November 2, 2021 • 31 mins
Facebook changed its name, but will it change its game? Also, some folks in Oregon want to know how much water Google uses. A suspicious cryptocurrency turns out to be a scam. And YouTube is done making Rewind videos.
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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,
joth In Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Radio and I love all things tech. It is time
for the tech news for Tuesday, November two, twenty one,
(00:27):
and we're gonna start off with some old news because
didn't do a news episode last Thursday. And as predicted Facebook,
the company has changed its name to Meta, which is
pretty much in line with what The Verge predicted a
couple of weeks ago. Meta in this case is a
reference to the concept of a metaverse, which in turn
(00:48):
we typically envision as being an implementation of such things
as virtual reality and augmented reality, and a persistent online
virtual world where you can behave as if it were
the real world. You can, you know, do things like shopping,
you can have entertainment. Essentially, you have this online, persistent
world that in some ways mirrors the real one, except
(01:12):
of course you're not burdened by reality. Right, So in
the metaverse, you might have an entire social structure that
exists inside this virtual world, and you might have some
elements of that environment spill out into the real world
through stuff like augmented reality technology. So in a way,
it's an extension of the concept of social networks, only
they become even more immersive. Anyway, I'm sure you're all
(01:35):
aware of the name change by now. There's very little
chance that I'm telling you this for the first time.
Of course, Meta is still going to face a lot
of questions from political leaders around the world. A name
change is not magically going to make all the critics
who want to split the company up say, oh, well,
Facebook's gone now. I mean, Facebook the platform is still there,
(01:58):
but Facebook the company's gone. We're not, and I don't
think that's going to happen. And I suspect as leaders
get their heads wrapped around what a metaverse actually is
and how it would enable a company like you know,
former Facebook now Meta to track even more information about people.
There's going to be more questions, or at least I
hope there will be. NBC News reports that an internal
(02:21):
blog post at what was then Facebook and now as Meta.
This is just going to be tiresome anyway, It revealed
that the company was actively pursuing opportunities to market to kids,
kids as young as six years old. In fact, the
blog post identified five different age groups that the company
was you know, kind of delineating as targets. They had
(02:44):
the six to nine age group, ten to twelve, thirteen
to fifteen, sixteen to seventeen, and then everybody else. And
I should add that this blog post specifically mentioned stuff
like making sure the company protected the security and privacy
of users, So at least there's that like this was
an internal blog post, it wasn't outward facing. The fact
(03:04):
that they even mentioned that we need to do this
in a responsible way is at least somewhat comforting, I guess,
But I would say this is more grist for the
mill when it comes to scrutinizing this enormous company and
it's various strategies involving user experiences and more importantly, how
the company generates revenue based on user behaviors and how
(03:28):
much data they are collecting from users. Now, as I
mentioned last week, the Facebook platform itself has seen a
decline in use among younger folks, and so this is
likely part of the company's overall strategy to find ways
to attract new users, not necessarily to the Facebook platform,
although I'm sure that's part of it. But you know
to the company's services. Overall, Facebook reps defended the blog post.
(03:53):
They argued that really, any business that interfaces with the
public is always trying to attract new and younger people
all the time. Like, if you get people, you know,
to connect with your product at a young age, you
might have a customer for life. So in that sense, yeah,
that that really does make sense. And in fact, Facebook
said the only thing that would be newsworthy is if
the company wasn't doing this. However, I would add it
(04:16):
is a little creepy when you think that as a
kind of preventive measure, Facebook said, an age limit on
who could have a Facebook or an Instagram profile, you know,
you have to be thirteen or older. And that seems
like it's a tacit acknowledgement that the services the company
provides might not be a good fit for younger users.
(04:36):
And when you take the blog post in concert with
the thousands of other documents that have emerged thanks to
whistleblower Francis Hogan, it all starts to look a little sinister.
So yeah, I guess companies that are you know, in
the business of dealing with you know, the average consumer
are always looking to find a way of tapping into
(04:59):
that at a young or age. But um, that doesn't
mean it's always good. I mean I could easily point
to the case of say, cigarette companies using cartoonish mascots
to market their cigarettes and how that is not really
a good thing. But we'll leave it for here. Now
let's talk about data tracking for a second. So Apple
(05:23):
introduced the App Tracking Transparency Policy last year, and this
policy sets firm rules that iOS apps must follow. That is,
apps that appear on Apple's app stores have to follow
these rules or else Apple won't carry them. So, if
the app is tracking data in any way, it first
(05:44):
has to request user permission to do so and to
talk about which types of of data it intends to track.
So if a user says no thanks, then the app
is not allowed to track that data. To say that
some companies were upset about this would be underplaying it.
I mean. Facebook went so far as to take out
a full page newspaper ad arguing against the policy, saying
(06:07):
that you know it would interfere with the Facebook apps
performance and give users the mistaken impression that you know,
Facebook is collecting loads of private information or to monetize
the info which was actually the correct implication because that
is what the company does well. Now. The Financial Times
reports that companies like you know, Meta Slash, Facebook and
(06:30):
Snap and Twitter and YouTube lost nearly ten billion dollars
last year due to this policy, and by lost, I
mean they weren't able to capitalize on user data for
those users who opted out of the data tracking. Snap
was hit particularly hard, which is not a big surprise
because Snap does not exist outside of the mobile experience.
(06:52):
Right There's no desktop version for Snapchat, so that would
explain how that company was hit particularly hard because there
no other platform for it to depend upon. Uh. Interestingly,
Apple itself has been found to engage in practices that
break its own rules, so you know, I'm not giving
Apple a full pass on this one. I think that
(07:12):
the policy is a good one, but only if everybody
be behaves and everyone follows it, you know, Apple included.
But it does also show a couple of things. And one,
it shows that your data is valuable, so you should
think about treating it as such, that it has value,
and so think about that, you know, take value in it.
