Tech News: The Sun is Angry

A solar storm is heading toward Earth but it's nothing to worry about. Plus, Apple says its human rights were violated and the Chairman of TSMC states the obvious. 

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Episode Transcript

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
job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you. It's time for the
tech news for Tuesday, August two, two thousand twenty two. Now,
if you haven't seen reports already, you are likely to

(00:26):
come across a headline or a news snippet saying something
along the lines of a solar storm is going to
hit the Earth tomorrow. In case you're listening from the future,
tomorrow would be Wednesday, August three, twenty two. And if
you are from the future, how did it turn out?
Are the zombies as bad as we heard? I'm kidding.
So this news could sound a bit concerning, So I

(00:49):
am here to tell you what this actually means. And
right at the top, there is no need to worry.
There's no cause for panic here. This is a mild
solar storm, g one solar storm, and it's quite probable
that tomorrow will come and go and most of you
won't even notice anything unusual. However, solar storms do have

(01:10):
the potential to cause some disruption here on Earth. So
here's what's going on. The Earth has a strong magnetic field,
and that's great because it helps protect us from being
bombarded by stuff like solar debris, such as what is
recently erupted from the Sun. These particles can carry a
lot of energy. They could be harmful if they were
to collide with us here on Earth. In fact, life

(01:33):
would not really be possible if it weren't for the
fact that we had this magnetic field that helps protect us.
The magnetic field and the and the atmosphere together are
like a force field for us here on Earth. Well,
when the debris makes contact with Earth's magnetic field, that
field ends up contracting a little bit. It gets you know, constricted,

(01:53):
It absorbs energy, and the result is we get geo
magnetic storms. Now, those can actually be gorgeous, They can
be spectacular if they're strong enough. Fluctuations on Earth's magnetic
field are sometimes visible. That's what the Aurora borealis is, right,
the aurora at the polls. That's from these fluctuations of

(02:14):
the magnetic fields, so the northern and southern lights. In
other words, well, during a very powerful geomagnetic storm, those
aurora can sometimes be visible much further away from the source.
Than is typically possible. Like normally, for the Northern Lights,
for example, you have to be pretty far north to
see them, but in times of real geomagnetic storm activity,

(02:39):
it might be possible to see them as far south
as the Caribbean, which is unbelievable. So in places like Atlanta, Georgia,
where I am, you know that's it's it's almost unheard
of to be able to see the Northern Lights. Now,
to be clear, that kind of activity is not going
to happen tomorrow. Again, this is a mild solar storm.

(02:59):
People in places like Michigan and Maine might be able
to see the Northern Lights, but folks as far south
as I am are not going to see it. These
storms are electromagnetic in nature, so you get these electromagnetic
surges and as a result, they can interfere with larger
electronic systems and devices, um stuff like power grids. You

(03:23):
can see surges and power grids because these are enormous systems, right,
so you can almost think of them as a huge
antenna for electro magnetic surges and that can then be
detected within those systems. Generally speaking, the larger the system,
the more prone it is to at least being affected
a little bit by solar storms. Now, are really powerful

(03:45):
electromagnetic surge is something from a massive solar eruption or
maybe something you know, more terrestrial in in nature, like
a blast from a nuclear warhead for example. That would
be powerful enough to affect things like personal electronics. But again,
that's not what's happening tomorrow. The solar storm will see

(04:07):
tomorrow will be very mild in nature, so there might
be some power surges here and there, but it's not
going to be anything massive at least that's not what
anyone's predicting. So, uh, chances are most people are going
to go through the day tomorrow and not even notice
that there was anything weird happening. We are entering into

(04:28):
an era of increased solar activity. This is not unusual.
This happens in cycles. The full cycle lasts eleven years,
and we're coming back round to the part of the
cycle where there's increased solar activity. Now, could this mean
that in the future there is a solar flare coronal
mass ejection that's large enough to have a noticeable effect

(04:52):
on systems here on Earth. Yes, that is possible. Way
back in the nineteenth century, I believe it was eighteen
fifty nine there was a solar storm that was so
powerful that it ended up causing surges in telegraph lines
here on Earth and caused issues. Then that is not
what we're gonna see tomorrow. Doesn't mean that we won't

(05:13):
see it in the future. It's another reminder that we
have to be very careful in how we prepare and
design our systems so that they can handle these kinds
of surges. As it stands, power grids on Earth typically
aren't built to survive massive spikes like that. We would

(05:35):
likely see outages in a in a truly large solar storm,
So we can really think of this more as a warning,
but not anything to be alarmed about for the time being. Okay,
let's go for another Elon Musk Twitter update. So when
last we met, Twitter had sued Musk for trying to
back out of his acquisition deal for the company, and

