Si: Welcome to 2025, a year of exciting upcoming presidential swaps in the U.S.
Desi: Yeah, 20th of January, Donald Trump is in, Joe Biden is out. I only read about that today, and then that deep fear struck me. But we’ll see how that actually turns out.
Si: I was flown out to a conference in Luxembourg, in central Europe, on AI in law.
It was talking mostly about the implications of AI in the court system and in things like decisions made using AI in immigration processes etc.
It’s quite broad, as well as the things that we’ve talked about, like computer generated imagery and stuff like that. It was the day after the election, so we were all sitting around and I could see the tickers on the news saying that that Donald Trump had won.
There were a couple of Americans who were at the conference and one of the things that they were telling me was actually that some of the legislation that was actually put through was very good on a legal standpoint.
They were saying for presidential acts around AI, one was done by Obama, two were done by Trump, and one was done by Biden, and they’re all actually good law.
What we see externally is often fear mongering because it sells newspapers. It’s not about the good stuff that gets done in the background that you know makes a country work. It is getting a bit better and it will be interesting to see.
I think my concern with that particular one is that I feel we’re already seeing some of the impacts of it in things like Facebook or Meta as a whole because it includes Instagram, are scaling back on their moderation.
Desi: Yeah, the free spirit. I found out about that as I was scrolling through LinkedIn this morning for looking for stuff for my job. There was a bunch of articles about Mark Zuckerberg being a convicted paedophile and had gone to jail for the last 36 months and contracted all these diseases. But it was a mock Facebook post.
That’s how everyone is now reporting on this news. I saw six of them and I was like, what the hell’s this? Then When I found the video of and who knows whether that video was deepfaked. For someone who is so in the public, it’s very hard to tell some of these defects because there is so much voice data and visual data.
Si: Yeah, I mean basically, we’re screwed then. You realise that, don’t you?
Desi: Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely realise that. I was looking at AI generated images in terms of humans in pictures and you could train your individual self to try and find pictures, I think it was earlier in the year we might have been talking to Ant about that.
It was like that uncanny valley. You’d look at something and you would feel slightly uncomfortable. You wouldn’t know what it was, but it was that kind of deep human feeling that this isn’t natural.
I was looking at some of those images today and now I’m questioning myself. Is this an actual photo or are they saying it’s AI generated and it’s not. But looking at the photos, it looks like family photos from two years ago, it was phenomenal, some of the content that was coming out.
This is scary, now we’re getting to the point where if they can hide the digital traces of this, and especially with phones now. You have Samsung, you’ve got an Apple, all of that has AI software into the pictures. How do you tell between the two?
It’s a scary thought going into 2025. Not the fact that the technology is there, it’s how it’s going to be used is the scary part.
Si: There was interesting proposal that was put forward by Leica, the camera company. They basically digitally watermark genuine images from the start.
So, we’ve given up on trying to show what’s not real, but if we can prove that something is real, then at least you’ve got that extra layer of assurance. I think we may end up going that way, actually.
It’s easier to do that than it is to get everybody to tag. Because unless you’re going to make your own camera, which is possible and technically feasible to do.
Desi: It’s almost the reverse of when DVDs had the copyright encryption on it. People would go through and jailbreak that copyright so they could then burn the DVDs and sell them to the black market.
Companies like this will do this encrypted watermark. If this watermark is on the picture, it means the picture’s real. I can see criminals then reverse engineering that, to then put the watermark on AI generated images.
Then you have, in the news cycle, cybercriminals who have figured this out. These images from these dates we don’t know whether they’re real or not, because it’s got this watermark. We’ve updated the watermark, but between this six month period, who knows.
Si: Yeah. I think this is the new normal whereby you see something and you’re not necessarily going to be able to trust it.
It’s interesting because we’ve given all sorts of advice. You can go and look up all the advice about how to check an image and check sources, verify using multiple things and all of this. But none of us really do it. This thing pops up on your Instagram feed and you’re sending that to everyone.
Desi: Yeah, and it’s already there designed to be an echo chamber of your own opinions and what you’re viewing.
Si: I think the other problem is, is that reality is actually every bit as bizarre as I think it is. You get some really weird headline saying that some politician has said something and you’re like that can’t be true. It turns out to be utterly real.
There’s a quote attributed to Einstein, which I think it may have been disproved as being his but I like it for him anyway, which was there’s only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not so sure about the universe.
Desi: I love those fake quotes. There was one from Isaac Newton that said, kids are always on their phones these days. That’s fantastic.
