February 9, 2021 • 43 mins
Facebook COO claims the platform wasn't heavily used to plan the assault on the US Capitol on January 6th, but the Department of Justice begs to differ. Plus news about Tesla, why the developer for Terraria will not port the game to Google Stadia and rumors about a very expensive Apple VR product.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And this is the
news for Tuesday, February ninth one. On Monday, Facebook announced
(00:29):
that the company would take a stronger stance against posts
containing misinformation regarding vaccines. This is an escalation of earlier
Facebook policies. In October twenty, Facebook said it would no
longer sell ad space to parties that promoted misleading information
about vaccines. Then in December, Facebook upped the anti by
(00:52):
saying it would remove posts the elevated claims that had
been debunked by the World Health Organization or w HO.
But Monday's announcement broadens this approach behind vaccines for COVID
nineteen and encompasses all vaccines period. While Facebook used to
flag misleading posts and then just down rank them, you know,
(01:14):
not remove them, but reduce their rank, that would just
mean that they were less likely to show up in
users feeds. Now the company will actually remove posts promoting
false claims about vaccinations. Facebook worked with the World Health
Organization and other governmental agencies to create something like a
(01:35):
database of false or misleading claims. According to a Facebook
post on the matter, the company's stance on vaccines falls
under multiple user policies. For example, content that would promote
events intended to spread COVID nineteen on purpose, presumably in
the belief that catching it is better than being vaccinated
(01:57):
against it, would fall under the coordinating Harm policy. Because
it turns out Facebook is against coordinating harm, which frankly
is news to me. So I suppose other things that
would fall into this category would include, uh, Facebook pages
dedicated for big public events in places that have a
(02:19):
quarantine or lockdown in place, you know, That would presumably
fall under the coordinating harm policy. Meanwhile, under the Regulated
Goods policy, Facebook says it will prohibit posts that are
attempting to sell quote medical and respiratory face masks and
COVID nineteen test kits end quote. Apparently there are a
(02:42):
lot of parties out there selling stuff that's like a
counterfeit type of of medical mask or tests that haven't
actually been cleared by any regulatory agency, that kind of thing,
And it's a real bear to wade through. The legit
versus the illegitimate one, so Facebook saying, all right, we're
(03:04):
just not going to run those ads. Under the hate
speech policy, Facebook will remove content that suggests people who
share a protected characteristic are in some way, you know,
responsible for the virus, or they are spreading the virus
and so on. But this doesn't include national origin as
(03:25):
an outright band because Facebook states that it wants to
allow for posts about health statistics that are not hate speech.
Rather they are giving important information such as x percent
of Americans have caught COVID nineteen since the beginning of
the pandemic, something like that, And you wouldn't want to
(03:46):
put a full ban on uh nation of origin because
the information could be really useful. And there's a whole
list of prohibited content that falls under Facebook's Community Standards barrier,
and that includes a ton of stuff, including more broadly
debunked claims about vaccines in general, such as the claim
(04:07):
that they cause autism, despite the fact that you know
that claim has been thoroughly rejected and the researchers who
first proposed the link between vaccines and autism we're later
found to have essentially fabricated the whole thing, but the
idea has still stuck around and a lot of people
latch onto it. Facebook will now remove those posts when
(04:30):
they catch them, though I should add the language indicates
that this general policy really is only in effect for
as long as there is a COVID nineteen public health emergency,
so there's no telling if the company is going to
ease off on these restrictions later on down the road.
According to Facebook, the reason behind these changes comes from
(04:51):
the Facebook Oversight Board, which is the independent group that
would recently formed to review Facebook's content moderation policies. And
while we're talking about Facebook, Forbes published an article that
put claims made by the company's chief operating officer under
the microscope. The CEO of Facebook is Cheryl Sandberg, and
(05:12):
the specific claims were regarding the siege on the US capital.
On January six, Sandberg had said quote, I think these
events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our
abilities to stop hate, and don't have our standards and
don't have our transparency end quote. Which yikes. Okay, as
(05:35):
you guys probably have gathered, because I am not subtle
about it, I'm pretty critical of Facebook and how it
enforces or until recently, I guess it would be better
to say, failed to enforce its policies. Forbes looked over
documents from the U s Department of Justice regarding the
charges against two hundred twenty three people connected to the
(05:58):
riots now part of the nation that they looked at.
Part of the information in those documents includes cases in
which they identified posts on social media that account for
some of the evidence against the respective individuals with regard
to planning and you know, the various threats that were made.
(06:18):
Seventy three of those documents name Facebook as one of
the social platforms upon which an associated suspect posted material
relating to the assembly in d C and the riot
at the Capitol, which puts Facebook in the lead for
platforms that were cited by the d o J as
(06:39):
having hosted material related to the riots. In a distant
second place is YouTube, which had twenty four appearances in
these documents, and Instagram takes up spot number three, with
twenty of the documents citing Instagram posts, and since Facebook
owns Instagram, you could arguably add those twenty two Facebook's account,
(07:00):
although to be fair, some of these documents probably referenced
more than one social network, So while Facebook appeared seventy
three times, and Instagram appeared twenty times. Some of those
may have been in the same documents, there might be
some overlap. There's what I'm saying as for Parlor or Parley,
(07:20):
you know, the free speech social network that largely catered
to extremists and the far right, that one the d
o J only cited in eight documents. Now, that does
not necessarily mean that everyone involved in the riots used
Facebook primarily, and hardly anyone used Parlor, But it also
seems to undercut Cheryl Sandberg's claims that Facebook was somehow
(07:44):
in a better position compared to these other platforms. It's
true that Facebook had been working to remove groups, you know,
hate groups and and posts that violated its policies against
militarized social movements. But it's also true that the platform
was still hosting a lot of communication and organization related
to the riots on January six. So I'm not saying
(08:08):
that Facebook is more responsible than these other platforms, or
that the vast majority of planning happened on Facebook. Rather,
I'm saying that Sandberg's claims that somehow Facebook is elevated
above these other platforms just doesn't hold water when we're
looking at the evidence that the d o J has
been bringing together. In other news, zd net reports that
(08:31):
Microsoft is going to add a new type of threat
alert for its Defender product for Office three sixty five,
and the alert is for nation state cyber attacks. So
if Microsoft detects that a nation state backed hacking group
is targeting a particular companies, employees, or its systems, it
(08:51):
can send up the alert through Defender for Office three
sixty Microsoft has already been kind of doing this on
a more granular approach, since if the company detected that
a nation state backed attack was targeting one of Microsoft's customers,
then Microsoft would send an email to that specific person,
(09:12):
alerting them of the attack and providing advice on how
they should secure their account. Now, according to Microsoft, it
was sending out around ten thousand alerts per year since.
But there is a problem with this approach, and that's
the fact that not everyone stays up to date on
their emails. You know, I'm kind of guilty of that.
(09:36):
I get a lot of emails every single day, and
I'm frequently busy researching or recording, so I'll miss a
lot of messages or you know, read them in batches
at the end of the day, and considering that a
nation state backed hacking attack is what I would call
a super high priority and urgent matter, people like me
(09:58):
can be a real problem. And so this new feature
will allow Microsoft to send out an alert through the
Office three sixty five dashboard, which should pop up on
the screens of various system administrators and I T personnel,
who can then take steps to address problems, including proactively
changing the settings on affected accounts and then contacting the
(10:19):
affected employees. So then no time is wasted in responding
to the threat. It would be better for an employee
to get locked out of their account by their system
administrator than to have it, you know, compromised by a
nation state backed hacker. And I really wanted to include
this news item today, not because I want to advertise
for Microsoft, but rather point out how the rise of
(10:42):
nation based hacker groups has really become a serious and
persistent threat around the world. And just to be clear,
tons of countries do these kind of cyber attacks. Here
in the United States, we typically hear about groups that
are backed by China and Russia in North Korea, but
keep in mind that the United States has engaged in
(11:05):
this kind of cyber warfare too. Cyber warfare is real,
and it is quietly raging online all the time, and
we typically only become aware of it when someone discovers,
you know, a big flaw in security, such as the
solar Winds hack. So it's a pretty scary world out
there and wild to think that there needs to be
(11:25):
an official alert built into an Office three product to
let you know about a nation state based hacking attack
on your company. That's I mean, it's this is like
like spy movie type stuff. Bloomberg reported that Twitter is
looking at some potential ways to generate revenue for the
company in addition to its normal route. Right now, Twitter's
(11:49):
main source of revenue is through advertisements, such as promoted posts.
