More Top Tech Stories of 2019

We look back at some more of the biggest stories and themes in tech over the course of 2019. From planned obsolescence to missteps in tech, we look at how things shook out over the year.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And
we are continuing on our look back on the big
text stories of twenty nineteen. Now, the last episode was

(00:26):
all about bummers. This one is only mostly about bummers.
But don't blame me. I didn't make the news. Also,
I should point out that, of course I'm just giving
kind of a high level overview of stuff that happened
in twenty nineteen, because to cover everything that happened in
tech would be beyond even my impressive capabilities. And I

(00:49):
should also add that I've got some updates to stuff
what happened in the last episode, because, as it turns out,
when I recorded part one and when I'm recording part two,
time past and stuff continue to develop. That's how news works,
and I resent it. But one story I do need
to follow up on broke between that time and that

(01:10):
was that Dennis Muhlenberg, the CEO of Boeing, resigned from
Boeing as the company was dealing with the consequences of
the seven thirty seven max fleet being grounded, among other
problems at the company. Generally speaking, analyst said that his
stepping down was sort of a necessary part of Boweing
regaining confidence among customers and shareholders. Not that all blame

(01:34):
should be put on the CEOs shoulders, but that this
was one of those steps a company has to take
in order to convince people, hey, we are really taking
this seriously and we need to make some changes. Now.
The next two stories that I want to talk about
are related, and they are both extremely dark and upsetting,

(01:55):
but I also feel they are important to acknowledge and consider.
And for some of you you might feel as though
I'm going to get really preachy about this. I am
not going to apologize for that in this case. Now,
the first dark story is about March fifteen, two thousand nineteen.
That was when a gunman carried out attacks on two

(02:15):
different mosques in christ Church, New Zealand, killing fifty one
people and injuring another forty nine. Now, the reason the
story gets included in tech news is that the gunman
streamed the attack on the first mosque over on Facebook Live.
Other people grabbed the video feed, and then they began
to post it elsewhere, which ensured that even as platforms

(02:38):
were removing it, others were hosting it. The New Zealand
government classified the video as objectionable, which is a legal
classification in New Zealand. It meant that distributing, copying, or
exhibiting the video would be against the law, but the
video was already out on the internet. Now most platforms
have created digital fingerprints of the video in order to

(02:59):
detect future uploads, thus blocking it automatically and then removing
them very quickly. The gunman, identified as Britain Tarrant, had
been active in far right organizations and white supremacy groups
online and off, and there's been a rise in activity
in online communities of such radical groups, raising warnings of

(03:20):
extremists using the Internet to recruit others and reinforce some
truly awful beliefs. And this brings me to story number two,
which is that these groups have made use of some
notable online communities to encourage one another and create a
space for extremism. One of those online communities, and perhaps

(03:40):
the most infamous, is eight kun formerly known as eight chan.
The history of eight chan dates back to when Frederick
Brennan created it, as an alternative to an earlier online
message board community called four chan. Now, Brennan felt four
chan was becoming too restrictive, which is a sentence that's

(04:00):
hard to even believe if you're at all familiar with
four chan. The only rule on a chan was that
you weren't supposed to post or link to any content
that would be illegal in the United States. Brennan ended
his association with the site in two thousand eighteen. In
two thousand nineteen, in the wake of shootings in christ Church,

(04:20):
New Zealand, also in Poway, California, and El Paso, Texas,
and also links back to eight chan showing how the
perpetrators of those three different shootings had used eight chan
to publish their own manifestos. Brennan, the founder of the site,
was one of the voices calling for the site to
get shut down. That actually did happen in August two

(04:42):
thousand nineteen, but the site since returned as a con
as of November two thousand nineteen. And there is a
pretty complicated situation going on here. On the one hand,
the founders of the Internet and of the Worldwide Web
envisioned a platform that would support freedom of speech and
the exchange of ideas. On the other hand, many people,

(05:02):
particularly those from already vulnerable communities, are put in danger
as extremism is on the rise. The safe haven for
those who espouse these extremist, radical, racist, and misogynist and
violent beliefs as contributing to an increasingly toxic subculture. In addition,

(05:24):
several tech companies have enabled this subculture. It hasn't necessarily
been a conscious decision, but the principles of running a
business in which your goal is to return value to
shareholders isn't always in alignment with doing what's actually best
for the general population. In fact, those two things can

(05:44):
often come into conflict with one another. In some cases,
like eight Kun, this is far more apparent, but it's
also the case with stuff like more public platforms such
as Twitter and Facebook. Those companies struggle with how to
deal with a particularly thorny subject to varying degrees of success,
most of which satisfy very few people. I wish I

(06:07):
had a solution to this very large problem, but I
believe such a solution has to go much deeper than
taking a website offline or removing an option for people
to voice these hateful philosophies. That's part of it, but
it doesn't address the deeper underlying problems that feed into
that toxicity to begin with. So all I can really

(06:28):
do is appeal to you guys to exercise compassion and
critical thinking. Those two things are absolutely necessary in my view.
All Right, the darkest of the dark stuff in this
episode is over, so let's move on. One thing that
happened in twenty nineteen might set us on a path

(06:49):
for widespread use of drones to deliver packages. In the
spring of twenty nineteen, the Federal Aviation Administration or f
A a certified Wing that's the drone delivery startup company
that's owned by the Google parent company alphabet UH. They
certified them to operate as an air carrier. This regulatory

(07:09):
step allows Wing to make commercial deliveries in the United States.
The company had already been conducting tests in Australia in
anticipation of receiving government approval in the United States. And
there's still many questions that need to be answered, and
we're likely to see very limited roll out of drone
delivery services in specific regions as companies and local governments

