Click on any social media platform and you will be flooded with advertisements.
Amongst the regular ads, there's also scams, including get rich quick schemes and fraudulent ads. These scams may not be a simple glitch in the system. It is rather an organized effort for Meta to get richer.
Two journalists from Reuters uncovered the truth about Meta with their series “Meta’s Secrets of Success.”
Quantum computing is one of the leading developments that applies knowledge of quantum physics to solve problems in cybersecurity, medicine and finance. We will learn more about this emerging tech field.
During many universities' finals week, Canvas was hacked, causing disruptions for many universities, including Ohio State, while the system was shut down for several hours.
We're talking about all of these topics during this week's Tech Tuesday.
Guests:
- Jeff Horwitz, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Reuters
- Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin, co-director, Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering
- Russell Holly, director of commerce content, CNET
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. Users of social media are constantly being bombarded with advertisements for just about everything. Some of them are real, many of them aren't. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is exposing their users to thousands of fraudulent advertisements and profiting off of them. Reuters journalist Jeff Horwitz and Engin Tum reported on this and won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting for the report Meta's Secrets of Success. And here today to talk about this is Jeff Horowitz. Welcome to the show, Jeff. Thanks for having me. So congratulations on winning a Pulitzer Prize. Before we get into your reporting, what was that experience like? What was it like winning the Pulitzer?
Jeff Horwitz: That was pretty wild. I knew that they had entered the work into that, but it was just pretty bizarre to first hear that maybe I was a finalist and then when the actual ceremony happened that, wow, okay. So it's one of those things that I don't know that I ever had that on. Expected for my career in journalism. Mostly it seems like staying employed in this business is really a compensation enough.
Juravich: Yeah, well, you know, write it on your bucket list and then checkmark it off. There you go. Yeah, all right. So you and your reporting partner won for your reporting on Metta and the investigation into the company's acceptance of exposing users, including children, to scams, fraudulent ads, AI manipulation. In your reporting, you found that Metta did not seem to care much what they were exposing people to fraudulent adds. Tell me, was this all about just making money off the ads? They didn't care what the ads were.
Horwitz: Yeah, that would be a short version of it, is that, look, the company doesn't prefer fraudulent advertising, but the thing is that scam advertisers, like people who are attempting to separate you from your money for fake products, for fake health, you know, miracle cures, or like, you now, sort of advertisements for financial firms that really are just crypto scams or pump and dump operations. That stuff, those guys pay top dollar for the advertising. Like they out-compete other advertisers very frequently. And so Metta set up a system in which they were aware they were doing $10 billion a year of sort of banned advertising. And, you know, they... Handcuffed the teams that were trying to address that by telling them that they couldn't ever really have any false positives So in other words, they had to pretty much be almost entirely accurate when you remove anything now, of course if you're demanding perfect accuracy from From people who are responsible for you know building computer systems to filter out scams Then maybe you're not going to end up removing many many scams at all And that's kind of where things ended up going and in fact, they actually even Their preferred method, instead of actually removing dubious advertisers, was to actually charge them a premium. So if you were an advertiser that seemed pretty sketchy, were likely fraudulent, Meta might put what they called sort of a handicap on your bid. And so you'd have to pay more than other more legitimate advertisers for the same space. But they'd still take the money.
Juravich: Yeah, okay. So basically what you're saying is Meta created this system that only banned advertisers who were marked by an automated system as being something like 95% certain they were committing fraud. So, I mean, and that's such a high percentage, right? So this computer system would be like, we think this is a fraud and it would have to be flagged. Were there any humans involved in making these decisions?
Horwitz: Very few. I mean, at the top, yes, in terms of the design of this system, absolutely. But one thing that we found was that Meta had, in fact, laid off a whole bunch of entities that a whole of teams that had worked on this stuff. And they really kind of had starved it for laughing for years, I mean, to the point that they... Didn't even sort of track some of this stuff. So on, I mean, this is just an example of a particular type of scam, but on sextortion as a form of abuse, they basically missed every single one in hundreds of examples they were looking through. They just simply didn't have the people or tools necessary to actually deal with this.
Juravich: Something else I found interesting is that users who clicked on a scam were then more likely to be shown more scams due to the way Meta's algorithm personalized the system. Can you talk to me more about this endless cycle that users could fall into?