So if you've ever been on Twitter and you thought, huh,
I don't remember following Taco Bell. Did I follow Taco Bell?
Did I get loopy last night and follow Taco Bell,
Well there's a chance you never followed Taco Bell, but
rather Taco Bell had paid for a promoted post and
(12:12):
Twitter then posted that to your feed. And while Twitter
had a rocky road early in the pandemic, as companies
began to kind of cut back on their advertising, budgets.
It did bounce back. Recently, Twitter announced that second one
billion dollar quarter. That's one billion dollars in revenue, I
should add, not profit. And there are questions about whether
(12:35):
that trend will continue, you know, because after all, most
recently Twitter purged tons of accounts from its platform due
to the aforementioned riots at the US Capital, among other things.
So that means it's a good idea to diversify. If
your growth isn't going on the up and up, like
(12:55):
if you're not expanding the number of users to your service,
then you have to figure out how you're going to
generate revenue beyond just advertising, because advertisers are more interested
in seeing those numbers go up. So in this case,
Twitter is reportedly considering introducing some features that users can
access if they cough up the dough. One possible change
(13:16):
is that Twitter will start charging for tweet Deck, which
is an alternative way to view tweets. Uh. It's it's
its own little kind of dashboard. For one thing, you
get all the tweets in reverse chronological order, so there's
no confusing little segments of stuff like labeled. You might
have missed this. That's nestled in the middle of more
(13:38):
recent tweets. I know that whenever I use Twitter directly,
I will run into tweets that were posted, like, you know,
eighteen hours ago, and I'll think, wow, that's a big gap.
That's because Twitter has kind of aggregated those, thinking, hey,
maybe you want to see these. I prefer it in
reverse chronological order. Tweet deck does that. If you manage
(13:58):
multiple Twitter accounts, you can set up tweet deck to
actually show all those various feeds side by side, including
things like replies and direct messages. So I use tweet
deck to manage Twitter accounts for myself, for tech stuff
and for large nerdron collider. So one option Twitter is
reportedly considering is making the service a subscription based service.
(14:22):
Another feature that could be a paid option is an
undo send button. I'm not sure how it's different from
a delete tweet option unless it actively removes the tweet
from displaying in various feeds in real time. Because sometimes
if you send out a tweet and you delete it
and somebody else has an older, unrefreshed Twitter feed up,
(14:45):
they can see that undeleted tweet. Maybe this deals with that.
I don't know, and another pitch would allow accounts to
offer up exclusive content to people who tip the accounts,
sort of like a tiered subscription that you would find
on platforms like YouTube. Twitter responded to a request from
Bloomberg to clarify the strategies, and the company essentially said
(15:05):
that any plans right now are in the very early
stages of discussion. Nothing is said in stone, and you
shouldn't really expect to see anything implemented this year. Now.
I say all that knowing that Twitter is going to
hold its quarterly earnings called later the day. This goes
out on Tuesday, the ninth of February, so it's possible
(15:26):
that I'll have some updates for Thursday's episode. We'll see.
And one big story that I've yet to touch on
tech stuff is uh the ongoing political upheaval in Myanmar. Now,
this country in Southeast Asia was formerly a British colony.
For several decades, it existed under military rule. It transitioned
to a civilian based government, used to be known as
(15:49):
Burma in the United States. It frequently is referred to
still as Burma, and until very recently, the leader of
the country was on San su Ki, who won a
re election campaign in a landslide. She she was originally
elected in one reelection this past year, and the military's
(16:09):
justification for taking over the government hinged on charges of
nationwide voter fraud, and those are charges that have no
evidence behind them, which sounds a bit familiar and indicative
of a general trend in world politics that we've seen
in many places not too long ago. And this isn't
the first time that sue Ki has seen this kind
(16:32):
of resistance. She had served around fifteen years in detention
as punishment for efforts to organize a democratic government in
the country. She also received the Nobel Peace Prize for
her efforts in nineteen one. Now, the reason I bring
up the story here is that the military has been
steadily cracking down on Internet platforms within the country. One
(16:53):
of the big changes between the last era of military
regimes and this current one is the proliferation of the
Internet and affordable technology that citizens can use to access
the Internet. This ends up giving people a lot of
options when it comes to doing stuff like organizing protests
and sharing information, something the military has been keen to squash.
(17:17):
As such, the military has moved to cut off citizens
access to the Internet. The BBC reported over the weekend
that nationwide connectivity fell to sixteen percent of what it
normally would be. The military also moved to block citizen
access to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Some citizens
switched to using virtual private networks or VPNs in order
(17:39):
to get around those blocks, and that prompted the military
to go for the more brute force approach of essentially
shutting down internet service entirely within the country. Essentially, the
military are taking the philosophy of the founders of the
Internet and trying to do the opposite in order to
restrict speech and organization. Citizen in the country continue to
(18:01):
speak out against the coup, organizing in the streets. Apparently,
the three finger salute from Hunger Games has become a
widely adopted symbol representing a rejection of authoritarianism. There's a
growing international pressure against the military to reverse course and
acknowledge the democratically elected leaders. And this story is ongoing,
so I'm sure we'll have more updates in future episodes. Okay,
(18:24):
we've got a lot more news to cover, but before
we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back.
The New York Times published a piece about the gig
economy in general, and Uber, Lift and Airbnb in particular.
(18:45):
Over the course of twenty twenty. Clearly, the pandemic has
had a major effect on these companies and their employees
or contract workers as the case may be, and their customers.
Uber and Lift have never had a profitable year, though
the typical response to that criticism has been that they're
(19:06):
you know, both companies have invested more in growth year
over year, which made costs outpaced revenue, but both have
had I p o s or you know, initial public offerings.
They're both publicly traded companies, which typically brings along with
it a certain general expectation that the companies will become
profitable and represent a return on investment for shareholders. And
(19:30):
of course was a much different year than any of
us had planned thanks to the pandemic. Usage of ride
hailing services and Airbnb dropped significantly in the spring. It
recovered a bit and then had a second dip in
the fall, though not as drastic as it could have been,
and the gig workers have had a lot of concerns
(19:51):
during that whole time. There's a higher risk for them
to get sick as they can encounter a lot of
people on a single shift. And what's more so, gig
workers intentionally sought out gigs around larger public events, you know,
potential super spreader events. Because people needed transportation, a lot
of gig workers stopped working those types of jobs completely.
(20:14):
Others would swap over to stuff like driving deliveries rather
than passengers, and you know, Uber really did a major
shift towards delivery. In with that change came lower paychecks
and lower risk of getting sick. According to Lift and
its ten largest markets, the drivers who you know kept
(20:35):
picking up passengers were working at a fairly steady pace
through most of the year because there were a reduced
number of drivers out there, which meant there was a
smaller supply, so a smaller demand was okay, But in
other places, drivers spent a lot of time just waiting
idly in their cars for potential fares. And apparently tipping
(20:56):
was down in as well. Oh and drivers often had
to supplement masks and cleaning products that were supplied by
their companies, and they had to add in stuff that
they bought with their own money because it wasn't enough
to cover their their work, which represented another cost for
the driver. Both Uber and Left will be announcing their
(21:17):
financial results for twenty twenty later this week, and we'll
learn more about how these companies have been doing. Currently.
