Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts, and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? It's time for us to talk about
Speaker 1: the tech news for the week ending on Friday, April fifth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. Had to think about that for a minute,
Speaker 1: but starting off, Microsoft released a warning that says we
Speaker 1: should all expect China to try and disrupt elections in
Speaker 1: several countries, including the United States, which I guess is news,
Speaker 1: though at this point I think a lot of folks
Speaker 1: just assumed that was going to be on China's to
Speaker 1: do list anyway. Microsoft also warned that North Korea could
Speaker 1: be involved in this sort of effort as well, although
Speaker 1: from what I gather, the two countries would largely be
Speaker 1: working independently toward a similar goal. Microsoft's stated that China
Speaker 1: went the very least lean heavily on AI generated content
Speaker 1: that's intended to shape public opinion to favor political outcomes
Speaker 1: that would align with China's own goals. In fact, the
Speaker 1: country's already been doing this, and Microsoft said that right
Speaker 1: now such content hasn't proven to be really that effective
Speaker 1: in moving the needle of public opinion, but it is
Speaker 1: important to pay attention to it because with every failure
Speaker 1: comes the chance to learn from the stakes and to
Speaker 1: get better. So it could just be a matter of
Speaker 1: time before AI generated propaganda really does help push public
Speaker 1: opinion in a specific direction. Microsoft says that various social
Speaker 1: accounts linked to China have been posting AI generated content
Speaker 1: with a call to action. So essentially, the posts push
Speaker 1: conspiratorial language and then follow that up with what do
Speaker 1: you think? And that call to engagement could both serve
Speaker 1: to elevate the visibility of the post as well as
Speaker 1: just you know, actually ask for feedback to judge how
Speaker 1: well their propaganda is working. Oh Brave new world. Here
Speaker 1: in the United States, the concept of net neutrality has
Speaker 1: had a pretty rocky go of it. The idea is
Speaker 1: a little bit complex, but one way to look at
Speaker 1: it is that all parties involved in facilitating information moving
Speaker 1: across the Internet would allow that data to travel freely
Speaker 1: without interference, without regard of where it came from, where
Speaker 1: it's going to, or what kind of device is accessing it.
Speaker 1: So in a world with net neutrality, you would not
Speaker 1: allow an Internet carrier to throttle some types of data
Speaker 1: while allowing others to go on a fast track. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't leverage your position to favor certain partners or even
Speaker 1: your own services and content over that of your competitors,
Speaker 1: so everyone would have a level playing field. The United
Speaker 1: States Federal Communications Commission attempted to codify net neutrality during
Speaker 1: the Obama administration, and in fact did so briefly, but
Speaker 1: those decisions were overturned by the FCC of the Trump administration. Now,
Speaker 1: during the Biden administration, the FCC plans to vote to
Speaker 1: restore those net neutrality rules, or at least some of them.
Speaker 1: That vote will officially happen on April twenty fifth, and
Speaker 1: tech Dirt points out that the new rules are going
Speaker 1: to have some exceptions and loopholes in them thanks to
Speaker 1: a lot of lobbying, and links to a post by
Speaker 1: Barbara Van Shuick, a law professor at Stanford that explains
Speaker 1: it greater detail the differences of the new set of
Speaker 1: rules compared to the previous attempt to really codify net neutrality.
Speaker 1: So I might do a full episode about this because
Speaker 1: it is a topic that's fairly complicated. In Google News,
Speaker 1: the company has said that it will destroy data records
Speaker 1: that number in the billions with a B and you
Speaker 1: might wonder, well, what do these records involved, And it's
Speaker 1: the kind of sort of information about what people were
Speaker 1: doing when they were browsing the Internet while in incognito mode,
Speaker 1: you know, that mode that at least implies that your
Speaker 1: activities on your browser are you know, protected in private.
Speaker 1: So Google is doing this as part of a settlement
Speaker 1: that still must be approved, and it's for this big
Speaker 1: old lawsuit. And the lawsuit accused Google of implying that
Speaker 1: incognito mode would give Chrome users privacy as they skulked
Speaker 1: around on the web doing whatever it was they were doing.
Speaker 1: But all the while Google was actually tracking data and
Speaker 1: being able to identify the user, meaning that incognito is
Speaker 1: not that incognito. You know, you can't go incognito if
Speaker 1: everybody recognizes you. This is the big complaint I have
Speaker 1: about James Bond films, because he's a spy, but he
Speaker 1: goes around introducing himself as James Bond. But I suppose
Speaker 1: that doesn't really fit in a tech podcast anyway. It's
Speaker 1: really a good reminder that the stuff you do on
Speaker 1: the Internet isn't necessarily as private as you thought it was,
Speaker 1: and that's just something to keep in mind, not to
Speaker 1: prevent you from using the Internet, but being aware of
Speaker 1: it is a good thing. Amazon has booted its cashierless
Speaker 1: grocery store strategy at least a little bit. They have
Speaker 1: opted to go with a different approach for their larger supermarkets.
