July 22, 2021 • 20 mins
A problem with a Content Delivery Network meant that several major web sites and services went offline on Thursday. The State of California brings a lawsuit against video game company Activision Blizzard. And the UAE zaps clouds to make it rain.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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. First of all, of
this episode sounds at all different. It's Tori's fault. I'm
(00:25):
in the studio today, but I'm using my normal microphone
for home recording. But it may mean that it sounds
a little different. Tarry, by the way, is also here.
She's um She's waving and blowing kisses to all of
you because she loves you so much. That might not
be true, but there are definitely some hand gestures. Anyway,
let's get to the tech news for Thursday, July twenty two,
(00:50):
two thousand, twenty one. Earlier today, you might have had
some problems using certain websites or web based services. For example,
Delta Airlines customers found they couldn't use online check in
for a while. Amazon customers were having trouble connecting to
that site. Gamers saw the PlayStation network and Steam were
(01:13):
down as well. So what the heck happened? Well, it
appears that fault lies with part of acamize system. Now
acam I is a c d N. Also, I could
be mispronouncing it. It's a K A m AI, but
it's a c d N that's a content delivery network.
So as that name implies a com I is in
(01:35):
the business of facilitating the movement of data across networks
to customers. C d n's address an issue that we
just can't otherwise get around, and that's the fact that
the further you are away from a computer like a server.
Let's say that you're trying to connect to a specific website. Well,
the further away you are from that that server, the
(01:59):
longer it's going to take for signals to pass between
you and that server. And if the service you're trying
to access is one that requires fast response, like maybe
it's a streaming video game or something, that could be
a problem. So if you want to access a specific
companies services and that company happens to be located in
(02:19):
Washington State, but you live in the state of Florida,
which is all the way on the opposite side of
you know, America, then you might have some delays. If
your computer and the company's servers had to communicate across
the entire country, you'd run into lag and that's where
c d ends come in. They are essentially huge server
(02:41):
farms located in specific geographic areas, and they function as
a faster way to deliver Internet content. They're kind of
like um mirrors of existing content. So instead of having
to transmit you know, that episode of Modern Love across
the entire United States, a c d N with the
(03:03):
Modern Love content can step in closer to home. C
d n s can also provide other services. They can
act as a layer of protection against malicious attacks from hackers,
liked DOS attacks, distributed denial of service attacks, and most
of the time everything's just working fine and people are
able to access services like Netflix or PlayStation games or
(03:27):
whatever without a problem. But sometimes stuff goes wrong, and
that's what happened today. Akama says that it was an
emerging issue with its Edge DNS service, but as I'm
recording this, it appears that the company's engineers have resolved
the problem. It's just a reminder that there's always a
(03:48):
point of failure in a given system, and sometimes that
point of failure can be one that affects a lot
of other systems. However, I have to take my hat
off to those engineers who fix the problem relatively quickly.
That's really impressive. You know, it really stinks when these
things happen, but it's it's incredible to see how quickly
(04:09):
people can respond and get things back on track, because
I mean, that's a big issue. Now. In an early episode,
I mentioned that President Biden here in the United States
issued an executive order that urged the Federal Trade Commission,
or FTC, to look into the issue of the right
to repair. Just in case you're not familiar with that term,
(04:31):
that refers to stripping away the layers that companies will
put in place that can discourage or outright prevent users
from making their own repairs or going to an independent
repair service, and instead they might put in layers that
force those users to go to a corporate approved service company.
(04:52):
And this can apply to everything from basic consumer electronics
all the way up to things like giant tractors for agriculture.
And this is a really big deal for people who
either don't want to be tied down to a specific
ecosystem or those who might not have easy access to
corporate approved services or both. The FTC now says that
(05:15):
the organization will step up law enforcement actions against companies
that are engaged in quote illegal repair restrictions end quote.
