Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He 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 Tuesday,
Speaker 1: March twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, and we start off
Speaker 1: with a little bit of sad news. So last Friday,
Speaker 1: Gordon Moore passed away at the age of ninety four.
Speaker 1: That's a ripe old age. Now I plan to do
Speaker 1: an episode about more to really go into detail about
Speaker 1: his life and contributions. But he is someone that I
Speaker 1: have talked about a lot in past episodes of tech
Speaker 1: Stuff because he's a pretty important person in the world
Speaker 1: of tech. He's the man who first observed that semiconductor
Speaker 1: fabrication companies had followed a particular trajectory, namely that the
Speaker 1: companies were cramming twice as many components onto a square
Speaker 1: inch of silicon every two years or so. So if
Speaker 1: you were able to put ten thousand components on a
Speaker 1: square inch of silicon in year one, two years later,
Speaker 1: by year three, you're cramming twenty thousand on there by
Speaker 1: year five. That would go up to forty thousand and
Speaker 1: so on, and it gets real big, real fast. Now,
Speaker 1: this observation came to be known as Moore's law, which
Speaker 1: is funny because you know, he was making an observation
Speaker 1: and saying that you could predict what would happen based
Speaker 1: on this observation, But he wasn't saying that there was
Speaker 1: some fundamental law that drove this. His initial observations were
Speaker 1: really more about economic factors that would fund that kind
Speaker 1: of innovation and make it necessary in order to be competitive.
Speaker 1: But later interpretations of his observation would kind of boil
Speaker 1: down to a predict that computing processing power doubles every
Speaker 1: two years or so. But Moore's law was just one
Speaker 1: of his big contributions. Another huge one is that he
Speaker 1: was a co founder of Intel. So we'll do a
Speaker 1: full episode about him and his contributions soon, and in
Speaker 1: the meantime, Fair Winds and following sees Gordon Moore. Markets
Speaker 1: Insider reports that, according to analyst Dan Ives, TikTok has
Speaker 1: a ninety percent chance of being banned in the US
Speaker 1: if things continue as they are now. This follows shall
Speaker 1: she Chew, which is TikTok's CEO appearing before Congress. Now,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned last week, I was writing and recording
Speaker 1: during his testimony, so I had to follow up on
Speaker 1: what was going on, and I couldn't watch very much
Speaker 1: of it, y'all because it was not pretty. There was
Speaker 1: some real ethnocentric xenophobic behavior on display in Congress, some
Speaker 1: of it really really ugly, and there were a lot
Speaker 1: of assumptions about choose heritage. It seemed like everybody was
Speaker 1: assuming he's Chinese. He's not. He comes from Singapore, not China.
Speaker 1: There was also a lot of railroading where like no
Speaker 1: one was asking a question at one point, like they
Speaker 1: were essentially making accusations and statements but not asking anything.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of like counterproductive. I mean, if someone's
Speaker 1: there to provide testimony, you're supposed to ask them questions
Speaker 1: so that they can answer, then you follow up. And
Speaker 1: it looked like a lot of them, the people in
Speaker 1: Congress were kind of using it to grandstand, and you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of TikTok folks, like a lot of users
Speaker 1: took the ball and ran with it by creating a
Speaker 1: bunch of satirical videos pointing out how Congress was behaving.
Speaker 1: Of course, TikTok users have their own bias obviously, so
Speaker 1: according to Ives the analyst, TikTok has a couple of
Speaker 1: options if it wants to avoid being obliterated, and it's
Speaker 1: pretty much what we heard a few years back when
Speaker 1: former President Donald Trump started to go after TikTok. The
Speaker 1: company can either hold an initial public offering or IPO
Speaker 1: and go public and in the process presumably break its
Speaker 1: connection with byte Dance, though you would have to take
Speaker 1: some real steps to make sure that happened, or it
Speaker 1: could be sold off to some other company, you know,
Speaker 1: not a Chinese company. Now. Honestly, I don't know how
Speaker 1: to feel about all this. On the one hand, China
Speaker 1: very much is focused on digital espionage. Like that's not
Speaker 1: a controversial thing to say. China's actively pursuing digital espionage
Speaker 1: in multiple venues. I don't know that TikTok's one of
Speaker 1: them necessarily, it wouldn't surprise me if it were. But
Speaker 1: you know, it's there's no denying China's in that business.
