Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech 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 Thursday, June twenty one. We've got a
Speaker 1: short one for you today. I'm heading into my birthday
Speaker 1: weekend and I'm celebrating by unplugging. But let's get to
Speaker 1: some news. Top of the news today is that yesterday
Speaker 1: we learned from authorities in Spain that John McAfee, who
Speaker 1: founded the McAfee anti virus company, was found dead in
Speaker 1: his jail cell. There is a lot for us to
Speaker 1: unpack here, because there are elements to McAfee's life story
Speaker 1: that sound like they could have come from some over
Speaker 1: the top film about excess and handle. McAfee founded the
Speaker 1: company back in the late nineteen eighties to market anti
Speaker 1: virus software, but he actually resigned his position in nine
Speaker 1: sold off his stake in the company. So McAfee Anti
Speaker 1: Virus hasn't had anything to do with John McAfee for
Speaker 1: nearly thirty years now, and in fact, McAfee would go
Speaker 1: on to kind of slag off on McAfee anti virus,
Speaker 1: calling it unnecessary, recommending people not install it, arguing that
Speaker 1: it had bloatwear in it. He even said at some
Speaker 1: point that he had never bothered to install anti virus
Speaker 1: software on his own computers, that rather he would just
Speaker 1: keep his devices UH disconnected from his own identity, he
Speaker 1: would not link them to him, and that he wouldn't
Speaker 1: go to sites that would typically host malware anyway. He
Speaker 1: went on to found or work for several other companies.
Speaker 1: He accumulated a pretty sizeable amount of wealth, but lost
Speaker 1: a great deal of that during the global financial crisis
Speaker 1: around two thousand eight. He lived in Belize for quite
Speaker 1: a while, where authorities once rated his home on suspicion
Speaker 1: that he was connected to unlicensed drug production. That was
Speaker 1: a whole story, and he was also accused of having
Speaker 1: hired a hit man to torture and kill one of
Speaker 1: his neighbors in Belize. That was stemming from a long
Speaker 1: kind of feud between the two UH. The neighbors certainly
Speaker 1: was murdered, and there were questions about whether or not
Speaker 1: McAfee was involved, either directly or, as is the case
Speaker 1: with the hitman allegation, indirectly McAfee fled Belize in the
Speaker 1: aftermath of that, and after refusing to show up in
Speaker 1: court for charges connected to that neighbor's murder, the court
Speaker 1: ordered him to pay twenty five million dollars to the
Speaker 1: neighbors next of ken, which was a judgment that McAfee
Speaker 1: just dismissed out of hand. But then he had a
Speaker 1: habit of dismissing court judgments out of hand, kind of
Speaker 1: made it part of his His stick is not paying
Speaker 1: the court mandated finds that he got hit with multiple times.
Speaker 1: He toyed with presidential campaigns at least twice, but they
Speaker 1: never really seemed terribly serious to me. It seemed more
Speaker 1: like almost a publicity stunt. Last October, Spanish authorities arrested
Speaker 1: McAfee as he was preparing to travel to Turkey, and
Speaker 1: the charge was that McAfee had been committing tax evasion
Speaker 1: for four years, essentially not filing taxes, which he thought
Speaker 1: of as being illegal. Uh. Turns out that's not how
Speaker 1: the US government sees it, and this week a Spanish
Speaker 1: court ruled that he would be extradited to the United States,
Speaker 1: a ruling that could have been appealed, but he was
Speaker 1: found dead in his jail cell. Not long afterward, authorities
Speaker 1: say that it appears that it was suicide. McAfee himself
Speaker 1: actually sowed the seeds of out about suicide a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. He claimed he would never do such
Speaker 1: a thing, and he got a tattoo that said whacked on.
Speaker 1: It actually had like a dollar sign in w H
Speaker 1: A C K D. He argued that if he were
Speaker 1: ever found dead by quote unquote suicide, that all his
Speaker 1: true believers could take faith that it was actually murder,
Speaker 1: that he had been killed while in prison, And not
Speaker 1: long after authorities discovered his body, his own Instagram account
Speaker 1: posted an image of a giant Q on it, presumably
Speaker 1: a reference to the Q and NON group. But McAfee
Speaker 1: also has a team of folks who worked with him,
Speaker 1: and some of them were managing his social media profiles.
Speaker 1: That has been a thing that's been going on for
Speaker 1: a while, so it's not like McAfee had some sort
Speaker 1: of dead man switch to to post a picture of Q.
