Speaker 1: Get text with technology with tech Stuff from dot Com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer here at How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: and there are a few episodes of tech Stuff I
Speaker 1: try to do every year. It's kind of become a tradition.
Speaker 1: And this is the first of that series of episodes
Speaker 1: that happens to cap off each year as as best
Speaker 1: I can. Anyway, this is a look back on the
Speaker 1: previous twelve months in tech Stories. Now I want to
Speaker 1: take a quick look at some of the biggest stories
Speaker 1: in tech that happened in and just so I'm totally
Speaker 1: transparent and everyone at home listening can understand this, I'm
Speaker 1: actually recording this episode on December seven, which means there's
Speaker 1: like an extra month of stories and gossip and scandals
Speaker 1: that are not gonna make the cut as they ain't
Speaker 1: happen yet. What when I'm recording this, they'll happen by
Speaker 1: the time you hear this. So I apologize for that,
Speaker 1: but the predictions episodes have proven over and over again.
Speaker 1: I am not someone who can see into the future,
Speaker 1: so I might chat a little bit about some stuff
Speaker 1: that's coming up later on in December. As I record this,
Speaker 1: it'll of course be in your past and maybe we'll
Speaker 1: see how it turns out by that point. But let's
Speaker 1: start where every year starts in January, according to the
Speaker 1: calendar that I I follow. Anyway, if you've been keeping
Speaker 1: up with tech stuff, you know I recently did a
Speaker 1: full series about the company Xerox. Well, January one was
Speaker 1: when Xerox officially split into two companies. One of them
Speaker 1: continue to carry the name Xerox, and that one is
Speaker 1: all about the traditional document businesses that we tend to
Speaker 1: think about when we hear the name Xerox. The other
Speaker 1: company is now known as Conduit and is one focused
Speaker 1: on business process services. So that happened, knocking January off
Speaker 1: right off the bat. Also in January, very early, I
Speaker 1: went to c e S I was formerly known as
Speaker 1: the Consumer Electronics Show. Ramsey was also there. A whole
Speaker 1: bunch of us from how Stuff Works went this past year,
Speaker 1: and some of the stuff that got a lot of
Speaker 1: attention during that year's c e S included Amazon's Alexa product.
Speaker 1: I apologize if I just activated your Alexa, but it
Speaker 1: was getting incorporated into all sorts of devices, including vehicles,
Speaker 1: There were dozens of different smart devices on display, like
Speaker 1: weird ones too, like smart pillows that could tell you
Speaker 1: when you were snoring, as if I needed that. I've
Speaker 1: got a wife who punches me whenever it happens. There
Speaker 1: were self balancing motorcycles. There were fancy concept cars like
Speaker 1: Faraday Futures vehicle. There were ultra high definition displays with
Speaker 1: amazing resolution and color representation. There were self driving vehicles.
Speaker 1: There were luetooth toasters for crying out loud. In other words,
Speaker 1: it was a mix of amazing, amusing, and befuddling technology,
Speaker 1: which is pretty much par for the course. I went
Speaker 1: with a team of several talented people here at how
Speaker 1: stuff works. We explored the floor and we shot lots
Speaker 1: of videos so you can actually find those if you
Speaker 1: want to be nostalgic and look at the the cutting
Speaker 1: technology of yesteryear. Literally, this coming ce S will be
Speaker 1: the first one I will miss in ten years, And
Speaker 1: by miss, I mean I won't attend it. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to actually miss it. I'm actually okay with sitting
Speaker 1: one out for once now. One story that got Nintendo
Speaker 1: fans excited early in seventeen was the unveiling of the
Speaker 1: Switch that's Nintendo's latest gaming console. The Switch can be
Speaker 1: played as a portable gaming device, or it can be
Speaker 1: docked in a into a station and connect with a television.
Speaker 1: Controllers include detachable handheld devices that are called joy cons,
Speaker 1: and when the console went on sale later in demand
Speaker 1: far exceeded supply, particularly here in the States. This is
Speaker 1: not an unusual story for Nintendo. It's pretty much their
Speaker 1: m O whenever they release a new product. In fact,
Speaker 1: as of December, it can still be challenging to find
Speaker 1: a Nintendo Switch in some markets. Games like Legend of Zelda,
Speaker 1: Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Odyssey were able
Speaker 1: to leverage the love of iconic franchises while also incorporating
Speaker 1: new types of gameplay into the world's and they have
Speaker 1: received some good critical response. So the system appears to
Speaker 1: be a step in the right direction for a Nintendo
Speaker 1: which clearly needed to recover after the WEU came out
Speaker 1: to less than uproarious applause. We also learned more in
Speaker 1: January about the fires that were being caused by Samsung
Speaker 1: Notes seven hand sets. You might remember that story from
Speaker 1: where some hand sets were spontaneously catch fire and it
Speaker 1: led to a an industry wide ban in the airline
Speaker 1: industry for Samsung Notes sevens, who had the office officers
Speaker 1: actually confiscating Notes sevens before passengers could get onto planes. Well,
Speaker 1: the company conducted a four month long investigation, and in
Speaker 1: January seventeen they announced that the problem was due to
Speaker 1: some irregularly sized batteries which would lead to overheating and
Speaker 1: that would then lead to fires. Moving on to February,
Speaker 1: one of the troubling themes in seventeen, and this is
Speaker 1: putting it lightly, has revolved around allegations of sexual harassment
Speaker 1: and related charges. And I want to be clear here.
Speaker 1: The troubling thing for me is seeing how systemic this
Speaker 1: culture has been across multiple industries. I don't mean it's
Speaker 1: troubling that victims are coming forward. It's good that they are.
Speaker 1: It's rather troubling that there was such an enormous environment
Speaker 1: for victimization in the first place. Well, in February seen
Speaker 1: one of the earliest instances of this in the tech
Speaker 1: industry was of a former Uber employee named Susan Fowler,
Speaker 1: who claimed that the car service company, the ride hailing
Speaker 1: service company Uber, had a toxic culture filled with misogynistic
Speaker 1: executives and a permissive attitude towards unacceptable behavior. Her accusations
Speaker 1: were such that it it essentially forced Uber to launch
Speaker 1: an internal investigation on its practices and its culture. That
Speaker 1: investigation continued for months, and in early June, news broke
Speaker 1: that Uber had fired more than twenty employees as a
Speaker 1: result of this investigation at all levels within the company.
