Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: and I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? It's time for the tech News for
Speaker 1: a Thursday, August tenth, twenty twenty three. First up, I've
Speaker 1: got a short update on the Epic versus Apple legal saga.
Speaker 1: So for people who aren't up to speed, Epic is
Speaker 1: the company that makes the insanely popular game Fortnite. That
Speaker 1: game is available on a lot of platforms, including Apple's iOS.
Speaker 1: Fortnite's revenue depends heavily on in app purchases, but Apple
Speaker 1: has this pesky policy in that Apple takes a healthy
Speaker 1: chunk between fifteen to thirty percent of every in app transaction. Epic,
Speaker 1: in an attempt to circumvent those rules and to keep
Speaker 1: more of the money for themselves, urged players on iOS
Speaker 1: to make transactions outside of the app that would then
Speaker 1: be applied to their accounts in game. Apple objected to
Speaker 1: this workaround and removed Fortnite from its app store, and
Speaker 1: this started a big old legal battle between the companies,
Speaker 1: with Epic arguing that Apple's policies are predatory and they're
Speaker 1: anti competitive. Because Apple requires developers to use Apple's in
Speaker 1: house payment processing system for in app payments, you can't
Speaker 1: go anywhere else. This legal battle has gone back and
Speaker 1: forth over the last few years. Sometimes Epic makes some progress,
Speaker 1: sometimes Apple wins some progress. In California, Epic won a
Speaker 1: case where a judge ruled that Apple had been engaging
Speaker 1: in anti competitive practices and that the company should allow
Speaker 1: for alternative forms of payment. Apple then appealed that ruling
Speaker 1: to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Apple partially
Speaker 1: won that case. One of the things that one was
Speaker 1: a stay on that specific part of the ruling, and
Speaker 1: that gave Apple three months to petition the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: to hear the case. Epic then appealed directly to the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court in an effort to negate the stay that
Speaker 1: the Ninth Court Circuit Court awarded, and Epic argued that
Speaker 1: otherwise allowing Apple to continue this practice would cause harm
Speaker 1: not just to Epic but to other developers as well
Speaker 1: as to consumers. The Supreme Court denied epics plea to
Speaker 1: negate the stay, so the stay remains in place. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess we have to wait and see if the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court will hear out the actual Apple versus Epic case. Also,
Speaker 1: while Apple has budged a bit on its policy about
Speaker 1: having to use Apple's payment systems in other places, the
Speaker 1: company reserves the right to charge a commission on payments
Speaker 1: that are outside of its own in house system. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, Apple still is pointing to a cut
Speaker 1: of every transaction even if you're not using Apple's own
Speaker 1: payments system. Sometimes that cut means that it actually ends
Speaker 1: up being more expensive to use an alternative than to
Speaker 1: use Apple, which I'm sure is going to initiate a
Speaker 1: lot more court cases because that still sounds anti competitive
Speaker 1: as all get out to my ears. On Tuesday, Nvidia
Speaker 1: announced that its new GH two hundred chip is going
Speaker 1: to be ideal for companies that are in the AI sector,
Speaker 1: especially ones that are building out things like large language models.
Speaker 1: The GH two hundred combines the same GPU chip as
Speaker 1: the H one hundred, which is like the flagship chip
Speaker 1: that Nvidia makes for the AI industry right now, but
Speaker 1: this one also pairs with it a seventy two core
Speaker 1: ARMS central processor seventy two cores and also a whopping
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty one gigabytes of memory. That's insane.
Speaker 1: The chip are going to start shipping next year, maybe
Speaker 1: second quarter. I don't often talk about the hardware side
Speaker 1: of the AI boom. I talk a lot about the
Speaker 1: models and stuff, but not necessarily the underlying hardware. But
Speaker 1: you have to understand it is companies like Nvidia that
Speaker 1: are making that hardware viable right that it's creating a
Speaker 1: market for AI hardware, and it's really enabling the AI
Speaker 1: boom in many ways because more companies can have access
Speaker 1: to the actual circuitry used to run this and not
Speaker 1: just rely upon cloud based strategies that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I should probably do a full episode about
Speaker 1: the underlying hardware that is powering the AI revolution. The
Speaker 1: White House is increasing restrictions on US investments into Chinese
Speaker 1: tech companies, specifically ones that are in the AI, high tech, chip,
Speaker 1: and quantum computing sectors. Those three sectors in partic This
Speaker 1: executive order will actually go into effect next year and
Speaker 1: will require American companies to disclose investments in these Chinese sectors. Now,
Speaker 1: previously the US has banned exports of American tech to China.
