Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And this is the
Speaker 1: tech news for Tuesday, August three one, and we've got
Speaker 1: a ton of it, So this might be a slightly
Speaker 1: longer news episode than I usually do. And we're gonna
Speaker 1: start off I'm not burying the lead. I've titled this
Speaker 1: Tesla The Good, the Bad, and the on Fire. We're
Speaker 1: gonna get right to it with a trio of Tesla
Speaker 1: stories and we're gonna start off with the first one
Speaker 1: being a positive story involving Tesla autopilot. Now, we typically
Speaker 1: hear about autopilot when something goes wrong, sometimes tragically wrong,
Speaker 1: but this is different. In Norway, a Tesla owner was
Speaker 1: driving their car apparently well under the influence of alcohol.
Speaker 1: Now that bit is awful. It never should have happened. Obviously,
Speaker 1: no one should ever drive under the influence, but that's
Speaker 1: what was going on with this case, apparently, and the
Speaker 1: driver allegedly passed out behind the wheel of their car.
Speaker 1: And obviously this could have led to tragedy, but the
Speaker 1: Testla system. The autopilot system detected that the driver was unresponsive,
Speaker 1: and it thus went into what it was supposed to do,
Speaker 1: so at that point, the system kept the car traveling
Speaker 1: smoothly within the lanes of the road until it could
Speaker 1: come to a safe spot on the side of the
Speaker 1: road and come to a stop. The driver was later
Speaker 1: found unconscious behind the wheel of the vehicle and received
Speaker 1: medical treatment. That driver also denied two authorities that they
Speaker 1: had been operating the vehicle while intoxicated, but that story
Speaker 1: was somewhat undermined by the fact that other motor had
Speaker 1: apparently captured video of this driver unconscious behind the wheel
Speaker 1: of the car. The authorities subsequently put a temporary suspension
Speaker 1: on that driver's license and filed a criminal complaint against them.
Speaker 1: So this is a case of Tesla's autopilot, which I
Speaker 1: should remind you is not technically a fully self driving system,
Speaker 1: but rather a driving assist system that was working just
Speaker 1: as it was intended. The autopilot checks for driver responsiveness
Speaker 1: to make sure that you are attentive and that you
Speaker 1: are prepared to take over driving, and in cases where
Speaker 1: that isn't happening, it will prompt the driver to take
Speaker 1: control of the vehicle, essentially alerting you so that like
Speaker 1: if you dozed off, you wake up and you can
Speaker 1: put your hands in the wheel and that way you
Speaker 1: can't just you know, engage the autopilot system and read
Speaker 1: a book or go to sleep or watch the next
Speaker 1: episode of ted Lasso or whatever. You have to be
Speaker 1: an active driver, and if you ignore the alerts, then
Speaker 1: the car does what we saw in this case, it
Speaker 1: will come to a stop on the side of the road. So,
Speaker 1: thanks to autopilot, a possible catastrophic car wreck did not happen.
Speaker 1: Though again, we do need to remember we're still a
Speaker 1: long way away from a fully autonomous consumer vehicle, and
Speaker 1: if we need another reminder, we can move on to
Speaker 1: our next story about Tesla. This one's also about autopilot,
Speaker 1: but it's less good. It's not terrible, it's just not good.
Speaker 1: And this story actually comes from last week, but I
Speaker 1: only just saw it today, so I thought I would
Speaker 1: include it in our Tesla trio of news stories. A
Speaker 1: Twitter user named Jordans Nelson posted a video that showed
Speaker 1: that the Tesla they were in mistakenly identified the moon
Speaker 1: as a yellow traffic light, and thus the autopilot system
Speaker 1: was that was guiding the car, told the car to
Speaker 1: slow down in anticipation of a red light, that there
Speaker 1: will be a red light, so let's slow down. This
Speaker 1: can happen on any stretch of road in which the
Speaker 1: car is facing a low yellow moon, even if you
Speaker 1: happen to be, say on a highway. You could see
Speaker 1: how that could be something of an issue if you
Speaker 1: were engaging autopilot at that time. And in this case,
Speaker 1: the autopilot mode was actually Tesla's full self driving feature FSD.
