Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. And the big story that I have this week is how a product update for software called Falcon Sensor led to worldwide operating system failures, which in turn necessitated that important businesses businesses like airlines, for example, had to shut down or at least delay operations while folks tried to fix the problem. The heart of the matter lies with a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. So CrowdStrike pushed out a content update to customers for the Falcon Sensor product. And Microsoft is such a customer, and this update went out to Windows virtual machines, many of which handle mission critical operations for big customers, including some major companies all over the world. The update caught the machines into a recovery boot loop, which means the machines never really loaded in. They would get to a certain point of booting up and then they would reboot and they would just keep doing this, and that's when the failures began. So here in the United States, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, and United Airlines all grounded their flights because their systems effectively went down. In other parts of the world, banks were affected, which severely slowed down operations there. One stock trader called it the mother of all global market outages. In the UK, Sky News went off the air they were unable to broadcast. In Australia, emergency call centers reported disruptions due to this issue, which is pretty darn scary. Everyone was plagued by the dreaded blue screen of death. George Kurt's CEO of CrowdStrike, took to x formerly known as Twitter, and posted quote, CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed. End quote. Now, deploying a fix is great, However, it does not magically stop the already affected machines from being in that reboot loop cycle. So to do that it admins will actually have to stop the reboot cycle. They'll have to boot into essentially safe mode and then navigate to the CrowdStrike file directory and delete the appropriate file manually. And depending on the it situation for each business, that could be a fairly easy thing to do or a not so easy thing to do. It's definitely a time consuming thing to do, but in the meantime, a lot of companies are unable to function properly, some can't really function at all, and this mistake really points out how reliant the world is on a limited number of service providers, and I would argue it also reinforces to hackers the potential impact of targeting the supply chain because it lets you hit a huge number of targets simultaneously and disrupt them. Though again in this case, we're not talking about a hacker attack. This was just a mistake that CrowdStrike made that has affected a lot of people all around the world. And I bet there's going to be some uncomfortable meetings about it at CrowdStrike headquarters today, So yeah, yikes. Another obviously huge story this week was the assassination attempt on the life of former president and now GOP nominee Donald Trump. But this is not a politics or crime podcast, so why would I bring it up. Well, that's because the FBI took possess of the would be assassin's phone and within a couple of days announced that they had successfully accessed the phone's contents, which raised a lot of questions in the tech community, as there is this ongoing concern in tech about the extent to which your privacy and security can be insured by the hardware that you use. So if someone were to get hold of your device, would they be able to access it without your direct aid? And how did the FBI manage this? While the phone in question is a Samsung device and it was locked when the FBI received it. Bloomberg reported that the FBI initially couldn't crack the phone's security, but then they worked with an Israeli digital intelligence company called Celebrate to get access. Earlier this week, I saw online speculation that the at that time unnamed Israeli firm was actually the NSO Group. That's the group that's best known for producing the spyware on steroids product called Pegasus. But no, these are two separate cyber intelligence companies. According to Bloomberg, Celebrate used new software that's actually still in development, it's not offered as a product yet, and cracked the phone security and gave FBI access to it. A piece in nine to five, Mac points out that a data leak from within Celebrate revealed its software is currently unable to crack iPhone security at least on any devices running iOS seventeen point four or later. So this just shows a gap between their ability to crack security in iOS platforms versus Android platforms. And yeah, this is like an ongoing discussion in the tech community. Is you know which operating system provides better security? Can you expect to keep your stuff on lock even if it were to fall into the hands of, say the FBI. Like, there are a lot of conversations in tech that follow that, which is why I covered the story. On Thursday, open ai unveiled a slimmed down AI Large Language Model, So I guess a not so large language model or LM, and it's called fittingly enough GPT four to oh mini oh in this case is the lowercase letter O not the number zero or the numeral zero or however you want to call it. I'm not a mathematician. Further, this model is slated to take over from GPT three point five Turbo for the purposes of powering chat GPT, so it will be the language model behind the chatbot. It's currently available for consumer chat GPT users. It will later spread to enterprise customers next week. For now, it's similar to earlier