March 7, 2023 • 31 mins
The US Senate introduces a bill that could give the President the power to ban TikTok (and other foreign tech products and services). Microsoft introduces an AI platform for enterprises. Cambridge Analytica resurfaces in the news down under. And Meta plans to hold more layoffs soon. Plus more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you? So before I talk about the news for Tuesday,
March seven, twenty twenty three, I want to give y'all
(00:24):
a heads up that tomorrow a special guest host takes
over the show, Bridget Todd, also known as the host
of There Are No Girls on the Internet, among many
other things, And I'm really excited to have y'all hear
this special episode. I don't want to spoil anything, but
I'm definitely looking forward to everyone getting a chance to
(00:46):
hear it. So make sure you tune in tomorrow to
get that special episode, and I'll be back on the
following Thursday. But now let's get to the news for today.
And first up, for a change, I really just have
one story explicitly about AI today, and it's about Microsoft's
(01:07):
incorporation of AI. This one was developed by open Ai
and it has to do with Microsoft's products for enterprises
for businesses. All right, So, first off, Microsoft had previously
invested a billion dollars in open ai and more recently,
the two organizations I've entered into a type of partnership,
Though details are scarce as to the extent of that partnership,
(01:31):
some folks estimate that the agreement has Microsoft investing ten
billion dollars with open AI over the next several years. Anyway,
this week, Microsoft has unveiled how it is integrating AI
into suits like power Platform, which is a platform with
tools for developers that kind of stuff, as well as
(01:54):
Dynamics three sixty five, which is used for enterprise resource planning. So,
in other words, these aren't not consumer facing products. You know,
if you don't happen to work in these fields, you'll
never really encounter them. They are meant to be tools
that businesses can use to optimize processes and stuff. So
the idea is that the AI will assist companies and
(02:15):
employees to do jobs, particularly those that are highly repetitive.
In other words, Microsoft's pitch is that this AI augments
what you're already doing, and thus the name they picked
copilot really makes sense. These tools are not intended to
replace decision makers. Instead, it's supposed to make their jobs
(02:36):
easier and less repetitive. And side note my own personal
opinion is. I think Tesla could probably take notes on
how Microsoft's naming approach went this way, because I think
Copilot is a much more responsible naming convention than say,
full self driving, when the actual technology is not full
(02:59):
self drive. Anyway, that being said, I haven't personally had
any experience using Copilot. It's really for stuff that's outside
my job duties, so I can't actually comment on the
quality of the tools performance, but supposed to do things
like help marketing departments identify new customers. For example, let's
(03:19):
say you've got a product or a service. Then you're
doing pretty well, but you're leaving money on the table
because you haven't identified people who would be really good customers.
You you never reached out to them because you weren't
aware of them or whatever. This tool is meant to
help people identify those potential customers and then craft communications
(03:40):
that are likely to resonate with them. That sort of thing. Further,
when building, say a message to potential customers, Copilot will
clearly label all the pieces of that communication that had
been crafted by AI, which will give real human beings
in whatever organization we're talking about a chance to review
(04:02):
these communications to make sure that everything's accurate and appropriate,
and you know, it doesn't end up just being a
message that says that, you know, robots should kill all
humans or something. Last week, I talked about how there's
a bill in the US House of Representatives that could
potentially call for the ban of TikTok. Well, the Senate,
(04:22):
which is the other branch of the US Congress, plans
to unveil a similar bill today. In both cases, the
aim really does go beyond TikTok. I mean, obviously the
app is a big reason for these proposals in both cases,
but in neither case is it exclusively the target. So
the Senate version is said to give the President of
(04:45):
the US the authority to restrict technology from foreign countries
if it's reasonable to suspect that those companies might be
using the tech to compromise the US's national security. And y'all,
this does get super tricky. I talked last week about
how the ACLU claims that banning TikTok would amount to
violating the First Amendment, which is the right to free speech,
(05:07):
and I honestly don't know about that one way or
the other. There's no doubt that as technology gets more advanced,
and starts to lean heavier on stuff like cloud computing
and has the potential to serve as a data gathering system.
We should be concerned, In fact, we should already be
concerned about this, because it's already happening all around us,
(05:30):
whether we're talking about companies that are foreign or domestic.
I mean, that is happening. That's what's going on with Meta,
it's what's going on with Google. Pretty much any big
tech company is doing this. But here, obviously, the concern
is tech companies that are ultimately located outside the United States.
From a national security perspective, I can understand that there's
(05:53):
a fear that foreign companies could potentially pose a threat.
We've already seen similar movements the US against foreign companies. So,
for example, the US banned telecom companies from using tech
from the Chinese company Huawei out of concern that that
could be used as a massive surveillance system. So Huawei
(06:15):
makes all sorts of networking equipment, among other things, and
the fear was that if telecom companies were integrating Huawei
systems within their infrastructure, that it could turn the telecommunications
industry in the United States into a giant espionage service
for the Chinese government. That was the fear. And you know,
(06:35):
we in the United States would much rather the NSA
do all the spying on communications within our country. Now
keep an American anyway. I haven't seen the proposed bill
yet because it wasn't released while I was writing this.
By the time you hear it, it may have already
been released. I will say that according to reports, it
does have bipartisan support, and we've seen other parts of
(06:58):
the world, like the EU, to a stronger stance against
letting information flow out of a region to foreign countries
without restriction. Right. The EU guards citizen data very carefully
and is quick to jump on companies that don't follow
the regulations within the EU, and I have long said
(07:19):
that the United States kind of fell behind on this.
So in some ways, I think this is correcting a
problem that has been around for ages. And of course,
if you look at China, it actually takes this whole
concept to an extreme right. It doesn't just limit what
(07:39):
goes out, it limits what comes in. You know, it
limits what citizens are able to access. And see you
can't even access lots of different Western based tools within China.
