Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland, dominant executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on August nine, twenty twenty four, and this week Google got some bad news. A US judge has ruled that Google has violated antitrust laws by spending let's see says here, truckloads of cash in an effort to establish its search engine dominance in the global market. Google has invested billions of dollars forging partnerships with various other companies like Apple, to make the Google Search Engine the default search tool on numerous devices and apps and sites. This in turn, gave Google a near monopoly on search advertising. According to the US government, this means that Google could pretty much set whatever rules it liked without fear of competition. The ruling means that now the US government can pursue another case in an effort to rectify this situation. So this case just said, yes, Google is guilty of having done this thing. The next one will be this is what we're going to do about it? But how do you solve a problem like Google. That's a darn good question. I guess you could google it. But one possibility is that the government could look to break Google or its parent company Alphabet into smaller entities. Now that's something that hasn't really been done in the United States in many years. But even if it does turn out to be the focus, it will likely be a long time before anything like that happens on a substantial level. The legal process is likely to stretch on for more years, and there's every reason to suspect that this case will eventually make its way up the appeals process, possibly all the way to the US Supreme Court at some point. So this story is far from over now. For one thing, there's going to be a ripple of massive consequences following this initial Google ruling. One massive deal that is likely at risk is Google's agreement with the aforementioned Apple. Apple has Google as its default search engine on iOS devices, and in return, Google bays Apple a cool twenty billion dollars every year. That's more than a third of what Google makes as a result of having it set as the default search for all of these devices. So Apple could see a drop of up to six percent on its annual profits. Because that twenty billion wouldn't be coming in anymore. That's not likely to make Apple investors very happy. According to Reuter's, analysts expect Apple to FastTrack adopting AI powered search tools, and was likely already doing this before the decision was even handed down. One thing that isn't likely to happen is Apple switching to Microsoft Bing. According to Eddie Q, Apple's senior VP of Services, quote, I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. They offered to give us Bing for free, they could give us the whole company end quote. So I think that suggests Apple's likely going to stick around with Google even without the twenty billion dollar deal, at least until the company's ready to switch to some AI powered search solution. Over at Ours Technica, there's an article titled Google and Meta ignored their own rules in secret teen targeting ad deals. The piece, in turn cites the Financial Times. In fact, I think the article originally appeared in the Financial Times, and it reports on documents showing that Meta and Google partnered on a project in which Google he helped Meta design a marketing campaign aimed at teens on YouTube. The campaign promoted Meta's Instagram app and features. The documents apparently lay out something that violates Google's own rules. Namely, the campaign was at least indirectly targeting users who were under the age of eighteen. Now Google has pledged to not target such users with specific advertising. If you are under the age of eighteen, you are not supposed to receive personalized targeted ads from Google platforms, So this is a problem now. According to Ours Technica, the campaign began late last year. Meta was in a tight spot because research was showing that the company was having problems attracting young folks to its various platforms. Google was looking to make a lot more ad cash. So these were two great tastes that go great together. I guess The Financial Times investigated this. The two companies ran a pilot campaign in Canada and then later began to roll out a similar campaign in the United States, and when The Financial Times contacted Google about the story, Google said it would investigate the matter and then subsequently shut the project down, while simultaneously not actually admitting fault. So the workaround for Google was that this campaign was technically targeting unknown accounts as an accounts where the age of the user wasn't actually recorded. So that's how Google could say we aren't targeting people under the age of eighteen, at least we're not doing it knowingly because we have no idea how old these users are. But it seems like the users were actually skewing young. That yes, technically there was a field for a user's age and that field was blank, but in reality you could easily conclude how old the users were, or reasonably at least conclude how old the users were, and that they were skewing young as an under the age of eighteen, so you could say, like maybe this was Google argument like ah, yeah, you know, it's plausible deniability, right, we don't know how old they are, so as a loophole. To learn more about the story, I would recommend checking out the article in Ours Technica or The Financial Times. Google's also facing some trouble