January 28, 2021 • 42 mins
News items include more updates on the stock market drama around GameStop, TikTok lays off employees in India, Virgin Hyperloop puts out a new concept video, and a new hardware company called Nothing promises something.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And this is the
tech news episode for Thursday, January twenty twenty one. And
(00:28):
you know, guys, I often start the news episodes with
some heavy stuff, and today is no exception, except that
this is more of a good news heavy story than
a bad news one. So that's a nice change. Reuters
reported on Wednesday, January, so yesterday, if you're listening to
(00:50):
this episode, the day it comes out that police agencies
in the United States, Canada, and six European countries completed
an inter national operation to bring down a malware bought
net network called Emo TET. Germany's federal police agency had
named Emo TET as quote the most dangerous malware globally
(01:14):
end quote, which is saying something considering some of the
contenders that are out there. Emma TET is a type
of malware called a trojan, which, like the trojan horse
of legend, serves as a delivery mechanism for some other
type of code, typically malicious code. So Emo TET is
the nasty piece of software that creates the opportunity for
(01:37):
other potentially nastier pieces of software to infiltrate a system.
So it could help deliver code that encrypts everything on
a computer, which would lead you towards ransomware. Or it
could be used to allow hackers to install monitoring software
to keep an eye on everything going on in a system,
or even giving administrative level access to various computers and
(02:01):
so on. The main way this malware spread was through
email attachments, so it used the old, tried and true
fishing technique, which is still around for a reason people
still fall for it. It first appeared back in and
it has gone through various cycles of activity and inactivity
in the Emo tet activity on the Internet dropped in February,
(02:25):
but it surged again in July. Now, according to authorities
in the Ukraine, imotet was responsible for about two point
five billion dollars in damages globally. The police takedown included
a raid on a physical location within the Ukraine in
which hackers had servers that were doing a lot of
the heavy lifting for you know, maintaining and administering the
(02:48):
botan net. The police released photos of bank cards and cash,
which I find particularly wild, as I usually imagine most
of the crime involving digital transfers of funds rather than
you know, the physical manifestation of money. But I guess
my imagination is far too limited. At the time I'm
recording this, there were no reports about any arrests. That
(03:11):
doesn't mean that arrests didn't happen. I just didn't have
any news about them as I was recording this. Now,
the takedown is certainly a disruption for this particular type
of malware botan net operation, but we should keep in
mind there are lots of other ones out there. There
are hacker groups that are independent, and then there are
some that are state sponsored. But this is definitely good
(03:34):
news that one of the more dangerous networks appears to
be offline. Now. Next, I wanted to follow up on
a story I talked about briefly involving game Stop and
their stocks. Now, if you listen to recent news episodes,
you heard me talk about game Stop and use that
as a way to explain the process of short selling.
(03:56):
That's where an investor borrows stock that doesn't along to
that investor and then sells that stock for market price
and then hope that the price of the stock falls
so that the investor can then buy back those borrowed
shares and pocket the difference because the investor is obligated
to return the borrowed shares. The goal is for you
(04:19):
to buy back those borrowed shares when they're cheaper, and
then you know, you get to keep whatever the difference
was between the cell price and the buy price. Well,
we knew that a subreddit called Wall Street Bets was
driving the price of game Stop stock up after a
company called Citron and another one called Melvin Capital had
recommended that the stock be used as a short sell.
(04:40):
In fact, those companies were short selling game Stop stock
and they were anticipating that there was going to be
a drop in stock price. Now, in my last piece
on this, the price of game Stop stock is so
hard to say that. By the way, anyway, that stock
had climbed seventy in a day, it climbed another after that.
(05:02):
In fact, over the course of two weeks, the stock
price has increased dramatically, and that definitely puts the squeeze
on anyone who's trying to short sell the stock, because
now buying back those borrowed shares will cost more money
than the investor would get from selling them at the
earlier market price. It means that when that price goes up,
(05:22):
you lose money. If you were quote unquote selling stock
at ten dollars and then the stock goes to twenty
and you have to buy back that stock, well now
you're paying twice as much, right, So when stock prices
go up, short selling becomes a loss for the investor.
Now some investors will double down. They will start short
(05:44):
selling even harder. They will start selling more stock that
they don't own, with the hope that the new higher
price of stock is going to take a turn and
start dropping again, and thus they'll be able to cover
their original short sell and perhaps make money in the
long term by jumping on it again. But this activity
(06:07):
of of buying and selling it ends up pushing the
stock price even further hop so it becomes a vicious
cycle that becomes known as a stock squeeze or a
short squeeze. Really well, back in January twelve, game stop
stocks we're selling at nineteen dollars and cents per share,
(06:28):
and I mentioned that they've increased dramatically, So what does
that actually mean well, by January the stock price was
at three hundred fifty dollars per share. So now let's
talk about market capitalization. Now, essentially, we take the number
of shares that the company issues out and we multiply
that number of shares by the share price to figure
(06:51):
out what the market cap is. So for game Stop,
as of the time I'm recording this, that market cap
is at around twenty six bill in dollars. That is bonkers.
And you might ask what has game Stop done to
merit this jump and value, and the answer is nothing. Really,
(07:12):
this price inflation is due to a lot of perception
and market activity among stockholders and was exacerbated when the
short sellers were trying to buy up more stock or
sell more stock, short sell more stock in an effort
to make up for the losses they were already experiencing,
and the cycle was getting worse and worse. The stock
market has actually halted trading on game Stop shares numerous
(07:37):
times over the last week due to that high volatility
in trading. That's a protective measure that's necessary because sometimes
a really volatile stock can set off a kind of
chain reaction in the market, and then you've got real
chaos on your hands, and it's hard to see how
this will all end well in the long run. It
(07:57):
seems that eventually the market value for game Stop will
have to readjust to better reflect the actual value of
the company, and you would expect to see that the
market share price fall as a result of that. And
for those of you who don't know what game Stop
is in the first place, it's a video game retail
company as and this is a company best known for
(08:20):
having brick and mortar stores in the real world where
you can go and buy video games and video game systems,
or even sell back your old copies of games to
the game Stop. You would think that would the double
wamy of the pandemic keeping most people at home and
away from stores, and the general rise of digital downloads
(08:41):
as opposed to buying physical copies, It would mean that
a company like game Stop wouldn't be seeing such a
huge surge and stock market price, which is why I
get the feeling that eventually this will all have to
settle down. At least I hope it settles rather than crashes. Now.
I should also stress I am no market expert. Maybe
(09:02):
this higher stock price will stick around and become stable.
I doubt it, but I fully admit this is not
my area of expertise by a long shot, or else
I would probably be a millionaire by now. Now. One
of the big stories in the second half of twenty
was all about how former President Trump was pressuring Chinese
(09:25):
company byte Dance to sell off its video streaming platform
TikTok to an American company or companies or else face
the apparently unenforceable threat that the service would be taken
down in the United States. In fact, the reason that
that sale has yet to take place is because the
government really didn't follow through on the threats that was making.
(09:49):
And I think I think a lot of people over
at byte Dance slash TikTok are just saying, well, until
they actually show us they really mean business, I guess
we just keep doing what we're doing. Now. It remains
to be seen what the Biden administration is going to
do with regard to TikTok. It's possible they don't do
anything at all. But meanwhile, over in India, things are
(10:11):
definitely changing. The Indian government banned TikTok along with fifty
eight other apps that are linked to China. Now that
followed a military confrontation between India and China in the
Galawan Valley back in the summer of twenty twenty, and
this week by Dance announced it was shutting down nearly
all of its operations in India and laying off almost
(10:32):
every employee there as well. One unnamed source told the
website in Tracker that as many as eighteen hundred people
would lose their jobs and the company would retain around
maybe two fifty employees in India. Some of the other
apps affected by this band include the mobile version of
Player Unknowns Battlegrounds and the messaging service we Chat. In
(10:56):
terrifying news, The Guardian reports that a US government appointed
panel that included tech executives have made the recommendation that
the United States pursue the development of military AI applications,
including weapons powered by artificial intelligence. Leading that panel was
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. I guess it kind
(11:21):
of is fitting to say that before he was CEO
of Google, the company had kind of an unofficial motto
of don't be evil, and that's not the motto anymore.
