Tech News: Twitter and Tesla and Elon, Oh My!

We get an update on Elon Musk and his quest to own or walk away from Twitter. We also learn what Apple unveiled at WWDC 2022. And we hear about an AI-piloted ship crossing the Atlantic.

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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 tex Stuff. I'm your host,
Jothan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And
how the tech are you. It's time for the tech
news for Tuesday, June seven, t d two, and I
am back after a short vacation. Let's get to the

(00:27):
news and we'll start off with an Elon update. We
should probably get a little jingle for that, and of
course I'm talking about Elon Musk, the world's richest man
who has mastered the art of staying in the headlines,
usually by being a borish jerk. First, an update on

(00:49):
the Twitter situation. In case you weren't aware, Elon Musk
announced his intention to acquire Twitter and signed a deal
valued that around forty four bill million dollars and has
been kind of weird about it ever since. So he's
been showing signs they wants to back out of this
deal to acquire Twitter. In fact, he's been doing that

(01:11):
for a couple of weeks now, but it's been getting
more dramatic with Ellen demanding that Twitter handover data proving
the company's assertion that fewer than five percent of all
monetize able accounts on the platform are actually boughts. Ellen
says it's much much higher, maybe as high as ninety
or ninety five percent, but come on, that just doesn't

(01:33):
seem possible. Though it's also admittedly hard for me to
believe the five percent number. I think it's probably somewhere
in between. Anyway, His legal team sent a letter to Twitter,
essentially saying that Ellen is prepared to drop the deal
because Twitter has not complied with his requests. Twitter has
stated repeatedly that it has handed Elan the data. Also,

(01:55):
the deal included Elon waving due diligence. Plus from the
very beginning, he said that one of his goals was
to weed out bots, so this argument seems off right, Like,
if one of the things Ellen wanted to do was
clean Twitter of bots, then it seems odd that he's
hung up on the number of bots. And a lot

(02:15):
of armchair analysts have suggested that Ellen has been having
lots of second thoughts about this deal and that the
forty four billion dollar price tag is way too high,
particularly since Twitter's stock prices dipped a couple of times
since the deal was announced, and moreover, Elon's own stock
in Tesla, where a lot of his wealth is has

(02:35):
been affected by another very dramatic drop in stock price.
Twitter appears to be set on this deal, however, and
I would not be surprised to see Twitter's own legal
team enter into litigation in an effort to force Ellen
to see it through. Right now, it sounds like the
deal is more likely to happen than not, despite the
appearance that Ellen wants out, because it's not that easy

(02:58):
to back out of these kinds of deals. We'll have
to see where this goes next. In related news, the
attorney general for the state of Texas has launched an
investigation into Twitter to look into the bought account issue.
Now you might wonder why the heck is the attorney
general of Texas doing this? What what is he doing?

(03:20):
Is it illegal to have bots on your platform? Well,
the answer to that second question is no, it's not
illegal to have bots in your platform. But Texas is
an attorney general whom I should point out faces charges
of securities fraud from seven years ago and has yet
to stand trial for that. He says that bots could
inflate Twitter's value, which could affect quote the costs of

(03:43):
doing business with it, thus directly harming consumers and businesses.
End quote. Now you might wonder if all this is
worth spending taxpayer money on an investigation, and I would
say I don't think so. But maybe Ellen is friendly
with the Attorney General's office. I just don't know. Meanwhile,
over at Tesla, there's been some confusion as to whether

(04:07):
or not the company is going to make some big
cuts in its employees. Reuters reported that Musk sent out
an email last week indicating that Tesla was instituting a
hiring freeze and that there would be a move to
cut staff by ten percent. A second email apparently indicated
that that ten percent cut would really just affect salaried employees,

(04:29):
not hourly workers. Then Musk tweeted that total head count
at Tesla would actually increase, but salaried employee numbers would
stay quote fairly flat end quote. So does that mean
there will not be a ten percent cut of salaried employees,
I honestly have no clue. Musk indicated that he felt

(04:50):
some areas of the company were overstaffed, which suggests that
he is going to make cuts and maybe cutting one
tenth of your salaried employees seems fairly flat to him,
It's hard to say. Also, this comes on the tail
of numerous messages from Musk indicating that he wants folks
back in the office full time and that people should