Horwitz: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is really core to all social media, which is that they're going to be looking at your behavior on the platform and whatever things seem to work, whether that's, you know, videos that you click on and watch three times or whether that is advertisers you're interested in, all that data is going to get fed back into a algorithm to determine what things those behavioral patterns might predict. Should be shown to you next. And so without a doubt, and MetaPeople internally recognized this in documents we saw, if you happen to click on one scam ad, well, that means you're more likely to click on the next one and the next. And so this system does, every bit as much as if you like basketball, you're likely to see basketball clips. You know, if you fall for one scam, you're likely to get targeted by Meta for other scams because the advertisers are paying for that access and Meta is trying to deliver it in the most efficient way possible.
Juravich: You talked with a digital threat strategist named Sandeep Abraham. And basically they said, if regulators wouldn't tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn't tolerate it in tech. So help me understand why are tech companies held to a lower standard than banks when it comes to fraud?
Horwitz: Yeah, and Sundeep, it's worth noting he used to work at Metta doing stuff along these lines. The kind of crazy thing of media, even though these are literally some of the biggest companies on the planet, right, Meta, Google, et cetera, is that the rules governing... How they do business and sort of the money they take in, they just don't exist compared to say banking, right? It's understood that if a bank is handling dubious transactions, or there's like really questionable merchants on their platform, the bank is gonna have to deal with that. I mean, there are both financial and legal penalties if not. There's just simply we just haven't made any laws in this country and that's you know, not just us I think a lot of countries are Haven't really dealt with this even as so much of the economy has migrated to social media
Juravich: All right, and so we haven't made any laws, but you also discovered that it was easier to advertise a scam on Meta than Google. So why was that?
Horwitz: There were a few reasons. One was that it turns out that a lot of this scam activity is coming from overseas and Metta had, for sort of just reasons of how it set up its business in China, allowed these ad agencies to sell enforcement protected accounts. That doesn't mean they were invincible, but basically Metta's Chinese partners were selling access to accounts that, you know, even if they were flagged. For misbehavior by companies' own algorithms would be allowed to keep operating. And so that was a big part of it. Likewise, just the really high thresholds for removal, right, which is that there was just no tolerance for the people who did safety work for them bringing down Metta's revenue by any meaningful amount, or just even a fraction of a percentage would get their operations shut down.
Juravich: Hmm. Okay. So, so Google was at least doing something compared to Meta, is that what you mean? Google, well, Google- Yeah.
Horwitz: And Google did. Google had more verification. I think that's one of the things that we found in terms of solutions to all of this is that people inside of Meta had amply documented that if you required advertisers to prove who they were, that fraud went down. Meta didn't want to require that because revenue also went down
Juravich: This is Tech Tuesday from all sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the Pulitzer Prize winning report on meta and fraudulent advertisements promoted on their platforms. We're taking with one of the reporters who won, Jeff Horowitz. So one of things that you did as a part of your reporting is you kind of built your own scam. Talk to me about that process and what you learned.
Horwitz: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, as you know there is a fairly ironclad rule in journalism that we are never supposed to lie or misrepresent any information and that goes both to readers and also in our dealings offline. So we had to get some approval for this from Reuters League But what we did was create ads asking if people were interested in a 10% weekly return, which would be insane. That's like a 14,000% annual return. If anyone ever offers you this, you should run away because they are lying. And so we put up these ads, put them through the system, and found that Meta actually, through its AI tools... Was offering to improve them and in many instances medicine improvements like sort of automated upgrades to our ads They'd like target they'd add in, you know people of different races with the are you interested in 10% weekly returns on crypto? You know, they would you know Tell you know create content or create text about you know how you know, are you tired of living paycheck to paycheck? Like that sort of thing. You know, get your guaranteed income stream coming through the door, you know? Like that's sort of stuff. So it was really, I think Metta was actively a part of creating these ads, which is interesting because that traditionally has been what Metta's relied on to say this isn't our responsibility is that this is user created content. Well, I mean, in the case of the ads we ran. Yeah, I mean, I was involved in the process, but so was Metta, you know, they were actively optimizing the ads to make them, in my mind, kind of even scamier.
Juravich: Yeah. So tell our listeners, how did Metta respond to you? I mean, you won an award for your reporting. You exposed all of this, but I'm just going to take a guess and say it's still happening.
