September 16, 2021 • 39 mins
A 2020 internal report at Facebook reveals that Instagram use can have a negative impact on mental health, and it gets worse from there. We also have stories about what Apple unveiled at their iPhone event and what's going on with the Theranos trial.
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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 tex 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 twenty one. And our
(00:25):
first story is a big one. It's probably gonna take
the whole first section because there's a lot to say,
and then there's Jonathan's take on it as well, So
let's get to it. The Wall Street Journal published an
article this week revealing that their journalists got to see
a report about Instagram that is concerning, to say the least,
while also confirming a lot of commonly held suspicions. Now,
(00:49):
I think most of us have at least a sense
that social media can lead us to place unrealistic expectations
on us in the lives we lead. A lot of
people have written or talked about the tendency for folks
to put forward an idealized version of themselves online, like
it's not the real them, it's an idealized version of them.
It makes their lives out to seem more dramatic, more exciting,
(01:12):
and lush than they really are, and Instagram, but it's
focus on pictures is particularly bad about this. A picture
tells a thousand words, but you know, a lot of
those words tend to be Look how awesome I am,
or how awesome my house is, or how awesome this
vacation spot is now. Facebook representatives, including Mark Zuckerberg himself,
(01:34):
have frequently told the public and the United States Congress
that the benefits of social media include a boost to
mental health because they allow us to be part of
communities and to connect with people that we care about.
And that narrative might seem fairly convincing, particularly during COVID
times when a lot of us have had few or
(01:56):
possibly no opportunities to see people we used to hang
out with, you know, before COVID. But the report that
Wall Street saw confirmed suspicions that Instagram can have devastatingly
harmful effects to mental health, particularly for teenage girls. And
this report didn't come from some third party research group
(02:19):
that you might suspect was applying confirmation bias to the investigation.
By that, I mean if you have a group that
has an agenda like they expect to find something bad,
then they often will look for something bad, and they'll
ignore anything that is contrary to that particular you know,
sort of prejudice. But in this case, the investigation report
(02:42):
came from inside Facebook itself. Researchers in the company studied
the effects of Instagram on behavior and mental health and
found that nearly a third of all teenage girls who
are on Instagram traced serious issues with self image, confidence,
and mental health to their participation with Instagram. So let's
(03:04):
make some very rough estimates here, just again idea of
how many people we could be talking about. So Instagram
reportedly has around one billion users. That's billion with a B. Now,
more than of those users are no older than twenty two.
That's more than but let's just cut it at that
(03:25):
gives us four million users who are twenty two or younger. Now,
let's assume about half of those are women. Statistic, by
the way, estimates that women make up more than it's
more like fifty one. But we're doing kind of a
pen on a napkin style estimation here. So that means
(03:45):
two hundred million young women and girls are using Instagram. Now,
let's say that of that number are older than teenagers. Okay,
so one fifth of that number. This is just me
saying this that one fifth of them are aged twenty
or older. That's probably a generous estimate. It's probably fewer
than that, but I'm just doing this for the purposes
(04:07):
of illustrations. That would leave us with one sixty million
teenage girls. And the report said that around thirty two
of the girls that were you know, part of the
study said they ended up experiencing a negative impact on
their mental health that they attributed to their participation on Instagram.
So that means more than if we apply this across
(04:29):
the board and say that is representative, that would mean
that more than fifty one million teenage girls could be
struggling with mental health problems. They're the very least exacerbated
by their time on Instagram. By the way, it gets worse.
Those mental health issues can ripple into other dangerous and
catastrophic consequences, everything from developing eating disorders or even leading
(04:52):
to suicidal thoughts. Fifty one million teenage girls, and again
that's a rough estimate, and I took some pretty conservative
shortcuts getting there. Okay, so what's actually leading to the
issues that we're seeing with mental health? One possible contributor,
and again we're talking about possibilities. Here would be a
(05:16):
tendency called social comparison, and that's exactly what sounds like.
It's when you see the depiction of someone else's life
and then you compare your own life to that person's life,
and you come back with like a negative feeling about
your own situation. So maybe it's an influencer who looks
like they're in phenomenal shape. This happened to me. I'm
not a teenage girl. I'm a middle aged man. But
(05:37):
when I started on my fitness journey, which I totally
have fallen off of because COVID and then a lack
of resolve I'll say on my part. Anyway, when I
was on that journey, I actually looked at some Instagram
accounts that were about fitness, which meant that Instagram was
serving up tons of different pictures of people who were
(05:59):
insane shape. I mean Greek statues would be jealous of them, uh.
And so I was inundated with images of people who
were in much better shape than I was, some of
which appeared to suggest that they got there in a
very short amount of time. Obviously, this stuff can be
rather than motivating, discouraging, right, Like if I'm seeing people
(06:20):
who are like, yeah, you just must not be doing
it right because I got to where I am in
three weeks or something like that, some ludicrous explanation that
can be very discouraging to me. Well, that's just one example.
Or maybe the influencer is wearing designer clothing. Maybe they're
hanging out in gorgeous locations. I mean, how many times
have you opened Instagram and just browse stuff and saw
(06:43):
incredibly hot people hanging out on yachts or by pools
and stuff like that. In fact, I mentioned influencers. We
do have an entire profession called influencer that is geared
toward that kind of experience to project this pick sure
of idealization, and their whole job is to influence you,
(07:03):
to convince you that they're living out their best life
and that they're being showered with amazing products and trips
and stuff, and that your life could be better if
it was more like their life. And then you've got
the issue with people getting obsessed over numbers on Instagram,
like how many followers they might have, or how many
likes a post gets or how many comments of post receives.
(07:26):
And again, if we look at influencers, we see them
constantly trying to prompt engagement, often by including sort of
some sort of question as a caption for a photo.
So I happen to really like cool cosplay. Instagram profiles
people who put in tons of work and make incredible costumes,
so I get a mix of all sorts of cosplayers
(07:47):
served up. Now, some of these cosplayers, will you know,
end up posting provocative images, maybe something a bit steamy. Right.
Then they'll include a caption that might say something like
cheezburgers or hot dogs, which could possibly have nothing to
do with the image itself, but that gets people commenting,
because increased engagement is currency for influencers. Heck, I remember
(08:10):
when some influencers were using the trick of spell out
such and such in the comments letter by letter, meaning
that you would post each letter in order as a
separate post as a separate comment in order to prove something.
I guess that was really just a trick to kind
of get more comments, because if you get a high
comment count as an influencer, your price tag starts to
(08:32):
go up for brands. Right. Meanwhile, people who are comparing
themselves against these sorts of influencers may start to feel
really badly about themselves, like they're not popular, that something's
wrong with them, and Instagram reinforces that experience again and again. Worse,
Instagram has a vicious cycle built into it because so
many young people use Instagram to interact with their peers.
(08:56):
It's almost as if being on the platform is necessary
just to take part in socialization with your peer group,
and the experience, even when negative, can lead to compulsive
use of the platform. It's like, you can't quit it
because you need it. Now, I'm not just spouting off
my own opinions here, although I'm doing a bit of
(09:16):
that too. According to The Wall Street Journal, that internal
report that Facebook researchers generated backs a lot of this
stuff up. The researchers generated that report back in the
spring of twenty twenty. But wait, it gets worse because
in the spring of this year, twenty twenty one, Mark
Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing that essentially their research
(09:39):
indicated that social platforms like Instagram have a benefit of
positive effect on mental health, which is the exact opposite
of what this internal report found. Now, again, it's an
internal report. Facebook did not share this outside the company,
so I don't think you can say that Facebook in general,
like executives in general, were on a aware of it.
