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 are you. I'm on the mendan
Speaker 1: side of being sick yet again. This has been a
Speaker 1: rough year for me. But we're getting through it and
Speaker 1: we'll just go right into the tech news. That's the
Speaker 1: important stuff, not that I sound cruddy, So let's get
Speaker 1: to it first. Up. Cloud Flare, which among other things,
Speaker 1: is a content delivery network or c d N, had
Speaker 1: a widespread outage earlier this morning that affected numerous services
Speaker 1: across the Internet, which included services like discord, O'meagel, nord VPN,
Speaker 1: crunchy roll, and door dash so quick refresher. A content
Speaker 1: delivery network's purpose is to speed up access to certain services.
Speaker 1: So ideally, if you ran a big Internet based service,
Speaker 1: you would set up servers strategically all around the world
Speaker 1: in order to deliver your service to your customers with
Speaker 1: as little delay as possible. Right So that way you
Speaker 1: had servers close to your customer basis and you know, otherwise,
Speaker 1: if you had all your servers centrally located in one place,
Speaker 1: then some people are going to get really slow service.
Speaker 1: So that's where content delivering network services kind of popped up.
Speaker 1: Most companies don't have the facility to build out these
Speaker 1: server farms all over the world, but these companies that
Speaker 1: specifically focused on that, like cloud Flare could. However, that
Speaker 1: means that whenever cloud Flare has an outage, which has
Speaker 1: happened a few times, then that disruption affects other big
Speaker 1: entities online and it might seem like the entity itself
Speaker 1: had an outage, right like it might seem like door
Speaker 1: dashes down, but really it's more that the content delivery
Speaker 1: network that was carrying door dash went down. Fortunately, cloud
Speaker 1: Flare was able to resolve the problem within about an
Speaker 1: hour after users began having trouble accessing services. No word
Speaker 1: yet on what actually caused the outage. Last week, cloud
Speaker 1: Flare had some similar issues in other parts of the world.
Speaker 1: So hopefully whatever is going on has been resolved to
Speaker 1: a point where we were not going to see that again. Uh,
Speaker 1: these sort of allergies do happen. It could be very
Speaker 1: frustrating when it happens, because you know, we we rely
Speaker 1: on these services. We start to get to a point
Speaker 1: where we just feel that they're always going to be there,
Speaker 1: but we have to be reminded occasionally that it's dependent
Speaker 1: upon technology that can fail for one reason or another,
Speaker 1: and that that will occasionally happen. So a good thing
Speaker 1: to keep in mind, because you don't ever want to
Speaker 1: be so dependent upon services that could potentially go away
Speaker 1: that you are in a really bad situation when those
Speaker 1: services do go down. U S. Senator Ed Markey from
Speaker 1: Massachusetts issued a letter raising concerns about Amazon's Ring products. So,
Speaker 1: looking at Ring one way, you would say it's a
Speaker 1: smart doorbell and it's a security system component. But if
Speaker 1: you look at it another way, you could say Ring
Speaker 1: is really a network of surveillance devices. And Marky's letter
Speaker 1: was in part a reaction to a report from Consumer
Speaker 1: Reports that once a Ring doorbell's motion sensor goes off,
Speaker 1: the doorbell can record conversation level audio from up to
Speaker 1: twenty five feet away. Mark's concern, and I think it's
Speaker 1: a reasonable one, is that these devices pose a huge
Speaker 1: threat to privacy. The doorbells could be recording private conversations,
Speaker 1: perhaps even conversations that are happening inside the house that
Speaker 1: has the Ring doorbell, and Marky wrote quote, since Ring
Speaker 1: has well over ten million device users, it appears likely
Speaker 1: that Ring products record millions of Americans activity without their
Speaker 1: knowledge every day. A This surveillance system threatens the public
Speaker 1: in ways that go far beyond abstract privacy invasion. Individuals
Speaker 1: may use Ring devices audio recordings to facilitate blackmail, stalking,
Speaker 1: and other damaging practices. As Ring products capture significant amounts
Speaker 1: of audio on private and public property adjacent to dwellings
Speaker 1: with Ring doorbells, including recordings of conversations that people reasonably
Speaker 1: expect to be private, the public's right to as symbol,
Speaker 1: move and converse without being tracked is at risk end quote.