(05:58):
a judge has now schedule a day five day court
case that's going to take place in October, and Twitter
still has to hold a shareholder vote to get shareholder
approval for Musk purchasing the company. That vote will happen
later this year. Now, I suspect that the shareholders are
going to approve of the acquisition because Musk agreed to
buy Twitter at fifty four dollars and twenty since per share,

(06:21):
and right now Twitter stock is currently trading, you know,
somewhere around the forty one mark, so shareholders would stand
to make a good amount of money if they sold
their shares to Elon Musk. But the latest update is
that last Friday, Musk filed a counter suit against Twitter,
so he has countersued Twitter. Now we know that the

(06:42):
filing is more than a hundred sixty pages long, but
we don't know what's in it. It was privately filed.
Only the court knows what's in it. Up to this point,
the analysts whose work I've been reading about this haven't
been terribly impressed with the arguments made by Musk's team
of lawyers as to why he should be allowed to
back out of the deal without any issue. But then

(07:05):
it may be that the countersuit contains more compelling arguments.
I just don't know. Now. We might get a redacted
version of the countersuit before too long, and then we'll
learn a bit more. I still don't know how this
whole thing is gonna go. So my gut tells me
the musk is kind of up the creek due to
the nature of that initial agreement to acquire Twitter, But

(07:27):
I am no legal expert, and anyway, sometimes court cases
defy logic, or at least what I call logic. Fast
Company has a report on how the tech sector continues
to cut back on costs, which includes stuff like hiring
freezes and layoffs. So the Fast Company says that Oracle

(07:48):
reports are saying that thousands of employees will be laid
off in the coming months in places like the United
States and Canada, India, and Europe. Shopify laid off around
ten percent of its work force last month. Lift has
reorganized its business and in the process eliminated sixty jobs
in its rental division. Netflix, which is a company that's

(08:11):
been in and out of the news a lot this
year due to issues with subscriber loss, has laid off
around three hundred employees this year so far, and has
also canceled a bunch of projects that I was personally
looking forward to. So sad that the world is not
going to get an animated movie version of Bone phenomenal
uh comic book series. You can get the full collection

(08:33):
and I highly recommend it, and it is sad that
we're not going to get the animated version of it.
Fast Company also notes that coin Base, which is a
cryptocurrency exchange, is going to lay off nearly twenty percent
of its workforce, and while it wasn't part of Fast
Company's report, we've also heard about companies like Microsoft and
Meta and Apple putting hiring freezes in place for certain departments.

(08:57):
We've also heard Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicating that the
company is going to reduce headcount and try to do
more with less, saying things like they're probably people working
here who shouldn't be working here. Fun times. Well, we've
also got a few Apple related news I ams to
talk about that I am eager to get to. We're
gonna take a quick break when we come back. I'm

(09:18):
going to talk about these Apple stories. We're back. So
Apple story number one, it's that Apple has sent out
an email to all employees saying that the company is
lifting its mask mandate for employees at quote most locations

(09:41):
end quote. In fact, I'm going to expand on that.
Apple employees received an internal email that had one part
of it saying quote in light of current circumstances, wearing
a face mask will no longer be required in most locations.
End quote. Now I'm curious what those current circumstances are
because we're kind of in another COVID nineteen surge, and

(10:04):
then there's an increased concern for other diseases, like you know,
monkey pocks is a growing concern. And now I should
still add that doctors are still working out to what
extent monkey pocks could transmit from person to person through
you know, respiratory excretions. Uh, there's there's not a full
understanding of that. There's some evidence to suggest that it

(10:26):
can happen, but we don't know to what extent. However,
I would think that would be enough to raise concerns
in certain areas like you know, California, for example, and
suggest that maybe masks would be a good idea. So
I don't I don't understand. In fact, over in San Francisco,
which is not too far from where Apple headquarters is,

(10:46):
I mean it's not like super close, but it's not
super far either, BART, which is also known as the
Bay Area Rapid Transit System, has reinstated it's mask mandate.
So weird that Apple would remove its mask mandate just
as you down the road, Bart is putting it back

(11:06):
in place. I guess it just feels like odd timing
to me. I am not sure what is going on
here now. I will say that Apple's email reiterated that
if employees feel more comfortable wearing a mask, they should
do so. Uh, and that the company wants all employees
to respect each other's decisions about whether or not to
wear a mask. Um. Again, just odd timing. I don't

(11:28):
know what prompted that, but there you go. Next up,
Apple reported a decline and its profits last week. The
company's profits were down by more than ten percent compared
to the end of the second quarter of last year. Revenue, however,
is up. The company is growing at a slower pace

(11:49):
than it was last year, so it's still growing, just
not growing as quickly. Uh. Insert rant from Jonathan here
about how using growth as a prime metric for business
is ultimately destructive. I'm sparing all of you all that
this time. Just imagine that I'm ranting about it now. Anyway,
Despite the fact that Q two of two thousand twenty

(12:10):
two didn't perform as well as Q two of two
thousand twenty one, Apple still beat expectations, and so it
saw its stock price increase as a result. The company
also reported that Apple's services division saw twelve growth. Now
that's something that I would be a little bit concerned about,
given what's going on with Apple in the world right now.