So there's clearly a spectrum here between letting everything go
flow in and flow out, everyone access everything and let
(08:01):
everything access us, and then the extreme of China, where
you take really authoritative control over what can be seen
and accessed. And I don't think either extreme is good.
I think you need to find someplace in the middle
where things work out properly. And I honestly don't know
where this Senate bill is going to fall along that spectrum.
(08:22):
I haven't had chance to read it yet, but I'm
sure i'll talk about this later on this week once
we have more information, and I definitely want to see
moves that will protect citizens without escalating into an issue
where the United States just becomes even more isolationist and
insular than we already are. Okay, do you remember Cambridge
(08:46):
Analytica and that scandal, So essentially a political marketing company
was using data that had been collected by an app developer,
a Facebook app developer who had crafted a survey app
for Facebook. Now, back in the days when this app
was created, Facebook's API was not particularly careful about the
kinds of information and app could gather, so it was
(09:09):
possible to design an app to scoop up all sorts
of data even if that information had nothing to do
with whatever the app was doing. In the Cambridge Analytica case,
this included getting a look at folks who hadn't even
used the app themselves. And here's how it would work.
Person A decides that they want to install this app
(09:31):
and take the survey, partly because it's a paid survey,
so they have an incentive, a monetary incentive to participate.
So they install the app on Facebook and they take
the survey. Now, persons B through Z, who happened to
be friends with person A, they don't download the app.
They don't install the app and take the survey. However,
(09:53):
the app gets access to person A's views as if
it were person a. So in other words, it can
actually look at all the profiles of all the friends
that person A has as if it were person A.
So it can collect all this information on persons B
through Z, even though none of them consented to have
(10:16):
their data shared. They didn't have a say in this. Well,
now Australia, nearly a decade after all this happened, is
hearing a case about this. The High Court is going
to hear a case that claims that as many as
three hundred thousand people in Australia had their data harvested
thanks to just fifty three people using the quids. Think
(10:40):
about that, fifty three people use this app and in
the process, around three hundred thousand people have their information
exposed and gathered by the app developer. And further, the
case claims that Facebook should be held accountable for allowing
this data harvest to happen. Now, since this incident that
happened nearly a decade ago, Facebook has subsequently beefed up
(11:03):
its restrictions. Further, the company is challenging the validity of
the case brought against it because at the time of
the incident, Facebook says it didn't have any commercial business
set up in Australia, no staff, no offices, no real
means of generating revenue within the country, nothing, and that
(11:24):
as such, the law that concerns this whole case, the
law that Facebook has been alleged to have broken, would
not apply because it has a prerequisite that the company
that carried out that broke the law rather carried out
business within Australia. So Facebook is saying, we didn't carry
out business in Australia, we didn't have any offices here,
(11:46):
we offered our platform here, but we weren't generating revenue.
There was no business being done. Now, there have been
lower courts that have disagreed with that conclusion, but Facebook's
pushing it as part of their defense. Now, if it
loses the case, the company faces a two point two
million dollars fine, which for Facebook that's not that much.
(12:10):
So even if the High Court ultimately rejects Facebook's arguments
and finds the company guilty, Facebook is not going to
be taking a massive hit when it's compared to its
overall revenue. And speaking of Facebook slash Meta, numerous outlets
like Bloomberg have reported that more layoffs are imminent at
the company. So if you remember Meta downsized by thirteen
(12:31):
percent late last year and actual numbers of employees, that's
around eleven thousand people who lost their jobs. According to Bloomberg,
that initial round of layoffs was really related to a
reorganization effort, which largely included cutting entire teams and also
managerial levels. The idea being that they wanted to flatten
(12:54):
out the hierarchy, so they didn't want to have as
many vertical levels between entry level employees and top brass.
So this was like a middle management clearinghouse kind of situation. However,
Bloomberg says that the upcoming layoffs will be more about
financial results than a reorganization, So it's possible we'll see
(13:18):
departments that are not heavily associated with revenue affected the most.
But time will tell a lot of people think that
this is going to unfold within the week or early
next week, so we'll just have to keep an eye out.
All right, we've got more news to cover, but first
let's take a quick break. We're back. UDN reports that
(13:49):
Intel has finalized its design of two nanometer and one
point eight nanimeter fabrication processes. Remember a nanometer is a
billion of a meter. However, when you hear these numbers,
it does not actually mean that Intel is about to
churn out chips that have components that measure two nanometers
(14:09):
or one point eight nanometers in size. It's actually just
a naming convention at this point. Once upon a time,
the numbers actually did refer to the size of the
individual components on a chip, but we abandoned that several
generations back. We kept the naming convention, which is odd
because it's a naming convention where the numbers keep going down,
(14:32):
but those numbers don't actually refer to the size of
anything on the chip anymore. Also, I should mention that
these processes have been designed but not actually built out.
So in other words, Intel has come out up with
the approach they're going to take, but they haven't actually
created the manufacturing process itself. So we're not going to
get chips right away that have these new features on them.
(14:56):
And if you're wondering why we don't go smaller anymore, really,
when it comes down to it, I mean, some stuff
does get shrunk from generation to generation, but not as
much as what the Naming Convention would have you think.
And the big reason for that comes down to quantum physics.
If you make components small enough, then quantum mechanics come
(15:17):
into play and electrons will decide to do whatever the
heck they want to do instead of following these careful
pathways you built for them with your transistors and whatnot.
That's being a little flippant, but it's also true anyway.
Intel is introducing a lot of stuff all at once
with the one point eight nanimeter fabrication process, also known
as the eighteen A process. The A stands for Angstrom
(15:40):
because you know, you have to go down from the
nanoscale to the Angstrom scale. Intel has a new transistor
design with this eighteen A approach. It is shrinking some
components so some things are getting smaller, and also has
added backside power delivery. And as Tom's Hardware point out,
(16:01):
there's a lot of stuff that has been incorporated into
this new design. It's a bold and potentially risky approach.