Speaker 1: And yes, there's gonna be a lot about Uber in
Speaker 1: this episode because stuff went whackadoodle crazy over there. So
Speaker 1: you could call this episode Uber what Happen because that's
Speaker 1: gonna come back multiple times. There's hardly a month that
Speaker 1: doesn't have an Uber story in it. On February eleven,
Speaker 1: North Korea test fired a ballistic missile across the Sea
Speaker 1: of Japan, and this also becomes a big story throughout
Speaker 1: the year. This set the stage for a very tense
Speaker 1: game of posturing between North Korea and other nations, particularly
Speaker 1: the United States. And this was just one of a
Speaker 1: few tests throughout seen that caught the world's attention. Another
Speaker 1: in July demonstrate that North Korea had an intercontinental ballistic missile,
Speaker 1: and it became clear that North Korea had developed or
Speaker 1: acquired some powerful missiles capable of carrying a payload a
Speaker 1: great distance as far as the United States, and that
Speaker 1: was only a matter of time before those missiles would
Speaker 1: be outfitted with nuclear warheads. And as someone who lived
Speaker 1: through the Cold War and an era of mutually assured destruction,
Speaker 1: the story did not exactly set my heart to singing.
Speaker 1: But this is a story that's still playing out today.
Speaker 1: In February, Disney's Maker Studios dropped Peautie Pie YouTube superstar
Speaker 1: from its network because of a some videos that Ptpie
Speaker 1: had had published in which he had voiced some anti
Speaker 1: Semitic messages, some uh slurs against Jewish people. He included
Speaker 1: some Nazi imagery and a couple and Disney dropped him
Speaker 1: like a hot potato, and then YouTube followed suit, canceling
Speaker 1: a planned season two of pd pis series Scare Beauty Pie.
Speaker 1: The company also removed him from the Google Preferred Advertising program,
Speaker 1: and this caused a big discussion in the online world
Speaker 1: about the the rights of creators the rights of platforms. Uh. Also,
Speaker 1: it was just feeding into a generally toxic environment online
Speaker 1: about harassment and and really awful trollish behaviors, which was
Speaker 1: kind of a theme throughout March I have a happy
Speaker 1: story to start with March, and I'm thankful for it
Speaker 1: because there's so many negative ones that happened in But
Speaker 1: in March, SpaceX successfully launched a used Falcon nine first
Speaker 1: stage rocket, and that proved the usefulness of reusable launch vehicles.
Speaker 1: This brings down the costs of launching a payload into
Speaker 1: space considerably. Now it's still incredibly expensive to launch stuff
Speaker 1: into space, but it's slightly less incredibly expensive than if
Speaker 1: you had to construct a brand new launch vehicle for
Speaker 1: every single launch. And this might have the first time
Speaker 1: anyone had used a first stage rocket a second time.
Speaker 1: SpaceX designed the Falcon nine launch rocket to return to
Speaker 1: Earth and land upright and intact after a use to
Speaker 1: allow for this, and you may remember when SpaceX was
Speaker 1: able to bring back a first stage rocket and land
Speaker 1: it successfully, that first one they did, they retired. They
Speaker 1: did not plan on using it again. It was more
Speaker 1: of a proof of concept that this could actually work.
Speaker 1: And then after that they started to really work on
Speaker 1: practical ones that they would be able to use repeatedly,
Speaker 1: and this was the first case of that. So that's
Speaker 1: pretty darn cool. Also in March, Uber's contentious year continued
Speaker 1: as one of its autonomous vehicles got involved in an
Speaker 1: accident in Arizona. The company suspended all its self driving
Speaker 1: vehicle test operations, which were at that point taking place
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, Arizona, and Pittsburgh. San Francisco's cars were
Speaker 1: the first to get moving again just a few days
Speaker 1: after the accident. This was a tough time for Uber
Speaker 1: because they had just managed to to resecure permission in
Speaker 1: San Francisco to operate autonomous vehicles in they had encountered
Speaker 1: a problem where the city said, hey, you failed to
Speaker 1: fill out the proper paperwork and get the proper licenses
Speaker 1: to be able to do what you are doing, So
Speaker 1: this was the second setback for them. Police, however, stated
Speaker 1: that the Uber vehicle was not at fault in the accident,
Speaker 1: in fact, was the fault of the other driver, and
Speaker 1: also in March, the president of Uber, Jeff Joe Owns,
Speaker 1: stepped down from the company. In a statement to the press,
Speaker 1: Jones said, quote, the beliefs and approach to leadership that
Speaker 1: have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw
Speaker 1: and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue
Speaker 1: as president of the ride sharing business. End quote. This
Speaker 1: was another indicator that perhaps those accusations Fowler had levied
Speaker 1: earlier had some merit to them, and that there were
Speaker 1: other problems going on over in Uber's business. For the
Speaker 1: president to actually resign and not be asked to resign,
Speaker 1: he stepped down because he felt that it was not
Speaker 1: a good fit for him. That was another big red
Speaker 1: flag for Uber. Also in March, after months of being
Speaker 1: absent from Oculus events, Palmer Lucky left Facebook and thus Oculus. Now.
Speaker 1: Lucky was the creator of the Oculus rift. He had
Speaker 1: made headlines in sixteen for his involvement in groups that
Speaker 1: supported Trump's president sidential campaign, and that group used trollish
Speaker 1: strategies to antagonize people with opposing viewpoints. That's a kind
Speaker 1: way of putting it. There was a lot of hate
Speaker 1: messaging out of this group, and Palmer Lucky had been
Speaker 1: financially supporting the group, which led to a lot of
Speaker 1: developers deciding to leave the Oculus platform out of protest.
Speaker 1: Palmer Lucky had given an apology and said that his
Speaker 1: actions in no way reflected the company, but uh Facebook,
Speaker 1: which is extremely cognizant of its public relations, decided that
Speaker 1: palmer Lucky or at least apparently decided that Palmer Lucky
Speaker 1: probably should not be at various official events. In fact,
Speaker 1: Lucky was absent at the Oculus Developers Conference, which was
Speaker 1: a notable absence considering the fact that he's the guy
Speaker 1: who made it in the first place, and so his departure,
Speaker 1: while not a big surprise, had came after months of
Speaker 1: him being essentially out of the public ie. Moving on
Speaker 1: to April, Tesla announced a new type of solar panel
Speaker 1: for house rooftops that looks like a high end roof shingle.