Speaker 1: So the company introduced this technology a few years ago,
Speaker 1: and the idea, in case you're not familiar with it,
Speaker 1: is that you would go into an Amazon store, like
Speaker 1: an Amazon Ghost store or an Amazon Fresh grocery store.
Speaker 1: Then you would do your normal shopping and you would
Speaker 1: fill up your shopping cart, and then you could just
Speaker 1: leave the store and Amazon would automatically bill you for
Speaker 1: the stuff that was in your cart. But the company
Speaker 1: says that customers didn't really gel with this technology, particularly
Speaker 1: for like grocery store big shopping days, because that involved
Speaker 1: not just you know, like prepackaged foods, that's one thing,
Speaker 1: but also stuff like produce, where typically you would need
Speaker 1: to weigh the produce in order to get a price
Speaker 1: on what it was you were buying. And the company
Speaker 1: says that the technology might be a better fit for
Speaker 1: small stores rather than a full supermarket. CNN states that
Speaker 1: Amazon is looking at some alternatives for the larger Amazon
Speaker 1: Fresh stores in the United States, such as using the
Speaker 1: dash cart. So this is a shopping cart that customers
Speaker 1: can use to scan items that they are purchasing, so
Speaker 1: they can purchase the items by scanning them and putting
Speaker 1: them in their shopping cart. And they can also interact
Speaker 1: with other elements of their account, like they can have
Speaker 1: their shopping list active with their cart so that the
Speaker 1: cart is guiding them to the items that are on
Speaker 1: their list. They can have alerts as to sales that
Speaker 1: are going on, that kind of thing. On a related note,
Speaker 1: The Information published an article that says the automated technology
Speaker 1: wasn't as automated as Amazon implied. So, according to the piece,
Speaker 1: around one thousand workers in India reviewed up to seventy
Speaker 1: percent of the purchases made through the just walk out
Speaker 1: technology that's what was called and this was back in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. So when seventy percent of your transactions
Speaker 1: are actually going under human review to make sure that
Speaker 1: you know you're getting charged for the right stuff, then
Speaker 1: it's not really just walk out, like, at least not
Speaker 1: on Amazon side. Now, Amazon has disputed this. They said that no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that seventy percent is not reflective of reality, that it
Speaker 1: was a much lower percentage of transactions that required human review,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the staff was really there to help
Speaker 1: train the AI to get better, so it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: guided training. According to Amazon, that's a pretty big discrepancy
Speaker 1: between seventy percent of all transactions and just a few.
Speaker 1: I don't know where the truth is, but it is
Speaker 1: true that that technology is no longer going to be
Speaker 1: used in the fresh stores in the United States. It
Speaker 1: will still be used in some of the smaller stores.
Speaker 1: It has also kind of coincided with some other companies
Speaker 1: saying that maybe going the cashierless way isn't the best
Speaker 1: approach because people make mistakes or some people are just
Speaker 1: plain dishonest, and that there's been a lot of loss associated,
Speaker 1: perhaps more loss than what you would see if you,
Speaker 1: I don't know, hired people to do the job. So
Speaker 1: just a fun little thing about how technology doesn't always
Speaker 1: replace people at a level that makes sense. A couple
Speaker 1: of companies had a really rough day this week on
Speaker 1: April third, on Wednesday, maybe it was delayed April Fool's
Speaker 1: Prank or something. But Meta's WhatsApp service was unavailable for
Speaker 1: many users this past Wednesday. But by many, we have
Speaker 1: to really contextualize that we're talking about in the tens
Speaker 1: of thousands. Now, granted that's a lot of people. Tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people is a lot, but WhatsApp boasts
Speaker 1: around two billion users, so in the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 1: it was hardly even a blip. Now, Meta resolved the issue,
Speaker 1: and I have no clue what it was that went wrong.
Speaker 1: The company didn't really say. And meanwhile, Apple service is
Speaker 1: on that same day, April, including its streaming platforms, so
Speaker 1: like Apple TV and Apple Music, its podcast app was affected.
Speaker 1: The App store itself was affected by another outage. Now,
Speaker 1: this issue lasted a bit more than an hour for
Speaker 1: users in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, India,
Speaker 1: and China, and whatever the cause of that issue, Apple
Speaker 1: was able to restore services just a little bit later.