According to the site x d A. Now what constitutes
illegal repair restrictions, Well, if it's part of an anti
competitive strategy, it could violate the Sherman Act that deals
(05:35):
with the issues of monopolies and anti competitiveness. And there
are other laws that can play a role as well,
And I may have to do a full episode about
that at some point, because frankly, I am not that
well read up on these laws, because let's get real,
until really recently, no one was looking into enforcing those laws,
(05:56):
so they weren't really playing a part. But I think
that this is really encouraging. As the FDC points out,
the denial of the right to repair leads to a
lot of wastefulness, uh, And that can go from anything
from the amount of time it takes for you to
actually go to a company approved maintenance area to just
(06:19):
throwing something away and buying a new one because you
can't be bothered to take it to get repaired. None
of those are really good things, So I think this
might be a good move in general. In a different
earlier episode, I talked a bit about the backlash against
audacity that's the free to download audio recording and editing
(06:39):
software that folks like yours truly use when recording podcasts
from home. It's what I'm actually using right now instead
of using our studios recording system because Tari won't let
me do that anyway. Uh oh, look she's blowing more kisses.
She's just so loving to a all right, anyway. A
(07:01):
while back, there was this company called Muse or the
Muse Group now that acquired Audacity and then released a
version with some new privacy policies that raised a lot
of eyebrows because those policies included data collection, uh policies
and meaning data collected from users, and we're talking about
(07:23):
a lot of data that could potentially be used with
conjunction with with law enforcement. So it raised a lot
of big questions about privacy and legality, and it led
to a backlash in which some Audacity users were proposing
that they develop a forked version of Audacity, to go
back to an earlier version of Audacity and develop for
(07:45):
that as an independent program in order to avoid the
issues that they were seeing based on this updated privacy
policy from the quote unquote real Audacity. That is not
a great thing for the new owners to hear. I mean,
if customers are saying they're gonna go and make their
own version of your product just to avoid your policies,
that's tough. Now Audacity has a new new privacy policy
(08:09):
and it removes the sections that were causing the concern.
So in a message to users, Audacity said the following
quote phrasing has been adjusted to remove ambiguity or aid
in transparency, in particular that we do not collect any
additional information for law enforcement or any other purpose. We
have explained the purpose of the two networking features, error
(08:32):
reporting and update checking. We have removed the provision that
discourages children under thirteen years old from using Audacity. We
have taken steps to ensure that we never store a
full IP address we now truncated before hashing or discarded entirely,
and have reflected this change in the privacy policy document.
We have made some changes to how we process error
(08:55):
reports to ensure that we never store any potentially identifiable information. Further,
they explained that any version of Audacity from three point
zero point two or earlier has no networking capability at all,
meaning there's no way for the company to collect any
data from people who are using those versions of audacity.
(09:16):
Whether all this is going to be enough to calm
the critics remains to be seen, but it feels like
it's at least the right thing to do. We've got
some more news to report on, but before I get
to that, let's take a quick break. We're back. The
(09:39):
state of California has filed a lawsuit against the video
game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard, alleging that the company
has a culture of harassment that makes the company a
hostile work environment, particularly for women. In fact, the lawsuit
alleges that there is a quote pervasive frat boy end
(10:00):
quote culture there, and y'all, that phrasing definitely conjures up
some negative images in my mind. But then you have
to understand I went to college at the University of
Georgia in the mid to late nineties, and the frats
there were literally the worst. Like they made the news,
(10:21):
that's how bad they were. Anyway, The allegations include lots
of really despicable charges, everything from women being groped and
otherwise assaulted, to women receiving far less pay for doing
the same jobs as men, to one case where apparently
an executive reportedly delegated his work to a female direct
(10:43):
report so that he could play call of duty. Gross.
Now I should add that the company says these charges
are actually relating to the past, and that the Activision
Blizzard company of today does not reflect this image. In
other words, they're saying, yeah, things used to be bad,
but we have taken great strides to fix them, and
(11:05):
we take this seriously. In fact, the company representatives have
said that every charge is taken seriously and the company
has made substantive moves to really change corporate culture. Now,
I am sure that a more complete story will come
out in court, assuming that this actually goes that far,
and maybe we will hear whether or not the representatives
(11:28):
are accurate right whether or not this this toxic culture
still exists. It appears to at least have existed. But
the question is is that how things are now. I
honestly don't know what to believe. I don't know anyone
at that company, so I have no idea if it
(11:49):
has changed significantly or if it's still a hostile work environment.
