June 1, 2021 • 31 mins
A report claims Google purposefully hit location tracking settings to discourage users from turning them off. Facebook funds a questionable report. And we learn about a military drone that attacked targets autonomously.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
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 this is the
tech news for Tuesday, June one, twenty twenty one. And
(00:27):
one story that I haven't really covered on this podcast
is that there is a global semiconductor shortage and that
has a cascading effect on the computer and electronics industries
and beyond. So let's dive into that really quickly. Now.
It mostly comes down to a couple of big things
(00:48):
that happened in twenty and one of those is, of course,
the pandemic. The global shutdown of various industries disrupted supply chains,
and that meant that shortages and raw materials became an
issue really quickly. It just had this you know, ripple effect.
And it's not like the whole world went on pause
(01:10):
at the same time, and it certainly isn't like they
all started up again in synchronization along with everyone else.
So in a way, this kind of led to the
supply chain version of a traffic jam, except instead of
cars going through you know, stop and start traffic, because
of some other event that happened Further down the road.
(01:32):
You have various manufacturers who found themselves waiting on other
elements in the supply chain, and thus they had to
go idle because they didn't have the stuff they needed
to do their part in the chain. Everything got knocked up.
Related to that, the silicon used to create the vials
to hold vaccines is the same stuff that's used in semiconductors.
(01:55):
And you know, because the vaccines are understandably of very
very high priority, it meant the semiconductor industry experienced a
silicon shortage, and thus the price for silicon went up. Now,
when the price for materials goes up, you get one
of two outcomes. Either the companies that are making stuff
(02:16):
out of that raw material have to increase prices or
they experience a smaller profit margin. Either way, the squeeze
is felt further up the chain. But the other big
issue on top of that is that the demand for
semiconductors grew a lot in by nearly seven per cent.
(02:36):
More of our everyday tech relies on semiconductors, everything from
you know, video game consoles to automobiles. Now, because of
the shortage of semiconductors. Everything else down the line gets
held up too, and this is likely to lead to
massive losses in several industries. Automakers are probably going to
(02:57):
be losing billions of dollars in the short term because
semiconductors are important components for nearly every system inside a car,
like there's more than fifty of them, and that includes
everything from entertainment two breaks to steering. Pat Gelsinger, the
new CEO of Intel, warrants that this could just be
(03:17):
the start of a shortage and that we could see
the effects of the shortage stretch on several years. Gelsinger
has said that the semiconductor industry has reacted quickly to
near term challenges, but that the long term effects are
still a big concern. Meanwhile, on the consumer side, we're
seeing the effects of this crisis. The laptop maker ACER
(03:40):
has said that due to this semiconductor shortage, the company
is only able to fill half of worldwide demand for
laptop production on any given day. So what this means
for all of us, you know, you and me is
that the supply for all sorts of tech, from smartphones
to computers to cars is going to be more limited
(04:01):
than what we've come to expect, at least for the
near term, and demand is likely to be high. So
when you've got high demand and you've got limited supply,
the next thing you typically see is prices go up.
So get ready to spend more money to buy your
tech over the next year or two until things shake
(04:22):
out and while we get ready to pay out more money,
the Guardian reports that the Silicon Six have actually paid
out less than they claimed. The Silicon Six refers to
six gargantuan tech companies. That would be Alphabet, which is
Google's parent company, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Netflix which interestingly,
(04:49):
uh is the first time I've seen Netflix added to
this particular list. Totally makes sense though, and according to
the Guardian, these six companies overstated their tax payments by
nearly one hundred billion dollars over the last ten years.
A report from the Fair Tax Foundation claims that these
six companies paid ninety six billion dollars less in tax
(05:13):
between two thousand and eleven and two thousand twenty than
their annual reports indicate. Moreover, these six companies paid a
tax rate that you or I would go bonkers over.
According to Fair Tax Foundation, these companies paid out three
point six percent of their total revenue in tax that's
(05:34):
two d nineteen billion dollars of taxes. And yeah, that
is an astounding amount of money, two hundred nineteen billion dollars.
But let's compare that to the amount of revenue they generated,
which was more than six trillion dollars trillion. That goes
beyond a princely sum. Now let's be fair. That is
(05:56):
revenue that is not profit, right, Like, profit is what
you get after you remove all the costs from the
money that you've brought in. So luckily the Guardian digs
down into that a little bit as well. Over that decade,
you know, the last ten years, Amazon collected around one
point six trillion dollars in revenue but collected a mere
(06:20):
sixty point five billion dollars in profits. So I mean,
I'm being a little flippant because honestly, these numbers are
so big I can't actually comprehend them. Like, from an
abstract perspective, I kind of get it, but you know,
if I try to dive any further down, it's just
too big. But you see that the amount of profit
(06:42):
compared to revenue is very, very tiny when you look
at them in ratio right, not by sheer amount. Sixty
billion dollars is a huge amount of money anyway. The
Guardian reports that Amazon ended up paying well below what
it should have been expected to pay, almost half as much.
In fact, there's a shifting movement around the world to
(07:06):
apply new tax laws that would limit companies from being
able to to put profits over into tax havens. Whether
that actually happens or not, whether countries around the world
really act on this, Uh, that remains to be seen,
because I'm sure there will be more than a few
dollars spent on lobbying to oppose those measures. So we'll
(07:27):
have to see how this develops further. Okay, but what
if money is no object to you? What if you
are swimming in the stuff you know, Scrooge McDuck style,
How do you flaunt your wealth in a way that's
both flashy and environmentally friendly. Well, my friend, maybe it's
(07:49):
time you look into the silent Shadow, a luxury electric
vehicle concept in the works over at Rolls Royce. Now,
the brand Rolls Royce has long been associated with luxury
and opulence, and the word shadow has significance for the
company because back in nineteen Rolls Royce introduced the Silver
(08:12):
Shadow luxury car. When it comes to the Silent Shadow, well,
we don't really have that many details about the car.
