Speaker 1: Welcome to tex 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 I love all things tech, and we are covering
Speaker 1: some of the biggest text stories of twenty twenty, some
Speaker 1: of them, not all of them. In our last episode,
Speaker 1: we looked at the first three months, which means if
Speaker 1: we were to keep that pace, we would need four
Speaker 1: episodes to get through the year, assuming each quarter has
Speaker 1: about the same amount of news. However, if you listen
Speaker 1: to the late last episode, you also know that I
Speaker 1: stuck with stories that played out through twenty twenty, so
Speaker 1: maybe that will help us out. I guess we'll see.
Speaker 1: I know that that's going to be at least three episodes. Spoiler,
Speaker 1: we don't finish it out today, but let's jump back
Speaker 1: into April twenty. In a tip of cool Year, I
Speaker 1: would start off talking about April by mentioning the various
Speaker 1: pranks and jokes that brands pulled or tried to pull.
Speaker 1: Something that exasperates many of my peers who cover technology,
Speaker 1: but I kind of like a good silly joke as
Speaker 1: long as it's not you know, mean spirited or just
Speaker 1: an outright lie posing as the truth in an effort
Speaker 1: to actually trick people. But the pandemic and the Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter movement really changed things in the United States.
Speaker 1: Many states or cities had issued lockdown restrictions, and a
Speaker 1: lot of brands chose to give April first twenty a pass. Personally,
Speaker 1: I would have preferred twice as many jokes and no pandemic.
Speaker 1: But the balls in your court, grouchy tech journalists, those
Speaker 1: jokes don't seem so bad now, do they. In our
Speaker 1: previous episode, I talked about how Zoom had a huge
Speaker 1: year due to more people moving their work and personal
Speaker 1: connections online. In April, we would see some concerns about
Speaker 1: zooms security. The company's privacy protections were brought into question,
Speaker 1: and we started seeing a trend of zoom bombing, in
Speaker 1: which people who were not invited to a Zoom session
Speaker 1: We're showing up, often because someone had shared the link
Speaker 1: for that meeting in a way that wasn't secure, and
Speaker 1: it would prompt Zoom to institute more accessible password protection
Speaker 1: options uh into an encryption and other methods to make
Speaker 1: sure that the people who are joining a session were
Speaker 1: the ones who are meant to, not just people who
Speaker 1: happen to have a link to the online session. Now,
Speaker 1: granted these are all options. You don't have to have
Speaker 1: password protection on your Zoom meeting, so it's still are
Speaker 1: there still are possibilities for people to to barge in
Speaker 1: on a meeting they aren't really welcome to, but there
Speaker 1: are now more options to allow you to have more
Speaker 1: control over that. We also began to see various coronavirus
Speaker 1: tracking apps in development. The apps had a couple of
Speaker 1: real big jol leunges. So the idea is that these
Speaker 1: apps can track where you go, and if you should
Speaker 1: happen to be near someone else who happens to have
Speaker 1: the app and who has indicated that they have been
Speaker 1: exposed to COVID, then you would get a notification saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you came into contact with someone who has already indicated
Speaker 1: that they may have been exposed. If used properly, you
Speaker 1: can help mitigate the spread of the disease. But there's
Speaker 1: also a genuine concern for privacy and a general fear
Speaker 1: that such an app would violate the privacy of the
Speaker 1: people using it, or that the companies that are making
Speaker 1: the apps could then later on use that information in
Speaker 1: ways that we don't necessarily approve of. And if this
Speaker 1: were just a disease and people were just treating it
Speaker 1: as a disease, maybe all of these concerns are things
Speaker 1: that we could overlook. But we have to remember that
Speaker 1: there are other factors at play here. One of those
Speaker 1: is that some people hold up pretty racist and xenophobic
Speaker 1: opinion about the origins of the disease. There were so
Speaker 1: many stories of people with Chinese heritage being harassed because
Speaker 1: of that perception, and people can be pretty awful if
Speaker 1: they choose to be, so there are a lot of
Speaker 1: things to balance out when it comes to tracking coronavirus.
Speaker 1: On top of that, the apps tend to be voluntary,
Speaker 1: which means each person has to choose to download and
Speaker 1: install it, and some people are just unwilling to do that.
Speaker 1: And then there's the fact that you would need to
Speaker 1: update the app to reflect a diagnosis. It's an imperfect solution,
Speaker 1: and in places like Europe, there were a lot of
Speaker 1: long discussions about how to balance out these various concerns.
Speaker 1: As it stands, there are lots of different apps, most
Speaker 1: of them focus on relatively small regions, but much of
Speaker 1: the world is not covered by them. I mean I
Speaker 1: live in Georgia, which is the home for the Center
Speaker 1: for Disease Control, and we don't have an app for
Speaker 1: our state as of yet. We also started seeing cases
Speaker 1: of people damaging five G towers in April of twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned in my episode about five gen myths,
Speaker 1: some people somehow corroborated these towers with the creation or
Speaker 1: spread of coronavirus, as if somehow, then, for some reason,
Speaker 1: the telecommunications companies were broadcasting a virus which is just impossible.
Speaker 1: I mean, a virus that can affect humans. I guess
Speaker 1: you could broadcast a computer virus. That's a different kettle
Speaker 1: of fish. The pandemic also delayed one of the more
Speaker 1: anticipated criminal trials in recent tech history. Elizabeth Holmes, founder
Speaker 1: of medical startup Theoris, was to have her trial begin
Speaker 1: in twenty but the pandemic became a factor and the
Speaker 1: court would order the trial to be delayed until the
Speaker 1: spring of For those who don't know who Elizabeth Holmes
Speaker 1: is or what her company, Theopness did, here's a super
Speaker 1: brief rundown Holmes, who idolized Silicon Valley leaders like Steve
Speaker 1: jobs created a company that had the goal of developing
Speaker 1: a medical device. The device, which was projected to be
Speaker 1: about the size of your typical desktop printer, would be
Speaker 1: able to take a very small blood sample, the tiniest
Speaker 1: little droplet, and run hundreds of different analytical tests on
Speaker 1: that sample. Within a short time, perhaps an hour or two.
