September 14, 2023 • 31 mins
Apple's iPhone 15 reveal fails to impress my producer Tari. Google's antitrust trial is underway. The government starts to ask questions about AI. And much more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you, y'all? I am in the studio recording today,
which means that super producer Tari is actually listening on
(00:28):
the cans right now across the room from me in
the control room. And this is the first time we've
done this, possibly since the pandemic. It has been a while, y'all,
and already Tari is making her presence felt on this show,
largely by suggesting numerous inappropriate titles for the episode, so
(00:52):
her assistance, as always, is invaluable. Anyway, what we're going
to talk about first is, well, you know, around this
time of year you can count on a few things
here in the United States. For example, folks are already
obsessing over Halloween, honestly, with my friend's list that actually
started last month. Pumpkin spice flavors have made their way
(01:16):
into pretty much everything you are able to eat or
drink at this point. And also, you know that if
it's this time of year, Apple's going to hold an
event highlighting the next generation iPhone. This is where Tari's
suggestions for titles came in, because technically they showed off
the iPhone fifteen, but Tari says, it's more like they
(01:36):
reintroduced the iPhone fourteen, or maybe the iPhone fifteen is
really iPhone fourteen A or Part two or something like that.
This already gives you a hint as to how certain
Apple devotees are feeling toward the Apple fifteen. So what
is different, Well, there is one big difference, and that
(01:57):
is that this is the first iPhone to have the
USBC charging port. This was a change that Apple had
to make because the EU government has mandated that all
smartphones as well as several other digital devices are going
to have to adopt the USBC standard for charging, and
that means that people will be able to use the
(02:19):
same USBC cables to charge their stuff, rather than have
to hunt between two or three different kinds of cables
with different connectors. Now that's not to say that all
USBC cables are equal. They're not, so there still can
be some cable confusion, but less so than there would
be if you've got like five different proprietary connectors or whatever. Also,
(02:42):
Apple announced that the dynamic Island feature, which previously was
only available on the phone fourteen Pro and the iPhone
fourteen Pro Max, is actually going to be on all
the iPhone fifteen models. So there's one difference, Tari. You
get your dynamic island. You know that little black oval
(03:02):
at the top of the screen that gives you your notifications.
So you know, I don't know what you're complaining about
USBC port Dynamic Island sounds to me like you guys
are getting tons of upgrades. Anyway. There are two broad
versions of the basic iPhone fifteen. The base model has
a screen that measures six point one inches on the diagonal.
(03:24):
That one starts at seven hundred and ninety nine dollars.
Then you have the iPhone fifteen Plus, which is a
little bit bigger. It's six point seven inches and it
will start at eight ninety nine. Then you've also got
the Pro and the Pro Max models as well. These
will have the A seventeen Pro processor. Of the iPhone
fifteen will have the A sixteen, which was what you
(03:45):
saw on the I fourteen Pro, So yeah, A seventeen
Pro processor. The iPhone fifteen Pro Max has a forty
eight megapixel camera and a five times telephoto lens, so
well there's that as well. The Pro starts at nine
hundred ninety nine dollars, the Promax starts at one one
(04:05):
hundred ninety nine dollars. All of these phones will be
available for pre orders starting tomorrow. Apple also had updates
to some other product lines, like air pods and the
Apple Watch. I think for the most part, we just
saw sort of incremental changes in this update, apart from
that migration to USBC, which is pretty that's a pretty
(04:28):
big thing, but everything else was a kind of smaller
innovation or incremental improvement. But you also have to realize
that the smartphone is a mature technology at this point,
right It's been around for more than a decade, so's
it's hard to imagine coming out with something that's significantly
different from what we're already used to. Doesn't mean it's impossible,
(04:51):
but as technology form factors mature, it's less realistic to
expect huge updates and innovations in the They still can happen,
but they're fairly rare. Yesterday, US Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer hosted an insight forum focusing artificial intelligence. Among the attendees,
(05:12):
were the CEOs of Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Open Ai. Plus.
You had Elon Musk there and the president of Nvidia
was there too. The event happened behind closed doors and
no media was invited. However, some of the executives gave
a statement after the meeting was over, and not surprisingly,
(05:35):
most of these executives were calling for a methodical and
careful approach toward legislation and regulation. Now. They argue that
AI has enormous potential to benefit business and society and
warning that if the government is a little too strict
with regulations, this can stifle innovation. It's an argument we
(05:56):
have heard before, but one dissenting voice was Elon Musk.
Musk actually said that a federal oversight committee or agency
would be appropriate, like to have a part of the
government specifically to oversee AI development and deployment. He argued
that companies don't really have an incentive to run AI
(06:17):
projects responsibly if you don't have these sorts of constraints,
and I kind of agree with him. We have seen
time and again that in the absence of regulations, companies
will take advantage of the very long leash they are
allowed to be on, and this can lead to consequences
that then we have to handle and far too late
(06:37):
then the government will step in to do something about it.
According to Schumer, the purpose of the meeting was for
members of the US government to gain a better understanding
around AI. You know what it is, what it can do,
what the potential risks are, what are the benefits. And
that is also understandable. While I cover tech for a
living and I have a decent but by no means exhaustive,
(06:59):
understanding of artificial intelligence, it could be easy to develop
a view of the technology that's far too specific and
far too narrow, or to just have a totally mistaken
concept of what AI is all about. Schumer was quick
to point out that this forum was to help educate
leaders and that any legislation that follows will take some
(07:19):
time to draft and then to amend, and then to
vote unto law. So really this was just an early
step in the process. We shouldn't expect to see AI
legislation roll out anytime soon. I've got some more updates
on the cybersecurity issue that has severely impacted MGM resorts,
So in case you missed this news on Monday, properties
(07:42):
belonging to the company MGM resorts in cities like Las Vegas,
Atlantic City, Detroit and others started to encounter massive computer
system problems. Those problems shut down many, but not all,
of the slot machines in some of these casinos. They
took ATM offline. They forced MGM to replace their normal
(08:04):
website with a new landing page directing people to contact
resorts by phone for stuff like reservations and that kind
of thing, and lots more other issues. And we can't
be sure how extensive these attacks were or what other
systems could be affected. In fact, we don't even know
for a fact that it's an attack, or at least
(08:24):
MGM Resorts has not come out and said that explicitly.