(07:30):
kind of hash out the best way to move forward now. Personally,
I'm curious to see if drone delivery will prove to
be a more efficient means of delivering packages on a
large enough scale to make sense. I mean, I can
see how it could be incredibly useful in scenarios where
getting to a location is challenging and the need to

(07:50):
deliver something important like medication is really urgent, but I'm
not entirely convinced yet that it would make sense from
a more general use standpoint. However, I also haven't run
the figures, nor do I know how much it costs
to operate delivery services as they stand right now, So
it's entirely possible that this is a viable alternative to

(08:11):
more traditional delivery services. I just don't know enough to
comment on it firmly, But it's hard for me to
believe that, on the face of it, that it would
be more cost effective and efficient unless you just had
truly enormous fleets, in which case then you have the
technological and administrative difficulties that come with managing that large
of a fleet. So I just don't know. Sticking with

(08:35):
government approval, because there are a lot of stories that
fall into that category this year, the Federal Communications Commission
in the United States, or the FCC, approved the merger
of telecommunications companies T Mobile and Sprint. Now. According to analysts,
the chief purpose of this merger is to enhance T
mobiles five G technology rollout to give it a stronger

(08:57):
position in the United States as a As you know,
five G networks are starting to come online. Just a
few years ago, according to reports from a consulting firm
called McKenzie, T Mobile was eyeing a merger was Sprint,
but for a different reason. It was in an effort
to become more competitive against A T and T and Verizon,
which are the other two major cellular phone carriers in

(09:18):
the United States. While the FCC has given its approval,
that's just one regulatory hurdle that telecommunications companies have to
overcome before they can merge. Regulatory agencies at both the
state and federal levels are still considering this plan, and
they may place restrictions or limitations on any merger, or
they might deny it outright. T Mobile has reportedly been

(09:41):
renegotiating the deal in the meantime, and the old reports
from two thousand and fifteen, the ones that stated tea
Mobile was first looking at Sprint for a possible merger,
said that t Mobile also entertain the notion of allowing Comcast,
the mega cable corporation, to acquire Team Bowl. There may
well be some serious offers for acquisitions like that in

(10:04):
the near future of either te Mobile or Sprint, or
emerged version of the two from such a cable company,
whether it's Comcast or a different one. Speaking of corporate maneuvers,
one drama that finally finished playing out in nineteen really
kind of fizzled out and sputtered a bit was the

(10:25):
tale of Amazon's HQ two in New York City. So
let's backtrack a bit. The company initially announced it was
looking into expanding its corporate headquarters, which are based out
of Seattle, Washington, into a different city. In two thousand eighteen.
They famously held a Request for Proposals in asking for

(10:47):
cities that were eager to host this new headquarters to
present their their proposals their deals. That in turn prompted
a series of stories about incredibly generous tax breaks and
other incentives, as well as some fairly absurd publicity stunts
that stretched throughout most of until in November of that year,

(11:09):
Amazon announced it had settled on two locations that would
share the duty of being HQ two. One is in Arlington, Virginia,
and the other was in New York City, New York. Now,
there was some pretty hefty criticism early on from various
sources that alleged Amazon had chosen these two locations from

(11:29):
the beginning, that had these in mind when they even
asked for the proposals in the first place. One of
the pieces of supposed evidence that they used to support
this claim is that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apparently had
homes near those two proposed locations, and that the whole
selection process was therefore nothing more than an effort to

(11:52):
create a competitive environment so that both New York and
Arlington would continuously improve their deals so Amazon we get
the sweetest tax break, but that presumably the plan all
along was to move into those two locations. Whether that's
true or not, we get to two thousand nineteen, and
early in twenty nineteen, New York City residents voiced some

(12:16):
rather critical opinions about their new proposed neighbor. Journalists reported
that the proposed HQ two site in New York City
would take up land that had previously been intended for
the use of six thousand homes, including a significant number
of low income homes. Alexandria Accacio Cortez, a US representative

(12:37):
from New York, voiced concern that the incentives offered to
Amazon would hurt the city both in the near and
the long term, that it would undermine efforts to fund
government improvements to critical infrastructure in the city because of
these enormous tax breaks. You know, if Amazon is not
paying taxes, that revenue is not coming from them, the
financial burden falls on everyone else in New York and

(12:59):
frequently that means that programs have to get reduced or
cut so that you can, you know, make your money
stretch out further. In February two thou nineteen, Amazon announced
it was canceling its plan to build out its location
in New York City. Amazon does lease out some office space,
a significant amount of office space in New York, but

(13:20):
it no longer plans to have a second corporate headquarters there.
And since we're talking about Amazon, let's move on to
one of the properties that Amazon owns, and that would
be the Ring Company. That's the company that produces surveillance
cameras and and surveillance doorbells, you know doorbells that have
the cameras and communication systems. Well, in twenty nineteen, there

(13:40):
were a few stories of hackers who had gained access
to users Ring equipment, whether it was the surveillance cameras
or the Ring doorbells. Some hackers did this in an
effort to expose vulnerability, so they were doing it to say, hey,
we need to fix this because it's a problem. But
others did it specifically to her asks or exploit people,

(14:02):
and those stories were alarming and continue to be alarming.
Some of them involve kids, and it's incredibly disturbing, and
they've led to at least one class action lawsuit against Amazon.
The allegation is that Ring isn't doing enough to ensure
customers privacy and security are maintained, which is particularly a

(14:22):
problem for a company that markets equipment that's meant to
enhance security, not exploit vulnerabilities. Now I haven't seen all
the details about how the Ring systems were actually hacked.
There are different ways to gain access to connected systems
on a network. Sometimes you can find a vulnerability in
an endpoint, such as an actual device connected to the network.