in Russia, where Internet monitoring companies detected a mass outage of YouTube this week. So according to one such company called Sboi dot RF, many Russian citizens reported being unable to access YouTube unless they first made use of a VPN or virtual private network. Google representatives have said that the interruptions in service have not come from the company, whereas a lot of Russian media says that it's it's YouTube's fault. The Russian government has become increasingly hostile toward YouTube for what it claims is a determined stance against Russian legislation. It wasn't long ago when an information policy representative in Russia warned that YouTube could face a reduction in transmissions of up to seventy percent because of the company's refusal to allow certain Russian state backed channels from posting to the site. So I don't have proof that this is a case where the Russian government has purposefully throttled YouTube traffic in Russia, but it at least seems like that's a plausible reason for the outages. Not confirmed, just plausible. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media or GARM. GARM has shut down after being served an antitrust lawsuit from x formerly known as Twitter. So this group was spun off of the World Federation of Advertisers and its purpose was to protect the interests of member advertising companies and the primary focus was to make certain that ads on platforms weren't going to be served next to objectionable material, you know, like advertisers don't like it if their ad is showing up next to someone who's making hate comments, you know, or something along those lines. X alleges that GARM told its members to not advertise on X due to the platform's policies, and it saw these policies as being increasingly hostile toward the platform. GARM staffers received an email that essentially said the organization was folding because it didn't have enough money to both carry out its goals and defend itself from this lawsuit. I think most folks assume the lawsuit doesn't actually have that much merit to it, because boycotting isn't against the law. That's not breaking the law. It's not against the law to build associations either. These things are generally protected by constitutional amendments, you know, the right to free speech and the right to free assembly. But then it could be that Musk is using the law not because he's seeking justice, but rather to persecute those he finds to be vexum because lawsuits are expensive at any rate. Musk has continued to make statements that I think most ad companies would at least find con so I'm not expecting ad dollars to flood the corporate coffers now that GARM has disbanded. And GARM wasn't the only company targeted by a Musk lawsuit in recent days. He also brought a case against open ai and it's CEO, Sam Altman. So this lawsuit argues that open ai has put profit above public good, which you know, I actually don't disagree. I think open ai has put profit above public good, but I don't know where the legal issue is In all of that. Musk seeks to nullify open AI's partnership with Microsoft. That's a partnership that has seen the giant Microsoft invest thirteen billion dollars into open Ai. This could also be seen as an effort to just outright destroy open ai, which, according to some analysts, is on track to lose around five billion dollars this year as revenues haven't come close to covering the costs of operation. Plus we have to remember Musk does have his own competing AI company that's in the process of ramping up x dot ai, So there's that too. This lawsuit, by the way, mirrors one that Musk brought against open ai earlier. This year. But in that case, Musk dropped the lawsuit one day before a judge was to hear a motion to dismiss that was brought against the lawsuit by open Ai. I suspect we're going to get another motion to dismiss in this case because I don't think the details have really changed since the last time this came around. And that includes a record of messages that Elon Musk himself sent back when he was still part of Open Ai that showed his own desire to focus on profitability. Of course, in Musk's version of this plan, the profitability would have served the interests of his company, Tesla. Maybe that's the real sticking point here. Okay, we've got more tech news to cover before we get to all that. Let's take a quick break, and you know, there are a lot of stories about antitrust issues and technology this week. So over in the UK, the concern there is about Amazon and the company's four billion dollar partnership with AI startup firm Anthropic. The Competition in Markets Authority or CMA is probing if this partnership will potentially further entrench Amazon in the realm of cloud computing. So essentially, the fear is that Amazon dominates the cloud compute space, and that people who are developing AI models may feel they have no option other than to rely on Amazon for computational power needs. So the CMA is looking into the possibility that this partnership between Amazon and Anthropic would really qualify more as a merger. Maybe not a merger in the formal sense of two companies actually merging into a single entity, but a business process that ultimately results in an outcome that is similar to that of a merger. Now, that particular investigation is still ongoing, so this is not a foregone conclusion. The CMA says it expects to probe this matter until October fourth, at which point the CMA will then announce whether there's enough