October 12, 2021 • 20 mins
Last week, Facebook was dealing with a whistleblower. This week, the company might have another one. Plus stories about Amazon corporate employees working from home indefinitely, Microsoft blocking a massive DDoS attack and Magic Leap trying to bounce back.
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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 Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer here at iHeart Radio and a
love all things tech. It is time for the tech
news for Tuesday, October twelfth. One. Let's get into it.
(00:27):
Last week was a tough one for Facebook, to put
it lightly, with a whistleblower appearing before Congress and testifying
that her former employer knowingly engaged in practices that were
harmful to its users and two entire countries. As it
would turn out, while Facebook went into damage control last week,
(00:48):
some of the measures that were taken by PR spokespeople
in an attempt to kind of deflect or to defend
themselves ended up rubbing other current and former employees a
Facebook the wrong way. One person who had already been
critical of the company is Sophie Young. She used to
work as a data scientist for Facebook. Well. She first
(01:12):
came forward with concerns about Facebook last year, and she
even published a full blog post that contained her concerns,
like she wrote this very long farewell message to Facebook employees,
and then she also posted it to her own website.
Facebook then subsequently sent a takedown notice to the the
(01:34):
administrator for the website itself, so it got taken down.
It's pretty bad anyway. Jiang has now said she's willing
to testify in front of Congress as well. She has
said that she sent potentially incriminating documents regarding Facebook practices
to a US law enforcement agency. Other people have also
(01:57):
shown support for investigations into face Book, as well as
condemning the company's tactics of trying to dismiss criticisms by
questioning the credentials of the whistleblowers. My guess is that
it's likely going to be another tough week for Facebook.
Sticking with Facebook, I want to talk about Louis Barclay.
(02:18):
Barclay is an app developer from the UK app and
software developer, and he created a browser extension specifically to
use on Facebook called Unfollow Everything, and you know, it
does exactly what it says on the tin, as they
say across the pond. A user activating unfollow Everything would
(02:41):
see that they had unfollowed every single friend and every
single page that they had previously followed on Facebook. So
they would unfollow everything and you could still you know,
connect to people on Facebook, but you unfollowed them, you
would have to use other methods, And um, it is
interesting because it would essentially mean that your news feed
(03:02):
would be blank except for stuff that maybe you had posted.
I'm assuming I don't know. I haven't actually seen pictures
of what this looked like when it was an action,
but it it's it confuses me a little, only in
the sense of I don't know what it would look like.
Would it just be your posts? Would it become the
true narcissists Facebook? I don't know. His extension, however, got
(03:25):
the attention of researchers in Switzerland who wanted to see
what impact there might be on this kind of thing.
Would would there be an impact on happiness for users
who were still on Facebook but no longer had a
real news feed. They also wanted to see what kind
of impact it might have on the amount of time
that users typically would spend on the platform. And I
(03:46):
honestly wonder really what that experience is like. Maybe it
would be like Facebook would become essentially your photo album
or maybe a journaling exercise. If you were posting and
you were the only one posting there. Any ways, you
can imagine Facebook was not happy about any of this.
So the company booted Barclay off Facebook as well as
(04:07):
Instagram and banned him from ever having an account with
either of those now. The article I read on Business
Insider didn't indicate whether Facebook has also banned him from WhatsApp,
the messaging app, but Barkley did say that he had
been on the platform for about fifteen years and you
used it a lot to stay in touch with friends
and family, so this has had an impact on him.
(04:32):
Facebook says that Barclay's browser extension violates Facebook's terms of Service,
which in parts says that users and developers are not
not to do anything that would interfere with the intended
operation of Facebook. And you know, Barklay said the tool
had only been downloaded a few thousand times. The whole thing,
to me is really interesting. I wonder how many people
(04:54):
would actually use a tool like this, and whether they
would continue to use it or if they would just
you know, turn it off after a it. I get
why Facebook is kind of going nuclear because the entire
revenue model for Facebook depends upon ads being served up
in the news feed and keeping folks on the platform
for as long as possible to sell as many things
(05:14):
as possible, right to serve up as many ads as
possible and rack up the big bucks. But if there's
no news feed, then people would likely spend way less
time on the platform and Facebook would make way less money.