Both Uber and Left have stocks priced in the fifty
to sixty dollar range, which is a pretty drastic increase
from the lows that their stocks hit in. And now
for a couple of Tesla stories. First up as a
story in the Wall Street Journal. Their reports. China has
(21:39):
criticized Tesla for the build quality of the US built
vehicles the Tesla has been trying to sell in China.
China's State Administration for Market Regulation has rebuked Tesla for
inconsistent build quality, which is something that the company has
faced over here in the United States on occasion. Is
inconsistent build quality. The company has issued a few recalls
(22:03):
on US built models, like the Model S and the
Model X. One of those recalls was about the touch
screen that was incorporated into the dashboard of these vehicles,
and another recall was for an issue with the suspension
systems of the vehicles. Interestingly, the Tesla vehicles that are
actually built in the company's Giga factory in Shanghai are
(22:25):
clear of these problems or appear to be so. This
seems to be an issue specifically with the American made
Tesla vehicles. Tesla apparently greased a lot of wheels to
open up operations in China. It received funding from Chinese banks,
which are stayed owned and operated, and it also sidesteps
some regulations that normally it would have to go through
(22:47):
in order to get you know, approval in China, and
it was all in an effort to get the production
even faster. So it's kind of rough to get all
these sorts of favors from a foreign country and then
turn round and kind of mess up. It's too early
to say if there will be further consequences, but they
could escalate up to and including an import ban on
(23:10):
US built Tesla vehicles. So it's not, as the kids say,
a good look. And our second Tesla story is that
the company is really into bitcoin, like really into it,
as in making a one and a half billion dollar
investment into the cryptocurrency kind of into it. And in
(23:33):
its tin K report to the SEC, we learned that
the company apparently plans to accept bitcoin as a form
of payment in the future to some degree. Now, personally
I find this whole thing ridiculous, but I find almost
everything about bitcoin to be ridiculous. As I have pointed
out on numerous occasions in my old grouchy Man voice,
(23:56):
bitcoin's value fluctuates so much that it's hard for me
to see it as a valid currency. I mean, yes,
people have used bitcoin to make transactions, particularly for stuff
that they would rather not have on the books anywhere else.
But on January twenty one, the value of a single
(24:17):
bitcoin was thirty thousand, four hundred seventeen u s. Dollars.
That's a lot, right, Well, this morning it was just
above forty three thousand dollars, and as a record this
episode in the night of February eight, the current value
for a bitcoin is forty six thousand, four hundred twenty
seven dollars and fifty cents. So in two weeks, the
(24:39):
value of a single bitcoin increased by more than sixteen
thousand dollars, and it increased by nearly three thousand dollars
just over a few hours for one bitcoin. So let's
say that you've got some bitcoins, maybe you invested in
them and purchased them, maybe you mind them. It doesn't
really matter or how likely are you to spend a
(25:02):
bitcoin if you know that in two weeks, the bitcoin
you spend might have increased in value by more than
fifteen thousand dollars. I mean, you would have already spent
the bitcoin, so none of that value would come back
to you. You would have spent that money already. It
would be out of your wallet and in someone else's
and that person would see the money they received from
(25:24):
you increase in value dramatically. Now that doesn't seem like
it's a very viable currency to me. I would be
terrified to spend money, thinking what if I held onto
this for two weeks and it increased in value, you know,
by sixteen thousand dollars, I would never spend it. So
maybe you could think of it more as an investment,
(25:46):
but you know, not really currency anyway. Tesla essentially acknowledged
that the company is diversifying its investments with money that
you know, they don't need for their regular operating expenses,
and bitcoin represents one of those investments. Now, this next
story isn't a Tesla story, but it does involve Elon Musk,
(26:08):
who is currently the richest person in the world. He's
putting money, a hundred million dollars of it, toward a
prize pool for a special contest. No, he is not
inviting five children to a Tesla factory to get gobbled
up by various machinery until he takes one of them
on a glass elevator ride, though I do continue to
(26:32):
pitch that movie instead. The contest is for teams to
propose carbon removal solutions to reduce the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere and then to lock it up
in some form to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases
that are out there and help fight climate change. The
prize pool totals one million dollars. But this isn't a
(26:54):
winner takes all kind of game. There will be a
fifty million dollar grand prize, and second and third place
we'll get twenty million and ten million dollars respectively. The
remaining twenty million bucks will be divvied up between small
teams to help fund their solutions. It's incantive to get
people thinking about ways to combat climate change and hopefully
(27:16):
come up with some practical solutions that can be actually
implemented and make a real world difference. It's part of
the X Prize series of events. X Prize is itself
a nonprofit organization and X Prize events have covered tons
of different challenges, from space exploration to building more efficient
(27:36):
automobiles to improving literacy among adults. Generally speaking, the contests
tackle really big problems that require a lot of innovative solutions.
And to learn more about x Prize, specifically the carbon
removal one, but other ones as well, uh, you can
go to x prize dot org. Just know that when
(27:57):
we're talking carbon removal, we're talking big picture because the
goal is to come up with solutions that can remove
carbon on the gigaton scale that's a billion tons. And
the last little bit for this new segment, Bloomberg reports
that Dan Richio, who used to lead Apple's hardware division,
(28:17):
has moved over to Apple's mostly secret department that oversees
the company's work in augmented and virtual reality technologies. And
just for a quick refresh. Virtual reality is when you're
using technology to create a simulated reality, so the stuff
that you can see and hear, and sometimes even touch
(28:38):
and smell is all created by technology to create the
sensation that you are in a different kind of environment.
Augmented reality is when you use technology to create a
digital enhancement to the real world around you, and you
might access this using a headset where you can see
the real world around you, but there's a year old
(29:00):
display that is on top of your view of reality.
You might just use a smartphone, so you hold up
the smartphone and you're looking at the world through the
smartphones camera with a digital overlay added. Or it might
even be something like headphones where you get digital information
through audio cues. But the whole idea is that the
technology identifies your location and your orientation, so in other words,
(29:23):
where you happen to be and what you happen to
be facing, and then provides information on top of that
environment around you. The information might be for entertainment, I
mean you might just be looking at people and seeing
bunny ears pop up on everyone's head. Or it might
be informative, like giving you digital instructions overlaid on top
of your view of say and otherwise incomprehensible pile of
(29:45):
furniture pieces from Ikea. The rumors about Apple mostly suggests
that the company would first build out a really premium
and really expensive VR set up before moving into the
augmented reality technology G for a consumer space. And I
can kind of understand that VR is a small market
(30:06):
but it's a market. It has actually had some success,
though I would call it modest success are at least
in a robust implementation has seen less success, with companies
like Magic Leaps still struggling, and the Microsoft Hollow lens
restricted more for developers and enterprise customers, and the whole
(30:27):
mixed reality thing that Microsoft was behind kind of just
faded away. So a R is gonna probably be in
a holding pattern for a little while. But when we're
talking VR and we're saying expensive, how much do we
mean by that? Well, the website the Information estimates that
a VR set from Apple might have a price tag
(30:48):
somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. Yikes. I mean,
you could build a really good gaming rig for three grand,
you know, not a like bleeding Edge it'll rip the
skin off your face kind of gaming rig, but still
a really good one for three thousand dollars. Now, maybe
(31:08):
Apple is building out a better VR implementation than anyone
else has ever managed. That is possible, but the company
has had some missteps in the past as well, So
nothing is certain except that you'll definitely be paying the
Apple tax if you want to buy one, because nobody
gets out of that. We have a few more stories
(31:28):
to cover in this episode. Before I get to those,
let's take another quick break. You know, if I weren't
making podcasts, I would be pitching big budget blockbusters to
Hollywood types. You heard me do one with Elon Musk's contest.
(31:51):
If you listen to large nerd Dron Collider, you know
I do it every week, and I would make really
groundbreaking stuff. For example, here's one for you for free.