But I will keep an eye on this story as
it develops. One technology that tends to come up and
conversation about the future is weather control. I mean, I
know that Cobra Commander was really obsessed with it. But
when we get to the realities of tech and the weather,
(12:09):
our understanding of how we can affect whether it gets
a little bit wibbly wobbly. For years, people have attempted
to seed clouds to induce rain over drought, and the
question then pops up does that actually work? Which is
actually kind of hard to say because it's difficult to
test these things because it either rains or it doesn't
(12:31):
rain after you seed the clouds. And if it does rain,
then can you be sure that it would not have
rained if you hadn't seeded the clouds? Like was the
cloud seeding the thing that actually made it rain or
was it going to rain anyway? Now, long term studies
suggest that cloud seating is effective, like there there have
been studies of snow packs over the course of several
(12:54):
years that suggests that there is greater precipitation in years
when cloud seeding was actually performed. But it's just, you know,
it's one of those things it's very hard to see.
In the short term. However, the United Arab Emirates is
using a slightly different approach to the typical cloud seeding approach.
The U A E is going to zap clouds with
(13:17):
electricity to see if that makes it rain. So they're
gonna be using drones to do this, and the idea
is to actually create an electric charge on droplets of
water that encourages the droplets to bind together. And as
these droplets bind together, they're gonna they're gonna grow larger,
They're gonna grow heavier and potentially heavy enough to fall
(13:39):
his rain. Assuming this all works, which actually sounds pretty
plausible to me at least, so I'll be very eager
to see how this turns out. Though I should say
I am a bit disappointed because I originally imagined that
these drones were gonna fly up there and threatened clouds
with electric shocks unless they would go ahead and rain
and to ns out, that's not how that works, so
(14:02):
that's a bummer. Finally, if you've listened to tech stuff
for a while, you have certainly heard me talk about
an electric vehicle company called Faraday Future, and not for
necessarily positive reasons. I first learned about this company when
I saw a concept model of an electric sports car
at C E s way back in t and that
(14:26):
concept looked super cool. It was one of those like,
you know, gasp moments when you're walking the floor. It
was extremely popular. Lots of people taking video and pictures
of that thing. The company was this upstart ev producer
that was taking shape in California and Nevada, and then
news about weird stuff relating to this company began to
(14:49):
pop up. The company founder had a different company back
in China, that's where he's from, and that company was
apparently in die or straits. It was starting to fail,
and the Chinese government was extremely eager to have this
founder come back to China and settle up with his creditors.
(15:10):
The founder was extremely eager to not do that thing,
because you know, answering for issues in China can sometimes
be a pretty serious thing. So he also allegedly spent
a lot of the company money as if it was
his own personal bank account. There were a lot of
at least perceived possible misuses of corporate funds. Things were
(15:35):
not really looking on the up and up, in other words,
so there were a lot of questions about whether Faraday
would ever be able to produce a consumer vehicle. Because
spoiler alert. So far it has not, and it all
got very dramatic. And now it's time to add another
bit of drama to this story because now Faraday Future
(15:56):
is a publicly traded company. The same organization SHAN that
was teetering on the brink of implosion is now publicly traded.
So you would be well justified in asking how the
heck could this happen? How could it go from almost
falling apart to becoming a publicly traded company. H And
(16:17):
by the way, that move of becoming publicly traded added
like a billion dollars to the company's coffers, so that
is incredibly significant. Well, it's because of a little thing
called a SPACK or sp A C. And by a
little thing, I mean a big thing. So a SPACK
(16:38):
is a special purpose acquisition company. And this is kind
of a work around for companies that want to go
public but would otherwise have trouble with an initial public
offering or i p O. And we've seen lots of
stories about companies that had to back off and rethink
their approach to an i p O, you know, like
(16:59):
Uber companies that at one point we're really bullish about
having an I P O. And then something happens and
it kind of throws a monkey wrench into the works. Well,
here's how a spack works. You get some investors and
they create a company that does nothing. It's it's like
like the old joke on Seinfeld. I mean, it literally
(17:22):
is a company that does nothing except exist to pool resources.