The company says that the plans are to have the
vehicle ready for purchase within the decade, but we don't
know any specs. We don't know what the projected prices,
although you know, if you have to ask, you can't
(08:33):
afford it. We don't know really any real details except that,
of course, you know, Silent Shadow. The name tells us
that we know it's going to be very, very quiet.
But then again, Rolls Royce is known, at least in
part for engineering cars that operate quietly, because the whole
point of a Rolls Royce is that the experience of
(08:53):
driving it, or for those who prefer to employ a driver,
the experience of riding in a Rolls Royce is to
enjoy luxury rather than that you know, chassis shaking, engine
revving experience you get with like muscle cars. Rolls Royce
isn't the only luxury car maker that's diving into electric vehicles,
(09:14):
and as I've reported in previous episodes of Tech Stuff,
that's pretty much a necessity because a lot of places
around the world intend to phase out the sale of
new fossil fuel powered vehicles over the next decade and
a half. Earlier this year, I talked about how the
electronics company l G was exiting the smartphone industry. The
(09:36):
company had shown off a couple of interesting concepts at CES,
but it sounds like they're never going to hit store shelves,
So that magical expanding smartphone is just gonna be a
thing of legend. I think we're not, at least we're
not going to see it from l G now Korea.
Biz Wire reports that l G is switching its former
(09:59):
smart phone manufacturing facilities over to make home appliances instead.
The company is also consolidating its operations in Brazil, expanding
facilities in the city of Manouse. And I apologize for
the terrible mispronunciation of that. I am certain I got
it completely wrong. While LG pulled the plug on smartphones
(10:19):
after finding the market too competitive, it was dominated by
companies like Apple and Samsung, home appliances are a totally
different story. One of the many consequences of the pandemic
of twan. I guess I shouldn't give it a year.
It's still going anyway. One of the big consequences was
this increased demand in home appliances as people spent more
(10:42):
time at home, and LG saw its sales skyrocket as
a result. Now this move reflects that increased demand was
really the driver for l g S decisions. However, it
will remain to be seen if that demand will contin nue,
right if the demands that were generated by the pandemic
(11:03):
in are going to stick around even as we start
to have a better handle on dealing with the consequences
of that pandemic. So we don't really know if this
is the start of a trend in home appliance sales
or if it's more of a blip in the radar.
C Net reports that some recently unsealed court documents show
(11:27):
that Google purposefully obvious skated the location settings in its
Android phone software so that it would be harder for
users to find those settings and then turn them off.
As we've seen when numerous tech companies, including one we're
going to cover in a second, the real business of
those companies aren't necessarily in hardware or social networking sites
(11:53):
or whatever the surface level businesses. You know, Google's business
isn't really search. It's in data. That's where the real
money is collecting and then exploiting data in different ways,
primarily when it comes to user data that comes in
the form of the company's relationships with various advertisers. You know, obviously,
(12:17):
the more information you can give an advertiser about their
intended market, the more effectively that advertiser can serve up
ads to that market. So it becomes this the cycle,
this feedback loop between these companies and advertisers that in
turn inform the business decisions of those companies like Google. So,
(12:42):
according to this document, Google discovered that if the location
settings on an Android phone were relatively easy to navigate to,
a lot of people opted to turn off their location settings.
How about that folks are not super jazzed about being
tracked wewere and so google solution to this issue was
(13:04):
not to shift business operations away from the benefits of
harvesting location data. No, the answer apparently was to make
those settings just way harder to find so that users
would continue to generate those geo located zeros and ones
for Google, so that Google could profit off of them
(13:25):
without those users actually really being aware of it. On
top of that, Google apparently reached out to various manufacturers
that make Android products in an effort to convince them
to hide the location settings away in deep various menus
and clunky user interfaces like LG pushed geolocation settings to
(13:47):
the second page of Settings and its phones, And anyone
who's had any experience on the Internet knows that if
you are below the fold, that is, if you have
to scroll down in order to see the ticular entry,
you lose like the vast majority of people who are
looking at your stuff like this is clear in Google Search. Right,
(14:08):
if you're not in those first few hits of a
Google search, the traffic that comes to you thanks to
Google Search is super low because you know, most people
don't bother to school down any further. Sayings true with
settings on phones. If it's not right there, a lot
of people don't take the effort to go any further.
This revelation comes on the heels of an investigation from
(14:31):
three years ago by the Associated Press into Google, and
that investigation found that Google was tracking location even if
users opted out of the location history feature. So apparently,
if you turned off location history on your Android device,
it just meant that Google was going to keep on
tracking you everywhere you go. They just wouldn't tell you
(14:53):
about it. I mean, why should you care about all
this anyway? Why why is this important? Well, location data
isn't just about collecting information on where you go and
when you go there. It's also about collecting the data
of everybody else at the same time. Anyone who has,
you know, a device that has geolocation connected to it,
(15:16):
if you're in a space that has a lot of
folks with phones in it. Well, now, as a data
collection company, you can do all sorts of interesting things.