(12:32):
So Tim Cook has been guiding Apple into becoming more
of a services company for years. That's that's been the path,
the trajectory that Apple has been on for quite some
time now. But we're seeing more regulatory agencies around the
world pushing back against Apple's processes. At the heart of
the matter for most of these is whether or not

(12:52):
Apple's approach is ultimately anti competitive, namely that the company
requires all in app purchases to use Apple his own
payment processing system, which automatically gives Apple a fifteen to
cut of each in app transaction. Uh, it gets a
little more tricky than that, but that's the general gist
of it. So if we see Apple lose ground on

(13:15):
that matter, that would have a potentially massive impact on
an increasingly important revenue source for the company, and it
could force Apple to have to pivot again. But it's
early days and I expect we're gonna see Apple perform well,
at least in the short term. It's just the question
of when is the other shoe going to drop? And

(13:35):
now for some weird Apple news, the company has requested
emergency relief from a U S court over how it
cannot sell five G iPhones and iPads in Colombia. And
you might say, Colombia is not in the United States.
That's a different country entirely. What is going on? All right,
let's sort all this out. So Apple's five g iOS

(13:57):
products rely on ed technology that's out from Ericsson. So
Ericsson holds the patent on these technologies. Apple does not
dispute this. This is something that all parties agree upon.
And until recently, Apple was paying a licensing fee to
Ericsson to make use of that technology. So far, so good.

(14:18):
But then Apple decided, Yo, this is expensive and I'm
not gonna pay it anymore, and so Apple stopped paying Ericson.
So Ericsson started reaching out to various markets, with Columbia
being a very earlier one, and and said, hey, Apple
is illegally selling these products. They are violating our patents,
so do not sell five G products in your stores. Really,

(14:40):
Ericson said this to Colombian courts, and the courts in
Columbia ordered stores there not to sell these five G
Apple products. So then Apple goes in files an emergency
motion in the Eastern District of Texas, arguing that Ericsson
owes Apple damages for disrupting its operations and Colombia. Now

(15:01):
the judges said, you're on your cotton picken minds. One, Apple,
you're in the wrong here by refusing to sit down
with Ericson and negotiate a licensing fee to Ericson is
within its rights to defend its patents. Three, this is
not an emergency situation. And if you do this again,
I'm gonna make you go out there and get me

(15:21):
a switch. I am paraphrasing, I should add anyway, Now
Apple's filing another emergency motion, so it might be a
switch time. Uh, And I'm sure that's gonna get a
fun response from the courts. And the argument is that
Apple's making is get this, It's human rights are being violated,
as an Apple's human rights are being violated. So Apple,

(15:44):
or maybe It's arguing its products have had human rights
that have been violated by this action by Ericsson. Now
you might be saying, but that none of those things
that you talked about are actually human You are right now.
You could potentially argue that corporations in the United States

(16:04):
are granted a legal form of personhood, but that doesn't
necessarily extend human rights to them. Plus, experts are arguing
that even if it did, there are no human rights
violations happening here anyway. So we'll have to see how
this plays out. It might just be that Apples trying
to wait out Ericson and hope that the loss of
revenue will be enough to make Ericson go belly up

(16:26):
and they won't have to pay anything anymore because no
one will be around to own those I p um.
I don't know. It's just bizarre. It's this is one
of those stories where as I read it, I was thinking,
am I awake or is this a fever dream? Uh?
Turns out I was awake. Amazon released its sustainability report

(16:46):
and the news isn't great. Now, the company did try
to spin it into a positive direction. So here's the
quote unquote good news. Amazon has managed to decrease the
amount of emissions it generates on a more US per
dollar level, so meaning the amount of emissions produced for
every dollar of merchandise sold fell by just under two percent. Uh.