So the company that does nothing, you know, goes public
and then this newly publicly traded company uses the assets
that it has that otherwise are doing nothing to acquire
the target company, you know, the one that would not
(17:43):
be able to hold an I p O on its own.
So Faraday Future never would have gotten an i p
O off the ground, not not with the way the
company has been mismanaged and miss run for the last
several years. But by creating essentially a shell company that
then can be publicly traded and use that company to
purchase Faraday futures, that suddenly means that Faraday Future, by extension,
(18:08):
is publicly traded. Kind of seems like a like almost
like a bait and switch, but it's totally illegal. It's
something that can actually happen without any you know, legal
implications whatsoever. Now along the way through this process, as
this spack acquired Faraday Future and made it a publicly
(18:28):
traded company. The founder of Faraday Future effectively surrendered control.
So today things are very different from how they were
in years past. But does this mean that Faraday Future
is on track to actually produce electric vehicles after years
of languishing in a melodramatic mess of financial shenanigans. Well,
the plan is to get things up and running so
(18:51):
that the company can release an suv electric vehicle sometime
by the end of next year. We'll see if that happened.
I think some skepticism is warranted, but I would actually
love to see the company deliver upon that initial promise
I first encountered back in two thousand sixteen at c
E S. I don't want to see a company fail.
(19:13):
It's just, you know, my skepticism is up only because really,
if you look into the history of Faraday Future, and
I've got I've got an episode about it, a couple
of them, you start to see where there's enough history
of shenanigans going on there to make anyone feel a
little cautious. But that is it for this episode of
(19:36):
tech Stuff. That is the news for Thursday, July twenty
two one. I hope you are all well. If you
have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The
best way to do that is over on Twitter. The
handle we use for the show is tech Stuff hs
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. M
(20:02):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. First of all, of
this episode sounds at all different. It's Tori's fault. I'm
(00:25):
in the studio today, but I'm using my normal microphone
for home recording. But it may mean that it sounds
a little different. Tarry, by the way, is also here.
She's um She's waving and blowing kisses to all of
you because she loves you so much. That might not
be true, but there are definitely some hand gestures. Anyway,
let's get to the tech news for Thursday, July twenty two,
(00:50):
two thousand, twenty one. Earlier today, you might have had
some problems using certain websites or web based services. For example,
Delta Airlines customers found they couldn't use online check in
for a while. Amazon customers were having trouble connecting to
that site. Gamers saw the PlayStation network and Steam were
(01:13):
down as well. So what the heck happened? Well, it
appears that fault lies with part of acamize system. Now
acam I is a c d N. Also, I could
be mispronouncing it. It's a K A m AI, but
it's a c d N that's a content delivery network.
So as that name implies a com I is in
(01:35):
the business of facilitating the movement of data across networks
to customers. C d n's address an issue that we
just can't otherwise get around, and that's the fact that
the further you are away from a computer like a server.
Let's say that you're trying to connect to a specific website. Well,
the further away you are from that that server, the
(01:59):
longer it's going to take for signals to pass between
you and that server. And if the service you're trying
to access is one that requires fast response, like maybe
it's a streaming video game or something, that could be
a problem. So if you want to access a specific
companies services and that company happens to be located in
(02:19):
Washington State, but you live in the state of Florida,
which is all the way on the opposite side of
you know, America, then you might have some delays. If
your computer and the company's servers had to communicate across
the entire country, you'd run into lag and that's where
c d ends come in. They are essentially huge server
(02:41):
farms located in specific geographic areas, and they function as
a faster way to deliver Internet content. They're kind of
like um mirrors of existing content. So instead of having
to transmit you know, that episode of Modern Love across
the entire United States, a c d N with the
(03:03):
Modern Love content can step in closer to home. C
d n s can also provide other services. They can
act as a layer of protection against malicious attacks from hackers,
liked DOS attacks, distributed denial of service attacks, and most
of the time everything's just working fine and people are
able to access services like Netflix or PlayStation games or
(03:27):
whatever without a problem. But sometimes stuff goes wrong, and
that's what happened today. Akama says that it was an
emerging issue with its Edge DNS service, but as I'm
recording this, it appears that the company's engineers have resolved
the problem. It's just a reminder that there's always a
(03:48):
point of failure in a given system, and sometimes that
point of failure can be one that affects a lot
of other systems. However, I have to take my hat
off to those engineers who fix the problem relatively quickly.