(14:46):
So in those cases you would say, all right, the
hacker managed to hack into the network via this RING device.
That very well maybe the case maybe they were able
to brute force a password through that and the got
access that way. But other times hackers might find a
way to compromise the network itself and then they can
access the various components connected to that network as if

(15:09):
they were, in fact the legitimate administrator of the network.
In the case of Ring, it sounds to me as
though they found it through password vulnerabilities. The lawsuit states
that Ring should have required users to create more robust
passwords and to require two factor authentication to prevent abuse.
And just in case you're not familiar with the concept,

(15:30):
two factor authentication is a subset of what is called
multi factor authentication, which just means that you're using two
or more factors, which really just means two to three
factors to authenticate your identity. And those factors are categories
of stuff, right. Those categories are what you know. This

(15:50):
would be something like a password or a pin, so
it would be something that you have knowledge of and
you provide when you're accessing a system. The second factor
is what you have, like what you physically have on
you that could be a mobile device, So it could
be that you provide your password or pen and then
it sends a code to your mobile device, which you

(16:10):
also have to enter, or you might have a token
that you have to use in some way to access
the system. And then the third factor is what you are,
and this would refer to things like biometric data. Maybe
it's a retinal scan or fingerprint scan or voice scan.
Multi factor authentication requires you present at least two of
those three factors, possibly one of all three. It all

(16:32):
depends on the implementation. So you might enter a password,
then you receive your code, you enter the code, and
then you get access. But that proves you both know
the password and you also have possession of an authorized
mobile device, which limits the possibility that an unauthorized person
is going to gain access to that system. Now, this
touches on an issue that I think is really important

(16:55):
and is growing more important as the Internet of Things
gets bigger. And I'm sure you've heard the saying that
a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
In network security, there are many potential weak links. You
could have a badly designed piece of hardware or software
that has vulnerabilities in it, and that offers an in

(17:16):
road for an intrusion into a network. You can also
have users who practice really poor security habits, like they
choose common passwords like a common dictionary word as a password.
That's a terrible, terrible habit and no one should do it.
Or they're using the same password for multiple services, also
a terrible idea. But this raises a question who should
be accountable for data security? After all, users should be

(17:40):
employing strong, unique passwords as a matter of habit. And
if you heard about someone's house being robbed because they
forgot to lock the door, I don't think your first
instinct would be to sue the lock company for letting
it happen. I think end users are at least partly
accountable for good data security. However, that being said, I
also think that companies have a responsibility. They need to

(18:04):
create rules that require strong passwords and multi factor authentication
by default. They need to essentially force users to be
more careful. They enable users to practice good security, and
by enable users, I really mean limit the options that
users have that that result in poor security. I think

(18:25):
it's the user's responsibility to be more secure and the
company's responsibility to enable it. But that's just me. Now,
when we come back, we'll look at some more stories
from twenty nineteen. Here's a story that started making the

(18:46):
news just before twenty nineteen wrapped up. I mean I
learned about it shortly before coming into the studio. So
Devin Wilson, or at Atomic Thumbs on Twitter, criticize the
company so Nos for what he saw as a particularly
egregious example of trying to control the aftermarket on electronics now.

(19:06):
Sons is primarily known for making speaker systems, particularly smart speakers,
and like a lot of tech companies, it depends heavily
on creating incentives for established Sons customers to upgrade and
update their equipment. You know, if everyone just went out
and bought the latest Sons speaker and they thought, oh,

(19:28):
this works great and had no reason to upgrade, the
company would have a very rough year. So they have
to create incentives for people to keep buying their stuff.
In that way. Sonas is strategy is really similar to
that of things like smartphone handset manufacturers. It's the Apple
iPhone model. In other words, each subsequent generation of devices

(19:49):
incorporates features that older devices cannot support, whether that lack
of support comes from technical limitations of the hardware or
managerial decisions. Is a moot point as a pose, I
mean it could come down to executives say, just don't
let this run on older stuff, not that the older
stuff is inherently incapable of running. It doesn't matter. The

(20:11):
end result is the same. So NOS has a trade
up program that gives existing so nos users a thirty
credit toward a new so nos device if those users
activate what is called recycle mode on their older so
nos device. Now, recycle mode starts a countdown clock. It's

(20:31):
a twenty one day countdown, and at the end of
that SONS puts the device on a blacklist so that
it is bricked, meaning you can't use it at all.
It will not work, it is ineffective, and it also
means that you can't give it away or sell it,
or at least you can't do so ethically because you'd
just be handing over what amounts to being a giant

(20:53):
paperweight with a lot of circuit boards and wires in it.
So really the only options are to try and hack
the speakers, which isn't really an option most people would
feel comfortable trying to tackle and would probably have limited
use anyway, or you could send the speaker to an
e waste recycling facility, or you just throw the darn
thing away. That's not a great option. It adds e waste.

(21:17):
E waste is bad stuff, and recycling, while better than
throwing stuff out, isn't as environmentally friendly as reusing stuff.
If you've ever heard reduce, reuse, recycle, well it's in
that order of preference. You want to reduce the amount
of waste you generate. You want to reuse stuff as
much as you can. The stuff you can't reuse, you recycle.