Speaker 1: They are very pretty. They're also very expensive. Uh Tesla says, well,
Speaker 1: they're not more expensive than other roof tiles of this type,
Speaker 1: but they are roof tiles that essentially very well off
Speaker 1: people would use to tile their houses. They're not like
Speaker 1: the shingles that you would get at your local hardware
Speaker 1: store so that you could do a d I Y
Speaker 1: shingle repair on your roof. It's definitely more expensive than that,
Speaker 1: but they are very attractive. So it's possibly a step
Speaker 1: toward more solar panels and solar power in various markets.
Speaker 1: I just feel like it's gonna be markets where people
Speaker 1: already have a ton of disposable income rather than uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a standard type of of home construction moving forward.
Speaker 1: But still every advance is a good one in a roll.
Speaker 1: Yek Yak, which is a location based anonymous messaging app,
Speaker 1: shut down now. At its height, yik Yak was worth
Speaker 1: four hundred million dollars. When it's shut down, the company
Speaker 1: sold off assets in the form of its engineering talent,
Speaker 1: for one million dollars. The service had been the target
Speaker 1: of much criticism as people argued that it encouraged cruelty
Speaker 1: and gossip among its user base, which was primarily college
Speaker 1: students that's to whom yek Yak was marketed. Many people
Speaker 1: were concerned that the app put vulnerable populations at risk
Speaker 1: and that it could lead to mob mentality in some communities.
Speaker 1: And there were also many concerns that younger people might
Speaker 1: get on the app and be exploited or otherwise harmed. Now,
Speaker 1: and just so you guys know, I once chaired a
Speaker 1: panel discussion with the apps founders at a south By Southwest.
Speaker 1: I walked away from that feeling uncertain about the experience.
Speaker 1: I wasn't entirely comfortable with how things had unfolded, and
Speaker 1: so it didn't surprise me when this happened. The app
Speaker 1: now is a thing of the past. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: In fact, the blog post that was the farewell doesn't
Speaker 1: exist either, because I was going to go there and
Speaker 1: quote some of it, but it's gone, and I didn't
Speaker 1: use archive dot org to look at an old one.
Speaker 1: But yep, yek yek is no more. Well. That brings
Speaker 1: us up to Mayen. But that means I've gotten through
Speaker 1: the first four months of the year. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take a little break and thank our sponsors. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're up to Mayen. That's when a malware known as
Speaker 1: Wanna cry begins to infect computers around the world, locking
Speaker 1: the computer contents away. Now, this type of malware falls
Speaker 1: under the category known as ransomware. Typically, ransomware will infect
Speaker 1: a computer. It will encrypt part of a computer's hard
Speaker 1: drive or the whole darn thing and lock off the
Speaker 1: contents from users. So you log into your computer and
Speaker 1: suddenly you can't access any of your data because it's
Speaker 1: all been encrypted. There's usually some sort of communication to
Speaker 1: the victim that gives instruction on how to earn back
Speaker 1: the access to your own data. Normally that includes paying
Speaker 1: some sort of ransom, usually in a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin,
Speaker 1: to an account that's associated with the hackers. The Wanna
Speaker 1: cry virus specifically targeted Microsoft Windows machines, taking advantage of
Speaker 1: a vulnerability in the operating system. As the story developed,
Speaker 1: news broke that the US National Security Agency or n
Speaker 1: s A had discovered that same vulnerability and designed its
Speaker 1: own exploit before Wanna cry appeared on the scene. In fact,
Speaker 1: there were some allegations that perhaps the authors of Wanna
Speaker 1: cry were able to create Wanna cry because some of
Speaker 1: the n s A stuff got leaked in a in
Speaker 1: a big data dump earlier in the year. This raised
Speaker 1: some questions about the n s AS ethics, which many
Speaker 1: argued the agency had a responsibility to report this vulnerability
Speaker 1: to Microsoft, but instead they chose to keep it for themselves.
Speaker 1: A security researcher named Marcus Hutchins discovered a u r
Speaker 1: L that acted as a kill switch for the malware
Speaker 1: and that helped restrict the effects of Wanna Cry. It
Speaker 1: did infect hundreds of thousands of computers, but it would
Speaker 1: have been even worse had it not been for this
Speaker 1: kill switch. This same security researcher was later arrested in
Speaker 1: August seventeen and charged with creating another type of malware
Speaker 1: called Chronos k r o o S, which was designed
Speaker 1: to steal online banking credentials. According to crebs On Security,
Speaker 1: which is an excellent blog if you've not checked it out,
Speaker 1: I recommended, Hutchens did seem to have a past in
Speaker 1: making malay just software up until around two thousand twelve
Speaker 1: or two thousand thirteen. At that point he seemed to
Speaker 1: have a change of heart and he started working diligently
Speaker 1: to uncover and counteract malware. Hutchens has pleaded not guilty
Speaker 1: to the charges against him, and his case is yet
Speaker 1: to be heard as of the recording of this podcast episode.
Speaker 1: As for Wanna Cry, experts suspect that it had its
Speaker 1: origins in North Korea, though officials from North Korea denied
Speaker 1: that the government had anything to do with the virus. However,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about North Korea and a virus and
Speaker 1: infecting the Internet, the most sort of most fingers have
Speaker 1: to point at the government because North Korea has the
Speaker 1: Internet pretty much locked down. Within the country. There's an intranet,
Speaker 1: but not very very limited access to the outside internet. Uh.
Speaker 1: North Korea does not necessarily want everyone to have access
Speaker 1: to the world's information. Now it's time to get back
Speaker 1: to Uber. Yep, we're not done with Uber yet. In May,
Speaker 1: Uber and Weymo began their court battles in earnest Now,
Speaker 1: Weymo is the self driving company. Self driving car company,
Speaker 1: I should say that spun off from Google's R and
Speaker 1: D department. An engineer who once worked at Weymo named
Speaker 1: Anthony Lewandowski. He worked there when it was still just
Speaker 1: part of Google, had left Google in UH sixteen. He
Speaker 1: founded a new company called Auto and Uber then acquired
Speaker 1: Auto O. T t O was the name of that company,
Speaker 1: and as a result, Lewandowski began to work for Uber. Now. Weymo,
Speaker 1: in its legal claim against Uber, said that Lewandowski had
Speaker 1: illegally downloaded fourteen thousand documents that belonged to Weymo, including
Speaker 1: proprietary trade secrets, and that therefore Uber was developing its
Speaker 1: own self driving car technology on trade secret information that
Speaker 1: was developed at Weymo, and Lewandowski was effectively a thief.
Speaker 1: This particular trial is still playing out as of the
Speaker 1: recording of this podcast, it has not been resolved. Uh.