(07:36):
There are people who have proposed systems that would require
companies to pay folks directly in order to be able
to use their data. That's how valuable. It is. Not
that those policies have actually, you know, seen any real traction,
because companies obviously have a strong incentive to resist that,
but it shows how how valuable the data is too.
(07:59):
This shows these apps are tracking you in tons of
different ways, and those ways might relate back to the
way the app functions, So there could be some legit
arguments that the data tracking is necessary in order for
you to have full functionality of the app. But this
also reminds us that our phones are constantly data gathering machines.
Sin since we pretty much take them everywhere we go,
(08:21):
it means we're always being tracked, and the stuff we
do is being tracked. The stuff we look up on
our phones is being tracked. Just good to remember, you know.
Fun times Up in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest in
the United States, there's a bit of a brew haha
going on regarding Google and its use of water near
(08:42):
the city of the Dowells. That's two words, It's the
and dows d A L L. E. S. Actually had
to look up how to say that so I wouldn't
get the pronunciation wrong. Google has data centers in the
Dowells on a site of an old aluminum smelting facility
that closed down years ago, like in the eighties, uh,
(09:03):
and they built data centers there, and the company plans
to build a couple more of those massive data centers. Well,
you know, buildings that are filled with computers that are
running all the time get pretty hot and you have
to keep computers from overheating or else stuff breaks down.
So as part of this plan, Google negotiated with the
city council of the Dolls and they got a new
(09:24):
deal when it comes to water rights. You know, Google
uses water to pull heat away from these computers and
then through a heat exchanger, cools the heated water back
down and can recirculate it through the system in order
to keep things at a good operating temperature. Although it
does mean that they have to occasionally bring in more water,
so it's like a water cooled BC, only on an
(09:46):
epic scale. Anyway, this would mean Google would have to
collect more water from the area, and it's an area
that's also been hit with droughts in the recent past,
so this has led some residents to become a bit
concerned over the matter, and making it worse is that
the amount of water that Google wants is a secret.
According to the City of the Dolls, Google's request constitutes
(10:10):
a trade secret, and so the city is not allowed
to share the information with residents. So the city council knows,
but they can't tell. According to other entities in Oregon,
the use of water is a matter of public interest
and that supersedes any trade secret. Moreover, those people who
are concerned have pointed out that Google doesn't provide information
(10:30):
about how much water it needs because the city has
an information. They know how much water Google needs, and
that means that the city is refusing to share information
with the citizens of the city. The newspaper the Oregonians
sued to get access to that information, and a judge
sided with the newspaper, But now the city has countersued
(10:51):
the newspaper in order to keep the information secret. Meanwhile,
there's a vote coming up on the matter, and a
vote that's really only open to the city council members,
not the public, and there's no chance that this particular
legal matter will be resolved before the vote happens. So things,
as you might imagine, are a little bit tense up
in the dolls. The city council says that Google's plan
(11:13):
will actually mean the more water will be provided to
the city, because Google will be contributing nearly thirty million
dollars to expand water services for the area. But the
secrecy around how much water the company needs seems to
be feeding into a general distrust of Google and the
city council, at least according to a piece I read
on Oregon Live dot com. We've got some more stories
(11:36):
to cover, but before we get to that, let's take
a quick break. Before the break, I was talking about
Google and Oregon. I've got another Google story here, which
involves a worker petition that's aimed at convincing both Google
and Amazon to back out of a deal that the
(11:58):
companies have made with is Real. The deal is called
Project Nimbus, and as you might suspect with that name,
it involves cloud computing centers. The workers who are leading
the petition are two Jewish Google employees, and they're worried
that the cloud computing tech quote allows for further surveillance
(12:19):
of an unlawful data collection on Palestinians and facilitates expansion
of Israel's illegal settlements on the Palestinian land end quote,
and the two say that more than one thousand employees
have signed a petition, though the petition itself allows employees
to remain anonymous, and all but three have done so,
so it's obviously hard to verify. According to the Jewish
(12:42):
Telegraphic Agency, the cloud computing contract has clauses in it
that are meant to prevent Amazon and Google from pulling
out of the deal, even if they're under the threat
of boycott, so it's questionable whether the petition will make
any headway, though it does bring more attention to the project.
Last week, I talked about how Hurts, the rental car company,
(13:05):
had signed a deal with Tesla to buy one hundred
thousand Tesla vehicles by the end of next year. Well
Elon Musk then went out and tweeted that the ink
has not even been put to paper yet, that no
contract has been signed, which, hey, you know, woopsie, because
you know, the initial news about that deal pushed Tesla
(13:27):
stock value up more than ten percent, like around twelve
percent actually, so that means if you had Tesla stock,
you potentially could have seen your wealth increase pretty dramatically
before Musk revealed that the deal hadn't actually been done yet,
which you know, elon Musk and the stock market, there
are all these stories that don't paint Musk in a
(13:48):
very good light in the way he communicates things. Um.
But then, to be fair, if the contract wasn't signed
and someone claimed that it was, it's not really on
Musk's shoulders this time. But yeah, stock markets are fun,
and by fun I mean we all play pretend and
hoping you make money. A Hurts, by the way, is
still communicating as though this has been a done deal
(14:09):
for some time. In fact, the company had told the
BBC that Hurts is already receiving deliveries of Tesla vehicles,
so that's kind of weird, right. Hurts was directly asked
by the BBC if the contract was in fact signed,
and a rep said, oh, we don't comment on business
dealings to the press. Yeah, okay. Tesla is also opening
(14:29):
up a program in the Netherlands that will help people
with e vs UH for the first time evs, by
the way, electric vehicles for the first time. Tesla is
opening up ten supercharger locations in the Netherlands to people
who are driving any type of electric vehicle not just
Tesla vehicles. Previously, you needed to be driving a Tesla
(14:50):
in order to make use of the supercharger stations. Now
anyone in the Netherlands with an electric vehicle can establish
an account with Tesla through the company's mobile app uh A,
establish a payment method in the app, and they use
a selection called charge your Non Tesla, which will then
give them directions to a participating supercharger station and they
(15:12):
pay through the app. There are a few other steps
for non Tesla drivers. The supercharger stations were made to
be compatible with Tesla vehicles, and with a Tesla car,
it's essentially plug in play. You plug it in, it
does everything on its own. It automatically shuts off when
it's done charging. But for non Tesla evs, users will
actually have to indicate in the app when the charging
(15:33):
station should begin charging the car and when it should stop.