Speaker 1: But then so is everybody else, including the United States.
Speaker 1: It's not like China's the outlier here. You can also
Speaker 1: argue that even the private and public companies here in
Speaker 1: the US and the tech sector are, when you get
Speaker 1: down to it, focused on digital espionage with regard to users.
Speaker 1: They are in the business of buying and selling personal
Speaker 1: information about people like us. No one is clean on this.
Speaker 1: In other words, like you can't just single out TikTok
Speaker 1: and say you are bad because you're collecting information, because
Speaker 1: that's the truth across the board. You could say everyone's
Speaker 1: bad and that would be true. But yeah, singling out
Speaker 1: TikTok for that specific purpose doesn't hold a lot of water. Now,
Speaker 1: the national security component does complicate things further, but it
Speaker 1: also creates an opening for xenophobic ideologies to take hold,
Speaker 1: which gets pretty ugly. Like there are elements of the
Speaker 1: rhetoric that we're starting to sound a bit like McCarthyism
Speaker 1: from back in the nineteen fifties. If you don't know
Speaker 1: what that is, you need to look up the Red
Speaker 1: Scare and educate yourself. And you know, some of the
Speaker 1: concerns might be based in reality, but they can become
Speaker 1: exaggerated and also conflated with other things, and it just
Speaker 1: can get very very ugly, very very quickly. So the
Speaker 1: whole thing is a huge mess. And I sure as heck,
Speaker 1: do not know what the best way forward is. I
Speaker 1: just feel pretty comfortable saying whatever the best way happens
Speaker 1: to be, that ain't the way we're going right now.
Speaker 1: Joseph Cox of Motherboard has a piece about the FBI's
Speaker 1: contract with a company called Team Simru or perhaps Simru
Speaker 1: it's see why Mru, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
Speaker 1: And the contract is to acquire what is called NetFlow data.
Speaker 1: This is kind of like a big picture of view
Speaker 1: of information that's moving across networks like the Internet. You
Speaker 1: can see which servers are connecting to one another, transmitting
Speaker 1: information from endpoint to endpoint. So Team Simru is able
Speaker 1: to get this data by doing deals with Internet service providers.
Speaker 1: Team Simru offers ISPs threat detection services and in return,
Speaker 1: the ISPs trade this data, which Team Simru then sells
Speaker 1: to clients like the FBI. Apparently. Now. The reason this
Speaker 1: is important is it marks a kind of loophole that
Speaker 1: the FBI has leaned on in order to get an
Speaker 1: eye on data transmissions without first going through the legal
Speaker 1: process to do so lawfully. Right, instead of getting a warrant,
Speaker 1: a digital warrant, they just buy the data outright. Now,
Speaker 1: NetFlow is not quite the same thing as spying on
Speaker 1: the actual information being exchanged itself. It can, however, include
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff like what you are l you're visiting,
Speaker 1: so you know which websites people are going to during
Speaker 1: a given Internet session, and NetFlow can definitely provide clues
Speaker 1: as to potential illegal activity, so you might be able
Speaker 1: to find which servers are associated with a hacker group,
Speaker 1: for example. But the issue is that metadata can tell
Speaker 1: us a lot about a person by itself. Like you
Speaker 1: might think the information within a conversation is important, and
Speaker 1: it is, but the metadata about that conversation can give
Speaker 1: you a lot of clues all on its own. Now,
Speaker 1: I've mentioned this before, but there have been a lot
Speaker 1: of demonstrations showing that with just a few data points
Speaker 1: you can really narrow down the specific Internet users identity
Speaker 1: with incredible accuracy and precision. So this practice of just
Speaker 1: buying information from companies like team cymru it gets into
Speaker 1: some really dangerous surveillance state territory. Here, if you'd like
Speaker 1: to learn more, you can visit vice dot com and
Speaker 1: just read the article. Here is the FBI's contract to
Speaker 1: buy mass Internet data. The facial recognition company clear View,
Speaker 1: which built out an enormous database of images using questionable means,
Speaker 1: mainly scraping social network platforms to gather digital photos without
Speaker 1: first getting the consent of users of those platforms, says
Speaker 1: that it has facilitated almost a million searchers or US police.