Speaker 1: Uber did end up firing Lewandowski, who was still to
Speaker 1: this day as far as I know, taking the Fifth
Speaker 1: Amendment against self incrimination, so he's not really core. He's
Speaker 1: not really cooperating with investigators on this matter. But other
Speaker 1: developments have happened over the past few days, so I'm
Speaker 1: sure I will do a full story about weymo versus
Speaker 1: uber once this has concluded. Meanwhile, going into June, a
Speaker 1: different type of ransomware attack happened, this time in the Ukraine.
Speaker 1: This one was called Petya, which also takes advantage of
Speaker 1: that same exploit that the n s A identified with
Speaker 1: Microsoft Windows machines, so Petya and Wanna cry both were
Speaker 1: taking advantage of that same vulnerability. The attacks were traced
Speaker 1: back to a software update package of a Ukrainian tack
Speaker 1: preparation program that was very popular in the corporate world
Speaker 1: in the Ukraine. Suspicion fell on the company itself that
Speaker 1: made this software, but representatives of that company said no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're victims as well, where it's not us. We didn't
Speaker 1: make this. It did infect our our software that we sold,
Speaker 1: but we didn't actually put it there. An investigation revealed
Speaker 1: that there was a compromised employee account, and suspicions pointed
Speaker 1: investigators towards Russian hackers. The same patch that was used
Speaker 1: to secure computers against Wanna cry would work against Petya,
Speaker 1: but as it turned out, many systems in the Ukraine
Speaker 1: and beyond had failed to install those patches, and so
Speaker 1: they ended up getting encrypted. In addition, the email provider
Speaker 1: post e O shut down the email addresses that were
Speaker 1: associated with the hacker demands, so there was no way
Speaker 1: to pay the ransom even if you wanted to, so
Speaker 1: some people had to completely just get rid of entire
Speaker 1: drives of information and including a hospital in West Virginia
Speaker 1: that had to just junk it's computer systems in order
Speaker 1: to rebuild. In June, Verizon completed its acquisition of Yahoo,
Speaker 1: so this has been going on since the end of sixteen.
Speaker 1: The price tag ended up being at around four point
Speaker 1: four eight billion dollars. Merissa Meyer, who had left Google
Speaker 1: to head Yahoo as CEO for about four and a
Speaker 1: half years, left the company with a reported twenty three
Speaker 1: million dollar severance package. Verizon created a new subsidiary company
Speaker 1: called Oath, under which Yahoo would join other assets like
Speaker 1: Huffington's Post. Now I've done an episode about Yahoo before,
Speaker 1: but I feel like I might need to revisit this
Speaker 1: and do a new episode and really dive into how
Speaker 1: the company meandered. Over the last several years. There were
Speaker 1: some massive data breaches which Yahoo failed to disclose for
Speaker 1: quite some time that did enormous damage to the company's
Speaker 1: reputation and affected millions of people, and Meyer, who at
Speaker 1: one time was looked at a as a possible savior
Speaker 1: of the company, became the target of a lot of
Speaker 1: criticism for her role in leading a company that seemed
Speaker 1: to fail completely in protecting its customers. Also that month,
Speaker 1: the European Union hit Google with a two point seven
Speaker 1: billion dollar fine after finding the company guilty of practicing
Speaker 1: anti competitive strategies in the world of online comparison shopping. Yikes.
Speaker 1: This was the largest fine levied for an antitrust case
Speaker 1: from a governing body, so they set a record. Amazon
Speaker 1: announced in June that it was moving to acquire the
Speaker 1: upscale grocery store chain Whole Foods. The deal was reported
Speaker 1: to be about thirteen point seven billion dollars, which is
Speaker 1: just shy of how much it costs to shop at
Speaker 1: Whole Foods for a week of groceries and hey, let's
Speaker 1: check in with Uber, shall he. So? In in June
Speaker 1: of CEO Travis Kalanik announced he would take a lead
Speaker 1: eve of absence. His departure would end up being permanent.
Speaker 1: The former CEO of Expedia, Dara kasro Shah, he became
Speaker 1: the new CEO of the company a couple of months
Speaker 1: later in August. He came into a company that was
Speaker 1: in crisis, not just from a rash of sexual harassment
Speaker 1: scandals that were still unresolved, but also there was these
Speaker 1: charges that law enforcement were levying against Uber, saying that
Speaker 1: the company had developed software specifically designed to help drivers
Speaker 1: evade law enforcement. This is something that the company is
Speaker 1: still dealing with today. Moving on into July, that's when
Speaker 1: hyper Loop one held its first full scale test of
Speaker 1: its technology. It happened on a test track in Nevada
Speaker 1: using an actual size vehicle, So there is like a
Speaker 1: full scale vehicle of what would end up being the
Speaker 1: types of transportation we would get into once the system
Speaker 1: is complete. However, no one was inside this test vehicle.
Speaker 1: The hyper loop one method relies on mag lev technology,
Speaker 1: which is different from the original hyper loop concept that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk talked about. Elon Musk's version used what he
Speaker 1: called air skis, so you would use uh, you pump
Speaker 1: air down kind of like a reverse air hockey table,
Speaker 1: and that would allow the pod to float above the
Speaker 1: surface of the tunnel, and then you might use magnets
Speaker 1: to propel it forward. But in this case, instead of
Speaker 1: using air skis, the hyper loop one method actually used
Speaker 1: magnetic levitation itself, so you're using permanent and electro magnets
Speaker 1: to repel against one another and thus levitate the pod
Speaker 1: above the surface of the track. Otherwise, it's very similar
Speaker 1: to elon Musk's original concept. The test had the pod
Speaker 1: elevate for about five seconds, not terribly long, but it
Speaker 1: did accelerate to about two gs, so that's twice the
Speaker 1: strength of gravity of Earth, so that's pretty impressive that it,
Speaker 1: you know, went to two g acceleration within five seconds.
Speaker 1: July was also when Adobe announced its plan for terminating
Speaker 1: flash software. It's going to be a gradual death with
Speaker 1: the end of distribution and updates not scheduled until twenty
Speaker 1: so it's gonna be around a few more years. That's
Speaker 1: supposed to give content creators the time they need to
Speaker 1: move their work over to a more secure platform like
Speaker 1: HTML five rather than the relatively vulnerable and venerable flash
Speaker 1: program or platform, I should say. China announced that it
Speaker 1: had completed a and connected a massive floating solar farm.
Speaker 1: The farm itself is on top of a flooded region
Speaker 1: that once used to mine coal, so that's kind of cool. Also,
Speaker 1: the pictures of this massive floating solar farm are really impressive.
