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 iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday,
Speaker 1: July sixth, twenty twenty three. And a whole lot is
Speaker 1: happening in the social network platform space right now, as
Speaker 1: I'm sure many of you are aware. So last weekend,
Speaker 1: Twitter changed quite a bit and it really upset a
Speaker 1: lot of people. First up, folks noticed that unless you
Speaker 1: were actually logged into Twitter, you couldn't see stuff that
Speaker 1: had been posted on Twitter. Now, that was not always
Speaker 1: the case. You could go and view things on Twitter
Speaker 1: without logging in. My wife has done this numerous times.
Speaker 1: She does not have a Twitter account but occasionally checks Twitter.
Speaker 1: Now this has since been walked back, so now if
Speaker 1: you don't have an account, you can view it again.
Speaker 1: But for a while you couldn't. Beyond that, Even if
Speaker 1: you were logged in to an account, you would notice
Speaker 1: that you would hit some view limits on the number
Speaker 1: of tweets you could see. Initially, those limits were the
Speaker 1: ability to see up to three hundred tweets per day,
Speaker 1: if you were brand spank and new and an unverified account,
Speaker 1: or rather not a Twitter Blue subscriber, I guess we
Speaker 1: should say verification at this point means very little existing
Speaker 1: quote unquote unverified accounts. So those who are not Twitter
Speaker 1: Blue subscribers but who have been on Twitter for a while,
Speaker 1: they could see up to six hundred tweets per day.
Speaker 1: And then if you were a verified user, a Twitter
Speaker 1: Blue subscriber, or maybe one of the celebrities that Musk
Speaker 1: granted verification to, possibly as a trolling tactic, I don't know, anyway,
Speaker 1: they could see up to six thousand tweets per day.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk ventually explained his reasons for doing this. He
Speaker 1: said that Twitter was being bombarded by bots, and those
Speaker 1: bots were scraping data from Twitter in efforts to build
Speaker 1: out things like large language models for AI chat bots,
Speaker 1: and that the platform had made the changes in an
Speaker 1: effort to confound those bots, and they couldn't tell anyone
Speaker 1: about it beforehand because then the companies behind the bots
Speaker 1: would have, you know, changed their tactics or something, which
Speaker 1: is weird to me because by not communicating it, all
Speaker 1: you're doing is just delaying the amount of time it
Speaker 1: takes them to adjust to the tactics, Like, if that's
Speaker 1: your concern that by announcing that you're going to do this,
Speaker 1: you're giving people the chance to circumvent it, well, if
Speaker 1: they can circumvent it, then why aren't that Shouldn't that
Speaker 1: be happening right now? Right that circumvention should be going
Speaker 1: on right now. So it doesn't matter whether you say
Speaker 1: it or not, I don't know whatever. So it's an
Speaker 1: unfortunate side effect that, you know, this attempt to confound
Speaker 1: the bots affected everybody. Musk mention that the limits were temporary,
Speaker 1: and I believe at the time that I'm recording this
Speaker 1: right now, those limits have been increased to five hundred
Speaker 1: tweets for brand new users, one thousand for unverified but
Speaker 1: existing accounts, and ten thousand tweets for verified users. A
Speaker 1: couple of other things we need to mention here. One
Speaker 1: is that if this were a plan to confound bots,
Speaker 1: it seems dumb because a verified account is not that expensive,
Speaker 1: not for a company that's looking to build out large
Speaker 1: language models. They could end up making lots of accounts
Speaker 1: and then paying the small fee to verify them or
Speaker 1: to subscribe to Twitter Blue and then use those to
Speaker 1: scrape data. I mean, I guess Twitter could ban those accounts,
Speaker 1: but still it's not a big expense. Secondly, Twitter relies
Speaker 1: on revenue from advertising. Now I am no business genius,
Speaker 1: but it seems to me that this move is discouraging
Speaker 1: advertisers from continuing to work with Twitter because if they
Speaker 1: are being told, hey, fewer people are going to be
Speaker 1: able to see your tweet because of these limits, they're
Speaker 1: going to say, what are we paying for? Then we're
Speaker 1: paying for people to see our ads. And if you're
Speaker 1: limiting the number of tweets they can see, then that
Speaker 1: means you're limiting the number of people who can see
Speaker 1: our ads. Third, as we will talk about in a moment,
Speaker 1: Meta launched its own Twitter competitor this week, So the
Speaker 1: timing of this move seems almost comical, right. It seems
Speaker 1: like Elon Musk is trying to convince people to jump
Speaker 1: ship and move over to Meta's short messaging social platform
Speaker 1: threads and just leave Twitter, y'all. Maybe Elon Musk really
Speaker 1: is a space brain business genius, like some people say,
Speaker 1: but from my humble perspective, it sure looks like he's
Speaker 1: made some dumb moves in a very short amount of time.
