March 28, 2023 • 35 mins
An analyst predicts that there's a 90% chance the US will ban TikTok unless there are drastic changes at the company. A legend in the tech industry passes away. And why does NVidia's CTO say that cryptocurrencies serve no use in society?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He 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. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday,
March twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, and we start off
(00:26):
with a little bit of sad news. So last Friday,
Gordon Moore passed away at the age of ninety four.
That's a ripe old age. Now I plan to do
an episode about more to really go into detail about
his life and contributions. But he is someone that I
have talked about a lot in past episodes of tech
(00:48):
Stuff because he's a pretty important person in the world
of tech. He's the man who first observed that semiconductor
fabrication companies had followed a particular trajectory, namely that the
companies were cramming twice as many components onto a square
inch of silicon every two years or so. So if
(01:11):
you were able to put ten thousand components on a
square inch of silicon in year one, two years later,
by year three, you're cramming twenty thousand on there by
year five. That would go up to forty thousand and
so on, and it gets real big, real fast. Now,
this observation came to be known as Moore's law, which
(01:32):
is funny because you know, he was making an observation
and saying that you could predict what would happen based
on this observation, But he wasn't saying that there was
some fundamental law that drove this. His initial observations were
really more about economic factors that would fund that kind
of innovation and make it necessary in order to be competitive.
(01:55):
But later interpretations of his observation would kind of boil
down to a predict that computing processing power doubles every
two years or so. But Moore's law was just one
of his big contributions. Another huge one is that he
was a co founder of Intel. So we'll do a
full episode about him and his contributions soon, and in
(02:16):
the meantime, Fair Winds and following sees Gordon Moore. Markets
Insider reports that, according to analyst Dan Ives, TikTok has
a ninety percent chance of being banned in the US
if things continue as they are now. This follows shall
she Chew, which is TikTok's CEO appearing before Congress. Now,
(02:40):
as I mentioned last week, I was writing and recording
during his testimony, so I had to follow up on
what was going on, and I couldn't watch very much
of it, y'all because it was not pretty. There was
some real ethnocentric xenophobic behavior on display in Congress, some
of it really really ugly, and there were a lot
(03:03):
of assumptions about choose heritage. It seemed like everybody was
assuming he's Chinese. He's not. He comes from Singapore, not China.
There was also a lot of railroading where like no
one was asking a question at one point, like they
were essentially making accusations and statements but not asking anything.
(03:24):
And it's kind of like counterproductive. I mean, if someone's
there to provide testimony, you're supposed to ask them questions
so that they can answer, then you follow up. And
it looked like a lot of them, the people in
Congress were kind of using it to grandstand, and you know,
a lot of TikTok folks, like a lot of users
(03:47):
took the ball and ran with it by creating a
bunch of satirical videos pointing out how Congress was behaving.
Of course, TikTok users have their own bias obviously, so
according to Ives the analyst, TikTok has a couple of
options if it wants to avoid being obliterated, and it's
(04:09):
pretty much what we heard a few years back when
former President Donald Trump started to go after TikTok. The
company can either hold an initial public offering or IPO
and go public and in the process presumably break its
connection with byte Dance, though you would have to take
some real steps to make sure that happened, or it
(04:30):
could be sold off to some other company, you know,
not a Chinese company. Now. Honestly, I don't know how
to feel about all this. On the one hand, China
very much is focused on digital espionage. Like that's not
a controversial thing to say. China's actively pursuing digital espionage
(04:51):
in multiple venues. I don't know that TikTok's one of
them necessarily, it wouldn't surprise me if it were. But
you know, it's there's no denying China's in that business.
But then so is everybody else, including the United States.
It's not like China's the outlier here. You can also
argue that even the private and public companies here in
(05:13):
the US and the tech sector are, when you get
down to it, focused on digital espionage with regard to users.
They are in the business of buying and selling personal
information about people like us. No one is clean on this.
In other words, like you can't just single out TikTok
and say you are bad because you're collecting information, because
(05:35):
that's the truth across the board. You could say everyone's
bad and that would be true. But yeah, singling out
TikTok for that specific purpose doesn't hold a lot of water. Now,
the national security component does complicate things further, but it
also creates an opening for xenophobic ideologies to take hold,
(05:55):
which gets pretty ugly. Like there are elements of the
rhetoric that we're starting to sound a bit like McCarthyism
from back in the nineteen fifties. If you don't know
what that is, you need to look up the Red
Scare and educate yourself. And you know, some of the
concerns might be based in reality, but they can become
(06:16):
exaggerated and also conflated with other things, and it just
can get very very ugly, very very quickly. So the
whole thing is a huge mess. And I sure as heck,
do not know what the best way forward is. I
just feel pretty comfortable saying whatever the best way happens
to be, that ain't the way we're going right now.
Joseph Cox of Motherboard has a piece about the FBI's
(06:39):
contract with a company called Team Simru or perhaps Simru
it's see why Mru, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
And the contract is to acquire what is called NetFlow data.
This is kind of like a big picture of view
of information that's moving across networks like the Internet. You
(07:00):
can see which servers are connecting to one another, transmitting
information from endpoint to endpoint. So Team Simru is able
to get this data by doing deals with Internet service providers.
Team Simru offers ISPs threat detection services and in return,
the ISPs trade this data, which Team Simru then sells
(07:21):
to clients like the FBI. Apparently. Now. The reason this
is important is it marks a kind of loophole that
the FBI has leaned on in order to get an
eye on data transmissions without first going through the legal
process to do so lawfully. Right, instead of getting a warrant,
a digital warrant, they just buy the data outright. Now,
(07:44):
NetFlow is not quite the same thing as spying on
the actual information being exchanged itself. It can, however, include
a lot of stuff like what you are l you're visiting,
so you know which websites people are going to during
a given Internet session, and NetFlow can definitely provide clues
as to potential illegal activity, so you might be able
(08:05):
to find which servers are associated with a hacker group,
for example. But the issue is that metadata can tell
us a lot about a person by itself. Like you
might think the information within a conversation is important, and
it is, but the metadata about that conversation can give
you a lot of clues all on its own. Now,
(08:28):
I've mentioned this before, but there have been a lot
of demonstrations showing that with just a few data points
you can really narrow down the specific Internet users identity
with incredible accuracy and precision. So this practice of just
buying information from companies like team cymru it gets into
some really dangerous surveillance state territory. Here, if you'd like
(08:51):
to learn more, you can visit vice dot com and
just read the article. Here is the FBI's contract to
buy mass Internet data. The facial recognition company clear View,
which built out an enormous database of images using questionable means,
mainly scraping social network platforms to gather digital photos without
(09:13):
first getting the consent of users of those platforms, says
that it has facilitated almost a million searchers or US police.