concern to block this deal, or maybe they'll say no, no, there's nothing here that rises to the level to make it a merger situation. Or maybe it is a merger situation, but it doesn't have enough red flags to make us block it in the first place. So it's still entirely possible that the CMA will allow this deal to continue without impeding it in any way. However, the CMA can be pretty darn strict with tech companies, and I don't necessarily think that's always a bad thing, but I have no clue which way they're going to decide this matter. If you'd like to read up on it, I highly recommend Ashley Bellinger's article in Ours Technica this titled Amazon defends four billion dollar anthropic aideal from UK monopoly concerns. Reuter's reports that open ai co founder John Shulman has left that company and has now joined the aforementioned anthropic. He posted x that quote, this choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands on technical work end quote. Shulman is one of several influential key people at open ai who either has recently stepped away from that company or they've had their role changed significantly in the recent past. Now, could this be an indicator that open ai is actually in some trouble? Is it possible the company expanded too quickly and cannot sustain itself, or is this just coincidence and just a sign that once you reach a certain level within an organization, you could pretty much take any giggy like beats me. It could be any of those or something else. Entirely. I know that with all the other open ai news, it becomes tempting to say, oh, open ai is starting the long process of circling the drain. I think it's way too early to say something like that, but I also admittedly am not an expert on those matters. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, has ruled that the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX must pay twelve point seven billion dollars in relief to former customers. Now, that might actually sound like old news to you, because earlier this year, ftx's CEO, slash Fires sale guru John J. Ray the Third, had already assured various stakeholders that he was able to claw back all the money that had been lost in the FTX blowout. I guess, but this new development should really make former FTX customers feel a little better, because it represents a US agency guaranteeing that those who were directly affected by ftx's spectacular implosion will be compensated before any of the money goes to pay off anything else. Since there is an ongoing lawsuit against FTX that's from the US government. This is a good thing for those folks, because the lawsuit could potentially mean that it'll have to dip into ftx's assets to pay off fines and whatnot. But the decision from the CFTC says that they can't touch any of the money that's meant to go back to paying the FTX customers. That that money is for those customers and they're going to receive their compensation. There's still some hurdles to clear, of course. There are some folks who feel they should actually be paid based on the current value of crypto as opposed to where that value was in November twenty twenty two when everything went pear shaped. So yeah, not over yet, but still good news for folks who thought they might have lost everything when FTX went belly up. Now let's wrap this up with some space news, and it's really bad news for Boeing anyway. That company is already fighting a public perception war on multiple fronts at this point. I mean, you've obviously got the seven thirty seven issues, but you've also got the star Liner. We're going to get to that in just a moment, but for right now, I actually want to mention a report from NASA that calls into question Boeing's quality control capabilities, particularly with regard to the Exploration upper stage section of NASA's SLS launch vehicle. So this is a piece of a much bigger project that includes NASA's planned mission to return astronauts to the Moon. But according to NASA's report, the agency found quote an array of issues that could hinder SLS Block oneb's readiness for Artemis four, including Boeing's inadequate quality management system, escalating costs and schedules, and inadequate visibility into the Block one bee's projected costs end quote. So, in other words, NASA says Boeing is not doing a good job, they're going way over budget, and they're not very transparent about either of those things. Further, NASA llegends that Boeing's workforce has quote insufficient aerospace production experience end quote. Again, according to this report, it is this lack of experience that NASA credits as being the cause of issues in quality control. This is not good news. Now. To learn more about this, I recommend Eric Berger's piece. A new report finds Boeing's rockets are built with an unqualified workforce. You can find that in ours technica. And of course we're not done with Boeing woes just yet. So you may recall that astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Willmore piloted a Boeing Starliner capsule to the International Space Station in early June of twenty twenty four, and we're able to dock despite some technical issues. One of those technical issues was a helium leak, which, while concerning, wasn't a catastrophic event. Helium is not toxic, it's not flammable. You can asphyxiate if that's all you have to breathe, but otherwise it was seen as a concern but not a mission critical issue. But another bigger issue was that five of the twenty eight thrusters on