March 23, 2021 • 21 mins
A New York council member wants to ban police from owning weaponized robots. A San Francisco couple who co-founded a startup face multiple charges of fraud. And which app is the most invasive?
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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 a love of all things tech. And this is
the tech News episode for Tuesday, March twenty one. Now,
(00:27):
last week we had an episode that really went into
how various companies and organizations are tracking you. But don't worry,
We're only gonna do that a little bit in today's episode. So,
which app do you think is the most invasive? TikTok? Nope,
not that one. YouTube, Nope, Facebook, you're getting warmer. But
(00:52):
according to the cloud storage company p Cloud, the actual
answer is Instagram, So we're still in the Facebook family.
That makes sense, right, that tracks The company came to
this conclusion after reviewing updated app privacy labels. See not
that long ago. Apple updated its privacy policy and it
(01:14):
now requires companies to more thoroughly list out the ways
in which those companies collect and use data through these apps.
And this is one of the reasons why it took
Google a long time to update the company's apps on iOS.
Because it should come as a surprise to no one
that Google is collecting a lot of user information. Well,
(01:37):
the same appears to be true of Instagram, only more so.
According to p Cloud, Instagram collects nearly eighty percent of
users personal data, including stuff like search history, location, financial
information like what bank do you use, where do you
shop that kind of thing, plus who your contacts are,
(01:59):
and Instagram shares that information with various third parties who
presumably are paying a decent price for that level of access. Now,
this is how companies like Facebook, which by the way,
was in second place behind Instagram, It's how they can
market you to various advertisers. The more these companies know
(02:19):
about each user, the more they can target that user
with specific ads. They can match that user up with advertisers,
and being able to go to advertisers with the message
that hey, our app is going to put your ads
in front of the people who are most likely to
act on those ads. That's a powerful selling point. We
(02:41):
are well beyond the old days where you might, as
part of your marketing strategy, really rely on putting up
a billboard in a prominent location in town and hope
you get as many eyeballs as possible. Now we have
companies identifying which eyeballs are the most valuable to any
given client, and then sending those ads that way. Now,
(03:03):
what's the moral of this story, Well, it's that we
should all be aware of how apps are collecting our information,
how we are providing data to these apps. If we're
okay with that, no worries, right, I mean, it's this
is a personal thing. But if we're not okay with that,
we need to consider if those apps are really something
(03:25):
we want to use, because there's not really an easy
way for us to go in and cherry pick which
points of data can and cannot be used by any
given app. I mean, just doing that alone would become
a full time job. Now, in the interest of full disclosure,
I have Instagram on my phone, So I say this
as someone who is both aware that the app is
(03:48):
collecting a lot of data and still is using that app.
I'm one of those people. But I am also very
very boring. So my hope is that Facebook is not
getting very much money at all for my information, because
come on, I'm lame. According to the Korea Herald, the
giant tech company l G is now considering just shutting
(04:12):
down its smartphone division entirely. You might remember that. Earlier
this year, LG announced that it was looking into the
possibility of selling off its smartphone division to some other
company and just getting out of the smartphone game. Now
apparently no suitable parties have made an offer to LGS liking,
(04:32):
so the company may just shut down that division entirely
and then try to cut its losses. And LG has
been experiencing losses through its smartphone division. While LG is
the third largest smartphone maker behind Apple and Samsung, at
least according to market share that is from a counterpoint research.
(04:53):
Depending on which analysts you look at, you get different
numbers for these things. Anyway, despite being a big are
in the smartphone space, the division has been operating at
a loss for several years in a row. In fact,
according to the website gives China, l G has lost
four point four three billion dollars total and has had
(05:15):
a loss at the end of every single one of
the past twenty three consecutive quarters. This is a pretty
big deal. LG had even made a pretty big splash
this year earlier at CS with the reveal of the
rollable smartphone, a smartphone that can actually change screen sizes
dynamically because it uses a flexible oh LED display that
(05:39):
can unroll as it expands, and it also shows that
the smartphone business is a really tough one to be in.