Speaker 1: This is according to the company itself that has made
Speaker 1: that claim. They revealed this startling information and a piece
Speaker 1: for the BBC. Clearview has received some high profile criticism
Speaker 1: in the United States, and several cities here in the
Speaker 1: US outright banned their police forces from using the service.
Speaker 1: They say do not make use of clear Views services. Now,
Speaker 1: as I've mentioned several times in the past, facial recognition
Speaker 1: technology is far from perfect and frequently encounters issues when
Speaker 1: identifying people of color in particular, and ultimately, these are
Speaker 1: the same people who received dispropor or sets, scrutiny and
Speaker 1: abuse from law enforcement. Making matters worse is that it's
Speaker 1: very difficult to say which police departments have been frequent
Speaker 1: customers for clear View, because there are very few laws
Speaker 1: and regulations that require police to disclose that kind of information.
Speaker 1: So this lack of transparency creates a further gap of
Speaker 1: distrust between police and citizens, and scraping social media for
Speaker 1: data like this typically goes against the terms of services
Speaker 1: for those social networks. Facebook has come down hard on
Speaker 1: companies that have tried to scrape Facebook in order to
Speaker 1: gather data. Also academic researchers. Facebook's really gone hard against
Speaker 1: academic researchers doing that. So essentially, companies like Meta slash
Speaker 1: Facebook don't like anyone else being able to do what
Speaker 1: they are very very definitely doing themselves. I mean it's
Speaker 1: I don't have information on it. I cannot say with
Speaker 1: evidence that they do, but it would shock me if
Speaker 1: they are not making use of that technology that they
Speaker 1: don't want anyone else to be able to use on
Speaker 1: their platforms. Okay, with that cheerful note, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break. We'll come back with some more tech news. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. So this past weekend, an organization called the
Speaker 1: Military Cyber Professional Association, or MCPA, petitioned lawmakers to create
Speaker 1: a new branch of the US military that would focus
Speaker 1: solely on digital and cyber threats. The group, which consists
Speaker 1: of folks who have worked in digital security within the military,
Speaker 1: some of them current military officials, some of them former ones.
Speaker 1: They say that one of the largest challenges that the
Speaker 1: United States faces with digital warfare in mind is that
Speaker 1: up to now, each branch of the military has its
Speaker 1: own independent methodology to fight cyber threats, and there is
Speaker 1: a unified office that can take some actions, but it's
Speaker 1: not a full branch of the military. So the MCPA
Speaker 1: is saying this creates gaps in US defenses and that
Speaker 1: if we are to actually have a real strong national
Speaker 1: security approach to cybersecurity, there needs to be a military
Speaker 1: branch specifically dedicated to cyber warfare and defense. This branch
Speaker 1: could establish best practices, it could spearhead projects to protect
Speaker 1: the United States, and it would be a fully funded
Speaker 1: branch of the military, as opposed to something that could
Speaker 1: see its funding ebb and flow based upon the individual
Speaker 1: branches of the military that already exist. We've already established
Speaker 1: a new branch of the military here in the United
Speaker 1: States in the recent past, the Space Force being the
Speaker 1: most recent branch. So if this did happen, I mean
Speaker 1: there is precedents, recent precedents. Before Space Force, it was
Speaker 1: like seventy two years since the last time the US
Speaker 1: had created a branch of the military. But Hey, we're
Speaker 1: on a roll now, right, I mean two, that's a streak.
Speaker 1: We can start creating branches for everything. Whether or not
Speaker 1: anyone actually makes a move on this to turn this
Speaker 1: proposal into something more actionable remains to be seen. There
Speaker 1: does not appear to currently be a lot of behind
Speaker 1: this in Congress or in the executive branch, so we
Speaker 1: may not see any movement on this in the near future.