(21:38):
The stuff you can't reuse or recycle, then you can
throw away. But even that is, you know, not great.
So Wilson's point was that so NOSES program actually incentivizes
creating e waste. It encourages people to break their old
device in order to get this thirty percent credit towards

(21:59):
their next purchase, and it makes those old devices useless
to anyone. And sure, they these people might go and
recycle their old Sons speakers, but it's not as good
an option as to keep the equipment in working order
so that someone else can actually make use of it,
rather than for it to just go to waste. Critics

(22:19):
have said, this really isn't about reducing waste, it's about
so Nos limiting the viability of a secondary market. Because
Sonas doesn't make money off of someone selling off an
old pair of speakers or anything like that. The company
has a financial incentive to discourage aftermarket resales and to
create pathways for people to buy directly from Sons or

(22:42):
or from retailers who are carrying so Nos speakers. So
the criticism states that this is a devious way for
Sons to play the environmentally conscious card, you know, to
make it look like they're being eco friendly, while actually
they're taking aim at a market that can undercut their
own and revenues, that being the resale market. You know,

(23:03):
we've seen this with other properties as well, other types
of gadgets and electronics as well as video games. This
idea of getting rid of that resale market in order
to create the incentive for people to go out and
buy new copies as opposed to used copies or used
devices in this case. All right, well, how about we
do some Apple news. A big piece of news regarding

(23:25):
Apple broke in late June two thousand nineteen, when Jonathan I've,
better known as Sir Johnny I've announced he was leaving
the company. He had been with Apple for nearly three decades,
working primarily in design. He joined the company back in
nineteen nine six when it wasn't a bit of a pickle.
That was a year before the ousted Steve Jobs would
return to the company. He was one of the influential

(23:48):
designers who defined Apple's iPhone approach, setting the stage for
the company's meteoric rise in success. He announced he would
be heading up a new design company called Love From
and that he would still work with Apple on projects,
just from an independent business owner standpoint as opposed to
an Apple executive. I've played an intrinsic role in designing

(24:11):
some of Apple's defining products over the last twenty years,
so it will be interesting to see how the company
moves forward. I've and Jobs together were often cited as
the visionaries who kind of set Apple on its course,
and people have been asking what Apple's up to ever
since Jobs passed away. So with Ive's departure, I'm wondering

(24:32):
how that's going to affect the company as well. Apple
wasn't just dealing with the departure of one of its
more famous employees. However, the company also had some other
snags in twenty nineteen due to product issues. At the
beginning of the year, Benjamin Mayo of the Apple news
and rumors site nine to five Mac broke a big
story about a vulnerability in the company's FaceTime app. So,

(24:55):
for those who aren't familiar, FaceTime is a video chat app.
It's so you can video calls on iOS devices. Uh
though I should add that at least one Apple user
had tried to warn the company more than a week
before the story broke. They had found this independently, so
it was a known issue, arguably not just to the

(25:16):
Apple community but to Apple itself before the story broke
in nine to five Mac. Anyway, Mayo found that if
you used FaceTime to make a call between any devices
running iOS version twelve point one or later, and then
you added your own number into the call, as if
you were conferencing in yourself the person making the call,

(25:37):
you would be able to hear the audio from the
receiver's phone before the receiver had chosen to accept the
call in the first place. So all you would have
to do is put in someone's number, have it start
to dial a FaceTime call conference in yourself, and you
could listen in on the other phones microphone. You could

(25:57):
even use some options to act debate the camera on
the phone. And it wasn't just phones, it was also
you know, other mobile devices, but also max because the
mac os supported FaceTime as well, so if you did this,
you could presumably use someone's Mac computer to spy on
their home. Uh And because this would only work as

(26:19):
long as the other device was ringing, and FaceTime times
out after a certain amount of ringing, that ringing actually
lasts a lot longer on mac Os. A call can
end up going much longer in the in the calling
phase for mac Os because the thought is not everyone
is at their computer all the time, so you might

(26:39):
be across the house when the call comes in, you
might not hear it at first, so they have a
longer calling session that will last until there's an automatic
cut off, which means you could presumably spy longer until
someone noticed that there was a FaceTime call coming in.
So this was a huge law on the software and

(27:01):
the vulnerability would be patched. But initially Apple's response was
just to suspend the group FaceTime feature so that you
couldn't conference anyone in at all. You could only do
person to person calls, you couldn't do conference calls. And
then in February twenty nineteen, the company pushed out the
patch that sealed up those vulnerabilities and re enabled group
FaceTime features. Another problem Apple faced was the release of

(27:25):
iOS version thirteen and the release of Mac OS ten
point one five a k A. Catalina. Critics found problems
with both, identifying numerous bugs that prompted some tech reporters
to advise people, especially for people looking at buying a
new iPhone, to wait for patches before updating to the

(27:45):
latest OS version or buying a new phone. Even Apple
announced iOS thirteen point one a patch to thirteen point
oh before thirteen point oh had even shut, which indicated
that the initial rule east wasn't really ready for implementation.
So why was iOS thirteen so buggy? Or maybe I

(28:06):
should say why is it because not all those bugs
have been fixed? Well? Some people have suggested that Apple
was being overly aggressive when adding in new features to
the operating system, and that feature creep might have been
an issue. David Shaer, and Apple software engineer theorized that
perhaps teams working on certain features, were reluctant to admit

(28:27):
when they were falling behind on deadlines, and that rather
than cutting back on features, rather than saying let's not
do this because it's taking too much time and we
need to ship, things were kept in the mix far
longer than they needed to be, and Share also listed
several other possible contributing factors. It's all in the post
on tidbits dot Com. I recommend checking that out if

(28:50):
you want to learn more. The piece is titled six
reasons why iOS thirteen and Catalina are so Buggy, and
he goes into much greater detail there now. In late December,
Apple pushed out an update for its mobile operating system,
and this one's called iOS thirteen point three, which might
make you think it's the third update to iOS to