This is according to the company itself that has made
that claim. They revealed this startling information and a piece
for the BBC. Clearview has received some high profile criticism
(09:35):
in the United States, and several cities here in the
US outright banned their police forces from using the service.
They say do not make use of clear Views services. Now,
as I've mentioned several times in the past, facial recognition
technology is far from perfect and frequently encounters issues when
identifying people of color in particular, and ultimately, these are
(09:58):
the same people who received dispropor or sets, scrutiny and
abuse from law enforcement. Making matters worse is that it's
very difficult to say which police departments have been frequent
customers for clear View, because there are very few laws
and regulations that require police to disclose that kind of information.
So this lack of transparency creates a further gap of
(10:20):
distrust between police and citizens, and scraping social media for
data like this typically goes against the terms of services
for those social networks. Facebook has come down hard on
companies that have tried to scrape Facebook in order to
gather data. Also academic researchers. Facebook's really gone hard against
(10:41):
academic researchers doing that. So essentially, companies like Meta slash
Facebook don't like anyone else being able to do what
they are very very definitely doing themselves. I mean it's
I don't have information on it. I cannot say with
evidence that they do, but it would shock me if
they are not making use of that technology that they
(11:04):
don't want anyone else to be able to use on
their platforms. Okay, with that cheerful note, let's take a
quick break. We'll come back with some more tech news. Okay,
we're back. So this past weekend, an organization called the
(11:28):
Military Cyber Professional Association, or MCPA, petitioned lawmakers to create
a new branch of the US military that would focus
solely on digital and cyber threats. The group, which consists
of folks who have worked in digital security within the military,
some of them current military officials, some of them former ones.
(11:50):
They say that one of the largest challenges that the
United States faces with digital warfare in mind is that
up to now, each branch of the military has its
own independent methodology to fight cyber threats, and there is
a unified office that can take some actions, but it's
(12:11):
not a full branch of the military. So the MCPA
is saying this creates gaps in US defenses and that
if we are to actually have a real strong national
security approach to cybersecurity, there needs to be a military
branch specifically dedicated to cyber warfare and defense. This branch
(12:33):
could establish best practices, it could spearhead projects to protect
the United States, and it would be a fully funded
branch of the military, as opposed to something that could
see its funding ebb and flow based upon the individual
branches of the military that already exist. We've already established
(12:57):
a new branch of the military here in the United
States in the recent past, the Space Force being the
most recent branch. So if this did happen, I mean
there is precedents, recent precedents. Before Space Force, it was
like seventy two years since the last time the US
had created a branch of the military. But Hey, we're
(13:20):
on a roll now, right, I mean two, that's a streak.
We can start creating branches for everything. Whether or not
anyone actually makes a move on this to turn this
proposal into something more actionable remains to be seen. There
does not appear to currently be a lot of behind
this in Congress or in the executive branch, so we
(13:44):
may not see any movement on this in the near future.
It may take a while. I do think that it's
not a bad idea to establish such a branch, to
have something that is well funded and can attract talent
and maintain and keep that talent in order to fight
off things like the various hacker groups that are constantly
(14:08):
poking at vulnerabilities within the United States to find a
way to get a foothold. I think it's important to
establish a defense against that, and the longer we wait,
the harder it will be to do it effectively. So personally,
I think it's not a bad idea. I'm not a
huge fan of creating more military necessarily, but this is
(14:30):
the way the future is going, and with the increase
in things like ai USE, it's going to be a necessity,
and I would rather see us be proactive than reactive.
I mean, we're already going to be at least a
little reactive, but you know, we could argue we're proactive.
Zoe Schiffer over at Platformer has a great article titled
(14:53):
the Secret list of Twitter VIPs getting boosted over everyone else,
which obviously reveals how some of Twitter's internal documents show
that the platform is being, let's say, inconsistent with how
it applies the rules. I'm sure this comes as a
massive shock to everyone, all right. So the heart of
the matter comes from Elon Musk saying that to hold
(15:16):
onto that blue verified check mark that some users have,
they're going to have to pony up the eight bucks
a month subscription fee to Twitter Blue. Or actually it's
more than that, if you're talking about a brand and
like a company as opposed to an individual. Elon Musk
says that this is really about treating everyone equally, that
(15:38):
people shouldn't be elevated over others with that blue check mark.
But already that's just a fricking lie, right, because if
it were about treating everyone equally, either you get rid
of the blue check mark entirely so no one has it,
or everybody gets the blue check mark, which is the
same thing as nobody having it, but you wouldn't have
(15:58):
to pay for it. That's not about treating people equally.
You're talking about a paid for version and a non
paid for version. That's not equal. Besides, the blue check
mark was never intended to be a status symbol. That's
why it turned into what it was meant to be.
Was a way for Twitter to show that it had
(16:20):
verified the identity of that Twitter account, and that Twitter
could vouch that that account actually did represent the person
or brand that it was connected to. So if you
saw I don't know Nicholas Holt on Twitter and there's
a blue check mark, you know, oh, that actually does
belong to the actor Nicholas Holt, or probably to his
(16:44):
PR personnel who handle his social media accounts, but you
would know that that's the official one and it's not
just someone claiming to be that. That was the reason
for the verified check mark. It was to verify the
person was who they said they were. But of course
the checkmark did become a sort of social capital kind
of thing, like people were like, I'm important enough to
(17:05):
have a check mark, and that this somehow raised them
in social status above everyone else on Twitter, where social
status means really nothing, I would argue. I mean, I
say that as someone who got a blue check mark anyway.
Now the new version is weird because what the blue
(17:26):
check mark means is that the person's willing to pay
a fee to keep that blue check mark. I don't
know when that actually comes into play. I haven't even
seen a message saying hey, you're gonna need to pay
a subscription to keep your blue check mark. It may
have come through and I just ignored it because I
don't pop on Twitter that much anymore. So it's entirely
possible that's just on me, not on Twitter. Anyway. It
(17:47):
turns out that this version, the new version, that Elon
Musk is talking about, is even less fair than what
we had heard before, because while he's saying, hey, you're
gonna have to pay if you want that blue check mark,
there are around thirty five VIP users of Twitter who
not only are secure with their status, they actually get
(18:09):
a boost from Twitter. They get higher visibility than everybody
else does so that they appear in more Twitter timelines.