Barclay is kind of without options here. He lives in
the UK, and that means that if he took Facebook
to court over the matter, and if he lost, he
(05:36):
would be liable to pay Facebook's court costs. And you know,
Facebook's a company with billions of dollars. Facebook could even
if they fought this in a way where they weren't
going to win, they could really drain Barclay's resources. And
if they did win and they really drew this out
so it was a very long court battle, it could
(06:00):
bankrupt him. So he's kind of resigned himself to being
Facebook free. He sounds like he's both a little sad
about it, but also kind of relieved because he had
said that he was trying to cut back for a
while now and now he has no choice but to
go cold turkey. We usually hear about successful hacker attacks.
It is fairly rare when we hear about a hacker
(06:21):
attack that was unsuccessful, that had been defeated, but we
have a report like that. Now, Microsoft says that it's
Azure Cloud service was able to mitigate a massive distributed
denial of service ord DOS attack in late August of
this year. Now, let's explain what that means. And we're
gonna start first with a denial of service or DOS attack,
(06:46):
because that's that's our basic unit here. That's an attack
where someone tries to overwhelm a specific targeted server or
system on the Internet, typically by sending tons of messages
to that system. And I often use a specific analogy here.
So imagine that you live in a house. The house
(07:07):
has a front door with a doorbell, and part of
the condition of you living in this house is that
if someone rings that doorbell, you have to answer the door.
It doesn't matter what else is going on. If the
doorbell rings, you've got to go answer it. And so
someone is starting to ring your doorbell and then run away.
And even though you know that there is a very
(07:28):
good chance that you're going to go to the door
and open it and no one's gonna be there, you
still have to answer it. You're not allowed to ignore it.
It would be really hard to get anything else done.
If someone was continuously ringing your doorbell and running away. Well,
denial of service attack is kind of similar. The attacker
is directing messages to a targeted server, and the server
(07:51):
is trying to answer these messages. But those messages are
coming in thick and fast, as you might say, and
soon the server can't do anything at all. It's just
overwhelmed by these incoming messages. It might even crash the server.
In fact, that's often the goal. If it's not to
just gum it up, it's to bring it down entirely. Well,
a distributed denial of service attack is the same thing,
(08:15):
but on a much bigger scale. Typically, hackers will first
use malware to infect as many computers as they possibly
can to get sort of backdoor access to these computers
and have them join what's called a bot net or
sometimes called a zombie network. So the infected computers are
the zombie army, and the hacker can use this army
(08:38):
to direct messages to this targeted server. Now, instead of
one machine just trying to overwhelm a target, you could
be talking tens of thousands, like seventy thousand computers. Is
not unheard of for this sort of thing. For this reason,
we often describe the magnitude of DIDOS attacks and how
much data is being sent toward a target. In this case,
(09:01):
it was a whopping two point for terra bytes per second.
That's the largest DIDAS attack on record by volume. A
terabyte is a trillion bytes, so a gigabyte is a
billion bytes. Terabyte is a trillion bites. This was two
point four terabytes per second. Microsoft says Azure detected the
flood of traffic and was able to mitigate it to
(09:23):
hold it back so that the targeted server didn't get overwhelmed,
which is pretty impressive. Microsoft did not identify the target,
but only said it was located in Europe. Amazon has
become the latest company to back off of an official
return to the office plan for their corporate employees. Like
several other big tech companies, Amazon originally hoped to be
(09:45):
back in the office this year, but had pushed back
to a plan that would see corporate employees returned to
at least three days a week in the office by
January two. Now, the company has sent out another message
saying employees will not have to return to the office
in the new year. Rather, team leaders will make decisions
on a team by team basis as to whether people
(10:06):
need to return or not. Uh, some people will be
able to work remotely indefinitely. In addition, employees will still
be able to work for up to four weeks in
any location within their home country, but they should spend
the rest of the year somewhere that would allow them
to attend, say, an in person meeting, given a day's notice.