So, to continue on from the watermark breaking and putting on pictures, where I can see that becoming an issue is the value. I was just looking for news articles, there’s been a bunch of men convicted in 2024 for generating AI CSAN, and they’re getting quite hefty prison sentence sentences for all of that.
I can see the rarity of the natural product that they’re pushing, which is the CSAN material that’s generated with real victims being a premium within that market. So, this whole encryption thing is where I could see the motivation for doing that. Those niche circles to push that, to then generate the AI images to sell, maybe if they’re selling them at a higher cost as a market product.
Si: Oh, that’s so deeply disturbing.
Desi: I know right, but that’s the real dark side of AI and where all this technology is going. There’s so much benefit, but then when you try and put yourself in the shoes of a criminal and go how would I use this poorly? How would I use this for bad?
I think it’s because we’ve had so many of those discussions last year in terms of AI is being used to try and detect this stuff and where I can see it being used on the other side. Unfortunately, probably where some of those conversations will go this year, as we talk to more vendors and more people in the space that are researching it, that it’s that prediction where it’s going.
I read today that NVIDIA is coming out with a desktop supercomputer for 3,000 US dollars. Have you seen that?
Si: I haven’t, but then you’re going to say that you’re younger than I am, so you haven’t seen quite as many iterations of the desktop supercomputer as I have.
In my garage, I have one of the very first, desktop level, supercomputers, which was a Silicon Graphics Indy Machine. At the time, the graphics card in it alone was a £15,000 purchase and the rest of the machine was an incredible piece of kit. When I picked it up, we were throwing them out from the company I was working with. Which was insane, I’m having one.
I’m going to say it’s Moore’s Law, isn’t it? We constantly increase in this almost exponential rate. It’s slowing, but it’s the processing power that’s available and the cost of it is coming down. The processing is going up, the cost is coming down.
Then again, the new M4 chips with the Mac are phenomenally powerful desktop processors. The speed of them is ridiculous. I’ve got one M1 and one M2 chip and even those are still blazingly fast.
This is on the M1 and it’s still blazingly fast. A machine that’s three, four, five years old and it’s still holding up brilliantly.
Desi: Until the AI models, when you’re trying to generate that stuff where you need way more processing power, anything else you can throw out day to day is nothing, right?
We hit a peak on where we couldn’t generate a software program big enough to challenge the chips that we had. With AI now, when you’re working with large data model sets, that’s the next benchmark. Cinebench will go away and it’ll be handling these multinomial AI models and see how fast you can churn through the data set.
Si: It’s interesting because there’s huge range of issues in doing AI. Like you say, churning through a data set and building a model, but actually disk access.
You’ve got to have your buses that are handling all of that data to be able to put it into a multi core processor in a VPU. To distribute it, and then the memory’s got to be able to pull it and push it at the rates that the process is handling at.
The technology is being pushed on leaps and bounds. This is before we even get to quantum computing.
Desi: I think that’s the leverage, looking at some of the write up for this. They haven’t released all the specs yet. They announced it recently. The leverage that it has they’re doing a lot of it in VRAM. All the processing’s done there and then it’s out onto a NVME drive. Still quite high right speeds, but all the processing be done. It’s just pushing the solution out of it.
Si: Obviously parallel processing is the way forward. How can it not be? You’re doing more things at the same time, purely logical. I wonder if we’re heading towards seeing more things like distributed parallel processing, whereby you’re, you’re chaining together multiple machines, perhaps of a lower spec.
Desi: That’s the NVIDIA one.
They were talking about that you can buy multiple units and chain them together.
Si: When the link comes into the show notes, I’ll look forward to that very much.
Desi: It’s a brief, initial announcement for them. You can go on a waitlist at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to see some of the early testing that comes out when they pass it off to vendors to run tests and what their reviews say.
They’re going the way that Apple went. Everything integrated onto the one chip, it’s not a piecemeal thing. If you’re plugging pieces in, your bandwidth is limited. So, they’re pushing everything in the same way.
Si: Interestingly, on the chip front, Raspberry Pi 5, 16gb edition drops this morning, so you can have a Raspberry Pi with 16gb of onboard memory as a system on a chip.
Desi: Raspberry Pi is now just like a computer from 2010, right? That’s where we’re at.
Si: I would agree with you, except I think it’s better than a computer from 2010. I’ve got one that sits behind my TV running a of a media server version.
Desi: I have a computer from 2010 running a media server. So, it’s probably better than mine. I had to get mine fixed because the RAM failed. So maybe I should just upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 5.
Si: Yeah, there you go. It’s probably cheaper than a couple of sticks of RAM.