Now it will come as no surprise that Elon Musk
is in there. We've talked about in the past, how
Elon Musk has his Twitter feed boosted above other stuff
so that he shows up in more feeds. But others
(18:31):
are also on that list, and it ranges from ultra
conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to the progressive politician Alexandria Okazia Cortez.
And then there's a few celebrities thrown in there. There's
some athletes in there, there's other politicians in there. It's
a real animal farm situation. You know, all Twitter users
(18:53):
are equal, but some are more equal than others. Probably
not a big surprise to most of you out there.
It wasn't a big surprise to me. But again, just
more evidence that things at Twitter are our topsy turvy.
And hey, if your account doesn't have that paid for
blue check mark, it sounds like your tweets ain't ever
(19:15):
gonna show up as a recommended tweet in the four
you page of Twitter. So if you go to Twitter,
you'll see there's like a four you thing, And the
stuff in the four you section is curated for you.
It's supposed to be stuff that the algorithm serves to
you that you are likely to find interesting or engaging.
(19:37):
That's the purpose. Actual practice varies because goodness knows. The
last time I checked it out, I was like, none
of this feels like it's for me, but whatever. So anyway,
if you don't have a blue check mark, if you
haven't paid that subscription fee, then your tweets aren't going
to be showing up in anyone's for you page. So
I guess this is an incentive to try and get
(19:59):
more people to pay for that check mark so that
they get increased visibility on the platform. This change will
take effect on April fifteenth, according to Elon Musk. Not
only that, but only the paid for accounts will be
able to vote in Twitter polls. Now. Musk says this
is to fight off the issue with AI bots, which
is funny because I thought his whole plan was to
(20:22):
eliminate bots from the platform. I remember distinctly him talking
about this in the lead up to him purchasing Twitter,
that this was a big part of what his plan was.
But I guess now he's saying, Nope, you can't do that.
It's impossible. So the bots are going to ruin everything
like the ding dang poles unless we make it a
paid for service. So this could also maybe have something
(20:46):
to do with the fact that, you know, a few
months ago, he ran a poll asking if he should
step down from Twitter, and the majority voted yes, and then,
you know, one of his followers later suggested that maybe
only people who are subscribe to Twitter Blue should be
able to vote in those kinds of polls, and he
was like, huh, interesting, world may never care. I mean,
(21:07):
the world may never know whatever. CNBC reports that Twitter
also applied for a subpoena against gethub, the collaborative developer platform,
because someone using the handle free speech Enthusiast shared what
appeared to be segments of Twitter's own source code. Get
Hub complied with the court order and remove the code,
so it's no longer up there. Interestingly, Musk himself had
(21:30):
previously said he would make the source code for Twitter's
recommendation algorithm and open source code in an attempt to
suss out if there is any actual bias or preference.
You know, there are a lot of allegations that Twitter
downplay conservative messaging and prevents it from getting as large
(21:51):
an audience as other messages, so making it open source
would allow people to comb through the code and see
is in fact bias there. Also to find any mistakes
in the algorithm, or a way to create the algorithm
so that it is more effective in what it's supposed
to do. And the whole idea is that this is
going to create better transparency and fairness moving forward. But
(22:16):
you know, it hasn't happened yet. And as we just said,
Twitter moved to strike source code off of GitHub, though
I don't know necessarily that the source code in question
related to the recommendation algorithm, the stuff that was on GitHub,
and obviously it should be done on Twitter zone terms.
I do believe that. I'm just I don't know when
(22:36):
we're going to see that code actually become open source. Okay,
I've got a few more news stories in the tech
world to cover before we wrap this up, so let's
take another quick break and we'll be right back. The
(22:58):
chief technology officer of Nvidia, guy named Michael Kagan, recently
dismissed cryptocurrencies, saying they don't quote bring anything useful for
society end quote. This is according to an article in
the Guardian. This is interesting. It was not that long
ago that Nvidio was selling truckloads of GPUs to the
(23:20):
crypto mining community. It was really big business, so much
so that it actually became very difficult for anyone else
to find a new GPU, and if you did find one,
chances are the price was marked up so high that
it would be difficult to justify buying one. The aftermarket
on these things was insane. You had people either buying
(23:43):
them up to use as crypto mining rigs, or buying
them up and then selling them at an insane markup
to gamers. But then Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that had fueled
this GPU frenzy, finally made the trend transition from proof
of work to proof of steak operations. So with proof
(24:05):
of work, you need a lot of computing processing power
to be a successful miner in the system and to
be awarded new crypto tokens by participating in that system.
But with proof of steak, you just have to have
a big old pile of cryptocins already, and then you
stake some portion of those crypto coins in the system,
(24:28):
and the more you stake, the more likely you are
going to make even more money. Well, once it made
that transition, you suddenly didn't need all those GPUs to
just churn away at all hours of day and night,
so really overnight the demand for GPUs plummeted because now
cryptomners had no use for them, and not every cryptocin
(24:52):
has moved off of proof of work. There are cryptocurrencies
out there that still depend on proof of work, like
Bitcoin being the big one. Bitcoin is such a big
fish that GPUs don't have enough output. They They're processing
power is nowhere close to being competitive for bitcoin mining,
(25:13):
so you wouldn't buy a GPU if you wanted to
try and be a bitcoin miner. And then for smaller
crypto tokens, you know, less valuable ones, GPUs are overkill
because you'd spend more on electricity bills than you would
make through mining, so it doesn't make sense to use
GPUs for that. So in other words, what I'm saying
(25:34):
is it sounds like a little bit of suspicious timing
for Kagan to say that that cryptocurrency offers nothing useful
to society. It certainly offers nothing really useful for Nvidia
right now, but like, why are you saying nothing? Like
it's nothing useful to society at this point. Now. I
don't mean to say that I disagree with them. I
(25:54):
actually am you know, very hard on cryptocurrencies. If you've
been listening to this show. You know that, But I
do feel like if ethereum, we're still proof of work.
If it hadn't made that transition, I dealt Kagan would
have said this, that's what I'm saying. Maybe he would have.
Maybe I'm being too cynical, but it seems to be
(26:15):
one of those things where, like, you know, there's a
nasty break up, one person breaks up with the other
and the other person's like, well, I never loved you anyway.