Speaker 1: It may take a while. I do think that it's
Speaker 1: not a bad idea to establish such a branch, to
Speaker 1: have something that is well funded and can attract talent
Speaker 1: and maintain and keep that talent in order to fight
Speaker 1: off things like the various hacker groups that are constantly
Speaker 1: poking at vulnerabilities within the United States to find a
Speaker 1: way to get a foothold. I think it's important to
Speaker 1: establish a defense against that, and the longer we wait,
Speaker 1: the harder it will be to do it effectively. So personally,
Speaker 1: I think it's not a bad idea. I'm not a
Speaker 1: huge fan of creating more military necessarily, but this is
Speaker 1: the way the future is going, and with the increase
Speaker 1: in things like ai USE, it's going to be a necessity,
Speaker 1: and I would rather see us be proactive than reactive.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're already going to be at least a
Speaker 1: little reactive, but you know, we could argue we're proactive.
Speaker 1: Zoe Schiffer over at Platformer has a great article titled
Speaker 1: the Secret list of Twitter VIPs getting boosted over everyone else,
Speaker 1: which obviously reveals how some of Twitter's internal documents show
Speaker 1: that the platform is being, let's say, inconsistent with how
Speaker 1: it applies the rules. I'm sure this comes as a
Speaker 1: massive shock to everyone, all right. So the heart of
Speaker 1: the matter comes from Elon Musk saying that to hold
Speaker 1: onto that blue verified check mark that some users have,
Speaker 1: they're going to have to pony up the eight bucks
Speaker 1: a month subscription fee to Twitter Blue. Or actually it's
Speaker 1: more than that, if you're talking about a brand and
Speaker 1: like a company as opposed to an individual. Elon Musk
Speaker 1: says that this is really about treating everyone equally, that
Speaker 1: people shouldn't be elevated over others with that blue check mark.
Speaker 1: But already that's just a fricking lie, right, because if
Speaker 1: it were about treating everyone equally, either you get rid
Speaker 1: of the blue check mark entirely so no one has it,
Speaker 1: or everybody gets the blue check mark, which is the
Speaker 1: same thing as nobody having it, but you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to pay for it. That's not about treating people equally.
Speaker 1: You're talking about a paid for version and a non
Speaker 1: paid for version. That's not equal. Besides, the blue check
Speaker 1: mark was never intended to be a status symbol. That's
Speaker 1: why it turned into what it was meant to be.
Speaker 1: Was a way for Twitter to show that it had
Speaker 1: verified the identity of that Twitter account, and that Twitter
Speaker 1: could vouch that that account actually did represent the person
Speaker 1: or brand that it was connected to. So if you
Speaker 1: saw I don't know Nicholas Holt on Twitter and there's
Speaker 1: a blue check mark, you know, oh, that actually does
Speaker 1: belong to the actor Nicholas Holt, or probably to his
Speaker 1: PR personnel who handle his social media accounts, but you
Speaker 1: would know that that's the official one and it's not
Speaker 1: just someone claiming to be that. That was the reason
Speaker 1: for the verified check mark. It was to verify the
Speaker 1: person was who they said they were. But of course
Speaker 1: the checkmark did become a sort of social capital kind
Speaker 1: of thing, like people were like, I'm important enough to
Speaker 1: have a check mark, and that this somehow raised them
Speaker 1: in social status above everyone else on Twitter, where social
Speaker 1: status means really nothing, I would argue. I mean, I
Speaker 1: say that as someone who got a blue check mark anyway.
Speaker 1: Now the new version is weird because what the blue
Speaker 1: check mark means is that the person's willing to pay
Speaker 1: a fee to keep that blue check mark. I don't
Speaker 1: know when that actually comes into play. I haven't even
Speaker 1: seen a message saying hey, you're gonna need to pay
Speaker 1: a subscription to keep your blue check mark. It may
Speaker 1: have come through and I just ignored it because I
Speaker 1: don't pop on Twitter that much anymore. So it's entirely
Speaker 1: possible that's just on me, not on Twitter. Anyway. It
Speaker 1: turns out that this version, the new version, that Elon
Speaker 1: Musk is talking about, is even less fair than what
Speaker 1: we had heard before, because while he's saying, hey, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to pay if you want that blue check mark,
Speaker 1: there are around thirty five VIP users of Twitter who
Speaker 1: not only are secure with their status, they actually get
Speaker 1: a boost from Twitter. They get higher visibility than everybody
Speaker 1: else does so that they appear in more Twitter timelines.