I'm not saying the two are connected, but I'm not
not saying the two are connected anyway. The logic of this,
if you can call it, that, is that the AI would,
(11:41):
if designed properly, make fewer mistakes than people. And you
know that if designed properly, is an enormous qualification there.
I mean, if we have seen stories about how image
recognition software can sometimes get things really wrong at times
that can go from embarrassing to outright offensive, you know
(12:03):
that kind of opens up your eyes When that happens.
You might be dealing with some harsh criticism, and maybe
it might lead to a deeper discussion about topics like
bias and transparency and artificial intelligence. But when we're talking
military applications, it's obviously a more immediate issue of life
or death type of scenarios. A former Deputy Secretary of
(12:25):
Defense named Robert Work said that quote, it is a
moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis end quote,
which might come as news to the hundreds of computer
scientists who have previously spoken out about this very concept.
In fact, there is a coalition of organizations that have
signed documents calling for a ban on any uses of
(12:48):
artificial intelligence with regard to warfare. UH it often gets
reduced to no killer robots, that kind of thing. The
general concern is that applying AI to war will set
off a type of arms race, and that further, any
poorly made AI would be inherently dangerous. I mean, for
that matter, a well designed AI would be dangerous, because
(13:10):
I mean, that's its job. But it doesn't take much
imagination to conjure up scenarios in which an AI system
could make a call that a human being would never do,
potentially setting off a catastrophic series of events. For example,
just as a hypothesis, if an AI decided that losing
an entire city was an acceptable loss, it might move
(13:34):
forward with that decision that could lead to the deaths
of millions of people. Now that's definitely on the bad
end of the spectrum of possibilities. You could also argue
it's possible that AI systems could prevail in situations where
humans would fail, that an AI would act faster and
with a better result than humans would, and that lives
(13:55):
would be saved in that example. But it is a
sobering thought, and in the end, the panel's recommendations, which
will be finalized the spring, are not binding. It's not
like whatever the panel finds the government will immediately implement,
and I expect we're going to see a lot more
people speaking out against the idea. And we've chatted a
(14:19):
bit about the trend of employees at tech companies forming
unions to help create more leverage when negotiating with executive leadership.
A lot of the news episodes have talked about Google's
ongoing battle with the Alphabet Workers Union or a w
you another thing that's very hard to say. But meanwhile,
(14:39):
over at Amazon, we're seeing something play out that seems
pretty familiar to anyone who was following the stories around
the United States elections last year. Amazon workers planning to
unionize a warehouse in Alabama have to vote on whether
or not that happens. It's a union election, and essentially
(15:01):
now the people trying to form the union want to
hold this vote through mail in ballots. I mean, we're
in the middle of a pandemic, so going to a
physical location in order to cast your vote is frowned upon,
generally speaking. But Amazon is pushing back on this. They're
attempting to force the workers to participate in an in
person vote instead, perhaps due to the fact that it
(15:24):
might be a way to discourage people from voting. I mean,
that's that's my just hypothesizing. I don't have anything to
back that up. It could be other reasons. Amazon says
that the reason is because, at least according to company representatives,
that the mail in process would take too long and
that would require too many resources. Uh. The National Labor
(15:47):
Relations Board had previously said that employees should be allowed
to vote by mail in ballot. Amazon is appealing that decision.
But assuming that the n l RB does not roll
back that decision, and there should be a union election
on February eight for that warehouse, and if the workers
do vote to unionize, it would mark the first Amazon
(16:10):
warehouse in the United States to do that. I'm sure
much of the tech sector has its eyes on Alabama,
as between Amazon and Google, we could end up seeing
a general move toward unionization in the tech space. I've
got a lot more to cover in today's episode, but
first let's take a quick break. The Iranian government has
(16:38):
issued a new social networking ban, this one targeting Signal,
the messaging app. Now you might remember from recent episodes
that Signal was having a bit of a growth spurt
because people who had been using WhatsApp, which is owned
by Facebook had started to abandon WhatsApp and they were
turning to companies like Signal and Telegram instead. Well, Iran
(17:00):
has already banned Telegram, and now Signal has followed suit.
At the heart of the issue of people leaving WhatsApp
is a recent announcement that Facebook would be gathering some
meta data around how users were interacting with WhatsApp and
then putting that metadata to use over on Facebook proper,
(17:21):
and that raised a lot of privacy concerns that led
to people kind of abandoning ship. Well, the Iranian government
does doesn't seem too thrilled with Signals product, which includes
encrypted communication services. As such, the government dropped all Signal
traffic on the country's internal networks, and the government has
(17:41):
also ordered Iranian app stores to drop Signal from their
virtual shelves. As I said, Telegram had already been banned
in Iran. It's still in use in Iran. You just
can't download it legally there, but there are people who
are still using it in order to communicate. And in fact,
when it comes to social apps that allow for messaging,
(18:02):
the only two big ones that have not yet been
banned by Iran our WhatsApp, and Instagram, both of which
are owned by Facebook. Maza A Lamardani, a researcher with
article nineteen, speculates that this is probably because the Iranian
government wants to put bands in place on social services
before those services grow large enough for it to cause
(18:24):
a noticeable uproar within the country. Generally speaking, the Iranian
government tends to not like it if people can talk
without them being able to see what they're talking about,
as the Iranian government can fall a little bit on
the paranoid side of the scale. NBC reports that a
survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics found
(18:48):
that around eleven percent of respondents, which were mainly you know,
business leaders, expected to see a future in which all
employees would return to offices. So, in other words, eleven
of those surveys said, yeah, I think we're going to
get to a point where everyone will be back in
the office, which means everybody else was saying, I'm not
so sure about that. In fact, more than half of
(19:09):
them said that they had already allowed for most or
all staff to work remotely during the pandemic, and the
general consensus is that at least for the short term,
most companies are seeing a future in which a significant
percentage of the workforce will continue to work from home
rather than commute to an office, or they might move
(19:30):
to a model and which people do come in for
some days during the week and they work from home
on other days, which is what I was doing before
the pandemic switched me over to working from home almost
entirely exclusively. I am not surprised by the results of
this survey. I am curious how it will affect office
spaces moving forward. Uh. For some companies, the office is
(19:54):
a bit of prestige, right. It's something that can be
used to impress partners and clients or potential higher ers.
But an empty office doesn't give off quite the same vibe,
and office space can be really expensive to maintain, particularly
in fashionable parts of town. So I imagine some businesses
will examine various scenarios, including some that see them downsizing
(20:18):
the actual office space used in an effort to cut
costs and conserve resources. You know, if they say, well,
we've got a hundred people who work out of this office,
but only twenty of them come in, there's no reason
why we need to support a space that can hold
a hundred people. Let's scale back now. Perhaps when enough
people have been vaccinated, we'll start to see a change.