I got this idea. There's a robot from the future
and it comes back to present day because it has
one mission to make a really good salad. That's my
(32:13):
way of introducing this next story, which is that door
Dash is set to acquire a company called chow Botics,
which tech Crunch describes as quote a Bay Area based
robotics company best known for its salad making robot end quote.
That robot, by the way, is named Sally, so in
my movie Pitch, Arnold Schwarzenegger would clearly be playing Sally,
(32:37):
the salad making robot. Chow Botics first got its start
in and according to tech Crunch, it has raised more
than twenty million dollars so far. The salad making robot
looks kind of like a vending machine and also kind
of like one of those claw games that you see
in arcades, except instead of being filled with garfield plush toys,
(33:00):
it's filled with these columns of containers that are filled
with leafy greens or other veggies and stuff like salad
dressings and croutons and cheese. The earlier incarnation of the
robot had a touch screen ordering interface, so you'd walk
up to the device and you could pick from a
selection of salads or you could, you know, customize your
(33:21):
own and choose which elements would go into your mix,
and you'd make your choices. Then the robot would spin
a carousel of containers, each filled with stuff like spinach
or kale or carrots or whatever, and it would dispense
the stuff into a bowl and it would measure it
by weight, so you get a consistent salad from serving
(33:42):
to serving, and you just put the bowl into a
little outlet for the robot and it would shoot the
salad into your bowl. With the pandemic, robots like Sally
clearly had an advantage over other options like salad bars
or people prepping salads for you, and chalbotics also introduced
an interface that would work with an app so that
(34:03):
you could actually order your salad with your phone instead
of having to touch the touch screen on the robot,
which is pretty clever. Now, how that company is going
to fit into door dashes strategy isn't totally clear yet,
but I imagine it's going to be along the lines
of door Dash offering up its own products to consumers
(34:26):
in addition to those found in local restaurants. So when
you open up door Dash, you might order a salad
from door Dashes army of merciless killer salad robots for
a slightly lower price than you would spend if you
were to get it from kill Me maybe or whatever,
you know, some salad place. I got some more bad
(34:47):
news for Google Stadia owners, which includes myself. I mean,
for one thing, there's a general feeling that this service
might not be around for much longer. Google already killed
off it's internal Stadia development division, the people who were
working on, uh, the exclusive games for Google Stadia. Now,
(35:08):
as far as I know, no one actually working on
the division has been you know, targeted for early retirement
or anything. But now we hear that the developer for
the indie game Terra Area has decided that his company
is going to cancel all plans to port that game
over to Google Stadia and wherefore should it be thus well.
(35:31):
Ours Technica reports that this move was in response to
YouTube banning Andrew Spinx's channel, and Spinx is the lead
developer for Terrarium, and YouTube banned the Relogic Game Developer
channel for a terms of service violation. But it gets worse.
The Terra Area Twitter account elaborate that first their YouTube
(35:53):
channel was banned despite the fact that no one had
actually added anything to that channel for several months, so
there was nothing new there to be objectionable, and the
email message that they received said that there was some
sort of undefined terms of service violation, and the email
itself even said that it was probably an error on
(36:15):
Google's part and that they should not get any strikes
against the channel because of that. But then, just three
days later quote the entire Google account, YouTube, Gmail, all
Google apps, even every purchase made over fifteen years on
the Google Play Store was disabled with no warning or recourse.
(36:37):
This account links into many business functions and as such
the impact to us is quite substantial. End Quote yikes
Spins took Twitter to air his grievances and formally canceled
the port of Terraria for Google Stadium, which, honestly, given
the extent of the issues with having a total ban
(36:58):
on all Google services, I wouldn't call that an extreme reaction.
This is one of the downsides to Google's approach to
having a single sign in account system for all Google services,
because a single band can potentially affect everything else, which,
as ours technic up points out, creates a disproportionate kind
(37:18):
of punishment. And when you're being punished for something that
is likely not your fault, it's just an accident, that's
extra harsh. In happier news, at least for TikTok fans,
the app has secured a music license for Universal Music
Group's entire catalog of music from around the world and
for those who have never used TikTok except maybe to
(37:40):
sing along to see shanties, which is how I use it.
A very popular use of the app is creating lip
SYNCD videos to various clips of audio, which frequently includes music,
and those licenses are important because it grants users permission
to make videos of themselves, you know, dancing or lip
syncing or singing along with copyrighted music without fear of
(38:02):
having their videos flagged or their accounts banned for unauthorized
use of copyrighted material, or at least that's how it's
supposed to work. In the first six months of twenty
TikTok received more than ten thousand, six hundred copyright takedown requests,
and earlier in Universal was one of the music publishing
companies threatening to sue TikTok for copyright infringement, arguing that
(38:26):
the company lacked the proper licenses to allow its users
to create the kinds of videos that they were making.
The music companies argued that without the agreements in place,
the artists who create the songs that fans love don't
get paid for the use of their music, and yeah,
that is a raw deal. But I do want to
point out that when it comes to altruistic philosophies, music
(38:47):
publishing companies rarely rank really high on my list of
candidates for most thoughtful of the year. Anyway, it looks
like Universal and TikTok negotiated to a common ground, which
probably means TikTok is shelling out big oh buckos the
Universal in order to make the music available to TikTok creators.
TikTok has reached similar agreements with Sony Music and Warner
(39:09):
Music Group, as well as lots of independent labels. Now
does this mean you can upload a video to TikTok
and use the music from TikTok's database without ever worrying
about a takedown? Notice? Maybe it sometimes happens anyway, which
has to be frustrating to creators. Meanwhile, old timers like
yours truly say stuff like where reminds me are the
(39:31):
old days of YouTube? Shutter down? Let me tell you
about them? So no one ever settles down and everyone
leaves me. Finally, entrepreneur Mark Cuban is co founding a
new podcast platform called Fireside. Apparently, the idea behind this
venture is to create a platform in which creators can
(39:53):
record and or broadcast conversations, monetize them, and use analytics
tools to see how different content performs on the platform.
It's supposed to be a curated platform as well, so
it's not like an open mic night at the local
CD comedy club. I think the sales pitch here is
that it takes a lot of stuff for probe podcasters
(40:17):
to do their jobs. And it takes all those duties
and aggregates it into a cohesive service. So rather than
a podcaster having to do marketing, analysis and sales all
on their own, you know, landing sponsors for their shows
and that kind of thing, this platform would handle that
stuff for them, at least to some degree. Now I
(40:39):
don't know how much control the creators on the platform
are going to have, So for example, with my show,
I typically get to have a say with regard to
which sponsors are allowed to advertise on tech stuff, and
I generally avoid sponsors that I don't feel are a
good fit for the show are or maybe they're in
the type of business that I'm not a fan of.
(41:00):
So for example, if an ad for any alternative medicine
company plays on my show, you can be pretty certain
that I did not get the chance to shoot that
one down, because I would never have something like that
run during one of my episodes. But I don't know
if people working on Fireside are going to be given
that level of authority to make those kind of decisions.
(41:22):
And just to be clear, they're actually already is a
company called Fireside that is in the podcast business. It's
a company that hosts podcasts and provides analytics for those podcasts,
which frankly surprises me that no one over on the
New Fireside project thought to check out that you know,
(41:43):
the name was available, because I mean, it's one thing
to take a company name that's already in use. It's
another thing to take a name that's already in use
in the exact same industry that you are getting into.
That's just bad form. According to the Verge, Fireside that is,
the New One has already reached out to some established
podcasters to talk about being part of the founding group
(42:06):
of creators on the platform. I am not one of them.
I'm not saying I'm hurt, but I'm not not saying
it either. And that wraps up this episode of tech
Stuff News. I know I got a little loopie there,
but it is ten fifteen PM as I record this,
(42:27):
So my day has been a long one. Give me
some slack, but don't put me on slack. I just
I can't. I can't do another project management tool right now.