Desi: It is, because it’s Ddr4 which is like hen’s teeth to come by these days.
Si: I was going to say, you offered to send me something earlier, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a drawer full of DDR4 kicking around somewhere. I’ll send it in exchange.
Desi: I was in that transition period when I was looking to buy my new computer, which I didn’t end up buying before I got this one. It was right in that in between where Ddr5 was new and it was so expensive, but then Ddr4 was getting more expensive because they weren’t making it anymore. I’ll just wait five years and then Ddr5 will be cheap.
Si: The one thing about the Apple ecosystem is that I can’t upgrade the memory in my machines because otherwise it breaks them. So, I buy as much as I can from the outset and then live with it. Having said that, my laptop is a 96gb machine, so it’s not insignificant for a little portable device.
I’ll share this window with you. Apologies for the quality of the photo, it was taken in the supermarket but this is where we’re heading.
Desi: Rise of killer robot fridges. Boffins fear AI devices going rogue.
Si: The prevalence of fears about AI hitting the press. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the Daily Star Sunday edition is quality press.
Desi: The font type of choice doesn’t scream professionalism to me.
It almost looks like one of those slasher films from the 80s and the camera starts off looking at a news stand about a serial killer killing a bunch of people. Then it pans to the street and there’s all the college kids having a milkshake or something.
Si: This was in the entryway to my local supermarket, so a pan to the right would have given me the meat fridges, and if they were eating someone it would have made perfect sense. Perhaps it’s a horror film yet to come.
Desi: Those fridges, they’ll get you.
I’m fascinated by stories, the headings and the kind of choices that journalists make for their titles that are clickbait. Then when you read the actual article, what is the underlying message?
It’s always been like this, but you see it a lot more in Instagram, Reels or TikTok’s, where you read the title and it’s not representative of the content because it’s generally AI generated or it’s just trying to be catchy.
Are you looking at the story?
Si: I’m actually looking at the daily star.
Desi: Your phone is going to track you and give you a lot more Daily Star now. That’s going to be the end of your news cycle on your phone.
Si: But yeah, fridges could lead a robot takeover of the world.
Almost all UK homes have a refrigerator. That’s a fairly self-evident statement. 40 million fridges. Experts, however, reckon that as home tech gets smarter, they could soon be plotting to overthrow us.
Desi: I’m currently reading the same article, and I’m not against one of the points in here.
So, worries, however, have been raised that the internet connected fridges could be targeted by hackers, and that they could talk to other devices through WiFi. Now, that, I’m on board with.
I went and did a sleep Apnoea test. Turns out, didn’t have it. The breathing machines were really shit to use, but the majority on the market are WiFi connected. Now, there’s the whole ethical issue about those companies just collect your data and then sell them off. I found a security researcher that hacked a whole bunch of them and gets you your data, which is awesome. I’ll try and find that and link it in the show notes.
Those devices themselves are WiFi connected, so the doctors can remote in and then control the breathing function. Now, if you had a full face mask you could ramp up the pressure to push the air back. I don’t know whether you could kill someone, but you could definitely disrupt their sleep for a long time and make their life miserable.
It’s those WiFi home devices that I’m then concerned about. It’s not the fridge killing me, but if the fridge is the initial vector, then into a breathing machine. Or even heart pacemakers that are Bluetooth connected. Could someone get in, via the fridge, into someone’s laptop, which then has the Bluetooth connection to the heart device for the pacemaker?
Si: There’s a beautiful murder case coming up somewhere in the future, isn’t there? Am I giving the criminal the plot now? I am so struggling to remember what series it was on television, that somebody carried out an assassination by Pacemaker in this television series and this was years ago.
I think it was probably more complicated at that point in time. I went through the sleep apnoea test as well, although I didn’t have a mask at the time. I was wired up to a million different things in The John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, overnight.
Desi: Oh, you did the overnight test. I just did the, I did the take home one.
Si: If there’s nothing that is going to make you sleep worse than being wired up to a million different things overnight, I can’t imagine it.
Desi: Not in your own home as well.
Si: I have one of those CPAP machines. It’s Constant Positive Airway Pressure, CPAP machines and mine isn’t WiFi. I don’t know whether it’s better or worse. It’s actually mobile, it’s GPRS, it sends them to back via the cellular network.
Si: For free, I hasten to add. I didn’t buy the machine and, and don’t pay for the data.
Desi: In Australia you can put little Sim chips in them and some connect via WiFi. I was researching because I was trying to find the security researcher that hacked the CPA machines. There was another one. All CPAP machines now have an activated microphone by default. It’s meant to collect sound data, but it’s like another Alexa just collecting your voice data.
