November 22, 2022 • 32 mins
Even as Twitter headcount dwindles, Elon Musk announces an ambitious vision for the service's future. Alphabet is gearing up for layoffs. Tax prep services have been sending Americans' financial info to Meta. And more!
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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 how the tech are you? It is time for
the Tech News for November twenty second, two thousand twenty two,
(00:26):
the Tuesday before American Thanksgiving. So the rest of this
week is going to be reruns and then we'll be
back next week with all new episodes. But let's get
to the news today, and you know the drill. We
need to get the Twitter stuff out of the way first,
because obviously a ton has happened since our last news
episode on Thursday of last week. So last Thursday, Elon
(00:48):
Musk's ultimatum hit. Employees had to sign a form indicating
whether they would stick it out and work longer, harder
hours to build what Musk calls Twitter two point oh,
which we'll talk about the it in a second, or
if they would take a severance package and just walk.
And reportedly a lot of folks, maybe as many as
a thousand, took that package. It's hard to get a
(01:10):
real number because I feel some of the reporting has
been fueled by schadenfreude and also Twitter no longer has
a public relations office Elon must got rid of that
early on in the layoffs, so there's no one to
ask to get official feedback on this stuff. There were
stories about entire departments within Twitter essentially being emptied, including
(01:34):
departments like payroll, which obviously would create a real hassle
at the company. One story that proved to at least
have some substance was that the folks in charge of
monitoring badge access to Twitter h q had left, and
since Musk had directed Twitter HQ two essentially go on
lockdown for this week, the idea being they want to
keep the area safe from disgruntled former employees while things
(01:59):
settle down. Uh. It also meant that no one, not
even Musk, could regain access to the building because all
the people who maintain that had left, So Musk actually
had to call up a now former employee to come
in and open the building up again, which is pretty
wild anyway. Tons of people popped on Twitter throughout the weekend,
(02:20):
waiting to see if it might crash and not come
back up, you know, kind of like I was there
when Twitter went away, but for now the site is
still active. I imagine the people left at Twitter are
really working super hard to make sure that stays the case. Meanwhile,
Musk has also sent a memo in Twitter indicating that
many employee perks are now gonzo, as in they are
(02:45):
no more at least for the time being. And that
includes stuff like company allowances for home internet, employee wellness programs,
training and development programs, daycare, and quarterly team activities, among
other things. So for the folks who are left behind,
there are fewer and fewer benefits that they can take
advantage of while they work longer and longer hours. Of course,
(03:08):
for some employees, working for Twitter is absolutely critical. Some
are here in the US on work visas and if
their employment ends, they have to leave the country. Some
are dependent upon healthcare for ongoing treatments. So even if
you never use Twitter, or you've never liked Twitter, or
maybe you hate Twitter now, whatever it might be, please
(03:29):
send out good vibes for the people who are in
tough situations that are just continuing to get tougher. I mean,
for all the people who resigned, who are laid off,
and for the people who are still at Twitter. It
is a tough time to be in that situation, especially
right as the holidays are picking up. But wait, there's more.
After all that drama late last week, this week opened
(03:50):
with even more drama. Musk announced that he was holding
even more layoffs, this time specifically targeting twitters sales teams.
Last week, the company saw the head of ads Ales
and the VP of Partnerships both get their walking papers. Reportedly,
these leaders were fired because they refused directives to lay
off more of their employees. They were trying to protect
(04:12):
the people who are working in their departments, and they've
been canned as a result. So must decide that if
these folks are not going to follow his orders, they
gots to go. And then the head of US Content
Partnerships left the company. From what I can tell, she
made that choice on her own. So it's possible that
she saw what was going on in other departments and
said I can't be a part of this, or maybe
(04:32):
she had other reasons. I don't know, but she left
the company as well. So the senior leadership at Twitter
continues to dwindle. When Musk assumed control of Twitter, the
company had seventy five hundred employees seven thousand, five hundred people. Now,
The Verge reports that the head count is down to
around two thousand, seven hundred, and Business Insider is even
more pessimistic. They say it's actually two thousand, three hundred employees. Yesterday,
(04:57):
after the sales team layoffs, must held in all hands
meeting where he announced that he'd be hiring again, specifically
that he was looking to hire people in engineering, and
hang on a second, says here sales, you know the
department where he had just laid people off. Well, details
are somewhat scarce because you know, again no public relations
(05:21):
department within the company, so you can't really reach out
to get comment. But outlets are saying that Musk himself
was fairly vague about what these people would be doing. So, yeah,
he needs engineers and he needs needs salespeople, but he
didn't specify what roles he was looking to fill. Um
And at least as of yesterday, there were no job
openings listed on Twitter's corporate site, but Musk said, quote,
(05:43):
in terms of critical hires, I would say people who
are great at writing software are the highest priority end quote.
And one recent higher well and in turn is George
hots H o t Z. If you're not familiar with
Hotts's name, he's a hacker, and he made his name
doing things like jail breaking iOS devices. Uh. He figured
(06:04):
out how the PlayStation three works, he reverse engineered it. Uh. Infamously,
he had a real kind of tiff with Elon Musk.
