Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I am an executive producer with I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and a love of all things tech. And this
Speaker 1: is the news episode for Tuesday, January nineteen one. And
Speaker 1: let's just dive right into it. Parlor or Parley, the
Speaker 1: social networking platform that aims to be a place where
Speaker 1: free speeches held above all else, has a new home,
Speaker 1: at least for its u r L. You might remember
Speaker 1: that Parlor saw Apple, Google, and Amazon all close off
Speaker 1: support for the service, removing apps from stores, and, in
Speaker 1: the case of Amazon, shutting down the servers that actually
Speaker 1: hosted the site. All of this was done due to
Speaker 1: the content being posted to Parlor, much of it from
Speaker 1: extremists advocating for violence. When the site proved either unwilling
Speaker 1: or unable to rein in the user base and moderate
Speaker 1: such things, the other companies started to pull the plug
Speaker 1: on the service. The site now has a registered domain
Speaker 1: on EPIC servers. That's e p i K founded in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine. Epic says it quote offers cheap domain names, hosting, domaining,
Speaker 1: and more end quote, but it might be better known
Speaker 1: as the hosting service that is home to many far
Speaker 1: right extremist sites and services. It's the home for the
Speaker 1: social network gab, which is associated with far right extremist groups,
Speaker 1: neo Nazis, and white supremacists. So yikes, Parlor is not
Speaker 1: really back, at least not yet. It has its domain,
Speaker 1: but the homepage is just a landing page with a
Speaker 1: message on it. It will take time to transfer Parlor's
Speaker 1: data to new servers, and it isn't clear how much
Speaker 1: needs to be actually rebuilt from the ground up. There
Speaker 1: are conflicting messages on that front. Some of those messages
Speaker 1: suggest that the code used for Parlor wasn't dependent upon
Speaker 1: Amazon's proprietary tools, which would make it easier to port
Speaker 1: over to a new home, but there are other messages
Speaker 1: that indicate that much of Parlor did depend on Amazon's tools,
Speaker 1: and since those tools won't be present at Epic, it
Speaker 1: will require rebuilding Moreover, the process of moving a service
Speaker 1: from one hosting company to another is time consuming and expensive.
Speaker 1: It can take years, even if you are planning it
Speaker 1: in advance, to migrate to different servers, and, as The
Speaker 1: Atlantic pointed out in a recent piece titled what comes
Speaker 1: after Parlor. A lot of companies that offer tools to
Speaker 1: help with migration are refusing to work with Parlor because
Speaker 1: the association with that platform is pretty darn and toxic,
Speaker 1: to say the least. Parlor has also been in the
Speaker 1: news for having truly atrocious privacy and security measures in place,
Speaker 1: which means the service effectively exposed users to a great
Speaker 1: deal of scrutiny. That's something that can benefit organizations like
Speaker 1: the FBI, as agents are conducting investigations regarding the siege
Speaker 1: at the Capitol on January six, but it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: a selling point for users. Here's my ultimate take on
Speaker 1: the subject. I understand the call for free speech. It
Speaker 1: is incredibly important. I mean, that's why it is the
Speaker 1: first Amendment to the United States Constitution. But Parlor wasn't
Speaker 1: some sort of equal platform for all speech, as much
Speaker 1: as it was touting itself to be. It was funded
Speaker 1: by people who had previously funded Cambridge Analytica, and it
Speaker 1: was used by people who were employing the type of
Speaker 1: language that's used in white supremacist rhetoric. It's all designed
Speaker 1: to recruit new members. It wasn't a town square, it
Speaker 1: was a radicalization engine. Now, this is a complex problem,
Speaker 1: one that holds up conflicting and foundational values, and it
Speaker 1: shows us that life is complicated. There are times when
Speaker 1: we as a society have to make a call whether
Speaker 1: to lean more on protecting free speech or more on
Speaker 1: protecting the underpinnings of democracy itself. As for Parlor's return,
Speaker 1: there's still no published timeline for that as of this recording.