Speaker 1: The device would produce a report about that sample, giving
Speaker 1: the user information about their health, diagnosing any diseases or conditions,
Speaker 1: and in theory, empowering the user. And The idea was
Speaker 1: to democratize medicine in a way that would give users
Speaker 1: more information about their own health and a better way
Speaker 1: to interact with their primary care physician and the general
Speaker 1: medical establishment. Some doctors worried that this would cause people
Speaker 1: to misinterpret results, but it turns out they didn't really
Speaker 1: have much to fear because the device never worked properly,
Speaker 1: at least not to the extent that the company wanted
Speaker 1: it to. It turned out the actual process was way
Speaker 1: more are complicated than Holmes had first imagined, and her
Speaker 1: team of engineers were tackling problem after problem in order
Speaker 1: to try and make it work. In the meantime, The
Speaker 1: allegations against Holmes state that she and her fellow executives
Speaker 1: purposefully misled investors, including using equipment from established blood testing
Speaker 1: companies to run blood tests while claiming that a themised
Speaker 1: device was actually doing all the work. The house of
Speaker 1: cards came crashing down, but not before investors had poured
Speaker 1: more than seven hundred million dollars into it. Holmes is
Speaker 1: now charged with numerous counts of fraud, and we'll have
Speaker 1: to wait to see how that all turns out. One
Speaker 1: of the big early stories tied in with the coronavirus
Speaker 1: was how ill prepared hospitals were to meet the challenge
Speaker 1: of early serious cases. We saw some people try to
Speaker 1: help in novel ways, such as using three D printers
Speaker 1: to create airflow splitters for ventilators. So ventilators take over
Speaker 1: the process of breathing for patients, and they are expensive
Speaker 1: pieces of machinery and there's a limited number of them.
Speaker 1: So the thought was that by using splitters, you could
Speaker 1: divert air from one ventilator to multiple patients, like two patients,
Speaker 1: and that way you wouldn't have to have just one
Speaker 1: ventilator per patient, and thus you could stretch the limited
Speaker 1: resources you have further. And I think it was a
Speaker 1: fairly clever move. But I also have very strong feelings
Speaker 1: about how the United States government completely failed to meet
Speaker 1: the challenge of COVID on a national scale. But i'll
Speaker 1: spare you that rant. I'm sure you're all familiar and
Speaker 1: tired of hearing those kind of things already. But on
Speaker 1: a related note, in April, Elon Musk said he had
Speaker 1: sent ventilators to hospitals in California to help alleviate the
Speaker 1: resource scarcity. Musk had sent valuable equipment, but they weren't
Speaker 1: technically ventilators. There were machines that aid in breathing assistance,
Speaker 1: but there are stepped down from ventilators themselves, which, as
Speaker 1: I said, handle breathing entirely for a patient. This I
Speaker 1: think was largely a case of bad communication, by which
Speaker 1: I mean Musk really did help these hospitals, just not
Speaker 1: in the way that was initially reported. So I don't
Speaker 1: want to throw shade on Musk for this, as he
Speaker 1: was doing something that actually was incredible and the hospitals
Speaker 1: did have need of that equipment. But that being said,
Speaker 1: Musk also used his position and platform to argue against
Speaker 1: stuff like stay at home orders. He was defiant of them.
Speaker 1: He said that Tesla would continue to operate even in
Speaker 1: the face of stay at home orders, and he helps
Speaker 1: spread misinformation about the coronavirus. So while he did help
Speaker 1: some hospitals by sending them equipment, he also lent credence
Speaker 1: to false narratives about COVID And I think the scales
Speaker 1: mostly way on the You done did bad on this one,
Speaker 1: and I almost forgot. On April six, twenty Quimby, the
Speaker 1: short form high production video streaming service, officially launched. Led
Speaker 1: by dream war its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP
Speaker 1: CEO Meg Whitman. The service could not have come out
Speaker 1: at a worse time. It was geared towards mobile users,
Speaker 1: the idea being that people like to consume media on
Speaker 1: their phones well they're waiting for stuff like when they're
Speaker 1: on a bus or on a subway, or when they're
Speaker 1: in line for something. But of course, the service launched
Speaker 1: just as a pandemic was forcing most of us to
Speaker 1: stay at home. Even without the pandemic, a new video
Speaker 1: service was going to have a really tough fight to
Speaker 1: be competitive, But the use case for Quimby was pretty
Speaker 1: much wiped out before it could even get started. It
Speaker 1: launched a lot of exclusive programming and gave a lot
Speaker 1: of creative folks and outlet, but it couldn't tough it
Speaker 1: out and it would shut down late in so R
Speaker 1: I p Quimby if you want to learn more. I
Speaker 1: did do a couple of episodes about Quimby earlier this year.
Speaker 1: I did one a few months after it had launched,
Speaker 1: and then I did another one after the announcement that
Speaker 1: Quimby was going to shut down in December. There are
Speaker 1: a few other stories that happened in April, but they
Speaker 1: mostly involved how the heck do we do what we
Speaker 1: do when there's a pandemic going on? And I think
Speaker 1: we've heard, you know enough of those to kind of
Speaker 1: know that these stories are largely the same as companies
Speaker 1: big and small. We're grappling with the challenges of a
Speaker 1: world being thrown into chaos thanks to a virus. Two
Speaker 1: other stories I think I should mention, though, are that
Speaker 1: Nintendo revealed in April that hackers compromised one sixty thousand
Speaker 1: accounts on the Nintendo network, and they stole funds from
Speaker 1: account holders in the process by using any stored funds
Speaker 1: that were in the those accounts to do stuff like
Speaker 1: by Fortnite's virtual currency, which, as we learned in a
Speaker 1: previous episode, would not be subjected to federal taxes. The
Speaker 1: hackers exploited the older Nintendo Network I D system, which
Speaker 1: was used for the older three DS and we U consoles.