Speaker 1: Now it will come as no surprise that Elon Musk
Speaker 1: is in there. We've talked about in the past, how
Speaker 1: Elon Musk has his Twitter feed boosted above other stuff
Speaker 1: so that he shows up in more feeds. But others
Speaker 1: are also on that list, and it ranges from ultra
Speaker 1: conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to the progressive politician Alexandria Okazia Cortez.
Speaker 1: And then there's a few celebrities thrown in there. There's
Speaker 1: some athletes in there, there's other politicians in there. It's
Speaker 1: a real animal farm situation. You know, all Twitter users
Speaker 1: are equal, but some are more equal than others. Probably
Speaker 1: not a big surprise to most of you out there.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a big surprise to me. But again, just
Speaker 1: more evidence that things at Twitter are our topsy turvy.
Speaker 1: And hey, if your account doesn't have that paid for
Speaker 1: blue check mark, it sounds like your tweets ain't ever
Speaker 1: gonna show up as a recommended tweet in the four
Speaker 1: you page of Twitter. So if you go to Twitter,
Speaker 1: you'll see there's like a four you thing, And the
Speaker 1: stuff in the four you section is curated for you.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be stuff that the algorithm serves to
Speaker 1: you that you are likely to find interesting or engaging.
Speaker 1: That's the purpose. Actual practice varies because goodness knows. The
Speaker 1: last time I checked it out, I was like, none
Speaker 1: of this feels like it's for me, but whatever. So anyway,
Speaker 1: if you don't have a blue check mark, if you
Speaker 1: haven't paid that subscription fee, then your tweets aren't going
Speaker 1: to be showing up in anyone's for you page. So
Speaker 1: I guess this is an incentive to try and get
Speaker 1: more people to pay for that check mark so that
Speaker 1: they get increased visibility on the platform. This change will
Speaker 1: take effect on April fifteenth, according to Elon Musk. Not
Speaker 1: only that, but only the paid for accounts will be
Speaker 1: able to vote in Twitter polls. Now. Musk says this
Speaker 1: is to fight off the issue with AI bots, which
Speaker 1: is funny because I thought his whole plan was to
Speaker 1: eliminate bots from the platform. I remember distinctly him talking
Speaker 1: about this in the lead up to him purchasing Twitter,
Speaker 1: that this was a big part of what his plan was.
Speaker 1: But I guess now he's saying, Nope, you can't do that.
Speaker 1: It's impossible. So the bots are going to ruin everything
Speaker 1: like the ding dang poles unless we make it a
Speaker 1: paid for service. So this could also maybe have something
Speaker 1: to do with the fact that, you know, a few
Speaker 1: months ago, he ran a poll asking if he should
Speaker 1: step down from Twitter, and the majority voted yes, and then,
Speaker 1: you know, one of his followers later suggested that maybe
Speaker 1: only people who are subscribe to Twitter Blue should be
Speaker 1: able to vote in those kinds of polls, and he
Speaker 1: was like, huh, interesting, world may never care. I mean,
Speaker 1: the world may never know whatever. CNBC reports that Twitter
Speaker 1: also applied for a subpoena against gethub, the collaborative developer platform,
Speaker 1: because someone using the handle free speech Enthusiast shared what
Speaker 1: appeared to be segments of Twitter's own source code. Get
Speaker 1: Hub complied with the court order and remove the code,
Speaker 1: so it's no longer up there. Interestingly, Musk himself had
Speaker 1: previously said he would make the source code for Twitter's
Speaker 1: recommendation algorithm and open source code in an attempt to
Speaker 1: suss out if there is any actual bias or preference.