That's kind of what it feels like to me. Maybe
I'm being too harsh here, But what does Kagan say
is useful to society? Well, that would be AI. And
there's here's a big shock AI. A lot of those
(26:36):
applications lean hard on parallel processing, which happens to be
something that GPUs are really good at. So the thing
that no longer needs GPUs is useless to society, but
the thing that really does need GPUs is going to
be super useful. GOT it doesn't seem like there's any
bias going on there at all. Huh. Reuters reports that
(26:58):
the United States Commodity Trading Commission or CFTC, has sued Binance,
the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. They also sued Binance's founder,
Chong pen Xao Akacz. According to Reuters, the charge is
that Binance illegally quote offered and executed commodity derivatives transactions
(27:22):
on behalf of US persons end quote. Essentially, the CFTC
says that Binance was operating in such a way as
to avoid compliance with US laws securities laws in particular,
and Binance says that it has worked hard to make
sure that it doesn't have US users on its platform.
So even if it were doing the things that the
(27:42):
CFTC says it's doing, it doesn't apply because it didn't
involve any US transactions in the first place. There is
a US based version of Binance, and the relationship between
that entity and the main Binances it's kind of like
one of those Facebook relationship statuses. Know It's complicated. CNBC
(28:03):
reports that the giant Chinese e commerce company Ali Baba
is splitting into six business groups, and that these groups,
with the exception of one of them, could potentially spin
off to become their own independent company. Each group will
have its own CEO and its own board of directors,
and the groups include a cloud intelligence group, which current
(28:24):
Ali Baba CEO Daniel Joan will oversee a Talbau Tamaal
Commerce group which will focus on online shopping platforms. This
one will continue to operate as a subsidiary of Ali
Baba even if the other businesses spin off successfully. There's
there's a smart logistics company or business group, a global
(28:46):
digital commerce business group, a digital media and entertainment group,
and a local services group. Now the reason for this
is probably due to the fact that Ali Baba lost
around six hundred billion dollars in value over recent months,
and so this is an attempt to reorganize and allow
(29:07):
each business group to focus on what it does without
having to rely on the company as a whole to
support each business decision. So we'll see whether or not
this ends up having a net positive effect on the company.
Lift is getting a new CEO. According to CNBC, Logan Green,
(29:29):
the current CEO and a co founder of the company,
will step down on April seventeenth. David Risher, who formerly
worked at Amazon as an executive, will take over as
CEO of Lift. In addition, another co founder, John Zimmer,
who was serving as president of Lift, will be stepping
down and the Chairman of the board. Sean Agaroal will
(29:49):
step down as chairman but will remain on the board
of directors. Logan Green, the current CEO who's stepping down,
will take his place as chairman. So why the change, Well,
kind of like Ali Baba, Lift has been in a
really rough spot over the last year. Stock prices dropped
by around seventy percent year over year, So my guess
is that this is a big reorg push to try
(30:11):
and turn the company around and get those share prices
up and make stockholders happy. Amazon meanwhile, failed to get
a massive lawsuit thrown out of court last week. A
class action lawsuit alleges that Amazon engaged in anti competitive
practices that artificially drove prices higher through other retailers who
(30:31):
depend upon the Amazon platform. Namely, that Amazon had a
policy that prevents retailers from offering lower prices for goods
sold outside of Amazon if they also wanted to sell
those products on the Amazon platform. So it's that kind
of price fixing, is what the argument is here. The
judge hearing the arguments rejected Amazon's objections to the case,
(30:54):
so it can move forward through the court system. If
Amazon ultimately loses this case, it could face damages in
the billions of dollars, up to a potential one hundred
seventy two billion. Now that I expect it would ever
get to that. I think if Amazon lawyers suspected that
they would be unable to win the case, it would
(31:15):
go to a settlement. It would shock me if it
was otherwise. But still pretty massive deal there. And finally,
we've seen dozens of big companies announced massive layoffs for
the past few months, and Disney is no exception. Bob
Iger who quickly returned to Disney to replace Bob Chapeck
(31:35):
as CEO, and keep in mind Chapec was Bob Iger's replacement.
A few years ago, Iger said that Disney would be
downsizing to the tune of around seven thousand employees. Now
it sounds like the company's Metaverse team, which had around
fifty people in it, are among those who saw their
jobs eliminated. Now, I'm not sure that this is a
(31:59):
commentary on the Metaverse as a whole. You could see
this as Disney looking at something that at best is
going to take several years to become a thing and saying,
you know what, we need to focus our resources onto.
Here and now, and we can worry about the future
once we have stabilized, or you could look at it
as Disney losing confidence that the metaverse is ever going
(32:22):
to be anything more than a curiosity. Either way, it
really stinks for so many people to get hit with
job cuts. When it's happening across so many companies, particularly
in the tech sector, you really start to worry for
folks and hope that they can find a job that
makes good use of their skills and their knowledge and experience. Plus,
you know, it would be nice if it was a
job that they also liked. I guess, you know, you
(32:45):
can't ask for too much, I suppose, But yeah, I
don't know if this means that the metaverse is on hold.
I suspect that what we're seeing right now means that
it's going to take even longer for whatever the metaverse
is going to be for it to emerge, and it
may end up having a big effect on how the
(33:06):
metaverse emerges. It may mean that we get a very
different kind of metaverse at some point in the future
then we would if the economy hadn't gone into this
economic uncertainty that we're in right now. So hard to say,
I know again, just like cryptocurrency, I've been very skeptical
(33:29):
about the metaverse, but that's largely because I see it
as this poorly defined concept that a lot of companies
are trying to rush into to either claim a space
in when there's no real space there, or they're doing
their darnedest to be the entity that defines what the
(33:51):
metaverse is, which rarely ends up benefiting everybody. It largely
benefits whoever planted their flag in the first place. So
I'm still very skeptical about the whole thing. Also, I'm
getting older, Like we got to establish that every time, right,
I'm getting older, and as a person who's getting older,
(34:12):
I'm running into the risk of being unable to see
the potential benefits of emerging technologies. So I fully admit
that that's entirely possible. It could very well be that,
you know, in twenty years time, everyone will be looking
back on the metaversus being the truly revolutionary wave that
(34:34):
transformed the world for the better, and everybody's super happy
about it, and I'll just be the grouchy old man
in the shit in the woods who yells at passing clouds.
Entirely possible. I admit it. All right. That's it for
this episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well.
If you would like to reach out to me, do
so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech
(34:55):
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Or you can download the iHeartRadio apps free to downloads,
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(35:17):
Let me know what you would like to hear, and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
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. He 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. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday,
March twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, and we start off
(00:26):
with a little bit of sad news. So last Friday,
Gordon Moore passed away at the age of ninety four.