We don't know if the issue has impacted customer data. Personally,
I'm very interested in that because literally a couple of
hours before all this happened, I made a ding dang
reservation at an MGM property for an upcoming work trip.
Come on anyway. At first, a cybersecurity research group called
(08:47):
VX Underground posted a message on X you know, formerly
known as Twitter, that claimed a Russian based hacker group
known as black Cat also known as Alpha so it's
spelled alph that this group was behind the attack, and further,
according to this research group, the hackers gained access through
(09:09):
the old fashioned and tried and true method of social engineering.
They allegedly called someone in it and they got access
to the system that way. However, more recent reports mentioned
a different hacker group as being responsible for the attack,
or perhaps working in collusion with Alpha. This other group
is called Scattered Spider, and hackers in that group are
(09:31):
mostly located in places like the United States and the
United Kingdom. The general consensus is that this is a
ransomware attack, though again MGM Resorts is not yet commented
on that. And interestingly, it appears as though Caesar's Entertainment,
which also owns multiple casinos and resorts, was attacked by
this very same group a few weeks ago, and according
(09:52):
to some unnamed sources, the company agreed to pay millions
of dollars in ransom to regain control of their sets.
And if that's true, the company has yet to disclose
that attack. And I feel that if in fact it
is true that Caesar's Entertainment was attacked a few weeks ago,
MGM Resorts executives are going to be seeing red because
(10:12):
they might feel that maybe had they known about the
attack on Caesar's, they might have been better prepared for
the one that hit them now. Anyway, apparently the rest
of the story kind of fits what VX Underground reported
that hackers seemingly got access through social engineering, although the
(10:33):
most recent account says that they targeted a third party
IT vendor and got access through them. And this is
really bonkers because presumably these IT professionals should be on
the lookout for social engineering attacks. Anyway, it really hammers
home that people tend to be the weakest link in
security systems, and that companies are justified in educating and
(10:56):
testing their employees regarding cybersecurity practices and good gull on
a selfish level, I sure hope this is sorted out
by the time I had to Vegas next week. Also,
paying ransoms is a bad idea. Companies should not do
that because paying a ransom sends the message that the
attack wasn't just successful, it was profitable, and that means
(11:17):
you get more attacks in the future. Okay, while I
regain my composure, let's take a quick break to thank
our sponsors. We're back. As I mentioned in Tuesday's episode,
(11:39):
Google is on trial this week. The US Department of
Justice has accused Google of engaging in non competitive practices,
using the company's dominant position in web search to stifle
any potential competition, and according to the DOJ, part of
those efforts include paying billions of dollars a year to
smartphone companies and web browser companies to make Goo Google
(12:00):
the default search engine on those devices and browsers. The
DOJ says that Google spends around ten billion dollars a
year in payments to companies like Samsung and Apple and
Mozilla and others for the privilege of Google Search being
the default go to search engine, and that this prevents
any other company from having a fair shot. Now, we're
still in the very early stages of this trial and
(12:22):
there's no telling where it will go. For one thing,
another news article revealed that the judge in this case,
I'm at Meta, may not have a really strong grasp
of the tech being discussed. According to Ours Technica, Meta
has asked if Mozilla is a browser or a search engine,
which I get it. If you're not using this stuff
(12:43):
a lot, and you're not covering the world of tech,
you might not know what Mozilla is. But it could
mean that this could be a particularly complicated case for
the judge to preside over. And as you might imagine,
Google's lawyers say that the company really hasn't done anything
wrong and that it just makes a superior product and
that's why it has a dominant position in the market.
(13:04):
It's not that they have acted unfairly to get and
hold that position, rather than no one else makes stuff
that's as good as Google does. A paper just published
in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders lays out
a case that TikTok videos covering autism have information that
(13:24):
is quote not aligned with the current scientific understanding of
autism end quote. This is according to Eric Dolan Ofsypost
dot org. So the researcher has created a brand new
TikTok account because they wanted to make sure that they
didn't have any algorithmic bias if they used an already
existing account, so brand new account. Then they started searching
(13:44):
for videos and they use the search query hashtag autism.
They then weeded out things like duplicate videos, so if
it showed up more than once, they would eliminate the extras.
They eliminated any videos from non English speaking hosts. They
took those out to They also got rid of any
videos that didn't cover autism but were showing up in
(14:07):
search results. And what they had left once they did
that initial culling was three hundred and sixty five videos,
one for every day of the year. They then went
further and they continued to weed out videos. They took
out ones that were more about a person's experience with autism,
you know, kind of like life story stuff, and they
wanted to focus solely on videos that were claiming to
(14:30):
be educational or informational to be providing information about autism.
They wanted to just focus on those. This got them
down to one hundred thirty three videos. Then they started
to really look at these videos and compare them against
the body of accepted scientific knowledge surrounding autism to see
(14:52):
how accurate. They were. They would label videos as being inaccurate,
containing over generalizations, or being accurate right. They would look
and say, which of these does this fit or how
many instances are we finding per video. They would also
only label a video inaccurate if something in the video
clearly contradicted accepted scientific knowledge. So they wanted to be
(15:16):
as fair as possible in this approach. Even with all
those steps, they found that seventy three percent of those
one hundred thirty three videos contained at least some inaccurate
information or over generalized claims regarding autism. They also noted
that these videos get a lot of views, like the
one hundred thirty three videos collectively accounted for nearly two
(15:37):
hundred million views, and while the medical professionals who were
hosting videos were more likely to get things correct, they
weren't necessarily the most viewed videos. There were other content creators,
either those who claimed to have autism or to be
a caregiver for someone with autism, that were giving information
(15:59):
that just won scientifically correct or at least not in
agreement with the scientific consensus on autism. So the researchers
are actually suggesting that TikTok works to create a space
where people who want to talk about autism and talk
about their life experiences and that sort of thing, that
they have a space where they can do that, but
that that space is separate from discussions that are about
(16:24):
the scientific understanding of autism to try and minimize the
dissemination of misinformation about autism. They so that it's good
to have the platform to expand people's understanding of autism
and to reduce stigma. That's good. What we don't want
to do is to fuel misinformation. So I think it
(16:45):
was actually a pretty measured approach outlined in the paper.