Speaker 1: You know, there are a lot of allegations that Twitter
Speaker 1: downplay conservative messaging and prevents it from getting as large
Speaker 1: an audience as other messages, so making it open source
Speaker 1: would allow people to comb through the code and see
Speaker 1: is in fact bias there. Also to find any mistakes
Speaker 1: in the algorithm, or a way to create the algorithm
Speaker 1: so that it is more effective in what it's supposed
Speaker 1: to do. And the whole idea is that this is
Speaker 1: going to create better transparency and fairness moving forward. But
Speaker 1: you know, it hasn't happened yet. And as we just said,
Speaker 1: Twitter moved to strike source code off of GitHub, though
Speaker 1: I don't know necessarily that the source code in question
Speaker 1: related to the recommendation algorithm, the stuff that was on GitHub,
Speaker 1: and obviously it should be done on Twitter zone terms.
Speaker 1: I do believe that. I'm just I don't know when
Speaker 1: we're going to see that code actually become open source. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got a few more news stories in the tech
Speaker 1: world to cover before we wrap this up, so let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break and we'll be right back. The
Speaker 1: chief technology officer of Nvidia, guy named Michael Kagan, recently
Speaker 1: dismissed cryptocurrencies, saying they don't quote bring anything useful for
Speaker 1: society end quote. This is according to an article in
Speaker 1: the Guardian. This is interesting. It was not that long
Speaker 1: ago that Nvidio was selling truckloads of GPUs to the
Speaker 1: crypto mining community. It was really big business, so much
Speaker 1: so that it actually became very difficult for anyone else
Speaker 1: to find a new GPU, and if you did find one,
Speaker 1: chances are the price was marked up so high that
Speaker 1: it would be difficult to justify buying one. The aftermarket
Speaker 1: on these things was insane. You had people either buying
Speaker 1: them up to use as crypto mining rigs, or buying
Speaker 1: them up and then selling them at an insane markup
Speaker 1: to gamers. But then Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that had fueled
Speaker 1: this GPU frenzy, finally made the trend transition from proof
Speaker 1: of work to proof of steak operations. So with proof
Speaker 1: of work, you need a lot of computing processing power
Speaker 1: to be a successful miner in the system and to
Speaker 1: be awarded new crypto tokens by participating in that system.
Speaker 1: But with proof of steak, you just have to have
Speaker 1: a big old pile of cryptocins already, and then you
Speaker 1: stake some portion of those crypto coins in the system,
Speaker 1: and the more you stake, the more likely you are
Speaker 1: going to make even more money. Well, once it made
Speaker 1: that transition, you suddenly didn't need all those GPUs to
Speaker 1: just churn away at all hours of day and night,
Speaker 1: so really overnight the demand for GPUs plummeted because now
Speaker 1: cryptomners had no use for them, and not every cryptocin
Speaker 1: has moved off of proof of work. There are cryptocurrencies
Speaker 1: out there that still depend on proof of work, like
Speaker 1: Bitcoin being the big one. Bitcoin is such a big
Speaker 1: fish that GPUs don't have enough output. They They're processing
Speaker 1: power is nowhere close to being competitive for bitcoin mining,
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't buy a GPU if you wanted to
Speaker 1: try and be a bitcoin miner. And then for smaller
Speaker 1: crypto tokens, you know, less valuable ones, GPUs are overkill
Speaker 1: because you'd spend more on electricity bills than you would
Speaker 1: make through mining, so it doesn't make sense to use
Speaker 1: GPUs for that. So in other words, what I'm saying
Speaker 1: is it sounds like a little bit of suspicious timing
Speaker 1: for Kagan to say that that cryptocurrency offers nothing useful
Speaker 1: to society. It certainly offers nothing really useful for Nvidia
Speaker 1: right now, but like, why are you saying nothing? Like
Speaker 1: it's nothing useful to society at this point. Now. I
Speaker 1: don't mean to say that I disagree with them. I
Speaker 1: actually am you know, very hard on cryptocurrencies. If you've
Speaker 1: been listening to this show. You know that, But I
Speaker 1: do feel like if ethereum, we're still proof of work.