(29:14):
this version, but it's not the third update. It's actually
the eighth update since iOS thirteen was first announced. Many
of the updates were in the iOS thirteen point one
and iOS thirteen point two designations. Oh and by the
time you hear this, iOS thirteen point three point one
might be available. It's currently in beta. As a record

(29:36):
this episode. Gordon Kelly of Forbes suggests that if you
have a device running an earlier version of iOS thirteen,
you should absolutely update to thirteen point three, but if
you're still running iOS twelve, you might actually still want
to wait a little bit longer before you upgrade. He
does say that things are starting to look promising, that

(29:58):
the initial months following the release of iOS thirteen were
pretty bad. He would give a categorical skip this update
until it's fixed recommendation. That recommendation is slowly starting to
soften as these numerous patches are addressing some of the
more serious bugs and vulnerabilities that people have found in
iOS thirteen. But this has not been an illustrious launch

(30:22):
for Apple. Bugs and operating system updates are really nothing new.
I mean, it happens all the time. No one's perfect,
and operating systems are large and complicated pieces of software.
But it does create a bit of an image problem,
particularly if you're a company like Apple that has built
itself on a reputation that its devices just work, and

(30:42):
it also complicates a discussion that relates back to data security.
Generally speaking, it's a good idea to keep as up
to date with operating system and security patches as you
possibly can. So if there's an update, generally speaking, it's
good to install right away. Now, eventually you might find
that your particular device can't support whatever the latest and

(31:05):
greatest version of the operating system is. That does happen
where the hardware itself cannot physically support the software, but
keeping up to date reduces the opportunities that hackers can
take to exploit vulnerabilities. However, when the operating system itself
is a buggy mess and the updates aren't much better,
it's not as clear cut a case that updating is

(31:28):
your best option. It may be that, yeah, you can update,
and that will technically patch some things, but could open
up either brand new vulnerabilities or might just make stuff
not work anymore. That's not great either. All right, let's
pop on over to Microsoft, Apple's old rival and sometimes savior.
If you've listened to old episodes of tech Stuff, you
know what I'm referring to. Now. I don't have a

(31:50):
whole lot to say about Microsoft in twenty nineteen. The
company has moved much of its operations into cloud based services,
but it did launch a product in late twenty nineteen
has folks like me a little excited. It's the hollow
lens too. Now, the hollow lens is an augmented reality platform,
and augmented reality involves overlaying digital information on top of

(32:12):
the real world around us in some way. Now, you
typically can achieve this through one of several approaches. You
could have special glasses that act as a projection screen
to display information in front of you as you look around,
so that you have digital information that you're looking at,
but you can also look through that and see the
real world beyond it. You could even have headphones that

(32:35):
feeds you information by audio that enhance your experience of
moving through a physical environment. That's the type of augmented reality.
It's maybe not as flashy as the first type, but
it's still very legitimate. You could have an app on
a smartphone that can recognize certain images and display data
on top of a video view of the world. So
in this case, you're looking at the world through your
smartphone screen, which then can overlay digital information on top

(32:58):
of that video view. But it's as if you're looking
at the real world around you if you just kind
of ignore the fact that you're really looking at a monitor. Alright,
So the hullo lens and its sequel hollow Lens to
the augment in ing or if you prefer hollow lens
to electric boogaloo. It's a head mounted display and the

(33:19):
first generation of the hollow lens received a very limited
release because it wasn't intended as a consumer electronics product.
It wasn't meant to go to the average person. It
was more of a first step into a new market
for Microsoft. The company launched the Hollow Lens two in
November two thou nineteen with a price tag of three thousand,
five hundred dollars. So it's still far from being priced

(33:42):
as a basic component of home computing. Right. No one,
h not, not your average person is going to go
out and adopt the hollow lens too. At I will
not be buying a hollow lens too. I just can't
justify that expense for something you know that would interesting
but have limited utility in my life. However, you could

(34:04):
say that this is slowly moving this technology into the
consumer space. Now, the new version of the hollow lens
has an improved field of view, so users will have
a less restricted view of the world around them. To me,
the headset looks kind of like imagine you've got a
pair of safety goggles. And then above the safety goggles
that you look through, so those are clear, you're looking

(34:26):
at the world around you. Above that, you've got a
device that has a camera system mounted inside of it,
and that part is actually attached to like a headband,
so you're wearing that on your forehead. And then below
that is where the safety goggles are. That's kind of
what it looks like. I'm doing a poor job describing it,
but it's hard to do in an audio format. But

(34:48):
the cameras that face out from this device capture the
scene around you, right. It takes in that information and
interprets it through the computational system inside the device, which
the determines what data to display on your your lenses
when you're looking at something in particular. So as an example,

(35:09):
let's say you're looking at an electrical panel, then the
data that pops up might tell you what each element
on that electrical panel relates back to, So it's kind
of like a labeling system in that case. That's just
one use case for this kind of technology. The company
also tweaked the gesture control interface that the hollow lens uses. UH.

(35:30):
This was to improve on responsiveness and to cut down
on false positives. So gestures obviously would be an important
way to control this kind of technology. You might use
voice control as well. Google Glass did that, but it
seems weird because that sounds like you're talking to yourself.
I can see that from personal experience, because I got
to play with Google Glass for a while. But the
gesture controls, they did something that I thought was pretty clever.

