altman sitting at the defendant's table, that must have just been a heartbreaker to have your, like, hero be like, yeah, he's a liar, you know, and do you
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A
think he expected it?
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I mean, he must have on some level, because he knew about. I mean, he, you know, he. It's why he got fired for that five day period in 2023, is because he put this together. Right. And that came up a lot in the trial was, why did he get fired? How did that work out? You know, like all that stuff you had. Mira Morati, who was the CTO of OpenAI, she testified about needing him, needing to be fired and how he just was like, again, untrustworthy. You had two different board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner. They both testified that he was untrustworthy and about the firing. So a lot of stuff sort of coming up about that. But Sutskever is this guy who's just beyond reproach. You cannot even. Musk was like, this guy's gene, a brilliant person, and at one point said in a tweet, even as he was suing OpenAI, Musk said in a tweet, Ilya is something. I'm paraphrasing here, but something like Ilya is a extremely moral and brilliant thinker. Something like that. Like, you never hear Musk say anything positive about anybody.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Not Even his own kids, you know, and, and, and he loves sutzkever. And so to have Sutskever in there was as close to the sort of word of God as you could get in this trial. And that was interesting. So then another thing and that I, another sort of person in the parade that I loved was Satya Nadella, right? CEO of Microsoft testifies. Great to watch these people have to come into this squalid little courthouse and raise it right?
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Realize Satya was there.
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Yeah, dude, he was there. He like walked in. You know, it's crazy. It's so many of these brilliant people, you know, I don't know about brilliant, but really, really accomplished people. So Nadella's there and Nadella, right. So Microsoft had formed this $10 billion arrangement with OpenAI that basically made it so that OpenAI no longer needed Musk. And that's part of what Musk is angry about. And he's, you know, suing in part, sort of Microsoft by extension. So anyway, he, he, Nadella's there and he's like a guy who knows everybody in the bar fight but has no interest in being part of the fight, is trying so hard to be like, I know these guys, but I'm not swinging. I don't know anything. But you know these guys. I didn't come with these guys. I got, I got my own ride home, you know, like. And so he just kept saying, like, oh, I don't know about that. Like, oh, I don't know. You know, he just like, would not take any sides really, which was so funny. And while all the other guys are trying, are falling all over themselves to say that they were not about money and they're all about saving the world and improving the world. And this is a non profit in spirit, if not in letter, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nadella doesn't care about any of that. He's like, we're serving customers, we're making money, we have a strategic investment. You know, he, at one point he said this phrase that really stuck with me. He was like, we had to decide what, where to put Microsoft's quote, scarce resources.
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Scarce.
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Yeah, he used that phrase a lot. Where to put the scarce resources of Microsoft. And it, and what it makes you realize is how a guy like that perceives the world, which is you. And I would think that you have this endless amount of money to play with. The company has a $3 trillion market cap, right? But the reason you become CEO is because you think of that stuff as limited. You think of yourself as on a very Tight budget and that you cannot mess up with that money. And I was. And I. For me, it was really good and illustrative to be like, right. That's why these guys stay up all night and take beta blockers and do the thing, you know, do all this crazy stuff. Yeah. Microdose. And do all this stuff. To stay on top of the game is because they consider themselves to be right at the edge of death all the time.
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A
That can't be healthy.
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No, no, dude, I don't think I want this job. Is another thing I learned being in the courtroom. But. But it was. But it's interesting that he was interesting. Just both in that he doesn't have any of this philosophical hand wringing about whether or not we're making something good for the. For the world. While the other guys are talking about literally the fate of the world. He's like, we're talking about customers, we're talking about products. Okay, I gotta go. You know, and he was out.
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So, yeah, I gotta get back to talking about everything.
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Yeah, I got back to the money making.
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You know, I want to keep going, but we need to take a quick little break.
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C
Let's do it.
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And then we'll come back. Cause there's a lot here to talk about. But first, let me tell you about Delete Me, bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. If you ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see, well, I gotta tell you, it's probably more than you think. Your name, your contact information, Social Security number. Yeah. And home address, even information about your family members, all being compiled by data brokers and sold online. Then anyone on the web can then buy those private details. This, of course, leads to things like identity theft, phishing attempts, doxing harassment. But now you can protect your privacy with Delete Me. You know, someone who regularly is covering this stuff, looking at this stuff, and hosts a show about big tech. I am aware of how little privacy we have and how much personal information is out there that can compromise my safety, my security. And that is why I actually do use and recommend Delete Me, because it has helped me to solve the problem and keep me protected. It's. It was kind of an eye opener to sign up for Deleteme and look at all of the information that was out there. And look, I'm extremely online, as they say, and so I can expect that I have a lack of privacy. But when I saw that data brokers had connected me to my family members and had information about who my grandparents were and where they could be found. That's when I started to go, okay, we gotta do something about this. Deleteme is a subscription service that removes your personal information from the hundreds of data brokers out there. You sign up, you provide Delete Me with exactly what information you want deleted and then DeleteMe's experts take it from there. Delete Me will send you regular personalized privacy reports that show you what information they found. That's where I go, oh my goodness. Where they found it and then what they removed. And here's the important part. Deleteme is not just a one time service because data brokers are not just a one time service. DeleteMe is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. To put it simply, Deleteme does all the hard work of wiping your and your family's personal information from data broker websites. So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme at a special discount for our listeners today, you can get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to join joinedeleteme.com twit and use the promo code TWIT at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com TWIT and enter code TWIT at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com TWIT with the code TWIT. Thank you, delete Me for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break and joined this week by Jake Ward, who has been, as I said before in the room where it's happening, covering the Musk Altman trial. And we're in the midst of kind of looking at the alleged humans with this case. I think honestly, for me, that's another aspect of it. When you're watching the conversations take place, something that fascinates me is seeing someone's thinking on their face, watching their behavior and kind of learning a little bit about them and perhaps sort of the way that they go about responding. But something that you touched on is how often it seems to be sort of triggering for these folks who are at the height of something. I don't know if it's the, you know, it's certainly the height of money to hear that perhaps people don't regard them as the, the most capable individuals or that they can you talk about sort of. Was there ever a time maybe where you heard a question being asked and you go, oh, I. I can't wait to see how this person responds. And, like, is there shouting that takes place at any time? Yeah. Is there a lawyer whispering in someone's ear? How.