Development costs are really high. It's a huge challenge to
stand out when you've got so many different smartphone companies
and models that are all on the market, you know,
and they're all competing for the same customers, and the
(06:00):
challenge to price units so that they are competitive in
such a dense field. So not a huge surprise. It
is sort of the end of an era with LG
getting out because LG has played such a big part
in smartphones. Atlas VPN released a report stating that in
twenty twenty, there was a one thousand, nine two percent
(06:22):
increase in development of malware aimed at the Mac operating system. Now,
percentages are tricky things, right, because it doesn't actually tell
you the total numbers. If only one instance of Mac
OS malware had happened in twenty nineteen, that would just
mean that there were one thousand, ninety two of them
(06:44):
in twenty twenty, and that number is dwarfed by the
number of incidents you would expect for Windows based operating systems,
But in this case, the report found evidence of six
hundred seventy four thousand, two hundred seventy three news samples
of malware for the MA cos. Still that's nothing. I mean,
half a million is a lot, so it's not nothing,
(07:05):
But it's not the same as what you see for Windows.
That's orders of magnitude bigger with Windows. So I just
want to be clear because I don't want people saying
my anti Mac bias is coming into play. The same
group that is Atlas VbN found ninety one oh five
million new Windows malware samples. Now that means that Windows
(07:29):
would rack up as many examples of malware new malware
in just three days as Mac had for the entire
year of twenty Still, this is a reminder that Mac
computers are not magically immune to malware. I'm not actually
sure what the perception is these days, but when I
(07:51):
got started in podcasting, there was this kind of general
belief among the public that Mac computers were effectively malware proof.
And there was, you know, some truth to that, but
not because the Mac operating system was just magically better
than Windows. It had more to do with opportunity. Because
if you are someone who's developing malware you probably want
(08:14):
that malware to hit as many targets as possible, and
the market share of Windows versus Mac os machines was
really out of whack. It just made more sense to
develop malware targeting PCs because there were way more PC
users out there. But we've seen a rise in instances
of Mac based malware over the past few years and
(08:35):
it's a solid reminder that there is no bulletproof operating
system out there, and no matter what type of machine
we used to access files and the Internet, we need
to be wary of malware. And now we transition to
a segment I like to call robots are scary and
they can be over In the UK, the Defense Secretary
(08:58):
Ben Wallace said that Britain's mill terry will be able
to achieve a greater effect with fewer actual soldiers in
the future thanks to technology, and part of that involves
drones now. The established strength of the UK Army in
the mid two thousands was set at eighty two thousand troops.
UH This includes all people who have received basic training
(09:19):
and then a secondary specialized training to focus on a
particular role or area of expertise. Today, the army has
seventy six thousand, five hundred personnel, including seventy six thousand,
three hundred fifty soldiers. Wallace's plans would reduce this number
to seventy two five hundred by five. At the same time,
(09:39):
the defense budget in the UK is to increase by
twenty four billion pounds over the next four years, So
the question is where is that money going if the
army is actually scaling back on the number of soldiers
that will be part of the army. Well, big part
of it is automated systems and drones, including replacing existing
Reaper drones with Protector drones. That is a little bit
(10:04):
confusing to some folks, I'm sure, because both the Reaper
and the Protector are themselves variants of the Predator B
class drone. Other big expenses include establishing a national cyber force,
building out a digital backbone for the purposes of rapid
data sharing, and the development of a future combat air system.
(10:27):
Technology is going to play a much bigger role, and
in theory it will reduce the need to have as
many human soldiers as are currently in service in the UK,
so at least some of that responsibility will fall to
technology and the operators who are in charge of it,
including the drones, which, by the way, are pretty terrifying things. Meanwhile,
(10:54):
on this side of the pond, Ben Callos, a New
York City Council member, has raised concerns about the New
York Police Force using robots to respond to a hostage
situation that took place in the Bronx. The robot in
question was a Diggi Dog from Boston Dynamics, and according
to Ours Technica, Callos reacted with horror seeing this robot
(11:15):
in use, which then prompted him to propose a ban
on police forces from owning or operating robots that are
armed with weaponry. But I do want to be clear
that the Digi Doog robot wasn't armed. It was only
equipped with surveillance cameras which gave police a view into
an area that was considered too dangerous for a human
(11:36):
officer to enter. But it wasn't like Diggi Dog was
packing heat or anything. Even so, without weapons, the Digi
Dog still has its critics. The American Civil Liberties Union
has asked why the Digi Dog didn't show up on
a police list of surveillance devices that they use. That's
a problem because New York recently passed a law that
(11:58):
states law enforcement agencies have to divulge that kind of information.