(10:00):
Possibly Zuckerberg was unaware of it. I mean, maybe this
is like a case with Independence Day where the president
isn't told about the alien at area fifty one for
the purposes of plausible deniability. Maybe that happened. I doubt it,
but maybe Anyway. Congress people had already remarked on how
Zuckerberg seemed evasive when answering questions, like he was trying
(10:23):
to find ways to talk around things without actually addressing them,
and that had already raised concerns even before the existence
of this report was known. But this report confirms that
those concerns were well narrated and to make matters even worse.
Even knowing this, even knowing the potentially disastrous effect the
(10:44):
experience of being on Instagram can have on young people,
Facebook has been hard at work to develop an aversion
for Instagram for kids under the age of thirteen. Now,
let that settle in for a bit. You have a
company knowing that its product can have harmful effects on
young girls, they have a whole report about it, and
(11:04):
they're working to make a product for even younger ones. Also,
I should add that while the report focuses on young girls,
those are not the only people have a negative impact
from this stuff. I mean, I just mentioned that I
experienced this on a certain scale, so it can affect
people of all genders and ages. The teen girls appear
to be, you know, as a as a population, slightly
(11:27):
more vulnerable to this sort of influence, but that doesn't
mean they they're the only ones who end up feeling
lesser than after spending time on Instagram. It happens to
a lot of people. So then the question comes down
to what is to be done about this? Now? I
suspect that without intense external pressure, not much is going
to change a Facebook and Instagram. Uh. Facebook really hasn't
(11:49):
seemed to take any massive steps towards reducing the harm
it causes unless public opinion, political pressure, or most effectively
and most telling lee pressure from advertisers has forced it
to do so. Facebook is a heck of an example
of a capitalist organization gone to the extreme, in which
(12:11):
the primary purpose of the organization is to return value
to shareholders and everything else is secondary or maybe not
even a consideration. That being said, democratic lawmakers here in
the United States are starting to apply that kind of
pressure right now. In fact, today they've been calling on
Zuckerberg to give up on this idea of an Instagram
(12:31):
app for kids. There's also talk of another massive investigation
into the company, and armed with this internal report, I
think Zuckerberg is destined for another very uncomfortable hearing in
front of Congress. But for most of us, I think
the study shows that parents really need to be aware
of these influences and to take an active role in
helping their children with stuff like self esteem and confidence,
(12:54):
and an understanding that the representations we see of people
online are often a fabrication and are not reflective of reality,
nor are they reflective of a person's value. We need
to educate everyone that the reason most of this content
that falls into this kind of harmful tendency usually is
(13:14):
meant to ultimately serve one of a couple of different
purposes that are tightly related. Now, often it's all in
the effort to sell you something. Now, it might be
a specific branded product, or the thing on sale might
actually be the brand of the person who's sharing the
content themselves, or it could be to boost a person's status,
essentially saying look and how amazing my life is because
(13:37):
I'm the best. But either way, understanding that the images
that you see are not necessarily showing you what's really
going on, and also that the reason that these images
exist is to push out a specific branding message, all
of that is helpful. I mean, I see this everywhere obviously,
like this this tendency, especially in relation to Instagram. It's everywhere,
(13:59):
like there are plenty of pop up experiences that really
only exist for the purposes of people to take selfies
at them and to kind of generate this image of
a fun experience. But the whole experience is just about
taking those selfies. Like there's nothing, there's nothing more substantive
(14:19):
to the experience that that's all it is. It's just
surface level that in itself may not, you know, be
harmful on the face of it, but it contributes to
this tendency I'm talking about. Also, the report found that
most other social platforms don't have nearly the same negative
impact as Instagram. Stuff like TikTok tends to be focused
(14:40):
more on performance than on appearance. Stuff on Snapchat tends
to feature lots of ridiculous filters, and these things don't
seem to contribute as much of a negative effect on
mental health. So long long coverage of that one story.
But I think this one is really important. I don't
think it was quite enough for me to of a
full episode dedicated to it unless I get an expert in,
(15:03):
but I really wanted to talk about it because it's
it's pretty damning that Facebook had its own internal report
that said these things, and yet outwardly the company has
behaved as if everything it does is fine, when that
is patently not the case, and they know it, and
that's the worst part. All Right, We're gonna go and
(15:26):
take a break, and when we come back, we'll have
some other unrelated tech news. On Tuesday's episode this week,
I mentioned that Apple was about to hold its iPhone
thirteen event, but at that point it had not yet
done so as I was recording the show. Obviously it's
(15:49):
happened since then, and some of you may know all
about this, But really the big surprise at the event
was that some of the stuff that was rumored to
be featured, like a really big update to the Apple
Watch and new air pods, uh, those actually weren't part
of the show. I mean, there was a new Apple Watch,
but the The big changes that had been rumored uh
(16:11):
ended up being just a slightly larger screen and a
couple of new features, but nothing like the redesign that
folks were expecting. Uh, you know, nothing dramatic. The new
watch looks fairly close to the previous ones. It's a
little bigger with the screen, and the air pods with
the rumored shorter stems were a no show at the event.
There are also rumors about the iPhone itself, a big
(16:32):
one being that Apple was going to build in some
sort of satellite cell phone feature so that there would
be a transmitter where you could actually make a satellite
phone call if you had to. Now, you wouldn't normally
use the satellite system. There are issues with latency. It
tends to be a really expensive kind of thing to do.
But according to these rumors, you would be able to
make use of this feature if you happen to be
(16:54):
in an area that had no cell service. So that way,
if you need to make an emergency phone call but
you weren't close to a cell tower or a WiFi hotspot,
you can do it. But that ended up not being
part of the announcements either. So what we did get
were new iPhones with new A fifteen bionic chips powering them.
That's a proprietary chip from Apple, a new dual camera system,
(17:16):
and the two pro models support a one hurts refresh
rate for the screen. Now that means that the screen
refreshes on times per second. The iPad also got a facelift.
But yeah, you know, the announcements were fairly modest in nature. Honestly,
I wonder if it actually benefits Apple to keep holding
these big marketing events unless there happens to be something
(17:38):
that's going to really blow people's socks off, because the
company set expectations ridiculously high with big reveals, you know,
a decade ago or more, and now there's a tendency
for folks to say, oh, that's it, even even if
the stuff that Apple is showing is an improvement over
previous models, because you know, it's not like a show
(18:01):
stopper kind of thing. But hey, I mean, it's a
two trillion dollar company and the folks running it are
way smarter than I am, so I'm sure I'm just
not seeing the big picture. In the past, I've talked
about the N s O Group a few times on
this show. That's the Israeli company famous for developing a
malware tool that exploits security vulnerabilities and Apple's Eye message program.
(18:24):
And just to be clear, that's not the only company
to take aim at I message and create exploits. An
American company called Acuvant once upon a time did the
same thing. Now use the past tense here because Acuvant
subsequently found itself absorbed into a larger company called Optive,
and reportedly Optive is out of the exploit development game,
(18:47):
but Acuvant was very much in that game, using security
experts to not just find vulnerabilities in various software platforms,
but to develop exploits that leveraged those vulnerabilities, then selling
those as products to various other entities, usually government agencies.