Speaker 1: There are other tools out there that extremists have been
Speaker 1: using for communication and organizing, some that predated Parlor, but
Speaker 1: most of them don't have the same amount of visibility
Speaker 1: that Parlor did, and so right now they're not necessarily
Speaker 1: as heavily trafficked. We'll have to wait to see if
Speaker 1: anything happens on inauguration day, that being January, and even
Speaker 1: more sobering is the thought that moving for Word will
Speaker 1: have to be vigilant in an effort to counteract the radicalization.
Speaker 1: Otherwise we're going to see more acts of violence and terrorism,
Speaker 1: and we'll likely see reactions to that grow more extreme
Speaker 1: as well, from surveillance to enforcement. In other words, right
Speaker 1: now we are on the precipice of things getting a
Speaker 1: whole lot worse if we don't make very good decisions
Speaker 1: moving forward, and in the meantime, their entire vulnerable populations
Speaker 1: that are depending on the rest of us making those decisions.
Speaker 1: So it creates even more responsibility for all of us
Speaker 1: to employ those two things I constantly call for compassion
Speaker 1: and critical thinking. We've got to make use of those
Speaker 1: to make sure that we forge a good path forward
Speaker 1: and we don't just sweep things under the rug where
Speaker 1: it can fester and grow worse and the status quo
Speaker 1: is maintained. Because the status quo is not it's not
Speaker 1: good enough eyes And getting back to Parlor and security,
Speaker 1: that security was so poor that in the hours leading
Speaker 1: up to Amazon giving Parlor the boot, numerous hackers scraped
Speaker 1: the service to archive as much information as possible. And
Speaker 1: when I say hackers, it could be anyone. It could
Speaker 1: be Independence, it could be people working on behalf of
Speaker 1: the United States government. It could be people working on
Speaker 1: behalf of other governments. The list goes on, and the
Speaker 1: content included not just the stuff that was posted publicly
Speaker 1: to Parlor, but also the locations and sometimes the identities
Speaker 1: of thousands of people on the service, and by linking
Speaker 1: locations to posts, people have found potential links to the
Speaker 1: riots and d C showing how participating on parlor could
Speaker 1: create a digital trail that agencies like the FBI could
Speaker 1: find particularly interesting, and it's a reminder that security and
Speaker 1: privacy are really important. While I think it is also
Speaker 1: important for people who are subverting the democratic process US
Speaker 1: to be held accountable, I kind of find it disturbing
Speaker 1: to think about how a total failure in privacy for
Speaker 1: a social network like this leads to abuse anyway. One
Speaker 1: group that archived a lot of information, and it did
Speaker 1: so without needing to hack anything was Pro Publica, the
Speaker 1: nonprofit news organization. Pro Publica employees copied videos that were
Speaker 1: publicly uploaded to parlors, so they weren't, you know, scraping
Speaker 1: data or anything. They were literally grabbing the stuff that
Speaker 1: was available for anyone to look at, and collectively, Pro
Speaker 1: Publica preserved more than five hundred videos that the news
Speaker 1: organization determined had been taken during the riots on January six,
Speaker 1: creating a thorough record of how those events unfolded. I
Speaker 1: don't recommend watching them if you are easily affected by
Speaker 1: scenes of violence and violent rhetoric. It is hard stuff
Speaker 1: to watch, but it's also incredibly important to maintain that
Speaker 1: as a record of what happened, and to remind people
Speaker 1: of again what happens if we sweep things under the
Speaker 1: rug and we try to pretend like nothing is wrong,
Speaker 1: this stuff just gets worse. And sticking with the riots
Speaker 1: for a bit longer, the FBI filed an affidavit against
Speaker 1: a woman named Riley June Williams of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who
Speaker 1: participated in the riots at the US Capital. There are
Speaker 1: images of her up online, so she was there on
Speaker 1: January six, and according to the affidavit, Williams had planned
Speaker 1: to steal the House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's laptop,
Speaker 1: so the Speaker of the House her laptop, and the
Speaker 1: goal was to ultimately sell this laptop to a contact
Speaker 1: in Russia. And the plan from there, presumably was to
Speaker 1: then sell the laptop to the Russian government, to an
Speaker 1: intelligence agency in Russia. So this was to be a
Speaker 1: monetary transaction, so effectively, she would be selling out the
Speaker 1: United States to Russia. Now, as I'm recording this, Williams
Speaker 1: remains at large. I do not know if by the
Speaker 1: time you hear this, if that will have changed, but
Speaker 1: as I'm recording that is the case, she has deleted
Speaker 1: her accounts with various social media platforms. She discontinued her
Speaker 1: phone number as well. I imagine the FBI is using
Speaker 1: a lot of different resources to track her down. I'm
Speaker 1: sure they have a lot of questions for her. I
Speaker 1: have a quick update on this story. It turns out
Speaker 1: that Williams turned herself into local police Monday evening after
Speaker 1: I had already finished recording that episode, but wanted to
Speaker 1: update it with the most recent news I had. Moving on,
Speaker 1: and my last story for this section is that on
Speaker 1: January eighth, twenty twenty one, get hub fired an employee.
