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September 9, 2021 22 mins

Facebook and Ray-Ban introduce new smart glasses. Twitter creates Communities. And the Australian High Court makes a really bad decision about Facebook.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a lot of all things tech. And this is
the tech news for Thursday, September nine, twenty one. And

(00:25):
before I jump into the news, I want to address
something I said earlier this week about political groups using
pressure to gain data from various companies, you know, companies
like telecommunications companies or internet service providers or social media platforms, etcetera. Uh,
specifically data about and belonging to other politicians. A lot

(00:48):
of folks reached out to me and made some really
good points, you know, kind of in opposition to what
I was saying. I spent a lot of time thinking
about my perspective and I tried to really critically analyze it,
and just as a reminder, I said that generally I
am against the idea of politicians doing this because I
feel it can lead to a situation in which whatever

(01:10):
political party happens to be in power can use that
kind of leverage to disempower the other party, and that
is fundamentally antithetical to the democratic process. However, I also
have to acknowledge that if there is a criminal investigation
and if there's a sufficient evidence to support a subpoena,

(01:31):
you know, you can't just make a subpoena, you have
to file for one and get a court appointed subpoena.
If that is the case, then investigators should exercise that
to look at data and see what it holds with
regard to a crime, and that telecommunications companies and I
s p s and whatnot should obey subpoenas if those

(01:53):
subpoenas are legally valid. I'm still wary of this sort
of approach snowballing beyond situations that appear to be justified,
Like we were talking about the January six insurrection. That's
a very high stakes, specific situation. But as we all know,
justifications can get pretty loosey goosey as time goes on.

(02:16):
So like once you start to chip away it's stuff
you've got to be super careful or or you know,
the whole damn breaks and you get flooded. But under
very controlled circumstances, I think seeking out that information can
be valid if if all those processes are followed. I
just worry that we'll lose a grip on those controls.

(02:37):
By the way, just full disclosure. It is not easy
for me to amend my thoughts because, like a lot
of folks, when I form an opinion, I'm loath to
change it. But critical thinking says I need to resist
that urge, and sometimes I actually managed to do that,
probably not nearly as frequently as I should, but I

(02:57):
wanted to get that all the way first. Now, let's
go on to the news in Israel. Hacker using the
handle Sung Council, and I apologize. I'm sure I've mispronounced
that claims to have stolen personal information from seven million Israeli's. Now,
if like me, you wondered how many people live in Israel,

(03:18):
a quick search tells you it's a little more than
nine million. It's like almost nine and a half million.
But if this claim is true, then that means the
hacker got access to the personal information of nearly everyone
in Israel. The hacker says that they targeted a website
called City for You. That's c I t Y the
number for and the letter you, and Israel uses that

(03:40):
as sort of a payment processing utility, so folks can
pay stuff like fines or bills and their taxes through
this site. The hacker has shared images of documents that
they claimed to have stolen from this website and included
documentation with like personal details like like I D Cards
and tax bill. Is that kind of thing? The hacker

(04:02):
says that they want to sell this data off to
interest ad buyers on the black market. Uh. The National
Cyber Directorate meanwhile, says that they don't think this is
a legit claim. They say that they believe these documents
that the hacker has released actually come from an older
document leak, and that it's unlikely the hacker has actually

(04:22):
stolen that much data. But that's all the information I
have as of right now. Several news outlets report that
Los Angeles police officers have been directed to ask people
to hand over social media details and have been doing
so for years, and that includes stuff like the handles
that people use online, and that was whenever the police

(04:43):
stopped anyone, even if that person wasn't a suspect of
any sort of crime. So a cops stops someone in
l A and then asks them to reveal their social
media handles, which seems weird right, also a little invasive,
and the only reason we even know about This officially
is because a nonprofit New York University agency called the

(05:04):
Brennan Center for Justice filed a request under California's Public
Records Act and wanted to learn how the l a
p D uses social media as a means to monitor
and conduct surveillance on people. The l a p D
declined to acquiesce to that request, so the agency brought
the matter to the California Superior Court, at which point

(05:26):
the l a p D said it's a fair cup
and handed over the information, which included around six thousand
pages of documentation. And this practice appears to have been
in place for several years, like I mentioned, with cops
regularly collecting social media information presumably for the purposes of surveillance,
and again that was for everyone, whether or not they

(05:48):
were suspected of being involved in a crime. The documentation
also showed that the l a p D had been
monitoring specific hashtags for activity on social media, such as
black Lives Matter. Once again we see how the combination
of our social interactions online and a surveillance state can
converge into a pretty nasty horror show of a scenario. Anyway,