So I'm going to give you an example. And this
is actually something that's related to a Twitter thread I
saw and I wish I could remember the person who
posted it because it was very good. But I'll give
(15:37):
you kind of an example. So let's say that you've
got a good friend of yours you haven't seen in
a long time, and you go to visit this friend
for a few days. So you're staying at your friend's house. Now,
your friend also has various devices, and you've got your smartphone,
and location tracking tells Google where you are. And assuming
Google also has at least some access to the data
(16:00):
that's generated by your friends devices, Google also knows who
you are with. They know that you're at this specific
person's house, and they know things about that specific person too.
Google knows all about your friends activities and what they
like and where they like to go and all that
kind of stuff. So now Google starts to integrate ads
(16:21):
into your various experiences that aren't just targeting you, They're
also targeting your friend. I mean, you like this person
well enough to stay at their house for a few days.
Maybe you like them well enough to shop for a
birthday present for them, and Google happens to know when
their birthday is because that's some of the data that
(16:44):
these companies collect, like email, addresses, birthdays. A lot of
the stuff these companies collect not through directly grabbing it
off of your device, but by you know, cross referencing
the databases that have your information in them from across
all the different services you use. So if you've ever
(17:04):
used a service where you've had to put in things
like your name and address and phone number and your
birthday and your email and all that kind of stuff,
all that data ends up getting mixed up with information
that's gathered from sources like devices, and that's a really
powerful thing. So now, because Google knows where you are
and who you're with, and they know about that person's birthday,
(17:27):
maybe they serve up ads about something that this friend
of yours really likes, and the suggestion is, hey, it's
it's it's my friend's birthday coming up. I should, you know,
click on this ad and buy this stuff. So now
you get this weird sensation that you're getting served ads
that are very specifically targeted at you and the experiences
(17:49):
that you've recently had. It feels like Google is listening
in on you right, like it's just spying on you,
and it's picking up stuff from say you're your phone's
microphone or whatever. But no, Google doesn't have to do
any of that. Google doesn't have to do any active
spying on you. It doesn't have to listen to you.
It's just collecting all the data from you and your
(18:12):
friend just by being who you are and where you are,
and then cross referencing that data with other data sets,
and then analyzing that data and then acting on it.
This is just one way where data collection can become
intrusive and creepy. Now we're gonna take a quick break.
When we come back, I'll give another update about another
(18:35):
company that's equally obsessed with your information. It rhymes with
a space look. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay,
we're back, And before the break, I was telling you
(18:56):
about Google and geolocation data and how the company was
apparently trying to hide the settings for geolocation away so
that fewer people would turn it off. I mean, that's
the thing. These companies are often compelled by various legislations
around the world to offer up that solution. But then
(19:17):
the companies do their best to make that option, you know,
harder to find so that fewer people actually use it
because it's it's we've seen when people are given the option,
they often like to opt out of these features. And
when your entire business is dependent upon those features, that's
where you see these companies coming up with these clever
(19:38):
ways to try and get around the issue. So along
that same vein, remember how Facebook put up a fuss
about the new privacy settings that are included in the
latest version of Apple's iOS. So one of the new
features of the iPhone operating system, well really the iOS
operating system, because it's for all sorts of devices, not
(20:01):
just an iPhone anyway, one of the new features is
that users will get a prompt asking if they will
allow certain apps like Facebook, for example, to collect data
about themselves outside of the app itself, So that includes
data that comes from other apps that are on your phone. So,
(20:22):
for example, Facebook, if you were to allow this option,
would potentially be allowed to collect information about your shopping
habits on other apps, or what restaurants you like to
order from whenever you use delivery services and so on. Now,
because of apples change in policy, users will get a
(20:43):
message asking them to grant permission to allow apps like
Facebook to do this. And Facebook really hates that. And
the reason the company really hates it is pretty much
the same reason that Google was burying location settings. Because
data is money, and if you give people the option
to share less data about themselves, they might actually take
(21:07):
that option. And I mean, really, isn't that just stealing?
I mean, when you get down to it, isn't it
just ungrateful for users to not hand over all the
information about who they are and what they do and
who they know so that poor scrappy companies like Facebook
can just make a buck off that info. Now, I'm
(21:29):
obviously I'm being incredibly obnoxious and sarcastic here because I
think Facebook is like literally the worst anyway. Now, a
new study suggests that Apple's changes to privacy are in
fact bad. The study says Apple is doing a bad
thing by including these privacy options. It says that those
(21:52):
policies only serve to help Apple, and they hurt all
other companies, and thus these are anti competitive practice. Is
that Apple has put in place, Apple saying if you
want to operate on our system, you must follow these rules, which,
by the way, we don't have to follow as Apple.
As Apple, we it's cool for us to collect all
(22:13):
the information, but you companies out there, you cannot do that,
and that this hurts other companies. Also, Facebook totally funded
that study. Now that might cause you to question the
studies objective perspective, right, Like, the studies outcome is essentially
(22:35):
in line with Facebook's complaints against Apple. So I think
that's actually a pretty darn healthy attitude to have to
question the objectivity of the results because the study itself
was funded by the company that has a beef against Apple.
But all that being said, does that mean it's possible
(22:56):
that the paper actually has a point in that Apple
is going to be fit while other companies do not.
I mean, maybe it's very likely Apple is certainly no
innocent lamb in this equation either. Right, You've got all
these different companies that are leveraging data in different ways.
