This video was made possible by Hover. Buy your custom domain or email for 10% off
by going to hover.com/HAI. This video is about bricks. Now, when it comes to producing bricks, there
are three main methods: molding, dry-pressing, and extruding, each of which has its own benefits
and drawbacks that should be carefully considered as you select the right bricks for your personal
brick-laying projects. Now, extruded bricks are, without a doubt,
the workhouse brick. They’re formed by forcing a clay mixture
through a special piece of equipment called a die, resulting in bricks that are strong,
light, and relatively cheap—but, and here’s the big but—that have rough faces that need
to be covered up. If you’re looking for a show brick, dry-pressed
is the way to go, because… ok there’s no way the feds would sit through all that. We’re safe now. Today we’ll be spilling some government
secrets, or should I say, we’ll be talking about someone else who spilled government
secrets. So we’re not so much doing spilling, as
we are taking the spill and… um… pouring that spill into your… cup… of knowledge. This is a good metaphor, right? Anyways, this is Strava: it’s fitness app
that tracks and shares your runs, bikes, swims, skis, kayaks, ice skates, and even kitesurfing
sessions, in case you want to show off. And this is the Strava Heat Map, a big, beautiful,
and only somewhat terrifying map that shows where Strava’s tens of millions of users
across the world have been going on their bikes and runs and walks and kite-surfs. And this is a secret military base in Yemen
that I am definitely not supposed to know about. And if you’re wondering if the giant movement-tracking
map and the me knowing about a secret military base are correlated: congratulations, you’re
officially smarter than the entire development team at Strava who apparently didn’t consider
that possibility at all before they released the map to the public in 2018. You see, it turns out military officers like
working out, and they like using Strava to track those workouts, and they also apparently
really like forgetting to turn off the public data sharing option on Strava, which allows
the app to track those workouts and then publish them to a giant publicly-available global
map. The problem started to gain media attention
in January of 2018, about two months after the map was published, when a 20-year-old
Australian college student started posting on twitter that he’d managed to find the
locations of secret military bases across the world, which seems like a great way to
get new followers—both on twitter and in real life. Turned out, identifying the bases was pretty
simple: the patterns would nearly always look like this—a ton of activity all happening
in the same little loop in the middle of an otherwise deserted area which either meant
that there were farmers who really loved going into the middle of the desert to do a workout
where they run around the same jagged half-mile loop a few dozen times, or that there were
soldiers stationed there who were running within the confines of a base. As much as farmers do love running desert
laps, that second suspicion seemed more likely once people started cross-referencing the
heat map with previous reporting and were able to confirm that, in fact, you could see
the movements of soldiers at supposedly secret military bases like this Italian base in Djibouti,
or this US base in Syria, or this US base in Syria, or even this other US base in Syria. Now, this was all bad for a few reasons. First of all, obviously, it was a problem
for secret bases because they’re supposed to be, you know… secret. A secret base that people know about is like
a Wendover video without planes—it’s completely pointless—but even at known bases, the Heat
Map was a huge security breach, because it showed soliders’ patrol routes and common
transportation paths between bases, which is exactly the type of place you would want
to stage an attack if you were the attack-staging type. The problem got even worse with the realization
that Strava displays the top 10 runners or bikers for each route by age and gender group,
giving military adversaries the opportunity to not only compete with their enemies for
the fastest times, but also to discover their names. But here’s where things get really scary:
with some coding ability, it was even possible to scrape the site’s data and potentially
track the same user across routes. One guy on twitter claimed that he had managed
to track a single French solider from deployment overseas all the way to his home in France,
which would, in theory, allow someone to send that solider mail—like a present. Or, you know, like… the opposite of a present. Now, things weren’t as bad as they could
have been—the maps didn’t show any sort of real-time data, nor did it show when runs
were done, and everything on the map was an aggregate of data from the past 2 years. Also, to be fair to Strava, there was an option
to opt out of publicly sharing data, which soldiers apparently forgot to select. In response to the Strava scandal, the US
military said they would re-examine their policies on what types of personal fitness
trackers soldiers were permitted to use, with an eye towards fitness technology that doesn’t
use the internet—which is bad news for Strava, but great news for Wii Fit Yoga. Now, if you’re thinking about setting up
a giant fitness tracking map that doesn’t reveal sensitive national security information,
you’ll need to host it on a cool URL—maybe something like mapthatwontgetyoukilledbycia.com,
which you could buy on hover.com. With their award-winning customer support
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