So while I heap a lot of criticism on n
(19:08):
s O Group, which you know, does a similar thing
with the blessing and restrictions of the Israeli government, we
are seeing the same sort of thing going on in
other parts of the world, including here in the United States. Anyway,
I bring all this up because the m I T
Technology Review reports that the U. S. Department of Justice
recently find three former U S intelligence and military personnel
(19:29):
for working for the United Arab Emirates without US permission
in what was called Project Raven. The operatives were using
this exploit, they had purchased it from Acuvant, and then
they were acting as mercenaries. They were deploying the exploit
on behalf of the U A E. And reportedly the
list of targets included American citizens and companies. Uh. And
(19:54):
you know that's a big no no working on behalf
of a foreign government when you're a U. S citizen
without you know, the consent of the United States government.
The finds amounted to a little less than one point
seven million dollars. I'm assuming that's collectively, but the m
I T Technology Review Report was not specific, so to
be clear, the focus here is on the three and
(20:17):
that investigation, and there's not really any investigation into optave
or the former equivant. So if you take it like that,
you know, you could say, oh, well, the government says
it's okay if for your companies to develop tools that
specifically exploit some other company's product, you know, I message
from Apple in this case, it's just not okay to
(20:38):
take that same product and then work with a foreign government.
Pretty weird world we live in anyway. I Message, as
the Technology Review points out, is a very popular destination
for malware because Apple includes it on every iPhone, so
the install base is on every single iPhone that's out
there and you can't uninstall it. Anyone using an iOS
(21:01):
device with your phone number can send you a message
on I Message, and I Message automatically accepts those incoming messages,
doesn't matter if you don't recognize the number or not.
So if you build in what's called a zero click exploit,
that's an exploit that doesn't need someone to click on
a link or open up a file or anything like that,
(21:21):
it just infects malware as long as there's a hit. Well.
That means you can have one of these compromise your
phone just because you receive the message on I Message.
Apple has patched the vulnerabilities and I Message a couple
of times, including a patch called blast Door, but hackers
are always looking for other cracks in the security around
the app, and it's a constant seesaw battle between developers
(21:44):
and hackers. In addition to that, one of those three
people that have been fined by the US government for
this thing is Daniel Garrick, who currently serves as the
Chief Information Officer or c i O of Express VPN,
now the v The end company says it was aware
of Garrick's previous activities before they hired him, that he
(22:04):
was completely transparent about that, and that might sound surprising,
but then the company said that his experience was what
made him valuable to the company. So VPNs, or virtual
private networks, are a way for people to log into
one system in order to access other systems privately. Uh Effectively,
it masks your activities between you and whichever end server
(22:28):
you're trying to access. The VPN is kind of like
the man in the middle in this case, and they're
you know, encrypting everything so that snoopers don't know what
it is you're actually doing. Anyway, Express VPN's stance was
that Garrick's experiences meant he understood security vulnerabilities because he
had been searching for them and then exploiting them. So
(22:50):
this could help the company build more effective tools to
protect security and privacy, because who do you want on
your team other than, you know, the person who knows
how to break those thingsings And that definitely makes sense
from that perspective. Now, the bit about him working as
a mercenary for a foreign government seems a bit much
to me, but I get the concept of wanting to
(23:12):
find someone to put on your team who has experience
of familiarity with exploits. A few weeks ago, I talked
about how employees at Activision Blizzard had brought forth charges
relating to a toxic work culture within the company and
had been part of that company for years, including charges
of sexual harassment and assault, as well as a tendency
(23:33):
for the company to protect certain employees accused of perpetrating
or encouraging some truly awful behavior. There are also charges
of general gender discrimination, like women getting paid significantly less
for doing the same job as their male counterparts. Now
the company is in the news again because the Communications
Workers of America or c w A alleges that Activision
(23:57):
Blizzard intimidated employees in an to prevent unionization. In other words,
they didn't want their employees to band together to form
a union, so they set about hiring folks who would
you know, prevent that from happening. As such, the labor
organization has now brought a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard. According
(24:18):
to the organizing director of the c W A Tom Smith. Quote,
Activision Blizzards response to righteous worker activity was surveillance, intimidation
and hiring notorious union busters end quote. So that righteous
worker activity reference, Uh, that's actually two employees who were
taking a stand against Activision Blizzard, protesting conditions about you know,
(24:42):
the disparities and the sexual harassment and bringing those things
into the spotlight. I should add there's an ongoing discussion
within the gaming community over whether or not it's a
good idea to boycott Activision Blizzard titles. You know, there
are a lot of Twitch streamers who have been talking
about this, and some argue that this sends a message
(25:02):
to the company, and it's a message that's hard to
ignore because if enough people are boycotting the products, that
hurts the bottom line. It has to be a lot
of people, and the odds of getting that many people
to participate are pretty low. But if you can do it,
it sends a definite message. But then you have other
people saying no, game developers who are working under these
(25:23):
awful conditions are doing so partly because they really want
their work to be seen and experienced and enjoyed, and
that a boycott kind of pours salt on an already
you know, painful wound. So it's a complicated situation. Speaking
of complicated situations, I haven't talked about Tharoness for a while,
but the trial of the former CEO of that doomed company,
(25:47):
Elizabeth Holmes, is now underway and Erica Cheung, who once
worked for Tharaus, is testifying, and she actually has testified
that she observed questionable processes in the company as Holmes
continued to court investors to spend money on thairness, and
also as she was engaging in a rather lavish and
(26:08):
eccentric lifestyle. All right, so quick refresher on homes and thoroughness.
Holmes attended Stanford University before dropping out to go on
to found a biotech medical company that would evolve into Thoroughness. Now.
The goal was to develop a blood scanning technology that
could take a minuscule amount of blood as a sample
(26:30):
and then run a battery of tests on it, potentially
more than one hundred tests all from that tiny sample,
and then print out definitive and easy to understand results
based on those tests. So the ideal goal was to
produce something around the size of a desktop printer that
could do all of this, potentially even creating a consumer
(26:53):
version that people could buy and have in their own homes.
They could then run tests to understand whether that take
in the back of their throat with something serious or not,
or they could scan to see whether they might be
a risk for developing some sort of serious condition down
the line based upon their blood work. This was all
supposed to democratize medicine, to disrupt the entire blood testing industry,
(27:17):
and to empower patients so that they could have better,
more informed conversations with their doctors. But there was a
bit of a problem, and that problem was the tech
was just not up to snuff, and some folks, including
some people who served as advisors to Holmes while she
was at Stanford, have expressed that they thought the tech
(27:38):
might not ever work on such a small sample, that
this is just asking too much from the tech and
it puts too much faith on the powers of technology.
That alone is somewhat understandable. I mean, I see a
lot of people like putting a lot of hope in technology.
But you can kind of get that because most of
(27:59):
us carry a device in our pockets or our handbags,
that is far more powerful than the most powerful personal
computer from a decade ago, and we just carry it
around with us wherever we go. I mean, that's that's
what smartphone is. So if that became a reality, then
what can't tech do. That's sort of the thought process.