large language models, but open ai says this one will eventually be able to analyze and interpret images as well as generate its own so not just text, plus it will also be able to analyze audio. It will not, however, have access to the latest breaking news. It will have a knowledge cutoff of October twenty twenty three. So what's the benefit of moving to a smaller large language model. Well, the big one is cost. They are less expensive to operate and thus less expensive for customers. They're still fairly robust, though they aren't as capable of performing in depth analysis as their bigger siblings. They're good for smaller and more niche oriented tasks, so the sort of stuff you would probably encounter in your typical apps that tap into generative AI. Because your apps usually aren't do everything apps, they usually are keyed to a specific subset of features. So, for example, let's say you've made an app that is essentially a dynamic to do list. Well, you won't need access to a massive, large language model to handle any AI component of this implementation, right, because that would be overkill. Like, you don't need something that's great at everything, or even passable at everything. You need something that's good at, you know, a very small set of tasks. But on the flip side, if you did need some heavy lifting on the AI front, smaller models aren't necessarily going to be as good of a fit because they just won't be capable of performing that in depth analysis. You would end up spending more time and possibly more money to achieve the results you actually wanted, So there are trade offs. Plus, you are also still beholden to whatever material was used to train the model in the first place. That doesn't matter about the size. In fact, like whether it's a small model or a large model, the training material needs to be good. If the training material is garbage, that's what you're going to get on the other end, right, garbage in garbage out. I talked about this previously this week on tech Stuff about how bad training material leads to bad AI performance, and there's a real fear that AI models of the future are going to be training off of AI generated content from today, and that will lead to what is called model collapse. That's a real thing. Listen to earlier episodes this week to learn more about that. Ours Technica's Ashley Bellinger has an article titled Elon Musk's X may succeed in blocking California content moderation law on appeal and I would like to touch on this. The matter at hand concerns a law called AB five to eight seven in California, and it is concerned with the terms of service for social media companies. Specifically, the bill says that social media companies must make available their terms of service. They must define clearly what is and is not permitted under those terms, and then create a record of any and all cases in which users or their content are subjected to action from the company for violation of those terms, such as when a company deletes a post or bans a user, as well as a record of exactly what violation occurred. X's law team argue that the law violates the company's First Amendment rights to conduct content moderation. That's forcing them to make a comment on specific controversial subjects, and that is against the First Amendment, and you know, to definitively state why someone or something was banned, which also sends the message that stuff that is allowed to stay on the platform is permitted. This is actually a movement to create backlash against X, and the State of California is determined to just stir stuff up, so to speak, by making X essentially say, well, yeah, what this person said was awful, but it's not against our terms of service, or we don't like what this person said, so we banned them. Bellinger points out that the appeals court seems at least partly sympathetic to X, and I can understand why I might not agree with stuff going on over at X, and in fact, I disagree a lot with stuff going on over at X. But you do get into a pretty thorny issue when a company has to first define what is and isn't acceptable. As one judge pointed out, x's argument seems to be that the State of California is trying to compel X to express company views on these controversial subjects that range from stuff like hates each to foreign political interference, and that compelling someone to speak does seem like it is running a foul of first Amendment protections. So does this mean the appeals court will ultimately find in favor of X. Possibly, but it's not a done deal yet. Okay, I got a few more news stories to cover before we get to that. Let's take a quick break. We're back, so and less serious but still irritating news. Netflix is increasing the cost of subscribers who want an AD free experience on the streaming platform by getting rid of the existing lowest tier in that in that range, so the monthly fee for the lowest AD free tier, which limited users to viewing Netflix on just one device at a time, as well as viewing content and a maximum resolution of seven hundred and twenty P. That has been twelve dollars a month, But now that tier is being ended phased out, and current customers who are at that level will get shifted to a different tier, less expensive per month, but it is AD supported. If they want to move to an AD free version, they'll have to go up to fifteen dollars forty nine cents per month to do it. Now. This is technically a different tier, a different plan. It supports up to two devices and also a resolution of ten ADP plus. Customers at this tier are allowed to download content to a local