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'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech area. It's time for the tech
Speaker 1: news for Tuesday, August twenty three, two thousand twenty two.
Speaker 1: Apple's semiconductor chip manufacturing company of choice which is t SMC,
Speaker 1: and to be fair, that's kind of the choice for
Speaker 1: pretty much every company that's making advanced chips and is
Speaker 1: a problem in its own right, but that's a matter
Speaker 1: for a different podcast episode. It is reportedly working on
Speaker 1: a three nanometer chip for upcoming MacBook computers. Now, the
Speaker 1: reason I decided to include this was because I wanted
Speaker 1: to do a little deconstruction on the nomenclature we use
Speaker 1: for chips, because it is wildly misleading. So for ages,
Speaker 1: the semiconductor industry has differentiated chips by using the size
Speaker 1: of nodes as the naming convention, and by nodes, we're
Speaker 1: really talking about the length of transistor gates. So the
Speaker 1: length of the transistor gate in whatever unit was an
Speaker 1: indicator of the chips sophistication. Generally, think speaking, you know,
Speaker 1: the more you can cram onto a chip, the more
Speaker 1: powerful the chip can be. That's not always the case,
Speaker 1: but that was kind of the rule of thumb. Now,
Speaker 1: does this mean that a three nanometer chip has a
Speaker 1: transistor gate that is three nanometers long. No, it does not,
Speaker 1: because for more than a decade, companies have shifted away
Speaker 1: from focusing on reducing components size almost exclusively and looked
Speaker 1: more at stuff like chip arc a texture and increasing
Speaker 1: the density of transistors and that sort of thing. So
Speaker 1: chips are still getting more powerful and more sophisticated, but
Speaker 1: the transistor gates aren't shrinking at the same crazy rate
Speaker 1: that they were before. However, the naming convention that we
Speaker 1: use where we use that transistor gate size as the
Speaker 1: name for the next generation of manufacturing processes, has stuck around.
Speaker 1: So if your transistor gates aren't getting that much smaller,
Speaker 1: but you're still dependent upon that that naming convention, then
Speaker 1: things rapidly stop measuring out. So that means that ten
Speaker 1: nanometer chip doesn't necessarily have transistor gates that are ten
Speaker 1: nanometers long. In fact, some of them have transistor gates
Speaker 1: that are nearly twice as long as that, so it's
Speaker 1: really just a naming convention. But a lot of folks
Speaker 1: think that this naming convention is dumb because for one thing,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not accurate. For another, since we keep
Speaker 1: going down, you know, we're reducing the size, and now
Speaker 1: we're talking about a three nanometer process. We're running out
Speaker 1: of nanometers. We're about to get down to the atomic scale, y'all.
Speaker 1: Because a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. And
Speaker 1: that also means that consumers have been really confused for
Speaker 1: a while and often draw the wrong conclusions because you
Speaker 1: can have a so called ten nanometer chip from Company
Speaker 1: A and a seven nanometer chip from Company B. And
Speaker 1: because there's this implication that the smaller number means more
Speaker 1: powerful chips, you would naturally think the seven nanometer chip
Speaker 1: is superior. But that's not necessarily true because we're really
Speaker 1: talking about things like architecture and power efficiency, and even
Speaker 1: the size of the components of the ten nanometer chip
Speaker 1: could be smaller than that on the seven nanometer chip.
Speaker 1: Because you're talking about two different companies and you're just
Speaker 1: talking about them using a naming convention to market a
Speaker 1: new generation of semi conductor chip, it isn't actually measuring anything,
Speaker 1: so a ten ter chip and a seven nimeter chip
Speaker 1: from two different companies could be made in such a
Speaker 1: way that the ten nimeter isn't always superior to the
Speaker 1: seven nanometer. That's why I can get confusing. It's this
Speaker 1: marketing strategy that creates confusion, and it perpetuates confusion. So yes,
Speaker 1: I just used a news story to give a quick
Speaker 1: lesson on why the semi conductor industry is using misleading
Speaker 1: marketing material and you should do research before you choose
Speaker 1: a processor and not just do it based off the
Speaker 1: supposed node size. Former Apple employee Xiao Lang Jong has
Speaker 1: pled guilty of charges of stealing proprietary information from Apple
Speaker 1: for the purposes of sharing it with another company, one
Speaker 1: in China for that matter. Now, this story actually started
Speaker 1: back in when Jong was first arrested. Jeong had turned
Speaker 1: to Apple after taking a trip to China, and then
Speaker 1: not long after his return, he resigned from Apple, and
Speaker 1: he also started sending corporate documents to his wife's computer,
Speaker 1: including documents that, in fact, as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: exclusively focusing on documents related to Apple's worst kept secret.