Speaker 1: It also marks another example of how the nation of
Speaker 1: China is working on being a global leader in renewable energy.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk in July tweeted that he had received a
Speaker 1: verbal go ahead from the White House to begin a
Speaker 1: huge project that would connect Washington, d C. With New
Speaker 1: York via an underground tunnel, presumably using hyperlop like technology
Speaker 1: to transport people between the cities at high speeds so
Speaker 1: that you could get between them in like half an hour.
Speaker 1: Must get introduced a new company called the Boring Company.
Speaker 1: Boring as in digging or tunneling. That is, the plan
Speaker 1: is to use massive digging machines, which by the way,
Speaker 1: work at a pace that's slower than a snail. That's
Speaker 1: absolutely true, in order to dig these tunnels between an
Speaker 1: under cities. In an effort to revolutionize transportation. In November
Speaker 1: sev a White House advisor said that disapproval was not
Speaker 1: official or a green light for the project at all,
Speaker 1: that this verbal agreement was more like verbal excitement, and
Speaker 1: even if it had been a verbal agreement, such an
Speaker 1: undertaking would involve many more governmental bodies at the state
Speaker 1: and city and county levels, so it's not exactly signed, sealed,
Speaker 1: and delivered. That month, Microsoft announced it would also layoff
Speaker 1: around three thousand employees in an effort to reorganize the
Speaker 1: company and focus more on cloud based services, thus showing
Speaker 1: a massive shift in Microsoft strategy. Now we get into August,
Speaker 1: a string of resignations on various United States White House
Speaker 1: Economic councils made headlines that month. Executives from many companies,
Speaker 1: including big ones in the tech sector, handed in resignation
Speaker 1: letters citing differences of philosophy with the President of the
Speaker 1: United States, and among those who left these councils were
Speaker 1: Jeff Emilt, who was the chairman of General Electric, Brian Krasnick,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Intel, Windell Weeks, the CEO of Corning,
Speaker 1: and more, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, and Bob
Speaker 1: Iger of the Walt Disney Company had already left in June.
Speaker 1: Travis Kalanik, who was the former CEO of Uber, we
Speaker 1: talked about just minute ago. Uh. Of course, he had
Speaker 1: his own laundry list of problems to handle throughout seventeen.
Speaker 1: He left the Strategic Policy Council all the way back
Speaker 1: in February, but August marked as sort of a mass
Speaker 1: resignation for various councils and mostly consisted of prominent business leaders.
Speaker 1: Over at Google, an engineer named James Demore released a
Speaker 1: memo that argued against Google's employee diversity measures. The memo
Speaker 1: protested several of Google's initiatives that were aimed to create
Speaker 1: an inclusive environment, particularly for women. Demore's memo made headlines,
Speaker 1: and Google was quick to act. They fired the more
Speaker 1: in the wake of the news, and among the elements
Speaker 1: of the memo that riled up the text fear were
Speaker 1: his hypotheses that the gender gap in tech exists not
Speaker 1: because there's been an historic resistance and sometimes pervasive hostility
Speaker 1: toward women entering the tech field, but that biological differences
Speaker 1: between the sexes were to blame. Reaction to Demore's firing
Speaker 1: has also been across the board but there's actually a
Speaker 1: pretty large group of folks who feel that while he
Speaker 1: may have been expressing a point of view or two
Speaker 1: Google's culture, it wasn't necessarily something that in itself should
Speaker 1: have been a fire a bowl offense. And this is
Speaker 1: across the board. It's not one side or the other
Speaker 1: that argues is a lot of people say maybe firing
Speaker 1: him might have been going too far, But from Google's perspective,
Speaker 1: they were pointing out that this was a very disruptive
Speaker 1: point of view and it was difficult to deal with
Speaker 1: in a constructive way. Disney made an announcement in August
Speaker 1: that it was going to acquire a company called bam Tech,
Speaker 1: a streaming video company that's behind services like HBO Now
Speaker 1: and the ones that Major League Baseball and the NHL use.
Speaker 1: Disney also announced its own video streaming strategy, which will
Speaker 1: consist of its own service, and this will mean that
Speaker 1: it's going to start phasing titles off of other platforms
Speaker 1: such as Netflix over the next couple of years. Microsoft
Speaker 1: would show off some mixed reality headsets, which are meant
Speaker 1: to bring augmented reality to the general consumer. The company
Speaker 1: works with hardware manufacturers to make a platform for are
Speaker 1: hardware applications, and Lee Jay Young, one of the heirs
Speaker 1: to the Samsung fortune, received a five year prison sentence
Speaker 1: for being found guilty of bribery and embezzlement. Now to
Speaker 1: hear more about the crazy stories involving Samsung's ruling family,
Speaker 1: check out the series of episodes I did on the
Speaker 1: company earlier this year. All right, we are two thirds
Speaker 1: of the way through. We still got the last little
Speaker 1: bit of the year to get through. But before I
Speaker 1: jump into that, let's take another quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. Okay, September, we're in the home stretch. Boiler
Speaker 1: stuff happened. In September. Apple held its annual press event,
Speaker 1: in which it unveiled new products, including the iPhone eight
Speaker 1: and the iPhone ten, which once again reinforce the idea
Speaker 1: that's really tough to be the number nine in the
Speaker 1: tech world. Apple skipped it. Microsoft skipped it with the
Speaker 1: wind Nose platform. The iPhone ten, so called because it's
Speaker 1: ten years after the original iPhone, features a super retina display,
Speaker 1: facial recognition technology that has come under fire recently for
Speaker 1: alleged vulnerabilities, and a design that makes the phone look
Speaker 1: like it's just a really attractive screen and that's it.
Speaker 1: And by that, I mean it's impressive that it looks
Speaker 1: like it's just a screen. It's also pretty expensive, with
Speaker 1: the starting price of nine ninety nine dollars. Now, one
Speaker 1: of the stories that has spanned much of seventeen was
Speaker 1: the sixteen election and the involvement of Russian influence upon
Speaker 1: it at different levels, from charges of fraudulent ads to
Speaker 1: more direct attempts to influence the outcome of the election.
Speaker 1: We've seen multiple accusations fly, we've seen denials, we've seen investigations.
Speaker 1: In September, Facebook reported that Russian operatives had spent around
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars in fraudulent ads to throw support toward
Speaker 1: Donald Trump during the election season. Twitter and Google revealed
Speaker 1: that their investigation has found similar evidence of clandestine involvement.