Speaker 1: That's what Tesla calls it, which I would argue is
Speaker 1: another somewhat confusing name. I've often said I don't like
Speaker 1: the name autopilot. I think it gives the wrong implication
Speaker 1: as to what that system actually does. Well, I feel
Speaker 1: the same about the full self driving feature because Tesla
Speaker 1: has fully admitted that none of its vehicles qualifies being
Speaker 1: truly autonomous vehicles, and so even in FSD mode, the
Speaker 1: vehicle needs to operate under human supervision. So yeah, that
Speaker 1: name doesn't really work. But then I guess calling it
Speaker 1: almost full self driving doesn't have quite the same ring
Speaker 1: to it. Now, that moon issue that Jordan Nelson ran
Speaker 1: into is not likely to happen all the time. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it would only happen if the moon were particularly yellowish
Speaker 1: that night and low in the sky enough so that
Speaker 1: it would look kind of like the height of a
Speaker 1: traffic light. The car would obviously have to be facing
Speaker 1: that direction as well. But this does illustrate how the
Speaker 1: challenges of developing autonomous cars can include stuff that we
Speaker 1: humans just wouldn't take into account. Right, humans wouldn't mistake
Speaker 1: a yellow moon for a yellow traffic light. Of course,
Speaker 1: in the future, we might have some infrastructure like traffic
Speaker 1: lights that maybe contained a little transmitter that can communicate
Speaker 1: directly with compatible vehicles, and thus cars on the road
Speaker 1: would quote unquote no if a light were about to change,
Speaker 1: because they'd be in communication with the infrastructure. However, if
Speaker 1: that is ever to happen, it's pretty darn far off.
Speaker 1: Because here's the thing. While that technology isn't necessarily that
Speaker 1: complicated or futuristic, it's something that we could probably do today.
Speaker 1: The scale of rolling it out practically of actually installing
Speaker 1: it would be enormous even for just a single city,
Speaker 1: let alone the entire world. But a feller can dream
Speaker 1: canny and now our third Tesla story rounding them out.
Speaker 1: Last Friday, Tesla had a true disaster on its figurative hands.
Speaker 1: A Tesla Mega Pact battery, which is a thirteen ton
Speaker 1: lithium battery, caught fire. Now, the Mega Pac is meant
Speaker 1: to store electricity for utility scale projects. Like imagine you've
Speaker 1: got some sort of huge work site and you need
Speaker 1: to supply electricity there. Or maybe you've got, you know,
Speaker 1: some form of electrical generation facility and you need a
Speaker 1: place to store excess electricity. That's sort of the kind
Speaker 1: of thing we're talking about. This isn't a car battery
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It's order of magnitude larger than that. Anyway,
Speaker 1: one of these things caught fire on Friday in Australia
Speaker 1: and it took four days, thirty fire trucks and one
Speaker 1: hundred fifty firefighters to extinguish that fire. Now, if you
Speaker 1: remember back when Samsung had issues with the Samsung Galaxy
Speaker 1: Note seven battery which exploded in several different instances, you
Speaker 1: remember how that issue was incredibly serious. Right, the reaction
Speaker 1: is violent, it's it can be deadly. Uh, it also
Speaker 1: can release a lot of toxic fumes, and that threat
Speaker 1: was serious enough to prompt airlines to prevent passengers from
Speaker 1: carrying a Note seven on board the aircraft. They were
Speaker 1: essentially told they had to hand in their phones and
Speaker 1: which would not be allowed on the plane, or they
Speaker 1: themselves would not be allowed to get on the flight. Well,
Speaker 1: this is kind of like that, only instead of being
Speaker 1: a battery that fits inside handheld smartphone, it's a thirteen
Speaker 1: ton monstrosity. The battery itself was inside a shipping container,
Speaker 1: which was likely a good thing because it probably helped
Speaker 1: prevent the fire from spreading to other megapact batteries at
Speaker 1: that site, because if there's anything worse than one thirteen
Speaker 1: ton battery catching on fire, it's a bunch of them
Speaker 1: doing it. Australian authorities say the fire was brought under
Speaker 1: control on Monday, so that's a good thing. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a scary story and a reminder that batteries with
Speaker 1: volatile components are a bit dangerous. If the battery should
Speaker 1: be damaged in a way that the path for the
Speaker 1: electrons to travel from the negative terminal to the positive
Speaker 1: terminal opens up, you know, without having to be connected
Speaker 1: to some sort of circuit, well then the battery is
Speaker 1: going to discharge rapidly, right, the electrons are just going
Speaker 1: to rush from one part of the battery to another.