Musk apparently wanted Hots to come over and work for
Tesla because Hatts was looking to replicate Tesla's auto pilot system,
but make it like a kit that you could just
get and install into other machines, like other cars, and
(06:26):
so Musk reportedly wanted to offer Hots a job, but
Hots says that while they were sitting down to work
out terms, they couldn't come to an agreement, and eventually
Hots split and he got irritated at Musk. But now
Hots has agreed to spend twelve weeks working at Twitter,
and he says it's his main focus is to work
on search functions for Twitter itself. So what do you
(06:51):
do after you lay off half of your company, your
newly purchased company. You then convince another one thousand or
so folks to resign. You require engineers to come in
on a weekend to cram on code and keep things afloat,
and then you call in all hands, meaning to talk
about hiring again, well, you also unveil your plan for
(07:13):
the next incarnation of your company. Musk's Twitter two point
oh is going to have voice calls and video chat
and encryption for direct messages, according to Elon himself, and
it's sounding like Musk is merging his vision of Twitter
with his desire to build and everything app that he
(07:34):
had previously referred to as X. You may not know this,
but when Musk was first founding UH, I believe it
was PayPal co founding PayPal, he wanted to call it
X and ended up not calling it that because they
thought that probably wouldn't be a viable business name. But
now he wants to make an everything app called X
(07:55):
that would be similar to China's we Chat app, and
we Chat incorporates tons of off like communications, social networking,
commerce features, all these sort of things. Elon Musk kind
of wants to make a similar app to that, but
for markets outside of China. Obviously, whether he can do
that with a team that has been so heavily affected
(08:16):
by layoffs and resignations remains to be seen. Reportedly, a
lot of the folks who have left Twitter were ones
who are senior members of their respective teams, which could
represent a huge loss of knowledge like that alone is
going to set people back when you've got people who
were sort of the the depositories of knowledge within the
(08:36):
company and they leave. I mean, if the documentation is there,
then you can you can muscle your way through it,
but it takes time. But the documentation isn't there, then
it gets increasingly difficult. Elon Musk himself has said that
several of Twitter's departments are going to need to be
rebuilt from scratch, which seems to me to be a
monumental undertaking of itself that where people are going to
(09:00):
be around to actually tackle. So it definitely sounds like
it's gonna be a tough time ahead. Um and in
the meantime, we don't know if any of this is realistic,
even from inside Twitter, because again there's no PR department there. Well,
that's it for the Twitter dues. Will move on to
(09:22):
some other things after we come back from this quick break. Okay,
we're back. So last spring, the National Labor Relations Board,
or in l RB here in the United States brought
a lawsuit against Amazon, saying that the company had engaged
(09:45):
in retaliatory actions against employees who are workplace activists, namely
that Amazon fired former employee Gerald Bryson after Bryson worked
to organize employees at a warehouse on Staten Island that
went on to actually vote to unionize. Now, a judge
has partly ruled in favor of the n l RBS argument.
(10:06):
They have said that Amazon did engage in such behaviors
and that Amazon needs to knock that crap off in
the future. However, the judge did not go so far
as to agree with the n l r B the
Amazon's actions impacted employees efforts to unionize and that the
company should reinstate Bryson. So, the n l RB said
(10:28):
Bryson's firing was intended to scare other employees away from organizing,
because firing Bryson showed that other employees would receive no
protection during the actual organization process. That yes, once you
are unionized, you have an organization that can protect you
from the company, but until that happens, you are incredibly vulnerable.
(10:51):
But the judge determined that employees continue to organize even
in the wake of Bryson's firing, and so did not
agree to the request to have Bryson reinstated as an
Ama on employee. So Amazon does have a cease and
desist order against it regarding interfering and employee organization efforts,
but the company will not have to hire Bryson back
on the team. As I mentioned last week, Amazon is
(11:12):
holding layoffs that are expected to hit around ten thousand
employees before they're all done, and the hardware divisions have
been affected a lot by this, and Business Insider reports
that the Amazon Alexa division is in real jeopardy right now.
My apologies for any of you who have Amazon devices
in ear shot, but we are going to have to
say that name a couple of times. The project began
(11:34):
as a Jeff Bezos backed idea. That is, Alexa was
like Jeff Bezos's baby for a little while, but after
a few years of failing to find any way to
drive revenue via Alexa, the shine on the product has
really worn off for the company. Of course, Bezos has
no longer had Hancho at Amazon. You've got Andy Jase
(11:54):
there as CEO now, and he tends to take a
more pragmatic view of the business. And according to various reports,
a big part of the problem is that while Amazon's
Echo devices are really popular, they sell really well. The
company is selling them at cost with the goal of
making money off of the use of the devices, rather
(12:16):
than through the sale of devices themselves. So this is
similar to how companies that make game consoles will sell
those consoles close to the cost of production. So while
a game console might be hundreds of dollars, that typically
isn't making the company a lot of profit or any
profit with each sale. Sometimes companies even take a loss
(12:38):
on it because their ideas that they'll make their money
by selling you games and services that leverage the console,
the consoles the entry point to making revenue. Well, that's
how Amazon was looking at the Echo line of products.
But the problem is the team never quite figured out
a way to monetize Alexa's use, and so the division
(13:00):
and accrued more and more financial losses over time, and
according to Ours Technica, that division is headed toward a
ten billion dollar loss this year billion with a B
Holy cow. Just to be clear, this problem is not
unique to Amazon. Apple and Google each have found it
(13:20):
difficult to monetize their digital voice assistant products. People have
been using them, but there hasn't really been a way
to tap into that use and generate revenue. And that
could mean that the days of us talking to our
electronics like we're aboard the starship Enterprise and we're chatting
with the ship's computer could be living on borrowed time
(13:42):
across the pond. In the United Kingdom, regulators are taking
a closer look at the mobile operating system landscape. So
the concern is that Google's Android and Apple's iOS represent
a duopoli, you know, two companies that control pretty much
the entire mobile operating system landscape. And I don't think
you can really argue that. I think that's pretty much
(14:03):
effectively the case. I mean, there's not really that many
operating systems in the laptop desktop universe either. You've got
a few, but the two dominant ones, really the dominant
one is Windows and then you've got mac os. There
are others as well, their Linux systems, their unique systems,
but those represent such a a small percentage of at
(14:23):
least a particular slice of computer. Like if we're talking
about web servers is a totally different thing. But anyway,
this do woppoli may have a negative impact on app developers. Specifically,
the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK or the
c m A is looking into issues that impact mobile gaming.
