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Friday! Time for your weekly roundup.
On the podcast this week, we talk about Ticketmaster, and how scalpers have teamed up with hackers to liberate "non-transferable" tickets. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains the latest with sales of netflow data to the U.S. government. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
Next week, a very exciting FOIA Forum: We’re teaming up with Seamus Hughes of Court Watch to learn how to access court records using PACER on Wednesday, July 31 at 1 p.m. EST. Paid subscribers get the link in their email!
Here’s what happened this week:
HELLO??
Hackers broke into a cloud platform used by AT&T and downloaded call and text records of “nearly all” of AT&T’s cellular customers across a several month period, AT&T announced. The stolen data, which mostly contains data related to calls and texts made between May and October 2022, presents “a hugely significant and unprecedented data breach for AT&T and the telecom industry more broadly,” Joseph wrote.
IN THE PIT
Concert giant AXS filed a lawsuit in California that revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS. Jason wrote about how scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.
DOING THE TRIPLE ARM CROSS
Anthony Polcari, better known as Tony P, or “Big Tone” as many of his P-Hive followers call him, has a massive audience on TikTok and Instagram. He documents his life as a “25-year-old bachelor in Washington, D.C.” And now, in a very normal career path for a TikTok star, he’s a NATO influencer.
GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT
A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change predicts that more than 40 percent of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated, saving a fifth of their time in aggregate, and potentially leading to a huge reduction in workforce and costs for the government. Guess how they got that prediction? Chat-GPT. “This is absurd—they might as well be shaking at Magic 8 ball and writing down the answers it displays,” computational linguistics expert Emily Bender told Emanuel.
MORE GOOD POSTS
Responding to “The Ticketmaster Hack Is Becoming a Logistical Nightmare for Fans and Brokers,” Dan said:
“This crazy train is going to keep going until the Ticketmaster monopoly is broken up. They're just too attractive and giant a target. Makes me want to go back to the days of will call tbh”
And in response to “AI Finds That AI Is Great In New Garbage Research From Tony Blair Institute,” Nick Miller wrote:
“I feel like if OpenAI really cared about ‘AI that benefits humanity’, they would specifically call out this kind of bad scholarship and poor tech literacy from high-profile institutions. It's not hard to say ‘we're excited that people are using our stuff but this is not an appropriate use case’. Not holding my breath though!”
Replying to Nick, Shari Benscoter said:
“Exactly. One way to get people not distracted by shiny, new objects is to make sure that expectations about your product are accurate. Our crappy corporate media just gets the click (if someone actually goes to the article, not just reads the headline). Competent journalists questioning claims made by all manner of grifters would be a nice change.”
We try!
BEHIND THE BLOG
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss embargoes, research papers, terminology and epic Reel pulls.
JOSEPH: Today AT&T announced one of the most significant data breaches in recent history: the theft of call and text metadata for “nearly all” of its customers. Telecoms are constantly hacked; in March, AT&T addressed another data breach of customer data. But this latest one is wholly different because of the type of data: what phone numbers each customer called or texted, information that is ordinarily only available to law enforcement under legal process.
I want to tell you how this story and the breach announcement came about because I’ve never quite seen a disclosure to the media like this either. On Thursday, I received an email from AT&T’s communications department. A spokesperson told me they had information they would like to share with me under embargo after trading markets closed in the U.S.
Read the rest of Joseph's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason, Emanuel, and Sam's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
Ok, I gotta go stock up on honey. See you next week.
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