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C
No, no shouting. Right. And you're not allowed to talk to counsel when you're testifying, so you're. Especially under cross examination, you have to just, like, wing it. So you're just on stage. And so there's, There's. But. But they, you know, it absolutely was a fairly. A fairly hostile conversation between a couple of these folks. I mean, like, so Musk certainly had been very irritated by William Savage, who's. Who's Sam Altman's lawyer, who basically just kept trying to say to him, like, you didn't really contribute all that much to OpenAI, right? And. And must be like, well, I gave them a lot of money and my word and my, you know, a single tweet from me is worth a lot and blah, blah, blah. You know, he's like, yeah, but you don't. But you don't contribute any real, like, anything technical, which he just knew would trigger him, and it absolutely did. You could just see Musk just be like, are you kidding me? You know, and the same thing was. Went for Stephen Molo, Musk's attorney, in talking to. To Altman is. Is saying, you know, but you're not really a. You know, you're not really a. You're not making technical contributions here, and it's the same thing. You know, what would you say you do here for, like, that line from Office Space? It was that question for both of them, like, what do you think you do here? And. And you could just see them both be like, oh, my God, what is my value in the world? You know, And. And so Altman's saying, you know, well, I. I raise money and I introduce people to each other and I arrange for the compute and blah, blah. You know, but desperately trying to, like, list off why he's a valuable person, which is. Which is really funny, you know, but then, I mean, ultimately, the big. The big thing was Altman getting shaken around by Stephen Molo, Musk's attorney, about being a dishonest person and having a huge amount of reputation for being dishonest. So I'll read you a little bit of one of the exchanges. He. He says. He basically, so Molo gets up, up. This dude is not subtle. He gets right up to, you know, it always starts with, Good morning, Mr. Altman. And then, you know, good morning, we met out in the hallway. You you'll remember. Yes, I remember you. You know, it's a weird, like, I, I'm, I'm looking how friendly I am, kind of demonstrations, very strange. And then, and then he says, Mr. Altman, are you completely trustworthy? It's like his first question. Yes, here it is. This is. You've got it. I'm reading the same thing here. Are you completely trustworthy? I believe so. And, and, and if you've ever listened to Sam Altman, talk is a long. He likes to pause for a long time before he responds. He's.
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A
See, that's interesting.
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Yeah.
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His teleprompter's on a delay, and so he's his mental teleprompter. And so he's. He paused a long time before each one of these. I believe so. Do you always tell the truth? Long pause. I believe I'm a truthful person. And then Molo says, it's just like, it's such classic writing. That wasn't my question, sir. Do you always tell the truth? And then Altman has to say, because he's under oath, right? He can't say, no, I don't.
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Because everyone lies.
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Everyone lies. And he's been shown in testimony after testimony with that, that he does that he has lied quite a bit. And so, you know, so he's saying, you know, he says, I'm sure there is some time in my life when I have not. The only time he ever came out with an actual denial was, do you tell lies to advance your business interests? No. No. But then he said, have you misled people with whom you do business? He says, I believe I am an honest and trustworthy business person. That wasn't my question about what you believe. Have you misled people with whom you do business? I do not think so. Would they think so? I can't answer that for other people. It went on like that for like 25 minutes where he would walk through like, here's all the testimony of all these people who said that you lied to this person and this person and this time and this time and, you know, and Altman's got to just kind of take it. And to his credit, he didn't get angry. He really was. He stayed very calm. Whatever beta blockers he's on there, he's doing a great job. They're. They're doing a great job. He's real icy and cool and calm. He's got a great wide eyed, I'm just a guy trying to get to the truth here kind of act that he, that he does which I. Multiple people I've spoken to who spent time with him say he just. That that's an incredible gift he has, is always seeming like this kind of earnest young person when in fact he's telling you something that's untrue or, you know, or telling you exactly what you want to hear. And so that kind of. I don't know, it's just great. Like, he just, he got asked about all these people who said he was a liar. And he. His answer each time was like, I have not heard that testimony. The only thing he. The only time he showed any kind of flash of irritation is he said so at one point he was. He was. Dario Amadi was. Was mentioned and how Dario Amadai has accused him of being dishonest about safety regulations and various things. And Altman said, dario accuses me of many things.
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A
Oh, wow.
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C
Which is interesting. There's a. There's a picture, John. I don't know if it's easy to find, but there's a great picture of them on stage together at. I think it was in the European Union or something, where they refused to hold hands. Musk, sorry, Altman and Amadai. There's a picture of all these AI CEOs with their arms upraised as if they're all on the same soccer team. And Altman and Amadi, or not holding hands in this very obvious and weird way because they hate those guys. They hate each other. They're just, you know, they're so irritated by one another. And these are all people who used to work together closely. Amadi was like the third or fourth higher or something at OpenAI. So huge amounts of just like personal animosity that you could sort of sense out of these people. And then one really weird thing that I. So there are a couple other weird things that jumped out at me. One was there's just this incredibly casual, extremely high self regard that the characters in this have, right? The talking about how valuable your own tweets would be and that kind of thing from Musk, you would sort of expect from Musk. But at one point, Altman is asked about a memo that came to him from Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, asking him why it mattered so much that he'd be CEO of OpenAI. And they asked him if it had to do with his, quote, political goals. And Molo, Musk's attorney, asked Altman if that meant that he had wanted to be President of the United states. He said, Mr. Altman, did you want to be President of The United States. And Altman says, I was thinking about running for governor at the time, which is, I believe what they meant there.
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A
As if to say, just like, you know, that, oh, yeah, that was that one thing I was doing.
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C
And as if to say, not like. And as if to say like, oh, no, no, not president. Just. Just president of the world's fourth largest economy here in California. You know, just this like, very casual feeling of that, which was kind of hilarious. And then there was just great stuff about, like, what it is to be with Musk and. And be around him and have to deal with him and so forth. So at one point, Altman describes his happiest memory, literally happiest memory he had of working with Elon Musk was some late night meeting in 2018. And. And they said it was that the. That the meeting had gone unusually well. And the reason that he knew that is because at the end, they spent a long time where Musk just sat there showing Altman memes on his phone.
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A
Oh, my Lord.