device, So like if you're going on a plane or something and you're not going to have access to Wi Fi, you download the episode or whatever tier phone and you can watch it then. So, according to Sharon Harding of Ours Technica, Netflix's strategy is to get more people to move to this lowest lower tier, this AD supported tier, because ads are more lucrative as a revenue generator than subscriptions alone. So their hope is not to convince people to spend more per month and move to the new lowest AD free tier, but rather be content with the fact that they're also going to have to watch some ads, because that is a more lucrative revenue generation model. Of course, Netflix isn't the only streaming service that has recently bumped up prices. That's been true across the board. We've actually seen, you know, some streaming platforms bump up prices a couple of times in the span of a year. A heck, I just got an email earlier this week about how my Peacock subscription is getting more expensive and I'm wondering should I even bother keeping it? I mean, I only use it to watch like things super rarely, but I think this also has to be expected because obviously, early on in the streaming days, the game was all about getting as large a subscriber base as you possibly could, even if that meant you were losing money in the process. Like you had these very attractive Intrey offers, you had a lot of original material. But you can't operate like this forever. You know, you do have to find ways to make a profit or at least to keep shareholders happy, since that's really what it's all about these days, and that means you can't just give stuff away for very low amounts of money. You have to figure out a method to cover the costs of operation at the very least, and preferably make a profit. Just Weatherbed of The Verge has a piece about how Google is cleaning house on the app front. The company says it will be cracking down on apps that don't live up to Google's play Store standards. So for apps that have extremely limited functionality or content and thus are seen as low value apps, they could find themselves on the chopping block. So let's say it's an app and all it is is like a wallpaper. That's it. That's the whole app. This is one little thing of wallpaper. That's the sort of thing that Google says will not survive this change. Google already has policies in place for apps that are downright malicious or that introduce security vulnerabilities to hardware, which is a no brainer. But this new rule says, not only must your app be safe, it also has to be you know, kind of good. The new rule take effect at the end of August. There's a famous saying that is often attributed to Dustyyevsky, and it goes something like this, the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Now, before I go any further, I should add that Princeton University's Russian literature professor Ilyavinitsky has written extensively about how this quote is not in fact from Dustyevsky, and actually it's in conflict with what Dustyevsky's actually actual words on the subject of prisons have said. It's a great read, by the way, I love reading experts who are saying, yeah, everyone says this quote came from this place, but it really doesn't. But wherever the quote does come from, it has been repeated and reinforced by lots of others, including like Nelson Mandela, And while the origins of the quote are perhaps unknown and maybe even unknowable, I do think the intent behind the quote has merit no matter who it was that said at first. Which is a long way to go to introduce this next story, which is that the FCC has no now closed a loophole that existed here in the United States that allowed the various prison telephone service operators in this country to place really high telephone rates on prisoners who wanted to make calls, specifically intra state calls like within a state. And most prisoners, like their families, live in the same state that the prison that they're in is in, so most of the calls they want to make are within the state. And for a long time, those rates were pretty darn high. And like a fifteen minute phone call might cost a prisoner eleven dollars thirty five cents. Well, that doesn't sound like a lot maybe to you, But then you've got to remember these prisoners are making pennies on the dollar in prison. Like there's a whole conversation to be had about what ultimately amounts to slave labor and the prison system of the United States. But anyway, now that eleven dollars thirty five cents is going to be closer to ninety cents at least that's what it would be for very large prisons, like prisons that have at least one thousand inmates, if not more. This is significant because a previous challenge to the FCC's attempts to curb telephone rates in prisons was defeated when the companies that are actually providing these services argued that the FCC lacked the authority to impose price caps in the first place. But President Biden signed into law a bill that grants such powers to the FCC. So now the FCC is saying, well, Congress has granted us that authority. Now, so now you have to reiin in your prices, and we've already analyzed the numbers. We can prove that, based upon the information provided by you, you'll still make a profit and cover all costs of operations even with these lower price caps. So there, so that's a good story. I think that shows how if you don't have regulations, there's no check and balance system for most vulnerable populations, right like powerful populations, ones that have a lot of sway they can push back, and that's substantial. But when you're