I just can't. All right, guys, if you have any
suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a
topic about a company, a technology, a person in tech,
a trend in tech. Maybe you just want to know
(42:49):
how something works let me know. The best way to
reach out is over on Twitter. The handle I use
for the show is text stuff H s W and
I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
(43:09):
I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And this is the
news for Tuesday, February ninth one. On Monday, Facebook announced
(00:29):
that the company would take a stronger stance against posts
containing misinformation regarding vaccines. This is an escalation of earlier
Facebook policies. In October twenty, Facebook said it would no
longer sell ad space to parties that promoted misleading information
about vaccines. Then in December, Facebook upped the anti by
(00:52):
saying it would remove posts the elevated claims that had
been debunked by the World Health Organization or w HO.
But Monday's announcement broadens this approach behind vaccines for COVID
nineteen and encompasses all vaccines period. While Facebook used to
flag misleading posts and then just down rank them, you know,
(01:14):
not remove them, but reduce their rank, that would just
mean that they were less likely to show up in
users feeds. Now the company will actually remove posts promoting
false claims about vaccinations. Facebook worked with the World Health
Organization and other governmental agencies to create something like a
(01:35):
database of false or misleading claims. According to a Facebook
post on the matter, the company's stance on vaccines falls
under multiple user policies. For example, content that would promote
events intended to spread COVID nineteen on purpose, presumably in
the belief that catching it is better than being vaccinated
(01:57):
against it, would fall under the coordinating Harm policy. Because
it turns out Facebook is against coordinating harm, which frankly
is news to me. So I suppose other things that
would fall into this category would include, uh, Facebook pages
dedicated for big public events in places that have a
(02:19):
quarantine or lockdown in place, you know, That would presumably
fall under the coordinating harm policy. Meanwhile, under the Regulated
Goods policy, Facebook says it will prohibit posts that are
attempting to sell quote medical and respiratory face masks and
COVID nineteen test kits end quote. Apparently there are a
(02:42):
lot of parties out there selling stuff that's like a
counterfeit type of of medical mask or tests that haven't
actually been cleared by any regulatory agency, that kind of thing,
And it's a real bear to wade through. The legit
versus the illegitimate one, so Facebook saying, all right, we're
(03:04):
just not going to run those ads. Under the hate
speech policy, Facebook will remove content that suggests people who
share a protected characteristic are in some way, you know,
responsible for the virus, or they are spreading the virus
and so on. But this doesn't include national origin as
(03:25):
an outright band because Facebook states that it wants to
allow for posts about health statistics that are not hate speech.
Rather they are giving important information such as x percent
of Americans have caught COVID nineteen since the beginning of
the pandemic, something like that, And you wouldn't want to
(03:46):
put a full ban on uh nation of origin because
the information could be really useful. And there's a whole
list of prohibited content that falls under Facebook's Community Standards barrier,
and that includes a ton of stuff, including more broadly
debunked claims about vaccines in general, such as the claim
(04:07):
that they cause autism, despite the fact that you know
that claim has been thoroughly rejected and the researchers who
first proposed the link between vaccines and autism we're later
found to have essentially fabricated the whole thing, but the
idea has still stuck around and a lot of people
latch onto it. Facebook will now remove those posts when
(04:30):
they catch them, though I should add the language indicates
that this general policy really is only in effect for
as long as there is a COVID nineteen public health emergency,
so there's no telling if the company is going to
ease off on these restrictions later on down the road.
According to Facebook, the reason behind these changes comes from
(04:51):
the Facebook Oversight Board, which is the independent group that
would recently formed to review Facebook's content moderation policies. And
while we're talking about Facebook, Forbes published an article that
put claims made by the company's chief operating officer under
the microscope. The CEO of Facebook is Cheryl Sandberg, and
(05:12):
the specific claims were regarding the siege on the US capital.
On January six, Sandberg had said quote, I think these
events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our
abilities to stop hate, and don't have our standards and
don't have our transparency end quote. Which yikes. Okay, as
(05:35):
you guys probably have gathered, because I am not subtle
about it, I'm pretty critical of Facebook and how it
enforces or until recently, I guess it would be better
to say, failed to enforce its policies. Forbes looked over
documents from the U s Department of Justice regarding the
charges against two hundred twenty three people connected to the
(05:58):
riots now part of the nation that they looked at.
Part of the information in those documents includes cases in
which they identified posts on social media that account for
some of the evidence against the respective individuals with regard
to planning and you know, the various threats that were made.
(06:18):
Seventy three of those documents name Facebook as one of
the social platforms upon which an associated suspect posted material
relating to the assembly in d C and the riot
at the Capitol, which puts Facebook in the lead for
platforms that were cited by the d o J as
(06:39):
having hosted material related to the riots. In a distant
second place is YouTube, which had twenty four appearances in
these documents, and Instagram takes up spot number three, with
twenty of the documents citing Instagram posts, and since Facebook
owns Instagram, you could arguably add those twenty two Facebook's account,
(07:00):
although to be fair, some of these documents probably referenced
more than one social network, So while Facebook appeared seventy
three times, and Instagram appeared twenty times. Some of those
may have been in the same documents, there might be
some overlap. There's what I'm saying as for Parlor or Parley,
(07:20):
you know, the free speech social network that largely catered
to extremists and the far right, that one the d
o J only cited in eight documents. Now, that does
not necessarily mean that everyone involved in the riots used
Facebook primarily, and hardly anyone used Parlor, But it also
seems to undercut Cheryl Sandberg's claims that Facebook was somehow
(07:44):
in a better position compared to these other platforms. It's
true that Facebook had been working to remove groups, you know,
hate groups and and posts that violated its policies against
militarized social movements. But it's also true that the platform
was still hosting a lot of communication and organization related
to the riots on January six. So I'm not saying
(08:08):
that Facebook is more responsible than these other platforms, or
that the vast majority of planning happened on Facebook. Rather,
I'm saying that Sandberg's claims that somehow Facebook is elevated
above these other platforms just doesn't hold water when we're
looking at the evidence that the d o J has
been bringing together. In other news, zd net reports that
(08:31):
Microsoft is going to add a new type of threat
alert for its Defender product for Office three sixty five,
and the alert is for nation state cyber attacks. So
if Microsoft detects that a nation state backed hacking group
is targeting a particular companies, employees, or its systems, it
(08:51):
can send up the alert through Defender for Office three
sixty Microsoft has already been kind of doing this on
a more granular approach, since if the company detected that
a nation state backed attack was targeting one of Microsoft's customers,
then Microsoft would send an email to that specific person,
(09:12):
alerting them of the attack and providing advice on how
they should secure their account. Now, according to Microsoft, it
was sending out around ten thousand alerts per year since.
But there is a problem with this approach, and that's
the fact that not everyone stays up to date on
their emails. You know, I'm kind of guilty of that.
(09:36):
I get a lot of emails every single day, and
I'm frequently busy researching or recording, so I'll miss a
lot of messages or you know, read them in batches
at the end of the day, and considering that a
nation state backed hacking attack is what I would call
a super high priority and urgent matter, people like me
(09:58):
can be a real problem. And so this new feature
will allow Microsoft to send out an alert through the
Office three sixty five dashboard, which should pop up on
the screens of various system administrators and I T personnel,
who can then take steps to address problems, including proactively
changing the settings on affected accounts and then contacting the
(10:19):
affected employees. So then no time is wasted in responding
to the threat. It would be better for an employee
to get locked out of their account by their system
administrator than to have it, you know, compromised by a
nation state backed hacker. And I really wanted to include
this news item today, not because I want to advertise
for Microsoft, but rather point out how the rise of
(10:42):
nation based hacker groups has really become a serious and
persistent threat around the world. And just to be clear,
tons of countries do these kind of cyber attacks. Here
in the United States, we typically hear about groups that
are backed by China and Russia in North Korea, but
keep in mind that the United States has engaged in
(11:05):
this kind of cyber warfare too. Cyber warfare is real,
and it is quietly raging online all the time, and
we typically only become aware of it when someone discovers,
you know, a big flaw in security, such as the
solar Winds hack. So it's a pretty scary world out
there and wild to think that there needs to be
(11:25):
an official alert built into an Office three product to
let you know about a nation state based hacking attack
on your company. That's I mean, it's this is like
like spy movie type stuff. Bloomberg reported that Twitter is
looking at some potential ways to generate revenue for the
company in addition to its normal route. Right now, Twitter's
(11:49):
main source of revenue is through advertisements, such as promoted posts.