Groups like the A c L You are concerned that
there aren't proper privacy protections in place that would prevent
police from abusing the surveillance power on citizens. I did
not realize how many words start with P in that sentence. Uh,
there were until I actually said it out loud. But
(12:21):
there have been a lot of people, myself included, who
have been warning against the use of armed robots because
going down that pathway could lead to another type of
arms race, and that's one that will undoubtedly lead to
tragic consequences, whether by intent or accident. Callis himself isn't
totally anti robot. He said that utility robots like the
(12:42):
digit dog are not really what he's concerned about. Despite
that initial, you know, reaction of horror, I guess, nor
would he want to see bomb disposal robots get banned either,
But he is concerned about there being a slippery slope.
The ARS Technica piece at atually quotes the director of
the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic, and
(13:05):
he points out that what is a non lethal robot
today could be tweaked and modified and become a lethal
robot in the future, and we've already seen what happens
when we militarized police forces. To learn more about this,
I highly recommend reading the full article on Ours Technica.
It is titled New York lawmaker wants to ban police
(13:29):
use of armed robots. It's by Sydney Fussele, who writes
for Wired dot com. So, like I said, I found
the article over at ours Technica. It is extremely well
written and well researched, So go check that out. And
now let's move to some varying degrees of weird stories.
Our first one is that the final bid for Twitter
(13:49):
CEO Jack Dorsey's first tweet has been made. The transaction
has happened. Specifically, this was a bid for the n
f T or on fungible token version of that tweet. Now.
I have an episode coming up explaining what n f
t s are and how they work. That's going to
be later this week, but for the purposes of this story,
(14:12):
it's safe to boil it down and just say this
is a way to certify a digital thing as being
unique anyway. In this case, the n f t was
Dorsey's first tweet, which reads just setting up my Twitter.
Dorsey posted that back on March twenty one, two thousand six.
Back then Twitter had no vowels. I mean, the service
(14:34):
would let you use vowels, but the the company didn't
use vowels in the name, so it was spelled t
W T t R. The winning bid came from Senna Estav,
the CEO at Bridge Oracle and stiv Or Stav. His
winning bid was for two million, nine hundred fifteen thousand,
(14:54):
eight hundred thirty five dollars and forty seven cents, which
is not a round number and I don't know if
that number has any special significance. He paid for the
tweet using Ether cryptocurrency, and Dorsey took the money, converted
it to bitcoin, and then donated it to give directly
(15:16):
a charitable organization that gives money directly to those who
needed That two million and such and such dollars ended
up being just under fifty one bitcoin. The actual value
was fifty point eight seven five one six six nine bitcoin,
because that's how bitcoin works. Five of the bid actually
(15:38):
went to the platform sent that's c E n T.
That is the platform that hosted the auction pretty wild.
Also wild is that the actor William Shatner, perhaps best
known as the original Captain James T. Kirk in the
Star Trek franchise, has turned ninety years old, and he
(15:59):
has also spawned an AI version of himself with the
help of a company called story File. Now, according to
the CEO of story File, there will be a video
version of William Shatner that will not be a deep fake.
It will not be an avatar. In her words, it
will be the real Shatner. What that actually means, I
(16:22):
guess is up to interpretation. But the idea is that
this video version of Shatner will be able to interact
with people and respond to people, just as William Shatner
himself would if he were, you know, doing like a
video conference with you. So, in other words, it should
be a digital copy of William Shatner, though I have
(16:43):
questions about how faithfully the video will recreate the experience
of actually interacting with the star. Shatner said he wanted
to create a way that would allow his family and
friends to interact with him for all time. The video
version should be up and running by May of this year,
and I really, really hope that if you ask it
(17:03):
very trivial questions about Star Trek, it will prompt the
video Shatner to respond in the same way that the
real Shatner did in an old Saturday Night Live sketch
in which he appeared as uh if you were a
guest at a science fiction convention and he fields increasingly
weird questions from a big group of nerdy Star Trek
(17:25):
fans until he just explodes and yells, get a life,
will you people? That's what I want from my Shatner interaction.
I'll be disappointed if I don't get it. And our
final story for today's episode comes as a huge personal
challenge for me, but I will do my best to
keep things at the standards that we expect for tech stuff.