Speaker 1: Hopefully Marky's concern will encourage other lawmakers to look into
Speaker 1: the topic and perhaps rain in some of the surveillance
Speaker 1: features of the Ring products. Mark Zuckerberg recently released a
Speaker 1: video showing off four prototype mixed reality headsets that Meta
Speaker 1: has been working on in its quest to bring the
Speaker 1: Metaverse to life. Three of the four prototypes focused on
Speaker 1: specific goals that mixed reality headsets need to achieve in
Speaker 1: order to create a really compelling experience, which range from
Speaker 1: depth of focus too high resolution like retinal image level
Speaker 1: resolution to HDR support. That's high dynamic range, which is
Speaker 1: mostly about representing brightness and color representation as accurately as possible.
Speaker 1: The fourth was really a concept in making a very
Speaker 1: lightweight headset. So these headsets are all focusing on critical
Speaker 1: components to the company's vision of the metaverse future. Presumably
Speaker 1: users will be dawning headgear to interact with these persistent
Speaker 1: online environments. There's still a lot of work to be done,
Speaker 1: not just on the headset hardware, but also building out
Speaker 1: the infrastructure that would support a robust online environment capable
Speaker 1: of hosting tens of thousands of people. Zuckerberg himself said
Speaker 1: that we're quote pretty far off end quote from that
Speaker 1: future during a roundtable discussion. Francis Hogan, the former Facebook
Speaker 1: employee who handed over hundreds of internal documents to US
Speaker 1: authorities that showed how the company was being we'll say
Speaker 1: Lucy Goosey with Data Policies, is now putting together a
Speaker 1: nonprofit organization designed to train lawyers on how to fight
Speaker 1: against big tech companies. Part of our goal is to
Speaker 1: build out a simulated social network so that you know lawyers, lawmakers, regulators,
Speaker 1: and more. Such folks can war game different scenarios that
Speaker 1: mimic the sort of things we encounter in real life,
Speaker 1: such as you know, body accounts that are violating misinformation policies,
Speaker 1: or the platform itself harvesting user data without permission. And
Speaker 1: we've been seeing a growing resistance to the rising power
Speaker 1: of tech platforms around the world. I think this is
Speaker 1: just another example of that. Former Tesla employees have filed
Speaker 1: a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming it violated
Speaker 1: a federal law that requires companies to give advanced notice
Speaker 1: of mass layoffs before handing out pink slips. The layoffs
Speaker 1: happened at a Tesla Giga factory plant in Sparks, Nevada,
Speaker 1: reportedly affecting more than five hundred employees, and the law
Speaker 1: states that companies have to give sixty days notice before
Speaker 1: conducting those kinds of layoffs. The lawsuit alleges that Tesla
Speaker 1: terminated employees on the spot with no advanced warning. Elon
Speaker 1: Musk has dismissed the whole matter, saying, quote, it seems
Speaker 1: like anything related to Tesla gets a lot of clicks,
Speaker 1: whether it is trivial or significant. I would put that lawsuit.
Speaker 1: You're referring to in the trivial category end quote, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure for the five plus folks who were fired
Speaker 1: it was anything but trivial. And on a related note,
Speaker 1: among folks recently laid off by Tesla, where some employees
Speaker 1: who were leaders in diversity and inclusivity programs at the company,
Speaker 1: that includes the president of the l g B t
Speaker 1: Q plus community in Tesla and considering Elon Musk has
Speaker 1: talked about a quote woke mind virus in the quote
Speaker 1: that brings up the question of whether or not those
Speaker 1: employees were specifically singled out amid the layoffs, something that
Speaker 1: would be very much illegal if that were the case.
Speaker 1: Variety reports that Netflix is getting ready to hold another
Speaker 1: layoffs itself. The company had laid off a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: employees back in May and where it has it that
Speaker 1: this next round should be around the same size. Netflix
Speaker 1: has had a remarkable change in fortune in twenty two.
Speaker 1: Earlier this year, the company posted its first net loss
Speaker 1: in subscriber numbers in its history, and that precipitated a
Speaker 1: dramatic drop in investor confidence as folks began selling off
Speaker 1: Netflix stock, and that plunged the stock value in the process.