(05:12):
expect to work from home only after they've put in
forty hours of work at the office. And for those
of you who are unaware, forty hours is considered a
normal workload for a week in the United States. Anyway.
That led many of those same armchair analysts that I
mentioned earlier suggests that maybe Musk is trying to convince
salaried folks to quit, but possibly because maybe if they quit,

(05:35):
they won't get the same sort of severance deal that
they would be entitled to if they were instead laid off.
I don't know. That sounds pretty cynical to me, but
I mean it could be true. Yesterday, Apple held its
Worldwide Developers Conference, or w w d C. This event is,
as the name suggests, primarily directed towards app developers so

(05:56):
that they can see the sort of support and features
that they can expect while they're eating the next generation
of computer and mobile apps. But there's usually some nuggets
in there that are of interest to the end consumer
as well. This year we got to see a redesigned
MacBook Air, which features Apple's mto processor chip. The MacBook

(06:16):
Air weighs in at just two point seven pounds or
one point two kims, and it measures just eleven millimeters thick.
It's also cut some other nifty features, so folks who
won a super thin, super light Mac should be happy,
assuming they can shell out the twelve hundred bucks it'll
take to secure the base model. Other models are more expensive.

(06:37):
The company also introduced the MacBook Pro thirteen, also with
the M two chip and a new active cooling system.
The MacBook Pro their team starts at about hundred bucks
and to run on top of those computers. Apple showed
off the new Mac OS build called Ventura. So app
always names its OS builds off California landmarks anyway. Ventura

(07:00):
adds some new features, like an improved search function, which
can search not just the macs contents but also the web.
The OS also supports face i D and touch i D,
allowing users to create biometric logins rather than past words,
and there's also a feature called Continuity Camera that will
let Mac users with iPhones turn their iPhone into a

(07:22):
webcam while chatting on their Mac. iOS also got an update,
so we're up to iOS sixteen now. Apple showed off
an updated customizable lock screen for iPhones, which users can
tweak by changing up fonts and colors, And I wonder
how Sir Johnny Ives feels about all that. Folks who
use Apple's Messages app will be glad to see that

(07:44):
they can now edit messages that they've sent so they
can fix irritating typos or un send a message if
they like. Oh and Apple also added new safety check
features that lets users revoke data access from other people
so that those other people cannot snoop or stalk you,
which is a darn good edition in my mind. Likewise,

(08:04):
the iPad got some similar updates, plus a new app
for weather data, and the watch os is up to
version nine now and has more watch phases. You can
pen apps that you use a lot on the watches
face and things like that. There's a lot more than
they announced, but I figure anyone's super interested in Apple
announcements is either already well aware of this or is

(08:24):
going to look into it into further detail, so we'll
just move on. Earlier today, the EU gave Apple a
bit of a setback when it adopted a provisional agreement
that would require all smartphones and tablets to be compatible
with us b C chargers by late twenty four in
the EU. Now, this is not yet set in stone.
Twenty seven EU countries are going to have to agree

(08:46):
to this and the EU Parliament will have to pass
it into law. But if it does become law, Apple
will have no option but to include USB Sports on
its devices sold in the EU. So why is the
EU doing this? Well, having a common standard for chargers
gives consumers the option of using the same cables from

(09:07):
device to device, which can save them money and it
can also cut back on E waste. Apple had previously
argued that forcing the company to abandon its lightning port
and to convert over to USBC would hurt innovation. Now
I don't know if that's true or not. I do
know it would hurt Apple's ability to make more money

(09:27):
by selling lightning accessories. Anyway, I'll follow up on this
should the provisional Agreement become EU law. We've got a
few more stories to cover before we get to that.
Let's take a quick break. Mercedes Benz has issued a

(09:49):
recall that is affecting almost a million vehicles around the world.
So at issue are the break booster components in certain
Mercedes vehicles. They turn out to be prone to corrosion,
and that corrosion can be severe enough to cause break failure,
which is obviously something you would want to avoid. The

(10:10):
vehicles affected include the two thousand six to two thousand
twelve mL class and g L class SUVs, as well
as the R class minivan. The company warns that drivers
may notice that their brake pedal starts to feel a
bit soft, or that they might hear air noises like
wheezing or or squeaking through the breaking system, and that

(10:32):
if you do experience any of that, you should not
be driving your vehicle anymore until it can be inspected
and then subsequently repaired by an authorized dealership. Last week, Axon,
the company behind the Taser stun gun, announced that it
was developing a drone outfitted with a Taser, specifically to
deploy in situations where there is an active shooter or