Horwitz: Yeah, the Metta has said that they are continuing to pursue verification and that they have other, you know, and other sort of anti-scam enforcement efforts. There are investigations in the EU, Santa Clara County on behalf of California residents has now sued Meta over this stuff. And so the company has denied that basically the fundamental stuff of our reporting, which was based on meta-documents stating that they had tolerated this level of fraud, in fact, had even resisted cutting back on it because it would hurt their earnings. And they say that they are, you know, that consumer safety is a priority for them.
Juravich: So you mentioned the Santa Clara County suit in California. They're alleging about Metta profiting off of these scams. But how does that lawsuit fit into the larger context of tech companies being sued? I mean, I feel like there's just lawsuits left, right, and center everywhere related to this. Yeah.
Horwitz: Yeah, I mean, there's, so this is in terms of scams in the business side. This is a notable development. But you are correct, there is this larger pattern of suits that have only recently started to get traction and get in front of juries, alleging that failures in product design are so significant. That the platform should be liable, even though US law protects them from being responsible for anything, you know, user generated on their platform. And so I think, I think that, you know with child safety, that was kind of the thing that led to verdicts against Meta in New Mexico and Los Angeles. And there are thousands, literally thousands of other cases coming, some brought by school districts, some bought by private plaintiffs. The, on something like this as well, you know, the claim made by Santa Clara, and you know I wouldn't be surprised if there are more entities coming on this front, is that Metta deliberately designed its system to make money for the company while exposing its users to fraudulent and scam ads.
Juravich: Well, just to end on from your reporting and from, you know, you basically making up a false advertisement and all that, you develop some safeguards, some safety tips to prevent people from participating in scams. So what would you what would you like to tell people to watch out for when they're scrolling through their Facebook or Instagram?
Horwitz: Some of it's really obvious, such as like, look, if something looks too good to be true, for the love of God, don't do it. Then there's also, you know, to be very wary about ads that sort of lead to direct messaging, particularly in an encrypted form. So that I mean this stuff is common sense, I mean the problem is that this is a system, as we were discussing earlier, that will target those who seem to be lacking in it most. So it's one of those things that, yes, I think individuals can and should try to take care of themselves, but this is maybe a bigger problem than just consumer caveat and consumer beware.
Juravich: We have been talking about the Pulitzer Prize winning report on meta profiting off of fraudulent ads with the winner, Jeff Horwitz. Thank you for joining us today, Jeff.
Horwitz: Thanks for having me.
Juravich: Coming up, we're going to learn how quantum physics is being used to solve problems in cybersecurity, medicine, and finance. That is when Tech Tuesday from all sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
Speaker 4: You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow Up First wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what and why.
Juravich: You're listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. Most everyone took a physics class in high school in which we learned about the laws of gravity and motion. And some of us even know a bit about relativity, recent modern branches of physics, known as quantum physics, which studies nature at its smallest scale. Movies like "Oppenheimer" touched on the technology. That understanding quantum physics allows. Quantum computing is one of the leading developments that apply the knowledge of quantum physics to solve problems in cybersecurity, medicine, and finance. Joining us now to talk about quantum information technology is Zeke Johnston Halperin, co-director of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering at Ohio State. Welcome to the show, Zeke. So your field of study came to our attention because we saw some media coverage about the date April 14th, which ended up being known as World Quantum Day. What's the significance of April 14? Tell me about that.
Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin: So I think it's an international effort to sort of broadly raise knowledge of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum mechanics and how it affects our world. And so it's a great opportunity for us to do things like this and sort of share how exciting the frontiers of science really are. And I think something I'm particularly interested in being a professor at a land-grant institution like Ohio State that it's. Very fun in the pure academic sense. It also has important implications for everyday life, for modern technology, for the economic development of the state. So I think it's really a great venue for talking about what the future holds.
Juravich: Yeah, so my exposure to physics would be a high school class where we studied roller coasters, you know, and that would be where it ends. So can you tell me what differentiates quantum physics from the classical physics that I studied?
Johnston-Halperin: Yeah, and it's a great question and a fascinating topic, and you did a great job in your intro and framing it. The movie "Oppenheimer" is actually my go-to to start the conversation as well. And the back end is obviously exciting for many reasons, but to a scientist, it's the first 15 minutes that are really telling. And so I think they really did an impressive job given the limits. The first.
Juravich: Well, for someone who hasn't seen the movie, tell me a little bit about what happens then.