Speaker 1: And obviously there's more to the story than just that
Speaker 1: companies fire employees all the time. But get hub is
Speaker 1: in the business of offering a software development environment with
Speaker 1: version control features. In case you're not familiar with what
Speaker 1: they do, they sort of help other companies do the
Speaker 1: things they need to do in order to develop the
Speaker 1: software they either depend upon internally or that they incorporate
Speaker 1: into external products. The get hub employee, who is Jewish,
Speaker 1: had posted an internal message on January six two colleagues
Speaker 1: located in Washington, d C. And said that they need
Speaker 1: to stay safe from Nazis. Now, the term Nazi is
Speaker 1: definitely a loaded one that is obvious, it really goes
Speaker 1: without saying, but it also happened to be appropriate, as
Speaker 1: a number of people at the riots and d C
Speaker 1: belonged to neo Nazi organizations. However, a fellow get hub
Speaker 1: employee complained to HR about the use of the term Nazi,
Speaker 1: finding it objectionable, and HR first rep remanded, but then
Speaker 1: later fired the employee two days later. Following this action,
Speaker 1: around two d gethub employees demanded to know the reasons
Speaker 1: for the firing, and they also began to use the
Speaker 1: word Nazi to describe rioters in these various slack channels
Speaker 1: at get hub. So essentially they said, if this is
Speaker 1: why you let that person go, we're all going to
Speaker 1: end up doing the same sort of thing, because it's
Speaker 1: calling something by its name. And this escalated, and on
Speaker 1: January six, the CEO of get hub, Nat Friedman, sent
Speaker 1: an internal message saying the company acted in the wrong
Speaker 1: and that he would extend a public apology to the
Speaker 1: fired employee and that that person's job would be offered
Speaker 1: back to him should he want to return. Freedman also
Speaker 1: committed to keeping internal communications open allowing for a discussion
Speaker 1: of sensitive topics, provided that they are done in a
Speaker 1: professional manner. So in other words, you're not trying to
Speaker 1: use this freedom in a way to site, intimidate, or
Speaker 1: harass other people. Assuming you're not doing that, then they
Speaker 1: are allowing for the discussion of these sensitive topics, particularly
Speaker 1: with regard of making maintaining a safe environment for their employees. Well,
Speaker 1: that is all of the news I have that relates
Speaker 1: to parlor and to the riots on January six. I
Speaker 1: certainly hope that on Thursday I won't have to talk
Speaker 1: about riots that relate to the inauguration, and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will cover totally different stories. Have nothing
Speaker 1: to do with the rest of that, I promise. But first,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. Our first story after the
Speaker 1: break is about Samsung and problems with corruption and leadership.