It will also cost non Tesla drivers a bit more
to do it than Tesla owners will have to pay. Now,
will we see the same sort of program rolled out
in the United States. In order for that to happen,
we would need some special adapters because here in the States,
Tesla has proprietary connectors that means no other EV company
(15:57):
makes a port that fits the Tesla a charging system,
but the company has indicated that this is the way
of the future. So I suspect we'll see Tesla offering
up adapters, you know, for a fee, of course, so
that EV drivers in the US will be able to
take advantage of supercharger locations whenever the company chooses to
make that available, and that will be a good thing
(16:18):
because it will extend the driving range of electric vehicles effectively,
like you don't have to search around for a charging
station if you have an app that tells you where
the next one is, that's really useful. Back in two
thousand sixteen, Dell, the computer company that was made famous
in my childhood with the marketing phrase dude, you're getting
(16:39):
a Dell, merged with a company that's called e m C.
And as a result of that merger, the virtualization and
cloud computing company vm ware essentially came along for the ride,
with Dell gaining more than eight percent ownership of vm ware.
But over the last few years, Dell has begun to
spin off some of its acquired properties, mostly in an
(17:00):
effort to manage debt. Vm Where is the latest of
those spinoffs, and now Dell has divested itself of its
more than ownership of vm Ware, and vm Ware is
an independent company. Vm Ware's CEO UM released a statement
that says, quote as a standalone company, we now have
(17:21):
the flexibility to partner even more deeply with all cloud
and on premises infrastructure companies to create a better foundation
that drives results for our customers. Today's move will strengthen
our mission to be the Switzerland of the cloud computing
industry end quote which cool. Last month I talked about
how US telecom companies are to remove Huahwei equipment from
(17:45):
their networks, which is a directive from the United States government.
Last Friday, that effort began in earnest as the FCC
launched a reimbursement program. This will allow telecom companies to
seek financial assistance to actually make this happen, because it's
a pretty tricky thing to do, particularly if you want
(18:05):
to avoid interruptions in service when you've got a network
with all these pieces that are working together. Removing pieces
after they're all integrated is not the easiest thing in
the world to do. However, once these companies get a check, well,
the timers starts for them, because the rules state that
the companies that receive financial assistance have a year to
(18:26):
remove network components once those checks come in. These are
networks components supplied by Huawei as well as a second
Chinese company called Zte corp Or Corporation. And you might wonder, well,
why is this even happening in the first place, And
it's largely concerned about national security. China has been responsible
for and home to many surveillance and espionage efforts against
(18:49):
other nations, particularly the United States, and it's pretty well
known that China's government funds hacker groups to target US
based businesses and institutions. And so the thinking goes, it
might not be a great idea to rely upon critical
network infrastructure that came out of China. As you know,
it's it's possible that Chinese companies have built in ways
(19:13):
in which these companies could perform espionage duties on behalf
of the Chinese government. Um And I should add that
the companies deny that this would be the case, But then,
considering the amount of influence China's government has on Chinese companies,
it could be a little difficult to accept that claim.
(19:33):
We've got a few more stories, but we're gonna take
one more break and we'll be right back. Okay, we
left off in China. Let's go back to China, because
that's where Yahoo has called it quits. And some of
you might even be surprised that Yahoo is still a thing,
(19:54):
because that company had its own dramatic rise and fall
and sort of was scavenged from the wreckage. But yeah,
it was operating in China. But over the years, in fact,
since like two thousand thirteen or so, Yeahoo had been
shutting down services in that country, and now it has
(20:16):
ended all operations in China, stating that the move is
quote in recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal
environment end quote, which is a very polite way of
saying that it's incredibly hard to do business in China
for many reasons, especially in the tech industry, and most
of the reasons get pretty ugly when you start digging down.
(20:40):
For example, China's government has been passing legislation that puts
tight restrictions on tech companies and limiting their services dramatically.
Many of these regulations restrict how and when Chinese citizens
can access tech services. China's government states it's cracking down
on practices that could tend towards monopolistic control of a
particular industry or field. And I can get behind the
(21:03):
idea that we should not allow monopolies to happen, but
in the case of China, it's hard not to view
the government itself as wanting to hold monopolistic control of
pretty much everything, at least as far as what citizens
can access. So in other words, I guess there's not
really any good guys here. And while China has an
enormous population and thus a potentially huge market, these increased
(21:28):
regulations and restrictions have convinced more than a few companies
to abandon operations in China as it has started to
get to be more trouble than what it's worth, which
is mind blowing, right. You think about more than a
billion people live there and for that to be more
trouble than what it's worth and to pull out, that's
(21:49):
a lot of trouble, y'all, because that's a lot of
money left on the table. Gamers who love hedgehogs might
be excited to learn that Sega, the Japanese video game
company famous for Sonic in the Hedgehog, announced it was
forming a strategic alliance with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft's Azure program.
So Azure is a cloud computing service and it's typically
(22:12):
used to develop and manage apps. Sega's plan is to
form a new process when it comes to game development.
Sega has an initiative called super Game and this is
part of it. It's really an incredible effort to overhaul
how the company i dates and develops games and to
tap into the potential of five G connectivity. So there's
(22:33):
been the tendency toward cloud gaming over the last couple
of years, and what was at first a really jan
Kee experiences gradually evolved and Sega is banking on the
gaming of the future to be largely mobile and connected,
and so the company is leaning on a cloud based
service like Azure, which makes sense. The website nicaia Asia
(22:57):
reports that Nintendo will produce twenty fewer Nintendo Switch consoles
for fiscal year one than was originally predicted. And for Nintendo,
the fiscal year ends in March, so March. Of the
reason for the decline isn't due to decreased demand, but
rather to the ongoing semiconductor chip shortage. The original plan
(23:21):
was for Nintendo to produce as many as thirty million
Switch consoles, but the final number will be closer to
twenty four million. And this is a pretty tough story.