(17:47):
In San Francisco, a couple who founded a company called
you Biome have now been indicted on multiple fraud charges
by the federal government. You Biome was in the how
do I put this uh fecal matter testing business? Now.
The pitch was that this startup company would take your
(18:08):
sample and then they would run tests on it and
determine like your gut health and give recommendations on how
to improve your general well being. The only problem, according
to the charges anyway, is that their methods were totally
untested and without evidence, and there was no proof that
they were even at all effective. In the meantime, the
(18:32):
company developed so called clinical tests that they urged medical
professionals to give to patients, but these tests, again according
to the charges, also lacked any sort of actual validation
or accreditation. The whole purpose of the tests was just
to create a way for you biom to seek reimbursements
(18:54):
from health insurance companies. So essentially, again according to the charges,
this was about committing a type of insurance fraud if
in fact the tests had no validity and had no
you know, medical necessity. The story is very similar to
that of thora nos in that the pitch for it
sounds plausible, right a company that you know analyzes poop
(19:18):
to determine gut health. That seems like that would be
achievable in a startup kind of company. But according to
the charges, the couple fooled an awful lot of people
in the process of trying to get this business going.
It sounds like a really crappy situation to me. No
Beans A dun Winton did the thing I said I
(19:39):
wasn't gonna do anyway. But they also gained praise from
various parties, including Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle company Goop, which I
mean for Goop to praise Poop not a big surprise
if you follow Goop. The story of you Bioms should
(20:00):
mind everyone that hype can be exciting, but it can
also be really hazardous, not just to your investment, but
potentially to your health. If you're counting on something that
doesn't actually have any medical validity to it, you could
be making really bad decisions. So before you Biom began
(20:20):
to fall apart back in twenty nineteen, and it reached
a valuation of more than half a billion dollars. That
is terrible. It tells us that there is there's something
seriously broken in the investment tech sector. It's really just
enough for you to give them all the stink. I Well,
that wraps up all the stories for Tuesday March, or
(20:45):
at least all the stories I wanted to talk about.
We'll be covering more tech news later in the week.
If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover
in episodes of Tech Stuff, let me know. Reach out
to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is
text of H s W and I'll talk to You
again really soon. Y. Text Stuff is an I heart
(21:10):
Radio production. For more podcasts from my 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 a love of all things tech. And this is
the tech News episode for Tuesday, March twenty one. Now,
(00:27):
last week we had an episode that really went into
how various companies and organizations are tracking you. But don't worry,
We're only gonna do that a little bit in today's episode. So,
which app do you think is the most invasive? TikTok? Nope,
not that one. YouTube, Nope, Facebook, you're getting warmer. But
(00:52):
according to the cloud storage company p Cloud, the actual
answer is Instagram, So we're still in the Facebook family.
That makes sense, right, that tracks The company came to
this conclusion after reviewing updated app privacy labels. See not
that long ago. Apple updated its privacy policy and it
(01:14):
now requires companies to more thoroughly list out the ways
in which those companies collect and use data through these apps.
And this is one of the reasons why it took
Google a long time to update the company's apps on iOS.
Because it should come as a surprise to no one
that Google is collecting a lot of user information. Well,
(01:37):
the same appears to be true of Instagram, only more so.
According to p Cloud, Instagram collects nearly eighty percent of
users personal data, including stuff like search history, location, financial
information like what bank do you use, where do you
shop that kind of thing, plus who your contacts are,
(01:59):
and Instagram shares that information with various third parties who
presumably are paying a decent price for that level of access. Now,
this is how companies like Facebook, which by the way,
was in second place behind Instagram, It's how they can
market you to various advertisers. The more these companies know
(02:19):
about each user, the more they can target that user
with specific ads. They can match that user up with advertisers,
and being able to go to advertisers with the message
that hey, our app is going to put your ads
in front of the people who are most likely to
act on those ads. That's a powerful selling point. We
(02:41):
are well beyond the old days where you might, as
part of your marketing strategy, really rely on putting up
a billboard in a prominent location in town and hope
you get as many eyeballs as possible. Now we have
companies identifying which eyeballs are the most valuable to any
given client, and then sending those ads that way. Now,
(03:03):
what's the moral of this story, Well, it's that we
should all be aware of how apps are collecting our information,
how we are providing data to these apps. If we're
okay with that, no worries, right, I mean, it's this
is a personal thing. But if we're not okay with that,
we need to consider if those apps are really something
(03:25):
we want to use, because there's not really an easy
way for us to go in and cherry pick which
points of data can and cannot be used by any
given app. I mean, just doing that alone would become
a full time job. Now, in the interest of full disclosure,
I have Instagram on my phone, So I say this
as someone who is both aware that the app is
(03:48):
collecting a lot of data and still is using that app.