Speaker 1: The company offered to fund money to those affected and
Speaker 1: urged users to change their passwords. Later on, Nintendo would
Speaker 1: reveal the hat compromised more accounts than they first realized,
Speaker 1: nearly twice as many in fact. The other little story
Speaker 1: that from April was that Apple introduced the iPhone SE,
Speaker 1: the budget model entry into the iPhone line, and it
Speaker 1: looked a lot like the older iPhone eight which came
Speaker 1: out back in And while it is a budget model,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean it's actually cheap. The baseline iPhone SE
Speaker 1: marketed for three dollars. Still, compared to top of the
Speaker 1: line phones in the iPhone line, that's definitely on the
Speaker 1: less expensive side. Now we're up to May, Airbnb announced
Speaker 1: it would lay off a quarter of its employees. The
Speaker 1: travel industry in general was hit super hard by the pandemic,
Speaker 1: from hotels to airlines, to ride share companies and more.
Speaker 1: We'd see a lot of other companies follow suit, either
Speaker 1: laying off employees or ending contract worker agreements, all in
Speaker 1: an effort to scale back and tighten the belt to
Speaker 1: outlast the pandemic. So here are a few companies that
Speaker 1: laid off people. In Cisco laid off around thirty five
Speaker 1: hundred employees, Comcast laid off another thirty dred A. T
Speaker 1: and T was right behind with thirty four hundred. Salesforce
Speaker 1: laid off a thousand people. Microsoft laid off nine hundred
Speaker 1: sixty employees, PayPal laid off a hundred employees, and all
Speaker 1: of those companies managed to remain profitable during COVID. So
Speaker 1: that's a pretty tough pill to swallow. Right, that these
Speaker 1: companies were making these big cuts in an effort to
Speaker 1: remain profitable during a pandemic benefits the shareholders, but not
Speaker 1: the employees. Meanwhile, those workers are left to struggle and
Speaker 1: find new employment in an environment that's really, really hard.
Speaker 1: I mean, it is difficult to to overstate how hard
Speaker 1: it is to get a new gig in the midst
Speaker 1: of a pandemic. And I'm sure some of you out
Speaker 1: there either may have dealt with this personally or know
Speaker 1: someone who is dealing with it. And you know, this
Speaker 1: is tough. And then there are the companies that made
Speaker 1: big cuts but we're still unprofitable during COVID. The Walt
Speaker 1: Disney Company is a big one. Now I'm a big
Speaker 1: Disney fan, but the company has got a pretty ugly
Speaker 1: tarnish on it, having laid off more than thirty thousand
Speaker 1: employees during the pandemic. And you could argue that a
Speaker 1: lot of that might be necessary from a business standpoint
Speaker 1: because some places, some points of employment within Disney, like Disneyland,
Speaker 1: for example, those remain closed with no firm reopening dates.
Speaker 1: So it's hard to justify, Hey, let's keep all the
Speaker 1: people from Disneyland on payroll indefinitely and we have no
Speaker 1: idea when we'll be able to reopen. You can see
Speaker 1: from a business standpoint how that's a tough call. But
Speaker 1: you could also argue that Disney has been printing money
Speaker 1: for the last few years, with franchises like Star Wars
Speaker 1: and Marvel bringing in billions of dollars from the box
Speaker 1: office alone, and that's before you even touch stuff like merchandizing.
Speaker 1: The company has been losing money, however, and shareholders typically
Speaker 1: are not super crazy about that, So this is a
Speaker 1: very difficult road to travel here. It's I don't want
Speaker 1: to to dismiss this as saying Disney bad. I am
Speaker 1: not a fan of them laying off so many people
Speaker 1: during a pandemic, But at the same time, you have
Speaker 1: to acknowledge the realities of what business is. So it's
Speaker 1: not like there's an easy decision to make here, but
Speaker 1: man talking about having the magic stripped away, or rather
Speaker 1: having to reckon with the realization that magic is all
Speaker 1: in perception, and when the veil has fallen, it's a
Speaker 1: lot harder to you know, recapture that feeling of Oh,
Speaker 1: it's a magical company. Uh, it's a company, and it's
Speaker 1: a company that that is very much focused on its
Speaker 1: forward facing pr with the public, and that took a
Speaker 1: pretty big hit in Boeing, Chevron and Exxon Mobile also
Speaker 1: laid off thousands of employees and also remained unprofitable during
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Uber laid off a lot of its staff.
Speaker 1: Unemployment claims in the United States have hovered around one
Speaker 1: million each month, with some of the most recent being
Speaker 1: between a hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand claims. UH
Speaker 1: the average in a year that is not going through
Speaker 1: a pandemic in the United States would be two thousand
Speaker 1: claims or so. Now we should keep that in mind
Speaker 1: that as bad as all this is, at least it's
Speaker 1: not the levels that we saw unemployment hit in March
Speaker 1: when the claims spiked up to six point nine million. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: companies like door Ash and insta Carts saw their valuation
Speaker 1: skyrocket as demands for home delivery services increased. We saw
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff too, with services specializing in
Speaker 1: deliveries growing quickly and hiring on a lot of people.
Speaker 1: So there were some industries that were actually in a
Speaker 1: hiring mode, not a laying off mode. Twitter would announce
Speaker 1: in May that it would flag tweets containing coronavirus misinformation
Speaker 1: on its service, even if those tweets should come from
Speaker 1: really important people such as President Trump, and this would
Speaker 1: kick off essentially a big old mess in the United
Speaker 1: States as Twitter would become more aggressive and flagging tweets
Speaker 1: that contained misinformation, including those coming from Trump, and the
Speaker 1: categories of misinformation would extend beyond the pandemic as well.