(17:09):
They referred to this as carbon intensity, So from that perspective,
things are moving in the right direction. Right Like per operation,
Amazon's emissions are decreasing. But here's the big issue. Amazon
also saw an enormous boom in business, and the volume
of these operations increased dramatically. So while the carbon intensity

(17:33):
of each individual operation dropped slightly, the total number of
operations meant that carbon emissions ballooned by eighteen percent in
twenty one. That means Amazon generated more than seventy one
million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year. As The
Verge points out, that's roughly equal to the amount of

(17:54):
carbon dioxide that a hundred eighty gas fired power plants
would generate over the course of a full year. The
Verge also rightfully points out that companies like Amazon us
stuff like carbon offsets to push toward being a net
zero carbon company on paper. But here's the thing offsets. Really,

(18:14):
what that means is that you're pouring money into projects
that are at least intended to remove carbon from the
atmosphere in some way, Like it might be a program
where you're planting lots of trees for all, for certain
amounts of carbon that you're emitting, and you get credits
for that right because you're spending money, you get credits

(18:34):
that allow you to emit that carbon. Here's the problem.
You're dumping all that carbon now, and the solutions can
take years to mature and start to make an impact.
So in the in between that you've got this growing
issue of of increasing amounts of carbon being emitted into

(18:55):
the atmosphere with the quote unquote solution for the problem
not really even making an impact until years later. You
can't do that that there's a there's a recipe for disaster.
It's heading toward collapse. But that is how a lot
of these companies deal with trying to look like they're
being carbon neutral. They're not actually carbon neutral. They're essentially

(19:18):
buying the right to emit more carbon. And since these
companies have enormous amounts of money, they can do that
because in the end, the money they spend in order
to appear carbon neutral on paper is way less than
the money they would have to spend to actually overhaul
operations so that it truly was carbon neutral. Dark times, y'all,

(19:42):
it's it's tough, and this is something It's not just
Amazon that does this, So I don't want to give
that impression. It's not only Amazon that is guilty of
kind of doing this sort of bait and switch or
or juggling numbers around on a piece of paper to
make it look better. This is something that's problemat throughout
multiple industries, not just the tech industry. So it's something

(20:04):
that we really do have to pay more attention to
and make sure that we address in a responsible way. Alright,
We've got a few more stories to cover before we
conclude this episode, but first let's take another quick break.

(20:24):
We're back. So, the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company,
better known as t s MC, released a statement that
I think kind of says the obvious, like it's something
where everybody knows this, but I guess by saying it
out loud, you make it more ominous. What he said

(20:44):
was that if China were to invade Taiwan, that would
cause huge economic turmoil in the entire region, it would
change global economies, and it would render t s MCS
semiconductor factory's nonoperable. Now, this has been something that's been
a huge concern for a long time. So so let's

(21:07):
do a very quick cliffs notes version of what's going
on here. Taiwan is off the coast of mainland China.
The two entities, China and Taiwan have had a long
and complicated history. Way back in the nineteen forties, the
Republic of China, which was the government that was in
place of the entire nation at that time, was being

(21:31):
pushed out by the People's Republic of China, a totally
different group, and the Republic of China fled to Taiwan.
The People's Republic of China assumed control of the Chinese mainland. Essentially,
both governments more or less claim that they're the rightful
power for all of China. So, uh, you have these

(21:51):
two different entities that that essentially say, yeah, we're in
charge of everything. Um well, effectively they operates separately. Although
China and Taiwan have a lot of connections, obviously there
are people who go back and forth. China has been
accused of stealing talent from Taiwan for years now in

(22:13):
order to bolster its own semi conductor industry in China,
and there have been tensions there for ages. So this
has been a huge reason why places other places around
the world, like particularly here in the United States, we've
seen a real push to create semiconductor fabrication facilities in

(22:36):
order to reduce the dependence upon Taiwan. Right now, Taiwan
produces nearly half of all semi conductors that are used
in the world, and and more than half if you're
looking at the really advanced semi conductors. That's because you know,
Taiwan poured billions of dollars into developing this industry, and
companies in other places like the United States, chose to

(22:59):
outsource manufacturing to Taiwan because it made more economic sense.
But now when you start looking at it and you
look at the vulnerability of putting, you know, all of
your semiconductor eggs in Taiwan's basket, you start to get
a little nervous, especially when China seems to get a
little more aggressive and it stands towards Taiwan. So an

(23:21):
invasion would be a massive disruption to the entire tech
sector and beyond. And I think the reason why this
even came out in the news at all is because
the United States Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has
announced a planned visit to Taiwan, which in turn prompted
China to warrant that, you know, Western interference in Taiwan

(23:45):
would raise tensions in the region. So there's this general
worry that this is going to precipitate into a cascading
event that will upend the entire semiconductor industry. My hope
is that that doesn't happen, because obviously if it did,
it's going to be incredibly disruptive across everything. Um it

