**The Dark Side of Productivity: Microsoft's Monitoring Feature and the Rise of Chrome Spyware**

Microsoft's latest productivity feature has sparked a wave of outrage among users, who are now questioning the company's commitment to privacy. The feature, which was added to Office 365, allows managers to monitor employees' productivity levels, including the number of meetings attended, emails sent, and tasks completed. However, this new feature has raised concerns about the level of surveillance being conducted by the company, with many users feeling that their work lives are being monitored at all times.

The feature in question is a dashboard that displays an employee's productivity metrics, allowing managers to track their performance and identify areas for improvement. However, this feature has been criticized for its potential misuse, particularly in corporate settings where it could be used to control employees' behavior or create a culture of fear and mistrust. As one user put it, "This is not good management. It's like they're mentally keeping a tally" of an employee's productivity levels.

Microsoft has since responded to the backlash, stating that they are committed to privacy and did not intend for the feature to be used in this way. However, many users remain skeptical, questioning how a company as large and powerful as Microsoft could have missed the potential implications of their product. As one user noted, "I don't think they went far enough" in addressing concerns about employee surveillance.

Meanwhile, another tech giant has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Google's Chrome browser has been found to contain spyware, with some users reporting that their browsing habits were being tracked and monitored without their consent. This has led to widespread outrage among internet users, who are now questioning the level of data collection being conducted by major tech companies.

In a shocking revelation, one user reported that they had detected 481 instances of Google telemetry on a single webpage, highlighting the level of surveillance being conducted by the company. This discovery has sparked concerns about the impact of spyware on internet users' online experiences and the need for greater transparency and accountability from major tech companies.

**The Rise of Teslaphobia: A Security Breach that Sparked Global Interest**

Tesla's electric vehicles have long been touted as a symbol of innovation and technological advancement. However, in recent months, the company has faced several high-profile security breaches, including a massive vulnerability that allowed hackers to gain access to certain Tesla models.

The breach, which was discovered by a PhD student who claimed to have created a custom device that could hack into Tesla's key fobs, sparked widespread interest and concern among tech enthusiasts and security experts. The fact that the breach required a convoluted process involving a Raspberry Pi and a diagnostic port highlighted the complexity of modern automotive systems and the need for greater cybersecurity awareness.

Tesla's response to the breach was swift and decisive, with the company issuing an over-the-air patch to fix the vulnerability and ensuring that all affected vehicles received the update. However, the incident has raised important questions about the security of connected vehicles and the need for greater transparency and accountability from automakers.

**The Future of Business: Will Social Media be the Next Target?**

As we move into the next week, our topic will shift to social media, an area that is increasingly under scrutiny. With growing concerns about online harassment, fake news, and data protection, social media companies are facing increasing pressure to prioritize user safety and security.

But what does the future hold for business in this rapidly changing landscape? Will social media platforms be able to regain users' trust after a series of high-profile scandals? And how will the rise of emerging technologies like AI and blockchain impact the way we do business online?

Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: the next week promises to be an exciting and unpredictable ride. Stay tuned for our upcoming coverage of social media and beyond!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everybody welcome to the level one news uh what are we doing today government and security and it is december 8th i see that the dog is back in the frame yeah she was about to knock over my ipad case and i was like don't you do it there's the ipad's not in it right now but she was like nosing at it oh now she's licking her crotch chat yeah that's what you do yeah it's friday right that's what you do yeah well it's tuesday for you yeah anyway uh yeah government security i'm not even i don't have the browser open i'm not prepared no oh uh all right yeah all of this stuff this week is brought to you by lenode because they have really awesome hosting one click whatever you want you want to do the you know wordpress thing you can totally do that why you always go with that example i don't know we did the wire guard thing or you did the wire card thing it's really awesome now we also have a minecraft server hosted on the node that was not the one click installer because of the replugins though but they do have one clicking so they do they do have one now we need to make a decision about that actually so it's been running since wednesday yes wednesday yeah uh we're averaging probably three four players yeah it's not a lot i think because i need to move it from the category it's in the forum yeah we put it in a somewhat protected category to try to balance the griefing and the fun well i can tell you that you had at least 30 people in the comments that tried one time to look for it and then they just said oh i guess it's not up yet right but as a result of doing this we will get a lot because i did the same thing with the giveaway and all of a sudden 300 people signed up but so it is in the oh are we going to move it like we should probably decide move the thread because it's in a you can't just register the link is in the description there's no excuse for us not to do that in this episode because it now exists oh so we are you want to put the ip in uh in this video the link to the thread in the description oh okay okay yeah yeah but some people still don't have access to that right no they'll have access to it no it's because it's it's in the the server thread and you have to be i think form level the trust level oh yeah we'll fix that so yeah i'll pick all right anyway everybody everybody will have access couple of people have had three days by being forum members i think that's fair i think that's fair too yeah if you weren't already a forum member why not and remember we're giving stuff away at the end of december depending on how impressive your stuff is and chris is the judge yeah all the information's in the thread about how we're gonna do the judging and stuff so well i mean i can help judge too but i would defer to krista because i i think we should uh we should do some live streams and check it out live well there was yeah wendell there was talk of minecraft on the stream oh yeah i know that you're not that's fine i mean i was tolerant i would take one for the team for that that's fine i'm not i don't know what to do on a minecraft stream like minecraft to me is a game where you just tune out you put on a podcast and you just you just you know your brain takes a little vacation that's why i like it yeah but on a stream how much fun is that to watch that's the question not at all anyway speaking of the level 1 forum the level 1 forum among with millions and millions of other websites also hosted on the node might have a problem not related to lenode oh right if this were to come true now we've seen we've done a lot of stories about this there's been a lot of back and forth but this is maybe the uh the nastiest volley in this exchange because it's a very disgusting thing that happens a lot in u.s politics trump to congress repeal section 230 or i'll veto military funding basically section 230 is what shields online platforms from the stuff that their users post legally so if somebody goes rogue and starts posting something it's like here's how you can download minecraft for free we can just block that content or take that content off and we are not responsible for the actions of our users uh trump's main problem is that twitter keeps labeling his tweets as incorrect or as being disputed and that is driving him insane well it's not just twitter yeah it's not just twitter a lot of different social media and news organizations are doing it i feel like we wouldn't be seeing this if twitter wasn't doing that though he does seem to focus on that one now in section 230 the big thing they drilled down a little bit more ours technically did a pretty good job uh so when it comes to trump's vision of this it's kind of scorched earth there are some other provisions that are a little less extreme and probably the most likely one i think is one that removes language which says that otherwise objectionable content can fall under the things that you can get rid of lewd obscene lascivious filthy excessively violent harassing or otherwise objectionable who gets to decide well basically twitter at this point that's what trump really really hates i also it's also worth pointing out that in all of the rhetoric around this it's like oh this is free pass for big businesses blah blah blah it's like look we're level one we're we're scratching out a decent you know thing here but without section 230 we literally could not do it so i think it would disproportionately affect small businesses more than large businesses this could turn into one of those monkeys paw things where remember when netflix was like oh net neutrality blah blah then netflix realized like wait a minute we could just pay our way out of this and then it would actually be harder for competing companies to get you know a level playing field okay let's buy into the whole net neutrality thing