So typically what Intel does is follow a pretty standard
tick talk pattern, which means it comes up with a
new design for chip architecture, and then it builds a
(16:21):
chip based on that design. Then in the next generation
it optimizes that design, and then after optimizing the previous design,
Intel goes and makes another new design. So it goes
talk tick talk, So new architecture optimization, new architecture optimization.
Once upon a time, the architecture really did refer more
(16:43):
to shrinking things down, Like you would design an architecture
and then the next generation you would shrink it down.
The next generation you would build a new architecture based
on that new size you had reached, then you would
shrink it down. That kind of thing. We're kind of
beyond that at this point anyway, we're not likely to
see any chips based off this new process for at
(17:05):
least a year. Intel hopes to have it in place
by early twenty twenty four. Earlier on in this episode,
I talked about how Huawei has come under suspicion by
the US government, which then pushed telecom companies to ditch
Huawei equipment in their networks. Well, in another Huawei related story,
the company recently participated as an exhibitor at the Mobile
(17:28):
World Congress event in Spain, and visitors to Huawei's booth
were given personal security badges. They had to wear them
while they were in the booth, and they were meant
to hand the badges back when they were ready to
leave the booth. Only some folks forgot to hand the
badges back and they ultimately walked off with them, and
then some of them just left their badges lying around,
(17:49):
And then of course people got a little curious and
they took the badge which was on a lanyard, one
of those extending lanyards where you got the little plastic
clip that has the spool in site it so you
can extend and retract your badge. Well, someone found out
that inside that plastic clip, there was a tiny circuit board,
(18:10):
like they popped the clip open, and besides the spool
for the lanyard there was a chip, And so folks
started to speculate what this circuitry could be. Was Whahwei
trying to track people? So the company said, essentially yeah,
because those badges were meant to track where people were
going within the booth and how much time they were
(18:33):
spending at specific parts of the booth, that kind of thing.
This in turn would inform Huawei about what people were
most interested in. Folks were expected to hand over the
badges after the end of their visit, so it wasn't
like Huawei was trying to bug someone and track all
their movements throughout all of Mobile World Congress. They were
(18:53):
just really, according to what they're saying, interested in what
people were doing when they were actually visiting Huawei's booth.
Now there's concerned that individual badges could be connected to
specific people, like if they were personalized. I don't know
if they were personalized because the report I read it
and go into detail, but if they were, then there's
some concern about that data being linked to a specific individual.
(19:17):
But huawehas said that they're following their privacy policy, they're
going to protect that information. That that's not really what
they're really focused on. They're looking at what parts of
their booth design were effective and what wasn't. Honestly, I
get the feeling this is a story that's more innocent
than malicious. I didn't see anything to indicate that the
circuitry could really do anything sinister. It looks like it's
(19:41):
a passive RFID and Bluetooth system, so something that when
it passes within range of an emitter can reflect back
a response which just gives the system information of where
someone is and how long they are there. It didn't
look like it was capable of doing more than that
to me, but that was at a casual glance based
(20:03):
upon some photographs, and I just think that this one
is probably not that big of a deal. Honestly, I
think Huawei is pretty much telling the truth here. However,
it does really illustrate how Huawei has a reputation associated
with it. Whether that reputation is fair or not is
up for debate, but I think it shows that there's
(20:23):
this kind of cloud of suspicion that's associated with the company.
In a new segment that I'd like to call y'all
got to read this. I want to give a shout
out to Wired. Wired published a piece that's titled Inside
the Suspicion Machine, and it's about governments using systems that
reduce people to data points for the purposes of making
(20:45):
really important decisions regarding those people. It opens talking about
a welfare system in Europe and how such an algorithmic
approach can be used by administrators of these systems to
determine who is taking advantage of the system. As Wired
points out, they said, it's not like it's being used
(21:07):
to determine how much welfare a person requires, but rather
how likely is it that this person is abusing the system,
like it's taking an accusatory stance out of the gate. Well,
this reminds me a lot about a story we covered
recently about how a lot of HR leaders expect that
(21:28):
they will at least partly be relying on AI and
algorithms when it comes to making layoff decisions. So to
do that, you kind of have to reduce people into
a collection of data points so that an algorithmic system
can actually make decisions, and compare this set of numbers
against this set of numbers. But there are a lot
of dangers with this approach, including bias potentially leading to
(21:51):
specific populations of people being disproportionately targeted and affected by
these kinds of decisions. Now, the piece on Wired is extensive,
it is thorough, it is a great read. So I
recommend go check out the piece again. It's on Wired.
It's titled Inside the Suspicion Machine. Also, just for the
(22:13):
interest of full disclosure, I do not know any of
the people who contributed to that article. I do not
have any connection with Wired other than being a subscriber.
It's just my recommendation as someone who reads a lot
about tech. You know, in the early days of the pandemic,
when everyone was scrambling to find ways to work in
a suddenly decentralized remote approach, conference tools like Zoom really
(22:37):
took off, followed closely by people determined to disrupt work
being done through these tools. Well, we haven't emerged from
the disruption stage yet because recently a meeting that was
being held by the US Federal Reserve had to be
canceled in process due to a stream hijacker who blasted
(22:58):
pornographic content to the attendees of the Zoom meeting, which
was like a couple hundred people. I think now you
might remember there were similar stories from just a couple
of years ago about people who found that they could
access corporate meetings that failed to protect their links, and
also that didn't use any kind of password protection. I
saw a rapid adoption throughout the industry of things like
(23:22):
protected links and passwords after that kind of happened because
it was easy to do. It was pretty easy to
find links that were being shared publicly, but they weren't
intended to be public meetings, and then people would just
crash them. So this is kind of similar to that.