(06:12):
fun times when it comes to talking about misinformation and
disinformation online. I usually end up talking about Facebook, Twitter,
and YouTube, but US Senator Elizabeth Warren has issue with
Amazon's role in the matter as well. Warren says that
her staff, while searching for materials about COVID nineteen and
vaccines on Amazon, received results that included books dedicated to

(06:35):
spreading falsehoods about those issues, and Warren wrote, quote, as
cases of COVID nineteen continue to rise, Amazon is feeding
misinformation loops through its search and best seller algorithms, potentially
leading countless Americans to risk their health and the health
of their neighbors based on misleading and inaccurate information that
they discover on Amazon's website end quote. Warren's office is

(06:59):
asking Amazon to view its recommendation algorithm and to weed
out dangerous misinformation. The company has yet to reply as
of the recording of this podcast. Microsoft, in a move
that I think is pretty wise, has decided to postpone
indefinitely a return to the Microsoft headquarters in Washington State.

(07:19):
This postponement also applies to Microsoft's other offices around the
United States, and the reason, of course, is the ongoing
pandemic and the dangers of COVID nineteen Originally, the company
had planned for employees to come back to the office
by October four, but now there is no return date
in place, which is probably for the best because things

(07:39):
are changing so quickly, it really saves time having to
push those return dates around. In fact, company executives have
said that the uncertainty around COVID nineteen is precisely why
they won't set a new target return date. Further, they
said that when that time does come, when they do
feel confident that they can go back to the office,
employees will have a month long transition period to readjust

(08:02):
for that reality. Now we've seen several tech companies shift
their expected return dates. Google, Apple, Facebook, and others all
planned to return earlier, you know, this year and into
the fall, but now most of them have pushed that
back to twenty twenty two. One other bit of Microsoft
related news, the company has announced that it is updating

(08:23):
it's Microsoft Teams product, which is a virtual meeting software solution,
and the update will incorporate Teams features into car Play.
That's the Apple standard that let's say Vehicles Entertainment System
act as the user interface for an iOS device, So
you pair your iPhone with your car's entertainment system. Then
you can control your iPhone through the car system. Now,

(08:46):
this means that if you do have an iOS device
with Microsoft Teams installed on it, and if you're connected
via car Play to your car, you'll be able to
join in Microsoft Teams meetings from the comfort of your
car seat, uh in a very sameless way. You can
even use Siri to do it. This feature only supports
audio mode, so folks will not see video of you

(09:07):
as you do mad drifts around the street corners with
the fam. Microsoft also announced several other updates Teams that
do not involve vehicles, such as additional features the team's
mobile app to make it easier to access chat and
the Microsoft white Board. Today, Facebook and ray Ban introduced
some smart glasses called ray Ban Stories. They cost two

(09:31):
hundred and nine dollars eight princely some so what do
they do? While? They've got to five megapixel cameras built
into the frames, one at either corner on the outside
the eyes. They have speakers built into the stems on
the frames so you can listen to audio from a
connected device. They've got a physical button that you can

(09:52):
use to take photos or record videos, or you can
use voice commands to activate the cameras. They do not
have any sort of in lens display, so these glasses
are not capable of providing any sort of augmented reality experience.
Nor can you see the photos that you've just taken
with the glasses themselves. To do that, you will need

(10:13):
to use a connected phone and open up an app
called Facebook View, which is kind of like a simple
photo camera roll app. And these don't sound that different
from the Snapchat glasses we saw a while back, but
I do have to admit that these glasses look like
you know, sunglasses. They don't look clunky or anything like that.
So if you have a need for glasses that will

(10:35):
let you take photos without using your hands, I guess
these could fit the bill for a lot of us.
I'm not sure there's a strong use case. Maybe if
I were wearing these and going kayaking or something, I
could use the glasses to take photos and I could
leave my phone behind so I don't have to worry about,
you know, dunking it in the water. Although the glasses
are also not waterproof, They're not meant to get wet,

(10:57):
but the glasses can hold up to around five those
or are somewhere around ten to twelve thirty second video
clips before you would need to offload them from the
glasses into some other device, and they connect via WiFi
to authorized devices and then they synchronize using that Facebook
View app I was talking about. So from the description

(11:18):
I read, it sounds like you could use them to
take photos without being directly connected to some other device.
That makes them different from some other gadgets that I've used,
where they were kind of conduits for your smartphone. Uh.
They sound interesting, but I don't think I'll be putting
them on my holiday wish list. We've got some more
stories to cover, but before we get to that, let's