Si: I may have to check on that. I don’t think mine does, but I may have to check that.
Desi: When I was chatting to these people, because if I did need to get a machine, I want one that I just control. Happy to have a digital interface, but I don’t want to have GPS. I don’t want to have WiFi. If it does have WiFi, I want it to be disconnected and I want it certified that it is not connected. That it can be proven.
They couldn’t provide me, because it’s all like really closed network of these companies that sell these machines. So, none of the actual specifications are available.
To buy a machine that doesn’t have any of this stuff was like twice the cost. They’re just not produced as much, so they’re rarer to get and there was one company in Australia that you could get it from. That’s ridiculous.
It’s essentially pushing people who need these machines into this closed off market where their data, let alone the security concerns of someone hacking your own CPAP machine. The fact that these companies can then just harvest your data and you can’t do anything about it is horrible.
Si: I was enrolled into it automatically by the NHS and it’s really good, by the way, if you do need one. I thoroughly recommend.
Desi: I’ve got plenty of family that use them and they’re great. It’s just the privacy concerns.
Si: I log into my app and it tells me all of my sleep data about how many what incidents in sleep apnoea, when you stop breathing.
Desi: To finish off on this CPAP rant that I had because I went down a rabbit hole last year about it. I think there was also a case where an insurance company had purchased the data and then denied someone, some kind of insurance claim because of it.
Obviously that person found out somehow, I think someone whistle blowed or something, and then they countersued as you shouldn’t be able to access that data because it’s private medical data.
That was interesting, I’ll definitely try and find all this stuff with the CPAP Machine. I might have notes somewhere, because I really went down a rabbit hole on this one. It was super interesting, because it’s a niche medical industry.
Si: That is an interesting question though, isn’t it?
On the one hand if you are disrupting someone’s sleep through a hack. I know how much better I feel for having been on it, versus not. How much less tired I am. If you can induce somebody to be in a state where they are more likely to have an accident, then there’s that.
At the same time, being told by my insurance company that, no, you were driving tired that day and therefore I’m not paying out on that accident claim that you’ve just put in. That sounds horrific. It’s an interesting topic perhaps to debate, which is that wearing an Apple smartwatch.
I think it’s an Apple smartwatch. You’re wearing a smartwatch of some kind.
Desi: Oh, mine? Mine’s a Samsung Fit 3. I bought the one where it’s not collecting much. It does step tracking, I can get it to do my heartbeat, and that’s about it.
Si: Oh, right. Okay, so it’s not as bad as it could be.
But even that if that was subpoenaed as part of an investigation into something about you, it’s going to start handing over data that normally wouldn’t have been collected.
Desi: There’s a recent one. Apple’s privacy lawsuit with Siri. They had a 95 million dollar payout. I’m just reading the article from Reuters.
They settled a 95 million dollar lawsuit for Siri, which includes probably some health data out of that, realistically.
I think they calculated per user what that was for how many estimated Apple users they have, and it was like 0. 09 cents per user.
I think it said how much Siri made in a year, and I think for Apple based on the data that they have. It’s not in this one. It was 205, from memory, but I can’t remember whether that was million or billion. Either way, 205 million is still above in a year, is above the fine that they got for essentially selling their data or using the data inappropriately.
All of these things and how it’s being fed into AI, and where all of our data is going, in terms of privacy, is an issue. When it’s then being used against us in health insurance claims and everything else.
Si: I guess the question is, are we heading towards the dystopian future of what was it?
It’s Tom Cruise Minority Report, isn’t it?
Desi: Where they predict the crimes and stuff?
Si: Predicts you’re going to commit a crime in advance and acts. To a certain extent, already we see it because there’s predictive algorithms.
Desi: Your cholesterol’s a little bit high; you’re definitely going to stab someone today.
Si: Yeah, that’s it. But predictive algorithms for policing patrol.
Desi: Yeah.
Si: They do do that sort of thing. To a certain extent, yes, we are. We are already starting to live in the dystopian future. Happy 2025 everyone. Actually, that was an interesting one.
Desi: Just as a side thing, I found the security researcher, which I’m very happy about.
Going back to the Apple thing. Apple will pay out 20 dollars to Siri users and users can submit a claim for each device they use. It’s not just an automatic $20; you have to submit it. Up to five devices or $100 total. Ridiculous.
Cancel the apocalypse, what we can learn from film set in 2025. Right.