Speaker 1: It's you know, autonomous electric vehicle project that everyone knows about,
Speaker 1: but Apple is never publicly at knowledge that included a
Speaker 1: twenty five page document with detailed schematics of a circuit
Speaker 1: board that Apple was designing for the vehicle. Moreover, Jeong
Speaker 1: had told Apple that he was going to return to
Speaker 1: China and he was also going to work for a
Speaker 1: company called ex Paying Motors, which is an electric vehicle
Speaker 1: manufacturing company that's also developing an autonomous vehicle. Jong had
Speaker 1: previously led not guilty to the charges after being arrested,
Speaker 1: but now he has changed his flea to guilty, and
Speaker 1: he faces up to ten years in prison and a
Speaker 1: fine of up to two fifty thousand bucks. And you
Speaker 1: might remember the story of former Google employee Anthony Lewandowski,
Speaker 1: whom Google accused of stealing documents from its autonomous car
Speaker 1: project that would become way Mo. Lewandowski subsequently worked for Uber,
Speaker 1: and that led to a nasty court battle between Google
Speaker 1: and Uber plus, Uber unceremoniously ending its relationship with Lewandowski.
Speaker 1: Lewandowski was subsequently tried and convicted of stealing documents, but
Speaker 1: then former President Trump pardoned Lewandowski on the last day
Speaker 1: of his presidency. Anyway, it looks like autonomous vehicle research
Speaker 1: is the hottest target for industrial espionage in tech right now,
Speaker 1: so I guess it's fashionable. A senior fellow for the
Speaker 1: Irish Council for Civil Liberties named Johnny Ryan has spearheaded
Speaker 1: a class action lawsuit in the United States targeting the
Speaker 1: computer technology company Oracle. Now, in case you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with Oracle, it is primarily a A B two B
Speaker 1: kind of company, a business to business like Its clients
Speaker 1: are other businesses, and it works in software and database
Speaker 1: management and cloud services as well as hardware. Ryan's lawsuit
Speaker 1: alleges that Oracle has illegally been collecting the information of
Speaker 1: around five billion people. Essentially that Oracle is assembling dossiers
Speaker 1: on folks, and those dossiers can contain information that includes
Speaker 1: stuff like names, physical addresses, email addresses, political views, purchase history,
Speaker 1: geolocation data, meaning that Oracle has been tracking people or
Speaker 1: at least has access to tracking information so they know
Speaker 1: where people have been, as well as records of online activity.
Speaker 1: So essentially all the personal data stuff that we talk
Speaker 1: about in other you know, news articles and such. So
Speaker 1: Ryan disclaiming Oracle is collecting all of that and organizing
Speaker 1: it into what he calls dossier's Ryan has brought this
Speaker 1: lawsuit to California, probably because that is the U s
Speaker 1: state that has the most strict privacy laws, and this
Speaker 1: is a massive endeavor. It's too early to say how
Speaker 1: it's all going to turn out, but some folks at
Speaker 1: least suspect that this is a push to encourage the
Speaker 1: United States to adopt stronger privacy laws more in line
Speaker 1: with what we see over in the European Union. Joshua
Speaker 1: Benton at Nieman Lab dot org has a great article.
Speaker 1: It's titled are you legally Liable for the contents of
Speaker 1: every web page You linked? To? Australia finally gets sensible?
Speaker 1: All right, some backstory on this. So back in the
Speaker 1: first decade of this millennium, I just hate saying. The
Speaker 1: early two thousand's, an Australian lawyer named George Defterros was
Speaker 1: arrested and charged with conspiring to commit murder. Defterro was
Speaker 1: known as a lawyer who represented people accused of belonging
Speaker 1: to organized crime gangs. Anyway, an Australian newspaper published an
Speaker 1: article about defter Ros, alleging that he was in fact
Speaker 1: part of this conspiracy and such, and Google ended up
Speaker 1: linking to that article and its search results because Google
Speaker 1: indexes the web, and when people do searches for things,
Speaker 1: you get the links. Right. Well, flash forward many many years.
Speaker 1: The lawyers representing Defterros, who by the way, had all
Speaker 1: charges dropped against him, so he did not he did
Speaker 1: not stand for those those charges they were dropped. His
Speaker 1: lawyers were seeking to have this article removed from the
Speaker 1: from the Internet, and they went to the newspaper and
Speaker 1: demanded that the newspaper removed the article, and the newspaper
Speaker 1: said no. So when that proved fruitless, they then went
Speaker 1: after Google, and their argument was that Google, by publishing
Speaker 1: a link to this article, was kind of endorsing the article,
Speaker 1: that Google itself was acting as a publisher, and that
Speaker 1: it was almost as if the offending piece had come
Speaker 1: from Google because it was linking to it. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of wild, right, like that a link can somehow
Speaker 1: imply that you're responsible for the material that the link
Speaker 1: goes to. While initially a court in Australia ruled that
Speaker 1: Google was in fact responsible, but then it got appealed.