Speaker 1: In fact, Netflix is stock today is almost seventy lower
Speaker 1: in price than it was at the beginning of the year. Now,
Speaker 1: there is no denying that Netflix is in a very
Speaker 1: different environment than it was even just a few years ago.
Speaker 1: So for a while, Netflix was the only major streaming
Speaker 1: service on the market, but gradually services like Hulu, HBO, Max,
Speaker 1: Disney Plus and more began to drink Netflix's milkshake. So
Speaker 1: while I still get a bit antsy over folks treating
Speaker 1: growth as the only metric that really adders, I have
Speaker 1: to admit Netflix isn't in the dominating position it was
Speaker 1: just a few years ago. All Right, We've got a
Speaker 1: couple more news stories that I want to cover before
Speaker 1: we close this out. My apologies for this being so short,
Speaker 1: but as you could probably tell, a bit short on
Speaker 1: breath myself. But first, before we get to those last
Speaker 1: few stories, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1: South Korea has become the tenth country in the world
Speaker 1: capable of sending a satellite up into orbit on its own,
Speaker 1: and just the seventh country in the world that can
Speaker 1: send up a satellite that's heavier than a ton. So
Speaker 1: the country launched a three stage rocket from the Niro
Speaker 1: Space Center and it's successfully guided a one and a
Speaker 1: half ton satellite into orbit. The country has some pretty
Speaker 1: ambitious goals set for the near future. I mean, considering
Speaker 1: this was the first time it was successful in launching
Speaker 1: a payload into orbit. It there had been a previous
Speaker 1: attempt that was unsuccessful to launch a dummy satellite into orbit. Well,
Speaker 1: they're now planning on sending up a lunar rover to
Speaker 1: the Moon, obviously lunar in August of this year, which
Speaker 1: I think is really cool and like I said, really ambitious.
Speaker 1: They went straight from let's launch this, uh, this one
Speaker 1: payload into orbit to let's launch this and have it
Speaker 1: land on the Moon. NASA meanwhile is choosing which instruments
Speaker 1: it needs to shut down on the Voyager spacecraft in
Speaker 1: order to keep the spacecraft operational for as long as possible.
Speaker 1: The two Voyager probes were first launched into space way
Speaker 1: back in nineteen Their star Wars came out and they
Speaker 1: conducted flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, and then they both
Speaker 1: kept ongoing after their mission objectives were complete, and eventually
Speaker 1: the two Voyager probes passed out of the area that's
Speaker 1: generally considered to be our solar system, which means these
Speaker 1: two probes became the first human spacecraft to enter inter
Speaker 1: interstellar space. So in order to conserve power and have
Speaker 1: them operate for as long as possible, NASA is gonna
Speaker 1: shut down some of the instrumentation aboard the probes and
Speaker 1: hopefully keep them running to at least and potentially beyond.
Speaker 1: Both probes rely on plutonium as a power source, and
Speaker 1: they use low powered computer systems. A software engineer from
Speaker 1: Hungary named Nicola Chien demonstrated that he could harvest a
Speaker 1: chip from a cheap smart lamp that came out of
Speaker 1: Ikea for like fifteen bucks and use that chip to
Speaker 1: serve as a processor on a home built system that
Speaker 1: could run the first level of the classic first person
Speaker 1: shooter video game Doom. And I thought this was a
Speaker 1: neat story that showed how far processors have come in.
Speaker 1: You know, you know, something that now powers a simple
Speaker 1: smart lamp is sophisticated enough to handle running a computer
Speaker 1: game that just a few decades ago was considered state
Speaker 1: of the art. Now I should add that Rachel did
Speaker 1: cobbled together other components to make this all work. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like the one chip could power everything. Uh, the
Speaker 1: chip from the lamp really just served as a primitive
Speaker 1: CPU rachee and wired eight megabytes of flash memory to
Speaker 1: this and several other components as well, including a very
Speaker 1: low resolution screen. Um I think it had something like
Speaker 1: thirty or thirty five frames per second playback speed in
Speaker 1: order to make all of this work. Still really really
Speaker 1: impressive that you could harvest a chip off a lamp
Speaker 1: and have it play a classic computer game. And that's
Speaker 1: it for the news for today. Tuesday, June twenty one,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. Hope you're all well. If you would
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