Chung's testimony included the revelation that Thereness staff had a
(28:23):
six data point test that each each you know, blood
test was supposed to pass in order to meet quality
control standards. So, in other words, when you ran a
test on the equipment, it should meet these six data points,
and if it doesn't, then it's a failed test. But
the staff were told to delete up to two of
(28:44):
those six points if that would mean that the test
would otherwise pass. So in other words, if you said, well,
if we ignore these outliers, then everything's fine. So in
other words, this could be seen as a form of
cherry picking, looking for positives and then ignoring the negatives
in order to boost your numbers. Chung quit her job
after working for Thoroughness for six months, uh disillusioned that
(29:07):
she was working for an organization that was, in her mind,
at best unprofessional and at worst downright unethical. Chung was
previously featured as a whistleblower in the book Bad Blood,
which is probably the most thorough expose a on Thorodness,
certainly the most famous. She was also featured on the
HBO documentary The Inventor. Cross Examination of Chung began yesterday
(29:31):
it will pick up again tomorrow on Friday. Well, I've
got a couple more stories to cover, but before I
do that, let's take another quick break and now we
move over to the world of n f t s
(29:52):
or non fungible tokens. These have been likened by some people,
including myself, as a sort of digital receipt that shows
that you quote unquote own some instance of something. Right, technically,
what you own is a digital token that represents something else.
(30:13):
That something else could be data in the form of
like an illustration or a digital baseball card, or a
tweet or something else. And the n f T market
is built on top of blockchain technology, which means that
the chain of ownership of an n f T is
well established and distributed in a ledger. Uh There's so
(30:35):
everyone who's part of the system can see when an
n f T changes hands from one entity to another
and verify that yes, ownership of this n f T
has changed. So what can you do with n f
T s. Well, you could collect them. You could try
and do some speculative investing, So you could try and
(30:55):
buy an n f T and hope that it improves
in value and then sell it off for a profit.
Or if you're an employee of open c that's s
e A that was that's an n f T marketplace
by the way, then you might engage in a little
insider trading. Apparently an open Sea employee secretly purchased n
f T s that the employee knew we're soon going
(31:17):
to be featured on the front page of the open
see website, and I guess the idea was that the
n f T S value would increase due to the
exposure of being on the front page of the website.
Then the employee could sell off the n f T
s at an inflated value for a tidy profit. Now,
the company did not say who that employee was. A
(31:38):
user on Twitter with the handle at zu w u
t V or zooo TV accused the head of product
for open c, a guy named Nate Chastain, of engaging
in this behavior, but open Sea gave no real confirmation
that that's the employee in question, at least not as
I record this episode. However, a Chinese news platform reported
(32:02):
that chas Stain's scheme brought in the equivalent of sixty
seven thousand dollars of Ether cryptocurrency. But that's according to
the current value of Ether, because cryptocurrency values tend to fluctuate,
so on one day it might be you know, sixty
four thousand, on another day it might be sixty eight thousands,
so it can change pretty dramatically in short order. So
it's kind of hard to make these kind of calls.
(32:24):
But yeah, not great. Not great to have any sort
of insider trading. It's it's not the sort of thing
that you can necessarily get away with quickly, because if
people are paying attention to which digital wallet these n
f t s are going to, then they can start
to connect the dots. Even though like on the surface
level it looks like it's anonymous, if you're really paying
(32:45):
attention to stuff, you can start to draw some conclusions,
and that is what happened in this case. Now, you
might remember, if you've listened to previous news episodes of
tech stuff, that General Motors has had to issue a
global recall on the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, and the
problem stems from faulty batteries, which can develop a short
circuit and that leads to the battery overheating and potentially
(33:07):
catching on fire. Now, the company has started to advise
some Bolt owners that they shouldn't park their cars within
fifty feet of any other vehicles, which yauza, I mean,
you know, think about that in different parking situations, like
parking decks or parking lots. I live in Atlanta, and
if you're going anywhere in the city, it's going to
(33:29):
be a real challenge to find a spot that's fifty
feet from all other vehicles. But that illustrates how serious
this issue is and how seriously Bolt owners need to
take this now. To be clear, GM has given this
advice in response to Bolt owners who have called into
the company into like a helpline to ask what they
should do when it comes to parking their vehicles. So
(33:51):
this is not a proactive message that's going out to
Bolt owners. It's more like a well, we would advise
you not to park anywhere close to another car, just
in case your car starts to catch on fire, like
an answer to a question. Now, the recall is expected
to cost GM somewhere in the neighborhood of one point
eight billion dollars. As someone who is generally in favor
(34:14):
of electric vehicles, I'm kind of sad to see the
situation happen, not the recall. I'm not sad that they're
recalling the faulty vehicles. That's absolutely necessary. Instead, I'm just
kind of, you know, bummed that the defective batteries are
there in the first place, because anything that could contribute
to a reluctance to move toward an electric fleet is
(34:34):
going to make that process more difficult. But the fact
remains that we really do need to transition away from
fossil fuel vehicles. Actually that that includes the entire chain,
from the power production facilities like power plants, all the
way down to the technology that we're relying upon day
to day, like our vehicles. My last story today is
(34:57):
a pretty cool one cern the Scientific Organization that I
think might be best known in the United States either
as the company that ended up or organization I should
say that ended up giving birth to the Worldwide Web
because of Tim berners Lee, who was working at started
at the time, or more likely these days, it might
(35:17):
be known as the organization in charge of the large
Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator. Anyway, it's created a tool
that's being used by the organization as well as the
Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva to
use machine learning to determine what the most effective methods
would be to prevent the spread of COVID nineteen in
school settings. So we're seeing a lot of unfortunate and
(35:40):
scary news about school systems being affected by COVID breakouts,
and clearly students, teachers, and staff all want safe environments,
but it can be difficult to know how to go
about creating those environments, particularly when you've got a lot
of variables involved, and you also have different levels of
understanding about the behavior or the virus. Sometimes you get
(36:02):
information that appears to contradict earlier information, so that can
cause confusion. So the research with this tool has shown
that a few things are most effective at really preventing
the spread of COVID. Among those things are natural ventilation,
so open windows are a good uh HEPPA filtration systems
that's h g p A filtration systems in order to
(36:24):
filter out contaminants in the air and face masks are
all the most effective you know strategies when they're all
used in combination with one another. On top of that
are practices that improve it even more, like social distancing,
so keeping everyone six ft apart or more, vaccinations clearly
very very important, and contact tracing in the event of
(36:46):
an actual case being detected, so that you can figure
out who that person has been in close contact with.
Since in most cases kids still can't get vaccinated yet,
especially younger kids can't get vaccinated, these steps are really
important because they can't benefit from the vaccination themselves. I mean,
they can benefit from the fact that adults around them
(37:08):
are vaccinated, but you know, the kids can't get vaccinated. Now,
you might say that this all just confirms what we
already thought, but that's an important part of science. Sometimes
we find out that the thing we suspected to be
true is true. That does happen. But there are other
times where the science shows we don't have the full picture,
or maybe we're asking the wrong questions. Because that's how
(37:31):
science works and why it's not as simple as this
is how it is and nothing more. Now. The reason
I say all that is actually not the lecture you,
because I know it comes across that way. But that's
not why I say it. I say it because I
need to remind myself of this very thing, because I
know that I have been guilty of looking at a
(37:52):
situation and drawing a conclusion and then acting on that
conclusion without you know, actually investigating whether or not that
conclusion was valid in the first place. That's not critical thinking,
and I've been guilty of it. So I say this
to try and hold myself more accountable. And yeah, responsibility
(38:12):
tastes bad. Well that's the news for Thursday, Septe one.
There was a ton of it, a lot of Jonathan
on a soapbox. I make no apologies for it. I
appreciate all you who listen all the way through, and
I understand that you may not agree with my perspective.
I completely respect that as long as you know you're
(38:33):
respecting others. That's the most important part, making sure that
we all do our own efforts to keep not just
ourselves safe, but everyone else too, like we gotta look
out for each other. Anyway, if you have suggestions for
topics I should cover on future episodes of Tech Stuff,
reach out to me the handle for the show. It's
Tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really.