Sometimes it's obvious and sometimes it's subtle, but they're all
(23:18):
profiting off of it. Now. I don't have a solution
that addresses this whole issue unless it's just to give
up on smartphones in general and go to like really
simple cell phones and and just kind of opt out
of the online experience. That's not really an option for
most people, or at least not a you know, an
(23:41):
attractive option. But the flip side is, unless there's some
specific legislation in place that that directs how data can
and cannot be used, I don't see really a way
of fixing this. Um it's a mess. It's speaking of messes.
In science fiction, autonomous killer robots are a common trope,
(24:06):
from terminator to RoboCop to the classic chopping mall. The
threat of AI powered killing machines is made apparent, and
we've seen numerous experts in robotics and AI speak out
against the development of these kinds of devices. They've pointed
out that autonomous weapons would very likely lead to a
(24:28):
new type of arms race, and that we would also
see horrific uses of this technology. It does not take
much imagination to conjure up a scenario in which a machine,
all under its own power, mistakenly identifies a group of
people as being targets and then attacks them. Or heck,
it's not hard to imagine a machine that identifies a
(24:51):
group quote unquote correctly, But the people behind the machine
are committed to wiping out specific populations, and they're just
using the machin jeans to carry out the awful, horrific work.
And according to the u N, we are essentially in
that terrifying era. A u N Security Council reports said
(25:12):
that in March of twenty the Nation of Turkey deployed
an STM cargo to military drone. This drone, apparently under
autonomous command, attacked Libyan armed forces that were repositioning and
withdrawing from an area. The report claims that the drone
(25:32):
could identify an attack targets without first establishing any line
of communication back to a human operator. The u N
had previously warned against this sort of thing, advocating for
a global ban on the production of autonomous weaponry. That
was a move that was opposed by two major world powers,
(25:53):
Russia and the United States. Now this was back in
the U S. Isn't a very different place politically today.
In however, I am not confident enough to say that
the US would unilaterally condemn the development of these kinds
of autonomous weapons. And I say that mostly because the
(26:17):
Obama administration had its own serious burden to bear when
it comes to the use of lethal military drones, though
those were under the control of human operators. Anyway, the
report has prompted more experts in the fields of AI
and machine learning to speak out against the practice of
developing and deploying autonomous weaponry. So it pretty much falls
(26:40):
to governments to take action from here and perhaps give
the U N the authority to to have a unilateral
ban on the development and thus, you know, processes in
place for any countries found to have violated that ban,
because otherwise, without that kind of global operative approach, we're
(27:01):
going to see countries say, well, we can't let there
be an autonomous weapon gap. If we don't pursue it,
we will be destroyed by these tools. Because our our
our opponents will surely go down that pathway, so we
have to and it becomes the sort of escalation that
we've seen time and time again. Pretty concerning stuff. We've
(27:26):
got another cyber attacks story to cover, this time targeting
the food industry. A company called JBS Foods had to
shut down operations over the weekend due to a cyber attack.
JBS Foods is the world's largest producer of beef and
poultry and the second largest producer of pork, which surprised
me because I mean, I guess pigs have to be
(27:48):
the biggest producer of pork. Uh huh jokes. Anyway, a
cyber attack forced JBS Foods to shut down operations in
multiple countries, including the UK, the United States, Australia, Canada,
and more. The attack hit the I T systems of
the company, and at the time of this recording, I
(28:10):
don't have specific details about the nature of that cyber attack.
If I had to guess, and again this is just
a guess, I would say it's very likely another ransomware attacks,
similar to what we saw with Colonial Pipeline earlier this year.
If that is the case, then JBS Foods could, in
(28:31):
theory be weighing the option about whether or not to
pay off a ransom. If that is the case, I
still maintain paying off ransoms is always a bad idea
because it consistently fuels more attacks in the future. The
more times hackers get paid off, the more they see
that this is profitable, and they'll do it even more.
(28:54):
The company is definitely working to restore functionality to its
systems and JBS Foods as that it has no evidence
that this attack compromised any data relating to employees, customers,
or suppliers, but that processing transactions might take a while
because the company has to restore functionality, So we'll keep
(29:15):
an eye on this story. And finally, up in space,
the International Space Station's robot arms suffered some damage recently,
and at first I was kind of hoping to read
about how the I s s got into a robot
arm wrestling competition will Sylvester Stallone and that this was
finally my eagerly anticipated sequel to the hit film Over
(29:37):
the Top, And I think that this one could be
called way over the Top. And now Stallone is like
a space trucker who likes to arm wrestle. But I'm
told that none of this is true, and I should
just probably not talk about that anymore. But what is
true is that the arm did get damaged, and the
real reason it got damaged was because of space debris,
(29:59):
which is a real issue and a growing one as
we send more stuff up into space and we lack
a coheri adhesive approach to getting that stuff down. Once
it ends its its useful life cycle, it's going to
get worse. And when this actually happened is hard to say,
but NASA states that the Canada Arm two, which has
(30:21):
been part of the I S S since two thousand one,
has a puncture in its thermal blanket, so this is
essentially like insulation around the arm, and that the boom
underneath also suffered some damage. As to when this happened,
I'm not actually sure, but the issue of space debris
is one that has been growing over the years without
(30:44):
much action on the part of terrestrial governments to create
a foundation for rules and processes to mitigate that issue, or,
as Jack right Nelson from the National University of Singapore
Faculty of Law said to the Register quote, the whole
in Canada Arm two is minuscule compared to the whole
in the international legal regime concerning space debris. End quote.