(20:39):
So it may be that a lot of companies just
say let's just tread water until the vaccinations roll out. However,
we need to remember that COVID is not going away
even after vaccinations, and that we're likely looking at a
reality in which we will need to get vaccinated against
COVID on a regular basis as the virus evolves. So,
(21:00):
in other words, there's no real resetting back to the
normal that existed pre COVID. Now. I don't know how
this is all going to turn out, and I'm sure
there will be a lot of negative consequences no matter
how it unfolds. I also know that working from home
isn't easy for everyone. In fact, on a personal note,
it's changed me quite a bit. I used to be
(21:21):
extremely extroverted, but now I actually get antsy if I
happen to see a group of people, and even if
I play a video game with a crowd and it
it makes me feel anxious. But that's enough about me. However,
related to that story is what's going on over in
the San Francisco Bay Area. In California. Now that has
(21:42):
long been the epicenter of the tech world, or at
least the tech world in the United States, so you know,
the US slice of the tech world. Anyway, there are
a few things to know about San Francisco in general. One,
the real estate market there is truly outrageous, like Jim
and the Halla Graham's truly truly truly outrageous. For example,
(22:03):
according to Town and Country, an empty lot measuring less
than half an acre in size, meaning there's no house there,
there's nothing there but an empty lot, that would set
you back five point four million dollars in Palo Alto, California. Now,
Palo Alto is closer to San Jose than it is
(22:23):
to San Francisco, but it is in the general Bay area.
The average rent in San Francisco for a one bedroom
apartment in the city itself is about thirty dollars per month. Now,
it's not the most expensive place in the world, but
it is. You know, it's expensive to live there. And
in a world where you can do your work from
(22:45):
home and not commute to an office, it opens up
the possibilities to you know, live somewhere else, somewhere that
isn't nearly as expensive. Axios published an article citing that
nearly nine thousand households have left the San Francisco area recently. Now,
some of that might be due to COVID directly, but
(23:06):
a lot of it seems to be more about the
cost of living versus the actual living conditions of the area.
The tech sector attracts a lot of talent to it,
and in general, the tech sector pays talent pretty well,
and that drove up the real estate prices in the
Bay Area over a couple of decades. And that also
pushed people who were not fortunate to have a high
(23:28):
paying tech gig further out of the city. They had
to commute much further to their jobs. So people working
in industries that, you know, it wasn't like a high
paying developer job or something, might have to commute more
than an hour each way because they couldn't afford to
live in the same region where they worked. Now we're
(23:50):
starting to see some of the tech companies themselves consider
a move away from the Bay Area, and some of
the places that companies are looking at include Miami, Florida,
in Austin, Texas. And it's really too early to see
what the effect of all this is going to be.
But it's certain that the disruptive sector known as tech
is going to disrupt the Bay Area even more. Sticking
(24:13):
with that Bay Area tech sector, let's talk a bit
about Facebook, the media platform that is frequently part of
the headlines. MSN reported on the amount of money that
tech lobbyists spent in twenty twenty in the United States
in an effort to influence politics. Here, Facebook, to no
huge surprise, was the top spender in a lot of
(24:35):
them now. According to the report, Facebook spent nearly twenty
million dollars on lobbying, which represented an increase of nearly
eighteen percent over how much it's spent in twenty nineteen. Google,
by contrast, actually cut spending by thirty six percent in twenty,
down to a measly seven and a half million dollars. Overall,
(24:58):
the top five tech companies, which also includes Apple, Amazon,
and Microsoft, spent less on lobbying efforts in twenty than
they did in twenty nineteen. So Facebook is more of
an exception in this case, since Facebook actually increased its spending,
and out of those five companies I just mentioned, only
Microsoft has recently been left out of antitrust investigations into
(25:21):
whether or not those other companies represent a monopoly. The
investigations conclude that, yeah, they kind of do. So hey,
Microsoft dodged a bullet on that one. But then let's
remember that Microsoft itself has been the subject of antitrust
investigations in the past. With the change in administrations here
in the United States, it will be interesting to see
how things progress on this front. Will various state and
(25:45):
federal agencies pushed to break up some of these companies,
will the unionization efforts create complications for them? I have
no clue, but I'll be keeping an eye out on
this and of course reporting it to you guys. And
another Facebook story, this one really a grim one, centers
on material posted on Facebook that denies or distorts information
(26:07):
about the Holocaust, like claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax.
You know that never happened. The Anti Defamation League has
long pressured Facebook to take a more active role in
banning posts that claimed that the Holocaust was a hoax,
and while the company had been urged by various groups
and individuals to take action for years against that kind
(26:28):
of material, it was only back in October of twenty
twenty that the company actually said it was going to
do it. In a blog post by Monica Bickert, who
is the vice president of Content Policy at Facebook, the
company laid out that the official hate speech policy for
Facebook would now include any content that quote denies or
(26:50):
distorts the Holocaust end quote. But now, several months later,
in one the a d L found that such contents
still pops up on face Book and stays there, including
Facebook groups dedicated to claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax.
The organization thus awarded Facebook the grade of D a
(27:10):
failing grade, for its efforts to moderate such content. This
kind of reinforces the idea that it is relatively easy
to create an algorithm that's designed to boost content that
shows signs of a lot of air quotes engagement, but
it is a lot harder to find ways to moderate
content to remove stuff like hate speech and misinformation. That
(27:32):
is a huge problem because in the meantime, Facebook continues
to be a misinformation distribution machine with incredible reach, and
it was you know, had had an economic incentive to
be like that, because again, engagement means spending more time
on the platform. Spending more time on the platform means
being served more ads and ads our health. Facebook makes
(27:55):
the vast majority of its revenue, so it had an
incentive to keep people there, And if people are staying
there because of bad stuff, then there wasn't a whole
lot of incentive to remove the bad stuff until public
pressure reaches a point where it's undeniable. That's kind of
where we are, and even now Facebook is still failing,
(28:16):
at least according to the Anti Defamation League. Well, we
have a couple more stories for this episode, but before
I get to that, let's take another quick break. We're
back and some of you listeners might not be aware
that back in the old days, I wrote for a
(28:39):
site called how Stuff Works dot com. That's how tech
Stuff got started as a podcast offshoot of the website.
Just like other shows like Stuff You Should Know and
Stuff You Missed in History Class, if the show has
the words stuff in the title, there's a chance, not
a guarantee, but a chance that it branched off from
(29:00):
How Stuff Works. Anyway, one of the articles I wrote
for that site was about Project Loon, which was an
effort from Google to create a network of high altitude
balloons carrying equipment that would provide Internet connectivity as a
sort of floating infrastructure, and it was an innovative approach
to extending Internet connectivity to remote areas that otherwise might
(29:24):
go without. So, for example, think of like a little
town in Africa that's many, many many miles away from
the nearest big city. It might not have any Internet connectivity,
and it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to build
out the infrastructure to connect it to that big city.
(29:44):
But if you float the Internet above this this community,
you could potentially provide it network connectivity. But we learned
last week that Google is deflating the program, so to speak,
ending the nine year long experiment. Now the technology worked.
The balloons could send down signals that communities could tap into.
(30:07):
The high altitudes were above really gusty winds, so it
was possible to maintain a connection to specific regions. You
knew what was going to happen with the balloons, so
if you just had enough coverage, then you could maintain
that connectivity. But the company could not find a way
to make the business work from a revenue perspective. So
(30:28):
in other words, it was just costing too much to
deploy and maintain than could be balanced. Out through revenue,
and so we see the loons sink back down to
Earth and we're really seeing a different approach satellite services. Starlink,
the project associated with Elon Musk, is such a service.
(30:48):
The idea is to send up thousands of tiny satellites
in a relatively low orbit that can act as kind
of like a mesh networking system of their own. They
would be at far too low and altitude to maintain
a geosynchronous orbit, that is, an orbit where the satellite
maintains its spot relative to the position on the Earth.