I'm one of those people. But I am also very
very boring. So my hope is that Facebook is not
getting very much money at all for my information, because
come on, I'm lame. According to the Korea Herald, the
giant tech company l G is now considering just shutting
(04:12):
down its smartphone division entirely. You might remember that. Earlier
this year, LG announced that it was looking into the
possibility of selling off its smartphone division to some other
company and just getting out of the smartphone game. Now
apparently no suitable parties have made an offer to LGS liking,
(04:32):
so the company may just shut down that division entirely
and then try to cut its losses. And LG has
been experiencing losses through its smartphone division. While LG is
the third largest smartphone maker behind Apple and Samsung, at
least according to market share that is from a counterpoint research.
(04:53):
Depending on which analysts you look at, you get different
numbers for these things. Anyway, despite being a big are
in the smartphone space, the division has been operating at
a loss for several years in a row. In fact,
according to the website gives China, l G has lost
four point four three billion dollars total and has had
(05:15):
a loss at the end of every single one of
the past twenty three consecutive quarters. This is a pretty
big deal. LG had even made a pretty big splash
this year earlier at CS with the reveal of the
rollable smartphone, a smartphone that can actually change screen sizes
dynamically because it uses a flexible oh LED display that
(05:39):
can unroll as it expands, and it also shows that
the smartphone business is a really tough one to be in.
Development costs are really high. It's a huge challenge to
stand out when you've got so many different smartphone companies
and models that are all on the market, you know,
and they're all competing for the same customers, and the
(06:00):
challenge to price units so that they are competitive in
such a dense field. So not a huge surprise. It
is sort of the end of an era with LG
getting out because LG has played such a big part
in smartphones. Atlas VPN released a report stating that in
twenty twenty, there was a one thousand, nine two percent
(06:22):
increase in development of malware aimed at the Mac operating system. Now,
percentages are tricky things, right, because it doesn't actually tell
you the total numbers. If only one instance of Mac
OS malware had happened in twenty nineteen, that would just
mean that there were one thousand, ninety two of them
(06:44):
in twenty twenty, and that number is dwarfed by the
number of incidents you would expect for Windows based operating systems,
But in this case, the report found evidence of six
hundred seventy four thousand, two hundred seventy three news samples
of malware for the MA cos. Still that's nothing. I mean,
half a million is a lot, so it's not nothing,
(07:05):
But it's not the same as what you see for Windows.
That's orders of magnitude bigger with Windows. So I just
want to be clear because I don't want people saying
my anti Mac bias is coming into play. The same
group that is Atlas VbN found ninety one oh five
million new Windows malware samples. Now that means that Windows
(07:29):
would rack up as many examples of malware new malware
in just three days as Mac had for the entire
year of twenty Still, this is a reminder that Mac
computers are not magically immune to malware. I'm not actually
sure what the perception is these days, but when I
(07:51):
got started in podcasting, there was this kind of general
belief among the public that Mac computers were effectively malware proof.
And there was, you know, some truth to that, but
not because the Mac operating system was just magically better
than Windows. It had more to do with opportunity. Because
if you are someone who's developing malware you probably want
(08:14):
that malware to hit as many targets as possible, and
the market share of Windows versus Mac os machines was
really out of whack. It just made more sense to
develop malware targeting PCs because there were way more PC
users out there. But we've seen a rise in instances
of Mac based malware over the past few years and
(08:35):
it's a solid reminder that there is no bulletproof operating
system out there, and no matter what type of machine
we used to access files and the Internet, we need
to be wary of malware. And now we transition to
a segment I like to call robots are scary and
they can be over In the UK, the Defense Secretary
(08:58):
Ben Wallace said that Britain's mill terry will be able
to achieve a greater effect with fewer actual soldiers in
the future thanks to technology, and part of that involves
drones now. The established strength of the UK Army in
the mid two thousands was set at eighty two thousand troops.