The study itself is called The Reach and Accuracy of
Information on Autism on TikTok. The Verge reports that TikTok
has started to include excerpts from and links to Wikipedia
articles in your search results. This seems to follow the
(17:07):
trend of younger people treating TikTok as a search engine,
which I still have to wrap my mind around because
I'm old. The Verge reached out to TikTok, and a
spokesperson confirmed that the platform has partnered with Wikipedia and
that in fact, this feature has actually been live for
several weeks. It's just been gradually rolling out, and TikTok
(17:27):
didn't make a big old fuss about it. They just
kind of let it roll out. Now. I do not
use TikTok, so I have not seen this in action myself,
but apparently the Wikipedia stuff appears between videos in your
search results. So you search for something, you scroll down
and in between video like four and five, there might
be a Wikipedia excerpt or link there, and it's not universal.
(17:51):
You're not guaranteed to see Wikipedia content connected to any
in every search. Some topics appear to have Wikipedia in
tries included, and others. TikTok is also plopping down videos
from sponsors in between those search results. So it sounds
like using TikTok is starting to become more like using
(18:11):
a regular web search engine. You know, you get some excerpts,
you get some summaries, you get some links to the
stuff you are actually looking for, and you get a
whole bunch of sponsored content peppered throughout fun times. A
high profile Russian journalist and publisher named Galina Timchenko revealed
(18:32):
this week that her iPhone was compromised by the NSO
Group's spyware product Pegasus earlier this year, so in case
you need a refresher. Pegasus is a piece of software
that lets someone send an I message to a target
iPhone or iOS device, and because of a flaw in
Apple's software, this message would compromise that target device and
(18:55):
turn it into a surveillance gadget. The attacker could activate
the device's camera and its microphone remotely, so you can
spy using a person's own phone. You can also like
search stuff that's in the phone's memory and essentially access
all of its contents. Anyway, according to MEDUSA, that's a
(19:16):
news outlet that Galina Timchenko co founded, someone used Pegasus
to infiltrate Timchenko's phone just a few hours before she
was scheduled to meet with exiled members of Russia's media
in a meeting in Berlin. MEDUSA says this is the
first confirmed case of a Russian journalist being the target
of a Pegasus attack, which isn't a surprise. The NSO
(19:39):
group says that the tool, the Pegasus tool will not
work on phone numbers from the United States or from Russia,
and they won't do business with Russia, and Russia won't
do business with them, largely because Russia believes in funding
their own spyware technologies. They don't outsource it, they build
(19:59):
that stuff themselves. So anyway, NSOL Group has said that
Pegasus was intended for people to use to identify and
surveil like terrorists and other dangerous people. But we've seen
time and again that NSO groups customers have been using
(20:20):
Pegasus to really spy on anybody they don't like and
that includes journalists and activists and other politicians that sort
of stuff, not active threats against the state, and so
NSO groups claims that it's kind of innocent of all
these issues fall on deaf ears for me anyway, because
(20:41):
I think it's pretty clear their customers include some very
not nice people who are using this tool to spy
on folks who are not an active like threat existential
threat to the state. So yeah, still no word exactly
on who might have been responsible for this attack. You know.
(21:01):
The thought is that it probably wasn't Russia, but it's
hard to say or if it was Russia, the attack
was carried out through an intermediary of some sort, So yeah,
no telling who it was that directed the attack on
Galina Timchenko. But yeah, it's a continuing issue and now
(21:21):
has affected a Russian journalist. She joins the ranks. All right,
we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back,
I've got a few more news stories to cover. Okay,
let's wrap up with some more news stories. This is
a big one. So there's this rumbling over in the
(21:44):
video game development world, and I don't mean the little
motors that cause game controllers to vibrate There's a company
that's called Unity, right. They make a popular game engine,
the Unity Engine, and this company has announced a big
change in its subscription tier that has upset a lot
of developers. So the way this used to work is
(22:06):
that as a developer, you would subscribe to a tier
of service with Unity, and in return, you would get
access to the Unity Engine and you would get a
suite of editing tools, and that was it. You would
pay the subscription that would give you access and you
went on your merry way. There were no royalty fees
you had to worry about. In fact, if you were
(22:27):
a really small developer, let's say that you made less
than one hundred thousand dollars per month in revenue, well
then you would get no fees at all to subscribe
to the Personal Tier, the lowest tier of service of
Unity Engine. However, now Unity has announced that starting next year,
the company will charge developers a certain amount per install
(22:50):
once a title reaches a particular threshold. So, for example,
let's say you're an independent game developer and you have
subscribed to that Unity Personal Tier or the lowest tier,
you will have to fork over twenty cents per install,
not per sale, per install of your game once you
have hit two hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue or
(23:12):
you have hit an install base of two hundred thousand
players for that game. For customers who are paying more
money for a higher tier of service, they'll actually see
a lower per install fee and a higher threshold they
have to meet before they have to pay it. So,
in other words, if you're paying more money for a
higher subscription tier, you're paying fewer royalties or less amount
(23:35):
of royalties, at least on a per install basis. So
developers got really really upset. Some of them called out
to the developer community to stop using Unity Engine full stop.