So since the satellites wouldn't be in the exact same
(31:11):
spot in the sky, you need a lot of them
in order to keep coverage consistent. Otherwise you would lose
your Internet connection every time the satellite moved out of range,
and then you would have to wait for it to
go all the way around the planet and swing back
overhead again. The Starlink service is aiming to have more
than forty thousand satellites in orbit in order to provide
(31:32):
a global Internet connectivity service, which, hey, that's cool, but
it does also represent another concern for scientists and astronauts
who worry about stuff like space debris and it also
represents a potential issue for astronomers, as reflections both of
light and potentially of radio waves can make it harder
to observe cosmological goings on down here on Earth. So
(31:57):
scientists also point out that the efforts to blanket the sky,
eyes and satellites comes not from some sort of altruistic
desire to supply Internet to everybody. It's not like, look
under your seat, you get an Internet, and you get
an Internet now. It's rather because these companies are viewing
this as a potentially profitable business. So in other words,
(32:17):
they are arguing that the media should not frame these
efforts as being noble. Necessarily on the business side of things,
there are skeptics who wonder if this approach will ever
be profitable. Getting stuff into space is expensive, after all,
and while it's useful to have persistent Internet connectivity, there
are some inherent downsides to using satellite technology. One big
(32:40):
one is the problem with latency. Satellites. Even those in
a low orbit are very far away, so it takes
time for information to travel from the satellite to either
the backbone of the Internet or you're in device, so
you're kind of playing a game of phone tag. Let's
say you've got a laptop that connects to a router
(33:02):
that then connects up to the satellite link. So you
are on a website, you click on a link, your
command goes out through your satellite dish beams up to
a satellite in orbit, which then has to relay that
command back down on Earth at a receiving station, which
then sends that signal out over the Internet to its destination,
(33:23):
you know, whatever website you were trying to visit, And
then that whole response has to take the same journey,
but in reverse, and that tends to create a pretty
noticeable delay between when you do something and when you
see the results. So if companies can't make satellites work
from a revenue perspective, they could go the same way
that Project Loon went, but then we also have the
(33:46):
added problem of a bunch of junk in low Earth orbit. Next,
Carl Pay made a name for himself as one of
the co founders for the Chinese consumer electronics company one
plus back in mean and you might wonder what he's
up to today, and the answer is nothing. That is,
he founded nothing. I mean, he has founded a company
(34:11):
that has the name nothing, which makes me think that
if you were an employee of that company, you would
automatically have a fun, quirky thing to say at cocktail parties.
You know, if we still had cocktail parties, it would
be the kind of joke that makes the other person
kind of give a humorless smile and return before they
(34:32):
silently wander off to see if maybe someone's laid out
some new snacks on the table or something. And now
you have an insight as to what it's like when
I go to parties. Anyway, this company nothing will apparently
be making something. Exactly what that something is is a mystery.
For now. We know that the product or products they
(34:53):
plan to introduce perhaps this year, fall into the general
category of smart devices, but that's a pretty big category
all on its own these days. I mean, it could
be anything from a phone to a coffee maker, or
a doorbell or toast or who knows. But the philosophy
of the company is one that probably feels familiar to
(35:14):
science fiction fans, the idea that technology should be so
advanced that just kind of fades into the background of
our environments and our reality, so using it should be
just as intuitive as if it were nothing like. It's
right up there with breathing or blinking. By the way,
don't think about breathing or blinking, because then you're gonna
(35:35):
start doing it manually and that will drive you crazy.
We do know that the products will eventually be across
numerous subcategories, and that the goal is to create a
cohesive ecosystem within which these devices will operate. And we
also know that the plan is to focus more on
the hardware side of things than on the software side.
(35:55):
But that's about all we know, which you know, I
guess ain't nothing. Virgin hyper Loop, which is just one
of the company's trying to make hyper loop or hyper
loop like train systems a reality, released a concept video
of what it might be like to go through a
hyper loop terminal board a pod, which is, you know,
the hyper loop version of a train car, and traveled
(36:18):
to a destination. The video was about two and a
half minutes long, and I have to admit it's kind
of cool. The video shows a scenario which you're on
a pod that gets up to more than six centred
miles per hour as it travels through tunnels that have
had nearly all the air removed from them, so that
reduces air resistance to near zero. The video shows pods
(36:38):
that have a sort of train truck or bogey on
the top of the pods, so you know, uh, a
structure that fits against a track, and the track is
in the ceiling of the tunnel. Now that's a shift
from the original hyper loop design, which suggested using air
bearings kind of like an air hockey table, but with
the pod push out compressed air to float above the
(37:02):
floor of the tunnel. However, that particular approach was found
to be impractical, so Virgin hyper loop is going with
a more tried and true method of magnetic levitation. The
whole thing looked really clean and sleek and futuristic, kind
of like you're commuting inside of an Apple commercial or something.
I'm still a little skeptical about hyper loop. I'm not
(37:23):
skeptical about the technology, mind you, but the practicality of
building out the systems and operating them profitably. If traveling
by hyperloop costs the same or more as a plane ticket,
that would be a big barrier. A study out of
Ohio suggested that at least for a system in the
Midwest that would connect Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Columbus. The ticket
(37:45):
prices might be about the same as it would cost
if you were to drive from one location to another,
and that would be pretty incredible. But building out hyper
loop infrastructure is going to be monumentally expensive and complicated
because it involves not just construction and technology, but also
getting the various clearances from federal, state, and local governments
(38:05):
to do it. But hey, just because it's not easy
doesn't mean it's impossible. And my hope is that we
will see hyper loop systems connecting various regional cities and
that my skepticism ends up being misplaced. That's what I hope.
I don't feel like that's going to work out, but
I'm hoping I'm wrong because I would personally love for
(38:26):
there to be a hyper loop connecting, say Atlanta with Orlando, Florida.
In the official Google blog, we saw a post about
how covid continues to dominate our world that's not news,
and that it can be really challenging to navigate all
the various information sources to find out important information like
where you can actually go to get vaccinated. To that end,
(38:49):
Google CEO said that the company is focusing on providing
timely and accurate information about vaccines catered to a person's location,
and he wrote that within a few weeks we should
see that Google Maps in places like Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Texas will allow you to search for locations that
offer the vaccine, and that the results will also have
(39:12):
accompanying information about whether you would need a referral or
an appointment. Maybe it's a drive through location, all that
kind of stuff, everything you need to know before you
actually go. Now, as someone who had spent a lot
of time researching this kind of information for my parents,
who thankfully on their own, were able to get appointments,
(39:33):
I definitely have an appreciation for tools that make this easier.
I mean, I do this stuff for a living, and
even for me, it was a little too complicated. And finally,
Twitter is giving a gift to the world of academia
and overdue gift, and that gift is free access to
the full history of all public conversation on Twitter. Now. Previously,
(39:55):
researchers who wanted to use that information had to pay
a premium to get the full record. Now they can
just apply to Twitter's research track for approval, and if
they're accepted, they will be able to access the full
history of all public tweets. Now, why would anyone want
to do that? While they might want to research big
trends and behaviors, you know, kind of track when certain
(40:17):
things started to appear on Twitter, When did they peak,
when did they settle off? How did that relate to
things that were going in the real world. So a
lot of things that might be related to sociology and psychology,
that kind of stuff. And while it might sound scary
to hear that suddenly someone's got access to everything that's
ever been posted on Twitter, keep in mind that's not
(40:40):
quite accurate. It only covers public tweets, so any protected
tweets are not included in this. And it should also
remind us that when we post something to a public forum,
the important thing to remember is that it is public. So, hey,
if you're having second thoughts about tweeting that joke that
you thought was funny but other people might find it offensive,
(41:02):
you know, maybe just don't do it. Now. That's advice
for everyone, including myself. I've certainly been guilty of rattling
off a tweet. At the time, I was like, ha, ha ha,
aren't I so clever? And then like five minutes later,
I realized, oh, you know, sometimes it's better to be
quiet or kind than clever. In fact, frequently it's better
(41:25):
to be quiet or kind than clever, something I'm working
on personally, as being clever was a big part of
my personal identity for a long time, but now I don't.
I don't think it's necessarily the best treat for me. Anyway.
That's enough self reflection from Jonathan for this episode. If
you guys have suggestions for topics that I should cover
in episodes of tech Stuff, you should reach out to me.