Si: I came across this the other day. What the future has been predicting for us in 2025, Pacific Rim. There we are, we have Repo man. Reclaiming organs if you don’t pay your debts. I’m not sure Thor counts entirely.
But Pacific Rim. Large robots fighting in the middle of the Pacific to guide you, he says, stretching his knowledge of Japanese culture.
Desi: Yeah, it is. Wasn’t it last year that Japan built the giant robot? The giant fighting robot? Then the U.S. were like, we’ll fight you, and I don’t think it worked. Was it Japan?
Si: I mean, if anybody’s going to have done it, it’s Japan, isn’t it? Let’s face it.
Desi: Oh no, it was a while ago. I was way off. It was 2017 when that happened. Well, those nine years went fast?
Si: Time is purely a social construct anyway.
So, what will 2025 actually bring? Hopefully it’s not large giant robots battling, or nuclear apocalypse, although that’s on the cards, it seems.
Desi: I don’t know whether we spoke about this actually, but I got recommended a series, which is also a book and I ended up listening to the audio book of it. It was about the US’s strategic preparation plans for like continuation of president and the White House, essentially. Like Designated Survivor, if you’ve ever seen that TV show.
What it did is go into the history of how all that started. When presidents essentially started to become targets for assassination they went into the world and were traveling around the country, that kind of thing. Then the Cold War with the nuclear deterrents that were going on between the two countries.
The presidents back then, I don’t think they do this anymore, but for a while, there was an assistant to the president that would always carry around the suitcase, which was the football, which had the nuclear armament codes, and that they could launch nuclear weapons.
I should look up what that’s called, but there is a series that you can watch in Australia it’s on SBS, so you could watch it on demand. It was very interesting to hear how there was this huge nuclear arms race, and then what essentially stopped two of the explosions were just people being really hesitant, not wanting to blow up the world, but it could have happened.
Then you see some of the dictators who are chasing nuclear arms who are just unhinged. An you’re like, are we going that way?
Si: I think that’s somewhat scarily been brought more to our perspective with some suggestions of the annexation of areas of land that are of strategic importance, shall we say. Like Greenland. Yeah, put the title of that in, that sounds fascinating.
I did watch some of Designated Survivor.
Desi: Raven Rock is the book. I’ll find the link for that and the TV series is called something else, but I’m sure if you’ve looked up Raven Rock TV series. Very, very interesting.
We’ve kind of talked a lot about AI. That was one of the things we wanted to talk about when we jumped on. The other big thing that we both spoke about a lot together last year and with the guests that we had on was mental health.
I don’t know about you, but I felt myself, and with a lot of people that I’m close to, 2024 was a rough year for a myriad of reasons.
This is me speculating, but I was thinking about this today before we were doing this, well this is my night time, before we were doing this. I was wondering if this is the hangover from COVID still. We had this massive pandemic and for me, that was a huge time sink.
Now, we’ve kind of lost two years, and then we’ve done two years. For me, now I’m like we now coming out of this, and there’s a lot more problems that are symptoms from what we all went through as a society, and even as we’re working.
I felt like cybercrime rose a shitload when we all went to remote work because there were so many workflow changes without any of the security in place. World economics and countries that are putting tariffs on each other, and there’s so much more turmoil than there seemed to be. Then that’s flowing from a macro level down to the micro community level as well.
For me it felt 2024 was like that. I feel like we were only just scratching the surface at mental health when we were chatting last year. I think, I know we wanted to focus on mental health again this year, and we’re going to have another host that’s coming on and he’s doing a few talks potentially around mental health as well that are going to be released.
Si: It’s interesting because I saw this informational video the other day. I will share and I’ll try and find a link for it that doesn’t go through Facebook, but this is the copy of it that I found.
I don’t know if I can share sound, but let’s just go with the video. It’s documented anyway, and it’s fairly self-obvious. It helps if I also share it, doesn’t it? That really helps.
Desi: I see what this is doing.
Who put out this ad?
Si: Sandy Hook, one of the US shootings.
Desi: I know it’s from one of the shootings, is this like a foundation thing though? Like, the Sandy Hook Promise?
Si: I don’t know, actually. I think it is. I’ll try and find out more detail.
Desi: Oh, it is. Sandy Hook Promise Preventing Gun Violence. It educates and empowers youth and adults to know the science to prevent violence in school shootings.
It’s a non-profit US organisation established in 2013. I’ll chuck that link in our show notes as well.
Si: Just the isolation, I think it definitely had an impact, I think it definitely had a feed into it.