So if you've ever been on Twitter and you thought, huh,
I don't remember following Taco Bell. Did I follow Taco Bell?
Did I get loopy last night and follow Taco Bell,
Well there's a chance you never followed Taco Bell, but
rather Taco Bell had paid for a promoted post and
(12:12):
Twitter then posted that to your feed. And while Twitter
had a rocky road early in the pandemic, as companies
began to kind of cut back on their advertising, budgets.
It did bounce back. Recently, Twitter announced that second one
billion dollar quarter. That's one billion dollars in revenue, I
should add, not profit. And there are questions about whether
(12:35):
that trend will continue, you know, because after all, most
recently Twitter purged tons of accounts from its platform due
to the aforementioned riots at the US Capital, among other things.
So that means it's a good idea to diversify. If
your growth isn't going on the up and up, like
(12:55):
if you're not expanding the number of users to your service,
then you have to figure out how you're going to
generate revenue beyond just advertising, because advertisers are more interested
in seeing those numbers go up. So in this case,
Twitter is reportedly considering introducing some features that users can
access if they cough up the dough. One possible change
(13:16):
is that Twitter will start charging for tweet Deck, which
is an alternative way to view tweets. Uh. It's it's
its own little kind of dashboard. For one thing, you
get all the tweets in reverse chronological order, so there's
no confusing little segments of stuff like labeled. You might
have missed this. That's nestled in the middle of more
(13:38):
recent tweets. I know that whenever I use Twitter directly,
I will run into tweets that were posted, like, you know,
eighteen hours ago, and I'll think, wow, that's a big gap.
That's because Twitter has kind of aggregated those, thinking, hey,
maybe you want to see these. I prefer it in
reverse chronological order. Tweet deck does that. If you manage
(13:58):
multiple Twitter accounts, you can set up tweet deck to
actually show all those various feeds side by side, including
things like replies and direct messages. So I use tweet
deck to manage Twitter accounts for myself, for tech stuff
and for large nerdron collider. So one option Twitter is
reportedly considering is making the service a subscription based service.
(14:22):
Another feature that could be a paid option is an
undo send button. I'm not sure how it's different from
a delete tweet option unless it actively removes the tweet
from displaying in various feeds in real time. Because sometimes
if you send out a tweet and you delete it
and somebody else has an older, unrefreshed Twitter feed up,
(14:45):
they can see that undeleted tweet. Maybe this deals with that.
I don't know, and another pitch would allow accounts to
offer up exclusive content to people who tip the accounts,
sort of like a tiered subscription that you would find
on platforms like YouTube. Twitter responded to a request from
Bloomberg to clarify the strategies, and the company essentially said
(15:05):
that any plans right now are in the very early
stages of discussion. Nothing is said in stone, and you
shouldn't really expect to see anything implemented this year. Now.
I say all that knowing that Twitter is going to
hold its quarterly earnings called later the day. This goes
out on Tuesday, the ninth of February, so it's possible
(15:26):
that I'll have some updates for Thursday's episode. We'll see.
And one big story that I've yet to touch on
tech stuff is uh the ongoing political upheaval in Myanmar. Now,
this country in Southeast Asia was formerly a British colony.
For several decades, it existed under military rule. It transitioned
to a civilian based government, used to be known as
(15:49):
Burma in the United States. It frequently is referred to
still as Burma, and until very recently, the leader of
the country was on San su Ki, who won a
re election campaign in a landslide. She she was originally
elected in one reelection this past year, and the military's
(16:09):
justification for taking over the government hinged on charges of
nationwide voter fraud, and those are charges that have no
evidence behind them, which sounds a bit familiar and indicative
of a general trend in world politics that we've seen
in many places not too long ago. And this isn't
the first time that sue Ki has seen this kind
(16:32):
of resistance. She had served around fifteen years in detention
as punishment for efforts to organize a democratic government in
the country. She also received the Nobel Peace Prize for
her efforts in nineteen one. Now, the reason I bring
up the story here is that the military has been
steadily cracking down on Internet platforms within the country. One
(16:53):
of the big changes between the last era of military
regimes and this current one is the proliferation of the
Internet and affordable technology that citizens can use to access
the Internet. This ends up giving people a lot of
options when it comes to doing stuff like organizing protests
and sharing information, something the military has been keen to squash.
(17:17):
As such, the military has moved to cut off citizens
access to the Internet. The BBC reported over the weekend
that nationwide connectivity fell to sixteen percent of what it
normally would be. The military also moved to block citizen
access to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Some citizens
switched to using virtual private networks or VPNs in order
(17:39):
to get around those blocks, and that prompted the military
to go for the more brute force approach of essentially
shutting down internet service entirely within the country. Essentially, the
military are taking the philosophy of the founders of the
Internet and trying to do the opposite in order to
restrict speech and organization. Citizen in the country continue to
(18:01):
speak out against the coup, organizing in the streets. Apparently,
the three finger salute from Hunger Games has become a
widely adopted symbol representing a rejection of authoritarianism. There's a
growing international pressure against the military to reverse course and
acknowledge the democratically elected leaders. And this story is ongoing,
so I'm sure we'll have more updates in future episodes. Okay,
(18:24):
we've got a lot more news to cover, but before
we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're back.
The New York Times published a piece about the gig
economy in general, and Uber, Lift and Airbnb in particular.
(18:45):
Over the course of twenty twenty. Clearly, the pandemic has
had a major effect on these companies and their employees
or contract workers as the case may be, and their customers.
Uber and Lift have never had a profitable year, though
the typical response to that criticism has been that they're
(19:06):
you know, both companies have invested more in growth year
over year, which made costs outpaced revenue, but both have
had I p o s or you know, initial public offerings.
They're both publicly traded companies, which typically brings along with
it a certain general expectation that the companies will become
profitable and represent a return on investment for shareholders. And
(19:30):
of course was a much different year than any of
us had planned thanks to the pandemic. Usage of ride
hailing services and Airbnb dropped significantly in the spring. It
recovered a bit and then had a second dip in
the fall, though not as drastic as it could have been,
and the gig workers have had a lot of concerns
(19:51):
during that whole time. There's a higher risk for them
to get sick as they can encounter a lot of
people on a single shift. And what's more so, gig
workers intentionally sought out gigs around larger public events, you know,
potential super spreader events. Because people needed transportation, a lot
of gig workers stopped working those types of jobs completely.
(20:14):
Others would swap over to stuff like driving deliveries rather
than passengers, and you know, Uber really did a major
shift towards delivery. In with that change came lower paychecks
and lower risk of getting sick. According to Lift and
its ten largest markets, the drivers who you know kept
(20:35):
picking up passengers were working at a fairly steady pace
through most of the year because there were a reduced
number of drivers out there, which meant there was a
smaller supply, so a smaller demand was okay, But in
other places, drivers spent a lot of time just waiting
idly in their cars for potential fares. And apparently tipping
(20:56):
was down in as well. Oh and drivers often had
to supplement masks and cleaning products that were supplied by
their companies, and they had to add in stuff that
they bought with their own money because it wasn't enough
to cover their their work, which represented another cost for
the driver. Both Uber and Left will be announcing their
(21:17):
financial results for twenty twenty later this week, and we'll
learn more about how these companies have been doing. Currently.
Both Uber and Left have stocks priced in the fifty
to sixty dollar range, which is a pretty drastic increase
from the lows that their stocks hit in. And now
for a couple of Tesla stories. First up as a
story in the Wall Street Journal. Their reports. China has
(21:39):
criticized Tesla for the build quality of the US built
vehicles the Tesla has been trying to sell in China.