Speaker 1: Lee J Young, otherwise known as j y Lee, is
Speaker 1: facing a thirty month prison sentence in South Korea. Lee
Speaker 1: is a vice chairman of the mega corporation Samsung. Again
Speaker 1: out of South Korea. Lee has already served some of
Speaker 1: that time for a previous day in prison. This is
Speaker 1: actually an order for him to return to prison, not
Speaker 1: just go to prison, and at the heart of all
Speaker 1: this are charges that Lee was bribing a close friend
Speaker 1: of the then president of South Korea, Park Gunner. The
Speaker 1: reason for the bribe Well j Y Lee was trying
Speaker 1: to grease the wheels to get government support for his
Speaker 1: ascension to the head of Samsung. Park herself was ousted
Speaker 1: as president and found guilty on charges of grafting, so
Speaker 1: all this tracks. She is currently serving a sentence in
Speaker 1: the same prison where Lee is headed. Lee, for his part,
Speaker 1: served about a year a little less than a year
Speaker 1: of a five year long sentence at that prison previously
Speaker 1: from two thousand seventeen into two thousand eighteen UH but
Speaker 1: then an appeals court overturned part of those charges and
Speaker 1: suspended his sentence. But then the Korean Supreme Court reinstated
Speaker 1: that sentence and as demanding that Lee returned to prison
Speaker 1: to serve out those two and a half years. He
Speaker 1: also faces a separate trial relating to charges that he
Speaker 1: engaged in stock manipulation and other illegal activities while overseeing
Speaker 1: a merger in two thousand and fifteen. His father, Lee Kunhi,
Speaker 1: had been chairman of Samsung, but he passed away in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty. J y Lee had in effect been leading
Speaker 1: the company since, but you know, not officially, and there's
Speaker 1: been no formal restructuring at Samsung yet. The company has
Speaker 1: had other high level legal issues in the board chairman
Speaker 1: Lee Sang Hun resigned after being convicted for violating labor
Speaker 1: laws and under my a labor unions. Samsung is a
Speaker 1: conglomerate under the control of the Lee family, and in Korea,
Speaker 1: these families likely wield enormous influence in business and politics.
Speaker 1: Uh the the all of it is wrapped up together
Speaker 1: and has been a big concern for people who are
Speaker 1: on the lookout for corruption. Last week, I talked about
Speaker 1: how WhatsApp users were abandoning the platform for other messaging
Speaker 1: services after Facebook updated the terms of service for WhatsApp,
Speaker 1: and in case you missed it, the big change is
Speaker 1: that Facebook will be mining WhatsApp for data to share
Speaker 1: it with Facebook proper. Now. Facebook has since said that
Speaker 1: it would not be reading the content of messages. It
Speaker 1: said it can't there's no way for WhatsApp to know
Speaker 1: what is inside the messages sent between users. According to Facebook, Instead,
Speaker 1: the data would be more meta in nature rather than
Speaker 1: the content of the messages themselves, more like, who is
Speaker 1: it that you're messaging at? What time of day? And
Speaker 1: where did the two of you happen to be? Still
Speaker 1: kind of on the creepy side, And anyway, Facebook's messaging
Speaker 1: was too little, too late, and a lot of folks
Speaker 1: found the news upsetting enough to jump ship. One ship
Speaker 1: to which they jumped was the messaging service Signal. Signals
Speaker 1: saw such a huge boost in numbers that the service
Speaker 1: couldn't handle the jump. For more than a day, Signal
Speaker 1: was offline, having collapsed under the weight of new users.
Speaker 1: This is almost a good problem to have because it
Speaker 1: shows a real enthusiasm for a product, but it's also
Speaker 1: a serious problem because people would be frustrated with the
Speaker 1: lack of service, and then they might migrate to a
Speaker 1: competing messaging service instead. So this is a classic example
Speaker 1: of the challenges of scale. Creating a service that works
Speaker 1: for a relatively modest number of users is one thing,
Speaker 1: but building it out so that it can handle millions
Speaker 1: of new users that is entirely different. That being said.