(10:28):
In the ongoing battle between Apple and Epic Games, Apple
is now seeking an appeal to the court ruling that
requires Apple to allow app developers and alternative payment option
and not just go through Apple's own in app system.
While seeking the appeal, Apple has asked for a stay
on the injunction that would otherwise require them to follow
the court order. So essentially, they're saying, until we've actually
(10:50):
settled this matter for good, we don't want to have
to change stuff. And from that perspective, it makes kind
of sense, right if Apple were to change things and
then subsequently when their court appeal reversing that change after implementing,
it would be a messy thing at best. Apple claims
that allowing developers to use their own payment systems could
(11:12):
lead to incorporation of other stuff like external links and
potentially bring risks to Apple users. We think of the children.
So the argument here is that this could potentially lead
to security risks, and it's hard to argue against that.
But honestly, I don't think that's what Apple's main concern is.
I think their main concern is that they take a
(11:32):
fifteen to thirty cut out of in app purchases, and
if you allow for alternative payment systems, you have to
say goodbye to that kind of revenue. But then Apple
has lots of security concerns to think about. Two like
how a company is like n s, a group have
targeted eye message to create zero click attacks that turned
(11:53):
phones into spy devices. Apple did subsequently patch out certain vulnerabilities.
My point being that you know, there are security concerns
that have nothing to do with the apps being developed
by third parties. When you really dig into this case,
no one looks super awesome in the full light. I
think I'm more on the developer side on this one.
(12:14):
I feel that Apple and Google to have a real
stranglehold that can hurt developers. At the same time, there's
some legit arguments to make for a streamlined, trustworthy payment system.
We've got a few more stories to go through before
we get to that. Let's take a quick break. So
(12:38):
before the break, we were talking about Apple and Epic,
and a large part of that court argument is about
anti competitiveness and whether companies like Apple and Google are
being anti competitive with demanding developers use their in app purchasing. Well,
speaking of anti competitive issues, we've got a different story
that falls into that category. And Video has run into
a speed bump in its quest to acquire the chip
(13:01):
design company ARM. Now, if you listen to my episodes
about ARM, that's a r M, you know that's a
company that's based in the UK. And Video has a
fifty four billion dollar acquisition deal to bring ARM into
the company fold. But this move has raised some concerns,
and some of those originate in the UK itself. ARM
(13:21):
is an important company in the UK, and there have
even been some questions raised as to whether an acquisition
by a foreign company, because in Video is based out
of the United States, could constitute a matter of national security.
Then there are the questions about competitiveness. ARM creates chip
designs and then issues licenses to manufacturing companies. So a
(13:43):
chip manufacturing company makes a deal with ARM and gets
the design for a specific type of processor and then
they go and make it. Now, the fear is that
if in Vidia, which also makes chips, acquires ARM, maybe
in Video would say no more of doing that. Right,
Maybe in Video would prevent ARM from licensing designs to
(14:05):
in videos competitors. The EU plans and antitrust investigation to
look into the matter further. And this does not mean
that the acquisition is off the table, but it could
take a bit longer than in Video was hoping for.
Last year, many school systems in the United States shifted
to a distance learning model due to the pandemic. However,
that meant that, you know, kids needed access to computers
(14:26):
in order to participate in class, and not everyone comes
from a family where that's a possibility. There is a
real digital divide in the United States, so numerous programs
popped up to provide hardware to students. Now, a research
paper from the Center for Democracy and Technology shows that
a lot of these computers contained monitoring software on them
(14:46):
that logged student activities on these computers. Essentially, many computers
come loaded with spyware, and it gives schools the ability
to see what students are doing on those computers. This
opens up a pretty difficult series of topics. So the
argument to support this initiative says that students are vulnerable
and monitoring could allow school systems to detect a problem
(15:09):
early on and potentially address it before it gets worse.