(14:44):
So one thing they're looking at is cloud gaming, which
is where you have servers that run an instance of
a game and then stream that instance too and in
device like a smartphone. Another is that developers claim Apple
and Google have failed to address deficiencies in their respective browsers,
which in turn forces developers to create workarounds to try
(15:05):
and deal with these shortfalls. So the CMA is going
to investigate these developer concerns. They're gonna look into this
and then if they decide that the concerns are merited
and changes are warranted, they will issue a kind of
patch response. Now, there is an entire department within the
UK that is intended to deal with just this kind
(15:25):
of thing, and it's called the Digital Markets Unit. But
the problem is this particular agency lacks any regulatory authority,
Like they have no way of creating any implements of
change because they don't have any authority yet. So that's
that's an agency that's still kind of forming and until
(15:49):
it gets some bite to it, it really it really
can't do much. So the dirty work is following falling
to other departments for the time being. Alphabet Google's parent
company appears to be bending to pressure brought against it
by Sir Christopher Hone, whom you might remember owns some
six billion dollars worth of steak in the company, and
(16:12):
Hone had argued that Google was overstaffed and that employees
there are overpaid, which, again I want to say, is
really saying something when you're a freaking billionaire. Okay, when
you're a billionaire and you're saying other people are overpaid,
maybe rethink your statements a bit, But enough commentary. The
(16:33):
crux of this story is that Alphabet has directed Google
managers to identify the low performers in their departments, and
the bottom six percent or so, which would be around
ten thousand employees, will presumably be shown the door. And
it's a really tough time to be working for tech
companies right now. Amazon, Meta, Twitter, infamously, Alphabet and many
(16:55):
others have been laying off thousands of people right at
the start of the holiday season. So if you're listening
to the show and you've been affected directly or indirectly
by these layoffs, I just want to say I wish
you the absolute best. I hope things turn around quickly.
And as for the argument that companies like Alphabet and
particularly Google have too many employees. Part of that can
(17:15):
actually be a strategy to scoop up talent so that
this talent doesn't end up working for a competitor because
it is a cut road business out in Silicon Valley, y'all.
Just in case my fellow Americans weren't worried enough that
Meta slash Facebook is gathering all of their data, let's
talk about taxes, shall we. So The Markup has published
(17:37):
a piece that says tax services like tax Slayer, tax Act,
and H and R Block have been transmitting financial information
from web clients that are coming to do their taxes
online to Facebook. And that information being sent to Facebook
includes some pretty you know, standard stuff like like person
(18:00):
names and their email addresses and user names, that kind
of stuff. But in some cases at least, it also
includes more privileged information like income filing status, refund amounts,
the actual amount of income a person makes, that kind
of thing. And you might be saying to yourself, Huh,
does matter really know how much I make? Do they
(18:20):
need to know that how much I pay in taxes
or whether or not I qualify for a refund? Do
I want Meta to use that kind of information as
a way to sell more targeted ads to me. I mean,
you can easily see why Meta would like that information
in the first place, because advertisers would love to be
able to more accurately target their customers. At the heart
(18:41):
of this is the pixel. This is a product that
Facebook offers up for free for companies to use, and
installing pixel into a web page allows several things, Like
on the web page side, it allows for a lot
of customization of an experience, but the Facebook side, it
means that users who visit these pages that have the
(19:03):
pixel on it are sending data to Facebook. Facebook gets
more information about user behaviors, like what websites are they visiting,
how long are they spending time there, what are they
doing in some cases, So in these cases the activities appear,
at least in some instances to include sensitive financial data. Now,
(19:26):
not all tax preparation services have the pixel installed on
sensitive pages, even if they have used the pixel so
into its Turbo Tax, which has its own history of issues,
does use pixel, but it only has it at the
log in page, which means that the pixel on that
page sends information like user names and how frequently a
(19:49):
specific device has logged into the service, but it doesn't
include any financial information or anything like that, and the
pixel is not included on any pages beyond the log
in page. So Facebook isn't getting any more information about
turbo taxes clients in that case. But for other tax
preparation preparation services that's not necessarily the case. And if
(20:11):
you don't live in the US, and you're wondering why
I'm even talking about all this, because most places outside
of the US, the government handles all this stuff, and
really it just comes down to the individual citizen to
sign off on what the government has found or to
you know, take issue with it and explain, hey, you
you missed this thing that should change the amount of
(20:32):
taxes i owe. US does not do that. The tax
preparation sequences is highly privatized here in the United States.
Taxes are incredibly complex. If you do have a good
grounding in how taxes are prepared, you can do it yourself,
nothing stopping you. But a lot of people find them
(20:52):
intimidating because the language used, the forms used, they're not
they're not user friendly. So frequently people turn to professional
services or web services that that automate A lot of
the stuff. So that's why this is a huge issue
here in the United States. And there's a lot more
to this story, but I actually recommend heading over to
the Verge and reading their article. It's titled tax filing.
(21:16):
Websites have been sending users financial information to Facebook. Go
check out that article. It's very well done. It's exhaustive,
it's a very long article and incredibly informative. So check
that out. Okay, we've got a few more news items
to cover before we conclude, but first let's take one
more break. We're back. Researchers at MISK, that's m Y
(21:49):
s k are saying that Apple talks the talk, but
does not necessarily walk the walk when it comes to
user activity and privacy on iOS devices. So Apple famously
handed over more control to iOS users when it comes
to how their data and behavior can be tracked by
third party apps. This was a huge blow to companies
(22:11):
like Meta, for example, because users could choose to not
share their behaviors and other private data with Meta, which
meant that Meta could no longer use that data to
sell targeted ads and have them target you, the user
more effectively. But MISK says that Apple's first party apps
(22:32):
don't have the same sort of restrictions, which may mean
Apple is preventing other companies from being able to do
what it itself can continue to do. On iOS. Miss
said that some first party apps use what is called
a Directory Services Identify R or D s I D,
and that this identifier, in turn is linked to a
(22:53):
user's unique I cloud data and Apple I D. So
while Apple might say our apps are not depending on
data that can personally identify you, it sounds like it's
at best one degree of separation away from doing just that. Moreover,
Miss researchers are arguing that other details can converge to
create a kind of digital fingerprint for a user, so
(23:15):
that while you might be able to say that no
single point of data points to a specific person, if
you collectively take all the different points of data, you
can start making very educated guesses as to who that
user is. We've seen this in the past. It really
takes just a few points of data to kind of
narrow down a person's identity, and you don't need anything
(23:37):
specific to to really, you know, figure that out. You
just need a few different general points and that's enough
for you to make a really good guess. Now, this
does not necessarily mean that Apple is doing anything with
that data, right, We don't know that. We don't know
if Apple is actually taking advantage of this data collection
(24:00):
and analyzing it in any meaningful way. Uh. The problem
is Apple's really quiet when it comes to its data
acquisition and analytics, and that means that we do have
these unanswered questions. We don't know if Apple is actually
doing anything with data. It just seems like Apple could
do something that Apple has that capability because of these
(24:21):
little points of connection. And the problem is we don't
know enough, so that breeds suspicion. But um, yeah, this
is what happens when you have a lack of transparency.