Johnston-Halperin: So that they're they're describing in the early 1900s when the theory of quantum mechanics was really coming together and that you know They they followed Oppenheimer as sort of the main character traveling to Germany where a lot of this work was happening And just learning about these new rules of nature, and it's really impossible to overstate how important and foundational This advance was so our discovery of how the quantum world operates you know initially a question of How do atoms and electrons and the protons in them actually behave? What rules do they follow? Changed everything. Biology, chemistry, technology from lasers to microelectronics to everything. It's geology. Pick a field of study. Foundations were shifted by this theory. And one of the exciting things that's happening now, and sort of, so you can imagine from that that. A lot of the work we do at Ohio State touches on quantum mechanics in one way or another. There's an exciting new frontier of the field that's opened up just in the last 10 years or so, which is sort of taking an aspect of the theory that people realized pretty early on but didn't really know what to do with. So it often happens in science. People wrote some papers. It kind of sat on someone's desk for a while. Yeah. And then. Has sort of exploded into really exciting opportunities in what's being called quantum information technology. And so science can have lots of jargon. Here, we're fortunate. That information technology piece means exactly what it means in everyday life. So if you think of IT being computers, networks, maybe less common, but also important, like the sensors that connect those computers to the outside world, whether it's a camera. Or like an accelerometer and an airbag, all of that information technology is poised to be transformed by these advances in quantum information.
Juravich: Okay. So tell me how quantum computers, how is it different from a classic computer?
Johnston-Halperin: So I think a useful analogy here is to maybe touch on one of the popular metaphors from what I'll call quantum 1.0. This is the original quantum revolution in the early 1900s and sort of the fields talking about this quantum information as quantum 2.0 or second.
Juravich: Okay, so pre-Oppenheimer and post-Openheimer. Go ahead.
Johnston-Halperin: One point it was Oppenheimer. Yeah. Yeah, and we're okay. We're I don't even know who to give credit to there's so many people But yeah so one of the the famous Findings of the original quantum theory was in this thought experiment by this guy Schrodinger and his cat
Juravich: Okay, I've heard of this. Okay, continue. Go ahead.
Johnston-Halperin: Yes, and it's clear from this metaphor that Schrödinger is a dog person. Because he said, well what if we take a cat and we put it in a box and we take a vial of poison with a little trigger and the trigger is relying on the state of a single atom and we're gonna put that atom in an excited state and wait for it to relax back to the ground state. We'll hit it with some light, there's lots of things you can do to excite an atom. As a little side note, this is how neon lamps work. You take neon atoms, you excite them, and then when they go back to the ground state, they give off light, they give of glow. That's how you get a neon sign. So basically, design a trigger based on this, but for only a single atom. And the rules of quantum mechanics say that you can't predict exactly when that atom is going to return to its ground state. It's a probabilistic event. So if you put this cat in a box with this device with this trigger, and you close the box and you don't look, you don't know whether the trigger has gone off or not.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Johnston-Halperin: So the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.
Speaker 6: Ahh.
Johnston-Halperin: And so this is his way of somewhat morbid way, but it really grabs the attention of demonstrating this concept of superposition, which exists in the quantum world. So that means that quantum objects can be in two states at the same time. And it's even more complex than that, because it's not just a binary 1 or 0. It can also exist superposition can be 10% 0, 90% 1, or 20% 1 80% 0. So it's not just two states that are mixed, you get, you generate sort of an infinite number of mixed states when you're in this superposition.
Juravich: All right, you might have lost me there, but I was with you with the cat. This is Tech Tuesday from all sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about quantum information technology with Zeke Johnston Halperin, co-director of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering at Ohio State. So there's been a lot of talk online, hype about quantum computing. Companies like IBM seem to be capitalizing on new technology. So what are companies like IBM and the like, what are they so excited about when when it comes to quantum computing.