(24:06):
would be terrible for for millions of people uh directly
affected by such a thing, and then indirectly billions more. So, obviously,
here's hoping that we don't see, uh, this rhetoric grow
into more drastic action. On the United States side, the

(24:27):
government is placing more restrictions on what companies are able
to export to China when it comes to chip making tools.
So China has been investing billions in building more semiconductor
facilities within China itself, and it has been importing some
of the the advanced chip making tools from other countries

(24:48):
like Japan and the United States. So you can kind
of look at this as a political approach to trying
to slow China's progress a little bit. The U s
government is essentially saying to come needs within the US
that you cannot sell current tools to China. You can
sell much older tools, tools that are essentially obsolete when

(25:12):
when you compare to the state of the art of
what's what we're capable of making, But you can't sell
China any tools that would allow China to stay up
to date on manufacturing processes. So again it's another another
case of trying to slow down China's march towards global domination,

(25:36):
at least in the technology technology sector. Over in Spain,
there's some concerning news about a pair of hackers who
disrupted a significant number of radiation detection sensors that are
part of a radioactivity alert system there. Moreover, these two
hackers apparently previously served as contractors who were put in
charge of maintaining that network. So the people who were

(25:58):
meant to take care of the network, we're dismantling it.
Here's what happened. So Spain has several nuclear power plants,
so in a in an effort to assure safety, Spain
also has this mesh network of around eight hundred gamma
detection sensors. That network is meant to provide an early
warning in case of something going wrong at one of

(26:19):
these nuclear facilities, so that we don't have a catastrophic
disaster on the order of Chernobyl. Also, it means if
the Hulk goes out for Paea, will know about it
right away. Anyway, apparently these two contractors were purposefully sabotaging
those sensors. They were effectively severing the connection between the
censor and the control center that monitors everything, and they

(26:42):
did it to more than three hundred of the eight
hundred censors. They also allegedly tried to delete a program
that was designed to manage this network at the control center. Now,
this was all happening last year between March and July,
and investigators cut onto the fact that something was going
on and they launched an investigation that lasted a full year. Now,

(27:03):
the two unnamed individuals have been arrested. Uh no motive
has been shared with the media, so there's no word
if there was more to this plan or not. As
it stands, the two hackers greatly reduced the detection capacity
of the network, so if something had gone wrong with
one of these nuclear facilities, it might have taken longer
to detect it, which in turn could have been disastrous.

(27:26):
But the question is, is this just part of a
bigger plan. Maybe there was something far more destructive planned
for the future. Maybe dismantling the warning system was step
one to make sure that this more destructive plan would
have a maximum effect. I don't I don't know if
that's the case. Maybe I've just watched too many James
Bond films. Finally, Logitech is working on a handheld gaming

(27:49):
system with ten Cent games. It sounds like the games
themselves will be mostly running in the cloud. Logitech announced
that the device will support Xbox Cloud Gaming and G
four Now, which is from Nvidia. There is an enormous
lack of details about this. Logitech did not mention a
release date. It did not mention what sort of price

(28:10):
range this might be at, or whether there will be
different models of the device. We actually didn't see any
pictures or illustrations of the things, so we don't even
know what it's going to look like. But there's definitely
been a huge demand for handheld PC gaming systems. Valve
came out with the Steam Deck and demand was so
high that they could not meet it, like the supply

(28:30):
was way too low, and in fact for a while
there was concern about you know, people had put in
reservations for one of these things, they didn't know if
they were ever going to get one. Valve has said
recently that people who had a current reservation as of
four days ago would get their steam Deck by the
end of twenty twenty two, and I think they're going

(28:51):
in a first come, first serve basis, so in other words,
the earlier you made your reservation, the earlier you will
be able to get yours. I made a reservation for one,
but I didn't get until relatively recently, so I expect
if I do get one this year, it will be
at the tail end of the year. But that's on
me because I was slow to act on that. So
Logitech getting into the space makes sense. Having competition in

(29:15):
handheld PC gaming is great. It's going to drive innovation
for all parties concerned. So I think this is a
good thing, especially if you do like having portable gaming systems.
I've heard great things about the Steam Deck, you know,
people talking about certain titles that are just a joy
to play on steam Deck, and I'm really hoping that

(29:35):
I get a chance to try that out sometime towards
the end of this year. So Logitech coming out with
another model I think is nothing but good news and
hopefully it means that we'll see other ones also join
in the market, uh that are well designed so that
ultimately the consumers benefit. And that's it for the news
for Tuesday, August two, two thousand twenty two. If you

(29:57):
have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episod
is a tech Stuff, please reach out to me. There
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(30:18):
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(30:40):
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