the space capsule became unresponsive on approach to the ISS, and NASA and the astronauts had to do some troubleshooting to get enough of those working again to proceed with docking, which they were able to do. But since then NASA has been working on ways to address the problems with the star Liner so that these two astronauts can return to Earth. So they were meant to stay aboard the ISS for a little more than a week, but now it's been more than two months and they're still there. NASA has indicated that they might stay up there for the rest of twenty twenty four, and the agency hasn't ruled out the possibility that when they do come back, it will not be aboard the star Liner but instead a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Now those decisions have yet to be made, nothing is official yet. Before the star Liner issue, plans called for another Dragon Crew capsule to launch on August eighteenth to go to the ISS, but that is now been pushed back to September twenty fourth at the earliest. So what would a change of plans look like If NASA says, you know what, we don't feel comfortable putting them aboard the star Liner, Well, if NASA does feel the star Liner poses too great a risk, the likely solution is to have the star Liner separate from the ISS and return to Earth with no crew aboard the capsule. A Dragon Crew capsule with just two astronauts aboard. It would then join the ISS and relieve both the star Liner crew and two other ISS crew members, but that might not even happen. Until next year. So why would there be such a long delay. Well, A big part of that is that we actually aren't still really sure about what went wrong with those thrusters. Engineers on Earth tested an identical thruster and they found some problems. But then subsequent tests on the star Liner that's in orbit showed that its thrusters that had previously been unresponsive were now working again, and potentially that means that the issue that we're seen on Earth are different from the ones that affected the star Liner in orbit. So there's a lot we don't know, and figuring it out remains a top priority. I mentioned a couple of articles worth reading this week, but one more is Rebecca Jennings article on vox dot com titled those Olympics AI ads feel bad for a reason, and I highly recommend you check it out. It really does a good job of talking about missing the mark when it comes to trying to promote AI, because it seems like it's promoting AI to do things like take on emotional loads on our behalf so that we can be I don't know, soulless consumers. Doesn't seem that great to me. Highly recommend checking that out and that's it for this week. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again. Really So tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland, dominant executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on August nine, twenty twenty four, and this week Google got some bad news. A US judge has ruled that Google has violated antitrust laws by spending let's see says here, truckloads of cash in an effort to establish its search engine dominance in the global market. Google has invested billions of dollars forging partnerships with various other companies like Apple, to make the Google Search Engine the default search tool on numerous devices and apps and sites. This in turn, gave Google a near monopoly on search advertising. According to the US government, this means that Google could pretty much set whatever rules it liked without fear of competition. The ruling means that now the US government can pursue another case in an effort to rectify this situation. So this case just said, yes, Google is guilty of having done this thing. The next one will be this is what we're going to do about it? But how do you solve a problem like Google. That's a darn good question. I guess you could google it. But one possibility is that the government could look to break Google or its parent company Alphabet into smaller entities. Now that's something that hasn't really been done in the United States in many years. But even if it does turn out to be the focus, it will likely be a long time before anything like that happens on a substantial level. The legal process is likely to stretch on for more years, and there's every reason to suspect that this case will eventually make its way up the appeals process, possibly all the way to the US Supreme Court at some point. So this story is far from over now. For one thing, there's going to be a ripple of massive consequences following this initial Google ruling. One massive deal that is likely at risk is Google's agreement with the aforementioned Apple. Apple has Google as its default search engine on iOS devices, and in return, Google bays Apple a cool twenty billion dollars every year. That's more than a third of what Google makes as a result of having it set as the default search for all of these devices. So Apple could see a drop of up to six percent on its annual profits. Because that twenty billion wouldn't be coming in anymore. That's not likely to make Apple investors very happy. According to Reuter's, analysts expect Apple to FastTrack adopting AI powered search tools, and was likely already doing this before the decision was even handed down. One thing that isn't likely to happen is Apple switching to Microsoft Bing. According to Eddie Q, Apple's senior VP of Services, quote, I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. They offered to give us Bing for free, they could give