Johnston-Halperin: Yeah, and so first, let me just quickly expand your question because quantum computing is one of the branches of quantum information. But just like our computers, and I'm solidly Gen X, so I remember back when computers didn't talk to each other. And that was very useful. But now with the internet and having IT communications, there's more power there. There's also the sensing piece. So. It's a lot and it's sort of everywhere in the economy, but circling back to your point on the computing, what it does is it takes this Schrodinger's cat metaphor and it flips it around in a really interesting way. So, and this is the more recent innovation. So people already knew this problem in what they would call quantum measurement. Like how do you, you can't measure the state of the cat. You don't know. But the other side of that coin is if you don't know the cat is actually existing in all these states at the same time. So that's a very information-rich environment. So classical computing is always either a 1 or a 0. And that's part of how it works. You can do very powerful things with that. But in quantum computing, they imagine a quantum bit or a qubit, where it can actually exist not just in one of two different states, but an infinite number of states. And so it's a really almost poetic statement, Like, bye. Giving up some knowledge about the state of your bit when you're running your calculation, you enter this infinite superposition where now you have much more computing power. And so it's not just faster in the way that we're used to computers getting faster and faster, it's actually a very different, it's a whole different way of thinking about how to do a computation. So one of the really powerful things that can happen is that problems that are extremely hard for a classical computer. And the famous one is factoring prime numbers, which you might say, great. Here's Zeke getting even more academic. But this is actually the foundation of modern cryptography. So this is how your bank account stays secure when you make a purchase over the internet is this principle that classical computers are really bad at factoring large numbers. Okay, but it turns out because Quantum computers aren't necessarily faster, but they're coming at this problem sideways. With a completely different way to build a computer, that problem becomes trivial.
Juravich: So can they hack, can a quantum computer hack my bank account then?
Johnston-Halperin: And so this is really the realization that really turbocharged this field between 10 and 15 years ago. As you might imagine, everybody, but in particular nation states, banks, people who have really valuable secrets, as soon as this became clear that a possible future quantum computer could do this, it became very important for us to understand how this technology is working.
Juravich: So let's talk about Ohio State Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering, where you work. Does OSU have quantum computers?
Johnston-Halperin: Uh, we do.
Juravich: OK.
Johnston-Halperin: We're, in fact, building two different kinds of quantum computer on campus right now. Not to.
Juravich: Not to hack my bank account, but to understand it.
Johnston-Halperin: And also, this is an important thing to say, because this is very exciting and future look, future. Focused. So it's important to be realistic about what are the time scales and what can we do now. So nobody's hacking anybody's bank account today. Have a great day.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Johnston-Halperin: Um, is it five, 10, 15 years away? That's hard to say.
Juravich: Big shrug ladies and gentlemen
Johnston-Halperin: But to be clear, for now it's still a future thing, but obviously exciting. And so at a research university, you mentioned IBM, who's doing a lot of work. There's Google. There's a whole forest of companies out there building quantum computers based on different technology platforms. And what we can do at a Research University is we can build small sort of test computers to learn more about, you can think of it as the rules of the road. How do those computers work? And then that then feeds into the commercial activity that's happening in quantum computing So just two quick words about the two different kinds of computers reason because it's really really cool So one is very similar technology to what IBM is using Okay, which is using and this is gonna sound science fiction II, but superconducting circuits cooled down to about 10 1,000ths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero so much much colder than space and that works. And that's the technology that IBM and a number of other big players have invested billions of dollars in pushing forward. We also have and so that that's currently being pursued by a young faculty member Youngsuk Kim in our electrical and computer engineering department. In our physics department we have another young faculty member Kevin Singh who's taking something that sounds if possible even crazier. He's trapping individual atoms. Using focused beams of light and those individual atoms become the bits and he can make arrays of thousands of atoms and then use very sophisticated sort of steerable mirrors more or less to sort of move these little, move these light beams to let the atoms interact or not interact. So he can dynamically reconfigure this array and that's another approach to building quantum computers that is also out there.
Juravich: And then he's putting it in a box with a cat. No, I'm kidding.
Johnston-Halperin: I do happen to know Kevin, and he is also a dog person. OK. So yeah.
Juravich: Well, so tell me about students like that coming to Ohio State, are students around the country, around the world learning this in high school or are they just, are they learning the physics that I learned where they take a field trip to Cedar Point and study a roller coaster and then they have to be really into it and then do all this college.
Johnston-Halperin: That's a really great question. And I think it points to a real need to revisit how we teach science, K-12, all the way through the PhD program. And so Ohio State has been a pretty early mover on this education front, because I think your question's exactly on point. I mean, this is, we need to train the future workforce. We need to educate. And there are actually some pretty innovative ideas out there about how to start teaching these aspects of quantum mechanics much earlier I think high school is very reasonable To start being introduced now Getting curriculum into a high school classroom is a process and you know, one of the things I've learned because I've done some work with my colleagues who are experts in this science education field and My personal expertise is more on the physical properties of matter and building these widgets and like if we want to move faster we can build more widgets but it takes a semester to pilot a semester-long class yeah so there's just kind of a time scale yeah but yeah so Ohio State along with other partners in the Midwest University of Chicago Michigan State University of Michigan back in 2020, started one of the first sort of national scale programs looking at how to introduce these concepts at the college level. And that that's a program called Q STEAM, adding quantum plus science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.