That's a ripe old age. Now I plan to do
an episode about more to really go into detail about
his life and contributions. But he is someone that I
have talked about a lot in past episodes of tech
(00:48):
Stuff because he's a pretty important person in the world
of tech. He's the man who first observed that semiconductor
fabrication companies had followed a particular trajectory, namely that the
companies were cramming twice as many components onto a square
inch of silicon every two years or so. So if
(01:11):
you were able to put ten thousand components on a
square inch of silicon in year one, two years later,
by year three, you're cramming twenty thousand on there by
year five. That would go up to forty thousand and
so on, and it gets real big, real fast. Now,
this observation came to be known as Moore's law, which
(01:32):
is funny because you know, he was making an observation
and saying that you could predict what would happen based
on this observation, But he wasn't saying that there was
some fundamental law that drove this. His initial observations were
really more about economic factors that would fund that kind
of innovation and make it necessary in order to be competitive.
(01:55):
But later interpretations of his observation would kind of boil
down to a predict that computing processing power doubles every
two years or so. But Moore's law was just one
of his big contributions. Another huge one is that he
was a co founder of Intel. So we'll do a
full episode about him and his contributions soon, and in
(02:16):
the meantime, Fair Winds and following sees Gordon Moore. Markets
Insider reports that, according to analyst Dan Ives, TikTok has
a ninety percent chance of being banned in the US
if things continue as they are now. This follows shall
she Chew, which is TikTok's CEO appearing before Congress. Now,
(02:40):
as I mentioned last week, I was writing and recording
during his testimony, so I had to follow up on
what was going on, and I couldn't watch very much
of it, y'all because it was not pretty. There was
some real ethnocentric xenophobic behavior on display in Congress, some
of it really really ugly, and there were a lot
(03:03):
of assumptions about choose heritage. It seemed like everybody was
assuming he's Chinese. He's not. He comes from Singapore, not China.
There was also a lot of railroading where like no
one was asking a question at one point, like they
were essentially making accusations and statements but not asking anything.
(03:24):
And it's kind of like counterproductive. I mean, if someone's
there to provide testimony, you're supposed to ask them questions
so that they can answer, then you follow up. And
it looked like a lot of them, the people in
Congress were kind of using it to grandstand, and you know,
a lot of TikTok folks, like a lot of users
(03:47):
took the ball and ran with it by creating a
bunch of satirical videos pointing out how Congress was behaving.
Of course, TikTok users have their own bias obviously, so
according to Ives the analyst, TikTok has a couple of
options if it wants to avoid being obliterated, and it's
(04:09):
pretty much what we heard a few years back when
former President Donald Trump started to go after TikTok. The
company can either hold an initial public offering or IPO
and go public and in the process presumably break its
connection with byte Dance, though you would have to take
some real steps to make sure that happened, or it
(04:30):
could be sold off to some other company, you know,
not a Chinese company. Now. Honestly, I don't know how
to feel about all this. On the one hand, China
very much is focused on digital espionage. Like that's not
a controversial thing to say. China's actively pursuing digital espionage
(04:51):
in multiple venues. I don't know that TikTok's one of
them necessarily, it wouldn't surprise me if it were. But
you know, it's there's no denying China's in that business.
But then so is everybody else, including the United States.
It's not like China's the outlier here. You can also
argue that even the private and public companies here in
(05:13):
the US and the tech sector are, when you get
down to it, focused on digital espionage with regard to users.
They are in the business of buying and selling personal
information about people like us. No one is clean on this.
In other words, like you can't just single out TikTok
and say you are bad because you're collecting information, because
(05:35):
that's the truth across the board. You could say everyone's
bad and that would be true. But yeah, singling out
TikTok for that specific purpose doesn't hold a lot of water. Now,
the national security component does complicate things further, but it
also creates an opening for xenophobic ideologies to take hold,
(05:55):
which gets pretty ugly. Like there are elements of the
rhetoric that we're starting to sound a bit like McCarthyism
from back in the nineteen fifties. If you don't know
what that is, you need to look up the Red
Scare and educate yourself. And you know, some of the
concerns might be based in reality, but they can become
(06:16):
exaggerated and also conflated with other things, and it just
can get very very ugly, very very quickly. So the
whole thing is a huge mess. And I sure as heck,
do not know what the best way forward is. I
just feel pretty comfortable saying whatever the best way happens
to be, that ain't the way we're going right now.
Joseph Cox of Motherboard has a piece about the FBI's
(06:39):
contract with a company called Team Simru or perhaps Simru
it's see why Mru, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
And the contract is to acquire what is called NetFlow data.
This is kind of like a big picture of view
of information that's moving across networks like the Internet. You
(07:00):
can see which servers are connecting to one another, transmitting
information from endpoint to endpoint. So Team Simru is able
to get this data by doing deals with Internet service providers.
Team Simru offers ISPs threat detection services and in return,
the ISPs trade this data, which Team Simru then sells
(07:21):
to clients like the FBI. Apparently. Now. The reason this
is important is it marks a kind of loophole that
the FBI has leaned on in order to get an
eye on data transmissions without first going through the legal
process to do so lawfully. Right, instead of getting a warrant,
a digital warrant, they just buy the data outright. Now,
(07:44):
NetFlow is not quite the same thing as spying on
the actual information being exchanged itself. It can, however, include
a lot of stuff like what you are l you're visiting,
so you know which websites people are going to during
a given Internet session, and NetFlow can definitely provide clues
as to potential illegal activity, so you might be able
(08:05):
to find which servers are associated with a hacker group,
for example. But the issue is that metadata can tell
us a lot about a person by itself. Like you
might think the information within a conversation is important, and
it is, but the metadata about that conversation can give
you a lot of clues all on its own. Now,
(08:28):
I've mentioned this before, but there have been a lot
of demonstrations showing that with just a few data points
you can really narrow down the specific Internet users identity
with incredible accuracy and precision. So this practice of just
buying information from companies like team cymru it gets into
some really dangerous surveillance state territory. Here, if you'd like
(08:51):
to learn more, you can visit vice dot com and
just read the article. Here is the FBI's contract to
buy mass Internet data. The facial recognition company clear View,
which built out an enormous database of images using questionable means,
mainly scraping social network platforms to gather digital photos without
(09:13):
first getting the consent of users of those platforms, says
that it has facilitated almost a million searchers or US police.