China's State Administration for Market Regulation has rebuked Tesla for
inconsistent build quality, which is something that the company has
faced over here in the United States on occasion. Is
inconsistent build quality. The company has issued a few recalls
(22:03):
on US built models, like the Model S and the
Model X. One of those recalls was about the touch
screen that was incorporated into the dashboard of these vehicles,
and another recall was for an issue with the suspension
systems of the vehicles. Interestingly, the Tesla vehicles that are
actually built in the company's Giga factory in Shanghai are
(22:25):
clear of these problems or appear to be so. This
seems to be an issue specifically with the American made
Tesla vehicles. Tesla apparently greased a lot of wheels to
open up operations in China. It received funding from Chinese banks,
which are stayed owned and operated, and it also sidesteps
some regulations that normally it would have to go through
(22:47):
in order to get you know, approval in China, and
it was all in an effort to get the production
even faster. So it's kind of rough to get all
these sorts of favors from a foreign country and then
turn round and kind of mess up. It's too early
to say if there will be further consequences, but they
could escalate up to and including an import ban on
(23:10):
US built Tesla vehicles. So it's not, as the kids say,
a good look. And our second Tesla story is that
the company is really into bitcoin, like really into it,
as in making a one and a half billion dollar
investment into the cryptocurrency kind of into it. And in
(23:33):
its tin K report to the SEC, we learned that
the company apparently plans to accept bitcoin as a form
of payment in the future to some degree. Now, personally
I find this whole thing ridiculous, but I find almost
everything about bitcoin to be ridiculous. As I have pointed
out on numerous occasions in my old grouchy Man voice,
(23:56):
bitcoin's value fluctuates so much that it's hard for me
to see it as a valid currency. I mean, yes,
people have used bitcoin to make transactions, particularly for stuff
that they would rather not have on the books anywhere else.
But on January twenty one, the value of a single
(24:17):
bitcoin was thirty thousand, four hundred seventeen u s. Dollars.
That's a lot, right, Well, this morning it was just
above forty three thousand dollars, and as a record this
episode in the night of February eight, the current value
for a bitcoin is forty six thousand, four hundred twenty
seven dollars and fifty cents. So in two weeks, the
(24:39):
value of a single bitcoin increased by more than sixteen
thousand dollars, and it increased by nearly three thousand dollars
just over a few hours for one bitcoin. So let's
say that you've got some bitcoins, maybe you invested in
them and purchased them, maybe you mind them. It doesn't
really matter or how likely are you to spend a
(25:02):
bitcoin if you know that in two weeks, the bitcoin
you spend might have increased in value by more than
fifteen thousand dollars. I mean, you would have already spent
the bitcoin, so none of that value would come back
to you. You would have spent that money already. It
would be out of your wallet and in someone else's
and that person would see the money they received from
(25:24):
you increase in value dramatically. Now that doesn't seem like
it's a very viable currency to me. I would be
terrified to spend money, thinking what if I held onto
this for two weeks and it increased in value, you know,
by sixteen thousand dollars, I would never spend it. So
maybe you could think of it more as an investment,
(25:46):
but you know, not really currency anyway. Tesla essentially acknowledged
that the company is diversifying its investments with money that
you know, they don't need for their regular operating expenses,
and bitcoin represents one of those investments. Now, this next
story isn't a Tesla story, but it does involve Elon Musk,
(26:08):
who is currently the richest person in the world. He's
putting money, a hundred million dollars of it, toward a
prize pool for a special contest. No, he is not
inviting five children to a Tesla factory to get gobbled
up by various machinery until he takes one of them
on a glass elevator ride, though I do continue to
(26:32):
pitch that movie instead. The contest is for teams to
propose carbon removal solutions to reduce the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere and then to lock it up
in some form to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases
that are out there and help fight climate change. The
prize pool totals one million dollars. But this isn't a
(26:54):
winner takes all kind of game. There will be a
fifty million dollar grand prize, and second and third place
we'll get twenty million and ten million dollars respectively. The
remaining twenty million bucks will be divvied up between small
teams to help fund their solutions. It's incantive to get
people thinking about ways to combat climate change and hopefully
(27:16):
come up with some practical solutions that can be actually
implemented and make a real world difference. It's part of
the X Prize series of events. X Prize is itself
a nonprofit organization and X Prize events have covered tons
of different challenges, from space exploration to building more efficient
(27:36):
automobiles to improving literacy among adults. Generally speaking, the contests
tackle really big problems that require a lot of innovative solutions.
And to learn more about x Prize, specifically the carbon
removal one, but other ones as well, uh, you can
go to x prize dot org. Just know that when
(27:57):
we're talking carbon removal, we're talking big picture because the
goal is to come up with solutions that can remove
carbon on the gigaton scale that's a billion tons. And
the last little bit for this new segment, Bloomberg reports
that Dan Richio, who used to lead Apple's hardware division,
(28:17):
has moved over to Apple's mostly secret department that oversees
the company's work in augmented and virtual reality technologies. And
just for a quick refresh. Virtual reality is when you're
using technology to create a simulated reality, so the stuff
that you can see and hear, and sometimes even touch
(28:38):
and smell is all created by technology to create the
sensation that you are in a different kind of environment.
Augmented reality is when you use technology to create a
digital enhancement to the real world around you, and you
might access this using a headset where you can see
the real world around you, but there's a year old
(29:00):
display that is on top of your view of reality.
You might just use a smartphone, so you hold up
the smartphone and you're looking at the world through the
smartphones camera with a digital overlay added. Or it might
even be something like headphones where you get digital information
through audio cues. But the whole idea is that the
technology identifies your location and your orientation, so in other words,
(29:23):
where you happen to be and what you happen to
be facing, and then provides information on top of that
environment around you. The information might be for entertainment, I
mean you might just be looking at people and seeing
bunny ears pop up on everyone's head. Or it might
be informative, like giving you digital instructions overlaid on top
of your view of say and otherwise incomprehensible pile of
(29:45):
furniture pieces from Ikea. The rumors about Apple mostly suggests
that the company would first build out a really premium
and really expensive VR set up before moving into the
augmented reality technology G for a consumer space. And I
can kind of understand that VR is a small market
(30:06):
but it's a market. It has actually had some success,
though I would call it modest success are at least
in a robust implementation has seen less success, with companies
like Magic Leaps still struggling, and the Microsoft Hollow lens
restricted more for developers and enterprise customers, and the whole
(30:27):
mixed reality thing that Microsoft was behind kind of just
faded away. So a R is gonna probably be in
a holding pattern for a little while. But when we're
talking VR and we're saying expensive, how much do we
mean by that? Well, the website the Information estimates that
a VR set from Apple might have a price tag
(30:48):
somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. Yikes. I mean,
you could build a really good gaming rig for three grand,
you know, not a like bleeding Edge it'll rip the
skin off your face kind of gaming rig, but still
a really good one for three thousand dollars. Now, maybe
(31:08):
Apple is building out a better VR implementation than anyone
else has ever managed. That is possible, but the company
has had some missteps in the past as well, So
nothing is certain except that you'll definitely be paying the
Apple tax if you want to buy one, because nobody
gets out of that. We have a few more stories
(31:28):
to cover in this episode. Before I get to those,
let's take another quick break. You know, if I weren't
making podcasts, I would be pitching big budget blockbusters to
Hollywood types. You heard me do one with Elon Musk's contest.
(31:51):
If you listen to large nerd Dron Collider, you know
I do it every week, and I would make really
groundbreaking stuff. For example, here's one for you for free.
I got this idea. There's a robot from the future
and it comes back to present day because it has
one mission to make a really good salad. That's my
(32:13):
way of introducing this next story, which is that door
Dash is set to acquire a company called chow Botics,
which tech Crunch describes as quote a Bay Area based
robotics company best known for its salad making robot end quote.
