January 8, 2020 • 50 mins
This is part two of a retrospect on the last decade in tech. Jonathan looks at Apple in the post Steve Jobs era, protests at Google and Uber's worst year ever.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
iHeart Radio and a love of all things tech, and
we are going to continue our retrospective look at how
technology has changed over the last ten years. Now. In
(00:25):
our last episode, I went from two thousand nine to
the end of two thousand thirteen, and we talked about
stuff like Apple launching the iPad, all the way up
to the emergence of Cambridge ANALYTICAM. And in this episode,
we'll keep on marching down the path of time to
see how tech has evolved and shaped our world in
the years since. Now, if you listen to the last episode,
(00:48):
you'll remember then two thousand thirteen, Steve Balmer, who was
at that point the CEO of Microsoft, had announced his retirement.
He would actually remain CEO until February of two thousand teen,
and that's when he would hand over the reins to
Satya Nadela. Nadela, who had been the executive vice president
of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group, had been working for
(01:10):
Microsoft since two so this was definitely a case of
a company promoting from within. Microsoft had been around nearly
forty years, and Nadela would mark only the third CEO
in the company's history. Nadella's first year wasn't exactly smooth,
partly due to his own actions. While at a conference
(01:32):
named after tech pioneer Grace Hopper, who many people referred
to as the person who invented the term computer bug,
Nadela made some comments that women in the tech industry
should rely on good karma rather than asking for a
pay raise, essentially saying if you were if your work
is good, it'll come back to you now. As you
(01:54):
might imagine, the response to this rather tone deaf statement
wasn't terribly positive of and he would subsequently apologize for
those comments, and he would later explain that he was
applying a personal philosophy that he followed that doing good
work leads to rewards to a broad environment, but he
did not take into account stuff like systemic bias, in
(02:17):
which an entire population of employees contends with lower salaries
among other problems, just as a matter of course, that
if you don't address that part, then this whole do
good work and you'll get rewarded thing ends up being
lips service. Nadela committed to continuing existing policies and enacting
new ones to help overcome this systemic bias in general,
(02:40):
including launching programs that would help expand diversity within Microsoft. Now.
On top of that scandal, Nadela also had to helm
Microsoft through some pretty tough layoffs throughout two thousand fourteen.
In July, he announced that the company would eliminate eighteen
thousand jobs. Yikes. Many of those, about twelve thousand, five
(03:03):
hundred of them, in fact, were employees who had previously
worked at Nokia. And here's the really rough thing. Microsoft
had just acquired Nokia in April two thousand fourteen. This
was all in an effort to create mobile devices, mainly
smartphones that could compete against Google, Android devices and the
Apple iPhone, and spoiler alert, this would not really pan
(03:28):
out so well. Microsoft would ultimately get out of the
smartphone market entirely, though it stuck around longer than a
lot of people thought was necessary. On the US government level,
the FCC was forced to go back to the drawing
board in an effort to establish rules about the concept
of net neutrality. If they had been able to look
(03:48):
into the future, maybe they wouldn't have even bothered this.
A little commentary will come back by the end of
this episode, but essentially, the idea behind net neutrality is
that all data should be equal on the Internet. So
no service provider, that is, the company that actually allows
you to connect to the Internet, none of those should
be able to give preferential treatment to some data at
(04:10):
the expense of others, particularly for services or data provided
by the I s P itself or against competing services. So,
in other words, if you have an I s P,
that I s P should not be able to prioritize
its own properties at the expense of others in an
effort to get you to subscribe to more of their stuff.
(04:32):
And also, net neutrality states that you should be able
to access your data on whatever Internet capable device you're using,
so that a company would not be able to restrict
your access to certain content just because you were using
a device that was made by a competitor. For example,
the FCC had established regulations in two thousand eleven that
would require Internet providers to treat all traffic equally, but
(04:55):
the U S courts ultimately ruled that the FCC didn't
actually have the authority to enforce those rules, which means
the rules were meaningless. Right if you can't enforce them,
then the rules might as well not exist. So the
FCC changed tactics and began to argue that broadband should
be reclassified as a regulated utility, which FCC does have
(05:17):
the authority to oversee. Now, we'll revisit this issue again later,
because who boy, has it been a mess now? Over
in the European Union, a ruling made things pretty complicated
for a companies like Google. The EU passed a rule
that informally is referred to as the right to be forgotten.
That is, people should have some option to remove their
(05:40):
name and details from search results to protect their privacy,
or to remove reference to something that really no longer
applies to them. For example, let's say that I grew
up in the era of the Internet, and as a
dumb teenager, I did some stupid act that got me
in legal trouble. Nothing too serious, but bad and off
to bring my judgment into question, and as a result,
(06:04):
someone wrote about it and perhaps my identity is known
as a result of that. Then, as an adult who
has grown up and supposedly matured, I would never do
such a thing again. But I still have this thing
that's in my past, that's in my record that people
can see, that follows me around everywhere. Then I might
find harmful and I might want to find a way
(06:24):
to wipe that off the Internet, because that's not really
who I am anymore. That was the whole purpose of
this rule, But critics of the rule pointed out that
this could allow someone to whitewash their own background. They
could erase records that have real meaning and are of
public importance. They could, in theory, demand that links leading
to factually correct articles about them be removed from search results.
(06:47):
So let's say you're a local business owner and you
want to run for a publicly elected office, but you
also have some dark skeletons in your closet, like illegal
stuff that people wrote about in the past. You could
manned any references to your past activities be removed from
search results, making it harder for the voting public to
know about the kind of terrible, nefarious person you actually
(07:10):
are when they go to vote. Now, as it stands,
the rule would require people to submit requests to Google
to have their search results removed from general search, and
Google would review the request before acting on it, and
so it's a pretty messy subject. Speaking of messy subjects,
two thousand fourteen was also when more hacking stories made
(07:32):
the news. Many people, including prominent celebrities, found their private
stuff that was stored in iCloud on public display. Apple
was quick to say that I cloud itself had not
been breached. This wasn't an example of hackers getting access
to Apple's servers. Rather, the people who were hacked were
(07:52):
hacked because their passwords and their security questions were compromised,
probably through guesswork and brute force attacks. Apple promised to
boost security in the wake of the hacks, but yeah,
this was pretty ugly stuff. On a much larger scale,
Sony Pictures was hit with a massive hack attack, which
included everything from employee compensation records and benefits data to
(08:16):
unreleased movies. Suspicion turned to North Korea, with a possible
motivation for the hacks being the upcoming release of a
film titled The Interview, which was a comedy in which
two characters are charged with assassinating North Korea's leader Kim
Jong Un. Chinese e commerce company Ali Baba held its
i p O on the New York Stock Exchange in
(08:38):
September of two thousand fourteen, reaching a stock price of
two dollars and seventy cents per share, which was more
than thirty five percent higher than it's already pretty hefty
sixty eight dollars per share opening price. It was the
biggest I p O in tech up to that point
and helped show how the Chinese market was becoming an
(09:00):
increasingly powerful player in the tech space. Apple announced Apple Pay,
the company's mobile payment technology that has found its way
into multiple Apple products. To use it, you can tap
an NFC enabled device against a compatible payment terminal, and
after authorizing the payment on the device, you could be
on your way. Apple also announced, but did not launch,
(09:22):
the Apple Watch in two thousand fourteen, and would enter
into the wearables market in the hopes of succeeding where
many other companies had struggled. One other thing about the
Apple Pay thing that I just think is funny. When
I was on a trip to San Francisco, Tari was there.
We went past a girl scout group that was selling
cookies and they accepted Apple Pay, and I thought, well,
(09:45):
of course they do. It's San Francisco. Facebook shocked the
tech world with a sixteen billion dollar acquisition. This was
the messaging service WhatsApp. Since then, it's become clear that
the intent was team merge the features of Facebook, WhatsApp,
and Instagram together, but that has come under recent scrutiny
(10:07):
as various government officials around the world have speculated that
breaking up Facebook might be a good idea, that perhaps
the company has gotten too big, too powerful, and people
were too dependent upon it. Uh And also that's just
anti competitive in general, so there's been some moves to
perhaps forced the company to break into separate companies again.
(10:30):
But yes, this was the massive acquisition Facebook made with WhatsApp,
and that was the first time a lot of people,
including myself, had heard of the app, despite the fact
that it was a very very popular and still is
a very popular text messaging service used by millions of
people around the world. I just hadn't heard of it
because I was ignorant. And two thousand fourteen would be
(10:54):
a bad year for Uber, but by far not the
worst year for Uber. The company did get hold of
an enormous amount of cash in the form of investments,
but it also faced increasing resistance and multiple markets around
the world as governments and taxi cab unions pushed back.