talking about prisoners, who are the most vulnerable in society arguably or at least among the most vulnerable populations in society, they have no political clout. So obviously any company that decides that they're going to price gouge, there's no checks and balances there. So now the FCC is saying, well, we've been grinded that authority. You can't do it anymore. We'll see where it goes from here. To round up for recommended reading this week, I've got a couple of space related pieces from ours Tetnica, both by Stephen Clark, and I think these are worth your time. So first up is his Rocket Report, which is a weekly roundup of space news, and it's incredible, Like he I don't know where he gets the time to do all this, because he does a great job. But you can learn about how a space startup recently lost at CEO due to inappropriate relationships with an employee of the company. You can learn about how SpaceX's Falcon nine rockets are temporarily grounded after a launch vehicle. The second stage of a launch vehicle failed to deliver twenty Starlink Internet satellites into their proper orbit last week. That being said, the Falcon nine actually remains the most reliable launch vehicle in history and it has a ninety nine point seven percent success rate. This was the first failure, so it's an amazing piece of technology and the FAA is likely to lift that grounded status within the next day or so. There are also lots more stories in that roundup, and next up is another piece by Stephen Clark in Ours Technica. It's titled NASA built a moon rover, but can't afford to get it to the launch pad, and it's the sad tale of Viper, a project that already saw four hundred and fifty million dollars of investment, but sounds like the various delays in the project and the cost increases reached a point where NASA had to make a decision they had to either cut the project or they would have to cancel a bunch of other projects in order to find money in the budget to get it across the finish line. And last is a piece in The Guardian by Charlotte thal titled doom Scrolling Linked to existential Anxiety distrust suspicion, and despair study finds. I think Thal did a really good job pointing out that the study had some limitations and it does seem to confirm a lot of common sense ideas about the nature of doom scrolling, like it's going to just sort of be like, yeah, of course. But she also points out that due to the scope and nature of the study, it is perhaps viewed as a good reason to research the matter more thoroughly, rather than to draw conclusions from the study itself. In other words, be careful not to fall victim to confirmation bias. And that's it for the tech News for the week ending July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcas casts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. And the big story that I have this week is how a product update for software called Falcon Sensor led to worldwide operating system failures, which in turn necessitated that important businesses businesses like airlines, for example, had to shut down or at least delay operations while folks tried to fix the problem. The heart of the matter lies with a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. So CrowdStrike pushed out a content update to customers for the Falcon Sensor product. And Microsoft is such a customer, and this update went out to Windows virtual machines, many of which handle mission critical operations for big customers, including some major companies all over the world. The update caught the machines into a recovery boot loop, which means the machines never really loaded in. They would get to a certain point of booting up and then they would reboot and they would just keep doing this, and that's when the failures began. So here in the United States, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, and United Airlines all grounded their flights because their systems effectively went down. In other parts of the world, banks were affected, which severely slowed down operations there. One stock trader called it the mother of all global market outages. In the UK, Sky News went off the air they were unable to broadcast. In Australia, emergency call centers reported disruptions due to this issue, which is pretty darn scary. Everyone was plagued by the dreaded blue screen of death. George Kurt's CEO of CrowdStrike, took to x formerly known as Twitter, and posted quote, CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been deployed. End quote. Now, deploying a fix is great, However, it does not magically stop the already affected machines from being in that reboot loop cycle. So to do that it admins will actually have to stop the reboot cycle. They'll have to boot into essentially safe mode and then navigate to the CrowdStrike file directory and delete the appropriate file manually. And depending on the it situation for each business, that could be a fairly easy thing to do or a not so easy thing to do. It's definitely a time consuming thing to do, but in the meantime, a lot of companies are unable to function properly, some can't really function at all, and this mistake really points out how reliant the world is on a limited number of service providers, and I would argue it also reinforces to hackers the potential impact of targeting the supply chain because it lets you hit a huge number of targets simultaneously and disrupt them. Though again in this case, we're not talking about a hacker attack. This was just a mistake that CrowdStrike made that has affected a lot of people all around the world. And I bet there's going