could be plus twitter probably not going to worry too much about this if they can just hold out for another month yeah yeah and but who should be worrying and increasingly worried i would say because this snowball just keeps gaining mass and that is the big tech companies specifically google and facebook because they are the juiciest targets facebook and google to face new anti-trust suits in the us uh ceo eric schmidt sees antitrust law as a very blunt instrument so this is uh talking mainly about facebook and google but it's also talking about lawsuits that states are going to file so google is facing antitrust at the federal level and new york is sort of spearheading this thing against facebook to say that facebook has behaved anti-competitively as well and so uh yeah it's gonna be interesting to see how that shakes out now i can't imagine what google could have done to be labeled as such a monster i mean what kind of behavior would cause the government to come after you like this oh man google illegally spot on workers before firing them u.s labor board alleges company policies violated labor law according to the complaint we reported on this like two years ago and we said uh hey that seems weird because google sent out a notice that said they were going to do something with your calendars and people were adding personal events but marking them as private to their personal calendars and using google like their google stuff i mean like a gmail account in order to organize and google was like uh we can spy on things and it seems to be google's interpretation of if you're using any google services not just your employee google services we have a right to look at that and the labor board looks like they're going to disagree those people were not just creating calendars entries they were creating unionization calendar entries that's not allowed not fair unacceptable but see you can't not allow that you can't not not allow that but the end run that google tried to do around that was to say they can't use company resources to do that but that's not actually what happened according to the us labor board now if this plays out completely in favor of the individuals google might have to rehire them how awkward would that be i think google will probably just you know give them a million dollars and be like good luck i would go on i would see how far i could take it because now you're basically invulnerable right i would be just like throwing trash all over the place you know just go in the cafeteria just start like sh putting stuff on the floor peeing in the sink roo agrees with that yeah yeah it's all about pain in the sink we just threw a pillow down like the establishment hang on root not going to be good oh you can't eject rue chat she's going to have to bring her back with treats after the labor board ruling she's so clumsy she she was also about to knock the lamp off the bedside table so i was like all right we're done in here you're gonna come out the comment section is gonna be furious with you kristen i'm sorry she's distracting me now if you'll think back to 1986 uh we were live we were pretty young uh the world saw that the personal computer was going to become a thing and it was going to be big and so the lawmakers got together and they said we got to figure out what happens when you're trying to get into other people's computers we see this could be a problem and amazingly enough that same law this many years later is still controlling how we interact with computer systems and what's a crime and what isn't until possibly now the supreme court will hear its first big computer fraud and abuse case this is important because we see many cases where the prosecutor has vastly overreached in my opinion with this law uh aaron schwartz you know he was downloading uh publications that probably should have been free in the first place if you look at it on the whole and then he was republishing them on the internet they brought the hammer down on him hard and you know being a relatively meek nerd you know he committed suicide as a result of that so um it's definitely the punishment has to fit the crime and in a lot of cases with the cfaa it doesn't i got burned by the washington post again washington post has the worst paywall because they just phoning you back to their front page yeah i hate that oh well oh well enjoy whatever it was in the one tab i don't know why we lost there but now but you you miss the opportunity or you miss an important point about that story is it could get worse yeah there's a definitely a lobby who wants to lock it down and prevent these researchers from doing things the worst lobby is making the terms and conditions of the website somehow binding like you agree not to do this and it's like oh it's illegal you you agreed that's not what that is the moment that the signature the last stroke of that signature goes on to that we all become criminals yeah i mean those of us that who aren't already well i mean the google terms of service would it's like i'm misusing google services and you criminal imagine using youtube dl being criminalized which i mean they wonder obviously yeah we have another state that has chosen to put the stop to facial recognition and like every other stop like every other instance of this this is a slightly different flavor which is that's the bad thing about these you know like the federal level they're never going to do it on the state level yeah maybe you get some progress but they're all so different massachusetts lawmakers vote to pass a statewide police ban on facial recognition this is just police using the technology directly and even in other places that have this ban there have been cases where they haven't actually done that and it also doesn't close the loophole on third-party services that do facial recognition you think the uh palantir stock went up on that announcement yeah vintel yeah clinton's not official recognition so we don't actually own our own police cars we lease them from palantir and they're