Speaker 1: Now we're seeing kind of a similar move covering investment
Speaker 1: into Chinese tech companies. The Biden administration sites concerns over
Speaker 1: national security as the motivation for these bands. China's Commerce
Speaker 1: Ministry has denounced this strategy. The ministry says that it
Speaker 1: quote deviates from the principles of fair competition and the
Speaker 1: market economy that the US consistently advocates end quote, And
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's true. I think it does
Speaker 1: like it does seem to fly in the face of
Speaker 1: the general market velosophy of the United States. However, we
Speaker 1: also have to acknowledge that China has backed countless hacker
Speaker 1: groups and attacks against US companies and government agencies, and
Speaker 1: China has infiltrated systems left, right and center in the
Speaker 1: United States and in other places. So there's definitely an
Speaker 1: element of self preservation going on here. It's not just
Speaker 1: a case of we're treating you unfairly. It's we're being
Speaker 1: attacked and we're trying to find ways to mitigate that. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of critics are saying, this actually isn't that
Speaker 1: likely to affect China that much, because it's not like
Speaker 1: China has a shortage of access to money to fund
Speaker 1: these kind of things. And there are other investors around
Speaker 1: the world who seem to be a little reluctant to
Speaker 1: acquiesce to a ban on investing in such Chinese technologies.
Speaker 1: But this is going to have a big impact on
Speaker 1: venture firms and private equity groups here in the United
Speaker 1: States that we're hoping to make some serious bank while
Speaker 1: backing Chinese tech initiatives. Dan Ackerman, the editor in chief
Speaker 1: of Gizmoto and the author of a book titled The
Speaker 1: Tetris Effect, is soon Apple, the Tetris company, and the
Speaker 1: filmmakers behind the movie Tetris, which is an Apple TV
Speaker 1: Plus film. Apple produced it. Ackerman is claiming that the
Speaker 1: filmmakers have plagiarized his work, that screenwriter Noah Pink adapted
Speaker 1: Ackerman's book without his permission and without compensation. And this
Speaker 1: gets tricky because both the movie and the book are
Speaker 1: detailing the real world events that led to Tetris emerging
Speaker 1: from the then Soviet Union to become a global phenomenon,
Speaker 1: and how a Dutch American businessman played a pivotal role
Speaker 1: in that story. This is a real world story, so
Speaker 1: it's been told multiple times. It's not like Ackerman was
Speaker 1: the first person to write about this. Now that being said,
Speaker 1: Ackerman argues that the film contextualizes the story as if
Speaker 1: it were like a Cold War era thriller, which his
Speaker 1: book also did. So he says, it's not just that
Speaker 1: we're both telling the same story, it's that we're telling
Speaker 1: it the same way, and his lawsuit lists twenty two
Speaker 1: points of similarity between his book and the film's screenplay
Speaker 1: or the film itself. Ackerman also alleges that the Tetris
Speaker 1: Company and its CEO, Maya Rodgers, denied Ackerman's attempts to
Speaker 1: secure film and TV rights to his book by denying
Speaker 1: him the use of the Tetris license. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: he couldn't end up, you know, having the film rights
Speaker 1: or TV rights to his story because Tetris would not
Speaker 1: allow him to license the IP at all. And how
Speaker 1: do you tell the story that way? This kind of
Speaker 1: feels similar to me to the recent film The Beanie Bubble.
Speaker 1: That's where we got the story behind the people who
Speaker 1: created beanie babies, but the film didn't manage to land
Speaker 1: a license to actually show beanie babies in the movie,
Speaker 1: so they have stand ins instead. There are no actual
Speaker 1: beanie babies in the Beanie bubble film. It's really weird anyway.
Speaker 1: Ackerman says that the Tetris company stonewalled his own attempts
Speaker 1: to have his work adapted into a film and simultaneously
Speaker 1: used his book as source material for a movie of
Speaker 1: their own. So he is seeking around five million dollars.