The Federal Reserves Brent Jarks issued an apology for the
(23:43):
incident and committed to finding out how the hijack happened
and how to prevent it from happening again. Okay, I've
got a couple more news stories, but before I get
to those, let's take another quick break. We're back. So,
(24:05):
Engadget has a piece about Honda's newest robot, which, unlike
the Tesla Optimus robot, and unlike Honda's own retired Asimo robot,
isn't humanoid. It's not built to look like a human.
It doesn't have legs and arms, no, Instead, Honda's robot
is actually the third generation of its autonomous work vehicle
(24:29):
or a w V design, So it's a type of
kind of self guided electric wagon. It's meant to carry
payloads and has a large enough surface flat surface that
can carry two pallets worth of payload, and it can
support up to two thousand pounds per go. It has
(24:51):
a top speed of around ten miles per hour. That's
actually fairly darned zippy for something like this, and it
reportedly can go for twenty eight miles before needing a recharge.
I don't know if that's under a full load. It
might be less time under a full load. But this
is not the first automous work vehicle, like I said,
it's actually the third generation, and Honda says it is
(25:12):
capable of working either by remote control, so you could
have someone actually steering this remotely, or it can operate
completely autonomously. Honda anticipates that the AWV will have utility
in environments like warehouses and construction sites and that kind
of thing. That it's designed to also be able to
(25:34):
travel over rough terrain, so a construction site would be fine.
So Honda now is looking to form strategic partnerships with
construction companies to kind of test the AWV in the
real world, Like, let's actually put this thing on real
construction sites and see if it ends up being a
(25:55):
useful tool. I think that this is actually a great
example of a robot the engineer build to perform a
specific function with a form that supports that function. I
talked about this earlier when we chatted about the Optimus
robot a few episodes ago. Where building a humanoid robot
is cool, like it's neat to see humanoid robots, no
(26:17):
doubt about it. They are fascinating, they are incredibly complicated.
It's impressive work, but it's not always or not necessarily
the best tool for the job. Sometimes it's better to
design a robot that is engineered to tackle a specific
task as efficiently as possible, which may not have anything
(26:37):
to do with the human form, and then you get
great results. If you try to create a humanoid robot
that can do anything, often it doesn't do anything very well,
Like it can do lots of different stuff, but it's
not necessarily performing at the top level. Whereas if you
build specific purpose built robots to do a small group
(26:59):
of tasks, you can get much better results. Typically, we're
just at that stage, like humanoid robots are really complicated
and difficult to pull off. So I think Honda's approach
makes way more sense than companies like Tesla that are
pushing this humanoid approach, at least in the near term.
(27:21):
Maybe in the future we'll get to a point where
building a humanoid robot that's really good at everything will
be a relatively trivial task. But right now, just making
them walk or be able to open a door and
walk through without falling over is harder than it sounds. Finally,
Japan's H three rocket didn't do so well this week
(27:41):
in its first test flight. So this is a new
launch vehicle that Japan's government has developed to put payloads
into orbit. Competitions getting really tight when it comes to
putting satellites up into space. So during its first launch,
the second stage of the vehicle failed to ignite, so
(28:03):
the administrators of Japan's space program gave the order to
the vehicle for it to self destruct. The vehicle did
self destruct. It came crashing down the ocean off the
coast of the Philippines, and Japan says there are no
reports of any injuries or damage caused by the wreckage
falling to Earth. But what it was meant to do
(28:25):
was to put a satellite called the Advanced Land Observing
Satellite three into orbit, and this satellite's purpose was to
monitor conditions on the ground to help the government coordinate
efforts in the wake of a disaster. And it also
carried some other tools for the defense ministry that would
be able to detect ballistic missile launches. And that makes
(28:48):
a lot of sense because if you know about Japan
and North Korea, you know that North Korea will occasionally
hold test launches and fire missiles into the Sea of Japan.
So having a system that detects those sorts of things
totally makes sense. But all of that obviously was lost
because the vehicle failed to attain orbit and had to
(29:09):
be put into self destruct mode. Numerous administrators in Japan's
space agency have expressed regret over the failure and apologies
for the failed launch. There are even questions about how
this might affect the government's space industry moving forward, which
it sounds incredible to me because, I mean, obviously any
failure is regrettable. Right, you don't want to ever see
(29:33):
a failure, but technology does fail, and we're talking about
rocket science. There's a reason you say, well, that's not
rocket science because rocket science is hard. It is really hard.
But I think this also is tough because it follows
on Japan's previous launch vehicle, the H two A, which
(29:55):
had a reputation for being extremely reliable, had a successful
launch eight of around ninety seven point eight percent. So
when you're following that track record and your first launch
out of the gate is a failure, I could see
how this could be a real black mark on the
program as a whole. So I'm not sure where Japan's
(30:16):
gonna go based on this failure, but yeah, I thought
I would cover that. And that's it for the News today, Tuesday,
March twenty three. Just a reminder tomorrow we have a
special episode of tech Stuff coming out, hosted by bridget
Todd of There Are No Girls in the Internet. I
look forward to hearing your thoughts on that show, and
(30:36):
I'll be back on Thursday with more tech news and
then it's off to Austin, Texas, where I'll be at
south By Southwest. So if you see me in Austin
over the weekend. You can wave. I'll probably be on
my way somewhere, probably Torchi's Tacos if I'm honest, because yes,
I am basic. And the taco of the month is
(30:57):
the Rosco, which is a chicken and waffles taco, and
y'all I got to get one. Okay, okay, Sorry kind
of lost the thread there. If you have suggestions for
topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
please reach out. You can do so on Twitter. The
handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW or you
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(31:20):
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(31:41):
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you? So before I talk about the news for Tuesday,
March seven, twenty twenty three, I want to give y'all
(00:24):
a heads up that tomorrow a special guest host takes
over the show, Bridget Todd, also known as the host
of There Are No Girls on the Internet, among many
other things, And I'm really excited to have y'all hear
this special episode. I don't want to spoil anything, but
I'm definitely looking forward to everyone getting a chance to
(00:46):
hear it. So make sure you tune in tomorrow to
get that special episode, and I'll be back on the
following Thursday. But now let's get to the news for today.