Speaker 1: And while I'm certain there will be no shortage of
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories coming out about McAfee, I do want to
Speaker 1: point out that he was certainly not a reliable narrator.
Speaker 1: By any stretch of the imagination. I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: there aren't questions about his death. There certainly are. There
Speaker 1: are questions, um, whether it was by suicide or some
Speaker 1: other means, there are definitely questions. However, I wouldn't take
Speaker 1: anything McAfee said in the past as something truly reliable.
Speaker 1: In rock Steady, the Spanish court had already ordered him
Speaker 1: to be extradite to the United States, which would give
Speaker 1: the US the chance to prosecute McAfee. So the story
Speaker 1: that was being pushed around is that the US wanted
Speaker 1: McAfee dead. But if the US had just successfully one
Speaker 1: out an agreement to have McAfee extradite to the United States,
Speaker 1: seems like having a murdered wouldn't make a whole lot
Speaker 1: of sense to me. I mean, I'm not like deep
Speaker 1: state Michael Crichton level kind of thing thinking sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: So maybe I'm just missing it. But my advice is,
Speaker 1: don't go spreading conspiracy theories. Use critical thinking. You can
Speaker 1: ask questions. There's nothing wrong with asking questions, but it's
Speaker 1: the leaping two answers that part that is the problem. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know what happened. I I'm inclined to think
Speaker 1: that this is a case where he committed suicide after
Speaker 1: coming to the realization that he was not going to
Speaker 1: be able to slip out of this like he had
Speaker 1: previous times. But that's just a guess. I don't have
Speaker 1: the information to make, you know, a solid statement on it.
Speaker 1: I do believe that there will probably be a billion
Speaker 1: movies made about this guy in the years to come,
Speaker 1: maybe one with Adam Sandler playing the part. I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, this is sort of an uncut Gems kind
Speaker 1: of opportunity here. In other news, the reddit crowd over
Speaker 1: at Wall Street Bets might be doing a little bit
Speaker 1: of a victory lab this week. Vice reported on Tuesday
Speaker 1: that White Square, a hedge fund that had recommended a
Speaker 1: short cell of game Stop stock, has shut down. All right,
Speaker 1: So if you're like me and financial stuff is a
Speaker 1: bit outside of your wheelhouse, let's go ahead and break
Speaker 1: all this down. And for the record, you know, I
Speaker 1: had to refresh myself on all this kind of stuff
Speaker 1: because this isn't my world. But hedge funds are investment
Speaker 1: bouls in which people, typically really rich people, pour a
Speaker 1: lot of money into the fund in the hopes of
Speaker 1: turning it into a lot more money. So it's one
Speaker 1: of the many ways on how the wealthy get even wealthier. Anyway,
Speaker 1: hedge funds tend to have more risky strategies than other
Speaker 1: types of investment funds. Uh. It tends to be a
Speaker 1: high risk, high reward kind of situation. So when it works,
Speaker 1: it's paying off big time. Hedge fund managers have to
Speaker 1: be accredited by the SEC, but in return, hedge funds
Speaker 1: have less oversight and less regulation than other types of funds,
Speaker 1: which gives them the freedom to make these kind of
Speaker 1: risky moves. All right, we got hedge funds. So what's
Speaker 1: a short sell? Well, if you suspect that a company's
Speaker 1: stock price is going to go down, you can do
Speaker 1: something called selling short. And essentially what's happening is you
Speaker 1: don't own any of this company's stock already. Okay, you
Speaker 1: just think, oh, this company X is about to have
Speaker 1: a decline in stock price. Maybe you thought that the
Speaker 1: stock price was overvalued and it's going to be readjusted.
Speaker 1: Maybe you think the company's entering into some choppy waters.
Speaker 1: Whatever the case. So what you do is you borrow
Speaker 1: shares of that company's stock from some other investor. And
Speaker 1: you're essentially saying, I'll give these shares back to you
Speaker 1: at this specific date. So you you're you set a
Speaker 1: date when you have to return the shares to that investor.
Speaker 1: Then you sell these borrowed shares, You wait for the
Speaker 1: price of the stock to go down. Then you buy
Speaker 1: back the shares you borrowed, but at a lower price.