Juravich: Okay, so stem became steam and now we're adding a Q to it. Yep. All right, all right. I got you
Johnston-Halperin: And the A, we actually think is pretty important because we need to revisit how do people learn about things because we don't want to just push the same information through the old system. We've got to really be creative in how we do this. And so that's now spun off into an Ohio-based nonprofit continuing that work. And one fun thing to say is that I know people are used to thinking of computing and thinking of Silicon Valley as really the epicenter of that justifiably. But one of the real opportunities when there's a paradigm shift like this is you can have new players in the field. And I think the Midwest is really making them an extremely strong play for being a leader in these new technologies.
Juravich: Do you know what's the name of the nonprofit that is adding the queue?
Johnston-Halperin: Convenientlyqsteam.org
Juravich: Okay. So yeah, no, I'm just interested. So you it's based here.
Johnston-Halperin: Yep, Q-U-S-T-A-M.
Juravich: All right, I'm gonna search that up later. Before we run out of time though, I understand we talked about how this can help in the cybersecurity field and I understand the finance because we use the example of the bank account. But I mentioned at the outset that we can also help with medicine. So how can what you're doing with the quantum information science help in the future with medicine?
Johnston-Halperin: So there's two really strong plays in motion right now. One is in the quantum computing side and one is on the quantum sensing side. So on the Quantum computing side, it turns out that most of the molecules important for medicine are pretty big as far as molecules go. There's lots and lots of atoms and then thousands and thousands. So that makes them difficult to simulate in a computer, which would give us predictive value for knowing what a drug is gonna do or what a... Biomolecule in your body or in a cell is going to do before actually going into the lab and doing it. And so quantum computers function inherently by the rules of quantum mechanics, so there's reasons for optimism that implementing quantum computing will allow us to study these medically relevant molecules much more effectively. And in fact the Cleveland Clinic has a strong partnership. With IBM, they have one of the first privately installed quantum computers in the country there. And they just put out a really nice paper. No affiliation here with OSU, but they put forward a paper that really, again, we're not in the future yet, but they did really nice work in moving the ball forward and simulating these large molecules. So on the other side, in the lab, which is more in my wheelhouse, I mentioned this superposition aspect of quantum computing, and again, we're really taking limits and going back and forth to lemonade a lot in the sciences. And one of the challenges in building a quantum computer is this super position state is extremely fragile. So that why for the IBM computer, you have to make it very cold so nothing disturbs it. Flipping that around, though, that means it's very sensitive to everything happening around it. Qubits can then become very sensitive probes of very subtle interactions that are happening inside individual molecules. And so at Ohio State we have a big push and sort of a federally funded center that's sort of laying the foundation for those quantum sensing technologies where you could, for example, with a quantum computer predict what you expect a biomolecule to do and using a quantum sensor go into the lab and measure it, learn more, you know, feed that back into our virtuous cycle of innovation. And push the ball forward.
Juravich: All right, well, we have been talking about quantum physics being used to solve problems in cybersecurity, medicine, and finance. And I want to thank you so much for your time today. We've been talking with Zeke Johnston Halperin, co-director of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering at Ohio State. Thank you for taking the time to explain this to us.
Johnston-Halperin: Well, thank you so much for having me, it's been fun.
Juravich: Coming up, we're gonna talk about Google's Big Tech Conference and when more AI will be announced. That is when Tech Tuesday from all sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. Google's annual developer conference begins today, and they are announcing, yet again, more AI features and smart classes. To tell us more about Google's announcements, we have Russell Holly, director of commerce content at CNET. Welcome back, Russell.
Russell Holly: Thank you.
Juravich: So Google's conference is about to start. Tell us what we should expect from the event. What are you looking forward to announcement wise?
Holly: Yeah, so Google usually takes this event and splits it up into two days, where the first day is primarily focused on kind of product-focused things because that's when the most people are watching. So things like entering back into the world of smart glasses, something that Google left a while back with its VR project that is now looking at, working with a couple of different manufacturers to have smart glasses that do quite a bit more than just read you your notifications or playing music in your head like you would see with things like the meta Ray-Ban glasses that Facebook has been making. The goal is to expand this so that it's capable of doing a lot more. At the same time, we know that Google has been working on its own brand of laptop to go above and beyond what we call Chromebooks today and to what they are maybe whimsically calling Google Books for one of the better title.