Desi: Yeah. Well to share a bit of a personal story, I got out of the military in 2021, I think? No, September 2020. I think September 2020. COVID had started at the end of 2020 and then we went into it.
During that time a whole bunch of defence stuff, defence is great sometimes and then not great other times. I think coming out of defence you lose that familial network of peers. Then hitting COVID straight away. I’d also ruptured my Achilles and had just had surgery as well. So, I was like house housebound for kind of eight months straight.
The year and a half of COVID where it was very limited interaction, for me exacerbated quite a lot of social anxiety. Which is weird because I jump on this and I can chat to you and one on one is, is fine. Doing podcasts and all the content that I put out is fine, but I found coming out of that, it was very hard to go to social gatherings, even with friends if it was more than like three of us there.
To the point where, plenty of times Liz and I would jump in the car to drive and I’d get halfway and I’d be like I can’t do this. I didn’t think anything of it. I was just like, oh, I’m just tired, or there’d be all this other stuff. I’d drop her off, and then I go pick her up afterwards.
Then I went through an assessment process from post military through Defence Veterans Affairs in Australia and part of that’s a mental health assessment. I had all these things that I wanted to talk about from when I was in the military, but as I was talking through them, and he was asking me questions about what I’m like now, I was explaining some of this stuff. I thought that I’m way more fucked up than I had realised.
I think it is typical for a lot of veterans to feel isolated, but then I think COVID made it so much worse because my workmates all still lived near me, but we couldn’t hang out and have beers because of COVID, so there was none of the getting out and still hanging out with friends for a little bit and making some new friends. It was just you’re in lockdown and that’s it.
I think that’s where I was kind of coming at it from. 2024 for me was my realisation year that, that happened. It’s still bad, I haven’t solved any of that, but it felt like that for a lot of people that I spoke to. It’s hitting them that they’re having to go out in the world again now, because there are workplaces that are return to work three days a week kind of thing, two days at home. I think that’s stressing people out because they’re like, I haven’t had to do this for four years.
Si: I’m going to say that the return to work thing is actually a particularly interesting one because, I work at home anyway, so it’s not really an issue for me. But I know that for a long time, even before COVID hit, what I was doing in a day was going into an office, sitting at a desk, typing on a computer and interacting with people for maybe an hour in that day.
I used to travel a lot for work, not in the sense of I used to travel a lot like you do to go to conferences and go places and seek clients, I just used to do an hour plus commute every day to get there and an hour plus on the way back. I was wasting two and a half, three hours of my day, occasionally on one particular job, four hours of my day, getting to a place where I sat at a desk.
The somebody goes, you can work from home. Great. I have four hours of my day back. That’s 20 hours a week that I am not spending getting to somewhere to earn a living when I don’t need to be there. I think a lot of knowledge workers are actually objecting to that encroachment into their personal life again.
It’s not the issue of being in the office. If there was a transporter that would take them there for the meeting that they need to see people for and then they could be back in the comfort of their own home, sitting at their desk, doing the things that they do anyway. I think the return to work thing, as well as that we’ve forgotten how to be social animals to a certain extent. I think that’s quite a weighty conversation.
It’s interesting the way that certain employers have taken it as well because it’s like some employers were like, right, we’re going to save all our costs, scrap all our offices.
My accountant did this. In fact, he doesn’t have an office anymore. He’s only a small firm, but they figured out that everybody was working from home, it was all going perfectly swimmingly. So, they now don’t have an office. Everybody’s perfectly happy. Whereas others are now saying you’ve got to be back in three days a week, minimum.
Desi: Yeah.
Si: So yeah.
Desi: I think beginning in 2024 when I started seeing it, I was against the whole.
It’s never been a threat for anywhere I’ve worked. All of the companies that I’ve worked for since I left the first initial cyber job that I was in when I first got out of the military, have been American companies and they are remote work.
So, start of 2024, I was like this sucks for a lot of people, but I think even myself sometimes, if you only interact with people for one hour a day, it really depends on what your home life is like.
If you’ve got a family, maybe you’re taking your kids to sport, you’re interacting with other parents and you’ve got social interaction in that sense, then work from home makes 100 percent sense. You’re getting the human need of human interaction, physical human interaction, because I think that’s different from you and me being on a call.
I loved when I came over and you showed me around Oxford. Fantastic. I’m not saying this is shit, but it’s way different from the catch ups that we do. So, Liz has had a very busy year at her work, she’s been away a lot for trips for her work and is very busy all the time and I’ve just got the dogs. My human interaction, I’ve found, is very minimal.