The Global Games Market report from New Zoo has good
news and it has some bad news for the gaming industry. Now,
the good news is that there are four point six
percent more gamers there today than there were this time
(24:44):
last year. Places like Africa in the Middle East saw
the largest gains in people becoming gamers. North America grew
the least. But even in North America, we saw two
point six percent more gamers this year compared to last year. Uh.
That's impressive because you gotta remember that there was a big,
big boost in gaming during the pandemic, as people were,
(25:08):
you know, in lockdown and they couldn't leave their their homes.
There was a big surge towards gaming in various ways. Uh.
So to see growth continue even as the world has
largely emerged from lockdown is impressive. Now, the bad news
is that even though there are more gamers, they generated
(25:29):
less revenue this year compared to last year. Uh this
is where we're reminded that gaming is a multibillion dollar industry,
because even the revenue dropped by four point three percent globally,
still amounted to a hundred eighty four billion dollars. Now,
about half of that came just from mobile games. And
(25:50):
that's a spassive meatball. I know, like quote unquote real
gamers can often dismiss mobile games, but y'all, that makes
up like half of all the revenue generated by gaming.
If you look at consoles, that's like a little more
than a quarter, and then PC is a little less
than that, and then it's everything else. Right, So mobile
(26:12):
gaming is by far the dominant form of gaming if
you're looking at it from a global perspective. Uh. The
decline in revenue was the first time the gaming industry
saw a decline in fifteen years. But as tech spot
points out, that's still not terrible considering how other industries
have fared in the current era of economic uncertainty. I
(26:34):
still wonder if in the future we will name this
period as the Great Economic Uncertainty, sort of akin to
the Great Depression. Speaking of games, about four years ago,
it would be Soft made the decision to lean on
the Epic Game Store when it came to digital distribution
of its titles and its spurned valves competing Steam Store.
(26:58):
These are online stores where you can purchase games and
then download them directly to your machine. Now now Ubisoft
is actually bringing some titles back to Steam. On December six,
gamers will be able to purchase titles like Assassin's Creed, Valhalla,
or a No. Eight hundred through Steam. So why did
(27:18):
it be Soft ditch Steam in the first place. Well,
it's very similar to how app developers are frustrated with
Google and Apple because Steam takes a thirty cut off
sales that are made through its store, so the game
company only gets each sale it makes. Ubisoft didn't really
care for that, and so it made the move to
(27:39):
pull out of Steam. But Steam also has an incredible reach,
is really popular with gamers. So while you will keep
more of each individual sale, if you can get gamers
to come to whichever digital storefront you use, there are
potentially millions of gamers that you will never reach because
they are more sticking to the Steam environment. So you
(28:03):
could say like, well, yeah, on an individual level, we're
making more per sale, but look at all these millions
of sales were not making because we aren't where the
people are, So it would be soft appears they have
decided to go where the people are. Maybe we soft
wants to see wants to see them dancing, walking around
on those what do you call them. Finally, in a
(28:25):
general trend of inclusivity, Axios reports that more big title
games are untethering character creation tools from gendered terms. Players
will have access to more options to create characters they
feel they want to play. That can include players feeling
that they are a closer match to the characters that
they've created, which is nice. To be able to see
(28:46):
representation of yourself in a game is incredible. So we're
seeing a trend for games to allow players to mix
and match features that often would have been divided into
a gendered approach in the past, and now players are
more frequently discovering they are not being forced down binary
pathways where choosing one gender will limit you to a
(29:10):
subset of features and options and remove others. So one
example of a game that's doing this is World of Warcraft,
which is preparing to release an expansion called Dragonflight. Wow
has ditched the terms male and female in character creation
instead opted for body type one and body type two.
Other games like The Sims have done this, and surprisingly,
(29:33):
so has Hogwarts Legacy. I say surprisingly for Hogwarts Legacy
because Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has made some
infamous statements, mostly on Twitter, that are critical of the
transgender community, but Hogwarts Legacies character creation system appears to
allow trans characters. Personally, I think increased inclusivity is great.
(29:55):
It is a huge benefit to people who otherwise would
never see represent tation within a game, and on the
flip side, it doesn't have negative impacts on anyone else
who already had representation in games, so I see it
as a net win. I like how games can bring
people together, though obviously games have also served as incubators
(30:18):
for hateful behavior, as well, it's complicated. Oh feet, that's
what you call them. That's the stuff that people are
dancing on. I'm glad we got that sorted out alright.
That wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. Hope
you are all well. Hope you fellow Americans out there
are getting ready for a joyful Thanksgiving. I hope you
(30:40):
have lots to be thankful for. And if you have
any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
of tech Stuff. There are a couple of ways to
get in touch. One is to download the I Heart
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(31:01):
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if you like. You can even indicate if I can
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I will not do it unless you tell me it's okay,
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assuming that it's up and the handle there is tech
stuff hs W. I did create an account on Mastodon.
(31:25):
I will share that in the future when probably do
a full episode about Mastodon, so people who are on
Mastodon can find me there. And I'm looking at a
couple of other possibilities. The problem is, of course, that
one a lot of people are gonna stick with Twitter
until it just isn't a thing anymore if that, in
fact happens, and too if they choose something else. There
(31:47):
are like a dozen other options, and I can't maintain
a presence at all of them because I'll always forget
one and I'll never be like, checking like fourteen different
accounts for messages is a huge time sink. So we'll
figure it out. We'll keep on going. Maybe I'll reach
out yet again to get an email address for this show. Uh,
(32:10):
I know that Ben Bowland keeps sending people to my
personal email address to issue complaints from ridiculous history and
stuff they don't want you to know because that's fun.