(10:53):
a similar threat. However, Axon's ethics board subsequently released a
statement making it clear they were vehemently opposed to this idea.
The board revealed that Axon had previously suggested a more
scaled back version of this drone, and they had proposed
that a year ago, and the Ethics Board had even

(11:14):
voted that down, which was you know, less robust, you
might say. So it did come as quite a shock
when the company announced this, you know, full on Taser drone,
and that was enough to convince nine of the twelve
Ethics Board members to quit. So that brought a lot
more attention to the topic. ACS and then released a

(11:34):
subsequent statement revealing the company had decided to pause work
on the project and refocus quote to further engage with
key constituencies to fully explore the best path forward end quote, which,
uh is kind of a fancy way of saying, we
need to rethink this. Spiegel reports that Telegram, the messaging app,

(11:56):
has been sharing user data with the Federal Criminal Police
Office and Harmony in several cases. Now this is noteworthy
mainly because Telegram has long claimed that it would never
share user data with any third party, including governments. That
appears to no longer be the case. As for why
Telegrams shared this data in the first place, While the

(12:17):
cases in question were very serious ones, they ranged from
terrorism to child abuse. Now complicating matters is that far
right extremists have been taken to using Telegram precisely because
the service has said it will not hand data over
to authorities. The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, did announce

(12:38):
back in ten that the company would start to hand
over information like phone numbers and I P addresses if
it were so ordered by a court, but otherwise would
not share data, and the company added that at least
as of the last time it updated the information on
this web page, that it had never received any request
from a court like that, like an actual court order.

(13:00):
But apparently in February of this year, Durov and some
of his associates held a virtual meeting with Germany's Federal
Ministry of the Interior to set up a quote reliable
direct channel at the working level end quote. I am
actually not entirely sure what that entails. I don't know
what information the authorities actually have access to. But this

(13:21):
is another example of the very complicated dilemma of running
a messaging service. So on the one hand, you want
the service to be secure and private for users, so
that your users trust it and they use it, and
that they feel that they are safe from having authoritarian
governments turned the app into a kind of surveillance. But

(13:42):
on the other hand, you also want to limit the
spread of extremist ideology that you don't want to enable
hate groups. So it is a very complicated matter. I
expect we're gonna get a well, I'm sure, I'm sorry
from Canadian coffee chain Tim Horton's pretty soon. Turns out
that the mobile app for tim Horton's was snoreffing up

(14:02):
user data like location information faster than I can wolf
down a whole bag of tim bits. That's pretty darn fast.
According to Canadian investigators, the app was pulling down location
data every few minutes of every day up to through
and not only is that a massive breach of privacy,
it's also illegal, but it would also make your phone

(14:26):
work overtime and drain your battery faster. So, according to
the investigators, the app would alert users that it would
track their location, so it was asking permission to track location,
but the implication was that it was only going to
do that while the app was actively open, But in fact,
the app was tracking users even when the app wasn't

(14:46):
in use, and it would continue doing so as long
as the user's device remained on the company had been
planning to use the app for targeted advertising, which obviously
gets more targeted the more data you have about your customer.
And Tim Horton's actually stopped track users locations on a
continual basis back in, but maintained a contract with a
location data broker for a while and the company has

(15:09):
agreed to now bring all apps and processes within Canadian
compliance and in return it will not be punished because
setting the law on a coffee shop is just playing ludicrous.
I mean, you've probably seen all the cops hanging out
at the coffee shop. A few years ago, I talked
about how researchers were working on an autonomous ship that

(15:31):
would cross the Atlantic Ocean. It's called the Mayflower Autonomous
Ship or m AS, and it's named after the Mayflower
ship that brought settlers to North America. Well, the ship
has now crossed the Atlantic, but the crossing did not
go completely as planned. The m a S left the
UK on April nine, crewed only by its AI and

(15:54):
all of its sensors and and actuators, and it was
bound for Massachusetts, but at some point the ship began
encountering technical difficulties, so the researchers decided to divert the
ship so that it would instead arrive in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
That's a bit further north than east of Massachusetts. IBM,

(16:14):
which developed much of the technology on board the ship,
says the plan is for the m AS two later
continue its journey and head from Halifax to Plymouth, Massachusetts
and then on to Washington, d C. And that's it.
That's the news for Tuesday, June seven two. Hope you
are all well. If you would like to leave me

(16:34):
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(16:54):
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