In addition, some pretty unethical corporate behavior became public knowledge
(11:15):
in two thousand fourteen, including the revelation that Uber corporate
employees could access writer logs without any type of consent,
opening up the possibility of extortion or blackmail. This wouldn't
be the low point for Uber, as we will see
later on. Hewitt Packard would announce in October two fourteen
that the company was going to split up, spinning off
(11:38):
the PC and printer operations from the corporate enterprise side
of the business, and Google acquired smart demstat company Nest
for three point to billion dollars, bolstering Google's smart home
technology strategy. Nest would operate as an independent company just
a year later, but would then rejoin Google into the
(12:00):
in eighteen. Two thousand fourteen was a busy year, all right,
Let's get on to now. One big thing to happen
in was a confusing series of corporate maneuvers over at
the aforementioned Google Now. The end result was that the
company formed a new umbrella corporation called Alphabet, which would
(12:20):
be at the top of the hierarchy of companies that
would include stuff like Google, and YouTube, and later on Weymo,
the automated driving company, as well as others. The logic
behind the move was that this would allow each individual
company in the family to operate independently of all the others,
giving each company the ability to make moves without having
(12:41):
to coordinate everything with everyone else. So you wouldn't have
one leader at the top of all of these having
to consider all these very different initiatives. Each one would
have its own leader and thus would be able to
move more nimbly. Larry Page moved up as CEO of
Alphabet and Sundar Pichai would take over as CEO of Google,
which at this point was a little more stripped down
(13:03):
but still an enormous company. So uh, Apple would officially
launch the Apple Watch. It received mixed reviews. A lot
of folks said that it was clearly the best smart
watch on the market. Others said, yes, it is, but
the bar is pretty darn low, so that's not a
big thing now. Generally speaking, the watch has a devoted
(13:25):
following among Apple fans, but it hasn't really moved on
to become a bigger success among a broader audience. That's
often looked at as something of a disappointment in tech
journalism circles. I'm not as sure that the owners find
it as disappointing, but reviewers kind of did. Microsoft launched
Windows ten in now this was a really big reversal
(13:48):
from Windows eight, and it also skipped right the heck
over Windows nine. There's no Windows nine goes from Windows
eight to Windows ten, seeing how is how the iPhone
is going to do the exact same thing just a
little bit later. It starts to make you wonder if
the number nine holds any sort of dark significance in
the world of technology, like you just don't want to
(14:10):
have version nine, or maybe it's just people want to
create the perception of a fresh start and the number
ten gives you a fresh start that one zero. It
makes you think of it being a big leap forward
as opposed to a nine. In some cases it was
meant to mark not the tenth version of a property,
but rather the anniversary of a product launch. But whatever,
(14:32):
I hate it because it makes tracking versions a pain.
It just when you look over the history and you're
skipping over numbers, you start to think, did I miss something?
So I hate it. It's dumb. So we're gonna call
Windows ten Windows nine. Now everybody write it down the
year's and it's Windows nine. Anyway, Windows ten launched and
(14:53):
in general people liked it way more than Windows eight. However,
it didn't have a perfect launch. There were reports coming
out that the OS incorporated elements of data tracking, and
it had some troubling implications regarding user privacy. As a result,
eventually Microsoft was able to smooth this over, but initially
those were big concerns. In the US, the Federal Aviation
(15:14):
Administration or f a A released its set of guidelines
and rules for drone operation in the US airspace. So
generally speaking, the rules are not that much different from
the ones that govern stuff like the operation of model aircraft,
though they do require operators to get a permit if
the drone they are piloting is over a certain size.
(15:35):
Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker. In it incorporates a
personal digital assistant and not surprisingly deep integration and Amazon's
e commerce services. It introduced us to Alexa, the digital
voice that can do all sorts of stuff, though you
might have to ask her to do it for five
times if you have a particularly strong Southern accent. I
(15:57):
based that off listening to my mom tried to interact
with a LEXA, I love you, mom. Both SpaceX and
Blue Origin were able to launch and return to Earth
a reusable rocket that year. In Blue Origin actually did
it first, and then SpaceX followed suit a few weeks later.
The achievement was a significant step in the effort to
(16:17):
reduce the cost of getting stuff out into space. By
using the same launch vehicle for multiple launches, the price
tag drops significantly. Now. It's still not exactly cheap, mind you,
but it lowers the price tag enough to allow parties
that had previously never been able to launch a payload
into space potentially piggyback on a launch, which is pretty cool.
(16:40):
Over at Twitter, Dick Costolo, the CEO back at that point,
was forced to essentially step out of that role, and
Jack Dorsey, the co founder of Twitter, became the interim
CEO and then full time CEO of the company. One
of his first big moves was to oversee an eight
percent cut of the workforce, staying that it was a
(17:00):
tough move, he viewed it as absolutely necessary for the
company's success. Oh and hey, in Twitter got rid of
favorites in which you would mark tweets you liked with
a star, and they replaced it with likes and which
you marked tweets you like with a heart. Not. At
the time, this was considered a big deal and some
(17:22):
people really hated it, And now I think most people
don't even remember when it was different, which kind of
sums up a lot about Internet culture in general. We
all have memories like a goldfish when it comes to
these things. All right, well, I have a little bit
more about a lot of stuff happened in these years,
must have been making up for that recession. But I'll
(17:43):
get to it in just a second after we take
this quick break. Okay, some more stuff From two thousand fifteen,
Volkswagen had to deal within an enormous scandal. It was
discovered that the company had installed devices in diesel vehicles
(18:05):
being sold in the United States. The purpose for these
devices was to detect when the vehicle was going through
emissions testing, something that many places in the United States
require in order for a vehicle to be registered in
that region. So during testing, the device would cause the
vehicle to underperform, which would reduce the emissions the vehicle
(18:25):
would give off in the process. Once the cars systems
detected that the test was over, it would switch itself
off and the car would go into full performance mode.
But that also meant the car was emitting more pollution. So,
in other words, Volkswagen had installed gadgets that allowed its
cars to cheat on official tests, and as you can imagine,
(18:47):
that's a big no no and it cost the company
dearly HP. After announcing the intent to split its company
into two businesses, went forward with that plan, and in
the process the company eliminated thirty three thousand jobs. Yikes.
Meg Whitman would remain CEO of the enterprise unit of
(19:09):
the company. The other side, the PC and UH and
consumer facing approach would go to someone else. Now. Tesla
introduced the autopilot feature in its vehicles in two thousand fifteen.
The feature has been the news several times since then
due to crashes, including crashes with fatalities that happened while
(19:30):
Tesla cars were allegedly in autopilot mode. Now, the company
has repeatedly stated that this feature is not meant to
be an autonomous car mode and it requires drivers to
acknowledge as much before they can enact the feature, But
many people, including myself, still criticized the company for calling
(19:51):
the darned thing autopilot in the first place. Now, not
to go off on too much of a tangent, but
I think the company bears at least a little response
stability for setting unrealistic expectations with that name, though I
also agree that ultimately the majority of accountability should fall
on the shoulders of the drivers, not on just Tesla.
(20:13):
Over on the data security side, one of the big
stories of that prompted more than a little schadenfreude affected
the site Ashley Madison, which is a sort of dating
website for people who want to have extramarital affairs. The
hackers demanded that the site's owner, Avid Life Media, shut
down the website or else they were going to release
(20:35):
the data to the world. Well, the site stayed up,
and the info got leaked onto the dark web, where
it quickly circulated and people hurriedly did searches to make
sure they weren't showing up on any lists. Two thousand
fifteen was also when so called hoverboards, which is a
terrible name for what's essentially a variant of a motorized scooter,
(20:56):
started bursting into flames. Do you remember when that happened?
Airline said you can't take them on board because they
were catching on fire so much. Yikes. Okay, finally let's
move on into twenty six and twenty sixteen, we had
to say goodbye to something beloved. I am, of course,
referring to the three and a half millimeter headphone jack,
(21:18):
the wired headphone jack on phones. The iPhone seven got
rid of it, and so did a lot of other smartphones.
The industry was pushing a move towards bluetooth headphones or
this was even worse, the use of a dongle adapter
so you could plug your old wired headsets into new
smartphone devices. And there were a lot of jokes about
(21:38):
the word dongle back in two thousand sixteen, because we
are all very mature. Over at Samsung, there was smoke,
and where there's smoke, there's fire, you know. Well, in
this case, the Galaxy Note seven, a flagship smartphone from Samsung,
began to have a pretty disastrous year as reports surfaced
(22:01):
of Notes seven handsets exploding into flames. At fault were
the batteries that prompted a global recall of the device.
Airlines made announcements the passengers with a Note seven would
have to surrender their phone before being allowed on a plane.
It was really bad press, a huge mess, so Samsung
(22:22):
recalled them and replaced the faulty batteries with new ones
that didn't seem to do much better than the original ones.
There were more reports of accidents flooding the news, and
eventually Samsung was forced to discontinue the handset entirely. Yeah.
In early twenty sixteen, a Google engineer named Anthony Lewandowski
(22:42):
left the company and he went on to found a
new self driving car company called Auto O T t O.
Lewandowski had previously founded other companies related to autonomous cars
that had later been acquired by Google. That would actually
lead to some people questioning the ethic behind those moves.
Some people said that it seemed like he was specifically
(23:04):
creating companies with the intent for Google to acquire them later,
so essentially printing his own money. That was the implication
that some people had made against him. In late twenty sixteen,
Uber acquired Auto and Lewandowski would move on over to
Uber and become the head of their attempts to develop
self driving cars. Now. The following year, Google mostly in
(23:26):
the form of Weymo that was the self driving startup
under Google's parent company, Alphabet. It didn't really exist when
Lewandowski was there. The division that would become Weymo existed,
but Weymo as a thing didn't exist till a little
bit later. But Weymo would allege that Lewandowski had downloaded
nearly ten gigs of confidential information, including trade secrets, from
(23:46):
Google before he left the company. Lewandowski, when met with
questions about this at a trial, exercised his Fifth Amendment rights.
The Fifth Amendment protects US citizens from having to increase
emanate themselves in a court of law. Uber would subsequently
fire Lewandowski for not cooperating with the investigation. Google and
(24:08):
Uber would have ultimately settled the lawsuit in two thousand eighteen,
and Lewandowski would go on to found another self driving
car company. Google would bring another charge against Lewandowski personally
for theft of trade secrets, and after being indicted, the
board of directors of his new startup, called Pronto, announced
that Lewandowski was no longer CEO and appointed a new
(24:29):
leader in his place. Lewandowski has pled not guilty to
the charges, and his trial has not yet happened as
of the recording of this podcast. Apple also had a
face off with the U. S Department of Justice in
two thousand sixteen, and the crux of the matter was
a mass shooting that happened in late The perpetrators of
(24:50):
the shooting had an Apple iPhone five C in their possession,
and the FBI wanted Apple to unlock the phone and
decrypt its contents. Apple said no way. Tim Cook, the
CEO of Apple, said that if they complied with the
FBI's orders, it would set a dangerous precedent, and that
(25:10):
if the company acquiesced in the United States, it might
be forced to do the same thing in other countries,
including countries that have more authoritarian governments and fewer guaranteed
human rights for citizens. Ultimately, the FBI gained access to
the phone using a third party contractor to break through
the security, and the entire matter was dropped without a
(25:33):
final resolution. Something else that had its roots in two
thousand fifteen, but really played out over the course of
two thousand sixteen was the precipitous fall of the medical
startup company Paronus. The expose of Faroness began in October
and continued throughout the following year. Paronus launched with the
(25:53):
promise that it was going to develop an amazing piece
of technology capable of testing a single drop of blood
for dozens of different diseases and conditions, reducing the need
for blood tests and creating unprecedented access to medical data.