Speaker 1: If it hadn't made that transition, I dealt Kagan would
Speaker 1: have said this, that's what I'm saying. Maybe he would have.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm being too cynical, but it seems to be
Speaker 1: one of those things where, like, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: nasty break up, one person breaks up with the other
Speaker 1: and the other person's like, well, I never loved you anyway.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what it feels like to me. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'm being too harsh here, But what does Kagan say
Speaker 1: is useful to society? Well, that would be AI. And
Speaker 1: there's here's a big shock AI. A lot of those
Speaker 1: applications lean hard on parallel processing, which happens to be
Speaker 1: something that GPUs are really good at. So the thing
Speaker 1: that no longer needs GPUs is useless to society, but
Speaker 1: the thing that really does need GPUs is going to
Speaker 1: be super useful. GOT it doesn't seem like there's any
Speaker 1: bias going on there at all. Huh. Reuters reports that
Speaker 1: the United States Commodity Trading Commission or CFTC, has sued Binance,
Speaker 1: the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. They also sued Binance's founder,
Speaker 1: Chong pen Xao Akacz. According to Reuters, the charge is
Speaker 1: that Binance illegally quote offered and executed commodity derivatives transactions
Speaker 1: on behalf of US persons end quote. Essentially, the CFTC
Speaker 1: says that Binance was operating in such a way as
Speaker 1: to avoid compliance with US laws securities laws in particular,
Speaker 1: and Binance says that it has worked hard to make
Speaker 1: sure that it doesn't have US users on its platform.
Speaker 1: So even if it were doing the things that the
Speaker 1: CFTC says it's doing, it doesn't apply because it didn't
Speaker 1: involve any US transactions in the first place. There is
Speaker 1: a US based version of Binance, and the relationship between
Speaker 1: that entity and the main Binances it's kind of like
Speaker 1: one of those Facebook relationship statuses. Know It's complicated. CNBC
Speaker 1: reports that the giant Chinese e commerce company Ali Baba
Speaker 1: is splitting into six business groups, and that these groups,
Speaker 1: with the exception of one of them, could potentially spin
Speaker 1: off to become their own independent company. Each group will
Speaker 1: have its own CEO and its own board of directors,
Speaker 1: and the groups include a cloud intelligence group, which current
Speaker 1: Ali Baba CEO Daniel Joan will oversee a Talbau Tamaal
Speaker 1: Commerce group which will focus on online shopping platforms. This
Speaker 1: one will continue to operate as a subsidiary of Ali
Speaker 1: Baba even if the other businesses spin off successfully. There's
Speaker 1: there's a smart logistics company or business group, a global
Speaker 1: digital commerce business group, a digital media and entertainment group,
Speaker 1: and a local services group. Now the reason for this
Speaker 1: is probably due to the fact that Ali Baba lost
Speaker 1: around six hundred billion dollars in value over recent months,
Speaker 1: and so this is an attempt to reorganize and allow
Speaker 1: each business group to focus on what it does without
Speaker 1: having to rely on the company as a whole to
Speaker 1: support each business decision. So we'll see whether or not
Speaker 1: this ends up having a net positive effect on the company.
Speaker 1: Lift is getting a new CEO. According to CNBC, Logan Green,
Speaker 1: the current CEO and a co founder of the company,
Speaker 1: will step down on April seventeenth. David Risher, who formerly
Speaker 1: worked at Amazon as an executive, will take over as
Speaker 1: CEO of Lift. In addition, another co founder, John Zimmer,
Speaker 1: who was serving as president of Lift, will be stepping
Speaker 1: down and the Chairman of the board. Sean Agaroal will
Speaker 1: step down as chairman but will remain on the board
Speaker 1: of directors. Logan Green, the current CEO who's stepping down,
Speaker 1: will take his place as chairman. So why the change, Well,
Speaker 1: kind of like Ali Baba, Lift has been in a
Speaker 1: really rough spot over the last year. Stock prices dropped
Speaker 1: by around seventy percent year over year, So my guess
Speaker 1: is that this is a big reorg push to try
Speaker 1: and turn the company around and get those share prices
Speaker 1: up and make stockholders happy. Amazon meanwhile, failed to get
Speaker 1: a massive lawsuit thrown out of court last week. A
Speaker 1: class action lawsuit alleges that Amazon engaged in anti competitive