the ones that are doing the face at license plate recognition and then when we want to know if you know what all faces were seen in this thing we don't we don't know we don't maintain that we just give palantir five thousand dollars and then they tell us all the faces that they saw on that corner in a given day and time so not only is it unethical it's also incredibly wasteful of tax dollars yeah but valentine makes so much it's so good for palliative shareholders yay that's what you call trickle up economics it's more of a really working out for us so we talked about uh was the week before last the big reveal of course this was years ago decades ago that this happened but the swiss the populace they were thinking ah yes we're so neutral we're so much better than the rest of the world because of our neutrality what they didn't know is that with some of their corrupt government and maybe all of it we're really not sure they were not being neutral at all and it was a big story and it was a big explosion and now we find out that it was even bigger of a break of that neutrality than we originally thought report claims cia controlled second swiss encryption firm so this one went out of business two years ago but it turns out the cia were there all along uh that company has sold cryptographic technologies scripted phones encrypted fax machines things like that to many countries around the world including some to switzerland themselves which their communications were not secure also swiss banks their communication also not secure the phrase you you used a phrase there that i think is probably applicable far more than we realize which is the cio was there all along the cia has been a lot always has been apple i love this one apple makes a lot remember the the big troll yeah once you've downloaded the update it's waterproof yeah but this is not that apple really did say that they'd increased water resistance to their iphones but no one told that to the engineering team who installed the watermark devices inside the iphones which void your warranty apple fined 12 million for unfair claims about iphone water resistance so they said it's water resistant up to 4 meters for up to 30 minutes but it turns out those are only at best in in ideal underwater lab conditions but you would think a phone that's waterproof you know would not be excluded from warranty based on water claims but no there's still water indicators all over the device so people would go to get their devices repaired because it got water in it and something happened and apple will be like no you don't you don't get it replaced the water sensors in the old phones used to be set off by having your phone in the bathroom while you take a shower just really high humidity and it's like oh no there's water in your phone that's how hideously evil apple is and i'm surprised that hasn't been a class-action lawsuit i mean 12 million come on yeah well that was only one eu member state other member states may also yeah they do mention that if they got class action with all those but still it's not going to be enough to yeah apple stop being terrible that's all you got to do stop being terrible also the eu you know they like to present this unified front like we're all one except the uk we don't they're not part of us anymore we don't talk about them but when it comes to how they do things often the actions of the government doesn't reflect that you know beautiful hand-in-hand reality or the reality doesn't reflect the hand-in-hand fantasy and one of those things that will be obvious to you if you live in the eu is your streaming you lawmakers push audio visual sector on geo blocking so it turns out that if you've got a netflix subscription and you travel it doesn't work so it'd be like us in the us it's like i've got netflix i'm going to go you know visit some family to live in texas my netflix subscription doesn't work there it only works in my home state that's kind of like how it is actually for europe it'll work or it'll work a little bit or it'll not work at all so the eu is saying we can't we can't have this but a lot of the time this is rights holders it's you know predates the european union that's just how it's always been the grift for uh you know commercial technology there's also a lot of economic variants because you know you think like turkey they're still in the eu right you gotta think of netflix subscription in turkey costs a lot less than say germany well they actually pointed that out so well not turkey but so germany germany is the example of lots of money germany gets uh if you take all of the content of the eu netflix into account germans can access 43 of it not bad probably everything in their language and a little bit that's not greece on the other hand not as rich greece can access 1.3 of netflix i think greece is what i was thinking of yeah yeah because why why because i can't afford a subscription variance and it's like no we are one european union is this where we get corrected that turkey's not in the eu yeah it's in nato yeah right yeah that's what i was yeah i was trying to think of greece they've already yeah yeah there's already 20 comments about it you idiot puerto rico is not a state i'm sorry like if you thought puerto rico was a state i could forgive you well uh wait it's not a state i said if if they thought that puerto rico was a steak oh yeah forgive them let me uh so that'll be a bunch of garbage in the comments but let me uh filter out that garbage and start a bunch of new garbage comments because we're going to talk about vaccinations oh no now vaccines we won't argue the efficacy of the the vid vaccines or who's going to have them first or whether or not you should take them what we want to talk about is the security around them and it seems like some major players have already identified most of that supply chain and are very interested in it mysterious phishing campaign targets organizations that are involved in the vaccine cold chain the targets include eu directorates