This is according to the company itself that has made
that claim. They revealed this startling information and a piece
for the BBC. Clearview has received some high profile criticism
(09:35):
in the United States, and several cities here in the
US outright banned their police forces from using the service.
They say do not make use of clear Views services. Now,
as I've mentioned several times in the past, facial recognition
technology is far from perfect and frequently encounters issues when
identifying people of color in particular, and ultimately, these are
(09:58):
the same people who received dispropor or sets, scrutiny and
abuse from law enforcement. Making matters worse is that it's
very difficult to say which police departments have been frequent
customers for clear View, because there are very few laws
and regulations that require police to disclose that kind of information.
So this lack of transparency creates a further gap of
(10:20):
distrust between police and citizens, and scraping social media for
data like this typically goes against the terms of services
for those social networks. Facebook has come down hard on
companies that have tried to scrape Facebook in order to
gather data. Also academic researchers. Facebook's really gone hard against
(10:41):
academic researchers doing that. So essentially, companies like Meta slash
Facebook don't like anyone else being able to do what
they are very very definitely doing themselves. I mean it's
I don't have information on it. I cannot say with
evidence that they do, but it would shock me if
they are not making use of that technology that they
(11:04):
don't want anyone else to be able to use on
their platforms. Okay, with that cheerful note, let's take a
quick break. We'll come back with some more tech news. Okay,
we're back. So this past weekend, an organization called the
(11:28):
Military Cyber Professional Association, or MCPA, petitioned lawmakers to create
a new branch of the US military that would focus
solely on digital and cyber threats. The group, which consists
of folks who have worked in digital security within the military,
some of them current military officials, some of them former ones.
(11:50):
They say that one of the largest challenges that the
United States faces with digital warfare in mind is that
up to now, each branch of the military has its
own independent methodology to fight cyber threats, and there is
a unified office that can take some actions, but it's
(12:11):
not a full branch of the military. So the MCPA
is saying this creates gaps in US defenses and that
if we are to actually have a real strong national
security approach to cybersecurity, there needs to be a military
branch specifically dedicated to cyber warfare and defense. This branch
(12:33):
could establish best practices, it could spearhead projects to protect
the United States, and it would be a fully funded
branch of the military, as opposed to something that could
see its funding ebb and flow based upon the individual
branches of the military that already exist. We've already established
(12:57):
a new branch of the military here in the United
States in the recent past, the Space Force being the
most recent branch. So if this did happen, I mean
there is precedents, recent precedents. Before Space Force, it was
like seventy two years since the last time the US
had created a branch of the military. But Hey, we're
(13:20):
on a roll now, right, I mean two, that's a streak.
We can start creating branches for everything. Whether or not
anyone actually makes a move on this to turn this
proposal into something more actionable remains to be seen. There
does not appear to currently be a lot of behind
this in Congress or in the executive branch, so we
(13:44):
may not see any movement on this in the near future.
It may take a while. I do think that it's
not a bad idea to establish such a branch, to
have something that is well funded and can attract talent
and maintain and keep that talent in order to fight
off things like the various hacker groups that are constantly
(14:08):
poking at vulnerabilities within the United States to find a
way to get a foothold. I think it's important to
establish a defense against that, and the longer we wait,
the harder it will be to do it effectively. So personally,
I think it's not a bad idea. I'm not a
huge fan of creating more military necessarily, but this is
(14:30):
the way the future is going, and with the increase
in things like ai USE, it's going to be a necessity,
and I would rather see us be proactive than reactive.
I mean, we're already going to be at least a
little reactive, but you know, we could argue we're proactive.
Zoe Schiffer over at Platformer has a great article titled
(14:53):
the Secret list of Twitter VIPs getting boosted over everyone else,
which obviously reveals how some of Twitter's internal documents show
that the platform is being, let's say, inconsistent with how
it applies the rules. I'm sure this comes as a
massive shock to everyone, all right. So the heart of
the matter comes from Elon Musk saying that to hold
(15:16):
onto that blue verified check mark that some users have,
they're going to have to pony up the eight bucks
a month subscription fee to Twitter Blue. Or actually it's
more than that, if you're talking about a brand and
like a company as opposed to an individual. Elon Musk
says that this is really about treating everyone equally, that
(15:38):
people shouldn't be elevated over others with that blue check mark.
But already that's just a fricking lie, right, because if
it were about treating everyone equally, either you get rid
of the blue check mark entirely so no one has it,
or everybody gets the blue check mark, which is the
same thing as nobody having it, but you wouldn't have
(15:58):
to pay for it. That's not about treating people equally.
You're talking about a paid for version and a non
paid for version. That's not equal. Besides, the blue check
mark was never intended to be a status symbol. That's
why it turned into what it was meant to be.
Was a way for Twitter to show that it had
(16:20):
verified the identity of that Twitter account, and that Twitter
could vouch that that account actually did represent the person
or brand that it was connected to. So if you
saw I don't know Nicholas Holt on Twitter and there's
a blue check mark, you know, oh, that actually does
belong to the actor Nicholas Holt, or probably to his
(16:44):
PR personnel who handle his social media accounts, but you
would know that that's the official one and it's not
just someone claiming to be that. That was the reason
for the verified check mark. It was to verify the
person was who they said they were. But of course
the checkmark did become a sort of social capital kind
of thing, like people were like, I'm important enough to
(17:05):
have a check mark, and that this somehow raised them
in social status above everyone else on Twitter, where social
status means really nothing, I would argue. I mean, I
say that as someone who got a blue check mark anyway.
Now the new version is weird because what the blue
(17:26):
check mark means is that the person's willing to pay
a fee to keep that blue check mark. I don't
know when that actually comes into play. I haven't even
seen a message saying hey, you're gonna need to pay
a subscription to keep your blue check mark. It may
have come through and I just ignored it because I
don't pop on Twitter that much anymore. So it's entirely
possible that's just on me, not on Twitter. Anyway. It
(17:47):
turns out that this version, the new version, that Elon
Musk is talking about, is even less fair than what
we had heard before, because while he's saying, hey, you're
gonna have to pay if you want that blue check mark,
there are around thirty five VIP users of Twitter who
not only are secure with their status, they actually get
(18:09):
a boost from Twitter. They get higher visibility than everybody
else does so that they appear in more Twitter timelines.
Now it will come as no surprise that Elon Musk
is in there. We've talked about in the past, how
Elon Musk has his Twitter feed boosted above other stuff
so that he shows up in more feeds. But others
(18:31):
are also on that list, and it ranges from ultra
conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to the progressive politician Alexandria Okazia Cortez.