Speaker 1: And this has brought up a lot of tough questions
Speaker 1: about how the United States and companies within it can
Speaker 1: make certain that foreign parties can't exert such direct influence
Speaker 1: over American voters. It's been pretty ugly and it's still
Speaker 1: a story that is unfolding even as I record right now.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's been a lot of fun. A related
Speaker 1: story by the way is the whole concept of fake news.
Speaker 1: The term has been used to describe false stories that
Speaker 1: only have the goal of influencing behaviors or reinforcing beliefs
Speaker 1: without relying on actual facts, and in general promoting one
Speaker 1: perspective over others without regard for honesty. And you can
Speaker 1: find examples of this for different ideology. So I want
Speaker 1: to be clear, I'm not singling out any one side
Speaker 1: over another. You can find examples for either the right
Speaker 1: side or the left side. There they're examples of both.
Speaker 1: But it also became a rallying cry for anyone who
Speaker 1: takes you with any news article or report with which
Speaker 1: they disagree. So in other words, you don't agree with something,
Speaker 1: you call it those fake news, and that's the extent
Speaker 1: of your argument. That's also kind of awful, not kind
Speaker 1: of it's just awful. Another huge story that broke in
Speaker 1: September centered on Equifax talked about awful. This is a
Speaker 1: consumer credit reporting agency. The company revealed that hackers had
Speaker 1: managed to exploit a vulnerability and Equifax's web systems, and
Speaker 1: they gained access to millions of customers data records in
Speaker 1: one of the worst data breaches in history. More than
Speaker 1: a hundred forty three million people were affected by this.
Speaker 1: The company's former CEO, who stepped down in light of
Speaker 1: this controversy, was brought before the United States Congress to
Speaker 1: explain what had happened, and while the story broke in September,
Speaker 1: the actual events dated back further. In twenty seventeen, the
Speaker 1: former CEO revealed that the Department of Homeland Security alerted
Speaker 1: Equifax to the presence of a vulnerability in the Apache
Speaker 1: struts software package, which was used in equifaxes Online Disputes Portal,
Speaker 1: which is where consumers could dispute credit report items. Let's
Speaker 1: say you see something in your credit report that doesn't
Speaker 1: belong there, you would go online and use this particular
Speaker 1: portal so that you could file a claim. Well, according
Speaker 1: to company policy, Equifax was supposed to patch all instances
Speaker 1: of this software in their systems within forty eight hours.
Speaker 1: That's company policy. That wasn't you know, a law or anything.
Speaker 1: They just said, if we find a vulnerability, it is
Speaker 1: our responsibility to fix it within forty eight hours. But
Speaker 1: for some reason that didn't happen. So the first detected
Speaker 1: intrusion into EQUIFAXES systems happened in early May seventeen. Now,
Speaker 1: remember they found out about those vulnerabilities in March, so
Speaker 1: more than a month later. That's when they first detect
Speaker 1: an intrusion. And these intrusions continued through June, and it
Speaker 1: wouldn't until September that Equifax would actually announce anything. So
Speaker 1: several months before anyone outside of the company learned of
Speaker 1: this potentially devastating data breach. It did not win Equifax
Speaker 1: any new fans. Oh. Also, that month, Uber got banned
Speaker 1: in London. You didn't forget about Uber, did you? Actually?
Speaker 1: To be more accurate, Uber was told that it's licensed
Speaker 1: to operate in the city would expire on September and
Speaker 1: the city would not renew that license. However, the company
Speaker 1: would be allowed to continue to operate within the City
Speaker 1: of London while appealing this decision. Many issues led to
Speaker 1: that decision, not the least of which was this scandal
Speaker 1: involving Uber's technology that allegedly allowed drivers to evade law enforcement.
Speaker 1: So what's the status now? Well, in November, the Mayor
Speaker 1: of London said the appeals process could quote go on
Speaker 1: for a number of years end quote So Pip, Pip Gueri, Oh,
Speaker 1: I guess A side note, Anthony Lewandowski, the former Google
Speaker 1: employee at the heart of the way Moos slash uber
Speaker 1: Legal Battle, founded a tech based religion in September. He
Speaker 1: claims to want to create an artificially intelligent godhead for
Speaker 1: humans to worship, one which will make decisions for people
Speaker 1: and generally guide humanity. And yes, I will do a
Speaker 1: full episode on this concept in the future, because how
Speaker 1: could I not. That moves us to October Now. A
Speaker 1: year earlier, back in the little company Snapchat, the social
Speaker 1: network that everybody envies, debuted a consumer electronics gadget called Spectacles. Now,
Speaker 1: these were sunglasses that incorporated a camera, and the camera
Speaker 1: could take photos and video and upload them to a
Speaker 1: user's Snapchat. Well, when these glasses first premiered in they
Speaker 1: were a hot commodity. You would have these pop up
Speaker 1: vending machines that would be installed in different places in
Speaker 1: Trindy cities and major markets, and and techno hipsters eager
Speaker 1: to be one of the elite would line up for
Speaker 1: hours to buy a pair. You flash forward a year
Speaker 1: later and the story is very different. In October, the Information,
Speaker 1: a journal, published an article detailing the sad state of
Speaker 1: affairs for Snapchat. There are now hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: unsold spectacles. Some of them are not yet assembled, others
Speaker 1: are ready to ship immediately if only there were any
Speaker 1: customers to buy them. The company admitted later in November
Speaker 1: that it had spent nearly forty million dollars on quote
Speaker 1: excess inventory reserves and inventory purchase commitment cancelation charges end quote.
Speaker 1: These unmoved units are literally costing the company millions of
Speaker 1: dollars hashtag no filter. Just in time for Halloween, security
Speaker 1: researchers announced that there was a vulnar ability in WiFi technology.
Speaker 1: That's awful. It all has to do with w P,
Speaker 1: a to encryption protocol for WiFi. Users are told they
Speaker 1: should update their firmware on their routers and client devices
Speaker 1: as patches become available. But yeah, not great when the
Speaker 1: underlying encryption technology that is meant to protect an entire
Speaker 1: form of communications ends up having a critical vulnerability. Not
Speaker 1: good at all. Microsoft officially ended manufacturing on the Connect
Speaker 1: Xbox peripheral in October. The motion sensing device had been
Speaker 1: popular among hackers for all sorts of interesting applications, but
Speaker 1: had failed to really catch on with gamers. Now whether
Speaker 1: this was due to the hardware itself or a widely
Speaker 1: lamented lack of content. It didn't really matter. Microsoft just
Speaker 1: decided to pull the plug. Now, this did not really
Speaker 1: come as a surprise because more recent versions of the
Speaker 1: Xbox One have shipped without a dedicated connect port on
Speaker 1: the console itself, so the writing was kind of on
Speaker 1: the wall. But in October it became official. Amazon announced
Speaker 1: a new program called Key, which would allow customers to
Speaker 1: authorize delivery personnel to enter their homes and deliver packages
Speaker 1: while they are away. I don't think i'd be comfortable
Speaker 1: doing that. I'd rather the box be left on my
Speaker 1: porch and I just have to hope nobody steals it
Speaker 1: rather than having an Amazon person coming into my house
Speaker 1: to drop off a package. But maybe that's just me. November.