to be some uncomfortable meetings about it at CrowdStrike headquarters today, So yeah, yikes. Another obviously huge story this week was the assassination attempt on the life of former president and now GOP nominee Donald Trump. But this is not a politics or crime podcast, so why would I bring it up. Well, that's because the FBI took possess of the would be assassin's phone and within a couple of days announced that they had successfully accessed the phone's contents, which raised a lot of questions in the tech community, as there is this ongoing concern in tech about the extent to which your privacy and security can be insured by the hardware that you use. So if someone were to get hold of your device, would they be able to access it without your direct aid? And how did the FBI manage this? While the phone in question is a Samsung device and it was locked when the FBI received it. Bloomberg reported that the FBI initially couldn't crack the phone's security, but then they worked with an Israeli digital intelligence company called Celebrate to get access. Earlier this week, I saw online speculation that the at that time unnamed Israeli firm was actually the NSO Group. That's the group that's best known for producing the spyware on steroids product called Pegasus. But no, these are two separate cyber intelligence companies. According to Bloomberg, Celebrate used new software that's actually still in development, it's not offered as a product yet, and cracked the phone security and gave FBI access to it. A piece in nine to five, Mac points out that a data leak from within Celebrate revealed its software is currently unable to crack iPhone security at least on any devices running iOS seventeen point four or later. So this just shows a gap between their ability to crack security in iOS platforms versus Android platforms. And yeah, this is like an ongoing discussion in the tech community. Is you know which operating system provides better security? Can you expect to keep your stuff on lock even if it were to fall into the hands of, say the FBI. Like, there are a lot of conversations in tech that follow that, which is why I covered the story. On Thursday, open ai unveiled a slimmed down AI Large Language Model, So I guess a not so large language model or LM, and it's called fittingly enough GPT four to oh mini oh in this case is the lowercase letter O not the number zero or the numeral zero or however you want to call it. I'm not a mathematician. Further, this model is slated to take over from GPT three point five Turbo for the purposes of powering chat GPT, so it will be the language model behind the chatbot. It's currently available for consumer chat GPT users. It will later spread to enterprise customers next week. For now, it's similar to earlier large language models, but open ai says this one will eventually be able to analyze and interpret images as well as generate its own so not just text, plus it will also be able to analyze audio. It will not, however, have access to the latest breaking news. It will have a knowledge cutoff of October twenty twenty three. So what's the benefit of moving to a smaller large language model. Well, the big one is cost. They are less expensive to operate and thus less expensive for customers. They're still fairly robust, though they aren't as capable of performing in depth analysis as their bigger siblings. They're good for smaller and more niche oriented tasks, so the sort of stuff you would probably encounter in your typical apps that tap into generative AI. Because your apps usually aren't do everything apps, they usually are keyed to a specific subset of features. So, for example, let's say you've made an app that is essentially a dynamic to do list. Well, you won't need access to a massive, large language model to handle any AI component of this implementation, right, because that would be overkill. Like, you don't need something that's great at everything, or even passable at everything. You need something that's good at, you know, a very small set of tasks. But on the flip side, if you did need some heavy lifting on the AI front, smaller models aren't necessarily going to be as good of a fit because they just won't be capable of performing that in depth analysis. You would end up spending more time and possibly more money to achieve the results you actually wanted, So there are trade offs. Plus, you are also still beholden to whatever material was used to train the model in the first place. That doesn't matter about the size. In fact, like whether it's a small model or a large model, the training material needs to be good. If the training material is garbage, that's what you're going to get on the other end, right, garbage in garbage out. I talked about this previously this week on tech Stuff about how bad training material leads to bad AI performance, and there's a real fear that AI models of the future are going to be training off of AI generated content from today, and that will lead to what is called model collapse. That's a real thing. Listen to earlier episodes this week to learn more about that. Ours Technica's Ashley Bellinger has an article titled Elon Musk's X may succeed in blocking California content moderation law on appeal and I would like to touch on this. The matter at hand concerns a law called AB five to eight seven in California, and it is concerned with the terms of service for social media companies. Specifically, the bill says that social media companies must make available their terms of service. They must define clearly what is and is not permitted under those terms, and