That's really impressive. You know, it really stinks when these
things happen, but it's it's incredible to see how quickly
(04:09):
people can respond and get things back on track, because
I mean, that's a big issue. Now. In an early episode,
I mentioned that President Biden here in the United States
issued an executive order that urged the Federal Trade Commission,
or FTC, to look into the issue of the right
to repair. Just in case you're not familiar with that term,
(04:31):
that refers to stripping away the layers that companies will
put in place that can discourage or outright prevent users
from making their own repairs or going to an independent
repair service, and instead they might put in layers that
force those users to go to a corporate approved service company.
(04:52):
And this can apply to everything from basic consumer electronics
all the way up to things like giant tractors for agriculture.
And this is a really big deal for people who
either don't want to be tied down to a specific
ecosystem or those who might not have easy access to
corporate approved services or both. The FTC now says that
(05:15):
the organization will step up law enforcement actions against companies
that are engaged in quote illegal repair restrictions end quote.
According to the site x d A. Now what constitutes
illegal repair restrictions, Well, if it's part of an anti
competitive strategy, it could violate the Sherman Act that deals
(05:35):
with the issues of monopolies and anti competitiveness. And there
are other laws that can play a role as well,
And I may have to do a full episode about
that at some point, because frankly, I am not that
well read up on these laws, because let's get real,
until really recently, no one was looking into enforcing those laws,
(05:56):
so they weren't really playing a part. But I think
that this is really encouraging. As the FDC points out,
the denial of the right to repair leads to a
lot of wastefulness, uh, And that can go from anything
from the amount of time it takes for you to
actually go to a company approved maintenance area to just
(06:19):
throwing something away and buying a new one because you
can't be bothered to take it to get repaired. None
of those are really good things, So I think this
might be a good move in general. In a different
earlier episode, I talked a bit about the backlash against
audacity that's the free to download audio recording and editing
(06:39):
software that folks like yours truly use when recording podcasts
from home. It's what I'm actually using right now instead
of using our studios recording system because Tari won't let
me do that anyway. Uh oh, look she's blowing more kisses.
She's just so loving to a all right, anyway. A
(07:01):
while back, there was this company called Muse or the
Muse Group now that acquired Audacity and then released a
version with some new privacy policies that raised a lot
of eyebrows because those policies included data collection, uh policies
and meaning data collected from users, and we're talking about
(07:23):
a lot of data that could potentially be used with
conjunction with with law enforcement. So it raised a lot
of big questions about privacy and legality, and it led
to a backlash in which some Audacity users were proposing
that they develop a forked version of Audacity, to go
back to an earlier version of Audacity and develop for
(07:45):
that as an independent program in order to avoid the
issues that they were seeing based on this updated privacy
policy from the quote unquote real Audacity. That is not
a great thing for the new owners to hear. I mean,
if customers are saying they're gonna go and make their
own version of your product just to avoid your policies,
that's tough. Now Audacity has a new new privacy policy
(08:09):
and it removes the sections that were causing the concern.
So in a message to users, Audacity said the following
quote phrasing has been adjusted to remove ambiguity or aid
in transparency, in particular that we do not collect any
additional information for law enforcement or any other purpose. We
have explained the purpose of the two networking features, error
(08:32):
reporting and update checking. We have removed the provision that
discourages children under thirteen years old from using Audacity. We
have taken steps to ensure that we never store a
full IP address we now truncated before hashing or discarded entirely,
and have reflected this change in the privacy policy document.