I mean, the company has seen declining sales of the Switch,
but the demand for the console is still super high.
So that means the reason for the decline in sales
is largely issues with production. If the company could just
(23:44):
ramp up production, those sales numbers would likely be going
in the opposite direction. This is a strong example of
how supply chain issues can have huge impacts on company performance,
not just for video game consoles, but for everything from
computers to graphics cards to cars. In News of the Obvious,
(24:04):
the Squid cryptocurrency, supposedly tying into the popular Squid game
TV series from Korea has turned out to be a scam. Now,
I say that it's news of the obvious because when
it comes to red flags, the Squid cryptocurrency really took
the cake. For one thing, you could buy squid currency,
(24:27):
but you couldn't sell it. That's kind of weird, right,
I Mean then you're like, well, how is this a commodity?
I mean, how is it an actual cryptocurrency? If you
can only exchange it in one direction with real currency
for the squid based currency. That should have been a
huge red flag right away. On top of that, the
(24:47):
website promoting squid said the crypto was going to be
used in an online game that was inspired by the
TV series where people play various childlike games but for
very very high stakes, So you could purchase these cryptocurrency tokens,
and then the idea was he would use these tokens
inside this online game. But the site also that was
(25:11):
promoting this also had tons of spelling errors in it,
and that at least suggested that the people who were
behind it were not being terribly careful in setting it up,
which is another big red flag. Well, the creators of
this supposed cryptocurrency took the money and then they ran.
The value had gone up to nearly three thousand dollars
per squid unit, and that's when the scam artists pulled
(25:35):
the plug. They pulled all their money out of it,
probably fearing that their ruse would be discovered before they
could cash out, and then the value of squid went
from being nearly three grand a unit to a big
old fat goose egg that is zero. So the con artists.
They made off with a couple of million dollars of
real money. Keep in mind, this is like a fake cryptocurrency,
(25:58):
so it's not like they were able to cash out
their cryptocurrency and get all that value back. The value,
or the perceived value anyway, was probably in the you know,
dozens of not hundreds of millions of dollars, but they
just took the real money and ran with it. So
this was a heck of an attack of opportunity. The
hucksters tapped into a love of a popular TV series,
(26:20):
the desire to virtually play in Squid Game, which I mean,
if you've seen the show, you would know that the
only way you would want to play is virtually and
also depended upon the general ignorance that folks have about cryptocurrency. Now,
I hope none of you got pulled into this scam now,
just in case it did happen to you, Like that sucks,
(26:42):
but don't feel like terrible about it. I have done
some monumentally dumb things in the past when my enthusiasm
got the better of me, where I got so excited
about something I failed to really think about what I
was doing, and I ended up paying the price later.
So I am not immune to this kind of thing.
I don't mean to suggest that I'm above it all.
(27:04):
It's why I actually mentioned critical thinking so often in
this this podcast. It's not just to tell you to
use critical thinking. It's also to remind me that I
need to do the same. Finally, do you remember the
rewind videos that YouTube used to make. They started doing
them in two thousand eleven, crafting ah from two thousand
(27:25):
eleven two thousand eighteen. It was kind of a montage
set to music. They would feature some of the most
popular YouTube creators and channels in a video celebrating the year,
and it would have like a loose thematic link between
the creators, often grouping tons of people who otherwise never
interacted with each other. They just all made popular videos,
(27:48):
all being like in a bus or something. Um well,
they didn't do one in because, you know, was a
total bust. Plus getting a bunch of people together for
a complicate did choreograph video shoot probably sounded like a
bad idea during a pandemic. Now YouTube says that it's
not gonna do rewind videos moving forward. It is made
(28:11):
its last one. By the way, the two thousand uh
nineteen rewind video was slightly different from the ones from
two thousand eleven to two thousand eighteen. That's because two
thousand eighteen was received so poorly. It became the most
down voted video of all time within one week of
it being up, largely because there were certain people who
(28:33):
were left out of the video. Some of them I
think should have been left out of the video because
they are reprehensible people. But they still have lots and
lots and lots of fans who disagree with me, and
they made that disagreement known by downloding the video. So
two thousand nineteen they said, okay, you know what message received,
We're just gonna make a video that features some of
(28:56):
the videos that got the most likes. So literally, you
chose these videos. It's not on us have fun while
we're not even doing that anymore. And it's largely because
YouTube has grown so large and videos are so diverse
across so many different genres and topics that it is
(29:17):
literally impossible to make a rewind video that even represents
a fraction of what is going on on YouTube that
if you were to try and do it, unless that
video was, you know, eighteen hours long, and featured flashes
that lasted maybe a couple of seconds of each person.
You wouldn't even scratch the surface. So instead YouTube says
(29:40):
we're going to leave that to individual creators to make
their own kind of rewind videos to be a reflection
on the year. But we're not gonna do it anymore.