And first up, for a change, I really just have
one story explicitly about AI today, and it's about Microsoft's
(01:07):
incorporation of AI. This one was developed by open Ai
and it has to do with Microsoft's products for enterprises
for businesses. All right, So, first off, Microsoft had previously
invested a billion dollars in open ai and more recently,
the two organizations I've entered into a type of partnership,
Though details are scarce as to the extent of that partnership,
(01:31):
some folks estimate that the agreement has Microsoft investing ten
billion dollars with open AI over the next several years. Anyway,
this week, Microsoft has unveiled how it is integrating AI
into suits like power Platform, which is a platform with
tools for developers that kind of stuff, as well as
(01:54):
Dynamics three sixty five, which is used for enterprise resource planning. So,
in other words, these aren't not consumer facing products. You know,
if you don't happen to work in these fields, you'll
never really encounter them. They are meant to be tools
that businesses can use to optimize processes and stuff. So
the idea is that the AI will assist companies and
(02:15):
employees to do jobs, particularly those that are highly repetitive.
In other words, Microsoft's pitch is that this AI augments
what you're already doing, and thus the name they picked
copilot really makes sense. These tools are not intended to
replace decision makers. Instead, it's supposed to make their jobs
(02:36):
easier and less repetitive. And side note my own personal
opinion is. I think Tesla could probably take notes on
how Microsoft's naming approach went this way, because I think
Copilot is a much more responsible naming convention than say,
full self driving, when the actual technology is not full
(02:59):
self drive. Anyway, that being said, I haven't personally had
any experience using Copilot. It's really for stuff that's outside
my job duties, so I can't actually comment on the
quality of the tools performance, but supposed to do things
like help marketing departments identify new customers. For example, let's
(03:19):
say you've got a product or a service. Then you're
doing pretty well, but you're leaving money on the table
because you haven't identified people who would be really good customers.
You you never reached out to them because you weren't
aware of them or whatever. This tool is meant to
help people identify those potential customers and then craft communications
(03:40):
that are likely to resonate with them. That sort of thing. Further,
when building, say a message to potential customers, Copilot will
clearly label all the pieces of that communication that had
been crafted by AI, which will give real human beings
in whatever organization we're talking about a chance to review
(04:02):
these communications to make sure that everything's accurate and appropriate,
and you know, it doesn't end up just being a
message that says that, you know, robots should kill all
humans or something. Last week, I talked about how there's
a bill in the US House of Representatives that could
potentially call for the ban of TikTok. Well, the Senate,
(04:22):
which is the other branch of the US Congress, plans
to unveil a similar bill today. In both cases, the
aim really does go beyond TikTok. I mean, obviously the
app is a big reason for these proposals in both cases,
but in neither case is it exclusively the target. So
the Senate version is said to give the President of
(04:45):
the US the authority to restrict technology from foreign countries
if it's reasonable to suspect that those companies might be
using the tech to compromise the US's national security. And y'all,
this does get super tricky. I talked last week about
how the ACLU claims that banning TikTok would amount to
violating the First Amendment, which is the right to free speech,
(05:07):
and I honestly don't know about that one way or
the other. There's no doubt that as technology gets more advanced,
and starts to lean heavier on stuff like cloud computing
and has the potential to serve as a data gathering system.
We should be concerned, In fact, we should already be
concerned about this, because it's already happening all around us,
(05:30):
whether we're talking about companies that are foreign or domestic.
I mean, that is happening. That's what's going on with Meta,
it's what's going on with Google. Pretty much any big
tech company is doing this. But here, obviously, the concern
is tech companies that are ultimately located outside the United States.
From a national security perspective, I can understand that there's
(05:53):
a fear that foreign companies could potentially pose a threat.
We've already seen similar movements the US against foreign companies. So,
for example, the US banned telecom companies from using tech
from the Chinese company Huawei out of concern that that
could be used as a massive surveillance system. So Huawei
(06:15):
makes all sorts of networking equipment, among other things, and
the fear was that if telecom companies were integrating Huawei
systems within their infrastructure, that it could turn the telecommunications
industry in the United States into a giant espionage service
for the Chinese government. That was the fear. And you know,
(06:35):
we in the United States would much rather the NSA
do all the spying on communications within our country. Now
keep an American anyway. I haven't seen the proposed bill
yet because it wasn't released while I was writing this.
By the time you hear it, it may have already
been released. I will say that according to reports, it
does have bipartisan support, and we've seen other parts of
(06:58):
the world, like the EU, to a stronger stance against
letting information flow out of a region to foreign countries
without restriction. Right. The EU guards citizen data very carefully
and is quick to jump on companies that don't follow
the regulations within the EU, and I have long said
(07:19):
that the United States kind of fell behind on this.
So in some ways, I think this is correcting a
problem that has been around for ages. And of course,
if you look at China, it actually takes this whole
concept to an extreme right. It doesn't just limit what
(07:39):
goes out, it limits what comes in. You know, it
limits what citizens are able to access. And see you
can't even access lots of different Western based tools within China.
So there's clearly a spectrum here between letting everything go
flow in and flow out, everyone access everything and let
(08:01):
everything access us, and then the extreme of China, where
you take really authoritative control over what can be seen
and accessed. And I don't think either extreme is good.