Juravich: Is that the new name? Okay.
Holly: That is, yeah, that is the new name. And yeah, the goal there is to have a separate chip built into the laptop that is entirely for handling AI tasks, locally on the laptop, separate from the processing power that you would use for other things on that laptop.
Juravich: So is this, this is a super Chrome book, but they're calling it a Google book. Is that what you mean?
Holly: That seems to be the case. Yeah, I'm sure that they will have other names as more manufacturers get involved. But as Google tends to do with its laptop coverage, the first one will be made by Google. It'll be something that developers will be able to get their hands on within the next little while. And during that process, we will almost assuredly hear more about the next version of Android and the way that it connects to all of the different products that Google has within its ecosystem.
Juravich: All right, and then you mentioned the smart glasses. So we're not giving up on the smart classes. We're gonna move forward with this.
Holly: Smart glasses are not going anywhere, either from Google or from Apple or from Samsung. I'm sure that this will be something that we will hear for quite some time. There is a quite popular Chinese company named Xreal that just last week announced the set of smart glasses that they did in partnership with Google. And I imagine we'll hear more about that during this event as well.
Juravich: All right, so at day one, they announce all of these new things and stuff. And then are you saying at day two is where they're going to talk about AI features?
Holly: Day two is typically when Google breaks it down for developers. So how the things that they build will connect into these things, more granular conversations with more technical demonstrations and explanations for how a lot of this stuff works, where the first day is really more for flash and show, and weirdly, in some cases, creeping people out.
Juravich: Oh, great. Okay, what's do you can you can you give us a preview what's going to creep us out?
Holly: Uh, the last time Google made a big announcement that they thought was going to be very exciting that ended up creeping people out was the feature that allowed you to have your AI agent call a restaurant and book a reservation for you, uh, where there was no human on your end, it was just the AI calling and, and making that conversation. Um, weirdly that is a feature that gets used by a ton of people now. And there are a lot of people who genuinely love it, but when it was first announced, it is viewed as a deeply creepy thing.
Juravich: Okay. Got it. All right. Well, I guess we'll just wait and see after tomorrow. What creeps us out. Right. Is that the plan. Okay. Moving on to our next topic. So about two weeks ago right around finals week canvas which is a platform used by almost nine thousand schools for instruction was hacked. It caused a lot of disruption. We saw it here at Ohio State University. Can you tell me more Russell about the hack. What happened and how it impacted these schools.
Holly: Yeah, so, you know, there is a group of hackers that refer to themselves as shiny hunters, and they breached the Canvas servers and on two different occasions, and, you now, were able to grab the personal information of just about every student and teacher that had information within Canvas. So, this includes email addresses, physical addresses, any conversations that happened because Canvas has a chat platform with either fellow students or with professors. And so, all of that information, in some cases financial information, credit card data for paying for additional services or extra storage and things like that, were available to these hackers. They got just about everything important that they could have gotten, which caused Canvas to kind of shut things down for two weeks and figure out how they could recover, which is what you were just describing.
Juravich: So, did the hacker want to do something with the information? Or did they want Canvas to pay a ransom? Like, what was the goal here?
Holly: Yeah, so it was a ransom situation. Shiny hunters reached out to Canvas and said, hey, we have all of this information. If you agree to pay us, then we promise that we will destroy copies of this user data and promise not to extort users. That is, as far as we understand, the deal that was made was a bunch of money, which we don't know exactly how much, changed hands under the promise that that data would destroyed and not used maliciously.
Juravich: So the ransom was paid as far as we know.
Holly: Yes, as far as we're aware, a deal was reached with the group with Canvas that made it so that things could return to normal working order. And as far anybody knows, nobody has access to that data as long as we trust the group that hacked them in the first place.
Juravich: Which seems like a backward statement. Trust the group that hacked them in the first place, but okay. So the US House Homeland Security Committee is now involved in this. What are they concerned about? What I just said? Trusting this group? So yeah, it's-
Holly: So yeah, it's an enormous amount of personal information for a ton of people, not just current Canvas users, but legacy Canvas users. So if you graduated a couple of years ago when Canvas was fairly new, then your information was still in some way available to these folks. So it's a ton personal information, for a lot of people across the country. And yeah, so it was a combination. The House Homeland Security Committee and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency, have been working with the company that owns Canvas to work with external forensic experts to try and track down who exactly is responsible for this in that hacker group.