Speaker 1: practices that artificially drove prices higher through other retailers who
Speaker 1: depend upon the Amazon platform. Namely, that Amazon had a
Speaker 1: policy that prevents retailers from offering lower prices for goods
Speaker 1: sold outside of Amazon if they also wanted to sell
Speaker 1: those products on the Amazon platform. So it's that kind
Speaker 1: of price fixing, is what the argument is here. The
Speaker 1: judge hearing the arguments rejected Amazon's objections to the case,
Speaker 1: so it can move forward through the court system. If
Speaker 1: Amazon ultimately loses this case, it could face damages in
Speaker 1: the billions of dollars, up to a potential one hundred
Speaker 1: seventy two billion. Now that I expect it would ever
Speaker 1: get to that. I think if Amazon lawyers suspected that
Speaker 1: they would be unable to win the case, it would
Speaker 1: go to a settlement. It would shock me if it
Speaker 1: was otherwise. But still pretty massive deal there. And finally,
Speaker 1: we've seen dozens of big companies announced massive layoffs for
Speaker 1: the past few months, and Disney is no exception. Bob
Speaker 1: Iger who quickly returned to Disney to replace Bob Chapeck
Speaker 1: as CEO, and keep in mind Chapec was Bob Iger's replacement.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, Iger said that Disney would be
Speaker 1: downsizing to the tune of around seven thousand employees. Now
Speaker 1: it sounds like the company's Metaverse team, which had around
Speaker 1: fifty people in it, are among those who saw their
Speaker 1: jobs eliminated. Now, I'm not sure that this is a
Speaker 1: commentary on the Metaverse as a whole. You could see
Speaker 1: this as Disney looking at something that at best is
Speaker 1: going to take several years to become a thing and saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, we need to focus our resources onto.
Speaker 1: Here and now, and we can worry about the future
Speaker 1: once we have stabilized, or you could look at it
Speaker 1: as Disney losing confidence that the metaverse is ever going
Speaker 1: to be anything more than a curiosity. Either way, it
Speaker 1: really stinks for so many people to get hit with
Speaker 1: job cuts. When it's happening across so many companies, particularly
Speaker 1: in the tech sector, you really start to worry for
Speaker 1: folks and hope that they can find a job that
Speaker 1: makes good use of their skills and their knowledge and experience. Plus,
Speaker 1: you know, it would be nice if it was a
Speaker 1: job that they also liked. I guess, you know, you
Speaker 1: can't ask for too much, I suppose, But yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know if this means that the metaverse is on hold.
Speaker 1: I suspect that what we're seeing right now means that
Speaker 1: it's going to take even longer for whatever the metaverse
Speaker 1: is going to be for it to emerge, and it
Speaker 1: may end up having a big effect on how the
Speaker 1: metaverse emerges. It may mean that we get a very
Speaker 1: different kind of metaverse at some point in the future
Speaker 1: then we would if the economy hadn't gone into this
Speaker 1: economic uncertainty that we're in right now. So hard to say,
Speaker 1: I know again, just like cryptocurrency, I've been very skeptical
Speaker 1: about the metaverse, but that's largely because I see it
Speaker 1: as this poorly defined concept that a lot of companies
Speaker 1: are trying to rush into to either claim a space
Speaker 1: in when there's no real space there, or they're doing
Speaker 1: their darnedest to be the entity that defines what the
Speaker 1: metaverse is, which rarely ends up benefiting everybody. It largely
Speaker 1: benefits whoever planted their flag in the first place. So
Speaker 1: I'm still very skeptical about the whole thing. Also, I'm
Speaker 1: getting older, Like we got to establish that every time, right,
Speaker 1: I'm getting older, and as a person who's getting older,
Speaker 1: I'm running into the risk of being unable to see
Speaker 1: the potential benefits of emerging technologies. So I fully admit
Speaker 1: that that's entirely possible. It could very well be that,
Speaker 1: you know, in twenty years time, everyone will be looking
Speaker 1: back on the metaversus being the truly revolutionary wave that
Speaker 1: transformed the world for the better, and everybody's super happy
Speaker 1: about it, and I'll just be the grouchy old man
Speaker 1: in the shit in the woods who yells at passing clouds.
Speaker 1: Entirely possible. I admit it. All right. That's it for
Speaker 1: this episode of tech Stuff. Hope you are all well.
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