(31:08):
Couldn't have said it better myself, Mr Nelson. All right,
that is it for the news for Tuesday, June one,
twenty one. If you have any suggestions for topics I
should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach
out to me on Twitter the handle we use as
tech stuff H s W and I'll talk to you
(31:29):
again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
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 this is the
tech news for Tuesday, June one, twenty twenty one. And
(00:27):
one story that I haven't really covered on this podcast
is that there is a global semiconductor shortage and that
has a cascading effect on the computer and electronics industries
and beyond. So let's dive into that really quickly. Now.
It mostly comes down to a couple of big things
(00:48):
that happened in twenty and one of those is, of course,
the pandemic. The global shutdown of various industries disrupted supply chains,
and that meant that shortages and raw materials became an
issue really quickly. It just had this you know, ripple effect.
And it's not like the whole world went on pause
(01:10):
at the same time, and it certainly isn't like they
all started up again in synchronization along with everyone else.
So in a way, this kind of led to the
supply chain version of a traffic jam, except instead of
cars going through you know, stop and start traffic, because
of some other event that happened Further down the road.
(01:32):
You have various manufacturers who found themselves waiting on other
elements in the supply chain, and thus they had to
go idle because they didn't have the stuff they needed
to do their part in the chain. Everything got knocked up.
Related to that, the silicon used to create the vials
to hold vaccines is the same stuff that's used in semiconductors.
(01:55):
And you know, because the vaccines are understandably of very
very high priority, it meant the semiconductor industry experienced a
silicon shortage, and thus the price for silicon went up. Now,
when the price for materials goes up, you get one
of two outcomes. Either the companies that are making stuff
(02:16):
out of that raw material have to increase prices or
they experience a smaller profit margin. Either way, the squeeze
is felt further up the chain. But the other big
issue on top of that is that the demand for
semiconductors grew a lot in by nearly seven per cent.
(02:36):
More of our everyday tech relies on semiconductors, everything from
you know, video game consoles to automobiles. Now, because of
the shortage of semiconductors. Everything else down the line gets
held up too, and this is likely to lead to
massive losses in several industries. Automakers are probably going to
(02:57):
be losing billions of dollars in the short term because
semiconductors are important components for nearly every system inside a car,
like there's more than fifty of them, and that includes
everything from entertainment two breaks to steering. Pat Gelsinger, the
new CEO of Intel, warrants that this could just be
(03:17):
the start of a shortage and that we could see
the effects of the shortage stretch on several years. Gelsinger
has said that the semiconductor industry has reacted quickly to
near term challenges, but that the long term effects are
still a big concern. Meanwhile, on the consumer side, we're
seeing the effects of this crisis. The laptop maker ACER
(03:40):
has said that due to this semiconductor shortage, the company
is only able to fill half of worldwide demand for
laptop production on any given day. So what this means
for all of us, you know, you and me is
that the supply for all sorts of tech, from smartphones
to computers to cars is going to be more limited
(04:01):
than what we've come to expect, at least for the
near term, and demand is likely to be high. So
when you've got high demand and you've got limited supply,
the next thing you typically see is prices go up.
So get ready to spend more money to buy your
tech over the next year or two until things shake
(04:22):
out and while we get ready to pay out more money,
the Guardian reports that the Silicon Six have actually paid
out less than they claimed. The Silicon Six refers to
six gargantuan tech companies. That would be Alphabet, which is
Google's parent company, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Netflix which interestingly,
(04:49):
uh is the first time I've seen Netflix added to
this particular list. Totally makes sense though, and according to
the Guardian, these six companies overstated their tax payments by
nearly one hundred billion dollars over the last ten years.
A report from the Fair Tax Foundation claims that these
six companies paid ninety six billion dollars less in tax
(05:13):
between two thousand and eleven and two thousand twenty than
their annual reports indicate. Moreover, these six companies paid a
tax rate that you or I would go bonkers over.
According to Fair Tax Foundation, these companies paid out three
point six percent of their total revenue in tax that's
(05:34):
two d nineteen billion dollars of taxes. And yeah, that
is an astounding amount of money, two hundred nineteen billion dollars.
But let's compare that to the amount of revenue they generated,
which was more than six trillion dollars trillion. That goes
beyond a princely sum. Now let's be fair. That is
(05:56):
revenue that is not profit, right, Like, profit is what
you get after you remove all the costs from the
money that you've brought in. So luckily the Guardian digs
down into that a little bit as well. Over that decade,
you know, the last ten years, Amazon collected around one
point six trillion dollars in revenue but collected a mere
(06:20):
sixty point five billion dollars in profits. So I mean,
I'm being a little flippant because honestly, these numbers are
so big I can't actually comprehend them. Like, from an
abstract perspective, I kind of get it, but you know,
if I try to dive any further down, it's just
too big. But you see that the amount of profit
(06:42):
compared to revenue is very, very tiny when you look
at them in ratio right, not by sheer amount. Sixty
billion dollars is a huge amount of money anyway. The
Guardian reports that Amazon ended up paying well below what
it should have been expected to pay, almost half as much.
In fact, there's a shifting movement around the world to
(07:06):
apply new tax laws that would limit companies from being
able to to put profits over into tax havens. Whether
that actually happens or not, whether countries around the world
really act on this, Uh, that remains to be seen,
because I'm sure there will be more than a few
dollars spent on lobbying to oppose those measures. So we'll
(07:27):
have to see how this develops further. Okay, but what
if money is no object to you? What if you
are swimming in the stuff you know, Scrooge McDuck style,
How do you flaunt your wealth in a way that's
both flashy and environmentally friendly. Well, my friend, maybe it's
(07:49):
time you look into the silent Shadow, a luxury electric
vehicle concept in the works over at Rolls Royce. Now,
the brand Rolls Royce has long been associated with luxury
and opulence, and the word shadow has significance for the
company because back in nineteen Rolls Royce introduced the Silver
(08:12):
Shadow luxury car. When it comes to the Silent Shadow, well,
we don't really have that many details about the car.