For example, a student writing about you know, self harm
might need counseling to help them, or someone who's engaging
in some form of online bullying might similarly need someone
to step in and intervene and help that person before
that gets worse. On the other hand, the argument against
(15:29):
this points out that this becomes a surveillance state and
it places an unhealthy burden of responsibility on teachers who
end up having to serve multiple roles in addition to
making lesson plans and educating children. Plus, it disproportionately harms
the less fortunate, like the less economically fortunate, because those
are people who likely don't have any other computer to use,
(15:52):
or smartphone or anything like that, so they rely even
more on the school supplied devices than another students do,
and thus they are disproportionately affected by this monitoring. The
Guardian has a great rite up on this. It's called
us Schools Gave Kids laptops during the pandemic, then they
spied on them. It was written by Jessa Crispin. I
(16:14):
think it's a good read if you want to learn
more about what happened, why it happened, and whether or
not it's a good idea and spoiler alert. Jess thinks
it's a bad idea and I am inclined to agree.
One news item from last week that I did not
get to is that NASA has pushed back the launch
of a test flight for the Boeing star Liner spacecraft.
This would have been the second test flight for the
(16:36):
Boeing star Liner, and the plan was to conduct it
within this year, but now it's gonna happen next year
at the earliest. The reason for the delay is that
a component on the spacecraft and oxidizer isolation valve isn't
functioning correctly, and this component is not exactly in an
easy to access spot in the spacecraft, so it requires
(16:56):
a lot of planning just to figure out how to
address this and fixed the issue without causing more damage
along the way. Boeing Starliner did have an earlier unscrewed
test flight this year, but that one encountered problems with
its onboard software, which prevented it from docking with the
International Space Station. So for right now, the only U
S space craft that can make the journey to the
(17:18):
I S S is space X's Crew Dragon. Finally, Magic Leap,
which was a company I thought might be headed towards insolvency,
has turned things around, at least for the time being. Now.
If you're not familiar with this company, it started creating
Buzz several years ago as a pretty secretive business aimed
at creating an incredible augmented reality headset, presumably meant for
(17:42):
the consumer market. They released some promotional material that truly
made it look magical, so the name seemed fitting. The
company raised billions of dollars and investments like three billion dollars.
But over the years things changed, and I'm guessing that
some of the engineering challenges is were far more significant
than they had first anticipated, and this in turn drove
(18:05):
costs up. Ultimately, Magic Leap released a professional level headset
called Magic Leap One Creator. A name like that suggests
that this headset was intended for developers so that they
could build useful or compelling augmented reality experiences that would
rely on this headset. But it definitely wasn't priced at
or targeted for a consumer user base. It was professional only.
(18:30):
Magic Leap also laid off about half its workforce last year.
One of the co founders, Ronnie abbo It's, left the
company in July last year. But now the company has
raised an additional half billion dollars, which pretty phenomenal that
they were able to do that after all these issues.
And they plan to release a new a R headset
(18:51):
called the Magic Leap To next year. Some early headsets
are reportedly already in circulation, and this new headset is
light and it has a larger field of view than
the previous model. But it is however, still being targeted
at enterprise level customers. So this is not something you
or I would purchase in order to you like, turn
(19:11):
our homes into like a Willy Wonka Wonderland or something. Nope,
these are meant for companies that might use it for
design departments, or maybe they might use it for really
technically complicated installations like the a R headset could show
you exactly where you might need to solder something, or
where you need to connect cables or lay certain electronics
(19:33):
in a very compact space. I'm glad to see that
magic leap, hasn't you know, leapt off a cliff? But
I'm left wondering how long it will take before we
eventually do see a good consumer targeted air headset. And
that's it for the news for Tuesday, October twelve, twenty one.