And then there's a few celebrities thrown in there. There's
some athletes in there, there's other politicians in there. It's
a real animal farm situation. You know, all Twitter users
(18:53):
are equal, but some are more equal than others. Probably
not a big surprise to most of you out there.
It wasn't a big surprise to me. But again, just
more evidence that things at Twitter are our topsy turvy.
And hey, if your account doesn't have that paid for
blue check mark, it sounds like your tweets ain't ever
(19:15):
gonna show up as a recommended tweet in the four
you page of Twitter. So if you go to Twitter,
you'll see there's like a four you thing, And the
stuff in the four you section is curated for you.
It's supposed to be stuff that the algorithm serves to
you that you are likely to find interesting or engaging.
(19:37):
That's the purpose. Actual practice varies because goodness knows. The
last time I checked it out, I was like, none
of this feels like it's for me, but whatever. So anyway,
if you don't have a blue check mark, if you
haven't paid that subscription fee, then your tweets aren't going
to be showing up in anyone's for you page. So
I guess this is an incentive to try and get
(19:59):
more people to pay for that check mark so that
they get increased visibility on the platform. This change will
take effect on April fifteenth, according to Elon Musk. Not
only that, but only the paid for accounts will be
able to vote in Twitter polls. Now. Musk says this
is to fight off the issue with AI bots, which
is funny because I thought his whole plan was to
(20:22):
eliminate bots from the platform. I remember distinctly him talking
about this in the lead up to him purchasing Twitter,
that this was a big part of what his plan was.
But I guess now he's saying, Nope, you can't do that.
It's impossible. So the bots are going to ruin everything
like the ding dang poles unless we make it a
paid for service. So this could also maybe have something
(20:46):
to do with the fact that, you know, a few
months ago, he ran a poll asking if he should
step down from Twitter, and the majority voted yes, and then,
you know, one of his followers later suggested that maybe
only people who are subscribe to Twitter Blue should be
able to vote in those kinds of polls, and he
was like, huh, interesting, world may never care. I mean,
(21:07):
the world may never know whatever. CNBC reports that Twitter
also applied for a subpoena against gethub, the collaborative developer platform,
because someone using the handle free speech Enthusiast shared what
appeared to be segments of Twitter's own source code. Get
Hub complied with the court order and remove the code,
so it's no longer up there. Interestingly, Musk himself had
(21:30):
previously said he would make the source code for Twitter's
recommendation algorithm and open source code in an attempt to
suss out if there is any actual bias or preference.
You know, there are a lot of allegations that Twitter
downplay conservative messaging and prevents it from getting as large
(21:51):
an audience as other messages, so making it open source
would allow people to comb through the code and see
is in fact bias there. Also to find any mistakes
in the algorithm, or a way to create the algorithm
so that it is more effective in what it's supposed
to do. And the whole idea is that this is
going to create better transparency and fairness moving forward. But
(22:16):
you know, it hasn't happened yet. And as we just said,
Twitter moved to strike source code off of GitHub, though
I don't know necessarily that the source code in question
related to the recommendation algorithm, the stuff that was on GitHub,
and obviously it should be done on Twitter zone terms.
I do believe that. I'm just I don't know when
(22:36):
we're going to see that code actually become open source. Okay,
I've got a few more news stories in the tech
world to cover before we wrap this up, so let's
take another quick break and we'll be right back. The
(22:58):
chief technology officer of Nvidia, guy named Michael Kagan, recently
dismissed cryptocurrencies, saying they don't quote bring anything useful for
society end quote. This is according to an article in
the Guardian. This is interesting. It was not that long
ago that Nvidio was selling truckloads of GPUs to the
(23:20):
crypto mining community. It was really big business, so much
so that it actually became very difficult for anyone else
to find a new GPU, and if you did find one,
chances are the price was marked up so high that
it would be difficult to justify buying one. The aftermarket
on these things was insane. You had people either buying
(23:43):
them up to use as crypto mining rigs, or buying
them up and then selling them at an insane markup
to gamers. But then Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that had fueled
this GPU frenzy, finally made the trend transition from proof
of work to proof of steak operations. So with proof
(24:05):
of work, you need a lot of computing processing power
to be a successful miner in the system and to
be awarded new crypto tokens by participating in that system.
But with proof of steak, you just have to have
a big old pile of cryptocins already, and then you
stake some portion of those crypto coins in the system,
(24:28):
and the more you stake, the more likely you are
going to make even more money. Well, once it made
that transition, you suddenly didn't need all those GPUs to
just churn away at all hours of day and night,
so really overnight the demand for GPUs plummeted because now
cryptomners had no use for them, and not every cryptocin
(24:52):
has moved off of proof of work. There are cryptocurrencies
out there that still depend on proof of work, like
Bitcoin being the big one. Bitcoin is such a big
fish that GPUs don't have enough output. They They're processing
power is nowhere close to being competitive for bitcoin mining,
(25:13):
so you wouldn't buy a GPU if you wanted to
try and be a bitcoin miner. And then for smaller
crypto tokens, you know, less valuable ones, GPUs are overkill
because you'd spend more on electricity bills than you would
make through mining, so it doesn't make sense to use
GPUs for that. So in other words, what I'm saying
(25:34):
is it sounds like a little bit of suspicious timing
for Kagan to say that that cryptocurrency offers nothing useful
to society. It certainly offers nothing really useful for Nvidia
right now, but like, why are you saying nothing? Like
it's nothing useful to society at this point. Now. I
don't mean to say that I disagree with them. I
(25:54):
actually am you know, very hard on cryptocurrencies. If you've
been listening to this show. You know that, But I
do feel like if ethereum, we're still proof of work.
If it hadn't made that transition, I dealt Kagan would
have said this, that's what I'm saying. Maybe he would have.
Maybe I'm being too cynical, but it seems to be
(26:15):
one of those things where, like, you know, there's a
nasty break up, one person breaks up with the other
and the other person's like, well, I never loved you anyway.