And I mean it makes sense to me, Like you
look at YouTube and you start to forget all the
different content that's on there, because like if if you're
like me, you start to kind of narrow in on
(30:01):
the content you like, and you your mind forgets that
everything else is on there too. I mean everything like
d I O. Y guides to critical analysis of the
cultural appropriation and Disney films too, comedy videos that I
have to admit I am too old to find funny
two recipe videos that are far more useful than recipes
(30:23):
you find online because you don't have to wade through
a novel before you get to the recipe. So I
understand where YouTube's coming from, but I think we should
have a moment of silence for rewind two thousand eleven
to two thousand nineteen. That's enough silence, Okay. That wraps
(30:43):
up the news items for Tuesday, November two, two thousand
twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should
cover on tech Stuff, reach out and let me know
what those are. The best way to do that is
on Twitter and the handle for the show is text
Stuffs H. S W. And I'll talk to you again
really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
(31:09):
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
joth In Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Radio and I love all things tech. It is time
for the tech news for Tuesday, November two, twenty one,
(00:27):
and we're gonna start off with some old news because
didn't do a news episode last Thursday. And as predicted Facebook,
the company has changed its name to Meta, which is
pretty much in line with what The Verge predicted a
couple of weeks ago. Meta in this case is a
reference to the concept of a metaverse, which in turn
(00:48):
we typically envision as being an implementation of such things
as virtual reality and augmented reality, and a persistent online
virtual world where you can behave as if it were
the real world. You can, you know, do things like shopping,
you can have entertainment. Essentially, you have this online, persistent
world that in some ways mirrors the real one, except
(01:12):
of course you're not burdened by reality. Right, So in
the metaverse, you might have an entire social structure that
exists inside this virtual world, and you might have some
elements of that environment spill out into the real world
through stuff like augmented reality technology. So in a way,
it's an extension of the concept of social networks, only
they become even more immersive. Anyway, I'm sure you're all
(01:35):
aware of the name change by now. There's very little
chance that I'm telling you this for the first time.
Of course, Meta is still going to face a lot
of questions from political leaders around the world. A name
change is not magically going to make all the critics
who want to split the company up say, oh, well,
Facebook's gone now. I mean, Facebook the platform is still there,
(01:58):
but Facebook the company's gone. We're not, and I don't
think that's going to happen. And I suspect as leaders
get their heads wrapped around what a metaverse actually is
and how it would enable a company like you know,
former Facebook now Meta to track even more information about people.
There's going to be more questions, or at least I
hope there will be. NBC News reports that an internal
(02:21):
blog post at what was then Facebook and now as Meta.
This is just going to be tiresome anyway, It revealed
that the company was actively pursuing opportunities to market to kids,
kids as young as six years old. In fact, the
blog post identified five different age groups that the company
was you know, kind of delineating as targets. They had
(02:44):
the six to nine age group, ten to twelve, thirteen
to fifteen, sixteen to seventeen, and then everybody else. And
I should add that this blog post specifically mentioned stuff
like making sure the company protected the security and privacy
of users, So at least there's that like this was
an internal blog post, it wasn't outward facing. The fact
(03:04):
that they even mentioned that we need to do this
in a responsible way is at least somewhat comforting, I guess,
But I would say this is more grist for the
mill when it comes to scrutinizing this enormous company and
it's various strategies involving user experiences and more importantly, how
the company generates revenue based on user behaviors and how
(03:28):
much data they are collecting from users. Now, as I
mentioned last week, the Facebook platform itself has seen a
decline in use among younger folks, and so this is
likely part of the company's overall strategy to find ways
to attract new users, not necessarily to the Facebook platform,
although I'm sure that's part of it. But you know
to the company's services. Overall, Facebook reps defended the blog post.
(03:53):
They argued that really, any business that interfaces with the
public is always trying to attract new and younger people
all the time. Like, if you get people, you know,
to connect with your product at a young age, you
might have a customer for life. So in that sense, yeah,
that that really does make sense. And in fact, Facebook
said the only thing that would be newsworthy is if
the company wasn't doing this. However, I would add it
(04:16):
is a little creepy when you think that as a
kind of preventive measure, Facebook said, an age limit on
who could have a Facebook or an Instagram profile, you know,
you have to be thirteen or older. And that seems
like it's a tacit acknowledgement that the services the company
provides might not be a good fit for younger users.
(04:36):
And when you take the blog post in concert with
the thousands of other documents that have emerged thanks to
whistleblower Francis Hogan, it all starts to look a little sinister.
So yeah, I guess companies that are you know, in
the business of dealing with you know, the average consumer
are always looking to find a way of tapping into
(04:59):
that at a young or age. But um, that doesn't
mean it's always good. I mean I could easily point
to the case of say, cigarette companies using cartoonish mascots
to market their cigarettes and how that is not really
a good thing. But we'll leave it for here. Now
let's talk about data tracking for a second. So Apple
(05:23):
introduced the App Tracking Transparency Policy last year, and this
policy sets firm rules that iOS apps must follow. That is,
apps that appear on Apple's app stores have to follow
these rules or else Apple won't carry them. So, if
the app is tracking data in any way, it first
(05:44):
has to request user permission to do so and to
talk about which types of of data it intends to track.
So if a user says no thanks, then the app
is not allowed to track that data. To say that
some companies were upset about this would be underplaying it.
I mean. Facebook went so far as to take out
a full page newspaper ad arguing against the policy, saying
(06:07):
that you know it would interfere with the Facebook apps
performance and give users the mistaken impression that you know,
Facebook is collecting loads of private information or to monetize
the info which was actually the correct implication because that
is what the company does well. Now. The Financial Times
reports that companies like you know, Meta Slash, Facebook and
(06:30):
Snap and Twitter and YouTube lost nearly ten billion dollars
last year due to this policy, and by lost, I
mean they weren't able to capitalize on user data for
those users who opted out of the data tracking. Snap
was hit particularly hard, which is not a big surprise
because Snap does not exist outside of the mobile experience.
(06:52):
Right There's no desktop version for Snapchat, so that would
explain how that company was hit particularly hard because there
no other platform for it to depend upon. Uh. Interestingly,
Apple itself has been found to engage in practices that
break its own rules, so you know, I'm not giving
Apple a full pass on this one. I think that
(07:12):
the policy is a good one, but only if everybody
be behaves and everyone follows it, you know, Apple included.
But it does also show a couple of things. And one,
it shows that your data is valuable, so you should
think about treating it as such, that it has value,
and so think about that, you know, take value in it.
(07:36):
There are people who have proposed systems that would require
companies to pay folks directly in order to be able
to use their data. That's how valuable. It is. Not
that those policies have actually, you know, seen any real traction,
because companies obviously have a strong incentive to resist that,
but it shows how how valuable the data is too.