You could have one of these devices sitting on a
desktop at home and do a blood test all on
your own, just check if you wanted to. That was
(26:15):
the promise. There were a lot of claims that Saronus
was using smoke and mirrors to make it seem like
the company was making progress when in fact development was
hitting some major roadblocks, and there Anos founder Elizabeth Holmes
found herself in the center of a massive investigation that
is still heading towards criminal proceedings as of the recording
of this episode. And it was also two thousand sixteen
(26:37):
when Yahoo disclosed the data breach that had happened back
in two thousand and fourteen. They actually disclosed two of them.
The first time they disclosed one, they said that it
affected around half a billion accounts, and then a little
bit later in twenty sixteen, they said, whoops, there was
also another one in that one affected at least one
(26:57):
billion accounts. This was also right around the time that
Verizon was looking to acquire Yahoo. Uh. The acquisition would
still go through, but it did so at a pretty
hefty price drop, and that happened in Merissa Meyer, the
CEO of Yahoo, would find herself out of a job
not long after the acquisition. We also watched a bizarre
(27:20):
series of allegations over at a company called hyper Loop One.
That company had emerged as one of many with the
intended goal of bringing Elon Musk's vision of high speed
transportation to life. This one was not directly affiliated with
Elon Musk himself. The company had built and demonstrated technology
that would be a foundational part of operations earlier in
(27:44):
But then there was a big executive kerfuffle that mainly
involved the CEO, Shervin Pishavar and the chief technology officer
Brogan bam Brogan. Both parties alleged wrongdoing conducted by the
other and it got really ugly and weird, and ultimately
the whole matter would be settled out of court. Bam
(28:04):
Brogan would go on to co found another maglev train
company called Arrivo, which would eventually fold due to lack
of funds. Hyper Loop one would go on to become
Virgin hyper Loop one in two thousand seventeen, after announcing
a partnership with the Virgin Group, Richard Branson's company. We
also got to say hello to three different consumer VR
(28:24):
headsets in you had the Oculus Rift, the PlayStation VR,
and the HTC Vibe that all came out that year
in the hopes that this time virtual reality would become
you know, real reality, meaning that it would become a
viable consumer industry. While new VR hardware is still coming
out today and new experiences arrive every year, the tech
(28:47):
hasn't really caught on with the mainstream general public, and
part of the reason might be the relatively high price tag.
Not only are the headsets expensive, but in many cases
they require a PC with some fairly hefty specs in
order to run smoothly. They also require a dedicated space,
particularly the headsets that allow for full movement within an area.
(29:10):
You've got to have the space available to actually use it.
So it's asking a lot of consumers to adopt the technology,
and so far we've only seen limited interest in the space.
The people who love it really love it, but it
remains a pretty hard sell. To the general consumer. And
one thing we had to say goodbye to in two
thousand sixteen was Vine, the service that lets users record
(29:33):
and upload six second videos to the Internet. Twitter had
acquired the service in two thousand twelve, not long after
it launched, but decided to sunset it in oh and
was an election year in the United States, and you
might have heard about how data was weaponized during that
whole circus from misleading news propagating on platforms like Twitter
(29:55):
and Facebook. That's a big thing. The whole fake news
stuff to hack into the Democratic National Committee servers and beyond.
It was and is a huge deal. And this isn't
restricted to just the United States, of course, but the
effects here in the States are still being revealed as
of this recording as we head into yet another election year. Now,
(30:16):
this entire part of our recent history is one that
is far too complicated and emotionally charged for me to
go into in this episode, but it remains one of
the most important stories in our recent history, and perhaps
one of the biggest consequences is that for many people
it has undermined their confidence in the democratic process, which
(30:36):
is a devastating outcome. We've seen companies like Google, Twitter,
and Facebook all struggle with how to deal with misinformation campaigns.
But that's something that continues to evolve as a record
these shows, and probably will continue to evolve for quite
some time to come. Now, I would say that also
made it pretty obvious how powerful a tool social media
(30:57):
can be, as well as how easily it can be manipulated.
Facebook in particular. Now I've said this on other episodes,
but Facebook's business model is dependent upon people spending time
scrolling through Facebook and thus being served ads. The best
way to get people to stay on your site is
to present engaging material. This doesn't have to be positive material,
(31:19):
it doesn't have to be true. It just has to
be stuff that gets people engaged, and that can be
liking the post or sharing it or commenting on it
or whatever. So inflammatory stuff actually does really well over
at Facebook because it prompts a great deal of engagement. Again,
it doesn't have to be positive engagement. It just has
to get people using the site because that's when they're
(31:40):
looking at advertising. So if you know that little bit
of information, then you have all you need to devise
a misinformation campaign that will get a lot of play
on Facebook because you can create something that isn't true,
that's inflammatory, and you can be pretty sure that Facebook
as a platform will help promote it because once it
(32:03):
starts getting interaction, once people engage with it, Facebook will
want to promote it to more people to drive more engagement.
So you're gaming the system, all right. Now, when we
come back, we'll talk about two thousand seventeen and two
thousand eighteen, and then I'm gonna go take a nap,
(32:26):
all right. So two thousand seventeen, what a year. It
was the year when Facebook would be in the news
repeatedly as a company and leadership team were put under scrutiny,
particularly within the context of promoting the misinformation I was
just talking about, particularly stories have been seeded on Facebook
from a collection of accounts that were traced back to
Russian sources. But hey, I just talked about all that
(32:48):
before the break, and I'm gonna be talking about Facebook
even more for two thousand eighteen, so I'm not gonna
rehash it all here except to say the company continued
to squirm under scrutiny while simultaneously may king bucket loads
of cash, like crazy amounts of money, y'all. And remember
how I said that two thousand fourteen was a rough
year for Uber. Well, that was a cake walk compared
(33:11):
to two thousand seventeen. The year started out rough. US
President Donald Trump announced a travel ban at New York's
John F. Kennedy Airport, a move that many companies and unions,
including the New York City Taxi Union, protested, but Uber
continued to operate at the airport, even turning off surge
pricing to undercut all competition, which led to people accusing
(33:35):
Uber of trying to profit off of the situation at
the expense of taxi cab companies, and it led to
a movement called hashtag delete Uber. It's also when former
Uber employees Susan Fowler went public with her allegations of
sexual harassment and other misconduct at Uber's corporate level. Following
the publication of her account, were several other stories that
(33:57):
pointed to a truly awful culture at the ride hailing company,
indicating some pretty deep trends of sexism and a tolerance
for inappropriate and sometimes criminal behavior. Apparently, if you were
viewed as a top performer in the company, you were
given a great deal of leeway as far as your
behavior was concerned. It was, without a question gross. However,
(34:22):
it was also one of the big launching points for
the hashtag me too movement, and which many people spoke
out against sexism, sexual harassment, racism, and related issues in
the workplace. Now, I would argue that gamer Gate sort
of set the stage for this, but I believe Fowler's
post really got things moving, and while the need to
(34:44):
movement goes well beyond technology, it was particularly visible in
the tech world, which has long been dominated by mostly
men for decades. I was around this time in early
seventeen that alphabet Google's parent comp He began to go
after Uber, stating that the former Googler Anthony Lewandowski had
(35:05):
stolen trade secrets before making his way over to Uber
the year earlier. Then, there was a video of Uber
CEO Travis Kalenik berating again Uber driver that went viral
in February seventeen, and that prompted the CEO to say
he would quote fundamentally change as a leader and grow
up end quote. Several Uber executives were either fired or
(35:29):
opted to leave the company as investigators looked into Fowler's claims,
indicating that there was indeed a pretty terrible culture at
the company and that it extended all the way up
the executive ranks. The senior vice president of Engineering, a
guy named Amit Singhal, was told to resign after about
a month on the job because it turned out he
(35:51):
had a sexual harassment allegation against him from a previous
employer that he had not divulged. The Uber VP of
Product and Growth, a guy named Ed Baker, resigned now.
He said he resigned because he wanted to focus on
the public sector, but there were other people in the
company who claimed he had engaged in inappropriate behavior while
(36:11):
at Uber. The president of Uber, Jeff Jones, resigned in
March of stating he had differences over the approach to
leadership at the company. By May, Uber fired Lewandowski for
not cooperating with that investigation, stemming from allegations that Lewandowski
had stolen terabytes of confidential information from Google. In June,
(36:35):
the company would fire twenty people at various levels within
Uber as a result of an internal investigation into Fowler's
claims that showed that she was being truthful. And it
didn't stop there. There were more resignations, including CEO Travis Kalenik,
whom I venture to say was not helping matters. He
was essentially forced to resign his position and eventually was
(36:57):
forced out the board of directors as well. The company
announced a new commitment to addressing its problems, acknowledging that
there were in fact problems in the process, but obviously
more happened in twenty seventeen than just Uber's super crazy
bad year. Amazon acquired high end grocery store chain Whole
Foods for fourteen billion dollars. For example, Apple launched the
(37:22):
iPhone ten, the tenth anniversary iPhone. They skipped right over
iPhone nine, just as Windows has skipped over Windows nine
and driving me a little closer to the edge because
my brain works in a very numeric way, and that's
on me and I'll stop now. We also had a
lot of efforts to codify net neutrality in the United
States that were reversed in seventeen. A Jitpi, the FCC
(37:44):
chairman during the Trump era, led the effort in reversing
the regulations that the FCC under the previous US administration
had established. So essentially he was saying, yeah, all those
efforts that the FCC made to regulate the road band industry,
We're reversing that, and uh, actually the following year, in ten,
(38:05):
net neutrality would be declared dead. So there's that. A
type of ransomware called Wanna cry went viral in seventeen.