Speaker 1: In addition to those decisions, Twitter also made another move
Speaker 1: that has upset a lot of users, including me, and
Speaker 1: that's a change to the social media dashboard app called
Speaker 1: tweet Deck. Now, for those of y'all who have never
Speaker 1: used tweet deck, this tool has some really useful features,
Speaker 1: and big among those is that you can use tweet
Speaker 1: deck to set up a view so you can monitor
Speaker 1: multiple Twitter accounts from the same screen. So in one view,
Speaker 1: I would be able to see my Twitter feed and
Speaker 1: then all of the replies and mentions for me, I'd
Speaker 1: be able to see the feeds for the Twitter handle
Speaker 1: for this show, which is technically tech stuff HSW. But
Speaker 1: now that tweet deck is locked behind a paywall, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure how often I'll be logging in to check
Speaker 1: on it. Plus, I could have a view for my
Speaker 1: old show Forward Thinking, or my other podcast large nerdron Collider, etc.
Speaker 1: Tweet Deck made it really easy to see activity across
Speaker 1: multiple accounts. Media managers loved tools like this because they
Speaker 1: could have one view and maintain a good idea of
Speaker 1: what's going on across any accounts they happen to manage.
Speaker 1: So if you are a manager, who Maybe you have
Speaker 1: multiple clients and you like to have a single view
Speaker 1: so you can see what's going on at any given time.
Speaker 1: This becomes frustrating. Tweet Deck started off as an independent
Speaker 1: third party app, but in twenty eleven, Twitter purchased it,
Speaker 1: and the key element in all of this is that
Speaker 1: tweet Deck, until now, or really until later this year,
Speaker 1: was free to use, and then this month, Twitter announced
Speaker 1: that tweet deck is shifting to become a Twitter Blue
Speaker 1: exclusive feature. So when you take that in with the
Speaker 1: other weird moves that happened over this past weekend, it
Speaker 1: sure does feel like Musk's attempt to convince more people
Speaker 1: to subscribe is what is driving these moves. Maybe it
Speaker 1: has to do with bots in the case of limiting
Speaker 1: p people's ability to see posts, but it sounds more like, hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to see a lot of posts, you
Speaker 1: need to subscribe, and locking tweet Deck behind a Twitter
Speaker 1: Blue subscription seems likewise an attempt to get people to
Speaker 1: subscribe to Twitter Blue, and considering the shaky ground the
Speaker 1: company is on with advertisers, I can see why maybe
Speaker 1: Musk is hoping that subscriptions will pick up the slack
Speaker 1: that's left by advertisers getting really concerned about spending their
Speaker 1: money on Twitter. But it is really hard to convince
Speaker 1: people to fork over a subscription fee for Twitter blues
Speaker 1: features when you've also got drum roll. Please Meta Threads.
Speaker 1: So Meta launched Threads yesterday. This is the company's answer
Speaker 1: to stuff like Twitter and masted On and blue Sky,
Speaker 1: which is currently in an invitation only beta program. I
Speaker 1: only just got access to blue Sky today because I
Speaker 1: dragged my feet on requesting an invite, and I don't
Speaker 1: know that I would have gotten one if I even
Speaker 1: had requested an invite early on. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: moot point. I ended up getting a invitation code from
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, so I'm on blue Sky. It's neat.