(07:59):
This shows these apps are tracking you in tons of
different ways, and those ways might relate back to the
way the app functions, So there could be some legit
arguments that the data tracking is necessary in order for
you to have full functionality of the app. But this
also reminds us that our phones are constantly data gathering machines.
Sin since we pretty much take them everywhere we go,
(08:21):
it means we're always being tracked, and the stuff we
do is being tracked. The stuff we look up on
our phones is being tracked. Just good to remember, you know.
Fun times Up in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest in
the United States, there's a bit of a brew haha
going on regarding Google and its use of water near
(08:42):
the city of the Dowells. That's two words, It's the
and dows d A L L. E. S. Actually had
to look up how to say that so I wouldn't
get the pronunciation wrong. Google has data centers in the
Dowells on a site of an old aluminum smelting facility
that closed down years ago, like in the eighties, uh,
(09:03):
and they built data centers there, and the company plans
to build a couple more of those massive data centers. Well,
you know, buildings that are filled with computers that are
running all the time get pretty hot and you have
to keep computers from overheating or else stuff breaks down.
So as part of this plan, Google negotiated with the
city council of the Dolls and they got a new
(09:24):
deal when it comes to water rights. You know, Google
uses water to pull heat away from these computers and
then through a heat exchanger, cools the heated water back
down and can recirculate it through the system in order
to keep things at a good operating temperature. Although it
does mean that they have to occasionally bring in more water,
so it's like a water cooled BC, only on an
(09:46):
epic scale. Anyway, this would mean Google would have to
collect more water from the area, and it's an area
that's also been hit with droughts in the recent past,
so this has led some residents to become a bit
concerned over the matter, and making it worse is that
the amount of water that Google wants is a secret.
According to the City of the Dolls, Google's request constitutes
(10:10):
a trade secret, and so the city is not allowed
to share the information with residents. So the city council knows,
but they can't tell. According to other entities in Oregon,
the use of water is a matter of public interest
and that supersedes any trade secret. Moreover, those people who
are concerned have pointed out that Google doesn't provide information
(10:30):
about how much water it needs because the city has
an information. They know how much water Google needs, and
that means that the city is refusing to share information
with the citizens of the city. The newspaper the Oregonians
sued to get access to that information, and a judge
sided with the newspaper, But now the city has countersued
(10:51):
the newspaper in order to keep the information secret. Meanwhile,
there's a vote coming up on the matter, and a
vote that's really only open to the city council members,
not the public, and there's no chance that this particular
legal matter will be resolved before the vote happens. So things,
as you might imagine, are a little bit tense up
in the dolls. The city council says that Google's plan
(11:13):
will actually mean the more water will be provided to
the city, because Google will be contributing nearly thirty million
dollars to expand water services for the area. But the
secrecy around how much water the company needs seems to
be feeding into a general distrust of Google and the
city council, at least according to a piece I read
on Oregon Live dot com. We've got some more stories
(11:36):
to cover, but before we get to that, let's take
a quick break. Before the break, I was talking about
Google and Oregon. I've got another Google story here, which
involves a worker petition that's aimed at convincing both Google
and Amazon to back out of a deal that the
(11:58):
companies have made with is Real. The deal is called
Project Nimbus, and as you might suspect with that name,
it involves cloud computing centers. The workers who are leading
the petition are two Jewish Google employees, and they're worried
that the cloud computing tech quote allows for further surveillance
(12:19):
of an unlawful data collection on Palestinians and facilitates expansion
of Israel's illegal settlements on the Palestinian land end quote,
and the two say that more than one thousand employees
have signed a petition, though the petition itself allows employees
to remain anonymous, and all but three have done so,
so it's obviously hard to verify. According to the Jewish
(12:42):
Telegraphic Agency, the cloud computing contract has clauses in it
that are meant to prevent Amazon and Google from pulling
out of the deal, even if they're under the threat
of boycott, so it's questionable whether the petition will make
any headway, though it does bring more attention to the project.
Last week, I talked about how Hurts, the rental car company,
(13:05):
had signed a deal with Tesla to buy one hundred
thousand Tesla vehicles by the end of next year. Well
Elon Musk then went out and tweeted that the ink
has not even been put to paper yet, that no
contract has been signed, which, hey, you know, woopsie, because
you know, the initial news about that deal pushed Tesla
(13:27):
stock value up more than ten percent, like around twelve
percent actually, so that means if you had Tesla stock,
you potentially could have seen your wealth increase pretty dramatically
before Musk revealed that the deal hadn't actually been done yet,
which you know, elon Musk and the stock market, there
are all these stories that don't paint Musk in a
(13:48):
very good light in the way he communicates things. Um.
But then, to be fair, if the contract wasn't signed
and someone claimed that it was, it's not really on
Musk's shoulders this time. But yeah, stock markets are fun,
and by fun I mean we all play pretend and
hoping you make money. A Hurts, by the way, is
still communicating as though this has been a done deal
(14:09):
for some time. In fact, the company had told the
BBC that Hurts is already receiving deliveries of Tesla vehicles,
so that's kind of weird, right. Hurts was directly asked
by the BBC if the contract was in fact signed,
and a rep said, oh, we don't comment on business
dealings to the press. Yeah, okay. Tesla is also opening
(14:29):
up a program in the Netherlands that will help people
with e vs UH for the first time evs, by
the way, electric vehicles for the first time. Tesla is
opening up ten supercharger locations in the Netherlands to people
who are driving any type of electric vehicle not just
Tesla vehicles. Previously, you needed to be driving a Tesla
(14:50):
in order to make use of the supercharger stations. Now
anyone in the Netherlands with an electric vehicle can establish
an account with Tesla through the company's mobile app uh A,
establish a payment method in the app, and they use
a selection called charge your Non Tesla, which will then
give them directions to a participating supercharger station and they
(15:12):
pay through the app. There are a few other steps
for non Tesla drivers. The supercharger stations were made to
be compatible with Tesla vehicles, and with a Tesla car,
it's essentially plug in play. You plug it in, it
does everything on its own. It automatically shuts off when
it's done charging. But for non Tesla evs, users will
actually have to indicate in the app when the charging
(15:33):
station should begin charging the car and when it should stop.