Speaker 1: This would infuriate the President, who stepped up his opposition
Speaker 1: to Section two thirty A bit of American legislation that
Speaker 1: gives online platforms protection against what their users post, as
Speaker 1: well as gives them the authority to moderate posts without
Speaker 1: fear of litigation. I did a full episode about section
Speaker 1: to thirty not too long ago. If you want to
Speaker 1: learn more about that and what the whole argument is
Speaker 1: both for and against it, I recommend you check that out.
Speaker 1: Now it's time for us to take a quick break.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we will get through spring and
Speaker 1: start pushing into the summer of But first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. May was when A T and T
Speaker 1: agreed to stop using five G evolution in its marketing efforts.
Speaker 1: And if you listen to my episode about five G
Speaker 1: Myths versus Reality, you know that A T and T
Speaker 1: had rebranded its LTE service, a four G service, as
Speaker 1: five G E, with the icon and users phones changing
Speaker 1: to reflect this. Now, a lot of other carriers criticized
Speaker 1: A T and T for doing this. They claim that
Speaker 1: this was a deliberate misdirection with the intent to make
Speaker 1: people think that they suddenly had a five G phone,
Speaker 1: when in fact they didn't. They were using a four
Speaker 1: G phone on a four G network that was being
Speaker 1: labeled as five G. A T and T faced some
Speaker 1: sanctions when they were using this in their marketing, and
Speaker 1: so ultimately the company stopped using the terminology in its
Speaker 1: various advertising campaigns, but the five G E icon on
Speaker 1: the phones stuck around. Also in May, Doug Lavero, who
Speaker 1: had served as the head of human Spaceflight Operations at
Speaker 1: NASA for six months, resigned abruptly, and in his resignation note,
Speaker 1: he alluded to making a mistake, but there was no
Speaker 1: real elaboration on what that mistake was. Speculation and rumor
Speaker 1: soon took hold. I mean, if there's ever a gap
Speaker 1: in knowledge, people will fill it with whatever they can.
Speaker 1: So could it be that he made some sort of
Speaker 1: controversial decision regarding the use of commercial space company like
Speaker 1: SpaceX might have something to do with the Artemis program,
Speaker 1: which has the incredibly aggressive goal of getting people back
Speaker 1: on the Moon by four At first, there wasn't much
Speaker 1: information on the matter, but later on in August, the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal reported that a federal criminal probe into
Speaker 1: Lavero's activities was commencing That was looking to see if
Speaker 1: Laverro had given any information illegally to Boeing during the
Speaker 1: bidding process to design and build a new human lunar
Speaker 1: lander for the Artemis project. If he had, that would
Speaker 1: be in violation of the Procurement Integrity Act. As NASA
Speaker 1: isn't to show any favoritism to any particular bidding entity.
Speaker 1: You're not supposed to give information that might give one
Speaker 1: bitter uh of an advantage over others. And the announcement
Speaker 1: of his resignation in May was particularly of concern because
Speaker 1: it happened just two weeks before NASA was to rely
Speaker 1: upon SpaceX launch vehicles and spacecraft to take astronauts to
Speaker 1: the International Space Station. So this was just two weeks
Speaker 1: before the first manned launch of a spacecraft on US
Speaker 1: soil since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle program. Bad timing.
Speaker 1: Besides the pandemic and the election, another thing we need
Speaker 1: to remember about in the United States is the Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter movement and how they would play a big
Speaker 1: part in how tech and society intersect. As organizers relied
Speaker 1: on social platforms to bring people together to demonstrate in
Speaker 1: the real world, so too did those who opposed the movement,
Speaker 1: So you had rights activists clashing with white supremacists online
Speaker 1: and off. Some platforms like Facebook tried to take a
Speaker 1: hands off Switzerland like approach. Others like Twitter, tried to
Speaker 1: flag content that contained misinformation or those that glorified violence,
Speaker 1: including tweets from Trump, and it became the subject of
Speaker 1: increasingly heated debates about what text role is in these
Speaker 1: matters and whether or not these social platforms were making
Speaker 1: things better or worse. Let's move into June. Early that month,
Speaker 1: a group of Facebook employees staged a virtual walk off
Speaker 1: in protest of Zuckerberg's lack of response to Trump's messaging
Speaker 1: on Facebook, largely regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. They
Speaker 1: were arguing that he was turning a blind eye to
Speaker 1: posts that clearly violated Facebook's own terms of service. Internally,
Speaker 1: Facebook managers were told not to retaliate or require employees
Speaker 1: to use paid time off to cover for the walkout,
Speaker 1: and so the company was facing criticism both from external
Speaker 1: sources and from within the company itself. Not that this
Speaker 1: would change things very much over at Facebook for most
Speaker 1: of twenty and you might think I have a bias
Speaker 1: against Facebook, And you know what, I guess I kind
Speaker 1: of do, as I've said in previous podcasts, if you
Speaker 1: give the truth and lies and equal ground to stand
Speaker 1: upon lines are gonna win. It's just way easier to
Speaker 1: tell people what they want to hear rather than to
Speaker 1: make them listen to the truth. At the protests themselves,
Speaker 1: we saw tech also play a role. People used drones
Speaker 1: to get footage of protests, including one case at least
Speaker 1: one in which US Customs and Border Patrol flew a
Speaker 1: drone over Minneapolis. And I'm not talking about some little
Speaker 1: quad captor. The drone in this case appeared to be
Speaker 1: a Predator B drone a k A and m Q
Speaker 1: nine Reaper, which is designed to be a so called
Speaker 1: hunter killer drone, as in, this was a drone designed
Speaker 1: to be armed and used to track down a target
Speaker 1: and fire upon it. Now, the agency said it was
Speaker 1: operating the drone purely as a means to keep police
Speaker 1: informed of potential problems like outbreaks of violence or looting.