(11:39):
take a quick break. We're back and we're going to
talk some more about Facebook and organization in the UK
called Global Witnesses accusing Facebook of being negligent when it
comes to making certain that's advertising platform is not using

(12:00):
discriminatory targeting of advertising to users. Now, that's essentially to
say that Facebook was not stopping companies from breaking equality
laws by specifically targeting some subgroups while specifically excluding others,
particularly in the job category. The group did an experiment
to see what kind of advertisements might be shown to

(12:20):
different types of people, and in that experiment they found
that for certain categories of products or services, nearly all
the ads would be shown to one gender or the other. So,
for example, if it was an ad for a mechanic,
it was almost a guarantee that that ad would only
be displayed to a male Facebook user. If it were

(12:41):
a nursery nurse, it would almost be guaranteed it would
only be shown to a female Facebook user. In another experiment,
the group sent two job ads to Facebook, with one
of the ads saying Facebook should not show that ad
to women, and the other saying that Facebook should not
show that add to anyone older than Facebook did approve

(13:02):
both of those ads. However, it also sent back a
little message to the group to Global Witness, saying, Hey,
you need to acknowledge that you promise you won't discriminate
against these groups by taking this little box. However, if
Facebook actually was only showing the ad to, you know,
the people that were designated by Global Witness, then it

(13:27):
sounds to me like you can't avoid discrimination. Like just
the very nature of the fact that you have limited
the ad so that you know certain groups can't see it.
That seems at least that it's facilitating discrimination. Now, whether
this escalates to UK government action remains to be seen. Meanwhile,
the Australian government continues to make decisions that I think

(13:49):
are ill advised. I talked about the Surveillance Bill earlier
this week that would allow law enforcement to potentially alter
a person's online posts without their consent. But now I
want to talk about something else. A decision that was
made by the Australian High Court that's kind of like
the U. S. Supreme Court. That court found that Facebook
users can be held liable for content posted by people

(14:11):
who are commenting on their posts. So if you were
to post something on Facebook, let's say it's even something
that's just a goofy meme, it's totally harmless, and then
someone else leaves a comment that includes like a threat
or libelous content, then you could be held responsible for
the post of that person because, according to the court,
you're effectively a publisher from that moment forward. Your original

(14:35):
post is a publication platform, so someone leaving a comment
is being published through you, and as a publisher, you
can be held liable for the stuff they post without
your control. At least, if I'm understanding this, correctly. That's
how it goes now. To be fair, this whole thing
was really more about news media outlets and their Facebook

(14:57):
pages posting content and then not modoring the moments that
were left under that content. But the implications extend well
beyond those companies, Like you could see how this could
quickly become a true nightmare in other news, Twitter is
starting a rollout of a new feature called Communities. I
say it's new, but it sounds like this particular feature

(15:17):
has actually languished in development at Twitter for half a decade.
The ideas that you can create a community of users
focused on a particular subject, like I don't know, the
Marvel Cinematic Universe. Okay, you've got a Marvel Cinematic Universe
Twitter community as so you can apply to Twitter to
create the community. You can't just make it yourself, at
least not right now. And then once it's created, folks

(15:40):
can join that community, and then you can tweet to
that community in particular, and you spare everyone else who
follows you all of your endless theories about how Mephisto
is most definitely going to end up being the one
who is responsible for all the bad stuff going on
in the m c U these days. Now, I actually
applied to create a community around tech so that I

(16:01):
can send tech related takes there and anyone who follows
me just for my dad jokes or pictures of my dog,
Tiblet can be spared. All the talk about the Hoosts
and Watsons galore. I'm not sure if this feature is
actually gonna drive more engagement on Twitter. That's something that
the company has really been concerned with, because, you know,
Twitter adoption has really leveled off, so in order for

(16:22):
the company to show value, it needs to drive more engagement.
Twitter has previously launched features that didn't catch on in
the platform later abandoned them. So we'll have to see
and I'll let you know if they approve my request
to create that community. And finally, some quick stories to
end out today's episode, The James Webb Space Telescope has
a new launch date. If all goes well, the telescope

(16:44):
should finally let slip the bonds of Earth on December.
The telescope has had a long and sometimes rough journey
over the years to get to this point. The launch
has had several delays over that time, and the James
Webb Space telescope is in many ways the spiritual successor
to the Hubble telescope and has the potential to allow
us to learn more about how our galaxy works. It's

(17:06):
a super interesting piece of technology. And heck, I even
have a tattoo because of this telescope. I even got
that tattoo while on camera for an episode of the
show Forward Thinking that I used to host. So there's
a there's a video of me getting tattooed with a
tattoo that's inspired by the James Webbs James web Space telescope. Anyway,