The malware would infect machines and lock them from being
used by their rightful owners, and those owners would be
met with a demand to pay a ransom or else
(38:25):
lose their data forever. A twenty two year old security
researcher named Marcus Hutchins found and implemented at kill switch
that prevented Wanna Cry from being even worse than it
already was. Hutchins himself would be subsequently arrested by US
law enforcement and charged with numerous accounts of crimes that
included wire fraud and distributing a device meant to intercept
(38:47):
electronic communications. This was not related to want to Cry,
but to earlier malware. He would plead guilty to those
charges and would be sentenced to time served plus a
year of supervised uh you know, not really captivity, but
supervised activity and then before you be released. And that
sentencing happened in July of two thousand nineteen, so it'll
(39:08):
be middle of when that is up, all right, So
we're in the home stretch. Let's talk abouteen. And remember again,
I'm not covering twenty nineteen. I just did that ding
dang durn thing a couple of episodes ago. But I
will wrap up with a couple of thoughts about the decade.
So was when Cambridge an Oalytica that whole scandal became
public knowledge. It was revealed that through a loophole and
(39:30):
Facebook's API, a developer was able to collect information on
eighty seven million Facebook accounts without the user's permission. It
marked yet another really rough year for Facebook's leadership team,
which was compelled to testify to the United States government
a couple of times. Now, all that being said, the
company continued to be massively profitable, So while the testimony
(39:50):
was certainly uncomfortable, the financial results weren't exactly hurting the
executive team. Night they might be under some pretty intense
questioning in front of Congress, but then they could comfort
themselves with a nice, snugly, enormous yacht or mansion or whatever.
So in two thousand eighteen, Apple became the first U
(40:10):
S company to hit a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. However,
this only lasted about a month before the value of
the company dropped down to a measly seven billion losers.
And yes, that was me being facetious. That was also
the year we learned about two massive vulnerabilities in CPUs.
(40:33):
I probably need to do a full episode about this
at some point to explain exactly what's going on. But
the vulnerabilities are called specter and meltdown, And ultimately it
means that these chips that are built on this architecture,
and that's almost all of them, almost all modern chips
have a tendency to leak valuable information. Um, it's just
(40:55):
it's just an inherent vulnerability in the chip design and
it's terrible. But I'll probably have to do a full
episode to explain exactly how that works. Amazon opened its
first automated supermarket in two thousand eighteen. It's called Amazon Go.
And the ideas you walk in, you pick up whatever
stuff you want, and you walk out, and Amazon tracks
(41:15):
where you are in the store, It tracks what you grab,
it checks how much of it you take, and whether
or not you leave the store with it ideally anyway,
and then it builds you. Hopefully it does so correctly.
I know at least one person who had an experience
where he picked something up, put it back down, walked
out of the store uh with other stuff, but was
also charged from the thing he picked up but did
not actually take. So it's not full proof, but it's interesting. Also,
(41:39):
Amazon announced it would open up It's HQ two in
two cities, one near Alexandria, Virginia and the other one
in New York City. Only if you listen to my
two thousand nineteen episodes, you know how that all turned out.
We also started seeing online platforms react to the pressure
they were feeling in the wake of various misinformation campaigns
(42:00):
and fake news scandals. One of those reactions was to
remove many of the platforms used by Alex Jones, a
guy who has championed various fringe theories for years and
tends to be pretty hateful in his delivery. From his
podcasts getting pulled to his accounts on various platforms getting banned,
he found himself largely silenced on mainstream channels. Now that
(42:23):
being said, I'm not sure that I've seen similar movements
for you know, lesser known personalities, So part of me
wonders if this particular initiative was mostly meant to placate
people who were worried about rhetoric on these platforms. In
other words, we silenced someone who is really notable in
the field, So maybe you won't notice if we don't
(42:46):
silence all these other hundreds of lesser known accounts. That's
I don't know. Maybe I'm just too cynical. The U. S.
Supreme Court voted five to four in that law enforcement
of shows must secure a warrant before they are allowed
to obtain location data from mobile carriers. The court recognized
(43:07):
that location data gives a really deep insight into a
person and their activities, and that it could be a
major invasion of privacy and therefore uh it falls under
the Unreasonable Search and Seizure Amendment. Over at Google, more
than four thousand employees signed a petition asking the company
to end its participation in a Pentagon project called Project Maven.
(43:30):
The purpose of Maven was to develop drone platforms that,
with the addition of image recognition capabilities, could identify specific
humans from a really good distance away. And while Mayven
itself wasn't directly connected to weaponization, employees at Google felt
that it would not take much of a stretch to
incorporate that sort of technology on a weaponized platform, which
(43:53):
means you could have a future of flying robotic assassins.
Now Understandably, these Google employees felt that this approach conflicted
with the no longer official Google motto of don't be evil.
At least a dozen or so employees resigned over the
whole thing, refusing to work for a company that participated
in the project. Google said that once the contract was up,
(44:15):
it would not seek to renew, but it would try
and find someone else to take over that contract. It does, however,
continue to pursue and work with the Department of Defense
on other projects. Google also showed off a project of
its own called Duplex that it's IO Developer conference. The
AI program called up a restaurant and made a dinner
(44:36):
reservation automatically over the phone, all without the person on
the other end at the restaurant realizing that they were
talking to an AI BT So that was kind of creepy.
This was also the year that Google employees around the
world staged a walk out to protest the way the
company was handling sexual harassment claims. This was in part
prompted by reports that Andy Rubin, the guy who created
(44:58):
Android and who been forced to resign due to sexual
harassment allegations, had left the company with a ninety million
dollar severance package. Yeah. Tragedy struck in Tempe, Arizona, in
March two thousand eighteen, when an autonomous Uber test vehicle
collided with a pedestrian. A video analysis of the incident
(45:19):
seemed to indicate that the accident was preventable, and the
incident raised serious questions about the viability of autonomous cars
moving forward. Over in Europe, Visa experienced a major outage
that lasted eight hours due to a hardware failure that
in turn led to a run on a t m
S for cash. So that kind of shows you how
delicate our technological society can be. You can have a
(45:41):
single point of failure end up causing massive problems. Physicists
and science communicator Stephen Hawking passed away on March fourteen,
two thousand eighteen. He was seventy six years old, and
his work aimed to expand our understanding of the universe.
UH the sort of science communicator that I found particularly interesting.
(46:02):
Over in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation
Rules went into effect. These rules limit how companies can
gather and use personal information, and places requirements on companies
to make sure that users are aware of how and
when their data is collected. Has prompted some pretty massive
changes in how companies do business all over Europe as
a result. Then we get to SpaceX SpaceX conducting a
(46:26):
test of its Falcon heavy launch vehicle. How by launching
a payload that included a Tesla roadster that belonged to
Elon Musk, they got pushed into an orbit around the Sun,
because why not, right, Also, Samsung would show off its
foldable phone concept, a concept that would become a massive
headache in twenty nineteen. But I talked about that in
the last episodes, And let's wrap up with a couple
(46:49):
of observations about the decade in general. Now, one thing
that I noticed while looking back on this was the
evolution of the Internet of things, because ten years ago
it was sort of just a concept, almost like a buzzword,
closer to that than to reality. But over the course
of ten years we saw that change. You back in
(47:10):
two thousand nine, you know, you're talking about routers, computers,
and maybe some smartphones connected to the Internet, and today
they're looking at things like standalone sensors, home security systems,
maybe even a homemade dog feeding device, all connected to
the Internet, and we're just in the early stages of
this era. For better or for worse, the evolution has
taught us many lessons, including that the data we generate
(47:33):
throughout the day can be used for us or against us,
and we need to pay close attention to things like
data security as we connect more devices to the Internet
at large, unless we're just willing to have all of
our details, of all of our lives on display for everyone,
all the time for any purpose, which I don't think
is necessarily the best course of action. We also saw
(47:54):
how automated cars went from being a cool idea to
something being tested in the real world to something that,
if implemented poorly, can result in tragedy. And perhaps the
biggest lesson there is that we need to do a
lot more testing and tweaking before we see a wider
implementation of the technology, and perhaps we shouldn't take the
fail fast, you know approach when it comes to autonomous cars.
(48:18):
We really can't afford to. We also saw how data security, privacy,
and misinformation are all kind of linked together, and they're complicated,
and we have to pay much closer attention to make
sure that we stay safe and relatively sure that the
information that we are encountering is correct and true. It
puts a lot more accountability on us as consumers to
(48:40):
make sure that we're seeking out information from the right sources.
It puts a lot more pressure on platforms like Facebook
and Twitter and Google to make sure that they're not
enabling the spread of misinformation and making the world a
worse place. My goal has always been leave the world
a little better than the way it was when you
(49:01):
showed up. Uh. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do
that because there's only so much I can do and
there's a lot of bad stuff happening out there. However,
I do still think that with the right approach, we
can make a positive change. I am still an optimist.
I'm just an optimist who acknowledges that we have big,
big challenges ahead of us in order to make things
(49:23):
work out. But I think we can do it. I mean,
we've sent people to the moon. We've done the impossible before,
so let's do it again. It might take ten years
to get into a better place, but I'm willing to
put in the work if you are. If you guys
have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, knowing that
I already covered twenty nine, don't send me messages about that.