That's kind of what it feels like to me. Maybe
I'm being too harsh here, But what does Kagan say
is useful to society? Well, that would be AI. And
there's here's a big shock AI. A lot of those
(26:36):
applications lean hard on parallel processing, which happens to be
something that GPUs are really good at. So the thing
that no longer needs GPUs is useless to society, but
the thing that really does need GPUs is going to
be super useful. GOT it doesn't seem like there's any
bias going on there at all. Huh. Reuters reports that
(26:58):
the United States Commodity Trading Commission or CFTC, has sued Binance,
the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. They also sued Binance's founder,
Chong pen Xao Akacz. According to Reuters, the charge is
that Binance illegally quote offered and executed commodity derivatives transactions
(27:22):
on behalf of US persons end quote. Essentially, the CFTC
says that Binance was operating in such a way as
to avoid compliance with US laws securities laws in particular,
and Binance says that it has worked hard to make
sure that it doesn't have US users on its platform.
So even if it were doing the things that the
(27:42):
CFTC says it's doing, it doesn't apply because it didn't
involve any US transactions in the first place. There is
a US based version of Binance, and the relationship between
that entity and the main Binances it's kind of like
one of those Facebook relationship statuses. Know It's complicated. CNBC
(28:03):
reports that the giant Chinese e commerce company Ali Baba
is splitting into six business groups, and that these groups,
with the exception of one of them, could potentially spin
off to become their own independent company. Each group will
have its own CEO and its own board of directors,
and the groups include a cloud intelligence group, which current
(28:24):
Ali Baba CEO Daniel Joan will oversee a Talbau Tamaal
Commerce group which will focus on online shopping platforms. This
one will continue to operate as a subsidiary of Ali
Baba even if the other businesses spin off successfully. There's
there's a smart logistics company or business group, a global
(28:46):
digital commerce business group, a digital media and entertainment group,
and a local services group. Now the reason for this
is probably due to the fact that Ali Baba lost
around six hundred billion dollars in value over recent months,
and so this is an attempt to reorganize and allow
(29:07):
each business group to focus on what it does without
having to rely on the company as a whole to
support each business decision. So we'll see whether or not
this ends up having a net positive effect on the company.
Lift is getting a new CEO. According to CNBC, Logan Green,
(29:29):
the current CEO and a co founder of the company,
will step down on April seventeenth. David Risher, who formerly
worked at Amazon as an executive, will take over as
CEO of Lift. In addition, another co founder, John Zimmer,
who was serving as president of Lift, will be stepping
down and the Chairman of the board. Sean Agaroal will
(29:49):
step down as chairman but will remain on the board
of directors. Logan Green, the current CEO who's stepping down,
will take his place as chairman. So why the change, Well,
kind of like Ali Baba, Lift has been in a
really rough spot over the last year. Stock prices dropped
by around seventy percent year over year, So my guess
is that this is a big reorg push to try
(30:11):
and turn the company around and get those share prices
up and make stockholders happy. Amazon meanwhile, failed to get
a massive lawsuit thrown out of court last week. A
class action lawsuit alleges that Amazon engaged in anti competitive
practices that artificially drove prices higher through other retailers who
(30:31):
depend upon the Amazon platform. Namely, that Amazon had a
policy that prevents retailers from offering lower prices for goods
sold outside of Amazon if they also wanted to sell
those products on the Amazon platform. So it's that kind
of price fixing, is what the argument is here. The
judge hearing the arguments rejected Amazon's objections to the case,
(30:54):
so it can move forward through the court system. If
Amazon ultimately loses this case, it could face damages in
the billions of dollars, up to a potential one hundred
seventy two billion. Now that I expect it would ever
get to that. I think if Amazon lawyers suspected that
they would be unable to win the case, it would
(31:15):
go to a settlement. It would shock me if it
was otherwise. But still pretty massive deal there. And finally,
we've seen dozens of big companies announced massive layoffs for
the past few months, and Disney is no exception. Bob
Iger who quickly returned to Disney to replace Bob Chapeck
(31:35):
as CEO, and keep in mind Chapec was Bob Iger's replacement.
A few years ago, Iger said that Disney would be
downsizing to the tune of around seven thousand employees. Now
it sounds like the company's Metaverse team, which had around
fifty people in it, are among those who saw their
jobs eliminated. Now, I'm not sure that this is a
(31:59):
commentary on the Metaverse as a whole. You could see
this as Disney looking at something that at best is
going to take several years to become a thing and saying,
you know what, we need to focus our resources onto.
Here and now, and we can worry about the future
once we have stabilized, or you could look at it
as Disney losing confidence that the metaverse is ever going
(32:22):
to be anything more than a curiosity. Either way, it
really stinks for so many people to get hit with
job cuts. When it's happening across so many companies, particularly
in the tech sector, you really start to worry for
folks and hope that they can find a job that
makes good use of their skills and their knowledge and experience. Plus,
you know, it would be nice if it was a
job that they also liked. I guess, you know, you
(32:45):
can't ask for too much, I suppose, But yeah, I
don't know if this means that the metaverse is on hold.
I suspect that what we're seeing right now means that
it's going to take even longer for whatever the metaverse
is going to be for it to emerge, and it
may end up having a big effect on how the
(33:06):
metaverse emerges. It may mean that we get a very
different kind of metaverse at some point in the future
then we would if the economy hadn't gone into this
economic uncertainty that we're in right now. So hard to say,
I know again, just like cryptocurrency, I've been very skeptical
(33:29):
about the metaverse, but that's largely because I see it
as this poorly defined concept that a lot of companies
are trying to rush into to either claim a space
in when there's no real space there, or they're doing
their darnedest to be the entity that defines what the
(33:51):
metaverse is, which rarely ends up benefiting everybody. It largely
benefits whoever planted their flag in the first place. So
I'm still very skeptical about the whole thing. Also, I'm
getting older, Like we got to establish that every time, right,
I'm getting older, and as a person who's getting older,
(34:12):
I'm running into the risk of being unable to see
the potential benefits of emerging technologies. So I fully admit
that that's entirely possible. It could very well be that,
you know, in twenty years time, everyone will be looking
back on the metaversus being the truly revolutionary wave that
(34:34):
transformed the world for the better, and everybody's super happy
about it, and I'll just be the grouchy old man
in the shit in the woods who yells at passing clouds.
Entirely possible. I admit it. All right. That's it for
this episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well.
If you would like to reach out to me, do
so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech
(34:55):
stuff HSW believe it. Even though there's no blue check
mark next to it, that's the brand for the show.
Or you can download the iHeartRadio apps free to downloads,
free to use. Navigate over to tech Stuff by putting
that into the little search field. It'll take you to
the tech stuff page. You'll see there's a little microphone
icon there. If you click on that, you can leave
me a voice message up to thirty seconds in late
(35:17):
Let me know what you would like to hear, and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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