Speaker 1: This will end up causing the battery to start to
Speaker 1: heat and then overheat, and that can lead to issues
Speaker 1: like a fire or explosion. Now I'm not certain if
Speaker 1: that's what led to the fire in this particular case,
Speaker 1: but just based on how batteries work, I figure it's
Speaker 1: a decent bet. Right. If you create a shortcut or
Speaker 1: a short circuit between terminals, then this is the sort
Speaker 1: of thing that can happen. Moving on from Tesla, a
Speaker 1: cybersecurity firm called threat Fabric reports that the company's researchers
Speaker 1: have found instances of Android apps downloaded from the Google
Speaker 1: Play Store that are attempting to steal banking log in information.
Speaker 1: This malware, which the firm has called Volter, which is
Speaker 1: like Vulture but without E at the end, essentially takes
Speaker 1: a screenshot when someone uses a bank app to log in.
Speaker 1: So you launch your bank application and the malware notices this.
Speaker 1: It attacts the data entry form format and it uses
Speaker 1: the screenshot coupled with a key logger, so a program
Speaker 1: that records key strokes in order to get the user
Speaker 1: name and password uh for whatever that that application is,
Speaker 1: and as I said, it's mainly banking applications. Then the
Speaker 1: malware uses the phone itself to send that data off
Speaker 1: to whichever computer the hackers are using to gather log
Speaker 1: in information. The researchers found that most instances of this
Speaker 1: did seem to target banking information, but some were also
Speaker 1: apparently logging stuff like social media account logins and so
Speaker 1: far and looks at this malware is mainly concentrated in
Speaker 1: Europe and Australia. The Cybersecurity company suggests that Android users
Speaker 1: install anti virus apps to try and detect if you
Speaker 1: happen to have any malware on your phone, because it
Speaker 1: can be a little tricky to figure it out if
Speaker 1: it's on there just by yourself until it's too late.
Speaker 1: I would also recommend having a really good password vault
Speaker 1: that allows you to have a secure place to store
Speaker 1: passwords where it can automatically insert the password into whichever
Speaker 1: you know log inform you need, which means there are
Speaker 1: no key strokes for it to log right if it's
Speaker 1: an automated process where you need a master password to
Speaker 1: log into your account, or if it has biometrics like
Speaker 1: an ice scan or something that can be more secure,
Speaker 1: assuming that obviously they're not key logging your password account,
Speaker 1: which could be devastating. If they add access to all
Speaker 1: your passwords, that's even worse. So I think that a
Speaker 1: password vault and anti virus app is those are two
Speaker 1: good things to have on an Android phone. Um keeping
Speaker 1: in mind nowhere can also affect iOS devices. It's just
Speaker 1: that with Google it has been more of an issue
Speaker 1: more frequently, partly because the Android operating system is on
Speaker 1: way more phones around the world than iOS is, so
Speaker 1: it's a target rich environment. We have lots more stories
Speaker 1: to go, but before we get to any of those,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. I got a question for you,
Speaker 1: dear listener. This is back into the news, and my
Speaker 1: question to you is how much are your biometrics worth
Speaker 1: to you? How much would a company need to pay
Speaker 1: you in order to, say, register your fingerprints or your
Speaker 1: retinal scan or maybe a palm print. If your answer
Speaker 1: is ten bucks, well I have some great news for you,
Speaker 1: at least if you happen to live somewhere close to
Speaker 1: one of Amazon's checkout free stores. So the company is
Speaker 1: offering a ten dollar credit to customers who allow their
Speaker 1: palms to be scanned by the company and then linked
Speaker 1: to their Amazon accounts, and the idea being that then
Speaker 1: the customers could walk into one of these Amazon stores,
Speaker 1: they pick up whatever it is they want, and as
Speaker 1: they're leaving, they just scan their palm and that links
Speaker 1: to their Amazon account and payment is automatically transferred to Amazon.
Speaker 1: And that's it. That's the payment. You just, you know,
Speaker 1: you Jedi style, waive your palm and say these are
Speaker 1: the eight apples I'm looking for or whatever, and you
Speaker 1: can go on your married little way. Uh. As you
Speaker 1: might imagine, this move has prompted a rather divisive response,
Speaker 1: and there are some people who just shrug their shoulders
Speaker 1: and say, this is just tech creating a convenient method
Speaker 1: for transactions, and that's kind of cool. And I like
Speaker 1: the idea of being able to do this without having
Speaker 1: to fumble for a credit card or put in some
Speaker 1: sort of code for a transaction. This makes it even
Speaker 1: more convenient and futuristic. It isn't the future awesome. Then
Speaker 1: there are some people who take kind of a middle
Speaker 1: ground approach and they say, well, yeah, it's more convenient,
Speaker 1: but it's also another way for Amazon to tie purchases
Speaker 1: to a specific person. I would argue that the company
Speaker 1: could pretty much do it anyway, because presumably all purchases
Speaker 1: would be linked to an Amazon account in the first place.