But anyway, I hope you're all well and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
(32:33):
Heart 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 how the tech are you? It is time for
the Tech News for November twenty second, two thousand twenty two,
(00:26):
the Tuesday before American Thanksgiving. So the rest of this
week is going to be reruns and then we'll be
back next week with all new episodes. But let's get
to the news today, and you know the drill. We
need to get the Twitter stuff out of the way first,
because obviously a ton has happened since our last news
episode on Thursday of last week. So last Thursday, Elon
(00:48):
Musk's ultimatum hit. Employees had to sign a form indicating
whether they would stick it out and work longer, harder
hours to build what Musk calls Twitter two point oh,
which we'll talk about the it in a second, or
if they would take a severance package and just walk.
And reportedly a lot of folks, maybe as many as
a thousand, took that package. It's hard to get a
(01:10):
real number because I feel some of the reporting has
been fueled by schadenfreude and also Twitter no longer has
a public relations office Elon must got rid of that
early on in the layoffs, so there's no one to
ask to get official feedback on this stuff. There were
stories about entire departments within Twitter essentially being emptied, including
(01:34):
departments like payroll, which obviously would create a real hassle
at the company. One story that proved to at least
have some substance was that the folks in charge of
monitoring badge access to Twitter h q had left, and
since Musk had directed Twitter HQ two essentially go on
lockdown for this week, the idea being they want to
keep the area safe from disgruntled former employees while things
(01:59):
settle down. Uh. It also meant that no one, not
even Musk, could regain access to the building because all
the people who maintain that had left, So Musk actually
had to call up a now former employee to come
in and open the building up again, which is pretty
wild anyway. Tons of people popped on Twitter throughout the weekend,
(02:20):
waiting to see if it might crash and not come
back up, you know, kind of like I was there
when Twitter went away, but for now the site is
still active. I imagine the people left at Twitter are
really working super hard to make sure that stays the case. Meanwhile,
Musk has also sent a memo in Twitter indicating that
many employee perks are now gonzo, as in they are
(02:45):
no more at least for the time being. And that
includes stuff like company allowances for home internet, employee wellness programs,
training and development programs, daycare, and quarterly team activities, among
other things. So for the folks who are left behind,
there are fewer and fewer benefits that they can take
advantage of while they work longer and longer hours. Of course,
(03:08):
for some employees, working for Twitter is absolutely critical. Some
are here in the US on work visas and if
their employment ends, they have to leave the country. Some
are dependent upon healthcare for ongoing treatments. So even if
you never use Twitter, or you've never liked Twitter, or
maybe you hate Twitter now, whatever it might be, please
(03:29):
send out good vibes for the people who are in
tough situations that are just continuing to get tougher. I mean,
for all the people who resigned, who are laid off,
and for the people who are still at Twitter. It
is a tough time to be in that situation, especially
right as the holidays are picking up. But wait, there's more.
After all that drama late last week, this week opened
(03:50):
with even more drama. Musk announced that he was holding
even more layoffs, this time specifically targeting twitters sales teams.
Last week, the company saw the head of ads Ales
and the VP of Partnerships both get their walking papers. Reportedly,
these leaders were fired because they refused directives to lay
off more of their employees. They were trying to protect
(04:12):
the people who are working in their departments, and they've
been canned as a result. So must decide that if
these folks are not going to follow his orders, they
gots to go. And then the head of US Content
Partnerships left the company. From what I can tell, she
made that choice on her own. So it's possible that
she saw what was going on in other departments and
said I can't be a part of this, or maybe
(04:32):
she had other reasons. I don't know, but she left
the company as well. So the senior leadership at Twitter
continues to dwindle. When Musk assumed control of Twitter, the
company had seventy five hundred employees seven thousand, five hundred people. Now,
The Verge reports that the head count is down to
around two thousand, seven hundred, and Business Insider is even
more pessimistic. They say it's actually two thousand, three hundred employees. Yesterday,
(04:57):
after the sales team layoffs, must held in all hands
meeting where he announced that he'd be hiring again, specifically
that he was looking to hire people in engineering, and
hang on a second, says here sales, you know the
department where he had just laid people off. Well, details
are somewhat scarce because you know, again no public relations
(05:21):
department within the company, so you can't really reach out
to get comment. But outlets are saying that Musk himself
was fairly vague about what these people would be doing. So, yeah,
he needs engineers and he needs needs salespeople, but he
didn't specify what roles he was looking to fill. Um
And at least as of yesterday, there were no job
openings listed on Twitter's corporate site, but Musk said, quote,
(05:43):
in terms of critical hires, I would say people who
are great at writing software are the highest priority end quote.
And one recent higher well and in turn is George
hots H o t Z. If you're not familiar with
Hotts's name, he's a hacker, and he made his name
doing things like jail breaking iOS devices. Uh. He figured
(06:04):
out how the PlayStation three works, he reverse engineered it. Uh. Infamously,
he had a real kind of tiff with Elon Musk.