That robot, by the way, is named Sally, so in
my movie Pitch, Arnold Schwarzenegger would clearly be playing Sally,
(32:37):
the salad making robot. Chow Botics first got its start
in and according to tech Crunch, it has raised more
than twenty million dollars so far. The salad making robot
looks kind of like a vending machine and also kind
of like one of those claw games that you see
in arcades, except instead of being filled with garfield plush toys,
(33:00):
it's filled with these columns of containers that are filled
with leafy greens or other veggies and stuff like salad
dressings and croutons and cheese. The earlier incarnation of the
robot had a touch screen ordering interface, so you'd walk
up to the device and you could pick from a
selection of salads or you could, you know, customize your
(33:21):
own and choose which elements would go into your mix,
and you'd make your choices. Then the robot would spin
a carousel of containers, each filled with stuff like spinach
or kale or carrots or whatever, and it would dispense
the stuff into a bowl and it would measure it
by weight, so you get a consistent salad from serving
(33:42):
to serving, and you just put the bowl into a
little outlet for the robot and it would shoot the
salad into your bowl. With the pandemic, robots like Sally
clearly had an advantage over other options like salad bars
or people prepping salads for you, and chalbotics also introduced
an interface that would work with an app so that
(34:03):
you could actually order your salad with your phone instead
of having to touch the touch screen on the robot,
which is pretty clever. Now, how that company is going
to fit into door dashes strategy isn't totally clear yet,
but I imagine it's going to be along the lines
of door Dash offering up its own products to consumers
(34:26):
in addition to those found in local restaurants. So when
you open up door Dash, you might order a salad
from door Dashes army of merciless killer salad robots for
a slightly lower price than you would spend if you
were to get it from kill Me maybe or whatever,
you know, some salad place. I got some more bad
(34:47):
news for Google Stadia owners, which includes myself. I mean,
for one thing, there's a general feeling that this service
might not be around for much longer. Google already killed
off it's internal Stadia development division, the people who were
working on, uh, the exclusive games for Google Stadia. Now,
(35:08):
as far as I know, no one actually working on
the division has been you know, targeted for early retirement
or anything. But now we hear that the developer for
the indie game Terra Area has decided that his company
is going to cancel all plans to port that game
over to Google Stadia and wherefore should it be thus well.
(35:31):
Ours Technica reports that this move was in response to
YouTube banning Andrew Spinx's channel, and Spinx is the lead
developer for Terrarium, and YouTube banned the Relogic Game Developer
channel for a terms of service violation. But it gets worse.
The Terra Area Twitter account elaborate that first their YouTube
(35:53):
channel was banned despite the fact that no one had
actually added anything to that channel for several months, so
there was nothing new there to be objectionable, and the
email message that they received said that there was some
sort of undefined terms of service violation, and the email
itself even said that it was probably an error on
(36:15):
Google's part and that they should not get any strikes
against the channel because of that. But then, just three
days later quote the entire Google account, YouTube, Gmail, all
Google apps, even every purchase made over fifteen years on
the Google Play Store was disabled with no warning or recourse.
(36:37):
This account links into many business functions and as such
the impact to us is quite substantial. End Quote yikes
Spins took Twitter to air his grievances and formally canceled
the port of Terraria for Google Stadium, which, honestly, given
the extent of the issues with having a total ban
(36:58):
on all Google services, I wouldn't call that an extreme reaction.
This is one of the downsides to Google's approach to
having a single sign in account system for all Google services,
because a single band can potentially affect everything else, which,
as ours technic up points out, creates a disproportionate kind
(37:18):
of punishment. And when you're being punished for something that
is likely not your fault, it's just an accident, that's
extra harsh. In happier news, at least for TikTok fans,
the app has secured a music license for Universal Music
Group's entire catalog of music from around the world and
for those who have never used TikTok except maybe to
(37:40):
sing along to see shanties, which is how I use it.
A very popular use of the app is creating lip
SYNCD videos to various clips of audio, which frequently includes music,
and those licenses are important because it grants users permission
to make videos of themselves, you know, dancing or lip
syncing or singing along with copyrighted music without fear of
(38:02):
having their videos flagged or their accounts banned for unauthorized
use of copyrighted material, or at least that's how it's
supposed to work. In the first six months of twenty
TikTok received more than ten thousand, six hundred copyright takedown requests,
and earlier in Universal was one of the music publishing
companies threatening to sue TikTok for copyright infringement, arguing that
(38:26):
the company lacked the proper licenses to allow its users
to create the kinds of videos that they were making.
The music companies argued that without the agreements in place,
the artists who create the songs that fans love don't
get paid for the use of their music, and yeah,
that is a raw deal. But I do want to
point out that when it comes to altruistic philosophies, music
(38:47):
publishing companies rarely rank really high on my list of
candidates for most thoughtful of the year. Anyway, it looks
like Universal and TikTok negotiated to a common ground, which
probably means TikTok is shelling out big oh buckos the
Universal in order to make the music available to TikTok creators.
TikTok has reached similar agreements with Sony Music and Warner
(39:09):
Music Group, as well as lots of independent labels. Now
does this mean you can upload a video to TikTok
and use the music from TikTok's database without ever worrying
about a takedown? Notice? Maybe it sometimes happens anyway, which
has to be frustrating to creators. Meanwhile, old timers like
yours truly say stuff like where reminds me are the
(39:31):
old days of YouTube? Shutter down? Let me tell you
about them? So no one ever settles down and everyone
leaves me. Finally, entrepreneur Mark Cuban is co founding a
new podcast platform called Fireside. Apparently, the idea behind this
venture is to create a platform in which creators can
(39:53):
record and or broadcast conversations, monetize them, and use analytics
tools to see how different content performs on the platform.
It's supposed to be a curated platform as well, so
it's not like an open mic night at the local
CD comedy club. I think the sales pitch here is
that it takes a lot of stuff for probe podcasters
(40:17):
to do their jobs. And it takes all those duties
and aggregates it into a cohesive service. So rather than
a podcaster having to do marketing, analysis and sales all
on their own, you know, landing sponsors for their shows
and that kind of thing, this platform would handle that
stuff for them, at least to some degree. Now I
(40:39):
don't know how much control the creators on the platform
are going to have, So for example, with my show,
I typically get to have a say with regard to
which sponsors are allowed to advertise on tech stuff, and
I generally avoid sponsors that I don't feel are a
good fit for the show are or maybe they're in
the type of business that I'm not a fan of.
(41:00):
So for example, if an ad for any alternative medicine
company plays on my show, you can be pretty certain
that I did not get the chance to shoot that
one down, because I would never have something like that
run during one of my episodes. But I don't know
if people working on Fireside are going to be given
that level of authority to make those kind of decisions.
(41:22):
And just to be clear, they're actually already is a
company called Fireside that is in the podcast business. It's
a company that hosts podcasts and provides analytics for those podcasts,
which frankly surprises me that no one over on the
New Fireside project thought to check out that you know,
(41:43):
the name was available, because I mean, it's one thing
to take a company name that's already in use. It's
another thing to take a name that's already in use
in the exact same industry that you are getting into.
That's just bad form. According to the Verge, Fireside that is,
the New One has already reached out to some established
podcasters to talk about being part of the founding group
(42:06):
of creators on the platform. I am not one of them.
I'm not saying I'm hurt, but I'm not not saying
it either. And that wraps up this episode of tech
Stuff News. I know I got a little loopie there,
but it is ten fifteen PM as I record this,
(42:27):
So my day has been a long one. Give me
some slack, but don't put me on slack. I just
I can't. I can't do another project management tool right now.
I just can't. All right, guys, if you have any
suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a
topic about a company, a technology, a person in tech,
a trend in tech. Maybe you just want to know
(42:49):
how something works let me know. The best way to
reach out is over on Twitter. The handle I use
for the show is text stuff H s W and
I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
(43:09):
I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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