Speaker 1: But the Customs and Border Patrol jurisdiction ends once you
Speaker 1: get one hundred miles out from US borders. I mean
Speaker 1: it's Customs and Borders Patrol. Minneapolis is three hundred miles
Speaker 1: away from the Canadian border, so that creates a pretty
Speaker 1: thorny basis for operations. How can the the U S
Speaker 1: Customs and Border Patrol justify flying a drone over Minneapolis
Speaker 1: when it has no jurisdiction over that area. This is
Speaker 1: a troubling matter. The use of drones raised multiple privacy
Speaker 1: concerns and fueled allegations that the government was actively attempting
Speaker 1: to disrupt citizens as they exercise their constitutionally guaranteed First
Speaker 1: Amendment rights to public assembly and free speech. One Twitter follower,
Speaker 1: I have suggested that I talk about how the federal
Speaker 1: government used drones and other aircraft to jam cell phone
Speaker 1: service over areas that had protesters. Now, as far as
Speaker 1: I know, that never actually happened. Jamming cell phone service
Speaker 1: is technically possible, but legally it's very tricky to do,
Speaker 1: and it brings along a lot of collateral damage because
Speaker 1: anyone in an area would find their service disrupted, whether
Speaker 1: they were part of a protest or not. You can
Speaker 1: easily imagine how that could lead to disaster. I mean,
Speaker 1: you could have a medical emergency, or there could be
Speaker 1: a fire not even connected to the protests, and you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have any way of of contacting first responders to
Speaker 1: get aid. But there were reports of various agencies, federal
Speaker 1: and local, using things like helicopters, drones, and planes to
Speaker 1: conduct surveillance on protesters, which definitely was happening. The cell
Speaker 1: phone jamming probably not, but surveillance definitely happened, including some
Speaker 1: allegations that the government was making use of devices called
Speaker 1: sting rays. Now, a sting ray poses as a legit
Speaker 1: cell phone service tower as far as phones are concerned,
Speaker 1: that's what it is. But it's real purpose is to
Speaker 1: pick up data from phones that are in the area.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like having someone posted at a
Speaker 1: cell phone tower and making note of all the phones
Speaker 1: that connect to that tower and to what those phones
Speaker 1: are there then connecting to, like if they're making a
Speaker 1: call somewhere or uploading data to a service. In October
Speaker 1: of twenty a group of US representatives called for an
Speaker 1: investigation into the surveillance techniques that were being used by
Speaker 1: federal agencies during the Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations,
Speaker 1: questioning whether the government violated the constitutional rights of US citizens.
Speaker 1: As I record this that has not concluded, but it
Speaker 1: points to how serious this issue was. The protests would
Speaker 1: affect the tech sector in other ways as well. Sony
Speaker 1: chose to postpone its PlayStation five event. Largely due to
Speaker 1: the protests, Various online personalities such as YouTubers and twitch
Speaker 1: streamers would use their platforms to help raise money for
Speaker 1: the activist movement. IBM canceled and entire your program that
Speaker 1: was using machine learning and artificial intelligence to build facial
Speaker 1: recognition systems, recognizing that these technologies had a disproportionately negative
Speaker 1: impact on people of color. Amazon announced it would stop
Speaker 1: providing facial recognition software to police for the terms of
Speaker 1: a year, with the company representatives saying that their their
Speaker 1: hope was that the US government would quote implement appropriate
Speaker 1: rules end quote regarding facial recognition technologies. During that year
Speaker 1: long ban, Microsoft also announced it would not sell facial
Speaker 1: recognition technology to police departments in the United States. So
Speaker 1: he started to see the corporations make a shift as
Speaker 1: the public sentiment grew around the Black Lives Matter movement.
Speaker 1: On a totally different note, Microsoft announced in June that
Speaker 1: it was going to shut down its streaming video game
Speaker 1: platform uh known as Mixer. So it's kind of like Twitch.
Speaker 1: It's a platform for people to stream their video game
Speaker 1: playing sessions to an audience, and they chose instead to
Speaker 1: partner with Facebook Gaming and some very high profile streamers
Speaker 1: had been enticed to leave Twitch for lucrative contracts with Microsoft.
Speaker 1: Among them guys like Ninja and Shroud, two of the
Speaker 1: most popular video game streamers in the world. Microsoft spent
Speaker 1: a lot of money on these exclusive agreements with these
Speaker 1: top streamers, hoping that they would bring their legions of
Speaker 1: fans along with them to Mixer, but that really just
Speaker 1: didn't happen. Twitch was pulling in fifteen million visits per
Speaker 1: day with one million monthly active users. Mixer, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, was managing ten million monthly active users, literally
Speaker 1: one tenth of what Twitch was pulling. Microsoft had introduced
Speaker 1: a lot of innovative features that users and critics were praising,
Speaker 1: but it just couldn't make much ground against the juggernauts
Speaker 1: of Twitch and YouTube gaming. The low return on investment
Speaker 1: meant that Microsoft decided to pull the plug and folks
Speaker 1: like Ninja and Shroud were free to go wherever they pleased,
Speaker 1: and the Mixer technology would transition over to Facebook gaming,
Speaker 1: which I have honestly never checked out. I have no
Speaker 1: idea how big Facebook gaming is, uh, which is odd.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that I've heard about, but
Speaker 1: I have never experienced. I am more of a twitch
Speaker 1: and YouTube gaming kind of guy. Also tying into this
Speaker 1: was that in June we saw another surge of the
Speaker 1: me too movement, this time focused in video games and streaming.
Speaker 1: Many women's streamers came forward with accusations against influential people
Speaker 1: in the streaming community, most of them men, saying that
Speaker 1: they had been manipulated by these people, they had been groomed,
Speaker 1: they had been coerced, and it's all really ugly, ugly stuff.