(17:26):
I really hope it all works out and that we
see the telescope triumphantly take its place in orbit. Later
this year, in Iceland, an enormous facility called Orca has
come online. And Orca's purpose is to capture carbon dioxide
from the air and lock it into mineral form. So
it's a carbon capture and sequestration facility. In other words. Now,
before you start to think that we've got the climate

(17:47):
issue solved thanks to this technology, let's talk limitations. This
is the largest carbon capture facility in the world up
to this point, and according to the companies that are
behind it, it will be able to capture around four
thousand tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year.
The US Environmental Protection Agency says that's approximately equal to

(18:08):
the amount of carbon emissions generated by eight seventy cars
running on internal combustion engines, presumably in a year. Well,
that's fewer than a thousand cars. There are millions of
cars out there, not to mention airplanes, coal plants, oil refineries,
and other sources of carbon dioxide emissions. This is why

(18:28):
it's good to remember that carbon capture, while it can
be a critical component of mitigating the problems of climate change,
is only part of that solution. We cannot look at
carbon capture as absolving us of the responsibility to cut
back on carbon emissions. Unfortunately, that's how the practice often
gets marketed. I see a lot of companies saying, hey, look,

(18:51):
we don't need to cut back. We'll just catch the
carbon dioxide using this facility, and we'll just keep on
doing stuff the way we always have. Maybe we'll even
crank up the carbon emissions. Now, the truth of the
matter is, we just can't do that. We cannot keep
up with that kind of approach. Finally, the Stanford Computational
imaging lab or at least a paper describing a really

(19:13):
cool technology. Cool and a little creepy. They developed a
new non line of sight imaging tech and that's kind
of what it sounds like. It's technology that can take
images of stuff that isn't in the actual line of
sight of the imaging technology or you know, like the lens.
And you may have heard about cameras that can quote
unquote see around corners. Well, that's a subset of this

(19:35):
type of technology, and the way it works is not
that different from echolocation. A camera will include a light
emitter and it shoots out light, perhaps outside of the
visible spectrum, that goes out ahead of the camera. So
let's say you're going down a hallway and the hallway
has a ninety degree corner in it, so it turns
off to the left and you're using this, uh this device,

(19:58):
and some light is coming out of the end of
the device. It hits the corner that you're facing, bounces
off the corner, it goes off to the left side.
Some of that light could encounter an object, let's say
it's the Bobba duke, and then some of that light
bounces off the Bobba duke, and it goes back around
the corner and hits your sensor on your device, and
the camera picks up this returning light and says, hey,

(20:19):
there's something around that corner and you should probably definitely
not go that way now. Again. It's it's a lot
like you know echolocation or laser range finders or speed
tracking devices. Well, the Stanford Group developed a tech that
they call keyhole imaging because you could, in theory, set
up a device to shine a laser beam through a

(20:40):
keyhole or a crack in a wall to hit a
single point on the opposite side of a closed door,
So like on the wall opposite of the door. So
just imagine you're kneeling at a door it's got a
keyhole in it, one of those classic ones, and you
stick this device and it's got its a little laser pointer,
and it shoots the laser across the room and it
hits the wall on the other side. Well, some of

(21:00):
the photons and that laser beam are going to be
bouncing off of all the different stuff that's in that room,
and some of those bouncing photons will actually make their
way back to a sensor paired with the laser and
by measuring the time of travel for those photons, software
can figure out if stuff is actually moving around on
the other side of that door. Now I should add
that moving around part is important. The researchers have noted

(21:21):
that this method, which uses less surface area than the
older non light on site imaging technologies, is really limited
in the amount of information it can gather. If the
room is static, if nothing is moving there, you really
can't get a bead on what's inside the room. But
if there is stuff moving around, with enough time, you
can gather data to gain an idea of what it

(21:43):
is that's moving around in there, as well as the
trajectory of its pathway. So this tech could be useful
in everything from military applications to integrations with car navigation
and driver assist systems. And it's just kind of neat
when you think that this tech, which sounds like it
belongs in a Mission Impossible movie, could get all that
information just by shining a laser light through a small

(22:05):
hole in an otherwise sealed off room. And that's it
for this episode of tech Stuff. If you have any
stories you would want me to cover, or any technologies
you would like me to cover in future episodes reach
out to me. The best way to do that right now,
before I get that community going anyway, is just to
use the regular old Twitter handle for the show, which
is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to

(22:27):
you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an I
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows

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