us the whole company end quote. So I think that suggests Apple's likely going to stick around with Google even without the twenty billion dollar deal, at least until the company's ready to switch to some AI powered search solution. Over at Ours Technica, there's an article titled Google and Meta ignored their own rules in secret teen targeting ad deals. The piece, in turn cites the Financial Times. In fact, I think the article originally appeared in the Financial Times, and it reports on documents showing that Meta and Google partnered on a project in which Google he helped Meta design a marketing campaign aimed at teens on YouTube. The campaign promoted Meta's Instagram app and features. The documents apparently lay out something that violates Google's own rules. Namely, the campaign was at least indirectly targeting users who were under the age of eighteen. Now Google has pledged to not target such users with specific advertising. If you are under the age of eighteen, you are not supposed to receive personalized targeted ads from Google platforms, So this is a problem now. According to Ours Technica, the campaign began late last year. Meta was in a tight spot because research was showing that the company was having problems attracting young folks to its various platforms. Google was looking to make a lot more ad cash. So these were two great tastes that go great together. I guess The Financial Times investigated this. The two companies ran a pilot campaign in Canada and then later began to roll out a similar campaign in the United States, and when The Financial Times contacted Google about the story, Google said it would investigate the matter and then subsequently shut the project down, while simultaneously not actually admitting fault. So the workaround for Google was that this campaign was technically targeting unknown accounts as an accounts where the age of the user wasn't actually recorded. So that's how Google could say we aren't targeting people under the age of eighteen, at least we're not doing it knowingly because we have no idea how old these users are. But it seems like the users were actually skewing young. That yes, technically there was a field for a user's age and that field was blank, but in reality you could easily conclude how old the users were, or reasonably at least conclude how old the users were, and that they were skewing young as an under the age of eighteen, so you could say, like maybe this was Google argument like ah, yeah, you know, it's plausible deniability, right, we don't know how old they are, so as a loophole. To learn more about the story, I would recommend checking out the article in Ours Technica or The Financial Times. Google's also facing some trouble in Russia, where Internet monitoring companies detected a mass outage of YouTube this week. So according to one such company called Sboi dot RF, many Russian citizens reported being unable to access YouTube unless they first made use of a VPN or virtual private network. Google representatives have said that the interruptions in service have not come from the company, whereas a lot of Russian media says that it's it's YouTube's fault. The Russian government has become increasingly hostile toward YouTube for what it claims is a determined stance against Russian legislation. It wasn't long ago when an information policy representative in Russia warned that YouTube could face a reduction in transmissions of up to seventy percent because of the company's refusal to allow certain Russian state backed channels from posting to the site. So I don't have proof that this is a case where the Russian government has purposefully throttled YouTube traffic in Russia, but it at least seems like that's a plausible reason for the outages. Not confirmed, just plausible. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media or GARM. GARM has shut down after being served an antitrust lawsuit from x formerly known as Twitter. So this group was spun off of the World Federation of Advertisers and its purpose was to protect the interests of member advertising companies and the primary focus was to make certain that ads on platforms weren't going to be served next to objectionable material, you know, like advertisers don't like it if their ad is showing up next to someone who's making hate comments, you know, or something along those lines. X alleges that GARM told its members to not advertise on X due to the platform's policies, and it saw these policies as being increasingly hostile toward the platform. GARM staffers received an email that essentially said the organization was folding because it didn't have enough money to both carry out its goals and defend itself from this lawsuit. I think most folks assume the lawsuit doesn't actually have that much merit to it, because boycotting isn't against the law. That's not breaking the law. It's not against the law to build associations either. These things are generally protected by constitutional amendments, you know, the right to free speech and the right to free assembly. But then it could be that Musk is using the law not because he's seeking justice, but rather to persecute those he finds to be vexum because lawsuits are expensive at any rate. Musk has continued to make statements that I think most ad companies would at least find con so I'm not expecting ad dollars to flood the corporate coffers now that GARM has disbanded. And GARM wasn't the only company targeted by a Musk lawsuit in recent days. He also