If I’m not forced to do it, then I don’t need to do it and it was already an issue for me to avoid it. I definitely felt that towards the end of the year. Especially when I was going through all the shit towards the end of the year, I was like I actually don’t have any work friends that I could just go for a coffee with and sit down, and have a chat.
Sure, I could arrange a call and have a coffee with someone, but that isn’t the same as let’s just go for a coffee because you’re at work. I’ve definitely appreciated having that in the past. I think it definitely depends on your family dynamic, where you’re getting your social interaction and that’s just the individual human side.
There’s definitely arguments either way for companies. On the other side, because my background now is insider risk. Insider risk is much easier to manage when you’re in an office. It is much harder when you’ve got a remote workforce. But then it’s also how society has gone.
You used to live in a house and you drive five minutes to the factory. Whereas city costs, cost so much, which is where all the tech centres are with knowledge workers, and what you were doing is now a commute. Now if businesses were hiring you and then paying you for that commute, you might be less opposed to doing an hour commute, because you can listen to a podcast, you’re just driving into work, but it’s part of your job.
When companies say we’re going to employ people from two, three hours away. I think if they took that stance and they only going to hire people in the city, and then no one can live in the city, they’d find out pretty soon that they’re not going to have any workers.
There’s economic arguments and time based arguments etc. But, it’s a tricky balance. It feels like an us versus them. Going full circle back to what we were talking about at the start, sensationalised media. That’s what the media is like.
Every article title that I read about return to work, work from home, it’s like companies are losing all this money, but then on the other side they’re making Brenda, who’s like a single parent, travel two hours. It’s not clear cut. Let’s have balanced reporting, but I don’t think most journalists know how to do balanced reporting.
Si: Balanced reporting doesn’t sell. It’s that simple. Looping back around in conversation perhaps this is a good parting point for us, is that boring articles that are very fair and reasoned aren’t going to sell newspapers if you don’t have killer AI machines.
Actually, the headline the other day on the Daily Star was how to survive a Yeti attack. So clearly, they know their target market. I have to say, I have taken the photo of covers of that newspaper twice in probably about two weeks because it’s caught my eye, because I’m human, because I’m a magpie like everybody else and I look for shiny and it does that.
We’re a victim of our own success as a species, aren’t we? We pull it out. We want to hear about the gossip. It’s very interesting, two books, I don’t know if you’ve read either of them. One is the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, which is a fundamental exploration of evolution, funnily enough.
Where Darwin specifies that the item that evolves is the species. The species does it. Richard Dawkins puts forward the suggestion that actually it’s the genes because the gene is the bit that gets transmitted and survives. The animal doesn’t, but the genes do. It’s very interesting thing in that regard. The other book is Humans by, and I’m going to get his name wrong, unless I look it up.
Desi: It’s not A Brief History of Humankind? Yuval Noah Hari
Si: Yeah, that’s it.
Desi: Or Sapiens.
Si: That’s it. This is what happens when you don’t make notes before you start a show, and then think of things on the fly. But yes, that one. Obviously, you know, communication and gossip and things that build us as a society are hugely advantageous to us.
We value information, and that information means that. I don’t. associate myself with someone who is a risk to me. Gossip basically exists to go, you know that bloke who lives down the street, he’s a bit dodgy, stay away from him. Means you stay away from the guy who lives down the street who’s a bit dodgy. That sort of thing is actually a survival instinct. It’s something that we as human beings do.
Gossip for us is actually a hugely important aspect of our societal structure and as we build into larger societies the way that we communicate these things is by the press, by television, by word of mouth. We still want the gossip. We still wants the things that are going to stick in our mind as important facts.
Fear AI fridges and perhaps it’ll work, perhaps we will stay away from AI fridges. Perhaps it will stop them from getting world domination and imposing a lifetime of ice cream upon us or something.
I don’t know. We are victims of our own success in this, but what we’ve done is then gone off and created a bunch of tools that allow us to make up stuff completely fictional.
Desi: That’s the thing, right? Gossip, and especially language, has evolved.
Us evolving when language started, the gossip would have been to protect the tribe from external threats. When you think about it, maybe like a from threat within the tribe would have been potentially someone with like a mental illness that was struggling
So, that was gossip to stay away from them, which I think is interesting because I mental illness has been a big thing that I’ve been looking into this year around the different disorders that exist and also, into the research that exists. It’s still quite infant when you look at it because the human brain is such a hard, complex thing to map, let alone understand the actual thought process that’s in it.