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C
That. That's like the sign that you're getting along great with Musk is he wants to show you some memes on his phone, you know, and you're just like, oh, the worst. These guys are the. Just to hang out with. It's such a lame party. It's like a party you. You think you want to be invited to, but. Oh, my God.
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A
Yeah, they say, what is that? The. The kids say it's the worst blunt rotation.
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B
It's so funny.
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C
Somebody said that. Somebody gave me that comment on a tik Tok I did about. They were like, oh, worst blunt rotation ever. It's totally true. That's exactly right. So. And then.
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A
Sorry, all the other stuff they're on. I can't imagine that I want them also on weed.
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C
No, I bet they're not. I bet they're not so good on. On weed, if I had to guess. Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, and then the last thing I'll throw at you is there was a lot of weird stuff about Siobhan Zillis. So Siobhan Zillis was on the OpenAI board. She's a mover and shaker in the world. And. But she was also working for Musk at the time. And she's like, cc'd on most of the later correspondence between OpenAI and Musk. And. And what's so weird is, so. So Siobhan Zillis was Musk's employee. She was Musk's sort of close advisor. She was for this period of time, a member of the OpenAI board. And what Altman testified is that he. He learned in 2021 that. That Zillis had children. But it wasn't until 2022, and by this time there's. The divorce with Altman has really happened for the most part. It wasn't until 2022 that he figured out that Zillis had children with Musk. Zillis is the. Is the mother of four of Musk's kids. And in other testimony, a video deposition that she did, she was asked about him as a. As a. Like, what their relationship is, what her relationship with Musk is. Is. And she basically was like, I don't know if I would call it a relationship. Like, and certainly. And she said at one point, like, there were times you could consider romantic, but not many, or something like that. Like, just the weirdness of, like, this is somebody who's a. Who's. Who's mothered these children with this guy, but. But doesn't consider them to really have much of a relationship. And yet she is also clearly like Altman's pipeline into understanding how to deal with Musk's moods, and that's part of why she stayed on the board. So he. He was asked, Altman was asked whether learning that she had Musk's kids changed his view of whether she should be on the board at a time when Musk is, like, actively angry at them and maybe has even filed suit. And she. He said, quote, it was a close call for me personally, because she sort of told us that Mr. Musk was playing a more involved role than originally intended and that they were spending more time together. But I think very highly of Ms. Zillis, and I valued her counsel. Also. Part of the reason we had her in this role was to keep things smoother with Elon. And she represented me at the time that they didn't have a personal relationship beyond this, and I trusted her on that. So, like, saying she represented to me at the time that they didn't have a personal relationship beyond the former four kids they have together.
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A
Wow.
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C
You know what I mean? And so just like the, The. The transactional, like, what is she. What use is she to the board and. And for Musk, like, what use is she to him? And. And what both of those things are for Zillis, like, like I say, like you said, weird blunt rotation. Not. Not a. Not a party I want to spend time in.
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A
It's easy. No, not people that I want to hang out with because just the mind space is just.
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C
Yes.
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A
I can't imagine.
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C
Yes, the mind space is the right phrase. That's exactly right. Yep. Yep.
- [31:55]
A
Jake, you are always a pleasure to get to chat with and I love that you have been able to attend this in person and tell us about it. There's a lot that you've been covering over on your your site and in your newsletter. If people would like to keep up with your work and see your video and read more about this. Where are the places they go to do that?
- [32:19]
C
The rip current.com is your place for all things. I do literally everything paid subscribers go to everything I do there. I'm on YouTube, I'm on TikTok, I'm on substack for, you know, free. Free readers get a little slice of that. But yeah, the rip current.com Please come check it out. And Micah, thank you so much. This is always such a pleasure to be here.
- [32:37]
A
Absolutely. Always a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much. All righty folks, we're going to take another quick break before we come back with a familiar face. And you all know now by the time I say that, you know it's Jason Howell who will be joining us to give us the lowdown on Google I O and everything that Google has announced thus far. But first, let me tell you about Hawkshunt, bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. As a security leader, you've been there. The eye rolls during training, the one size fits all fishing simulations that your employees spot from a mile away, and the report button that gets ignored. More often than not, your programs are running, but it's not changing employee behavior. Meanwhile, AI is making real attacks more convincing by the day and leadership is starting to ask the question you don't have a clear answer to. Is this actually working? Hoxhunt is built to answer that. Hoxhunt empowers your employees to spot and stop advanced phishing attacks drive measurable behavior change through personalized gamified micro training powered by AI and Behavior Behavioral Science as an admin, Hawkshunt does the heavy lifting. Simulations run automatically across email, slack and teams personalized to each employee based on role, location and behavior. Every simulation uses AI to mirror real world attacks, meaning employees are being tested on what's actually getting through, not outdated templates they recognize immediately. Gamified training keeps engagement high without feeling good punitive. And because every interaction generates a coaching moment, you're not just tracking completion, you're building behavioral indicators that tell a real story. Reporting rates, repeat clicker reduction and time to report the Kind of metrics that hold up when leadership asks those hard questions. But you don't have to take our word for it. With more than 3,500 verified reviews on G2, Hoxon is the top rated security training platform, recognized for best results and easiest to use. It's also recognized as customers choice by Gartner and thousands of companies like Qualcomm, Docusign and Nokia, which trust it to train millions of employees worldwide. Visit hoxhunt.comsecurity now today to learn why modern secure companies are making the switch to Hoxhunt. That's hoxhunt.com security now. And of course we thank Hawks Hunt for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break and as I promised, we are joined now by the wonderful Jason Howell.
- [35:24]
B
How's it going? Good to see you.
- [35:26]
A
It's good to see you too.
- [35:27]
C
It's going well.
- [35:27]
A
How are you?
- [35:29]
B
You know I can't complain. Got a busy week coming up. Next week gonna be going down to Mountain View and check out a little Google IO. And the way Google does things now, they don't just keep their big news on that week, they start a week before and so it's been. Yeah, it's been kind of crazy.
- [35:45]
A
Yeah, I was gonna say I'm there's a part because as on, on the Apple reporting side of things leading up to it there's sort of a dip in what's available and we have to wait for wwdc. And I always get really excited seeing some of the earlier announcements that come by way of Google ahead of IO and this year you have to explain this to me because has it always been called the Android show and like what, what that's because that's what sort of was the pre announcement of many things. So you could start there.