It will also cost non Tesla drivers a bit more
to do it than Tesla owners will have to pay. Now,
will we see the same sort of program rolled out
in the United States. In order for that to happen,
we would need some special adapters because here in the States,
Tesla has proprietary connectors that means no other EV company
(15:57):
makes a port that fits the Tesla a charging system,
but the company has indicated that this is the way
of the future. So I suspect we'll see Tesla offering
up adapters, you know, for a fee, of course, so
that EV drivers in the US will be able to
take advantage of supercharger locations whenever the company chooses to
make that available, and that will be a good thing
(16:18):
because it will extend the driving range of electric vehicles effectively,
like you don't have to search around for a charging
station if you have an app that tells you where
the next one is, that's really useful. Back in two
thousand sixteen, Dell, the computer company that was made famous
in my childhood with the marketing phrase dude, you're getting
(16:39):
a Dell, merged with a company that's called e m C.
And as a result of that merger, the virtualization and
cloud computing company vm ware essentially came along for the ride,
with Dell gaining more than eight percent ownership of vm ware.
But over the last few years, Dell has begun to
spin off some of its acquired properties, mostly in an
(17:00):
effort to manage debt. Vm Where is the latest of
those spinoffs, and now Dell has divested itself of its
more than ownership of vm Ware, and vm Ware is
an independent company. Vm Ware's CEO UM released a statement
that says, quote as a standalone company, we now have
(17:21):
the flexibility to partner even more deeply with all cloud
and on premises infrastructure companies to create a better foundation
that drives results for our customers. Today's move will strengthen
our mission to be the Switzerland of the cloud computing
industry end quote which cool. Last month I talked about
how US telecom companies are to remove Huahwei equipment from
(17:45):
their networks, which is a directive from the United States government.
Last Friday, that effort began in earnest as the FCC
launched a reimbursement program. This will allow telecom companies to
seek financial assistance to actually make this happen, because it's
a pretty tricky thing to do, particularly if you want
(18:05):
to avoid interruptions in service when you've got a network
with all these pieces that are working together. Removing pieces
after they're all integrated is not the easiest thing in
the world to do. However, once these companies get a check, well,
the timers starts for them, because the rules state that
the companies that receive financial assistance have a year to
(18:26):
remove network components once those checks come in. These are
networks components supplied by Huawei as well as a second
Chinese company called Zte corp Or Corporation. And you might wonder, well,
why is this even happening in the first place, And
it's largely concerned about national security. China has been responsible
for and home to many surveillance and espionage efforts against
(18:49):
other nations, particularly the United States, and it's pretty well
known that China's government funds hacker groups to target US
based businesses and institutions. And so the thinking goes, it
might not be a great idea to rely upon critical
network infrastructure that came out of China. As you know,
it's it's possible that Chinese companies have built in ways
(19:13):
in which these companies could perform espionage duties on behalf
of the Chinese government. Um And I should add that
the companies deny that this would be the case, But then,
considering the amount of influence China's government has on Chinese companies,
it could be a little difficult to accept that claim.
(19:33):
We've got a few more stories, but we're gonna take
one more break and we'll be right back. Okay, we
left off in China. Let's go back to China, because
that's where Yahoo has called it quits. And some of
you might even be surprised that Yahoo is still a thing,
(19:54):
because that company had its own dramatic rise and fall
and sort of was scavenged from the wreckage. But yeah,
it was operating in China. But over the years, in fact,
since like two thousand thirteen or so, Yeahoo had been
shutting down services in that country, and now it has
(20:16):
ended all operations in China, stating that the move is
quote in recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal
environment end quote, which is a very polite way of
saying that it's incredibly hard to do business in China
for many reasons, especially in the tech industry, and most
of the reasons get pretty ugly when you start digging down.
(20:40):
For example, China's government has been passing legislation that puts
tight restrictions on tech companies and limiting their services dramatically.
Many of these regulations restrict how and when Chinese citizens
can access tech services. China's government states it's cracking down
on practices that could tend towards monopolistic control of a
particular industry or field. And I can get behind the
(21:03):
idea that we should not allow monopolies to happen, but
in the case of China, it's hard not to view
the government itself as wanting to hold monopolistic control of
pretty much everything, at least as far as what citizens
can access. So in other words, I guess there's not
really any good guys here. And while China has an
enormous population and thus a potentially huge market, these increased
(21:28):
regulations and restrictions have convinced more than a few companies
to abandon operations in China as it has started to
get to be more trouble than what it's worth, which
is mind blowing, right. You think about more than a
billion people live there and for that to be more
trouble than what it's worth and to pull out, that's
(21:49):
a lot of trouble, y'all, because that's a lot of
money left on the table. Gamers who love hedgehogs might
be excited to learn that Sega, the Japanese video game
company famous for Sonic in the Hedgehog, announced it was
forming a strategic alliance with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft's Azure program.
So Azure is a cloud computing service and it's typically
(22:12):
used to develop and manage apps. Sega's plan is to
form a new process when it comes to game development.
Sega has an initiative called super Game and this is
part of it. It's really an incredible effort to overhaul
how the company i dates and develops games and to
tap into the potential of five G connectivity. So there's
(22:33):
been the tendency toward cloud gaming over the last couple
of years, and what was at first a really jan
Kee experiences gradually evolved and Sega is banking on the
gaming of the future to be largely mobile and connected,
and so the company is leaning on a cloud based
service like Azure, which makes sense. The website nicaia Asia
(22:57):
reports that Nintendo will produce twenty fewer Nintendo Switch consoles
for fiscal year one than was originally predicted. And for Nintendo,
the fiscal year ends in March, so March. Of the
reason for the decline isn't due to decreased demand, but
rather to the ongoing semiconductor chip shortage. The original plan
(23:21):
was for Nintendo to produce as many as thirty million
Switch consoles, but the final number will be closer to
twenty four million. And this is a pretty tough story.