Just don't use Unity, use something else. And they have
accused Unity of pulling sort of a bait and switch
routine which got companies invested in using the Unity Engine
(23:57):
and then they had the rug pulled out from under
them with this change in policy. One developer, Megacrit, which
produced the game Slay the Spire, posted a message that
said its next game, which has already been in development
for two years, will actually migrate to a different game
engine if Unity does not change its policy. That's a
(24:17):
heck of a thing to say, To say you're willing
to throw away essentially two years of work in order
to switch over. They also posted the statement quote we
have never made a public statement before that is how
badly you fed up end quote, only they didn't use
the word ft if you catch my drift. Eurogamer reports
(24:39):
that Unity executives sold off thousands of their shares in
the company earlier this year, which some might interpret as
the executives knowing that this change would likely lead to
a decline in Unity's share price. It certainly looks suspicious
considering the timing. In fact, the CEO of the company
has sold more than fifty thousand shares this year, bought
(25:00):
no shares in this company this year two thousand of
those transactions or those shares, I should say, we're done.
Just last week. Unity has now backtracked a little bit
on this policy. They are now saying that the charges
will only come after a user has first installed the title,
and that's it just the first time. The reason for
(25:22):
that is that some developers were concerned that users who
are particularly angry at a developer could potentially install the
uninstalled then reinstall a game many, many, many times, and
if there's a charge for every install, it means that
these trollish gamers can install bomb a developer. If the
(25:45):
developer has to pay for every single install above a
certain threshold, that could bleed them dry. So now Unity
is saying, Okay, it only counts the first time you
install it on a device. However, we are still going
to count it for every device they install it on.
So if they have like fifteen devices and they install
the game on all fifteen, that counts fifteen times, but
(26:05):
it won't count if they delete it and then reinstall it.
That that should be done anyway. Developers are not mollified
by this, so I expect we're going to see a
lot more conversation around this moving forward. In the video
game space. The Wall Street Journal reports that SpaceX's Starlink
division is underperforming, at least from a business perspective, based
(26:29):
upon what the company had previously projected. So The Wall
Street Journal says that back in twenty fifteen, SpaceX presented
potential investors in Starlink with a pitch, and they said
that by twenty twenty two, Starlink would have twenty million
subscribers and would generate close to twelve billion dollars in
revenue and around seven billion dollars in profit. Now, obviously
(26:54):
this pitch was designed to convince investors to invest money
in two SpaceX's coffers, right, Like, that's the whole purpose
of it. But then, how well did the company deliver
on these estimations. Well, again, according to The Wall Street Journal,
twenty twenty two, revenues for Starlink were one point four billion. Now,
(27:16):
don't get me wrong, one point four billion is a
lot of money, and it was a big jump from
twenty twenty one. In twenty twenty one, Starlink made two
hundred and twenty two million, So one point four billion
is a lot of money. But as impressive as one
point four billion is, it falls pretty darn short of
the twelve billion that SpaceX was projecting back in twenty fifteen. Also,
(27:38):
the Jeneral reports that the service has more than a
million customers. According to SpaceX VP Jonathan Haffeler, it's like
a million and a half customers worldwide. But again, back
in twenty fifteen, SpaceX was saying they estimated that they
would have twenty million customers by now, not one and
a half. So it does sound like the division is
(28:00):
going to potentially turn out a profit this year, so
that's good, but it's not performing up to the estimates
that investors were being told back in twenty fifteen, and
I don't know how they're gonna feel about that. And finally,
astronomers have analyzed data gathered by the James Webb Space
Telescope and discovered that an exoplanet called K two eighteen
(28:25):
B has some interesting signs that could potentially mean the
planet might support life or maybe support the life in
the past. Now, before we get too excited, let's try
and be calm and rational. So this planet is in
the so called Goldilocks zone around its home star, so
(28:45):
that means it's not too far out from the star
to receive too little energy to support life, and it's
not too close to its star where the radiation from
the star would burn away any life that could be
on the planet. It's in the zone that's just right,
the Goldilock zone, so theoretically it should be receiving the
(29:06):
right amount of energy to sustain life, at least life
as we are familiar with it now. On top of that,
according to the data that the scientists studied, the planet's
atmosphere includes carbon dioxide and methane in it, and also
a whole lot of hydrogen. Plus the scientists say they
believe there could be signs of another molecule, this one
(29:27):
called dimethyl sulfide. So here on Earth, the stuff that
produces dimethyl sulfide is life, specifically like microbial life like phytoplankton,
that kind of stuff. So again this points to the
possibility that there is life on this other planet. K
two eighteen B is much bigger than the Earth, is
(29:50):
more than eight times as large as the Earth. It's
also one hundred and ten light years away, so we're
not gonna pop by to borrow a cup of sugar
anytime soon. But still, pretty aren't exciting. And that's it
for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you are
all well. As I said, pretty soon, I'm going to
be traveling for work. I'm going to continue to bring episodes.
(30:12):
Next week, we're going to have an interview with someone
from Surf air Mobility, a company that is looking to
be a pioneer in the regional air mobility space. It's
a really interesting conversation that's on Monday, so check that out. Tuesday.
I believe we've got another Smart Talks with IBM episode.
I think I don't have my calendar pulled up, but
(30:33):
I think that happens on Tuesday. But you should also
get some more new episodes throughout the week, I hope,
assuming everything's going well, and yeah, we're gonna have a
whole bunch of weird stuff coming out soon because I'm
going all the way out to Las Vegas to record
a show and then cover Mobile World Congress and then
(30:56):
come back home. So here's hoping that goes well. Here's
hoping MGM Resorts has cleared away the problems by the
time I get there. From a purely selfish level, I mean,
I want it to be solved because I'm sure the
people working for MGM Resorts right now are at their
wits end. It has to be really stressful, I imagine.
So I hope that's all been cleared up, and I
(31:18):
hope again that you are all well out there, and
I'll talk to you again. Really. So tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you, y'all? I am in the studio recording today,
which means that super producer Tari is actually listening on
(00:28):
the cans right now across the room from me in
the control room. And this is the first time we've
done this, possibly since the pandemic. It has been a while, y'all,
and already Tari is making her presence felt on this show,
largely by suggesting numerous inappropriate titles for the episode, so
(00:52):
her assistance, as always, is invaluable. Anyway, what we're going
to talk about first is, well, you know, around this
time of year you can count on a few things
here in the United States. For example, folks are already
obsessing over Halloween, honestly, with my friend's list that actually
started last month. Pumpkin spice flavors have made their way
(01:16):
into pretty much everything you are able to eat or
drink at this point. And also, you know that if
it's this time of year, Apple's going to hold an
event highlighting the next generation iPhone. This is where Tari's
suggestions for titles came in, because technically they showed off
the iPhone fifteen, but Tari says, it's more like they
(01:36):
reintroduced the iPhone fourteen, or maybe the iPhone fifteen is
really iPhone fourteen A or Part two or something like that.
This already gives you a hint as to how certain
Apple devotees are feeling toward the Apple fifteen. So what
is different, Well, there is one big difference, and that
(01:57):
is that this is the first iPhone to have the
USBC charging port. This was a change that Apple had
to make because the EU government has mandated that all
smartphones as well as several other digital devices are going
to have to adopt the USBC standard for charging, and
that means that people will be able to use the
(02:19):
same USBC cables to charge their stuff, rather than have
to hunt between two or three different kinds of cables
with different connectors. Now that's not to say that all
USBC cables are equal. They're not, so there still can
be some cable confusion, but less so than there would
be if you've got like five different proprietary connectors or whatever. Also,
(02:42):
Apple announced that the dynamic Island feature, which previously was
only available on the phone fourteen Pro and the iPhone
fourteen Pro Max, is actually going to be on all
the iPhone fifteen models. So there's one difference, Tari. You
get your dynamic island. You know that little black oval
(03:02):
at the top of the screen that gives you your notifications.
So you know, I don't know what you're complaining about
USBC port Dynamic Island sounds to me like you guys
are getting tons of upgrades. Anyway. There are two broad
versions of the basic iPhone fifteen. The base model has
a screen that measures six point one inches on the diagonal.
(03:24):
That one starts at seven hundred and ninety nine dollars.
Then you have the iPhone fifteen Plus, which is a
little bit bigger. It's six point seven inches and it
will start at eight ninety nine. Then you've also got
the Pro and the Pro Max models as well. These
will have the A seventeen Pro processor. Of the iPhone
fifteen will have the A sixteen, which was what you
(03:45):
saw on the I fourteen Pro, So yeah, A seventeen
Pro processor. The iPhone fifteen Pro Max has a forty
eight megapixel camera and a five times telephoto lens, so
well there's that as well. The Pro starts at nine
hundred ninety nine dollars, the Promax starts at one one
(04:05):
hundred ninety nine dollars. All of these phones will be
available for pre orders starting tomorrow. Apple also had updates
to some other product lines, like air pods and the
Apple Watch. I think for the most part, we just
saw sort of incremental changes in this update, apart from
that migration to USBC, which is pretty that's a pretty
(04:28):
big thing, but everything else was a kind of smaller
innovation or incremental improvement. But you also have to realize
that the smartphone is a mature technology at this point,
right It's been around for more than a decade, so's
it's hard to imagine coming out with something that's significantly
different from what we're already used to. Doesn't mean it's impossible,
(04:51):
but as technology form factors mature, it's less realistic to
expect huge updates and innovations in the They still can happen,
but they're fairly rare. Yesterday, US Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer hosted an insight forum focusing artificial intelligence. Among the attendees,
(05:12):
were the CEOs of Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Open Ai. Plus.
You had Elon Musk there and the president of Nvidia
was there too. The event happened behind closed doors and
no media was invited. However, some of the executives gave
a statement after the meeting was over, and not surprisingly,
(05:35):
most of these executives were calling for a methodical and
careful approach toward legislation and regulation. Now. They argue that
AI has enormous potential to benefit business and society and
warning that if the government is a little too strict
with regulations, this can stifle innovation. It's an argument we
(05:56):
have heard before, but one dissenting voice was Elon Musk.
Musk actually said that a federal oversight committee or agency
would be appropriate, like to have a part of the
government specifically to oversee AI development and deployment. He argued
that companies don't really have an incentive to run AI
(06:17):
projects responsibly if you don't have these sorts of constraints,
and I kind of agree with him. We have seen
time and again that in the absence of regulations, companies
will take advantage of the very long leash they are
allowed to be on, and this can lead to consequences
that then we have to handle and far too late
(06:37):
then the government will step in to do something about it.
According to Schumer, the purpose of the meeting was for
members of the US government to gain a better understanding
around AI. You know what it is, what it can do,
what the potential risks are, what are the benefits. And
that is also understandable. While I cover tech for a
living and I have a decent but by no means exhaustive,
(06:59):
understanding of artificial intelligence, it could be easy to develop
a view of the technology that's far too specific and
far too narrow, or to just have a totally mistaken
concept of what AI is all about. Schumer was quick
to point out that this forum was to help educate
leaders and that any legislation that follows will take some
(07:19):
time to draft and then to amend, and then to
vote unto law. So really this was just an early
step in the process. We shouldn't expect to see AI
legislation roll out anytime soon. I've got some more updates
on the cybersecurity issue that has severely impacted MGM resorts,
So in case you missed this news on Monday, properties
(07:42):
belonging to the company MGM resorts in cities like Las Vegas,
Atlantic City, Detroit and others started to encounter massive computer
system problems. Those problems shut down many, but not all,
of the slot machines in some of these casinos. They
took ATM offline. They forced MGM to replace their normal
(08:04):
website with a new landing page directing people to contact
resorts by phone for stuff like reservations and that kind
of thing, and lots more other issues. And we can't
be sure how extensive these attacks were or what other
systems could be affected. In fact, we don't even know
for a fact that it's an attack, or at least
(08:24):
MGM Resorts has not come out and said that explicitly.
We don't know if the issue has impacted customer data. Personally,
I'm very interested in that because literally a couple of
hours before all this happened, I made a ding dang
reservation at an MGM property for an upcoming work trip.
Come on anyway. At first, a cybersecurity research group called
(08:47):
VX Underground posted a message on X you know, formerly
known as Twitter, that claimed a Russian based hacker group
known as black Cat also known as Alpha so it's
spelled alph that this group was behind the attack, and further,
according to this research group, the hackers gained access through
(09:09):
the old fashioned and tried and true method of social engineering.
They allegedly called someone in it and they got access
to the system that way. However, more recent reports mentioned
a different hacker group as being responsible for the attack,
or perhaps working in collusion with Alpha. This other group
is called Scattered Spider, and hackers in that group are
(09:31):
mostly located in places like the United States and the
United Kingdom. The general consensus is that this is a
ransomware attack, though again MGM Resorts is not yet commented
on that. And interestingly, it appears as though Caesar's Entertainment,
which also owns multiple casinos and resorts, was attacked by
this very same group a few weeks ago, and according
(09:52):
to some unnamed sources, the company agreed to pay millions
of dollars in ransom to regain control of their sets.
And if that's true, the company has yet to disclose
that attack. And I feel that if in fact it
is true that Caesar's Entertainment was attacked a few weeks ago,
MGM Resorts executives are going to be seeing red because
(10:12):
they might feel that maybe had they known about the
attack on Caesar's, they might have been better prepared for
the one that hit them now. Anyway, apparently the rest
of the story kind of fits what VX Underground reported
that hackers seemingly got access through social engineering, although the
(10:33):
most recent account says that they targeted a third party
IT vendor and got access through them. And this is
really bonkers because presumably these IT professionals should be on
the lookout for social engineering attacks. Anyway, it really hammers
home that people tend to be the weakest link in
security systems, and that companies are justified in educating and
(10:56):
testing their employees regarding cybersecurity practices and good gull on
a selfish level, I sure hope this is sorted out
by the time I had to Vegas next week. Also,
paying ransoms is a bad idea. Companies should not do
that because paying a ransom sends the message that the
attack wasn't just successful, it was profitable, and that means
(11:17):
you get more attacks in the future. Okay, while I
regain my composure, let's take a quick break to thank
our sponsors. We're back. As I mentioned in Tuesday's episode,
(11:39):
Google is on trial this week. The US Department of
Justice has accused Google of engaging in non competitive practices,
using the company's dominant position in web search to stifle
any potential competition, and according to the DOJ, part of
those efforts include paying billions of dollars a year to
smartphone companies and web browser companies to make Goo Google
(12:00):
the default search engine on those devices and browsers. The
DOJ says that Google spends around ten billion dollars a
year in payments to companies like Samsung and Apple and
Mozilla and others for the privilege of Google Search being
the default go to search engine, and that this prevents
any other company from having a fair shot. Now, we're
still in the very early stages of this trial and
(12:22):
there's no telling where it will go. For one thing,
another news article revealed that the judge in this case,
I'm at Meta, may not have a really strong grasp
of the tech being discussed. According to Ours Technica, Meta
has asked if Mozilla is a browser or a search engine,
which I get it. If you're not using this stuff
(12:43):
a lot, and you're not covering the world of tech,
you might not know what Mozilla is. But it could
mean that this could be a particularly complicated case for
the judge to preside over. And as you might imagine,
Google's lawyers say that the company really hasn't done anything
wrong and that it just makes a superior product and
that's why it has a dominant position in the market.
(13:04):
It's not that they have acted unfairly to get and
hold that position, rather than no one else makes stuff
that's as good as Google does. A paper just published
in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders lays out
a case that TikTok videos covering autism have information that
(13:24):
is quote not aligned with the current scientific understanding of
autism end quote. This is according to Eric Dolan Ofsypost
dot org. So the researcher has created a brand new
TikTok account because they wanted to make sure that they
didn't have any algorithmic bias if they used an already
existing account, so brand new account. Then they started searching
(13:44):
for videos and they use the search query hashtag autism.
They then weeded out things like duplicate videos, so if
it showed up more than once, they would eliminate the extras.
They eliminated any videos from non English speaking hosts. They
took those out to They also got rid of any
videos that didn't cover autism but were showing up in
(14:07):
search results. And what they had left once they did
that initial culling was three hundred and sixty five videos,
one for every day of the year. They then went
further and they continued to weed out videos. They took
out ones that were more about a person's experience with autism,
you know, kind of like life story stuff, and they
wanted to focus solely on videos that were claiming to
(14:30):
be educational or informational to be providing information about autism.
They wanted to just focus on those. This got them
down to one hundred thirty three videos. Then they started
to really look at these videos and compare them against
the body of accepted scientific knowledge surrounding autism to see
(14:52):
how accurate. They were. They would label videos as being inaccurate,
containing over generalizations, or being accurate right. They would look
and say, which of these does this fit or how
many instances are we finding per video. They would also
only label a video inaccurate if something in the video
clearly contradicted accepted scientific knowledge. So they wanted to be
(15:16):
as fair as possible in this approach. Even with all
those steps, they found that seventy three percent of those
one hundred thirty three videos contained at least some inaccurate
information or over generalized claims regarding autism. They also noted
that these videos get a lot of views, like the
one hundred thirty three videos collectively accounted for nearly two
(15:37):
hundred million views, and while the medical professionals who were
hosting videos were more likely to get things correct, they
weren't necessarily the most viewed videos. There were other content creators,
either those who claimed to have autism or to be
a caregiver for someone with autism, that were giving information
(15:59):
that just won scientifically correct or at least not in
agreement with the scientific consensus on autism. So the researchers
are actually suggesting that TikTok works to create a space
where people who want to talk about autism and talk
about their life experiences and that sort of thing, that
they have a space where they can do that, but
that that space is separate from discussions that are about
(16:24):
the scientific understanding of autism to try and minimize the
dissemination of misinformation about autism. They so that it's good
to have the platform to expand people's understanding of autism
and to reduce stigma. That's good. What we don't want
to do is to fuel misinformation. So I think it
(16:45):
was actually a pretty measured approach outlined in the paper.
The study itself is called The Reach and Accuracy of
Information on Autism on TikTok. The Verge reports that TikTok
has started to include excerpts from and links to Wikipedia
articles in your search results. This seems to follow the
(17:07):
trend of younger people treating TikTok as a search engine,
which I still have to wrap my mind around because
I'm old. The Verge reached out to TikTok, and a
spokesperson confirmed that the platform has partnered with Wikipedia and
that in fact, this feature has actually been live for
several weeks. It's just been gradually rolling out, and TikTok
(17:27):
didn't make a big old fuss about it. They just
kind of let it roll out. Now. I do not
use TikTok, so I have not seen this in action myself,
but apparently the Wikipedia stuff appears between videos in your
search results. So you search for something, you scroll down
and in between video like four and five, there might
be a Wikipedia excerpt or link there, and it's not universal.
(17:51):
You're not guaranteed to see Wikipedia content connected to any
in every search. Some topics appear to have Wikipedia in
tries included, and others. TikTok is also plopping down videos
from sponsors in between those search results. So it sounds
like using TikTok is starting to become more like using
(18:11):
a regular web search engine. You know, you get some excerpts,
you get some summaries, you get some links to the
stuff you are actually looking for, and you get a
whole bunch of sponsored content peppered throughout fun times. A
high profile Russian journalist and publisher named Galina Timchenko revealed
(18:32):
this week that her iPhone was compromised by the NSO
Group's spyware product Pegasus earlier this year, so in case
you need a refresher. Pegasus is a piece of software
that lets someone send an I message to a target
iPhone or iOS device, and because of a flaw in
Apple's software, this message would compromise that target device and
(18:55):
turn it into a surveillance gadget. The attacker could activate
the device's camera and its microphone remotely, so you can
spy using a person's own phone. You can also like
search stuff that's in the phone's memory and essentially access
all of its contents. Anyway, according to MEDUSA, that's a
(19:16):
news outlet that Galina Timchenko co founded, someone used Pegasus
to infiltrate Timchenko's phone just a few hours before she
was scheduled to meet with exiled members of Russia's media
in a meeting in Berlin. MEDUSA says this is the
first confirmed case of a Russian journalist being the target
of a Pegasus attack, which isn't a surprise. The NSO
(19:39):
group says that the tool, the Pegasus tool will not
work on phone numbers from the United States or from Russia,
and they won't do business with Russia, and Russia won't
do business with them, largely because Russia believes in funding
their own spyware technologies. They don't outsource it, they build
(19:59):
that stuff themselves. So anyway, NSOL Group has said that
Pegasus was intended for people to use to identify and
surveil like terrorists and other dangerous people. But we've seen
time and again that NSO groups customers have been using
(20:20):
Pegasus to really spy on anybody they don't like and
that includes journalists and activists and other politicians that sort
of stuff, not active threats against the state, and so
NSO groups claims that it's kind of innocent of all
these issues fall on deaf ears for me anyway, because
(20:41):
I think it's pretty clear their customers include some very
not nice people who are using this tool to spy
on folks who are not an active like threat existential
threat to the state. So yeah, still no word exactly
on who might have been responsible for this attack. You know.
(21:01):
The thought is that it probably wasn't Russia, but it's
hard to say or if it was Russia, the attack
was carried out through an intermediary of some sort, So yeah,
no telling who it was that directed the attack on
Galina Timchenko. But yeah, it's a continuing issue and now
(21:21):
has affected a Russian journalist. She joins the ranks. All right,
we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back,
I've got a few more news stories to cover. Okay,
let's wrap up with some more news stories. This is
a big one. So there's this rumbling over in the
(21:44):
video game development world, and I don't mean the little
motors that cause game controllers to vibrate There's a company
that's called Unity, right. They make a popular game engine,
the Unity Engine, and this company has announced a big
change in its subscription tier that has upset a lot
of developers. So the way this used to work is
(22:06):
that as a developer, you would subscribe to a tier
of service with Unity, and in return, you would get
access to the Unity Engine and you would get a
suite of editing tools, and that was it. You would
pay the subscription that would give you access and you
went on your merry way. There were no royalty fees
you had to worry about. In fact, if you were
(22:27):
a really small developer, let's say that you made less
than one hundred thousand dollars per month in revenue, well
then you would get no fees at all to subscribe
to the Personal Tier, the lowest tier of service of
Unity Engine. However, now Unity has announced that starting next year,
the company will charge developers a certain amount per install
(22:50):
once a title reaches a particular threshold. So, for example,
let's say you're an independent game developer and you have
subscribed to that Unity Personal Tier or the lowest tier,
you will have to fork over twenty cents per install,
not per sale, per install of your game once you
have hit two hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue or
(23:12):
you have hit an install base of two hundred thousand
players for that game. For customers who are paying more
money for a higher tier of service, they'll actually see
a lower per install fee and a higher threshold they
have to meet before they have to pay it. So,
in other words, if you're paying more money for a
higher subscription tier, you're paying fewer royalties or less amount
(23:35):
of royalties, at least on a per install basis. So
developers got really really upset. Some of them called out
to the developer community to stop using Unity Engine full stop.