Speaker 1: It went to Australia's High Court and the High Court
Speaker 1: has reversed that ruling and essentially said this is ludicrous.
Speaker 1: If we follow this logic, anyone who links to anything
Speaker 1: that is later claimed, not even proven, just claimed to
Speaker 1: be defamatory, shares responsibility and therefore could be sued for liabel.
Speaker 1: That seems pretty extreme, doesn't it that a link alone
Speaker 1: could make you respond constable for libel. So what if
Speaker 1: you were to come across a link to a story
Speaker 1: and you shared it on your social media plat platforms
Speaker 1: like on Facebook or on Twitter. Maybe you saw the story,
Speaker 1: you just thought it was interesting you wanted to share it. Well,
Speaker 1: if this earlier court ruling had been upheld, it would
Speaker 1: have said a precedent that suggests you could be found
Speaker 1: guilty of libel yourself just by sharing the link, and
Speaker 1: that you could potentially face charges for it even though
Speaker 1: you didn't write the supposed defamatory material. By the way,
Speaker 1: a big part of this story is that while the
Speaker 1: lawyers were claiming that the article was found to be defamatory,
Speaker 1: it never actually went to court. It was settled out
Speaker 1: of court. So because of that, the claims were spurious,
Speaker 1: and yet they still went through UH and got this
Speaker 1: initial decision by the court that was then overturned by
Speaker 1: the High Court. So it's good that the High Court
Speaker 1: saw this for what it was, or at least five
Speaker 1: of the seven judges saw it for what it was.
Speaker 1: Two of them dissented and argued that Google was in
Speaker 1: fact responsible. Not sure what they were thinking. Okay, we've
Speaker 1: got a few more news stories to go, but before
Speaker 1: we get to that, let's take a quick break. We're
Speaker 1: back US automaker Ford announced it is laying off three
Speaker 1: thousand employees and includes around two thousand salaried positions and
Speaker 1: one thousand contractors, and the company says this is all
Speaker 1: part of its strategy to pivot from focusing primarily on
Speaker 1: internal combustion engine vehicles and to change to put more
Speaker 1: emphasis on electric vehicle production. Ford CEO Jump Farley denies
Speaker 1: that the cuts are a cost saving move, but rather
Speaker 1: they indicate how Ford is serious about fundamentally each changing
Speaker 1: course by committing to the future of electric vehicles. My
Speaker 1: heart goes out to all the folks who got their
Speaker 1: walking papers. It is an increasingly tough job market, particularly
Speaker 1: when other auto manufacturers like Tesla have also been laying
Speaker 1: off employees or making other kinds of cost saving cuts.
Speaker 1: The CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange company Binance, says that
Speaker 1: LinkedIn is absolutely swarming with people falsely claiming to be
Speaker 1: Binance employees. And I'm not joking about swarming. He says.
Speaker 1: There are about fifty real profiles belonging to Finance employees
Speaker 1: on LinkedIn, but in total it's closer to seven thousand
Speaker 1: claimed Binance employees, which is a big old yauza. So
Speaker 1: why would people be lying about working for Binance, Well,
Speaker 1: it's probably part of crypto scams. The scammers are likely
Speaker 1: listing Finance on LinkedIn to give themselves a sense of
Speaker 1: legitimacy when they're talking to their marks, their targets. They're
Speaker 1: tricking people into pouring money into various schemes. They're usually
Speaker 1: types of Ponzi schemes. If you don't know what a
Speaker 1: Ponzi scheme is, it's a subset of pyramid schemes. So
Speaker 1: a scammer convinces a group of investors to pour money
Speaker 1: into you know, whatever it is, in this case, a
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency scheme. Then the scammera convinces a second round of
Speaker 1: investors to do the same, and then pays a percentage
Speaker 1: out to the first round of investors to keep them
Speaker 1: happy while pocketing the rest of the money, and then
Speaker 1: they keep going and so on and so forth, and
Speaker 1: effective scammers can often convince investors to reinvest into the scheme,
Speaker 1: so they take the money that they're supposedly getting paid
Speaker 1: out as the scheme is paying off, and they put
Speaker 1: it back into it, which just gives more money to
Speaker 1: the scammers. And ultimately these schemes all collapse in on themselves.