Speaker 1: And this was also when we started hearing more about
Speaker 1: ongoing sexual harassment issues at the major video game developed Ubisoft,
Speaker 1: which would go through a tumultuous series of personnel changes
Speaker 1: as a result. And I recently did several episodes about Ubisoft,
Speaker 1: so if you want to know more, you can check
Speaker 1: those out. But some of the people who were ultimately
Speaker 1: let go had been with the company for more than
Speaker 1: a decade and included very high ranking executives. Meanwhile, over
Speaker 1: at Facebook, the company was now dealing with more than
Speaker 1: just criticism. Advertisers were starting to leave the platform. They
Speaker 1: were concerned that Facebook's opposition to dealing with harassment and
Speaker 1: misinformation and hate groups would end up reflecting poorly on
Speaker 1: the companies that were using Facebook to advertise their Verizon
Speaker 1: would announce it would withdraw ads from Facebook in late June,
Speaker 1: and that must have been a serious wake up call
Speaker 1: for the company because most of the companies that were
Speaker 1: doing this, where they were backing away and boycotting Facebook,
Speaker 1: were in the small to medium range, which honestly doesn't
Speaker 1: represent very much of Facebook's revenue. It's of a few
Speaker 1: very very large companies that represent the bulk of revenue.
Speaker 1: So a company like Verizon definitely got a lot more attention,
Speaker 1: and this became known as the hashtag stop Hate for
Speaker 1: Profit movement. More than one thousand advertisers would join this campaign,
Speaker 1: but many of those also said that their boycott was
Speaker 1: temporary and that the pandemic had made it too risky
Speaker 1: to remain off Facebook for very long, like it was
Speaker 1: unnecessary evil essentially, and the company managed to actually grow
Speaker 1: its revenue despite this boycott. As The New York Times
Speaker 1: would point out in November, the movement did more to
Speaker 1: hurt the platform's reputation than its actual bottom line. That's
Speaker 1: not to say that a future, more widespread effort wouldn't
Speaker 1: have a greater impact, but this was more like a
Speaker 1: warning signal sent to Facebook than anything else. Facebook did
Speaker 1: agree to ban negative ads about immigrants or those who
Speaker 1: seek asylum, as well as on ads that include hate
Speaker 1: speech or discrimination. Zuckerberg said Facebook would also begin to
Speaker 1: label quote unquote newsworthy posts that violate the site's policies,
Speaker 1: the idea being that if a post is newsworthy, then
Speaker 1: it can still be on Facebook, even if otherwise the
Speaker 1: content of that post would violate Facebook's terms of service,
Speaker 1: but now at least Facebook would flag those ya. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: YouTube would ban David Dukes and Richard Spencer and a
Speaker 1: few other prominent white supremacist channels from its platform after
Speaker 1: being pressured to do so, and a year after the
Speaker 1: company had said it was going to ban accounts that
Speaker 1: posted videos supporting white supremacists. So there was a big
Speaker 1: question about why it took so long for these particular
Speaker 1: high profile cases by the company's own policies. This action
Speaker 1: was long overdue, and it followed what other platforms like
Speaker 1: Reddit had been doing in the wake of the Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter movement. These bands would sometimes include accounts or
Speaker 1: subbreddits that purported to support President Trump, turning this into
Speaker 1: kind of a political controversy, though the reason for the
Speaker 1: removal wasn't because of a political affiliation, had to do
Speaker 1: with the actual content within these accounts and subreddits. So,
Speaker 1: for example, the subreddit community the Donald was home to
Speaker 1: a lot of posts that included hate speech and promoted
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories that blamed minorities for various societal problems, so
Speaker 1: it got the acts. Toward late June, we learned that
Speaker 1: Uber was in talks of acquiring the delivery service Postmates.
Speaker 1: Uber already has its own food delivery service with Uber Eats,
Speaker 1: and the talks progressed throughout ending in November, when the
Speaker 1: companies agreed to an all stock transaction that would see
Speaker 1: Postmates moved to Uber for the princely sum of two
Speaker 1: point six five billion dollars worth of stock. Uber had
Speaker 1: previously attempted to scoop up grub Hub, but the company
Speaker 1: was beaten to the punch by a different company out
Speaker 1: of Europe called Just Takeaway for seven billion dollars. Holy cats.
Speaker 1: One bit of more lighthearted news that I can add
Speaker 1: to June was published on my birthday, that would be
Speaker 1: June twenty six. That's when I learned that NASA has
Speaker 1: a design competition, or rather had a design competition, and
Speaker 1: the first prize of this competition was twenty thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: second prize was ten thousand dollars, and third prize five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. And what you are meant to design was
Speaker 1: a toilet yep. NASA was looking for designs for a
Speaker 1: toilet that can work in micro gravity as well as
Speaker 1: the reduced gravity on the Moon. The Moon's gravity is
Speaker 1: about one sixth that of Earth's and presumably this would
Speaker 1: be on the lunar Lander module of the future, so
Speaker 1: they had very strict size and weight limitations for this
Speaker 1: particular piece of technology. And because NASA intends to send
Speaker 1: women to the Moon, it means the toilet has to
Speaker 1: be to work for both men and women. And a bonus,
Speaker 1: said NASA, and I swear I am not making this up,
Speaker 1: is that the toilet should be able to deal with
Speaker 1: an astronaut who needs to vomit without the astronaut having
Speaker 1: to place their head and said toilet. That was the
Speaker 1: thing that NASA was looking for. And if you have
Speaker 1: a great idea for the design, well, I hate to
Speaker 1: be the bearer of crappy news. But the deadline was August,
Speaker 1: So I guess I just flushed all those hopes and
Speaker 1: dreams down the moon toilet. When we come back, we'll
Speaker 1: head into July and see if I can compress the
Speaker 1: second half of the year's news into one third of
Speaker 1: an episode. Spoiler alert. I couldn't, so we will have
Speaker 1: a part three. But before we get into all of that,
Speaker 1: let's take another break. I haven't really talked about it
Speaker 1: so far in these episodes, but one of the stories
Speaker 1: that played out over the core of twenty was the
Speaker 1: fate of TikTok and how the US government was continuing
Speaker 1: to exert pressure on the company for its links to
Speaker 1: a Chinese parent company like Huawei. The implication was that
Speaker 1: the company was potentially vulnerable to Chinese government interference, and
Speaker 1: since so many Americans were using the app, it could
Speaker 1: pose as a national security concern. Or if you look
Speaker 1: at it another way, you could say this was a
Speaker 1: high profile company that the US government could target in
Speaker 1: an ongoing trade dispute between the United States and China
Speaker 1: and thus be a point of pain that US could
Speaker 1: inflict on China. Now, the truth behind the motivations to
Speaker 1: pressure TikTok is probably somewhere between those two pillars of philosophy.