then create a record of any and all cases in which users or their content are subjected to action from the company for violation of those terms, such as when a company deletes a post or bans a user, as well as a record of exactly what violation occurred. X's law team argue that the law violates the company's First Amendment rights to conduct content moderation. That's forcing them to make a comment on specific controversial subjects, and that is against the First Amendment, and you know, to definitively state why someone or something was banned, which also sends the message that stuff that is allowed to stay on the platform is permitted. This is actually a movement to create backlash against X, and the State of California is determined to just stir stuff up, so to speak, by making X essentially say, well, yeah, what this person said was awful, but it's not against our terms of service, or we don't like what this person said, so we banned them. Bellinger points out that the appeals court seems at least partly sympathetic to X, and I can understand why I might not agree with stuff going on over at X, and in fact, I disagree a lot with stuff going on over at X. But you do get into a pretty thorny issue when a company has to first define what is and isn't acceptable. As one judge pointed out, x's argument seems to be that the State of California is trying to compel X to express company views on these controversial subjects that range from stuff like hates each to foreign political interference, and that compelling someone to speak does seem like it is running a foul of first Amendment protections. So does this mean the appeals court will ultimately find in favor of X. Possibly, but it's not a done deal yet. Okay, I got a few more news stories to cover before we get to that. Let's take a quick break. We're back, so and less serious but still irritating news. Netflix is increasing the cost of subscribers who want an AD free experience on the streaming platform by getting rid of the existing lowest tier in that in that range, so the monthly fee for the lowest AD free tier, which limited users to viewing Netflix on just one device at a time, as well as viewing content and a maximum resolution of seven hundred and twenty P. That has been twelve dollars a month, But now that tier is being ended phased out, and current customers who are at that level will get shifted to a different tier, less expensive per month, but it is AD supported. If they want to move to an AD free version, they'll have to go up to fifteen dollars forty nine cents per month to do it. Now. This is technically a different tier, a different plan. It supports up to two devices and also a resolution of ten ADP plus. Customers at this tier are allowed to download content to a local device, So like if you're going on a plane or something and you're not going to have access to Wi Fi, you download the episode or whatever tier phone and you can watch it then. So, according to Sharon Harding of Ours Technica, Netflix's strategy is to get more people to move to this lowest lower tier, this AD supported tier, because ads are more lucrative as a revenue generator than subscriptions alone. So their hope is not to convince people to spend more per month and move to the new lowest AD free tier, but rather be content with the fact that they're also going to have to watch some ads, because that is a more lucrative revenue generation model. Of course, Netflix isn't the only streaming service that has recently bumped up prices. That's been true across the board. We've actually seen, you know, some streaming platforms bump up prices a couple of times in the span of a year. A heck, I just got an email earlier this week about how my Peacock subscription is getting more expensive and I'm wondering should I even bother keeping it? I mean, I only use it to watch like things super rarely, but I think this also has to be expected because obviously, early on in the streaming days, the game was all about getting as large a subscriber base as you possibly could, even if that meant you were losing money in the process. Like you had these very attractive Intrey offers, you had a lot of original material. But you can't operate like this forever. You know, you do have to find ways to make a profit or at least to keep shareholders happy, since that's really what it's all about these days, and that means you can't just give stuff away for very low amounts of money. You have to figure out a method to cover the costs of operation at the very least, and preferably make a profit. Just Weatherbed of The Verge has a piece about how Google is cleaning house on the app front. The company says it will be cracking down on apps that don't live up to Google's play Store standards. So for apps that have extremely limited functionality or content and thus are seen as low value apps, they could find themselves on the chopping block. So let's say it's an app and all it is is like a wallpaper. That's it. That's the whole app. This is one little thing of wallpaper. That's the sort of thing that Google says will not survive this change. Google already has policies in place for apps that are downright malicious or that introduce security vulnerabilities to hardware, which is a no brainer. But this new rule says, not only must your app be safe, it also has to be you know, kind of good. The new rule take effect at the end of August. There's a famous saying that is often attributed to Dustyyevsky, and it goes something like this, the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Now, before I go any further, I should