Speaker 1: Not revolutionary, but neat. Anyway. Meta has positioned Threads to
Speaker 1: be an extension of Instagram. That makes a lot of
Speaker 1: sense because Instagram boasts more than two point three billion
Speaker 1: active users. That's billion with a B. So what better
Speaker 1: way to compete with Twitter than to leverage an already
Speaker 1: existing enormous user base. Now, according to Engadget, it took
Speaker 1: Threads about seven hours to reach ten million users because
Speaker 1: you do still have to create an account and you
Speaker 1: do still have to download the app and stuff, but
Speaker 1: it is connected to your Instagram account. This is what
Speaker 1: gives Threads a huge leg up on would be competitors
Speaker 1: like Blue Sky. Blue Sky has to start from scratch.
Speaker 1: Threads is already an extension of an enormously successful company.
Speaker 1: So why would Meta bother with a Twitter competitor at all. Well,
Speaker 1: the answer to that question is pretty much because Elon
Speaker 1: Musk has created a huge opportunity. Musk's handling of Twitter
Speaker 1: has alienated a good number of users. Now there's some
Speaker 1: users who absolutely love what Twitter has become, and there
Speaker 1: are a lot of others who they have bemoaned the
Speaker 1: changes that have happened since Musk has taken over the company.
Speaker 1: And as I mentioned earlier, quite a few advertisers are
Speaker 1: disenchanted with Twitter. So if Meta can establish a competitive service,
Speaker 1: the company stands to gain by convincing those advertisers to
Speaker 1: just go all in on a meta focused advertising approach.
Speaker 1: I would not be surprised if salespeople in Meta are
Speaker 1: positioning ad deals that include, you know, an ad campaign
Speaker 1: as a presence on Facebook and Instagram and eventually on Threads. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, Musk made some brash moves, and now
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg wants to drink his milkshake and there will be
Speaker 1: blood terminology. I actually reactivated my old Instagram account last
Speaker 1: night just to create a Thread's presence and to see
Speaker 1: what it's like. This hurt me emotionally to reconnect my
Speaker 1: Instagram account because I just hadn't been on there in
Speaker 1: more than a year. Anyway, right now, Threads is a
Speaker 1: little bit of a chaotic mess Users face kind of
Speaker 1: a fire hose of messages from folks that they may
Speaker 1: or may not follow on Instagram. And this is kind
Speaker 1: of Thread's attempt to populate the feed with more than
Speaker 1: just two or three messages. Because if you logged in
Speaker 1: there and the only thing you saw were the people
Speaker 1: you're connected to on Instagram and what they had to say,
Speaker 1: you might not see anything at all. Right, maybe none
Speaker 1: of your friends are on there, or none of the
Speaker 1: accounts you follow are on there. This way, it creates
Speaker 1: a reliable, you know, flo of information and hopefully, according
Speaker 1: to Meta anyway, hopefully convince people to stick with the service.
Speaker 1: Now it's early days, I expect we're going to see
Speaker 1: Meta roll out more features than the not too distant future.
Speaker 1: Right now, there are some minor oversights, like there's no
Speaker 1: easy way to just look at the stuff that your
Speaker 1: friends are posting, so you do get this fire hose approach. Also,
Speaker 1: you can't do any direct messaging through Threads. You can
Speaker 1: in Instagram, but not through Threads, and maybe that's going
Speaker 1: to change. We'll have to see. Now. Personally, I'm a
Speaker 1: little reluctant to jump in wholeheartedly and to make Threads
Speaker 1: my new means of communicating to the public, because, as
Speaker 1: Twitter's former CEO Jack Dorsey pointed out on Twitter No
Speaker 1: Less Meta notoriously slurts up all the personal data it can,
Speaker 1: including how long you're using its services, what other services
Speaker 1: you use, what purchases you make online, and way way
Speaker 1: more than just that. So feeding that machine isn't something
Speaker 1: I am personally excited about doing. But there is no
Speaker 1: denying that Threads has already been a huge success. Word
Speaker 1: of warning. By the way, if you make a Threads profile,
Speaker 1: you can delete it, but only if you also delete
Speaker 1: your Instagram account. So once it's up, it's up, unless
Speaker 1: you're ready to nuke it from orbit, because that's the
Speaker 1: only way to be sure. Okay, we're going to take
Speaker 1: a quick break to think. Our sponsors will be back