(35:53):
So for example, they built in a system where you
would hold out your hand and you would look down
at your hand and you and by moving your head
a little bit, you could position an icon so that
it appears to be projected onto the palm of your hand.
Then you could touch that icon with the fingers of
your other hand to activate it and launch whatever the

(36:14):
app is. And that's kind of neat. It adds a
sort of tactle response to the gesture control that otherwise
was lacking. Now I haven't been able to try a
hollow lens of either generation yet, but I hope I
can at some point. I love the potential of augmented reality,
and I think really clever implementations have enormous possibilities in

(36:34):
the future. But I think it was probably gonna be
several more years before we see this as a common
technology for the everyday person. However, for certain industries I
suspect it will play a much larger role moving forward.
We've already seen it being used in the medical field,
and engineering will probably see it move beyond that slowly,
and then gradually we'll see it possibly enter into the

(36:57):
mainstream market if there's a compelling enough use case. If
it's more of a curiosity, I would argue Google Glass
kind of fell into that category, then it probably won't
receive much traction, kind of like how virtual reality has
been struggling again. All right, when we come back, we'll
talk about some more stories, including touching on what a
little company that rhymes with Schmoogle has been up to. Okay,

(37:28):
let's talk Google. So, like Facebook, Google came under intense
scrutiny throughout two thousand nineteen, whether it was about user
privacy or allegations that the company was covering up really
terrible behavior and turning a blind eye despite employee protests,
or allegations that the company's search results were purposefully promoting

(37:51):
certain material, specifically sites that were in alignment with Google's
own perceived agenda perceived by the public guy should say
at the expense of other materials. So, in other words,
that Google was promoting things that fell in line with
what Google wanted and suppressing anything that Google didn't like.

(38:12):
That was the charge. The company had to weather a
lot of strife in twenty nineteen, and to be clear,
at least some of that strife was brought on by
the company itself. One big change for the company actually
requires us to take a step back and look up
a level higher than Google itself. At Google's parent company,
which I mentioned earlier, is Alphabet Now. In early December nineteen,

(38:35):
Larry Page, a co founder of Google, announced that he
was stepping down as the CEO of Alphabet. Sunday, the
CEO of Google itself, would become the new CEO of Alphabet,
while simultaneously remaining CEO of Google. Sarah A. Brenn, another
co founder, had stepped down as Alphabet's president, but both

(38:56):
Page and Brand said they were going to remain on
the board of directors for or the company. Paige and
Brand said that their decisions reflected a need for Google's
management structure to streamline, but it also came into time
when the company was dealing with big problems from within
and without. There was the scrutiny that I mentioned earlier,
in which government agencies and advocacy groups were criticizing Google's

(39:18):
policies and talking about its power in the marketplace, and
there were also allegations that the company had engaged in
some retaliation against a few employees. Now to understand that
last bit, we have to look back a little further
than the beginning of twenty nineteen. So in twenty eighteen,
internal issues within Google became big news as thousands of

(39:39):
employees protested issues ranging from sexual harassment problems in the
workplace to quote, unethical business decisions that create a workplace
that is harmful to us and our colleagues end quote. Now,
that last quote actually comes from four former Google employees
who posted a piece on Medium after they were fired.

(40:00):
This was around Thanksgiving twenty nineteen. The four employees had
been leading efforts to unionize at Google to organize employees,
and it was a move that did not look good
on Google's part, and it certainly appears at a casual
glance at least, that Google executives were trying to squash
employees from being able to organize in a union or

(40:22):
other organizational structure. The company's official response to inquiries about
the firing was that the employees had allegedly violated Google's
security policies, an allegation that the four former employees deny.
The story is still playing out as I record this episode,
and it does tap into another upsetting trend in business

(40:45):
in general and the text fear in particular. It has
become pretty common practice for a lot of companies to
require employees to sign an agreement that limits the rights
an employee has when they want to address problems in
the workplace. Companies enact these policies so that they can
limit their own liability and limit the impact those types

(41:05):
of problems can have on business. The agreements typically force
employees to try and work through issues through internal systems
at the company, like going through human resources, and it
really places restrictions on other options, such as pursuing a
legal case against the company, like you could get severely
punished for going outside the company and seeking outside help. Now,

(41:30):
assuming the HR department is on the side of the employees,
you could maybe argue that this policy isn't too restrictive.
It might be you might not feel great about it.
But if you think, oh, well, HR is gonna be
on the employees side, maybe you're going to say, well,
I'm willing to endure it. But at least in some cases,
particularly with Google, it's appeared that the HR department was

(41:52):
really more on the side of the corporation on the employees.
That they had a tendency to shut down complaints or
to try to mitigate the fallout of complaints by kind
of shifting people around without removing or punishing anyone who
was the focal point of an allegation, and so they
weren't really addressing the underlying issues, which left the affected

(42:14):
employees with very few options. And it's pretty ugly stuff.
So that's one of the things that I think a
lot of employees around the world really, but particularly in
the tech space, have started to kind of act out against.
And we're not done with Google yet. The company launched
its gaming service, Google Stadia in two thousand nineteen. That

(42:35):
service allows users to access games via streaming, so you're
actually running the game on one of Google's servers and
you're playing it via your local connection. According to Google,
you can stream games up to four K resolution and
sixty frames per second, assuming that your Internet connection and

(42:56):
your hardware can support that. The service launched with some
stupality problems and with a pretty limited library of games,
and so far it hasn't really taken off, despite the
fact that it removes the need for buying a high
end gaming rig or even a gaming console to access
current generation games. Now. To be fair, Google is not

(43:17):
the only company that has tried this model with only
limited success. There are lots of companies that have tried
a similar approach and also have had some issues getting
anywhere with it. Meanwhile, over at YouTube, which again is
part of Google, it's part of that alphabet company, other
problems were plaguing Googlers. So in September of twenty nineteen,

