Tech News: Proposed Laws to Protect Consumers

Here in the US, the government is looking at laws that could change how tech companies operate. Japan is looking into supersonic passenger flight technology. And Amazon is cracking down on fake reviews.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and a love
of all things tech. And this is the tech news
for Thursday, June one. And following up on antitrust news,

(00:28):
proposed piece of legislation here in the United States would
make it illegal for tech companies to prevent users from
removing pre installed apps on devices. So at the heart
of the matter here would be competitive advantage. And we'll
use Apple as an example. So currently Apple can and
does pre install its own apps on iPhones. Apple also

(00:52):
prevents users from being able to uninstall some of those apps.
So even if some other developer makes an iPhone app
that gets approved, goes into the iPhone App Store and
it does the same thing as a native Apple app,
you can't just swap them out. You can't uninstall the
Apple app and replace it with this new one. They

(01:15):
would have to sit side by side, so you could
install the new third party app, but the Apple app
would stay on your phone, mocking you, judging you. But
if this legislation becomes law, Apple would be required to
make its own apps removable so that people could choose
to go with a competitor if they wanted to. The

(01:35):
argument is that by making it impossible to remove the apps,
Apple is discouraging competition, and since Apple is the source
of both those apps and the hardware that those apps
run on, this is a big problem. There are currently
a few different pieces of proposed antitrust legislation in the
US that could have an enormous impact on the tech

(01:56):
industry should they actually be passed into law. So will
keep pace with the story as it develops. Meanwhile, in
the US Senate, a proposed bill would require companies to
make it easier for customers to cancel a service at
the end of a free trial, and it's being called
the Unsubscribed Act, And this would address situations in which

(02:18):
a company entices new customers with a free trial and
then switches those customers to a paid subscription service without
you know, much notice or an easy way to cancel out.
They would also affect companies that break out the monthly
rate of a service but they charge in larger increments,
like they'll say, oh, you'll get you know charged a month,

(02:41):
but then they actually make you pay for half a
year or a year all at once, which is not great, right,
because what if you change your mind about the service
you've already paid for, you know, six months you don't
want to have to pay for half a year or more,
and then a week in you realize this service isn't
for me. I think it's interesting to see more moves

(03:04):
to address consumer rights. We've seen that kind of a
few times in recent months, and I think this also
points to how more politicians have been on the receiving
end of these corporate policies. Typically here in the United States,
we see politics lag behind tech quite a bit because,
I mean, let's face it, a lot of politicians tend
to be old people who are perhaps not quite as

(03:26):
in touch with technology and tech services as younger people.
That's a pretty general statement. I get it, uh, And
I don't mean to say that all old people are
clueless when it comes to tech. I am rapidly becoming
an old person, and I like to think that, you know,
I got a clue or two. But politicians in particular
traditionally have not been on that bleeding edge of technology scale. Now,

(03:52):
while we're past the initial n f T craze, we've
got another one to talk about. Tim berners Lee, the
man who has since really invented the World Wide Web,
is now going to auction off and n f T
representing the original files used to create the first web pages.
Now again we need to talk about what an n
f T actually is. That initialism stands for non fungible token,

(04:16):
and that means it's a thing that represents something that
itself is not interchangeable. So a US dollar is interchangeable
with any other US dollar, or U S dollars interchangeable
with four U S quarters or twenty U S nickels,
and you get the point. But an n f T
represents a unique instance of something. However, that being said,

(04:39):
an n f T doesn't give the owner the right to,
you know, do anything with whatever it is that n
f T represents. It's more like you have a certificate
of ownership of that thing. Like if you've ever seen
ads for a company that will let you quote, purchase
and name a star, end quote. It's kind of like that,
except it's a token that sits on top a blockchain

(05:01):
and you can buy and you can sell n f
t s, so you can make them a commodity. But
they really just represent the idea of ownership in a
way that's so nebulous that it makes me grouchy. Thanks
a lot in f T s over in China, the
Chinese military is training AI combat pilots and using those

(05:21):
pilots to train human pilots. So human pilots have been
training with and against, depending upon how you view it,
AI controlled simulated aircraft. So this is all computer simulations.
So according to the military, the AI displays an incredible
ability to learn and apply knowledge and rapidly gain a

(05:42):
level of expertise similar to that of China's Golden Helmet squadron,
and the Golden Helmet is an elite group of human pilots.
The humans participating in the sessions say that the AI
pilots are able to adapt quickly, so you might defeat
them once using certain tactics, and then they would turn
around and use those exact same tactics in the next

(06:04):
matchup and defeat the human pilots. The project is really, again,
more about training up human pilots. It's not really about
creating autonomous fighter jets down the line, at least not yet.
Guy Snodgrass, a former U. S. Navy commander, expressed some
skepticism about the usefulness of this project. His point of

(06:25):
view is that the Chinese pilots might just be learning
how to fight against AI opponents rather than how to
engage with actual human pilots who may display very different
tactics and behaviors, and since we're not in a world
with robot jet fighters, that could end up being useless
in a real combat situation. Amazon appears to be removing

(06:46):
certain tech brands and online storefronts from the Amazon service,
and the reason behind this ties into the issue of
fake reviews, something that Amazon has really been struggling with recently.
Several brands have made it a practice to include a
card or a slip of paper inside the box of
various gadgets stuff like you know, charging cables or computer

(07:07):
mice or something like that, and those cards give you
an offer to get a like gift card usually or
credit in a store in return for posting a favorable
review on Amazon. Typically, the card has some instructions on
it to guide the consumer through that process of posting
the review and then sending it to the vendor in

(07:28):
order to verify that the review was posted, and in return,
the consumer gets a gift card or credit, so it's
kind of like bribing for a good review. This practice
does drive up reviews that might not actually reflect the
quality or reliability of a product, and Amazon has become
pretty sensitive to this problem of fake reviews recently, so
now Amazon appears to be removing entire brands from the store.