The company says that the plans are to have the
vehicle ready for purchase within the decade, but we don't
know any specs. We don't know what the projected prices,
although you know, if you have to ask, you can't
(08:33):
afford it. We don't know really any real details except that,
of course, you know, Silent Shadow. The name tells us
that we know it's going to be very, very quiet.
But then again, Rolls Royce is known, at least in
part for engineering cars that operate quietly, because the whole
point of a Rolls Royce is that the experience of
(08:53):
driving it, or for those who prefer to employ a driver,
the experience of riding in a Rolls Royce is to
enjoy luxury rather than that you know, chassis shaking, engine
revving experience you get with like muscle cars. Rolls Royce
isn't the only luxury car maker that's diving into electric vehicles,
(09:14):
and as I've reported in previous episodes of Tech Stuff,
that's pretty much a necessity because a lot of places
around the world intend to phase out the sale of
new fossil fuel powered vehicles over the next decade and
a half. Earlier this year, I talked about how the
electronics company l G was exiting the smartphone industry. The
(09:36):
company had shown off a couple of interesting concepts at CES,
but it sounds like they're never going to hit store shelves,
So that magical expanding smartphone is just gonna be a
thing of legend. I think we're not, at least we're
not going to see it from l G now Korea.
Biz Wire reports that l G is switching its former
(09:59):
smart phone manufacturing facilities over to make home appliances instead.
The company is also consolidating its operations in Brazil, expanding
facilities in the city of Manouse. And I apologize for
the terrible mispronunciation of that. I am certain I got
it completely wrong. While LG pulled the plug on smartphones
(10:19):
after finding the market too competitive, it was dominated by
companies like Apple and Samsung, home appliances are a totally
different story. One of the many consequences of the pandemic
of twan. I guess I shouldn't give it a year.
It's still going anyway. One of the big consequences was
this increased demand in home appliances as people spent more
(10:42):
time at home, and LG saw its sales skyrocket as
a result. Now this move reflects that increased demand was
really the driver for l g S decisions. However, it
will remain to be seen if that demand will contin nue,
right if the demands that were generated by the pandemic
(11:03):
in are going to stick around even as we start
to have a better handle on dealing with the consequences
of that pandemic. So we don't really know if this
is the start of a trend in home appliance sales
or if it's more of a blip in the radar.
C Net reports that some recently unsealed court documents show
(11:27):
that Google purposefully obvious skated the location settings in its
Android phone software so that it would be harder for
users to find those settings and then turn them off.
As we've seen when numerous tech companies, including one we're
going to cover in a second, the real business of
those companies aren't necessarily in hardware or social networking sites
(11:53):
or whatever the surface level businesses. You know, Google's business
isn't really search. It's in data. That's where the real
money is collecting and then exploiting data in different ways,
primarily when it comes to user data that comes in
the form of the company's relationships with various advertisers. You know, obviously,
(12:17):
the more information you can give an advertiser about their
intended market, the more effectively that advertiser can serve up
ads to that market. So it becomes this the cycle,
this feedback loop between these companies and advertisers that in
turn inform the business decisions of those companies like Google. So,
(12:42):
according to this document, Google discovered that if the location
settings on an Android phone were relatively easy to navigate to,
a lot of people opted to turn off their location settings.
How about that folks are not super jazzed about being
tracked wewere and so google solution to this issue was
(13:04):
not to shift business operations away from the benefits of
harvesting location data. No, the answer apparently was to make
those settings just way harder to find so that users
would continue to generate those geo located zeros and ones
for Google, so that Google could profit off of them
(13:25):
without those users actually really being aware of it. On
top of that, Google apparently reached out to various manufacturers
that make Android products in an effort to convince them
to hide the location settings away in deep various menus
and clunky user interfaces like LG pushed geolocation settings to
(13:47):
the second page of Settings and its phones, And anyone
who's had any experience on the Internet knows that if
you are below the fold, that is, if you have
to scroll down in order to see the ticular entry,
you lose like the vast majority of people who are
looking at your stuff like this is clear in Google Search. Right,
(14:08):
if you're not in those first few hits of a
Google search, the traffic that comes to you thanks to
Google Search is super low because you know, most people
don't bother to school down any further. Sayings true with
settings on phones. If it's not right there, a lot
of people don't take the effort to go any further.
This revelation comes on the heels of an investigation from
(14:31):
three years ago by the Associated Press into Google, and
that investigation found that Google was tracking location even if
users opted out of the location history feature. So apparently,
if you turned off location history on your Android device,
it just meant that Google was going to keep on
tracking you everywhere you go. They just wouldn't tell you
(14:53):
about it. I mean, why should you care about all
this anyway? Why why is this important? Well, location data
isn't just about collecting information on where you go and
when you go there. It's also about collecting the data
of everybody else at the same time. Anyone who has,
you know, a device that has geolocation connected to it,
(15:16):
if you're in a space that has a lot of
folks with phones in it. Well, now, as a data
collection company, you can do all sorts of interesting things.