UH This includes all people who have received basic training
(09:19):
and then a secondary specialized training to focus on a
particular role or area of expertise. Today, the army has
seventy six thousand, five hundred personnel, including seventy six thousand,
three hundred fifty soldiers. Wallace's plans would reduce this number
to seventy two five hundred by five. At the same time,
(09:39):
the defense budget in the UK is to increase by
twenty four billion pounds over the next four years, So
the question is where is that money going if the
army is actually scaling back on the number of soldiers
that will be part of the army. Well, big part
of it is automated systems and drones, including replacing existing
Reaper drones with Protector drones. That is a little bit
(10:04):
confusing to some folks, I'm sure, because both the Reaper
and the Protector are themselves variants of the Predator B
class drone. Other big expenses include establishing a national cyber force,
building out a digital backbone for the purposes of rapid
data sharing, and the development of a future combat air system.
(10:27):
Technology is going to play a much bigger role, and
in theory it will reduce the need to have as
many human soldiers as are currently in service in the UK,
so at least some of that responsibility will fall to
technology and the operators who are in charge of it,
including the drones, which, by the way, are pretty terrifying things. Meanwhile,
(10:54):
on this side of the pond, Ben Callos, a New
York City Council member, has raised concerns about the New
York Police Force using robots to respond to a hostage
situation that took place in the Bronx. The robot in
question was a Diggi Dog from Boston Dynamics, and according
to Ours Technica, Callos reacted with horror seeing this robot
(11:15):
in use, which then prompted him to propose a ban
on police forces from owning or operating robots that are
armed with weaponry. But I do want to be clear
that the Digi Doog robot wasn't armed. It was only
equipped with surveillance cameras which gave police a view into
an area that was considered too dangerous for a human
(11:36):
officer to enter. But it wasn't like Diggi Dog was
packing heat or anything. Even so, without weapons, the Digi
Dog still has its critics. The American Civil Liberties Union
has asked why the Digi Dog didn't show up on
a police list of surveillance devices that they use. That's
a problem because New York recently passed a law that
(11:58):
states law enforcement agencies have to divulge that kind of information.
Groups like the A c L You are concerned that
there aren't proper privacy protections in place that would prevent
police from abusing the surveillance power on citizens. I did
not realize how many words start with P in that sentence. Uh,
there were until I actually said it out loud. But
(12:21):
there have been a lot of people, myself included, who
have been warning against the use of armed robots because
going down that pathway could lead to another type of
arms race, and that's one that will undoubtedly lead to
tragic consequences, whether by intent or accident. Callis himself isn't
totally anti robot. He said that utility robots like the
(12:42):
digit dog are not really what he's concerned about. Despite
that initial, you know, reaction of horror, I guess, nor
would he want to see bomb disposal robots get banned either,
But he is concerned about there being a slippery slope.
The ARS Technica piece at atually quotes the director of
the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic, and
(13:05):
he points out that what is a non lethal robot
today could be tweaked and modified and become a lethal
robot in the future, and we've already seen what happens
when we militarized police forces. To learn more about this,
I highly recommend reading the full article on Ours Technica.
It is titled New York lawmaker wants to ban police
(13:29):
use of armed robots. It's by Sydney Fussele, who writes
for Wired dot com. So, like I said, I found
the article over at ours Technica. It is extremely well
written and well researched, So go check that out. And
now let's move to some varying degrees of weird stories.
Our first one is that the final bid for Twitter
(13:49):
CEO Jack Dorsey's first tweet has been made. The transaction
has happened. Specifically, this was a bid for the n
f T or on fungible token version of that tweet. Now.
I have an episode coming up explaining what n f
t s are and how they work. That's going to
be later this week, but for the purposes of this story,
(14:12):
it's safe to boil it down and just say this
is a way to certify a digital thing as being
unique anyway. In this case, the n f t was
Dorsey's first tweet, which reads just setting up my Twitter.
Dorsey posted that back on March twenty one, two thousand six.