Speaker 1: Though I guess you could have a household has a
Speaker 1: shared Amazon account and thus you can't really target the
Speaker 1: specific person in that case. So anyway, by linking purchases
Speaker 1: to an individual, Amazon could potentially target ads more precisely
Speaker 1: to that person. And then it gets to be a
Speaker 1: little kind of big Brother creepy invasive. And then you
Speaker 1: have the more extreme privacy advocates. And I use extreme
Speaker 1: not to you know, downplay them, but rather just to
Speaker 1: say they take privacy far more seriously than most people do.
Speaker 1: They are obviously deeply concerned as Amazon has had a
Speaker 1: pretty shaky record with biometrics, including facial recognition technology, and
Speaker 1: that that that ten dollar credit makes it sound like
Speaker 1: the company is paying people to, in the words of
Speaker 1: Albert fox Cohn, a privacy advocate, sell their bodies. That
Speaker 1: doesn't sound great. Con also pointed out that with many
Speaker 1: aspects of your life, you can make changes if you
Speaker 1: need to get like a fresh start. Let's say something
Speaker 1: terrible happens. You know, maybe you made a terrible mistake
Speaker 1: and then you had to go to jail for it.
Speaker 1: Maybe you were, you know, mistakenly identified for something. Maybe
Speaker 1: you just maybe you just need to start over because
Speaker 1: of your life experiences. So you could move across country,
Speaker 1: you could change your name, legally, you could try and
Speaker 1: start out fresh, but biometrics stick with you and could
Speaker 1: potentially link you back to a time that you would
Speaker 1: rather leave behind. And I figure that I am actually
Speaker 1: falling somewhere in that middle camp where I'm not sold
Speaker 1: on the convenience over privacy feature, but I'm also not
Speaker 1: quite so dystopian in my mindset as some privacy advocates are.
Speaker 1: And I want to just point out again that that's
Speaker 1: just me, and that could be a failing on my heart.
Speaker 1: I might be giving this far too much credit, and
Speaker 1: that maybe I do need to be as paranoid or
Speaker 1: as passionate is probably a better word for as some
Speaker 1: of these privacy advocates are. So I'm not saying they're wrong.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that's not where I'm at at the moment.
Speaker 1: Moving on, the United States Air Force, specifically, the Special
Speaker 1: Operations Command commissioned a study from the RAND Corporation to
Speaker 1: look into the issue of disinformation campaigns online. As Popular
Speaker 1: Science reports, disinformation is a deliberate attempt to mislead a target,
Speaker 1: like a target audience, by feeding that target a false
Speaker 1: narrative of some sort, so it is purposeful. Misinformation is
Speaker 1: something that could be passed on by accident. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe you omit certain facts and not necessarily on purpose,
Speaker 1: or maybe you just get something wrong in the communication
Speaker 1: of it and it becomes misinformation, whereas disinformation is done
Speaker 1: on purpose with the intent to mislead. Well. The report
Speaker 1: gives a pretty dismal assessment of the U. S government's
Speaker 1: response to disinformation campaigns, calling it dubiously effective and fractured
Speaker 1: and uncoordinated. So the takeaway is that the entities behind
Speaker 1: these disinformation campaigns, such as various Russian operatives and Russian
Speaker 1: troll farms, they tend to be at least they tend
Speaker 1: to operate in a way that that makes them seem
Speaker 1: highly organized and accurate in their targeting, whereas the response
Speaker 1: to these attacks is slipshod and inconsistent. The report also
Speaker 1: found something that I think a lot of people are
Speaker 1: probably at least you know, unconsciously aware of which is
Speaker 1: that these disinformation campaigns don't necessarily invent issues out of
Speaker 1: whole cloth. It's not like they create a story and
Speaker 1: push it out there and just hope it takes hold. Instead,
Speaker 1: they usually leverage existing gaps that are in philosophies within
Speaker 1: the United States, and then they exacerbate those gaps. So,
Speaker 1: for example, before the pandemic even happened, there was already
Speaker 1: a community of people who were distrustful of vaccines, the
Speaker 1: anti vaxers. And they're not just in the United States, obviously,
Speaker 1: there are anti vaxers everywhere. And much of that initial
Speaker 1: distrust here in the United States hinged upon published works
Speaker 1: in respected journals. But later those works got retracted because
Speaker 1: people discovered that the actual results that were reported had
Speaker 1: been falsified, that the papers that had been published themselves
Speaker 1: were disinformation. And yet that distrust remained, you know, the
Speaker 1: distrust towards vaccinations remained within that community, even though the
Speaker 1: supposed evidence that supported that narrative had been proven to
Speaker 1: be false. Like, they had already bought into the idea
Speaker 1: and it didn't matter that the foundation for that idea
Speaker 1: turned out to be false. Well, disinformation campaigns pounced on
Speaker 1: that existing undercurrent of anti vax fear and fed into it,
Speaker 1: creating doubts about the COVID Night teen vaccines, spreading fear
Speaker 1: and uncertainty and doubt. The Good Old Food Brand evaluated
Speaker 1: the Air Forces very young fourteen F Information Operations Division,
Speaker 1: something that has really just recently come into its own.