So I'm going to give you an example. And this
is actually something that's related to a Twitter thread I
saw and I wish I could remember the person who
posted it because it was very good. But I'll give
(15:37):
you kind of an example. So let's say that you've
got a good friend of yours you haven't seen in
a long time, and you go to visit this friend
for a few days. So you're staying at your friend's house. Now,
your friend also has various devices, and you've got your smartphone,
and location tracking tells Google where you are. And assuming
Google also has at least some access to the data
(16:00):
that's generated by your friends devices, Google also knows who
you are with. They know that you're at this specific
person's house, and they know things about that specific person too.
Google knows all about your friends activities and what they
like and where they like to go and all that
kind of stuff. So now Google starts to integrate ads
(16:21):
into your various experiences that aren't just targeting you, They're
also targeting your friend. I mean, you like this person
well enough to stay at their house for a few days.
Maybe you like them well enough to shop for a
birthday present for them, and Google happens to know when
their birthday is because that's some of the data that
(16:44):
these companies collect, like email, addresses, birthdays. A lot of
the stuff these companies collect not through directly grabbing it
off of your device, but by you know, cross referencing
the databases that have your information in them from across
all the different services you use. So if you've ever
(17:04):
used a service where you've had to put in things
like your name and address and phone number and your
birthday and your email and all that kind of stuff,
all that data ends up getting mixed up with information
that's gathered from sources like devices, and that's a really
powerful thing. So now, because Google knows where you are
and who you're with, and they know about that person's birthday,
(17:27):
maybe they serve up ads about something that this friend
of yours really likes, and the suggestion is, hey, it's
it's it's my friend's birthday coming up. I should, you know,
click on this ad and buy this stuff. So now
you get this weird sensation that you're getting served ads
that are very specifically targeted at you and the experiences
(17:49):
that you've recently had. It feels like Google is listening
in on you right, like it's just spying on you,
and it's picking up stuff from say you're your phone's
microphone or whatever. But no, Google doesn't have to do
any of that. Google doesn't have to do any active
spying on you. It doesn't have to listen to you.
It's just collecting all the data from you and your
(18:12):
friend just by being who you are and where you are,
and then cross referencing that data with other data sets,
and then analyzing that data and then acting on it.
This is just one way where data collection can become
intrusive and creepy. Now we're gonna take a quick break.
When we come back, I'll give another update about another
(18:35):
company that's equally obsessed with your information. It rhymes with
a space look. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay,
we're back, And before the break, I was telling you
(18:56):
about Google and geolocation data and how the company was
apparently trying to hide the settings for geolocation away so
that fewer people would turn it off. I mean, that's
the thing. These companies are often compelled by various legislations
around the world to offer up that solution. But then
(19:17):
the companies do their best to make that option, you know,
harder to find so that fewer people actually use it
because it's it's we've seen when people are given the option,
they often like to opt out of these features. And
when your entire business is dependent upon those features, that's
where you see these companies coming up with these clever
(19:38):
ways to try and get around the issue. So along
that same vein, remember how Facebook put up a fuss
about the new privacy settings that are included in the
latest version of Apple's iOS. So one of the new
features of the iPhone operating system, well really the iOS
operating system, because it's for all sorts of devices, not
(20:01):
just an iPhone anyway, one of the new features is
that users will get a prompt asking if they will
allow certain apps like Facebook, for example, to collect data
about themselves outside of the app itself, So that includes
data that comes from other apps that are on your phone. So,
(20:22):
for example, Facebook, if you were to allow this option,
would potentially be allowed to collect information about your shopping
habits on other apps, or what restaurants you like to
order from whenever you use delivery services and so on. Now,
because of apples change in policy, users will get a
(20:43):
message asking them to grant permission to allow apps like
Facebook to do this. And Facebook really hates that. And
the reason the company really hates it is pretty much
the same reason that Google was burying location settings. Because
data is money, and if you give people the option
to share less data about themselves, they might actually take
(21:07):
that option. And I mean, really, isn't that just stealing?
I mean, when you get down to it, isn't it
just ungrateful for users to not hand over all the
information about who they are and what they do and
who they know so that poor scrappy companies like Facebook
can just make a buck off that info. Now, I'm
(21:29):
obviously I'm being incredibly obnoxious and sarcastic here because I
think Facebook is like literally the worst anyway. Now, a
new study suggests that Apple's changes to privacy are in
fact bad. The study says Apple is doing a bad
thing by including these privacy options. It says that those
(21:52):
policies only serve to help Apple, and they hurt all
other companies, and thus these are anti competitive practice. Is
that Apple has put in place, Apple saying if you
want to operate on our system, you must follow these rules, which,
by the way, we don't have to follow as Apple.
As Apple, we it's cool for us to collect all
(22:13):
the information, but you companies out there, you cannot do that,
and that this hurts other companies. Also, Facebook totally funded
that study. Now that might cause you to question the
studies objective perspective, right, Like, the studies outcome is essentially
(22:35):
in line with Facebook's complaints against Apple. So I think
that's actually a pretty darn healthy attitude to have to
question the objectivity of the results because the study itself
was funded by the company that has a beef against Apple.
But all that being said, does that mean it's possible
(22:56):
that the paper actually has a point in that Apple
is going to be fit while other companies do not.
I mean, maybe it's very likely Apple is certainly no
innocent lamb in this equation either. Right, You've got all
these different companies that are leveraging data in different ways.
Sometimes it's obvious and sometimes it's subtle, but they're all
(23:18):
profiting off of it. Now. I don't have a solution
that addresses this whole issue unless it's just to give
up on smartphones in general and go to like really
simple cell phones and and just kind of opt out
of the online experience. That's not really an option for
most people, or at least not a you know, an
(23:41):
attractive option. But the flip side is, unless there's some
specific legislation in place that that directs how data can
and cannot be used, I don't see really a way
of fixing this. Um it's a mess. It's speaking of messes.