I mean, the company has seen declining sales of the Switch,
but the demand for the console is still super high.
So that means the reason for the decline in sales
is largely issues with production. If the company could just
(23:44):
ramp up production, those sales numbers would likely be going
in the opposite direction. This is a strong example of
how supply chain issues can have huge impacts on company performance,
not just for video game consoles, but for everything from
computers to graphics cards to cars. In News of the Obvious,
(24:04):
the Squid cryptocurrency, supposedly tying into the popular Squid game
TV series from Korea has turned out to be a scam. Now,
I say that it's news of the obvious because when
it comes to red flags, the Squid cryptocurrency really took
the cake. For one thing, you could buy squid currency,
(24:27):
but you couldn't sell it. That's kind of weird, right,
I Mean then you're like, well, how is this a commodity?
I mean, how is it an actual cryptocurrency? If you
can only exchange it in one direction with real currency
for the squid based currency. That should have been a
huge red flag right away. On top of that, the
(24:47):
website promoting squid said the crypto was going to be
used in an online game that was inspired by the
TV series where people play various childlike games but for
very very high stakes, So you could purchase these cryptocurrency tokens,
and then the idea was he would use these tokens
inside this online game. But the site also that was
(25:11):
promoting this also had tons of spelling errors in it,
and that at least suggested that the people who were
behind it were not being terribly careful in setting it up,
which is another big red flag. Well, the creators of
this supposed cryptocurrency took the money and then they ran.
The value had gone up to nearly three thousand dollars
per squid unit, and that's when the scam artists pulled
(25:35):
the plug. They pulled all their money out of it,
probably fearing that their ruse would be discovered before they
could cash out, and then the value of squid went
from being nearly three grand a unit to a big
old fat goose egg that is zero. So the con artists.
They made off with a couple of million dollars of
real money. Keep in mind, this is like a fake cryptocurrency,
(25:58):
so it's not like they were able to cash out
their cryptocurrency and get all that value back. The value,
or the perceived value anyway, was probably in the you know,
dozens of not hundreds of millions of dollars, but they
just took the real money and ran with it. So
this was a heck of an attack of opportunity. The
hucksters tapped into a love of a popular TV series,
(26:20):
the desire to virtually play in Squid Game, which I mean,
if you've seen the show, you would know that the
only way you would want to play is virtually and
also depended upon the general ignorance that folks have about cryptocurrency. Now,
I hope none of you got pulled into this scam now,
just in case it did happen to you, Like that sucks,
(26:42):
but don't feel like terrible about it. I have done
some monumentally dumb things in the past when my enthusiasm
got the better of me, where I got so excited
about something I failed to really think about what I
was doing, and I ended up paying the price later.
So I am not immune to this kind of thing.
I don't mean to suggest that I'm above it all.
(27:04):
It's why I actually mentioned critical thinking so often in
this this podcast. It's not just to tell you to
use critical thinking. It's also to remind me that I
need to do the same. Finally, do you remember the
rewind videos that YouTube used to make. They started doing
them in two thousand eleven, crafting ah from two thousand
(27:25):
eleven two thousand eighteen. It was kind of a montage
set to music. They would feature some of the most
popular YouTube creators and channels in a video celebrating the year,
and it would have like a loose thematic link between
the creators, often grouping tons of people who otherwise never
interacted with each other. They just all made popular videos,
(27:48):
all being like in a bus or something. Um well,
they didn't do one in because, you know, was a
total bust. Plus getting a bunch of people together for
a complicate did choreograph video shoot probably sounded like a
bad idea during a pandemic. Now YouTube says that it's
not gonna do rewind videos moving forward. It is made
(28:11):
its last one. By the way, the two thousand uh
nineteen rewind video was slightly different from the ones from
two thousand eleven to two thousand eighteen. That's because two
thousand eighteen was received so poorly. It became the most
down voted video of all time within one week of
it being up, largely because there were certain people who
(28:33):
were left out of the video. Some of them I
think should have been left out of the video because
they are reprehensible people. But they still have lots and
lots and lots of fans who disagree with me, and
they made that disagreement known by downloding the video. So
two thousand nineteen they said, okay, you know what message received,
We're just gonna make a video that features some of
(28:56):
the videos that got the most likes. So literally, you
chose these videos. It's not on us have fun while
we're not even doing that anymore. And it's largely because
YouTube has grown so large and videos are so diverse
across so many different genres and topics that it is
(29:17):
literally impossible to make a rewind video that even represents
a fraction of what is going on on YouTube that
if you were to try and do it, unless that
video was, you know, eighteen hours long, and featured flashes
that lasted maybe a couple of seconds of each person.
You wouldn't even scratch the surface. So instead YouTube says
(29:40):
we're going to leave that to individual creators to make
their own kind of rewind videos to be a reflection
on the year. But we're not gonna do it anymore.
And I mean it makes sense to me, Like you
look at YouTube and you start to forget all the
different content that's on there, because like if if you're
like me, you start to kind of narrow in on
(30:01):
the content you like, and you your mind forgets that
everything else is on there too. I mean everything like
d I O. Y guides to critical analysis of the
cultural appropriation and Disney films too, comedy videos that I
have to admit I am too old to find funny
two recipe videos that are far more useful than recipes
(30:23):
you find online because you don't have to wade through
a novel before you get to the recipe. So I
understand where YouTube's coming from, but I think we should
have a moment of silence for rewind two thousand eleven
to two thousand nineteen. That's enough silence, Okay. That wraps
(30:43):
up the news items for Tuesday, November two, two thousand
twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should
cover on tech Stuff, reach out and let me know
what those are. The best way to do that is
on Twitter and the handle for the show is text
Stuffs H. S W. And I'll talk to you again
really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
(31:09):
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i
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TechStuff News
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Karah Preiss
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