(41:48):
The best place to do that is on Twitter. The
handle for the show is tex Stuff hs W, and
I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(42:09):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And this is the
tech news episode for Thursday, January twenty twenty one. And
(00:28):
you know, guys, I often start the news episodes with
some heavy stuff, and today is no exception, except that
this is more of a good news heavy story than
a bad news one. So that's a nice change. Reuters
reported on Wednesday, January, so yesterday, if you're listening to
(00:50):
this episode, the day it comes out that police agencies
in the United States, Canada, and six European countries completed
an inter national operation to bring down a malware bought
net network called Emo TET. Germany's federal police agency had
named Emo TET as quote the most dangerous malware globally
(01:14):
end quote, which is saying something considering some of the
contenders that are out there. Emma TET is a type
of malware called a trojan, which, like the trojan horse
of legend, serves as a delivery mechanism for some other
type of code, typically malicious code. So Emo TET is
the nasty piece of software that creates the opportunity for
(01:37):
other potentially nastier pieces of software to infiltrate a system.
So it could help deliver code that encrypts everything on
a computer, which would lead you towards ransomware. Or it
could be used to allow hackers to install monitoring software
to keep an eye on everything going on in a system,
or even giving administrative level access to various computers and
(02:01):
so on. The main way this malware spread was through
email attachments, so it used the old, tried and true
fishing technique, which is still around for a reason people
still fall for it. It first appeared back in and
it has gone through various cycles of activity and inactivity
in the Emo tet activity on the Internet dropped in February,
(02:25):
but it surged again in July. Now, according to authorities
in the Ukraine, imotet was responsible for about two point
five billion dollars in damages globally. The police takedown included
a raid on a physical location within the Ukraine in
which hackers had servers that were doing a lot of
the heavy lifting for you know, maintaining and administering the
(02:48):
botan net. The police released photos of bank cards and cash,
which I find particularly wild, as I usually imagine most
of the crime involving digital transfers of funds rather than
you know, the physical manifestation of money. But I guess
my imagination is far too limited. At the time I'm
recording this, there were no reports about any arrests. That
(03:11):
doesn't mean that arrests didn't happen. I just didn't have
any news about them as I was recording this. Now,
the takedown is certainly a disruption for this particular type
of malware botan net operation, but we should keep in
mind there are lots of other ones out there. There
are hacker groups that are independent, and then there are
some that are state sponsored. But this is definitely good
(03:34):
news that one of the more dangerous networks appears to
be offline. Now. Next, I wanted to follow up on
a story I talked about briefly involving game Stop and
their stocks. Now, if you listen to recent news episodes,
you heard me talk about game Stop and use that
as a way to explain the process of short selling.
(03:56):
That's where an investor borrows stock that doesn't along to
that investor and then sells that stock for market price
and then hope that the price of the stock falls
so that the investor can then buy back those borrowed
shares and pocket the difference because the investor is obligated
to return the borrowed shares. The goal is for you
(04:19):
to buy back those borrowed shares when they're cheaper, and
then you know, you get to keep whatever the difference
was between the cell price and the buy price. Well,
we knew that a subreddit called Wall Street Bets was
driving the price of game Stop stock up after a
company called Citron and another one called Melvin Capital had
recommended that the stock be used as a short sell.
(04:40):
In fact, those companies were short selling game Stop stock
and they were anticipating that there was going to be
a drop in stock price. Now, in my last piece
on this, the price of game Stop stock is so
hard to say that. By the way, anyway, that stock
had climbed seventy in a day, it climbed another after that.
(05:02):
In fact, over the course of two weeks, the stock
price has increased dramatically, and that definitely puts the squeeze
on anyone who's trying to short sell the stock, because
now buying back those borrowed shares will cost more money
than the investor would get from selling them at the
earlier market price. It means that when that price goes up,
(05:22):
you lose money. If you were quote unquote selling stock
at ten dollars and then the stock goes to twenty
and you have to buy back that stock, well now
you're paying twice as much, right, So when stock prices
go up, short selling becomes a loss for the investor.
Now some investors will double down. They will start short
(05:44):
selling even harder. They will start selling more stock that
they don't own, with the hope that the new higher
price of stock is going to take a turn and
start dropping again, and thus they'll be able to cover
their original short sell and perhaps make money in the
long term by jumping on it again. But this activity
(06:07):
of of buying and selling it ends up pushing the
stock price even further hop so it becomes a vicious
cycle that becomes known as a stock squeeze or a
short squeeze. Really well, back in January twelve, game stop
stocks we're selling at nineteen dollars and cents per share,
(06:28):
and I mentioned that they've increased dramatically, So what does
that actually mean well, by January the stock price was
at three hundred fifty dollars per share. So now let's
talk about market capitalization. Now, essentially, we take the number
of shares that the company issues out and we multiply
that number of shares by the share price to figure
(06:51):
out what the market cap is. So for game Stop,
as of the time I'm recording this, that market cap
is at around twenty six bill in dollars. That is bonkers.
And you might ask what has game Stop done to
merit this jump and value, and the answer is nothing. Really,
(07:12):
this price inflation is due to a lot of perception
and market activity among stockholders and was exacerbated when the
short sellers were trying to buy up more stock or
sell more stock, short sell more stock in an effort
to make up for the losses they were already experiencing,
and the cycle was getting worse and worse. The stock
market has actually halted trading on game Stop shares numerous
(07:37):
times over the last week due to that high volatility
in trading. That's a protective measure that's necessary because sometimes
a really volatile stock can set off a kind of
chain reaction in the market, and then you've got real
chaos on your hands, and it's hard to see how
this will all end well in the long run. It
(07:57):
seems that eventually the market value for game Stop will
have to readjust to better reflect the actual value of
the company, and you would expect to see that the
market share price fall as a result of that. And
for those of you who don't know what game Stop
is in the first place, it's a video game retail
company as and this is a company best known for
(08:20):
having brick and mortar stores in the real world where
you can go and buy video games and video game systems,
or even sell back your old copies of games to
the game Stop. You would think that would the double
wamy of the pandemic keeping most people at home and
away from stores, and the general rise of digital downloads
(08:41):
as opposed to buying physical copies, It would mean that
a company like game Stop wouldn't be seeing such a
huge surge and stock market price, which is why I
get the feeling that eventually this will all have to
settle down. At least I hope it settles rather than crashes. Now.
I should also stress I am no market expert. Maybe
(09:02):
this higher stock price will stick around and become stable.
I doubt it, but I fully admit this is not
my area of expertise by a long shot, or else
I would probably be a millionaire by now. Now. One
of the big stories in the second half of twenty
was all about how former President Trump was pressuring Chinese
(09:25):
company byte Dance to sell off its video streaming platform
TikTok to an American company or companies or else face
the apparently unenforceable threat that the service would be taken
down in the United States. In fact, the reason that
that sale has yet to take place is because the
government really didn't follow through on the threats that was making.
(09:49):
And I think I think a lot of people over
at byte Dance slash TikTok are just saying, well, until
they actually show us they really mean business, I guess
we just keep doing what we're doing. Now. It remains
to be seen what the Biden administration is going to
do with regard to TikTok. It's possible they don't do
anything at all. But meanwhile, over in India, things are
(10:11):
definitely changing. The Indian government banned TikTok along with fifty
eight other apps that are linked to China. Now that
followed a military confrontation between India and China in the
Galawan Valley back in the summer of twenty twenty, and
this week by Dance announced it was shutting down nearly
all of its operations in India and laying off almost
(10:32):
every employee there as well. One unnamed source told the
website in Tracker that as many as eighteen hundred people
would lose their jobs and the company would retain around
maybe two fifty employees in India. Some of the other
apps affected by this band include the mobile version of
Player Unknowns Battlegrounds and the messaging service we Chat. In
(10:56):
terrifying news, The Guardian reports that a US government appointed
panel that included tech executives have made the recommendation that
the United States pursue the development of military AI applications,
including weapons powered by artificial intelligence. Leading that panel was
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. I guess it kind
(11:21):
of is fitting to say that before he was CEO
of Google, the company had kind of an unofficial motto
of don't be evil, and that's not the motto anymore.