(49:43):
Those are two episodes back. Go check those out. They're
a bummer, but they're there. If you have other suggestions, though,
reach out tell me about them. You can do so
on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those
is tech stuff hs W and uh I'll talk to
you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is a production
(50:05):
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
iHeart Radio and a love of all things tech, and
we are going to continue our retrospective look at how
technology has changed over the last ten years. Now. In
(00:25):
our last episode, I went from two thousand nine to
the end of two thousand thirteen, and we talked about
stuff like Apple launching the iPad, all the way up
to the emergence of Cambridge ANALYTICAM. And in this episode,
we'll keep on marching down the path of time to
see how tech has evolved and shaped our world in
the years since. Now, if you listen to the last episode,
(00:48):
you'll remember then two thousand thirteen, Steve Balmer, who was
at that point the CEO of Microsoft, had announced his retirement.
He would actually remain CEO until February of two thousand teen,
and that's when he would hand over the reins to
Satya Nadela. Nadela, who had been the executive vice president
of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group, had been working for
(01:10):
Microsoft since two so this was definitely a case of
a company promoting from within. Microsoft had been around nearly
forty years, and Nadela would mark only the third CEO
in the company's history. Nadella's first year wasn't exactly smooth,
partly due to his own actions. While at a conference
(01:32):
named after tech pioneer Grace Hopper, who many people referred
to as the person who invented the term computer bug,
Nadela made some comments that women in the tech industry
should rely on good karma rather than asking for a
pay raise, essentially saying if you were if your work
is good, it'll come back to you now. As you
(01:54):
might imagine, the response to this rather tone deaf statement
wasn't terribly positive of and he would subsequently apologize for
those comments, and he would later explain that he was
applying a personal philosophy that he followed that doing good
work leads to rewards to a broad environment, but he
did not take into account stuff like systemic bias, in
(02:17):
which an entire population of employees contends with lower salaries
among other problems, just as a matter of course, that
if you don't address that part, then this whole do
good work and you'll get rewarded thing ends up being
lips service. Nadela committed to continuing existing policies and enacting
new ones to help overcome this systemic bias in general,
(02:40):
including launching programs that would help expand diversity within Microsoft. Now.
On top of that scandal, Nadela also had to helm
Microsoft through some pretty tough layoffs throughout two thousand fourteen.
In July, he announced that the company would eliminate eighteen
thousand jobs. Yikes. Many of those, about twelve thousand, five
(03:03):
hundred of them, in fact, were employees who had previously
worked at Nokia. And here's the really rough thing. Microsoft
had just acquired Nokia in April two thousand fourteen. This
was all in an effort to create mobile devices, mainly
smartphones that could compete against Google, Android devices and the
Apple iPhone, and spoiler alert, this would not really pan
(03:28):
out so well. Microsoft would ultimately get out of the
smartphone market entirely, though it stuck around longer than a
lot of people thought was necessary. On the US government level,
the FCC was forced to go back to the drawing
board in an effort to establish rules about the concept
of net neutrality. If they had been able to look
(03:48):
into the future, maybe they wouldn't have even bothered this.
A little commentary will come back by the end of
this episode, but essentially, the idea behind net neutrality is
that all data should be equal on the Internet. So
no service provider, that is, the company that actually allows
you to connect to the Internet, none of those should
be able to give preferential treatment to some data at
(04:10):
the expense of others, particularly for services or data provided
by the I s P itself or against competing services. So,
in other words, if you have an I s P,
that I s P should not be able to prioritize
its own properties at the expense of others in an
effort to get you to subscribe to more of their stuff.
(04:32):
And also, net neutrality states that you should be able
to access your data on whatever Internet capable device you're using,
so that a company would not be able to restrict
your access to certain content just because you were using
a device that was made by a competitor. For example,
the FCC had established regulations in two thousand eleven that
would require Internet providers to treat all traffic equally, but
(04:55):
the U S courts ultimately ruled that the FCC didn't
actually have the authority to enforce those rules, which means
the rules were meaningless. Right if you can't enforce them,
then the rules might as well not exist. So the
FCC changed tactics and began to argue that broadband should
be reclassified as a regulated utility, which FCC does have
(05:17):
the authority to oversee. Now, we'll revisit this issue again later,
because who boy, has it been a mess now? Over
in the European Union, a ruling made things pretty complicated
for a companies like Google. The EU passed a rule
that informally is referred to as the right to be forgotten.
That is, people should have some option to remove their
(05:40):
name and details from search results to protect their privacy,
or to remove reference to something that really no longer
applies to them. For example, let's say that I grew
up in the era of the Internet, and as a
dumb teenager, I did some stupid act that got me
in legal trouble. Nothing too serious, but bad and off
to bring my judgment into question, and as a result,
(06:04):
someone wrote about it and perhaps my identity is known
as a result of that. Then, as an adult who
has grown up and supposedly matured, I would never do
such a thing again. But I still have this thing
that's in my past, that's in my record that people
can see, that follows me around everywhere. Then I might
find harmful and I might want to find a way
(06:24):
to wipe that off the Internet, because that's not really
who I am anymore. That was the whole purpose of
this rule, But critics of the rule pointed out that
this could allow someone to whitewash their own background. They
could erase records that have real meaning and are of
public importance. They could, in theory, demand that links leading
to factually correct articles about them be removed from search results.
(06:47):
So let's say you're a local business owner and you
want to run for a publicly elected office, but you
also have some dark skeletons in your closet, like illegal
stuff that people wrote about in the past. You could
manned any references to your past activities be removed from
search results, making it harder for the voting public to
know about the kind of terrible, nefarious person you actually
(07:10):
are when they go to vote. Now, as it stands,
the rule would require people to submit requests to Google
to have their search results removed from general search, and
Google would review the request before acting on it, and
so it's a pretty messy subject. Speaking of messy subjects,
two thousand fourteen was also when more hacking stories made
(07:32):
the news. Many people, including prominent celebrities, found their private
stuff that was stored in iCloud on public display. Apple
was quick to say that I cloud itself had not
been breached. This wasn't an example of hackers getting access
to Apple's servers. Rather, the people who were hacked were
(07:52):
hacked because their passwords and their security questions were compromised,
probably through guesswork and brute force attacks. Apple promised to
boost security in the wake of the hacks, but yeah,
this was pretty ugly stuff. On a much larger scale,
Sony Pictures was hit with a massive hack attack, which
included everything from employee compensation records and benefits data to
(08:16):
unreleased movies. Suspicion turned to North Korea, with a possible
motivation for the hacks being the upcoming release of a
film titled The Interview, which was a comedy in which
two characters are charged with assassinating North Korea's leader Kim
Jong Un. Chinese e commerce company Ali Baba held its
i p O on the New York Stock Exchange in
(08:38):
September of two thousand fourteen, reaching a stock price of
two dollars and seventy cents per share, which was more
than thirty five percent higher than it's already pretty hefty
sixty eight dollars per share opening price. It was the
biggest I p O in tech up to that point
and helped show how the Chinese market was becoming an
(09:00):
increasingly powerful player in the tech space. Apple announced Apple Pay,
the company's mobile payment technology that has found its way
into multiple Apple products. To use it, you can tap
an NFC enabled device against a compatible payment terminal, and
after authorizing the payment on the device, you could be
on your way. Apple also announced, but did not launch,
(09:22):
the Apple Watch in two thousand fourteen, and would enter
into the wearables market in the hopes of succeeding where
many other companies had struggled. One other thing about the
Apple Pay thing that I just think is funny. When
I was on a trip to San Francisco, Tari was there.
We went past a girl scout group that was selling
cookies and they accepted Apple Pay, and I thought, well,
(09:45):
of course they do. It's San Francisco. Facebook shocked the
tech world with a sixteen billion dollar acquisition. This was
the messaging service WhatsApp. Since then, it's become clear that
the intent was team merge the features of Facebook, WhatsApp,
and Instagram together, but that has come under recent scrutiny
(10:07):
as various government officials around the world have speculated that
breaking up Facebook might be a good idea, that perhaps
the company has gotten too big, too powerful, and people
were too dependent upon it. Uh And also that's just
anti competitive in general, so there's been some moves to
perhaps forced the company to break into separate companies again.
(10:30):
But yes, this was the massive acquisition Facebook made with WhatsApp,
and that was the first time a lot of people,
including myself, had heard of the app, despite the fact
that it was a very very popular and still is
a very popular text messaging service used by millions of
people around the world. I just hadn't heard of it
because I was ignorant. And two thousand fourteen would be
(10:54):
a bad year for Uber, but by far not the
worst year for Uber. The company did get hold of
an enormous amount of cash in the form of investments,
but it also faced increasing resistance and multiple markets around
the world as governments and taxi cab unions pushed back.