I think you need to find someplace in the middle
where things work out properly. And I honestly don't know
where this Senate bill is going to fall along that spectrum.
(08:22):
I haven't had chance to read it yet, but I'm
sure i'll talk about this later on this week once
we have more information, and I definitely want to see
moves that will protect citizens without escalating into an issue
where the United States just becomes even more isolationist and
insular than we already are. Okay, do you remember Cambridge
(08:46):
Analytica and that scandal, So essentially a political marketing company
was using data that had been collected by an app developer,
a Facebook app developer who had crafted a survey app
for Facebook. Now, back in the days when this app
was created, Facebook's API was not particularly careful about the
kinds of information and app could gather, so it was
(09:09):
possible to design an app to scoop up all sorts
of data even if that information had nothing to do
with whatever the app was doing. In the Cambridge Analytica case,
this included getting a look at folks who hadn't even
used the app themselves. And here's how it would work.
Person A decides that they want to install this app
(09:31):
and take the survey, partly because it's a paid survey,
so they have an incentive, a monetary incentive to participate.
So they install the app on Facebook and they take
the survey. Now, persons B through Z, who happened to
be friends with person A, they don't download the app.
They don't install the app and take the survey. However,
(09:53):
the app gets access to person A's views as if
it were person a. So in other words, it can
actually look at all the profiles of all the friends
that person A has as if it were person A.
So it can collect all this information on persons B
through Z, even though none of them consented to have
(10:16):
their data shared. They didn't have a say in this. Well,
now Australia, nearly a decade after all this happened, is
hearing a case about this. The High Court is going
to hear a case that claims that as many as
three hundred thousand people in Australia had their data harvested
thanks to just fifty three people using the quids. Think
(10:40):
about that, fifty three people use this app and in
the process, around three hundred thousand people have their information
exposed and gathered by the app developer. And further, the
case claims that Facebook should be held accountable for allowing
this data harvest to happen. Now, since this incident that
happened nearly a decade ago, Facebook has subsequently beefed up
(11:03):
its restrictions. Further, the company is challenging the validity of
the case brought against it because at the time of
the incident, Facebook says it didn't have any commercial business
set up in Australia, no staff, no offices, no real
means of generating revenue within the country, nothing, and that
(11:24):
as such, the law that concerns this whole case, the
law that Facebook has been alleged to have broken, would
not apply because it has a prerequisite that the company
that carried out that broke the law rather carried out
business within Australia. So Facebook is saying, we didn't carry
out business in Australia, we didn't have any offices here,
(11:46):
we offered our platform here, but we weren't generating revenue.
There was no business being done. Now, there have been
lower courts that have disagreed with that conclusion, but Facebook's
pushing it as part of their defense. Now, if it
loses the case, the company faces a two point two
million dollars fine, which for Facebook that's not that much.
(12:10):
So even if the High Court ultimately rejects Facebook's arguments
and finds the company guilty, Facebook is not going to
be taking a massive hit when it's compared to its
overall revenue. And speaking of Facebook slash Meta, numerous outlets
like Bloomberg have reported that more layoffs are imminent at
the company. So if you remember Meta downsized by thirteen
(12:31):
percent late last year and actual numbers of employees, that's
around eleven thousand people who lost their jobs. According to Bloomberg,
that initial round of layoffs was really related to a
reorganization effort, which largely included cutting entire teams and also
managerial levels. The idea being that they wanted to flatten
(12:54):
out the hierarchy, so they didn't want to have as
many vertical levels between entry level employees and top brass.
So this was like a middle management clearinghouse kind of situation. However,
Bloomberg says that the upcoming layoffs will be more about
financial results than a reorganization, So it's possible we'll see
(13:18):
departments that are not heavily associated with revenue affected the most.
But time will tell a lot of people think that
this is going to unfold within the week or early
next week, so we'll just have to keep an eye out.
All right, we've got more news to cover, but first
let's take a quick break. We're back. UDN reports that
(13:49):
Intel has finalized its design of two nanometer and one
point eight nanimeter fabrication processes. Remember a nanometer is a
billion of a meter. However, when you hear these numbers,
it does not actually mean that Intel is about to
churn out chips that have components that measure two nanometers
(14:09):
or one point eight nanometers in size. It's actually just
a naming convention at this point. Once upon a time,
the numbers actually did refer to the size of the
individual components on a chip, but we abandoned that several
generations back. We kept the naming convention, which is odd
because it's a naming convention where the numbers keep going down,
(14:32):
but those numbers don't actually refer to the size of
anything on the chip anymore. Also, I should mention that
these processes have been designed but not actually built out.
So in other words, Intel has come out up with
the approach they're going to take, but they haven't actually
created the manufacturing process itself. So we're not going to
get chips right away that have these new features on them.
(14:56):
And if you're wondering why we don't go smaller anymore, really,
when it comes down to it, I mean, some stuff
does get shrunk from generation to generation, but not as
much as what the Naming Convention would have you think.
And the big reason for that comes down to quantum physics.
If you make components small enough, then quantum mechanics come
(15:17):
into play and electrons will decide to do whatever the
heck they want to do instead of following these careful
pathways you built for them with your transistors and whatnot.
That's being a little flippant, but it's also true anyway.
Intel is introducing a lot of stuff all at once
with the one point eight nanimeter fabrication process, also known
as the eighteen A process. The A stands for Angstrom
(15:40):
because you know, you have to go down from the
nanoscale to the Angstrom scale. Intel has a new transistor
design with this eighteen A approach. It is shrinking some
components so some things are getting smaller, and also has
added backside power delivery. And as Tom's Hardware point out,
(16:01):
there's a lot of stuff that has been incorporated into
this new design. It's a bold and potentially risky approach.