(43:38):
YouTube changed its policy for verified creators. Verified creators are
an interesting thing. So these are creators who had earned
a verified check mark and that indicated that essentially up
until recently, that they had attracted at least one hundred
thousand subscribers. I happen to be one of these verified

(44:00):
uh creators, but more on that in the minute, because
it's an interesting case. So in the past, YouTube had
issued verified check marks two accounts that had reached that
one hundred thousand subscriber mark or more. That's all you
really had to do in order to get the verified
check Now they decided to change that so that not

(44:22):
only would you need the one hundred thousand subscribers, you
also need to have your account be active, meaning you
have to be uploading content on a semi regular basis,
and it doesn't need to be you know, had had
been quiet without an upload for ages. Also, the accounts
needed to be authentic. In other words, the account need
to be linked back to a real creator, brand, or

(44:43):
entity that YouTube could verify was in charge of creating
that content. This meant that a lot of the people
who had the little check mark didn't necessarily meet those requirements.
So then YouTube revoked the verified badge for thousands of creators,
and that created an uproar. I happened to be one

(45:04):
of the creators who lost my badge I lost. I
got an email it said you're verified badges going away. Now.
In my case, I wasn't fussed about it. I'll explain
that again in just a minute. So YouTube's motivation was
to clarify what a verification check mark actually meant, because
one confusion was that people thought that a check mark

(45:24):
meant that YouTube was endorsing the content of that creator,
that somehow YouTube was saying, yes, we approve of this.
This is what that check mark means. But it wasn't
meant to be that. It was meant to be an
indicator that the associated account was authentic and not some
sort of impersonation account. And this is a legit issue
over on YouTube because a lot of creators, really popular creators,

(45:49):
see their work get lifted and reposted under other accounts.
So you might create a really awesome video and maybe
it gets a little bit of notice, so somebody else
captures that video, they use a program to download it,
then they re upload it under their own account, and
they try to get that one to take off. It's

(46:09):
even possible for a copy to outperform the original, and
that means that the person who originally put in the
work to making that thing be what it is doesn't
get the benefit of it. They aren't able to monetize
the appearance on the other channel. You can put down
takedown strikes and stuff like that, but it means having

(46:29):
to constantly, you know, search the internet, search YouTube for
copies of your work. So YouTube wanted to create a
system that would make a more straightforward approach to verification,
in the sense that if you saw the check mark,
you knew this person was a legit, that the content

(46:51):
coming from that person's channel was in fact coming from
that creator. And uh so they put that change and
they revoked all those check marks. People went nuts, and
so YouTube walked it back a week later, and a
week later it gave everybody their verified check marks back,
including me, which again in my case, I don't think

(47:14):
it was necessary. So let me explain about my check mark.
So a few years ago, I was hosting a video
series called forward Thinking This is for Work, and the
channel for forward Thinking was linked to my personal YouTube
channel for reasons I don't remember at this point. I
think it was so that I could go in and

(47:35):
make changes if I needed to, even though typically we
would have other people handle all of that. For some reason,
they trusted me and they linked the channel to my
personal YouTube account. The result was I got a check
mark because the Forward Thinking series had a pretty good
subscriber base, like two fifty thousand subscribers, so it met

(47:57):
the criteria and it got the check mark. King to me, now,
this is despite the fact that on my channel, I
very rarely post anything. I've only got a few videos
up on my personal channel, and when I do put
a video up, I get only a few views. You know,
it's typically like, hey, my mom watches my stuff, which
is totally fine. I'm I was doing it for fun.

(48:19):
I wasn't trying to do it as a YouTuber, right,
So in my case, when my check mark went away,
I thought, you know, that's totally fair. I'm an outlier
and I don't meet this requirement. I definitely don't deserve
the check mark. It's okay that it's gone, But there
are lots of creators out there who did deserve the
check mark and they saw it go away. So for them,

(48:41):
I'm glad that it came back, because that thing can
really help you. That check mark means that you have
a little bit more clout when it comes to stuff
like looking for sponsorships, maybe getting advertisers to support your channel,
monetizing your work so that you can get compensated for it.
That's important. Now my case, again, I was doing it

(49:01):
for fun. I never expected it to be anything beyond
that for my own personal channel, so I didn't worry
about it. Forward thinking was a different story, but that
was also a project that had a company backing it,
so that was a totally different case. So yeah, I'm
glad that it got fixed and moving forward, YouTube is
being much more picky about who gets a verification check mark,

(49:25):
but they're not wholesale eliminating all the previously awarded check marks.
But another controversy that's also playing out on YouTube is
one that's going to roll into and beyond, and it
all has to do with a law from the nineteen
nineties intended to protect children, and that law is a
US law. It's called Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or

(49:47):
Kappa CEO p p A. It was again first established
as law, and in twenty nineteen, the Federal Trade Commission,
also known as the FTC, brought a suit again YouTube
and alleged that YouTube had been illegally collecting the personal
information of children without their parents consent, that kids were

(50:09):
watching videos on YouTube, that what they were watching was
being tracked by YouTube, and that this was creating a
digital fingerprint that advertisers were using to target advertising towards
those children, and the children being too young to consent
to this meant that this whole practice under Kappa was illegal,
and specifically that the company was using this quote in

(50:33):
the form of persistent identifiers that are used to track
users across the Internet end quote. So in other words,
this would be the sort of thing where if you
were watching a bunch of videos about elephants and then
you happened to navigate over to say Amazon, you might
see a bunch of suggestions that relate in some way
to elephants. And the concern was that this was going

(50:56):
to be targeting kids, and there was no way for
kids to give legal consent to allow that to happen,
and that data has value in it, and children's privacy
and security also has value to them, so that was
the problem. Well, YouTube would settle this lawsuit out of court.
They paid a hundred seventy million dollars in fines, which