Musk apparently wanted Hots to come over and work for
Tesla because Hatts was looking to replicate Tesla's auto pilot system,
but make it like a kit that you could just
get and install into other machines, like other cars, and
(06:26):
so Musk reportedly wanted to offer Hots a job, but
Hots says that while they were sitting down to work
out terms, they couldn't come to an agreement, and eventually
Hots split and he got irritated at Musk. But now
Hots has agreed to spend twelve weeks working at Twitter,
and he says it's his main focus is to work
on search functions for Twitter itself. So what do you
(06:51):
do after you lay off half of your company, your
newly purchased company. You then convince another one thousand or
so folks to resign. You require engineers to come in
on a weekend to cram on code and keep things afloat,
and then you call in all hands, meaning to talk
about hiring again, well, you also unveil your plan for
(07:13):
the next incarnation of your company. Musk's Twitter two point
oh is going to have voice calls and video chat
and encryption for direct messages, according to Elon himself, and
it's sounding like Musk is merging his vision of Twitter
with his desire to build and everything app that he
(07:34):
had previously referred to as X. You may not know this,
but when Musk was first founding UH, I believe it
was PayPal co founding PayPal, he wanted to call it
X and ended up not calling it that because they
thought that probably wouldn't be a viable business name. But
now he wants to make an everything app called X
(07:55):
that would be similar to China's we Chat app, and
we Chat incorporates tons of off like communications, social networking,
commerce features, all these sort of things. Elon Musk kind
of wants to make a similar app to that, but
for markets outside of China. Obviously, whether he can do
that with a team that has been so heavily affected
(08:16):
by layoffs and resignations remains to be seen. Reportedly, a
lot of the folks who have left Twitter were ones
who are senior members of their respective teams, which could
represent a huge loss of knowledge like that alone is
going to set people back when you've got people who
were sort of the the depositories of knowledge within the
(08:36):
company and they leave. I mean, if the documentation is there,
then you can you can muscle your way through it,
but it takes time. But the documentation isn't there, then
it gets increasingly difficult. Elon Musk himself has said that
several of Twitter's departments are going to need to be
rebuilt from scratch, which seems to me to be a
monumental undertaking of itself that where people are going to
(09:00):
be around to actually tackle. So it definitely sounds like
it's gonna be a tough time ahead. Um and in
the meantime, we don't know if any of this is realistic,
even from inside Twitter, because again there's no PR department there. Well,
that's it for the Twitter dues. Will move on to
(09:22):
some other things after we come back from this quick break. Okay,
we're back. So last spring, the National Labor Relations Board,
or in l RB here in the United States brought
a lawsuit against Amazon, saying that the company had engaged
(09:45):
in retaliatory actions against employees who are workplace activists, namely
that Amazon fired former employee Gerald Bryson after Bryson worked
to organize employees at a warehouse on Staten Island that
went on to actually vote to unionize. Now, a judge
has partly ruled in favor of the n l RBS argument.
(10:06):
They have said that Amazon did engage in such behaviors
and that Amazon needs to knock that crap off in
the future. However, the judge did not go so far
as to agree with the n l r B the
Amazon's actions impacted employees efforts to unionize and that the
company should reinstate Bryson. So, the n l RB said
(10:28):
Bryson's firing was intended to scare other employees away from organizing,
because firing Bryson showed that other employees would receive no
protection during the actual organization process. That yes, once you
are unionized, you have an organization that can protect you
from the company, but until that happens, you are incredibly vulnerable.
(10:51):
But the judge determined that employees continue to organize even
in the wake of Bryson's firing, and so did not
agree to the request to have Bryson reinstated as an
Ama on employee. So Amazon does have a cease and
desist order against it regarding interfering and employee organization efforts,
but the company will not have to hire Bryson back
on the team. As I mentioned last week, Amazon is
(11:12):
holding layoffs that are expected to hit around ten thousand
employees before they're all done, and the hardware divisions have
been affected a lot by this, and Business Insider reports
that the Amazon Alexa division is in real jeopardy right now.
My apologies for any of you who have Amazon devices
in ear shot, but we are going to have to
say that name a couple of times. The project began
(11:34):
as a Jeff Bezos backed idea. That is, Alexa was
like Jeff Bezos's baby for a little while, but after
a few years of failing to find any way to
drive revenue via Alexa, the shine on the product has
really worn off for the company. Of course, Bezos has
no longer had Hancho at Amazon. You've got Andy Jase
(11:54):
there as CEO now, and he tends to take a
more pragmatic view of the business. And according to various reports,
a big part of the problem is that while Amazon's
Echo devices are really popular, they sell really well. The
company is selling them at cost with the goal of
making money off of the use of the devices, rather
(12:16):
than through the sale of devices themselves. So this is
similar to how companies that make game consoles will sell
those consoles close to the cost of production. So while
a game console might be hundreds of dollars, that typically
isn't making the company a lot of profit or any
profit with each sale. Sometimes companies even take a loss
(12:38):
on it because their ideas that they'll make their money
by selling you games and services that leverage the console,
the consoles the entry point to making revenue. Well, that's
how Amazon was looking at the Echo line of products.
But the problem is the team never quite figured out
a way to monetize Alexa's use, and so the division
(13:00):
and accrued more and more financial losses over time, and
according to Ours Technica, that division is headed toward a
ten billion dollar loss this year billion with a B
Holy cow. Just to be clear, this problem is not
unique to Amazon. Apple and Google each have found it
(13:20):
difficult to monetize their digital voice assistant products. People have
been using them, but there hasn't really been a way
to tap into that use and generate revenue. And that
could mean that the days of us talking to our
electronics like we're aboard the starship Enterprise and we're chatting
with the ship's computer could be living on borrowed time
(13:42):
across the pond. In the United Kingdom, regulators are taking
a closer look at the mobile operating system landscape. So
the concern is that Google's Android and Apple's iOS represent
a duopoli, you know, two companies that control pretty much
the entire mobile operating system landscape. And I don't think
you can really argue that. I think that's pretty much
(14:03):
effectively the case. I mean, there's not really that many
operating systems in the laptop desktop universe either. You've got
a few, but the two dominant ones, really the dominant
one is Windows and then you've got mac os. There
are others as well, their Linux systems, their unique systems,
but those represent such a a small percentage of at
(14:23):
least a particular slice of computer. Like if we're talking
about web servers is a totally different thing. But anyway,
this do woppoli may have a negative impact on app developers. Specifically,
the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK or the
c m A is looking into issues that impact mobile gaming.