Speaker 1: And this might not be an open and shutcase even
Speaker 1: with those points of similarity, because the people that the
Speaker 1: stories about happened to be the producers of the movie,
Speaker 1: right like the people that are the the the protagonists
Speaker 1: of this story are producing the film. So there could
Speaker 1: be a very valid argument to make that they were
Speaker 1: the source of all the information used in the screenplay
Speaker 1: and that they were also the principal sources for Akerman,
Speaker 1: and that the argument is that the story wasn't taken
Speaker 1: from Akerman, The story was taken from the people who
Speaker 1: experienced it, and they just happened to be the source
Speaker 1: for both works. That could be the argument we see.
Speaker 1: Although if Akerman is able to argue that the presentation
Speaker 1: of the story is the way it is because of
Speaker 1: his book, then I think he's got a fairly solid case.
Speaker 1: It's just this is a tough situation. We'll have to
Speaker 1: see if the court allows all the blocks to fall
Speaker 1: into place, or if this is one of those cases
Speaker 1: where you accidentally drop that S shape block in the
Speaker 1: wrong spot and really mess things up for yourself. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break and we'll be
Speaker 1: back with some more news stories. US regulatory agencies are
Speaker 1: coming down hard on nearly a dozen financial institutions relying
Speaker 1: on so called off channel messaging apps to conduct financial deals,
Speaker 1: you know, like discussing trades and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And that is a big no note because some of
Speaker 1: these messaging apps they don't keep a log of messages,
Speaker 1: and the financial sector is heavily regulated, so these kinds
Speaker 1: of deals aren't allowed to happen off the books. That
Speaker 1: would be illegal. Everything is supposed to be well documented
Speaker 1: and preserved, and the nature of these apps makes that impossible.
Speaker 1: So in total, the regulators hit eleven financial institutions with
Speaker 1: more than half a billion dollars in fines. If you're curious,
Speaker 1: the one that was hit hardest was Wells. Fargo SEC
Speaker 1: hit them for one hundred and twenty five million dollars,
Speaker 1: and the Commodity Futures Training Commission hit them for another
Speaker 1: seventy five million dollars. On top of that, the regulators
Speaker 1: say that the violations occurred at all different levels within
Speaker 1: these financial institutions. This wasn't a case of like some
Speaker 1: new hire not understanding that they can't use watts app
Speaker 1: to talk about big trades. It was all through different levels,
Speaker 1: including supervisors, managers, leadership, that kind of stuff. So big o' yikes.
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia has followed the EU's lead when it comes
Speaker 1: to mandating a USB C charging port on smartphones moving forward.
Speaker 1: You may recall that the EU ruled on this matter
Speaker 1: not too long ago, and that's going to necessitate companies
Speaker 1: like Apple to migrate away from proprietary ports, in Apple's case,
Speaker 1: the lightning port, in order to adopt the USBC standard,
Speaker 1: and this would make charging ports universal across the EU
Speaker 1: and then obviously across Saudi Arabia. Now, so the philosophy
Speaker 1: behind this is that it helps cut way down on
Speaker 1: e waste because you would go out, you'd buy a phone,
Speaker 1: and you would buy a USBC charging cable, and you
Speaker 1: could still use that same cable even as you upgrade
Speaker 1: your phone over the years, even if you switch models
Speaker 1: and brands of phones. At least until some new charging
Speaker 1: standard would replace USBC, or maybe you need to buy
Speaker 1: a new USBC cable because your old one no longer works,
Speaker 1: or it needs to be upgraded to a new standard
Speaker 1: that is more powerful. But I can get behind this.
Speaker 1: I often think back to when I have had a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of different digital gadgets, like you know, like
Speaker 1: a standalone camera and an MP three player and a
Speaker 1: smartphone and all this kind of stuff, and all of
Speaker 1: them had their own charging ports and cables, and if
Speaker 1: you misplaced one of them, you were out of lock.