brought a case against open ai and it's CEO, Sam Altman. So this lawsuit argues that open ai has put profit above public good, which you know, I actually don't disagree. I think open ai has put profit above public good, but I don't know where the legal issue is In all of that. Musk seeks to nullify open AI's partnership with Microsoft. That's a partnership that has seen the giant Microsoft invest thirteen billion dollars into open Ai. This could also be seen as an effort to just outright destroy open ai, which, according to some analysts, is on track to lose around five billion dollars this year as revenues haven't come close to covering the costs of operation. Plus we have to remember Musk does have his own competing AI company that's in the process of ramping up x dot ai, So there's that too. This lawsuit, by the way, mirrors one that Musk brought against open ai earlier. This year. But in that case, Musk dropped the lawsuit one day before a judge was to hear a motion to dismiss that was brought against the lawsuit by open Ai. I suspect we're going to get another motion to dismiss in this case because I don't think the details have really changed since the last time this came around. And that includes a record of messages that Elon Musk himself sent back when he was still part of Open Ai that showed his own desire to focus on profitability. Of course, in Musk's version of this plan, the profitability would have served the interests of his company, Tesla. Maybe that's the real sticking point here. Okay, we've got more tech news to cover before we get to all that. Let's take a quick break, and you know, there are a lot of stories about antitrust issues and technology this week. So over in the UK, the concern there is about Amazon and the company's four billion dollar partnership with AI startup firm Anthropic. The Competition in Markets Authority or CMA is probing if this partnership will potentially further entrench Amazon in the realm of cloud computing. So essentially, the fear is that Amazon dominates the cloud compute space, and that people who are developing AI models may feel they have no option other than to rely on Amazon for computational power needs. So the CMA is looking into the possibility that this partnership between Amazon and Anthropic would really qualify more as a merger. Maybe not a merger in the formal sense of two companies actually merging into a single entity, but a business process that ultimately results in an outcome that is similar to that of a merger. Now, that particular investigation is still ongoing, so this is not a foregone conclusion. The CMA says it expects to probe this matter until October fourth, at which point the CMA will then announce whether there's enough concern to block this deal, or maybe they'll say no, no, there's nothing here that rises to the level to make it a merger situation. Or maybe it is a merger situation, but it doesn't have enough red flags to make us block it in the first place. So it's still entirely possible that the CMA will allow this deal to continue without impeding it in any way. However, the CMA can be pretty darn strict with tech companies, and I don't necessarily think that's always a bad thing, but I have no clue which way they're going to decide this matter. If you'd like to read up on it, I highly recommend Ashley Bellinger's article in Ours Technica this titled Amazon defends four billion dollar anthropic aideal from UK monopoly concerns. Reuter's reports that open ai co founder John Shulman has left that company and has now joined the aforementioned anthropic. He posted x that quote, this choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands on technical work end quote. Shulman is one of several influential key people at open ai who either has recently stepped away from that company or they've had their role changed significantly in the recent past. Now, could this be an indicator that open ai is actually in some trouble? Is it possible the company expanded too quickly and cannot sustain itself, or is this just coincidence and just a sign that once you reach a certain level within an organization, you could pretty much take any giggy like beats me. It could be any of those or something else. Entirely. I know that with all the other open ai news, it becomes tempting to say, oh, open ai is starting the long process of circling the drain. I think it's way too early to say something like that, but I also admittedly am not an expert on those matters. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, has ruled that the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX must pay twelve point seven billion dollars in relief to former customers. Now, that might actually sound like old news to you, because earlier this year, ftx's CEO, slash Fires sale guru John J. Ray the Third, had already assured various stakeholders that he was able to claw back all the money that had been lost in the FTX blowout. I guess, but this new development should really make former FTX customers feel a little better, because it represents a US agency guaranteeing that those who were directly affected by ftx's spectacular implosion will be compensated before any of the money goes to pay off anything else. Since there is an ongoing lawsuit against FTX that's from the US government. This is a good thing for those folks, because the lawsuit could potentially mean that it'll have to dip into ftx's assets to pay off fines and whatnot. But the decision from the CFTC says that they