add that Princeton University's Russian literature professor Ilyavinitsky has written extensively about how this quote is not in fact from Dustyevsky, and actually it's in conflict with what Dustyevsky's actually actual words on the subject of prisons have said. It's a great read, by the way, I love reading experts who are saying, yeah, everyone says this quote came from this place, but it really doesn't. But wherever the quote does come from, it has been repeated and reinforced by lots of others, including like Nelson Mandela, And while the origins of the quote are perhaps unknown and maybe even unknowable, I do think the intent behind the quote has merit no matter who it was that said at first. Which is a long way to go to introduce this next story, which is that the FCC has no now closed a loophole that existed here in the United States that allowed the various prison telephone service operators in this country to place really high telephone rates on prisoners who wanted to make calls, specifically intra state calls like within a state. And most prisoners, like their families, live in the same state that the prison that they're in is in, so most of the calls they want to make are within the state. And for a long time, those rates were pretty darn high. And like a fifteen minute phone call might cost a prisoner eleven dollars thirty five cents. Well, that doesn't sound like a lot maybe to you, But then you've got to remember these prisoners are making pennies on the dollar in prison. Like there's a whole conversation to be had about what ultimately amounts to slave labor and the prison system of the United States. But anyway, now that eleven dollars thirty five cents is going to be closer to ninety cents at least that's what it would be for very large prisons, like prisons that have at least one thousand inmates, if not more. This is significant because a previous challenge to the FCC's attempts to curb telephone rates in prisons was defeated when the companies that are actually providing these services argued that the FCC lacked the authority to impose price caps in the first place. But President Biden signed into law a bill that grants such powers to the FCC. So now the FCC is saying, well, Congress has granted us that authority. Now, so now you have to reiin in your prices, and we've already analyzed the numbers. We can prove that, based upon the information provided by you, you'll still make a profit and cover all costs of operations even with these lower price caps. So there, so that's a good story. I think that shows how if you don't have regulations, there's no check and balance system for most vulnerable populations, right like powerful populations, ones that have a lot of sway they can push back, and that's substantial. But when you're talking about prisoners, who are the most vulnerable in society arguably or at least among the most vulnerable populations in society, they have no political clout. So obviously any company that decides that they're going to price gouge, there's no checks and balances there. So now the FCC is saying, well, we've been grinded that authority. You can't do it anymore. We'll see where it goes from here. To round up for recommended reading this week, I've got a couple of space related pieces from ours Tetnica, both by Stephen Clark, and I think these are worth your time. So first up is his Rocket Report, which is a weekly roundup of space news, and it's incredible, Like he I don't know where he gets the time to do all this, because he does a great job. But you can learn about how a space startup recently lost at CEO due to inappropriate relationships with an employee of the company. You can learn about how SpaceX's Falcon nine rockets are temporarily grounded after a launch vehicle. The second stage of a launch vehicle failed to deliver twenty Starlink Internet satellites into their proper orbit last week. That being said, the Falcon nine actually remains the most reliable launch vehicle in history and it has a ninety nine point seven percent success rate. This was the first failure, so it's an amazing piece of technology and the FAA is likely to lift that grounded status within the next day or so. There are also lots more stories in that roundup, and next up is another piece by Stephen Clark in Ours Technica. It's titled NASA built a moon rover, but can't afford to get it to the launch pad, and it's the sad tale of Viper, a project that already saw four hundred and fifty million dollars of investment, but sounds like the various delays in the project and the cost increases reached a point where NASA had to make a decision they had to either cut the project or they would have to cancel a bunch of other projects in order to find money in the budget to get it across the finish line. And last is a piece in The Guardian by Charlotte thal titled doom Scrolling Linked to existential Anxiety distrust suspicion, and despair study finds. I think Thal did a really good job pointing out that the study had some limitations and it does seem to confirm a lot of common sense ideas about the nature of doom scrolling, like it's going to just sort of be like, yeah, of course. But she also points out that due to the scope and nature of the study, it is perhaps viewed as a good reason to research the matter more thoroughly, rather than to draw conclusions from the study itself. In other words, be careful not to fall victim to confirmation bias. And that's it for the tech News for the week ending July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcas casts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.