Speaker 1: with more news in just a moment. We're back. In France, citizens,
Speaker 1: primarily young people, have been holding protests, some of those
Speaker 1: escalating into full blown riots. This happened after French police
Speaker 1: killed a teenager who was stopped during a traffic stop
Speaker 1: in a Parisian suburb last week. That's a terrible story
Speaker 1: in of itself. But the tech angle here is that
Speaker 1: the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has threatened to suspend
Speaker 1: social networking platforms in France in response, or at least
Speaker 1: raised the possibility of doing so, maybe not going so
Speaker 1: far as threatening, but at least raising the question of
Speaker 1: maybe that should be an option. So the concern is
Speaker 1: that the rioters or protesters if you want to be
Speaker 1: more critical of the government, are relying on social networks
Speaker 1: to schedule and organize themselves, so by cutting off that avenue,
Speaker 1: Macron could potentially attempt to restore order in times of
Speaker 1: political unrest. This announcement, however, has spurred massive criticisms against Macron,
Speaker 1: saying that it's the sort of move that an authoritarian
Speaker 1: leader would make against citizens in an effort to suppress
Speaker 1: the freedom of speech, I mentioned the freedom of assembly,
Speaker 1: and Macrone's office has responded by saying that the idea
Speaker 1: was never a widespread general blackout that would go on indefinitely. Instead,
Speaker 1: this was really meant to initiate a conversation between leaders
Speaker 1: of various territories and cities within France and talk about
Speaker 1: the role of social networks during times of political unrest
Speaker 1: and what moves, if any, would be reasonable during such
Speaker 1: turbulent times. Now, we've seen lots of other countries lean
Speaker 1: into silencing online communication in the name of security, and
Speaker 1: it can often lead to governments going for that pause
Speaker 1: button more and more frequently, with less and less justification.
Speaker 1: So critics argue that all of this, all this discussion
Speaker 1: about the role that social networks are playing in the
Speaker 1: part of planning out these protests or assembling for riots,
Speaker 1: is really just a distraction from the actual underlying problem,
Speaker 1: which is police violence against city and until that is addressed,
Speaker 1: the rest of this is kind of moot, because the
Speaker 1: problem isn't just that people are getting together and rioting.
Speaker 1: The problem is that they're doing this in response to
Speaker 1: a perceived violation of justice. So that has been the
Speaker 1: large criticism that has been posed against the government as well,
Speaker 1: that they're really not actually dedicating the attention they need
Speaker 1: to the underlying issue. Getting back to Meta for a moment,
Speaker 1: there's a war going on between Canadian leadership and Zuckerberg's company,
Speaker 1: and this is in regards to a law the Canadian
Speaker 1: government passed that requires platforms like Meta to pay Canadian
Speaker 1: media for the news that folks post on platforms like Facebook.
Speaker 1: We've seen a similar law like this enacted in Australia,
Speaker 1: and the argument is that platforms like Meta end up
Speaker 1: hurting publishers and they profit off of publishers work without
Speaker 1: sharing of the revenue with the people who created the
Speaker 1: work in the first place. Meta, in response, has restricted
Speaker 1: news content from appearing on its platforms if you're viewing
Speaker 1: them in Canada, and now the Canadian government is saying
Speaker 1: it will pull all government advertising from Meta's platforms. Now,
Speaker 1: that is not actually that huge of an escalation because
Speaker 1: my assumption is that the Canadian government is not a
Speaker 1: major advertiser on Meta, especially when you're looking at global revenue,
Speaker 1: when you're looking at more than one hundred billion dollars worldwide.
Speaker 1: But this does send the message that Canada is not
Speaker 1: backing down from the legislation. Also, the government hopes that
Speaker 1: other companies in Canada will follow suit and pull their
Speaker 1: advertising off of Meta's platforms, and that other countries that
Speaker 1: are in the process of passing similar laws to protect
Speaker 1: local media will continue to do so. And if that happens,
Speaker 1: it's possible leverage will change and Meta will have to
Speaker 1: make some concessions or risk losing out on significant revenue.