We'll be back with more news later this week. If
(19:53):
you have suggestions for things I should cover on tech Stuff,
reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech
stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Y text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For
more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
(20:13):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer here at iHeart Radio and a
love all things tech. It is time for the tech
news for Tuesday, October twelfth. One. Let's get into it.
(00:27):
Last week was a tough one for Facebook, to put
it lightly, with a whistleblower appearing before Congress and testifying
that her former employer knowingly engaged in practices that were
harmful to its users and two entire countries. As it
would turn out, while Facebook went into damage control last week,
(00:48):
some of the measures that were taken by PR spokespeople
in an attempt to kind of deflect or to defend
themselves ended up rubbing other current and former employees a
Facebook the wrong way. One person who had already been
critical of the company is Sophie Young. She used to
work as a data scientist for Facebook. Well. She first
(01:12):
came forward with concerns about Facebook last year, and she
even published a full blog post that contained her concerns,
like she wrote this very long farewell message to Facebook employees,
and then she also posted it to her own website.
Facebook then subsequently sent a takedown notice to the the
(01:34):
administrator for the website itself, so it got taken down.
It's pretty bad anyway. Jiang has now said she's willing
to testify in front of Congress as well. She has
said that she sent potentially incriminating documents regarding Facebook practices
to a US law enforcement agency. Other people have also
(01:57):
shown support for investigations into face Book, as well as
condemning the company's tactics of trying to dismiss criticisms by
questioning the credentials of the whistleblowers. My guess is that
it's likely going to be another tough week for Facebook.
Sticking with Facebook, I want to talk about Louis Barclay.
(02:18):
Barclay is an app developer from the UK app and
software developer, and he created a browser extension specifically to
use on Facebook called Unfollow Everything, and you know, it
does exactly what it says on the tin, as they
say across the pond. A user activating unfollow Everything would
(02:41):
see that they had unfollowed every single friend and every
single page that they had previously followed on Facebook. So
they would unfollow everything and you could still you know,
connect to people on Facebook, but you unfollowed them, you
would have to use other methods, And um, it is
interesting because it would essentially mean that your news feed
(03:02):
would be blank except for stuff that maybe you had posted.
I'm assuming I don't know. I haven't actually seen pictures
of what this looked like when it was an action,
but it it's it confuses me a little, only in
the sense of I don't know what it would look like.
Would it just be your posts? Would it become the
true narcissists Facebook? I don't know. His extension, however, got
(03:25):
the attention of researchers in Switzerland who wanted to see
what impact there might be on this kind of thing.
Would would there be an impact on happiness for users
who were still on Facebook but no longer had a
real news feed. They also wanted to see what kind
of impact it might have on the amount of time
that users typically would spend on the platform. And I
(03:46):
honestly wonder really what that experience is like. Maybe it
would be like Facebook would become essentially your photo album
or maybe a journaling exercise. If you were posting and
you were the only one posting there. Any ways, you
can imagine Facebook was not happy about any of this.
So the company booted Barclay off Facebook as well as
(04:07):
Instagram and banned him from ever having an account with
either of those now. The article I read on Business
Insider didn't indicate whether Facebook has also banned him from WhatsApp,
the messaging app, but Barkley did say that he had
been on the platform for about fifteen years and you
used it a lot to stay in touch with friends
and family, so this has had an impact on him.
(04:32):
Facebook says that Barclay's browser extension violates Facebook's terms of Service,
which in parts says that users and developers are not
not to do anything that would interfere with the intended
operation of Facebook. And you know, Barklay said the tool
had only been downloaded a few thousand times. The whole thing,
to me is really interesting. I wonder how many people
(04:54):
would actually use a tool like this, and whether they
would continue to use it or if they would just
you know, turn it off after a it. I get
why Facebook is kind of going nuclear because the entire
revenue model for Facebook depends upon ads being served up
in the news feed and keeping folks on the platform
for as long as possible to sell as many things
(05:14):
as possible, right to serve up as many ads as
possible and rack up the big bucks. But if there's
no news feed, then people would likely spend way less
time on the platform and Facebook would make way less money.