companies making shipping containers and a website development firm linked to the supply chains wow they're starting to target the the nerds that are involved that's not very smart yeah so clearly uh what do you think the game in here you think this is ransomware i think it's probably ransomware and probably also intelligent services because intelligence services need to know like what the actual state is because you just you can't like all the media and the press secretaries literally none of it's trustworthy that's true now when you get hacked i'm sorry obviously didn't they say uh they had a bunch of the vaccine i remember there was a story that were like oh it's at o'hare airport in chicago and i was like that seems like a security risk to mention that you have a large amount of your stock at a certain airport i don't think they've chosen one yet right i think it some of it has already been distributed and it's going to the healthcare workers the healthcare workers are the first ones to get it aren't there multiple candidates at this point which one are they using uh i think both are out wiser was the one i saw about in chicago a lot of this these guys are prepping they don't actually care which one wins they're the refrigeration backbone yeah to distribute it because it has to be cold one of them has to be super cold impossibly cold we don't have the distribution infrastructure to handle it i think both of the ones that are like the leading contenders have to be super cold someone's going to correct me in that but i i think both moderna and pfizer both of them do but one of them has to be like colder than most hot like most hospitals just don't have a storage facility that operates at that temperature what if we used a jeep pie and he could use his cold cold heart to keep our vaccines at the proper temperature little known fact his heart is actually a superconductor we've moved to security in case you didn't notice the fbi is often throwing out these little uh cyber security warnings this one is uh it's kind of obvious but maybe you don't think about this when you're thinking about your cyber security and it's a good thing to think about fbi warns of email forwarding rules being abused in recent hacks so your email gets compromised you change your password everything's all good right wrong your email client especially if it's a web client could have a rule in it that says hey any message that comes in forward it to this other external email it's a pretty common tactic and depending on what kind of hookup you have for your hosted email i t people may not be able to see that that's happening so like for example if you've got your corporate email hooked up to download into your gmail and they hack your gmail and they're forwarding out of your gmail your corporate people can't see the rules that you've created in gmail for forwarding and so you could be forwarding internal corporate emails to an external thing just depending on the mail client you're using you could also have a local mail client like say thunderbird and you can have that rule set up in your it people can't see that rule inside your local mail client you know so it could be sent in two factors yeah so they dark web you they find your password oh but it's two factors oh except they're already in your mailbox yeah and even after you change your password they're still in your mailbox and if you didn't change your password they go in and delete the email so you never see it yeah dark times now we know at this point that phone apps are mostly malicious just you gotta you gotta live in terror yeah you can't just go and install phone apps they literally bundle malware browser extensions also malware they're done a couple of people will comment and they're like you gotta install these pay wall blockers and on one hand i like you to be frustrated by the paywalls because they should hate them but on the other hand i don't trust those extensions i don't trust many of them either yeah i mean you block that's got a decent pedigree but these are just random ones you link to or not installing them but perhaps the darkest timeline a timeline that it can only be in 2020 is when the package managers fall malicious npm packages caught installing remote access trojans javascript and node.js developers who installed the jdb.js and db.json.js packages were infected with the nj rat malware this is truly the darkest timeline who can you trust literally nobody do you ever think like we'll look back on 2020 and it'll be like that was the last good year like like this is just the beginning of the the worst times they were quick to get on top of them these were only there for approximately a hundred installs but that's a hundred installs that's a hundred installs and who knows what else is lurking on there gosh that always that always freaks me out too when you just you npm install a bunch of stuff and then it's just your computer's just thrashing for several minutes and it's like you install something and you're pretty confident about it it's like oh this will also install and it's like a big list do i have to do another hour of research here that's weird this s trace shows that it's looking for wallet.dat i wonder what that's about and when it comes to hacks for our phones those are maybe our most vulnerable places our phone at this point i would say yeah and uh when you hear about them they come fast you know it's fast and furious you get them every single week but we really only like to talk about the most severe now the good news is this was patched i don't think every anybody was ever affected but oh boy did you see the video on this yeah it's amazing this is an amazing one the iphone zero click wi-fi exploit is one of the most breathtaking hacks ever i would expect nothing less from apple so it turns out apple has put airdrop functionality in the kernel so if there's a vulnerability in airdrop guess what you can take over the kernel so they've got a demo here where like they do something on a laptop and then there's a