- [36:26]
B
I mean has it always. No, starting last year. Yes. Last year was the first time that they did this where a week ahead of Google I o they created a prerecorded video full of announcements that are Android related called the Android Show. And I think the reason for this is because this moment in time, as you are very well aware, Micah is you know, AI and everything. Artificial intelligence is just sucking up all the oxygen. And so I think my understanding is that it, they wanted Android to have its own place, have its own celebration, its own kind of coming out party for, for the news that that was going to hit and they don't always, you know, they aren't always guaranteed to have that time on stage. At Google I O because of the just the depth of AI, you know, research and announcements and everything that they are certainly going to announce next week. So they're giving Android its own time in the spotlight a week before and yeah, this is the second year that they've done that.
- [37:29]
A
That makes sense, that makes sense. Now at this event, what did we see as the pre announcements? If we just kind of want to go, go through what the company either previewed or revealed and I'd love to hear kind of your initial reactions to things.
- [37:48]
B
Sure, sure. So I would probably split it into three groups and we'll start with the phone stuff because when we think about Android it's easy to just jump right into the smartphone even though Android is so many more things which we'll talk about. But on the phone they made a number of announcements. Yes, most of them have something to do with AI. I mean it's a theme today in their news. Even though it's an Android news announcement, it still has everything to do with Gemini and all that kind of stuff. Multi step app automations. So basically bringing the ability for Gemini in some way, shape or form. Still not sure I entirely understand exactly how, but being able to kind of bounce between apps that you have installed to carry out tasks for you. They were definitely noted though it's not going to go the final step. So if it's a matter of like click here to purchase, it's not going to do that. It's not going to click here to tap, you're going to have to do that as a human. So it does many things for you but not everything for you. Rambler is another feature that they mentioned which is I don't know about you but I Talk to my LLMs a lot nowadays and I've gotten way more comfortable with it and I have often described myself as rambling to the LLM and you know, just talking and not worried about like ums and us and oh, I changed my mind actually could we change that to blah blah blah, just no editing, just say the thing however you get there and then in, in the app, in the keyboard app, the G board, there will be a button that you press after you do that and it will clean up and just basically synthesize just the thing that you wanted to say. So if you're texting someone and you know you have this long sprawling thing, you could shorten it to just the nuggets and still keep it in your voice and that sort of stuff. Very, very curious to play around with that.
- [39:40]
A
I like That I have to say, because that's something that when I'm thinking about sending a longer message, for example, I have in the past just said, you know what? I'm just going to sit down and record a little audio and send that instead. But here's the thing about that. It's really convenient to do. It's not incredibly convenient to receive. And I used to get from one of my younger brothers voice memos all the time. And then I'd go, well, I don't have the time to look at that right now or hear that right now. And then it made me go, I gotta quit doing that to people. And so the idea that, again, the reason why I would do it is mostly because I hadn't quite put together the thoughts and I felt like it would come out as I was speaking. And this idea of being able to just do that and then have the actual final message there is a pretty cool idea.
- [40:36]
B
Yeah, I like it. I think it remains to be seen how well it does it and keeps it dialed into the voice. Because we've done a lot of, like, you write an email and then you do the little button and it. Then it re kind of types your email to kind of polish it for you. And then often when it does that, it doesn't sound quite like you anymore. And so I'm curious to know how that, how that works within Rambler whenever we get access to that. One of the things that they mentioned about the phone that is easy to write off or sign off because, because it's just widgets, but is Create my widget, which sounds kind of ridiculous, kind of like, okay, widgets. Yeah, whatever. Widgets are, you know, a bygone era. They're still here. But like, I don't know, they're, they're, they're not cutting edge, let's just say. But what I think is interesting about this is it uses Gemini and you know, the natural voice prompt to create a specific widget to what you want that you can put on your home screen. And why I feel like that's more important than just a cool widget feature is it will probably be for some amount of people the first time they experience what we call vibe coding, which is. Oh, you mean I can just like have an idea for a thing and poof, I've got an app on my home screen that does it. Now that's so cool. I think it's going to be an interesting kind of entry point for some people to finally get firsthand experience with that, you know, and Mind you, these are probably people who are not developers at all and be like, oh, that's really powerful. What else can I do? You know? And then your imagination runs wild.
- [42:07]
A
Absolutely.
- [42:09]
B
Chrome on Android also getting an AI browsing assistant. So Chrome on Android getting more built out with AI that's coming late June, paid tiers only. So that's neat. And a few, few other things smarter autofill with Gemini, which is okay, I guess Gemini is probably good at that. A toned down material, three expressive design. That's a few things for phones with,
- [42:31]
A
with the Chrome or Gemini in Chrome on Android. Something that's really been fascinating to me is I think it's, it's clear to me that developers who work at these companies either do a lot of traveling themselves or the managers to whom they report seem to do a lot of traveling because it's like three things. It's planes, it's ordering cars. Yeah. And food and like restaurant reservations.
- [43:10]
B
Yeah.
- [43:10]
A
It's always covering those same things over and over again and those rarely show up for me in my email. And so, you know, it's kind of hard to sort of visualize what that looks, what that actually looks like. But I wanted to ask you a lot of this stuff again, getting into the agentic space of taking action on your behalf, but the company has already in the last iteration introduced some of that, the taking action on your behalf. And I wanted to know how much of those kinds of features have you used or do you use regularly a feature that, you know that, that, that books a, a reservation at a restaurant or orders pizza for you or any of the stuff where perhaps money is involved. Have you, do you, are you at a trusting place yet for that?
- [44:13]
B
I'm, I mean I'm, I'm convinced vinced enough to play around with it, but I haven't, I haven't bought into it, if that makes sense. Like, yeah, like I've tested it and I played around with it and I'm not too concerned that it's going to make a purchase on my behalf because for the most part, barring any really weird whacked out scenario where the AI just completely goes off the rails, it's going to stop at that purchase point. And if it didn't, well, that would be a great story to cover. Right. It probably makes the news. So I feel confident enough that they're, because they continue to kind of say this when they introduce these features, it will not take that final step. It will not click that button to purchase. So that gives me confidence to at Least play around with it. And if it puts a bunch of stuff in my cart that I didn't care for, the worst thing in the world that I do probably is just remove them from the cartoon. Do I rely on them? Do I often order doordash, you know, autonomously? No, I don't. But I think as these features become seeded in ways to which people get curious and start to kind of test with them and their imaginations start to go a little bit more, then maybe that becomes something that people buy into more. You know, it's kind of like with, with Agentix stuff. Trust is really important. You as a user have to A, trust that it's not going to do something wrong, but B, you know, trust that it's got your best interest in mind and there's a whole lot of trust that falls into that. And if it just messes up once and you know, does that in a way that that is notable to you, it could take years before you decide to try it again, you know. So I think Google has to get it right and I think, I think slow exposure is probably the right way to go.
- [46:04]
A
That makes sense. All right, so that's phones. What's after phones?
- [46:11]
B
Well, it would be the Google Book, of course, which was the thing that no one apparently saw coming. And I mean if you really read the tea leaves, we would know that something was up because we've been hearing for years now about this aluminium OS which is essentially being created enough out in front of the public that people saw, oh, Google's working on a desktop interface for Android. What is this going to turn into? Is this a replacement of Chrome OS entirely? Which by the way, it is not. Google went through great lengths in our interview with Samir Samad, who's the Android president on Android Faithful, he basically said, look, no, Chrome OS isn't going anywhere. They wouldn't want Chrome OS to go anywhere because dang, they're making a lot of money with it. In the education space is one example that works for that. Google Book is a separate kind of step up. It's running on Android, a modified version of the Android operating system. So Android apps are native to it and it has some Gemini hooks embedded into the experience. And, and in very interesting ways. I'm super compelled to try it out to kind of see like, what is this? It's probably not as popular or as powerful as a MacBook Pro, right? But it's certainly more powerful than Chrome OS. And in fact it takes the browser based stuff from Chrome OS and just puts it into here. So it's basically Chrome OS plus, you know what I mean?
- [47:41]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. I really. Some of the, the functionality that I saw with this device and I guess really the operating system was really clever. I think about, I think it's a Jackie Chan meme and they're sort of like hands going like this and sort of a question of like what's going on and the cursor shake when you are over something and you shake your cursor to learn more about that thing. Yeah. So John just posted it in to the Discord. That's what it reminded me of and I really like that gestural idea that it's like what is this? And then yeah, you can see and learn more about it. There's some clever stuff that I think Google, I was just talking to Abrar Al Heiti of CNET about some of the stuff that we've seen with Google using AI in convenient, truly convenient ways of making things a little bit simpler. And I do think that this is one of those situations where you know, it's just, it's very human and I appreciate that because for me being on the outside of Android, you know, especially I think perhaps not as much now, but it used to be really the Tinkerer platform and the sort of like nerdy make every single tiny adjustment platform and that to me gave it more of a robotic quality, I guess a really sort of techie, not intuitive, maybe a little bit, I don't know, cold. But seeing these interactions and seeing the motion and the color and the joy, there's a joy to this UI that I really appreciate and a very again human aspect of yeah, shaking a cursor, it's just a clever way. So there's no question there. I just think it's cool.
- [49:56]
B
Well, I'm super curious to play around with that. Right. Like messing with the pointer in the computer interface is. It's a gutsy move because it's been part of the computer experience for. I don't even want to guess, but 40ish years, 30, very, very long time, you don't see many people playing around with the function of a pointer. How well does it do it? I mean this was developed with DeepMind so I'm sure that there's some really cool integrations. The idea being you shake it, it kind of turns the cursor into a Gemini mode and then depending on where the cursor is pointing or what you do with it on the screen, it pulls in that as context or kind of, you know, juggles between these, you know, these two images for Gemini. I'm not even entirely certain what that's going to be like, but I'm super curious and I give them a lot of credit for deciding to take this thing we all take for granted and have used a very particular way for a very long time and bringing something into it. I just hope that it's good enough, what it gives you is good enough that it warrants it being there at all. And you know, because it could, it could ultimately end up being one of those things. It's like, well, that seemed good on paper and then you use it a handful of times. You're like, well I could deactivate that if they even let you deactivate that. So I don't know. But I'm very, very curious about it. I think it's one of the key kind of differentiators of what Google Book brings with Gemini embedded into the OS like that.
- [51:26]
A
Absolutely. Anything else with Google Book or is it time for the next category?
- [51:32]
B
Yeah, I mean I think that's about it. I mean create my widget, you know, quick access, immediate file sharing between your Android device and Google Book without, you know, everything's just a lot more seamless from what they're saying and a lot more intentional connected and not like let's tack this on after the fact. It's really truly meant to be a companion to your phone and your phone a companion to it. So I'm curious and, and high, high end materials based on the, the limited promo photos that they're showing. So it looks like a nice device too. So I'm very curious about it. The other category that I was going to mention is kind of just like a more category, right? Like you've got random stuff in there. Quick share airdrop compatibility going to Mordecai devices, which I'm really happy about. An improved iOS to Android and Android to iOS transfer process that covers more ground. Includes ESIM connectivity transfer. Android Auto gets some really cool updates, one of them being the ability to basically expand the interface onto any shape and size of screen. So if you've got like a trapezoidal screen in your car, the interface just fills it all seamlessly and it just looks really neat. I was would love to see that Gemini Intelligence embedding into there some immersive navigation, a new navigation kind of environment or look and feel which I think remains to be seen whether we like that or we just want our maps to be dumb and some creator focused stuff like screen reactions which is essentially recording your device while also recording your selfie in the same thing. This is something that people creators might have to throw onto a timeline in order to do and now they can just pick up their phone with this update and boop boop record a reaction or whatever the case may be some Instagram updates as well that improve the image quality which has been a long standing complaint on Android. So yeah, other bits and pieces there.
- [53:28]
A
Nice. We are going to take a little break and then come back with kind of just any other expectations we have for Google I o as it kicks off in the coming week. But first let me tell you about Zscaler bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. The potential rewards of AI I know they're too great to ignore, but frankly so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data and attacks against enterprise managed AI Generative AI. We've talked about this. It increases opportunities for threat actors, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures, write malicious code and then automate data extraction. In fact, there are 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications. Zscaler is the most trusted AI security platform. 40% of Global 2000 companies use Zscaler. 500 billion transactions are secured daily with more than 9.4 thousand global customers. Zscaler carries a net promoter score of more than 75, 150% higher than average SaaS. Check out what Siva, the director of Security and Infrastructure at Zura, says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks.
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A
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- [56:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, that has really changed and transformed over the years. I mean, a couple of years ago the expectation was this is an Android event with a little bit of search and a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And now that's just not the case. Now it's an AI event. Right. So. And also hardware. Right. There was a long time there where if you were going to Google I O, you were almost assured that you were going to walk out with some gifted piece of hardware, either the new smartphone that they were releasing or a tablet or a little streaming orb called the Nexus Q. That kind of stuff just doesn't happen anymore. Google really, these days targets Google I O to be, I would say a couple of things. A, it's a developer conference, right? At the end of the day, this is a developer conference. Lots of events, lots of information and announcements, very relevant to developers. The majority of it is relevant in some way, shape or form to developers. And so there's a lot of talks and things like that that happen. But B, I think from a larger scale, I'd say outside of the event itself, it's. It's really a PR arm. It is the keynote, the main keynote that happens next Tuesday. Everybody in tech press is paying attention to that. This is where Google has saved up an insane list of big announcements related to their biggest efforts that they show off on stage. And so you're guaranteed to get news item after news item that you've either heard about in rumors or in rumor land or hearing about for the first time. And my hunch is that if there is an announcement that has nothing to do with AI, it is a very, very, very small portion of anything that you hear from the keynote.
- [58:06]
A
Absolutely. Now, when it comes to the sort of Google I O, separate from these initial previews, how much more is expected to be on stage versus what we've seen? Because as you, as you mentioned, there's so much that needs to get out there that Google sort of precedes everything or precedes some. Is it going to be a rehashing of what the Android IO show is, or are we expected to hear mostly stuff outside of what we've seen thus far?
- [58:44]
B
They might in passing mention a few Things here and there dotted throughout as related to something else. For example, Google Book. Right. We know a little bit about the Android operating system basis of the Google Book, but Google really didn't go into much detail this week on what exactly that is, what it means, what it looks like. And like I said, we've been hearing about this Aluminium os. I even reached out to Google when Google Book was announced and I said, so is this Aluminium os? And I got silenced. That tells me something. So, you know, might we hear things that tangentially tie into some of the announcements that we've already gotten? You know, might we get a deeper look into what aluminium OS actually is? Just as one example, possibly. So I don't think that they're going to extend anything like. Like taking the Google Book, for example. We got very little in the way of hardware peaks this week. I don't think that at next week it Google I o. They suddenly go, and here it is, we're going to have it on display and demo and everything. My hunch is that we heard what we're going to hear about Google Book for a little while. They're going to revisit that later and this event is going to be full of new news and some of it might tie into what we've already heard, but we're going to hear a ton about Gemini. We're going to hear a ton. We're going to hear somewhat about their kind of environmental conflict commitment, because they always spend some time on that. DeepMind announcements are going to be sprinkled throughout. There's probably going to be a whole section on DeepMind, to be honest, their VO and their generative efforts, all this stuff is going to share space and they're going to really flex and show like, hey, we are one of the premier frontier AI makers that exists. And here's everything that you should get excited about right now, because you're hearing about it for a. The first time. So I expect a lot of big news.
- [60:38]
A
So big news then. What are you excited about? What are the folks that you talk to regularly excited about here? And one of the things that I see Google. Do you get these Pixel drops, I think they're called. Throughout the year, the company seems to really trickle out lots of new stuff, whereas we see from other tech companies, it's kind of like a. You get a keynote a few times a year and that's when the stuff, the big stuff happens. Do you feel like Google does a good job of balancing the excitement of new announcements versus this slow rollout or it's not even really a slow rollout, but it's just a pace rollout. Right. And then after you answer that, then you can kind of tell us. Yeah. What we expect to see, what everyone's excited about.
- [61:38]
B
Sometimes they do a good job of it. Sometimes it feels like these random little updates that happen, like drops and everything. Like, there are certain drops that'll happen for Pixel, where I'm like, okay, that's legit. That's a strong collection of new features. I'm happy about that. And then there are some that are just way more clearly, like, I guess we got to do a drop. What do you got in your team? Okay, yeah, sure.
- [62:02]
A
We'll just.
- [62:02]
B
Yeah, okay. Put that on the pile. Yeah, well, you know what I mean. And so sometimes it's more successful than others. The thing about it, though, is this moment in time. As anyone who watches or listens this show probably recognizes by now, the pace is crazy. The pace in AI in particular is just madness. Right now you can have a new thing. You can be Google and release Nano Banana Pro. And then a month later it is completely outdated because the next thing came along and sucked out the oxygen from the room. And now you. And you've already been feeling the pressure for the last month to create the next thing because you've got to have it out in three months, just because that's the pace they're all running at right now. So, yeah, I think it really just depends on what. What that's tied to, I suppose now as far as what we can expect at Google I o. There are some kind of rumors happening. Almost certainly you can go into it and be like, well, we're probably going to hear something about whatever the next version of Gemini is, whatever that looks like. And certainly Alex Heath has published today on his site that there is a rumor of a new Gemini model. Model. He's saying it's on par with something like a GPT 5.5. So nothing Earth shattering, nothing like anthropic mythos level, anything. But the next version, the next point version of Gemini probably going to release. I'm actually excited about the idea that if and when that happens. There has been a lot of rumors kind of pointing to Google working on its kind of. Of its always on agent solution. And right now we're hearing it named Remy or Spark Beta. But it's essentially this idea that like an AI agent can be working, say in the Gemini app or on a desktop or whatever, working 24 7, triaging your email, automating workflows connecting to third party apps from inside the Gemini app, that sort of stuff. And that's really big right now. Right. Openclaw was huge. Was a huge kind of like eye opener for people. Claude Cowork is like the everyday person's open claw, essentially. And that's opening a lot of people's eyes. I'm loving Cowork. I make no secret about that on AI Inside. I'm absolutely digging it. And so Google has to have that too. They all kind of have to have that because if they're not on that, that piece of the pie, then they're missing out. Right. Because they all feel like they need to keep up with each other. So I think we're going to see something like that for sure.
- [64:40]
A
That's exciting. See, that's. This is again where I applaud, applaud Google on, on creating stuff that I think it's very easy to see how people can make use of it. And there's just. It doesn't feel so pie in the sky floaty kind of, you know, we can't wait to see what you do with it. It's more. Hey. Here are 15 examples of how you can make use of this. And it's real life stuff. And I think that, you know, we saw, I think it was, was it last year's event where we had. Was it Google I o that there was a celebrity host?
- [65:34]
B
Oh, yeah, it was. It was then. God, the Tonight Show.
- [65:40]
A
Is that Fallon? Kimmel?
- [65:41]
B
Fallon, yeah, that's Fallon.
- [65:43]
A
Yeah. And yes, that was.
- [65:45]
B
But that was. That, that wasn't actually Google I O, now that I think about it, that was like the hardware event that they had.
- [65:50]
A
That's.
- [65:51]
B
That's right.
- [65:51]
A
That's right.
- [65:51]
B
Yeah. Which was a live event, but it was, it was Fallon. But yeah, they do, they do play around with those, those kind of ideas.
- [65:58]
A
Yeah. And I thought that they did a good even, you know, there were complaints and whatnot and cringe and blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I did appreciate, again, I think you do need to demonstrate to people and show what some of the capabilities are and maybe make it not so much about like the code of it all. And I give Google credit for that. So, yeah, that's exciting. Anything else that you want to kind of touch on as stuff that we should be ready to look out for at this event?
- [66:37]
B
I'm pretty sure we're going to hear more about smart glasses. And it's interesting how fast it. These things changed. Now I'm kind of getting the sense that the general Temperature in the room about smart glasses is moving back into glass hole territory. And yet Google still has its project Aura with its partnership with xreal that they showed off last year. I'm guessing we're probably going to see that in some sort of tangible form while we're there. This year their partnerships with Gentle Monster were with Warby Parker, their upcoming glasses that they still haven't released the Meta Ray Ban style glasses with or without display. Google has said that there will be some sort of showcase on smart glasses at Google I o I'm guessing there's going to be some announcements there around either availability for Aura or its regular glasses. Something along those lines with. We've also been hearing rumors of Samsung's glasses. Samsung might actually save that for its own event, but if there's some sort of showcase, maybe Samsung's a part of it. I'm guessing that has the stage time a little bit to kind of show like, hey, check out what else Google and DeepMind are doing with Gemini in the wearable form factor space. I'm very curious about that.
- [67:56]
A
Nice. Well Jason, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today to not only talk about what Google has already revealed, but also what's coming up. It's been wonderful getting to chat with you and if people would like to follow along with the work that you do, watch your videos, listen to your shows, all that jazz. Where are the places they go to do that?
- [68:22]
B
Android Faithful is my Android Podcast. AI Inside with Jeff Jarvis is my AI podcast and we actually just announced a daily version of AI. It is for patrons only, but it's for free right now. So if you go to patreon.com AI inside show, join for free and follow, you can check out the show before it becomes a paid thing. I might actually end up opening up like one episode per week that is just for everyone. So follow it, see if you like it and lots of things to keep me busy these days, that's all. That's where I'll cap it.
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A
Awesome. Thank you Jason. We appreciate it.
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B
Great to see you. Thank you everybody.
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A
You too. Alrighty folks, let's take a quick break and we'll come back with a little story of the week I want to tell you about Bitwarden bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. Bitwarden is the trusted leader in password, passkey and secrets management. With more than 10 million users across 180 countries and more than 50,000 businesses, Bitwarden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews. With Bitwarden Access intelligence, organizations can identify weak, reused or exposed credentials and take action immediately, while vault health alerts and password coaching surface risks to individual users in real time and then guide them to fix issues on the spot, turning one of the most common causes of breaches into something visible, prioritized and fixable. And now Bit Warden is introducing the new Agent Access SDK, a power powerful way for developers and teams to securely integrate controlled credential access into applications, automation, workflows and AI agents. It enables programmatic just in time access to vault stored credentials without exposing sensitive data, supporting secure use within modern development environments. This release does not incorporate any AI functionality into the Bitwarden solution and does not grant AI systems persistent or unrestricted access to vault data. The Agent Access SDK is a separate open source development toolkit designed to enforce secure human approved and scoped credential access for teams that leverage AI agents in their workflows. Available now in early alpha phase for testing, the Agent Access SDK introduces a secure framework for how agents request, receive and use credentials, helping define a model for safe credential interaction in agent driven systems. Bit Warden now enables PassKey login for Windows 11. Very cool. You can securely unlock devices at the OS level and it's working with Microsoft on native Passkey support while extending SSO to automatically log users into more apps, making credential management across devices more seamless than ever. For those who want a lightweight option, Bitwarden Lite offers a self hosted password manager designed for home labs, personal projects or quick deployments with minimal overhead. Bitwarden's open source code is regularly audited by third party experts and it meets SoC2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and ISO 270012002 standards. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user@bitwarden.com TWiT that's bitwarden.com TWiT thank you so much to Bitwarden for sponsoring this episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from the break and this is important. This week in what one digital librarian is already calling the biggest student data privacy disaster in history, the Edtech Platform Canvas. I am certainly familiar with this tool used by roughly 9,000 schools across more than 100 countries from kindergartens to through major universities. That's where I used it was hit by a ransomware attack that locked millions of students out during finals week and exposed an enormous trove of personal data. I learned about this on Instagram when a it flew by. On my algorithm. A post from a student showed some email exchanges with a professor who the professor was saying, it doesn't matter that you don't have access to Canvas and can't get the study guide. You are going to still have to take the final, you know, on X day. I am not. I can't help you. And that's pretty wild. The hacking group called Shiny Hunters claims it accessed information tied to more than 275 million students and faculty, including billions of private messages exchanged on the platform. Now, you know, I imagine most of those messages are probably just assignments from professors saying read this piece and respond to it with your thoughts. Regardless, not great. Two pieces frame the story. Jason Kebler at 404 Media broke the scale and the stakes through a conversation with longtime EdTech critic Ian Linkletter. And Stephanie Schapper at Cyber News had even more news that Instructure, which is Canvases parent company, has now confirmed that it paid the hackers and is asking everyone to trust that the stolen data has been destroyed. Of course there's a lot here. There's the breach itself, there's the ransom, what was actually taken and of course the much bigger question of what happens when one company sits on the academic lives of hundreds of millions of people. So let's talk about how that one person, that one individual, the digital librarian who's worked in ed tech for 20 years, says that this is the biggest student data privacy disaster in history. This, this Ian Linkletter, who is this digital librarian is actually known because Ian exposed privacy concerns in a software called Proctorio, which was a test proctoring software. That company sued him but then eventually dropped the case. He did support Blackboard, the tool that was once. Maybe that's what I used, maybe I didn't use Canvas. Now I'm thinking about it. I think it was Blackboard. But we may have changed from Blackboard to Canvas at this university regardless. Then Canvas came along in I think 2022 for linklettr and in doing so he says watch the whole industry shift from what he calls scrappy little self hosted learning management system apps that ran on local services, local servers rather, to the centralized US based cloud model. Now the point of that is that the hack wasn't just bad luck. It's what happens when every school's data is placed in one basket. Before it wasn't like this. If you had these local servers and you had this local infrastructure and Everybody was working with their own thing then. It was not as easy to have this huge target here. Having the centralization maybe made it easier and cost saving for universities and schools. But the problem is now there's one place to look. That said, let's talk about what was actually taken. So in structure the company, their public line is that the exposure is limited. Worry not. The exposure is limited because usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information, student ID numbers, and private messages exchanged on the platform, that's all that was taken. The company has been explicit that passwords, Social Security numbers, financial information, grades, coursework submissions and student files were not exposed. And that seems good. But let's think about what's actually in a Canvas message thread because Linkletter talks about this in a chunk of the interview over at 404 Media, talking about the what students routinely tell instructors through the platform. They will talk about medical circumstances. They'll talk about accessibility accommodations. They'll talk about disputes. They'll talk about sexual assault allegations. They'll talk about all sorts of stuff using Canvas as the platform because that's where the professors are looking. Well, that's the data that got out. Muhammad Yaya Patel, who is a cybersecurity advisor, made another point to Cybernews saying, unlike a credit card that can be canceled, a child's identity and educational record follows them. And that said, it's still, you know, out there in the world. So what happened when the company was faced with the choice of continuing to not be able to access the data or regain access to the data? Well, on Monday, as we record this, on Thursday, May 14, Instructure CEO Steve Daly excuse me, Steve Daly confirmed in a blog post that the company paid they don't say how much, but they do say that in return they got the stolen data. Plus digital confirmation of data destruction, plus assurances that no customer will be extorted publicly or individually. In fact, one Shiny Hunters representative told Reuters, quote, data is deleted, gone. The company and its customers will not further be targeted or contacted for payment by us. But we have to be mindful of the fact that that this is the word of a ransomware gang. Cyber News quotes the standard expert caveat that payments to extortion groups don't guarantee that data is destroyed. And in fact, the FBI Cyber Division put out its own PSA to victims saying, if you are contacted directly by anyone claiming to have your data, we recommend you not send payment or respond to their demands. The FBI guidance and instructors payment obviously point in opposite directions. Now let's how, how did this happen? Where did this happen? What happened? Well, it seems to be that the technical entry point is I think, kind of embarrassing because of the scale of the damage in structure. Went ahead and said what happened. It disclosed that the hackers got in by exploiting a vulnerability tied to to canvases free for teacher accounts. This is a no cost tier that will let individual instructors spin up a canvas environment without having to go through an institution. That feature is currently shut down. But the company says or, and also the company says that it revoked privileged credentials and access tokens. It did a whole bunch of other stuff to try to mitigate this. But a free lightly gated on ramp which is supposed to get more teachers onto the platform was the way and the door into the systems holding data on hundreds of millions of people. So what do we do when we're balancing growth model and security model? It seems that in this case the balance was unbalanced. So now it comes down to what happens next. What will the group who stole this data and allegedly deleted this data do? We don't know yet. We have to wait and see. And students have to wait and see what information of theirs has been accessed and whether or not, you know, private and and important data as part of those messages is out there as well. Ultimately, the company needed to move quickly to get all of its customers back into the platform, but at the same time choosing to pay and running the risk of this being an ongoing issue if the Shiny Hunters group continues to, to reach out and say, hey, we've got this data still, so pay us again. We don't know if that's going to happen. It is the era of ransomware. It is the era of AI phishing and this, I think, is incredibly frightening. I'm glad that I no longer have a Canvas account, as far as I know where I have shared, you know, information that I'd rather not have out there. Students should of course wait for or look for communication from their own universities or education institutes and also be on the lookout for more communication from the company that is in, that owns Canvas. I've already forgotten what it's called. Instructure. Look for more information from Instructure on next steps and kind of ongoing recommendations for how to protect that. Folks, is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. I want to thank you all for being here with us today, for tuning in. It's always a pleasure to have you here. If you would like to, if you're not subscribed to the show you can subscribe to the show in audio and video formats at TWiT TV TNW. I would also like to invite you to join our club Club Twit at Twit TV Club Twit. You can head there or use that QR code in the top corner to join the club. It's $10 a month, $120 a year and in joining you will gain access to some awesome benefits. Every single one of our shows ad free, just the content. You'll also gain access to our special feeds. We've got a feed that has kind of behind the scenes before the show, after to the show these little clips. We also have a feed that has our live coverage of tech news events upcoming. Google IO will be covering that as well as the upcoming WWDC where Leo and I will be there to to not there but we will be covering that live as well. Those are only available to you in the discord or as part of the club because of the the fact that now tech companies really like to have our videos that we stream taken down for you know, rebroadcasting. In any case you can get it there and then also a feed that has our awesome club shows my crafting corner which by the way this month will be the last Wednesday of the month so we've rescheduled it for May 27th. It's usually on the third Wednesday of the month which would be May 20th but this this month it'll be on May 27th and tune in tomorrow. I will be joining Leo and Stacy for book club. Very excited about that. Where we are covering we are talking about the book A Psalm for the Wild built. So be sure to tune in tomorrow and hang out for that as well. I think that just about covers it. You can follow me online ikasargent on many social media network or head to Chihuahua.com 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. Thank you so much for being here. Catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly.
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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course if you enjoy overpaying.
- [84:46]
A
No judgments.
- [84:46]
C
But that's weird.
- [84:48]
A
Okay, one judgment anyway.
- [84:51]
C
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [84:55]
A
of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.