In addition, some pretty unethical corporate behavior became public knowledge
(11:15):
in two thousand fourteen, including the revelation that Uber corporate
employees could access writer logs without any type of consent,
opening up the possibility of extortion or blackmail. This wouldn't
be the low point for Uber, as we will see
later on. Hewitt Packard would announce in October two fourteen
that the company was going to split up, spinning off
(11:38):
the PC and printer operations from the corporate enterprise side
of the business, and Google acquired smart demstat company Nest
for three point to billion dollars, bolstering Google's smart home
technology strategy. Nest would operate as an independent company just
a year later, but would then rejoin Google into the
(12:00):
in eighteen. Two thousand fourteen was a busy year, all right,
Let's get on to now. One big thing to happen
in was a confusing series of corporate maneuvers over at
the aforementioned Google Now. The end result was that the
company formed a new umbrella corporation called Alphabet, which would
(12:20):
be at the top of the hierarchy of companies that
would include stuff like Google, and YouTube, and later on Weymo,
the automated driving company, as well as others. The logic
behind the move was that this would allow each individual
company in the family to operate independently of all the others,
giving each company the ability to make moves without having
(12:41):
to coordinate everything with everyone else. So you wouldn't have
one leader at the top of all of these having
to consider all these very different initiatives. Each one would
have its own leader and thus would be able to
move more nimbly. Larry Page moved up as CEO of
Alphabet and Sundar Pichai would take over as CEO of Google,
which at this point was a little more stripped down
(13:03):
but still an enormous company. So uh, Apple would officially
launch the Apple Watch. It received mixed reviews. A lot
of folks said that it was clearly the best smart
watch on the market. Others said, yes, it is, but
the bar is pretty darn low, so that's not a
big thing now. Generally speaking, the watch has a devoted
(13:25):
following among Apple fans, but it hasn't really moved on
to become a bigger success among a broader audience. That's
often looked at as something of a disappointment in tech
journalism circles. I'm not as sure that the owners find
it as disappointing, but reviewers kind of did. Microsoft launched
Windows ten in now this was a really big reversal
(13:48):
from Windows eight, and it also skipped right the heck
over Windows nine. There's no Windows nine goes from Windows
eight to Windows ten, seeing how is how the iPhone
is going to do the exact same thing just a
little bit later. It starts to make you wonder if
the number nine holds any sort of dark significance in
the world of technology, like you just don't want to
(14:10):
have version nine, or maybe it's just people want to
create the perception of a fresh start and the number
ten gives you a fresh start that one zero. It
makes you think of it being a big leap forward
as opposed to a nine. In some cases it was
meant to mark not the tenth version of a property,
but rather the anniversary of a product launch. But whatever,
(14:32):
I hate it because it makes tracking versions a pain.
It just when you look over the history and you're
skipping over numbers, you start to think, did I miss something?
So I hate it. It's dumb. So we're gonna call
Windows ten Windows nine. Now everybody write it down the
year's and it's Windows nine. Anyway, Windows ten launched and
(14:53):
in general people liked it way more than Windows eight. However,
it didn't have a perfect launch. There were reports coming
out that the OS incorporated elements of data tracking, and
it had some troubling implications regarding user privacy. As a result,
eventually Microsoft was able to smooth this over, but initially
those were big concerns. In the US, the Federal Aviation
(15:14):
Administration or f a A released its set of guidelines
and rules for drone operation in the US airspace. So
generally speaking, the rules are not that much different from
the ones that govern stuff like the operation of model aircraft,
though they do require operators to get a permit if
the drone they are piloting is over a certain size.
(15:35):
Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker. In it incorporates a
personal digital assistant and not surprisingly deep integration and Amazon's
e commerce services. It introduced us to Alexa, the digital
voice that can do all sorts of stuff, though you
might have to ask her to do it for five
times if you have a particularly strong Southern accent. I
(15:57):
based that off listening to my mom tried to interact
with a LEXA, I love you, mom. Both SpaceX and
Blue Origin were able to launch and return to Earth
a reusable rocket that year. In Blue Origin actually did
it first, and then SpaceX followed suit a few weeks later.
The achievement was a significant step in the effort to
(16:17):
reduce the cost of getting stuff out into space. By
using the same launch vehicle for multiple launches, the price
tag drops significantly. Now. It's still not exactly cheap, mind you,
but it lowers the price tag enough to allow parties
that had previously never been able to launch a payload
into space potentially piggyback on a launch, which is pretty cool.
(16:40):
Over at Twitter, Dick Costolo, the CEO back at that point,
was forced to essentially step out of that role, and
Jack Dorsey, the co founder of Twitter, became the interim
CEO and then full time CEO of the company. One
of his first big moves was to oversee an eight
percent cut of the workforce, staying that it was a
(17:00):
tough move, he viewed it as absolutely necessary for the
company's success. Oh and hey, in Twitter got rid of
favorites in which you would mark tweets you liked with
a star, and they replaced it with likes and which
you marked tweets you like with a heart. Not. At
the time, this was considered a big deal and some
(17:22):
people really hated it, And now I think most people
don't even remember when it was different, which kind of
sums up a lot about Internet culture in general. We
all have memories like a goldfish when it comes to
these things. All right, well, I have a little bit
more about a lot of stuff happened in these years,
must have been making up for that recession. But I'll
(17:43):
get to it in just a second after we take
this quick break. Okay, some more stuff From two thousand fifteen,
Volkswagen had to deal within an enormous scandal. It was
discovered that the company had installed devices in diesel vehicles
(18:05):
being sold in the United States. The purpose for these
devices was to detect when the vehicle was going through
emissions testing, something that many places in the United States
require in order for a vehicle to be registered in
that region. So during testing, the device would cause the
vehicle to underperform, which would reduce the emissions the vehicle
(18:25):
would give off in the process. Once the cars systems
detected that the test was over, it would switch itself
off and the car would go into full performance mode.
But that also meant the car was emitting more pollution. So,
in other words, Volkswagen had installed gadgets that allowed its
cars to cheat on official tests, and as you can imagine,
(18:47):
that's a big no no and it cost the company
dearly HP. After announcing the intent to split its company
into two businesses, went forward with that plan, and in
the process the company eliminated thirty three thousand jobs. Yikes.
Meg Whitman would remain CEO of the enterprise unit of
(19:09):
the company. The other side, the PC and UH and
consumer facing approach would go to someone else. Now. Tesla
introduced the autopilot feature in its vehicles in two thousand fifteen.
The feature has been the news several times since then
due to crashes, including crashes with fatalities that happened while
(19:30):
Tesla cars were allegedly in autopilot mode. Now, the company
has repeatedly stated that this feature is not meant to
be an autonomous car mode and it requires drivers to
acknowledge as much before they can enact the feature, But
many people, including myself, still criticized the company for calling
(19:51):
the darned thing autopilot in the first place. Now, not
to go off on too much of a tangent, but
I think the company bears at least a little response
stability for setting unrealistic expectations with that name, though I
also agree that ultimately the majority of accountability should fall
on the shoulders of the drivers, not on just Tesla.
(20:13):
Over on the data security side, one of the big
stories of that prompted more than a little schadenfreude affected
the site Ashley Madison, which is a sort of dating
website for people who want to have extramarital affairs. The
hackers demanded that the site's owner, Avid Life Media, shut
down the website or else they were going to release
(20:35):
the data to the world. Well, the site stayed up,
and the info got leaked onto the dark web, where
it quickly circulated and people hurriedly did searches to make
sure they weren't showing up on any lists. Two thousand
fifteen was also when so called hoverboards, which is a
terrible name for what's essentially a variant of a motorized scooter,
(20:56):
started bursting into flames. Do you remember when that happened?
Airline said you can't take them on board because they
were catching on fire so much. Yikes. Okay, finally let's
move on into twenty six and twenty sixteen, we had
to say goodbye to something beloved. I am, of course,
referring to the three and a half millimeter headphone jack,
(21:18):
the wired headphone jack on phones. The iPhone seven got
rid of it, and so did a lot of other smartphones.
The industry was pushing a move towards bluetooth headphones or
this was even worse, the use of a dongle adapter
so you could plug your old wired headsets into new
smartphone devices. And there were a lot of jokes about
(21:38):
the word dongle back in two thousand sixteen, because we
are all very mature. Over at Samsung, there was smoke,
and where there's smoke, there's fire, you know. Well, in
this case, the Galaxy Note seven, a flagship smartphone from Samsung,
began to have a pretty disastrous year as reports surfaced
(22:01):
of Notes seven handsets exploding into flames. At fault were
the batteries that prompted a global recall of the device.
Airlines made announcements the passengers with a Note seven would
have to surrender their phone before being allowed on a plane.
It was really bad press, a huge mess, so Samsung
(22:22):
recalled them and replaced the faulty batteries with new ones
that didn't seem to do much better than the original ones.
There were more reports of accidents flooding the news, and
eventually Samsung was forced to discontinue the handset entirely. Yeah.
In early twenty sixteen, a Google engineer named Anthony Lewandowski
(22:42):
left the company and he went on to found a
new self driving car company called Auto O T t O.
Lewandowski had previously founded other companies related to autonomous cars
that had later been acquired by Google. That would actually
lead to some people questioning the ethic behind those moves.
Some people said that it seemed like he was specifically
(23:04):
creating companies with the intent for Google to acquire them later,
so essentially printing his own money. That was the implication
that some people had made against him. In late twenty sixteen,
Uber acquired Auto and Lewandowski would move on over to
Uber and become the head of their attempts to develop
self driving cars. Now. The following year, Google mostly in
(23:26):
the form of Weymo that was the self driving startup
under Google's parent company, Alphabet. It didn't really exist when
Lewandowski was there. The division that would become Weymo existed,
but Weymo as a thing didn't exist till a little
bit later. But Weymo would allege that Lewandowski had downloaded
nearly ten gigs of confidential information, including trade secrets, from
(23:46):
Google before he left the company. Lewandowski, when met with
questions about this at a trial, exercised his Fifth Amendment rights.
The Fifth Amendment protects US citizens from having to increase
emanate themselves in a court of law. Uber would subsequently
fire Lewandowski for not cooperating with the investigation. Google and
(24:08):
Uber would have ultimately settled the lawsuit in two thousand eighteen,
and Lewandowski would go on to found another self driving
car company. Google would bring another charge against Lewandowski personally
for theft of trade secrets, and after being indicted, the
board of directors of his new startup, called Pronto, announced
that Lewandowski was no longer CEO and appointed a new
(24:29):
leader in his place. Lewandowski has pled not guilty to
the charges, and his trial has not yet happened as
of the recording of this podcast. Apple also had a
face off with the U. S Department of Justice in
two thousand sixteen, and the crux of the matter was
a mass shooting that happened in late The perpetrators of
(24:50):
the shooting had an Apple iPhone five C in their possession,
and the FBI wanted Apple to unlock the phone and
decrypt its contents. Apple said no way. Tim Cook, the
CEO of Apple, said that if they complied with the
FBI's orders, it would set a dangerous precedent, and that
(25:10):
if the company acquiesced in the United States, it might
be forced to do the same thing in other countries,
including countries that have more authoritarian governments and fewer guaranteed
human rights for citizens. Ultimately, the FBI gained access to
the phone using a third party contractor to break through
the security, and the entire matter was dropped without a
(25:33):
final resolution. Something else that had its roots in two
thousand fifteen, but really played out over the course of
two thousand sixteen was the precipitous fall of the medical
startup company Paronus. The expose of Faroness began in October
and continued throughout the following year. Paronus launched with the
(25:53):
promise that it was going to develop an amazing piece
of technology capable of testing a single drop of blood
for dozens of different diseases and conditions, reducing the need
for blood tests and creating unprecedented access to medical data.