can't touch any of the money that's meant to go back to paying the FTX customers. That that money is for those customers and they're going to receive their compensation. There's still some hurdles to clear, of course. There are some folks who feel they should actually be paid based on the current value of crypto as opposed to where that value was in November twenty twenty two when everything went pear shaped. So yeah, not over yet, but still good news for folks who thought they might have lost everything when FTX went belly up. Now let's wrap this up with some space news, and it's really bad news for Boeing anyway. That company is already fighting a public perception war on multiple fronts at this point. I mean, you've obviously got the seven thirty seven issues, but you've also got the star Liner. We're going to get to that in just a moment, but for right now, I actually want to mention a report from NASA that calls into question Boeing's quality control capabilities, particularly with regard to the Exploration upper stage section of NASA's SLS launch vehicle. So this is a piece of a much bigger project that includes NASA's planned mission to return astronauts to the Moon. But according to NASA's report, the agency found quote an array of issues that could hinder SLS Block oneb's readiness for Artemis four, including Boeing's inadequate quality management system, escalating costs and schedules, and inadequate visibility into the Block one bee's projected costs end quote. So, in other words, NASA says Boeing is not doing a good job, they're going way over budget, and they're not very transparent about either of those things. Further, NASA llegends that Boeing's workforce has quote insufficient aerospace production experience end quote. Again, according to this report, it is this lack of experience that NASA credits as being the cause of issues in quality control. This is not good news. Now. To learn more about this, I recommend Eric Berger's piece. A new report finds Boeing's rockets are built with an unqualified workforce. You can find that in ours technica. And of course we're not done with Boeing woes just yet. So you may recall that astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Willmore piloted a Boeing Starliner capsule to the International Space Station in early June of twenty twenty four, and we're able to dock despite some technical issues. One of those technical issues was a helium leak, which, while concerning, wasn't a catastrophic event. Helium is not toxic, it's not flammable. You can asphyxiate if that's all you have to breathe, but otherwise it was seen as a concern but not a mission critical issue. But another bigger issue was that five of the twenty eight thrusters on the space capsule became unresponsive on approach to the ISS, and NASA and the astronauts had to do some troubleshooting to get enough of those working again to proceed with docking, which they were able to do. But since then NASA has been working on ways to address the problems with the star Liner so that these two astronauts can return to Earth. So they were meant to stay aboard the ISS for a little more than a week, but now it's been more than two months and they're still there. NASA has indicated that they might stay up there for the rest of twenty twenty four, and the agency hasn't ruled out the possibility that when they do come back, it will not be aboard the star Liner but instead a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Now those decisions have yet to be made, nothing is official yet. Before the star Liner issue, plans called for another Dragon Crew capsule to launch on August eighteenth to go to the ISS, but that is now been pushed back to September twenty fourth at the earliest. So what would a change of plans look like If NASA says, you know what, we don't feel comfortable putting them aboard the star Liner, Well, if NASA does feel the star Liner poses too great a risk, the likely solution is to have the star Liner separate from the ISS and return to Earth with no crew aboard the capsule. A Dragon Crew capsule with just two astronauts aboard. It would then join the ISS and relieve both the star Liner crew and two other ISS crew members, but that might not even happen. Until next year. So why would there be such a long delay. Well, A big part of that is that we actually aren't still really sure about what went wrong with those thrusters. Engineers on Earth tested an identical thruster and they found some problems. But then subsequent tests on the star Liner that's in orbit showed that its thrusters that had previously been unresponsive were now working again, and potentially that means that the issue that we're seen on Earth are different from the ones that affected the star Liner in orbit. So there's a lot we don't know, and figuring it out remains a top priority. I mentioned a couple of articles worth reading this week, but one more is Rebecca Jennings article on vox dot com titled those Olympics AI ads feel bad for a reason, and I highly recommend you check it out. It really does a good job of talking about missing the mark when it comes to trying to promote AI, because it seems like it's promoting AI to do things like take on emotional loads on our behalf so that we can be I don't know, soulless consumers. Doesn't seem that great to me. Highly recommend checking that out and that's it for this week. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again. 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