We have made some changes to how we process error
(08:55):
reports to ensure that we never store any potentially identifiable information. Further,
they explained that any version of Audacity from three point
zero point two or earlier has no networking capability at all,
meaning there's no way for the company to collect any
data from people who are using those versions of audacity.
(09:16):
Whether all this is going to be enough to calm
the critics remains to be seen, but it feels like
it's at least the right thing to do. We've got
some more news to report on, but before I get
to that, let's take a quick break. We're back. The
(09:39):
state of California has filed a lawsuit against the video
game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard, alleging that the company
has a culture of harassment that makes the company a
hostile work environment, particularly for women. In fact, the lawsuit
alleges that there is a quote pervasive frat boy end
(10:00):
quote culture there, and y'all, that phrasing definitely conjures up
some negative images in my mind. But then you have
to understand I went to college at the University of
Georgia in the mid to late nineties, and the frats
there were literally the worst. Like they made the news,
(10:21):
that's how bad they were. Anyway, The allegations include lots
of really despicable charges, everything from women being groped and
otherwise assaulted, to women receiving far less pay for doing
the same jobs as men, to one case where apparently
an executive reportedly delegated his work to a female direct
(10:43):
report so that he could play call of duty. Gross.
Now I should add that the company says these charges
are actually relating to the past, and that the Activision
Blizzard company of today does not reflect this image. In
other words, they're saying, yeah, things used to be bad,
but we have taken great strides to fix them, and
(11:05):
we take this seriously. In fact, the company representatives have
said that every charge is taken seriously and the company
has made substantive moves to really change corporate culture. Now,
I am sure that a more complete story will come
out in court, assuming that this actually goes that far,
and maybe we will hear whether or not the representatives
(11:28):
are accurate right whether or not this this toxic culture
still exists. It appears to at least have existed. But
the question is is that how things are now. I
honestly don't know what to believe. I don't know anyone
at that company, so I have no idea if it
(11:49):
has changed significantly or if it's still a hostile work environment.
But I will keep an eye on this story as
it develops. One technology that tends to come up and
conversation about the future is weather control. I mean, I
know that Cobra Commander was really obsessed with it. But
when we get to the realities of tech and the weather,
(12:09):
our understanding of how we can affect whether it gets
a little bit wibbly wobbly. For years, people have attempted
to seed clouds to induce rain over drought, and the
question then pops up does that actually work? Which is
actually kind of hard to say because it's difficult to
test these things because it either rains or it doesn't
(12:31):
rain after you seed the clouds. And if it does rain,
then can you be sure that it would not have
rained if you hadn't seeded the clouds? Like was the
cloud seeding the thing that actually made it rain or
was it going to rain anyway? Now, long term studies
suggest that cloud seating is effective, like there there have
been studies of snow packs over the course of several
(12:54):
years that suggests that there is greater precipitation in years
when cloud seeding was actually performed. But it's just, you know,
it's one of those things it's very hard to see.
In the short term. However, the United Arab Emirates is
using a slightly different approach to the typical cloud seeding approach.
The U A E is going to zap clouds with
(13:17):
electricity to see if that makes it rain. So they're
gonna be using drones to do this, and the idea
is to actually create an electric charge on droplets of
water that encourages the droplets to bind together. And as
these droplets bind together, they're gonna they're gonna grow larger,
They're gonna grow heavier and potentially heavy enough to fall
(13:39):
his rain. Assuming this all works, which actually sounds pretty
plausible to me at least, so I'll be very eager
to see how this turns out. Though I should say
I am a bit disappointed because I originally imagined that
these drones were gonna fly up there and threatened clouds
with electric shocks unless they would go ahead and rain
and to ns out, that's not how that works, so
(14:02):
that's a bummer. Finally, if you've listened to tech stuff
for a while, you have certainly heard me talk about
an electric vehicle company called Faraday Future, and not for
necessarily positive reasons. I first learned about this company when
I saw a concept model of an electric sports car
at C E s way back in t and that
(14:26):
concept looked super cool. It was one of those like,
you know, gasp moments when you're walking the floor. It
was extremely popular. Lots of people taking video and pictures
of that thing. The company was this upstart ev producer
that was taking shape in California and Nevada, and then
news about weird stuff relating to this company began to
(14:49):
pop up. The company founder had a different company back
in China, that's where he's from, and that company was
apparently in die or straits. It was starting to fail,
and the Chinese government was extremely eager to have this
founder come back to China and settle up with his creditors.