Speaker 1: So again, maybe just a delayed prank, Maybe it was Grimlins,
Speaker 1: Maybe it was just two similar events that just happened
Speaker 1: to happen at the same time by coincidence. It's probably
Speaker 1: that last one. Okay, I got a few more news
Speaker 1: stories for y'all. But before we get to that, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break so forward here in the United States,
Speaker 1: is the most recent automaker to announce that it is
Speaker 1: shifting its stra toward electric vehicles. It is pushing back
Speaker 1: when it's going to produce all electric models of cars.
Speaker 1: The plan was that twenty twenty five was going to
Speaker 1: be the big year where Ford was going to bring
Speaker 1: out all these all electric vehicles, you know, like cars, trucks,
Speaker 1: and SUVs. And instead they're going to focus on hybrids
Speaker 1: at least in the short term and push back the
Speaker 1: electric vehicle approach for a few more years. And several
Speaker 1: other car manufacturers have made similar decisions in the not
Speaker 1: too distant past, and it's kind of created this slow
Speaker 1: down in the conversion to electric vehicles. Now, the companies
Speaker 1: have cited a general slow adoption rate among consumers for evs,
Speaker 1: so they're saying consumers don't want electric vehicles, or at
Speaker 1: least not enough of them. There's just been a very
Speaker 1: slow uptake on electric vehicles. I think that part of
Speaker 1: that is probably price. I think a big part of
Speaker 1: that might be recent economic issues that have played a
Speaker 1: huge part in the decision making process of buying a
Speaker 1: new car, are you know, we were dealing with really
Speaker 1: high inflation rates that made stuff like loans and financing
Speaker 1: kind of scary, Like when you're paying more in your
Speaker 1: interest than you are for the vehicle, that's an issue, right.
Speaker 1: And then there was also inflation and that ended up
Speaker 1: creating a real sticker shock situation too. You'd go in
Speaker 1: and the car at the beginning would just be priced
Speaker 1: at a really high level, and you know, that's hard
Speaker 1: to deal with. So I am not fully convinced that
Speaker 1: the general public is just reluctant to adopt evs. I
Speaker 1: think it's more likely a more complicated situation that a
Speaker 1: lot of the public can't afford a new car in general,
Speaker 1: but specifically an EV which still they tend to be
Speaker 1: pretty expensive. However, I'm no expert. I cannot pretend to
Speaker 1: say like I have the insight here and it's one
Speaker 1: hundred percent accurate. This is just sort of my perception,
Speaker 1: and it could very well be that I'm totally off base,
Speaker 1: And surely these car manufacturers have very intelligent people working
Speaker 1: on these things, so so I don't know. Maybe it
Speaker 1: is that the public in general is still a little
Speaker 1: wary about evs. I can understand why. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: this perception that you know, you're going to have a
Speaker 1: limited range as far as you can drive, and that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. I don't think that this means that
Speaker 1: the entire plan to shift toward electric vehicles has taken
Speaker 1: a totally wrong turn. This just might be one of
Speaker 1: those cases where you know, you're on a car trip
Speaker 1: and your dad says he knows a short cut, and
Speaker 1: then next thing, you know, here four hours late to
Speaker 1: Grandma's house because the shortcut wasn't that effective. Maybe that's
Speaker 1: what's happening here. Metaphorically, in what was a really expected announcement,
Speaker 1: this didn't come as a surprise Disney CEO Bob Iger, who,
Speaker 1: by the way, recently posted a victory against a proxy
Speaker 1: battle among activist shareholders. He said that the company is
Speaker 1: going to start to crack down on password sharing among
Speaker 1: Disney Plus customers starting this June. The rules have already
Speaker 1: been in place. It's not like they're putting in new rules.
Speaker 1: They're just really kind of being more proactive about it
Speaker 1: later this summer. And of course we've seen lots of
Speaker 1: other streaming services approach the same challenge, right because it
Speaker 1: turns out that creating a profitable streaming service that can
Speaker 1: sustain efforts to produce original content is tricky. Right, You've
Speaker 1: just got subscribers coming in. You could base your performance
Speaker 1: on growth, but eventually you're going to max out that growth.
Speaker 1: You're gonna plateau. So how do you make enough money
Speaker 1: where you can continue to create the content that people
Speaker 1: want and still make a profit. So Netflix famously pushed
Speaker 1: back against password sharing not too long ago and saw
Speaker 1: some positive results in fact, despite the fact that a
Speaker 1: lot of people complained about the whole practice. Iiger says
Speaker 1: that one part of the plan is to create a
Speaker 1: paid sharing option. So essentially, customers who want to share
Speaker 1: a password with another household will get a little alert
Speaker 1: popping up, and there will be a subscription tier priced
Speaker 1: exactly for that kind of thing. So it costs more
Speaker 1: than just your typical subscription for that level because it'll
Speaker 1: be a shared level. Otherwise, Disney expects you to keep
Speaker 1: your own password in your own grubby little hands and
Speaker 1: let other households go and get their own passwords. So technically, Disney,
Speaker 1: like I said, has had these rules in place for
Speaker 1: a while now. But in June, you know, people that
Speaker 1: Disney suspects are actually using a shared password will get
Speaker 1: a little pop up message suggesting that, you know, they
Speaker 1: sign up for their own subscription, or maybe Mickey Mouse
Speaker 1: will come on over to their house and bust their kneecaps.