Speaker 1: In fact, the first trainees of that division graduated very
Speaker 1: late last year. And according to Rand, that division is
Speaker 1: a good idea, it's a nice step. However, the people
Speaker 1: and it still lacked the training to really recognize and
Speaker 1: react to modern disinformation campaigns, and they also lack the
Speaker 1: resources needed to make any sort of real difference. In fact,
Speaker 1: they were saying they might identify disin fformation campaign, but
Speaker 1: they don't have the resources to actually, you know, act
Speaker 1: on that and to make aware all the other divisions
Speaker 1: to be able to counteract those disinformation campaigns. So you
Speaker 1: would just have a division saying, yeah, we know about it,
Speaker 1: but we can't really do anything about it. That's not great.
Speaker 1: And while that assessment was specifically aimed at the Air
Speaker 1: Force and disinformation campaigns that could impact say, military operations,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty confident to say the same as true across
Speaker 1: the board for disinformation campaigns in general, we are as
Speaker 1: a rule sorely underprepared and under provisioned to deal with them.
Speaker 1: And that's why they can be incredibly effective because we
Speaker 1: don't have the resources to deal with them, and people
Speaker 1: who buy into these disinformation campaigns can become evangelists and
Speaker 1: effectively they become unwitting agents of the disinformation campaign itself
Speaker 1: and spread it further. Disinformation really in itself is like
Speaker 1: a virus, and there is no real vaccine for it
Speaker 1: apart from critical thinking skills, so as always I advocate
Speaker 1: to you to exercise critical thinking and compassion. Moving on,
Speaker 1: ours Technica has a great article titled big tech companies
Speaker 1: are at war with employees over remote work, and it
Speaker 1: touches on things that we've talked about in other tech
Speaker 1: news episodes, like how Apple's CEO Tim Cook would really
Speaker 1: very much like to get all Apple employees back into
Speaker 1: Apple offices for at least three days a week soon,
Speaker 1: like in September, so that you know that super high
Speaker 1: tech and incredibly expensive Apple campus isn't left empty all
Speaker 1: the time. Cook's memo to employees feels a bit out
Speaker 1: of touch to me and honestly, not just to me.
Speaker 1: The Verge reported that an employee survey revealed that the
Speaker 1: vast majority of Apple employees felt the memo was out
Speaker 1: of touch. But Cook isn't the only tech leader pushing
Speaker 1: to get folks back into offices. Google had plans to
Speaker 1: do the same, as did Lift and other big tech companies.
Speaker 1: The Delta variant of COVID has changed things, delaying those
Speaker 1: plans in several cases. But as the RS Technica piece
Speaker 1: points out, the pandemic may have simply rushed what was
Speaker 1: an already growing movement within the corporate world in general,
Speaker 1: the tech world in particular, that for at least several
Speaker 1: types of jobs, remote work is totally feasible and just
Speaker 1: as effective, sometimes more effective than going to the office,
Speaker 1: And for people working for companies in the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: it opened up the possibility of relocating to a part
Speaker 1: of the country that isn't as insanely expensive to live
Speaker 1: in as the Bay Area. So the idea of getting
Speaker 1: a Bay Area tech salary but living in a place
Speaker 1: with a lower cost of living is really attractive to
Speaker 1: a lot of people. And plus you take out the
Speaker 1: commuting and the other aspects of living in an expensive city,
Speaker 1: and you start to see a lot of pros and
Speaker 1: only a very few cons. Heck, there's also this general
Speaker 1: move in the corporate world to the open floor plan.