(14:44):
So one thing they're looking at is cloud gaming, which
is where you have servers that run an instance of
a game and then stream that instance too and in
device like a smartphone. Another is that developers claim Apple
and Google have failed to address deficiencies in their respective browsers,
which in turn forces developers to create workarounds to try
(15:05):
and deal with these shortfalls. So the CMA is going
to investigate these developer concerns. They're gonna look into this
and then if they decide that the concerns are merited
and changes are warranted, they will issue a kind of
patch response. Now, there is an entire department within the
UK that is intended to deal with just this kind
(15:25):
of thing, and it's called the Digital Markets Unit. But
the problem is this particular agency lacks any regulatory authority,
Like they have no way of creating any implements of
change because they don't have any authority yet. So that's
that's an agency that's still kind of forming and until
(15:49):
it gets some bite to it, it really it really
can't do much. So the dirty work is following falling
to other departments for the time being. Alphabet Google's parent
company appears to be bending to pressure brought against it
by Sir Christopher Hone, whom you might remember owns some
six billion dollars worth of steak in the company, and
(16:12):
Hone had argued that Google was overstaffed and that employees
there are overpaid, which, again I want to say, is
really saying something when you're a freaking billionaire. Okay, when
you're a billionaire and you're saying other people are overpaid,
maybe rethink your statements a bit, But enough commentary. The
(16:33):
crux of this story is that Alphabet has directed Google
managers to identify the low performers in their departments, and
the bottom six percent or so, which would be around
ten thousand employees, will presumably be shown the door. And
it's a really tough time to be working for tech
companies right now. Amazon, Meta, Twitter, infamously, Alphabet and many
(16:55):
others have been laying off thousands of people right at
the start of the holiday season. So if you're listening
to the show and you've been affected directly or indirectly
by these layoffs, I just want to say I wish
you the absolute best. I hope things turn around quickly.
And as for the argument that companies like Alphabet and
particularly Google have too many employees. Part of that can
(17:15):
actually be a strategy to scoop up talent so that
this talent doesn't end up working for a competitor because
it is a cut road business out in Silicon Valley, y'all.
Just in case my fellow Americans weren't worried enough that
Meta slash Facebook is gathering all of their data, let's
talk about taxes, shall we. So The Markup has published
(17:37):
a piece that says tax services like tax Slayer, tax Act,
and H and R Block have been transmitting financial information
from web clients that are coming to do their taxes
online to Facebook. And that information being sent to Facebook
includes some pretty you know, standard stuff like like person
(18:00):
names and their email addresses and user names, that kind
of stuff. But in some cases at least, it also
includes more privileged information like income filing status, refund amounts,
the actual amount of income a person makes, that kind
of thing. And you might be saying to yourself, Huh,
does matter really know how much I make? Do they
(18:20):
need to know that how much I pay in taxes
or whether or not I qualify for a refund? Do
I want Meta to use that kind of information as
a way to sell more targeted ads to me. I mean,
you can easily see why Meta would like that information
in the first place, because advertisers would love to be
able to more accurately target their customers. At the heart
(18:41):
of this is the pixel. This is a product that
Facebook offers up for free for companies to use, and
installing pixel into a web page allows several things, Like
on the web page side, it allows for a lot
of customization of an experience, but the Facebook side, it
means that users who visit these pages that have the
(19:03):
pixel on it are sending data to Facebook. Facebook gets
more information about user behaviors, like what websites are they visiting,
how long are they spending time there, what are they
doing in some cases, So in these cases the activities appear,
at least in some instances to include sensitive financial data. Now,
(19:26):
not all tax preparation services have the pixel installed on
sensitive pages, even if they have used the pixel so
into its Turbo Tax, which has its own history of issues,
does use pixel, but it only has it at the
log in page, which means that the pixel on that
page sends information like user names and how frequently a
(19:49):
specific device has logged into the service, but it doesn't
include any financial information or anything like that, and the
pixel is not included on any pages beyond the log
in page. So Facebook isn't getting any more information about
turbo taxes clients in that case. But for other tax
preparation preparation services that's not necessarily the case. And if
(20:11):
you don't live in the US, and you're wondering why
I'm even talking about all this, because most places outside
of the US, the government handles all this stuff, and
really it just comes down to the individual citizen to
sign off on what the government has found or to
you know, take issue with it and explain, hey, you
you missed this thing that should change the amount of
(20:32):
taxes i owe. US does not do that. The tax
preparation sequences is highly privatized here in the United States.
Taxes are incredibly complex. If you do have a good
grounding in how taxes are prepared, you can do it yourself,
nothing stopping you. But a lot of people find them
(20:52):
intimidating because the language used, the forms used, they're not
they're not user friendly. So frequently people turn to professional
services or web services that that automate A lot of
the stuff. So that's why this is a huge issue
here in the United States. And there's a lot more
to this story, but I actually recommend heading over to
the Verge and reading their article. It's titled tax filing.
(21:16):
Websites have been sending users financial information to Facebook. Go
check out that article. It's very well done. It's exhaustive,
it's a very long article and incredibly informative. So check
that out. Okay, we've got a few more news items
to cover before we conclude, but first let's take one
more break. We're back. Researchers at MISK, that's m Y
(21:49):
s k are saying that Apple talks the talk, but
does not necessarily walk the walk when it comes to
user activity and privacy on iOS devices. So Apple famously
handed over more control to iOS users when it comes
to how their data and behavior can be tracked by
third party apps. This was a huge blow to companies
(22:11):
like Meta, for example, because users could choose to not
share their behaviors and other private data with Meta, which
meant that Meta could no longer use that data to
sell targeted ads and have them target you, the user
more effectively. But MISK says that Apple's first party apps
(22:32):
don't have the same sort of restrictions, which may mean
Apple is preventing other companies from being able to do
what it itself can continue to do. On iOS. Miss
said that some first party apps use what is called
a Directory Services Identify R or D s I D,
and that this identifier, in turn is linked to a
(22:53):
user's unique I cloud data and Apple I D. So
while Apple might say our apps are not depending on
data that can personally identify you, it sounds like it's
at best one degree of separation away from doing just that. Moreover,
Miss researchers are arguing that other details can converge to
create a kind of digital fingerprint for a user, so
(23:15):
that while you might be able to say that no
single point of data points to a specific person, if
you collectively take all the different points of data, you
can start making very educated guesses as to who that
user is. We've seen this in the past. It really
takes just a few points of data to kind of
narrow down a person's identity, and you don't need anything
(23:37):
specific to to really, you know, figure that out. You
just need a few different general points and that's enough
for you to make a really good guess. Now, this
does not necessarily mean that Apple is doing anything with
that data, right, We don't know that. We don't know
if Apple is actually taking advantage of this data collection
(24:00):
and analyzing it in any meaningful way. Uh. The problem
is Apple's really quiet when it comes to its data
acquisition and analytics, and that means that we do have
these unanswered questions. We don't know if Apple is actually
doing anything with data. It just seems like Apple could
do something that Apple has that capability because of these
(24:21):
little points of connection. And the problem is we don't
know enough, so that breeds suspicion. But um, yeah, this
is what happens when you have a lack of transparency.