Speaker 1: Cybersecurity experts, however, have pointed out that it is unlikely
Speaker 1: that China would be able to access data about US
Speaker 1: TikTok users because that data would be stored on servers
Speaker 1: that are here in the United States and thus outside
Speaker 1: the grasp of China directly, and that the TikTok CEO
Speaker 1: is an American CEO, so there might be a desire
Speaker 1: to access all that stuff, but not necessarily an actual
Speaker 1: ability to do that anyway. In July, we saw some
Speaker 1: curious reactions to TikTok in corporate America. Wells Fargo sent
Speaker 1: a directive to employees to delete TikTok from any corporate
Speaker 1: owned devices, citing security concerns. Now, I don't think this
Speaker 1: is actually that unusual. Companies must frequently deal with the
Speaker 1: possibility of data breaches or security vulnerabilities, and many of
Speaker 1: them are created not because of a hole in the
Speaker 1: technical security that a company has put in place, but
Speaker 1: rather the human element, the behavior of employees. I felt
Speaker 1: that Wells Fargo was actually pretty much in the right
Speaker 1: with this one, as the directive really only covered corporate
Speaker 1: owned devices, so to me, it's the same as if
Speaker 1: my company were to tell me, hey, you can't install
Speaker 1: the games on your work computer because that computer doesn't
Speaker 1: belong to you, it belongs to the company. So to me,
Speaker 1: that works the same way with this Wells Fargo example.
Speaker 1: TikTok's response, however, was to say that it was open
Speaker 1: to talk with Wells Fargo about how TikTok's secures user privacy,
Speaker 1: and maybe if Wells Fargo had told employees that they
Speaker 1: couldn't use TikTok on their own personal phones, I would
Speaker 1: feel that that was a totally different conversation and would
Speaker 1: be unjustifiable. But as it stands, I don't really see
Speaker 1: a big deal here, because even if you remove the
Speaker 1: Chinese element, let's say, all right, let's let's say let's
Speaker 1: say that it is impossible for China to get hold
Speaker 1: of that information, which is probably true. It's still a
Speaker 1: problem to have an app from a different company installed
Speaker 1: onto a corporate owned device because it could represent a
Speaker 1: potential security leak. And we already give a lot of
Speaker 1: our information over to company. He's both private and publicly traded,
Speaker 1: and that's already an issue. It's it's almost like the
Speaker 1: problem is present. It's just that the the ultimate uh
Speaker 1: entity that we should be afraid of is misidentified, if
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Now, Interestingly, Amazon had also sent a
Speaker 1: similar directive to its employees to delete TikTok from corporate
Speaker 1: owned devices, but within a couple of hours of that,
Speaker 1: Amazon sent a follow up email saying that the first
Speaker 1: message was sent in error, so Amazon retracted that directive. Now,
Speaker 1: we did see one big security breach in July. On
Speaker 1: July to be precise, that was buzzworthy. Hackers gained access
Speaker 1: to multiple high profile accounts on Twitter belonging to people
Speaker 1: like Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and others.
Speaker 1: The accounts blasted out messages promising something too good to
Speaker 1: be true, and we all know what that means. But
Speaker 1: in this case, the message has said that people should
Speaker 1: send bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency, to a particular digital wallet,
Speaker 1: and in return they would receive double what they sent.
Speaker 1: And if you're thinking, well, that just don't make no sense,
Speaker 1: then you're way ahead of the game, because this is
Speaker 1: just a scam that praise on the impulsive and the greedy.