Speaker 1: I don't know about any of y'all who have worked
Speaker 1: in offices with open plans, but I can tell you
Speaker 1: that in my office it is not a popular thing,
Speaker 1: at least not among the editorial team. It turns out
Speaker 1: editors and writers like having a bit of space that
Speaker 1: kind of shuts out the world around them so they
Speaker 1: can focus on their jobs. I suspect a lot of
Speaker 1: other people feel the same way on their jobs. So
Speaker 1: there's this escalating tension between companies pushing to get back
Speaker 1: to this corporate norm that feels a bit oppressive and
Speaker 1: a bit you know again, big brother ish, like, like
Speaker 1: they only feel comfortable if they can see what everyone's
Speaker 1: doing all the time. And then you have the folks
Speaker 1: who would really rather work remotely if it's all the
Speaker 1: same to you. And for some companies that does seem
Speaker 1: to have sunk in. At Twitter, the remote work policy
Speaker 1: has effectively become at least semi permanent, setting Twitter apart
Speaker 1: from some of the other big tech companies. It's also
Speaker 1: kind of funny to see these tech companies that base
Speaker 1: part of their reputations on innovation as being beholden to
Speaker 1: this older idea of what work should be. Anyway, as
Speaker 1: Samuel Acson of Ours Technica points out, we're likely at
Speaker 1: the beginning of a pretty big shift in work cultures
Speaker 1: in general and in the tech sector in particular. I've
Speaker 1: got a few more tech stories to come up, but
Speaker 1: before we get into that, let's take another quick break. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've been listening to my tech news episodes, you
Speaker 1: might remember one that I talked about last month, I think,
Speaker 1: in which the video game publisher Electronic Arts was hit
Speaker 1: with a hacker intrusion in which the hackers were able
Speaker 1: to steal a good amount of digital information. Um. By
Speaker 1: a good amount, I mean nearly a terrabyte of data,
Speaker 1: like more than seven fifty gigabytes of information, and that included,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, the source code for the company's
Speaker 1: FIFA twenty one soccer game or football if you prefer.
Speaker 1: FIFA is the most popular sports video game franchise in
Speaker 1: the world, so it represents a really important cornerstone for
Speaker 1: e A. Now, the hackers said that they would sell
Speaker 1: back this information to e A to the tune of
Speaker 1: twenty eight million dollars. But e A did what I
Speaker 1: frequently say is the best course of action. It did
Speaker 1: not pay up. E A did not play ball with
Speaker 1: the FIFA thiefs, and when that happened, the hackers ended
Speaker 1: up dumping their stolen data on the dark web. It
Speaker 1: sounds like they were first trying to sell that off
Speaker 1: to any buyers, but they couldn't find any because that
Speaker 1: source code actually isn't that much use unless you want
Speaker 1: to try and run your own illegal FIFA servers. Potentially
Speaker 1: that has pretty lim an appeal. There's not there's not
Speaker 1: like a lot of profit out of it. E A
Speaker 1: has said that while that source code was grabbed, the
Speaker 1: hackers actually didn't access any databases containing customer information, which
Speaker 1: you know, would have potentially been far more valuable as
Speaker 1: uh for to a thief than the source code would be.
Speaker 1: So player information was still safe, and the company also
Speaker 1: updated its security systems and practices in the wake of
Speaker 1: the attack, which that attack involved both some techno wizardry
Speaker 1: as well as some good old fashioned social engineering. That's
Speaker 1: when you trick someone into helping you infiltrate a system.
Speaker 1: Something that can often surprisingly be pretty easy to do.
Speaker 1: Now I may have to do another episode about Electronic Arts,
Speaker 1: because I mean that company has had a rough history.
Speaker 1: In fact, there have been years where that company was
Speaker 1: voted as the worst company to work for. But this
Speaker 1: is a case where I would say that the company
Speaker 1: did the right thing. Sticking with games, let's talk for
Speaker 1: a moment about what's happening with ten Cent. That's a
Speaker 1: Chinese holding company that owns a bunch of stuff, including
Speaker 1: a major stake in several video game companies and studios
Speaker 1: around the world, not just in China. Well back in China,
Speaker 1: the Chinese media referred to video games in general as
Speaker 1: sort of a spiritual opium and suggested that obsessing obsessively
Speaker 1: playing games was ruining the children of China, with ten
Speaker 1: cents game Honor of Kings getting special attention in the article.
Speaker 1: Ten Cent then saw its stock prices take a beating
Speaker 1: plunging as a result of this scathing attack. In fact,
Speaker 1: the company lost around sixty billion dollars in valuation because
Speaker 1: of the drop in stock price. The company says it
Speaker 1: will now limit minors access to its video game and
Speaker 1: there's no doubt that video games, especially mobile games set
Speaker 1: up a challenge and reward cycle that encourages continued play.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's like a basic element of game design
Speaker 1: for these kinds of games. Games that monetize through in
Speaker 1: game purchases only succeed if players want to spend more
Speaker 1: time in that game and get access to more in
Speaker 1: game features or content, and so spend money to do so.
Speaker 1: So there definitely is something to the fact the games
Speaker 1: have an addictive quality to them, so the report is
Speaker 1: not completely off base. However, it's also interesting for me
Speaker 1: because seeing the Chinese media take aim at a Chinese
Speaker 1: business is sometimes a little unusual because both the media
Speaker 1: and the businesses in China have strong links back to
Speaker 1: the Chinese Communist government. The Communist government is essentially integrated
Speaker 1: into every major system in China. Then again, this could
Speaker 1: just be an issue in which the reporting is just sincere.
Speaker 1: It could just be a sincere reporting on that social problem,
Speaker 1: or it could also be an issue in which the
Speaker 1: Chinese government is a little bit concerned that some of
Speaker 1: these huge companies are getting powerful enough to have their
Speaker 1: own authority that in some ways can rival that of
Speaker 1: the Chinese governments itself. Maybe it's a combination of a
Speaker 1: lot of these things, but it's kind of fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: And what's also interesting is that the kerfuffle meant that
Speaker 1: for a brief period, Tensent actually found itself knocked off
Speaker 1: the most valuable company in Asia, though it did regain
Speaker 1: that throne. Meanwhile, in space, last week there was an
Speaker 1: accident that affected the International Space Station. A Russian module
Speaker 1: called Knocka docked with the station last week, and a
Speaker 1: few hours after it had docked with the station, it
Speaker 1: started to fire its thrusters accidentally. It was unplanned, and
Speaker 1: that caused the space station to start to move out
Speaker 1: of alignment and lead to a loss of quote unquote
Speaker 1: attitude control. Now, in my household, a loss of attitude
Speaker 1: control means that get really sassy, but in space this
Speaker 1: is way more serious than that. Apparently, the space station
Speaker 1: ended up spinning one and a half times five forty
Speaker 1: degrees and it stopped rotating upside down. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: in a microgravity environment, up and down are meaningless without
Speaker 1: a frame of reference. So the astronauts aboard the space
Speaker 1: station were initially unaware of this issue because the movement
Speaker 1: was actually really gradual. It's not like they were just
Speaker 1: spinning around like in that film Gravity. NASA reports that
Speaker 1: the station is now back in its correct alignment, having
Speaker 1: undergone a one eighty degree forward flip. And you thought
Speaker 1: the Olympics were just limited to here on Earth now,
Speaker 1: all kidding aside, This whole thing sounds pretty intense and terrifying,
Speaker 1: But the astronauts aboard the station and the people here
Speaker 1: on Earth were able to handle the emergency and return
Speaker 1: things to their normal operating parameters. And I find that
Speaker 1: just really in orational, like really phenomenal stuff to show
Speaker 1: what can happen when people banned together in the face
Speaker 1: of an emergency and apply human ingenuity to fix the problem.
Speaker 1: In fact, reading up on the full account, it gets
Speaker 1: really crazy. The module fired thrusters as if it were
Speaker 1: attempting to maneuver away from the station, even though it
Speaker 1: was physically docked to the station. And again this was
Speaker 1: apparently some sort of automatic error, and only Russian's mission
Speaker 1: control was able to actually send a command to stop
Speaker 1: the thrusters. But the space station wasn't in range of
Speaker 1: Russian mission control. You know, the station orbits the Earth,
Speaker 1: and at that point in the orbit, it wasn't close
Speaker 1: enough to Russia for a message to go out, it
Speaker 1: wasn't in line of sight. It would actually take another
Speaker 1: hour before the station would potentially be reachable by Russian
Speaker 1: mission control, So the crew ended up using a second
Speaker 1: Russian module as well as a cargo ship, and fired
Speaker 1: the thrusters aboard both of those UH elements in order
Speaker 1: to try and counter the thruster effect of Naka's malfunctioning thrusters.
Speaker 1: Fifteen minutes after it started the knocka module settled the
Speaker 1: heck down. At the time I'm recording this, no one
Speaker 1: seems to know what caused it to start or what
Speaker 1: made it stop. And I'm sure that had to be
Speaker 1: a pretty tense day aboard the space station. And finally,
Speaker 1: I'll end this episode by talking about something that is
Speaker 1: not nearly as traumatic, and that's the news we have
Speaker 1: about the next flagship phones from Google. These are the
Speaker 1: Pixel six and the Pixel six Pro, both of which
Speaker 1: Google previewed yesterday on August two. With a limited preview.
Speaker 1: The company did not give a full rundown of all
Speaker 1: the specs on both phones, did spend a good amount
Speaker 1: of time talking about the new system on a chip
Speaker 1: or s o C called the Tensor S oc. This
Speaker 1: chip includes multiple element it's not just a CPU. That's
Speaker 1: why you get the system on a chip nomenclature, which
Speaker 1: essentially means that it has all the necessary components to
Speaker 1: allow it to act as a computer. It's all present
Speaker 1: on a single chip, so like CPU, GPU, memory, all
Speaker 1: that stuff. According to the Verge, the new phones definitely
Speaker 1: have a higher tier fuel to them than previous Pixel phones.
Speaker 1: That probably means they will be muccio expensive when they
Speaker 1: come out later this year, but we do not know
Speaker 1: the pricing as of yet. As the Verge piece points out,
Speaker 1: it will probably be north of a thousand dollars for
Speaker 1: just the base model. The Pixel six Pro is slightly
Speaker 1: larger than the Pixel six the former. The Pro has
Speaker 1: a screen that measures six point seven inches and the
Speaker 1: regular Pixel six has a screen that measures six point
Speaker 1: four inches. The Pro also has a higher refresh rate
Speaker 1: of its screen. It has hurt refresh rate that means
Speaker 1: the screen refreshes times a second. The regular old Pixel
Speaker 1: six has a refresh rate of ninety hurts, so it
Speaker 1: doesn't have quite the same rate. The Pro also has
Speaker 1: three cameras. The Pixel six has just two, and the
Speaker 1: pros extra camera is at telephoto camera, so you can
Speaker 1: get those long distance shots. The new phones will also
Speaker 1: incorporate AI features in some ways that I don't fully
Speaker 1: grock yet. I know that some of it relates to photos,
Speaker 1: which is good, Like if you have a telephoto lens
Speaker 1: on a phone, having AI to help counter stuff like
Speaker 1: jitter is really good because otherwise, uh, you would get
Speaker 1: a lot of very fuzzy images if you were trying
Speaker 1: to take long distance photos and you you could not
Speaker 1: correct for just the general motion that most of us
Speaker 1: have when we're holding stuff. Anyway, as I said, this
Speaker 1: was more of a preview than anything else. We're likely
Speaker 1: to hear a lot more about these phones as we
Speaker 1: get closer. Talked Ober, and I'm debating on whether I
Speaker 1: actually stick with the Pixel I have an earlier Pixel phone.
Speaker 1: I think it's a Pixel four, or whether I change
Speaker 1: teams because I am due to upgrade my phone. It's
Speaker 1: it's a four and so I skipped the five. But
Speaker 1: I want to make sure that the PIXEL features are
Speaker 1: actually gonna be worth whatever that premium price turns out
Speaker 1: to be. I don't want to be beholden to a
Speaker 1: flagship phone just because it's a flagship phone. If I
Speaker 1: don't feel like I'm getting value for whatever the prices,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna wait a little bit longer to learn
Speaker 1: more details before I make a decision on that. And
Speaker 1: that is the news for Tuesday, auguste. If you have
Speaker 1: suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach
Speaker 1: out to me. The best place to do that is
Speaker 1: on Twitter and the handle we use is text stuff
Speaker 1: hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff is an I heart rate Dio production. For
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