Speaker 1: They cannot sustain themselves forever. And so the Binance CEO
Speaker 1: is warning followers not to assume someone really is a
Speaker 1: finance employee just because it might say so on a
Speaker 1: LinkedIn account, particularly if that supposed employee is trying to
Speaker 1: coerce people into pouring money into a crypto investment scheme.
Speaker 1: This is pretty tricky because LinkedIn doesn't verify work or
Speaker 1: education history. They do claim to respond to reports of
Speaker 1: false accounts, and they say that they look for false accounts,
Speaker 1: but yeah, this is a If it's seven thousand fake
Speaker 1: ones out there, that's a that's a pretty big problem.
Speaker 1: And you know, folks, fib on resumes all the time.
Speaker 1: I get it, But this goes well beyond that. Japanese
Speaker 1: company Fujitsu has partnered with reik In, a research institute,
Speaker 1: with the intent of developing and selling a quantum computer
Speaker 1: boasting sixty four cubits starting next year. Now, to brush
Speaker 1: up on quantum computers, the fundamental unit of classical computers
Speaker 1: is the bit, and a bit can either be a
Speaker 1: zero or a one. The fundamental unit of information in
Speaker 1: a quantum computer is a cubit, which, thanks to quantum effects,
Speaker 1: can essentially be a zero and a one at the
Speaker 1: same time under specific circumstances. And I'm being very high
Speaker 1: level with this, but when paired with the right algorithms,
Speaker 1: that kind of computer, a quantum computer can potentially solve
Speaker 1: a subset of computer problems far faster than a classical
Speaker 1: computer can. Uh. It's essentially solving for all potential solutions
Speaker 1: at the same time and then presenting the one that
Speaker 1: is most likely to be the best. It deals with probabilities,
Speaker 1: not certainties. It gets very wibbly wobbly, but uh. It's
Speaker 1: also important to remember quantum computers are no better than
Speaker 1: classical computers for other types of applications, other types of
Speaker 1: computer problems. You would not be using a quantum computer
Speaker 1: as a gaming rig for example, but they do potentially
Speaker 1: have the ability to change really important things that we
Speaker 1: depend upon, like encryption in the near future. NASA has
Speaker 1: narrowed down potential future lunar landing sites to thirteen regions,
Speaker 1: all of which are not too far from the Moon's
Speaker 1: south pole. I like to think they were on the
Speaker 1: lunar equivalent to Zillo at the time. Scientists believe that
Speaker 1: the region is perfect for future Moon missions because the
Speaker 1: deep craters in the area could potentially hold hydrogen and
Speaker 1: water ice. That kind of stuff would be useful if
Speaker 1: you wanted to make your own rocket fuel, for example,
Speaker 1: or if you wanted to perhaps process water ice to
Speaker 1: create not just water, but maybe oxygen. This falls in
Speaker 1: line with the goals of the Artemis campaign, which has
Speaker 1: some really ambitious targets, including creating a base of operations
Speaker 1: suitable for long term stays on the Moon. NASA has
Speaker 1: been planning this out for years, and in fact, the
Speaker 1: launch of Artemis one, which will be an unscrewed Orion
Speaker 1: vessel on top of the Space Launch System, which is
Speaker 1: a super heavy lift launch vehicle, is scheduled to launch
Speaker 1: on Monday of next week. If everything goes to plan.
Speaker 1: The actual return mission to the Moon in which humans
Speaker 1: will head back up there. That one is designated as
Speaker 1: Artemis three. That's not expected to launch until twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five at the earliest. Sony has announced via Instagram of
Speaker 1: all Things that's new generation of VR hardware for the
Speaker 1: PlayStation console is likely to launch in early This generation
Speaker 1: of hardware is going to work with the PlayStation five.
Speaker 1: It's reportedly softer with better ergonomic design than the earlier
Speaker 1: generation of Sony's VR peripherals, and Sony says the headset
Speaker 1: will display graphics at a four thousand by two thousand
Speaker 1: forty resolution per eye that breaks down to two thousand
Speaker 1: by twenty and it will have a refresh rate of
Speaker 1: nineties slash hurts. It's also gonna have a c through mode,
Speaker 1: so if you get too close to the wall, it'll
Speaker 1: show you so you don't bump your nose in there.
Speaker 1: They have not have any information on how much it
Speaker 1: will cost. My guess is it will be a few
Speaker 1: hundred dollars um, So here's hoping that we find out soon.
Speaker 1: We know that it's coming in early, and that's about it. Well,
Speaker 1: that is the news for Tuesday, August two. Hope you
Speaker 1: are all well, make sure you reach out to me
Speaker 1: with any suggestions you have for future episodes of tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: You can do that on the I Heart Radio app
Speaker 1: or on Twitter at tech stuff H s W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
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