Speaker 1: You return the borrowed shares and you get to keep
Speaker 1: the difference. So, in other words, uh, let's say that
Speaker 1: you borrow some shares and you sell these shares at
Speaker 1: twenty dollars apiece, but you buy them back when they're
Speaker 1: down to five dollars a piece. That means you would
Speaker 1: make fifteen dollars per share profit. But if the price
Speaker 1: doesn't go down, if the stock price goes up, then
Speaker 1: you're in trouble because you still have to return those
Speaker 1: borrowed shares. So let's say you sold off the borrowed
Speaker 1: shares for twenty dollars each, but now the price is
Speaker 1: fifty dollars each and you're due. That means you're gonna
Speaker 1: lose thirty dollars per share because you have to buy
Speaker 1: back the borrowed shares to return them to the other investor,
Speaker 1: so White Square shorted game Stop, and then, because a
Speaker 1: bunch of folks really wanted to mess with hedge funds,
Speaker 1: and more than a few of those folks also wanted
Speaker 1: to make some money in the process, a ton of
Speaker 1: small independent investors began buying up game Stop stock that
Speaker 1: eventually drove up the price to a point where when
Speaker 1: it came time for White Square to return those shortened shares,
Speaker 1: the company was hurting pretty badly. Now, for the record,
Speaker 1: White Square reps say that the closure of the hedge
Speaker 1: fund is unrelated to the game Stop stock issue. Instead,
Speaker 1: according to the reps, the issue was that two of
Speaker 1: the really big investors into that hedge fund withdrew their
Speaker 1: investments from the pool, which made the hedge fund untenable,
Speaker 1: and that this really was marking a shift toward a
Speaker 1: different approach to making investments just generally that's happening in
Speaker 1: the market. Which might be true, But I do imagine
Speaker 1: that the company was rocked pretty hard by the game
Speaker 1: Stop issue, just you know, perhaps not enough to precipitate
Speaker 1: the funds actual demise. Over in the UK, authority these
Speaker 1: want to have a word with Amazon and I t
Speaker 1: V News investigation captured footage of Amazon warehouse workers packing
Speaker 1: returned and unsold merchandise, including stuff like laptops, tv other electronics, books,
Speaker 1: into boxes, and those boxes had the word destroy on them,
Speaker 1: and that the workers then loaded trucks down with these
Speaker 1: boxes before driving the trucks over to landfills or recycling centers.
Speaker 1: A former Amazon employee told the investigative team that workers
Speaker 1: were expected to dispose of more than a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: items every week. Activists pounced on this. They pointed out
Speaker 1: the enormous amount of waste that this generates, and they
Speaker 1: also questioned how can a company behave in this way,
Speaker 1: throwing out hundreds of thousands of products each week and
Speaker 1: still remain profitable. As Greta Thunberg pointed out, quote that's
Speaker 1: a clear sign that something is fundamentally wrong end quote.
Speaker 1: And I concur if a company can afford to throw
Speaker 1: out hundreds of thousands of unsold products each month, you know,
Speaker 1: high end products at that, like TVs and computers, then
Speaker 1: something wacky has got to be going on in order
Speaker 1: to keep that company profitable. Now, Amazon reps have actually
Speaker 1: responded to this. They said that no items were actually
Speaker 1: sent to landfills. In the UK though, that could be
Speaker 1: a qualifier, but they rather went to some recycling centers
Speaker 1: for a quote unquote energy recovery, and that the company
Speaker 1: routinely donates unsold items to charitable organizations in the like.
Speaker 1: Other unnamed Amazon employees seem to contradict this, but a
Speaker 1: full investigation would need to follow to really ferret out
Speaker 1: the truth. I think it's pretty phenomenal. It's kind of
Speaker 1: crazy to think about a company literally throwing out hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of products. It just it's so wasteful, and
Speaker 1: you you sit there and think, if you had a
Speaker 1: different approach to business, you wouldn't have that waste, which
Speaker 1: presumably would mean you would profit more. But maybe there's
Speaker 1: other stuff going on that I just don't understand. I
Speaker 1: admit I look at the world when it comes to business.
Speaker 1: I look at the world in a pretty simplistic way,
Speaker 1: and I acknowledge that things are way more complicated than
Speaker 1: I particularly understand. Finally, a change in how Google handles
Speaker 1: unlisted links could mean that we'll see some stuff sort
Speaker 1: of just disappear from the web, or at least become inaccessible.
Speaker 1: So in an email to YouTube creators, I got one
Speaker 1: of these emails. Just so you know, the company wrote quote.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seventeen, we rolled out an update to
Speaker 1: the system that generates new YouTube unlisted links, which included
Speaker 1: security enhancements that make the links for your unlisted videos
Speaker 1: even harder for someone to discover without you sharing with them.