Then how does that play in it. Then we’ve gone and created all these methods to create fake things. Then we’ve also created all these networks to then publish all this information very fast so that we can’t even fact check. The news cycle used to be the 24 hour news cycle and it would go into a static paper. Whereas now, the news cycle is like a minute.
Si: I was going to say 24 minutes would be good. It’s not even that long, is it?
Desi: Well, when you look at the attention span of most people and what reels are these days it’s like 15 seconds. How much information can you put in front of someone in 15 seconds? They’re scrolling through that for an hour. How much information are they taking in? How much of that’s fake?
Si: This is a really good question. How much of it are we taking in? I remember the informational piece I showed. I remembered that from an Instagram scrolling session, admittedly. It’s obviously successful enough to have caught my eye and to be memorable. But if you asked me what else I’d scrolled past, I have no idea.
Desi: That’s probably good point to end, because it’s late at night for me.
Si: Yeah, I was going to say, it is very late at night for you.
Desi: That was quite a good recap. We’ll capture some more links to put into the show notes, but we’ve got quite a few there.
Si: I think it was a good warmup for the year. Hopefully we can get a few good podcasts set up. We’ve still got Brett Shavers to organise. Between the three of us, we have singularly managed to fail to coordinate a workable time.
Desi: There was quite a lot of travel towards the back end of the year. Which I think hit all three of us at some point.
I think when we first tried to book that in, I was actually working remotely in Thailand at the time.
Si: Yeah, you were in Thailand, he was in America, I was in the UK. Then he was in Japan, you were in Australia, and I was in the UK. It just didn’t pan out. But we will figure it out. We will get there.
So that’s certainly coming up, and hopefully we will have conversations again with all our good friends. I’m pretty sure that Amped will be on again with the AI image generation. I know that they’ve just released modules to do with reflections and reflection tracking, which is really interesting and an exciting piece of work.
Again, it’s something it doesn’t get right yet, so if you can start to figure out those things. So, that’s another good way for picking it up if you have a reflective surface within.
Desi: I am optimistic for this year. Excited. It will be, I don’t know how much you’ve been tracking cyber threat actors, but as always, Christmas was an exciting period for our cyber defenders out there. We’ll probably see that trickle down into cybercrime. It will be a busy start of the year for those people and I think the message there is to take care of your mental health.
I’ve been there before, and you probably haven’t had much of a break, and you’re probably running into a very busy start of the year with a lot of companies coming back, realising that they have been breached.
Then to all of our Digital Forensics friends as always, there’s lots of mental health issues there, was chatting to a few of them over Christmas as well around, a bit of burnout. There’s a few people who changed different roles from the criminal side into more admin roles. So that’s always an ongoing concern, but it will be a big topic for us again this year, I think.
Si: I think it’s always going to be a big topic.
The question is, is are we going to get to the point where there’s something that’s actually being done about it or not?
Desi: It feels like at the moment, and where we were getting to at the end of last year, is it’s more of that exposure in those roles that haven’t had it before. If talking about it more on here helps push it out more, gets it in people’s minds, then that’s a good thing.
Si: Absolutely, and maybe some decision makers somewhere up the tree will listen and go, maybe we should invest some money in this.
Desi: I guess the message that we’ll leave you all with, as Si and I sign off, is that if you are feeling lonely, there are plenty of services that you can reach out to. I know Lifeline’s a big one in Australia that’s reached out to a lot over the year. You’ve got Beyond Blue. We’ll try and dig out a list and we’ll put those in the show notes as well.
Si: We’ll make sure they all get put on to the end and indeed if any of you are really struggling pop onto the Forensic Focus, he says, also in the vague pitch attempt Discord channel. If you DM me I’m, I’m happy to have a chat with you personally.
I’m not qualified, but I have been where you are so, do let me know.
Desi: Also, to the people that aren’t struggling, if you are working remotely, reach out to your peers is what I’d say. Christmas and the holiday period itself is a very stressful time for a lot of people because families aren’t always a great time.
So, if you are doing well, then reach out to the others and try and have a deeper chat than you normally would. Especially at the start of the year as we move into 2025.
Thanks everyone. We will see you in a lot more podcasts this year. Hopefully we’ll make it out to a few conferences and can meet you in person. I am excited to be back. Forensic focus. I think this is going into our third year, right? I think like we were kind of halfway through. We’ve definitely done two new year things. So, it’s going to be at least, at least one year full plus others.
Honestly, when I started this, I was like, this will be a quick year-long thing, but here we are three years later and it’s still going.
I’m keen to keep doing it. Good stuff. All right. Well, we’ll catch you all next podcast.
Si: Bye everyone.