The Global Games Market report from New Zoo has good
news and it has some bad news for the gaming industry. Now,
the good news is that there are four point six
percent more gamers there today than there were this time
(24:44):
last year. Places like Africa in the Middle East saw
the largest gains in people becoming gamers. North America grew
the least. But even in North America, we saw two
point six percent more gamers this year compared to last year. Uh.
That's impressive because you gotta remember that there was a big,
big boost in gaming during the pandemic, as people were,
(25:08):
you know, in lockdown and they couldn't leave their their homes.
There was a big surge towards gaming in various ways. Uh.
So to see growth continue even as the world has
largely emerged from lockdown is impressive. Now, the bad news
is that even though there are more gamers, they generated
(25:29):
less revenue this year compared to last year. Uh this
is where we're reminded that gaming is a multibillion dollar industry,
because even the revenue dropped by four point three percent globally,
still amounted to a hundred eighty four billion dollars. Now,
about half of that came just from mobile games. And
(25:50):
that's a spassive meatball. I know, like quote unquote real
gamers can often dismiss mobile games, but y'all, that makes
up like half of all the revenue generated by gaming.
If you look at consoles, that's like a little more
than a quarter, and then PC is a little less
than that, and then it's everything else. Right, So mobile
(26:12):
gaming is by far the dominant form of gaming if
you're looking at it from a global perspective. Uh. The
decline in revenue was the first time the gaming industry
saw a decline in fifteen years. But as tech spot
points out, that's still not terrible considering how other industries
have fared in the current era of economic uncertainty. I
(26:34):
still wonder if in the future we will name this
period as the Great Economic Uncertainty, sort of akin to
the Great Depression. Speaking of games, about four years ago,
it would be Soft made the decision to lean on
the Epic Game Store when it came to digital distribution
of its titles and its spurned valves competing Steam Store.
(26:58):
These are online stores where you can purchase games and
then download them directly to your machine. Now now Ubisoft
is actually bringing some titles back to Steam. On December six,
gamers will be able to purchase titles like Assassin's Creed, Valhalla,
or a No. Eight hundred through Steam. So why did
(27:18):
it be Soft ditch Steam in the first place. Well,
it's very similar to how app developers are frustrated with
Google and Apple because Steam takes a thirty cut off
sales that are made through its store, so the game
company only gets each sale it makes. Ubisoft didn't really
care for that, and so it made the move to
(27:39):
pull out of Steam. But Steam also has an incredible reach,
is really popular with gamers. So while you will keep
more of each individual sale, if you can get gamers
to come to whichever digital storefront you use, there are
potentially millions of gamers that you will never reach because
they are more sticking to the Steam environment. So you
(28:03):
could say like, well, yeah, on an individual level, we're
making more per sale, but look at all these millions
of sales were not making because we aren't where the
people are, So it would be soft appears they have
decided to go where the people are. Maybe we soft
wants to see wants to see them dancing, walking around
on those what do you call them. Finally, in a
(28:25):
general trend of inclusivity, Axios reports that more big title
games are untethering character creation tools from gendered terms. Players
will have access to more options to create characters they
feel they want to play. That can include players feeling
that they are a closer match to the characters that
they've created, which is nice. To be able to see
(28:46):
representation of yourself in a game is incredible. So we're
seeing a trend for games to allow players to mix
and match features that often would have been divided into
a gendered approach in the past, and now players are
more frequently discovering they are not being forced down binary
pathways where choosing one gender will limit you to a
(29:10):
subset of features and options and remove others. So one
example of a game that's doing this is World of Warcraft,
which is preparing to release an expansion called Dragonflight. Wow
has ditched the terms male and female in character creation
instead opted for body type one and body type two.
Other games like The Sims have done this, and surprisingly,
(29:33):
so has Hogwarts Legacy. I say surprisingly for Hogwarts Legacy
because Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has made some
infamous statements, mostly on Twitter, that are critical of the
transgender community, but Hogwarts Legacies character creation system appears to
allow trans characters. Personally, I think increased inclusivity is great.
(29:55):
It is a huge benefit to people who otherwise would
never see represent tation within a game, and on the
flip side, it doesn't have negative impacts on anyone else
who already had representation in games, so I see it
as a net win. I like how games can bring
people together, though obviously games have also served as incubators
(30:18):
for hateful behavior, as well, it's complicated. Oh feet, that's
what you call them. That's the stuff that people are
dancing on. I'm glad we got that sorted out alright.
That wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. Hope
you are all well. Hope you fellow Americans out there
are getting ready for a joyful Thanksgiving. I hope you
(30:40):
have lots to be thankful for. And if you have
any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
of tech Stuff. There are a couple of ways to
get in touch. One is to download the I Heart
radio app. It's free to download, free to use. You
can navigate over to tech Stuff. Just put tech Stuff
in the little search bar that will bring you over
to the tech Stuff podcast page. You'll see there a
little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can
(31:01):
leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length
if you like. You can even indicate if I can
use that voice message in a future episode of tech Stuff.
I will not do it unless you tell me it's okay,
or if you prefer. You can reach out on Twitter,
assuming that it's up and the handle there is tech
stuff hs W. I did create an account on Mastodon.
(31:25):
I will share that in the future when probably do
a full episode about Mastodon, so people who are on
Mastodon can find me there. And I'm looking at a
couple of other possibilities. The problem is, of course, that
one a lot of people are gonna stick with Twitter
until it just isn't a thing anymore if that, in
fact happens, and too if they choose something else. There
(31:47):
are like a dozen other options, and I can't maintain
a presence at all of them because I'll always forget
one and I'll never be like, checking like fourteen different
accounts for messages is a huge time sink. So we'll
figure it out. We'll keep on going. Maybe I'll reach
out yet again to get an email address for this show. Uh,
(32:10):
I know that Ben Bowland keeps sending people to my
personal email address to issue complaints from ridiculous history and
stuff they don't want you to know because that's fun.
But anyway, I hope you're all well and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
(32:33):
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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