Barclay is kind of without options here. He lives in
the UK, and that means that if he took Facebook
to court over the matter, and if he lost, he
(05:36):
would be liable to pay Facebook's court costs. And you know,
Facebook's a company with billions of dollars. Facebook could even
if they fought this in a way where they weren't
going to win, they could really drain Barclay's resources. And
if they did win and they really drew this out
so it was a very long court battle, it could
(06:00):
bankrupt him. So he's kind of resigned himself to being
Facebook free. He sounds like he's both a little sad
about it, but also kind of relieved because he had
said that he was trying to cut back for a
while now and now he has no choice but to
go cold turkey. We usually hear about successful hacker attacks.
It is fairly rare when we hear about a hacker
(06:21):
attack that was unsuccessful, that had been defeated, but we
have a report like that. Now, Microsoft says that it's
Azure Cloud service was able to mitigate a massive distributed
denial of service ord DOS attack in late August of
this year. Now, let's explain what that means. And we're
gonna start first with a denial of service or DOS attack,
(06:46):
because that's that's our basic unit here. That's an attack
where someone tries to overwhelm a specific targeted server or
system on the Internet, typically by sending tons of messages
to that system. And I often use a specific analogy here.
So imagine that you live in a house. The house
(07:07):
has a front door with a doorbell, and part of
the condition of you living in this house is that
if someone rings that doorbell, you have to answer the door.
It doesn't matter what else is going on. If the
doorbell rings, you've got to go answer it. And so
someone is starting to ring your doorbell and then run away.
And even though you know that there is a very
(07:28):
good chance that you're going to go to the door
and open it and no one's gonna be there, you
still have to answer it. You're not allowed to ignore it.
It would be really hard to get anything else done.
If someone was continuously ringing your doorbell and running away. Well,
denial of service attack is kind of similar. The attacker
is directing messages to a targeted server, and the server
(07:51):
is trying to answer these messages. But those messages are
coming in thick and fast, as you might say, and
soon the server can't do anything at all. It's just
overwhelmed by these incoming messages. It might even crash the server.
In fact, that's often the goal. If it's not to
just gum it up, it's to bring it down entirely. Well,
a distributed denial of service attack is the same thing,
(08:15):
but on a much bigger scale. Typically, hackers will first
use malware to infect as many computers as they possibly
can to get sort of backdoor access to these computers
and have them join what's called a bot net or
sometimes called a zombie network. So the infected computers are
the zombie army, and the hacker can use this army
(08:38):
to direct messages to this targeted server. Now, instead of
one machine just trying to overwhelm a target, you could
be talking tens of thousands, like seventy thousand computers. Is
not unheard of for this sort of thing. For this reason,
we often describe the magnitude of DIDOS attacks and how
much data is being sent toward a target. In this case,
(09:01):
it was a whopping two point for terra bytes per second.
That's the largest DIDAS attack on record by volume. A
terabyte is a trillion bytes, so a gigabyte is a
billion bytes. Terabyte is a trillion bites. This was two
point four terabytes per second. Microsoft says Azure detected the
flood of traffic and was able to mitigate it to
(09:23):
hold it back so that the targeted server didn't get overwhelmed,
which is pretty impressive. Microsoft did not identify the target,
but only said it was located in Europe. Amazon has
become the latest company to back off of an official
return to the office plan for their corporate employees. Like
several other big tech companies, Amazon originally hoped to be
(09:45):
back in the office this year, but had pushed back
to a plan that would see corporate employees returned to
at least three days a week in the office by
January two. Now, the company has sent out another message
saying employees will not have to return to the office
in the new year. Rather, team leaders will make decisions
on a team by team basis as to whether people
(10:06):
need to return or not. Uh, some people will be
able to work remotely indefinitely. In addition, employees will still
be able to work for up to four weeks in
any location within their home country, but they should spend
the rest of the year somewhere that would allow them
to attend, say, an in person meeting, given a day's notice.