Speaker 1: Signal has recovered it is back online as I am
Speaker 1: recording this, and the company says it has expanded its capacity,
Speaker 1: which typically means adding more servers to run the service,
Speaker 1: but the company wasn't really specific, so it should be
Speaker 1: back up and running now. But the question is did
Speaker 1: this harm signals momentum? We're gonna have to wait a
Speaker 1: little bit longer to find out the answer to that.
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon is the target
Speaker 1: of a new lawsuit that claims the company was colluding
Speaker 1: with five major book publishers in the US to fix
Speaker 1: prices on e books. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon and
Speaker 1: the publishers have worked out a deal in which Amazon
Speaker 1: charges a high commission to carry the publishers books, and
Speaker 1: that in turn determines the price of the e books
Speaker 1: in the Amazon Store, so the prices are higher than
Speaker 1: they might otherwise be because that commission price, and then
Speaker 1: the publishers charge other retail organizations the Amazon price, which
Speaker 1: means those retailers can't offer the titles at a lower
Speaker 1: price point than Amazon does, or they would be doing
Speaker 1: so at a loss. And since those five publishers are
Speaker 1: the major publishing companies in the United States, they account
Speaker 1: for more than of all the books published in the country.
Speaker 1: Considering that Amazon is one of the big companies under
Speaker 1: investigation for anti competitive and monopolistic practices. Along with Google, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and Apple, this is probably going to be a bit
Speaker 1: rough for the company. Apple faced a similar lawsuit back
Speaker 1: in and they ultimately decided to settle out of court.
Speaker 1: They weren't given much choice in that. Actually, it was
Speaker 1: a pretty big settlement too. It remains to be seen
Speaker 1: what Amazon will do across the pond. The constabulary have
Speaker 1: a big blunder to answer for. The UK Home Office
Speaker 1: recently revealed that n dreds of thousands of lease records,
Speaker 1: including stuff like DNA records, are gone records that could
Speaker 1: be instrumental in linking suspects with crime scenes. So we're
Speaker 1: talking active files here, not just archives. Stuff puff vanished,
Speaker 1: maybe as many as four hundred thousand as of this recording,
Speaker 1: that number might be higher by the time you hear this.
Speaker 1: And that includes two offense records, one thousand arrest records
Speaker 1: and fifteen thousand person records. Some of the data links
Speaker 1: to serious offenses and was too intended to indicate individuals
Speaker 1: who had perpetrated some pretty nasty crimes in the past,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that is gone now. And how
Speaker 1: how is that possible? What what actually happened? Was it
Speaker 1: a hack. Was it some sort of massive equipment failure, Well,
Speaker 1: it seems as though human error caused it as and
Speaker 1: someone accidentally deleted all that stuff during what the Home
Speaker 1: Office calls quote unquote housekeeping. The Home Office Digital Data
Speaker 1: and Technology division is working to see if it can
Speaker 1: restore any or maybe all of those files. It's a
Speaker 1: little difficult for me to get a handle on exactly
Speaker 1: how serious this is, apart from, you know, extremely serious.
Speaker 1: It's also amazing to me that there was apparently no
Speaker 1: secure backup system in place, and that these files were
Speaker 1: all on the type of centralized storage and not siloed out.
Speaker 1: That so many files could be wiped out through error
Speaker 1: is staggering. Hopefully the engineers at Home Office will figure
Speaker 1: out how to restore the data, but in the meantime
Speaker 1: it will almost certainly have a negative effect on ongoing cases. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency or SIPA, has been the
Speaker 1: target of a ransomware attack, something that SIPA revealed right
Speaker 1: around Christmas time last year. According to reports, the attackers
Speaker 1: were able to steal around one point to gigabytes of data,
Speaker 1: which SIPA says included quote limited sensitive information end quote
Speaker 1: meaning most of the information was a lot of publicly
Speaker 1: available stuff. There wasn't a whole lot of you know,
Speaker 1: really important data. They're important in the sense of secret
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It's all important, it's just a
Speaker 1: lot of it was also, you know, public stuff, not
Speaker 1: particularly precious data. The organization is working to recover its capabilities.