Back then Twitter had no vowels. I mean, the service
(14:34):
would let you use vowels, but the the company didn't
use vowels in the name, so it was spelled t
W T t R. The winning bid came from Senna Estav,
the CEO at Bridge Oracle and stiv Or Stav. His
winning bid was for two million, nine hundred fifteen thousand,
(14:54):
eight hundred thirty five dollars and forty seven cents, which
is not a round number and I don't know if
that number has any special significance. He paid for the
tweet using Ether cryptocurrency, and Dorsey took the money, converted
it to bitcoin, and then donated it to give directly
(15:16):
a charitable organization that gives money directly to those who
needed That two million and such and such dollars ended
up being just under fifty one bitcoin. The actual value
was fifty point eight seven five one six six nine bitcoin,
because that's how bitcoin works. Five of the bid actually
(15:38):
went to the platform sent that's c E n T.
That is the platform that hosted the auction pretty wild.
Also wild is that the actor William Shatner, perhaps best
known as the original Captain James T. Kirk in the
Star Trek franchise, has turned ninety years old, and he
(15:59):
has also spawned an AI version of himself with the
help of a company called story File. Now, according to
the CEO of story File, there will be a video
version of William Shatner that will not be a deep fake.
It will not be an avatar. In her words, it
will be the real Shatner. What that actually means, I
(16:22):
guess is up to interpretation. But the idea is that
this video version of Shatner will be able to interact
with people and respond to people, just as William Shatner
himself would if he were, you know, doing like a
video conference with you. So, in other words, it should
be a digital copy of William Shatner, though I have
(16:43):
questions about how faithfully the video will recreate the experience
of actually interacting with the star. Shatner said he wanted
to create a way that would allow his family and
friends to interact with him for all time. The video
version should be up and running by May of this year,
and I really, really hope that if you ask it
(17:03):
very trivial questions about Star Trek, it will prompt the
video Shatner to respond in the same way that the
real Shatner did in an old Saturday Night Live sketch
in which he appeared as uh if you were a
guest at a science fiction convention and he fields increasingly
weird questions from a big group of nerdy Star Trek
(17:25):
fans until he just explodes and yells, get a life,
will you people? That's what I want from my Shatner interaction.
I'll be disappointed if I don't get it. And our
final story for today's episode comes as a huge personal
challenge for me, but I will do my best to
keep things at the standards that we expect for tech stuff.
(17:47):
In San Francisco, a couple who founded a company called
you Biome have now been indicted on multiple fraud charges
by the federal government. You Biome was in the how
do I put this uh fecal matter testing business? Now.
The pitch was that this startup company would take your
(18:08):
sample and then they would run tests on it and
determine like your gut health and give recommendations on how
to improve your general well being. The only problem, according
to the charges anyway, is that their methods were totally
untested and without evidence, and there was no proof that
they were even at all effective. In the meantime, the
(18:32):
company developed so called clinical tests that they urged medical
professionals to give to patients, but these tests, again according
to the charges, also lacked any sort of actual validation
or accreditation. The whole purpose of the tests was just
to create a way for you biom to seek reimbursements
(18:54):
from health insurance companies. So essentially, again according to the charges,
this was about committing a type of insurance fraud if
in fact the tests had no validity and had no
you know, medical necessity. The story is very similar to
that of thora nos in that the pitch for it
sounds plausible, right a company that you know analyzes poop
(19:18):
to determine gut health. That seems like that would be
achievable in a startup kind of company. But according to
the charges, the couple fooled an awful lot of people
in the process of trying to get this business going.
It sounds like a really crappy situation to me. No
Beans A dun Winton did the thing I said I
(19:39):
wasn't gonna do anyway. But they also gained praise from
various parties, including Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle company Goop, which I
mean for Goop to praise Poop not a big surprise
if you follow Goop. The story of you Bioms should
(20:00):
mind everyone that hype can be exciting, but it can
also be really hazardous, not just to your investment, but
potentially to your health. If you're counting on something that
doesn't actually have any medical validity to it, you could
be making really bad decisions. So before you Biom began
(20:20):
to fall apart back in twenty nineteen, and it reached
a valuation of more than half a billion dollars. That
is terrible. It tells us that there is there's something
seriously broken in the investment tech sector. It's really just
enough for you to give them all the stink. I Well,
that wraps up all the stories for Tuesday March, or
(20:45):
at least all the stories I wanted to talk about.
We'll be covering more tech news later in the week.
If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover
in episodes of Tech Stuff, let me know. Reach out
to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is
text of H s W and I'll talk to You
again really soon. Y. Text Stuff is an I heart
(21:10):
Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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