Speaker 1: We're now making changes to older unlisted videos that were
Speaker 1: uploaded before this update took place. End quote. So in
Speaker 1: other words, the company is retroactively applying this updated security
Speaker 1: SCHEMEAU to YouTube and also to Google Drive documents as
Speaker 1: well that have you know, links in them, and users
Speaker 1: will be able to choose one of several options with
Speaker 1: regard to this. They can opt out of this change
Speaker 1: entirely by filling out a form. They have to do
Speaker 1: that by July twenty one in order to keep those
Speaker 1: documents and those videos in their current unlisted states. So
Speaker 1: in other words, no change is made, the unlisted u
Speaker 1: r L remains the same, and that way people who
Speaker 1: have the links to those videos will still be able
Speaker 1: to get them, or embedded videos and other platforms that
Speaker 1: otherwise are unlisted will still be accessible. Or creators can
Speaker 1: change unlisted videos and make them public, which just gets
Speaker 1: around the problem. Now the unlisted videos are public, they're
Speaker 1: publicly available. That will take care of it as well.
Speaker 1: They can also re upload the old video as a
Speaker 1: new unlisted video, so essentially they just swap out one
Speaker 1: for the other, or they can do nothing at all,
Speaker 1: and the unlisted videos that were posted before will switch
Speaker 1: over to become private videos, which means no one will
Speaker 1: be able to access it other than the channel creator
Speaker 1: or channel administrator. Now why is this all important, Well,
Speaker 1: it means that any videos that were made before but
Speaker 1: are unlisted, but are also embedded on other platforms like
Speaker 1: on a blog or something like that, those videos will
Speaker 1: disappear unless the creators actually take one of these options.
Speaker 1: So if I had made a video in two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: and I made it unlisted on my channel, so you
Speaker 1: wouldn't just come across the video if you were to
Speaker 1: visit my channel. However, I then embedded that video on
Speaker 1: say a personal web page or something, then that video
Speaker 1: is going to be a broken link. Later this year,
Speaker 1: you would go and you would find a like one
Speaker 1: of those YouTube embedded videos that just has the little
Speaker 1: X on it where like there's no video there, You
Speaker 1: push play and nothing happens. Because the link doesn't work,
Speaker 1: it's a dead link. The same is true as I
Speaker 1: said with Google Drive links. So if you have links
Speaker 1: to documents created and Google Drive from before, that's unlisted
Speaker 1: documents and things like that, the same sort of rules apply.
Speaker 1: This was all in an effort to improve privacy and security,
Speaker 1: which I think is the right move, but it is
Speaker 1: going to be a hassle for some creators and for
Speaker 1: channels that have been inactive or even abandoned. That might
Speaker 1: mean that that video content will just disappear from Discovery,
Speaker 1: so that videos that people once were able to watch
Speaker 1: suddenly they won't have access to them anymore because those
Speaker 1: will be switched to private and the channel administrators just
Speaker 1: don't deal with that channel anymore, which is kind of
Speaker 1: a bummer. I mean, we always say that everything lasts
Speaker 1: forever on the Internet, but things like this, where you
Speaker 1: break links, that kind of stuff is an exception to
Speaker 1: the rule, and I've certainly had experience with this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff before air a change in policy meant that
Speaker 1: suddenly linked documents were no longer linked, and it is
Speaker 1: a huge pain in the butt when that happens. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's the news for Thursday. June twenty one. I hope
Speaker 1: you all have a great day, a great weekend. As
Speaker 1: I said, it is my birthday weekend, so make sure
Speaker 1: you go out and do something you know, nice and
Speaker 1: thoughtful for someone else. That's that'll be a great birthday
Speaker 1: present for me. Just doesn't have to be big, just
Speaker 1: a nice, thoughtful gesture to someone else. And after you
Speaker 1: do that selfless act, you are to turn your face
Speaker 1: to the heavens and cry out, this was all for you,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, and I'll know wherever I am, i'll know
Speaker 1: that you did that. Now, if you have any suggestions
Speaker 1: for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: reach out to me on Twitter handle is tech Stuff
Speaker 1: h s W. I've been getting a bunch of those recently,
Speaker 1: which is awesome. I am currently still working through the
Speaker 1: glossary of tech to rms, or rather tech acronyms and initialisms,
Speaker 1: But as soon as that series is over, I'm going
Speaker 1: to be tackling some of these suggestions sent in by listeners,
Speaker 1: so you can get your suggestions into and I look
Speaker 1: forward to hearing from you, and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. YEA tech Stuff is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio production. For more podcasts from My heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.