Speaker 1: You would have to go out and buy a replacement,
Speaker 1: and often those were way overpriced because you didn't have options,
Speaker 1: so you had to buy the official one and obg
Speaker 1: like ridiculously expensive. By adopting a standard, consumers can purchase
Speaker 1: a cable from whichever merchant and manufacturer they like and
Speaker 1: it should work just fine because it's a standard. Saudi
Speaker 1: Arabia's law takes effect January first, twenty twenty five. It's
Speaker 1: widely believed that Apple's iPhone fifteen will have a USB
Speaker 1: C charging port, not because of Saudi Arabia, but certainly
Speaker 1: the EU would have been a big part of that,
Speaker 1: and according to Apple, Insider. There were even rumors that
Speaker 1: Apple had planned to incorporate technology that would throttle both
Speaker 1: data transfer speeds and charging speed if users were going
Speaker 1: to plug in a USBC cable that was not Apple certified.
Speaker 1: So in other words, yes, Apple would use a standard,
Speaker 1: but it would throttle any standard cable that wasn't Apple certified,
Speaker 1: and that would artificially inhibit that cable's performance. But the
Speaker 1: EU lawmakers have now said, if you do that, we
Speaker 1: ban iPhone sales in the EU because the EU does
Speaker 1: not play around with this stuff. Gizmodo has an article
Speaker 1: by Thomas Jermaine titled c neet deletes thousands of old
Speaker 1: articles to game Google Search. I think that article is
Speaker 1: worth a read, but I'm actually going to go into
Speaker 1: it a little bit here, so it's not just a recommendation.
Speaker 1: The name of the game here is SEO, which, in
Speaker 1: case you're not familiar with that initialism, that's search engine optimization.
Speaker 1: This is an umbrella term for strategies that are meant
Speaker 1: to improve a website's ranking in search results, primarily Google
Speaker 1: search results, but it can apply to other search engines
Speaker 1: as well. So SEO, when you really boil it down,
Speaker 1: is all about figuring out what a search algorithm actually values.
Speaker 1: You're kind of reverse engineering the approach to the algorithm
Speaker 1: uses in order to rank search results, and then you
Speaker 1: apply what you've learned to your own website so that
Speaker 1: you can boost your websites appearance in search results. For example,
Speaker 1: maybe you notice that trends are showing an increase in
Speaker 1: searches around a particular topic, so you might rush to
Speaker 1: create a page centered on that topic and then use
Speaker 1: lots of stuff like links to and from that page
Speaker 1: to help boost its performance. Gizmodo's report is about how
Speaker 1: c net has been removing articles like thousands of them
Speaker 1: over the past several months, and that this is a
Speaker 1: case of c net attempting to prune material that could
Speaker 1: otherwise be dragging the site as a whole down in
Speaker 1: search results. So the thought is that older articles get
Speaker 1: very little traffic and that they could be hurting the
Speaker 1: c net's rankings and search overall. Because if Google's search
Speaker 1: algorithm says, oh, not very many people are going to
Speaker 1: this site when you take into account all the different
Speaker 1: web pages, then it must not be very good, so
Speaker 1: we're going to rank it lower. That's kind of the
Speaker 1: thought here. So the idea is that you remove this
Speaker 1: dead weight, you know, you cut the anchor away from you,
Speaker 1: and the remaining pages on your website have better traffic
Speaker 1: and better engagement, and that means you rank better in
Speaker 1: search results. That's the thinking. Google, by the way, denies
Speaker 1: that this is the way it works, but then SEO
Speaker 1: experts say, no, this is part of how it works.