In science fiction, autonomous killer robots are a common trope,
(24:06):
from terminator to RoboCop to the classic chopping mall. The
threat of AI powered killing machines is made apparent, and
we've seen numerous experts in robotics and AI speak out
against the development of these kinds of devices. They've pointed
out that autonomous weapons would very likely lead to a
(24:28):
new type of arms race, and that we would also
see horrific uses of this technology. It does not take
much imagination to conjure up a scenario in which a machine,
all under its own power, mistakenly identifies a group of
people as being targets and then attacks them. Or heck,
it's not hard to imagine a machine that identifies a
(24:51):
group quote unquote correctly, But the people behind the machine
are committed to wiping out specific populations, and they're just
using the machin jeans to carry out the awful, horrific work.
And according to the u N, we are essentially in
that terrifying era. A u N Security Council reports said
(25:12):
that in March of twenty the Nation of Turkey deployed
an STM cargo to military drone. This drone, apparently under
autonomous command, attacked Libyan armed forces that were repositioning and
withdrawing from an area. The report claims that the drone
(25:32):
could identify an attack targets without first establishing any line
of communication back to a human operator. The u N
had previously warned against this sort of thing, advocating for
a global ban on the production of autonomous weaponry. That
was a move that was opposed by two major world powers,
(25:53):
Russia and the United States. Now this was back in
the U S. Isn't a very different place politically today.
In however, I am not confident enough to say that
the US would unilaterally condemn the development of these kinds
of autonomous weapons. And I say that mostly because the
(26:17):
Obama administration had its own serious burden to bear when
it comes to the use of lethal military drones, though
those were under the control of human operators. Anyway, the
report has prompted more experts in the fields of AI
and machine learning to speak out against the practice of
developing and deploying autonomous weaponry. So it pretty much falls
(26:40):
to governments to take action from here and perhaps give
the U N the authority to to have a unilateral
ban on the development and thus, you know, processes in
place for any countries found to have violated that ban,
because otherwise, without that kind of global operative approach, we're
(27:01):
going to see countries say, well, we can't let there
be an autonomous weapon gap. If we don't pursue it,
we will be destroyed by these tools. Because our our
our opponents will surely go down that pathway, so we
have to and it becomes the sort of escalation that
we've seen time and time again. Pretty concerning stuff. We've
(27:26):
got another cyber attacks story to cover, this time targeting
the food industry. A company called JBS Foods had to
shut down operations over the weekend due to a cyber attack.
JBS Foods is the world's largest producer of beef and
poultry and the second largest producer of pork, which surprised
me because I mean, I guess pigs have to be
(27:48):
the biggest producer of pork. Uh huh jokes. Anyway, a
cyber attack forced JBS Foods to shut down operations in
multiple countries, including the UK, the United States, Australia, Canada,
and more. The attack hit the I T systems of
the company, and at the time of this recording, I
(28:10):
don't have specific details about the nature of that cyber attack.
If I had to guess, and again this is just
a guess, I would say it's very likely another ransomware attacks,
similar to what we saw with Colonial Pipeline earlier this year.
If that is the case, then JBS Foods could, in
(28:31):
theory be weighing the option about whether or not to
pay off a ransom. If that is the case, I
still maintain paying off ransoms is always a bad idea
because it consistently fuels more attacks in the future. The
more times hackers get paid off, the more they see
that this is profitable, and they'll do it even more.
(28:54):
The company is definitely working to restore functionality to its
systems and JBS Foods as that it has no evidence
that this attack compromised any data relating to employees, customers,
or suppliers, but that processing transactions might take a while
because the company has to restore functionality, So we'll keep
(29:15):
an eye on this story. And finally, up in space,
the International Space Station's robot arms suffered some damage recently,
and at first I was kind of hoping to read
about how the I s s got into a robot
arm wrestling competition will Sylvester Stallone and that this was
finally my eagerly anticipated sequel to the hit film Over
(29:37):
the Top, And I think that this one could be
called way over the Top. And now Stallone is like
a space trucker who likes to arm wrestle. But I'm
told that none of this is true, and I should
just probably not talk about that anymore. But what is
true is that the arm did get damaged, and the
real reason it got damaged was because of space debris,
(29:59):
which is a real issue and a growing one as
we send more stuff up into space and we lack
a coheri adhesive approach to getting that stuff down. Once
it ends its its useful life cycle, it's going to
get worse. And when this actually happened is hard to say,
but NASA states that the Canada Arm two, which has
(30:21):
been part of the I S S since two thousand one,
has a puncture in its thermal blanket, so this is
essentially like insulation around the arm, and that the boom
underneath also suffered some damage. As to when this happened,
I'm not actually sure, but the issue of space debris
is one that has been growing over the years without
(30:44):
much action on the part of terrestrial governments to create
a foundation for rules and processes to mitigate that issue, or,
as Jack right Nelson from the National University of Singapore
Faculty of Law said to the Register quote, the whole
in Canada Arm two is minuscule compared to the whole
in the international legal regime concerning space debris. End quote.
(31:08):
Couldn't have said it better myself, Mr Nelson. All right,
that is it for the news for Tuesday, June one,
twenty one. If you have any suggestions for topics I
should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach
out to me on Twitter the handle we use as
tech stuff H s W and I'll talk to you
(31:29):
again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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