Speaker 1: So you know, the argument is share a little bit
Speaker 1: now or lose out a lot later on. Though you
Speaker 1: could argue that Meta is concerned about other countries all
Speaker 1: doing this and then collectively they take a huge bite
Speaker 1: out of Meta's revenue, So we'll have to see. TikTok's
Speaker 1: lawyers have petitioned a US judge to block a Montana
Speaker 1: ban on TikTok before the ban takes effect in January
Speaker 1: first of next year. TikTok argues that this ban constitutes
Speaker 1: a violation of First Amendment rights, both for TikTok users
Speaker 1: and for the company itself. This is where I remind
Speaker 1: myself and everybody else here in the United States, corporations
Speaker 1: are legally people because for lots of reasons, actually, many
Speaker 1: of which really do make a lot of sense, but
Speaker 1: that's a discussion for another time. The Montana ban calls
Speaker 1: for fines of up to ten grand per violation if
Speaker 1: TikTok allows content to appear in the state of Montana.
Speaker 1: In other words, if if citizens are allowed to access
Speaker 1: TikTok within Montana, TikTok could be hit by ten grand
Speaker 1: the worth of fines each time. According to TikTok, more
Speaker 1: than a third of Montana's citizens are actually on TikTok,
Speaker 1: so you know, that's a lot of the state's population
Speaker 1: to cut off from the service, though in the grand
Speaker 1: scheme of things, we're talking about just three hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty thousand people here, because Montana is not a heavily
Speaker 1: populated state. How this law would actually be enforced as
Speaker 1: a pretty darn good question, and how TikTok is supposed
Speaker 1: to handle it is another one. And how the state
Speaker 1: can prevent citizens from accessing TikTok through VPNs as yet
Speaker 1: another good question. This all stems from the ongoing concern
Speaker 1: that TikTok serves as a data siphon that takes precious
Speaker 1: US citizen information and funnels it to China. That's an
Speaker 1: accusation that the company has repeatedly denied. But then there
Speaker 1: have been lots of people who have contradicted those denials,
Speaker 1: including people who formerly worked for TikTok or its parent company.
Speaker 1: So at this point I don't know who or what
Speaker 1: to believe. But as I have said many times before,
Speaker 1: in an era where our private information is collected by
Speaker 1: numerous companies and then bought and sold on the open market,
Speaker 1: taking out TikTok is kind of like if you were
Speaker 1: to plug up a small hole in a dam, and
Speaker 1: to your left and to your right are dozens of
Speaker 1: other holes that you haven't even touched. Sure, you've plugged one,
Speaker 1: but the problem is that this has been going on
Speaker 1: for a while, and it's not due to a single source.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think the problem here is much bigger,
Speaker 1: and the issue is we've been distracted by focusing just
Speaker 1: on TikTok. France has passed a surveillance bill that has
Speaker 1: civil liberties activists highly concerned. Going back to France again,
Speaker 1: this bill allows authorities to essentially tap into citizens' devices
Speaker 1: like laptops, smartphones, their cars, any other connected gadgets they
Speaker 1: might rely upon, and to use those devices to track
Speaker 1: them and to essentially spy on them. That could even
Speaker 1: include activating a device's camera and microphone to record images
Speaker 1: and sounds of targets. This law does have some limits.
Speaker 1: It's not that the authorities can just, you know, turn
Speaker 1: it on and spy on everybody all the time. First,
Speaker 1: they have to secure permission from a judge before they
Speaker 1: can begin surveilling a subject. And they are only supposed
Speaker 1: to be able to use this tactic when quote justified
Speaker 1: by the nature and seriousness of the crime end quote.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the threshold is for a crime
Speaker 1: to be serious enough to be to warrant this kind
Speaker 1: of thing. I guess that's up to the individual judge's judgment.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's somewhat troubling that there's not a more,
Speaker 1: you know, concrete threshold. Further, if you are a journalist,
Speaker 1: a judge, a lawyer, or a doctor, I have some
Speaker 1: good news for you. You've got some protection because those
Speaker 1: jobs do not fall under legitimate targets according to the law.