Speaker 1: Early that month, US President Donald Trump had a brief
Speaker 1: snaff who with his Twitter account. It disappeared, it was deactivated,
Speaker 1: it was gone, seemingly deleted, and it was so for
Speaker 1: about eleven minutes, then it returned. It so happens that
Speaker 1: a Twitter customer support employee decided to deactivate the President's
Speaker 1: Twitter account on their last day at the company as
Speaker 1: a defiant gesture. Twitter and now as a result of
Speaker 1: that action, the company would do a full internal review
Speaker 1: and make changes to avoid having any one employee having
Speaker 1: that power ever again. But boy, that definitely got Twitter
Speaker 1: conversations going due to those eleven minutes. Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: that has had incredible ups and downs throughout its entire existence,
Speaker 1: started off seventeen worth a little less than a thousand
Speaker 1: dollars per bitcoin. In November of seventeen, the value of
Speaker 1: bitcoin topped ten thousand dollars for the first time ever.
Speaker 1: The morning that I'm recording this had the value of
Speaker 1: a single bitcoin listed at twelve thousand, eight hundred seventy
Speaker 1: three dollars and ninety nine cents. There have been so
Speaker 1: many stories about bitcoin in twenty seventeen, tons of them.
Speaker 1: Several journals reported on lost bitcoin that are likely never
Speaker 1: to be recovered. The design of bitcoin necessitates that there
Speaker 1: is a finite number that will ever be released to
Speaker 1: the world. That number is twenty one million bitcoin, and
Speaker 1: the release happens over time through a process called mining.
Speaker 1: Bitcoin are stored as data, and if you lose the
Speaker 1: devices that contain that data, it's like you just lost
Speaker 1: a wallet full of money. According to a study cited
Speaker 1: by The Independent, around three point seven nine million bitcoin
Speaker 1: may be lost in such a way, which means a
Speaker 1: loss of many billions of dollars worth of bitcoin. One
Speaker 1: guy named James Howells says he alone lost seven thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred bitcoin by accidentally throwing away a hard drive
Speaker 1: that had his bitcoin supply stored on it. At twelve
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a pop, seven thousand, five hundred bitcoins is
Speaker 1: an astounding amount of wealth. Numerous financial experts have debated
Speaker 1: about whether or not there's going to be a bitcoin
Speaker 1: bubble burst, like is a crash coming, When might it
Speaker 1: happen and how bad is it going to be. Some
Speaker 1: state that the currency is destined for a massive collapse.
Speaker 1: Others argue there's no real grounds for that prediction. Bitcoin's
Speaker 1: value has certainly fluctuated over the years, so we'll likely
Speaker 1: see some big changes over time, but the currency has
Speaker 1: stuck around so far. YouTube began to face harsh criticism
Speaker 1: for its YouTube Kids service, which is supposed to serve
Speaker 1: up age appropriate material for kids to enjoy, but was
Speaker 1: having issues with people slipping in videos that were at
Speaker 1: best questionable and at worst wildly inappropriate for the service.
Speaker 1: Part of the problem is just the sheer amount of
Speaker 1: material being added to YouTube every moment. It's an estimated
Speaker 1: four hundred hours of content every single minute. At that rate,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to vet everything and make sure it
Speaker 1: passes muster. So YouTube is now under pressure to design
Speaker 1: a system that more effectively filters out inappropriate content. Tesla
Speaker 1: Motors merged with the solar provider company Solar City for
Speaker 1: an estimated two point six billion dollars. Solar City was
Speaker 1: founded by some of Elon Musk's relatives and has a
Speaker 1: close relationship with the batteries that Tesla produces, but not
Speaker 1: every thing was sonny for Tesla Motors. In seventeen, the
Speaker 1: company missed its ship date for the Model three Tesla,
Speaker 1: and on November one reported that it wouldn't hit the
Speaker 1: five thousand units per week number the company had promised
Speaker 1: until late q one. The company cited unspecified production bottlenecks
Speaker 1: as the reason for the delay initially, but in a
Speaker 1: later shareholder letter more details emerged. According to that letter,
Speaker 1: the major delay came from the quote battery module assembly
Speaker 1: line at Giga Factory one, where cells are packaged into
Speaker 1: modules in the quote. The letter went on to explain
Speaker 1: the complexity of the design required more time to manufacture
Speaker 1: and as symbol than engineers had anticipated. The delays came
Speaker 1: with more than just the cost of not moving units.
Speaker 1: Investors filed a lawsuit against Tesla, alleging that the executives
Speaker 1: had deliberately hidden the nature of these delays from investors
Speaker 1: in an attempt to preserve the company's value. Oh And
Speaker 1: the company also faced law suits from workers claiming to
Speaker 1: have experienced discrimination at the Fremont, California plant, claims that
Speaker 1: Tesla representatives have been quake to deny. David carp, the
Speaker 1: founder of Tumbler, announced he would leave the company after
Speaker 1: eleven years of working there. Yahoo had purchased Tumbler back
Speaker 1: in two thousand thirteen for one billion dollars. By March
Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen, Yahoo had to write off that purchase,
Speaker 1: essentially saying the whole thing was lost. The Tumbler acquisition
Speaker 1: is one of the decisions that critics of Merissa Meyers
Speaker 1: say led to the downfall of Yahoo. Uber YEP, We're
Speaker 1: back to Them continued its tumultuous year with yet another scandal.