I'm not saying the two are connected, but I'm not
not saying the two are connected anyway. The logic of this,
if you can call it, that, is that the AI would,
(11:41):
if designed properly, make fewer mistakes than people. And you
know that if designed properly, is an enormous qualification there.
I mean, if we have seen stories about how image
recognition software can sometimes get things really wrong at times
that can go from embarrassing to outright offensive, you know
(12:03):
that kind of opens up your eyes When that happens.
You might be dealing with some harsh criticism, and maybe
it might lead to a deeper discussion about topics like
bias and transparency and artificial intelligence. But when we're talking
military applications, it's obviously a more immediate issue of life
or death type of scenarios. A former Deputy Secretary of
(12:25):
Defense named Robert Work said that quote, it is a
moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis end quote,
which might come as news to the hundreds of computer
scientists who have previously spoken out about this very concept.
In fact, there is a coalition of organizations that have
signed documents calling for a ban on any uses of
(12:48):
artificial intelligence with regard to warfare. UH it often gets
reduced to no killer robots, that kind of thing. The
general concern is that applying AI to war will set
off a type of arms race, and that further, any
poorly made AI would be inherently dangerous. I mean, for
that matter, a well designed AI would be dangerous, because
(13:10):
I mean, that's its job. But it doesn't take much
imagination to conjure up scenarios in which an AI system
could make a call that a human being would never do,
potentially setting off a catastrophic series of events. For example,
just as a hypothesis, if an AI decided that losing
an entire city was an acceptable loss, it might move
(13:34):
forward with that decision that could lead to the deaths
of millions of people. Now that's definitely on the bad
end of the spectrum of possibilities. You could also argue
it's possible that AI systems could prevail in situations where
humans would fail, that an AI would act faster and
with a better result than humans would, and that lives
(13:55):
would be saved in that example. But it is a
sobering thought, and in the end, the panel's recommendations, which
will be finalized the spring, are not binding. It's not
like whatever the panel finds the government will immediately implement,
and I expect we're going to see a lot more
people speaking out against the idea. And we've chatted a
(14:19):
bit about the trend of employees at tech companies forming
unions to help create more leverage when negotiating with executive leadership.
A lot of the news episodes have talked about Google's
ongoing battle with the Alphabet Workers Union or a w
you another thing that's very hard to say. But meanwhile,
(14:39):
over at Amazon, we're seeing something play out that seems
pretty familiar to anyone who was following the stories around
the United States elections last year. Amazon workers planning to
unionize a warehouse in Alabama have to vote on whether
or not that happens. It's a union election, and essentially
(15:01):
now the people trying to form the union want to
hold this vote through mail in ballots. I mean, we're
in the middle of a pandemic, so going to a
physical location in order to cast your vote is frowned upon,
generally speaking. But Amazon is pushing back on this. They're
attempting to force the workers to participate in an in
person vote instead, perhaps due to the fact that it
(15:24):
might be a way to discourage people from voting. I mean,
that's that's my just hypothesizing. I don't have anything to
back that up. It could be other reasons. Amazon says
that the reason is because, at least according to company representatives,
that the mail in process would take too long and
that would require too many resources. Uh. The National Labor
(15:47):
Relations Board had previously said that employees should be allowed
to vote by mail in ballot. Amazon is appealing that decision.
But assuming that the n l RB does not roll
back that decision, and there should be a union election
on February eight for that warehouse, and if the workers
do vote to unionize, it would mark the first Amazon
(16:10):
warehouse in the United States to do that. I'm sure
much of the tech sector has its eyes on Alabama,
as between Amazon and Google, we could end up seeing
a general move toward unionization in the tech space. I've
got a lot more to cover in today's episode, but
first let's take a quick break. The Iranian government has
(16:38):
issued a new social networking ban, this one targeting Signal,
the messaging app. Now you might remember from recent episodes
that Signal was having a bit of a growth spurt
because people who had been using WhatsApp, which is owned
by Facebook had started to abandon WhatsApp and they were
turning to companies like Signal and Telegram instead. Well, Iran
(17:00):
has already banned Telegram, and now Signal has followed suit.
At the heart of the issue of people leaving WhatsApp
is a recent announcement that Facebook would be gathering some
meta data around how users were interacting with WhatsApp and
then putting that metadata to use over on Facebook proper,
(17:21):
and that raised a lot of privacy concerns that led
to people kind of abandoning ship. Well, the Iranian government
does doesn't seem too thrilled with Signals product, which includes
encrypted communication services. As such, the government dropped all Signal
traffic on the country's internal networks, and the government has
(17:41):
also ordered Iranian app stores to drop Signal from their
virtual shelves. As I said, Telegram had already been banned
in Iran. It's still in use in Iran. You just
can't download it legally there, but there are people who
are still using it in order to communicate. And in fact,
when it comes to social apps that allow for messaging,
(18:02):
the only two big ones that have not yet been
banned by Iran our WhatsApp, and Instagram, both of which
are owned by Facebook. Maza A Lamardani, a researcher with
article nineteen, speculates that this is probably because the Iranian
government wants to put bands in place on social services
before those services grow large enough for it to cause
(18:24):
a noticeable uproar within the country. Generally speaking, the Iranian
government tends to not like it if people can talk
without them being able to see what they're talking about,
as the Iranian government can fall a little bit on
the paranoid side of the scale. NBC reports that a
survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics found
(18:48):
that around eleven percent of respondents, which were mainly you know,
business leaders, expected to see a future in which all
employees would return to offices. So, in other words, eleven
of those surveys said, yeah, I think we're going to
get to a point where everyone will be back in
the office, which means everybody else was saying, I'm not
so sure about that. In fact, more than half of
(19:09):
them said that they had already allowed for most or
all staff to work remotely during the pandemic, and the
general consensus is that at least for the short term,
most companies are seeing a future in which a significant
percentage of the workforce will continue to work from home
rather than commute to an office, or they might move
(19:30):
to a model and which people do come in for
some days during the week and they work from home
on other days, which is what I was doing before
the pandemic switched me over to working from home almost
entirely exclusively. I am not surprised by the results of
this survey. I am curious how it will affect office
spaces moving forward. Uh. For some companies, the office is
(19:54):
a bit of prestige, right. It's something that can be
used to impress partners and clients or potential higher ers.
But an empty office doesn't give off quite the same vibe,
and office space can be really expensive to maintain, particularly
in fashionable parts of town. So I imagine some businesses
will examine various scenarios, including some that see them downsizing
(20:18):
the actual office space used in an effort to cut
costs and conserve resources. You know, if they say, well,
we've got a hundred people who work out of this office,
but only twenty of them come in, there's no reason
why we need to support a space that can hold
a hundred people. Let's scale back now. Perhaps when enough
people have been vaccinated, we'll start to see a change.
(20:39):
So it may be that a lot of companies just
say let's just tread water until the vaccinations roll out. However,
we need to remember that COVID is not going away
even after vaccinations, and that we're likely looking at a
reality in which we will need to get vaccinated against
COVID on a regular basis as the virus evolves. So,
(21:00):
in other words, there's no real resetting back to the
normal that existed pre COVID. Now. I don't know how
this is all going to turn out, and I'm sure
there will be a lot of negative consequences no matter
how it unfolds. I also know that working from home
isn't easy for everyone. In fact, on a personal note,
it's changed me quite a bit. I used to be
(21:21):
extremely extroverted, but now I actually get antsy if I
happen to see a group of people, and even if
I play a video game with a crowd and it
it makes me feel anxious. But that's enough about me. However,
related to that story is what's going on over in
the San Francisco Bay Area. In California. Now that has
(21:42):
long been the epicenter of the tech world, or at
least the tech world in the United States, so you know,
the US slice of the tech world. Anyway, there are
a few things to know about San Francisco in general. One,
the real estate market there is truly outrageous, like Jim
and the Halla Graham's truly truly truly outrageous. For example,
(22:03):
according to Town and Country, an empty lot measuring less
than half an acre in size, meaning there's no house there,
there's nothing there but an empty lot, that would set
you back five point four million dollars in Palo Alto, California. Now,
Palo Alto is closer to San Jose than it is
(22:23):
to San Francisco, but it is in the general Bay area.