Speaker 1: Some of its systems were still inaccessible as of the
Speaker 1: time of my recording due to that ransomware attack. Investigators
Speaker 1: are also looking into the matter, although you know, figuring
Speaker 1: out who did this doesn't necessarily make much of a difference.
Speaker 1: Frequently we're talking about organizations that get targeted from outside
Speaker 1: the country, so jurisdiction becomes really tricky. And SIPA has
Speaker 1: reassured UK citizens stating that the organization is not going
Speaker 1: to be using any public funds to pay off the ransom,
Speaker 1: and that is for the best because as paying off
Speaker 1: a ransom sends a message to those who would carry
Speaker 1: out ransomware attacks. For the record, that messages, hey, y'all,
Speaker 1: this totally works, so you don't you don't want to
Speaker 1: do that, you know, not paying the ransom is the
Speaker 1: right move because that sends the message that the attackers
Speaker 1: are going through the effort of compromising a system, but
Speaker 1: are not going to receive any sort of ransom in return.
Speaker 1: Now that doesn't necessarily mean that all ransomware attacks are
Speaker 1: going to stop. I mean you can steal data, as
Speaker 1: is the case with this particular instance, and then try
Speaker 1: to sell that information, perhaps on the black market, but
Speaker 1: typically the information doesn't command a very high price. Like
Speaker 1: in in aggregate, you can get a lot of money
Speaker 1: for it, but data actually is is fairly cheap on
Speaker 1: the individual level, so there's not a huge return of
Speaker 1: investment for time and effort if you're not getting that ransom.
Speaker 1: So long story short, if you are hit with ransomware,
Speaker 1: don't pay the ransom. In fact, there's no guarantee that
Speaker 1: the attackers will return any stolen data, or not keep
Speaker 1: a copy of it if they do return it, or
Speaker 1: that they will actually decrypt your hard drive if that's
Speaker 1: what they've done, or anything like that, So don't pay it.
Speaker 1: All it does is encourage further attacks, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: guarantee that any damage that was done to you will
Speaker 1: be reversed. So bad idea. All right, well, that wraps
Speaker 1: up this segment. When we come back After this break,
Speaker 1: we'll have a few odds and ends to cover, but
Speaker 1: first let's take that quick break. Our first story in
Speaker 1: this segment is about an app and the more security breaches.
Speaker 1: So Amazon's Ring Team revealed that there was a security
Speaker 1: bug in the Ring Neighbor's app. The Neighbors app is
Speaker 1: a neighborhood watch tool allowing users to post about public
Speaker 1: safety concerns or neighborhood crime. That reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: of what next door tends to become, although in my
Speaker 1: neighborhood it gets way worse than that. But that's of
Speaker 1: soapbox I can get on on some other podcast. The
Speaker 1: security bug in this case revealed that the app was
Speaker 1: pulling personal data off of neighbors, so it was revealing
Speaker 1: stuff like the home addresses of users, which really it
Speaker 1: shouldn't have been able to do. The Ring team changed
Speaker 1: the app so that it will only pull the city, state,
Speaker 1: and ZIP code of users, but not their actual street address.
Speaker 1: As far as security failures go, this one appears to
Speaker 1: be fairly mild. The Ring Team claims that there are
Speaker 1: no signs that anyone was misusing the data or that
Speaker 1: any other party had access to it. It's more of
Speaker 1: a case of an app pulling more information than it
Speaker 1: needs to in order to operate, then that has now
Speaker 1: been resolved. If you have been following app news for
Speaker 1: a long time, you know that this was something that
Speaker 1: companies used to do on purpose. They would actually request
Speaker 1: more information than the app required in order to operate,
Speaker 1: and often users were unaware of that. In fact, that
Speaker 1: was at its heart the working principle behind Cambridge Analytica. Uh.
Speaker 1: The app that was used was pulling a lot more
Speaker 1: information than people were aware of. And it wasn't until
Speaker 1: Facebook went and made major changes to its approach that
Speaker 1: things like that were harder to do and ideally impossible
Speaker 1: to do. But as we see, sometimes it happens. Anyway,
Speaker 1: let's talk about food, because it's almost lunchtime for me.