(07:51):
On a related note, Amazon has called social media platforms
to task, saying that they are helping perpetuate the fake
review problem. Amazon says that companies that deal in fake
reviews either as a vendor that's trying to get people
to positively review it's stuff or as kind of a
middleman service provider that allows other vendors to purchase good reviews,

(08:15):
they often turn to social media to recruit folks in
those efforts, and Amazon says that Amazon's alerted various social
media platforms about this problem and that the platforms have
traditionally been pretty slow to do anything about it. Now,
you could argue that Amazon's structure is what ultimately enables
the practice of fake reviews to flourish, but there is

(08:37):
no doubt that using social media to recruit more folks
to the effort is a problem. I don't think it's
fair to place all or even most of the blame
on social media. But I do think that a lot
of social media platforms, notably Facebook, have traditionally moved very
slowly to address problems with fraudulent, misleading, or deceptive practices

(08:58):
on the platform. Twitter is not much better. It's honestly
a really big mess. General Motors, the number one auto
brand in the United States, announced yesterday that the company
will invest thirty five billion dollars in electric vehicle technologies
through five That marks a significant increase in investment, and

(09:20):
it coincides with a general trend across the world that
sees auto companies moving away from producing fossil fuel powered
vehicles and moving more toward electric ones. According to Reuters,
a consulting firm called Alex Partners projects that by electric
vehicles will make up nearly of our all car sales,

(09:41):
and today it's more like two. We're definitely headed toward
a future in which all new vehicles will be electric vehicles.
And I should also add that while electric vehicles could
lead to a decrease in carbon emissions, though that also
depends upon where the electricity to power those vehicles has
come from. Evs are also the source of some pretty

(10:04):
serious environmental concerns. The lithium used in lithium ion batteries
is a substance that you know, people mind, and some
of those mining operations can have a catastrophic effect on
the environment, at least in the immediate area around the mines. Plus,
there are some serious concerns about worker welfare and safety
because many of these minds are in places where workforces

(10:27):
can be heavily exploited by companies that run the minds.
So I guess the moral of that story is that
these issues are really complicated and there are no simple solutions.
SpaceX is facing some tough questions from Texas law enforcement. Allegedly,
private security guards working for SpaceX denied people access to

(10:48):
a county road, a public road, in other words, a
road that SpaceX doesn't own, and the local government says
that it never gave SpaceX authorization to close down the
public roads, so by denying citizens the use of those roads,
those employees, the security guards, and potentially the company itself,

(11:09):
has broken the law. In addition, there are questions as
to whether the security personnel had the required licenses to
serve as security or to carry a weapon, though at
the time of the reporting, it was unclear as to
whether the security personnel in question were armed or not.
Earlier this year, the japan Supersonic Research Organization got off

(11:30):
the ground figuratively speaking, in an effort to develop supersonic
passenger jets. The organization now includes several Japanese aerospace and
manufacturing companies. There hasn't been a supersonic passenger jet since
the Concord, which operated for several years before some high
profile disasters and the harsh reality of economics forced the

(11:52):
company out of business. Creating a fuel efficient supersonic jet
is one of several challenges that One of the reasons
that was so expensive with the Concorde is just jet
fuel prices were really dragging down the company figuratively speaking, again,
because it's just too expensive to operate. You had to

(12:12):
charge higher and higher prices for for flights and eventually
get to a point where you kind of price yourself
out of the market. But another big challenge is to
limit the effects of sonic booms. When you travel faster
than the speed of sound, you create a sonic boom
and that travels with you. So if an aircraft is
flying faster than the speed of sound, there's a boom

(12:35):
that kind of trails behind the aircraft, and it does
so consistently as long as that aircraft is going faster
than speed of sounds. So anything the aircraft passes over
will experience a sonic boom shortly afterward. For that reason,
the Concords supersonic flight paths were restricted to being over
the Atlantic. Once they got to the point where they

(12:55):
were going to pass over land, they had to slow
down below supersonic speeds because nobody wants these enormously allowed
booms to pass over their their area, like it could
be strong enough to shatter glass in some cases. There's
no word yet if the Japanese are planning on restricting

(13:16):
their supersonic aircraft to flying just over the oceans when
they're in supersonic mode um and we probably won't see
these aircraft until about twenty thirty or so. However, the
engineers do say that the design of the aircraft they
have created should mean that it will produce a sonic
boom that's only half as loud as the Concords, so

(13:37):
that's some progress. There are a lot of other companies
and organizations around the world working on supersonic and hypersonic aircraft,
and a lot of them are working on ways to
try and minimize that sonic boom so that these aircraft
could travel not just over the ocean, but over land
as well at supersonic speeds. But that's something that's still

(13:59):
in development, and I mean there are big challenges like
how do you make something like that fuel efficient so
that it makes economic sense to operate it. If it's
too expensive to operate for anyone to ever bother flying
on it, well then there's doesn't too much of use,
does it. And that's it. That's all the news that
I have for you today, Thursday, June one. If you

(14:21):
have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future
episodes of tech Stuff, let me know on Twitter. The
handle is tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit

(14:42):
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