Speaker 1: This was an effort to prevent the law from being abused,
Speaker 1: so that officials could say, keep an eye out on
Speaker 1: a pesky journalist who is working on a big expose
Speaker 1: about local government or something. The law is supposed to
Speaker 1: protect people from that. If they fall into those categories,
Speaker 1: anyone outside of that, it's a different story. The law
Speaker 1: also has a time limit on how long authorities are
Speaker 1: allowed to spy on a target, which is a maximum
Speaker 1: of six months. Half the year. Seems like quite a time,
Speaker 1: and I suppose at the end of that the authorities
Speaker 1: could petition another judge to get another allowance to continue
Speaker 1: spying on people. Activists point out this is already a
Speaker 1: potentially catastrophic violation of citizen privacy and security, and furthermore,
Speaker 1: it could be the start of a slippery slope into
Speaker 1: more pervasive surveillance. As to how the government will actually
Speaker 1: achieve these results, I presume it will require the cooperation
Speaker 1: of device and telecommunications companies, because otherwise there's not like
Speaker 1: a magic button that you can push that lets you,
Speaker 1: you know, select a random citizen and then tap into
Speaker 1: all their technology. You would need some methodology to access
Speaker 1: that that stuff, which could mean either that you have
Speaker 1: to get access to the actual gadget and then install
Speaker 1: like an espionage app on there that would let you
Speaker 1: do that, something akin to what the NSO Group has
Speaker 1: done out of Israel selling it it's Pegasus package to
Speaker 1: iOS device, you know, infiltrators that kind of thing, or
Speaker 1: maybe direct work with the various telecommunications companies and gadget
Speaker 1: companies to have them cooperate with this, which I would
Speaker 1: imagine would be a tall ask, like it'd be a big,
Speaker 1: big request to get those companies to agree, because consumers
Speaker 1: don't like that kind of stuff, and if a consumer
Speaker 1: finds out that a company is in cahoots with the
Speaker 1: government to spy on people, that could be a real
Speaker 1: pr blow to a company's image. So we'll have to
Speaker 1: see how this develops, because I'm very curious how it
Speaker 1: actually gets enforced, how it actually moves forward. But even
Speaker 1: without those questions, it's a huge concern to me. I
Speaker 1: think that this is a bad step for law and
Speaker 1: for technology and for the continuation of the surveillance state. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to take another quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: I've got a few more stories to cover. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: back and ready to wrap up this news episode. I've
Speaker 1: got three more stories. First up. In New York City,
Speaker 1: City government officials have passed a law that will require
Speaker 1: hiring organizations to pay for an auditor, a third party
Speaker 1: auditor to come in and check any software that uses
Speaker 1: automated processes for the purposes of hiring. So if you
Speaker 1: are a company that either outsources you're hiring to another company,
Speaker 1: or you're using software that has automated systems to kind
Speaker 1: of sort candidates so that you can more effectively decide
Speaker 1: upon who you should hire, this applies to those companies.
Speaker 1: So the goal here is to identify any unwanted bias
Speaker 1: in the automated system that could disproportionately be disadvantageous to
Speaker 1: certain populations. Right, we have seen multiple instances of bias
Speaker 1: incorporated into automated functions. Now, most of the time this
Speaker 1: is unintentional. It's not that bias is built in on purpose,
Speaker 1: but bias can be a part of automated systems and
Speaker 1: it can still have a massive negative impact on affected individuals.
Speaker 1: So as companies lean harder on AI and automation to
Speaker 1: do things like sort through potential job candidates, it becomes
Speaker 1: really important to identify possible problems in the software so
Speaker 1: that legit job seekers aren't left out of the loop
Speaker 1: through no fault of their own and they are just
Speaker 1: discriminated against due to this, you know, systemic bias that's
Speaker 1: built into the software. So companies that do not comply
Speaker 1: with the bias audit law will face fines for violations.
Speaker 1: But these fines are are I mean, they're pretty small.
Speaker 1: They're like three hundred and seventy five bucks for the
Speaker 1: first offense, which is you know, that's nothing for most businesses.
Speaker 1: Three hundred and fifty dollars for a fence number two,
Speaker 1: and then every time after that it's fifteen hundred bucks.
Speaker 1: And by a violation, we're not talking about every instance
Speaker 1: of the use of such software. Rather, we're talking about
Speaker 1: each day a company uses an automated tool that has
Speaker 1: not yet been audited, or has been audited and found
Speaker 1: to have bias and it hasn't been addressed, or that
Speaker 1: the company has failed to inform job applicants that part
Speaker 1: of the process involves software with automated processes in it.
Speaker 1: Anything like that would count as a violation for each day,
Speaker 1: So a day ends up being a violation as opposed
Speaker 1: to an instance. So interesting that New York City has
Speaker 1: passed this, I hope to see similar laws passed in
Speaker 1: other areas. I think it is important to make certain
Speaker 1: that as we start to lean heavier on AI that
Speaker 1: we build in protections that can help prevent unintended consequences
Speaker 1: from affecting people, because we've seen it happen time and
Speaker 1: again already in other applications like facial recognition technology, for example,
Speaker 1: So we want to make sure that those are not
Speaker 1: really present for these kind of things. I mean, you
Speaker 1: don't want to be out of work and then submitting
Speaker 1: your resume and you know, cover letter and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff to a company and then find out
Speaker 1: that you weren't even up for consideration because some automated
Speaker 1: program had a bias in it that automatically dismissed you
Speaker 1: from consideration. That would stink. You know, you might be
Speaker 1: the perfect person for that job, it might be your
Speaker 1: passion and you never get a chance because some automated
Speaker 1: piece of software had bias built into it. So we
Speaker 1: definitely need laws like this because I don't think there's
Speaker 1: enough of a move within the companies that are making
Speaker 1: this software to stop it at the source from the
Speaker 1: very get go. In fact, a lot of times they're
Speaker 1: just not even aware of it. That's why you have
Speaker 1: to have the third party auditor come in and really
Speaker 1: check it. Out now second our penultimate story, second to last.
Speaker 1: Stephen Winkleman, the CEO or Steffan I guess I should
Speaker 1: say Stefan Winkleman, the CEO of the famous car company Lamborghini,
Speaker 1: has said that Lamborghini has now sold its last fully
Speaker 1: gas powered supercar. So it is the end of an era.
Speaker 1: From this point forward, all vehicles sold by Lamborghini will
Speaker 1: at the very least be hybrid cars, with all electric
Speaker 1: vehicles coming a few years down the road, so to speak. Now,
Speaker 1: this does not mean Lamborghini has manufactured its last gas
Speaker 1: only vehicle, and that's because Lamborghini is a company that
Speaker 1: takes pre orders on cars and then builds them to order.
Speaker 1: So this is like a luxury supercar experience. So while
Speaker 1: Lamborghini has sold its final gas drink and supercar, the
Speaker 1: car hasn't been built yet. That's still in the future.
Speaker 1: It's still an interesting footnote in history that July twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three was the month when Lamborghini sold its last
Speaker 1: gas only vehicle. It's a real mark of change. And finally,
Speaker 1: after more than two months, NASA has re established communications
Speaker 1: with the Mars based helicopter Ingenuity. This plucky little vehicle
Speaker 1: relies upon the Mars rover Perseverance to provide the communication
Speaker 1: link to NASA, But at the conclusion of its last flight,
Speaker 1: which happened more than two months ago, Ingenuity plopped down
Speaker 1: on Martian soil and a rocky hill blocked its line
Speaker 1: of sight to Perseverance, and as such there was no
Speaker 1: way for NASA to connect to the little helicopter because
Speaker 1: he needed that line of sight connection. Now Perseverance has
Speaker 1: moved into a position that allows for communication, so NASA
Speaker 1: can finally gather data from Ingenuity's fifty second flight and
Speaker 1: then check diagnostics to see if the helicopter is up
Speaker 1: for another jaunt in a couple of weeks. Ingenuity has
Speaker 1: been on Mars since early twenty twenty one. It made
Speaker 1: its first flight on April nineteenth of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: and originally the hope was to get five flights out
Speaker 1: of a little thing. So this sucker has punched way
Speaker 1: above its weight, having gone on more than fifty flights
Speaker 1: at this point. Ingenuity has gathered images that have helped
Speaker 1: NASA plot out the route for Perseverance, so that has
Speaker 1: been like Ingenuity's prime operational use is to kind of
Speaker 1: gather intelligence so that engineers can figure out the best
Speaker 1: way forward for Perseverance to be able to explore Mars's
Speaker 1: surface while encountering as few obstacles as possible. So here's
Speaker 1: hoping ingenuity can keep taking to the skies for a
Speaker 1: while longer yet. And that is it. That's the tech
Speaker 1: news for Thursday, July sixth, twenty twenty three. I hope
Speaker 1: you are all well and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
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