Speaker 1: So a group of researchers with the Florida Institute of
Speaker 1: Technology road a paper for the International Journal of Society
Speaker 1: System Science, which I guess is called I just and
Speaker 1: I found it really interesting. The paper is about how
Speaker 1: there is a growing need for advanced technologies dedicated to
Speaker 1: supporting sustainable agricultural processes around the world as the global
Speaker 1: population continues to rise. Among those advanced technologies is artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: which presumably would be used to help farmers manage farms
Speaker 1: efficiently and effectively. The paper is more of a call
Speaker 1: to action, with the researchers pointing out that there needs
Speaker 1: to be a new generation of engineers and scientists working
Speaker 1: on technologies that are specifically applicable to agriculture. The challenges
Speaker 1: will be considerable, particularly with regard to finding ways to
Speaker 1: maximize agricultural effectiveness in a way that's environmentally responsible. In
Speaker 1: other words, you don't want to try and solve one
Speaker 1: problem while making a different problem even worse. The title
Speaker 1: of the piece is exploring technological management innovations that include
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence and other innovations in global food production Snappy.
Speaker 1: Virgin Orbit, part of the Virgin group of companies, is
Speaker 1: all about putting small satellites into orbit, as opposed to
Speaker 1: Virgin Galactic, which is a company that's all about creating
Speaker 1: a way for very rich people to go to outer space.
Speaker 1: Over the weekend, Virgin Orbit held a test flight in
Speaker 1: which it's modified seven forty seven airliner carried a rocket
Speaker 1: up to cruising altitude. Once they're the rocket detached from
Speaker 1: the seven seven and then ignited to push a payload
Speaker 1: out into orbit. The successful test flight demonstrated that the
Speaker 1: process works. The goal was to reduce the overall cost
Speaker 1: of launching smaller payloads into space. Launching from the ground
Speaker 1: costs a lot of money, with the seven forty seven
Speaker 1: already several thousand feet up. The overall costs mostly with
Speaker 1: regard to how much fuel is needed in thus how
Speaker 1: larger rocket you need those get deuced. Virgin Orbit isn't
Speaker 1: really seen as an alternative to the approach of companies
Speaker 1: like SpaceX, but rather as a complementary business for different clients.
Speaker 1: If you've got a larger payload, you're gonna need to
Speaker 1: go with a company like SpaceX to get it up
Speaker 1: into space. But if it's a smaller satellite, Virgin Orbit
Speaker 1: might be the way to go. Now, this was the
Speaker 1: first time a Virgin Orbit flight launched a rocket into
Speaker 1: orbit successfully. Back in May, the company had attempted a
Speaker 1: similar test, but in that case, the rockets failsafe system
Speaker 1: initiated an automatic shutdown not long after it detached from
Speaker 1: the seven. Now, as failures go, that one was disappointing,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't catastrophic, and Virgin Orbit reps say that
Speaker 1: the failure taught their teams a lot, and the things
Speaker 1: they learned helped them achieve success the second time around.
Speaker 1: You know, people find different ways to pass the time.
Speaker 1: For example, I practice playing guitar poorly, but some people,
Speaker 1: you know, they take up carpentry, like Justin McElroy, and
Speaker 1: some I suppose look over recent patent applications to find
Speaker 1: neat stuff that appears to be what happened when a
Speaker 1: Reddit user with the handle torrential snow posted a link
Speaker 1: to a patent application filed by Take two Interactive. Take
Speaker 1: two is better known as the parent company for rock
Speaker 1: Star Games and two K, both of which are video
Speaker 1: game publishing companies, and the patent is all about NPC
Speaker 1: behaviors and games. The patent name is system and Method
Speaker 1: for the virtual navigation in a gaming environment, and it
Speaker 1: explains the challenges of creating non player characters that behave
Speaker 1: in a natural and believable way when it comes to
Speaker 1: traversing a virtual world. For example, and NPC, left to
Speaker 1: its own, devices might travel to a seemingly random location, turnaround,
Speaker 1: and then retrace its steps over and over, or it
Speaker 1: might just do endless loops of a specific route in
Speaker 1: the game. The patent describes a system that aims to
Speaker 1: make NPC behaviors make more sense, particularly with regard to
Speaker 1: a game that has a multiplayer element to it. Ideally,
Speaker 1: you would want NPC behaviors to be natural enough that
Speaker 1: another player wouldn't immediately be able to tell the difference
Speaker 1: between a human player and an NPC just by watching
Speaker 1: how they move, unless the other players are, you know,
Speaker 1: behaving in really erratic ways on purpose, which, hey, that's
Speaker 1: actually a pretty safe bet for most of these games.