Speaker 1: In late November, news broke that Uber Systems had been
Speaker 1: the target of hackers in sixteen. Further that the hackers
Speaker 1: were able to access and steal customer data in that attack,
Speaker 1: and worse yet, the head of Uber's security department, Joe Sullivan,
Speaker 1: had authorized payments to the hackers to the tune of
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars in an effort to cover the
Speaker 1: whole thing up. In the wake of his firing, more
Speaker 1: details about his practices came to light that didn't seem
Speaker 1: terribly ethical. He allegedly told employees to quote use ephemeral
Speaker 1: messaging apps in the quote as an applications that do
Speaker 1: not save threads and delete all the contents after a
Speaker 1: certain amount of time. According to a former Uber employee,
Speaker 1: this was to make sure we didn't create a paper
Speaker 1: trail that would come back to haunt the company in
Speaker 1: any potential criminal or civil litigation. Yikes, alright, home stretch,
Speaker 1: We're in December, and uh, you know, I haven't covered
Speaker 1: a nasty hostile takeover story in a long time. So
Speaker 1: in early December, a company called broad Calm started to
Speaker 1: take the earliest steps toward a hostile takeover of the
Speaker 1: company qual Calm. Qualcom makes semiconductors and telecommunications equipment It
Speaker 1: also has a healthy business in licensing various patents. The
Speaker 1: company holds broad Calm, which used to be known as
Speaker 1: e Vago Technologies, makes stuff that uses semi conductors and
Speaker 1: try uses. Its history back to being part of Hewitt Packard.
Speaker 1: Broadcom had sidled up to Qualcom and offered to buy
Speaker 1: the company for a reported a hundred three billion dollars
Speaker 1: in stocks and cash. Qualcom turned down this initial offer,
Speaker 1: so now Broadcom has nominated eleven people to the board
Speaker 1: of Qualcom in an effort to get the supported needs
Speaker 1: to make the acquisition. Because Qualcom is a publicly traded company,
Speaker 1: it must answer to stockholders. Broadcom's hope is to convince
Speaker 1: those stockholders that their investment will be more valuable should
Speaker 1: Qualcom join Broadcom's umbrella. The stockholders have the ability to
Speaker 1: elect the nominees Broadcom put forward. According to Broadcom representatives,
Speaker 1: stockholders already want this deal to be in place, They've
Speaker 1: just been blocked by Qualcom's board of directors. This story
Speaker 1: will continue to unfold in eighteen as the next shareholder
Speaker 1: meeting for Qualcom isn't until March of that year. Musician
Speaker 1: Neil Young made nearly all of his music available online
Speaker 1: through a streaming service called x stream, which will send
Speaker 1: the highest quality audio stream to a user based on
Speaker 1: that users bandwidth. If you have a wicked fast connection,
Speaker 1: you will presumably have a more rich experience musically speaking.
Speaker 1: The music is free to listen to until June, whereupon
Speaker 1: it turns into a subscription based service. It's interesting to
Speaker 1: see another streaming service pop up because there's already a
Speaker 1: ton of them available, but arguing for sound quality might
Speaker 1: be enough to set it apart from its competitors. Lift,
Speaker 1: the other big right hailing service, recently launched a test
Speaker 1: autonomous car service in the Boston support area. The cars
Speaker 1: still have a human operator behind the wheel, though, so
Speaker 1: it's not entirely driverless yet. The cars themselves were created
Speaker 1: by a company called New Autonomy, so if you're in
Speaker 1: the Boston area, you might be able to get a
Speaker 1: ride from a car that drives itself. Valve, about which
Speaker 1: I did a full podcast series, recently said December that
Speaker 1: it would stop accepting bitcoin in Steam because of how
Speaker 1: wildly the value of the currency fluctuates. Valves stated that
Speaker 1: even in the process of a single transaction, the value
Speaker 1: of bitcoin could change significantly enough to cause major problems.
Speaker 1: So you might determine that something is worth point zero
Speaker 1: zero zero eight bitcoin, but then the value of bitcoin
Speaker 1: changes so much that you end up overpaying or under
Speaker 1: paying for that particular project. And Valve said, this just
Speaker 1: isn't working, and they pulled the plug. By the time
Speaker 1: this episode goes live, the f c C will have
Speaker 1: held a vote on whether to overturn the decision made
Speaker 1: by the former leaders of the f c C to
Speaker 1: reclassify Internet service providers as a common carrier. Since this
Speaker 1: has not yet happened. As a record this episode, I
Speaker 1: can only give a guess as to how it turned out,
Speaker 1: and my guess is that they did indeed overturn that decision.
Speaker 1: I personally consider this the wrong path to take, as
Speaker 1: I feel that without regulations, we will be in danger
Speaker 1: of facing a fractured, throttled Internet based on whatever I
Speaker 1: s P we use. But we'll see. That would be
Speaker 1: all the stories I have prepared, and obviously this is
Speaker 1: just a hint of the stuff that unfolded in. Some
Speaker 1: of the biggest stories are the ones that caught my attention,
Speaker 1: but there are so many others, and I have to
Speaker 1: give a shout out to my buddies over at daily
Speaker 1: tech news show. That'd be Tom Merritt and Sarah Lane
Speaker 1: in particular. They cover this kind of technology news every
Speaker 1: single day. I highly recommend you check out their show
Speaker 1: so that you can keep up to date on news.
Speaker 1: And I relied very heavily on their past episodes, the
Speaker 1: episodes they did for to pull some of the big
Speaker 1: stories for this particular episode of tech Stuff. But it's okay,
Speaker 1: Tom and Sarah and I know each other, so it's
Speaker 1: all cool. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I
Speaker 1: look forward to the next couple of episodes. Next one
Speaker 1: will be how did we do with Predictions for and
Speaker 1: then the one following that will be predictions for eighteen,
Speaker 1: which I'm I'm honestly not looking forward to because I
Speaker 1: should have learned my lesson by now. But once you
Speaker 1: establish a tradition, it's really hard to stop. If you
Speaker 1: guys have suggestions for topics that I should absolutely cover
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand eighteen, then I recommend you
Speaker 1: get in touch with me and let me know what
Speaker 1: those suggestions are. You can write me the address is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle of both of those is text stuff hs W.
Speaker 1: Remember we have an Instagram account also text stuff hs W.
Speaker 1: And Hey, if you want to watch me record these
Speaker 1: things live, go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff.
Speaker 1: Typically I record on Wednesdays and Fridays. You can see
Speaker 1: the schedule there. You can join in, be part of
Speaker 1: the chat room, and be up to all sorts of
Speaker 1: crazy shenanigans. That wraps us up for this year. I'll
Speaker 1: be wrapping up the predictions next making more predictions, and
Speaker 1: then we'll say farewell forever to be your two thousand
Speaker 1: and seventeen, and turn our eyes forward to two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: and I'll tell to you guys again really soon for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, because it
Speaker 1: how stuff works. Dot com