(39:02):
Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. 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 tex 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 twenty one. And our
(00:25):
first story is a big one. It's probably gonna take
the whole first section because there's a lot to say,
and then there's Jonathan's take on it as well, So
let's get to it. The Wall Street Journal published an
article this week revealing that their journalists got to see
a report about Instagram that is concerning, to say the least,
while also confirming a lot of commonly held suspicions. Now,
(00:49):
I think most of us have at least a sense
that social media can lead us to place unrealistic expectations
on us in the lives we lead. A lot of
people have written or talked about the tendency for folks
to put forward an idealized version of themselves online, like
it's not the real them, it's an idealized version of them.
It makes their lives out to seem more dramatic, more exciting,
(01:12):
and lush than they really are, and Instagram, but it's
focus on pictures is particularly bad about this. A picture
tells a thousand words, but you know, a lot of
those words tend to be Look how awesome I am,
or how awesome my house is, or how awesome this
vacation spot is now. Facebook representatives, including Mark Zuckerberg himself,
(01:34):
have frequently told the public and the United States Congress
that the benefits of social media include a boost to
mental health because they allow us to be part of
communities and to connect with people that we care about.
And that narrative might seem fairly convincing, particularly during COVID
times when a lot of us have had few or
(01:56):
possibly no opportunities to see people we used to hang
out with, you know, before COVID. But the report that
Wall Street saw confirmed suspicions that Instagram can have devastatingly
harmful effects to mental health, particularly for teenage girls. And
this report didn't come from some third party research group
(02:19):
that you might suspect was applying confirmation bias to the investigation.
By that, I mean if you have a group that
has an agenda like they expect to find something bad,
then they often will look for something bad, and they'll
ignore anything that is contrary to that particular you know,
sort of prejudice. But in this case, the investigation report
(02:42):
came from inside Facebook itself. Researchers in the company studied
the effects of Instagram on behavior and mental health and
found that nearly a third of all teenage girls who
are on Instagram traced serious issues with self image, confidence,
and mental health to their participation with Instagram. So let's
(03:04):
make some very rough estimates here, just again idea of
how many people we could be talking about. So Instagram
reportedly has around one billion users. That's billion with a B. Now,
more than of those users are no older than twenty two.
That's more than but let's just cut it at that
(03:25):
gives us four million users who are twenty two or younger. Now,
let's assume about half of those are women. Statistic, by
the way, estimates that women make up more than it's
more like fifty one. But we're doing kind of a
pen on a napkin style estimation here. So that means
(03:45):
two hundred million young women and girls are using Instagram. Now,
let's say that of that number are older than teenagers. Okay,
so one fifth of that number. This is just me
saying this that one fifth of them are aged twenty
or older. That's probably a generous estimate. It's probably fewer
than that, but I'm just doing this for the purposes
(04:07):
of illustrations. That would leave us with one sixty million
teenage girls. And the report said that around thirty two
of the girls that were you know, part of the
study said they ended up experiencing a negative impact on
their mental health that they attributed to their participation on Instagram.
So that means more than if we apply this across
(04:29):
the board and say that is representative, that would mean
that more than fifty one million teenage girls could be
struggling with mental health problems. They're the very least exacerbated
by their time on Instagram. By the way, it gets worse.
Those mental health issues can ripple into other dangerous and
catastrophic consequences, everything from developing eating disorders or even leading
(04:52):
to suicidal thoughts. Fifty one million teenage girls, and again
that's a rough estimate, and I took some pretty conservative
shortcuts getting there. Okay, so what's actually leading to the
issues that we're seeing with mental health? One possible contributor,
and again we're talking about possibilities. Here would be a
(05:16):
tendency called social comparison, and that's exactly what sounds like.
It's when you see the depiction of someone else's life
and then you compare your own life to that person's life,
and you come back with like a negative feeling about
your own situation. So maybe it's an influencer who looks
like they're in phenomenal shape. This happened to me. I'm
not a teenage girl. I'm a middle aged man. But
(05:37):
when I started on my fitness journey, which I totally
have fallen off of because COVID and then a lack
of resolve I'll say on my part. Anyway, when I
was on that journey, I actually looked at some Instagram
accounts that were about fitness, which meant that Instagram was
serving up tons of different pictures of people who were
(05:59):
insane shape. I mean Greek statues would be jealous of them, uh.
And so I was inundated with images of people who
were in much better shape than I was, some of
which appeared to suggest that they got there in a
very short amount of time. Obviously, this stuff can be
rather than motivating, discouraging, right, Like if I'm seeing people
(06:20):
who are like, yeah, you just must not be doing
it right because I got to where I am in
three weeks or something like that, some ludicrous explanation that
can be very discouraging to me. Well, that's just one example.
Or maybe the influencer is wearing designer clothing. Maybe they're
hanging out in gorgeous locations. I mean, how many times
have you opened Instagram and just browse stuff and saw
(06:43):
incredibly hot people hanging out on yachts or by pools
and stuff like that. In fact, I mentioned influencers. We
do have an entire profession called influencer that is geared
toward that kind of experience to project this pick sure
of idealization, and their whole job is to influence you,
(07:03):
to convince you that they're living out their best life
and that they're being showered with amazing products and trips
and stuff, and that your life could be better if
it was more like their life. And then you've got
the issue with people getting obsessed over numbers on Instagram,
like how many followers they might have, or how many
likes a post gets or how many comments of post receives.
(07:26):
And again, if we look at influencers, we see them
constantly trying to prompt engagement, often by including sort of
some sort of question as a caption for a photo.
So I happen to really like cool cosplay. Instagram profiles
people who put in tons of work and make incredible costumes,
so I get a mix of all sorts of cosplayers
(07:47):
served up. Now, some of these cosplayers, will you know,
end up posting provocative images, maybe something a bit steamy. Right.
Then they'll include a caption that might say something like
cheezburgers or hot dogs, which could possibly have nothing to
do with the image itself, but that gets people commenting,
because increased engagement is currency for influencers. Heck, I remember
(08:10):
when some influencers were using the trick of spell out
such and such in the comments letter by letter, meaning
that you would post each letter in order as a
separate post as a separate comment in order to prove something.
I guess that was really just a trick to kind
of get more comments, because if you get a high
comment count as an influencer, your price tag starts to
(08:32):
go up for brands. Right. Meanwhile, people who are comparing
themselves against these sorts of influencers may start to feel
really badly about themselves, like they're not popular, that something's
wrong with them, and Instagram reinforces that experience again and again. Worse,
Instagram has a vicious cycle built into it because so
many young people use Instagram to interact with their peers.
(08:56):
It's almost as if being on the platform is necessary
just to take part in socialization with your peer group,
and the experience, even when negative, can lead to compulsive
use of the platform. It's like, you can't quit it
because you need it. Now, I'm not just spouting off
my own opinions here, although I'm doing a bit of
(09:16):
that too. According to The Wall Street Journal, that internal
report that Facebook researchers generated backs a lot of this
stuff up. The researchers generated that report back in the
spring of twenty twenty. But wait, it gets worse because
in the spring of this year, twenty twenty one, Mark
Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing that essentially their research
(09:39):
indicated that social platforms like Instagram have a benefit of
positive effect on mental health, which is the exact opposite
of what this internal report found. Now, again, it's an
internal report. Facebook did not share this outside the company,
so I don't think you can say that Facebook in general,
like executives in general, were on a aware of it.