Speaker 1: But the whole patent is interesting, and because it's a
Speaker 1: public resource, it's free to read if you want to.
Speaker 1: But the thing that has most people excited is the
Speaker 1: idea that this patent could be related to an upcoming
Speaker 1: take to release, and the speculation seems to be centered
Speaker 1: on the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
Speaker 1: That might be the case, or perhaps this has more
Speaker 1: to do with the online world of Grand Theft Auto five.
Speaker 1: It remains to be seen, but it is interesting. And finally,
Speaker 1: Mica Price gets my award for smart Alec of the Week.
Speaker 1: Price created a bot for Reddit. Has a very specific
Speaker 1: set of directions pull text from arguments on Reddit and
Speaker 1: then turn those into captions on top of a scene
Speaker 1: from a video game called Ace Attorney. It's a it's
Speaker 1: an attorney game. It's pretty fun. And you find a
Speaker 1: suitable argument in Reddit when you find something that you
Speaker 1: would think, oh, this thread is really blowing up and
Speaker 1: it's ridiculous, this is perfect. Preferably it's one where the
Speaker 1: argument has got really low stakes and it's overblown. And
Speaker 1: then you use the command exclamation point objection bot and
Speaker 1: the system will pull the text from the two most
Speaker 1: prolific posters in the thread to create the scene. One
Speaker 1: of the two gets assigned the role of Phoenix right,
Speaker 1: the other one becomes Miles Edgeworth. Other people can become
Speaker 1: supporting characters within the scene. According to Price, it took
Speaker 1: him three old days to make the bot. The code,
Speaker 1: by the way, is open source, so other people can
Speaker 1: see prices work and improve upon it or alter it
Speaker 1: and use it to make their own version of this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. He also mentioned that the bot doesn't
Speaker 1: work on all Subreddit's, only a subset of them, and
Speaker 1: I expect we'll see a lot of creative approaches to
Speaker 1: framing out Reddit arguments. I also expect we're gonna see
Speaker 1: a lot more Reddit arguments, not that we didn't see
Speaker 1: enough already, but now if you know that this argument
Speaker 1: couldn't turn into like a meme, it's off to the races.
Speaker 1: So yeah, all you people who love Reddit, get ready
Speaker 1: to read lots of ridiculous arguments specifically for the purpose
Speaker 1: of getting it turned into an ace attorney meme, and
Speaker 1: then get ready for all the moderators throwing down new
Speaker 1: rules to ban that kind of stuff so that the
Speaker 1: threads don't just turn into nonsense all the time, fun times.
Speaker 1: Why can't we have nice things, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I like the idea of a bot that makes things
Speaker 1: were aculous. I don't like the idea of people being
Speaker 1: ridiculous just for the sake of a bot doing stuff
Speaker 1: with it. Anyway, that wraps up the news items for Tuesday,
Speaker 1: January one. I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk
Speaker 1: about on Thursday. Wednesday promises to be an eventful day. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, you will get a regular episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff on Wednesday. And that's all for me. If
Speaker 1: you guys have anything you want me to cover in
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff. The regular episodes where I
Speaker 1: talk about technology or tech companies or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Let me know. The best way to reach out is
Speaker 1: on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff hs W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite show.