The average rent in San Francisco for a one bedroom
apartment in the city itself is about thirty dollars per month. Now,
it's not the most expensive place in the world, but
it is. You know, it's expensive to live there. And
in a world where you can do your work from
(22:45):
home and not commute to an office, it opens up
the possibilities to you know, live somewhere else, somewhere that
isn't nearly as expensive. Axios published an article citing that
nearly nine thousand households have left the San Francisco area recently. Now,
some of that might be due to COVID directly, but
(23:06):
a lot of it seems to be more about the
cost of living versus the actual living conditions of the area.
The tech sector attracts a lot of talent to it,
and in general, the tech sector pays talent pretty well,
and that drove up the real estate prices in the
Bay Area over a couple of decades. And that also
pushed people who were not fortunate to have a high
(23:28):
paying tech gig further out of the city. They had
to commute much further to their jobs. So people working
in industries that, you know, it wasn't like a high
paying developer job or something, might have to commute more
than an hour each way because they couldn't afford to
live in the same region where they worked. Now we're
(23:50):
starting to see some of the tech companies themselves consider
a move away from the Bay Area, and some of
the places that companies are looking at include Miami, Florida,
in Austin, Texas. And it's really too early to see
what the effect of all this is going to be.
But it's certain that the disruptive sector known as tech
is going to disrupt the Bay Area even more. Sticking
(24:13):
with that Bay Area tech sector, let's talk a bit
about Facebook, the media platform that is frequently part of
the headlines. MSN reported on the amount of money that
tech lobbyists spent in twenty twenty in the United States
in an effort to influence politics. Here, Facebook, to no
huge surprise, was the top spender in a lot of
(24:35):
them now. According to the report, Facebook spent nearly twenty
million dollars on lobbying, which represented an increase of nearly
eighteen percent over how much it's spent in twenty nineteen. Google,
by contrast, actually cut spending by thirty six percent in twenty,
down to a measly seven and a half million dollars. Overall,
(24:58):
the top five tech companies, which also includes Apple, Amazon,
and Microsoft, spent less on lobbying efforts in twenty than
they did in twenty nineteen. So Facebook is more of
an exception in this case, since Facebook actually increased its spending,
and out of those five companies I just mentioned, only
Microsoft has recently been left out of antitrust investigations into
(25:21):
whether or not those other companies represent a monopoly. The
investigations conclude that, yeah, they kind of do. So hey,
Microsoft dodged a bullet on that one. But then let's
remember that Microsoft itself has been the subject of antitrust
investigations in the past. With the change in administrations here
in the United States, it will be interesting to see
how things progress on this front. Will various state and
(25:45):
federal agencies pushed to break up some of these companies,
will the unionization efforts create complications for them? I have
no clue, but I'll be keeping an eye out on
this and of course reporting it to you guys. And
another Facebook story, this one really a grim one, centers
on material posted on Facebook that denies or distorts information
(26:07):
about the Holocaust, like claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax.
You know that never happened. The Anti Defamation League has
long pressured Facebook to take a more active role in
banning posts that claimed that the Holocaust was a hoax,
and while the company had been urged by various groups
and individuals to take action for years against that kind
(26:28):
of material, it was only back in October of twenty
twenty that the company actually said it was going to
do it. In a blog post by Monica Bickert, who
is the vice president of Content Policy at Facebook, the
company laid out that the official hate speech policy for
Facebook would now include any content that quote denies or
(26:50):
distorts the Holocaust end quote. But now, several months later,
in one the a d L found that such contents
still pops up on face Book and stays there, including
Facebook groups dedicated to claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax.
The organization thus awarded Facebook the grade of D a
(27:10):
failing grade, for its efforts to moderate such content. This
kind of reinforces the idea that it is relatively easy
to create an algorithm that's designed to boost content that
shows signs of a lot of air quotes engagement, but
it is a lot harder to find ways to moderate
content to remove stuff like hate speech and misinformation. That
(27:32):
is a huge problem because in the meantime, Facebook continues
to be a misinformation distribution machine with incredible reach, and
it was you know, had had an economic incentive to
be like that, because again, engagement means spending more time
on the platform. Spending more time on the platform means
being served more ads and ads our health. Facebook makes
(27:55):
the vast majority of its revenue, so it had an
incentive to keep people there, And if people are staying
there because of bad stuff, then there wasn't a whole
lot of incentive to remove the bad stuff until public
pressure reaches a point where it's undeniable. That's kind of
where we are, and even now Facebook is still failing,
(28:16):
at least according to the Anti Defamation League. Well, we
have a couple more stories for this episode, but before
I get to that, let's take another quick break. We're
back and some of you listeners might not be aware
that back in the old days, I wrote for a
(28:39):
site called how Stuff Works dot com. That's how tech
Stuff got started as a podcast offshoot of the website.
Just like other shows like Stuff You Should Know and
Stuff You Missed in History Class, if the show has
the words stuff in the title, there's a chance, not
a guarantee, but a chance that it branched off from
(29:00):
How Stuff Works. Anyway, one of the articles I wrote
for that site was about Project Loon, which was an
effort from Google to create a network of high altitude
balloons carrying equipment that would provide Internet connectivity as a
sort of floating infrastructure, and it was an innovative approach
to extending Internet connectivity to remote areas that otherwise might
(29:24):
go without. So, for example, think of like a little
town in Africa that's many, many many miles away from
the nearest big city. It might not have any Internet connectivity,
and it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to build
out the infrastructure to connect it to that big city.
(29:44):
But if you float the Internet above this this community,
you could potentially provide it network connectivity. But we learned
last week that Google is deflating the program, so to speak,
ending the nine year long experiment. Now the technology worked.
The balloons could send down signals that communities could tap into.
(30:07):
The high altitudes were above really gusty winds, so it
was possible to maintain a connection to specific regions. You
knew what was going to happen with the balloons, so
if you just had enough coverage, then you could maintain
that connectivity. But the company could not find a way
to make the business work from a revenue perspective. So
(30:28):
in other words, it was just costing too much to
deploy and maintain than could be balanced. Out through revenue,
and so we see the loons sink back down to
Earth and we're really seeing a different approach satellite services. Starlink,
the project associated with Elon Musk, is such a service.
(30:48):
The idea is to send up thousands of tiny satellites
in a relatively low orbit that can act as kind
of like a mesh networking system of their own. They
would be at far too low and altitude to maintain
a geosynchronous orbit, that is, an orbit where the satellite
maintains its spot relative to the position on the Earth.