(10:00):
Possibly Zuckerberg was unaware of it. I mean, maybe this
is like a case with Independence Day where the president
isn't told about the alien at area fifty one for
the purposes of plausible deniability. Maybe that happened. I doubt it,
but maybe Anyway. Congress people had already remarked on how
Zuckerberg seemed evasive when answering questions, like he was trying
(10:23):
to find ways to talk around things without actually addressing them,
and that had already raised concerns even before the existence
of this report was known. But this report confirms that
those concerns were well narrated and to make matters even worse.
Even knowing this, even knowing the potentially disastrous effect the
(10:44):
experience of being on Instagram can have on young people,
Facebook has been hard at work to develop an aversion
for Instagram for kids under the age of thirteen. Now,
let that settle in for a bit. You have a
company knowing that its product can have harmful effects on
young girls, they have a whole report about it, and
(11:04):
they're working to make a product for even younger ones. Also,
I should add that while the report focuses on young girls,
those are not the only people have a negative impact
from this stuff. I mean, I just mentioned that I
experienced this on a certain scale, so it can affect
people of all genders and ages. The teen girls appear
to be, you know, as a as a population, slightly
(11:27):
more vulnerable to this sort of influence, but that doesn't
mean they they're the only ones who end up feeling
lesser than after spending time on Instagram. It happens to
a lot of people. So then the question comes down
to what is to be done about this? Now? I
suspect that without intense external pressure, not much is going
to change a Facebook and Instagram. Uh. Facebook really hasn't
(11:49):
seemed to take any massive steps towards reducing the harm
it causes unless public opinion, political pressure, or most effectively
and most telling lee pressure from advertisers has forced it
to do so. Facebook is a heck of an example
of a capitalist organization gone to the extreme, in which
(12:11):
the primary purpose of the organization is to return value
to shareholders and everything else is secondary or maybe not
even a consideration. That being said, democratic lawmakers here in
the United States are starting to apply that kind of
pressure right now. In fact, today they've been calling on
Zuckerberg to give up on this idea of an Instagram
(12:31):
app for kids. There's also talk of another massive investigation
into the company, and armed with this internal report, I
think Zuckerberg is destined for another very uncomfortable hearing in
front of Congress. But for most of us, I think
the study shows that parents really need to be aware
of these influences and to take an active role in
helping their children with stuff like self esteem and confidence,
(12:54):
and an understanding that the representations we see of people
online are often a fabrication and are not reflective of reality,
nor are they reflective of a person's value. We need
to educate everyone that the reason most of this content
that falls into this kind of harmful tendency usually is
(13:14):
meant to ultimately serve one of a couple of different
purposes that are tightly related. Now, often it's all in
the effort to sell you something. Now, it might be
a specific branded product, or the thing on sale might
actually be the brand of the person who's sharing the
content themselves, or it could be to boost a person's status,
essentially saying look and how amazing my life is because
(13:37):
I'm the best. But either way, understanding that the images
that you see are not necessarily showing you what's really
going on, and also that the reason that these images
exist is to push out a specific branding message, all
of that is helpful. I mean, I see this everywhere obviously,
like this this tendency, especially in relation to Instagram. It's everywhere,
(13:59):
like there are plenty of pop up experiences that really
only exist for the purposes of people to take selfies
at them and to kind of generate this image of
a fun experience. But the whole experience is just about
taking those selfies. Like there's nothing, there's nothing more substantive
(14:19):
to the experience that that's all it is. It's just
surface level that in itself may not, you know, be
harmful on the face of it, but it contributes to
this tendency I'm talking about. Also, the report found that
most other social platforms don't have nearly the same negative
impact as Instagram. Stuff like TikTok tends to be focused
(14:40):
more on performance than on appearance. Stuff on Snapchat tends
to feature lots of ridiculous filters, and these things don't
seem to contribute as much of a negative effect on
mental health. So long long coverage of that one story.
But I think this one is really important. I don't
think it was quite enough for me to of a
full episode dedicated to it unless I get an expert in,
(15:03):
but I really wanted to talk about it because it's
it's pretty damning that Facebook had its own internal report
that said these things, and yet outwardly the company has
behaved as if everything it does is fine, when that
is patently not the case, and they know it, and
that's the worst part. All Right, We're gonna go and
(15:26):
take a break, and when we come back, we'll have
some other unrelated tech news. On Tuesday's episode this week,
I mentioned that Apple was about to hold its iPhone
thirteen event, but at that point it had not yet
done so as I was recording the show. Obviously it's
(15:49):
happened since then, and some of you may know all
about this, But really the big surprise at the event
was that some of the stuff that was rumored to
be featured, like a really big update to the Apple
Watch and new air pods, uh, those actually weren't part
of the show. I mean, there was a new Apple Watch,
but the The big changes that had been rumored uh
(16:11):
ended up being just a slightly larger screen and a
couple of new features, but nothing like the redesign that
folks were expecting. Uh, you know, nothing dramatic. The new
watch looks fairly close to the previous ones. It's a
little bigger with the screen, and the air pods with
the rumored shorter stems were a no show at the event.
There are also rumors about the iPhone itself, a big
(16:32):
one being that Apple was going to build in some
sort of satellite cell phone feature so that there would
be a transmitter where you could actually make a satellite
phone call if you had to. Now, you wouldn't normally
use the satellite system. There are issues with latency. It
tends to be a really expensive kind of thing to do.
But according to these rumors, you would be able to
make use of this feature if you happen to be
(16:54):
in an area that had no cell service. So that way,
if you need to make an emergency phone call but
you weren't close to a cell tower or a WiFi hotspot,
you can do it. But that ended up not being
part of the announcements either. So what we did get
were new iPhones with new A fifteen bionic chips powering them.
That's a proprietary chip from Apple, a new dual camera system,
(17:16):
and the two pro models support a one hurts refresh
rate for the screen. Now that means that the screen
refreshes on times per second. The iPad also got a facelift.
But yeah, you know, the announcements were fairly modest in nature. Honestly,
I wonder if it actually benefits Apple to keep holding
these big marketing events unless there happens to be something
(17:38):
that's going to really blow people's socks off, because the
company set expectations ridiculously high with big reveals, you know,
a decade ago or more, and now there's a tendency
for folks to say, oh, that's it, even even if
the stuff that Apple is showing is an improvement over
previous models, because you know, it's not like a show
(18:01):
stopper kind of thing. But hey, I mean, it's a
two trillion dollar company and the folks running it are
way smarter than I am, so I'm sure I'm just
not seeing the big picture. In the past, I've talked
about the N s O Group a few times on
this show. That's the Israeli company famous for developing a
malware tool that exploits security vulnerabilities and Apple's Eye message program.
(18:24):
And just to be clear, that's not the only company
to take aim at I message and create exploits. An
American company called Acuvant once upon a time did the
same thing. Now use the past tense here because Acuvant
subsequently found itself absorbed into a larger company called Optive,
and reportedly Optive is out of the exploit development game,
(18:47):
but Acuvant was very much in that game, using security
experts to not just find vulnerabilities in various software platforms,
but to develop exploits that leveraged those vulnerabilities, then selling
those as products to various other entities, usually government agencies.
So while I heap a lot of criticism on n
(19:08):
s O Group, which you know, does a similar thing
with the blessing and restrictions of the Israeli government, we
are seeing the same sort of thing going on in
other parts of the world, including here in the United States. Anyway,
I bring all this up because the m I T
Technology Review reports that the U. S. Department of Justice
recently find three former U S intelligence and military personnel
(19:29):
for working for the United Arab Emirates without US permission
in what was called Project Raven. The operatives were using
this exploit, they had purchased it from Acuvant, and then
they were acting as mercenaries. They were deploying the exploit
on behalf of the U A E. And reportedly the
list of targets included American citizens and companies. Uh. And
(19:54):
you know that's a big no no working on behalf
of a foreign government when you're a U. S citizen
without you know, the consent of the United States government.
The finds amounted to a little less than one point
seven million dollars. I'm assuming that's collectively, but the m
I T Technology Review Report was not specific, so to
be clear, the focus here is on the three and
(20:17):
that investigation, and there's not really any investigation into optave
or the former equivant. So if you take it like that,
you know, you could say, oh, well, the government says
it's okay if for your companies to develop tools that
specifically exploit some other company's product, you know, I message
from Apple in this case, it's just not okay to
(20:38):
take that same product and then work with a foreign government.
Pretty weird world we live in anyway. I Message, as
the Technology Review points out, is a very popular destination
for malware because Apple includes it on every iPhone, so
the install base is on every single iPhone that's out
there and you can't uninstall it. Anyone using an iOS
(21:01):
device with your phone number can send you a message
on I Message, and I Message automatically accepts those incoming messages,
doesn't matter if you don't recognize the number or not.
So if you build in what's called a zero click exploit,
that's an exploit that doesn't need someone to click on
a link or open up a file or anything like that,
(21:21):
it just infects malware as long as there's a hit. Well.
That means you can have one of these compromise your
phone just because you receive the message on I Message.
Apple has patched the vulnerabilities and I Message a couple
of times, including a patch called blast Door, but hackers
are always looking for other cracks in the security around
the app, and it's a constant seesaw battle between developers
(21:44):
and hackers. In addition to that, one of those three
people that have been fined by the US government for
this thing is Daniel Garrick, who currently serves as the
Chief Information Officer or c i O of Express VPN,
now the v The end company says it was aware
of Garrick's previous activities before they hired him, that he
(22:04):
was completely transparent about that, and that might sound surprising,
but then the company said that his experience was what
made him valuable to the company. So VPNs, or virtual
private networks, are a way for people to log into
one system in order to access other systems privately. Uh Effectively,
it masks your activities between you and whichever end server
(22:28):
you're trying to access. The VPN is kind of like
the man in the middle in this case, and they're
you know, encrypting everything so that snoopers don't know what
it is you're actually doing. Anyway, Express VPN's stance was
that Garrick's experiences meant he understood security vulnerabilities because he
had been searching for them and then exploiting them. So
(22:50):
this could help the company build more effective tools to
protect security and privacy, because who do you want on
your team other than, you know, the person who knows
how to break those thingsings And that definitely makes sense
from that perspective. Now, the bit about him working as
a mercenary for a foreign government seems a bit much
to me, but I get the concept of wanting to
(23:12):
find someone to put on your team who has experience
of familiarity with exploits. A few weeks ago, I talked
about how employees at Activision Blizzard had brought forth charges
relating to a toxic work culture within the company and
had been part of that company for years, including charges
of sexual harassment and assault, as well as a tendency
(23:33):
for the company to protect certain employees accused of perpetrating
or encouraging some truly awful behavior. There are also charges
of general gender discrimination, like women getting paid significantly less
for doing the same job as their male counterparts. Now
the company is in the news again because the Communications
Workers of America or c w A alleges that Activision
(23:57):
Blizzard intimidated employees in an to prevent unionization. In other words,
they didn't want their employees to band together to form
a union, so they set about hiring folks who would
you know, prevent that from happening. As such, the labor
organization has now brought a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard. According
(24:18):
to the organizing director of the c W A Tom Smith. Quote,
Activision Blizzards response to righteous worker activity was surveillance, intimidation
and hiring notorious union busters end quote. So that righteous
worker activity reference, Uh, that's actually two employees who were
taking a stand against Activision Blizzard, protesting conditions about you know,
(24:42):
the disparities and the sexual harassment and bringing those things
into the spotlight. I should add there's an ongoing discussion
within the gaming community over whether or not it's a
good idea to boycott Activision Blizzard titles. You know, there
are a lot of Twitch streamers who have been talking
about this, and some argue that this sends a message
(25:02):
to the company, and it's a message that's hard to
ignore because if enough people are boycotting the products, that
hurts the bottom line. It has to be a lot
of people, and the odds of getting that many people
to participate are pretty low. But if you can do it,
it sends a definite message. But then you have other
people saying no, game developers who are working under these
(25:23):
awful conditions are doing so partly because they really want
their work to be seen and experienced and enjoyed, and
that a boycott kind of pours salt on an already
you know, painful wound. So it's a complicated situation. Speaking
of complicated situations, I haven't talked about Tharoness for a while,
but the trial of the former CEO of that doomed company,
(25:47):
Elizabeth Holmes, is now underway and Erica Cheung, who once
worked for Tharaus, is testifying, and she actually has testified
that she observed questionable processes in the company as Holmes
continued to court investors to spend money on thairness, and
also as she was engaging in a rather lavish and
(26:08):
eccentric lifestyle. All right, so quick refresher on homes and thoroughness.
Holmes attended Stanford University before dropping out to go on
to found a biotech medical company that would evolve into Thoroughness. Now.
The goal was to develop a blood scanning technology that
could take a minuscule amount of blood as a sample
(26:30):
and then run a battery of tests on it, potentially
more than one hundred tests all from that tiny sample,
and then print out definitive and easy to understand results
based on those tests. So the ideal goal was to
produce something around the size of a desktop printer that
could do all of this, potentially even creating a consumer
(26:53):
version that people could buy and have in their own homes.
They could then run tests to understand whether that take
in the back of their throat with something serious or not,
or they could scan to see whether they might be
a risk for developing some sort of serious condition down
the line based upon their blood work. This was all
supposed to democratize medicine, to disrupt the entire blood testing industry,
(27:17):
and to empower patients so that they could have better,
more informed conversations with their doctors. But there was a
bit of a problem, and that problem was the tech
was just not up to snuff, and some folks, including
some people who served as advisors to Holmes while she
was at Stanford, have expressed that they thought the tech
(27:38):
might not ever work on such a small sample, that
this is just asking too much from the tech and
it puts too much faith on the powers of technology.
That alone is somewhat understandable. I mean, I see a
lot of people like putting a lot of hope in technology.
But you can kind of get that because most of
(27:59):
us carry a device in our pockets or our handbags,
that is far more powerful than the most powerful personal
computer from a decade ago, and we just carry it
around with us wherever we go. I mean, that's that's
what smartphone is. So if that became a reality, then
what can't tech do. That's sort of the thought process.
Chung's testimony included the revelation that Thereness staff had a
(28:23):
six data point test that each each you know, blood
test was supposed to pass in order to meet quality
control standards. So, in other words, when you ran a
test on the equipment, it should meet these six data points,
and if it doesn't, then it's a failed test. But
the staff were told to delete up to two of
(28:44):
those six points if that would mean that the test
would otherwise pass. So in other words, if you said, well,
if we ignore these outliers, then everything's fine. So in
other words, this could be seen as a form of
cherry picking, looking for positives and then ignoring the negatives
in order to boost your numbers. Chung quit her job
after working for Thoroughness for six months, uh disillusioned that
(29:07):
she was working for an organization that was, in her mind,
at best unprofessional and at worst downright unethical. Chung was
previously featured as a whistleblower in the book Bad Blood,
which is probably the most thorough expose a on Thorodness,
certainly the most famous. She was also featured on the
HBO documentary The Inventor. Cross Examination of Chung began yesterday
(29:31):
it will pick up again tomorrow on Friday. Well, I've
got a couple more stories to cover, but before I
do that, let's take another quick break and now we
move over to the world of n f t s
(29:52):
or non fungible tokens. These have been likened by some people,
including myself, as a sort of digital receipt that shows
that you quote unquote own some instance of something. Right, technically,
what you own is a digital token that represents something else.
(30:13):
That something else could be data in the form of
like an illustration or a digital baseball card, or a
tweet or something else. And the n f T market
is built on top of blockchain technology, which means that
the chain of ownership of an n f T is
well established and distributed in a ledger. Uh There's so
(30:35):
everyone who's part of the system can see when an
n f T changes hands from one entity to another
and verify that yes, ownership of this n f T
has changed. So what can you do with n f
T s. Well, you could collect them. You could try
and do some speculative investing, So you could try and
(30:55):
buy an n f T and hope that it improves
in value and then sell it off for a profit.
Or if you're an employee of open c that's s
e A that was that's an n f T marketplace
by the way, then you might engage in a little
insider trading. Apparently an open Sea employee secretly purchased n
f T s that the employee knew we're soon going
(31:17):
to be featured on the front page of the open
see website, and I guess the idea was that the
n f T S value would increase due to the
exposure of being on the front page of the website.
Then the employee could sell off the n f T
s at an inflated value for a tidy profit. Now,
the company did not say who that employee was. A
(31:38):
user on Twitter with the handle at zu w u
t V or zooo TV accused the head of product
for open c, a guy named Nate Chastain, of engaging
in this behavior, but open Sea gave no real confirmation
that that's the employee in question, at least not as
I record this episode. However, a Chinese news platform reported
(32:02):
that chas Stain's scheme brought in the equivalent of sixty
seven thousand dollars of Ether cryptocurrency. But that's according to
the current value of Ether, because cryptocurrency values tend to fluctuate,
so on one day it might be you know, sixty
four thousand, on another day it might be sixty eight thousands,
so it can change pretty dramatically in short order. So
it's kind of hard to make these kind of calls.
(32:24):
But yeah, not great. Not great to have any sort
of insider trading. It's it's not the sort of thing
that you can necessarily get away with quickly, because if
people are paying attention to which digital wallet these n
f t s are going to, then they can start
to connect the dots. Even though like on the surface
level it looks like it's anonymous, if you're really paying
(32:45):
attention to stuff, you can start to draw some conclusions,
and that is what happened in this case. Now, you
might remember, if you've listened to previous news episodes of
tech stuff, that General Motors has had to issue a
global recall on the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, and the
problem stems from faulty batteries, which can develop a short
circuit and that leads to the battery overheating and potentially
(33:07):
catching on fire. Now, the company has started to advise
some Bolt owners that they shouldn't park their cars within
fifty feet of any other vehicles, which yauza, I mean,
you know, think about that in different parking situations, like
parking decks or parking lots. I live in Atlanta, and
if you're going anywhere in the city, it's going to
(33:29):
be a real challenge to find a spot that's fifty
feet from all other vehicles. But that illustrates how serious
this issue is and how seriously Bolt owners need to
take this now. To be clear, GM has given this
advice in response to Bolt owners who have called into
the company into like a helpline to ask what they
should do when it comes to parking their vehicles. So
(33:51):
this is not a proactive message that's going out to
Bolt owners. It's more like a well, we would advise
you not to park anywhere close to another car, just
in case your car starts to catch on fire, like
an answer to a question. Now, the recall is expected
to cost GM somewhere in the neighborhood of one point
eight billion dollars. As someone who is generally in favor
(34:14):
of electric vehicles, I'm kind of sad to see the
situation happen, not the recall. I'm not sad that they're
recalling the faulty vehicles. That's absolutely necessary. Instead, I'm just
kind of, you know, bummed that the defective batteries are
there in the first place, because anything that could contribute
to a reluctance to move toward an electric fleet is
(34:34):
going to make that process more difficult. But the fact
remains that we really do need to transition away from
fossil fuel vehicles. Actually that that includes the entire chain,
from the power production facilities like power plants, all the
way down to the technology that we're relying upon day
to day, like our vehicles. My last story today is
(34:57):
a pretty cool one cern the Scientific Organization that I
think might be best known in the United States either
as the company that ended up or organization I should
say that ended up giving birth to the Worldwide Web
because of Tim berners Lee, who was working at started
at the time, or more likely these days, it might
(35:17):
be known as the organization in charge of the large
Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator. Anyway, it's created a tool
that's being used by the organization as well as the
Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva to
use machine learning to determine what the most effective methods
would be to prevent the spread of COVID nineteen in
school settings. So we're seeing a lot of unfortunate and
(35:40):
scary news about school systems being affected by COVID breakouts,
and clearly students, teachers, and staff all want safe environments,
but it can be difficult to know how to go
about creating those environments, particularly when you've got a lot
of variables involved, and you also have different levels of
understanding about the behavior or the virus. Sometimes you get
(36:02):
information that appears to contradict earlier information, so that can
cause confusion. So the research with this tool has shown
that a few things are most effective at really preventing
the spread of COVID. Among those things are natural ventilation,
so open windows are a good uh HEPPA filtration systems
that's h g p A filtration systems in order to
(36:24):
filter out contaminants in the air and face masks are
all the most effective you know strategies when they're all
used in combination with one another. On top of that
are practices that improve it even more, like social distancing,
so keeping everyone six ft apart or more, vaccinations clearly
very very important, and contact tracing in the event of
(36:46):
an actual case being detected, so that you can figure
out who that person has been in close contact with.
Since in most cases kids still can't get vaccinated yet,
especially younger kids can't get vaccinated, these steps are really
important because they can't benefit from the vaccination themselves. I mean,
they can benefit from the fact that adults around them
(37:08):
are vaccinated, but you know, the kids can't get vaccinated. Now,
you might say that this all just confirms what we
already thought, but that's an important part of science. Sometimes
we find out that the thing we suspected to be
true is true. That does happen. But there are other
times where the science shows we don't have the full picture,
or maybe we're asking the wrong questions. Because that's how
(37:31):
science works and why it's not as simple as this
is how it is and nothing more. Now. The reason
I say all that is actually not the lecture you,
because I know it comes across that way. But that's
not why I say it. I say it because I
need to remind myself of this very thing, because I
know that I have been guilty of looking at a
(37:52):
situation and drawing a conclusion and then acting on that
conclusion without you know, actually investigating whether or not that
conclusion was valid in the first place. That's not critical thinking,
and I've been guilty of it. So I say this
to try and hold myself more accountable. And yeah, responsibility
(38:12):
tastes bad. Well that's the news for Thursday, Septe one.
There was a ton of it, a lot of Jonathan
on a soapbox. I make no apologies for it. I
appreciate all you who listen all the way through, and
I understand that you may not agree with my perspective.
I completely respect that as long as you know you're
(38:33):
respecting others. That's the most important part, making sure that
we all do our own efforts to keep not just
ourselves safe, but everyone else too, like we gotta look
out for each other. Anyway, if you have suggestions for
topics I should cover on future episodes of Tech Stuff,
reach out to me the handle for the show. It's
Tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Really.
(39:02):
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