Juravich: Now, did Canvas just have really poor cybersecurity measures? Like how and why did this happen?
Holly: Details of the hacker is something that we don't have a ton of information on right now. I imagine that as the house investigation continues, that more of that data will become public to the United States, because there's going to have to be some understanding of how exactly this was breached. But this is kind of an inherent problem any time that there are third party platforms that promise security and they're not regularly tested. We don't really have a governing body in the United States for guaranteeing a certain level of personal security. There's no standard that must be met in order to guarantee a certain level of security unless we're talking about healthcare information. Then there's some personal layer there.
Juravich: So could Canvas, in theory, tell other companies what happened and how they got hacked to help prevent it? Or would that just expose what was wrong?
Holly: I'm sure that once Canvas is able to guarantee a certain level of security that they will be willing to disclose some information on how a breach like that happened. Being able to fix a breach is something that is unlikely to happen overnight. They may have fixed a single exploit that came from the folks who were responsible for this, but there's kind of no such thing as a guarantee, and if your security ends up being more lax than you were claiming it was, then fixing that could end up taking quite a while to make sure that that information is available. So there's just not enough information right now, and it wouldn't surprise me if Canvas was quiet about this until after the house investigation was complete.
Juravich: This is Tech Tuesday from all sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about some recent tech news with the CNET Director of Commerce content, Russell Hawley. On a lighter note and a cooler note, Shark just launched what's called the Chill Pill, which is a personal fan. And the CNet Wellness Editor just tested out the product. Can you tell me some key takeaways about the Shark fan?
Holly: Yeah, so personal fans got really popular over the last two years. I haven't been able to walk outside when it was hot and not see someone with one of these little tiny fans that blew air on them, or one of the next fans that get worn. They got really popularity over the the last little while. And with that comes a desire to make kind of a higher end version of that. So where a lot of the fans that you would probably find on Amazon range from like 30 to $40, this one is a fairly staggering 150. From from shark, which is a brand known for making, you know, fairly budget friendly things like vacuums and and stuff like that. So this fan is very, very light. It has a cooling plate and a water mister attachment. So these are attachments that you can either clip onto yourself and allow the cooling plate to cool you at the wrist, which a bunch of studies have shown will decrease your body temperature if you're feeling warm out in public or separately paid for water mister attachment that will do as the name suggests.
Juravich: So it seemed though, that CNET and your testers kind of advise that there are more affordable options out there. So they're not saying, yeah, go ahead and get the shark chill pill and spend $150.
Holly: Yeah, there's a lot of testing that goes into this. Sharp is a trusted brand in the space for a while, and so making something like this is not out of the way. A lot of the tests that were shown, especially things like the cooling plate, work really, really well. Our tester found that the skin temperature around the plates where the plate was decreased by 16 degrees in the span of 20 minutes, which is an impressive drop for that sort of thing. But yeah, this is one of the more expensive personal fans that you will find right now. And it's likely the kind of thing that we will see more of over the next year or two as, you know, folks look for ways to cool down when they're outside.
Juravich: Yeah, and I mean Dyson came out with one and that and it surprised me that the because Dyson's always the more expensive brand than shark So what about this like shark versus Dyson wore on vacuums? How are they doing with the fans?
Holly: Yeah, Shark is nowhere near competing with Dyson when it comes to a lot of their vacuum products, but for this, it seems to be a bit more functional than what Dyson has offered so far.
Juravich: So would you recommend, for heading into the summer, would you recommended one of those $40 or $50 fans from Amazon, or would you recommendation jump, I'm gonna say jumping the shark, I just did it, yes, and getting the $150 one, what do you think?
Holly: I think it very much depends on your personal tolerance for heat and how much time you're planning on being outside. A lot of the cheaper ones tend to be really loud. The fans have like a squeal to them that you can hear or the batteries don't last for a long. For this one, the battery lasts up to 11 hours and we only found kind of higher squeal in the fan when it was at its highest setting, which Shark claims can produce 55 mile an hour winds out of its tiny little tunnel. So I am I think something like this really only applies to someone who spends a lot of time outside and wants a fan That is gonna last for quite some time
Juravich: All right, we've been talking with Russell Holly, Director of Commerce Content at CNET. Thank you so much for your time, Russell.
Holly: Thanks for having me.
Juravich: You've been listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich.