June 10, 2021 • 20 mins
Hackers share billions of passwords while others infiltrate EA's internal systems. El Salvador moves to make bitcoin legal tender within the country. And politicians propose legislation that could mean huge changes for some major tech companies.
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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 iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech. And this is the tech
news for Thursday, June tenth, two thousand twenty one. Let's
(00:25):
get to it first. Some background. In two thousand nine,
some hackers were able to access databases that were hosting
a social app called rock You, and they got away
with more than thirty million user passwords, which was considered
to be a lot. And those passwords, by the way,
(00:46):
we're in plain text. In other words, they were unencrypted.
So once the hackers got them, they had, you know,
passwords that were as valid for as long as people
you know failed to change them. Well, now, where it
is out that a data breach could mean anywhere from
eight point four billion to potentially as many as eighty
(01:06):
two billion passwords have been leaked billion. Now eight point
four billion unique users or unique logins were identified of
this batch, so that's already bad. But multiple passwords belonging
to the same logan could be in that group. So
(01:28):
that's why the eight two billion is on the upper level.
So people are calling it rock You twenty twenty one
in reference to that you know data breach from two
thousand nine. I would like to suggest an alternative, rock
you like a hurricane. But what's actually going on here?
That's a good question. Someone, some hacker has posted a
(01:51):
text file that is one hundred gigabytes in size. That
is huge for a text file, and they've post did
it on various hacker forums. This text file contains billions
of user names and passwords for various sites and services.
All the passwords are between six and twenty characters long.
(02:14):
There's no telling how many of those passwords are currently
valid versus inactive. In fact, I would not be surprised
if a lot of those log ins were for services
that don't even really exist anymore. But generally speaking, it's
a good idea to check to see if you were
potentially affected. One way you can do that is to
search your email address against tools like have I Been Pooned?
(02:38):
But another is to use a password vault program because
a lot of those will monitor news about data breaches
and they will proactively reach out to users and prompt
them to change their passwords at various sites and services.
It's also by the way, a very good idea to
activate two factor authentication for those services that allow for that.
(02:59):
If it allows for it, you should probably do it.
These sorts of data breaches are the kind that are
outside of our control as users, so we kind of
have to take steps to protect ourselves. We also have
to remember every time there's a big data breach like this,
then those passwords, even if they're not active, even if
they aren't currently associated with those accounts, they go into
(03:22):
an ever increasingly huge dictionary of existing passwords. So if
you're the type of person who creates a password and
then over time cycles back to that password, let's say
that you know you alternate between a few uh, that
means that if you're part of this breach, then even
a password you're not using right now but could use
(03:45):
in the future, that could mean that you leave yourself vulnerable.
So again, always a good idea to get like a
password vault program. There's some that will generate very tough
passwords on your behalf and store them for are you
and you don't have to keep track of all that. Uh,
it is a little bit more of a hassle, I mean,
(04:05):
obviously more than a hassle than just using the single
password for everything. But obviously that is not safe and
it means that everywhere you go you're potentially vulnerable. So
I recommend getting a password vault and using it. There
are a lot of good ones out there, uh so
I recommend researching those and choose one that fits your needs.
(04:28):
And speaking of hackers, the video game developer and publisher
Electronic Arts or e A, got hacked, and I feel
like a lot of people outside of the A don't
have a whole lot of sympathy for the company. But
that's more because there are people with very strong negative
opinions about e A. I think it is a shame.
I don't like it when any company gets hacked. And apparently,
(04:51):
in this case, the hackers were able to access some
of e a's internal systems and they gained access to
the source code for certain game as well as access
to other internal tools. Now, according to e A, no
user data was compromised as a result of this breach,
so in theory at least users were not affected by this.
(05:13):
The company also says it's are A taking steps to
address the issue by changing things up so that the
source code that the hackers access would be useless. In
other words, that they wouldn't be able to exploit e
A titles because e A is going to change those
titles significantly enough where that source code will be you know,
a moot thing. Now, unless the source code was for
(05:35):
some pretty minor stuff, I imagine that last bit is
going to be really challenging to pull off. It's not
as easy as just waving your hand at it. The
hackers claim to have stolen around seven hundred eighty gigabytes
of data, though so far the hackers have largely just
alluded to what they've stolen. They've shown some screenshots and stuff,
but they haven't actually shared the information itself. They are
(05:58):
advertising the data is being up for sale on various
black market forums, so there's some crime right there. El
Salvador recently announced that the country may soon accept bitcoin
as legal tender and consider it parallel to the Salvadoran dollar,
and in the sense that you know, this would be
(06:19):
an accepted currency that you could use bitcoin anywhere within
El Salvador and it would be accepted just as the
actual currency of the country would. And the government of
El Salvador says that this will aid people who are
from El Salvador but who are living abroad to be
able to send remittances back home. That it will remove
(06:40):
some of the barriers that would exist otherwise when they
want to transfer funds back to people in El Salvador.
But the International Monetary Fund has expressed concern for this move,
stating that cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin in particular, represents
some legal and economic concerns that have yet to be addressed. Uh,
they didn't go into a whole lot of detail on that.
(07:01):
I'm sure there's a lot of different things that we
could easily point to, like the fact that cryptocurrencies frequently
get used in concert with illicit activities, not not exclusively,
but it does have that association unfortunately. And also taxation
becomes an issue, and that brings us to here in
(07:22):
the United States, where the Internal Revenue Service where i
r S, is seeking authority from Congress to oversea operations
that relate to cryptocurrencies. So as it stands, there is
no clear law that gives the i r S authority
to do stuff like collect taxes on gains that are
generated through cryptocurrency transactions. Um and Further, the i r
(07:47):
S lacks the legal foundation to go after instances of
fraud that involve cryptocurrencies. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies is
one of the many features that attract people to it,
and another is that a lot of transactions, while part
of a publicly viewable ledger, are otherwise kind of off
the radar. And it remains to be seen if Congress
(08:08):
will grant the authority to the I r S in
order to pursue, you know, more responsibility with regard to cryptocurrencies.
And I imagine that this news is affecting the cryptocurrency
market a bit, because everything seems to affect the cryptocurrency
market a bit. I mean, if Elon Musk tweets about
it, it it will really get going. Sticking with politics for
(08:30):
a moment, a group of Democrat politicians in the United
States have proposed a few different pieces of antitrust legislation
that seems to be aimed specifically at really big tech companies,
and particularly the Big Five of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook,
and Microsoft. While there are draft bills on the matter,
(08:52):
and there are several of them, and they come from
different people and they say slightly different things, you can
kind of boil them all down own to trying to
deal with two main concerns. Concern number one regards companies
that can both operate a marketplace and sell their own
goods and services through that marketplace, along with goods and
(09:14):
services from other companies. So this would include corporations like
Apple and Amazon. Both of them have their own products
listed for sale in market places that they each control, respectively. Right,
So Amazon's got its own shop obviously, and it has
its own products in that shop side by side with
(09:34):
products from other companies. That's kind of what they're talking about.
That represents a conflict of interest, and it means that
these companies could conceivably promote their own products over those
from other entities. So if you've ever done a search
for a product on Amazon and you notice that the
first few results all seem to be Amazon branded products,
(09:55):
then you get what I'm saying. This is a little
different than stores that have a store brand. Usually in
those stores, you don't see the store brand presented in
a way that obscures or you know, eclipses the other brands.
It's side by side, and the idea is that, well,
it's not promoted over these others. It may be cheaper
(10:18):
and thus more attractive. But it's not like the store
is necessarily using tricks to promote one over the other.
The concern here is that through technology, those are tricks
that these companies are using, and it's there's a worry
that creates an unfair market and sets all the other
parties at a disadvantage over the main company. The other
(10:40):
big concern is about acquisitions. So a lot of these
big tech companies got that big not just through organic growth,
but by gobbling up other companies along the way. Sometimes
these acquisitions lead to less competition in a market, which
is rarely good news for consumers, and we see this
(11:00):
across numerous industries, from tech hardware to entertainment media and beyond.
The draft bills generally are going to make it more
difficult for a large company to pursue acquisitions. Now all
the stuff is again just in draft form. It could
change significantly before it ever goes to the floor for
(11:21):
a vote, and of course there's no guarantee that any
of these bills will even get that far, but it
is interesting to see where things are going. Speaking of Amazon,
the company could face a fine in excess of four
hundred twenty five million dollars in the EU for violations
of the g d p R. That's the General Data
(11:41):
Privacy Regulation. The g d p R is a set
of pretty strict rules that dictate how companies can collect
and use information that's generated by citizens of the EU.
And apparently Amazon's approach was not in line with those rules,
and now the company will have to pay up. I
recently did a couple of episodes about privacy and how
(12:02):
tech companies collect and use our personal information, so I
recommend you check out the episodes that published on Monday
and Wednesday to learn more about that. And related to
Amazon is Ring, a company Amazon purchased in two thousand
and eighteen. Ring is famous for its smart doorbells, and
it's also famous for being a part of massive surveillance
(12:25):
systems utilized by police forces around the United States. Ring
filed a report earlier this year that showed that in
twenty twenty, the company received more than eighteen hundred legal
demands to share video footage with various agencies, which was
more than double than the year before that. But what
the report does not include is how many users actually
(12:48):
had footage from their Ring systems shared with police. You know,
that's eighteen hundred separate demands. Those demands could have included
more than one video source, and RING didn't really say
how many users had their their footage shared with police.
Privacy advocacy groups and civil rights organizations have long protested
(13:09):
how RING will work with law enforcement, including the fact
that you know, you can have instances in which surveillance
is being shared with police without the police first securing
a warrant for that information, which does seem to to
tread pretty close to unreasonable search and seizure, which is,
you know, something that we should be protected against by
(13:32):
the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. Meanwhile,
over at Google, the company has recently made changes to
down list search results from sites that focus on slander.
That is, sites that are perpetrating slander. So if you've
ever googled someone's name and you saw some results that
seem to be targeting that person for whatever reason and
(13:54):
slagging off on them, that's really what we're talking about here.
And some of these sites have been using very as
tactics to kind of game the system and rise up
the page rankings so they dominate the top search results
for the those people, and now Google is going to
actively remove that advantage. They're going to start down listing
or pushing down the results for sites that appear to
(14:17):
be dedicated to dragging other people down. But this is
a really delicate thing. You know, over in the EU,
there's this concept of the right to be forgotten, and
that's caused Google a lot of grief. And some folks
point out that if it is easy to get negative
things removed from search results, that could be doing a
public disservice in some cases. So for example, let's say
(14:42):
you've got a high ranking public official and this person
does something truly terrible. It is in the public's best
interest to know about that thing, and having a means
to squelch that kind of information would effectively be suppressing
the truth. So I am interested to see how this progresses.
I do think it's important to knock down the trolls,
(15:03):
who are, you know, slagging off people in bad faith,
usually as a way of either harming those people or
profiting off of this, versus the cases where you have
actual journalists who are attempting to document misbehavior. The Verge
reports that Facebook is working on a smart watch that,
should things go as planned, will debut next summer. The
(15:27):
smart watch will have a display that incorporates two cameras,
and that display will be detachable from the watch band.
One of the two cameras will be forward facing, and
users will rely on that one to make video calls
and the like. The second cameras rear facing, and thus
it's really only useful if you detach the smart watch
display from the band, Otherwise you're just taking very dark
(15:50):
pictures and videos of your wrist I imagine anyway, the
rear facing camera will have a ten a DP resolution.
Facebook is already reportedly working with other companies to develop
tech that could house the smart watch display. Like you
could plug the smart watch into other types of stuff,
like maybe a backpack. Or imagine a robot that can
(16:13):
accept this little smart watch in a in a slot
in the robot and then it uses that smart watch
to power some functions. I might just be dreaming here, anyway.
The watch might also include a heart rate sensor, as
well as other sensors. That, of course, has raised questions
from people and organizations that are concerned about privacy because
Facebook has well, let's just say it's known for being
(16:36):
pretty darn hungry when it comes to personal information, and
so if you've got yet another device feeding data points
to Facebook, that's even more juicy information that the company
can use to sell to advertisers and whatnot. But a
year is a really long time in the tech industry,
so we'll have to wait and see if this watch
(16:56):
ever really comes out. If it doesn't, it will have
been a very expensive lesson for Facebook, because the company
has reportedly invested around a billion dollars in this endeavor already.
And finally, Liz Hameron, the c v P of xboxes
Gaming Experience and Platforms, laid out future plans to games
Radar with regard to where Xbox is going next. Hameron
(17:20):
says that the company will continue to develop new consoles
and hardware, so that's not going away, but we shouldn't
expect anything new for a while because the series X
console is still a very young one. Also, I would
like to propose that the name of whatever follows should
be the next box, so I'll take my check, thank you.
(17:42):
Beyond that, however, it appears that you know, Microsoft is
really focusing on creating a way for gamers to access
the company's services. That includes partnerships with various smart TV
manufacturers so that future televisions have a version of Xbox
Game Pass just built right into them. So that means
all you would need is a compatible controller to connect
(18:04):
to your TV, and then you could stream games from
the cloud to your TV and you don't need a
console at all. There's also talk of standalone games streaming devices,
you know, kind of the little gaming sticks that you
could plug right into a smart TV, possibly like through
an HDMI connector, and then you link that device to
your WiFi network at home and you stream games through that.
(18:26):
So if your television doesn't come with Xbox Game Pass
built into it, you could use this method to do it.
In other words, Microsoft's really exploring ways to reach beyond
the consoles themselves to let players get access to games
content through the cloud. And this is really interesting to
me because not that long ago Microsoft was really pushing
consoles as being sort of a a nexus for cloud
(18:49):
based services. You would buy a console, and then that
console would be your gaming rig. It would be your
your set top device where you could watch YouTube or
Netflix or Hulu or whatever. Plus it could interact with
live television broadcasts and cable. And now Microsoft is sort
of taking an opposite approach, at least when it comes
(19:09):
to the games themselves. Again, the company is not abandoning
hardware or consoles or anything like that, and I'm sure
that future consoles will continue to support that nexus approach
to services, but this does show a change in strategy.
I like to think of it as the Netflix approach,
where your goal is to get your service on every
possible platform you can, and you extend your reach that way.
(19:35):
And that wraps up the news for Thursday, June two
thousand twenty one. I hope you're all doing well and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(19:58):
or wherever you listen to your favorite It's only
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 iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech. And this is the tech
news for Thursday, June tenth, two thousand twenty one. Let's
(00:25):
get to it first. Some background. In two thousand nine,
some hackers were able to access databases that were hosting
a social app called rock You, and they got away
with more than thirty million user passwords, which was considered
to be a lot. And those passwords, by the way,
(00:46):
we're in plain text. In other words, they were unencrypted.
So once the hackers got them, they had, you know,
passwords that were as valid for as long as people
you know failed to change them. Well, now, where it
is out that a data breach could mean anywhere from
eight point four billion to potentially as many as eighty
(01:06):
two billion passwords have been leaked billion. Now eight point
four billion unique users or unique logins were identified of
this batch, so that's already bad. But multiple passwords belonging
to the same logan could be in that group. So
(01:28):
that's why the eight two billion is on the upper level.
So people are calling it rock You twenty twenty one
in reference to that you know data breach from two
thousand nine. I would like to suggest an alternative, rock
you like a hurricane. But what's actually going on here?
That's a good question. Someone, some hacker has posted a
(01:51):
text file that is one hundred gigabytes in size. That
is huge for a text file, and they've post did
it on various hacker forums. This text file contains billions
of user names and passwords for various sites and services.
All the passwords are between six and twenty characters long.
(02:14):
There's no telling how many of those passwords are currently
valid versus inactive. In fact, I would not be surprised
if a lot of those log ins were for services
that don't even really exist anymore. But generally speaking, it's
a good idea to check to see if you were
potentially affected. One way you can do that is to
search your email address against tools like have I Been Pooned?
(02:38):
But another is to use a password vault program because
a lot of those will monitor news about data breaches
and they will proactively reach out to users and prompt
them to change their passwords at various sites and services.
It's also by the way, a very good idea to
activate two factor authentication for those services that allow for that.
(02:59):
If it allows for it, you should probably do it.
These sorts of data breaches are the kind that are
outside of our control as users, so we kind of
have to take steps to protect ourselves. We also have
to remember every time there's a big data breach like this,
then those passwords, even if they're not active, even if
they aren't currently associated with those accounts, they go into
(03:22):
an ever increasingly huge dictionary of existing passwords. So if
you're the type of person who creates a password and
then over time cycles back to that password, let's say
that you know you alternate between a few uh, that
means that if you're part of this breach, then even
a password you're not using right now but could use
(03:45):
in the future, that could mean that you leave yourself vulnerable.
So again, always a good idea to get like a
password vault program. There's some that will generate very tough
passwords on your behalf and store them for are you
and you don't have to keep track of all that. Uh,
it is a little bit more of a hassle, I mean,
(04:05):
obviously more than a hassle than just using the single
password for everything. But obviously that is not safe and
it means that everywhere you go you're potentially vulnerable. So
I recommend getting a password vault and using it. There
are a lot of good ones out there, uh so
I recommend researching those and choose one that fits your needs.
(04:28):
And speaking of hackers, the video game developer and publisher
Electronic Arts or e A, got hacked, and I feel
like a lot of people outside of the A don't
have a whole lot of sympathy for the company. But
that's more because there are people with very strong negative
opinions about e A. I think it is a shame.
I don't like it when any company gets hacked. And apparently,
(04:51):
in this case, the hackers were able to access some
of e a's internal systems and they gained access to
the source code for certain game as well as access
to other internal tools. Now, according to e A, no
user data was compromised as a result of this breach,
so in theory at least users were not affected by this.
(05:13):
The company also says it's are A taking steps to
address the issue by changing things up so that the
source code that the hackers access would be useless. In
other words, that they wouldn't be able to exploit e
A titles because e A is going to change those
titles significantly enough where that source code will be you know,
a moot thing. Now, unless the source code was for
(05:35):
some pretty minor stuff, I imagine that last bit is
going to be really challenging to pull off. It's not
as easy as just waving your hand at it. The
hackers claim to have stolen around seven hundred eighty gigabytes
of data, though so far the hackers have largely just
alluded to what they've stolen. They've shown some screenshots and stuff,
but they haven't actually shared the information itself. They are
(05:58):
advertising the data is being up for sale on various
black market forums, so there's some crime right there. El
Salvador recently announced that the country may soon accept bitcoin
as legal tender and consider it parallel to the Salvadoran dollar,
and in the sense that you know, this would be
(06:19):
an accepted currency that you could use bitcoin anywhere within
El Salvador and it would be accepted just as the
actual currency of the country would. And the government of
El Salvador says that this will aid people who are
from El Salvador but who are living abroad to be
able to send remittances back home. That it will remove
(06:40):
some of the barriers that would exist otherwise when they
want to transfer funds back to people in El Salvador.
But the International Monetary Fund has expressed concern for this move,
stating that cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin in particular, represents
some legal and economic concerns that have yet to be addressed. Uh,
they didn't go into a whole lot of detail on that.
(07:01):
I'm sure there's a lot of different things that we
could easily point to, like the fact that cryptocurrencies frequently
get used in concert with illicit activities, not not exclusively,
but it does have that association unfortunately. And also taxation
becomes an issue, and that brings us to here in
(07:22):
the United States, where the Internal Revenue Service where i
r S, is seeking authority from Congress to oversea operations
that relate to cryptocurrencies. So as it stands, there is
no clear law that gives the i r S authority
to do stuff like collect taxes on gains that are
generated through cryptocurrency transactions. Um and Further, the i r
(07:47):
S lacks the legal foundation to go after instances of
fraud that involve cryptocurrencies. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies is
one of the many features that attract people to it,
and another is that a lot of transactions, while part
of a publicly viewable ledger, are otherwise kind of off
the radar. And it remains to be seen if Congress
(08:08):
will grant the authority to the I r S in
order to pursue, you know, more responsibility with regard to cryptocurrencies.
And I imagine that this news is affecting the cryptocurrency
market a bit, because everything seems to affect the cryptocurrency
market a bit. I mean, if Elon Musk tweets about
it, it it will really get going. Sticking with politics for
(08:30):
a moment, a group of Democrat politicians in the United
States have proposed a few different pieces of antitrust legislation
that seems to be aimed specifically at really big tech companies,
and particularly the Big Five of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook,
and Microsoft. While there are draft bills on the matter,
(08:52):
and there are several of them, and they come from
different people and they say slightly different things, you can
kind of boil them all down own to trying to
deal with two main concerns. Concern number one regards companies
that can both operate a marketplace and sell their own
goods and services through that marketplace, along with goods and
(09:14):
services from other companies. So this would include corporations like
Apple and Amazon. Both of them have their own products
listed for sale in market places that they each control, respectively. Right,
So Amazon's got its own shop obviously, and it has
its own products in that shop side by side with
(09:34):
products from other companies. That's kind of what they're talking about.
That represents a conflict of interest, and it means that
these companies could conceivably promote their own products over those
from other entities. So if you've ever done a search
for a product on Amazon and you notice that the
first few results all seem to be Amazon branded products,
(09:55):
then you get what I'm saying. This is a little
different than stores that have a store brand. Usually in
those stores, you don't see the store brand presented in
a way that obscures or you know, eclipses the other brands.
It's side by side, and the idea is that, well,
it's not promoted over these others. It may be cheaper
(10:18):
and thus more attractive. But it's not like the store
is necessarily using tricks to promote one over the other.
The concern here is that through technology, those are tricks
that these companies are using, and it's there's a worry
that creates an unfair market and sets all the other
parties at a disadvantage over the main company. The other
(10:40):
big concern is about acquisitions. So a lot of these
big tech companies got that big not just through organic growth,
but by gobbling up other companies along the way. Sometimes
these acquisitions lead to less competition in a market, which
is rarely good news for consumers, and we see this
(11:00):
across numerous industries, from tech hardware to entertainment media and beyond.
The draft bills generally are going to make it more
difficult for a large company to pursue acquisitions. Now all
the stuff is again just in draft form. It could
change significantly before it ever goes to the floor for
(11:21):
a vote, and of course there's no guarantee that any
of these bills will even get that far, but it
is interesting to see where things are going. Speaking of Amazon,
the company could face a fine in excess of four
hundred twenty five million dollars in the EU for violations
of the g d p R. That's the General Data
(11:41):
Privacy Regulation. The g d p R is a set
of pretty strict rules that dictate how companies can collect
and use information that's generated by citizens of the EU.
And apparently Amazon's approach was not in line with those rules,
and now the company will have to pay up. I
recently did a couple of episodes about privacy and how
(12:02):
tech companies collect and use our personal information, so I
recommend you check out the episodes that published on Monday
and Wednesday to learn more about that. And related to
Amazon is Ring, a company Amazon purchased in two thousand
and eighteen. Ring is famous for its smart doorbells, and
it's also famous for being a part of massive surveillance
(12:25):
systems utilized by police forces around the United States. Ring
filed a report earlier this year that showed that in
twenty twenty, the company received more than eighteen hundred legal
demands to share video footage with various agencies, which was
more than double than the year before that. But what
the report does not include is how many users actually
(12:48):
had footage from their Ring systems shared with police. You know,
that's eighteen hundred separate demands. Those demands could have included
more than one video source, and RING didn't really say
how many users had their their footage shared with police.
Privacy advocacy groups and civil rights organizations have long protested
(13:09):
how RING will work with law enforcement, including the fact
that you know, you can have instances in which surveillance
is being shared with police without the police first securing
a warrant for that information, which does seem to to
tread pretty close to unreasonable search and seizure, which is,
you know, something that we should be protected against by
(13:32):
the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. Meanwhile,
over at Google, the company has recently made changes to
down list search results from sites that focus on slander.
That is, sites that are perpetrating slander. So if you've
ever googled someone's name and you saw some results that
seem to be targeting that person for whatever reason and
(13:54):
slagging off on them, that's really what we're talking about here.
And some of these sites have been using very as
tactics to kind of game the system and rise up
the page rankings so they dominate the top search results
for the those people, and now Google is going to
actively remove that advantage. They're going to start down listing
or pushing down the results for sites that appear to
(14:17):
be dedicated to dragging other people down. But this is
a really delicate thing. You know, over in the EU,
there's this concept of the right to be forgotten, and
that's caused Google a lot of grief. And some folks
point out that if it is easy to get negative
things removed from search results, that could be doing a
public disservice in some cases. So for example, let's say
(14:42):
you've got a high ranking public official and this person
does something truly terrible. It is in the public's best
interest to know about that thing, and having a means
to squelch that kind of information would effectively be suppressing
the truth. So I am interested to see how this progresses.
I do think it's important to knock down the trolls,
(15:03):
who are, you know, slagging off people in bad faith,
usually as a way of either harming those people or
profiting off of this, versus the cases where you have
actual journalists who are attempting to document misbehavior. The Verge
reports that Facebook is working on a smart watch that,
should things go as planned, will debut next summer. The
(15:27):
smart watch will have a display that incorporates two cameras,
and that display will be detachable from the watch band.
One of the two cameras will be forward facing, and
users will rely on that one to make video calls
and the like. The second cameras rear facing, and thus
it's really only useful if you detach the smart watch
display from the band, Otherwise you're just taking very dark
(15:50):
pictures and videos of your wrist I imagine anyway, the
rear facing camera will have a ten a DP resolution.
Facebook is already reportedly working with other companies to develop
tech that could house the smart watch display. Like you
could plug the smart watch into other types of stuff,
like maybe a backpack. Or imagine a robot that can
(16:13):
accept this little smart watch in a in a slot
in the robot and then it uses that smart watch
to power some functions. I might just be dreaming here, anyway.
The watch might also include a heart rate sensor, as
well as other sensors. That, of course, has raised questions
from people and organizations that are concerned about privacy because
Facebook has well, let's just say it's known for being
(16:36):
pretty darn hungry when it comes to personal information, and
so if you've got yet another device feeding data points
to Facebook, that's even more juicy information that the company
can use to sell to advertisers and whatnot. But a
year is a really long time in the tech industry,
so we'll have to wait and see if this watch
(16:56):
ever really comes out. If it doesn't, it will have
been a very expensive lesson for Facebook, because the company
has reportedly invested around a billion dollars in this endeavor already.
And finally, Liz Hameron, the c v P of xboxes
Gaming Experience and Platforms, laid out future plans to games
Radar with regard to where Xbox is going next. Hameron
(17:20):
says that the company will continue to develop new consoles
and hardware, so that's not going away, but we shouldn't
expect anything new for a while because the series X
console is still a very young one. Also, I would
like to propose that the name of whatever follows should
be the next box, so I'll take my check, thank you.
(17:42):
Beyond that, however, it appears that you know, Microsoft is
really focusing on creating a way for gamers to access
the company's services. That includes partnerships with various smart TV
manufacturers so that future televisions have a version of Xbox
Game Pass just built right into them. So that means
all you would need is a compatible controller to connect
(18:04):
to your TV, and then you could stream games from
the cloud to your TV and you don't need a
console at all. There's also talk of standalone games streaming devices,
you know, kind of the little gaming sticks that you
could plug right into a smart TV, possibly like through
an HDMI connector, and then you link that device to
your WiFi network at home and you stream games through that.
(18:26):
So if your television doesn't come with Xbox Game Pass
built into it, you could use this method to do it.
In other words, Microsoft's really exploring ways to reach beyond
the consoles themselves to let players get access to games
content through the cloud. And this is really interesting to
me because not that long ago Microsoft was really pushing
consoles as being sort of a a nexus for cloud
(18:49):
based services. You would buy a console, and then that
console would be your gaming rig. It would be your
your set top device where you could watch YouTube or
Netflix or Hulu or whatever. Plus it could interact with
live television broadcasts and cable. And now Microsoft is sort
of taking an opposite approach, at least when it comes
(19:09):
to the games themselves. Again, the company is not abandoning
hardware or consoles or anything like that, and I'm sure
that future consoles will continue to support that nexus approach
to services, but this does show a change in strategy.
I like to think of it as the Netflix approach,
where your goal is to get your service on every
possible platform you can, and you extend your reach that way.
(19:35):
And that wraps up the news for Thursday, June two
thousand twenty one. I hope you're all doing well and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(19:58):
or wherever you listen to your favorite It's only
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