(15:10):
The founder was extremely eager to not do that thing,
because you know, answering for issues in China can sometimes
be a pretty serious thing. So he also allegedly spent
a lot of the company money as if it was
his own personal bank account. There were a lot of
at least perceived possible misuses of corporate funds. Things were
(15:35):
not really looking on the up and up, in other words,
so there were a lot of questions about whether Faraday
would ever be able to produce a consumer vehicle. Because
spoiler alert. So far it has not, and it all
got very dramatic. And now it's time to add another
bit of drama to this story because now Faraday Future
(15:56):
is a publicly traded company. The same organization SHAN that
was teetering on the brink of implosion is now publicly traded.
So you would be well justified in asking how the
heck could this happen? How could it go from almost
falling apart to becoming a publicly traded company. H And
(16:17):
by the way, that move of becoming publicly traded added
like a billion dollars to the company's coffers, so that
is incredibly significant. Well, it's because of a little thing
called a SPACK or sp A C. And by a
little thing, I mean a big thing. So a SPACK
(16:38):
is a special purpose acquisition company. And this is kind
of a work around for companies that want to go
public but would otherwise have trouble with an initial public
offering or i p O. And we've seen lots of
stories about companies that had to back off and rethink
their approach to an i p O, you know, like
(16:59):
Uber companies that at one point we're really bullish about
having an I P O. And then something happens and
it kind of throws a monkey wrench into the works. Well,
here's how a spack works. You get some investors and
they create a company that does nothing. It's it's like
like the old joke on Seinfeld. I mean, it literally
(17:22):
is a company that does nothing except exist to pool resources.
So the company that does nothing, you know, goes public
and then this newly publicly traded company uses the assets
that it has that otherwise are doing nothing to acquire
the target company, you know, the one that would not
(17:43):
be able to hold an I p O on its own.
So Faraday Future never would have gotten an i p
O off the ground, not not with the way the
company has been mismanaged and miss run for the last
several years. But by creating essentially a shell company that
then can be publicly traded and use that company to
purchase Faraday futures, that suddenly means that Faraday Future, by extension,
(18:08):
is publicly traded. Kind of seems like a like almost
like a bait and switch, but it's totally illegal. It's
something that can actually happen without any you know, legal
implications whatsoever. Now along the way through this process, as
this spack acquired Faraday Future and made it a publicly
(18:28):
traded company. The founder of Faraday Future effectively surrendered control.
So today things are very different from how they were
in years past. But does this mean that Faraday Future
is on track to actually produce electric vehicles after years
of languishing in a melodramatic mess of financial shenanigans. Well,
the plan is to get things up and running so
(18:51):
that the company can release an suv electric vehicle sometime
by the end of next year. We'll see if that happened.
I think some skepticism is warranted, but I would actually
love to see the company deliver upon that initial promise
I first encountered back in two thousand sixteen at c
E S. I don't want to see a company fail.
(19:13):
It's just, you know, my skepticism is up only because really,
if you look into the history of Faraday Future, and
I've got I've got an episode about it, a couple
of them, you start to see where there's enough history
of shenanigans going on there to make anyone feel a
little cautious. But that is it for this episode of
(19:36):
tech Stuff. That is the news for Thursday, July twenty
two one. I hope you are all well. If you
have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The
best way to do that is over on Twitter. The
handle we use for the show is tech Stuff hs
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. M
(20:02):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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