You could have one of these devices sitting on a
desktop at home and do a blood test all on
your own, just check if you wanted to. That was
(26:15):
the promise. There were a lot of claims that Saronus
was using smoke and mirrors to make it seem like
the company was making progress when in fact development was
hitting some major roadblocks, and there Anos founder Elizabeth Holmes
found herself in the center of a massive investigation that
is still heading towards criminal proceedings as of the recording
of this episode. And it was also two thousand sixteen
(26:37):
when Yahoo disclosed the data breach that had happened back
in two thousand and fourteen. They actually disclosed two of them.
The first time they disclosed one, they said that it
affected around half a billion accounts, and then a little
bit later in twenty sixteen, they said, whoops, there was
also another one in that one affected at least one
(26:57):
billion accounts. This was also right around the time that
Verizon was looking to acquire Yahoo. Uh. The acquisition would
still go through, but it did so at a pretty
hefty price drop, and that happened in Merissa Meyer, the
CEO of Yahoo, would find herself out of a job
not long after the acquisition. We also watched a bizarre
(27:20):
series of allegations over at a company called hyper Loop One.
That company had emerged as one of many with the
intended goal of bringing Elon Musk's vision of high speed
transportation to life. This one was not directly affiliated with
Elon Musk himself. The company had built and demonstrated technology
that would be a foundational part of operations earlier in
(27:44):
But then there was a big executive kerfuffle that mainly
involved the CEO, Shervin Pishavar and the chief technology officer
Brogan bam Brogan. Both parties alleged wrongdoing conducted by the
other and it got really ugly and weird, and ultimately
the whole matter would be settled out of court. Bam
(28:04):
Brogan would go on to co found another maglev train
company called Arrivo, which would eventually fold due to lack
of funds. Hyper Loop one would go on to become
Virgin hyper Loop one in two thousand seventeen, after announcing
a partnership with the Virgin Group, Richard Branson's company. We
also got to say hello to three different consumer VR
(28:24):
headsets in you had the Oculus Rift, the PlayStation VR,
and the HTC Vibe that all came out that year
in the hopes that this time virtual reality would become
you know, real reality, meaning that it would become a
viable consumer industry. While new VR hardware is still coming
out today and new experiences arrive every year, the tech
(28:47):
hasn't really caught on with the mainstream general public, and
part of the reason might be the relatively high price tag.
Not only are the headsets expensive, but in many cases
they require a PC with some fairly hefty specs in
order to run smoothly. They also require a dedicated space,
particularly the headsets that allow for full movement within an area.
(29:10):
You've got to have the space available to actually use it.
So it's asking a lot of consumers to adopt the technology,
and so far we've only seen limited interest in the space.
The people who love it really love it, but it
remains a pretty hard sell. To the general consumer. And
one thing we had to say goodbye to in two
thousand sixteen was Vine, the service that lets users record
(29:33):
and upload six second videos to the Internet. Twitter had
acquired the service in two thousand twelve, not long after
it launched, but decided to sunset it in oh and
was an election year in the United States, and you
might have heard about how data was weaponized during that
whole circus from misleading news propagating on platforms like Twitter
(29:55):
and Facebook. That's a big thing. The whole fake news
stuff to hack into the Democratic National Committee servers and beyond.
It was and is a huge deal. And this isn't
restricted to just the United States, of course, but the
effects here in the States are still being revealed as
of this recording as we head into yet another election year. Now,
(30:16):
this entire part of our recent history is one that
is far too complicated and emotionally charged for me to
go into in this episode, but it remains one of
the most important stories in our recent history, and perhaps
one of the biggest consequences is that for many people
it has undermined their confidence in the democratic process, which
(30:36):
is a devastating outcome. We've seen companies like Google, Twitter,
and Facebook all struggle with how to deal with misinformation campaigns.
But that's something that continues to evolve as a record
these shows, and probably will continue to evolve for quite
some time to come. Now, I would say that also
made it pretty obvious how powerful a tool social media
(30:57):
can be, as well as how easily it can be manipulated.
Facebook in particular. Now I've said this on other episodes,
but Facebook's business model is dependent upon people spending time
scrolling through Facebook and thus being served ads. The best
way to get people to stay on your site is
to present engaging material. This doesn't have to be positive material,
(31:19):
it doesn't have to be true. It just has to
be stuff that gets people engaged, and that can be
liking the post or sharing it or commenting on it
or whatever. So inflammatory stuff actually does really well over
at Facebook because it prompts a great deal of engagement. Again,
it doesn't have to be positive engagement. It just has
to get people using the site because that's when they're
(31:40):
looking at advertising. So if you know that little bit
of information, then you have all you need to devise
a misinformation campaign that will get a lot of play
on Facebook because you can create something that isn't true,
that's inflammatory, and you can be pretty sure that Facebook
as a platform will help promote it because once it
(32:03):
starts getting interaction, once people engage with it, Facebook will
want to promote it to more people to drive more engagement.
So you're gaming the system, all right. Now, when we
come back, we'll talk about two thousand seventeen and two
thousand eighteen, and then I'm gonna go take a nap,
(32:26):
all right. So two thousand seventeen, what a year. It
was the year when Facebook would be in the news
repeatedly as a company and leadership team were put under scrutiny,
particularly within the context of promoting the misinformation I was
just talking about, particularly stories have been seeded on Facebook
from a collection of accounts that were traced back to
Russian sources. But hey, I just talked about all that
(32:48):
before the break, and I'm gonna be talking about Facebook
even more for two thousand eighteen, so I'm not gonna
rehash it all here except to say the company continued
to squirm under scrutiny while simultaneously may king bucket loads
of cash, like crazy amounts of money, y'all. And remember
how I said that two thousand fourteen was a rough
year for Uber. Well, that was a cake walk compared
(33:11):
to two thousand seventeen. The year started out rough. US
President Donald Trump announced a travel ban at New York's
John F. Kennedy Airport, a move that many companies and unions,
including the New York City Taxi Union, protested, but Uber
continued to operate at the airport, even turning off surge
pricing to undercut all competition, which led to people accusing
(33:35):
Uber of trying to profit off of the situation at
the expense of taxi cab companies, and it led to
a movement called hashtag delete Uber. It's also when former
Uber employees Susan Fowler went public with her allegations of
sexual harassment and other misconduct at Uber's corporate level. Following
the publication of her account, were several other stories that
(33:57):
pointed to a truly awful culture at the ride hailing company,
indicating some pretty deep trends of sexism and a tolerance
for inappropriate and sometimes criminal behavior. Apparently, if you were
viewed as a top performer in the company, you were
given a great deal of leeway as far as your
behavior was concerned. It was, without a question gross. However,
(34:22):
it was also one of the big launching points for
the hashtag me too movement, and which many people spoke
out against sexism, sexual harassment, racism, and related issues in
the workplace. Now, I would argue that gamer Gate sort
of set the stage for this, but I believe Fowler's
post really got things moving, and while the need to
(34:44):
movement goes well beyond technology, it was particularly visible in
the tech world, which has long been dominated by mostly
men for decades. I was around this time in early
seventeen that alphabet Google's parent comp He began to go
after Uber, stating that the former Googler Anthony Lewandowski had
(35:05):
stolen trade secrets before making his way over to Uber
the year earlier. Then, there was a video of Uber
CEO Travis Kalenik berating again Uber driver that went viral
in February seventeen, and that prompted the CEO to say
he would quote fundamentally change as a leader and grow
up end quote. Several Uber executives were either fired or
(35:29):
opted to leave the company as investigators looked into Fowler's claims,
indicating that there was indeed a pretty terrible culture at
the company and that it extended all the way up
the executive ranks. The senior vice president of Engineering, a
guy named Amit Singhal, was told to resign after about
a month on the job because it turned out he
(35:51):
had a sexual harassment allegation against him from a previous
employer that he had not divulged. The Uber VP of
Product and Growth, a guy named Ed Baker, resigned now.
He said he resigned because he wanted to focus on
the public sector, but there were other people in the
company who claimed he had engaged in inappropriate behavior while
(36:11):
at Uber. The president of Uber, Jeff Jones, resigned in
March of stating he had differences over the approach to
leadership at the company. By May, Uber fired Lewandowski for
not cooperating with that investigation, stemming from allegations that Lewandowski
had stolen terabytes of confidential information from Google. In June,
(36:35):
the company would fire twenty people at various levels within
Uber as a result of an internal investigation into Fowler's
claims that showed that she was being truthful. And it
didn't stop there. There were more resignations, including CEO Travis Kalenik,
whom I venture to say was not helping matters. He
was essentially forced to resign his position and eventually was
(36:57):
forced out the board of directors as well. The company
announced a new commitment to addressing its problems, acknowledging that
there were in fact problems in the process, but obviously
more happened in twenty seventeen than just Uber's super crazy
bad year. Amazon acquired high end grocery store chain Whole
Foods for fourteen billion dollars. For example, Apple launched the
(37:22):
iPhone ten, the tenth anniversary iPhone. They skipped right over
iPhone nine, just as Windows has skipped over Windows nine
and driving me a little closer to the edge because
my brain works in a very numeric way, and that's
on me and I'll stop now. We also had a
lot of efforts to codify net neutrality in the United
States that were reversed in seventeen. A Jitpi, the FCC
(37:44):
chairman during the Trump era, led the effort in reversing
the regulations that the FCC under the previous US administration
had established. So essentially he was saying, yeah, all those
efforts that the FCC made to regulate the road band industry,
We're reversing that, and uh, actually the following year, in ten,
(38:05):
net neutrality would be declared dead. So there's that. A
type of ransomware called Wanna cry went viral in seventeen.