(51:18):
really sounds like a lot, but for YouTube, it's nothing.
And if that's where it all ended, we would just
wrap up the story and beyond with it. But in
addition to the fine, the company had to agree to
create a system that is compliant with Kappa. So this
would mean that any creator who was making child directed content,
meaning content meant to be viewed by children would be

(51:41):
affected by this. They would have to be Kappa compliant.
They would have to make sure that they were running
a channel that was not gathering information about the uh
the children watching it, that they were not building in
targeted advertising, that they had to self identify as being
a creator it was creating child directed content. You had

(52:03):
to actually go into your little profile and click and
say whether or not your channel was meant for kids
or not. But this raises questions like what exactly is
child directed? And it has a lot of creators nervous
right now because there are creators who do, for example,
unboxing videos, and some of them are clearly meant for kids.
Some of them are hosted by kids and clearly meant

(52:24):
for kids, but there are others where it may not
be for kids. It maybe for people who really are
into collecting toys that are from their favorite you know, franchises,
for example, so toy unboxing would likely be in the spotlight.
Creators who use video games are likewise concerned. There are

(52:44):
people who are using video games to tell stories that
are people use let's plays or play throughs, but they're
not necessarily meant for kids. There's also people who are
working in animation, and that animation may not be meant
for kids, but the general perception is that cartoons are
children and they're concerned that they will be interpreted as
being child directed when they don't intend to be, and

(53:07):
that they will be affected by this. There's a lot
of fear that this is going to have an effect
on monetization, so that people might not be able to
get paid for what they're making, which means they'll probably
stop making it. I mean, you've got to make your living. Uh.
They may move on to a different platform than YouTube,
or they may just stop entirely. Every single violation of

(53:27):
Kappa can be fined up to a maximum of forty
two dollars. Now, keep in mind some of these channels
have hundreds or thousands of videos up online, so if
they were identified as being child directed and that their
material wasn't Kappa compliant, they could get that maximum fine

(53:48):
for every single video that seemed to be that was
on their channel. So the cost could be staggering. So
it's possible we'll see entire channels go dark with PAS
videos hidden away or deleted, all out of fear that
a mislite labeling situation could result in massive fines, and
there's still a lot of uncertainty around this issue, and

(54:09):
we're not entirely sure how it's all going to play
out now. As for me, well, I'm in favor of
rules that protect kids from having their data harvested without consent.
I mean, I don't like that idea at all about
kids getting tracked and targeted and advertising that's you know,
before they're able to even work with the idea of
what that means. They're particularly uh, you know, vulnerable to it.

(54:32):
It's one thing to be an adult and to understand,
at least on a basic level, what is going on
when we use the internet. It's another matter entirely for children. However,
the application of those rules can be pretty chaotic and disruptive,
particularly to people who are well intentioned. They are not
trying to create child directed content, but they're worried about

(54:54):
their material being misrepresented or misunderstood as child directed, and
therefore every thing is put in danger. That's not great either,
and channels that are clearly not meant for kids could
get caught up in the crosshairs through no fault of
their own. So this is a situation worthy of attention.
Because it stands to affect hundreds of creators on YouTube

(55:17):
who are not trying to make stuff for kids. Then
you've got people who like their main audience are kids,
and they're not making stuff for kids. Just so happens
that their audience is mostly kids. That's an issue all
on its own, and one that I don't have any
solutions for. If you're making stuff that you know you

(55:38):
didn't intend to appeal to children, but children think it's fantastic,
where does that put you because you weren't targeting them,
but that's your audience. That's tough. Now. There are a
lot of other stories I didn't get to like, for example,
the Testlas Cybertruck debut and how awkward it was when

(55:59):
they had the debut and they hit it with a
sledgehammer and then they threw some stuff at the windows
and the windows started cracking. That was pretty a pretty
rough showing. And the cybertruck itself is is really funky.
It's a very odd design, kind of reminds me of
a Lamborghini Kuntash or an old DeLorean in a way.
Or I didn't talk about how the Samsung Galaxy folds

(56:22):
mobile device, the foldable smartphone how that launch didn't go
so well. You could say that the fold cracked under pressure.
I didn't talk about the launch of Star Wars Galaxy's
Edge at Disneyland and Disney World. That was a big deal,
not just in tech obviously, but in theme parks. Uh.
There were the seemingly endless supply of movie and television

(56:43):
streaming services that either launched in twenty nineteen or were
announced in twenty nineteen, stuff like Disney Plus and the
upcoming HBO streaming service, Apple Plus launched just tons of them.
Now there was Baby Yoda. But I think it's a
good time to wrap up this episode. Let's set our
sights on twenty Yeah, you know what, Let's all get

(57:07):
twenty twenty vision in the year with a pun. I
guess technically I'm starting the year with a pun because
I think this episode goes live on January one. Anyway,
that was twenty nineteen in a nutshell. I've got a
lot of plans for I'm looking forward to sharing with
you more wonderful stories about technology, interesting stuff about how

(57:28):
tech works, how it affects us, how we affect it,
how things change over time, and how that change can
be messy. But sometimes once you get through the messy parts,
you can get something really incredible. So we're gonna look
at those stories as well as well as the times
where things just didn't go right. We'll be covering more
of those as well. If you guys have suggestions for

(57:49):
future topics I should cover in technology, let me know.
The Facebook and Twitter handle are both tech stuff hs W.
It's best to reach out to me there and I
We'll talk to you again really soon. Hext Stuff is
a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For

(58:09):
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.