Speaker 1: If I walked up to you and said, hey, if
Speaker 1: you give me a five dollar bill, I'll give you
Speaker 1: ten bucks. You would probably be suspicious of that, and
Speaker 1: you should be, because I'm a shifty character. But for
Speaker 1: some reason, scammers use this technique with Bitcoin and compromising
Speaker 1: such high profile accounts to do this seems to give
Speaker 1: the scam a bit more legitimacy. I mean, if it's
Speaker 1: coming from Barack Obama, it's got to be legit, right,
Speaker 1: So maybe that was the real difference here. So how
Speaker 1: the heck did this hack even happen? Well, once again
Speaker 1: we saw that the way into the system wasn't to
Speaker 1: brute force passwords or anything like that. Rather, the scammers
Speaker 1: targeted Twitter employees, trying to trick them into going to
Speaker 1: a dummy website to enter their credentials and solve some
Speaker 1: imaginary problem that was in the initial message. And it's
Speaker 1: the sort of approach that requires a very wide net,
Speaker 1: but you only have to catch a few fishies for
Speaker 1: it to pay off. And it paid off. The scammers
Speaker 1: were able to get enough Twitter administrators to give them
Speaker 1: that kind of access, and they began to use Twitter's
Speaker 1: methods to access various accounts, which actually raises questions about
Speaker 1: whether or not Twitter could ever do this to your account,
Speaker 1: could Twitter send out messages under your account without your permission,
Speaker 1: but that's a topic for another discussion. I guess Twitter
Speaker 1: eventually got it all locked down, but it was a
Speaker 1: sobering experience, particularly in a year where there was so
Speaker 1: much misinformation running rampant regarding everything from the pandemic to
Speaker 1: social movements to the upcoming US elections. Towards the end
Speaker 1: of July, the U S Congress called upon executives from Google, Apple, Amazon,
Speaker 1: and Facebook to appear for hearings about whether these companies
Speaker 1: are engaging in anti competitive practices and monopolizing various tech sectors,
Speaker 1: primarily digital advertising. And it was the first antitrust hearing
Speaker 1: in the tech sector in the United States since Microsoft
Speaker 1: had to do this back in nine now. The outcome
Speaker 1: of that Microsoft case was initially a threat of breaking
Speaker 1: Microsoft up into separate companies, but ultimately Microsoft was able
Speaker 1: to come to an agreement with the government that kept
Speaker 1: it whole, so it didn't have to split up. These
Speaker 1: discussions with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook continue up to
Speaker 1: the recording of this podcast, but for one company in particular,
Speaker 1: and that is Facebook, things escalated dramatically. In December, a
Speaker 1: collection of states and the US federal government sued Facebook
Speaker 1: in a pair of antitrust lawsuits, and the Federal Trade Commission,
Speaker 1: or f TC started taking steps toward demanding that Facebook
Speaker 1: divest itself of some of the properties it has acquired
Speaker 1: over the years, like Instagram and WhatsApp. So Facebook has
Speaker 1: a history of acquiring companies that fill in gaps in
Speaker 1: what Facebook can offer, particularly from other types of social
Speaker 1: networks that serve a slightly different purpose from Facebook's main site.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's just easier to buy up your competition
Speaker 1: than trying to outperform them on their own turf. But
Speaker 1: now various governments and agencies are arguing that Facebook has
Speaker 1: effectively established an exclusive lock on certain online services, particularly
Speaker 1: with regard to monetization, and that further, the company has
Speaker 1: actively tried to discourage competition from other companies, and that's
Speaker 1: a big no no. It's still way too early to
Speaker 1: say how this is all going to turn out, and
Speaker 1: it's quite possible that litigation could last several years. Now.
Speaker 1: Complicating matters is the fact that the US government changes
Speaker 1: over all action cycles, and new leaders might not share
Speaker 1: the same concerns or beliefs about Facebook as the ones
Speaker 1: who are currently pursuing this litigation, and there are those
Speaker 1: who argue that should the antitrust lawsuits conclude with Facebook
Speaker 1: having to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp, that the
Speaker 1: underlying problem itself still won't be solved. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: this process is going about things the wrong way. But
Speaker 1: it's a very complicated issue with a lot of vested
Speaker 1: parties involved in Honestly, I don't know what the right
Speaker 1: answer is here, or even if there is a right answer,
Speaker 1: because tech is simple, but business is hard, you know.
Speaker 1: By the end of July, Google's parent company, Alphabet, posted
Speaker 1: the first decline in revenue in the company's history. Now,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean the company lost money. Rather, it means
Speaker 1: the company made less money than it had the year before,
Speaker 1: so it didn't grow. It indicated that the company wasn't
Speaker 1: growing at the same rate as it had been. Alphabet
Speaker 1: brought in a revenue of thirty eight point three billion
Speaker 1: dollars for the second quarter of so I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about annual revenue. That's the revenue that the company generated
Speaker 1: in just three months, just shy of forty billion dollars.
Speaker 1: And this represented a two percent decline in revenues from
Speaker 1: the previous year. However, it was still more than what
Speaker 1: analysts had predicted for Alphabet given the circumstances of stuff
Speaker 1: like the pandemic and social unrest, so it was still
Speaker 1: good news for Alphabet. And when you start talking in
Speaker 1: terms like that, you begin to get a feeling of
Speaker 1: the scope of those antitrust issues that the US government
Speaker 1: and places like the European Union have really been looking into.
Speaker 1: It's one thing to say we've had a two percent
Speaker 1: decline in revenues, which you know isn't great, particularly in
Speaker 1: a world that values year over year growth over just
Speaker 1: about everything else. But when you break that down as
Speaker 1: we only brought in thirty eight point three billion dollars
Speaker 1: for these last three months, it kind of breaks your brain,
Speaker 1: or rather it breaks my brain. I mean, your brain
Speaker 1: might be just fine. I don't. I don't mean to
Speaker 1: project my own limitations on you. But we have now
Speaker 1: reached the end of July, and if I'm looking at
Speaker 1: this calendar correctly, we still have a few months to go.
Speaker 1: So it looks like I'm going to need to do
Speaker 1: one more episode to cover everything else. And I don't
Speaker 1: want to jump into August only to have to cut
Speaker 1: off everything after a couple of stories for the next part.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna pick up in August for part three
Speaker 1: of our retrospective on the year. And I guess I
Speaker 1: could go on about how this is all really irrational
Speaker 1: because of our way of tracking time. It's all human
Speaker 1: construct so it doesn't really matter what I cover when.
Speaker 1: But that's not really interesting or techie, so well, I'll
Speaker 1: just spare you. In our next episode, we'll wrap up
Speaker 1: the big stories of and you can look forward to
Speaker 1: a quick overview of the struggle between Epic Games and Apple,
Speaker 1: as well as the continuing proliferation of streaming services and
Speaker 1: how they are making huge waves in the entertainment industry
Speaker 1: at large, and more in our next episode. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, shoot them
Speaker 1: my way. It can be a technology, it could be
Speaker 1: a company, could be a personality in tech, could just
Speaker 1: be a trend in tech. Any of those things are
Speaker 1: fair games. Send me your suggestions over on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
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