Speaker 1: Google just doesn't want you to go out there and
Speaker 1: start blasting out old articles in an effort to game
Speaker 1: the system, which is what people are saying c net
Speaker 1: is doing. I actually suspect that how Stuff Works has
Speaker 1: done this in the past. I don't have any proof
Speaker 1: on that, just other than I've had trouble finding my
Speaker 1: own articles on that site, and I wrote for them
Speaker 1: for like a decade, so it's it's a little weird
Speaker 1: that I can't find very much many articles that I've
Speaker 1: written on there, although maybe they just updated them and
Speaker 1: removed my byline. I don't know. But yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of a bummer because it means that people who have
Speaker 1: been writing have lost a lot of their portfolio of
Speaker 1: work that they could show off to other people. And
Speaker 1: it just is kind of depressing to see that you know,
Speaker 1: creative types like yours truly have to remember the stuff
Speaker 1: we make isn't even at all permanent, which makes me
Speaker 1: wonder why I'm even doing this. Okay, wait, i gotta
Speaker 1: step out of it. I've got a couple more stories
Speaker 1: to get through, all right. So Disney is getting ready
Speaker 1: to hike prices for its streaming services again. It's starting
Speaker 1: to get a bit ridiculous with the number of services
Speaker 1: and options within those services. But here we go. For
Speaker 1: those subscribe to the ads supported tiers for Disney Plus
Speaker 1: Hulu or Disney Plus and Hulu, there's no change. The
Speaker 1: monthly fee is going to stay exactly the same. But
Speaker 1: if you want the no ads version of Disney Plus,
Speaker 1: that's going from ten ninety nine per month to thirty
Speaker 1: teen ninety nine per month starting October twelfth. If you're
Speaker 1: going ad free on Hulu, that goes from fourteen ninety
Speaker 1: nine per month to seventeen ninety nine per month. And
Speaker 1: if you want both of them with no ads, you
Speaker 1: can opt in for a new tier called Duo Premium
Speaker 1: that launches in early September. That one is nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: nine per month, or hey, you could go Duo Basic
Speaker 1: that's Disney Plus and Hulu with ads. That's nine ninety
Speaker 1: nine per month. That's kind of why it is right now, Oh,
Speaker 1: sports fans, there are options for you too. ESPN Plus
Speaker 1: with ADS is going to be ten ninety nine per month,
Speaker 1: But if you wanted to lump that into Disney Plus
Speaker 1: and Hulu packages, well you could go basic. That means
Speaker 1: all the platforms are ADS supported. That combined package will
Speaker 1: cost you fourteen ninety nine per month. Or you could
Speaker 1: go AD free on Hulu and AD free on Disney Plus. However,
Speaker 1: ESPN Plus is still AD supported, that ends up being
Speaker 1: twenty four ninety nine a month. There are other options too.
Speaker 1: There's ones where you can have live TV included, the
Speaker 1: ones where you can have a subscription to all UFC
Speaker 1: pay per views. In a year is a big old
Speaker 1: complicated mess, and just a quick reminder a little flashback
Speaker 1: back when Disney Plus first launched in twenty nineteen. You
Speaker 1: know how much that cost six ninety nine per month.
Speaker 1: It has doubled in price, or at least it will
Speaker 1: have come October. According to multiple sources. Disney is also
Speaker 1: following in Netflix's footsteps, and by that I mean exploring
Speaker 1: ways to eliminate password sharing among households. Finally, you might
Speaker 1: remember that last year NASA tested out a method that
Speaker 1: could be used to divert an asteroid on an impact
Speaker 1: trajectory with Earth. They were slamming a spacecraft into it.
Speaker 1: They did that with an asteroid called Dimorphose, which was
Speaker 1: in orbit around another asteroid called Didamus, not on a
Speaker 1: collision course with Earth. This was just a test, and
Speaker 1: now an astronomer team led by David Jewett have discovered
Speaker 1: that apparently that impact caused boulders to eject off the
Speaker 1: surface of Dimorphose. And the problem with that is that
Speaker 1: if we were to use this method on an incoming asteroid,
Speaker 1: what we might end up with is instead of one
Speaker 1: big asteroid coming at us, we might have a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of smaller bodies of rock flying at us. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of like going from a cannonball to buckshot, or,
Speaker 1: as Jewett has says, shrapnel from a hand grenade. This
Speaker 1: is why the plan and Armageddon wouldn't have worked, y'all.
Speaker 1: That documentary was so wrong. But yeah, you can't just
Speaker 1: blow it up. You would just end up with the
Speaker 1: same amount of mass just spread out some And yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe some of the smaller pieces would burn up on
Speaker 1: entry into the Earth's atmosphere, but others would make it
Speaker 1: down and potentially cause massive amounts of damage. So this
Speaker 1: could mean that we have to reevaluate that particular methodology
Speaker 1: when it comes to diverting a near Earth object's trajectory.
Speaker 1: If it's coming our way, it may be that slamming
Speaker 1: something into it isn't the we need, but a lot
Speaker 1: more work has to be done before we can come
Speaker 1: to that determination. It is interesting, though. All Right, that's it.
Speaker 1: I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
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