(10:28):
In the ongoing battle between Apple and Epic Games, Apple
is now seeking an appeal to the court ruling that
requires Apple to allow app developers and alternative payment option
and not just go through Apple's own in app system.
While seeking the appeal, Apple has asked for a stay
on the injunction that would otherwise require them to follow
the court order. So essentially, they're saying, until we've actually
(10:50):
settled this matter for good, we don't want to have
to change stuff. And from that perspective, it makes kind
of sense, right if Apple were to change things and
then subsequently when their court appeal reversing that change after implementing,
it would be a messy thing at best. Apple claims
that allowing developers to use their own payment systems could
(11:12):
lead to incorporation of other stuff like external links and
potentially bring risks to Apple users. We think of the children.
So the argument here is that this could potentially lead
to security risks, and it's hard to argue against that.
But honestly, I don't think that's what Apple's main concern is.
I think their main concern is that they take a
(11:32):
fifteen to thirty cut out of in app purchases, and
if you allow for alternative payment systems, you have to
say goodbye to that kind of revenue. But then Apple
has lots of security concerns to think about. Two like
how a company is like n s, a group have
targeted eye message to create zero click attacks that turned
(11:53):
phones into spy devices. Apple did subsequently patch out certain vulnerabilities.
My point being that you know, there are security concerns
that have nothing to do with the apps being developed
by third parties. When you really dig into this case,
no one looks super awesome in the full light. I
think I'm more on the developer side on this one.
(12:14):
I feel that Apple and Google to have a real
stranglehold that can hurt developers. At the same time, there's
some legit arguments to make for a streamlined, trustworthy payment system.
We've got a few more stories to go through before
we get to that. Let's take a quick break. So
(12:38):
before the break, we were talking about Apple and Epic,
and a large part of that court argument is about
anti competitiveness and whether companies like Apple and Google are
being anti competitive with demanding developers use their in app purchasing. Well,
speaking of anti competitive issues, we've got a different story
that falls into that category. And Video has run into
a speed bump in its quest to acquire the chip
(13:01):
design company ARM. Now, if you listen to my episodes
about ARM, that's a r M, you know that's a
company that's based in the UK. And Video has a
fifty four billion dollar acquisition deal to bring ARM into
the company fold. But this move has raised some concerns,
and some of those originate in the UK itself. ARM
(13:21):
is an important company in the UK, and there have
even been some questions raised as to whether an acquisition
by a foreign company, because in Video is based out
of the United States, could constitute a matter of national security.
Then there are the questions about competitiveness. ARM creates chip
designs and then issues licenses to manufacturing companies. So a
(13:43):
chip manufacturing company makes a deal with ARM and gets
the design for a specific type of processor and then
they go and make it. Now, the fear is that
if in Vidia, which also makes chips, acquires ARM, maybe
in Video would say no more of doing that. Right,
Maybe in Video would prevent ARM from licensing designs to
(14:05):
in videos competitors. The EU plans and antitrust investigation to
look into the matter further. And this does not mean
that the acquisition is off the table, but it could
take a bit longer than in Video was hoping for.
Last year, many school systems in the United States shifted
to a distance learning model due to the pandemic. However,
that meant that, you know, kids needed access to computers
(14:26):
in order to participate in class, and not everyone comes
from a family where that's a possibility. There is a
real digital divide in the United States, so numerous programs
popped up to provide hardware to students. Now, a research
paper from the Center for Democracy and Technology shows that
a lot of these computers contained monitoring software on them
(14:46):
that logged student activities on these computers. Essentially, many computers
come loaded with spyware, and it gives schools the ability
to see what students are doing on those computers. This
opens up a pretty difficult series of topics. So the
argument to support this initiative says that students are vulnerable
and monitoring could allow school systems to detect a problem
(15:09):
early on and potentially address it before it gets worse.