So since the satellites wouldn't be in the exact same
(31:11):
spot in the sky, you need a lot of them
in order to keep coverage consistent. Otherwise you would lose
your Internet connection every time the satellite moved out of range,
and then you would have to wait for it to
go all the way around the planet and swing back
overhead again. The Starlink service is aiming to have more
than forty thousand satellites in orbit in order to provide
(31:32):
a global Internet connectivity service, which, hey, that's cool, but
it does also represent another concern for scientists and astronauts
who worry about stuff like space debris and it also
represents a potential issue for astronomers, as reflections both of
light and potentially of radio waves can make it harder
to observe cosmological goings on down here on Earth. So
(31:57):
scientists also point out that the efforts to blanket the sky,
eyes and satellites comes not from some sort of altruistic
desire to supply Internet to everybody. It's not like, look
under your seat, you get an Internet, and you get
an Internet now. It's rather because these companies are viewing
this as a potentially profitable business. So in other words,
(32:17):
they are arguing that the media should not frame these
efforts as being noble. Necessarily on the business side of things,
there are skeptics who wonder if this approach will ever
be profitable. Getting stuff into space is expensive, after all,
and while it's useful to have persistent Internet connectivity, there
are some inherent downsides to using satellite technology. One big
(32:40):
one is the problem with latency. Satellites. Even those in
a low orbit are very far away, so it takes
time for information to travel from the satellite to either
the backbone of the Internet or you're in device, so
you're kind of playing a game of phone tag. Let's
say you've got a laptop that connects to a router
(33:02):
that then connects up to the satellite link. So you
are on a website, you click on a link, your
command goes out through your satellite dish beams up to
a satellite in orbit, which then has to relay that
command back down on Earth at a receiving station, which
then sends that signal out over the Internet to its destination,
(33:23):
you know, whatever website you were trying to visit, And
then that whole response has to take the same journey,
but in reverse, and that tends to create a pretty
noticeable delay between when you do something and when you
see the results. So if companies can't make satellites work
from a revenue perspective, they could go the same way
that Project Loon went, but then we also have the
(33:46):
added problem of a bunch of junk in low Earth orbit. Next,
Carl Pay made a name for himself as one of
the co founders for the Chinese consumer electronics company one
plus back in mean and you might wonder what he's
up to today, and the answer is nothing. That is,
he founded nothing. I mean, he has founded a company
(34:11):
that has the name nothing, which makes me think that
if you were an employee of that company, you would
automatically have a fun, quirky thing to say at cocktail parties.
You know, if we still had cocktail parties, it would
be the kind of joke that makes the other person
kind of give a humorless smile and return before they
(34:32):
silently wander off to see if maybe someone's laid out
some new snacks on the table or something. And now
you have an insight as to what it's like when
I go to parties. Anyway, this company nothing will apparently
be making something. Exactly what that something is is a mystery.
For now. We know that the product or products they
(34:53):
plan to introduce perhaps this year, fall into the general
category of smart devices, but that's a pretty big category
all on its own these days. I mean, it could
be anything from a phone to a coffee maker, or
a doorbell or toast or who knows. But the philosophy
of the company is one that probably feels familiar to
(35:14):
science fiction fans, the idea that technology should be so
advanced that just kind of fades into the background of
our environments and our reality, so using it should be
just as intuitive as if it were nothing like. It's
right up there with breathing or blinking. By the way,
don't think about breathing or blinking, because then you're gonna
(35:35):
start doing it manually and that will drive you crazy.
We do know that the products will eventually be across
numerous subcategories, and that the goal is to create a
cohesive ecosystem within which these devices will operate. And we
also know that the plan is to focus more on
the hardware side of things than on the software side.
(35:55):
But that's about all we know, which you know, I
guess ain't nothing. Virgin hyper Loop, which is just one
of the company's trying to make hyper loop or hyper
loop like train systems a reality, released a concept video
of what it might be like to go through a
hyper loop terminal board a pod, which is, you know,
the hyper loop version of a train car, and traveled
(36:18):
to a destination. The video was about two and a
half minutes long, and I have to admit it's kind
of cool. The video shows a scenario which you're on
a pod that gets up to more than six centred
miles per hour as it travels through tunnels that have
had nearly all the air removed from them, so that
reduces air resistance to near zero. The video shows pods
(36:38):
that have a sort of train truck or bogey on
the top of the pods, so you know, uh, a
structure that fits against a track, and the track is
in the ceiling of the tunnel. Now that's a shift
from the original hyper loop design, which suggested using air
bearings kind of like an air hockey table, but with
the pod push out compressed air to float above the
(37:02):
floor of the tunnel. However, that particular approach was found
to be impractical, so Virgin hyper loop is going with
a more tried and true method of magnetic levitation. The
whole thing looked really clean and sleek and futuristic, kind
of like you're commuting inside of an Apple commercial or something.
I'm still a little skeptical about hyper loop. I'm not
(37:23):
skeptical about the technology, mind you, but the practicality of
building out the systems and operating them profitably. If traveling
by hyperloop costs the same or more as a plane ticket,
that would be a big barrier. A study out of
Ohio suggested that at least for a system in the
Midwest that would connect Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Columbus. The ticket
(37:45):
prices might be about the same as it would cost
if you were to drive from one location to another,
and that would be pretty incredible. But building out hyper
loop infrastructure is going to be monumentally expensive and complicated
because it involves not just construction and technology, but also
getting the various clearances from federal, state, and local governments
(38:05):
to do it. But hey, just because it's not easy
doesn't mean it's impossible. And my hope is that we
will see hyper loop systems connecting various regional cities and
that my skepticism ends up being misplaced. That's what I hope.
I don't feel like that's going to work out, but
I'm hoping I'm wrong because I would personally love for
(38:26):
there to be a hyper loop connecting, say Atlanta with Orlando, Florida.
In the official Google blog, we saw a post about
how covid continues to dominate our world that's not news,
and that it can be really challenging to navigate all
the various information sources to find out important information like
where you can actually go to get vaccinated. To that end,
(38:49):
Google CEO said that the company is focusing on providing
timely and accurate information about vaccines catered to a person's location,
and he wrote that within a few weeks we should
see that Google Maps in places like Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Texas will allow you to search for locations that
offer the vaccine, and that the results will also have
(39:12):
accompanying information about whether you would need a referral or
an appointment. Maybe it's a drive through location, all that
kind of stuff, everything you need to know before you
actually go. Now, as someone who had spent a lot
of time researching this kind of information for my parents,
who thankfully on their own, were able to get appointments,
(39:33):
I definitely have an appreciation for tools that make this easier.
I mean, I do this stuff for a living, and
even for me, it was a little too complicated. And finally,
Twitter is giving a gift to the world of academia
and overdue gift, and that gift is free access to
the full history of all public conversation on Twitter. Now. Previously,
(39:55):
researchers who wanted to use that information had to pay
a premium to get the full record. Now they can
just apply to Twitter's research track for approval, and if
they're accepted, they will be able to access the full
history of all public tweets. Now, why would anyone want
to do that? While they might want to research big
trends and behaviors, you know, kind of track when certain
(40:17):
things started to appear on Twitter, When did they peak,
when did they settle off? How did that relate to
things that were going in the real world. So a
lot of things that might be related to sociology and psychology,
that kind of stuff. And while it might sound scary
to hear that suddenly someone's got access to everything that's
ever been posted on Twitter, keep in mind that's not
(40:40):
quite accurate. It only covers public tweets, so any protected
tweets are not included in this. And it should also
remind us that when we post something to a public forum,
the important thing to remember is that it is public. So, hey,
if you're having second thoughts about tweeting that joke that
you thought was funny but other people might find it offensive,
(41:02):
you know, maybe just don't do it. Now. That's advice
for everyone, including myself. I've certainly been guilty of rattling
off a tweet. At the time, I was like, ha, ha ha,
aren't I so clever? And then like five minutes later,
I realized, oh, you know, sometimes it's better to be
quiet or kind than clever. In fact, frequently it's better
(41:25):
to be quiet or kind than clever, something I'm working
on personally, as being clever was a big part of
my personal identity for a long time, but now I don't.
I don't think it's necessarily the best treat for me. Anyway.
That's enough self reflection from Jonathan for this episode. If
you guys have suggestions for topics that I should cover
in episodes of tech Stuff, you should reach out to me.
(41:48):
The best place to do that is on Twitter. The
handle for the show is tex Stuff hs W, and
I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(42:09):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
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