whole bunch of iphones you don't have to touch anything or do anything and it immediately starts sending pictures and files on the iphone devices back to the laptop it's insane and it can worm because it's full control and all you need is bad packets so infected phone becomes spreading point for more infected phones apple is better at security than they have been but this just underscores that like clearly they don't have anybody internal doing any auditing well it goes back to last week when we talked about their uh internal firewall their major problem is that they want to excuse themselves from the draconian security rules that they instill they put on everybody else yeah man what a dumpster fire and uh let's say that you're like oh just miss me with those popular browsers i only use terrible browsers and that'll keep me safe right no microsoft removes 18 malicious edge extensions for injecting ads into web pages now you might be thinking no i don't use that horrible old edge i knew i used the new chromium-based edge no this is this is this is what it is the people like looked at popular extensions on chromium and said let's create fake versions of these extensions for people that have come here from edge and so oh it's a double whammy of malware do you know anybody who uses edge i don't know like testing i'm sure there's so many people who just buy new computers and use edge i know a few people that have switched to edge on linux because microsoft is offering edge on linux and edge on linux believe it or not is less spyware even than chrome that's what it works well it's not surprising oh no yeah it doesn't surprise me about chrome yeah this webpage has had you know i had that load 37 assets on this webpage huh that's weird called the google telemetry 481 times as i was loading it that seems odd let's see how to die young or live long enough to become microsoft phrase we have to talk about here speaking of microsoft they are uh we talked last week about their productivity score if you don't know if you missed that one in office 365 office 365 is monitoring you at all times obviously and if you are in a corporate setting then someone has a dashboard they can go in and sort of look at your metrics see what you're up to now obviously when people learn about this they were furious because they're being spied on by a product that they're using hey people don't like that and so microsoft has responded i don't think they went far enough yeah microsoft will remove user names from productivity score feature after privacy backlash so the little dashboard there is like this person sent this many emails and did this other thing and did something else it's like this is not good managers that don't know what they're doing are going to start to use this as a metric for things and it's just it's in 20 meetings and so they're obviously productive right people just schedule it's like they're mentally keeping a tally it's like oh i've only done four meetings this week ready to schedule a bunch and uh microsoft says they're like no no no no we're committed to privacy and this was just you know like this was a feature we added we didn't think about it being used that way we would never do that this is not something that microsoft even thinks about ever microsoft patents tech to score meetings using body language facial expressions and other data man the sequel to office space or you know the 2020 remake of office space the the dialogue here writes itself it's like hey did you see bob he scored a 9.8 on his last meeting is that out of ten or yeah christa you would get crucified by this yeah i would because you'd be doodling and you know like maybe some flapping or something in it yeah i don't i don't know how to hide my facial expressions either like if something's distasteful to me you can see it on my face i i tried to repress that but i can't do it what do you think the effect on your score would be if you made somebody cry in a meeting probably take it the dashboard starts blinking your head that's like oh no we've got a code 43 in the meeting security garage so look i'm just trying to make a better product like i think it's it's exciting that you have somebody that passionate that you're you're wanting to make the product that much better but yeah then it's just like no we must we must not upset the status quo it's all about feelings yeah and finally the tesla world boy are they killing it this year they are making a lot of money gonna talk more about that in business and uh people seem to be somewhat happy except for consumer reports but they did have a massive massive security hole although you had to work pretty hard to exploit it yeah the good news is it's patched and it's over the air patch so you know you don't actually own that car don't worry they fixed it for you raspberry pi used to hack tesla model x so uh you were able to stand next to somebody and make a change or read their key fob or something with a raspberry pi the bluetooth low energy could be updated so you could poison the update and it would accept any update but you still had to like plug in something to the diagnostic port in order to pair the cloned key or something i don't know if you need to do that or not it was some some sort of a convoluted process but yeah it wasn't easy to do i'm pretty sure the phd student is going to get their phd for this though because they discovered something new and tesla had to make changes to the global fleet everywhere congratulations neat dr so-and-so what's your phd in hack and tesla's key fobs all right that's all we got for today and tomorrow we will look at uh business business and i don't remember what the i think it's gonna be social media what a great week of news this will be you think so no no i mean like our content will always be fantastic every week but uh the news stories will probably be depressing and sad but it's just our charismatic spin on the news that causes that kristen not the news itself right all right right right dab on give them that good\n"