Google on Trial, AI Support Fails, and Krebs Fights Back | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, the guy who gets to use the hot dog canon at the baseball game.

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Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast, where Chris and I get into four interesting news articles we found in the last week. Chris, what you got for me?

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Chris: Microsoft updates create a sus-sounding folder. Microsoft then has to tell everyone to just leave it be.

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Ned: It's cool, guys. It's cool.

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Chris: C: inetpub is the name of a directory that you would not expect to show up on a desktop computer.

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Ned: No.

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Chris: Historically, this has been part of IIS, the famous/infamous Windows based web server. In that context, the name is obvious. What would be in a folder called inetpub? Maybe things that are intended to be publicly available on the internet, you might say, quietly to yourself. I don't need that on my laptop, right? I'll just delete it. No need for extraneous folders on the route. Oh, that's right. It's Windows. C Partition. Linux is better. There I said it. Well, hold your horses before you delete, Microsoft would say, if corporations were actually people. They are. That folder, empty as it is, is essential to ongoing system Some updates. What's the word? Updating things. According to reports from users, if you delete that folder, the cumulative update package for April will fail to install. According to a CVE that Microsoft had to release about this folder, this is a sentence I cannot believe I had to say out loud, quote, After installing the updates listed in the security updates table for your operating system, a new system drive/inetpub folder will be created on your device. This folder should not be deleted regardless of whether IIS is active on the device.

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Chris: This behavior is part of changes that increase protection and does not require any action from it admins or end users. They're saying this because they don't want attackers to be able to create this folder, because that would be an attack vector, whether you have IIS or not, which is also super sus. What?

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Ned: What?

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Chris: Almost like these things shouldn't be built as core components of the operating system.

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Ned: Almost.

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Chris: Microsoft just goes ahead and creates that folder for you in a hard to mess with fashion from a permissions perspective. So not quite security through obscurity, but I mean, whatever. I don't care. Just don't delete it.

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Ned: Maybe they should just fix whatever fucking thing is causing this instead of dropping a random folder on my C drive, which I looked and there it is. Delightful. Advertising company Google, guilty of being a monopoly. I mean, we all knew, but still, nice to hear it. The Eastern district federal court has ruled against Google for two of three counts in a lawsuit claiming that Google has maintained a monopoly across ad exchange, publishing, and networks. In the opinion written by federal Judge Leoni M. Brinkema? Brinkema? Let's go with that. Google was found in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act for their Open Web Publisher Server Ad Market and Open Web Display Ad Exchange Market. But the defense failed to prove the same for Google's Open Web Display Ad Networks. The Opinion runs 115 pages long, and it is a masterfully written document with a detailed history of the ad tech business. Seriously, if you've ever wanted a relatively quick lesson in how modern internet advertising works, the first 15 pages alone will give it to you with tons of citations to dig into. I feel a whole ass episode coming on just from this.

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Ned: The two areas Google was guilty of having a monopoly on were the Ad Exchange and the Publisher Ad Server. The Exchange is how advertisers are matched up with sites wishing to publish ads. Ad buys occur via a programmatic bidding process that occurs while a page is loading. The publisher ad server is the method by which the publisher indicates that they have ad spaces for sale. The details of the potential impression for the person visiting the page and what rate they're willing to accept. Now, you might imagine that if Google manages both the exchange and the publisher side of things, they might have an unfair advantage at matching their publisher inventory space before other advertisers publishers. And that's what Google did, requiring publishers using DFP, which is their ad server, to offer ADX, their ad exchange, a right of first refusal for each. In other words, a publisher using DFP had to give ADX the opportunity to buy the publisher's impression before any rival exchanges were permitted to bid for that impression. So yeah, Google sucks. What happens Next, the court will need to set a date to determine appropriate remedies for Google, and Google still has the opportunity to appeal, which they most certainly will.

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Ned: At a minimum, Google will need to pay penalties to the 17 states named in the lawsuit along along with an order to change their internal business practices. It could also include a breakup of Google into separate companies, but that remains to be seen.

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Chris: Ai is well known for hallucinating answers to questions. Let's go ahead and use it for tech support.

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Ned: What could go wrong?

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Chris: Yeah, I know people are immediately going to correct me and say that poorly trained AI is the only kind that hallucinates, to which I would say, isn't poorly trained AI a redundancy? That's a burn. That's a burn, you guys. Yeah, that's a good one.

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Ned: Well done.

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Chris: This week, a user of CURSOR, an AI-powered coding assistance company that is desperately, desperately trying to get purchased. Oh, yeah. Reported a problem with recurring logouts from the CURSOR service. This user tried to contact customer support and was told by Sam Sam, a name I'm putting in air quotes for reasons you'll understand momentarily. According to Sam, this was a new login policy and expected behavior. Confused, the user dug deeper. Turns out there was absolutely no new policy, and there was also no Sam. Sam was an AI support agent who had hallucinated the whole damn thing. This pissed off users of CURSOR, who, I need to remind you, are paying for this experience, especially since the leadership at CURSOR slow rolled a response about AI and about the bug. No apologies seem to be expressed or implied regarding the fact that an AI bot was foisteed upon paying customers with no notice. There have been all kinds of problems with AI bots used as first call tech support and the like over the past few years. As this story shows, it doesn't seem to be slowing down. This isn't quite as bad as the Chevy dealership from a few years ago that agreed to sell a Tahoe for a dollar.

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Chris: No, let me take that back. This is actually way worse. Cursor is allegedly an AI company. It speaks volumes that they had a screw up like this. Of course, it forces us to ask the ever-present question, are they that incompetent or they just not care enough to make sure that they're putting out a quality product? Because let's be honest, neither of the answers is a good answer.

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Ned: Also, why choose? Chris Krebs quits Sentinel One to keep fighting. First, a point of clarification. Brian Krebs is a well-known security researcher who runs Krebs on Security and is in no way related to Chris Krebs. They're not brothers, they're not cousins, But they're both in cybersecurity, so they have to be related, right? Chris is the former head of CISA and was fired by Donald Trump back in 2020 for disputing Trump's inaccurate claims about a stolen election. Through social media posts using the official CISA account, he had delivered several tweets that disputed what Trump was saying at the time, and then also helped to write a written statement that stated flatly, The November third election was the most secure in American history. Since that time, Chris Krebs joined Cyber Security Outfit Sentinel One as their chief intelligence and public policy officer. Now that Trump is back in power, it would appear that he still bears Krebs' some ill will. A memo titled, Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship, lays out the same tired complaints that Krebs suppressed conservative voices and denied possible election malfeasance and prevented social media platforms from publishing alternative viewpoints about COVID-19 and Hunter Biden's laptops.

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Ned: Why won't anybody love me? I mean, okay, so that last part might not have been in there. The memo goes further to state that Chris Krebs' alleged misdeeds mean that his security clearance should be revoked. And further, anyone employed by Sentinel One should also have their security clearance is revoked because that's how the transitive property works. The clear message is that anyone employing Chris Krebs should expect no quarter from the Trump administration. Krebs has decided to fight this decision and its accompanying executive order, but rather than drag Sentinel One through the process, he has resigned his position. The Trump administration has been threatening multiple institutions to punish and suppress dissent, including law firms, universities, and now cyber security companies. We at Chaos Lever support Chris for his efforts as we do any person or institution who stands up to the current authoritarian regime. God, I hope they don't come for the podcast next. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.