For example, a student writing about you know, self harm
might need counseling to help them, or someone who's engaging
in some form of online bullying might similarly need someone
to step in and intervene and help that person before
that gets worse. On the other hand, the argument against
(15:29):
this points out that this becomes a surveillance state and
it places an unhealthy burden of responsibility on teachers who
end up having to serve multiple roles in addition to
making lesson plans and educating children. Plus, it disproportionately harms
the less fortunate, like the less economically fortunate, because those
are people who likely don't have any other computer to use,
(15:52):
or smartphone or anything like that, so they rely even
more on the school supplied devices than another students do,
and thus they are disproportionately affected by this monitoring. The
Guardian has a great rite up on this. It's called
us Schools Gave Kids laptops during the pandemic, then they
spied on them. It was written by Jessa Crispin. I
(16:14):
think it's a good read if you want to learn
more about what happened, why it happened, and whether or
not it's a good idea and spoiler alert. Jess thinks
it's a bad idea and I am inclined to agree.
One news item from last week that I did not
get to is that NASA has pushed back the launch
of a test flight for the Boeing star Liner spacecraft.
This would have been the second test flight for the
(16:36):
Boeing star Liner, and the plan was to conduct it
within this year, but now it's gonna happen next year
at the earliest. The reason for the delay is that
a component on the spacecraft and oxidizer isolation valve isn't
functioning correctly, and this component is not exactly in an
easy to access spot in the spacecraft, so it requires
(16:56):
a lot of planning just to figure out how to
address this and fixed the issue without causing more damage
along the way. Boeing Starliner did have an earlier unscrewed
test flight this year, but that one encountered problems with
its onboard software, which prevented it from docking with the
International Space Station. So for right now, the only U
S space craft that can make the journey to the
(17:18):
I S S is space X's Crew Dragon. Finally, Magic Leap,
which was a company I thought might be headed towards insolvency,
has turned things around, at least for the time being. Now.
If you're not familiar with this company, it started creating
Buzz several years ago as a pretty secretive business aimed
at creating an incredible augmented reality headset, presumably meant for
(17:42):
the consumer market. They released some promotional material that truly
made it look magical, so the name seemed fitting. The
company raised billions of dollars and investments like three billion dollars.
But over the years things changed, and I'm guessing that
some of the engineering challenges is were far more significant
than they had first anticipated, and this in turn drove
(18:05):
costs up. Ultimately, Magic Leap released a professional level headset
called Magic Leap One Creator. A name like that suggests
that this headset was intended for developers so that they
could build useful or compelling augmented reality experiences that would
rely on this headset. But it definitely wasn't priced at
or targeted for a consumer user base. It was professional only.
(18:30):
Magic Leap also laid off about half its workforce last year.
One of the co founders, Ronnie abbo It's, left the
company in July last year. But now the company has
raised an additional half billion dollars, which pretty phenomenal that
they were able to do that after all these issues.
And they plan to release a new a R headset
(18:51):
called the Magic Leap To next year. Some early headsets
are reportedly already in circulation, and this new headset is
light and it has a larger field of view than
the previous model. But it is however, still being targeted
at enterprise level customers. So this is not something you
or I would purchase in order to you like, turn
(19:11):
our homes into like a Willy Wonka Wonderland or something. Nope,
these are meant for companies that might use it for
design departments, or maybe they might use it for really
technically complicated installations like the a R headset could show
you exactly where you might need to solder something, or
where you need to connect cables or lay certain electronics
(19:33):
in a very compact space. I'm glad to see that
magic leap, hasn't you know, leapt off a cliff? But
I'm left wondering how long it will take before we
eventually do see a good consumer targeted air headset. And
that's it for the news for Tuesday, October twelve, twenty one.
We'll be back with more news later this week. If
(19:53):
you have suggestions for things I should cover on tech Stuff,
reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech
stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Y text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For
more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
(20:13):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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