The malware would infect machines and lock them from being
used by their rightful owners, and those owners would be
met with a demand to pay a ransom or else
(38:25):
lose their data forever. A twenty two year old security
researcher named Marcus Hutchins found and implemented at kill switch
that prevented Wanna Cry from being even worse than it
already was. Hutchins himself would be subsequently arrested by US
law enforcement and charged with numerous accounts of crimes that
included wire fraud and distributing a device meant to intercept
(38:47):
electronic communications. This was not related to want to Cry,
but to earlier malware. He would plead guilty to those
charges and would be sentenced to time served plus a
year of supervised uh you know, not really captivity, but
supervised activity and then before you be released. And that
sentencing happened in July of two thousand nineteen, so it'll
(39:08):
be middle of when that is up, all right, So
we're in the home stretch. Let's talk abouteen. And remember again,
I'm not covering twenty nineteen. I just did that ding
dang durn thing a couple of episodes ago. But I
will wrap up with a couple of thoughts about the decade.
So was when Cambridge an Oalytica that whole scandal became
public knowledge. It was revealed that through a loophole and
(39:30):
Facebook's API, a developer was able to collect information on
eighty seven million Facebook accounts without the user's permission. It
marked yet another really rough year for Facebook's leadership team,
which was compelled to testify to the United States government
a couple of times. Now, all that being said, the
company continued to be massively profitable, So while the testimony
(39:50):
was certainly uncomfortable, the financial results weren't exactly hurting the
executive team. Night they might be under some pretty intense
questioning in front of Congress, but then they could comfort
themselves with a nice, snugly, enormous yacht or mansion or whatever.
So in two thousand eighteen, Apple became the first U
(40:10):
S company to hit a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. However,
this only lasted about a month before the value of
the company dropped down to a measly seven billion losers.
And yes, that was me being facetious. That was also
the year we learned about two massive vulnerabilities in CPUs.
(40:33):
I probably need to do a full episode about this
at some point to explain exactly what's going on. But
the vulnerabilities are called specter and meltdown, And ultimately it
means that these chips that are built on this architecture,
and that's almost all of them, almost all modern chips
have a tendency to leak valuable information. Um, it's just
(40:55):
it's just an inherent vulnerability in the chip design and
it's terrible. But I'll probably have to do a full
episode to explain exactly how that works. Amazon opened its
first automated supermarket in two thousand eighteen. It's called Amazon Go.
And the ideas you walk in, you pick up whatever
stuff you want, and you walk out, and Amazon tracks
(41:15):
where you are in the store, It tracks what you grab,
it checks how much of it you take, and whether
or not you leave the store with it ideally anyway,
and then it builds you. Hopefully it does so correctly.
I know at least one person who had an experience
where he picked something up, put it back down, walked
out of the store uh with other stuff, but was
also charged from the thing he picked up but did
not actually take. So it's not full proof, but it's interesting. Also,
(41:39):
Amazon announced it would open up It's HQ two in
two cities, one near Alexandria, Virginia and the other one
in New York City. Only if you listen to my
two thousand nineteen episodes, you know how that all turned out.
We also started seeing online platforms react to the pressure
they were feeling in the wake of various misinformation campaigns
(42:00):
and fake news scandals. One of those reactions was to
remove many of the platforms used by Alex Jones, a
guy who has championed various fringe theories for years and
tends to be pretty hateful in his delivery. From his
podcasts getting pulled to his accounts on various platforms getting banned,
he found himself largely silenced on mainstream channels. Now that
(42:23):
being said, I'm not sure that I've seen similar movements
for you know, lesser known personalities, So part of me
wonders if this particular initiative was mostly meant to placate
people who were worried about rhetoric on these platforms. In
other words, we silenced someone who is really notable in
the field, So maybe you won't notice if we don't
(42:46):
silence all these other hundreds of lesser known accounts. That's
I don't know. Maybe I'm just too cynical. The U. S.
Supreme Court voted five to four in that law enforcement
of shows must secure a warrant before they are allowed
to obtain location data from mobile carriers. The court recognized
(43:07):
that location data gives a really deep insight into a
person and their activities, and that it could be a
major invasion of privacy and therefore uh it falls under
the Unreasonable Search and Seizure Amendment. Over at Google, more
than four thousand employees signed a petition asking the company
to end its participation in a Pentagon project called Project Maven.
(43:30):
The purpose of Maven was to develop drone platforms that,
with the addition of image recognition capabilities, could identify specific
humans from a really good distance away. And while Mayven
itself wasn't directly connected to weaponization, employees at Google felt
that it would not take much of a stretch to
incorporate that sort of technology on a weaponized platform, which
(43:53):
means you could have a future of flying robotic assassins.
Now Understandably, these Google employees felt that this approach conflicted
with the no longer official Google motto of don't be evil.
At least a dozen or so employees resigned over the
whole thing, refusing to work for a company that participated
in the project. Google said that once the contract was up,
(44:15):
it would not seek to renew, but it would try
and find someone else to take over that contract. It does, however,
continue to pursue and work with the Department of Defense
on other projects. Google also showed off a project of
its own called Duplex that it's IO Developer conference. The
AI program called up a restaurant and made a dinner
(44:36):
reservation automatically over the phone, all without the person on
the other end at the restaurant realizing that they were
talking to an AI BT So that was kind of creepy.
This was also the year that Google employees around the
world staged a walk out to protest the way the
company was handling sexual harassment claims. This was in part
prompted by reports that Andy Rubin, the guy who created
(44:58):
Android and who been forced to resign due to sexual
harassment allegations, had left the company with a ninety million
dollar severance package. Yeah. Tragedy struck in Tempe, Arizona, in
March two thousand eighteen, when an autonomous Uber test vehicle
collided with a pedestrian. A video analysis of the incident
(45:19):
seemed to indicate that the accident was preventable, and the
incident raised serious questions about the viability of autonomous cars
moving forward. Over in Europe, Visa experienced a major outage
that lasted eight hours due to a hardware failure that
in turn led to a run on a t m
S for cash. So that kind of shows you how
delicate our technological society can be. You can have a
(45:41):
single point of failure end up causing massive problems. Physicists
and science communicator Stephen Hawking passed away on March fourteen,
two thousand eighteen. He was seventy six years old, and
his work aimed to expand our understanding of the universe.
UH the sort of science communicator that I found particularly interesting.
(46:02):
Over in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation
Rules went into effect. These rules limit how companies can
gather and use personal information, and places requirements on companies
to make sure that users are aware of how and
when their data is collected. Has prompted some pretty massive
changes in how companies do business all over Europe as
a result. Then we get to SpaceX SpaceX conducting a
(46:26):
test of its Falcon heavy launch vehicle. How by launching
a payload that included a Tesla roadster that belonged to
Elon Musk, they got pushed into an orbit around the Sun,
because why not, right, Also, Samsung would show off its
foldable phone concept, a concept that would become a massive
headache in twenty nineteen. But I talked about that in
the last episodes, And let's wrap up with a couple
(46:49):
of observations about the decade in general. Now, one thing
that I noticed while looking back on this was the
evolution of the Internet of things, because ten years ago
it was sort of just a concept, almost like a buzzword,
closer to that than to reality. But over the course
of ten years we saw that change. You back in
(47:10):
two thousand nine, you know, you're talking about routers, computers,
and maybe some smartphones connected to the Internet, and today
they're looking at things like standalone sensors, home security systems,
maybe even a homemade dog feeding device, all connected to
the Internet, and we're just in the early stages of
this era. For better or for worse, the evolution has
taught us many lessons, including that the data we generate
(47:33):
throughout the day can be used for us or against us,
and we need to pay close attention to things like
data security as we connect more devices to the Internet
at large, unless we're just willing to have all of
our details, of all of our lives on display for everyone,
all the time for any purpose, which I don't think
is necessarily the best course of action. We also saw
(47:54):
how automated cars went from being a cool idea to
something being tested in the real world to something that,
if implemented poorly, can result in tragedy. And perhaps the
biggest lesson there is that we need to do a
lot more testing and tweaking before we see a wider
implementation of the technology, and perhaps we shouldn't take the
fail fast, you know approach when it comes to autonomous cars.
(48:18):
We really can't afford to. We also saw how data security, privacy,
and misinformation are all kind of linked together, and they're complicated,
and we have to pay much closer attention to make
sure that we stay safe and relatively sure that the
information that we are encountering is correct and true. It
puts a lot more accountability on us as consumers to
(48:40):
make sure that we're seeking out information from the right sources.
It puts a lot more pressure on platforms like Facebook
and Twitter and Google to make sure that they're not
enabling the spread of misinformation and making the world a
worse place. My goal has always been leave the world
a little better than the way it was when you
(49:01):
showed up. Uh. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do
that because there's only so much I can do and
there's a lot of bad stuff happening out there. However,
I do still think that with the right approach, we
can make a positive change. I am still an optimist.
I'm just an optimist who acknowledges that we have big,
big challenges ahead of us in order to make things
(49:23):
work out. But I think we can do it. I mean,
we've sent people to the moon. We've done the impossible before,
so let's do it again. It might take ten years
to get into a better place, but I'm willing to
put in the work if you are. If you guys
have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, knowing that
I already covered twenty nine, don't send me messages about that.
(49:43):
Those are two episodes back. Go check those out. They're
a bummer, but they're there. If you have other suggestions, though,
reach out tell me about them. You can do so
on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those
is tech stuff hs W and uh I'll talk to
you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is a production
(50:05):
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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