Just don't use Unity, use something else. And they have
accused Unity of pulling sort of a bait and switch
routine which got companies invested in using the Unity Engine
(23:57):
and then they had the rug pulled out from under
them with this change in policy. One developer, Megacrit, which
produced the game Slay the Spire, posted a message that
said its next game, which has already been in development
for two years, will actually migrate to a different game
engine if Unity does not change its policy. That's a
(24:17):
heck of a thing to say, To say you're willing
to throw away essentially two years of work in order
to switch over. They also posted the statement quote we
have never made a public statement before that is how
badly you fed up end quote, only they didn't use
the word ft if you catch my drift. Eurogamer reports
(24:39):
that Unity executives sold off thousands of their shares in
the company earlier this year, which some might interpret as
the executives knowing that this change would likely lead to
a decline in Unity's share price. It certainly looks suspicious
considering the timing. In fact, the CEO of the company
has sold more than fifty thousand shares this year, bought
(25:00):
no shares in this company this year two thousand of
those transactions or those shares, I should say, we're done.
Just last week. Unity has now backtracked a little bit
on this policy. They are now saying that the charges
will only come after a user has first installed the title,
and that's it just the first time. The reason for
(25:22):
that is that some developers were concerned that users who
are particularly angry at a developer could potentially install the
uninstalled then reinstall a game many, many, many times, and
if there's a charge for every install, it means that
these trollish gamers can install bomb a developer. If the
(25:45):
developer has to pay for every single install above a
certain threshold, that could bleed them dry. So now Unity
is saying, Okay, it only counts the first time you
install it on a device. However, we are still going
to count it for every device they install it on.
So if they have like fifteen devices and they install
the game on all fifteen, that counts fifteen times, but
(26:05):
it won't count if they delete it and then reinstall it.
That that should be done anyway. Developers are not mollified
by this, so I expect we're going to see a
lot more conversation around this moving forward. In the video
game space. The Wall Street Journal reports that SpaceX's Starlink
division is underperforming, at least from a business perspective, based
(26:29):
upon what the company had previously projected. So The Wall
Street Journal says that back in twenty fifteen, SpaceX presented
potential investors in Starlink with a pitch, and they said
that by twenty twenty two, Starlink would have twenty million
subscribers and would generate close to twelve billion dollars in
revenue and around seven billion dollars in profit. Now, obviously
(26:54):
this pitch was designed to convince investors to invest money
in two SpaceX's coffers, right, Like, that's the whole purpose
of it. But then, how well did the company deliver
on these estimations. Well, again, according to The Wall Street Journal,
twenty twenty two, revenues for Starlink were one point four billion. Now,
(27:16):
don't get me wrong, one point four billion is a
lot of money, and it was a big jump from
twenty twenty one. In twenty twenty one, Starlink made two
hundred and twenty two million, So one point four billion
is a lot of money. But as impressive as one
point four billion is, it falls pretty darn short of
the twelve billion that SpaceX was projecting back in twenty fifteen. Also,
(27:38):
the Jeneral reports that the service has more than a
million customers. According to SpaceX VP Jonathan Haffeler, it's like
a million and a half customers worldwide. But again, back
in twenty fifteen, SpaceX was saying they estimated that they
would have twenty million customers by now, not one and
a half. So it does sound like the division is
(28:00):
going to potentially turn out a profit this year, so
that's good, but it's not performing up to the estimates
that investors were being told back in twenty fifteen, and
I don't know how they're gonna feel about that. And finally,
astronomers have analyzed data gathered by the James Webb Space
Telescope and discovered that an exoplanet called K two eighteen
(28:25):
B has some interesting signs that could potentially mean the
planet might support life or maybe support the life in
the past. Now, before we get too excited, let's try
and be calm and rational. So this planet is in
the so called Goldilocks zone around its home star, so
(28:45):
that means it's not too far out from the star
to receive too little energy to support life, and it's
not too close to its star where the radiation from
the star would burn away any life that could be
on the planet. It's in the zone that's just right,
the Goldilock zone, so theoretically it should be receiving the
(29:06):
right amount of energy to sustain life, at least life
as we are familiar with it now. On top of that,
according to the data that the scientists studied, the planet's
atmosphere includes carbon dioxide and methane in it, and also
a whole lot of hydrogen. Plus the scientists say they
believe there could be signs of another molecule, this one
(29:27):
called dimethyl sulfide. So here on Earth, the stuff that
produces dimethyl sulfide is life, specifically like microbial life like phytoplankton,
that kind of stuff. So again this points to the
possibility that there is life on this other planet. K
two eighteen B is much bigger than the Earth, is
(29:50):
more than eight times as large as the Earth. It's
also one hundred and ten light years away, so we're
not gonna pop by to borrow a cup of sugar
anytime soon. But still, pretty aren't exciting. And that's it
for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you are
all well. As I said, pretty soon, I'm going to
be traveling for work. I'm going to continue to bring episodes.
(30:12):
Next week, we're going to have an interview with someone
from Surf air Mobility, a company that is looking to
be a pioneer in the regional air mobility space. It's
a really interesting conversation that's on Monday, so check that out. Tuesday.
I believe we've got another Smart Talks with IBM episode.
I think I don't have my calendar pulled up, but
(30:33):
I think that happens on Tuesday. But you should also
get some more new episodes throughout the week, I hope,
assuming everything's going well, and yeah, we're gonna have a
whole bunch of weird stuff coming out soon because I'm
going all the way out to Las Vegas to record
a show and then cover Mobile World Congress and then
(30:56):
come back home. So here's hoping that goes well. Here's
hoping MGM Resorts has cleared away the problems by the
time I get there. From a purely selfish level, I mean,
I want it to be solved because I'm sure the
people working for MGM Resorts right now are at their
wits end. It has to be really stressful, I imagine.
So I hope that's all been cleared up, and I
(31:18):
hope again that you are all well out there, and
I'll talk to you again. Really. So tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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