Speaker 1: Not literally, I'm paraphrasing. Disney did not actually say that.
Speaker 1: That's me taking some poetic license. The French Alternative Energies
Speaker 1: and Atomic Energy Commission has produced the Azult MRI machine
Speaker 1: or izult. I don't know how to pronounce it. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't speak French. This MRI machine is a
Speaker 1: real whopper, so your typical hospital MRI machine, the magnetic
Speaker 1: resonance imaging. It's able to create a magnetic field that
Speaker 1: has a strength of between one and a half to
Speaker 1: three teslas. In this case, we're not talking about the
Speaker 1: electric vehicle. We're talking about unit of measurement, but the
Speaker 1: one that I'm talking about here, the new one, which
Speaker 1: has been in practice for a while but has just
Speaker 1: recently been used on human subjects. This sucker bumps up
Speaker 1: the power of that magnetic field to eleven point seven teslas,
Speaker 1: so significantly more powerful than what you're going to find
Speaker 1: in your typical hospital and this isn't just like a
Speaker 1: home improvement moment of more power. The benefit of such
Speaker 1: a machine is that it can produce images with a
Speaker 1: much higher resolution in a fraction of the time it
Speaker 1: would take your standard machine. Like you might have to
Speaker 1: lie motionless in a device for two hours to get
Speaker 1: the same sort of image that this thing can produce
Speaker 1: in just four minutes. And since you have to stay
Speaker 1: perfectly still during an MRI scan, four minutes is a
Speaker 1: much less taxing request than two hours. Now from what
Speaker 1: I understand, the new MRI machine also has a larger
Speaker 1: opening that the patient's would go into. That means it
Speaker 1: should be a less daunting experience for those who have,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of claustrophobic issues. To operate the machines,
Speaker 1: engineers actually have to use liquid helium to cool some
Speaker 1: of the components down so that they reach superconductor status.
Speaker 1: And when you're talking about a machine that's as large
Speaker 1: and complicated and challenging to operate as this is, it
Speaker 1: means it's not really likely to replace the mr eyemachines
Speaker 1: that are currently around the world, but this could be
Speaker 1: really handy for researchers, you know, scientists and doctors, who
Speaker 1: want to use it when they want to look into
Speaker 1: different brain conditions and diseases in order to learn more
Speaker 1: about how they advance and hopefully help inspire new treatments
Speaker 1: and cures, which is super cool. Finally, I've got a
Speaker 1: couple of article recommendations for you all this week. One
Speaker 1: is a piece in The New York Times by Kevin
Speaker 1: Bruce titled did One Guy Just Stop a Huge cyber Attack?
Speaker 1: It tells the story of a German born programmer named
Speaker 1: Andres Freund who spotted a back door in some software
Speaker 1: and through his actions, was able to address it before
Speaker 1: nefarious hackers could make use of that access to wreak havoc.
Speaker 1: So that's a good piece to read. I also recommend
Speaker 1: a piece in Fortune by Sage Lazaro titled Musicians are
Speaker 1: up in Arms about Generative AI and stability. AI's new
Speaker 1: music generators show why they are right to be. Both
Speaker 1: of these stories touch on things that are ongoing conversations
Speaker 1: in tech. You know, cybersecurity is always part of the conversation,
Speaker 1: and then this concept of how AI could threaten various occupations,
Speaker 1: you know, and art, that sort of thing, how its
Speaker 1: impact on art could be really negative I'm sure we're
Speaker 1: going to have lots more conversations about that, because not
Speaker 1: a day goes by that I don't see another article
Speaker 1: about how AI is going to impact the job market.
Speaker 1: Then it's concerning in a lot of ways. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of companies could potentially make bad decisions with
Speaker 1: AI and then learn the hard way that those bad
Speaker 1: decisions were bad, and they can then get back on track.
Speaker 1: But it would be really nice if we could just
Speaker 1: like avoid the pitfall stage and just kind of sidestep
Speaker 1: around the issue. But I don't know how realistic that is. However,
Speaker 1: I hope all of you out there listening are well,
Speaker 1: and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech
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