So typically what Intel does is follow a pretty standard
tick talk pattern, which means it comes up with a
new design for chip architecture, and then it builds a
(16:21):
chip based on that design. Then in the next generation
it optimizes that design, and then after optimizing the previous design,
Intel goes and makes another new design. So it goes
talk tick talk, So new architecture optimization, new architecture optimization.
Once upon a time, the architecture really did refer more
(16:43):
to shrinking things down, Like you would design an architecture
and then the next generation you would shrink it down.
The next generation you would build a new architecture based
on that new size you had reached, then you would
shrink it down. That kind of thing. We're kind of
beyond that at this point anyway, we're not likely to
see any chips based off this new process for at
(17:05):
least a year. Intel hopes to have it in place
by early twenty twenty four. Earlier on in this episode,
I talked about how Huawei has come under suspicion by
the US government, which then pushed telecom companies to ditch
Huawei equipment in their networks. Well, in another Huawei related story,
the company recently participated as an exhibitor at the Mobile
(17:28):
World Congress event in Spain, and visitors to Huawei's booth
were given personal security badges. They had to wear them
while they were in the booth, and they were meant
to hand the badges back when they were ready to
leave the booth. Only some folks forgot to hand the
badges back and they ultimately walked off with them, and
then some of them just left their badges lying around,
(17:49):
And then of course people got a little curious and
they took the badge which was on a lanyard, one
of those extending lanyards where you got the little plastic
clip that has the spool in site it so you
can extend and retract your badge. Well, someone found out
that inside that plastic clip, there was a tiny circuit board,
(18:10):
like they popped the clip open, and besides the spool
for the lanyard there was a chip, And so folks
started to speculate what this circuitry could be. Was Whahwei
trying to track people? So the company said, essentially yeah,
because those badges were meant to track where people were
going within the booth and how much time they were
(18:33):
spending at specific parts of the booth, that kind of thing.
This in turn would inform Huawei about what people were
most interested in. Folks were expected to hand over the
badges after the end of their visit, so it wasn't
like Huawei was trying to bug someone and track all
their movements throughout all of Mobile World Congress. They were
(18:53):
just really, according to what they're saying, interested in what
people were doing when they were actually visiting Huawei's booth.
Now there's concerned that individual badges could be connected to
specific people, like if they were personalized. I don't know
if they were personalized because the report I read it
and go into detail, but if they were, then there's
some concern about that data being linked to a specific individual.
(19:17):
But huawehas said that they're following their privacy policy, they're
going to protect that information. That that's not really what
they're really focused on. They're looking at what parts of
their booth design were effective and what wasn't. Honestly, I
get the feeling this is a story that's more innocent
than malicious. I didn't see anything to indicate that the
circuitry could really do anything sinister. It looks like it's
(19:41):
a passive RFID and Bluetooth system, so something that when
it passes within range of an emitter can reflect back
a response which just gives the system information of where
someone is and how long they are there. It didn't
look like it was capable of doing more than that
to me, but that was at a casual glance based
(20:03):
upon some photographs, and I just think that this one
is probably not that big of a deal. Honestly, I
think Huawei is pretty much telling the truth here. However,
it does really illustrate how Huawei has a reputation associated
with it. Whether that reputation is fair or not is
up for debate, but I think it shows that there's
(20:23):
this kind of cloud of suspicion that's associated with the company.
In a new segment that I'd like to call y'all
got to read this. I want to give a shout
out to Wired. Wired published a piece that's titled Inside
the Suspicion Machine, and it's about governments using systems that
reduce people to data points for the purposes of making
(20:45):
really important decisions regarding those people. It opens talking about
a welfare system in Europe and how such an algorithmic
approach can be used by administrators of these systems to
determine who is taking advantage of the system. As Wired
points out, they said, it's not like it's being used
(21:07):
to determine how much welfare a person requires, but rather
how likely is it that this person is abusing the system,
like it's taking an accusatory stance out of the gate. Well,
this reminds me a lot about a story we covered
recently about how a lot of HR leaders expect that
(21:28):
they will at least partly be relying on AI and
algorithms when it comes to making layoff decisions. So to
do that, you kind of have to reduce people into
a collection of data points so that an algorithmic system
can actually make decisions, and compare this set of numbers
against this set of numbers. But there are a lot
of dangers with this approach, including bias potentially leading to
(21:51):
specific populations of people being disproportionately targeted and affected by
these kinds of decisions. Now, the piece on Wired is extensive,
it is thorough, it is a great read. So I
recommend go check out the piece again. It's on Wired.
It's titled Inside the Suspicion Machine. Also, just for the
(22:13):
interest of full disclosure, I do not know any of
the people who contributed to that article. I do not
have any connection with Wired other than being a subscriber.
It's just my recommendation as someone who reads a lot
about tech. You know, in the early days of the pandemic,
when everyone was scrambling to find ways to work in
a suddenly decentralized remote approach, conference tools like Zoom really
(22:37):
took off, followed closely by people determined to disrupt work
being done through these tools. Well, we haven't emerged from
the disruption stage yet because recently a meeting that was
being held by the US Federal Reserve had to be
canceled in process due to a stream hijacker who blasted
(22:58):
pornographic content to the attendees of the Zoom meeting, which
was like a couple hundred people. I think now you
might remember there were similar stories from just a couple
of years ago about people who found that they could
access corporate meetings that failed to protect their links, and
also that didn't use any kind of password protection. I
saw a rapid adoption throughout the industry of things like
(23:22):
protected links and passwords after that kind of happened because
it was easy to do. It was pretty easy to
find links that were being shared publicly, but they weren't
intended to be public meetings, and then people would just
crash them. So this is kind of similar to that.
The Federal Reserves Brent Jarks issued an apology for the
(23:43):
incident and committed to finding out how the hijack happened
and how to prevent it from happening again. Okay, I've
got a couple more news stories, but before I get
to those, let's take another quick break. We're back. So,
(24:05):
Engadget has a piece about Honda's newest robot, which, unlike
the Tesla Optimus robot, and unlike Honda's own retired Asimo robot,
isn't humanoid. It's not built to look like a human.
It doesn't have legs and arms, no, Instead, Honda's robot
is actually the third generation of its autonomous work vehicle
(24:29):
or a w V design, So it's a type of
kind of self guided electric wagon. It's meant to carry
payloads and has a large enough surface flat surface that
can carry two pallets worth of payload, and it can
support up to two thousand pounds per go. It has
(24:51):
a top speed of around ten miles per hour. That's
actually fairly darned zippy for something like this, and it
reportedly can go for twenty eight miles before needing a recharge.
I don't know if that's under a full load. It
might be less time under a full load. But this
is not the first automous work vehicle, like I said,
it's actually the third generation, and Honda says it is
(25:12):
capable of working either by remote control, so you could
have someone actually steering this remotely, or it can operate
completely autonomously. Honda anticipates that the AWV will have utility
in environments like warehouses and construction sites and that kind
of thing. That it's designed to also be able to
(25:34):
travel over rough terrain, so a construction site would be fine.
So Honda now is looking to form strategic partnerships with
construction companies to kind of test the AWV in the
real world, Like, let's actually put this thing on real
construction sites and see if it ends up being a
(25:55):
useful tool. I think that this is actually a great
example of a robot the engineer build to perform a
specific function with a form that supports that function. I
talked about this earlier when we chatted about the Optimus
robot a few episodes ago. Where building a humanoid robot
is cool, like it's neat to see humanoid robots, no
(26:17):
doubt about it. They are fascinating, they are incredibly complicated.
It's impressive work, but it's not always or not necessarily
the best tool for the job. Sometimes it's better to
design a robot that is engineered to tackle a specific
task as efficiently as possible, which may not have anything
(26:37):
to do with the human form, and then you get
great results. If you try to create a humanoid robot
that can do anything, often it doesn't do anything very well,
Like it can do lots of different stuff, but it's
not necessarily performing at the top level. Whereas if you
build specific purpose built robots to do a small group
(26:59):
of tasks, you can get much better results. Typically, we're
just at that stage, like humanoid robots are really complicated
and difficult to pull off. So I think Honda's approach
makes way more sense than companies like Tesla that are
pushing this humanoid approach, at least in the near term.
(27:21):
Maybe in the future we'll get to a point where
building a humanoid robot that's really good at everything will
be a relatively trivial task. But right now, just making
them walk or be able to open a door and
walk through without falling over is harder than it sounds. Finally,
Japan's H three rocket didn't do so well this week
(27:41):
in its first test flight. So this is a new
launch vehicle that Japan's government has developed to put payloads
into orbit. Competitions getting really tight when it comes to
putting satellites up into space. So during its first launch,
the second stage of the vehicle failed to ignite, so
(28:03):
the administrators of Japan's space program gave the order to
the vehicle for it to self destruct. The vehicle did
self destruct. It came crashing down the ocean off the
coast of the Philippines, and Japan says there are no
reports of any injuries or damage caused by the wreckage
falling to Earth. But what it was meant to do
(28:25):
was to put a satellite called the Advanced Land Observing
Satellite three into orbit, and this satellite's purpose was to
monitor conditions on the ground to help the government coordinate
efforts in the wake of a disaster. And it also
carried some other tools for the defense ministry that would
be able to detect ballistic missile launches. And that makes
(28:48):
a lot of sense because if you know about Japan
and North Korea, you know that North Korea will occasionally
hold test launches and fire missiles into the Sea of Japan.
So having a system that detects those sorts of things
totally makes sense. But all of that obviously was lost
because the vehicle failed to attain orbit and had to
(29:09):
be put into self destruct mode. Numerous administrators in Japan's
space agency have expressed regret over the failure and apologies
for the failed launch. There are even questions about how
this might affect the government's space industry moving forward, which
it sounds incredible to me because, I mean, obviously any
failure is regrettable. Right, you don't want to ever see
(29:33):
a failure, but technology does fail, and we're talking about
rocket science. There's a reason you say, well, that's not
rocket science because rocket science is hard. It is really hard.
But I think this also is tough because it follows
on Japan's previous launch vehicle, the H two A, which
(29:55):
had a reputation for being extremely reliable, had a successful
launch eight of around ninety seven point eight percent. So
when you're following that track record and your first launch
out of the gate is a failure, I could see
how this could be a real black mark on the
program as a whole. So I'm not sure where Japan's
(30:16):
gonna go based on this failure, but yeah, I thought
I would cover that. And that's it for the News today, Tuesday,
March twenty three. Just a reminder tomorrow we have a
special episode of tech Stuff coming out, hosted by bridget
Todd of There Are No Girls in the Internet. I
look forward to hearing your thoughts on that show, and
(30:36):
I'll be back on Thursday with more tech news and
then it's off to Austin, Texas, where I'll be at
south By Southwest. So if you see me in Austin
over the weekend. You can wave. I'll probably be on
my way somewhere, probably Torchi's Tacos if I'm honest, because yes,
I am basic. And the taco of the month is
(30:57):
the Rosco, which is a chicken and waffles taco, and
y'all I got to get one. Okay, okay, Sorry kind
of lost the thread there. If you have suggestions for
topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
please reach out. You can do so on Twitter. The
handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW or you
can reach out on the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download,
(31:20):
it's free to use. You put tech Stuff in the
little search field. It'll pop right up and you'll see
on the tech Stuff page there's a little microphone icon.
If you click on that, you can leave me a
voice message up to thirty seconds in way, and I'll
talk to you again and really soon. Tech Stuff is
(31:41):
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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